Radical Philosophy 118, 2003

CONTENTS
R A D I C A L P H I L O S O P H Y
a j o u r n a l o f s o c i a l i s t a n d f e m i n i s t p h i l o s o p h y
MARCH/APRIL 2003
118
Radical Philosophy Ltd
Editorial collective
Caroline Bassett, Andrew Chitty, Howard
Feather, Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie,
Kevin Magill, Stewart Martin, Mark
Neocleous, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford,
Alessandra Tanesini
Contributors
Megan Stern teaches English literature
and critical theory at the London
Metropolitan University. She has written
on science fiction, popular science and
anatonomy in Science as Culture, New
Formations and Utopian Studies.
.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has held
chairs in philosophy at the University of
Strasburg and the University of California,
Berkeley. His books in English include
Typography (Harvard University Press,
1989) and The Subject of Philosophy
(University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
Martin Seel is Professor of Philosophy
at the University of Giessen, Germany.
His book Aesthetics of Appearing is
forthcoming from Stanford University
Press.
David Chandler is Senior Lecturer
in International Relations, Centre for
the Study of Democracy, University of
Westminster. His recent books include
Bosnia (Pluto, 1999), From Kosovo
to Kabul (Pluto, 2002), and (editor)
Rethinking Human Right (Palgrave, 2002).
Bruce Robbins is Professor of English
and Comparative Literature at Columbia
University, New York.
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COMMENTARY
Shiny, Happy People: Body Worlds and the Commodification
of Health
Megan Stern ................................................................................................. 2
ARTICLES
Oedipus as Figure
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe ............................................................................ 7
The Aesthetics of Appearing
Martin Seel ................................................................................................. 18
The Cosmopolitan Paradox: Response to Robbins
David Chandler ........................................................................................... 25
Reply to Chandler
Bruce Robbins ............................................................................................ 31
REVIEWS
Daniel Bensad, Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures
of a Critique
Stewart Martin ........................................................................................... 33
Wendy Cealey Harrison and John Hood-Williams, Beyond Sex and Gender
Stella Sandford ........................................................................................... 36
Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason
Ted Benton .................................................................................................. 38
Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing
and the Difference of Theology
Ray Brassier ................................................................................................ 41
Howard Caygill, Levinas and the Political
Chris Thompson .......................................................................................... 44
Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory
and the Avant-Garde
Nitin Govil ................................................................................................... 46
Craig Brandist, The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture, Politics
Rachel Malik ............................................................................................... 48
OBITUARY
Norman O. Brown, 19132002
Eli Zaretsky ................................................................................................. 50
Kristin Ross ................................................................................................. 52
CONFERENCE REPORT
Philosophy As, London, 2830 November 2002
Nickolas Lambrianou ................................................................................. 55
2 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 11 8 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 0 3 )
COMMENTARY
Shiny, happy people
Body Worlds and the
commodication of health
Megan Stern
G
unther von Hagens touring Body Worlds exhibition of dissected, plastinated
human corpses has generated a great deal of public interest, much of it critical
and even hostile. The use of animal body parts in art installations and exhibi-
tions and documentaries exploring human anatomy may have become familiar fare in
recent years,
1
but the display of actual human esh seems, for many people at least,
to constitute an unacceptable violation of human dignity. There have been attempts to
ban Body Worlds in all of the countries that have hosted the exhibition thus far. In
Britain the pressure group Pity II, comprising parents whose children were involved in
the Alder Hey Hospital body-parts scandal, attempted to prevent the London exhibi-
tion. It has also come under serious criticism from the British Medical Association and
Nufeld Foundation, as well as being subject to critical demonstrations from visitors,
one of whom threw a sheet over a pregnant gure. According to Paul Harris, von
Hagen has been shunned by fellow scientists in his native Germany and Gnter Grass
has allegedly compared him to Joseph Mengele.
2
Prior to the recent public perform-
ance of an autopsy, von Hagen was threatened with arrest, and the police, alongside
the media, were out in force to attend von Hagens demonstration. All this hostility
and distrust can easily be explained as the inevitable consequence of the breaking
of a powerful social taboo, but there is more to the commotion surrounding Body
Worlds than this. The exhibition is shocking not simply because it goes against the
grain of what is apparently acceptable. It also represents, in the most dramatic terms,
the redenition of the human body within consumer culture. In this sense it is eerily
representative of current values.
The art of plastic
In some respects at least Body Worlds treatment of the human body is extremely
conventional. Notably, it reproduces the long-standing assumption within anatomical
tradition that the male represents the anatomical norm and that the female is of interest
primarily as a means of demonstrating the reproductive system. Of those whole-body
plastinates on display at the Atlantis Gallery in Shoreditch, East London last year, only
two were female. Of these one was pregnant, reclining on one side with a hand behind
the head, a pose taken straight from pornographic clich. The other drew attention to
the position of the uterus and ovaries in relation to other organs and was suspended,
midair, in the graceful position of a swimmer. This gure also had signicant quantities
of hair on its head, despite the uniform baldness of other plastinates. By contrast most
male plastinates were displayed in heroic manly poses, with titles such as the horse-
man, muscleman, the swordsman, the runner and the chess player. The urinary
system was represented exclusively using male organs, and, while the breast and female
reproductive system were displayed in isolation, male reproductive organs were not
treated in the same way. The penis thus appeared as part of the normal body, rather
than as the male organ of reproduction, a process that is exclusively identied with
the female body in the exhibition. Body Worlds may thus be shocking in so far as it
features real corpses, but the ways in which these corpses are represented is, certainly
in terms of gender, extremely conservative.
Basing the poses of a number of his whole-body plastinates on works of art, von
Hagen also offers us the human body in ways that are already familiar to us aestheti-
cally. This is humanity as we already know it, through the paintings, sketches and
sculptures of da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Czanne, Dal and Boccioni, among others.
Ironically, given von Hagens insistence that ordinary people should have access to
the real thing, these are actual human bodies that have been reworked to look
like aesthetic representations of the body. The plastination process itself, in which
all bodily uids are replaced with a variety of synthetic materials including silicone
rubber, epoxy resin and polyester, enhances this sense of the bodies as constructs.
The plastinate, denuded of the qualities that would make it eshly, becomes a static,
odourless, impermeable and clearly delineated reworking of the original body. Real,
decaying corpses are messy and smelly, qualities which play a crucial role in rendering
the corpse taboo, the destabilizing abject that must be made safe through rituals of
purication and detachment. Plastination arguably constitutes just such a ritual, so that
instead of shocking visitors by confronting them with abject corpses, Body Worlds
renders these corpses safe, unthreatening. Body Worlds is reassuring because, whilst
undoubtedly promising the ghoulish thrill of encountering authentic human corpses, it
also neutralizes this encounter. It gives us the corpse in spectacular fairground mode:
exciting but safe.
In other words, the exhibition goes beyond the economy of representation and offers
us the dissected corpse as simulacrum. The original body cannot anywhere show
itself because it constitutes the very material from which the simulation is made. The
actual body has been displaced by a hyper-real one whose durability and authenticity
entirely displace the need for the real thing. Imogen ORorkes comparison of what she
calls the new necro-body to a Barbie doll is telling in this respect. While Barbie is
femininity packaged as idealized spectacle, the plastinate has a similar relationship to
the corpse. If real women and corpses age and, in the case of the latter, putrefy, their
plastic substitutes go on for ever. Likewise Barbies idealized shape and the plastinates
perfectly dened anatomy displace the inadequacies and uncertainties of the real thing.
In each case the commodity promises what the real body can never deliver, and, since
immortality is even less attainable than feminine perfection, plastination has a very
particular appeal. Von Hagen himself has suggested that plastination
eliminates anxiety because I am able to extend my physical existence after death I dont
know whether we continue or not after life, but this exhibition gets much closer to the soul
than the Church because you are so close to the body. I dont fear death any more.
3
Plastination promises the donor neither the spiritual eternity of most religions, nor the
cerebral eternity of cryogenics, but physical permanence: plastination offers a uniquely
secular, material form of immortality. In the comments of many donors, the avoidance
of physical decay is prominent among the reasons given for registering as a donor. Body
Worlds is, quite literally, a consumer heaven.
One of the criticisms most frequently levied at von Hagen is that he is commercially,
rather than (as he claims) educationally, motivated. His self-conscious showmanship,
the dramatic advertising used to promote Body Worlds, the glossy website and the
range of products available from both website and exhibition including tie pins,
puzzles and soft toys all support this view. But the commercial appeal of Body
Worlds goes beyond these trappings; the very process by which von Hagen constructs
his gures is a form of commodication. As such, the exhibition can be understood in
terms of the redenition of health, the body and death within the increasingly com-
mercialized medical system of contemporary Britain.
The foundation of the National Health Service in 1948 institutionalized the idea
that health was a matter of state responsibility towards the public. Within this context,
patients tended to defer to medical experts, in whose hands they placed their bodies. In
recent years, however, these patients have become consumers of health care with con-
tractual relationships to service providers. In the new order consumers rights over their
bodies and the bodies of their relatives are paramount. Furthermore, as state paternal-
ism has diminished, health-care systems
place increasing responsibility on individuals
for maintaining their own health. Health, in
other words, is less a matter of social welfare
and more a matter of individual choice, self-
awareness and responsibility.
Von Hagen, who, according to Stuart
Jeffries sees himself on a global mission
to end the elitism of the medical profession
which, he believes, has denied the lay public
access to a better understanding of their own
bodies, is very much in tune with this new
medical culture. The Anatomy Act of 1832,
which abolished anatomy as a public specta-
cle and mode of punishment, played a crucial
role in creating a culture of professional
exclusivity and authority within medicine.
The act empowered doctors, whilst diminish-
ing the authority of patients, leaving them
with little option but to trust the judgement of
professionals. Body Worlds and von Hagens
recent public autopsy begin to reverse this
process, echoing the contemporary shift in
power between the medical profession and
patients/consumers of health care.
But von Hagen is not simply offering
people anatomical understanding. Just as the
new consumer ethos of health care places
emphasis on individual self-awareness, so
Body Worlds encourages visitors to identify
themselves, quite intimately, with the dissected gures they have come to see. The
animated poses of many plastinates and their proximity to visitors seem designed to
encourage visitors to reect upon their own bodies and the Body Worlds website fea-
tures visitors comments that highlight this sense of identication. One visitor marvels
at his complexity, another says that Body Worlds profoundly changed my attitudes
towards my own body, towards life and death. I feel myself in a different way now,
more intensely. A third talks of smiling while watching the dressed, living bodies
standing next to the plastinated, mute bodies. The slippage between visitor and exhibit
becomes even clearer in relation to von Hagens donation programme. The inclusion of
donors comments and donor application forms within the exhibition encourages visitors
to conceive of themselves as future plastinates, and one of the attractions of becoming
a donor is the annual invitation to witness the plastination process. The display of
plastinated organs in Body Worlds clearly links self-awareness and self-maintenance.
As Chris Bloor points out, the number of tar-stained and cancerous lungs in the exhibi-
tion carries with it a clear moral message about personal responsibility. The same can
be said of the array of cirrhotic livers, hardened arteries and haemorrhaged hearts; it
is difcult to look at this collection of diseased organs without feeling a very direct
connection with ones own body and wondering how its organs might compare to those
on display.
It is necessary to be well informed, self-aware and responsible within the rationale of
consumerism, because this enables the individual to make good choices. In the context
of health care this means that the patient should not simply accept what he or she is
told, but should instead be in a position to make informed decisions about available
options. In Body Worlds donation is gured as just such an informed decision. The
majority of donors made their decision after visiting one of von Hagens exhibitions

(in March 2002 there were 3,200 donors registered, and according to Jeffries each
exhibition leads to a ood of volunteers) and, as noted above, they are invited to attend
annual plastination demonstrations, so they clearly know (despite much criticism to the
contrary) what they are letting themselves in for. The public dissections nostalgically
recalled by von Hagen used the bodies of executed criminals, anatomy being part of
the punishment for murder. In more recent times, medical etiquette has dictated that
relatives of organ donors should be given as little information as possible about what
exactly will happen in order to minimize their distress. Von Hagens donation scheme
contradicts both of these positions, presenting plastination, dissection and public display
as personal choices made by well-informed individuals.
At the same time, von Hagen is absolutely in tune with the current guidelines
concerning the procedures for procuring and retaining body parts and organs, guide-
lines which emerged in response to changing attitudes towards medical care. The
Redfern Inquiry into the Alder Hey scandal, in which thousands of infant and fetal
body parts were removed and retained without parental consent, emphasized the great
importance of gaining informed consent. That is to say, the report rejected the routine
practice of protecting parents from distressing clinical details and insisted that only
procedures of which parents were fully cognizant and for which they had given consent
could be allowed. As consumers of health care, in other words, parents have a right
to knowledge and informed decision-making that supersedes the doctors right to
research. Arguably, it was this same cultural shift which led to the scandal in the rst
place. While it was precipitated by the serious misconduct of one pathologist, Dick van
Velzen, disclosures concerning his malpractice very soon escalated into a widespread
condemnation of the routine removal of organs at all research hospitals that went back
to the early years of the NHS. What had been acceptable within the context of medical
paternalism is condemned within that of consumer health care. Ironically, given that
Alder Hey parents formed the most vocal opposition to Body Worlds in Britain, von
Hagens donation programme is exemplary, according to the terms laid out by the
Redfern Inquiry. In so far, then, as Body Worlds and Pity II adhere to the principles
of informed consumer choice, they appear to have much in common.
Too close to home
Where they differ, however, is in their response to the other half of the consumer health
equation. Patients may be redened as consumers in so far as they are incorporated
into a discourse of rights and choices, but given the new economic imperative within
health care as bodies requiring treatment they are also transformed into commodities.
They become the specic illness or dysfunctional organ from which they suffer and
enter the medical market place accordingly. It was the idea of their childrens body
parts being reduced to objects in this way that incensed Alder Hey parents, and the
spectacular display of corpses in Body Worlds could do nothing but anger them. The
language of rights and choices deployed by the Redfern Inquiry clearly emerges from
the idea of the patient as consumer, but the corresponding idea of the patient as com-
modity is implicitly condemned. In Body Worlds the proximity of these ideas is much
clearer, as plastination is represented as a desirable, well-informed consumer choice.
The full extent to which Body Worlds reveals the uncomfortable relationship
between consumer and commodity emerges from accusations that have been made
against von Hagen concerning the sources of some of his plastinates. Although von
Hagen is clear that all the whole body plastinates included in his exhibitions have been
donated for this specic purpose, he does not make the same claim for exhibited body
parts or whole body plastinates sold to research and teaching institutions. In the light of
his move from Germany to China and Kyrgyzstan, where legislation concerning the use
of dead bodies is far looser than in Europe, there has been concern over the sources for
these plastinates. In particular, news that he had bought fty-six bodies from a psychi-
atric hospital in Novosibirsk, Kyrgyzstan, led to widespread criticism in the press. The
image of von Hagen acquiring quantities of unspecied bodies, plastinating, dissecting
and then selling them on to medical institutions is clearly very different from the one
evoked by the Body Worlds donation scheme. Von Hagen represents plastination as
an enlightened, individual choice, and to this extent the plastinates enable consumer
desires and fantasies. However, his alleged use of the Novosibirsk corpses would
suggest that plastination might also exemplify the bodys reduction to an exchangeable
object within the global marketplace. Moreover, the fact that those who buy into the
Body Worlds donation scheme are predominantly white Europeans (as well as being
predominantly male, the whole body plastinates on show at Body Worlds are also
exclusively white), while those whose bodies have apparently been bought are mentally
ill, impoverished or convicted Asians, reects the global relationship between consumer
rights and commodied bodies in contemporary medical culture.
Whether or not there is any truth in the allegations brought against von Hagen, the
fact that such speculations circulate at all suggests the pertinence of Body Worlds to
recent changes in medical culture. Like the scandal of organ selling in the Third World,
the story suggests an uncomfortable awareness of the reduction of people to com-
modities that the language of medical choices, rights and responsibilities avoids. Body
Worlds attracts attention, whether from supporters or detractors, because it highlights,
in spectacular ways, the changes that consumer culture has wrought upon ideas of
medicine, the body and death. If it has been a recurring source of offence, hostility,
legal intervention and allegation, this is perhaps because it articulates so clearly what is
too close to home.
Notes
1. Korperwelten or Body Worlds (hww.bodyworlds.co.uk/en.htm), which had previously been
shown in Tokyo, Mannheim, Vienna, Basle, Cologne, Oberhausen, Berlin and Brussels, was
preceded in London by the 2000 Spectacular Bodies exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, which
included uncannily lifelike anatomical waxworks. In the summer of 2002, the Science Museum in
London also ran the high prole Grossology exhibition, an educational tour of the human body
targeted at schoolchildren. Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn and Rick Gibson are among a number of
British artists who have used animal or human body parts, tissues and uids. Body Works will
be shown next in Munich.
2. Stuart Jeffries, The Naked and the Dead, Guardian, 9 March 2002; Paul Harris, World Trade in
Bodies is Linked to Corpse Art Show, Observer, 17 March 2002.
3. Imogen ORorke, Skinless Wonders, Observer, 20 May 2001.
Oedipus as gure
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
I
t is probable, or at the very least plausible, that Western humanity now models itself
on two gures or types two examples, if you like. They appear to be antagonistic
(or are at least supported by antagonistic discourses), but their antagonism also
binds together, and founds, their kinship, as each of these gures or types claims to
provide an exclusive representation of humanity as such.
The rst of these gures is the older and obviously the more powerful in terms of
its social, political and historical effects: the gure of the worker, in the sense in which
it was expressly designated and thematized by Ernst Jnger, but also in the sense that it
is supported by the entire social metaphysics of the nineteenth century, and especially
by the thought of Marx in its entirety. Under its inuence or impact, the essence of
humanity humanitas recognizes itself, understands itself and tries to realize itself
as the subject of production (the modern poiesis)
in general or as the subject of energy in the strict
sense: energy that is applied and put to work. In
this gure, man is represented as worker.
The second gure is less obvious, even though
its gural or mythical determination is no less
clear. This does not mean that its effects are
less powerful, but it does mean that, thanks to a
structural necessity, they are concealed: they are
inscribed in the element of history and politics
(but not society) in a less immediately readable
manner. They have a kind of infra or hypo
(sub) status, and therefore pertain more clearly
to the order of the subjectum in general. I refer,
of course, to the gure of Oedipus in the sense
that, ever since Freud, Oedipus has been the
name of desire, and in the sense that the gure of
Oedipus represents the subject of desire. Which
necessarily means: desire as subject. Desire is
not the opposite of labour in the same way that
consumption is the opposite of production. That
crude opposition has had its day. But the fact
that desire, like production, is consumed may
mean that desire itself is a form of production
or energy. It was probably a mistake to speak of
a libidinal economy. I do not know if that was
enough to reach the unique root from which the
antagonism between desiring man and working
man springs, or should spring. And nor do I know
if we now have, given the current state of affairs,
the ability to nd that root. I would, however, like
to take a step in that direction. Just a step, or in
other words a very rst step.
Heidegger has the distinction of having begun to
deconstruct the gure of the Worker.
1
In doing so,
he began to deconstruct the gural in general, or to
deconstruct everything that modern ontology elevated
to the rank of Gestalt, gure or type, when, abandon-
ing its claim to be an onto-theology, it transformed
itself into an onto-anthropology or, as I have suggested
elsewhere, an onto-typology.
2
This gure or type is,
making due allowance for the reversal of transcend-
ence into rescendence (the expression is Heideggers)
that we can observe in Feuerbach and Marx as well
as Nietzsche, a strict equivalent to the Platonic idea.
The gure or Gestalt of the Worker is understood by
Heidegger as being one of the modes in which the
essence of technology is deployed, or in other words
as one of the modes of Ge-stell. The word designates
the unity of coming together of all the modes of
Stellen, formulating or (re)presenting in general,
from Vorstellung to Gestalt. It therefore designates
being in its last envoi.
No such deconstruction of the gure of Oedipus has
been attempted. It is usually ignored as a gure and
viewed solely as a structure. The deconstruction of the
Oedipal structure was and is still necessary. Just as it
was necessary for the Freudian interpretation of the
myth to be rigorously delineated. And yet it is perhaps
just as necessary to look at the very simple, almost
anodyne, gesture whereby Freud appropriates a mythi-
cal name and erects it into a concept, a schema or, as
I believe, a gure. After all, that gesture is no more
innocent that the gesture whereby Nietzsche decides
to make Zarathustra the gure of the Will to Power
(and the spokesman for the Eternal Return). And it is
all the less innocent in that Nietzsche is never very
far behind Freud. The question I would like to raise is
therefore as follows: what necessity was Freud obeying
when he turned to Oedipus and elevated him to the
rank of gure? Just what was it that this mythical or
post-mythical gure supported that made Freud think
of appropriating it?
Freud himself is quite explicit about the many good
reasons for recognizing the history or prehistory of
desire in the myth. He also makes it perfectly clear
that the mythical in general has to be resolutely taken
into account. On the other hand, he never takes the
trouble to re-examine the apparent spontaneity of his
major gesture: subsuming everything to do with his
discovery under the name of Oedipus and thus making
that name the emblem of psychoanalysis itself because
that name can be regarded as the name of the very
subject of the unconscious. And yet the gesture was
not without its consequences.
The suspicion or rather the hypothesis I would
like to put forward is therefore this, and it can be
formulated without too many precautions: the reason
why Oedipus has become a gure in this way is that
Oedipus could take on the status of a gure. A gure
is not simply what it signies or what we say it means.
A gure is a gure only because it imposes itself as
such and because it can have that position, or in other
words the position of an idea that has been inverted
or reversed. A gure necessarily has an ontological
status in the metaphysical sense of that term. To put
it in different terms: the fact that Oedipus is a gure
is none of Freuds doing, or not just Freuds doing. It
is the result of an ontology that pre-exists Freud, and
that may also provide a support for what he always
described as the fortuitous outcome of pure research.
The question is therefore: what predisposed Oedipus
to take on the status of a gure? What authorized
Freuds gesture? And my hypothesis though it is
merely a rst hypothesis is as follows: before becom-
ing, no doubt jointly and severally, the gure of desire
and science, Oedipus was already a gure; perhaps not
the gure of desire, but certainly the gure of science.
Oedipus was a gure in philosophy, and the gure
of philosophy. Which probably means that Oedipus
was also the gure of a desire: the desire for what
philosophy, because of the very name it gives itself,
claims to take as its object: love. Sophon is one of
the words, but not the only word, that the Greeks used
for knowledge. And perhaps who knows? loving
means desiring.
There appears, in other words, to be a prehistory
of the Oedipus. A philosophical prehistory of the
Oedipus. Oedipus seems to have been considered the
philosophical hero par excellence: the man in whom,
or the man in whose destiny, all the inner meanings of
the Wests spiritual quest come together in a symbolic
sense; he appears to have been recognized as the initial
or tutelary hero of our history and our civilization.
Within that history and within that civilization, the
West is therefore described as Oedipal. The name
Oedipus, which is one of his names or at least one
possible translation of his name, appears to have been
a name for the West.
Just now, I alluded to a determinate moment in
our history or in the history of thought. Truth to tell,
and although this occurred before the sudden rise of
psychoanalysis, Oedipus or the name Oedipus entered
philosophy somewhat late in the day. So late, in fact,
that his entrance coincided with the moment when
philosophy was beginning to believe that its end was
near, that the questions that it had brought into being
over two thousand years ago were on the point of
receiving a denitive answer, or in short that a certain
history, if not history itself to the extent that it was the
history of thought, was coming to an end or a nish:
the programme had been completed. That is why
Oedipus, who, for the Greeks themselves and at the
inaugural moment of our history was the incarnation
of the archaic, and referred to the darkest realms of a
prehistory, became in reality, when philosophy appro-
priated him, a gure of the end and of completion. Or,
which amounts to the same thing, he is, henceforth,
the denitive gure of origins: Oedipus is the man in
whom and according to whom the destiny of the West
was sealed for ever.
This is the moment when philosophy nds its most
appropriate name outside itself (and, for instance, no
longer recognizes itself, or recognizes itself less and
less, in the name of Socrates). This is the moment, that
is, when philosophy begins to seek its symbolic mark
in its oldest antagonist myth and in doing so nds
that it can board it for inspection. The moment when
philosophy goes in search of a gure is the moment
in its history that follows the most serious crisis that
has ever affected philosophy: this is the moment that
follows Kants critique of metaphysics, and it sees
philosophy attempting, no doubt for the rst time, to
nd a new self-condence and to restore itself to what
it once was by overcoming the apparently nal verdict
that Kant had pronounced against it. Oedipus therefore
appears at a truly tragic moment it is the destiny of
philosophy, or metaphysics to be more accurate, that
is at stake and, as in the myth, he appears in order
to resolve a crisis. He appears like a pharmakos, and
with all the ambivalence that surrounds that ritual
character. It so happens that the crisis is symbolic: it
is a crisis within thought. But perhaps who knows?
the social crisis reected in the myth is no longer a
symbolic crisis. Perhaps the symbolic crisis that occurs
in philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century is
very directly related to the immense political crisis
that threw Europe into upheaval after the French
Revolution. The Schlegels of this world, at least, made
no distinction between the two.
