R A D I C A
a journal of
84
Editorial collective
Chris Arthur, Ted Benton, Nadine Cartner,
Andrew Collier, Diana Coole, Peter Dews,
Roy Edgley, Gregory Elliott, Howard
Feather, Jean Grimshaw, Kathleen Lennon,
Joseph McCarney, Kevin Magill, Peter
Osborne, Stella Sandford, Sean Sayers,
Kate Soper
Issue editor
Jean Grimshaw
Reviews editor
Sean Sayers
Contributors
Leo Panitch and Colin Leys are the
authors of The End of Parliamentary
Socialism: From New Left to New
Labour, to be published by Verso in the
autumn.
Gregory Elliott is the editor of Althusser:
A Critical Reader (Blackwell, 1994).
Carrie L. Hull is a Ph.D Candidate in
the Department of Political Science at the
University of Toronto.
Anna-Sabine Ernst is the author of
a history of the medical profession in
the GDR, Die Beste Prophylaxe ist der
Sozialismus – Socialism is the Best Pro-
phylactic (Munster & New York, 1997).
Gerwin Klinger has published various
articles on philosophy in the GDR.
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Cover: Soho, Gina Birch, 1996
Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd.
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© Radical Philosophy Ltd
L P H I L O S O P H Y
socialist and feminist philosophy
CONTENTS JULY/AUGUST 1997
COMMENTARY
Beyond The Soundbites: The General Election In Britain
Colin Leys and Leo Panitch .......................................................................... 2
ARTICLES
Socialist Socrates: Ernst Bloch in the GDR
Anna-Sabine Ernst and Gerwin Klinger ...................................................... 6
The Need In Thinking: Materiality In Theodor W. Adorno And Judith
Butler
Carrie L. Hull ............................................................................................... 22
Fateful Rendezvous: The Young Althusser
Gregory Elliott ............................................................................................. 36
REVIEWS
Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renée T. White, eds,
Fanon: A Critical Reader
Alan Read, ed., The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and
Visual Representation
David Macey................................................................................................. 41
W.V. Quine, From Stimulus to Science
Paolo Crivelli and Marco Santambrogio, eds, On Quine: New Essays
Max de Gaynesford ..................................................................................... 44
Christopher Norris, Reclaiming Truth: Contribution to a Critique of Cultural
Relativism
Willy Maley .................................................................................................. 45
Jodi Dean, Solidarity of Strangers
Lois McNay .................................................................................................. 46
Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other
Real-and-Imagined Places
Stuart Elden ................................................................................................. 47
Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture
Moyra Haslett ............................................................................................ 48
Thomas M. Kemple, Reading Marx Writing
Mark W. Turner ........................................................................................... 49
Enrique Leff, Green Production: Toward an Environmental Rationality
Chris Wilbert................................................................................................. 50
G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science
Sean Sayers ............................................................................................... 51
Richard A. Etlin, In Defense of Humanism: Value in the Arts and Letters
Duncan J. Campbell .................................................................................... 52
Anthony Elliott, Subject to Ourselves: Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and
Post Modernity
Candida Yates ............................................................................................... 53
Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy
Stephen Frosh ........................................................................................... 53
Lloyd Spencer and Andrzej Krauze, Hegel for Beginners
Chris Arthur .................................................................................................. 54
LETTERS
Richard Cleminson, Bill Marshall ............................................................... 55
NEWS
SWIP conference at Kent
Naomi Hammond .............................................................................. 56
COMMENTARY

Beyond the Soundbites

The general election in Britain

Colin Leys and Leo Panitch

T
he 1997 general election result has rightly been celebrated as a huge relief,
the lifting of a choking fog. For a while New Labour has the benefit of almost
everyoneʼs doubt. There is, after all, an alternative, and people are willing to
wait and see what it looks like. And the size of the majority means that things can be
done: over the next four or five years, what the alternative means will become pretty
clear. But this should not prevent us from recognising that a chapter in the history
of socialism has been closed. For almost a century the Labour Party was committed
to ʻparliamentary socialismʼ; in this election, for the first time, that commitment was
unambiguously abandoned. We need to reckon with this: to look back over the past
three decades and consider what ʻparliamentary socialismʼ was, and why it failed; and
to reflect on what its termination in the Labour Party implies for the construction of a
new socialist project.
What was ʻparliamentary socialismʼ? As practised by Labour, it combined three
things: an ideological commitment (however vague) to a non-market-driven social
order; an extra-parliamentary mass organization; and a particular conception of democ-
racy. This conception, evolved over time from Burke to Schumpeter, saw democracy
simply as a contest between competing teams of parliamentary elites. It treated the
extra-parliamentary party as, in the final analysis, a servant of the parliamentary team;
and it conceived of citizens primarily as mere voters, not as active participants in
self-government.
One of the main contributions of the British New Left in the 1960s was its critique
of this supposed route to socialism. But although the leading New Left intellectuals
thought the Labour Party would never transcend it, they themselves did not generate
any organizational alternative. When, however, the postwar settlement – the high-water
mark of parliamentary socialismʼs achievements – finally unravelled under the Wilson
government in the late 1960s, a significant current emerged within the Labour Party
which broadly accepted the New Leftʼs appreciation of the limits of parliamentary
socialism, but which did not think it impossible that Labour might yet be transformed
into a democratic socialist party of a different kind.

New Left, New Right

This new Labour left emerged at roughly the same time as the New Right within the
Conservative Party: it was a critical political turning point. Tony Benn articulated the
new left activistsʼ understanding of this, and their sense of urgency, when he called for
fundamental democratic reform of both the party and the state in order to prevent the
ascendancy of what he described as ʻa new philosophy of government, now emerging
everywhere on the rightʼ, dedicated to deregulating business and controlling citizens in

2 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)

the name of market freedoms. Yet, whereas the New Right quickly gained ascendancy
within the Conservative Party, allowing them to reach outwards as a coherent political
force and start reorganizing the country, the new left in the Labour Party was bitterly
resisted by the partyʼs deeply entrenched parliamentary elite, who, besides being com-
mitted to ʻsocial-democratic centralismʼ, failed to grasp the magnitude of the crisis
of the postwar order. They shared the judgement of Crosland, who declared at the
beginning of the 1970s that there were no signs of a new crisis in Western economies,
and that therefore ʻno fundamental rethinkingʼ of party strategy was needed. They
rejected the new Labour leftʼs alternatives to the postwar settlement, in the shape of
the Alternative Economic Strategy, and the municipal socialism that culminated in the
Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone; and they were determined to defend
the status quo inside the party. The ensuing decade-long struggle to change the Labour
Party exhausted the new left – and what they had to offer the wider society was sub-
merged in the intra-party conflict.
The 1983 election disaster was a product of these divisions – exacerbated by those
social democrats who pushed matters to a split, while those who stayed energetically
enlisted the media to denigrate their opponents as the ʻloony leftʼ, whatever the cost
to the partyʼs overall standing in the country. The way back to power after 1983 was
then defined in terms of systematically isolating and marginalizing the new Labour
left and its ideas, but this meant that the party turned its back on the one segment of
its membership that had seriously confronted the issue of how to sustain a socialist
project in the new era. With their defeat, the die was cast for the modernizersʼ project:
accepting the legacy of Thatcherism as a kind of ʻsettlementʼ akin to the Conservativesʼ
accommodation to the legacy of the Attlee governments in the 1950s. The new Labour
left had wanted to replace parliamentary socialism with democratic socialism. ʻNew
Labourʼ replaced it, in effect, with a new kind of parliamentary capitalism, the so-called
ʻradicalism of the centreʼ.
Of course, New Labourʼs election triumph was partly due to the Conservativesʼ
weaknesses. Already by 1995 the Conservatives had impaled themselves on a double
contradiction. First, politics are national; and yet capital, of which the Conservatives are
nothing if not the guardians, is increasingly transnational. In playing the nationalist card
so recklessly, the ʻEuroscepticsʼ forgot how much capital is already integrated into and
dependent on the EU economy. When the leadership looked like surrendering to them,
the party no longer appeared to be a completely ʻsafe pair of handsʼ – either to big
business, or to many voters. Second, the Conservativesʼ neo-liberalism, and the growing
inequality and social marginalization it generates, was in increasing contradiction with
the electorateʼs residual sense of social solidarity. The tide was beginning to flow the
other way; the Tories failed to see it. In the end, people preferred anything to a fifth
Conservative victory.

The many and the few

The difference made by Blair and the modernizers has nevertheless been enormous.
First, they have gone as far as they could in detaching the Labour Party from the old
bases of ʻparliamentary socialismʼ – the trade unions, and Labourʼs inner-city heartlands
– and have instead concentrated on promoting whatever political ʻproductʼ seemed most
consistent with the wishes of voters in the ʻtarget seatsʼ of ʻmiddle Englandʼ. Second,
they accepted that globalized financial markets pre-empt macroeconomic management
by national governments, and that growth depends on creating conditions attractive to
investors; and they went to great lengths (the adoption of monetarist economic policy,
more independence for the Bank of England, etc.) to persuade capital of their sincer-
ity, seeking by all available means (including the scrapping of the old ʻClause IVʼ)
to replace the image of ʻtax and spendʼ with that of ʻa party of businessʼ. Third, with

Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 3

the exceptions of work projects for unemployed young people, and reduced primary
class sizes, they have tried their best to reduce socio-economic expectations to a bare
minimum, engaging instead in a good deal of ʻsymbolic politicsʼ (ʻparentingʼ, ʻmoral
valuesʼ, ʻtough on crimeʼ, etc). Finally, so as to do all this, they have rewritten the party
constitution, formally disempowering the grassroots activists, effectively disempowering
the trade-union leadership, and potentially disempowering stroppy left-wing Labour
backbenchers (through changes in the Parliamentary Partyʼs standing orders).
These changes have been crucial to the scale of New Labourʼs victory, and we
have no wish to belittle their achievement in definitively terminating the Thatcherite
era. The Conservative Party may well take more than one parliament to overcome its
unrepresentativeness and its Europhobia, and to seem trustworthy again to both ʻmiddle
Englandʼ (not to mention middle Scotland and Wales) and big business.
But the hard fact remains that the disparity between Blairʼs oft-repeated goal of
ʻnational renewalʼ and the means proposed (from a more representative council for the
Bank of England, to compulsory school homework) is painfully large. The weaknesses
of the British economy will not go away of their own accord, yet New Labour has
ruled out the kind of ʻradical bourgeoisʼ reforms that progressive economists like Will
Hutton and John Wells have persuasively argued are necessary, fearing the opposition
from vested interests that they would inevitably provoke. Even New Labourʼs modest
economic proposals, from tax reforms to the end of the assisted-places scheme, will
be rancorously misrepresented and attacked when the Tory tabloids have restocked on
spleen, as will Scottish devolution and other constitutional reforms, not to mention the
inevitable compromises in store on Europe, Northern Ireland, and other controversial
issues.
Nor is it clear that giving absolute priority to low inflation, and making a big point
of not ʻplaying politicsʼ with public finances, will be rewarded in the long run, either
by lasting business support for Labour, or by higher rates of investment, growth and
employment. On the other hand, Gordon Brownʼs born-again fiscal rectitude leaves so
little scope for redistributive spending, or the real improvements in education, health,
pensions and social services that Labourʼs least advantaged supporters are hoping for
(in spite of all the modernizersʼ efforts to lower their expectations), that considerable
disenchantment seems unavoidable.
And as opposition rebuilds – and as accidents happen and mistakes are inevitably
made – the cost of the disempowerment of the partyʼs activists and the labour move-
ment will have to be reckoned. It may have
facilitated the near-military discipline of the
election campaign, but it also means that
the party no longer has a nationwide cadre
of committed grassroots activists capable of
mobilizing opinion behind any reforms which
are seriously opposed by powerful interests.
Over the next parliament, in other words, the
narrowness of the terrain of democratic action
that New Labour defines as practicable will
gradually become painfully clear.
The optimism generated by New Labourʼs
stunning victory should be tempered, then, by
the recognition that its programme is set so
frankly within the boundaries set by capital.
Do people really suppose that capitalismʼs
contradictions have disappeared? Is its
indispensable need for growth ecologically

4 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)

sustainable? Do we really expect full employment to return? Or – alternatively – can
we foresee a new consensus on transferring a steadily growing share of the surplus to
the support of the poor and the unemployed, so that the increasingly alienated ʻrelative
surplus populationʼ is reintegrated into ʻthe communityʼ? Has the secret been discovered
that will prevent worsening worldwide inequalities from leading to more and more
crime, violence and wars, as they always have in the past?

Thinking long term

It is not entirely far-fetched to see a parallel between our situation and that of 1850.
Then, national economic conditions did not yet make it possible for the workers to take
power, as the socialist revolutionaries of 1848 had imagined. Today, the conditions do
not exist for socialism to be achieved in face of the power of global capitalism. Now, as
then, there is an urgent need to study the current phase of capitalism and understand the
new forms taken by its contradictions.
Analysing the contradictions of globalized capitalism and their political effects is
not the same as constructing a renewed socialist project, even though the two tasks are
intimately interconnected. We need to think through some fundamental issues in any
conception of an alternative future to the one the neo-liberals are creating for us, includ-
ing how far we accept the ideas of continued growth and consumerism. We also need
to address ourselves to developing a new set of conditions governing capital flows that
would once again allow governments to have a decisive say in their countriesʼ economic
and social development. This will require new transnational alliances among progressive
parties, which must be capable of generating a powerful groundswell of popular support
for such control over capital, instead of focusing on assuring business of their support
for the market.
The defeat of the new Labour leftʼs attempt to transcend parliamentary socialism sug-
gests that the way forward does not lie in transforming the Labour Party. This does not
mean that progressive elements in it should not be supported. However, supporting them
should not be confused with the main task. New organizational forms must be devel-
oped, and a new conception of parliamentarism and its relation to extra-parliamentary
politics needs to be worked out. It is not a question of parliamentarism versus extra-
parliamentary struggle, but of what kind of parliamentary practice, complemented by
what kinds of non-parliamentary practices, is capable of moving us forward. Vital to this
will be debate and collective thinking on how to involve ordinary citizens in a radical
democratic transformation of the institutions of the state – a line of thought that has
been virtually extinguished in the Labour Party since the defeat of the new left project.
The prospect for the emergence of new types of socialist organization depends on
renewed popular mobilization on a scale that cannot be expected to emerge quickly.
For behind New Labourʼs electoral success lies the reality of the defeat inflicted on
socialism, and major defeats take time to recover from. We need to be ready to think
long term again. Not the least benefit of New Labourʼs electoral success, predicated on
a resolute acceptance of the short term as the horizon of the possible, may be to have
reopened some space for socialists to work out how to act in the present in a way that
does not undermine our capacity to build a different future.

Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 5

Socialist Socrates
Ernst Bloch in the GDR
Anna-Sabine Ernst and Gerwin Klinger
A philosopher is being ‘turned’
Ernst Bloch is experiencing a peculiar revival. Peculiar
in the sense that, currently fashionable discourses of
ʻthe futureʼ notwithstanding, contemporary interest
in his philosophy focuses not so much on his concept
of concrete utopia as on reshaping the Bloch image.
This is no coincidence. Ever since the German ʻturnʼ
(Wende) of 1989, German philosophy has singled out
Ernst Bloch for particular consideration. Bloch was a
philosopher whose writings were, among other things,
consistently geared towards interventions in the con-
crete political issues and constellations of his time.
The entire ʻGerman wretchednessʼ of this century,
including the era of Wilhelm II and World War I, the
Nazi regime, World War II, and the subsequent divi-
sion of Germany, are reflected in his writings. During
the period of exile, Bloch was involved in battles
between the different political fractions concerning
issues of anti-fascism and Stalinism. Returning from
exile, Bloch entered the German Democratic Republic,
where he found himself straitjacketed by the dogmatic
application of GDR-style Marxism-Leninism. In 1956
he finally broke with a version of socialism he rec-
ognized to be incapable of reform. Upon his crossing
over into West Germany in 1961, he became a leading
figure for the student movement.
All of these events, even at a cursory glance,
provide sufficient reason and ample material for
reviewing a portion of the contemporary history of
philosophy. What is at issue here are current attempts
to re-evaluate twentieth-century German history in
the light of the 1989 ʻturnʼ. These have occasioned
embittered contestations of interpretation, which have
come to dominate the recent reception of Ernst Bloch,
resulting in a plethora of Bloch images and inter-
ventions motivated by particular slants in the politics
of interpretation.
In his book Der zerstörte Traum. Vom Ende des
utopischen Zeitalters (The Dream Destroyed: On the
6 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
End of the Age of Utopia, 1991), Joachim Fest, veteran
editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, attempts
to make the failure of law-and-order socialism the nail
in the coffin of any social-utopian notion of a just
society. The principle of hope, vital motor of any social
movement, is thereby eliminated in the name of the
status quo. Fest sketches Bloch as an apocalyptic rider
of Stalin, deriving from Marxism ʻonly the messianic
motifʼ, the ʻMarxian prophecyʼ. For Fest, the figure of
Bloch the prophet exemplifies the fact that a socialist
utopia did not experience its violation at the hands
of Stalinism, but found its actual fulfilment there. It
followed the ʻinevitability by which utopian ideas of
world redemption make their way into totalitarianismʼ.
Bloch ʻsaw the Soviet Union as a precedent of Christʼs
ascension to power as Caesar; he celebrated Lenin as
Caesar and toed the line of every twist and turn of
Moscow politics – an exercise that degraded his think-
ing and his person. He still celebrated Stalin and sang
his praises at a time when he could have known better,
and, with a categorical shotgun in hand, declared the
Moscow Trials to herald a better futureʼ.1 Such are the
coarse methods used to discredit Bloch; they brush
over the distinctions to be drawn between political
and philosophical, private and public pronouncements,
as well as over the specificities of changing historical
and political constellations.
Manfred Riedelʼs picture of Bloch, outlined in
Tradition und Utopie. Ernst Blochs Philosophie im
Lichte unserer geschichtlichen Denkerfahrung (Tradi-
tion and Utopia: Ernst Blochʼs Philosophy in the Light
of Reflection on Our Historical Experience), looks
very different. A conservative adherent of Blochʼs
philosophy, the author is confronted by the problem
that ʻBlochʼs ideas have become devalued with the
downfall of Marxismʼ.2 Hence his intention of drawing
a neat distinction between the actual consistent themes
in Blochʼs thinking on the one hand, and a particular
version of Marxism accompanied by a particular con-
temporary type of commitment to socialist principles,
on the other. What Riedel sees as politically decisive is
Blochʼs ʻdream of a “true Germany”ʼ. With this vision,
Bloch was drawn into the whirlpool of the ʻcivil war
in Europeʼ and was thrown backwards and forwards
between an eastward and a westward orientation. The
motifs that henceforth become decisive in character-
izing Blochʼs stance, according to Riedel, include ʻhome
countryʼ (Heimat), ʻGermanyʼ, ʻEuropean fatherlandʼ,
ʻdemocracyʼ, and ʻhuman rightsʼ. These topoi seem
apt to reconcile Bloch with the conservative zeitgeist.
Their meaning, however, remains indeterminate. What
is of interest, rather, is the precise way in which these
themes feature in Blochʼs writings.
The Left, likewise, has its problems in dealing with
Bloch. He forms the centre of diverging lines leading
to contradictory positions: to Stalin, whose trials Bloch
defended, on the one hand; and to the de-Stalinization
efforts of Eastern reform communism, the Western
Marxism of the New Left, and the student movement,
on the other hand. The extent of the narrow-minded-
ness evident here is shown by the journal utopie
kreativ. This journal, whose name ostensibly refers to
what Bloch has come to stand for, makes it its task
to present revealing archival documents of the SED
(Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands). These
show SED functionaries intent on rectifying Blochʼs
1956 oppositional stance in the Cultural Association
for the Democratic Renewal of Germany by means
of a tribunal. Exposing this plan of the SED might
have been a meaningful contribution to the restoration
of historical truth, especially when embarked on by
a PDS-oriented journal. (Partei des Demokratischen
Sozialismus succeeded the East German SED after
1989.) However, it relies on a portrait of Bloch drawn by
the East German philosopher Arnold Schölzel, which
distorts perspectives in a bizarre way. Schölzel shows
little or no interest in the tribunal instituted against
Bloch. While he contents himself with denouncing it
as ʻunspeakableʼ, shunning the effort to find words to
understand it, he is alerted to the ʻmalicious slanderʼ
that Bloch experienced in the West at the hands of the
ʻRaddatz of all timesʼ after leaving the GDR.3 The East
German philosopher Irrlitz, in contrast, gave a sigh of
relief, as it were, at Blochʼs decision. Counting Bloch
among the ʻintellectual fathers of the civic movementʼ,
the German ʻturnʼ, according to Irrlitz, was in part
Blochʼs triumph.4
The question as to how Bloch will find his place in
history has been opened once again, this time by the
German ʻturnʼ; not least because the GDR archives
have now been opened and contemporary witnesses
are coming forward. A piece of contemporary history
of philosophy is on view.
The homecoming of the
Other Germany
When Ernst Bloch returned from exile in the USA to
accept a professorship at the University of Leipzig, like
Bertolt Brecht, Hans Mayer and other intellectuals,
he thereby affirmed the emergence of the GDR as a
new German state. To them it meant the possibility of
realizing their hopes for the socialist and democratic
Germany for which they had fought.5 The miserable
end to which these hopes would come was not fore-
seeable in those days. But soon afterwards, the Cold
War was to force, by hook or by crook, any thought
of a Third Way into the scheme of Friend or Foe.
The forces of democratic socialism were destroyed
in the wear and tear of continuous conflict between
Party, bureaucracy and ideological orthodoxy. What-
ever remained was labelled ʻenemy of the stateʼ, and
ground to bits in the mills of repression.
However, Blochʼs 1949 appointment as successor
to Gadamer in the first Chair of Philosophy at the
University of Leipzig saw him happy and confident,
undaunted by the delays resulting from the political
controversy sparked by his appointment. This was
partly the doing of Werner Krauss, then Romance
Studies specialist and literary historian at Leipzig
University, and member of the executive committee
of the SED. The conservative old guard of professors
around Menzel, Baetke and Kühn feared the establish-
ment of a Marxist outpost in the traditional territory
to which they themselves laid claim. They resisted
Blochʼs appointment by claiming that Bloch was not
an academically accredited philosopher. As absurd as
this may sound, it is not entirely unfounded. At that
time, Blochʼs great works existed only in the form of
manuscripts, waiting to appear for the first time in the
GDR. The majority of old-guard professors staunchly
opposed Blochʼs appointment, and sought to relegate
him to the Chair of Sociology vacated by Freyer, who
was discredited for his Nazi past. At this point, the
Provincial Government Ministry of Education stepped
in. Bloch was appointed against the will of the faculty,
to take up office on 1 June 1948. It was argued that if
Nazi injustice was to be made good, a positive gesture
had to be made towards the exiles. The Ministryʼs
decision was backed politically by the Soviet Military
Administration (SMAD), which had signalled an inter-
est in Bloch at an early stage.6
For Bloch, who was oblivious to much of this
behind-the scenes activity, the relatively comfortable
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 7
 existence which the Chair of Philosophy promised
came as a relief following long years of intellectual
existence outside the institution of the university. What
attracted Bloch in particular was the prospect of pub-
lishing his ʻoverflowing and still homeless manuscripts
of the last twenty yearsʼ. Thus, he writes to Schumacher
in a letter from the USA, on 16 March 1948:
Finally I am, believe it or not, Spinoza and
Schopenhauer may pardon me, a civil servant,
expert, a recognized professor, holder of the chair
of philosophy.… Being picked up from Hamburg by
car, being assured of sufficiently spacious accommo-
dation, extra pay for heavy duty, salary equivalent
to the 1932 buying power of 15–20,000 Mark. In
short, my bum in butter, as the saying goes. I am
ashamed and am again longing for my dream.7
In contrast to Brecht, who was nauseated by the
ʻstinking breath of the provinceʼ soon after settling in
the GDR,8 Bloch was positively surprised by the city
of Leipzig. Two months after his return, he reported
to Schumacher:
I am happy and content here. Sufficient food, due
to ample rations, and due to the fact that in certain
restaurants one can get virtually everything, at a
cost, of course, but still, without any food stamps.
… Life: One can speak oneʼs mind, i.e. my mind;
that initially seems highly surprising; and one can
do so again and again, in the sense of complete
freedom. University: fully equipped; the level
among academics surprisingly a lot higher than that
© Dr. Jan Robert Bloch
Ernst and Karola Bloch, Leipzig 1952
8 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
of students. Solidarity with the cause remarkable.…
Edition of my collected works will get under way
sooner or later in Berlin. For the servile Germans,
the professorial title breaks the ice that I felt at ease
in.9
It was to the special conditions obtaining in Leipzig
at the time that Bloch owed his sense of well-being.
For it was here that the university politics of the SED,
with Werner Krauss at its helm, was concerned to
counterbalance the large contingent of old-guard profes-
sors with the appointment of returning emigrants. This
is how the former West German emigrants, including
Budzislawski, Herzfelde, Boehnheim, Bloch and others,
came to make their mark on intellectual life in Leipzig
during the first years of the GDRʼs existence.10
Gradually university life normalized. Blochʼs Philo-
sophical Seminar became fertile intellectual ground.
On the whole, one could say, he did not have a
fixed circle, neither of assistants (since these were
provisional appointees), nor among newly enrolled
or senior students studying philosophy as their ma-
jor subject. His students and adherents came from
all faculties, but especially from History, German
Studies, Musicology, Theology.… Nevertheless, the
initial period was such that one could say, thereʼs
someone sitting in Ritterstrasse, on the third floor
of that brick building, someone who sits up there
thinking up some crazy ideas.11
What to unsuspecting students initially seemed like
some ʻcrazy ideasʼ, soon turned
out to be the most interesting
philosophy on offer in the GDR.
Bloch was one of the few people
who could provide students with
something new. Wolfgang Harich,
collaborating with Bloch on the
Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philoso-
phie, describes his impression:
You got the sense that you were
coming face to face with an abso-
lute genius, once he got going in
discussions, also with his fantastic
anecdotes and jokes, and so forth.
He was a veritable bird of paradise
in what we might want to call a
rather mediocre GDR – he could
make the whole thing so interest-
ing.12
La cathédrale – c’est moi!
To understand the power of this
fascination, one has to look at the
position occupied by Bloch within
philosophy in the GDR. Blochʼs
position was marked by tense relations to two camps.
On the one hand, there was traditional bourgeois
philosophy, represented by someone like Menzel. It
found itself sidelined by the tertiary education reforms
of the early 1950s, and was decimated by the fact that
its adherents emigrated to West Germany. Menzel
was left as representative of an atrophied school, with
equally atrophied articulations. In addition, there was
the rising star of Marxism-Leninism, solidified into
state ideology. In philosophy, it featured as orthodoxy,
with privileged access to dialectics, the supposed pillar
of Marxism. This summed up the situation of phil-
osophy: the exodus of the old guard of professors, on
the one hand, and the dogmatic sterility of official
Marxism–Leninism, on the other. The traditional
bourgeois tradition had found an abrupt end, without
being replaced by a new, lively culture of philosophical
thought.
One can guess at the electrifying effects of Blochʼs
teaching, which brought these different and distinct
positions into confusion. In his inaugural lecture on
ʻUniversity, Marxism, Philosophyʼ, Bloch outlined his
programme. He was intent on subjecting the storehouse
of ideas of traditional bourgeois philosophy to Marxist
scrutiny; bourgeois philosophy was to be opened up
for the possibility of serving Marxism and the GDR
as the latterʼs inheritance. Harich sums up Blochʼs
achievements as follows:
The reason why I have always held Bloch in high
esteem is that he managed to carry with him an
enormous store of knowledge and insights in a
situation of spiritual and intellectual drought. The
transmission of this knowledge was something that
just had to be promoted, as a matter of keeping the
cultural heritage alive.13
This particular notion of ʻheritageʼ soon aroused the
suspicion of the orthodoxy. What challenged and
daunted the Party-Marxist theorists of heresy (such as
Rubert-Otto Gropp, who presided over the Department
for Dialectical and Historical Materialism in Leipzig),
was the fact that Bloch claimed the name of Marxist
philosophy for his enterprise. For that, he attracted the
interest and acclaim of students, which is more than
any of the obligatory courses on the basics of official
Marxism-Leninism could muster.14
ʻIs Bloch a Marxist or not?ʼ This was the ideologi-
cal cardinal question, which remained unspoken, and
yet exercised the minds of the guardians of official
Marxism-Leninism from the outset. Blochʼs students
settled for Bloch the Marxist. ʻWhat was expected
of him was to raise the standard of philosophical
discussion in this place, this much is true, but also
to bring with him a detailed and in-depth knowledge
of Marxist philosophy – that much, likewise, remains
indisputable.ʼ15 The ordering schemes of what in the
tradition of Lukács was deemed authentic classical
Marxism answered the above-stated cardinal question
with a resounding ʻnoʼ. Harich, reader in the publishing
house Aufbau Verlag and vested by the Party with
considerable power in decisions concerning publishing,
is prepared to accept Blochʼs ingenuity, but, being a
friend of Lukács, reacts with puritanical defensive-
ness when it comes to Blochʼs version of Marxism.
He considers the line traced by Bloch in relation
to Marxism too obscure; and the basic pattern too
transparent, which for him amounts to ʻa philosophy
of sympathisersʼ, patched together from the fashion of
the day in combination with communism.
It is obvious that it is made up of two basic compo-
nents. One is the pursuit of things famous and fash-
ionable, of ʻinʼ things, which are given a new slant.
Thus: ʻHeidegger has Angst, so I have Hoffnung.ʼ
The new slant which he invents for things is now
supposed to appeal to the communists whose credo
he politically endorses, but without entering into the
barracks where they are being taught discipline. In
the same way he deals with Freudʼs work, which
is also en vogue. Bloch says: ʻThe sexual drive
– all well and good, I also have got one – so what.
But hunger! That is the most fundamental instinct.ʼ
There heʼs back with the proles. Somehow the man
lacks seriousness of purpose. He is forever fooling
around, in what one might be tempted to call frivo-
lous thinking.… Bloch in actual fact was considered
philosophically harmless, because nobody could
understand his writings – they were esoteric; his
stylistic idiosyncracies did not appeal to the masses
– no reason for concern in that respect. And, most
importantly, it was clear to everybody who knew
anything about Marxism that he was not a Marx-
ist.16
Bloch mockingly shrugged off such small-minded
litmus-tests with apparent unconcern. That he was
above such petty opprobrium is demonstrated by the
following telling anecdote.
Bloch claimed to be a Marxist, but privately he
tended to admit: ʻI am the cathedral. And in the
cathedral there is an altar, one of many altars,
maybe the inner shrine – that is what Marxism is,
maybe even only a side chapel… I donʼt know. But
I would say that here in the GDR the inner shrine is
in the cathedral, but then I am the cathedral!ʼ17
The Bloch who could assert this was still confident
in his attack and critique. He publicly denounced the
schematism of a bigoted Party Marxism as ʻMarxism
of the narrow laneʼ, which held an original idea to be
nothing but the ʻlink between two quotesʼ.18 Bloch was
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 9
no doubt a leading figure in the intellectual landscape
of the GDR. He was influential and highly acclaimed,
as is evident in the positions and honours bestowed
upon him: editor of the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Phi-
losophie (1953), member of the presiding council of
the Kulturbund (1954), member of the Academy of
Sciences and recipient of the National Prize and of
the Patriotic Order of Merit (1955).
A modus vivendi
The philosophers of Marxism-Leninism held Blochʼs
position to be sacrosanct. It was clear to the cultural
commissars of the SED, first and foremost among
them Kurt Hager, that a mind like Blochʼs constituted
a rarity and a difficulty.19 He was not to be butchered
by the knives of dogmatism. The official Party philoso-
phers did not exercise their discriminatory powers in
demarcating Blochʼs philosophy from the official one,
but instead sought ways to integrate this philosophical
monster into their politics of ideas. Harich provides
an impression of the way in which the engineers of
knowledge attempted to mobilize Bloch for what they
claimed as their superstructural achievements.
For propagandistic purposes and to the outside
world he could be held up as a bird of paradise, but
to the inside he was the transmitter of an enormous
store of cultural values.… To understand and utilize
a recalcitrant and philosophically hostile individual
means, in this case, to avert the impoverishment of
intellectual life as it has befallen the young gener-
ation especially. Therefore the motto is to enter into
an alliance with him!20
What Harich formulates in the thought-style of a
cultural commissar, namely an informal type of repres-
sive tolerance, might actually have been what the Party
aspired to at the time. It soon turned out, however, that
any notion of an ideal balance was highly precarious.
Law-and-order Marxism and the creative adaptation
of traditional learning did not make for a stable,
harmonious synthesis. With his subversive dialectics,
Bloch played his own tune, so as to make the iron
laws of official Marxism-Leninism dance.
He was known to be a fellow comrade. But now
it turned out that this man, in the manner of
Socrates, exerted a fascination on scores of young
people.… Probably without intending to, he taught
people to rethink and think through communist
dogma, the dogma of historical or dialectical
materialism. The end result, as can be shown in
a number of cases, was that party functionaries
became incapable of fulfilling their official duties.
Under Blochʼs supervision, they had worked their
way through this dogma. And this, of course,
made him highly dangerous.21
10 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
However, both sides managed to retain the balance
of some modus vivendi for another few years. This was
facilitated partly through the repressive tolerance of
the Party, which kept its law-enforcing watchdogs on a
short leash; and partly through Blochʼs not involuntarily
rendered loyalty to state and Party. Occasionally
Blochʼs loyalty was reduced to lip service. On the
occasion of Stalinʼs death, the Deutsche Zeitschrift
für Philosophie (February 1953) published a memo-
rial speech composed by the Secretariat for Tertiary
Education, in which Stalin is praised as the ʻgreatest
scientist of our epochʼ. Bloch tunes into this song of
praise. In his essay on the Theses on Feuerbach in the
same edition, he inserts the well-known icon of Stalin
into the series of portraits of the forefathers: ʻThere
are, indeed, philosophers who have since changed the
world: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin.ʼ
17 June 1953
It was the momentous events of 17 June 1953 that
shook the compromise. Bloch intervened by calling for
the democratization of the socialist state. The critical
remarks, ventured by Bloch after the tanks of the
Red Army had subdued the protesting workers, were
actually aimed at political conditions in the GDR as a
whole, even though he presented the bitter truths on a
silver platter of loyalty. In his letter, he writes:
We have to pay much closer attention, with much
greater commitment, to the grievances of our
people. In searching for the causes, it would be
equally important not to rest content once the
Western agents have been identified. They carry the
full share of the blame and will have to be dealt
with accordingly, so as to set an example; but they
should not be used as an alibi for different, deeper
causes of the manifest discontent. The advances
towards the building of socialism have obviously
proceeded at too rapid a pace, outstripping the
masses whose co-operation should be sought. The
building of socialism requires sacrifices, but those
of whom it asks them have not in every case been
sufficiently conscientized in the socialist spirit. Add-
ed to this were the unnecessary sacrifices that were
brought about not by the building of socialism, but
by inefficiency, bureaucracy, and rigid schematism.
In fact, it was a complacent, cowardly schematism
which has hampered socialist conscientization where
it should have been promoted. Far too often does
it exhaust itself in always presenting the self-same
store of quotes; it remains trapped in formalistic
politics of delayed reaction, shunning any notion of
individual responsibility, while being quite happy to
preach lessons from above.22
These were candid words, for which anyone lesser than
Bloch would have probably been persecuted. However,
Blochʼs address met a fate similar to that of Brecht,
which reached the public only in a truncated version:
it was filed in the archives and remained without
consequence. The Ulbricht regime, whose replacement
would have even pleased Moscow, was trembling in its
boots. It learnt its own bitter lesson, realizing that it
had been kept in power only by the tanks of the Red
Army. This realization, brought home to the regime
through the events of 17 June, marked the birth of the
Stasi-state (Staatssicherheit – literally, State Security):
the latter tightened its ideological controls. At the Uni-
versity of Leipzig, a witchhunt got underway to sniff
out ʻelements hostile to the Partyʼ and ʻprovocateurs
and counter-revolutionariesʼ. With the allegation that a
ʻforum hostile to the Partyʼ had been formed around
the person of Teller, a student of Bloch, individual
members of the Institute of Philosophy were expelled
from the Party. It became clear that the forces of the
ʻotherʼ Germany – that is, of a democratic-socialist
Germany – no longer had any influence on the Party
line, not even as a subset of checks and balances. Any
attempts at democratizing the Party and society as a
whole became subject to persecution, being labelled
ʻcounter-revolutionary fraction formationʼ, ʻsocial
democratismʼ, or ʻrestoration of capitalismʼ. The Party
got rid of the intellectual vanguard by means of a
golden handshake. Brecht received his own theatre, in
order to silence him. The honours bestowed on Bloch
on the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 1955 were
designed to elevate him into an ivory tower far away
from active politics; the Academy of Sciences received
him into its ranks.
The peaceful dusk that was to envelop the demo-
cratic line of socialism did not settle in, though. In
the face of a growing silence, Bloch became more
vociferous. He went on a veritable campaign against
the bigoted rigidity of ʻMarxism of the narrow laneʼ
which he found prevalent in the universities and which
was keeping the lid on intellectual life. In lectures
and university committees he mocked the lecturers
of Marxism-Leninism in terms of the ʻpairing of
non-scientificity and mediocrityʼ that characterized
their teaching. He vehemently defended the intellectual
spaces of science and Marxism. The requirement of
ʻideological clarityʼ served as the padlock of orthodox
hermeticism. At the 4th Congress of Writers in January
1956, an anti-scholasticist Bloch gave an address adopt-
ing this motto and leading it ad absurdum.
Ideological clarity, ladies and gentlemen, is a seri-
ous and difficult business. You will permit me,
whose subject is philosophy and whose concern is
ideological clarity, to say this: What Thomas Mann
says about the writer could just as well be said
about the thinker: thinkers are people who take
thinking a bit more seriously than other people.
So that must then yield ideological clarity.… But
even to writers … ideological instruction is not
always of the kind that we need. That would be
one of having oneʼs nose rubbed in the dirt, plas-
tering it over with schemata. Gottfried Keller, one
of our great writers, once came up with the very
apt picture of a dog who had his nose smeared all
over with cottage cheese, and who henceforth saw
the whole world as cottage cheese. There are hazy
horizons, we are dealing with a partly de-natured
spirit of revolution, one which has lost its alcohol
content, like the pieces of music that are played in
Bad Pyrmont accompanying the stroll to the foun-
tains: eternal repetition, eternal copying, eternal
harping and resting on quotes, and parthenogenesis,
immaculate conception from one quote to the next.
We would have achieved much more if Marxism
could become indispensable, not by occupying the
moral high ground, but by encouraging a scientific
imagination and inventiveness which could easily
ally itself with creative imagination.… Well, all of
this has to do with the fact that ideological clar-
ity is easy in theory and difficult in practice, but
nevertheless most honourable to be worked out. The
space in Marxism for this kind of clarity is wide
open, provided weʼre talking about a clarity that is
real, not strangled by schematism, not covered with
the mildew of boredom.23
Away with the pointed beard
The year 1956 saw events following upon one another
at a breathtaking pace. The 20th Party Congress in
Moscow (14–25 February) seemed to bring the long-
awaited turn. Khrushchevʼs secret speech on Stalinʼs
crimes made waves. For a brief moment, de-Staliniza-
tion and the democratic reform of socialism were on
the agenda. In Poland, a reform communist by the
name of Gomulka took over the reins. The slogan of a
ʻPolish spring in Octoberʼ made the rounds. Ernst and
Karola Bloch attentively registered any and every sign
that could strengthen their own position. Karola Bloch
sat in front of the radio, listening to the first declara-
tion by Gomulka, translating it there and then.
For the first time, we heard a speaker giving expres-
sion to the need for a ʻhuman socialismʼ. Ernst and
I were taking heart, hoping that the spell was bro-
ken and that this would be followed by the form of
socialism that we had dreamt about. In front of my
comrades, I was singing Gomulkaʼs praises.24
Bloch, who after all had defended the Moscow
trials against left-wing criticism, was shocked at the
revelations of Stalinʼs reign of terror. For him, the
20th Party Congress was the unmistakable signal for
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 11
 renewal and democratization. He was hoping for the
end of his own marginalization, now that even Moscow
was signalling the go-ahead for reforms. But it was not
to be. At the Third (SED) Party Conference in March
1956, Ulbricht made it clear that he rejected all reforms
in the GDR. Bloch, who attended this conference as
an observer, did not hide his disappointment over this
ʻOne Man Show, directed by Walter Ulbrichtʼ, as he
told the Scientific Council of his Institute. In over-
crowded lecturing halls, with students circulating their
lecture notes, Bloch criticized the SED regime. As
the Secretary of the steering commitee of the Partyʼs
university branch reported, Bloch even demanded the
resignation of Ulbricht, so as not to jeopardize German
unity.25
It is not entirely clear how far Bloch was prepared
to go. His thinking is evident from a publication ʻOn
the Significance of the 20th Party Congressʼ, which
was written in May 1956, but only published later.
The 20th Party Congress must … be brought to
its logical conclusions, and with its own measure
inherent in its own logic.… But this task is not to
be delegated to a single man.… For at the 20th
Party Congress, it was brought to light for the first
time, and to the outside world as well, that millions
of noiselessly executed murders throughout Russia,
turning ordinary people, unsuspecting communists,
innocent helpless people into victims – that these
were sheer bestialities, without any ʻbarbaric admix-
ture of personality cultʼ. Admittedly, these crimes
were given over to subaltern sadism only through
Moscowʼs centrally administered showcases.…
It was the 20th Party Congress which has given
Photo: Ingrid Zwerenz ©
Bloch with students, Leipzig 1955
12 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
Marxists an alternative yardstick, which will now
have to prove its worth in its application all over
the place. Its proof would lie in inner-party democ-
racy throughout the entire socialist camp, and the
re-establishment, at long last, of a theory activated
in research, learning and teaching. An additional
criterion would be the formation of a new popular
front.26
Bloch demanded that the GDR government free itself
from the fixation on the Soviet model. The opportunity
of a German road to socialism, opened up by the
20th Party Congress, would have to be seized. The
20th Party Congress had ʻopened up the possibility
of fighting the notion that the Soviet Union was the
one and only model of socialism.… Devoutness, as
in the case of the defeated, might have had a place in
the initial period of touch and go, of a Soviet Sector
virtually paralysed; but this is certainly not appropriate
in the times of the German Democratic Republic.ʼ27
These words found a resounding echo, first among
students, later among the critical heads of the SED.
The students adopted the polemics against the com-
pulsory courses in Marxism-Leninism for their own
cause, and fought, up to the point of lecture boycotts,
for the abolition of these courses. Students of Bloch
gained popularity, were politicized, and made a name
for themselves as members of a ʻBloch Circleʼ.
There was a Bloch Circle in Leipzig, which natural-
ly did not perceive itself as a resistance grouping by
Stasi definition. It was a circle of approximately ten
young people, who got together in their digs, where
there was the possibility of establishing some hu-
 man contact. But of course it was the actual Bloch
Circle that was eyed and placed under a spotlight
by those students who were regularly composing
reports for the Stasi. We did not identify with anti-
communism, not in the least. We wanted what in
those days was called a human socialism. Neither
were we in favour of free elections or for German
reunification, or for contacts with other, Western
philosophical institutes and schools; no, we just
wanted to serve the Party, but as human socialists.
We were given to the illusion that we could practise
highfalutin philosophy and nevertheless remain loyal
to the Party.28
Students at other universities also got moving. In
Jena, the Eisenberger Circle went so far as demanding
free elections. When Ulbricht held a speech at the
agricultural-horticultural faculty of Leipzig Univer-
sity, things came to a head. The agrarian policy of
collectivization and of the undermining of peasant
farming met with vociferous resistance. Ulbricht was
made to feel the massive indignation of the students.
SED District Secretary Fröhlich was alarmed. The
party reports, hurriedly commissioned and collected,
conveniently identified Bloch as instigator, on account
of his ʻpolitical-ideological derailmentsʼ. Comrades
Schleifstein and Handel were ordered to check ʻthe
ideological situation at the Institute of Philosophyʼ.29
The Party leadership of the university was brought
into line, and the defiant Party grouping at Blochʼs
Institute was called to order. The first in a series of
measures to restore order was the requirement of sub-
mitting fully written-up lectures of basic core courses
for purposes of control.
But even within the SED, the demand for reform
was articulated by members who allied themselves
with the name of Bloch. These reformers, whose efforts
were aimed ultimately at the ʻdisempowerment of the
criminal Ulbricht groupʼ, Party reform, and a ʻspecial
German road to socialismʼ, were making themselves
heard in intellectual circles. The mood of reform
spread to the Kulturbund, the quasi-state-sponsored
organization of intellectuals in the GDR. Their most
important journal, Sonntag, was published by Aufbau
Verlag. The directors of this publishing house were
Walter Janka and Wolfgang Harich, both of whom
were oriented towards Bloch. Bloch was
the ideological backbone, a very important back-
bone without, however, belonging to this group. We
were influenced by him, because he was a strong
personality with international reputation; he was
a great figure and defended certain positions. And
since Blochʼs pronouncements came in conjunction
with the criticism of Stalinism and with the program-
matic positions of his friend–foe Lukács, and now
even with Brecht, this was irresistible. If the great
Bloch says, ʻAway with the pointed beard! The
Party needs a new head and a new bodyʼ and ʻIt is
unbearable to see a little sergeant-major from the
province occupying the positions of Karl and Rosaʼ
– this is enormously influential.30
People grew more daring; they wanted to take
action. The people in the forefront believed themselves
to be on the eve of a ʻred 20 Julyʼ and prepared an
internal revolution. The coup was to take place at a
meeting of the Central Committee. A paper entitled
ʻPlatform for a Special German Road to Socialismʼ
was to force Ulbricht to resign. Paul Merker, a well-
respected figure, was prepared to succeed Ulbricht as
Party leader, and Bloch was earmarked for the office
of new state president. In preparation for this coup,
contact had been established with the Western office
of the SPD; contacts with the Soviet ambassador had
reportedly met with a positive response.31
The new enemies of the state
But in Moscow the die had been cast against democratiz-
ation and de-Stalinization. The Kremlin saw its control
threatened by reform moves in the socialist camp.
When transformation in Hungary turned into open
civil war, the Red Army was called in. The literary
circle around Petöfi was declared to be the centre of
a counter-revolutionary conspiracy, and its members
were arrested and sentenced.
Having been dealt some severe blows, the Ulbricht
regime managed to stabilize itself by conjuring up
the image of the dragon of counter-revolution which
had to be put down. The end of November saw the
arrest of Harich, Janka, Just and Zöger. The Plat-
tform group was presented as the Petöfi circle of the
GDR, and sentenced in the course of show-trials. As
for Bloch, Ulbricht was keen to find out whether he
was one of the rebels. On the basis of IM (unofficial
collaboratorsʼ) reports, the Stasi reckoned that Bloch
shared their positions, but did not belong to the core
group. This explains why Bloch, as one of the intel-
lectual leading lights of the Plattform group, was not
initially removed from the scene. This might well
have been calculated policy. For Ulbricht could now
announce with conviction that no prominent writer or
thinker of the GDR had participated in the attempted
coup. In the background, however, there were renewed
efforts to convert Bloch to Party doctrine; these were
without success. Karola Bloch, summoned to the Party
for a discussion, did not budge. She protested against
Harichʼs detention, against the accompanying lies
propagated in the press, and the neglected promise
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 13
of help for Lukács, who was sitting in prison in
Hungary. Karola and Ernst Bloch organized a lawyer
for Harich.
Hand in hand with the criminalization of the Party
opposition, the universities were subjected to inter-
vention by the Party. Teller was punitively placed
in production, where he lost an arm. Zehm was
imprisoned for several years in Torgau. Blochʼs assist-
ant, the Party Secretary of the Institute by the name
of Horn, who still allowed himself to be used as an
informant against Bloch, ended up hanging himself.
Others, like Zwerenz, fled to the West in time. The
crushing of the circle of students around Bloch had left
Bloch unscathed, but it dried up his field of activity.
The intervention of the repressive apparatuses was
flanked by an ideological offensive. On 6 December,
Ulbricht gave the go-ahead for massive purges with his
ʻOpen Letter to the Student Youthʼ. A conference of
SED delegates was set to take place at the University
of Leipzig at the end of December, under the slogan
ʻIdealist Errors under the Token of “Anti-Dogmatism”ʼ.
As early as 19 December, Gropp could embark on a
trial run of the set anti-Bloch theme in the newspaper
Neues Deutschland. SED members of the Institute
of Philosophy vowed to support Bloch, but could
not withstand the pressure from above. Ulbricht took
the opportunity of a public appearance in Leipzig to
engage in invective against Harich and Bloch. The
ensuing witchhunt was made to seem justified. It
came with the resolution that ʻany effects of Harichʼs
activities in the Philosophical Front are to be traced
and liquidatedʼ.32 Party membersʼ slavish obedience to
orders from above meant that Bloch was driven into an
ambush. Even the Party leadership at the Institute of
Philosophy joined in the campaign against Bloch. An
open letter dated 18 January 1957 criticized Blochʼs
stance on Poland and Hungary, and his habit of calling
the compulsory courses on official Marxism-Lenin-
ism an exercise in ʻnarrow-lane Marxismʼ. But Bloch
resisted being labelled ʻtraitorʼ. He responded with a
circular letter, in which he claimed ignorance of the
charges against him, declaring them to be the result
of misunderstandings. He purported to have welcomed
the intervention of the Red Army in Hungary, and
not to have known anything about Harichʼs plans. In
the end, he offered a trade-off: his retirement and
resignation from any teaching responsibilities for the
right to complete his work. He tried to make this offer
palatable by reminding his persecutors of the service
he had done the Party while in exile: ʻI have rendered
loyalty to the Soviet Union as a matter of course, even
throughout the period of the Moscow Trials, which I
14 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
tried to outline and interpret in articles published in
Neue Weltbühne, Prague 1937 and 1938.ʼ33
West German followers of Bloch were dismayed to
read this letter (published in the 1983 Bloch-Alma-
nach) by the figure they had come to respect as the
pioneer of the ʻwalk tallʼ campaign. To interpret the
Moscow trials philosophically when it should have
been a matter of openly criticizing them was con-
sidered a sacrifice of truth on the altar of the Party,
as early as 1937.34 By 1957, after Stalinʼs crimes had
been exposed, this trahison des clercs provided all the
more reason for a self-critical evaluation. But Bloch
once more affirmed the clandestine Party morality,
reproducing his earlier uncritical prostration to the
Party. He was banking on the interests of the Party to
handle things discreetly. The reference to his loyalty
to the Party as a matter of exigency, the renunciation
of his role as social critic, and the retreat into inner
emigration – all of this was calculated to bring about a
ceasefire, without having to subordinate himself to the
Party in publicly denouncing his stance, and without
having to break with the Party completely.
Judgement on Bloch was passed at the end of
January 1957 at a conference of the Central Com-
mittee. Kurt Hager, who had counted Bloch among
his associates and who had hitherto shielded him,
was now prepared to sacrifice him on the altar of
restoration. On 11 February, Ulbricht informed Bloch
of the verdict of the Central Committee: retirement,
but no prohibition on publishing. Ulbricht justified this
verdict by pointing out that, ʻconcerning the present
differences which sets us at variance, what is at issue
are not your philosophical views, but your position
on the politics of our workersʼ and peasantsʼ stateʼ.35
At the end of August, Bloch officially retired and was
deposed as director of the Institute of Philosophy.
He was barred from the Institute. Karola Bloch was
expelled from the Party.
The struggle against Blochism
Ulbrichtʼs verdict fell halfway within Blochʼs own
suggested compromise, but it didnʼt remain at that.
The guardians of ideological purity proceeded to stage
a public sentencing, which turned inner emigration
into inner banishment. In April 1957, the SED Party
leadership held a so-called academic conference at the
Institute of Philosophy to denounce ʻthe revisionist
philosophy of Ernst Blochʼ. The new puppets attempted
to make their careers by refuting Bloch; Blochʼs former
adherents were made to confess their sins. Everybody
was made to renounce ʻBlochismʼ, the formula being,
ʻProfessor Bloch was not a Marxist, is not a Marxist,
and did not become a Marxist during
the period of his residency in the GDR
since 1949ʼ.36
There seemed to have been a plan
to remove Bloch from public life in the
GDR after all. He lost the editorship of
the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie
and his seat in the presiding council of
the Kulturbund. The latter is all the more
remarkable, since the Kulturbund was
geared towards issues not specifically
dictated by the Party, and towards plu-
ralism. It was not an unconditional and
unlimited domain of the SED. It brought
together intellectuals of the most varied
interests, backgrounds and opinions.
Since the leadership of the Kulturbund
had voiced reservations against the

politics of the SED after the 20th Party
Congress, the Politburo raised the ʻques-
tion as to the justification of the existence
of the organizationʼ. With the prospect of
the dissolution of the Kulturbund, SED
members in the Kulturbund were quick
to act to bring the organization into line.
They brought in a regulation whereby
members had to conform to the require-
ment of finally overcoming ʻall revisionist tendenciesʼ
by publicly pledging to contribute to the ʻbuilding of
socialismʼ.
Bloch became a prominent victim of this levelling
exercise. The Presiding Council instituted inquisition-
style proceedings against him on two occasions, the
first one in February, and the second one in December
1957.37 The first time round, Bloch attempted to evade
SED members handling the case: he presented the
presiding members with the politely formulated con-
cluding passage from the letter announcing his forced
retirement, which he had received from Ulbricht. Bloch
presented the quotes as if he were dealing with a docu-
ment attesting to the most congenial agreement with
the SED Party leader. The SED members in attendance
promptly applauded Bloch. The next interrogation was
to end with Blochʼs expulsion, or at least with the
impossibility of his re-election as presiding member.
That was what the cadres around Kurt Hager, Alfred
Kurella and Erich Wendt had decided in a preparatory
meeting. Since Blochʼs expulsion had to be publicly
enacted within the Council, a tribunal was staged
within the Presiding Council, which was to force Bloch
either to renounce his views, or to face being found
guilty of insufficient loyalty to the state.
© Bundesarchiv, Koblenz
However, as is evident from the minutes of the
tribunal, Bloch knew how to undermine the inquisi-
torial logic facing him. The herald of the ʻWalk Tallʼ
campaign proved himself to be a master at defiant
manoeuvring. Whenever members of the Council were
intent on finding him guilty of political treason, he
wheedled his way out with undaunted insistence on
his defence. His defence was: ʻI have never said any-
thing; nothing can be proven or brought against me.ʼ
In his shortsightedness, he had not noticed students
applauding him as an opposition figure on the occasion
of his public lecture in honour of Hegel. The theme
of the address had, ʻof course, not contained any
topical criterionʼ. Neither was his Institute home to any
political opposition. He had simply followed his job
description in lecturing on the history of philosophy.
He had never demanded Ulbrichtʼs resignation; he
had welcomed the intervention of the Red Army in
Hungary. He denounced Zwerenz, who had left for the
West, as a ʻrenegade who had changed sidesʼ.38
Bloch gave the SED members sitting in judgement
of him just what they wanted, namely pledges in
support of socialism and of GDR politics. In the end,
they could not get more out of him than an act of
distancing himself from Zwerenz, which he conceded
without, however, mentioning Zwerenzʼs name. This

Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 15

concession appeared in the daily newspaper Neues
Deutschland (20 April 1958) under the headline ʻI
stand on the ground of the GDRʼ. Whenever anyone
dared to question his writings, however, the limit had
been transgressed, as far as Bloch was concerned.
Then he would blow the cover of loyal phrases:
The question is just: What is all this for, and why
is there no end to it? What do they want to achieve
– to exacerbate the unrest? Or is it a matter of
intimidation, and who is to be intimidated? I would
only need to appear behind a lectern, and a wildfire
would be ignited among students in Lepzig, Halle,
Jena and Berlin. There are wars that have broken out
for lesser reasons. I have not done this. I returned
to this Republic, and it is my wish to find a proper
place here for the fruits of my long labours. I
came here on these conditions, that was what I was
promised; this promise must be kept as a matter
of course. I will remain here, and I am stating this
simply and without pathos. But I will not allow my
work to be further humiliated, shouted down, or
insulted, as if there was nothing to the progressive
elements which were conceded as recently as six
months ago. In the West, this is called a witch-hunt.
This word cannot be avoided. I am not a witch, and
I do not need to be hunted down. I would like to
find a place for my work, which would be no small
honour to our cause and our state.39
The SED did not manage to convict Bloch of ʻtreasonʼ.
Nor could they expel him on grounds of being a
general nuisance. There remained only one solution,
namely to refrain from nominating Bloch for the
Presiding Council for a second time.
Inner emigration and the long arm
of the Stasi
Blochʼs expulsion from GDR cultural life had satisfied
the purging urges of the Party. A few ʻrelatively quiet
yearsʼ ensued.40 Officially sentenced to silence, Bloch
worked at the edition of his Collected Works, and got
more involved in the Academy of Sciences. There he
presented several ʻhard-hittingʼ lectures.41 In 1960, he
became chair of the Leibniz Commission. But it turned
out that Ulbrichtʼs promise to allow Bloch to publish
his work was not worth much. Klaus Gysi, the newly
appointed director of Aufbau Verlag, who worked
for the Stasi under the name I.M. Kurt, undermined
the publication of Blochʼs work. Bloch knew how to
defend himself. In 1959, he withdrew all contracts
with Aufbau Verlag, and transferred them to the West
German publishing house Suhrkamp. This threat had
some effect. Gysi generously gave permission for the
third volume of The Principle of Hope to be released,
after having delayed it for years.
16 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
The ʻquiet yearsʼ were deceptive. The Stasi had
long kept Bloch under surveillance and maintained
an interest in his activities. Telephone conversations
were tapped, mail was opened, and his house was
bugged. Unofficial collaborators informed on him. On
29 November 1956, the day before Harichʼs arrest, a
first report had been compiled on Bloch, from rela-
tively thin documents on file. Not quite a month later,
this was turned into a first report against Bloch. In
May 1957, a so-called Operative Process was initi-
ated, which was code-named OV Wildt, after Blochʼs
address in Wilhelm Wildt Strasse. It was not directed
exclusively against Ernst Bloch, but also against Karola
Bloch, against Ernst Blochʼs friend Hans Mayer and
his assistants Jürgen Teller and Lothar Kleine. The
files were assessed by Guntolf Herzberg from the
Division of Education and Research of the Gauck
Commmission:
What was revealed by the files, in addition, was the
fact that Ernst Bloch was being interrogated along
with his wife, but separately, in January 1957. The
object was to try, once more, to find out by what-
ever means necessary what he had discussed with
Harich shortly before the latterʼs arrest, how far he
was initiated into Harichʼs counter-revolutionary
activities, for instance into the visit of the East-
ern bureau of the SPD. But both Karola and Ernst
Bloch … managed, courageously and elegantly, to
evade the incriminating questions put to them.42
For the Party, the case of Bloch was settled, for the
time being, with his forced retirement at the end of
1957. Not so for the Ministry for Security (MfS). From
1958, the MfS files show an intensification of the cam-
paign against Bloch. Bloch is now being accused of
views directly hostile to the Party and the State,
as well as demands for the transformation of the
GDR, and of the entire socialist camp. That means
an adverse positioning of Bloch in the role of the
accused. In that case, one only has to compile
official evidence for evaluation by the courts, in
order then to institute criminal proceedings against
him, possibly even ending with a prison sentence.…
The circle of academics at Karl Marx University
included in his alleged group of friends and intel-
lectual associates is being widened; again and again,
reference is being made to the Petöfi Circle. Bloch
is being systematically construed as the enemy. In
summer 1958, two female unofficial collaborators
are introduced into his household. Bloch, by himself
and with his family, comes under continuous sur-
veillance from unofficial collaborators accompany-
ing him on his travels. In January 1959, something
happens which probably no-one knew at the time,
not even Bloch himself: the State Security, assisted
by these unofficial collaborators, conducts a search
of Blochʼs home, in order to find incriminating
 evidence which would finally conclude this Opera-
tive Process.43
The results of this search, however, seemed too meagre
for the Stasi to trump up a charge. Generally speaking,
the intrigues of Party and Stasi are not very easy to
make sense of.
At about the same time as the Stasi was preparing
the charge against Bloch, the Party was planning to use
him for their own purposes. He was the only one who
could counterbalance Karl Jaspersʼ campaign against
the armament politics in East and West. The great
resonance that the Suhrkamp edition of Blochʼs Princi-
ple of Hope had created, as well as the fanfares in the
West in honour of his seventy-fifth birthday (which had
been ignored in the GDR) roused the fears of the Party
leadership that the figure of Bloch could be elevated
to a weapon in the hands of the West in the ideologi-
cal fronts of the Cold War. After the debacles around
the publications in the West, the Central Committeʼs
Division of Science under Kurt Hager had to admit
that there was an all-round lack of clarity in matters
concerning Bloch. Now, all of a sudden, ʻclose contactʼ
was to be sought. Several threads running to Bloch
were being spun. Klaus Gysi and the acting General
Secretary of the Academy, Robert Dewey, approached
Bloch in their capacity as emissaries of the Party. The
threads came together in the Science Division, with
Dewey and Gysi being in regular contact with the
Division, coordinating every move.
The conversations recorded in the files of the SED
indicate a tug-of-war: Bloch was exploring possibilities
© Dr. Jan Robert Bloch
Bloch with his son, Jan Robert, 1955
of gaining greater elbow-room; and the Party was
exploring whether he could be used as an instrument
of its politics. The emissary of the Party reported to
his superiors that he had gained the impression that
Bloch ʻwanted to overcome his condition of being
insufficiently linked with the Partyʼ.44 In mid-Septem-
ber, Bloch enquired of Dewey whether there was any
sign of an ʻechoʼ from the SED Central Committee.
Dewey and Gysi transmitted the message from the
Party that ʻthere was no objection to clarifying things
in publicʼ, which would best be achieved if ʻBloch
himself were to appropriately outline his position on
the principles of party and government politics in
the sense which he himself has positively indicated
to meʼ. But it was precisely this kind of public state-
ment in support of Party and state that Bloch was no
longer prepared to deliver. He indicated that he was
prepared to prove his positive attitude ʻafter delibera-
tion and agreementʼ, and that the dispute with Jaspers
was included anyway. His ʻreintegration into public
lifeʼ, however, was to take place ʻpeu à peuʼ, via the
journal Sinn und Form, for instance.45 But Gysi and
Dewey repeatedly insisted on a public statement. It
was indeed the essential condition, which Ulbricht
had ordered Harich to enforce. Ulbrichtʼs declaration
reads as follows: ʻIt is of utmost importance to insist
on a public statement by Bloch. Bloch must declare his
sympathy for us and mention names.ʼ46 Thus the issue
of a public statement in the newspaper Neues Deut-
schland became a bone of contention that prefigured
a parting of the ways.
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 17
The leap into the realm of freedom and
the offended Alma Mater
The building of the Berlin Wall ended Blochʼs commit-
ment to the GDR. News of the Wall reached Bloch and
his family while on holiday in Bavaria. Heeding the
wish of the Blochsʼ son Jan Robert, they decided not
to return to the GDR. The gravity of this decision was
eased by the prospect of smuggling Blochʼs manuscripts
out of the GDR. On 20 September, Bloch explained
himself in a letter to Werner Hartke, president of the
Academy of Sciences. The latter had already received
several such farewell letters from members who had
left for the West ʻillegallyʼ. This time round, however,
the circumstances were unusual. Bloch had also given
the letter to the press, which disseminated it even
before it got to Hartke. The letter read:
I returned from exile in America in May 1949, tak-
ing up an appointment to the Chair of Philosophy
at the University of Leipzig. Since that time, I have
lived in a state which later called itself the German
Democratic Republic. During the first years of my
activities at the University, I enjoyed unhindered
freedom of speech, of writing, and of teaching.
During the last few years, this situation changed
at a rapid rate. I was driven into isolation, was not
granted the possibility of teaching, contacts with
students were being interrupted, my best students
were being persecuted and punished, avenues of
publishing were being closed off, I could not pub-
lish in any journal, and Aufbau Verlag in Berlin did
not meet its contractual obligations in relation to my
works. This was the making of a tendency aimed
at burying me in silence. After the events of 13
August, which do not leave any hope for any living
and working space for independent thinkers, I am
no longer prepared to expose myself and my work
to undignified conditions and to the threats which
are wielded to maintain them. I therefore have to
inform you, honourable President, that I can regret-
tably no longer be present at future meetings of the
Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften, of which I
am an ordinary member.47
This statement turned into ammunition in the propa-
ganda battles of the Cold War; it was being fired
by megaphone across the wall. But Bloch surpassed
this exercise in discreditation by proclaiming in a
radio interview that ʻthe leap across the Wall was
the leap from the realm of necessity into the realm
of freedomʼ.48
The response to this insult was not long in coming.
Soon afterwards, on 26 October, Bloch was expelled
from the Academy by a resolution of the plenary. A
peculiar disciplinary measure, if one considers the
way in which academics usually vote on resolutions.
18 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
The expulsion of a member of the Academy was an
extremely grave – indeed unprecedented – move in the
history of the Academy. It smelt like the deliberate
creation of a precedent. Even though the Academy
was being subsidized by the GDR state, this did not
mean that it was the equivalent of an intellectual and
educational production collective, as it became later
on. Its academics were from East and West Germany,
and SED comrades were in the minority. Party struc-
tures within the Academy were weak, and at most
controlled the administration and related institutes;
they did not have a decisive say over the exclusively
intellectual group, which constituted the highest deci-
sion-making body.
The initiative to exclude Bloch emanated from the
SED. On 26 September, a member of the Science
Division of the Central Committee told Fred Oelßner,
secretary of Blochʼs philosophy class, about the inten-
tions of the Party. Oelßner considered Blochʼs expul-
sion a ʻhardʼ measure. The constitution required a
three-quarters majority of ordinary members in the
plenary; moreover, invitations to meetings had to
be issued in advance, including the agenda. Oelßner
reckoned that the class taking philosophy, history, and
political, legal and economic sciences, among whom
there were numerous SED members, would have been
capable of motivating Blochʼs exclusion, given detailed
preparation. But in other classes, strong resistance
was to be expected, especially on the part of promi-
nent opponents of the regime, like Frings, Mothes
and Hertz. If subsequently prominent West German
members were to leave the Academy, this would weigh
more heavily than the case of Bloch taken by itself.
Nevertheless, Oelßner was willing to ʻgo along in
preparing and propagating Blochʼs exclusion, in case
this was demanded by the Party leadershipʼ.49
In order to mobilize veteran members of the
Academy to support Blochʼs exclusion, the Party
cadres relied on a strategy of scandal-mongering and
shock. Academy members Streisand and Dewey prov-
ided cogent ʻargumentationʼ, as arranged. The ʻargu-
mentationʼ was cunningly designed to re-address the
reproaches raised by Bloch against the GDR regime
to the Academy, thereby provoking the indignation of
members of the Academy.
Blochʼs contention that there is no hope of any
living and working space for independent thinkers
after 13 August constitutes an insult, especially to
GDR scientists, the most prominent of whom belong
to the Academy. In an act of immense arrogance,
Bloch dares to insinuate that members of the Deut-
sche Akademie der Wissenschaften are incapable of
independent thinking.50
The plan of scandal-mongering caught on. There was
ʻgeneral indignation about Blochʼs letterʼ.51 The phil-
osophy class demanded Blochʼs expulsion. The plenary,
likewise, proceeded as anticipated by the SED. People
loyal to the Party line had been mobilized; the agenda
had been sent out at such short notice that the danger
of West German opponents suddenly turning up was
minimized. Moreover, the vote was pushed to the end
of the agenda, in order to give those intent on abstain-
ing the chance to disappear unnoticed. What provided
the trigger was the fact that even conservative members
of the Academy like Theodor Frings, who tried to
prevent Blochʼs expulsion in advance, did not take a
stand in favour of Bloch, but disappeared before the
resolution was put to the vote. The SED resolution was
carried by the required three-quarters majority. In the
Academy, up-and-coming philosophers like Manfred
Buhr seized the reins. Buhr had been awarded his Ph.D
under Bloch, but he earned himself a career by refuting
Bloch – he exposed the alleged immanent theology
in Bloch. Buhrʼs verdict was generally accepted until
1989; Blochʼs work found only secret admiration in
the GDR.
Bloch and the German Question
Blochʼs departure dealt the GDR a hard blow. It meant
a final parting of the ways. From this end, the question
remains as to why this unorthodox and unassimila-
ble thinker, this ʻbird of paradiseʼ, could attain such
eminent significance in the GDR in the first place. Or,
turning the question the other way round, we could ask
what kind of political line Bloch was advocating, what
kind of forces were carrying him along. It is instruc-
tive to interpret the figure of Bloch from the angle of
Soviet foreign policy on Germany, as Irrlitz suggests.
Bloch had emigrated from the West; he is not by any
means to be seen as an intellectual appendix of the
group around Ulbricht. It was all the more remarkable
that his appointment was effected with the approval
of the SMAD.
Soviet policy on Germany was still in flux. Before
embarking on the policy of ʻsovietizationʼ, Stalin
wanted to keep the option of a united and neutralized,
democratic-parliamentary Germany open. This was an
offer held out to the West, as a way of maintaining
the anti-Hitler coalition as a basis for the renewal of
Stalinʼs foreign policy, in order to get out of the cul-
de-sac of ʻsocialism in one countryʼ or ʻsocialism in
one campʼ. But a ʻunited but neutralized Germany was
a variant that was not attractive to the Western powers,
confronted as they were with Eastern and Western
European Communist Parties gaining in strengthʼ.52
Considered in this light, the relationship between the
blocs which committed the West German state to
the role of a barrier against the Eastern European
Peopleʼs Democracies was Stalinʼs defeat in victory.
The Soviet option of a united and neutral Germany
created its offshoots in the GDR, especially among
the second-in-line SED cadres.53
Until 1957, the SED represented the line of a
special German road to socialism (in the end, in a
weaker form, represented by the group of Schird-
ewan, Wollweber, Herrnstadt …). Among the
Party functionaries of the forties, like Selbmann,
Ackermann, Fechner, Leonhard, and Wandel, the
beginnings of a new partnership between workersʼ
movement and liberal bourgeoisie were more clearly
visible.54
This option was what gave SMAD cultural politics
its character; initially, it was far from embarking on
ʻsovietizationʼ.55 This was the line that carried Bloch;
and he, in turn, supported it. It found its final demise in
1956. It was at this point that Bloch became untenable
to the GDR.
Translated by Ulrike Kistner
Notes
1. Joachim Feste, Vom Ende des utopischen Zeitalters, Ber-
lin, 1991, pp. 73, 60, 59, 69.
2. Manfred Riedel, Tradition und Utopie. Ernst Blochs
Philosophie im Lichte unserer geschichtlichen Denker-
fahrung, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1994, p. 20.
3. Arnold Schölzel, ʻErnst Bloch (1885–1977)ʼ, utopie kreativ
15, 1991, pp. 55–7. Fritz Raddatz was the editor of the
feuilleton of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. Schölzel
was part of the East Berlin philosophy scene and al-
lowed himself to be used as an informer by the Ministry
for State Security. See Guntolf Herzberg, ʻAbhängigkeit
und Verstrickungʼ, in Volker Gerhardt, Henning Ottmann
and Martyn P. Thompson (eds), Politisches Jahrbuch,
Stuttgart, Weimar, 1994, pp. 160, 170.
4. Gerd Irrlitz, ʻEin Beginn vor dem Anfang. Philosophie
in Ostdeutschland 1945–1950ʼ, in Walter H. Pehle and
Peter Sillem, Wissenschaft im geteilten Deutschland.
Restauration oder Neubeginn nach 1945?, Frankfurt-
am-Main, 1992, p. 122.
5. According to Irrlitz (ibid., p. 124), Bloch did not at the
time stand a chance of obtaining a Chair at a West Ger-
man university.
6. Ernst and Karola Blochʼs departure from the United States
was delayed due to passport problems. Their decision
to return to Germany was influenced by their precari-
ous financial situation, which mitigated Ernst Blochʼs
aversion against lecturing in the ʻformer land of the
swastikaʼ. Moreover, the rise of McCarthyism was not
in any way encouraging, especially since Karola Bloch
had at times been working for the Soviet secret service
and had entered the US Communist Party under a pseu-
donym (see Karola Bloch, Aus meinem Leben, Pfull-
ingen, 1981, pp. 110ff). Werner Krauss entered the KPD
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 19
 (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) via his role in the
anti-fascist resistance. A member of the Rote Kappelle,
he had been sentenced to death and had escaped execu-
tion by a hairʼs breadth. On Krauss, see Gerwin Klinger,
ʻWerner Krauss (1900–1976) – ein Intellektuellen-Leben
in deutschen Diktaturenʼ, Jahrbuch des Mitteldeutschen
Kulturrates 1995, 1995.
7. Ernst Bloch, Briefe 1903–1975, 2 vols, ed. Karola Bloch,
Frankfurt-am-Main, 1985, pp. 593, 597, 592f.
8. Bertold Brecht, Arbeitsjournal 1942 bis 1955, Frankfurt-
am-Main, 1974, diary entry 6 January 1949.
9. Bloch, Briefe 1903–1975, pp. 599f.
10. Exiles originally from West Germany returning to East
Germany were eyed suspiciously by the Moscow clique
within the SED. During the 1950s, when the SED felt it
had repaid its debt by neutralizing the old guard in the
universities, the returning exiles were sent into retire-
ment so as to ensure their intellectual extinction.
11. Jürgen Teller, Interview, 15 December 1993, Leipzig.
12. Wolfgang Harich, Interview, 20 August 1993, Berlin.
13. Ibid.
14. Official Marxism-Leninism staked its sphere of influence
with the issuing of the Standing Orders for the Restruc-
turing of Tertiary Education (1951). It was imposed on
students through the Social Sciences Faculty and Core
Courses on the Basics of Marxism-Leninism.
15. Teller, Interview.
16. Harich, Interview.
17. Ibid.
18. A phrase paraded by Ulbricht. Bloch adopts and adapts
it to characterize official Marxism-Leninism. Minutes of
the meeting of the presiding council of the Kulturbund,
22 February 1957, Archiv des KB Akte 268. See also
Anna-Sabine Ernst and Gerwin Klinger, ʻ“Wenn es mich
nicht überzeugt, kann ich keine Selbstkritik üben”. Die
Verhandlungen gegen Ernst Bloch im Kulturbund der
DDRʼ, Bloch-Almanach 12, 1992, p. 136.
19. In the aftermath of the Formalism Debate of 1954, carried
out in the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, Rugard-
Otto Gropp, director of the DHM Division and master
of ideological intrigue, accused Bloch of revisionism.
Bloch demanded that Gropp leave the Institute of Phil-
osophy at Leipzig University. Hager, the SEDʼs chief
in charge of cultural affairs, intervened in a moderating
function. He ordered Gropp to retreat and whipped the
Party section. It is ironic that Gropp had to co-ordinate
the Festschrift in honour of Bloch on the occasion of the
latterʼs seventieth birthday one year later.
20. Harich, Interview.
21. Günther Zehm, Interview, 3 February 1994, Jena.
Günther Zehm studied under Bloch and belonged to
the Bloch circle. He was transferred from Leipzig to Jena
in 1956. One year later, he was arrested and sentenced
to four yearsʼ imprisonment. He later became editor of
the feuilleton of the politically conservative newspaper
Die Welt.
22. Blochʼs letter was found in the SED Party Archive in a
file with explanatory notes added by intelligence agents
assessing information on the events surrounding 17 June
(SAPMO-ZPA IV 2/904/426, pp. 93–4). It is not en-
tirely clear who the addressee of Blochʼs letter was;
most probably the letter was addressed to the university
Party leadership.
23. Ernst Blochʼs address to the 4th Writersʼ Congress, Janu-
ary 1956, from an edited tape recording in the Deutsches
Rundfunk Archiv (Archive of the German Broadcasting
20 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
Service), Berlin.
24. Karola Bloch, Aus meinem Leben.
25. Volker Caysa, ed., ʻHoffnung kann enttäuscht werdenʼ
– Ernst Bloch in Leipzig, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1992, p.
40.
26. Ernst Bloch, ʻÜber die Bedeutung des XX. Parteitagsʼ,
in Bloch Ernst: Politische Messungen, Pestzeit, Vormärz,
Frankfurt-am-Main, 1985, pp. 359ff.
27. Ibid., p. 362.
28. Zehm, Interview.
29. Quoted in Caysa, ʻHoffnung kann enttäuscht werdenʼ,
p. 41.
30. Harich, Interview. Ulbricht had a pointed beard.
31. Telephone communication with Harich, 7 February 1994.
The title of the paper (reprinted in Wolfgang Harich,
Keine Schwierigkeiten mit der Wahrheit. Zur national-
kommunistischen Opposition 1956 in der DDR, Berlin,
1993) provided the name for the ʻPlattform Gruppeʼ.
After his return from exile in Mexico in 1946 (where
he co-founded the movement Neues Deutschland), Paul
Merker was a member of the SED Party leadership. In
1950, he was expelled from the SED in connection with
the ʻNoel Field Affairʼ. He was detained in 1952. At the
instigation of the Soviets, a show-trial was to be staged.
But since they could not extract a confession even after
29 months of detention, he was sentenced to eight yearsʼ
imprisonment in March 1955. In February 1956, on the
eve of the 20th Party Congress, he was discharged on
grounds of serious illness. He was officially acquitted
in July 1956. From 1957 onwards, the publishing house
Volk und Welt employed him as a reader. After the de-
tention of Harich and Janka, Merker was ʻforced by
Erich Mielke to state the nature of his relation to the
Party in writingʼ (Harich, Keine Schwierigkeiten mit der
Wahrheit, p. 83). In the main trial against Harich, he
was made state witness, together with Zöger, Just and
Richard Wolf (ibid., p. 88).
32. Quoted in Caysa, ʻHoffnung kann enttäuscht werdenʼ,
p. 44.
33. Open Letter from Bloch to the district leadership of the
SED, 21 January 1957, quoted in Caysa ʻHoffnung kann
enttäuscht werdenʼ, p. 141.
34. Bloch commented on the Moscow trials on two occa-
sions, in ʻKritik einer Prozeßkritik. Hypnose, Mescalin
und die Wirklichkeitʼ, Neue Weltbühne vol. 14, no. 33,
4 March 1937, and ʻBucharinʼs Schlußwortʼ, Neue Welt-
bühne, vol. 18, no. 34, 5 May 1938. As Hans-Albert
Walter has shown in a reconstruction of the context
(ʻ“Stalin – Richtgestalt der Liebe”. Ernst Bloch und
die Moskauer Prozesseʼ, manuscript, Sendung des Hes-
sischen Rundfunk, 17 April 1992), Blochʼs interventions
were aimed at taking the wind out of the sails of the
criticisms directed against the Moscow trials in the lib-
eral-left exile press. In the Neues Tage-Buch, Bornstein
had adduced substantial evidence which led him to talk
of a ʻwitchesʼ trial in Moscowʼ. These arguments were
not of interest to Bloch. He relegates the editors of the
Neues Tage-Buch to the ʻgravitational field of the Nazisʼ,
in order to separate them, as ʻreactionary intrudersʼ,
from the designation of ʻpolitical exileʼ.
35. Ulbricht, quoted in Caysa, ʻHoffnung kann enttäuscht
werdenʼ, p. 53.
36. Quoted from a document in the files of the SED district
committee. It is dated April 1957; no further details
are given. Quoted in Caysa ʻHoffnung kann enttäuscht
werdenʼ, p. 168.
37. For a detailed outline, see Ernst and Klinger, ʻ“Wenn
es mich nicht überzeugt, kann ich keine Selbstkritik
üben”ʼ. Excerpts of minutes were published in utopie
kreativ 15, 1991.
38. Quotes from the statement of Bloch at the Conference of
the Presiding Council of the Kulturbund, 13 December
1957, Kulturbund Archive, File no. 266.
39. Statement by Ernst Bloch, presented to the Conference of
the Presiding Council of the Kulturbund, 13 December
1957, Kulturbund Archive, File no. 320 GV.
40. Karola Bloch, Aus meinem Leben, p. 231.
41. Bloch, Briefe 1903–1975, p. 615.
42. Herzberg, Interview, 10 January 1994, Berlin.
43. Ibid.
44. Abtlg. Wiss. ZK, Möhwald, Information on the conduct
of Prof. Dr Bloch, 9 October 1959, SAPMO-ZPA IV
2/904/163, p. 44.
45. Report Dewey, 26 September 1960, SAPMO-ZPA IV
2/904/163, pp. 61–4. Bloch tried to avert the impend-
ing summons to make a public statement, by suggesting
that the Party would thereby harm its own image. He
was said to ʻconsider himself a “Trojan Horse in West
Germany”. A public statement would prevent him from
