Ross Abbinnett-Politics of Happiness - Connecting The Philosophical Ideas of Hegel, Nietzsche and Derrida To The Political Ideologies of Happiness-Bloomsbury Academic (2013) PDF

Politics of Happiness
Politics of Happiness:
Connecting the Philosophical Ideas
of Hegel, Nietzsche and Derrida to
the Political Ideologies of Happiness
Ross Abbinnett
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2013
© Ross Abbinnett, 2013
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Abbinnett, Ross.
Politics of happiness : connecting the philosophical ideas of Hegel, Nietzsche and Derrida
to the political ideologies of happiness / by Ross Abbinnett.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-2081-6 (alk. paper)
1. Happiness--Philosophy. 2. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. 3. Nietzsche,
Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. 4. Derrida, Jacques. I. Title.
BJ1481.A235 2013
320.01--dc23
2012035946
ISBN: 978-1-4411-7620-2
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Contents
Introduction: Elements of the Politics of Happiness 1

Happiness and the modern subject 1
Three philosophies of desire 6
The politics of happiness 13
1 Liberalism and the Uses of Desire 19

The governance of pain and pleasure 19
The science of wellbeing 26
Life beyond contentment 33
Life, death and the new world order 38
2 Postmodernism, or The Dream of Limitless Possibility 49

Aesthetic consolations 49
Art, Irony, and romanticism 57
The tragedy of pure Culture 63
Simulacra of happiness 70
3 Marxism, Socialism and the Beautiful Object of Labour 79

Organic labour and species being 79
The promise of revolutionary materialism 87
Work, servitude and ressentiment 95
Socialism and the messianic 101
4 Fascism and the Pleasure of Self-Annihilation 111

The essence of fascism 111
Anxiety and modern desire 119
Reactionary love and ‘the people’ 125
Spectres of fascism 132
5 Religion and the Love of the Sacred 143

Religion in the disenchanted world 143
Faith and enlightenment 150
Orthodoxy and the death of God 157
The ecstasy of the sacred 164
Conclusion: Happiness in the Time of Catastrophe 171

Bibliography 187
Index 193
For Simon
‘One may contemplate history from the point of view of happiness. But history
is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it.’
Hegel, The Philosophy of History
‘Philosophy divorced itself from science when it inquired which knowledge

of the world and life could help man live most happily. This happened with
the Socratic schools: out of a concern for happiness man tied off the veins of
Â�scientific investigation – and still does today.’
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
‘I am at war with myself, it is true; you cannot possibly know to what extent,
beyond what you can guess, and I say contradictory things that are, we might
say, in real tension; they are what construct me, make me live, and will make me
die. I sometimes see this way as terrifying and difficult to bear, but at the same
time I know that that is life. I will find peace only in eternal rest.’
Derrida, Learning to Live Finally
Introduction
Elements of the Politics of Happiness
Happiness and the modern subject
Much of the ‘new science’ of happiness that has emerged over the last ten years
or so, has been prompted by the discovery that, contrary to the expectations of
classical economic theory, happiness has not increased with the sustained period
of growth experienced by Western societies from the early 1990s until the onset
of the global recession in 2007. Richard Layard’s Happiness: Lessons from a New
Science and Robert E. Lane’s The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, for
example, have responded to this by maintaining that the acquisitiveness that has
been encouraged by the global market has become uncoupled from the basic
needs of human beings for friendship, stable work relations, peer recognition,
and familial love. National governments therefore, should seek to moderate the
dream of absolute excess, and to bolster the fundamental sources of community
life, in a global economy that demands the constant intensification of work
and desire. This line of argument is also pursued in the large number of social
psychological and neuropsychological works on ‘what makes us happy’. Studies
such as Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis and Stefan Klein’s The Science
of Happiness tend to reduce the question of happiness to an account of how
social institutions produce or frustrate feelings of wellbeing, and how self-help
techniques can be employed to aid those whose outlook on life tends towards
the ‘glass half empty’. My position is not that these studies are without value, for
it is clear that regulation of the relationship between intellect, libido, and satis-
faction is an important factor in the economy of personal wellbeing. However,
I will argue that their conceptualization of the individual as a unit that seeks to
maximize its own wellbeing (and the pedagogical and therapeutic techniques
that derive from it) has a tendency to tune out the ideological context within
which the possibility of happiness is experienced, and to minimize the political
questions that arise from the collective pursuit of the good life.
The experience of happiness, I will argue, is essentially related to ideas of
the good society and to the forms of individual life that are appropriate to it.
This makes it both a philosophical and a political question: philosophical in
2 Politics of Happiness
the sense that it cannot be definitively decided, and political in the sense that
it is constantly circulated through the ideologies that have shaped modern
Western societies. It is also an infinitely recurrent question; for the experience
of happiness (as impending, or departing, or absent) is something that always
bears upon the constitution of the present and its orientation to the future.
A proper investigation of the ideological forms through which happiness
is experienced therefore, requires us to look beyond the reconfiguration of
Utilitarianism presented by the ‘new science’. What I am proposing is to open
up the question of happiness to a more general account of the formation of the
individual subject within the evolution of modernity.
So, my account of the politics of happiness begins with the task of defining
the relationship between ‘subjectivity’, as a form that has been radically overde-
termined in the discursive culture of Western societies, and the mass appeal of
modernity’s epochal ideologies (Nazism, communism, socialism, liberalism,
religious fundamentalism, and postmodernism). We are not, in other words,
simply the products of our own will; and the satisfactions of the atomistic
individuals who have emerged in late modernity should not be regarded as
defining the moral parameters of happiness per se. My approach to the question
of happiness therefore will be a genealogical one, in which the individual is
understood as a category whose present disposition is the outcome of multi-
farious processes of historical formation. This does not mean that each of us
is reducible to traces that have been laid down by the ideological powers of
modernity, or that happiness is simply a matter of historical accident that bears
no relation to the soul of each individual. For there is an essential vulnerability
to the human subject which means its happiness is always touched by a sense of
impending departure, and by the desire for satisfactions whose province is that
of totality (wholeness, community, the collective) rather than pure singularity.
Theodor Adorno once remarked that ‘to happiness the same applies as to
truth: one does not have it, one is in it’ (Adorno, 1996: 112). What I believe he
meant by this is that there is a subjective element to happiness, an existential
particularity and evanescence, which means that it cannot be directly repro-
duced by social structures, institutions, or economies. This particularity is
bound up with the contingencies that make individuals what they are: person-
ality, upbringing, life experience, physical constitution, psychical dispositions,
and intellectual culture. Thus, the happiness experienced by each of us remains
beyond quantification and independent of the social, economic, and political
institutions we inhabit, even though we are all ‘products of society down to the
Introduction 3
inmost fibre of our being’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2011: 112). This is one
of the existential truths Adorno sought to articulate in his concept of negative
dialectics; that the realization of happiness as a collective condition is impos-
sible, and that the search for its realization remains one of the fundamental
imperatives of social life. What emerges from this aporia is the distinctive sense
in which Adorno conceived the idea of spirit as the apprehension of the finitude
through which each human being experiences the temporality of his or her
existence. One aspect of this experience is the damage particular individuals
experience within the rationalized relations of social totality, and Adorno’s
work is at pains to register the implicit harm that is done to each of us by the
imposition of reified forms of identity.
It is the other side of this relationship, however, that interests me, the ‘being
in’ happiness that emerges spontaneously and unexpectedly within the negative
identity of the social whole. Such happiness is, as I have said, irreducibly
subjective; it is always an exaggeration of the moment, a partly conscious
decision to overvalue the time, the place, the friend, or the lover who brings the
moment of happiness with them. And so happiness, when it comes, is always
a departure from the pure facticity of the social world, a brief transfiguration
of the self which is always distinct from the experiences of collective ecstasy,
worship, or love1.
According to Adorno, this kind of happiness is distinctively modern, for it
is only after the atomistic individual has emerged from the formative culture
of the Enlightenment, that its psychical, aesthetic, and cognitive faculties can
invest the subjective experience of delight with a spiritual, redemptive signifi-
cance2. The Romantic configuration of happiness, in other words, arises from
the increasingly rationalized relations of modernity: for it is the fate of each
individual to inhabit a social world in which putative satisfactions are experi-
enced as sources of anxiety (political affiliations, conformity to fashion), and
to wish, at some level, for remission in the form of unique feelings of unity,
connection, and love (Adorno, 1991: 121–3). Thus, what is still compelling
in Adorno’s conception of modernity is his account of the vulnerable subject
who, even in its performance of identity with the masses, retains a certain
hope of happiness that cannot be reduced to the logic of socio-technological
reproduction. This Adornian specification of the aporia of modernity (that
the autonomous subject which emerged from the Enlightenment has lost its
connection with the institutional life of its community) is close to the position
from which I will begin my account of the politics of happiness. Being happy, as
Adorno claimed, is subjective and un-reproducible, but this does not mean that
it is politically irrelevant. Rather, it is the yearning of the subject for more than
is offered by mass political ideologies and the aesthetic patterns of the culture
industry, that lies at the core of the modern obsession with bringing happiness
into being, and with killing the political impulse of the masses (Adorno and
Horkheimer, 2011: 75–81).
What is compelling about Adorno’s reflections on the fate of human happiness
is the sense of the fragility of the post-Enlightenment individual who has been
cut off from the satisfactions of God and ethical life, and subjected to a regime in
which work and desire have been synthesized into modalities of the commodity
form. Indeed, the premise of the culture industry thesis, which Adorno formu-
lated with Max Horkheimer in the early 1940s, is that the hermetic relationship
between capitalism and rationalization has produced a synthetic culture, the
purpose of which is to erase the moment of existential reflection from our
experience of pleasure. The forms of enjoyment offered by the culture industry
aim to neutralize the particularity of each individual; they are devised to
regulate the encounter between the self, as a point of unfathomable contingency,
and the demotic pleasures which constitute the ego/personality of the universal
consumer (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 120–67).
It is possible therefore to discern the contours of a certain politics of happiness
in the evolution of Adorno’s thought. If we begin with Dialectic of Enlightenment,
there is a clear sense that what is being presented is the end of democracy; the
culture industry has all but absorbed the reflexive faculties of the public, and so
the pursuit of politics has become a question of how best to manipulate the fears
and desires of ‘the masses’3. From this point on, the relationship Adorno presents
between the synthetic happiness of the culture industry and the conduct of
politics in late modernity is characterized, on the one hand, by the narrowing
of the field of desire that is possible for each individual ego, and, on the other,
by the narrowing of the range of demotic appeals it is possible for any ideology
to make. In the end, the differentiation of ‘the political’ becomes a reflection
of the reified life of civil society: the Marxist left has little chance of appealing
to the ‘species being’ of individualized consumers (even in times of economic
dislocation), and so it is through the kitsch aesthetics of love, freedom, piety, and
sexuality that the different versions of ‘liberal democracy’ compete for control of
the state.
The account of modernity which Horkheimer and Adorno present in
Dialectic of Enlightenment is simultaneously an account of the rationalization
Introduction 5
of capitalism, the aestheticization of reality, and the fate of the human soul in
the realm of appearances. The first section of the book develops a concept of
Enlightenment as the perfection of a mythic version of control; the new scientific,
mathematical, and philosophical paradigm presents the world as the repetition
of irreducible laws that can allow no variation or anomaly (Horkheimer
and Adorno, 1986: 12). The fundamental telos of the Enlightenment project
therefore, is the establishment of control of both nature and society through the
perfection of our understanding of the laws governing their objective opera-
tions. This teleology, for Adorno, is inherently totalitarian; for the organization
of society is based around purely instrumental principles that are concerned
with maximizing the efficiency of production, rather than the happiness of
particular individuals and the improvement of their moral culture. Indeed,
his argument is that the organization of work, satisfaction, and desire that
emerges from the Enlightenment paradigm, proceeds from a complete trans-
formation of human subjectivity; the ‘language and perception’ of the soul has
been appropriated by the administered life of the social totality, and each of
us simply awaits what satisfactions may come from its productive machinery.
The original ethos of Enlightenment philosophy, which was the emancipation
of humanity from its subjection to the gods and to nature, is transformed into
a regime of control in which every aspect of human particularity is expressed
as a quantum of productive potential (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 38–42).
Thus, for Adorno, the Enlightenment brought about a fatal degradation of the
faculties of the soul (apprehension, articulation, recognition, and desire), which
opened the way for ‘happiness’ to become a condition whose possibility is
controlled by the standardized aesthetics of the culture industry. This account
of Enlightenment, however, is too strongly teleological, for it seems as if its
only possible outcome is the progressive enclosure of humanity within a bubble
of synthetic-acquisitive desire. It is my contention that the reflexive self that
emerged from the Enlightenment has been formed by a plurality of heteroge-
neous sources (cultural, religious, economic, aesthetic, and technological), and
that it is this multiple formation that lies at the root of its relationship to the
ideologies of happiness I will examine. However, before I turn to the politics
of happiness as such, I want to look briefly at the three philosophies of post-
Enlightenment desire that will inform my study, and how they have theorized
the affective formation of the modern subject.
Three philosophies of desire
In Adorno’s thought, the regime of social and economic rationalization that

emerges after the Enlightenment threatens to engulf the modern subject in
a system of reproducible happiness that, in the end, is not happiness at all.
There is a sense then, in which Adorno’s work continues in the same vein as
Schopenhauer’s account of the suffering of the world; for the constitution of
the human subject (its physical being, perceptive apparatus, cognitive faculties)
appears to predestine a life that moves between the two poles of pain and
boredom. For Adorno, this condition is not metaphysically determined, as it
is in Schopenhauer’s philosophy; it arises from an unfortunate susceptibility
of human beings to the systems of rational control and representation that
emerged from the Enlightenment. One of the most urgent questions to arise
from Adorno’s account of the evolution of modernity therefore concerns the
transformation that takes place during the Aufklarung, or, more precisely, the
effect the Enlightenment has had on the knowledge, sensibility, and autonomy
of the human subject. It is my contention that the politics of happiness that takes
place in modernity is not simply a reflection of, or reaction to, the commodified
desire that has come to dominate the social and political relations of modernity.
Rather, this politics emerged and developed concomitantly with three different,
opposed, but essentially related versions of what Enlightenment is, and what its
moral, ethical, and political consequences have been.
The first of these responses is most consistently articulated in Hegel’s
philosophy, and is concerned with the fate of ethical life, or Sittlichkeit, after
the emergence of the radically autonomous individual who is the subject of
Enlightenment philosophy. The second approach is presented in Nietzsche’s
critique of metaphysics, and is concerned with the limits to human freedom that
are perpetuated in Enlightenment ideas of art, morality, and community. The
final approach to the concept of Aufklarung has become associated with Levinas’
and Derrida’s later ethical writings, and is concerned with the transformation of
the relationship between ‘self ’ and ‘other’ that has arisen from Enlightenment
ideals of transparency and calculability.
Let me begin with some brief remarks on Hegel. The history of self-
consciousness set out in The Phenomenology of Mind develops an account
of how each of the temporal forms, or ‘cultures’, in which the individual
becomes certain of its self-identity, is related to the evolution of ethical life.
In post-Socratic Greece, for example, the concept of happiness (eudaimõnia)
Introduction 7
was conceived as belonging to a realm of finalities, of discrete things that are

intrinsically good and which have to be harmonized through the consistent
exercise of reason. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, argued that for rational
beings, happiness is the ultimate end that lies behind all of their activities, for
it is completely self-sufficient and ‘by itself makes life something desirable and
deficient in nothing’ (Aristotle, 1962: 15). Some activities however have a closer,
more essential, relationship to happiness than others, the highest of which is
theõria, the disinterested contemplation of the unchanging forms that sustain
the unity of man, nature, and society. The study of such eternal truths is, for
Aristotle, an activity that is wholly self-sufficient, as it requires nothing else to
complete it and can never lead the lover of knowledge into excess or immorality
(Aristotle, 1962: 288–91). Those who know the satisfactions that come from
pure contemplation are, by definition, the best of all citizens, for the balance
of their souls has been shifted from the compulsions of appetitive desire (sex,
greed, selfishness) towards the proportionality of friendship and civic duty. The
happiness that comes from a life of contemplation therefore gives rise to the
greatest possible virtue; it is the very form of self-possession and engenders the
noble friendships that constitute the ethical substance of the state (Aristotle,
1962: 256–8). For Hegel, however, the moral unity of Polis as it is presented
in post-Socratic philosophy, is deeply ambiguous. On the one hand it is the
happiest time in human history, for the moral, aesthetic, and political faculties
of individual citizens are turned towards the ‘objective spirit’ of Sittlichkeit. And
yet on the other hand, this unity lacks a properly developed sense of the divided
nature of knowledge, and of the ‘spiritual’ responsibility of each individual to
the differentiation of ethical life into masters and slaves, subjects and objects of
authority (Hegel, 1967a: 462–99; 1944: 275–7).
In the expository structure of The Phenomenology of Mind, the post-Socratic
order of the Polis sits on the cusp of modernity. It has already moved beyond
the parochialism that is described in Sophocles’ Antigone, where the unques-
tionable authority of the king in matters of law and state comes into conflict
with Antigone’s demand that her brother Polynices be properly interred after his
death at the battle of Thebes (Hegel, 1967a: 477). And yet the ideals of justice,
legality, and happiness that inform post-Socratic democracy still lack an artic-
ulate sense of the essence of human subjectivity. The constitution of the Polis is
founded on the designation of hundreds of thousands of slaves and foreigners
as ‘sub-political’ beings, who are deemed incapable of apprehending the ideals
of Hellenic democracy. The eventual breakdown of Hellenic civilization comes
through its inability to recognize the concept of subjectivity: its institutional

structures seek to perfect a moral, aesthetic, and appetitive balance in the Greek
citizen, whose telos is undisturbed by the diremption of knowledge which, for
Hegel, is implicit in the historical evolution of self-consciousness. The freedom
of divine propitiation and of property ownership that are the essence of the
Roman state, is the initial form in which modern subjectivity emerges. For
although there is a tendency to corruption on both sides (the individual and the
state), it is in the Roman world that free subjectivity is first granted its right to
self-determination (Hegel, 1967a: 501–6; 1944: 278–82). What follows from this
movement of subjectivity into the sphere of abstract legal relations is a history
of the work, satisfaction, and desire of subjects who have lost their concrete
relationship to Sittlichkeit (Hegel, 1967a: 500–6). Thus, from its depiction of
the Roman epoch onwards, The Phenomenology of Mind presents the moral,
aesthetic, religious, and philosophical cultures through which consciousness
has determined its self-identity, in their contradictory relationships to the
substance of ethical life.
I will say more about Hegel’s account of the evolution of modernity in the
chapters that follow, especially his expositions of the Enlightenment and the
impact of its highly individuated forms of sovereignty on the constitution of the
state and civil society. For the moment, however, I want to return to the more
general issue of the relevance of Hegel’s philosophy to the politics of happiness.
The question of how the autonomous individual, whose rights and desires
have emerged as the telos of enlightened modernity, is to be reunified with the
substance of ethical life, is, I believe, the primary question that should inform
any account of the political organization of happiness. Indeed, it is this question
that is taken up and articulated in the founding texts of the sociological canon
– not just Marx, Durkheim and Weber, but also Comte and Spencer. In the
present context, I have used Hegel’s characterization of modernity as the tension
between the abstract rights of free individuals and the substantive good that is
realized in the institutions of the state, to configure the economy of collective
redemption and sacred community that is essential to every political expression
of the good life. For, without the promise that the ‘self ’ that has emerged from
the discursive resources of the Enlightenment (Kantian and Fichtean versions
of subjective idealism, Rousseauist notions of ‘natural’ freedom, Utilitarian
accounts of rational self-interest) can achieve some form of shared satisfaction,
the ideological dynamics of happiness would lack the core around which it has
always gathered. Thus, if we return to my original contention that happiness is
Introduction 9
an evanescent state that cannot be reproduced as a social condition, it is clear

that from a Hegelian perspective this evanescence is the outcome of a highly
atomistic tendency that runs through Western society, in which ‘the self ’ has
been cut adrift from the substance of ethical life. This rootless condition is the
one we have come to know as ‘late’ or ‘post’ modernity, and which both Marxists
and neo-Hegelians have sought to characterize as the aesthetic overdetermi-
nation of bourgeois civil society. The bearing of Hegel’s thought on modern and
postmodern ideologies of happiness therefore lies in the demand to reunite the
errant forms of egoism with the substantive satisfactions of ethical community.
For those who seek happiness through Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power,
the ‘conservatism’ of Hegel’s concept of ethical life is easy to caricature. Hegel is
presented as never having escaped the influence of the Greek ideal of Sittlichkeit,
in the sense that he regards the contingent forms of autonomy that arise from
the substance of man’s social being, as vehicles of the evolution of absolute spirit
(Nietzsche, 1968: 225–6). Hegelianism, in its Marxist, functionalist, nationalist,
and theological forms, always conceives happiness as a condition of unity with
the universal, whose de facto absence is the result of an overvaluation of the
contingent pleasures of individual existence. Nietzsche’s thought, on the other
hand, is the active solicitation of just such contingency, of the joyful overcoming
of the inertial forces he conceives as the essence of Hegel’s ‘Apollonian’ ideal
of Sittlichkeit. Hegel’s concept of spirit, in other words, is the collective purifi-
cation of suffering; the movement of history in which the greatest gestures of
self-overcoming are reduced to the beneficial effects they may have for the life
of ‘the herd’. This characterization of the relationship between Nietzsche and
Hegel is, of course, something of a caricature. Indeed, Nietzsche’s discussion
of German philosophical identity in The Gay Science acknowledges a debt to
the radicalization of reality that is implicit in Hegel’s concept of dialectics: the
transformation of both world and subject from a condition of stasis into one
of flux and reciprocal transformation (Nietzsche, 1974: 304–10). Despite this
‘astonishing stroke of genius’ however, Nietzsche’s thought does mark a radical
departure from what he conceives as the theological economy of Hegelian spirit.
The essence of his materialism lies in a refusal to allow that unity is the telos of
infinity; the world is a ‘monster of energy’ whose concrete determination as
‘species’, ‘genus’, ‘class’, or ‘society’ is simultaneously the chance of a bacchanalian
performance where such categories are put at risk (Nietzsche, 1968: 360–1).
And so it is in the fleeting, transformative joy of excess that we must seek the
political significance of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
The relationship between truth, virtue, and power in Nietzsche’s thought

configures a complex economy that is still being worked through in contem-
porary critical theory. Thus, we have the Deleuzian version of Nietzsche, which
presents the sheer transformative potential of capitalized desire as the way
beyond the Oedipal satisfactions of ethical life; we have the Foucauldian version
of Nietzsche, in which the play of reactive powers is configured as a rational-
technological regime that creates, disciplines, and energizes the human subject;
and we have the Lyotardian-Baudrillardian version of Nietzsche, in which
the relativity of truth is configured as a play of heterogeneous narratives and
simulacra, none of which is able to establish its claims to authority. Each of these
reformulations attempts to bring Nietzsche’s critique of truth to bear on the
categories of historical materialism: the contingent effects of flow, energy, and
resistance through which he presents the relationship between ‘world’ and ‘man’,
are used to reconfigure the Marxist dynamics of class, technology, and historical
necessity. As we will see in Chapter 3, the question of an authentically collective
happiness is central to this reconfiguration; for once the essence of man’s
‘species being’ has been dispersed into the technological flows of capital, the
telos of socialized production is radically transformed. However, the influence
of Nietzsche’s thought on modern ideologies is not restricted to its transfor-
mation of the culture of Marxism. What defines his philosophical style is its
movement between aesthetic-poetic figurations of excess (heroism, masculinity,
love, greatness) and detailed engagement with the origins of Western civili-
zation. Thus, it is through his obsession with overcoming the limits imposed
by morality, religion, and metaphysics, that Nietzsche has exerted a powerful
influence on the ideology of happiness; for it is possible to discern an appeal to
joyful empowerment in all of the political ideologies I will examine, even those
that would seem constitutionally opposed to his thought.
The question raised by Nietzsche’s idea of happiness as the joyful trans-
figuration of suffering (rather than Schopenhauerian endurance or Hegelian
sublation) concerns its radical transformation of the individual’s relationship to
the bonds of social existence (Nietzsche, 1974: 270). The association between
Nietzsche and the performative demands of fascism and postmodernism has
been carefully addressed by contemporary critical theory. Indeed, a common
thread that runs through the work of Jürgen Habermas, David Harvey and
Fredric Jameson is the idea that there is a relationship between the postmod-
ernist demand for a multiplication of the sources of pleasure and the reversion
of politics to the spectacle of charismatic leadership4. In a society dominated by
Introduction 11
the media-technological staging of reality, the individual has been transformed

into an egoistic consumer, whose engagement with ‘politics’ extends only to the
mythologies of race, nation, faith, and heroism that are reactivated by charis-
matic personalities. The ghost of fascism, in other words, can return through
postmodernism’s obsession with aesthetics and the drama of the spectacle.
I will say more about the link between Nietzsche’s thought and the satisfac-
tions promised by these two extreme cultures – fascism and postmodernism
– in a moment. It is important to note, however, that Nietzsche’s influence on
the political imagination of modernity is multiply determined, and has been
played out in ideological contexts that would not appear to be receptive to
his solicitations of joyful excess. I will argue that Marxism’s recognition of its
difficulty with the concept of pleasure owes a great deal to Nietzsche’s critique
of materialism, and that this is one of the crucial factors involved in the
reformulation of its cultural and ideological agendas. At the other end of the
political spectrum, neoliberalism has adopted a quasi-Nietzschean vocabulary
of ceaseless overcoming and self-reliance, and has presented this as the only
form in which ‘moral’ happiness can be attained. Ultimately, however, the
rhetorical tropes of Nietzschean overcoming have their own political dangers,
which emerge through their relative, or absolute, indifference to who lies
outside the ecstatic autonomy of the self.
Derrida’s engagement with Nietzsche is particularly concerned with the
aesthetic modalities through which he dramatizes the encounter between ‘free’
and ‘bound’ spirits, or, more specifically, with the mythologies of seduction and
death through which he describes the fatal attraction of ‘the feminine’ (Derrida,
1979: 43–7). According to Nietzsche, the happiness of man is related to his
capacity for self-overcoming, and this means that his constitution as a volatile
mixture of creative and reactive powers predestines him to ‘happy moments’
rather than peaceful epochs (Nietzsche, 1984: 222). The materiality of human
desire always exceeds the legal, political, and cultural forms into which it is
channelled; it retains a certain ressentiment towards those institutions that seek
to determine its truth in the form of collective wellbeing. The experience of
joy that accompanies self-overcoming has no intrinsically moral significance;
it is simply the counterpart of individual acts of sovereignty, the greatest of
which keep alive the hope of aristocratic order and the return of man’s trans-
formative relationship to his own mortality. In Nietzsche’s thought therefore,
the contingency of happiness is conceived as part of an economy of material
desire, the truth of which always remains to be determined by the most actively
transformative of all men. For Derrida, ‘the feminine’ occupies an ambiguous

position in this economy. On the one hand, it is the very form of evil: the woman
is the incomplete and unpredictable being who at any moment might strike at
the well-constituted forms of masculine order. On the other hand, however, the
evanescence of the feminine seems to configure the economy of chance that
is essential to Nietzsche’s genealogy – the dangerous contingency that haunts
every movement into substance, authority, and truth (Derrida, 1979: 47–54).
Thus, in Nietzsche’s account of the feminine we have what Derrida conceives
as the trace of an originary responsibility; an obligation to respond to the other
who cannot be known, but whose presence is the condition of moral desire.
Derrida’s thought stands close to that of Emanuel Levinas, for whom the
whole epistemic, affective, and ontological structure of subjectivity is brought
in to being through its proximity to the other. Each of us is originally obligated
to the plight of those with whom we share the world, and whose suffering
is revealed to us through the expressive capacity of the face (Levinas, 1994:
194–219). Thus, for Levinas, it is ethical obligation that is primary in human
relationships, and which is the foundation of non-violent desire and the moral
satisfaction that comes from helping others. Derrida’s later work owes much to
Levinas’ account of the ethical demand, particularly his writing on the politics
of friendship and hospitality. However, there is an important difference between
their respective accounts of ethical obligation, which is determined through
Derrida’s insistence that the alterity of the other belongs to an economy of
representation, and that his or her appearance is always mediated through the
aesthetic forms in which sexuality, gender, race, and culture are staged. Or, to
put it in slightly different terms, the signifiers through which the social totality
re-presents itself as law, production, and desire, are the essential conditions of
an encounter between self and other that always remains undecidable (Derrida,
2007: 102–3). For Derrida, it is this uncertainty that both founds and disturbs
the substance of social being; it reveals traces of the ‘others’ (xenoi) who mark
the ontological boundary of the state, and whose re-presentation within the
body of ethical life (as foreigners, asylum seekers, disease carriers) sustains the
chance of hospitality and moral desire (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000: 83).
In the chapters that follow, I will use Derrida’s thought to characterize the
problematic nature of happiness in a social world that is increasingly virtual,
and in which the production of information and the speed of social exchange
is constantly increasing. One of the criticisms often levelled against decon-
struction is that it offers no concept of community, and that there is no sense
Introduction 13
of the ‘embeddedness’ of the subject in his or her particular lifeworld. This is

to misconstrue the critical gesture of Derrida’s writing; for it is the increasingly
insubstantial experience of the lifeworld, its dispersal into the networks of media
and communications technologies that, for him, is the central question raised by
the concept of postmodernity (Derrida, 2007: 102–3). Thus, if we proceed from
Derrida’s critique of politics as the re-presentation of a hierarchy of presence
(classes, religions, races, nations), it is possible to discern a relationship between
the anxiety sustained by media-techno-scientific society, and the politics of
ontological community. For, as the substance of Sittlichkeit floats away into
the encoded exchange of global capitalism, so the hunger for submersion in
the sacred, whatever form this may take, becomes ever more acute. From this
perspective, the recrudescence of fascism and religious fundamentalism is an
effect of the increasing instability of the global economy; it is the return of a
deep, intractable desire to be at one with God or the Führer. Derrida’s thought
therefore demands that we examine the logic of return that characterizes the
politics of happiness in ‘postmodern’ times: the transformation of fascism into
new forms of racial ontology and identification, the reversion of religious faith
to a politics of unquestionable revelation, and the ideological processes through
which Western democracies have supplemented their freedoms with racial and
religious intolerance5. It is through such analyses that we might approach the
question of how the cultures of fascism, and religious fundamentalism, provoke
the spectre of a moral desire that haunts their mythologies from the beginning.
The politics of happiness
So far then, I have set out the two central theses of my study. The first is that
happiness is not a socially reproducible condition, and that it is essentially bound
up with the events and singularities of individual existence. The second lies close
to Adorno’s account of the coercive structure of social totality, and maintains
that it is the very evanescence of happiness that has made it an obsession of
post-Enlightenment philosophy. In the previous section I gave a brief account
of how Hegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida have approached the relationship between
happiness and the particular forms of work, satisfaction, and desire that are
characteristic of Western modernity. I also made some provisional connec-
tions between the political ideologies I will examine in the following chapters,
and the concepts of ethical life, self-overcoming, and moral desire presented
in their respective philosophies. The nature of these connections, however,

needs to be developed more fully, as all that seems to have emerged from
the preceding sections is the rather unspecific claim that political ideologies
are attempts to realize impossible regimes of happiness. In order to give this
claim some historical substance therefore, it is necessary to change the angle of
attack slightly. Instead of asserting that it is the fate of happiness to become an
individuated state that lies outside the sphere of politics, I will argue that the
egoism of the modern subject has been accompanied by an intensification of
political narratives of wellbeing, self-fulfilment, and social obligation. After the
loss of the Greek ideal of Sittlichkeit and the Enlightenment’s rationalization of
the social world, in other words, it is ideological struggles over happiness that
have come to determine the fate of politics in Western modernity.
Before sketching the relationship between happiness and the ideologies that
have shaped the political life of the West, however, I want to offer a very brief
account of the difference between the practical and philosophical politics of
happiness. Louis Althusser once claimed that there could not be a Hegelian
politics because Hegel’s account of the state simply assumes that each of its
‘limbs’ (economy, civil society, family, judiciary) is a synchronous embodiment
of the spirit’s historical evolution (Althusser, 1986: 101–4). This is, of course, an
extremely tendentious reading of Hegel, designed to show how Marx’s analyses
of law, state, and economy uncover the contradictory structure in dominance
of capitalist society. However, while it true that Althusser’s critique ignores
the complex relations of subjectivity and substance that underly his theory of
the state, it does highlight an essential difference between practical and philo-
sophical politics. Philosophical politics, as we have seen, is concerned with
the fundamental questions that arise from ideologies that have evolved under
the regime of modernity. (And here there certainly is a Hegelian politics.)
These ideologies however, while they are related to philosophical narratives of
freedom, collective life, democracy, and responsibility, are essentially represent-
ative regimes: they configure the life of the social totality through imaginary and
aesthetic resources that are, from the beginning, demotic in their orientation.
So, we come to my third thesis, which is that each of the political ideologies
that have emerged in Western modernity, and which have shaped its history, is
structured around a particular representation of happiness. Thus, the nucleus
of Nazism and fascism is the aesthetic paraphernalia of the Aryan race and
its promise of ecstatic unity with the Fatherland. The ideological appeals of
Marxism and socialism have been configured around mythologies of the natural
Introduction 15
equality of men and the universal community of their productive labour.

Liberalism, and its more extreme variant, postmodernism, presents the story
of a free desire through which humanity is able to exceed all limitations to its
happiness. And religious fundamentalism, in its various forms, promises the
reward of eternal unity with God.
I will say more about the internal dynamics of these ideologies in the chapters
that follow. Before this, however, I want to make some brief remarks about the
relations that exist among them. As I have said, the ideologies that have shaped
modernity are representational regimes that seek to gather the masses to them
with their respective promises of happiness. These regimes are transformative
and antagonistic; each prescribes how social and political relations ought to be
organized in order to maximize happiness, and each defines itself in opposition
to the others. Thus, the fascist vision of hell is one in which Marx has imposed
his vision of equality on all the races of the earth, and for Marxists, the secular
form of evil is encapsulated in the massed ranks of the Volk destroying the
last traces of workers’ solidarity. (It is possible to offer any number of further
examples: Christianity’s hatred of Marxism, radical Islam’s detestation of liber-
alism, and the Marxist repudiation of ‘bourgeois’ postmodernism, to cite just a
few.) This economy has an escalatory tendency, for the fact that each ideological
regime draws power from its repudiation of the others, means that their antag-
onism has transformed ‘happiness’ into a condition that can always be made
happier, more complete. Of course, this logic of escalation is essentially related
to socio-economic dislocations produced by the global expansion of capital. So,
the political dynamic I will set out does not portray a ‘postmodern’ economy of
life choices, but rather the way in which political ideologies are implicated in
violence through their respective prescriptions of the way to the good life. This
brings me to my final thesis, which is that the pursuit of happiness provoked by
the contestation of ideologies is the practical form in which the Enlightenment
metaphysics of ‘man’ has come to bear on the politics of modernity. In the
chapters that follow, I will argue that the escalatory pursuit of unity, individu-
ation, and autonomy as the way to happiness has become increasingly detached
from the ethical desire to reduce the suffering of humanity.
There is a crucial difference between practical and philosophical politics:
the former being an attempt to solicit the support of the masses through repre-
sentational techniques, the latter a reflective consideration of the questions
of freedom, solidarity, and wellbeing posed by the contestation of ideologies.
Clearly the present study falls into the latter camp, but this does not mean it
is of purely academic interest. Most of the conventional literature on Marxist,

Utilitarian, fascist, and liberal ideologies has underplayed the importance of
happiness both to their internal coherence, and to their demotic appeals. Thus,
by showing how the ideal of collective life and enjoyment is represented in
different movements, it will be possible to get a clearer sense of the antagonisms
that exist among them. Also, having formulated a concept of how the ideal of
happiness is distributed across the ideologies of Western modernity, it will be
possible to evaluate how each has participated in the diverse and persistent
violence of its recent history. Finally, there is the crucial question of the ‘trans-
formability’ of political movements. Earlier, I referred to Levinas’ and Derrida’s
work on the nature of ethical responsibility, and to the idea that happiness is
essentially related to helping those spectral beings who fall outside conventional
obligations. The demand that is sustained throughout the book therefore lies
close to this idea of the ethical, for it is my contention that political ideologies
can be differentiated in terms of their transformability, that is, their openness
to transforming the particular vision of happiness on which they are founded.
Fascism is a highly mutable ideology, in the sense that it is able to invest any
form of difference with the weight of ontology, and yet it is not transformable;
it cannot open itself to the experience of difference as a possible source of
education or desire. The other movements I will examine are more ambiguous
in their representation of happiness, for each has a history of vacillation between
‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ ideals of community life. In the end therefore the
ideological power of political doctrines lies in their formation of the subject as
susceptible to the power of representation, and so the politics of happiness I will
set out is an attempt to disclose what remains of the negative in each of them –
the trace of desire for affective democracy.
Notes
1 This point is made, with a characteristic exaggeration of the solipsistic structure of

intentionality, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Sartre argues
that all emotion, including joy and happiness, ‘is a phenomenon of belief ’ enacted
by each of us quite separately from the ‘real’ conditions of its occurrence. This
means that happiness is present only as an ecstatic anticipation of its reality; it is the
bodily and psychical enjoyment of a possibility whose realization is always far more
difficult than its imagination (Sartre, 1976: 76–8).
Introduction 17
2 See, for example, the account of delight in the beautiful in Kant’s Critique of
Judgement (1982: 50–60).
3 This point is made with particular force in the account of the social psychological
dynamics of fascism set out in the final chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment,
‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 168–208).
4 See: Habermas, J. (1994), Chapter 7; Harvey, D. (1999), Chapter 27; and Jameson, F.
(1995), Chapter 1.
5 See particularly Derrida’s Politics of Friendship (1994) and Acts of Religion (2002).
1
Liberalism and the Uses of Desire

The governance of pain and pleasure
I want to begin by examining the relationship between pleasure and the

wellbeing of humanity that lies at the foundation of Utilitarian philosophy. To
put it rather too crudely, the Utilitarian position is that pleasure is the purpose
of life, and that the conjunction of sensibility, intellect, and physical powers that
make up the essence of the human species is, generally speaking, well suited
to the fulfilment of that purpose. This solicitation of life is, of course, radically
opposed to Schopenhauer’s philosophy, in which the physical constitution of
the body appears as little more than a receptacle of pain, which, no matter how
we may transform its sensibilities, always returns us to our original condition
of suffering (Schopenhauer, 1970: 41). Schopenhauer’s thought stands as the
last of the great philosophical rejections of modernity; for, as Lukács pointed
out in The Destruction of Reason, his advocacy of quiet resignation to the trials
of life aligned him to a patrician conservatism which would protect its intel-
lectuals from the excesses of bourgeois culture and revolutionary socialism
(Lukács, 1980: 199–200). Indeed, the implicit ‘politics’ of Schopenhauer’s
philosophy lies closest to Thomas Hobbes’ lugubrious version of Utilitarianism,
which makes the avoidance of death by revolutionary violence the constitutive
function of civil authority1. Against this severe style of conservatism, however,
the work of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill on the capacity
of human beings to transform and intensify their enjoyment of the world and
its resources, has been immensely influential on liberal and neoliberal ideas
of individualism, the free market, and the constitution of the state. And so I
will begin by examining the moral economy of happiness that emerged and
developed through Utilitarian philosophy.
At the start of An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation,
Jeremy Bentham makes the assertion that:
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters,
pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well
as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and
wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their thrown
… The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the
foundation of that very system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity
by the hands of reason and law (Bentham, 2007: 1–2, author’s italics).
This initial statement of the principle of utility involves four propositions that
need to be made explicit: one ontological, one epistemological, one ethical,
and one political. The first, the ontological, concerns the yoke of necessity that
nature has placed upon human beings through what Bentham calls ‘the radical
frame of the body’ (Bentham, 2007: 55–7). Bentham’s account of the possibility
of happiness proceeds from the idea that the basic physiology of human beings
cannot be so drastic a deviation from the principle of adaptive fitness that the
normal condition of their lives is one of suffering. While it is certainly true that
human beings are vulnerable to pain, the fact that their natural constitution is
designed to perform the vital tasks of life means that there is a fundamental
substrate of pleasure that belongs to the experience of living. Thus, the pursuit
of physical satisfaction is both part of and more than the order of nature: it is
the practical principle that is constantly extended through the activities of self-
conscious individuals.
This account of the foundation of human sensibility entails a movement
away from the Classical concept of epistemology as the revelation of truth in
the chaos of particular events and sensations. In his Principles, Bentham argues
that the relationship between the external world and the act of cognition is
determined by the expectation of pleasure or pain caused in discrete individuals
by the presence of particular kinds of objects. Thus, the possibility of having
knowledge of the world as differentially organized types of being, is dependent
upon contingent formations of the will that arise from the affective sensibilities
of particular individuals (Bentham, 2007: 47–8). Or, to put it slightly differently,
the rational orientation of human beings to the world of objects, and to each
other, is intrinsically tied to the principle of utility, that is, to the maximization
of pleasure and minimization of pain that, for Bentham, is the essential fact of
human existence. The very essence of reason, therefore, is tied to the happiness
of the individual. Any practical, theoretical, or moral principle that violates
the capacity of human beings for the enjoyment of pleasure is, by definition,
perverse and sophistic (Bentham, 2007: 3).
The fundamental question that arises from this account of the relationship
between reason and the principle of utility is, of course, how the conflicting
Liberalism and the Uses of Desire 21
desires of individual pleasure seekers are to be integrated into a peaceful and

law-abiding community. Bentham’s attempt to resolve this question, in the final
part of Principles, constitutes what is perhaps the definitive statement of the
Utilitarian position on the rights of individuals and the limits of state power.
Thus, I propose to look at the detail of his account of the relationship between
the spheres of ‘ethics and legislation’ (Bentham, 2007: 308–23). Bentham
proposes that ethics is divisible into two branches. The first he calls private
ethics, whose practical designation is the prudent pursuit of happiness that is
the duty of each individual to himself. The second branch is that of legislation,
or the art of framing laws whose purpose is the maximization of the sum of
happiness that is possible for a given community of moral individuals. To return
to the first principle, Bentham claims that, while it is true that the origin of
ethical obligation lies in the duty each individual has to his own happiness, this
does not exclude the possibility of a sense of obligation to others. The origin of
this kind of solicitude lies in the general sense of sympathy that is habituated in
civil society, and in the concern for reputation, love, and friendship that are part
of the life of every moral individual. Thus, the sphere of private ethics exists as a
substrate of moral feeling that can be expressed either in forbearing to diminish
the happiness of one’s neighbour (‘probity’), or in actively promoting the sum of
his happiness (‘beneficence’), or in expressing disapprobation at his wrongdoing
(‘censure’).
So, how is this sphere of private moral feeling related to the practice of legis-
lation? The first thing to bear in mind is that, for Bentham, it is the happiness of
those who belong to a particular state that is the proper object of the legislative
process. Given that acts of criminal delinquency diminish the sum of happiness
that is present in a given state at a given time, the enforcement of sanctions
against those who break the law is justified by the principle of utility. Bentham’s
argument, however, maintains that the enforcement of any legal sanction, even
where it is demonstrably necessary for the overall happiness of society, always
carries with it the possibility of unnecessary violence against the prudence and
beneficence of private individuals. Thus, even though Bentham maintains that
the probity of moral individualism depends on there being private property
laws established by the state, once the sphere of private ethics has come into
being, it becomes the wellspring of civic virtues that have to be protected from
overbearing legislation. In practice, this means that certain kinds of morally
reprehensible behaviour cannot be made the object of legal sanctions; for the
powerful attraction that drunkenness, fornication, treachery and the like have
for human beings means that to seek to punish their every occurrence would
end up ‘tearing the bonds of sympathy asunder, and rooting out the influence
of all the social motives’ (Bentham, 2007: 320). The true purpose of legislature
therefore is not the constant extension of its powers, but rather to provide an
exemplary formation of the general good, through which the ethics of benefi-
cence, probity, and censure can take root in every private citizen (Bentham,
2007: 322).
Bentham’s account of Utilitarianism is, I will argue, fundamentally important
to the idea of happiness that has taken root in neoliberal ideologies of the state,
individual rights, and civil society. This is because the question of happiness
is addressed in a way that seeks to foreclose upon the aporias that arise from
the pursuit of simple individual pleasure. For Bentham, ‘pleasure is in itself a
good [and] pain is in itself an evil … or else the words good and evil have no
meaning’ (Bentham, 2007: 102), which means that, in the end, it is the sheer
immediacy of the physical sensation of pleasure that is the one true source
of human happiness. This dictum of physical pleasure as the ultimate good
for which all human beings exist is radical in the sense that Classical notions
of fate, mortality, and community no longer regulate it. Rather, the good life
ought to be orientated towards the pursuit of new kinds of pleasure, rather than
the integration of enjoyment into the economy of sacrifice and deferral that is
proper to the moral community of the Polis. The only caveat to this principle is
the restraint upon individual action that is required by the principle of utility
itself: that if the self-regarding action of person x causes harm to person y,
then that action must, by definition, be the subject of sanctions issued by the
legislature. Thus, every moral action, every act of care or beneficence, and every
consideration of the necessity and severity of punishment ought, for Bentham,
to be calculated in terms of their effect on the sum of physical pleasure that is
present in society (Bentham, 2007: 152–68).
John Stuart Mill’s attempt to reformulate the concept of Utilitarianism is
significant because it bears upon Bentham’s identification of happiness with the
physical sensation of pleasure. Mill begins his essay Utilitarianism by stating
his broad agreement with Bentham’s definition of the principle of utility as the
greatest happiness for the greatest possible number (Mill, 1980: 6). Mill also
agrees that all systems of morality are, at least implicitly, aimed at the maximi-
zation of happiness, that the principle of utility arises out of the instinct for
collective survival, and that it has exercised a democratizing influence on the
institutional life of government and civil society (Mill, 1980: 29–31). What
marks the essential difference between Bentham and Mill, however, is Mill’s
insistence that not all pleasures are equal, and that the basis of this inequality
consists in their particular relationship to the moral disposition of human
beings. He claims that, while physical pleasures should not be discounted as
a source of happiness, their contribution to the moral cohesiveness of society
is always less than the complex sensibilities that arise from the study of art,
poetry, philosophy, and literature. Such intellectual satisfactions may lack
the immediacy of physical satisfaction, but the subtleties of the feelings and
judgements they require, ‘tend to generate in each individual a feeling of unity
with the rest, which, if perfect, would make him never desire any beneficial
condition for himself, in the benefits of which they are not included’ (Mill,
1980: 30). Thus, for Mill, what saves the principle of utility from the promotion
of simple contentment is the fact that the pleasures enjoyed by morally praise-
worthy individuals, are not unmixed with the responsibilities that define the
Enlightenment concept of free, self-determining intellect.
The idea of democracy that Mill sets out in On Liberty, therefore, is an active
solicitation of such responsibilities, as it is the free exchange of conflicting ideas
throughout society that Mill regards as the proper condition of moral solidarity.
In the section ‘Freedom of Thought and Discussion’, Mill defends a nominal-
istic conception of truth, and maintains that the clash of opinions encouraged
by moral government is the form most likely to encourage independence of
thought, the constant transformation of conventional opinions, and the provo-
cation of the state to defend its appeals to divine right, human nature, or the
weight of tradition. Thus, for Mill, the limitation of government powers on the
actions of sovereign individuals is directly correlated with the maximization
of human happiness. Where the uniqueness of any individual is subsumed
under the strictures of human nature, religious authority, or tradition, his or
her unique contribution to the sum of human knowledge and happiness is
suppressed (Mill, 1987: 119–40). There is something unmistakably Kantian
about this line of argument. For, despite the fact that Mill always seeks to refer
the value of individual freedom to the general increase in human wellbeing
it produces, the justifications for freedom of thought, action, and conscience
he presents in On Liberty, refer beyond Bentham’s original designation of the
principle of utility. The concept of individuality that Mill seeks to defend, in
other words, is promised to an ideal community of self-creative individuals, each
of whom has the right to express their dissension from established traditions of
taste, belief, and morality (Mill, 1987: 136). What Mill seeks to defend through
the principle of ‘definite damage’ in the last section of On Liberty therefore, is

closer to the ideal of moral community that Kant sets out in his essay ‘What is
Enlightenment?’ than it is to Bentham’s account of rational utility2. For in the
end, it is the sacrosanctity of individual freedom as a regulative idea, rather than
as part of the productive assemblage of society, that takes precedence in Mill’s
moral and political philosophy (Mill, 1987: 123).
Mill’s and Bentham’s respective versions of Utilitarianism, and the persis-
tence of their particular accounts of natural right, liberty, and justice, are
important because they mark the point at which the possibility of happiness
becomes irrevocably bound up with the economic relations of civil society. On
the Benthamite side, the secret of happiness lies in paring down the powers of
the legislature to those that are strictly necessary for the maintenance of order,
and in allowing the maximum possible expansion of pleasure and beneficence.
The advantages of this approach are clear. Once physical pleasure is made the
standard by which all possible states of happiness are judged, it becomes a
simple matter to determine the material goods that will most reliably increase
the general sum of happiness. Thus, the founding principle of good governance
lies in determining the point at which the productive organization of work, sex,
consumption, and leisure has the greatest possible affinity with the mechanics
of human pleasure. This is the issue Mill seeks to address in both Utilitarianism
and On Liberty. His arguments seek to shift the principle of utility away from
the maximal recuperation of pleasure within the legislative and administrative
organization of society, towards a concern with the relationship between truth,
freedom, and the concept of ethical life. And so, we need to determine the
ideological significance of this divergence within the Utilitarian tradition.
Bentham’s arguments in favour of minimal government and the right of
individuals to decide what will bring them most happiness were profoundly
influenced by Adam Smith’s account of the free market economy in The Wealth
of Nations. Smith’s contention is that collective happiness is impossible as long
as humanity is plagued by material scarcity, and that this can never be overcome
as long as the economy is based on the agrarian system that is the foundation of
the feudal regime (Smith, 1961: 351–71). The relations of mercantilism are the
instrument through which human society begins to overcome the dead weight
of feudalism: for the enlightened self-interest that is essential to the logic of free
trade is a vitalizing force that serves to breakdown all external limits placed
upon it (Smith, 1961: 450–73). Thus, it is the regime of mercantile innovation
and emancipated labour that ultimately transforms the feudal order, and leads
to the increase in productivity, personal wealth, and individual freedom that