Aristotle
How did Oedipus entry into philosophy come about?
Why and how did philosophy go in search of him or
seek him out? What was it that he represented that
made him the incarnation of the hope that the crisis
could be resolved, or that a model for its resolution
could be found?
Truth to tell, Oedipus was already present within
philosophy prior to this late moment or, perhaps,
before this terminal phase in philosophy in the strict
sense which, for us, begins with German idealism. The
name was already in circulation and had been for a
very long time; at least since Aristotle. I think that we
have to dwell on this for a moment; otherwise we are
in danger of failing to understand the meaning of the
Oedipal operation undertaken by German idealism.
It was indeed Aristotle and you know how long
his authority held sway over thought who made
Sophocles Oedipus Rex what might be described
as the denitive model for tragedy, the tragedy par
excellence, or the tragedy of tragedies. He does so in
the Poetics, which, as you know, attempts to dene
the specicity of tragedy within that specic form of
mimesis known as the theatrical or the dramatic, or in
other words the (re)presentation of human actions (the
representation of a mythos). Aristotle introduces the
question of its telos, its intended goal or nal purpose.
In his opinion, mimesis itself, which is natural to all
men and therefore truly human, has a very specic
function: that of teaching us to see and theorize
(and here there is an obvious link with theatre).
Mimesis predisposes us to think and to know; it has
a philosophical vocation. But it does not just have a
theoretical function; or, rather, that theoretical func-
tion is also an economic function (with knowledge,
an economy, if not the economy itself which is estab-
lished): mimesis is also capable, according to Aristotle,
of making bearable the sight (and this again is a matter
of theory) of what we would nd repulsive in the real
world. The representation of, say, a corpse is bearable.
In more general terms, the spectacle of death frightens
us less than death itself and allows us to look at it
(and therefore to think about it). Bataille will use this
as an argument against Hegel. This function, which is
the direct corollary of the theoretical function, is none
other than katharsis purgation or purication, not
that the distinction matters greatly here (it is always
a matter of driving out evil). Mimesis in fact acts like
homeopathic medicine; to shift register, it functions
like a sacrice that uses a simulacrum or subterfuge
to drive out social violence by spectacularly projecting
the violence and murderous desires onto an animal. It
is because it is theoretico-theatrical that mimesis is
cathartic and, if you like, that it can provide a cure.
We are within the space of what Jacques Derrida calls
economimesis.
3
The exemplary instance of economimesis is tragedy,
which is in Aristotles view the highest form of art.
And within tragedy, it is illustrated in exemplary
fashion by Sophocles Oedipus Rex. For tragedy is,
according to Aristotle, the social or political art par
excellence (which should be understood as meaning
the art that deals with the essentials of human praxis)
and its task it to drive out the evil that affects human
relations. That is why it plays simultaneously upon
the two basic passions implicit, because of their very
possibility, in any human relationship: fear, which is
the passion inspired by the dissolution of the social
bond, by unbinding or dissociation; and pity, which is
in contrast the passion that inspires social relations,
if not as Rousseau thought the primal passion of
sociality. The tragic spectacle must discharge in the
sense that Freud will use that term, which derives
directly from Aristotle fear and pity. (This is easy
to understand when it comes to fear, but much less so
when it comes to pity. But if we reread Freuds Mas-
senpsychologie, we nd that an excess of love poses
at least as great a threat to the social body as hatred.)
This is why the tragic spectacle must (re)present a
myth that can bring about this (twofold) discharge, or
in other words the actions of a man who can inspire
both fear and pity. The true tragic hero must, in other
words, be both and simultaneously frightening
and touching. He must inspire fear and still, because
he inspires fear, make us feel compassion. He must
therefore be a being who bears within him a basic
contradiction, if not the basic human contradiction
that is the enigma of humanity. He must therefore
be, for the same reason and in his very identity,
both a monster (the incarnation of evil) and a poor
wretch (goodness itself). The tragic, dened in the true
sense, comes about, that is, when guilt (responsibility
for a sin) and innocence come together in one and
the same being; when the myth is based upon the
gure of contradiction, oxymoron (innocent guilt) or
even paradox (the greater the guilt, the greater the
innocence and vice versa). That is why the story of
Oedipus, who pays the price for a sin he has committed
without knowing it who quite simply pays the price
for his non-knowledge and whose desire for knowledge
reveals the horror of his destiny is the tragic myth
at its highest degree of perfection.
All these things are well known. I recall them only
to point out that, from philosophys point of view, what
is in play here explains not only why, until Nietzsche
and Freud (and even until Heidegger after them),
Oedipus Rex was regarded as the model for tragedy,
but also why philosophy was able to seize hold of the
myth, make it its own and promote Oedipus to being
the very gure of philosophy. There are two main
reasons for this and they are certainly not the only
ones.
On the one hand, the very structure and nality of
tragedy, as analysed by Aristotle, this whole theoretico-
cathartic mechanism (of knowledge and salvation) and
therefore this economic mechanism, predispose tragedy
to full the two great functions of philosophy (Aris-
totles rival was quite right about this): the theoretical
and the practical, or, if you prefer to put it that way, the
speculative and the ethico-political.
In that respect, it is not at all sur-
prising that for the young Nietzsche,
for example, the insistent recall of
the Oedipal motif went hand in hand
with the denition of philosophy as
the doctor of culture and with the
political hope that tragedy would
enjoy a renaissance in the modern
West (and in Germany).
On the other hand, and what
is more important, the fact that
tragedy is already politically ori-
ented implies that tragedy is the site
for the revelation of the very essence
of knowledge and the inspiration
behind the desire for knowledge: the
encounter with contradiction. In general. And that, it
appears to me, is the basic reason why Oedipus reap-
pears in philosophy at the moment when philosophy, in
the person of Kant, reveals the contradictions to which
human reason is exposed when it goes beyond its own
limits, goes beyond the limits of nite experience and
attempts to take up a position beyond the sensible
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world, or in the metaphysical as such, in order to tell
the truth about the world, the soul or God, when,
taking the model (or following the example) of the
tragic hero, it becomes guilty of hubris insolence
and transgression. Oedipus and this is the last gasp
of metaphysics makes it possible to think contra-
dictions being-thinkable. It represents a model for
the solution of what Kant called the antinomies. And
because this kind of solution is what constitutes the
dialectic as such or speculative logic, Oedipus will be
regarded as the dialectical hero or, which amounts to
the same thing, the speculative hero.
Let me attempt to demonstrate this briey.
Schelling
The singular honour of reintroducing Oedipus and
the question of the tragic along with him into phil-
osophy falls to Schelling. The gesture is contemporary
with the rst beginnings of German idealism, and
therefore with the moment of the owering of early
Romanticism (the Romanticism of Jena). It is not
unrelated to Friedrich Schlegels philological work on
Greek tragedy. It takes place at the time when Hegel,
Hlderlin and Schelling were all beginning their philo-
sophical work. The question confronting them was
obviously the question bequeathed them by Kant or,
in a word, the critical question: is metaphysics, as
elaborated from Plato to Leibniz and Spinoza, still
possible? Or is the subject of thought the Cartesian
cogito on which all the metaphysics of the Moderns
is based subordinated to so many conditions as to
be denied any truly metaphysical knowledge from the
outset?
According to Schelling, who deals with this problem
in a little book entitled Letters on Dogmatism and
Criticism (1795), the debate within metaphysics that
is initiated by Kant essentially comes down to the
problem of freedom. To put it very schematically,
Kants critique declares that the problem of freedom,
or the metaphysical problem of freedom, is insoluble,
because there is no way of proving either that freedom
is possible, or that it is impossible and that the rule
of natural necessity is absolute. In order to solve this
problem we would have to be able to adopt the position
and viewpoint of God. Those are the terms bequeathed
us by Spinoza. We would, in other words, have to
accede to the Absolute Knowledge which alone can
decide whether man is completely subordinate to the
order of things and natural determinism, whether he is
hemmed in by the sphere of objectivity, or whether he
is, on the contrary, capable, in so far as he is a subject,
of escaping the mechanism of the world and acceding
to freedom. According to Schelling, the most basic
philosophical contradiction is the very contradiction
which Kant took to extremes between the objective
(necessity or nature) and the subjective (freedom). And
what is at stake here is, in his view, the possibility of
the absolute subject, or, in other words, the possibility
of the Absolute as subject.
Now there is a solution to this seemingly insur-
mountable contradiction. And the solution is given
by Greek tragedy in its presentation of the myth of
Oedipus. This is how the tenth and last of the letters
that make up Schellings book opens. It is a text to
which I have already referred elsewhere.
4
It has often been asked how Greek reason could
put up with the contradictions of its tragedy. A
mortal who is destined by fatality to be a crimi-
nal struggles against fatality and yet he receives a
terrible punishment for a crime for which destiny
was responsible! The reason for this contradiction,
or what makes it bearable, lay deeper than where it
was being sought: it lay in the conict between hu-
man freedom and the power of the objective world.
When that power was a superpower (a fatum), the
mortal must necessarily lose and yet, as he did not
lose without a struggle, he had to be punished for
his very defeat. The fact that the criminal, who was
defeated only by the superpower of destiny, was
punished implied that the recognition of human
freedom was a tribute to freedom. Allowing its hero
to struggle against the superpower of destiny was
Greek tragedys way of paying tribute to human
freedom; in order not to cross the barriers of art, it
had to ensure that he was defeated but, in order to
compensate, through art, for the humiliation of hu-
man freedom, he also had to undergo punishment
for the crime committed by destiny. The great idea
was to accept that ... [he] could consent to being
punished for an inevitable crime in order to demon-
strate his freedom through the loss of that freedom
and to founder thanks to a declaration of the rights
of free will.
This is a speculative interpretation of the innocent
guilt of Oedipus, as analysed by Aristotle. By struggl-
ing against the unavoidable, or in other words against
the destiny (the most rigorous form of necessity) that is
responsible for his crime, the tragic hero brings about
his own downfall and voluntarily chooses to expiate a
crime of which he knows himself to be innocent and
for which he should, in any case, have paid the price.
Innocent guilt or the deliberate, gratuitous courting
of punishment: that is the solution to the conict or
contradiction. In the face of the objective world against
which he is powerless, and of which he is no more
than a part or a cog, in the face of the formidable
machine known as destiny, the subject demonstrates
his freedom by accomplishing of his own accord,
or voluntarily, what the machine demands of him.
He manifests his freedom, not simply by accepting
necessity (an old solution which has no efcacy), but
through the very loss of his freedom. He knows that
he is innocent and is destinys plaything (he knows that
he did not know he was committing a sin), but it is he
himself who strives to know who committed the sin
and who freely accepts his condemnation by destiny.
We have here the schema and matrix for dialecti-
cal logic itself: the negative (the loss of freedom) is
converted into the positive (the realization of freedom)
thanks to exacerbation of the negative itself (courting
punishment, the will to lose freedom). The dialectic
deals with the paradox of contradiction or, in other
words, identity. Whilst identity presupposes, if it is to
exist, being identical to itself, identity is always both
self-identity and its opposite. Which also means that
alterity including the most extreme alterity, or contra-
diction is potentially an identity. No matter whether
the supersession is named or not (in Schellings text, it
goes by the name of the barriers inherent in art, or in
other words the conditions specic to (re)presentation,
Darstellung or mimesis), identity, Self-realization is
always possible in the form of the work of the negative,
or rather, in the present case, its reduplication. And it
is because identity is thought of in terms of the Self,
ipseity or Selbstheit that only a metaphysics of the
subject can claim to resolve the paradox of the Same.
When, conversely, the paradox remains a paradox, or
when extreme difference is preserved, we stray beyond
the limits of such a metaphysics in one way or another.
This is probably the case in some of Diderots work;
it is also the case, in a clearer way, in Hlderlin. The
dialectical operation and it is an operation is
intended from the outset to safeguard the Self and the
subject. That is why it can begin with the problematic
of freedom. And that is also why, in its unfolding and
as an unfolding, it is no accident, and not by chance,
that the speculative dialectic recounts the history
in the twin senses of mythos and Geschichte of a
subject. Of the Subject itself as subjectum: foundation
and being. The truth of the dialectic is the subject as
possibility of the (re)presentation of identity to the self:
self-consciousness, according to Hegel. But the strange
thing is that, in the present case, it is another form of
representation Darstellung and not Vorstellung, or in
other words theatricality and mimesis, that allows us
to think its truth. If, as Bataille thought,
5
we have here
an irreducible necessity, then the dialectic, in so far as
it is the truth of the onto-theological, is a determinate
interpretation or a determinate effect of a mimetology
that is older and deeper down than the discourse on
being. But I cannot follow that line of inquiry here.
Hegel
I am not at all certain that Schellings rst operation
explains why, a few years later (and shortly after
Hlderlin had in his turn offered a mimetologically
inspired interpretation of Oedipus Rex, though it is
marginal to dialectical-speculative thought in the strict
sense of that term), Hegel should have chosen the
character of Oedipus to be the very symbol of the act
of philosophizing and, in doing so, elevated him to the
rank of the gure of the philosophical for our entire
era. For Hegel was indeed the rst to promote Oedipus
to the rank of gure.
The operation for it is another interpretation is
relatively famous. To put it briey, as going into detail
is out of the question here, the episode takes place in
the lectures on history given in Berlin, or in other
words in the Philosophy of History. Here, Hegel sets
out to demonstrate how the subject or Spirit gradually
emerges, moment by moment, from its non-knowledge
(ignorance, superstition, magic, confused religions and
all the forms of the non-knowledge of the self), wrests
itself away from or escapes the materiality that sub-
merges it, gradually wins its own essence (which is to
be knowledge, intellection and self-knowledge) by
freeing itself from its sensory and corporeal servitude,
and succeeds in accomplishing and realizing itself as
such. Once more, this is a question of freedom. This
history of Spirit is history tout court; the meaning
of history, in other words, is none other than the
realization of Spirit and the accomplishment of the
metaphysical. It begins, as we know, in the night of
time and its very trajectory is symbolic: it moves from
West to East, from Orient to Occident, from an ancient
and far off China to the Greece where philosophy
(self-consciousness) sees the light of day, after having
traversed India, Mesopotamia and Egypt. In a word,
its trajectory follows that of the sun: the philosophy
of history is a heliology.
6
In this context, Oedipus intervenes when Hegel
attempts to explain, still using the same metaphysical
symbolism, how this transition from Egypt to Greece
takes place. It is, of course, the transition from symbol
to concept or idea that allows Spirit to reach its zenith.
Egypt, explains Hegel, is the eve of Spirits awaken-
ing: in its sun worship (heliophilia), Egypt senses
the essence of Spirit; in its cult of the dead and its
belief in metempsychosis, it senses the meaning of the
immortality of the soul, or the idea that the human
subject is the absolute and possesses innite value.
But this is no more than a presentiment, and it does not
succeed in expressing itself. In Egypt, writes Hegel,
spirit still remains trapped in stone, in materiality and
in sensuality. Egypts discourse on truth, conscious-
ness and man is inrm and is still infantile (infans);
it does not speak the true language of Spirit, or the
logos. It expresses itself through symbols carved on
stones, through statues and mysterious monuments, in
representations of the divine that remain half animal.
This is why Egypt is the land of contradiction: in
Egypt, Spirit struggles against that which enslaves it
the sensible, the corporeal, materiality and animality
but if it is to break loose and free itself, it must take
one more step.
It is the Greeks who take that step, and it is the philo-
sophical (metaphysical) step itself. This is inscribed in
their mythology, but still in a symbolic form. And it is
inscribed there twice. Its rst inscription comes about
when it transpires that the Greeks have a god who
symbolizes the solution to the Egyptian enigma of the
divine: in Egypt, the divine is the enigma itself. That
enigma is none other than the enigma of truth. Hegel
refers here to the inscription that could once be read
in the goddess Neiths sanctuary in Sas. It read: I am
that which is, that which was, and that which will be;
no one has lifted my veil.
7
Hegel immediately thinks
that this is a metaphor for truth, unveiling or aletheia.
But the inscription goes on: The fruit which I have
produced is helios. Hegel comments: This lucidity
is Spirit the sun of Neith the concealed night-loving
deity. In the Egyptian Neith, truth is still a problem.
The Greek Apollo is its solution: his utterance if
Man, know thyself . The (Greek) solution to the
(Egyptian) enigma or the solution to the mystery of
truth is therefore Spirit as self-consciousness. The
legend in the sanctuary in Sas is deciphered by the
inscription on the pediment of the temple of Apollo
in Delphi, and it will fall to Socrates to make it phi-
losophizings imperative. Somewhat earlier than Hegel,
as it happens, Hlderlin had a similar intuition in a
short story entitled The
Disciples in Sas. After
a long journey, the hero
of this tale of initiation
reaches the sanctuary of
Neith and lifts the veil
covering the statue of
the goddess. And what
he sees is himself, or his
own image. He himself
is the subject in general
is the secret of truth.
And this is what Hegel
says: the truth about the
truth is the Self.
Now this same step
is taken for a second
time outside Egypt (the
Orient) and it is Oedipus
who takes it at least to the extent that the mythical
sequence about the Sphinx is deciphered in a similar
way. This is what Hegel says:
Wonderfully, then, must the Greek legend surprise
us, which relates that the Sphinx the great Egyp-
tian symbol [Bild] appeared in Thebes, uttering
the words What is it which in the morning goes
on four legs, at midday on two, and in the evening
on three? [You will notice that this too is a so-
lar trajectory.] Oedipus, giving the solution, Man,
precipitated the Sphinx from the rock. The solution
and liberation of that Oriental Spirit is certainly
this: that the Inner Being of Nature is Thought
[Spirit], which has its existence only in the human
consciousness.
8
Oedipus is, then, the man who solves the Egyptian
riddle by replying: the truth or the secret is the subject
(Spirit as subject). And this, according to Hegel, is the
answer given by knowledge in general. The answer
is man to the extent that he knows himself, that
he is self-consciousness. And this is why Oedipus
articulates the rst sentence, or rather the rst word,
of philosophy: Oedipus thus shows himself to be
possessed of knowledge.
9
That is one of his names;
this is one of the translations or interpretations of the
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name Oedipus. Oedipus answers only with gives
only his name: I, who have seen, am the one who
knows. That is the name of the philosopher.
It is true that Hegel qualies this Praise of Oedipus
with some serious reservations: good philosopher that
he is, he not only remains discreet about the Oedipal
scandal (the parricide and especially the incest) but
also, and this is a sign of a disturbing ambivalence,
notes that Oedipuss abominations mean that his
gure remains in darkness. In a word, he is not too
much of a Socrates to rectify and correct Oedipuss
example. But the fact that he is not too much of a
Socrates also means that something Oedipal secretly
overdetermines the exemplarity of Socrates: Socrates
resurrects the gure of Oedipus only because he himself
is a tragic gure the gure of the innocent guilty
man and the hero of a philosophical (re)presentation
who borrows at least the dialogical form from tragedy.
Socrates is Socrates only in so far as he is the truth
of Oedipus. That is why he will repeat Oedipuss
Delphic answer and will place the entire philo-
sophical West until Hegel, that is under the sign
of self-consciousness.
In a note on Gides Oedipe the Oedipus who Gide
has say that, whatever the riddle of the sphinx might
be, he is resolved to answer man Walter Benjamin
remarks that something happens to Oedipus between
the moment when he appears for the rst time on the
stage of Dionysus theatre and when he appears to
us, in our era: Very little, he says, But it is of great
importance. Oedipus conquers speech. Recalling the
denition of the tragic hero that he has borrowed from
Rosenzweig (The tragic hero has only one language
that is proper to him: silence
10
), he then goes on: For
Sophocles remains silent, almost silent. He is a blood-
hound on his own trail, complaining about the harsh
treatment meted out to him by his own hand. We nd
no thought, no reection, in his discourse. The tragic
hero was, in other words, pure lamentation. He said
nothing. He was immured in the riddle of his own pain,
and the theatre resounded only with his lamentations
and screams. Those are the lamentations and screams
that, on a different stage, philosophy transforms into
language, into logos, in order to recognize in them its
own language: the logos. But the operation has taken
2,200 years 2,200 years for the West to discover
that it was Oedipal, and for it to be able to speak the
discourse Oedipus could not speak. To develop his
phrase, or rather to expand his one-word answer into
a phrase. Or into his name. And that phrase is the
dialectic itself: Absolute Knowledge.
Nietzsche and Freud
But this also means that Oedipus accession to speech
is very late in occurring. Oedipus becomes the gure
of philosophy only when philosophy is coming to an
end, only when its discourse is becoming exhausted.
Paradoxically, Oedipus becomes philosophys spokes-
man and he is a verbose spokesman only when
philosophy is beginning to lose its voice and speaks
only in languages that have become detached from it.
And it is, perhaps, here that the Hegelian symbolic
reaches its limits: it is quite possible that the sun that
rises in Egypt where the colossal statue of Memnon
resounds at the rst glance of the young morning sun
11

reaches its zenith in the sky of Greece, but then it
immediately begins to set and to begin its westward
trajectory. That is why Oedipus, who is the gure of
a dawning Greek knowledge, is also the gure of a
truly Western knowledge: the last knowledge. It is
therefore not his hostility towards Hegel that explains
why Nietzsche, that latecomer, should choose to call
Oedipus the last philosopher who is, as it happens,
also the last man.
I am thinking of a rather surprising text by Nietzsche:
a fragment written shortly after his study of tragedy. It
is a sort of short philosophical prose-poem. Oedipus,
who is now alone, is talking to himself as though
he were two people. He is about to die, and it is with
the echo of his own voice that he bemoans his own
fate, rather as though he were the posthumous (or pre-
posthumous, as Musil would have put it) incarnation
of self-consciousness.
Let me paraphrase part of this text. Oedipus des-
cribes himself as the last philosopher because he is
the last man. No one but himself speaks to him, and
his voice sounds to him like that of a dying man. He
requests an hours communion with the beloved voice,
with the last breath of the memory of all human happi-
ness. Thanks to that voice, he can cheat his loneliness
and enter an illusory multiplicity and love because his
heart refuses to believe that love is dead. His heart
cannot bear the shiver of extreme solitude, and forces
him to speak as though he were two men And yet
he can still hear the beloved voice. Someone is dying
outside him, the last man in the world. The last sigh is
dying with him, a long alas whispered to him by the
most wretched of the wretched: Oedipus.
That the old Oedipus could be the gure of an
exhausted self-consciousness that is dying; that this
nal discourse could take the paradoxical form of an
interminable soliloquy in which the psyche speaks
to itself (this is the last possible form of dramatic
dialogue) at the very moment of its death; that there
should be this voice that resonates almost beyond death
and that death should divide the voice of the subject
perhaps it is this (or at least this is the hypothesis I
would like to propose) that in some way opens up the
space in which Freud too, probably without realizing
it, encounters Oedipus. What I mean is that perhaps
it is this that allows Oedipus to go on representing
beyond or beneath the way consciousness relates to
itself through self-presence, or beyond self identity
a desire to know of which consciousness knows
nothing, and of which it can know nothing. Perhaps it
is this that allows him to reach a place (if it is a place)
where by becoming absent from himself, forgetting
himself as such, he emerges from himself, external-
izes himself within the self, divides and becomes cut
off from himself. Strangely enough, Nietzsche evokes
forgetfulness in an early draft of this fragment, and
speaks of the terrible solitude of the last philosopher,
who is paralysed by the Medusa. Vultures hover over
him. And he begs nature to let him forget.
But it is true to say that the gure Nietzsche is
thinking of is, rather, that of Prometheus, or the gure
which, from Feuerbach and Marx to Jnger, and even
the Heidegger of 1933, overdetermines the gure of
the Worker and therefore a certain interpretation of
techne that is not shared by Nietzsche. And still less is
it shared by Freud. That Nietzsche should have failed
to choose between the names Oedipus and Prometheus
is not, however, immaterial by any means. This failure
to choose does not concern only the mythical guration
of the last philosopher. The last philosopher like
all the mythical gures invoked by Nietzsche, from
Dionysus and Empedocles to Zarathustra concerns
the determination of (modern) man in his essence. It
so happens that, for Nietzsche, the essence of man
could be designated by the name Oedipus, rather
than the name Prometheus. The implications of this
preference are perhaps still incalculable.
You can already see the point I am trying to
make for the moment: Freuds Oedipus is always
reduced to the problematic of desire. It is said, with
some justication, that Oedipus is, in Freuds view,
the emblem of desires destiny, and that the myth
of Oedipus, as read in what we now know to be a
tendentious way (or at least a lacunary way, as is any
mythological reworking of a myth), simply supplies the
model for the familial structuration of desire and the
tragic structuration of the unconscious. But if we place
a unilateral emphasis of this aspect of the way Freud
deals with the gure and the myth and if, in doing
so, we also simplify the way he deals with it we fail,
despite certain of Lacans specic caveats to notice
that, for Freud, Oedipus is the incarnation of what
he has embodied for philosophy, at least from Hegel
onwards: the desire to know (or, to be more accurate
and to use the Nietzschean term, the drive Trieb
to know). And when Oedipus is at stake, the status
of Freuds science is also at stake.
