R

journal

D I

of

socialist

and

feminist

S O P

philosophy
MARCH/APRIL 2005

H Y

130
Editorial collective David Cunningham, Howard Feather, Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie, Kevin Magill, Stewart Martin, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford, Alessandra Tanesini Contributors Lisa Guenther teaches feminist and continental philosophy at the University of Auckland. Her book The Gift of Birth: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction is forthcoming. Christian Kerslake is Research Fellow in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University. His book on Deleuze and psychoanalysis, Pathologies of Repetition, will be published by Continuum in 2006. Alain Badiou is Professor of Philosophy at the cole Normale Suprieure, Paris. His books in English include Manifesto for Philosophy (SUNY Press, 1999), Ethics (Verso, 2001) and Theoretical Writings (Continuum, 2004). Being and Event is forthcoming from Continuum in 2006. Kostas Axelos was editor of the journal Arguments (195662). Recent works include Ce questionnement and Rsponses nigmatiques (Minuit, 2001 and 2005). Stuart Elden is the author of Understanding Henri Lefebvre (Continuum, 2004). His essay Kostas Axelos and the World of the Arguments Circle appears in Julian Bourg, ed., After the Deluge: New Perspectives on Postwar French Intellectual and Cultural History (Lexington Books, 2004).

CONTENTS
COMMENTARY

Unborn Mothers: The Old Rhetoric of New Reproductive Technologies

Lisa Guenther ................................................................................................ 2

ARTICLES
Transcendental Cinema: Deleuze, Time and Modernity
Christian Kerslake .......................................................................................... 7

Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic

Alain Badiou................................................................................................. 20

INTERVIEW
Mondialisation without the World
Kostas Axelos interviewed by Stuart Elden ............................................. 25

REVIEWS
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life John Kraniauskas ........................................................................................ 29 Neil Lazarus, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies Janna Thompson, Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Justice Franoise Vergs .......................................................................................... 32 Alessandra Tanesini, Wittgenstein: A Feminist Interpretation Gavin Kitching, Wittgenstein and Society: Essays in Conceptual Puzzlement Simon Glendinning ..................................................................................... 36 Michel Foucault, Il Faut Dfendre la Socit; Society Must Be Defended Michel Foucault, Les Anormaux; Abnormal Michel Foucault, LHermneutique du sujet Michel Foucault, Le Pouvoir psychiatrique Michel Foucault, La Peinture de Manet, suivi de Michel Foucault, un regard David Macey................................................................................................. 40 Dianna Taylor and Karen Vintges, eds, Feminism and the Final Foucault Monica Mookherjee .................................................................................... 43 Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization James Tobias............................................................................................. ... 46 John Carter and Dave Morland, eds, Anti-Capitalist Britain Jonathan Purkis and James Bowen, eds, Changing Anarchism: Anarchist Theory and Practice in a Global Age Mark Neocleous ........................................................................................... 48 Renaud Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Pontys Ontology Howard Feather ........................................................................................... 50 Jeffrey A. Schaler, ed., Szasz under Fire: The Psychiatric Abolitionist Faces His Critics Rene Talbot ................................................................................................... 52

Copyedited and typeset by Illuminati mortongable@illuminatibooks.co.uk Production and layout by Peter Osborne, Stewart Martin and Stella Sandford Printed by Russell Press, Russell House, Bulwell Lane, Basford, Nottingham NG6 0BT Bookshop distribution UK: Central Books, 99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN Tel: 020 8986 4854 USA: Bernard de Boer, 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, New Jersey 07100 Tel: 201 667 9300; Ubiquity Distributors Inc., 607 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217 Tel: 718 875 5491 Cover: Silver Shoes, 2004

Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd. www.radicalphilosophy.com

NEWS
Persian Empire: Negri in Iran
Nina Power................................................................................................... 54

Radical Philosophy Ltd

COMMENTARY

Unborn mothers
The old rhetoric of new reproductive technologies
Lisa Guenther

f nothing else, the new reproductive technologies produce fabulous headlines. One of the most impressive comes from the Guardian: Prospect of babies from unborn mothers.1 A team of researchers in Israel led by Dr Tal Biron-Shental have been attempting to grow viable eggs from the ovarian tissue of aborted fetuses, for use in fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization. So far, their success has been limited; by stimulating the tissue with hormones, they are able to develop primary and secondary egg follicles about halfway to the point of maturity. In response to questions about the ethics of this research, Dr Biron-Shental says: We use sperm thats donated. Ethically, its almost the same. Theres just the question of whether your mother was an aborted foetus or your father was someone who donated his sperm. But there is one crucial difference. In this sentence, the father is a person who donates his sperm; but the mother is not in any ordinary sense a person who donates an egg. Rather, the mother here is a bit of ovarian tissue, harvested from an aborted fetus and cultivated under certain conditions to produce an egg. In this sense, the unborn mother would be an egg donor but not a person, a mother but not a woman. Under what cultural and political circumstances does it make sense to identify this disembodied egg source as a mother? And why does the dominant image of motherhood admit so readily of a dissociation between mothers and persons? An important part of the struggle for womens reproductive freedom in the 1970s and 1980s aimed at securing womens access to the liberal sense of personhood. I own my body, therefore I have a right to choose what to do with my body, including whether or not I will carry a pregnancy to term. The fetus, by contrast, ought not to be recognized in law as a person with rights on behalf of which the state may intervene by forcing a woman to continue a pregnancy against her will. Such an intervention would violate a womans own rights as an autonomous person for the sake of a fetus whose personhood remains highly contestable. While this position by no means exhausts the personal or philosophical signicance of pregnancy, the liberal notion of autonomous personhood has been strategically important for feminist politics. The right to choose holds open a gap between being a woman and becoming a mother; so long as I have a right to choose, my bodys capacity to bear children remains a possibility rather than a fate. But the prospect of unborn mothers poses new challenges to the liberal feminist discourse of personhood. How do we articulate the ethical issues involved in harvesting eggs from an aborted fetus, without resurrecting the debate over whether this fetus is a full-edged person with, for example, rights to non-interference or freedom from harm? Can we coherently defend a womans right to terminate pregnancy without relinquishing

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

a feminist position from which to critique the use of aborted fetuses in certain experimental procedures? In short, what happens when the new discourse of reproductive technology intersects with the old discourse of abortion?

Mothers and/or persons

The Guardian surveys the reaction to so-called unborn mothers from various groups, including researchers, ethicists and pro-life groups; no feminist response is mentioned in the article. Two main issues arise in this brief discussion. First is the issue of consent. Clearly, an aborted fetus cannot agree or refuse to donate its ovarian tissue; the material is simply harvested from the organism, presumably with the legal consent of the woman who had the abortion (though this detail is not mentioned in the article). Roger Gosden (an American fertility expert) suggests that it would be less controversial to take ovarian tissue from a woman, for which consent could be given. Less controversial, to be sure; but it would also be more expensive, less efcient, and more unpredictable to persuade mature women to donate ovarian tissue, when there is already a worldwide shortage of donated eggs. The appeal of growing eggs from aborted fetal tissue would be the possibility of treating this tissue as raw material, rather than as an autonomous subject who is able to consent or refuse or (worst of all) change her mind. The cultivation of eggs from fetal material would circumvent the need to negotiate with egg donors as persons in any sense of the word. If women are not providing enough eggs to keep up with the demand of the reproductive marketplace, then we can simply develop new sources, putting otherwise wasted bio-material to good use. In this sense, the use of aborted fetuses as raw material for reproductive technologies circumvents the need to deal with women or fetuses as persons who can give or withhold consent. Apart from this concern over fetal consent, the other dominant response to this new research has been a concern for the identity of any child produced by so-called unborn mothers. A spokesperson for the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA) in the UK suggests, It would be hard for any child to come to terms with being created using aborted foetal material. A representative from Life (the

UKs largest pro-life organization) makes a similar point: Children manufactured as a result of these donor eggs will probably often be the result of donor sperm. This means they will have no sense of their own identity and may have enormous psychological problems. These responses are notable for the close association they assume between personal identity and biological genesis. Here again, the question of personhood arises, though in a more complicated way; for, through a series of unarticulated assumptions, the article asks us to imagine mothers simultaneously as persons and non-persons, in a way that mirrors the representation of women in pro-life discourse. In order to make sense of the threat that unborn mothers (and, to a lesser extent, sperm donors) pose to the identity of their offspring, we need to believe that the contribution of an egg or of sperm to the fertilization process gives something more than just genetic information. Already in this biological contribution of a cell, there must be a social or psychological contribution which is substantial enough to inuence the childs future identity. Just an egg, grown from a bit of aborted female tissue, is apparently not enough to make this important psychological contribution; as a child, I need to know that my mother really existed as a person and not just a slice of tissue in the lab. And yet, the psychological contribution of the egg cell to a childs sense of identity is not considered to be entirely separate from the biological. If it were, then it would hardly matter that the fetus was produced from an egg grown from aborted tissue, so long as its identity was supported in other ways by other people who care for it once it is born. If we are to accept that the child of an unborn mother would suffer from identity problems, then we must believe that social and psychological consequences follow from the biological contribution of an egg to fertilization. In other words, we need to imagine the mother as more than just a bit of tissue from which eggs are produced, as someone who shapes the identity of a child in substantial ways, and moreover does so already through her donation of an egg. The mother must be a person: not necessarily for her own sake, but for the sake of developing the childs identity. Yet this is only one-half of the story. For simply in order to make sense of the phrase unborn mother, we need to imagine the mother quite differently: as nothing more than a source of egg cells. The phrase unborn mother relies for its coherence upon a reduction of motherhood to a strictly biological function, where the social practice of mothering and the subjective life of the mother have become irrelevant. Valerie Hartouni makes a similar point about the media representation of so-called mothers in her book Cultural Conceptions. In response to a headline which reads Brain-dead Mother Has Her Baby (from the San Francisco Chronicle, July 1986), Hartouni writes:
The coherence of this statement rests, in part, on a very particular understanding of motherhood, an understanding in which motherhood is equated with pregnancy and thereby reduced to a physiological function, a biologically rooted, passive indeed, in this case, literally mindless state of being.

In the cultural context where headlines like this make sense (however surprising or disturbing they may be), it is difcult to imagine a biological female who is not already a potential mother, or a mother who is not biologically female. As Hartouni observes, The only sense in which it could be said that she [this brain-dead woman] is a mother who has a baby is if her sheness is reduced to motherhood [which in turn] is reduced to all biological tissue and process.2 If we put these two representations of motherhood together, then we nd ourselves in an awkward position. The woman is reduced to a mother, and the mother reduced to a biological condition for the production of a child; but at the same time, social and psychological consequences for the childs identity are drawn from the biological status of the woman as mother. The discourse surrounding unborn mothers remains caught between a reduction of motherhood to the merely biological, and an expansion of the biological to include a social and psychological

signicance. It asks us to imagine the mother as just an egg source and more than just an egg source, at the same time.

Everything old is new again

This equivocation mirrors the by now familiar logic of mainstream pro-life discourse. As many feminists have noted, pro-life rhetorical strategies tend to represent the fetus as already a baby and the pregnant woman as already a mother from the moment of conception. The womans termination of a pregnancy is thus interpreted, apparently with perfect coherence, as a mother murdering her baby. The incoherence of this position and its immediate attribution of social, psychological and moral consequences to a biological moment is obscured by the powerful impact of photographic images depicting the fetus as a tiny, independent person. Lennart Nilssons 1977 book, A Child is Born,3 provides the template for these images. In Nilssons photographs, the maternal body tends to appear in bits and pieces: as an amniotic sac enclosing the fetus, or as a bit of umbilical cord trailing off the edge of the picture. Where the image of the fetus as a separate, autonomous person moves into the foreground, the image of the pregnant woman as a separate, autonomous person moves into the background, or even becomes the background for new life. Against this background, the fetus emerges as both a self-sufcient individual and an extremely vulnerable, threatened person who requires the services of doctors, lawyers and political advocates to maintain its wellbeing even against the wishes of its uterine environment. This double-sided representation of the fetus as both a rights-bearing person and a potential victim implies a similarly double-sided representation of women as both a depersonalized uterine environment and a uniquely responsible moral agent who can be justly forced to support the life of the fetus. In this context, the pregnant woman is understood as being not only morally responsible for the fetus but biologically responsible; indeed, her moral obligations are thought to derive from her biological condition, just as in the Guardian article a social and psychological effect on the childs identity is thought to derive from her biological contribution of an egg. The much-vaunted future of the species depends on women carrying through this biological responsibility from beginning to end. The irony of this representation is that it demands responsibility from the pregnant woman, while at the same time denying her the subjectivity required to make this responsibility meaningful. An ethical relation between woman and fetus is only possible where the popular representation of the fetus is disrupted, and where the claim for responsibility is not issued to women in general, as an automatic consequence of our reproductive capacity, but rather to a singular person who has a chance to respond, but also to turn away from this particular fetus. Yet if this is the case, then a unique and unshared responsibility for the fetus could never apply to women as a whole, and certainly not as a social, psychological or ethical effect caused by our biological constitution. Only an I a singular, subjective being can bear responsibility for the Other. And only a political commitment to the equality of women and men can hold open the space in which this responsibility is possible. The denial of access to abortion implicitly reduces women to an isolated part of their bodies; it says, for example, You are this egg, this womb, this bit of ovarian tissue. Once this egg is fertilized, you will be a mother; and if you terminate this pregnancy, you will be a mother murdering her baby. The denition of woman as a collection of body parts and the interpretation of these body parts as isolated bits of motherhood makes it possible for us to think of ovarian tissue from an aborted fetus as an unborn mother. But it also makes it difcult to imagine the mother as a person, and the person as a mother. Rather than invoking responsibility, it attacks the conditions under which both autonomous personhood and the responsible parenthood might emerge.

Like the fertility experts and pro-life activists mentioned in this article, I also nd the prospect of unborn mothers chilling, though not for the same reasons. The most urgent ethical issues raised by this procedure are not, I believe, whether it poses problems for the identity of children, or even whether a contract is signed to give consent. The most pressing ethical problem here is that one womans choice to terminate a pregnancy the political guarantee of which inserts a gap between womanhood and motherhood is then used to deny this gap symbolically, and to circumvent the need to recognize mothers and other women as persons in their own right. The whole point of growing eggs from the tissue of aborted fetuses is to produce donor eggs for IVF, apparently in a way that avoids the complication of negotiating with egg donors individually. But perhaps if we imagined the identity of motherhood more generously not as a biological condition with automatic social and psychological consequences, but as the gift of ones time, care and responsibility then we might not perceive it as a problem that some women do not produce eggs which develop into embryos. The absence of viable eggs is only a shortage and the shortage is only a problem if women are thought to have natural rights and/or obligations to produce offspring. When considered in this light, the proposed procedure of growing eggs from the ovarian tissue of aborted fetuses collapses the meaningful distinction between woman and mother, which is otherwise maintained by access to a decent range of reproductive choices. In so doing, it reinforces the reduction of women to mothers and of mothers to their reproductive organs which feminists have fought so hard to contest.

Notes
1. Ian Sample, Prospect of Babies from Unborn Mothers, Guardian Weekly, 1 July 2003, www. guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,11381,988615,00.html (accessed 3 July 2003). Unless otherwise noted, all further citations refer to this article. 2. Valerie Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions: On Reproductive Technologies and the Remaking of Life, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 1997, pp. 29, 31. 3. Lennart Nilsson, A Child Is Born: New Photographs of Life Before Birth and Up-to-Date Advice for Expectant Parents, Delacorte Press/S. Lawrence, New York, 1977. The photographs were rst published in Life magazine as a photo essay entitled Drama of Life before Birth; see Life, vol. 58, no. 17, April 1965.

radical philosophy conference

Shiny, faster, future CAPITALISM AND FORM
10.00 am5.30 pm, Saturday 19 March 2005 Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London WC1
Speakers Christopher J. Arthur David Cunningham Wolfgang Haug Veronica Hollinger Bob Jessop Patrizia Lombardo Stewart Martin China Miville Ian Pace Doina Petrescu Bernard Stiegler Eyal Weizman Sessions Architecture and power Commodity aesthetics Money as form: cultural & economic Musics: avant-garde and industrial Philosophy of the metropolis S-F as political allegory
Admission 5 unwaged/students, 12 waged. Advance registration from David Cunningham, Dept of English Literature, University of Westminster, Regent Street Campus, W1B 2UW; D.Cunningham02@westminster.ac.uk. Cheques payable to Radical Philosophy Ltd.

Transcendental cinema
Deleuze, time and modernity
Christian Kerslake

In the preface to the English edition of Cinema 2, Deleuze claims that cinema is a repetition, in speededup form, of an experience that has already occurred in the history of philosophy.1 This notion of repetition recalls the biological notion of the recapitulation of phylogeny in ontogeny: individual development recapitulates, or replays in speeded-up form, the development of the species. Haeckel noted that this recapitulation was strongly in evidence at the embryonic stage, so that one can see the human embryo at a certain point appearing to be on the verge of developing a tail that subsequently disappears as the embryo develops. So, on this metaphor, cinema, an apparently new and unprecedented phenomenon in the modern world, nevertheless only develops through recapitulating an arduous development already undergone elsewhere. Now Deleuzes claim is that cinema recapitulates a movement already undergone in philosophy. Why philosophy, and not visual art, or some other discourse, or perhaps the history of civilization in general? Why does cinema recapitulate a historical passage in the life of the mind? Deleuze says that the development in philosophy that cinema recapitulates concerns the nature of the notion of time from the Greeks to Kant. Whereas philosophy before Kant thinks of time in relation to movement, Kant subordinates movement to time.2 Before Kant, the world was seen as made up of changing, moving bodies, and time referred to our way of measuring rates of change in the physical world. The notion of time was thus subordinated to the demand for measurement of moving bodies. For instance, in the Aristotelian world-view, time is secondary to the general cosmic movement from potentiality to actuality. In the Christian world-view, there is an eternal order opposed to a temporal realm, where time is fundamentally referred to the end of the world, or apocalypse. Deleuze also has in mind cyclical conceptions of time based on the passage of

the seasons. In all these cases, time is subordinated to an already given movement of the physical world. Kant, on the other hand, inaugurates modern thinking about time. Kant makes time the transcendental condition of all of our experience, so that it is the structure of time itself, as stretched out, projected and synthesized by a human subject, that in the rst place conditions our experience of moving bodies, and not vice versa. So time conditions movement. As we will see, however, Deleuze has an unusual reading of Kants conception of time, and his ultimate aim is to bring to light a precise moment within Kantianism, a furtive and explosive moment which is not even continued by Kant, much less by post-Kantianism,3 the consequences of which nevertheless reverberate within modern philosophy as well as outside it, in domains such as the cinema. Deleuzes contention is that we have still not fully realized the consequences for our conceptions of subjectivity and selfhood of the endless, merciless line of time uncovered in its purity by transcendental philosophy. How might this relate to cinema? What is the simplest denition we can give to cinema? We can say at least that the fundamental unit of cinema is the moving image. Cinema is composed of images which move, or self-moving images.4 Deleuze is suggesting with his recapitulation thesis that cinema develops in two main phases. In a rst phase, time is subordinated to movement. Cinema thus operates with movementimages, and recapitulates traditional ideas about time. Deleuzes privileged example here is Eisenstein, who develops a form of montage able to express the dialectical totality of the world. In the second phase, cinema arrives in philosophical modernity and comes to terms with time itself, not just with movement. Deleuzes privileged examples here are Welles, Resnais and Robbe-Grillet (Last Year in Marienbad is the lm Deleuze constantly returns to when expounding the dimensions of the time-image) and Godard. The

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

development of cinema thus recapitulates in image form the path leading up to a fundamental moment in philosophical modernity the realization that time is the condition of the world, that it has no beginning and end, and we are at the mercy of it. Cinema for Deleuze is possessed of a singular power in that not only is it a fundamentally temporal art form, but it is always potentially a mass art form as well, and thus is in a perfect position to crystallize a nascent human coming-to-consciousness of the fundamental character of time in the post-Kantian world. We should comment on the justice of this apparently entirely philosophy-centric view of the cinema. Is Deleuzes claim, then, that cinema is a kind of spatiotemporal incarnation of ideas that have their pure form in philosophy? What would it mean to answer yes to this question? On the plus side, if cinema is the spatio-temporal incarnation of a set of ideas about space and time, doesnt that mean that cinema, rather than being parasitic upon philosophy, assumes a powerful autonomy as a realization of philosophy? It would complete philosophys speculation by realizing it in practice. So what philosophy gives to cinema, it gets back by realizing itself in more concrete form. However, this may seem to many to give philosophy a ridiculously exaggerated role in the internal logic of the development of cinema. So Deleuze qualies this idea a little. If cinema in its second phase confronts time in all its purity, and overcomes the traditional ideas about time as movement that were holding it back, this moment is triggered by a specic set of socio-historical conditions. Specically, cinema only enters its second phase after the Second World War. The new cinema records the ruins of the old world, and depicts characters who can no longer rely on traditional, habitual ways of life, who can no longer react in the way they used to. The period after the Second World War is also marked by a new phase of capitalist development: not only are people uprooted or deterritorialized from their traditional forms of life (as in the rst phase of capitalism), but their desires are now manipulated and deterritorialized by the new consumer society. Not only are old ways of living and working abolished, but peoples interior lives, their very desires, are deterritorialized. Western societies become radically cut off from their past. We enter a new phase of history, governed by the tendency towards absolute deterritorialization. It is these social conditions that allow the Kantian theory of time to become relevant for everybody. And cinema is the privileged place where we can become spectators of the process of this transformation. The darkened space

of the cinema auditorium, populated by bodies whose sensory-motor life is suspended along with their social being, provides the ideal space for the unfolding of what Deleuze calls the pure form of time, a form of time in which the temporal syntheses of memory and anticipation are permitted to detach themselves from their ballast in everyday active social experience. This is the strong central thesis that undergirds Deleuzes Cinema. It implies an evaluation, as it implies that lms which remain caught up in mere movement-images must be seen as outmoded. It also has an ethical component in that it shows that the great modern directors were attempting to come to terms with, and imagine ways of dealing with, life in a world with a profoundly new temporal structure. Deleuzes Cinema is thus a great progressive work of aesthetics. But we must note it was written in the early 1980s that is, in what perhaps now looks like the twilight of the great age of European cinema. So perhaps here as well the owl of Minerva only ies at dusk. In this article I explore two things. First, I try to explain what Deleuze means by this pure form of time that he holds to be essential for philosophical modernity and for the cinema. I will do this by referring back to the philosophy of time Deleuze sets out in his earlier works, notably Difference and Repetition (1968), where we nd Deleuze claiming that it is Hlderlin and Kierkegaard who have most clearly seen the consequences implicit in the Kantian account of time. It is notable that the Cinema books (1983 and 1985) mark a return for Deleuze to some of the most intriguing aspects of his earlier work, work that had apparently been buried following Deleuzes earlier collaborations with Flix Guattari on Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). The Cinema books develop and clarify the theory of time at the core of Difference and Repetition, underlining the ongoing interest of the latter work. Second, I give Deleuzes argument a new presentation. His claims about the modern form of time in cinema and philosophy rest on a difcult but potentially powerful reading of the relationship between the Kantian subject and time. In Difference and Repetition Deleuzes strategy is to generate from the bare possibility of repetition in time three different levels of temporal synthesis (habit, memory and thought), arriving at the Kantian account only at the end. Deleuze seems to follow Kierkegaard in allotting an unexpectedly large philosophical role to the notion of repetition. In one text, Kierkegaard states that repetition is the key to formulating the basic collision between ideality and reality, because any moment of cognition is a

re-cognition, a repetition of something that has been before.5 Deleuzes ideal genesis of the types of repetition, however, beginning with the passive syntheses of habit and memory, lays itself open to criticism, partly due to his reluctance to declare the details of his method. It is hard to escape the thought that the accounts of habit and memory are fundamentally psychologistic.6 But even if this is not true, there are other good reasons for trying to invert Deleuzes actual procedure, and begin instead with his account of the synthesis of thought. Such a reading has an advantage, in so far as it places Deleuzes thought more squarely in the same normativist space (i.e. the level of thought) inhabited by most thinkers in the Kantian and postKantian traditions today. In this way, the argument can also be reformulated along the lines of Kants own Transcendental Deduction, upon which it is generally agreed the success of Kants Copernican revolution turns. Kants Deduction starts out from a normativist account of the I think that must be able to accompany all my representations, and then works from there to a synthetic and a priori account of the relation of thought and intuition. Might it not be possible to trace a similar Deduction in Deleuzes work, starting with his claim that Kant is the philosopher who truly introduces time into thought?7 Thus I sketch out an alternative Deleuzean Transcendental Deduction which also leads from the I think and arrives, if not at the pure form of intuition in general, then at the pure form of time. On that basis, I then conduct a regressive argument that lls in further transcendental conditions for temporal experience by appealing to Deleuzes interpretation of Bergsons theses about memory.8 Although the path and the result are radically different to Kants own Deduction, the reconstruction may cast light on what can truly claim transcendental status in Deleuzes theory of temporal synthesis. There is another reason for proceeding in this way. For, as we have noted, in the Cinema books, we nd Deleuze also ascribing a historical dimension to his notion of the pure form of time. The claim is that cinema has provided a space for the contemplation of a profound restructuring of our temporal structure, a reconguration that was rst mooted in the philosophy of Kant. If there is any truth in this, that means that we have been undergoing, or living, this reorganization as the form of historical actuality, albeit in the alienated form of the image. The embryonic movements taking place in the darkened space of the cinema auditorium have turned out to be the harbingers of a new form of subjectivity which will no longer be able to be unaware of its own internal, temporal structure.

