UMBR(a)

a journal of the unconscious 2008

issn 1087-0830
isbn 0-9799539-0-1

EDITOR: UMBR(a) is published with the help of grants

Ryan Anthony Hatch from the following organizations and individuals at
the State University of New York at Buffalo:
ART DIRECTION & LAYOUT:
The Center for the Study
Lydia R. Kerr
of Psychoanalysis & Culture
EDITORIAL COMMITTEE: The Graduate Student Association
Joseph Aldinger Jordan Green
Kevin Arnold Ryan Anthony Hatch The Group for the Discussion of the Freudian Field
Andrew Ascherl Crystal Hickerson
Phillip Campanile Lydia R. Kerr The Department of English
Ryan Crawford Minna Niemi
Peter DeGabriele Russell Pascatore The David Gray Chair (Steve McCaffery)
Alexei Di Orio Matthew Pieknik
Sara Eddleman Sol Pelez The Eugenio Donato Chair (Rodolphe Gasch)
Stephen Elin Steven Ruszczycky
Kyle Fetter Andrew Skomra
Richard Garner Michael Stanish Editorial and subscription enquiries may be sent to :
Joel Goldbach Guy Witzel UMBR(a)
Nathan Gorelick Hiroki Yoshikuni Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis & Culture
SUNY/Buffalo, North Campus
FACULTY ADVISORS: 408 Clemens Hall
Joan Copjec Buffalo, NY 14260-4610
Tim Dean alethosphere.org
Steven Miller psychoanalysis.buffalo.edu
CONTENTS
TUCH & UTOPIAN 5
ryan anthony hatch

UTOPIA & PSYCHOSIS: 13

THE QUEST FOR THE TRANSCENDENTAL
danielle bergeron

NOWHERE, ELSE: ON UTOPIA 37

juliet ower maccannell

THE AMBIGUITY OF THE UTOPIAN GAZE 49

slavoj iek

A BLAST FROM THE FUTURE 65

[freud, lacan, marcuse, & snapping the threads of the past]
adrian johnston

INHERITANCE LAW REFORM & THEOLOGICAL ELECTION 87

joseph jenkins

RESURRECTION WITHOUT DEATH? 97

[notes on negativity & truth in luthers & badious interpretations of paul]
felix ensslin

JUSTICE & EQUALITY: A POLITICAL DILEMMA? 111

[pascal, plato, marx]
etienne balibar

REVOLUTION & REPETITION 131

kojin karatani

REVIEWS 148
TUCH & UTOPIAN
ryan anthony hatch

Unless we dene happiness in a rather sad way, namely

that it is to be like everybody else, which is what the
autonomous ego could be resolved into nobody, it has
to be said, knows what it is.

Jacques Lacan1

We maintain that the invention of psychoanalysis discovers its true specicity at

the precise point when Freud, having listened well to the appeals of his analysand,
refuses to concern himself with making her happy again, with recalibrating her
relation to reality so as to help her nally achieve her full potential. We can read
this specicity at the outset, in Freuds early Studies on Hysteria, which concludes
with these words of encouragement to the analysand: Much will be gained if we
succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.2 One
might say and this would be to say nearly the same thing that psychoanalysis
arrives at the domain proper to it (and only it) when Frued, rather than respond to
his patients demand to simply get rid of her suffering to excise, annihilate, or
at least cauterize the symptom that stands between her and the world in which

Umbr(a) 5
she recalls she once took so much satisfaction instead allies himself to her symptom, positions himself
as its oblique addressee. In so doing, Freud absents psychoanalysis once and for all from the normalizing
schema of therapy, a schema oriented toward the elimination of what is beyond the pleasure principle
today we call this orientation biopower and makes of it a practice oriented toward the subjects
construction of a knowledge about the jouissance which alone marks her singularity. The promise of
psychoanalysis, then, is neither personal happiness nor a happy return to the shared norms of the social
eld, but the articulation of a singular truth that opens up for the subject a horizon for creative action.

From the vantage point of this rough sketch, to the extent that it is true, psychoanalysis appears
to be an intrinsically anti-utopian venture. That throughout his entire corpus Lacan mentions utopia very
rarely is telling; that on those rare occasions when he does say something about it, he says very little,
is more telling still. One such occasion, however, will be particularly important to an examination of the
relationship between analysis and utopia: in his Seminar on The Purloined Letter, Lacan not only opposes
psychoanalysis to the utopian but, more dramatically, inverts the basic terms by means of which the
utopian is typically thought. This is to say that at a very basic level no matter whether or not one thinks
well of it utopia has generally been understood as an endgame, the ultimate point in a progressive
social and political teleology, the eventual resolution of the contradictions that exist between the common
weal and human happiness. In contradistinction to this, Lacan uses the word utopian to characterize the
extreme state of disrepair into which analytic practice largely fell after Freud, gesturing in particular to its
widespread mutation into a redemptive ego-psychology oriented toward the adaptation of subjects. By
simply eliminating any and all reference to the symbolic poles of intersubjectivity in order to reduce analytic
treatment to a utopian rectication of the imaginary couple, we have now arrived at a form of practice in
which, under the banner of object relations, what any man of good faith can only react to with a feeling
of abjection is consummated.3 Utopia, according to Lacan, names the abjection of psychoanalysis,
its rock bottom. What psychoanalysts had succumbed to, Lacan argues, was the mirage of the One, the
possibility of its being therapeutically restored. We know Lacans rebuttal to these vanquished analysts:
theres no such thing as a sexual relation. The One is not.

Further evidence that Freuds invention nds in utopia a conceptual enemy: Recall that, in
Civilization and its Discontents, Freud is led to deduce that in the social eld, beyond the many incidental
historical regulations standing in the way of the subjects satisfaction, a piece of unconquerable nature
may lie behind [] a piece of our own psychical constitution,4 which derails the subject from her pursuit
of happiness. This wager needs to be approached from both sides. On the one hand, it asks that we
imagine a world in which all external prohibitions have been lifted; their absence would not amount to the
nal achievement of an unimpeded path to fulsome satisfaction. On the other hand, and more importantly,
it asserts that this piece of psyche that does not budge is precisely that around which the social eld is
structured. Freud is clear about the nature of this unconquerable: it is nothing other than the jouissance
that renders the destiny of the drive an original derailment. It is not only the pressure of civilization but
something in the nature of the [sexual] function itself which denies us full satisfaction and urges us along
other paths.5 It is thus this primary intrusion of jouissance, the fact that the sole action of jouissance
is to intrude, that both prevents us from realizing happiness and presses us to wander out in search of
it. Freuds discourse too is subject to this wandering: The programme of becoming happy, which the
pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be fullled; yet we must not indeed, we cannot give up our
efforts to bring it nearer by some means or other.6 Does this complicate things for us? Does it invalidate
our claim that psychoanalysis is at odds with the utopian project? It could but only if we fail to place the
stress where it belongs in Freuds remark. If there is such a thing as genuine satisfaction, the subject will
not arrive at it progressively. Read in this way, Freuds call to wrest happiness from the doomed agenda
of becoming happy turns out to be a psychoanalytic engagement with Zenos Dichotomy Paradox (which,
youll recall, asserts the impossibility of motion from one point to another because, between any two
points, there exists an innity of other points that would rst have to be traversed). How by what other
means does psychoanalysis propose to overcome this paradox, to arrive at happiness?

Lets defer the answer to this question in order to speak more precisely about what, exactly,
constitutes utopia; until we do, we will fail to grasp the productive dimension of thinking through its
articulation with psychoanalysis. Our point of departure has, of course, been chosen for us: where else to
begin but with Sir Thomas Mores 1516 handbook, through which the name Utopia (if not the notion of
the perfect place, which of course begins with Plato) rst entered the world? At the rudimentary descriptive
level, what is most striking to the contemporary reader is the perfect mediocrity of Mores imagined State.
The degree to which Utopia fails to impress is impressive. That said, it would no doubt be wrong-headed
to place the blame for this on More. We have to also take into account the fact that the better part of what
must have been a truly novel, fantastic, and remote proposal at the time of its emergence (bear in mind,
for instance, that Mores entire public likely thought of manual labor as a bad joke) has since been realized.
The laws, mores, and ideals of Mores no-place composed of equal parts parliamentary republicanism
and proto-Jeffersonian agrarian socialism have nearly all, if not all at once, found their place in the world.
On the whole, they did not occasion the dull, sustained ecstasy promised in Mores text.

True though this may be, it probably does little more than summarize the fate of any speculative
political text; moreover, it makes room for a critique only of the content of the utopian project, leaving the
form by means of which such projects are sustained untouched. One therefore ought not to rest content
with such a generic historicist argument to account for the conceptual let down as which Utopia gures
today. We will obtain results more compelling and more faithful to the principles of psychoanalytic method
if we scrutinize the logic at work within Utopia, if we follow Freuds lead and read the utopian narrative for
its limits, impasses, and ruptures.

The New Island of Utopia, More tells us he himself hasnt been, he relates a report conveyed to him
by a new friend, Hythloday (roughly, the nonsense peddler) is a State composed of several city-states,
each one perfectly identical to every other one, each almost perfectly square in shape. Utopia is a grid;
like any geometric grid, it tends toward its complete exposure and mapping. There are therefore (ideally)

Umbr(a) 7
no folds in Utopia, nowhere to hide oneself; there is no space for the subject with whom psychoanalysis is
concerned, a subject who is partly constituted by her being hidden from herself. This is the cost happily
paid, we are led to believe, by all Utopians of a State of complete equality and the perpetual harmony
of pleasure and virtue. Because they live in the full view of all, the citizens of Utopia, More writes, are
bound to be either working at their usual trades or enjoying their leisure in a respectable way.7 Hence the
claustral order of Utopia is not maintained by way of a forced renunciation of pleasures, but rather through
a total policing of enjoyment organized around the violent injunction to enjoy usefully and in plain sight.

The pleasures of the Utopians are administered by law, as duties to be performed in very particular
ways. Nothing is left to the imagination; the content, duration, periodicity, and purpose of each and every
form of recreation is calculated in advance. It should thus come as no surprise that the one pleasure most
enthusiastically banned from the space of the State is playing at dice. This seemingly minor detail one
among a great many is in fact crucial for us. Mores text is curiously vague about exactly why dicing
has no place in Utopia. In one instance, More writes that this ruinous pastime is so beyond the superior
reason and virtue of the Utopians as to be unthinkable by them here, the throw of the die gures as a
privileged element whose foreclosure sustains the fragile integrity of the Utopian conception of pleasure.
But in another instance, More gives us the impression that the citizens of Utopia know of dice games, yet
altogether fail to grasp their appeal: If there were any pleasure in the action, wouldnt doing it over and
over again make one tired of it?8 Whether prohibited or foreclosed, dicing must never arrive on the shores
of Utopia, and for obvious reasons. In playing at dice, the subject forges a link between himself and the
odds. He stakes a bit of himself on repeated instances of pure chance, on the meaningless difference
between a win and a loss, which escapes all calculation. Such a mode of recreation seizes jouissance in
its true form and mode of action. It precipitates a short circuit between the symbolic domain of sociality
and its punctual support in the real (tuch). To win or lose at dice is to encounter the minimal difference
between eutuchia and dustuchia; this gap is, for psychoanalysis, the very site from which the signier rst
emerges as the mark of the subject.

Our partial analysis of Mores plan permits us to propose that the only difference between a
utopian State and a dystopian State is the position of the subject with respect the State; utopia and
dystopia name the same place from two different points. At best, there are three positions from which
one would be able to experience the too well-tempered and harmonious order of a State such as Mores
and thereby designate it a utopia: those of the sovereign (the king or the author), the tourist, and the reader.
The citizen of a utopia, the subject to utopia, will experience it as dystopian precisely because the States
success ultimately depends upon his elimination as a subject. In desperation, he will ask, to what end,
for whom, am I made to feel so atrociously pleasant? Were a State really to succeed in administering an
even and constant dosage of pleasure to all equally, this would be experienced by its citizens as the very
limit point of abjection; like Freud, we should heed Goethes warning and bear in mind that nothing is
harder to bear than a succession of fair days.9
 We began our consideration of Utopia
with the assertion that the State it advertises fails
to impress; it seems that our further examination
of it, rather than complicate this assertion, has
only helped to reinforce it. The time has come
to complicate our position. We owe it to Sir
Thomas More to pose a new question: To be
sure, his text contains a Statist plan supposed
to repair the disjunct between human happiness
and the common good but is his text as such
a plan? Should we reduce Utopia to the proposal
it contains? If we were to answer this question
with a yes, we would not be far off from those
clinicians who Lacan charged with the abjection
of psychoanalysis. Lets avoid such bad company
and attend to the fact that Utopia participates in the
serio ludere tradition of Lucien a form of writing
that deliberately ironizes speculative political
discourse and that achieves its comic effect to
the extent that it postures ofcious seriousness.
We should read Mores choice to transmit his
utopian vision by way of this form precisely as a
forced choice, that is, as having been chosen for
him by his subject. His text demonstrates that there
exists some tension intrinsic to utopian thinking
an intractable difference from itself that would
render its realization, as a state of things, its fatal
inversion. Mores genius resides in his capacity
to afrm the political exigencies of equality and
happiness while disclosing the sort of catastrophe
that awaits the state eager to administer such ends
at the expense of the subject.

To say that psychoanalysis is plainly

and simply anti-utopian, and to leave it at that,
is therefore to miss the point of the encounter
we wish to stage here. It is rather committed to
interrogating the ontological status and political
deployment of the utopian idea and to preserving

Umbr(a) 9
the tension inherent to the concept. What psychoanalysis does oppose, unambiguously and in advance, is
an approach to utopia that disavows this tension. Such a vulgar treatment will seek to realize the good by
rst identifying what is evil and then simply subtracting it. It will seek to enforce as universal a particular
determination of the good, itself subordinated to the evil other that supposedly precedes and constitutes
it. It will, therefore, fall prey to the kind of accid negativity intrinsic to every substantive political ethics.
(The great Laurie Anderson put it best: Paradise is exactly like where you are right now only much,
much better!) Before Freud, Engels understood that utopian socialism, insofar as its realization depends
on the subjective understanding of a particular political architect, could but be a transitional structure on
the path to real communism.10 Yet unlike Engels, who opposed to utopian socialisms subjective impasse
the real basis of science, Freudian thought, which aims to wrest the subject from both ethico-political
relativism and scientism, moves in exactly the other direction and insists that utopian thinking has not yet
been subjective enough.

What is left of utopia following its encounter with psychoanalysis? If we do in fact oppose its
vulgar realization, do we thereby add it to the growing list of ever-receding ideal ethical horizons? Certainly
not: this would be to resign the subject to capture by Zenos bad innity, an option that, as we noted
above, Freud refuses. Over and against the interminable traversal of an innity of points between what
is and what ought to be, between discontent and satisfaction psychoanalysis proposes, as an axiomatic
movement that overcomes Zenos problematic, the act of the subject, which places her in relation not to
reality, but to an irreducible encounter with the real. The true act, which for both Freud and Lacan is the
single site of ethics, gures as a rupture in the eld of the Other; hence, it is with this act that something
of utopia irrupts into being, something punctual, singular, and impervious to domestication. Or, more
precisely: the act is utopian in that there exists no place for it prior to its emergence, no place t to receive
and bear it. The act discloses and is supported by a void of being; it reveals that what is is not-all and, in
so doing, points to the openness of the world. If, as we will argue, the Freudian clinic promises something
like a eutopia, this is because it is the one space in which the subject is invited to stake herself on her
irredeemably unique capacity to act.
1
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XVII:
The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller,
trans. Russell Grigg (New York and London: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2007), 73.

2
Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, in The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter
S.E.), ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth
Press, 1953-1974), 2:305.

3
Lacan, Seminar on The Purloined Letter, in crits: The First
Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and
London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 41.

4
Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, S.E., 21:86.

5
Ibid, 105.

6
Ibid, 83.

7
Thomas More, Utopia, ed. George M. Logan and Robert
Merrihew Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), 59.

8
Ibid, 70.

9
Goethe, quoted in Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, S.E.,
21:76.

Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientic, in The

10

Marx and Engels Reader (New York and London: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1978), 693.

Umbr(a) 11
 UTOPIA & PSYCHOSIS:
THE QUEST FOR THE TRANSCENDENTAL
danielle bergeron

The true, authentic, object the one at stake when we speak of the object is
in no way graspable, transmissible, exchangeable. It is on the horizon of that
around which our fantasies revolve. And yet, it is nevertheless with this that we
must make objects which, themselves, are exchangeable.1 Lacans wording here
situates the stakes of the concept of utopia within psychoanalysis itself that of
the social receivability of a pure creation of the mind just as well as it indicates
the specic difculty encountered by the psychotic in his articulation to social life
namely, the difculty of transforming the impossible and unpresentable object
of fantasy into exchangeable objects.

UTOPIA: THE PRODUCTION OF A TRANSCENDENTAL OBJECT RELIANT

UPON CENSORED JOUISSANCE

Well before Thomas More based the concept of utopia on the Greek eu-topia,
Platos The Republic a text in which he sets forth the conditions of a just
city inhabited by happy citizens and directed by a State whose proper end is

Umbr(a) 13
not power, but rather justice2 raises the possibility that humans can go beyond the sensible world of
reality, the world of the visible and perceptible. Through thought, humans might enter into the world of
the intelligible, where the Ideas rule. The Idea gives access to something other than what is lived in the
actual and perceptible; it is linked to the minds production of a pure mental representation, from which
an ideal that effects a radical rupture with the existing system can then be elaborated. And inspired by
Plato, whose genius he revered, this is precisely what More did. With a utopian approach, he developed
his project for an ideal egalitarian society by targeting an entirely novel human ideal, deriving from a pure
mental representation, whose impressive impact upon the future of humanity can now be veried. Claude
Mazauric considers utopia to fulll a triple function:

By nourishing the dream of a better that is to say, different society, it sustains the
retrospective hope for a voluntary transformation of the real world; by describing the ideal
organization of this inaccessible world, it encourages the assumption of a critical distance
with respect to the political institutions and social inequalities within which we live; by
opposing the possibility of another life to the attitude of habituation and acceptance of
what surrounds us [ it] can become an invitation to practical contestation, or in any
case, a refusal of the hardship of living.3

Sren Kierkegaard dened transcendence as a divinity within each man, an agency that exceeds
consciousness, drives it to despair, and ravishes it, overturning Arthur Schopenhauers notion of a second
and new transcendence of man as the exceptional ideal to be attained, but with the qualication that it
is accessible only to supermen such as geniuses, saints, or philosophers.4 Having thus instituted divinity
as an agency inherent in all human beings, and an unbearable challenge for consciousness, Kierkegaard
is able to establish truth as internal to subjectivity and to link it with the passions and anxiety.5 Dened
in this way, divinity is thought of as an attempt to outline, through the signier, a pure mental object in
other words, the object a, whose specicity is to be in no way graspable and non-transmissible.6 For
Lacan, the only conceivable idea of the object [is] that of the object as cause of desire, of that which is
lacking.7 In this same line of thought, Sartre for whom it is necessary that a being make itself its own
lack sets the preconditions for the notion of the Lacanian subject that we are linking to the denition of
transcendence: an objective that comes about because of an unllable lack, constitutive of the being.8

One can thus conceive of Mores proposal for an ideal society as deriving from his own subjectivity
from the divine within him, as Kierkegaard would say and from a pure mental representation that
has acquired the characteristics of a transcendental object, because it has been polished by reason so
that it can be recognized and received by humanity. The transcendent targets an ideal larger than the self,
which goes beyond the satisfaction of the individuals needs and demands, his narcissistic ambitions,
and the sensible limits of his own body. The transcendental object projects an entirely new ideal into
humanity, created out of something unpresentable at the heart of the subject; this objects traits and forms
are shaped by thought to such a degree that men can discern within it a common interest, and use it to
mark out the path to a better humanity. It is this capacity to produce a transcendental and immaterial
object, an ideal with universal import, which makes great artists, brilliant writers, and great mathematicians
those whose acts and discoveries will be inscribed in history. The efcacy of the transcendental object
resides also in its ability to thwart resignation and mobilize the subject to think and calculate his future as
something larger than himself and outside his own sensibility the very thing that conditions and limits
his access to reality.

The idea of the quest for a space of recognition within the social link for this pure and singular
mental object, which is at the origin of the choices and actions of the human subject, is primarily indebted
to Freud. He founded the concept of drive as the beings response to an internal excitation, completely
singular and non-localizable by a third party, for which the individual has no answer and from which he
cannot ee. As the beings responses to a hallucinated real traumatizing because it disturbs the
neurophysiological equilibrium and appears as a persistent and insistent menace of death within him
the drives make far higher demands on the nervous system than external excitations, and cause it
to undertake involved and interconnected activities by which the external world is so changed as to afford
satisfaction to the internal source of stimulation.9 In his Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis
the Rat Man case history Freud masterfully demonstrates how jouissance, the hallucinated real,
controls his patients behavioral irregularities and aberrations at the point when his interpretation of the
surrounding reality was bizarrely transformed in order to temper the source of the internal excitations of
the drives. In the cure, a connection is made between the Rat Mans complex and sterile ritual organized
around the repayment of a debt for a pince-nez and the impact made by the cruel Captains narration
of the rat punishment. The excessive jouissance was attributed to the Captain, and then at last to the Rat
Mans recollection of his having been a young child without the words to express the devastating and
consuming anger that his fathers reprimand had provoked within him. During the cure, the deployment of
the fantasy of having been a little biting rat, disgusting and heinous, having wished for his fathers death,
will solve the enigma of the expression Freud saw on his face during the recounting of the rat punishment:
the horror at pleasure of his own of which he himself was unaware.10 This was an excluded jouissance
rejected in childhood, for which the Rat Man, thanks to analysis, was now going to assume his own
responsibility. In order to identify this unspeakable thing that is unpresentable on the social scene, we
will, following Willy Apollon, make use of the concept of censored jouissance.11 Launching the insistent
quest, internal and singular, for an object outside of the norm, outside of the signier and the social link,
this jouissance makes an effraction in [] the limits of pleasure and reality, and causes a dysfunction of
the being, who henceforth grapples with the second death.12

This is the same jouissance, lost because it has been censored, that Freud dened as an object
and source of the drives which are not bound to the structure of the social link. This jouissance will have
to be transformed into desire by the action of the fantasy, so that it can be translated into that phenomenal
capacity for creation which is characteristic of the speaking being in his constantly repeated attempt to
return to the lost jouissance. As indicators of the passage from the animal to the human, and promoters of

Umbr(a) 15
humanitys progress in surpassing organic limits and the reality that is supposed therein, the drives what
Lacan refers to as responses of the speaking being [parltre] to the object a, which constitutes him as that
which he is lacking are the bearers of transcendental objects that will spring from the manifestations of
desire, in spite of and through the social link.

THE INTIMATE EXPERIENCE OF THE PSYCHOTIC: THE IDENTIFICATION OF A MADDENING

CONTRADICTION IN THE SYMBOLIC

The psychoanalyst who works with the psychotic has, on more than one occasion, met with his sharp
critiques of our social systems, and been interrogated about the pitfalls of our social organizations, their
injustices, and their failings. He has been surprised by the scope of the psychotics critique and enterprise,
which aims to correct not only the functional defects of his own socio-culture, but also extends so far as
to seek to repair humanity, if not the entire universe. The application of his theory, which was conceived
and elaborated in his mind, often from his earliest childhood, would give rise to a new humanity, one
that is free from the defect that has been heretofore unstoppable, and which has led to its present state
of decline. Having thus targeted what is considered to be an originary anomaly those faults that are
identied as being fatal from his own subjective experience, whether it be opulence, passion, the society
of consumption, prostitution, cowardice, class inequalities, even euroterrorism or a telepathic virus the
psychotic will devise a theory in order to denitively curb it, and therefore make possible a new humanity
which would not be hindered by any default: an ideal or perfect humanity. Does this make the psychotic
a utopist?

Let us push a little further before reecting upon this. The psychotic denounces the contradiction
between, on the one hand, the functioning of the human, and, on the other, the structure of the social link.
For the human, libido the work of jouissance develops thoughts that guide his reason and lead him
to base his ethic on fundamental objects. In the social, however, everything is centered around relations
of force between individuals, whether they are determined by the economical, in the context of resource
utilization; by the political, where reason rules at its most powerful; by the juridical, where laws imposed by
the dominant prevail; or even by the affective, which produces a maddening arbitrariness in decisions. The
experience of this contradiction triggers a fundamental mistrust of all human relations in the psychotic.
We cannot count on anyone, argued a solitary young psychotic in order to justify and continue his
seclusion in his apartment. Power, sex, and money run the world! he added, to make sure that he had
been understood.

Psychotics contest this contradiction between the human and their societies, which are nourished
and ruled by relations of force to such an extent that some cannot enter into the social link, which in their
eyes offers nothing believable; others refuse to join the social link because of their unshakable ethical
position. Being thus folded back into their imaginary, they rene their cynical analysis of human events.
By living this antinomy as an incompatibility that threatens humanity, they assume the responsibility of
rectifying this apparently unsolvable problem through a humanistic crusade that seeks to make the social
link believable by eliminating its defect.

Because they consider narcissistic struggles to be alienating and refuse any compromise,
psychotics suffer profoundly from this contradiction and become socially and personally dysfunctional if
their solution to this antinomy proves to be irreceivable. It is at this point marginalized, disorganized,
anxiety stricken, and lost that the behaviors sustaining their quest for meaning become erratic and
they are taken for medical care, having become thoroughly distressed by the failure of their quest for
transcendence.

If, at this time, the psychotic subject is fortunate enough to be heard and guided by a psychoanalyst
who does not recoil in the face of his delusion and mission, then a future other than one of stigmatization
and exclusion from the social link will be opened up to him. Out of his discourse which, commanded
by voices, is apparently unreasonable or implausible a space of recognition will be cleared for the
mental object, which this time will be connected to the social link and to language. This is the address that
we wanted to make possible twenty-ve years ago in Qubec City, when we created the Center for the
Psychoanalytic Treatment of Young Psychotic Adults the 388 in the middle of urban political life and
the turmoil of a national capital.13 The center acts as a place where psychoanalysts work in concert with
psychotics to open up a space for the exploration of a socially receivable expression of the dissidence and
singularity founded upon the mental representation of censored jouissance.

The psychotic, we have said, encounters a major problem: even though his ethical quest is based on
a responsibility facing the human which makes this quest something transcendental its object, which
seeks to repair the defect of language by creating a new social link, cannot be described as transcendental.
Effectively, insofar as this object is outside of language it cannot be useful for humanity. Because of this,
the psychotic who has not found a pertinent social application for his delusion, a mission adapted to
language and to humanity, cannot be called a utopist. His object does not have this transcendental
quality; in most cases, when extracted from the delusion, it only functions for a single person. Such is not
the case for Mores proposal for the rational foundation of an ideal society, whose grand principles taken
up through Karl Marx, among others, by the socialists of the nineteenth century, or advantageously applied
in communitarian societies such as kibbutz have marked the history of these past two centuries.

Umbr(a) 17
MORES IDEAL SOCIETY: A NEUROTIC STRATEGY WHICH MAINTAINS THE REPRESSION OF
DESIRE

This question of transcendence in the production of the ideal society has led us to be interested in the
societal model advocated by More through an interrogation of the social link in light of Lacans propositions
about discourse, with respect to the object of desire and the position of the subject.14 A very signicant
phrase, for our purposes, closes the introduction to the second book, in which More signals the success
that crowned Utopus achievement of the gigantic work of the Island of Utopia: that of the humanization
of a population of ignorant savages into a people who are more civilized than any others. More writes:
The neighboring peoples, who at rst had laughed at the folly of the undertaking, were struck with wonder
and terror at its success.15

Here, More wisely identies what provokes resistance to change in a social group. We still see it
today: a project that goes against the discourse of the masters, which has determined the moral and cultural
guidelines of the receivable through interdictions and ideals, rst incites disqualication and mockery, only
to then be transformed into apparently inexplicable manifestations of hatred. We see here the response
to that terror, which provokes, in the neurotic individual, the lifting of the repression that is exercised upon
mental representation. This, in turn, produces a response from the anxiety-generating wandering of the
drives that have been disanchored from the social link. There is no possible escape from the unbearable
terror brought about by the return of censored jouissance when the discourse of the master is put into
peril. This is unlike fright, which is clearly dened by Freud as the state a person gets into when he has run
into danger without being prepared for it, while the danger itself can be avoided in reality.16 The profound
hatred which is in fact the hatred of the phallus that surges forth in the individual when the discourse
of the master is called into question puts the spotlight back on the social groups own unconscious scene
the scene governed by the obscene dimension of jouissance, by lack, by desire, and by the object a.
The unreason that characterizes this hatred is what directs its real address, which is none other than the
libido that supports the other jouissance in each one of the groups members.

Avoiding a useless and risky direct confrontation with feudal politics, Mores strategy was to
propose the rational foundations of a new society in a heavily politicized work of literature, whose action
is set in an imaginary no-place: the Island of Utopia. As a jurist and a great humanist who was troubled
by the indigence of the people in feudal England, and touched by the profound social inequalities and
rampant deplorable abuses that were causing misery and famine, More created a concept of the ideal
society a strange republic founded on communal living and [a] moneyless economy, where an ideal
government rules.17 In the utopist society, public happiness comes through the application of the principle
of equality among the members of that society. To achieve this, More identies the modications that must
be carried out in the functioning and ways of life of known societies: abolish individual property and social
hierarchies based on money, and eliminate all of those who live at the expense of others monks, idle
nobles, and lazy servants by distributing the workload among all; disband the army, which spills blood
for someone elses petty pride and exclude lawyers, a class of men whose trade it is to manipulate
cases and multiply quibbles; abolish luxury and its wild expenditures, combat drunkenness, places of
prostitution, debauchery, and ill-repute, and all of the seeds of crime and misery.18

On this Island of no-place, where idleness and laziness are inconceivable because each person
contributes to the collective task, a six-hour work day will sufce; with an extreme abundance of all things,
the father of the family returns from the market with everything that was asked for; the Utopians being
everywhere at home, the doors to all of the houses are opened with a simple push; the sick are protected
and the elderly who preside over the familial group are honored, just like all their ancestors, to whom they
have devoted a cult; dress is standardized and precious stones are reserved for children, who cast them
off as puerile frivolities upon growing up; with marriage being an integral part of society, the Utopians do
not marry blindly: ancs are presented to each other completely nude, so that they have a precise idea
of the body to which they are joining themselves (!), and so on. In utopist societies, observes historian Jean
Servier, just laws protect citizens from stasis, which is dened as the battle of passions and reason.19
What, then, are the foundations of this type of social link?

The discourse on social life that we have just described, and which makes it possible to apply
the notions of justice and equality among the members of this society, becomes operational through an
obligatory passage: the belief in the existence of a God-creator and in the immortality of the soul. This
conditions the practice of virtue in this country, where to hope for nothing after death is the height of
madness. In the name of morality and the hope that in the end [] madness will yield to reason, one
educates the skeptical citizens the weak link in the group to believe in the immortality of the soul
and a future life, where crime is awaited by punishment and virtue is awaited by reward.20 Without this
conviction of a life after death, they would lose all reason to submit themselves to the rules of society. Is
there, then, a price to be paid by each individual in order to prot from this ideal society, where no one
suffers from indigence and all needs are satised? What, exactly, is this price?

A VOLUPTUOUSNESS WHICH IS OPTIMAL & INTRINSICALLY WITHOUT PAIN

Two main moral principles subtend the practice of virtue: one, Stoic, exhorts man to follow the impulse of
nature, which bears within itself the voice of reason; the other, Epicurean, prescribes the optimal use of
voluptuousness as natural delight, which is equitable because it is potentially accessible to everyone,
and authorizes the voluptuousness that brings about the most intense joys and pleasures, on the condition
that it is not followed by pain.21 Here, we see, quite explicitly, how desire is marked with the stamp
of impossibility for the Utopian. He must constrain his desire to the voluptuousness under the sway of
the pleasure principle, which is to say, to those satisfactions made possible by the social link within the
framework of what is authorized or forbidden.22 It is here that we nd the price to be paid: the renunciation

Umbr(a) 19
of desire. In this society, the expression of desire is forbidden, as well as subjectivity and the passions that
it animates and with good reason: by hurling the individual into the beyond of the pleasure principle,
desire would eliminate society. Thrown, in effect, into a psychic register that is managed by the quest for
the impossible object, and confronted with an unllable lack that no voluptuousness could sooth, the
individual who is grappling with desire is introduced to the malaise, pain, and suffering of his anxiety-
inducing imposture in the beyond of the pleasure principle. Thus, he becomes not only useless for society
but also, above all, uncontrollable by any discourse.

Even if we are able to assume that More who was revolted by cruelty, violence, and injustice
elaborated the guidelines for an ideal society beginning from the transcendental within him, it nevertheless
remains the case that this society must suppress subjective desire and the quest for the transcendental
object in order to function. In Utopia, More conceives a social link with much better masters, renewed
religion, and Laws that are considerably more just, but he upholds them as the pillars of his proposal.
The utopist moves within the structure of discourse, while maintaining the discourse of the master. The
objects of consumption that are offered to the demand, in the guise of need and the right to pleasure and
maximal voluptuousness, erode the space of the mental object and its substitutes, which must be silenced
in the name of the collective good. Thus, his society remains one that is built upon a neurotic strategy:
its success depends on the repression of desire and the maintenance of censorship on pure mental
representation. Indeed, in the place of personal ethics he imposes a morality which is founded upon
virtue and in opposition to the impassioned quest for the transcendental in the subjects relation to the
object a, the emblem of the subjects lack of being [manque--tre]; More retains the image of the Father-
God as the promise of a beyond for the exaltation of the soul after death. For Freud, this mechanism
proper to religion consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world
in a delusional manner which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence.23 In large measure, the
edice of civilization postulates the non-satisfaction of powerful drives.

Under the ideal promoted by the utopist society, the discourse of the master which makes the
ersatz of extreme voluptuousness seem to sparkle is employed to give the illusion of plugging up the
gap hollowed out by the object a, just as it attempts to erase any manifestation of the subjects lack of
being. The social link in the utopist society tries to abolish the effects of the object a; it condemns desire
to serve demand.

THE PSYCHOTICS UTOPIA: CREATING A HUMANITY RULED BY A NEW SYMBOLIC ORDER

WITHOUT DEFECT

Just as the utopist, the psychotic is also concerned with the symbolic. But unlike those who, in the same
line as More, suggest changing masters and religions in order to improve them, the psychotic wants
to reconstruct everything by wiping the slate clean of masters, instituted knowledges [savoirs], and the
university and religious discourses.24 The psychotic wants to create a new language, free from the defect
introduced into it by jouissance. His solution, which suppresses lack, necessarily fails to materialize. Let
us take up the example of Mr. F.s manner of restructuring the world, in order to grasp its characteristics
with respect to the social link. When he began his treatment, this young man explained the way in which
his true identity had been communicated to him, what his raison dtre was, the essentials of his mission,
and the risks associated with its implementation through the radical social changes he had been called
upon to carry out:

I am the redeemer-Lamb, he who is going to come at the end of time to vanquish the
forces of evil. This may seem extraordinary to you, but it is the truth, and here is why. At
eight years old the voice of God interpellated me: you will be judged by your works, he
declared. At ten years old, while looking at myself in the mirror, I knew that I was the son of
God. Having become an adult, one night an angel communicated with me through dream
thoughts, and marked me. The following year, I was listening to a radio program in which
an expert in the unusual was speaking; at one point, his spirit entered into me through my
third eye; then his voice spoke to me and conrmed that I was the great monarch. Some
weeks afterwards, my future was revealed to me: when the high command of the Russian
army betrays me by revealing my secret to the world that I am the son of God I will
be immolated. Then, after a series of trials, as the head of the celestial armies, I will return
to Earth to exterminate The Beast in Man, that is to say, opulence and capitalism. At the
end of my mission, I will wed the New Jerusalem and I will give birth to a new humanity.
Afterwards, justice and peace will reign in the world.

In two different epochs, both Thomas More and Mr. F. identied more or less the same major social
defect: opulence and capitalism for the one, money and individual property for the other. Both aimed at
the same transcendental objective: to reestablish justice and social peace. To achieve this, More took the
receivable path. He published a work of ction that incited the European intelligentsia to reect upon the
failings of his society and to consider the possibility of a better world. For Mr. F, however, there is nothing
ctional in the enterprise that has become his raison dtre, his unique reality: when he outlines the mission
that was assigned to him as the redeemer-Lamb and savior of the world, he also explains how he had
to rearrange his daily life in order to concentrate on the speech he will give on the day of his immolation,
whose imminence he awaits with sentiments divided between fear and hope.

Unlike the utopist, whose project can go unrealized without his being destroyed, the psychotic
makes the realization of his enterprise into a matter of life or death; for him, it is not a matter of a stimulating
intellectual or political game. And this is the reason why it is so important to treat the psychotic through
psychoanalysis: to give him the means to survive the failure of his delusional project. Indeed, the ideas of
death that surge forth when the constraints of reality introduce missteps or delays into the execution of
the mission can very well end in a fatal suicidal act, if the mission should fail. The fact that the possibility of

Umbr(a) 21
a tragic end in reality is considered with so much more seriousness than death is not at all strange to the
psychotic, because, in believing himself to be personally responsible for the dysfunction of society, he has
often considered it. In his imaginary, this end may be the only way to guarantee the accomplishment of his
task for humanity. For example, Mr. F, who advocates a total transformation of world-wide human relations,
says that he is ready to suffer, to die, and even to be castrated in order to achieve his goal, because it is his
duty: since the New Jerusalem will be made up only of men, it will be quite necessary if he must marry
it to sacrice his masculinity and become a woman in order to repopulate the Earth! He has become
tranquilly accustomed to these initially frightening thoughts about the death of his masculinity, while the
analyst detects there a real risk of castration.

For lack of the signier of the Father to open a space for censored jouissance and temper the
exigency of the superego, the psychotic interprets his relation to the pure mental representation which
brings about an anxiety of unbearable division within him as an arbitrary exigency of jouissance which
is commanded by an intransigent master, an imaginary Other. In order to correct this defect, he wants
to radically transform the social link so that man will never again be submitted to some arbitrary power
and will no longer need a master, or religion. The new humanity for which he is responsible will rebuild a
totally new social link, one without masters, without gods, without recourse to the laws or knowledges
instituted by masters, defying all Names-of-the-Father. This is the type of humanity that Pierre, another
analysand, aspires to establish: as God of the unconscious, he says that he possesses the formula for
constructing a perfect imaginary society, animated by a force of sensibility. This society according to
him, and contrary to utopist societies actually works, and within it everyone will be free. I am the only
one capable of constructing a society that works. The strongest society I have it right here in my head,
he afrms.

The utopists ideal society, supported by neurotic strategies, establishes its basis on the repression
of originary trauma beneath the gure of the Father, exchanging the subjects desire and his imperious
quest for a pure ction the object a for the tranquility of the satisfaction of needs and maximal
pleasure. The formula for a perfect humanity that the psychotic develops in his delusion, and for which
he gives his life as collateral, would denitively eradicate the Voice of the Other the very thing in him
that imposes the mental representation as a cruel and insatiable superegoic exigency, which he lives as a
perpetual threat of death.

THE ROOTS OF THE PSYCHOTICS CONTRIBUTION TO HUMANITY: MAKING THE MENTAL

OBJECT OF THE DELUSION TRANSMISSIBLE THROUGH THE MISSION

Mr. F. awaited his immolation in vain. His wait was punctuated by critical moments wherein, discouraged
by having been abandoned by God, he made plans for suicide. This is the point at which he entered into his
psychoanalytic treatment. Having elaborated his project for a new humanity through mental representations
that he had not succeeded in making transmissible and receivable, we are able to say that, like many
other psychotics, he had just come up against a tragic impasse of meaning. Nevertheless, a number of
other people with a psychotic structure have succeeded in taking up the challenge of producing a mode
of transmissibility for the unpresentable. This production has most often found its receivability in the
dimension of the act, rather than of discourse. Such is the case with Salvador Dali, who with a denite
talent for painting, and with his wife Gala serving as his reference point in reality never stopped creating
an appropriate space for his imaginary, where the mental object insisted. In this manner, he channeled
his madness into the production of an inspired work precisely by inventing a frame for the unpresentable.
Hence the truth of his big-headed aphorism: the only difference between me and a madman is that I
am not mad.25 Despite his psychotic structure, his extravagances, and his peculiarities, Dali was never
considered an ill person who required treatment in a psychiatric hospital. His art was, on the contrary, a
source of wealth and notoriety for him, and an invaluable treasure for society that laid the groundwork of
new aesthetic criteria for modernity.

He almost always worked alone, in his head, usually walking, often whistling Bach.26 Sylvia
Nasar, here, calls to mind another gure of genius in the past century: John Nash, the mathematician
and winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for economics. Just like Dali, he leads us to press the question of
utopia even further, and to rethink the place that should be given to the psychotic when faced with the
development of humanity in this age of globalization, where the explosion of communication systems
educates us about the urgency of acting in order to avoid extinction. It is necessary, on the one hand, to
afford the psychotic the possibility of explaining his proposals rather than excluding them straightaway. On
the other hand, when he comes to the psychoanalyst it is necessary to deploy the means for helping him
rethink and reconsider what he has constructed out of his mental representations and uncompromising
social critiques, with the aim of making it transmissible and humanly useful.

We now know that Nash, the mathematical genius who invented game theory, was also aficted by
a severe schizophrenia for thirty years. How do we explain that genius and schizophrenia can be combined
in the same man? No need to seek their combination, the ordinary psychiatrist would respond in rejecting
the question, for Nash made his inspired discovery before becoming schizophrenic. He was twenty-
one years old when he produced his doctoral thesis on non-cooperative games, which revolutionized
game theory and transformed economic science, while his schizophrenia broke out when he was thirty.
Such a response would represent the presently dominant point of view in psychiatry, emphasized by the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Based on the strict observation of symptoms
collected into syndromes, this psychiatry excludes any dimension of transcendence in the human, which
is to say, the dimension that is inaccessible to observation and scientic experimentation, unpresentable
within the discourse that regulates the social link, but which is present and active in every human being,
in every epoch and in all cultures.27 It makes language into a production of the brain qua organ at a
particular moment in evolution, and comfortably passes over what the individual could have to say

Umbr(a) 23
about his innermost experience. Fortunately, Nash responded in opposition to this organicist psychiatry
which, by excluding the mind, manages to carve the development of a human beings life into slices of
heterogeneous meaning. When provoked by a former colleagues question about his irrational and illogical
belief in extraterrestrials, he solved the apparent contradiction between his brilliant work and the illness
that was disrupting his behavior by linking them together as integral parts of his most secret subjectivity:
The ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me in the same way that my mathematical ideas did.
So I took them seriously.28

For a long time, the great scholar coexisted with the schizophrenic. On the one hand, this is exactly
what the testimony of our schizophrenic analysands whose delusional elaborations began, in childhood,
to forge the reference points of meaning in their lives authorizes us to think. It is also, on the other hand,
what psychoanalysis conrms since Lacan, in that it considers psychosis to be a structure and not, as
other analytic approaches suggest, a form of maladjustment in the stages of childhood development. For
a long time, well before the noticeable beginning of his slide from eccentricity into madness at the age
of thirty, Nash was living with voices.29 And if, in retrospect, one relies upon Nasars words in her minutely
detailed biography of this exceptional man, it certainly seems that some signs of schizophrenia were
brewing in his childhood and adolescence. If, following Apollon, we dene schizophrenia as the capture
of the mind by a mental object which reason fails to nd a way of managing and transmitting, then we
see that this is what is expressed here: the combination of a brilliant, curious, investigative mind with a
penchant for encyclopedias in a child who is a dreamer, introverted, solitary, without friends, limited in his
social relations, distracted by attention disorders, and disregarding the rules of group life.

Just as in the case of Mr. F. who says the fact that God designated him as his own son has
put him to the task of saving the world ever since childhood, thereafter orienting his entire manner of
being and of entering into relations it appears that the young Nashs intellectual curiosity helped him
to understand what his mind presented as problems that needed to be resolved through managing the
censored jouissance that insisted within him, for which he had to create a space of visibility. His inner
difculty and psychic questioning were bound to cause his social link and interpersonal relations to fall
by the wayside. As with other psychotics, this quest for a mode of transmissibility for the irreceivable and
unpresentable also marked his life as a student at Princeton University. People were surprised that he was
impervious to the teachings and working methods of the prominent gures that surrounded himsuch as
Einstein and Von Neumannor that he did not become the disciple of anyone or any school of thought, or
even still that he managed to develop alone in the complex world of science, without a guide, indifferent
to ridicule and his dubious colleagues, shielded by a erce independence and colossal individuality.
They even say that Einstein once criticized him for wishing to amend relativity theory without studying
physics.30 The fact is that for the psychotic the unique truth lies in the mental representation which
touches upon his intimate confrontation with the savoir of the voices and not in established knowledge,
no matter how celebrated it may be. His only guide becomes this vital urgency to offer an entirely new
space of meaning for a jouissance which is incompatible with the signier, and which bears the inscription
of a deadly trauma.