To take only one well-known example. It can be
found in the second of the Three Essays on the Theory
of Sexuality (Infantile Sexuality), at the beginning of
section 5 on The Sexual Researches of Childhood. It
consists of two short paragraphs:
The Drive for Knowledge
At about the same time as the sexual life of chil-
dren reaches its rst peak, between the ages of
three and ve, they also begin to show signs of
the activity which may be ascribed to the drive
for knowledge of research. This drive cannot be
counted among the elementary instinctual com-
ponents, nor can it be classed as exclusively belong-
ing to sexuality. Its activity corresponds on the one
hand to a sublimated manner or obtaining mastery,
while on the other hand it makes use of the energy
of scopophilia. Its relations to sexual life, however,
are of particular importance, since we have learnt
from psychoanalysis that the drive for knowledge in
children is attracted unexpectedly and intensively to
sexual problems and is in fact possibly rst aroused
by them.
The Riddle of the Sphinx
It is not by theoretical interests but by practical
ones that activities of research are set going in chil-
dren. The threat to the bases of a childs existence
offered by the discovery or the suspicion of the
arrival of a new baby and the fear that he may, as
a result of it, cease to be cared for and loved, make
him thoughtful and clear-sighted. And this history
of the drives origin is in line with the fact that the
rst problem with which it deals is not the question
of the distinction between the sexes but the riddle
of where babies come from. (This, in a distorted
form which can be easily rectied, is the same rid-
dle that was propounded by the Theban Sphinx.)
12
There is, then, such a thing as a drive for knowl-
edge, and Freud says of it that it is a sublimated
manner of obtaining mastery (and it might perhaps
in that sense be said to be Promethean), and that it
makes use of the energy of scopophilia, or in other
words theoretical desire itself. Freud, who uses the
word theory in a rather weak sense, is no doubt
pointing out that this interest in sexual problems is not
theoretical (even though he notes in truly Aristotelian
manner that childrens drive for knowledge is aroused
by them). Even so and even before the problem of the
distinction between the sexes arises, it is quite simply
the question of origins that stimulates the rst search
for knowledge: the great riddle of birth, and that is
the very riddle that is propounded by the Theban
Sphinx.
For Freud, Oedipus is, then, the gure of knowledge
of seeing and knowing; of the theoretical in the
true sense. Similarly, in a related register which also
concerns the entire psychoanalytic mechanism, tragic
theatricality is still the model for the cathartic appara-
tus. Oedipus, in other words, is the emblem of desire
but he also represents the man who solves the riddle
of desire and interprets his destiny. For many people
if not the Massen today, the so-called subject of
psychoanalysis is the form in which the philosopher
lives on. Or lives on as a posthumous being, if the last
analyst really has not been born.
You are not unaware that Freuds consulting rooms
and his desk were cluttered up with Egyptian gurines
and statuettes, for which Freud appears to have had a
real passion. Today, it is thought that we can simply
dismiss this as a survival of some old idolatry; the
rather strange attachment of the agnostic to these
archaic divinities is seen as a symptom of some linger-
ing belief in the world of myth. We have often heard
it said, from Lvi-Strauss to Girard, and now by
many others, that psychoanalysis is no more than a
mythology. But who knows? Perhaps the old Theban
scene was in fact being re-enacted in its philosophical
interpretation. Who knows? Perhaps this was Freuds
way of symbolizing his determination to solve the
riddle. Perhaps he was re-enacting, in his own way, the
very scene of the philosopher, of the man possessed
by a desire to know. What is at issue is, after all, the
meaning of the strange exodus from Egypt that was
to be Freuds daily adventure and permanent exile.
For there must have been something of an exodus
from Egypt for a man who, towards the end of his
life, identied so strongly with Moses. Was that some-
thing, without him really knowing it (or without him
wanting to know it), the decision to pursue the philo-
sophical project, to inscribe in the tradition of knowl-
edge, once more to begin yet again the destiny of
Greece (which is not without a secret kinship with the
Jewish destiny). Or is he taking over from a tradition
that is dying out, that has become exhausted? Is he
setting himself up as a rival and imaging a possible
new beginning that extends beyond? Is he in search of
a new discovery, and will he nd it if he can nd the
nal and denitive solution to the riddle of the Western
adventure of knowledge? And is he facing up to the
risks implicit in this new knowledge, and is he better
at doing so than the Greeks? It would take a lot of time
and patience to get anywhere with these questions. And
perhaps simply asking them is still an Oedipal gesture:
King Oedipus (still) has one eye too many.
Having said that, the fact that the Freudian gure of
Oedipus (the oedipal) has nally been victorious as
I think we can argue and has been able to compete,
in what is now a worldwide struggle, with the (Prom-
ethean) gure of the Worker presupposes that, over and
beyond the opposition if that is what it is between
desire and work, there is something that makes this
struggle, this encounter, possible. Given the current
state of play, I have no more than a vague suspicion of
what it is. It is based upon some allusive suggestions
from Heidegger who, as we know, never took Freuds
discovery into consideration. For many reasons. But
he did, as we also know, at least briey subscribe to
the mythology the onto-typology of the Worker,
and he did overcome, for the space of a few months,
Nietzsches inability to choose between Oedipus and
Prometheus.
It so happens that there is a Heideggerian Oedipus.
A gure of Oedipus can, that is, be found in Heidegger,
in a passage from the 1935 Introduction to Meta-
physics (written over a year after the break with
National Socialism). The passage appears in a section
where, in a discussion of the limitation of being,
Heidegger reworks the distinction between being and
appearance:
For the thinking of the early Greek thinkers the
unity and conict of being and appearance pre-
served their original power. All this was represented
with supreme purity in Greek tragic poetry. Let us
consider the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles. At the be-
ginning Oedipus is the saviour and lord of the state,
living in an aura of glory and divine favour. He is
hurled out of this appearance, which is not merely
his subjective view of himself but the medium in
which his being-there appears; his being as mur-
derer of his father and desecrator of his mother is
raised to unconcealment. The way from the radi-
ant beginning to the gruesome end is one struggle
between appearance (concealment and distortion)
and unconcealment (being). The city is beset by the
secret of the murderer of Laius, the former king.
With the passion of a man who stands in the mani-
festness of glory and is a Greek, Oedipus sets out to
reveal this secret. Step by step, he must move into
unconcealment, which in the end he can bear only
by putting out his own eyes, i.e. by removing him-
self from all light, by letting the cloak of night fall
round him, and, blind, crying out to the people to
open all doors in order that a man may be manifest
to them as what he is.
But we cannot regard Oedipus only as the man
who meets his downfall; we must see him as the
embodiment of Greek being-there, who most radi-
cally and wildly asserts its fundamental passion, the
passion for the disclosure of being, i.e. the struggle
for being itself. In his poem In lieblicher Blue
blhet, Hlderlin wrote keen-sightedly: Perhaps
King Oedipus has an eye too many. This eye too
many is the fundamental condition for all great
questioning and knowledge and also their only
metaphysical ground. The knowledge and the sci-
ence of the Greeks were this passion.
13
The story of Oedipus does not simply symbolize or
(re)present the destiny of aletheia, or the unveiling of
being (in which case, the West is more Oedipal than
ever); because his determination is so savage, Oedipus
is the gure of the Greek Dasein to the extent that it
embodies the basic and inaugural passion of the West:
the passion for knowledge. That is what Heidegger was
trying desperately to show the Germans at that time,
and that was the meaning of his political discourse:
they were his heirs. Now for Heidegger, as he explains
at length in his commentary on the famous chorus
about man from Antigone, it is the word technethat
originally allowed the Greeks to think about knowl-
edge. Here, Oedipus is none other than the gure of
techne. . Now that Heideggers political adventure is
over, Oedipus occupies exactly the same position as
the gure of Prometheus in the Rectorship Address.
Heidegger makes the same shift as Nietzsche, but
this time it is more explicit: it concerns the meaning
of the word techne , and the word has at least two
meanings. And it therefore concerns the essence of
metaphysics. And we can also see how this interpre-
tation of Oedipus Rex basically reveals the truth of
the mythico-philosophical use both Hegelian and
Nietzschean of the gure of Oedipus. Oedipus has
nothing to do with the subject (self-consciousness), or
in other words with knowledge (theory) as subject; but
it has everything to do with knowledge as techne ,
and that is the starting point for the whole of Western
metaphysics. And that is why modern technology is the
Oedipal realization of the metaphysical.
Is this why the two rival gures of our day have
something in common? Is the Worker, like Oedipus, a
gure and (re)presentation of techne ? Does the same
knowledge secretly animate both the labouring animal
and the desiring animal, and does it run through both
political economy and libidinal economy? If that is the
case, we require more than a complete re-evaluation of
both socialism and psychoanalysis, their metaphysical
status and their scientic destination (or pretensions).
We must solicit and displace an entire opposition and
the interpretation of that opposition. It is, after all, the
major antagonism of our times.
It remains, then, for us to ask what knowledge
might mean from now on. And to ask what the name
Oedipus might mean. Perhaps one day we will under-
stand that a certain desire for knowledge or the
desire of a certain knowledge denitely has some-
thing to do with the curious limp that has affected the
Western gait ever since the Greeks.
Translated by David Macey
Notes
1. Martin Heidegger, On the Question of Being, trans.
William McNeill, in Pathmarks, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1998.
2. Typographie, in Sylviane Agacinski, Jacques Derrida,
Sarah Kofman and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Mime-
sis: des articulations, AubierFlammarion, Paris, 1975;
translated as ch. 1 of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typog-
raphy: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, Harvard Univer-
sity Press, Cambridge MA, 1989.
3. Jacques Derrida, Economimesis, trans. Richard Klein
Diacritics, vol. 11, no. 2, Summer 1981.
4. La Csure du spculatif, in LImitation des modernes,
Galile, Paris, 1986; translated as ch. 4 of Typography.
5. Georges Bataille, Hegel, Death and Sacrice, trans.
Jonathan Strauss, in Allan Stoekl, ed., On Bataille: Yale
French Studies 78, 1990.
6. Jacques Derrida White Mythology in Margins Of
Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 1982. See also Bernard Pautrat, Ver-
sions du soleil, Seuil, Paris, 1971.
7. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Si-
bree, Dover, New York, 1956, p. 220.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., pp. 22021.
10. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama,
trans. John Osborne, New Left Books, London, 1977, p.
108.
11. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p. 199.
12. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexual-
ity, in On Sexuality, Pelican Freud Library, Volume 7,
Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1977, pp. 11213; translation
modied to read drive for Trieb.
13. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans.
Ralph Manheim, Yale University Press, New Haven and
London, 1987, pp. 1067.
If for a moment we were to imagine aesthetics as
an expansive building that has been worked upon
continuously for centuries, that has undergone many
redecorations and acquired numerous extensions lets
say, as a museum that has become somewhat laby-
rinthine in the course of time then we could consider
which of its many entrances is the best for us to
commence a tour of the building. It would probably
be easiest to meet up at the entrance most conveniently
located for reaching the important exhibition halls,
the caf, the cloakroom, the screening room, and the
bookstore. If we were lucky, this would be the main
entrance, to which someone giving us directions would
in any case send us. But we are not that lucky. As a
result of the many renovations and additions to the
building, the idea of a main entrance has been for-
gotten. Instead, there are countless portals from which
the various exhibits can be reached more or less easily.
Therefore we must rst set about nding an appropri-
ate entrance that will lead us without diversion to the
heart of the complex.
In what follows I would like to give an account
of what I found during my search. I shall distinguish
an entrance to aesthetics that can lead us without any
detours in medias res. My concern here is exclusively
with such an opening, not with the many further
steps that follow upon this access.
1
I shall take this
step into aesthetics exemplarily two examples are
to show where a suitable access point is located. As
in our imaginary building, there are of course many
other entry points, some of which are hardly any less
suitable; but the entrance presented here is the one I
would recommend should anyone ask.
A topographical sketch
Since its Platonic beginnings, philosophical aesthet-
ics has been impelled by an alternative that is as
enlightening as it is misleading. Aesthetic perception
has been attributed the capacity either to gain a genuine
access to being or to disclose a genuine sphere of illu-
sion [Schein]. In the rst gure of thought, aesthetic
perception is seen as an encounter with how things
truly are, as a penetration of illusionary conditions of
everyday life. In the second gure of thought, however,
aesthetic perception appears inversely as a turning
away from the stability of the reliable world and thus
as a penetration of the power of the real.
To my mind, this is one of the incorrect contrasts
from which aesthetics ought to escape. The way of
doing so becomes evident once it is clear that the
alternative paths are just variations of a third path that
is already well trodden, where intuition and reection
are on a pilgrimage to being or appearance.
The classical aesthetics of being [sthetik des Seins]
understands the aesthetic process as the revelation of
an otherwise concealed higher sense or being. In
current discussions, though, a non-classical variation,
one frequently formulated in media theory, plays a big
part; in the objects of art, this variation sees at work
a discovery of the constructiveness of all relations of
the real. Both variations of an aesthetics of being do,
however, assume that general structures of reality can
be recognized in or by means of aesthetic perception;
the basic constitution of the reality becomes visible in
the constitution of aesthetic perception.
An aesthetics of illusion [sthetik des Scheins], by
contrast, rejects this close liaison between reality and
aesthetic reality, and, correspondingly, between the
aesthetic, epistemological and ethical theory of the one
reality. For the aesthetics of illusion the eld or, more
radically, the time span of the aesthetic is a separate
zone from which nothing can be inferred about the
constitution of reality. It describes the process of
aesthetic experience as entering the sphere of illusion,
an illusion that is otherwise ignored, one that is located
outside the continuity of being.
Each of these positions has been defended in very
different variations and with enormously varying
willingness to form alliances. One need only recall
Hegels hugely inuential discussion of the absolutes
sensuous illusion [sinnlicher Schein], Nietzsches ideas
about artistically exposing the illusionary character
[Scheincharakter] of the cultural world, or Blochs aes-
thetics of anticipating [Vorschein] a better society in
the future. Nonetheless, the preoccupation with being
or appearance, which goes back to Plato, presents an
The aesthetics of appearing
Martin Seel
especially unfortunate alternative. According to this
xation, aesthetic consciousness paves the way either
to a higher reality or out of the lower reaches of reality
(or it goes both ways simultaneously). Either way,
aesthetic perception is conceived of as ight from the
phenomenal presence of human life. In effect, aesthetic
consciousness is understood in both perspectives as
an inattentiveness to the concrete here and now of its
acts of perception.
We should not accept this disastrous consequence.
For there is a lot of evidence that aesthetic conscious-
ness ought to be comprehended as an excellent form of
intuiting presence. Even if it is past or future presences
that are perceived in their fathomlessness, for this we
nevertheless require a situation that is perceived in
its own particular momentariness. This turn to the
presence of something present, I would like to say,
is a basic propelling force of all aesthetic perception.
Aesthetic consciousness perceives reality in the par-
ticularity of its own sensuous self-presentation, and
this means in the simultaneity and momentariness in
which it presents itself to sensuous discernment. In
this perspective, aesthetic perception is understood
as the opening of a zone of appearing [Erscheinen]
in which reality is revealed from a different, other-
wise inaccessible, side. Neither determinable being nor
irreal appearance, but the momentary and simultane-
ous repleteness of the process of appearing, constitutes
the rst touchstone of aesthetic conduct.
The basic idea is simply to translate Kants turn of
phrase play of epistemological faculties, which in its
original place is not much more than a terminological
metaphor, into a specication that encompasses both
the subjective and the objective elements of aesthetic
practice equally. What is important is to comprehend
aesthetic perception in terms of its object and aesthetic
objects in terms of their perception. In accordance with
this demand we can say that aesthetic perception is
attentiveness to a play of appearances. This connect-
ing and interweaving of appearances is closed to both
theoretical and practical access as Kant demonstrated
convincingly. Nonetheless, it is not a chimera or a
projection, and certainly not a deception. After all, this
interaction of sensuously distinguishable aspects an
interaction indeterminable in its totality is present
to everyone who can hear and see (as well as feel,
smell and taste). What we perceive here is not a world
different from the one of sensuous objects; we do,
however, perceive it differently with an intensied
feeling for the here and now of the situation in which
perception is executed.
What is discerned here is a constellation of aspects
that are indeed separately determinable. The appear-
ances that come into play here are not undetermined
object[s] of empirical intuition, as we read at the
beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason;
2
they are
conceptually determinable objects or aspects of per-
ception, frequently determined in intuition. When I
observe the ight of a plastic bag aesthetically, I
observe the ight of a plastic bag and the intensity
of my observation is in no way diminished by the fact
that I know what kind of object I actually see. The
appropriate starting point for an analysis of aesthetic
perception is not a concept of appearance conceived
prior to all processes of conceptual understanding but
a concept of the conceptually graspable given. Every-
thing, however, that can be grasped by using predicates
of perception can also be perceived in a particularity
that, for its part, cannot be conceptually exhausted. As
long as we concentrate on this particularity, what is
important is not the xing of a being so [Sosein], but a
play of appearances we perceive the empirical world
in the radiance of its constitutive underdeterminacy.
Aesthetic appearing is not primarily an appearing
of something; it is an appearing of itself. Something
appears as itself; it is not grasped in the role of
something or as a sign for something else. All antici-
pation [Vorschein] or semblance [Anschein] in the
eld of aesthetics is to be understood in terms of an
appearing that does not merely serve the function of a
revealing or illuminating representation. All aesthetic
showing originates in a self-showing that does not
always include an intentional act of showing. All
aesthetic illusion [Schein] originates in an appearing
[Erscheinen] that is itself not illusory [scheinhaft].
For that reason, I believe, the indisputable insights
of both an aesthetics of being and an aesthetics of
appearance can be formulated plausibly only on the
basis of an aesthetics of appearing.
This aesthetics should not be restricted to art,
especially if it wishes to do justice to the particularity
of the arts. The presentation of artworks operates in
the medium of a semantically charged appearing that
can be analysed only in combination with elementary
processes of appearing, processes that are not directed
towards the act of showing or the formation of signs
and are therefore not semantically charged.
3
Of course,
works of art do frequently make complex knowledge
possible; they can impart knowledge and their per-
ception often requires a special knowledge. And of
course art operates a lot with elements of illusion; it
may imagine states of the world that do not correspond
to any reality outside ction. But a primary element of
the perception of artworks, too, and therefore a favour-
able starting point for its theory, is attentiveness to the
phenomenal individuality of their forms.
Hence, the rst step into aesthetics is to be devoted
to this attentiveness. It focuses on what kind of attentive-
ness it is and on that to which it is directed. The objects
of perception can be any objects whatsoever a ball, a
tree or a car wash. Even so, I take this step here with
the help of two artistic examples, rst, because they
are also individual objects of perception and, second,
because they have the convenient advantage of being
aesthetically something more than that.
A plastic bag in ight
In the movie American Beauty directed by Sam Mendes
(1999) there is a short sequence that deserves all the
recognition that has been abundantly conferred upon
the work itself. It is a video recording of a plastic bag
that ies about in a circulating air current. The video
footage is approximately 80 seconds long and is seen
halfway through the movie. At the end of the movie,
when the epilogue of the deceased main character
is narrated, another 20-second segment of this lm
within the lm is shown.
This video is embedded in the movies plot in a
manner that is as unequivocal as it is complex. The
footage is taken from the video diary, shot with a cam-
corder, of the eighteen-year-old Ricky; in this diary
he lms everything that appears noteworthy to him.
When the movie shows a situation from Rickys per-
spective, it shows the video pictures that he shoots of
the situation and that he views in his cameras display.
It is through the videos that he has shot of Jane, the
neighbours daughter, that the audience discovers his
interest in her. The rst time Jane accompanies Ricky
to his room, he plays the videocassette of the plastic
bag for her. The total recording, he tells her, is 15
minutes long. While the two young people are watch-
ing the video, they form the only, as yet, unbroken
relationship in the movie. Similarly, the excerpt shown
again at the end of the movie engenders a positive
image. The sequence with the hovering bag veries
the dead heros view of the beauty of a life that has
liberated itself from the constraints of convention and
routine, and is open to the experience of the moment
an experience that he underscores even though it has
cost him his life.
Within the framework of my example, however, the
movie is important only as forming the context for
the video. In it the camera follows a white plastic bag
hovering against the background of a red brick wall
whose sections are separated by white pillars. The
bag rst circles just above the surface of grey paving
stone in front of this wall. The paving is partly covered
with autumnal leaves, which are also moving in the
wind. After a short time the bag but not the leaves
takes to the air and begins to oscillate in circular
movements and, followed by the camera, progresses
to the left along the wall. In the sequence shown at
the end of the movie, the camera zooms in on the
bag so that only the wall and the gyrating object in
front of it can be seen. It is a completely silent video.
Neither the whooshing of the wind nor the rustling of
the bag nor any other sound can be heard. The scene
is completely isolated. The recorded episode unfolds
in no-mans-land; it could be the wall of a shopping
mall in the suburbs. The pictures do not provide any
information about this, however. They do not provide
any information at all. They document a unique event
by following it with the camera. The camera stays with
the movement, which it follows with its own movement
generated by pan shots and zooms. This concentration
is the aesthetic sense of the video. It is about nothing
else but the perception of something in the process of
its appearing. When, and to the extent that, something
is taken up in this manner (irrespective of the sensory
apparatus employed), we nd ourselves in a state of
aesthetic perception. The video exemplies a particular
access to the outer world, an access that is at hand in
all aesthetic attentiveness. This attentiveness is tuned
into the phenomenal individuality and, thus, to the
irreducible sensuous presence of its objects or sur-
roundings.
In or after the process, we can of course discern
all sorts of things, just as I did in describing the
scene: that there are leaves on the ground; that it has
been paved; that there are white pillars; that the bag
moves this way or that way; and so forth. If we were
to break the sequence down into a series of stills, we
could conduct detailed studies of the aerodynamics
of a plastic bag or of the fortuitous choreography of
leaves on a surface. We can do all this, just as we can
treat any aesthetic object in a manner that is contrary
to its aesthetic consideration. (In principle, every aes-
thetic object can be treated non-aesthetically and every
non-aesthetic object aesthetically.) But this is not the
crucial sense of the video it reects neither the sense
Ricky had in mind when he shot the footage, nor the
sense in which the video is employed in the movie. The
video is an icon of aesthetic intuition itself.
Everything and anything that is at all perceptible
can be perceived in the process of its appearing. We
just have to pay attention to the simultaneity and
momentariness of its own present giveness in sensuous-
ness, a giveness experienced in the particular here
and now. It then encounters us with a phenomenal
repleteness, the perception of which allows us to take
the time to sense the moment. I believe that we can
locate a basic relation of all aesthetic perception here:
a relation that is operative in all states of aesthetic
perception, however differently they may otherwise
be developed.
The concept of appearing, as I use it here, should
not therefore be equated with, or precipitately opposed
to, the concepts of being and illusion, in the sense pre-
sented in my opening sketch. The concept of appearing
is a counter-concept not to the concept of being, but
just to the concept of the conceptually predeterminable
being so of phenomenal objects. In contradistinction
to this phenomenal constitution of things and events,
the complex contemporaneousness of their appearing
can indeed be grasped in perception but it cannot be
held fast in a knowledge form. This appearing can
encompass elements of sensuous appearance to a high
degree but it can also do without them quite easily.
What the tradition has called aesthetic appearance is
primarily a relation of simultaneous, momentary, and
in this sense real appearing; it is not the relation
of an irreal as-if be it feigned, ctional or imaginary.
Nor should this appearing be generally grasped as a
relation of representation. It is not primarily an appear-
ing of something else; it is an occurrence that presents
itself here and now to unreduced sensuous perception
and thereby makes its presence felt in the time span
of a nonfunctionalized present.
Emphasizing the reality of appearing is, of course,
equivocal in the context of our video. For we are con-
cerned here with three such realities. The video is the
recording of a real occurrence; yet what we see is not
this occurrence but a video a video, however, whose
pictures have themselves been lmed, and indeed in
such a way that they are at all times recognizable as
video sequences in contradistinction to the movies
sequences. (In the ction of the movie this means: as
the subjective representation of reality in contrast to
represented reality.) We can describe this as a play of
appearance: the occurrence visible in the video, along
with the occurrence of the video, as well as the occur-
rence of the presentation of the video as a video. Our
minimal specication relates neutrally to these differ-
ences. Irrespective of whether we are concerned with
a segment of reality or with a representation of reality
or with the representation of a representation, what we
perceive when we perceive something aesthetically is a
play of appearances that is never just appearance but a
connecting and interweaving of phenomenal aspects.
Whether we see the dance of a plastic bag or the
moving images of such a dance or the moving images
of the moving images of a dancing bag, all this makes
a very signicant difference. For something notably
different appears in each of the situations in question.
In the scene in which the video recording was made,
other senses besides seeing would have played a part
in the perception: hearing, touch and smell would have
been involved too. In perceiving the video, by contrast,
we see a stirring choreography of colours and forms,
which we as practised image users recognize as the
ight of a plastic bag; at the same time we follow the
choreography of the video, which directs our percep-
tion to the bag, and our perception makes the bag the
hero of its reconnaissance. (The video is by no means
a poor copy of the real occurrence, as Ricky says it
is to Jane; it transforms the occurrence into a silently
animated ornament.) In the movie that presents the
video to us, we see what is on the video recording;
but we also see the grainy video image and understand
it moreover as an extract from a much longer video
recording, just about one-fteenth of which we get
to see. We imagine a video work of art that creates a
school of seeing using artistic means.