continuing to appear publicly in West Germany.ʼ Haus-
mitteilung Abtlg. Wissenschaft, Hörnig to Ulbricht, 23
July 1960, SAPMO-ZPA IV 2/904/163, p. 45.
46. Internal memo handwritten by Ulbricht, Abtlg. Wiss.,
Hörnig, 23 July 1960, informing him of the efforts un-
dertaken by Gysi, SAPMO-ZPA 2/904/163, p. 45.
47. Quoted in Peter Zudeick, Der Hintern des Teufels.
Ernst Bloch – Leben und Werk, Moos, Baden-Baden,
p. 245.
48. This statement by Bloch, made during the course of a
radio interview, is reported by both Harich (Interview)
and Buhr (Interview, 2 November 1993, Berlin).
49. Aktennotiz Abtlg Wissenschaft des ZK, 27 September
1961, SAPMO-ZPA IV 2/904/163, pp. 97–8.
50. Begründung zum Antrag auf Ausschluß von Ernst
Boch, SAPMO-ZPA, SAMPO-ZPA IV 2/904/163, pp.
99–102.
51. Aktennotiz Abtlg. Wissenschaft, 27 September 1961,
SAPMO-ZPA IV 2/904/163, pp. 97–8.
52. Irrlitz, ʻEin Beginn vor dem Anfangʼ, p. 118.
53. Wolfgang Zank (ʻAls Stalin Demokratie befahlʼ, Die
Zeit 25, 16 June 1995) presented an SED document
which shows Stalin impressing upon the leadership of
the German Communist Party in 1945 that a policy of
sovietization was not the way to avoid the division of
Germany. Both tendencies were present in the SED
at the time: the policy of sovietization represented by
Ulbricht, on the one hand, and the German Road to So-
cialism represented by Ackermann, on the other hand.
They converged in the figure of Stalin.
54. Irrlitz, ʻEin Beginn vor dem Anfangʼ, p. 118.
55. On the contrary, the SMAD tried to retain bourgeois-
liberal professors like Gadamer or Litt. In Berlin, if
the SMAD had had its way, Nicolai Hartmann would
have been preferred to Bloch (see Irrlitz, ʻEin Beginn
vor dem Anfangʼ, p. 121).
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 21
The need in thinking
Materiality in Theodor W. Adorno
and Judith Butler
Carrie L. Hull
In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler attempts to
deconstruct the body and matter in the same way that
the self-constituting, stable, centred subject has been
deconstructed in recent years.1 In the process, Butler
claims to be operating in a theoretical realm beyond
the frameworks of materialism and idealism. While I
concur with many things that Butler argues, I do not
agree with her implication that there is no analytically
meaningful distinction between matter and discourse.
For the purposes of this article, I will therefore com-
pare Butlerʼs position with that of Theodor Adorno
in his essay ʻSubject and Objectʼ and his book Nega-
tive Dialectics. I hope to demonstrate that one can
defend the content of most of Butlerʼs arguments from
Adornoʼs materialist perspective, while consequently
rescuing the critical potential of that materialism.
My point of departure will be Butlerʼs most
renowned argument: there is no natural sex prior to
the social categories of gender. Taking inspiration from
Lacan, Derrida and, in particular, Foucault, Butler
advocates ʻthe construal of “sex” no longer as a bodily
given on which the construct of gender is artificially
imposed, but as a cultural norm which governs the
materialization of bodies.ʼ2 Butler repeatedly contends
that there are various general implications for idealism
and materialism within this central argument. For
example, she argues that ʻthe set of metaphysical oppo-
sitions between materialism and idealism embedded
in received grammar … [is] critically redefined by a
poststructuralist rewriting of discursive performativity
as it operates in the materialization of sex.ʼ3 The bulk
of this article will examine the ontological and epistem-
ological implications of this ʻredefinitionʼ, particularly
as Butler relates it to the categories of sex. I will
also briefly explore the strategic political gains Butler
believes can follow from this theoretical move. As
22 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
indicated, my analysis will always be contextualized
within the alternative of Adornoʼs materialism. I now
turn to Butlerʼs epistemological interventions.
The mediation of matter
Butler first of all insists that there is no access to
matter prior to its conceptualization in thought and
language. We can only perceive matter, things, reality
and therefore bodies through concepts. ʻMateriality
[is] that which is bound up with signification from
the startʼ, states Butler.4 With regard to the specific
categories of sex, Butler draws attention to the act of
ʻgirlingʼ a baby at the moment of birth on the basis of
the genitalia read as a sign of a prior natural girlhood.5
We see the baby through the mediating categories
affixed to the external sex organs and infer that those
traits have some kind of real meaning or natural status.
Butler, on the contrary, argues that sexed men and
women cannot be said actually to exist outside of these
categories and that there is no way to ground sex in
any kind of material reality.
Adorno is in partial agreement with Butler on this
issue. It is central to Adornoʼs theories that thought
or language can never equate to what it is an effort
to describe, its object. The object is therefore ʻnon-
identicalʼ to thought in Adornoʼs terminology.6 ʻThat
the nonidentical is not immediateʼ, he writes, ʻthat it
is a matter of transmission, is trivial.ʼ7 This principle
that knowledge of the world is mediated via thought
has been accepted by materialists for a long time,
according to Adorno. Despite this assertion, I think
it is fair to say that utilization of this tenet has not
been as radical as it perhaps could have been. Butler
is therefore original in her consistent application of
the principle of the mediated nature of reality to the
categories of sex and sexuality.8
Discursive performativity
Second, and more controversially, Butler contends that
not only is our perception of reality or materiality
always mediated via language or thought; mediation
will of necessity entail partial formation or construc-
tion of reality. She writes: ʻTo claim that discourse is
formative … is to claim that there is no reference to
a pure body which is not at the same time a further
formation of that body.ʼ9 I will let a more detailed
passage clarify this argument as it pertains to sex:
ʻsexʼ not only functions as a norm, but is part of a
regulatory practice that produces the bodies it gov-
erns, that is, whose regulatory force is made clear
as a kind of productive power, the power to produce
– demarcate, circulate, differentiate – the bodies
it controls. Thus, ʻsexʼ is a regulatory ideal whose
materialization is compelled, and this materialization
takes place (or fails to take place) through certain
highly regulated practices. In other words, ʻsexʼ is
an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized
through time. It is not a simple fact or static condi-
tion of a body, but a process whereby regulatory
norms materialize ʻsexʼ and achieve this materializa-
tion through a forcible reiteration of those norms.10
Consequently, not only do we see the baby girl in
a mediated fashion; the act of ʻgirlingʼ is an imposi-
tion of a form on the baby turning it into a girl and
simultaneously readying ʻherʼ for a lifetime of similar
directives.11 Discourse or language, therefore, is never
purely ideal; it is not simply a reflection of prior
reality because it will actually shape the materiality it
supposedly mirrors. As already indicated, Butler does
not limit her argument to the issue of the materiality
of sex. At one point she calls for the conceptualization
of matter in general, ʻnot as a site or surface, but as
a process of materialization that stabilizes over time
to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface
we call matterʼ.12 It seems that her consistent use of
the word ʻmaterialityʼ as opposed to matter is a result
of this distinction between the latter as static entity
and the former as the effect of a process without
beginning or end. The suggestion is that this principle
is a challenge to any materialism which maintains
that language and ideas merely reflect a previously
existing reality.
Butlerʼs definition of discourse also incorporates
a critique of idealism. She does not believe that lan-
guage13 is purely noumenal. She repeatedly declares
that it is a system intermingling phenomenal and
non-phenomenal elements:
But if language is not opposed to materiality,
neither can materiality be summarily collapsed into
an identity with language. On the one hand, the
process of signification is always material; signs
work by appearing (visibly, aurally), and appear-
ing through material means, although what appears
only signifies by virtue of those non-phenomenal
relations, i.e., relations of differentiation, that tacitly
structure and propel signification itself. Relations,
even the notion of différance, institute and require
relata, terms, phenomenal signifiers. And yet what
allows for a signifier to signify will never be its
materiality alone; that materiality will be at once an
instrumentality and deployment of a set of larger
linguistic relations.14
The example of the little girl should again illuminate.
Her definition as a girl unquestionably requires the
material existence of the external reproductive organs.
Therefore there is no ʻideaʼ of girlness pre-existing the
secondary sex traits. Language in itself, even without
these material references, becomes material via its
utterance or inscription. Despite these materialities, the
girlʼs sex traits only mean something because of their
relationship to the little boyʼs penis, and that relation-
ship is immaterial. In other words vagina means girl
because penis means boy, and vice versa. The ideas
ʻboyʼ and ʻgirlʼ are in turn connected to all of the
various things it means to be a boy or a girl in our
world, defined in language yet having real effects and
requiring phenomena to mean anything at all.
Adorno concurs that language ʻshapesʼ reality,
but with significant qualifications. Much of Negative
Dialectics consists of a critique of a form of idealism
which Adorno labels ʻidentity thinkingʼ. He argues that
idealists like Hegel ultimately believed that thought
could in fact correspond to its object. This entailed the
corresponding tenet that the object could be reduced
to or equated with the subjectʼs knowledge of it.
Hegel, according to Adorno, ʻexploited the fact that
the nonidentical on its part can be defined only as a
concept.… [The object] was thereby removed from
dialectics and brought to identity.ʼ15 In other words,
Hegel converted our inability to perceive objectivity
except via concepts into the premiss that objectivity
was only the concept. Because identity thinking or
idealism was/is hegemonic in Adornoʼs eyes, it has
universally been accepted that the object is what we
define it to be. Adorno writes:
In idealism, the highly formal identity principle had,
due to its formalization, an affirmative substance.
This is innocently brought to light by terminol-
ogy, when simple predicative sentences are called
ʻaffirmative.ʼ The copula says: It is so, not other-
wise.16
Here, Adorno is pointing out that thought has an
ʻaffirmativeʼ substance, that it can constitute reality.
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 23
Adorno frequently addresses the pain that such utter-
ances inflict, speaking in terms of the categorized
object as conquered and suffering. The ʻIt is soʼ has
an obvious parallel with Butlerʼs ʻItʼs a girl!ʼ
Yet clearly Adorno is saying something else too.
As indicated, one of his fundamental premisses is
that thought cannot equal its object. Adorno wants to
emphasize both the mediative nature of thought and
the objectivity or material reality external to thought.
Adorno maintains that idealists disregard the fact
that the ʻindirectness [of thought] must always refer
to some transmitted thing, without which there would
be no indirectnessʼ.17 For Adorno, there is always
something, some entity, some object beyond thought.18
Of course, Butler does not posit the existence of
a constituting subject in any idealist sense of the
word, and she specifically states that language requires
phenomena or relata. However, Adorno would say
that Butler, even given these distinctions, makes the
Hegelian error of asserting that the object itself is
nothing but what discourse claims of it. The state-
ment ʻItʼs a girl!ʼ only creates the concept of girlhood
according to Adornoʼs position. This is not to say that
the declarative has no effect; again, identity thinking
has resulted in tangible misery according to Adorno.
Calling the baby a girl may make her act, think and
feel like a girl; indeed, as Butler says, her personhood
may be unimaginable without her girlness. That does
not make her through and through a girl, however.
The baby girl is always something other than what
we have labelled her. In Adornoʼs words, ʻRather than
constitutive for objectivity, the subjective mediation is
a block to objectivity; it fails to absorb entity, which
objectivity is in essence.ʼ19 This insistence on the exist-
ence of prior material reality nevertheless entails the
possibility that there is at least something true about
the concept of girlhood. Adorno would not argue for
any sort of essential girlness; nevertheless, according
to Adorno, the girl is something, other than merely
what we declare her to be.
The abject margins of discourse
Butler expends considerable effort establishing that
discursive practices will have relative outsides or
margins that are also constitutive of reality. Materiality
is therefore partly forged by what is not specifically
uttered and by what falls outside of any category:
the point has never been that ʻeverything is discur-
sively constructedʼ; that point, when and where it
is made, belongs to a kind of discursive monism
or linguisticism that refuses the constitutive force
of exclusion, erasure, violent foreclosure, abjection
24 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
and its disruptive return within the very terms of
discursive legitimacy.20
This is one of the main ways in which Butler attempts
to distinguish her position from what she variously calls
ʻdiscursive monismʼ or ʻradical constructivismʼ, the
apparently purely idealistic conception of discourseʼs
relationship to the world. She would undoubtly contend
that Adornoʼs criticism of identity thinking cannot be
applied in her case for this very reason.
How does this theoretical distinction specifically
play itself out in Butlerʼs work? In the example of
ʻgirlingʼ provided above, while girls are frequently
denigrated in relation to boys, babies who are not
readily classified as either sex are utterly abject.21 In
our world, it is not possible to be anything unless you
can be classified according to sex.22 The existence
of a sexually ambiguous baby or adult, furthermore,
can threaten the supposedly solid ground of the ʻrealʼ
boys and girls of the world.23 Similarly, heterosexual-
ity is defined by its relation to homosexuality and
bisexuality, and the reverse is true as well. Power
conditions in society dictate which margins will be
more abject than others.24 The main point is that the
ʻotherʼ to any thought category, while lying outside of
that category, is intimately connected to it. Because
the outsides of a discourse do not ʻfitʼ into any of the
categories, it becomes impossible to say that every-
thing is discursively constituted. Butler expands:
The paradox of subjectivation is precisely that the
subject who would resist such norms is itself ena-
bled, if not produced, by such norms. Although this
constitutive constraint does not foreclose the possi-
bility of agency, it does locate agency as a reitera-
tive or rearticulatory practice, immanent to power,
and not a relation of external opposition to power.25
In other words, the man or woman who resists the
norms of heterosexuality via homosexual or bisexual
practice has had their rebellion defined in terms of
that heterosexuality (even though they have not specifi-
cally been ʻconstitutedʼ by its discourse), and not in
terms of some natural or pre-discursive bisexuality or
homosexuality.
Adorno similarly asserts that ʻidentityʼ thinking
subjects any sign of difference to abjection. Otherness
is suppressed or denied as everything is forced into
reified categories. When identity thinking is aware of
otherness, it can only imagine it in terms of absolute
contradiction and hence antagonism, as everything is
viewed in relation to the identical, self-same and hence
non-contradictory subject.26 Writing of the legal realm,
Adorno observes:
 The law in society is a preservative of terror,
always ready to resort to terror with the aid of
quotable statutes.… In law the formal principle of
equivalence becomes the norm; everyone is treated
alike. An equality in which differences perish se-
cretly serves to promote inequality.… The total legal
realm is one of definitions. Its systematic forbids
the admission of anything that eludes their closed
circle.27
The thought categories of identity thinking thus
deform their objects as they terrorize their margins.
There are obvious similarities again between Adorno
and Butlerʼs projects.
Adorno would still criticize Butlerʼs assertion that it
is the immaterial ʻoutsideʼ of a discourse that is con-
stitutive. He would again perhaps ask, ʻWhat is it pre-
cisely that does not fit into the discursive category girl
or boy?ʼ Even if the answer is ʻeverything that cannot
be classified as girl or boyʼ, that is still something.
While Butler says that this ʻsomethingʼ is constituted
in its relationship to the categories ʻgirlsʼ and ʻboysʼ,
Adorno would insist that the abject outside maintains
a distinctness owing directly to its objectivity.
Causality and experience, or,
the roast dinner
It is necessary to qualify further Butlerʼs arguments
concerning the notion of causality and construction.
Even though she resorts to the language of cause
and effect to make her point, Butler cautions that
construction cannot mean the simple reversal of the
ʻsubject–objectʼ declarations of idealism. It is therefore
not theoretically correct to say that ʻdiscourse con-
structs the subjectʼ. It is more precise to adopt the
following formulation:
construction is neither a subject nor its act, but a
process of reiteration by which both ʻsubjectʼ and
ʻactsʼ come to appear at all. There is no power that
acts, but only a reiterated acting that is power in its
persistence and instability.28
Thus, even if Butler is forced by the conventions of
our language (and, undoubtedly, the desire to relate her
argument forcefully) to say that sex and sexuality are
discursively constituted, this important caveat should
be kept in mind. Discourse is performative only as a
repeated social practice. It cannot be said to originate
from a specific subject, in the same way that it is
not imposed upon a pre-existing subject or object.
A specific act of ʻgirlingʼ is successful because it is
embedded in an already accepted social norm.
Adorno also has relevant criticisms of the idealist
formulation of causality. He presents the somewhat
enigmatic example of a diner before a roast. Adorno
contends that the mindʼs experience is like this dinerʼs
relation to the roast: ʻexperience lives by consuming
the standpoint; not until the standpoint is submerged
in it would there be philosophy.ʼ29 Adorno adds that
ʻthought does not preserve itself as an origin, and it
ought not to hide the fact that it does not generate
– that it merely returns what it already has as experi-
enceʼ.30 I read these passages to mean that thought only
occurs when the thinker is inside an experience. Even
when you are just sitting there ʻthinkingʼ, your thought
cannot be said to be separated from that experience of
thinking. Furthermore, your thought changes as you
think it: ʻreflecting on things of the mind, re-thinking
them, … turn[s] them into something else.ʼ31 In the
only slightly more concrete example above, one does
not have an idea of roast until one is eating a roast.
In eating it, you alter the roast and your thought of
what it is like to eat a roast. Neither the thought nor
the roast goes through the experience unchanged.
Even if one has had roast in the past, Adorno warns
that your idea of that taste will be different from the
actual taste, and that idea will of course be different
from the roast itself.
There are several opaque messages in all of this.
Like Butler, Adorno wants to reformulate our notion of
causality. Thought (and, therefore, language) is experi-
ence, and as such it is fully immersed in its objects.
Thought cannot, of course, be said to ʻoriginateʼ
anything. Furthermore, the entire concept of origin
or cause is deconstructed in the same manner that
Adorno analyses all concepts. ʻThe concept “origin”
ought to be stripped of its static mischiefʼ,32 writes
Adorno; further, ʻ[t]he universal dependence of all
moments on all other moments makes the talk of
causality obsolete.ʼ33 For Adorno, there is no stasis, no
unrelatedness, in the world. Therefore, even the thing
that supposedly comes first needs a context, something
else to be aware of it. If this is the case, no single
thing can be said to be the cause of any other thing.
Everything is always already embedded, just like the
diner and the roast.
How can Adornoʼs reformulation of causality be
applied to the sex categories ʻgirlʼ and ʻboyʼ? Clearly,
there are similarities to Butlerʼs ideas here, as she is
careful to indicate that discourse is not a lone utter-
ance; it is practice (which invokes the social) that
constitutes a materiality in which it is always already
immersed. Adorno would certainly concur with Butler
that the ʻideaʼ of girl does not pre-exist society. He
would point out that the materiality of girlhood and its
idea alter with time. This does not negate the fact that
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 25
there is a reality underlying the concept. Furthermore,
each specific act of girling involves the socially con-
stituted ʻcategoryʼ of girl and a particular baby, whose
materiality is not exhausted by the category. This
would be the case with each and every baby. Butler
would probably agree with this last point, although
her writings tend to focus less on the inability of a
category to fully describe its object and more on the
slippage between the category and its abject margins.
Nevertheless, Butler and Adorno are still in substantial
accord.
Adornoʼs criticism of the idealist conception of
causality is ultimately greater than this, though. In
Adornoʼs world-view, the dinerʼs experience of the
roast is dependent on that roast in a more substantial
way than the roast is dependent on the diner. For this
reason, he would yet again insist that Butler succumbs
to identity thinking. It is to this essential difference
between Butler and Adorno that I now turn.
The heart of the matter
I will now address the central question, ʻwhat pre-
cisely is objectivity or materiality for Butler?ʼ Recall
that Butler has already granted that language requires
phenomenal objects to signify anything. In addition,
she repeatedly asserts that even though discourse is
partially constitutive of matter, matter is not therefore
a tabula rasa or something upon which discourse is
simply imposed. Matter should rather be thought of
as ʻa demand in and for language, a “that which”
which prompts and occasions, … [and] calls to be
explainedʼ.34 At one point, Butler does concede that
there must be an ʻarray of materialitiesʼ that make
up the body.35 However, this declaration comes with
a caveat:
the undeniability of these ʻmaterialitiesʼ in no way
implies what it means to affirm them.… That each
of those categories has a history and a historicity,
that each of them is constituted through the bound-
ary lines that distinguish them, and hence, by what
they exclude, that relations of discourse and power
produce hierarchies and overlappings among them
and challenge those boundaries, implies that these
are both persistent and contested regions.36
Contrary to discursive monism or idealism, then, the
body is not an inert object that passively receives
discursive markings. However, the bodyʼs ʻdemandʼ for
conceptualization cannot be translated into anything
more specific for Butler because a positive descrip-
tion of material reality would become a statement of
metaphysical primacy. The most that can be said of
the body is that it has a history and is therefore subject
to differing interpretations/constructions, and that it in
26 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
effect necessitates and comes to be via symbolization
in language.37
This principle needs to be examined in detail. Not
only is our ʻknowledgeʼ of matter always mediated, not
only is matter mutable, not only is discourse material,
there is no analytically distinct material realm. I think
it is again best to quote a passage at length, in order
not to reduce Butlerʼs argument to a simple denial of
material reality:
Apart from and yet related to the materiality of the
signifier is the materiality of the signified as well
as the referent approached through the signified, but
which remains irreducible to the signified. This radi-
cal difference between referent and signified is the
site where the materiality of language and that of
the world which it seeks to signify are perpetually
negotiated. Although the referent cannot be said to
exist apart from the signified, it nevertheless cannot
be reduced to it. That referent, that abiding function
of the world, is to persist as the horizon and the
ʻthat whichʼ which makes its demand in and to lan-
guage. Language and materiality are fully embedded
in each other, chiasmic in their interdependency, but
never fully collapsed into one another, i.e., reduced
to one another, and yet neither fully ever exceeds
the other.38
Along with several things that I have already discussed,
Butler formulates several new ideas. First, she says that
there is a ʻradical differenceʼ between the referent and
the signified. Thus, the world cannot be reduced to our
thought of it, the extreme idealist perspective. Note also
Butlerʼs statement that the difference between referent
and signified marks a site of permanent ʻnegotiationʼ
between the two. Language is in some sense a response
to the worldʼs need for a hearing. However, Butler also
adds that the referent or the material cannot be said
to exist apart from the signified. Again, the most we
can ascribe to the material is that it is a demand for
signification. In summary, Butler wants to maintain a
distinction between language and materiality, yet she
insists that materiality ʻcannot be said to existʼ apart
from language.
To support further this central premiss, Butler
relies heavily (yet implicitly) on Hegelʼs critique of
the Kantian thing-in-itself. Kant argued that there were
unknown essences of phenomena that placed a fixed
limit on human knowledge.39 Butler, like Hegel, writes
that the mere mention of that limit is an attempt to say
something about which you have previously insisted
you can know nothing: ʻTo posit a materiality outside
of language is still to posit that materiality, and the
materiality so posited will retain that positing as its
constitutive condition.ʼ40 There is no absolute other of
discourse because we can only conceive of that outside