Deleuzes transcendental arguments must therefore be reoriented to take account of the consequences of their being brought to the surface. The article concludes by bringing up some possible consequences of this interpretation for cinema today.

The fractured I: Kant and the pure form of time

We know that Kant has a number of theses about time. I will mention three, and then show how Deleuze goes on to exploit a paradox that emerges from their conjunction. First, Kant claims that time is the a priori condition of all appearances in general.9 Not all events must appear through outer sense (there are non-spatial mental events), but all events must appear through inner sense, and time is the form of inner sense. Time is thus a
substratum (as persistent form of inner intuition) [in which] both simultaneity and succession can alone be represented. The time, therefore, in which all change of appearance is to be thought, lasts and does not change; since it is that in which succession or simultaneity can be represented only as determinations of it.10

However, time cannot be perceived by itself, nobody has ever met time, it is the form of appearance, not itself an appearance. If we wish to represent permanence, therefore, we are obliged to nd a substitute among the objects of perception, which can serve as a substance upon which to pin properties.11 Second, for Kant, this time can only be conceived as single and innite.12 There is no beginning or end to time itself. Third, Kant claims that our experience is made up of temporal syntheses. We make sense of our sensible experience through the rule-governed use of concepts, which are ordered implicatively in judgemental and inferential networks, by what Kant calls the understanding. But judgements and inferences require a unity of consciousness in order to function coherently: a transcendental subject. Because Kant has excluded the possibility of epistemic realism, he claims that the order (or objectivity) of experience can arise from nothing other than the synthetic activity of combining such representations. Thus there is only coherence and unity in our experience because we actively relate, via normative rules, our past experiences to our present ones, and anticipate on that basis our future experiences. The unity of temporal experience thus depends on a subject, a transcendental I think, characterized by the spontaneous capacity for apperception or reexivity, which does the work of synthesizing temporal representations.

Before we encounter the paradox that Kant discovers when he goes on to relate the rst two theses abouttime to his account of the subject, let us look a little closer at the latter. Kant famously says that The I think must be able to accompany all my representations.13 As Henry Allison comments, this identical I think does not take the form of some sort of numerically identical Cartesian consciousness; rather, all that we need to be aware of is the fact that this identity must be presupposed as a necessary condition of possibility. What this principle really asserts is the necessity of a possibility.14 However, following Robert Pippin, Allison has emphasized that Kants claim that the unity of consciousness requires a consciousness of unity also implies a consciousness of synthesis which is an essential ingredient in the rst-order activity of judgement.15 As Pippin puts it,
In any, say, remembering, thinking or imagining, while the object of my intending is some state of affairs or other, I am also aware as I intend that what I am doing is an act of remembering, thinking or imagining, and that I bring to these acts a subject identical with the subject of prior acts of intending.16

Every act of judgement is at least implicitly reexive, in the same way that playing a game requires rules, for in games I can consciously follow a rule without consciously applying a rule.17 Such rule-following is still normative, in that the subject takes itself as able in principle to give an account of what it is doing, and thus in some sense as binding itself to the rules. Let us concur with this strict spontaneist or activist interpretation of the Kantian subject, in order to highlight Deleuzes move all the more starkly, which turns upon the paradox that Kant discovers when attempting to give a full account of the activity of the subject. The paradox is that if inner sense is the form of all appearance, then this presents even ourselves to consciousness only as we appear to ourselves.18 But how can this apply to the transcendental I think, which after all is the transcendental condition for there being order among temporal appearances? Kant writes that
I do not have yet another self-intuition, which would give the determining in me, of the spontaneity of which alone I am conscious, even before the act of determination, in the same way as time gives that which is to be determined, thus I cannot determine my existence as that of a self-active being, rather I merely represent the spontaneity of my thought, i.e. of the determining, and my existence always remains only sensibly determinable.19

Pippin takes the penultimate clause (rather I merely represent the spontaneity of my thought) to indicate that I do not have an intuition of my active determining capacities but I am conscious of the spontaneity of it.20 Thus Kant is claiming that although we can only experience ourselves and our thinking activity in time, that does not rule out a peculiar consciousness of spontaneity which is not itself an experience.21 For Deleuze, on the other hand, when Kant says I merely represent the spontaneity of my thought, this should be taken to mean that the activity of thought applies to a receptive being, to a passive subject which represents that activity to itself rather than enacts it, which experiences its effect rather than initiates it, and which lives it like an Other within itself.22 So what remains paradoxical in Kants account for Deleuze is that while the spontaneity of the subject is held to ground the normativity of the processes of conceptual recognition, not only does its spontaneity turn to passivity as soon as I try to apprehend it in time, but I can never truly recognize that spontaneity as my own. Kants paradox issues in a ssure or crack in the pure Self of the I think, an alienation in principle, insurmountable in principle.23 The point is not just that the conceptual activity through which the mind represents an object, including itself as an object, cannot itself be given to it as an object.24 Deleuzes argument undermines the normativist claim that being implicitly aware of our rule-following implies also that we bind ourselves to it. The rst result of Deleuzes suggestion is that there may indeed be a spontaneity that grounds the activity of the understanding, but we cannot assume that we are identical with it. Whatever else it does, at the very least this move introduces an ineradicable heteronomy into the space of judgement and reason. Moreover, as we will see shortly, it is the temporal aspect of the fracture in the I that is at the heart of the matter. For Deleuze, paradoxically, this temporal aspect, rather than vitiating the transcendental project, will actually provide the hidden key to it. Expressed most radically, in this picture the self becomes something like the Freudian ego, a satellite of the true spontaneity, which must now be opposed to a Cogito [which] incorporates an unconscious of pure thought.25 Isnt something like this conrmed in Kants section on the Paralogisms, where, after having proven the necessity for an I think to synthesize our judgements, Kant turns his gaze upon the transcendental subject itself? There we nd him taking to its conclusion the idea that the transcendental subject whose self-consciousness is necessary in order for

10

experience to be possible is entirely lacking in substance, and we really have no way of knowing what it really is, or how to think the internal character of its spontaneity.
The transcendental subject is a whole empty representation I, of which one cannot even say that it is a concept, but a mere consciousness that accompanies every concept. Through this I, or He or It (the thing) which thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of thoughts = x.26

The problem is not just that we do not know noumenally what the I is made of; it is that there is nothing about the transcendental subject = x, even taken in its bare spontaneity, which ultimately licenses the ascription of self-consciousness to it. Transcendental self-consciousness is revealed to be so absolutely formal that it must in fact be of a different kind to our everyday empirical self-consciousness. The transcendental I think, by virtue of the severity of its abstraction, must become an Other, which is as it were feeding me thoughts, which appear to me through the medium of time.27 Deleuze therefore goes in the opposite direction to the early Fichte here, who thinks that if selfconsciousness is to be primary for the Kantian turn, one must take it as univocal for Fichte, at least in the rst Wissenschaftlehre, it is legitimate and indeed necessary to focus in on the act of self-consciousness, to use the kind of self-consciousness that we actually have access to, in order to secure the goals of the Kantian project. For Deleuze, on the other hand, the lesson of the Paralogisms is that the transcendental act of self-consciousness is a sterile, impassive act; its spontaneity occurs in another scene. This is one of the key differences between Deleuze and the German Idealists: Deleuze is suspicious of using our experience of self-consciousness as a direct model for the transcendental subject. Now Deleuze in fact goes so far as to say that the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental, the element of the Copernican Revolution.28 This is an obscure claim; why might this be? On the face of it, this correlation, such as it is, seems to bode rather ill for Kants whole argument in the Transcendental Deduction. The Deleuzean Deduction indeed must follow a very different path from Kants. But let us suspend this thought for a moment and now take into account that the deduction of the role of transcendental self-consciousness is only the rst step of Kants argument in the Transcendental Deduction, and the second

step is the argument that space and time, as innite wholes, must themselves be subject to the unity of self-consciousness that is, an intelligible passage needs to be hollowed out that runs from pure concept to pure intuition, in order nally to secure the synthetic a priori validity of Kants project. Once this latter step of the Deduction is completed, it can be lled out by the various specications of the Transcendental Schematism. What Deleuze wants to suggest, however, is that in a sense there is a more fundamental a priori encounter between the I think and time: the paradox of inner sense already reveals to us, at least potentially, time in its pure form. The fractured I itself, the I as fractured, can serve as the site for the encounter with a form of time that is more primordial than time taken abstractly as innite whole. Deleuze is suggesting that there is a pure form of time that is prior to the form (innite wholeness) that for Kant will guarantee the correspondence of intuition with unied self-consciousness. So let us trace out an alternative path for the Transcendental Deduction along these lines. Let us imagine that, after having secured the necessity of the I think in the rst stage of the Deduction, Kant now proceeds to reecting on the attributes of this new subject he has discovered. Here he encounters the Paralogisms, and the paradox of inner sense. His basic task is to nd a passage from this I think to the pure spatio-temporal manifold. But he now faces the obstacle that the subject

11

can only experience its spontaneity passively through a temporal self, as if it were fractured. Now what happens if we take this apparent obstacle as a positive condition? For isnt another way of stating Kants paradox to say that although the transcendental subject is entirely formal and universal, its activity can only be transmitted through irreducibly local temporal perspectives? Isnt Kants paradox telling us that there is no actual, permanent standpoint that I can take upon my own cognitive and practical acts, due to the impersonality of the subject = x? If, as Deleuze suggests, the I think affects time, and only determines the existence of a self that changes in time and presents a certain degree of consciousness at every moment,29 then there is no transcendental standpoint that I can take on my own past or future, whereby my memories and hopes can be once and for all linked together to form the story of one life, acknowledged by myself as subject as my own. In Karl Ameriks formulation, the persistent representation of an I need not be the representation of a permanent I.30 At any given moment, when I am synthesizing my experiences together, it is always going to be from a local, temporal standpoint. Doesnt it follow that the way I understand my past now might be different from the way I understand that same past in the future? My past is thus in principle open to being recoded in the future. It is as if, in principle, I must live in the future anterior I can no longer say I was this, only I will have been this. Conversely my hopes are hostage to my current capacity to interpret my past. What I hope for now, what the future is for me now, depends on my understanding of my past. Here we start to glimpse the vertiginous nature ascribed to time in its pure form by Deleuze.31 He compares the labyrinthine structure of time that emerges from this interpretation of Kant to Borgess vision of time in his story The Garden of Forking Paths.32 Deleuzes argument applies at three distinct levels. First, it applies at the level of the analysis carried out by the transcendental philosopher: when he attempts to grasp the nature of the spontaneous subject in person, he is left describing an indeterminate subject = x. This may or may not be a problem, depending on ones view of Kants project.33 Second, it erodes the basis in the Deduction for claiming that objective judgements are strictly normative, in so far as it erodes the identity implied in implicitly self-reexive judgements. Thus in so far as one adheres to a spontaneist reading of transcendental apperception, then the ground of the normative space of reasons becomes undermined by the possibility of radical heteronomy. But, third, it perhaps applies most effectively to the attempt by the

subject itself to grasp its own unity in inner experience. For the transcendental subject provides absolutely no help in bringing about personal coherence inside the medium of inner sense (thoughts, memories, fantasy images and affects). It is this latter level that is of further interest for Deleuze.34

Oedipus
By taking away the possibility that the spontaneous subject is in any determinate way related to the self, Kant seems to surrender the self to merely external determination. The contents of inner sense appear to be left to be related back to the external events which gave rise to them (according to the logic of the Refutation of Idealism), with their relative importance for the self merely a matter of objective determination according to natural laws. But it would be fallacious to conclude from this that the syntheses constraining the objects of inner sense are therefore exactly the same as those constraining outer sense (space). For even if the content of inner sense originates in outer sense, the rules for the reproduction of these mental objects (considered as objects of inner sense) are surely different from the rules governing objective, external appearances. As well as behaving entirely differently, my mental events are open to a fundamental reinterpretation of their sense in a way that objective events are not. My memories may undergo subtle reinterpretations over time, thus fundamentally changing their nature. Under certain conditions of interpretation, what appeared as a memory can be retrospectively transformed into a fantasy image, and vice versa. Isnt it this very defeasibility of inner experience that is precisely what is most threatening about the paradox of inner sense? So, by right, each moment of my past opens itself up to possible reinscription. Forking paths lead out of each moment into different possible future worlds. Deleuze claims that time now assumes a special kind of inexorability: to be in time is to be perpetually open to the breakdown of continuity in my experience, to be perpetually open to a loss of coherence in the narrativity of my life. My memories and hopes are in a profound sense defenceless against this permanent a priori possibility at the heart of time, the a priori temporal labyrinth that must accompany my experience of myself in time. Each memory bears within it the explosive potential to be reinterpreted from an indiscernible point in the future; each hope bears within it the catastrophic possibility that it is a delusion based on an incompletely integrated past.35 Kants insistence that the unity of the subject for itself must be grasped in the form of an Idea (the

12

Idea of the self) is itself an acknowledgement of the problematic nature of the gap that opens up between subject and self.36 In a sense he is protecting himself from the wound he has uncovered in the subject, in the fractured I. However, on the other hand, if Deleuze wants to avoid postulating an Idea of the self which would serve to wall up the passages opened up by times labyrinth, he would seem to be faced with a profoundly negative result. Time would seem to undermine perpetually the I think and the situation would seem to be equivalent to something like the radical separation of the I of enunciation from the I of the statement in Lacanian psychoanalysis. The I of enunciation would perpetually escape any position within the statements it utters; the most we could do is come to accept that fact.37 However, Deleuzes aim is different. It is rather to discover a pure analogy to the fractured I in a special synthesis of time. Appealing initially to the rst Kantian thesis about time, Deleuze asserts that such a synthesis is necessarily static, since time is no longer subordinated to movement; time is the most radical form of change but the form of change does not change.38 The transcendental conception of time must be stripped down to a pure order of irreversibility, in which the future and the past are formal and xed characteristics which follow a priori from the order of time. Deleuze now claims that this before and after in all their purity can provide the perfect receptacle for the schematization of the fractured I, under certain extreme, dramatic conditions. If this is possible, then wouldnt it full the demands of the second step of a Transcendental Deduction, while retrospectively clarifying the proper transcendental level of the rst? Deleuzes suggestion is that the transcendental subject might show itself as empty precisely under the condition that the self shows itself incapable of assuring its own continuity, having abjured its empirical content.39 A radical failure of empirical unication could actually provide the space for the appearance of the Cogito, as empty, as a pure form, and as Other. Here obviously Deleuze departs even further from Kant, and he claims in fact that the only post-Kantian thinker really to glimpse the consequences of this furtive and explosive moment in Kants theory is Hlderlin, in his short text Remarks on Oedipus. In Difference and Repetition it is the case of Oedipus, as read by Hlderlin, which provides Deleuze with an illustration of how the subject can in a sense give body to the pure form of time, although in Cinema 2 he also goes on to appeal to the potential of cinema to present

all kinds of dramatic temporal forking paths, beyond the limit-case of Oedipus. But the story of Oedipus has a privilege for Deleuze due to the purity of its structure as outlined by Hlderlin.40 Is it possible, Deleuze asks, that Kantian philosophy should thus be the heir of Oedipus?41 For the rst half of his life, Oedipus grows up believing that he is the son of a Corinthian nobleman. He hears a prophecy that he will kill his father and sleep with his mother, which terries him. So he leaves Corinth. On the way he gets into a ght with an entourage of noblemen from another place, and kills them. He arrives at Thebes, where he answers the riddle of the Sphinx and the people elect him as king, thus obliging him to marry the queen, whose husband has recently been killed. Oedipus remembers the prophecy but he knows he is safe as he has not killed his father nor slept with his mother; his mother and father are alive and happy in Corinth. When it starts to dawn upon him what has been happening, he undergoes a massive crisis. He realizes that he is not the person he believed he was. His whole conception of who he has been is completely overturned. He now must realize that he was unwittingly all this time treading the path towards the fate that was spelled out for him. Every single past memory is undermined, and recoded by his realization that he is not who he thought he was. For Hlderlin, the story of Oedipus at this point manifests a caesura.42 Deleuze suggests that it is nothing other than the caesura, along with the before and after which it ordains once and for all, [which] constitutes the fracture in the I (the caesura is exactly the point at which the fracture appears).43 Hlderlin writes that in this moment of transition,
in the utmost form of suffering, there exists nothing but the conditions of time and space. Inside it, man forgets himself because he exists entirely for the moment. [Time] is reversed no longer tting beginning and end.44

The power of time to overturn ones most intimate memories thus actually seems to gain body in this caesura that holds apart a pure before and after. The entire before and after of Oedipus history is structured around the caesura of his transformation. Oedipus memories from this moment on are not his own memories; it is as if they belong to another man. His ability to unify his experience in time is shattered; in a profound sense, he has become subject to time. The fractured I has become realized, but at the expense of a mans coherence.

13

Now although Oedipus is of course a limit-case in the range of human experience, this does not detract from his possible transcendental value. Deleuzes statement that the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental might in fact mean that, in so far as this correlation involves a direct schematization of the formal emptiness of the transcendental subject onto the empty order of time, even if such a movement can only be sustained by a dramatization (involving the story of a self such as Oedipus), this nevertheless fulls the condition of necessity that it is possible that such a gure, if not accompanies, then certainly haunts our representations. The model of Oedipus presents the fractured I in person, but in dramatic form. It is in Oedipus that Kants account of the subject reveals its deepest meaning as a Cogito for a dissolved Self.45 In Cinema 2 Deleuze wants to say that such moments are implicit whenever there is a temporal forking. The lms of Welles, Resnais and Robbe-Grillet all provide further dramatizations of the effects of times multiple forking paths. The abandonment of Oedipus as a child is the fork in the Oedipus story. The story fulls the role of limit-case because, after he realizes he has married his mother and killed his father, his entire previous history is rewritten for him; there is nothing left on which to rest his identity. Yet ultimately for Deleuze this condition of reinscription is potentially present throughout experience. But is there a way to descend from this pure form of time back to the empirical experience of time? This can be achieved by excavating the further conditions of this limit-case of temporal experience, the fractured I, or, more specically, by deducing the de jure structures of temporality that have to be in place in order for the limit-case to function as such. It is at this point that we need to turn to Bergson.

gives the past its peculiar weight? It is not enough to say that the past is constituted as such after a new present has taken its place, as then the scope of that past would be restricted to what it signied for the following present. As Bergson says,
according to the point of view in which I am placed, or the centre of interest which I choose, I divide yesterday differently, discovering several very different series of situations or states in it. Scores of systems of carving are possible, no system corresponds with joints of reality. What right have we, then, to suppose that memory chooses one particular system, or that it divides psychical life into denite periods and awaits the end of each period in order to rule up its accounts with perception?46

Dj vu: Bergson and the transcendental synthesis of memory

We have said that each present in principle opens itself to potential recoding by the future, and that each future in turn depends on the way the past is taken. But clearly this potential for recoding cannot be unlimited. So we are obliged somehow to formulate how each present can be a reservoir of future interpretations, without it falling into indeterminacy. Deleuze appeals to Bergson here because the latter shows us how this problem must lead into another more fundamental one: the problem of how the present passes into the past at all. How does a present become past and preserved as that past if it is open to future interpretations? What

Because the content of each present cannot simply be delimited as soon as the moment has passed, and because it therefore remains open for future reinterpretation, we must assume that the past is somehow formed alongside the present: for otherwise we are left without a measure for determining how the past remains that past.47 Bergsons paradoxical resolution, according to Deleuze, is that no present would ever pass were it not past at the same time as it is present The past is contemporaneous with the present that it was.48 In other words, each actual present is somehow doubled by a virtual shadow of itself, which enables it to be re-actualized as the past it will have been. Perhaps the best analogy to use while thinking about this is how something can happen to us which we know now will have signicance for us at some point in the future, but at the moment we are at a loss to determine precisely how.49 Deleuze takes Bergson as doing transcendental philosophy here; he takes him to have profoundly explored the domain of [the] transcendental synthesis of a pure past.50 What is compelling about Deleuzes return to Bergson here is the suggestion that the constitution of the past as past needs to be accounted for, and that so far transcendental theory has failed to do this, limiting itself to the conception of memory as reproduction. But Bergson also suggests that a certain experience can bear out his extrapolation here: the experience of dj vu.51 Dj vu, he suggests, can only be accounted for if we assume that the past is constituted as past at the same time as the present. Under normal circumstances, this double inscription of past and present is not experienced as such, because our attention is directed towards the future. But if this latter condition is suspended (due to failures in attending to the present), then dj vu becomes possible: that is, we experience a paradoxical memory of the present. The

14

Bergsonian notion of dj vu provides Deleuze with a paradigmatic example of transcendental empiricism. Transcendentally speaking,
our actual existence whilst it is unrolled in time, duplicates itself all along with a virtual existence, a mirror-image. Every moment of our life presents two aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and memory on the other. Each moment of life is split up as and when it is posited. Or rather, it consists in this very splitting.52

But if the future-oriented direction of cognition is suspended, we can become conscious of this duplicating, and experience what Deleuze calls a direct or transcendental presentation of time.53 Having made this paradoxical move to the assumption of a double inscription of past and present, having been forced into it by the potential of each present to be recoded in the future, Bergson takes a deep breath and makes one more step into this increasingly dark territory. We are obliged, he argues, to assume that the past is preserved in integral layers which accumulate, one on top of the other, as if memory were structured like a cone, with the apex representing the present advancing into the future, while the base grows ever larger. Each present that has passed is akin to a layer of this ever enlarging cone; these layers of the past have a merely virtual existence, in contradistinction to the actuality of the passing present. Now although Bergson does write as if this model implies the integral preservation of each level or layer of the past in an ongoing, ever more bloated synthesis, he does not have to go that far. The important point, as Deleuze comes to realize in the Cinema books, is to help us conceive how attention to an actual object at any given moment may be lled out by an appeal to different layers of the past where that object is embedded in different remembered contexts, and conversely to conceive how each past may contain more in it than has been actualized by any subsequent attempt to recall it. One doesnt have to go the whole way and claim that the entire past is preserved in self-subsisting levels; that hypothesis can perhaps simply be sent back to its historical context, the prewar Victorian world of spiritualism and F.W. Myers, with which Bergson was entangled, as shown by his essay on The Soul and the Body.54 What I want to do now is put together these two facets of Deleuzes theory of time and explain how they lead towards his theory of repetition, which ultimately completes this theory of time. I have suggested that Deleuzes Bergsonian take on the past can help us descend from the Kantian notion of the pure form of time and provide us with a model of how the past

is able to be reinterpreted by the future. With the cone model of memory, we move towards an account of how the accumulation of experience individuates us, and serves as a backdrop for temporal continuity. With this in mind, we can work our way back up the transcendental ladder, back to the situation of Oedipus. I described how the story of Oedipus in a sense dramatizes the situation of the fractured I. One may justiably respond: what has this to do with us? By turning to the concept of repetition, inherited from Kierkegaard, we will see more clearly what it has to do with us.