Smith equates with enlarging the sum of social happiness (Smith, 1961: 401–6).
The logic of this equation is completed in Bentham’s account of the principle
of utility. For, by anchoring the possibility of happiness in the physical frame
of man, and by asserting the essential democracy of his pursuit of pleasure,
Bentham’s version of civic virtue dispensed with the vestiges of moral and
religious transcendence which appeared in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments3.
Smith’s and Bentham’s versions of Utilitarianism, in other words, mark the
beginning of a powerful ideology of individual rights, personal striving, and
punitive law that, as we will see in the following sections, has been immensely
influential on liberal and neoliberal theories of happiness.
Mill’s essay on Utilitarianism however, begins with a question that immedi-
ately opens the principle of ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’
to forms of uncertainty that, for Bentham, could only serve to undermine
the essence of material satisfaction. The question, which begins in Classical
antiquity and is passed down to both the French and German versions of
Enlightenment, concerns the designation of physical pleasure as the highest end
that human beings can attain, and the link to the animal/appetitive element of
the soul that this designation entails. Mill famously argues that ‘it is better to be
a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied
than a fool satisfied’ (Mill, 1980: 9). A community of contented fools, in other
words, cannot be a community; for to live entirely for the individual pleasure
afforded by food, sex, and consumption is, in the end, to live without honour
or civic responsibility. It is in Mill’s political thought therefore that the tensions
within Utilitarianism become most acute. The arguments presented in both
On Liberty and Utilitarianism vacillate between complicity with the logics of
exchange value, commodification, and rationalization that are established under
mercantile capitalism, and the idea of a community of perfectible individuals
that exceeds these logics and is irreducible to them. Indeed, Marx’s comments
on ‘Principles of Political Economy’ in Grundrisse, criticize what he conceives as
the idealism of Mill’s claim that the moral demand for distributive justice could
transform the bourgeois mode of production (Marx, 1993: 832).
The argument I will develop in the following sections is not that Mill’s
Utilitarianism is simply a justification of bourgeois desires that have been
depraved by the commodity form, and which are destined to disappear once
the economy has been properly socialized. Rather, I will argue that Mill’s
understanding of the social dynamics of pleasure gives implicit expression
to philosophical questions about the nature of enjoyment, mortality, and

community that continue to traverse the ideological terrain of neoliberal
capitalism.
The science of wellbeing
Jeremy Bentham’s thought is, in essence, an attempt to determine the greatest

possible sovereignty of pleasure in the affairs of human beings. In the pursuit
of this enterprise, he sets out principles of legislation and morality that are
bound strictly to the principle of utility; for any public, private, or governmental
action that does not increase the overall sum of happiness should be regarded
as materially wrong. Thus, there is a programme of dismissal that runs through
Bentham’s Principles of Morals and Legislation, in which abstract morality,
religious worship, and votive politics are presented as impediments to the
natural desire of human beings to live happily. The effect of this is to margin-
alize the philosophical and existential questions that arise from the designation
of pleasure as the ultimate end of human life. So, we might ask how it would
be possible for a strictly Utilitarian approach to theorize the concept of ethical
community, or, more precisely, the relationship between formal economic
freedoms, the achievement of collective social goals, and the constitution of
moral solidarity. It is this question that lies at the heart of Hegel’s critique of
Utilitarianism, and so we need to look at the detail of his arguments.
In both the Encyclopaedia Logic and the Science of Logic, Hegel situates the
origin of Utilitarianism in the Doctrine of Being. His argument turns upon the
relationship between the finite and the infinite, the mortal and the eternal, that
runs through the designation of any particular thing as a self-identical being.
Thus, if a particular object is considered merely in terms of the boundary it
presents between itself and other objects (‘determinate being’), its existence
is determined as a punctual unit, or ‘atom’, that is constantly transformed
through its contingent encounters with the world (Hegel, 1982: 137). If man
is conceived from this perspective, he presents no more than the insatiable
demand for the withdrawal of restraint on the immediacy of his desire. The
others whom he encounters in the world are viewed entirely instrumentally;
they either help him realize his desire, in which case they are determined as
good, or they impede it, in which case they are determined as evil (Hegel, 1982:
136). The logic of this process is transformative, for the atomistic determination
of man moves beyond the crude antagonism of the Hobbesian model towards
the transformation of subjective mind through purposive forms of reason and
desire (‘being-for-self ’). Each individual, in other words, attains a concept of
identity that is both constitutive, in the sense that the ‘I’ knows itself through its
motivating pleasures, desires, and predilections, and negative, in the sense that
such pleasures and predilections are essentially antagonistic (Hegel, 1982: 143).
For Hegel therefore, the Utilitarian claim that happiness is rooted in the organic
pleasures of the body, and that the art of good government consists in allowing
maximum enjoyment of those pleasures to each individual, is to confuse the
culture of abstract individualism that arose from the historical differentiation
of social life with its original condition (Hegel, 1982: 143–4; 1969: 137–8). And
so, the fundamental question that emerges from Hegel’s critique of ‘modern
atomism’ concerns the relationship between the universal satisfactions of ethical
community (Sittlichkeit), and the individualized forms of pleasure, desire and
inclination through which those satisfactions are represented.
The history of this relationship is set out in the second part of the section
on ‘Reason’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. As I said in the introduction,
the early Greek Polis is characterized by the identity of religion, state, and
individual: each knows himself only as part of a whole that is the embodiment
of the divine ordination of human affairs. This happy sense of identity of ethical
life, however, is the origin of an immanent desire which forms the freedom of
self-consciousness, and which is constantly transformed through its relationship
to the constitution of ethical life as law, family, property, and state. Under the
Romans, the world is stripped of this religious unity; the state and its citizens
are reduced to the status of bearers of property rights, and the world is recog-
nized only as a realm of ‘things’ to be appropriated. It is this transformation of
subject-object relations that lies at the core of Hegel’s exposition of ‘Pleasure
and Necessity’ in The Phenomenology of Mind. He argues that once the world is
determined for consciousness simply as a means to the achievement of pleasure,
it loses its substance; every object passes away with the evanescent experience of
satisfaction it has made possible. The contemplative attitude of the Greek citizen
therefore is displaced by the Roman desire for appropriation; the world is cut
up into legal and practical categories relating to the fulfilment or frustration of
individual desire (Hegel, 1967a: 386). These categories, however, remain entirely
instrumental: they constitute an objective fate in which each ‘one’ recognizes
only its particular desires, and nothing of its immanent universality. Thus, the
hedonic consciousness learns that its certainty of itself as ‘life’ alienates it from
the substantive community of others: it knows itself only in the intimations of

death that accompany the frustration of its boundless desire (Hegel, 1967a: 387).
The experience of the world as a hard necessity that frustrates human
desire is the origin of the Romantic consciousness that Hegel describes in ‘The
Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit’. This consciousness, which
emerges from the frustration of its isolated desire, attempts to take pleasure
in vicariously experiencing the suffering of others and dedicating itself to the
reformation of the world. And yet the pathos that marks the experience of the
Romantic self-consciousness turns out to be violent and tyrannical, for it treats
others not as ends in themselves, but as material for its unfeasible projects
(Hegel, 1967a: 392). The formal virtue that arises from this perversion of
human relations therefore, pursues the labour of abnegation: it turns away from
the actual sources of violence that have afflicted its activity in the world, and
attempts to find satisfaction in the closed circle of its private morality (Hegel,
1967a: 402–3). At its worst, this virtuous consciousness is pure hypocrisy, for
its pronouncements on the evil of the world are no more than words without
meaning or purpose. Hegel argues that it is this withdrawal of virtuous
individuality into itself that determines the abstract forms of work, satisfaction,
and desire that are presented in Utilitarian philosophy. The only standard
of judgement that this monadic consciousness can employ is that of its own
individuality, and so its every act of self-realization is understood as intrinsically
honest and good (Hegel, 1967a: 424–5). Thus, the freedom that is characteristic
of this association of individuals remains purely fortuitous: it arises spontane-
ously from their particular physiologies, is given objective form in the public
sphere, and determines a state of perpetual conflict among the ‘community’ of
independent persons (Hegel, 1967a: 431). Ultimately, therefore, the principle of
utility is a hypostatization of this abstract freedom, the form in which antago-
nistic cultures of pleasure, irony, and luxury constantly return to the substance
of ethical life.
The concept of civil society that Hegel presents in The Philosophy of Right is
essentially related to this account of the dynamics of individual pleasure. His
argument is that the formal-legal relationships that constitute civil society are
essential to the modern order of ethical life; for, without the modes of reflection
that are characteristic of the bourgeois individual, the state would be unable
to accomplish the movement into subjective recognition that is demanded by
its concept (Hegel, 1967b: 122–56). However, the pursuit of happiness in civil
society is always haunted by spectres of excess and mortality. The development
of technical means for the satisfaction of need, and the proliferation of egoistic
desires that accompanies this development, inevitably gives rise to the distortions
of subjective desire, moral will, and legal recognition that belong to the concept
of modernity. Thus, the question posed in The Philosophy of Right concerns the
possibility of bringing the moral, legal, and political configurations of individu-
alism that have come to dominate civil society back into the universality of the
state (Hegel, 1967b: 126–34). And so, Hegel’s account of the institutions that
crystallize within civil society (‘Right as Law’, ‘Law Determinately Existent’,
‘Court of Justice’) describes the movement of self-consciousness from the
‘external’ relationships that Utilitarian philosophy conceived as the absolute
principle of civil association, towards an explicit recognition of the state as the
substance of work, satisfaction, and desire.
The essential question that arises here concerns the relationship between
the atomistic experience of pleasure and the hard necessity of death. In Hegel’s
account of the modern form of ethical life, it is through their work that
self-conscious individuals transform the objective world, and also moderate
the experience of mortality through their participation in the universality
of the state (Hegel, 1967b: 123). Thus, the methodical practice of work and
the relations that arise from it (family, sexual difference, property, respect,
conscience) are essentially related to the experience of the infinite that is made
actual in the body of the state. And yet the pleasures of abstract individualism
retain an excessive intensity, for the fact of their separation from the substance
of ethical life is what gives them their particular jouissance. Thus, for Hegel, the
defining problem of modernity lies in the formation of the ‘self ’ as an abstract
ego that takes its own actions and desires to be the origin of the state and its
institutions (Hegel, 1967b: 127–8). In the section that follows, I will examine
the most extreme form this cult of individualism has taken, that is, the quasi-
Nietzschean account of self-overcoming, daring innovation, hard necessity, and
sovereign excess that is the core of neoliberal economics. Before turning to this
particular account of the political economy of happiness however, I want to look
at the rather more conservative reading of Utilitarian thought that has formed
the basis of the ‘new science’ of wellbeing.
Richard Layard begins his book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science with
a rejection of one of the axioms of modern economics: that greater GDP, more
wealth, and higher rates of consumption always increase the sum of human
happiness (Layard, 2005: ix). He argues that the recent history of developed
Western societies has proved this beyond doubt. For, despite the fact that the
general level of affluence in most Western nations increased continuously

between 1993 and 2002, the World Health Authority found that depression had
become the most common form of disability in both the European Union and
the United States (Layard, 2005: 181–4). This, according to Layard, is because
the economist’s equation of higher purchasing power with more happiness is
simply wrong. It is wrong because the enjoyment we get from consumption
diminishes as our ability to consume increases. Material consumption per se
cannot make us happy, for its logic is always one of diminishing returns, which
culminates in satiety and loss of meaning.
For Layard, Bentham’s account of happiness as the outcome of physical
pleasure is still the best approach to the issue of what kind of society we should
strive to create. His new science develops Bentham’s account of the ethics of
corporeal affection through a neurophysiological model of the relationship
between brain function and the social formation of each individual subject
(Layard, 2005: 17–20). Or, to put it slightly differently, Bentham’s approach
to happiness maintains that neuroscience provides a description of the basic
structures and chemical processes that constitute the foundation of cognition,
motivation, and sociality. This insight, according to Layard, adds three crucial
elements to Bentham’s version of Utilitarianism. First, it provides the basis of
an evolutionary account of human society in which the pleasures of friendship,
physical contact, and family groups are taken as reducible to the functionality
of social cooperation. Second, it supplies a theory of how social, economic, and
political institutions are related to the fundamental desires of human beings; of
how, for example, they exaggerate acquisitive tendencies while suppressing the
moral satisfactions of cooperation and care for others. Finally, it enables us to
make properly scientific judgements about how society ought to be organized
in order to maximize the greatest happiness for the greatest number. For, if
we know what the primordial sources of pain and pleasure are, it should be
possible to devise a more open and democratic system of collective wellbeing.
Thus, the fundamental question Layard seeks to answer is this: given the specific
neurophysiological constitution of human beings, what is the happiest kind of
society?
Layard approaches this question by deducing a set of socio-political
principles from the neuropsychological model of human motivation (Layard,
2005: 6–8). This deduction can be briefly summarized. The neuropsycho-
logical constitution of human beings is the outcome of genetic modifications
that have proved positive for the evolution of the species. Once this evolution
has produced the basic institutions of civilization, it is the social, economic,

and political organization of human life that has the greatest influence on
the sum of happiness. Given that pleasure is the ultimate good for human
beings, the best type of society is the one that maximizes their pleasure and
minimizes their suffering. Such a society would be one in which certain kinds
of pleasure naturally predominate; for excessive egoism, infidelity, and acquisi-
tiveness always lead to increasing levels of unhappiness. Thus, for Layard, the
good society is one in which the pleasures and obligations of sociality are
constantly reinforced by their public performance, and in which friendship,
trust, and stable community are valued more highly than material wealth and
status. According to Layard’s analysis the closest approximation to this ideal is
Western-style liberal democracy4, but with a much less acquisitive economy,
a much more responsible state (which would utilize the science of human
motivation for a more effective promotion of happiness), and a greater determi-
nation to perfect the wellbeing of all individuals (Layard, 2005: 149–65). And
so, while it is true that human desire always retains the potential for excess, it is
possible to organize it into a functional totality whose evolution would sustain
the highest possible level of social satisfaction.
Stated in this way it is difficult to argue against Layard’s formulation of
the new science of happiness. His account of the connection between the
fundamental feelings of pleasure that make human life worthwhile, and the
institutional forms in which these feelings are best able to flourish seems to
provide a watertight account of how the scientific, technological, and economic
resources of modernity could be most humanely deployed. The moral conserv-
atism that Layard sets against neoliberal economics, therefore, is sanctioned by
the affective catastrophe the latter has produced in the West. We have, in other
words, been made profoundly unhappy by the subjection of work, family, and
religion to standards of efficiency that have destroyed their power to regulate the
social life of human beings (Layard, 2005: 127–48). However, the emergence of a
new science, especially one that seems to take us back to what we already knew
about the good life, demands to be treated with a certain level of scepticism.
There is a tendency in much of the recent work on the science of happiness, to
treat the neurological pathways of the brain as if they were sentient processes
that experience pleasure or pain5. They are presented as the material foundation
of self-consciousness, and their maximal satisfaction becomes the essential
purpose of family, civil society, and state. What Hegel’s account of the evolution
of Sittlichkeit teaches us however, is that any attempt to ground the experience of
self-consciousness in the ‘facts’ of its material being, are always complicated by

the economy of representation and recognition through which the experience
of truth and objective necessity is mediated. So, we need to look more closely
at the concept of affective integration that is at the core of the new science of
happiness.
Layard’s appeal to the sensations that are hardwired into our self-consciousness
pays almost no attention to the categories, relations, and ideas through which
pleasure is experienced within the totality of modern life. There is no doubt
that the positive psychology and pharmaceutical interventions that are essential
to the new science of happiness have a certain kind of effectiveness, and much
of the evidential support that is presented by Layard and others concentrates
on how individual lives have been transformed by the manipulation of chronic
neuropsychological dysfunctions. However, it is the leap from this therapeutic
regime to the claim that we should treat society as a mechanism for the equili-
bration of pleasure that is problematic. As we have seen, the neo-Utilitarian
position refers to a conception of somatic pleasure that lies at the origin of
human society, and which is threatened by the increasing ‘abstraction’ of work,
satisfaction, and desire characteristic of late modernity. In Layard’s thought, it is
the neoliberal determination constantly to accelerate growth and consumption
that is the greatest danger to community life and happiness. This postulation
of the shape and temporality of ethical life, however, is essentially problematic;
for the gift of cathexis (Eros) is always conditional, always becoming impossible
in the shifting terrain of atomistic modernity, and can never be made good by
simply restoring the old estate (Rose, 2008: 208). Thus, in the final section of
the chapter, I will argue that the ‘new science’ is a deeply conservative approach
to the question of happiness; for it stands opposed to networks of innovation,
autonomy, and simulation that have facilitated the spread of global capital,
without the means or desire to transform them. Or, putting it another way, the
neo-Utilitarian approach is turned away from the vast dimensions of suffering
to which the global frenzy of consumerism has given rise, and is dedicated, as
Hegel said, to ‘the shape of life grown old’ that is still traceable in the ideology
of the nation state (Hegel, 1967b: 13). Before turning to the possibility of ethical
desire in the time of globalization however, we need to examine the particular
seductions of neoliberal ideology, and how they have taken hold of the Western
imagination of happiness.
Life beyond contentment
In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche remarked that ‘from lack of rest our
civilization is ending in a new barbarism. Never have the active, that is to say
the restless people, been prized more’ (Nietzsche, 1994: 172). On the following
page, he claimed that ‘without stable lines on the horizon of his life’, the soul
of a man becomes ‘restless, distracted, and covetous: he knows no happiness
and gives none’ (Nietzsche, 1994: 173). This is very close to the warning about
abstract individualism with which Hegel begins the section on civil society in
The Philosophy of Right. Hegel, as we have seen, argues that, once the individual
ego becomes divided from the substance of the Polis, the sheer particularity
of its desire threatens to destroy the chance of self-recognition that arises
from its original moment of separation (Hegel, 1967b: 123). If the ‘I’ of self-
consciousness lacks the possibility of reflecting on its own desire, in other
words, it cannot return to the unity of Sittlichkeit. Thus, for both Nietzsche and
Hegel, the ‘spiritual’ vocation of humanity is threatened by the proliferation of
desires that takes place through the modern market economy. Both maintain
that such desires are ways of avoiding, forgetting, or compensating for the fact
of mortality – but ways which, in the end, determine an experience of death
that is all the more unhappy. For, if the activity of consumption is made into
the ultimate end of life, then the negation of such an existence confronts the
pleasure-seeker as an unbearable fact that he can neither change nor accom-
modate (Tubbs, 2008: 30–3).
Yet Hegel is not Nietzsche, and their respective accounts of the relationship
between pleasure, mortality, and the purpose of life, mark a radical divergence
within the philosophy of spirit. The nature of this divergence is difficult to
specify without lapsing into caricature, but it seems to me that the best way to
understand it is in terms of the idea of ‘the Pharisees’ that Nietzsche presents
in part three of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche, 1984: 214–32)6. Nietzsche’s
argument is that the spirit of religiosity always clings to idealist thought; for
the concepts to which it reduces the contingency of the world are, in the end,
expressions of a deeply held wish for divine order and stability in human life.
This designation of the truth, no matter how sophisticated its mediation of ‘the
particular’, is constantly retraced in the form of the Pharisees: the body of men
who keep the moral conscience of Sittlichkeit, and who ‘crucify him who devises
his own virtue’. This punitive function of the Pharisees is inevitable: insofar as
they are charged with preserving the integrity of divine revelation, they must
be seen to enforce the sacred order of the law (Nietzsche, 1984: 229). And so, if
we read Hegel’s account of civil society through Nietzsche’s designation of the
complicity between idealism and religion, it is possible to discern a movement
from the particularity of desire to the secular administration of justice, through
to the intuitive, quasi-familial body of the corporation (Hegel, 1967b: 122–55).
The ethico-religious root of the state, in other words, is immanent in material
desires that seem to promise little more than chaotic individualism. The
question that arises from this reading of Hegel, which is rather different from
the one presented in the previous section, concerns the intensity of the desire
that is constituted in civil society. For, if it is the case, as Nietzsche maintains,
that the productive-acquisitive constitution of man should be understood as a
particular modification of the will to power, then our analyses of civil society
should aim to illuminate the effects of Homo economicus on the power of
humanity to overcome the limits of its present existence.
However, simply to assume that the relationships constituted in civil society
function only to degrade the spiritual life of human beings, would not be true
to Nietzsche’s account of the satisfactions of economic activity. In Human, All
Too Human he makes a distinction between the cold rationality of science and
the ‘illusions, biases and passions’ that sustain the affective bonds of everyday
existence (Nietzsche, 1994: 154). The latter are essential to the constitution of
society, for without the pleasures of consumption, popular art, and ordinary
taste, the common run of life would lose the moral stability that is essential to
the work of civilization. Yet this ‘work’ has a tendency to become overheated.
On the one hand, the pleasures of consumption are multiplied to the point
where the masses are constantly distracted by capricious desires, and on the
other, ceaseless productivity becomes the only way in which the intellect can
justify itself. This overheated condition is, for Nietzsche, endemic in modernity:
the obsession with production and consumption that has come to dominate
Western societies is the result of a historical process in which ‘science’ has been
made into the instrument of human need. Thus, if there is to be a modern
form of civilization in which the economy no longer determines the progress
of culture, science must emerge as a distinct form of rationality that is able to
transform the cycle of work, consumption, and desire. Such a science will always
have departed from the utilitarian logic that is inscribed in civil society, and will
be responsible to futures whose approach cannot be expressed in the terms of
economic recuperation, distributive justice, or collective happiness (Nietzsche,
1994: 154; 1974: 253).
How then is neoliberal ideology related to Nietzsche’s philosophy? It seems

to me that there are two elements in Nietzsche’s thought that are crucial to
this relationship. The first is the concept of overcoming itself. The virtue of
the ‘Fearless Ones’ that Nietzsche commends in The Gay Science is one of
‘happiness, exhilaration and encouragement’: an ethic of absolute individu-
alism that exceeds every form of pity and seeks only to solicit the highest
independence of man (Nietzsche, 1974: 280). This notion of virtuous selfishness
has become a fundamental constituent of neoliberal ideology: the idea that the
state is a drag on the power of each individual to exceed his limitations and
to galvanize the lives of others, is transformed into what Benjamin called the
religion of ‘explosive and discontinuous’ innovation (Benjamin, 1997b: 289).
The virtues of this religion, as we will see, take shape in the radical individu-
alism expounded by Nozick, Friedman, and Hayek. The second element is the
demand for action that originates in Nietzsche’s account of the responsibilities
of knowledge. True knowledge, for Nietzsche, lies closer to death than to the
contentments of ethical life (work, family, church); and so the responsibility
of ‘knowing’ lies in always soliciting what is possible, what might come, the
monstrosity of the future (Nietzsche, 1984: 311–13). This demand cannot be
discharged in the order of civil society, as even the most sublimely calculated
deferral of profit is still a conduit through which man’s power is channelled into
the traps of hedonism. And yet, in neoliberal ideology, the imperative to ‘act’
has acquired a quasi-Nietzschean imperative; for the demands for flexibility,
daring entrepreneurialism, and resistance to the reactionary power of the state,
stand radically opposed to the exhausted desire of Utilitarian man (Nietzsche,
1984: 39–53). Thus it is that Nietzsche’s claim that it is only through remorseless
striving and self-sacrifice that true happiness can be achieved, has become the
axiom of neoliberal ideology.
We have seen that in Nietzsche’s thought, the concepts of chance and
overcoming are closely related: if there is to be any virtue that is worthy of the
name, it has to endure the unforeseen hardships that afflict each individual life.
Virtuous overcoming is virtuous precisely because it is not based upon moral
prescription or pious withdrawal from the world; it is fearlessness towards the
future and whatever contingencies it may bring. It is a particular version of this
idea of the relationship between radical contingency and individual striving
that marks the break between Utilitarian and ‘neoliberal’ thought. Milton
Friedman, in his Capitalism and Freedom, expresses this succinctly. He argues
that the basic principle on which the market economy is founded is ‘voluntary
bi-lateral exchange’, or, ‘to each according to what he and the instruments he
owns produces’ (Friedman, 1962: 161–2). The conventional objection to this
is that, historically, the realization of the principle of free exchange has been
compromised by the emergence of a class hierarchy in which the unequal
distribution of wealth has all but destroyed equality of opportunity. Friedman’s
position, however, is that to view the de facto existence of inequality as the
outcome of economic laws governing the evolution of capitalism is to begin
by ignoring the vital principle that instituted the market economy in the first
place. That principle, according to Friedman, is chance; for if the investigation
were to go back far enough, it would be possible to trace the origin of all
inequalities to contingent transactions that took place between individuals in
the state of nature (Friedman, 1962: 163). Friedrich Hayek, in his essay ‘The
Use of Knowledge in Society’, makes a similar point: he talks of the ‘marvel’
of the price system, where fluctuations produce a spontaneous adaptation
of businesses to new circumstances that could not possibly be achieved by
a centralized planning authority (Hayek, 1945: 9). Thus, if the market is to
function as a stimulus to individual striving, it is essential that this sense of
chance, of possibility, be maintained. For without it, the individual becomes
little more than a cipher of the political forces and powers that control
economic life, and finds himself locked into a regime that robs him of dignity
and self-reliance (Friedman, 1962: 165).
Nietzsche’s account of virtue constitutes a demand for action that risks
everything, even life itself, for the sake of conviction. In neoliberal thought, this
absolute demand is represented through the regime of rational choice, natural
rights, and the heroism of the entrepreneur. Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State
and Utopia, for example, begins from Locke’s account of a state of nature in
which individuals are bearers of natural rights of possession and self-protection
(Locke, 1988: 118–20; Nozick, 1974: 26–8). He argues that the kind of state
that emerges from the incipient protective associations that arise among men
in the state of nature is ‘ultraminimal’; its sole function is to stabilize relations
among warring factions and to determine a table of retributive law and penal
sanctions. Thus, for Nozick, the fundamental question of political philosophy is:
if there are natural rights, and if the state emerges as an agency whose essential
purpose is to protect those rights, then what is the proper balance between the
regulative function of the state (its determination of who merits what) and the
spontaneous order of action (the market) that springs from individual freedoms
(Nozick, 1974: 82–3)?
Nozick’s answer to this question is to argue that, although the ultraminimal

state is insufficient to guarantee the best possible life for each individual citizen,
the extension of its powers of intervention into the life of civil society ought to be
strictly limited by the principle of individual rights. In practice this means that
the range of moral legislations that are open to the state is extremely limited. For,
if political morality is defined strictly in relation to individual freedom of action,
then the function of the minimal state is essentially that of determining when
violations of the ‘moral space around an individual’ have occurred (Nozick,
1974: 57). If the bar is set too low, and each individual is made subject to random
violations of his liberty on the basis of universal compensability, the state fails
in its duty to protect the natural rights of each individual. However, if the bar
is set too high, the state becomes responsible for recompensing each individual
who claims that his position in the economic hierarchy is the result of ‘natural’
disadvantages that are beyond his control (Nozick, 1974: 223). Thus, the state
should tolerate entrepreneurial activities that risk the violation of individual
sovereignty, and so the maximum extent of its obligation to compensate is deter-
mined by the particular cases of damage that arise from the free exchange of the
market (Nozick, 1974: 78–84). According to Nozick, therefore, the aim of wealth
redistribution, in the form of taxation to fund state pensions, welfare benefits,
and public housing, is completely at odds with the principle of self-reliance:
the way to happiness lies not in increasing the weight of social responsibilities
assumed by the state and its citizens, but in allowing each individual to live
‘experimentally’ in spontaneous productive associations (Nozick, 1974: 331–3).
I argued above that the difference between liberalism and neoliberalism
is marked by the latter’s movement towards a kind of quasi-Nietzschean
vitalism that gives unconditional priority to adaptation, innovation, and self-
overcoming. Nietzsche’s demand for a ‘bestowing virtue’ however is touched by
the spectre of death; for those who live in absolute independence of the morality
of the herd, must constantly risk the comfort and enjoyment of their lives, in
order to become exemplary beings that point the way to the future (Nietzsche,
1984: 26–38). The experience of death, as that which belongs to the ecstasy of
overcoming, however, is fundamentally altered by the ideology of economic
freedom. Man is captured by the mechanism of production: his pleasures are
those of immediate gratification, his friendships are always touched by the
cynicism of the market, and his risks are dispersed into the statistical proba-
bilities of heart attack, cancer, or suicide that arise from the pressures of the
economy. The liberal ideology of happiness therefore is balanced between an
evolutionary concept of desire as the ‘natural’ ground of human community,

and a conditional welcome to new forms of socially generated pleasure.
Neoliberalism, however, is essentially related to the transformation of the
global economy that took place towards the end of the twentieth century,
the principal factors of which were the virtualization of exchange value and the
aestheticization of mass desire. Under these conditions, ‘happiness’, as Layard et
al have pointed out, is identified with the constant expansion of desire beyond
the qualitative and quantitative limits that were thought to define it, and with
the ‘hit’ that is made possible by such transgressive innovation. In the radically
individualistic version of liberalism that has become hegemonic in Western
economies therefore, the Nietzschean demand for self-overcoming has been
transformed into an empty pursuit of pleasure, which is obsessed with the
avoidance of death and the constant revitalization of failing desire.
I will come to the consequences of this aestheticization of desire in Chapter
Two, on the postmodernist dream of unlimited possibility. Before the question
of happiness in postmodern times can be addressed, however, we need to look at
the older philosophical question of what moral desire is, where it originates, and
how it might realize itself in the world. For, if we are to criticize the postmodern
regime of synthetic pleasure, we must have a sense of the moral satisfactions it
has succeeded in erasing from the map of subjective experience. This, for me,
is the question raised by the apologists for the New World Order, who view the
demise of the Soviet Union and the liberalization of the Chinese economy, as
the ‘end of history’, or, more specifically, the triumph of liberal capitalism over
the forces of political repression. For it is in the ideology of liberal exchange,
legal rights, personal freedom, and moral self-determination, that the neoliberal
attempt to transfigure the violence of pure egoism reveals its aporetic structure.
In the final section therefore, I will argue that it is in the inscription of such
rights as the hegemonic form of freedom, happiness, and democracy that we
can determine the satisfactions of a certain political ethics, whose original form
Derrida designates as hospitality.
Life, death and the new world order
Emmanuel Levinas once remarked of love that it is ‘the possibility of the

Other appearing as an object of need, or, again, the possibility of enjoying
the Other, placing oneself … beneath and beyond discourse’ (Levinas, 1994:
255). The erotic relationship, in other words, is not fixed in the Other as pure
concupiscence; it is drawn beyond his or her immediacy to the incalculable
fact that Others will always come, and to the infinite horizon of care to which
moral desire is responsible. Thus, for Levinas, the erotic is ‘the equivocal par
excellence’, the uncontainable chance of moral desire. I began this chapter by
examining the basic claims of Utilitarianism: that happiness arises primarily
from the physical frame of the body; that moral culture is essentially related to
the regular experience of pleasure; and that the fundamental principle of human
society lies in the reproducibility of somatic enjoyment. Clearly then, there is
a contradiction between these two approaches to the question of happiness.
Classical Utilitarianism begins with the assumption that happiness is grounded
in a state of corporeal wellbeing, which can be steadily augmented by the
rational-technological progress of human society. Even the more subtle versions
of this position, like J. S. Mill’s account of higher pleasures, remain committed
to this fundamental principle. For Levinas, however, the Utilitarian assumption
of pleasure as an unmediated state is simply wrong. In its very origin, our sense
of identity (ego, ipseity) emerges from the primordial experience of sharing a
certain vulnerability with those we encounter; and it is this experience which,
for both Levinas and Derrida, is the origin of the moral desire that springs,
without precedent, from the system of utilitarian production. In this section,
therefore, I will examine the mutation of Liberal and Utilitarian ideologies that
has taken place in response to the globalization of capital, and the possibility of
forming a cosmopolitan ethics that exceeds the compulsions of technologically
reproducible desire.
I want to begin by examining Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the
Last Man, as it is here that the idea of a capitalist ‘New World Order’ is given its
most celebratory expression. The theoretical foundation of Fukuyama’s book is
a reading of Hegel that is taken from Alexander Kojève. What Fukuyama found
attractive in Kojève’s account of The Phenomenology of Mind was his concen-
tration on the dialectics of recognition, particularly in the extended discussion
of the master-slave dialectic that comprises the first chapter of his Introduction
to the Reading of Hegel. Essentially, Kojève’s account of the master-slave dialectic
attempts to show how the absolute domination of the master institutes the
history of social recognition that is played out in Hegel’s philosophy. The life or
death struggle in the state of nature produces a form of social organization in
which the master exists as a subject absorbed in his own desires, and the slave,
as the self-consciousness that mediates between nature and the desire of the
master, is transformed by the continuous demands of work performed under

threat of death (Hegel, 1967a: 228–40). Kojève understands Hegel’s master-slave
dialectic as the origin of the concrete forms of social life in which the work of
self-consciousness is denied proper recognition. He presents the ideal form
of their relationship as a type of universal transparency, in which the activity
of each individual transforms itself, its other, and the mutual experience of
the world (Kojève, 1969: 27–30). For Kojève, however, the realization of this
ideal is problematic. In a footnote to his lecture on the final section of The
Phenomenology of Spirit, he remarked that, from a certain perspective, the
consumer capitalism of 1960s America had already achieved the universal avail-
ability of things that is characteristic of Marx’s ‘classless society’ (Kojève, 1969:
161). And yet this virtual simultaneity of desire and satisfaction is what solicits
a return of the Hegelian question of spirit: the contentment of post-historical
man is such that it threatens to reduce him to a condition of complacency that
is without opposition to the play of utilitarian desire (Kojève, 1969: 162).
The reading of Hegel presented in The End of History and the Last
Man, however, ends up postulating the rational subjectivity of the French
Enlightenment as the model of free citizenship. The essence of man, in other
words, appears in Fukuyama’s historiography as a free intelligence, which, when
it is deprived of the right to express itself, is made subject to a fundamental
violation of its dignity. Indeed, the defining characteristic of political violence
is the denial of basic rights of physical and spiritual recognition (thymos)
to any self-conscious individual (Fukuyama, 1992: 162–5). Yet the ethical
position that Fukuyama derives from Kojève’s reading of Hegel is conjoined
with a libertarian concept of the value of free subjectivity. Fukuyama argues
that the generally higher levels of prosperity achieved by liberal democratic
societies are not accidental, and that these societies’ recognition of the diverse
and unequal abilities of each individual citizen has been the decisive factor in
their domination of the world economy (Fukuyama, 1992: 235–44). So, while
it is true that religious conflicts, wealth inequalities, and political repression
continue to distort the ideal functioning of the global market, it is also the case,
according to Fukuyama, that the unity of freedom and happiness established in
liberal democratic societies will, in the long run, overcome the perverse satisfac-
tions of all other political regimes. Once the last enclaves of fascism, socialism,
and theocracy succumb to the rational satisfactions of the market, man will
settle into the happy complacency that Fukuyama calls the end of history. The
technological networks through which money, knowledge, and information are
distributed will attain their maximum efficiency, every individual will be able to
realize his or her productive potential, and all the technological resources of the
world will be dedicated to the happiness of man as such (Fukuyama, 1992: 314).
This reduction of humanity to a post-historical species whose every
need is satisfied, and whose happiness has become the guiding principle of
liberal democracy, is not, for Fukuyama, an entirely desirable state of affairs.
According to his reading of Hegel, the history of spirit that is presented in The
Phenomenology of Mind is the history of the great political events that have
transformed human society. The truth of humanity, in other words, has arisen
from conflicts that are essentially ‘thymotic’, that is, concerned with the condi-
tions of ethical, political, and moral recognition. And so, by the time Western
liberal democracies have developed into the happiness machines they have
become, the dynamics of this thymotic struggle have begun to wane. For the
risks that are essential to the movement of Hegelian spirit are beginning to
recede into the past, and man is becoming the passive consumer of repetitive
utilitarian pleasures. The impending completion of history, therefore, gives rise
to a fundamental problem: if the totality of satisfactions offered by techno-
logically advanced liberal democratic societies fundamentally threatens the
thymotic vocation of man, how will it be possible to maintain the transformative
will that is essential to the spirit of humanity?
Fukuyama’s answer is to suggest that it is already possible to discern a new
economy of thymotic activity in the most developed liberal democracies. Once
the problem of need has been overcome by the technological development of
forces of production, the ideal of eliminating substantial differences of individual
happiness emerges as political programme (Marxist-Leninism, Maoism, welfare
capitalism). Such attempts to make isothymia, or material equality, the principle
of social organization, however, are doomed to failure. For the infinite number
of differences obtaining among discrete individuals will always render impos-
sible the effort to suppress their expression as innovative activity. It is nature,
in other words, that restores thymotic striving to post-historical man, as the
sheer spontaneity of individual difference will always return to the totality of
the planned society. The desire for recognition therefore is a natural desire that
belongs to the essence of humanity, and when this has become uncoupled from
the struggle for subsistence, ‘thymotic individuals begin to search for other
kinds of contentless activities that can win them recognition’ (Fukuyama, 1992:
319). These activities include scientific and technological innovation, business
entrepreneurialism, and all the ways in which social status and respect are
gained. Beyond this, however, the pursuit of excellence in diverse activities

like mountaineering, skydiving, language learning, and music, are also ways in
which the ‘Nietzschean’ demand for recognition of excellence (megalothymia) is
expressed (Fukuyama, 1992: 313–15)7. Thus, the stultifying tendencies that arise
from the technological organization of happiness (as rational consumption,
regimented leisure time) are counteracted by the thymotic innovation that is
implicit in the form of liberal capitalism.
But there is something missing here. Fukuyama’s account of the end of
history, or rather the historical evolution that brings us to the point at which
history is about to end, is careful to present the rise of liberal democracy and
the free market as a process led by man’s natural desire for spiritual recognition.
The concept of capitalism is never allowed to crystallize into the complex play
of mastery and slavery, freedom and determinism that arises from the interrela-
tions of labour power, commodities, technology, and scientific knowledge. Thus,
Fukuyama’s appropriation of the Hegelian concept of spirit maintains that the
external relations of civil society constitute the realization of free subjectivity,
and that post-historical man will live out his life as a happy thymotic individu-
alist. However, it is difficult to see how the logic of this historiography can
escape the accusation of complicity with the economic and technological condi-
tions that have shaped the evolution of global capitalism. The critiques of civil
society that Hegel and Nietzsche develop in their work, as we have seen, focus
on the illusory forms of sovereignty, moral self-determination, and aesthetic
sensibility that arise within the sphere of abstract individualism. And so, despite
the fact that their respective philosophies lead in radically different directions,
it is the infringement of functional-utilitarian rationality on man’s unrealized
potential, or spirit, that each presents as the negative power of modernity. The
secret of Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ is that it conceals the modes of violence
and subjection through which global-technological capitalism operates, and
consigns the activity of spirit to the play of ‘contentless’ striving.
The line of argument I have pursued in this chapter is that happiness, both
as a concept and a form of experience, is originally bound up with the idea of
spirit. There is, in other words, no true sense of happiness that does not arise
from responsibilities that exceed the Utilitarian designation of contentment.
The idea of spirit, however, is not fixed, and the philosophies I have chosen
as exemplary of the relationship between modernity and spirit are marked by
fundamental differences of style, emphasis, and political significance. What
these differences reflect, I believe, are transformations of the way in which
spirit, as a responsibility that is not programmatically determined by existing

productive relations, inhabits the technological body of capital. In Hegel’s
thought, particularly The Philosophy of Right, there is an anticipation of the
forms of abstract freedom that have come to dominate civil society (aesthetic
distraction, Romanticism, irony), and to jeopardize the reformation of atomistic
self-consciousness within the substance of ethical life (Hegel, 1967b: 122–34). In
Nietzsche’s work, the modern nexus of technology, productivity, and democracy
is made the subject of a radical critique of Utilitarian contentment: if man is to
go beyond his animal nature, it must be done through the transformative vigour
that springs from the satiety of the most noble spirits (Nietzsche, 1974: 240–4;
1994: 171–3). I am certainly not claiming that Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s respective
configurations of spirit are simply reflections of the atomistic culture of capital.
What I am suggesting is that the engagement of the self in the mediatic, techno-
logical, and scientific production of happiness, has transformed the way in
which spirit inhabits the totality of capitalist relations. And so I will conclude
by examining the fate of ‘substance’ and ‘overcoming’, as forms of non-utilitarian
satisfaction, within the networks of the global market.
In Spectres of Marx, Derrida presents the question of ‘spirit’ as one that
belongs to the economy of presence and absence, substance and dissemination,
which is essential to the constitution of human society (Derrida, 1994: xvii–xx).
The fundamental significance of Marx’s work therefore, lies in his recognition
of the impact of capital on the temporality of this experience: as the demands of
rational-technological production are brought to bear on the whole social and
individual life, so the dynamics of community, identity, and self-recognition
are fundamentally altered. This process is not static, and the argument Derrida
pursues in Spectres of Marx is that there has been a fundamental shift in the
mode of exploitation: the psychical constitution of the self is deeply entangled
in the virtual networks of media technologies, the dominant regime of work is
transformed from physical/manual to technical/conceptual, the body is made
a possible object of technological prosthesis, and consumption has become
the implicit necessity underlying every form of social exchange8. The evolution
of this regime does, of course, beg the question of spirit; for if the reality of
subjective mind (a la Hegel) and corporeal existence (a la Nietzsche) has
merged into the matrices of the biopolitical production, then the question of
ethical and political agency becomes urgent. Clearly, the extent to which this
homogenization of experience has actually taken place is not an uncontentious
issue, for both conventional Marxists and neoliberals have sought to maintain
the idea of a ‘public reason’ that collectively resists the integrative powers of
capital. However, it is incontestably true that the conditions under which ethical
and political responsibilities can be recognized and acted upon have been trans-
formed, and that this transformation requires us to re-examine the concepts of
substance, spirit, and moral desire.
If the aim of the technological manipulation of ‘man’ is the constant repro-
duction of his happiness, then the question we must address concerns the
violence that is implicit in the perfection of this regime. Derrida’s reading of
Marx is important here because of the relationship he seeks to establish between
the ideology of happiness that is perpetuated by neoliberalism (work, striving,
consumption, flexibility) and the logics of exclusion, homogenization, and
silencing that are co-present with the networks of biopolitical production. The
spatial and temporal dynamics of this relationship are extremely complex, for the
totality of ‘capital’ extends into the internal organization of developed economies,
the relationships between those economies and Second and Third World nations,
and the international systems of policing and cooperation that have come into
being with the spread of the global economy (Derrida, 1994: 77–88). In order to
understand the fate of ethico-political responsibility, therefore, we need to under-
stand the relationships between those who are able to participate in the ‘managed
playground’ of consumer capitalism, and those who occupy the marginal
positions that service the developed economies of the world market. The former
do not, of course, constitute a homogenous body, as they are fragmented across
national, economic, and political lines. However, it is possible to identify a
fundamental difference in the fate of those on the geopolitical margins of the
system, for the fact of the divide between ‘Third’ and ‘First’ worlds is inexplicable
without reference to the systems of technological mediation/exploitation that
have come to dominate the global economy. The logic of mastery and slavery, in
other words, is re-inscribed in the international relationships that emerge from
the totality of biopolitical production. And so, for Derrida, if we are to form
a proper understanding of the play of narcissism, friendship, and subjection
through which the chance of ethico-political responsibility is determined, it is
essential to attend to the contingent encounters that occur between the margin
and the centre of the world economy (Derrida, 1994: 96–9).
In an interview that was published as ‘There is No One Narcissism’, Derrida
returned to the economy of desire and representation he first addressed in
Of Grammatology. His original claim was that Rousseau’s discussion of the
danger of excessive sexual desire in modern society has a paradoxical structure.
The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (see Rousseau, 1988) postulates a

‘natural’ hierarchy that predestines men and women to occupy their respective
positions of domination and subservience in the moral order of society. And
yet, for Rousseau, the condition of this order are the supplementary forms
of inscription through which human society has been corrupted (literature,
painting, theatre). Derrida’s point is that there is nothing outside this economy
of supplementation, and that desire is always already affected by the inscription
of the other in the soul of the self (Derrida, 1976: 175–9). So, to return to the
essay on narcissism, Derrida maintains that the very condition of self-identity is
the ‘movement of narcissistic appropriation’, and that this movement is haunted
in advance by spectres that are provoked by the performative certainties of
race, gender, and nation (Derrida, 1995: 199). The engagement of the self in
the relations that constitute ‘the social’, in other words, is always done on the
basis of a certain self-love, for, without this auto-affection there could be no
chance of moral desire. This is not to say, however, that the modes of self-
identity that have accompanied the development of biopolitical capitalism are
inherently cosmopolitan, as they are formed within an economy that constantly
alters the dynamics of acquisitive desire. Yet this regime cannot complete itself,
as the patterns of satisfaction that determine the possibility of being happy,
are haunted by a sense of contingency that is inscribed in the structure of
each individual ego. This contingency is not itself contingent; it is the sense
of mortality that arises from the performance of freedom and consumption,
the ghostly presence of those others who attend the spectacle of a life they
cannot share (Derrida, 2000: 77). Such encounters are a practical necessity that
belongs to the neoliberal representation of life as heroic self-overcoming; and
so, for Derrida, the more the sphere of abstract right is dominated by the labile
freedoms of the neoliberal self, the more it becomes a place of spectres who
reopen the chance of moral desire, of hospitality (Derrida, 2000: 55).
Derrida presents the ‘spirit’ of Marxism as that which constantly re-emerges
from the mutations through which the productive regime of capital evolves:
One must assume the inheritance of Marxism, assume its living part, which is
to say, paradoxically, that which continues to put back on the drawing board the
question of life, spirit, and the spectral, of life-death beyond the opposition of
life and death (Derrida, 1994: 54).
The spirit of Marxism, in other words, is immanent from the sheer mutability of
the money-commodity-money (M-C-M) relation; it is the demand for practical
responsibility that arises from the physical, psychical, and cultural damage
that is done to the other by the exploitative regime of capital. This demand is
messianic rather than dialectical, for the arrival of the other, as other, is always
unforeseen: it is the alterity whose weakness undermines the fundamental
structures through which the ego identifies with itself. Thus, the experience of
happiness belongs to the organization of the ego as narcissism, for it is only in
so far is the ‘I’ is able to identify itself as a subject with specific kinds of desire,
that happiness is possible at all. And yet for Derrida this possibility is simulta-
neously impossible, as the condition of its being experienced is the presence of
others (spectres) within the protentive structure of feeling/knowing that consti-
tutes the experience of happiness. It is this fragility of happiness that makes it
essentially spiritual and political, for it is the sense of its impending loss, and
the hope of its return, that opens the possibility of being responsible for the
suffering (life or death) of the other. Or, to change the emphasis slightly, it is
the unknowability of the arrivant that transforms the immediate experience of
responsibility, and opens the chance of altering the modes of representation,
resistance, and hospitality through which politics is enacted in the biopolitical
systems of capital (Derrida, 1994: xx).
What I have attempted to do in this chapter is to give a sense of how the
economy (work, productivity, wages, and consumption) has come to dominate
the ideological register of happiness. The origin of this process, I have argued,
lies in the relationship between the Utilitarian construction of physical pleasure
as the source of all true satisfaction, and the rationality of efficient production,
sovereign consumption, and individual rights that is essential to the evolution
of capitalism. The Utilitarian account of civil society as the place of greatest
enjoyment, in other words, is essential to the formation of the neoliberal
ideology of happiness. For it is through the reduction of all satisfactions to
analogical forms of physical pleasure that Utilitarianism lays the ground for
the neoliberal demand for limitless productivity, limitless consumption, and
limitless freedom. This demand for the constant expansion of the market,
however, has become completely uncoupled from the moral economy of
collective wellbeing, and I have argued that the ‘new science’ of happiness is a
response to the failure of modern economics to address the paradox of rising
prosperity and falling levels of social satisfaction. My own position is that
this approach fails to engage with the ethical questions that are implicit in the
concept of happiness, particularly those arising from the compulsions of the
sovereign consumer and his capacity for reflection on the plight of the Other.
I have expounded these questions through the modifications of spirit that

are present in the work of Hegel, Nietzsche and Derrida, and I have shown
how each conceives the problem of how Homo economicus might transform
the repetitive cycle of production, consumption, and demoralization. This
exposition however is far from complete, as the potential that ‘postmodern’
capitalism has opened up for flights of self-love and the aesthetic transformation
of the real, demands to be investigated much more fully.
Notes
1 See especially Chapter 13 of Leviathan.

