R a d i c a l     P h i l o s o p h y

a journal of socialist and feminist philosophy

152 CONTENTS november/decemBER 2008

Editorial collective COMMENTARY

Claudia Aradau, David Cunningham,
Howard Feather, Peter Hallward,
Esther Leslie, Stewart Martin, Kaye Mitchell,
Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne,
Stella Sandford
Between Imperial Client and Useful Enemy: Pakistan’s Permanent
Crisis
Justin Podur..................................................................................................... 2

Contributors
Justin Podur is Assistant Professor of articles
Environmental Studies at York University,
Canada. In July 2008 he was a Fellow of
the Iqbal International Institute for Research
Entsetzen: Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part One
and Dialogue at the International Islamic Irving Wohlfarth............................................................................................... 7
University, Islamabad.
Irving Wohlfarth studied with Adorno and Flux and Flurry: Stillness and Hypermovement in Animated Worlds
the student movement in the 1960s and has Esther Leslie................................................................................................... 21
worked on Benjamin ever since. Recent
publications include ‘On Benjamin’s Death’,
Naharaim, autumn 2008 (with Nathalie Non-traduttore, Traditore? Notes on Postwar European Marxisms
Raoux) – a refutation of an article by Jeremy in Translation
Harding in the London Review of Books – and
‘Anachrony: Interferences between Benjamin Gregory Elliott............................................................................................... 31
and Sebald’, Internationales Archiv für die
Sozialgeschichte der Literatur. He is currently Introduction to Rozitchner
assembling an essay collection on Benjamin
entitled No Man’s Land and writing a book on Philip Derbyshire and John Kraniauskas.................................................... 40
Benjamin’s politics.
Esther Leslie teaches in the School of English Exile, War and Democracy: An Exemplary Sequence
and Humanities at Birkbeck, University León Rozitchner............................................................................................. 41
of London. She has recently published a
biography of Walter Benjamin in Reaktion
Books’ Critical Lives series (2007).
Gregory Elliott is a Visiting Fellow at reviews
Newcastle University. His Ends in Sight:
Marx/Fukuyama/Hobsbawm/Anderson was Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
published by Pluto earlier this year. Peter Hallward............................................................................................... 51
León Rozitchner is an Argentine intellectual.
Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software
James Tobias.................................................................................................. 57

Nicos Poulantzas, The Poulantzas Reader: Marxism, Law and the State
Copyedited and typeset by illuminati Bob Jessop..................................................................................................... 61
www.illuminatibooks.co.uk
Layout by Peter Osborne and David Peg Rawes, Space, Geometry and Aesthetics: Through Kant and towards Deleuze
Cunningham
Printed by Russell Press, Russell House,
Garin Dowd.................................................................................................... 63
Bulwell Lane, Basford, Nottingham NG6 0BT
Bookshop distribution Alastair Morgan, Adorno’s Concept of Life
UK: Central Books, Josh Robinson............................................................................................... 64
115 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN
Tel: 020 8986 4854
Nick Hewlett, Badiou, Balibar, Rancière: Re-thinking Emancipation
USA: Ubiquity Distributors Inc., Todd May, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality
607 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217
Tel: 718 875 5491 Pablo Lafuente............................................................................................... 65
Cover Snow Globe, 2008

Letters
Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd.
www.radicalphilosophy.com Critical Views of South Africa

© Radical Philosophy Ltd Patrick Bond and Ronald Suresh Roberts.................................................. 67

Commentary

Between imperial client

and useful enemy
Pakistan’s permanent crisis
Justin Podur

P
akistani scholar–activist Eqbal Ahmed, who died in 1999, had a canny ability to
predict events. In a 1974 article for the Journal of Contemporary Asia, he sug-
gested that Pakistan was headed towards a police state structure because of the
class and ideological composition of the military and its supremacy over civil society.1
Other sectors, such as the bureaucracy, feudal landlords and the small entrepreneurial
class, were weak and subordinate. Opposition parties, meanwhile, were ‘given more
to hyperbole and public meetings than to organizing and resisting. A large part of the
opposition is either ideologically reactionary or indistinguishable from the party in
power.’ A police state would use either a kind of developmental-fascist ideology (as
happened in Chile, Brazil and Greece) or it would rely on religious fundamentalism,
and would find an eager sponsor in the United States. ‘Unfortunately,’ the article
concludes, ‘the democratic and revolutionary groups in Pakistan to whom falls the
responsibility of halting this trend are as yet only weakly developed.’
The main elements of Eqbal Ahmed’s analysis remain valid today. The military
has become even stronger relative to civil society, opposing social forces weaker and
divided, with democratic and revolutionary groups only weakly developed. At the epi-
centre of the War on Terror, Pakistan’s current predicament brings together the inability
of the state to deliver development or justice to its people, an ambiguous imperial
sponsor, all the economic woes of neoliberal capitalism, and the cooptation mechanisms
of ‘democracy promotion’. Despite an absence of legitimacy, organizational inefficacy,
and shrinking capacity to respond to challenges from the USA or India, Pakistan’s
military dictatorship survives because it is stronger than civil society and political alter-
natives to it have been destroyed. The strength of the regime is based on the absence of
feasible alternatives.

Ousting Musharraf: back to civilian power?

President Musharraf resigned in August 2008, but, as Tariq Ali commented, ‘Over the
last 50 years the USA has worked mainly with the Pakistan army. This has been its
preferred instrument. Nothing has changed. The question being asked now is how long
it will be before the military is back at the helm.’2
In Pakistan the reins of government are the prize of a three-way contest between
civilian authority, a weak civil society and the military, with the military by far the
strongest player. Musharraf came to power in a coup back in 1999. When his legitimacy
was eventually challenged by the Supreme Court last year, he sacked the Supreme
Court judges. The judges responded and large numbers mobilized alongside them

 Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)

in the ‘lawyers’ movement’ that began when Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar
Muhammad Chaudhry was suspended in March 2007. That movement also found
support and strength from commercial media that had paradoxically acquired some new
freedom under Musharraf’s dictatorship, and continue tentatively to test that freedom.
The next phase of the contest was fought in the arena of the parliamentary elections,
which Benazir Bhutto, after negotiations with Washington and Musharraf, returned to
Pakistan to contest – only to be assassinated in December 2007. The elections took
place anyway, in February 2008; Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) as well as the
Pakistan Muslim League–Nawaz (PML–N) of Nawaz Sharif, who had been prime min-
ister until ousted by Musharraf’s coup in 1999, came to dominate the post-coup govern-
ment. The Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid-e-Azam (PML–Q), Musharraf’s party, made
a poor showing, as did those Islamist parties that had enjoyed state sponsorship under
Musharraf. When the PPP and PML–N reached power with help from popular support
and the prestige of the lawyer’s struggle, they did not reinstate the Supreme Court.
Both Nawaz Sharif and the PPP head and new President Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir
Bhutto’s widower, have reasons to fear an independent judiciary. Zardari and Sharif
had both been up for corruption charges for their behaviour under previous govern-
ments. The post-election brokering involved various mutual amnesties. Moreover, if the
judiciary didn’t give in to the military government, it might not give in to the civilian
government either.
In August 2008, Zardari and Sharif finally made their move, taking action to
impeach President Musharraf and stating that the reinstatement of the judges would
follow. After months in power, during which they neither restored the judges nor made
any headway with the country’s growing number of political or economic problems,
the fractious coalition of the PPP and PML–N agreed on a plan: to move against
Musharraf, using the prestige the elected government still retains, and to reinstate the
judges. It was a risky strategy for leaders who are dogged by charges of corruption
and illegality dating from previous turns in government (or, in Zardari’s case, behind
the scenes in government). There is still no plan for dealing with the US occupation of
Afghanistan or the resistance against it, or with other forces operating from the Afghan
border area of Pakistan. Nor do they have a plan for the economic problems. No doubt
the strategy is to blame Musharraf for the inherited problems, to buy some time.

The USA in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s intractable insurgency

Now that the plan has succeeded, the coalition has already begun to unravel as US
military pressure continues on the Afghan border, and the Supreme Court judges
remain out of office. As the USA tries to decide whether Pakistan would be of greater
benefit as an ally or an enemy, Pakistan’s rulers have a delicate balance to strike if they
want to stay in power. Musharraf’s claim to competence was based on the fact that he
managed the country and kept a relationship with the USA through an impossible situa-
tion. Pakistan’s military strategy since its independence in 1947 has always been based
primarily on the Indian threat and Kashmir. Pakistan’s alliances with the United States
and China were motivated by this consideration.
Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and the Federally Administered
Tribal Areas (FATA) are ethnically Pashtun, which is also the ethnicity of the largest
number of Afghans. The border is porous and not really recognized by the people
who live there. The state’s relationship to NWFP has also been complex. The FATA
area does not have provincial status and administration occurs through patron–client
and negotiated relationships with local leaders. Throughout its history, Pakistan faced
resentment from each subnational minority, all of whom resented domination by the
Punjabi majority, whose elite is overrepresented in the military. One of the reasons that
the military operations in the NWFP have been so unsuccessful is that Pashtuns in the


military do not see the logic of firing on their fellow Pashtuns, Pakistanis, Muslims, for
the sake of a US war.
When the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979, these areas of Pakistan became the
bases for a US-, Saudi- and Pakistani-sponsored war against the Soviets. This moment
saw three important changes in Pakistan. First, control passed to Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan’s
worst military dictator, who ‘Islamized’ the military and attempted to ‘Islamize’ the
other institutions of the country.3 Second, the USSR presence in Afghanistan changed
the US attitude towards Pakistan, including its nuclear programme, which the USA
began to support covertly. Third, the most ‘hands-on’ role in organizing this war was
taken on by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). After the USSR left in 1988,
Pakistan maintained a very strong influence in Afghanistan, and was profoundly
influenced in turn – by the small arms, narcotics economy, and militarism that are
inevitably associated with covert operations, and by the Islamist ideology that was used
to mobilize fighters from all over the world to come through Pakistan to join battle with
the USSR. When veterans of these movements, angry with America’s bases in Saudi
Arabia, the destruction of Iraq and support for Israel, turned their guns on the USA and
attacked New York in 2001, Pakistan was in a bind. Clients that it had once supported
along with the USA were now in the gunsights of its ally. By providing the USA with
help in the invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan was able to save its clients and its own
personnel from destruction, as much of the Taliban and al-Qaeda crossed the border to
Pakistan or went to ground and Afghanistan was taken over by US-friendly warlords.
Musharraf paid a price for this, however, in assassination attempts and accusations of
treason for supporting the USA against fellow Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
That tension has escalated continuously since 2001. Today, the USA and NATO
demand that Pakistan take action against insurgents operating in NWFP and FATA.
When Pakistan does so, its forces take casualties and it loses legitimacy in the region.
When it provides passive or active support for the insurgents, as it has in the past, it is
exposed to US threats (and its soldiers, sometimes, to US bombs). As the motives of the
USA/NATO themselves seem increasingly confused or contradictory – is their aim to
establish a long-term presence in the region? To watch and threaten Pakistan? To fight
al-Qaeda and the Taliban? – parts of the countryside of Afghanistan and the NWFP and
FATA have come under the control of the Taliban. While Pakistan’s authorities promise
to use their military to extend the ‘writ of the state’ in those areas, insurgency in both
countries is growing in opposition to the extension of the writ of the wrong kind of
state. The global and local balance of forces makes it virtually impossible for a state
like Pakistan to deal with this kind of insurgency.

Counterinsurgency and the absence of the state

As mentioned above, the FATA have no representative provincial administration: the
central government rules through deals with local leaders. This hangover from the
British Raj is a symptom of a colonial state, the operation of which has generated resis-
tance in FATA, Baluchistan and Sindh over decades. The Taliban have flourished not
just because of the NATO occupation of Afghanistan but also because of the absence
of the state in the NWFP and FATA. People rely on the insurgency’s sharia courts for
justice, as even brutal justice fills a vacuum.
In other parts of Pakistan, the vacuum is filled in different ways. In Karachi, for
example, there are reports of mob violence and lynching. The idea that the Taliban
could take all of Pakistan is exaggerated. Despite its strength in NWFP and FATA,
there are very different structures, elites, and power bases in Punjab, Sindh and
Baluchistan. If NATO leaves and Afghanistan falls to the Taliban, the maximal scenario
for Pakistan is probably a de facto Taliban-controlled NWFP and FATA. Deterioration
of the state could also be blamed for the region’s opium problem. Since 2001, there


have been periodic waves of stories about opium and its role in fuelling the insurgency
in the West. But the idea of an ‘opium-fuelled insurgency’ can be deceptive. Today, the
Afghan economy is dependent on poppy, which, according to the UN sociologist David
Macdonald, supplies 60 per cent of Afghanistan’s GDP and employs 10 per cent of its
people.4 Everyone in the economy, from farmers to local warlords, from foreign intel-
ligence agents to government officials, from the Taliban to probably NATO soldiers as
well, are taking a piece. It is not just the insurgency that’s opium-fuelled, but the entire
economy.
The narcotics trade provides resources for the
insurgency to challenge the state. Meanwhile, the
state, and specifically the military, is present in
areas that are normally the preserve of the private
sector. As Ayesha Siddiqa documents in her book
Military Inc., the military owns cornflakes, banks,
real estate, cement, insurance, and many other
industries. 5 This is far from the public ownership of
socialist economics, as there is no national develop-
ment project behind it. Indeed, transnational capital
is encouraged to take its share as well, especially
in resource-rich Baluchistan, where companies such
as Canada’s Barrick Gold are signing contracts for
exploration and mining. Military spending has also
drawn resources away from development and invest-
ment in the national economy.

Government failures, ecological dangers

Although Pakistan’s military business, or ‘Milbus’,
structure is sometimes blamed for poor economic
performance, the country has deeper structural
economic and ecological problems exacerbated
by the rise in energy prices and climate change.
Pakistan’s breadbasket is the Punjab, also the keystone site of the ‘Green Revolution’,
in which modern chemical agriculture was adopted at the urging of Western planners
and financiers. The Green Revolution is often presented as a tremendous advance, but
some students of South Asian agriculture, like Vandana Shiva, Devinder Sharma and P.
Sainath, have shown a less bright side to it – exhausted soil, people without work and
no way to feed themselves, rural-to-urban migration, increased vulnerability to global
commodity prices, and dependence on expensive inputs.
In 2008 Pakistan missed its cotton production target and had to import cotton to
run its textile industry, significantly reducing its earnings of foreign exchange Without
much energy of its own (except for gas in Baluchistan), Pakistan needs this foreign
exchange in order to buy ever-more-expensive energy. It is also importing food – milk,
meat, vegetables, wheat, dry fruits, tea, spices, edible oil, sugar and pulses. Combined
with global problems in the food system (see Raj Patel, ‘The Hungry of the Earth’
RP 151) and the supply of food to NATO in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s food security is in
peril. The way in which the energy price shocks of the 1970s hurt the development of
Third World countries that didn’t have their own oil resources is repeating itself today,
combined this time with the perils of climate change. The Punjab’s water comes mainly
from glacier-fed rivers, which, according to most scenarios, will dry up when the
glaciers melt. These economic and ecological problems are a potent source of regional
catastrophe, to which must be added the threat of nuclear destruction, derived from the
rivalry with India.


The weakness of the Left
Such converging crises ought to provide an opening for left politics. But secular left
forces in Pakistan are isolated and precarious, and have to contend with forces of
cooption that have become far stronger since the 1970s, especially NGOs. Critics of
neoliberalism, privatization and militarism are present, but cannot find a foothold in the
clientelistic structures of the main political parties. Some leftists work through the NGO
sector, but the NGO structure has its own serious limitations, based as it is on foreign
funding, often providing clientelistic services itself.
Some NGOs, like Roots for Equity, which works in villages in Sindh and NWFP,
are aware of these limitations and use the structure anyway, as a basis for organizing
and educating peasants about agrarian policy and problems. ‘The only alternative would
be to form a political party’, argued Azra Talat Syed of Roots for Equity, ‘and there
are dozens of tiny left political parties with no following. When movements are strong
enough, parties will emerge.’
Other grassroots groups such as the Rawalpindi-based People’s Rights Movement
(PRM) agitate and demonstrate on political issues, including support for the lawyers’
movement and opposition to military operations in the NWFP and FATA. Aasim
Sajjad Akhtar suggested that capacity was a problem for radical politics: ‘the objective
conditions for progressive politics are tremendous: all parties are not trusted and have
fallen off the pedestal. We are growing but not fast enough. There is potential but
we don’t have the people to do the work.’ Partly, PRM argued, the NGO sector was
diverting people who would otherwise join movements. Partly, there has been a break in
historical continuity, with missing generations of leftists and hence no one to work with
younger people interested in radical politics due to decades of dictatorship. Socialism
is often associated with atheism and, at worst, with the USSR and its invasion of
Afghanistan.
Secular opposition groups do not take an anti-religious stand, but instead focus on
economic and political issues without attacking the connection between religion and
politics directly. To date, there has not been a movement that articulated opposition to
the regime in religious terms. In Pakistan and India (as well as in Israel and the USA),
religious symbols in politics are associated with the Right, although there are hints of
attempts to challenge and contest right-wing politics and religion in Pakistan.
Despite its inability to offer development or democracy to most of its citizens,
Pakistan’s regime survives with help from the USA and through the absence of chal-
lengers in civil society strong enough to replace it. In relative terms, the military is still
the supreme institution in the country. In the coming years the regime could easily find
itself facing a hostile United States, and it might not survive such a contest. Many of
the possible future scenarios are disastrous, but not all of them. Forces in play include
those who mobilized to reinstate the judges, media that have had a taste of freedom,
fledgling anti-imperialist movements for social justice, and activists working for
dialogue and detente with India. When I was in the country in July, university students
invited me to return in twenty years, when, they promised, democracy in Pakistan
would be flourishing.

Notes
1. Eqbal Ahmed, ‘Pakistan – Signposts to a Police State’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, vol. IV, no.
4, 1974, republished in E. Ahmed, Between Past and Future, Oxford University Press, Oxford,
2004.
2. Tariq Ali, ‘Musharraf Will Be Gone in Days’, Guardian, 14 August 2008, www.guardian.co.uk/
commentisfree/2008/aug/14/pakistan.usa?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront.
3. An entertaining and well-informed version of Zia ul-Haq’s last days is presented in Mohammed
Hanif’s 2008 novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes, Jonathan Cape, London.
4. David Mansfield, ‘Drugs in Afghanistan’, 2007, www.davidmansfield.org.
5. Ayesha Siddiqa, Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy, Pluto Press, London, 2007.


Entsetzen
Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction,
Part One

Irving Wohlfarth

The true politician reckons only in dates. And if
the abolition of the bourgeoisie is not effected by
an almost calculable moment in economic and
technical development (one signalled by inflation
and poison-gas warfare), then all is lost. Before the
spark reaches the dynamite, the lighted fuse must be
severed. (‘Fire Alarm’, 1928)1
Between 1865 and 1875 a number of great
anarchists each worked, without knowing of one
another, on their infernal machine. And the astonish-
ing thing is that they independently set its clock at
exactly the same hour – and forty years later the
writings of Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, and Lautréamont
all simultaneously blew up in Western Europe. One
might, to be more exact, single out one episode
from Dostoevsky’s entire work …: ‘Stavrogin’s
Confession’ in The Possessed. This chapter …
contains a justification of evil. … ‘Hatred, to you
I have entrusted my treasure,’ [Rimbaud] writes in
Une saison en enfer. … Since Bakunin, Europe has
lacked a radical concept of freedom. (‘Surrealism’,
1929)2
existence, conflagrations and celebrations are both
only so much play, preparation for its coming of
age, the hour when panic and celebration, now
recognizing the other as a long-separated brother,
embrace one another in the revolutionary uprising.
(‘Schönes Entsetzen’ [‘Fine Terror’], 1929–34)3
The course of history as represented in the concept
of catastrophe has no more claim on the thinking
man’s attention than the kaleidoscope in the hands
of a child. With each new twist, everything collaps-
es into a new order. The image is thoroughly well-
grounded [hat sein gutes, gründliches Recht]. The
concepts of the rulers have always been the mirrors
by which the image of an ‘order’ was established.
– The kaleidoscope must be smashed. (‘Central
Park’, 1938)4
Strength of hatred in Marx. Fighting spirit of the
working class. Interlay revolutionary destruction and
the idea of redemption. (Netschajev. The Possessed.)
(Notes for ‘On the Concept of History’, 1939)5

Is this dull multitude not waiting for a disaster great
enough to strike a spark from its own inner tension:
a conflagration or world-end, something that could
suddenly convert this velvet thousand-voiced mur-
muring into a single cry, as a gust of wind sud-
denly exposes the scarlet lining of a cloak? For the
piercing cry of terror [des Entsetzens], panic dread,
is the other side of all authentic mass celebration
[Massenfeste]. In the unconscious depths of mass
‘Dangerous relations’?
Benjamin and the Red Army Faction – is the subject
even worth discussing?* Its background, or under-
ground, has, it is true, hardly been broached in the sec-
ondary literature. Yet both sides claimed that violence
was needed to avert disaster; and Benjamin underwrote
an ethics which did not shrink from the ‘revolutionary
killing of the oppressor’.6

*
The present essay, to be published in three instalments, is a slightly revised version of one that appeared in the first of two
collective volumes (Der RAF und der linke Terrorismus, Hamburg, 2006) edited by Wolfgang Kraushaar under the auspices of
the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung. These are a sequel to an invaluable three-volume study under the same editorship
and auspices: Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung. Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotow-Cocktail 1946–1995 (Hamburg,
1998). The volumes on the Red Army Faction and present-day German ‘reception’ of the latter thirty years after the events
constitute in large measure a case of what the Germans call ‘historicization’; a case too, on occasion, of ‘pathologization’.
It is as if there existed an unspoken consensus to put the ‘leaden years’ in their place – that is, safely behind us. (There was
considerably less agreement across the political spectrum about whether to release long-incarcerated terrorists one or two years
early.) Some former members of the extreme or dogmatic Left have, it is true, given self-critical accounts of their past aberra-
tions; but here too the purpose has been to settle accounts and lay ghosts. There is little doubt that the RAF was indeed a case
of historico-political pathology. But from where – from what normality – do we call it that? The same one that the student
movement originally rebelled against? Or one yet to be born? (And wouldn’t the latter require a certain madness – though not
that of the RAF?) Was the decade around 1968 merely the proverbial sowing of wild oats – the ‘wild years’, as a recent film
called them, of Uschi Obermaier, who lived in a Berlin commune (Kommune I) before becoming a fashion model? Why does

Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08) 

 But a difficult question remains. Does any kind of
fuse or trail lead from his words to their deeds? If
so, it would mark a striking instance of the general
problem: how responsible is a thinker for the fate of
his/her ideas? Such questions were hardly foreign to
Benjamin. He had, he wrote only a year before Hitler
seized power, not yet considered what meaning might
be extracted from Nietzsche’s writings ‘in an extreme
case’ (im Ernstfall).7 But who, or what, determines,
precisely when such a case obtains? Does the trajectory
of the Red Army Faction (which will here henceforth
be termed the RAF) raise in retrospect the question
of the political meaning that might be wrested, in an
extreme case, from Benjamin’s writings – especially
since such states of emergency were their common
concern?
Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin… Each
‘case’ requires its own elaborate assessment. But by
whom, for whom, in the name of whose justice? In
one of the texts to be discussed below, Benjamin
claims that while ‘justice’ (Gerechtigkeit), in contrast
to ‘right’ or ‘law’ (Recht), is ‘generally valid’, it is not
‘susceptible to generalization’. It can only be done to
a specific ‘situation’, never, as in the case of law, to
a ‘case’ – unless each case be one unto itself. 8 This
claim could equally hold for Benjamin’s situations,
those of the RAF, and relations, real or potential,
between them.
Another of Benjamin’s key concepts should
be introduced here: the ‘guilt nexus of the living’
(Schuld­zusammenhang des Lebendigen).9 At the time
he was considering joining the German Communist
Party, he noted, in response to Gershom Scholem’s
(mis)apprehensions, that he had never been able to
‘respond rightly (richtig) to false circumstances – that
is, with something “right”’ (mit “Richtigem”), but
only by way of a ‘necessary, symptomatic, productive
falseness’.10 His decision to join the Party, had he ever
made it, would have been of this nature: no quasi- or
pseudo-religious vow but a sober, provisional move of
a productively false kind. Under false circumstances,
thought and action certainly did not have to be false
through and through, but they could not be completely
dans le vrai. In Benjamin’s case, they were often
spatially and temporally on the verge.
‘There is no right life in a false world’: Adorno’s
dictum in Minima Moralia has been much quoted.
Arguing from very different premisses, Jacques
Derrida claims that there is no entirely innocent text.11
All writing, seen from this ‘deconstructive’ angle,
supervenes on, and intervenes in, a dense network of
idioms that criss-cross one another and ‘themselves’.
If, as Benjamin claims, philosophy is confronted ‘at
every turn’ by the problem of exposition (Darstellung),
then, according to Derrida, each turn marks a decision
within a specific discursive situation – a decision for
which the writer is accountable. The ‘critical’ activ-
ity is – as Benjamin recalls in the very context at
issue here – at once ‘discriminating’ (scheidend) and
‘decisive’ (entscheidend).12 Doing justice to textual
complications/implications and reaching a judgement
on them is, for both Benjamin and Derrida, as difficult
as it is necessary, notably in the face of important,
controversial and ‘dangerous’ writings. A philosophi-
cal philology of this kind represents an immense, still
largely neglected programme, not merely in the case
of Benjamin’s texts and contexts.
To live and think with and against danger: this was
as critical to Nietzsche, who called himself ‘dyna-
mite’,13 as to Benjamin, who often gravitated to images
of ‘detonation’ (sprengen).14 Nor were their explosives
safe. ‘Danger’, Benjamin observed, ‘threatens both
the stuff of tradition and its recipients’. Nietzsche was
a case in point. Over his dead body, his work was
– or allowed itself to be – truncated and annexed to
the cause of National Socialism, whose ‘inner great-
ness’ his heir Heidegger briefly affirmed. Benjamin,
who made certain ‘dangerous’ elements of right-wing

the erstwhile Left need to throw out the baby with the bath water? Doesn’t ‘historicization’ fall back behind Benjamin’s critique
of historicism? These are some of the questions behind the following essay. It is far from ‘soft’ on the RAF, if only because that
episode has had the long-term effect of further demobilizing radical energies. But it also wants to see in the RAF the symptom
of a collective pathology – a false, unconscionable answer to a true, massive, ongoing, urgent catastrophe of systemic, global
injustice. Meanwhile, the Left has still further declined and its place has been partly taken by terrorisms beside which the RAF
seems parochial. All this has created a new world disorder and complicated any contemporary discussion of terrorist violence.
Under existing conditions, and given the all too foreseeable consequences, no one in his right mind would still want to justify it,
at least in the Western context. But what mind is right without the demon which, unchecked, would lead us in that direction?
Such is perhaps the most intimate reason for our Entsetzen. This verbal noun, which is as untranslatable as das Un­heimliche
(or indeed the latter’s English counterpart: ‘the uncanny’), means, on the one hand, horror and dread to the point of de-rangement
(Ent-setzen); it thus marks, or so one of the opening epigraphs would have it, the reverse side of ec-stasy. On the other hand,
it signifies the displacing or deposing (ent-) of what has been legally instituted (setzen, gesetzt, Gesetz). If Benjamin argued in
1921 for the Entsetzung of Law and State, this was because the prospects for a new world-historical epoch which would break
the cycle of myth did not then seem so ‘inconceivably remote’ as to reduce such talk to insignificance [daß ein Wort gegen das
Recht sich von selbst erledigte]. Today this prospect does seem that remote: how remote the RAF’s attempt to force it involun-
tarily proved. Benjamin, however, held the prospect out even and precisely in the darkest hour – 1940 – as the only real chance
for survival. This claim has not been disproved and, for better or for worse, perhaps cannot be disproved.


thought his own, opted for, and for many years strug-
gled with, Soviet Communism.15 Much ‘remains to
be deciphered’16 on both left and right. The question
posed in the present essay is part of this wider ‘context
of guilt’.
This context affords no immunity, no place safe
from guilt, violence or danger, no situation devoid of
complexities and perplexities.17 ‘We are all embarked’
(Pascal), all variously and differently implicated.
Today’s common wisdom has it that such implication
can be avoided by identifying right- and left-wing
extremism as two sides of the one and the same totali-
tarian coin.18 The allegedly neutral ground from which
this claim is usually made is, however, the radical
middle out of – and against – which the extremes grew
in the first place.
If danger was Benjamin’s element, this was not
because he wanted to ‘live dangerously’ in some neo-
romantic way, but because he found himself caught up
in shifting ‘constellations of danger’.19 In the general
economy of his thought (he wrote in response to well-
meaning warnings concerning his allegedly dangerous
closeness to Brecht), a select number of relationships
had always allowed him to ‘affirm a pole utterly
opposed to that of my original being’. His life, like
his thought, moved in extremes:
The breadth it thereby stakes out, its freedom to
juxtapose things and thoughts usually considered
incompatible, gains its complexion only from
danger – a danger that in general also appears
to my friends in the guise of such ‘dangerous’
relationships.20
Only through exposure to danger can thinking perform
its task. The positions this involves can even be reclin-
ing ones, as in the case of Proust, whose achievement
has its place ‘in the heart of the impossible, at the
centre – and also at the point of indifference – of all
dangers’.21
To return to the original question: is there really
some kind of relation between Benjamin and the
RAF? The question is full of pitfalls. To answer in
the affirmative was at the time to risk playing into
the hands of the hardened right-wing ideologues who
tried to incriminate the Frankfurt School for the real
and alleged excesses of the 1968 student movement
and the terrorism of the 1970s. From such smear
campaigns it is only a short step to Sippenhaft: the
Nazi incarceration of an entire family for the misdeeds
of a single member. But this danger harbours another,
contrary one to which the Left has in the past, when
it still existed, been particularly vulnerable: that of
claiming a doctrinal monopoly on the truth. Positions
do not have to be wrong because the right defends
them, even when it falsifies them in the same breath
by its tone and intent.
In historical retrospect, the events that took place
between 1965 and 1969 look to this particular eye-
witness more or less as follows. Relations between
the Frankfurt School and the emerging student move-
ment were marked by a Hegelian ‘cunning of reason’
which, whatever their theoretical familiarity with the
concept, operated as usual behind everyone’s back. It
fell to Adorno, the author of a programmatic essay,
‘Education after Auschwitz’, to play a public role
which Benjamin, in some respects his educator, had
never known – a thankless and barely dischargeable
task for which he was barely equipped. That no life,
thought or teaching can be right in a false world
would be painfully confirmed in his own case by a
sequence of events which may well have shortened his
life. Every attempt to break out of the ‘administered
world’ of late capitalism was, so his pedagogy implied,
almost inevitably doomed; yet – and here something
quasi-religious came to the rescue – this could not
be all there was. A whole generation of students was
unable to accept this conclusion – one of unresigned
resignation – and the meagre recommendations that
accrued from it: reformist politics, retreat to sublime
areas of resistance, notably art, hibernation in the
iron cage in hopes of a better day. Under the impact
of the Vietnam War, the sense of powerlessness and
frustration fostered by Adorno’s philosophy of history
erupted into a political activism that was at once
theoretically top-heavy, short-sighted and false – yet
productively so in many respects. The unproductively
false aspects of this situation included both the viru-
lent denunciations of the student movement mounted
notably by the Springer press conglomerate and its
own skewed ‘anti-authoritarianism’, fixated as it was
on its father figures.
As long as right-wing demagogues made the teach-
ers’ theory directly responsible for their students’
acts, it was clear that this was not the time to reflect
in public on the real but easily misunderstood and
misappropriated connections between the Frankfurt
School and the German student movement. Important
though it still may be to make up for that missed
chance, which raises still-relevant questions about the
relation between theory and praxis in the context of
political protest, the moment for this may meanwhile
have passed – for in matters of timing there may
indeed be, as one of the opening epigraphs to the
present essay claims, ‘rightness in the false’. Much of
the ’68 generation seems, with age, to have yielded to