The crime of time: Kierkegaard and the pathology of repetition

Perhaps the quickest way to approach Kierkegaards notion of repetition is through his critique of Kants notion of moral agency. Kierkegaard famously claims that ethical action needs to be supplemented by another dimension he calls the religious, but which he also calls repetition. He goes so far as to claim that just as [the ancients] taught that all knowing is a recollecting, modern philosophy will teach that all life is repetition.55 Kierkegaard claims that, because moral agency involves the realization of an ideal norm in time, the person who chooses the good freely is always subject to a vertigo which ethics itself, considered purely as demand, is unable fully to deal with. With the thought of our freedom, the eld of possibilities opens up.56 We realize that what happens in the future is up to us. But Kierkegaard claims that anxiety permanently accompanies freedom because we inevitably doubt our capability to actualize moral actions in the future because of our failures in the past. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when freedom looks down into its own possibility.57 We doubt whether we are up to being good, to subjecting ourselves to universal law, because past failures weigh us down. What we have been, and what we feel like we are because of what has been, make us hesitate to become what we might be. But Kierkegaards point only becomes strong if we accept that these past failures are not contingent but somehow necessary and uncircumventable. In other words, guilt must be shown to be a precondition of the exercise of freedom. We cannot say that we committed past misdeeds out of ignorance, because we did not know better. Past misdeeds must somehow be shown to involve the active denial of autonomous free action. And this is why guilt must be thought of as indicating sin an active defection from the moral law. With this reformulation of the notion of original sin, we arrive

15

at an interesting encounter between Kierkegaards thought and psychoanalysis. Just as Freud postulates a rst error or proton pseudos in childhood, an original experience of pleasure at the hands of a parent which inevitably becomes recoded as complicity in an act of seduction,58 so also does Kierkegaard posit that an experience of guilt necessarily arises at the beginning of conscious life because as soon as one understands oneself as responsible one is committed to interpreting ones temporal experience morally, and ones moral experience temporally. However, on Kierkegaards picture, although we have an account of the co-originality of morality and temporality, we still do not quite have a specic reason why the human being must necessarily experience its past as a source of guilt. On its own terms, Kierkegaards claim that original sin is necessary is left crucially hanging. Yet this is not true for Deleuze, who can refer at this point to the Bergsonian account of the past just outlined. If the past is contemporaneous with the present it has been, any present is by right accompanied by its potential to be reinterpreted from the future. But, conversely, future reinterpretations of the past really do recongure the meaning of that past as a past. Inevitable infantile acts of hesitancy, complicity or confusion will thus become recoded in the light of moral order; I will not be able to help seeing myself as responsible for my actions even when I wasnt. The induction into moral experience is thus necessarily accompanied by the sentiment that we are always already guilty. It is this effect of the weight of the past that gives power to the Platonic pathos of recollection, and that Kierkegaard will want to combat with repetition. In the former, the present is always grounded in the past, but in the latter it is the realization of the very contingency of the past as well as the present that motivates ones decision to will it again, as if for the rst time, thus in turn releasing ones capability to act successfully now.59 There is no other crime than time itself.60 Kierkegaard provides highly nuanced accounts of how assuming such a necessary guiltiness can conspire to scupper moral action. For instance, it can lead very easily to our taking an ironic stance on the possibility of achieving the good. The ironic person is someone who has a consciousness of the ideal, of what man should be striving for, but is convinced of our inability to attain it. He imagines anyone who seriously strives for the good as somewhat laughable. Another possibility is what Kierkegaard calls the demonic. In the story of Agnes and the Merman in Fear and Trembling, the Merman is so transxed by his sinfulness that he denies himself the possibility of

achieving the good as a punishment. He has a thorn in his side and he gets a savage pleasure from driving it further in.61 These possibilities (or, we could say, these pathologies of time) show that ethics has to be supplemented by another dimension, the forgiveness of sins. Ethics cannot forgive sins, as it wants people to be ideal; it would be paradoxical for ethics to guarantee forgiveness of sins, as it needs to be strict, to keep one striving. Only another discourse, religion for Kierkegaard, can forgive sins. But Kierkegaard is quite specic about what religion must do. It must overcome memory, overcome recollection, overcome any idea that ones capability for the good pre-exists ones action. This is what repetition must ultimately mean: getting back the innite sense of possibility lost in the course of temporal existence, as a result of the necessary weight of the past.62 As we have seen, the modern, Kantian notion of time at least allows for the possibility of a radical break with ones understanding of ones own past. Oedipus is the negative example of this. But Deleuze suggests that the same structure shows the possibility of a repetition that permits the overcoming of guilt in order to act, by refusing determination by the past. In Either/Or, Kierkegaard imagines an unhappy person who is never satised by any realization of their will because they have already experienced in thought what they are hoping for, while they are unable to accept the past as past because they refuse to accept that what has happened has happened. Thus they constantly remember something they should be hoping for, and hope for something that they should remember.63 On the Deleuzean theory of time I have presented so far, shouldnt we conclude that this singular unhappy person is everybody, at least potentially, and that to reclaim the possibility of agency in modernity means confronting the labyrinth of time and passing through it by virtue of a repetition?
The modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events which happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us. It is not we who make cinema; it is the world which looks to us like a bad lm.64

Cinema
For Deleuze cinema is the art form that has the most potential to dramatize the multiple ways of inhabiting the modern form of time. Cinema permits a montage of temporal relays quite different from, but based on the same temporal syntheses as, the experience of human beings.65 However, in an interview Deleuze comments that the real reason he felt drawn to writing about the

16

cinema is because of the possibility it has of representing spiritual life, the way it has of dramatizing spiritual acts, or acts of choice.66 And if, as Deleuze says, the philosophy of repetition is pathology,67 then that dramatization will also include temporal maladies of agency, such as those depicted by Kierkegaard. Deleuze describes how Kierkegaards tales, such as Agnes and the Merman, are akin to sketches for lm scripts, as if they each lay out different possibilities of ethically inhabiting time.68 Cinema has the means to present all the vicissitudes of ethico-temporal experience, whether it be the experience of fatality in Bresson, or the choice to choose in Rohmer. Bressonian fatality, for instance, may be a dead end from the purely ethical point of view, but when presented as cinema it not only gains the power to move us because it allows us to inhabit the ethico-temporal situation of its characters, but it also cannot fail to call forth the power of repetition almost in recoil to what is being depicted. At the outset, we encountered Deleuzes suggestion that cinema recapitulates in speeded-up form a movement undergone in philosophy. The claim was that the embryo of cinema repeats the revolutionary movement already undergone in Kantian philosophy. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes that embryology already displays the truth that there are systematic vital movements, torsions and drifts, that only the embryo can sustain: an adult would be torn apart by them.69 If philosophy was not in fact able to live this moment, if it could not sustain the movement demanded of it, then could its most beautiful daughter, the cinema?70 Deleuze suggests that for mass audiences in darkened spaces across the rubble-strewn landscape of the mid- to late-twentieth century, cinema was indeed sustaining movements that could not otherwise be lived by its spectators. But the suspicion was also ventured at the outset that Deleuzes Cinema project itself appeared at what now looks like the moment of the twilight of European cinema. Could it be that cinema has now undergone the fatal experience of being born, so that its powers as an embryo are now becoming something less than a memory? What can this mean for the relation of Deleuzes analyses to future cinema? If Deleuze is right about the destination he retrospectively discovers in cinema, then surely there is no other option but to seek out and to produce ever more sophisticated realizations of the possible pathologies of repetition. Fredric Jameson was wrong to see the collapse of narrative coherence in individual, society and art as a fragmentation with analogies to schizophrenia. What is going on in aesthetic works of frag-

mentation is rather an exploration of the new temporal reality. On the other hand, it could be objected that Deleuzes argument depends on the retention of the intrinsic power of the past to form a weight against the present. Jameson argues that this is precisely what is lost: the present comes before the subject with heightened intensity the breakdown of temporality suddenly releases this present of time from all activities and intentionalities.71 Moreover, if there is an ongoing historical actualization of the fractured I, as Deleuze suggests in Cinema 2, then that will participate in an absolute deterritorialization which tends towards the accomplishment of the de-substantialization of the past. As is indicated in the Bergsonian transcendental argument above, the pre-existence of the past is in any case ultimately grounded only on its openness to the future. It is the fact that we never know what is implicated for the future in any single present that is the nal reason for the constitution of the past as such. But with the historical collapse of the boundary concepts of God and Self, initiated by Kant, all recollection now tends to reveal its internal dependence on the future. This is why we no longer believe in this world. If lms such as Lynchs Lost Highway or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind testify to an ongoing interest in cinematic temporality, one could nevertheless argue that they also tend to follow one of two tendencies: on the one hand, towards increased focus on the trauma at the source of temporal divergence (Lost Highway as model); on the other hand, to the extent that they articulate a movement towards repetition, they can appear as oddly glib and sentimental (Eternal Sunshine). Perhaps the lms and spectators of today are no longer spiritually able to sustain the movement. Or perhaps, just as religion was the gurative, alienated, yet penultimate form taken by Hegels absolute subject, cinema as alienated image of the Deleuzean subject will increasingly tend to show its inability to gure a pure act of repetition, so that it must react against its very status as image, or be complicit in its entrapment in it. In this case, Deleuzes writing of the Cinema books would have been an act of memory, preserving the historical drama of cinema itself from oblivion.

Notes
Thanks to Peter Hallward for his comments on an earlier draft, and to Peter Dews for inviting me to the Philosophy and Social Sciences conference at the Czech Academy of Sciences, where an earlier version of this article was rst given. It was written during a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University.

17

1. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, Athlone, London, 1989, p. xi. 2. Ibid. Cf. also pp. 39 and 271 for further comments indicating the centrality of Kants theory of time for Deleuzes cinema project. For other purely philosophical formulations of this epochal shift, see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, Athlone, London, 1994, p. 88; and On Four Poetic Formulas that Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D.N. Smith, Verso, London, 1997, pp. 279. 3. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 58. 4. This primary emphasis on the moving (kinematic) image is behind Deleuzes decision to privilege the term cinema over lm. 5. In reality as such, there is no repetition. This is not because everything is different, not at all. If everything in the world were completely identical, in reality there would be no repetition, because reality is only in the moment. When ideality and reality touch each other, then repetition occurs. When, for example, I see something in the moment, ideality enters in and will explain that it is a repetition, Sren Kierkegaard, Johannes Climacus, or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est, trans. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1985, p. 171. This is the most epistemological or metaphysical of the interpretations Kierkegaard gives to repetition, as usually repetition is an aesthetic concept (in the book Repetition itself) or a religious concept (e.g. in Fear and Trembling, where Abraham acts in order to get back Isaac). However, Deleuze does not explicitly mention this text, so my use of it here is speculative. Deleuze unfortunately never justies why he thinks the concept of repetition is of such fundamental import, or why he thinks one can generate a whole theory of temporal synthesis from it. I return to the religious notion of repetition below. 6. Deleuze denies that these syntheses are fundamentally psychological. He variously declares them to be organic, transcendental or ontological. But it remains difcult to assess at which theoretical level they are pitched. 7. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 87. 8. This regressive account could be said to stand to Deleuzes Difference and Repetition as Kants Prolegomena stands to the rst Critique. See Kants distinction between synthetic or progressive and analytic or regressive approaches in Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. J. Ellington, Hackett, Indianapolis, 1985, p. 8, Akademie edition, p. 263. 9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, A34/B50. This text will cite as usual with rst and second edition pagination. 10. Ibid., A181/B224. As Deleuze says, Everything that moves and changes is in time, but time itself does not change or move [it is] the immutable form of change and movement. On Four Poetic Formulas that Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy, p. 29. 11. Ibid. Thus begins the First Analogy. 12. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A32/B48. 13. Ibid., B131. 14. Henry Allison, Kants Transcendental Idealism, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1983, p. 140. 15. Henry Allison, On Naturalising Kants Transcendental Psychology, in his Idealism and Freedom, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p. 62.

16. Robert Pippin, Kant on the Spontaneity of Mind, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 17, no. 2, June 1987, p. 459. Pippin repeats this account in Hegels Idealism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, pp. 214. 17. Ibid., p. 460. 18. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason B152. 19. Ibid., B158. Deleuze refers to this passage (as well as to B428430, where similar views are expressed) in Difference and Repetition, pp. 85f. 20. Pippin, Kant on the Spontaneity of Mind, p. 454. 21. See also Allison, Kants Transcendental Idealism, pp. 2758, where he comments at length on Kants fragment Is it an Experience that We Think? 22. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 86, stress added. 23. Ibid., p. 58. 24. Allison, Kants Transcendental Idealism, p. 278. 25. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 174. 26. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A346/B404. 27. Deleuze arrives at something like Freuds view of selfconsciousness by pushing the Kantian view to the limit. 28. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 86, stress added. 29. Deleuze, On Four Poetic Formulas that Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy, p. 29. 30. Karl Ameriks, Kants Theory of Mind, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2000, p. 135. 31. The vertigo is amplied if we take into account Deleuzes claim that Kants critique of rational psychology in the Paralogisms coincides with what he calls the speculative death of God effected by Kants destruction of the Ontological Argument for the existence of God. 32. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 111. This reference occurs during Deleuzes later interpretation of the pure form of time from a psychoanalytic point of view. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester, C. Stivale and C. Boundas, Columbia University Press, New York, 1990, pp. 62, 114; Cinema 2, p. 49. In the latter, Deleuze compares the Borges story with the lms of Joseph Mankiewicz, and the implications I am drawing here are most clearly spelled out in these passages. 33. It may not be a problem if one takes a merely functional view of what Kant is attempting to achieve in the Deduction. The non-experiential nature of pure apperception is in that case not so threatening, as one would just be providing a bare model for possible cognition, without specifying how it is actualized, or without claiming that the perspective of the individual who is engaging in various mental activities [is the same as] that of the theorist who is describing those activities (Patricia Kitcher, Kants Transcendental Psychology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990, p. 83). 34. I leave it open here whether Deleuzes accentuation of the paradox of inner sense brings down the legitimacy of Kants account of the understanding (the second level just referred to). For a strict normativist reading of Deleuzes Kantianism which accentuates the role of reason and Ideas over that of the understanding, see my Deleuze, Kant and the Question of Metacritique, in the Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 42, no. 4, December 2004. From this point I shall rest the weight of Deleuzes argument on the consequences of the paradox for inner experience. 35. In my forthcoming Deleuze and Psychoanalysis (Continuum, London, 2006), I make it explicit that one of Deleuzes aims in Difference and Repetition is to contribute to a new psychoanalytic theory of Nachtrglich-

18

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

55.

keit (deferred action or traumatic causality). For suggestions about possible socio-political schematizations of a similar temporal structure, see Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time, Verso, London, 1995, ch. 4, Modernity, Eternity, Tradition. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A335/B392, on the Idea of the absolute unity of the thinking subject. Cf. Jacques Lacan, The Subversion of the Subject in the Dialectic of Desire, in crits, trans. B. Fink, Norton, New York, 2002, pp. 288/801, 298/813. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 89. Ibid., p. 89. There is also something uncannily appropriate in the way this ancient story waits for post-Kantian modernity to reveal its most explosive possibilities. The Erasers, the rst successful novel by Robbe-Grillet (one of the central gures in Deleuzes Cinema) was also an exploration of the temporality of the Oedipus story. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 87. Hlderlin, Remarks on Oedipus, Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. T. Pfau, SUNY Press, Albany NY, 1988, p. 102. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 89. Hlderlin, Remarks on Oedipus, p. 108. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 58. Bergson, Memory of the Present and False Recognition, in Mind-Energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr, Macmillan, London, 1920, p. 129. Bergson is also right to insist that the past cannot be accounted for in terms of weakened perceptions, which would mean that if one varied the intensity of a perception, at some point it would change tense. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 81. As mentioned above in note 32, the work of Joseph Mankiewicz is the cinematic convergence point for Deleuzes Kantian, Borgesian, and now Bergsonian arguments about time. Mankiewicz uses ashback in lms such as The Barefoot Contessa and All About Eve in such a way that they manifest each point where time forks in the narrative. But times forks thus provide ashback with a necessity, and recollection-images with an authenticity, a weight of past without which they would remain conventional (Cinema 2, p. 50). Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 81. Bergson, Memory of the Present and False Recognition, in Mind-Energy. Ibid., p. 135. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 275. The illusion, Bergson says, can become so complete that the subject not only feels that they have experienced this moment before, but that they can predict exactly what will happen from now on. The subject risks becoming a double of himself, present as a simple spectator of what he is saying and doing (Bergson, Mind-Energy, p. 109). See Mind-Energy, chapter 2. Bergson there contends that his theories of memory help us to conceive how memories can be preserved after death. Deleuzes suggestion that the past is pure ontology (Bergsonism, p. 56) certainly lends itself to a substantialist interpretation, which should nevertheless be resisted. As Deleuze himself claims, his account is transcendental, and is thus pitched at the level of sense. It is non-psychological in this particular sense. Sren Kierkegaard, Repetition, trans. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1983, p. 131.

56. The possible corresponds exactly to the future. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, trans. R. Thomte, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1980, p. 91. 57. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, p. 61. 58. Sigmund Freud, Project for a Scientic Psychology, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 1, trans. J. Strachey, Hogarth Press, London, 1966, pp. 352f. 59. Kierkegaard develops a point in Leibniz in order to arrive at this idea. Against the fatalistic Lazy Sophism that if the future is necessary, that which must happen will happen, whatever I may do, Leibniz says that it is untrue that the event happens whatever one may do: it will happen because one does what leads thereto (Leibniz, Theodicy, trans. E.M. Huggard, Open Court, La Salle IL, 1985, pp. 54, 57). Historical events are contingent truths different in kind from necessary truths. Kierkegaard adds to this that past events must also be thought of as retaining their contingency. Citing Leibnizs notion of possible worlds, Kierkegaard writes that not only is the future not necessary, but the basis of the certainty of the past is the uncertainty regarding it in the same sense as there is uncertainty regarding the future (Philosophical Fragments, trans. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1985, p. 80.) The past could have happened otherwise than it did. 60. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 37. 61. Sren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1983, pp. 949. 62. On repetition as getting back, see Edward F. Mooney, Repetition: Getting the World Back, in A. Hannay and G. Marino, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998. 63. The Unhappiest One, in Either/Or, trans. A. Hannay, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1992, p. 216. 64. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 171. 65. As a random example, take a scene of Citizen Kane. After his election defeat Kane has a conversation with his friend Leland, who we know he will fall out with. Because we know this before we arrive at this scene in the lm, we cant help but experience the scene with a sense of dj vu, as if we have already experienced it. We realize we are observing the moment which will have been the rst sign of Kanes falling out with Leland. This scene shows how cinema allows us to appreciate the double inscription of each moment: as well as being present, it always has a projective, future anterior dimension, which allows it to be experienced in the past or future, depending on how the lm is organized. See Cinema 2, p. 106. 66. In Gregory Flaxman, ed., The Brain is the Screen, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2000, p. 366. 67. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 290. 68. Deleuze, The Brain is the Screen, p. 366; and Cinema 1, p. 233. 69. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 118. 70. In On Four Poetic Formulas that Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy, Deleuze writes of the Shakespearean aspect of Kant, who begins as Hamlet and winds up as Lear, whose daughters would be the post-Kantians (p. 35). 71. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, London, 1991, p. 27.

19

Democratic materialism and the materialist dialectic

Alain Badiou

Frances agony was not born of the agging reasons to believe in her: defeat, demography, industry, etc., but of the incapacity to believe in anything at all. Andr Malraux

the universe. Aesthetic theory merely follows in their wake. A random example: a letter from Antonio Negri to Ral Sanchez, from December 15, 1999. In it, we read the following:
Today the body is not just a subject who produces and who because it produces art shows us the paradigm of production in general, the power of life: the body has become a machine into which production and art are inscribed. This is what we postmoderns know.1

What do we all think, today?* What do I myself think when I dont monitor myself? Or, rather, what is our (my) natural belief? By natural, of course, I mean in accordance with the rule of an inculcated nature. A belief is all the more natural to the extent that its imposition, or its inculcation, is freely sought out and to the extent that it serves our immediate and often unavowed designs. Today, natural belief can be summarized in a single statement: There are only bodies and languages. This statement is the axiom of our contemporary conviction. I propose to name this conviction democratic materialism. Why? Democratic materialism. The individual fashioned by the contemporary world recognizes the objective existence of bodies alone. Who would ever speak today, other than to conform to a certain rhetoric, of the separability of our immortal soul? Who does not subscribe de facto in the pragmatics of desires and the self-evidence of commerce to the dogma of our nitude, of our carnal exposition to enjoyment, suffering and death? Take one symptom among many: artists, the creative people of our day choreographers, painters, video-makers track the self-evidence of bodies, of the desiring and machinic life of bodies, of their intimacy, their nudity, their entwinings and ordeals. They all adapt the inhibited, quartered and soiled body to the domain of fantasies and dreams. All, in the end, impose upon the sphere of the visible the partition of bodies shot through with the noise of

Postmodern is certainly one of the possible names for contemporary democratic materialism. Negri is right about what the postmoderns know: the body is the only concrete instance [instance] available to individuals who aspire, in their desolation, to enjoyment. Man, within the regime of the power of life, is a somewhat unhappy animal, perpetually needing to be convinced that the law of the body harbours the secret of his hope. In order to validate the equation existence = individual = body, contemporary doxa must bravely absorb humanity into an overstretched vision of animality. Human rights are indistinguishable from the rights of the living that is, the rights of the living being to remain a desolate individual aspiring to enjoyment. Mortal bodies. Suffering lives. The humanist protection of all animals, humans included: such is the norm of contemporary materialism. It supplies contemporary materialism with its scientic name, bioethics. The progressive inversion [envers progressiste] of bioethics borrows its own name from Foucault: biopolitics. This materialism is therefore a materialism of life. It is a bio-materialism. Moreover, it is essentially a democratic materialism. This is because the contemporary consensus, in

* This text is an extract from a draft version of the Preface to Alain Badious forthcoming book, Logiques des Mondes (Logics
of Worlds). Further anticipations of that work can be found in Badiou, Theoretical Writings, ed. R. Brassier and A. Toscano, Continuum, London, 2004, chs 16 and 17.

20

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

recognizing the plurality of languages, presupposes their juridical equality. That is why the absorption of humanity into animality culminates in the identication of the human animal with the diversity of its subspecies and with the democratic rights that inhere in this diversity. This time, the progressive inversion of this stance borrows its name from Deleuze: minoritarianism. Communities and cultures, colours and pigments, religions and religious orders, traditions and customs, disparate sexualities, public intimacies and the publicity of the intimate: everything and everyone deserves to be recognized and protected by the law. Having said that, democratic materialism acknowledges a global limit to its polymorphous and animalistic tolerance. A language that does not recognize the universal juridical and normative equality of languages does not deserve to benet from this equality. A language that claims to regulate all the others, to rule over all bodies, will be termed dictatorial and totalitarian. Then it is no longer a matter of tolerance, but of our right to intervention: legal, international and, if necessary, military intervention. Aggressive actions serve to rectify our universalistic claims, along with our linguistic sectarianism. Bodies will be made to pay for their excesses of language. That is how a violent Two (the war against terrorism, democracy against dictatorship at any cost!) sustains the juridical promotion of the multiple. In the nal analysis, war, and war alone, makes possible the alignment of languages. War is the barely hidden materialist essence of democracy. This is something we can already see, and shall not stop seeing, as this new century unfolds, if we do not manage to cut short the effects of the following maxim (which nonetheless guides us, irresistibly): There are only bodies and languages. Logics of Worlds deploys a fair amount of science to the task of a somewhat fastidious examination of democratic materialism. What name can we give to the theoretical ideal under whose aegis this examination is carried out? Many a good mind has been tempted by versions of an aristocratic idealism. Often under the shelter provided by a communist vocabulary, this was the stance taken by the surrealists, and then by Guy Debord and his nihilist heirs: to institute the secret society of the few surviving creators. It is also the speculative wish of what remains most commendable within the Heideggerian heritage: practically to safeguard, in the secret sharing enabled by the writ-

ings in which the question dwells, the possibility of a Return. However, since such a preservation intended to sustain the hope that the intellectual and existential splendours of the past will not be abolished has no chance of being effective, it is inadequate to the creation of a concept for the coming times. The struggle against forms of nostalgia, often waged as a war against decadence, is not only endowed as it already was in Nietzsche with a martial and critical image, but is also marked by a kind of delectable bitterness. All the same, this struggle is always already lost. And while defeat may have its poetics, there is no philosophy of defeat. Philosophy, in its very essence, elaborates the means of saying Yes! to the previously unknown thoughts that hesitate to become the truths that they are. But if we refuse to counter democratic materialism with its formal opposite, which is indeed aristocratic idealism, what will be our own (still insufcient) name? After much hesitation I have decided to name my enterprise or, rather, the ideological atmosphere in which it gives vent to its most extreme tension a materialist dialectic. This is surely to conjure up a phrase from the realm of the dead! Wasnt my teacher Louis Althusser, more than thirty years ago, already one of the last to make noble use (not without some misgivings) of the phrase dialectical materialism? And Stalin? He is no longer what he once was, not even in his reputation as exemplary state criminal (a role in which, in these last years, he has been overshadowed by Hitler). But he nevertheless remains an unwelcome reference: didnt Stalin spell out, under the heading Historical Materialism and Dialectical Materialism, the most starkly formalist principles of a communist subjectivity whose paradoxical radiance now seems inexplicable? What is one to do with such a black sun? With a beheaded sun?2 Does the inversion of the terms turning materialism into the adjective sufce to shield me from the fatal accusation of archaism? Let us agree that by democratic (or Western, its the same thing) we should understand the maintenance and dissolution of symbolic or juridical multiplicity in warlike violence, in real duality. For example, the cold war of the free nations against communism, the semi-cold war of democracies against terrorism, or the Israeli war (the only democracy in the Middle East, is it not?) against the ragged Palestinians. Let us agree that by dialectic, following Hegel, we should understand that the essence of all difference is the third term that marks the gap between two others. It is then legitimate to counter democratic materialism

21

with a materialist dialectic, if by materialist dialectic we understand the following statement, in which the Three supplements the reality of the Two: There are only bodies and languages, except that there are truths [sinon quil y a des vrits]. You will recognize here the style of my master Mallarm nothing has taken place but the place, except, in the heights, perhaps, a Constellation. I erase, nevertheless, in the heights and perhaps. The statement there are some truths which opposes the dualistic axiomatic of democratic materialism the law protects all the bodies, arranged under all the compatible languages is for me the obvious empirical point of departure. There is no doubt concerning the existence of truths, which are not bodies, languages, or combinations of the two. And this obviousness is materialist, inasmuch as it does not require any scission of world, any intelligible place of its own, any height. In our worlds, as they stand, truths are taking place. These truths are incorporeal bodies, languages devoid of sense, generic innities, unconditioned supplements. They become and remain suspended, like the poets consciousness, between the void and the pure event. We should be attentive to the syntax that separates the axiom of the materialist dialectic from that of democratic materialism. Specically, we should be attentive to this except that [sinon que] whose Mallarman character I have already underlined. This syntax indicates that we are dealing neither with an addition (truths as mere supplements of bodies and languages) nor with a synthesis (truths as the selfrevelation of bodies seized by languages). Truths exist as exceptions to what there is. We admit therefore that what there is what composes the structure of worlds is well and truly a mixture of bodies and languages. But there isnt only what there is. And truths is the (philosophical) name of what thus comes to interpolate itself into the continuity of the there is. In a certain sense, the materialist dialectic is identical to democratic materialism, and to that extent they are indeed both materialisms, even if, by a nuance that cannot be neglected, the rst renders adjectival what the second substantializes. Yes, there are only bodies and languages. Nothing exists as a separable soul, life, spiritual principle, etc. But in another sense, the materialist dialectic centred on the exception that truths inict on what there is through the interpolation of an assertion that There is what there is not differs entirely from democratic materialism. In Descartes we encounter an intuition of the same order concerning the ontological status of truths. We

know that Descartes names substance the general form of really existing being. Substance is what there is. Every thing is substance. It is gure and movement in extended substance. It is idea in thought substance. Whence the commonplace identication of Descartess doctrine with dualism: the substantial there is is divided into thought and extension, which, in man, means soul and body. Nevertheless, in paragraph 48 of Descartess Principles of Philosophy, we see that this substantial dualism is subordinated to a more fundamental distinction. This distinction is precisely the one between things (what there is, that is substance, whether as thought or extension) and truths: I distinguish everything that falls under our knowledge into two genera: the rst contains all the things endowed with some existence, and the other all the truths that are nothing outside of our thought. What a remarkable text! It acknowledges the wholly exceptional ontological and logical status of truths.