2 Kant remarks: ‘In so far as this or that individual … considers himself as a member
of a complete commonwealth, or even of cosmopolitan society, and thence as a man
of learning who may through his writings address a public in the truest sense of the
word, he may indeed argue without harming the affairs in which he is employed for
some of the time in a passive capacity’ (Kant, 1991: 56).
3 See especially Chapters 2 and 3 of Section Three.
4 The rationality of Layard’s affirmation of liberal democracy is close to Mill’s
argument that the principle of utility, while it is not naturally determined, is the
most functional for the evolutionary development of the human species. For the
freedom to pursue one’s own desires, within the limits prescribed by the moral
demand of respect for the rights of others, is essential to the idea of a happy
society. The Marxist attempt to ‘socialize’ desire is therefore guaranteed to kill the
uniqueness of every particular pleasure, and thereby to destroy the possibility of
individual happiness (Layard, 2005: 121).
5 Stefan Klein, in The Science of Happiness, for example, conceives the true purpose of
philosophy as the study of how we can come to a proper accommodation with our
passions (Klein, 2006: 82–4). Reason, in other words, should occupy a subservient
relationship to ontogenetic desire, and its moral pronouncements should always
accord with what will maximize our happiness as a social species. The distinction
between ‘control’ and ‘automatic’ processes that forms the basis of Jonathan Haidt’s
The Happiness Hypothesis offers a slightly more subtle account of the relationship
between reason and desire. His argument is that the secret of happiness consists in
finding an appropriate balance between the sensations of fear, elation, and disgust
associated with the automatic functions of the organism, and the higher functions
of control exercised by the rational self. Such a balance requires a complex
mediation of work, social attachment, and affective relations. And yet even here,
the relationship that self-consciousness has to its ontogenetic desire is one in which
the latter is presented as the determining condition of all positive moral and social
evolution (Haidt, 2006:13–22).
6 Nietzsche’s intention here is to use the Pharisaic demand for patient suffering,
respect for the laws of the Torah, and faith in God’s ordination of his chosen people
as exemplary of the power of religious orthodoxy.
7 Fukuyama’s reference to the ‘last man’ is in fact a reference to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke
Zarathustra. What comes after the ‘end of history’ is not a lapsing of humanity into
the contentment of animalistic desire, but rather the fulfilment of man’s capacity
for self-overcoming (but within the limits of Judeo-Christian morality) (Fukuyama,
1992: 313–21).
8 One of the main foci of the concept of biopolitical production that Hardt and Negri
present in Empire is the capitalization/commodification of emotional wellbeing.
Psychical health, in other words, has become an industry, and more and more
people have become involved in the labour of promoting happiness (Hardt and
Negri, 2000: 292–3). Thus it is not, I think, unreasonable to suggest that one of the
motivations behind the ‘new science’ of happiness is the smoothing out of social
space, and the emotional integration of production and consumption.
2
Postmodernism, or The Dream of

Limitless Possibility
Aesthetic consolations
T. S. Eliot, in his Four Quartets, recounts the story of man’s admission to Eden,
and the vulnerability of his soul to the pain and privation of the world. Nature,
in the guise of the thrush, enjoins man to enter, ‘as human kind cannot bear very
much reality’ (Eliot, 1980: 190). One obvious implication of this is that, after the
Fall, art and the mythologies it perpetuates are an essential part of the civilizing
process, and that, without the comforting figuration of life through the familiar
themes of love, redemption, and belonging, the world would confront us as an
alien place, refractory to all human purposes and desires. Thus, if we accept
this designation of the origin of aesthetic representation, a particular kind of
relationship emerges between art and happiness; a relationship in which the
veil of mysticism that poetry, drama, painting, and music cast over the world
is seen as offering relief from life as rational action performed in the service of
material need. It is this account of aesthetic experience that lies at the core of
the postmodern ideal of happiness as the pursuit of infinite possibility. And so,
the present chapter will examine the dissemination of this ideal of individual
striving, and its influence on the affective economy of global capitalism.
Schopenhauer’s philosophy, as we have seen, argued that the world has no
underlying purpose, and that the brute fact of the suffering it causes to most of
us for most of the time should lead us to conclude that it is the outcome of an
unhappy and accidental conjunction of circumstances. The primary cause of
human suffering is the exercise of individual will, for in attempting to pursue
a particular purpose, any given human being will inevitably experience the
frustration of his desire by external circumstances or by the contrary desires of
others. Action, in other words, is always implicated in suffering, either through
the failure of the agent to achieve his goal, or through the harm that his action
does to the wellbeing of others. The only moral position to adopt in this world
of conflicting wills is to keep one’s desires under strict control, and to behave
with forbearance towards one’s fellow sufferers, as not to do so will only increase
the sum of violence in the world. Yet even this possibility is limited by the
fact that the constitution of each particular individual is the expression of an
unchangeable will that forms his character and determines his capacity for self-
control (Schopenhauer, 1970: 143). The one possibility of remission that exists
within this remorseless mechanism is the feeling of happiness that accompanies
aesthetic transfigurations of the world. According to Schopenhauer, ‘it is quite
obvious that the beautiful as such excites pleasure in us without having any kind
of connection with our personal aims, that is to say, our will’ (Schopenhauer,
1970: 155). Aesthetic experience, in other words, is contemplation without
appetite; it is the disinterested penetration of the mind into the essence of the
object as Idea, and the absence of the particular desires from which the suffering
of each individual being derives (Schopenhauer, 1970: 156).
For Schopenhauer, therefore, the purpose of a work of art is to provoke this
‘intrinsically painless’ state of aesthetic abstraction from the world of temporal
causality. The plastic arts of sculpture and painting should seek to configure the
timeless essence of what they depict, that is, the Idea which is embodied in an
individual being or object, considered as the expression of a pure act of will.
Thus, the genius of the artist consists in his ability to manipulate the content of
the object he is depicting in such a way that the universal Idea shows through,
for it is in this manipulation that the viewer is momentarily snatched away from
the suffering of the temporal realm (Schopenhauer, 1970: 159). According to
Schopenhauer, however, it is music that allows the most direct experience of the
essence of the world. In The World as Will and Idea, he argues that there is ‘an
analogy … between music and the Ideas whose manifestation in plurality and
incompleteness, is the visible world’ (Schopenhauer, 1996: 164). The harmonies
that are made possible by the physical resonance of high and low notes, in other
words, reflect the inner constitution of the world as will; they are the phonic
solicitation of the essence of things in the soul of man, the momentary ecstasy
of transcendence. Experience of the phenomenal world is governed, as we
have seen, by need and the principle of sufficient reason; so, under the yoke of
this material necessity, human beings are destined to suffer from the constant
frustration of their desires. In the presence of music, however, they may
experience sublime gratification; for in the return of each separate modulation
to the keynote of the melody, the soul’s desire for completion is constantly
aroused and satisfied within the totality of the movement. Serious music
therefore, produces a completely non-appetitive apprehension of the world; it
Postmodernism, or The Dream of Limitless Possibility 51
is the provocation of the purest emotions, and the release of the soul from its
tragic attachment to the phenomenal world (Schopenhauer, 1996: 167–8).
Schopenhauer’s account of aesthetic experience is, of course, explicitly
Classical in its orientation, for it depicts the elevation of humanity beyond
the sufferings of the temporal realm and into a state of sublime unity with the
essence of things. The remission that human beings can achieve through the
experience of the beautiful is a timeless experience, whose possibility is given
in the power of the soul to intuit the essence of the world through its affective
faculties (Schopenhauer, 1996: 166–7). As I argued in Chapter One, however,
Schopenhauer’s philosophy tends to transform the entire range of human
feelings and capacities into reflections of his concept of ontological will; and so,
the relationship between happiness and aesthetic experience that he postulates
in The World as Will and Idea, is determined by the fundamental creative force
that sustains the order of existence (Schopenhauer, 1996: 171–2). This Classical
conception of the aesthetic, however, misses two fundamental things about the
fate of representation: first, the fact that its modalities are essentially related to
the order and complexity of the mode of production (as Marx pointed out); and
second, the fact that the relationship between representation and happiness has
become the province of technological artifice. In the three philosophies of spirit
I have expounded (Hegel, Nietzsche and Derrida), the fate of representation
within the rational-purposive structure of modernity is an explicit concern. So,
I propose to begin this chapter by expounding the place of aesthetic represen-
tation in each of these philosophies, and by examining their relationship to the
form of social life that has become known as ‘late’, or ‘postmodern’ capitalism.
In order to understand the relationship between modernity and represen-
tation properly, it is necessary to begin with the materialist thesis that Marx
developed in The German Ideology. Marx begins his exposition by claiming that
ruling ideas never come into conflict with the particular interests of the ruling
class, whatever these interests might be. His claim is that, although the ideas
set out by bourgeois philosophers, jurists, aesthetes, and economists do attain
a certain level of autonomy, and although they may seem to come into conflict
with conventional forms of political hegemony, this conflict is no more than a
‘semblance’ that dissolves in the inevitable reassertion of class interests. Thus,
although the shift from the feudalistic ideas of poverty, chastity, and obedience
to those of equality and individual rights does mark a certain level of progress
in the realization of human freedom, the increase in self-consciousness that is
brought about by the refinement of the bourgeois regime, is significant only
insofar as it sharpens the contradiction between the ideological forms in which

subjective freedom is represented, and the material deprivations under which
the mass of humanity is forced to live. Thus, for Marx, the granting of formal
equality before the law and the right to sell one’s labour on the open market is
not a transcendental differentiation of ethical life; its true significance lies in the
fact that it produces a class of workers whose ‘free’ activity is characterized by
the experience of loss and physical compulsion (Marx and Engels in McLellan,
1977: 176–82).
The important issue here is the economy of power, representation, and truth
that is implicit in Marx’s concept of ideology. The first thing to notice is that
the exemplary forms he presents in The German Ideology are discursive rather
than aesthetic; they are inscriptions of the moral, legal, normative, and religious
knowledge that constitutes the public sphere of bourgeois society. The second
thing is that these inscriptions, despite the fact that they form the substance of
social life under capitalism, are essentially false; they are misrepresentations
of the truth of work, satisfaction, and desire, and as such, perpetuate a system
of exploitative social relations. Finally, the dissimulating power of bourgeois
ideology is historically contingent, for the particular inversion of reality that is
produced by conventional forms of law, morality, art, and ethics, is grounded
in processes of exploitation that progressively impoverish the ‘species being’ of
humanity (Marx and Engels in McLellan, 1977: 176). Crucially therefore, Marx’s
account of ideology gives precedence to the institutional power of reason; for it
is in the negative experience of work, satisfaction, and desire as it is constituted
in civil society, that he locates the revolutionary immanence of capitalism. The
figurative-affective power of art therefore is given little consideration in Marx’s
thought, and he seems to regard its ‘bourgeois’ form as perpetuating a cult of
originality that ruptures the essential unity of human labour (Marx and Engels
in McLellan, 1977: 189–90). However, we can at least infer that the marginal
role that Marx gives to aesthetic representation is an inherently reactionary
one. For, if it is the case that the core of bourgeois sovereignty is the enjoyment
of mastery over both men and things, then the ‘happiness’ produced by the
ideals of heroism, romantic love, freedom, and redemption that have come to
dominate the artistic imagination, can be no more than an illusion imposed
upon the actual experience of alienation. However, and this is really the central
point I will explore in this chapter, the three philosophies through which I have
attempted to expound the question of happiness, attach a much greater impor-
tance to the aesthetic dimension of modernity than Marx. So, I want to look
briefly at the relationships between modernity and aesthetic representation that

are configured in the work of Hegel, Nietzsche and Derrida.
In his Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel makes the following general
definition of the work of art:
It is addressed to sensuous feeling, outer and inner, to sensuous perception

and imagination … [However] the work of art is not only for the sensuous
apprehension as sensuous object, but its position is of such a kind that as sensu-
ousness it is at the same time essentially addressed to the mind, that the mind
is meant to be affected by it, and to find some satisfaction in it (Hegel, 1993: 40,
author’s italics).
The work of art, in other words, is a sensuous configuration of spirit; it is a

form in which the imagination (Vorstellung) takes hold of the concept of ethical
life, and is able to apprehend it through the aesthetic figurations that are put
into play by the artist. The formation of self-consciousness through aesthetic
representation is something that, in Hegel’s thought, is essentially related to the
complexity of the social relations that make up the substance of social existence.
And so, the kind of artistic representation that is characteristic of primitive
societies is the symbolic, in which nature, encountered as an overwhelming
power, is crudely re-fashioned through cultic devices designed to intensify
the experience of transcendence (Hegel, 1993: 83). It is in the Classical art of
the Greek Polis however, that the formative power of the aesthetic emerges as
essential to the politics of happiness. In symbolic art, the Idea is expressed in
cultic objects and embellishments that invoke a sublime absolute, which is
beyond the secular world. In Classical art, this deficiency is overcome; its object
is man as the physical embodiment of subjective mind, and, as such, it seeks
to present the unity between the institutional life of the Polis and the ideal of
a spiritually ennobled humanity. Thus for Hegel, art, as a socially formative
practice, reaches its highest point in Classical Greece. For, in Hellenic culture,
the relationship between the idealized representation of humanity and the
ethical order of the state is experienced as the eternal unity of the secular and
the divine (Hegel, 1993: 85).
The Classical unity of ethical substance and the aesthetic forms through
which it is represented, occupies what Gillian Rose called an ‘impossible
position’ in Hegel’s philosophy (Rose, 1981: 113). Citizens of the Athenian state
experience its institutions as the embodiment of the goddess Athene: she is
immediately present in the legal, economic, and political relations of the Polis,
which she infuses with the aura of divinity. Classical Greek art therefore is the
expression of this happy community of feeling, intellect, and religiosity; it is the
form in which the substance of ethical life is made present to the citizen, and in
which he re-experiences the immediate satisfactions of his citizenship through
the ideals of aesthetic representation. This then, is the high point of artistic
practice as Vorstellung, or the sensuous imaginary; for it is only insofar as the
unity of the Polis is without the subjective reflection of the ego, that it is possible
for Classical art to represent the unity of Sittlichkeit ‘in an immediate and
sensuous mode’ (Hegel, 1993: 40). For Hegel therefore, the very possibility of
this representation marks both the particular deficiency of the Classical Greek
society and ‘the defect in art as a whole’ (Hegel, 1993: 85–6). The fact that ethical
life is experienced by Greek citizens as the unity of the secular and the divine
means that the happiness of the people is without reflection: no individual can
be a ‘subject’, for each lacks the experience of suffering that results from the
differentiation of spirit into subject and object, universal and particular (Rose,
1981: 113). Thus, the history of Western civilization since the Greeks, is the
history of this experience of separation; and so, if we are to understand the
significance of art in the affective constitution of modernity, we will need to
examine its relationship to the free subjectivity that has formed the sphere of
civil society. I will come back to this in the following section.
The economy of truth and aesthetic representation is a fundamental concern
of Nietzsche’s philosophy from the very beginning. In his first book, The Birth
of Tragedy, he sets out the relationship between art, truth, and the experience
of being that is configured in the pre-Socratic form of Greek drama. Rather
than pre-empt the discussion of Nietzsche in the third section of this chapter,
I will confine myself at this point to a brief indication of the relationship
between aesthetics and modernity that emerges from his thought. Put very
simply, Nietzsche’s account of Hellenic culture maintains that its highest point
comes before the emergence of the Socratic philosophy; for once the demands
of absolute clarity and rational justification are established as the model of
Sittlichkeit, the transformative experience of tragedy is forced to the margins of
the Polis. Nietzsche conceives the pre-Socratic epoch of Greek culture in terms
of the antagonism between Apollo and Dionysus: Apollo is the god of light and
prophecy who gives form (eidos) to all that is chaotic, and Dionysus is the god
of the life force (physis) which overflows every restriction that is placed upon it.
Thus, with the importation of pagan elements into Greek culture, the Apollonian
and the Dionysian come to exist in an antagonistic unity that is the apotheosis
of both: the Dionysian outpouring of voice/music is given formal structure in

the chorus, dialogue, and plot of tragic theatre; and the Apollonian demand for
order is constantly provoked beyond the reproduction of its own formalism
(Nietzsche, 1990: 28). After Socrates, however, it is the Apollonian ideal of
lucidity that achieves cultural dominance, and so the collective experience of
submersion in the unity of being is lost to the rational demands for justice,
morality, and equality that become established in the ethical life of the Polis.
This displacement of Dionysus by Apollo is, for Nietzsche, the founding
moment of modernity. In Greek tragedy, the artifice of the Apollonian ideal is
driven to its limits by the Dionysian power of the chorus; and so the audience
experiences something akin to the sublime, or the inability of the intellect to
supply concepts for what is literally overwhelming in the spectacle of nature
(Nietzsche, 1990: 133). The tragic form, therefore, is the mystical revelation of
the beauty of existence, and inevitably gives rise to powerful affects of pathos and
catharsis that are inexpressible in the discursive concepts of language. But, in the
Enlightenment culture that has taken Apollonian ideals of lucidity and rational
justification as its model, these affects are displaced, and it is the moral education
of the free individual that becomes the guiding principle of modernity. Modern
culture becomes sterile, as it is no longer the medium through which the tragic
necessity of being is constantly impressed upon the civic constitution of ‘the
people’ (Nietzsche, 1990: 136). There are, I think, two fundamental questions
that arise from this construction of the relationship between aesthetic experience
and the genealogy of modernity. The first concerns the aestheticization of the
political that Walter Benjamin conceived as the essence of fascism, and I will
examine the tragic forms of enjoyment that arise from authoritarian politics
in Chapter Five. The second question concerns the fate of the Apollonian ideal
of lucidity, or more precisely, the bathos of representation that, for Nietzsche,
is a consequence of the mass communications that have come to dominate the
public sphere (newspapers, pamphlets, magazines). Thus, in section three of
this chapter, I will trace the possibility of there being ‘Nietzschean’ interventions
in the postmodern world of fluid identities, ambiguous sexualities, and hybrid
ethnicities. Or, to change the emphasis slightly, I will explore the possibility of
configuring gestures of transformative excess that are not simply absorbed into
the simulacra of difference and happiness that dominate the representation of
social life.
In his book Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, Derrida presents an unusual thesis:
that it is the figure of ‘woman’ who, as a spectral absence that haunts the
plenitude of man’s ethical life, represents the infinitely ungraspable nature of

truth in Nietzsche’s thought (Nietzsche, 1979: 53–4). Thus, the figuration of
the feminine as a labile and dangerous indeterminacy is expounded by Derrida
as the presence of death within the stylistic economy of Nietzsche’s writing;
for it is only insofar as this threat is present in every configuration of truth
that an existential responsibility to what one believes to be true is possible
(Nietzsche, 1979: 137). The economy of Nietzsche’s writing is such that his
demand for overcoming constantly slips into aesthetic figurations which
occupy a different register from the true convictions arising from the rigour
of materialist science. Thus, the rhetorical passages of Nietzsche’s philosophy
are part of a general economy of aesthetic figuration that, for Derrida, is both
the solicitation of an exorbitant desire for the particular (the non-universal
event), and of political mythologies of race, religion, sex, and culture (Derrida,
1979: 81–3; 1997: 82–4). The critique of the philosophy of representation that
Derrida has developed in Dissemination, The Truth in Painting, and ‘Envoi’,
however, attempts to trace the logic of supplementarity that is always put
into play by the image. Representation, in other words, constantly provokes
linguistic, psychoanalytic, political, and textual effects that exceed the geomet-
rical reduction of the real, and keep open the chance of unforeseen events of
love, sacrifice, and hospitality. This concept of aesthetic contingency, as we will
see, is essential to Derrida’s attempt to reconfigure the temporal economy of
postmodern desire.
In the final section of the chapter, therefore, I will look at the chance of the
political as it is configured in Derrida’s work on the fate of representation in
the media-technological systems of capital. His account of the possibility of
political transformation, as presented in Of Hospitality, Rogues and Spectres
of Marx, articulates a deep and original involvement of representation in the
economy of social exchange. Both Marx’s and Schopenhauer’s attempts to
separate the aesthetic from the ‘material’ violence of the world, and to present
it as the sphere of illusory happiness, is fundamentally to miss the economy
of affects and possibilities it distributes into the economy of the social. It is in
Spectres of Marx, as we will see, that Derrida develops the relationship between
the concepts of hospitality, democracy to come, and the media-technological
staging of the real that has come to dominate the experience of social life. Thus,
I will examine Derrida’s account of the co-presence of aesthetic representation
and ethical responsibility that is sustained within the virtual networks of the
global economy. I will explore the modalities in which the spectre of the other is
disseminated, and the possibility of its infringing on the postmodern experience

of happiness as consumption, lifestyle, and aesthetic conformity.
Art, irony and romanticism
I want to begin this section by returning briefly to the general definition of the
work of art that Hegel presents in Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics. As we have
seen, Hegel states that a work of art ‘is not only for sensuous apprehension …
the mind is meant to be affected by it, and to find some satisfaction in it’ (Hegel,
1993: 40). Thus, there is an essential relationship between the satisfaction that
self-consciousness as such finds in the aesthetic mode of experience, and the
happiness that particular human beings derive from sensory apprehension of
the Absolute in the temporal world. It is in the Greek Polis that this unity of form
and content achieves its highest expression; state and religion are experienced
in Classical aesthetic forms that configure the infusion of social and political
life with the divine unity of creation. The happiness of the Polis therefore is that
of a state which is as yet undisturbed by the formation of abstract subjectivity:
it is a reflection of the fact that ‘the citizen’, who is recognized as the bearer of
rights and responsibilities that are inapplicable to slaves, foreigners, women, and
children, is entirely at home in the milieu of Sittlichkeit (Rose, 1981: 130). Thus,
the Classical artworks of the Greek world are ‘auratic’ in Walter Benjamin’s
sense of the term; for they hold the divinity of nature, the genius of the artist,
and the moral and intellectual sensibilities of man together within the symbolic
universe of the culture they embody (Benjamin, 1992: 217–18).
The aesthetic configuration of ethical life in the Polis, even though it is always
threatened by the retribution of divine law, is, for Hegel, the most substantive
experience of happiness that humanity will ever have. This is because the ‘I’
of self-consciousness has not yet become detached from the unity of religious
and political life, and remains embedded in the concrete totality of the Polis.
This state of happiness, and its configuration in the forms of Classical art, is
essential to the hierarchy of recognition that, I will argue, is implicit in Hegel’s
notion of Sittlichkeit. As we have seen, the artwork is by definition inadequate
to represent the reflective unity of social life: the differentiation of Sittlichkeit
into the abstract relations of free subjectivity, and the complexity of the political
forms through which they are mediated, cannot be adequately configured in
the sensuous medium of ‘picture thinking’, or Vorstellung (Hegel, 1993: 43).
Thus, if art is destined to come to an end because it is unable to represent

the unity of social and economic life, then perhaps the ‘end of art’ that is the
underlying thesis of Hegel’s aesthetics is not its termination, but rather its differ-
entiation into a religious iconography that would support the contentment of
the masses, and a labile Romanticism that is constantly reformed through the
activity of bourgeois individuals. It is the loss of aesthetic unity, and the end of
the Classical configuration of fate, ethics, and happiness within the substance
of Sittlichkeit, that, for Hegel, is the tragedy of modernity. And so, we need to
examine the history of this dislocation, and its consequences for the moral and
affective constitution of modern life.
After the collapse of the aesthetic unity of the Polis, the status of art is
fundamentally altered. In Classical art, the substance of ethical life is perfectly
expressed; for the artworks that embody the divine ordination of man capture
the aura of the Polis as monumental, tragic, glorious, ethical, and heroic. Art,
in other words, is the sensory expression of social relations in which nature
and humanity, concept and intuition, exist in a state of concrete unity (Rose,
1981: 126–7). However, once the substance of Sittlichkeit lost its immediacy (a
process that began with Socrates’ determination to subject the entire fabric of
Greek society to the method of rational scepticism), Classical art was no longer
able to configure the presence of the divine in the institutional structures of the
state. Sittlichkeit, in other words, comes to express the inward differentiation
of the Idea into contingent particularities of the subjective mind; and so the
dialectic of representation that is essential to Hegel’s phenomenology of ethical
life, is transformed by the emergence of rational religion as the mode in which
the Idea recognizes itself. The old Greek Titans, whose monstrous power was
presented in the pre-Socratic tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus, cede place
to the ideals of truth and justice that are watched over by the Olympian gods.
The origin of Western modernity, therefore, lies in this tragic breakdown of
ethical substance: with the proliferation of different spheres of knowledge and
activity, the unity of ethical life can only be conceived through the ‘conflict and
collision’ of abstract freedoms (Rose, 1981: 135). Thus, the emergence of the
modern citizen is afflicted by a certain absence of contentment, an absence that
is determined by the inevitable loss of sensory-aesthetic unity in the relations of
the Polis.
The question of the relationship between happiness, morality, and the
aesthetic in Hegel is fundamental to the hierarchy of recognition that is implicit
in the idea of Sittlichkeit. As we have seen, the experience of art, as a mode
of subjective recognition, is inadequate to represent the complex unity of the

state. For Hegel, the end of the Greek state is determined by the acute contra-
diction between reason and representation that emerged in the later stages of
Classical antiquity. The Socratic ideal of light and reason in all things is brought
to bear on the traditional beliefs which founded the state; and so the flowering
of Hellenic culture and philosophy is also the precursor of its destruction as
ethical life, and the break up of Greek civilization into competing states whose
disparate interests come into conflict with Athens/Athene. This break up calls
down destruction upon itself, for it is the ‘crushing Destiny’ of the Roman war
machine that ultimately puts an end to the remains of Athenian democracy
(Hegel, 1944: 276–7). The social order that comes to replace the Greek form of
Sittlichkeit, therefore, is Roman property law, in which the world is divided up
according to the principle of abstract rights of ownership. In the Roman state,
the law becomes totally separate from ‘disposition and sentiment’, and operates
as an unyielding principle to which every citizen is made subject (Hegel, 1944:
289). Thus, the citizen of Rome knows the world only as an external and deter-
mining object, and so ‘his covenants, political relations, obligations, family
relations etc’ have no properly religious content, merely the formal power of a
legal obligation (Hegel, 1944: 290–1). The pantheon of Roman gods therefore
becomes an array of ‘frigid allegories’ who are appealed to only on the basis of
individual desires, and whose influence is mediated through a state that is the
instrument of a rapacious aristocracy. Thus, under Roman law, the universal
principle of ethical life is determined as agonistic utility, and egoistic desire
becomes the ruthless condition of all public and private relations (Hegel, 1944:
295).
For Hegel, the Roman differentiation of state and religion through the
principle of abstract reason is the founding principle of modern individu-
alism (although he maintains that at this stage the law takes the form of an
objective necessity which serves to dominate, rather than enable, the realization
of rational ends). So, the question we need to address at this point concerns
the fate of art after the dissolution of the Greek world. It is the loss of the
aesthetic unity of the Polis that forms the background to Hegel’s exposition of
Romantic art. In Roman society, the ‘mechanical side of Art has been brought
to perfection’: it has become a technical exercise designed to produce what
is pleasing to the senses without expressing any spiritual content that would
appeal to the intellect (Hegel, 1944: 289). It is through Christianity’s sublime
suffering under Roman law that corrupt aesthetics are given the form of
infinite yearning, which, for Hegel, is the essence of the Romantic aesthetic.
For, insofar as the secular world is dominated by the Roman sanctification
of acquisitiveness, Christian representations of God and ethical life fixate on
themes of martyrdom and otherworldly salvation. Thus, it is the iconography of
early Christianity that forms the basis of Romanticism; the themes that come to
predominate (human feeling, emotion, and the sublime transcendence of God)
represent the victory of the ‘beautiful soul’ over the secular world it is forced to
inhabit. Romantic art, through its exaggerations of the inward life of humanity,
repeats the contradiction of symbolic art; it falls into a kind of grotesquery that
takes emotions, thoughts, and imaginings to be ‘things in themselves’ that have
no determinate relationship to the actuality of ethical life (Hegel, 1993: 87).
Art, in other words, begins the process of its own transcendence. For, once it
ceases to express the unity of state and religion as an aesthetic experience, its
representation of subjective ideals of happiness, redemption, and love, becomes
complicit with the conflictual relations of mastery and coercion through which
ethical life develops as an objective totality (Rose, 1981: 144).
In the final sections of The Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel works through
the distinctions between the three modes in which spirit is apprehended by
finite consciousness: Art, Revealed Religion, and Absolute Knowledge (Hegel,
1967a: 680–808). There is a sense in which art, as Hegel conceives it, is the
least adequate of these modes of apprehension, for there is a close relationship
between primitive forms of religious experience (pantheism, polytheism) and
the symbolic figures through which the divine is represented. Religion, for
Hegel, is implicitly a mode of representation of inner life, and as such, is
capable of evolving towards an apprehension of the Absolute that is more than
imagination (Vorstellung), and which illuminates the relationship of finite self-
consciousness to the presence of the infinite. We have seen that Hegel conceives
Romanticism as the form in which Vorstellung transcends itself as a medium
of ethical recognition; for the flights of aesthetic fancy depicted by Romantic
art are a refusal to recognize the real conditions of mastery and slavery that are
inscribed in the objective relations of Sittlichkeit (Hegel, 1993: 88). Indeed, what
Romantic art encourages is a kind of ironic attitude towards these relations,
which are seen simply as impediments to the pursuit of heroic adventures
beyond the prosaic responsibilities of work, family, and communal life.
There is then, an essential relationship in Hegel’s thought between aesthetic
representation and a pernicious irony that haunts the inner life of the morally
autonomous citizen. In his exposition of ‘The Good and Conscience’ in The
Philosophy of Right, Hegel expounds the relationship between the bourgeois

citizen, whose pursuit of particular desires is supposedly regulated by the
formal consistency of the moral law, and the emergence of an ironic subjec-
tivity that regards itself as ‘the arbiter and judge of truth, right, and duty’
(Hegel, 1967b: 102). The Kantian moral will, in other words, merely gives
legitimacy to the labile desires that arise in civil society: its demand for formal
consistency can be extended to encompass any action that is taken in pursuit of
egoism and self-love. As such, Kant’s moral imperative ends up legitimizing the
dominance of pure subjectivity over the objective forms in which the Absolute
is expressed. Now, although the formal demand of the moral will is presented
in The Philosophy of Right as a precursor of the objective Gemeinschaft of the
state, this does not mean that Hegel regarded the abstract sovereignty and
subjective desires of civil society as destined to disappear in the movement
of history. Rather, civil society is the sphere in which the contingencies of
subjective freedom are played out; contingencies that are an essential part of
the concept of ethical substance (Hegel, 1967b: 122–3). Thus, the aesthetic
configurations of Romanticism and the formal morality of the bourgeois
individual are part of a sphere of abstract rights that is constantly haunted by
a sense of solipsistic irony. It is not the world that is regarded as excellent, but
the individual ego that ‘lets the highest perish and merely hugs himself at the
thought’ (Hegel, 1967b: 122).
The relationship between art, irony, and abstract morality is important
because it opens up the question of the fate of art in modernity. Hegel, as we
have seen, implicates Romantic art in the emergence of civil society as a ‘totality
of wants and a mixture of caprice and physical necessity’ (Hegel, 1967b: 122).
Thus, it is possible to read Hegel’s claim that Romanticism marks the ‘end of art’
as a designation of the tragedy of modernity, or as the complicity of the aesthetic
with the contradictory relationship between state and civil society. This, in fact,
is the way that Gillian Rose understands the telos of Hegel’s aesthetics. She
argues that the development from Symbolic to Classical and from Classical to
Romantic styles is not simply a movement that concludes with the expulsion
of aesthetic representation from the substance of Sittlichkeit. Rather, she argues
that the abstract relations of bourgeois subjectivity are too complex for art to
represent their implicit universality, and that the significance of aesthetic repre-
sentation in modernity is its capacity to configure cultures of religious zeal,
nationalistic fervour, and romantic ecstasy within the formal-legal relations
of civil society (Rose, 1981: 141–2). Thus, on Rose’s reading, the concept of
representation is understood as essential to the formation of civil society, and

as essentially part of a universal determination of modernity in which the
institutions of Sittlichkeit are always vulnerable to the transformative power of
the negative (the fatal unhappiness of finite subjects who are caught up in the
violence of abstract individualism).
My own position is slightly different from this. While I agree with Rose
that the concept of subjective autonomy both threatens and perpetuates the
telos of modernity, it seems that the idea of ethical life that crystallizes in The
Philosophy of Right, is inconceivable apart from certain ontological categories
of identity. Spirit undergoes a process of objectification that is expressed in the
legal, economic, and corporate institutions that reflect its own essential unity;
and so the movement of spirit through the aporias of abstract individualism
is, in the end, animated by a certain conservatism that always returns to the
transcendental necessity of the Idea. This conservatism can be traced in the
relationship between happiness, representation, and ethical life that is implicit
in Hegel’s account of modernity. As we have seen, Hegel conceives the bourgeois
subject that emerges in civil society as prone to dissemblance of the crude utility
of its existence; it seeks remission from its permanent striving after particular
desires, through Romantic fantasies and its ironic relationship to the totality of
Sittlichkeit. However, the bourgeois personality is not the exclusive principle
of ethical life, and Hegel maintains that the corporate bodies that arise for the
mutual benefit of those who practise a particular craft or trade, have an integrity
that is closer to religious feeling than to the reflexive self-consciousness of Homo
economicus. Thus, for Hegel, family and the corporations sit between the state
and civil society: they are the ‘two fixed points round which the unorganized
atoms of civil society revolve’ (Hegel, 1967b: 154). Or, to put it another way,
the Classical tradition of art and the feelings of religious awe and primordial
community that are associated with it remain essential to the constitution of
Sittlichkeit, for, without its formative influence on the corporations, civil society
would collapse into a lawless play of individual desires.
There is, therefore, a kind of double play in Hegel’s concept of modernity
that is particularly acute in his exposition of art and the aesthetic. On the one
hand, there is a clear recognition of the power of the aesthetic to transform both
the individual subject and the objective constitution of its social relationships.
On the other hand, the Hegelian economy of representation is haunted by the
relationship between religion and Classical iconography that gave substance to
the Polis. For, while it is true that Hegel gives priority to the rational relations
that constitute the life of the modern state, he also maintains that religion
expresses the same content qua the aesthetic-intuitive form which infuses the
corporate life of Sittlichkeit (Hegel, 1967a: 171). Hegel’s distrust of Romantic art
therefore stems from his concern about the subjective culture of civil society,
and its importation of radical individualism into every sphere of ethical life.
The old fear of idolatry, in other words, is played out in Hegel’s aesthetics; for
the multitude of subjective ideals that are expressed in the Romantic style are
conceived as malign simulacra that can bring neither happiness nor unity to
ethical life. The recuperative movement that is determined within the substance
of the state therefore always carries the weight of the origin: it expresses a differ-
entiation of spirit into appearance and particularity that, for Hegel, determines
the return of the image to the substantive intuition of the corporate body. This
begs the question of whether such a spiritual-religious recuperation of the
aesthetic is still possible under the conditions of modernity, and, if not, what
the significance of this would be for the politics of happiness. In the following
section, I will examine Nietzsche’s account of the relationship between truth,
power, and the aesthetic, and how this bears on the ‘pure culture’ of postmodern
societies.
The tragedy of pure culture
In the opening section of the chapter, I argued that Marx’s ideology thesis crucially
underplays the role of the aesthetic in the formation of bourgeois subjectivity
and the relations of civil society. I also argued that Hegelian philosophy gives a
much more sophisticated account of the relationship between art, subjectivity,
and the state; an account that conceives the ‘objectivity’ of economic relations as
both constituted by, and constitutive of, the individual dispositions that animate
bourgeois economic life. And yet, the concept of spirit that Hegel deploys does,
I believe, lead to a certain conservatism in his assessment of the trajectory of
modernity. Ultimately, what protects the substance of ethical life from collapse
into the anarchy of egoistic desire is the fact that the corporate structures of civil
society provide an intuitive sense of community, which grounds the excesses
of abstract individualism. Thus, the question that Marx’s ideology thesis raises
is rather more complex than the simple ‘inversion’ of Hegelian philosophy he
presents in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. His attempt to show that
the economic base of capitalism determines the shape of its ideological life is,
in the end, an attempt to show that the truth dissimulated in that life is the
historical antagonism of the bourgeois and labouring classes. If, however, we
allow that Hegel has theorized the relationship between representation and
objectivity in a way that destabilizes Marx’s theory of the political teleology of
economic forces, then it follows that a post-Hegelian philosophy of spirit must
give a radically non-dialectical account of the desires and satisfactions that arise
from the aestheticization of truth which is characteristic of modernity. This
is what Nietzsche’s account of the relationship between truth, power, and the
aesthetic attempts to do – and so we need to examine the detail of his arguments.
We have already seen that Nietzsche’s philosophy begins with an exami-
nation of the relationship between art and the ethical formation of humanity.
In The Birth of Tragedy, he affirms Schopenhauer’s thesis that the essence of
aesthetic experience is the physical affect it has upon the material being of the
subject (Nietzsche, 1990: 96–102). Schopenhauer’s argument is that the essence
of creation is will, and that each phenomenal being is the expression of the
particular kind of willing that lies at the foundation of all its temporal existence.
Thus, the fundamental cause of human unhappiness is the frustration of the
will, for even the most successful life has been curtailed by the accidents of its
temporal unfolding. According to Schopenhauer, however, aesthetic experience
offers the possibility of remission from these frustrations; the feelings that are
produced by music, as the primordial form of aesthetic experience, resonate
with the essence of things, and produce a sense of unity with the transcendental
conditions of existence. Music and the plastic arts, in other words, ‘are merely
different expressions of the same inner nature of the world’ (Schopenhauer,
1996: 171). Nietzsche’s affirmation of Schopenhauer’s thesis, however, does not
extend to his conclusion that the truth of the aesthetic is the contemplative relief
it provides for the tortured souls who inhabit the world. Indeed, The Birth of
Tragedy describes the processes through which pagan and Classical ideals are
combined in pre-Socratic Greek tragedy, and the constitutive effects this combi-
nation had on the affective solidarity of the Polis. Nietzsche’s contention is that
the choral accompaniment to the drama provokes feelings of ecstatic unity with
those tragic individuals who have tested the authority of the gods. And so the
transformative power of the tragic arises from a feeling of sublime unity with
the primordial force of creation: it is that which exceeds the formal organization
of artistic style, and which constantly returns to rupture the unity of each artistic
genre (Nietzsche, 1990: 97).
Despite Nietzsche’s post-hoc deprecation of The Birth of Tragedy for ‘all the
hoariness of its topic and every conceivable fault of adolescence’, the question
of the relationship between truth and the aesthetic is one to which he returns
in all of his subsequent writings (Nietzsche, 1990: 5). What, for me, is most
significant in Nietzsche’s first book is his introduction of the idea that the truth
cannot be presented in a form that is free from stylistic configuration. ‘Being’,
in other words, has no objective existence that can be expressed independently
of the mythological powers of Dionysus and Apollo; for it is that which can
be known only through the conflicts of light and darkness, knowledge and
mystery, masculine and feminine, through which it is constantly re-encountered
(Nietzsche, 1990: 28). In early Greek society, the relationship between Apollo,
the god of light and prophecy, and Dionysus, the god of the life force itself, is
one in which there is a rough equality between form and power. The tragic
drama of pre-Socratic Greece still aims to draw the audience into a state of
ecstatic unity with the life force of nature, yet the rule of Dionysus is tempered
by the discipline of Apollo, who demands clarity of form and representation. It
is this unstable proximity of opposites that, for Nietzsche, is the highpoint of
Greek civilization, for the alliance of reason and lucidity that came to dominate
post-Socratic Greece had yet to exclude the ecstasy of nature from the life of
humanity. But there is in the figure of Apollo a seductiveness that beguiles the
power of Dionysus and prepares the way for Classical Greek art and philosophy.
The demand for lucidity that Apollo represents is, for Nietzsche, the formal
condition of the concepts through which the world is cut up into particular
kinds of being, each of which has a particular ethical significance within the
substance of Sittlichkeit (Nietzsche, 1990: 128–9). It is through this process of
rationalization that the experience of fate ceases to be the determining condition
of human life, and happiness (eudaimõnia) becomes a condition whose possi-
bility is defined by the relationship of the soul to the substance of the Polis.
Classical Greek society becomes a work of art in itself, and its artworks
present the aesthetic form of the ethical principles that should take possession
of the soul of each citizen. However, the ideals of lucidity expounded by
Socrates, Plato and Aristotle are, for Nietzsche, haunted by the ghost of
Dionysus; for the perfection of rational order provokes a spirit of resistance
that acts against the powers of repetition, integration, and containment
(Nietzsche, 1990: 130). Thus, the incipient dilemma of modernity that
Nietzsche identifies in The Birth of Tragedy can be briefly stated. If the
Apollonian alliance of reason and aesthetics that is the essence of Classical
Greek civilization is lost to the principles of utility and technological
reproduction, then the fundamental question that arises from the persistence
of art is how it has functioned to represent the ideals of truth, beauty, and
communal life. For, while it is true that art can engender a sense of the tragic
confrontation of will and necessity, it is also the form in which modernity, in
its insipid way, has sought to retrieve the presence of God (Nietzsche, 1983:
40–1). Yet, beyond this perpetuation of divinity in the auratic tradition of
art, modernity opens up a new configuration of the aesthetic, one that trans-
forms the economy of truth and desire. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche
remarks that ‘we belong to a time in which culture is in danger of being
destroyed by the means of culture’ (Nietzsche, 1994: 239), by which he meant
that the means of cultural dissemination had all but stripped the aesthetic
of its relationship to the tragedy of ethical life, and transformed it into the
medium of homogeneous desire. To put it slightly differently, technological
means of representation have facilitated a reduction in the gap between the
feeling of desire and its satisfaction in the array of trivialities offered to the
masses. And so, as we saw in the previous chapter, the Utilitarian demand
for ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’ is essentially related to the
representation of happiness as private gratification.
This configuration of the aesthetic has certain similarities with Marx’s
ideology thesis. Both Marx and Nietzsche regard the relationships that arise
from ‘bourgeois’ subjectivity as profoundly limiting, for they confine the human
species to a cycle of desire and satiation that comes to dominate the entire sphere
of cultural production. However, Marx’s thesis is separated from Nietzsche’s by
his insistence that the relationship between truth and illusion is underpinned
by the founding experience of productive activity. In both Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology, Marx argues that human
self-consciousness develops through its direct interaction with the ‘inorganic
body of nature’, and that it is this original determination of productive relations
that constitutes the place from which he pursues his critique of ideology (Marx
in McLellan, 1977: 81). Thus the proto-society of hunter-gatherers that Marx
designates as ‘primitive communism’ is originally non-representative; man’s
relationship to nature is essentially unmediated and gives rise only to the most
basic inscriptions on the surface of the natural world. Thus, for Marx, the very
idea of representation is untrustworthy, as the emergence of art is essentially
related to the power of religion that comes after the most primitive community,
and to the ideological illusions that have justified the history of class domination
(Marx, in McLellan, 1977: 107).
For Nietzsche, however, to claim that the originary form of sociality emerges
as a cooperative organization, and that it should be regarded as an ideal possi-
bility that is immanent in the history of all social conflicts, is anti-materialist.
In The Genealogy of Morals, he insists that to postulate the origin of the social
in the cooperative satisfaction of need is a ‘piece of sentimentalism’ that refuses
to accept the violent contingencies in which human society originated. The
austere truth to which true materialism must respond is the violence of events,
the pure exigencies through which the will to power brings the future into being
(Nietzsche, 1990: 211). Human history therefore emerges from the ‘terrible
despotism’ imposed by the strongest of the species, whose violent strictures
transform the animality of formless pre-hominids into a life of disciplined
servitude (Nietzsche, 1990: 219).
This austere materialism, for Nietzsche, marks the possibility of liberating
man from the limitations of his essence as a social animal. According to the
argument he develops in Human, All Too Human, the socialist version of man’s
original unity with nature is the logical conclusion of Western democratic
thought. For, insofar as the principles of equal rights, moral obligation, and
civic duty have become incorporated into a theory of the universal conditions
of happiness, the highest end of humanity becomes the alleviation of all contin-
gency in the mode of production (Nietzsche: 1994: 145). Socialism, in other
words, aims to reduce the gap between desire and its fulfilment to a minimum,
and to give each individual the chance to participate in the self-consciously
ethical production of the means of subsistence. Now, for Marx, a society of
this kind would by definition have overcome the need for ideology, as human
beings would no longer suffer from the pernicious individuation through which
capital has colonized their being. The sphere of representation, in other words,
would survive only as a reflection of the social and technological organization
of production, whose ‘truth’ would be validated in the universal flourishing of
humanity1. According to Nietzsche, however, socialism’s remorseless pursuit
of the alleviation of suffering is also the end of the possibility of happiness.
For the weight of this project is such that it reduces the violence of events, and
the extremity of the ethical and aesthetic self-determination it provokes, to
a programmatic demand for more production, more organization, and more
technology. If there is to be happiness, this can only come through the exposure
of the greatest of all humanity to the infinite risk and suffering that arises from
unforeseen confrontations of will and necessity. So, the idea of socialism should
be understood not as the revelation of the truth of human history, but as a
particular nexus of power that arises from within the pleasures and privations
of bourgeois culture (Nietzsche, 1994: 213–14).
Nietzsche’s genealogies of socialism and bourgeois culture are, I believe,
fundamental to understanding the Frankfurt School critique of mass culture.
As we have seen, there is an implicit assumption in Nietzsche’s thought that
the ‘public sphere’ is a bourgeois invention, whose development is facilitated by
technological advances in the dissemination of information, images, and texts.
What Nietzsche discerns in this evolution is the end of culture: the constant
dilution of the forms of virtue, ethics, and religious faith that have sustained
the spiritual life of humanity from the beginning of history. It is the image
that is instrumental in this destruction. For, insofar as the highest possibilities
of self-overcoming are provoked by the sheer unpredictability of events, the
generic configuration of reality through technological means of representation
is, by definition, a reduction of this contingency to a paralysing repetition of
the familiarity (Nietzsche, 1994: 239). The issue here, of course, concerns the
possibility of not simply inhabiting this sphere of generic figuration, but of
overcoming its totalizing powers. In Nietzsche’s thought, the happiness that
arises from demotic culture is part of an economy of risk and stability that
is in constant flux: the distribution of happiness that takes place through the
means of culture always includes the experience of mortality and satiation that
is produced in those ‘higher natures’, whose excessive will disrupts the techno-
logical reproduction of the social totality.
Horkheimer and Adorno’s original formulation of the culture industry thesis
in Dialectic of Enlightenment, however, maintains that the influence of media
technologies has become so pervasive, that they have colonized the conditions
under which the formation of will and subjectivity takes place. The image has
become the very form of ideological management, for it constantly recon-
figures the labile, but ultimately repetitive, desires of each individual consumer
(Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 124–31). So, is it the case that Horkheimer
and Adorno’s account of reified totality marks the point at which every act of
excessive will, and the transformative joy to which this gives rise, is anticipated
by the synthetic-aesthetic organization of reality?
In the dedication that begins Minima Moralia, Adorno introduces his
exposition of modernity as a ‘melancholy science’ that seeks the good life in
the traces of its erasure from the reified networks of capital (Adorno, 1996: 15).
His writing pursues the insinuation of functional codes into the very fabric of
human experience, and configures a speculative vision that would ‘contemplate
all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption’
(Adorno, 1996: 247). Thus, the moral purpose of Adorno’s critique lies close to
Schopenhauer’s demand for restraint within the irrational violence of the world.
For it is in the glimpses of peaceful totality that occasionally emerge from the
logic of reification, that the utopian imagination of alternative forms of existence
is kept alive (Adorno, 1996: 224–5). From a Nietzschean perspective, of course,
this melancholic critique of the evil of the world is entirely inadequate, for it
ends up positing the ruins of divine transcendence as the ultimate ground on
which the future can be imagined. The visions of destruction through which
Adorno configures the moral demand that inhabits the corpus of humanity,
and the responsibility of art to that demand, can be no more than the perpetu-
ation of hopeless pity (Adorno, 1990: 361–408). What Nietzsche’s materialism
demands, on the other hand, is not the morbid return of the imagination to the
vulnerability of the flesh, but an aesthetics that would solicit the careless power
of great individuals, and a science that would lead them deeper into the contin-
gency of the world (Nietzsche, 1974: 327–33).
The power of Horkheimer and Adorno’s thesis lies in their account of how
civil society becomes the sphere in which the influence of the commodity form
on human happiness becomes absolute. As we have seen, the culture industry
is the reduction of reality to its image; every social relationship is reduced to
a play of ‘aesthetic semblance’ that conceals its relationship to the totality of
commodified life (Adorno, 1991: 61). This, for Adorno, is the tragedy of pure
culture, for the culture industry’s complete aestheticization of experience forms
all of us into distracted consumers who know the world only as the object of
our particular desires. Such is the ideological power of the pleasures that are
essential to this culture, that even the spectacle of war, terrorism, and loss of
democracy that are their inevitable cost is insufficient to educate us, and we
begin to take a despairing pleasure in the destruction of our humanity (Adorno,
1990: 398; Tubbs, 2008: 91–3).
The difference between Nietzsche’s and Adorno’s theories of the tragedy of
culture lies in their respective approaches to the relationship between aesthetic
affection and the presence of the real in the soul of humanity. In Nietzsche’s
philosophy, the mass degradation of aesthetic experience carries within it the
possibility of a transgressive ressentiment, which would put the boredom of
industrialized culture to flight. The cautious precision of Adorno’s negative
dialectics, however, remains suspicious of such solicitations of individual will
and creative conflict; for it seems as if the ruination of culture is so complete
that even the greatest acts of sacrifice, or love, could not be received by the mass
of humanity. The question we are left with therefore, concerns the form and
possibility of transgression within the totality of reified life. And so, in the final
section, I will examine the hyper-aesthetic culture that has come to define the
epoch of ‘postmodernity’, and the chance of moral desire within the networks
of synthetic happiness.
Simulacra of happiness
We need to pause here for a moment to take stock of where we are. So far, I
have set out the relationship between happiness and representation as part of a
speculative history in which representation has become the condition on which
sensations of pleasure, restraint, responsibility, passion, and love can be experi-
enced as happiness. In Hegel’s thought the concept of Vorstellung is conceived
as a medium that, even in its highest aesthetic manifestations, is inadequate to
reveal the truth of spirit. And so it is destined to occupy a subordinate place
in the hierarchy of ethical life, one whose proper function is to configure
the absolute within the practical-intuitive life of civil society. Romantic art,
however, carries the medium of representation beyond this proportionality, and
the chimerical figures it presents to the senses are implicated in the formation
of subjective cultures that threaten the integrity of Sittlichkeit. For, although
Romanticism is a rejection of bourgeois economic life, its elevation of each
individual to the defender of his own particular faith and happiness, can only
increase the egoism that is present in civil society. So, despite the fact that the
substance of ethical life includes the moment of aesthetic affection, the concept
of the state demands that this is made subject to the institutional forms in which
its authority is realized (family, police, judiciary, and corporation). If there is
to be a virtuous happiness that does not constantly redetermine the aporias of
luxury, irony, and self-aggrandizement therefore, this can only arise from the
intuitive forms of good sense that have crystallized in the corporations, and
which serve to restrain the overactive imaginary of bourgeois Romanticism
(Hegel, 1967b: 152–5).
This account of the aesthetic configuration of the individual ego is important
because it exemplifies a particular concept of modernity. For Hegel, the
relationship between the institutions of ethical life and their representation
as Vorstellung is such that the latter appears as the medium of possibility. The
lived experience of self-consciousness always misrecognizes the aporias of