Whichever of these sensations we might be looking
for, each time we have to meet at the scene of the
appearing. That does not mean that attentiveness
to what is appearing is the start of each aesthetic
perception. That is not always the case. Aesthetic
perception can begin wherever it wants to while
reviewing a critique or a theory, when awakening in
a train, or while climbing a mountain. My claim is
simply that it is an immanent telos of aesthetic percep-
tion to be attentive to a presence of what is appearing.
Because this is the case, the theory of perception and
its objects is well advised to begin its analysis with the
presence of appearing. Sooner or later this theory must
however make distinctions, all of which are already
present in this minimalist primal scene of aesthetic
perception.
First of all, to perceive aesthetically may be nothing
more than a concentration on sensory appearing. Aes-
thetic perceptions attentiveness is then directed toward
mere appearing. Ricky irritates his fellow human beings
by, among other things, nding odd things inherently
worthy of consideration and thereby beautiful. He tells
Jane that he once saw and lmed a homeless person
who had frozen to death. She asks him why he did it.
Because it was amazing, he replies. Ricky espouses
an aesthetics of contemplative wonder about the things
of the world and of life. It is in this sense that he also
interprets his work on the ying plastic bag: he has
never seen anything more beautiful in his whole life,
he says. What is important to the two young people is
the scenes meaninglessness, its being free of symbols,
its innocence. In this sense they experience the ight
of the plastic bag as something absolutely beautiful,
as can be found in a profane world only in the realm
of garbage.
Second, however, the video also creates a special
atmosphere between the two. They sense that they are
of one mind in their admiration for this detached occur-
rence, which becomes for them the event of detaching
themselves from their depressing social surroundings.
By watching the video together they become closer to
each other in a manner that would have been much
more difcult for them in a direct face-to-face situa-
tion. While they are looking at the screen and Ricky
is talking about the experience of recording the video,
Jane takes hold of his hand; a little later she kisses
him. Not only has the video transformed the scene
in which it is shot into a oating dance of elements,
in being perceived by the couple jointly this dance is
transformed into an atmospheric appearing that cor-
responds vividly with the viewers lives.
Third, moviegoers can experience the video not
only as mere appearing, nor just as an atmospheric
alteration of a situation (be it the protagonists or
their own situation), but over and above this as an
artistic presentation of a kind of world encounter and
therefore as a process of artistic appearing. They see
an excerpt from a video artwork that draws part of its
fascination precisely from the fact that it appears only
in fragments within the movie.
4
Like every artistic
fragment, this one also has to be thought further by the
beholder; it guides the imagination beyond the limits
of the perceivable. The fragmentary character of the
excerpt also highlights the improvisatory nature of
the video recording. The camera lets itself be guided
by the movements of the object in focus, closes in
on it and moves away from it through the alternating
settings of the zoom. On the grainy television screen
that is seen in the movie and on which the electronic
images horizontal and vertical grid points are still
visible the camera work acquires an element of
scribbling; its actions are those of a pictorial criture
automatique that lets everything enter into the stream
of its daydreams.
5
The event of cinematic movement
thus becomes the event of presenting a form of percep-
tion for which all interpretations and meanings become
provisional.
Philip Roth has someone read a line from
Shakespeare
However the ight of a plastic bag is experienced as
a real occurrence, as a lm document, or as an artistic
presentation ying plastic bags can be grasped differ-
ently. We chase after them because they have taken
ight; we regard them as trash that does not belong
here; we measure their trajectory in the context of
aerodynamic experiments. In perceiving them, we can
relate to them aesthetically or otherwise, sometimes
aesthetically and otherwise. This is the case with
everything that is or can be an object of our sensuous
perception be it sounds, weights, textures, tastes, or
morphemes and phonemes.
Ostensibly Philip Roths novel I Married a Com-
munist is about the impossible marriage of the com-
munist agitator Ira Ringold (alias Iron Rinn) and the
actress Chava Fromkin (alias Eve Frame). The core
of the book, however, depicts the relationship between
Nathan Zuckerman, who functions again here as Roths
alter ego, and Murray Ringold, Rinns elder brother.
The novel begins with Zuckermans recollections of
the elder Ringold, who was his much-admired English
teacher in high school. The novel ends with the aged
Murray visiting Nathan, who has also grown older,
and telling him how the tragic story of his brother
continued and nally ended. After the dramatic break-
up of his marriage, Ira is ercely determined to kill
his wife and stepdaughter. Ira had already committed
a murder in his youth; at the time Murray helped
him to cover it up. Once again, he believes, he has to
stand back and watch while his brother makes him
an accomplice to a crime. The enthusiastic ex-teacher
describes in the following words what crosses his mind
in this situation:
And thus the whirligig of time brings in his re-
venges. Line of prose. Recognize it? From the last
act of Twelfth Night. Feste the clown, to Malvolio,
just before Feste sings that lovely song, before he
sings, A great while ago the world begun,/ With
hey ho, the wind and the rain, and the play is
over. I couldnt get that line out of my head. And
thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.
Those cryptogrammic gs, the subtlety of their
deintensication those hard gs of revenges.
Those terminal ss thus brings his revenges.
The hissing surprise of the plural noun revenges.
Guhh. Juhh. Zuhh. Consonants sticking into me like
needles. And the pulsating vowels, the rising tide of
their pitch engulfed by that. The low-pitched vow-
els giving way to the high-pitched vowels. The bass
and tenor vowels giving way to the alto vowels.
The assertive lengthening of the vowel i just before
the rhythm shifts from iambic to trochaic and the
prose pounds round the turn for the stretch. Short
i, short i, long i. Short i, short i, short i, boom!
Revenges. Brings in his revenges. His revenges.
Sibilated. Hizzzzzuh! Driving back to Newark with
Iras weapons in my car, those ten words, the pho-
netic webbing, the blanket omniscience I felt I
was being asphyxiated inside Shakespeare.
6
There is really nothing to be added to this. There are
probably only a few passages in the history of aesthet-
ics that simultaneously analyse and evoke with such
clarity the literal sensuousness of literature. Like the
video within the movie, there is an artistic doubling
here, too. Through the mouth of the gure of the
teacher, Roth dramatizes the lines, whose highly dra-
matic energy is crucial. It is not, however, as Murray
explicitly emphasizes, a poem; it is a line of prose to
which he devotes his passionate attention. Of course
the literal sensuousness of the Shakespearean words is
not purely literal: without a sense of the sense of the
words, the sense of their sensuousness is not disclosed.
Sensuousness and sense reinforce each other; they
form a speech gesture that enjoys the very attributes
that this gesture ascribes to its object. The words in
Shakespeares line thus become mimetic signs that
show what they express about the relentless passing
of time.
This is often the case in literature, though fre-
quently in a less dramatic manner. The sound of the
words, their choice and order, the rhythm of sen-
tences and paragraphs, the kind of punctuation all of
these are means used in literary writing, and they are
employed no less in prose than in poetry. They allow
the moved body of words to come to appearance, in
a way that does not occur in other language use. This
coming-to-appearance of language is not, however,
a privilege of literature alone; it occurs wherever
words become striking in their audibly and visually
perceptible arrangement, be it in the whispering of
sweet nothings, in newspaper headlines, or in advertis-
ing catchphrases.
7
It occurs wherever language forms
are heard, seen, or read in such a way that what is
important is their acoustic, rhythmic and pictographic
appearing be it identical or parallel to, or even
contrary to, their conventional meaning.
Returning to the starting point
Nevertheless it has become almost a convention to
hold modern art responsible for a tendency to abandon
all appearing. I do not wish to argue against this
implausible conception again here.
8
Those works of
ne art, of music and literature, that ostensibly adopt
an indifferent stance toward appearing are either
interested in a different appearing or experimenting
with the conditions of artistic appearing. They do not
advocate an artistic rejection of all sensuous contact
in favour of ideas, conceptions or other software. For
an artistic rejection is to be understood as the rejec-
tion that produces its own sensuous irritations, and
through these irritations it in turn makes of itself an
incommensurable phenomenal event.
That is why a contemporary aesthetics of the arts
ought to set up camp at the scene of appearing. The
objects of recent art also gain their emotional and
atmospheric, their reective and cognitive, their moral
and political signicance from processes, energies,
constellations of their appearing. If, however, that is
the case, then it is evident that aesthetics should make
a start not with art but generally with incidents of
appearing: wherever we leave something as it is, just
as it appears to us here and now. That is by no means
an encounter with pure being, whatever that might be
for it is after all socialized and cultured individuals
who, in their intuition, reside with a thing or in a
situation; we transport our capabilities and knowledge,
our distinctions and views into all the moments of this
sensuous alertness. Appearing is that being that can
become aware only as an unreduced simultaneity of
the features of phenomenal being and thus as a passing
presence. The paths of aesthetic experience, which
diverge in all directions, intersect at this being.
At that intersection we nd the answer to Hegels
question concerning the necessity of aesthetic
consciousness, concerning its indispensable meaning
for the human form of life.
9
Of course aesthetic con-
sciousness of presence is neither the sole nor the only
important form of focus on presence. Everyone striving
to accomplish something has to be aligned with the
here and now in a different way. In an ascertaining
and determining manner, he or she has to adhere to
what is given in and to what may be expected from
that presence in contrast to aesthetic reaction, which
does not adhere to adherence. Here is where aesthetic
perception differs decisively from all theoretical and
practical appropriation: it allows us to develop a sense
of the passing presence of life.
This sense can ourish or decay on individual and
social, informal and institutional, cultural and societal
levels. It is an anthropologically central capability
that, in being applied, is subject to constant historical
change. Its value in the economy of culture varies.
Just as there are, inside or outside art, no aesthetic
objects without the capability of aesthetic perception
although these objects exist independently of the
ongoing performance of this perception and although
they reveal themselves in this performance as an objec-
tive play of appearances a presence made present
aesthetically is a state that, in individual and collective
life, can be more or less open or closed. What would
therefore be lost if the aesthetic sense decayed, would
be a private and public sensitivity and receptivity to
what immediately touches and moves our imagina-
tion and reection in the midst of all historical and
biographical, social and societal mediation. However
important this seismographic meaning of aesthetics is
for the self-evaluation of human cultures, it continues
to be a side effect of aesthetic conduct. For aesthetics
primary sense is located in itself in a self-encounter
executed as world encounter, a self-encounter that is
concerned with nothing other than the encounter. In
this encounter, human beings have one of their best
possibilities for being allowed to be in the time of
their being.
Translated by John Farrell
Notes
1. On these steps, see Martin Seel, sthetik des Erschein-
ens, Hanser, Munich, 2000; forthcoming as Aesthetics
of Appearing, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA,
2003.
2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman
Kemp Smith, Macmillan, London, 1933, p. A19/B33;
see also p. A69/B94.
3. In recognizing the necessity of this connection, aesthetic
theories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were
correct in the comparative and complementary treatment
of nature and art; see Martin Seel, Eine sthetik der
Natur, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1991, ch. V.
4. The ight of plastic bags seems to be a topic in recent
video art. The video Incidents by Igor and Svedlana
Kopistiansky, which was shown at the Fourth Biennale
in Lyon in 1997, and in a revised version at the Museum
for Modern Art in Frankfurt in 1999, shows objects in-
cluding plastic and paper bags that are blown by the
wind through the streets (and sounds) of New York; the
video runs for 15 minutes. Similar fortuitous choreo-
graphies can be found in the work of the Swiss video
artist Eric Hattan. The video Air (1998) follows for 34
minutes a plastic bag that is blown by the wind in an
inner courtyard. Blowing in the Wind (1999) follows the
gurations formed by a strip of paper blowing in the
wind. Yesterday, the artist wrote to the critic Kathrin
Becker, I saw the movie American Beauty. The scene
with the plastic bag could have come from me; rather,
it can be found in my oeuvre, too. See the exhibition
catalogue: Eric Hatten, Beton Liquide, Mller, Baden,
Switzerland, 2000, no pagination.
5. As an artefact of the character Ricky, the video is also a
chapter in the chronicle of luring someone to passionless
beholding (which, of course, abruptly turns into passion
the moment Jane becomes the primary object of his
lens).
6. Philip Roth, I Married a Communist, Vintage, London,
1999, p. 302.
7. Il mio mito e nito, ammette Rossi ran the headline
in Italys sports newspaper Gazetta dello Sport in the
summer of 1982 when the Italian soccer team com-
pleted a dismal rst round in the World Cup without
its virtuoso forward scoring a goal (after which, in the
second round, the team began its triumphant march to
the title and Paolo Rossi began his advance to player
of the tournament). I like Ike was a catchphrase of
General Eisenhowers presidential campaigns in the
1950s, a slogan to which Roman Jakobson has devoted
a convincing analysis in Linguistics and Poetics, in
K. Pomorska and S. Rudy, eds, Language in Literature,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1960, pp.
6294.
8. See Martin Seel, Art as Appearance: Two Comments
on Arthur C. Dantos After the End of Art, in History
and Theory 37, 1998, pp. 10214.
9. G.W.F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans.
Bernard Bosanquet, ed. with an introduction and com-
mentary by Michael Inwood, Penguin, Harmondsworth,
1993, p. 28.
Bruce Robbinss excellent article in RP 116 points
up the paradox of cosmopolitanism that it seems
perpetually torn between an empirical dimension and
a normative dimension.
1
For Robbins, the paradox of
cosmopolitanism is rooted in the limited empirical
sense of political community. For genuine democracy
people need to belong to the same community of
fate, and there is at present little evidence of such a
sense of cosmopolitan consciousness. Although lead-
ing (Western) governments make claims in support
of cosmopolitan human rights established by virtue
of membership of a common humanity, their practice
is often limited by the communitarian reality. The
lack of shared fate leads to inequalities in practice
as governments are often reluctant to sacrice either
treasury resources or military lives in the cause of
others, and citizens appear unwilling to shoulder the
tax burdens involved in any potential cosmopolitan
redistribution of wealth and opportunities.
Robbins suggests that it would be wrong to use
the empirical limits to cosmopolitan practices as an
argument against normative cosmopolitan claims. He
asserts that there is no possibility of simply choosing
the actual over the normative and instead suggests
that we should accept that the contradiction exists. A
solution to the problem lies in political change which
seeks to bring abstraction and actuality together. A
Left cosmopolitanism is one that denies the past
authority over the present the empirical reality that
there is as yet little evidence of transnational soli-
darity should be the justication for engagement and
struggle on the side of the progressive cosmopolitan
cause.
2
This campaigning perspective is advocated by
several cosmopolitan theorists who, in different ways,
seek to develop ideas and mechanisms whereby global
civil society can encourage and further cosmopolitan
practices against the communitarian inclinations of
national governments and their electorates.
3

This article suggests that the cosmopolitan paradox
the gap between universal aspiration and hierarchical
practice is not merely one of cosmopolitan con-
sciousness lagging behind an immanent cosmopolitan
reality. Rather, the paradox is rooted in the essence
of the cosmopolitan thesis itself. The limitations
of abstract normative cosmopolitan conceptions of
rights and responsibilities, in a world structured by
economic and social inequalities, raise major questions
over the progressive claims made by cosmopolitan
theorists. In fact, rather than challenging existing inter-
national structures of power, there is a real danger that
the cosmopolitan impulse will legitimize a much more
hierarchical set of international relationships.
Cosmopolitan democracy?
Whether the cosmopolitan aspiration takes the form
of Robbinss call for a transnational welfare safety
net or claims for the protection and promotion of a
more extensive range of human rights, all cosmopoli-
tan perspectives reect the increasing prominence of
individual rights claims in the international sphere.
Leading cosmopolitan theorists seek to challenge the
restrictions of the UN Charter framework, imposed
by the major powers in the aftermath of the Second
World War, which formally prioritized the state-
based principles of sovereignty and non-intervention.
They argue that these principles need to be replaced
by a new set of cosmopolitan principles, which make
the universal individual rights of members of global
society the primary focus.
Cosmopolitans argue that democracy and rights
can no longer be equated with territorially restricted
state-based politics: democracy must transcend the
borders of single states and assert itself on a global
level.
4
They thereby propose replacing the territorially
bounded political community of the state as the subject
of international decision-making by new exible frame-
The cosmopolitan paradox
Response to Robbins
David Chandler
works based on the rights of the global citizen, freed
from territorial restrictions:
If some global questions are to be handled accord-
ing to democratic criteria, there must be political
representation for citizens in global affairs, inde-
pendently and autonomously of their political repre-
sentation in domestic affairs. The unit should be the
individual, although the mechanisms for participa-
tion and representation may vary according to the
nature and scope of the issues discussed.
5

Cosmopolitan theorists accept that there is no global
government and suggest that, if there were, it would
be a bad thing. They are clear that the establishment
of democratic institutions on a global level would
meet the opposition of nation-states and that, even if
this could be brought into existence, it would involve
such a high level of homogenization, through social,
economic and cultural regulation, that it could only be
imposed through war and repression.
6
In which case,
there can be no cosmopolitan framework of formal
political rights, which enable individual citizens to
be represented as political equals. The global citizen
cannot have the same sorts of rights as the citizen of
a nation-state. For cosmopolitan theorists, the new
institutions, through which the cosmopolitan citizen
can exercise their rights, must exist independently
of states and their governments. For this reason the
global citizen can only be represented through global
or transnational civil society, which, it is argued, can
forward non-statist concerns and hold governments to
account through transnational campaigning and media
pressure.
There are several difculties with this perspective.
First, there is the question of whether a global civil
society exists in a meaningful sense. Without a global
state or a global political framework, it is debatable
whether it is possible to analyse a sphere beyond
nation-states where global civil society operates.
7
It
would appear that global civil society is no less ori-
entated around national governments than state-based
political structures such as national political parties or
other representative institutions. Second, there is little
agreement on the extent to which civil society groups
can inuence government policymaking and thereby
create a new mechanism of political accountability.
Third, and most importantly, even if groups in civil
society did wield inuence over policymakers, this
may not necessarily enhance the level of democratic
accountability.
Civil society operates in close relationship to the
sphere of formal politics but, by denition, organiz-
ations in civil society whether they are community
groups, single-issue pressure groups, NGOs, grassroots
campaigns, charities, media organizations, research
groups, or non-government-funded policy advisers
operate outside the political sphere of institution-
alized democratic equality and accountability. Civil
society groups play a legitimate and often crucial role
in policymaking but, as Michael Edwards notes, it
is vital to differentiate between the views of special
interest groups (however well intentioned) and formal
representation from below.
8

The opportunity for participation depends on the
organization concerned. For example, many of the
NGOs most active and inuential in defending rights,
like Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis
Group or the International Commission of Jurists,
have no mass membership and concentrate on elite
advocates to enable them to gain admittance to gov-
ernment and international ofcials. The extent of any
participation differs between organizations, and even
where there are high levels of participative involvement
this generally stops short of having any say over policy.
There is no direct link between (non)participation and
any conception of citizenship rights which can be given
content through formal mechanisms of democratic
accountability. We are not all equally involved in civil
society, we do not vote for policies in civil society and
we cannot hold civil society to account.
In the cosmopolitan framework, it would appear
problematic to talk about the exercise of rights, or of
democracy, outside the framework of nation-states.
As Steve Charnovitz highlights, even the involvement
of international NGOs in policymaking cannot make
nation-states more accountable: the establishment of
NGO advisory committees actually gives nation-state
governments greater control over decisionmaking as
the real power belongs to the international ofcials
who determine which NGOs to appoint.
9
This reality
of dependency is acknowledged in the frameworks
articulated by Daniele Archibugi and David Held, and
in similar reform proposals forwarded by the Com-
mission on Global Governance. These allow citizens
and civil society groups to participate in global or
regional institutional forums where they have specic
competencies, for example in those that deal with
the environment, population issues, development or
disarmament. However, this participation would sup-
plement but not replace existing intergovernmental
organizations. Their function would be essentially
advisory and not executive.
10

Despite the claims of cosmopolitan advocates, there
appears to be little evidence of the new rights prom-
ised to the global citizen. The new rights of global
citizens are exercised not by the rights-holders but
by international institutions, which have new duties
corresponding to the new rights created. The duties
and rights created in the cosmopolitan discourse are
of a qualitatively different nature to those established
under the domestic framework of the rule of law
and enforced through the police and the courts. The
equation of the right of the global citizen or global
civil society with the duty of international institu-
tions creates a new level of rights on paper but is
problematic in practice. This is clearly demonstrated
in the area of the prevention of wide-scale abuses of
human rights.
The exercise of a right of protection or prevention
of acts of genocide or domicide is dependent on the
actions of international institutions and major powers,
which have the economic and the military resources
to intervene. The new rights of cosmopolitan citizens,
additional to their territorial citizenship rights, are
ones which they cannot act on or exercise themselves,
and in this crucial respect the new rights imply depend-
ency rather than freedom or autonomy. While there
may be a duty to protect the new rights of the cosmo-
politan citizen the cosmopolitan framework provides
no mechanism of accountability to give content to
these rights. There is no link between the right and
the duty of its enforcement. The additional rights
upheld in the cosmopolitan framework may thus turn
out to be a chimera. Rather than exercising direct
control, the cosmopolitan citizens and cosmopolitan
civil society groups remain dependent on powerful
nation-states to decide whether or not to enforce their
claims. The imperative of action to defend the human
rights of cosmopolitan citizens ironically entails a
realpolitik that is highly state-centric. Rather than
internationally extending the rights of individuals vis-
-vis states, it would appear that the new rights being
created imply additional duties and responsibilities
for major powers.
What makes the cosmopolitan project important is
not so much the chimera of empowering global citizen-
ship but the consequences which this framework has
for the defence of existing democratic and political
rights. While the new rights may be difcult to realize,
the cosmopolitan cause has helped cohere a powerful
consensus on the need to recast the relationship
between international institutions and the nation-state.
Far from a utopian theory of hope in progress and
the development of democracy, cosmopolitan theory
appears to be a reection of a growing disillusionment
with politics at the international level. Cosmopolitan
theorists are disappointed that after the end of the
Cold War the resources of international society have
not been devoted towards resolving outstanding global
concerns. Liberal international relations theorists often
display a teleological or idealistic view of progress at
an international level, assuming that the creation of
international society in itself established a framework
through which differences could be put aside and new
means developed for the resolution of global problems.
It appears that the only thing stopping progress today,
after the diversion of the Cold War, is the narrow
preoccupation of nation-states with appeasing their
electorates as opposed to addressing global concerns.
This disillusionment with the narrow or selsh inter-
ests of realpolitik, and its legitimization through demo-
cratic mandates, has resulted in a growing attention to
the prioritization of ethical or moral approaches. In
contrast to realist approaches to international relations,
which have been accused of justifying the status quo,
ethical international relations theory sets out a radical
agenda of criticism. The question cosmopolitans seek
to address is how to legitimize moral and ethical policy
ends against the apparently narrow limits of liberal-
democratic frameworks and of sovereign government.
Its advocates are hostile to sovereignty and strongly
in favour of international regulation of the sovereign
sphere, but not in order to strengthen the mechanisms
of democratic accountability. They challenge the exist-
ing order because they represent a growing belief that
progressive ends such as the protection of human
rights, international peace or sustainable development
would be more easily achieved without the insti-
tutional constraints of democratic accountability or
the formalized rights of state sovereignty. In fact, the
moral and ethical premisses of cosmopolitan democ-
racy lead advocates of this perspective to downgrade
the importance of the rights framework of democracy
and political equality.
Cosmopolitan practice
The source of democratic rights is the citizen, as a
member of a political community, rather than the
abstraction of the cosmopolitan or global human indi-
vidual. As Hannah Arendt noted, the concept of rights,
separated from a specic political framework, would
mean claimants falling back upon the minimum fact
of human origin. For Arendt:
Equality, in contrast to all that is involved in mere
existence, is not given us, but is the result of human
organization. We are not born equal; we become
equal as members of a group on the strength of
our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal
rights.
11
The universal human subject of cosmopolitan rights
may be identiable as an individual, but unless that
individual can act within a political or legal framework
they will be unable to exercise equal legal or political
rights. In reinterpreting rights as a moral category,
as opposed to a legal and political one, a contradic-
tion appears between the enforcement and guarantee
of cosmopolitan rights and the formal equality of
the liberal-democratic legal and political framework.
Within the ethical framework of cosmopolitan theory,
vital areas of formal accountability, at both the domes-
tic and international levels, are questioned while new
and increasingly ad hoc frameworks of decisionmaking
are seen to be positive.
Take, rst, the formal right of sovereign equality
under international law. The UN Charter regime was
a radical break from the pre-World War II system of
legitimate Great Power domination. For the rst time,
non-Western states had the same legitimacy and inter-
national rights as the more developed Western states,
despite the inequality of economic and military power.
Unlike the UN, which formally recognizes the equality
of nation-states regardless of political regime, cosmo-
politans argue that many regimes are illegitimate. The
right to equality under international law, the central
pillar of the postcolonial international system, would
be a conditional or residual right under the cosmo-
politan framework. States that fail the assessments of
their legitimacy will no longer have equal standing
or full sovereign rights and could be legitimately
acted against in the international arena. Cosmopolitan
regulation is actually based on the concept of sover-
eign inequality: that not all states should be equally
involved in the establishment and adjudication of inter-
national law. Ironically, the new cosmopolitan forms
of justice and rights protection involve law-making
and law-enforcement, legitimized from an increasingly
partial, and explicitly Western, perspective.