Truths are without existence. Is that to say they do not exist at all? On the contrary. Truths have no substantial existence. That is what must be understood by the notion that they are nothing outside of our thought. In paragraph 49, Descartes observes that this criterion serves to designate the formal universality of truths, and consequently their logical existence, which is nothing other than a certain kind of intensity. For instance, when we think that we cannot make something out of nothing, we do not believe that this proposition is some thing that exists or the property of some thing, but we treat it as a eternal truth that has its seat in our thought, and that is called a common notion or maxim: nevertheless, when someone tells us that it is impossible for something to be and not to be at the same time, that what has been done cannot be undone, that he who thinks cannot

22

stop being or existing whilst he thinks, and numerous other similar statements, these are only truths, and not things. Note that the basis of the cogito (the induction of existence through the act of thought) is a truth in the sense outlined in this passage. This means that a truth is what thought persists in presenting even when the regime of the thing is suspended (by doubt). A truth is thus precisely what insists as an exception to the forms of the there is. Descartes is a dualist not only in the sense accorded to this term by the opposition it draws between intellectual things that is, intelligent substances, or rather properties belonging to these substances and corporeal things that is, bodies, or rather properties belonging to these bodies. Descartes is a dualist at a more essential level, which alone sustains the demonstrative machinery of his philosophy, the level at which things (intellectual and/or corporeal) and truths (whose mode of being is inexisting) are distinguished. One will carefully note that unlike things even when these things are souls truths are immediately universal and very precisely beyond doubt. Consider the following passage, which also links truths to the innite of their (in)existence: There is such a great number of [truths] that it would be difcult to enumerate them; but it is also not necessary, because we could not fail to know them once the occasion to think about them presents itself. And it is true that a truth is an exception to what there is, since, if we are given the occasion to encounter truth, we immediately recognize it as such. One can see in what sense Descartes thinks the three (and not just the two). Indeed, his own axiom might be formulated as follows: There are only (contingent) corporeal things and intellectual things, except that there are (eternal) truths. Like every genuine philosopher, Descartes registers, at the point of friction between ontology and logic, the necessity of what we have chosen to call a materialist dialectic. The idea that the type of being that pertains to truths can be identied over and above the empirical evidence of their existence was one of the principal issues at stake in my 1988 book Being and Event. In that text I established, on the basis of a lengthy analysis of the forms of being, that truths are generic multiplicities: no linguistic predicate allows them to be discerned, no explicit proposition allows them to be designated. I also explained why it is legitimate to call subject the local existence of the process that unfolds these

generic multiplicities (the formula was: a subject is a point of truth). It is not a question here of returning to those conclusions, which undermine the linguistic, relativist and neo-sceptical parenthesis in which contemporary academic philosophy is conned a philosophy which, when all is said and done, is merely the sophisticated handmaiden of democratic materialism. For the time being, sufce it to say that these conclusions fully ground the possibility of a prospective metaphysics capable of enveloping the actions of today and of reinforcing itself, tomorrow, in view of what these actions will produce. Such a metaphysics is a component of the new materialist dialectic. I would like to draw attention here to the fact that, via entirely different (even opposed) paths, that of a vitalist analytic of undifferentiated bodies, Deleuze too sought to create the conditions for a contemporary metaphysics. In this sense, he too embodied one of the orientations of the materialist dialectic, as can be shown by his stubborn resistance to the devastating gains made by democratic materialism. We should remember that he used to say that when the philosopher hears the words democratic debate, he turns and runs. That is because Deleuzes intuitive conception of the concept presupposed the survey of its components at innite speed. But this innite speed of thought is indeed incompatible with democratic debate. Generally speaking, the materialist dialectic opposes the real innity of truths to the principle of nitude which is deducible from the maxims of democracy. For example, we can say: A truth afrms the innite right of its consequences, with no regard to what opposes them. Deleuze was a free and sombre bearer of such an afrmation of the innite rights of thought. This afrmation had to clear a path for itself against the democratic complicity of the phenomenological tradition, always too pious (including Heidegger), and the analytic tradition, always too sceptical (including Wittgenstein). The insistent motif of this complicity is nitude, which has since been transformed, by essayists or editorialists, into that of modesty. In the nal analysis, one is never modest enough when it comes either to exposing oneself to the transcendence of the destiny of Being, or to becoming aware of the fact that our language games cannot open an access to that mystical beyond in which the meaning of life is decided. The materialist dialectic exists only in so far as it digs the furrow which separates, on its right, the

23

diktats of authenticity, and, on its left, the humilities of Critique. If the combined effect of the two French traditions of Brunschvicg (mathematizing idealism) and Bergson (vitalist mysticism) respectively: the one passing through Cavaills, Lautman, Desanti, Althusser, Lacan and Badiou; the other through Canguilhem, Foucault, Simondon and Deleuze is enough to allow this new century not to be devastated by modesty, then philosophy will not have been useless. To produce, in the world such as it is, new forms that might shelter the pride of the inhuman this is what legitimates us. It matters therefore that by materialist dialectic we understand the deployment of a critique of all critique. To have done, if at all possible, with the diluted Kant of limits, of rights and of unknowables. To afrm, with Mao Zedong (and why not?): We will come to know everything that we did not know before. In brief, to afrm this other variant of the axiom of the materialist dialectic: Every world is capable of producing, within itself, its own truth. Nevertheless, the ontological break alone, be it mathematizing or vitalist, does not sufce. We must also establish that truths have their own distinctive mode of appearing, one that traces subjective operations whose complexity is not even broached in the purely ontological treatment provided in Being and Event. What the 1988 book did at the level of pure being determination of the ontological type of truths and the abstract form of the subject that activates them my Logics of Worlds aims to do at the level of being-there, or of appearing, or of worlds. In this respect, Logics of Worlds is to Being and Event what Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit is to his Science of Logic, despite the inverted chronological sequence: an immanent grasp of the given forms of being-there, a local survey of the gures of the true and the subject, and not a deductive analytic of the forms of being. In this task we are guided as Hegel was in the context created by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars by a contemporary conjuncture which, believing itself to possess a stable, guaranteed foundation (democratic materialism), wages a ceaseless propaganda campaign against the evidence of truths. We are all familiar with the signiers that punctuate this campaign: modesty, team work, fragmentation, nitude, respect for the other, ethics, selfexpression, balance, pragmatism, cultures All of these are summarized in an anthropological (and thereby restricted) variant of the axiom of democratic

materialism, a variant that could be formulated as follows: There are only individuals and communities. In opposition to this statement, the fourfold thinking of being, appearing, subjects and truths a thinking whose construction is completed by Logics of Worlds asserts the maxim of the materialist dialectic: The universality of truths is upheld by subjective forms that can be neither individual nor communitarian. Or: Inasmuch as it is of a truth, a subject subtracts itself from every community and destroys every individuation. Translated by Alberto Toscano

Notes
1. Antonio Negri, Lettre sur le corps, La Sur de lange 1; www.hautetfort.com/revuelasoeurdelange/pages/1174 [Translators note]. 2. Soleil cou coup is the title of a poem by Aim Csaire [Translators note].

2 July to 20 August 2005... the art exhibition without the art...selector Gustav Metzger...

Ethics into Aesthetics... two day international conference... Norwich 12/13 August 2005... call for submission of abstracts by 1 May 2005 The conference Ethics into Aesthetics and the exhibition EAST 05 are perceived by Gustav Metzger as dealing with the extreme economic, political and ethical issues facing us all... through the use by artists and artists groups of communications media in real time...

NORWICH GALLERY Norwich School of Art and Design east@norwichgallery.co.uk www.norwichgallery.co.uk tel. +44 (0)1603 756247
NORWICH GALLERY

05

E A S T

24

INTERVIEW

Kostas Axelos

Mondialisation without the world

Stuart Elden When you left Greece in 1945, why did you choose Paris? Kostas Axelos Having a trilingual education Greek, French, German when I had to leave Greece, dominated by the Right, at the end of 1945, there was no choice. To undertake advanced studies in philosophy one must know the language in which one is working. Not speaking English, and with Germany in smoking ruins, this left only France. In addition, the Institut Franais of Athens, of which I was a student, had organized a system of bursaries that allowed me to leave with a group of comrades. SE You were already political, but why did you become a philosopher?

KA The impulse towards active politics had come from my interest in philosophical thought. Marxism and communism were Kostas Axelos was born on 24 June 1924 in Athens. He was seen as the realization of philosophy. In educated in a Greek lyce, the Institut Franais in Athens the Communist movement I had funcand the German School. He enrolled in the Faculty of Law in tioned not only as an organizer, but also Athens, but the war turned him towards politics. Under the German and Italian occupation he took an active role in the as a journalist and theoretician. SE What role did the Parti communiste franais (PCF) play in your rst years in France? KA The PCF seemed to me at once too Stalinist and too conservative. In the socalled cultural sphere its positions did not seem very advanced. SE So what kind of intellectual environment did you encounter in France? KA At that time, France was dominated by Marxism more or less dogmatic and existentialism. Neither of them satised me, and the university philosophy of the professors did not essentially concern me. I therefore met and discussed with the marginalized, the isolated that is to say, those who were that way at that time in the search for another way, outside of trodden paths. SE Can you tell us about your studies in France, teaching at the Sorbonne and working as a researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientique (CNRS)?

resistance and the ensuing civil war as an organizer, journalist and communist theoretician (194145). Axelos moved to Paris at the end of 1945, leaving on the same boat as Cornelius Castoriadis and Kostas Papaoannou, where he pursued studies in philosophy at the Sorbonne. From 1950 to 1957 he was a researcher at the Centre national de la rcherche scientique. He then worked on his theses, as a research assistant at the cole pratique des hautes tudes, until 1959. During this time he attended courses by Heidegger and Jaspers. From 1962 to 1973 he taught philosophy at the Sorbonne. His rst book, Essais philosophiques, was published in Athens in 1952. He was a contributor, editor and then the chief editor of the Arguments journal (195662), whose contributors included Barthes, Lefebvre, Blanchot and Lefort. Since 1960 he has been the director of the Arguments imprint with ditions de Minuit. His Sorbonne doctoral theses were published by Minuit as Marx penseur de la technique (1961; trans. Ronald Bruzina as Alienation, Praxis and Techne in the Thought of Karl Marx, University of Texas Press, 1976) and Hraclite et la philosophie (1962). These are the rst two volumes of a trilogy, Le dploiement de lerrance, of which the third volume, Vers la pense plantaire, appeared in 1964. This was followed by Einfhrung in ein knftiges Denken: ber Marx und Heidegger (Niemeyer, 1966), based on lectures given in Berlin. Axelos then published two more trilogies, Le dploiement du jeu (196977) and Le dploiement dune enqute (196979). Other works include Systmatique ouverte (1984), Mtamorphoses (1991), Lettres un jeune penseur (1996), Notices autobiographiques (1997), Ce questionnement (2001) and Rponses niqmatiques (2005), all with Minuit.

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

25

KA Teaching at the Sorbonne did not do much for me: it was too academic. I learnt some things, certainly, here and there, but the decisive things were elsewhere. At the CNRS my work consisted of developing my two theses: on Heraclitus and on Marx. As when teaching at the Sorbonne later, I had the freedom to speak on the issues on which I was working; these related to the books which succeeded my theses. SE How did you come to meet Lacan, Picasso and Heidegger?

KA Lacan I had dinner together twice with our partners one the editorial secretary of Arguments; the other an ex-actress and ex-wife of Bataille. There was the beginning of a discussion which did not continue. I met him again in his country house in Guitrancourt in August 1955, where he had invited Heidegger and his wife, Elfriede, Jean Beaufret and me to spend a few days. This was just before the seminar Heidegger gave at Cerisy-la-Salle, in Normandy, on What is Philosophy?, which Lacan did not attend.1 The discussion between the thinker and the psychoanalyst was a complete failure. They did not speak the same language, their approaches were entirely different. I met Picasso in 1948 in Vallauris where I was spending a few days on holiday with a friend. He impressed me very much, quite apart from his work, which fascinated me. The relationship was very good. After Picassos partner Franoise Gilot left him, she and I had a love affair. Heidegger I met in the summer of 1955, when he was spending a few days in Paris, just before the meeting with Lacan and the conference in Cerisy. We subsequently met several times, in his house in Freiburg or his hut in the Black Forest. We discussed many things the political question throughout. SE This question of Heideggers politics is still very present. What did Heidegger say about this? What do you think of this? KA The discussion of the political question with Heidegger never advanced very far. One must say, the political realm in general eluded him. He was a great thinker and a narrowminded petty bourgeois at the same time; he did not really understand what had happened and was happening on this level. In the discussions, he tried to exonerate himself, saying that he had committed a great error, that in the beginning National Socialism was not what it later became, that he had distanced himself from Nazism, and so on. All this was wholly insufcient. But despite the National Socialist enticement of Heidegger, his thought can absolutely not be reduced or limited to Nazism. It is an opening, but it remains covered by a shadow. This shadow cannot and must not be forgotten, but all reductive attempts to explain it fail entirely. SE The Arguments journal existed before you were involved in it, and yet you went very quickly from being a contributor, in the fourth issue, to editing it, in the fth. How did this happen? This was the time of the explosion of Stalinism: was this important for you? KA Arguments was created in 1956, effectively by Edgar Morin and Jean Duvignaud. I was involved very quickly. It was a passionate adventure, a laboratory of ideas, very distant from orthodoxies and -isms of the time. My separation from MarxistLeninism dates from 1946. The events of 1956 only made clearer what had been visible before. They constituted a breach that announced in advance the collapse of an entire system, which only took place much later. SE What was its heritage non-orthodox Marxism, or not Marxism at all? Towards post-structuralism, or more Heideggerian ideas like that of world? Its opposition to
1. Axelos was Heideggers interpreter at this event, and the translator (with Beaufret) of the lecture into French.

26

the journal International situationniste is fairly well known, but its relations to Socialisme ou barbarie and Les temps modernes appear more complicated. KA It is difcult to say what the heritage is. The researches and ideas of the editorial team and their close collaborators were a long way from constituting a homogenous plan. The differences never ceased. I would say, briey, that an attempt at an open Marxism, of a revised and corrected Freudo-Marxism and, nally, a post-Marxist and post-Heideggerian thought were elaborated, but not without difculties. International situationniste fought against us violently. With Socialisme ou barbarie we exchanged articles from time to time. There was no contact with Les temps modernes. Each of these reviews had their direction and we had ours. SE You played a signicant role in the translation of Lukcs, Korsch, Heidegger and Adorno. Why these particular gures? And why did the review close in 1962? KA Lukcs, Korsch and Adorno because they opened up a breach in systematic Marxism quite insufcient of course. With Heidegger, a great thinker, it was important that a review that was denitely of the Left was open to him. The review was scuttled in 1962 when it was at the top of its form and its inuence was growing. We did not want to repeat ourselves, to become institutionalized. We thought that we had said what we had to say in this review and in this time period. Additionally, each of us was turning more to our own work, writing our own books. SE There are ve principal thinkers who were important in your formative years: Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Heraclitus. Why return to Heraclitus? KA Heraclitus was at the beginning of a very great current of thought, and he remains an originator. Nietzsche and Heidegger productively confronted this, each in his own way. SE The world, the game, errancy and technology are perhaps the four central themes of your work. Would it be true to say that mondialisation is not the same thing as globalization? What would be the difference? KA Globalization names a process which universalizes technology, economy, politics, and even civilization and culture. But it remains somewhat empty. The world as an opening is missing. The world is not the physical and historical totality, it is not the more or less empirical ensemble of theoretical and practical ensembles. It deploys itself. The thing that is called globalization is a kind of mondialisation without the world. SE The becoming-philosophical of the world is at the same time the becomingworldly of philosophy; its realization is at the same time its loss. Why is this quotation from Marx so important to you?
2. See Eugen Fink, Spiel als Weltsymbol, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, 1960. A French translation appeared in the Arguments series: Le Jeu comme symbole du monde, trans. Hans Hildenbrand and Alex Lindenberg, ditions de Minuit, Paris, 1966.

27

KA Philosophy, as philosophy, is not alive any more. It is reected in the history of philosophy, and is replaced by technical sciences of nature, humanity and its works, theories and social-historical practices. These technical sciences ignore what they cross. As such philosophy sees its end. Those that succeeded Hegel should not be called philosophers, but thinkers. SE What is the relation between the world and the game, le jeu? What do you mean when you talk of the jeu du monde, the play of the world? Is this related to the fragment of Heraclitus where he talks of time as the child who plays? KA The world deploys itself as a game. That means that it refuses any sense, any rule that is exterior to itself. The play of the world itself is different from all the particular games that are played in the world. Almost two-and-a-half thousand years after Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Fink and I have insisted on this approach to the world as game.2 SE Technology is a theme of Heideggers, but you read it in the work of Marx. Is it a question of alienation through technology? What political implications follow from your understanding of the idea? KA Heidegger talks of the question of technology and, more precisely, of the essence of technology. Technology is certainly at work in Marxs thought, but Heidegger deepens the theme further. Technology is neither a god nor a devil. We can neither unconditionally say yes to it, nor deny it completely. It is at the same time alienating and an opening, it is everywhere in work: in techno-science, techno-politics, techno-culture in all political regimes. Friendship towards technology neither wanting to dominate it, nor submitting to it is a present and future task. Contemporary people and societies apart from Islamic fundamentalism, which displays a backward-looking tendency are marked by an omnipresent technology, as much in the real as in the imaginary. Technology irresistibly advances. We always have to think, still more deeply, and search for a style of living which exhausts itself in neither conformism nor unreective revolt. SE You write of planetary technology. How do you understand this idea, and what relation does it have to politics, planetary politics? KA Technology puts into movement all that happens on the earth and leads to the conquest of space, the conquest of the other stars in the heavens. In Greek, planet means wandering star [astre errant]. All planetary movement is therefore errant, it takes place in the play of errancy. Errancy is not the converse of truth, it does not mean error or vagrancy. Everything that we name as truth empirical or transcendental is precipitated into errancy; the truth does not illuminate what it is, it is done, it demolishes itself. Planetary technology governs planetary politics and no government can resist it.
Interviewed by Stuart Elden Paris, Autumn 2004

subscribe to

radical philosophy

and get a 10% discount on all subscriptions paid by direct debit

See inside back cover for subscription rates

subscribe online at www.radicalphilosophy.com

28

REVIEWS

Multiple choice
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Penguin, New York, 2004. xviii + 427 pp., 20.00 hb., 1 59420 024 6 hb. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, foreword by Sylvre Lotringer, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, Andrea Casson, Semiotext[e] Foreign Agents Series, New York and Los Angeles, 2004. 120 pp., 8.95 pb., 1 58435 021 0. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire is the companion volume to their previous co-authored work, Empire (2000). It is also a response to its reception. In the rst place, it is a theoretical response to the perceived lack of conceptual development of its founding political and emancipatory concept, the multitude. In this sense, Multitude also completes Empire, inverting at the end of the modern era the theoretical gesture of state-building to be found in Hobbess move from De Cive to Leviathan at its beginning. Since the publication of Empire, the authors have written and spoken on the subject at length, both in books (Negris Kairs, Alma Venus, Multitude, included in Time for Revolution, Negri on Negri his biopolitical abc and Subversive Spinoza: (Un)contemporary Variations) and in lecture tours around the world. Other writers associated with Negri and neo-autonomist politics have too, such as Paolo Virno, whose A Grammar of the Multitude was originally given as a series of seminars in the University of Calabria in 2001. The year 2000 saw the publication in France of the rst issue of the radical anti-capitalist journal Multitudes, edited by Eric Alliez and Yann Moulier Boutang, who, although not immediately identiable with Negri, partake of the post-Marxist and neo-positivist Deleuzean paradigm of refusal increasingly associated with him. (Their pluralization of the subject suggests a de-founding that the latter would oppose.) Hardt and Negris latest work thus participates in this wider diffusion and use of the term multitude for a historical and biopolitical subject, as it simultaneously attempts to produce its concept. Second, Multitude is a response to a series of historical events that have occurred since the publication of Empire, which would seem to disprove one of its basic premisses: the end of US imperial dominance. In Empire, Hardt and Negri had insisted that, as a new form of global sovereignty that reects the global subsumption of the social by capital, empire is denitively a post-imperialist social form. This is a fundamental point because it is what constitutes empires historical specicity and difference from the past. But worldpolitical affairs changed drastically after the attack on the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001. The US governments national security doctrine of regime change and the subsequent war against terror seemed to conrm the view of many of Hardt and Negris critics that the US remained the world hegemon and that so-called globalization remained in fact Americanization. In itself, however, such a display of US military dominance does not disprove the post-national and global tendency of empires emergence, which, the authors maintain, resorts to existing inter-state forms for non-national purposes, as these forms are historically overcome. The kinds of question that such an argument might raise include: what is the relation between the US state apparatus, the uses of its military, technological and economic power, and national capitals? Or, in what sense does the US state represent US capital as capital in general? However, Hardt and Negri do not pose such questions, rst, because nation-state forms are not objects of their concern unless imperial, and second, because their conception of rule is delinked from processes of accumulation and almost entirely coercive and administrative, as their use of the idea of command suggests. In Multitude Hardt and Negri thus attempt to maintain and strengthen their original position with an analysis of what they refer to as the permanent character of the contemporary war waged against the multitudes biopolitical productivity and constituent demand for democracy. From this perspective, war today is not international, but a transnational because globalized civil war in which military action is increasingly becoming police action. Multitude has a triadic structure: three parts, each divided into three chapters. The rst part is dedicated to contemporary postmodern warfare. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on its actuality from the point of view of

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

29

domination (that is, as a permanent state of exception) and its historical emergence (from traditional interstate war, via counter-insurgency, to network war). Chapter 3 refocuses the same history but from the point of view of the primacy of resistance (the logic of refusal constitutive of historical development) that is, from the gure of the partisan as it emerges during the Napoleonic Wars, via modern anti-colonial wars and guerrilla warfare (Guevarism to neo-Zapatismo and the Intifada) to the organized network resistance of the anti-globalization movement (as evidenced in Seattle towards the end of 1999, and subsequently in Genoa). This is the most original part of Multitude, although much of its account of contemporary shifts in the tactics and ideology of intelligence and information-led netwar may be equally gleaned from day-today journalistic accounts of the war in Iraq. Most interestingly, Hardt and Negri discuss the emergence of new supranational juridico-political structures legitimizing such violence whilst simultaneously, through human rights legislation and new forms of transnational imperial justice, producing humanity as a legal subject in a permanent war of all against all in which the enemy becomes inhuman elements, all, of a globalized state-form subordinating national territories to its sovereignty. Here, the

authors produce an interesting summary and interpretation of the extensive literature on the subject, giving it an imperial inection, such that empire emerges in retreat as a network form. But, by resorting to Giorgio Agambens anachronistic generalization of Schmitts and Benjamins experience of fascism in his recent State of Exception to suggest that we are living under a permanent and paradoxically normalized state of emergency, they fail to think through the implications of the unequal character of its experience across the world, as well as the supposed novelty of the times to which it is being applied. Parts Two and Three, dedicated to the multitude and to its struggle for democracy, have similar structures. Hardt and Negri insist that they represent a shift from an analysis of form to one of content the chapters dedicated to the multitude being, at least theoretically, the most important of the book. And there is no doubt that the breadth of determinations philosophical, economic, cultural and historical brought to bear on the production of the concept of the multitude are impressive. As Virno points out, the multitude is a way of life, the mode of being of the many, whose investigation requires a varied kind of conceptual orchestration in which one must circumnavigate the multitude-continent changing frequently the angle of perspective. Unfortunately, however, there is no theoretical advance on the accounts of empire and sovereignty contained either in Empire or in Negris earlier works in political philosophy, The Savage Anomaly and Insurgencies, other than in their historical narrativization in which the being and becoming of the multitude function as an always present natural-historical and creative substrate emerging (or even evolving) to demand the realization of the absolute democracy it has embodied since Spinozas seventeenth century. In contrast with the more or less philosophically dense histories of constituent and constitutional power (potentia and potestas) related in the earlier works, the accounts in Multitude read as both overpoliticized and overindebted to the present. Both Multitude and Virnos Grammar present themselves as philosophical inquiries, although in this regard the latter is both more condensed and more original. Virno uses the idea of the multitude to open up traditional philosophical themes to new questions, as posed by the contemporary experience of post-Fordist capitalism. The books share a similar structure. Grammar also begins by considering the question of security, but it does so not from the point of view of recent military strategy, but existentially, focusing on Heideggers distinction between fear and