work, satisfaction, and desire that arise in its particular epoch; and yet this
misrecognition is the precursor to the more adequate expressions of subjectivity
that mark the historical progress of spirit. What is important here is Hegel’s
designation of modernity as the point at which the relationship between repre-
sentation and the substance of ethical life becomes acutely problematic. For,
as the sphere of representation begins to float free of concrete social relations,
so its configuration of experience is consigned to an arbitrary play of images
that is inadequate to the truth of the Idea (Hegel, 1993: 87). This designation
of the aesthetic is distinctively modern in the sense that it gives priority to less
ambiguous modes of apprehension, and subjects ‘picture thinking’ to a logic
of restraint and prohibition within the totality of ethical life. In Nietzsche’s
thought, on the other hand, the relationship between truth and representation
is such that the objective relations of Sittlichkeit are originally co-present with
the figurative power of the aesthetic – to the point that it is impossible to disen-
tangle the unity of the Idea from the sensory-intuitive figures of Vorstellung.
Thus, the concept of ‘subjective culture’ that Hegel uses to designate the effects
of the modern aesthetic, cannot be confined to the forms of luxury, servitude,
and domination that arise in civil society. If there is such a culture, it entails the
possibility of an excess of individual will that is irreducible to the movement
of self-consciousness towards a universally mediated state of satisfaction. The
aesthetic, in other words, is the form through which subjectivity differentiates
itself as will to power and bestowing virtue, even though this process always
obscures itself in the misunderstanding, trivialization, and distraction that is
co-present with all truly creative activity (Nietzsche, 1984: 99–104).
The relationship between truth, power, and the aesthetic is, as we have
seen, the initial concern of Nietzsche’s philosophy. His first book, The Birth of
Tragedy, is an account of how Greek drama was able to unify ethical life through
its staging of the clash between the eternal laws of the gods and the wilfulness
of man. Within this pre-Socratic epoch, the aesthetic maintains a sublime
balance between the Dionysian excess of nature/instinct and the Apollonian
regime of form and image. For perhaps the only time in history, ‘the masses’,
or, to use Nietzsche’s term, ‘the herd’, are spiritualized by their experience of
the conflict between human culture and the divine and unfathomable contin-
gency of nature. What comes after the Classical epoch is a degradation of this
conflict: the domination of the Apollonian ideal produces a world in which
‘non-sensuality assumes the rank of perfection, in which the brutal, the animal,
the proximate must be avoided’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 187). Thus it would not be
unfair to say that, for Nietzsche, the defining problem of modernity is that of
representation. Insofar as the history of Western art has been narrated from the
point of view of an Apollonian teleology, Nietzsche’s fundamental concern is
with the possibility of an instinctual intellect (or an intellectual instinct) that
could rupture the aura of harmonious ethical life. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the
possibility of such a transformative power is conceived as radical solitude; for it
is only insofar as the superman is able to wrench himself free of the utilitarian
pleasures of the eye and the stomach, that his virtue can disturb the demotic
happiness of the marketplace (Nietzsche, 1984: 78–81). And so, Zarathustra’s
songs and the poetry of his words are addressed to the traces of the future that
live in the most powerful souls, those who anticipate the ‘free spirits’ for whom
the world will be the source of joyful overcoming (Nietzsche, 1984: 99–104).
There is, then, a secret economy that Nietzsche puts into play with his
concept of the aesthetic – a play of power, illusion, and autonomy whose logic
Derrida interrogates in Spurs. One of Nietzsche’s most famous maxims is that
when one ‘gazes long into an abyss’, one is not confronted by something that
leaves the structures of one’s identity undisturbed. The abyss is a monstrous
absence, a total lack of determination that looks back into the individual and
shakes the very substance of his desires and satisfactions (Nietzsche 1979: 84).
The question that arises here, of course, concerns the chance of man’s encounter
with this annihilating absence; of how he is drawn towards the destructive
power of the abyss and of the effects it has upon his being in the world. For
Nietzsche, the possibility of this encounter is ever present in human experience.
For, insofar as the truth of the world is revealed through the contingent figura-
tions of the aesthetic, the possibility of glimpsing the nothingness that underlies
the dissimulations of the image is an essential element of human experience. It
is this ‘absence’ that lies at the core of Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche in Spurs.
His argument is that Nietzsche’s references to ‘woman’ as lack and caprice are
not simply the philosophical apotheosis of man as universal creator. Rather, the
capricious woman that Nietzsche presents in Human, All Too Human and The
Gay Science is, for Derrida, the expression of a ‘spiritualized sensuality’ that
arises from Christianity’s attempt to castrate the life of the passions. It is the fact
of such an unpredictable resistance within the regime of acetic Enlightenment
that reveals the contingency of all truth; for the gesture/style of alterity that
Derrida calls ‘the feminine’ is always dispersed into the aesthetic conventions of
ethical life (Derrida, 1979: 92). Thus, if there is to be a self-overcoming that is
worthy of the superman, it is essentially related to the conjunction of strength,

weakness, and duplicity that is configured in woman’s strange departure from
the life of the totality – her encounter with the abyss (Derrida, 1979: 101). I will
return to this in moment.
We come now to the politics of representation that Derrida traces in his work
on the aesthetic, and particularly the reconfiguration of Nietzsche this entails. In
his essay ‘Envoi’, Derrida presents a theory of how language, representation, and
philosophy are related to each other, and of how the Platonic-Socratic under-
standing of this relationship has come to dominate the ethics and politics of
representation2. The essay begins by addressing the question of the origin of this
Socratic hegemony, that is, the claim that the fundamental concepts deployed by
philosophy as such, are unaffected by the languages in which they are expressed,
and that the idiomatic meanings that constitute the identity of these languages
can be filtered out by sufficiently rigorous processes of translation. What this
entails is that ‘representation’ appears as a neutral space that, even though it
is divided into different regions by the idiomatic forms of language, is able to
sustain the possibility of a cross-cultural transparency of concepts (Derrida,
2007: 100). It is this idea of remainderless translation that, for Derrida, lies at
the origin of Western philosophies of representation (epistemology, aesthetics,
and politics). The Socratic idea of representation, as we have seen, entails that
the idiomatic diversity of language determines a universal field of meaning
constituted for the revelation of the object. And so, the sense of security we
derive from the objective forms of social life, moral identity, law and order, and
political authority, can be traced to the idea that the presence of the signifier to
the mind of the subject is, if all the proper precautions are followed, adequate to
the being of the object (Derrida, 2007a: 103).
According to Derrida, however, this account of representation is pre-philo-
sophical, in that it begins by eliding the economy of representation, which stages
reality through analytical processes of synthesis, reintegration, and deferral,
with the concept of presence, through which the operations of representation
are gathered into categories of being. Derrida’s strategy of treating the conven-
tional idea of representation as the outcome of a phenomenological ontology
that runs throughout Western philosophy, therefore, is an attempt to show that
the ‘reality’ which presents itself as present is, from the beginning, haunted by
the ghosts of ‘others’ who are excluded from the protocols of representational
thinking. Thus, the critique of representation that Derrida pursues in ‘Envoi’, is
an attempt to disclose the objectifying processes through which Enlightenment
philosophy has pursued the disclosure of being, and the complicity of these
processes with the exclusion of all that is ‘unrepresentable’ within the regime of
ethics, legality, and value (Derrida, 2007a: 107–8).
Heidegger’s essay ‘The Age of the World Picture’ (see Heidegger, 1996) is
important here, as it introduces a sense of the historical contingency through
which the modern regime of representation came into being. Heidegger argues
that although the origin of this regime can be traced to the Greek idea of
Anwesenheit, that is, to the proximity of being and its apprehension that is given
in the aesthetic unity of the Polis, this relationship is not the same as the one in
which the modern subject imposes the synthetic categories of the intellect on
the disorder of the world. Thus, the relationship between the Socratic concept
of representation and the one that has come to define modernity is not one of
strict teleology. Rather, the Ancient Greek world is conceived by Heidegger
as the epoch of man’s closest proximity to being, and the modern epoch of
representation that follows it, as a regime of distantiation in which man’s
ethical, political, and aesthetic experience has become increasingly inauthentic.
What is sent as an envoi from the Greek world, in other words, is the ghost of
Anwesenheit that casts ontological doubt on modern representative institutions:
abstract art, representative democracy, and procedural moralities. None of these
subjective forms can possibly be a source of true happiness for they all deepen
the sense of man’s alienation from himself.
Derrida’s reading of ‘The Age of the World Picture’, however, maintains that
Heidegger’s critique of the representational regime of modernity ends up as an
act of mourning for the greatness of the Polis. For the fact that he maintains that
this regime is the outcome of an envoi from the Greek world, means that his
account of the dangers of the aesthetic imagination (loss of authenticity, hiding
from mortality, the distractions of idle chatter) presupposes an originary unity of
being and representation in the life of the Classical Greek state (Derrida, 2007a:
122). Yet, for Derrida, the logic of this presupposition is such that it ruptures
the unity from which it proceeds; for the criteria through which Heidegger
evaluates the community of the Anwesenheit are precisely those which are
supplied by the modern epoch’s regime of abstract representation (adequacy,
deducibility, and legality). Thus, the idea of pre-Socratic presence that informs
Heidegger’s critique of modernity is originally contaminated by the abstract
categories through which it is presented. The envoi of being can never arrive
at its destination without bringing with it the sense that its unity was, from the
beginning, displaced into the abstract regime of the law (Derrida, 2007a: 122).
So, by maintaining that man’s relationship to Being has degenerated into a crisis
of authenticity, Heidegger’s thought functions to determine the proper place of
representation within the modern order of law, religion and ethics (Sittlichkeit),
and to designate it as a mode of affection whose purpose is to rejuvenate the
being of nation, home, and people (Derrida, 2007a: 126–7; 1990a: 73–82).
This brings me finally to the concept of postmodernism and its relationship
to the politics of happiness. Derrida remarked in ‘Envoi’, ‘If there has been
representation, it is perhaps, precisely, because the envoi of Being was originally
menaced in its being-together’ (Derrida, 2007a: 122). The temporal economy of
representation, in other words, gives rise to a complex logic of dissemination
even within the ethical substance of the Polis; for the play of figuration, deferral,
and remainder that is implicit in the Apollonian aesthetic is the originary
condition of their being a community of responsible citizens. So, if this is the
case, the technological intensification of the image sphere that culminates in
the virtual networks that have come to saturate contemporary society, should
be understood as part of a history of representation that constantly provokes
‘the political’ beyond the programmatic contestation of the public sphere. What
is important in Derrida’s analysis is his insistence that the tragedy of culture,
which is essentially the collapse of the real into its aesthetic representation,
cannot stage itself without disseminating traces of the ‘outside’ it constantly
seeks to appropriate. Thus, Baudrillard’s account of fourth-order simulation,
in which the technologically reproducible image has completely broken away
from the real, is never quite able to escape from the trace of alterity that is
both its condition and its impossibility (Baudrillard, 2000: 3–7). For, even
though the happiness of the postmodern individual is constantly transformed
by the evanescence of its objects (gender reassignment, sexless reproduction,
body prosthesis), such virtual desires always carry within them the spectre of
unforeseen suffering and responsibility. So, while there is certainly some truth
in Baudrillard’s contention that ‘the masses’ have been transformed by the
virtual technologies which have replaced the old devices of the culture industry,
it is, I believe, their intensification of love, sex, war, and consumption beyond all
limits, that provokes the return of a certain ethical desire (for the other).
I have argued elsewhere that the essence of Baudrillard’s hyperreality thesis
is the claim that media technologies have become such efficient fabricators of
the real that they have all but erased the experience of death from the realm
of the social3. The postmodern world, in other words, becomes a ‘managed
playground’ in which ethics, politics, and happiness are reduced to stylistic
affects of simulation, and the experience of death – in the destitution of the

other, the violence of the law, or the strange attraction of the feminine – is
erased. As we have seen, the genealogy of the image Derrida presents in ‘Envoi’
calls the possibility of such an erasure into question. If the solicitation of
remainders is the essence of representation, and if the technological intensifi-
cation of this process constantly reconfigures our experience of the relationship
between pleasure, mortality, and responsibility, then the chance of unforeseen
acts of transgression is always retraced within the system of hyperreality. The
encounter between Third and First World nations, for example, could never be
completely co-opted by the faux cosmopolitanism of debt management and
global charity spectaculars (Baudrillard, 1994: 26–35; 1995: 67): as Derrida
argues in Rogues, the processes of representation through which these inter-
ventions appear as the epitome of human compassion would simultaneously
configure the effects of passivity, silencing, and loss that are the fragile trace
of the political within the regime of global accumulation (Derrida, 2005: 157).
There is therefore something of the sublime in the virtual systems of the network
society; something ghostly and disturbing that plays around the aesthetic codes
that transform the destitution of others into a source of moral desire.
Perhaps then, it is possible to offer a slightly different take on the conjunction
of practical, aesthetic, and economic affects that have become known as ‘postmo-
dernity’. Marxist analyses have tended towards the idea that postmodernity is
the ideological reflex of global capitalism, in which traditional, nationally
based forms of social solidarity have been displaced by the phantasmagoria
of consumer desire (Jameson, 1995; Harvey, 1999). However, if we conceive
the experience of postmodernity as the outcome of fundamental shifts in the
relationship between aesthetic representation and the constitution of ethical life
(as Hegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida have done), then the feelings of displacement
that have accompanied the postmodern regime of excess signify rather more
than the strategic capture of desire by global capitalism. Considered as a techno-
aesthetic culture, the postmodern epoch is the point at which the relationship
between ideology and the experience of solidarity has become one of perfor-
mance; the satisfactions of class, race, religion, and sex, have become part of
the play of technological representation (Bennington and Derrida, 1993: 349;
Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 1–29). This technological staging of ethical life is one
of constant transformation, for the proliferation of signs through which political
solidarities are experienced is without limit or reserve: fascism re-emerges as
the good defender of the homeland against immigration; socialism becomes
the reactionary voice of the white working class; and religious fundamentalism
emerges as the only alternative to the disenchantment of postmodern life. The
politics of happiness that has emerged from the media-saturated world, in other
words, is a politics of purity; for the appeals to collective life that have emerged
from the labile patterns of postmodern aesthetics are attempts to conjure an
experience of unity from an illimitable play of difference. Thus, in the chapters
that follow, I will trace the dynamic of this politics; its infinite re-presentation
of the state of happiness, and the economy of hope and violence this opens up.
Notes
1 In his Epilogue to ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Walter
Benjamin pointed to the politicization of art that had emerged with the Bolshevik
revolution. He saw the essence of socialist realism as its constant re-presentation
of the great revolutionary moment, and its depiction of the happy simplicity with
which all classes worked towards goals of collective life (Benjamin, 1992: 141).
2 The essay was originally presented by Derrida as the opening address at the
18th Annual Congress of the Sociétés de Philosophie de Langue Française at the
University of Strasbourg.
3 See ‘The Spectre and the Simulacrum: History After Baudrillard’, Theory, Culture
and Society, Vol. 25, No. 6 November 2008.
3
Marxism, Socialism and the Beautiful

Object of Labour
Organic labour and species being
In his book The Destruction of Reason, the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács
expounds a history of philosophy in which the relationship between reason
and the evolution of capital is traced through the various phases of bourgeois
Idealism, Empiricism, and Utilitarianism. In the course of this history, Lukács
presents Schopenhauer’s thought as a kind of hopeless Romanticism, in
which the increasingly reified relations of human culture are conceived as the
metaphysical condition of human suffering. Thus, Schopenhauer’s claim that the
only ‘moral’ response to this condition is a kind of monadic quietism is indicted
with leading philosophy into a blind acceptance of the suffering of the world
that lacks any concept of revolutionary transformation (Lukács, 1980: 200–1). I
would suggest, however, that the question raised by Schopenhauer’s philosophy
is rather more subtle and persistent than Lukács maintains, as it concerns the
nature of the economic necessity that historical materialism seeks to describe,
and the expectation of happiness that it is reasonable to invest in Marxism as a
political philosophy. It is these two issues that inform the expository structure
of the present chapter.
The anthropology that Marx presents in the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts is, in essence, the disclosure of a possibility: of a mode of production
in which the creative labour of the human species becomes the explicit meaning,
purpose, and object of social existence (Marx in McLellan, 1977: 91–2). The
question that emerges from this original designation of human labour concerns
the relationship between the form of economic necessity embodied in the mode
of production, and the subjective recognition of that necessity which Marx calls
class-consciousness1. What has become known as ‘voluntarist Marxism’ tends to
give more weight to the latter in its description of political praxis, as it situates
the transformative power of the revolution in the collective forms of subjectivity
that emerge from within the proletarian movement itself. Rosa Luxemburg, for
example, maintained that the event of the revolution was inconceivable without
the collective satisfaction constituted through heterogeneous forms of resistance
and cooperation (Luxemburg, 1961: 10–26). Lenin’s appeal to the strategic organ-
ization of the masses by the revolutionary vanguard of the Party, on the other
hand, was rather more sceptical about the formative power of local agency. For
although he demanded the destruction of the ‘special apparatus’ through which
the capitalist state maintains control of the working class, he also maintained that
the necessity of the revolution was such that it could not be left to the chance that
spontaneous solidarity will triumph over the organized interests of bourgeois
society (Lenin, 1976: 44–68). Thus, as we will see, the place of happiness in
Marx’s thought is essentially bound up with the disparate history of Marxism,
and particularly the relationship of Marxist politics to the questions of suffering,
agency, and responsibility that constitute the philosophy of spirit.
Louis Althusser’s essay ‘On the Young Marx’ highlights an issue that inevi-
tably complicates the discussion of the place of happiness in Marx’s thought.
Famously, he claims that there is a definitive break between the young Marx of
the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and the mature Marx of Capital,
and that this break is characterized by an epistemological departure from Hegel
necessitated by the social, economic, and ideological evolution of capitalism
(Althusser, 1986: 62–3). Marx’s materialism, in other words, is conceived as
emerging from his consistent refusal to allow the return of the categories of Geist
through the political representations of left-Hegelians like Bruno Bauer, David
Strauss and Arnold Ruge (Althusser, 1986: 60). Their respective configurations
of ‘spirit’ are conceived by Althusser as determining the cultural field into which
Marxism originally enters: for each perpetuates the uniquely German sphere of
ideology in which the ideals of freedom, morality, and democracy appear to float
free of the limits which capitalism imposes on their realization. Thus, insofar as
there is a teleological movement in Marx’s thought, it develops through his
articulation of the structural causality that, for Althusser, becomes the exclusive
basis of his critique of capital. Or, to change the emphasis slightly, Marx’s break
from the Hegelianism of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts begins
with The German Ideology’s attempt to specify the relationship between the
economic base (forces of production) and the bourgeois ideals through which
the mode of exploitation is represented (ideological superstructure) (Marx and
Engels in McLellan, 1977: 160–8).
According to Althusser’s reading, the revival of interest in Marx’s early
writings in the 1950s and 1960s had a political significance that can be traced
Marxism, Socialism and the Beautiful Object of Labour 81
beyond the boundaries of pure intellectual history. From the perspective of

scientific materialism, the exhumation of Marx’s early writings prefigured
the re-emergence of a certain left-Hegelianism (or Socialist-Humanism) that
attempted to situate the critique of estranged labour within the historical
dialectics of Hegelian spirit. For Althusser, this ideological conjunction
demanded a materialist response that would specify whether or not the young
‘Hegelian’ Marx should be regarded as integral to Marxist science; for, in the
absence of such a theoretical determination, there would remain a risk that
historical materialism would become contaminated with ideals of human
nature, spontaneous autonomy, and subjective feeling that, strictly speaking,
belong to Hegelian philosophy (Althusser, 1986: 53). This question of contami-
nation is crucial to understanding Marxism’s relationship to the concept of
happiness. As we saw in the previous chapter, Marx’s critique of ideology
is an attempt to disentangle the illusory forms through which religion and
philosophy configure the essence of capital from the everyday experience of
exploitation that arises from the class position of the proletariat. The account
of the subjective and institutional life of civil society begun in the Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts, and developed through The German Ideology,
is presented by Althusser as a critique of the accumulation of idealist culture
around the expanding regime of commodification. So, for example, the moral
individual who knows himself as the subject of self-regarding rights and duties
is seen as a fundamentally ‘bourgeois’ construction whose autonomy is incon-
ceivable apart from the regime of private appropriation. Thus, the mode of
production to come after capitalism would sustain neither the strictures of such
a morality nor the satisfactions that are part of its economy of denial: its funda-
mental premise is the abolition of the antagonistic relationships that maintain
the sphere of bourgeois economic activity (Jay, 1984: 412–13).
According to Althusser, the danger of fetishizing Marx’s early work is that of
transforming Marxism into a revisionist project that would seek to purify the
ideals of bourgeois political philosophy of their complicity with class exploi-
tation (Althusser, 1986: 60). What is required, therefore, is a new vocabulary
that would capture the forms of community, cooperation, and responsibility
that arise from the practical relations of socialized production and which
expresses the collective labour of the totality. The difficulty here, of course, is
that of uncoupling this new vocabulary from the archive of ‘ruling ideas’ that
have dominated the ideological life of class-based societies. There are, I think,
two ways of understanding this demand for purification. The first is the line that
Althusser inherits from Lenin: that the proletarian democracy that is to come
from the revolutionary condensation of the masses will give rise to fundamental
rules of community that become ingrained in every sphere of social, economic
and political life (Lenin, 1976: 115–24). The second anticipates something of
the deconstructive reading of Marx I will develop in the final section of the
chapter. This line of argument maintains that it is impossible to disentangle the
fundamental rules of social life from the ruling ideas, and that the attempt to do
it is not only futile, but betrays the revolutionary gesture that is made in Marx’s
thought. For, by making the concepts of proletarian democracy and socialized
production into legislative demands determined through the strategic organi-
zation of the proletariat, Marxist politics becomes detached from the critique of
bourgeois subjectivity, technological development, and commodification that,
at least for Derrida, is the essence of Marxist critique.
From the latter perspective, Althusser’s demand that the science of historical
materialism should be purified of the Hegelian inheritance of the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts is based on a misunderstanding of the persistence
of Marxism, both as a political ideology and a mode of critical exposition. The
persistence of Marxism is, I would contend, based upon five related elements:
1) the critique of the economics of waste, 2) the promise of the overthrow of the
bourgeois state, 3) the theory of the immanent purpose of human history (the
end of class exploitation), 4) the theory of radical democracy and distributive
justice, and 5) the theory of human flourishing. The first four elements are
what, for Althusser, constitute the core of a scientific Marxism, whose devel-
opment proceeds through the exclusion of the metaphysics of human labour
presented in Marx’s early writing. Derrida’s disagreement with Althusser’s
reading of Marx is that it assumes that the realm of bourgeois ideology will pass
quietly into the history of obsolete ideas, never to return to the exigencies of
the present (Derrida in Sprinker, 1999: 182–231). The materialist science that
Althusser sought to expound, in other words, would supposedly break free of
the ideological categories of bourgeois political economy, and determine the
conditions under which the necessities of social being would become the core
of individual identity formation. In Derrida’s reading, however, this project
is always haunted by the return of unquiet ghosts: if it is the case that the
capitalism persists through its determination of affects and contingencies that
exceed its structural organization as class society (virtual realities, technological
prosthesis, genetic recoding), then the return of ‘bourgeois’ concepts of law,
morality, ethics, and religion is part of a far more complex logic of recurrence
than the one entailed in the Marxist concept of revisionism. The return of
these concepts, in other words, gives rise to a plurality of contestations through
which the fate of Marxism is constantly redetermined; for it is the fundamental
satisfactions of labour, community, and autonomy postulated at the beginning
of Marx’s philosophy, and their transformation in response to the media-techno-
scientific evolution of capitalism, that keeps open the political project of
Marxism.
The three sections that follow therefore are concerned with the relationship
of Marx’s ideas of labour, self-fulfilment, and socialized production to the
philosophies of desire presented by Hegel, Nietzsche and Derrida. In order to
expound this relationship, however, I need to begin by setting out the detail of
Marx’s account of the transformative potential of human labour, as it is here that
it is possible to discern the outline of his concept of human happiness.
Marx’s idea of happiness is embedded in a theory of human labour developed
as part of his critique of idealist philosophy. As is well known, the first of his
Theses on Feuerbach maintained that:
The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism … is that the thing, reality,
sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation,
but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectivity. Hence, in contra-
distinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism
– which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such (Marx in
McLellan 1977: 156).
Materialist philosophy, and particularly that of Feuerbach, begins with the bare
fact of being, which is conceived as an object of contemplation independent of
the human capacity for practical action. Idealism, on the other hand, develops
the ‘active side’ of human existence in the form of abstract faculties, categorical
imperatives, and speculative anthropologies that fail to comprehend the dialec-
tical relationship of self-consciousness to the material world it inhabits. Thus,
for Marx, the truth of man’s being in the world is the mediation of his self-
consciousness through ‘sensuous activity’ (labour): the categories through
which he knows the world are constantly transformed in the encounter between
practical intelligence and what Marx called ‘the inorganic body of nature’. It
is important to recognize however, that the aphoristic style of the Theses on
Feuerbach tends to obscure the fact that, in Marx’s thought, the relationship of
self-consciousness to the sensuous world is essentially social; for the encounter
between man and nature, which founds the productive organization of human
society, is grounded in primitive forms of cooperation which emerge from the

violent necessity of the state of nature.
In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx configures the
relationship between self-consciousness and sensuous activity through the
concept of ‘species-being’, that is, the dual determination of man as the being
whose activity contributes simultaneously to his physical and spiritual life
(Marx in McLellan, 1977: 82–3). Nature, in other words, is the ‘inorganic
body’ of humanity; it is the means both of their physical subsistence and of
their spiritual development through the practical activities of art, science,
and productive technique. And yet, the history of humanity’s social labour is
one of progressive estrangement. For, although the development of the forces
of production that takes place in the transitions from primitive to feudalist
to capitalist societies increases the potential to satisfy the totality of human
needs, the persistence of private property relations means that access to the
means of subsistence (commodified nature) is monopolized by the bourgeois
class. In fact, the M-C-M relation, which reduces labour to a commodity that
can be bought and sold on the open market, constitutes the highest point
of human estrangement; for the transformation of the worker into a calcu-
lable element in the production of commodities determines a constant and
methodical corruption of the faculties that constitute his or her humanity.
Marx’s description of estranged labour specifies four elements in this process of
dehumanization: estrangement from the product of labour, estrangement from
the productive process, estrangement of ‘man from man’, and estrangement
from ‘species-being’. So, the fact of the appropriation of the product of labour by
the capitalist for sale on the market, means that the more the worker produces,
the more impoverished he becomes. The outcome of this process is that each
individual encounters his fellow producers only as the means to his own instru-
mental labour. Thus, the overall effect of capital on the labour process is the
estrangement of humanity from its species-being, that is, from the vocation of
man to perfect himself through the perfection of the organic body of nature
(Marx in McLellan, 1977: 84–7).
In both Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology,
the primal scene from which humanity emerges into language and cooperation
is presented as the communal labour of hunter-gatherer tribes, in which the
activity of each individual is subsumed under the needs of the group. What
emerges from this primitive condition is the very possibility of human civili-
zation: once the production of the means of subsistence has been made subject
to principles of strategy and protentive imagination, no matter how primitive,

man has distinguished himself from the instinctual life of the animal. So, the
simple imitation of hunting or gathering techniques practised by other species
passes over into practical activities that involve higher cognitive functions
of judgement, innovation, and technique. Having broken the link between
instinct and the satisfaction need therefore, the species-being of humanity is
no longer limited to the simple satisfaction of its material needs: the emergence
of reason and judgement initiates a relationship in which humanity becomes
responsible both to its own perfectibility and to that of nature. As Marx puts
it, ‘man knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard of the object
[he] therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty’ (Marx
in McLellan, 1977: 82).
There are two important points that emerge from this account of the origin
of human self-consciousness. The first is that it is haunted by a concept of
originary community that Engels refers to as the ‘primitive communism’ of the
consanguine family (Engels, 2010: 66–8). The fundamental idea is that, at the
beginning of history, the organization of human society is such that the law
springs from the immediate needs of humanity, and that relationships among
men are such that their unity (with one another and with the subordinate
presence of women and children) springs from their common experience of
work, satisfaction, and desire. For, even though the division of labour in such
primitive societies eventually gives rise to the violence of private appropriation,
it is this originary form of cooperative labour that underlies the revolutionary
promise of Marx’s work. It is, I will argue, impossible to disentangle this promise
from a particular concept of collective being which is implicit in the expository
structure of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: a concept which is,
from the beginning, distinguished from the regime of bourgeois acquisitiveness
that is the absolute negation of man’s creative autonomy (Marx in McLellan
1977: 77–8). Yet this is not a concept of happiness, for the doctrine of subjective
feeling and aesthetic taste that defines bourgeois satisfaction belongs explicitly
to the egoism of civil society. Rather, the utopian hope of Marx’s theory of
labour is for a collective flourishing which will come after the regime of
commodification; a system in which productive activity regains its cooperative
essence, and the life of the individual is given back its concrete relationship to
both Man and Nature (Marx and Engels in McLellan, 1977: 168–71).
This brings me to my second point. In Marx’s early writing, autonomous
labour is presented as the simultaneous realization of creative spirit, alleviation
of suffering, and substantive purpose of human community; it is that which has

the capacity to transform both the world and the being of humanity. Althusser’s
account of the development of Marx’s theory, as we have seen, maintains that
there is an epistemic break in Marx’s work, and that consequently, this ‘Hegelian’
notion of human nature and all its attendant ideas of happiness, fulfilment, and
morality, has to be rejected in favour of the structural analysis of capitalism
implicit in his later writing. This claim is, it seems to me, unsustainable. Not
for the reasons put forward by humanist critics of Althusser (that Marx’s early
writings on creative labour are the real truth of his thought2), but because the
‘scientific’ method he developed in his later writings on capitalism remains
entangled with the metaphysics of labour set out in his early work. Indeed, the
labour theory of value originates in the ‘pre-scientific’ phase of Marx’s thought:
it is only insofar as the ‘organic labour’ of the proletariat is conceived as creating
value ‘throughout every instant it is in motion’, and as the antithesis of ‘fixed
capital’ that can only increase the speed of production, that Marx is able to
derive the self-destructive tendency of capitalism from its historical devel-
opment (Marx, 1990: 316).
Towards the end of Grundrisse, Marx argues that, under the regime of indus-
trial capitalism, machine technologies have become the ‘objective power’ that
dictates the temporality of the labour process (Marx, 1993: 692). He understands
this deployment of machinery as essential to the development of the mode of
production: insofar as it is true that machines can achieve their potential for
increasing relative surplus value only if they are run almost without cessation,
the consequence for those workers who remain in employment is that they
are made to perform ever-more repetitive tasks for an ever-larger proportion
of the day (Marx, 1993: 822). Considered from the perspective of the worker,
therefore, the tendency to increase expenditure on machinery results in the ‘real
subsumption’ of his creative labour under the objective power of capital (Marx,
1993: 694). Considered from a historical perspective, however, this tendency
is immanently social. Even though the accelerated temporality of the labour
process arises from the demands of private appropriation, its overall effect is to
reduce the time necessary for the production of use values. Thus, for Marx, the
historical evolution of capitalism is determined by a contradiction: on the one
hand it increases the efficiency with which human labour can produce the means
of subsistence (and thereby opens the possibility of a social form of production
in which labour would be freed from the yoke of physical compulsion), while
on the other hand it channels this intensified labour power into the production
of superfluous commodities, the process of whose manufacture is the concrete

fact of human unhappiness (Marx, 1993: 824).
Marx expresses this contradictory determination of capital’s pursuit of
organic labour in two different registers. In the first of these, his aim is to
set out the different shapes which fixed and organic capital assume under
large-scale industry, and to map out the crises of over-production and under-
consumption which are entailed in the technological intensification of labour
power (Marx, 1990: 435). Even in Capital, however, this ‘scientific’ register is
interwoven with the ethico-aesthetic demand that originates in the Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts – that the productive desire and general intellect
of humanity should regain its right of access to the inorganic body of nature.
The systematic alienation of human beings from their productive essence
therefore begins with the M-C-M relation; it is brought into existence through
capital’s first moment of self-valorization and made increasingly acute by its
transformation of the technological means of labour. According to Marx,
the dialectics of historical necessity and human emancipation are intrinsi-
cally related. While it is true that his theory of ideology discloses a powerful
movement of displacement among the forms of religion and citizenship, the
practical experience of alienation always haunts the illusory happiness of
bourgeois society. Thus, the end of capitalism is determined by its concen-
tration of three essentially related effects: the over-representation of fixed
capital in the M-C-M relation, the socialization of labour under technological
systems, and the practical and affective composition of the working class as a
revolutionary subject (Marx, 1990: 926).
In the sections that follow, I will examine the possibility of this revolutionary
condensation of the masses, and the questions of freedom, responsibility, and
happiness to which it gives rise. For, despite his claims to the contrary, Marx’s
account of human labour takes place within the logos of the philosophy of
spirit, so I will trace some of the major themes that have arisen from Marxism’s
encounter with neo-Hegelianism, neo-Nietzscheanism, and deconstruction.
The promise of revolutionary materialism
In this section, I will examine the terms of a radical shift in the concept of
modernity announced in Marx’s writing. This is most clearly expressed at the
start of The Communist Manifesto where Marx presents the impact of bourgeois
economic relations on traditional forms of social, religious, and political life in

the following way:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the means of

production, and with them the whole relations of society. Constant revolution-
izing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all previous
ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of venerable prejudices are
swept away … All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man
is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his
relations with his kind (Marx and Engels in McLellan, 1977: 224).
What Marx is describing here is the transformation of feudalist society through

the formal structure of the M-C-M relation: all of the old values that supported the
ancien régime are made subject to an accumulative demand that transforms the
totality of social life into a medium of economic exchange. The production of
surplus value becomes the universal imperative that determines social action;
and so the existence of every non-economic institution depends on its ability to
facilitate the turnover of capital. Marx’s assertion that ‘all that is solid melts into
air’ therefore, announces a radically new form of individualism; one in which
each person comes to see himself as both the source of his own freedom and as
morally independent of the heteronomous authority of state and religion. It is
this conjunction of radical individualism and economic necessity that, for Marx,
cannot be sublated within the metaphysical unity of Sittlichkeit. He maintains
that capitalism performs the historical destruction of Hegelian spirit, that is, its
reduction to ideological figures of authority and religiosity whose ‘substance’
belongs to pre-capitalist modes of production (Marx in McLellan, 1977: 300).
So, even if it is the case that Marx and Hegel share a concern with the transient
nature of bourgeois satisfaction, the question of the possibility of happiness
within the totality of market relations is posed in fundamentally different ways.
My contention is not that Hegel is simply wrong about the relationship
between happiness and social totality, or that Marx’s analysis of capital has
succeeded in banishing the spectre of philosophy from the question of human
flourishing. What Marx does do is radically alter the terms of this question.
His analysis of the revolutionary effects of capital on the political, religious,
and technological organization of society is such that the recuperative powers
of bourgeois economic relations have been fundamentally undermined. Thus,
while it is true that certain ‘Hegelian’ questions do re-emerge from Marx’s
account of revolutionary praxis and the social organization of labour, these

questions arise from the dynamics of fetishized production and consumption
that are the core of his critique of capitalism. Any neo-Hegelian politics of
happiness must therefore begin with Marx’s characterization of the bourgeois
epoch as ‘everlasting agitation’: if there is to be a return to something like
the mediated totality of the Greek Polis, this must arise out of the dispersal
of abstract individuals across radically heterogeneous regimes of pleasure,
utility, and servitude. In its more right-leaning forms, this politics maintains
that capital is merely one component of civil society, and that the history of
modernity cannot be adequately understood without reference to the autonomy
of the spheres of law, morality, and ethics that regulate the relationship between
state and economy3. The key to happiness therefore, is to defend the objective
morality of ethical life (the spheres of law, justice, conscience, and religion)
against the reductive powers of both socialism and market economics.
A more interesting engagement with Marx’s account of bourgeois economic
relations, however, is presented in Gillian Rose’s Hegel Contra Sociology. Put
rather too simply, her argument is that Hegelian philosophy is not ‘dialectical’
but ‘speculative’, and that the transformations of subjective feeling, aesthetic
taste, and legal recognition which constitute ethical life, sustain a history of
violence and misrecognition that reaches its height in bourgeois modernity.
Marx’s error was to proceed from a concept of a ‘pure sensuous activity’
(collective labour) that initiates human history; for in doing so, his concepts
of class and capital emerge as deterministic powers whose necessity operates
throughout the totality of bourgeois ethical life. In this section, therefore I
will examine Rose’s account of historical materialism, and the consequences
that arise from its formation, and re-formation, as a political ‘culture’ (Rose,
1981: 214–20).
Happiness is a difficult thing to specify in Hegelian thought. On the one
hand, Hegel’s notion of Sittlichkeit has been read as providing the foundation of
a substantive community that offers the possibility of mediating demotic forms
of subjectivity in the explicitly rational organization of the state. Happiness,
therefore, would take the form of the movement of desire through the institu-
tional forms of work and satisfaction that are realized in civil society, towards
intuitive recognition of a universal authority that is neither external nor
coercive. The left-Hegelian approach taken by Rose, on the other hand, presents
a kind of phenomenological messianism. For her, to advocate the possibility of
universal mediation within the complex differentiation of commodified society
is to fundamentally misunderstand the history of spirit as Sittlichkeit. The

atomistic subjectivities that have developed in civil society are essentially related
to bourgeois economic relations, and as such, they are forms of misrecognition
that cannot express the idea of the state. Historical time, in other words, is not
the unfolding of objective and subjective spirit as identity in difference; it is
the constant redetermination of a phenomenology of misrecognition, in which
subjective cultures (of desire, religiosity, consumption, and aesthetic taste) stand
in opposition to the concept of ethical substance. On this reading of Hegel,
the happiness that arises from work, consumption, religiosity, or political zeal
is always complicit with the violence of exclusion; for the subjective cultures
constituted through these modes of desire are always formed through an
imperfect apprehension of the ethical substance from which they arise. To live
within the totality of Sittlichkeit is to bear responsibility for the lack of recog-
nition implicit in every form of self-satisfaction, no matter how demotic or
apparently inclusive. It is this wisdom of the negative that, for Rose, is the key
to understanding the relationship between the cultures of illusory happiness
formed within the relations of bourgeois modernity, and a messianic politics
that remains responsible to the concept of ethical life (Rose, 1981: 204–14).
So, to return to Marx, Rose maintains that the problem with his approach
to the negativity of capitalism (and to the regime of socialized production that
is to come after it), is that his account of the formation of self-consciousness
in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, presents the ‘sensuous activity’
of labour as an original mode of feeling, praxis, and recognition that suffers
estrangement in the evolution of private property relations. History, in other
words, is progressive in the sense that the flourishing of the human spirit
that Marx described as primitive communism is what is promised by the
immanent potential of capitalism to satisfy the needs of all. The problem with
this, according to Rose, is that it proceeds from an ideal of practical labour
that predates, determines, and concludes the evolution of human society. To
postulate this originary trace of flourishing in the activity of social production
is, for Rose, to fail to apprehend the complex phenomenology of experience that
has produced the bourgeois form of modernity. She argues that Hegel’s account
of the origin of self-consciousness in the egoistic desire of nature, and of its
primary formation through the fear of death that underlies the master-slave
relationship, initiates a history in which subjective spirit is constantly formed
and re-formed within the substance of Sittlichkeit. The ‘culture of Marxism’
that Rose sets out in Hegel Contra Sociology, therefore, fails to apprehend the
contradictory relations of work, religion, morality, and love that constitute

ethical life, as always having mediated the ideal of socialized production
from which historical materialism begins. The complex dynamic of subjective
autonomy, in other words, goes practically unrecognized in Marx’s account
of the ideological satisfactions of civil society; so the expressive totality of
socialized production, which is the aim of his revolutionary materialism, is
given absolute priority over the actual relations in which sensibility, intellect,
and desire have been constituted in ethical life (Rose, 1981: 214–20).
So, what the culture of Marxism fails to recognize is that ‘reality is ethical’;
that the historical forms in which spirit is realized express more than the
simple estrangement of humanity from its creative essence, or ‘species being’
(Rose, 1981: 198). Rose argues that ‘capitalism’ should be understood as a
self-perpetuating culture that constantly transforms both the experience of
work, satisfaction, and desire, and the legal-institutional relations in which
the bourgeois subject determines its autonomy. This perpetual transformation,
however, is not a ‘melting into air’ that destroys it own illusory substance; for,
according to Rose, the abstract economic relations of civil society are essen-
tially related to cultures of subjective excess (aesthetic distraction, sacred
revelation, utilitarian morality) which have also framed the modern individual
as an ethical subject. Thus, the transformative demand of politics should be
informed by a historical-phenomenological account of how the bourgeois
individual represents itself in civil society, and of the contradictions to which
these representations have given rise within the substance of Sittlichkeit. For
Rose, the violence that has accompanied the political history of Marxism is
essentially bound up with a mythology of natural happiness, in which man’s
sensuous activity is related without mediation to that of his fellows, and where
the inorganic body of nature has yet to be appropriated by the regime of law
and private property. The culture of Marxism that Rose describes, therefore,
proceeds from an ‘unsatisfied’ form of materialism which identifies happiness
purely with the satisfactions of collective labour, and which regards the reality
of bourgeois society as the object of an absolute revolutionary demand (Rose,
1981: 163–74).
Rose’s argument that it is the fate of Marxism to become a culture of revolu-
tionary activity without limitation, and that the origin of this culture lies in its
perpetuation of a mythology of natural happiness that is utterly without substance,
is both compelling and problematic. Clearly, there is a connection between the
political cultures that came after the Second International (Maoism, Leninism,
and Stalinism) and Marx’s utopian promise. The programmatic liquidation of

classes deemed to be reactionary elements of the old order makes no sense unless it
is understood as an attempt to purify society of everything that could be considered
acquisitive, individualistic, or bourgeois. Rose compares the destructive trajectory
of these Marxist cultures to the logic of ethical degradation that Hegel identified in
the descent of the French Revolution into the Jacobin Terror. Hegel argued that the
French Enlightenment’s critique of the ancien régime as the absolute frustration
of universal rights and subjective autonomy produced a violent revolutionary
movement in which ‘universal will goes into itself and becomes individual will, to
which the universal will and work stand opposed’ (Hegel, 1967a: 602). Freedom, in
other words, becomes utterly idealized and utterly destructive: the lawlessness of
feudal aristocracy which the revolutionary movement set out to reform is simply
reaffirmed, and the substance of ethical life is ever-more deeply disrupted by the
loss of its objective structures. Now, there is a recognition in Rose’s work of Marx’s
contribution to the critique of bourgeois property relations, and of the durability of
his account of the socially transformative power of the M-C-M relation. Indeed, the
demand with which she concludes Hegel Contra Sociology is for a critical Marxism
that would seek to trace the effects of that power throughout the moral, legal, and
aesthetic constitution of Sittlichkeit. However, this demand raises fundamental
questions about Rose’s Hegelian concept of modernity, and about the relationship
to Marxism this determines.
Rose and Derrida share the idea that The Phenomenology of Mind is a ‘book
of death’: that it presents the evolution of self-consciousness as haunted by
mortality, and that it is this sense of the finitude that is co-present within the
dialectics of recognition-misrecognition that takes place in the substance of
Sittlichkeit (Derrida, 1990b: 254–62; Rose, 1981: 159–63). The question here
is that of the passage into and out of Hegel’s philosophy, or, to put it slightly
differently, the question of the mediating power of spirit as it is expressed in
the objective relations of state and civil society. In Derrida’s thought, as we will
see in a moment, the passage into the philosophy of spirit is the precondition
of ethical reflection; for the possibility of transforming the powers of totality is
opened by the categories through which ‘the social’ is constituted as ‘substance’,
‘beauty’, and ‘sacred love’. This opening of the possibility of ethics is central
to the fate of spirit in the technological space of modernity. For if, as Derrida
maintains, Hegel’s account of the ‘unhappy consciousness’, ‘beautiful soul’,
‘unworldly virtue’, and ‘abstract morality’ traces the elements through which the
modern subject has learned of its unity with the historical relations of ethical
life, then simply to redeploy these categories as marking the falsity of happiness,
morality, and feeling within the technological organization of capital is to
miss the uniqueness of the ethical demands that arise from that organization.
Rose’s reading of Marx is transformative in that it demonstrates his neglect of
representation in the dynamics of the commodity form, and specifies the impli-
cations of his idea of material labour as the pure antithesis of bourgeois excess.
However, her attempt to determine a critical space from which to expound
the complicities of capital with the atomistic cultures of modernity is caught
between the dynamical elements of Hegel’s critique of identity thinking in The
Phenomenology of Mind, and the movement of return and recuperation that
is traced in The Philosophy of Right. For Rose, of course, the latter is always
messianic; it always raises the existential questions of identity, otherness,
and violence that haunt The Phenomenology. And yet this begs the question
of repetition which lies at the root of Marx’s critique of Hegelian dialectic:
the question of whether the socio-technological relations that arise from the
pursuit of surplus value can be conceived as part of the history of redemptive
misrecognition through which Hegel expounds the evolution of modern ethical
life (Marx in McLellan, 1977: 26–7).
Rose’s reading of Hegel is very far from being a search for the ultimate
condition of happiness in his account of the struggles of subjective spirit with its
own finitude. Her exposition of the relations of bourgeois modernity is charac-
terized by a concentration on the negative: the loss of substance and satisfaction
that arises from the commodification of reality. And yet, there is a certain
reserve in this exposition. For, while it is true that her tracing of the negative
is always concerned with the aporetic forms of experience that arise within the
social whole, we might perhaps be right to suspect that the structure of these
aporias refers the dissatisfaction of each individual subject to the possibility of
redemption within the substance of Sittlichkeit (Rose, 2008: 208). Rose’s reading
of Marx therefore tends to reduce the political import of his materialism to a
kind of Rousseauist gesture that simultaneously determines ‘capitalism’ as the
absolute negative of creative labour, and the suffering of ‘the proletariat’ as the
unifying principle of social transformation. Yet, Rose’s appeal to the substance
of Sittlichkeit implicitly validates the forms of bourgeois life whose exploitative
violence Marx seeks to expound. Marx’s critique of surplus value is inherently
unsatisfied, and the possibility of happiness to which it gestures does exceed
the hierarchies of intuition, contemplation, and religiosity that organize the
differentiation of ethical life. What his critique of surplus value opens up, in
other words, is the subjection of humanity to technological forces that have

fundamentally transformed the conditions under which the dynamics of recog-
nition can take place within the relations of civil society. Thus, the readings of
Hegel that Rose derides as lacking insight into the destabilizing presence of the
negative reveal something essential about the fate of his philosophy: that the
prescriptive style of The Philosophy of Right would have a profound influence
on the systemic forms of modernism (functionalism, structuralism, systems
theory, analytical Marxism) through which the ‘spiritual’ element of happiness
is expelled from Sittlichkeit (Rose, 1981: 211–14; Abbinnett, 1998: 9–37).
Ultimately, the question of unsatisfied materialism and its relationship to
happiness cannot be erased from the political culture of Marxism. If I were to
put this crudely, the recurrent question of the relationship of the left to pleasure
– and of whether it is possible to be a happy socialist – indicate a doctrinal diffi-
culty that Marxism has always had with enjoyment that is not won through the
conduct of revolutionary struggle or through the strictures of collective work.
In Marx’s thought, as we have seen, there is a tension between the ultimate satis-
faction of man’s species-being under the conditions of socialized production and
the power of capital constantly to transform the intellect, sensibility, and desire
of human beings. Socialized production, as Marx conceives it, is the universal
satisfaction of need through collective work, and the realization of the human
spirit through its release from the constraints of forced labour. Yet, might it not
be the case that Marx’s dissatisfaction with the content of bourgeois life is not
dissatisfied enough, and that the effects that the regime of capital accumulation
introduces into the relations of Sittlichkeit (massive accumulations of wealth
and power, colonial enslavement, the despoliation of nature) fundamentally
transform the chance of human happiness? Perhaps, in other words, what has
been released by the capitalist mode of production cannot be understood as
part of a historical teleology in which it is man’s increased capacity to satisfy his
material needs that determines the ultimate end of human civilization.
In Nietzsche’s thought, bourgeois modernity is conceived as an accumu-
lation of power in which the interests of ‘the herd’ have already achieved moral
dominance; and so the demands for distributive equality that are organized
in the political apparatus of socialism are, in reality, the fulfilment of the
Utilitarian obsession with production. Nietzsche’s insistence on the impos-
sibility of deriving happiness from the satisfaction of material need therefore,
is related to a concept of ‘spirit’ that arises out of the existential boredom that
haunts the collective wellbeing of the species. Thus, if there is an encounter
between Marx and Nietzsche that goes beyond the repetition of orthodoxies,
this is played out through the possibility of transforming the ethics of distrib-
utive justice and collective labour that Nietzsche disparages in his critique of
socialism. What these reconfigurations might be, and how they are related to
the politics of happiness, I will examine in the following sections.
Work, servitude and ressentiment
I began this chapter by making a connection between Althusser’s structuralist