Some recurrent aspects of Nashs biography show him to be a man who is as resistant to the
discourse of the master as to the discourse of the university, as if he had found nothing in the social link
that could regulate the psychic problem that had been monopolizing and consuming his libidinal energy
since childhood. It was only when he was thirty-one, in a letter to the algebraist Emil Artin whom he
curiously addressed as a great necromancer and numerologist that he indicated the problem and
formulated the reasons for it:

I, a while ago, was seized with the concept that numerological calculations dependent
on the decimal system might not be sufciently intrinsic also that language and alphabet
structure might contain ancient cultural stereotypes interfering with clear understands
[sic] or unbiased thinking.... I quickly wrote down a new sequence of symbols.... These
were associated with (in fact natural []) system [sic] for representing the integers via
symbols, based on the products of successive primes.31

Here, it is clear that Nashs thought had been monopolized by the identication of a defect in the very
foundations of language, and that he was engaged in a psychic work of restoring languagewith the aim
of producing a new reference system for humanity which, this time around, in the absence of contamination
by cultural stereotypes, would prove to be sufciently intrinsic and would remain unchanged and
untouched by affectivity and the response of the drive. Nash excludes cultural stereotypes from the
structure of language and the alphabet those arbitrary things that ceaselessly revert and disrupt the
unity of meaning, which are likened here to the pure mental representations that cloud understanding and
deform thought or, in other words, corrupt the symbolic and language. He does so in order to replace them
with a new sequence of symbols that are based upon the product of prime numbers, providing the solution
for correcting the defect.

That being said, it becomes obvious that Nashs true guide, his mentor, could not be one or
another prestigious scientic personality of his time, no matter how brilliant. For, on the one hand, his
knowledge came entirely from his inner world, from his ideas and mental representations, or even from
cosmic revelations. On the other hand, his challenging of the global nature of language due to a constitutive
defect, as well as the discourse which subtends the social link, would make any such afliation antonymic
insofar as he is concerned.

The identication of his enterprise in the letter to Artin to found language on new bases,
excluding the deadly drives that respond to censored jouissance also sheds light on the intimate
connections between his genius discovery of game theory and the mission undertaken in his psychosis.
In this mission, the mental representations that served as his intuition, those ideas with which he believed
himself to be able to x everything, are called cosmic revelations; the censored jouissance that circulates

Umbr(a) 25
in the unbound drives and corrupts the social link goes by the name of cultural stereotypes. Identifying
human rivalry as the defect to be corrected in the social link, he then makes the discovery of a new
language for economic exchanges that is applicable on a world scale: a revolutionary game theory which
assures that the issue is resolved when every player independently chose his best response to the other
players best strategies, making mutual gain possible, and doing away with the disastrous and deadly
weight of human rivalry.32

It is not surprising that we refer to his theory today as the Nash Equilibrium. To organize social
relations, the social link, so that there are no longer winners or losers but, rather, something for everyone
this is a world that could not be more well-balanced. In this sense, by a totally different route, it is similar
to the world on the Island of Utopia: no more cultural or affective interferences; no more submission of
the one for the pleasure and satisfaction of another; an equitable distribution of satisfaction among all.
Nashs approach is also comparable to Mores insofar as his undertaking has a collective aim and his
objective is to restore a collective good language. They are sharply distinguished from one another,
however, by the actors implicated in each project: the utopist depends upon an entire community, while
Nashs enterprise relies on a single individual. Be that as it may, it must be recognized that although More
launched a movement of social reection that has had manifest repercussions on the history of societies
after his death, the setting up of a utopist society remained but a wish for him, and nothing tangible was
realized in his lifetime. Such is not the case with Nash, who, during his lifetime, even though he was
schizophrenic, succeeded in concretely modeling a crucial aspect of the question of human rivalry in
economic competition.

Nasar rightly emphasizes the inuence that the history of Nashs hometown of Blueeld, West
Virginia had upon his career as a mathematician.33 Before his birth, Blueeld was far from a charming and
prosperous middle-class town, reveling in the respectability that it now enjoys. Instead, it had been the
theater of violent unionization negotiations, disputes, and bloody strikes during confrontations between
rich mine owners and workers; in short, it was a merciless world of racketeering where private fortunes
were built and motivated solely by individual interests.34 His ideas are the results of striking subjective
experiences of confrontation with the jouissance of the Other, prior to the use of language, to which all
children are exposed in the most profound solitude. From the content of his theory about the defect in
language as social link developed under the inuence of these ideas, we can advance the hypothesis
that the Blueeld of his childhood could have contributed to his identication of individualism, economic
competition, and human rivalry as the fundamental defects in the social link: the cultural stereotypes
at the origin of the wars and rifts within humanity. We could also say that in his theory, just like More, he
denounces the inhuman behavior of the man who, with no legitimate reason when compared to the need
for the survival of the species, is able to become brutally animal towards his fellow man, a predator who
is more ferocious than any species of ferocious beast because he is grappling with the ravages of the
jouissance introduced by the Voice.
 What has particularly interested us in Nashs experience is the following demonstration it allows us
to set up: out of the spontaneous work of elaborating the structurally selfsame delusional theory, his mission
is expressed doubly positively for humanity, in a brilliant and applicable creation that won him the Nobel
Prize; and negatively for him, through the mobilization of his mind into schizophrenic disorganization. The
publication of his game theory proved to be a positive outcome of his work of conceiving a true utopia,
an effective theory for reestablishing worldwide equilibrium by doing away with the bloody competitions
which are catastrophic for humanity. At the same time his quest for a solution to the defect in language,
which leaves this disorganizing censored jouissance in the lurch, was successful in passing sufciently
enough through the signier so as result in a transmissible act. On the other side of his mission, which
was expressed in the period of his active schizophrenia the delusional underside of the Nobel medal,
we could say Nash relied on numerology and cosmic revelations to sort out the worlds problems.
His thinking was followed by apparently incoherent actions and actings out which were detached from
common sense, incomprehensible to his scientic colleagues and those around him, but which were
perfectly straightforward and rational to him. Such was the case, for example, with his ight to Europe with
the intention of forming a world government for Peace which he, the Prince of Peace, would lead.35 He
also claimed to be a messianic gure of great but secret importance, alone capable of deciphering the
hidden meaning of things, awaiting cosmic revelations, the sole human being in the world invested with
the power to discover the magical, secret, and dangerous numbers.36 Ultimately, the magical structure of
the numbers, to which he alone would one day have access, will make possible a new language that would
allow the unpresentable which profoundly distresses human beings to pass into the social link.

Deriving, in his own words, from the same ideas and the same delusional elaboration, it is no
wonder that gures and numbers were of vital importance to him just as much in his brilliant game theory
as in the exercise of his schizophrenic mission, during which his scribblings revealed a mix of mathematics
and numerology. Even if one would like to clearly distinguish his genius from his madness, even if it would
seem to be troubling to attribute Nashs Nobel Prize to an invention based upon a delusional theory,
we must admit this evidence. There is nothing surprising here for a subject with a psychotic structure,
whose thinking is very early on put at the service of the enterprise which gives meaning to his life. This is
something that Nash, whose scientic discoveries were the result of vision[s] for which he construct[ed]
the laborious proofs long afterward, never would have denied.37

This acknowledgement of the delusion as a source of remarkable social progress drawn, here,
from the history of a well-known personality assumes an exceptional importance by restoring value and
a human dimension to all psychotics. It also provides a courageous lesson for the neurotic, who all too
often chooses to conne himself to the mediocrity of repression and compromise rather than be engaged
in and contribute to social history, spurred by that Thing in him which makes him human and singular.
This fact also permits us to rehabilitate the psychotic, to return him to the place and importance to which
he is due in society that of a potentially prodigious thinker, and a sage who is capable of shining light
upon our great social debates and acting for the good of humanity. This is realizable on the condition that

Umbr(a) 27
he has access to a psychoanalytic space when the psychotic illness is triggered by an encounter with
an insurmountable obstacle in his work of reconstructing the symbolic. This is a place wherein his ideas,
under the constraint of the desire of the analyst and the wager of speech, will nd new social access
articulated, this time, in language. Andr teaches the following to his analyst about the vital necessity
of a welcoming place for his speech, in overcoming the tragedy of his existence:

Someone who has constructed worlds in his head, which he has never been able to speak
about, does not see any way he could talk about them, because if he talks about them
to someone who is unreceptive, if he gives himself to people who do not understand, he
dies. If he does not die, it is inwardly painful. This is an extreme annoyance because, for
his whole life, he must defend himself on account of his dreams, which are not like the rest
of the worlds dreams; many forces, sentiments, impressions, reactions, perceptions, or
convictions about lifes events can produce imaginary creations in him.

The psychotic knows that a crucial truth is expressed in his theory, and the psychoanalyst must
recognize this if he wishes to guide him in the reorganization of his articulation to the social link, with the
aim of making his mental representation receivable. In the autobiography Nash composed for the Nobel
Prize ceremonies, he lends support to the position the analyst and, moreover, all other clinicians
must assume, when he recalls the important role his delusional way of thinking played in his discoveries.
He also, with a note of bitterness, indicates the risk that humanity runs by wanting too much to restrain
creative inspiration under the auspices of rationality and standardization:

So at the present time I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic
of scientists. However, this is not entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from
physical disability to good physical health. One aspect of this is that rationality of thought
imposes a limit on a persons concept of his relation to the cosmos. For example, a non-
Zoroastrian could think of Zarathustra as simply a madman who led millions of naive
followers to adopt a cult of ritual re worship. But without his madness Zarathustra
would necessarily have been only another of the millions or billions of human individuals
who have lived and then been forgotten.38

With this warning, he concludes that very few mathematicians like him, at sixty-six years old, could
continue to make progress in their research and bring forth new discoveries for science; whereas he, after
a twenty-ve-year parenthesis of partially delusional thought, has resumed his research and thinks that
he is quite able to once again bring something new to his eld.

On the basis of his experience, which he is obviously not ready to renounce, Nash here gives a
subtle warning to scientists: if you do not want your research to fade into oblivion, then do not let scientic
rationality limit and destroy the creative richness of your inner madness that bit of unruly and intractable
jouissance, we could say which ties man to the whole universe of humanity, exceeding the capacity of
his mind and the limits of his biological life.

Based on the lived experience of a devastating defect in language, a subject about which they
make no concessions, psychotics like Nash refuse the discourse of the master just as much as the
discourse of the university. Both prove to be incapable of offering a space of expression for pure mental
representations, which they diagnose as a fault immanent in language itself. Ravaged by the anxiety-
producing effect of the drives response to the censored jouissance, thoughts, ideas, and mental objects
lead them through the reparative mission upon which their survival depends: to remove the destructive
defect intrinsic to the social link by changing the very foundations of language, in order to create a new
structure for the social link and a new humanity which is freed from this deciency.

Some such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Auguste Comte, Friedrich Nietzsche, or Dali nd a

mode of transmissibility, and a way of connecting their secret thoughts to the stakes of their communitys
social link and the great questions facing humanity in their time. What they elaborated in the intimate
experience of their thought has proven, after the fact, to be useful for humanity. Others never manage
to erect, within the social discourse to which they are submitted, an anchoring point for the censored
jouissance that inhabits them; they begin to become personally and socially dysfunctional, and are tossed
as sick people into a care-giving environment. With the psychoanalyst, the work of the analytic
treatment will consist rst in retracing, through the corporeal experience, the manifestations of cuts
which are attributable to the impact of the object, unraveling its imputed relation to the imaginary Other.39
This is done in order, then, to make it possible to reappropriate the mental object as intrinsic to the subject
the authentic substrate of his cause, as Lacan would say and the support of social participation
from that humbling (but oh!, how liberating!) position that goes by the title of one among others.

UTOPIA IN THE PERVERSE STRATEGY: A SOCIAL LINK IN THE CONTINUING PROCESS OF

DECONSTRUCTION BY CENSORED JOUISSANCE

The psychotic envisages a humanity without defect, founded upon the mental object that the Voices
impose; emboldened by the savoir the Voices have deposited in him, and locked in the deepest solitude
of occupying an indisputable ethical position, he devotes himself body and soul to the realization of the
utopian enterprise to which he believes himself to have been appointed. He is submitted to the supreme
authority of the Voices and the jouissance they command, which, through the superego, has rendered all
Names-of-the-Father the foundation of the neurotics security obsolete, in addition to the exigencies
of masters, and religious or scientic knowledges. Mores ideal society proposes new reality constraints
which correct the rules and improve the masters in order to offer a supplement of satisfaction to the
citizens, which, on the one hand, guarantees the maintenance of censorship on the jouissance that is

Umbr(a) 29
bound to pure mental representation. On the other hand, the proposal makes bearable the repression of
the object of desire under the signier of the Father. We would like to briey recall here another perspective
on utopia, which makes use of the strategies that are proper to the structure of perversion. These
strategies denounce the uselessness of the paternal phallus and of the Names-of-the-Father, as well as
the arbitrariness and inconsistency of the laws and rules that found the social link across cultures and
civilizations. They give themselves the objective of establishing a new humanity and new living conditions,
not by imposing new rules for living in society, but by starting from the laws of the unconscious, where
censored jouissance is at work. The pervert likens this jouissance to Nature, of which man would be but
a moment of development.

Dadaism seems to us to be a pertinent example of this third type of utopist approach as long
as it is understood that Dada had not only a major impact upon the revolutionary turn in artistic creation
taken by the surrealism that followed in its wake, but also notable political repercussions, owing to its
wide-ranging, merciless, and uncompromising questioning thereof. As the originator of a break in the art
world, a brutal rupture with all art, all culture, and even all previous civilizations, annihilating its uses and
very foundations, by declaring a merciless war on art, as well as society, the artistic movement of Dada
contributed to the blossoming of the human mind in the twentieth century.40 Born in the midst of a world
war, an offshoot of a profound disgust for all who had participated in the ruination of society and particularly
for language, which the Dadaists denounced as an instrument of deceitful relations, Dada put all social
organizations, indeed the entirety of civilization, on trial calling into question its conventions as well as
its ideological, artistic, and political constraints, in order to radically reform them.41 Animated by a mad
desire to exit from culture and all instituted systems of value, they were called destructive iconoclasts
who denied any heritage of the past in art, whose rules had been transmitted by the Masters and their
Schools.42 The new social order they proposed exits from the logic of what is receivable in the social link
because it only recognizes one Master: the experience promoted by the unconscious, its subversive logic
and anarchical rules, in the face of conventions and ofcial discourses.

Spontaneity, unreason, chance, and jouissance become the landmarks of Dadaist humanity. A
true Trojan horse creeping into the art world, Dadaism centers artistic experience around the singularity
that marks the experience of the subject of the unconscious, whose polyvalent creativity it esteemed
the very thing which, in each individual, seeks a space of visibility and translatability for the unpresentable
object of jouissance that has been excluded from the social link.43 In so doing, the Dadaists democratized
art: insofar as everyone lives or has the right to live such subversive experiences, they are accessible
to all. Moreover, in their hope of achieving a better humanity by recognizing the creative capacity of
each human being, and not only artists, we can say that they came across a truly experimental denition
of communism: the conception of a classless society which puts the production expected from each
member into common stock. Indeed, if each element of the social group be it the child, the disabled,
the elderly, the sick, or the young adult had the opportunity to accede to the censored within him and
develop this singular and incomparable treasure of creativity into the source of his social contribution, then
any intention of mastering, pretension to leadership, or exercise of power would be rendered obscene,
obsolete, and invalid.

Furthermore, in keeping with their belief that language is deceptive, the Dadaists did not gorge
themselves on words. They created events wherein they performed acts organized into scenarios, whose
apparent insignicance, disrespect for interdictions, and mockery of ideals shocked some spectators.
Implicated despite themselves, these spectators reacted to their own inner turmoil with expressions of hate
or animosity for Dada groups, as is expressed in the following excerpt from a contemporary newspaper:

With the bad taste that characterizes them, the Dadas have this time called upon the
spirit of terror. The stage was in the cellar and all of the lights were turned off in the store;
he came up through a creaking trap door The Dadas, without ties and wearing white
gloves, paced back and forth Andr Breton bit into matches, Ribemont-Dessaignes
was constantly screaming: it is raining on a skull, Aragon meowed, Philippe Soupault
played hide-and-seek with Tzara, while Benjamin Pret and Chachourne [sic] continuously
shook hands. In the doorway, Jacques Rigaut loudly counted the visitors automobiles
and pearls.44

Obviously irritated and hostile, this is how the journalist recalled the atmosphere of a Dada event, the
varnishing of Max Ernsts collages, an event which was indisputably counter-cultural. The journalists
reaction is understood in this way: the Dadaists, relying on a philosophy of subversion, made their creative
act into the montage of a scene which offers a space of visibility to the other jouissance, severing all ties to
the social link. The lifting of the censorship on what remains irreceivable and unpresentable in the staging
of the signier that structures the social link has, thus, an effect of effraction in the spectator; this triggers
anxiety in him, which is quickly transformed into hatred for the artist who has awakened his inner demons
the working in him of a jouissance excluded from the social link.

On the one hand, because it proposes a new ideology for humanity, a new social link through art,
Dada is utopist in the same sense as More. On the other hand, the subversive character of this ideology
that of subjecting the social link to the laws of the unconscious contains the paradox that irreparably
separates it from Mores utopian project, which maintains the repression and censorship of jouissance
and its manifestations in the drives. Dada raises the psychotics critique of the social link to the power of
ten. However, the ethical responsibility it proposes is collective and not subjective; this is not a personal
mission, it is a new social project, and is unbearable as such for the majority of the population.

Umbr(a) 31
CONCLUSION: PSYCHOANALYSTS & PSYCHOTICS IN THE CITY: A UTOPIA THAT HAS BECOME
NECESSARY

The psychoanalytic perspective, says Apollon, turns upon the afrmation that the human being is always
grappling with pure mental representations, to which it responds, and in relation to which it organizes
all of its thoughts, its actions, and objectives that is, its entire personal and social existence.45 With
psychoanalysis, Freud opened up a land of welcome wherein under the inuence of the object, and the
desire of the psychoanalyst, both of which act as guides off the beaten track of consciousness and the
signier it becomes possible for the analysand to identify this mental representation and its effects of
jouissance, as well as to attribute a form to the object, starting from which he will henceforth sign his act in
humanity. The neurotic manages this through the minute shedding of identications and the interdictions
of thought and actions, as well as through the decoding in the letter of the body of experiences of
the censored, up to the limit of its originary inscription in the fantasy.

As for the psychotic who consults a psychoanalyst, even though his ethical position of responsibility
for humanity forces his quest into the register of transcendence, its object that which the delusion
promotes has thus far proven to be useless for society. The work of the analytic treatment will consist,
under the action of transference, in reconstructing the conditions of the believable; that is to say, it will
consist in revising his certainties against the benchmark of the savoir of the unconscious revealed by
the dream, until he comes to recognize the work of censored jouissance and the response of the drive
within him as no longer an evil to be eradicated, but as a simple human fact, an incompleteness inherent
in language and the social link. From this point on, it will be possible for him to reappropriate the object
commanded by the savoir of the Voices of the Other and through the assumption of the inevitable
castration of the being caught in the groundlessness of language to give a new form to the mental
object, which is the source of heretofore unseen creativity that is articulated, this time, to the recognition
of others.

It is only in the eld of utopia that the freedom of thought can be exercised, observes Lacan.46 At
the beginning of the 1980s, the opening of a center for the psychoanalytic treatment of psychotics in the
very heart of Qubec City the 388 seemed to us to be a necessary utopia, a challenge indebted to
a certain psychiatry of the day that subscribed to the physical approach of reductive psycho-pharmaco-
therapeutic treatment with disappointing results, marked by those ceaseless round-trips to the hospital
that we had learned to call the revolving door syndrome. A poet, now being treated at the 388, pokes fun
at it in this way: Doctor! Doctor! Come help me! Drill into me again where you must!

Twenty-ve years later, psychoanalysis has given the gift of freedom of thought, speech, and
action to the hundreds of psychotics who have beneted from it. Following the threat of the Centers
closure under the pretext of allocating its budget to the depressed a group deemed more protable
for society than psychotics some of these psychotics have, for seven years now, been engaged in a
struggle to assert their right to another type of treatment than the one provided in traditional institutions.
The objectives of this struggle, which they continue of their own free will, coincide with the principle
characteristics of transcendence: a desire committed to the preservation of a site that breaks with existing
systems for the good of humanity. They went to battle for themselves, of course, but also for all of the
others the youth, as they call them who have just entered into psychoanalytic treatment or will do
so in the future. They have lost their fear of living and learned to take their rightful place in society, as
one of them asserts. By letter, they implore the governmental authorities to act properly: Do not close
the 388, that gem of mental health. If you close the 388, you are going to extinguish the lighthouse on a
hostile ocean, and the boats will be able to do nothing but be shattered upon the reefs. Unfortunately,
their battle which exposes the delusional side of the discourse that contests their right to satisfactory
treatment still meets with a repression of the mentally ill in the guise of skepticism about their actions:
some circles of power within the city question their initiative, pretend that others are writing their letters,
or are dictating their actions. This burning reminder of the failure of the political to produce a just society
insults and revolts the psychotics. Short of arguments, they rebel: Damned bourgeoisie, go to hell with
your criticisms, one of them writes in the Centers journal.

It must be said that after being engaged in the arduous work of reconstructing the believable during
their analytic treatment, the psychotics suffer at the hands of the very thing that the Dadaists denounced,
and which founded their iconoclastic intervention into the eld of art: the gap between what is said and
what is done, the destructive trickery of the ofcial discourses that draws upon the structure of language.
Freed from the hold of the imaginary Other and the cruel exigencies of the superego, these citizens with
a psychotic structure now suddenly come up against a wall: they lose the sense of the believable with
respect to some of our public institutions. The outside of meaning [hors sens] and unreason that they
are now confronting head-on in the discourses and acts of public authorities are no longer born of a
production of their own mind. Instead, they derive from what they experience, tragically for some, as the
trickery of certain leaders who with their short-lived promises, their inconsistency, and the volatility of
their convictions at the whims of power deprive them of what has become absolutely vital: a believable
social link to which they can anchor the singularity of their passion for the mental object that drives
them. Despite these pitfalls, they are used to enduring setbacks and they persist, of their own accord, in
demanding an egalitarian society, one where the services that are offered to citizens are not based upon
their psychic structure or pathological symptoms. They refuse to continue embodying the rejects of the
society to which they are henceforth linked.

Translated by Michael Stanish

Umbr(a) 33
1
Jacques Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre VIII: Le Merrihew Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
transfert (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 285. 2002), 42.

2
mile Brhier, The History of Philosophy, Volume 1 (Chicago: 16
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, S.E., 18:12.
University of Chicago Press, 1963), 132.
17
More, Utopia, 106.
3
Claude Mazauric, Prface, in Thomas More, LUtopie, trans.
Victor Stouvenel (Paris: Messidor-ditions sociales, 2007), 6. 18
Ibid, 30, 82.

4
See Robert Misrahi, Lumire, commencement, libert (Paris: 19
Jean Servier, Histoire de lutopie (Paris: Gallimard, 1967),
Plon, 1969). 314.

5
See Brhier, The History of Philosophy, Volume 3. 20
More, Utopia, 96.

6
Lacan, Le transfert, 285. 21
Ibid, 69.

7
Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: The Four 22
See Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, S.E., 18.
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W.W. 23
Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, S.E., 21:84.
Norton & Co., 1998), ix.
24
All subsequent occurrences of knowledge in the present
8
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in text translate the French savoir. Trans.
Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York:
Routledge, 1969), 87. 25
Daniel Abadie, Les obsessions dguises de Salvador Dal,
in Salvador Dal: Rtrospective (Paris: Dreguer, 1979), 15.
9
Sigmund Freud, Instincts and their Vicissitudes, The
Standard Edition of the Completely Psychological Works of 26
Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind (New York: Touchstone, 2001),
Sigmund Freud (hereafter S.E.), ed. and trans. James Strachey 12.
et al. (London: Hogarth Pres, 1953-1974), 14:120.
27
Apollon, Clinical Seminar, 2007-2008, unpublished.
10
Freud, Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis, S.E.,
10:167. Emphasis in original. 28
Nasar, A Beautiful Mind, 11.

Willy Apollon, The Untreatable, in Umbr(a): A Journal of the

11 29
Ibid, 16.
Unconscious: Incurable (2006), 32.
30
Ibid, 12.
12
Ibid, 30.
31
Ibid, 19.
13
Here, the we refers to the Groupe Interdisciplinaire
Freudien de Recherches et dInterventions Cliniques et 32
Ibid, 14.
Culturelles, more widely known simply as GIFRIC, the group
with which Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron, and Lucie Cantin, 33
Ibid, 29.
psychoanalysts, created the 388. Ed.
34
Ibid, 14-15.
14
Lacan, Radiophonie, in Autres crits (Paris : Seuil, 2006),
403-447. 35
Ibid, 255.

15
Thomas More, Utopia, ed. George M. Logan and Robert 36
Ibid, 16,18.
37
Ibid, 12.

38
John Nash, Autobiography, in Les Prix Nobel/ The Nobel
Prizes 1994 (Stockholm: Imprimerie Royale, 2005), 279.

39
Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre X: Langoisse
(Paris: Seuil, 2004), 248-9.

40
Ren Huyghe and Jean Rudel, Lart et le monde modern, vol.
2, de 1920 nos jours (Paris: Larousse, 1970), 20.

41
Henri Bhar, tude sur le thtre dada et surraliste (Paris:
Gallimard, 1979), 24, 148-150, 311.

42
See Marc Le Bot, Dada et la guerre, Europe, 42:421/422
(1964: May/June), 166.

43
Ibid.

44
Gatan Picon, Journal du surralisme, 1919-1939 (Genve:
Skira, 1976), 37-39.

45
Apollon, The Untreatable, 27.

46
Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre XVI: Dun Autre
lautre (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 268.

Umbr(a) 35
NOWHERE, ELSE: ON UTOPIA
juliet ower maccannell

Then at last my soul broke forth, and wisely did she cry,
No matter where, no matter where, so long as it is out
of the world!

Baudelaire1

Utopias do not ordinarily inspire meexcept perhaps to want to break open

their articial perfection. Like any thinking person, I naturally feel an obligation to
imagine how our condition might be better than it now is, but I am unable to do
so without making an analysis of things as they are (including their unconscious
aspects). If the implicit claim of a utopia is that it offers a cure for the discontent
with civilization that Freud discovered as being endemic to it, this strikes me, at
very least, as premature, and possibly dangerously nave. Thus, I have always
preferred Rousseaus stance in the Social Contract over full-blown utopias: while
trying to frame a new relation to the law, Rousseau took men as they are and
the laws as they might be. His attack on the dream of perfectibility, which was
driving the cultural developments of his era (in the wrong direction), is still relevant
today: witness the many planned-to-be-perfect communities now dotting the
globe (such as Disneys town of Celebration, Seaside in Florida, Orange County
China).2 His complaint that we lack sufcient imagination to place ourselves in a
different situation from the one we nd ourselves in should still strike a chord
in us.

Umbr(a) 37
 Rousseaus urging us toward an other situation than the one we are in could be characterized as
utopian, even though it does not call for a complete escape from civilizationa wish that clearly underlies
some utopian impulses.3 His call is more akin to Walter Benjamins destructive character, who does not
know why but nevertheless knows that s/he must break out of the stiing situation s/he is into make a
way through.4 Into what else? remains unspecied, and necessarily so if the future is to be granted the
freedom to be dened as indeniteness, as openness to change.

EVERYWHERE: UTOPIA AT THE END OF HISTORY

Today, the sort of utopian drive I see in Rousseaus critical ctions and Benjamins destructive character
seems quaint, even antiquatedlost to the charms of the utopia that, it is claimed, has emerged at
(and as) the end of history (a utopia many of us experience as suffocating, to be sure). Neo-liberals,
neo-conservatives, the beltway Hegelians, all have represented this utopia as a post-scarcity economy
of plenty, as the end to all serious war (since conict is no longer the driving force behind history), and as
a universal, global inclusivenessan everywhere utopiain which no one need be left out or behind.
Not only are we supposedly immersed in this plenty, which has oozed out to coat the entire world like
the waste/excess on which it is based (oil), but we are also said to have at last managed to stop time at
a particularly propitious, which is to say faultless, utopian moment. It is no accident that utopia today
presents itself more directly as instituting the end of history.

The facts on the ground are not reassuring, as the horrifying and deadly wars which have emerged
from this golden age of peace make plain. The articulation of this set of utopian ideals offers, however, an
opportunity to reconsider utopia. What is its enduring appeal? Is it the appeal of destructiveness (that is,
the success of that primal hostility to civilization rst noted by Freud)? Or is it the selsh appeal to the
notion that we can nally rid ourselves of any obligation to other generations? After all, one precondition
of utopia is its timelessness, its break with any real commitment to the past or to the future. Benjamin
already perceived this in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, where he quotes Lotzes comment that
the present is remarkably free of envy toward the future.5 Our unconcern for what comes after is rooted
in our wish to believe ours is an already perfected present with no need of a future that would consist of
anything other than its own repetition. The promise of a permanent Eden or Nirvana quickly puts us in the
region of Freuds pleasure-principled death drive, aimed at eternalizing a moment that will never transform
or change; an atemporal state of being, assembled out of bits of mythic pre-history and forged into a
controlled, tightly designed post-history with no room for accident, discovery, or chance.6 A nowhereness,
then, that is everywhere; a timelessness that contains all time.

We have cause for suspicion regarding the universality of these claims, since no dreamed-of
utopia has ever failed to require crucial sacrices later considered unnecessary. Most often these go well
beyond the original sacrice of libido (Freuds conception of the problematic insertion of the natural into
the cultural); instead, they almost always take the form of a total ban on some particular element (a person
or a passion, a class or a race) which, deemed inimical to a projected harmony, must therefore be radically
excised.

By contrast, dystopias are largely constructed out of the opposite impulse towards a future they
view with deep consternation. They precipitate out a specic weakness in cultures here and now and
extrapolate this often apparently minor aw to its catastrophic logical conclusion in a proximal (and not
entirely improbable) future. Dystopias are constructed along the faultline they discover underlying a taken-
for-granted feature of current culture, a faultline that is then forced open until its extreme expression
emerges full-blown in a vile future created by this magnied aw. Dystopias are intended as a corrective
to the distortedly positive view of a cultures own present. Huxleys Brave New World, Orwells 1984,
Atwoods The Handmaids Tale, Ridley Scotts Blade Runner, and Michael Bays The Island all try to nd the
aw in their cultures pretense to perfection. For Orwell, this feature is the debasing of everyday language
in the service of power, resulting in unimaginable totalitarianism. For Atwood, it is our do-good desire (even
on the part of the best-intentioned feminism) to rationalize and regulate our disordered, conictual sexual
arrangements, resulting in a theocratic solution that assigns women specic functionalities such that
the roles of wife, mother, mistress can no longer overlap. For Blade Runner, it is the increasingly vertical
structure of our economic arrangements that progressively distance wealthy whites (in high towers or
gated communities) from their ethnic and poorer brethren (who are nonetheless the source of their wealth).
On the ground, these others tear at each other just to get by.

The Island (a minor lm, but with outstanding car-motorbike-helicopter chases) shows the
dystopian future of todays worship of wealth. Thousands of young adults work at bio-medical tasks in a
secluded research institute where they must also live in order to remain sheltered from an outside world
that has suffered global contamination. If a person is lucky enough to win the nightly lottery, however,
s/he wins a place on the Island, a paradise that miraculously escaped the contamination and is located
outside the institutes hermetic walls. The trick is that there never was any contamination; each inhabitant/
worker is unaware that s/he is the clone of a wealthy person created by the institute from the wealthy
donors DNA. The clones are born full-grown from pods where they have been implanted with articial
childhood memories and sufcient education to perform the institutes tasks. For the client, their clone is
an insurance policy: the institute will harvest the clones mature organs should the client ever suffer an
accident or a fatal disease. The problem begins when the clones start to wonder, to think for themselves,
even in very small measure. One clone tries to map the probabilities of who will win the lottery based on
the letters of their names. Another nds a ying insect, which must have come from the outside, and is
curious about how it could have survived the contamination. The desire to knowWhat if?is the one
urge the scientists have concentrated on eliminating from the clones mental apparatus.7

Classical utopias deny such incipient faults could lead to their ruination from within and gird
themselves against dangerous exposure to competing social orders (they are often sealed off spatially

Umbr(a) 39
and temporally from other communities; think, for example, of the trench that protects Mores Utopia from
other societies, or the mountains that mark the uncrossable boundary of Hiltons Shangri-La).8 It could
even be said that, as a rule, no utopia can entertain any intercourse with other communities if it hopes to
persist in its being. Witness the travails of Bill Paxtons character (Bill) in the HBO series Big Love, who
perpetually tries to immunize his personal utopia (consisting of a three-wife, three-house family faithful
to the Principle of righteous polygamy) from attacks by the radical polygamous outlaw Compound,
presided over by the totalitarian leader Roman Grant. Bill was born at the Compound, but exiled from it
as a potential troublemaker when he was a teenager. He also has to protect his utopian commune-family
from potentially damaging censure from the surrounding Mormon culture, should his lifestyle become
known (the Mormons gave up polygamy a century ago so that Utah could become a state). Bill juggles
his life by becoming a successful Salt Lake City entrepreneur, which places him in constant jeopardy of
exposure because it earns him a precarious prominence in the business community. On the other front, he
intervenes in the internal power politics of the Compound, and attempts at the same time to outmaneuver
its members by snatching protable investments from their large portfolio, thus incurring their wrath. It is
because Bill struggles on all these fronts that his utopian home front comes near to ruin.

NOWHERE

When Theres Nowhere You Have To Be, Where Do You Go?9

Can a case be made for utopia today? In its very nowhereness is there not something to be said for
the utopian urge that might still manifest itself against our own presumptive plenitude, the saturation of
satisfaction, or what I am calling the Utopia of Everywhere?10 Could a different utopian impulse and a
more fertile imagination conceive of new satisfactions and other forms of enjoyment not (death) driven by
a pleasure principle that inevitably joins the reality principle in a lethal nale?11

Despite the resistance I have to utopianism, I must admit that most famous literary and philosophical
utopias, from Platos Republic to Thomas Mores Utopia, actually can and possibly should be read
completely upside down, ironically, if only because they are composed by language (which always has a
repressed, unconscious, and therefore metaphoric side). In stating their claims, utopian works inevitably
lead us to question the situation surrounding their enunciation. Reading utopias crosswise to their self-
representation is possible and possibly necessary. And this possibility is even built into works such as
Mores, where the narrator explains that Utopia bears a name, Hythloday, whose Greek root points to
a triviality that undercuts his reports. Moreover, theoretical utopias often go so far in their proscriptions
that they edge toward self-satire: when they insist on banning, say, poets from the Republic, readers feel
compelled to question whyand they often side with the excluded, not with the utopians: with the poets;
with the lying (and hence the possibilities of metaphor and ction) that are banished from Swifts Land of
the Houyhnhnms in which no one can say the thing that is not; with the theater outlawed by Rousseaus
idyllic Geneva in his Lettre DAlembert sur les Spectacles (a Geneva whose isolation and self-satised
smugness he could hardly wait to ee as a boy).

Fictional and theoretical Utopias can be ironically reversed because they are composed of the
ambivalent form called language, language being the central formative force of civilization and thus the
ultimate source of our discontent with it. Language is also our primary, if not only, means of dealing with
that discontent. Plato, More, Swift, Rousseau (who rst made the case that perfectibility was the source
of a great human misery) wrote their utopias to maximize the potential to read them satirically while at
the same time taking them seriously.

Taking perfectibility seriously leads to nightmarish outcomes. Efforts to institute actual utopias
(and not only by the neo-cons today, but also by the myriad others who preceded them from the phalansteries
of Fourier to the often religious utopian communities of upstate New York, to Jonestown, Waco, and the
Kampuchea of the Khmer Rouge) have had decidedly mixed and often extremely negative results. When
the Khmer Rouge dreamt of extracting a truer, purer, more original, and more authentic Kampuchea out of
the Cambodia it had become under various colonialisms, they banned many things, among them those
with weak eyesight and less-than-ideal body shapes. These, along with the artists, they killed.

While the excisions that found a ctional utopia as a nowhere are intended to preserve the
communitys serene detachment, the violent cuts required to establish de facto utopias are always lethal
for some.

ANYWHERE: UTOPIA, SUBURBIA, & THE UNCONSCIOUS

The processes of the system Ucs are timeless; i.e., they are not ordered temporally,
are not altered by the passage of time; they have no reference to time at all. ...
Disregard of the characteristic of time is no doubt an essential distinction between
the activity of the Pcs. and the Ucs.

Freud12

This leads me to my longstanding criticism of the idea that we are at the end of history. This idea
has opened the door to a belief in an actually utopian world of plenty or full satisfaction,13 one that has
materially shaped and also fundamentally distorted communal life. Contemporary culture and its economy
have not failed to present themselves as global in character, as a comprehensive single system encircling
the entire world,14 a world of wealth gained peacefully, without exploitation.15 If wealth, as Freud dened
it, represents the amount of instinctual satisfaction obtainable by its means, and if civilization formerly
required that certain instinctual satisfactions be sacriced for the good of the human group, todays

Umbr(a) 41
immense accumulation of commodities (Marxs phrase) renders such sacrice unnecessaryor so the
argument goes.16 A culture of satisfaction, of jouissance aplenty (even if Lacan revealed the fakeness of
such jouissance) is the center of todays representations of the world as a utopia of timeless, universal
enjoyment. But in refusing to acknowledge any possible other side, its global character must be called into
question. What is the drive to install ours as a one-dimensional universe free of the internal and external
contradictions that might propel it in unpredictable ways?

The reader may by now have seen that I have been building a picture of this everywhere/anywhere
utopia on the model of the Freudian unconscious: timeless, without contradiction, inalterable. Neo-
conservative/neo-liberal theory frames its utopia as a space(less)-time(less) that fully saturates the drives
once consigned or conned to the unconscious. The pre-eminent concrete expression of its ideal global
state (concrete, literally and guratively), that which anchors its vision, is suburbia-as-utopia. The suburb,
whose architecture and installation over tracts of land cleared of all historical reference and distinctive
natural features, also happens to be the site where the plethora of ready-to-wear satisfactions are
supposedly freely enjoyed.17

In contemporary cultural images, suburbia is depicted as that special non-place where incest
and murder are no longer punishable transgressions, and where the drives that fuel them need no longer
be repressed or even symbolically sacriced. See the infamous show, Desperate Housewives, where
murder, child abuse, pederasty and incest ourish on the Wisteria Lane of suburban Fairview. Or take the
BBCs Murder in Suburbia, which uncovers the wild sexual lives led by murder victims, lives that often
shock the two young women detectives, but not their blas neighbors, who are not only fully cognizant of
these sexual aberrations but often their cheerful co-participants. Or consider Showtimes Weeds, which
features a widowed housewife in a San Fernando Valley suburb of Los Angeles, who also happens to be a
dope dealer. She has soccer mom values, yet in one
episode she will casually have sex with a rival dealer
(a Latino) on the hood of a car, in an urban alley, in
broad daylight. (This is to keep him away from her
ideal neighborhood, where pedophile millionaires
prey on teenage boys and everyone engages in
all manner of what were once considered deviant
sexual practices.) Advertised, then, by and as our
new utopia: An orgy of sexual transgression now
available in your nearest neighborhood suburb.

Suburbia is not, of course, the unconscious:

it simply denies that limits are necessarily placed
on absolute enjoyment. It is a will-to-jouissance,
an effort to control this unruly and unmanageable
excess. As such it is only modeled on the unconsciouson that no-place where antipathy to civilization
reigns supreme. This may be the key to comprehending why suburbia must be a bland samenessit must
be an anywhere. If it had a specic spatiality and a genuine historicity it could not aspire to the utopian
nowhere of the unconscious unleashed.

The problem is obviously that where this repressive desublimation masquerades as the
unconscious unbound, all it actually realizes is a sadistic pseudo-utopia where unfettered enjoyment
is tied upin bondage, chains, forced connement; in sequestered bedchambers, fortied enclosures,
prisons. Spaces self-declared to be exempt from the Law (in the Lacanian, symbolic and linguistic sense,
not in the sense of positive law). We now translate these into the forms of gated communities, of the
entourages who guard the privacy of the billionaire, of the infamous bubbles enveloping our political
leaders where they enjoy the bliss of ignorance and irresponsibility.

Is consumer capitalisms pretension to full satisfaction (that one that de Sade dreamed up for
his own utopias) really a nal conquest of the repressions that drive the Freudian unconscious? Has it
achieved the universal right to jouissance that Lacan once claimed would alone be truly revolutionary?18
Here I cannot help but recall Freuds remark (re-emphasized by Lacan) that the damming up of libido is
a hallmark of the impotent subject, the one unable to partake of good old fashioned enjoyment. This
impotence, Lacan adds, is the psychical foundation of capitalism. The dream of stockpiling jouissance is
the act of someone lacking actual political or social power.19

I have argued that the reality of late capitalist life is shaped as if it were a realization of our
deepest fantasies, so fully satisfying that we need be tempted by no elsewhere and by no other moment.
If this is utopia, it may be high time to nd a new way out. For, after all, as Lacan wryly remarks in Seminar
VII, we havent even been able to create a single new perversion.20 If not that, then what is at stake in
touting utopias long-awaited arrival?

ELSEWHERE

La vie est ailleurs21

In these any-spaces-whatever a new race of characters was stirring, a kind of

mutant...they were seers.

Deleuze22

At this point, I will be mercifully brief. We stand in the greatest need of imagination to pursue (as Ambasz
says) alternative futures. It is indeed seers we need now, seers who will dream utopia for us neither as

Umbr(a) 43
a nowhere-and-everywhere, nor as a never-and-forever, but simply as elsewhere. The utopian turn
of the post-war mid-century has now reached a dnouement that turns out to be only the bland, blank
anywhereness of global sadism-as-suburbia. In other words, it has arrived at no utopia at all. Its subjective
commandmentsuperegoic in formto enjoy by respecting none of the laws of civilization shows itself
as nothing more than the age-old game of exploiting us by extracting our wealth and adding it to the stores
of the already wealthy.

What is to be done? If utopias have been the chief mode of attempting to solve the insoluble
puzzle of what to do with the surplus that comes from/with the sacrices (of enjoyment) imposed on us
in the name of civilization, they have never yet come up with anything more than a series of proposals for
administering this excesswhich is also its waste. None has yet devised anything like a perfect solution.
Recall Freuds late thesis that civilization spontaneously generates three ways to treat the problem of surplus
enjoyment: identication (with cultural ideals);23 art (dened as the sublimated substitute for vicariously
satisfying forbidden drives); and religion (which orders society around a non-negotiable demand to keep
the basis for its authority closed to inspection).24 Freud found all three of these illusions wanting; they
have become increasingly ineffectual the more civilization perfects itself. The only hope he held out was
that human curiosity, the desire to know, science (for example, psychoanalysis), would ultimately trump
the all-pervasive illusions civilization has devised as palliatives for the malaise it creates in all of us.

When I was a child, Freuds utopian dream of endless learning was mine, too: I imagined always
being able to live in the land of the free(thinking). But this utopia now seems as impossible to me as
continuing to believe we could live forever in the land of the free. A passion for ignorance and connement
washes over global culture as it reaches the end of history.

But should we not rethink at least one of Freuds premises about the illusions that falsely reconcile
us to a civilization to which we can never really be reconciled? At least in the domain of art, I think we
should entertain some new hypotheses. The value of art, according to Freud, lies in its sublimation, its
illusion of satisfying our necessarily repressed drives.25

But what if we were to consider art differently: as a unique undertaking to confront the Real (with
its unknowable, terrifying jouissance) and to transmute the experience of that confrontation into something
that not only places it at a protective distance (sublimation) but also brings it unimaginably closer than
we could ever dream possible? By making it into an entirely new, transmissible experience of the Thing,
without deceiving ourselves as to its horror and its pleasure.

At the end of his life, Lacan set off along this other pathway and wondered if we could not, indeed,
get out from under the burdens civilization forcibly imposes on speaking beings while yet retaining the
crucial generative value of the language that is its instrument of choice. He turned to James Joyce who,
Lacan thought, had contrived a way to convey jouissance (which the signier carves off) in language. To
read Joyce, Lacan notes, is not necessarily to experience the promise of meaning inherent to the structure
of language, but to feel instead the reality of the authors jouissance. To accomplish this impossible task,
Lacan says, Joyce had to destroy the English language as we know it. Joyces personal malaise in his
own (Irish) civilization was that of a double encirclement by the hell of an English language that had been
forcibly imposed on his culture and that had remained xed at the moment of its imposition. It had no
freedom to change or evolve. Like the language of conquerors forced upon their new subjects, it brooked
none of the playful, metaphoric outlets for the jouissance language repressesoutlets open to any native
speaker. English stagnated in its Irish iteration. (See the passage in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
where young Stephen discovers that only he knows that the English priest laughs at the old-fashioned
word for candle-snuffer, tundish, one no longer current in English usage.) The upshot was that Joyce was
oppressed not simply by language, but that his oppression was aggravated by the fact that this language
was deeply foreign to his culture; it was the language of his imperial oppressor.