in relation to discourse. It is thus a constituting outside
– it influences what we think about the inside – and
cannot really be said to exist apart from that inside.
In Butlerʼs words,
There is an ʻoutsideʼ to what is constructed by
discourse, but this is not an absolute ʻoutside,ʼ an
ontological thereness that exceeds or counters the
boundaries of discourse; as a constituting ʻoutside,ʼ
it is that which can only be thought – when it can
– in relation to that discourse, at and as its most
tenuous borders.41
The setting of a limit automatically puts some
things on the other side of that limit. Most importantly
for Butlerʼs purposes, the positing of a limit is an
undeniably political act. As I have discussed, in saying
what a woman is in relation to a man, those who do
not fit either category will be abject, other. Saying that
the categories boy and girl are prior to culture sets a
baseline, a limit, for the effects of culture. No matter
what we do, we are implying that we canʼt get past that
boundary, we canʼt change the reality of boys and girls.
Yet, we are simultaneously saying that that nature is
what exists beyond the level of our present knowledge.
This is a logical flaw according to Butler.
Butler also contends that to posit any sort of material
or natural reality outside of discourse is to negate the
possibility that we could ever know what that reality
is. ʻTo posit a materiality outside of language, where
that materiality is considered ontologically distinct
from languageʼ, she contends, ʻis to undermine the
possibility that language might be able to indicate
or correspond to that domain of radical alterity.ʼ42
Butlerʼs Hegelian roots are showing even more clearly
here, as this too is Hegelʼs critique of the Kantian
thing-in-itself. Hegel, of course, argued that we could
come to absolute knowledge via Geist or Spirit. Butler
obviously discards the concept of Geist, and she cer-
tainly rejects the notion of the centred and constituting
subject, but she has curiously resurrected something
similar to the idealist belief that thought can perhaps
one day correspond to reality. This is a Hegelian
synthesis of the type that Butler is critical of on most
other occasions, for example when she writes:
The ideal of transforming all excluded identifi-
cations into inclusive features – of appropriating all
difference into unity – would mark the return to a
Hegelian synthesis which has no exterior and that,
in appropriating all difference as exemplary features
of itself, becomes a figure for imperialism, a figure
that installs itself by way of a romantic, insidious,
and all-consuming humanism.43
Butlerʼs contention thus seems to be contradictory in
that, up to this point, she has insisted that there is
no positivity ʻbehindʼ language other than a demand.
What precisely, then, could be in ʻthat domainʼ to
which language might correspond? Butler gets pushed
into this inconsistency because of her reluctance to
posit the existence of a prior material reality combined
with her willingness to use Hegelʼs idealist (and, in
certain respects, positivist) synthesis of objectivity and
subjectivity. Thus, Butler has basically asserted that
there is no distinct reality outside of discursive, social
practice, yet we may one day know that reality.
Because of this seeming contradiction, it is perhaps
best to summarize that Butler argues that matter is not
discourse and not a blank slate. Positively, the most
that can be said is that materiality is a ʻdemandʼ. Yet
is there any effective difference, then, between materi-
ality and discourse? At one point, Butler specifically
affirms an analogy between the body and a social
institution. She praises Foucaultʼs investigation of the
constitution of the criminal in Discipline and Punish,
and the homosexual in History of Sexuality, Volume
I.44 Butler goes on to say that for the Foucault of Disci-
pline and Punish, the materialization of the criminalʼs
body is analytically equivalent to the materialization
of the prison. She then refers to Foucaultʼs mentions
of ʻbodies and pleasuresʼ at certain points in his texts.
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 27
Here her tone changes, as she writes disparagingly
that ʻ[a]t times it appears that for Foucault the body
has a materiality that is ontologically distinct from the
power relations that take that body as a site of invest-
ments.ʼ45 If indeed Butler does think that the body can
be materialized in exactly the same manner that a
prison can, again one must ask, is there any effective
difference between the body and a blank slate, or the
body and discourse?
What does Adorno say about materiality and objec-
tivity? He, like Butler, firmly believes that matter is
mutable and has a history. He writes that sensations
themselves ʻhave the character of transiencyʼ, and
furthermore, that ʻthe idea of something immutable,
something identical with itself, … collapse[s]ʼ when
identity thinking is challenged.46 Adorno contends that
it is the idealist premiss that thought equals its objects
that has misled people into believing that matter is
reified and stable. ʻEven the “I” of a personal history
is constantly turning into anotherʼ, he adds, further
demonstrating the parallels between his project and
that of poststructuralism.47 Despite this, Adorno does
indeed believe that there is a material realm existing
outside discourse or language. Indeed, he accepts the
materialist label. Recall once more that for Adorno,
the slippage between thought and its concept marks
the built-in and inevitable inability of thought ever
completely to capture its object. For him, this cannot
ever be taken to mean that the object represented
does not exist outside of that conception. Rather,
thoughtʼs shortcomings point to the fact that con-
cepts and the subject have their grounding in non-
conceptualities and objects. The subject depends on
the object in a way that the object does not depend
on the subject:
Not even as an idea can we conceive a subject
that is not an object; but we can conceive an
object that is not a subject. To be an object also
is part of the meaning of subjectivity; but it is
not equally part of the meaning of objectivity to
be a subject.48
cogitatively indispensable substrate of any concept
… is the utmost abstraction of the subject-matter that
is not identical with thinking, an abstraction not to
be abolished by any further thought process.ʼ52 The
dependence of the subject on the object must not
entail a total reduction of subjectivity to objectivity,
either. According to Adorno, even though thought
does not generate or constitute, and even though we
can conceive of objectivity without the existence of
a subject, subjectivity still mediates objectivity: ʻno
object is determinable without the subject.ʼ53 Adorno
fleshes out what subjectivity might mean if we were
to refocus on the object:
Since primacy of the object requires reflection on
the subject and subjective reflection, subjectivity
– as distinct from primitive materialism, which re-
ally does not permit dialectics – becomes a moment
that lasts. The general assurance that innervations,
insights, cognitions are ʻmerely subjectiveʼ ceases
to convince as soon as subjectivity is grasped as the
objectʼs form.54
Thus, even if the subject is ʻconstructedʼ, it has potency
in the objective world. More fundamentally, awareness
of the objective world could not occur without the
subject.
But what does ʻthe primacy of the objectʼ mean?
Adorno would not, like Butler, be satisfied with
proclaiming that the object or matter was merely a

Adornoʼs materialism therefore draws attention to

ʻthe constitutive character of the nonconceptual in
the conceptʼ.49
Granting the object ʻprimacyʼ is not to privilege it
as superior. ʻIt is not the purpose of critical thought
to place the object on the orphaned royal throne once
occupied by the subjectʼ, declares Adorno; ʻ[t]he pur-
pose of critical thought is to abolish the hierarchy.ʼ50
Granting the object primacy is definitely to insist
that all thought must be of something, and that that
ʻsomethingʼ is irreducible.51 ʻ“Something” … as a