30

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

anguish in Being and Time and their contemporary de-differentiation and overlapping as the boundaries between communities break down and a generalized not feeling at home exposes the multitude that emerges in this space omnilaterally to the world. Here, Virno suggests, the many are united in risk. For Virno, the idea of the multitude is intimately associated with crisis. It has returned in the age of post-Fordism from the seventeenth century to take its revenge on the modern world which excluded it, largely through the juridico-political institution of the people historically tied to the modern nation-state hence its association with monstrosity and the uncanny. In such a context, the common places of language become productive and protective of communities and practices in the form, even, of a noble conservative violence as does, in another of Virnos everyday examples, idle talk in the workplace. However, such invention (which Hardt and Negri refer to as the biopolitical potentia of the multitude) is functional to post-Fordist production too, which, in Virnos account of immaterial labour, appropriates and recodes such communicative potential to produce what he calls the communism of capital. This is the last of his ten theses on the multitude and post-Fordism, which bring the book to its conclusion. In Hardt and Negris nal words, on the other hand, the violence and grievances produced by such appropriation must at some point be transformed by a strong event, a radical insurrectional demand an event that will thrust us like an arrow into that living future a future that lives already in the power of the multitude. This, they insist, will be the real political act of love. The gure of the one and the many is crucial for a minimum political denition of a concept of the multitude with emancipatory intent. According to Hardt and Negri, the one is constituted by the unity of what is held in common and refers to concrete forms of social cooperation. This is why, for example, the increasing hegemony of communication as both natural condition of the social and computerized media technology (networks) and other forms of immaterial labour, such as affect, are so important to their account of contemporary forms of labour-power and capitalist appropriation. Contemporary forms of capital put the dense cultural means of social relation the esh of the multitude to work in a process one could refer to as colonization, imposing sovereign body politics and reconguring exploitation and value production beyond the factory to occupy the eld of the social as a whole. It is at this point, according to Negri, that historical developments explode

and put an end to the measurability on which Marxs theory of value depends. Hardt and Negri, as well as Virno, insist that this does not mean that all labour is immaterial, but that this form is hegemonic and increasingly subordinates all other forms to its logics. What is held in common is thus both constitutive condition and historical result. In this regard, the authors dedicate much space to the disappearance and/or transformation of the peasantry as traditionally conceived. This attempt at thinking exploitation beyond the factory has been one of the most interesting aspects of post-autonomia thought. In Multitude Hardt and Negri also develop one of its key historical and political implications: a critique of the hypostatization of the industrial proletariat as the universal subject of freedom, now historically transcended. This is a critique they share with subalternism (which, in turn, is too peasant-centred as a perspective in their view). However, they tend to reproduce the same developmentalist gesture in their own privileging of the immaterial worker, within the multitude, as the subject of freedom. The multitude, we are told, is the unity of singularities in which differences are maintained in relations of non-subordination and equality. Hardt and Negri have taken on the lessons of identity politics, of gender and race. They also insist that the multitude is a class concept. At this point, however, an interesting question emerges: can the bourgeoisie, in whatever particular context, be categorized as just another singularity, or is its identity constituted in necessary contradiction (and antagonism) to another class, for example the sellers of their labour power? Does the concept of the multitude look to maintain these kinds of social division, characterized as difference? There is no real answer to such questions because the bourgeoisie as a class does not make an appearance in Multitude (or Empire). Moreover, with the emergence into dominance of immaterial labour, modelled on forms of symbolic exchange, and the collapsing of the political into the economic, the process of exploitation through which bourgeoisie and proletariat are constituted and reproduced the wage form is transformed into a form of semiotic appropriation more akin to the rearticulating or recoding mechanisms of translation. This is what makes it possible for the creative idle talk (virtuosity) of the multitude, for example, to be recombined and transformed into administrative imperatives (command). In this account, exploitation is recongured as bureaucratized intellectual labour. This would seem to be Hardt and Negris solution to a historical problem signalled in Perry Andersons The

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

31

Origins of Postmodernity (1998), where he suggests that one of the dening experiences of contemporary capitalism has been the blurring of class identities into unrecognizability. More specically, Anderson maintains that, beginning in the 1970s with the denitive disappearance of its aristocratic alter ego and, paradoxically, with the subsequent universal triumph of capital during the 1980s, the bourgeoisie itself, in any strict sense, as a class possessed of self-consciousness and morale was all but extinct. Anderson resorts to a mix of Jamesonian tropes to produce an image of this state of affairs, and describes the new milieu televisually:
In place of that solid amphitheatre is an aquarium of oating, evanescent forms the projectors and managers, auditors and janitors, administrators and speculators of contemporary capital: functions of a monetary universe that knows no social xities or stable identities.

Anderson does not refer to the fate of working-class identity in his discussion, but, given both its structural and historical relation to the bourgeoisie, one might deduce from his arguments that the process of blurring will have been effective there too. Although pitched principally at the level of cultural experience, Andersons reections on the reconguration of capitals rule might also be formulated in more conventionally Marxist terms: as the forms taken today of the classic capitalist contradiction between the socialization of production, on the one hand, and

private appropriation, on the other. As Anderson suggests, the ways in which socialization and appropriation combine and are embodied in property relations today, as social capital, are not quite so visible. Recent discussions of either the consolidation or the crisis of US imperial dominance since the 1970s, for example in Giovanni Arrighis The Long Twentieth Century (1994) and Peter Gowans The Global Gamble (1999), address this problem too. Hardt and Negris Empire (2000) was an important and polemical addition to this debate. And so is its companion volume Multitude. Together, they set out an account of a post-imperialist, globalized form of sovereignty they call empire, which is irreducible to US (or any other form of national or regional) dominance, and characterized by new forms of capital and labour in which the bourgeoisie as a class does not make an appearance as well as post-televisual, network media. In this sense, the work of Hardt and Negri reveals how technologically outdated Andersons reections have already become. The dominant form of capital is thus a network form in which the ruling class has become bureaucratized, as Hegel suggested it might. A new subject of history has emerged, whose emancipatory potential lies in its singular appearance and creativity, but whose political space of actualization simultaneously erases such singularity (its specic political coordinates and historical means) as it becomes a mirror reecting back the forces of appropriation. John Kraniauskas

It really is time
Neil Lazarus, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004. 350 pp., 45.00 hb., 16.99 pb., 0 521 82694 2 hb., 0 521 53418 6 pb. Janna Thompson, Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Justice, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2002. 200 pp., 50.00 hb., 15.99 pb., 0 7456 2884 2 hb., 0 7456 2885 0 pb. In his introduction to this Cambridge Companion, Neil Lazarus species the aims of the volume as to introduce readers to key concepts, methods, theories and debates; to situate these concepts, theories and debates; and to contextualize the emergence of postcolonial literary studies. These are standard goals for any such collection: to offer the reader, who does not necessarily wish to become an expert in the eld, a series of references. If the reader expects to be presented with the pros and cons of the debate, he or she also usually expects some sympathy towards the topic. The reader of The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies is thus a little bit surprised to nd a collection of essays that are highly critical of the central concepts, methods and theories of postcolonial literary studies. The criticisms of Neil Lazarus, Benita Parry, Laura Chrisman and Timothy Brennan are familiar to anyone conversant with the debates around postcolonial theory. Yet one wonders why the collection was not called A Critique of Postcolonial Literary Studies, which would be a better description of the contents. The main reproach levelled at postcolonial literary critics among whom Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha stand tall is that they tend to erase, ignore, dismiss that body of literature usually connected with anti-colonialism and decolonization which, despite the claims of postcolonial critics, addressed similar issues

32

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

of culture and identity They are, in other words, exhibiting a symptom that is very common in the social sciences and humanities: pretending that, before them, nobody had noticed, observed or analysed tensions and conicts that were there nonetheless. This is why previous struggles failed to full their promises. Several chapters here attempt to demonstrate this through detailed and often critically incisive analyses of notions in postcolonial literary criticism. Though they indict postcolonial critics for ignoring the nonEnglish-speaking world, they are themselves, except for Coronil, guilty of ignoring work written in French, Spanish or Chinese. The chapters are uneven. Brennan, Lazarus and Coronil, for instance, demonstrate a deep knowledge of colonial and postcolonial history, postcolonial criticism, theories of globalization and European thought. Others tend to get carried away by their antipathy towards postcolonial literary studies. For those interested in scholarship critical of postcolonial studies, this is the book. Larazuss and Brennans essays are very thorough, and Brennans is also very clear and to the point. I share the irritation of many of the contributors with a postcolonial literature that seems to ignore the impact of capitalism upon peoples, plays with history, dismisses the violence of predatory practices and appears indifferent to peoples suffering. Yet, and this might be where postcolonial critics and their opponents meet, there is an assumption that literature is there to describe the world as it is, to propose solutions, to mobilize readers around political goals. On both sides, literature is assigned a duty, whether it is to support nationalist, anti-imperialist struggles or to deconstruct their discourses and representations. Is it fair to ask literature to describe the situation of a country and to suggest what is to be done? In Chapter 2 for instance, Lazarus eloquently describes the global dispensation since 1945: the inegalitarian, unevenly integrated, and highly polarized world system, the impact of US hegemony, the logic of unilateral capital, the unfolding hegemony of neoliberal ideology, and the consequences of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) on local economies. Samir Amins analysis is often invoked to support Lazaruss argument. Postcolonial critics are criticized for ignoring the unfolding power of the US hegemon. Yet the reader wonders if it is fair to indict Salman Rushdie or Arundhati Roy for not making the right analysis? Further, it is somewhat disquieting to have just one villain, the United States. Postcolonial rulers are criminal but at the same time creatures of larger powers and forces. Are they only puppets, with no responsibilities

in the degradation of their countrys economy and society? And the Soviet Union was not patronizing? Its love for the monumental was not problematic? When Roy wrote about the dreams that fuelled the freedom struggle, was she really saying that they always lacked substance, plausibility, realism or was she, rather, pointing to the dimension of idealization in freedom struggles, a dimension we might wish to address, instead of thinking any query about idealization to be guilty of cynicism about decolonization and national liberation? Tamara Sivanandan pursues a similar approach. Decolonization was a key global process, we are told, yet postcolonial critics have disparaged anti-colonialist discourse as Eurocentric and elitist. To prove her point, Sivanandan looks at the liberation struggle in Algeria and celebrates the heroism of the Algerian people. However, we might expect a more complex analysis of the Algerian struggle that would take into account the large body of literature written by Algerians which is highly critical of the national narrative; the focus on heroism, often producing a gendered narrative; and the dismissal of conicts within the national movement. There are novels, plays, lms and essays written and made by Algerians that if we follow Sivanandans analysis would be seen as not serving a politics of the people. Consider Nadir Moknches lm Viva Ladjrie; the writers El-Mahdi Acherchour, Massa Bey, Rachida Khouazem, Lela Sebbar; the scholars Mostefa Lacheraf, Mohamed Harbi, Mahfoud Kaddache do these postcolonial thinkers, lmmakers and artist constitute an elite that betrays the people? They have been harassed by their own state, their work has been censored because they refused to support a politics of the people without rst asking how that people has been constructed. Continuing to analyse the Algerian struggle through Fanon versus Bhabha, as if no critical analysis of the FLN was produced during the struggle or since strikes the reader as somewhat lacking in knowledge of current debates in Algeria. The English-speaking world seems to have stopped at Frantz Fanon where Algeria is concerned. It is time to read the current generation of postcolonial Algerians, to look at their lms, to listen to their voices. What they say would t the political criteria of the volumes contributors, yet the latter might be surprised at their criticism of the narrative of national liberation. These artists, writers and scholars are aware of the disparities and inequalities of the world, of the responsibility of the West for their countrys impoverishment, but they are also very much aware of the responsibilities of their leaders with their shameless

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

33

and violent predatory practices. Why still an idealization of the peasant? Who would set the criteria of an independent and progressive culture? The programme sounds great, but it does not answer to the current anxieties of postcolonial thinkers. Reading one current body of literature postcolonial studies through the texts of an older generation (of the 1960s and 1970s), while ignoring the current body of literature coming from postcolonial countries, is a method used by most of the contributors. It is not convincing. Bhabha and Spivak are criticized via Fanon or Cabral, but if we looked at current political activists and intellectuals, the reading would be different. True, Bhabha and Spivak themselves have turned to the generation of the 1960s and 1970s (Fanon et al.) to support their criticism of the national narrative, the discourse of national emancipation, and its gendered dimension. However, it is time to go beyond Fanon and Cabral, not to forget or ignore their theories but to contribute to an analysis of our current condition. Critically reassessing the dreams of national liberation does not in any way signify contempt for what these struggles achieved. If we discuss the notion of the nation via Fanon, Cabral, Mandela and Gandhi, we can confront their views with those of Bhabha, Spivak and Pattherjee, for instance. But we cannot discuss the Algerian struggle, as event, via Fanon versus Bhabha. Some chapters are confusing: the reader moves from analysis of slavery in the Caribbean to the Indian national struggle, with quotations from Amin, Fanon and Csaire thrown in. We do not get a sense of the chronology (the fact that a work by Csaire published in 1959 appears in the text with the date of its translation into English (1970) does not help). For that matter, Csaire is often invoked along with Fanon and Cabral, although he does not belong at all to the same generation or struggle (and Csaire was never an anticolonial nationalist as claimed here). The use of Fanon and Csaire is frequently decontextualized, despite the fact that all authors insist on the importance of context. Some of the contributors would benet from following Brennans precept of respecting liation and genealogy. Coronils essay is very suggestive. He looks at the reception of postcolonial theory in Latin America and the debate that followed. I was especially interested by the work of the philosophers Santiago Castro-Gmez and Eduardo Mendieta, who suggest understanding the post of postcolonialism as an anticolonial position: post at the service of decolonizing decolonization. This comparative approach is interesting also because it raises tangentially an important question:

why has a body of work said to use French theories (post-structuralism and postmodernism) extensively had so little resonance in France? Should we rejoice? If I have understood most of the contributors essays, we should. Edward Saids Orientalism, translated into French in 1980, never deeply inuenced French literary criticism and there exist no translations of Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, the Subaltern Studies Group, Neil Lazarus, Anthony Appiah, Benita Parry, Lisa Lowe, Aihwa Ong or Gayatri Spivak. (Paul Gilroys Black Atlantic was translated in 2004 and references have been made in recent reviews to work by postcolonial thinkers. The 2005 translation of a book on subaltern studies in India was a criticism of the methods and theory of the Subaltern Studies Group, whose works have not themselves been translated.) French literary criticism, art history, historical or anthropological research have not been affected by the apolitical and ahistorical approaches of postcolonial theory. One could suggest that the success of certain French thinkers in the English-speaking world has been a matter of snobbery and the French, being au courant, have been amused. Unfortunately, the explanation is more problematic. French critics are suspicious of the populism and culturalism of postcolonial theory, in the name of the universal. But this too is a way to avoid confrontation with a postcolonial generation. Scholarship on the colonial and postcolonial experience is dominated by either denunciation or remorse. Pierre Vidal-Naquet or Mohamed Harbi, both highly respected scholars, have noted how much French scholarship is still timid where analysis of the colonials impact on the Republic, the Nation, is concerned. Furthermore, there is a narcissism among many French scholars that forbids them from acknowledging what might come from the postcolony. They must be the ones who will discover the postcolonial whether to celebrate it or to criticize it. I cannot help thinking that a dose of postcolonial theory would do some good to French research, and that a debate, like the one Coronil describes in Latin America, might challenge French narcissism. I do think that the postcolonial debate has been much more fruitful than most of the contributors here suggest: work on the nation, identity, sexuality, hybridity, creolization, masculinity, femininity has opened up new areas of research and inquiry, and provided concepts to think postcolonial discontent. This work has freed researchers to look at what was considered of minor importance in the theory of national liberation: urban cultures, music, sexuality, gays and lesbians lives, theatre. Following Stuart Hall, the method of post-

34

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

colonial theory is a method of reading the colonial legacy, the promises of national emancipation, its realizations and its defeats, and the experience of current forms of exclusion and inclusion in neoliberal globalization. In Taking Responsibility for the Past, Janna Thompson proposes a new way of looking at justice and mass crime: historical obligation, the moral responsibility incurred by individuals as citizens, owners or executives of corporations, or members of some other transgenerational association or community, as the result of the commitments or actions of their predecessors. Historical obligation is not the same thing as political obligation: the former exists across time, where the latter can be transformed by new contexts. Thomson looks at the violation of treaties and demands for reparation (for slavery, genocide, deportation). She examines concrete examples, going through arguments and counterarguments regarding transgenerational obligations. Treaties, she says, are promises and, as such, should be respected. It is not clear who will enforce the promise across time. When she writes reluctant citizens might be persuaded that the burdens they are forced to assume are justied because of these good consequences (promotion of trust and peaceful coexistence), the reader might ask: persuaded by whom? How? Will there be a police to enforce the promise? Or is it goodwill among people that will ensure its enforcement? Thompson seems to believe in a natural desire of people to be good. It seems simply a matter of moral education that will allow this natural desire to win over the politics of force and might. The discussion of historical obligation is unsatisfactory. It seems as though the violation of treaties came from people who were not aware of their historical obligation. What of politics as a site of conicts between diverging interests, which entails struggle,

which can be armed and violent for what seems right for a group, a people, and which means the violation of a treaty? Further, the focus on heritage is problematic: should people really be accountable for crimes committed by their nation centuries ago? Thompson is right to try to develop a framework in which some restitution, reparation, can be achieved. But is it a matter of proposing an ethics of historical obligation or of thinking about developing international law and tribunal and the means to make this law and tribunal efcient? (But then, who writes the law? Who names the judges? Witness the controversy around the International Tribunal for Rwanda.) I was uncomfortable with Thompsons understanding of inheritance: protecting the right to make bequests and the right of heirs to receive them. To enjoy the prestige of our heroic parents or to commiserate with the suffering of our victimized parents is normal, but when these sentiments support a political demand we must ask if we are not acting in our own interests rather than in the name of morals. As Tzvetan Todorov has argued, The public reminder of the past has an educative dimension only if it also questions our own actions and shows that we (or those with whom we identify ourselves) have not always been the good incarnate. Past suffering comes down as a narrative that exercises a powerful attraction because it conjures up images of loss, misfortune and tragedy. Thompson assumes a state of innocence. But the state of innocence, Hannah Arendt has remarked, does not belong to the world of the human conceived as members of a political community. Thompsons book is a contribution to the current debate on crime, reparation, apology, responsibility, but her trust in the moral weight of the promise prevents her from analysing some of its ethical implications. Franoise Vergs

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

35

Wittgenstein supplements
Alessandra Tanesini, Wittgenstein: A Feminist Interpretation, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2004. xiv + 164 pp., 55.00 hb., 15.99 pb., 0 7456 2074 4 hb., 0 7456 2075 2 pb. Gavin Kitching, Wittgenstein and Society: Essays in Conceptual Puzzlement, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2003. 230 pp., 47.50 hb., 0 7546 3342 X. There is some playful typography on the title pages of Alessandra Tanesinis boldly argued book on the relevance of Wittgensteins philosophy for feminism. The name of the man whose work is the object of the authors interest has been adapted with two graphic images. The two little is have been replaced with the schematic gures of two little Is, two children. In the place of the rst little i is the gure of a little girl, a girl with a short ponytail wearing a knee-length, sleeveless dress. She seems to be taking a peek around the rst t. Maybe she is hiding from or spying on the second gure at the other end of the line of letters, the gure of a little boy wearing a T-shirt and shorts. He seems to be standing still, alone, facing the back of the n, facing away from the girl who seems to be keeping her eye on him. The boy might be quietly counting obediently inattentive to every other until he is allowed to start looking for the ones who are hiding. But his hands are by his sides, perhaps in his pockets, not covering his eyes. Is he just a boy on his own, in his own world? Is he even aware that he is being watched by a girl? Did he turn away from her so that he could be on his own, playing by himself. The girl has stepped slightly out of line as she tries to get a better view. Perhaps she wants to see whatever it is that the boy is doing on his own, perhaps it intrigues her. She is peeping round the corner of the t so she can see the boy. This is not the rst time graphic designers have worked with and on Wittgensteins name. The cover of the paperback reprint of Henry Statens Wittgenstein and Derrida establishes a visual contrast between the compared authors by using the old German high Gothic font for the name Wittgenstein and a serif font for and Derrida. It is hard not to see the Gothic font as marking a distinction of styles, so that the coming work of paralleling developed by Staten is silently prefaced by a worry which Staten himself quickly voices: namely, how Derridas work could possibly be compatible with Wittgensteins. The graphic difference marking the apparently obvious contrast between a proper philosopher, someone who (one might presume) continues the old Platonic quarrel with poetry and someone who develops a view of language which is attentive to the way words as words (sounds, shapes, associative echoes) allow themselves to be tted together. If the former uses an unusual style this is something to be read through in order that one can come to see the point lying behind them. The way his words are ordered or tted together is not part of their real business the work of argument and demonstration. Authors who show too much interest in features of a text that seem to have very little, almost nothing to do with the (literal) meaning of words are involving themselves with powers of language which philosophy routinely declares illegitimate for the purposes of rationality. Tanesini wants her reading of Wittgenstein to do better than those proposed by imaginatively challenged interpreters, and attempts properly to embrace an attentiveness to a sense that Wittgenstein chooses his words in the way poets choose their words. Indeed, using the new (and in my view rather heavy-handed) translation of a rarely quoted remark from Culture and Value, Tanesini urges us not to forget Wittgensteins saying one should write philosophy only as one writes a poem. In Wittgensteins writing, she wants to insist, every word counts. Well, if every word counts we should perhaps be more attentive to the fact that Wittgenstein wrote that one should only be allowed to write philosophy nur dichten, not nur Gedicht. (Winchs original translation of dichten as poetic composition in the 1977 edition seems ne to me.) In order to see why Wittgenstein might want to write in this way why he nds a distinctively dense (dicht) way of writing irreplaceably tting in philosophy one will want to read his work in ways which do not expend every effort reading through its unusual composition. And even if this should not be too rapidly equated with wanting to write as one writes a poem, Tanesinis attempt in this regard is warmly to be welcomed. In what seems to me a questionable gesture, Tanesini presents this approach as one of two basic feminist strands in her interpretation of Wittgenstein. She bases this on the (no doubt correct) point that feminist theorists have suggested that we look more closely at the style in which philosophers write. I think it is fair to say that feminists are not alone here, unless that term

36

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

has been so incorporated into contemporary grammar that it now simply denotes the kind of reading championed by anyone who is prepared to be unprepared, prepared for example not to assume that they know what it means to be an appropriately sensitive reader of every text that might be called philosophical. But such an identication would be a loss to feminism and to reading. Nevertheless, Tanesinis interpretive proposals seem to me, like Statens, profoundly more in tune with the texts she is exploring than are the more narrowly argumentocentric varieties that prevail. On the other hand, however, the details of her interpretive work suggest that her conceptual debts owe more to that other sort of reader than she might suppose. The reader she wants to oppose is the one who comes to a text with the following distinctive assumptions:
We are expected to understand the propositional contents, the literal meaning, of the (declarative) sentences which make up a work of philosophy. We understand the philosopher when we understand the claims she puts forward as true in her work.