Lacan saw that Joyces solution to the double impasse he encountered in language was his
breaking out of (while not altogether breaking with) language. For Lacan, Joyce was the sinthome, the one
who forged unimaginable signiers that bear jouissance.26

What can we draw from Lacans appreciation of Joyce? Perhaps this: that art can now be charged
with the singular burden of absorbing the slings and arrows of our permanent cultural misfortune in order
to turn them into a new experience of jouissance. Not just for the sake (as in Joyces case) of the artists
treating her own impossible condition, but rather to transmit her own transmuting of that experience, a
transmutation that has allowed her to bear it, and to bear witness to it, and to share it with others. This
would be an art that follows an alternative path, then, from the consumer path along which art is currently
racing.

Umbr(a) 45
1
Charles Baudelaire, XLVIII: Anywhere, Anywhere Out of
the World in Little Poems in Prose, ed. Martin P. Starr, trans.
Aleister Crowley (Chicago: The Teitan Press, 1995), 117-119.
2
See Dean MacCanell, New Urbanism and its Discontents
in Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, ed. Joan Copjec
and Michael Sorkin (London and New York: Verso, 1999), 106-
128.
3
Rousseau is, of course, charged with just that; but I have
argued that he actually takes the reverse position, seeing the
state of nature as the utopian dream of a culture formed
around an ego center, the which he deplores. He intended to
recast culture from egocentricity into a new form of sociality.
See Juliet Flower MacCannell, Rousseau and Law: Monstrous
Logic in Law, Justice, Power, ed. S. Cheng (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2004), 240-258; and The City, Year
Zero: Memory and the Spatial Unconscious, in The Journal of
Romance Studies, 7:2 (2007): 1-18.
4
Walter Benjamin, The Destructive Character in Reections,
ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 301-
303.
5
One of the most remarkable characteristics of human
nature, writes Lotze, is, alongside so much selshness in
specic instances, the freedom from envy which the present
displays toward the future. Reection shows us that our
image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which
the course of our own existence has assigned us. The kind of
happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we
have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women
who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our
image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of
redemption. Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History
in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken
Books, 1969), 253-254.
6
The same applies to our view of the past, which is the
concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by
which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement
between past generations and the present one. Our coming
was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded
us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a
power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be
settled cheaply. Ibid, 254.
7
Freud believed that the only way out for a civilization
increasingly trapped by its own conicting desires to exploit
and stie it was the unquenchable desire to know. We can no
longer be so certain of this hope as Freud was. But I suggest
other possibilities at the end of this essay. Sigmund Freud, The
Future of an Illusion, in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter S.E.), ed.
and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press,
1953-1974), 21: 53.
8
The excisions required to manufacture a utopia also
extend to its need to cut itself off. Mores Utopia enters into
relations with other non-utopian societies mainly to recruit the
mercenaries they need to protect them (Utopians themselves
are pacists). As the mercenaries are naturally killed in the
course of their service, the Utopians justify these deaths with
Panglossian logic: eliminating the violence-prone from other
societies will help advance those societies along the path to
perfection.
9
The caption of an advertisement for a luxury hotel (Hyatt
Corporation), The New Yorker, 28 December 1998/9 January
1999 double issue, inside back cover.
10
The Google Corporation could stand as the utopian emblem
of this. It not only seems to generate endless prots, its
campus swathes its knowledge-workers with every creature
comfort and every amenity, including gourmet lunches and
personal on-demand massages. One masseuse, brought in to
service the workers, has recently retired, as a multimillionaire,
on the stock options granted her when she was rst hired.
At the same time, the dialectical opposition to this plenitude
is already emerging, as we look towards an ecotopia whose
hallmark would be the cut: in energy consumption, greenhouse
gases, waste. See also the various abstinence movements
(in eating and in sex) now becoming common. The quest
for the solution to the problem of surplus enjoyment seems
increasingly desperate.
11
I am thinking of someone like Emilio Ambasz, who, in
Analyzing Ambasz, describes his architecture as the pursuit
of alternative futures. Analyzing Ambasz, ed. Michael Sorkin
(New York: Monacelli, 2004), 108.
12
Freud, The Unconscious, S.E. 14:187.
13
This is, at least, how it is described by the neo-conservatives
and Kojevian/Beltway Hegelians, whose theses achieved
their apogee under the regime of the second Bush
administration. 21
Wall grafti, Paris, 1968.

14
Already in 1969, Lacan speaks of an alethosphere girdling
the world, lled with intangible messages and messengers
of jouissance that he calls lathouses (gadgets). See Jacques
Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan.
Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York and London: W.W.
Norton & Company, 2007), 150-163.
15
The neo-conservative argument refuses to be belied by
empirical experience. Indeed, disasters are now considered
opportunities: witness Condoleezza Rices slip of the tongue
regarding the South Asian tsunami of 2006. See also Naomi
Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
(Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2007) and The
Rise of Disaster Capitalism, The Nation, 2 May 2005, 9-11.
16
Freud, in The Future of an Illusion, had said that individuals
must band together to control the forces of nature, and
extract its wealth for the satisfaction of human needs. Yet,
he notes that men have remained unconsciously hostile to the
ban on satisfying their animal body by the demand for social
coexistence. On the other hand, even though communal or
common wealth is its byproduct, Freud notes, the result is that
its use becomes the subject of regulation, made necessary in
order to adjust the relations of men to one another especially
in the distribution of the available wealth (Freud, The Future of
an Illusion, S.E. 21:6).
17
Desperate Housewives is broadcast on Disney-owned ABC.
22
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: The University of
Minnesota Press, 1989), xi.
23
No doubt one is a wretched plebeian, harassed by debts
and military service; but to make up for it, one is a Roman
citizen, one has ones share in the task of ruling other nations
and dictating their laws (Freud, The Future of an Illusion, S.E.
21:13).
24
Ibid, 54-55.
25
Art offers substitutive satisfactions for the oldest and still
most deeply felt renunciations, and for that reason it serves as
nothing else to reconcile man to the sacrices he has made
on behalf of civilization. Freud goes on to say it heightens our
feeling of identication, and as a product of our own particular
culture, it is also a narcissistic satisfaction (Ibid, 14).
26
Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre XXIII,
Le Sinthome, 1975-1976 (Paris: Seuil, 2005). A more
contemporary example is the comic genius of Denis Leary,
who laces his brilliant language with profanities that are not
meant simply to be rude and transgressive; instead, they
convey to his listeners an unnameable passion and intensity.
Another device, dreamt up by some unknown genius, is
that series of symbols inserted into cartoons to indicate the
strongest emotions, expressing profanity without saying a
word: !!$#@%!!

18
Lacan, Kant with Sade in crits: The First Complete Edition
in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London: W.W.
Norton & Company, 2006), 645-668.

19
See Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XVII:
The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. See also Juliet Flower
MacCannell, More Thoughts for the Times on War and Death:
The Discourse of Capitalism in Seminar XVII in Jacques Lacan
and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reections on Seminar
XVII, ed. Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2006), 195-215.

20
Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII: The Ethics
of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller,
trans. Dennis Porter (New York and London: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1992), 15.

Umbr(a) 47
THE AMBIGUITY OF THE UTOPIAN GAZE
slavoj iek

The rst novella of David Grossmans Her Body Knows does for jealousy in
literature what Luis Buuels l does for it in cinema it masterfully displays
the basic fantasmatic coordinates of this notion. In jealousy, the subject creates/
imagines a paradise (a utopia of full jouissance) from which he is excluded. The
same denition applies to what one might call political jealousy: from anti-Semitic
fantasies about the excessive enjoyment of the Jews, to Christian fundamentalist
fantasies about the weird sexual practices of gays and lesbians. This logic recently
reached its climax in Alan Weismans The World Without Us, a vision of what would
happen if humanity (and only humanity) were suddenly to disappear from the earth
natural diversity blooms again, nature gradually reclaims human artifacts, and
so on. We humans are reduced to a pure disembodied gaze observing our own
absence, and, as Lacan points out, this is the fundamental subjective position
of fantasy: to be reduced to the object a, to the gaze that observes the world in
the condition of the subjects non-existence (the fantasy of witnessing the act of
ones own conception the parental copulation or of witnessing ones own
burial, like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn). The world without us is thus fantasy at
its purest: witnessing the earth in its pre-castrated state of innocence, before we
humans spoiled it with our hubris. The irony is that the most prominent example

Umbr(a) 49
of the world without us comes from the catastrophe at Chernobyl: exuberant nature taking over the
disintegrating debris of the nearby abandoned city of Pripyat, which was left the way it was.

These examples indicate an approach to utopia that leaves behind the usual focus on content,
which is to say, on the structure of the society proposed in a utopian vision. Perhaps it is time to step
back from the fascination with content and reect on the subjective position from which content appears
utopian. On account of its temporal loop, the fantasmatic narrative always involves an impossible gaze,
one by means of which the subject is already present at the scene of its own absence. An exemplary case
of this vicious cycle in the service of ideology is an anti-abortion fairy-tale written in the 1980s by a right-
wing Slovene nationalist poet. The tale takes place on an idyllic South Sea island where aborted children
live together without their parents: although their lives are nice and calm, they miss parental love and
spend their time in sad reection on how their parents could have preferred a career or a luxurious holiday
to themselves. The trick, of course, resides in the fact that the aborted children are presented as having
been born into an alternative universe (the lone Pacic island), all the while retaining the memory of the
parents who betrayed them this way they can direct a reproachful gaze at their parents, which makes
them culpable. What this reactionary fairy-tale relies on is the overlapping of two lacks in the subjects
encounter with the enigma of the Others desire. As Lacan puts it, the subject answers the enigma of
the Others desire (what does the Other want from me? what am I for the Other?) with his own lack, by
proposing his own disappearance: when a small child is confronted by the enigma of his parents desire,
the fantasy with which to test this desire is that of his own disappearance (what if I die or disappear? how
will my mother and father react to it?). In the Slovene fairy-tale, this fantasmatic structure is realized: the
children imagine themselves as non-existent and, from this position, question their parents desire (why
did my mother prefer her career or a new car to me?).

Is utopia, however, constrained to this fantasmatic dimension, or is there another dimension to

it, a dimension that one might be tempted to call fantasizing beyond fantasy? Surprisingly, it was none
other than Hegel who rst delineated the contours of this other dimension. His famous guideline that one
should conceive the Absolute not only as substance but also as Subject conjures up the discredited notion
of some kind of absolute Subject, some mega-Subject that creates the universe and watches over our
destinies. For Hegel, however, the subject in its very core stands also for nitude, for the cut or gap
of negativity, which is why God only becomes subject through Incarnation: He is not already in-itself,
prior to Incarnation, a mega-Subject ruling the universe. Consequently, it is crucial not to confuse Hegels
objective spirit with the Diltheyan notion of a life-form, a concrete historical world, objectivized spirit,
the product of a people, or its collective genius. The moment we do this, we miss the point of Hegels
objective spirit, namely, that spirit in its objective form is experienced by individuals as an external
imposition, even constraint there is no collective or spiritual super-Subject that would be the author
of objective spirit, whose objectivization this spirit would have been. There is, for Hegel, no collective
Subject, no Subject-Spirit above and beyond individual humans. Therein resides the paradox of objective
spirit: it is independent of individuals, encountered as given or pre-existent, and as the presupposition of
activity, yet it is nonetheless spirit, i.e., something that exists only insofar as individuals relate their activity
to it, only insofar as it is their (pre)supposition.1

This is why Kierkegaards critique of Hegel relies on a fatal misunderstanding of Hegels fundamental
insight. The rst thing that strikes the eye is that it is based on the (thoroughly Hegelian!) opposition
between objective and subjective thought: objective thought translates everything into results []
subjective thought puts everything into process and omits the result [] for as an existing individual he
is constantly in process of coming to be.2 For Kierkegaard, obviously, Hegels philosophy is the ultimate
achievement of objective thought: it does not understand history from the point of view of becoming,
but with the help of the illusion attaching to pastness understands it from the point of view of a nality that
excludes all becoming.3 Here, one should be very careful not to miss Kierkegaards point: for him, only
subjective experience is effectively in becoming, and any notion of objective reality as an open-ended
process with no xed nality remains within the connes of being. This is because any objective reality,
processual as it may be, is by denition ontologically fully constituted and present as a positively-
existing domain of objects and their interactions; only subjectivity designates a domain that is in-itself
open, marked by an inherent ontological failure: Whenever a particular existence has been relegated
to the past, it is complete, has acquired nality, and is in so far subject to a systematic apprehension []
but for whom is it so subject? Anyone who is himself an existing individual cannot gain this nality outside
existence which corresponds to the eternity into which the past has entered.4

What if, however, Hegel effectively does the exact opposite? What if the wager of his dialectic is not
to adopt the point of view of nality towards the present, viewing it as if it were already past, but precisely
to reintroduce the openness of future into the past, to grasp that-which-was in its process of becoming,
to see the contingent process which generated to existing necessity? Is this not why we have to conceive
the Absolute not only as Substance, but also as Subject? This is why German Idealism already explodes
the coordinates of the standard Aristotelian ontology, which is structured around the vector running from
possibility to actuality. In contrast to the idea that every possibility strives to fully actualize itself, one
should conceive of progress as a movement that restores the dimension of potentiality to mere actuality,
that unearths, in the very heart of actuality, a secret striving towards potentiality. Recall Walter Benjamins
notion of revolution as redemption-through-repetition of the past: apropos the French Revolution, the task
of a true Marxist historiography is not to depict the events the way they actually took place (and to explain
how these events generated the ideological illusions that accompanied them); the task is rather to unearth
the hidden potentiality (the utopian emancipatory potential) that was betrayed in the actuality of revolution
and its nal outcome (the rise of utilitarian market capitalism). Marxs point is not primarily to make fun of
the Jacobins wild hopes and revolutionary enthusiasm, to point out how their high emancipatory rhetoric
was just a means used by the historical cunning of reason to establish a vulgar commercial capitalist
reality; his point is to explain how these betrayed radical-emancipatory potentials continue to insist as
kinds of historical specters and to haunt the revolutionary memory, demanding enactment, so that the later
proletarian revolution will also have to redeem and lay to rest all of these ghosts. These specters are the

Umbr(a) 51
utopian site of fantasizing beyond fantasy. The alternate versions of the past, which persist in a spectral
form, constitute the ontological openness of the historical process, as G.K. Chesterton was well aware:

The things that might have been are not even present to the imagination. If somebody
says that the world would now be better if Napoleon had never fallen, but had established
his Imperial dynasty, people have to adjust their minds with a jerk. The very notion is
new to them. Yet it would have prevented the Prussian reaction; saved equality and
enlightenment without a mortal quarrel with religion; unied Europeans and perhaps
avoided the Parliamentary corruption and the Fascist and Bolshevist revenges. But in this
age of free-thinkers, mens minds are not really free to think such a thought.

What I complain of is that those who accept the verdict of fate in this way accept it
without knowing why. By a quaint paradox, those who thus assume that history always
took the right turning are generally the very people who do not believe there was any
special providence to guide it. The very rationalists who jeer at the trial by combat, in the
old feudal ordeal, do in fact accept a trial by combat as deciding all human history.5

Why, then, in an apparent contradiction with the Marxist approach, has the blooming genre of
What-If histories been hegemonized by conservative historians? As a rule, the typical introduction to
such a volume begins with an attack on Marxists, who allegedly believe in historical determinism. The
conservative sympathies of the leading what-if volumes become all too clear as soon as one examines
their tables of contents: their favored topics oscillate between the major premise how much better
history would have been if a revolutionary or radical event had been avoided (if King Charles had won
the English Civil War; if the English Crown had won the American Revolutionary War; if the Confederacy,
aided by Great Britain, had won the American Civil War; if Germany had won the Great War; if Lenin had
been shot at Finland Station, and so on) and the minor premise how much worse things would be if
history had taken a more progressive turn (if Thatcher had been killed in the IRA bombing of the Brighton
Hotel in 1984; if Gore had defeated Bush and been President on 9/11).

So what should the Marxists answer be here? Denitely not a rehashing of Georgi Plekhanovs
tired and boring ratiocinations on the role of the individual in history the logic which holds that if had
Napoleon never been born, someone else would have had to play a similar role, because the deeper
historical necessity called for a passage to Bonapartism. One should, rather, question the very premise
that Marxists (and Leftists in general) are dumb determinists, opposed to entertaining such alternative
scenarios.

The rst thing to note is that the what-if histories are part of a more general ideological trend, of
a perception of life that explodes the form of linear narratives and renders life as a multiform ow. Even in
the domain of the hard sciences (quantum physics and its multiple-reality interpretation, neo-Darwinism)
we seem to be haunted by the contingency of life and alternate versions of reality. As Stephen Jay Gould
a Marxist biologist if there ever was one put it bluntly: wind back the lm of life and play it again.
The history of evolution will be totally different. This perception of our reality as one of the possible (and
not even necessarily the most probable) outcomes of an open situation, this notion that other possible
outcomes are not simply cancelled out but continue to haunt our true reality as the specters of what
might have happened (thereby conferring on our reality a status of extreme fragility and contingency), is by
no means foreign to Marxism the felt urgency of the revolutionary act relies on it.

Since the non-occurrence of the October Revolution is a favored topic of the conservative
what-if historians, let us look at how Lenin himself related to it. Indeed, he was as far as possible from
any kind of reliance on historical necessity (on the contrary, it was his Menshevik opponents who
emphasized that one cannot jump over the succession of stages prescribed by historical determinism:
rst bourgeois-democratic, then proletarian revolution, and so on). When Lenin, in his April Theses from
1917, discerned the Augenblick, the unique chance for a revolution, his proposals were rst met with
stupor or contempt by a large majority of his own party. Within the Bolshevik party, no prominent leader
supported his call to revolution, and Pravda even took the extraordinary step of dissociating the party, and
the editorial board as a whole, from the April Theses. Far from being an opportunist who was attering
and exploiting the prevailing mood in the party, Lenins views were highly idiosyncratic. In fact, Alexander
Bogdanov characterized the April Theses as the delirium of a madman, and Nadezhda Krupskaya
herself concluded that I am afraid it looks as if Lenin has gone crazy. Lenin immediately perceived a
revolutionary opportunity which was the result of unique, contingent, circumstances: if the moment will
not be seized, the chance for the revolution will be forfeited, perhaps for decades. So we have here Lenin
himself entertaining an alternative scenario: what if we do not act now it was precisely his awareness of
the catastrophic consequences of not acting that pushed him to act.

But there is a much deeper commitment to alternative histories in a radical Marxist view, which
brings the what-if logic to its self-reexive reversal. For a radical Marxist, the actual history that we live is
itself the realization of a kind of alternative history. It is a dystopian reality that we have to live in because, in
the past, we failed to seize the moment and act. Military historians have demonstrated that the Confederacy
lost the battle at Gettysburg because General Lee made a series of totally uncharacteristic mistakes:
Gettysburg was the one battle, fought by Lee, that reads like ction. In other words, if ever there was a
battle where Lee did not behave like Lee, it was there in southern Pennsylvania.6 For every wrong move,
one can play the game of what would Lee have done in that situation in other words, it is as if, in the
battle of Gettysburg, an alternate history actualized itself.

This brings us back to the what-if dimension that permeates the very core of the Marxist
revolutionary project. In his ironic comments on the French Revolution, Marx opposes revolutionary
enthusiasm to the sobering effect of the morning after: the actual result of the sublime revolutionary
explosion, of the Event of freedom, equality, and brotherhood, is the miserable utilitarian/egotistic universe

Umbr(a) 53
of market calculations (and, incidentally, is it not the case that this gap is even wider in the case of the
October Revolution?). However, as we have already seen, one should not simplify Marxs position: his
point is not the rather commonsensical insight into how the vulgar reality of commerce is the truth of
the theater of revolutionary enthusiasm, and that this was what all the fuss really was about. In the
revolutionary explosion as an Event, another utopian dimension shines through: the dimension of universal
emancipation, which is precisely the excess betrayed by the market reality that takes over the day after.
As such, this excess is not simply abolished or dismissed as irrelevant, but is transposed into the virtual
state, continuing to haunt the emancipatory imaginary as a dream waiting to be realized. The excess of
revolutionary enthusiasm over its actual social base, or substance, is thus literally that of an attribute-
effect over its substantial cause a ghost-like Event waiting for its proper embodiment.

This is why one should bear in mind Walter Benjamins fundamental lesson, which is, to put it
somewhat crudely, that scientic socialism (the science of historical materialism) cannot survive without
utopian socialism (the theological dimension of the messianic redemption of the past). To properly
grasp historical reality, one must include within it the utopias that were betrayed and defeated in the
victorious march of real history. And one should go all the way to the very end here and imagine the world
without humanity although, of course, in a way which is different from Weismans. It was Gilles Deleuze
who showed the way here, often varying the motif of how, in becoming post-human, we should learn to
practice a perception as it was before men (or after) [] released from their human coordinates.7 Those
who fully endorse the Nietzschean return of the same are strong enough to sustain the vision of the
iridescent chaos of a world before man.8 Although Deleuze openly resorts here to Kantian language, with
reference to direct access to things (the way they are) in themselves, his point is precisely that one should
subtract the opposition between phenomena and things-in-themselves between the phenomenal and
the noumenal level from its Kantian functioning, where noumena are transcendent things that forever
elude our grasp. What Deleuze refers to as things in themselves is in a way even more phenomenal
then our shared phenomenal reality: it is the impossible phenomenon, the phenomenon that is excluded
from our symbolically-constituted reality. The gap that separates us from noumena is thus not primarily
epistemological, but practico-ethical and libidinal. There is no true reality behind or beneath phenomena,
noumena are phenomenal things which are too strong, too intens(iv)e, for our perceptual apparatus
attuned to constituted reality.

Epistemological failure is a secondary effect of libidinal terror, which is to say that the underlying
logic is a reversal of Kants you can, because you must! you cannot (know noumena), because you
must not! Imagine someone being forced to witness a particularly terrifying act of torture: the monstrosity
of what he saw would, in a way, make this an experience of the noumenal impossible-real that would
shatter the coordinates of our common reality (the same holds for witnessing an intense sexual activity). In
this sense, if we were to discover lms shot in a concentration camp among the Musulmannen, showing
scenes from their daily life, how they were systematically mistreated and deprived of all dignity, we would
have seen too much, the prohibited, we would have entered a forbidden territory of what should have
remained unseen. This is also what makes it so unbearable to witness the last moments of people who
know that they are about to die and are, in this sense, already living-dead. Again, imagine if we would
have discovered, among the ruins of the Twin Towers, a video camera from onboard one of the planes
which magically survived the crash intact, and was full of footage of what went on among the passengers
in the minutes before it crashed into one of the Towers. In all these cases, we would effectively have
seen things as they are in themselves, outside human coordinates, outside our human reality we
would have seen the world with inhuman eyes (maybe U.S. authorities do possess such footage and are,
for understandable reasons, keeping it secret). The lesson here is profoundly Hegelian: the difference
between the phenomenal and the noumenal has to be reected/transposed back into the phenomenal as
the split between the gentried normal phenomenon and the impossible phenomenon.

Robert Altmans universe, best exemplied by his masterpiece Short Cuts, is effectively one of
contingent encounters between a multitude of series, which communicate and resonate at the level of
what he refers to as subliminal reality meaningless mechanical shocks, encounters, and impersonal
intensities which precede the level of social meaning. Against the temptation to reduce Altman to a poet
of American alienation who renders the silent despair of everyday lives, one should see him as embracing
the opening of oneself to joyful contingent encounters. Just as Deleuze and Guattari read the Absence of
the inaccessible and elusive transcendent Center (Castle, Court, God) in Kafkas universe as the Presence
of multiple passages and transformations, one is tempted to read the despair and anxiety in Altmans
lms as the deceiving obverse of a more afrmative immersion into a multitude of subliminal intensities.
The difference is precisely that between the human and the inhuman: insofar as the story is perceived as a
story of alienation and despair, it is reduced to its human coordinates; however, insofar as it is perceived as
the interplay of contingent encounters between a multitude of series, the story is released from its human
coordinates and perceived as part of the iridescent chaos of a world before man.

In one of his less well-known stories, Everlasting Man, Chesterton constructs wonderful mental
experiment along these lines, imagining how man may have rst appeared as a monster to the merely
natural animals around him:

The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of
being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance
of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an
unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot
trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and ngers and
a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in articial bandages called clothes; he is propped on
articial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same
wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called
laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden
from the universe itself. Alone among the animals he feels the need of averting his thought

Umbr(a) 55
 from the root realities of his own bodily being; of hiding them as in the presence of some
higher possibility which creates the mystery of shame. Whether we praise these things
as natural to man or abuse them as articial in nature, they remain in the same sense
unique.9

This is what Chesterton called thinking backwards: we have to place ourselves in time a before the
fateful decisions were made, or before the accidents which generated the state that now seems normal to
us had ever occurred and the supreme way to do this, to render palpable this open moment of decision,
is to imagine how, at that point, history may have taken a different turn. Human freedom is grounded in
this ontological openness. At its most fundamental, Christs sacrice is neither a payment for our sins nor
a legalistic ransom, but the enacting of an openness that sets us free. When we are afraid of something
and the fear of death is ultimately one that enslaves us a true friend tells us something like: dont
be afraid. Look, I will do what you are so afraid of, and I will do it for free. Not because I have to, but out
of my love for you. I am not afraid! He does it, and in this way sets us free, demonstrating in actu that it
can be done, that we can do it too, and that we are not slaves. Recall Ayn Rands The Fountainhead, and
her description of the momentary impact Howard Roark makes on those present in the courtroom where
he stands trial:

Roark stood before them as each man stands in the innocence of his own mind. But Roark
stood like that before a hostile crowd and they knew suddenly that no hatred was
possible to him. For the ash of an instant, they grasped the manner of his consciousness.
Each asked himself: do I need anyones approval? does it matter? am I tied? And
for that instant, each man was free free enough to feel benevolence for every other
man in the room. It was only a moment; the moment of silence when Roark was about to
speak.10

This is the way Christ brings freedom: when confronting him, we become aware of our own
freedom. The ultimate question, thus, is in what kind of universe is freedom possible? What ontology
does freedom imply? In September 2006, Pope Benedict XVI caused an uproar in Muslim circles when he
quoted the infamous lines of a fourteenth century Byzantine Emperor: Show me just what Muhammad
brought that was new, and there you will nd things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread
by the sword the faith he preached. Some commentators defended the Popes remarks as the beginning
of a serious theological dialogue between Christianity and Islam; along these lines, Jeff Israely praised the
Popes razor-sharp intellect for shifting:

The terms of a debate that has been dominated by either feel-good truisms, victimization
complexes or hateful confrontation. He sought instead to delineate what he sees as a
fundamental difference between Christianitys view that God is intrinsically linked to reason
(the Greek concept of Logos) and Islams view that God is absolutely transcendent.
 Benedict said Islam teaches that Gods will is not bound up with any of our categories,
even that of rationality. The risk he sees implicit in this concept of the divine is that the
irrationality of violence might thereby appear to be justied to someone who believes
it is Gods will. The essential question, he said, is this: Is the conviction that acting
unreasonably contradicts Gods naturealways and intrinsically true?11

In the same move, the Pope also condemned the Western godless secularism in which the divine gift
of reason has been warped into an absolutist doctrine. The conclusion is clear: reason and faith must
come together in a new way, discovering their shared ground in the divine Logos, and it is to this great
Logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures.12

Whenever someone proposes the simplistic, Aristotelian, middle-of-the-road solution of avoiding

the two extremes, everyone acquainted with the Stalinist notion of the Party line as the proper path
between the Rightist deviation (in the Popes case, Muslim irrationalism) and the Leftist deviation (godless
secularism) should react with great suspicion. There are at least two things to add here: rst, the Popes
remarks, which provoked outrage among Muslims, should be read together with his remarks a week earlier
on the irrationality of Darwinism. The Pope removed Father George Coyne from his position as director of
the Vatican Observatory after the American Jesuit priest repeatedly contradicted the Popes endorsement
of intelligent design theory, which essentially backs the Adam and Eve idea of creation. The Pope
favors intelligent design, in which God directs the process of evolution, over Charles Darwins original
theory, which holds that species evolve through the random, unplanned processes of genetic mutation
and the survival of the ttest. Father Coyne, on the contrary, is an outspoken supporter of Darwins theory
of evolution, arguing that it is compatible with Christianity. The Pope wrote in Truth and Tolerance:

The question is whether reality originated on the basis of chance and necessity and, thus,
from what is irrational; that is, whether reason, being a chance by-product of irrationality
and oating in an ocean of irrationality, is ultimately just as meaningless; or whether the
principle that represents the fundamental conviction of Christian faith and of its philosophy
remains true In principio erat Verbum at the beginning of all things stands the creative
power of reason. Now as then, Christian faith represents the choice in favor of the priority
of reason and of rationality.13

This, then, is the rst qualication one must add: the reason of which the Pope speaks is a Reason
for which Darwins theory of evolution and ultimately modern science itself, since the assertion of the
contingency of the universe, the break with Aristotelian teleology, is one of its constitutive axioms is
irrational. The reason of which the Pope speaks is pre-modern teleological Reason, the view of the
universe as a harmonious Whole in which everything serves a higher purpose. (Which is why, paradoxically,
the Popes remarks obfuscate the key role of Christian theology in the birth of modern science: what

Umbr(a) 57
 paved the way for modern science was precisely the voluntarist
idea elaborated by Duns Scotus and Descartes, among others, which
holds that God is not bound by any eternal rational truths.

That is to say, while the illusory perception of the scientic

discourse is that it is a pure description of facticity, the paradox
resides in the coincidence of bare facticity and radical voluntarism.
Facticity can be sustained as meaningless, as something that just
is as it is, only if it is secretly sustained by an arbitrary divine will.
Hence, Descartes establishes the foundation for modern science
precisely by having made even the most elementary mathematical
facts, such as 2+2=4, dependent on an arbitrary divine will: there is
no hidden obscure chain of reasons behind it, God simply wills it so.
Even in mathematics, this unconditional voluntarism is discernible in
its axiomatic character. One begins by arbitrarily positing a series of
axioms out of which, then, everything else is supposed to follow).
Second qualication: is Islam really so irrational, does it really
celebrate a totally transcendent/irrational God above reason? In the
same issue of Time magazine in which Israely published his praise of
the Pope, there is an interesting interview with the Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in which he advocates exactly the same
unity of reason (logic) and spirituality. When asked what question he
would have posed to Bush in the public debate that Ahmadinejad had
proposed, he replied: I would ask him, Are rationalism, spirituality and humanitarianism and logic are
they bad things for human beings? Why more conict? Why should we go for hostilities? Why should we
develop weapons of mass destruction? Everybody can love one another. [] I have said we can run the
world through logic. [] Problems cannot be solved through bombs. Bombs are of little use today. We
need logic.14

And, effectively, from the perspective of Islam, it is Christianity as the religion of love which is
not rational enough: its focus on love makes God all too human and biased in the gure of Christ, who
intervenes into creation as an engaged and combative actor, allowing his passion to overrun the logic
of the Creator and master of the universe. The Muslim God, on the contrary, is the true God of Reason;
he is wholly transcendent not in the sense of frivolous irrationality, but in the sense of a supreme
Creator who knows and directs everything, and thus has no need to get involved in earthly accidents
with partial passion. As Mohammad Bouyeri, the Islamist who killed the Dutch lmmaker Theo van Gogh,
wrote to Ayaan Hirsi Ali in a letter which was stuck into van Goghs body with a knife: You, as unbelieving
fundamentalist [sic], of course dont believe that there is a Higher Power who runs the universe. You dont
believe in your heart, with which you repudiate the truth, that you must knock and ask this Higher Power
for permission. You dont believe that your tongue with which you repudiate the Direction of this Higher
Power is subservient to His laws.15

This idea, according to which our very act of opposing God is directed by God, is unthinkable in
Christianity. No wonder, then, that Islam nds it much easier to accept the paradoxical results of modern
physics: the notion of an all-encompassing rational order which runs counter to our common sense. The
underlying logic of Islam is that of a rationality which can be weird but allows for no exceptions, while the
underlying logic of Christianity is that of an irrational exception (an unfathomable divine mystery) which
sustains our rationality or, as G.K. Chesterton put it, the Christian doctrine not only discovered the
law, but it foresaw the exceptions.16 It is only the exception that allows us to perceive the miracle of the
universal rule. And, for Chesterton, the same goes for our rational understanding of the universe:

The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of
what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and
succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious,
and everything else becomes lucid.The one created thing which we cannot look at is the
one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism
explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility.17

Chestertons aim is thus to save reason by sticking to its founding exception. Deprived of it, reason
degenerates into a blind self-destructive skepticism, into total irrationalism or, as Chesterton liked
to repeat: if you do not believe in God, you will soon be ready to believe anything, including the most
superstitious nonsense about miracles. Chestertons basic insight and conviction was that the irrationalism
of the late nineteenth century was the necessary consequence of the Enlightenment rationalist attack on
religion:

The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not
organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason. They were organized for
the difcult defense of reason. Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were
wildly questioned, reason could be questioned rst. The authority of priests to absolve,
the authority of popes to dene the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify: these were
all only dark defenses erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable, more
supernatural than all the authority of a man to think.In so far as religion is gone,
reason is going.18

Here, however, we encounter Chestertons fateful limitation, a limitation which he himself overcame in his
wonderful and small Introduction to Book of Job, which is, he claims, the most interesting of ancient
books. We may almost say of the Book of Job that it is the most interesting of modern books.19 What
accounts for its modernity is the way in which The Book of Job strikes a dissonant cord in the Old

Umbr(a) 59
Testament:

Everywhere else, then, the Old Testament positively rejoices in the obliteration of man in
comparison with the divine purpose. The book of Job stands denitely alone because the
book of Job denitely asks, But what is the purpose of God? Is it worth the sacrice even
of our miserable humanity? Of course, it is easy enough to wipe out our own paltry wills
for the sake of a will that is grander and kinder. But is it grander and kinder? Let God use
His tools; let God break His tools. But what is He doing, and what are they being broken
for? It is because of this question that we have to attack as a philosophical riddle the
riddle of the book of Job.20

However, the true surprise is that, in the end, the Book of Job does not provide a satisfying answer to this
riddle: it does not end in a way that is conventionally satisfactory. Job is not told that his misfortunes were
due to his sins or a part of any plan for his improvement.21 In fact, God comes in at the end, not to answer
riddles, but to propound them.22 And the great surprise is that the Book of Job:

makes Job suddenly satised with the mere presentation of something impenetrable.
Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the
enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted
after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of
something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself
a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of
man.23

In short, God performs here what Lacan calls a point de capiton: he resolves the riddle by way
of supplanting it by an even more radical riddle, by way of redoubling the riddle, by way of transposing
the riddle from Jobs mind into the thing itself. God himself comes to share Jobs astonishment at the
chaotic madness of the created universe: Job puts forward a note of interrogation; God answers with
a note of exclamation. Instead of proving to Job that it is an explainable world, He insists that it is a
much stranger world than Job ever thought it was.24 To answer the subjects interrogation with a note
of exclamation: is this not the most succinct denition of what the analyst should do in a treatment? So,
instead of providing answers from his total knowledge, God makes a proper analytic intervention, adding
a merely formal accent, a mark of articulation. For this reason, God has to rebuke his own defenders, the
mechanical and supercilious comforters of Job:

The mechanical optimist endeavors to justify the universe avowedly upon the ground that
it is a rational and consecutive pattern. He points out that the ne thing about the world is
that it can all be explained. That is the one point, if I may put it so, on which God, in return,
is explicit to the point of violence. God says, in effect, that if there is one ne thing about
 the world, as far as men are concerned, it is that it cannot be explained. He insists on the
inexplicableness of everything. Hath the rain a father?Out of whose womb came the
ice?. He goes farther, and insists on the positive and palpable unreason of things; Hast
thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is, and upon the wilderness wherein
there is no man?.To startle man, God becomes for an instant a blasphemer; one might
almost say that God becomes for an instant an atheist. He unrolls before Job a long
panorama of created things, the horse, the eagle, the raven, the wild ass, the peacock, the
ostrich, the crocodile. He so describes each of them that it sounds like a monster walking
in the sun. The whole is a sort of psalm or rhapsody of the sense of wonder. The maker of
all things is astonished at the things he has Himself made.25

God, here, is no longer the miraculous exception which guarantees the normality of the universe, the
unexplainable X who enables us to explain everything else; on the contrary, he himself is overwhelmed by
the over-brimming miracle of his Creation. When viewed from a proper perspective, there is nothing normal
in our universe everything, every small thing that is, is a miraculous exception; every normal thing is a
monstrosity. Why, for example, should we think horses are normal and unicorns are miraculous exceptions
even a horse, the most ordinary thing in the world, is a shattering miracle. This blasphemous God is the
God of modern science, because modern science is sustained precisely by just such an attitude of wonder
at those things that are the most obvious. In short, modern science is on the side of believing in anything:
do the theory of relativity and quantum physics not teach us that modern science undermines even our
most elementary natural attitudes and compels us to believe (accept) the most nonsensical things?
Lacans logic of the non-All can be of some help in clarifying this conundrum.26 Chesterton rst relies on
the masculine logic of universality and its constitutive exception: everything obeys natural causality
with the exception of God, the central Mystery. The logic of modern science is, on the contrary, the
feminine logic of the God who appears to Job: on the one hand, it is materialist, accepting the axiom
that nothing escapes natural causality which can be accounted for by rational explanation. However, the
other side of this materialist axiom is that not all is rational, obeying natural laws not in the sense
that there is something irrational, something that escapes rational causality, but in the sense that it is
the totality of the rational causal order itself which is inconsistent, irrational, non-All. Only this non-All
sustains the proper opening of the scientic discourse to the iridescent chaos of a world before man, to
the emergence of the unthinkable: who, in nineteenth century, could have imagined things like relativity
theory or quantum physics? This space of the non-All is the proper space of utopia, of fantasizing beyond
fantasy.

Umbr(a) 61
1
See Myriam Bienenstock, Quest-ce que lesprit objectif 17
Ibid, 49.
selon Hegel?, in Lectures de Hegel, ed. Olivier Tinland, Paris:
Le livre de poche 2005. 18
Ibid, 59.

2
Sren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientic Postscript, trans. 19
G.K. Chesterton, Introduction to Book of Job, in The Book
David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton of Job (London: Cecil Palmer & Hayward, 1916), xvi.
University Press, 1968), 68.
20
Ibid, xv-xvi.
3
Ibid, 272.
21
Ibid, xxvi-xxvii.
4
Ibid, 108.
22
Ibid, xxi.
5
G.K. Chesterton, The Slavery of the Mind, in The Thing:
Why I am a Catholic (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 23
Ibid, xxi-xxii.
1930), 197-8.
24
Ibid, xxiii.
6
Bill Fawcett, How to Lose a Battle (New York: Harper, 2006),
148. 25
Ibid, xxi-xxii.

7
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh 26
For the logic of non-All, see Jacques Lacan, The Seminar
Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of of Jacques Lacan. Book XX: Encore, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller,
Minnesota Press, 1986), 122. trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1998).
8
Ibid, 81.

9
Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (New York: Image Books,
1962), 34-5.

10
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York: Signet, 1992), 677.

11
Jeff Israely, The Pontiff Has a Point, Time, 25 September
2006, 44.

12
Ibid.

13
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance: Christian
Belief and World Religions, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 2004), 181.

14
Scott McLeod, We Do Not Need Attacks, Time, 25
September 2006, 34-35.

15
Available at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/
id/312.

16
Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane Co., 1909),
181.
A BLAST FROM THE FUTURE
[freud, lacan, marcuse, & snapping the threads of the past]
adrian johnston

FAILURES OF VISION: FREUD & FALSE FUTURES

From the vantage point of the present, the perhaps sole unambiguously utopian
moment in the entirety of Freuds sizable corpus, a moment occurring in 1927, now
appears to be a failed vision. In a Hegelian spirit, Lacan notes that someones
work is to be judged by the standard of its own criteria.1 So, interpreting
Freud with Freud, with an appropriate degree of dialectical reexivity, this failed
vision can be seen to result from what Freuds own psychoanalytic theories (as
elaborated in other texts situated both before and after the 1927 moment in
question) would diagnose and explain as a failure of vision driven by such factors
as the mechanisms of disavowal and intellectualization, as well as the ubiquitous
inuences of powerful thwarted wishes. This Freudian irtation with the fantasies
characteristic of a certain type of utopianism is situated toward the end of The
Future of an Illusion (and, with the benet of hindsight, the predictions made in
this passage could easily be dismissed today as the illusion of a future, a phrase
used by Oskar Pster as the title of his 1928 article responding to Freuds text).2
Therein, Freud states:

Umbr(a) 65
 We may insist as often as we like that mans intellect is powerless in comparison with
his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar
about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has
gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one
of the few points on which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but it is
in itself a point of no small importance. And from it one can derive yet other hopes. The
primacy of the intellect lies, it is true, in a distant, distant future, but probably not in an
innitely distant one.3

Both before and after these assertions (in, for example, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death [1915]
and Civilization and Its Discontents [1930]), it is Freud himself who insists, in multiple and sometimes overtly
anti-utopian ways, that mans intellect is powerless in comparison with his instinctual life.4 However, in
the 1933 text Why War? (written in reply to a letter from Albert Einstein), Freud, echoing the sentiments
expressed in the passage above, hopes aloud that his Enlightenment-style conviction in the inevitable
progress of civilization, a progress promising to lead to the further weakening and domestication of human
aggression, isnt a merely utopian belief.5 In his contemporaneous New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-
Analysis, he similarly declares that our best hope for the future is that intellect the scientic spirit,
reason may in process of time establish a dictatorship in the mental life of man.6 Jean Hyppolite, during
a visit to Lacans second seminar of 1954-1955, points to this tension within Freuds oeuvre between,
on the one hand, the portrayal of reason as relatively feeble compared with the emotional and libidinal
forces operative within the psyche, and, on the other hand, the cautiously optimistic forecast that reason
eventually will gain the upper hand in the governance of human affairs.7

On many levels, Freudian psychoanalysis indeed undermines the modernist, Enlightenment faith
in this voice of the intellect that does not rest till it has gained a hearing, a faith anticipating a future to
be reached through the gradual forward march of civilizations collective development (although, as Lacan
emphasizes, this doesnt amount to Freud embracing any sort of irrationalism that would hypothesize
the existence of an ineffable, opaque underbelly of existence as, so to speak, madness-without-method,
beyond the reach of all possible understandings).8 In addition, the subsequent course of history owing
up through contemporary circumstances seemingly has vindicated the anti-utopian Freud and refuted
the utopian Freud. With the exception of Western Europe, the ever-accelerating dynamics of science-
fueled modernization havent entailed a corresponding degree of increased secularization and this
contra the 1927 predictions made in The Future of an Illusion regarding a recession of religion in the face
of the relentless advances of the natural sciences.9 Furthermore, against Freuds opposing civilization
to barbarity as per his assumption that the intellectually guided powers of the former are able to tame
the brutal viciousness of the latter, one would have to be utterly delusional nowadays to maintain that
humanitys socio-historical progress has led to a lessening of human violence.10

As regards the last sentence of the above-quoted passage from The Future of an Illusion (The
primacy of the intellect lies, it is true, in a distant, distant future, but probably not in an innitely distant
one), it ought to be noted at the outset of this discussion that the notion of utopia isnt necessarily tied
to the topic of the future. For instance, rather than being limited to imaginings of the venir, utopias can
be posited either as paradises lost, alluringly shrouded in the mists of an obscure past, or, to use Kantian
terminology, as atemporal regulative idea(l)s, such as, most notably, the admittedly impossible-to-realize
beautiful city (kallipolis) envisioned by Socrates in Platos Republic (not to mention spatial localizations of
utopia, with Thomas Mores depiction of Utopia as geographically elsewhere being the most obvious and
paradigmatic example).11 However, utopia is indeed often linked to a time yet-to-come, and Freud makes
explicit that he anticipates the eventual actual arrival of a possibility he claims to glimpse on humanitys
distant historical horizon. And, of course, this utopian moment surfaces in a text whose very title indicates
its concern with the future.

Freuds explicit references to the future are rare. There is no listing of future, not even as a sub-
category under the headings of time or the temporal, in the Indexes and Bibliographies volume of the
Standard Edition. Maybe the reason for this is the obvious one: Viewed from a perspective focused on the
matter of temporality, psychoanalysis seems to be, rst and foremost, a science of the past. Isnt Freudian
analysis an approach to understanding mental life grounded on the axiom that, as Wordsworth puts it, the
child is the father of the man?