12
Second, there is the right of sovereign autonomy
or self-government. Cosmopolitans assert that despite
adherence to all internationally accepted formal demo-
cratic procedures, a states government may not be
truly democratic. Because of this bias of self-inter-
est a decision or choice made by the demos, or the
people, even with full information and full freedom of
decisionmaking, would not necessarily have political
legitimacy. In the cosmopolitan framework a deci-
sion by popular vote could be as awed as national
governments having the nal say. The demos cannot
necessarily be the nal arbiter of democracy because
the choices of a people, even when made demo-
cratically, might be biased by self-interest. It may,
for example, be in the interests of the French public
to obtain cheap nuclear energy if they manage to
dispose of radioactive waste in a Pacic isle under
their control, but this will obviously be against the
interests of the public living there.
13

For cosmopolitan theorists the ethical ends which
they advocate are privileged above the sphere of
democracy. In this framework a small minority may
be more democratic than a large majority, if they have
an outlook attuned to cosmopolitan aspirations. Mary
Kaldor draws out the implications of the argument
when she suggests that the international community
should not necessarily consult elected local representa-
tives but seek to identify local advocates of cosmo-
politanism where there are islands of civility.
14
Just
as states cannot be equally trusted with cosmopolitan
rights, neither can people. Instead of the limited
but xed demos of the nation-state there is a highly
selective demos identied by international institutions
guided by the cosmopolitan impulse.
If governments and people cannot be trusted to
overcome their narrow political differences and
prejudices, then a new authority is needed to enforce
cosmopolitan morality. This authority must be inde-
pendent of established political mechanisms of demo-
cratic accountability. Cosmopolitan theorists favour an
independent and higher mechanism of international
regulation in the belief that under such a system
the ethical ends of cosmopolitan liberalism can be
enforced. The authority they wish to establish, without
democratic accountability but with the legitimacy to
overrule popular opinion and elected governments,
is that of cosmopolitan governance. The essential
attribute of governance is that it is regulation freed
from the formal restrictions of government. Cos-
mopolitan governance, the less accountable power of
international regulation, is the ideological counterpart
to the cosmopolitan citizen, who has fewer rights of
democratic accountability. In exchange for new rights
for the global individual, the cosmopolitans want to
sacrice the old rights of self-government, which are
seen to restrict the benign and protective actions of
international institutions.
These rights would exist under a new body of
cosmopolitan democratic law, a domain of law dif-
ferent in kind from the law of states and the law made
between one state and another, that is, international
law. This law transcends the particular claims of
nations and states and would be upheld by a frame-
work of interlocking jurisdictions.
15
While there is
no world state that is constituted politically, there are
international and transnational institutions which have
the authority to undermine sovereignty when the need
arises regarding an issue of global concern.
This prescription of a new form of exible law-
making, no longer formally restricted by traditional
domestic or international frameworks of accountability,
reects the evolving practice of leading Western states
in international intervention. Over recent years the
legitimization of intervention through claims of pro-
tecting the universal rights of citizens has clashed with
traditional international law restrictions on interference
in the internal affairs of sovereign nation-states. The
report of the Independent International Commission on
Kosovo acknowledged the gap between international
law and the practice of leading Western states and
suggested the need to close the gap between legal-
ity and legitimacy.
16
However, rather than proposing
to extend the formal reach of international law, the
Commission sought to justify a new moral concep-
tion of legitimacy, one which differed from formal
legality. They described their doctrinal proposal for
humanitarian intervention as situated in a gray zone
of ambiguity between an extension of international law
and a proposal for an international moral consensus,
concluding that this gray zone goes beyond strict
ideas of legality to incorporate more exible views of
legitimacy.
17

This international commission was followed by the
International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty, which held further discussions on the
question throughout 2001. These discussions indicate
that formal legal equality will be undermined by cur-
rent developments in international law. In a typical
panel, leading policy advisor Adam Roberts noted
that it would be a mistake to focus mainly on general
doctrinal matters regarding rights under formal inter-
national law:
The justication for a particular military action,
if it is deemed to stand or fall by reference to the
question of whether there is a general legal right of
intervention, is likely to be in even more difculty
than it would be if legal considerations were bal-
anced in a more ad hoc manner.
18

The attempt to resolve the clash between the partial
demands of Western powers and the universal form of
law means that the advocates of cosmopolitan forms
of international law assert the need for new, more
exible, legal forms. Whether a military intervention
is legitimate is in the last analysis a question of the
perspectives and interests of those involved.
19
This
viewpoint, implicitly adopted by the Commission, is
an open argument for law-making by an elite group
of Western powers sitting in judgement over their
own actions.
The cosmopolitans allege that this ethical frame-
work can lead to a more equal society, as any state
can be intervened in if it breaches moral or ethical
norms. However, larger and more powerful states
will have the resources and opportunities to intervene
whereas weaker states will be unable to take on the
interventionist duties on behalf of the global citizen.
This exible and multilayered framework, where the
strict hierarchies of international law are absent, and
there are no established frameworks of accountabil-
ity in decisionmaking, undermines the UN Charter
protections for non-Western states. The realities of
unequal power relations mean that the more exible
decisionmaking is, and the less xed international law,
the easier it is for more powerful states to dictate the
international agenda.
20

The ethical or normative approach of cosmopolitan-
ism legitimates the corrosion and undermining of the
formal legal and political framework of international
society, but does little to shape a new or more posi-
tive framework of rights in the international sphere.
In fact, the focus on ethical and moral responsibility
helps cohere a new hierarchy of power where major
Western states claim an ethical mantle of responsi-
bility to act in the interests of the less fortunate
around the world. Tony Blairs Labour Party Con-
ference speech following 9/11 demonstrated the ease
with which the cosmopolitan rights framework could
legitimate an otherwise questionable claim to act on
the behalf of others. Blair declared that he was not
just concerned with British interests but that: The
starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant,
those living in want and squalor from the deserts of
northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountains
of Afghanistan: they too are our cause.
21
Without
any relationship of formal accountability, this ethical
reformulation of Great Power interference as the basic
element in the code of global citizenship attempts to
legitimize a post-UN order based on a new hierarchy
of political inequality.
22

Today the governments of the United States and
Britain declare they have a duty to develop democ-
racy and protect the cosmopolitan rights of people the
world over, if necessary through intervening by mili-
tary, diplomatic or economic means as, for example,
in the case of Zimbabwe, East Timor, Sierra Leone,
Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Belarus, Afghanistan or
Iraq. Tomorrow they will doubtless claim the duty
to protect the rights of the citizens of other states
declared to be failing or facing condemnation for
putting their citizens at risk. While, to many people,
the cosmopolitan cause is a laudable one, and a far
cry from a previous imperial era of Great Power
regulation, there are political parallels in the fact that
the actions of the worlds most powerful states are
accountable neither to the broader world community
of states as embodied in the United Nations nor to the
citizens of the states they choose to intervene in.
Notes
1. Bruce Robbins, Whats Left of Cosmopolitanism?,
Radical Philosophy 116, November/December 2002,
pp. 3037.
2. Ibid., pp. 345.
3. See, for example, David Held, Democracy and the Glo-
bal Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan
Governance, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995; David
Beetham, Democracy and Human Rights, Polity Press,
Cambridge, 1999; Daniele Archibugi, David Held and
Martin Khler, eds, Re-imagining Political Community:
Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy, Polity Press, Cam-
bridge, 1998; Tim Dunne and Nicholas Wheeler, eds,
Human Rights in Global Politics, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1999; Richard A. Falk, Human Rights
Horizons: The Pursuit of Justice in a Globalizing World,
Routledge, London and New York, 2000; Mary Kaldor,
New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era,
Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999.
4. Daniele Archibugi, Cosmopolitical Democracy, New
Left Review 4, JulyAugust 2000, p. 144.
5. Daniele Archibugi, Principles of Cosmopolitan Democ-
racy, in Archibugi, Held and Khler, eds, Re-imagining
Political Community, p. 212.
6. See, for example, Commission on Global Governance,
Our Global Neighbourhood, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1995, p. xvi; Kaldor, New and Old Wars, p.
148; Held, Democracy and the Global Order, p. 230.
7. Martin Khler, From the National to the Cosmopolitan
Public Sphere, in Archibugi, Held and Khler, eds, Re-
imagining Political Community, p. 233.
8. Michael Edwards, Future Positive: International Co-
operation in the 21st Century, Earthscan, London, 1999,
p. 180.
9. Steve Charnovitz, NGOs and International Govern-
ance, Michigan Journal of International Law, vol. 18,
1997, p. 283.
10. Archibugi, Principles of Cosmopolitan Democracy, p.
219.
11. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new edn,
Harvest, New York, 1979, pp. 300301.
12. See, for example, Martin Shaw, Global Society and Inter-
national Relations: Sociological Concepts and Political
Perspectives, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 180
81.
13. Archibugi, Principles of Cosmopolitan Democracy, p.
211.
14. Kaldor, New and Old Wars, p. 120.
15. Held, Democracy and the Global Order, pp. 227, 232.
16. Independent International Commission on Kosovo, The
Kosovo Report, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000,
p. 10.
17. Ibid., p. 164.
18. Adam Roberts, Intervention: Suggestions for Moving
the Debate Forward, Round Table Consultation, Lon-
don, 3 February 2001, Discussion Paper, International
Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty,
p. 2.
19. Jon Holbrook, Humanitarian Intervention and the Re-
casting of International Law, in David Chandler, ed.,
Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Approaches to Inter-
national Politics, PalgraveMacmillan, London, 2002,
p. 148.
20. See, further, David Chandler, International Justice,
New Left Review 6, NovemberDecember 2000, pp.
5566.
21. Tony Blair, Full Text of Tony Blairs Speech to the
Labour Party Conference, 2 October 2001, Guardian,
3 October 2001.
22. Report of the International Commission on Intervention
and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect,
International Development Research Centre, Ottawa,
2001, p. 75.
David Chandler ends his response by insisting on the
need for a globally institutionalized framework of
political and legal equality. I dont know what this
means. But it seems to be the key to Chandlers argu-
ment, so let me speculate. Does it mean a world state?
If so, then Chandler is being more utopian than the
cosmopolitan theorists hes discussing. Does it mean
some set of more or less ad hoc (and therefore more
feasible) institutions that would protect the worlds
weakest populations and push toward a more equitable
distribution of its resources; institutions such as, say, a
tax on international nancial transactions? If so, then
Chandler is merely restating my argument. But in that
case it makes no sense for him to tell us would-be
cosmopolitans to wait until we have such a thing, to
delay all cosmopolitan aspirations in the absence of
such a framework. For what we aspire to is to bring
this framework of equality into existence.
Or perhaps the word framework refers (but in
that case why not say so?) to a reformed United
Nations, one for example without the veto power of
the Security Councils permanent members? Devoutly
to be wished, I agree. But where is the contradiction
between this eminently cosmopolitan goal and the
theorists of whom Chandler is so suspicious? Chandler
seems to harbour an answer. For him, cosmopolitans
are secretly invested in the Western privilege of exer-
cising global leadership; this leadership is currently
exercised through the United Nations by means of the
championing of rights discourse and humanitarian
intervention; the result is the undermining of national
sovereignty. A democratized UN could not possibly
permit this undermining of national sovereignty, and
thus (if I may put words in Chandlers mouth) cosmo-
politans cannot possibly want a democratized UN.
This does not happen to be the case, but it does point
toward the real issue here: national sovereignty.
The only framework Chandler appears to want
is a non-framework, in other words one that will
leave nation-states alone. Which raises the question of
whether such a framework would not have the same
effect on the social status quo. From this angle, Chan-
dlers desire for a UN that would be less compliant to
the most developed nations looks a lot like a nostalgia
for the UN of the Cold War, when the existence of
another superpower helped enforce greater respect
for national sovereignty, regardless of how any given
regime treated its citizens. Yes, the Soviet Union was
a genuine counterweight to US expansionism, and,
yes again, that expansionism is currently forcing us
all into defensive desperation. But did the principle
of national sovereignty the Soviet Union once helped
to defend really function as a force for change in the
worlds social arrangements? Or did it simply petrify
existing social hierarchies within the nation?
Chandler and I both want a big change in the
structure of global power: more justice, more equal-
ity, and so on. The question is how to move in this
direction. Like Perry Anderson, Chandler seems to
assume that we would have a better chance if we
were to reinforce national sovereignty. I would like to
see that case made rather than assumed. But my own
argument does not simply contradict this assump-
tion. My position, in brief, is that under the present
conditions of restricted political possibility, the sort
of national solidarity required in order to sustain
domestic welfare-state institutions becomes a precious
resource to be carefully nurtured, and a resource that
will also prove necessary and invaluable if we try (as
we must) to extend the protection of such institutions
to the countries of the global South, which can perhaps
be dened by not having them. Respect for the national
sovereignty of these countries does not even make a
start on this project.
Which is not to say that a start has been made.
Chandlers worries about the inadequacy of what I
would call actually existing cosmopolitanism to
accomplish so formidable a task are of course well
founded. Indeed, these worries would probably be
shared by most of the cosmopolitan thinkers with
whom he announces his disagreemenr as would his
equal and opposite worry that cosmopolitanism may
be more effectual than it appears. The danger that
normative concepts like human rights can help legiti-
mize present inequalities of power specically, the
hegemony of the United States and its allies is clear
Reply to Chandler
Bruce Robbins
to any sentient being who has followed the discourse
of humanitarian intervention. But it surprises me that
Chandler does not admit, in return, what powerful
weapons these concepts can make in the hands of
critics of US hegemony. Any force that is capable of
changing the world is capable of changing it for the
worse as well as for the better. At this moment it is
arguable that human rights discourse is a force that
has largely escaped from those who once thought they
owned it. Why didnt the US even bother to attend the
Durban conference on racism? Why the silence from
our leaders when Israel does what they accuse Iraq
of doing? What about the prisoners in Guantnamo?
According to Chandler, cosmopolitanism demands a
subject that has been freed from any political frame-
work which institutionalizes liberal democratic norms
of formal accountability. I have trouble understanding
how the effort to hold my elected ofcials accountable
by asking questions like these could come to stand as
a proud refusal of accountability.
Speakers:
Rudi Visker (Catholic University of Leuven)
Philosophy and Pluralism: Entering the
Performative Self-Contradiction
Christine Battersby (University of Warwick)
Re-imagining Feminist Metaphysics
Jay Bernstein (New School for Social Research, NY)
The Necessity and Disappointment of Critique:
Schillers Aesthetic Education
Cline Surprenant (University of Sussex)
Reection and Anteriority in Freud
QUESTIONING/CRITIQUE/
CONSTRUCTION:
ASPECTS OF PHILOSOPHY
Saturday 15
th
March 2003
10am6pm
Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy
7
th
Annual Conference
Modern European philosophy
encompasses a diverse array
of apparently incompatible
approaches, traditions, and
concerns: phenomenology,
critical theory, hermeneutics,
deconstruction, theory of
multiplicities. The list could
go on. At a time when this
heterogeneity threatens to
degenerate into eclecticism and
an inconsequential pluralism, this
conference will provide a forum
for discussion of what is at stake
in some of these various schools
or tendencies. It will foreground
the contrasting conceptions
of philosophy as: locus of
a fundamental questioning;
subjective and socio-historical
reexivity in the Kantian and
Hegelian critical traditions; and
positive conceptual construction
in gures such as Schelling, Freud
and Deleuze.
25 waged, 12 unwaged.
Cheques payable to Middlesex University.
Advance registration and further details from: Ray Brassier,
Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy,
Middlesex University, White Hart Lane, London N17 8HR.
Telephone: 020 8411 6220 Email: r.brassier@mdx.ac.uk
REVIEWS
Revenge or revival?
Daniel Bensad, Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique, trans. Gregory Elliott,
Verso, London and New York, 2002. xvii + 392 pp., 20.00 hb., 1 85984 712 9.
The translation of Marx for Our Times presents to
an Anglophone readership one of the more ambi-
tious and, in many respects, more intriguing prod-
ucts of the recently fted recovery and renewal of
Marxist thought in France (see Conference Report
in RP 115). As its title and Preface to the English
Edition accentuate, Marx for Our Times is proposed
as a disruptive intervention into the intellectual and
political conjuncture of the present; an intervention
claimed all the more forcefully now as the end to the
dismal period that induced and attended the books
composition. Bensad describes the very act of reread-
ing and re-engaging with the dead dog that Marx
had become from the late 1970s to the early 1990s as
itself an act of resistance against the Counter-Ref-
ormation or Restoration that he brands this period
of anti-Marxism in France, a period symbolized by
the nouveaux philosophes. Marx for Our Times is
revenge. In fact, writing revenges on the nouveaux
philosophes has become the main genre of contem-
porary French Marxism.
The year 1995 marked both the French publication
of Marx for Our Times (entitled Marx lintempestif
Marx the Untimely) and, according to Bensad,
the alignment of various conditions enabling a wider
reformation of Marxism. Dominant among these was
the percolating effect of the dissolution of the Soviet
Union; more specically, the dissolution of its over-
determination of the meaning of Marxism within the
ideological struggle of the Cold War. This decisively
broke the association that had been fundamental to
the strategy of the nouveaux philosophes, thereby
removing the generalized suspicion that had stied
reconsiderations of Marx. Intellectually, there has been
a resurgence of work on Marx. Among the celebrity
highlights, Bensad cites the 1993 publication of Derri-
das Specters of Marx and, in the same year, Deleuzes
tantalizing remarks to Le Nouvel Observateur that My
next book and it will be my last will be called
Grandeur de Marx. More punctually, he cites the
rst International Marx Conference, organized by
the journal Actuel Marx in 1995. And, more generally,
he itemizes a wealth of contemporary international
research on or relating to Marxism, which, in a refresh-
ing lack of chauvinism, and a pointed depreciation of
Althusserianism, he afrms against any nostalgia for
a Golden Age of 1960s French Marxism.
But Bensad is also highly critical of the tendency
to develop a purely academicized renewal of Marxism,
a temptation he characterizes as a desire for Marx
without communism. For Bensad, communism is
distinguished radically from its Stalinist connotations
and identied with the general practice of resistance
to capital, a practice that acquires an urgent contem-
poraneity because of, rather than despite, capitalisms
current hegemony. Again, 1995 is circled in Bensads
calendar. The winter of that year saw strikes and
marches in defence of public services and social secu-
rity in France and the intimations of a broad repost
to a hegemonic neoliberalism intimations of the
emergence of the Left of the Left that has resonated
in the actions of a global anticapitalist movement from
Seattle to Genoa to Prto Alegre.
But 2002 was not 1995. It was marked by the asco
of the French presidential elections and the irruption
of the War Against Terrorism. These are phenomena
that conrm a crisis for neoliberalism, but that also
demand deep reconsideration for an emergent anti-
capitalist movement. Bensad does not reect on this
transformation. And in certain respects there is little
need for him to do so. The immediacy claimed for the
books historical self-consciousness is largely belied
by the research constituting the body of the book,
most of which concerns methodological and logical
disputes that, despite being oriented towards a critique
of the contingencies of the present, nonetheless remain
merely gestural in this orientation. It is tempting to
downplay this disjuncture as overzealous promotion.
But this is insensitive to the desire of Marx for Our
Times, as well as to the desire for a Marx for our times.
For it is the condensation of these desires that reveals
some of the books highest stakes.
The book appears elegantly simple in structure.
Unied by the general characterization of Marxs
theoretical practice as critique, the three main parts
of the book thematize according to deployments of
critique attributed to Marx: the Critique of Historical
Reason, the Critique of Sociological Reason and
the Critique of Scientic Positivism. Appended to
the last is also a Contribution to the Critique of
Political Ecology. However, this conceals a collection
of essays that scarcely constitutes a straightforward
narrative. Eclectic, idiosyncratic and occasionally
laboured, they read very much like the documents
of an extended period of research undertaken with
complex demands. Bensads mode of presentation
here is derived from Benjamin: assembling and
juxtaposing extracts make it possible to outline the
constellation of an epoch, to awaken echoes under
the impact of the present. And Adornos criticisms
can be cited again, in so far as Bensads presentation
of material tends as much towards positive exposi-
tion as critical juxtaposition. Furthermore, perhaps
the most striking juxtaposition of the book is not
quite intended as such: namely, that between Walter
Benjamin and analytical Marxism. It informs much
of its analysis.
With respect to the critique of historical
reason, Bensad criticizes the normative and
determinist theory of history developed by
G.A. Cohen as a renewal of the conserva-
tism of the Second International, and, via
Benjamins critique of the latter, proposes a
radically disjunctive and politicized model
of history, structured by eventful singular-
ities. But in a confusion that is perhaps
engendered by Bensads eclecticism, the
clarication of Benjamins relation to the
logic of singularities is left largely sus-
pended. And when we return to the con-
sideration of singularity in the critique of
scientic positivism, it is inected by a
recourse to chaos theory that raises more
questions that it answers. The second part of
the book, on Marxs critique of sociological
reason, is a defence of class struggle against
its reduction to methodological individ-
ualism, in so far as the latter dissolves the
central political category of Marxism in the
name of explaining it. However, conceived
in terms of a general renewal of Marxism,
this choice of opponent seems anachronistic.
There is no discussion of the post-Marxism
developed by Laclau and Mouffe, which has
been in many respects more inuential in the present
scepticism towards Marxist political philosophy. Their
articulation of the challenge presented to the Marxian
conception of class struggle by new social movements
and the multiplication of political subjectivities would
be an urgent task for a renewal of Marx today. It
is also noticeable that, despite the debt to Benjamin,
and passing nods to Bloch and Adorno, there is no
sustained discussion of Habermasian Critical Theory,
which would seem to offer the obvious target for a
Marxian critique of sociological reason today.
Indeed, in many respects the discussion of analyti-
cal Marxism is anachronistic. At a time in Britain
when it has lost most of its momentum, inuence and
credibility as a Marxist enterprise, we are offered an
extensive conrmation of this as a critical renewal
of Marxism today. For all Bensads insistence on
the present, there is a denite time-lag here, a sense
in which he has arrived too late. Paris in 1995,
maybe, but in London and New York in 2002 it is
so pass. And yet, much like a video time-delay,
the effect is strangely revealing. The time passed
has transformed the critique of analytical Marxism,
from the suspicion of an insidious dismantling, into
the preparatory ground-clearing for a radical
renewal of Marxism.
A further surprising, but also confusing
feature of the book is its relation to Hegel,
who undergoes a peculiar odyssey as he bobs
up and down at different points in the book.
He is the principal target of Bensads attempt
to conceive the critique of historical reason
non-teleologically and disruptively, and to
apprehend history strategically and politi-
cally. However, in the critique of scientic
reason Hegel is redeemed emphatically as
the fundamental progenitor of the logic of
Capital. But few of the historic disputes over
Marxs relation to Hegel are articulated here,
and the critique of teleology proposed in the
rst part of the book is later transformed into
an understanding of Hegelian dialectic as a
fundamentally open and pluralistic form of
totality; indeed, a dynamically indeterminate,
probabilistic, and therefore strategically
understood and negotiated logic of chaos.
In characteristically rhetorical mode, Bensad
writes: Regarding capital as a dynamic
social relation in chronic disequilibrium,
Marx glimpsed the footprints of chaos on
the sands of time, but was not yet able to
decipher them. (The quotation is from Ian
Stewarts Does God Play Dice?)
Bensads indifference to Althusserianism
is more the pity here. The elaboration of the con-
sequences of this reading of Hegel in relation to
Althusser would have great resonance for a renewal
of Marxism today, when Althussers echo can still be
heard in the work of a number of inuential intel-
lectuals on the Left. And in many ways the strategy
of renewing Marx through the diagnosis of his blind
anticipation of a subsequent scientic paradigm is
very similar to Althussers, only here it is chaos
theory rather than structuralism.
There are many desires for a Marx for our times
that Marx for Our Times does not serve. It is not an
analysis of the contemporary political possibility of
communism. It is a pedagogical introduction to Marx
in only a very peculiar form. Many of the crises
of Marxist thought on the Left are broached only
indirectly, if at all. Marx for Our Times is in many
respects best understood according to its most modest
self-understanding, as the document of a particular
period of critical research into the renewal of Marxism
in a particular context. In this, it remains true to its
original French title, untimely. However, this does
not diminish what gradually emerges as the unifying
horizon of the book, but which is ironically absent
from its structuring themes: namely, a Marxian cri-
tique of political reason. This is the secret passage that
links the assumption of Benjamins political transfor-
mation of historiography to the antagonistic structure
of class struggle and, nally, to the elaboration of its
ontology as the strategic negotiation of open systems
of determination. The development of this critique of
political reason is the implicit but pervasive labour of
Marx for Our Times. Buried in the immanent critique
of its own critiques, it emerges only indistinctly. But its
critical self-reection demands more than conceptual
clarication. It demands, as Bensad himself insists,
an organic relationship with the revived practice of
social movements in particular, the resistance to
imperialist globalization. These social movements are
to be excused if they dont immediately recognize this
call as their revival.