the resignation, and accepted the analyses, for which it
once indicted Adorno; and today’s ‘fragile’ generation,
confronted as it is with problems of survival to which
their predecessors were far less exposed, has no need
or time for rebellion. It struggles instead for a place in
the system that its elders had once dreamt of overturn-
ing. Between these generations lies the RAF episode
– a desperate lunge at ‘direct action’ (the name, this,
of its French counterpart) whose excesses help explain
the ‘dull thousand-voiced’ inertia that rules today: the
reverse, this, of what Benjamin dreamt of in one of the
epigraphs to this essay. The RAF episode is a disaster
from which the German Left has failed to recover.
Let us return to the narrower focus of our initial
question. The reasons why the RAF was eager to
enlist Benjamin into its cause are not hard to find.
Even and especially parricides need father figures.
Once the other mentors of the German student
protest movement (Habermas, Marcuse and Negt
in particular) had refuted the RAF’s analysis and
methods and had been denounced as traitors to the
cause, there remained, apart from Marx himself,
only one German ‘authority figure’ with whom the
RAF could identify – one who, being dead, could
not object to what they did with him. The way they
not merely used but instrumentalized his thought
was, moreover, in complete contradiction to its
fundamental impulse. Instrumental rationality is
the defining feature of bourgeois thought and action:
this was as clear to Benjamin as it was to Max Weber.
Hence the uncompromising rejection of all means–end
relations at the heart both of his theory of language
and his critique of violence – a nexus to which we
will shortly return.
Benjamin was all the more valuable a prize for the
RAF, because their intellectual (ex-)fathers, notably
Adorno and Marcuse, themselves appealed to his
authority. In claiming to be his only legitimate political
heir, the RAF drove a wedge between the living and
the dead. Benjamin thus represented symbolic capital
and pedigree. But there were also other reasons for
their preference. However slender the RAF’s actual
acquaintance with his thought, it cannot have escaped
them that he had staked out a bolder position vis-à-vis
the question of violence than their teachers had done.
Already the student movement had played off Benja-
min’s ‘historical materialism’ against their Frankfurt
teachers out of frustration with their political timidity
and the withdrawal of ‘the critical theory’ (as it called
itself) from its original positions. The RAF polarized
the fronts still further. While Benjamin (compared
with Marx, Che Guavara, Gramsci, Frantz Fanon,
10
Carlos Marigella and others) had little to offer them in
the way of revolutionary strategy, there was nothing to
prevent them from wrenching a whole series of motifs
from the body of his thinking and casting themselves
as its political executor. Nothing, that is, except its
complexity.
In so doing, they did it violence. The RAF freely
incorporated quotations from Benjamin into their own
delusional system. But they could thereby claim – or
might have claimed – to be doing far greater justice
to the driving impulse of his work than anything that
the sophisticated exegeses of Benjamin philology had
to offer. Did not his own method of citation enact a
theory and practice of violence?
Only one who despairs discovers in citation the
power not to preserve but to purify, tear out of
context, destroy: the only power in which hope
still lies that something might survive this time and
place – because that hope has been hewn out of it.22
The RAF were themselves despairers, indeed des-
perados, who tore Benjamin’s writings out of context
(and in so doing, like Brecht, dropped his ‘Judaisms’).
They could, moreover, have made further interesting
finds, such as his praise for the Surrealists’ ‘frenetic
will’ to ‘escape the stage of endless discussion and
come, at any price, to a decision’. 23 On the strength
of their claim to be no longer discussing but doing,
they practised ideological blackmail on their more
vulnerable sympathizers. For a variety of reasons,
Benjamin could hardly have endorsed the reckless
decisions to which they ‘at any price’ came. That he
had felt compelled to do a certain calculated ‘violence’
to his original way of thinking was not, in his eyes,
a matter of internalized blackmail but, as he put it,
of solidarity with the experiences of his generation.
The task was ‘not to decide once and for all, but to
decide every moment. But indeed to decide.’24 And to
do so, in his own case, without reducing ‘the entire
contra­dictory fund’ of his thinking to a mere ‘credo’. 25
‘Always radical, never consistent’, especially in the face
of a party line whose motto was practically the reverse
– this would remain Benjamin’s circuitous, tortuous,
but by no means alogical or equivocal strategy, one
that had, as in chess, to be worked out anew with each
new move.26 To be of the Left also meant improvising
‘with the left hand’. By contrast, the line taken by
the RAF, while no less improvised, was radical in a
compulsively, suicidally consistent way.
In short, the RAF fatally parodied Benjamin’s deci-
sions and positions. ‘Hear me! For this precisely is who
I am. Do not, above all, confuse me with another!’27
Thus spoke the author of Ecce Homo, whose alter ego,
Zarathustra, warns in turn against being ‘confused and
confounded’ with the socialists.28 It is true that Ben-
jamin could on occasion champion ‘falsification’ and
‘being misunderstood’.29 But such ‘new barbarism’ had
to be done ‘the right way’.30 Which meant among other
things: without falsification or misunderstanding.
In a dense letter to Martin Buber written in 1916,
Benjamin anticipates the move from his essay of the
same year ‘On Language in General and the Language
of Man’ (1916) to his ‘Critique of Violence’ (1920–21),
to both of which he will remain faithful throughout.
The letter rejects all political language that aims
to motivate, influence and activate others; the essay
likewise rejects the prevailing (‘bourgeois’) reduction
of language to a debased, powerless, merely external
‘means’ of communication directed towards equally
debased activities (Mittel, Mittelbarkeit). What Benja-
min invokes in their place is the intensive, ‘im-mediate’
(un-mittel-bare) action of a ‘poetic prophetic objective’
language; the notion of a ‘matter-of-fact (sachlich) yet
highly political’ style; and a ‘sphere of the wordless’
that yet marks the ‘crystal-pure elimination of the
unsayable’, one where ‘the magic spark’ is generated
that ‘overleaps’ the distance between word and deed. 31
In the ‘Critique of Violence’ this sphere will be called
that of ‘pure means’ and exemplified by the ‘general
strike’. At this point, however, the politics implicit
in this quasi-mystical conception of language can
barely be made out. Two aspects nevertheless begin
to emerge. This other politics somehow emerges from
the depths of language; and it is worlds apart from the
– interrelated – spheres of individual psychology and
instrumental rationality.
What relevance did this seemingly esoteric train of
thought have to the issue at hand?
1.  It points to the immense gulf between Benjamin’s
politics (‘“my” politics’, he once called them) and
everything we normally consider such, be it left-wing
activism or right-wing realpolitik, both of which are,
from his standpoint, based on the debased, instrumen-
tal language of everyday communication. (Benjamin’s
universe is equally remote from that of George Orwell,
who, in his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’,
holds out clean plain English prose as the antidote to
corrupted political language.)
2.  Benjamin’s ‘very particular stance’ on the phil-
osophy of language32 thus raises at least two questions
in the present context. First, whether the actions of the
RAF weren’t, contrary to appearances, closer to the
‘bourgeois’ politics of impure, instrumental means than
to the other, communist politics of ‘pure means’;33 but,
second, what, besides the model of the pure general
strike, such a politics might conceivably look like.
3.  The question remains whether a not-so-magic
spark might have ‘overleapt’ another gulf – the one
between Benjamin’s words (or Word) and the RAF’s
actions. Would he have seen in their leap into action
his own theory of the ‘leap’ (Sprung)?34 Or rather its
parody?
This brings us back to the original problem: under
the pressure of a ‘critical’ situation (im Ernstfall),
did the RAF, by its actions, do justice to, or pass
un­witting judgement on, Benjamin’s politics? Or was
it a mockery of such justice?
Clues to a possible encounter
These questions do not in principle depend on there
having been an actual relation between the RAF and
Benjamin. It would be enough to establish a virtual
dialogue. Did, however, the elements of a real dialogue
exist? In lieu of the circumstantial investigation that
would have been needed to decide this question, here
are a few shreds of documentary evidence concern-
ing the RAF’s intermittent contact with Benjamin’s
thought.35
1. On 13 September 1985, Karl Dietrich Wolff, the
then chairman of the Association of German Socialist
Students (SDS), published an ‘Open Letter’ in the
Tageszeitung entitled ‘Anything would be better than
to go on murdering this way’, written in response to
two attacks committed by the RAF the month before
which had resulted in the death of three American
soldiers. He here recalls having discussed Benjamin’s
‘Critique of Violence’ in 1969 with Gudrun Enslin
in the Preungsheim Women’s Prison, where she had
just been incarcerated following her conviction for
participation in arson attacks on two department stores
in Frankfurt; and adds that he has recently reread
Benjamin’s essay. He then goes on:
11
 With your murder of Edward Pimenthal, and the
cynical bad faith of your public statement [of 25
August 1985], you have betrayed whatever once
motivated the West German terrorist movement.
Your ‘war’ contains no image of liberation. Your
violence has become ‘part of the problem’, not its
solution. Is it nevertheless possible even now – after
this murder and this statement – to call on you to
turn back? Yes, nevertheless.
The final paragraph of the letter reads:
Betrayal of terrorism? War without an image of lib-
eration? Violence as part of the solution? Questions
upon questions.
Wolff draws the line here between arson and murder
– more precisely, the premeditated abduction and
killing of an American soldier for the purpose of
obtaining his uniform and ID card.
Violence against things, yes; violence against
human beings, no. On the strength of this or similar
distinctions, many former sympathizers sooner or later
severed all links with the RAF. The issue to which
Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ had addressed itself
was, however, a quite different one. 36 Neither side
could here plausibly appeal to the precise wording
of this very difficult text. Wolff’s sense of its spirit
did not, however, deceive him. It could not have been
used – or only have been used – to justify the murder
in question.
Benjamin had there written:
[The commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’] stands not
as a standard of judgement, but as a guideline for
the actions of persons or communities who have to
12
wrestle with it in solitude and, in awful cases [in
ungeheuren Fällen], to take upon themselves the
responsibility of disregarding it. This is how it was
understood in Jewish tradition, which expressly re-
jected the condemnation of killing in self-defence.37
The RAF was embroiled in a political logic of
means and ends that Benjamin’s essay unequivocally
rejects. Its members also laid claim, however, to a
certain expanded notion of self-defence and convinced
themselves that they were standing at a world-historical
turning point. Now according to the ‘Critique of Vio-
lence’ the imminent prospect of a ‘new world-historical
era’ may indeed, as in antinomian messianism, allow
or require the transgression of legal rights and holy
commandments. Nor is it always possible to identify
in what ‘awful’ cases such ‘expiatory’ violence has
actually taken place:
It is less possible and also less urgent
… to decide when pure violence
[reine Gewalt] became real in par-
ticular cases. For only mythic, not
divine, violence will be recognizable
with certainty as such, unless it be
in incomparable effects, because the
expiatory power of violence is not ap-
parent to men.38
If men cannot know when ‘pure’
violence has taken place, it follows
that they cannot appeal to it to justify
their actions. It is, on the other hand,
difficult to avoid the conclusion that
the violence championed by the RAF
was and is ‘recognizable with cer-
tainty’ as being not of the ‘expiatory’
but of the ‘guilt-incurring’ (verschul-
dende) kind which, far from breaking
the ancient mythic cycle, perpetuates
it. How to break this Schuldzusammenhang through a
pure violence that, as Benjamin variously presents it, is
as powerful as it is powerless: this is the enigma with
which the ‘Critique of Violence’ leaves us.
2.  In a ‘Letter to the Prisoners’ (1978), the RAF’s
leader Andreas Baader repeatedly cites Benjamin’s
Theses ‘On the Concept of History’ (hereafter the
Theses) on
the question of how we may achieve the particular,
historically possible form of revolutionary violence
that matches the institutional use of power, this
through the notion of a revolutionary break and
a definition of the reactionary forces at work in
Europe, in relation to which mass action can be
meaningful only if it absorbs the experience of the
front lines of armed struggle worldwide.39
In conclusion he cites Thesis XII:
The subject of historical knowledge is the strug-
gling, oppressed class itself. In Marx’s writings
it appears as the last enslaved, the avenging class
that completes the work of liberation in the name
of generations of the beaten [Geschlagener]. This
consciousness, which briefly came back into its own
in the Spartacus League, was offensive to Social
Democracy from the outset. Within three decades it
managed to extinguish almost completely the name
of Blanqui, whose iron ring had caused the previous
century to quake. It found it congenial to cast the
working class as a redeemer of future generations.
Thereby it severed the sinews of its best strength. It
taught the working class to unlearn both its hatred
and its spirit of sacrifice. For both are nourished by
the image of enslaved ancestors rather than by the
ideal of liberated grandchildren.40
Baader’s comments here are not merely wooden but
somewhat garbled:
this point is essential, for the project of a utopia
held out as socialist can only be the attempt to
make the revolution look as if it were attractive and
thus to await its conjuncture. The revolution is real
only as the negation of the existing state of things,
as its destruction.41
In lingua veritas, said Victor Klemperer. It is Baader’s
language that gives his politics away. Its critique is
partly contained in a passage from Benjamin’s Sur-
realism essay (which Baader is unlikely to have read)
which rejects the ‘as-if’ rhetoric typical of social-
democratic party programmes, predicated as they are
on an attitude of vague, indefinite waiting for a utopian
never-never land. The optimism they profess is in
fact defeatism: the despairing capitulation of socialist
thought to bourgeois modes of thought. Benjamin’s
analysis of social-democratic phraseology could be
partly adapted to that of the RAF. What both dia-
metrical opposites have in common is a programmatic,
self-alienated rhetoric that strenuously masks an inner
despair. Both are equally remote from Benjamin’s
alternative: the ‘organisation of pessimism’.42
Since Baader had no wish to be thought an intel-
lectual, one might hardly have expected him to pay
much attention to Benjamin’s Theses, especially since,
even on a less than careful reading, they lend little
credence to his attempt to cast the RAF as the only
legitimate heir of a revolutionary tradition, notably that
of Blanqui and the Spartacists, that social democracy
had repeatedly betrayed. But the idea of carrying off
such booty must have been very tempting. The Theses,
Benjamin’s political testament, had meanwhile been
practically canonized by the German student Left and
were honoured, if also misread and disregarded, on all
sides. It thus represented a coup – a putsch – to claim
them as one’s own. Among their quotable revolution-
ary phrases was the one about ‘blasting’ texts out of
their original context and saving certain splinters as
citations ‘à l’ordre du jour’.43 This clearly was, or could
have been, how the RAF thought it was reading them.
But was the Communist Manifesto still, as it had been
for Benjamin from 1929 until the day of his death, the
‘order of the day’?44 If so, how, exactly?
3.  This letter of Baader’s, along with its quotations
from Benjamin, forms part of a rambling, more than
300-page declaration entitled Erklärung zur Sache,
which Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof and Raspe read at the
court in Stuttgart–Stammheim on 13 and 14 January
1976.45 This declaration of war against the world
capitalist system itself had something of a paranoid
world-system about it.46 In the second Exposé (of
1939) to his Arcades Project, Benjamin had noted
something seemingly similar, but ultimately antitheti-
cal, in Blanqui’s last text.47
The Stammheim trial was, on both sides, a con-
tinuation of the struggle by other means. As such, it
provided confirmation for Benjamin’s analysis in the
‘Critique of Violence’ of the violence exerted by the
law (Rechtgewalt). The court refused to recognize the
accused as political prisoners; they in turn tried to
transform the occasion into the ‘tribunal of history’.48
In so doing, they cited three of Benjamin’s Theses as
witnesses for the defence.
(a) Thesis XII. The phrases already cited from Baader’s
letter are amplified here by a few partially incomplete
sentences:
the more capital organizes itself and coordinates
(its cycle) in the state, the experience that power
only comes from the barrel of a gun brings with it
the problem: how to develop forms of action which
accelerate this development … and political-military
action on the part of the revolutionary avant-garde,
which directly intervenes in the crisis and deter-
mines its course and resolution for the offensive.49
The ‘political-military action’ of an urban guer-
rilla force – the ‘revolutionary avant-garde’ – is here
conceived as the alarm or fuse which will set off
revolution throughout Europe.
According to one of the preparatory notes for the
Theses, the defining trait of the materialist historian
is a sharpened consciousness of the crisis in which
the ‘subject of history’ – namely, the ‘struggling and
oppressed class in its most exposed situation’ – finds
himself. 50 Already here the notion of a collective
13
subject is on the verge of becoming a wishful, exhorta-
tory belief, a ‘consummation devoutly to be wished’,
even if the Proletarian International still existed at
the time. Forty years later, the RAF will believe,
against all the evidence, that they now represent the
most exposed European vanguard of this universal
subject. They derive their political-military strategy
from their allegedly sharpened consciousness of a
situation which pits the international proletariat against
global capital. The connection with the above-quoted
note and with Benjamin’s Theses is as compelling as
it is deluded. Thesis XII still invoked, in Marxian,
biblical and already somewhat apocryphal fashion, the
‘struggling and oppressed class’ as the ‘last enslaved,
the avenging’ one. Meanwhile, however, the Arcades
Project had increasingly focused on a ‘dream collec-
tive’51 intent on not waking up. In the RAF’s court
declaration, the class which, in Marx’s scheme of
things, had represented a theoretical but still plausible
and substantive construction has become an object of
rhetorical, emptily self-fulfilling belief. Amidst the
endlessly abstract and inflexible phraseology of the
Erklärung, one unclear turn of phrase casts a sudden
shaft of light: ‘class is merely strategy’. 52 It is thus still
to be constituted. Already in George Lukács’s History
and Class Consciousness (1923), class was the empiri-
cal bearer of a non-empirical, ‘imputed’ (zugerechnet)
consciousness. Fifty years later, such imputation cannot
withstand the facts without arming itself against them
– without, that is, wanting to exchange the people for
another one (as Brecht said of the rulers). According
to another late note of Benjamin’s, every moment
brings with it ‘its own revolutionary opportunity’. 53
The task was, and is, to find out what the remaining
post-revolutionary opportunity is. Measuring it against
reality would have meant, at least in the West European
context, abandoning a desperate, dogmatic belief in
armed struggle. But that, as the RAF would have been
the first to object, leaves us back where we are and can
only be a – very unpromising – beginning.
Baader’s observations on Thesis XII in his ‘Letter
to the Prisoners’ are pursued in the Erklärung:
the destruction, the shattering of the capitalist
relations of production – in economic, military, cul-
tural, and ideological terms. Experience tells us that
the function of utopia is a kind of arrangement with
the badness of the present, a way of enduring the
bad conscience that arises from our own inactivity.
This gesture, which recalls Lukács’s low remark that
the Frankfurt School had taken up quarters in the
‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ – Adorno would in turn entitle
his article on Lukács ‘Extorted Reconcilation’ – is
14
calculated to take the entire ‘inactive’ left hostage. In
the ‘Critique of Violence’, on the other hand, blackmail
is opposed to ‘pure’ violence and said to perpetuate
the existing order.
(b) Thesis IV:
The class struggle, which a historian schooled in
Marx always has before him, is a struggle for the
crude and material things without which there are
no refined and spiritual ones. The latter are never-
theless differently present in the class struggle than
as a vision of the spoils that fall to the victor. They
are alive in this struggle as confidence, courage,
humour, cunning and perseverance and have effects
that reach far back into the past. They will forever
call into question each victory that fell to the rulers.
As flowers turn their heads to the sun, so, by virtue
of a secret heliotropism, the past turns toward the
sun that is rising in the sky of history. The histori-
cal materialist must know about these, the most
inconspicuous of changes.54
Baader introduces this quotation with the remark:
‘Benjamin says of bourgeois values in the proletarian
revolution’ and follows it with the comment: ‘Gramsci
said the same thing in a few words: the proletariat
represents the heritage of classical German philoso-
phy.’55 But it is precisely not the ‘heritage’ or ‘spoils’
of bourgeois ‘values’ that interest Benjamin here, but
rather a bundle of revolutionary virtues which might
have rescued the RAF from its demons – notably, his
equation of revolutionary consciousness with attention
to imperceptible changes. Baader, on the other hand,
parades the Theses as a trophy – that, perhaps, of
‘rising’ would-be rulers.
(c) Thesis VIII. The court declaration cites this Thesis
– to which we will return – in full and adds the fol-
lowing garbled commentary:
to be the protagonist of the class struggle in the
major urban centres, from the history and defeats
of the proletariat, here from its subjection to the
imperialist state through social democracy which is
in the hands of US capital and the CIA-controlled
trade unions [sic] – the motor of the revolutionary
proletarianization of society.56
Of all the Theses, the eighth seems to lend itself
most easily to a ‘terrorist’ reading. In the ninth, history
contracts – before the terrified eyes of the Angel of
History as he is borne away from Paradise by Progress
– into a ‘single catastrophe’. In the eighth, it is polar-
ized between an immemorial state of emergency and
the unprecedented one needed to end it. The only
remedy against Self-Sameness is the wholly Other:
one Entsetzen is pitted against the other.
 The Angel and the RAF hardly constitute a well-
matched pair. But they have at least one thing in
common: the will to arrest the continuum of history. 57
‘Since he is himself exposed to fright’ (Schrecken),
Benjamin writes, ‘it is not unusual for Baudelaire to
occasion it.’58 To quell terror by terror – to derange
derangement: this is the classic, apotropaic answer to
the gaze of the Medusa. The petrified stare of Ben-
jamin’s Angel is of that order. It petrifies a Medusa-
like History into an arresting wide-angled image – a
violent act of non-violence that, in turning the world’s
violence against itself, transforms it beyond recogni-
tion. The RAF too wanted, in Hegelian fashion, to
‘enter the enemy’s strength’. Against the great infer-
nal machine of the world they built some of their
own. They took the language of exploding (sprengen)
history literally. It was no longer a matter of quotation
but of bombs.
To sum up, there indeed exists, over their dead
bodies, a whole complex of conflicted connections
between all four elements: the Frankfurt School, Ben-
jamin, the German student movement and the RAF.
The hard evidence for the Benjamin–RAF connection
is scanty; the soft evidence – the social and intellectual
climate (Umfeld), the web of intervening figures, real
and rhetorical – is considerable. There is no longer
any need, if there ever was, to deny it. But the links
are difficult, often tenuous, always delicate and easily
misstated, misunderstood and misappropriated. The
Angel of History could, after all, hardly figure on a
wanted list. This whole field of tensions, as Benjamin
might have called it, is not the night in which all
differences lose their contours, but that of an epoch
in which everything depended upon making critical
distinctions and decisions.
A preceding volume documenting the historical
reception of Dialectic of Enlightenment was subtitled
From the Message in the Bottle to the Molotov Cock-
tail: 1944–1975. This formula neatly summarizes the
problematic relation of word and deed at issue here.
Published in Amsterdam in 1947 and widely circu-
lated in ‘auratic’ pirate editions during the 1960s,
Dialectic of Enlightenment59 has been described as a
‘time bomb’ that lay dormant for twenty years.60 By
casting their ‘philosophical fragments’ as a ‘message
in a bottle’, Adorno and Horkheimer had, however,
effectively defused the other ‘bomb’ wrapped up in
theirs: Benjamin’s Theses. Both the SDS and the RAF
aimed, in very different ways, to reactivate the bomb
that had been consigned to the philosophers’ bottle.
It was here that the crucial distinctions/decisions had
to be made.
Between the message in the bottle
and the Molotov cocktail: Benjamin,
Marcuse, Negt
Herbert Marcuse’s ‘Afterword’ to a collection of essays
published in 1965 by Suhrkamp under the title The
Critique of Violence and Other Essays constitutes
a plausible link between Benjamin and the RAF.
This small volume marked an important moment both
in the initial reception of Benjamin’s work and the
emergence of the student movement. Here for the first
time the inner connection between the early ‘Critique
of Violence’ and the late Theses – and thereby the
latter’s politically explosive character – was brought
to the fore.
But the ‘Afterword’ also contains tacitly cautionary
words from its mentor-to-be for the emerging move-
ment – potentially the most serious addressees of these
texts. He writes:
The writings of Walter Benjamin collected here
originated in the historical period that began with
the outbreak and end of the German revolution
(the two dates almost coincide) and ended with the
Second World War. They belong to that ‘image of
the past which threatens to disappear with every
present that fails to recognize itself as intended in
it’. Words appear here, perhaps for the last time,
which can no longer be seriously uttered without
taking on a false content or resonance: words such
as ‘culture of the heart’, ‘love of peace’, ‘redemp-
tion’, ‘happiness’, ‘spiritual things’, ‘revolutionary’.
Their interrelations and the form their truth takes in
the present are the stuff of Benjamin’s work.61
Marcuse reads Benjamin’s texts the way they want
to be read: in the ‘Now’ of their ‘recognizability’
(Erkennbarkeit).62 The present can, they both claim,
recognize itself even, and perhaps above all, in texts
that belong to an irretrievable past. It can do so,
however, only from a – by no means safe – distance
which leaves none of their content unchanged. In the
present case, that content is the common cause; and
Marcuse, who had decades before taken sides with the
short-lived German Revolution, here ventures to ask
whether that cause can still be called the ‘revolution-
ary’ one. Benjamin’s critique of social democracy is,
he writes, not primarily that of a party that has come
to be an underpinning of the status quo, but ‘the (not
yet despairing) memory of the truth and actuality of
revolution as a historical necessity’.63 From the further
distance of our present, Marcuse’s parenthesis – ‘(not
yet despairing)’ – prompts the question whether the
RAF wasn’t desperately clinging to a version of the
common cause whose hollowness it was both putting
15
to the test and unwilling or unable to concede.64 ‘The
angry man’, Benjamin said of Baudelaire, ‘“will not
listen”.’65 What Benjamin had called the ‘revolutionary
chance’ inherent in every moment might, in short,
now best survive in a certain abandonment of ‘the’
revolution.
Benjamin’s Theses, Marcuse goes on,
were written at the outbreak of the Second World
War, at a time when Fascism was triumphing. The
present no longer belongs to the same historical
period: it has put an end to the age when the open
or covert struggle against Fascism still seemed
capable of exploding the continuum of history.
This continuum has once again closed over. Real
developments thus stand as a bloody testament to
Benjamin’s truths.66
Weitermachen (Keep on): so reads the inscription
on Marcuse’s Berlin grave. The struggle goes on (as
Rudi Dutschke, a student leader opposed to the RAF,
called out at the graveside of Holger Meins, an RAF
member who died in prison after a hunger strike). But
it cannot do so, according to Marcuse, in its past guise.
The terms which rang false in his ear already in 1965
included not merely ‘redemption’ and ‘culture of the
heart’, but also ‘Fascism’, ‘the class struggle’, and so
on – in short, the typical later phraseology of large
sections of the SDS and of the entire RAF.67 And yet,
Marcuse argues, the struggle for which Benjamin’s
name stands draws its ‘strength’ and ‘weakness’ from
the fact that he was unable to ‘compromise the concept
of revolution – even at a time when compromises still
seemed to further its cause’.68
Marcuse expounds the uncompromising argument
of the ‘Critique of Violence’ in a few broad strokes,69
sides with it, raises the unavoidable question of how
an interruption of the existing order can be effected
when the class struggle is ‘not acute’70 and concludes,
in suddenly Adorno-like fashion, by appealing to great
art as the repository of homeless radical impulses. In
contrast to his long-standing Frankfurt associates,
however, Marcuse was ready and willing to become
publicly involved in the ensuing turbulence.71 Combin-
ing political radicality, youthful anger, sane judgement
and long experience, he openly supported the ‘Extra-
parliamentary Opposition’ (APO), clearly distinguish-
ing its theory and praxis of counter-violence from that
of the RAF and remaining faithful to the revolutionary
idea without overestimating its existing chances of
realization.
It is pointless to speculate about the political posi-
tions that Benjamin might have taken if he had lived
to see the 1960s and 1970s and could have intervened
in, among other things, his own reception. But it may
16
plausibly be suggested that on the question of violence
he would have been close to the eminently militant and
eminently reasonable line argued by such elder states-
men of the student movement as Marcuse and Negt in
a series of fraught dialogues with Horkheimer, Adorno,
Habermas, Dutschke, Krahl and others.72 There were
other ways of reading Benjamin’s Theses ‘in earnest’
than by appealing to the ‘language of the gun barrel’73.
That a ‘certain circumspection and caution’ is called
for, especially in matters of ‘destruction’, if historical
materialism is to prove a ‘match for all comers’,74 was
not something that the RAF was capable of hearing.
Its ultra-radicalism stood ‘to the left of the possible’.75
Our present stands far to its right.
Translated by Nick Walker and Irving Wolhfarth
Notes
1. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (henceforth
GS), ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppen-
häuser, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1972–89,
IV, 1, p. 122; ‘Fire Alarm’, in One Way Street, in Wal-
ter Benjamin, Selected Writings (henceforth SW), ed.
Michael W. Jennings, Harvard University Press, Cam-
bridge MA, 1999, vol. 1, p. 470. In what follows, extant
English translations are often amended.
2. GS, II, 1, pp. 305–6; ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot
of the European Intelligentsia’, in SW, vol. 2, pp.
214–15.
3. GS, IV, 1, pp. 434–5.
4. GS I, 2, p. 660; ‘Central Park’, trans. Lloyd Spencer
with Mark Harrington, New German Critique 34, Winter
1985, p. 34.
5. GS, 1, p. 1241.
6. GS, II, 1, p. 201; ‘Critique of Violence’, in SW, vol. 1,
pp. 250–51.
7. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe (henceforth GB),
ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, Suhrkamp Ver-
lag, Frankfurt am Main, 1995–2000, IV, p. 100, letter to
Gershom Scholem of 1 June 1932; English translation:
The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940,
trans. R. and E.M. Jacobson, University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 1994, p. 394. The materials of the Ar-
cades Project contain the following jotting: ‘There is a
draft where Caesar, rather than Zarathustra, appears as
the bearer of Nietzsche’s doctrine. … This is of some
importance. It underscores the fact that Nietzsche sensed
something of the complicity of his own doctrine with
imperialism’ (GS, V, 1, p. 175).
8. ‘For ends that for one situation are just, universally
recognisable and universally valid, are so for no other
situation, no matter how similar it may be in other re-
spects’ (GS, II, 1, p. 196; ‘Critique of Violence’, in SW,
vol. 1, pp. 247–8).
9. GS, II, 1, p. 175; ‘Fate and Character’, in SW, vol. 1, p.
204.
10. GB, IV, pp. 24–5, letter to Gershom Scholem of 17
April 1931; The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin,
p. 385.
11. Cf. Derrida’s contribution to the controversy provoked
by certain disturbing remarks in the wartime writings of
the young Paul de Man, Mémoires: For Paul de Man,
trans. C. Lindsay, J. Culler and E. Cadava, Columbia
 University Press, New York, 1986.
12. GS, II, 1, p. 202; ‘Critique of Violence’, in SW, vol. 1,
p. 251.
13. Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe (hence-
forth KG), ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, De
Gruyter, Berlin, 1969, VI, 3, p. 363; Ecce Homo, trans.
A.M. Ludovici, Dover, New York, 2004, ‘Why I Am a
Fatality’, p. 131.
14. George Orwell’s dismissal of intellectuals who, for lack
of any other outlet, indulge in violent thought and lan-
guage may be countered by Georges Bataille’s claim
(on behalf of the Marquis de Sade) that the worst vio-
lence usually shelters behind a facade of bureaucratic
euphemism.
15. The differences are nonetheless decisive. Can one le-
gitimately play off Brecht’s and Benjamin’s relations to
communism against Heidegger’s to Nazism by claiming,
as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe does, that they were all
‘taken in’ (floués)? Cf. La fiction du politique, Bour-
geois, Paris, 1987, p. 43; Heidegger, Art and Politics,
trans. Chris Turner, Blackwell, Oxford 1990, pp. 61f.
16. Cf. the title, taken from Benjamin, of the collection of
critical essays edited by Burkhardt Lindner, ‘Links hatte
noch alles sich zu enträtseln’ … Walter Benjamin im
Kontext, Syndikat, Frankfurt am Main, 1978.
17. ’Have not all railings and bridges fallen into the water?’,
asks Zarathustra. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach
Zarathustra, III, ‘Von alten und neuen Tafeln’, KG, VI,
1, p. 248; Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part III, ‘On Old
and New Tablets’, section 8, trans. Walter Kaufmann,
Penguin, New York, 1966. Hannah Arendt – the first to
dare, rightly or wrongly, to link Heidegger and Benjamin
– similarly called for a ‘thinking without railings’, H.
Arendt, Denken ohne Geländer, Piper, Stuttgart, 2005.
18. Cf. Norbert Bolz, Auszug aus der entzauberten Welt.
Philosophischer Extremismus zwischen den Weltkriegen,
Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich, 1989.
19. Cf. GS, I, 3, p. 1242 (notes and materials for ‘On the
Concept of History’).
20. Walter Benjamin, Gretel Adorno. Briefwechsel 1930–
1940, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, Suhrkamp
Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2005, p. 156.
21. GS, II, 1, p. 311; ‘On the Image of Proust’, in SW, vol.
2, p. 237.
22. GS, II, 1, p. 365; ‘Karl Kraus’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 455.
23. GS II, 1, p. 295; ‘Surrealism’, in SW, vol. 1, p. 207.
Benjamin is thinking here – in 1929 – of the surrealists’
‘highly exposed position’ between ‘anarchistic Fronde
and revolutionary discipline’. André Breton aimed to
break with ‘a praxis that presents the public with the
literary precipitate of a certain form of existence while
withholding that existence itself. To put it in a nutshell:
The realm of literature was exploded (gesprengt) from
within’ (GS, II, 1, 295–96; ‘Surrealism’, in SW, vol. 1,
pp. 207–8). Like Nietzsche’s ‘dynamite’, such explosive
is clearly metaphorical; yet it partakes, in however sub-
limated a way, of the non-metaphorical kind; otherwise
it would be a merely metaphorical ‘as-if’. The leap from
literature to life here remains a literary act this side
of the border; but what this act invokes is, precisely,
the leap beyond that border – the drawing of practical
consequences from a verbal commitment to the revolu-
tion. True, the anarchists’ machines infernales referred
to above are all literary texts. But they are not merely
literary, inasmuch as the ‘real’ ones are all mediated
through and through by language.
24. Benjamin’s letter to Adorno of 10 November 1938,
Adorno–Benjamin Briefwechsel 1928–1940, ed. Henri
Lonitz, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main; Walter
Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, The Complete Corre-
spondence 1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker, Har-
vard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1999, p. 284.
Cf. Benjamin’s response in his letter of 9 December
1938 (Briefwechsel, p. 379; The Complete Correspond-
ence, pp. 291f.). This exchange epitomizes their different
relations to the question of violence.
25. GB, IV, p. 408, letter to Gershom Scholem of 6 May
1934; The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, p.
439.
26. GB, III, p. 159, letter to Marcel Brion of 2 September
1935. If, as Jürgen Habermas claims, Benjamin’s thought
should not be confronted with ‘facile demands for con-
sistency’, this is because, in and through all its leaps and
tangents, it has, contrary to that claim, another, more
radical consistency. Cf. Zur Aktualität Walter Benjamins,
ed. Siegfried Unseld, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am
Main 1972, p. 176; J. Habermas, ‘Consciousness-Raising
or Rescuing Critique’, in On Walter Benjamin, ed. Gary
Smith, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1988, p. 92.
27. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, ‘Foreword’ I, KG, VI,
3, p. 255, also pp. 363–4; Ecce Homo, trans. Duncan
Large, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007, pp. 3f.
and 88f.
28. ‘There are those who preach my doctrine of life, and
are at the same time preachers of equality, and tarantu-
las’. KG, VI, 1, p. 125; Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans.
Thomas Common, New York 1999, Part II, ch. XXIX,
p. 66.
29. Cf. GS, II, 1, p. 297 (‘Surrealism’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 208);
GS, II, 2, p. 621 (‘Dream Kitsch’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 4);
GS, IV, 1, p. 397 (‘The Destructive Character’, in SW,
vol. 1, p. 542).
30. GS, II, 1, pp. 217–19; ‘Experience and Poverty’, in SW,
vol. 2, pp. 732 and 735.
31. GB I, 325–7, letter to Martin Buber of 17 July 1916;
The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, p. 80.
32. A certain form of ‘mediation, however fraught and prob-
lematic’, he claims, links his philosophy of language ‘to
dialectical materialism …, but none whatsoever to the
bloated character of bourgeois knowledge’ (GB, IV, p.
18, letter to Max Rychner of 7 March 1931).
33. Given its situation as a would-be urban guerrilla move-
ment bereft of any support from the general population,
including its left-leaning segments, the RAF was reduced
to endless strategies of self-preservation and bogged
down in what Benjamin’s early essay on language had
termed Mittelbarkeit – an endless means–ends nexus that
was the fallen antithesis of all divinely inspired language
and revolutionary action. For a discussion of its mem-
bers’ ‘autistic’ fixation on their own activities and the
logic of exchange underlying the release of prisoners,
see Wolfgang Kraushaar, ‘Die Schleyer-Entführung: 44
Tage ohne Opposition’, in Revolte und Reflexion. Poli-
tische Aufsätze 1976–87, Frankfurt am Main, 1990, pp.
81–3. ‘Entering into the adversary’s strength’ – Hegel’s
postulate for effective combat – thus meant – or resulted
in – assuming the features of the ‘monster’ (p. 83) that
the would-be liberators were fighting. But how avoid this
dilemma under modern conditions and in such unequal
combat? Beyond the particular case of the RAF, this vast
problem remains. It confronts apologists of the status
quo with the question whether even legitimate violence
17
 may not be monstrous (in which case, distinctions be-
tween forms of monstrosity become unavoidable). And
it asks Benjamin how ‘pure’ violence can exist (or from
where it can intervene) in the enveloping ‘guilt nexus’
he describes. Doctrines of racial, ideological and other
purity have spawned the impurest violence (genocide,
ethnic cleansing etc.). Purity is a much-contaminated,
reactive notion. This is, however, no reason to lump all
doctrines of purity together. The motives for doing so
are themselves ‘impure’.
34. Cf., among other relevant places, GS, I, 2, p. 701; ‘On
the Concept of History’, Thesis XIV, in SW, vol. 4, p.
395.
35. The following material was made available to the author
by Wolfgang Kraushaar.
36. Between private individuals, Benjamin observes, count-
less cases exist in which conflicts find non-violent solu-
tions. These are, however, usually of a ‘mediate’, objec-
tive nature ‘by way of things’ (GS, II, 1, p. 191; ‘Critique
of Violence’, in SW, vol. 1, p. 244).
37. GS, II, 1, pp. 200–201; ‘Critique of Violence’, in SW,
vol. 1, p. 250.
38. GS, II, 1, p. 202–3; ‘Critique of Violence’, in SW, vol.
1, p. 252.
39. Cited from Texte der raf, Stockholm 1977, pp. 177–
207; partially reproduced in ‘Dokumente zur Rezeptions­
geschichte Andreas Baaders’, Schattenlinien 6–7, Berlin
1993, pp. 83ff.; and Reinhard Markner, ‘Walter Benjamin
nach der Moderne. Etwas zur Frage der Aktualität an-
gesichts der Rezeption seit 1983’, Schattenlinien 8–9,
Berlin 1994. The text of the ‘Declaration to the Court’
(Erklärung zur Sache), which has never been published
in its entirety, is housed in the archives of the Hamburg
Institute for Social Research. In the following discussion
it is cited as ‘Typescript’.
40. GS, I, 2, p. 700; ‘On the Concept of History’, Thesis
XII, in SW, vol. 4, p. 394. The last sentence tells us
precisely where the ‘image of liberation’ mentioned in
Wolff’s letter is to be looked for.
41. Typescript, p. 14.
42. GS, II, 1, pp. 308–9; ‘Surrealism’, in SW, vol. 2, pp.
216–17. Benjamin proceeds to contrast (dialectical)
‘image’ with (social-democratic) ‘metaphor’, to insist
on the necessity of ‘expelling moral metaphor from
politics’, and to equate the revolution with a process of
‘dialectical destruction’.
43. GS, I, 2, pp. 694 and 703; ‘On the Concept of History’,
Theses III and XVII, in SW, vol. 4, pp. 390 and 396.
44. In this connection, cf. the concluding remarks of the
essay on ‘Surrealism’ (GS, II, 1, p. 310; SW, vol. 2, pp.
217–18).
45. See note 39 above.
46. Freud pointed to the affinity between paranoid and philo-
sophical systems. How both might be disentangled is a
question also raised by a text of a quite different calibre
that belonged to the theoretical underpinnings of the
German student Left, namely Dialectic of Enlighten-
ment. Anti-systematic though they are, these ‘philo-
sophical fragments’ constitute a closed system of their
own.
47. GS, V, 1, pp. 75–7; Paris, Capital of the 19th Century,
1939 Exposé, in The Arcades Project, trans, H. Eiland
and K. McLaughlin, Harvard University Press, Cam-
bridge MA, 2002, pp. 25–6.
48. Cf. GS, V, I, p. 459 (notes and materials on Baudelaire).
49. Typescript, day I, p. 14.
18
50. GS, I, 3, p. 1243 (notes and materials for ‘On the Con-
cept of History’).
51. GS, V, I, pp. 493ff. In the second 1939 outline of the
Arcades Project, Benjamin no longer refers, as he had in
the first 1935 one, to a ‘historical awakening’ (GS, V, I,
p. 59; Paris, Capital of the 19th Century, 1935 Exposé,
p. 13).
52. Typescript: ‘with reference to I (2), 2.’
53. GS, I, 3, p. 1231 (notes and materials for ‘On the Con-
cept of History’).
54. GS, I, 2, p. 694–5; ‘On the Concept of History’, Thesis
IV, in SW, vol. 4, p. 390.
55. Typescript 4.
56. Typescript 2, day 7.
57. GS, I, 2, p. 667 (‘Central Park’, in New German Cri-
tique 34, 1985, p. 39); GS, I, 2, pp. 702 and 703 (‘On
the Concept of History’, Theses XVI and XVII, in SW,
vol. 4, pp. 396–7).
58. GS, I, 2, p. 616; ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in
Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, trans. H. Zohn,
Verso, London, 1997, p. 117.
59. ‘If [this message] can be addressed to anyone today, it
is neither the so-called masses nor the individual, who
is powerless, but rather an imaginary witness to whom
we bequeath it so that it does not entirely go under with
us’. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik
der Aufklärung, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main
1969, p. 273; Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical
Fragments, trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford University Press,
Stanford, 2002, p. 213. At the time, Marcuse had ob-
jected to the image of a ‘message in the bottle’ (in a
letter to Horkheimer of 11 November 1941; cited in
Willem van Reijen and Gunzelin Schmitt Noerr, eds,
Vierzig Jahre Flaschenpost: ‘Dialektik der Aufklärung’
1947–87, Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1987, pp.
8–9).
60. Ibid., p. 7.
61. Walter Benjamin, Zur Kritik der Gewalt und andere
Aufsätze, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1965,
p. 99 (henceforth Zur Kritik). Benjamin suspects even
the ‘recent German revolution‘ of having amounted to
a ‘political’ general strike – the type in which, accord-
ing to Georges Sorel, ‘the masses change their masters’
– rather than a ‘proletarian’ one directed against the
masters (GS, II, 1, p. 194; ‘Critique of Violence’, in SW,
vol. 1, p. 246). The latter exercises ‘pure’, the former
‘impure’ violence. According to the Theses, such pure
revolutionary consciousness briefly re-emerged with the
Spartacus League (GS, I, 2, p. 700; ‘On the Concept of
History’, Thesis XII, in SW, vol. 4, p. 394). The latter
would thus have represented the ‘struggling, oppressed
class in its most exposed situation’ (GS, I, 3, p. 1243,
notes and materials for ‘On the Concept of History’).
62. GS, I, 3, p. 1237 (notes and materials for ‘On the Con-
cept of History’).
63. Zur Kritik, p. 101.
64. In two late essays Adorno explicitly links student ‘ac-
tionism’ to ‘desperation’. ‘Where experience is blocked,
or altogether absent, praxis is damaged and therefore
longed for, distorted, desperately overvalued’ (T.W.
Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann,
Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1977, vol. 10.2,
p. 760; Marginalia to Theory and Praxis, in Critical
Models, trans. H. Pickford, p. 260). ‘Desperation which,
finding the exits blocked, blindly leaps into praxis joins
forces with catastrophe – with the purest of intentions’
 (Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10.2, p. 766; Critical Mod-
els, p. 265). ‘People who are locked in desperately want
to get out’ (Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10.2, p. 796;
‘Resignation’, in Critical Models, p. 291). Adorno, who
himself once said with a smile ‘Open Sesame: I want to
get out’, did not reflect, at least in print, on the possibil-
ity that what he called the ‘actionism’ of the students
might in some measure be an unintended consequence
of his own teaching and thus a bitter instance of his
dictum: ‘However one does it, one does it wrong.’
65. GS, I, 2, p. 642; ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ Section
X, p. 143. In the penultimate strophe of the fourth
‘Spleen’ poem in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, howl-
ing church bells furiously leap at the sky, followed in
the final strophe by a slow, silent funeral procession in
which the ‘sable banner’ of ‘terrifying, despotic Fear’
– which thus has the same colour as the flag of anarchy
– is planted on the defeated subject’s skull. Charles
Baudelaire, Œuvres Complètes (henceforth OC), ed. Y.-
G. le Dantec, Gallimard, Paris, 1968, p. 71. Benjamin
links the poem to the coup d’état of Napoleon III and
Blanqui’s surrender to the stellar system in L’Eternité
par les astres (GS I, 3, p. 1139 [notes and materials
for Charles Baudelaire]).
66. Zur Kritik, pp. 106–7.
67. See, by contrast, Marcuse’s letter to Horkheimer of 17
June 1967: ‘Allow me to express my view in the most
extreme manner possible: I see today’s America as the
historical heir of Fascism.’ Frankfurter Schule und
Studenten­bewegung (henceforth Frankfurter Schule), ed.
Wolfgang Kraushaar, Rogner and Bernhard, Hamburg
1998, II, p. 262.
68. Zur Kritik, p. 101.
69. ‘The violence which is the object of Benjamin’s critique
is not the one generally criticized, especially when those
below use (or attempt to use) it against those above. This
latter violence is precisely the one that …Benjamin calls
“pure” violence. … The violence criticised by Benjamin
is that of the existing order, which has acquired a mo-
nopoly of legality, truth and law, whose violent character
has disappeared, only to reappear all more terrifyingly
in so-called ‘states of emergency’ (which de facto are
no such thing). For the oppressed, such a state of emer-
gency is the rule; the task, however, is to bring about that
“actual state of emergency” which can explode the his-
torical continuum of violence’ (Zur Kritik, pp. 99–100).
Roughly accurate though this summary of Benjamin’s
argument is, it ignores its theological underpinnings and
transforms his critique of violence into a militant ver-
sion of Frankfurt ‘critical theory’: ‘The truth of critical
theory has seldom been expressed in such exemplary
form.’ Ibid., p. 104.
70. Marcuse responds to this problem at the end of One-
Dimensional Man (Beacon Press, Boston MA, 1964, p.
257), where he interprets the ‘Great Refusal’ of unarmed
marginal groups as a possible ‘chance’ for radical change
– this in the spirit of Benjamin’s claim: ‘It is only for
the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us’
(cited in Zur Kritik, p. 257).
71. For his concrete differences with Adorno on the question
of violence, cf. Marcuse’s letter to Adorno of 5 April
1969 and Adorno’s reply of 5 May 1969 (Frankfurter
Schule, II, pp. 601–2 and 624–5). The correspondence
between Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer in the 1960s
takes up, in certain respects, Adorno’s exchange of let-
ters with Benjamin in the 1930s. There Adorno voices
reservations about Benjamin’s political sympathies. But
he never comes to grips with the ‘Critique of Violence’,
even though it belongs to the early theological phase of
Benjamin’s thinking, in which, in their discussion of the
Arcades Project, Adorno holds out against what he takes
to be Benjamin’s dangerously Brechtian, insufficiently
dialectical turn to Marxism.
72. In this connection, cf. the following letters by Marcuse:
‘Letter to Max Horkheimer’ (17 June 1967); ‘The prob-
lem of violence in the context of political opposition’
(13 July 1967), and its continuation in ‘This terror is
counter-revolutionary’ (11 June 1972); ‘The predica-
ment of the revolutionary spirit’ (15 June 1972); ‘Murder
cannot be a weapon of politics’ (16 September 1977);
‘I have never preached terrorism’ (19 July 1978). Cf.
also the following letters by Oskar Negt: ‘Politics and
protest’ (28 October 1967); ‘Politics and violence. On
the assassination of Rudi Dutschke’ (18 April 1967);
Negt’s ‘Introduction’ to ‘The Left Responds to Jürgen
Habermas’ (1968); ‘The strategy of answering violence
with violence’ (26 April 1968); ‘Student protest – liber-
alism – “Left Fascism”’ (June 1968); ‘On the Baader–
Meinhof case’ (October 1971); ‘Socialist politics and
terrorism’. All reprinted in: Frankfurter Schule II, pp.
261–3, 272–8, 297–303, 356–63, 366–7, 406–7, 417–25,
745–7, 752–7, 758–61, 806–7, 828–31. If these careful
demarcations of the problem have lost much of their
relevance for today, this is also because today has lost
much of its relevance for them. It is in part because the
Left has meanwhile lost so much ground that present-day
discussion of the problem of violence has fallen behind
the level reached in the 1960s and 1970s.
73. GB, V, 248, letter to Adorno of 27 February 1936; The
Complete Correspondence, p. 126.
74. GS, I, p. 693; ‘On the Concept of History’, Thesis I,
in SW, vol. 4, p. 389. Some sympathizers of the RAF,
however, voiced doubts about its theoretical position. In
1967 there appeared a pirate edition of Benjamin’s The-
ses, along with two essays by Adorno, never officially
published in his lifetime, which argued the current im-
possibility of revolutionary praxis (‘Reflections on the
Theory of Class’ and ‘Theses on the Concept of Need’,
in T.W. Adorno and W. Benjamin, Integration und Des-
integration, Kritik Verlag, Hanover, 1976; reprinted in:
A. Götz von Olenhausen, ‘Der Weg vom Manuskript
zum gedruckten Text ist länger, als er bisher je gewesen
ist’. Walter Benjamin im Raubdruck 1969 bis 1996,
Lengwil am Bodensee 1997, pp. 96ff. There is no refer-
ence here to Adorno’s two published responses to the
student movement: Marginalia to Theory and Praxis
and Resignation). The editor’s ‘Foreword’, signed by
‘J. Peachum’, explains the purpose of this unauthor-
ized edition. The West German Left is, it claims, cur-
rently retreating into a ‘re-privatization’ of politics’,
is considering whether to establish a new party and is
thereby acting ‘as if nothing at all had happened’. Its
fear of contact with the RAF and other armed groups
has led to ‘political impotence and intellectual sterility’.
Theoretical clarification of the situation is needed. It is
provided by the theoretical contributions of the student
leader Hans Jürgen Krahl, Benjamin’s ‘indispensable’
reflections on the philosophy of history, and Adorno’s
‘uninhibited’ adoption of key concepts of Marxist
theory.
75. GS, III, p. 281; ‘Left-wing Melancholy’, in SW, vol. 2,
p. 425.
19
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20
Flux and flurry
Stillness and hypermovement in animated
worlds
Esther Leslie
Animation, as any Wikipedia reader knows, is ‘the
optical illusion of movement’, whether achieved
through photographing drawings, moving clay models
and recording the tweaks frame by frame, drawing
directly on film or devising models digitally. But the
definition is a weak one, or only a starting point. Not
only animation but all film/video proceeds by generat-
ing an ‘optical illusion of movement’. A recording
device samples fragments of the world, repeatedly
biting a moment of time from its flow. Later the result-
ing still frames of a film or video strip are cranked
or streamed into motion, generating a second-order
re-creation of the motion of which they had once been
part. Furthermore, to define animation as ‘the optical
illusion of movement’ makes it impossible to think of
animated stillness – perhaps rightly so. But, in one way
or another, there is much stillness in animation: from
the aforementioned individual cels or frames at ani-
mation’s root to the static backgrounds that accompany
a scene’s main action; from production storyboards to
those moments, occasioned by the narrative or gag,
when everything has to stop. This must be qualified:
it is true only inasmuch as stillness can ever be said
to exist and is not itself something of an illusion. It
is, after all, a question of scale whether the movement
that inhabits all things is perceived and, in addition, the
perceiving eye itself is always in movement. Moreover,
what animation or any cinematic production presents
is not simply an illusion of movement. It is move-
ment itself: movement of the image data through the
projecting mechanism, which produces movement on
the screen. There is, indeed, an animation technique
that explores vision’s contingency and the relativity of
stillness and movement through the extreme extension
of time. Bullet time or time slice or view morphing
stills the scene or object within the flow of the film
or moves it only at extreme slowness, while our view
of it changes constantly, as the visions of multiple
cameras are sequenced. Thereby a frozen moment of
Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
time is stretched out, presenting us not so much with
an example of the optical illusion of movement of an
object but rather with the perception of movement
itself in motion.
A definition of animation, found in the relays
between movement and stillness, is outlined here, per-
versely perhaps, by exploring some scenes or sites that
are more or even much less conventionally conceivable
as animation. At first glance these are motionless sites,
but, on closer examination, they prove to be sites of
movement, in various ways. The characterization of
animation pursued is different to the commonsensical.
It is best described as an insistence that animation’s
special contribution to cinematic culture is not the illu-
sion of movement but rather, chiastically, and at least
potentially, the movement of illusion, a displacement
that brings to light or focuses the given illusion even to
the point of dispelling it. It does this through the con-
densation, within and between animated elements, of
a number of movements, a series of passages between
different states and forces, conditions and temporali-
ties. A shorthand version of my definition is animation
is ‘different nature’ or animation is ‘non-indifferent
nature’. Animation is ‘different nature’ (Benjamin1)
because it is different to ours, but not distinct from
it. Animation reflects on nature, but shatters its laws
in its physics-defying recombinations of space, time
and matter. Animation proposes ‘small worlds’, each
one bound by the newly and specifically devised laws
of the animator. Animation is ‘non-indifferent nature’
(Eisenstein2), because it appeals to us, invites us into
its particular small world. Its appeal is mediated via
technology and is a shuttle between the image world of
a new or second nature and us, addressed too as nature.
We are invited in for the duration of the show. This
image world or microcosm is, in turn, appropriated
– or, better, inhabited – by its viewers. Animation’s
small and dialectical image worlds propose certain
stances on the part of viewers, encouraging them to
21
 be at least minimally alert to the ways of the image
world unrolling before them, especially as it compares
to the world in which they sit. They are aware too, at
some level, of the differences within the image world
– that is to say, the gaps between the cels or poses.
These gaps, key to animation’s structure, enable the
excessive or implausible movements that characterize
animation and mark it as seemingly unlimited and
infinitely potential. This animated nature might assume
any form and usually does in its presentation of hybrids
of human and animal, coagulations of machineries and
bodies, scenarios in which natural law is overturned
or maliciously asserted. Animation presents a dynamic
image world in which – in much the same way as
Sergei Eisenstein, Disney fan, describes the dialecti-
cal cinema he hoped to develop as his contribution
to post-revolutionary culture – there is manifested a
condensation of tensions that appeals, or may appeal,
in a particular, cognitive way to its viewers. This
is because, in propelling the viewer from image to
thought, from percept to concept, it models the motion
of thinking itself – such that viewers are invited to
complete the film through an act of appropriation of
its new nature.
To specify, animation is, characteristically, whatever
its form, genre, technique, enlivened, which is not to
say that it is lively only because it displays movement.
Rather, more specifically, it is made lively by the
inherent movement of the dynamic contradictions that
inhabit it and that are projected in its small image
worlds. Animation’s small image worlds are generated
– structurally, formally, content-wise – through the
work of oppositional and interconnected, or, better,
dialectical, forces, these being stillness and move-
Olaus Magnus, 1555
22
ment, life and lifelessness, identity and non-identity,
singularity and universality, fetishism and its criticism
and a basic repetition or replication that paradoxically
yields heterogeneity. These forces are at work vari-
ously: perhaps in the image or between images or in
the storyline or the technology or at the moment of
projection and being seen.
To explore this further the present enquiry takes in
some frozen sites – ostensibly the least animated thing
imaginable, for that which is frozen is precisely immo-
bilized, though this no more so than the still image
that is the cell of animation. After a spell among the
frozen, some melting into air follows. First the focus
is on a stilled figure, allowing us to arrest our attentive
eye on an entity that quite literally crystallizes numer-
ous dialectical tensions, such as might also be found
lurking in the obviously mobile animated image.
Microphotography of snow crystals
On 15 January 1885 Wilson Bentley of Vermont,
USA, became the first person to photograph a single
snow crystal. Having built and adapted a bellows
camera and a microscope and taking advantage of
the icy winters in North America, Bentley captured
snowflakes, whisked them inside a cold hut, isolated
several beautiful crystals on a microscope slide and
quickly photographed each one singly. The procedure
was impelled by a scientific desire to understand, by
bringing into view, the snow crystal. That it produced
something of aesthetic beauty was a happy side effect
that Bentley noted and exploited in publications. He
went on to produce and reproduce many hundreds of
images.
Walter Benjamin points out in his ‘Little History
of Photography’ (1931) how in its initial period pho-
tography enjoyed a particular affinity with science. 3
In those early days, some of its first uses explored
how the whole cosmos could be projected into port-
able form, for contemplation in the interior. This
was, Benjamin decreed, part of photography’s original
utopian compass. In a speech to the French Chamber
of Deputies in 1839, when he sought to gain state funds
for Daguerreotypy, François Arago reveals something
of this utopianism of scientific enquiry. Arago was an
astronomer and a politician, and had requested that
Daguerre make a photographic image of the moon,
which Daguerre did on 2 January 1839. Arago imag-
ined the uses to come for photography. He planned
wondrous maps of the planets, too far away for the
human eye to perceive, but brought into vision through
chemistry. He imagined photographs of infinite numbers
of stars, in a mapping of the heavens. He also conceived
R. Hooke, 1665
a comprehensive record of the only recently poten-
tially legible Egyptian hieroglyphics. Mysterious and
extraterrestrial worlds are visualized. Furthermore, as
Benjamin notes of an epoch that, with its widespread
promulgation of possession, is turning away from
the optical towards the ‘tactile’,4 these largest worlds
– offworlds – are made graspable, quite literally, as
they are taken into the viewer’s hand in image form.
When Bentley devised a way to capture snowflakes, he
was performing likewise a seemingly impossible task.
He was capturing accurately the image of something
tiny and ephemeral, enlarging it vastly and making
a permanent record of it for hands-on leisurely and
scientific contemplation.
However, by Bentley’s time, some forty-odd years
into its life, photography comes to be better known
as a mediator of more everyday visions. It is increas-
ingly associated with multiplication, reproduction and
a recording of the mundane. The relationship to, on the
one hand, the outlandish and mysterious and, on the
other, the scientific and exploratory, slips behind more
prosaic and superficial uses of the medium. Bentley’s
practice, though (like other examples of nature photog-
raphy), holds on to the twin aspects of photography as
magical and scientific, in the context of normalization
of the photograph. His work presents another image of
contradictory nature. Photography, a mechanical form
of image production, bore important implications for
the shaping of concepts such as originality and unique-
ness, key concepts of traditional art understanding.
Photography and film possessed no original. Each print
from the negative was only as ‘original’ as the next or
the one before it, which is to say not original at all. In
this context it is of some fascination that Bentley’s first
photographs of snow crystals in 1885 and then the thou-
sands that follow, despite their endlessly reproducible
nature, despite their multiple, series-like appearance,
provide evidence for quite the opposite – a proof of
the cliché that largely still holds as scientifically true:
that no two snow crystals are the same. A technique of
multiplicity garners proof of uniqueness. It is not giant
off-worlds brought down to earth, in this case, but rather
the tiniest portions of our universe projected larger. The
smallest particle is amplified and makes thereby, in
representation, a small image world in itself, particular,
unique, complex and intricate. Microphotography – and
never more so than in the case of snow crystals – is a
replicational, repetitive technology that evinces hetero­
geneity, the disparateness of nature displayed to the eye
as curiosity.
Snow forms in the atmosphere, perhaps around a
microscopic dust particle or on a frozen droplet. The
six branches of the crystal grow from bombardment
by water molecules present in air’s vapour. Each snow
crystal self-organizes its hexagonal lattice, a complex
result of repetition, under a particular and peculiar
set of circumstances: the specific temperatures in the
air at various points, the particular supersaturation
at the time of formation, might favour the formation
of snow needles, or, instead, plates, stars or columns.
Blown through clouds, every crystal is subjected to
random shifts of temperature. Each forms in response
to these fluctuating conditions, which are unrepeatable.
Some journey down from the sky intact, their intricate
designs preserved. Some fuse with cloud droplets or
conglomerate into flakes. Each life history is recorded
in the crystal and made visible in microphotography.
What the viewer receives, in the microphotograph,
is static, an arrest of a process of falling, floating,
melting. Yet still, it might be said, these photographs
constitute a type of animation, for they provide, in
a flash, evidence of diachronic processes, of indi-
vidual and heterogeneous ‘biographies’, ‘physiognomic
aspects’5 – that is to say, indications of deep structures,
processes and character – legible through the surface
of the finished form.
In 1893, a little while after Bentley’s first photo-
graphs, the German meteorologist Gustav Hellmann
published his scientific reflections on snow crystals.
These were accompanied by heliogravures from micro-
photographs by Richard Neuhaus. Originally, Hell-
mann confesses, each winter, gleeful at the appearance
23
of snow, he tried to sketch individual snow crystals, known. Just as Hellmann deems photographed nature
but melting and evaporation meant he had to fill in the livelier than drawn, schematized nature, Benjamin
missing parts and so he relied on symmetry. Comparing too endows the photographed image of nature, or the
these drawings with crystals glimpsed for a moment nature that comes into being photographically, with a
under a microscope, they appeared ‘too schematic and liveliness or vividness that results from a more intense
too stiff’.6 Hellmann observes how drawings, as, for knowing.
example, in the sketches of Mrs Glaisher, carried out at Close-ups are a key vehicle of this knowing and
her meteorologist husband James’s behest, idealize the they are attuned to the requirements of a photography
crystal’s form. The drawings of snow crystals produce of the everyday, which differs in terms of its scale from
symmetrical, geometric figures that do not exist in
actuality. They do this as a way of finishing off an
image whose original model was long melted away. Or
perhaps drawing captured a geometry that existed only
for a moment long ago at the snow crystal’s formation,
never to be visible to a human eye.7 In contrast to the
drawing, the microphotographs reveal imperfections,
asymmetries, deformations, deviations from the laws,
which is to say that the photographs detail the ‘reality’
of the snow crystal. Through the microphotographs,
Hellmann commented:
Now we no longer have ideal shapes and schematic