Although the past is endowed with a signicant amount of power by Freuds theorizations and
plays various absolutely indispensable roles in the psychoanalytic explanation of the human condition,
its status is never so simple as supercial impressions of psychoanalysis make it out to be. From its
very beginnings, Freudian analysis avoids positing the past as a frozen ensemble of episodic memories
from childhood, determining later stages of psychical maturation in a linear, non-reciprocal fashion. To
be convinced of this, one need only consult such early writings as Studies on Hysteria (1985), Letter 52
to Wilhelm Fliess (1896), Screen Memories (1899), and The Interpretation of Dreams (1900),12 writings
in which subtle dialectical oscillations between retained memory-traces and the changing conditions
perpetually unfurled by the present force the past to be conceived of as something other than a set of
static snapshots of factual historical happenings.13

Nonetheless, at rst glance, these treatments of time by Freud appear to remain limited to an
examination of the interaction between past and present, rather than bringing into theoretical consideration
the third dimension of the future. Where is the future to be found in Freudian psychoanalysis? Apart from
The Future of an Illusion, one of the few exceptions to Freuds general neglect of futurity is located in
the 1908 essay Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming. As treated therein, the topic of the literary arts is
important to Freud primarily insofar as it permits insight into the phenomena of fantasizing as operative in
each and every individual psyche.14 For Freud, the structures of fantasies exhibit all three dimensions of
time:

Umbr(a) 67
 We must not suppose that the products of this imaginative activity the various phantasies,
castles in the air and day-dreams are stereotyped or unalterable. On the contrary, they
t themselves in to the subjects shifting impressions of life, change with every change in
his situation, and receive from every fresh active impression what might be called a date-
mark. The relation of a phantasy to time is in general very important. We may say that it
hovers, as it were, between three times the three moments of time which our ideation
involves. Mental work is linked to some current impression, some provoking occasion in
the present which has been able to arouse one of the subjects major wishes. From there
it harks back to a memory of an earlier experience (usually an infantile one) in which this
wish was fullled; and it now creates a situation relating to the future which represents
a fulllment of the wish. What it thus creates is a day-dream or phantasy, which carries
about it traces of its origins from the occasion which provoked it and from the memory.
Thus past, present and future are strung together, as it were, on the thread of the wish that
runs through them.15

Although the future is mentioned directly here, it ought to be deemed a false future to the extent that the
yet-to-come is made to be a disguised reection of a past, limited to the prospect of recovering something
left behind. A few lines after the remarks quoted immediately above, Freud says as much the wish
makes use of an occasion in the present to construct, on the pattern of the past, a picture of the future.16
All of this develops assertions made eight years earlier in The Interpretation of Dreams: Dreams are
derived from the past in every sense. Nevertheless the ancient belief that dreams foretell the future is
not wholly devoid of truth. By picturing our wishes as fullled, dreams are after all leading us into the
future. But this future, which the dreamer pictures as the present, has been moulded by his indestructible
wish into a perfect likeness of the past.17 The future of dreams and day-dreams, whose construction is
motivated by wishes, is indeed the illusion of a future, given that, in The Future of an Illusion, Freud denes
an illusion in his specic sense (qua distinct from error) as a belief created and sustained largely on the
basis of wishes, regardless of whether this belief proves to be true or false vis--vis the facts of external
reality.18 He stipulates that what is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes,
and that we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulllment is a prominent factor in its motivation.19

A future restricted to being the fantasized sating of desires situated at the temporal intersection
of the past and the present isnt a real future. As portrayed by Freud in the register of metapsychology,
dreams involve the same basic dialectical co-mingling of the past (in terms of infantile wishes) and the
present (in terms of day residues) as screen memories, day-dreams, and other fantasy-laden psychical
phenomena. In light of this, John Forrester notes that dreams do create a future, but only insofar as that
future is like the past. A future that is not like the past is not to be found in dreams.20 Several pages later,
he goes on to claim that the aim of analysis [] is to unwrite the future, to erase the future.21 The future
to which Forrester refers here is a false one, one in which the anticipation-defying potentials essential to
futurity as such are obscured and suppressed.
 As just seen, in Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming, Freud describes fantasies, insofar as they
fabricate a future on the basis of the present arousal of past desires, as bearing a date-mark more
precisely, an indicator of the singular contextual-temporal situation in which a particular image of what
remains venir is assembled (with this image amounting to nothing more than a semblance, a false future
cobbled together out of bits and pieces of the past and the present). In this essay, Freud also identies
what is responsible for the falsication of the future via its reduction to the coordinates of the dialectical
continuity established between what was and what is: the thread of the wish. Desires chain what is yet-
to-come to these other registers of temporality.

From all of this arise several urgent questions bound up with the interlinked topics of futurity and
utopianism: According to psychoanalysis, can utopian visions of the future be anything other than fantasies
dangling a stale old donkeys carrot plucked from the soil of history? Is every imagined utopia necessarily
a dated dream, namely, a reverie bearing a date-mark testifying to its ultimately rather unimaginative
anticipation of an venir, constrained merely to addressing the demands and plaints of the unfullled
ghosts of the past? If a real utopia, as a true future different from various ctions of futurity, would be
something more than a fantasmatic resolution of deadlocks and impasses plaguing the combined past
and present, then, based on Freuds indications, snapping the threads of wishes is requisite for envisioning
utopias that would actually represent the newness of radical ruptures with(in) the currents of historical
time.

FROM ANTICIPATION TO INSUFFICIENCY

LACAN & THE PRECONDITIONS FOR ANY POSSIBLE TREATMENT OF UTOPIANISM

Lacan, like many others, sees Freuds picture of the human condition, at its most basic and fundamental
levels, as pessimistic and tragic.22 And, at least supercially, Lacan himself seems to endorse a strikingly
bleak prognosis of humanitys shared socio-political future. Perhaps the most notorious example of
what could be described as Lacanian anti-utopianism is his reaction to the events of May 1968 and
their immediate aftermath. He derides the revolution of the students as promising nothing genuinely new,
their apparently momentous upheaval ostensibly being just another spin on the same all-too-familiar,
well-worn course (i.e., being a revolution not in the sense of radical change, but in the astronomical
sense of an orbital iteration or movement around a xed center).23 In this vein, Lacan, during a 1969 talk
attended by a provocative group of student agitators, infamously informs them that, what you aspire to
as revolutionaries is a Master. You will get one.24

Similarly, toward the end of his 1974 televised appearance, Lacan is asked by Jacques-Alain Miller
(serving as his off-screen interlocutor) about some recent remarks of his regarding racism that evidently had

Umbr(a) 69
troubled certain auditors of the Seminar.25 In response, Lacan notes that he tossed out these comments at
the very end of a seminar session, hinting that they should be taken as underdeveloped indications calling
for further elaboration.

The remarks in question are situated in the two parallel-running seminar series given during the
academic year 1971-1972 (Le savoir du psychanalyste and ou pire). In the latter half of the opening session
of Le savoir du psychanalyste, Lacan predicts that, within a few years, new strains of racism centered on
issues of segregation will arise (with the description provided of this supposedly soon-to-arrive state
of affairs resembling aspects of what is nowadays designated by the term bio-politics). Moreover, this
session closes with Lacans announcement that his upcoming nineteenth seminar (launched a little over
a month later) is to be entitled ou pire (or worse), an announcement immediately preceded by the
assertion that psychoanalysis involves an outlook that cannot be characterized as progressive.26 The
last session of this thus-announced nineteenth seminar concludes with Lacan stating that he cannot
permit his audience to view the future in rosy hues, that they must brace themselves for the onslaught of a
renewed racism grounded on the fraternity of the body, a racism about which, he ominously tells them,
the nal word has yet to be said (these statements are presumably what Miller asks about in the televised
interview).27

Both the published and broadcast versions of Television wrap up in a rather dark fashion, sounding
distinctly anti-utopian notes. In print, Lacan ends by enigmatically speaking of a trajectory running from
Dad to worse [du pre au pire].28 Not only does this echo the title of the nineteenth seminar it
resonates with Lacans 1938 predictions regarding a social decline of the paternal imago.29 Interestingly,
then, Lacans 1972 musings about the rise of a reinvigorated racism associated with horizontal brother-
to-brother racial relations might very well be linked to his 1938 warnings regarding the coming dissolution
of all vertical relations to any viable, validated socio-symbolic authority gure. In the absence of such a
paternal/patriarchal avatar standing over and above various lateral individual and group positions, fratricidal
tendencies allegedly are inclined to intensify. In fact, in Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de
lindividu, the early Lacan discusses the forces and factors involved with sibling rivalries, forces and
factors capable, when exaggerated to a pathological degree, of producing psychotic manifestations of
jealousy and paranoia (all of this also foreshadows Lacans 1950s account of the pathogenesis of the
psychoses as due to the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father).30

On the air, after answering Millers question about the issue of racism in such a way as to tie it
together with the non-existence of the sexual relation and the mislaying of jouissance, Lacan ponders
aloud the possibility of a return to a gloomy past in the near future. With an apparent disregard for the
camera lming him, he then terminates the interview by asking Well, what do you want? He silently lights
a cigar in seeming indifference, and the closing credits roll. Lacan pointedly signals here that he has no
intention of providing prescriptions for what is to be done in light of the dim prospects for humanity he
discerns further down the historical road.
 Explicit occurrences of the concept-term utopia in Lacans oeuvre are few and far between. In his
1938 Encyclopdie franaise article, he diagnoses utopianism as symptomatic of the neurotic embodiment
of a position akin to Hegels beautiful soul. To be more specic, this is to say that the condemnation
of status quo reality that goes hand-in-hand with the desire for utopia condemns a situation with which
the utopian is fully complicit, despite his or her tendency to refuse to recognize and acknowledge this
complicity.31 Over the twenty-seven year course of the Seminar, Lacan directly mentions the notion of
utopia a mere four times. In the fth seminar, he associates utopianism with the aspiration toward a
society organized around the communist principle from each according to his ability, to each according
to his needs. Laying the foundations for a thorough critique of Freudo-Marxism, he then indicates that
this communist-utopian aspiration fails to take into account structures revealed by psychoanalysis in its
treatment of the libidinal economy and subject formation. These structures (specically those delineated
by Lacan in terms of his need-demand-desire triad) purportedly render any such utopia a literal no-place,
an unattainable fantasy-ideal.32 A couple of years later, in the seventh seminar, Lacan further develops this
line of critical reection, calling utopia a dream world that overlooks the distance that exists between
the organization of desires and the organization of needs, a distance said to be quite familiar to those
steeped in the clinical practice of analysis.33 Arguably, Freudo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School neglect
precisely this gap separating desire from need this neglect stems from an inadequate appreciation of
the theoretical specicity of the psychoanalytic concept of drive and thereby avoid confronting those
aspects of subjectivity that would be resistant to embracing easily the benets of a revolutionary new
political economy in which need-meeting goods are distributed more equitably.34

There is likely little coincidence in the fact that Lacans other two references to utopia in the
Seminar both surface in the sixteenth seminar (in sessions dated April 23rd and May 21st, 1969), a seminar
conducted during the academic year following the events of May 1968. In the rst of these two sessions,
Lacan touches upon the idea of utopia in the course of musing about the phrase freedom of thought
in response to accusations that his teaching involves a terrorism dissuading the rest of the French
psychoanalytic community from thinking freely.35 Lumping together Plato and More, he declares any such
intellectual liberty to be non-existent, to exist solely in the placeless (non-)space of utopia.36 The unreal
ideality of this ideal autonomous space is testied to by, among other things, the manners in which analytic
free association invariably reveals the absence of capriciousness and spontaneity in even the most
freewheeling of monologues.37 In addition to an ensuing detailed discussion of Hegel and Freud apropos
the liberty of thinking (or lack thereof), Lacan here pinpoints both a limitation inherent to the utopian
imagination as well as an indissoluble barrier to the concrete actualization of a certain type of utopia.38

Again referring to Platos Republic, Lacan draws attention to the way in which Socrates moves
back and forth between the microcosm of the soul and the macrocosm of the polis in his philosophical
pursuit of a comprehension of the essence of justice. As regards the Socratic-Platonic embedding of
these spheres small and large, he claims that the utopian kallipolis envisioned in this text is a disguised

Umbr(a) 71
distortion of the microcosmic body image.39 In other words, the macrocosmic collectivity is an imaginary
projection writ large (something hinted at when Socrates suggests that, just as letters are easier to read
when enlarged, so too might it be easier to discern what justice is in moving from the smaller level of the
individual psuch to the larger level of the collective polis).40 Additionally, Lacans references to modern
mathematics Lacan invokes, among other mathematical truths, the incommensurability between a
set and its sub-sets as per set theory are meant to show, contra Socrates and Plato, that the image
of embedded spheres in which microcosm and macrocosm form a harmonious, integrated whole is an
untenable fantasy.41

In relation to the topic of utopia, the preceding assertions raise questions similar to those prompted
by Freuds Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming: Are all utopian visions, without exception, reducible to
misrecognized, derivative dreams sustained by desires for an impossible cohesive unity? If utopia is an
idealized non-place with no place in either the symbolic (as indicated by the need-demand-desire triad and
the just-mentioned example from set theory mathematics) or the real (in this same 1969 discussion, Lacan
maintains that utopia has no place in the real), can it be anything other than a ctional phenomenon of
the imaginary?42

Both sessions of the sixteenth seminar in which Lacan mentions utopian matters (April 23rd and May
21 ) involve pinpointing an indissoluble barrier to the concrete actualization of a certain type of utopia. This
st

obstacle is nothing other than the Lacanian notion of jouissance as impossible.43 Insofar as this unattainable
enjoyment could be dened as the nal result of eliminating the discrepancy between need and desire
generated via the fateful ontogenetic detour through the mediation of demand, Lacan reiterates, in this
later context, the earlier critiques of utopianism articulated in the fth and seventh seminars. Reaching for
an underemployed distinction deployed in the twentieth seminar of 1972-1973, the various utopias Lacan
has in mind can be interpreted as fantasmatic anticipations of jouissance expected this expected
jouissance, for several psychoanalytic reasons, is never equivalent to any instance of the jouissance
obtained under desire-driven constraints.44 Obviously, the kind of utopia rendered unattainable by the
impossibility of jouissance (as an actually realized state of full, undiluted enjoyment) is that of an entirely
happy set of sustainable circumstances in which all serious dissatisfactions are resolved without remainder,
dissolved into the placid waters of a social milieu in which the individual microcosm and the collective
macrocosm are peacefully at one with each other.

Considering Lacans tendency toward a sort of pessimistic, conservative resignation and his
overtly expressed anti-utopian views, its interesting to note that Lacanian psychoanalysis, more than any
other analytic orientation, devotes considerable attention to futurity (and, more broadly, to temporality).
Whereas Freud speaks of the past and the present much more than the future, Lacan, starting with such
early texts as the crit introducing the mirror stage (1936/1949) and Logical Time and the Assertion of
Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism (1946), assigns the time(s) of the future a prominent place in
psychoanalytic theory and practice. And, of course, there is the notion of the future anterior consistently
running through lengthy stretches of Lacans teachings. The rst seminar, to cite one specic instance
where Lacan mentions the future ( la the future anterior), contains the assertion that the return of the
repressed [] doesnt come from the past, but from the future.45 This would be the future in the sense of
the Freudian false future discussed previously here, namely, the future that will have been on the basis
of the desires determined through the temporal dialectic enmeshing together the past and the present.
Such a future is compelled to conform to the repressed that the past-present dialectic keeps making
interminably return in any number of guises.

But the yet-to-come, as dreamed up out of the fragments of what was and is, the new reduced to
the old, isnt the sole form of futurity envisioned by Lacanian theory. In The Function and Field of Speech
and Language in Psychoanalysis (1953), Lacan identies precipitating the subjects realization of his
history in its relation to a future as one of the goals of analysis.46 Appreciating exactly what this means
can be facilitated by going back approximately four years, returning to the extant version of the account of
the mirror stage published in the crits more precisely, to the well-known concluding sentence of that
text: In the subject to subject recourse we preserve, psychoanalysis can accompany the patient to the
ecstatic limit of the Thou art that, where the cipher of his mortal destiny is revealed to him, but it is not in
our sole power as practitioners to bring him to the point where the true journey begins.47 Clinical analytic
practice is indeed focused on past and present desire-dominated identications, which hold in place, for
the analysand, certain fate-like trajectories, i.e., the Thou art that [Tu est cela] as the cipher of his mortal
destiny [le chiffre de sa destine mortelle].48 However, Lacan indicates that one of the consequences
of an analysis seen through to a tting end is the breaking apart of images of an apparently fated future, a
breaking apart that makes way for something different from this false futurity. Tu est cela is homophonous
with Tuer cela [Kill that]. On this reading, the that to be killed is the future as seemingly destined due
to the conscious and unconscious inuences of accumulated ego-level identicatory structures (Thou art
that) installed over the course of the subjects prior history.49 In The Mirror Stage, Lacan describes the
ontogenetic path leading to xation upon the imago-Gestalt of the moi as a movement from insufciency
to anticipation, i.e., from the infantile helplessness [Hilosigkeit] of the fragmented body-in-pieces [corps
morcel] to the expectation of eventual (self-)mastery aroused by the mirages of the mirror.50 By contrast,
the other futures opened up by the undermining of an venir previously fated to return again and again
(i.e., the venir of a version of the future anterior) involve moving from anticipation (as expectations of the
yet-to-come modeled on the past and the present) to insufciency (as the realized inadequacy of these
expectations with respect to futures that can and should be different from what came before). Identifying
and thereby taking distance from the expected future clears space for the real future, the latter being what
Lacan grants as lying beyond the proper boundaries of analysis as a specic practice.

Umbr(a) 73
THE END OF A CERTAIN UTOPIA
REVISITING THE CASE OF MARCUSE AFTER LACAN

If Herbert Marcuse isnt guilty of the unpardonable conceptual confusions that Lacanian theory
insists are utterly detrimental to particular efforts to wed Marx and Freud confusions related to the
conceptualizations of drive and desiring subjectivity as depicted in psychoanalytic metapsychology
then nobody is. Marcuses brand of Freudo-Marxism obviously exemplies the idealism of the late 1960s,
using loosely borrowed (quasi-)Freudian notions in the course of articulating socio-political aspirations
that strike a contemporary eye as hopelessly nave: the emergence of a new economic system in which
the meaningless drudgery of alienated labor becomes obsolete and is replaced by fullling activities
resembling the play of leisurely free time, the elimination of repression and renunciation as cultural
requirements for subjectication, the allowance for creative enjoyments of the unleashing-without-reserve
of advanced industrial societies technological and productive powers, and so on. He encapsulates these
interrelated hopes in exuberantly announcing that the achievements of repressive progress herald the
abolition of the repressive principle of progress itself.51 If anyone presses psychoanalysis into the service
of shameless, unabashed utopianism, its Marcuse.

Much time could be spent diagnosing the many theoretical and empirical problems plaguing
Marcuses Freudo-Marxism. For instance, theoretically, he speaks of instincts and needs (rather than
drives and desires) apropos psychoanalysis, and he also carelessly conates intra-psychical repression
(Verdrngung) in the strict Freudian sense with less precise notions of oppression/suppression as externally
imposed by trans-individual institutions and mechanisms. Empirically, it sufces to observe that history
since the 1960s hasnt been kind to his cautiously optimistic anticipations. Despite the many glaringly
apparent aws with this historically peculiar (and now quite dated) political philosophy, inspired by a
rather problematic understanding of psychoanalysis, the details of the perspective on utopia outlined by
Marcuse deserve a second look in light of the preceding Freudian-Lacanian reections on utopia(nism)
and futurity.

Before proceeding further, it must be admitted that Marcuse himself doesnt accept being identied
as a utopian thinker. In a 1967 lecture entitled The End of Utopia, he contends that the term utopia
refers to whatever is deemed to be totally and completely impossible (as a project for social change
that contradicts real laws of nature).52 Pushing off from a justied general thesis that the border between
the possible and the impossible is much more historically variable than reigning ideologies make it seem,
Marcuse advances a set of particular claims about specic potentials realizable in the not-too-distant
future.53 These potentials supposedly dwell within the already-existent infrastructure of twentieth-century
capitalism. In Marcuses view, his hypotheses regarding the possibility of a non-repressive, post-alienated-
labor socio-political economy arent utopian, insofar as this not-yet-present arrangement allegedly isnt
impossible (i.e., it doesnt contradict the laws of nature). He concedes that there may very well be (and
indeed are) potent forces and tendencies opposing possible revolutionary changes.54 But, he goes on to
assert, the apparent non-existence of any social agents of revolution in the current capitalist situation
doesnt mean that Marxism is utopian. Instead, if radical transformations create revolutionaries (rather
than nd them ready-made, already there in the social eld), then pointing to the absence of groups
prepared to foment real upheavals in the status quo isnt to prove the impossibility of genuine, signicant
change (one cannot help but hear resonances with more recent theorizations concerning self-constituting
revolutionary subjectivities).55 Marcuses political prophecies and proposals sound utopian (qua unrealistic
and unfeasible) only when heard through the distortions of the distinction between the possible and the
impossible motivated by the ideology of an established system threatened by prospects for people living
differently. Marcuses end of utopia doesnt mean what this phrase likely connotes for a listener/reader
nowadays (abandoning idealism, accepting Realpolitik, and so on). Rather, it means ceasing to think of
far-reaching alterations of predominating conditions in the here-and-now as far-fetched fantasies, as vain,
ineffective imaginings.56

In addition to the incredibly useful concept of repressive desublimation, Marcuses labors at the
intersection of Marxist political theory and Freudian psychoanalytic metapsychology yield several insights
that should not suffer the fate of the proverbial baby thrown out with the bathwater of his nave idealism.57
At a very basic, fundamental level, he rightfully insists that psychoanalysis, even as a private clinical
practice dealing with the intimacies of individual psychical suffering, cannot be easily and thoroughly
depoliticized; psychoanalysis isnt to be applied to politics insofar as analysis itself is, as both a theory
and a practice, shot through with the very stuff at stake in political processes.58 Furthermore, Marcuse
correctly recognizes that a Marxist employment of Freudian Metapsychology, in its confrontation with
changing conditions in the post-war Western world, demands that materialist approaches devote sustained
attention to the dimension of consciousness, that is, the subjective factor as the psychical structures
shaped by and shaping social, political, and economic frameworks:

I consider the reevaluation and determination of the subjective factor to be one of the most
decisive necessities of the present situation. The more we emphasize that the material,
technical, and scientic productive forces for a free society are in existence, the more we
are charged with liberating the consciousness of these realizable possibilities. For the
indoctrination of consciousness against these possibilities is the characteristic situation
and the subjective factor in existing society. I consider the development of consciousness,
work on the development of consciousness, if you like, this idealistic deviation, to be in
fact one of the chief tasks of materialism today, of revolutionary materialism. And if I
give such emphasis to needs and wants, it is meant in the sense of [] the subjective
factor.59

He continues:

Umbr(a) 75
 One of the tasks is to lay bare and liberate the type of man who wants revolution,
who must have revolution because otherwise he will fall apart. That is the subjective
factor, which today is more than a subjective factor. On the other hand, naturally, the
objective factor and this is the one place where I should like to make a correction is
organization. What I have called the total mobilization of the established society against
its own potentialities is today as strong and as effective as ever. On the one hand we nd
the absolute necessity of rst liberating consciousness, on the other we see ourselves
confronted by a concentration of power against which even the freest consciousness
appears ridiculous and impotent. The struggle on two fronts is more acute today than it
ever was. On the one hand the liberation of consciousness is necessary, on the other it is
necessary to feel out every possibility of a crack in the enormously concentrated power
structure of existing society. In the United States, for example, it has been possible to
have relatively free consciousness because it simply has no effect.60

Among the many issues raised in these passages, two are crucially important for the present discussion.
First, Marcuse implies that the key resource offered by psychoanalysis to Marxist dialectical materialism
is the delineation of a material libidinal economy (i.e., needs and wants as understood through
metapsychological drive theory) situated, so to speak, in subjectivity more than subjectivity itself (the
subjective factor, which today is more than a subjective factor). Second, despite Marcuses heady
optimism as regards the potentials for change presumed to lie hidden just below the surface of the
capitalist situation, he manages to be surprisingly frank about the barriers, obstacles, and resistances to
potentially revolutionary alterations of prevailing circumstances. For instance, one should note in passing
that his reections on the impotence of ideologically demystied consciousness in certain contexts has
become increasingly relevant in recent times.

Marcuse insists on the urgency of a consciousness-raising informed by a materialist appreciation

of the libidinal dynamics of psychical life and focused on arousing in individuals the need for transformation,
a need whose lack/suppression is identied as the principle impediment to radical change in advanced
capitalism.61 He simultaneously admits that, for a number of reasons, this still might not be enough to
bring about desired changes. As will be seen, whereas Freuds pervasive anti-utopianism is punctuated by
brief irtations with utopian sentiments and speculations, Marcuses sustained faith in the possibility of a
utopia-made-actual is shaken occasionally by moments in which he expresses deep skepticism about the
viability of his visions of the future.

Specically apropos the theme of utopia, the socio-political newness Marcuse impatiently awaits
is a novelty conceived of as entirely distinct from the past and the present. The realization of, as it were,
the utopia to end all utopias (i.e., that which makes what before seemed impossible not only possible,
but actual) requires a rupture with the already-owing currents of historical time.62 Marcuse states that
these historical possibilities must be conceived in forms that signify a break rather than a continuity with
previous history, its negation rather than its positive continuation, difference rather than progress. They
signify the liberation of a dimension of human existence this side of the material basis, the transformation
of needs.63 In the paragraph immediately after these lines, he adds:

It is precisely the continuity of the needs developed and satised in a repressive society
that reproduces this repressive society over and over again within the individuals
themselves. Individuals reproduce repressive society in their needs, which persist even
through revolution, and it is precisely this continuity which up to now has stood in the way
of the leap from quantity into the quality of a free society. This idea implies that human
needs have a historical character. All human needs, including sexuality, lie beyond the
animal world. They are historically determined and historically mutable. And the break
with the continuity of those needs that already carry repression within them, the leap
into qualitative difference, is not a mere invention but inheres in the development of the
productive forces themselves.64

Marcuses use of the word need in connection with psychoanalysis can too easily generate confusions.
Nonetheless, at least in this context, his distinction between the malleable, historicized needs of human
beings and the instinctually xed structures of other animals needs is in line with some of the most
basic tenets of analytic metapsychology (elsewhere, he notes that the plasticity of drives la Freudian
psychoanalysis prevents these libidinal mechanisms from being reduced to essentially unalterable
biological substrata).65 Marcuse observes that changing the objective domain of the political economy
without correlatively transforming the subjective sphere of the libidinal economy almost certainly will result
in a disappointing revolution-without-revolution. In other words, minus the latter sort of transformation, a
potentially different future is quickly reduced, upon arrival, to being nothing more than the proverbial old
wine in new bottles, a continuation of the same past patterns and problems. Psychoanalysis, according
to this version of Freudo-Marxism, justies the belief that it is possible to radically refashion the dreams
and fantasies of the body politic. Thanks to the historical variability of the structures of human motivation,
the impulses and urges of humanity, its needs and wants, are open to major qualitative (as opposed to
minor quantitative) alterations.

For Lacanian psychoanalysis, the newness of difference and the oldness of repetition inter-penetrate
one another at the level of the libidinal economy.66 Specically in relation to the present discussion, this
means that, through the inuences of drives and desires, there will always be (to paraphrase Creative
Writers and Day-Dreaming) a thread of wishful consistency stringing together past, present, and future.
Or, in Lacanese, there is the One (Y a dlUn), even when one-ness appears to be liquidated in rapidly
moving streams of changes. Freud and Lacan insist that relating to the future via libidinal mechanisms
invariably risks falsifying it through its reduction to illusory compensations for and resolutions of past
grievances. If this is the case, then, contra Marcuse, what a utopian politics needs is not new needs (as tied
to contentment, gratication, pleasure, satisfaction, and so on), but, rather, a break with needs altogether.67

Umbr(a) 77
Without such a break, political futurity becomes a sad stage on which the conicts and deadlocks of prior
history are interminably re-enacted. No matter how supercially radical the proposed rearrangements of
a society-to-come, aimed at the promise of a long-awaited happiness (qua jouissance expected), these
imaginary revolutions can never amount to anything more than the settling of prior complaints and debts.
These settlements inevitably generate further complaints and debts, demanding the formulation of yet
another roadmap (mapping out a road entirely continuous with the prior paths of history) toward one more
cycle through the vicious circle of resentment and reconciliation. As Lacan would claim, this false future,
receptacle of all fake utopias, is revolutionary solely in the celestial sense, namely, just one more rotation
along a tired trajectory that remains essentially unchanged.

In the question-and-answer session following his presentation of the lecture entitled The End
of Utopia, Marcuse confesses to being somewhat stumped by the problem of how his new needs (i.e.,
radically refashioned desires, wants, and so on) might emerge out of status quo states of affairs. He initially
articulates this difculty thus: How can we imagine these new concepts even arising here and now in
living human beings if the entire society is against such an emergence of new needs. This is the question
with which we have to deal.68 A few pages subsequent to posing his conundrum in this manner, Marcuse
further species the impasse to be faced here: For new, revolutionary needs to develop, the mechanisms
that reproduce the old needs must be abolished. In order for the mechanisms to be abolished, there must
rst be a need to abolish them. That is the circle in which we are placed, and I do not know how to get out
of it.69 Without pretending to have a solution in hand to this chicken-and-egg-style quandary regarding the
subjective and/or objective initiations of processes of transformation, Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis
poses an arguably more important problem neglected by Marcuse, a problem related to the change-
mitigating, future-annihilating powers of the libidinal economy outlined above: Is a modality of imagination
possible that wouldnt be constrained by and reducible to the inclinations, intentions, and investments
normally tethering dreams and fantasies to the coordinates of past and present? As Frederic Jameson
comments, if the sole type of imagination that exists is one conforming to empiricist epistemological
reections on this mental faculty (i.e., the imagination as limited to cut-and-paste operations utilizing
only the materials of retained memory-traces), then this [] spells the end [] of Utopia as a form []
afrming as it does that even our wildest imaginings are all collages of experience, constructs made up
of bits and pieces of the here and now.70 A non-reactionary utopia, a radically different situation venir
subtracted from the retributive logics of all politics of the past, really isnt even thinkable without a non-
empiricist imagination.

Perhaps the motto for a new utopian politics that truly struggles to rise to the particular challenges
revealed by psychoanalysis (challenges not sufciently grappled with by Marcusian Freudo-Marxism) should
be a precise inversion of the Locke-inspired slogan from the United States Declaration of Independence
promising life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That is to say, the possibility of utopia today depends
on death, necessity, and something other than the pursuit of happiness (or, the pursuit of something other
than happiness). Death signies the readiness to sacrice the safety and comfort of bio-political life,
the will to disregard or transcend the mere physical existence of animal-organisms. Necessity signies
the setting aside of hedonistic self-indulgence for the sake of disciplined commitments over-riding the
caprice of whim and fancy. Something other than happiness signies causes and values not dened
strictly as mere emollients to be applied to lingering socio-historical injuries actual and perceived, namely,
idea(l)s trumping the prioritization of contentment and well-being. The chance for the actualization of
anything resembling a genuine utopia (if there ever will be such a chance in the rst place) turns on the
re-actualization of these admittedly quite traditional guidelines for concrete action.

Taking to heart what psychoanalytic metapsychology has been shown to assert regarding the
libidinal economy, futurity, and utopianism, a deontological (qua non-consequentialist) practical philosophy,
an ethics and politics decoupled from considerations connected to the inclinations of the pleasure principle
(i.e., cost-benet calculations in light of hopes for anticipated outcomes), indeed has a future, a real future.
Additionally, if the space for imagining a novel no-place (or, more optimistically, a not-yet-place) is to be
cleared and held open, terrible violence must be done to ones cherished old wishes and day-dreams. In
his seminal 1911 paper Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning, Freud, building on
insights elaborated in such earlier texts as the Project for a Scientic Psychology and The Interpretation
of Dreams, clearly explains his crucial distinction between the pleasure principle and the reality principle:
the genesis of the latter out of the former involves the interruption of the (hallucinatory) gratications
and satisfactions of infantile auto-eroticism, with the sense of reality being born through experiences of
disappointment and frustration.71 Generally speaking, for Freud, stinging slaps in the face are needed to
awaken human beings from the slumber of fantasizing, a fantasizing that otherwise, left to itself, tends in
the direction of a kind of libidinal solipsism.

Through fortuitous collisions between a desire for something more than ones desires and the
surprise of specic events that provide a jarring, bracing blast from the unpredictable future, maybe an
imaginable and deployable framework for refreshing socio-political newness could come into being.
Smashing extant fantasmatic foundations allows for breaking away from unnecessary destinies usually
fating humanity to, as Lacan phrases it, a return to gloomy past. In the absence of such liberatory
masochism (as it might appropriately be called), it is hard not to see every attempt at sweeping
revolutionary changes succumbing to the fate of being subverted and spoiled by what Marcuse
terms a psychic Thermidor.72 The complicity of the dreams and fantasies of utopian imagining with
the libidinal economy (an economy containing fundamentally conservative tendencies) practically
guarantees perpetuating the existence of virulent counter-revolutionary psychical-political forces
tirelessly prepared for a backlash. Utopia isnt a matter of dreaming it begins with the end of dreaming.

Umbr(a) 79
1
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III: The
Psychoses, 1955-1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell
Grigg (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993),
234.
2
Oskar Pster, The Illusion of a Future: A Friendly
Disagreement with Prof. Sigmund Freud, ed. Paul Roazen,
trans. Susan Abrams, The International Journal of Psycho-
Analysis 74, no. 3 (1993): 557-579.
3
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud (hereafter S.E.), ed. and trans. James Strachey et al.
(London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), 21:53.
4
See Freud, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,
S.E. 14:287, and Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, S.E.
21:112-114.
5
See Freud, Why War? S.E. 22:215.
6
Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, S.E.
22:171.
7
See Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego
in Freuds Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis,
1954-1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli
(New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988), 69.
8
See ibid. See also Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan.
Book III: The Psychoses, 242, and Le Sminaire de Jacques
Lacan. Livre XVI: Dun Autre lautre, 1968-1969, ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 2006), 269.
9
See Freud, The Future of an Illusion, S.E. 21:49-50, 54-55.
10
See Freud, New Introductory Lectures, S.E. 22:214-215.
11
Plato, Republic, trans. G.M.A. Grube, rev. C.D.C. Reeve
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992), 147-148.
12
See Freud, Studies on Hysteria, S.E. 2:133; Freud, Letter
52, S.E. 1:233; Frued, Screen Memories, S.E. 3:322; and
Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, S.E. 5:573.
13
Adrian Johnston, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the
Splitting of the Drive (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
2005), xxx, 7-8, 9-10, 46, 218-219, 345.
14
See Freud, Creative Writers and Daydreaming, S.E. 9:146.
15
Ibid, 147-148.
16
Ibid, 148.
17
Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, S.E. 5:621. See
also Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in
Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1995), 207-208.
18
Freud, The Future of an Illusion, S.E. 21:30-31.
19
Ibid, 31.
20
John Forrester, The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud,
Lacan and Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), 90-91.
21
Ibid, 96.
22
See Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III, 243.
23
See Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre XVI, 238.
See also Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XVII:
The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller,
trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W.W. Norton and Company,
2007), 55.
24
Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XVII, 207.
25
This exchange between Lacan and Miller occurs in the
program broadcast on French state television, but doesnt
form part of the written version of this presentation originally
published by ditions du Seuil (1973).
26
Jacques Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre XIX:
Le savoir du psychanalyste (1971-1972), unpublished seminar,
4 November 1971.
Jacques Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre XIX:
27
ou pire (1971-1972), unpublished seminar, 21 June 1972.
28
Jacques Lacan, Television trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind
Krauss, and Annette Michelson, in Television/A Challenge to
the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec (New York
and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990), 46.
29
Jacques Lacan, Les complexes familiaux dans la formation
de lindividu: Essai danalyse dune fonction en psychologie,
in Autres crits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: ditions du
Seuil, 2001), 23-84; see 60-61.
30
Ibid, 44-45. See also Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan.
Book III, 321, and On a Question Prior to Any Possible
Treatment of Psychosis, in crits: The First Complete Edition
in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2006), 465-466, 479.
44
Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX: Encore,
1972-1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New
York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), 111-112.
See also Johnston, Time Driven, xxxiv-xxxv, 238-239, 318,
324-325.
45
Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I: Freuds
Papers on Technique, 1953-1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller,
trans. John Forrester (New York and London: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1988), 158.

31
See Lacan, Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de 46
Lacan, The Function and Field of Speech and Language in
lindividu, 61. Psychoanalysis, in crits, 249.

32
See Jacques Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as
47

V: Les formations de linconscient, 1957-1958, ed. Jacques- Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience, in crits, 81.
Alain Miller (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1998), 460-461.
48
Lacan, Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction
33
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII: du Je telle quelle nous est rvle dans lexprience
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, ed. Jacques-Alain psychanalytique, in crits (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1966), 100.
Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York and London: W.W.
Norton & Company, 1992), 225. 49
See Johnston, From the Spectacular Act to the Vanishing
Act: Badiou, iek, and the Politics of Lacanian Theory, in Did
34
See Johnston, Time Driven, xxxiv, 154-155, 244, 253-254. Somebody Say Ideology?: Slavoj iek in a Post-Ideological
Universe, ed. Fabio Vighi and Heiko Feldner (Basingstoke:
35
See Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre XVI, 267- Palgrave-Macmillan, forthcoming 2008).
268.
50
Lacan, The Mirror Stage, 78.
36
See ibid, 268-269, 271-272.
51
Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics,
37
See ibid, 276. and Utopia, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shierry M. Weber
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 39.
38
See ibid, 272, 273-274, 275.
52
See Marcuse, Five Lectures, 63.
39
See ibid, 269.
53
See ibid, 63-64. See also Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A
40
See Plato, Republic, 43-44. Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: Vintage Books,
1955), 5, 133-134, 136.
41
Some of this is foreshadowed by certain remarks contained
in the thirteenth seminar. See Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques 54
See Marcuse, Five Lectures, 64.
Lacan. Livre XIII: Lobjet de la psychanalyse (1965-1966),
unpublished seminar, 20 April 1966. See also Lacan, Le 55
See ibid.
Sminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre XVI, 269, 270-271.
56
See Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, 25-26, 75.
42
Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre XVI, 271.
57
See Marcuse, Five Lectures, 57-58. See also Marcuse, Eros
43
See ibid, 277, 327. and Civilization, 188-189, 190.

Umbr(a) 81
58
See Marcuse, Five Lectures, 44, 56, 60-61.

59
Ibid, 74.

60
Ibid, 74-75.

61
Ibid, 70.

62
See ibid, 62, 69.

63
Ibid, 65.

64
Ibid.

65
Marcuse, Five Lectures, 7.

66
See Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre XIV: La
logique du fantasme (1966-1967), unpublished seminar, 15
February 1967; Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre
XVI, 121, 126-127; Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan.
Book XVII, 45-46; Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan.
Livre XIX, 19 April 1972 and 10 May 1972; Lacan, Of Structure
as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject
Whatever, in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages
of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey
and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1970), 192; Johnston, Time Driven, 152-153, 189-
190, 193, 215, 252, 320; and Johnston, ieks Ontology: A
Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2008).

67
See Marcuse, Five Lectures, 77.

68
Ibid, 76.

69
Ibid, 80.

70
Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire
Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso,
2005), xiii.

71
See Freud, Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental
Functioning, S.E. 12:219.

72
Marcuse, Five Lectures, 38-39.
INHERITANCE LAW REFORM
& THEOLOGICAL ELECTION*
joseph jenkins

I begin with the proposition that questions of legal redress are ultimately
undecidable. By enforcing its own redress judgments, often by requiring money
payment to be made from one person to another, the law is said to make
something right that had previously somehow gone wrong. Clearly, such an
undertaking involves a certain reading and writing of history. Trial lawyers know,
without the benet of any literary theory at all, that their job is to make a certain
simple story seem like truth. That is what many in the humanities call, following
Walter Benjamin, catastrophic straight-line narrative: a closed form of writing that
renders unthinkable what is covered over through simplication.

Further proof about the undecidability of legal redress judgments can be

found in Stephen Kershnars 2002 article in Legal Theory, The Inheritance-Based
Claim to Reparations.1 There, Kershnar reacts to demands for reparations (that is,
redress) voiced on behalf of United States slavery victims. In addition to political
pressures from various quarters, requesting acknowledgements and nancial
responses from various government agencies, several class action suits were
led, and later consolidated, in the United States Federal Court, Northern District
of Illinois. The suits, brought by slave descendants, sought damages from named

Umbr(a) 87
insurance, tobacco, and transportation companies. One group of plaintiffs alleges that these companies
conspired with slave traders, and with others, to commit human rights atrocities and to prot illicitly
from the labor of slaves. The plaintiffs, by so framing the complaint, join deep-pocket defendants who
cannot respond with claims of governmental immunity.

Enslaving another person for life is arguably the most extreme injustice. Yet Kershnar deploys
the following arguments, among others, in assembling what he calls an overwhelming case against
reparations (267):

1. Slavery did not harm the descendants of slaves, because had there not been slavery
they would never have been born (244-51);
2. United States blacks are economically better off than descendants of blacks who
remained in Africa (258);
3. One would need to deduct, from any redress possibly owing to slave descendants, (a)
compensation to the victims of crimes (disproportionately) committed by United States
blacks and (b) repayment of United States welfare benets (disproportionately) paid to
blacks (258-63);
4. Differences in intelligence, sociocultural beliefs and values, crime rates, etc. between
the descendants of slaves and other U.S. populations are not necessarily the effects of
slavery and related oppression, because interracial adoption studies provide evidence
that there is a genetic explanation of interracial differences in intelligence (259-60);
5. It would be difcult to calculate and allocate any such reparations (259-61);
6. Finally, the United States government should not be liable for reparations because its
Constitution explicitly recognized slavery (263).

The point here is not to take issue with this article (although the temptation to do so is great). It
is rather to manifest, by relating actual debate, that human efforts at redress judgments are no match for
the complexities that will inevitably confront them. In addition to political biases, such as those that seem
to color the above deployed arguments, the problem remains: how far into history could a community
possibly probe, attempting to set right the wrongs to which its people are heirs?

Another way of expressing this undecidability is to say that decisions on legal redress come under
the sway of particular cultural values. Following Benjamin, one might say that the ultimate values of a
juridical order (and I want to specify that here I use the term juridical order in a broad sense that includes
the enforcing pulls, the conforming pressures, of cultural norms) can only be insisted upon, while the ideas
repressed by these values also continue to insist. These mutually constituting insistences delineate the
origins and constellations read by Benjamin. This is also what Giorgio Agamben expresses so elegantly
in his Homo Sacer and what Hardt and Negri elaborate as constituent power. All of these insistences
remind us to read and write history with impossible breadth of scope and impossible sensitivity to formal
problematics, although above all they remind us to read for potentialities as they press upon the actual.

One of the most important ways that literary theory currently speaks to law and politics is its
rehearsal and development of a certain post-Benjaminian technique: reading for the rising-and-falling
power of rhetorical tropes to constitute ultimate values. This is reading for constellations: the origins
are the change-over points, when a newly victorious trope, like vive la rpublique!, shines its light rst
and foremost on what seems natural to a certain juridical order. Note that the ultimate trope can claim
transcendence a kind of divine legitimacy or it can claim to be the fruit of reason (like la rpublique).
These may seem to be vastly different justications, but the structural function is much the same: both
pretend to grasp the whole from the prospect of a limit point. These limit points, whether justied divinely
or rationally, orient the most intimate desires of those who speak. Speaking takes its very place from within
the closed realms, the totalizations, such limit points imply. As Paul of Tarsus puts it in Romans 7: Yet, if
it had not been for the law, I should not have known sin.

One of the major points often made against the line of criticism I have just described is that it leads
to no action: if we believe that our values are skewed, that we are always under the sway of some trope
that seems ultimate but in fact is only temporarily compelling, then we may as well do nothing. If we have
learned anything from Hegel, however, we have learned that the negative can become concrete. The kind
of consensus we see now for Benjamin, a consensus evident at least in the humanities, could help that
concretization along.

The question I would like to address: if we can agree there are catastrophic effects in reading history
as straight-line narrative, then why can we not also agree that straight-line private property inheritance is
also catastrophic? If redress decisions in fact all decisions, including those attributing private property
status are always under the sway of an ultimate trope that is soon to be deposed, should the law not take
its own fallibility into account and endeavor to enforce its decisions for the shortest time possible?

This would mean laying to rest the idea that rights over things must be valid eternally. The granting
of such rights entails a decision as well; it is the converse of the civil or criminal judgment that deprives
one of rights. Consider the above redress issue, which presses through demands for slavery reparations.
What possible sacricial calculation could fully quell the insistences of slaverys victims and their progeny?
Yet, how much more tranquilly would these insistences die away if the property rights gained through such
wronging of others simply diminished with time by denition?

The distant ends of law should be dispensing with legal judgments and their remains. This Pauline
thought law as if not law can be accomplished without a violent apocalypse. If juridical ordering, and
perhaps meaning itself, requires that a limit point be imagined, why not imagine, as the ultimate law,
passing away or cancellation, not only of our bodies, but of the orders we invent? Today no order will
gently pass away unless private property is limited in time.

Umbr(a) 89
 Why does the state enforce a property owners Last Will and Testament? What is at stake? The
property owner could not do it alone, enforce his own Last Will after his death. There needs to be a kind
of pact, an agreement that those who remain alive will respect a Last Will. Even when someone dies
without writing a Will, the laws of intestate succession, which then take effect, are drafted with the aim of
distributing property as the deceased would have probably wanted it. Regardless of whether there is a
writing, the law imagines a Last Will and enforces it.