reading of Marx and Schopenhauer’s account of the limits of human happiness.
Althusser argues that to maintain that the key to Marx’s thought is his early
speculations on the relationship between productive labour and the perfect-
ibility of man is to ignore the epistemological break between the ‘young’ Marx
and the ‘scientific’ materialist who emerged from these Hegelian beginnings.
An essential part of Althusser’s specification of this break is his claim that
the structural dynamics of capitalism that Marx expounded in Capital, reveal
certain inescapable necessities of production, consumption, and integration
to which a socialist society would have to attend. The difference between
capitalism and socialism, therefore, is not the absence of estrangement, but
rather that the integration of the social totality is organized around a rational
distribution of resources possible only in the absence of class exploitation. This
reading of Capital maintains an austere sobriety in relation to the revolutionary
ideals of Marxism: the equitable distribution of resources that, for Althusser,
is the ultimate aim of communism cannot be given over to such metaphysical
notions as perfectibility or happiness. It is in this sense that Althusser’s Marxism
shares something of Schopenhauer’s moral conservatism. For, insofar as he
conceives the purpose of socialism as the removal of structural antagonisms
from the mode of production, Althusser transforms the revolutionary promise
of Marxism into a demand for the maximum satisfaction of need compatible
with equal distribution of the means of subsistence. This ‘Schopenhauerian’
reading of Marx is close to the way in which Nietzsche understands the
historical dynamics of socialism, that is, as the threat of an unbearable weight
of productive necessity that the masses might one day impose on every act of
spontaneous self-determination. Thus, Nietzsche maintains that if we are to
understand the influence of socialism on the historical unfolding of the will to
power, we must look at the forms of conflict, repression, and destruction that
the revolutionary body of the masses has put into play, and at the events of
transgression that this economy are likely to produce (Nietzsche, 1994: 214–15).
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche remarked on the frugality of modern society
in its attitude towards joy: ‘More and more work enlists all good conscience on
its side; and the desire for joy already calls itself a “need to recuperate” and is
beginning to be ashamed of itself ’ (Nietzsche, 1974: 259). We can divine from
these remarks that, for Nietzsche, constant productive activity has something
ignoble about it, and that it is the opposite of his demand for the joyful pursuit of
an infinitely elusive truth. We have already seen how this critique of compulsive
productivity is developed in Nietzsche’s critique of Utilitarianism. He argues that
the attempt to reduce happiness to a function of the average level of satisfaction
of material needs abstracts humanity from the primordial history of affects that
have formed its desire. The sensations of pleasure and pain that belong to the
organic life of each individual, in other words, are presented by the Utilitarians as
both absolutely fixed and as designating the true conditions of human happiness
(Bentham, 2007: 1–2; Mill, 1980: 5–7). For Nietzsche, the ‘wisdom’ that such an
attitude to life would bring to mankind, is no more than the mathematical calcu-
lation of how best to realize the conditions of universal contentment. And so from
this perspective, Marx’s claim that communism would overcome the symbolic
economy of love, religiosity, and sacrifice that clings to bourgeois society, can be
seen as the highest expression of this utilitarian logic. For the materialist histori-
ography through which Marx presents the evolution of productive forces entails
a progressive disenchantment of the world, in which every social relationship is
made subject to the demands of relentless productivity.
One of the dangers in constructing a Nietzschean critique of Marx is that of
presenting his aphorisms on socialism as a celebration of ‘symbolic ambiguity’
against the demands of communal obligation (Baudrillard, 1990: 131–53; 1975:
43). Socialism, in other words, is bad because it denies the unforeseen inten-
sities that arise from life lived to excess, and where the essence of virtue lies in
confronting the danger of what or whoever may come. There is, of course, some
truth in this assessment of Nietzsche’s attitude towards socialism; and yet such
a simplistic formulation misses the deeper significance of his encounter with its
demands for social justice and universal equality. We need therefore to return
to the concepts of history and materialism that are put into play by Marx and
Nietzsche. In the second essay of his Unfashionable Observations, ‘On the Utility
and Liability of History for Life’, Nietzsche remarked that ‘only by means of the
power to utilize the past for life and to reshape past events into history once
more … does the human become a human being’ (Nietzsche, 1995: 91). The
movement into modernity, in other words, should not be regarded as a process
of decay from the ideals of Greco-Roman civilization, or as the re-articulation of
a universal spirit in which it is possible to discern the truth of ethical life. Rather,
the purpose of history is always yet to be determined, and as such, ought to be
regarded as a demand for which each successive generation has to take respon-
sibility. (We will see in the following section that this generational responsibility
is a complex one.) This relationship to the past reopens the question of spirit,
or, more precisely, the question of the value of the metaphysical categories
through which the worldly struggles of humanity are represented. In Nietzsche’s
thought, these concepts are, in a fundamental sense, unavoidable; they are the
medium through which the truth of the world is articulated by living humanity.
However, the value of the forms in which the moral, aesthetic, and religious
substance of Sittlichkeit is expressed lies not in the happiness they may bestow,
but in the provocation to overcoming which is inherent in the weight of their
organization. Thus, the concepts of ‘spirit’ and ‘materialism’ are closely related in
Nietzsche’s thought. For, while it is true that he maintains that idealism proceeds
by reducing the dangerous contingency of events to the recuperative logic of
universal spirit, it is the profound seriousness of this process of spiritualization
that gives rise to the ‘refined cynicism’ of materialist science (Nietzsche, 1979:
39–40). And so we need to look briefly at the dynamics of this relationship and
how it is played out in the social and political relations of modernity.
For Nietzsche, idealism begins with the warnings of Classical antiquity
against overbearing passions. The ideals of justice, virtue, love, and honour
that are expounded by Plato and Aristotle, however, are not simply repressive
systems that stifle the freedom of humanity; they gave rise to intensities of
desire that are radically different from the utilitarian forms that have come to
dominate bourgeois modernity. Conceived genealogically, the original stric-
tures that idealism placed on the excessiveness of human vitality were an
intervention that produced profound transformations of the economy of love
and desire, privation and suffering (Nietzsche, 1974: 333). And yet, the history
of the metaphysical world that is woven into Nietzsche’s thought, sets out the
decline of idealist philosophy into an inertial force that has gathered in the
flesh and culture of humanity. An important point emerges here. It is clear
from Nietzsche’s remarks on the ‘prejudice of science’, that he has come to
regard the ‘materialism’ expressed in the laws of Newtonian physics as the most
devitalized form of idealism (Nietzsche, 1974: 332–41). The notion that all the
extensive and intensive dimensions of the universe are susceptible to a unitary

regime of mathematical calculation assumes that the truth of all phenomena is
expressible in the formulae of mathematical physics, and that this objectivity is
unaffected by the proliferation of its regimes, the diversity of its applications,
and the reactions provoked by its dominance. It is this calculative materialism
that, for Nietzsche, lies at the core of both Socialism and Utilitarianism; both
are obsessed with the quantification of conditions that would bring about the
maximum level of happiness and the minimum level of suffering.
If we look at historical materialism from a genealogical perspective therefore,
the categories through which Marx expounds the transition from ancient
communal to feudalist to capitalist societies (forces of production, class
relations, the means of exchange), derive from his belief that it is quantitative
differences in powers of material production that determine the evolution of
human society. So, as the productive power of industrial capitalism increases,
it eventually gives rise to the revolutionary conditions that allow the fulfilment
of its historical destiny, which is the provision of the maximum means of
subsistence for the maximum number of people. The problem with this, if we
follow Nietzsche’s line of argument, is that it repeats the Hegelian law of the
transformation of quantity into quality. Marx’s doctrine of communism, in
other words, maintains that the more physical need is eradicated from human
society, the more complete our sense of happiness will be. This happiness will
be strictly incomparable to the Romantic forms of bourgeois ideology. It will,
according to Marx, be a simultaneous recognition of self and other, and of how
the needs of all are best satisfied through the activity of the one (Marx and
Engels in McLellan, 1977: 168–71). For Nietzsche, this prescription for the way
to happiness is premised on a misunderstanding of the relationship between
truth and materiality. The materiality of the world, as Nietzsche conceives it, is
illimitable; it arises from within the metaphysical categories through which ‘the
real’ is configured as truth, harmony, and order. In the sphere of morality, for
example, Nietzsche maintains that the origin of bourgeois ‘good will’ should be
sought in the dynamics of pleasure and pain which form primitive society, and
that the possibility of its dissolution is given in the intensities it distributes into
the life of ‘the herd’ and the austere community of ‘noble spirits’ (Nietzsche,
1990: 194–5). This materiality, which Nietzsche characterizes through the
concept of will to power, is an infinite provocation; it constantly opens up new
realms of unexplored necessity, responsibility and virtue that exceed the calcu-
lative economy of socialized production.
This brings me to the pivotal question that Nietzsche’s thought poses for the
doctrine of socialism. Nietzsche’s concept of materialism discloses an aporia
in Marx’s work, the same aporia that Althusser attempted to negotiate in his
account of the epistemological break between the young and the mature Marx.
As we have seen, Marx’s early writing, especially the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts, gives an account of communism as the simultaneity of desire
and creativity, or, to put it slightly differently, as the practical abolition of the
rupture that private property creates between the ‘inorganic body of nature’ and
the freely creative labour of mankind. Thus, the abolition of private property is
understood as the only way to achieve a creative/aesthetic relationship between
the harmonious presence of nature and the perfectible essence of humanity. In
Marx’s later economic writings, however, the nature of this promise changes.
The future that capitalism opens up is a rationalized form of the productive
necessity it has already achieved, and so the transition to communism is under-
stood as the instalment of a planned economy, state culture, and equal access
to the means of subsistence. On the one hand therefore, we have a concept of
flourishing that appeals to the unity of nature as the goal of human creativity,
and, on the other, we have the weight of social production as the shared respon-
sibility of all human labour (see Lenin, 1976 and Luxemburg, 1961).
Conceived genealogically therefore, it is this aporia that configures the
history of socialism: the constant vacillation of workers’ movements between
the utopian promise of universal creativity and the Sisyphean labour of equal-
izing the shares of all in the means of subsistence. So, if we return to Nietzsche’s
remarks on the power of socialism in Human, All Too Human, it is clear that the
convergence of these two paths would be the work of the party apparatus: for
it is in the designation of how the masses are to be formed into a revolutionary
body, and of how they are to determine the regime of socialized production, that
the messianic power of socialism is constituted (Nietzsche, 1994: 213–14).
Thus, to say that for Nietzsche there is no truth in socialism, or that it is the
total abandonment of spirit, would be wrong. It is better to say that it is a risk
that emerges with modernity; a risk that is the counterpart of the petty acquisi-
tiveness of bourgeois culture, and which demands that we understand ‘in which
of its modifications it can still be used as a mighty lever in the current political
power game’ (Nietzsche, 1994: 215). There may be times, in other words, when
it is necessary to encourage the commitments and virtues of socialism against
the utilitarian values and Romanticism of the bourgeoisie. Yet this is always a
gamble. What socialism threatens is that the soul of each man should become
utterly overburdened with the weight of responsibility; that it should become

the soul of the camel, the ‘weight-bearing spirit’ that subjects itself to all and
sundry rather than reveal what is fine or noble about itself (Nietzsche, 1984: 54).
Such a spirit carries the burden of a deep unspoken anger; for it cannot entirely
reconcile itself to living under the yoke of social need and the endless repetitive
duties of communal production. So, the concept of socialism, if it is fashioned
into the exclusive truth by which human beings represent themselves and their
destiny, becomes an economy of perfect resentment: it frustrates the power
of those ‘free spirits’ for whom the harmony of nature constantly slips away
into the madness of profane possibility, and whose happiness can come only
through the virtues of hardship, endurance, and loneliness. For Nietzsche, the
experience of excess that inhabits the materiality of being is closer to the dread
of Schopenhauer’s world than to the edenic mythologies from which socialism
is descended.
This, of course, is not to say that Nietzsche commends the quietism of
Schopenhauer’s philosophy any more than he does the obsessive labour of
socialism. Rather, his argument is that the pure accidentality of the world
that Schopenhauer presents as the eternal suffering of mankind opens the
possibility of a joyful and excessive happiness that is inconceivable under the
conditions of socialized production. What socialism is, according to Nietzsche,
is a modern form of herd morality that attempts to enlist the whole of mankind
in the task of removing need and suffering from the world. This task, however,
is neither achievable nor beneficial, for, conceived genealogically, Marx’s
thought remains tied to an idealist account of the relationship between the
perfectibility of man and the inorganic body of nature. What Marx’s version of
this dialectical history does is to make the creative activity of man into a kind
of immanence that underlies the practical estrangement it suffers in different
regimes of private appropriation (Marx in McLellan, 1977: 160–8). Thus, the
periodization through which humanity progresses towards the non-alienated
transformation of nature (communism), assumes an underlying identity of the
human species which, for Nietzsche, is the outcome of contingent strategies of
entrapment, periods of inertia, excesses of violence, and surfeits of pity that are
essential to the substance of social life. Nietzsche’s concept of spirit, therefore,
arises from the vertiginous sense of possibility that haunts this substance. It is
the proximity of life, death, and becoming which transforms the soul from a
camel into a lion that cannot accept the strictures of laborious contentment.
And yet, beyond this act of ferocious refusal there is the childlike ‘yes’; the
welcome to all that may come from the infinite depths of the world, and
the careless dance that creates its own virtue from the trembling of the real
(Nietzsche, 1984: 54–6).
What Nietzsche’s thought opens up, therefore, is the possibility that socialism,
as a politics of happiness, takes place within a general economy of effects (the
will to power) that both precedes and exceeds its dialectical representation
of history. For Nietzsche, human society is an experiment; the outcome of
acts of will whose antagonisms have always already diffracted the collective
pursuit of peace and distributive justice (Nietzsche, 1984: 229). This idea of
an excessive contingency that underlies the formation of life into a coherent
order of production, consumption, and obligation, and which keeps open the
responsibility of ‘free spirits’ to what is beyond the utilitarian happiness of the
masses, raises the crucial question of what the aims of socialist politics can be
‘after Nietzsche’. For, if we accept that Nietzsche’s critique of idealist teleologies
has fundamentally undermined the appeals to collective creativity that are
inscribed in the Marxist ideal of socialized production, then the responsi-
bility of a contemporary socialist politics/critique would be to reconfigure the
vocabularies of class, exploitation, silencing, and exclusion that have arisen out
of historical materialism. This, of course, would mean effecting a total trans-
formation of what ‘socialism’ means, particularly the terms of its promise to
provide universal happiness for all humanity. So, it is the transformation of this
possibility that I will examine in the final section.
Socialism and the messianic
Nietzsche once remarked that man ‘is the will to power and nothing else besides’
(Nietzsche, 1968: 364). This statement begs one of the most basic questions
of his philosophy: if it is the case that ‘man’ is nothing but the will to self-
overcoming, why is it that the genealogies of religion, morality, and philosophy
that Nietzsche develops in his later writing, present a history of reactive powers
with which creative will has colluded? How is it possible that the transformative
cruelty which brought human culture into being (the brutal discipline imposed
by the most powerful wills on the instinctual life of the weak), has become
so enmeshed in systems of guilt and self-attrition that it is no longer able to
transform the conditions of its own subjection? In this section, therefore, I will
examine the forms of mastery, servitude, and desire that Nietzsche’s concept of
genealogy seeks to illuminate, and their relationship to what Derrida has called
the ‘spectre’ of socialism.
The most comprehensive answer Nietzsche gives to the question of reactive
powers comes in The Genealogy of Morals. His argument is that the origin
of human culture lies not in the peaceful transformation of nature through
collective labour (as with the ‘idealist’ Marx of the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts), but in the power of those who have disciplined the chaos of
their own organic nature to impose order on the formlessness of ‘the herd’
(Nietzsche, 1990: 192). ‘Culture’, in other words, originates in those ‘free spirits’
who are capable of enacting their desires; for, insofar as they are able to suppress,
defer, or intensify their reactive impulses, they are able to exercise a certain
degree of sovereignty over their instinctual lives. It is this assertion of the will to
power that, for Nietzsche, is the origin of spirit. For it is, as Deleuze has pointed
out, the spontaneous enactment of desire, and the psychological economy of
deferral, projection, and memory to which this gives rise, that constitutes the
first appearance of ‘the human’ (Deleuze, 1983: 133–5). To put this in a slightly
different register, the collective achievements of ‘spirit’ cannot be separated from
the ‘blood and horror’ of the discipline that brought human society into being.
Thus, if human consciousness is capable of exercising sovereignty, this power is
not ‘given’ to it through an act of divine grace. Rather, man is his own creation:
his will, satisfaction, and desire are the outcome of what the contingency of the
earth has brought into being; the free spirits whose brutality lies at the origin of
‘all good things’ (Nietzsche, 1990: 193–4). And yet, for Nietzsche, this original
dominion of powerful men over the weak and dependent remains vulnerable to
the reactive forces of ‘the herd’.
The concept of herd existence that Nietzsche presents in The Genealogy of
Morals has often been misconstrued as referring to a natural state of contented
ignorance from which the greater part of humanity has yet to emerge. This,
however, is to misunderstand the concept of culture that informs Nietzsche’s
genealogy. Insofar as it is the inculcation of the basic strictures of social existence
that brings ‘the herd’ into existence, its relationship to the active powers that have
formed the primitive economy of punishment, requital, barter, and justice is one
of primordial vulnerability. The weakest are subject to a regime of discipline and
caprice that forms them into a thoroughly reactive body dedicated to the easing
of their collective sufferings. The three distinctive forms in which this reactivity
is expressed are religion, ressentiment, and bad conscience. The first two stand
close to each other in the moral constitution of the herd. Human culture begins
with the exercise of terrible physical strictures, and it is this that constitutes a
fundamental desire for vengeance within the mass of humanity. This desire is
essentially reactive: it arises from the existential frustration felt by the weak,
and manifests itself in a religious inversion that makes God the unique source
of happiness beyond the sufferings of the temporal world. The ressentiment that
animates the life of the herd, in other words, is given a transcendental justifi-
cation; their misery becomes the ‘sign of their election by God’, and their desire
to avenge themselves on the strong is transformed into the Christian doctrine of
‘faith, love and hope’. The satisfactions of this redemptive doctrine are powerful
and pervasive; they transform the reactive desire for blissful obedience into an
active pursuit of the glory of God against the excesses of the godless (Nietzsche,
1990: 182–3). It is this transformation that lies at the root of what Nietzsche
calls bad conscience. Once the divinely sanctioned mission of universal love
has demonized the world of sensory desire, the life of spirit is turned against
its attachment to the world of sense, and the power of the strong is trapped in
ecstasies of guilt and denial (Nietzsche, 1990: 194–6).
Socialism, according to Nietzsche, is inextricably linked to the reactive
economy of religion. Indeed, he locates the basis of its power over the
masses in the fact that its fundamental concepts of community, brotherhood,
and happiness are related genealogically to religious ideals of sacrifice and
redemption (Nietzsche, 1994: 90). Thus, to understand the place of socialism
in the history of human culture, we have to understand its relationship to the
sense of loss that the Enlightenment produced in European civilization, and to
the painful death of religion that is announced in The Gay Science (Nietzsche,
1974: 181–2). So, to bring the issue back to Marx, we need to determine how
far the concept of ‘species being’ he presents in the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts is shot through with a ‘theology’ of transformative labour, and the
extent to which this theology has animated the disputes among the different
political factions of the left. For Nietzsche, such disputes disclose a vicious circle
of ressentiment that is made all the more intense by the inability of any faction to
transform conventional norms of desire. Socialism intensifies what it professes
to overthrow: the domination of productivity over the creative life of body/
spirit, and the transformation of labour into a regime of hopeless repetition.
As such, socialist ideology is the counterpart of nihilistic tendencies that are
essential to the project of modernity: the disenchantment of life, the loss of
symbolic meaning, and the calculability of social relationships. The assemblages
of universal cooperation that Marxism would build against the contingencies
of the world are, for Nietzsche, always haunted by a ‘passive nihilism’ that
threatens the end of the will to transformation (Nietzsche, 1994: 145; Deleuze,
1992: 152–6).
So, can this Nietzschean genealogy of socialism be mapped onto the ethical,
political, and epistemic assemblage of Marxism? This is a complex question,
and one that is fundamental to the difference between Marx’s and Nietzsche’s
respective accounts of the possibility of human happiness. It seems to me that
the concept of materialism that Nietzsche developed in his genealogical writings
(the idea that man is thrown into the chaos of the world and must give form to
what threatens to overwhelm him) is essentially a provocation to overcoming;
it is a demand constantly to go beyond the philosophical theologies that have
configured the world as the immanence of love, happiness, or redemption.
What is fundamentally restrictive about the dialectical mode of thought that
Marx inherits from Hegel is the fact that it attempts to unify each of these
moments: the convergence of sense, reason, and religiosity that is played out in
the concrete relations of Sittlichkeit is recapitulated in Marx’s notion of labour
as both the essence of man and the original purpose of human social relations.
All that it is possible for his critique of capitalism to engender therefore is the
equalization of passivity – the severing of spirit from ‘the heart of the earth’ and
the final deification of the state (Nietzsche, 1984: 152–5). Yet there is something
in Marx’s analysis of the economy of commodity production that communicates
with the dangerous infinity of Nietzsche’s materialism. For, insofar as the M-C-M
relation expresses an infinitely flexible system of production-consumption-
exchange, it gives rise to intensities that are constantly transformed by the
mutability of the commodity form (Baudrillard, 1981: 101). Thus, the impor-
tance of Marx’s critique lies in the fact that it registers the absolute extremity
of living in the technological body of capitalism: the precipitation of new
intensities of happiness, suffering, cooperation, and love from which the possi-
bility of the political arises. And so it is here that we encounter what Walter
Benjamin conceived as the ‘messianic’ responsibility that inhabits the strictures
of historical materialism: the possibility of a radical transvaluation of the social
covenant that comes with each new generation (Benjamin, 1992: 246).
Benjamin’s account of the messianic responsibility that haunts Marx’s theory
of history has a strange ambiguity about it. On the one hand, he invokes the
messiah as a figure who may come at any time to mend the fractured bonds
of humanity, and on the other, this figuration is also the spectral form of what
is owed by every generation to the dead of past conflicts and to the liberty
of those who are not yet born (Benjamin, 1992: 255). This dual determi-
nation of the messianic is important because it has configured two radically
different, although related, approaches to the relationship between happiness
and the political potential that is immanent in the evolution of capitalism. In
Deleuze and Guattari’s work on capitalism and schizophrenia, it is the theme
of making good what is suppressed within the territorialized space of capital
that is pre-eminent. I should point out that, in this context, ‘making good’ does
not mean the restoration of a happier archaic past, but rather the liberation
of possibilities that live in the body, mind, and imagination of the Oedipal
subject. Derrida’s later work on the political responsibilities that arise from
the media-techno-scientific regime of capital, on the other hand, is orientated
towards the unconditional law of the messiah: the transformation of the present
through a moral desire (hospitality) that is without limit or reserve (Derrida,
2000: 75–83). This distinction needs to be explored more fully.
In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari retrace Nietzsche’s history of reactive
forces as the emergence and development of three kinds of productive machine:
‘the primitive’, ‘the despotic’, and the ‘civilized capitalist’. Their analysis of the
first of these social machines presents the transition from nature to society as
the capturing of primitive flows of desire (that are not so very different from
the simian) within a particular kind of territoriality. The flows through which
social production is sustained – ‘flows of women and children, flows of herds
and seed, sperm flows, flows of shit, menstrual flows’ – are inscribed on the
surface of the earth and the bodies of the tribe. And so, the inorganic body of
nature emerges as the object of desire and the source of repression; it becomes
the ‘mega machine’ that encodes the animality of the human organism (Deleuze
and Guattari, 2000: 140–2). The emergence of the despotic state is not an
evolutionary process: its possibility depends on 1) the departure of a reactive
asceticism from the economy of the primitive machine, 2) its constitution as a
religious alliance in which the despot becomes the focus of spiritual desire, and
3) the return of this asceticism to the primitive machine as ‘a terror without
precedent’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000: 192). Thus, the anthropological event
described here is the invasion of a labile economy of flows and conflicts by the
reactive organization of spirit: the intensities of mimetic unity are colonized by
the religious inscription of sovereignty, and the nomadic occupation of space (as
a boundless possibility of flight) is displaced by a theology of creation. And so,
if there is a trace of primordial happiness at the origin of Deleuze and Guattari’s
history of machinic desire, this is sustained in the labile assemblage of the
nomad; for it is that which returns, as a kind of unpredictable drive (conatus),

to each subsequent mode of political capture and territorialization (Deleuze and
Guattari, 2004: 440–1).
At the start of Section Three of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari remark
that capitalism ‘has haunted all forms of society as their terrifying nightmare,
it is the dread they feel of a flow that would elude all of their codes’ (Deleuze
and Guattari, 2000: 140). The history of primitive, despotic, and capitalist terri-
torialities set out in Capitalism and Schizophrenia therefore does not present a
diachronic progression; it traces a play of immanence, repression, and departure
through which ‘progress’ is displaced by the unpredictable affects of machinic
desire. It is in this sense that ‘capitalism’ has haunted all forms of society. For
what is named here is not a historically specific mode of production (in Marx’s
sense), but the very condition of history: the excessive flows of desire that are put
into play by every territorial machine and against which every machine deter-
mines its strategies of capture. For Deleuze and Guattari, there is a disturbing
homology between the infinite mutability of ‘capitalism’ (as the unrestricted
flow of knowledge, capital, sex, and money) and the general economy of excess
immanent in each system of territoriality. Even in the primitive territorial
machine, for example, intensities arose that exceeded the dominant system of
encoding and gave rise to the despotic regime (Deleuze and Guattari: 2000: 194).
Thus, capitalism is the ‘dark precursor’ of freedom; it is a randomness that
redistributes the possibility of joyful encounters across the networks of political
sovereignty, or, to put it slightly differently, an immanent power whose affects
are played out in the emergence of spontaneous ‘essences’ which transgress
the Oedipal relations of the state (Deleuze, 1988: 104; Deleuze and Guattari,
2004: 465). Rosi Braidotti, for example, maintains that the Deleuzian concept
of essence, as it is applied to the ontological constitution of the feminine,
introduces a radical conditionality into the economy of sexual difference.
The historical present is conceived as the dispersal of archaic forms of gender
identity through the flows of desire put into play by civilized capitalist machines.
The ‘essence’ to which feminist politics is responsible, therefore, is an evolving
reality that emerges through the contingent forms that subjective desire has
taken, and which becomes the object of an ‘ethical passion’ for new forms of
representation and community (Braidotti, 1994: 186–90).
So, if we are to discern the difference between Derrida’s and Deleuze and
Guattari’s accounts of capitalism, happiness, and revolutionary desire, the
best strategy is perhaps to return to the distinction between representation
and affect that distinguishes their respective modes of thought. As we saw in

the previous chapter, Derrida’s account of representation coheres around the
Classical ideal of the image as an ‘envoi’ whose arrival is supposed to bring the
truth of being with it. His argument, which I will have to abridge here, is that
this pursuit of pure representational adequacy is one of the founding ideals of
Western metaphysics, and that as such, it is inscribed in the ideals of truth,
justice, and recognition that constitute Western democracy (Derrida: 2007:
109). However, the crucial point is that the image, as envoi, is always haunted
by what it cannot bring: even the most intense feelings of happiness and identity
that are provoked by its regime, are ‘menaced by divisibility’ and the return of
the unrepresentable (Derrida, 2007: 122). It is this logic of return that informs
the expository strategy of Spectres of Marx. Derrida’s argument is that the
media-techno-scientific networks that have given rise to the global fluidity of
capital have fundamentally transformed the conatus of revolutionary politics;
its possibility, if there is one, is dispersed across virtual systems that constantly
defer the immediacy of machinic desire and its affects. Capitalism can only be
what it is through its power to manipulate the structure of the real. Its ability
to transgress borders, to condense space and time, and radically to accelerate
the formation and dissolution of experience occurs through virtual networks
that have radically transformed the social, economic, and political effects of
commodification (Derrida, 1994: 77–94). Thus, if we proceed from Derrida’s
analysis of the image as envoi, this transformation of capitalism’s political super-
structure is neither the absolute loss of the aesthetic nor the complete dispersal
of affect into an infinite refraction of signs. Rather, it becomes the condition of
affects that are solicited by the total re-presentation of reality: the disturbance
of the present by others who come to us as the ‘paradoxical immediacy’ of
hatred and desire, and who always reopen the possibility of unconditional acts
of hospitality (Derrida, 1994: 7; Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000: 16–18).
For Derrida as well as Deleuze and Guattari, the concept of ‘capitalism’ by
which Marx designated the universality of economic exploitation has mutated
into an assemblage of media-techno-scientific relations whose future is always
uncertain. In order to capture something of this uncertainty, new categories are
required to understand both the experiences of suffering and exploitation that
arise from the global networks of capitalism, and the technological integration
of mind, organism, body, and life into the expanded regime commodification.
Thus, the demand for universal happiness that inhabits Marx’s work from its
beginnings is precisely the ‘spirit’ of socialism maintained in historical struggles
between totality and particularity, alterity and legality. This is not to say that
all struggles for happiness have an ethical significance; we saw in the previous
chapter, for example, how postmodern capitalism has succeeded in transforming
‘socialism’ into the struggle for lifestyle and personal identity choices that Marx
would not have recognized as part of the historical struggle of the oppressed. It
should be clear, however, from Derrida’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s attempts to
anticipate moments of resistance within the most extreme effects of silencing,
exclusion, and denial, that their respective critiques are intended constantly to
reopen the possibility of transformative activity on the part of ‘the oppressed’
(even if ‘the oppressed’ have now become a spectral body that no longer has the
substantive presence of Marx’s proletariat). The politics of happiness inherited
by Derrida and Deleuze, therefore, is genealogically related to Benjamin’s notion
of messianic return: although they both depart from the totalizing powers of
historical materialism, they both return to the spectral possibility of a happiness
that can never be entirely coincident with the somatic pleasures, legal freedoms,
or economic rights that constitute the ideological experience of the present
(Derrida, 1994: 66; Deleuze and Guattari, 2000: 263).
The doctrine of socialism therefore retraces the messianic notion of happiness
as the horizon of every new generation; it is reborn as a political movement
not just from the most abject poverty and suffering, but also out of the elusive
part of the soul that goes unsatisfied in the most extreme experiences of
consumption, domination, and pleasure. According to Hardt and Negri, this
persistence of the soul within the systems of technological capitalism can lead
either to the fulfilment of Marx’s promise of shared satisfaction, or to a kind of
theology of the negative. For, if we begin from the premise of a spectral freedom
that can respond only to the damage caused by the technological development
of capital, then the happiness of humanity is lost forever in the multiplication
of transcendental responsibilities. Thus, they maintain that it is only if we
proceed from a particular version of Deleuzian materialism, which conceives
‘the human’ as a collective essence immanent in the technological evolution of
labour, that it is possible to remain true to the Marxist promise of the practical
flourishing of humanity (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 25). In the end, the immanence
of what Hardt and Negri call ‘the multitude’ is there to be found in the techno-
scientific relations of capital, and so the responsibility of Marxist critique is to
the coming of a singularity, the point at which the implicitly cooperative regime
of labour overcomes the atomistic relations of accumulation (Hardt and Negri,
2000: 392). What is at stake in Hardt and Negri’s reworking of the concept of
materialism is the question of moral desire and its relationship to the political.
In Derrida’s reading of Marx’s work, it is the very complexity of capitalism that
sustains its messianic promise; for, as the technological systems appropriate
more and more of the conditions of life, so there arise new forms of suffering
which demand practical transformation of the idea of revolutionary community
(Derrida, 1994: 89–94). This, for me, is the chiasmic power of socialism: the fact
that its pursuit of universal happiness can neither be realized nor, as an inher-
ently ethical demand, given up. And it is this ambiguity, as Walter Benjamin
pointed out, which brings it into an inescapably provocative relationship with
the affective dynamics of fascism and religion (Benjamin, 1992: 234–50).
Notes
1 It was the general decline in the ability of capitalist enterprise to transform

commodities into surplus value, and the crises of overproduction and
unemployment that emerged in the most developed economies at the turn of the
twentieth century that gave impetus to the political, economic, and theoretical
debates of the Second International (1889–1913). And it was here that the conflict
between Lenin and Luxemburg’s ideas on the dynamics of the workers’ revolution
took shape.
2 See, for example, Lewis, J. (1972), The Marxism of Marx. London: Lawrence and
Wishart.
3 Richard Dien Winfield, for example, maintains that Hegel’s analysis of modernity
reveals that capital ‘is but a component rather than the unifying structure of
commodity relations’, and that the different spheres of civil society (exchange,
individuation, morality, contract) constitute an organic whole that expresses the
substance of just economy (Dien Winfield, 1988: 131).
4
Fascism and the Pleasure of Self-Annihilation

The essence of fascism
In Schopenhauer’s philosophy, it is the fact of corporeal suffering that places

an irreducible restriction on the happiness it is possible for human beings to
attain. There is a fundamental conservatism in his thought, which, despite
the redemptive element he identifies in aesthetic experience, demands careful
sobriety in the legal and political administration of desire. Unless the affective
life of each individual is kept within the boundaries of a sovereign law that
protects everyone from persecution, the potential for violence and harm spirals
out of control (Schopenhauer, 1970: 149). Despite its conservatism, this account
of the danger of excessive desire does, I think, identify something essential
about the ideology of fascism: that its appeal is an aesthetic solicitation of
suprahuman powers which exceed the commonality of human suffering, and
that this solicitation arises as a destructive culture from within the relations of
post-traditional society.
In this chapter, I will set out the processes through which this essence has
emerged from the rationalizing trajectory of Western societies, its intensification
of symbolic economies of race, community and identity, and its relationship to
certain philosophical notions of will, overcoming, and authenticity. For it is,
I believe, in such a genealogy of fascism’s militant solicitation of happiness,
that it is possible to discern the depth of its involvement with the structures
and relations of modernity. Before proceeding to examine the nature of this
genealogy, however, I want to look more generally at the kind of happiness
promised by fascist ideology, and at the relationship between this promise and
the organizational apparatus through which fascist movements have sought to
attract political support. It seems clear that any theory of fascism that lacks an
account of the constitutive instability of modern identity structures, and of what
fascist parties have to offer those who have lost their sense of status, community,
and hope, is incapable of shedding light on the emergence, persistence, and
fascination of fascist politics.
The preliminary issue I want to address in this section is that of the

relationship between fascism and Nazism, as I will argue throughout the chapter
that Nazism has certain essential characteristics that mark it out as the exemplary
form of fascist politics. So, what are these characteristics? In the first place, while
it is certainly true that there were organizational and ideological similarities
between Mussolini’s National Fascists and Hitler’s National Socialists1, it is
only in the latter that a decisive break with the corporatist authority of church
and monarchy took place (Laqueur, 1978: 180–1). Nazism, despite its strategic
appeals to the piety of small rural constituencies, was characterized by its deep-
rooted antipathy to both of the established religions in Germany (Catholicism
and Lutheran Protestantism), and by a determination to colonize the feelings of
sacred devotion that were inspired by the church. Second, this anti-corporatist,
anti-clerical ideology allowed the party apparatus to develop what Walter
Mommsen called a ‘Machiavellian technique’ that constantly transformed itself
in relation to the class and status groups whose support it was attempting to
solicit (Mommsen in Laqueur, 1978: 180). Thus, the demotic power of Nazism
took the form of a volkish militancy in which the appeals to race, nation, and
religion that were made by local groups became a matter of strategic necessity
rather than dogmatic ideological commitment (Hamilton, 1982: 310–27). Third,
this ‘perpetual campaigning’ was crucial to the emergence of Nazism as a
political movement that functioned through its use of technological means of
representation. For the speed and flexibility with which local groups were able to
respond to the changing circumstances of diverse political constituencies, were
the context in which the mass aesthetics of broadcast technologies became a
politically transformative power. Thus, it was the combination of organizational
flexibility, ideological opportunism, and the deployment of a new technological
aesthetic that differentiated Nazism from the more socially conservative forms
of authoritarianism that took control in Spain and Italy between the Wars.
This, however, still leaves open the question of how the National Socialists
were able to mobilize the level of support they achieved in the presidential
election of 1932, where they took 37.3 per cent of the vote. The Nazi party cadres
could not have achieved this kind of success without ‘some relatively attractive
political content to offer’ (Hamilton, 1982: 359, author’s italic). Or, to put it
another way, Nazi appeals to the unity of the Volk, the culpability of the Jews
and the communists in the breakdown of the German economy, and the urgent
need for the restoration of the Germanic spirit, must have found some level of
resonance in all the social strata of the Weimar Republic (Goodrick-Clarke,
Fascism and the Pleasure of Self-Annihilation 113
2005: 5–6). Richard Hamilton’s account of this process of ideological solicitation

gives a clear sense of the diversity of Nazism’s appeals, and of the strategic
modifications to party ideology that were made in different types of community.
Put very briefly, his argument is that the primary factor which determined the
success of the NSDAP in the 1932 election, was the party’s recognition that its
best chance lay in appealing to the ‘small rural’ and ‘middle sized’ communities
where religious affiliation remained a powerful influence on community life.
Thus, the local Nazi activists presented themselves in Protestant communities as
solidly against the liberal and conservative parties who had traditionally aligned
themselves with Catholicism. In Catholic communities, on the other hand, the
NSDAP presented itself as the natural enemy of Zentrum, the centrist party
aligned with the Protestant Church. In large cities, the Nazis had much less
success due to the increasing influence of class divisions in urban populations.
The dynamics of political allegiance that had developed among the working,
bourgeois, and middle classes made the electoral task of the NSDAP much
more difficult in the cities than in rural communities. Such limited support as
they were able to garner from the working class came largely from deferential
conservatives who respected the old regime and who were fearful of the rise
of organized labour associations. The meagre support that the Nazis drew
from the bourgeois classes was based largely on the fear of communism and
disillusionment with the economic policies pursued by the incumbent parties.
Finally, the support for the Nazi party from the urban middle classes was starkly
fractured along economic lines. The upper-middle classes contributed least
of all the urban socio-economic groups to the NSDAP’s support in the 1932
election (although some of the most vulnerable individuals did vote for Hitler),
while the lower-middle classes, who were under threat of financial ruin, proved
to be most amenable to the Nazis’ promise to smash the evils of Communism
and ‘Jewish capital’ (Hamilton, 1982: 361–419).
In his account of the inadequacy of ‘mass-society’ theory to explain the
success of the NSDAP in Germany, Hamilton claims that theories which invoke
generalized concepts of urbanization, anomie, competition, and isolation to
describe the condition of the masses, and then proceed to deduce the appeal
of Nazi ideology from this description, fail to grasp the complex distribution
of support gained by the NSDAP. Indeed, such an approach has been the
source of the most durable myth about Nazism’s rise to power: that it was made
possible primarily by the urban lower-middle classes who, because of their
acute sense of economic vulnerability, alienation, and loss of status, were most
easily seduced by Nazi propaganda (Hamilton, 1982: 433). Hamilton’s research

points to rural Protestant populations as providing the Nazis with the most
significant numbers of electoral converts in the 1932 election – numbers that
far outstripped those from the urban lower-middle classes. And yet there is
something crucial missing from this analysis; something that it would perhaps
have been impossible to include within its terms of reference, but without which
the social and political effects of Nazism cannot be properly understood. While
it is true that the cruder forms of mass-society theory have given rise to certain
misapprehensions about the rise of Nazism in Weimar Germany, the concept
of mass society itself is something that works at a more fundamental level
than Hamilton suggests, and is essential to understanding the transformative
relationship between fascism, happiness, and modernity.
There is a sense in which rational choice analyses of the kind undertaken
by Hamilton present the Nazi seizure of power as something that, through an
unlikely concatenation of circumstances, arose from the perceived self-interest
of specific socio-economic groups. However, if we are to formulate a proper
understanding of how the NSDAP was able to take over a third of votes in the
1932 election (as well as how they were able to press ahead with racist legislation
and eugenicist programmes once in power), it is essential to determine why
such a large percentage of the population were prepared to engage with Nazism’s
cult of Aryan nationalism, and to internalize it as the one way to happiness in
a time of absolute uncertainty. In order to do this, it is necessary to revisit Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s account of the connection between ration-
alization and the reification of the symbolic order of the social.
In Dialectic of Enlightenment they set out the complexities of the relationship
between capitalist relations of production and the regime of instrumental reason
that emerged from European Enlightenment philosophy. Their argument is a
reversal of the Marxist claim that scientific innovation in the organization of
the economy follows on from the establishment of capitalism as the dominant
mode of production. They claim that the rational-technological organization of
capital is inconceivable without the developments in physics, mathematics, and
engineering that had already begun to transform society before the emergence
of a fully industrialized capitalist regime (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 3–42).
Thus, the relationship between capital and instrumental reason is one in which
the latter constantly transforms the mode of exploitation; technological innova-
tions refine the process of production to the point where labour is stripped of
its symbolic meaning, and both public and private lives are experienced through
stereotypical images circulated by the culture industry. Horkheimer and Adorno

refer to this process as reification: the transformation of meaningful social
relationships into thing-like processes from which all human significance has
been evacuated. And it is this progressive and pervasive evacuation of meaning
from the social totality that, for them, is essentially related to the psychological
potency of Nazi ideology (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 168–208).
The fundamental question that emerges from Horkheimer and Adorno’s
theory of fascism is that of the relationship between ‘critical’ theorists who
pursue the monstrous reversions of subjectivity that fascist parties are sometimes
able to effect, and ‘analytical’ theorists who see the periodic success of fascism
as resulting from the maladjustment of self-interest that results from acute
disruption of social and economic order. These two kinds of theory are not
separated by an absolute gulf, for both of them are concerned with the strategies
and techniques through which fascism is able to gather support from different
social strata. However, the real difference is that analytical approaches of the kind
propounded by Hamilton have a tendency to regard categories such as ‘rural
populations’, ‘religious affiliation’ and ‘urban classes’ as remaining substantially
unchanged both by the dislocation of the social order and by the impact of Nazi
ideology. They explain the success of Nazism through the survival of a basic
self-interest/self-identity that defines how these groups will act under even the
most extraordinary of circumstances. Dialectic of Enlightenment, on the other
hand, attempts a radical questioning of this kind of social affiliation. This is not
to say that Horkheimer and Adorno simply disregard the historical constitution
of social, economic, and religious groups in their analysis of Nazism, rather that
their account of modernity demands that they conceive such identity structures
as having already been affected by its processes of rationalization. Thus, for
example, the concept of a ‘rural population’ would become something much
more hybrid than Hamilton’s analysis would allow; for the working practices,
religious affiliations, and familial ties that comprise its substance have already
been significantly affected by the technological networks of mass society. Also,
the symbolic order of class identity through which the urban population of
Weimar Germany was differentiated had undoubtedly been destabilized by the
economic crisis and by the Nazis’ manipulation of the mass media.
So, if it is true that analytical-comparative theories tend to ‘read in’ a level
of rational affiliation that may distract us from the state of emergency which
fascism precipitates, how should their analyses be reinterpreted? Well, to return
to Hamilton’s findings, might it not be the case that the support for the NSDAP
in rural populations, both Protestant and Catholic, is at least partly attributable

to a profound sense of loss – that of having been expropriated from the ethically
substantive position of the Bauerstande to little more than rural function-
aries? This is not to say that the normative traditions of the rural population
of Germany did not persist, but that their influence on electoral support for
the NSDAP was mediated through new forms of anxiety and disaffection that
were essentially related to the pervasive rationality of capitalism. Among the
urban population, the effects of spiralling inflation and the dissemination of
Nazi ideology transformed the symbolic order of class much more directly.
In the cities, the perpetual threat of unemployment was something that had
already begun to fracture traditional working class associations. Even though
support for the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KDP) remained relatively
high among the working class, there were, as Hamilton points out, significant
numbers of the urban proletariat who voted for the Nazis. This should lead us
to question whether the working class Nazi vote can be explained simply by a
shift in the allegiances of the most conservative labour aristocracies (Hamilton,
1982: 386–90), and to consider how the constitutive experience of working-class
solidarity was transformed by the German economic collapse.
Finally, and most importantly, there is the question of lower-middle class
support for the NSDAP. It is undoubtedly true that Horkheimer and Adorno’s
analysis of the rise of Nazism tends to implicate the lower-middle classes: for
the combination of economic vulnerability, status anxiety, and semi-intellectual
culture that delimits the lower boundary of middle-class life is something they
conceive as the essential form of Nazi sensibility (Horkheimer and Adorno,
1986: 195–7). This can be read in two ways. The first is that their analysis of
the middle class’s susceptibility to the appeals of Nazism is simply wrong. For
insofar as it fails to give an account of the persistence of specific normative satis-
factions among the lower-middle classes, neglects to analyse the actual reasons
why so many of them voted for the NSDAP, and presents this typification of the
alienated middle class life as having contaminated every other social stratum, it
can only obscure the real political dynamics of Nazism (Hamilton, 1982: 433–7).
Another way of reading Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis is to allow that their
account of the connection between fascism, subjectivity, and economy is an
attempt to question the concept of ‘rational choice’ that empirical approaches
read into the dynamics of Nazism in the Weimar Republic.
Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of the rise of fascism in Germany is
focused on the sense of mourning that haunts modern life, and its relationship
to the anti-Semitic essence of Nazi ideology. Put briefly, their argument is that
rational society replaces the enactment of life as mimesis (family, sacrifice,
love) with a regime of pre-programmed repetitive activity (work, innovation,
consumption). Any expression of instinctual life is made subject to a regime
of rational strictures that determines the difference between the human and
the animal; and so these strictures stake out the moral boundaries of bourgeois
society and define what is to count as civilized behaviour (Horkheimer and
Adorno, 1986: 181–2).
For Horkheimer and Adorno, Nazism’s reversion to a politics of unreflective
action is a response to the loss inflicted on every individual who is subject to
the reifying strictures of Enlightenment culture. As such, Nazism is essentially
a politics of scapegoating; it is the expression of a demand that someone should
be held responsible for the lack of satisfaction afflicting every aspect of social
existence. The anti-Semitism that forms the core of Nazi ideology is found
ready to hand in the attitude of Christianity towards the Jews: for insofar as
they have traditionally been conceived as living outside the sacred bonds that
attach secular life to the divine, they are represented as a devious and acquisitive
animality that has slowly dissipated the reserves of the Aryan spirit (Horkheimer
and Adorno, 1986: 183–5). The potency of Nazism’s appeal therefore is rooted in
the fundamental contradiction of bourgeois economic rationality; it arises from
the ‘half-educated’ sense of loss that pervades the totality of social existence,
and from the projection of universal blame onto the Jews that this provokes
(Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 194–7).
As I said at the start of the section, I believe that the key to understanding
the dynamics of fascism as a distinct political movement is its expression of an
ideology that promises happiness through the complete rejection of modernity,
and the return to an archaic community of ‘blood and soil’. Horkheimer and
Adorno’s argument captures something of the madness that animated the
‘Fascist spectacle’ of power, mastery, and self-sacrifice, and of the mass trans-
formation of the public sphere that this spectacle was able to bring about
(Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 185). This is not to say that historical analyses
of the kind presented by Hamilton are simply distractions from the racial and
aesthetic dynamics of fascism. To ignore such findings would be to allow critical
theory to become uncoupled from the historical reality it seeks to describe,
and to postulate the emergence of new ‘universal’ tendencies without attending
to the inertial effects of the established order. Yet there is something in the
rationality of such historical accounts of fascism that tends to underplay the
transformative power of its relationship to the German economic crisis, and

to assume that the motivations for supporting the NSDAP were, in the crucial
period between 1938 and 1939, still largely unchanged by the Nazis’ occultation
of the Volk and its enemies.
Horkheimer and Adorno’s concept of the relationship between Nazism
and modernity gestures towards the constitution of a paranoid ‘conscience’,
whose roots lie in the instrumental organization of the world as matter
to be transformed, and which inhabits each social stratum as an implicit
yearning for violence and the destruction of the ‘Other’. Hamilton makes it
clear that, for him, such conjectures have no place in academic discussions
of fascism, and that the motivations for voting for the NSDAP were so
diverse, even within the lower-middle classes, that they cannot be explained
by generalizations of the kind set out by ‘mass society theory’ (Hamilton,
1982: 453–74). But the fact remains of what happened after Hitler’s eventual
seizure of power: the Nuremberg race laws, the persecution of the Jews, and
the Holocaust. The extremity of such measures, it seems clear, requires a
deeper explanation of the transformations of desire, objectivity, and the good
that were precipitated by Nazi mythology than any version of rational choice
theory could give.
I will go on to examine the relationship between fascism and the devel-
opment of modernity as an assemblage of normative, instrumental, and
aesthetic institutions. Section two will look at the origins of the particular kind
of happiness sought in submission to an unquestionable, unchangeable, and
archaic authority. Specifically, I will examine the connection between fascism
and Hegel’s account of Jacobin Terror in The Phenomenology of Mind. Section
three will examine the dynamics of the Nazi politics of will: the demand for
absolute submission to the leader (Führer) and the impact of this on the legal,
normative, and aesthetic structures of the public sphere. In particular, I will
concentrate on the metaphorical structure of Nietzsche’s philosophy of power,
and its assimilation into the Nazi ideology of happiness through strength. The
final section will examine Derrida’s account of the persistence of this politics of
the will and the unconditional happiness it promises. If the essence of fascism
is its uniquely virulent representation of the racial origins of culture, then
the question of its persistence is really that of the politics of memory: of how
fascism can be ‘enjoyed’ after the Holocaust, of how it simulates itself as the true
alternative to democracy, and of how its violence towards representative institu-
tions is related to the chance of democracy to come. It is the recurrence of these
questions in times of crisis that makes the essence of fascism both dangerously
unpredictable and tragically messianic.
Anxiety and modern desire
At the beginning of the last section, I claimed that the question of the
relationship between fascism and happiness is, in the end, the question of the
essence of fascism as a political movement. In this section, I will begin to flesh
out the nature of this claim, and to give some sense of how this ‘essence’ is related
to the evolution of modernity. For it is only insofar as an intrinsic relationship
can be shown to exist between the constitutive elements of bourgeois society
(abstract autonomy, personal rights, moral individualism) and a desire for
absolute obedience, that it is possible to defend the idea of a fascist assem-
blage whose ‘return’ is implicit in the transformations of modernity. I will
look at Hegel’s reflections on the French Revolution and its relationship to
the form of bourgeois subjectivity that emerged after the descent of the First
Republic into the Jacobin Terror. Specifically, I will examine his account of the
concepts of happiness, individualism, and utility that emerged from the French
Enlightenment, and their relationship to the traditional structures of ethical life.
For it is here, I believe, that it is possible to discern the origin of a particular
compulsion that accompanies the rationalizing tendency of modernity, and
which is essential to the political assemblage of fascism.
In Hegelian philosophy, the idea of happiness is consistently distinguished from
the kinds of satisfaction through which spirit determines itself in the relations of
ethical life. Indeed, Hegel once remarked that periods of sustained happiness and
stability in the course of human history are ‘blank pages’ that contribute little to
the evolution of self-consciousness and its relationship to absolute spirit (Hegel,
1944: 31). In the pre-Socratic period of the Greek Polis, art, religion, and politics
attained an actual unity that, for Hegel, sustained the happiest epoch in human
history. Each element in this form of Sittlichkeit was a reflection of the others,
and so the experience of individual citizens remained largely undisturbed by a
sense of autonomous selfhood determined against the relations of the state. Such
contentment however is possible only at a unique point in historical time where
the three modalities of absolute knowledge – art, religion, and philosophy – are
configured as reciprocal elements of the state’s authority. What emerges from
Socrates’ heretical questioning of the laws of the Polis is spirit’s loss of immediate
communication with itself in the institutional relations of Sittlichkeit. This is the