R. Neuhaus, 1893
figures in front of us, but real images, as offered to
us by nature. Indeed, one could say that, in spite of
the icy congealment of the object what we see here
are images of nature as warm as life.8

The human eye perceives – after the intervention

of the mechanical eye with its enlarging lens – a ‘real
image’, an image of reality. The microphotography of
snow crystals mediates, via the camera, what Walter
Benjamin characterizes as a different nature, one that
is accessible to machine-enhanced perception. This
different nature visaged by the machine is now deemed
more real, more lively.
Benjamin’s essay ‘Little History of Photography’
details the other nature available to machine-enhanced
perception.
For it is another nature which speaks to the camera
rather than to the eye: ‘other’ above all in the sense
that a space informed by human consciousness gives
way to a space informed by the unconscious.9
For Benjamin the camera reveals aspects, indeed
whole worlds of images, ‘physiognomic aspects, image
worlds, which dwell in the smallest things’,10 that have
previously never been seen before – except perhaps in
dreams. The camera discloses these through its barrage
of effects that assault the unquestioned coherence of
actuality: slow motion and enlargement, for example.
It routes vision through the machine and so detaches
humans from their conscious, or habitual, modes of
seeing. It ‘reveals the secret’ and so, paradoxically,
dredges the world up from unconsciousness into being
the earlier epoch’s bringing of vast stars and the moon
and the sun miniaturized down to earth. In Benjamin’s
view, the knowledge that photography as close-up
uncovers is also a curious one. The different nature
that the camera imports discovers the ‘mysterious’ in
the everyday, according to Benjamin in his description
of the close-ups of plants by Karl Blossfeldt. These
reveal strange analogies, ones that intermingle natural
and artefactual forms and dramatize the action of the
camera on nature. That is to say, these are images
of ‘different nature’ or second nature, of a nature
confronted by creative human labour self-constituting
and expressing a world-view, kinship and protection,
in short human civilization: ancient columns in horse
willow, a bishop’s crosier in the ostrich fern, totem
poles in tenfold enlargements of chestnut and maple
shoots, and gothic tracery in the fuller’s thistle. As
such the images are evidence that nature too can be a
realm of human transformation in coordination with
technology and thought. Hellmann discovers analogies
through the magnifying lens too, though his do not
invoke the philosophical conundrums of second nature.
That the snow crystal resembles other natural forms,
botanical forms in particular, is the revealed secret
of the magnifying lens, the exposed filmstrip and the
time-defying coated papers. It is the magical trick or