Tanesini does not endorse this, of course. But the trouble is that she does endorse something like its mirror image. Where the traditional reader wants to focus on literal meaning, Tanesinis feminist approach is interested in the interpretation of the meanings of imagery. So her interpretation of Wittgensteins philosophy advances through an analysis of the metaphors Wittgenstein uses when he discusses philosophy itself. However, in turning from an interest in literal meaning to an attentiveness to metaphor, Tanesini is, I would suggest, simply turning within the framing assumptions of the more usual treatment. As if a concern with a philosophical text that is composed nur dichten demands that one pay special attention to the striking images and metaphors that the text resorts to. Even if the opposition between a reading that focuses on literal meaning and a reading that focuses on metaphorical meaning is somewhat simplistic, Tanesini does not pursue her interpretation naively but employs some of the methodological precepts developed by the French feminist philosopher Michle Le Duff. A nutshell of Le Duffs investigation of the metaphors that shore up traditional philosophical theory is then presented, in the form of four methodological instructions, to articulate a theoretically well-grounded route of access to dimensions of Wittgensteins teachings which are missed if one takes metaphors to be mere embellishments. This appropriation of Le Duff is not unproblematic. We are, as Tanesini is aware, some

way from Le Duffs critical effort to show how philosophical texts that aim to eschew metaphor at crucial points fail to do so, when we turn to a text which is self-consciously written with an ideal of composition that is completely foreign to such scientistic ambitions. Moreover, Tanesinis feminist efforts do not seem to me to reap many metaphilosophical rewards. Perhaps I have read too much Cavell (who is obviously an important reader of Wittgenstein for Tanesini too), but highlighting the fact that Wittgenstein recurs again and again to the image of the philosopher as lost in the landscape of language and a stranger in her homeland is hardly news. Cavell would also stress the traditional philosophers resistance to this image, and I think it would be grist to that resisting mill to add, as Tanesini does, that they are prone to resist and misconstrue his approach to philosophy because he diagnosed correctly some of the impulses that lead people to philosophize. Its because you are lost and homeless that you resist accepting that you are lost and homeless. As I have mentioned, however, the question of style is only one side of Tanesinis feminist interpretation. The other is the retrieval in Wittgensteins thought of aspects of his work that can be employed for feminist purposes. The idea of using Wittgensteins thought for this purpose is not itself much explored by Tanesini. She distinguishes it sharply from any suggestion of searching for ideas which could be put to feminist work (by which she means, I think, ideas which are about substantive issues of womens oppression or the various feminist approaches to issues concerning equality). But while she confronts tricky questions about Wittgensteins personal views about women with considerable subtlety, the more general question of using the work of a man to correct a perceived weakness within contemporary feminist thought the question, one might say, of Tanesinis own Hlose complex is not directly addressed. Of course that question can be answered without a icker of feminist scruple. There are feminists who care not a hoot about the source of helpful or intriguing ideas. But others are less condent. How deep do differences of thinking go along the lines of differences that matter to feminists? Some feminists might agree with Wittgenstein (on the substantive idea) that when one is concerned to acknowledge who we are we cannot simply ignore questions of ones being a man or being a woman. And Tanesinis own composition wriggles around trying to get comfortable with the prospect of seeking a relationship between feminism and Wittgensteins philosophy.

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

37

There is, she suggests, a convergence between them so his response is one with which feminist philosophers can fruitfully engage. In particular, his remarks can contribute to feminist arguments because his concern with the nitude of human existence is an important issue for feminist philosophy. Equally, his rejection of the modern conception of the autonomous subject can be put to use to further the feminist debate in this area because the modern conception of the subject has also been the target of much feminist criticism. The basic theme is that feminist criticism is usefully supplemented by taking on board Wittgensteins thought. Of course, this kind of relation is only furthering the debate because Wittgensteins teaching has not hitherto been endorsed by feminism. Indeed, it is a recurrent motif of the book that Wittgensteins work offers an alternative to standard feminist positions. One doesnt get much sense of what feminism is from this book. Just one paragraph on page 117 is devoted to historical or cultural themes conceived from a perspective which highlights injustices to women. But you get a good sense that Tanesini thinks feminism badly in need of a Wittgensteinian supplement, most frequently in the areas where Wittgensteins philosophy is itself most focused: the critique of traditional conceptions of the subject, of subjectivity and of language. However, what Tanesini regards as current feminist unclarity isnt conned to these issues. Feminist political philosophy too stands in need of some Wittgensteinian therapy. Interestingly, behind the feminist faade under re in this case is a male author whose supplement to feminism ought to have caused Tanesini to take stock of the conguration of Wittgenstein as a supplement to feminism: the already mentioned master-dichter, Jacques Derrida. The deconstructive paradox in political philosophy (so called because of its similarities to Derridas views on meaning) that Wittgensteins thought will help to dissolve is that the conditions of possibility of a democratic political community are at the same time the conditions of impossibility of the full realization of this same community. The central claim here (rehearsed in Tanesinis article in RP 110) is that every construction of a community in which insiders speak together with one voice as a collective we thereby produces (as a matter of logic) the possibility of outsiders to this community, the possibility of an excluded they. Special tensions arise as soon as one adds to this logical or conceptual point the political requirement that the constructed community be democratic, that it have a proper respect for equality and a recognition of individual freedom. The democratic

demand would seem ideal and yet, according to Chantal Mouffe, as such it is a dangerous illusion: the very realization of such a community would presuppose an unjust suppression of some group differences. In other words, any realized democratic community should (ideally as it were) be less than ideal, less than fully at one with itself: it must remain open to internal differences (differences which produce insiders and outsiders) that a fully realized democracy would have resolved. Tanesini attempts to dispel the sense of paradox by removing the conceptual oor on which it rests: the assumption that any act of saying we serves to dene a group of us from which they whoever they

are are excluded. Specically, what she seeks is a use of we which relates to a community based on acknowledgement rather than a community based on our knowledge of our similarities. Thus, the most forceful and distinctively Wittgensteinian objection to the assumption she advances is that since knowing others is to be regarded as, primarily, a matter of acknowledging them, then the paradox of democratic community turns out to be the claim that the conditions for the acknowledgement of some people are at the same time the conditions for the impossibility of acknowledging other people. And this, Tanesini suggests, does not seem compelling after all. The reasoning is that acknowledging that someone is, say, suffering simply has no bearing on whether there are or could be others that I fail to acknowledge, and acts of saying we which function as acknowledgements are no different. I dont think that this sufces to remove the paradox, however. Indeed, it seems clear that even the Wittgensteinian we is in the business of encircling a group. Consider the case Tanesini addresses concerning what

38

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

we share in sharing a language. The idea here is that there is a shared framework of attunements that makes possible a community based on acknowledgement. That is, each member of the community will be able to acknowledge and be acknowledged by every other. However, the conceptual point that motivates the paradox of community in this case would not be that such relations of acknowledgement require any failure, or possible failure, of acknowledgement of others, but rather that the existence of such a community presupposes the possibility of withholding acknowledgement from others. Tanesini accepts that, as a matter of logic, only if there are inferiors, can we possibly count as superiors, but, by parity of reasoning, we can only make sense of acknowledging others if we can at least conceive of the possibility of withholding it. So the apparently not-so-compelling formulation of the paradox as concerning conditions of acknowledgement turns out to be compelling after all, because the issue is not of someones failure to acknowledge others but of their refusing to. (Cavell, to whom Tanesini is again greatly indebted here, is as clear as one could wish on this. See, for example, The Claim of Reason, p. 428.) While Tanesini regards the paradox as a temptation one should resist, she nds the substantive conclusion drawn from the paradox namely, that we should not strive rationally to resolve all conicts in a democratic community as independently disturbing. This is somewhat surprising since Mouffes acceptance that living in such a community involves the apparently less than ideal feature of living with the permanent possibility of having non-rationally resolvable differences with ones adversaries (and so concerns relations to those among us whose ideas we combat), is not at all far from the Wittgensteinian idea that differences of world-view can be so serious that they cannot be resolved by giving reasons, cases where we end up using slogans to combat each other. In any event, to accept, as Mouffe seems to, that reasons come to an end somewhere and that at the end of reasons comes persuasion (On Certainty, 612) seems to me far less disturbing than what one might envisage as the upshot of attempting to regard the situation as one where reason is in play all the way down as it were. On such a view, it is hard to avoid seeing those who differ fundamentally from you as fundamentally unreasonable. And, as Geoffrey Bennington has put it in Arguing with Derrida, nothing is more like a holy war than the war of what perceives itself as reason against what it perceives as unreason. No doubt Tanesini would want to resist this implication, but her avowedly Rousseauist position precisely afrms that

outsiders to a community need not be treated in the same way as members of it. Towards the end of his book of essays Gavin Kitching is also keen to use Wittgenstein (and indeed Cavell) to dissolve what he calls a Derridean or postmodernist puzzle. However, Kitchings text develops far more dynamically as a lesson in conceptual puzzlement than as a text on it. That is, while Tanesini writes throughout with the air of someone who has a settled condence over what feminism is and needs and what Wittgenstein is on about, Kitchings book is largely devoted to putting on show the journey, or his journey, towards any such settled understanding. Indeed, for the most part Kitching gives the impression of being more keen to confess his failures than he is to claim to see things aright. Kitchings journey starts with an essay written some twenty years ago in which he sees Wittgenstein as providing a richly pragmatic and contextualist conception of the human use of language. This philosophical approach is taken both to be congenial to a classically Marxist emphasis on praxis and also to offer powerful criticisms of claims (especially Althusserian, structuralist claims) concerning the scientic character of Marxian theory. Hostility to approaches which seem to him insufciently attentive to the lives, thoughts and feelings of esh-and-bone human beings grows steadily throughout the book, culminating in a bitter and aggressive attack on what he calls the cult of theory. Roughly speaking, then, the twenty-year journey covered by the essays in this collection shows Kitching slowly shifting his position from that of a (mere) Wittgensteinian critic of theoretical stances which afrm some kind of scientic realism to being a (militant) Wittgensteinian opponent of theoreticist tendencies to afrm philosophical conceptions of any kind (including pragmatic or contextualist ones). For the later Kitching, an active and genuinely challenging political outlook (some kind of socialism) simply does not need any of that strictly inhuman, metaphysical discourse. The proximity here to at least one reading of Marxs famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach is greater than Kitching seems to acknowledge. While citing it as a favourite Marxian quotation of his youth, he thinks that it underestimates how far the activity of intellectuals as intellectuals (working in the British Library or wherever) can itself be an activity of (literally) world-changing signicance. So one shouldnt simply oppose philosophical interpretations of the world and active efforts at changing it, in the way his younger self wanted to. But the long-journeyed Kitching seems

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

39

to me to have arrived at a position every bit as radical as his youthfully impatient self: namely, to a no-holdsbarred afrmation that the only point of engaging with philosophy at all is to get oneself or somebody else to see that they have lapsed into metaphysics and ought to stop doing so. Kitchings fervent desire, which he takes himself to share with Wittgenstein, is that we stop doing philosophy. Marx is convicted at times for sliding into metaphysics too, but what Marx did that is still living today is what he did when he turned his back on philosophy. It is this profoundly hostile outlook towards what Kitching calls theoreticist reection that leads to the culminating engagement with Derrida at the end of the book. It aims to show, very much like Tanesini, that the Derridean or postmodernist puzzle about meaning is a classical piece of philosophical metaphysics. Out of the anger that he feels over the fact that some of the very best students today are falling prey to such thinking, Kitching fulminates against a humanities culture that has been terrorised by philosophy, a terrorism that has prevented it from doing the decent empirical work, statistical research and outward-looking writing which would bring intellectuals in our time back in the world. What they need to do, and what philosophy prevents, is seriously to respond to a desperate desire for at least some guidance or ideas on what is to be done about material issues today. It is probably a good thing that Kitching species his target rather vaguely as the Derridean or postmodernist puzzle since his only quotation from Derrida occurs in a part of the discussion illustrating of the difference between texts which do and texts which do not succeed in avoiding the temptation to do philosophy. The failure to read any of Derridas writings is extremely annoying, however, since the kernel of Kitchings criticism concerns the distinctive difculty of responding to it, of nding sense in it. That is, the basis for asserting the peculiar emptiness of Derridas work is supposed to be the fact that we do not know what to say in response. But if that is so important it is surely of equal importance to engage at some point with what Derrida actually writes, and not just what a frustrated reader read[s] Derrida saying. In any case, what Kitching says in feigned response to an absent text shows how his desire to escape philosophy remains profoundly entrenched in it. In particular, his insistence that it is more commonly the case that I am absolutely clear that you meant this and not that in language, and hence that what people say is more commonly free of ambiguity of meaning, shows him wanting, urgently, to engage

in a dispute in which he regards himself as stating facts recognised by every reasonable human being (Philosophical Investigations, 402). But to assert that Derrida [is] clearly wrong because we can recall cases where others got my meaning immediately is not to recognize and state facts about what is there, an event or happening in the world; it is, if anything, to recall that statements like She got my meaning immediately have a use in are in circulation in the economy of our language. As far as I know no one has suggested we take them out. Neither Wittgenstein nor Derrida identies his work with an effort to afrm or deny the correctness of our ways of speaking, but both engage in effort to come to terms with something they nd enigmatic and remarkable, a life with language. And it is in their virtuoso performances, their ways of writing philosophy nur dichten, in which they attempt reectively to endure without distortion what (in der tat) we endure every day as our every day itself that I, like Henry Staten, but unlike Tanesini and Kitching, still nd Wittgenstein and Derrida, in-deed, uncannily close. Simon Glendinning

Truth of anothers making

Michel Foucault, Il Faut Dfendre la Socit, Gallimard/Seuil, Paris, 1987. 283 pp., 2 02 0231169 7. Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey, Allen Lane, London, 2003. 310 pp., 16.99 pb., 0 71 399707 9 Michel Foucault, Les Anormaux, Gallimard/Seuil, Paris, 1999. 351 pp., 2 02 030798 7. Abnormal, trans. Graham Burchell, Verso, London, 2003, 374 pp., 25.00 hb., 1 85984 539 8. Michel Foucault, LHermneutique du sujet, Gallimard/Seuil, Paris, 2001. 540 pp., 30.00 hb., 2 02 030800 2. Michel Foucault, Le Pouvoir psychiatrique, Gallimard/ Seuil, Paris, 2003. 399 pp., 25.00 pb., 2 02 030769 3. Michel Foucault, La Peinture de Manet, suivi de Michel Foucault, un regard, ed. Maryvonne Saison, Seuil, Paris, 2004. 169 pp., 20.00 hb, 2 02 058537 5. When Michel Foucault died in June 1984 he left no will. There was, however, a note to his partner Daniel Defert, written in case something happened when

40

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

Foucault went to Poland in 1982. Nothing untoward did happen in Poland, but the note has been interpreted as expressing Foucaults last wishes. It stated, among other things, that there were to be no posthumous publications. In 1984 the corpus was both incomplete and untidy. Anthologies of selected writings existed in English, German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, but there were no French equivalents. There was no equivalent to the volumes of Sartres Situations. Other material, much of it unpublished, was in circulation in the form of pirate editions (especially in Italy), photocopies and transcripts of lectures but it was surprisingly difcult to get an overview of just how Foucaults work developed. It was certainly possible to locate a great deal of uncollected material but doing so took time and patience, particularly as most bibliographies were unreliable and incomplete. Anyone who wished to read, say, Foucaults views on the Iranian Revolution needed both a reading knowledge of Italian and access to a run of back issues of Corriere della Sera. Major lectures given in Brazil on the history of medicine and the politics of health were available only in Portuguese translation. Given this state of affairs, there were inevitably rumours about lost publications. Some of them concerned a mysterious plan for a book on Manet. Foucault was known to have signed a contract with ditions de Minuit in 1967, but the book was never written. Some hints as to what it might have looked like emerged from the little book on Magritte (Ceci nest pas une pipe) and Foucault was known to have lectured on Manet, but the texts remained elusive and therefore surrounded by legends. We can now read the famous lecture. La Peinture de Manet is a transcript of a lecture given in Tunis in 1971 (there are, apparently, other versions) and it discusses thirteen of the artists best-known paintings. The lecture raises some of the classic issues, such as that of the puzzling lines of sight in the Courtauld Institutes Bar at the Folies-Bergre but, although beautifully produced and illustrated, the book is something of a disappointment. It has its charm but, despite some of the claims made in the eight essays that accompany the lecture, cannot be counted as a major lost work. As is obvious from the opening of The Order of Things, the essay on Magritte and other minor pieces, Foucault could write well on the visual arts but he never claimed to a specialist in aesthetics or art history. He was right not to claim that status. It is, after all, a curious art historian who takes so little interest in colour and, for Foucault, Velasquezs Las Meninas and Manets paintings appear to be mono-

chrome. The main interest of Foucaults lecture is the hesitation between a Greenbergian emphasis on the atness and two-dimensionality of the canvases, and a phenomenological approach to painting as event that obviously owes a lot to Merleau-Pontys late work on visibility and invisibility. The landscape changed dramatically in 1994 when the four volumes of Dits et crits were published by Gallimard. They contained 364 items, presented in chronological order, and ran to over three thousand pages. Although Dits et crits supposedly contained everything published in Foucaults lifetime, there were some minor exceptions, such as a few interviews published in the gay press without the interviewees express authorization. It suddenly became apparent that Foucault was not just the author of the books that had made him famous. A lot of fascinating material could be found in articles, prefaces and marginalia. It was also surprising to see how much of Foucaults work originally relied on oral supports such as interviews, talks and conversations. The publication of the four volumes was the culmination of a long and timeconsuming project supervised by Defert and Franois Ewald, once Foucaults assistant at the Collge de France. The editing, indexing and bibliographical input were of outstanding quality. Taken together, the four volumes were a new and exciting box of intellectual and political tools. Sadly, the three volumes of Essential Works (a selected Dits et crits) available in English translation are not of the same quality (Paul Rabinow, ed. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. I, Ethics, Allen Lane, London, 1997; James D. Faubion, The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. II, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, Allen Lane, London, 1998; James D. Faubion, The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. III, Power, Allen Lane, London, 2001). They are certainly an improvement on the earlier collections, but the choice to group the texts by theme rather than chronology makes it difcult to trace Foucaults development, whilst the absence of a general index to the three volumes makes them awkward to use. The omission of Deferts detailed chronology of Foucaults life is to be regretted. In 1971, Foucault was elected to a chair at the Collge de France. His only responsibility was to give public lectures and seminars. Professors at the Collge do not teach a syllabus and the institution awards no degrees or qualications. They are required to present their original research, and that is all. Course summaries are published in the Collges Annuaire. Foucaults lectures were immensely popular and successful. Indeed they were too popular and successful;

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

41

the lecture theatre, with its portrait of Bergson, was lled to overowing and another room had to be provided to accommodate the overspill. A lot of people heard Foucault lecturing without actually seeing him as they listened to the amplied voice coming through the speakers. Many of those present were armed with cassette recorders, and transcripts of the lectures many of them incomplete and inaccurate soon began to circulate. In 1994 it was argued that the lectures were not published in Foucaults lifetime and therefore could not be printed. In 1997 the argument was reversed: the act of giving a public lecture constituted a form of performative publication. In February of that year, the rst volume of Foucaults lectures at the Collge appeared in print, to considerable acclaim. To date, six volumes have appeared (two of them too late to be discussed here: Naissance de la biopolitique (197879), Gallimard/Seuil, Paris, 2004; Scurit, territoire, population (197778), Galimard/Seuil, Paris, 2004) and two have been translated. At the moment, it is not clear whether all the lectures (thirteen volumes) will be published, as tapes of some of the earliest have yet to be located. The order in which the lectures have been published in French is itself slightly mysterious and, whilst all volumes are to be translated under the general editorship of Arnold Davidson (University of Chicago), it is puzzling to nd that the rst two have been issued by such different publishers. There is still something ambiguous about these publications. The texts are not Foucaults original manuscripts, which still come under the no posthumous publication rule. They are transcripts of tape recordings that have been compared with manuscripts in the possession of Daniel Defert, scrupulously annotated and edited with enormous erudition. Most of the recordings were made by Jacques Lagrange, the unsung bibliographical hero of Dits et crits and editor of the 197980 lectures on Le Gouvernement des vivants (publication announced for 2005). As anyone who has ever suffered headaches as a result of listening to the original tapes (once held by the Bibliothque du Saulchoir and now by the Institut Mmoires de ldition Contemporaine) will appreciate, an enormous amount of work has gone into producing these volumes. We owe their editors an enormous debt of gratitude. The essays appended to each volume help to situate the lectures in terms of both the broader context and Foucaults complex intellectual trajectory. As the series is still incomplete, there is a certain unevenness about it. The largest volume reproduces the lectures on the hermeneutics of the subject (198182)

and is in effect an immensely long version of the chapter on The Cultivation of the Self in The Care of the Self. A comparison of the two texts would no doubt provide fascinating insights into Foucaults working methods, but that task is best left to those with a great familiarity with the more remote byways of Greek and Roman philosophy. The other volumes are more accessible and, for most readers, of more immediate interest. Reading them is a somewhat curious experience. Foucault is not expounding or summarizing some existing body of thought. He is thinking on his feet as he explores the thesis, derived largely from French historiography but also from Hobbes and the English Levellers and Diggers, that society is always the site of a battle between antagonistic races (Franks and Gauls, Anglo-Saxons and Normans) in Society Must Be Defended (1976), as he surveys the domain of psychiatric power (197475) and as he traces the medicolegal genealogy of the concept of abnormality. There are many digressions and not a little repetition. Some lines of enquiry are pursued for a while and then suddenly dropped. There is much here that is familiar. There are intimations of the themes of Discipline and Punish and I, Pierre Rivire as Foucault charts the shift from a sovereign power that constantly seeks to legitimize itself by tracing its ancestry (and therefore its racial origins) to the disciplinary power that operates anonymously and establishes the capillary mechanisms that allow it to work from below as well as from above. Sovereign power was spectacular and its manifestations brutally physical, but it could be both legitimized and delegitimized from below. Marie-Antoinette was a queen who became a monster: she had committed adultery and incest, and she was a lesbian. No legitimacy there. The lectures on psychiatric power follow the medico-legal shifts that occur as acts and deeds becomes less important than the psychological pathological types held responsible for them. The rst three sets of lectures hint strongly at the work to come as the notions of biopower and governmentality begin to emerge. They also hint at the works that never came. Parts of Abnormal look like preparatory material for the anthology of lives of infamous men, which never saw the light of day. A patient reading of that volume and sections of the others might make it possible to reconstruct the six volumes of the History of Sexuality that were announced in 1976 but never written. Some passages in the lectures on psychiatric power have an almost alarming contemporary relevance. If proposed changes to the Mental Health Act are approved, persons suffering from DSPD (Dangerous

42

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

Severe Personality Disorder) known to most of us as psychopaths may be held indenitely in secure institutions not because of what they have done, but because of what they are and might do. Government statements admit, however, that there is no clear denition legal or medical of DSPD and that there is no denite diagnosis. The identication of DSPD was not the result of some diagnostic breakthrough but the outcome of discussions in a government committee. Foucault is a very good guide when it comes to comprehending how medico-legal entities such as dangerousness come into existence. DSPD is a similar entity. Those suspected of being DSPD the term functions as both a noun and an adjective will be referred to a Mental Health Tribunal by doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, carers and so on. The Tribunal will be created from on high but, if it is to function, power must seep downwards and then upwards. The Tribunal will supply the truth that will allow a court and a judge to pass sentence, but it will not be a truth of its own making. David Macey

Equal access?
Dianna Taylor and Karen Vintges, eds, Feminism and the Final Foucault, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 2004. 307 pp., 41.00 hb., 14.95 pb., 0 252 02927 5 hb., 0 252 07182 4 pb. Given that Foucaults inuence on feminism has been greater possibly than that of any other modern thinker, it is striking that he himself never specically examines the sources of womens subjectication. Nonetheless, there is a burgeoning analysis of the implications of his thought for feminism, a sizeable proportion of which focuses on his middle-period works such as Discipline and Punish. However, with the exception of Lois McNays 1992 critique, Foucault and Feminism, and Caroline Ramazonoglus collection, Up Against Foucault (1993), there have been few extensive feminist explorations of Foucaults nal intellectual phase. During this period, Foucault departed from a genealogical study of the disciplinary subject, analysing instead those practices or technologies of freedom that constitute it. Such technologies are ethical in the sense that they extend the possibility of critical human agency in a world in which faith in absolutes has become a remote prospect. Feminism and the Final Foucault responds to the need within feminism to

interrogate the critical value of this project by bringing together new reections on texts such as The Use of Pleasure and Care of the Self. The later Foucault, the editors claim, contributes to the feminist possibility of fashioning new forms of commitment without truth (Karen Vintges primary concern), and of sustaining responsibility within the limits of contingency (Dianna Taylors main theme). Taken as a whole, the volume is a fascinating theoretical engagement, which, I think, largely succeeds in shedding light on the core ambiguity that critics have identied with Foucaults later work. Whilst he pushes there against a postmodernist interpretation of French existentialism, claiming to nd within it the possibility of emancipatory politics, critics have characterized the later work as apolitical on account of its allegedly abstract, or even solipsistic, conception of freedom. In Care of the Self, the third volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault returns to the Ancient Greeks and Romans for inspiration, nding in their works productive notions of ethical self-formation and practices involving self-care (askesis). Far from conceiving these practices as abstract and solipsistic, Foucault himself argues not only that they should be used as strategies to resist normalizing power but self-care also involves care for others and a critical perspective on the world. By departing from the elitist conclusions of classical thinkers, Foucaults later claims seem uniquely signicant for modern times. Much depends, therefore, on their sustainability, and their purportedly emancipatory character. The contributors to this volume raise the relevant questions. What kinds of tactics promote personal dignity and resistance to power? If the moment of freedom occurs in the recognition of power, what sort of beings are we then free to become? What are the necessary conditions for self-creation? Centre stage is the Foucauldian concept of an ethos. The three sections of this volume are organized around this idea: rst, womens self-practices conceived as an ethos; second, feminism itself as ethos; and lastly, the political dimension of a feminist ethos. Feminists might rightly begin by asking how an ethos emerges: is it a purely personal achievement, or does it require a particular social environment in which to develop? What is the relationship between ones own personal ethos and regnant social beliefs and attitudes? Jeannette Bloem examines this issue in her opening essay, The Shaping of a Beautiful Soul, by exploring the arts of existence in which religious women historically engaged. Anna Maria Van Schurman, for example, was a Dutch intellectual and religious devotee whose social roles appear reactionary