point at which self-consciousness begins its evolution into an abstract form of
identity, whose satisfactions are transformed through relations of mastery and
subjection that issue from the breakdown of the Polis.
Thus, the concept of satisfaction that Hegel deploys throughout The
Phenomenology of Mind is crucially different from that of happiness. The latter
is a modality of satisfaction: it is the formation of self-consciousness into a
particular unity of intellect and sensibility whose aim is the reproduction of
the feeling of happiness itself. (This self-perpetuating circuit of pleasure is
what Utilitarian philosophy seeks to maintain.) Satisfaction, on the other hand,
is a dialectical concept that includes not just the immediate reproduction of
happiness essential to the constitution of the state, but also the disturbing sense
of uncertainty and loss that prefigures the death and reconstitution of spirit as
ethical community (Hegel, 1967a: 142–5).
After the dissolution of the Greek Polis and the Roman Empire, Hegel’s
account of the historical evolution of spirit proceeds through the relations
of mastery and servitude that developed under feudalism. These relations
are founded on the principle of divine election and, as such, are the explicit
denial of universality to the work of those whom God has created to serve the
master. Thus, the fundamental satisfactions of self-consciousness, its expressive
work and worship of God, are vitiated; they become the sources of inveterate
suffering implicated in the formation of the Unhappy Consciousness. This lack
of recognition in ethical life is what gives rise to the demand for reformation of
the relationship between Religion and State: it is the universal unhappiness of
self-consciousness that leads it to seek divine grace beyond the corrupt conven-
tions of the church (Hegel, 1967a: 251–67). Hegel’s analyses of the relationships
between self-consciousness and the regime of feudal absolutism are complex, and
give a profound sense of how the dissatisfaction of the Unhappy Consciousness
is played out in the Enlightenment’s struggle with superstition, its attempts to
rationalize religious worship, and its reduction of the world to matter and utility.
The practical form assumed by the French Enlightenment is that of the utili-
tarian consciousness which knows itself only through its power to transform the
external world. So, for Hegel, the association of individuals that is envisioned
by this particular worldview is brutally mechanistic: each confronts the other as
an object possessing a certain level of usefulness for its particular purposes, and
the concept of ethical life is reduced to the level of matter to be re-formed by the
will and activity of man (Hegel, 1967a: 590–8).
This utilitarian self-consciousness, however, is not the unmediated enjoyment

of the object, for it knows that ‘essential being and concrete actuality consist in
the knowledge consciousness has of itself ’ (Hegel, 1967a: 600). This is the form
in which Absolute Freedom comes on the scene: the individual who is assured
of his freedom as a pure negativity opposed to the differentiation of spirit into
the objective relations of work, satisfaction, and desire. The precondition of this
self-consciousness is what Hegel called the ‘unsatisfied Enlightenment’ of the
French philosophes (Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau), who saw the freedom of
man as an original essence that preceded the emergence of human society.
Of particular importance here is Rousseau’s concept of the ‘general will’ as the
pure emanation of natural freedom. Insofar as his writings on the goodness of
man postulate the original conditions of peace and equality, his account of the
inclusiveness of democratic deliberation is, in the end, a demand that the will
of each individual should accord exactly with the essence of natural freedom
(Rousseau, 1988: 181–200). As such, Rousseau’s general will is always formed as
an appeal to the heart of each individual citizen; a demand that he should listen
to the voice of nature that remains independent of the corruptible institutions
of society. Through this reconnection with its essence, the individual ego can
claim to be the executor of the only laws that are proper to free men. For Hegel,
however, this expression of Absolute Freedom can accomplish nothing positive
within the substance of ethical life, for it is merely a destructive idealism set
against the actual relations of the state and civil society (Hegel, 1967a: 601–5).
It is this absolute liberation of the individual ego that lay at the root of the
Revolutionary Terror. According to Hegel, the ‘unsatisfied materialism’ of the
French Enlightenment is directly related to the fact that the Catholic Church
in France retained its traditional ties with the feudal aristocracy (Rose, 1981:
117–18). And so, the social institutions into which Enlightenment philosophy
emerged were inveterately corrupt: the church, state, and aristocracy trium-
virate retained a monopoly on power that was exercised largely for the
aggrandisement of those who were rich enough to belong to the cartel. The
revolutionary consciousness that arose from the French Enlightenment was
radically atomistic; each individual confronts his fellows as an absolutely free
will whose purposefulness is without mediation. Under these circumstances,
the only kind of government that is possible springs from the strategic consti-
tution of a particular faction as the dominant force within the chaos of the state.
Self-consciousness, in other words, encounters itself not as spirit but as ‘matter’,
and as such, it becomes a disposable element in the struggle for the kingdom
of Absolute Freedom (Hegel, 1967a: 605). According to Hegel, therefore, the

essence of the French Revolutionary Terror lay in the extremity of its vocation to
purify the world – to rid it of the corrupting influence of church and aristocracy,
and to destroy any group who aligned themselves with their interests. Human
life, in other words, became the experience of an impending annihilation whose
enactment would have no more significance for the executioner than ‘cleaving
the head of a cabbage or swallowing a draught of water’ (Hegel, 1967a: 207).
This first appearance of an annihilationist movement whose strategic,
ideological, and political assemblage is organized around the achievement
of unconditional happiness is, of course, momentously important. It is the
first time that death, which is universally present in the dialectics of Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Mind, becomes a programmatic end pursued by self-
consciousness against itself (Hegel, 1967a: 607). But it would be wrong to
consider the Jacobin Terror as the archetype on which fascism was founded.
While it is true that the political assemblage that emerged from the Revolution
was constituted for the radical purification of society, it could be argued
that its political ideals were still grounded in the Enlightenment demand for
universal equality, and that these ideals did eventually become the foundation
of European democracy. Kant and Hegel pursue two different versions of this
argument. In Kant’s version, the contribution which the French Revolution
makes to the progress of human freedom, is revealed to those who witness it
from outside the theatre of violence: it appears as a ‘sign’ (Begebenheit) of the
rational form of democracy that is to come (Kant, 1991: 182–5). For Hegel,
the Jacobin transformation of the ideals of liberty into a destructive creed that
recognized only its own definition of freedom ultimately gave rise to the idealist
forms of morality (exemplified in the philosophies of Kant and Fichte) through
which the search for personal happiness was able to configure itself as the truth
of civil society (Hegel, 1967a: 610). Thus, the most pressing questions to have
emerged from Hegel’s account of Absolute Freedom concern the evolution of
the relationship between instrumental reason and the substance of ethical life,
the susceptibility of atomistic self-consciousness to the mythologies of primal
freedom, and the evolution of the relationship between aesthetic representation
and political power.
In Hegel’s thought, the sphere of civil society is the place of an unstable
confluence of atomistic desire and moral autonomy. Civil society makes each
individual responsible for his own happiness, while at the same time deter-
mining the objective-legal forms in which the spontaneity of conscience is
realized. The bourgeois individual is therefore caught between the strict appli-
cation of religious principles of charity and obedience, the moral determination
of free will as disinterested restraint, and the pursuit of his own material self-
interest. The importance of this account of the bourgeois subject lies in Hegel’s
identification of the volatility of its relationship to the networks of free exchange
that have come to dominate civil society (Hegel, 1967b: 122–6). His account
of the predominance of possessive individualism in The Philosophy of Right is
articulated as the constant loss of happiness; for the intrinsic principle of civil
society is the remorseless exposure of the ego to heteronomous desires that
destabilize its sense of worth and dignity. Thus, from the very beginning, the
constitution of the bourgeois individual is highly problematic: the evanescence
of its formation, the vulnerability of its status, and the contingency of its affili-
ations have always already affected its essence. This is crucially different from
Marx’s analysis of civil society, which treats the ‘middle class’ as an entity whose
desires and interests are largely homogenous and whose political potential is
limited to joining the proletarian revolution or forming an unholy alliance with
the reactionary powers of the feudal state (church, aristocracy, and monarchy).
In Hegel’s thought, there is a sense of the labile adaptability of bourgeois self-
consciousness to extreme situations, which complicates the historic choice
between socialized production and the return to feudal barbarism. And so, we
need to examine the relationship of this adaptability to the essence of fascism.
Hegel’s Aesthetics, as we saw in Chapter 2, presents Romantic art as the form
in which representation becomes radically detached from the objective institu-
tions of law and justice that constitute ethical life. In the Romantic art the knight
of faith is presented as seeking to redeem the world through the essential purity
of his soul; his trials are depicted as eternal struggles between good and evil
that have become uncoupled from actual social relations. Romanticism is the
aesthetic form in which art finally loses its formative relationship to Sittlichkeit
(Hegel, 1993: 87). Once its figurations of heroic service become engrained in
the bourgeois imagination, Romantic art becomes the mode in which atomistic
individuals conceive themselves and their travails in the world. The sturm und
drang movement, for example, urged salvation through the direct experience
of Nature, whose magnitude could inspire the artist to feats of creativity that
communicate with a transcendental sublime. This kind of art intensifies the
moral corruption against which it sets itself. The individuals in whom it becomes
a formative power seek only to escape the contradictions of ethical life and
to pursue the law of their own existence. It is this aesthetic tendency that
Gillian Rose identifies as essential to Hegel’s concept of tragic modernity, that

is, the enactment of the individual will through representations that lack any
substantive relationship to the substance of ethical life (Rose, 1981: 209). For,
insofar as individual persons live ‘together-apart’ in the sphere of civil society,
their representations of community, morality, and the good life become increas-
ingly susceptible to flights of aesthetic distraction. This, of course, is not to say
that Hegel’s account of the aesthetic culture to which bourgeois individualism is
prone is a direct anticipation of the fascist assemblage that took shape in Europe
between the Wars. As we saw in the previous section, the form and distribution
of bourgeois sensibility had been fundamentally altered by the industrialization
of European society; so the dynamics of fascism’s appeal cannot be understood
simply as a perversion of the Romance aesthetic into monstrous figurations
of original conflict and final overcoming. There is, however, a sense in which
Hegel’s account of the instability of bourgeois satisfaction, and of the contingency
of the happiness that is possible within the sphere of civil society, anticipates the
weakness of functionalized man for the politics of primal belonging.
If we are to understand the evolution of fascism, it is important to under-
stand its relationship to the evolution of bourgeois subjectivity. Hegel’s account
of this mode of self-consciousness is important because it begins to determine
the fundamental contradiction of modern subjectivity: that the formal freedom
of the self, which is the endemic condition of life in civil society, gives rise to
a profound sense of anxiety which haunts the experience of work, satisfaction,
and desire. The question that arises from Hegel’s analysis of modernity therefore
concerns the fate of this labile form of individualism. Given that the Nazi assem-
blage was able to provoke the desire for primal belonging to the point where
it fatally ruptured the normative consensus of Weimar, we must ask whether
its powers of aesthetic and ideological transformation exceed the possibility
of dialectical recuperation. Or, to put it another way, whether modernity ‘after
Auschwitz’ is still haunted by the recurrent threat of monstrous satisfactions
that endanger everything ethical in the constitution of social life. Thus, in the
following section, I will examine the dynamical power of the fascist assem-
blage – its illimitable commitment to salvaging the unity of the Volk from the
insidious influence of the Jews and Judaism – as an effect of the reactive powers
that, for Nietzsche, have constituted the soul of the bourgeois subject. It is in
Nietzsche’s determination to open modernity to effects of joy, suffering, and
violence that cannot be recuperated in the ‘normal’ organization of desire, that
we must follow the multiple and persistent ‘happiness’ of fascist excess.
Reactionary love and ‘the people’
The question with which I will begin this section is a Hegelian one, that is, the
question of whether Nietzsche’s solicitation of the joy of overcoming, and the
aesthetic of death, destruction, and aristocracy he deploys in this solicitation,
is complicit with the emergence of fascism as an aesthetico-political culture. Is
it the case that Nietzsche’s solicitation of the ecstatic dance performed above
the infinite depths of the world also determines a particular kind of violence
essential to the fascist politics of will and overcoming? In Nietzsche’s philosophy,
as we have seen, the formation of human society is dependent on the emergence
of a primordial hierarchy in which ‘the strong’, who have been able to discipline
their instincts, perform the task of disciplining ‘the weak’, who know only the
life of animal instinct. This hierarchy is founded on suffering and brutality; for,
without the constant reinforcement of pain, the weak could never acquire the
basic forms of civilized behaviour that differentiate humanity from the animal
(Nietzsche, 1990: 192–8). The primitive mechanisms of domination from which
the laws of human society emerge are founded on a distribution of pain in which
the suffering of the weak is a legitimate source of pleasure to the strong; for it is
they who provide the active force that sustains the integrity of law and culture.
From the beginning of human history, there has been an essential relationship
between the transformative exercise of power and the self-overcoming of the
human. All the possibilities that humanity might attain depend on the power of
the formative/active will to determine its action independently of those forces
that would restrain it. So, if we are to understand Nietzsche’s relationship to
the fascist assemblage, we need to look at the question of his complicity with
its politics of overcoming: of how, and indeed whether, the vocabulary of force
through which he expounds the doctrine of radical overcoming, affected the
formation and trajectory of fascist politics.
Nietzsche’s break with idealism is crucial here. Like all philosophical antago-
nisms, the clash between Nietzschean and Hegelian thought really comes down
to a difference of emphasis that is spread and intensified through infinitely
subtle mechanisms of representation. In Hegel’s philosophy, ‘the object’ is
something that is always part of a phenomenology of experience in which its
‘objectivity’ is determined in relation to the structures, categories, and relations
of ethical life. Thus, for example, the moral utilitarianism that arose from
Enlightenment philosophy is directly related to the atomistic concept of matter
that emerged from the New Science of nature. Happiness is conceived as a life
lived within a system of harmoniously related atoms/individuals who have

been brought into conformity with abstract laws of civil association. Hegel’s
phenomenology turns on the contradictions that arise from the present deter-
mination of truth/objectivity within ethical life: the absolute authority of the
feudal master, the unquestionable edicts of the church, and the abstract laws
of matter each produce a specific differentiation of consciousness into practical
self-recognition. History therefore proceeds through the immanent power of
rational subjects to recognize the ‘truth’ of the objective relationships in which
they are embedded, and to redeem the contradictions of Sittlichkeit through the
transformative experience of the negative (Hegel, 1967a: 114–15). In Nietzsche’s
critique of idealism, it is the dynamics of this experience that is questioned,
or, more precisely, what he takes to be the theological unity that is implicit in
Hegelian dialectics of truth, feeling, and intellect.
In the ‘history of moral feelings’ that Nietzsche sets out in Human, All Too
Human he remarks that:
Everything is necessity: this is the new knowledge, and this knowledge is

itself necessary. Everything is innocence; and knowledge is the way into this
innocence (Nietzsche, 1994: 76).
So, if ‘everything is necessity’, including the forms of recognition through which

self-consciousness recognizes itself as a spiritual essence, and if the economy
of Sittlichkeit is reducible to the logic of biological preservation, to what kind
of ‘innocence’ can the science of necessity lead us? We must recognize that,
for Nietzsche, this innocence is essentially related to the material existence of
the body. In Christian doctrine, God is conceived as utterly selfless; and so the
aspiration of every Christian should be to overcome those instincts that would
lead him to pursue secular pleasure at the expense of his responsibilities to God
and his fellow man. Thus, it is in ‘selfless’ acts of charity towards others and in
abasement before God that the moral conscience determines its morality: it
is the reactive power in which the transformative potential of the body, as an
assemblage of feeling, apprehension, intellect, and passion, is captured within
the mild satisfactions of human society.
However, the ‘innocence’ to which knowledge of the necessity that reigns in
the world gives rise is innocent precisely because it is not selfless, not originally
promised to the happiness of all. According to Nietzsche, to know the truth of
material necessity is to have encountered the abyss of its infinite dispersion:
for the world is constantly reconfigured into possibilities that can only come
into being through encounters with the dynamic assemblage of the body. The
innocence of such encounters lies in the fact that, whatever the scene of their
arrival, they solicit the noble generosity of he who is summoned to respond;
they are the solicitation of self-mastery by pure overcoming rather than
repression and guilt (Nietzsche, 1984: 279–83).
The concept of innocence that Nietzsche presents in Human, All Too Human
is a precursor of the idea of the dance he develops in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and
The Gay Science. The Nietzschean dancer is innocent because his encounters
with the world are always open; he is without prejudice against the strangeness
he may stumble upon, even if this appears as an obscene transgression of the
principles of taste and morality. The jouissance of the encounter with the obscene
is what marks its obscenity; and as such, it is only the innocent, the dancer,
who refuses the denunciation of the monstrous, who may carry something
of the truth of this encounter away with him. This is not the innocence of the
ingénue who ‘sees the good’ in everyone and everything, but a visceral appre-
hension whose transformation of the body’s assemblage of intellect and passion
threatens the order of bourgeois taste (Nietzsche, 1974: 174). For, insofar as
encounters between ‘the innocent’ and ‘the obscene’ occur as unpredictable
possibilities, their distribution of effects always introduces an element of
dangerous contingency into the constitution of ethical life. The innocence of the
dance therefore, is the tour de force of mortality: it is maintained by the dancer’s
will to outplay the seductive forms into which the old order of life will transform
itself, and to impose his own ‘style’ on the encounters he solicits (Nietzsche,
1984: 241–4; 1974: 231–2). So, if there is a moral demand in Nietzsche’s thought,
this is configured in the joyfulness of the dance – the provocative encounter
with the obscene that gives rise to the dangerous/innocent knowledge of how
that obscenity has been constituted (Nietzsche, 1974: 247–53).
The joyfulness of the Nietzschean dancer is not enacted as a miraculous
revelation; its possibility arises from the moral, aesthetic, religious, and political
relations that constitute the substance of ethical life. The dance transforms the
conditions of its performance. However, the relationship of the dance to the
concrete relations of Sittlichkeit is constantly changing; the representation of
‘life’ in the sphere of culture takes place as an economy of reactive powers able to
assume an infinite number of forms that would seduce the dancer. As Nietzsche
put in it Thus Spoke Zarathustra, moral life is the ‘accursed, nimble, subtle
snake and slippery witch’, whose touch is delicious poison to the dancer who
would push beyond the moral composition of the humanity (Nietzsche, 1984:
242). This mutual solicitation of ‘life’ and ‘dance’ is fundamentally important

to Nietzsche’s critique of modernity. The innocence of the dance is, as we have
seen, increasingly distant from the social life of humanity, for the Dionysian
power of the tragic is expunged from the moral and aesthetic sensibilities of
bourgeois culture. The simple necessity of organic life attains a position of
reactive dominance, in which mind and body are reduced to nodal points in the
circle of utilitarian happiness. This economy of capture, however, is not static:
it depends on the constant transformation of the legal, economic, and aesthetic
relations through which the integrity of social life is maintained. What separates
Nietzsche’s philosophy from Hegel’s therefore, is the former’s insistence that the
tragedy of history cannot be redeemed through the dialectics of re-cognition:
insofar as life and the vitality of the dance reciprocally provoke one another, the
violence of their relationship exceeds the ‘theological’ dialectics of Sittlichkeit.
For Nietzsche, the effects produced by the contending powers of socialism
and religion are essential to the unfolding of modernity. Religion is the original
form in which the desire for abiding happiness is invested: it is the configuration
of the world as the creation of a selfless God whose ultimate purpose is the
redemption of humanity. Socialism is a derivative form of the religious impulse
in which this selfless God is replaced by the self-creative power of the human,
and the idea of redemption is made over to the science of socialized production.
These two regimes, despite their common genealogical root, are brought into
conflict by the evolution of modernity. Religion is one of the mainstays of
bourgeois life and pervades its concepts of morality and conscience. It also
goes deep into the class and status divisions that have opened in modern
societies, and as such, the socialist apparatus constantly has to fight the power
of religion to ‘theologize’ its materialist ideals and to return the masses to the
bonds of poverty and obedience (Nietzsche, 1994: 213–14). The historical
conflicts that were played out among the landed aristocracy, bourgeois citizens,
and proletarian organizations at the beginning of the modern epoch gave rise
to an economy of ressentiment that both precedes and exceeds the mediating
resources of civil society. And so, from a genealogical perspective, the old
appeals that were restaged by the Communists (KDP), Social Democrats (SPD),
Catholic People’s Party (KVP), and Zentrum during the breakup of Weimar
Germany were fatally vulnerable to the dynamic culture of Nazism.
The question that emerges from this genealogical account of the violence that
consumed the political space of the Weimar Republic concerns the power of the
Nazi assemblage to transform the economy of ressentiment that had begun to
undermine established forms of bourgeois, religious, and proletarian life. Walter

Kaufmann has argued that the ‘Nietzsche legend’ on which the Nazi ideolo-
gists drew was, at least in part, the product of his sister Elizabeth’s tendentious
editing of his work (Kaufmann, 1974: 8)2. However, the question of Nietzsche’s
relationship to Nazism is more complex than this analysis would suggest. It is
certainly true that any attempt to reduce Nietzsche’s thought to a celebration of
Aryan anti-Semitism misses the destabilizing power his philosophy exerts on
the securities of race, nationality, and tradition. Yet there remains something
in his configuration of the power of overcoming that cannot be discharged in
the precision of textual analysis; something which, inevitably and necessarily,
lends itself to the intensification of life through the spectacle of violence. This
‘something’ is perhaps best understood as a kind of reversion, or the return
to certain tropes that, for Nietzsche, most poignantly configure the dance and
its relationship to the theological/idealist constitution of life. The question
of Nietzsche’s complicity with fascism therefore boils down to the repetitive
structure of his critique, or, more specifically, to his reversion to certain arche-
types – the dangerous mercurial woman, the clever resilient Jew, the heroically
suffering übermensch – that became essential to the reactive powers of Nazism.
Perhaps the aesthetic provocations of Nietzsche’s philosophy are haunted from
the beginning by the possibility of mass political caricature, and perhaps the
chance of the Nazi seizure of power was made greater by the dissemination of
such ‘Nietzschean’ mythologies.
Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment is compelling because it demands that
we conceptualize fascism not as a historical aberration, but as a movement
that reveals the non-dialectical economy of reactive powers that have formed
modernity. The Nazi seizure of power was accomplished through a promise of
happiness that was constantly snatched away; a happiness that could only be
approached in the ever-more barbarous tests of loyalty to the Volk that were
demanded by the Führer. Within the Nazi assemblage, the existential determi-
nation of the will is surrendered to a movement that aims to destroy who or
whatever its constitutive regime excludes from the Aryan Volksgemeinschaft.
Nietzsche’s genealogy of reactive power, however, gestures towards the fragility
of such an assemblage. The fact that it can only sustain itself through an
unregulated violence that constantly transforms the malediction of the ‘other’
(the Jew, the homosexual, the cripple, the mental defective, the intellectual),
reveals a tendency to self-destruction that is essential to the political organi-
zation of fascism. The force with which the fascist assemblage is able to demand
submission to the collective will of the Volk, and with which it is able to solicit
mass participation in millennial projects of purification and rebuilding, depends
on the condensation of historical time into the heat of the event. Thus, the
destructive evanescence of the fascist regime – its constitution as a movement
whose violence keeps everything in a state of flux and uncertainty – is what
determines the messianic structure of its relationship to the substance of ethical
life. For it is insofar as the experience of dutiful responsibility that constitutes
the public sphere is the outcome of a constant sublation of ‘life’, the power of
fascism to excite mind and body into a frenzy of unrealizable overcoming is
reborn from the ‘reactive’ constitution of democracy.
I will say more about this theme of recurrence in the concluding section.
For the moment, however, I want to return to the idea that the evolution of
modernity has been guided by the attempt to stabilize the system of reactive
powers through which the utilitarian ends of political economy are pursued.
At the start of the chapter I looked briefly at Horkheimer and Adorno’s theory
of the relationship between capitalism and the administration of desire by the
culture industry. I argued that their account of the connection between rational
capitalism and fascist anti-Semitism is important because it outlines a mutual
provocation between the drive for maximal economic utility and the return
of an archaic desire for belonging. If one were a Nietzschean, however, one
might suspect that Horkheimer and Adorno’s concern with the power of the
technological aesthetic to induce feelings of undifferentiated happiness in the
masses is little more than a new form of the ‘antiquarian history’ that Nietzsche
condemned in his essay ‘On the Utility and Liability of History for Life’
(Nietzsche, 1995: 102–8). The break with Hegelian dialectics, in other words,
has simply led back to a repudiation of the present as the place of reification and
violent distraction. A Nietzschean riposte to this melancholic description of the
world must, of course, seek the possibility of a break with the nameless damage
of reified life, and solicit the contingencies that are opened by the systemic
organization of production and desire. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari’s attempts to
shift the conceptual frame of critical theory from technologies of capture to the
unregulated flows through which capital expands its productive regime, is an
attempt to remain true to the possibility of a joyful overcoming that is without
compulsion or resentment.
In his preface to Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault remarks that what Deleuze
and Guattari were attempting was to answer the question, ‘How do we rid our
speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism?’ The fascism to
which Foucault refers here is not just that of the ‘historical fascism’ of Hitler and
Mussolini, but also ‘the fascism in us all … that causes us to love power, to desire
the very thing that dominates and exploits us’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000: xii).
This distinction between the historical fascism that seized power in Germany,
Italy, and Spain in the 1930s and the Oedipal colonization of desire that has
emerged as the reproductive system of late capitalism, is important because it
bears on the idea of the fascist assemblage I have expounded in this chapter.
From Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective, the successful fascist movements
of the mid-twentieth century developed as internecine war machines: their
organizational evolution was such as to produce unpredictable combinations of
aesthetic spectacle, Oedipal reversion, and mimetic violence within the desta-
bilized constitution of the nation state. The operational networks of the NSDAP
functioned to precipitate events in which the sufferings of historical time
could be miraculously transformed into the happiness of primal community
and redemption in the will of the Führer (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000: 102–4).
Fascism’s effectiveness within the social and economic degradation of Weimar
arose from a particular transformation of desire: the conservatism of the
most socially conservative classes was radicalized by the imminence of their
destruction, and the organizational power of working class movements was
fatally weakened by the degradation of their experience of work and collective
desire. Thus, the Oedipal figure of the Führer was able to precipitate the love and
violence of ‘the Volk’ at any time or place in the fractured relations of the state.
There is a certain homology between Foucault’s history of the disciplinary
organization of capitalist societies and Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the
Oedipal structures through which subjective desire is channelled into obsessive
production. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault maintains that the evolution of
the relationship between penality, surveillance, and capital that is characteristic
of control society, is determined by the demand for efficiency that is essential to
the reproduction of surplus value. Capitalism, in other words, requires a regime
of penal control that reduces conflict and facilitates the flows of labour power,
information, and knowledge on which the production of surplus value depends
(Foucault, 1979: 221).
Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the historical development of ‘civilized
capitalist machines’ outlines a similar teleology. They argue that the Oedipal
structures that have colonized subjective desire are governed by the demand
for productive forms of mastery, or, the ‘axiomatics’ of the capitalist state are
always concerned with capturing desire within the deep structures of Oedipal
representation (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 260–2). This implies that the
success of ‘classical’ fascism is bound to a particular historical epoch. Insofar
as it emerged from a volatile conjunction of active, reactive, and destructive
desires, the violence of fascism’s restaging of despotic power is something the
state had to reintegrate into its economy of representation. The disciplinary
fascism of the Oedipal regime, in other words, becomes the mise-en-scène in
which unpredictable desires both intensify and destabilize the metrical forma-
tions of functionality and servitude (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 543–4).
It is their determination to retain the transformative relationship of desire to
the Oedipal structures of the state, therefore, that place Deleuze and Guattari
in an unexpectedly ‘Hegelian’ position on the fate of fascism. For, insofar as
they maintain that classical fascism is too brutal to function as a durable mode
of political cathexis, there is a sense in which they conceive the state as having
(all but) sublated the possibility of the fascist war machine returning to the
space of capitalist production. Its mobile violence, in other words, turns out to
be an operational strategy that is perfectible within the order of representation
and which is reducible to the axiomatics of pacification and economy. Thus,
the fascist parties that re-emerged in Western democracies after the War, and
those that have become active since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc are, from
this perspective, little more than simulacra; their political effects are limited to
the scattered intensities of paramilitary demonstrations and the mobilization of
protest votes against the conspiracies of the state. The real battle against fascism,
therefore, has become the battle against the expanding networks through which
Oedipal desire has been able to extend its grip on the contingent desires that
inhabit the networks’ capital. In the section that follows, I will develop the
argument that the affective and representational assemblage of fascism has a
messianic essence, and that its return to the productive order of late capitalism
repeats and reconfigures the ‘classical’ assemblage of racism, narcissism, and
ecstatic violence.
Spectres of fascism
Let me begin by saying something about Derrida’s idea of the spectre. In Spectres
of Marx, Derrida presents it as something that hangs between life and death; a
thing that ‘looks at us, concerns us, comes to defy semantics as much as ontology,
psychoanalysis as much as philosophy (Derrida, 1994: 6). The context of this
definition is, of course, Derrida’s concern with the fate of Marxism after the fall
of the Soviet Union, or, with Marx as a revenant who points to the exploitation,
silencing, and wastage that has accompanied the unrestricted spread of global-
technological capitalism. This spectral presence is originally configured in the
constitution of ‘Europe’ as the place of Enlightenment; it is that which haunts
the antagonism that develops between the technological mechanism of capital
and the democratic rights that have evolved in the public sphere. Thus, the
‘event’ of Marx’s intervention is anticipated by this primary haunting: insofar as
he gave expression to the unnamed suffering implicit in the evolution of capital,
he devised the body of concepts, representations, and strategies that became
the assemblage, or, to use Derrida’s term, ‘technical prosthesis’, of Marxism. The
‘spectres’ that Derrida conjures from the body of Marx’s work, however, are
not simply nuanced repetitions of his critique of capital; indeed, a substantial
part of Derrida’s book is occupied with Marx and Engel’s failure to demonstrate
conclusively the independence of historical materialism from idealist categories
of freedom and ego (Derrida, 1994: 120–37). If we accept Derrida’s proposition
that the iteration of every truth is an act which contaminates its original unity,
then the ‘spectrality’ of Marx’s work lies in the multiple figurations of the idea
of democracy that have arisen from his critique of capital.
The idea of the spectre is related to the messianic structure of time that is
intrinsic to Derrida’s later writing. For Derrida, political ideologies are essen-
tially spectral. The ideas, representations, and strategies through which they
configure the experience of the present are never simply ‘of the moment’: they
arise as ambiguous modulations of the structural crises of modernity, and as
such, are fated to return to the crises entailed in its scientific, technological,
and economic unfolding. The promise of happiness is essential to this temporal
structure of politics; for it is in the nature of political spectrality that the
symbolic forms with which it invests the experience of life will return as new
possibilities of hope to each succeeding generation. Thus, Marxism is messianic
in the sense that its figurations of a community of collective labour oriented to
the perfection of the human species is embedded in the techno-scientific regime
of industrial capitalism (Derrida, 1994: 1–10). However, the logic of spectrality
that Derrida presents in Spectres of Marx is not originally dedicated to the return
of radical politics – and is perfectly compatible with the return of reactionary
ghosts whose power is bound to mythologies of primordial sacrifice. It has, of
course, been argued that Nazism, as the exemplary form of classical fascism,
has exhausted its political power: for its racial ideology is based on the myth of
the insidious Jew, its sacrificial demand rooted in the cult of the Fatherland, and
its social programme inextricably bound up with the mythologies of Aryanism
and primordial dwelling. All that remains of fascism are specific forms of
racist and nationalist mimesis, whose extremity returns them to the politics
of simulation they seek to overcome (Baudrillard, 1995: 89–99). I will argue,
following a particular reading of Derrida’s Of Spirit, that fascism is grounded in
a reactionary turn, or ‘inspiration’, that haunts the rationality of Enlightenment,
and that its promise of sacrificial happiness persists as a mobilizing force within
the mediatic networks that stage the experience of time, place, dwelling, and
responsibility.
In the previous section, I examined Deleuze and Guattari’s account of fascism
as a reactivation of Oedipal-despotic desire, and its relationship to the disloca-
tions of late capitalist modernity. Thus, in Weimar Germany the conjunction of
economic catastrophe and the powerlessness of every social class to sustain its
particular mode of existence, led to an aestheticization of politics in which the
spectacle of the Volk appeared to be the only way to recapture the basic satisfac-
tions of life. The question of the future of fascism that emerges from Deleuze
and Guattari’s work, therefore, is essentially related to the total administration
of capital and desire that has taken place since the Second World War. Insofar as
they conceived fascism as a ‘modern archaism’ that was, in the end, destructive
of the productivity of Oedipal desire, its horrific excesses became the stimulus
for a fundamental restructuring of capitalism’s striated space (Deleuze and
Guattari, 2004: 104). From this perspective, America’s commitment to the
European Recovery Plan between 1947 and 1951 was based on its recognition
of the need to restart flows of capital throughout the world economy, and to
re-establish democratic forms of representation in those states that had fallen to
fascism. This then is the non-messianic end of classical fascism: put down by the
military action of the Allies and neutralized as a political ideology by commod-
ified desires that outplayed its excessively destructive satisfactions. However,
I will argue that to approach the subject of fascism as if it had already been
absorbed into the networks of Oedipal happiness is to underplay something
fundamental to the dynamics of its relationship to modernity. The spectre of
fascism is not simply the reflection of an archaic regime of desire that has been
neutralized by the networks of democratic consumption. Rather, it occupies a
disturbing position within the unfolding of this regime: it is the figure of bad
infinity, or sacrificial excess, that returns to the representation of life as happy
responsibility and the pursuit of Oedipal perfection.
There is a split among critical theorists concerning the sporadic outbreaks

of fascism that continue to afflict Western democracies. On one side, there
are those such as Derrida, Rose, and Lyotard who maintain that the fascist
assemblage has a messianic essence that has been able to intensify the conflicts
inherent in ‘late’ or ‘post’ modernity, and that it continues to threaten the
institutions of liberal democracy. (I will return to this somewhat beleaguered
group in a moment.) On the other side, there are those who argue that the
revolutionary power of fascism belongs to an experience of modernization
that was peculiar to Europe in the middle part of the twentieth century. This
experience was characterized by the loss of nature, tradition, and religiosity
that accompanied the rapid expansion of technological capitalism, and which
became particularly acute during the global economic crisis of the early 1930s.
From this perspective, the success of Nazism in Weimar Germany is seen as
the outcome of a set of historically unique circumstances: the weakness of the
economy after the Versailles treaty, the payment of war reparations, the sense
of national humiliation, and the rapid destruction of existing class and status
hierarchies. Thus, the account of classical fascism that Deleuze and Guattari set
out in Anti-Oedipus, presents its militancy as a response to the unprecedented
dislocation of life and death within the productive assemblage of bourgeois
society. The conventional investments of the petit bourgeoisie in the trappings of
their respectability, of the capitalists who force a profit out of their workforce,
and of the proletariat who menace the system with their great somatic power, are
suddenly turned upside-down: and it is at this point that Hitler and the NSDAP
stepped in to offer a new sexualization of life that radicalized the old Oedipal
relations. For Deleuze and Guattari, the transformative power of Nazism arose
from the unprecedented speed with which the social hierarchy collapsed; and
it was this uniquely catastrophic temporality that allowed the fascist aesthetics
of desire to colonize the moral order of the nation state (Deleuze and Guattari,
2000: 293). This argument does perhaps allow that fascism could return to the
system of postmodern happiness; but such a return could only take the form
of an atavistic masochism whose perversion of ‘healthy’ desire is all too easy to
outplay.
It is in Baudrillard’s theory of simulation that the fascist assemblage finally
loses every trace of its messianic danger, and is transformed into a ‘deterrence
mechanism’ through which the simulacra of democracy re-establish their
connection with ‘the real’. In one of his later works, The Transparency of Evil, he
argues that the return of fascism to the theatre of Western democracy should
be understood as an effect of the collapse of politics into the play of media

simulation (Baudrillard, 1995: 72–7). If we follow Baudrillard’s contention that
political debate has been reduced to the aesthetic codes of celebrity culture
(its hyper-sexuality, hyper-sincerity, and hyper-conformity), then we must
acknowledge that the possibility of soliciting the events of mass assembly on
which the success of fascism depends, has come to an end. Thus, the sporadic
recurrence of fascist activity in Western democracies is attributed to an endemic
feeling that it offers the last chance of enacting something primordially real,
something that is fast disappearing into the indifference of media politics
(Baudrillard, 1995: 90).
For Baudrillard, this feeling persists as a strange attractor whose effects are
dispersed across the networks of virtual democracy and commodified desire.
And so, the xenophobia that fascist movements are sometimes able to provoke
in the masses is conceived as a mode of simulation destined to be transformed
into new codes of demotic opposition. The politics of fascism that Baudrillard
describes, therefore, is one of return, but a return that re-establishes the veracity
of those simulacra through which the democratic responsibilities of the West
have become ever-more insubstantial. Thus, while there may be sporadic
violence and protofascist outrage at the fundamentalist other who would
destroy the values of Enlightenment, in the end this is part of a mechanism
through which the simulacra of democracy have retained the last remnants of
the real.
So, is it possible that classical fascism was the last eruption of the symbolic
economy of death and sacrificial ecstasy into the ever-expanding system of
representation? In Heidegger and “the jews”, Lyotard maintains that such an
erasure is impossible. If we begin from the Freudian-Lacanian assumption that
the happiness of self-conscious beings depends on their ability to re-present the
original trauma of their subjection to the law, then the system of representation
through which that happiness is sustained is always open to the return of the
repressed, to the unrepresentable pain of the real (Lyotard, 1988: 16–17). This
account of the present as a solicitation of what cannot be incorporated into
synthetic modifications of happiness is what marks the break between those
who see fascism as having become ‘endemic’ in the state’s representations of
work, satisfaction, and desire, and those who see it as perpetually threatening a
new seizure of power (Rose, 1996: 59).
From the latter perspective, the return of fascism as a political movement
is not blocked by the event of the Holocaust; indeed, there would seem to
be a sense in which Nazism’s power over life and death has become part of
the ‘messianic’ appeal that fascism has been able to maintain. However, the
formation of fascist groups is not just a re-enactment of the past, a simulation
in which mimetic performance has the frisson of a return to the absolute evil
of Nazism. And neither has fascism been reduced to a deterrence function,
in which the media’s re-staging of the Nazi catastrophe becomes a warning of
what can happen if faith is lost in the endless performance of happiness, desire,
and consumption. While it is certainly true that fascism ‘after Auschwitz’ is
partly constituted through ironic denials of complicity with the exterminatory
programme of Nazism, its intrusions into the crises of the present are not just
solicitations of opportunistic violence. The spectre of fascism appears as an
ideological-organizational assemblage that returns to provoke new configura-
tions of the Volk and its others. And so, if we are to understand the danger of its
return, we have to understand its relationship to the conflicts and desires that
are staged, and restaged, in the global-technological theatre of capital.
In the last chapter, I argued that the spirit of socialism consists in the
possibility of its always being reopened through the aesthetic, economic,
and political crises of the present. This concept of socialism has a particular
relationship to the idea of democracy – one in which the demand for justice and
equality, following Marx’s version of materialism, is identified with the labour
of coordinating the primacy of human need with the discursive categories in
which that primacy is represented. So, what emerges from the event of Marx’s
intervention is a crucial transformation of the structure of democracy. Once
the exorbitance of his demand enters into the economy of political life (through
the lexicon of capital, class, and exploitation), it becomes a demand against
which bourgeois social democracy defines and defends its categories of formal
freedom, legal rights, and individual happiness. So, it is ‘between’ these two
regimes that Derrida traces the evolution of social democracy, that is, between
the eschatology of socialist materialism and the abstract freedoms propounded
by bourgeois political economy (Derrida, 1994: 97). This aporetic constitution
of democracy is, from the beginning, haunted by the spectre of reversion to
a militancy whose demands for self-overcoming are without limit. Fascism,
in other words, defines itself against both wings of modernist ideology: the
promiscuous tolerance of laissez faire liberalism and the proletarian utility of
Marxism (Jameson, 2008: 1–23).
Such a definition ought to remind us of Hegel’s reaction to the Jacobin
Terror, and of his warnings about the destructive powers of a representational
apparatus that has become completely detached from the actual relations of
democracy. For, where there is no limit to the mutations a political culture is
capable of performing, it becomes a despotic faction whose mimicking of justice
and ethical life is the very form of evil (Hegel, 1967a: 599–610). Perhaps then,
in the media-techno-scientific networks of the global economy, the spectre of
fascism exists as the ineradicable chance of this evil: the return of mythologies
of the Volk, who stand against the unregulated flows of humanity that penetrate
the borders of the nation.
Derrida explores the topology of this new fascism in the fourth essay
of Politics of Friendship: ‘The Phantom Friend Returning (In the Name of
“Democracy”)’. The crisis of modernity that Nietzsche sought to dramatize is, to
put it crudely, the loss of the symbolic order of conflict through which the power
of overcoming and the virtues of self-transformation are brought into existence.
Thus, the effects of morality and religion are insidious, precisely because they
absorb the friend-enemy distinction into a universalistic idea of love that must
be applied to all men all the time (Derrida, 1997: 81–2). The result of this is the
end of violence, or at least the end of a certain kind of ‘noble violence’ that forms
the virtue both of myself and my enemy. The way of the world has become the
way of pale forgiveness: nations speak to one another not as respected enemies
or trusted friends, but as trading partners, coalition members, or peacekeepers
whose mutual interests are never far from dissolution into petty malevolence.
What this situation threatens, therefore, is the collapse of the political; a chaos
of indifferent desires in the face of which, ‘war, conflict, enmity, cruelty, even
hatred, would regain reassuring contours’ (Derrida, 1997: 83). This Nietzschean
spectre is taken up in Carl Schmitt’s political philosophy. He argues that the
friend-enemy distinction is what founds the body of the nation state: for it is
only insofar as the fraternal association of citizens is constituted through real
or possible conflicts with identifiable enemies, that the state can be said to exist
as a substantive entity. And so, politics as such is defined by its reproduction of
a regulated economy of enmity; the mutual solicitation of a sacrificial violence
that entails no personal hatred of the enemy, and no xenophobic desire to wipe
him from the face of the earth (Derrida, 1997: 86–7; Schmitt, 1996: 27–37).
The deep conservatism that Derrida identifies in Schmitt’s work therefore – a
conservatism close to the essence of fascism, both classical and contemporary
– lies in his determination to protect the ontology of the political; to sustain the
conflict between nations with properly identifiable borders and, what amounts
to the same thing, between enemies who could respect each other as good men.
The position Schmitt develops in The Concept of the Political retains a certain
kind of classicism. For insofar as he makes sacrificial responsibility to the nation
the condition of a noble life, and maintains that the purity of this relationship
has to be defended against all mitigating influences, his thought echoes the
founding principle of the Polis: that the origin of the state is a blood kinship
formally expressed in the laws which constitute its fraternal bonds. War and its
commemoration are essential to this constitution, for, without them, the kinship
of brothers would become fatally attenuated and lose the power to unite them
against the incursions of their enemies (Derrida, 1997: 94–5). The enemies of
the political are those who encourage belief in the cosmopolitan democracy of
‘the human’: the beautiful souls who would welcome those who come neither
as enemies nor as friends, but as strangers without states and who have nothing
but their nameless abjection. What Derrida finds in Schmitt’s reflections on
the political therefore, is a determination to defend the borders that have
separated friends and enemies against the various cosmopolitan influences that
threaten the integrity of their conflicts. His work ‘walls itself up, reconstructs
itself unendingly against what is to come; it struggles against the future with a
prophetic and pathetic energy’ (Derrida, 1997: 88). Thus, the fact of Schmitt’s
complicity with the Nazi regime, and particularly his holding of the presidency
of the Union of National Socialist Jurists between 1933 and 1936, is somewhat
less than accidental. It marks a deep conservatism that views ‘what is to come’ as
nothing less than monstrous; the destruction of the order of political life by the
adulterous mixing of races, cultures, and peoples that is entailed in the liberal
idea of democracy. Schmitt’s approbation of Nazism therefore, is derived from a
sense that the loss of the political, as the regulated violence of the friend-enemy
distinction, is the loss of the order through which human beings maintain their
satisfaction and dignity.
It is this sense of fear about who and what is to come, and about the chaos
into which the political order of the world is descending, that constantly
provokes the spectre of fascism. The global organization of the world economy
is now such that the effectiveness of borders has been radically compromised.
The unrestricted flow of labour and capital has become a hegemonic principle
that operates most effectively when all reference to ‘archaic’ forms of enmity
are dropped from the practice of free trade. And so, the mechanism of global
capital, which constantly ruptures the political and economic integrity of nation
states, provokes a reactionary force within their increasingly fragile sover-
eignties (Bauman, 1993: 159–65).
This force, the spectre of fascism, whose labile essence I have tried to
adumbrate, tends to crystallize into mythologies of the homeland and
ideological versions of race and eugenics. The political movements that arise
from these representations are multiple and contingent, and their success will
vary in relation to the political culture established in particular states. However,
between the ‘managed playground’ of postmodern happiness, the waning of
class affiliations, and the culture of neo-liberalism, the spectre of fascism is
retraced as ‘a risk as terrifying as it is inevitable – the risk of the day, more than
ever’ (Derrida, 1997: 106).
The essence of fascism, therefore, is spectral rather than dialectical: its
relationship to the historical violence it has solicited does not destroy the
promise of happiness it offers in the present. In fact, its return is intrinsically
related to the powers of anamnesis and deception it is able to deploy in relation
to its own catastrophic history. Who the vulnerable constituencies will be in
the future cannot be known in advance, for there is a sense in which it is the
return of the spectre that creates their vulnerability. What is certain, however,
is that fascism’s representational ingenuity has always managed to configure the
‘others’ of its programme in terms that are both innovative and depressingly
familiar. We might draw attention here to Simon Watney’s work on the spectacle
of HIV/AIDS, particularly the way in which the language of biopolitics has been
used by the media to mark the boundary between the normal and the perverse,
the clean and the unclean (Watney, 1993: 202–11). It is with such crises that
the spectre of fascism returns to invest what is strange and unprecedented
with the power of evil: HIV becomes an ontological condition that renders the
sufferer liable to medical sequestration, the immigrant becomes part of a flood
of parasitic subhumanity to be corralled into transit camps, and the Muslim
becomes a fanatic whose rights of residence are placed under permanent review.
I have tried to show in this chapter that the spectre of fascism haunts the
institutions of civil society as the promise of a more satisfying life that exceeds
the arduous responsibilities of democracy. The appeal of this promise, however,
is not unchanging, and it is during periods of social dislocation that its essence
coheres into the specific networks of desire and representation through which
the concept of humanity is forcibly divided. From this perspective, the accusa-
tions of fascism made against those governments that have recently attempted
to intern or deport their Roma populations are far from being unfounded.
They draw attention to the fact that states are again presenting inhuman acts
perpetrated against specific populations as a public health issue that can only be
resolved through tough political action. It is such incidents that draw attention
to the cycle of return characteristic of the fascist assemblage: its provocation of
the state of emergency through the rapid transposition of biopolitical categories
(race, evolution, selection) into the affective mythologies of blood and nation.
So, while it is true that the ‘endemic’ fascism of the global economy continues
to intensify its powers of representation and control of mass desire, the possi-
bility of a ‘radical’ fascism that threatens to seize power in the most destabilized
economies in Europe cannot be discounted (Rose, 1996: 59). The organizational
forms of such local fascisms are already starting to appear in Europe with the
onset of the global recession. And, while the time may not yet be upon us when
fascist groups are able to seize power in the worst affected nations, it may well be
that such groups are able to exercise disproportionate influence on the institu-
tions of public democracy throughout the European Union.
To conclude then, if we approach the question of fascism’s persistence from
the point of view of spectrality, it is clear that the cycle of its return is intrinsi-
cally related to the mechanisms of representation and rationalization that have
constituted the global economy. The accelerated rhythm of crisis and response
through which this economy continues to function is such that its traces of
cosmopolitan democracy are always accompanied by the spectre of retreat into
the sacrificial mythologies of race and nation. In one of his last books, Rogues,
Derrida remarked that the epoch of the ‘rogue state’, in which the rogue was
the irritating exception, is now over; for every unaligned nation has become a
cause for concern within the networks of power, disciplinarity, and desire which
constitute the global domain of capital.
Perhaps this is the final convergence of endemic fascism and empire, where
the entire economy of difference is absorbed into the heterophobic codes of
the market (Derrida, 2005: 106; Hardt and Negri, 2000: 39–40). Derrida does
not think so; for the channels of representation he identifies as the media of
such a power-play, also defer the possibility of its completion. The chance of a
politics of moral desire, in other words, springs from the dynamical economy of
closure. That the world has not become inhospitable to the ecstasies of fascism,
however, and that their haunting of the state is implicit in the global liquidity of
capital, means that this politics must begin from the contemporary mutations
of fascist desire. Ever since the break up of the Soviet bloc, the proliferation
of racist and ultra-nationalist movements has destabilized the processes of
integration through which the ‘empire’ of capital has expanded. The impact of
the global recession on the European Union has led to a revitalization of racist
and ultra-nationalist factions, especially in those nations who have incurred

economic strictures imposed in return for financial aid. So, we come back to
the relationship between fascism and the threat of annihilation that Benjamin
identified in his account of German inflation in the 1930s – that the abyss which
opens up within the ‘rational’ relations of ethical life will drive the dispossessed
into insane flights of sacrificial devotion (Benjamin, 1997a: 54–60). It is this
sense of impending annihilation, which can come at any time, that will always
threaten to revitalize the mythologies of blood and soil within the matrix of
commodified happiness.
It is this endemic crisis of modern ethical life that brings us finally to the
crossroads of religion and politics. For, despite everything fascism does to stage
the ubiquitous presence of the leader and the community of the race, its frantic
performance lacks the scriptural power of religion to unify the community
of the sacred. In the final chapter, therefore, I will examine what Derrida has
called the ‘return of religion’ to the sphere of politics, both as an alternative to
neoliberal individualism and as the focus of a fundamental antagonism between
‘Oriental’ and ‘Occidental’ civilization.
Notes
1 I will use the term National Socialist party throughout the chapter as the common
abbreviation of the party’s official name: the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche
Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP).
2 Kaufmann maintains that while those who attempted to turn Nietzsche’s thought
into a Germanist ideology (principally Oehler, Bäumler and Härtle) were familiar
with his philosophy, they inherited the mythologies of ‘will to power’, ‘blonde
beast’, and ‘master morality’ from a caricature that was nurtured by his famously
anti-Semitic sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche (Kaufmann, 1974: 289–90).
5
Religion and the Love of the Sacred

Religion in the disenchanted world
In order to approach the relationship between religion, politics, and happiness,

it is first necessary to situate the concept of religion – religious faith, religious
experience, the being of God, and the constitution of the church – in relation to
the evolution of modernity. My discussion will be concerned initially with the
fate of religion in Western societies, the course of whose development has been
determined by the rational-scientific manipulation of man and nature. This,
of course, is a familiar theme in the classical sociologies of Marx, Weber and
Durkheim, and I will come to their respective accounts of the disenchantment
of the world in a moment.
Before proceeding to examine their arguments, however, I want to return
briefly to Schopenhauer’s work, for his thoughts on the place of religious belief
in the general scheme of human suffering give a sense of what is at stake in the
clash between faith and knowledge. Schopenhauer maintains that the value of
religion, if it has any, lies in its ability to satisfy a ‘metaphysical need’ common
to all men, no matter what their rank or intelligence. Religion is the form in
which the need to have some sense of where we came from, where we are
going, and why we should behave morally towards others, is satisfied; it is the
appearance of truth in allegorical forms that imbues human life with a sense of
higher meaning and purpose (Schopenhauer, 1970: 105). This representation
of truth as an object of faith is entirely distinct from the ideals of clarity that
should inform philosophical investigations. The practical question of whether
the sense of wellbeing that is derived from religious community has contributed
to man’s subjective happiness is not one that should occupy the philosopher. He
should only be concerned with the truth senso proprio, that is, with clarifying
the nature of the world as it is, including the role that religious experience has
played in sustaining the childishness of mankind and intensifying the violence
of the world (Schopenhauer, 1970: 103). So, the theological question that
emerges from Schopenhauer’s philosophy is that of the possibility of a human
society which has been freed from the mysteries of religious conviction, and
which functions exclusively through rational principles of truth and utility