Stewart Martin
Sex change
Wendy Cealey Harrison and John Hood-Williams, Beyond Sex and Gender, Sage, London, 2002. 258 pp., 55.00
hb., 17.99 pb., 0 7619 5599 2 hb., 0 7619 5600 X pb.
Her criticism is twofold. First, what amounts to
the separation of the natural (biological sex) from the
social (gender) results either in the insuperable dif-
culty of explaining their relation, or, if some relation
is posited, the separation is ipso facto denied. Second
(leading on from this), despite its delimitation of bio-
logical explanation, the distinction conrms the irre-
ducible facticity of biological sex, which then cannot
but function foundationally (cannot but be thought as
that which comes rst), acting as the lodestone on
gender, ultimately displacing the latters explanatory
power. Sex, in other words, will always remain the
nal court of appeal when contrasted with gender
in this way the very claim against which Oakleys
book argued.
In the same chapter Cealey Harrison then examines
Christine Delphys attempt to overcome this problem
with her claim that sex marks a social division that
is the product of the hierarchy of gender (that is,
patriarchy), working in its service. The criticism here
focuses on the fact that Delphys analysis forces us,
albeit unwillingly, into the question of the origins
of patriarchy, and to a presumption of the quasi-
causal role of patriarchy in the sex/gender (or now,
better, sexgender) conguration. Within this, although
Delphy may dene men and women as agents occu-
pying certain social positions (such that men in the
commonsensical sense of the term can be women in
Delphys sense), Delphy cannot help but also presume
the existence of men and women, in the sexed sense
of male and female, in the justication of the theor-
etical role of patriarchy in her analysis. Sex thus
creeps back in, as the presumption behind the concept
of patriarchy, and once again functions as the ground
of gender, inverting Delphys apparently progressive
intention.
Further chapters discuss, among other things, Bob
Connells Gender and Power, Suzanne Kessler and
Wendy McKennas ethnomethodology of sex and
gender, and Erving Goffmans work on gender as
display. The point of these chapters is often hard to
see without considerable retrospective reconstruction
and speculation on the part of the reader. There are
also serious problems in the details of some of the
analyses. The criticisms of Kessler and McKenna, for
Wendy Cealey Harrison would like to say thanks and
goodbye to the sex/gender distinction. (John Hood-
Williams, Cealey Harrisons intellectual partner in
previous publications and at the conception of this
book, died before very much of it was complete. The
ascription of joint authorship is a generous expression
of the intellectual debt.) Her books main thesis is that
the continued deployment of the sex/gender distinction
as an analytical tool is doomed to perpetuate the very
thing that it was designed to avoid or overcome. In
particular, in the use of the distinction, feminists nd
themselves occupying the same conceptual terrain
as their opponents, unwittingly ceding to the latters
presumptions, whilst attacking them.
Several chapters attempt to demonstrate this through
detailed and often critically incisive analyses of spe-
cic texts or oeuvres which have played an important
role in the analysis of gender or of the relationship
between sex and gender, across a variety of disciplines,
but primarily in Cealey Harrisons own: sociology. The
intellectual history in question here is one in which,
as a category referring to patterns of socio-culturally
determined behaviour, conformity with or resistance to
ideological and normative demands, gender has been
deployed to bear the weight previously accorded to sex,
understood as a biological or even zoological category,
in the explanation and justication or criticism of
social, familial and psychological structures. (The
implication being that where sex had tended to justify
the patriarchal status quo, gender would criticize it.)
An early chapter focuses on Ann Oakleys Sex, Gender
and Society (1972). Oakleys book is a much-copied
example of the sort of feminist analysis that, tired of
stupid claims about womens nature and the biological
imperatives to which we were subject, scrutinized the
biological claims about sexual difference, contrasted
them with evidence of cultural variation, and found a
vastly reduced eld of what really can be established
and conrmed with the result that the [explana-
tory] eld commanded by biology shrinks in favour
of gender. An analysis of a text from 1972 may seem
belated, but Cealey Harrisons point is that Oakleys
basic presumption about the sex/gender distinction is
still prevalent, and its alleged deleterious effects thus
still operate.
example, are fatally compromised by the claim that
phenomenological reduction entails epistemological
agnosticism. And claims elsewhere that epistemo-
logical conceptions (whatever they are) conceive of
knowledge in terms of a distinction and correlation
between two self-enclosed realms of knowledge and
the objects to which knowledge refers reveal a char-
acteristic confusion about philosophical terms. Yet
in so far as they are successful, these chapters tend
towards the same critical conclusion: wherever the
conceptual opposition of sex and gender is found to
operate even surreptitiously at the basis of any
attempt to displace the former in favour of the latter,
the same ontological order is reasserted in which
sex, ultimately, must be foundational. The basic point,
then, is that the sex/gender distinction just does not
work. The logic of the distinction is such that the
intention behind it is immanently stymied: gender is
conceptually tethered, and effectively weighed down,
by sex in the very attempt to give it an independent
life of its own.
To some extent, this conclusion functions as a
problematizing criticism (and one which is really very
troubling, if we take it seriously) of a whole range of
cross-disciplinary research based on the category of
gender, given that that category is semantically (at the
very least) dependent on its distinction from sex. But
how do things stand with the use of the concept of
gender in the theoretical eld in which the conceptual
genealogy or the deconstruction of the function of the
category of sex is an overt theme, or even its raison
dtre? Furthermore, if the sex/gender distinction has
outlived its usefulness, with what should it be replaced?
Rather than answer these questions, the book asks a
few others, askance, and offers us the Foucauldian
category of discourse to make other ones go away.
Cealey Harrison claims, for example, that in Making
Sex (1990) Thomas Laqueur remains caught within the
conceptual duality, the origin of which he himself
describes: simultaneously placing the social and politi-
cal imperatives that produce the markers of difference
[and thus produce sex] outside the terms of the
empirical investigation and denying that external-
ity. Laqueur, that is, implicitly retains the distinction
between sex and the social world (by insisting on the
separation of the real body from its representations)
although the main argument of his book is meant to
demonstrate its untenability. This happens, according
to Cealey Harrison, because Laqueur falls into the
common error of construing discourse as a linguis-
tic eld of representation, into which extra-linguistic
reality must not be allowed to collapse, theoretically.
Fear of a constructionist idealism has Laqueur running
for biological sex after all. Cealey Harrison suggests
that a Foucauldian concept of discourse is the answer
to this fear, although construing it as a phenomeno-
logically reduced, ontologically agnostic methodologi-
cal concept (which Foucault, as a good Heideggerian,
did not) and claiming its virtue to be the ability to
cut across epistemological ways of framing human
knowledge obviates its usefulness.
In any case, Cealey Harrisons criticism avoids a
bigger question. She may have identied Laqueurs slip
back into the traditional conception of the sex/gender
distinction, her criticisms of which are compelling,
but what if he had kept his footing? Committed to
the thesis of the historicality of both the concepts of
sex and gender and their referents, it would be contra-
dictory for Cealey Harrison to claim that the meaning
of the sex/gender distinction and its discursive function
is somehow immutable. Granted the criticisms of the
traditional understanding of the sex/gender distinction,
what do sex and gender mean now? Any answer to
this question obviously has to deal rst and foremost
with the work of Judith Butler, which is why it is so
odd to nd the treatment of this specic issue in Butler
sidelined, at best, in Cealey Harrisons book.
The main criticism centres on Butlers claim that
gender is melancholic because the identications
of which it is born are rooted in the (unavowable,
ungrievable) loss of same-sex attachments prohibited
in the resolution of the Oedipus complex. Cealey Har-
rison objects to the description of pre-Oedipal attach-
ments as homosexual, because in psychoanalytic
theory hetero- or homosexuality are achievements,
or the (necessarily unstable) result, of later stages of
psychic development. Further, describing the childs
pre-Oedipal attachments to its same-sex parent as
homosexual entails an admission of the place of sex
as a given, prior to the construction of gender as the
melancholic loss of this attachment, a position that
appears to contradict Butlers well-known thesis that
sex is produced as an effect of gender, and to fall
back into the traditional sex/gender distinction.
I suspect that Butlers theory of melancholic gender
(which she herself describes as hyperbolic) will not
turn out to be the most enduring part of her intellectual
legacy, but Cealey Harrisons criticism here suffers
from a psychoanalytical decit, failing to acknowledge
the peculiar form of psychical temporality and causal-
ity (Freuds afterwardsness, Nachtrglichkeit). Her
broader criticism, however, concerns the importation
of the category of gender into psychoanalysis in the
rst place, arguing that it sociologizes the psyche and
in theories of gender identity especially blunts
the sharp instruments of psychoanalysis. It seems
to me that this argument is worth considering in
relation to specic instances, but in general and as a
critique of Butler it is multiply displaced. First, while
it may be true that gender was not a category Freud
used, its subsequent use in psychoanalysis constitutes
a transformation of both the discipline and the cat-
egory itself, although Cealey Harrisons criticisms
always presume that it is the same old gender of the
traditional sex/gender distinction at work. Second,
far more worrying than the use of the category of
gender in psychoanalysis is the covert reliance of some
(specically Lacanian) theories of sexual difference on
an utterly conventional conception of sex as biological
sex difference a conception, moreover, which Butler,
perhaps more than anyone else, has done much to
problematize. Finally, in focusing her criticisms on
gender melancholia, Cealey Harrisons treatment of
Butler avoids what is surely the much more important
part of Butlers deconstructive ontology of sex and its
discursive construction through the iterative perform-
ance of gender. (If the theory of gender melancholia
contradicts this, so much the worse for that theory.)
This avoidance is symptomatic. This is a very
good book in so far as it correctly identies the
various conceptual problems attached inseparably to
the traditional sex/gender distinction and tracks the
re-emergence of the distinction, in its traditional form,
in various attempts to avoid precisely those problems.
But it reaches a profound impasse on the question of
what should replace it. Ideally, Cealey Harrison says,
the concepts of sex and gender will be replaced by
concepts of an equivalent level of generality, and the
current lack of such concepts sometimes explains the
difculty in escaping the old distinction (Laqueur, for
example locates[s] himself within the very distinc-
tion whose origins he has traced because the new
discursive space that would be necessary for the full
accomplishment of his criticism of the distinction
does not yet exist.) The book ends with the demand
that we think beyond sex and gender, but there is
no indication of how that might be accomplished. (It
is beyond the scope of this book.)
How is this theoretical impasse linked to the books
philosophical deciencies? The enquiry works within
what Cealey Harrison calls the sex/gender problem-
atic, a possible set of questions with a constraining
and regulatory character. Her overarching position is
that it is now necessary to do away with this problem-
atic; that is, she anticipates an epistemological break
and a transition to a new problematic including the new
concepts mentioned above. But it is indeed very hard to
imagine how we could do away with these concepts.
The impasse here is a consequence of an ideal-
ist conception of problematic which seems unable
to acknowledge the immanent transformation of the
meaning and function of concepts within the eld.
The structure of Cealey Harrisons critical analyses
is equally applicable to her own book: tracking the
historical and theoretical transformation of sex and
gender (and the book is worth reading for this),
she nevertheless insists on the impossibility of this
very transformation and thus fails to see the radical
theoretical possibilities in Butler, especially. Cealey
Harrisons book may help keep us on our toes in the
enormous task of rethinking sex and gender, but it
fails to acknowledge the ways in which some theor-
etical work has already gone beyond sex and gender,
traditionally understood. Things aint what they used
to be.
Stella Sandford
Earth others
Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological
Crisis of Reason, Routledge, London and New York,
2002. 304 pp., 50.00 hb., 14.99 pb., 0 415 17877 0
hb., 0 415 17878 9 pb.
This is a philosophy book for our time. Val Plumwood
takes it as given that the current dynamic of global
capitalist culture is leading inexorably to extinction.
For her, this is the most powerfully threatening of the
consequences of the domination of a particular form
of rationality, and its associated dualistic oppositions:
reason versus the emotions, culture versus nature,
human versus animal, objectivity versus subjectiv-
ity, and the gendered coding of these oppositions.
The ecological crisis is, at root, a crisis of rational-
ity a masculinist instrumental form of rational-
ity, characteristically Western, which objecties and
instrumentalizes its others, whether these others are
women, colonized peoples, or non-human beings of
all kinds. This form of reason is at work in the divi-
sion of the world into subjects, worthy of respect,
and objects, t to be studied down as topics for
reductionist science, to be used and possessed. The
historical working through of the consequences of this
form of rationality has produced our contemporary
world of globalizing capitalism, with its subjection
of women, indigenous cultures and nature itself to its
relentless logic.
In its neoliberal expression the destructive power
of this economic culture is greatly enhanced by its
disembedding from earlier forms of social and politi-
cal regulation. The hopes that capitalist moderniza-
tion will correct its malign trajectory by some inner
logic of technological innovation, or that well-meaning
political reforms will x the problem, are misplaced.
They fail to grasp the full depth and scope of the crisis.
The situation requires nothing less than a wholesale
critique of the most fundamental frames of thought
and practice governing modern capitalist culture, com-
bined with a counter-hegemonic struggle to transform
radically both our relations to one another and to the
rest of nature.
Plumwoods critique draws on feminist, postcolonial
and ecological literatures, and her prime target is the
cultural form of rationalism. This is an ideology
which effects a radical separation of consciousness
from the embodiment upon which it depends, and
elevates formal, abstract reasoning as the prime source
and repository of value. Associated with masculin-
ity, objectivity and science, it opposes itself to and
devalues the female-coded subjective, emotional and
ethical dimensions of experience. In relation to nature,
scientic objectivity licences an ethically and emotion-
ally evacuated project of mastery. The politics of the
technical x, without profound transformation of this
overriding dynamic, can only take us further on the
route to catastrophe.
However, to reject rationalism is not, for Plumwood,
to reject reason, nor indeed science. A profoundly
maladapted form of reason has acquired hegemonic
status, but it can only be challenged by alternative
rationalities: ones which are self-reective, conscious
of dependence and interconnection, context-sensitive
and both receptive and attentive to the voices of
others. Substantive rationalities, including critical and
organismic forms, are endorsed, but related to the
more fundamental requirements of ecological ration-
ality, which entails the corrective capacity to ensure
viability of ecosystems, and the coordination of them
with forms of social organization.
It is in her development of positive alternatives to
the dominant cultural forms that the distinctiveless of
Plumwoods position is revealed. Her critique of the
remoteness and hyper-separation between currently
dominant elites and the consequences of their decisions
for subordinated humans and for nature yields an
imperative for a transformation of democratic insti-
tutions. Against Ulrich Beck, she argues that social
inequality and various forms of remoteness ensure that
the worst consequences of ecological degradation fall
on the poor and marginalized. The essential capacity
for corrective feedback therefore depends on the open-
ness of political deliberation to the voices from below
and from nature. Both markets and liberal-democratic
institutions are poorly adapted to hear such bad news
from below. Liberal democracy needs to be deepened
in a deliberative and participatory direction, but even
this will not be enough unless it is accompanied by a
radical programme of redistribution to eliminate class
exclusions. The drift of the argument is towards some
form of egalitarian ecological socialism.
Furthermore, incorporating a capacity for correc-
tiveness into an ecologically rational polity requires
the voice of nature itself to be heard. This in turn
implies (among other things) a different understanding
and practice of science. Plumwood draws on a range
of well-established eco-feminist and feminist epistemo-
logical critiques of reductive and mechanistic science
(Merchant, Fox Keller, Harding) to suggest that the
form of reason favoured in the dominant traditions of
epistemology renders science open to appropriation by
big capital and the statemilitary complex. An alterna-
tive practice of science, ethically committed, receptive
to and respectful of those it studies, is needed. Such a
dialogic science will overcome the dualistic separa-
tion of the conscious, rational subject from the inert,
passive object of knowledge central to both rationalist
and empiricist philosophies of science.
Equally challenging are Plumwoods commentaries
on other concepts and traditions in environmental
philosophy and politics. Her treatment of the much-
disputed concept of anthropocentrism is particu-
larly insightful. She distinguishes between a cosmic
concept, according to which avoidance of anthropo-
centrism would require an Olympian universalism and
detachment from all trace of human interest, and a
liberation concept, rooted in the experience and ideas
of other liberation movements. She accepts that the
cosmic concept is an impossibility (and would, if pos-
sible, be undesirable), but defends the idea and practice
of non-anthropocentrism in the liberation sense. Just
as feminist thought decentres a masculinist perspec-
tive on the world, and antiracist and postcolonial
thought decentre hegemonic white-imperialist modes
of appropriation, so anti-anthropocentrism in the lib-
eration sense decentres the human species, situating
it ecologically and recognizing interdependence with
earth-others. Unlike cosmic non-anthropocentrism,
this involves acknowledging the inescapably embodied
and situated character of the self, but overcomes the
dualistic separation of self and other through a recog-
nition of the non-human other as a similarly located
source of agency and a possible partner in dialogue.
This way of understanding the idea of anthropocen-
trism retains its critical power in relation to hegemonic
centrist ideology, and also makes links between the
ecological critique and the work of other liberation
movements.
So, overcoming the dominant rationality involves
both resituating humans in their ecological context
and, at the same time, opening a space for the ethical
recognition of non-human (Plumwood says more-than-
human) beings. Here she engages with other philoso-
phies that have, more or less successfully, attempted
to do this. First, the philosophies of animal rights and
liberation. She recognizes that these have extended the
circle of ethical concern beyond the boundaries of the
human species, but this is only a rst step towards a
full philosophical engagement with the ethical ques-
tions which arise once the human/animal boundary
fence is breached. Both utilitarian and rights-based
approaches are, she argues, forms of extensionism:
extending ethical concern to non-humans in so far as,
and only in so far as, they share abilities conscious-
ness, sentience, subjectivity which confer ethical
status on humans. These neo-Cartesian philosophies
represent a minimal displacement of the hegemonic
framework, assigning honorary human status to a
narrow circle of human-like animals, at the cost of
reasserting the dualist exclusion of the rest of nature
at one remove.
There is also a measured critique of deep ecology,
particularly in its transpersonal versions, accord-
ing to which personal cultural transformation leads
to a fusion of the individual self with a totalizing,
cosmic Self. Recognition of the intrinsic value of
non-human nature rests on a notion of a higher meta-
physical unity of self with nature. Plumwood is clear
that, at least in Naesss pioneering vision, there is
much in common between her proposals and those
of deep ecology. However, she differs in putting the
emphasis on recognition of the independent agency
of others, rather than on merely recognizing them as
bearers of value: recognition of agency is an opening
to the possibilities of communication and cooperation.
More fundamentally, however, the notion of unity
runs the risk of reactionary appropriations of deep
ecological ideas by authoritarian political projects and
an associated loss of recognition of the autonomy and
difference of earth-others. She proposes an ethic of
solidarity, recognizing both continuity and difference,
as preferable to one of identity.
Implicit in the argument so far
is a proposal for quite radically
alternative ethical, ontological and
epistemological groundings for our
relationship to the rest of nature.
To be rejected are not just those
exclusionary moves which conne
moral worth to the human species
or its close relatives, but also hier-
archical views of the natural order.
What Plumwood calls non-ranking,
a stance which recognizes difference
and even incommensurability among
species, is her interpretation of inter-
species egalitarianism. This avoids
the extensionist logic of applying
abstract principles indifferently across the diversity
of species, but allows for a context-sensitive acknowl-
edgement of the claims of non-human others. This
in turn implies (as does the alternative practice of
science outlined above) a stance of openness to the
independent status of non-human others as intentional
agents and possible partners in communication and
cooperation.
The criticism that this implies an unjustied anthro-
pomorphism if extended beyond a relatively limited
category of other animals is countered by advocacy of
a much more differentiated view of mind and intention-
ality than the dominant Cartesian model allows. In
the human case, we rely on bodily cues to interpret
meaning and often give them priority over verbal
evidence. Similarly, attention to the activity of other
living beings reveals the many ways they communicate
with each other and is a source for enhancing and
deepening our own understanding of their needs. Of
course, there are limits and risks of misunderstanding,
just as there are in any activity of translation, such as
that between different human cultures. But this is no
reason to abandon the effort.
This is an immensely rich and rewarding book,
full of arresting insights and engaging arguments. If
it poses at least as many questions as it answers, that
is the mark of a work that is true to its own ideals
of dialogue in ethics and science. Some readers will
not be persuaded of its underlying premiss that our
world of globalizing capitalism is on course for global
catastrophe. This is more asserted than argued for,
but that would have required another book. As far as
this reader is concerned, the case has already been
made. However, there are two issues I would like to
raise. One concerns the advocacy of a dialogic ethic
in our relation to other beings. I nd the arguments for
other kinds of mind and for openness to intentionality
entirely convincing. I also recognize that Plumwood
acknowledges and guards against a possible anthropo-
centric reading of her vision: as assigning value to
others on the basis of an attribute shared (albeit much
more widely shared) with humans. However, I am not
sure that she entirely succeeds in this. Perhaps we
have sources for a stance of respect and wonder, even
for beings living or non-living with which we
may not be able to communicate in any substantial
sense. And if the emphasis on communication has
to do with allowing the voice of non-human beings
to be heard in our democratic decision-making, then
this voice cannot be heard directly, but only by way of
receptive human mediators. This is a very important
difference between a liberation ethic for nature and the
other liberation movements. Here, perhaps, the ethic
of solidarity dominates over an ethic of democratic
inclusion.
My second worry has to do with the central role
accorded in the argument to the concept of culture.
Plumwood rightly seeks to avoid economic determin-
ism, which she (wrongly, in my opinion) attributes
to Marxism, and conceptualizations of culture are a
common way of doing this. Im reminded of Webers
classic work on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism. Weber was quite explicit about the
importance of the economic, legal and political condi-
tions for capitalism, and about his desire to avoid a
one-sided idealist account. Nevertheless, his argu-
ment gives so central a place to the religious and
ethical dimension that we are left with the impression
that he views culture as an autonomous prime mover
in historical change. Sometimes one has a similar
impression in reading Plumwoods argument. It is as if
the cultural form of rationalism were the prime mover
in the generation of our ecological crisis, with global
capitalism and its various oppressions, exclusions and
devastations mere material effects. This runs entirely
counter to her own critique of the ontological primacy
assigned to reason in the rationalist tradition. It is
unclear just what causal role is being assigned to the
cultural form of rationalism in Plumwoods argu-
ment. What sorts of institutional structures and power
relations favour one form of rationality as against
another? Where might we look for social and economic
sources of cultures of resistance and opposition? Given
the centrality of globalizing capital accumulation and
commodication to her diagnosis of our contempo-
rary crisis, perhaps the explanatory relevance of the
Marxian heritage should not be dismissed so readily.
Ted Benton
Lack without lack
Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Phil-
osophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology,
Routledge, London and New York, 2002. 336 pp.,
55.00 hb., 17.99 pb., 0 415 27693 4 hb., 0 415 27694
2 pb.
One trillion years from now, the accelerating expansion
of the universe will have plunged the cosmos into
absolute darkness. Every star in the universe will have
burnt out, leaving behind spent husks of collapsed
matter. All free matter, whether on planetary surfaces
or in interstellar space, will have decayed, terminating
any remnants of life based in protons and chemistry.
Every trace of sentience irrespective of its physical
base will have been erased. Finally, in a state called
asymptopia, the dark stellar corpses littering the
empty universe will evaporate into a brief hailstorm
of elementary particles. Atoms themselves will cease
to exist. Only the implacable expansion will continue,
pushing the dead universe deeper and deeper into an
eternal and unfathomable blackness.
The asymptopic death of the cosmos provides an
interesting benchmark in terms of which to gauge the
ambit of nihilism and the ultimate insignicance of
what we call being, for, as Lyotard once astutely put
it, it marks the death of that death which, since Hegel,
has functioned as the life of philosophical thought. The
death of thought rather than the death of thought.
For theologian Conor Cunningham, philosophical
nihilism is the logic of the something as nothing
and of the nothing as something. Unsurprisingly, the
prospect of cosmological extinction plays no role in
Cunninghams ambitious study, for asymptopic nothing-
ness gures something altogether more viscerally
upsetting for Christian theology than nothingness as
a toothless conceptual abstraction. Nevertheless, Cun-
ninghams book is compelling in its remarkable synop-
tic breadth and conceptual audacity. Its title is slightly
misleading, for this is not a philosophical genealogy
in the now-familiar NietzscheanFoucauldian sense.
Instead, Cunningham adopts an explicitly ahistorical
methodology: in his analysis, the equivocal logic of the
nothing as something and the something as nothing
is a structural invariant running through Plotinus,
Avicenna, Scotus, Ockham, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel,
Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan and Badiou. Thus,
interestingly enough, for Cunningham, atheism is a
consequence rather than a condition of nihilism. And
the logic of nihilism which Cunningham discerns in
premodern thinkers like Plotinus, Avicenna, Scotus
and Ockham is a condition, not a consequence, of
that secular atheism which has apparently (only appar-
ently) become the norm in post-Kantian philosophical
discourse.
To his credit, Cunningham never shies from engaging
with the more radical aspects of the conceptual chal-
lenge nihilism presents for theology. He tries hard to
resist the theological temptation to ascribe a merely
privative status to the nihil in nihilism:
[N]ihilism does not lack anything, or more ac-
curately, it does not lack in lacking. [N]ihilism
may lack God but it also lacks this lack of God.