24
technologically acquired fact which makes tangible
what was not tangible before – for example, that snow
crystal columns are hollow tubes.
What the machine brings back for vision is not
deadly, not ahuman or inanimate, even if the mecha-
nism that recovers it is. Rather, as Hellmann phrases
it, it makes images that are ‘warm as life’. And while
the photographed ice crystals never move before the
eye, the image that appears on the filmstrip and gets
printed on photographic papers is the end-result of a
process that takes place over time – or through history.
It betrays the marks of such process in its imperfec-
tions, thus compounding time or history in a single
image that is as ‘warm as life’ because it is so real.
That is to say, animation – the apparent ‘breath’ of
life (a meaning suggested by its root anima, a cognate
of animus, or mind) – might be found in what seems
like stillness. The microphotograph of the snow crystal
brings into vision a small image world imbued with
life interrupted, cancelled, preserved, and like ours it
is one in which historical process has produced the
present state of things. The frozen mobile nature of
ice is frozen again, through the camera, into a stilled
image, a ‘different nature’, but that image of ‘different
nature’ pulsates with life. Indeed its ‘different nature’
is, it could be said, just such enhanced liveliness.
Animation may be the very state of the different nature
that inhabits a small image world.
Perhaps microphotography distils something intrin-
sic to animation: its achievement is, it seems, to conjure
a world that pulsates with physicality, analogy and
potential, even where life appears to be arrested.
Through processes of replication – the replication of
nature in image, the replication of the image from the
filmstrip – a unique and heterogeneous image world
is discovered.
Another scene: snow globes
The snow globe protects a little world housed under
glass or, later, transparent plastic. The scene is
un­touchable, but the globe itself exists precisely to
be grasped in the hand, which neatly fits around its
rounded or oval contours, in order every so often
to shake up the artificial snowflakes or flitter. After
shaking, it is as if life has suddenly entered and then
crept away again. The snow globe comes properly
to life only when it is replete with a liquid that
becomes invisible, functioning solely as a medium for
im­peding and transporting bone, rice, polystyrene or
glitter pieces until they settle.
The snow globe meddles somehow with life and
lifelessness, though where the emphasis lies has been
differently perceived. For Adorno, the glass globes
house Nature morte, still life, dead life. Their appeal to
Walter Benjamin, who collected them, like that of other
‘petrified, frozen or obsolete components of culture’,11
such as fossils or plants in herbariums, signals, for
Adorno, Benjamin’s attraction to everything that has
alienated from itself any ‘homely aliveness’. The snow
globe is an emblem of de-animation, of the passage to
a reified death or non-life as characterizes experience in
industrial and bureaucratic capitalism. For the literary
theorist Paul Szondi, the emphasis, on the contrary,
was on the snow globe’s freeze-framing of a scene of
life, not death. He called the snow globes ‘reliquaries’,
which provide shelter, the preservation of something
– a scene, an event – as image to bequeath to the future
in the shape of hope.12 A cruder, crueller description
might argue that the globe replicates a standardized
moment of happiness ad infinitum. The snow globe
fixates the mind on a special moment stilled forever,
except for the intermittently falling snow.
The snow globe is always an ideal scene, a com-
posite or fantasy, a small image or imagined world
that existed only in dreams and that comes to life in
its being moved, in displacement. Is the snow globe
animated? Unlike the microphotograph of the snow
crystal, it is unreal, in Hellmann’s terms – that is to
say, not photographic or indexical. It is an image of
perfection, a plastic mould loosely based on reality
– reinvented, with blue backing, in Germany, in the
1950s, as a vehicle for an excess production of flat
plastic brooches. It is the image of an ideal or idea.
The snow globe perhaps concentrates animation in
its most basic form. Animation is a type of giving
life technically. The life endowed to the snow globe
emerges out of the most basic gesture – a waving of
the hand. The snow globe is animated for a moment by
an external action, brought from lifelessness into life;
it sparks a memory or fantasy. Its animation is ignited
in the animation of the flakes and completed in the
wistful and transported mind of the viewer.
25
 Snow crystal photography, snow globes: two sites
where a flurry of contradictions is catalysed. Animated
dramas occur in both these small image worlds: a
rapid flux, a shift from one state to another, reversals
of scale, an interplay of replication and uniqueness,
sameness and difference, a summoning in both of
concentrated imaginative power.
Ice and artifice
Where snow and ice are there are always opposites at
work. Where there is opposition there is dynamism,
mobility, movement and transformation – which may
be why it offers itself especially for utopian reverie, for
example in the Christmas card, the painting by Caspar
David Friedrich, the ice sculpture or palace. Under
snow colour is extinguished by whiteness. Roughness
is overlaid by the smoothness of ice. And, furthermore,
ice and snow are made of water. This fluid, the fluid of
fluids, is frozen into crystals. What was always moving
becomes still, until it melts again back into water. Ice
crystals are the immobilized that is dynamic through
its interaction with environment. Ice is, therefore, a
transient form, which is perhaps to say not a form at
all, for it always presses towards formlessness again.
There is something materially present in the constitu-
tion of ice that allows it to annex to powerful fantasies
of renovation. Ice is a product of transformation – of
water – and it transforms environments. A comic strip
from 1906, one episode in Winsor McCay’s series
26
Little Nemo in Slumberland, about the nightly dream
escapades of a little boy, provides an emblem of this.
Snow has fallen in Nemo’s bedroom, a burgeoning drift
accumulating as he drifts into sleep. Once he is fully
covered by the thick snow Nemo burrows through the
snow blanket in search of his father’s room, but he
loses his bearings and finds himself in Jack Frost’s
domain. Unable to repress the sound of his breathing,
and so breaking the silence, he is chased by polar bears
through the snowy landscape back to his bed, where
Nemo wakes, as he does every week. The snow fell
in a dream and seemed to fill the room itself. In his
dream Nemo’s room becomes a snow globe, and, like a
snow globe, the room seems to be a microcosm of the
wider world inside just one part of it, a world within
a world, reflex of the way in which the dream might
be seen as a repetition of the world within the smaller
globe of the head. But what the comic strip also
concentrates in its weekly encounters with snow, ice,
storms, earthquakes, sudden climactic shifts, as well
as mobile cities, and shifting interiors, is a peculiarly
animated environment and an architecture of absolute
impermanence and drama, such as characterizes that
ushered in by capitalist industrial modernity.
Little Nemo drifts to the snowdrifts, but he lives
in the city, and this is the realm that is most graphi-
cally animated in the weekly stories. Here nature is
contained or bursts out. New York and its buildings, its
streets, docks, rivers and alleyways leap into storylines.
In its becoming motive, New York, or the city space,
is revealed in the comic strip as a place of modern
anxiety about urban space, an unease generated by the
built environment, with its monstrous power to crush,
oppress, damage, or, in turn, be damaged by humans
run amok. Little Nemo’s adventures feature humans
being pursued by tall buildings or humans knock-
ing buildings down, because magically proportions
have been suddenly and inexplicably reversed. Little
Nemo’s city is a place of constant disasters. Displayed
in the elegant stretching and shrinking rectangles of
the strip is a tangible anxiety about the relationship
between city inhabitants and their novel and rapidly
changing environments. And, to be crudely Marxist,
in New York, the land was special, magical, with
extraordinary powers of transformation. Land value
rose rapidly. Land was sold or leased, buildings were
flung up swiftly, causing earthquakes across the city. It
was as if mud, stone, brick, concrete and steel spored
value of their own accord. If ever there were a com-
modity fetishism of land it was here on this little island
– where buildings become animate or take on human
characteristics, human weaknesses, and sometimes
humans assume the destructive force of tumbling
buildings. To embed the peculiar energies of the city
of capital further in the motives of the comic strip,
Winsor McCay stretched Little Nemo’s panels verti-
cally to accommodate the new skyscraper-ordained
dimensions of city life.
Slumberland is terrifying, not least because its small
worlds fling up newly invented horrors and dislodge-
ments week after week. In his studies of modernizing
Paris, Walter Benjamin specified a tempo characteristic
of industrial capitalist modernity: the eternal recur-
rence of the ever-same in the guise of the new. This
is the tempo of technologically reproduced culture
within capitalism, just as it is that of any commodity:
replication that resembles heterogeneity. It has its
horror-face in the endless movement of conveyor-belt
commodity production. Cartooning is a particularly
graphic version of this hellish temporality. The cel
after cel or frame after frame, churned out again and
again, means that structurally it is based on such a rep-
etition with difference. Generically, too, cartoons are
notorious for dishing up the ever-same product with the
smallest tweaks as stimulus to sales. But Slumberland
also possesses its utopian side. McCay’s ever-returning
strips present the city as what Walter Benjamin terms
in his thoughts on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of
Its Technical Reproducibility’ a Spielraum, a place
of play, with room for manoeuvre, something that he
theorizes as a beneficial characteristic of technological
modernity. The presence of Spielraum allows, at least
imaginatively, the possibility of possibility, of the new,
of the different to all this.
Winsor McCay was also, from 1911, an animator
– where his comic strips thematically set the city in
motion, his animations used the rhythms of modernity
concretely. His first one transformed Nemo to the
screen, tentatively. Inside the boxes of New York
offices, men conspire to give flat shapes life and
colour. There is little narrative in this animation, which
consists of an unmotivated, illogical squashing and
stretching, the very principle of cartooning. It could
be described as an example of the ‘optical illusion of
movement’, though it is honest about its source and
does not seek to deceive. It might better be described
as a rumination on the passage between living and
drawing, between lifelessness and life, identity and
non-identity. It is not an illusion of movement but
presents movement itself, as a feat, rushing through
the projector, the result, as the film makes clear, of
thousands of drawings and gallons of ink.
Could the motion generated in these first studio-
offices of mass cultural production be seen as a model-
ling of the dynamic, ever-changing forms of modernity?
More specifically, it is a modelling of its seemingly
motive force, the commodity economy – whose endless
replications and innovations, and whose commodity
fetishism, are analogously evident in the animated
objects’ push beyond their own objectivity.
Animation, then, as rendition of commodity fetish-
ism, that illusory hyperliveliness of objects, a topsy-
turvy negation of the value that stems from labour.
What is animation but objects coming seemingly to
life, without human intervention, so it appears. And
yet it is also the realm in which such graphic rendi-
tion might make social forms available to knowledge,
conscious, in the sense of Walter Benjamin’s ‘optical
unconscious’ of photography and cinema, a new mode
of seeing beyond seeing, using the segmenting powers
of the camera and cinematic technology on a dissected
image world that must be broken down in order to be
made up again. As such animation might be not just the
illusion of movement but also the movement of illusion.
Frozen social relations are warmed into life; the rigid
surface unthaws. Animation has its analytical, critical
face. It melts the congealed surface of daily life with
its analytical and utopian stance.
As many have argued, animation contains within
itself always a sense in which its objects and images,
drawn or modelled, are motile, flexible, open to pos-
sibility, able to extend in any direction, undertake any
action or none. Sergei Eisenstein devised a category of
27
‘plasmaticness’ that he evoked in order to stress this
originary shape-shifting potential of the animated, the
way in which an object or image, drawn or modelled,
strains beyond itself, could adopt potentially any form,
thereby rescinding all back to a moment of ‘hope in the
past’, a future potential, beyond current constraints.13 It
was not frozen water that Eisenstein evoked in relation
to this ecstatic plasmaticness – despite the references
to Snow White. It was its opposite and nemesis, fire,
which, observes Eisenstein, ‘is capable of most fully
conveying the dream of a flowing diversity of forms’.14
This is animation’s utopian axis. It is the one that Walter
Benjamin emphasized in his reading of Mickey Mouse,
in the essay ‘Experience and Poverty’ from 1933.
Mickey Mouse embodies the utopian aspiration for a
technology-ravaged, yet technology-dependent, popu-
lace.15 Mickey Mouse inhabits a miraculous universe
in which objects exchange properties – suddenly a cow
is a musical box or a skirt a parachute. In Benjamin’s
analysis, Mickey Mouse is seen to fulfil the wish for a
harmonious reconciliation of technology and nature,
a graphic recognition of Eisenstein’s ‘non-indifferent
nature’, in the hostile conditions of an age when techno-
logical change threatens to destabilize human existence,
and also destroy it. But the benign union of technology
and nature has to be relegated to the dream world of
comics, photographs and cinema, where machinery
indulges humans, for in reality, in industrial capitalism,
technology and nature – that is machinery and humans
– are dead set against each other, torn apart or tearing
each other apart in labour and war.
Still animation now
A French artist by the name of Guillaume Paris is
producing small image worlds today. He has adapted
28
the strategies of Dada and Surrealism but sharpens and
demolishes in their spirit their relationship to advertis-
ing and commodity culture. Paris has a project called
H.U.M.A.N.W.O.R.L.D., an acronym for Holistic and
Utopian Multinational Alliance for New World Order
and Research in Living and Dying (or formerly The
New Perishable Gallery). In this his referent is anthro-
pology and the aim, he says, is a critical reflection on
‘multiculturalism and globalization’, an updating of
the anthropological, ‘primitivist’ and internationalist
fascinations that motivated the Surrealists and Dadaists
before him. H.U.M.A.N.W.O.R.L.D. is a collection, a
trashy one, far trashier than André Breton’s collation
of tribal and curious items. Paris has been collecting
packaging for several years. He collects packaging
that has faces on it. Much packaging has faces. Paris
archives the packages: producing a gallery of ideal
types, making eye contact, commodity-masks, sorted
according to genus, gender, family-product relations
and so on. Paris holds on to the packages
and their contents, as they perish. He says
the following:
Primarily intended to represent human
beings on an international scale,
H.U.M.A.N.W.O.R.L.D. is akin to a
traditional portrait gallery. Its constitu-
ents (referred to as ‘portrait-products’)
are supermarket products the packaging
of which features a realistic representa-
tion of a human being. These products
are generally of a perishable nature.
For any given product, a single speci-
men (packaging + contents) is entered
in H.U.M.A.N.W.O.R.L.D., with the
guarantee that it will never be replaced.
The products are treated as unique in-
dividuals that have been reified through
representation.16
This small image world threatens to grow vast.
H.U.M.A.N.W.O.R.L.D.’s Community comprises three
elements: the constituents (portrait-products) treated
individually as reified beings, which are left to perish,
something that the glorious shiny commodity bauble is
never supposed to do; Sub-Community, the individuals
(men, women, children) who, in real life, have sold
their faces to the products; Meta-Community, the
artificial lives (avatars) generated from the human-
ism of the commodity. In a parallel virtual world
meta-community the commodities have a whole social
world in which they age and die – or, with the aid of
computer technologies, give birth to new commodities,
minglings of their attributes, and generate the meta-
community in forms of ‘artificial spirituality’.
 Paris mediates the com-
modities in various ways,
through animating processes,
videoing them, digitalizing
them. He uses forensic
science to paint portraits of
the faces on packages envis-
aging how they might look
today. All these faces stare
out at us the viewers, making
us the object of art’s gaze in
its guise as commodity. In
various ways, Paris ‘extends
the humanism of the commodity to its logical conclu- And even if the packaging is largely indestructible, its
sion (and beyond)’. He bestows subjectivity on the com- immortality as object is compromised by its inevitable
modity, to a ludicrous degree, just as cartooning used slippage out of style and fashion: the mock historical
absurdism to unmask motive forces – of technology, rhythm of fashion at least poses the passage of time
of violence, in industrial capitalist society. as an issue.
One of Paris’s ploys is to find the models who Paris has also made a number of artworks that are
‘in real life have sold their faces to the commodity’ something between representation and sculpture. These
– these he locates across the world after some years’ he calls ‘permanent videos’. The form proposes some-
delay. Then he films their lips talking in the present thing quite untenable – an incoherent clash of stillness
about their dreams and hopes. These lips are then and mobility, of eternity and the ephemeral that should
montaged back onto a film of the commodity package. be impossible. Paris watched Disney animated films
Their older self turns into speaking commodities. He frame by frame (an apparently protracted labour that
explains it thus: negated the pleasure of the text, if ever an act did). He
wondered if some further meaning might be squeezed
Resuscitated (‘de-reified’) in such a fashion, they
are encouraged to express themselves subjectively, from this degraded epitome of rubbishy kitsch. He
and to communicate with each other. The interac- discovered thereby a banality that once mobilized
tive installation We Are The World constitutes a first displaces the material into telling a truth about itself
experiment in this direction. The installation brings and offers a space for some other-thinking in the flow
together, in a physical space, one portrait-product of time. Paris studied, for example, a scene in which
from each country of the G7. In the absence of any
Pinocchio lies face down in water for a few moments.
human beings, the portrait-products of this model
community speak among themselves, simultaneous- This animated piece of wood, who wishes to be human,
ly, each one expressing itself is almost killed – that is, almost
in its mother tongue. This returns to the deadness that he
activity ceases as soon as a is – but manages to survive and
visitor enters the space: the leap from the water. Except
animated objects are static
Paris found that in this scene
again, and the faces silent.
one frame is repeated. This
Processes of animation are used is the method of industrial
Kinder, 2003 (pastel on paper, frame, 34 x 31 x 4 cm),

here to mirror the overliveliness culture, the culture industry

of the commodity world that that Adorno and Horkheimer
would claim to be the world, eschewed. Its work is stand-
Lois Gibson for H.U.M.A.N.W.O.R.L.D

the one that we may purchase ardized. Short cuts are taken.
in order to prove ourselves Repetition occurs. Paris uses
alive. At the same time, in this fact of the material to loop
naturalizing this second nature the film. Pinocchio lies sub-
– through the contradictory merged and motionless in the
conservation and enstagement water forever, while the water
of its perishability – process gushes endlessly in this per-
assails the commodity object. manent video titled ‘Fountain’.

29
The animation circulates without ceasing: as indeed
does the rhythm of production. And the join cannot be
seen – or, alternatively, in this context emerges out of
the optical unconscious in order to be the only thing
seen. A similar effect is played out in ‘Minding’, where
a perambulating owl, from Disney’s Bambi, its face
always turned to the viewer, circles on a spot endlessly,
without marking it ever, without moving forward in
time one bit – stomping out something like the tem-
porality of hell that is capitalism in Walter Benjamin’s
typology, and permanently startled. Sisyphus at work,
but this labour leaves no traces: an image perhaps of
the clean virtual work of immaterial labour, which
is the current myth of production. The owl’s eyes are
never diverted: we are caught under his stare as much
as he is fixed by ours. Nature is snared in the human
bind of production: it would be different, it would be
non-indifferent, but can only propose this as possibility.
This permanent animation is simply repetition, is return
without heterogeneity, is bleak, except that the moment
of difference can be found in the twist of the strip that
becomes its own critique. The surface and the deep
structure of the animation combine to utter the horrid
truth of the system that it upholds.
Notes
1. Walter Benjamin’s phrase for this is ‘eine andere Natur’.
This has been variously translated as ‘a different nature’
and ‘another nature’.
30
2. The phrase ‘non-indifferent nature’ is, of course, to be
found where Eisenstein found it: in Hegel. It occurs
in his discussion of Chemism in paras 200–203 of the
Logic, where it is crucial to a discussion of motion,
transformation and affinity in natural processes.
3. Walter Benjamin, ‘Kleine Geschichte der Photographie’
[1931] Gesammelte Schriften, volume II.1, p. 370. ‘Little
History of Photography’, in Walter Benjamin, Selected
Writings, volume 2: 1927−1934, Harvard Belknap Press,
Cambridge MA, 1999 p. 508.
4. Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, Harvard Belknap
Press, Cambridge MA, 1999, p. 206.
5. Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, p. 512.
Guillaume Paris, Fountain, 1994 (permanent video monitor on the floor, color, sound)
6. Gustav Hellmann, Schneekrystalle: Beobachtungen und
Studien, Rudolf Mückenberger, Berlin, 1893, Introduc-
tion, p. 9.
7. Ibid., p. 21
8. Ibid., p. 24.
9. Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, p. 510. The
line is repeated virtually word for word in Benjamin’s
‘Artwork essay’: see Benjamin, Selected Works volume
3, p. 117.
10. Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, p. 512.
11. T.W. Adorno, ‘Charakteristik Walter Benjamins’, Pris-
men: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, Deutscher Taschen­
buch Verlag, Munich, 1963, p. 237.
12. Peter Szondi, ‘Hope in the Past: On Walter Benjamin’
[1961], Critical Inquiry, Spring 1978, pp. 500–501.
13. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, Methuen,
London 1988, p. 11.
14. Ibid., p. 24.
15. Walter Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, Selected
Writings, volume 2, pp. 734−5.
16. Quotations from Paris and examples of the work can be
seen on www.guillaumeparis.com/work.html and www.
guillaumeparis.com/humanworld7.
Non-traduttore, traditore?
Notes on postwar European Marxisms
in translation
Gregory Elliott
Certainly in the English-speaking world, probably
elsewhere, we lack the most rudimentary map of
European Marxism since the 1970s. Over the last
two decades, there has been nothing comparable to
several titles which, whatever their other differences,
featured roughly the same dramatis personae – the
age, golden or iron as you will, of György Lukács
and Antonio Gramsci, Critical Theory and Existential
Marxism, the Della Volpean and Althusserian schools.
The equivalent of André Tosel’s Développement du
marxisme en Europe occidentale depuis 1917 (1974),
Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism
(1976) and In the Tracks of Historical Materialism
(1983), Martin Jay’s Marxism and Totality (1984), or
even (in a dismissive key) J.G. Merquior’s Western
Marxism (1985), remains to be written. Tosel’s chapters
in Brill’s recent Critical Companion to Contemporary
Marxism on trends in French and Italian Marxism,
and on late Lukács and the Budapest School, approxi-
mate most closely to it.1 But they do not sum up to
the full-scale treatment signalled some years ago by
Presses Universitaires de France. Meanwhile, Göran
Therborn’s From Marxism to Post-Marxism promises
more route-maps out of Marxism than within it. 2
The notes below are prompted not by an idle
pleasure in drawing up and glossing league tables,
but by a concern to get an overall sense of displace-
ments in Marxist intellectual output since the 1970s
and the corresponding patterns of translation into
English. Their schematic character is compounded
by tabular presentation. This might, however, possess
some redeeming virtue inasmuch as it facilitates com-
parison and contrast within and between tables.
With all the risks that such an operation inevitably
entails, the two tables aim approximately to identify
the outstanding Marxist thinkers published in English,
French, German, Italian and Spanish/Portuguese since
the Second World War.
Authors have been allocated to broad linguistic
communities, rather than continental zones as such,
for several reasons. The most important, which also
accounts for the amalgamation of the Hispanophone
and Lusophone into one category, is that such an option
allows for registration of the major Latin American
contribution. The ‘European Marxisms’ of my title
should thus be read as shorthand for ‘Marxisms in
European languages’.
The number of representatives selected for each
table – ten – is incorrigibly arbitrary, suggested by
what immediately sprang to mind in the case of Anglo­
phone Marxism, which then imposed a template (not,
I trust, a Procrustes bed) on the rest. So as to avoid
squaring subjectivism, authors have been listed in
alphabetical order.
In the interests of breadth of coverage, any overlap
between the two tables was initially excluded. As
readers pointed out, however, this had the effet pervers
of foregrounding novelty at the cost of masking conti-
nuities. The ‘no double entries’ rule has therefore been
dropped and such figures as Eric Hobsbawm, Maurice
Godelier and Adolfo Sánchez-Vázquez now assume
their due relief.
Criteria for inclusion comprise some compound of
individual prominence and general representativeness
within the culture in question. Yet it should be noted
that not all entries possess precisely the same status.
In the Francophone case, for example, Althusser is
a proper name tantamount to a common noun (sub-
suming Étienne Balibar, Dominique Lecourt, Pierre
Macherey and Emmanuel Terray – but not Nicos
Poulantzas); and the same is true of Galvano Della
Volpe in the Italian instance (subsuming, say, Umberto
Cerroni, Nicolao Merker, Giulio Pietranera and Mario
Rossi – but not Lucio Colletti).
Albeit rough, the periodization – 1945–1978 and
1979–2007 – is ready, corresponding to two turning
31
points in the history of the European Left: the defeat
of the French Union of the Left interring Eurocom-
munism in 1978; the victory of Thatcher pioneering
the radical Right in 1979.
Taking my cue from Tosel’s reference to today’s
‘thousand Marxisms’, blooming if not contending, I
have adopted deliberately a latitudinarian stance when
it comes to what counts as Marxist. The implicit defin-
ing – not self-defining – characteristics used prove, on
rereading, to have involved a blend of the literary, the
epistemological and the political; and would doubtless
benefit from explicit discussion and critical inspection.
But in the absence of that, suffice it to say that I have
employed a distinction between revision of Marxism,
however radical, and repudiation of it – between the
neo-, para, quasi- and plain Marxist, on the one hand,
and the professedly post-Marxist, on the other. This is
bound to be controversial on more than one occasion:
why, for instance, late Antonio Negri but not recent
Balibar? (In the absence of an altogether compelling
response, I would simply venture that more continuity
is discernible between Negri’s sometime operaismo
and latter-day multitudinismo than between Balibar
on proletarian dictatorship in the 1970s and Balibar
on European citizenship in the 1990s.)
Designed to canvass other, better-informed propos-
als for inclusion (and consequent exclusion), the tables
– less professional survey maps than amateur sketches
– hopefully correspond to something approaching other
people’s intuitive sense of the landscape. Yet it must be
stressed that much of what follows is based on second-
hand knowledge, hearsay even – primarily, but by no
means exclusively, for want of linguistic competence.
As such, it solicits correction of errors of commission
and omission alike.
Last but not least: intended as biblio­graphical
reportage – nothing more – these notes nevertheless
abstain from judging the quality of any of the trans-
lations to which they refer. But it stands to reason
that the one thing worse than no translation is poor
translation. 3
Observations
A few points of detail for 1945–1978:
• Anglophone: Notwithstanding competing claims
– especially those of Joseph Needham – J.D. Bernal
has been selected as typifying Werskey’s ‘visible
college’ of British ‘scientific socialists’.
• Francophone: While arguably a less original histo-
rian than Pierre Vilar, and whatever the reputation
of his work after the study of the Parisian sans-
culottes, Albert Soboul has been chosen as the
inheritor and continuator of the Mathiez–Lefebvre
tradition of republican historiography of the French
Revolution – a key dimension of Gallic Marxism
(witness François Furet’s fulminations against it).
• Italian: Although dead in 1937, Gramsci has natu-
rally been included here because of the postwar
publication of the Prison Notebooks; and Ernesto
Ragionieri, although perhaps less well known
outside Italy than Paolo Spriano or Giuliano Pro-
cacci, has ultimately been preferred to them as a
Marxist historian on the grounds of his national
reputation.
• Hispanophone/Lusophone: The influence of his
theorization of Castroism – Revolution in the Revo-
lution?, originally published in Spanish – warrants
the Frenchman Régis Debray’s location here; while
the ‘dependency theory’ of Andre Gunder Frank
– born in Germany, exiled in the USA, writing in
English – had its greatest impact in South America,
where he lived and worked in the 1960s and 1970s
(Brazil/Chile), rendering him an honorary Latin.

Table 1  1945–1978

Anglophone Francophone Italian German Hispanophone/Lusophone

Anderson Althusser Badaloni Abendroth Aricó

Bernal Bettelheim Colletti Adorno Cardoso
Cohen Godelier Della Volpe Claudín Bahro
Dobb Gorz Gerratana Bloch Debray
Hobsbawm Goldmann Geymonat Habermas Frank
Miliband Lefebvre Gramsci Horkheimer Guevara
Nairn Mandel Luporini Lukács Laclau
Sweezy Poulantzas Ragionieri Marcuse Revueltas
Thompson Sartre Timpanaro Schmidt Sacristán
Williams Soboul Tronti Sohn-Rethel Sánchez