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

43

and therefore inimical to feminism. However, it seems that Van Schurman worked on established gender roles within the constraints of conventional religion, and in certain ways transformed the public image of Christian women through subtle practices of the self. Similarly, Emma Goldman, the subject of Kathy Fergusons study, is often taken to be a failed political philosopher, but a moderately successful feminist activist. Ferguson challenges this reading by arguing that, through persistent techniques of self-production, Goldman constituted herself as a political philosopher according to her own conception of the role. Both Bloem and Ferguson suggest that what is at stake for the subjects of their inquiry is the later Foucaults distinction between writing oneself and being written. Since power has no constitutive outside, expressions of authentic selfhood are always complexly related to the structures that discipline and police identities. In Foucaults later account, the subjects solution to disciplinary power is found in its self-created ethical response to the world. As he puts it, we have to create ourselves as a work of art. Stephen Barber takes up this point in showing that, by transgressing the tendency prevalent in the 1930s to separate politics from aesthetics, protagonists in Virginia Woolfs works embody the notion that the two categories presuppose one another. By analysing the forces that constitute us, we experiment with the possibility of going beyond the limits imposed on us by history. In Three Guineas, Woolf thus reveals the way in which religion and patriotism unconsciously affect the human psyche, producing a microfascism within. The recognition of the desire for power internalized is the very painful precondition of the outsiders practice of freedom. Like Woolf, Foucault describes this difcult practice not as a theory, much less as a dogma, but as an attitude of hyper- and pessimistic activism. The ensuing set of essays, which constitutes nearly half of this volume, concerns feminism itself as a critical ethos. Here Helen OGradys examination of gendered processes of identity-formation raises a number of important questions. Citing Sandra Bartkys Femininity and Domination (1990), she explains how the cultural inferiorization of gender emerges through womens experiences of guilt and personal exile. However, one might observe here that if feminism is to amount to more than a description of womens social inequality, it should also suggest how to move from recognizing disciplinary power to the conditions under which selfcare becomes possible. While Foucault contends that freedom essentially involves continual resistance to panoptical power, it is difcult to distinguish power,

which is potentially creative, from comprehensive domination. Additionally, how can one separate out those practices which are the outcome of disciplinary power from those which manifest resistance? OGrady suggests that it might only be possible to challenge womens pervasive beliefs about personal inadequacy by seeking to externalize them, perhaps in a grouptherapeutic context. However, recognizing subjection does not in itself entail resistance, much less liberation. Therapy is not synonymous with consciousness-raising. Thus, it is unclear that this solution alone grounds a feminist ethos, not least, paradoxically enough, since it appears to evoke the regulation of docile bodies that Foucault himself documented so effectively in works such as Madness and Civilization. Moreover, OGrady tends unfortunately to assume, rather than to investigate, the core issue in Foucaults later work, namely the relationship between the free self and its constitutive social world. She does take on board McNays objection that he often blurs the distinction between those self-practices that are accessible to self-fashioning and those that are less so, due to their deep inscription on the body and the psyche. She also recognizes the objection that Foucaults evocation of Greek practices of self-mastery not only seems to privilege the virile male but also appears disquietingly similar to the disciplinary practices that he hopes the modern subject might overcome. However, it is disappointing that OGrady does not also interrogate the relationship that Foucault seems to envisage between technologies of self-care and care for others. She appears to accept that a persons enhanced self-dignity leads to sociality and compassion for others. However, as Amy Allen points out in her essay, while Foucault does conceive technologies of the self as social in a certain sense, nevertheless he predominantly envisages this realm as a domain of strategic power-relations in which the individual strives to attain an individualized freedom. This conception of the social does not readily cohere with the world of equality and reciprocity advocated by feminists. In the context described by OGrady, therefore, it is not clear how self-care entails a change in the sexual division of caring, or the dichotomizing of self- and other-directed care. Sylvia Pritsch is more cautious in Inventing Images, Constructing Standpoints, contending that Foucaults aesthetic self is not as easy for feminists to adopt as it may at rst appear to be. Whilst feminist aesthetic practices described by de Lauretis and Haraway point towards a positive aesthetics (by recommending the construction of positive feminine images, and

44

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

images that provide a humane gurated perspective on the world), Foucault by contrast is concerned with a negative aesthetics an aesthetics of resistance. Technologies of the Self, for example, distinguishes four principal techniques: those of power, of the self, of signication or communication, and of production. While the latter two are other-directed and seek to install new relations between the self and sociopolitical institutions, the rst two (on which Foucault largely focuses) say nothing about the social reconstitution of dominated identities. This, then, represents a genuine difculty with the idea of support in the later Foucault for a feminist technology of care. Such techniques would involve image-production to build womens self-dignity, by putting into question existing social institutions as well as conceptualizing those that might be more humane. However, this criticism is not synonymous with the charge that the later Foucault is apolitical. In spite (or perhaps because) of its ambiguities, Foucaults later work might still generate a positive agenda for justice, as thinkers such as William Connolly and James Tully have argued. With regard to Foucaults feminist political signicance, however, the case seems more complicated. Susan Hekmans contribution to the nal, political section of this volume thus usefully foregrounds these contradictions of the modern identity that she believes cannot be resolved within the connes of liberal politics alone. Since identitypolitics seeks to reveal the forces that constitute selves informally as well as legally, practices of resistance and care must be equally dispersed. Foucaults account of panoptical, or ubiquitous, power is instructive in showing why multicultural and feminist politics strain the parameters of liberalisms juridico-political view. While some of Hekmans conclusions appear either to be debatable (e.g. that the xing of identities follows logically from the structure of the liberal polity), or oddly to be elementary and contestable at the same time (e.g. that the xing of identities is not endemic to identity politics as such), the main body of her essay does contribute helpfully to understanding Foucaults signicance for feminism. Perhaps one should conceptualize Foucaults signicance more broadly by conceiving feminism itself more expansively that is, not as a species of identity politics simpliciter, but as a critical orientation to the world. In Foucaults Ethos: A Guide(post) for Change Taylor suggests that the post-9/11 political climate has produced a crisis of meaning to which the Foucauldian ethos responds. However, this brings us back to the question of why exactly Foucault takes

the personal ethos he defends to be essentially geared to social transformation. Foucault does associate selfpractices with the social world, but this, as we have seen, simply appears to indicate his awareness of the (very important) point that a practice can only occur in the context of a way of life that supports it. But Taylor reads into Foucault a deeper, potentially feminist agenda: not only can self-practices be critical of existing institutions, but they are inherently directed towards forging new forms of social relations. The later Foucault supports not an abstract, individualized freedom, she argues, conceived as an idiosyncratic process signicant only to the person who undertakes it, but the free way of life, a certain way of being among others. This way of being encourages a political spirituality or a collective effort to keep power mobile. As Margaret McClaren also points out in her contribution, Foucauldian freedom occurs when power relations shift through resistance and reversal. Selftransformation implies social transformation precisely because social practices constitute subjectivity. Vintges reinforces this point in her concluding essay, which examines the relevance of Foucauldian practices of freedom for international feminism. Foucault, she contends, advocates a universalism that is pluralistically enlightened through its engagement with other religions such as Islam. An intercultural feminist project thus benets from an ethos that seeks to foster freedom practices for women everywhere. Foucaults democratic universalism is not a liberal universalism of values or principles. An ethos is not synonymous with an abstract moral code. Rather, its focus is equal access to freedom-practices within any one discourse. Ethical relations either with oneself or others do not necessitate the coercive internalization of norms or their imposition on the (religious, cultural or sexual) other. In the last instance, then, one gains the clear sense that the benet derived from a feminist encounter with Foucault is not to be found exclusively in examining the concept of a self-technology. Rather, it rests on studying another aspect of an ethos, the telos or goal. For Foucault, as for feminism, emancipatory politics should reject those self-techniques which aim narcissistically for personal transformation as an end in itself. The point of expanding, changing and developing what we are, think and do lies in the transformation of what anyone might become, think or do. The point of working on ourselves is, in the end, to promote the general human desire for transformation in communicative acts with others. Monica Mookherjee

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

45

Hacking it
Alexander R. Galloway: Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, MIT University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2004. 248 pp., 18.95 hb., 0 262 072475. As an earlier period of convergence and new economies in the digital mode fades, along with memories of WebTV and tamagotchi virtual pets, the halcyon days of associating unfettered (and, too often, uncritical) possibility with being digital have given way to more circumspect not long ago some might have said paranoid views. The now clearly visible elaboration of digital networks within larger systems of political, economic and mediatic power demonstrates that nding radically liberatory possibility or its obverse, the radical dissolution of heretofore well-understood, secure modes of subjectivity in the subjects graphical navigation of internetworked globality was an altogether too simple proposition. Its not as if cybercultural critics locating digital networks within larger networks of power were entirely silent during the period of digital euphoria: the Krokers conception of the virtual class comes to mind, as do Donna Haraways explorations of opaque epistemological ows ratifying humanisms conceptualization of the human, the animal and the machine. Yet even these negative or ironic conceptualizations of power, network technologies and the subject were often embraced with that same enthusiasm for cyberpossibility which now appears difcult to sustain. Today, critics of cyberculture and digital media have begun to take a rather more stark view of power and positioning in relation to the Internet and the World Wide Web. A more sceptical posthumanism has met the World Wide Web, and none too soon. Alexander R. Galloways Protocol is an example of the critical rethinking of network problems and potentials representative of a period too often schematically reduced in the USA to being post-9/11. Today, there is widespread concern in advanced information societies about security (with terrorist networks the symptom now dening the problem of security by default), the deprivileging of liberal democratic values (with voter fraud, digital and otherwise, guring as the sign of the political dissolution of the rights of citizenship), multinational colonization of individual ownership of cultural commodities (in December 2004 the American Supreme Court agreed to take up the challenges posed by peer-to-peer networks to the interests of the contemporary culture industries), and increasingly unfettered economic domination expressed as

multi-, inter- and transnational networks of economic power (spectacularly characterized at the 2001 Genoa WTO protests by police brutality and murder). It is not surprising that our conceptualizations of the network have taken on more of the cast of Foucaults panopticon, rather than his suggestion of heterotopia. The upshot is a less enthusiastic, and less jejune, critique of interactive media networks as cultural forms or modes of production. The emergent discipline of software theory means that new mediation in its digital variant appears more fully grown. This more mature digital medium, whether games or networks, has become theorys new object. Adding computational production into the canon of cultural forms susceptible to critical thought has important implications. If Galloways efforts are fruitful, it is in theorizing contemporary digital networks as opportunities for tactical media, rather than supplying strictly technical or sociological descriptions of digital networks or networked social behaviour. In his Introduction to Protocol, having proposed a Deleuze-inspired bioethics from his own recent work on cybernetics, genetics and nanotechnology, Eugene Thacker suggests that the value of Galloways study is that Protocological control in biopolitical contexts is not just the means, but the medium for the development of new forms of management, regulation, and control. However, Protocol is not as far-reaching as Thackers introduction suggests. The author concentrates on the Internet and the HTML-based World Wide Web, mentioning bioinformatics only in passing. Thackers statement reects, though, a methodological gap between description and theorization that haunts much of Galloways project. Simply, Galloway proposes that digital network protocols now provide the means and the limits of both social control and political resistance. He sees protocol as a general technique of power (a technique for achieving voluntary regulation within a contingent environment) which extends to the production of digital acts of resistance: hacking, net art, cyberfeminism. Galloways leap from technological protocol to macrological power structures aims to demonstrate a determined relationship between technological production and political constraint. Digital networks force us to adapt to the strategies of global capital, he says, while there has emerged a new set of social practices that inects or otherwise diverts these protocological ows toward the goal of a utopian form of unalienated social life. Protocol becomes a form of control and of utopian praxis alike within regimes undergoing decentralization.

46

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

Galloway agrees, then, with much recent scholarship suggesting that decentralization emerges historically for material reasons. The author understands the development of the regulatory apparatus of protocol in terms of a periodization which sees computation and control societies emerging after the disciplinary societies of an earlier stage of modernity. Interactive networks are the technical, psychic and social means of regulating late capitalism. Making extensive use of contributions to the history and theory of networked culture, Galloway attempts to reconcile the distinct and conicting views of networked regulatory apparatus given by Foucault, Kittler or Deleuze. And while never fully addressing the tensions among these various understandings, he suggests their resolution in Hardt and Negris recent account of empire. What Hardt and Negri have to say about the new imperial order of globalization, Galloway argues, is true as well of the new media emerging along with it. The key here is shifting architectures of power. As the exercise of power shifts from modernitys authoritarian, vertical architectures of discipline to postmodernitys horizon-

tal, decentralized networks, decentralization is but a reconguration of social discipline under late capitalism. Decentralization does not imply more freedom but, rather, a distributed form of power, broader in scope. Through a generative contradiction, though, Galloway suggests that the reactionary standardization implied in such protocological distribution of power provides apparently in dialectical fashion the means for resistance. We accept universal standardization in order to facilitate the ultimate goal of a free and more democratic medium. Working towards that goal are practitioners of tactical media. Here, Gallo-

way emphasizes the distinction between software code and hardware inscription software means adapatability as well as a potentially subversive mastery, so the hacker allegorically becomes a Robin Hood gure for the multitudes of global information networks. Yet when he proposes the hacker as an agent of liberatory desire in networked culture, Galloways rhetoric tends to escalate beyond his theorization, obliterating any distance between his careful critical framing (as in the periodization of information societies as control societies) and the metaphors he marshals in his own desire to valorize specic modes of protocological behaviour as utopian. For example, hackers are machines for the identication of this possibility [of moving towards a utopian vision based in desire]. This kind of discursive excess, evidence of Galloways aim of identifying the utopian possibilities at work within digital networks, occurs throughout the book. The problem is not so much that Galloway never really presents a thorough account of technological humanity as protocological machine, but rather that his attribution to the hacker of a status above, say, newbie users of what is to be a more democratic medium seems reductive and onedimensional not to mention contrary to the purposes of understanding how networked multitudes might produce some effective, non-representational democracy beyond that of humanism or the nation-state. Similarly, the 1990s cyberfeminism of Sadie Plant or Australian VNSMatrix is understood primarily as a protocological intervention feminist historiography is less important than scanning the networks for protocological rebellion. Finally, traditional aesthetic terminologies which might seem out of place given the size of the changes Galloway describes nonetheless manage to clutter the manuscript: one team of net art practitioners is said to practise a computer virus style but what does style mean in the evaluation of such work? Too often, the overloaded histories of terms such as style and the theoretical weight they imply are left uninterrogated theoretical baggage, as it were, in Galloways navigation of virtual resistance practices. Galloway has not entirely worked through the problem of evaluating tactical media resistance in terms appropriate to the changes he suggests are under way. The larger virtue of the book lies in Galloways provocative claim that the Internet never was liberatory in its essence, that it evolves as a regulatory mode of distributing power. In this sense, Galloways account differs notably from, say, Lawrence Lessigs earlier treatment of much the same territory (to which

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

47

Galloway refers more than once). In his 1999 Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lessig argued that we must come to grips with a tendency towards the diminution of rights of expression, privacy and access to intellectual property, as the Internet proceeds through a phase of corporate commercialization and increased scrutiny by government regulators. Lessigs work thus performed a liberal version of the paradise lost narrative of digital media long ago observed by Sandy Stone. In this narrative, technological virtuality promised even more, had begun to provide a revolutionary unfettering of speech, subjectivity, mediated embodiment, until power interests (commercial, governmental, technofascists at America Online, take your pick) came to tap this potential, to the detriment of the pioneer users who drove its initial development. Some version of this narrative runs through most treatments of the digital network as new medium. It is to Galloways credit that he is able to propose a model of power, instead, in its place. Still, proposing net art as a utopian praxis on the way to an unalienated social life looks like a lingering mark of the paradise lost narrative of cyberspace. If so, Galloway has not yet given up on that enterprise. More power to his counter-programme of protocological intervention! But the problem with Protocol centres on precisely this point: because Galloway identies technologically determined network protocols as providing the contemporary means for a regulatory domination of the subject, the economy and material culture, his analysis is left with no other resource for resistance than exactly this highly reied mode of distributed materiality: it is through protocol that one must guide ones efforts, not against it. In this regard, then, Lessigs earlier analysis, while liberal rather than radical in its critique of the Internet, offers in comparison a surprising heterogeneity, which should be brought to bear on Galloways project of protocological critique. For Lessig, governmentality, economics, behavioral norms and material architectures (including cybernetic code) determine the subjects experience as citizen of technological postmodernity I doubt that these heterogeneous forces can be reduced simply to protocol writ large. The challenge in relating these forces to Galloways project lies in determining how these other codes, norms, or architectures square with praxes of tactical media, and, therefore, in treating tactical media production as a matter of something more like literacy, speech or even mediatic gesture instead of treating it, as Galloway does, as something like conceptual art. While Lessigs book conated legal code and cybernetic code (this overdetermination provides the very thematic of

Code), Galloways Protocol avoids discussion of a larger eld of epistemological forces, in the interest of positing tactical media interventions capable of resisting globalizing empire. But if action today is, as Paolo Virno has suggested, contra Hardt and Negri, a question of the multitudes relationship to its own conicts rather than the enactment of conicts given in global capitals terms for living, it is engagement with this larger forceeld of politics, labour and intellect that motivates a vibrant, noisy, tactical media not the protocological reduction of these domains to standards within which opposition might be formatted. James Tobias

Shit, its the police

John Carter and Dave Morland, eds, Anti-Capitalist Britain, New Clarion Press, Cheltenham, 2004. x + 182 pp., 12.95 pb., 1 873797 43 5. Jonathan Purkis and James Bowen, eds, Changing Anarchism: Anarchist Theory and Practice in a Global Age, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2004. x + 259 pp., 50.00 hb., 0 7190 6694 8. The number of books about anti-capitalism is fast approaching the number of books about capitalism; books on anti-globalization are gradually catching up with the number of books on globalization. This might be welcomed as a good thing indicative of the extent to which the Left is organizing itself once more. But in an era in which both the Old Left and, increasingly, what was once called the New Left are said to be defunct, this poses two immediate and obvious questions. What is the relation between anti-globalization and anti-capitalism? And is there a political core to the anti-capitalist movement (ACM)? Dealing with these questions in roundabout ways, these books share two beliefs. The rst is that the antiglobalization movement is indeed anti-capitalist. (This point is not thought through in any way whatsoever; it is left entirely as an assumption.) The second is that despite the diversity of the anti-capitalist movement, anarchism is its core. The opening chapter of the Carter and Morland collection asks Anti-Capitalism: Are We All Anarchists Now?, and the answer given in both collections is a denitive yes. The theoretical concepts most apparently to the fore [of the movement], comment Bowen and Purkis in the Introduction to their edited volume, appear to be those associated with anarchism. This is a huge claim, implying that

48

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

anarchism provides the heart, soul and rationale of contemporary anti-capitalism. Anarchism, it would appear, is the new black. On the face of it, it is an absurd claim. It is quite clear that vast chunks of the ACM are manifestly not anarchist, have no desire to be drawn under the anarchist umbrella, and in many cases are positively antianarchist. But the general claim made in these books is that these other dimensions of the ACM are decreasing in both size and importance: fewer and fewer people want any kind of formalized organization, let alone a vanguard party; fewer and fewer people want to read Marxs critique of political economy, let alone talk about a revolutionary class. And stripped of these traditional organizational forms and theoretical claims, what is left but anarchism? Both books aim to ll out some of the anarchist claims and positions within the broader context of the ACM. That they both fail to do so, and in fairly similar ways, is testament to the short distance anarchism has travelled since the nineteenth century. The contradictions, absences, overstatements and ill-considered claims are too many to list; let me take just a few as indicative of the whole. None of the essays in either book makes any attempt genuinely to engage with Marx or contemporary Marxism. The implicit assumption is that the battle against Marxism has been won, to the extent that little more needs to be done beyond repeating the constant refrain that Marxisms problem is that it situates oppression in one basic problematic capital. But this is never set alongside the fact that the ACM appears to situate itself within this very problematic at the end of the day, it denes itself as anti-capitalist. Yet despite being anti-capitalist, the essays eschew anything that might be called a critique of capital. Instead, they oscillate between listing the problems generated by capital poverty, starvation, etc. but without explaining why these occur, and simply reiterating anarchist commonplaces regarding authority, oppression and the good life. To be sure, some big names (mostly from within poststructuralism and virtually always read through the lter of Todd Mays Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, 1994) are wheeled on to offer up some alternatives, but an actual critique of capital is the last thing on anyones mind. At the same time, and presumably as a further way of distancing itself from Marxism, the claim is often made that the ACM is explicitly anti-political although we are told that the movement aims to construct power relationships that can be lived with, which sounds very much like a traditional view of political to me. No assessment is made of what a non-political anti-

capitalism might actually achieve; no consideration is given to whether those in favour of capitalism might see anti-capitalism as unpolitical. By non-political the writers presumably mean that the ACM engages in a whole range of practices that had for some time been sidelined. This does generate some interesting discussions. It is good to read about the Art Bi-pass, SHAG (Super Heroes Against Eugenics) and the politics of carnival. But in each case either the writing never develops a sustained or coherent position, or it ends in a position which is far from being anti-capitalist. Thus one writer suggests that the taking of narcotics can constitute a form of radical opposition, a self-determined recreational resistance and thus a rejection of the very organization of capitalist reality. Maybe. But the taking of narcotics can also constitute a form of stupidity, a self-obsessed egotism and acceptance of the very organization of capitalist reality. The chapter in question, What did you do in the Drug War, Daddy? in the Purkis and Bowen collection, ends by taking a libertarian line on drugs. Anarchist it may be, anti-capitalist it certainly isnt. This is perhaps symptomatic of a more general problem, which is that the target of many of the essays is not capitalism at all, but a whole range of recent bad things that are lumped together under the label neoliberalism. The running assumption seems to be that it is the neo that is the problem, with the implication that if only we could get back to the days of traditional liberalism then everything would be alright. The incoherence of the new anarchism that is said to be emerging here comes when one traces themes across the two books. Bakhtin, for example, appears in both collections, as the most important writer on carnival as political practice, but also because of his supposedly scatological celebration of life. The claim is made that his recognition of sex, shit, birth, death, eating, etc. [as] part of the cycle of life was based on a more fundamental afnity with fertile life. This is intended to draw out the question of nature as a philosophical issue and to suggest a potentially emancipatory rejection of the mindmatter division in favour of a celebration of the materiality and eshiness of human existence. And yet at the same time the question of spirituality crops up throughout the volumes. We are reminded that anarchists are strongly against religion, yet also informed that there is a growing tendency for activists in the ACM to call themselves spiritual. The problems involved with religion are thus circumvented by changing the term while simultaneously accepting its central assumption that we need this thing called spirituality. This new

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

49

spirituality is then suggested as a basis for the possible re-enchantment of the world, to be achieved through a variety of processes and practices. At the most mundane level, spirituality can act as a potential technology of the self the Foucauldian trope here concealing more than it reveals. At another level, the spirituality is said to involve a range of healing arts which might then reorient us towards the earth via a new ecomagic harnessing natures divine powers and thus allowing us to heal the earth. Finally, this spirituality is said to open the movement to various myths and beliefs. For example, one popular myth [within the movement] prophesies that a time will come when children of the white people will come and seek the wisdom of the Elders, wearing long hair and beads. Its not clear quite how consciously Sorelian this talk of myths is intended to be, but one can only hope that for the sake of the unity of the ACM the long hair of the Elders wont get trailed in the shit of the Bakhtinians. In their introduction to Changing Anarchism Purkis and Bowen claim that for too long anarchists have been burdened by embarrassingly simplistic, redundant visions of political analysis and engagement. These books suggest that little has changed. On the other hand, perhaps thats not entirely true. In February 2002, Brian Paddick, then the Brixton police chief, commented that the idea of anarchism had always appealed to him, based as it is on the innate goodness of the individual which has been corrupted by the system. His comments are repeated by Bowen and Purkis and are treated with sufcient weight for Paddick to be given an entry in the glossary to their book, roughly midway between Bakunin and Zapatistas. So maybe some things have changed. But if it involves quoting coppers approvingly, the change might not be for the better. Mark Neocleous