According to current United States law books, the Last Will of the property owner is enforced as a
means of motivating economic production. French legal commentators have disparaged this justication,
calling it le capitalisme acharn, capitalism out of control. The French see their own laws of succession,
stemming from a proposal by Mirabeau in 1791, as only partly written to motivate production. The French
law is also concerned, they say, with producing egalitarian families worthy of the French Republic. It
remains the case today that each person accepted as a member of a family in France usually the
children and surviving spouse is assured of a roughly equal inheritance share. This protection is called
the hereditary reserve. After the reserve, only one extra share is left to distribute by Last Will.

Franois Mauriacs novel The Vipers Tangle (Le noeud de vipers), written in the early 1930s, is
about a man whose passion in life is to deny his wife and children the inheritance that he thinks is all they
want of him. Of course that novel could not have been set in the United States, where there is no hereditary
reserve. In the United States it would have been easy to disinherit them at least from a legal point of
view. Written under a different inheritance law regime, the novel can give U.S. readers (and U.S. voters!)
occasion to consider the complicated tensions that may comprise Last Wills.

Mauriacs novel does this by presenting itself as a kind of extended testamentary writing. The book
consists mainly of the protagonists journal, begun as a letter to his wife. Louis and Isa, much estranged,
have been married for over forty years. The impetus for Louis writing is a secret and long-cherished goal:
that Isa should nd this letter, after Louis death, as the only piece of paper in a strongbox emptied of
property titles. This determined will to vengeance, however, cannot keep its focus through an extended
act of writing. As the pages proceed, the will to destroy both Isa and all their children and grand-children
(by denying them their property inheritance) comes to share place with the need to be better known to
(and appreciated by) the family he continues to regard subject to lapses as his enemy, as a nest of
dangerous snakes. This need is expressed in ts and starts, in sudden urges to erase the document, to
preserve it in parts, to burn it later and to limit who can read it.

This focus on writing and its fractures unintentional punctuations through which desiring bodies
can be read inhibits a problematic reading practice: it discourages reading for identication with a (full
and rich) protagonist or subject. The very habit of seeking identications aligns the reader with the subject
of intent, the subject of will, the subject of last will, including its theological resonances. Mauriacs Vipers
Tangle, by highlighting an act of testamentary writing (in a broader sense of that term), makes certain
bodily habits readable, including our more immediate subjection to bodily ows, wrackings, e-motions.
These bodily habits render holding rm for long to any conscious resolution impossible, despite the fact
that we may think ourselves the Subjects of Ultimate Wills.

Consider the paradox of the name Old Testament. A testament is written precisely to make
permanent the effectiveness of the words sealed therein. They are meant to be received by coming
generations as singular and irreplaceable, always immutably present and new not old but rather immune
to the vicissitudes of exchange and obsolescence. The portrayal of such words as the commandments
of a jealous god tremendously gures this intention to permanence. This binding, this bond, this belief is
most holy, that which is most scandalous to deny. Any critique of property inheritance confronts, through
persistent echoes of language, the sacred connotations of the very word Testament it contents not only
with the inertia of the status quo, but the scandal of tampering with a holy bond.

Somehow inheritance law critique must question the ways the subject of intent the subject of
Last Will we have long in-habited relates to the Will of the One and Only God, the One with the power of
Election. This is work at the intersection of religious studies, politics, law, and the humanities.

Many read Prospero in Shakespeares The Tempest as something like the opposite of The Vipers
Tangles weak father. Perhaps never was there a stronger writing of human last Will than Prosperos
virtuosic orchestrations. With the help of his somewhat hyperactive attorney Ariel Prospero undoes his
prior defeat and places his daughter in the line of succession, not only of his long-lost Milan but of Naples
as well.

Many, including the great Stephen Orgel, have approached this work through the seemingly evident
question of Prosperos renunciation. Orgel tell us Prospero did not renounce that much: he demands and
exacts his Dukedom from his traitorous brother, and then returns to worldly rule in Milan, and he secures
that rule through the Prince of Naples love for his daughter.2

But I would argue that Shakespeare did not place the question of the fathers love for his daughter
at the center of politics and at the center of colonial expansion merely to depict a clever political
trade. While the relevance of the family to dynastic politics is usually thought through male primogeniture,3
Shakespeare rather gives us a father, all but alone on an island with his nubile daughter, and paints politics
from there. Incestuous desire and constitutional law are both drawn from the same lines.

Note how Prosperos description of Caliban, whom he has accused of attempting to rape his
daughter, maintains an ambivalence between rst and third persons, between reference to someone else
and, perhaps, to his own excess:

Umbr(a) 91
 Prospero: A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost!
And as with age his body uglier grows,
So his mind cankers. I will plague them all,
Even to roaring.4

Here is the incestuous devil raging behind the mask of the nurturing father. If there is a right that Prospero
renounces, it is the right to let loose this devil. But what a strange thing to call a legal right! This would be
more a constitutive excess, something that cannot be renounced. It might be better read as a potential,
ever pressing on the actual order.

There is of course another type of mask presented in this play. After humiliating Ferdinand, Mirandas
suitor and the son of his enemy, Prospero calls forth a cast of spirits to enact the blessings of Juno and
Ceres, goddesses of the sky and earth, on the young pairs contract of true love (4.1.149). However,
this mask of benevolence, grateful acceptance and continuing moderation is, nally, unsustainable. At
the sign of sunburned sicklemen that is, men of his own (dying) age dancing with fresh nymphs
(4.1.150, 153), Prosperos determined image-projection suddenly starts and breaks. Now fallen into a kind
of passion / That works him strongly (4.1.159-60), Prospero no longer speaks of the vanished apparition
as his own creation. He speaks to Ferdinand hes a little shaken up, like Mark Rylances dysfunctional
sovereign or an unhinged Christopher Lloyd character:

Prospero: You do look, my son, in a moved sort,

As if you were dismayed; be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. [4.1.163-73.]

This famous speech talks of Ferdinands dismay, but speaks of its own. Prospero strains for
cheerfulness despite his own foundering. The revels are ended, the spirits are melted; this was not the
magicians design. The particular perspective of the aging male brought to Prosperos mind by the dance
of aging sicklemen has pierced through and deated the universalist pretensions of Prosperos mask.
The violence of particular bodily insistences exceeds even the rmest determinations to totalize a juridical
order.

Far from representing renunciation, Prospero gures the limits of the Will, even of a seemingly
masterful Will. The one who appears to have power to Elect the rulers, the property holders, of the coming
generation, is in fact performing a mask to hide his fatherly tears as he fades from view. That is, the place
taken by the power of discretion, the place of Sovereign Grace at the limits of the law, is a place of danger,
of potential eruption. What may seem benevolent is, in fact, a mask. Moreover, the aging-male pact that
enforces Last Wills which is what inheritance law still is today is a kind of group performance to mask
each particular fathers tears, and to mask the fury that ever might erupt from them.

How would the family and the juridical order be different if we took away the mask? What would
the father be like if stripped of the power of Election? How would he attract desire as he fades away? That
is the question. Suppose one could not give ones money away not only at the time of ones death but at
any time?

I believe a certain law and economics, aligned with this law-and-humanities reading, could
demonstrate the feasibility of such a political constitution: property as transferable only in return for goods
and services what common law calls adequate consideration. This would be an economy that lets
no one play the role of God the one who Elects to private property attribution, to freedom and takes
in return for this gesture of love and respect forced gestures, no matter how natural they have come
to appear. This would be good not only for the oppressed but for those who now aspire to be Electors
themselves. They too would be set free from a life of only counting zeroes, from trying not to see how
monstrous how machinic theyve become, while wondering deep down why this one and the next one
too, it seems! wants me only for my money.

The insight of psychoanalysis is that desire is constitutive of the subject. It is structured by

language, yes, but by language symptomatic of a cultural moment. Today, as the gap between rich and
poor stretches like a rubber band, it is the song of property that most inects our every word. And what
do the poor do while being oppressed? They look at movie stars every chance they get. The movie star,
the new ultimate trope, the pretty face of concentrated capital. We are the subjects of this sovereign trope,
the font of all measures in this cultural moment. Fascination with celebrities naturalizes a vertical politics in
which everyone but the Chosen Few is placed in the role of the humiliated fan not surprised to be made
destitute. Nor is Election to celebrity status consider the high Nielson ratings of American Idol irrelevant
to the themes of this essay.

If the lesson of Benjamin and Agamben is to read history for its potential, then we must read the
current moment for what it could be. This involves eyeing its most constitutive tropes which today scan
songs of property and theo-logic Election and examining what potentials they repress. Inheritance law
today a god-like Election right enforced by the state represses enormously. It is not only the human

Umbr(a) 93
being who is becoming devalued. Both the post-human and our dreams of open networks also depend on
the forms of inheritance law. With eternal world ownership as the beckoning limit of our legalized desire,
how can we think that calls not to overly privatize intellectual property will be heeded? Is it not more likely,
under the motivations of United States inheritance laws today, that exclusion of the public from artistic and
other traditions will tend toward similarly eternal temporalities? The forms in which technology develops
have long been affected by property incentives.

Along the same lines, but much more simply stated: how is it that, now, one hundred senators
can decide that money for public schools can wait? Suppose they knew that if they died, their own small
children would depend on those schools? And that their own money could not protect their children
from all the short-sighted decisions that they are now making: environmental depletion, hasty wars, rising
decits, law based on a standard of every man for himself.

Imagine the potentials that would be unlocked if property were to return to the polity, the state, at
the end of every owners life, with these funds to be placed in a trust spent only for the good of the coming
generation as a whole. Let that be politics most important question! And let discussion of that question
be freed from the now overwhelming temptation to save the self, with only those it Elects, and let others
be damned. The important thing is that this juridical order would be structured with an eye toward legal
temporalities: as open to the desires it represses which, nally, are the desires of the young to the new
and the strange.

This is hard to take, of course, as Prospero and Mauriacs Louis can easily show us. That does not
mean, however, that we should sit and watch while political power is privatized just in order to give aging
males the illusion that somebody loves them. Why not make them earn respect, by working for the good
of the public thing? Fame itself would change its colors under reformed inheritance law.5
*
This is a transcript of a keynote address delivered at Somewhere in Time: A Response to Reinhard, Santner, and
the Zentrum fr Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin, in Zizeks The Neighbor in Law and Literature 20.2 (2008), 159-
July 2005. The occasion for it was a conference entitled 176.
What Should Inheritance Law Be? That question was
debated over two days, often in politico-theological terms,
by law professors, literary theorists, and philosophers and
historians of religion from the United States and Germany. A
continuation of this debate appeared in/as a Special Issue
of Law and Literature, 20.2 (2008), published by the Cardozo
School of Law through U.C. Press.

1
Stephen Kershnar, The Inheritance-Based Claim to
Reparations in Legal Theory, 8.2 (2002), 243-267.

2
Stephen Orgel, Prosperos Wife in Representations, 8
(1984), 1-13.

3
See, for example, the great law historians Pollack and
Maitland on the question of partition of the realm - or not -
depending on practical considerations. Frederick Pollock and
Frederic William Maitland, The History of English Law Before
the Time of Edward I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1923). See especially Inheritance (Volume 2, Chapter VI, p.
240 et seq). Pollack and Maitland contend that primogeniture
is a not unnatural outcome of feudalism, because as a
general rule [it is] convenient for the lord that he should have
but one heir to deal with (265). However, a rule based on this
convenience must also contend with a very ancient and deep-
seated sense of what is right and just, i.e., that daughters
and later sons should also be given benets (ibid). Another
consideration is the power of a lords vassals compared with
that of the lord. For instance, a king may wish to see his most
powerful vassals divide their estates upon their deaths, so that
the king will not later be threatened by an undivided power.
According to Pollack and Maitland, such a threat did not exist
in England at the time of its development of feudal law: That
absolute and uncompromising form of primogeniture which
prevails in England belongs, not to feudalism in general, but to
a highly centralized feudalism, in which the king has not much
to fear from the power of his mightiest vassals, and is strong
enough to impose a law that in his eyes has many merits,
above all the great merit of simplicity (ibid).

4
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 4.1.211-16. Subsequent
references will appear parenthetically within the text.

5
For more specically Lacanian considerations concerning the
above suggested inheritance law reform, see Joseph Jenkins,

Umbr(a) 95
RESURRECTION WITHOUT DEATH?*
[notes on negativeity & truth in luthers & badious interpretations of paul]
felix ensslin

In the last decade, there has been a renaissance of readings of St. Paul. Owing
much to the haunting presence of Carl Schmitts Political Theology, writers as
different as Jacob Taubes, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj iek have
turned to the Apostle.1 Primarily, this turn involves a reading of the Epistles to
the Romans. It is interesting to note that the great schism in Western Christianity
was also instituted by a new Paulinian emphasis. However, none of the writers
mentioned above have taken up this heritage or questioned what their own
interest in Paul might have to do with the Reformation. It has been said that,
considered from a philosophical point of view, two lines of liation are instituted
with Paul. On the one hand, that which is best captured with the name of
political theology, a thought that in one way or another afrms a transcendent
aspect in the conceptualization of human beings, their truth and their politics.
Considered with such generality, it is independent of the judgement whether or
not this transcendent is one structured in and by immanence. The second line of
philosophical heritage descending from Paul is an ontological-existential reading,
usually associated with a lineage that goes through Augustine and Luther, to
Kierkegaard and Heidegger. I will state from the outset that the inquiry into Badiou
clearly associated with the rst line and Martin Luther a culprit in the

Umbr(a) 97
second line for all those who want to rid themselves of this ontologico-existential aspect of Paul owes
much to my conviction that any contemporary reading of Paulinianism that wants to avoid the usual
antinomies associated with it will have to read these two lines together. In what follows I will present a few
notes on Badious reading of Paul, setting them up along with a presentation of some aspects of what the
early Luther thought was signicant in the elaboration of his own Paulinian turn.

THE ASPECTS OF SUBJECTIVATION IN LUTHERS LECTURES ON ROMANS

The sum and intention of the Apostle in this letter is to destroy all justice and wisdom that is properly ones
own and to erect in our eyes sin and foolishness, which were not (i.e., of which we thought due to such
justice and wisdom that is properly ones own that they were not), in all their power and magnitude (i.e., to
lead us to acknowledge that they are present still and in great number and magnitude) to nally see that
we need Christ and his justice in order to truly destroy them.2

Luther begins his Lectures on Romans (1515-16) with a discussion of the destructive effects of
the annunciation of truth: omnem Iustitiam et sapientiam propriam destruere. What is destroyed is what
is proper to us, our own justice (the Jewish inheritance) and our own wisdom (that is, Greek philosophy).
It is not only of this destruction of what is properly ones own a transformation that immediately
demonstrates an essential aspect of the thought he develops during this period that Luther speaks.
He also afrms the effect which brings before our eyes and magnies [augere et magnicare] the sin and
stupidity, or foolishness, that were not, that did not exist [peccata atque insipientiam, que non erant]. Yet,
this afrmation is possible precisely because they do exist in a retrospective sense, once the destructive
effect against what is properly ones own is at work. Thus, what concerns us is to acknowledge this other
effect; the effect referred to here makes us acknowledge that these sins tarry, and certainly are great in
number and magnitude [facera ut agnoscantur stare esse magna et multa]. It is not the case then that sin
and stupidity will be destroyed alongside what is proper to us. On the contrary, they only rst appear in
such a way that they can even be acknowledged through destruction of what is properly ones own. But
there follows yet another step or aspect: if that which achieves acknowledgment or recognition through
destruction is itself to be truly destroyed [vere destruendis], we must also recognize that Christ and his
justice [justitia or, elsewhere, sapientia aliena] are necessary to this process. The apostolic work registers
a double heteronomy: that of the epistolary revelation and that of the real effectiveness that is carried in or
made possible by it. Thus, we are dealing in a literal sense with a kind of transcendentalism. The condition
of possibility for the vere destruere is the epistolary or apostolic word heard, but it is not identical with
it. The latter, true destruction is coextensive with an opus alienum, another kind of work (or efciency)
or truth.

From this twofold aspect of heteronomy it follows that Luther ascribes three aspects or stages
to Pauls intentions and summa. It remains an open question whether these are logically sequential,
temporally sequential, or are in fact only to be viewed as aspects, as questions of perspective. There
is the destruction of our own wisdom and justice, which opens the way to the knowledge of sin and
stupidity, which will in turn be just as much destroyed that is, not taken into account by the faith
in truth. In his book Broken Hegemonies, Rainer Schrmann has similarly distinguished between three
modes by means of which the subject in Luther can be classied in relation to that which is effective: rst,
as prior to the Word; then, in the face of the Word; and, last, in the Word. It should be apparent that,
in the introduction to the Lectures on Romans cited above, the rst condition is only indirectly referred to:
Peccata que non errant. For, to call things by their names, it is by means of the law that the subject is
brought in the face of the Word. This retroactive recognition we might also say positioning does
not only bring sin before the law, for it is also stare esse; that is, it tarries there. Before the law, by means
of a spatial and dividing experience, there emerges a temporal dimension that is, in turn, a foundation. The
nal term in Luthers summarizing sequence, to once again call things by their names, is the subject, which
appears through Christ, that is, through the Messiah and his justice, or in Schrmanns terminology, in
the Word.

These are not smooth transitions, and they are also not steps or activities that can in any way
constitute the intentionality of a subject. In contrast to mystical ascent, to the anagoge of the soul to the
unity of God, or to negative mystical practices that gradually set out the stages of creaturely life, there
is here no technique that can be learned, transmitted, and applied. What is transmitted is the word,
the annunciation, and this in itself is divided in a threefold manner. Firstly, by means of the retroactive
positioning of the condition before the Word, however this is to be imagined. (As silence, perhaps? Or as
unbroken rational unity, of capacity and the will, as Saint Augustine says when he writes about sexuality in
paradise?) Secondly, by means of the word as law. And thirdly, by means of the Evangelion. In anticipation,
we can emphasize the question whether the rst mode of the word might not only be understood as
retroactive positioning, but also as the locus of a break between the subject of the law and the subject
of truth. This is a ploy for those ears that are accustomed to the thinking of Badiou. The subject is rare,
Badiou says in Being and Event, precisely because it rst appears for him when there is truth. He would
as a consequence reject the formulation of a subject of the law. Astoundingly (and we should keep this
in mind later) in the Lectures on Romans, after stating that it is the opus alienum alone that leads to the
declaration of truth and self-knowledge, Luther also writes: Thus it is very rare that a man acknowledges
himself to be a sinner and believes it.3

ON THE NOMINALISM OF TRUE NAMES

What I am concerned with here is neither exegesis nor theology, but instead the following question:
which formal structure of sapientia aliena, of opus alienum or of other knowledge (these things are in a
certain sense synonymous) can be extrapolated from Luther, and what can this tell us or teach us today?
Luther cannot abolish the law, for he would then have to abolish the word, the only power that exists, from

Umbr(a) 99
the perspective of mankind, in the question of the determination of the subjects being. In spite of the
unquestionable frequency with which an anti-Jewish tendency appears in Luther, a Marcionian path was
not open to him. I would contend that the young Harnack is certainly mistaken in his wish to expel the Old
Testament from the Protestant canon, because this step had already been set out tendentiously in Luther
and has not yet been able to be fully realized, if only for historical reasons (encapsulated in the formula the
fate of the Reformation). He is mistaken, even if Taubes, too, very ambivalently points out that a tendency
in Luther would thus have been elaborated. Harnack is mistaken for reasons that also contradict Dominik
Finkeldes claim that Badious description of Paul would be better suited to Marcion. Finkelde derives
this claim from Taubess description of Marcion: The creator of heaven and earth pronounces himself
in the Old Testament and is the just God, not the evil God. And because he is just, he is not the father of
Jesus Christ.4 The supernumerary nature of grace in the situation of creation cannot accommodate the
idea of justice in the way in which it can be discerned here. Grace does not break down into categories
of justice. Marcion draws the conclusion that we have to think two transcendent sources or effective
principles that have nothing to do with one another. From this, Finkelde in turn draws the conclusion that:
As against the tendency of the Marcionians of the second century to radically break with the Hebraic
bible, Paul consciously puts value on the Jewish tradition and thereby on a truth-event that can precisely
not be comprehended in pure immanence.5

The opposite is true. It is precisely by means of the division of God into two Gods, both
transcendent and both entirely independent of one another, that Marcion closes off the possibility of
structurally understanding the place or the event of truth in such a way that it can be thought immanently,
even if it is an immanence that has to account for a transcendence. Only the unity of truth, which allows
one to tie the transcendent into an effect of immanence, allows for the comprehension of pure immanence.
Both Luther and Badiou are in this respect literally nominalists: what once is true will always be true [semel
est verum, semper est verum]. William Courtenay has described as follows the nominalist solution to the
question of how it can be that, through declensions in signication, a truth can be continuously attested
to:

The nominalist theory of enuntiabilia retained the immutability of signication over time.
Beneath the consignication of past and future tenses was the signication of a sempiternal
present. The sense of the afrmation of belief or the content of knowledge remains the
same regardless of the temporal relation of the knower to known, believer to event. Linking
the Aristotelian rule of anything that has taken place, it was always true to say it is or it
will be, with the grammatical theory of [] signication [] of an enuntiabile was made
timeless. The object of Gods knowledge is not an event or a propositional statement
about an event, but timeless truth to which those tense-differing statements attest.6

The revolution says: I am, I was, I will be. In order to clarify what is at stake here, we can think of Rosa
Luxemburgs dictum. Dicta is also another word for enuntiabilia in the scholastic-nominalist tradition.
 Badious subject of truth and Luthers subject in the word are both subjects that are bound up,
by means of faith, declaration, and delity without, for the time being, making any precise distinctions
between them with the truth of a dictum, an enuntiabile. In fact, they are because, by means of the
dicere of the dictum or the enunciation of the enuntiabile, they become again and again, more and more,
subjectivized. After referring to the epistle to the Philippians and the description of the name of Christ as
the name above all names (in our sense as enuntiabilium or dictum), Badiou claims that it is always in
relation to such names, and not to those of a nite range, belonging to particular languages and entities
(i.e., those that are found in and divided by declension into various cases), that the subject of a truth
lays claim. All true names are above every name. They let themselves be inected and declared, just as
mathematical symbolism does, in every language, according to every custom, and through the traversal
of all differences. Every name from which a truth proceeds is a name from before the Tower of Babel. But
it has to circulate in the tower.7

The simile of a place of issue which is older than the Tower of Babel is reminiscent of Luthers
polemic against the sapientia propria or the justitia propria, which precisely consists in clouding or obscuring
this place from before the Tower of Babel and mistaking what circulates in it for its own cause or truth. I
have already pointed out that Luther could not have abolished the law he also struggled, in an entirely
consistent fashion, against the Antinomians, just as Badiou speaks out against Marcion precisely
because it is simply a mode of the word. The Verbum that names above every name can thus be
understood as the vehicle that binds together the expression and that which it expresses, but also and
this explains the modes of the word as that which separates them by means of lex. Subjectivation does
not rest once it has been named and delity to this name has become possible. The fact that this becomes
possible is contingent. It depends only secondarily on hearing, primarily on the existence of the discourse

Umbr(a) 101
of the word with its constitutive gaps between the different modes: prior to, before, and in the word. We
can think here, in relation to this secondary condition of hearing, of Luthers dus ex auditu, but also of
the example at the end of Badious book on Paul, when he says that the dissemination of the truth of the
subject has nothing to do with the degree of education of the hearer. In both cases the effectiveness of
the hearing depends on the underlying efcacy of the Verbum in all its modes. What does it affect? A play
between names or shifts in subject positions relating to names as understood above: As there are in the
realm of the natural ve steps, i.e. non-being, becoming, being, action, and passion or in the terminology
of Aristotle: privation, matter, form, action, and passion so it is also in the realm of the spiritual: non-
being signies a thing without a name and mankind in sin.8 We should understand mankind in sin here
as referring to those men who suffer the effect of the word in the mode of the law; non-being is then an
effect of the constitution of the subject of the law. It is not the rare subject mentioned in the quotation
above, or it is this only formally, in itself, not yet in potentiality or faith. Luther continues: becoming
signies this mans justication, i.e., it signies the subject of the law en route to a name above all
names, becoming a subject of truth. This is important, for it would be a mistake to immediately afrm
becoming as the status of the subject of truth. Rather, it is the split between the subject of the law and
the subject of truth that is itself becoming. The quote continues: being signies this subjects justice,
action its practical behavior and life in justice, and passion its becoming complete and perfect. And
these ve are in human beings as if in permanent movement, or rather all of them except the primordial
non-being and the nal being.9 Both the primordial origin and the nal end are excluded here from the
sphere of human ascription. This should be understood as a brief response to the question of whether or
not Luther is to be understood as an apocalyptic thinker. The answer here is clearly no, because the nal
end to repeat is constitutively excluded from the description of what is present in human beings.
And further: because those three, i.e. becoming, being, action are permanently in movement between the
poles of non-being and passion, moving back and forth.10

Once again, it is precisely by means of the movement between these limit cases that primordial
origin and nal end are excluded, and it is precisely this anthropology of the early Luther that the Protestant
and, above all, Calvinist doctrine of predestination will once again forget, by re-substantializing the nal
cause, as the deus absconditus toward whom earthly labor and this-worldly asceticism is directed.
The middle three modes of becoming, being, and action pass on the path of becoming new from
the state of sin into the state of justice and thus get (and here we must listen carefully, for he replaces
becoming with non-being, that is, the rst of the three circulating subject positions with the excluded
primordially original situation) from non-being through becoming to being.11 What was the middle
of the rst circle becomes here the last of the circulating positions, namely being, esse. If this has
happened, then also the action is just. From this new being, which in truth is a non-being [Sed ab hoc ipso
esse nuovo, quod est verum non esse] it moves progressively through passion to another new being,
i.e., through becoming another it comes into a better being and from there on to yet another [alius eri, in
esse melius, et ab illo iterum in aliud].12
 Before I concentrate more on the question I have concerning Badiou and his interpreters, it will be
instructive to parallel the above citation with another from Badious Ethics: To be faithful to an event is to
move within the situation that this event has supplemented, by thinking [...] the situation according to the
event. [] An evental delity is a real break (both thought and practised) in the specic order within which
the event took place. I shall call truth (a truth) the real process of a delity to an event: that which this
delity produces in the situation.13 The real break here is what is brought in addition, the supplement. It
is not already there, it does not exist in a different manner as cause before it leads to the declaration, the
name, as the condition of delity. The misreading of Badiou as a Marcionist has its roots here. For the rare
subject, the real break is supposed to be not a negation of the situation, but a pure supplement, a cause
of an entirely different and unrelated order. I will argue that this is not possible and that Badiou afrms
this condition too abstractly through a misadaptation of Lacans thought. However, this does not make
Badiou a Marcionist. Rather, it calls for an adjustment of the place of the law in Badious reading of Paul,
an adjustment bringing him closer into line with the early Luther and with Lacan.

The translators of the German edition of Luthers works (Luther Deutsch, edited by Kurt Aland)
perhaps go too far in the direction of interpretation when they translate the sentence that follows the
above citation Quare verisime homo semper est in privatione as mankind [in the sense of a
human being in his or her being human] is in reality and truth incessantly in the state of being sublated
[Aufgehobenseins]. After all, they also previously translated the Aristotelian privation as non-being
[Nichtsein]. However, they are not entirely wrong even if it is noted by all those who wish to too quickly
turn a false Hegel back into a false Luther that the completed subject position originally opposed to non-
being, that is, suffering [passio] does not appear here. If non-being is identical with completion, then
this is not because of a terminus ad quem, an absoluteness understood as a nal substantial cause (this
is exactly the notion which marks Protestantisms own forgetfulness of its inception) but instead because
of a movement in the situation of order, under the assumption that, as Badiou says, God is not the
god of Being, is not Being.14 The terminus ad quem in the series that Luther had previously set out is
passio. The God who does not attain to movement in the situation is the God of passion, is dead. The
place of non-being (non esse and privatio) is doubled: as the place of being by means of movement
in the situation and as the God who makes this place possible, who makes possible, by means of his
non-being, his death, that in this place movement in the situation can take place. But the doubling of
God appears only as a doubling (or, to be exact, a tripling) of the modes of the word. It is this, a heritage
of the existential-ontological line of Paul readings, which is forgotten in the history of Protestantism as
much as by Badiou. In his interpretation of Paul, Badiou does not make this step of doubling, neither in a
Marcionist philosophy of historical adaptation, by claiming that a new truth supercedes an old truth, nor in
an existential-ontological or phenomenological doubling (tripling) of the word, as in front of the word
and in the word (and, retroactively, temporally before the word, the third mode). I do not wish to follow
this by measuring Luther and Badiou up against the authentic Paul. I want to ask is whether Luthers
interpretation despite the entirely different history that it has produced or to which it has contributed
cannot serve instead as a descriptive model of the way in which concrete universality or universal

Umbr(a) 103
singularity appears through and in the structure of an order or generic situation. And might not this
interpretation serve as such a model precisely because it does not deny the subject of truth its necessary
double (that is, the subject of law)?

BADIOUS ANTI-DIALECTICAL PAUL

For Badiou, in contrast, it is the non-dialectical and, indeed, antidialectical conception of the event that is
central. This is why he opposes himself so virulently to the idea that there could be a place with which
the event might have something to do. The locus of the event is for Badiou not the facticity of a place
that could, or indeed must, allow for the emergence of a sudden transformation, subversion, or turning;
it is, rather, the mathematical-ontological determination of a generic situation. Paradoxically, in excluding
death and negativity he also excludes the law; for it is the law, the letter, that kills. However, if it is true
that Badiou is also a nominalist in the sense outlined above, whereby the truth is not itself historical,
but only takes place historically then he can do away with the law as little as can Luther. He knows
this himself, and this is why he speaks of the caesura of the law: I shall maintain that Pauls position is
antidialectical, and that for it death is in no way the obligatory exercise of the negatives immanent power.
Grace, consequently, is not a moment of the Absolute. It is afrmation without preliminary negation; it is
what comes upon us in the caesura of the law. It is pure and simple encounter.15

Can this be true? If the law is one of two (or three) modes of the single word, which is in itself
complex but nonetheless immutabilis and this immutability is also Badious position as regards the
names of truth can we then abstract from its effect (i.e., that the letter kills) to such an extent that it can
be understood as a cut, a caesura, without negativity? Badiou himself rightly says: Pauls fundamental
thesis is that the law, and only the law, endows desire with an autonomy sufcient for the subject of this
desire, from the perspective of that autonomy, to come to occupy the place of the dead. The law is what
gives life to desire. But in so doing, it constrains the subject so that he wants to follow only the path of
death.16 If I understand him correctly, Badiou wants to claim here that this death is not something
negative, but instead the positivity of the drive in the register of the pleasure principle. He seems to take
over from Lacan the idea that sin [] is not desire as such, for if it were one would not understand its link
to the law and death. Sin is the life of desire as autonomy, as automatism.17

This is taken over from Lacan then, but I would claim falsely. Lacan counterposes tuch to
automaton, both considered as aspects of the signier in the mode of the law: once as restitution and a
second time as repetition. We can here translate tyche as the fate of the subject as it is determined by the
signier, and we can translate automaton as what succumbs to the pleasure-principle. The automaton
directs itself towards object a as object. Tyche produces the object a as cause and is repeated by it. We
might even say that there are two modes of knowledge: knowledge of the law and knowledge through the
law. They are separated by an abyss, just as death drive and eros are separated. This then is also true if
we consider that precisely as object a, nothingness is not nothing but always contains something of the
one beyond the possibility of symbolization. The real appears here as cause by way of the symbolic; the
imaginary restores itself and the generic situation as object. Badious formulation of this ambivalence
seems to hint that its further elaboration might have compelled him to assume another attitude with respect
to negativity: The law is required in order to unleash the automatic life of desire.18

We should remember here the opening lines of Luthers Lectures on Romans: the sins that were
not there [non erant] were nonetheless there, made recognizable through the law. Badiou continues: For
only the law xes the object of desire, binding desire to it, regardless of the subjects will.19 What Badiou
does not consider in all its implications (even if he rightly says that it is unmistakable here that the problem
of the unconscious comes into play) is that tyche, i.e., chance and fate, thorny insistence and impulse
to repetition, and automaton, i.e., abreaction by means of the xated object, are both the same and,
nonetheless, not the same: object a.

The tuch, which we have borrowed, as I told you last time, from Aristotle, who uses it
in his search for cause. We have translated it as the encounter with the real. The real is
beyond the automaton, the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs, by which
we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle. The real is that which always lies
behind the automaton, and it is quite obvious, throughout Freuds research, that it is this
that is the object of his concern.20

It is important to emphasize in our reections not only that automaton and tyche are to be
irreducibly thought together, but also that no transition from one object to the other is thinkable without
thinking the break between them as total. It is the death of the subject as automaton, of the subject of the
law, of that subject that counts the situation itself as one, the counting of counting, or, we might also
say, the counting of division. Badiou knows this too and thus turns against this kind of reection in order
to safeguard his stance against negativity:

I maintain that it is not the truth which is cause for that suffering of false plenitude that is
subjective anxiety (yes, or no, what you [the psychoanalysts] do, does its sense consist
in afrming that the truth of neurotic suffering is that of having the truth as cause?). A
truth is that indiscernible multiple whose nite approximation is supported by a subject,
such that its ideality to-come, nameless correlate of the naming of an event, is that on the
basis of which one can legitimately designate as subject the aleatory gure which, without
the indiscernible, would be no more than an incoherent sequence of encyclopaedic
determinants.21

In order to grasp the dimension of tyche, the encounter with the real as such, and thus as that which always
already lies behind the automaton even if only, like the later Lacan, in order to formalize it Badiou

Umbr(a) 105
would have to differentiate his polemic against remembrance or memory.22 It is clear what concerns him
here. He does not want only the name of the victim to circulate as truth, he does not want the imaginary
bond with the situation which is itself counted as one to be confused with truth. But he throws the baby
out with the bathwater, because by failing to distinguish between symbolic remembrance and imaginary
reminiscence he also has to exclude the cause that in fact leads to the break with the situation. An apostle
is neither a material witness, nor a memory.23

The aim of this critique is also perfectly true. However, we can and must distinguish between
two things: imaginary reminiscence and symbolic remembrance. This distinction allows us to recognize
that object-xated automatism is not the whole story: it is not because of some mystery concerning the
indestructibility of certain childhood desires [here one could add the fantasy of returning to a point before
the Word] that the laws of the unconscious determine analyzable symptoms. The subjects imaginary
shaping by his desires which are more or less xated or regressed in relation to the object is too
inadequate and partial to provide the key.24 So argues Lacan, in order to indicate that beyond xation, its
cause, or the aspect of object a as cause, remains to be thought. The necessary and sufcient reason
for the repetitive insistence of these desires in the transference and their permanent remembrance in
a signier that repression has appropriated that is, in which the repressed returns is found if one
accepts the idea that in these determinations the desire for recognition [here one could add what Badiou
terms the logic of identitarian singularity] dominates the desire that is to be recognized, preserving it as
such until it is recognized.25

Universalizable singularity lies in that desire that is to be recognized the question of the
subject, as Lacan says in Seminar II. This desire, this question, is universalizable as such. It is here that
we can locate the break with the identitarian singularity of the desire for recognition. And this break is
the negation of desire (read the genitive as both objective and subjective). It is against this background that
Badious distinction between identitarian singularity and universalizable singularity must be reread,
and in a certain sense against Badiou himself: On the other hand, neither can a truth procedure take root
in the element of identity. For if it is true that every truth erupts as singular, its singularity is immediately
universalizable. Universalizable singularity breaks necessarily with identitarian singularity.26 Badiou is
correct when he speaks out against identity as an anchor of truth, but he is mistaken when he excludes
in the same move the very question of identity, that is, the experience of its lack, of questionability per se.
This is the reason why we should not, as is typical, simply oppose the political-theological and existential-
ontological lines of interpretation that follow from Paul, but instead try to understand how they belong
together.

Translated by Howard Rouse

*
These notes were presented at the XXX. Romanistentag, the
annual conference of the German Association of Romance
Language Scholars, held in Vienna, September, 2007. I
have mostly retained the elements specic to the spoken
presentation, as the paper makes no claim to exhaust the
topics it tries to open up.
1
See, for example, Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains:
A Commentary on the Letter to Romans (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2005); Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The
Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003); Jacob Taubes, The Political
Theology of Paul (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003);
Slavoj iek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of
Christianity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). There also has been
renewed interest in the question of the Jewishness of Paul:
see, for example, E.P. Sanders, Paul: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
2
Summa et intencio Apostoli in ista epistola est omnem
iusticiam et sapienciam propriam destruere et peccata atque
insipienciam, que non erant (id es propter talem iusticiam
et sapienciam non esse putabantur) statuere, augere et
magnicare, id est docere, ut agnoscantur stare, multa et
magna esse, ac sic demum pro illis vere destruendis Cristum
et iusticiam eius nobis necessarios esse. Martin Luther, Martin
Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimarer Ausgabe),
Vol. 57 (Weimar: Herman Bhlaus Nachfolger, 1971), 5. The
translation is my own; for a translation, see Luthers Works,
Volume 25, Lectures on Romans (Glosses and Scholia), ed.
Hilton C. Oslwald and Jaroslav Pelikan, (Saint Louis: Concordia
Publishing House, 1972), 135: The chief purpose of this letter
is to break down, to pluck up, and to destroy all wisdom and
righteousness of the esh. This includes all the works which
in the eyes of people or even in our own eyes may be great
works. No matter whether these works are done with a sincere
heart and mind, this letter is to afrm and state and magnify
sin, no matter how much someone insists that it does not
exist, or that it was believed not to exist. I had only the Pauck
translation available, The Library of Christian Classics, Volume
XV, Luther: Lectures on Romans, ed. and trans. Wilhelm Pauck
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961), 3. The translation is
so fraught with Lutheranism as to be hardly usable: The
sum and substance of this letter is: to pull down, to pluck up,
and to destroy all wisdom and righteousness of the esh (i.e.,
of whatever importance they may be in the sight of men and
even in our own eyes), no matter how heartily and sincerely
they may be practiced, and to implant, establish, and make
large the reality of sin (however unconscious we may be of its
existence).
3
Deswegen ist es sehr selten, dass ein Mensch sich als
Snder anerkennt und glaubt. Martin Luther, Luther Deutsch:
die Werke Martin Luthers in neuer Auswahl fr die Gegenwart,
Band 1, ed. Kurt Aland (Stuttgart: Klotz, 1969), 133. I do not
have the Latin original available.
4
Dominik Finkelde, Politische Eschchatologie nach Paulus:
Badiou, Agamben, Zizek, Santner (Berlin: Turia + Kant, 2007),
37. My own translation.
5
Ibid.
6
William J. Courtenay, Capacity and Volition: A History of
the Distinction of Absolute and Ordained Power, (Bergamo:
Pierluigi Lubrina Editore, 1990), 47-48. See also note 22: Res
and articulus were sometimes given different meanings by
individual authors, making it difcult to place them precisely
within this debate. Since res was used variously to mean the
historic event, the object of faith, the article of faith, or
the content of the article as proposition, it could be used by
either side. Even the Nominalist position sometimes used
res for that underlying thing or unity that made the articles
of faith supra-temporal. Similarly, articulus could mean a
proposition or the event to which a proposition referred. [...]
A res theory (perhaps better described as an event theory)
removes temporality by making the object into a single thing
(incomplexum), or the event itself. The Nominalist form of the
enuntiabile theory removes temporality by afrming the unity of
meaning behind the complexum (Ibid, 58). What is essential is
that both Luther and Badiou are Nominalists, because for both
the truth is complex and only exists through names. But not
only in names: for there must be something real in the name
that guarantees unity for the subject (cf. the question of
transcendentalism).
7
Badiou, Saint Paul, 110.
8
Denn wie es im Bereich des Natrlichen fnf Stufen gibt:
(nmlich) Nichtsein, Werden, Sein, Ttigsein und Erleiden
oder in der Terminologie des Aristotles: Unvorhandenheit,
Stoff, Form, Wirken und Erleiden so auch im Bereich des
Geistes: Nichtsein bezeichnet eine Sache ohne Namen und
den Menschen in Snden. Luther, Luther Deutsch, 229.
9
Werden bezeichnet dessen Rechtfertigung. Sein
Umbr(a) 107
bezeichnet seine Gerechtigkeit; Wirken bezeichnet sein 24
Lacan, The Freudian Thing, in crits: The First Complete
Handeln und Leben in Gerechtigkeit, und Erleiden bezeichnet Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London:
sein Vollkommen- und Vollendetwerden. Und diese fnf sind W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 358-359.
beim Menschen gleichsam in stndiger Bewegung. Und
alle menschlichen Vorndlichkeiten bzw. alle bis auf das 25
Ibid, 359.
unranfngliche Nichtsein und das endgltige Sein. Ibid.
26
Badiou, Saint Paul, 11.
10
Denn die drei, nmlich Werden, Sein, Ttigsein bewegen
sich ja stndig zwischen den beiden (andern), nmlich
Nichtsein und Erleiden hin und her. Ibid, 229-230.

11
Gehen auf dem Wege der Neuwerdung vom Stadium der
Snde in das der Gerechtigkeit ber und (gelangen) somit vom
Nichtsein ber das Werden zum Sien. Ibid, 230.

12
Is dies geschehen, so ist auch sein Wirken gerecht. Von
diesem neuen Sein aber, das in Wahrheit ein Nichtsein ist,
gelangt er fortschreitend ber das Erleiden zu einem weiteren
neuen Sein, d.h. durch ein Anderswerden in ein besseres
Sein und won hier aus in ein weiteres. Ibid.

13
Badiou, Ethics: an Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans.
Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 41-42.

14
Badiou, Saint Paul, 47 (emphasis in original).

15
Ibid, 66.

16
Ibid, 79.

17
Ibid (emphasis in original).

18
Ibid.

19
Ibid (emphasis in original).

20
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book
XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,
ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York
and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981), 53-54 (my
emphasis).

Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London:

21

Continuum, 2005), 433.

22
See Badiou, Saint Paul, 44.

23
Ibid.
JUSTICE & EQUALITY:A POLITICAL DILEMMA?*
[pascal, plato, marx]
tienne balibar

The title of my text should not be misleading: I will certainly not defend the idea
that we should chose between the values designated by the names justice and
equality, which to me are inseparable (in this sense, I gladly inscribe myself
in a long tradition of republican and democratic thinkers who proclaim their
inseparability).1 But I do want to draw attention to the fact that their articulation
remains theoretically and practically problematic: the tighter the relationship we
establish between them the closer we get to advancing a denition of each term
through the mediation of the other the more this becomes the case. I want also
to suggest that inherent in this conceptual riddle is a methodological question that
is not without contemporary relevance, even if it may appear rather academic in its
formulation, namely, which point of view should have primacy: moral philosophy (to
which the idea of justice remains traditionally and dominantly attached) or political
philosophy (whose modern language has been crucially framed around the claim
of equality among citizens, albeit in a typical association with the claim of liberty)?
This is where the form of a dilemma could possibly emerge. Interestingly, the roles
in this dilemma are not distributed in advance. This is especially the case when we
introduce considerations of social structure, social hierarchies, and social welfare.
It appears that considerations of social justice and injustice are much needed,

Umbr(a) 111
not only to provide the moral background against which political institutions and procedures acquire their
political meaning but also to actually force the political to move from a purely formal to a substantial and
practical dimension. It appears that the issue of social equality equality among groups in the broad sense
and not only among individuals renders the typical conicts between opposite conceptions of justice
inescapable. This means that justice now appears, not only as a moral issue, but as a fully political one.
The idea of the political thus becomes at the same time intensied, complicated, even destabilized, by
any deep investigation of the tensions, choices, and antinomies involved in the association of justice with
equality. This idea has to take into account its internal other, of which moral issues are perhaps only
a symptom and index. Together with several contemporary philosophers, I suggest calling this internal
other the impolitical, rather than unpolitical, side of politics.2 I will inscribe my tentative remarks in this
perspective.

A preliminary remark: each of the concepts with which we are dealing (justice and equality, but
also correlative notions of order, rights, power, freedom, society, community, and so on) is profoundly
equivocal, that is, constantly shifting between different denitions that are not arbitrary, but that reect
practical necessities and constraints for which there is no nal procedure of simplication.3 To elaborate a
little on the title of a remarkable essay by Ranabir Samaddar, from which I draw much of my inspiration here,
this equivocity brings to our attention the fact that there is not only a game of justice, but also several
competing language games of justice, heterogeneous but interfering.4 And behind the multiplicity and
tension of these language games lies the fact that justice and equality are irrevocably and essentially
contested concepts.5 It is not only that this conictual character built into the very denition of the
notions at stake here gives them a polemical character. Nor are we only, therefore, permanently confronted
with the opposition between antagonistic denitions of justice and equality, none of which would have
the capacity to impose itself in an absolute manner, either from a logical, moral, or political point of view.
This means that we are bound to make choices, to hold a partisan discourse and all the more so if we
seek universality and generality. There is yet a more disturbing effect: although we are not able to reconcile
all the different points of view concerning justice and equality (because they are in fact incompatible), we
are also not able to eliminate any of them; we must constantly face the return of repressed denitions from
within our chosen point of view. This double bind situation can be found in every classical theory of
justice or theory of equality. I take it to be a crucial aspect of any critical discourse on moral and political
conceptualizations of justice and equality not to ignore this discursive constraint, but on the contrary to
consciously acknowledge it and elaborate from it.