32
Table 2  1979–2007
Anglophone Francophone Italian
Anderson Andréani Agosti
Brenner Bidet Arrighi
Clark Bois Burgio
Davis Duménil Canfora
Eagleton Godelier Losurdo
Harvey Labica Magri
Hobsbawm Löwy Moretti
Jameson Robelin Negri
Wood Tosel Prestipino
Wright Vovelle Preve
The most striking thing to emerge from Table
1 is confirmation of the supremacy of continental
Marxisms in the first three postwar decades, with the
Anglophone tradition lagging behind, except in histori-
ography. The prominence of the latter within Anglo-
Marxism emerges even more clearly if, to the galaxy
of Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Eric Hobsbawm,
V.G. Kiernan, George Rudé, John Saville, Geoffrey de
Ste Croix, and E.P. Thompson, are added Raymond
Williams (a cultural critic, his Country and the City
nevertheless manifestly pertains to it), and Maurice
Dobb (a political economist, his best-known book
– Studies in the Development of Capitalism – was a
central reference for the Communist Party Historians’
Group in which Hill and co. were formed, seeding
the international ‘transition debate’ of the 1940s and
1950s). A sui generis tradition of Anglo-Marxist phil-
osophy began to emerge with G.A. Cohen’s Karl
Marx’s Theory of History at the turn of the 1970s,
only to mutate in short order into a rational choice
anti-Marxism (Jon Elster et al.).
For 1945–1978 there is a striking contrast between
the fairly comprehensive translation of authors writing
in French, German and Spanish/Portuguese – under the
auspices of New Left Books, Monthly Review Press,
Merlin Press, Allen Lane, Jonathan Cape, Routledge
& Kegan Paul, Heinemann, and so on – and the very
partial assimilation of their Italian counterparts (with
the exception of Della Volpe, Colletti and Timpanaro).
Whereas few truly major works by the former have
been overlooked – Auguste Cornu’s Karl Marx et
Friedrich Engels, Henri Lefebvre’s La Somme et le
reste and Lukács’s Ästhetik are three exceptions; and
whilst only one (admittedly central) Spanish figure
– Manuel Sacristán – has been altogether neglected,
many of the highlights of Italian Marxism never made
it into English and now presumably never will. This
German Hispanophone/Lusophone
Altvater Buey
Backhaus Dussel
Gerstenberger Echeverría
F. Haug Gilly
W.F. Haug Harnecker
Heinrich Rodriguez-Araujo
Hirsch Rozitchner
Negt Sader
Reichelt Sánchez-Vázquez
Wolf Schwarz
poses an obvious question: what, if anything, has been
lost as a result?
Enjoying the benefit of hindsight for the earlier
phase, where they are rooted in relatively settled
reputations, judgements necessarily become vulnerable
to the hazards of foreshortening as we approach the
present. That said, and setting individual details aside,
perhaps the most striking thing to emerge from Table
2 is the inversion in the relations between Anglo- and
continental Marxisms as regards international diffusion
and reputation – if for no other reason than the global
supremacy of Anglophone culture and the particular
place of the US academy within it. Whereas at least
half of the Anglophone authors, holders of chairs in
North American universities, might non-controversially
be said to be of international renown, the same propor-
tion cannot be ventured in other instances.
Whether or not cultural-linguistic comparative
advantage translates into qualitative superiority, what
would be difficult to gainsay is a relative decline in the
Francophone and German sectors, with a less marked
declension – if we exclude Gramsci as an exceptional
case – in the Italian and Hispanophone/Lusophone.
As things stand, by comparison with 1945–1978,
little continental Marxism from the last three decades
has been translated into English. Among that which
has, however, an unmistakable pattern emerges.
Taking the names entered in Table 2, there is an
overwhelming preponderance of French titles among
books translated to date (excluding edited volumes):
• seven by Michael Löwy
• five by Maurice Godelier
• three by Michel Vovelle
• two by Guy Bois
• two by Gérard Duménil (with Dominique Lévy)
• one by Georges Labica
• one by Jacques Bidet.
33
 For reasons that are not far to seek – the compara-
tively ready availability of translation subventions from
the French state – Verso, for example, has focused
overwhelmingly on Gallic titles in the last quarter-
century. Moreover, for the most part these have been by
figures from Table 1 – Althusser (5), Guy Debord (2),
André Gorz (3), Henri Lefebvre (3), Ernest Mandel (2),
Jean-Paul Sartre (3) – or authors once associated with
their strain of Marxism (particularly the Althusserian)
– thus Balibar (4), Debray (6), Lecourt (1), Pierre
Macherey (1), Alain Badiou (4), Jacques Rancière (3),
Daniel Bensaïd (1) and Henri Weber (1).4 The slack
has not been picked up by surviving independent left
presses (Merlin or Pluto Press) or thriving academic
imprints (Polity Press or Continuum).
Now that Jacques Bidet’s Que faire du ‘Capital’?
(1984) has finally appeared in the ‘Historical Materi-
alism’ series at Brill, only three of the Francophone
authors from Table 2 – Tony Andréani, Jean Robelin
and Tosel – remain without an English translation of
a single book to their name. (Notwithstanding initial
plans for a Brill edition, Robelin’s important Marxisme
et socialisation [1989] now seems likely, alas, to miss
out.)
The ledger for the other categories is much barer.
As regards German authors, the major translation pro-
grammes of recent years have been the Harvard edition
of Walter Benjamin’s works and Polity’s ongoing
release of titles by Theodor W. Adorno and Habermas.
By contrast, I am aware of a mere eight titles in English
(or forthcoming) by figures from Table 2:
• one by Elmar Altvater
• one by Heide Gerstenberger
• two by Frigga Haug
• two by Wolfgang Fritz Haug
• one (a 1970s’ classic) by Oskar Negt (with Alexan-
der Kluge).
Hispanophone/Lusophone authors, all of them based
in Latin America, have fared marginally better,
mustering:
• seven by Enrique Dussel (the majority, however, on
liberation theology)
• one by Adolfo Gilly
• two by Marta Harnecker
• one by Emir Sader (with Ken Silverstein)
• two by Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez (both, however,
from the 1960s)
• two by Roberto Schwarz.
In view, however, of the quality (not to mention
quantity) of the literature it generated when buoyed
by the presence of the PCI, and continued to produce
34
with the persistence (until recently) of Rifondazione
comunista, perhaps the greatest disservice has been
done to Italian Marxist culture.
The legacy of Italian Marxism from the eras of
the Second and Third Internationals can in essence
be boiled down to Antonio Labriola and Gramsci.
After a late start in 1957, when The Modern Prince
and Other Writings appeared in English, the latter is
now well served in translation. Since 1971, in addition
to assorted anthologies, there have been published:
two volumes of selections from the Prison Notebooks
(Lawrence & Wishart); two collections of political
writings (Lawrence & Wishart); one volume of cultural
writings (Lawrence & Wishart); a complete edition of
the prison letters (Columbia University Press), as well
as abridged offerings (Jonathan Cape, etc.); finally,
and most importantly, the ongoing translation of the
1975 Italian edition of the Quaderni del carcere from
Columbia.
The same cannot be said of Labriola. Essays on the
Materialist Conception of History was published in
English by the indefatigable Charles H. Kerr in 1908
and reprinted by Monthly Review in 1967. Socialism
and Philosophy appeared from the same imprint in
1934 and was re-released by Telos Press in 1980. Hard
to come by outside the USA, like the Essays it has
long been out of print. Moreover, in addition to the
fact that neither is a reliable modern translation, both
lack anything comparable to the editorial apparatus
– scholarly introductions and annotations – that has
distinguished English editions of Gramsci.
Turning now to Table 1, the striking thing is just
how few of the names in it have been translated.
Those titles that made it into English mainly derived
from New Left Books/Verso and reflected the reigning
priorities, political and intellectual, in Carlisle Street
in the 1970s. Initial research suggests not much more
than:
• three by Della Volpe
• two by Colletti
• two by Timpanaro
• one by Ludovico Geymonat
To these might be added various articles by Valentino
Gerratana that featured in New Left Review in the
1970s; and – among the names absent from the Italian
column in Table 1 – Manfredo Tafuri’s principal works
on the history and theory of architecture.
Quite apart from the absence of any titles from
Nicola Badaloni (e.g. Pel il comunismo, 1972), Cesare
Luporini (e.g. Dialettica e materialismo, 1974),
or Mario Tronti (e.g. Operai e capitale, 1966), we
should register the massive under-representation both
of Geymonat – premier philosopher of science in
Western Marxism, editor and principal author of a
multi-volume Storia del pensiero filosofico e scien-
tifico (1972) – and of the Della Volpeans. In striking
contrast to Althusser’s pupils and associates, whose
works were translated concurrently with his own, Della
Volpe’s followers – equally substantial, if not more so,
especially in intellectual history – drew a blank, with
the exception of Colletti. Consequently, the names of
Cerroni, Rossi – author of a four-volume study of Marx
(1970–75) surpassing Cornu’s in scope – and Merker
– still publishing work of high quality (e.g. Europa
oltre i mari. Il mito della missione di civiltà, 2006)
– are virtually unknown in the Anglophone world.
Just as Italy produced what is arguably the finest
individual account of the genesis of historical materi-
alism out of the ‘German ideology’, with Rossi’s Da
Hegel a Marx, so it boasts the two major attempts at
a collective history of Marxism down to the 1970s,
courtesy of the Feltrinelli Foundation in 1974 and
Einaudi in 1978–82. A complete translation of the
latter – the five-part Storia del marxismo edited by
Hobsbawm and others – seems to have been planned
by Harvester Press. In the event, however, only the first
volume ever appeared. 5
In passing, it might more generally be noted that,
aside from stray titles by Spriano, Procacci and
Giuseppe Boffa,6 a very rich tradition of Italian Marxist
historiography has largely missed its rendezvous with
Anglophone Marxist culture. Thus, for example, Gian
Mario Bravo’s work on pre-Marxian socialism and
Marx and the First International, like that of Ragion-
ieri on the Second and the Third, is familiar only to
specialists.
This neglect continues into the present, where Aldo
Agosti, one of the world’s leading experts on the inter-
national Communist movement – author, inter alia, of
an authoritative synthesis on European Communisms
(Bandiere rosse, 1999) – does not rate a single English
translation.7
What of the other entries in Table 2? The overall
picture is distorted by the ample representation in
English of three figures: the economist and systems
theorist Giovanni Arrighi, the literary critic Franco
Moretti, and the political philosopher Antonio Negri.
By virtue of their location in the US academy, the first
two are honorary Anglos, whose work either appears
well-nigh simultaneously in English and Italian (the
case of Moretti’s Modern Epic [1996] and Atlas of the
European Novel [1998]), or is originally published in
their non-mother tongue (as with Arrighi’s The Long
Twentieth Century, 1994, and Adam Smith in Beijing,
2007; and Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees, 2005). At all
events, English readers have rapid, easy access to their
oeuvres. In the case of Negri – himself effectively a
mid-Atlantic author since embarking on collaboration
with Michael Hardt – his brand of operaismo, pretty
much neglected in London or Minneapolis at the time,
has been widely rediscovered since 2000, in the wake
of Empire (translated from English into Italian, not
vice versa). As a result of his celebrity, there has been
an acceleration in the Anglicization of his material,
old and new, by imprints as diverse as Continuum,
Manchester University Press, Polity, Routledge and
Verso, with more doubtless in the offing.
The case of Lucio Magri is unusual, if only because
he has authored but a single book as such – Consid-
erazioni sui fatti di maggio on May ’68 – a section of
which was translated in Socialist Register the follow-
ing year. Nevertheless, a good sample of his theoretical
work, as well as his more topical political writing, is
available in English.
Other Italo-Italians, so to speak, have not fared
well. Two outstanding intellectual historians – the clas-
sicist Luciano Canfora and the Germanist Domenico
Losurdo – have had two or three books each translated
of late. But this still leaves the bulk of their volumi-
nous oeuvres in undeserved obscurity. Two equally
productive leading philosophers – Giuseppe Prestipino
and Costanzo Preve – in common with the political
theorist Alberto Burgio or the economist Gianfranco
La Grassa, have not enjoyed even that minimal degree
of attention. Thus, figures who loom large in Tosel’s
overview of Italian Marxism since 1975, as in Cristina
Corradi’s 2005 Storia dei marxismi in Italia, remain
strangers. Consequently, what are unquestionably major
works – for example, Losurdo’s Nietzsche, il ribelle
aristocratico (2002) or Controstoria del liberalismo
(2005), Preve’s Marx inattuale (2004) or Storia critica
del marxismo (2007), to name only the most recent and
prominent – await discovery.8
Conclusions
Other than in a bibliocentric conception of history,
cultural salience is no guarantee of political relevance;
the two can be inversely proportional. Thus, notwith-
standing the emergence of the ‘alter-globalization’
movement(s) in Seattle on the eve of the new mil-
lennium, the lead sector in contemporary Marxism
– the Anglophone – remains largely cloistered in the
academy, while its counterparts, all of them possess-
ing solid organizational relays, can (or could) boast
significantly greater degrees of presence in wider
societies and polities.
35
 Albeit to a lesser extent, the relative dearth of
English translation of more recent European material
appears to risk reproducing the postwar situation of
insular provincialism – with the difference that the
newly prosperous transatlantic branch of the family
now feels able to ignore its cross-Channel relatives.
The days are long gone since Louis Althusser,
invited by New Left Review to respond to The Poverty
of Theory, enquired of his correspondent: who is E.P.
Thompson? Even so, lest contrasts be overdrawn,
and an ‘inverted Podsnappery’ resuscitated, a brief
glance at foreign translations of the Anglo-Marxist
names entered in Table 2 is in order. Even allowing
for the highly approximate figures yielded by a rapid
scan, the record is decidedly patchy. Hobsbawm is
the exception that proves the rule: all his major texts
have been translated into French and German, while
the Italian and Spanish reception has extended even
further. At the other end of the scale, Ellen Meiksins
Wood (one each in German and Spanish) and Erik
Olin Wright (a sole text in Spanish) have fared badly.
Robert Brenner (a couple in German, one in Spanish)
and T.J. Clark (two in French, one each in German
and Italian) are not much better served. Remarkably,
in view of the stature and size of his oeuvre, Fredric
Jameson can only muster three titles in French, three
in German, two in Italian and four in Spanish. Perry
Anderson, Terry Eagleton and David Harvey are done
something approaching justice. (Anderson rates six
in French, five in German, five in Italian and seven
in Spanish; while the respective totals for Eagleton
are one, seven, three and eight; and for Harvey zero,
three, four and five.) The best recent performer is
Mike Davis, much of whose work since the mid-1980s
has made it into French (five), German (six) and
Italian (six), but rather less so into Spanish (two).
Paradoxically or not, with the retirement of François
Maspero in the early 1980s and the conversion of his
house into La Découverte, the publishing culture most
resistant to contemporary Anglo-Marxism is the one
that has enjoyed the greatest attention from it: the
Gallic. Five of the Anderson titles in French date from
the 1960s and 1970s; the sixth, three decades later, is
a long essay on the Hexagon itself. Brenner, Harvey,
Wood and Wright are so many unknowns in Paris;
Clark, Eagleton and Jameson scarcely less so. (A straw
in the wind? The three relevant Jameson titles appeared
in French more or less simultaneously, as recently as
autumn 2007.) Even Hobsbawm has faced trials and
tribulations outre-Manche, where Age of Extremes
was only finally translated under the joint auspices of
a Belgian publisher and Le Monde diplomatique.
36
Hence a final thought: are today’s incommunicado
Marxisms truly synchronized with the hour of social
forums, continental and global?
Notes
An initial version of these notes was drafted in October
2004 and elicited a variety of reactions – some offering
very helpful suggestions, others passably distracted. A
lengthy response by Peter Thomas indicated a degree of
convergence in our thinking and suggested that a joint
venture might be worthwhile. In the event, this proved
impossible, but what follows owes much to his input.
Thanks are also due to Peter Osborne, for helping me
to clarify what I was – and was not – doing; and to
John Kraniauskas for specific suggestions as regards
Hispanophone and Lusophone authors.
1. ���������������������������������������������������
See André Tosel, ‘The Development of Marxism: From
the End of Marxism–Leninism to a Thousand Marxisms
– France–Italy, 1975–2005’, and ‘The Late Lukács and
the Budapest School’, trans. Gregory Elliott, in Jacques
Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis, eds, Critical Companion
to Contemporary Marxism, Brill, Leiden and Boston
MA, 2008.
2. �������������������������������������������������������
For a pilot article, see Göran Therborn, ‘After Dialec-
tics’, New Left Review II/45, May–June, pp. 63–114.
3. ������������������������������������
My favourite example: misprision of procès sans sujet
as ‘trial without a subject’ (Althusserian equivalent, per-
haps, of Kafka’s trial without an object).
4. ���������������������������������������������������
Debord, Gorz, Lefebvre, Mandel and Sartre have, of
course also been extensively translated by publishers
other than Verso. Badiou’s most important works trans-
lated so far have appeared with Continuum (Theoretical
Writings, trans. R. Brassier and A. Toscano, 2004; Being
and Event [1988], trans. Oliver Feltham, 2005; The Logic
of Worlds [2006], trans. A. Toscano, forthcoming 2009)
and SUNY (Manifesto for Philosophy [1989], 1999);
Rancière’s have appeared with US university presses
(The Ignorant Schoolmaster [1987], trans. Kristin Ross,
Stanford University Press, 1991; The Names of History
[1992], trans. Hassan Melehy, Minnesota University
Press, 1994; Disagreement [1995], trans. Julie Rose,
Minnesota University Press, 1999).
5. E.J. Hobsbawm, ed., The History of Marxism, Volume
I: Marxism in Marx’s Day [1978], Harvester Press,
Brighton, 1982.
6. Giuseppe Boffa, The Stalin Phenomenon [1982], trans.
Nicholas Fersen, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY,
1992. Giuliano Procacci 1970, History of the Ital-
ian People [1968], trans. Anthony Paul, Weidenfeld,
London, 1970. Paolo Spriano, The Occupation of the
Factories: Italy 1920 [1973], trans. Gwyn A. Williams,
Pluto Press, London, 1975; Antonio Gramsci and the
Party: The Prison Years [1977], trans. John Fraser,
Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1979; Stalin and the
European Communists [1983], trans. Jon Rothschild,
Verso, London, 1985.
7. �����������������������������������������������������
Amends are due to be made with I.B. Tauris’s publica-
tion of Agosti’s biography of Palmiro Togliatti: Aldo
Agosti, Palmiro Togliatti: A Biography [1996], I.B.
Tauris, London and New York, 2008.
8. For a brief English introduction to the work of Losurdo,
see Peter Thomas, ‘Historicizing Nietzsche’, New Left
Review II/31, January–February 2005, pp. 137–44.
Select bibliography of translations
Althusser, Louis, 1969/1977 [1966], For Marx, trans. Ben
Brewster, London: Allen Lane/New Left Books.
——— 1971, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans.
Ben Brewster, London: New Left Books.
——— 1972, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx, trans. Ben Brews-
ter, London: New Left Books.
——— 1990, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of
the Scientists & Other Essays, ed. Gregory Elliott and
trans. Ben Brewster et al., London: Verso.
——— 1997 [1994], The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, ed.
François Matheron and trans. G.M. Goshgarian, London:
Verso.
——— 1999 [1995], Machiavelli and Us, ed. François Math-
eron, trans. Gregory Elliott, London: Verso.
——— 2003, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings,
ed. François Matheron, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, London:
Verso.
——— 2006, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings,
1978–1987, ed. François Matheron, trans. G.M. Gosh­
garian, London: Verso.
Altvater, Elmar, 1993 [1991], The Future of the Market: An
Essay on the Regulation of Money and Nature after the
Collapse of ‘Actually Existing Socialism’, trans. Patrick
Camiller, London: Verso.
Bensaïd, Daniel, 2002 [1995], Marx for Our Times: Adven-
tures and Misadventures of a Critique, trans. Gregory
Elliott, London: Verso.
Bidet, Jacques, 2007 [1984] Exploring Marx’s ‘Capital’:
Philosophical, Economic and Political Dimensions, trans.
David Fernbach, Leiden: Brill.
Bois, Guy, 1984 [1976], The Crisis of Feudalism: Economy
and Society in Eastern Normandy c. 1300–1550, Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
——— 1992 [1989] The Transformation of the Year One
Thousand: The Village of Lournand from Antiquity to
Feudalism, trans. Jean Birrell, Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Canfora, Luciano, 1989 [1988], The Vanished Library: A
Wonder of the Ancient World, trans. Martin Ryle, London:
Hutchinson Radius.
——— 2006 [2004], Democracy in Europe: History of an
Ideology, trans. Simon Jones, Oxford: Blackwell.
——— 2007 [1999], Julius Caesar: The People’s Dictator,
trans. Marian Hill and Kevin Whindle, Edinburgh: Edin-
burgh University Press.
Claudin, Fernando 1975 [1970], The Communist Movement
From Comintern to Cominform, trans. Brian Pearce and
Francis MacDonagh, New York and London: Monthly
Review Press.
——— 1978 [1977], Eurocommunism and Socialism, London:
New Left Books.
Colletti, Lucio, 1972 [1969], From Rousseau to Lenin: Stud-
ies in Ideology and Society, trans. John Merrington and
Judith White, London: New Left Books.
——— 1973 [1969], Marxism and Hegel, trans. Lawrence
Garner, London: New Left Books.
Debray, Régis, 1967, Revolution in the Revolution? Armed
Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America, trans.
Bobbye Ortiz, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
——— 1970, Strategy for Revolution, London: Jonathan
Cape.
——— 1971, Conversations with Allende, trans. Ben Brewster,
London: New Left Books.
——— 1973, Prison Writings, trans. Rosemary Sheed, New
York: Random House.
——— 1981 [1979], Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intel-
lectuals of Modern France, trans. David Macey, London:
Verso.
——— 1983 [1981], Critique of Political Reason, trans. David
Macey, London: Verso.
——— 1996 [1994], Media Manifestos: On the Technologi-
cal Transmission of Cultural Forms, trans. Eric Rauth,
London: Verso.
——— 2007 [1996], Praised Be Our Lords: The Autobiogra-
phy, trans. John Howe, London: Verso.
Della Volpe, Galvano, 1978a [1964], Rousseau and Marx
and Other Writings, trans. John Fraser, London: Lawrence
& Wishart.
——— 1978b [1960], Critique of Taste, trans. Michael Caesar,
London: New Left Books.
——— 1980 [1950], Logic as a Positive Science, trans. Jon
Rothschild, London: New Left Books.
Duménil, Gérard, and Dominique Lévy, 1993, The Econom-
ics of the Profit Rate: Competition, Crises, and Historical
Tendencies in Capitalism, Aldershot: Edward Elgar.
——— 2004 [2000], Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neo-
liberal Revolution, trans. Derek Jeffers, Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press.
Dussel, Enrique 1981 [1974], A History of the Church in
Latin America: Colonialism to Liberation (1492–1979),
trans. Alan Neeley, Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans.
——— 1985 [1980], Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilina
Martinez and Christine Morkovsky, Maryknoll NY: Orbis
Books.
——— 1988, Ethics and Community, trans. Robert R. Barr,
Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books.
——— 1995 [1992], The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse
of ‘The Other’ and the Myth of Modernity, trans. Michael
D. Barber, New York: Continuum.
——— 1996, The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur,
Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation, ed. and
trans. Eduardo Mendietta, Atlantic Highlands NJ: Hu-
manities Press.
——— 2001 [1985], Towards an Unknown Marx: A Commen-
tary on the Manuscripts of 1861–63, ed. Fred Moseley,
trans. Yolanda Angulo, London: Routledge.
——— 2003, Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism,
and Liberation Theology, ed. Eduardo Mendietta, Lan-
ham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Gerratana, Valentino, 1973, ‘Marx and Darwin’, New Left
Review I/82: 60–82.
——— 1977a, ‘Althusser and Stalinism’, trans. Patrick Camill-
er, New Left Review I/101–102: 110–21.
——— 1977b, ‘Stalin, Lenin and “Leninism”’, trans. Patrick
Camiller, New Left Review I/103: 59–71.
——— 1977c, ‘Heidegger and Marx’, trans. Kate Soper, New
Left Review I/106: 51–8.
——— 1978, ‘The Citizen of Geneva and the Seigneur of Fer-
ney’, trans. Kate Soper, New Left Review, I/111: 62–72.
Gerstenberger, Heide, 2007 [1990], Impersonal Power:
History and Theory of the Bourgeois State, trans. David
Fernbach, Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers.
Geymonat, Ludovico, 1965 [1957], Galileo Galilei: A Biog-
raphy and Inquiry into his Philosophy of Science, trans.
Stillman Drake, New York: McGraw-Hill.
Gilly, Adofo, 1983 [1971], The Mexican Revolution, trans.
Patrick Camiller, London: Verso.
Godelier, Maurice, 1972 [1966], Rationality and Irrational-
ity in Economics, trans. Brian Pearce, London: New Left
Books.
37
——— 1977 [1973], Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology,
trans. Robert Brain, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
——— 1986a, The Making of Great Men: Male Domination
and Power among the New Guinea Baruya, trans. Rupert
Swyer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——— 1986b [1984], The Mental and the Material: Thought,
Economy and Society, trans. Martin Thom, London:
Verso.
——— 1999 [1996], The Enigma of the Gift, trans. Nora Scott,
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gorz, André, 1973 [1967], Socialism and Revolution, trans.
Norman Denny, New York: Doubleday.
——— 1982 [1980], Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay
in Postindustrial Socialism, trans. Michael Sonenscher,
London: Pluto.
——— 1989a [1988], Critique of Economic Reason, trans.
Gillian Handyside and Chris Turner, London: Verso.
——— 1989b [1959], The Traitor, trans. Richard Howard,
London: Verso.
——— 1994 [1991], Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, trans.
Chris Turner, London: Verso.
Harnecker, Marta, 1987 [1985], Fidel Castro’s Political
Strategy: From Moncada to Victory, trans. Margarita
Zimmer­man, New York: Pathfinder Press.
——— 2007 [1999], Rebuilding the Left, trans. Janet Duck-
worth, London: Zed Books.
Haug, Frigga, et al., 1987 [1980], Female Sexualization: A
Collective Work of Memory, trans. Eric Carter, London:
Verso.
——— 1992, Beyond Female Masochism: Memory-Work and
Politics, trans. Rodney Livingstone, London: Verso.
Haug, Wolfgang Fritz, 1986 [1983], Critique of Com­modity
Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in
Capitalist Society, trans. Richard Bock, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
——— 1987, Commodity Aesthetics, Ideology and Culture,
New York: International General.
Labica, Georges, 1980 [1976], Marxism and the Status of
Philosophy, trans. Kate Soper and Martin Ryle, Brighton:
Harvester Press.
Laclau, Ernesto, 1977, Politics and Ideology in Marxist
Theory, London: Verso.
Lefebvre, Henri, 1971/1984 [1968], Everyday Life in the
Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch, New York:
Harper & Row/Transaction.
——— 1991a [1947], Critique of Everyday Life, Volume One:
Introduction, trans. John Moore, London: Verso.
——— 1991b [1974], The Production of Space, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Blackwell.
——— 2002 [1961], Critique of Everyday Life, Volume Two:
Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. John
Moore, London: Verso.
——— 2003 [1970], The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert
Bononno, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
——— 2005 [1981], Critique of Everyday Life, Volume Three:
From Modernity to Modernism (Towards a Metaphilosophy
of Daily Life), trans. Gregory Elliott, London: Verso.
Losurdo, Domenico 2001 [1991], Heidegger and the Ide-
ology of War: Community, Death, and the West, trans.
Marella and Jon Morris, Amherst NY: Humanity Books.
——— 2004 [1992], Hegel and the Freedom of the Moderns,
trans. Marella and Jon Morris, Durham NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press.
Löwy, Michael, 1979 [1976], Georg Lukács – From Romanti-
cism to Bolshevism, trans. Patrick Camiller, London: New
38
Left Books.
——— 1981, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Develop-
ment: The Theory of Permanent Revolution, London:
Verso.
——— 1992 [1988], Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Liber-
tarian Thought in Central Europe – A Study in Elective
Affinity, trans. Hope Heaney, Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press.
——— 1993, On Changing the World: Essays in Political
Philosophy from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin, Atlantic
Highlands NJ: Humanities Press.
——— 1998, Fatherland or Mother Earth? Essays on the
National Question, London: Pluto Press.
——— 2003 [1970], The Theory of Revolution in the Young
Marx, Leiden: Brill.
——— 2005 [2001], Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s
‘On the Concept of History’, trans. Chris Turner, London:
Verso.
Macherey, Pierre, 1998, In a Materialist Way: Selected
Essays, ed. Warren Montag, trans. Ted Stolze, London:
Verso.
Magri, Lucio, 1969, ‘The May Events and Revolution in the
West’, trans. Chiara Ingrao and Chris Gilmore, in Social-
ist Register 1969, ed. Ralph Miliband and John Saville,
London: Merlin Press.
——— 1970, ‘Problems of the Marxist Theory of the Revolu-
tionary Party’, New Left Review I/60: 97–128.
——— 1971, ‘Italian Communism in the Sixties’, New Left
Review I/66: 37–52.
——— 1982, ‘The Peace Movement and European Socialism’,
New Left Review I/131: 5–19.
——— 1991, ‘The European Left between Crisis and Refoun-
dation’, New Left Review I/189: 5–18.
——— 1995, ‘The Resistible Rise of the Italian Right’, trans.
Elena Lledó, New Left Review I/214: 125–33.
——— 2005 [2004], ‘Parting Words’, trans. Alan O’Leary,
New Left Review II/31: 93–105.
——— 2008, ‘The Tailor of Ulm’, New Left Review II/51:
47–62.
Mandel, Ernest, 1978a [1972] Late Capitalism, trans. Joris
de Bres, London: Verso.
——— 1989, Beyond Perestroika: The Future of Gorbachev’s
USSR, trans. Gus Fagan, London: Verso.
——— 1995 [1992], Trotsky as Alternative, trans. Gus Fagan,
London: Verso.
Negri, Antonio, 1988, Revolution Retrieved: Writings on
Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and New Social Subjects
(1967–83), London: Red Notes.
——— 1991a [1979], Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the
Grundrisse, ed. Jim Fleming and trans. Harry Cleaver et
al., London: Pluto Press.
——— 1991b [1981], The Savage Anomaly: The Power of
Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt,
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Books.

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Introduction to Rozitchner

L
eón Rozitchner is one of the generation of Argentine intellectuals who emerged in the
1950s around the journal Contorno. As a psychoanalyst and Marxist – and massively
influenced, as were all his confrères, by Sartre and the phenomenological tradition
– he undertook a lengthy theoretical project that attempted to engage psychoanalytical categ­
ories in the understanding of politics, most notably in explaining and countering that most
protean and influential phenomenon of Argentine politics, Peronism – the baleful legacy
of Juan Domingo Perón himself, and its links to the catastrophic dictatorship of 1976–83.
From the seminal Freud and the Limits of Bourgeois Individualism (first edition 1972), in
which he developed an account of the relation of psyche and capital, and the revolutionary
implications of Freud’s supposedly ‘conservative’ social works, to the recent The Thing
and the Cross (1997), in which he explores the archaeology of capitalism in Augustinian
Christianity, Rozitchner has laboured to provide a categorial apparatus that links libido,
leadership and economic form. But he has also been a prolific writer on the conjuncture,
intervening for fifty years in debates on the Left across the continent. As a committed
supporter of the Cuban Revolution, he lived in Havana during the early years, where, on
the basis of interviews with captured Bay of Pigs invaders, he produced his important
analysis of bourgeois morality, Bourgeois Morality and Revolution (1963) – the basis of the
dilemmas addressed in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s film Memories of Underdevelopment (1968).
During the Argentine Junta’s period of power, the so-called Proceso or Process of National
Reorganization, he lived in Venezuela. Never a popular intellectual, always prepared fiercely
to oppose leftist pieties, he remains – now in his eighties – an imposing but strangely
ignored figure of the Latin American Left, almost completely unknown in the English-
speaking world, to the latter’s detriment.
‘Exile, War and Democracy’ was originally presented at a conference in 1984 on the
reconstruction of Argentine political culture after the dictatorship had allowed the return
of democracy (‘the Pact’) with the election of Raúl Alfonsín in 1983. As well as giving a
flavour of the textual quality of his work and his attentive but cutting style of commentary,
it develops some of the themes he discussed in his 1979 book on Perón, Perón – Between
Blood and Time, in which Marx, Freud and Clausewitz are combined to form a framework
of articulation. But perhaps what is most striking is his passionate denunciation of left-
Peronist and leftist fantasies that were in some ways complicit with or tributary to the
political debacles of the Process. This is the context for his harsh criticisms of Rodolfo
Puiggrós, a well-known sociologist (one of the first to criticize the work of Andre Gunder
Frank from a Marxist perspective) and member of the Argentine Communist Party, who
had migrated to Peronism to become part of its ideological apparatus. Almost alone in the
Argentine Left, Rozitchner opposed the Gadarene rush to support the Malvinas/Falklands
adventure, seeing this capture of the oppositional energy of the Left by the Junta’s irre-
dentist nationalism as a stunning defeat. Some of the key intellectuals involved in such
support, like José Aricó and Juan Carlos Portantiero, who had been exiled in Mexico, were
present at the conference Rozitchner addresses here. Rozitchner’s book Las Malvinas: de la
guerra sucia a la guerra limpia (1985) also raises interesting questions for those of us who
opposed the Thatcherite ‘recovery’ of the Falklands.

Philip Derbyshire and John Kraniauskas

40 Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)