28 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)

demand for conceptualization. He specifically states:
ʻPrimacy of the object can be discussed legitimately
only when that primacy … is somehow definable.ʼ55
Adorno illuminates his point by explicitly acknowl-
edging the Hegelian critique of Kantʼs thing-in-itself.
Hegel and other post-Kantian idealists criticized their
predecessor for arguing that the ʻthing-in-itselfʼ was on
the other side of knowledge and could therefore not be
described. Hegelʼs alternative was, again, to grant full
knowledge to the absolute subject, Geist.56 Adornoʼs
entire project is obviously critical of the Hegelian tenet
that thought can one day equal its object. This is the
position that Butler has endorsed in stating that thought
or language could possibly correspond to materiality.
Adorno instead praises Kantʼs anti-positivist insist-
ence that there are some things we cannot know. For
Adorno and Kant, however, this does not mean that
those things do not exist. Adorno writes:
A convenient rebuke to the concept of intelligibility
is that mentioning unknown causes of phenomena
positively, even in extreme abstraction, is forbid-
den.… [But] [w]hat survives in Kant, in the alleged
mistake of his apologic for the thing-in-itself …
is the memory of the element which balks at that
logic: the memory of nonidentity.57
Adorno does not simply accept the Kantian positing
of the unknown ʻthing-in-itselfʼ. Kant, according to
Adorno, accepts as permanent and fixed the bounds
between knowledge and the beyond of that knowl-
edge.58 Adornoʼs uniqueness comes in his emphasizing
that the gap between the thought and its object is what
potentially drives thought to a further, more subtle,
approximation of that object.59 ʻMy thought is driven
… by its own inevitable insufficiency, by my guilt of
what I am thinking.ʼ60 The gap between thought and
its object is thus the space for critical manoeuvring,
while at the same time it is a recognition that there
will always be something other and more than thought.
Hegel states that we will ultimately know reality via
Geist or absolute knowledge; Kant declares that we can
only operate within a certain frontier of knowledge.
Adorno argues that there will always be something we
donʼt know, but the limit between subject and object,
ideas and matter, is not absolute. Neither will it ever
disappear. The object can exist without the subject in a
way that the subject can never exist without an object.
We cannot obtain absolute knowledge, nor can we say
there will be some things that we will never know
anything more about. Room for transformation lies in
the awareness that concepts are less than their objects.
Yet, thought can eternally endeavour to ʻcomprehend
a thing itselfʼ by ʻperceiv[ing] the individual moment
in its immanent connection with othersʼ.61 This quest
will be endless, but not directionless.
How can these principles be applied to the issue
of the sex categories? I think Adorno would want to
say, first, that the categories ʻgirlʼ and ʻboyʼ, or ʻhetero-
sexualʼ and ʻhomosexualʼ, misrepresent and deform
their objects. Furthermore, the categories ʻgirlʼ and
ʻboyʼ are mistakenly assumed to have relevance for all
aspects of a personʼs life. Girls and boys are falsely
perceived as discrete entities: mutually exclusive cat-
egories with absolutely no realms of commonality.
Adorno might say that, certainly, girls do not exist
outside of their relationship to boys. Nothing exists
outside of relatedness. Despite these qualifications,
Adorno might want to concede that there may be
some things we can specifically say that most of those
we call ʻgirlsʼ have in common. There would still be
things we could say that they have in common with
boys, too. Each particular baby would still possess
characteristics that are not exhausted by the categories
ʻgirlʼ or ʻboyʼ. There is no content that can be assumed
to be stable or permanent, and interpretations of mate-
riality are always subject to error.
I would like to substantiate these postulations with
a passage from Seyla Benhabib, who has been greatly
influenced by Critical Theory. She writes:
How do we know whether there is sexual desire
with a marked directionality which precedes ʻthe
law of cultureʼ or whether all human desire is es-
sentially plastic and acquires its directionality by
being impacted upon by culture? The answer is that
we do not, and all theorizing about the ʻoriginsʼ of
desire is a form of retrospective speculation.… The
important point is that there is a memory of the
body and a materiality to the somatic dimension of
our linguistic existence for each individual. These
cannot be reduced to language and discursivity
although being only [sic] epistemically accessible
through language and other linguistically interpret-
able forms of expression like bodily gestures, grim-
aces, symptoms, symptoms, and phobias.62
In this passage, Benhabib goes on to indicate that
ʻretrospective speculationʼ is not to be discouraged;
nor is it to be precluded from coming up with some
kind of tentative affirmative statements. This is a
materialist principle that I believe would be endorsed
by Adorno. In conclusion, contrary to my reading of
Butler, there are indeed things we can affirm about
ʻgirlsʼ and ʻboysʼ, but with all of the many caveats
outlined above.
This issue lies at the heart of my objection to But-
lerʼs position. For this reason, I will clarify my argu-
ment. Butler has been attacked repeatedly by critics
asking, ʻWhat about the materiality of the body?ʼ63
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 29
On at least two occasions (one referred to above),
Butler writes that ʻsurely there isʼ some necessity to
the ʻprimary and irrefutable experiencesʼ of eating,
sleeping, feeling pain and pleasure, enduring illness,
and other bodily events. However, her immediate reply
is that the irrefutability of these experiences ʻin no
way implies what it might mean to affirm themʼ.64 The
implication is again that any affirmation of a specific
bodily experience will have the political repercussions
of boundary setting and exclusion. Positive statements
will be performative, with the consequences Butler
details throughout her writings. She also indicates that
ʻthe options for theory are not exhausted by presuming
materiality, on the one hand, and negating material-
ity, on the other.ʼ65 However, this new theoretical
terrain cannot, by Butlerʼs own definition, be given
any specific content.
My contention is that Butler does not allow for
the possibility that there may be different levels of
materiality, or that some things may be less constituted
than others. I propose that that not all affirmations of
materiality are equally performative. On one occasion,
Butler seems to recognize this, but the implications
of this concession do not enter her work. My basis
for making this claim comes from a footnote, where
Butler cites Althusser approvingly:
an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its
practice, or practices. This existence is material.…
Of course, the material existence of the ideology
in an apparatus and its practices does not have the
same modality as the material existence of a pav-
ing-stone or a rifle. But, at the risk of being taken
for a Neo-Aristotelian … I shall say that ʻmatter is
discussed in many sensesʼ, or rather that it exists in
different modalities, all rooted in the last instance in
ʻphysicalʼ matter.66
In citing Althusser in this fashion, Butler would appear
to be granting that a stone has a materiality of a differ-
ent ʻmodalityʼ than that of an ideology, or perhaps
that a prisonʼs materiality is not identical to that of
the body. As demonstrated in this article, however,
Butler has explicitly ruled out such a distinction. I
would like to suggest that this conception of differ-
ing modalities of materiality be taken seriously, and
that the sexed body could sit, albeit uncomfortably,
on a level somewhere between the materiality of a
paving stone and that of a prison. A prison is a social
institution, the paving stone is a rock, and the body
is a living entity interpreted in a variety of ways, but
with an undeniable materiality that exceeds discourse.
Although Adorno does not technically incorporate this
notion of ʻmodalitiesʼ of materiality into his writings,
his recognition of an ontological reality in excess of
30 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
discourse is necessary to the overall coherence of the
position. Thus, I repeat that some positive statements
about the sexed body can be made without the violent
performative consequences that are the topic of much
of Butlerʼs writings. This is my theoretical position
with regards to Butler; I now turn to the various politi-
cal interventions proposed by Butler and Adorno.
Strategic interventions and implications
It is extremely likely that Butlerʼs reluctance to posit
a materiality prior to discourse is motivated in large
part by strategic concerns. Butler makes comments
such as the following to this effect:
To problematize the matter of bodies may entail an
initial loss of epistemological certainty, but a loss
of certainty is not the same as political nihilism.
On the contrary, such a loss may well indicate a
significant and promising shift in political thinking.
This unsettling of ʻmatterʼ can be understood as
initiating new possibilities, new ways for bodies to
matter.67
Butler concedes that it may on occasion be neces-
sary and desirable to refer to some sort of collective
subject grounded in the category of sex.68 The general
implication of Butlerʼs work, however, is that it may
be counterproductive to the agendas of feminism and
other social movements to make declarations regarding
the distinctness and priority of the material. Butlerʼs
politics instead emphasize the prospects for social
change presented by the threat that the abject ʻotherʼ
poses to the allegedly natural categories of sex and
sexuality. She also tentatively raises the possibility of
a reconfiguration of discourse.
As discussed above, Butler claims that the form-
ation of any category necessitates the creation of an
ʻother-thanʼ realm which is always intimately related
to that category. Again, boy implies girl and both
imply not-boy, not-girl. Now, however, Butler focuses
on the challenge that the ʻother-thanʼ extends to the
category: ʻthis disavowed abjection … threaten[s] to
expose the self-grounding presumptions of the sexed
subject, grounded as that subject is in a repudiation
whose consequences it cannot fully control.ʼ69 The
naturalness of the category woman, for example, can
be questioned if a natural ʻwomanʼ can appear to be
sexually ambiguous, or if a ʻnaturalʼ man can con-
vincingly present himself as a woman. One personʼs
confusing sex status could force others to rethink
the femaleness and heterosexuality they previously
accepted as natural. Butler writes that sex ambigu-
ity ʻis subversive to the extent that it reflects on
the imitative structure by which hegemonic gender is
itself produced and disputes heterosexualityʼs claim on
naturalness and originality.ʼ70 If sex ambiguity became
common, the norms of gender and sexuality could
loosen their hold on individuals, and different ways
to be and think could become culturally acceptable.
Butler is careful to note that parody may not be an
adequate strategy to displace the dominant norms of
sex and that it can put the performer at the risk of
violence or even death.71
Butler also advocates a rethinking of identity so
that it no longer entails a fixed, static wholeness and
the corresponding rejection of what that identity pur-
portedly does not include. A ʻreworking of that logic
of non-contradiction by which one identification is
always and only purchased at the expense of anotherʼ,
is proposed.72 In other words, Butler is hoping that we
could begin thinking of ourselves in a way that did not
absolutely exclude whatever it is that we are allegedly
not. Although she does not go into much detail, she
indicates that this can perhaps be accomplished by
ʻtracing the ways in which identification is implicated
in what it excludes, and … follow[ing] the lines of that
implication for the map of future community that it
might yieldʼ.73
This last refrain should remind the reader of Adorno
yet again. Adorno is, of course, interested in the very
same ʻreworking of that logic of non-contradictionʼ
that Butler outlines. Adorno claims that if we were to
emphasize the otherness of the object without losing
sight of our connection to it, we could possibly trans-
form our relationship to our own self and to others.
Adorno poetically describes the possibilities for a new
way of thinking and being as follows: ʻUtopia would
be above identity and above contradiction; it would be
a togetherness of diversity.ʼ74 Although this proposal
is undertheorized (or perhaps more accurately, under-
applied) in both Adorno and Butler, the point is that
a similar strategy is reached by both, and that thus
far neither of their positions grants an unassailable
political advantage.
Adornoʼs privileging of the object also redirects
philosophical attention to the social totality in which
all practice is embedded, even though he never claims
to know all aspects of that totality. This is a point of
substantial difference between Adornoʼs materialism
and Butlerʼs poststructuralism. Recall that Adornoʼs
materialism insists that there is an objective reality
existing outside of language, discourse, or thought.
Adornoʼs privileging of the object allows him to say
that, while there is no absolute truth that we as humans
can ever fully grasp, some things are relatively true
within a specific historical context. He argues that
idealismʼs equation of objective knowledge with the
subject negates the difference between essence and
appearance, as everything is reduced to the latter and
essence is categorically denied.75 As with the other
binary categories Adorno discusses, his version of
ʻtruthʼ is a combination of both sides of the equation.
He explains:
Essence can no longer be hypostatized as the pure,
spiritual being-in-itself. Rather, essence passes into
that which lies concealed beneath the facade of
immediacy, of the supposed facts, and which makes
the facts what they are.76
This means again that the object will never be only
what we claim it is. Once more, this doesnʼt imply
that the object is some stable or permanent thing. The
maintenance of a distinction between appearance and
essence allows Adorno to argue that there are ʻlawsʼ
of society that govern everyoneʼs behaviour. The laws
that are of primary concern to Adorno are the laws
of the capitalist economy.77 He writes of these laws
that ʻthey are more real than the facts in which they
appear, the facts which deceive us about them… [b]ut
they discard the traditional attributes of essence.ʼ78
Adorno can incorporate a critique of social structures
into his work by insisting that what is claimed about
capitalismʼs fulfilment of human needs is untrue.79 The
basis for making a judgement about a truth claim can
only come through practice or experience.80 Again,
arguing that one interpretation is ideological need not
imply that what is instead proposed is the absolute
truth. Rather, for Adorno, it is simply truer than the
ideology.
This is a form of critique that some poststructuralism
has disavowed almost entirely. I am not suggesting that
there can be some sort of simple linkage between
sexual inequality and capitalism. Furthermore, Butler
has acknowledged that her brand of poststructuralism
does not address all worthy political goals:
It is clear that in order to set political goals, it
is necessary to assert normative judgements. In a
sense, my own work has been concerned to expose
produced and differentiated. I concede that this is
not the only goal, and that there are questions of
social and economic justice which are not prima-
rily concerned with questions of subject-formation.
To this end it is crucial to rethink the domain of
power-relations, and to develop a way of adjudicat-
ing political norms without forgetting that such
an adjudication will also always be a struggle of
power.81
It is my contention, however, that Butler cannot address
social and economic injustice without the addition of
materialism to her paradigm. For example, Butler
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 31
could not utilize her theoretical framework to criticize
a society in which only some people, even if they were
of a variety of shapes and colours, performed domestic
and/or other types of either socially abject, low-paying,
or dangerous labour. Adornoʼs materialism, with its
insistence that some interpretations of material reality
are truer than others within a given historical context,
provides many of the tools of poststructuralism while
maintaining the grounding I think is necessary to
engage in an analysis of various aspects of the divi-
sion of labour. The basis for making a critique of the
division of labour lies in the ontological ground of the
material; the content of that critique is neither fixed
nor static and is open to debate.
But should Butler be criticized for a failure to
analyse absolutely everything? Adornoʼs maintenance
of the primacy of the object has one final political
implication that I think answers this question. If all
thought depends on an irreducible objectivity, there is
an undeniably real component to human sensations:
ʻthe somatic moment as the not purely cognitive part
of cognition is irreducible.ʼ82 Adorno therefore argues
that human pain and suffering have a real basis. We
are physical, objective creatures, and our subjectiv-
ity, however derivative, is a gauge of our sensual
well-being. Adorno wants us to heed these subjective
impressions of objective suffering. Given the real basis
of suffering,
Conscious unhappiness is not a delusion of the
mindʼs vanity but something inherent in the mind,
the one authentic dignity it has received in its sepa-
ration from the body.… The physical moment tells
our knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that
things should be different. Hence the convergence
of specific materialism with criticism, with social
change in practice.83
Adorno does not mean to imply that there is some final
state of happiness; he explicitly states that unhappiness
is only recognized as such in comparison to happiness.
Therefore happiness or unhappiness are interdependent
concepts, as are all concepts and entities according to
Adorno.84 The presence of unhappiness tells us that
happiness is a possibility. In fact, the human need for
happiness is present in all thinking. Adorno writes
that ʻthe need in thinking is what makes us thinkʼ.85
Social criticism cannot give up the wish for happiness;
correspondingly, unhappiness must be taken as the
grounding of any critique.
There is no similar component in Butlerʼs writings,
and I think that this has political implications for
her feminism. I will offer as illustration two medical
conditions that have received press coverage in recent
years. I am not suggesting that Adornoʼs ʻpainʼ need
32 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
always be interpreted in quite so literal a fashion, but
on occasion I think it is advisable to acquaint oneself
with the mundane realities of physical suffering. It has
been observed that Japanese women going through
menopause are much less likely than North Ameri-
can women to experience ʻhot flushesʼ. The typical
interpretation of this until recently has been that
Japanese culture appreciates its elders more than does
North American culture. Therefore, there is a stigma
attached to ageing North American women, which is
reflected in their feeling more discomfort throughout
menopause. Now, however, it has been reported that
Japanese women may be less likely to experience hot
flushes because of their diet. The second example is
that presented by the illness commonly known as
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. When this disease first
began to be diagnosed, it was typically argued that it
was the latest form of female hysteria. This explana-
tion is still promoted in some quarters. An increasing
number of studies alternatively indicate that there is
a cluster of real neurological/muscular/immune symp-
toms shared by most sufferers of CFS.
It is likely that Butler would want to agree that diet
can decrease the likelihood of experiencing hot flushes,
and that there are real symptoms and causes of CFS.
However, I do not think her theory could allow her
to do so consistently. I cannot see what is gained by
Butlerʼs supposed third ground beyond materialism
and idealism, other than the statement that disease
is interpreted differently by different cultures and
even different individuals, and that it cannot there-
fore be said to exist outside of those interpretations.
Whereas Butler states that nothing is lost in her move
away from materialism, I counter that her brand of
poststructuralism could be potentially harmful in the
instances I have just discussed. The insistence that
there can be no positive statements regarding material
reality does remove the grounds for science, despite
Butlerʼs protestations to the contrary. This is not to
say that cultural factors are unimportant in the experi-
ence of disease by individuals. However, Adornoʼs
reminder that there is an objective reality prior to any
interpretation of that reality, that some interpretations
are therefore truer than others, and that the human
experience of pain makes plausible truth statements
about objective reality, provides a better framework
for the interpretation of physical suffering.86
Furthermore, while some sufferers of CFS (and
perhaps even hot flushes?) are men, explanatory power
is gained by the observation that most afflicted with
the disease are women. For example, it is felt that the
female bodyʼs tendency to produce yeast under some
conditions may hamper the immune system; antibiot-
ics increasing the likelihood of that production may
therefore harm women more than men. Recall that
Butler has granted that on occasion, it may be useful
to employ the terms ʻmenʼ and ʻwomenʼ.87 What could
be the basis for such a deployment given Butlerʼs para-
digm, however? She might simply repeat that what we
call women are not women in any objectively real way.
She would perhaps further argue that if the categories
men and women did not in large part organize our
existence, we would just observe that CFS seemed
likely to strike one or more varieties of individuals
as opposed to others. This might indeed involve a
categorization that is less violent and exclusive than
the binary man/woman, and this is an important con-
tention. I do not think that it necessarily has more
emancipatory potential than the contention that what
we call women are more likely to suffer from CFS.
In fact, I think that this instance demonstrates that at
times, it will be necessary to fight for the recognition
that some things are indeed rooted in a sexed material
reality. I want to maintain that the creatures we call
women do share some material ground even as they
share other ground with the creatures we call men.
This partially shared reality of most women (and, cor-
respondingly, most men) should not have to colour all
aspects of our lives as it does presently. However, it is
a reality, open to interpretation and misinterpretation,
and never finally resolved.
Notes
1. Butlerʼs earlier book, Gender Trouble, engaged in a
similar project. Because she seems to have modified
her position somewhat with the publication of Bodies
That Matter, I have chosen to discuss the latter only.
2. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, Routledge, New York,
1993, pp. 2–3.
3. Ibid., p. 12.
4. Ibid., p. 30.
5. Ibid., p. 7.
6. Adorno prefers to employ the language of ʻsubjectʼ and
ʻobjectʼ in his writings. It is perhaps not absolutely cor-
rect to equate Adornoʼs objectivity with Butlerʼs mate-
riality, but I see enough parallels to be comfortable with
this comparison.
7. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Continuum, New
York, 1992, p. 120.
8. There are, of course, other feminists who have argued
that the sex categories are just as social as gender. Mo-
nique Wittigʼs ʻThe Category of Sexʼ, Feminist Issues,
vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 63–9, provides one such example. Less
well-known is Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy McKenna,
Gender, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1978, a
text written from an anthropological/psychological per-
spective.
9. Butler, Bodies, p. 10.
10. Ibid., pp. 1–2.
11. Ibid., pp. 7–8.
12. Ibid., p. 9.
13. I am aware that discourse and language cannot be simply
equated; however, Butlerʼs writings employ both terms,
and the slippage (both hers and mine) does not seem of
vital concern to this article.
14. Butler, Bodies, p. 68. Note Butlerʼs careful use of lan-
guage: Relations ʻinstitute and requireʼ relata. She does
not want to attribute any sort of priority to either the
phenomenal or the noumenal.
15. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 119.
16. Ibid., p. 147.
17. Ibid., p. 171.
18. For Adorno, entity or object does not have to mean
ʻexistentʼ; it is identity thinking that has forced reality
to be that which is purely physical. Therefore, accord-
ing to Adorno, the subject of idealism is always an ob-
ject, and not strictly in the sense of a physical creature.
Even thinking becomes phenomenal as soon as there is
a thought. See Negative Dialectics, p. 80.
19. Ibid., p. 185.
20. Butler, Bodies, p. 8.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., p. 7.
23. Several studies show that people become very un-
comfortable when they meet someone who cannot read-
ily be classed as ʻmanʼ or ʻwomanʼ. See Candace West
and Don Zimmerman, ʻDoing Genderʼ, Gender and So-
ciety, 18, 1987, pp. 125–51; also Kessler and McKenna,
Gender.
24. Butler, Bodies, p. 107. Butler acknowledges that not all
utterances have performative capacity; effective perfor-
matives must have some form of social power supporting
them. The connection between the discursive and extra-
discursive realms, between micro- and macro-power, is
undertheorized in the writings of Butler, but it is not my
intention to explore this issue here.
25. Ibid., p. 15.
26. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 26–7, 142, 193.
27. Ibid., p. 309.
28. Butler, Bodies, p. 9.
29. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 30.
30. Ibid., p. 63.
31. Ibid., p. 81.
32. Ibid., p. 155.
33. Ibid., p. 267. Certainly, as will be seen shortly, Adorno
wants to talk about structural causes. It is perhaps best,
therefore, to read this statement as a rejection of the
notion of uncaused ʻfirst causesʼ or ʻoriginsʼ.
34. Butler, Bodies, p. 67.
35. Ibid., p. 66.
36. Ibid., p. 67. Technically, Butler is quite careless here.
The full text runs as follows:
It must be possible to concede and affirm an array of
ʻmaterialitiesʼ that pertain to the body, that which is
signified by the domains of biology, anatomy, physi-
ology, hormonal and chemical composition, illness,
age, weight, metabolism, life and death. None of this
can be denied. But the undeniability of these ʻmateri-
alitiesʼ in no way implies what it means to affirm
them, indeed, what interpretive matrices condition,
enable and limit that necessary affirmation.
What concerns me is that Butler declares, on the one
hand, that it must be possible to ʻconcede and affirm an
array of materialitiesʼ, but on the other hand that ʻthe
undeniability of these “materialities” in no way implies
what it means to affirm them.ʼ Thus, she has effectively
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 33
 said that we must affirm materiality but we cannot affirm 48.
materiality. Saying what ʻitʼ is, furthermore, would au- 49.
tomatically be an effort to describe what you claim you 50.
cannot know. Thus, Butler must say things like the body 51.
is a ʻdemandʼ, etc. Here she is caught in a clear ambi-
guity, however, and she should not blame people for
finding in her writings an attempt to deny some kind of
extra-discursive otherness.
37. At times, Butler seems to be arguing that certain materi-
alisms, or at least certain contemporary empiricisms, can 52.
also be accused of positing a static, atemporal material 53.
reality. But she praises some forms of ancient material- 54.
ism, and says that Marx was on track when he conceived
of matter as ʻtransformative activity itselfʼ (Bodies, p.
250 n5). Butler at one point even says that she is argu- 55.
ing for a ʻreturn to the notion of matter, not as site or 56.
surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes 57.
over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and 58.
surface we call matterʼ (Bodies, p. 9). The notion of 59.
a qualified return indicates that Butler does not think
that all materialism assumes a static eternal materiality.
However, I would argue that serious materialist phil-
osophers have taken the concept of matter in motion and 60.
flux as one of their first principles since ancient times. 61.
Butler perhaps thinks that some materialist feminists will 62.
disagree with her contention. I instead argue that mate-
rialist feminists do agree with Butler here, but disagree
with her fundamentally on another point, which I will
elucidate shortly.
38. Butler, Bodies, pp. 68–9.
39. Although Kant discusses the thing-in-itself many times 63.
in his writings, a prime example is found in the division
entitled ʻTranscendental Analyticʼ, Book II, chapter 3 of
Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, 64.
Macmillan, London, 1933. 65.
Kantʼs writings indicate that the limit he ascribes 66.
to our knowledge is perhaps not as all-encompassing
as Hegel (and Adorno) suggests. For example, Kant
writes:
Through observation and analysis of appearances we
penetrate to natureʼs inner recesses, and no one can 67.
say how far this knowledge may in time extend. But 68.
with all this knowledge, and even if the whole of 69.
nature were revealed to us, we should still never be 70.
71.
able to answer those transcendental questions which
72.
go beyond nature. The reason of this is that it is
73.
not given to us to observe our own mind with any
74.
other intuition than that of inner sense; and that it is
75.
precisely in the mind that the secret of the source of
76.
our sensibility is located. (Critique of Pure Reason,
77.
p. 287)
Rather than intending the limit to apply to all human
knowledge, Kant indicates that it pertains only to very
specific transcendental questions.
40. Butler, Bodies, pp. 67–8. One of Hegelʼs critiques of the
Kantian notion of the limit to knowledge is found in his
Logic, trans. William Wallace, Clarendon Press, Oxford,
1975, §§92–5.
41. Butler, Bodies, p. 8.
42. Ibid., p. 68.
43. Ibid., p. 116.
44. Ibid., p. 33.
45. Ibid., p. 33. See Foucaultʼs History of Sexuality, Volume
I, Vintage Books, New York, 1990, pp. 152–3. 78.
46. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 137. 79.
47. Ibid.
34 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
Ibid., p. 183.
Ibid., p. 12.
Ibid., p. 181.
Adorno does not think that we can escape from concep-
tual thinking, a point on which many people disagree.
For Adorno, thought must always be of something, al-
though not necessarily an entity. If content cannot be
affixed to a thought, the thought truly is of nothing at
all.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 135.
Ibid., p. 103.
Theodor Adorno, ʻSubject and Objectʼ, in Andrew Arato
and Eike Gebhardt, eds, The Essential Frankfurt School
Reader, Continuum, New York, 1990, p. 504.
Ibid., p. 503.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 283.
Ibid., p. 290.
Ibid., p. 382; but see note 39 above.
Butler has similarly attributed to thought and language
a ʻdriveʼ to express material reality. However, as estab-
lished, this ʻdriveʼ cannot be further elaborated in But-
lerʼs world-view.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 5.
Ibid., p. 25.
Seyla Benhabib, ʻSubjectivity, Historiography, and
Politicsʼ, in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Ex-
change, New York, Routledge, 1995, p. 121 n5. At the
end of this footnote, Benhabib indicates that Butler is
coming to the same conclusion. I disagree, based on the
analysis in this article.
Butler, Bodies, p. ix. Butler begins her book with a
recollection of the many incredulous comments she has
received upon the presentation of her ideas.
Ibid., p. xi.
Ibid., p. 30.
Louis Althusser, ʻIdeology and Ideological State Appa-
ratuses (Notes towards an Investigation)ʼ, in Lenin and
Philosophy and Other Essays, Monthly Review Press,
New York, 1971, p. 166. Cited in Butler, Bodies, p. 252
n13.
Butler, Bodies, p. 30.
Ibid., p. 123.
Ibid., p. 3.
Ibid., p. 125.
Ibid., pp. 125, 133.
Ibid., p. 118.
Ibid., p. 119.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 150.
Ibid., p. 112.
Ibid., p. 167.
Lest it be thought that Adorno is a simple advocate of
global theory, he cautions that one must not lose site of
the need to engage with a specific object. Recall that the
thought of the roast after dinner differs from the taste of
the roast. In Adornoʼs words, ʻWithout recourse to the
material, no ought could issue from reason; yet once
compelled to acknowledge its material in the abstract,
as a condition of its own possibility, reason must not
cut off its reflection on the specific materialʼ (Negative
Dialectics, p. 242). Adorno is warning, albeit obscurely,
both that theory needs to be related to practice ʻin the
abstractʼ and that theory cannot be allowed to ignore
the particularity of the ʻspecific materialʼ that always
exceeds it.
Ibid., pp. 168–9.
Ibid., pp. 203, 378.
80. But this does not mean that Adorno has a pragmatic
definition of truth – Adornoʼs relative truths are really
truer than their false counterparts. The critique is an
immanent one, but fully grounded in material reality.
81. Judith Butler, ʻFor a Careful Readingʼ, in Feminist Con-
tentions, p. 141.
82. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 193.
83. Ibid., p. 203.
84. Ibid., p. 377.
85. Ibid., p. 408.
86. I would argue that Adorno and Butler fall short in their
efforts to concretize their theoretical positions. Other
components of my research deal with more explicit
ramifications of the materiality of the body.
87. Butler, Bodies, p. 123.
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 35
Fateful rendezvous
The young Althusser
Gregory Elliott
I enclose…a picture of the Dijon railwaymen which
appeared in LʼHumanité… I hope that people, ob-
serving the calm strength and dignity of these men,
will not one day say of us that ʻthe philosopher
missed his rendezvous with the railwaymenʼ.
Louis Althusser, letter to Jean Lacroix, 1949–50
Reviewing the English translation of Althusserʼs ʻcon-
fessionsʼ in these pages three years ago, David Macey
noted that ʻ[t]he death of the philosopher has led to a
resurrection of his writings.ʼ1 In addition to LʼAvenir
dure longtemps (1992), the ʻposthumous editionʼ at
that stage contained a prison journal and a collection
on psychoanalysis. Together with the first instalment
of Yann Moulier Boutangʼs comprehensive biography,
these disclosed the existence of a hitherto unknown
Althusser. Since then, a further six volumes have
appeared; more are in preparation. If only because they
exceed in quantity the material released during their
authorʼs lifetime – a rough estimate indicates some
three thousand pages as against approximately two
thousand – it will take considerable critical effort to
acquire an adequate perspective on them, and begin the
reassessment of Althusser to which Macey alludes.
Meanwhile, an Anglophone readership must await
the halting, uneven process of partial translation. To
date, a mere fraction of the new material has been
made available in English: a careless version of the
autobiography, The Future Lasts a Long Time, from
Chatto & Windus in 1993; and an attractive selection
from the Écrits sur la psychanalyse by Columbia
University Press this year.2 To these can now be added
Versoʼs excellent collection of the ʻearly writingsʼ,*
extracted from the first volume of the Écrits philos-
ophiques et politiques published in France in 1994,
* Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, edited by François Matheron, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, Verso, London
and New York, 1996.
36 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
and rounded off by a transitional text ʻOn Marxismʼ
dating from 1953. Many of its virtues derive from the
meticulous scholarship of the original editor, François
Matheron, whose introductory materials offer invalu-
able guidance to the uninitiated. Others are attributable
to Geoffrey Goshgarian, who has not only produced
an admirable rendition of some intractable French, but
appended bibliographical information well beyond the
call of translational duty. Cavils aside, The Spectre of
Hegel is the finest edition of Althusser in English.
What does it reveal? Conventionally, Althusserʼs
career has been periodized into three main phases,
spanning the years 1960–78, from the elaboration, via
the revision, to the destruction of ʻstructuralʼ Marxism.
At the very least, this requires supplementation by
another two periods of reflection and production – one
antecedent, the other subsequent, to the standard chro-
nology. The former is a pre-Althusserian moment,
circa 1945–51, comprising texts which remained
unpublished or inaccessible until the 1990s. If the
fragmentary character of the last writings makes it
hard to identify the philosopherʼs ultimate destination,
these allow us to fix his postwar point of departure
with greater confidence. The intellectual ʻbiographyʼ
of Marx outlined in For Marx and Reading Capital
was, it transpires, something in the nature of an ʻauto-
biographyʼ. The work of the mature Althusser con-
ducted a tacit settlement of accounts with his own
erstwhile philosophical consciousness; the critique of
Hegelian Marxism mounted therein was a conjoint
autocritique of the young Althusser. One result, as we
read The Spectre of Hegel, is an intermittent sense
of déjà lu. Not for nothing did Althusser remark
in a review of the newly translated Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts in 1962: ʻeven our own
experience should remind us that it is possible to be
“Communist” without being “Marxist”.ʼ3
The philosophico-political adventure recorded in
the early writings involves an intricately overlapping
and cross-cutting transition, from Catholicism to
Communism, and from a variant of Hegelianism to a
variety of Marxism. In the 1947 Masterʼs thesis ʻOn
Content in the Thought of G.W.F. Hegelʼ which forms
the centrepiece of the volume, Althusser wrote that
ʻGermanyʼs political disarray made, perhaps, as deep
an impression on the young Hegel as did the formal-
ism of its religious life; interestingly, it is only with
difficulty that we can distinguish his political from his
religious thought amongst the concerns of his early
years.ʼ With due alteration of detail, the observation
applies to its author. Indeed, formal adhesion to the
French Communist Party in 1948, at the age of thirty,4
coincided with maximum engagement in the activities
of the Catholic group, Jeunesse de lʼÉglise. When,
a year later, now no longer a lapsing but a lapsed
Catholic, Althusser remonstrated with his ex-teacher
Jean Lacroixʼs ʻpersonalistʼ philosophy, he was keen
to confide ʻsomething I have experienced along with
a number of your former studentsʼ:
namely, that in actively rallying to the working
class, we have not only not repudiated what had
been our reasons for living, but have liberated them
by fully realizing them.… The Christian I once was
has in no way abjured his Christian ʻvaluesʼ, but
now I live them …, whereas earlier I aspired to live
them. (p. 221)
ʻActively rallying to the working classʼ: it is, as they
used to say, no accident if the diction of Althusserʼs
apologia was straight out of the lexicon of Gallic
Stalinism.5
Like the young Marx under the German Confeder-
ation a century earlier, the young Althusser of the
French Fourth Republic was immersed in the ideas of
the age. Some of these were spawned by the ʻreturn
to Hegelʼ most prominently associated with that
self-professed ʻStalinist of strict observanceʼ, Alex-
andre Kojève, prompting Jacques Derrida to react to
Francis Fukuyamaʼs re-edition of him by recalling
that ʻeschatalogical themes … were, in the 50s, …
our daily bread.ʼ6 Althusserʼs postwar native philo-
sophical language was that of French Hegelianism; his
ideological orientation akin to what the ex-Communist
Edgar Morin once dubbed ʻHegelo-Stalinismʼ.7 It is
also apparent, however, that at the height of the Cold
War, Althusser shared in the crude anti-Hegelian turn
of Stalinist Marxism. Whilst it would seem to be the
case that he never fully endorsed the impostures of
Lysenkoism (the ʻtwo sciencesʼ, bourgeois and pro-
letarian); and did not succumb to the ferruginous
romance of ʻsocialist realismʼ (boy and girl meet
Machine Tractor Station), he certainly did subscribe
to the Zhdanovism – party partisanship in philosophy
– against which later claims for the autonomy of
theory were staked. To borrow the terms of his letter
to Lacroix, the philosopherʼs ʻrendezvous with the
railwaymenʼ proceeded under the sign of the Cold
War in culture, at a time when, for example, the PCF
was denouncing American films as ʻpoison darts that
corrupt the minds of French youthʼ, and Camel cigar-
ettes for ʻwaging war on French tobaccoʼ. Whatever
their intrinsic worth, Althusserʼs early writings are
redolent of a conjuncture of combatant philosophy,
evoked in the Introduction to For Marx in 1965, where
the shade of Hegel is barely distinguishable from the
spectre of Stalin.
The new slave of modern times
Repatriated after five years in a German prisoner-of-
war camp, his religious faith intact but his political
orientation up-ended by the infernal surprise of 1940,
Althusser resumed his education at a moment mem-
orably described by Ernest Gellner: ʻEnd-of-war and
post-war France was like the human condition, but a
damn sight more so. If ever there was a situation when
men could not find reassurance for their identity, dignity
or conviction, this was it.ʼ8 As the first piece in The
Spectre of Hegel – ʻThe International of Decent Feel-
ingsʼ (1946) – indicates, Althusser found reassurance
in not heeding the ideology of the ʻhuman conditionʼ
propagated by ʻnovelists turned prophetsʼ – Malraux,
Camus, Koestler and co. ʻ[A]nguishʼ, he wrote, ʻis
not the proletariatʼs lot: there is no emancipating
oneself from the human condition, but it is possible
to emancipate oneself from the workers.ʼ Contrary to
ʻthe false prophets of historyʼ, ʻthe Marxists and their
Christian or non-Christian alliesʼ possessed the sense
of a redemptive ending:
the road to manʼs reconciliation with his destiny is
essentially that of the appropriation of the prod-
ucts of his labour, of what he creates in general,
and of history as his creation. This reconciliation
presupposes a transition from capitalism to social-
ism by way of the emancipation of the labouring
proletariat, which can, through this act, rid not only
itself, but also all humanity of contradiction…
(p. 31)
The echo of Marxʼs early works is resonant; and
the Paris Manuscripts are positively invoked. However,
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 37
in repudiating ʻa “Western” socialism without class
struggleʼ as a ʻsystem of protection against Commu-
nismʼ, Althusser was swayed by a certain Hegelianism,
foregrounding a modern master–slave dialectic. That
he not only undertook an intensive study of Hegel,
in conjunction with Marx, in these years, but was a
Hegelian, is evident from his Masterʼs thesis, written
in August–October 1947. Although ʻThe International
of Decent Feelingsʼ was rejected by the journal for
which it was intended on account of its virulent
polemic, Althusser seemingly never sought to publish
this remarkable document. In a letter of 1963, he
maintained that he and his friend, Jacques Martin,
had responded to Merleau-Pontyʼs blandishments by
insisting that their theses ʻhad merely provided an
opportunity to rid ourselves of our youthful errorsʼ.
In any event, suggesting that post-Hegelian phil-
osophy had not superseded Hegel, Althusserʼs text
extravagantly displayed the historicist vices which he
would subsequently reprove in those who conflated the
Marxist and Hegelian dialectics:
by way of history, Hegelʼs thought escapes the
prison of a dawning age and the confines of a civil
servantʼs mentality, offering itself to our gaze in the
freedom of its realization and its objective develop-
ment. In a sense that is not un-Marxist, our world
has become philosophy, or, more precisely, Hegel
come to maturity now stands before us – is, indeed,
our world: the world has become Hegelian to the
extent that Hegel was a truth capable of becoming
a world. We need only read: fortunately, the letters
are there before our eyes, writ large in the text of
history – letters become men. (p. 36)
Contemporary readers would have had no trouble
spelling out those letters: not the Emperor at Jena, but
the Generalissimo of Stalingrad. Hegel was indeed ʻthe
last of the philosophersʼ. Yet it was ʻin the new slave
of modern timesʼ – the proletariat – that the freedom
prematurely announced by the Phenomenology was in
the process of being realized. Marxʼs immanent cri-
tique of the Philosophy of Right had demonstrated the
contradictory nature of Hegelʼs perversely consistent
benediction of the Prussian state in 1821, when actual-
ity did not incarnate rationality. For all that, however,
Marx had not surpassed Hegel, who represented his
ʻsilent rigourʼ:
having denounced the alienation of the bourgeois
world he lived in, and having merely predicted the
end of alienation in the coming revolution, he was
no more able than Hegel to leap over his time, and
his own truths were recaptured by what they de-
nounced. As philosopher, Marx was thus a prisoner
of his times and hence of Hegel, who had foreseen
this captivity. (p. 133)
38 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
The Marxist conception of history – a materialist
humanism irreducible to any natural or economic
determinism – was ʻthoroughly informed by Hegelian
truthʼ:
capitalist alienation is the birth of humanity. We
need not force the terms unduly in order to iden-
tify the fecundity of this division with the Passion
of Hegelian Spirit, which does not go forth from
itself by chance, but in order to appropriate its true
nature, and which, in this fall, attains the revelation
of a depth realized by the totality. The proletarian
discovers the truth of humanity in the depths of hu-
man misery. (p. 138)
Peppered with references to Kojèveʼs Introduction
to the Reading of Hegel, issued while Althusser was
preparing his thesis, ʻOn Contentʼ is not a Kojèvian
work. In a review of the volume – ʻMan, That Nightʼ
– written concurrently, Althusser criticized its uni-
laterally anthropological interpretation, which valor-
ized the subject at the expense of substance. The
upshot was an ʻexistentialist Marxʼ – ʻa travesty in
which Marxists will not recognize their ownʼ. Never-
theless, Kojève was to be applauded for ʻrestor[ing]
part of Hegelʼs veritable grandeurʼ.
Intellectuals in arms
Even as Althusserʼs notice was appearing, Andrei
Zhdanov was laying down the line of ʻtwo campsʼ
– bellicose imperialism/irenic socialism – at the
inaugural meeting of the Cominform, and intimidat-
ing a conference of ʻSoviet philosophical workersʼ:
ʻThe question of Hegel was settled long ago. There
is no reason whatsoever to pose it anew.ʼ9 In 1950,
an anonymous article, in fact penned by Althusser,
was published in La Nouvelle Critique – a new PCF
journal, significantly subtitled ʻRevue du marxisme
militantʼ. With Zhdanovʼs admonition as one of its
epigraphs, ʻThe Return to Hegel: The Latest Word in
Academic Revisionismʼ registered the Hegel phenom-
enon in France since the 1930s:
The consecration followed: Hyppolite instated at
the Sorbonne; Hegel recognized … as one of the
masters of bourgeois thought; commentaries in the
windows of all the book shops; the ʻlabour of the
negativeʼ in every term paper; master and slave in
every academic talk; the struggle of one conscious-
ness against another in Jean Lacroix; our theo-
logians discoursing on the ʻlesser Logicʼ; and all
the to-do connected with the academic and religious
jubilation over a reviving corpse. (p. 174)
Althusser, who had been compiling what he termed
Hégéliâneries (ʻHegelian inanitiesʼ) – the ʻHegelian
“Robinsonade” of master and slaveʼ included – castig-
ated the pervasive recourse to the philosophy of
history or the state. It served the
ideological needs of the ʻmoribund
bourgeoisieʼ, which had renounced
liberalism in this, the crisis-ridden
imperialist stage of capitalism; in
particular, it validated ʻthe projects
of reaction in Franceʼ. Moreover,
the Hegel revival tailored the
revisions of Marx required to
impugn Communism, seeking to
discredit the ʻscience and … the
events insep-arable from itʼ which
portended ʻthe inevitable collapse
of the bourgeoisie and the victory
of the working classʼ. The ques-
tion of Hegel had long since been
resolved for the proletariat by the
founders of ʻscientific socialismʼ, born among men and dwelt among them – and who
who had retrieved a revolutionary method from the are already preparing a humane place for it amongst
reactionary system. By contrast, the bourgeois return men. (p. 195)
amounted to ʻa revisionism of a fascist typeʼ. The July anathemas of the Holy Office (the former
Althusserʼs excoriation of modern ʻirrationalismʼ Inquisition) resolved Althusserʼs ʻmatter of factʼ for
occasionally reads like a miniature of the monument him. Henceforth it was not equally to Roman Cath-
to this ideological conjuncture in the history of the olicism, but exclusively to Russian Communism, that
international Communist movement: Lukácsʼs Destruc- he looked for salvation. The ʻYouth of the Churchʼ
tion of Reason (1953). An isolated published incident, having been repressed, ʻthe youth of the worldʼ
mercifully it did not entail the destruction of his own. – Vaillant-Couturierʼs characterization of Communism
By now, all roads were perceived to lead either to – absorbed Althusserʼs energies. In an extraordinary,
Washington or to Moscow. On 1 July 1949, Pope Pius
disconcerting seventy-page letter to Lacroix, completed
XII, whose record on fascism had been lamentable,
in January 1950, Althusser cited this phrase with the
issued a decree proscribing Catholics from associa-
ardour of the convert. Part cahier de doléances, part
tion with Communists, and menacing recusants with
confession of faith, this epistle affords privileged
sanctions.10 That February, Althusserʼs ʻA Matter of
access to the convictions and motivations of its author
Factʼ had featured in Cahiers de Jeunesse de lʼÉglise,
in his high Stalinist phase. For a start, the later parti-
one of the principal French groups targeted. There he
san of a ʻleft critique of Stalinismʼ harboured not the
reprehended the social doctrine of the Church – pro-
least doubt as to the legitimacy of the Rajk show-trial
pounded in the encyclicals Rerum novarum (1891) and
in Hungary in September 1949. Second, the former
Quadragesimo anno (1931) – as ʻa form of reactionary
Hegelian dismissed ʻthe good old problem of the end
reformismʼ.11 As to its present political stance,
of history and alienationʼ, claiming that, in Marxʼs
if we consider its policies on a global scale, we residual employment of the category, ʻ[a]lienation is
must admit that, apart from a few active but isolated an economic concept, in the broad sense…ʼ. Third, a
small groups, the Church comprises … an objec-
version of the Viconian verum–factum principle, held
tive … force that maintains a deep … commitment
to world-wide reaction, and is struggling alongside
up to ridicule in the Reply to John Lewis (1973), was
international capitalism against the forces of the advocated: the proletariat knew the truth of history
working class and the advent of socialism. (p. 191) because it made history; strictly speaking, historical
materialism was a proletarian science. Finally, paying
Contrariwise, its future depended homage to Zhdanovʼs injunctions, Althusser extolled
on the number and courage of those Christians who the ʻextraordinary freedomʼ vouchsafed Communist
… are developing an awareness of the necessity of intellectuals in and through their conformity to the
the struggle and joining the ranks of the world pro- ʻpartisan positionsʼ defined by the party. The respec-
letariat.… The Church will live thanks to those who tive conditions of party and intellectuals were marked
… are once again discovering that the Word was by a fundamental asymmetry:

Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 39

 I would like you to understand that the truth … is
the iron law and condition of the Party, and that
we intellectuals, perhaps, do not always live in the
same condition. The ʻconditionʼ that is ours does
not require us, materially, as a question of life and
death, to possess the truth, to put it to the test of
struggle, to share it with other men.… We are not
condemned to the truth. (p. 224)
Hence the duty to ʻshow ourselves worthy of our
admirable brothers, who are suffering and struggling
for their freedom, for our freedomʼ. Hence the impera-
tive of a ʻrendezvous with the railwaymenʼ – those
heroes of a Communist Resistance mythology, not
devoid of historical reality, impressed upon Althusser
and his like, who were incessantly reminded of the
railwaymanʼs rendezvous with the firing squad.12
The imaginary debt
Reflecting on the immediate postwar period in For
Marx, Althusser observed that ʻthe intellectuals of
petty-bourgeois originʼ recruited by the PCF ʻfelt that
they had to pay … the imaginary Debt they thought
they had contracted by not being proletariansʼ.13 Even
those, unlike Althusser, who had participated in the
Resistance, were unquestionably made to feel it by an
organization which, substituting itself for the class in
whose name it spoke, abased ʻitsʼ intellectuals before
la force tranquille of the proletariat – that is to say,
itself. If for no other reason, Althusser necessarily
missed his rendezvous.
The Introduction to For Marx suggested that ʻ[i]n
his own way, Sartre provides us with an honest witness
to this baptism of historyʼ, adding: ʻwe were of his race
as well.…ʼ Yet the ʻcommitted intellectualʼ, even when
a fellow traveller, was of a rather different species
from the ʻpartisan philosopherʼ. (In his Masterʼs thesis,
Althusser had poked fun at Sartreanism: ʻonly the man
who is uncommitted becomes the thinker of commit-
ment, elevating commitment into a systemʼ.) Compara-
tively sheltered, more importantly, the former vocation
was – and is – ʻdeeply ambivalent towards politics.
Exclusion from power is its life-blood.ʼ14 For worse
and better, no such ambivalence attached to those
who, seeking to escape the ʻintellectual conditionʼ,
and contribute to the cause of human emancipation,
submitted to the voluntary servitude of Communist
Party discipline after the Second World War.
As regards that baptism of history, The Spectre of
Hegel provides us with an honest witness. It is the less
40 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
surprising that when he (re)appeared on the public
stage, forewarned and forearmed, Louis Althusser
advanced masked.
Notes
1. ʻThe Lonely Hour of the Final Analysisʼ, RP 67, Sum-
mer 1994, pp. 45–7, here p. 45.
2. Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan, edited
by Olivier Corpet and François Matheron, trans. Jef-
frey Mehlman, Columbia University Press, New York,
1996.
3. ʻThe “1844 Manuscripts” of Karl Marxʼ, in For Marx,
trans. Ben Brewster, Verso, London and New York,
1990, pp. 153–60, here p. 160.
4. As if in conscious contradiction of a saying of which
Trotsky was fond: avant trente ans révolutionnaire,
après canaille [before thirty, a revolutionary; thereafter,
a scoundrel].
5. In particular, the exhortations of the Politburo member
responsible for intellectuals, Laurent Casanova. Cf. Le
Parti communiste, les intellectuels et la nation, Éditions
Sociales, Paris, 1949, e.g. pp. 19, 80.
6. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy
Kamuf, Routledge, New York and London, 1994, p.
14.
7. Autocritique (1959), second edition, Éditions du Seuil,
Paris, 1970, p. 60. See chapter 2, pp. 27–62, ʻLa Vulgate
ou lʼheure de Stalingradʼ.
8. Quoted by Michael Rustin in his obituary, ʻErnest Gell-
ner, 1925–1995ʼ, RP 76, March/April 1996, pp. 55–6,
here p. 55.
9. ʻOn Philosophyʼ, in A.A. Zhdanov, On Literature, Music
and Philosophy, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1950,
pp. 76–112, here p. 102.
10. See Jean-Yves Calvez, La Pensée de Karl Marx, Édi-
tions du Seuil, Paris, 1956, Part V, chapter 2, ʻLʼÉglise
catholique et le marxismeʼ, pp. 582–602 (especially pp.
590–91). And cf. Gilles Perrault, ʻLa germanophilie
obstinée de Pie XIIʼ, Le Monde Diplomatique, January
1997, p. 2 (a review of Annie Lacroix-Riz, Le Vatican,
lʼEurope et le Reich, de la première guerre mondiale à
la guerre froide, Armand Colin, Paris, 1996).
11. One aspect of this ʻreactionary reformismʼ – the new
theology of marriage, generating ʻthe illusion of emanci-
pationʼ for women (p. 239) – is mordantly analysed by
Althusser in an unpublished text from 1951, ʻOn Con-
jugal Obscenityʼ.
12. The fate, for example, of Pierre Sémard, Communist
leader and secretary of the railway workersʼ union, shot
by the Nazis on 7 March 1942.
13. For Marx, p. 27. Cf. Morin, Autocritique, pp. 107ff,
and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Paris-Montpellier. P.C.-
P.S.U., 1945–63 (Gallimard, Paris, 1982), p. 75, on an
analogous sense of ʻoriginal sinʼ attendant upon privi-
leged social origins.
14. Peter Osborne, ʻPhilosophy and the Role of Intellectualsʼ,
in P. Osborne, ed., A Critical Sense: Interviews with In-
tellectuals, Routledge, London and New York, 1996, p.
xiv.
REVIEWS
Fanon at seventy
Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Renée T. White, eds, Fanon: A Critical Reader, Blackwell,
Oxford, 1996. xxi + 344 pp., £50.00 hb, £14.99 pb., 1 55786 895 6 hb., 1 55786 896 4 pb.
Alan Read, ed., The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, Institute of Contemporary
Arts and Institute of International Visual Arts, London, 1996. 212 pp., £11.95 pb., 1 900300 02 8.
Frantz Fanon would have been seventy in the summer
of 1995 and the volumes under review celebrate the
anniversary of his birth. Most of the twenty-one con-
tributions to the Critical Reader are papers delivered
at the ʻFanon Todayʼ conference held at Purdue Uni-
versity in March 1995; the handsomely produced The
Fact of Blackness originates in a conference held in
conjunction with the Mirage season hosted by Lon-
donʼs ICA in May–July of the same year. A companion
volume entitled Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference
and Desire serves as a catalogue to the ICAʼs season
of exhibitions, screenings, events and discussions, and
provides a detailed record of a dialogue between Fanon
and artists working on the structures and technologies
of representation, race and radicalism.
The Reader and the ICA papers represent very dif-
ferent approaches to Fanon and his legacy. Many of the
contributors to the Reader adopt a broadly Africanist
or Afrocentric stance, and some are highly critical of
Fanonʼs alleged neglect of the African heritage, or of
what Paget Henry terms ʻhis decision to appropriate
the language and concepts of European existentialism
whilst excluding African onesʼ. In his introductory
remarks to the ICA conference Stuart Hall warns
against such ʻessentialismʼ, and rightly points out that
Fanonʼs work is deeply implicated in the French culture
he imbibed in his native Martinique and then in Lyon,
where he studied medicine and psychiatry. Fanonʼs
politics certainly had a pan-African dimension, but
his culture is French, crossed with a distinctly Franco-
phone Caribbean tradition that deserves more attention
than it receives in either volume. A strange ʻNote on
the textʼ in the Blackwell volume illustrates the need
to read Fanon in his own terms. It speculates that the
title Les Damnés de la terre connotes a religious sense
of ʻdamnationʼ, and may be influenced by the Catholic
context of France or even the literary example of
Dante. The title in fact derives from the Internationale
and alludes to Sales nègres (ʻDirty Niggersʼ), a poem
by the Haitian communist Jacques Roumain: ʻEt nous
voilà debout/Tous les damnés de la terreʼ (ʻNow we
are on our feet/All the wretched of the earthʼ).
The ICA conferenceʼs field of reference is the black
diaspora, rather than pan-Africanism. It focuses on
the seemingly inevitable ʻdesire–difference–sexual-
ity–homophobiaʼ syntagm, and at times bears an
uncanny resemblance to other events organized there
in recent years. This is a culture and an institution
in which Fanonʼs discussion of ʻthe lookʼ (ʻ“Look,
a Negro”ʼ) will be glossed by reference to Lacanʼs
scopic drive and Jacqueline Roseʼs Sexuality in the
Field of Vision, but not by reference to Sartre.
Whilst it is obviously difficult to judge visual
works solely on the basis of reproductions and verbal
descriptions, both The Mask of Blackness and Mirage
suggest that the dialogue between Fanon and con-
temporary artists was a somewhat one-sided one, in
which Fanon was a sounding board rather than a
true interlocutor. Renée Greenʼs explorations of the
iconography of Josephine Baker, and of the ʻHot-
tentot Venusʼ, Saartjie Baartman (who was paraded
in London and Paris at the beginning of the last
century like some anthropo-pornographic curiosity),
are powerful in their own right. But are they in any
real sense Fanonian?
Musing on the questions, ʻWhy Fanon? Why now?ʼ,
Stuart Hall opens the ICA volume by remarking that,
whereas Fanonʼs name was once a widely known
signifier of a ʻcertain brand of incendiary Third World-
ismʼ, it is now virtually unknown even to the young
artists ʻwhose work appears, unwittingly, to betray
the “trace” of his presenceʼ. It is true that the days
when Eldridge Cleaver and Stokely Carmichael could
claim that ʻevery brother on a rooftopʼ had read The
Wretched of the Earth are long gone, but it is also true
that what is forgotten in London is often remembered
elsewhere. Conferences on Fanon were organized in
Martinique, Paris and Algiers in 1982, and in Braz-
zaville in 1984. The proceedings of the Martinique
and Brazzaville conferences have been published in
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 41
full in French; those of the Paris and Algiers events
can be traced, albeit with some difficulty. They contain
a wealth of information on Fanon, and it is revealing
that no participant in either the Purdue or the London
events seems to have consulted them.
If a certain amnesia about the history of Fanon
studies characterizes both volumes, they also exhibit
one of the more dispiriting features of many studies
of Fanon – namely, a refusal to do the basic work that
might be expected of any serious commentary. There
are, for instance, published accounts of Fanon that
have him attending a segregated and religious lycée
in Martinique. Like all French schools, the Lycée
Schoelcher was secular, and, whilst the fees charged
meant that there were few black pupils, it was far from
being an apartheid institution. In their introduction to
the Critical Reader, the editors state that Martinique
was occupied by the Nazis during the Second World
War. It was not. Power was certainly usurped by a
pro-Vichy admiral, who was subsequently tried for
treason. But the only German to set foot on the island
was a wounded submariner who was interned for the
duration. In a paper on Fanon, violence and liberation,
Gail M. Presbey misreads a perfectly lucid passage
from Black Skin, White Masks so badly that Fanonʼs
account of the emancipation of the slaves in 1848
becomes an account of how France granted Martinique
its independence without an armed struggle. In legal
and administrative terms, Martinique is of course
an overseas département, and an integral part of the
French Republic.
No individual contributor to the ICA conference
makes such inexcusable errors, but the event itself is
inscribed under an unfortunate sign. The title, ʻThe
Fact of Blacknessʼ, is claimed to have been bor-
rowed from the fifth chapter of Black Skin. As Ronald
A.T. Judy notes at perhaps unnecessary length in the
Reader, the French title is ʻLʼExpérience vécue du noirʼ
(ʻthe lived experience of the black manʼ). In the badly
flawed English translation, the vital phenomenological
reference (probably to Merleau-Ponty) is erased. There
is no fact of blackness in Fanonʼs study of the psychol-
ogy of colonialism. Blackness and whiteness are a
matter of ʻepidermalizationʼ and of a positioning that
is described in phenomenological and not positivistic
terms.
Much of the literature of Fanon is of the ʻapplica-
tionʼ school. Olufemi Taiwo, for instance, contributes
a paper to the Purdue conference which endows Fanon
with the gift of prophecy, and applies The Wretched
of the Earthʼs predictions about the likely emergence
of post-colonial bureaucracies and dictatorships to
42 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
contemporary Nigeria. Whilst some of Fanonʼs vague
predictions may have come true, no one mentions that
his gift of prophecy failed him disastrously when it
came to Angola.
The real absence is Algeria. The editors of the
Reader claim in their introduction that Fanon was
ʻthe chief theoretician of the Algerian struggleʼ. It
is easy to inflate Fanonʼs relatively modest role in
the Algerian revolution – he was never part of the
leadership and many who knew him think that his
appointment as a roving ambassador was a way of
further marginalizing him – if one fails to mention
any other Algerian theoretician or leader: the index
contains only one Algerian name. The omission helps
to perpetuate the myth of a united FLN and conceals
the murderously divided organization described by
contemporary historians like Mahommed Harbi and
Khalfa Mameri. The exclusion of Algeria from the
debate is exacerbated by the construction of ʻblack
Algerians of African heritageʼ, a construct which may
seem politically correct in the USA, but which makes
it impossible to make sense of an Algerian national-
ism that has, since at least the 1930s, consistently
been defined as ʻArabo-Islamicʼ. Indeed, that was the
cause of certain of Fanonʼs difficulties. It is not hard
to find Algerian accounts which argue that he was not
Algerian despite his identificatory ʻWe Algerians…ʼ
Quite simply, he was black – not an Arab and not a
Muslim.
If Fanon could indeed prophesy the future, surely
the litmus test must be Algeria. Yet no contributor
even begins the difficult task of looking at what, if
anything, Fanon has to tell us about the situation
in Algeria today. Two contributions to the Reader
deal, respectively, with Fanonʼs description of the
role played by radio in the Algerian War and with his
account of the unveiling of the women fighters, which
provides the basis for one of the most memorable
sequences of Pontecorvoʼs Battle of Algiers. But these
are familiar images. The only contributor to allude
to the contemporary situation is Eddy Souffrant, who
remarks that what we are witnessing is ʻthe result of
a resurgence to (sic) secularize Algeria, to deny its
cultural baggage … a struggle for the cultural integrity
of that countryʼ. Policies of intervention for purposes
of democracy would, he goes on, be as ʻunwiseʼ as
attempts to introduce French liberalism earlier in the
centuryʼ. To my knowledge, no one has suggested
ʻinterventionʼ, but the death of thirty thousand people
in the last four years (and still counting by the day)
surely demands a more human response than this.
Most contributors to these volumes, and certainly
those at the ICA, would normally stress that a text
is always part of an intertext and cannot be read in
isolation. But something strange happens in the area
of sexuality. Fanon suddenly becomes an author in the
traditional sense, and is held directly and personally
responsible for his statements and for the vein of miso-
gyny and homophobia that supposedly runs through
his work. Fanonʼs sexual politics certainly do not
make for comfortable reading in the 1990s. However,
the danger of making anachronistic judgements is not
always avoided.
Contributors to both volumes discuss Fanonʼs
reading of Mayotte Capéciaʼs autobiographical novel
Je suis Martiniquaise (1947). It tells the story of a
mixed-race woman who has an affair with a white
naval officer and is inevitably abandoned by him.
For Fanon, it is emblematic of what he takes to be a
widespread desire on the part of Martinican women
to become white. In the ICA volume, Lola Young chal-
lenges Fanonʼs admittedly heavy-handed interpretation
of the fact that Mayotte is a laundress as an index of
desire to be ʻlactifiedʼ or ʻwhitenedʼ, on the grounds
that he ignores the effects of the gendered division
of labour: Mayotte had no choice. The argument is
somewhat undermined by Capéciaʼs second novel, in
which the heroine, whose sexual politics are the same
as Mayotteʼs, is a bar-keeper and prosperous enough
to have a servant.
Je suis Martiniquaise is not simply the story of a
black–white sexual encounter at the individual level.
It is also a story about Martinique under Vichy rule:
Mayotteʼs lover is a Pétainiste officer and she sym-
pathizes with his politics. In an account of the role
of Martinique in Franceʼs ʻcolonial familyʼ published
in 1994, Richard Burton reads Mayotteʼs loverʼs
departure as an allegory of Franceʼs refusal to make
the island colony an integral part of the ʻfamilyʼ. In
short, Fanonʼs criticisms of Capécia need to be read
in terms of the more general and highly sexualized
intertext of relations between a colonial daughter and
an androgenous mother-fatherland (mère-patrie). And
there may also be an unspoken personal explanation
for Fanonʼs hostility to the novel. Capéciaʼs snobbery is
at times quite breathtaking, and she crudely describes
the troops who were recruited to the Free French
forces as belonging to the ʻlowest category of niggersʼ.
Fanon was one of them.
Whilst both volumes are somewhat disappointing,
they do also contain some good essays. Helpful analy-
ses of Fanonʼs use of Hegelʼs master–slave dialectic
and of Lacanʼs mirror stage can be found in both. In
the Reader, Judt provides a good account of ʻFanonʼs
Body of Black Experienceʼ, whilst Sonia Kruks puts
forward a sophisticated case for seeing Sartre and
Fanon as the founding figures of identity politics. T.
Denean Sharpley-Whiting is keenly critical of the
dangerous tendency to romanticise Capécia as a proto-
typical black feminist. In the ICA volume, Hall speaks
of the need to read Fanon in his context and not ours,
and thus provides a nice counterweight to Kobena
Mercerʼs tendency to slide too easily from Fanonʼs
sexual politics to the black independent cinema of the
1980s, and to Homi Bhabhaʼs incorporation of Fanon
into a post-modernist doxa.
The real gems, however, are the fine essays by
Françoise Vergès, the only contributor to both volumes.
They are based upon original research into Fanonʼs
work as a practising psychiatrist and draw upon his
clinical writings, which have never been translated.
More than anything else in either book, they help
us to understand the emergence and formation of
Frantz Fanon. Trained in France, Fanon attempted to
apply the progressive methods he had learned there
in Algeria, only to find that they were culture-bound
and therefore ineffective. His clinical papers represent
an attempt to construct a psychiatry appropriate to
North Africa and to demolish the psychiatry of the
ʻAlgiers schoolʼ, whose nosographic typology turned
the Algerian into a credulous, superstitious semi-
primitive, with innately murderous impulses. Fanonʼs
psychiatry (and it helps to be reminded that he was
not a psychoanalyst) is grounded not in theory, but in
clinical practice. If we wish to understand his attempts
to create an anti-colonial psychiatry, we have to start,
not with another reading of his brief remarks on Lacan,
but with the history of psychiatry, and Vergès shows
us where to begin.
David Macey
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 43
Is your journey really necessary?
W.V. Quine, From Stimulus to Science, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London. vi + 114pp.,
£14.50 hb., 0 674 32635 0.
Paolo Crivelli and Marco Santambrogio, eds, On Quine: New Essays, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
1995. vi + 361pp., £40.00 hb., 0 521 46091 9.
Quine writes thrillers with a single plot. Each sets out
to explain how we ʻphysical denizens of the physical
worldʼ can have arrived at a scientific theory of that
world, given the nature of our contact with it. The
thrill is seeing how Quine journeys ʻfrom stimulus to
scienceʼ each time with the limited space and meagre
tools he allows himself. For reading Quine is also a
little like watching a contortionist – unless, of course,
one is already sold on his approach. It is amazing he
achieves anything at all, given the way he is trussed
up. But why the bonds? The answer is easy for the
contortionist; he is there to amaze, and the bonds help.
But what is the answer in Quineʼs case?
Some scene-setting. Quine is committed to contem-
porary natural science. This science represents his
preferred theory of what exists. Everything is material,
except for the abstract objects of mathematics. Physical
facts are all the facts there are. All changes in the
world involve physical changes. Science also gives
him his preferred theory of method and justification.
It informs us that the only evidence we have for
our theory of what exists is sensory. So Quine is a
naturalist and an empiricist. The philosophical study
of knowledge – Quineʼs ʻjourneyʼ – is the continua-
tion of natural science by other means. It draws on
psychology to explain how sensory stimulation gives
rise to beliefs about the way the world is.
This background leaves Quine little room for man-
oeuvre. It is not just that he restricts the possibilities
of our contact with the world to what may be gained
through sense-experience; he conceives of that experi-
ence in a minimalist way. It is ʻthe mere impact of
rays and particles on our surfaces and a few odds and
ends such as the strain of walking uphillʼ. Furthermore,
he restricts our contact with ourselves to what may be
learned through observation of each otherʼs behaviour
and conditioning.
Quine also makes his own job more difficult by
admitting only theories and solutions which are ʻsimpleʼ
and ʻeconomicalʼ. Indeed, he seems to delight in being
shockingly frugal. In response to Pilateʼs question, for
example, he marshals no Nietzschean mobile armies:
ʻTruth is just a degenerate case of denotation.ʼ This
approach combines nicely with a hard-nosed natural-
44 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
ism. Indeed, Quineʼs slightly platitudinous comment
in his autobiography, ʻI find philosophical thought
hardly separable from its expressionʼ, really does ring
true in his case.
All this gives Quine his basic problem. Contem-
porary science represents a torrential outpouring of
structured verbal theorizing. How can this even be
possible, in view of the meagre input which sensory
stimulation represents?
Well, is this a problem? Only if we accept that,
in getting here from there, we really could have
been ʻthereʼ in the first place. And it must be said
immediately that From Stimulus to Science offers
no response to those who might doubt it. Yet it is
by no means obviously true. Quine needs to make
several decisive moves in explaining how his surface
impacts could possibly become the kind of things
(ʻexperiencesʼ) that could rationally justify us in our
beliefs about the world, and in actions and behaviour
based on those beliefs. One of the most fundamental
is explaining how a perceiver reacts to two surface
impacts, registering them as similar or dissimilar.
Quine notes that this reaction is a necessary part of
his account, yet nowhere explains how it is possible.
It is plausible to suppose that perceiving one thing as
similar to another thing at least requires that one be in
the position of recognizing something common to both
as being similarly stimulated. But what is that ʻsome-
thing elseʼ, and how is it to be recognized as such?
It cannot be a registering of a third surface impact
– there are only two in our story. So, early on in his
account, Quine seems to require some additional and
suspiciously un-meagre input. Surface impacts have
to be acknowledged as something more than surface
impacts if perceptual similarity is to be possible. But
if this is the case, Quineʼs starting-point – and hence
the need for his journey – is put in doubt.
In the course of From Stimulus to Science, Quine
touches on and clarifies his position as regards many of
the subjects dealt with in less accommodating fashion
in earlier works – observation sentences, reference,
reification, truth and disquotation, meaning, translation
and interpretation, semantic ascent, and quotation.
The excitement is real and sustained with great verve
throughout this latest offering. The whole can be read
at a single sitting.
On Quine is for the initiated and the enthusiast. It
is a collection of nineteen papers by several eminent
philosophers, together with a paper-length response
by Quine. The contributors include Donald Davidson,
Barry Stroud, James Higginbotham, Nathan Salmon,
Hilary Putnam, George Boolos, Charles Parsons, and
Umberto Eco. The papers themselves range from the
expository to attempts at critical appraisal; few are at
all confrontational. The topics covered include interpre-
tation, naturalized epistemology, ontological commit-
ments, names, analyticity, and mathematical truths.
Aiming for the high ground
Christopher Norris, Reclaiming Truth: Contribution to a Critique of Cultural Relativism, Lawrence & Wishart,
London, 1996. xvi + 256 pp., £12.99 pb., 0 85315 815 0.
Christopher Norris is arguably one of the most prolific
and provocative critics around, and in this book he is
reacting with customary vigour against what he des-
cribes as the ʻlinguistic turnʼ in critical theory – the
bracketing of the real, evident in the scare quotes
that have sprung up around such terms as ʻhistoryʼ,
ʻpoliticsʼ, ʻrealityʼ and ʻtruthʼ. In a recent interview,
Norris insisted that he did not wish to ʻdefend the
notion of Truth with a capital T, some sort of timeless,
transcendent, ultimate Truth, which then becomes a
stick to beat opponentsʼ. But here he presents himself
as a purveyor of Truth with a capital T, and sets about
his opponents – chiefly Jean Baudrillard, Stanley Fish,
Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty – systematically
and without compunction.
According to Nietzsche – the prototype of those to
whom Norris is opposed – truth was merely a ʻmobile
army of metaphorsʼ. It is this rhetorical reading of
truth, exemplified by postmodernism, that Reclaiming
Truth takes to task, as it defiantly reasserts the power
of the literal over the literary. If recent continen-
tal philosophy has found fertile ground in literature
departments, it is because those working with fiction
are inevitably open to anything that undermines fact.
Norris objects to the fusion of one strand of French
thought with English literary criticism to produce
a hybrid theory in which ʻhistory is treated as just
another kind of narrative fictionʼ, and philosophy as ʻa
kind of writingʼ. What starts off as a critique of realism
quickly becomes a wholesale critique of reality, at
which point its claims come into conflict with other
established disciplines. In fact, what Norris is attack-
The papers were originally given at a conference
on Quine in 1990 at the University of San Marino.
The organizers contribute a melancholy introduction
to the whole. It was apparently their intention that the
conference should encourage communication between
analytical and continental philosophy. In the event,
ʻfewer continental philosophers than expected were
able to attend.ʼ Certainly, none of the papers collected
here – with the possible exception of Ecoʼs – represents
anything but the most uncompromisingly analytical
approach.
Max de Gaynesford
ing is not just cultural relativism, but culturalism – a
foe he confronts from the standpoint of philosophy,
specifically the Anglo-American analytic tradition.
The language of refutation pervades the text. A
section heading such as ʻChomsky contra Post-struc-
turalismʼ, or a chapter entitled ʻMarxism against Post-
modernismʼ, gives the flavour. The exception to the rule
is Derrida. Two chapters are devoted to proving that
ʻdeconstruction is not a part of this wider postmodern
driftʼ. If Norrisʼs purpose is to exonerate Derrida from
the charges he levels against most other continental
theorists under the umbrella of postmodernism or
poststructuralism, the central paradox is that Derrida
can be seen to conform to the model of postmodern
scepticism and cultural relativism. Norris is aware
of this, but it seems to me that he fails in his efforts
to render deconstruction compatible with his own
perspective. Norris ridicules ʻWittgensteinʼs famously
obscure dictum that “the limits of my language are
the limits of my world”.ʼ This echoes Nietzscheʼs
claim that we must cease to think if we refuse to do
so in the prison-house of language; and anticipates
Heideggerʼs remark about language speaking through
Man rather than the reverse, as well as Stanley Fishʼs
argument, anathema to Norris, that interpretation
goes ʻall the way downʼ. Yet is it really any more
obscure than Derridaʼs notorious assertion that ʻthere
is nothing outside the textʼ? Or again, when Norris
takes issue with Baudrillard for conflating use-value
and exchange-value, one is tempted to point out that
this happens to be Derridaʼs own strategy in the fifth
chapter of Specters of Marx.
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 45
 Postmodernism is held to be ʻpseudo radicalʼ
because it describes a situation, one of political
impasse, without offering a means of transforming
it. The problem throughout Norrisʼs text is that post-
modernism becomes a sort of generalized bogey.
Indeed, having praised Alex Callinicos for demol-
ishing it, in a chapter that is really a lengthy book
review, Norris concedes that there may well be no
such thing as postmodernism – the conclusion arrived
at by Callinicos. It is not clear to me why two critics
of such obvious energy and commitment should find
it necessary to refute something that doesnʼt exist.
The problem is compounded when one recalls that,
just as Marx declared himself not to be a Marxist,
Baudrillard has refused the label of ʻpostmodernistʼ.
If it is reduced to a term of abuse, then it ceases to
merit serious attention.
Finally, one important connection missing from
Norrisʼs account is the way in which the postmodern
critique of Enlightenment is complemented and com-
plicated by work being done under the rubric of post-
colonialism by critics such as Homi Bhabha, Edward
Said and Gayatri Spivak. Norrisʼs vision of a truth
that transcends cultural and historical differences is
largely oriented towards the West, and leaves the rest
out. By resisting both textual and contextual views
of truth, Norris is clearly aiming for the high ground
depicted on the bookʼs cover. Once there, however, he
may find himself staring into the abyss.
Willy Maley
Situating solidarity
Jodi Dean, Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism after
Identity Politics, University of California Press, Ber-
keley CA and London, 1996. x + 219 pp., $40.00 hb.,
$16.00 pb., 0 520 20230 9 hb., 0 520 20231 7 pb.
There are two discernible trends in much recent femi-
nist theory. The work of Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz
and others offers what might be called ʻexcentricʼ
theories of feminist critique, in which a politics of
resistance is formulated around the ʻabjectedʼ bodily
practices of marginal groups. One difficulty with it is
that the grounding of resistance in embodied practices
leads to an individualized form of politics which,
albeit unintentionally, reinscribes a public–private
dichotomy. Counterposed to this are the ʻinclusionaryʼ
theories of thinkers influenced by Habermas, such as
Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser, who try to establish
a universal foundation for feminist critique through a
46 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
reformulation of communicative ethics. Jodi Deanʼs
book is located in this second strand: it argues for a
communicatively redefined notion of solidarity as the
way forward for feminism.
Conventional conceptions of solidarity can no
longer serve as the basis for political mobilization
because of their grounding in unitary, and hence exclu-
sionary, notions of identity. However, if solidarity is
thought through the idea of a communicatively gener-
ated intersubjectivity, then consideration of the ʻotherʼ
is introduced into self-understanding, and identity is
rendered open-ended and indeterminate. The type of
relationship instituted with the other is based on the
distantiated or reflective perspective of the ʻsituated,
hypothetical thirdʼ. This establishes a key difference
between Deanʼs rereading of Habermas and the work
of Benhabib. Benhabib attempts to correct the abstrac-
tion and gender-blindness of conventional political
thought via the notion of the ʻconcrete otherʼ. In Deanʼs
view, this overly polarizes the distinction between the
concrete and the general, obscuring the utility of a
generalized perspective on social relations. Defined as
the individualʼs attempt to assume the organized set
of expectations of a given social group, a generalized
perspective points to the indeterminacy of identity.
Because it is not possible fully to assume the perspec-
tive of the generalized other, the individual must adopt
an interpretation which points to further openness in
so far as any interpretation can be contested. This
process of ceaseless argumentation and self-reflection
is crucial to the maintenance of solidarity as open-
ended and inclusionary rather than as a normatively
fixed relation.
The notion of reflective solidarity generates a
new understanding of other political terms that have
become enmeshed in the contradictions of identity
politics. The putatively universal nature of communi-
cative structures suggests that ʻjusticeʼ is a dimension
of validity which cannot be confined to the trad-
itionally conceived ʻpublicʼ sphere. It follows that
feminists should transcend the public–private dualism
central to its critique of patriarchy. A conception of
civil society as a series of differentiated, but com-
municatively integrated, spheres of activity opens
up the possibility of new forms of feminist political
intervention, traditionally foreclosed by the binary of
feminine particularity–masculine abstraction. An alter-
native understanding of the role of law in transmitting
and generating reflective solidarity is also proposed.
Far from being a sign of oppressive arbitrariness, legal
indeterminacy emphasizes the process of interpretation
and contestation which prevents reification of norms.
This provides the basis for a remodelling of democracy
along the lines of a ʻdialogic constitutionalismʼ.
This is a forcefully argued book which is bound to
have a significant impact on feminist political theory.
Deanʼs attempt to establish a reflective, formal per-
spective for feminist theory, by disentangling it from
charges of patriarchal disembeddedness, is an inter-
esting corrective to the emphasis on embodiment and
immediacy that dominates much feminist thought.
Her argument that feminist theory should relinquish
the dichotomy of public–private in order to establish
a more complex and inclusionary form of politics is
powerful, if rather underdeveloped. Her criticisms of
Butler, Benhabib and other leading feminist thinkers
are perceptive and well-judged. The central weakness
of the book derives from Deanʼs somewhat dogged
championing of Habermasʼs communicative ethics.
Huddersfield?
Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Blackwell, Oxford,
1996. xii + 320 pp., £55.00 hb., £14.99 pb. 1 55786 674 0 hb., 1 55786 675 9 pb.
Edward Sojaʼs Postmodern Geographies (1989) was
hailed as one of the most challenging and stimulating
studies of space and how it is used – and rightly so.
His new book was therefore eagerly anticipated. Sadly,
it is a great disappointment.
Soja sets out to encourage us to think about the
ʻspatiality of human lifeʼ. Spatiality, he suggests,
should be thought of along with historicality and
sociality, and should not be the exclusive preserve
of geographers, architects and urbanists: it is far
too important for that. The term ʻThirdspaceʼ – a
reworking of Lefebvreʼs ʻlived spaces of representa-
tionʼ – seeks to recombine and extend, rather than
simply replace, the real (Firstspace) and imagined
(Secondspace) perspectives normally applied to critical
work about space. This ʻthirding-as-Otheringʼ is one
of Sojaʼs theoretical hallmarks, whereby he seeks to
substitute a ʻboth/and alsoʼ logic for the binarism of
the ʻeither/orʼ. Again, this is borrowed from Lefebvre,
leading Soja to propose a ʻtrialecticʼ, or dialectic of
three terms, for, as Lefebvre puts it, ʻil y a toujours
lʼAutreʼ.
Soja draws not only on Lefebvre but also on
Foucault, Said, bell hooks, Homi Bhabha, and others,
to make Thirdspace ʻas polyvocal as I know howʼ.
He begins by attempting to spatialize the biography
of Lefebvre, an attempt which amounts to little more
than a run-of-the-mill intellectual biography with a
Although she acknowledges the charges of procedur-
alism and idealism widely levelled at him, these are
not dealt with in enough detail and indeed her work
replicates some of the problems. This is most evident
in her understanding of domination as simply a matter
of discursive distortion. Deanʼs claim that it is ʻnega-
tive cultural representationsʼ that prevent individuals
from recognizing the needs and interests of excluded
groups seems naive in its disregard of institutional
and systemic forms of oppression. The description of
the negative aspects of legal systems in terms of the
ʻdomination of a particular vocabularyʼ is similarly
understated. This is an important defence of the cen-
trality of Habermasʼs ideas for feminist thought; but
sceptics will not be convinced.
Lois McNay
What about
few map references. His reading of Lefebvreʼs The
Production of Space follows, identifying it not as a
linear (historical) argument, but as a musical (and, by
implication, spatial) polyphonic fugue. This adds little
to any careful reading of the text in question, but Soja
suggests that his Thirdspace is constructed in the same
way that he thinks The Production of Space is, with
each chapter ʻa new approximation, a different way of
looking at the same subject, a sequence of neverending
variations on recurrent spatial themesʼ. Polyvocal the
book may be, but the many voices are all made to
sing the same tune.
This is particularly evident in the third and fourth
chapters. Here Soja examines the work of bell hooks
and other writers who have supposedly understood the
Thirdspace critique, with particular emphasis on those
writing from a feminist or post-colonial viewpoint.
Soja is right about their interest and importance but,
all too often, he resorts to quoting lengthy passages
from them, and merely points out their convergence
with the Thirdspace project when his own voice is
heard. Similarly, the two chapters on Michel Foucault
repeat much of what was in Postmodern Geographies,
focusing on the short piece ʻOf Other Spacesʼ, to the
exclusion of Foucaultʼs other writings.
This partial reading of Foucaultʼs work highlights
what is perhaps the biggest problem with Sojaʼs project:
the conflation of two aims. Soja wishes to reassert the
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 47
importance of space in critical social theory,
complementing – without replacing – the previ-
ously privileged themes of historicality and
sociality. He also wants to understand the
spaces of our postmodern age. What Foucault
does so successfully (and Soja either misses
or excludes this) is to spatialize historical
studies in such a way as to show how space
is important in a number of ages, though
in different ways. His considerations of the
liminal position of the mad in Madness and
Civilisation, the spaces of the body and the
hospital in The Birth of the Clinic, and, of
course, the plague city and the Panopticon in
Discipline and Punish, all demonstrate this
spatialized history far more clearly than the
1967 lecture, ʻOf Other Spacesʼ.
At this point, Soja merely embarks on yet
another tour of Los Angeles. He is aware that
his analyses are often criticized on the basis of
a ʻwhat about Huddersfield?ʼ argument. His response is discussions of the nation, irrespective of the ʻdisciplineʼ
to suggest that what he finds in Los Angeles is present (see Francis Mulhern, ʻA Nation, Yet Againʼ, RP 65;
in other places; others may discover these things if Luke Gibbonsʼ comment in RP 67; and Mulhernʼs reply
they analyse those areas, but Los Angeles is the place in RP 72). This explains why Ireland experienced a
where ʻit all comes togetherʼ. This may be so, but to ʻcounter-Enlightenmentʼ in its dominant philosophy
use the tools of postmodernism continually to examine in the eighteenth century, and why the economist and
one particular place, and with only a cursory nod poet Tom Kettle was appointed Professor of National
toward its history, may blunt their critical edge. There Economics in 1912. This makes the absence of the
is also an uneasy sense of déjà vu, as Postmodern Irish situation from countless anthologies of post-
Geographies also moved from sketches of an approach colonial theory all the more striking. Moreover, despite
to a practical analysis of, yes, Los Angeles. the current interest in Irelandʼs post-coloniality, this
In this book, Soja is too ready to assert rather neglect largely persists.
than argue, too ready to quote than to explicate, and Gibbonsʼ book redresses this lack by considering a
too willing to trade in neologisms than further the variety of Irish cultural forms from cultural-material-
important insights of Postmodern Geographies. A ist, feminist and post-colonial approaches. The book is
companion volume, Postmetropolis, is due to hit the in fact a series of previously published essays, dating
shelves in early 1997, and will include yet more on from 1983 to 1995. By his own admission, at times
Los Angeles. What about Huddersfield? they appear slightly dated. There is a piece on the
popular television serial The Riordans (1965–79),
Stuart Elden
now rather eclipsed by its successor Glenroe, a series

Irish others
Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, Cork
University Press, Cork, 1996. 232 pp., £14.95 pb, 1
85918 059 0.
It has long been something of a truism that Ireland
has had no lack of creative practitioners, but very few
theoreticians to explain and debate the formations
of its culture. Yet, as Gibbons himself has noted in
his contribution to the Field Day Anthology, intel-
lectual inquiry has usually been channelled through
which also focuses on an Irish farming community,
and the Dublin-based Fair City. Gibbonsʼ introduction
usefully suggests points of intersection between the
seemingly anomalous considerations included here:
contemporary art and the secret agrarian societies of
the eighteenth century; the myth of the West exhibited
by both the Hollywood cowboy and the Aran islander;
feminist independent film-making and Irish postcards.
A central interest is how Irish culture confounds any
easy polarization of tradition/modernity, country/city,
and centre/periphery. Gibbonsʼ persuasive thesis is
that transformations in Irish culture are formed from

48 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)