In what follows, I will recall with the help of some classical references what I consider to be three
open speculative questions that for centuries have dominated and continue to dominate discussions
about justice. They concern the relationships of justice and law, justice and subjectivity, and justice and
conict. I leave it to you to decide if it is still worth reading Plato, Pascal, and some others.

I rst have to acknowledge that my references are entirely Western. Indeed, I suspect that other
references could and should also be considered. To do so might produce signicant changes in the ways
in which we draw the guiding lines of our discussions on moral and political issues, thereby increasing
alternatives and diversifying the possibilities for analytical distinctions. Hopefully this admission will be
granted more and more in the near future. I am not particularly proud of my own limitations in this respect,
but I offer, as a simple proof of honesty, my pledge not to make assertions about what I in fact know only
supercially.

ONE

My rst reference, concerning the relationship of justice and law, I draw from a famous, albeit enigmatic,
phrase in Pascal: Et ainsi ne pouvant faire que ce qui est juste ft fort, on a fait que ce qui est fort ft
juste (And so, unable to bring it about that what is just should be strong, we have made the strong just).6
This is a provocative formulation, the full understanding of which depends on a reconstruction of the
complete apologetic project of Pascal (but which nevertheless has its own specic intention). To be sure,
it encompasses a reection on the legacies of Augustine, Machiavelli, and Hobbes. It is decidedly anti-
Platonic. In fact, there are two ways of understanding it: one that I call weak in the logical sense (which
is favored by many critical theorists, particularly Marxists), the other that I call strong, which I nd much
more relevant for our debates, but which poses more difcult problems.7

The weak understanding goes something like this: we live in a world which is both a world of
injustices and of appearances, therefore a world of inverted values with respect to authentic morality (likely
inaccessible through human actions, if they are not inspired by Gods grace). In this world, following the
ancient motto, what holds true is summum ius, summa injuria. This means that nowhere can the claim of
justice or the exigency of a just order of things be realized, either because justice lacks force, or nds itself
before powerful forces obstacles that prevent it from winning a victory, that have the capacity to reverse
it and to appropriate its language. Conversely, no force or power, however materially overwhelming, can
remain dominant without legitimacy, without justifying itself, without appearing to the dominated (and
perhaps to itself) as the incarnation of justice. Therefore, force not only has to claim that it embodies
and establishes justice, but it has to dene justice in such terms so as to appear as its instrument and
embodiment. In modern terms such a reversal of the just order of justice and force can be called false
consciousness or an ideology-covering domination.8 Let us note in passing that, from a critical point
of view, it is always useful to have a powerfully rhetorical therefore short and brutal expression of this
essential aspect of the logic of domination.

This remains a weak reading compared with another one. I understand it like this. First, for justice
as such to be endowed with force or power, or for the just to also be the strong (politically, socially,
ideologically, or, as Bruno Clment would add, rhetorically) would represent exactly the impossible.
We can also understand this in the following way: it is precisely this element of impossibility that will

Umbr(a) 113
never be realized as such, either in the realm of politics or in relations of power, but that will nevertheless
keep haunting them, that will not be eliminated from them. Second, or conversely, for what Pascal calls
force probably less an anarchic or brutal force than the Hobbesian sovereigns monopoly of legitimate
violence to be or become just, therefore establishing or imposing justice among men, within society, this
is possible this is the possible. In other words, this is the political, understood as a challenge, a practical
project, and a risk. So, the formula suggests that the implementation of justice cannot be thought as
deriving purely from its own idea, but can be envisaged and attempted through the mediation of its own
opposite, of what immediately contradicts it; namely, power in the broadest sense. But this attempt is,
by its very nature, risky; it is in a sense a wager, a wager in which the odds are perhaps overwhelmingly
against the initial project.

With this description of a more realistic understanding of Pascals phrase which is also a more
dialectical one we can immediately associate two classical questions that form its correlatives. The
rst question concerns the negative side of every endeavor that seeks justice by means of strength or
empowerment. Whatever the nature of this strength its means, forms of organization, and so on the
just individual who seeks justice for himself and others, or the victim of injustice who seek redress and
the establishment of a just order (and therefore the destruction of the causes of injustice) must mobilize
force, i.e., he must wage force against force even the force of weakness. But what kind of force
could the impossible force of justice be? Which kind does not, sooner or later, reproduce the injustice it
attacks, or create, symmetrically, another injustice? Which force of justice remains just?

The second question is best understood in Hobbesian terms (which continue to govern the
construction of our States and legal systems, especially inasmuch as they are inseparable from a judiciary
institution): How can force become just, that is, an institutionalization of justice? This is, as we know,
the problem of the institution of Law. To institutionalize justice or to embody it in institutions (even if
this involves limitations, risks, and contradictions) is to make it Law. In a tradition that runs at least from
Hobbes to Kelsen and that is crucial for the establishment of the Republican State (also called the rule
of Law), Law is best dened in terms of a transcendental synthesis of force and justice. The Pascalian
formula seems to suggest that this synthesis can only be effective if it begins on the side of power (e.g.,
as a transformation of the institution of power or its relations) and that the life and history of power, which
organizes itself in the form of Law (a rule of Law, a legal system, a constitution) is governed by a dialectics
of relationships, whose internal principle of legitimacy is justice. Ultimately, we arrive at the idea that
the internal or hidden weak point of any institution of force is its principle of legitimacy, its pretension to
realizing and embodying justice. The stronger, the weaker.

We could compare to this Pascalian problematic, which I have but evoked here, but which I insist
is ineliminable from our debates on justice as a political issue, many parallel or antithetic discourses. I will
point to two of them.
 Let us rst remember Machiavelli in particular, one aspect of his thought which has been particularly
inuential for contemporary neo-republican and democratic theories, which, in the post-68 era, combined
a post-totalitarian reection on the immanent perversions of revolutionary conquests of power and (more
positively) a phenomenology of new social movements, which aimed not so much at conquering power
as democratizing existing institutions and pushing the State towards its own democratization. I am thinking
in particular of Hannah Arendt, Claude Lefort, and Jacques Rancire. Machiavellis proposition, expressed
in the rst chapters of the Discourses on Livy, states that in class societies, the objective of the dominant
classes is to keep their power and increase it continuously, thereby oppressing the dominated masses.
On the contrary, the objective of the masses is simply not to be dominated; it is not to conquer power or
reverse the relationship in a symmetric manner, to become dominant in turn, but to neutralize the dominant
will to power. The consequences of such negative representations of the political quest for justice, whose
relative success in the history of Republics Machiavelli would credit for their prosperity and stability, are,
as we know, far reaching, perhaps more so today than ever.

Another discourse that I believe can be fruitfully compared (I am not saying identied) with Pascals
question is to be found in Ranabir Samaddars essay on the game of justice to which I have already alluded.
Samaddar derives from his reading of Benjamin and Derrida a general formulation of justice as being in
excess over law, both in the sense that it demands more than legal changes or settlements (it demands
practices, modes of life) and that it cannot, accordingly, be expressed in legal terms and administered
as an object or a domain of conictual interests, in need of mediation by the legal and judiciary machine.
The legal world produces the subject of justice, yet the justice-seeking subject while caught up in the
justice game seeks more than a legal avenue. Inasmuch as justice is located in law yet exceeds law, the
justice-seeking subject too combines in its subject-hood the reliance on law yet the dialogic capacity to
look for other avenues of justice. The political complementarities and oppositions are reproduced in the
world of justice.9 But that idea, which I share and nd illuminating, can itself be interpreted and applied
in two different ways, with two different accents. On the one hand, it can be interpreted as saying (and
perhaps this is truest to the Derridian inspiration) that the institution of justice will forever remain beyond
the reach of legal structures, especially constitutional apparatuses that need to retranslate the claims
of justice-seeking subjects into the preestablished language of the Law, in order to provide what they
perceive as fair settlements of conicts. This, as we know, is a procedure that extends a veil of ignorance
over many popular ways of life and actual practices if it does not immediately deem them unacceptable.
So, the Law and purely legal procedures will appear defective, if not counterproductive, from the point
of view of justice. On the other hand, it can also be interpreted in a more dialectical way, whereby justice
appears as the internal lacuna or void of Law and the legal system, where the latter is seen as a historical
institution moving along a contingent path toward democratization or the constitutionalization of rights.
Therefore, justice is the name to be associated with practices, vindications, protests, claims of the very
insufciency of law, its contradictory character, both from the point of view of universality and from the
point of view of equity, i.e., of the care of singular persons. This in turn produces uneasiness in the strong
sense, and keeps Law from the possibility of appearing perfect or achieved, even in its basic principles.

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It seems to me that, in his presentation of this internal dialectics, which focuses in a very detailed manner
on the conict between antagonistic ways of taking care of justice in a post-colonial context, Samaddar
in fact already insists on the intrinsic link between justice and equality, or between justice, equality, and
capability (which is a particularly concrete form of liberty), inasmuch as he indicates that the essential
difference between the legal administration of justice and the demands on the side of the powerless,
aiming at minimal justice, resides in the opposition between a unilateral and a reciprocal (or dialogic) kind
of game. Reciprocity of obligations, that is, the power to obtain reciprocity in the relationship between a
State apparatus and the language of ordinary citizens, is a strong political concept of equality based on
social experiences.

TWO

Let me now evoke a second reference, which I have tried not to bring in immediately, but which we know
is inevitable: Plato. In a sense, every theory of justice (in the Western tradition at least) has been a rewriting
of Platos Republic, or perhaps I should say: any theory of justice that is not a rewriting of the Republic, or
that does not look for an alternate formulation of the questions it has raised, remains incomplete. This was
not easily recognized at a time, still recent, when the history of political philosophy was dominated by two
currents: on one side, by historicist and evolutionist representations that attached Platos philosophy to the
supposedly archaic universe of the Greek polis, and to a reactionary position within this archaic system of
references, and, on the other side, by axiomatic reconstructions of the issue of justice that simultaneously
took for granted the association of justice and equality that is, ruled out the idea that justice could
reside in the absolute negation of egalitarianism and immediately subjected the issue of equality to
individualistic or utilitarian premises. This is clearly no longer the case today. I said that the Platonic
discourse on justice is still towering over Western or Western-oriented debates in political philosophy, but,
as we know, there is something disturbing and unclear in this respect, which has to do with the allegedly
Oriental elements in Platos thought. These range from his defense of the idea of caste in general, to the
kind of eschatology that forms an intrinsic part of his reection on the nature of the relationship between
individual and group, and between theory and practice. But this allegation also testies to the completely
inadequate representations of the boundaries and supposed incompatibilities between East and West,
which themselves are very Western ideas. I leave this question open for another discussion.

Platos philosophy, as we know, strongly orients the discussion on justice in many different,
controversial, but also exciting ways in many respects, later philosophers have had to propose variations,
transpositions, or replies to Plato, from Aristotle to Rousseau, from Hegel to Habermas. I will recall three
obvious ones. However, I will also suggest that there is a fourth one, a supplement, if you like, which for
us will be the most important insofar as it ties the other three together.

The rst reason for Platos lasting importance is his radical critique of justice as equality, which
in modern times became an obsession for those who wanted to defend an alternative idea of justice as
equality, or equality as the absolute prerequisite of justice so that they had to refute Platos catastrophic
vision of the effects of equality as well as his understanding of the content of this term the most interesting
among them being those who, like Rousseau, tried to propose what we might call a Platonic reversal of
Plato on this point. But this is an innite chain, since we should not forget that Plato already expressed
his own critique in terms of a refutation. Not only a refutation of the dominant ideas or ideology of the
democratic regime of his own city, which he held responsible for the worst catastrophes and injustices
(to begin with, the trial against Socrates and philosophy), but a refutation of the contemporary discourse
of the Sophists which, in many respects, was already a complete justication, from a universalistic point
of view, of equaliberty as a civic principle. Platos constant aim, as we see developed in Books VIII and
IX of The Republic, was to identify the position of those Sophists who, in the name of nature (phusis),
advocated tyranny, with that of others who, in the name of convention or the law (nomos), advocated
isonomia, i.e., equal liberty (which he translates as democracy) in order to show that the two regimes
are in fact one and the same or are continuously passing into one another, since their principle is the
same: the absolutization of individual desire and the equivalence of all opinions or tastes. According to
Plato, it is above all equality that destroys justice, therefore justice has to establish its rule on inequality,
except that (as testied by the importance and the politically subversive function of dialogue) it should be
a kind of inequality emerging through the mediation of equality itself, or recognized from inside equality and
therefore associated with merit and not with custom or status. A disturbing idea, which he pushes to its
extreme consequences and mobilizes against many of the inegalitarian convictions of his own society.

The second reason for Platos importance is his radical holism, or anti-individualism, in that he
continually asserts the primacy of the whole over its elements or parts. As we know, this axiom leads to
dening justice, in the rst instance, as a harmonious relationship among the classes (or castes, since
they should become hereditary) that compose the society and as a mirroring of this structure, which is said
to be exhibited in big letters, in the political institutions of the (ideal) city. There exists a corresponding
harmonious relationship between the constitutive parts of the individual soul (which, with the help of
Freud, we could also call psychic agencies or instances). According to Plato, there are three such agencies
within the human soul: a rational agency, a desiring agency, and, in the middle, acting as a bilateral
mediator, a passionate agency, a capacity to project ones will onto an other object, to react to another
individuals behavior. All this is extremely important because it amounts to thinking justice in terms of order
and, conversely, injustice in terms of disorder.10 Plato not only provides a denition of order that is general
enough to encompass many variations and be translated into various institutional patterns; he also makes
three statements from which it will prove extremely difcult to depart:

(1) The relationship between justice and injustice is one of order versus disorder. Therefore,
a critique of what presents itself as order can only escape the reproach of admitting
disorder by demonstrating its capacity to bring about a superior order, a genuine order,
or an order that is not only apparent, but real. All of Hegel and some of Marx are here

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 already.

(2) What makes injustice unacceptable and unbearable is not or not only the suffering
that it causes, but also the disorder that it produces. Or, if you like, suffering itself is an
aspect of disorder, and as a consequence it is unthinkable that a claim of justice a
demand for compensation and redress for injustice or a revolution against injustice
take the form of a demand for disorder as such. Disorder is ultimately what has to be
avoided at all costs. But we may indeed admit that the denition of what will be deemed
disorder, or anarchy, is a historically and politically volatile matter, completely subject to
political debate and choice. This is where Platos own (sometimes hysterically inected)
antidemocratic ideology enters into play.11

(3) This leads to a criterion that is provided repeatedly in the text: the criterion of conict,
or, more precisely, civil war. Following a formulation concerning dissent (stasis), which is
crucial for the understanding of Greek politics, Plato describes civil war as the emergence
of two nations within the nation, two cities within the city, ghting each other as if they
were enemies, and perhaps worse than that, destroying the possibility for the whole, or
the common good, to prevail in the end.12 Civil war, in this sense, is perhaps not injustice
as such, but derives immediately from it, reproduces it indenitely, and therefore imposes
its counterpart. Consensus, at some basic or transcendental level, is the other name of
justice. No consensus without justice, no justice without consensus or its possibility.
Arendt, who was no great friend of Plato, fully endorses this thesis.13 And Habermas, with
his notion of procedural justice based on the primacy of the dialogic function, retrieves
the same idea in a manner adapted to his conceptualization of the liberal public sphere.
In other words, the realization of justice through conict is perhaps not unacceptable it
is perhaps even inevitable, realistic and moral at the same time but the idea of justice as
conict (attributed to Heraclitus) is absurd, nihilistic.14 Who escapes this absurd nihilism?
Do we? In a moment I will move to a discourse of social conict (referring in particular to
Marx) which might invert that position and which will have therefore to entirely change,
at a metatheoretical level, the terms of the relationship between whole, parts, conict,
order, and disorder, and not simply refute the (antidemocratic) political consequences
derived by Plato from his own premises.

The third reason for Platos importance lies in his idealism, or literally speaking, in his denition
of justice as an Idea. We know that what characterizes the Idea (or form, eidos) in Plato is that it forms
a model of reality more real than reality itself (or through which reality cannot but be measured, i.e.,
understood, produced, or transformed). In other words, justice is transcendent, and it is this transcendence
that commands a certain relationship of theory to practice: a logical anteriority of theory, a subordination of
practice, and above all (again) a relationship of inequality. Practice can approximate theory, or the model,
but it can never replace it, become indiscernible from it, or become fully adequate to it. This ontological
relationship of immanence versus transcendence, nitude versus innity, conditioned or conditional versus
unconditional, has been almost entirely removed from modern epistemology and technology not to
speak of the implicit ontology of mercantile and consumer society, which is ofcially based on an exact
reversal of this thesis. But, on the other hand, it is almost inexpugnable from politics, and I would gladly
say from revolutionary politics, in the broad sense, i.e., in the sense of changing the word transforming
the situation, conditions, structures, or dispositions embodying injustice, be they personal or impersonal.15
Reformists might ignore the notion of the transcendence of the model that practice only approximates,
but only at the cost of at some point admitting that they change nothing, nothing that matters, nothing
that is not reversible. Revolutionaries in the broad sense can hardly be absolute empiricist-materialists-
pragmatists or anti-Platonists in that sense. Marxs famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach notwithstanding
Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it16 in
order to change, one needs a model, however minimal. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Marx tried
to avoid the term justice itself, though he certainly could not completely avoid the idea: communism is
an idea, and it is even in a sense an idea of order.17 If you want to escape this ontological constraint, you
have to suppose that justice is not an idea, but a necessary tendency within (or the empirical development
of) history. You fall from Plato into Hegel, at the risk of making practice itself a superuous ction. As we
know, Marx could never resign himself to such teleological absolutism, and for good reason: he remained
an activist, in both senses of the term, and therefore an idealist.

Another philosophical alternative lies in the performative gesture that, on the one hand, refers
to the distance that has to be lled between the model and the effort, moral and/or political (in short,
practical) to approximate its order, fulll the exigencies of its internal justice, and, on the other hand, denies
the possibility of identifying the content the representational or ontological substance of the model in a
particular way. This therefore suggests that the movement toward the model is simultaneously an effort to
realize it and a questioning of its inadequate or mystifying representations. As we know, this gesture has its
roots in Plato which shows the extent to which he still awaits our critiques and objections from afar who
redoubles the notion of justice as harmonious order with an Idea of the Good in itself, of the True Good,
which lies beyond justice, therefore beyond any knowledge of its essence. Perhaps there is something of
this in Marx, at least negatively, whenever he refuses to dene communism or the end of history, except
in negative terms, as classless society. Above all this is the kind of gesture that we nd in Derrida (for
instance, in Force of Law and Specters of Marx), who in my opinion derives it from a radical interpretation
of the Kantian categorical imperative as unconditional responsibility toward a justice that is always other
than all its nite (constructed, constituted) representations. If we had time, we might return to Plato here to
read him from this point of view. Platos model of social justice is an amazing combination of revolutionary
utopia and conservative elitism or aristocratism, both converging in his critique of democracy (which, it
must be said, is practically unrivalled and has therefore been continually repeated). In a sense, he is the
rst and the arch revolutionary conservative.18 But there is an element in Plato that reopens the question
of the model and makes it an innite question, one which therefore continues to inhabit discussions of the

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structure or systematicity of justice.

In spite of all that, which is certainly crucial, I believe that the reason why our reection on justice
and equality however polemically, however conictually permanently owes a question to Plato remains
to be said. It concerns subjectivity, or the implication of the subject in the structure (or model) of justice.
Or, better said, it concerns the impossibility of isolating the denitive or essential underside of justice
from an understanding of the process of subjectivation that forms an intrinsic part of and condition for the
realization of justice itself.

I borrow a modern, even a postmodern, terminology that I think is perfectly acceptable here,
precisely because Plato is pre-modern, i.e., because there is no idea in his philosophy of a given subject as
an originary reference or invariant element (either as a living individual or as a point of moral responsibility).
This is not to say that there is in him no idea of subjectivity, whether as interiority, as reection, or as the
power to frame the world. But nothing is given. Or, if you like, what is given is a complex system of
forces, tendencies, capacities, virtualities, which have to combine in one way or another, orienting their
combination in one or another direction to produce a different kind of self.19 It is interesting to compare
this with its Aristotelian transformation and, I would say, rationalization, itself also expressed in terms
of the importance of the educational process, or the education for justice, which basically takes it
for granted that the various parts of the Soul (vegetative, sensitive/moving, and intellectual) form
an always already xed, natural hierarchy, anchored in the nality of Life. But Aristotle and modern
Aristotelians think that the accomplishment of just actions, individual and collective, requires a certain
disposition (hexis) of the individual, a certain quality or virtue. This disposition should, conversely, be
formed, prepared, and embodied in individuality itself, so that the realization of justice becomes more
likely, itself a natural consequence. But the just man or good citizen remains a virtuous voluntary
instrument of the realization of an objective order, of a just measure (for example the just distribution of
goods), which can be dened outside of and prior to his action. In Plato, however, we have a complete
reciprocity and interdependency between the subjective and the objective. The constitution of justice is,
from one point of view, nothing other than the constitution, formation, or recognition of the just man. From
another point of view psychological or anthropological the constitution of the just man is nothing other
than the emergence of the just order. Neither of these two positions can exist or even be thought apart
from the other. The subject-object relationship is a vanishing distinction, continually expressed in order to
become dialectically suppressed. This also means that to transform the social structure is to transform the
Human, to change Human Nature, and, conversely, to move either from justice to injustice (in the sense
of degeneracy) or from injustice to justice (in the sense of perfection). This is the guiding thread for the
whole exposition in the comparative discussion of the different political regimes and their corresponding
Human Type.20

Two brief remarks. First, the way in which Plato established the intrinsic correspondence between
justice as social order and justice as subjectivation (starting with the famous analogy between the big letters
in which we can read the composition of the city, or the relationship that it establishes between needs,
powers, capacities, and the small letters in which we try to decipher the contradictory movements of the
human soul and the meaning of individual attitudes toward different kinds of good) is closely linked with
his famous doctrine of the Philosopher King, i.e., his idea that the making just of man and society depends
on the highly unlikely event of a perfect fusion of power and knowledge. Power, which is the opposite
of knowledge, would nevertheless become its attribute. What is more likely (and, in the end, probably
inevitable) is that the multitude would not only deprive the philosopher of any access to power but, worse
than that, would succeed in perverting both his goals and his use of knowledge, thereby transforming the
Philosopher into a Sophist. Here, Plato is not only idealist, he is also elitist and an intellectualist. More
than this, we discover that behind the obvious holism of his representation of the just social order, in
which every class has its hierarchical function and every individual has to be located within a single class,
there lies a deeper element of individualism. This is true at least at the top, where the fusion of power and
knowledge that marks the extreme point of subjectivation takes the form of a singular individual, separated
as such from all others, and upon whom all others ultimately depend.

Second, any theory of justice, as a political theory in the strong sense, must either provide an
alternative to this conception, or must remain Platonic. It cannot, however, content itself with denitions,
rules, or models of objective social justice; nor can it be based solely on moral considerations of the
individuals virtues. It has to devise an alternative concept of subjectivation. This seems to have been the
case with a certain conception of action against injustice that stems from the revolutionary traditions. We
commonly associate the concept with three preferences: the primacy of practice over theory, the primacy
of the collective or transindividual over the individual, and a primacy of experience over the model. All
this points to a difcult conceptual move, which concerns the inversion of the relationship between the
concepts of justice and injustice, and the limits of their validity.

THREE

Let me now introduce my third and nal reference. It will be a complex one, in the sense that it is not
attached to a single name, but rather to a collection of names that I want to organize in the form of a
critical dialogue. It concerns the notion of conict, or the articulation of justice and conict, and therefore
in a sense it concerns equality, inasmuch as conict aims at equalizing conditions but also constitutes
a basic pattern of equalization itself (equalization as confrontation, agonism, antagonism). I will present
it not simply as deriving from the question asked by one philosopher, but rather as deriving from the
rectications and complications to which one philosophers question has been progressively submitted.
His name is Marx; he remains responsible for the forms in which contemporary social critique performs the
crucial reversal from a primacy of justice to a primacy of injustice. This reversal (at least epistemological,
if not ontological), leads to a new understanding of conictual justice as a form of political critique and not
only as a moral one.

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 I should probably take two precautions immediately. When I say that Marx Marxian discourse,
Marxian theory, Marxian activism remains emblematic of the notion that there can be no idea or model of
justice that does not derive from a certain experience of denite forms of injustice, I must avoid suggesting
that the notion originates with him, and must take into account the fact that Marx himself seems to have
carefully avoided such vocabulary.

We have every reason to believe that the idea of injustice corresponds not only to an age-old
experience (both collective and individual) but also forms something like a shadow of the elaborated
denitions of justice. This hidden face specically relates to the sovereign element of justice, which
is profoundly associated with the notion of righting wrongs and compensating for sufferings. All of this
is inseparable from the gure of the arbiter, the Sovereign as Judge and the Judge as Sovereign. This
gure has always been accompanied by a repressed (or, in some cases, not so repressed) anxiety that he
himself could become supremely unjust and cruel, inict wounds and humiliations, and embody injustice
in a diabolical manner. Hans Kelsen, that profoundly rational legal theorist, alluded to this anxiety in his
fascinating dialogue with Freud.21 This could draw our attention to the long series of mythological and
theological representations of justice as Last Judgment, which, in a sense, have found their secularized
transposition in modern social criticism. But since we aim at identifying certain elements in Marx, there are
more recent ancestors to be named, particularly those of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Thomas
Mores Utopia (1516) and Rousseaus Second Discourse (1755) are exceptionally interesting landmarks in
this respect. So the move that we observe in Marx is not without precedent.

It is no secret, however, that Marx himself was not very fond of the vocabulary of social justice
and injustice, not to say that he depreciated it. There could be several reasons for this reluctant attitude of
Marx. One of them may have to do with the extent to which, in his own time, the category of justice was
associated with and quasi-appropriated by one of his intimate adversaries, namely Proudhon.22 There is a
bifurcation in the Rousseauist legacy here, since Proudhon is an absolute egalitarian, claiming that justice,
association, and equality (or mutuality, as he also calls it) are absolutely reciprocal and interchangeable
notions. This is not the place to discuss Proudhons philosophy more alive than ever today.23 We will
do well simply to remember that its egalitarianism, however radical, is perfectly compatible with some
amazing exclusions from equality (notably, the exclusion of women), and that it aims, not at suppressing
the structural conditions of the exploitation of workers, but rather at equalizing the forces of workers and
capitalists in their relationship, on the one hand, by limiting the possibilities of capitalist concentration
and, symmetrically, by reinforcing the associations and unions of the workers. Who says this is absurd?
It is of course difcult, because it requires a State sufciently autonomous from the capitalists corporate
interests to correct the initial inequality or counteract the effects of class domination. But this leads
us back to Marx: the main reason why he does not speak of justice is probably that, for him, the forms of
justice and injustice are clearly on the side of effects, depending on a more decisive structural cause or set
of structural causes. So, much as justice and injustice are beyond the realm of law, modes of production
and appropriation are beyond their just and unjust effects.

But here we must pause and invert the argument, since, for Marx, there was an originary
experience of injustice that logically preceded the analysis of the structure of exploitation itself, or whose
introduction into the analytical pattern of exploitation, evolution, and transformation in fact commanded
its critical character. In the intricacies of the enormous theoretical machine constructed by Marx under
the title Capital, (which he left unnished and therefore open to many diverse continuations) this point of
introduction can be very precisely located. It takes place in Book I, Chapter VII, when the quantitative notion
of the surplus-value (Mehrwert) or increment of capital becomes translated into the qualitative notion
of surplus-labor (Mehrarbeit), and when the eternal cyclical forms of the accumulation of capital uncover
their hidden face: the historical forms of the coercive organization of labor and the alternating movements
of the proletarianization, deproletarianization, and reproletarianization of the working class. With this shift
in his analysis, Marx, willingly or not, also performed a philosophical gesture which revolutionized, in the
strict sense, the issue of justice. And by the same token he intensied the tension between its moral and
its political aspect.

But this could have become apparent, I believe, only inasmuch as a general form of Marxist
critique was transferred to other forms of oppression and domination. And this meant that, without losing
or destroying a certain intentionality of Marxs critique of capitalism, other social critics associated with
struggles, resistances, and social movements both criticized its one-sidedness or absolutization and
extracted from his discourse a more general model (at the risk, undoubtedly, of losing some of its practical
specicity).

This is a movement that in a way has become commonplace and even common sense in todays
criticism, ranging from feminism to subaltern studies. I could quote from many different authors, but for
the sake of brevity and also to pay homage to an admired colleague and militant intellectual who recently
passed away, allow me to simply quote from Iris Marion Youngs classic study, Justice and the Politics
of Difference.24 Criticizing what she calls the distributive paradigm in moral theory, but without purely
and simply adopting a holistic point of view for which each group would have to administrate the issue
of justice in terms of its internal order and division of labor, she focuses on experiences or faces of
oppression that cross the boundaries of institutions and solidarities (thus renewing the gesture that we
nd in Plato with respect to the injustice of traditional hierarchies). She broadly distinguishes ve types:
exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism (the production of stigmatized otherness
through the imposition of a dominant cultural norm), and violence (against weaker individuals and groups).
She then proceeds to analyze the symmetric problems related, on the one side, to the institutional character
of these forms of injustice and, on the other side, to the modes of insurgency (that is, resistance turned
active, collective, and political) corresponding to each of them. The conclusion that she reaches is that not
only difference, or the singularity of groups, but also the freedom of choice for each individual within the
solidarity of her group, is an essential component of that insurgency. She thus identies social equality, not

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with homogeneity but with a representation of the heterogeneity in the public sphere.

What I nd particularly interesting in Youngs description is that, in her phenomenology of

injustice, dened as domination and oppression, which generalizes and diversies a Marxian concept
of exploitation and alienation of labor, she stresses the fact that there are in fact always two faces to
processes of injustice, conceptually distinct, albeit hardly separable, from one another. For this reason,
two different terms are needed. Oppression, in the strict sense, relates to the discrimination that prevents
some individuals from developing and exercising ones capacities and expressing ones experience, and
therefore, to the institutional constraint on self-development. Domination relates to the institutional
constraint on self-determination that prevents one from participating [effectively] in determining ones
action and the conditions of ones action.25 She seems to me to retrieve in her own way what, elsewhere,
I have described more abstractly as equaliberty in the insurrectional sense: I myself have insisted on the
fact that there is no way to assert in both a direct and a positive manner the political identity of equality and
liberty, but only a way to demonstrate, and in fact experience, that their negations produce simultaneous
effects that amount to emptying citizenship of its reality.26 While I agree with the idea that oppression and
domination, or the negation of equality and the negation of liberty, contribute to a general and complex
denition of injustice, the critical denition of justice which will also of necessity be a polemical one can
nevertheless only be expressed dialectically as negation of the negation. This was in fact Marxs own term
toward the end of Book I of Capital, in the famous passage on the expropriation of the expropriators,
where he explicitly says, this is the negation of the negation.

I want to conclude by stressing the importance and difculty of three of problems associated, at a
general level, with a conictual idea of justice:

A rst problem is related to the articulation of negativity and subjectivity. The experience of
injustice is a necessary condition for the recognition of the existence of institutional injustice. This is
particularly important, as Young rightly insists, inasmuch as it involves the experience of the repetition of
identical injustices. This repetition itself testies to the institutional or structural character of injustice, for
which purely moral or legal characterizations cannot account. Thus Marx described the reproduction of
the conditions of exploitations, the permanent attraction and repulsion of the worker from the factory
system. But recognition from the standpoint of the victim is not the analysis of structure; I do not wish
to bring in the epistemological break. I am simply saying that there is a difculty in how the conict
develops, from the experience of injustice to the project of institutional justice itself. A scheme of conict
and its transformation such as the class struggle with its various degrees seems to be required
here, but this scheme does not arise from the experience itself.

This is also where the experience of injustice once again nds itself at the crossroads between
a moral and a political discourse, or, rather, between two different articulations of the moral and political
elements within critical discourse. This might explain, if not validate, the fact that Marx tried to escape this
dilemma by choosing a third term, science, which led him (and, even more so, his followers) into scientism
(from which Althusser paradoxically tried to recover through epistemology, or scientic discourse in the
second degree).

This rst difculty is closely related to a second one, which we can call, in Lyotardian terms, the
difculty of the effects of the differend. It is not by chance that Lyotard, when formalizing his idea of a
wrong that is redoubled by the fact that it cannot be expressed in the dominant language of the Judge (or
spoken to the Judge), the established system of Justice which becomes identied with the representation
of social interests as a whole, rst referred precisely to Marxs concept of the proletariat whose perception
of surplus-labor is in fact incommensurable with the capitalists notion of prot or accumulation.27 The
word incommensurability is also central to Youngs phenomenology.28 And it is not by chance that Spivak
and others have borrowed and reelaborated the Lyotardian notion of the differend in order to conceptualize
the heterogeneity or paradox of a subaltern condition of oppression which expresses itself while being
deprived of the instruments of collective and public expression. This is the problem of the alternative
public sphere and, consequently, of rationality. The other side of the differend is the fact that what is
incommensurable will only indirectly be brought to the fore, in the language of metaphor or metaphrasis.
Not only are conicts about crucial issues of injustice dissymmetric; they are also continuously repressed.
Otherwise, they become retranslated in the language, categories, and modes of regulative administration
that comprise the establishment of power, e.g., what is today universally called governance.

Third, and nally, this brings me back or would bring me back to issues of totality, totalization,
and the relationship between the whole and the processes of subjectivation. I will leave these for another
occasion, not only because I have abused the readers patience but because I myself am uncertain about
the Platonic terms in which the question has to be renewed. I dont want to reduce the Idea, the model,
or the form to the minor status of a dream or utopia, however much I value certain insurgent uses of
these terms for example, I have a dream. I can only suggest that if processes of subjectivation that
represent the other dimension of justice, on the side of individual and collective practices, virtually converge
toward the imaginary gure of a just society, they are also bound (because they are inseparable from
the conicts that feed them and give them meaning) to remain indenitely embedded in displacements
and new beginnings, rather than in recognitions, reconciliations, or nal revolutions. But this seemingly
negative or aporetic formulation also signals something positive, which is very important to us: justice,
as emancipation from injustice, as negation of the negation, is not only an effort; it is also a permanent
invention. While it runs after emancipation, it also already runs after the forms, contents, and institutions
of justice, which are not imposed from outside the effort (the struggle). Not remembered, like a lost ideal,
but rather discovered, like an insurrection without models.

Umbr(a) 125
FOUR

The three lines that I have been following (Pascal and the antinomy of justice as force and force as justice;
Plato and the constitution of subjectivity as the psychic image of the whole; Marx and Young and the
articulation of justice, injustice, and conict) seem in fact to indicate a common question, albeit a very
speculative one: that of an articulation of immanence and transcendence through the emergence of an
internal void. What was suggested by Pascal and retrieved by Derrida and Samaddar was not an accidental
excess of justice over law, but an internal excess. It does not affect the realm of Law from the outside
(from some theological or social other-realm that, by nature, would be non-legal or il-legal), but from within
the intrinsic heterogeneity of the legal realm. This could also be rephrased as: Law is never anything else
than the permanent conict between opposite practical representations of Law. For that reason, those
who are excluded from Justice by the Law are led to include or incorporate themselves into the public
sphere by changing the Law, or imposing a change in the rule of Law. What Plato and his legacy suggest
is the necessity of nding a convergence between the metaphysical question of what still lies beyond the
realm of essences and the political-ethical question of the element of hyper-individualism paradoxically
inhabiting the Platonic primacy of the whole, which culminates in the model of the Philosopher King
who incarnates the identity of contraries, of knowledge and power. A modern problematic of the collective
processes of subjectivation as anonymous effects of communication does not solve or suppress this
question, but it certainly does displace and rearticulate it. Finally, the hardly sketched discussion of Marxs
notion of the primacy of injustice and its generalization as justice in conict or justice through struggle
against injustices by Young and certain other contemporary social critics leads to a difcult moral and
political riddle concerning the condition of the victim and his or her place in this discourse. We are not
returning to a point before the political institution of justice, as allegorically depicted once and for all by
the Greek tragedies, to identify justice with the claim of the victim, or his or her vengeance, but we must
take into account the fact that conict itself (the reality of injustice and the necessity of justice) is made
visible and audible only by the void that the victim creates or performs within the plenitude of the social
fabric. The analogies that I am suggesting here do not amount to delineating a new metaphysics of justice.
But they have a family air which, I believe, makes it more likely for us to understand in which sense, to
imitate a Spinozistic formula, the just effort or struggle towards justice, or non-injustice, is indeed already
justice itself.
*
A rst version of this paper was delivered as Public Lecture at
The Second Critical Studies Conference, Spheres of Justice,
Academy of Fine Arts, Calcutta, India, September 20-22, 2007.
A slightly revised version was presented at the State University
of New York, University at Buffalo, on October 25, 2007, as a
Public Lecture in conjunction with the Humanities Institute
Annual Conference, Human Trafcking.
1
Le premier et le plus grand intrt public est toujours la
justice. Tous veulent que les conditions soient gales pour
tous, et la justice nest que cette galit. Jean Jacques
Rousseau, Lettres Ecrites de la Montagne, in The Political
Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Volume II, ed. C.E.
Vaughan (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1962), 284.
2
I borrow this terminology from Roberto Esposito, whose
works, unfortunately, are not yet translated into English.
3
A perfect example, particularly relevant to these debates,
is the discussion between Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth
around justice as equalitarian distribution and justice as
equalitarian recognition, in which the equivocity of equality is
involved as much as that of justice.
4
Ranabir Samaddar, The Game of Justice, in The Materiality
of Politics, Volume II: Subject Positions in Politics (London:
Anthem, 2007), 63-106.
5
I borrow this expression from W.B. Gallie. Emmanuel Renault
recalls it at the beginning of his recent and important book,
Lexprience de linjustice (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2004).
6
Blaise Pascal, Pense 103, in Penses Sur La Religion
et Sur Quelques Autres Sujets, ed. Louis Lafuma (Paris:
Editions du Luxembourg, 1951), 71. The English translation
can be found in Pascals Penses, ed. and trans. H.F.
Steward (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950), 221.
This fragment is also commented on at length by Derrida in
his Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority,
in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla
Cornell, Michel Roseneld, and David Gray Carlson (New York:
Routledge, 1992), 3-67. Complementary formulations are given
in Penses 81, 85, and 86.
7
My reading is partly inspired by Christian Lazzeris excellent
book, Force et justice dans la politique de Pascal (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1993).
8
Derrida also marks this afnity in his commentary on Pascals
formula.
9
Samaddar, The Materiality of Politics, Volume II, 102.
10
Plato also accomplishes this distinction by means of
cosmological and medical analogies. We must remember here
that the Greek term cosmos has two meanings: the world
and the (beautiful) order, each being the others model. The
medieval concept of order as equilibrium gives rise to a third
term: the (living, especially human) body.
11
See Plato, The Republic, 562, on the abolition of all
hierarchies (including the command of humans over domestic
animals such as dogs and donkeys) in the democratic city
governed by unfettered liberty.
12
See Plato, The Republic, 422e to 423a. On the concept of
stasis in Greek thought, see Nicole Loraux, The Divided City:
On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens (Cambridge:
Zone Books, 2006). There, Loraux also makes use of a
comparative reading of Plato and Freud.
13
See Hannah Arendt, Heft X (August 1952 bis September
1952), 18, in Denktagebuch: 1950 bis 1973, Erster Band, ed.
Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (Mnchen: Piper, 2002),
244-5.
14
See, among others, Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conict
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), especially the
rst chapter (The Soul and the City).
15
Sir Karl Popper, after all, was quite right on this point. In
his polemical writing, he traced the sources of totalitarianism
(i.e. communism and fascism) back to Platos philosophy. See
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (New York:
Routledge, 2006). See the refutation by Victor Goldschmidt,
the greatest Plato scholar of his generation.
16
Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, in The Marx-Engels
Reader, Second Edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York and
London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 145.
17
Recall Brecht, who, in one of his nest writings, M-ti.
Buch der Wendungen (a philosophical ction written under
the inuence of Karl Korsch during the War period, which
presents itself as a dialogue among Chinese wise men) called
dialectics the Great Method and Communism the Great
Umbr(a) 127
Order which arises from the contradictions of the Great
Disorder or Capitalism itself. See Bertolt Brecht, M-ti. Buch
der Wendungen, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992).
18
Among the German philosophers who, in the pre-Nazi and
Nazi periods, were more or less durably attracted within the
circle of Revolutionary Conservatism, the one who worked
especially on the idea of justice in Plato was Hans-Georg
Gadamer. See Teresa Orozco, Platonische Gewalt (Hamburg:
Argument Verlag, 2004).
After Marx, trans. James Swenson (New York: Routledge,
1994), 39-59.
27
Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute,
trans. George Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1989).
28
Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 39.

19
Perhaps there is something Oriental there? In any case,
there are afnities both with psychoanalysis and with a certain
mystical tradition.

20
All these ideas are pregured in another famous dialogue:
the Gorgias, in which Plato explains (against a ctitious or
syncretic Sophist, Callicles) that it is better to suffer injustice
than commit it. To this Brecht proposed, in the above quoted
imaginary dialogue, an interesting alternative: it is worse to
accept an injustice (committed towards others) than to commit
it oneself. Brecht, M-ti. Buch der Wendungen, 61.

21
See my forthcoming essay, The Invention of the Superego,
which comments on Hans Kelsens critical review of
Freuds Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and on
Freuds reaction to Kelsens critique.

22
Proudhon published his major work, De la justice dans la
Rvolution et dans lEglise, in 1860. But the theme of justice
and the dialectical identity of justice and equality were
already dominant in his earlier works, starting with What is
Property? (1841). Marx defended him in The Holy Family
(1844), but attacked him violently in The Poverty of Philosophy
(1846).

23
See for example the recent and very interesting book with
a chapter on equality as mutuality by Guillaume Le Blanc,
Vies ordinaries, vies prcaires (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2007).

24
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

25
Ibid, 37 (my emphasis).

26
Etienne Balibar, Rights of Man and Rights of the Citizen:
The Modern Dialectic of Equality and Freedom, in Masses,
Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and
REVOLUTION & REPETITION
kojin karatani

REPETITION IN THE STATE

Historians often say that one risks a repetition of history if one is ignorant of
history. If we know history, though, can we thereby avoid its repetition? And is
there really such a thing as the repetition of history? This kind of problem has
never been thought through; historians, who are supposed to be scientic, have
never addressed it, even if they intuitively acknowledge it. I believe that there
is a repetition of history, and that it is possible to treat it scientically. What is
repeated is, to be sure, not an event but a repetitive structure. Surprisingly, when
a structure is repeated, the event often appears to be repeated as well. However,
it is only the repetitive structure that can be repeated.

Marx is the thinker who attempted to elucidate this repetitive structure.

Marxs view of history is generally considered to be based on development in
stages rather than repetition. But he did think through the problem of repetition in
one of his early works, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The opening
sentences of the text refer precisely to the repetition of history: Hegel remarks
somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history

Umbr(a) 131
occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the rst time as tragedy, the second as farce.1 Here Marx
emphasizes that what happened between the French Revolution of 1789 and Napoleons coronation was
repeated sixty years later by the revolution of 1848 that resulted in Louis Bonapartes coronation. There
are, however, more repetitions. In the rst place, the history of the rst French Revolution followed the
pattern of ancient Romes history; these were repetitions as re-presentation. But it is not because the
past design was adopted that these repetitions occurred. Representation becomes actual repetition only
when there is a structural similarity between the past and the present, that is to say, only when there is a
repetitive structure inherent to the nation that transcends the consciousness of each individual.