Exile, war and democracy
An exemplary sequence
León Rozitchner
The question we want to pose is this: how do we open
up a field of democratic politics as we emerge from
terror and war?
In my exposition I will start where the previous
speaker, Feinemann, left off as he endorsed the
categories that Perón had taken from Clausewitz to
move from the discussion of war to that of political
leadership. My analysis, which is at the same time a
response, tries to offer a different analysis of the space
of tolerance emerging as war disappears and politics
appears and with it democracy. But in contrast to the
formulations offered by Feinmann, my starting point
keeps in mind the category of war as a foundation
from which to think and perhaps to understand the
problem of politics.
The pre-eminence of the categories
of war in Perón’s politics
The conception of war and politics that Feinemann
finds in Clausewitz is the same as that developed by
General Perón. In a book that was the fruit of lectures
given in the Consejo Superior de Guerra, and which
was later extensively used by the Peronist Left and the
Montoneros (some of its chapters being re-edited and
published in Peronist political journals), Perón devel-
oped his theory of war, following the interpretation
of Clausewitz that the French and German colonialist
military (from Dudeldorf to Marshall Foch) had put
forward. He thus appropriated the categories used by
the most aggressively reactionary European military:
these figures thought of war as a process of internal
domination over their own people and as the external
conquest of foreign territories through which they
could expand the domain of their own nation. These
categories were: the war of annihilation, the imposition
 Juan Pablo Feinemann is a historian and sociologist.
 The Montoneros were the armed wing of the Peronist Youth,
annihilated along with the other guerrilla groupuscules in the early
years of the military terror.
Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
of naked force, offensive war, the primacy of the war
leader – the soldier become politician – as fundamental
even in conditions of political peace. The central cat-
egory that regulates this project is the global concept
of the ‘nation in arms’. These categories – impossible
to develop in a dependent country – were the same
ones that Perón applied to the political field. This was
his ‘originality’. Clearly, however, it was impossible
to think of true national liberation from within such a
conception of war, as the minds of our military were
governed by the categories of the enemy. Since it
was impossible for the military to assert control over
external territory, they could only assert domination
over what was internal to their own nation. They thus
asserted domination over their own people. This is
where General Perón applies the categories of war
to the field of politics, so the latter becomes a field
of simulated confrontation, a pure representation of
a conflict of forces that is in fact avoided. Politics, in
other words, is developed as if it were war, suggesting
a radical confrontation. But this very conception was
instrumental in the failure of the popular movement.
Terror was its culmination, along with the murder of
the very people who though ignorant of the origins of
this conception of politics in Perón’s misapplication of
Clausewitz, nevertheless constituted themselves as his
followers, saying: ‘we are Perón’s tactics’; the ‘armed
wing’ of the Peronist body, they were subsequently
snapped off by the General himself.
Let us begin, then, by posing our problem from
another point of view, offering a critique of the cat-
egories of war as developed by Perón and the Right,
and looking at them again in the light of how they
emerge in Clausewitz.
The double concept of war and politics
One of Feinemann’s first mistakes in his exposition of
Clausewitz is the following: in Clausewitz there is not
one theory of war but two, something Perón also failed
41
to see. The first theory of war, a purely ‘objective’ one,
which both the Right and Perón leaned on, is a ‘monist’
theory that starts from an individualist conception,
centred fundamentally on the annihilation of the adver-
sary, the escalation of the conflict to extremes and the
predominance of war over politics. Even Clausewitz
criticized this as a ‘logical fantasy’, a spawn of the
imagination, because it began by conceiving war as a
‘duel’ centred on the drives of an individual body and
ignoring the powerful energies of the collective body
of the people.
There is a second theory of war, critical of the
former, and constituted as an account of a ‘wonder-
ful trinity’. This theory takes into account both the
appearance of new popular forces and the advance
of the Napoleonic army which transformed the whole
military horizon of the French Revolution, on the one
hand, and the undefeated resistance of the Spanish
guerrilla war against those forces, on the other. It is
this new experience that Clausewitz had to integrate
into his theory of war. The ‘wonderful trinity’ is the
basis of every war and comprises: (1) the ‘natural’
impulse of the people, which Clausewitz considers as
a ‘blind’, merely natural force; (2) intelligence, which
resides in the political cabinet and consists of the
right-thinking rationality of politics in war, which the
people lack; and (3) the war leader, who articulates the
blind drives of the people with the forms of rationality
elaborated by the cabinet and gives them soul and
will to integrate and push them forward. This second
conception of war is radically different from the first.
Clausewitz formulates it on the basis of defensive
rather than offensive war – that is, from the perspective
of a nation that is defending itself from an enemy that
is trying to occupy or has already occupied it. In other
words, he transforms the categories of the powerful
and colonizing, dominant force and reverses their
perspective: how may its domination be confronted
and opposed from within one’s own nation? This leads
Clausewitz to recognize the predominance of so-called
‘negative’ objectives over ‘positive’ ones. The colonizer
and conqueror, the forces attacking and attempting to
occupy a foreign territory, have a ‘positive’ objective:
conquest. From the perspective of defence, and thus the
defence of one’s own national territory – the position of
every dependent country – positive objectives acquire
a different nuance: they simply become the attempt to
preserve what the powerful want to seize from us by
force. In the face of pillage and aggression, we define
defence against an aggressor as ‘negative’. From this
perspective, Clausewitz criticizes the first theory of
war – the one Perón defends.
42
War as illusion: the negation of politics as
truce
Clausewitz criticizes the illusory, purely imaginary,
daydream-like character of the first theory of war that
posits the end of war as the annihilation of the enemy
through a presumed escalation of the conflict to its
extremes. This illusory field is associated with the
overbearing mentality of the military in the dominant
countries, who cannot conceive of a defensive, popular
force, not just physical and technological but, above all,
moral. This force is also material, albeit with a mate-
riality the colonialist military are ignorant of. Hence
the critique of war of annihilation: the people cannot
be annihilated. There is thus no final and definitive
destruction of the enemy while there is resistance.
And if there is no annihilation, every war results
in a truce, in the opening up of a political dimension.
Politics, there from the beginning, may seem to have
disappeared in the deafening clamour of war, but it re-
emerges and reveals itself again at war’s end. The truce
at the end of the war implies that both attacker and
defender have come to an equilibrium. This is because,
despite appearances, equilibrium is not simply decided
by the attacker. It signals rather the appearance of a
fundamental asymmetry between the attacker and the
defender, which is what leads to the truce and hence
the definition of peace. The fact is that although the
attacker may be stronger on the offensive, the defender
can be stronger on the defensive: they are of a different
nature and of unequal force. And it is this fact – that
there are two different forces in confrontation – which
opens up the space of equilibrium we call truce, and
which is, in reality, the opening up of a political field
where war is continued by other means. Politics opens
up as peace (a truce) between two wars: the one it
emerges from and the one it moves towards.
It is obvious that Clausewitz is referring to war
between nations and not to the confrontation of forces
within a single nation, as is the case with revolutionary
wars. His conception is important because it excludes
the commonsensical appearance that separates politics
from war, as if it were a matter of a radical or essential
opposition: we are in both, although we do not want
to be. Because when Clausewitz tells us that ‘war is
just the continuation of the politics of the state by
other means’, he means both are politics. It is also
true that there is a fundamental difference between
the armed confrontation to the death of war, and the
peaceful truce of politics. But what is at issue in the
essence of the phenomenon that defines conflict is in
reality an appearance if we do not keep sight of the
fact that politics is about the reorganization of forces.
Forgetting this could have fatal consequences for those
who engage in the political field as if it were in reality
– pure appearance of peace and not of truce – a formal
field, a juridical pact and not an effective material field
where the struggle continues to develop, only here too
‘by other means’. This is what we are now seeing. As
we emerge from terror and the unpunished domination
of the military over the whole nation, it would appear
that we are required to think this new political space
that has been opened up from a formal, purely juridical
angle that is radically opposed to any reference to the
development of our own (defensive) forces. This is
because we continue to think with the categories of the
forces that are on the offensive rather than with those
on the defensive: with the simple concept of offensive
physical force rather than from the perspective of that
other force which is stronger in defence.
The Right’s categories of war on the Left
I think that this has been the consequence of thinking
politics and war with the categories of the Right and
the Colonizer. As the political and military model for
the Left, furthermore, it preceded the appearance of
terror. I also believe that it was a consequence of the
way Perón deployed the apparent schema of radical
confrontation in Argentina, taking under his power
(and organizing as his own) the forces that in reality
he wished to contain and split – those of the workers
– leading them to failure, destruction and to the death
of so many of his followers. It was Perón who posed
the problem in terms of the categories of war: a
simulated war that, as politics, deprived the people of
the material and moral bases on which any real con-
frontation must be based. Because the truth is that he
did everything necessary in this confrontation to strip
the popular classes of their effective power and leave
them disarmed, even though they appeared to have a
force, which ideologically, materially and morally they
had been deprived of.
The popular forces are powerful
on the defensive
Hence our interest in taking up this problem again,
but from a political position that does not move in the
realm of appearance and does not exclude what is spe-
cific to each of the forces concerned. What is at issue
in war is the following: paradoxically, the attacker,
the one on the offensive, does not want war. The
invader would prefer to take over the enemy terrain
peacefully, make the enemy give up the will to resist,
dominate him, and thus achieve the ‘positive’ object
at the least cost. War only begins when the defender
resists this alien incursion and offers resistance and
defence on the ground. War begins with confrontation
and ends with a truce: not even the enemy’s surrender
entails the end of the conflict. What opens up here is
the field of another resistance, politics, in which what
the war had not managed to settle continues to be
elaborated, by other means. If there is no annihilation
– only the nuclear bomb promises that – it means that
the defeated enemy carries on with that peculiar and
specific force that resists annihilation. At some level,
at the point where the war stopped, the attacker (and,
perhaps, victor) is stronger on the offensive, but the
one who resists is stronger in defence. The truce is the
point at which force, on its own, can do no more: here
violence ceases, and the new sphere of politics opens
up in which the suspended conflict will continue to
develop. The conception of politics and war held by
Peronist (and some non-Peronist) groups was shaped
by a conception of the popular forces and armed
confrontation that General Perón had imposed through
his interpretation of war and politics. And it is these
categories that prevent the appearance, constitution and
development of a new force in the space opened up by
the current truce – that is, in the new democracy that
followed the military terror.
The new force
What is required is that we set out the preconditions
of this new force so that in our restored democracy
it is not tyrannized by a false choice: pure politics
or pure war. By this I mean that we do not posit a
purely formal politics, subject exclusively to a juridical
schematism, which leaves out of consideration the new
materiality and the new morality (and morale) that have
to be created. I think that if we occlude the problem
of the war from which the field of politics opened up
we are condemned once more to the illusion of peace,
a peace that obscures the fact of violence and death
on which it rests. We will also be condemned to shock
and surprise should terror erupt again, because we will
have failed to recognize the depth of the enemy and his
real force. We must recognize that in democracy, that
is to say in truce, we need our own force to confront
and contain the enemy. And the forceless formalism of
Alfonsín’s Radical Party is insufficient for this task.
In reality, politics is a field that opens up after a
prior war – whether a long time in the past or not. And
it then appears as the result of a prior confrontation to
the death. Confrontation in war, we have seen, opens
up a site of transaction and formalized reconciliation
within the juridical field which establishes the new
norms that will regulate this confrontation of forces
43
 without clear resolution. There are abundant examples
of this emergence from war. The Latin American
national revolutions show clearly how a new juridical
space, that of liberalism, opened up after a prior war.
This defined the norms and laws that came to regulate
the economic, social and political relations of the area’s
inhabitants with each other: a new sharing out of
power. This juridical field is in reality fenced in by the
power of the victor. In the last instance, I insist, there
will be a reorganization of forces, seemingly in peace,
in order for the crucial confrontation to find another
attempt at resolution. Politics, once again, does nothing
more than prepare for this. No one has yielded power
in peace, and politics is the extreme limit where this
transformation of quantity into quality is elaborated.
And in saying this we are not just talking in terms of
physical force, in ‘war’ language. We are talking about
that force which is of a different nature to that of the
enemy. Only this force can avoid the armed confronta-
Daniel Santero, Eva Perón Punishes the Marxist-Leninist Child, 2005.
44
tion that the enemy wants and is counting on – because
it is stronger on the offensive. The irruption of military
force is the limit of democracy. The military forms a
system with the political field that it engendered and
had to expand as it emerged from the war with an
external enemy, Britain, that it lost. ‘The dirty war’
was not a war, but just the unleashing of terror against
a disarmed, internal enemy, whose perpetrators have
yet to be punished.
What is peculiar to the force of
‘a different nature’ for confronting
military armed force
So we are concerned with a force that is different from
the merely armed force of military power. The nature
of this force cannot be perceived if it is considered
merely as a collective accumulation inscribed in the
formal ‘representation’ of politics: it is a matter of
a real force. We are not fetishizing the
‘fighter’: the failure of that attitude among
the armed guerrillas is patent and obvious.
What we are saying is that this form of
‘offensive’ war was undertaken accord-
ing to the enemy’s categories, apparatus
against apparatus, military force against
military force. What we want to refer to
here is another force, which has another
materiality and another morality, a force
which is more effective in defence than in
offence. Under the conditions of democ-
racy, only such a power could be real and
different from military power which rests
on nothing more than physical force. But
as yet it can only be invoked, expressed
as a desirable end. Nor is it a question of
our wanting war, and precisely because
we do not want it, we have to reconsider
how to prevent our enemies from resorting
to it. We have constantly to keep in view
the limits of a merely formal approach to
the project of democracy and consider the
character of the truce that led to it, so that
within this new space we can create the
popular force that would consolidate and
conquer its real power in the materiality
that is peculiar to it. If not, I think that
we are going to be faced with another
disappointment in a few years’ time. Even
as we open up the field of democracy, we
will be unable to counteract that shadowy
power that confronts us, which is already,
preparing for our undoing.
Beyond illusion
Hence I would like to talk about the responsibility that
we all have to go beyond the fantasies and illusions
that brought us to the current situation. It is not just
an ‘intellectual’ or theoretical problem: it is a ques-
tion of constructing a different reality and making
it visible. And in the attempt to learn from our past
experience and correct its mistakes and errors, we will
use two examples, two political positions, both with
their ‘before’ and ‘after’, where the mistakes that we
are trying to point out are clearly revealed. The first
example we will consider is that of Puiggrós. Here
we see the passage from Peronism in power (1973)
to its expression after the military had imposed their
dictatorship (1977). The second example is the position
taken on the Malvinas War by the Socialist Discussion
Group in Mexico (1982) and the subsequent political
positions adopted by two of its members in 1984. The
first passage reveals the failure of a political project
that had no real moral and material basis, which
finished up in exile. The second reveals how the
fantasy of a war to recover the Malvinas collapsed
and was replaced by the acceptance of democracy in
its purely formal aspect, a political field from which
war would now be excluded and politics would be a
social ‘pact’.
Perhaps in these examples it is a matter of thinking
through the concept of democracy which underlay both
political projects and in both cases led, albeit uncon-
sciously, to their failures. In part this was because of
the conception of popular power that these projects
sought to create, a conception that proved to be no
longer viable. What is at issue is the following: what
sort of relation is there between the formal and the
material, the individual and the collective, the subjec-
tive and the objective, between what we have now and
what we can hope for? What project would carry the
relation between forces? In short, what is the relation
between politics and war, peace and violence? How,
then, can force and power be conceived?
First passage: from triumphalist Peronism
to military terror – Rodolfo Puiggrós
In 1972 Rodolfo Puiggrós wrote Where Are We Going,
Argentines, a book in which he outlines the road by
which Argentina under the leadership of General Perón
would arrive at national socialism, and hence the most
developed form of social democracy. The year 1972
was when Argentine youth were feverishly caught up in
Perón’s imminent return: it was also the year when the
guerrilla movement was developing with uncontainable
intensity. They were prepared to risk and sacrifice
everything in the pursuit of a reality and politics
from another time whose origin they were ignorant
of. Puiggrós, among many others, offered a theoretical
and historical basis for this new Left: his critique of
the abstract and dependent character of Communist
internationalism led him to stress the specifically
national content, what was specific and creole (that is,
Latin American) about our road to socialism. But this
critique of the theory and practice of the Argentine
Communist Party did not prevent him from remaining
attached to the same old modality of Stalinism, even
if this time it was nationally rooted. The dispersion
of the social whole and hence the atomization of its
forces – individuals and opposing interests, groups
and levels of reality in which these find themselves
dispersed (ideology, history, economy, politics, trade
unions, armed forces) – find their unification in the
Leader, who must contain and direct them towards
national socialism:
This dispersion paralyses any tendency for change
and shows the lack of a global and realistic con-
ception of social and techno-scientific revolutions
… and manifests itself in the furious opposition to
the leadership that is indispensable to push them
forward.
Puiggrós thus outlines the key ideas, the two conditions
for the move to socialism:
1. A global and realistic conception of socialist revo-
lution that inevitably would have to develop in
Argentina.
2. The inevitable necessity of the leadership of General
Perón to attain it.
The exceptional nature of the moment, the unique-
ness of the opportunity, does not escape him: ‘We
Argentines are living the decisive moment of our
history which will mark our destiny for the coming
centuries’.
In Puiggrós’s conception, whose basic category
of the ‘historical dialectic’ is the accentuation of the
nationally particular (which would be the concrete)
opposed to the universal (which would be the abstract),
the dispersed collective in our reality, so different
to any other, finds its specific and distinctive unity
in the human figure of the Leader, Perón, where the
two combine, as a point of departure. The totality in
its dispersion converges in him: hence everyone must
surrender his own self and submit to Perón’s superior
leadership. A happy sacrifice of the subjective: ‘Party
based liberalism is incompatible with the democracy
of the working classes’. And this peculiar democracy
is conceived as having
45
 A single leadership that would centralise and drive
forward the revolutionary activity of millions of
Argentines (which) will save us from the great
catastrophe and place us on the threshold of the
vanguard of 21st century humanity.
The singleness of leadership means not only that
it does not allow for co-participants but also that it is
that supreme orientation of the interdependent techno-
scientific revolutions, the union of theory and practice,
the dialectical synthesis of ideology, politics, history,
economics, trade unionism and the armed forces.
Since we want to understand this new force, the
human foundation of its power, its ‘different nature’,
it is useful to stress what Puiggrós makes of it. We
thus read his conclusion: it is the integration of the
individuals in the Leader that will solve the equation
and determine the new meaning of human rights
within the democratic society that transcends the limits
of bourgeois individualism.
Puiggrós thus sets himself against the Rights of
Man and the Citizen. These principles that bourgeois
liberalism proclaims in law at the same time as it
denies them in application in fact are also decisively
negated by Puiggrós, as if what is stated in them were
a mere mystification. He does not understand that at
the juridical level they constitute a historic conquest
which, distorted in reality, nevertheless remain a goal
to be attained. On the contrary, forgetting the tension
and the social conflict that exist between facts and
law, and refusing to inscribe the full application of the
Rights of Man as a specific goal for a truly socialist
process, Puiggrós contents himself with flatly and
blithely asserting that they must be ‘transcended’ in
Peronism, in fact embedding their negation to the
benefit of a state centralized under the leadership of
General Perón.
The negation of the Rights of Man
Puiggrós considers ‘individual freedom’ as an abstrac-
tion and mystification. With the rule of the strong state,
the mendacious idea appears that ‘all men are free by
nature’ and ‘free through the rule of law’, as if this
idea of freedom were not the expression of a historical
struggle and the juridical reassertion of a conquest yet
to be achieved: the historical struggle is about the shift
from purely formal to material validity. And he accepts
its ‘transcendence’ – its negation – in the Peronist state.
Individual freedom, negated in its effective essence by
liberalism, becomes unnecessary and dispensable in
the organization of the centralized state.
The same thing happens with the ‘freedom of the
press’, which Peronism would claim to carry beyond
46
its liberal conception: ‘the freedom of the press has
been defined in liberalism as the freedom to publish
ideas, opinions and news without previous censorship
and without legal action.’ And he then claims that
its ‘transcendence’ has been realized during General
Perón’s government under the direction of his secretary
Apold in the Secretariat of Press and Broadcasting.
And the so-called pluralism of political parties
would also be ‘transcended’ and supplanted by the
single party:
Peronism [is] the greatest movement of the masses
ever known in Argentina. Though the antagonism
between liberal party politics and revolutionary
popular nationalism is still played out in it, it can
count on the backing of the workers and students
who have chosen the road of the struggle for a so-
cialism that grows from the seeds that already exist
in their own country.
The single party, then, led by Perón, against the
fragmentation of liberal party politics:
Never in the history of the nation have the popular
masses reached such a level of politicization and
such clarity about their objectives.
This politics rejected the Rights of Man as bour-
geois and dissolved the subjugated individuality of
men into the dictates and leadership of the Leader,
who maintained the appearance of his power on the
basis of a military and economic structure that was
antagonistic to him. The corruption of union leaders
consolidated the apparent power of the masses but
limited to a strictly economistic perspective. All this
constructed an ‘as if’: the fantasy of a real power
without a moral and material base. Collective organiza-
tion in the service of the leader produced a simulation
at the level of politics of preparedness for a real
confrontation, for war, yet without material basis and
support. This is why it dissolved at a stroke, without
resistance to the military coup which began and found
support inside the ranks of Peronism itself. Thus
Peronism culminates in terror against its own forces,
encouraged by General Perón.
But what is at issue for us, as we said at the outset,
is the creation of a real force in the sphere of politics
that would not leave the popular classes disarmed
and defeated in the face of its enemies’ political and
military offensive. It is a question of a real power not a
fantasized one, an apparent one, a mere representation
that in reality is impotent both to resolve the conflict
of interests in the field of politics and to prevent
the emergence of idealist solutions to an unequal
confrontation.
Outcome and verification
In 1977, when he was already in exile, Puiggrós pub-
lished his confession and recantation. Here he negated
everything that he had previously adored. He reveals
the real basis of the fantasy and illusions that had been
nurtured in those young people who had believed in the
power that their fathers and the intellectuals had taught
them to extol and had put forward as an alternative, as
though there were a real revolution at stake.
In an interview that appeared in The Argentine
Case, published in Mexico in 1977, the writer who had
previously demanded the univocal leadership of the
Leader confesses. Not only does he explain how Perón
conquered the workers’ organizations from his base in
the military but also how he replaced their Marxist and
leftist leadership, granting by gift of power what had
previously been the result of a hard social struggle.
On the basis of his power, Perón dictated the resolu-
tion of industrial conflicts and strikes, using the threat
of military intervention on behalf of the workers:
The strike is won like this and the Communist Peter
is replaced by Colonel Perón. This happened in all
the trade unions and explains how in a short time,
weeks or days, the Argentine workers’ movement is
transformed. The old leaders, with years of struggle
like Peter himself, are replaced by new ones who
have no idea what socialism or any sort of social
change is about, but who are very conscious of the
need to raise the standard of living of the workers.
In this way, the Peronism of Perón and Evita is
a movement born without its own ideology, it is
pragmatist.
Perón had no precursors, preparation or knowledge
of social struggles. He was ambitious but not in the
pejorative sense.
What Puiggrós had previously held to be the basis
of revolutionary and socialist drive, he now confesses
to be the original sources of failure, something hidden
in the mythical account of Peronist history.
The problem for the Peronist masses was not social
transformation … It was a heterogeneous move-
ment. In it there were Nazis, right wing nationalists,
liberal nationalists – reformists, socialists and com-
munists like us. All this was mixed up. And Perón
was always conscious that this heterogeneity of his
movement was his major weakness. But he knew
how to overcome it thanks to the growth in the
economy in the nation during this period. Greater
income improved the situation of the workers as
well as profits of the bosses.
And Perón – Puiggrós adds – never allowed the masses
in practice to be more than a means of pressure. What
had previously been the foundation of the revolutionary
impulse directed by the Leader now yields the real and
effective meaning of its limit: a means to put pressure
on Perón’s enemies, without its own force:
Perón’s task was to stick the masses together. Why
did Perón fall? What collapsed was Peronism.
He enumerates the forces that continued to command
Peronist social reality, persisting in their own power
without being effectively opposed:
Perón’s politics towards the military was not one
of ideological capture given there was no coherent
ideology. It was a politics of bribes and privileges.
Instead of tying the military, it corrupted them.
And the same thing happened with the leadership of
the workers:
The leading organization of the workers’ movement
the CGT [General Confederation of Workers] was
formed with groups of parvenus and people on the
make who got rich. Obviously they gave some-
thing to the workers, at the same time as they were
getting rich themselves and reaching an accommo-
dation with the government, or they wouldn’t have
been leaders.
And Puiggrós’s judgement of Perón contrasts with
his previous conviction, put forward only a few years
before. But he knew all this before:
Perón was enormously opportunistic.
Now Perón got entangled. In 1946 he could harmo-
nise many sectors, but in 1973 he wanted to be on
good terms with God and the Devil.
Perón was tied up against it. There are aspects of
his psychology and private life which have a great
deal of importance here.
Perón had come to power conditioned by a series of
contrasting ideologies and interests.
And so, speaking from exile and failure, the very
people who knew the falsity and weakness of the
project they had justified to the youth of Argentina
confess to its and their own inadequacies. Yet even
as they recognize how this weakness and distorted
content had alienated the Peronist workers from their
own interests, and therefore deprived them of a real
and effective sense of their force, the Peronist guerrilla
movement still finds endorsement:
Young students and many professionals slowly
came closer to and were won by Peronism. This
is how the first armed, popular [!] movements
emerged, clumsily like everything always happens:
full of gaps, without experience … The Monton-
eros emerged from Catholic nationalism. Eventually
they arrived at Marxism … But with a little spirit
47
 of struggle, perhaps unconsciously these groups
slowly matured until they came to support national
socialism.
The problem that worries me here is when Puig-
grós, at the end of this process, has to deal with the
painful experience that meant not only political failure
but the terrible and desolate fact of the death of his
own son.
The last time I saw my son was the night in which
I came here, that is in 1974. We didn’t say goodbye,
because neither he nor I knew that we were coming
here. He wrote to me, saying: Dad, we won’t see
each other again. Another time he wrote a letter to
me in which he said that he was with his comrades
but for the first time he felt alone. I tried to imagine
what was happening: I was in a state of enormous
anxiety, I knew that he was going to his death, but
that he had no other road. He could not give up. I
found out when I got back to Mexico: imagine the
situation, my only son, 26 years old, he’d been my
secretary. When he told me he was a rebel, what
sort of rebel? They had to live their lives, and the
slogan they fought under, was ‘No surrender’.
Death now shrouds both father and son, but beyond
this fact I want to reflect on Puiggrós’s pathetic words
as a father, in no way to condemn him but, as a father
myself, to understand the legacy we are bequeathing
our children. ‘I knew that he was going to his death
and had no other road’, ‘the slogan they fought under
was “No surrender”’. Is this really the way to create
life or is it simply the glorification of death? And when
he says ‘No surrender’, we would want to read that
one should not abandon oneself, but stay alive so as to
maintain the coherence of the stakes of our fight, but
not to obey the call to the ritual of sacrifice and death.
I insist on this: I am not judging him as a father. I am
simply drawing the consequences of what must have
been for him a most painful experience, consequences
we cannot responsibly ignore. I am thinking of the
necessary elaboration of our responsibility for crucial
actions that led to the useless sacrifice of a whole
generation of young people, and not just of them,
determined in great part by the falsity and fantasy of
a conception of politics. This mortal fantasy had its
genesis a long time ago, and the intellectuals whose
responsibility should be to tell the truth have a share
in the blame that is not minimal.
Second passage: from support for the
armed ‘recovery’ of the Malvinas
to the democratic ‘pact’
In the second example we will use to verify our thesis,
we will leave the positions taken during Peronism’s
48
triumphalist euphoria (1972) and the cruel confirma-
tion of failure in the face of the terror imposed by the
Military Junta (1977) as revealed in Puiggrós. Now we
are going to consider the positions taken during the
Proceso itself, on the occasion of the Malvinas War,
by the Socialist Discussion Group (SDG) formed by
Argentine exiles living in Mexico (1982) and the new
conception of politics outlined by various members of
the group after the defeat and failure, when democracy
was reintroduced into Argentina (1984). Here we see
the same mechanisms at work in a group of intellectu-
als of the Left. First, reality is covered over, then a
later political position replaces an initial programme in
which fantasy and illusory solutions were preponder-
ant. But fantasy and illusion are going to reappear,
we believe, although now in the contradictory aspects
of conflict and peace, in the new programme for
democracy.
The reasons for supporting the armed
‘recovery’ of the Malvinas
What made it possible for the members of the SDG to
support the recovery of the Islands undertaken by the
Military Junta can be found in the following theoreti-
cal assertions formulated in the 1982 document they
published during the war:
1. It was necessary to abandon our subjective and
affective experience of the origin of the Junta,
as well as the ‘a priori’ rationality that resulted
from our previous political experience, since these
were both based on logical fallacies. According to
the theoretical method that the Group offered us,
we should abandon as fallacious that fundamental
– rational and affective – experience because it was
opposed to an ‘objective’ and true grasp of reality.
The two fallacies result from trying to ‘explain a
phenomenon exclusively in terms of its origins’. This
means that we have to erase our subjective experi-
ence as our means of assessing the significance of
the Junta. We should also reject as a ‘fallacy’ ‘the
attribution of a priori coherence to political events’.
Here we are invited to abandon the rationality which
made it possible for us to take positions since the
Junta came to power, a rationality that hitherto we
have considered to be a necessary index of truth.
2. It was necessary to abandon political ethics in order
to assert an opportunism indifferent to values in
political activity. This allows the SDG to invert the
hierarchy of values, so that the main enemy is now
the British rather than the Military Junta. Which
means saying that at least at the military level we
should establish an alliance of common objec-
 tives, even if wrong ones, with the genocidaires
in power.
3. Once the subjective as a place where truth could
also be elaborated is removed, the absolute and
current index of political truth becomes the ‘objec-
tive’, scientific, direct or immediate ‘just interests
of the people’ – that is, the working class. The
political process is thus regulated by the mechanism
of history, in its simplest and most linearly deter-
ministic version. Where the working class expressed
itself immediately and directly in support [of the
War] was the place of truth for the social scientist
of the Left.
4. This led to a fundamental conclusion that the
problem of morals, that is ethics, should be excluded
from political confrontation, as if it had no value
of its own and had no contribution to make to the
constitution of political force. And this led in con-
sequence to thinking that victory could be achieved
with any politics, any power, any economy or any
morality, a conclusion that the simplest objective
logic would have rejected. And to think that it is
only physical force, without morale or morality
that leads to victory in social conflicts. In the case
of the Malvinas, it led to a claim that a victory for
the Junta’s war aims would also be an advance for
the popular forces and a raising of their conscious-
ness. The assertion and affirmation of pure force as
political power.
5. All this implied that it was only politico-economic
conditions within an ‘objective’ strategy that should
be the basis of our politics and that we should
discard any concerns with the meaning and effectiv-
ity of the popular forces which have to be created,
as if this specific force, of a different nature, as
we have seen, were not determinant in the political
struggles with a class opposition. Hence in the
Malvinas War, it meant laying stress on what could
be won economically and strategically at national
and international level, that is endorsing ‘objective’
gains for the nation, while obscuring the fundamen-
tal contradictions within the nation itself.
Separation, then, between the objective and the subjec-
tive, the past and the present, the internal and external,
the individual and collective, and hence, at the very
moment where the SDG claimed the most objective
far-sightedness, a blindness in the face of reality.
Because this attitude turned out to be completely
fallacious, given the result and consequences of the
conflict. It showed us not only that fantasy and illusion
were being projected onto the political field, but also
that theoretical conceptions continued to be regulated
by the categories of the Right.
The absence of ‘self-criticism’
and the new solution
After this, we might have expected self-criticism, but
there was none. Let us see whether theoretical work
does not necessarily imply critical work in the theorist,
and whether this requirement is essential for thinking
or not. And this is what is shown by an article written
by two members of that same Socialist Reflection
Group published in Punto de Vista, number 21, August
1984, in Buenos Aires. Here again what was once
adored is abandoned, and a new solution is offered for
a different confrontation with the raw reality that has
to be seasoned and cooked again.
It is the passage from the rule of the Military
Junta (1982) to the implantation of democracy in
1984. And once again the experience that dictated
the failure of previous theory and politics dictates the
new mode of understanding and the new position (no,
not self-criticism): simply a new theory and a new
conception.
And what is specifically asserted is:
• The previously negated subjectivity and the ethics
which had been happily put to one side now receive
encomia:
The recovery of the topic [sic] of subjectivity, as
well as the rebirth [sic] of investigations into the
relation between ethics and politics have always
been produced in situations of crisis.
The crisis displaces ‘objectivity’ in favour of
‘subjectivity’: it produces actors and projects.
The crisis produces a recovery of questions of
ethics.
[The crisis teaches us] to go beyond a schema
of political action that is a prisoner of abstract
dichotomies that separate ‘objective conditions’
from ‘subjective conditions’.
To save the subjectivity of the actors, the explo-
sion of subjectivity that constitutes it.
And these assertions, in which reflective subjectivity
is only included as a ‘topic’, where the separation
between the subjective and objective, this time in
theory, is extended, are backed up with a bibliog-
raphy of the international great and good. But our
extensive, elaborate, theoretical critique, published
over the last twenty years in their own country, is
 The article ‘Social Crisis and Democratic Pact’ is signed by
Emilio de Ípola and Juan Carlos Portantiero.
49
 completely ignored: Paggi, Habermas, Gramsci,
Crozier, Friedberg, Frankfurt School, Adler, Bern-
stein, yes; Rozitchner, no.
• What is now recovered is the ‘irreducibly
in­determinate, that is to say political, character, in
all its human density and fullness, of ‘the social
subsystems’, as against the political, strategic and
economic, mechanical and abstract determinism
that had placed the direct and immediate defini-
tion of its truth and meaning in a particular social
class:
Identities that appear to be subsumed in a par-
ticular centre, ‘class’ for example, or ‘nation’ …
fragment in a multiple manner.
And what is rejected is the relation between people
and state proper to populism – now described as
specular:
With the crisis certainties have collapsed, liberat-
ing new sets of questions: not only the centrality
attributed to certain social subjects (the prole-
tariat) has been interrogated.
But the crisis they flag up so repetitively is only
really a crisis and useful for predicting political
history when it is their own thought that has gone
into crisis. And their own crisis takes on world
dimensions.
• But what is most important is something else: to
the previous affirmation of the war unleashed to
‘recover’ the Malvinas, and which they supported,
now, by contrast, they oppose a sharp negation of
the war to allow the passage to pure politics, which
would exclude war altogether. And what they put
forward is the venerable and originary notion of the
‘pact’ as the rational foundation of the democratic
political accord that has been initiated in Argentina.
All that remains of the complex equation between
politics and war is their disjunction: either war or
politics. And naturally, since the war was lost, it is
excluded, leaving only the political pact.
War and politics once more
The authors write that Foucault criticizes this concep-
tion of politics, as he tries to ‘rethink politics according
to the categories of war’ where politics would be ‘a
war continued by other means’. In the politics that
does not forget its foundation in force, ‘political power’,
says Foucault, ‘would have the role of perpetually
reinscribing that relation of forces by means of a type
of silent war, inscribing it in institutions, in economic
50
inequalities, in language, and finally in bodies’. An
equivalence, it is said, between war and politics. But
I think that this conception does not do justice to
Clausewitz, who thought of politics as the field of
truce. Perhaps Foucault himself has abandoned that
essential distinction that differentiates the power ‘of a
different nature’ of the forces in confrontation, where
war which turns into truce, because it is necessary
for both contending parties: one is stronger on the
offensive, but the other is stronger in defence.
This conception maintains the effective presence
in politics of the potential specificity of each force
and on that basis allows us to think democracy as a
field of elaboration of forces, without war necessarily
predominating, precisely because we are in a situation
of truce. Here each side has its own, specific force,
but the one on the defensive, Clausewitz reminds us,
is stronger. So, if our authors previously asserted with
Crozier that politics ‘rests on a relation of forces’, the
‘pact’ they offer us cannot just be a voluntaristic one.
It cannot be put forward as purely formal leadership in
which everyone would be compelled to take part and
hide the fact (simulate) that it is the relation of forces
that constitutes the limits and possibility of attaining
the formal pact. It is not the will that establishes it
– if indeed the will means anything as a concept (and
we already know that ‘good will’ is what is postulated
as the necessary accompaniment for purely formal
rationality to enter historical reality and assert itself
as true). It is not the will, however good it is, which
establishes this pact, but the material recognition of
an equilibrium that of necessity leads the stronger to
open up that space of truce called ‘politics’. Is it not
perhaps utopian to think that democracy, currently, at
least among us, corresponds to that condition which
requires the ‘pact’: ‘that there exists if not a culture
then at least a democratic will solidly rooted in the
social actors’? Who can seriously think that all the
social actors will accept the surrender of their own
privileges that led the country to destruction and
murder, torture and death as political system, to save
a system that is inimical to them?
What we see in this passage from 1982 to 1984
is the appearance of a thought that has lived through
crisis, and although this time it coincided with one
more crisis of the system, this thought in and of
crisis continues to be dependent in its basic, political
formulations on a new utopia: an abstract rationalism
that excludes the reality of the forces present. Does
it not make us suspect that it is another case of the
appearance of fantasy in politics?
Translated by Philip Derbyshire
reviews
Anything is possible
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, preface by Alain Badiou, trans.
Ray Brassier, Continuum, London and New York, 2008. viii + 148 pp., £16.99 hb., 978 0 826 49674 4.
Philosophical speculation can regain determinate
knowledge of absolute reality. We can think the nature
of things as they are in themselves, independently of
the way they appear to us. We can demonstrate that
the modality of this nature is radically contingent
– that there is no reason for things or ‘laws’ to be or
remain as they are. Nothing is necessary, apart from
the necessity that nothing be necessary. Anything can
happen, in any place and at any time, without reason
or cause.
Such is the ringing message affirmed by the remark-
able French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux in his
first book, After Finitude, originally published by
Seuil in 2006. Against the grain of self-critical and
self-reflexive post-Kantian philosophy, Meillassoux
announces that we can recover ‘the great outdoors,
the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers’, the utterly
‘foreign territory’ that subsists in itself, independently
of our relation to it. And when we begin to explore
this foreign land that is reality in itself, what we learn
is that
there is no reason for anything to be or to remain
thus and so rather than otherwise.… Everything
could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from
stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws;
and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby
everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the
absence of any superior law capable of preserving
anything, no matter what, from perishing.
Neither events or laws are governed, in the end,
by any necessity other than that of a purely ‘chaotic
becoming – that is to say, a becoming governed by
no necessity whatsoever’. (Meillassoux, ‘Potentiality
and Virtuality’, Collapse 2, March 2007, p. 59)
For Meillassoux, as for Plato or Hegel, philosophy’s
chief concern is with the nature of absolute reality, but
as Meillassoux conceives it the nature of this reality
demands that philosophy should think not ‘about what
is but only about what can be’. The proper concern
of a contemporary (post-metaphysical, post-dogmatic
but also post-critical) philosophy is not with being but
with may-being, not with être but with peut-être. If
Meillassoux can be described as a ‘realist’, then, the
reality that concerns him does not involve the way
Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
things are so much as the possibility that they might
always be otherwise.
It is the trenchant force of this affirmation, no
doubt, that accounts for the enthusiasm with which
Meillassoux’s work has been taken up by a small
but growing group of young researchers exasperated
with the generally uninspiring state of contempo-
rary ‘continental’ philosophy. It’s easy to see why
Meillassoux’s After Finitude has so quickly acquired
something close to cult status among some readers who
share his lack of reverence for ‘the way things are’.
The book is exceptionally clear and concise, entirely
devoted to a single chain of reasoning. It combines a
confident insistence on the self-sufficiency of rational
demonstration with an equally rationalist suspicion of
mere experience and consensus. The argument implies,
in tantalizing outline, an alternative history of the
whole of modern European philosophy from Galileo
and Descartes through Hume and Kant to Heidegger
and Deleuze. It is also open to a number of critical
objections. In what follows I reconstruct the basic
sequence of the argument (also drawing, on occasion,
on articles published by Meillassoux in the last few
years), and then sketch three or four of the difficulties
it seems to confront.
The simplest way to introduce Meillassoux’s general
project is as a reformulation and radicalization of what
he on several occasions describes as ‘Hume’s problem’:
that pure ‘reasoning a priori’ cannot suffice to prove
that a given effect must always and necessarily follow
from a given cause. There is no reason why one and
the same cause should not give rise to a ‘hundred dif-
ferent events’. Meillassoux accepts Hume’s argument
as unanswerable, as ‘blindingly obvious’: ‘we cannot
rationally discover any reason why laws should be
so rather than otherwise.’ Hume himself, however
(along with both Kant and the main thrust of the
analytical tradition), retreats from the full implications
of his demonstration. Rather than ditch the concept of
causal necessity altogether, he affirms it as a matter
of ‘blind faith’. Whether this belief is then a matter
of mere habit (Hume) or an irreducible component of
transcendental logic (Kant) is, as far as Meillassoux is
51
concerned, a secondary quarrel. Ever since, analytical
philosophers have tended to assume that we should
abandon ontological speculation and retreat instead to
reflection upon the way we draw inductive inferences
from ordinary experience, or from ordinary ways of
talking about our experience.
In keeping with a tactic he deploys elsewhere in
his work, Meillassoux himself quickly turns Hume’s
old problem into an opportunity. Our inability ration-
ally to determine an absolute necessity or sufficient
reason underlying things, properly understood, can
be affirmed as a demonstration that there is no such
necessity or reason. Rather than try to salvage a
dubious faith in the apparent stability of our experi-
ence, we should affirm the prospect that Hume refused
to accept: there is no reason why what we experience
as constant laws should not break down or change at
any point, for the simple reason there is no such thing
as reason or cause. The truth is not just that a given
cause might give rise to a hundred different effects,
but that an infinite variety of ‘effects’ might emerge
on the basis of no cause at all, in a pure eruption of
novelty ex nihilo.
The vision of the acausal and anarchic universe that
results from the affirmation of such contingency is
fully worthy of Deleuze and Guattari’s appreciation for
those artists and writers who tear apart the comfortable
normality of ordinary experience so as to let ‘a bit of
free and windy chaos’ remind us of the tumultuous
intensity of things:
If we look through the aperture which we have
opened up onto the absolute, what we see there is
a rather menacing power – something insensible,
and capable of destroying both things and worlds,
of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of
never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but
also every nightmare, of engendering random and
frenetic transformations, or conversely, of produc-
ing a universe that remains motionless down to its
ultimate recesses, like a cloud bearing the fiercest
storms, then the eeriest bright spells, if only for an
interval of disquieting calm.… We see something
akin to Time, but a Time that is inconceivable for
physics, since it is capable of destroying, without
cause or reason, every physical law, just as it is
inconceivable for metaphysics, since it is capable
of destroying every determinate entity, even a god,
even God.
Without flinching from the implications, Meillassoux
attributes to such ‘time without development [devenir]’
the potential to generate life ex nihilo, to draw spirit
from matter or creativity from stasis – or even to resur-
rect an immortal mind from a lifeless body.
52 Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
Rational reflection encourages us to posit the
absence of sufficient reason and to speculate about
the potentialities of this absolute time: it is only our
experience, precisely, that holds us back. Our ordinary
sensory experience discourages us from abandoning a
superstitious belief in causality. Conversion of Hume’s
problem into Meillassoux’s opportunity requires, then,
a Neoplatonic deflation of experience and the senses.
However far we might push such deflation, though, it
obviously remains the case that the world we experi-
ence is not chaotic but stable. How might we explain
everyday empirical consistency on the basis of radical
contingency and the total absence of causal necessity?
If physical laws could actually change for no reason,
would it not be ‘extraordinarily improbable if they did
not change frequently’?
This question frames a second stage in Meillas-
soux’s argument. Since the earth so regularly rotates
around the sun, since gravity so consistently holds
us to the ground, so then we infer that there must be
some underlying cause which accounts for the consist-
ency of such effects. Meillassoux claims to refute
such reasoning by casting doubt on the ‘probabilistic’
assumption that underlies it. An ordinary calculation of
probabilities – say, the anticipation of an even spread
of results from a repeated dice-throw – assumes that
there is a finite range of possible outcomes and a
finite range of determining factors, a range that sets
the criteria whereby a given outcome is more or less
likely in relation to others. At this point, following
Badiou’s example, Meillassoux plays his Cantorian
trump card.
It is precisely this totalization of the thinkable
which can no longer be guaranteed a priori. For we
now know – indeed, we have known it at least since
Cantor’s revolutionary set-theory – that we have
no grounds for maintaining that the conceivable is
necessarily totalisable.
Cantor showed that there can be no all-inclusive set of
all sets, leaving probabilistic reason with no purchase
on an open or ‘detotalized’ set of possibilities: ‘laws
which are contingent, but stable beyond all prob-
ability, thereby become conceivable’ (‘Potentiality and
Virtuality’).
On this basis, Meillassoux aims to restore the rights
of a purely ‘intelligible’ insight – that is, to reinstate the
validity of pre- or non-critical ‘intellectual intuition’
and thereby challenge the stifling strictures of Kant’s
transcendental turn. Rather than elaborate a merely
‘negative ontology’, he seeks to elaborate ‘an ever
more determinate, ever richer concept of contingency’,
on the assumption that these determinations can then
be ‘construed as so many absolute properties of what
is’, or as so many constraints to which a given ‘entity
must submit in order to exercise its capacity-not-to-be
and its capacity-to-be-other’.
A first constraint required by this capacity entails
rejection of contradiction. The only law that survives
the elimination of causal or sufficient reason is the law
of non-contradiction. A contradictory entity would be
utterly indeterminate, and thus both contingent and
necessary. In order to affirm the thesis that any given
thing can be anything, it is necessary that this thing
both be what it is here and now, and forever capable
of being determined as something else. In other words,
where Kant simply posited that things-in-themselves
existed and existed as non-contradictory, Meillassoux
claims to deduce the latter property directly from the
modality of their existence.
What does it mean, however, to say that such
things exist? Meillassoux’s approach to this question
circumscribes a second, more far-reaching determina-
tion of contingency: absolute and contingent entities or
things-in-themselves must observe the logical principle
of non-contradiction, and they must also submit to
rigorous mathematical measurement. Here again, Meil-
lassoux’s strategy involves the renewal of perfectly
classical concerns. In addition to an affirmation of the
ontological implications of the scientific revolution,
it involves the absolutization of what Descartes and
then Locke established as a thing’s primary qualities
– those qualities like its dimensions or weight, which
can be mathematically measured independently of the
way an observer experiences and perceives it – that
is, independently of secondary qualities like texture,
colour, taste, and so on. But whereas Descartes con-
ceived of such qualities in geometric terms, as aspects
of an extended substance, Meillassoux takes a further
step, and isolates the mathematizable from extension
itself, so as then
to derive from a contingency which is absolute,
the conditions that would allow me to deduce the
absolutization of mathematical discourse [and thus]
ground the possibility of the sciences to speak about
an absolute reality …, a reality independent of
thought. (‘Speculative Realism’, Collapse 3, 2007,
p. 440)
Meillassoux admits that he has not worked out a full
version of this deduction, but the closing pages of After
Finitude imply that his approach will depend on the
presumption that ‘what is mathematically conceivable
is absolutely possible’, coupled with an appreciation for
the absolutely arbitrary, meaningless and contingent
nature of mathematical signs qua signs (e.g. signs
Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
produced through pure replication or reiteration, indif-
ferent to any sort of pattern or ‘rhythm’). Perhaps an
absolutely arbitrary discourse will be adequate to the
absolutely contingent nature of things (‘Time Without
Becoming’, talk at CRMEP, Middlesex University,
May 2008).
The main obstacle standing in the way of this
anti-phenomenological return ‘to the things them-
selves’, naturally, is the widely held (if not tautological)
assumption that we cannot, by definition, think any
reality independently of thought. Meillassoux dubs the
modern currents of thought that accept this assumption
‘correlationist’. A correlationist humbly accepts that
‘we only ever have access to the correlation between
thinking and being, and never to either term considered
apart from the other’, such that ‘anything that is totally
a-subjective cannot be’. Nothing can be independently
of thought, since here ‘to be is to be a correlate’.
Paradigmatically, to be is to be the correlate of either
consciousness (for phenomenology) or language (for
analytical philosophy).
Kant is the founding figure of correlationist phil-
osophy, of course, but the label applies equally well,
according to Meillassoux, to most strands of post-
Kantian philosophy, from Fichte and Hegel to Heidegger
or Adorno. All these philosophies posit some sort of
fundamental mediation between the subject and object
of thought, such that it is the clarity and integrity of
this relation (whether it be clarified through logical
judgement, phenomenological reduction, historical
reflection, linguistic articulation, pragmatic experimen-
tation or intersubjective communication) that serves
as the only legitimate means of accessing reality. The
overall effect has been to consolidate the criteria of
‘lawful’ legitimacy as such. Correlationism figures
here as a sort of counter-revolution that emerged in
philosophy as it tried, with and after Kant, to come to
terms with the uncomfortably disruptive implications
of Galileo, Descartes and the scientific revolution.
Post-Copernican science had opened the door to the
‘great outdoors’: Kant’s own so-called ‘Copernican
turn’ should be best understood as a Ptolemaic attempt
to slam this door shut.
How, then, to reopen the door? Since a correla-
tionist will assume as a matter of course that the
referent of any statement ‘cannot possibly exist’ or
‘take place [as] non-correlated with a consciousness’,
so then Meillassoux claims to find the Achilles heel
of correlationism in its inability to cope with what he
calls ‘ancestral’ statements. Such statements refer to
events or entities older than any consciousness, events
like the emergence of life, the formation of Earth, the
53
origin of the universe, and so on. In so far as correla-
tion can only conceive of an object that is given to a
subject, how can it cope with an object that pre-dates
givenness itself?
Now Meillassoux realizes that in order to overcome
the Ptolemaic–correlationist counter-revolution it is
impossible simply to retreat from Kant back to the
‘dogmatic’ metaphysics of Descartes, let alone to the
necessity- and cause-bound metaphysics of Spinoza
or Leibniz. He also accepts that you cannot refute
correlationism simply by positing, as Laruelle does,
a mind-independent reality. In order to overcome the
correlational obstacle to his acausal ontology, in order
to know mind-independent reality as non-contradictory
and non-necessary, Meillassoux thus needs to show
that the correlationist critique of metaphysical necessity
itself enables if not requires the speculative affirmation
of non-necessity.
This demonstration occupies the central and most
subtle sections of After Finitude. The basic strategy
again draws on Kantian and post-Kantian precedents.
Post-Kantian metaphysicians like Fichte and Hegel
tried to overcome Kant’s foreclosure of absolute reality
by converting correlation itself, the very ‘instrument
of empirico-critical de-absolutization, into the model
for a new type of absolute.’ This idealist alternative
to correlationist humility, however, cannot respond in
turn to the ‘most profound’ correlational decision – the
decision which ensures, in order to preserve the ban on
every sort of absolute knowledge, that correlation too is
just another contingent fact, rather than a necessity. As
with his approach to Hume’s problem, Meillassoux’s
crucial move here is to turn an apparent weakness into
an opportunity. The correlationist, in order to guard
against idealist claims to knowledge of absolute reality,
readily accepts not only the reduction of knowledge
to knowledge of facts: the correlationist also accepts
that this reduction too is just another fact, just another
non-necessary contingency. But if such correlating
reduction is not necessary then it is of course pos-
sible to envisage its suspension: the only way the
correlationists can defend themselves against idealist
absolutization requires them to admit ‘the impossibility
of giving an ultimate ground to the existence of any
being’, including the impossibility of giving a ground
for this impossibility (‘Speculative Realism’).
All that Meillassoux now has to do is absolutize, in
turn, this apparent failure. We simply need to under-
stand ‘why it is not the correlation but the facticity
of the correlation that constitutes the absolute. We
must show why thought, far from experiencing its
intrinsic limits through facticity, experiences rather
54 Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
its knowledge of the absolute through facticity.’ In
knowing that we know only contingent facts, we also
know that it is necessary that there be only contingent
facts. We know that facticity itself, and only facticity
itself, is not contingent but necessary. Recognition of
the absolute nature or absolute necessity of facticity
then allows Meillassoux to go on to complete his
deduction ‘from the absoluteness of this facticity those
properties of the in-itself which Kant for his part took
to be self-evident’ – that is, that it exists (as radically
contingent) and that it exists as non-contradictory. By
affirming this necessity of contingency or ‘principle
of factuality’, Meillassoux triumphantly concludes, ‘I
think an X independent of any thinking, and I know
it for sure, thanks to the correlationist himself and
his fight against the absolute, the idealist absolute’
(‘Speculative Realism’, p. 432).
Unlike Meillassoux, I believe that the main problem
with recent French philosophy has been not an excess
but a deficit of genuinely relational thought. From
this perspective, despite its compelling originality
and undeniable ingenuity, Meillassoux’s resolutely
absolutizing project raises a number of questions and
objections.
First, the critique of correlation seems to depend
on an equivocation regarding the relation of thinking
and being, of epistemology and ontology. On balance,
Meillassoux insists on the modern ‘ontological requi-
site’ which stipulates that ‘to be is to be a correlate’
of thought. From within the correlational circle, ‘all
we ever engage with is what is given-to-thought, never
an entity subsisting by itself.’ If a being only is as the
correlate of the thought that thinks it, then from a cor-
relationist perspective it must seem that a being older
than thought can only be ‘unthinkable’. A consistent
correlationist, Meillassoux says, must ‘insist that the
physical universe could not really have preceded the
existence of man, or at least of living creatures’. As
far as I know, however, almost no one actually thinks
or insists on this, apart perhaps from a few fossilized
idealists. They don’t think this because correlationism
as Meillassoux defines it is in reality an epistemologi-
cal theory, one that is perfectly compatible with the
insights of Darwin, Marx or Einstein. There’s nothing
to prevent a correlationist from thinking ancestral
objects or worlds that are older than the thought that
thinks them, or indeed older than thought itself; even
from an orthodox Kantian perspective there is little
difference in principle between my thinking an event
that took place yesterday and an event that took place
six billion years ago. As Meillassoux knows perfectly
well, all that the correlationist demands is an acknowl-
edgement that when you think of an ancestral event,
or any event, you are indeed thinking of it. I can think
of this lump of ancient rock as ancient if and only if
science currently provides me with reliable means of
thinking it so.
Genuine conquest of the correlationist fortress would
require a reference not to objects older than thought but
to processes of thinking that proceed without thinking,
or objects that are somehow presentable in the absence
of any objective presence or evidence – in other words,
processes and objects proscribed by Meillassoux’s own
insistence on the principle of non-contradiction. This
is the problem with using a correlationist strategy (the
principle of factuality) to break out of the correlation-
ist circle: until Meillassoux can show that we know
things exist not only independently of our thought but
independently of our thinking them so, the correlation-
ist has little to worry about. Anyone can agree with
Meillassoux that ‘to think ancestrality is to think a
world without thought – a world without the givenness
of the world.’ What’s less obvious is how we might
think such a world without thinking it, or how we
might arrive at scientific knowledge of such pre-given
objects if nothing is given of them.
Along the same lines, Meillassoux’s rationalist cri-
tique of causality and necessity seems to depend on
an equivocation between metaphysical and physical or
natural necessity. The actual target of Meillassoux’s
critique of metaphysics is the Leibnizian principle of
sufficient reason. He dispatches it, as we’ve seen, with
a version of Hume’s argument: we cannot rationally
demonstrate an ultimate reason for the being of being;
Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
there is no primordial power or divine providence
that determines being or the meaning of being to be a
certain way. What Meillassoux infers from this critique
of metaphysical necessity, however, is the rather more
grandiose assertion that there is no cause or reason
for anything to be the way it is. This inference relies
on a contentious understanding of the terms ‘reason’,
‘cause’ and ‘law’. It’s been a long time since scientists
confused ‘natural laws’ with logical or metaphysical
necessities, and it is perfectly possible, of course, to
reconstruct the locally effective reasons and causes
that have shaped, for instance, the evolution of aerobic
vertebrate organisms. There was nothing necessary or
predictable about this evolution, but why should we
doubt that it conformed to familiar ‘laws’ of cause and
effect? What does it mean to say that the ongoing con-
sequences of this long process might be transformed in
an instant – that we might suddenly cease to breathe
oxygen or suffer the effects of gravity? Although
Meillassoux insists that contingency applies to every
event and every process, it may be that the only event
that might qualify as contingent and without reason
in his absolute sense of the term is the emergence of
the universe itself.
Meillassoux’s acausal ontology, in other words,
includes no account of an actual process of transforma-
tion or development. There is no account here of any
positive ontological or historical force, no substitute
for what other thinkers have conceived as substance, or
spirit, or power, or labour. His insistence that anything
might happen can only amount to an insistence on
the bare possibility of radical change. So far, at least,
Meillassoux’s affirmation of ‘the effective ability of
every determined entity’ to persist, change or disappear
without reason figures as an empty and indeterminate
postulate. Once Meillassoux has purged his speculative
materialism of any sort of causality he deprives it of
any worldly historical purchase as well. The abstract
logical possibility of change (given the absence of any
ultimately sufficient reason) has strictly nothing to do
with any concrete process of actual change. Rather
like his mentor Badiou, to the degree that Meillas-
soux insists on the absolute disjunction of an event
from existing situations he deprives himself of any
concretely mediated means of thinking, with and after
Marx, the possible ways of changing such situations.
The notion of ‘absolute time’ that accompanies
Meillassoux’s acausal ontology is a time that seems
endowed with only one dimension – the instant. It may
well be that ‘only the time that harbours the capacity
to destroy every determinate reality, while obeying
no determinate law – the time capable of destroying,
55
without reason or law, both worlds and things – can
be thought as an absolute.’ The sense in which such an
absolute can be thought as distinctively temporal is less
obvious. Rather than any sort of articulation of past,
present and future, Meillassoux’s time is a matter of
spontaneous and immediate irruption ex nihilo. Time is
reduced, here, to a succession of ‘gratuitous sequences’.
The paradigm for such gratuitous irruption, obviously,
is the miracle. Meillassoux argues that every absolute
‘miraculous’ discontinuity testifies only to the ‘inexist-
ence of God’ – that is, to the lack of any metaphysical
necessity, progress or providence. It may be, however,
that an argument regarding the existence or inexistence
of God is secondary in relation to arguments for or
against belief in this quintessentially ‘divine’ power – a
supernatural power to interrupt the laws of nature and
abruptly reorient the pattern of worldly affairs.
The argument that allows Meillassoux to posit a
radically open miraculous time depends on reference
to Cantor’s ‘de-totalization’ of every attempt to close
or limit a denumerable set of possibilities. A still more
absolute lack of mediation, however, characterizes
Meillas­soux’s appeal to mathematics as the royal road
to the in-itself. Cantor’s transfinite set theory concerns
the domain of pure number alone. The demonstration
that there is an open, unending series of ever larger
infinite numbers clearly has decisive implications for
the foundations of mathematics, but Meillassoux needs
to demonstrate more exactly how these implications
apply to the time and space of our actually exist-
ing universe. In what sense is our material universe
itself infinite? In what sense has the evolution of life,
for instance, confronted an actually infinite (rather
than immensely large) number of actual possibili-
ties? It is striking that Meillassoux pays little or no
attention to such questions, and sometimes treats the
logical and material domains as if they were effectively
interchangeable.
Admittedly, you can make a case for the equation of
mathematics and ontology in the strict sense, as Badiou
does, such that post-Cantorian theory serves to articu-
late what can be thought of as pure being-qua-being
(once being is identified with abstract and absolute
multiplicity, i.e. a multiplicity that does not depend
on any preliminary notion of unit or unity). Such an
equation requires, however, that ontological questions
be strictly preserved from merely ‘ontic’ ones: as a
matter of course, a mathematical conception of being
has nothing to say about the material, historical or
social attributes of specific beings. A similar ‘onto-
logical reduction’ must apply to Meillassoux’s reliance
on Cantorian mathematics. Here again he seems to
56 Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
equivocate, as if the abstract implications of Cantorian
detotalization might concern the concrete set of pos-
sibilities at issue in a specific situation – for example,
in an ecosystem or in a political conflict. He seems to
think that the Cantorian transfinite – a theory that has
strictly nothing to do with any physical or material
reality – might underwrite speculation regarding the
‘unreason’ whereby any actually existing thing might
suddenly be transformed, destroyed or preserved.
In short, Meillassoux seems to confuse the domains
of pure and applied mathematics. In the spirit of
Galileo’s ‘mathematization of nature’, he relies on pure
mathematics in order to demonstrate the integrity of
an objective reality that exists independently of us – a
domain of primary (mathematically measurable) quali-
ties purged of any merely sensory, subject-dependent
secondary qualities. But pure mathematics is arguably
the supreme example of absolutely subject-dependent
thought – that is, a thought that proceeds without
reference to any sort of objective reality ‘outside’
it. No one denies that every mathematical measure-
ment is ‘indifferent’ to the thing it measures. But
leaving aside the question of why an abstract, math-
ematized description of an object should be any less
mind-dependent or anthropocentric than a sensual
or experiential description, there is no eliding the
fundamental difference between pure number and an
applied measurement. The idea that the meaning of the
statement ‘the universe was formed 13.5 billion years
ago’ might be independent of the mind that thinks
it only makes sense if you disregard the quaintly
parochial unit of measurement involved (along with
the meaning of words like ‘ago’, to say nothing of
the meaning of meaning tout court). As a matter of
course, every unit of measurement, from the length
of a metre to the time required for a planet to orbit
around a star, exists at a fundamental distance from
the domain of number as such. If Meillassoux was
to carry through the argument of ‘ancestrality’ to its
logical conclusion, he would have to acknowledge that
it would eliminate not only all reference to secondary
qualities like colour and texture but also all conven-
tional primary qualities like length or mass or date as
well. What might then be known of an ‘arche-fossil’
(i.e. a thing considered independently of whatever is
given of it, including its material extension) would
have to be expressed in terms of pure numbers alone,
rather than dates or measurements. Whatever else such
(neo-Pythagorean?) knowledge amounts to, it has no
obvious relation to the sorts of realities that empirical
science tries to describe, including realities older than
the evolution of life.
 After Finitude is a beautifully written and seduc-
tively argued book. It offers a welcome critique of
the ambient ‘necessitarian’ world-view, that pensée
unique which tells us ‘there is no alternative’, and
which underlies both the listless political apathy and
the deflating humility of so much contemporary phil-
osophy and critical theory. In the rationalist tradi-
tion of the Enlightenment and of ideology-critique,
Meillassoux launches a principled assault on every
‘superstitious’ presumption that existing social situa-
tions should be accepted as natural or inevitable. His
insistence that such situations are actually a matter of
The geek code
Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, Duke University Press, Durham NC,
2008. 378 pp., £51.00 hb., £12.99 pb., 978 0 82234 242 7 hb., 978 0 82234 264 9 pb.
Is programming software a mode of public speech?
Christopher Kelty’s Two Bits provides an answer care-
fully integrated with a proposal, in this cultural anthro-
pology of an important series of historical developments
that have been inadequately studied outside their
specific domains. Surveying debates around ‘open’,
‘free’ or ‘shared’ software, Kelty’s answer is that free
software, as privately developed but publicly shared
code, has its own specific subjects, material resources
and commons. Its citizens are those he characterizes
as ‘geeks’ who ‘get it’; its resources, software develop-
ment, sharing and use; its commons, any medium
(paper or digital network) through which software and
the discourses enabling its use and re-use are shared,
along with the resources thus archived. His central
proposal is that geeks’ construction of a contingent,
constantly modulated software commons results in a
‘recursive public’ emerging in the building, sharing,
usage and revision of free software, a public now
considerably broadened beyond its historical origins in
shared UNIX code and commentaries, and including
explicit engagements with legal discourses, organized
advocacy, and interface or database design for archiv-
ing, revising and accessing potentially any form of
scholarly knowledge as shareable ‘source code’.
This notion of a ‘recursive public’ underwrites
what are broad claims about the cultural significance
of a movement Kelty chronicles from roughly the
early 1970s to the present. Why does free software
impact everything from email to social networking
sites, the production of ‘traditional knowledge’, music
Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
uncaused contingency, however, offers us little grip on
the means of their material transformation. The current
fascination with his work, in some quarters, may be
a symptom of impatience with a more traditional
conception of social and political change – not that
we might abruptly be other than we are, but that we
might engage with the processes whereby we have
become what we are, and might now begin to become
otherwise. A critique of metaphysical necessity and
an appeal to transfinite mathematics will not provide,
on their own, the basis upon which we might renew a
transformative materialism.
Peter Hallward
downloading, identity theft, and the licensing of HIV/
AIDS medicines? Kelty’s reasoning is that the issues
each of these disparate epistemological domains raise
were first ‘figured out and confronted’ by historical
actors in the free software movement. Free software
is never simply a matter of operational, binary code;
its historical significance is that it prioritizes getting
code developed while reflecting a shared ‘moral and
technical’ order, a social imaginary. It thus becomes
something along the lines of a historical force that
disrupts relations of power and knowledge in par-
ticular socio-technical configurations. Not all Internet
publics are ‘recursive publics’, then, not all recursive
free software publics have relied on Internet-based
distribution, nor are all ‘open software’ projects ‘free’.
Free software precisely emphasizes freedom; it’s an
interventionist mode of building and facilitating code
as a kind of socio-technical speech, a ‘collective,
technical experimentation’. So while the free software
movement approximates something like a historical
force, disrupting hierarchies of knowledge produc-
tion, Kelty’s description also gives free software the
force of a futurity – as long, that is, as software gets
programmed, shared and revised.
It makes sense, then, that in Kelty’s analyses of his
informants’ stories, the meanings of ‘technology’ or
‘software code’ change from one informant or context
to the next, and that these historical mutations in
meaning provide both the rationale for his study and
the form of his argument. Kelty’s case studies begin
with interviews with contemporary ‘geeks’, and then
57
loop back towards a historical reconstruction of the
unauthorized distribution of Xeroxed copies of Ken
Thompson’s UNIX code with accompanying commen-
tary in Australian comp-sci classrooms, discussions
of Richard Stallman’s and Linus Torvalds’s respective
contributions, finally ending with ongoing efforts to
redefine copyright licences at the Creative Commons
project, and to provide free online scholarly texts, for
potentially any conceivable academic domain, at the
Conexions project (in which academic texts are con-
sidered as source code, producing a distinct model of
online scholarly content and access from, say, projects
like Wikipedia). These comparisons are among the
most interesting materials in Two Bits. The narrative
trajectory also registers Kelty’s own entry into the
world of free software production. Two Bits begins
with his education by ‘geeks’, and closes with Kelty’s
description of his contributions to Creative Commons
and Conexions. Overall, it’s an elegant formulation.
The histories he recounts are often fascinating in
their contradictions, and his own participation in Con-
exions provides the appropriate happy ending of an
observer transformed into a participant, an evangelized
geek who ‘gets it’ and starts building. Taking cultural
anthropology beyond participant observation, Two Bits
supplies a syllogistic demonstration of the power of a
‘recursive public’ and the virtuous circle of free soft-
ware development broadened far beyond its historical
origins.
Yet can the ‘moral and technical’ order that Kelty
describes be both the origin and the output of changes
as diverse as he suggests, to the extent of informing,
for example, the logics according to which the proper-
tized outputs of global pharmaceuticals industries were
situationally de-licensed? While Kelty at times limits
the applicability of his notional ‘recursive public’,
his commitment to it, and the ways many of the
transitions he describes turn on notional or conceptual
shifts, he asserts this public’s power to encompass
entire regimes of transactions which are dependent
on far more complex historical factors. Licensing and
de-licensing of HIV/AIDS drugs arguably has had
rather more to do with conflicts around sovereignty
and territoriality, conflicting regimes of human rights
and state responsibilities, global movement by human
agents, and careful, failed or radically irresponsible
health-care policies by nation-states. It’s more likely
that such larger conflicts and dynamics inform those
of the free software movement, rather than the other
way around.
Kelty’s concluding discussion of software, law,
culture and digital publicity is timely, because many
58 Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
adherents of ‘open software’ refuse the notional
re­orientations by which he treats, say, software com-
mentary or scholarly texts as constitutive of free soft-
ware’s ‘source code’. This allows him to emphasize
vibrant publicity as one of free software’s defining
characteristics. However, I found three claims essential
to his description of the discursive dynamism and
productivity of free software, as the commons of a
recursive public, particularly troubling.
First of all, Kelty warns his reader that she’ll find
little of the conventional cultural anthropological mate-
rials and methods instantiated here. ‘Nearly everything
[relevant] is archived’, he claims, so that free software
as an anthropological resource provides its own ‘self-
documenting history’. This claim relieves Kelty of the
need to historicize and theorize important conceptual
notions informing his descriptions of free software’s
‘moral and technical’ social imaginary. For example,
his frequent use of the term ‘bootstrapping’ supports
the self-evidentiality of free software’s socio-technical
dynamism. In fact, however, ‘bootstrapping’ was a
pragmatic and theoretical term discussed by figures
like Douglas Engelbart, who theorized ‘bootstrap-
ping’ as a ‘third way’ of institutional organizational
design. Engelbart’s ideas about organizational theory
originated in part with concerns about potential Soviet
dominance in information technology. But in Two
Bits, what are often terms and concepts central to the
postwar development of US cybernetic communication
networks are embedded into Kelty’s observations as
innocent, descriptive terms.
The other side of the historical coin is that the
only expression of networked public expressivity Kelty
imagines for the history of the Internet/web are those
predicated on, or conceivably inspired by, the rhetorics
and histories of the ‘software-code-as-speech’ para-
digm which he prefers. There’s no mention of other
networking projects of the 1970s wherein activists
tended to identify social needs without regard to data
or software, configuring whatever was technologically
available around expressing those needs, and filling
in whatever was required to pull the project off with
human insight, discussion, specialized labour and
coordination – not software – in order to ‘release’
human or social ‘potential’ more in terms of an explic-
itly politically conceived mode of participation than of
a moral and technical mode of software production as
participation. Such experiments were more plentiful
than we might imagine reading many contemporary
histories of networked sociality, including this one.
And while Kelty is probably correct in locating a
particularly powerful dynamism in the free software
model, it seems crucial to me to at least wonder why
earlier alternatives no longer seem dynamic, even
viable, especially in the US context. The movement
from a much broader range of mid-twentieth-century
social projects configuring technology around social
needs, to late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century
projects configuring sociality around building software
code and negotiating legal code, may well suggest that
what Kelty is describing as a resistant, restive social
imaginary is rather a reflection of a dominant, techno-
logical and legal imaginary which has subsumed prior
and more varied historical imaginations of technics
and sociality. This question isn’t raised specifically
in Two Bits, because Kelty’s discussions often turn
discursive lions like ‘bootstrapping’ or ‘social imagi-
nary’ into rhetorical lambs; and because, if ‘nearly
everything is archived’ online which matters now, he
feels no need to consider models beyond what ‘geeks’
are willing to believe about software’s digital publicity.
Kelty’s geeks ‘get it’, and ‘it’ is a credo: affirming that
software development and the discourse of knowledge
as software define the participatory subjectivity for
those Kelty thinks are most engaged in contemporary
knowledge production, and so reaping its gains, in one
form or another.
Kelty’s characterization of the subject of free soft-
ware’s recursive public is a second concern. He clari-
fies in a substantive footnote that corporealities such as
gender, age, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on, matter
less than the credo of ‘getting it’. Yet recent surveys
of teen usage of the Internet/web contradict Kelty’s
argument that the primary public productivity of the
Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
Internet/web lies in the public distribution of knowledge
as modifiable software code. (See the Pew Internet and
American Life Project at www.pew­internet.org.) As of
2006, the most popular Internet/web activity among
online US teens was finding entertainment that they
neither created nor modified. Girls have also outpaced
boys at creating their own website content; US girls
not only post more personal photos than boys but are
more restrictive in determining who can see the photos
they post. We could hardly have a stronger statement
about the use and necessity of both non-programming
publics and categorically anti-recursive expressivity in
Internet/web-mediated sociality determined around a
factor – gender – which Kelty explicitly discounts.
The same survey shows that 79 per cent of black
teens online in the USA are likely to search for web-
based information about colleges and universities on the
Internet/web compared to 55 per cent of teens overall.
My guess is that these teens are looking for a viable
transposition in lifeworlds even as they operate a mode
of recursive sociality: the web as medium helps them
design their potential locability within physical sites of
knowledge production, sociality and growing up. The
Internet/web can’t provide this in and of itself, suggest-
ing lessons for academics and pedagogues distinct from
the distance-learning models provided by websites like
Conexions, where the contribution and revision of
‘scholarly texts’ proceeds according to the integration
of database design and legal permissions. The simplest
generalization to be made here may be that a model
of recursive publics which subsumes social imaginar-
ies into technological and jurisprudential imaginaries
59
may be undescriptive, or possibly outdated. Kelty’s
study offers much for consideration, but it collapses a
range of concerns around technicity and mediality, and
emphasizes more a technosocial than a socio-technical
mediation of knowledge production. It may well be that
recursive publics of geeks work differently, and may
be defined through exclusions rhetorically maintained
around, say, the ability to code, but in fact they are
subtly substantiated in terms appropriated from larger
gender, sexuality, national, racial, ethnic or dis/ability
imaginaries.
My third concern has to do with the responsi-
bilities of the cultural anthropologist for observation
of media or technology histories. Glaring errors of
observation about mass media history appear in the
text. For example, while summarizing his dis­covery
that geeks everywhere from New England to Berlin
can be characterized as those who ‘get it’, he refers
to a Funkturm, or radio tower, standing behind
Berlin’s Alexanderplatz station. This reference must
be to the Fernsehturm, the television tower built by
Scandin­avian engineers under contract to produce a
functional monument to the DDR’s command over
East Berlin, a marker of mediological dominion over
a contested geopolity, and a warning about its territo-
rial violation. (Berlin’s Funkturm is in fact located
in the former West Berlin, having been rebuilt there
after it was bombed in World War II. Meanwhile
Alexander­platz’s Fernsehturm has been retrofitted
for both digital television broadcast and tourism.)
Getting the data on the tower’s name and function
right would have been a minor fact check – but
such errors make the book less usable and betray
a lack of interest in local media histories. Two Bits
produces a model of software as technicized expres-
sion by and for a re­cursive digital public which can
never be verified other than in the dimensions of a
‘collective, experimental technical system’, that is,
those dimensions destined to be expressed in terms
of the Internet as ‘singularity’. But it’s the larger,
cumulative dynamics of technics transforming into
mass media which constitutes the singularity, and at
least some of the larger history of this singularity has
to be explicated with reference to the often violent
histories in which it arises.
I’d appropriate the good bits from Two Bits. The
notion of a recursive public, when kept in check, allows
for a distinction between contributing to a digital
commons and simply plagiarizing others’ work, while
the treatment of scholarly text as source code is a
provocative proposal about web-based production of
academic knowledge. Discussion of these ideas might
60 Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
prompt consideration of the ways in which technologi-
cal imaginaries and social imaginaries are routinely
overlapped in descriptions of the Internet/web. Yet
that discussion requires some additional terms and
histories to be introduced, whether from other studies
of the Internet’s development (Castells’s version had
four, conflicting governmental, technical, social and
economic imaginaries, for example) or from histori-
cal or theoretical accounts of corporeality, culture,
technics, virtuality, and so forth. For example, in
considering why Kelty insists on ‘free’, as opposed
to ‘open’ or ‘shared’, software production, one might
recall Marcuse’s 1966 preface to Eros and Civilization:
‘I hesitate to use the word – freedom – because it is
precisely in the name of freedom that crimes against
humanity are being perpetrated.’ Not only are the
histories and actualities of the production of knowl-
edge determined far beyond the limits of geeks who
challenge, say, health-care provisioning by arranging
for the outsourcing of its technical functions (with the
predictable profit-taking and disillusionment they gain,
as Kelty takes care to report), but larger questions need
to be raised about shared knowledge conceptualized as
the virtuous, private production of shareable ‘source
code’.
Two Bits collapses the distinction between the tech-
nical medium and technical relations of production,
rather than upholding a difference between them.
On this point, Bernard Stiegler’s recent rereading
of Marcuse helps explain why any virtuous logic
of recursive public knowledge, doubly articulated as
software production and intellectual property, may
embed a confusion between the technical means of
support (the medium) and labouring conditions (the
relations of production). ‘The supports and the relations
of production are in co-evolution’, Stiegler believes, but
they are primordially discordant. Kelty’s geeks’ admi-
rable capacity for conceptually redefining software
code as discourse in a virtuous and growing circle of
knowledge production at times approaches something
of a cure-all designed to fill a melancholy gap opened
where the logic of a public sphere no longer coheres.
But you can’t share or revise what sovereign govern-
ments or multinationals manage to keep secret, and it
might well be that much of the recursive use of the
Internet/web has nothing to do with the production of
verifiable knowledge as software, fact, proposition, art
or critique – at all.
Kelty’s virtuous recursive public, when he grants
it conceptual powers beyond its historical capacities,
invokes an unstated sacrifice. Raising knowledge-as-
software-as-intellectual property to the level of a cure
for what ails digital publics also subjects knowledge
production to the terms of its encoding as both software
code and as (even minimalist) law. Such knowledge,
whatever its norms or its relations to power, becomes
then doubly compounded in axiomatic complexity even
as it is reduced to being a subset of itself: the produc-
tion of software code made coextensive with digital
law. If the larger demand is to guide capital towards a
different conclusion than that it can imagine for itself,
we’ll want to wonder more carefully whether the cure
for what ails the hyperindustrial production of the
planetary is to warrant now shifting ontologies, epis-
temologies and ethics with knowledge which becomes
productive primarily at the point where knowledge can
enact the interoperability of copyright agreements and
source code.
James Tobias
Revived
Nicos Poulantzas, The Poulantzas Reader: Marxism,
Law and the State, ed. and intro. James Martin, Verso,
London and New York, 2008, vii + 437 pp., £60.00
hb., £19.99 pb., 978 1 84467 199 1 hb., 978 1 84467
200 4 pb.
Nicos Poulantzas was a virtually obligatory reference
point in theoretical discussions of the state in the
1970s and 1980s, by virtue of his debate with Ralph
Miliband in the pages of New Left Review. Yet he
seemed to have died a lingering intellectual death after
his suicide thirty years ago in 1978. By the 1990s,
there were few who referred to him positively in the
Anglophone world, and even then they often did so
gesturally. In his adopted academic homeland, France,
he was ‘disappeared’ from intellectual life along with
other so-called structural Marxists in the 1980s, and
in his native Greece he lives on primarily through
an eponymous party foundation linked to the Greek
Communist Party.
More recently, however, the work of Nicos Poulantzas
is reappearing, not only in the field of state theory
but also in terms of his more general writings in
Marxist theory and political strategy. The same trend
emerged somewhat earlier in relation to one of his
theoretical influences, Louis Althusser, where, again,
the benefits of distance have led to a rediscovery of
the theoretical power and contemporary relevance
of a much misunderstood approach to key issues in
Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
historical materialism. The Poulantzas revival can be
seen in three recent edited collections on his work
and/or that of Miliband: Paradigm Lost: State Theory
Reconsidered (2003), edited by Aronowitz and Bratsis;
Poulantzas Lesen (2006), edited by Bretthauer, Gallas,
Kannankulam and Stuetzle; and Class, Power, and the
State in Capitalist Society (2007), edited by Wetherley,
Barrow and Burnham; as well as a revised edition of
Alex Demirovic’s German-language monograph. The
present Verso Reader is another important contribution
to this resurgence of interest in his work.
James Martin has performed a valuable service in
gathering, newly translating or republishing, as well
as introducing, eighteen essays and interviews that
cover the full scope of Poulantzas’s intellectual and
political interests. The essays range from his human-
ist existentialo-Marxist early work through his more
structuralo-Marxist period to his development of a
new relational account of the state and state power
influenced not only by Marx, Engels and Gramsci
but also by Foucault and Lefebvre. As part of this
comprehensive coverage, the editor includes material
that highlights the impact of Poulantzas’s early studies
in law (a legitimate route in the Greece of his student
days, especially as his father was a well-known lawyer,
to the study of sociology and politics as well as phil-
osophy) and legal philosophy. Likewise, he includes
early essays that reveal the significance in the early
post-doctoral period of the Italian philosopher and
political leader, Antonio Gramsci. Indeed, I suspect
that it was their shared interest in Gramsci, on whom
Martin has also written extensively, that led him to
want to bring the range of Poulantzas’s work to a new
generation of readers. The influence of Gramsci is
often ignored in commentaries that connect Poulantzas
mostly to the influence of Althusserian Marxism.
The Poulantzas Reader starts with an introduction
by the editor which provides much useful background
information about political conditions in Greece when
Poulantzas was growing up, attended university and
served in the Greek navy, before moving to Germany
and then, quickly, to Paris. This is important because
it helps to locate his enduring interest in issues of
state theory, the nature of liberal bourgeois democracy,
exceptional regimes and political strategy. Martin also
summarizes Poulantzas’s later intellectual trajectory,
identifying its distinct phases – existentialo-Marxism,
so-called structural Marxism, the emergence of a
relational approach to social classes and the state
through his engagement with contemporary political
issues and strategic debates, and the final syn­thesis
and self-proclaimed completion of the Marxist theory
61
of the state. In addition, the editor provides useful
contextualization and summaries of the eighteen
individual contributions by Poulantzas selected for
this Reader. I was particularly impressed with Mar-
tin’s decision to exclude the first exchanges in the
Poulantzas–Miliband debate and to content himself
with a brief summary of what was at stake. For this
debate did much to hinder an appreciation of the true
magnitude of Poulantzas’s wide-ranging contributions
to Marxist theory. Instead he has included the final
intervention in the debate by Poulantzas, comment-
ing after an interlude of six years, on lessons learnt,
critical ontological and methodological questions, and
the importance of adopting a consistently relational
approach to the state.
As the subtitle of the Poulantzas Reader makes
clear, the essays include:
1. Various interventions at different times into con-
temporary Marxist theoretical and strategic debates
among Marxists – including the nature of Marxism
and the limitations of alternative approaches to Marxist
analysis, such as Sartrean existentialism, economism,
humanism, Althusserian structuralism, and empiri-
cism; the specificity of Marxist historical inquiry
(covering issues of periodization and class analysis as
well as the historical specificity of economic, political
and ideological class domination in the development
of the English state); the significance of Gramsci as a
theorist of hegemony; and both the nature of crises in
Marxism and the forms and extent of the contemporary
crisis of Marxism in the 1970s.
2. Early work on law – a theme to which Poulantzas
would return in one form or another throughout the
remainder of his work, whether in terms of the signifi-
cance of sovereignty, the suspension of liberal democ-
racy and constitutional government in fascism and
military dictatorships, the relation between violence
and law, the threats posed by authoritarian statism, or
the importance of human rights.
3. The question of the state – especially the histori-
cal specificity of the capitalist type of state and the
possibilities that this opens for what Gramsci called
an autonomous theory of politics; the problem of the
normal state and exceptional regimes; the growing
trend towards authoritarian statism; the distinctive
features of political (as opposed to economic or ideo-
logical) crisis and the forms of a crisis of the state;
the distinctive problems posed by comparative analysis
of states, including the dependent state in dependent
capitalism; the nature of the state in state socialism;
and, lastly, the problems of a democratic transition to
democratic socialism.
62 Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
Although I am familiar with all eighteen essays in
this Reader, it was still a pleasure to read them in one
sitting and to rediscover yet again what an exciting and
inspiring theorist Poulantzas was. In particular, these
essays reveal the extent to which, however forbiddingly
theoreticist his arguments may sometimes appear, they
were motivated by political and strategic problems
rather than simple academic concerns. In this sense, his
key theoretical transitions were never prompted exclu-
sively by theoretical questions but always grounded
in pressing political issues. This is especially evident
in his interviews and more journalistic pieces rather
than in his monographs, and it is therefore good to see
two interviews included in this Reader. In addition to
their intrinsic interest, these interviews also illuminate
Poulantzas’s understanding of the strategic significance
of his work.
Another crucial point that emerges from Martin’s
Reader is the complexity of Poulantzas’s thought. He
never followed one theoretical current single-mindedly
but always sought to synthesize different traditions
and to integrate material relevant to different fields of
social life so that he could better understand a given
theoretical problem or a specific conjuncture. In this
sense, his theoretical work cannot be reduced to the
successive influences of Sartre, Gramsci, Althusser or
Foucault; there is always a distinctive Poulantzasian
appropriation of these great thinkers, shaped by his
continuing concern with ‘an autonomous science of
politics’ and the specificity of the capitalist type of
state. At the same time these essays reveal Poulant-
zas’s growing awareness of the dangers of ‘politicism’
– that is, a one-sided concern with the capitalist
type of state to the neglect of its embedding within
a capitalist social formation, its articulation with the
social relations of capitalist production, and its over­
determination of other types of social relation. This
can be seen in the increasing reintegration of general
and specific issues of political economy, class relations,
the mental–manual division of labour, the periodiza-
tion of capitalism, internationalization, new forms of
state intervention in the economy, the incompress-
ibility of economic crisis tendencies, and the political
mediation of economic crisis-tendencies and struggles
through political struggles conducted in and through
the institutional materiality of the state. For it was only
when Poulantzas returned from the state as a distinc-
tive theoretical object to a more general concern with
political economy that he could produce his original
synthesis and plausibly claim to have completed the
Marxist theory of the state.
Bob Jessop