If we are to speak seriously of nihilism we must,
it seems, understand nihilism precisely to be an
absence of nihilism: nihilism is not nihilistic. In-
deed, it may well be best to characterize nihilism
in plenitudinal, rather than negative, terms. If we
realize that nihilism can be understood as negative
plenitude what has been referred to throughout as
the nothing as something then we can realize that
nihilism will not fail to provide what it is usually
supposed to preclude.
But clearly, the possibility of distinguishing between
positive and negative plenitude still requires a trans-
cendent guarantor of the distinction between positive
and negative, plenitude and lack. For the enthusiastic
nihilist (by which I mean myself) will continue to
insist that the nihil in nihilism is positively insignicant
rather than reductively meaningless. If the death of God
wipes away every transcendent horizon of signicance
to which humanity could appeal as an ultimate guaran-
tor of the distinction between the meaningful and the
meaningless, then nihilism as that which reveals the
insignicance of meaning cannot be condemned as a
loss of meaning. Thus, as Cunningham argues, what
theology must reinstate is a transcendent guarantor of
the signicance of meaning.
This is the point at which Cunningham delivers his
most impressive bout of argumentative subtlety. By
depriving us of the capacity to distinguish between
meaninglessness and insignicance, nihilism generates
an excessive intelligibility (Cunninghams phrase) that
renders the possibility of choosing between something
and nothing (or faith and philosophy) unintelligible,
thereby depriving us of the capacity to choose between
signicance and insignicance, belief and nihilism.
Thus, according to Cunningham, what nihilisms uni-
versal provision fails to provide is the capacity to
choose between choosing and not-choosing:
If nihilism cannot provide something then it can be
found lacking and so a space for a critique arises,
precisely because it then appears as a choice, a
possibility, an intellectual stance. Nihilism is not
a choice but all choices. It endeavours to be so in
an attempt to avoid lack. It must be understood
that for nihilism it is nothing to provide something,
just as being is nothing, or it is nothing to be.
How then are we to critique nihilism? The answer
may lie in rendering nihilism possible, viz., after all
a choice, rather than all choices. In being a choice
(the etymology of heresy stems from the word for
choice, hairesis), then it will be a reality. In being
a reality it will be but a reactive discourse which
is better referred to as sin.
So for Cunningham the situation is as follows: since
theology is obliged to acknowledge the full force of
philosophical nihilism on pain of dogmatism, the
most it can accomplish is to render the possibil-
ity of not choosing nihilism intelligible again. The
nihilistic equivalence of all choice can be outanked
by showing that the difference between choosing and
not-choosing harbours a signicance irreducible to
the excessive intelligibility of the universal provision
whereby meaning is rendered insignicant. In other
words, the decision to choose (the nihilist heresy) must
be shown to presuppose the irreducible signicance
of the difference between choosing and not choosing.
Thus, by way of contrast to nihilisms meonto-
logical (in)-difference wherein nothing remains
indistinguishable from something and transcendence
and immanence are perpetually collapsing into one
another, Cunningham strives to articulate a radical
theological difference between immanence and trans-
cendence. Theology becomes possible again on the
basis of a transcendent analogical difference between
immanence and transcendence: For only through
the mediation of immanence by transcendence can
the immanent be. This mediating transcendence is
the irreducibly signicant difference between nihil-
ist insignicance (the immanent indifference between
choosing and not choosing) and theological meaning-
fulness (the transcendent difference between choosing
and not choosing).
The trouble with this ingenious move is that it
involves an appeal to transcendence that can only strike
the philosopher as exorbitantly dogmatic. According to
Cunningham, it is Christian faith that harbours the
irreducible guarantor of signicance. Moreover, this
irreducible signicance which is supposed to under-
write meaning remains rooted in the kind of equally
dogmatic phenomenological empiricism for which
gross molar unities remain the ultimate, non-decom-
posable units of meaning. As ever, phenomenology
is the handmaid of theology. Thus, for Cunningham,
the meaningfulness guaranteed by transcendence is
invariably the meaning of this tree, this ower, this
human being. And the analogical guarantor for the
signicance of the meaning of this ower, tree, or
human being is its innite eidos in the divine mind.
Accordingly, Cunningham acknowledges that for theo-
logy there is a sense in which only God sees, knows,
does, and we, by way of analogous participation,
receive the gifts of knowing in part. But in the absence
of any independent, which is to say non-theological,
access to God, Cunningham might as well say that
only we see, know or do, and God is merely a tran-
scendent analogue of our partial knowing.
Cunninghams analogical isomorphy between
divine eidos and nite phenomenon turns the most
wearyingly familiar furnishings of everyday phenom-
enological experience into irreducible ontological abso-
lutes. The notion that phenom-enology may not provide
the onto-logical measure of all things, that there
may be more things in heaven
and earth than are accessible to
human phenomenology, is not
even entertained. Christianitys
lasc-ivious appetite for mundan-
ity, which is merely the obverse
of its contempt for philosophical
ascetic-ism, has never been more
trans-parent than it is here. When
coupled with Cunninghams facet-
ious jabs at the nihilism of other-
worldly ascetism, this theological
lubriciousness reminds us of just
how debauched Christian spiritu-
ality becomes when it decides to
wallow in worldliness.
Nevertheless, even if Cunninghams attempt to
reinstate a transcendent guarantor for the signicance
of the difference between somethingness and nothing-
ness remains unconvincing, this adventurous book does
perform one indispensable service for the philosophical
debate about nihilism. Cunningham has quite correctly
seen that this is a debate about the ontological status of
meaning. More precisely, it is a debate about whether
there is some ultimate, transcendent guarantor under-
writing the signicance of meaning. Because it anchors
the debate about nihilism so rmly in this question,
and insists that any appeal to the transcendent or
irreducible signicance of meaning must ultimately
be theological, Cunninghams stance allows us to see
the extent to which all those putatively secular phil-
osophies that continue to insist on the irreducibility or
givenness of meaning remain in thrall to the prejudices
of theology. By insisting that the alternative must
be that between the radical difference of theological
signicance or the radical indifference of nihilist insig-
nicance, Cunningham has helped narrow the middle
ground of philosophical compromise hitherto occupied
by phenomenologists, hermeneuticists and other lay
theologians. All that remains now is for we nihilists
to narrow it still further by carrying out a denitive
assault on the signicance of meaning.
From the perspective of a truly consequent nihilism,
cosmic asymptopia illustrates the equivocity of the
something as nothing and the nothing as something
at least as well as any of the philosophies of nothing
analysed by Cunningham. Moreover, it does so in a
way that claries the main lacuna in Cunninghams
analysis: the failure to specify the status of the equivo-
cating as. Is this Heideggers phenomenological as
of apophantic disclosure so that nothingness is mean-
ingfully disclosed as something? Which is to say,
as a phenomenon? Clearly not, for in Cunninghams
analysis it seems to function as vanishing mediator
between the nothing and the something, in a manner
exemplied by the relation between substance and
attribute in Spinoza, the relation between noumenon
and phenomenon in Kant, as well as the relation
between diffrance and presence in Derrida. Thus,
this is an anti-phenomenological as: an operator
of disappearance rather than disclosure something
Cunningham tacitly acknowledges when he contrasts
the immanent equivocity of this annihilating as with
the transcendent analogy between the Creator and his
creatures.
So would it be too extravagant to suggest that there
is no more perfect paradigm for this annihilating as
than the asymptopic cosmic zero that cancels the
very possibility of disclosure? That cosmic asymp-
topia furnishes an immanent but terminal guarantor
of ontological insignicance? That, grasped as the
proper name for the nihil in nihilism, this death of
death effects an ultimate evacuation of sense far more
vigorously than any prospect of extinction situated at
the personal, civilizational or even species level?
Ray Brassier
Strange re
Howard Caygill, Levinas and the Political, Routledge,
London and New York, 2002. x + 218 pp., 45.00 hb.,
14.99 pb., 0 415 11248 6 hb., 0 415 11249 4 pb.
Levinas and the Political can be seen as Howard
Caygills delivery of the promissory note with which
he concluded his essay on Levinas in RP 104, on the
ve decades of Levinass political writings for the
French journal Esprit: Perhaps before trying to nd
a passage between Levinass ethics and politics it is
necessary rst to recover the specic political con-
ditions to which his ethics was a response? The books
painstaking reconstruction of these conditions takes
the form of a textured cultural history of Levinass
intellectual and political milieu and a scouring, some-
times scathing, exegesis of his writings. Beginning
with readings of Levinass early Theory of Intuition
in Husserls Phenomenology and Reections on the
Philosophy of Hitlerism, moving through his major
works Totality and Innity and Otherwise Than Being,
or Beyond Essence, and ultimately targeting his late
reections on the politics of Zionism and Israeli state-
hood, Caygill traces the unfolding of Levinass thought
through his personal proximity to the fault lines of
twentieth-century political history.
Caygills reading positions Levinass early but
ultimately lifelong preoccupation with the French
Republican trinity (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity par-
ticularly his desire to think the trinity in terms of the
last of these) against the fallout of the Dreyfus Affair,
its eventual justice, and the politics of assimilation. It
places his immersion in the work of Bergson, Husserl
and the phenomenological tradition and its culmina-
tion in Heideggers ontology (the engagement with
which was also to be lifelong and equally erce)
against the rise of Hitlerism and Heideggers migra-
tion to National Socialism. It relates the building of
the foundations for Existence and Existents and its
critique of Heideggers Dasein to the experience of
exhaustion during years spent in the parenthesis of
prison camp and the memory of the Nazi horror.
The mobilizing of the full-scale critique of ontology
and the interrogation of the relationship between war
and peace, politics and ethics that emerged in inter-
twined projects of Totality and Innity and Otherwise
Than Being are read against the Manichaean Cold
War geopolitical landscape. Finally, the integration
of Levinass ethical, political and religious thought is
presented as compelled by his commitment to think
through the explosive interdependence of the holy
mission of Israel (with its enduring commitment to the
incessantly interruptive work of justice) and the State
of Israel (with the opportunities for justice as well as
the temptations of the idolatrous power of the state
presented by the achievement of nationhood).
Caygills study dispels the illusion that Levinass
ethical philosophy can be extricated from its political
and religious dimensions. Such attention not merely
to the possible implications of Levinass ethics for
contemporary political debates, but to the concrete
and complex political realities that drove, nourished,
and indeed occasionally captured his thinking and
to which his work responded not just obliquely but
directly has been conspicuously absent from recent
treatments of Levinass work. Caygills consistent atten-
tion to how the question of the political consistently
troubles Levinass thought permits the recovery of the
richness, the scope, but crucially also the volatility of
Levinass philosophy.
It is with the foreshadowing of this volatility that
the book begins. Speaking of Levinass participation
in a radio broadcast that followed the 1982 execution
by Phalangist militias of refugees in the Lebanese
camps of Sabra and Shatila, Caygill explains that it
was precisely the unexpected coolness of political
judgement that verged on the chilling, an unsenti-
mental understanding of violence and power almost
worthy of Machiavelli proffered by Levinas, a thinker
whom he had been taught to regard as the thinker of
ethical alterity and the subject of a growing body of
sentimental commentary, that gave birth to Levinas
and the Political. The pages that follow marshal the
resources necessary to judge Levinass calculated pol-
itical perspective with the adequacy, and indeed the
justice, that it demands.
The results are brought to bear in a climactic nal
chapter on Levinass efforts at negotiating the chal-
lenges posed to Israel by its very statehood. Arguing
that Levinass response to the war crime at Sabra
and Shatila has to be seen as a touchstone for his
ethical and political principles as well as his views
on Israel and the State of Israel, Caygill revisits this
fateful radio broadcast. Here Levinas found himself
face to face with the following point-blank question:
Emmanuel Levinas, you are the philosopher of the
other. Isnt history, isnt politics, the very site of
the encounter with the other, and for the Israeli,
isnt the other above all the Palestinian? Levinass
evasive response, for Caygill, opens a wound in his
whole oeuvre:
My denition of the other is completely different.
The other is the neighbour, who is not necessarily
kin, but who can be. And in that sense, if youre
for the other, youre for the neighbour. But if your
neighbour attacks another neighbour or treats him
unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on
another character, in alterity we can nd an enemy,
or at least then we are faced with the problem of
knowing who is right and who is wrong, who is just
and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong.
Rather than judge this as a one-time wavering from an
otherwise consistent and stable philosophy of ethical
alterity, of grounded commitment to thinking and
performing the responsibility for and the welcoming
of the other, Caygill offers the radical (but methodic-
ally and comprehensively substantiated) assessment
that Levinass claim is rigorously consistent with
his philosophy, which we have argued recognizes the
inevitability of war. To describe the other as enemy at
this point is thus entirely consistent with such a reading
of Levinass ethics.
While the ve chapters of Levinas and the Politi-
cal map the ambiguities and the openings to violence
at the ethical and political conjunctions of Levinass
thought, the books afterword departs from the tone
and style of the preceding pages in order to explore
an alternative way into Levinass volatility. Entitled
Strange Fire, it traces the appearance throughout
Levinass writings of the complex biblical theme of
the miraculously enduring light. It appears as the ame
of Hanukkah (the miracle of a light richer than the
energies feeding it), whose legacy, in the words of
Levinas, sustains the magnicent combatants of the
young State of Israel; the burnt offering of the Temple
and its incarnation in the embers of the book that
provoke re and light when breathed upon in the act
of reading; the sparks of enlightenment that issue
forth from the debate between individual readings
and combine into a messianic blaze brighter than the
sun that consumes history the dangerous re that
is beyond history and yet can carry identity through
it. Caygill presents a haunting evocation of this trans-
migrating ame which for Levinas links teaching
and learning, war and peace, ethics and politics; this
strange re that at the moment it seems most benign
may ignite into a terrible and uncontrollable force,
not of nature but of spirit. He concludes by hinting at
the way out of this violence that is thankfully offered
by Levinass essay The Light and the Dark, with its
embrace of a withdrawal from the blaze of glory and
its cycle of consuming, protecting and avenging re in
order to nd the glory of the presence in an ember or
a little ask of pure oil that keeps alight our failing
memory for the future.
It is almost as though the afterwords departure
(which in its style and intent provides for a recovery of
Levinass messianic light from the economy of violent
light developed in Derridas Violence and Metaphys-
ics) extends a sort of compassion to Levinass com-
plicity in the violence undertaken in the name of Israel.
Indeed the tone and topic of this remarkable ending
open onto a deeper current of Levinass thought, one
that could be said to ow beneath the apology for the
Israeli states war crimes, and the appearance of which
in his work from his Strasbourg years onward now
comes into stark relief: namely, Levinass faith in this
ineffable but inexhaustible re that traverses history
without burning.
It is perhaps only after pinpointing the violence in
Levinass thought that Caygills reading could open to
this faith that steadfastly refuses to give up its commit-
ment to this prophetic light. This ending undermines
the ease with which we might rush to condemn Levi-
nass complicities, or to convince ourselves that his
failure to rise to the responsibility for the (Palestinian)
other a responsibility which everything in his work
ought to have demanded of him somehow compro-
mises his philosophy. This failure certainly does, as
Caygill notes, open a wound in his philosophy, but it
is one that permits, maybe even invites, this afterword
to serve as healing salve: the recognition of a wound
is a step towards recovery. What emerges from the
convergence of the forces unleashed by his study upon
this nal moment is the poetic notion that it is not
some kink or aw or missing link in the architecture
of Levinass thinking, but rather Levinass faith, that
makes his philosophy vulnerable and therefore gives
it its ethical and political presence.
Perhaps this does indeed deliver Levinas to the quiet
but nevertheless incandescent glory that Caygill nds
at the close of his book. Perhaps this is what Caygill
has in mind when, in introducing Totality and Innity,
he raises the possibility of a dynamic peace that is
something other than the mere absence or indenite
deferral of war. There is certainly a measure of grace
in an ending which shows that Levinass philosophy
is not impregnable, and which suggests that this is
how, at its most visceral level, it nally succeeds in
its refusal of totality. The book is, in this sense, an
afrmation of the risks of philosophical practice. It
documents the risks embedded in Levinass political,
ethical and religious philosophy, and ventures quite a
few of its own in bringing this dimension of Levinass
work to light.
Chris Thompson
A tale of two Walters
Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde, Verso, London and
New York, 2002. 350 pp., 20.00 hb., 1 85984 612 2.
Responding to the French Lefts criticism of Euro
Disney in the early 1990s, Disneys chief executive
ofcer Michael Eisner said the intellectual, and maybe
even the Communist, when they bring their children
to Euro Disney, will have a good time. Eisners state-
ments invoke the dilemma surrounding Walt Disney
the avuncular studio head and the dream factory he
helped to build especially given the cottage industry
in books detailing Disneys fervent anti-Communist
activism and almost-as-fervent anti-Semitism. Esther
Leslies Hollywood Flatlands doesnt shy away from
the contradictions inherent in the not-so-wonderful
world of Disney; she uses them as a starting point
for a fascinating story about the relationship between
cartoons, modernist theory and mass culture. The book
is about much more than the House of Mouse, tracing
with a deft hand the aesthetic precursors of lm ani-
mation in the work of Hans Richter, Walter Ruttman
and Dziga Vertov. Hollywood Flatlands, however,
centres around Disney the animation giant and his
diminutive mouse and tells us why European intel-
lectuals, even some erstwhile Communist ones, have
been fascinated by Disney since its Steamboat Willie
beginnings.
Hollywood Flatlands follows Siegfried Kracauers
classic periodization of Disneys animation styles. In
Theory of Film, Kracauer called Disneys shift away
from the fantastic towards the naturalistic a false
devotion to the cinematic approach which blunted an
earlier fascination with drawing the impossible with
a draftsmans imagination. As Disney moved from
slapstick shorts to feature-length narratives, Kracauer
argued, the anarchism of the gag gave way to the moral
recapitulation of the fable, and Disney features inched
inexorably towards social conformism. Early Disney
cartoons personied the anarchic spirit, outing the
conventions of realism with absurd acts of transforma-
tion and physical spaces that turned the laws of physics
on their head. Animation aesthetics changed in the
1930s, however, when new multiplane camera tech-
nology enabled the creation of naturalistic scenes while
the older single-plane animation fell victim to a spatial
orthodoxy dictated by cinematic realism. The later
Disney work lavishly embraced the imitative natural-
ism afforded by colour, but in the process illustrated the
limits of bland positivism, Malevichs dead objective.
Hollywood Flatlands follows a similar critical trajec-
tory in marking the shifts in Disneys work, beginning
with the deceptively simple black-and-white animation,
moving through the pioneering use of sound and colour
and ending with Disneyland: a spiralling degradation
from atness to roundness, from fantasy to delity, and
from estrangement to a comfortable familiarity. With
sound technology cementing the cartoons emotional
impact, Disneys Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(1937) signalled the rationalization of studio animation
by training artists in the mechanics of animal motion.
This ran counter to the logic of the early Disney work,
Leslie suggests, which embodied the self-consciousness
of the work of art that conceded atness not the fakery
of depth. Clearly, Hollywood Flatlands preference for
early Disney has antecedents in Adornos preference for
Schoenberg over Stravinsky and jazz and Greenbergs
championing of abstraction over kitsch.
In Hollywood Flatlands rst chapter, the history of
the 1920s European avant-garde is told through both
the manifesto and the anecdote. Extended descriptive
accounts of a number of animated classics proceed
through breakneck sequences of clauses, hyphens and
ellipses. There is some poetry in this: at its title sug-
gests, this chapter on drawing and the avant-garde is
all about dots and dashes. In a single paragraph on
the representation of the city, for example, we move
impressively, albeit frenetically, from Dblin, Bely,
Joyce and Dos Passos, to Maholy-Nagy, Kracauer,
Benjamin, Erwin Kisch then Baudelaire: a procession
of names, linked through staccato bursts of biography,
theory and chance encounter, embodying Benjamins
famous observation that history decays into images
rather than stories. However, the reader is sometimes
left with the wish that more stories be told.
Rooting her method in analogy, Leslie rehearses
a familiar refrain, nding that animation is an
unexpected metaphor for both Hegelian idealism and
capitalist alienation: because it is about movement in
time the negation of one cell after another ani-
mation embodies the movement
of thought; because it gives life to
the inanimate, animation follows
the logic of commodity fetishism.
It seems strange that she would
chose analogy over allegory of
which Benjamin wrote so brilliantly
since her previous book, Walter
Benjamin: Overpowering Conform-
ism (Pluto 2000), is an excellent
primer on Benjamins work. More
importantly, Disney continues to
fascinate because, in addition to
innovation in animation design,
the cartoons are allegorical
engagements with mass culture and
industrialization, memory and myth.
When Leslie avoids summarizing different takes on the
phenomenology of cinematic vision and focuses instead
on the imbrication of cartoons and caricature within
intellectual histories and social movements, Hollywood
Flatlands really hits its stride. Like Disney itself, the
book is at its best when it tells a good story.
Take Sergei Eisensteins appreciation of the cel-
lular nature of animation production, which readily
illustrated his ideas on animism and montage. While
his extensive interest in drawing certainly fuelled his
appraisal, Eisenstein also voted for Three Little Pigs
as 1935s landmark lm at a cinema conference, partly
as a protest against the plodding stodginess of socialist
realism. Not surprisingly, though, Benjamin is the
other Walter invoked by Hollywood Flatlands, and it is
through the trajectory of his engagement with Disney
that Leslie recounts the tremendous popularity of the
cartoon icon in intellectual life in 1930s Germany.
Part of his larger appreciation of a commercial culture
declared off limits by the orthodoxies of art history
at the time, Benjamin defended Mickey Mouse as the
fun-loving antithesis of bourgeois rationality, with
his comic antics signalling the redemptive spirit of
destructiveness: the negativity of the off-kilter pratfall
that shatters as all absurdity does the civilized
mans tenuous hold on reason. At the same time,
Brecht complained that his contemporarys advocacy
of the inanimate amounted to mere mysticism, while
Adorno vilied the laughter of the culture industrys
audience as a parody of humanity, a position claried
in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Here, Adorno and
Horkheimer saw the comic beatings of hapless Disney
cartoon heroes as a ruse to anaesthetize mass audi-
ences to the growing authoritarian brutality of fascism,
allegories of conformity which signalled the collapse
of individual resistance to industrialized society.
Of course, as Susan Buck-Morss has noted, Ben-
jamins appraisal of Disneys progressive potential
was ambivalent. In his notes to the Work of Art
essay, Benjamin ponders the applicability of Disneys
methods for fascism, and as Hollywood Flatlands
points out, Benjamin found in Disney a therapeutic
explosion of the unconscious which acted upon the
dangers occasioned by the repressions that endan-
ger humanity and that civilization brings with itself.
For Benjamin, Mickey Mouse was the representa-
tion of the very reication that constitutes everyday
industrialized life and Disneys lms resonated with
the public because they recognized their own brutal
disempowerment at the hands of industrial capital-
ism, war and barbarism. Benjamin suggested that our
fascination with the cartoon short and the animation of
the object reverses reication and through this negation
returns the audience, innervated, back to life: Mickey
is the alpha and omega of humanity, its inanimate
opposite and the very possibility of reinvigoration.
However, Benjamin remained conicted, and Leslie
recounts the drama of revision as Benjamin drafted
supplemental, more pessimistic, takes on Disney urged
by Adornos reservations. Nevertheless, the published
version of Benjamins Work of Art essay cut refer-
ences to Disney and Mickey Mouse alongside mention
of Marxism a consequence, ironically enough, of its
commission by the Institute for Social Research, which
feared the essays uptake by its New York sponsors.
Hollywood Flatlands also accounts for the appeal
that Disney held for the Nazi culture industry. While
the Nazis claimed that Disney contributed to the
Jewish bamboozlement of the people, Snow White
was greatly to inuence German animation and Disney
shorts circulated in Germany through the early 1940s
even though the ofcial trading relationship was dis-
solved in early 1940. Indeed, Disney remained a favour-
ite amongst the Nazi higher-ups, including Goebbels
and the Fhrer himself, and a German ancestry for
Walt Disney became part of the Nazi acknowledge-
ment of the power of American commercial culture.
Leslies chapter on Leni Riefenstahl draws on Disneys
fascination with the German fairy-tale, an observation
echoed by German lm journals of the time, which
further piqued the Third Reichs interest in learn-
ing from Disney aesthetics. By focusing on Disneys
distribution efforts in the late 1930s, coupled with the
studios production of American war propaganda lms,
Hollywood Flatlands complicates the metonymic asso-
ciation between Disney and Teutonic mastery, while
acknowledging the work of Greenberg, Adorno, Susan
Sontag and others who have outlined the connections
between Nazi monumentalism, Teutonic classicism and
Disneys commercial aesthetic. It might have added
even more to the debate by addressing Walt Disneys
links with American Nazism and the myriad rumours
that he attended meetings of the American Nazi Party
with his then legal counsel Gunther R. Lessing.
Despite its avowed interest in analogy, then, Holly-
wood Flatlands ultimately refuses to freeze Disneys
animation into a series of images and analogues for
fascist barbarism, which do little to convey the tre-
mendous allegorical impetus of the animated cartoon.