within by the operation of the apparently ʻbackwardʼ
on the supposedly ʻmodernʼ: ʻtransformations induced
by contact with the new may activate a transgressive
potential already latent in the oldʼ (p. 5). The Riordans,
for example, began as a serial which would instruct
rural Irish society in the ways of innovative farming
methods. Once it established this critical approach to
traditional ways, the serial, helped by its generic focus
on the family (here the economic and social unit of
the rural family), was able to broach issues usually
identified with urban referendum voters: contraception,
mixed marriages, illegitimacy, ʻliving in sinʼ, and so
on.
A second, related thesis is that tradition is experi-
enced differently by imperial and colonized cultures.
Because tradition is experienced as discontinuity
– fragmentation in Ireland – it might be said to have
experienced modernity before its time. This is a radical
inversion of the commonplace assumption that Joyceʼs
modernity was a cosmopolitan dynamic, brought to the
conservative tradition of ʻIrishnessʼ. Furthermore, con-
tinuing his work for the Field Day Anthology, Gibbons
discusses emergent nationalism as open rather than
confidently closed; as characterized, like allegory, the
trope on which it relies, by contestation. In the anthol-
ogy, Gibbons edited a section entitled ʻConstructing
the Canon: Versions of National Identityʼ, a selection
of competing definitions published between 1899 and
1937, which illustrates the debates within nationalism
of the period, from John Eglintonʼs accusation that
humanism is excluded by the prevailing nationalism, to
Aodh de Blacamʼs determinedly anti-racial definitions
of Irish national identity. Here this work is pursued in
the essay ʻRace against Time: Racial Discourse and
Irish Historyʼ. It is a shame, therefore, that in a book
so conscious of Irelandʼs representation as ʻotherʼ, the
ʻotherʼ Irish – namely, Northern Protestants – are so
racialized, identified as American frontiersmen or civil
servants in India. The only contemporary Unionist
quoted is James Molyneux, whose reference to the
ʻfrontierʼ in Ireland is cited as evidence of the ʻpsycho-
pathology of powerʼ. Admittedly, Unionism remains
outside of most of Gibbonsʼ references, and thus this
is a quibble comparable to the lack of a bibliography,
which frustrates dialogue with other debates. (Gibbons
might, for example, have signalled the Jameson/Ahmad
debate on allegory and ʻThird Worldʼ cultures as
further reading to ʻIdentity without a Centre: Allegory,
History and Irish Nationalismʼ.)
Despite these criticisms, Transformations is the best
book on Irish culture since David Lloydʼs Anomalous
States (1993). Theoretically sophisticated, inventive,
and frequently humorous, it inspires further Irish cul-
tural study and anticipates Gibbonsʼ next publication on
Irish cinema. With much new, and explicitly political,
Irish film-making imminent (indeed, the controversies
surrounding Michael Collins, Nothing Personal and
Some Mothersʼ Sons have preceded their showing in
British cinemas), it cannot be published too quickly.
Moyra Haslett
All night long
Thomas M. Kemple, Reading Marx Writing: Melo-
drama, the Market, and the ʻGrundrisseʼ, Stanford
University Press, Stanford, 1995. xviii + 274 pp.,
£25.00 hb., 0 8047 2408 3.
ʻI am writing like mad all night long and every night
collating my economic studies so that I at least get
the outlines clear before the deluge.ʼ So wrote Marx
to Engels in December 1857, as he was painstakingly
thinking through his overall argument about political
economy which led to the first volume of Capital
in 1867. Marxʼs ʻoutlinesʼ or ʻblueprintsʼ, comprising
seven notebooks prepared in 1857–58, were an attempt
to clarify his own thinking about capital and money,
which became the primary focus of his later, better
know writings. The notebooks, for all their importance
in Marxist studies today, were not published until the
twentieth century, and not in English until the early
1970s. Much of the history of Marxist thought, then,
had to do without Marxʼs own outlines for the massive
project which was left unfinished after his death.
Kempleʼs study is concerned less with the politics
of the Grundrisse than with the politics of reading
the notebooks. Asserting in his introduction that
late twentieth-century Marxism has ʻsold out Marx
and bought into the ideology of Western capitalismʼ,
Kemple argues that the many interpretations of Marxʼs
thinking which exist ʻunder Marxismʼs corporate logoʼ
no longer represent radical interpretation. His project
is to read Marxʼs writing not for its contribution
to the science of political economy, but rather for
its ʻaesthetic dimensions of music, text, and image
that provide structure and sense to Marxʼs writing.ʼ
Essentially informed by post-structuralist criticism,
Kemple attends to ʻthe open quality of Marxʼs textʼ,
ʻthe wide-open spacesʼ which remain in the many
gaps and silences in the outlines. Rather than attempt-
ing to elucidate a version of Marxism based on the
Grundrisse, or to place Marxʼs notebooks within his
overall oeuvre, Kemple posits ʻa plural Marx through
which we must read a multiplicity of meanings in
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 49
a scattering of marksʼ. Such an approach requires a
ʻviolence of readingʼ which seeks not to unify Marx,
but to explode him by acknowledging the fragmentary
and disgressive nature of his writing. Reading Marx
necessitates revolutionary ways of reading.
To this end, Kemple provides a number of imagi-
native and often enlightening readings of selected
passages from the notebooks. For example, in part
three of the book, in which Marxʼs writing is shown
to intersect with Balzacʼs Comédie Humaine (which
Marx greatly admired), Kemple reads the Grundrisse
as ʻa catastrophic melodrama that not only depicts the
annihilation of capitalism but also expresses his own
revolutionary impatience to see this system as the
victim of its own self-destruction.ʼ Kemple points us
to seven ʻfoundational passagesʼ from the notebooks
and creates his own Marxist melodrama in which
a mechanized monster clashes with, and is crushed
by, labouring individuals. The title for Kempleʼs
Marxist melodrama? ʻThe Curious Mystery of the
Cultures of an active nature
Enrique Leff, Green Production: Toward an Environmental Rationality, trans. Margaret Villaneuva, The
Guilford Press, New York and London, 1995. xix + 168 pp., £12.95 pb., 089862 410 X.
Some of the most interesting work in recent years
in Marxist political ecology has emanated from the
developing world, and this work by Enrique Leff
adds to a growing corpus. Leff is a former professor
at the National Autonomous University of Mexico,
now working for the United Nations Environmental
Programme. He is an ʻeditor at largeʼ for the journal
Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, and can be seen to be
part of the larger move to review Marxism from the
perspectives of environmentalism and to construct an
ecological socialism. This updated collection of essays
represents some of Leffʼs writings from the period
1975–85, previously published in Spanish in 1986.
Leffʼs project is to develop an ʻenvironmental
rationalityʼ to replace the dominant economic and
epistemological ʻrationalityʼ of capital, and to create
a new form of endogenous and independent ecological
development for the Third World. The first essay deals
with Marxist epistemological principles for studying
the relationships between nature and society. Much
of this revolves around a reinvestigation of Marx and
a critique of the naturalizing tendencies of Alfred
Schmidtʼs work, The Concept of Nature in Marx.
But Leff also goes on to reassert Marxʼs position that
50 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
Gold-Weighting Machines.ʼ This is all amusing and
inventive enough, but Kemple cleverly leads us straight
back to Lucács and a classic problem of Marxist
literary criticsm: what is realism, and how can fiction
represent the ʻrealʼ?
By reading Marx, by filling in the gaps of the text,
and by taking the detours made available throughout
the notebooks, we can reread Marx in revolution-
ary ways. For all its post-structuralist playfulness,
Kempleʼs provocative study makes a crucial point: at
a time when Marxism is said by many to have col-
lapsed, ʻthere is a need to reach into domains quite
beyond anything traditional Marxists, if not Marx
himself, ever envisioned.ʼ For Kemple, this means
refocusing on the aesthetics of Marx without offering
an overarching, totalized versions of ʻartʼ and history.
This is one strategy for providing radical new ways of
thinking and reading about the ʻrealʼ world.
Mark W. Turner
ʻnatureʼ must be seen as an active force in production
of all kinds. It is claimed that in historical material-
ism, as well as in economics generally, this productive
potential of natural processes has been displaced. The
second chapter extends this argument to show how
ecological processes are inscribed in the dynamics of
capital, before assessing the ecological conditions for
capitalist development in temperate climates.
Throughout the book, Leff criticizes the applica-
tion of science and technology developed in temperate
climes to tropical areas with very different ecological
conditions. Like many other political ecologists, he
argues that new forms of ecodevelopment must be
formed out of the reinvestigation of ethnic cultural
productive processes and cultural values that affect
these processes. Such ʻtraditionalʼ ways of interact-
ing with nature have developed in their own specific
ecological contexts and have increasingly been lost,
or exploitatively transformed, in the expanded repro-
duction of capital. Leff appears to argue that within
such traditional knowledges ʻnatureʼ was always
viewed as an active agent, as conditions and poten-
tials of production. The scientific and technological
improvement of such productive processes provides a
model for creating new forms of development in which
ecological conditions can be sustainably incorporated
into all patterns of production.
The rest of the book develops this notion of eco-
development and the critique of capitalist economic
rationality in greater detail, through discussions of
environmental economics and technology. As eco-
development is further explored, however, the reserve
shown towards the transfer of science and technology
developed in temperate climates to tropical areas
seems to collapse. Seemingly all kinds of technologies,
including bio-technologies, become acceptable here,
even though they have the capacity for much greater
disruption of tropical ecosystems than of temperate
climes. In addition, the constant invocation of nature
as resource begins to jar and may well be too instru-
mental for many environmentalists.
Yet in the last chapter Leff admits that eco-
development does have a somewhat ambiguous political
role. On the one hand, he argues that it does not imply
a frontal attack on capital, but may well take the form
of an adaptive strategy of capital to exploit the cultural
and ecological conditions of the developing world more
rationally. However, Leff maintains that ecological
technologies and productive strategies will give rise
to greater political conflict and social struggle over
them, because they will be inserted within ongoing
struggles over the appropriation of natural resources
and social wealth. This is an optimistic conclusion, if
not wholly convincing because of a latent objectivism
which characterizes the arguments.
Nevertheless, this is a thoughtful and interesting
book which seeks to develop a Marxist approach to
development rooted in cultural and ecological condi-
tions.
Chris Wilbert
Treasure trove
G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on Natural Right and Politi-
cal Science: The First Philosophy of Right, Heidel-
berg 1817–1818, with Additions from the Lectures of
1818–1819, translated by J. Michael Stewart and Peter
C. Hodgson, University of California Press, Berkeley
CA and London, 1995. x + 356 pp., £38.00 hb., 0
520 20104 3.
In the 1950s, while sifting through a pile of discarded
papers and unsaleable books in an antiquarian book-
shop in Heidelberg, a German geography lecturer came
across some old manuscripts on philosophical topics.
He was allowed to take them away and eventually, in
1982, they found their way to the Deutsches Literatur-
archiv in Marbach am Neckar. It was only then that
they were identified as a full set of notes of the first
version of Hegelʼs lectures on ʻNatural Right and
Political Scienceʼ. They are, in effect, the first draft
of Hegelʼs Philosophy of Right (1821).
Hegel was no slouch when it came to lecturing. He
delivered six times a week ʻon the basis of dictated
passagesʼ which he then expanded upon extempore.
The notes translated here were made by Peter Wan-
nemann, a law student who attended Hegelʼs first series
of lectures on this topic in Heidelberg in 1817–18,
and then again in Berlin in 1818–19. His Heidelberg
notes cover the whole course; while his Berlin notes
on the ʻIntroductionʼ (substantially changed from the
Heidelberg version) are included as an Appendix.
Comparison with other, more fragmentary records
confirms the reliability of Wannemannʼs transcriptions,
both of the dictated passages and of Hegelʼs exposi-
tions. (Four further volumes of transcripts of various
versions of these lectures, which Hegel continued to
give regularly until his death in 1831, are available
in German.)
The present lectures cover much the same ground,
and follow the same basic structure, as the version
published in the Philosophy of Right; but in the details
the treatment is often substantially different. This is
particularly the case with the much discussed section
on ʻThe System of Needsʼ and the passages on con-
stitutional questions. Here, moreover, Hegel expresses
himself with a simplicity, directness and freedom that
is often sacrificed in the more cautious and measured
language of the published version, which had to pass
the Prussian censor and stand as an enduring monu-
ment to Hegelʼs thought.
In particular, the condemnation of existing con-
ditions is more forceful and the critical significance of
his political theory more evident. Hegel was writing at
a time of profound political transformation. Napoleon
had finally been defeated only a few years previously,
and a new political shape given to Europe at the Con-
gress of Vienna in 1815. In his youth Hegel had been
enthusiastic about the French Revolution, but his view
here, as elsewhere, is not nostalgic: in world history
ʻwhat is laid low … had to be laid low. World spirit
is unsparing and pitilessʼ (§164). Nor, however, does
he adopt that attitude of resigned conservatism which
is often (if wrongly) read into the Philosophy of Right,
and particularly its notorious dictum, ʻwhat is rational
is actual; what is actual is rational.ʼ In these lectures,
Hegel instead says, ʻwhat is rational should [or must]
happenʼ (§§122, 134). Heine was right, after all, when
he quoted Hegelʼs dictum in this form and insisted
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 51
that it had a critical and radical significance which
Hegel himself was reluctant to voice. For the picture
of history given here is far more clearly dynamic and
affirmative than the published version.
These lectures are not only of scholarly importance,
as the initial version of one of the most influential
of all works of political thought. By making Hegelʼs
ideas more immediate and accessible, they have a
wider interest and deserve a wider readership. The
translation reads fluently; and there is a useful index
and apparatus of explanatory notes, as well as an
excellent introduction by Otto Pöggeller. In short,
this is a most important and welcome addition to the
corpus of Hegel in English translation, and California
University Press are to be congratulated for making it
available in such a handsome edition.
Sean Sayers
Value added
Richard A. Etlin, In Defense of Humanism: Value
in the Arts and Letters, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1996. xx + 283 pp., £30.00 ($39.95) hb.,
0 521 47077 3.
Richard Etlin describes himself as an ʻold-style
liberalʼ. His heroes are Thomas Jefferson, Frank Lloyd
Wright and, it would seem, F.R. Leavis; his opponents
(among many) are Edward Said, Jacques Derrida,
Richard Serra, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Unlike authors
such as David Lehman and the physicist Alan Sokal,
Etlin does not set out to ridicule deconstruction and
post-structuralism; In Defense of Humanism is instead
an attempt to demonstrate that the concept of ʻvalueʼ
still has a place in aesthetic criticism, and to return
criticism and philosophy to ʻthe standpoint of real
lifeʼ.
For Etlin, thinkers such as Derrida, Said, Foucault
and Nietzsche apply ʻthe consistency of logic
inappropriately to the realm of human behaviour and
insightʼ. In this manner, post-structuralism has turned
the world upside down through the substitution of
obscure theoretical formulations and epistemological
determinism for ʻreal lifeʼ – that is, the moral actions
and responses of human beings. This destruction of
ʻthe fundamental ground of thingsʼ pushes the human
subject into an abyss of contingency, negativity, and
the violence of Nietzschean ʻarmchair sadismʼ. In this
decentred world of the post-structuralist, value can
only be considered contingent, not inhering in the art-
work, but arising from cultural judgements about it.
52 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
Etlinʼs response is to demonstrate how, as he sees
it, the inherent value of the art-work is dependent
upon its presentation of ʻa heightened sensation of the
feeling of lifeʼ. This ʻfeeling of lifeʼ is a reflection in
aesthetic terms of the moral truths that ground the
liberal-humanist subject: ʻthe belief in value resides in
a conviction that is known deep within the soul in a
spiritual locus that nurtures ethics as well as aesthet-
ics.ʼ The art-work thus demonstrates that the subject
is centred, morally and aesthetically; the subject rec-
ognizes value in an art-work that displays the truths
that ground existence for the humanist.
Etlin remains unspecific when it comes actually to
defining what these ʻtruthsʼ actually are. The ʻprimal
numinous aweʼ we are supposed to feel when encoun-
tering, for example, the ʻdeeply moving humanityʼ of
a Rembrandt self-portrait would appear to be based
on some form of ʻnatural lawʼ or ʻnatural sentimentʼ.
This law is the common sense, or shared judgement,
of ʻgeneral cultureʼ (in T.S. Eliotʼs terms), or, the
ʻopinions and actions common to all good menʼ (for
Thomas Hardy). The art-work presents the moral truths
of common sense in such a way as to affect the human
subject, and thus inspires in that subject the recogni-
tion of common humanity and the morality that such
a being-in-common necessitates.
This is perhaps the major problem with Etlinʼs
account of the value of art. He assumes that ʻcommon
humanityʼ, ʻcommon senseʼ, ʻmoral and aesthetic truthsʼ
are self-evident and unproblematic terms. Post-struc-
turalism has attempted to debunk such self-evident
notions, and while it may be prey to lunatic and
obscure excesses, as Etlin shows, it certainly questions
the foundations to which he appeals. The ʻabyssʼ that
Etlin sees as separating the ʻinherent mysteryʼ of
art from rational discourse can never be bridged in
theoretical terms, if belief or faith is the only possible
mediator between the two.
In Defense of Humanism tries to defend a model of
aesthetic value that has been common since Aristotle.
But while it is well-written, intelligible, and accessible
to non-specialists, it can never demonstrate its case
without resorting to faith or belief, because of the
vagaries around which its argument is constructed.
Etlinʼs ideal model of aesthetics would be one in which
ʻone is … able to open oneʼs soul like the music box
to hear the lovely song of artʼ. He never questions
whether the abyss he postulates between reason and
art is only there in the first place because of assertions
such as this.
Duncan J. Campbell
Stranger and
stranger
Anthony Elliott, Subject to Ourselves: Social Theory,
Psychoanalysis and Post Modernity, Polity Press,
Cambridge, 1996. x + 174 pp., £39.50 hb., £12.95
pb., 0 7456 1422 1 hb., 0 7456 1423 X pb.
The aim of this book is to contribute to the ongoing
debate about modernity and postmodernity and the
survival of the self in the late modern world. As in
his earlier work, Elliott uses psychoanalysis and social
theory to examine the creative and dialectical relation-
ship between the self and society. He argues that
phantasy plays a central role in this interrelationship
and, as such, acts as a creative mediating category
between our inner and outer worlds. In this way, Elliott
presents a bold and compelling argument regarding
the links between the unconscious imagination and its
elaboration in the broader public sphere of knowledge,
politics and social relations.
A central theme is the notion of active, creative sub-
jectivity. Pessimistic accounts of postmodern culture
and the fragmented self receive short shrift. Although
Elliott acknowledges the alienation, increased sys-
tematization, and bureaucratization of contemporary
modernity, he draws on Marshall Bermanʼs paradoxi-
cal model of modernity (as both empowering and
alienating) to argue that people have developed a new
reflexive and emotional capacity to cope with ambiva-
lence and the contradictory demands of modern life.
The notion of reflexivity is crucial here, and Elliott
uses the work of Zygmunt Bauman and Anthony
Giddens to argue that postmodernity does not herald
the ʻendʼ of modernity, but instead prompts a critical
look at what has preceded it. This has facilitated a new
dialectical mode of being in which the critical capacity
to deconstruct is accompanied by an active process of
reconstruction. Thus postmodern shifts in knowledge
and culture, together with the global expansion of
capital and information systems, do not necessarily
signify the implosion of the self and social relations;
they provide new possibilities for critical self-reflection
and social change.
Giddensʼs account of reflexive subjectivity can
be criticized on the grounds that it involves an
unproblematic picture of the global subject, dissemi-
nating information at will. Elliott is aware of this and
uses psychoanalysis, which foregrounds the subversive
and creative force of the unconscious, to decentre the
subject in this context. Aside from Kristeva, Elliott
draws mainly upon the British School of Object
Relations, which emphasizes intersubjectivity and the
psychic role of phantasy in constructing relationships
with others. He employs these ideas to argue that
whereas the old forces of modernity promoted negative
psychic defences, and the desire for mastery, post-
modernity has helped to facilitate less defensive modes
of being and a new toleration of difference. In short,
the subject of postmodernity is able to handle ambi-
valence and is no longer threatened by otherness. The
“stranger within” is able to tolerate – even creatively
desire – the other “without”.
Elliott illustrates all this with a number of examples
and case studies, the fullest of which is an analysis of
the conflicts in Bosnia. However, his examination of
the destructive phantasies operative in these implicitly
qualifies his optimism about the positive aspects of
phantasy and its relation to otherness.
This is an informative and enjoyable book, which
will be of use to students and academics working
in psychosocial studies. It is accessibly written and
provides useful summaries of the different theories
and debates in cultural and psychoanalytic theory.
Recommended.
Candida Yates
Fitting fantasy into
the frame
Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy, Clarendon
Press, Oxford, 1996. viii + 188 pp., £20.00 hb., 019
818280 5.
The past is always with us, and for every conscious
story told of it there is a repressed aspect, always
threatening to return. Rose is interested in the way
personal and political reality are carved out of the sym-
bolic material which has often been seen as somehow
peripheral to real political concerns. In Roseʼs words,
describing the project in which she is involved,
It is central to the argument of this book that there
is no way of understanding political identities and
destinies without letting fantasy into the frame.
More, that fantasy – far from being the antagonist
of public, social being – plays a central, constitutive
role in the modern world of states and nations.
Opposing what she posits as the ʻcommon assump-
tionʼ that fantasy is excluded from the political rhetoric
of the Left ʻbecause it is not seriousʼ, she offers a
simile which is simple but, if anything, understated
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 53
in the light of contemporary events. ʻLike blood,ʼ she
writes, ʻfantasy is thicker than water, all too solid,
contra another of fantasyʼs more familiar glosses as
ungrounded supposition, lacking in foundation, not
solid enough.ʼ One might say, with plenty of historical
support, that fantasy is not only like blood; it produces
blood in its wake.
Rose pursues her argment through a series of liter-
ary and psychological encounters, with Amos Oz,
Daniel Malan (My Traitorʼs Heart), Wulf Sachs (Black
Hamlet), Kasua Ishiguro and Muriel Sparks, Bessie
Head and Dorothy Richardson, Henry James and
Lionel Trilling. Some of these speak of identity inside
the cultures or states with which they are in tension,
others (Wulf Sachs and Bessie Head as contrasting,
South Africa-focused examples here) are caught in
the cross-over, exposed to the crossfire that hits you
when you leave one cultural identity (state of fantasy)
and attempt to identify with another. In terms of liter-
ary criticism, Rose explores writers marginal to the
ʻcanonʼ of English literature, yet whose work reveals
the subjugated voices upon which this canon is built
(ʻthe links are there, those “other” voices present. What
needs explaining is why that fact has been ignored for
Wise owl
Lloyd Spencer and Andrzej Krauze, Hegel For Beginners, Icon Books, Cambridge, 1996, 175 pp., £8.99 pb.,
1 874166 44 7.
One has to admire the authors for taking on such a
difficult thinker as Hegel in the ʻFor Beginnersʼ series.
Spencerʼs text makes as good a job of it as anyone
could. He provides plenty of details of Hegelʼs life,
and he deals with all the works.
One main strategy he employs is to contextualize
Hegel heavily, both backwards (sketches of Spinoza,
Kant, Goethe, Fichte, Hölderlin, Schelling, Fries,
Boehme and Baader); and forwards (Hess, Feuerbach,
Marx, Engels, Lenin, Kierkegaard, Merleau-Ponty,
Derrida, Foucault, Rorty, Lukács – strangely spelt
Lukaçs – Adorno, Kojève, Breton, Bataille, and – inev-
itably – last and least Fukuyama). He does not attempt
to discuss the varying interpretations of Hegel – his
own is pretty mainstream – although he is concerned
to defend Hegel politically.
But, of course, the main feature of this series is
the graphic element. It strikes me that this is only
worthwhile if the graphics are amusing or instructive;
mere illustration is pointless. In this respect I found
the book disappointing. To be sure, there is a witty
depiction of Hegel as an owl. However, the diagrams of
54 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
so longʼ). Supporting the literary and political criti-
cism, as one would expect of Rose, is a rigorous and
imaginative rendering of Freud, in a sense reading
him backwards from Moses and Monotheism as the
originator of a mode of historical and political writing
which is personal, autobiographical, haunted, subjec-
tive, uncertain and fictitious, yet resonant with the
compelling force of those founding myths – traumas
– out of which individuals and states construct the
narratives of their lives. Psychoanalysis emerges from
this book as a key discipline, full of its own faults and
idiosyncrasies, but a political necessity: a language in
which fantasies can be given their due.
States of Fantasy is not a completely satisfying
book, in some ways not really a ʻbookʼ at all, but
a binding together of a lecture series, two previ-
ously published essays, and Roseʼs inaugural lecture
as Professor of English at Queen Mary and Westfield
College, University of London. But it is a good and
important read, politically engaged, personal and intel-
lectual all in one.
Stephen Frosh
Hegelʼs ideas did not work for me. And the vast bulk
of the drawings are simply illustrations – for example,
pictures of Hegelʼs patrons and so on.
One major disaster is also present. In the depic-
tion of the master and slave, the slave is saying ʻI
have obtained recognitionʼ, and the master replies
ʻYes but not from another self, only from … a slaveʼ.
Clearly the speech balloons have been interchanged.
(A suspicion that this secretes some deep joke about
the master becoming the slave of the slave is dispelled
when the next diagram shows the same man who was
depicted as the slave once again a slave and talking
about his labours.)
Another problem with the speech balloons attached
to Hegel (and others) is that often they do not contain
quotations; and yet the matter doubtless will appear as
such in future student essays. Conversely, real quota-
tions in the text are not always marked thus.
Those who like this sort of book may be satisfied
with this effort; but I see no special reason to recom-
mend it.
Chris Arthur
LETTERS
Lesbians, gays
and mainstream
politics
For Radical Philosophy, Angela Masonʼs commentary
on lesbian and gay politics in the 1990s was remark-
ably un-radical. The piece, which is little more than
an electoral apologia, charts ʻourʼ progress over the
last twenty or so years and weds our future ʻliberationʼ
and equality to the antics of politicians, legislators
and a political system which has rarely, if ever, been
uninterestedly kind, or kind at all, to lesbians and
gays.
While of course legal protection and an end to
discrimination should be on the agenda of any reason-
able organization, Masonʼs reliance on the outcome of
the general election is repetitive and naive. Her ʻthis
time we can surely expect a new government to sweep
away discriminationʼ speaks as one who is weary of
past treachery and deceit and, in its own terms, does
not even sound hopeful. But why should we be that
hopeful? We just need to look at the track record of
all the political parties to see that our equality will
not come from politicians who care more about careers
and votes than anything else. She recalls but is barely
critical of those so many Labour MPs who voted
against an equal age of consent. What real basis is
there for hoping Labour will support lesbians and gays,
any more than there is a chance it will stop funding
weapons research, pay decent benefits or renationalize
the railways?
Despite several supposed ʻturning pointsʼ, the battle
is not over, for it is a ʻdangerous gameʼ. Despite the
historical example of the fleeting nature of ʻrightsʼ
bestowed by party politicians, Mason somehow views
the destruction of the liberal GLC as ʻunthinkableʼ.
Not content with assimilating lesbians and gays into
the political machine, we are now poised for out-
and-out integration into the military one. This com-
pletely unethical position, and lack of critique of the
anti-humanitarian role of the military complex, the
authoritarianism endemic and intrinsic to its command
structure, is hailed as a viable possibility: ʻweʼ lesbians
and gays want the same ʻrightsʼ as everyone and if
that means participating in oppressive structures, well
so be it.
History should teach us that relying on politicians
for anything long lasting is a chimera. We have only
come so far by relying on ourselves and building an
alternative in our communities. I do not decry the
arduous and difficult work of those who believe that
working inside the Labour Party is the solution, or
part of the solution, to our problems, but Mason leaves
ʻusʼ no other way out than Labour party politics. This
route is presented as our only salvation. What if it
fails yet again?
With no critique of the basis of this society which
creates discrimination, with no analysis of authoritar-
ian structures and personalities, in Masonʼs view the
fate of lesbians and gays is dependent on the ebbing
and flowing of capricious lawmakers and politicians.
Bearing in mind that this ʻwindow of opportunity
may closeʼ, perhaps it is not worthy of our prolonged
attention. If this tiny fenester does not get any larger,
perhaps an idea is to change panorama and look
towards a different kind of society and a politics which
relies on a radical, ethical, diverse, direct actionist
front, not on one which decaffeinates homo-sex and
assimilates us into authoritarian, undemocratic, capri-
cious institutions.
Richard Cleminson
Department of Modern Languages,
University of Bradford
Guy Hocquenghem
I was disappointed in the review of my book Guy
Hocquenghem in Radical Philosophy 82 (March–April
1997). The difficulties I had with it go beyond differ-
ences of evaluation, for I believe it has been seriously
misrepresented.
There are some quibbles. The ʻundue reliance on
plot summaryʼ in discussion of the fiction in fact
consists, for an English-speaking audience after all,
of one paragraph per (all bar one) untranslated novel
in a chapter of over 9,000 words. I acknowledge Hoc-
quenghemʼs classical scholarship on page 80, and the
lack of unity of his philosophy throughout, concluding
Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997) 55
with this point on page 94. I am perfectly aware of
the relationship between Hocquenghem and Schérer,
but this book is not a biography, and detail of the
literal-minded kind not its concern. More bizarrely
and substantially, the reviewer chooses to ignore whole
aspects of the book – the specificity of the French
context in relation to Anglo-Saxon gay politics, the
discussion of modernity in LʼAme atomique – while at
the same time presenting as omissions ʻdoubtsʼ about
some of Hocquenghemʼs ideas which are in fact there
for all to read, and have been noted by other reviewers.
My discussions of his views on rape (pp. 11–12), and
paedophilia (pp. 48–50) are more developed than the
reviewer implies, seeking both to avoid knee-jerk reac-
tions and to adopt a critical distance. I also recognize
NEWS
SWIP conference at Kent
Last yearʼs conference of the Society of Women in
Philosophy (SWIP) was held at the University of
Kent on 7 December. It was organized in conjunc-
tion with and financed by the Centre for Womenʼs
Studies at Canterbury. For anyone, like myself, who
had never attended a SWIP conference before, it was
an opportunity to engage socially with colleagues,
academics and students, as well as to discuss philo-
sophical issues.
Adrian Cavarero opened the conference with an
informative discussion of the question of Being. Her
emphasis was not so much on ʻwhatʼ we are, which she
suggested would amount to a discussion on essence,
and therefore a return to a disembodied self and all
the dangers that go with it, but instead on ʻwhoʼ we
are. Cavarero began with a rereading of Sophoclesʼ
Oedipus Rex. Unknown to himself, his parentage in
doubt, Oedipus is able to complete his life story not
by identifying himself with the universal, as man,
but by attending to the external presence of others.
Autobiography, Cavarero thus argued, becomes less
egocentric and instead more of a biographical narra-
tive. This relationship between one and an other is a
reciprocal one where all parties involved desire mutual
ethical recognition of their own mediated uniqueness.
Not only is the significance of context restored; so too
is the possibility of change both within and between
our selves. The ʻwhoʼ we are, Cavarero ended with sug-
gesting, amounts to an awareness of being-for-others
as potential biographers.
56 Radical Philosophy 84 (July/August 1997)
the gender blindness and the absence of lesbianism in
Hocquenghemʼs theories (for example, p. 93). I shall
leave it to readers of Radical Philosophy to decide
whether they, like David Macey, consider Benjamin
and Bakhtin to be postmodernists.
As academics, we are all under pressure of time.
And Guy Hocquenghem is a little book with no greater
ambition than to help invigorate some contemporary
debates through an exposition and contextualization of
its subject. It surely deserves, however, to be reviewed
with the same care as any other work.
Bill Marshall,
School of Modern Languages,
University of Southampton
The second speaker was Miranda Fricker, who
presented a paper on ʻThe Radicalization of Epistemol-
ogyʼ. Though not entirely defending the teleological
project supposedly characteristic of modernism, she
nevertheless situated feminist philosophy firmly within
an emancipatory feminist movement. Her intent was
to undermine claims for the political efficacy of post-
modernism, by arguing that its preoccupation with
fragmentation, multiple identity and the local, while
necessary, has its limits. Postmodern discourse might
resist exclusion and overgeneralization, but it does not
provide the tools for a critical understanding of societal
relations, and thereby both courts conservatism and,
albeit perhaps unintentionally, helps to contribute to
epistemic oppression. She ended by calling attention to
the best of postmodernism, but refused to align herself
with the breakdown in rationality, truth and reality
which postmodern discourse appears to demand.
Our final speaker, Jean Grimshaw, in ʻPhilosophy
and the Feminist Imaginationʼ, relieved the intensity
of the conference, allowing us the opportunity to play
with and explore different means of expressing our
self-images through the use of metaphor and anarchic
language.
Thanks are due to Anne Seller and Sue Sherwood
for organizing such a successful conference.
Naomi Hammond