It is probably in The Philosophy of History that Hegel wrote what Marx refers to: [B]y repetition,
that which at rst appeared merely as a matter of chance and contingency, becomes a real and ratied
existence.2 Hegel refers to the event in which Octavian became the rst Roman Emperor after his adoptive
father Caesar was assassinated. Caesar sought to become emperor when the city of Rome could no
longer maintain republican principles in its expansion, and was murdered by those who chose to defend
the republic. It was only after Caesars assassination, however, that the Roman people accepted the
empire and emperor as inevitable reality. Caesar never became emperor, but his name became a general
noun that signies emperor (czar, Kaiser). Marx might have forgotten this context when he wrote that
Hegel remarks somewhere. Nonetheless, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx nds
repetition in the emergence of the empire out of the republic realized by the French Revolution. In the
Revolution of 1789, the king was executed and the emperor emerged from the subsequent republic with
the peoples support. This is what Freud calls the return of the repressed. The emperor is the return of
the murdered king but is no longer the king himself. The emperor stands for an Empire that transcends the
boundaries of the city- or nation-state. It is because of this structure that Caesars event appears to be
repeated in other places and times. For example, Napoleon, who gained power in the French Revolution
and its subsequent wars, attempted to counter British industrial capitalism by establishing a European
union: Napoleon crowned himself emperor and established an Empire not because he was mindful of the
past but because of the politico-economic situation of the time. Indeed, Napoleons concept could be
called a prototype of the European Union, but at this point in history, his scheme could be more properly
seen as a precursor of Hitlers Third Reich: the conquest of Europe. Concerning this point, Hannah Arendt
states the following:

The inner contradiction between the nations body politic and conquest as a political
device has been obvious since the failure of the Napoleonic dream. The Napoleonic
failure to unite Europe under the French ag was a clear indication that conquest by a
nation led either to the full awakening of the conquered peoples national consciousness
and to consequent rebellion against the conqueror, or to tyranny. And though tyranny,
because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in
power only if it destroys rst of all the national institutions of its own people.3
Napoleons war of conquest can be called the rst example of a nation-states imperialistic expansion
resulting in another nation-state. In the twentieth century, imperialism thus produced nation-states all
over the world. Generally speaking, modern states were formed by separating themselves from old world
empires. States derived from the same world empire share a common cultural and religious background
even if they compete with one another. If they were threatened by a state originating from another world
empire, they would nevertheless be united based on the identity of the old world empire. In other words,
they return to the Empire. But if a nation-state expands and tries to become an Empire, it cannot avoid
becoming imperialistic. Thus the modern nation-state, on the one hand, subsists in its reaction to the
Empire, but, on the other hand, is inclined to abolish itself and return to the Empire. This paradoxical
structure causes the repetition inherent to the state.

REPETITION IN CAPITAL

Marx refers to another repetition in The Eighteenth Brumaire: the economic crisis of 1851, which helped
Bonaparte gain support from the state apparatuses, such as the military and the bureaucracy: Only
under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have made itself completely independent. As against
civil society, the state machine has consolidated its position.4 It is at this point that Marx discovers the
encounter between the two kinds of repetitiveness: repetitiveness of the state and of capitalist economy.
No one at that time paid attention to the repetitiveness of this crisis. It was assumed that the commercial
crisis was the result of the revolution of 1848 and resolvable by economic policies.

Marx did not sufciently investigate the problem of the periodical crisis. He thought that this
crisis did not advance the revolution because the crisis was not yet full-blown: Apart from these special
circumstances, the apparent crisis of 1851 was nothing else but the halt which overproduction and over-
speculation invariably make in completing the industrial cycle, before they summon all their strength in
order to rush feverishly through the nal phase of this cycle and arrive once more at their starting point,
the general trade crisis.5 Accordingly, Marx believed that this crisis would be followed by a general
trade crisis, which would bring about the world revolution in Europe. No revolution, however, took place,
although a crisis did indeed occur in 1857. The crisis is a serious problem for capitalist economy, but
it neither destroys the system nor automatically yields revolutions. On the contrary, a severe crisis or
depression leads to counter-revolution. The incidents mentioned in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte attest to the fact that economic crisis facilitates the establishment of a state capitalist order,
such as Bonapartes, rather than a socialist revolution. Marxs study of capitalist economy became more
sophisticated after 1857, when he abandoned his eschatological hope for such a crisis. It was after this
period that Marx started investigating the crisis or the business cycle on its own, independently of the
political. A crisis is not a mistake of economic policy, and does not lead to the collapse of capitalism. Marx
began to conceive the crisis as an inevitable sickness inherent in the accumulation of capital. Why, then,
is there such a thing as crisis?

Umbr(a) 133
 The possibility of crisis, as Marx points out, lurks in the salto mortale, in the metamorphosis from
commodity to money. Plainly put, the possibility of a crisis lies in the uncertainty as to whether or not a
commodity sells. This jump, however, explains merely its possibility: For the development of this possibility
into a reality a whole series of conditions is required, which do not yet even exist from the standpoint of the
simple circulation of commodities.6 A crisis takes place in reality after a credit system is developed. Credit
overcomes the risk in the commoditys salto mortale; it can facilitate commerce as if commodities are
already sold. But this overcoming is idealistic: ultimately there is a time for the settlement of accounts, and
the discovery that the commodities were not sold. In a crisis, this happens on a vast scale: [A monetary
crisis] occurs only where the ongoing chain of payments has been fully developed, along with an articial
system for setting them.7 It is generally thought that the Netherlands crisis in 1637 resulted from the
speculation in tulips, but its direct cause was the bubble created by the development of the credit system.
Yet the bubble does not explain why such crises occur periodically. The crisis that started in Britain in 1825
and involved the Netherlands and Germany is radically different from the previous ones.

Most Marxists suppose that crisis is caused by anarchic overproduction or the contradiction
between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation. Yet, this idea explains the possibility of
crisis and not the cause of its periodicity. As far as I know, only Kozo Uno gives a convincing answer to
this mystery. Uno explores the problem of crisis and the business cycle in terms of the population law
of capitalism. Labor is a peculiar commodity; it is difcult to increase it immediately in its shortage, and
difcult to decrease it when it is overstocked. Workers dismissed in a recession comprise the reserve
army of labor. During periods of prosperity employment increases, wages rise, and the rate of prot
drops, but since the credit is still good, capital continues to produce according to the appearance of
demand. Eventually, credit is ruined and a crisis takes place, suddenly revealing that the commodities
were overproduced. Every crisis, therefore, emerges as a credit crisis; the cause of the periodic crisis in
industrial capitalism lies in the peculiarity of the labor commodity. A crisis and its subsequent depression
bankrupt and weed out fragile businesses that cannot secure their own prots. By lowering wages and the
interest rate, however, the depression allows capital to invest in new equipment and technology. Eventually
prosperity returns, and another crisis occurs. Thus capital accumulation or the advanced organic
composition of capital is guided by the business cycle. From this perspective, the crisis does not destroy
capitalism but is an indispensable process for capital accumulation. Conversely, what is applauded as the
automatic adjustment apparatus of capitalist economy signies the fact that capital accumulation can only
proceed violently.

Now it is clear that the periodic crisis occurs in a wage labor economy. Why, then, did these crises
take place at intervals of approximately ten years? And why is it that after the crises of 1857, 1866, and
1873, a chronic depression ensued instead of a dramatic crisis? These questions can be answered in
terms of the primary product, or the world commodity. The classic periodic crisis emerged when the cotton
industry was dominant. The cotton industry demanded a large amount of labor; the plants and equipment
would wear out about every ten years and need to be replaced. From the 1860s, a transition to heavy
industries took place, which caused an increase in equipment investment (constant capital) and a decrease
in the average rate of prot, even when labor productivity (the rate of surplus value) rose. Likewise, since
the heavy industries did not need as much labor as the cotton industry did, unemployment increased
and domestic consumption decreased. Consequently, the depression became chronic. Furthermore, the
products of heavy industries required overseas markets. This is called the export of capital. In this case
it was the states role to secure these markets. As a result, severe conicts arose between the countries
already in possession of colonies overseas, such as Britain, France, and the Netherlands, and the newly
growing powers, such as Germany, America, and Japan. This is what is called imperialism.

The business cycle Marx grasped in Capital takes the form of a short wave that was later called the
Juglar cycle. On the other hand, Kondratieff described a long wave that has a fty- or sixty-year cycle.
In my view, the difference in length is not important. The long wave is a phenomenon that is caused by
the change in world commodities. The transformation of world commodities from woolen, to cotton, to
heavy industries, to durable consumer goods, to the information industry have resulted in long, severe
depressions, if not crises. These transitions cause change not only at the level of technology but also
at the level of society in general. In spite of the difference in appearance, the basic principle that Marx
pointed out is still relevant: capital accumulation is possible only through violent reconguration, and this
is exactly what compels capitalist society to repeat. Nonetheless, this principle does not sufce to probe
the repetition of history as a social formation.

SOCIAL FORMATION VIEWED THROUGH MODE OF EXCHANGE

In Capital, Marx provides a far more profound insight into the repetitiveness of capitalist economy than he
does in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Yet the repetitiveness at the level of the state, which
had been set forth in The Eighteenth Brumaire, was never mentioned again by Marx. He regards the state
as merely a superstructure determined by the economic structure. Generally speaking, Marxists see the
state or the nation as a political or ideological superstructure determined by the economic substructure,
that is, the mode of production. This view is inapplicable to both pre-capitalist and capitalist societies. It is
clear that the state or the nation functions according to its own logic that is different from capital. In fact,
Marxist movements have largely ignored the signicance of the state and the nation. They occasionally
afrm that the politico-ideological superstructure has relative autonomy but have never thought through
why the state has autonomy. This difculty is caused by Marxs perspective, which sees history through
the mode of production. As long as we keep this perspective, the state and the nation will remain a
mystery.

In Transcritique, I proposed that we consider the history of social formation from the perspective
of the mode of exchange instead of the mode of production.8 Briey, there are three basic modes of
exchange: reciprocity of gift and return; plunder and redistribution; and commodity exchange. In my view,
every social formation exists as a juncture of these exchange modes, and differences between them

Umbr(a) 135
depend on what the primary mode is and how those modes are related. In the capitalist social formation,
commodity exchange is dominant, but the other modes of exchange and their derivatives still exist in
modied forms. The state becomes a modern state, and the dissolved community becomes a nation as an
imagined community. Thus the three modes of exchange are transformed into the trinity of capital, nation,
and state.9 From this point of view, it is obvious that the state has an autonomy that is completely different
from that of capital: they are rooted in different principles of exchange. In Capital, Marx abstracts capital
away from the state and the nation by bracketing the dimensions of other exchange modes because he
is attempting to grasp the system caused by commodity exchange in its purity. It is better, though, to
explore how each of the other modes of exchange forms a system (as Marx does concerning the system
of capitalist economy), than to complain of his not dealing with the state and the nation. Anthropologists
such as Mauss and Levi-Strauss, for example, have attempted to describe the reciprocal composition of
society. We should begin the same work regarding the state.

As stated above, the periodical crisis does not take place until society is completely reorganized
by the mode of commodity exchange and the commodication of labor. Differently put, it is not until
capitalist economy experiences the periodic crisis that it can manifest its autonomy. The same is true of
the states autonomy: only the repetition proper to it can attest that the state is autonomous.

HISTORICAL STAGES OF CAPITALISM

The history of social formations must be viewed by considering the relation between two subjects: the
state and capital. The repetitiveness of the state and that of capital should be examined at the same
time. The state and capital complement each other even while they are opposed to each other. Neither
of them can be reduced to the other. In Capital, Marx brackets the state; clearly, this bracketing makes
capitalism at the stage of imperialism a mystery. At the stage of heavy industry, the states interventions
in the economy are strengthened. Heavy industries require a large amount of investment by the state
rather than by corporations. Due to the lack of state interventions, Britain fell behind Germany in heavy
industrialization. This phenomenon, not to mention the Keynesian welfare state, is unintelligible if the state
is bracketed. Facing these new situations, Marxist economists have been forced to revise and develop the
principles of Capital. Their revision and development are actually the renunciation of Capital.

Concerning this gap between Capital and actual political economy, I would like to refer again to
Uno, who attempts to solve this problem in his own peculiar way. Uno conceives that what Marx grasps
in Capital is pure capitalism, the principles of capitalist economy and its functions when commodity
exchange is widely prevalent. However, there is no such thing as pure capitalism. Britain at the time of
Marxs sojourn might have come closest to it, but Capital is not limited to the economy of one state, even
if it employs Britain as the model. Capital deals with world capitalism, and therefore omits the problem of
taxation, (which Ricardo put great stress on), by bracketing the state. Uno insists that, in actual social
formations, the state intervenes in the economy, and this intervention appears as an economic policy
that forms the historical stages of capitalism. The stages suggested by Uno are mercantilism, liberalism,
and imperialism. Moreover, he distinguishes the stage after the Russian Revolution from imperialism.
Capitalist states adopted economic policies, such as Keynesianism and fascism. Capitalism after 1930
is generally called late capitalism, but it can also be called Fordism or welfare state capitalism. Robert
Albritton, following Unos theory, names this stage consumerism.10

In my view these stages can also be characterized by changes in the world commodity. The
mercantilism stage is characterized by the wool industry, liberalism by the cotton industry, imperialism
by heavy industry, and late capitalism by durable consumer goods, such as automobiles and electric
appliances. A new stage of capitalism began in the 1980s, when information became the world commodity.
The chart below demonstrates these stages (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The World-Historical Stages of State Capitalism

1750-1810 1810-1870 1870-1930 1930-1990 1990-

World
Mercantilism Liberalism Imperialism Late Capitalism Neo-imperialism
Capitalism

Hegemon Britain USA

Economic Policy Imperialistic Liberalistic Imperialistic Liberalistic Imperialistic

Merchant Industrial
Capital Financial Capital State Monopoly Multi-national
Capital Capital
World
Wool Industry Cotton Industry Heavy Industries Durable Goods Information
Commodity
Absolute
State Nation-state Imperialism Welfare-state Regionalism
Monarch

These stages appear to be developmental in terms of productivity. If so, this view is not greatly different
from that of the Marxists. The importance of Unos theory consists not in how it grasps the stages of
capitalisms development but in how it formulates the stages of economic policy. He reintroduces the state
that was bracketed in Capital, keeping the principle of pure capitalism that Capital grasped. For example,
it is clear that the state is an active subject in mercantilism. But liberalism is also the economic policy of
powerful countries, such as Britain. In the age of liberalism, the other less powerful states must defend
themselves by protectionism; otherwise they would be reduced to colonies. Needless to say, imperialism
is an economic policy adopted by the great powers. Under this policy the state has an explicit role, and

Umbr(a) 137
fascism and state welfare capitalism are no exceptions. These, too, are economic policies of the state,
which is now equivalent to capital.

Uno thus formulates the stages of capitalism by introducing the dimension of the state. As a result,
there arises another kind of repetitiveness distinct from economic development. Clearly, imperialism is
a repetition of mercantilism. Uno, however, is reticent about the problem of the state, limiting himself to
economics. On the other hand, Immanuel Wallerstein sees the stages of capitalism from the viewpoint of
struggle for hegemony between the state and capital. Wallerstein, for example, does not limit liberalism
to the mid-nineteenth century as Uno does. Liberalism is a policy employed by a hegemon, and is
possible in any period. In Wallersteins view, only three states have adopted liberalism in the modern
global economy: the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States of America. Between the latter half of
the sixteenth century and the mid-seventeenth century, when Britain had mercantilist or protectionist
policies, the Netherlands were liberal; politically it was not an absolute monarchy but a republic.11
 According to Wallerstein, the shifts in hegemonic power have the following pattern: Marked
superiority in agro-industrial productive efciency leads to dominance of the spheres of commercial
distribution of world trade, with correlative prots accruing both from being the entrept of much of world
trade and from controlling the invisibles transport, communications, and insurance. Commercial
primacy leads in turn to control of the nancial sectors of banking (exchange, deposit, and credit) and
of investment (direct and portfolio).12 A state thus establishes hegemony, proceeding from production
to commerce and then nance. But there is probably only a short moment in time when a given core
power can manifest simultaneously productive, commercial, and nancial superiority over all other core
powers.13 That is to say, even if hegemony is lost in the dimension of production, it can still be maintained
in that of commerce or nance. The Netherlands and Britain actually retained hegemony in commerce
and nance long after they lost it in production. The Dutch maintained hegemony in distribution and
nance even after Britain overwhelmed them in manufacturing in the latter half of the eighteenth century.
It was in the nineteenth century (during the stage that Uno calls liberalism) that Britain dominated them
completely. However, if the period of British hegemony is called liberalism, so should be the period of Dutch
hegemony. Mercantilism, on the other hand, is a period of the absence of a hegemon, such as the period
when the Netherlands lost the hegemony that Britain and France consequently fought over. The absence
of a hegemon can also be found at the stage called imperialism, after 1870, when America, Germany, and
Japan fought for the hegemony that Britain was losing. From this perspective, it is no wonder that similarity
can be found between the stages of mercantilism and imperialism.

The development in capitalisms stages cannot be purely linear, since it requires not only a change
in world commodity but also a long depression. That is to say, it requires a repetition inherent to the
capitalist system. On the other hand, it entails mortal struggles for hegemony among states and therefore
a repetition inherent in the dimension of the state. Accordingly, the stages of world capitalism can be
seen as the repetition of the stages of imperialism and liberalism (see Figure 1). In this chart, for example,
mercantilism is a transitive stage from Dutch to British liberalism, that is, a stage in which the Netherlands
was declining but Britain and France were not powerful enough to replace it and struggled against each
other. Also, the stage of imperialism after 1870 is marked by Britains decline and Germany, America, and
Japans attempt to re-divide the territories formerly held by the previous imperial powers. The stages of
world capitalism thus form not only the linear development of production but also the alternation between
the stages of liberalism and imperialism. In my view, this alternation operates in a cycle of sixty years. As
a result, the history of the modern world repeats every one hundred and twenty years. It is uncertain that
this cycle will continue, but it might be productive as a heuristic hypothesis.

THE CURRENT STAGE

The 1990s is considered the stage of neoliberalism. It is often said that America, like the old British Empire,
so overwhelmingly holds hegemony that its policies are representative of liberalism. While America was
the hegemon before 1990, it started declining economically from the 1970s, as was indicated by the end

Umbr(a) 139
of the gold standard in 1971. America is following the course that the Netherlands and Britain once trod:
while declining in manufacturing industries, America retains hegemony in nance and commerce of natural
resources such as oil, grain, and energy.

During the age of British liberalism, war posed no danger to Britain. Between 1930 and 1990
(especially between 1945 and 1975) America was as liberal as nineteenth-century Britain. The developed
capitalist states were under American protection, cooperated with each other by regarding the Soviet
bloc as the enemy, and adopted domestic policies of worker protection and social welfare. Contrary
to appearances, the international Soviet bloc and domestic socialist parties stabilized world capitalism,
rather than threatening it. The Cold War is therefore the stage of liberalism with America as the hegemon.
Since the 1980s, Reaganite and Thatcherite policies, such as retrenchment of social welfare, deregulation
of capital, and tax reduction, have been adopted in the advanced capitalist states. These policies are
generally considered neoliberal, but they are not inconsistent with the imperialism that was dominant in the
1880s. Lenin insisted that the stages of imperialism could be historically characterized by capital export:
capital seeks the global market because the domestic market is never sufcient for it. Arendt described
the imperialism of the 1880s as a liberation of a state tied to capital from the yoke of the nation. Rejecting
the nations demand, the state abandoned its domestic workers and supported the capital that went
abroad economically and militarily.14 This is also happening in the neoliberal stage. Globalization started in
the 1970s, when the advanced countries suffered from a falling rate of prot and chronic depression due
to the saturation of the market with durable consumer goods. Moreover, America lost hegemony in the
production of these goods because of Japan and Germanys signicant development. As a result, American
capital had to nd its way in the global free market. This global competition, however, is impossible without
American military hegemony. The current stage of capitalism is more neoimperial than neoliberal.

According to Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, America acted not as an imperialist state but like
Empire because it sought the approval of the United Nation in the Gulf War of 1991 when it had overwhelming
military hegemony: The importance of the Gulf War derives [] from the fact that it presented the United
States as the only power able to manage international justice, not as a function of its own national motives
but in the name of global right.15 I cannot agree that America is Empire and yet non-imperialist. No nation
or state can avoid falling into imperialism if it attempts to become Empire. Ten years after the Gulf War,
the Iraq War disproved the idea that America is not imperialist but Empire: America pursued unilateralism
rather than the approval from the United Nations. To be sure, Negri and Hardt do not pursue the idea of
the American Empire: for them, Empire is a place that has no place.

[The capitalist market] is thwarted by barriers and exclusions; it thrives instead by including
always more within its sphere. Prot can be generated only through contact, engagement,
interchange, and commerce. The realization of the world market would constitute the
point of arrival of this tendency. In its ideal form there is no outside to the world market:
the entire globe is its domain. We might thus use the form of the world market as a model
 for understanding imperial sovereignty.In this smooth space of Empire, there is no place
of power it is both everywhere and nowhere. Empire is an ou-topia, or really a non-
place.16

What Negri and Hardt call Empire is the world market. In this market, states have no importance. A
similar remark can be found in the 1848 Communist Manifesto, which predicts that the differences among
peoples and states would be annulled in the intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence
of nations. This view ignores the dimension of the state. The revolutions of 1848, for example, resulted in
state capitalism and imperialism in France and Germany yet did not annul those peoples and states.

Today the framework of the nation-state is said to be debilitated. It is true that the element of the
nation has been discarded, but this does not at all mean that the state is dissolved. It is only by the will
of the state as such that one state can ally itself with another state. There was never a state that rejected
alliance or subordination when its own survival was at stake. Only the nation as an imagined community
rejects it. The theorists of the European Union argue that the Union transcends the modern sovereign
state. As the nation-state is forced by the global economy, however, so is the regional union of the states.
In order to counter America and Japan, the European states formed the European Union and delegated
their economic and military powers to the supersystem. This cannot be called sublation of the modern
state. It is under the pressure of world capitalism or the world market that states unite and establish a
bloc state. The European Union is not the rst bloc state in history; it is preceded by Germanys Third
Reich and Japans Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, both of which were planned in the 1930s
in order to counter the bloc economies of Britain, France, and America. Before the war, these bloc states
represented themselves as overcoming the modern world-system, that is, capitalism and the nation-state.
The design for a European union existed even before Napoleon; its ideal is the old Empire, though it has
only been actualized in French and German imperialism.

In forming the European Union, Europeans did not thereby forget the past. It is obvious that they
are trying to actualize an Empire that would not be imperialistic. Nonetheless, the Union is nothing but
a bloc state framed within the global economy. Other regions are in the same situation: the old world
Empires of China, India, Islam, and Russia, which were marginalized in the modern world system, have
reappeared. In each region, since the nation-state was formed by separating itself from the world empire,
there is on the one hand a shared civilization, and on the other hand, a past full of divisions and struggles.
The states bracket their memories as nations and form a community by reducing their own sovereignty.
Yet this phenomenon occurs precisely due to the pressure of world capitalism that now dominates the
states. Renan once pointed out that the oblivion of history is necessary for a nation to be built, and his
remark is applicable to the formation of the bloc state. Like the nation, it is also an imagined or created
community.

Umbr(a) 141
REPETITION IN REVOLUTION

Thus far my argument has concerned the structure of historical repetition in the dyad of state and capital.
In this section, I would like to point out how the countermovements against the state and capitalism
socialist movements in the broadest sense have changed in accordance with the world-historical stages
of state and capital, and how those movements also have the same repetitiveness as the dyad of state and
capital. That is, the movement that counters the state and capital is also determined by the repetitiveness
of this very dyad. In this respect, Wallersteins remark is suggestive: the revolution of 1968 is equivalent to
that of 1848. According to him, the revolution of 1968 did not aim at achieving political power, but was a
widely inuential movement against the system. The revolution of 1848, too, failed to gain political power
but facilitated universal suffrage, legalization of labor unions, and welfare policies. Moreover, the revolution
of 1968 revived various kinds of socialism and utopianism, including young Marxs thought, which had
been repressed since 1848.

I would like to take special note of the fact that the revolution of 1968 broke out exactly one hundred
and twenty years after the revolution of 1848. Wallerstein would probably reject my hypothesis of the sixty-
year and one-hundred-and-twenty-year cycles, since he conceives periodicity based on Kondratieffs long
wave. Yet, the similarity between 1848 and 1968 is not a mere accident; it corresponds to the periodicity of
the stages of the state-capital dyad. It should also be noted that about sixty years before 1848, the French
Revolution took place, and that about sixty years after 1848, the Russian Revolution took place. These
events can be charted as follows:

A 1789 French Revolution (Kant, Perpetual Peace, 1795)

B 1848
A 1917 Russian Revolution (League of Nations, 1920)
B 1968

Wallerstein regards the world revolution of 1848 as the sublation of 1789, the Russian Revolution of 1917
as the sublation of 1848, and the world revolution of 1968 as the sublation of 1917.17 But it is futile to see
these events in a successive order: the A series is located at the imperialist stage and the B series at the
liberal stage. This difference and repetitiveness are important when we consider the period after 1990.

Let us begin with the B series. These revolutions happened basically at the stage of liberalism when
Britain or America achieved hegemony; these are the rst occurrences of the proletariats countermovement
against capitalism, but without the prospect of seizing state power. At this point, these revolutions were
utterly defeated, but they still had signicance. In the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, the uprising of the
proletariat compelled each state, which was equivalent to capital, to employ socialist policies. In short,
the revolution yielded a prototype of the welfare capitalist state. Against this tendency, imperialism after
1870 emerges as that which liberates the dyad of state and capital from the control of the nation. The
subjects of the struggle in 1968 were not proletarian in the narrow sense but students and those who
were discriminated against in terms of gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality. To borrow Negri and Hardts
term, the revolution was the rebellion of the multitude. As its result, state welfare capitalism was further
facilitated in each country. Neoliberalism after the 1980s is precisely a repercussion of the state-capital
dyad, that is, the liberation from the nation.

When we consider the A series, we see that the revolution of 1789 broke out during a period when
Britain and France struggled for hegemony. The revolution resulted in a war that aimed at making France
an empire that could compete with Britain. The revolution of 1917, on the other hand, occurred as a result
of the First World War and yielded another war. As a consequence of the revolution, Russia, which had
been the least powerful among the great powers, was revived as Empire. Only Marxists, who emphasized
class more than the nation, provided an ideology that denied the division of old world empires into nation-
states, though they were indeed divided.

In terms of the opposition to the state and capital, the B series is more important than the A. We
cannot, however, expect the B series in the future, for the stage after 1990 is that of imperialism and, if there
is a revolution, it would belong to the A series. Wallerstein considers the revolution of 1968 a rehearsal
for antisystemic movements on a global scale.18 Yet what is going to happen can never be the repetition
of 1968 on a larger scale. The rebellion of the multitude that Negri and Hardt expect is impossible at the
stage of imperialism. When we reect on events from 1968 to 1990, we should refer to history from 1848
to 1870 and its consequences.19 As the world after 1870 could not await the return of 1848, so we, who
live in the world after 1990, cannot expect the return of 1968. After 1990, the struggles for resources and
markets among the dyads of the state and capital could intensify and lead to another world war. This world
war could cause the rebellion of the multitude or could be caused by that rebellion. Either way, in the rst
half of the twenty-rst century, any action of countermovement against the state-capital dyad should take
the possibility of war into account.

It is worth noting that Kant wrote Perpetual Peace during the war that broke out with the French
Revolution. Peace generally means the state of the absence of war. But what Kant calls peace is the end
of all hostilities in which there is no state and in which the Hobbesian state of nature ends. That is to say,
Kants peace signies the sublation of the state. Therefore, what he terms the kingdom of ends or world
republic signies a society in which the state and capital are sublated.20 In this sense Kants thought could
be called anarchist. Unlike anarchism, however, Kant started with the notion that the state can be a state
only in relation to other states. Anarchists and Marxists conceive the sublation of a state only within a
state because they assume that the state is a secondary superstructure. Yet, the state is autonomous and
exists only in relation to other states. Supposing this autonomy of the state, Kant speculated on how the

Umbr(a) 143
state can be sublated. The design of a federation of states is merely a rst step toward a world republic,
which is the regulative idea of reason. Hegel scoffed at this idea as being unrealistic, but for Kant, it was
real. Kant thought that a federation of states could be achieved not by human reason or good will but by
human antagonism, that is, by war. This antagonism is different from Hegels cunning of reason and can
be called the cunning of nature. Indeed, although Kants design was ignored, it was revived at the end
of the nineteenth century, during the stage of imperialism. This was not an accident. Kants design itself
was conceived at the previous stage of imperialism. After the First World War, his design was realized as
the League of Nations. Needless to say, the League of Nations was too ineffectual to prevent the Second
World War, but it resulted in the establishment of the United Nations. It too is ineffectual, but any attempt
to thwart the United Nations would result in its reinforcement. At the stage of imperialism, there is no way
to avoid the repetition caused by the dyad of state and capital other than to repeat the countermovement
initiated by Kant.

Translated by Hiroki Yoshikuni

1
Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (London:
Electric Book, 2001), 7.
2
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, Trans. John Sibree
(New York: Collier, 1901), 402.
3
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1951), 128.
4
Marx, The 18th Brumaire, 129.
5
Ibid, 114.
6
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1,
Trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 209.
7
Ibid, 236.
8
Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, Trans. Sabu
Kohso (Cambridge: MIT, 2003).
9
Every social formation unies distinct principles of exchange.
For example, in primitive communities, the principle of
reciprocity is dominant, but there are also wars and trade
with other communities. But these modes never assume a
xed form in nomadic life. Marx emphasizes that commodity
exchange starts between communities, for within a community
reciprocity is dominant. Historically speaking, commodity
exchange prevails in communities only after modern
capitalism. The state begins when a community violently
plunders and rules other communities. The state does not start
from within a community since reciprocity prevents diadem,
that is, concentration of powers beyond chiefdom. Plunder is
not exchange, but in order to plunder constantly, various kinds
of redistribution are necessary. The redistribution includes
welfare, security, and public utilities such as ood control and
irrigation, which are indeed represented as a kind of exchange.
The state is based on this exchange mode of plunder and
redistribution.
On the other hand, there is not necessarily an
equal relationship of human beings in commodity exchange,
which is based upon mutual agreement unlike the other two
modes of exchange. In reality, commodity exchange takes
place between money and commodities, which are not in
a symmetrical relationship. While money has the social
pledge to the direct exchangeability of commodities, the
commodity needs the salto mortale in order to be exchanged
with money (Capital 228). Those who have money can obtain
others products and use others without recourse to violent
measure. Namely, those who have money and those who
have commodity are supposed to be in an equal relationship
but effectively are not. It is possible to force others with
money, and those with money become capitalists through the
movement of M-C-M'. Consequently, classes are formed not
by violence but by the mode of commodity exchange.
In pre-capitalist social formations, there are communities
and commodity exchange (merchant capital), but these are
controlled by the state. In capitalist social formations, the
mode of commodity exchange becomes dominant. The other
modes of exchange and their derivatives, however, do not
vanish but remain in different forms. The state becomes the
modern state, and the dissolved community becomes the
nation as the imagined community. All of them constitute the
trinity of capital, nation, and state.
Robert Albritton, A Japanese Approach to Stages of
10
Capitalist Development (New York: St. Martins, 1995).
11
In fact, Descartes and Locke sought refuge in Amsterdam,
where Spinoza also found a home. These phenomena are
similar to Marxs exile in Britain at the stage of liberalism.
Wallerstein writes, [G]enerations of Scotsmen went to the
Netherlands for their university education. This is another link
in the chain that explains the Scottish Enlightenment of the late
eighteenth century, itself a crucial factor in the British surge
forward. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System
II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-
Economy, 1600-1750 (New York: Academic, 1980), 66.
12
Ibid, 38.
13
Ibid, 39.
14
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 124 ff.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge:
15
Harvard University Press, 2000), 180 (emphasis in original).
16
Ibid, 190.
17
Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel
Wallerstein, Antisystemic Movements (London and New York:
Verso, 1989), 97-98.
18
Ibid, 111.
Umbr(a) 145
19
The world revolution of 1848 was defeated; consequently,
in the 1880s the advanced states established an internal
social democratic order and adopted imperialist policies
externally. In Britain, the Fabian Society was organized a year
after the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. In Germany,
too, while imperialist policies were employed abroad in the
1890s, the Social Democratic Workers Party was legalized
and subsequently gained a number of seats in the Bundestag.
Engels could then claim in 1895 that the mode of struggle
of 1848 is today obsolete in every respect (Introduction to
Karl Marxs The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850).
Although he had concluded in 1886 that England is the
only country where the inevitable social revolution might be
effected entirely by peaceful and legal means (Preface to the
English Edition, Capital), in 1895 he thought that it was also
possible to carry out such a revolution in Germany. His disciple
Bernstein furthered this view. Internal social democracy within
an advanced state is coexistent with external imperialism.
The Second International, which was composed of social
democratic parties, was opposed to imperialism and war. It
was ineffectual in preventing the First World War and dissolved
once the war broke out. On the other hand, there were those
who criticized the social democracy of the advanced states
and attempted to repeat the revolution of 1848; their actions
led to the Russian Revolution.

20
Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, Trans.
Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983). Long before
Perpetual Peace, Kant posited the world republic as the
goal of human history. He called it the kingdom of ends, a
realization of the moral law that commands us to treat others
in every case as an end withal, never as means only. It is
impossible to contain the kingdom of ends within a single
state: if it is achieved, the state can never use other states as
means only. Therefore the kingdom of ends is necessarily a
world republic; it is not only the sublation of the state but also
of capitalism. For example, as long as there is a system that
yields economic disparity among states, there can be no world
republic.
REVIEWS
THE MATHEMATICS OF NOVELTY: BADIOUS
MINIMALIST METAPHYSICS
Sam Gillespie
(Melbourne: re.press, 2008), 172 pp.
The Mathematics of Novelty: Badious Minimalist
Metaphysics represents the culmination of Sam
Gillespies pathbreaking work on the philosophy
of Alain Badiou. One of the most gifted and
promising philosophers of his generation, as
Joan Copjec put it in her tribute to him in the 2004
issue of Umbr(a), Gillespie was largely responsible
for introducing Badious writing to the English-
speaking world through the 1996 issue of the
journal, which he co-edited with Sigi Jttkandt.
This special issue was the rst of any English-
language journal devoted entirely to Badious
work, and it included translations of four essays by
Badiou as well as two introductory essays written
by Gillespie himself. Since Gillespies death, a
number of books and essays about Badiou have
been devoted to his memory. Among the friends
and colleagues who commemorated him and his
work in pioneering Badious Anglophone reception
are Ray Brassier, Joan Copjec, Peter Hallward, Sigi
Jttkandt, and Alberto Toscano scholars who,
like Sam Gillespie himself, are some of Badious
most astute and tireless critics, interpreters, and
interlocutors.