Tools of thought
Peg Rawes, Space, Geometry and Aesthetics: Through
Kant and towards Deleuze, Palgrave Macmillan,
London and New York, 2008. 256 pp., £45.00 hb.,
978 0 230 55291 3.
Geometry is typically associated with the principles
of ‘scientific’ exactitude and management of space,
as well as with the kind of ‘black-boxed’ efficacy and
mastery that characterize the discipline in its absolute
or universal modality as quintessential exemplar of
apodictic knowledge. If applied geometry is recogniz-
able by the tools of compass and the ruler, it is such
tools which, specifically in their practical deployment,
famously serve Kant in making the distinction, in the
Critique of Judgement, between a priori imagination
and reflective judgement, and between geometrical
construction and the higher geometry. For Peg Rawes,
however, it is Kant’s dalliance with the basic tools of
geometry itself that is, in its way, most telling. In the
philosopher’s very attention to these utilities lies the
basis of the thesis developed in her book.
‘We are at a moment, I believe, when our experi-
ence of the world is less that of a long life devel-
oping through time than that of a network that
connects points and intersects with its own skein.’
This diagnosis of Foucault resonates with the general
proposal made in Space, Geometry and Aesthetics.
Geometry is given back to the body, or the body back
to geometry – nowhere more so than in Husserl’s
assertion, cited by Rawes, that, rather than being an
instance of irrefutable reason, geometry is a ‘living
science’, which is constituted by an internal genetic
or ‘living “tradition”’.
If this explains the book’s main title, Rawes’s sub-
title, Through Kant and towards Deleuze, also proves
to be an accurate description of her concerns, albeit in
what would seem, initially, to be a more perverse way.
For while we get plenty of Kant, we encounter almost
no direct discussion of Deleuze at all. The majority of
the references to his work appear in footnotes, notably
to chapters 3 and 4, and we only ever get the sense that
he is indeed on the horizon (a moot term which is itself
subject to extended exegesis in chapter 6). Accurate
though it may be, then, it does lead one to ponder
the apparently idiosyncratic inclusion of Deleuze’s
name here. Closer inspection reveals that this comes
down to the author’s need to proclaim the influence
on her methodology of Deleuze’s idea of a ‘minor’
tradition. In Deleuze’s case, this tradition is made up
of Hume–Spinoza–Nietzsche; in Rawes’s case, it is
Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
Proclus and forgotten trajectories of Kant in aesthetic
geometric ‘sense reason’, which are ‘to be traced out
of the Critique of Pure Reason and embodied in the
figure of the reflective subject in the later Critique of
Judgement’.
Rawes, in this context (as frequently elsewhere in
the book), explicitly invokes the figure of anamnesis,
exemplified by her assertion that Kant repeats part of
Plato’s Meno – namely the famous Socratic example
of the slave boy with intuitive geometric understanding
– and that Proclus, in assigning ‘the imagination to
a position of mediation between the intelligible and
sensible realms’, is a precursor to the third Critique.
The first two chapters make a strong case, on this basis,
for revealing a minor tradition of geometric thought
within, and in some senses against, philosophy, and
certainly against orthodox accounts of the functioning
of geometry within the dominant tradition. The inspi-
ration for chapter 2 on Proclus, ‘Folding–Unfolding’, is
undeniably Deleuzean, and The Fold is clearly not far
from the author’s mind at this juncture, as well as when
she moves towards a detailed engagement with the dis-
tinct modalities of expression in Spinoza and Leibniz,
as these are articulated, in turn, in chapters 4 (‘Pas-
sages’) and 5 (‘Plenums’). In her innovative chapter on
Spinoza, Rawes argues that the term ‘passages’ names
the quality of Spinoza’s Ethics, most notably in the
Scholia. These passages have a function beyond that
of a discursive demonstration of a geometric method,
and entail, rather, a performative ‘figurational’ strategy.
The uniqueness of Leibniz’s geometric method, Rawes
proposes, is, by contrast, his conception of the plenum
as a topological figure enabling the paradoxical border
of monadic interior and exterior (which is perhaps
most succinctly proposed in the late concept of the
‘vinculum substantiale’, not discussed here) ‘rather
than a finite limit’ between them. Leibniz’s role in
producing the conditions for a thought of a properly
immanent conception of temporality thus prepares the
way for the chapter on Bergson’s more emphatically
topological geometric method. For Rawes, Bergson’s
specific contribution to the history of sense-reason
arises from the fact that ‘duration produces topologi-
cal relations between philosophy and the subject that
dramatically reconfigure the nature of science, phil-
osophy and life’.
The Deleuze towards whom the book is steering is
not therefore, as the author (with welcome subtlety)
demonstrates, to be located at the end of a career, from
Proclus to Husserl, of the concept of ‘sense-reason’.
The inclusion of a final chapter on Husserl, in place
of the Deleuze which the book is still supposedly
63
moving towards, is in fact to be explained rather by
elements of Husserl’s thought which, Rawes argues
(largely in footnotes), are compatible with Deleuze.
And it is, arguably, true that there is indeed more of
an affinity between the two philosophers than might
commonly be expected, particularly in their respective
concepts of sense (the convergence being most obvious
in Deleuze’s 1969 book Logic of Sense itself).
Rawes, who is a lecturer at the Bartlett School
of Architecture in London, writes with a keen eye
for connections between architectural design, the
visual arts and geometrical minor philosophy (in this
regard, there is an especially rewarding paragraph
on the importance of drawing as ‘postulate’ rather
than ‘axiom’ in Proclus on page 56). That intention
is explicitly announced in her introduction, and the
difficult task of giving palpable coordinates to an
apparently ineffable and abstract domain allows the
book to participate in potentially fruitful exchange
with recent books by Rajchman, Massumi, Grosz and
Goetz, each of whom has participated in an engage-
ment with space and/or architecture in the movement
either to or from a ‘Deleuzean’ aesthetics. Deleuze,
then, is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in
particular in this richly suggestive and ceaselessly
inventive book – like a kind of wind, as he himself
liked to characterize Spinoza’s Ethics.
Garin Dowd
Life less unexamined
Alastair Morgan, Adorno’s Concept of Life, Continuum,
London and New York, 2007. xi + 163 pp., £65.00 hb.,
978 0 826 49613 3.
Given that Adorno’s attitude towards Lebens­philosophie
could be described as, at best, ambivalent, the attempt
to construct a philosophy of life out of his work might
seem a perversely unrewarding task – a difficulty
exacerbated by the fact that, as Morgan acknowledges,
where Adorno does deploy a concept of life it is ‘not an
emphatic concept of life but damaged life as the form
of life within capitalism’. Morgan states that his aim is
to ‘defend Adorno’s dialectical philosophy as a means
of articulating a concept of life that evades either a
biological reductionism or the hypostasization of life as
a process beyond the human that requires the dissolu-
tion of the human subject’. Yet the attempt to construct
a constellation of the different uses of concepts of life
within his work is not simply an interesting exercise
64 Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
for scholars of Adorno. Such a constellation has a
profound relevance today – one which Morgan makes
present throughout the book.
Central to Morgan’s argument is Auschwitz, an
event which, for Adorno, ‘changes the very nature of
any affirmative attempt at thinking the absolute, the
core of the metaphysical tradition’. It is one thing to
make this assertion, another carefully to consider the
nature of this change: Auschwitz represents not only
the logical consequence of the dominance of identity
thinking, but also a paralysis that changes – or, more
specifically, limits – how we are able to think. As such,
it is not a culmination but a ‘caesura which reveals a
latent meaning in all that has gone before’. Morgan
addresses the difficulty of accounting for the damage
done to life from a subject-position that is itself affected
by this damage, considering not only the consequences
of suffering for a conception of the subject based on
‘a body that thinks’, but also the glimpses, within
damaged life, of life as it might be lived. These occur
most prominently within aesthetic experience, which
Morgan initially approaches through discussion of
Aesthetic Theory, and in particular Adorno’s account
of the ‘shudder’: a phenomenon that consists in the
subject’s recognition, in contemplation of an artwork,
of its own limitedness, which results in a process of
self-forgetting and disappearing into the work. Such
experience constitutes a ‘trace of “life” in an emphatic
sense, life in the sense of a reconciled relation between
subject and object that is non-subsumptive’. This is,
however, not a foundational experience, but a ‘reveal-
ing outcome of a process of experience’, a speculative
immediacy that represents a potential. The theme is
further developed in the five ‘figures of exhaustion’ set
out towards the book’s end, in which Morgan analyses
the dissolution of subjectivity in Adornian accounts
of the experience of literature and music as mimetic
rationality opens up the possibility of reconciliation.
This dissolution consists in the ‘recognition of life as
deadened’, which in turn produces a sense of loss, con-
fronting the horror of the mimesis of deadened life.
If I have a major complaint regarding Adorno’s
Concept of Life it is that it sometimes reads as if
other thinkers have been brought in only so as to
plug, as it were, the gaps in Adorno’s thought. At
times this danger is acknowledged, as is the case with
the presentation of John Dewey’s account of aesthetic
experience. But at other points Morgan seems to move,
as if seamlessly, between sources as if they constitute
parts of a single oeuvre split between two authors. This
is most obviously the case in the material discussing
Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life. It is claimed
that Agamben has ‘developed Adorno’s thinking’, or
that he ‘articulates Adorno’s thought’, with hardly a
word exploring the broader nature of the relationship
between their work, or with more than a glancing
acknowledgement of the potential problems posed
by Agamben’s Foucauldian and Heideggerian influ-
ences. Instead, what is articulated is more a fleeting
juxtaposition than a detailed comparative study. This
is illuminating for Adorno’s texts, but at the same
time slightly unsatisfying, as the combination seems
almost overly felicitous. Indeed, perhaps the most
disappointing aspect of Morgan’s study is that the sec-
tions addressing thinkers other than Adorno – among
them figures as diverse as Agamben, Dewey, Michel
Henry, John McDowell and Emmanuel Levinas – often
consist of little more than presentations of aspects
of their thought. What is said is always astute and a
relevant point of comparison, but they are not on the
whole treated with either the critical attention or the
intricacy of response afforded to the writings of either
Adorno or his direct critics.
This differs starkly from Morgan’s discussions of
thinkers to whom Adorno makes more explicit refer-
ence, whether as an acknowledgement of influence
or as an unambiguous critique. Adorno’s treatments
of Nietzsche, Freud, Lukács, Husserl and Heidegger
are presented adroitly so as to draw out the points of
interest for the understanding of his concept of life.
This adeptness is perhaps at its most visible in the
discussions of the work of Walter Benjamin, perhaps
unsurprisingly given that Adorno’s explicit engagement
with Benjamin’s work, and the lengthy correspondence
between them, make it considerably easier to trace both
lines of influence and points of disagreement. He not
only recounts which of Adorno’s arguments have their
origins in Benjamin’s thought, but also uses points
of influence and subtle disagreement to illuminate
the nuances of these arguments – whether through
Adorno’s insistence, in relation to Benjamin’s essay on
the artwork, that ‘the liquidation of subjectivity in the
reception of film cannot be recuperated in terms of a
subjective experience, because it has no experience as
Erfahrung to rely on’, or through the observation, in
relation to Adorno’s account of the dialectical image,
that even metaphysical experience is mediated between
subject and object, and necessarily contains an inelimi-
nable material moment.
Andrew Bowie has claimed that scholarly work on
Adorno tends either to seek to demonstrate, despite the
important insights within his work, that his project as a
whole is fundamentally flawed, or to attempt to defend
the indefensible. Morgan’s study avoids both of these
Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
pitfalls, advancing an attentive reading of Adorno’s
thought that is neither a refutation nor an unthinking
defence of every one of his claims. Rather it offers an
argument constructed through his works, investigating,
developing and interrogating a concept of life around,
and through, his writings on diverse subjects. It not
only provides a diagnosis of some of the problems that
we face in damaged life, but also presents possibilities
of thinking ways out of it.
Josh Robinson
Sharing
Nick Hewlett, Badiou, Balibar, Rancière: Re-thinking
Emancipation, Continuum, London and New York,
2007. 208 pp., £65.00 hb., 978 0 826 49861 8.
Todd May, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière:
Creating Equality, Penn State University Press and
Edinburgh University Press, University Park PA and
Edinburgh, 2008. 224 pp., £60.00 hb., £18.99 pb., 978
0 271 03449 2 hb., 978 0 271 03450 8 pb.
These two new books addressing the work of Jacques
Rancière exemplify opposing strategies for introducing
a philosopher’s thought: one focusing on the context
of emergence in order to explain its motivations and
shortcomings, the other obviating that context and
developing the thought into territories its author does
not. Each book also exhibits effects typical of its
strategy. In the case of Hewlett’s Badiou, Balibar,
Rancière, the initial accessibility of the contextual
approach runs into difficulties in engaging the thought
on the level it demands. In May’s Political Thought of
Jacques Rancière, the possible hermeticism of a ‘theo-
retical’ approach nonetheless ultimately enables a criti-
cal expansion of the philosopher’s initial proposal.
Badiou, Balibar, Rancière introduces its three
French philosophers by placing them within ‘the intel-
lectual and political tradition which embraces the
notion of human emancipation’. It provides a brief
and clear presentation of their work (though some-
times inaccurate, as when it asserts the individual
character of Rancière’s subject or its pre-existence to
the political ‘event’), explaining the context in which
it originated and, on that basis, it identifies perceived
limitations in their theories. May’s text, rather than
presenting Rancière’s political thought (as its title
suggests), elaborates a model of democratic politics
and a notion of active equality by taking as its starting
point Rancière’s discussion of politics, which it opposes
65
to liberal political theory and aligns with anarchism.
Managing to overcome the oddness of relating these
three disparate tendencies (liberalism, anarchism
and Rancière), it develops a functioning model of
democratic politics, through a critical engagement with
Rancière’s thought. Hewlett, on the other hand, can
only provide an introduction that ultimately strips the
three philosophers he discusses of the emancipatory
potential he identifies in them.
Despite celebrating Badiou, Balibar and Rancière
as ‘the most engaged philosophy since Sartre and
Althusser’, Hewlett identifies their Althusserian origins
and the intellectual and political situation in France
since the 1980s as part of the reason why the three
of them fail in delivering a satisfactory model of
political emancipation. Their philosophies necessarily
belong to their time and biography, of which they are
symptomatic; their positions, as responses to the stag-
nation of the Left in the face of a liberal conception
of democracy, become part of the diagnostic of such
stagnation. This failure is further identified by Hewlett
as a result of a certain degree of theoreticism – a lack
of consideration of ‘the rigours of the material world’
due to their academic position; a criticism that echoes
the one E.P. Thompson made of Althusser. Accord-
ing to Hewlett, the insufficient reference that their
works make to the material world results in abstract
constructions that are unable to account for or provide
models for emancipatory practice. Additionally, for
Hewlett, Badiou’s ‘isolationist purism’ (and presumably
also Rancière’s), manifested in his refusal to engage
with ‘ordinary activists’, results in a position that is
‘unrealistic’ rather than ‘politically appropriate’. This
empiricist critique seems to locate access to the real
in the descriptive abilities of the social sciences and
the practical wisdom of the seasoned activist, though
it is unclear whether for Hewlett this can also happen
in a third way – through the intuition of acting politi-
cal subjects. In any case, there is a privileging of an
experiential element as the guarantor of the propriety
of both theory and practice.
Rancière himself has often warned against socio-
logical, historiographic or biographical accounts of
political events and cultural products, as their attempt
to explain simultaneously determines and delimits
what is possible within politics or culture. His warning
is obviously not to be taken as a prohibition against
reconstructing his own thought in those terms, but
rather perhaps as a simple word of caution. This
caution tries to pre-empt not only determinism, but
also the interpretive schemas that are implied by a
historical/biographical reading, and the demands that
66 Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
are made on their grounds. In Hewlett’s assessment of
Badiou, Balibar and Rancière, the presuppositions of
the biographical approach become apparent: first, the
demand for coherence between an author’s theories and
his or her life (a coherence that, for different reasons,
is not present in any of the three); and second, an idea
of propriety based on a conception of theory as the
suspicious opposite of the real world and the practices
that take place within it.
However, in Rancière’s work, this opposition
between the abstraction of theory and the rigours of
the real is not tenable. His philosophy starts with the
recognition of practices – in which there are always
both discursive and extra-discursive elements – and
continues with an attempt to understand the world in a
way that can contain those practices and, importantly,
allow for new ones. In order to allow for new practices
(and not only ‘appropriate’ ones), theory must identify
possible obstructions to their emergence, and conceive
of a scenario where obstacles are minimized. This
version of Rancière’s thought is the one that May takes
up in his book.
May starts with an account of the liberal and
libertarian political theories of John Rawls, Robert
Nozick and Amartya Sen. He continues by opposing
to them a notion of active equality based on Rancière’s
model of democracy, which he then associates with
Peter Kropotkin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail
Bakunin’s communist anarchism. Here the counter-
intuitive confrontation of three disparate traditions
allows May to illuminate Rancière’s thought, test it in
specific political contexts, question some of his conclu-
sions, and propose some departures. The key departure
– an ethical version of Rancière’s democratic politics
– is, however, inconsistent with Rancière’s conception
of politics. May constructs this ethical reading around
the notions of sharing and trust, which he obtains
through the partial translation of Rancière’s partage
as ‘sharing’ (rather than the couple ‘share/divide’ that
Rancière insists on) and a mistranslation of confiant as
‘trusting’ (rather than, as the original context demands,
‘confident’). For Rancière, any attempt to define a
specific attitude and behaviour as the model for politics
is also an attempt to keep politics from happening.
So, although May’s identification of ethical behaviour
as essential to the process of political subjectivation
responds to the emancipatory goal that, as Hewlett
points out, is at the heart of Rancière’s philosophy,
it responds in a way that, by trying to consolidate
emancipation, creates obstacles to it.
Pablo Lafuente
Letters
Critical views of South Africa
In ‘Beware Electocrats: Naomi Klein on South Africa’
(the Commentary in RP 150, July–August 2008),
Ronald Suresh Roberts plays sophist with your readers.
First, Klein’s Shock Doctrine chapter can and should
be read directly. Second, Roberts makes repeated inter-
pretive mistakes. If, as he claims, the African National
Congress (ANC) government ‘successfully litigated
against intellectual property rights that had stymied
cheap generic antiretrovirals’, why did Mbeki get away
with AIDS denialism for so long, and why did he fight
(in the country’s highest court) against the Treatment
Action Campaign’s insistence on making those medi-
cines available to millions who need them?
If, as Roberts claims, the ANC supports dramatic
land reform, why has less than 5 per cent of available
land been redistributed and why was large-scale land
expropriation removed from the party’s legislative
agenda in August 2008?
If, as he claims, the ANC ‘privatized nothing stra-
tegic other than the telephone company’, why was
a $1 billion apparatus (the Municipal Infrastructure
Investment Unit) established at the Development
Bank of Southern Africa with World Bank and US
AID support, readily embraced by the water ministry
Roberts worked for, specifically to promote public–
private partnerships?
In reality, Mbeki’s team tried to privatize a great
deal – Telkom, two state airlines, electricity generation
capacity, toll roads, a middle-class resort network, and
many municipal services (water, bus transport, rubbish,
electricity) – and in all cases, any objective observer
would declare the result a failure.
Roberts is just as weak on macroeconomics, such as
the feared ‘cash crunch that [apartheid-era, inherited]
debt repudiation would entail as retaliating banks
shut down credit lines’. Argentina in 2002–03 proves
otherwise, and in any case South Africa did not expand
its foreign debt much after 1994, while mobilization
of domestic resources could have been accomplished
with prescribed asset requirements on local financiers,
a well-tested strategy.
Roberts also reports that currency controls were
‘thick on the ground, a result of the apartheid regime’s
earlier battles with capital flight’, without revealing
that the ANC lifted them in 1995 and 1999, allowing
rich whites and big capital to permanently expatriate
Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
apartheid-era loot, leaving South Africa with one of the
world’s highest current account deficits today.
Roberts mocks Klein for citing a ‘supposedly’ con-
straining IMF loan in 1993; indeed, explicit conditions
included wage restraint and shrinkage of the fiscal debt
ratio. The IMF also compelled Mandela to reappoint
the apartheid-era finance minister and central bank
governor in May 1994.
Third, politically, Roberts is a talk-left apologist for
a walk-right neoliberal neo-nationalist regime that has,
remarkably, worsened inequality, unemployment and the
environment since 1994. Thus as ‘a direct participant’
in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission debates,
Roberts ‘explicitly advocated a systematic focus and
rejected precisely the narrow torture-based approach
that Klein criticizes’ – but neglects to mention that he
obviously failed, leaving the Commission absent in the
struggle to rectify structural apartheid-caused inequal-
ity through reparations demands upon big capital.
In this struggle, Mbeki tellingly takes the side of
the Bush, Brown and Merkel regimes, alongside three
dozen corporations currently being sued for apartheid-
era profiteering under the US Alien Tort Claims Act.
Fourth, descending to trivial personal insult, Roberts
dismisses Klein as ‘stubbornly Orientalist’. And,
perhaps flowing from the rough treatment Percy Ngo-
nyama and I gave his Mbeki biography (www.nu.ac.za/
ccs/default.asp?2,40,3,1255), Roberts smears the Centre
for Civil Society (CCS), which hosted Klein when
she was drafting the South Africa chapter of Shock
Doctrine. Roberts claims that CCS ‘at times accepted
money from USAID’ (yes, once, for an activist-training
project in 2002–03) but ignores the well-known fact
that USAID defunded CCS soon after the then-director,
Adam Habib, opposed the war on Iraq – and was later
branded a ‘terrorist’ and banned from entry into the
USA. Ford has not extended new funding to CCS since
the time I arrived there in late 2004. Similar rebuttals
can be offered regarding William Mervin Gumede, a
far more reliable Mbeki watcher (according to Roberts,
merely Klein’s ‘black native informant’).
With less status quo bias, Roberts could put his
considerable talents to better use.
Patrick Bond
Director, University of KwaZulu–Natal
Centre for Civil Society
67
Reply to Bond
When I wrote that ‘Klein is content to recycle the by contrast, insisted that native submissiveness is a
impressions of a small and like-minded clique of ana- central trope of imperialism’s own propaganda (hence
lysts’ like Patrick Bond, I only guessed at what Bond imperialism’s infamously premature ‘Mission Accom-
confirms: his Centre for Civil Society (CCS) indeed plished’ banner in Iraq). Despite her anti-imperialist
‘hosted Klein when she was drafting the South Africa intentions, Klein’s account converges with empire’s
chapter of Shock Doctrine’. Klein’s uncharacteristically own story about itself.
weak South Africa chapter is a casualty of ideological I am a ‘talk-left apologist for a walk-right neo-
capture. liberal neo-nationalist regime’ (phew!). Posturing as
Bond evades my central argument: in a book that ‘independent’ critic, Bond sniffs that I ‘worked for’
seems to celebrate the wills of electorates, Klein a government ministry. Actually, I was the minister’s
strangely portrays electorates as susceptible to coma- personally appointed counterweight to, and critic of,
inducing ‘shocks’ that paralyse their wills. He sallies departmentally generated advice.
forth instead on matters of detail, but argues principally And here, caught red-handed in bad faith, is how
by non sequitur. That the democratic government ‘suc- Bond presented himself at a seminar on 3 September
cessfully litigated against intellectual property rights 2008, where he again attacked my RP commentary
that had stymied cheap generic antiretrovirals’ is not and, for that different audience, bolstered his cred-
an ‘interpretive mistake’ but a fact easily verifiable ibility thus: ‘I also worked for the water minister, as a
at the Pretoria High Court (see, e.g., http://academic. budget advisor, at exactly the same time as [Roberts].’
udayton.edu/health/06world/africa01.htm). Bond’s error (Bond’s own seminar notes are at www.nu.ac.za/ccs/
is astonishing. default.asp?2,68,3,1597). Bond’s cynical gyrations do
South Africa’s property clause expressly contem- Klein no good.
plates and encourages land reform. Klein specifically
Ronald Suresh Roberts
wrote the opposite. Dodging what I wrote, Bond attri-
butes to me the ill-defined suggestion that the ANC
‘supports dramatic land reform’ (which incidentally Editorial note  Roberts’s RP Commentary misattributed
Canadian citizenship to Patrick Bond as a result of an in-
it does, but that was not my point about Klein’s house error, for which the author bears no responsibility.
constitutional carelessness). Bond again hopes for a
careless readership when he writes that Mbeki’s team
‘tried’ to privatize lots. Klein of course wrote that the
ANC in fact privatized massively. This fake ‘fact’ but-
tresses her entire ‘shock’ thesis. On debt cancellation,
exchange controls, the pre-democracy IMF loan and
the Truth Commission Bond similarly rewrites what I
wrote. In each case he retreats from Klein’s specifics,
which I disputed.
Klein, I wrote, produces ‘well-meaning and yet stub-
bornly Orientalist representations of African politics’.
Bond rewrites: ‘descending to trivial personal insult,
Roberts dismisses Klein as “stubbornly Orientalist”’.
The point is fundamental, not trivial or personal.
‘With the Karl Marx epigraph at the front of his
Orientalism (“They cannot represent themselves, they
must be represented”) Edward Said meant to caution
not only against callow imperialists but also against
benignly orientalist protectors who trample upon native
political agency in the most well-meaning ways.’ Those
words opened my commentary. Klein argues that
shock jockeys in various times and places succeeded
in reducing their victims to political passivity. Said,

68 Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)