(Schopenhauer, 1970: 108–9).
In Schopenhauer’s ‘Dialogue’ on religion, this question is presented in a
way that suggests that religious belief, even though it is defined in opposition
to the rational standards of philosophy, is the necessary counterpart of man’s
attempt to fathom the mysteries of his existence by the use of reason alone. At
the end of the ‘Dialogue’, the two antagonists, Demopheles and Philalethes, agree
that religion is Janus faced: despite the undeniable fact that it has been used to
justify barbaric abuses of power, it has also been the matrix that has sustained
human society under the most extreme privations (Schopenhauer, 1970: 114).
So, there appears to be a necessary relationship between faith and knowledge:
a relationship in which the demands of philosophical reason, which are, by
definition, particularizing, hierarchical, and divorced from practical consid-
erations of wellbeing, constantly provoke the return of the religious allegories
through which the lives of the masses are made bearable. This account of the
affiliation between religion and philosophy is important, as it registers a tension
within the concept of Enlightenment that has guided Western civilization since
the end of the eighteenth century. This tension is determined by the funda-
mental belief that philosophy, as the light of reason, will be able to supplant
the satisfactions of religious mythology. Such a conviction however, fails to
recognize that religious faith and philosophical knowledge are categorically
distinct, and that the practical necessities met by the former (provision of a
sense of belonging, purpose, and community) cannot be directly translated into
rationalistic principles of organization and utility.
It is this tension between Enlightenment reason and the allegorical ‘truths’
of religion that is inherited by the classical sociologies of modernity. There is
an assumption common to Marx, Weber and Durkheim’s work on religion:
that the primary restraint on the emergence of modernity was the influence
of the church on the economic and political institutions of feudal societies.
In the introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right, Marx described religion as ‘the general theory of this world … its logic
and popular form, its moral sanction … and its universal basis of consolation
and justification’ (Marx in McLellan, 1977: 63). Under the conditions of feudal
absolutism, this experience of the world as an expression of the will of God,
and its sanctification in the edicts of the Catholic Church, functioned to hold
back the evolution of the mode of production. Insofar as the development of
money, taxation, and technological means were tied to a social hierarchy in
Religion and the Love of the Sacred 145
which poverty and obedience were the way to divine grace, the emergence
of new forms of mercantile activity and their attendant political freedoms
were, for Marx, very slow in coming. However, to maintain that the ‘inverted’
world of religious allegory is, as Schopenhauer claimed, the consequence of
the ontological necessity of suffering, is to surrender to the idea that human
happiness is an unattainable ideal and that the best philosophy can offer is the
consolation of reflective quietude. For Marx, religion is the product of human
suffering. But what Schopenhauer failed to grasp was that this suffering is not
the outcome of a malign conjunction of circumstances that cursed the world
from its inception, but rather an effect of man’s contrivance of exploitative
systems that have intensified his experience of impoverishment and alienation.
The emergence of capitalism marks the point at which human unhappiness
reaches its absolute; for not only are the physical resources of the body stretched
to breaking point by the production of surplus value, the religious forms
through which that suffering is represented become monstrous caricatures of
alienated humanity (the Unmensch) (Marx in McLellan, 1977: 63). Thus, if there
is hope for a society that is dedicated to man’s capacity for autonomous self-
creation, this consists in the final disenchantment of the proletariat with all the
illusions of the sacred.
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx famously presents the triumph of
bourgeois capitalism over the feudal order of church and state, as a moment of
liberation that has ‘drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of
chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egois-
tical calculation’ (Marx and Engels in McLellan 1977: 223). So, the question
that emerges from the sacrilegious trajectory of bourgeois capitalism (and
this despite its marriage of convenience to the worldly faith of Protestantism)
concerns the possibility of a mode of production that is without religious belief,
and of the enhancement of human existence that would be possible within it.
Marx’s faith in the transition from capitalism to communism is founded on the
idea that the egoistic desire, through which the bourgeois mode of production
perpetuates itself, is the fundamental source of suffering for the human species.
And so, the necessity of transition described in the Manifesto arises from the
apophatic vision of free, non-alienated relations that Marx set out in Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology (Marx and Engels in
McLellan 1977: 87–96; 190–1).
If we were to venture a distinction between Marx’s and Weber’s accounts of
the relationship between religion and modernity, therefore, it might be that the
latter attempts to remove the last traces of Marx’s humanism from the method
of historical explanation. In his ‘Religious Rejections of the World and their
Directions’, Weber maintains that religion, as an ethic of brotherly love orien-
tated towards the salvation of the faithful, has withdrawn from the sinful, or
at least morally neutral, spheres of worldly activity (Weber in Gerth and Mills,
1997: 327–8). This is particularly important in the economic sphere, as the
Catholic doctrine of salvation through poverty and obedience was instrumental
in sustaining an attitude of fatalism towards worldly activity, and a reverence for
the ancient regime of the feudal estates. Thus, it was not until the emergence of
Puritanism, which ‘accepted the routinization of the economic cosmos’ as part
of the telos of the created world, that the movement began towards the highly
rationalized activity through which ‘capital’ became the universal object of
volition (Weber in Gerth and Mills, 1997: 332–3).
The more variegated account of religion that Weber offers in his approach
to the evolution of modernity points to a rejection of the essentialism implicit
in Marx’s early writings. In Weber’s theory of the development of capitalism
in Europe, the dynamics of the transition are instituted through changes in
systems of religious belief that had retained a significant degree of independence
from the economic relations of feudalism. Thus, the transformative power of
the entrepreneurial spirit is not presented as part of a dynamic of frustrated
creativity that promises the eventual overcoming of human alienation, but as
a practical outcome of the shift in the balance of power between Protestant
and Catholic theologies. Capitalism could only emerge once the eschato-
logical significance of worldly activity had been transformed by the Protestant
doctrine of individual responsibility before God. Once this transformation has
happened, however, the social economy of the sacred is changed forever; for, as
religious meaning is eroded by the rational calculation that the Protestant ethic
has implicitly sanctified, so the practical relations of state, economy, and politics
have become increasingly instrumental.
This, then, is the contradiction of modernity that Weber identified at the
end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: that the regime of
instrumental reason which has come to dominate human society is incapable
of standing in for the symbolic meanings that the old systems of religious belief
had provided. Weber’s tracing of the disenchantment of modernity, therefore, is
radically opposed not only to the theological trajectory of Marxism (the belief
in man’s capacity to move beyond the dominance of instrumental reason), but
also to Durkheim’s attempt, in The Division of Labour in Society, to extrapolate
a new form of the ‘conscience collective’ from the interdependent networks of

legal, economic, and political reason (Durkheim, 1964: 222–9). Both Marx and
Durkheim, in other words, commit the sin of returning to the sacred via the
critique of religion, and thereby stray beyond a properly nominalist evaluation
of the happiness that secular-instrumental modernity is likely to bring.
Nothing, however, is definitively resolved in Marx’s, Weber’s, or Durkheim’s
formulations of the crises of social solidarity that the decline of religion has
caused in Western societies. Weber’s theory of total disenchantment is, in the
end, just as speculative as Marx’s and Durkheim’s attempts to conjure authentic
community from the dysfunctional abstractions of market capitalism. Weber’s
claim is that all possibilities of recognition, representation, and transcendence
are being swallowed up by the instrumental logic of modernity, and that this
process is a kind of radical evil that ‘petrifies’ the human soul and deprives it
of meaning and spontaneity (Weber, 1978: 182). The very postulation of such
a process, however, is a solicitation of the possibility of transcendence, that is,
something akin to the possibilities of cooperative action, self-recognition, and
affective community that Marx and Durkheim attempted to trace in their quasi-
religious histories of modernity.
Now, it might be argued that the reflexive modernization thesis developed
by Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, is, at least in part, an attempt to respond
to the question of what a democratically organized, post-religious form of
social solidarity might look like (Beck, 1996; 2008; Giddens 1997a; 1997b).
The foundation of Beck and Giddens’ thesis is a particular conception of
modernity in which the rationalization process determines not only the
normative crisis which characterized the expansion of industrial production,
but also an onto-ecological crisis in the relationship between man, technology,
and nature. Modernity, in other words, has entered a ‘catastrophic’ phase in
which human beings are brought face to face with the fact that the productive
mechanism they have devised (global-industrial-technological capitalism)
is also the regime that is rapidly destroying the natural environment. For
Beck and Giddens, this realization is the basis of an emergent cosmopolitan
democracy, one in which consensus and cooperation are underpinned by
universal recognition of impending, but avoidable, catastrophe. I will argue,
however, that this crisis has produced a new economy of fear, unhappiness, and
reactionary love of the sacred that constantly disrupts the movement towards
a cosmopolitan politics. This chapter will examine the religious dynamics of
this situation.
In Hegel’s philosophy, religion is an essential modality of spirit: it is the

sensory-aesthetic form in which self-consciousness initially conceives and
expresses its relationship to the Absolute Idea. Through the course of human
history, spirit emerges from the religious imagination of the world and the
ethical life of man. It becomes a revealed religion, the truth of whose presence
in the abstract relations of modernity lies in its mediation of their tendency to
provoke egoistic excess and lawless domination. Christianity is the exemplary
form of this revealed religion as, for Hegel, it is the only system of belief whose
concept of the sacred has been formulated through the history of its mediation
with the temporal world. The crucifixion of Christ, when it is represented as
the death of a ‘mediator’ whose existence illuminates the infinite movement
of spirit, is what gives human subjectivity to the presence of the sacred (Hegel,
1967a: 781–2). The Passion of Christ determines itself as a practical form of
love whose object is the sacred communion of God and Man. This movement
away from the aesthetic representation of God, however, does not mark the
final reconciliation of the secular and the divine, for the degradation of religious
imagination gives rise to the question of how Christianity can sustain a spirit
of brotherliness without lapsing into obscurantism and idolatry. For Hegel,
revealed religion should act as an allegorical expression of spirit within the
relations of civil society; it should give those whose work is abstract and techni-
cally differentiated a sense of their participation in, and reproduction of, the
unity of ethical life. Thus we encounter, at the end of The Phenomenology of
Mind, a reconfiguration of Christian mythology: although the essential being
of the world has fallen into the violence of finitude (abstract modernity), this
violence brings with it the practical formation of love in the work of civil society,
and the revelation of spirit as the infinite horizon through which the truth of
God, man, and nature is revealed. This figuration of love and redemption in the
tragic history of modernity is, I believe, essential to the reflexive modernization
thesis, for, without a certain faith in the satisfactions of rational belief, there can
be no hope for cosmopolitan ethics (Beck, 2008: 197–200).
As I have said, my principal concern in this final chapter is the return of
religion to the increasingly abstract, disenchanted, and antagonistic relations
of modernity. In Hegel’s philosophy, this return takes place through the
Aufhebung; it is the outcome of spirit’s preservation of the ‘concept’ of the sacred
and overcoming of the irrationalism that is inherent in aesthetic representa-
tions of God. (I will examine the political implications of this preservation of
religion in the following section.) In Nietzsche’s thought however, the kenotic
movement that is presented by Hegel is given a far more radical determination:

it is presented as modernity’s incremental destruction of the symbolic order
of religion, and the horrified realization that God has been killed by the sacri-
legious endeavour to know everything of ‘material’ existence. The experience
of this catastrophe is felt all the more acutely because of the abstraction of the
bonds that form society: after the Enlightenment, the world becomes ever-more
disenchanted, and it is this process of rationalization that increases humanity’s
sense of existential despair (Nietzsche, 1974: 181–2). Hegel’s revealed religion
marks the point at which the Enlightenment project is stretched to destruction;
its promise of balanced, rational, moderated happiness is ruptured by a confron-
tation with catastrophe that demands absolute risk and absolute sacrifice in the
face of the void. For Nietzsche, there can be no ‘politics’ of this confrontation;
it cannot be mediated through categories that configure the epochal crises of
existence as elements in the dialectical history of God, man, and nature. And
so it is Weber – who, at the end of The Protestant Ethic, prophesied ‘a great
rebirth of old ideas and ideals’ from the mechanism of modernity – who lies
closest to a certain suspicion that Nietzsche harbours from the beginning of
his philosophy: that the Christian mythos will return at moments of crisis, and
that Western humanity will come back to the life of the Saviour through his
charismatic representatives (Weber in Gerth and Mills, 1997: 328–9; Nietzsche,
1984: 89–90). It is from this Nietzschean-Weberian perspective, therefore, that
I will examine the political implications of what has become known as radical
orthodoxy: the return to the founding mythologies of the Christian faith and
the critiques of democracy, representation, and egoism this has inspired.
In the final section, I will address the questions of mystical revelation, holy
texts, ancient homelands, and sacred communities that have been provoked by
the constant expansion of the global economy. From a Nietzschean perspective,
these points arise from the essentially tragic history of modernity. For, as the
world becomes increasingly abstract and technocratic, so the yearning for the
experience of the sacred grows stronger. The return of religion, therefore, is
characterized by an antagonism of ancient faiths that, once it has precipitated
fundamentalist readings of sacred texts, transforms the secular-cosmopolitan
trajectory of capital and Enlightenment culture.
While it would be simplistic to argue that Nietzsche’s critique of religion
gestures towards an irresolvable conflict between ‘enlightened’ Christianity and
‘fanatic’ Islam and Judaism, there are traces of this trajectory in his thought,
particularly in The Anti-Christ. The underlying force of the will to power is what
precipitates the conflicts that take place among religious communities, and,
as such, their ultimate reference point is always the redistributions of power
precipitated by the intensity of the experience of the sacred. Thus, it seems that
the secularizing movement of modernity has become embroiled in an economy
of violence that is escalatory rather than dialectical: the imposition of Christian-
European law becomes the basis of a clash of fundamentalisms (Christian,
Islamic, and Judaic) the outcome of which is simply the intensification of
conflicts pursued in the name of God (Nietzsche, 1983: 183–4).
And so it is at this point, today, that we must ask if the happiness of humanity
will always depend on the power of sacrificial violence and the hope of
transcendental unity with the divine. These questions lie at the core of Derrida’s
last books, particularly Acts of Religion and Of Hospitality, and I will conclude
by examining his account of a certain messianic faith (in the Other) that is
co-present with the ecstasies of sacred devotion.
Faith and Enlightenment
At first glance, it would seem that Hegel’s philosophy offers little insight into
the fate of religion under the conditions of late modernity. Read formalistically,
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion sets out the history of religious experience
as an immanently universal development that culminates in the revealed
religion of modern Christianity. The sensory-aesthetic figurations through
which Islam, Judaism, and early Christianity express the presence of the divine
are expounded as mythological formations of the relationship between man,
God, and the temporal world of nature and society. These mythologies are an
essential part of the process by which self-consciousness differentiates itself
from inorganic nature, and yet they also institute a realm of law and desire that
does violence to the concept of God and to the essential freedom of humanity.
Both Islam and Judaism, according to Hegel’s typology, set God apart from
man as ‘the One’ whose majesty is without mediation, and whose presence is
revealed either in the ‘fanatical’ inspiration of subjective consciousness (Islam),
or in the tyrannical necessity of divine law (Judaism). It is in the evolution of
the Christian mythos, therefore, that the possibility of reconciling God, man,
and love is made actual: for the doctrinal significance of Christ shifts from his
simply being a historical figure who founded the ethical precepts of the church,
to his being the embodiment of God’s essence come to redeem the world (Hegel,
1987: 435). Thus, what the life and teachings of Christ reveal is the presence of
the divine in man and nature: human beings, as finite spirit, are not foreign to
God, and Christ shows how it is possible to live a life that constantly rededi-
cates itself to the realization of Christian love in the institutions of Sittlichkeit
(Hegel, 1987: 469). Hegel concludes the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
by rendering this ‘kenosis of Christ’, his simultaneous divinity and non-divinity,
as the ‘end of religion’: for it is at this point that the satisfactions of religious
community (selfless love, messianic hope, and the veneration of each individual
soul) are recognized as substantive ends in themselves, without the need of
figurative representation (Vorstellung). Revealed religion sublates itself in the
philosophical apprehension of spirit (Hegel, 1987: 487).
This apparently happy ending to the history of humanity, however, is rather
less clear-cut than it seems. Religion, for Hegel, occupies a particular place in
the history of spirit: it is simultaneously an autonomous form of recognition in
which the essential freedom of the soul takes shape, the source of universal love
within the objective relations of Sittlichkeit, and the provocation of irrational
cultures that deform the concept of human freedom. Thus, as Gillian Rose
points out in her exposition of Hegel’s Philosophy of History, the evolution of
spirit is essentially tragic: the transformative power of religious representations
of the sacred constantly conflict with the objective institutional relations of
the state (Rose, 1981: 112–20). This tragic figuration of history begins with the
break up of the Greek Polis. For, despite the fact that the state and religion are
united through the identity of Athene with the life of the city, the presence of
the goddess in all of the economic, political, and aesthetic institutions of Athens
is the denial of subjectivity to both man and deity. The happiness of the Polis
eventually succumbs to the higher necessity of spirit’s self-diremption, even
though the historical form in which this manifests itself, the Roman state, gives
rise to a thoroughly corruptible individualism in which each citizen is legally
free to propitiate any god he chooses. Thus, for Hegel, the truth of Roman
polytheism lies in its justification of the usury, slavery, and poverty that the state
perpetuates through its own venality. It is into this condition that the figure of
Christ comes as a transformative energy, as the Other of the Roman state and
its corrupt religion (Hegel, 1987: 462). He is the pure outpouring of the Holy
Spirit whose demand for discipleship is absolute; he will accept only complete
fidelity to his teaching of God’s word, and the utter rejection of the Roman
state and its institutions. As we have seen, this outpouring of spirit marks the
origin of Christianity, and of its movement towards substantive realization as
Sittlichkeit. However, Christ’s originary revelation of the truth takes the form of
pure passion that is without a properly ethical constitution. And so, Christianity,
in both the Roman world and under feudalism, determines itself as a passionate
hope of redemption that is complicit with the very forms of servitude it purports
to abhor (Rose, 1981: 117).
This evolution of religion continues through both the French and German
Enlightenments. In the former case, there is no reformation of the church, and
so the transformation of ethical life becomes a barbarous destruction of every
‘sacred’ institution of the ancien régime, while in the latter there is a refor-
mation, but without any substantial transformation of ethical and political life.
So, for Hegel, modernity emerges from this profoundly unhappy formation of
self-consciousness, in which the work of civil society is stripped of its sacred
significance and becomes the abstract activity of the utilitarian ego (Hegel,
1967a: 598–627; Rose, 1981: 118). It is this violent transformation of Christian
self-consciousness that forms the basis of Hegel’s account of the fate of religion.
While it is true that he regards the formal rights that emerge in civil society
as essential to the freedom of the individual subject, these always remain
inadequate to the concept of universal love and ethical community. The totality
of Sittlichkeit cannot be thought or represented through the ideology of the
atomistic individual (Utilitarianism), and so the return of religion to the instru-
mental relations that have come to dominate the state is something that Hegel
conceives as essential to the unity of modern society. This return, however, is
not the final subsumption of religious experience under the rational cognition
of Christian ethics, for, as Rose puts it, Hegel’s thesis ‘implies the cessation of
religion as formative experience, but it does not imply the end of represen-
tation’ (Rose, 1981: 120). The constant reconfiguration of poverty and excess,
autocracy and obeisance, love and hatred that is characteristic of modern social
relations, in other words, solicits an aesthetics of otherworldly salvation and
sublime unity with the sacred One.
For Hegel, this cycle of return is essentially tragic, for, as the relations of civil
society become increasingly instrumental, so the power of revealed religion to
sustain itself within the corporate structures of Sittlichkeit is diminished. There
is a tendency for the acquisitive souls who emerge from this organization of
ethical life to lose the sense of practical love and community that comes from the
allegorical forms of the Christian mythos. Religion retreats from its mediating
function, and instead of revealing the purpose of man (his transformation of
nature and society through the idea of free, self-engendering unity), breaks
down into an unholy chaos of subjective beliefs. The antagonisms of modernity

are exacerbated by the proliferation of religious sects; each ‘community’ of
believers seeks meaning through the imaginary bonds of subjective revelation.
The outcome of this return of religion is tragic, as it distorts the unity of God,
man, and nature that, for Hegel, is the substance of ethical life. Actual social
relations become increasingly atomistic, and God’s name becomes a cipher, an
empty form of legitimacy (Rose, 1981: 120). Yet there is a sense of providence,
or perhaps redemption, that runs through Hegel’s concept of tragic modernity.
It is true that religious experience tends to multiply its ‘unrevealed’ forms within
the abstract relations of modern society, but its relationship to God, as spirit,
is such that it must return again to the unifying power of Christianity. The
world is without end; for the triune relationship of God, man, and nature is the
underlying condition that mediates the violence of subjective belief, re-forms
the substance of ethical life, and re-establishes the equilibrium between man
and nature (Hegel, 1987: 435–6). It is also the condition on which ‘the Christian
world’ is given primacy over the other religions. I will return to this hierarchy
of world religions in a moment. For now, however, I want to look at the way in
which modern social theory has sought to transform this Hegelian economy of
religion and modernity.
Perhaps the most important insight of Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion lies
in its configuration of the relationship between imagination, the subjective
experience of work and desire, and the objective rationality of civil society. Put
simply, the persistence of religion as a modality of spirit is down to its ability
to infuse the formal necessities of ethical life (keeping the law, participation in
the political institutions of the state) with a sense of transcendent satisfaction.
The labour of society must be collectively meaningful, or the whole edifice is
held together only by the contingent relations of economic exchange, individual
morality, and the stricture of the law (Hegel, 1967b: 122–6). This is what Hegel
understands as the inadequacy of the ‘formal’ culture of Enlightenment: its
inability to bring a sense of love (Eros) to the collective life of civil society.
As we have seen, the German version of this culture achieves its highest
expression in the philosophical systems of subjective idealism, which present
the individual ego as the unique source of moral self-determination. In Kant’s
thought, for example, there is a radical distinction between the theoretical
reason (Verstand) through which the objective relations of the external world
are apprehended, and the practical reason (Vernunft) through which the moral
self-determination of the individual is made possible. This Kantian distinction
between practical and theoretical reason is important, as it marks the emergence

of a concept of ethical life in which it is the reflexive capacity of the individual
that is central to the unfolding of human freedom. The ‘material’ desires of
individual existence, which Hegel saw as implicit in the religiosity of finite spirit,
are opposed to the ends of practical reason. So, the progress of human society
is marked not by the labour of mediating the particularity of desire, but by the
articulation of laws and institutions which protect the freedom of individual
will, and maximize its capacity for spontaneous self-determination. Thus, for
Kant, if there is to be a happy reconciliation of God and man, this can only take
place in the hereafter; for in the temporal order of history, each Christian soul
must dedicate himself to the impossible task of perfecting the moral culture and
institutions of his nation state (Kant, 1993: 130–8).
It is in Kant’s separation of theoretical and practical reason that ‘bourgeois’
sociology (Weber, Durkheim, Adorno, Habermas, Beck, Giddens) found its
inspiration for the idea of catastrophic modernity. Insofar as Kant understood
nature as governed by external causes, and the material relations of society as
subject to violence and contingency, his concept of rational will has become the
motif of contemporary debates about secularization, disenchantment, and the
possibility of non-theologically grounded democracy. One of the defining charac-
teristics of modern materialism, or what Habermas has called ‘postmetaphysical
thinking’ (see Habermas, 1995), is its rejection of Hegelian dialectics: nature
and society are understood as subject to contingent effects that cannot be
subsumed under an ethico-teleology, and which resist sublation into the higher
categories of absolute knowledge. From this perspective, the world is conceived
as a mechanism within which humanity must, as a matter of fact, provide for its
survival and, as a matter of reflexive cognition, determine the optimal conditions
of its freedom and happiness. The idea of catastrophic modernity takes shape in
a post-Weberian world, where the autonomous individual has become subject
to the necessities of techno-scientific reason, and the spontaneity of its thought
has been pre-empted by the repetitive codes of mass culture. The dynamics of
this catastrophic turn have, as I have said, been variously configured as anomie,
reification, and technocratic necessity. What I am interested in however, is the
concept of civilization-risks developed by Ulrich Beck in Risk Society, and the
neo-Kantian concept of religion that he sets out in A God of One’s Own. It is in
Beck’s configuration of the relationships between anthropogenic risk, existential
anxiety, and the search for collective sources of hope, that the question of
religious experience returns with extreme urgency.
At the conclusion of his essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, Albert Camus enjoins
us to ‘imagine Sisyphus happy’ in the endless labour to which he has been
condemned (Camus, 2005: 119). This act of imagination is perhaps what is at
stake in the account of religion that Beck presents in his book A God of One’s
Own. What modernity has revealed to us, according to Beck’s conception of
risk society, is the fact that the technological regime that has facilitated the
alleviation of human want (at least in the industrialized regions of the world),
simultaneously produces catastrophic environmental effects which threaten
the future of humanity (Beck, 1996: 36–46). For, as these effects begin to
infringe on the conventional ideology of modernization (economic growth
funds scientific innovation; scientific innovation produces more wealth; more
wealth increases consumption; which produces more happiness, and so on),
so there emerges a ‘critical science’ which seeks to articulate the damage done
to nature and humanity by the unregulated use of technology (Beck, 1996:
172–3). Technological civilization therefore is confronted by the catastrophic
potential of its own evolutionary trajectory; for the bio-systems that make up
the natural environment are vulnerable to damages that could, potentially, cause
the extinction of all life on the planet. The politics of this threat are extremely
complex, and are dispersed across a plurality of different discourses: those that
maintain the necessity of technological solutions, those that demand a return to
our original unity with nature (deep ecology), and those that deny that indus-
trial modernity has had any significant impact on nature at all (the American
Petroleum Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, for example). What
impact has this threat of impending annihilation had on the existential condition
of humanity, or, more specifically, on the religious imagination of the world and
our place within it? If, as Beck contends, we must undertake the Sisyphean
labour of transforming every aspect of our ‘being in the world’, then we need
to understand how, and indeed if, religion can give hope and happiness to that
labour.
The account of the cosmopolitan potential of religion that Beck presents in
A God of One’s Own is essentially Kantian. His argument turns on the idea that
Kant presented in Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason, which is that
there is a rational core to religious belief, and that this can be articulated as a
doctrine of universal respect for the humanity of others. One worships God, in
other words, by keeping his moral law and by challenging religious dogma that
stands only on the ecstatic or miraculous revelation of the sacred (Kant, 1998:
79–102). Beck, however, works hard to sustain a critical distance between his
own version of revealed religion and Kant’s speculations on the relative merits of
Judaism, Islam, and Christianity as vehicles of moral culture. The core of Beck’s
thesis is that, under the conditions of global capitalism, all of the monotheisms
are revitalized as sources of identity: as the world becomes increasingly
secularized, so religion re-emerges as an alternative to the conflicts and
pressures of technological modernity. The ‘paradox of secularization’, therefore,
is that once Enlightenment science forces religion to give up its determination
to explain every element of the material world, it is able to become what it has
always been implicitly: the sphere in which the concepts of humanity, respect,
and love achieve their practical articulation (Beck, 2008: 24–6).
This transformation of religion has two consequences. The first is that
individuals are no longer situated as passive subjects within the orthodoxy of
the church; they have become active interpreters who take inspiration from
religious teachings, but who modify these in relation to the exigencies of their
own particular lifeworld (Beck, 2008: 104–9). The second consequence is that,
in a globalized world, reflexive faith is immediately connected to the ethnic
and religious diversity of the nation state, and to the religious conflicts and
negotiations that are played out in the sphere of international politics. Thus,
the solipsistic implications of having ‘a God of one’s own’ are overcome through
the everyday practice of one’s beliefs: each reflexive soul, no matter what her
religious denomination, encounters ‘others’ whom she must regard as both
different and valuable in themselves (Beck, 2008: 178). In the end, and despite
the apparent intensification of conflicts caused by ‘anti-modern fundamen-
talism’, there is a discernible shift from the religiosity of truth to the religiosity of
peace – a shift which Beck regards as a crucial supplement to the cosmopolitan
possibilities of global risk society (Beck, 2008: 197–200).
The geopolitical economy of Hegel’s lectures on religion does, of course,
return us to the question of the Eurocentric origin of his concepts of man, God,
and spirit. And it is certainly true that A God of One’s Own is dedicated to the
coming of a cosmopolitan religiosity, which is free of the Orientalist repre-
sentations that have been perpetuated in Western thought – including Hegel’s
philosophy of spirit. This is a crucial question, and I will return to it at the end of
the chapter. In the meantime, there is something disturbing in Hegel’s accounts
of truth and religion that is never properly discharged in Beck’s discourse on
the evolution of post-doctrinal faith. Despite the kenotic implications of his
philosophy, Hegel maintains that religious representations of love and affective
community are essential to the constitution of modern ethical life, for, without
them, ‘society’ is reduced to the utilitarian projects of atomistic individuals.

And yet, religious experience, even in its Christian form, remains inadequate to
stabilize the relations of civil society. The faculty of imagination, or Vorstellung,
in which God is made present, is an infinitely changeable medium whose
redemptive promise tends to intensify the antagonism of knowledge, belief, and
individual happiness characteristic of modernity. So, for Hegel, the crucial fact
about religion is that it cannot be formalized in the sense that Kant suggests in
Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason (the pursuit of moral happiness as
the divine purpose of human life), or, by extension, in the practical principles
that Beck argues are the essence of religious faith. The happiness offered by
religion is, by its very nature, maintained by eschatological figurations of the
world; and so the schisms within and among the monotheisms that have charac-
terized the modern era are perhaps less amenable to the logic of cosmopolitan
recognition than Beck’s analysis would suggest. Thus, if we are to understand
the relationship between faith and happiness in our time of impending catas-
trophe, we need to look more carefully at the distinctive satisfactions that form
the economy of the sacred.
Orthodoxy and the death of God
The term ‘nihilist’ is one that has, in recent years, returned to philosophical,
theological, and social scientific debates through the provocations of the
postmodernist movement. As we have seen, it is difficult to determine what
this movement stands for and who belongs to it; however, the putative concern
with deconstructing the foundations of knowledge and questioning the ‘metan-
arratives’ through which most of us orientate our lives, has given rise to the
suspicion that whoever they are, postmodernists have a dangerous fascination
for the nihilistic. In the Anglo-American response to this style of critique, the
genesis of postmodernism is usually traced to Nietzsche’s determination to
undermine the normative foundations of modernity by exposing their inertial
effects on the vitality of human will and its capacity for self-overcoming. Thus,
the argument runs, postmodernism is a kind of domesticated Nietzscheanism:
the critique of authoritarian presence that forms the core of the movement is
essentially a picking away at the established satisfactions of social life, which
ends up as nothing more than the solicitation of the negative for its own sake. I
will return to this in the final section, where I will look at Derrida’s account of
the ethical possibilities that arise from the economy of religious inscription. For
the moment, however, I want to consider the genesis of the opposition between
Western analytical philosophy, in which the concept of transcendence remains
essential to the constitution of ethical life, and Nietzsche’s attempt to make the
performativity of the will into the exclusive standard of truth and value. For it
is only by attending to this opposition that we can understand the significance
of Nietzsche’s critique of Western metaphysics as a critique of the categories of
God, soul, love, and redemption which form the essence of Christianity.
In the first section of Human, All Too Human, ‘Of First and Last Things’,
Nietzsche admitted that, as pure possibility, the existence of the metaphysical
world cannot be refuted. For Nietzsche, this world is a spectre that materialist
science can never exorcise, simply because every new connection made between
particular events and the laws of cause and effect re-engenders the hope that the
signature of divine agency has finally been revealed (Nietzsche, 1994: 17–18).
The origin of this hope is perhaps as old as man, and we may even think of it as
one of the fundamental structures of his existence. In the terms of Nietzsche’s
genealogy, it is the Apollonian construction of the good as a characteristic
of both nature (physis) and human society (koinõnia) in the Greek world,
which marks the beginning of the onto-theological tradition that has come to
dominate Western thought. After the decline of the Dionysian aesthetic, which
sought to expose the Polis to the radical contingency of the gods and their
capricious manipulation of nature, the axis of the Greek world shifted away
from the experience of tragic fate towards the Apollonian ideals of rational and
harmonious life presented in Socratic philosophy (Nietzsche, 1990: 76–83). The
aesthetic culture of the Polis ceased deliberately to solicit the violence of fate,
and so the constitution of ethical life, or koinõnia, is transformed from one in
which the people are deliberately exposed to the unknowable power of the gods,
into the expression of a deeper necessity (the logos) in whose harmonious differ-
entiation the ultimate good of humanity is to be found. Socratic philosophy,
as Nietzsche saw it, ‘divorced itself from science when it enquired which
knowledge of the world and life could help man live most happily’ (Nietzsche,
1994: 17). Thus, the idea of a world beyond the violence of opposing forces is
born with the Socratic logos: it is at this point that ‘man’ is envisioned as part of
a rational-ontological order that distributes his moral, practical, and aesthetic
faculties as gifts consecrated to the preservation of the good (agathos).
In Nietzsche’s thought, therefore, the articulation of Socratic philosophy in
the work of Plato and Aristotle marks the founding victory of the Apollonian
aesthetic over the tragic culture that was the vitality of early Greek society. In
its pre-Socratic form, the Polis exemplified what Nietzsche understood as the
original form of religiosity: the worship of gods who express the power of the
tribe to resist the threat of annihilation, and to be more than the simple process
of reproduction. Such primitive religions are the embodiment of a collective
existence in which ‘man’ is constantly exposed to his own finitude; his work
and familial satisfactions are performed within a social space shot through with
the capricious desire of the gods, and it is this desire that pushes human culture
beyond stagnation and moral involution. In pre-Socratic Greece, the Dionysian
aesthetic was still a reflection of this primitive vitality: the culture of music and
performance is animated by the presence of the divine in the world, and by
the danger this poses to the human transgressor. For Nietzsche, the greatness
and happiness of Greek culture lies in the paganism of its origins, that is, in the
contingency of fate to which a suitably powerful humanity ought to be exposed
(Nietzsche, 1990: 46–53). This aesthetic of joyful suffering, however, cannot
reproduce itself as pure excess; its performativity requires the light and figuration
of Apollonian technique in order to sustain itself as the substance of the Polis.
It is the Apollonian concept of a harmonious order that underlies the chaos of
material existence, therefore, which is the origin of Socrates’ determination to
expound the essential conditions of human virtue and happiness. Or, to put it
in rather more Nietzschean terms, the Apollonian ideal is the origin of the logos
in which human spirit is taken from its existential relationship to the material
world, and placed within a sphere of metaphysical ideas (form, soul, intellect,
highest good) that determine the proper limits of its power of self-determination.
So, what emerges from the Greek world is the ground of Christian theology:
the concept of a higher good whose apprehension underlies the responsible
friendship, moral self-regard, and civilizing restraint that forms the substance
of ethical life. Yet there is a trace, faint though it may be, of pagan contingency
in Aristotelian thought; for the unequal distribution of noble attributes that
forms the basis of Greek democracy is still conceived as the outcome of a physis
that it is not the concern of the state to correct. The happiness of the Polis, in
other words, depends on the bravery, diligence, and intellectual love of the
good that is practised by its greatest men: it is through their ‘greatness of soul’
(magalopsychia) that every sphere of ethical life (work, family, sexuality) is given
its most noble end, or telos (Aristotle, 1962: 93–9).
In Nietzsche’s genealogy, the last trace of this pagan ‘health’ is corrupted
by the Christian transformation of the good into the one omnipotent God by
whose will the whole of creation is brought into existence. God becomes the
unknowable mystery through which the world is gifted to man; he is the trans-
cendent unity to whom every soul is indebted, and who created the world so
that man should come to know the Kingdom of God. The crucifixion of Christ
is the point at which man comes to recognize himself as part of a world created
for redemption: his suffering shows us that every finite soul is infused with a
responsibility to God (poverty, chastity, obedience, and unconditional love) that
is opposed to the selfishness dominating the world of law, politics, and economy.
True happiness therefore, can be achieved only through a life of self-abnegation
that withdraws from the agonism of existence in the hope of blessed reconcili-
ation with the Creator. So, for Nietzsche, everything noble and good is sacrificed
to an empty abstraction, a false promise (Nietzsche, 1983: 126–9).
In Book Three of The Gay Science, Nietzsche, in the guise of the Madman,
announces man’s killing of God (Nietzsche, 1974: 181–2). This announcement,
however, is ambiguous, as the event of God’s death cannot ‘occur’ without the
willing participation of all humanity. This means that everyone must recognize
the truth of materialist science (that the created world is simply the happiest
of happy accidents), and forego the ‘festivals of atonement’ by which humanity
might conceal the death of God from itself. This is the tragic space of modernity;
the hiatus to which Christianity returns to claim those that cannot face the
death of the last deity, and who seek happiness in redemption rather than what
Nietzsche called the heights of joyful overcoming. Thus, the agonism of our
historical present is played out through opposing claims about the ‘nihilism’
that results either from belief in God, or from belief in the power of human will
to overcome every limitation imposed on it. From the perspective of orthodox
Christianity, Nietzschean materialism is nihilistic because pure will, freed from
its responsibilities to a transcendent God, has no concrete relation either to
other human beings or to its own essence as a created form. From a Nietzschean
perspective, on the other hand, Christianity is nihilistic because of its denial
of the creative forces that brought form and vitality to human civilization. For
Nietzsche, the depth of the material world is infinite: its different levels of cause
and effect cannot be understood simply in terms of the calculative model of
Enlightenment science, for each new sphere of causality arises from, and opens
up, the risks that offer the chance of joyful overcoming (Nietzsche 1974: 92).
A study of the kind I am attempting cannot, of course, attempt to provide
an answer to the question of whether it is Nietzsche or Saint Paul who is the
nihilist, and which of them points the way to the happiness of humanity.
However, it is possible, I think, to make a genealogical assessment of the return

of Christian orthodoxy to the space of modernity, without simply affirming the
entire complex of Nietzsche’s critique of religion.
One of the common themes that runs through the Catholic theological
movement that has become known as radical orthodoxy is the idea that Western
metaphysics has, since Socrates, been obsessed with cutting up the world into
different kinds of being, and with arranging each generic form into hierarchical
systems that designate their relative importance. The paradigmatic expression of
this worldview is René Descartes’ distinction between ‘thinking’ and ‘extended’
substance. The aporetic relationship between body and mind that occupies The
Passions of the Soul is the original expression of one of the founding problems
of modernity: the objectification of the human subject and its relationship to a
world that is regarded as entirely open to rational-mathematical explanations
(Descartes, 1989: 18–49). Thus, from the point of view of radical orthodoxy,
European Enlightenment has a deeply ambivalent significance. While it is
true that it was instrumental in sweeping away the pernicious superstitions
that clung to the institutional body of the church, it also marginalized the
works of Christian revelation through which God, before the rationalistic
turn of Enlightenment philosophy, had revealed the nature of the soul and its
capacity to receive his truth. As I have said, adherents of this radical Christian
orthodoxy consider Nietzsche’s thought to be the culmination of the secular-
izing movement of the Enlightenment, in the sense that the aporetic division
of the subject into faculties of intuition, apprehension, reason, and desire, is
breeched by his account of the joyful self-creativity of individual will1. All that
remains after this radical break with idealism is the will to nothingness, the
annihilation of substance, love, happiness, and of the expectation of something
better to come. Pure abstract will begets nothing – and so ‘the death of God’
immediately precipitates the necessity of His return.
It is this return, and its impact on the institutional life of modernity, that
brings us back to the politics of happiness, and, more specifically, to a certain
persistence of Nietzsche’s critique of the Christian ecclesia. Michael Handby’s
reading of Augustine’s concept of desire is exemplary of radical orthodoxy’s
attempt to reform modernity by returning to the founding insights of Catholic
theology (Handby in Milbank, Pickstock and Ward, 1998: 109–42). Handby’s
essay begins by setting out the detail of Augustine’s disquisition on the nature
of the soul in De Trinitate. God is plenitude: his love, goodness, and will are
discrete and yet absolutely unitary, and it is this unity that is embodied in his
creation of the world. Christ the Son is brought forth from the Father as the
necessity of his mediating the sinful desire, or concupiscence, of finite souls.
And so, Christ’s destiny as the mediator of sin is never foreign to his essence;
he is, and wills, everything he must suffer in order to bring about the salvation
of man, including his own crucifixion. The souls of human beings therefore, as
creations of God, are in essence this Christ-like participation in the goodness
of the world: they are capable of giving thanks, and of being happy with one
another, through their autonomous willing of the destiny which God has given
to them (Handby in Milbank, Pickstock and Ward, 1998: 121). And yet, this
divine desire is susceptible to perversion; the discrete elements of the soul
(knowing, willing, loving) are vulnerable to being split into abstract representa-
tions in which the ego/subject appears as the autonomous condition of its own
existence. Radical orthodoxy therefore conceives the institutional relations of
modernity as fundamentally opposed to the substance of the good (what John
Milbank has called the ‘transcendent materiality of God’2), as it originates in a
‘Pelagian’ metaphysics that can only encourage the divided soul to celebrate as
power the condition of its unhappy isolation (Handby in Milbank, Pickstock
and Ward, 1998: 116). And yet, this still leaves open the Nietzschean question
of how this return of Christian theology is to transform the ethical life of man
– the state, the economy, international law, and other religions.
Nietzsche’s work is the solicitation of excess; it always seeks to exhort ‘man’
beyond the sacred relations of love, faith, and charity that the Christian God has
bequeathed through his putative act of creation (Nietzsche, 1983: 118–19). The
happiness that comes from these relations, according to Nietzsche, is a stulti-
fying contentment that finds no need to question its existence or its destiny,
for the presence of God in the world has already been revealed in the life of
Christ. What Nietzsche demands is the joy of excess; the virtue of acts that
overcome religious piety, and whose power transforms the quasi-theological
subjection that still clings to modernity. Thus, if there is hope in the time of
catastrophe, it can only come from confronting the eschatological illusions that
have been revitalized by the turn to radical orthodoxy. In Nietzsche’s thought,
the final confrontation between religion and the unfettered will of man is to
come at the point of man’s annihilation. It is not until God is seen to have finally
abandoned the world that the inertial power of religion is overcome. In our
present state of uncertainty, we remain susceptible to the promise of redemptive
happiness held out by ‘ascetic priests’, and so, the return of orthodox belief is,
for Nietzsche, the counterpart of the loss of divine grace from the institutional
life of modernity (Nietzsche, 1984: 114–17). The compelling insight here is that
the disenchantment of the world must, by its very nature, bring about a resur-
gence of religious belief that cannot be subsumed under the logic of progress
and reflexive recognition. In Beck’s work, as we have seen, the globalization of
economy and culture presages a movement towards interfaith recognition; for,
as different religions are brought into more frequent contact, so the reflexivity of
belief comes to moderate adherence to sacred texts, sites, and traditions. What
this Kantian figuration of religiosity fails to grasp, however, is the ecstatic power
of religious orthodoxy, or more precisely, the logic of revelation through which
the movement into plurality is drawn back to the sacred origin.
So, what can we learn from Nietzsche’s genealogy of religion? What does his
prophecy of its protracted death tell us about the satisfactions and anxieties of
our own historical present? There are, I think, three things. First, we are forced
to reckon with the necessary involvement of religion with the secular forces that
have formed the regime of domination that is peculiar to each different culture.
There is no ‘pure’ theological necessity that can transform the life of man without
involving itself in the violence of the world: the politics of religion is essentially
bound up with satisfactions that are constituted in opposition to the scandalous
beliefs of the infidel. Second, the death of religion that Nietzsche envisages in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Gay Science is likely to be played out through
a history of reformation, secularization, and reversion to orthodoxy, in which
religion, or religious affiliation, becomes a potent source of ecstatic belief within
the globalized relations of modernity. The conventional wisdom in the West, of
course, is that Islam is an idolatrous religion that demands a fanatical worship
of God and solicits violence against the unbeliever. Yet there are numerous
examples of the same fanatical worship of the sacred and despisal of the other
in those who profess a certain Christian orthodoxy. We have, for example, the
recent cases of pastor Harold Camping, who predicted the end of the world
and the redemption of the righteous on 21 May 2011, and pastor Terry Jones,
who tried to organize an ‘International Burn a Koran Day’ to coincide with
the ninth anniversary of 9/11. Finally, although such conflicts are not strictly
reducible to the antagonism of different faiths, religion has been a crucial factor
in determining the relationship between ‘Oriental’ and ‘Occidental’ cultures.
While it is true, particularly in the West, that religiosity has been dispersed into
a matrix of subjective beliefs and movements, the mediatic confrontation with
the other (the infidel, the unbeliever) exerts a powerful ‘gathering’ effect within
that matrix. The satisfactions of Christian, Judaic, and Islamic beliefs, in other
words, are intensified by the spectacle of their antagonism, the effect of which
has been to destabilize established affiliations between state and religion (in both
East and West), and to open up a new economy in which fundamentalism is an
increasingly powerful force. Thus, what Nietzsche has bequeathed to the politics
of religion is, first, the concept of an economy of ressentiment in which every
faith must determine itself as a uniquely reformative authority; and second, the
question of whether such agonistic experience of faith can offer remission from
the violence of modernity. It is the latter question, which is ultimately that of the
relationship of religion and happiness, which will occupy us in the final section.
The ecstasy of the sacred
I want to begin this section by returning briefly to the subject of nihilism. The
new Christian orthodoxy that has emerged from Cambridge in the last decade
or so, is essentially a return to the idea that ‘the logos’, as it has been articulated
in Western philosophy, has succeeded only in dividing the world into abstract
categories of being, understanding, and imagination which lack substantive
unity. Without the presence of God in the world, which is vouchsafed by the life
and crucifixion of Christ, there can be no true community of man: all there is,
is the scepticism that arises from the reduction of the created world to mind and
matter, and the impossibility of configuring the immanent experience of love
that defines the human soul in terms of abstract legality, authority, and morality.
Without Christian theology, in other words, the movement of philosophy is
simply that of a ‘double shuttle’, in which ethics, epistemology, and ontology
attempt to give substance to the apparent contingency of the world, and then
find that the ‘substance’ they have determined has no ultimate principle with
which to unify its different modalities (Milbank in Davis, Milbank and Zizek,
2005: 415). It is the atheistic trajectory of philosophy, therefore, that has led
to the ‘Nietzschean’ turn in Western culture: the constant pursuit of egoistic
pleasure, the lack of sexual continence, and the breakdown in family life and
religious community. Once human beings lose their sense of gratitude to God,
their powers of self-overcoming are lost; they become arbitrarily violent and
hedonistic, and deliberately will the nothingness that is generated by their own
activity.
In the previous section, I was concerned with the Nietzschean claim that such
theological constructions of the indebtedness of the soul are essentially political,
in the sense that the profession of Christ and the Kingdom of God determines
itself as a reactive power within the secular organization of state, economy, and
law. The question I will address in this section concerns the possible survival of
sacred responsibility and the happiness of unconditional love after the death of
God.
Let me take stock of where we are. For both Hegel and Nietzsche, the question
of the persistence of religion is essentially bound up with the project of modern-
ization pursued in the West following the Enlightenment. In Hegel’s thought,
the allegorical forms through which Christianity gives meaning to the finite
constitution of Sittlichkeit are as close as it is possible for religious sensibility to
come to rational apprehension of the legal, economic, and political dynamics of
modernity. The fact of the lacuna between imagination (Vorstellung) and reason
(Vernunft) means that although Christian mythology still gives a formative
sense of the diremption of spirit (of how the soul of man is created through
the movement of universal reason in history), it cannot apprehend the ‘truth’
of this diremption, which is only possible through the application of dialec-
tical thought to the relations of law, state, and civil society (Hegel, 1967a:
751–85). The relationship between the abstract institutions of modernity and
the symbolic order of religion, therefore, becomes acutely contradictory. As the
Christian religion is placed under the demand to rationalize the apprehension
of the sacred, so its confession tends to return to ‘unrevealed’ forms of worship
that engender pure affective satisfaction. The immanent demand that arises
from this tendency is for the return of religious representation to its proper
place in the hierarchy of thought, feeling, and desire that is implicit in ethical
life. However, what has emerged from the secularizing movement identified by
Hegel in the history of Christianity, is the impossibility of this mediation, and
the emergence of a ‘politics of religion’ that is about the necessity of recalling the
most unstable forms of demotic faith to the substance of Sittlichkeit.
This, as we have seen, is the historical context into which Nietzsche’s
philosophy emerges. His account of the desperate madness through which
modern man confronts his killing of God is the point from which the power
of Christianity, as the happy suffering of life, begins to undermine everything
that is ‘well-constituted’ in Western civilization. So we are left with an aporia:
either the Christian religion does retain a certain originary relationship to a
just community of created souls (in which case the dialectical movement of
Hegelian philosophy seems to have been unable to separate itself from the
beneficence of the Creator), or it is a reactive force whose true expression is the
cycle of sectarian ressentiment (in which case every act of ‘faith’ must violate the
moral principles it espouses).
As with all aporias, this one cannot be resolved purely in its own terms.
One can go either with a Hegelian understanding of religion as a necessary
supplement to ethical life, or with Nietzsche’s genealogical approach, which
solicits a radical opposition to the false happiness of religious life. However,
if we return to the Nietzschean assertion of the death of God, it is possible
to reconfigure the concept of the sacred through a certain phenomenological
exposition of the subject who dwells within the world. Clearly, the origin of this
phenomenology lies with Heidegger, whose primary concern is to expound the
existence of man as Dasein, or the being that is defined by its concern for the
authenticity of its own existence. In Levinas’ thought, however, this relationship
of self-affection is radically transformed: the relation between the ‘I’ and the
‘Other’ becomes the very source of the world, for the objects encountered by
the I are given significance by the original presence of the Other in the self-
consciousness of ego. Thus the I encounters the world not just through its
utility, but also in the possibility that he may alleviate the suffering of the Other
through the giving of the object as a gift. This originary responsibility, which
is solicited by the face of the Other whom the I can never truly never know, is
the essence of the sacred; for it is in the resemblance of every suffering face to
God, that we are given the chance to break out of the repetitive egoism that has
become the determining principle of social totality. This resemblance, however,
is not intended to situate the subject in a relationship of indebtedness to a
transcendent deity, but rather to make each of us responsible to the Other as an
infinite demand through which our lives can be redeemed in the here and now.
And so, as Levinas puts it in the concluding paragraph of Otherwise Than Being,
‘after the death of a certain god inhabiting the world behind the scenes, the
substitution of the hostage discovers the trace … of what … does not enter into
any present, [and] to which are suited none of the nouns designating beings’
(Levinas, 1998: 185). Thus it is the Other itself who is sacred, and the labour of
care which her presence in the world demands.
Levinas’ ethical phenomenology is important because it responds to the
Nietzschean claim that ‘the sacred’ is a category of experience that can only
be sustained within a religious eschatology, and that as such it leads to the
stultifying asceticism he associates with religion in general and Christianity in
particular. For Levinas, as Silvia Benso has pointed out, the Other is a provo-
cation to excess, to an expenditure of the self that is conceivable only in relation
to an object of absolute and originary value (Stauffer and Bergo, 2009: 228–31).
In the presence of this ‘object’, all someone’s particular desires are subordinated
to the desire for the Other disclosed in the experiences of love, care, eroticism,
and fecundity. Thus, the sacredness of the Other is the only way to happiness,
for outside the intra-human relations that arise from the alterity of the self,
there is only the violent egoism that is both punished and encouraged in the
relations of social totality. However, if we are to be fair to Nietzsche’s assertion
that the killing of God is a deed to which humanity has yet to live up, and that
the sphere of representation after God’s death becomes a kind of posthumous
iconography, then we are compelled to engage with the problem of revelation
that runs throughout Levinas’ work. As we have seen, the killing of God does
not mark the end of religious representation, but the intensification and prolif-
eration of God’s image within the techno-scientific relations of modernity. The
ethical demand of the Other, which is received as a voice that interrupts the
homogenizing power of the image, must determine its necessity within a sphere
of media-technological images which compete to render the truth of God. Thus,
if we are to give an account of how the sacredness of the Other arises as a trans-
formative power in the economy of simulation, we must begin by setting out the
fate of religious experience within that economy.
There is, to paraphrase Derrida, nothing outside the networks of techno-
logical representation through which the global economy functions. Or, to
put it in a slightly different way, every form of experience – love, eroticism,
desire, obligation, and religiosity – is presented through visual-aesthetic codes
that constantly transform its meaning. In Baudrillard’s work, this economy is
conceived as completely hermetic: the relationship between simulation and
desire is mapped onto statistical models that allow the latter to be intensified
constantly by the technological manipulation of the image. The global regime of
capital therefore reproduces itself through the total manipulation of experience,
or what Baudrillard conceives as the limitless expansion of ‘the hyperreal’
(Baudrillard, 2000: 1–42). The fate of religion within this regime is to become
a simulation of itself, for, once the experience of the sacred has ceased to be
embodied in the symbolic economy of the social, it is endlessly refracted through
the technological means of representation characteristic of each particular epoch.
Baudrillard’s account of the evolution of the image into a pure technological
code begins with the ‘machinery of icons’ through which God is made present
in the performance of Christian religious ceremony. The Catholic fixation with
representing God immediately raises the question of idolatry, of whether it is
God’s ineffable transcendence that is being worshipped, or simply an imaginary