The primary concern of The Mathematics of

Novelty is to investigate the connections between
Badious theory of novelty and the notion of truth.
That is, what are the conditions under which the
new can occur, and to what extent is truth enabled
by such conditions? Gillespies book opens with a
sustained, albeit rudimentary, interrogation of the
materialist approaches to the concept of novelty
found in the philosophies of Badiou and Deleuze.
He does this, not in order to simply argue for
the superiority of one philosophical system over
another but rather to delimit a path on which one
can question and qualify Badious theory of the
new. He asks, rstly, to what extent is Badious
ontology adequate to (1) the criteria of multiplicity
and (2) the possible occurrence of an event and
its subsequent truth procedure? Secondly, how
does Badiou reinvigorate the category of truth
from its classical strictures as unchanging and
thus antithetical to novelty? Finally, how are the
previously mentioned sets of problems related?
The subsequent chapters confront these
questions clearly and carefully, presenting a
rigorous exposition of the core of Badious ontology.
Beginning with an analysis of the implications of the
claim that set theory is ontology through Badious
reading of Spinoza, Gillespie argues that the
acknowledgement of the void the nothingness
outside of ontology which Spinoza foreclosed
from his system is the minimal condition under
which thought can think being. Such an equation
between thought and being is the crucial support
for Badious meta-ontological assertion that set-
theoretical mathematics is ontology. Moreover,
Gillespie claims, because the void (the proper
name of being) is the necessary precondition for
thought itself, it is also the necessary precondition
for thinking the multiplicity that exists in excess
to what is presented in a situation. It is from the
inconsistency of the void, Gillespie argues, that
subjective action re-decides the consistency of
any situation, extending from a local decision
that an event has occurred (40). Without such
a thinking of being as multiplicity, one is left with
a philosophy that can only take recourse in a
descriptive afrmation of what always already is
(42).
However, we should not infer from this that
being is derived from thought. As Gillespie reminds
us, for Badiou being is not purely generated in and
by thinking itself (47). Rather, being is axiomatically
posited from the initial point of departure of zero, the
point from which mathematical thought formalizes
and enables the thinking of being itself. But how is it
that the positing of zero strictly speaking, nothing
could enable thought? Gillespie provides three
preliminary responses. Firstly, he contends that
the new must not be conated with mere change.
This is concomitant with Badious assertion that,
despite historical variation and the development
and evolution that take place within science and
the arts, that which is philosophically new is rare.
The void provides for the minimal assertions of
the power of thought to think the new through the
axiom of the void itself (the void exists), the event
(located on the edge of the void of the situation) as
the encounter of thought with its own limits, and
truth as the minimal immanence of thought to itself,
free from any positive content. Secondly, Gillespie
cautions that the void should not be considered a
measurement of a state of affairs but rather as the
local site of a situation from which an event can
be extracted (68). The measurement of change is
a representative function, and the void eludes any
and all such representation, remaining distinctly
indeterminate. Lastly, Gillespie explains, we must
be able to think the possibility for the new in and
through the concept of truth. Following Badiou,
truth is that which occurs in a situation insofar as
the situation itself is fundamentally transformed
by whatever consequences issue from that truth.
Furthermore, truth is the proper activity of thought,
above and beyond its ability to think being (ibid).
So then what can be said of truth as far
as Badious ontology is concerned? At rst glance,
Umbr(a) 149
it is tempting to radically divide ontology from the
category of truth, based on the perception of an
absolute separation between the primary, titular
categories of Being and Event: on the one hand,
being, proper to ontology, is simply what is; the
event, alternatively, is fundamentally undecidable
from the perspective of ontology it can only
retroactively come to be through a subjective
truth procedure. Gillespie maintains, however,
that such an opposition is patently erroneous: it
is impossible to think the category of truth apart
from the foundations that mathematical ontology
provides [] The challenge, Gillespie continues, is
to examine the extent to which the appearance of
a truth is enabled through the mathematization of
being (72). Thinking through the relation between
ontology and truth requires a renewed interrogation
of truth as a philosophical category as well as an
investigation of what foundations are necessary
for such a conception of truth. Moreover, Gillespie
contends it is only a sufcient understanding of
Paul Cohens generic set theory that will allow us
to comprehend Badious category of truth. The
Mathematics of Novelty is in large part a detailed and
patient study of Badious ontology, and the chapter
containing the outline of the connection between
truth and ontology is certainly the most difcult
of this slim volume. Overall, however, Gillespies
exegesis of the mathematical foundations of
Badious ontology is one of the clearest and most
approachable introductions to the meditations of
Being and Event ever written the heroic efforts of
Peter Hallward and others notwithstanding. This is
particularly true of the sections on the twin theories
of the generic and forcing as well as Gillespies
discussion of the relation between the ontology of
a situation and the truth that ruptures it.
As Gillespie argues, the necessary
connection Badiou must make between ontology
and truth necessitates a subreption of the
indiscernible, an imposition of an order to give
consistency to what is fundamentally inconsistent
(95). That is, in order for Badiou to avoid a
problematic tautology in his theory of the event it
is necessary to posit a phenomenology of sorts
that would account for what occurs when subjects
recognize or are seized by events. Because the
category of the event cannot be derived from
Badious formal ontology, according to Gillespie
one must look to an additional, phenomenological
framework for an elucidation of the way in which
events mobilize subjects to engage in truth
procedures. Not surprisingly, Gillespie nds such
a supplementary schema in Lacans teachings on
affect and on anxiety in particular. While the set
theory of Cantor and Cohen provides the basis
for Badious ontology, his theory of the event
clearly derives from Lacanian psychoanalysis. As
Gillespie puts it, the event is neither a category
of presentation nor representation [] it is an
unpresentation (101). That is, presentation does
not directly present the inconsistency of being
but rather being in its material instantiation. Thus,
the only direct presentation of inconsistency is an
event, the eruption of the void into the situation.
As clear as Badiou may make this point himself,
Gillespie points out that for Badious philosophy
to move beyond the sterility of the system put
forth in Being and Event it must be supplemented
by two operations that cannot be derived from
set-theoretical ontology (ibid). Namely, one must
be able to think the categories of being and
truth in particular situations without resorting to
subtraction. Equally necessary is a phenomenology
of subjectivity that would unite particular situations
to subjective action. For Gillespie, this comes, as
mentioned above, in the form of an isomorphism
between Lacans conceptualization of the relation
of the subject of psychoanalysis (the speaking
subject) to its own real or indiscernible being
and Badious theory of a subject seized by the
incalculable of an event. In short, Gillespie argues
that subjective delity toward a particular truth is
propelled by a form of what Lacan theorized as the
drive. More specically, for Lacan the confrontation
of the subject with the nothing that is the subjects
own being anxiety, the lack of lack is the
catalyst for subjective action. As Gillespie explains,
a person is compelled to go into analysis less
on the basis of a compulsive need or desire for
somethingas because of an underlying anxiety
that makes life unbearable (119). The process of
analysis is thus a way for that subject to give form
to the indiscernible being in which such anxiety is
rooted, namely jouissance, or that part of it that
supports subjective activity: object a. Object a is the
correlate of Badious event insofar as both provide
a minimal basis for the subjects confrontation
with being. While the operation of forcing causes
the subjective excess of indeterminate being (the
event) to pass from a strictly subjective principle
into a universal truth and thus is what distinguishes
Badious subject from Lacans subject, Gillespie
reminds us that forcing is not possible without the
activity of a militant subject whose framework is
provided by Lacan through the category of affect,
specically anxiety.
After explicating the central categories of
Badious philosophy (being, truth, the event, and the
subject), Gillespie confronts the questions of what,
in the end, philosophy is for Badiou. That is, what
is philosophy capable of? Set theory, from Cantor
to Zermelo and Fraenkel, is a scientic innovation
that reinvigorates the classical philosophical
category of ontology in such a way that it allows
philosophy to reect on and think the compossibility
between the novelties produced in science, art,
politics, and love that issues from a shared basis
in a common ontology. Badious mathematical
ontology changes the question What is thought?
from a determination of thought as substance to a
conception of thought as capacity. Gillespie shows
that, in opposition to a descriptive afrmation of
the world in which, for example, Deleuzes thought
places novelty, Badious philosophy situates the
new in complete exteriority to the situation (or
world) that is, in the void. Philosophy is not a
description of truth procedures that have occurred,
but rather a call to action for truth procedures to
occur. Whether or not there has ever been a true
event of novelty, Gillespie argues, is therefore
beside the point: it is simply enough to know that
there can be events insofar as we are capable of
thinking nothing (148). It is in this radical separation
of itself from the world that philosophy becomes
an imperative to try out through militant activity
(ibid.). The Mathematics of Novelty is in the end
an exercise in such philosophical activity, both
militant and elegant, at once a clarication and a
transformation of Badious thought. Gillespies loss
to philosophy is indeed, as Joan Copjec has said,
incalculable, and this loss is truly underscored by
the brilliance of this long-awaited book.
Andrew Ascherl
Umbr(a) 151
INTIMACIES
Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008),
144 pp.
If the most basic expression of intimacy is understood
to be the intense emotional and physical proximity
of one person to another a communion of souls,
a sharing of hearts, an immeasurably adoring gaze
then the problem with intimacy may be that sex
is always getting in the way. Sex is constantly
ruining the moment, rupturing the passionate
embrace conjoining two individuals, putting a stop
to the fragile and temporary affection sustaining
the intimate relationship. One simple reason for
this might be that sex is at its most enjoyable when
it is at its most selsh; any intimacy pervading the
space between two individuals is sacriced to
the unsharable spasm of satisfaction marking the
conclusion of the sexual act, or even to the search
for this nal paroxysm of enjoyment. The other is,
in sex, reduced to a mere instrument of the selfs
own narcissistic satisfaction.
Of course, this would not be a particularly
psychoanalytic account of the problem. It would
not account for all those sexual experiences within
which the self apparently sacrices his or her own
pleasure to the pleasure of the other; it cannot
account for the loss of self toward which the
narcissistic pursuit of enjoyment is directed; in short,
the notion that sex is not truly intimate, because
it simply stages an instrumentalization of each
partner by the other, cannot account for what Leo
Bersani has famously called the self-shattering of
the sexual experience. In earlier works especially
The Freudian Body and Is the Rectum a Grave?
Bersani articulated the Freudian approach to sex as
one that understands pleasure as a subjects willed
impulse to self-destruction, as the disarticulation
of the egos socially-directed narrative, and as
fundamentally masochistic.1 As his co-author,
Adam Phillips, notes in their new book Intimacies,
if the egos project is plausibility satisfyingly
coherent narrative accounts of the subjects wants
and moves [] the sexual becomes, as it were, the
individuals self-cure for his own plausibility, the
sexual identied as that which irremediably violates
the individuals intelligibility (to himself and others)
(92-93). In this account of sex, intimacy would be
spoiled not because the self is isolated in his or
her pleasure, but rather because through self-
shattering jouissance there is no self to share.
The strange paradox of self-shattering
of a self-destructive narcissism saturating human
experience only occasionally appears within the
actual text of Intimacies, but it could be understood
as the theoretical given from which this exploration
and reevaluation of the notion of intimacy begins.
Whatever might be meant by intimacy, it is not
it simply cannot be sex.
Readers looking to nd an authoritative
redenition of the term will no doubt be extremely
disappointed by this book, which, according
to Phillips short preface, is neither diligent,
thorough, researched, nor nished (viii). Intimacies
is structured less like an academic monograph
and more like a lop-sided conversation; Bersani
provides the rst three chapters and brief
conclusion, while Phillips offers only his preface
and a nal chapter crystallizing, criticizing and
generalizing some of his colleagues earlier insights.
However, this admittedly incomplete project for an
intimacy beyond sexuality may, in fact, be the most
appropriate means by which to frame this series
of speculations, one primary conceit of which is
that there can be no single, stable redenition of
intimacy. Even the plurality of the title indicates
that intimacy might better be understood not
as a state of being but rather as a process of
becoming, as a virtuality or potentiality denoting
the possibility of non-sexual and non-destructive
relationships between individuals or groups. The
rst intimacy, according to Phillips reading of the
relation between a mother and her child, is an
intimacy with a process of becoming, not with a
person. The question raised by Bersanis account
is why is this relation to difcult to sustain, so easily
sabotaged by the drive to take things personally
(114)? The book itself stages the kind of structural
incoherence, the resistance to analytic closure and
subjective certainty, that characterizes this new
account of an intimacy without object.
Neither author offers any program for
political change, any set of solutions from which to
rearticulate the social link. Bersani nds justication
for the ambiguity of these explorations in Foucaults
critique of power, a critique which insisted upon
the responsibility of criticism to enable a multitude
of resistances to problematic congurations of
authority without necessarily authorizing one
particular resistance over any other. As in Foucaults
work, this book seeks to provoke questions rather
than afford answers without, that is to say,
replacing one form of mastery with another, without
the prescriptions for a new normativity (95).
Both authors make a compelling case for
this disorderly method of inquiry, although it must
be said that this organization of ideas often takes
off in compelling or inventive directions only to lose
the thread of its own argument, as though the text
itself were distracted by the very energy of thought
driving its elaboration. The rst chapter consists
principally in a reading of Patrice Lecontes lm
Condences trop intimes (trans. Intimate Strangers)
and Henry James novella The Beast in the Jungle
as a kind of extended prolegomena to the general
question from which Intimacies emerges: what
can psychoanalysis teach us about the problem of
intimacy, and how can it guide our search for an
intimacy without (or against) sex? Bersani provides
an admittedly unsympathetic reading of James story
in order to augment Lecontes incisive exploration
of an intimacy between two people [p]urged of
their sexual selves (27); viewed through the lms
staging of an analytic encounter, psychoanalysis
could be understood to free desiring fantasies
from psychological constraints, thereby treating
the unconscious not as the determinant depth of
being but, instead, as de-realized being, as never
more than potential being (28). Here, a number of
fascinating questions concerning the nature of love
and desire within a Freudian or Lacanian context
are raised, only to be immediately abandoned along
with Bersanis literary and lmic focus. By the end
of the rst chapter, the preceding analysis is simply
subordinated to a new central question: Are there
no other versions of this intimacy, ones that might
emerge from larger relational elds? (30).
The second and third chapters generally
pivot around this question; chapter two titled, in a
surprisingly unambiguous fashion, Shame on You
concerns the emerging subculture of bareback
sex. Bersani elevates this increasingly popular set
of sexual practices as a paradigmatic example of
the search for new models of intimacy, decidedly
and unironically condemning barebacking as
socially irresponsible, morally bankrupt and
politically vacuous deviant behavior. He argues
that barebacking in its various forms signals an
internalization of homophobic expectations and
Umbr(a) 153
a desperate grasp for a subjectivity beyond the
politics of shame endemic to heteronormativity.
Moreover, Bersani argues, barebacking is insane
for obvious reasons; it is a manifestation of a
sexualized death drive and an irresponsible
spreading of disease and death; its participants
appear at once idiotic, saintly, and heavily
drugged; it is completely nonviable politically
and socially (47-8). Finally, in an argumentative
move that is truly shocking considering Bersanis
earlier pioneering insights into the socially and
politically disruptive potentials of sex as self-
shattering, he suggests that nothing useful can
come from this practice, the practice of sexually
repellant and staggeringly irresponsible behavior
(49-50, 55). While it is essential to acknowledge
Bersanis own privileged place intellectually and
personally within the history of AIDS activism,
and barebackings apparent indifference to that
history, it is difcult to reconcile his dismissive
vituperation toward this particular subculture with
his groundbreaking insight into the co-constitution
of death and sexuality in his earlier works. Why, we
might ask, must a sexual subculture prove useful
to anyone, if it is precisely through sexual pleasure
that systems of calculation and utilitarian valuation
break down? How is Bersanis suggestion that
the average barebacker is a stupid, detached,
chemically-deluded dupe at all consistent with
the ethics of psychoanalysis, with this theoretical
orientation toward subjectivity that upholds the
right to jouissance as the foundation of human
singularity?
This second chapter seems all the more
puzzling when juxtaposed with chapter three, which
revisits the problem of self-shattering within the
context of an increasingly frenetic collective will-
to-violence in United States foreign policy. Here,
Bersani brilliantly dissects the logic of the moral
monster as an instrument in the codication of a
militant and brutal American community; he argues
that the image of a dangerous, dehumanized, or
even evil other against which society must be
defended should be read as an anxious projection
of our own terrorizing jouissance, our own death
drive, onto a constructed enemy. Bersani may
wish to suggest that American neo-imperialism
manifests, on a grand scale, the same hyperbolic
masochism that characterizes barebacking, but
such an analogy collapses under the weight of his
own larger insight: the demonization endemic to
American exceptionalism and military adventurism
bears witness to a desire to establish and defend
the distinct borders of a collective identity, and is
thus symptomatic of a pervasive insecurity at the
core of any system of securitization. The same
cannot be said of barebacking, which organizes
itself around the dissolution of personal identity,
or at least the invasion of the ego by the body
(and sometimes even the viral trace) of the other.
Total security and total intimacy may be equally
utopian, but the former consciously articulates
itself through the disavowal of the death drive,
while barebacking constructs a new social link
around the enthusiastic embrace of pleasurable
self-shattering that Bersani himself revealed to be
the trace of the drives terrifying ubiquity.
These tensions remain unexplored in
Bersanis writing, although they do occupy a central
place in Phillips main contribution to the volume.
Barebacking, according to Phillips, shows us
that sex is a dead end and it is our consciousness
of this [] that makes human sexuality what it
is (114). This nal chapter raises a number of
fascinating questions, both incorporating and
questioning some of Bersanis most valuable
insights; the central problem here concerns the
foundational psychoanalytic axiom that the egos
fragility pertains to an excess without which it
simply would not exist. New notions of intimacy
would therefore require an attention to this excess
jouissance, the death drive, the object-cause
of desire and to its tendency to constantly
interrupt or undermine the social link. Here,
intimacy crystallizes as a problem of exceedingly
ethical proportions: at stake is a rearticulation of
the individual and his or her obligations to the
social. Against the collective wisdom that ethics
names the responsibility to respect the difference
of the other, Phillips and Bersani both suggest
that this love thy neighbor attitude provokes the
very aggression against which it is opposed and
mistakenly disregards the universal problem of
primary narcissism. In a truly incendiary critique of
the multiculturalism of shared differences, Phillips
provides a thinly veiled allusion to water-boarding
the interrogation procedure used by the Central
Intelligence Agency to simulate a sense of drowning
in its victim: To be encouraged, to be educated, to
be forced to drink what you would by desire spit
out, is a form of torture (102). Ethics would thus
require, paradoxically, that we have the courage
of our narcissism (98).
This is a clarication of Bersanis nal
suggestion, in chapter three, that new forms of
intimacy may be cultivated through what he calls
impersonal narcissism, a notion that he also
pursued in his earlier book Homos.2 This would
be a reciprocal self-recognition that attempts to
operate beyond the limited dichotomy of sameness
and difference, and that presupposes the co-
existence of individuals not as sovereign subjects,
but as incalculably singular (86). There is, then, an
ontological dimension to the problem of intimacy,
one that forces a reconsideration of the ground
of being upon which singular subjects appear to
themselves and to each other. This nal argument
recalls and even complements philosophical
considerations of this problem most notably, those
of Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben but
Bersanis nal reections may lay the groundwork
for further investigations into the particular value
of psychoanalysis as a theoretical orientation from
which to consider community. This unpolished,
often disjointed and internally inconsistent book
may, for all its shortcomings or perhaps because
of these shortcomings offer a formal and analytic
model from which to rethink what it means to be
together, with or without sex getting in the way.
Nathan Gorelick
1
Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Is the Rectum
a Grave?, October, Vol. 43, AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural
Activism, (Winter, 1987), p. 197-222.
2
Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1995).
Umbr(a) 155
VIOLENCE
Slavoj iek
(London: Prole Books LTD, 2008), 218 pp.
More often than not, the anniversaries of
major historical events are accompanied by
the opportunity, if not the forced obligation,
for philosophical reection. And as the fortieth
anniversary of May, 1968 falls upon us, the passing
of time once again provides academia with the
impetus to hold conferences and exhibitions to
both mark the event and question the lasting
consequences that the riots of 68 may still hold
for the world today. So it may not be coincidental
that the cover to the British edition of Slavoj
ieks most recent work, Violence: Six Sideways
Reections, bears the image of a Parisian youth in
the midst of hurling a stone at the police before him
a scene frozen in time that encapsulates the spirit
of those two months. For even after the passing of
four decades, the events of 68 still loom large in the
revolutionary imagination as a time of emancipatory
potential that appears all but lost in the current belief
that qualitative social change is yet still possible
through the dual liberal mechanisms of democratic
formalism and multicultural tolerance.
In his bric-a-brac of reections on
violence (1), iek offers an elucidation of the
vicissitudes of this complex dialectical concept,
which has of late been obscured by the images
of Muslim fundamentalist violence, random
university shootings, and natural disasters that have
come to dominate Western media. Indeed, one of
ieks central arguments in Violence is that it is
due to a pronounced emphasis on what he refers
to as subjective violence that a more fundamental
violence is obfuscated, a violence which
sustains the very zero-level standard against which
we perceive something as subjectively violent
(2). So, while certainly not shying away from the
idea of violence as a necessary component within
emancipatory politics, the core of ieks analysis in
Violence focuses upon those forms of violence that
covertly coordinate and mediate the very denition
of violence within Western democracies. As iek
notes, at the forefront of our minds, the obvious
signals of violence are acts of crime and terror, civil
unrest, international conict. But we should learn
to step back, to disentangle ourselves from the
fascinating lure of this directly visible subjective
violence performed by a clearly identiable
agent. We need to perceive the contours of the
background which generates such outbursts. A
step back enables us to identify a violence that
sustains our very efforts to ght violence and to
promote tolerance (1).
So as to rmly ground this distinction
between subjective and objective violence,
iek begins his reections by turning to an
almost forgotten event in Soviet history. In 1922,
the Bolsheviks carried out the expulsion of
anti-communist intellectuals, economists, and
theologians, forcing them into exile by means of
a ship named The Philosophy Steamer. Citing
Lesley Chamberlains recent study on the topic,
iek recounts the fate of Nikolai Lossky, a Russian
intellectual whose life was uprooted as he and his
family were forced from their homeland into exile
in Germany. Describing the vertiginous effects that
this apparently irrational decision of Lenins would
have on what he intuits to be the innocent victims
of a mad regime, Chamberlain writes that Lossky
simply couldnt understand who would want
to destroy his way of life. What had the Losskys
and their kind done? His boys and their friends,
as they inherited the best of what Russia had to
offer, helped ll the world with talk of literature and left to directly oppose all forms of violence that are
music and art, and they led gentle lives. What was easily identiable as being carried out by visible
wrong with that (8)? Of course it is this What was subjects, while, everything else can and has to
wrong with that? that comes to the fore in ieks wait (ibid).
defense of Lenins actions. According to iek, what
becomes obscured by Chamberlains emphasis on This pronounced emphasis on subjective
the subjective violence of Lenins order to expel the violence becomes the chief ideological supplement
intellectuals is the objective violence which went utilized by those referred to in Violence as todays
unseen and which allowed Lossky to live his life liberal communists. What lies at the center of this
in such a genteel manner. In other words, it is this ideology is a belief in the full power of capitalism to
objective violence that goes on behind the scenes expand unrestricted across the globe, while those
which sustains the domination and exploitation that who prot from these entrepreneurial enterprises
allows for those like Lossky to live their lives in the bear the responsibility to give back to the world
guise of innocence, when in actuality this innocence a part of their good fortune through charitable
is sustained by a deeper, systemic violence. In this and humanitarian acts of kindness. However, what
way, Lenins mad subjective violence did not these supposed acts of kindness actually conceal
originate from nowhere, but rather served to reveal is the fact that while they ght subjective violence,
the truth of those who sailed upon The Philosophy liberal communists are the very agents of the
Steamer: What they didnt understand was that in structural violence which creates the conditions for
the guise of this irrational subjective violence, they the explosions of subjective violence (31). So while
were getting back the message they themselves philanthropic billionaires such as George Soros and
sent out in its inverted true form (9). Bill Gates are praised for making large contributions
to the developing third world, such charity only
This distinction, between the subjective serves to mask that they themselves are the
violence of Lenins decision and the objective ultimate cause of the violence and destitution that
violence which covertly supported the cozy lives their millions of dollars are supposed to alleviate.
of Russian intellectuals, is further utilized by Furthermore, the rise of liberal communist ideology
iek to critique liberal ideologys emphasis on follows from the development of capitalism itself,
humanitarianism and tolerance as the two chief which iek analyzes via German philosopher
tools at its disposal to combat social inequalities Peter Sloterdijks Bataillian distinction between the
and injustices. Whether ghting overseas tragedies general economy of sovereign expenditure and
with nancial or humanitarian relief efforts, or the restrained economy of capitalisms endless
countering racism at home with renewed efforts proteering. By breaking out of the vicious
of promoting more and more tolerance, what both cycle of endless expanded reproduction, by
mechanisms ultimately obscure is the existence of diverting wealth away from the cycle of capitalist
a more essential systemic violence which is actually expansion and into philanthropic projects, capital
sustained by the very efforts to eradicate the all too is nonetheless doing nothing but rejuvenating itself
visible subjective violence. The dilemma arises due by both masking the objective violence of which it
to what iek characterizes as an SOS call of the itself is the cause and vouchsang its own social

Umbr(a) 157
reproduction. Viewed in this way, it becomes clear
that, while liberal communists are often lauded
for their charitable acts around the globe, it in no
way matters whether such acts are sincere or
hypocritical, for in either case what they amount
to is the logical concluding point of capitalist
circulation, necessary from the strictly economic
standpoint, since it allows the capitalist system to
postpone its crisis (20).
After analyzing the way in which liberal
communist ideology ultimately acts to conceal
how todays humanitarian capitalists give away
with one hand what they take with the other (18),
making them the enemy of every progressive
struggle today (32), iek goes on to confront what
is supposedly the very medium of reconciliation and
tolerance, a supposition employed most notably
by liberal theorists such as Jrgen Habermas. Of
course, this is nothing less than language itself,
which, despite appearing to be the means through
which tolerance and non-violence are actualized
in the symbolic order via liberal politics, is actually
the very medium of a fundamental violence that
gives the world a partial twist, imposing a
presupposed standard of what the normal non-
violent situation is [] [the] standard with reference
to which some events appear as violent (55). So,
contrary to the belief that at its most primordial level
language is a medium of social reconciliation, or,
that even if language is aggressive, it nonetheless
presupposes a minimal recognition of the
other party (51-52), iek argues that human
communication in its most basic, constitutive
dimension does not involve a space of egalitarian
subjectivity. It is not balanced. It does not put
the participants in symmetric mutually responsible
positions where they have to follow the same rules
and justify their claims (53).
Rather than imposing a homogenous,
stable set of symbolic coordinates for the subject,
language, iek argues, is rather an excess, an
absolute destabilizing heterogeneity, which pushes
the subject beyond its nite existence. In this way
it is the very medium of violence; it is language
which pushes our desire beyond its proper
limits, transforming it into a desire that contains
the innite, elevating it into an absolute striving
that cannot ever be satised (55). However, it
is by distinguishing between two modalities of
desire that the ethical implications of violence and
language come to the fore. The logic involved here
is the Hegelian insight as to how the opposition
between the Law and its transgression is actually
internal to the transgression itself. In other words,
it is the Law that is the ultimate transgression
that determines precisely what accounts for the
particular transgressions against it. As was noted
above, it is language that gives the world a partial
twist, a violence that implements the standard
against which violence itself is measured. And as
the transgression that actually establishes what
a transgression is, desire can be viewed as either
nite or innite, depending upon the stance it takes
in regards to that transgression which imposes the
initial distinction between absolute and particular
transgression.
In other words, those desires that are
in harmony with the world, which nd their
coordinates within the absolute transgression, are
anti-ethical in that they sustain the inertia of egotism
and pleasure-seeking (55), maintaining the subject
within a domain of post-political bio-politics that
favors expert management, administration, and
security over old ideological struggles. Contrary
to this position, desires that contain the innite
are ethical precisely because, by reaching for the
good, they are no longer a particular transgression
enacted within the framework established by the
absolute transgression, but rather are transgressions
which aim at the absolute itself. However, because
those desires that act as the source of the good
are set against the very framework that initially
dened exactly in what the good consists,
iek is quick to emphasize that an irreducible
ambiguity accompanies such innite desires, as
the source of the good is a power that shatters the
coordinates of our nite existence (56). So from
the perspective of the previous set of coordinates
maintained by the absolute transgression, the good
cannot but appear as its very opposite, evil. This, of
course, cannot be otherwise since what the good
undermines is the very presupposed standard by
which the good and violence had previously been
measured.
Later, iek expands upon his analysis of
ethics and subjectivity in order to account for a
form of politicization that is in opposition to todays
predominant emphasis on the multicultural politics
of tolerance. Relying on the work of Wendy Brown,
iek contends that the rise of tolerance as todays
post-political ersatz (119) is a direct consequence
of the abandonment of emancipatory projects,
ultimately resulting in the culturalization of politics
by which political differences become naturalized
and neutralized into cultural differences. Because
of this naturalization, iek argues that identity
politics and tolerance arise to supplement the
lack of a true emancipatory politics, becoming
the predominant mode of a liberal discourse
which privileges the particular (i.e., culture) while
obfuscating the universal dimension of subjectivity.
Put differently, by directly identifying the subject
with its culture, i.e., its particular life-world, the split
between the particular and the universal is reduced
to the particular itself. Hence, what becomes lost
is the key dialectical insight as to how universality
becomes for itself only insofar as individuals no
longer fully identify the kernel of their being with
their particular social situation. [] In a given social
structure, universality becomes for itself only in
those individuals who lack a proper place in it
(127-128).
However, what is of crucial importance
for iek is the fact that universality is not external
to the particular, but is rather inscribed within it;
the particular itself is split into its particular and
its universal aspects. This is essential for two
reasons. First, it follows that every particular
position is haunted by its implicit universality,
which undermines it (132) the universal within
the particular is nothing less than the negative
force that directly undermines the content of
every particular position. Secondly, in order for a
culture to maintain its particular identity, it must
repress the universal dimension which is active at
its very heart, that is the gap between the particular
(its identity) and the universal which destabilizes
it from within (133). iek maintains that the
consequences of this assertion directly undermine
the idea of cultural autonomy, as well as any
argument made in defense of cultural practices
that appear as inhumane or barbaric in the
eyes of Westerners. So, for instance, while protests
against clitoridectomy or patriarchy may arise from
within the protesters particular cultural life-world,
they do so only from the position of the universal,
the negativity that arises from within the particular
itself. The ultimate political consequence of this
split is that the universal has nothing to do with
any notion of sameness that may exist between
peoples despite cultural differences. If there is a
Umbr(a) 159
sameness that iek privileges, it is the universal
experience of negativity that cuts across every
particular identity and uproots the subject from the
domain of habits, which, in their very transparency
[] are the medium of social violence, (140)
adhering identities within the symbolic order. It is
this negativity, inherent to every particular culture,
which is at the core of every true emancipatory
struggle.
iek concludes his reections on violence
with what may be the most interesting aspect of his
analysis a confrontation with Walter Benjamins
enigmatic notion of divine violence. However, in
order to fully articulate exactly what constitutes
violence as divine, we must rst return to where we
started so as to distinguish what divine violence is
not. With this we turn to Paris, but not to the events
of Paris forty years ago. Rather, iek moves to the
suburban riots of Autumn, 2005 to articulate the
contours of a violent upheaval in stark contrast
to what constitutes revolutionary divine violence.
Put succinctly, what iek nds at the heart of the
2005 outbursts is nothing less than the lack of any
articulable utopian vision. Contrary to the events of
68, the riots of 2005 were not carried out to achieve
any particular demand, but were rather undertaken
as a means to gain recognition as such: They
were neither offering a solution nor constituting
a movement for providing a solution. Their aim
was to create a problem, to signal that they were
a problem that could no longer to ignored. This is
why violence was necessary. Had they organized a
non-violent march, all they would have got was a
small note on the bottom of the page (66). Hence,
the problematic nature of the 2005 riots rests in
the fact that what they ultimately amounted to was
nothing but a passage lacte whose only goal for
its participants was to gain recognition from the big
Other. What this frustrated acting out revealed was
the sad fact that opposition to the system cannot
articulate itself in the guise of a realistic alternative,
or at least a meaningful utopian project, but only
take the shape of a meaningless outburst (64), a
violence that merely reveals the impotence of those
perpetuating it.
However, it is this impotence that ultimately
distinguishes the violence of a passage lacte
from divine violence proper, as what changes
between the two is the position of this impotence
itself. In other words, what accounts for the crucial
distinction between the two is a shift in the position
of impotence from that of the people to that of the
big Other. Divine violence is divine not because
it signals an otherworldly divine intervention into
human affairs, but is divine because it signals the
impotence of God, i.e., of the big Other itself, which
is why divine violence exists within the domain
of sovereignty. In this sense, according to iek,
divine violence does partially overlap with the bio-
political disposal of Homini sacer: in both cases,
killing is neither a crime nor a sacrice (168). What
makes one susceptible to being annihilated by
divine violence is the fact that he/she is guilty of
leading a mere (natural) life. This was precisely
the predicament of Nikolai Lossky in his encounter
with Lenin and the Russian Revolution. While
Lossky could never determine what it was that
made him objectively guilty, what he had done
to deserve exile for himself and his family, it was
this supposed innocence itself which directly led
to his being caught up in the whirlwind of divine
violence. In this way, Divine violence puries the
guilty not of guilt but of law, because law is limited
to the living: it cannot reach beyond life to touch
what is in excess of life, what is more than mere
life (168). And it is this more than mere life that
denes divine violence as pure drive, the excess
of life, which strikes at bare life regulated by law
(ibid), as opposed to mythic violence, which both
imposes the rule of law and maintains it against
those outbursts of divine violence that threaten to
undermine it.
Ultimately, what iek opposes to mythic
violence is a violence that is paradoxically
composed of cruelty and love: The underlying
paradox is that what makes love angelic [] is
cruelty itself, its link with violence it is this link which
raises it over and beyond the natural limitations of
man and thus transforms it into an unconditional
drive (173). As opposed to the mythic violence that
reduces life to mere life, or, in Badiouian language,
to the domain of Being, divine violence is of the
order of the Event in that it can only be recognized
by those who are directly engaged within it. In other
words, there are no objective criteria by which to
distinguish violence as divine, as Benjamin himself
notes; only mythic violence, not divine, will be
recognizable as such with certainty [] because
the expiatory power of violence is invisible to
men (169). So, precisely because there is no big
Other to legitimate revolutionary violence as divine,
the risk to read and assume it as divine is fully
the subjects own, making the participation and
responsibility of the subject his/her own work of
love (172). As opposed to mythic violence, which
reduces the excess of life to mere life, the domain
of pure violence, the domain outside law (legal
power), the domain of the violence which is neither
law-founding nor law-sustaining, is the domain of
love (173).
Kyle Fetter
THE LACANIAN LEFT: PSYCHOANALYSIS,
THEORY, POLITICS
Yannis Stavrakakis
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 320 pp.
In his new book, The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis,
Theory, Politics, Yannis Stavrakakis articulates
political theory with Lacanian insights, deepening
the path he began with Lacan and the Political
(1999). His new work not only recapitulates his
articles from the last few years, but also integrates
his political thought on the reactivation of radical
democracy against the politics of fantasy of both
utopian and post-democratic thinking (268). This
text is an important achievement in articulating the
notion of jouissance and current political theory.
It aims to construct an open-ended typology of
jouissance [] able to guide the critical study of
political phenomena (17). In the rst part of the
book, Stavrakakis analyzes representative gures
of what he calls the Lacanian Left, such as
Cornelius Castoriadis, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj
iek, and Alain Badiou. In the second part of the
book, Stavrakakis analyzes a series of political
phenomena, such as obedience, national and
transnational identities, and consumerist post-
democratic society. He connects psychoanalysis
with traditional political theory, the behavioral and
psychological sciences, sociology, and marketing
and consumerism. By doing so, he considers how
these elds are being re-structured by different
Lacanian readings.
Part I, Theory: Dialectics of Disavowal,
maps the eld of the Lacanian Left through its
representatives. For Stavrakakis, the link among
these authors is not merely theoretical their
engagement with Lacan it is also political. They
all attempt (albeit in strikingly different ways) to
Umbr(a) 161
critique hegemonic orders and sedimented power
relations, in order to theorise beyond fantasy []
to orient thought and action in politically innovative,
enabling directions, and to illuminate the relation
between representation and affect, the signier
and enjoyment, and political identication and
social change (15). Drawing his inspiration from
Lacan, Stavrakakis claims that the Lacanian left
does not exist! (4), signifying thereby that this
group is not identical to itself. The authors have
neither a homogeneous relation with Lacan nor the
same conception of democracy and the political
(3). Further, this statement stresses that each
author in the group is not identical to himself.
In grouping them together, Stavrakakis aims to
create a eld based on a constitutive dislocation
and disagreement (4). Throughout this rst part,
Stavrakakis maps the eld of the Lacanian Left by
locating the aforementioned thinkers according
to how they deal with the real in its negative and
positive dimensions.
Left Lacanians have typically
stressed only one of the
dimensions involved, downgrading
the other. [] Castoriadis will
stress the positive creative value
of radical imagination, disavowing
the negativity of alienation. []
Laclau does take fully on board
the negative ontology of Lacanian
theory the real as negative but
is much more reluctant to engage
with the positive aspects of the
real as jouissance. Moving to the
terrain of political praxis, ieks
act and Badious event are also
implicated in a similar dialectics
of disavowal [in their cases of
negativity] (19).
Indeed, Stavrakakis recognizes that these
authors do acknowledge the dialectic between
negativity and positivity; but, according to him,
they perform a dialectics of disavowal (19).
They realize the duality, but still prefer one pole
to the other. This dialectics of disavowal needs
to be worked through, Stavrakakis argues, if the
Lacanian Left wants to re-invest in the political and
in radical democracy.
According to Stavrakakis, Castoriadis
relates to the Lacanian Left as an (extimate)
frontier (66), as both outside and inside the
eld at the same time. Beyond their differences,
Stavrakakis nds in Lacan and Castoriadis a
similar social constructionism (41). Both of them
recognize a gap between real and reality (Lacan),
natural world and social imaginary signications
(Castoriadis) (45). However, the author argues that
if, for Castoriadis, the notion of radical imagination is
a pure positive creative force repressed by instituted
society, for Lacan, alienation and a negative
ontology cannot be avoided (48). The focus then
turns to Laclaus (productive) negative ontology,
which allows the open connection between Laclau
and psychoanalysis (69). Laclaus afliation with
psychoanalysis supported by a terminological
cross-over and close conceptual afnity (67)
fails insofar jouissance is almost entirely missing
from Laclaus corpus (76). Indeed, Laclau, it is
argued, oscillates between an all encompassing
category [discourse] already incorporating the
logic of jouissance (83) and a distinction between
form discourse in its symbolic sense and the
force of discourse jouissance as manifestation
of the real (86, 93). This latter option is the most
promising for Stavrakakis (87), and he will develop
it later on in the book.
In his quest for a more positive conception
of jouissance, Stavrakakis turns to iek, nding
that even if he takes negativity into account, he
ultimately engages in a utopian disavowal of lack
and negativity in political discourse (124). Having
already developed their discussion on Antigones
act in Umbr(a) (2003), Stavrakakis here maintains,
contra iek, that is not Antigone, but Greek tragedy
in general that allows for an institutionalization
of lack. For him, Antigone can only ground an
optimistic politics of the miraculous act (121).
Her suicide is the only purely positive act (114)
the only act that will not be re-inscribed in the
symbolic. All other acts, insists Stavrakakis, do
misre (138). In deepening his reection on ieks
notion of the act, he compares it with Badious
concept of the event. While ieks disavowal
of negativity leads him to appropriate the most
optimistic elements of Badious concept of the
event, Stavrakakis emphasizes that negativity does
play a role in the event (150-6). Following Laclaus
distinction between situation and situatonness,
Stavrakakis splits the event into the event as such
and its event-ness, that is, the possibility of the
event as such (127, 156). For him, what matters is
not delity to the event, but to its event-ness, that
is, to its own possibility and recurrence which
entails endorsing an indel delity (127).
If the rst part of the book is primarily
theoretical (19), the second part of the book,
Analysis: Dialectics of Enjoyment, deals with
concrete issues (163) of stability in politics, insofar
as jouissance [is] an important factor in explaining
what sticks (167). Here, Stavrakakis drafts what I
would call a political economy of jouissance: from
the enjoyment of obedience, to national, utopian,
post-democratic, and democratic enjoyment. He
argues that obedience and hegemony rely on the
manipulation of emotion, on the mobilisation of
transference, on processes of affective attachment
and libidinal investment (180), and not on mere
rational consent or symbolic power. Accordingly,
for him, national identity shows that no identity []
can be constructed without effectively manipulating
libidinal investment and jouissance (207). Following
iek, he also asserts that every identication
is bound to produce its obscene Other or theft
of enjoyment (202). Stavrakakis nevertheless
concludes that the force of national identity does
not preclude the possibility of articulating alternative
administrations of enjoyment in the future (222),
such as transnational identity. He then analyzes
the attempts to create a transnational European
identity, which so far have failed to connect the
symbolic dimension of the project with a positive
enjoyment and feeling of identity. On the contrary,
as he notes, these efforts have aroused a nationalist
and obscene reaction to European identity (222-
5). For him, the issue is to rechannel this violent
resistance and to nd a way to relate ethically to
antagonism and jouissance (226).
Stavrakakis then turns to todays society,
which shows as its enjoyable sinthome a particular
(capitalist) administration of jouissance, a unique
crystallisation of desire marking consumerism and
advertising (228). He explains how consumerism
rests in the logic of desire and the promises of the
object a (238-9), creating a virtual utopia (241).
According to him, no critique [of consumerism] will
ever be effective without acknowledging this fact
and formulating an alternative administration of
enjoyment (235). Indeed, the logic of consumerism
has been able to found a post-democratic society
based on a politics of jouissance. On the one
Umbr(a) 163
hand, in post-democracy, the social space can
be represented as a space in which people pursue
their diverse private enjoyments and antagonism
is neutralised (266). On the other, post-democracy
depoliticizes the social link, promising a jouissance
venir, to paraphrase Derridas dmocratie
venir. [] [T]he jouissance [that post-democracy]
promises is an innitely deferred one (263).
Administration is, as he explains, the political
practice of post-democracy, by which the lack
of jouissance is reduced to a lack that can be
administered through consumption acts (266).
Yet not everything is harmonious; Western post-
democratic society also condemns and attacks the
Others jouissance (265).
Contesting these pessimistic
options, Stavrakakis proposes a truly ethical
conceptualization of democracy: not merely as an
aggregate of different interests or a constitutional
structure based on human and political rights, but
above all else as an institutionalisation of lack
and antagonism, as the possibility of instituting a
sustainable and interminable questioning which
permits the reexive self-creation of society (257).
He proposes not only the traversing of the utopian
fantasy of the recapture of jouissance qua fullness,
but also the abandoning of the logic of desire,
object a, and its post-democratic promises. The
left needs to experience a productive mourning
of the utopian revolutionary imagination (274,
275) to produce a political reorientation (276)
of jouissance (that is, of passion) towards radical
democracy. What is needed [] is an enjoyable
democratic ethics of the political (269); indeed, the
democratic citizen needs to be re-conceptualised
not only as enduring but as enjoying social lack
and emptiness (273). Democratic enjoyment,
as he understands it, needs to be connected
with feminine jouissance. Democratic passions
mobilise a jouissance beyond accumulation,
domination and fantasy, an enjoyment of the not-
all or not-whole (279).
Taking into consideration the overall strategy
of the book, certain important considerations come
to mind. Firstly, an observation must be made with
respect to the way he maps the Lacanian Left. As
useful as this map can be, the problem is that it
offers a perhaps too clear pattern (19). This
neat map might stereotype the different authors
positions. What is worse, it seems unwittingly to
connect the authors thus mapped in a teleological
Hegelian argument, with Stavrakakis at the end,
synthesizing them all, balancing negativity and
positivity. The book, nevertheless, cannot be
completely reduced to a synthesis or middle
point between the negative and the positive,
because Stavrakakis scrupulously attempts to
think a more specic relation between these two
poles of the real. In that sense, Stavrakakis focus
on the role of enjoyment (jouissance) in political
life (16) is productive, and may open onto a more
consistent discussion of his typology of enjoyments
as a whole.
Secondly, Stavrakakis naming and
construction of the eld of the Lacanian Left can
be extremely fruitful, if only in terms of highlighting
the import of Lacanian insights into politics.
Stavrakakis concept reveals its productivity
when we contemplate that it goes beyond the ve
male authors he considers. Throughout the book,
we encounter a considerably larger number of
intellectuals who make this eld possible by their
central, de-centered, or extimate interventions. We
could mention (among others) Chantal Mouffe, Joan
Copjec, Thalia Dragonas, Ceren Ozselcuk, Jason
Glynos, Marshal Alcorn, Todd McGowan, Ewa
Ziarek, and Judith Butler. It is Stavrakakis merit
to have articulated them in a broader theoretico-
political strategy.
Thirdly, this book allows us to envisage
the challenges of the further development of the
Lacanian Left by warning us about, but also by
incidentally performing, some of its difculties.
The whole argument of the book shows that the
articulation of psychoanalysis with politics and other
elds cannot be a mere complementary addition
of the rst to the others (77). This would end in a
mere substitution or addition of terminology. Also,
Lacanian theory does not merely supply more
knowledge about political phenomena. Against
this, Stavrakakis contests that the issue is not
to know more, but to know differently: through
an ethical awareness of the limits of knowledge
imposed by the real of experience, that is, in a
positive institutionalization of lack in theory (10).
Sooner or later the real re-emerges and dislocates
theory (7). Moreover, and this is important to point
out, the reality of the object of (political) science
is dislocated by this encounter with the real (6,
14, 16). Yet, sometimes, Stavrakakis falls into
the very shortcuts he warns us against. Perhaps
this is because his argument is based on a stark
analytical distinction between the symbolic and
jouissance. On the one hand, he posits the
symbolic alongside the imaginary (theory, science,
knowledge, reality, fantasy); on the other, he posits
the real (praxis, act, lack, loss, jouissance). For
him, they need to be conceived as separate poles
in order to avoid taking for granted the form that
their articulation takes (100). Accordingly, as we
have seen, the book is organized around a division
between theory and praxis. The question for
him is: can Lacanian theory the Lacanian Left
really deliver, as far as the analysis of concrete
issues is concerned? (183-4). The challenge and
Stavrakakis is aware of this is to understand that
theory and practice can only be [] represented
through the topological gure of a Moebius band
(15). But then, by separating theory (the symbolic
and imaginary) too much from praxis (the real),
the overall efcacy of his argument and political
investment is weakened, becoming too traditional.
Occasionally, psychoanalysis seems to be just a
theory with better analytical tools to apply (20).
Finally, the hardest challenge for the Lacanian
Left is how to deal with the fantasy that, through
psychoanalysis, the excess of the political (the real)
can be controlled. This is close, as Stavrakakis
warns us, to the major fantasy of consumerist
post-democratic society, that is, that jouissance
can be administered. Yet, even in criticizing
post-democracy, the language of administration
symptomatically recurs in Stavrakakis argument;
Lacanian political theory seems to be able to help in
manipulating, administering, and negotiating
the effects of jouissance. For example, he claims
that hegemony and ideological supremacy cannot
be achieved and sustained without manipulating
the bodily dimension of jouissance (183); also,
that from a psychoanalytic point of view, the
administration of enjoyment and the structuration
of desire are always implicated in the institution
of the social bond (248). Sticking to the language
of manipulation and administration of jouissance
limits the intersection between the political and
psychoanalysis as a conceptual refashioning of
a traditional perspective of the relation between
the political and the affective. We could argue
following Stavrakakis argumentsit is sustained in
the enjoyment of the fantasy of a subject supposed
to know and eventually in a disavowal of negativity.
Yet, as we have seen, Stavrakakis also offers more
Umbr(a) 165
creative paths to work through this challenge. If
the political is sustained by an encounter with, or
irruption of, the real of enjoyment (as Stavrakakis
also argues), it is because every attempt at taming
the real, at thinking that we can administer
jouissance, even in a democratic or revolutionary
sense, is bound to fail. To work through this failure
does not imply a rejection of democracy, but a
mourning of the utopian fantasies of fullness and a
confrontation of the political in its real negative and
positive dimensions.

Sol Pelez
CONTRIBUTORS

ETIENNE BALIBAR graduated from the Ecole Normale Suprieure and the
Sorbonne in Paris, later took his PhD from the University of Nijmegen (Netherlands),
and has a Habilitation from Universit de Paris I. He has taught at the Universities
of Algiers, Paris I (Panthon-Sorbonne), Leiden, and Nanterre (Paris X). He is now
Emeritus Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the University of Paris X
Nanterre and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California,
Irvine. He also teaches seminars at the Centro Franco-Argentino de Altos Estudios
de la Universidad de Buenos-Aires and the Center for Comparative Literature and
Society at Columbia University of New-York.

Balibar is the author or co-author of numerous books, including Reading Capital

(with Louis Althusser) (1965), On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1976), Race,
Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (with Immanuel Wallerstein) (1991), Masses,
Classes, Ideas (1994), The Philosophy of Marx (1995), Spinoza and Politics (1998),
Politics and the Other Scene (2002), and We, the People of Europe? Reections
on Transnational Citizenship (2004). He is also a contributor to the Dictionnaire
Europen des Philosophies (under the direction of Barbara Cassin) (2004).
Forthcoming are Extreme Violence and the Problem of Civility (The Wellek Library

Umbr(a) 167
Lectures, 1996), and Citoyen Sujet, Essais danthropologie philosophique (from Presses Universitaires de
France).

Balibar is a member of Ligue des Droits de lHomme (Paris), with a particular interest in the rights of
migrants and asylum seekers. He is co-founder of Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace and acting chair of
Association Jan Hus France.

DANIELLE BERGERON works as a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist in Qubec City. Supervising analyst
and responsable for teaching at GIFRIC, associate professor of Psychiatry at Laval University, she is also
Director of the 388, a Center for the psychoanalytic treatment of psychotics, which she co-founded with
GIFRIC colleagues in 1982. She is co-author of Traiter la psychose (GIFRIC 1990), After Lacan: Clinical
Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious (SUNY 2002), and La cure analytique du psychotique (GIFRIC
2008).

FELIX ENSSLIN is currently an adjunct professor in the Department of Philosophy at Potsdam University
and of Comparative Literary Studies at Maximilian Ludwig University in Munich. Director and dramaturge
with the German National Theatre in Weimar from 2002 to 2006, he co-curated (with Ellen Blumenstein)
Between Two Deaths at ZKM (Center for Arts and Media) in Karlsruhe and co-edited the exhibition
catalogue. He also curated Berlin Noir at the Perry Rubenstein Gallery (New York City) and, with Ellen
Blumenstein, Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition at KW (Institute for Contemporary Art) in Berlin. He
has published widely on aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy.

JOSEPH JENKINS is Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Education and English at the
University of California, Irvine. His credentials include a JD from U.C. Berkeley (Boalt Hall) and a PhD
in Comparative Literature from UCLA. He is Guest Editor of the summer 2008 special issue of Law
& Literature, What Should Inheritance Law Be? Professor Jenkins publishes in law and humanities in
journals such as Studies in Law, Politics, and Society; Law, Culture, and the Humanities; and Cardozo Law
Review. His book manuscript in progress is entitled Inheritance of Grace as State of Exception.

ADRIAN JOHNSTON is an Assistant Professor in the department of philosophy at the University of New
Mexico at Albuquerque and an assistant teaching analyst at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta.
He is the author of Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Northwestern University
Press, 2005), ieks Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Northwestern University
Press, 2008), and The Cadence of Change: Badiou, iek, and Political Transformations (Northwestern
University Press [forthcoming in 2009]). Also, he is currently co-writing a book (with Catherine Malabou)
addressing the relationship between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences. His work focuses on Freudian-
Lacanian psychoanalysis, the history of philosophy, and contemporary theory.
KOJIN KARATANI has taught at Hosei University, Yale University, Columbia University, and Kinki University,
and is the author of numerous articles and books on literature, philosophy and history. His books published
in English include Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (1993), Architecture as Metaphor (1995), and
Transcritique (2003). His more recent books, History and Repetition and Nation and Aesthetics, are now in
the process of being translated. He is currently at work on the Kantian idea of the World Republic.

JULIET FLOWER MACCANNELL is a scholar of literature, art, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Her most
recent writing addresses the question of space in Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis (from the consulting
room to the discourse of capitalism and the imaginary), applying the results to her studies of architecture,
cities and suburbs, lms, and Badious topology, among others. She is Professor Emerita of Comparative
Literature and English at UC Irvine, and author of Figuring Lacan, The Regime of the Brother and The
Hysterics Guide to the Future Female Subject and co-author of The Time of the Sign. She is currently co-
chair of the California Psychoanalytic Circle and editor of (a): the journal of culture and the unconscious.

SLAVOJ IEK is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck
Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute
of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is the author of The Sublime Object of Ideology; Tarrying
With the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology; The Ticklish Subject; The Parallax View; and,
most recently, In Defense of Lost Causes. He has also recently edited and introduced several volumes in
Verso Press Revolutions series, among them Trotsky: Terrorism and Communism; Mao: On Practice and
Contradiction; and Robespierre: Virtue and Terror.

Umbr(a) 169
 CALL FOR PAPERS
UMBR(A) 2009: ISLAM

Something stronger than resistance, let us call it excision, denes in large part the
relation of the West to Islam. The proliferation of labels such as terrorists, evil
doers, axis of evil, that are the nearly illiterate issue of the clash-of-civilizations
rhetoric machine, bear witness to a refusal to admit Islamic peoples and principles
under the expanded tent of humanity. Even when the topic turns to religion,
Christianity and Judaism have thus far captured the spotlight almost exclusively,
leaving discussions of the religion of Islam unaccountably aside. Thus every threat
(actual or imagined) coming from the Islamic world comes to us, it seems, from a
real beyond politics or diplomacy, a vast desert real that does not wish us well.

In recent volumes, Umbr(a) has published essays by Henry Corbin and Christian
Jambet, two authors whose extensive writings on Islamic thought are valuable both
in themselves and for the way they open a space for a specically psychoanalytic
discussion of Islamic culture, its philosophy and religion.

In the forthcoming special issue, Psychoanalysis and Islam, we would like to

examine this disjunctive nexus more closely. We are not interested in making
sweeping claims about the Islamic psyche. We want rather to open specic
problems arising in Muslim nations or out of the Wests relation to these nations to analysis in psychoanalytic
terms, where they can be shown to be appropriate. But we are equally interested in putting psychoanalysis
to the test of Islam, to use Fethi Benslamas felicitous phrase.

We intend rst of all to acknowledge through translations of already existing texts the important
work that has already been done in this area by writers from Islamic cultures such as Benslama, Jambet,
and Moustapha Safouan, among others. But we are also encouraging Western theorists to take up the
challenge Islam presents to psychoanalysis.

Possible topics that may be addressed include but are certainly not limited to the following: the veiling of
women in the Orient and the Western debate regarding it; the Islamic revolution; masculinity and femininity in
Islam; the applicability of Freuds theory of the father to the Islamic context; the inuence of Arabic translations
of classical Greek texts on Western thought; Iranian and/or Egyptian cinema; the importance of Islamic
political theory and/or philosophy (which is thought in the West to be virtually non-existent); the wide inuence
of Ishraqi thought on colonized nations; Western thinkers such as Corbin, Jambet, Foucault, Leo Strauss,
Giorgio Agamben, and Peter Hallward, who have written about or integrated Islamic ideas into their work.

Submissions are due December 31, 2008. They should be 1,500-6,000 words in length and can be
emailed as MS Word attachments or mailed on disk to the current editors:

lydiakerr@gmail.com Umbr(a)
nategorelick@gmail.com c/o Lydia R. Kerr & Nathan Gorelick
Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis & Culture
408 Samuel Clemens Hall - North Campus
State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260-4610

Umbr(a) is planning this special issue in cooperation with S, the new on-line journal produced in Maastricht
by the Jan Van Eyck Academie, which will concurrently publish its own special issue on Psychoanalysis
and Islam. Form more information on that issue, and to submit papers for publication, contact the editors
at editors@lineofbeauty.org or visit their website at www.lineofbeauty.org.

Umbr(a) 171