One story that the book does not tell is that Disneys
virulent 1940s anti-unionism which resulted in the
venomous anti-Communism of his testimony in front
of the House Committee on Un-American Activities
occurred at the same time that his Snow White and
the Seven Dwarves was praised by Peoples World as
propagating a miniature Communist society. When
it settles down to capturing the spirit of such contra-
dictions, Hollywood Flatlands aspires to, and gains, a
welcome third dimension.
Nitin Govil
Moving on
Craig Brandist, The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy,
Culture, Politics, Pluto Press, London, 2002. 221 pp.,
45.00 hb., 15.99 pb., 0 7453 1881 8 hb., 0 7453 1810
X pb.
I hear voices in everything. If the speaker were anyone
but Bakhtin, we would probably conclude they were
delusional, but from him the utterance is a seemingly
straightforward statement of the overriding condition
of his practice. It also condenses some key features and
difculties in Bakhtins writing: the focus on speech
(for example, the early attempt to assert intonation
as the process which individuates both utterance and
speaker), the vexed relation between word and referent,
the obsession with categorizing types of discourse
and their relations an obsession accompanied by a
marked refusal to acknowledge intellectual debts and
conrm or deny authorship of disputed texts.
Craig Brandists study engages with a number of
these issues, and is a useful counter to versions of
Bakhtin as poststructuralist literary critic avant le
mot or simple student of the popular that still play
inertially in some parts of literary and cultural studies.
Bakhtin is almost always more interested in literary
transformations of the popular than the popular itself,
and, as Brandist shrewdly notes, has nothing to say
about the quintessential mass form, cinema. Likewise,
the insistent corporeality of Bakhtins rhetoric has too
often been celebrated as a theory which turns culture,
and language into particular, material, with little
critical attention to the alchemy that might be involved.
This error is especially signicant for Brandist, one of
an increasing number of critics who insist on Bakhtin
as philosopher and place neo-Kantianism at the centre
of their reading. Part of what is distinctive about the
book is the attempt to bring this Bakhtin to a wider
readership. Brandist is concerned with the dialogisms
that shaped the Circles work (in particular that of
Voloshinov) and Bakhtins later projects. Neo-Kantian-
ism was just one of the philosophical varieties that
shaped the Circle in the 1920s. Lebensphilosophie, in
particular Simmels account of the rift between life and
culture in modernity, Gestalt theory and the work of
the Munich phenomenologists, particularly Schelers
account of intersubjectivity, were also key references.
Brandist focuses on a set of contradictions which he
sees as structuring Bakhtins thought. Thus, he argues,
the encounter with Cassirer in the 1930s transformed
his thinking, which acquired a Hegelian inection,
making possible the various histories of discursive
forms (the novelistic, the carnivalesque) for which he
is best known. These histories are, however, funda-
mentally compromised by a continuing commitment
to a universal and autonomous sphere of values. But
is the picture so straightforwardly contradictory? Ken
Hirschkops reading foregrounds a historicizing dimen-
sion in Marburg neo-Kantianism, where space and
time were themselves conceived as scientic categories
which should be subject to critique, and argues that for
Bakhtin human history must always be a fundamental
explanatory category once objects are dissolved into
processes. Further, history is never a simple historicist
registration of change, but is critically conceived in
terms of its orientation to the future. Such a reading
seems to make better sense of Bakhtins many histories
of cultural forms, where valorized categories both
constitute actually existing traditions of discourse and
embody future possibilities.
The similarities in many of the traditions that
Bakhtin metabolizes might also repay closer scru-
tiny. Brandist intimates Bakhtins connection with
Kulturkritik, here and elsewhere (RP 102), and this
might have been further developed. The account of the
carnivalesque, the Bergsonian celebration of laughter
against the mechanical, and the (ambivalent) attraction
to Lebensphilosophie all inscribe an idealized moment
of organic unity between culture and civilization and its
severing by mechanization. And while the categories
that Bakhtin values are the realization of possibilities
present in all discourse, his valorization of the literary
and his guring of the novelistic writer as historian
and philosopher armed with a distinctive knowledge
are thrown into a familiar light by such compari-
sons. Likewise, Bakhtins orientation to a transformed
future becomes more interesting when contrasted with
canonical Kulturkritik, where the future is conceived
as more of the same, or worse.
Brandist also suggests ways in which the Bakhtin
Circles programme might be revised and further
developed, and his nal chapter sketches some of the
possibilities. This short chapter is frustrating, often
reading as an outline for another book. One prospec-
tive connection Brandist suggests is with cognitive
science, in its current approach to the processes of
knowledge and meaning. In the most general terms this
argument is persuasive, but it seems odd that Brandist
does not consider the critical force that a Bakhtinian
concept of genre (however problematic) might bring to
elds (cognitive linguistics, but particularly pragmat-
ics) that routinely either deny the explanatory power of
textual form or banalize it. Unleashing Bakhtin (and
Voloshinov) into cognitive linguistics also requires
care. There is too much in Bakhtins thought that either
chimes with inadequacies in most cognitive linguistics
a neglect of the institutional or which can be
comfortingly (if wrongly) appropriated to conrm a
liberal model of dialogue.
There is a further tension in Brandists own relation
to Bakhtin. This is clearest in the dual function that
the Circle itself acquires within the book. In one mode,
Brandist is an intellectual historian and his account of
the Circle and its discursive engagements is part of a
commitment to contextualizing Bakhtins ideas. But
in another, Brandist wants to redeem Bakhtin for a
properly materialist cultural theory (the holy grail of
a Marxist theory of language takes form on more than
one occasion), despite his own sometimes seemingly
unanswerable criticisms. In this perspective, the Circle
functions as the legitimator of a Bakhtin that might
have been: a set of contingencies authorizing the sketch
of a critical future for Bakhtinian ideas. It may be that
the problem begins in the philological conditions of
the eld itself, where the difculties of dening and
accessing the archive, the complex textual histories,
and the comparative rarity of Russian language skills
among relevant reading constituencies, call for invest-
ments which then make it very hard to let go of
Bakhtin. But do we need to rely on the authority of
the conditional perfect? Is it not better to assess him
as a resource and move on?
Rachel Malik
OBITUARY
Norman O. Brown, 19132002
N
orman O. Brown was born in New Mexico in 1913 and educated at Balliol
College, Oxford, and at the University of Wisconsin. His tutor at Oxford was
Isaiah Berlin. A product of the 1930s, Brown was active in left-wing politics
for example, in the 1948 Henry Wallace presidential campaign and his work
belongs within the history of Marxist, as well as psychoanalytic, thought. During World
War II, he worked in the Ofce of Strategic Services, where his supervisor was Carl
Schorske and his colleagues included Herbert Marcuse and Franz Neumann. Marcuse
urged Brown to read Freud, leading, in 1959, to Browns most memorable work, Life
Against Death. Brown taught Classics at Wesleyan University and was a member of
the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California at Santa
Cruz. Although Life Against Death made him an icon of the New Left, he successfully
eschewed publicity, insisting to the end on his primary identity as teacher.
There is still no better introduction to Life Against Death than the one that Brown
wrote in 1959. The book was inspired, he explained, by a felt need to reappraise the
nature and destiny of man. The deep study of Freud was the natural means for this
undertaking. His motives, Brown continued, were political in the most profound sense
of the term: Inheriting from the Protestant tradition a conscience which insisted that
intellectual work should be directed toward the relief of mans estate, I, like many
of my generation, lived through the superannuation of the political categories which
informed liberal thought and action in the 1930s. Those of us who are tempera-
mentally incapable of embracing the politics of sin, cynicism and despair, he added,
were compelled to re-examine the classic assumptions about the nature of politics and
about the political character of human nature.
How did it come about, at the dawn of the 1960s, that Freud appeared as the suc-
cessor to a superannuated, but not yet surpassed, Marxist project? Life Against Death
addressed this question. Until the 1960s, as Marx had well understood, the overwhelm-
ing fact of human life had been the struggle for material existence. The afuence,
cybernation, and conquest of space that were becoming apparent signalled that this
struggle need no longer dominate. As John Maynard Keynes prophesied, even a glimpse
at solving the economic problem would provoke a society-wide nervous breakdown
or creative illness in which the ends of society would come in for re-examination.
Marxism lacked the means for this re-examination but psychoanalysis did not. However,
Freud in the 1950s was understood to be a conservative refuter of liberal and Marxist
illusions of progress and not as their successor. As Norman Podhoretz then a student
who, along with Jason Epstein, discovered and promoted the book noted, Brown
disdained the cheap relativism of Freuds early critics such as Karen Horney and Erich
Fromm and understood that the only way around a giant like Freud was through him.
Browns reading of Freud in Life Against Death had two main theses. First, Brown
offered a riddle: How can there be an animal that represses itself? Freuds texts
offered a solution. The determining element in human experience, in Browns reading,
was the fear of separation, which later takes the form of the fear of death. What we
call individuation is a defensive reaction to this primal fear and is based on hostile
trends directed against the mother. Driven by anxiety, the ego is caught up in a causa
sui project of self-creation; it is burdened with an unreal independence. The sexual
history of the ego is the evidence of this unreality. Desexualization (the transformation
of object-libido into narcissistic libido) is the primary method by which the ego is built
up.
While Browns emphasis on the infants psychical vulnerability was true to Freud,
his one-sided denigration of the ego was not. According to Brown, what psycho-
analysis considered the goals of development personal autonomy, genital sexuality,
sublimation were all forms of repression. Above all Brown criticized psychoanalysis
for endorsing dualism: the separation of the soul (or psyche) from the body. The true
aim of psychoanalysis, he argued, should be to reunite the two. This can be achieved
by returning men and women to the polymorphous perversity of early infancy, a state
that corresponds to transcendence of the self found in art and play and known to the
great Christian mystics, such as William Blake and Jakob Boehme. The key was to
give up the egos strivings for self-preservation; genital organization, Brown wrote,
is a formation of the ego not yet strong enough to die. Brown called repression the
universal neurosis of mankind, a neurosis that every individual suffered.
History, or the collective individual, he continued, went through an analogous
process of trauma, repression and the return of the repressed. History, then, had the
structure of a neurosis. In particular, Brown saw the birth of capitalism as the nucleus
of the neurosis, a critical period, somewhat akin to the stage of the Oedipus complex
in the evolution of the individual. Just as, in Freuds original formulation, the infant
moved from anality to genitality, so, Brown believed,
in the transition from medieval to modern capitalist
society, anality had been repressed, transformed
and reborn as property. Capitalism at root, Brown
argued, was socially organized anality: beneath
the pseudo-individuated genitality of early modern
society, its driving force was literally the love of shit.
The Protestants, he held, had been the rst to notice
this. Luther, in particular, regularly called attention
to the Satanic character of commerce, by which
Brown meant both its daemonic, driven character and
its excremental overtones of possession, miserliness
and control. The papacys ultimate sin, according to
Luther, was its accommodation to the world, meaning
to commerce or the Devil. Once again, as for the
individual, Brown viewed death as the portal to life.
Max Weber, he argued, in linking Protestantism to
capitalism, emphasized the calling but left out the
crucixion. According to Brown, the Protestant sur-
renders himself to his calling as Christ surrendered
himself to the cross, meaning that a free, unrepressed
merging with this world was the path to resurrection
and to the transcendence of the soul/body divide.
Life Against Death will always be associated with Herbert Marcuses Eros and
Civilization, which appeared four years earlier and which inevitably inuenced Brown.
Whereas Brown articulated his impossibly utopian vision of an unrepressed humanity
in prophetic tones, Marcuse distinguished surplus repression the repression imposed
by alienated labour and class society from necessary repression, the repression that
was inevitably involved in separation from the mother, the struggle with the instincts,
and death. Both books reected the historic possibilities of automation, but Marcuses
added a note of realism missing in Browns. Furthermore, in the ecumenical 1960s,
the Christian substructure of Browns thought was barely noticed, although it became
even more prominent in his 1965 Loves Body. By contrast Eros and Civilization
was unremittingly secular. In one sense, however, Browns book advanced beyond
Marcuses. Whereas Marcuse still suggested that most psychic suffering originated in
social demands imposed on the individual from the outside, Brown was closer to Freud
in grasping the mind-forgd manacles rooted in the painful facts of dependence and
separation.
Although published in the 1950s, Life Against Death found its main audience among
the polycentric, globally dispersed, revolution-oriented student and youth groups known
collectively as the New Left. Just as such extremist sects of the Reformation as the
Anabaptists, Diggers and Holy Rollers sought to experience salvation on earth, so
the New Left rejected Freuds insistence that repression was inevitable. In doing so,
it served as a kind of shock troop, limning the horizon of a new society. Life Against
Death spoke to its key preoccupations: the belief that the socio-political world was
intrinsically mad, the rejection of the nuclear family, the desire to transcend distinc-
tions and boundaries, to bring everything and everyone together, the rejection of
sublimation and the achievement ethic in favour of authenticity, expressive freedom and
play. Like Eros and Civilization it rested its claims on the egos original, inseparable
connection with the external world. Giving voice to the communal ethos of the time, it
provided an underpinning to the New Lefts critique of instrumental reason, its desire
for a new connectedness with nature, and its attempt to liberate sexuality from its
genital, heterosexual limits; indeed, to eroticize the entire body and the world.
What, nally, can we say about a work whose tone and vision seem almost innitely
alien to our own post-utopian times? Browns perception of the liberating potential of
the modern economy was not wrong, but it required cultural and political transforma-
tions that necessarily occurred only in partial and limited ways. If Brown missed the
fact that the fantastic power of the modern economy can be and has been harnessed
for life, he illuminated its dark and daemonic underside in ways that we have still not
fathomed. It is also worth remembering that the dreams that arise in great periods of
social upheaval do not disappear for ever. Rather, they go underground, as the 1960s
went underground and were reborn in the womens movement, in the upheavals of
1989, and in the anti-globalization struggles of today. Memorializing Browns death is
one way to encourage what he believed in above all: rebirth.
Eli Zaretsky
Closing time
To gain entry into Norman O. Browns seminar on Finnegans Wake, undergraduates
were handed a randomly chosen passage from the novel and asked to free associate
to it for two hours. Free associate? Perhaps I was the only one who understood the
assignment that way, and turned in a spiralling rhizome of questions and sentence
fragments rather than a coherent essay. Later in the term, we students suspected that
knowledge of a foreign language (or, better, two) meant an automatic place in the class.
Teaching at a state university in northern California in the early 1970s, and a counter-
cultural one at that, Brown could not expect students to arrive with or to pursue the
elaborate classical training he had received. Many of us had not yet read Joyces
Ulysses, let alone Browns Loves Body (whose title, we learned later, had come to
Brown in a dream) or Closing Time, his study of the Wake. Some students had shown
up only because of a story circulating around campus about the last time Brown had
taught the Wake that he had been carried in inside a cofn and had sat up suddenly,
reciting paragraphs from memory. Our more Dionysian expectations ran up against
Browns pedagogical demands the importance of reading foreign languages in the
original, of studying the most difcult texts, of being familiar with modern poets, of
having an etymological dictionary always ready to hand.
The great classicist and philologue was no antiquarian. Etymologies were valued
because, as in The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words (the text of choice in the
seminar), they were the road to the unconscious. In that class I learned that the only
response to poetry was more poetry. The Wake class was also my rst exposure to
theory, to the idea that thought, like numbers, could be squared, so to speak taken
to a higher level; and that this was what made thinking worthwhile. But only with the
understanding that you then had to bring it back to matters at hand, to the present, to
what was happening. Parents attending the l975 commencement ceremony for which
we had chosen Brown as our speaker were bewildered. Why was he talking about
Portugal? What could an insurrection among Portuguese army rank and le the end
of the Salazar regime possibly have to do with their young adult childs impending
integration into the world of job applications and a career?
Radical thought transversals of the kind Brown appreciated were not looked upon
favourably at the East Coast graduate school I attended. Well, youve certainly
covered a lot of ground, was the grudging professorial response I received to my
rst presentation, on Balzac, but which had suddenly taken a lurch and veered into a
discussion of Mao Zedong. The terse evaluation, from a narratologist, was delivered in
an accent striving to sound British. (Brown, who was British, sounded like he grew up
in Ohio.) When I returned to Santa Cruz several years later, this time as a colleague,
I heard several, possibly apocryphal stories about Brown. How, while delivering a
public lecture, he had been wrestled to the ground by an agitprop Bay Area character
of the era known as The Peoples Penis in full costume. How a radical lesbian
feminist author had erected a tent on his front lawn in Pasatiempo and refused to
leave until he agreed to an interview. Actually, it was very easy to speak with Brown.
He possessed an enormous curiosity about other peoples work, their projects. In fact,
what we experienced as his generosity his willingness to read what one was writing
and ponder it was really nothing more than the effect of that far-reaching and rest-
less intellectual appetite. There were only two requirements. First, you had to rid your
writing of any gratingly academic prose; temporizing or posturing phrases like as I
will clarify later on or arguably the most rigorous would be viciously scratched out
on the returned text. And second, you had to submit to a strenuous mountain walk to
pursue your discussion.
A small, compact man of regular, moderate habits, Brown was in good physical
condition well into his eighties. Younger, more dissolute friends and colleagues had
a hard time keeping up with him in the forest. But he had no shortage of fellow
walkers anthropologists, philosophers, poets, political theorists, historians mostly,
I think, because you could count on a better response to your work than you could
hope to receive from your own cohort of disciplinary specialists. Nobby, as he was
called, knew the forest trails very well. He used the rhythms of the walk dramati-
cally: waving his walking stick for punctuation, abruptly stopping short, sometimes
hitting you squarely on the back between the shoulder blades Youve got it! He
delighted in those moments when the conversation mimicked the landscape; when,
suspended between the vectors of poetry and theory, you looked down and found
yourself negotiating a treacherous passage across a fallen redwood over a chasm. Or
when revelation came in the form of an unexpected juxtaposition of texts and the rare
mushroom he had missed the week before. But the walks had a narrative logic as well.
They began with the estranging effect of having your own work refracted through
whatever else Brown was reading at the time: Hesiod, Ivan Illich, a book on Shiite
mysticism. By the return stretch, though, something like the proper ratio of Freud
to Marx underlying your project had been ascertained. Looking back, I think it was
mostly that: not enough Marx in some cases, not enough Freud in others. Go back to
Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In the last walks we took it seemed that a heavier dose
of Freud was always the answer.
Browns Freudo-Marxian theory of the l970s coincided with the most sustained
critique in American history of what we used to call the militaryindustrial complex.
That moment has now passed in more ways than one. The names of Brown and his
fellow travellers Laing, the Black Mountain poets, Fromm, Merce Cunningham,
Illich, Octavio Paz, Marcuse, John Cage, Denise Levertov seemed to disappear quite
suddenly in the late l970s, under waves of translations from the French. And within
the shell or cage of todays academic conventions, breeding ground for specialization
and opportunism, its not clear that the kind of intellectual courage Brown stood for
thought pushed to the borders of possibility mediated by a powerful grounding in the
materiality of the text is much valued any more. Its not clear that a gure like Brown
could exist in todays university. Brown did not live what he wrote; those who wanted
him to embody polymorphous perversity were disappointed. But it was very hard to
distinguish his thinking from his teaching. In this he exemplied a force and a moment
in American intellectual life whose distance from us now can be measured by how
little meaning the concept American intellectual life seems to have at this moment.
Kristin Ross
CONFERENCE REPORT
As if
Philosophy As Philosophy Programme of the School of Advanced Studies,
University of London, and the Centre for Theoretical Studies, University of Essex,
Senate House, University of London, 2830 November 2002
With ve plenary speakers Simon Critchley, Manuel
DeLanda, Michael Friedman, Hilary Lawson and Chris-
toph Menke and a somewhat daunting fty-four pro-
fessionals and postgraduates giving papers in parallel
sessions, Philosophy As promised a comprehensive
exploration of the nature and state of philosophy.
The ambition of this aim was tempered a little by the
specicity of the task given to the speakers: each was
asked to nish the phrase Philosophy As as the title
of their paper. This may bring to mind the competi-
tions found on the back of cereal packets (in no more
than twelve words, complete the sentence), but it
did provide a semblance of the breadth and diversity
to the proceedings.
Christoph Menke kicked off with Philosophy as
Deconstruction: Is it Possible? This took the form of a
reading of Derridas 1990 Force of Law essay, making
a rather general case for the work of deconstruction in
relation to philosophical questioning, conceived here
in Aristotelian terms as that which occurs between
wonder and insight. The practical faith needed
simultaneously to relinquish and to hold onto the belief
in the possibility of justice, and its relationship to the
problem of sovereignty, was read as a transformed type
of mysticism which puts Derridas position intrigu-
ingly close to Walter Benjamins. However, persuasive
as Menke was, this point was somewhat lost on an
audience that forced him to defend deconstruction in
terms so general as to be almost meaningless, as if it
were still some passing theoretical fad. This hinted at
the absence of anything like a common ground at this
gathering of diverse thinkers.
Whilst the titles of the papers in the parallel ses-
sions ranged from the apparently self-evident (Phil-
osophy as Understanding Philosophy, Philosophy as
Critical Reection) to the wilfully quirky (Philosophy
as Parenting), others came unintentionally close to
pastiche (Philosophy as an Argumentation Technique
which Allows Us to Immunize Any Arbitrary Opinions
Being Held and to Criticize any Counter-opinions).
Unsurprisingly, many research students and academics
particularly those who still described themselves as
analytic bemoaned crises of one sort or another within
their eld. More intriguing was the opinion, voiced in
separate papers, that the way forward for analytic phil-
osophy was to turn to Hegel. This is perhaps a more
palpable progression than simply relabelling oneself as
post-analytic, as some did. The need to return to the
foundational problems of the analytic tradition as they
were determined in early twentieth-century scientic
philosophy formed the basis of Michael Friedmans
paper Scientic Philosophy and the Dynamics of
Reason. Whilst its ambitious historical sweep inevita-
bly raised more questions than it could possibly answer
about the relationship between logic and science, it
did prompt a genuine dialogue between the more
scientically literate members of the audience (Manuel
DeLanda notable among them) and the speaker, which
was something of a rarity at the conference.
However, crises within philosophical methodology
are not always so apparent, and Hilary Lawsons paper
(Philosophy as Saying the Unsayable) unwittingly
went some way to showing why. Many philosophers
like to think they work in a sort of non-denominational
space in which neither the analytic nor the continen-
tal approaches are effective on their own, and the
(real or imagined) conict between the two can be
comfortably left behind. Described optimistically as
a new diversity, this approach often veers closer to
something like a weak pluralism, where the distances
between traditions of thought are underplayed so that
philosophically useful tools can be picked up from
different places in this case, Heidegger and Witt-
genstein. In practice, this means one can approach
abstract categories (for example, the unsayable for
Hilary Lawson) or even straightforwardly proclaim
oneself a certain type of philosopher (e.g. a realist
Lawson again) whilst sidestepping many of the
difculties of their particular philosophical formation.
Lawsons ambitious and persuasive attempt to conjure
a new form of epistemological realism out of his theory
of closure (all our form-making is the result of a
closing-off of other possible combinations of forms
seeing animal shapes in the constellations of stars
being the Ur-example) seemed pretty typical in this
regard, at least as presented here.
The possibility of a more genuine move beyond
the old analytic/continental divide was provided by
Manuel DeLanda. His paper, A New Ontology for the
Physical Sciences, reiterated his ontological realism,
unashamedly indebted to the radical empiricism
of Gilles Deleuze. Here the Deleuzean nest set or
Chinese doll model of expansive consciousness pro-
vided a tidy way of avoiding the old metaphysical
leaps into abstract categories (such as species, state,
or even, more problematically, society) by analysing
the ways in which intensive differences drive corporeal
processes into the world beyond the body as tradi-
tionally perceived. As expected, the sheer breadth of
multi-disciplinary knowledge demonstrated here was
impressive philosophy of science, computer tech-
nology, evolutionary theory and quantum mechanics
came under discussion. However, the problem and
for DeLanda it is a self-avowed problem is that
this Deleuzean break from idealist, phenomenological
and analytic methodologies almost always returns
too quickly to empirical examples. This may be the
reason for its popularity and success (for example, to
architecture students interested in both theoretical and
scientic avant-gardes), but it is also a mark of failure,
of a contradictory circularity, to critical epistemolo-
gists of all persuasions.
The conference concluded with Simon Critchleys
The Intricate Evasions of As Poetry as Philosophy.
This was the rst paper to pick up on the problem
of the as itself as the common linguistic ground of
philosophy and poetry and also one of the very few
papers to deal with art in any way. Whilst as can be
understood as the carrier of metaphor in the traditional
poetical sense, for Critchley it is also the exemplary
form of what we may call a hybrid poeticalphilo-
sophical epistemology found in certain types of self-
reective literary practice (such as Wallace Stevenss
Things as they are and Poetry is the subject of the
poem, both from The Man with the Blue Guitar).
As the Romantics knew well, here lies the problem
of demarcating the apparently innite abyss of the
imagination itself, and Critchley followed Novalis and
Schlegel by delivering the rst half of his paper as a
series of fragments, irting with poetic inscrutability
in a way that could not have been better designed to
alienate half the audience. However, the critical and
mimetic potential of this Romantic approach was left
largely undeveloped, and instead poetry was left to
stand as a mark of the failure of philosophy, almost as
if this was in itself something to be celebrated rather
than mourned.
Nickolas Lambrianou
www.radicalphilosophy.com

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