Patriarch whose kingship can only degrade the Christian virtues of selfless love
and service (Baudrillard, 2000: 7–11). For Baudrillard, the complicity of the
Christian Church with the power of the icon is a moment of fatality for the
West; for in the end, every expression of work, satisfaction, and desire, including
those that arise from the experience of the sacred, is formed within the techno-
logical economy of the image. Thus, the presence of God is dispersed into an
endless refraction of signs (gentle-handsome-peaceful-vengeful-loving-warrior
Jesus, for example), whose ‘reality’ is sustained only in their opposition to the
idolatrous beliefs of non-Christian faiths.
The importance of Baudrillard’s account of religion lies in its disclosure
of a radical escalation of signs. God is no longer revealed to a community
of faithful souls who have lived patiently in his service; rather, he is made
present through a global economy of images in which ‘faith’ becomes a matter
of sectarian antagonism. Thus, the radicalization of Christianity through its
attachment to ‘white mythologies’ of racial election, Oriental excess, and the
mission of Enlightenment, has its counterpart in the fundamentalist mythol-
ogies of Islam, which radicalize the body of original faith that arose from the
teachings of Mohammad (Baudrillard, 2010: 27–8). There is, of course, a certain
Nietzscheanism in this economy of faith, for the religious antagonisms deter-
mined in the globalized world spring from a network of representation from
which all reserve and exegetical hesitation has been expunged.
Derrida’s essay ‘Faith and Knowledge’ is, on one level at least, a sustained
interrogation of the possibility of such a Nietzschean-Baudrillardian economy
of ecstatic antagonism. Derrida argues that there are two sources of the word
religion, both of which are irreducible, and each of which is contaminated
by the other. These sources, which are etymologically combined in the Latin
word religio, are: a) religiere, which comes from the word for gathering, or
harvest (legere), and b) religare, which comes from the verb ‘to tie, bind’ (ligare)
(Derrida, 2002: 70). This duality at the origin of religion is, for Derrida, its
universal characteristic: religious belief as such is defined by the co-presence
of a blind faith in the sacred ‘One’ whose satisfactions are essentially mytho-
logical (religare), with a discursive community of the book (religiere), whose
demands are exegetic, and which hesitates before the repetition of orthodoxy.
The survival of this hesitation, this moment of reflection within the economy of
religious antagonism, is what is at stake in Derrida’s essay, and so I will conclude
by examining the detail of his argument.
Let me start by looking at the happiness that is promised by religion in terms

of the binding, unconditional love that is expressed in the concept of religare.
Derrida’s analysis of the ‘return of religion’ is premised on the dematerialization
of the world that has taken place through the mediatic networks of the global
economy. His claim is that the dissemination of being into immaterial flows of
labour, money, information, and knowledge, is what has precipitated the return
of religious fundamentalism – Christian, Judaic, and Islamic. The threat posed
by global capitalism to the cultural and geopolitical spaces in which religious
faith has been constituted is that of virtual disintegration; for the community of
symbolic belief is constantly penetrated by solicitations of desire that endanger
its original unity. Thus, the return to ‘all forms of originary physis’ that Derrida
conceives as the defining characteristic of religious fundamentalism is an attempt
to reconstitute a body of belief that includes holy sites, relics, homelands, tradi-
tions, and laws (Derrida, 2002: 82). It is here that fascism and religion come
closest to each other, for, insofar as religious fundamentalism determines itself
as an ecstatic demand for the reappropriation of sacred origins, its community
is organized around the destruction of a ‘radical evil’ that threatens its existence.
The Christian infidel, the Muslim terrorist, and the Jewish zealot are refracted in
a plurality of fundamentalist mythologies, each of which solicits the purity of its
own confession and the violence of holy war. Yet this logic of refraction, which
is the essence of the religious violence that has returned to the secular regime of
modernity, is not hermetic; it cannot rid itself of the hesitation that comes from
the demand to kill in the name of God, or to mutilate the body of he who would
violate the laws of sacred community (Derrida, 2002: 90). Each of the religions
of the book, in other words, maintain the original promise of religiere; that the
faithful should gather in the spirit of the scriptures, and that they should seek
the truth of God in whatever, or whomever, confronts the sacred community
(Derrida, 2002: 99). This, for Derrida, is the essence of all religious faith, and is
what distinguishes it from the nihilistic culture of fascism.
If there is a concept of happiness that is sustained in Derrida’s thought, it
lies close to the unexpected satisfactions that arise from whoever comes to us
demanding our care. The chance of this happiness emerges from the mutability
of the evil that afflicts the world, for it is only insofar as the ‘other’ is distributed,
and redistributed, through the technological representation of being, that the
demand for sacrificial love is made possible. Thus, there is a certain religiosity in
Derrida’s thought, but one that always defers the arrival of the Messiah. If there
is redemption in the world, it can only come through the moments of epiphany
that arrive with those who are beyond our conventional self-understanding;
and for Derrida, the ethical demand of such events has always contaminated
the recuperative resources of the sacred. The blessedness of peace, therefore, is
not given in the experience of sacred unity, no matter how this is conceived; for
such experience remains complicit with an essential sectarianism that cannot
accept the alterity of the other. In the West, it is Islam that has been identified as
the source of religious violence, the faith that has been unable to overcome its
dependence on thaumaturgy and ecstatic subjection to the will of God. So the
holy war of conversion is seen as implicit in the actions of every Muslim state
(Derrida, 2005: 78–94). This presumption of Christian Enlightenment, however,
is also part of the global economy of religious antagonism, for there is no purely
peaceful commitment to the glory of God. Thus, if we look across the spectrum
from the folksy community of the local church, which seems to possess
the imagination of the neo-Utilitarians3, to the complex re-articulation of
Catholic theology presented in the radical orthodoxy movement, there persists
a proselytizing demand that is never quite discharged from the happiness of the
faithful.
This is what Derrida refers to as the ‘autoimmunitary response’ that is part
of all religious doctrine, the reversion to a politics of self-defence that always
gathers around the community of the sacred (Derrida, 2002: 71). Perhaps
then, we can detect an echo of Schopenhauer in Derrida’s account of faith and
knowledge; for it is the fact that the Messiah can never arrive to redeem the
agonism of the world that makes the ethical satisfactions of religiere all the more
fragile and all the more sacred. I will return to this in the conclusion.
Notes
1 See the Kantian and Fichtean versions of subjective idealism: Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgement, and Fichte’s System
of Ethics.
2 See John Milbank’s essay ‘Materialism and Transcendence’ in Theology and the
Political: New Debates (2005. Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
3 See, for example, Robert E. Lane (2000), The Loss of Happiness in Market
Democracies. New Haven and London: Yale University Press: 134–5, and Richard
Layard (2005), Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. Harmondsworth: Allen
Lane: 71–2.
Conclusion
Happiness in the Time of Catastrophe
I
I began the book by suggesting that happiness, as we experience it, is not a

realizable condition. Each of us experiences our own particular moments of joy,
love, and ecstasy as events whose intensity derives from their being contingent
and unsustainable. I also suggested that the politics of happiness is essentially
related to this sense of contingency, as the promises of collective satisfaction
made by the ideologies I have examined are couched in terms of the conditions
that will maximize the chances of happiness for each individual. The normative
demands constitutive of fascist, liberal, socialist, postmodernist, and religious
ideologies are eschatologically discrete; they present ‘world pictures’, in which
the relationships between God, nature, and humanity are invoked in relation
to the contingencies of individual life. Thus, at a very basic level, the politics
of happiness I have sketched in the preceding chapters, is a complex mediation
of the experience of modernity – of the loss of religious meaning, symbolic
order, fate, community, love, and sacrifice that has resulted from the progress of
rational, techno-scientific, civilization. This mediation has a very long history,
for none of the ideologies I have looked at emerged from nowhere at the dawn
of Enlightenment. Each has philosophical and religious antecedents that stretch
back to the origins of ‘the West’, and each has developed in relation to the
suffering and dislocation that has accompanied the liberation of the modern
individual. I want to present, therefore, a short genealogy of this liberation (its
contradictions, aporias, compulsions, anxieties, and demands), whose brevity is
hopefully justified by its contextualization of the current state of emergency in
which we find ourselves.
The political ideologies I have examined are eschatological regimes; they
present the best way to happiness within the rational-systemic organization of
modernity. This, as we have seen, may involve ‘dethroning God and destroying
capitalism’, surrendering to the will of God, or giving oneself over to the
pleasure of postmodern hedonism. The fundamental point, however, is that
these strategies for the salvation and happiness of humanity are the outcome
of a history of social and individual formation that begins in Greek antiquity,

and which continues to unfold in our own epoch. As we saw in the thoughts
of both Hegel and Nietzsche, the history of the Classical world is marked by a
shift from the pre-eminence of Dionysus, the god of fate and nature, to Apollo,
the god of light and prophecy. In the former period, the Polis is made over to
the principle of amor fati, or the love of fate. The role of drama in the original
city-state was to show the suffering of man under the tyranny of the gods; for
without the tragic consequences of divine violence in the affairs of humanity,
there could be fortitude, no virtue, and no true happiness. Thus, in Sophocles’
Theban trilogy, the fate that befalls Oedipus, Jocasta and Antigone has no happy
resolution: all are destroyed by the caprice of the Olympian gods, and are left as
examples of the tragic fate through which man attains the greatness appropriate
to his being (Hegel, 1967a: 484–99; Nietzsche, 1990: 46–52). In the Hellenic
period of Greek civilization, however, this exposure of the Polis to the uncon-
trollable contingencies of fate is fundamentally changed. What Nietzsche saw
as the invigorating influence of tragedy on the life of the city-state, is displaced
by the power of Apollo, the ‘lucent one’, who demands the revelation of all
mysteries, and the harmonious unity of ethical life (Nietzsche, 1990: 46–52).
Thus, Hellenic civilization is driven by the Apollonian demand for sufficient
reason; the philosophies of Socrates and Plato emerge as the constant return to
eternal truth through the show of contingency (fate), and the aesthetic culture
of the Polis becomes the subordination of Dionysian excess to the principles of
good taste and integrity.
Hegel conceived the Hellenic phase of the Greek world as the happiest
epoch in human history, in which work, satisfaction, and desire were concretely
mediated in the body of the Polis, but also as a fundamental frustration of the
principle of subjective freedom. In the end, the Apollonian form of Sittlichkeit,
which culminated in Aristotle’s notion of the good life as a balance of the rational
and appetitive faculties of the soul, could not admit the radically democratic
demand of self-consciousness: that its formal freedom should be universally
recognized. The release of this demand from the beautiful restraint of the
Hellenic culture, as we have seen, is the release of a particular kind of violence
into the world. Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s analyses of the Roman world focus on
the atomism of Roman law, culture, and politics; for, once that state has ceased
to be the embodiment of divine truth and virtue, and has become an instrument
of expropriation, ethical life begins its long descent into the violence and super-
stition of feudalism (Hegel, 1967a: 484–99; Nietzsche, 1990: 185–7). The legacy
Conclusion 173
of the Roman Empire, therefore, is the irrational, capricious rule of kings and
princes over a peasantry who are bewitched by the spectacle of sovereignty and
the mystical pronouncements of the church. This is the time of Hegel’s Unhappy
Consciousness, for, under feudalism, the work of each individual is deprived
of all satisfaction; it is performed purely in the service of the sovereign master,
who, for the servant, is the arbiter of life and death (Hegel, 1967a: 251–67).
What emerges from this unstable kind of sovereignty is a form of Utilitarian
philosophy that regards the world as an essentially violent place, radically
opposed to the happiness of human beings. Thus, in Hobbes’ thought, nature, as
it has been created by God, takes the form of an irreducible ‘war of all against all’,
whose destructive consequences can be curtailed only by the implacable appli-
cation of the law (Hobbes, 1985: 183–8). This construction of human life as the
self-conscious desire to avoid pain, and of the state as the instrument through
which that desire is given practical form, is a persistent theme in the history of
Western thought (Machiavelli, de Maistre, Schopenhauer, Freud). However, if
we are to understand the political economy of desire that has emerged from the
rational-scientific apprehension of catastrophe that haunts our own time, we
need to look at the transition from the feudal worldview to that of industrialized
modernity.
The feudal form of sovereignty is not static, and contains the seeds of its
own dissolution. In Hegel’s thought, the determining contradiction that brings
about the overthrow of the feudal regime arises from the fact that the work
performed by the servant is utterly without satisfaction. Thus, the formation of
the Unhappy Consciousness through the pursuit of transformative labour that
brings no material or spiritual satisfaction is what underlies the emergence of the
Enlightenment. For Hegel, the revolt of free self-consciousness against the feudal
regime takes two distinct forms: the subjective idealism of Kantian and Fichtean
philosophies (which conceived freedom as a formal attribute of the ego) and the
materialism of the French philosophes (who saw the entire edifice of Sittlichkeit
as opposed to the originary rights of humanity). This dynamic of suffering and
autonomy is, for Hegel, the precursor of modern civil society. What is revealed in
the contradictions of pure reason and pure revolutionary feeing are the limits of
the radical individualism that emerged from Enlightenment philosophy (Hegel,
1967a: 599–610). The forms of justice, representation, and economy set out in
the Philosophy of Right, therefore, embody both an ethical and an existential
necessity; they are the substantial relations in which the free individuals that
have been released from the feudal regime, are able to recognize the satisfactions
of Sittlichkeit as their own (Hegel, 1967b: 134–45). However, even in Hegel’s

thought, this mediation of the atomistic ego is problematic; for the sphere of civil
society is increasingly traversed by aesthetic, economic, and religious cultures
that undermine the formative power of spirit within ethical life. So, one of
the defining questions of modernity concerns the relationship of individual
happiness to the expanding regime of rationalized-industrialized production.
As we saw in Chapter One, the Utilitarian philosophies of Bentham, Mill
and Smith mark the emergence of a particular kind of bourgeois optimism,
in that the constant expansion of productivity and the alleviation of need are
presented as the way to ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’. This
view of the world as a resource is the foundation of an ideology in which the
pleasure enjoyed by individuals in their acts of consumption or creation is seen
as the ultimate end for which human society is created. Thus, the best way to
increase the sum of human happiness is a) to encourage as much individual
innovation in civil society as possible, and b) to curtail radically the powers of
the state to reduce the pleasure of its citizens in the pursuit of their particular
desires. From this viewpoint, the state is viewed simply as an instrument of
national protection and law enforcement – beyond that, its interventions
into civil society (particularly through taxation and excessive legislation) can
only serve to limit the productivity and happiness of its citizens. What is of
particular importance here is the fact that the world appears as ‘ready to hand’,
as a resource that has been created for the benefit of humanity, and which is the
foundation of man’s capacity for creation, self-realization, and satisfaction.
Indeed, we have seen that there are Nietzschean arguments suggesting
that Marx’s critique of capital, and the pleasures of bourgeois individualism,
remains bewitched by the ideology of production (Adorno, 1998; Baudrillard,
1981). While it is true that Marx’s account of ruling ideas is radically opposed
to individual rights of expropriation, his categories of use-value, alienation,
and the ‘inorganic body of nature’, gesture towards the perfection of human
labour under the conditions of a fully socialized mode of production. Thus,
the political and philosophical experience of modernity has evolved primarily
through three eschatologies: the liberal worldview, in which atomistic desire
is presented as the driving force that initiates all positive change; the Marxist
worldview, in which the immanent community of labour is the telos of political
agency; and the Nietzschean-Weberian position, in which it is the effects of
instrumental reason on subjective desire that become the condition of ethical
and political possibility.
Conclusion 175
The evolution of modernity as a regime of desire is shot through with contra-

dictions. From the beginning, the accelerated pace at which scientific knowledge
is articulated into new technological systems leads to a disorientation of the
subject, and to a feeling of permanent instability that is radically different
from the feudal regime (Benjamin, 1997b: 288–91; Lyotard, 1991: 71–82). The
defining characteristic of ‘late’, or ‘post’, modernity is the fact that this process
accelerates exponentially; the traces of the real that it was possible to discern
in the politics of race, class, and gender, have been dispersed into a regime
of aesthetic simulation, cybernetic efficiency, and distracted consumption
which refers only to itself. In its most extreme form, the postmodernist thesis
maintains that all that is left after the end of modernity is what Baudrillard calls
the melodrama of difference; the obsession with staging, and restaging, the
rights of groups and individuals whose identity has become a matter of perfor-
mance (Baudrillard, 2000: 124–38).
As I said in the introduction, this economy of aesthetic equivalence is the
condition that gives rise to the postmodern preoccupation with happiness: as
the dislocated subject becomes increasingly concerned with the value of his or
her choices, so the old ideologies of belonging, community, and the sacred are
revitalized. The formal freedom of postmodern capitalism, in other words, is
what gives rise to the demand for eschatological regimes that provide meaning
beyond the immediacy of consumption. So, if we allow that the politics of
happiness is inscribed in this unstable relationship between individual freedom
and the desire for meaning, the possibility of our confronting the catastrophic
affects of technological modernity must be evaluated in terms of our attach-
ments to the ideological forms through which we understand our place in the
world. So, to bring things back to the original question, the politics of catas-
trophe that has taken shape in the work of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens
must present its own account of how to be happy, proactive, and ethical while
staring into the abyss created by modern civilization.
II
At the beginning of Risk Society, Beck introduces a periodization, in which

he claims that it is possible to make out the emergence of a new political
consciousness, which has begun to supersede the ideologies that have dominated
twentieth-century modernity. He argues that the concept of postmodernity is,
in fact, the last gasp of ideological politics; for, insofar as it has allowed the
return of left- and right-wing tribalism under the erasure of universal irony, it
is complicit with the preservation of political categories that no longer reflect
the changing dynamics of technological civilization (Beck, 1996: 9). The essence
of this transformation, according to Beck, is the shift from ‘industrial’ to ‘risk’
society. The former is characterized by the utilitarian demand for increased
productivity and the constant improvement of efficiency; and so the theories
of technology that emerged in both bourgeois and radical thought tended to
regard machinery as the ultimate means of improving the lot of humanity. Even
Marx, who, in early writings, connected the experience of alienation with the
regime of technological production, regarded machines as a liberating power
that had been corrupted by the acquisitive relations of capital.
In risk society, however, the logic of production is complicated by the risks
that are distributed by the use of industrial technologies (Beck, 1996: 20–4).
Nuclear power and nuclear weapons, for example, bring with them the possi-
bility of extinction-level events that could put an end to organic life on the
planet. (The case against genetic and biotechnologies is perhaps less certain,
but, for Beck, they are emergent factors in the dynamics of risk.) Beck’s thesis
therefore, is that the conditions of a new reflexive politics are beginning to
develop. For, insofar as this ‘catastrophic’ phase of modernity is starting to
emerge into public consciousness, we are faced with the fact that the political
eschatologies through which we have understood the world cannot represent
the new ethical demands that have been placed on us. Thus, before I examine
the detail of Beck’s thesis, I want to look briefly at the difference between his
construction of reflexive risk awareness, and the one that has been developed
by Anthony Giddens.
According to Beck, the damages that are continually being done to the
environment by technological systems have fundamentally undermined our
experience of security. Indeed, he argues that it is still unclear how the perpetual
confrontation with catastrophe will operate as a ‘binding force’, and that we
cannot be sure that the critical-scientific construction of risk will be sufficient to
hold the forces of irrationalism, extremism, and fanaticism at bay (Beck, 1996:
49–50). Giddens’ account of the influence of risk, on the other hand, is mainly
concerned with the practice of ‘self-reflexivity’: the personal transformations
made possible by the disembedding of social relations and the containment of
risks within the filtering mechanisms of the life world. Thus, the question of ‘how
existence itself should be grasped and lived’ presupposes a functional reduction
Conclusion 177
of risk: a ‘bracketing out’ of the anxiety that would paralyse both the expressive
resources of the self and the political life of the public sphere (Giddens, 1997a:
224). For Beck, however, the impact of civilization risks on the experience of
security is such that the whole concept of ‘the personal’ upon which Giddens’
account of reflexion depends, is called into question. The notions of ‘life style’
and ‘life choice’, through which Giddens characterizes the transformative
potential of the reflexive self, are made subordinate to the absolute demand of
civilization risks. While Beck certainly agrees with Giddens’ contention that
the social and economic organization of modernity is increasingly reflexive,
he would also maintain that the heterogeneous forms of risk evaluation that
arise from different spheres of activity (employment and economy, family and
intimacy, gender and sexuality), can have no legitimate independence from the
imperatives of risk. Ultimately, our ethical responsibility as human beings is to
the ‘natural whole’ of which each of us is a fragile and contingent part (Beck,
1996: 74).
Beck’s thesis maintains that, as the industrial revolution increased the produc-
tivity of Western capitalism, the relationship between scientific knowledge,
technological innovation, and economic growth became ever closer. Under the
conditions of what he called ‘primary industrialization’, capital emerged as the
key determinant of scientific research: unless a particular branch of knowledge
could hold out the possibility of technological innovation in the production
process, it would remain largely undeveloped. This relationship between science
and economy marks the emergence of a transactional logic, in which science,
contrary to its practice of methodological scepticism, is forced to present its
findings as infallible knowledge that awaits conversion into greater efficiency
and higher profits. What is important here, according to Beck, is the tension that
develops between the method and the ideology of science, or, more precisely,
between the self-critical procedures through which the testing of hypotheses is
carried out and the rhetoric of certainty through which results are presented
to the economic and political agents of industrialization (Beck, 1996: 164).
Thus, by presenting itself as the true foundation on which industrial modernity
could solve the problems of humankind (poverty, scarcity, disease, war), science
entered into a fatal complicity with the ideology of the market. Civil society, as
the legally sanctioned sphere of human rights and economic freedom, assumed
exclusive responsibility for the use of scientific knowledge, and for the progress
of the human species towards technological liberation from poverty and
need. According to Beck, however, the danger inherent in this subordination
of science is that the political authority of the state is reduced to approving

technological developments in medicine, agriculture, industry, and warfare, as
inescapable modalities of progress.
For Beck, the primacy of ‘ideological’ over ‘critical’ science and the dominance
of capital in the determination of human progress are not immutable charac-
teristics of modernization. His contention is that science, considered as an
instrument of critical inquiry, becomes increasingly self-reflexive in its research
practices, while at the same time being forced to hold on to the institution-
alized fiction of its infallibility. What is important here, is that the proliferation
of technogenic ‘side effects’, whose consequences are not spatially, temporally,
or generationally limitable, is what gives rise to a critical politics of risk. As
genetically mutable, biologically contaminable beings, we are all susceptible to
the effects of radiation and chemical poisoning; and it is such shared vulner-
ability that, for Beck, becomes the basis of a reflexive resistance to economic
powers that have, until very recently, monopolized the use and development
of technology. There are however, structural and ideological impediments to
the realization of this politics. Most of the damage done by radiation leaks or
chemical discharges does not occur in one-off events like Chernobyl, Bhopal,
or Fukushima; rather, it tends to spread as a pernicious build up of contami-
nants in natural systems and human communities. Given the institutional
power of the corporations who have invested in nuclear, agrichemical, and
biotechnological futures, and allowing for their ability to present ‘infallible’
scientific evidence in support of such futures, it is unsurprising that evidence of
contamination submitted by affected communities, has tended to be dismissed
by official agencies as anecdotal and unscientific (Beck, 1996: 63–4).
In Beck’s account of risk society, the kind of damages incurred by human
beings through the accelerated development of technology (genetic mutations,
the accumulation of toxins in the body’s organic structures, environmental
degradation), require scientific quantification before they can be adequately
represented as risks. In primary industrial societies, the colonization of science
by those enterprises which control the generation and distribution of capital
(industrial corporations, finance capital, the military), gave rise to a general
indifference to the negative consequences of technology, which allowed human
and environmental damages to be defined as ‘side effects’. However, with the
increasing frequency and extent of such harm, the power of science to enforce
its official assignment of particular exposures, contaminations, and irradiations
to this politically de-activating category, begins to be challenged. Within what
Conclusion 179
Beck conceives as the emergent ‘sub-politics’ of risk, critical science comes

forward as the facilitator of reflexive dialogue among different societal interests
(Beck, 1996: 172–3). The ideologies that emerged in the primary phase of indus-
trialization are revealed as complicit with regimes of exploitation and control
that enclose ‘the political’ within the very antagonisms that the sub-politics
of risk has begun to undermine. Marxism, for example, constantly revitalizes
the categories of class and commodification as the underlying conditions of
suffering that are concealed by the democratic culture of modernity (Beck
and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: 205). For Beck, however, such ideological politics
are coming to an end, for, as different branches of knowledge begin to break
free from their attachments to ‘system necessities’ and ‘objective economic
constraints’, they open up non-ideological practices of identity formation and
global cooperation (Beck, 1996: 231–5).
The idea of politics that runs throughout Risk Society is therefore informed
by a particular notion of science and its relationship to the future of humanity.
Clearly, the concept of a global community of risk can sustain its political force
only for as long as the future has not already been determined as humanity’s
self-attrition and ultimate destruction. Thus, Beck presents the imperative of
determining the biological, genetic, and environmental impact of technological
interventions as the basis of an emergent dialogue between the natural and
social sciences (Beck, 1996: 28). The emergence of this dialogue, which he
describes as a ‘still undeveloped symbiosis’, performs two crucial functions in
his account of the politics of risk. First, it opens up the possibility of a public
awareness of risk, in which the critical resources of science are brought to bear
on the collective experience of harm and anxiety. Second, it is this dialogue
on the present level of risk that rejuvenates the public sphere, which has been
progressively disempowered by the independence of corporate capital and
professional organizations from the political authority of the state. For Beck, the
emergence of such a pervasive risk consciousness brings about a crucial change
in the orientation of social democracy: the rights enshrined in the state evolve
from simple guarantees that allow non-political organizations to press on with
the labour of technological progress, into an ethical framework through which
citizens are able to protest against the damage this labour has done to nature and
the human community (Beck, 1996: 193). Thus, for Beck, the ‘implicit ethics’
that has come to haunt the autonomy of capital, the natural sciences, and the
technical disciplines is in the process of transforming the public sphere: its axis
is shifting from the ideological obsessions of culture industries, class conflicts,
sectarianism, and nationalism towards a global concern with the effects of

technological civilization (Beck, 1996: 235).
A few years ago, I wrote a piece on Risk Society which suggested a
connection between Adorno’s idea of the incarnated individual and the
concepts of damage and implicit ethics that Beck presents as underlying
the transformation of industrial modernity. I argued that there is a certain
homology between the suffering of the Adornian subject, who is exposed
to the caprice of functional-bureaucratic modernity, and the individuated
beings that, for Beck, are confronted with the impending destruction of their
species (Abbinnett, 2000: 112–13). An intense feeling of anxiety constitutes
the identity of both these beings; they are radically at odds with the world, for
neither is able to overcome the threat of annihilation that haunts every facet
of their work, satisfaction, and desire.
The crucial difference between Beck’s and Adorno’s versions of the fate of
modern subjectivity, however, lies in their respective accounts of the materi-
ality of human beings, and how this has impacted on the way in which they
confront the threat of catastrophe. In Adorno’s work, the violence endemic in
capitalist society is potentially limitless: as the connections between individual
beings become increasingly reified, so the frustrations that arise from the
rationalization of the commodity form begin to undermine the ephemeral
satisfactions of mass culture. Thus, there is a profound desire for mimetic
politics that underlies the evolution of modernity; and so the rise of Nazism,
fascism, and the authoritarian versions of Marxism are viewed by Adorno
as demanding a critique of the relationship between the aestheticization of
politics and the mutability of mass desire (Adorno, 1990: 398). For Beck, on
the other hand, the vulnerability of human beings to the risks that arise from
technological systems is the foundation of a shared sense of responsibility
for the natural environment on which humankind is dependent (Beck. 1996:
74). Ultimately, it is this deep, existential sense of dependency that underlies
the transformation of politics that Beck describes in Risk Society: the shift
away from the ideological obsessions of aesthetic identity towards a rational-
scientific engagement with the future of the human species. And so, it is to
the possibility of this shift, and its implications for the politics of desire, that
we must now turn.
Conclusion 181
III
Beck’s account of Risk Society is a strongly eschatological intervention, which,

as we have seen, makes a series of radical claims about the ethical and political
transformations to which technological modernity has given rise. The most
important of these is that a fundamental shift has occurred in man’s relationship
to nature. Industrial society, as Heidegger has pointed out, has tended to treat
nature as the ‘ready to hand’ resource to be utilized in the ever-expanding
mechanism of production (Heidegger, 1996: 308–41). With the emergence of
risk society however, this relationship is called into question: as the industrial
regime reveals the extent of its destructive effects on the natural environment,
so humanity’s connection to nature becomes central to the ongoing project of
modernization. The question of how we wish to live, in other words, is implicit
in every deployment of technology: for each intrusion into the deep structures
of organic life, gives rise to a feeling that ‘the human quality of the human, and
the natural quality of nature’, is what is at stake for all of us in the evolution
of modernity (Beck, 1996: 28). There emerges what Beck calls a ‘solidarity of
living things’, in which the higher faculties of reflexion are transformed from
expressions of transcendental subjectivity into practical forms of communi-
cation through which nature becomes a constitutive concern for each individual
subject (Beck, 1996: 74). If we are to find happiness in the time of catastrophe,
therefore, we must respond to this sense of unity with life as such; we must
seek constantly to re-harmonize our relationships with nature through the
evolving systems of science, representation, and communication that make up
the technological edifice of modernity. For it is only insofar as we pursue this
project as post-ideological subjects that the labour of living can become the
labour of ethical recognition (Beck, 1996: 41–8).
What Beck discerns in the emergence of risk society, is the possibility of
humanity’s confronting the future without recourse to the religious, aesthetic,
cultural, and philosophical illusions that have always accompanied the anxiety
of the new. Indeed, the account of post-orthodox religion that Beck sets out in
A God of One’s Own, is concerned to show that, in Western societies, religiosity
has changed from being a dogmatic assertion of particular articles of belief into
a source of reflexive engagement with the sacraments of other faiths. Religion, in
other words, is becoming an ethical practice, which serves to facilitate a culture
of mutual recognition in the public sphere (Beck, 2008: 24–6). However, if we
look back at the evolution of Western modernity, we can see that the ideological
forms, in which the dislocated subjects of industrial society have sought satis-
faction, have done no more than increase the sum of human suffering. The
radical demands of Marxism, fascism, and religious fundamentalism have all,
in the long run, been unable to secure the cooperative endeavour that is the
foundation of practical happiness. For Beck, these ideologies are dead – for,
even though they refuse to stop haunting the evolution of reflexive modernity,
their obsessive appeals to race, class, and divine revelation can only confirm the
hopelessness of their respective worldviews (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002:
203–5).
And yet, Beck’s claim that the time of dogmatic ideology is at an end, and
with it the intense and divisive ecstasies of the atomistic personality, is highly
problematic. What I have tried to show in the preceding chapters is that the
enduring value of the philosophies of Hegel, Nietzsche and Derrida, lies in
their disclosure of the economy of subjection, overcoming, and responsibility
through which the politics of happiness is played out. The specific appeals of the
ideologies I have looked at are therefore infinitely mutable: they are essentially
ways of coming to terms with the presence of death in the relations of ethical
life, and as such, their ‘return’ has a much more significant effect on the present
state of emergency than Beck suggests.
According to Beck’s thesis, it is the growing awareness of civilization risks that
will eventually disperse the compulsive satisfactions of political ideology. For, as
the consequences of climate change, global pandemics, nuclear contamination,
and economic crises become an established part of the public sphere, so the
contours of a world risk society begin to emerge, in which the old antagonisms
between capitalism and socialism, Third and First Worlds, begin to break down
(Beck, 1986: 24). What Beck’s postulation of this movement towards global
cooperation reveals, however, is the implicit eschatology in his thought; for his
claim is that, in the long run, the modes of religious, aesthetic, and political
representation through which human happiness is experienced, converge on
a reflexive awareness of the solidarity of all living things. It is my contention,
however, that the experience of catastrophe which has come to define our
historical epoch is much more unstable than Beck’s account of risk society
would suggest. Happiness, as we have seen in Hegel, Nietzsche and Derrida, is
an increasingly labile experience for the modern individual, which exceeds the
practical-ideological relations through which it is represented. Thus, the threat
of catastrophe that has emerged in the midst of technological utopia cannot be
made completely tractable within the fail-safe systems, cooperative relations,
Conclusion 183
and cosmopolitan bodies that are the goal of Beck’s reflexive modernization
thesis. The return of fascist, socialist, neoliberal, and fundamentalist ideologies
is provoked, at least in part, by the sense of imminent disaster that has come to
pervade the culture of late modernity. So, our experience of being close to the
end, of having been shaken out of our complacency by the presence of death, is
infinitely refracted through political eschatologies that seek to give hope in the
time of impending catastrophe.
So, where does this leave us? Are we now at the point where the frantic desire
of the modern subject to be happy is in danger of overwhelming the science
of risk? Is the radical over-determination of ‘the real’ through the powers of
technological representation driving us into ever-more distracted flights of
consumption, egoism, and political submission? There are those who believe
this to be the case. In Zygmunt Bauman’s reflections on the concept of ‘liquid
modernity’, for example, the world appears as ravaged by unregulated flows
of virtual capital that have lost all connection with nature, humanity, and the
ethical life of the state. All that Western societies are left with, after the collapse
of the old securities of class and nation, is the desperate desire to have fun in
the ‘managed playground’ of postmodern consumerism, and to make sure they
keep out those ‘others’ who would ruin the party (Bauman, 2000: 53–90; 1993:
174–81).
However, if what I have said in the preceding chapters has an ethical point, it
is this: the ideological regimes through which the way to happiness is prescribed
are shifting and unstable economies; they are constantly transformed within
the technological space of modernity, and yet are still able to reconfigure that
space through mythologies of freedom, belonging, and ethical community.
These mythologies, as we have seen, are originally implicated in the violence
that defined the history of the twentieth century; and yet they are also the
condition on which an untimely haunting of the obsessions of political identity
can take place. To put it in the terms of Derrida’s concept of hospitality, there is a
spectre of moral desire that haunts the performance of happiness; a desire which
disturbs the pure narcissistic enjoyment of the Oedipal self and its familiars,
and which reaches towards the absolute demand of the other (Derrida and
Dufourmantelle, 2000: 151).
If there is a common theme that runs through Hegel, Nietzsche and
Derrida’s philosophies of desire, it is that happiness can only be approached
through a sacrificial relationship of the self to its own life and satisfactions, and
that this is essentially related to the disturbing presence of the stranger. (Perhaps
this is the condition of every kind of love and community?) In the end, it is this
transformative desire for the other that haunts every political configuration
of happiness, and returns us to the demand to offer help, even if that help is
performed against the terrible conviction that it may be of no avail. Beyond the
rationality of catastrophe avoidance, therefore, there remains a desire (for the
other) that is beyond all reasonable satisfaction, and without which there is only
the technocratic reduction of humanity, in its various forms.
IV
As I am finishing these concluding remarks, I notice that Yahoo has flashed up

the OECD’s1 latest league table of the happiest countries. As of May 2012, the
top ten are:
Denmark
Norway
Netherlands
Switzerland
Austria
Israel
Finland
Australia
Canada
Sweden.
In a sense, who has gone up and who has gone down is not of any particular
interest: the top ten countries tend to stay the same, and simply swap places.
Rather, what is important is the OECD’s choice of criteria by which to determine
the conditions that best promote human happiness. There is, of course, some
recognition of contingency – why Denmark is that little bit happier than
Norway is hard to pin down – but, in the end, happiness is understood as arising
directly from relatively high disposable income, a good work-life balance, high
educational attainment, and good health care. It would, of course, be absurd
to maintain that these factors have nothing to do with being happy, as they
clearly are related to the sense of personal and collective wellbeing that comes
from living in a stable, well-organized, and efficient economy. But this attempt
to determine the perfect balance of productivity and wellbeing is wilfully blind
to the global conditions on which the happiness of the happiest countries is
Conclusion 185
founded. In the end, the OECD’s publication of the top ten presents an ideal
that is unattainable by all but the richest nations on the planet. And as such,
it remains complicit with the neoliberal ideals of growth, productivity, and
capitalization that have colonized the political understanding of happiness.
The OECD’s report also assumes that the happiest countries will be the most
democratic and tolerant, due to the experience of peace and security in which
their citizens have been brought up. This, however, is a highly questionable
assumption. As I have shown, the constitution of ethical life in any particular
country is always bound up with mythologies of belonging and identity.
These mythologies are essential to the experience of happiness and cannot
be erased from the sense of collective being that is performed within the
nation state. Thus, it is perfectly possible for a nation that exhibits high levels
of happiness among its citizens to sustain a culture of xenophobic insularity
which is extremely allergic to the presence of strangers. A cursory look at the
immigration policies and political movements that have emerged in some of
the OECD’s happiest countries since the onset of the recession does nothing to
refute this claim. The point therefore, is that the politics of happiness is always
bound up with the ideological representations through which we understand
our place in the world and, as such, is originally implicated in the violence and
opportunities for recognition to which these representations give rise. If we
are to move beyond the neoliberal economy of pleasure (which is perhaps the
most powerful determinant of the religious, aesthetic, geopolitical, and ethical
antagonisms of globalization), we must recognize that happiness is a moral
experience that can only be approached through the presence of others, both
familiar and unfamiliar, to whom we must respond without the expectation of
requital. This then is the aporetic fate of humanity: to live between ideological
regimes that offer the shelter of collective happiness and the possibility of
receiving the spectres that haunt the experience of belonging, plenitude, and
love.
Note
1 The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

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Index
Adorno, T. W. and commodification 81–5, 93, 107–8

Aesthetic Theory 174 catastrophe 32, 135–7, 147–9, 173–84
The Culture Industry 3, 69 Catholicism 112–13, 144–6, 161, 167, 170
Dialectic of Enlightenment 3–5, 68–9, Christianity 59–60, 72, 117, 149–68
114–19, 130
Minima Moralia 2, 68–9 Deleuze, G.
Negative Dialectics 69–70 Anti-Oedipus 105–6, 109, 131, 135
aesthetics A Thousand Plateaus 106, 132–4
Derrida on 73–7 Nietzsche and Philosophy 106
Hegel on 57–63 Derrida, J.
Nietzsche on 63–70 Acts of Religion 168–70
Althusser, L.: For Marx 14, 80–1 Grammatology 45
anxiety 3, 13, 119–25, 177–81 Of Hospitality 12, 45, 107, 183
Apollonian Ideal 9, 54–5, 65–6, 71–5, Spectres of Marx 43–6, 132–7
158–60 Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles 11–12, 56,
Aristotle: Nicomahean 7–8, 159, 172 72–3
art depression 30
classical 54–63 desire 6–13, 181–4
postmodern 75–7 Dionysus 54–5, 65, 172
romantic 4, 28, 58–63, 70–1, 123–4 disenchantment 77, 103–4, 143–7
Aryanism 134 Durkheim, E. 9, 143–7, 154
Athene 53, 60, 152
autonomy 81–92 Eliot, T. S. 49
Enlightenment 3–9, 24–6, 55, 114–18,
Baudrillard, J. 120–5, 150–7
on hyperreality 75–6
on simulation 75–6, 134–7, 167, 175 Engels, F.: The Origin of the Family,
Bauman, Z. 183 Private Property, and the State
Beck, U. 52–3
A God of One’s Own 147–8, 156, 181 Eros 33, 127, 153
Risk Society 182–3
Benjamin, W. 37, 55, 104–5, 108–9, 142, fascism 111–19
175 Fichte, J. G. 8, 173
Bentham, J.: An Introduction to the French Revolution 93, 120–2
Principles of Morals and Legislation Friedman, M. 35–6
20–3 friendship 1, 12, 22, 30–1, 44, 160
Braidotti, R. 106 Foucault, M. 130–1
Freud, S. 136, 174
Camus, A. 155 Feudal Society 121–6, 144–6, 173–5
capitalism, fundamentalism, 13, 77, 164, 169, 182
and alienation 52, 87, 145–6, 174–5 Fukuyama, F. 39–42
194 Index
Giddens, A. 147, 154, 176–7 Klein, S. 1, 47n. 5

God Kojeve, A. 40
Derrida on 168–70
Hegel on 143–50 Lane, R. E.: The Loss of Happiness in
Nietzsche on 157–64 Market Democracies 1–2
good life 158–62, 172–3 Layard, R.: Happiness: Lessons from a New
Science 29–31, 47n. 4
Habermas, J. 154 Lenin, V. I. 41, 80–2, 91
Haidt, J. 4n. 5 Levinas, E.
Hamilton, R. 113–19 Otherwise Than Being 166
Hardt, M. and Negri, M.: Empire 48n. 8, Totality and Infinite 12, 38
108–9, 141 Locke, J. 37
Harvey, D. 76, 86 love see Eros
Hegel, G. W. F. Lukács, G. 20, 79
Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics Luxemburg, R., 79–80, 109n. 1
53–4, 57, 60 Lyotard, J.-F.
Logic 26–7 Heidegger and ‘the jews’ 136
Phenomenology of Mind 7–8, 27–8, 40, The Postmodern Condition 175
120–6, 172–3
Philosophy of History 7–8, 59, 119 Marx, K.,
Philosophy of Religion 151–3 Capital, Volume One 86–7
Science of Logic 27 The Economic and Philosophical
Heidegger, M. 74–5, 166, 181 Manuscripts 80–7, 90–103
Hellenic Culture 7–8, 53–4, 60, 172 The German Ideology 80–5
Heyek, F. 36 The Grundrisse 25, 86
Horkheimer, M. see Adorno materialism,
hospitality 12, 38, 45–6, 57, 105, 107, 150, Marx on 80–1, 133–7
183 Nietzsche on 67–9, 104, 160
hope 183–4 Mill, J.S. 22–5
Milbank, J.: Radical Orthodoxy: A New
idealism 8, 34, 83, 97, 125–6, 161, 173 Theology 161–2
ideology, Marx on 51–2, 63–7, 80–7, mortality 11, 22, 26, 28–9, 34, 45, 74–6,
111–19 92, 127
irony 60–1, 70, 176 music 42, 49–50, 55, 64, 160
Islam 25, 150–1, 156, 163, 168–70
Neoliberalism, 11, 37–8, 44
Jameson, F.: Postmodernism, or, The Nazism see fascism
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Nietzsche, F.
10, 77, 137 The Anti-Christ 66, 150, 160–2
Jay, M. 82 Beyond Good and Evil 97
Judaism 150–6 The Birth of Tragedy 54, 64–5, 71
The Gay Science 9, 35, 72, 96, 103, 127,
Kant, I. 160, 163
Critique of Aesthetic Judgement 17n. 2 Genealogy of Morals 67, 102
Critique of Practical Reason 154 Human, All Too Human 33–5, 66–8,
Political Writings 47n. 2, 122 96–9, 103–4, 126–9, 158
Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Thus Spoke Zarathustra 11, 33–7, 71–2,
Reason 155 100–2, 104, 127, 149, 163
Index 195
Nozick, R.: Anarchy, State, and Utopia Schmitt, C. 138–93

36–8 Schopenhauer, A.
on art 49–51
‘The Other’ 12, 26, 28, 39, 45–7, 73, 109, on religion 143–5
144, 155–6, 184–5 on suffering 6
The World as Will and Idea 50–1,
Protestantism 112, 146 64
Smith, A.
reification 69, 114–15, 130, 154 The Theory of Moral Sentiments 25
Rose, G. The Wealth of Nation 24–5
Hegel Contra-Sociology 90–4, 124, the sublime 50, 53–5, 64, 71, 123, 152
151–3
Mourning Becomes the Law 136, 142 tragedy 54–8, 61–70, 75, 128,
Rousseau, J.-J.: Discourse on the Origin of 172
Inequality 121
Weber, M. 143–50, 154, 174
Sartre, J.-P.: Sketch For a Theory of the
Emotions 16n. 1

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Politics of Happiness

175 Fifth Avenue 50 Bedford Square

First published 2013

© Ross Abbinnett, 2013

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Introduction: Elements of the Politics of Happiness 1

1 Liberalism and the Uses of Desire 19

2 Postmodernism, or The Dream of Limitless Possibility 49

3 Marxism, Socialism and the Beautiful Object of Labour 79

4 Fascism and the Pleasure of Self-Annihilation 111

5 Religion and the Love of the Sacred 143

Conclusion: Happiness in the Time of Catastrophe 171

‘Philosophy divorced itself from science when it inquired which knowledge

Three philosophies of desire

In Adorno’s thought, the regime of social and economic rationalization that

was conceived as belonging to a realm of finalities, of discrete things that are

through its inability to recognize the concept of subjectivity: its institutional

an evanescent state that cannot be reproduced as a social condition, it is clear

The relationship between truth, virtue, and power in Nietzsche’s thought

the media-technological staging of reality, the individual has been transformed

transformative of all men. For Derrida, ‘the feminine’ occupies an ambiguous

of the ‘embeddedness’ of the subject in his or her particular lifeworld. This is

The politics of happiness

in their respective philosophies. The nature of these connections, however,

equality of men and the universal community of their productive labour.

is of purely academic interest. Most of the conventional literature on Marxist,

1 This point is made, with a characteristic exaggeration of the solipsistic structure of

Liberalism and the Uses of Desire

I want to begin by examining the relationship between pleasure and the

desires of individual pleasure seekers are to be integrated into a peaceful and

the principle of ‘definite damage’ in the last section of On Liberty therefore, is

to the increase in productivity, personal wealth, and individual freedom that

to philosophical questions about the nature of enjoyment, mortality, and

The science of wellbeing

Jeremy Bentham’s thought is, in essence, an attempt to determine the greatest

the substantive community of others: it knows itself only in the intimations of

general level of affluence in most Western nations increased continuously

has produced the basic institutions of civilization, it is the social, economic,

self-consciousness in the ‘facts’ of its material being, are always complicated by

Life beyond contentment

How then is neoliberal ideology related to Nietzsche’s philosophy? It seems

Nozick’s answer to this question is to argue that, although the ultraminimal

evolutionary concept of desire as the ‘natural’ ground of human community,

Life, death and the new world order

Emmanuel Levinas once remarked of love that it is ‘the possibility of the

master, is transformed by the continuous demands of work performed under

gained. Beyond this, however, the pursuit of excellence in diverse activities

spirit, as a responsibility that is not programmatically determined by existing

The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (see Rousseau, 1988) postulates a

I have expounded these questions through the modifications of spirit that

1 See especially Chapter 13 of Leviathan.

Postmodernism, or The Dream of

insofar as it sharpens the contradiction between the ideological forms in which

briefly at the relationships between modernity and aesthetic representation that

It is addressed to sensuous feeling, outer and inner, to sensuous perception

The work of art, in other words, is a sensuous configuration of spirit; it is a

of both: the Dionysian outpouring of voice/music is given formal structure in

plenitude of man’s ethical life, represents the infinitely ungraspable nature of

disseminated, and the possibility of its infringing on the postmodern experience

Art, irony and romanticism

Thus, if art is destined to come to an end because it is unable to represent