Something missing
Renaud Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Pontys Ontology, trans. and intro. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawler, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, xxxiv + 332 pp., 52.00 hb., 18.95 pb., 0 253 343550 hb., 1 800 842 6796 pb. Although it deals centrally with issues of praxis and the self-constituting nature of social being, this account of Merleau-Pontys oeuvre eschews any reference to

his encounter with Marxism and, moreover, barely acknowledges the inuence of Hegel. This encapsulates the continuing marginality of Merleau-Ponty to radical currents of thought. Merleau-Ponty is a writer whose dominant appropriation is via the academy rather than the engag. Further, despite the scope of his intellectual trajectory Merleau-Ponty remains in the shadows of, rst, Sartre and latterly Derrida. The off-centre character of his reception does, however, strangely chime with Merleau-Pontys intellectual preoccupations. The ec-centric is characteristic of his view of the self-mediation of the subject in the world. Rather than taking theory as a point of departure, phenomenological reading addresses clues or pointers provided by the style and strategies not the overt claims found within a text and in this way arrives at its sense and object. Hence such a reading is, as Barbaras argues, grounded in contingency. Sense in the early work is arrived at via perception, and in the later through bodily apprehension, sensibility. The relationship between sense and perception as phenomenal transcendence in the Phenomenology of Perception and later between sense and its expression, which is taken as an aspect of being, are both seen as tensions between a way of arriving and its end result, a situating of objects or speech which produces intersubjectivity, an opening on the world. Intentionality is delineated in successive modes of incompletion. This underlying contingency that is, the situatedness of ontological outcomes, whether in the earlier mode of perception, or subsequently in expression renders any comparison with the ineffability of Heideggerian Being otiose. The chiasm between theory and reality is for Merleau-Ponty only negotiable via the order of the Lebenswelt, the lifeworld, which at once dees philosophical reection and yet demands understanding via examination of its indexical, background nature in philosophical speech. Such a philosophy, in and of the Lebenswelt, calls for a deconstruction in the form of what it might be to do philosophy that is, how philosophy is lived as the in Garnkels phrase practically untellable of its production. Barbarass emphasis on philosophy as an interrogation of the lifeworld problematizes the text by reintroducing the chiasm. Nonetheless this project is perhaps in tune with Lefebvres recognition of the different but linked rhythms and routines which structure ofcial and everyday existence, providing a fundamental heterogeny between theory and its everyday practical interpretation. Similarly, for Merleau-Ponty, the lifeworld contains a wild logos via which expression

50

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

is arrived at, underlining the contingency with which theory comes to be practically articulated. This ellipsis in speech between conception and the way it is arrived at is marked both via Merleau-Pontys approach to language and communication and in his work on the sensibility of the body. In Prose of the World the distinction between operative and constitutive moments of an utterance is emblematic of this point. The sense of an expression cannot be conveyed constitutively but only through the operative mode of language, its doing and showing which moves towards a completion/goal. This incompleteness demonstrates the dependence of language on its base in the lifeworld of practical routine and the impossibility of closure in the rationalist style. By contrast to rationalism, in Prose of the World it is the positivity of utterances that grounds their theoretical claims. Their meaning can never be complete because it is mediated by their performance, which is an aspect of the world rather than of theory. Hence concepts and theories function metonymically that is, connectively in the operative mode of utterances. They work prepositionally rather than propositionally, their identications serve as a series of indicators rather than an overarching system of classication. As such, operatively, theories demonstrate their truth situationally; the specicity of the world speaks through them. For Merleau-Ponty this positivity of utterances is to be distinguished from the factual claims of positivism. Here the utterance qua theoretical reection renders a mute world intelligible. Language is the transparent medium through which the world is understood rather than being grasped as an aspect of being. As a result, we have no sense of how such a reection is produced. At the other end of the spectrum is the at ontology of the constructionists where language constitutes the world. Both these cases entail linguistic conventionalism and hence closure to the world. Phenomenology is positioned by its rejection of the Western philosophical tradition of dualism to offer a way out of this problem of inherent circularity, as Barbaras suggests, through the idea that expression is a moment of being rather than split off from it. The theoreticist orientation in both empiricism and constructionism ignores the variation of language and its intersecting viewpoints which are conveyed when we speak, whether we see this or not. The truth of an utterance is therefore conveyed by these equivalences rather than by its overt claims as these connections or self-evidences are the point of articulation of language with the world. Articulation is seen as the institution of language as sedimented praxis, which is referred

back by Merleau-Ponty to Husserls The Origin of Geometry, where the latter argued that meaning is sedimented as a form of writing or inscription which gives utterance a determinate sense. It may be possible to understand this in the way Husserls contemporary and correspondent Frege did, as expression of sense depending on the sentential nature of utterances. That is, that thoughts are always structured according to certain linguistic rules involving the way that a topic/ subject is predicated, but to grasp the way predication works in any given situation always involves an appeal to other predications sedimented within the context of the speaker, the mute or indexical features (being) expressed in the performance of the utterance. Sense or intentionality is always overdetermined by the structural effects of its previous articulations (which are continuously revivied in the ongoing history of articulations renewal). Utterances involve the appropriation and consequent sedimentation of lived experience. Utterance is sedimentation in its self-evidencing of the speakers position with that of the world. Aspects of a culture surface from their muteness transitorily in their appropriation by speakers in judgement and then, via the equivalencing of their variations with the already sedimented culture, they are deposited into muteness. It is clear from this account that sedimentation refers not to geological stasis, stocks of knowledge, as in Schutzs account, but to elements of culture that are continuously lived without judgement. Sedimented praxis is the ongoing performance of the past in the present. The utterance appropriated as the muteness of being again emphasizes Merleau-Pontys break with dualism. The sub-theme in the praxis-oriented later work which is central to Barbarass overall reading is that communication is already mediated by what it consciously mediates to us the latter traditionally seen as a starting point for interpretation. In The Visible and the Invisible the body is seen as a third term within which self and world are already enfolded. The relation of the body to things and others expresses their existence and in doing so situates our consciousness of them. As such, this mode of relating expresses the positivity the objectivity or truth of the subjects agency. One way in which Merleau-Ponty approaches this theme is through the example of touching our own bodies. The subjects sensibility enables it to grasp itself as an exteriority. The body tells us things: we have aches, pains, tiredness; it produces and reacts to body language, we feel uncomfortable, and so on. The bodys movement through space and time enables us to

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

51

grasp agents as enfolding the wider historical process and in this respect subjects are incarnations of the lines of force existing in any historical conjuncture. The body in its movements reveals the movement of the body as an expression of the times in which it lives. This concretization of historical conditions contrasts with the Foucauldian treatment of the body as a docile abstraction on which institutional lines of force operate, instantiating dualism in the form of brute corporeality versus shaping discursive knowledge/power. The constructionist body cannot tell us any thing we dont know a priori. The parallels with Prose of the World are clear. The body is expression. It is the means through which the world is appropriated, made esh, given an individuated, situated expression. As such the body is also the ground of sense, its sensibility the template for construction of projects possible in its situation. Consequently, lines of force emanate from the body and institutional structures congeal around these, rather than the body being inscribed within the latters discourse. The body as expression gives a different order of ontological priority from constructionism, as its intentionality always both exceeds and mediates institutional inscription. These ideas are clearly elaborated by Barbaras, but it could never be guessed from a reading of his book that Merleau-Ponty developed his conception of the self-mediatedness of being from his engagement with Marxism and its post-Hegel/Feuerbachian notions of intersubjectivity and self-constitution, or that his ideas about the self-mediation of power relations owe anything to Hegels observations on the masterslave dialectic. The signicance of Marxs 18th Brumaire for Merleau-Pontys approach to the contingency and terror accompanying all historical projects is likewise sedimented history. Neither would one have guessed that the subject of this work was the collaborator of Sartre on Les Temps Modernes. For a narrative of situation and institution this is a strangely disembodied account. It omits the everyday for another kind of reduction. For Barbaras the role of philosophy towards the lifeworld is to unfold experience, to make its content more explicit, to reveal the prepositional content enfolded within it. However, this ignores the way philosophy enters the lifeworld, becomes part of experience, and then, as such, interrupts its retrieval from the margins of theory. It seems that an opportunity to show the radical potential of the wild logos has been missed, for it is precisely in the appropriation of lived experience, the performativity of theory, that the lineaments of the

world in theory can be discerned. It is here that theory becomes an event, as the situationists, for example, claimed. Howard Feather

No such thing
Jeffrey A. Schaler, ed., Szasz under Fire: The Psychiatric Abolitionist Faces His Critics, Open Court, La Salle IL, 2004. 472 pp., 19.75 pb., 0 8126 9568 2. Despite all the efforts towards human rights and human emancipation, one group still systematically suppressed is those individuals diagnosed in the medical jargon as being mentally ill and in their daily lives equally slandered as ill or insane. Human rights and citizens rights in general do not apply to them, because at practically any time they can be locked up, tied up and subjected to mind-altering drugs. Even the use of electric shocks against the will of the patient is still practised. Physicians dene them as subhuman on the assumption of a changed biology and in this they regularly obtain the support of judges, whose legal measures give the appearance of legitimacy. The fact that this systematic dehumanizing found its climax in the Aktion T4 extermination by doctors in the Nazi era is well known. Less known is that this action was the prelude to and the blueprint for the extermination camps in Poland which followed. As Thomas Szasz put it in an interview in The New Physician in 1969:
Schizophrenia is a strategic label as Jew was in Nazi Germany. If you want to exclude people from the social order, you must justify this to others, but especially to yourself. So you invent a justicatory rhetoric. Thats what the really nasty psychiatric words are all about: they are justicatory rhetoric, labelling a package garbage, it means take it away! Get it out of my sight! etc. Thats what the word Jew meant in Nazi Germany; it did not mean a person with a certain kind of religious belief. It meant vermin!, gas him! I am afraid that schizophrenic and sociopathic personality and many other psychiatric diagnostic terms mean exactly the same thing; they mean human garbage, take him away!, get him out of my sight.

A cartel of power commits these crimes and organizes them from the universities. There, the agents of the system are indoctrinated, the connections are made from physicians to the politicians, the media and the legal system, and those in charge are recruited. The gears are lubricated by the prots of the drug companies, which gladly assist the villains with

52

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

substantial funds. One purpose is to counteract any criticism before it reaches a certain level and support any campaign which increases the number of people forcibly made dependent on the system. The camouage used by academics is the myth that knowledge produced in universities is committed to the truth, when in fact it is all about the occupation of positions of power. There are, however, a few exceptions: for example, Foucault and Szasz. Around 1961 both uncovered and publicized a fundamental aw in the epistemic structure: that there is no such thing as mental illness; rather, insanity is a medical fairytale told in order to extenuate the repression. The typical response to this unwanted truth was to ignore it completely. Where that doesnt work, disciplining and marginalization are used. One is slandered and even incriminated. After the 68 rebellion this slowly changed and in the 1970s autonomous groups were created and began to speak publicly about these cruelties and started to operate politically. This stage of development reached its zenith in the Foucault Tribunal. This public tribunal, and its international jury comprising survivors with Kate Millett as their spokeswoman, succeeded in reaching a verdict condemning coercive psychiatry using human rights as a yardstick for their judgement. Thomas Szasz delivered the indictment, and the defendants of the system were neither able to propose a settlement, nor capable of making a convincing argument of exoneration. The Russell Tribunal, which took place three years later, conrmed this judgement, once again with Szasz as a brilliant prosecutor. These events ended the phase of the denial defence and in my opinion heralded the denite decline of the psychiatric system. At the symposium of the University of Syracuse in honour of Thomas Szasz on his 80th birthday, at which the chair of the Department of Psychiatry, Mantosh Dewan, praised Szasz in the highest terms, calling him our gem! Germany, which was once at the forefront of crimes against humanity, now seems to lead the social disassembly of medical coercion. Soon all advanced directives about treatment (proposed by Szasz in 1982 as a Psychiatric Will) will be legally binding, even if the person can no longer express him/herself, is unable to consent, has no illness insight or is considered incompetent, as long as active killing is not requested. Each coerced diagnosis against such a directive would become a violation of the fundamental rights of informal self-determination. A psychiatric incarceration becomes a sanctioned deprivation of liberty. Any coercive treatment would be a bodily injury, indeed torture. The further development

of such legislation throughout the European Union can hardly be stopped. Szasz under Fire contains critical essays by thirteen prominent academic defenders of the system, each answering to one of Szaszs theses, to which he replies. Kaleidoscopically different premisses, conclusions and insinuations on the following topics are elucidated: the reality of mentally illness, physician-assisted suicide, the right to drugs, moral and medical ethic, civil commitment and the insanity defence. Szaszs replies are to the point, sometimes full of polemic and irony but always based on the libertarian ground of his thinking. To give just one example:
Kendell suggests that I would have been more successful if I had been satised with aiming to reform psychiatry. But I did not want to reform psychiatry. Why? Because it was clear to me then and it ought to be painfully clear to everyone today that psychiatry and coercion are locked in a deadly embrace, that psychiatry is synonymous with psychiatric slavery. Psychiatry and coercion are like conjoined twins sharing a single heart: they cannot be separated without killing at least one.

The book is suitable not only for connoisseurs of Szasz; it offers an overview of all Szaszs most important theses. Beyond that it contains a complete bibliography of his 646 publications. Another reason for reading it is the Autobiographical Sketch included, charting his development up to his thirty-sixth birthday, showing how distrustful he was from the very beginning of the notion of mental illness. To understand the importance of Szaszs work, we need to take into account its far-reaching consequences for epistemic questions in philosophy: it could turn out that the foundations of the theology of science are built on quicksand. If there is no such thing as mental illness in principle, then all experience has to be valued in equal terms. Experience may be impractical it but must not be subject to discrimination. Currently, experience is only validated if it is deemed non-hallucinatory. Thus the sword of power has divided experience into the insane experience of the madman and the sane experience of the others. However, as soon as the distorting lens of power starts to crack, natural science loses its rm standing and begins to fall. An uncertainty principle on a far broader scale would have to be accepted. By his new interpretation of Marxs statement, The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all, Szasz changed the world. Rene Talbot

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

53

NEWS

Persian Empire
Antonio Negri in Iran, 46 January 2005, House of Artists and Centre for Dialogue Among Civilizations, Tehran; 7 January 2005, Isfahan

hat exactly does Antonio Negri have to say to Iran? Politically and economically distanced from the standpoint of the US and its allies, Iran has produced its own quite singular, yet strangely familiar, take on the contemporary intersection of politics and philosophy. Leading politicians translate Kant and quote Plato; hyper-conservative mullahs look to Heidegger for anti-technological inspiration; students turn to Deleuze and Foucault for micropolitical forms of cultural resistance; Bakhtin, Benjamin and Adorno speak to others of their own uneasy modernity. After the suppression of several Marxist and Marxist-Islamist parties in the 1980s and a subsequent period of postmodern malaise among intellectuals (with Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard in ascendancy), there is now a new thirst for radical thought. Governmental reformists attempted parliamentary reorganization and the reconciliation of Islam and democracy under the shadow of Karl Popper, but this is now widely regarded as a failed project. Following a steady stream of recent philosophical visitors Rorty, Habermas, Ricoeur will Negri prove an appropriate guide for a country which is in Condoleeza Rices recent terms an outpost of tyranny, and as such most denitely outside of what America (though not Negri) understands by Empire? With the 1979 revolution still within living and cultural memory for many, there is, perhaps understandably, widespread suspicion of classical Marxist or revolutionary solutions. During one of the sessions, a middle-aged lecturer whispered in Negris ear that he was a Trotskyist, whilst another professor felt free to hail openly the death of Marxism and sing the praises of the free market. The obvious severity of the Iranian theocratic state, even as the government repeatedly applies, and fails, to join the WTO, might appear to scupper Negris globalizing analysis from the outset. Indeed, much of the discussion over the somewhat gruelling four-day lecture series focused on precisely this question: how much does the analysis of Empire matter to a country in which it is primarily the state, and not new transnational forms of power, that shapes the everyday experience of politics? Negris attempt to replace the analysis of the working class with an all-inclusive multitudinous new proletariat is a bemusing, if intriguing, proposition for many in Iran, who perhaps see little of relevance in his communicative, productive model of mass political agency to what is, in many ways, a society constrained, at virtually all levels, by a ubiquitous, if internally riven, state. Of course, Negri was not there to discuss the Iranian case in particular. Nevertheless, elements of Negris work might well appeal to different political tendencies: his anti-capitalism to the religious hard right, his perceived anti-Americanism to the conservatives, the emphasis on communication to liberals and his revolutionary rhetoric to the few remaining Marxists. The question during the lecture series thus became: how are the elements of Negris project immaterial labour, the analysis of Empire, biopolitics, non-parliamentary democracy to be united in a way that makes sense in the Iranian context? Two hundred people, including families, journalists and students, arrived for the rst day under the banner Spinoza and Democracy. While Iranian speakers (Ramin Jahanbegloo, Morteza Qassempour) presented the case for Spinoza as an eminently liberal and secular or even ecological thinker, pointing to a progressivist understanding

54

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

of politics, Negri talked instead of the need to read Spinoza as a thinker of absolute democracy whose critique of the theological-political apparatus is tantamount to a destruction of all transcendence and hierarchy. Echoing Spinozas argument that a theocratic government will necessarily perish because, as a rule based on fear and sad passions, it breeds dissent and sedition, Negri perhaps came close to voicing a welcome heresy. He also spent much time outlining the arguments of the recent Multitude, where, faithful to Spinozas Political Treatise, democracy is argued to form the fundamental tendency of every society, which every other political formation necessarily corrupts. When asked about the current state of progressive politics in Europe, Negri spoke passionately against existing democracies, claiming that the institutional Left must be destroyed if a Spinozan concept of politics is to emerge: the democracy of multitude against the democracy of the one (whether understood as the monarch, the state, the nation, the people or the party). But again this concept of democracy from below proved problematic in a country that has the lowest universal voting age in the world fteen yet whose democratic desires are caught between slow or sterile governmental reform and the prospective of Western democracy from above. It is also impossible to ignore the Iranian experience of revolution conceived in the rst place precisely as coming from below and the manner in which it was all too quickly captured by repressive and reactionary factions. Many, it seems, put their faith in the long slow march of modernization, driven by the vast and technologically astute youth (the result of a post-revolutionary population boom in the 1980s). If there is to be a new Iranian revolution from below, it is unlikely to take the form of a plebeian carnival or quasiBiblical exodus. The second and third days (concerning the concepts of globalization and radicalism, respectively) produced some interesting, rather trenchant responses, particularly considering that Empire has not yet been translated into Persian. It became clear that there is some disagreement among translators as to how to render certain central

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

55

concepts, particularly multitude, though most of the audience read French or English. Again the question was posed: what does it mean to maintain a concept of radicalism that has no frontal relation to the constraints of the existing order? Morad Farhadpour, in particular, pressed Negri on his attempt to bypass sovereignty in all guises, referring to Schmitt and Agamben in support of his argument that all politics must, at least initially, have a relation to the state, and that radical politics for Iran would not resemble an exodus from the state, but a gap within or distance from the state. After dismissing this line of questioning as a kind of mysticism, and rejecting the idea that true struggle ever takes place at the level of the state, Negri was also sceptical of any celebration of micropolitics although one could argue that part of his broader project attempts to reverse Deleuze and Guattaris horror at the excessively communicative elements of capitalism into the potential for a kind of connective and futuristic communism. Referring to recent social movements and political clashes, such as Genoa, Negri spoke about the importance of the common, the forms of direct democracy carried out by a new proletariat, and the production of new forms of cooperative existence. This latter point, related to the concept of immaterial labour and the exploitation of communicative capacity in general, has an interesting resonance in Iran, with its sudden massive proliferation of web-based networks (blogs, instant messaging, information-exchange sites such as orkut). There is some discussion about imposing an Iran-wide intranet to counter some of the pernicious inuences of the World Wide Web, but it is clear that this would jeopardize the simultaneous and opposing government desire for increased economic exchange. Besides, several of the reformist mullahs currently write popular, if frequently disparaged, blogs of their own. However, this kind of immaterial labour the informatization of Iran remains lopsided. It is not in the workplaces that information ows and communicative capacities are plundered, but on the outside, in the private realm. It is not at all clear that the boundaries between intellectual activity, political action and labour have really dissolved, as Negris analysis presumes. The technological knowledge possessed by the Iranian middle classes serves little purpose in this heavily bureaucratic world, which is why one blogger, who also works as the translator for a state ministry of science, can speak of a double logic of production. This separation of power, communication and labour is not without its problems. Even if their disseminatory potential outstrips that of newspapers (which are all too frequently shut down), what if blogs are just one tool in a larger strategy of bypassing politics altogether? In a country with a giant nationalized oil industry, a fragile Islamic welfare state, and a deeply corrupt form of state capitalism, it seems that Irans youth, rather than its economy, is increasingly plugged into the circuits of Empire, not least because massive numbers leave each year to work and study abroad. The Iranian state, on the other hand, appears to be on the wrong side of the new imperialism, rather than inside or outside of Empire as such. The difculty of articulating the dimensions of Negris univocal vision with the schizophrenic fragments of a complex nation mean that his presence in Iran, though very welcome, was oddly tangential to its most pressing concerns.
Nina Power

56

Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 20 05)

Subscription rates 2005

Individual Subscribers
6 issues UK: 27 Europe: 32/48 ROW surface: 33.50/$54 ROW airmail: 40/$66 12 issues UK: 48 Europe: 57/84 ROW surface: 61/$98 ROW airmail: 74/$120 Student rate UK: 22 Europe: 26/39 ROW surface: 28/$46 ROW airmail: 35/$56

Libraries and Institutions (agency discount 10%)

6 issues UK: 62 Europe 67/101 ROW surface: 70/$110 ROW airmail: 77/$124

Back issues: Subscribers 4.95/8/$9 per copy Non-subscribers 6.00/9/$11

Institutions 12/17/$20 (10% discount for orders of 10 or more)

Bound back sets (175) in ve handsewn burgundy hard-cover volumes

including indexes: 495/$745 plus p&p (surface) UK: 10 ROW: 20/$30
A list of contents of back issues is available from the Radical Philosophy web site at: www.radicalphilosophy.com

Radical Philosophy INDEX (160) Subscribers 5.00/$10 Non-subscribers 7 .50/$12 Institutions 12.00/$20
NEW CONTACT DETAILS: Radical Philosophy Subs, McMillan-Scott Subs Services, Garrard House, 26 Homesdale Road, Bromley, BR2 9WL Tel 020 8249 4444 Email rp@mcmslondon.co.uk
All prices include postage. Cheques should be made payable to Radical Philosophy Ltd We accept Visa, Access/Mastercard, Switch & Eurocard. When ordering please state your card no. and expiry date. Online subscriptions (secure link): www.radicalphilosophy.com

10% discount on all subscriptions paid by direct debit CONTRIBUTIONS Please send either by email attachment (Word) or mail 6 copies clearly typed on one side of A4 paper, double-spaced and including a one-paragraph summary and word count. Articles should not normally be longer than 8000 words, to: Radical Philosophy, c/o Mark Neocleous, Department of Politics, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH email: Mark.Neocleous@brunel.ac.uk Material is accepted for publication in Radical Philosophy on the understanding that copyright is assigned to Radical Philosophy Ltd unless other arrangements are explicitly made. Where copyright is held by Radical Philosophy, up to ten copies of any article may be reproduced for teaching purposes without charge, provided that Radical Philosophy is acknowledged as the original source. BOOKS FOR REVIEW Peter Osborne, Middlesex University, White Hart Lane, London N17 8HR email: P.Osborne@mdx.ac.uk NEWS items and LETTERS are welcome. They are subject to editing before publication. Please send details of events, reports, etc. to: Radical Philosophy, c/o Mark Neocleous, Department of Politics, Brunel University, Uxbridge UB8 3PH. email: Mark.Neocleous@brunel.ac.uk ADVERTISING Radical Philosophy, c/o Stewart Martin, 25(a) Cann Hall Road, Leytonstone, London, E11 3HY. email: stewart.martin@talk21.com Rates: 220 per page 110 half page 65 quarter page (plus VAT) Leaet inserts: 165 per 1000 (plus VAT) Copy deadlines: 6 weeks prior to publication Journal appears: 2nd week of January, March, May, July, September, November COPYRIGHT PERMISSIONS Kevin Magill, 18 Compton Road, Wolverhampton WV3 9PH email: k.magill@wlv.ac.uk EDITORIAL PROCEDURE Radical Philosophy is run by an Editorial Collective of ten members, who work on a voluntary basis and without any outside support. The journal appears six times a year. Each article submitted is read and refereed by at least four members of the Editorial Collective, one of whom is appointed Article Editor and takes responsibility for communication with the author. The Reviews Editor is responsible for commissioning reviews and for relations with publishers.
Radical Philosophy is included in: ALTERNATIVE PRESS INDEX, BRITISH HUMANITIES INDEX, SOCIAL SCIENCE CITATION INDEX & CURRENT CONTENTS, THE LEFT INDEX, PHILOSOPHERS INDEX and SOCIOLOGICAL ABSTRACTS.