Category: Volume 32 – Number 1 – September 2021

Bret Benjamin is Associate Professor of English at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). Author of Invested Interests: Capital, Culture, and the World Bank (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Benjamin teaches courses in Marx and Marxist theory, postcolonial studies, and globalization studies.  He is co-President (with Ericka Beckman and Neil Larsen) of the Marxist Literary Group, and sits on the editorial board of its journal Mediations.  In addition to his primary faculty appointment in upstate New York, he has held temporary teaching positions at Moscow State University in Russia and the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad, India. 

Christopher Chamberlin is a Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI) in Berlin. He holds a Ph.D. in Culture and Theory from the University of California, Irvine with emphases in Feminism and Critical Theory. From 2018 to 2020, he was the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of California, Berkeley. His research examines the history and theory of the antiracist traditions of clinical psychoanalysis.  He serves as an editor for Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, and the European Journal of Psychoanalysis.

Britton Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. Primarily focused on English and German modernism and informed by deconstruction and psychoanalysis, his research explores the wounds left in language—what Paul Celan would call enrichment—in the wake of various events of violence on multiple scales, from the individual to world historical. He reads formal experiments necessitated by trauma to show that they can provide ways of being hopefully together in a world that can so often seem without hope.

Matthew Flisfeder is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media (2021), Postmodern Theory and Blade Runner (2017), and The Symbolic, The Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film (2012).

A. Kiarina Kordela is Professor of German & Director of the Critical Theory Program at Macalester College. She works on philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis, social and political theory, and biopolitics. She is the author of Epistemontology in Spinoza-Marx-Freud-Lacan: The (Bio)Power of Structure (Routledge, 2018), Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology (SUNY Press, 2013), and Surplus: Spinoza, Lacan (SUNY Press, 2007), andthe co-editor of Spinoza’s Authority: Volume 1: Resistance and Power in Ethics, and Volume 2: Resistance and Power in Political Treatises (both: Bloomsbury, 2018), and Freedom and Confinement in Modernity: Kafka’s Cages (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011), as well as numerous articles in collections and journals.

Shmuel Lederman is a Research Fellow at the Weiss-Livnat Center for Holocaust Research and Education. He teaches at the University of Haifa and at the Open University of Israel. His first book, Hannah Arendt and Participatory Democracy: A People’s Utopia, was published in 2019 by Palgrave Macmillan. 

John Mowitt holds the Leadership Chair in the Critical Humanities at the University of Leeds. His publications range over the fields of culture, politics, and theory. In 2008 he collaborated with the composer Jarrod Fowler to transfigure his book Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking from print to a sonic text/performance, “Percussion” as Percussion.  His Radio: Essays in Bad Reception and Sounds: The Ambient Humanities appeared from the University of California Press, in 2011 and 2015 respectively.  His most recent book, Offering Theory: Reading in Sociography, appeared from Anthem Press earlier this year. In addition, he is a senior co-editor of the journal Cultural Critique.

Shmuel Lederman (bio)

A review of Gaffney, Jennifer. Political Loneliness: Modern Liberal Subjects in Hiding.Rowman & Littlefield, 2020.

Donald Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States was met with consternation and often horror at home and around the world. To make sense of the nonsensical, many turned to books that seemed to offer relevant insights, including George Orwell’s 1984 and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. That people turned to books about the rise and dynamics of totalitarian movements and regimes says much about how they understood Trump’s election. For political scientists, the appropriate term to explain his election would rather be populism, or authoritarian populism. This places Trump in a familiar lineage of political figures who manage to come to power and threaten seemingly well-entrenched democratic institutions and liberal values through their demonization of immigrants, refugees, and certain ethnic and religious groups; their exclusive claims to speak in the name of the vague entity called “the people”; and their outbursts against corrupt elites, lying media, and disloyal opposition. But for many “ordinary” citizens and quite a few political theorists, perhaps not without reason, Trump’s rise meant something more, something to be understood through the illuminating if frightening insights of intellectuals like Orwell and Arendt.

Jennifer Gaffney’s book on political loneliness shows the insight that can be drawn from a careful and erudite reading of some of the 20^th century’s most provocative thinkers, first and foremost Arendt. Gaffney begins with a simple but far-reaching observation: “Never before have we been so interconnected, so accessible to one another. . . . And yet . . . we have never before been so lonely” (1). Gaffney attempts to understand and shed light on this peculiar loneliness and its implications. Readers of Arendt will recognize the idea that modern loneliness, due in part to the loss of public spaces where individuals could converse and participate in politics, is an important precondition for the rise of totalitarian movements. These movements appeal to the atomized, alienated masses by convincing them that the complicated world around them can be explained by a single premise, be it the perennial struggle of races or the history of class warfare. In joining the totalitarian movement, these lonely individuals see themselves not only as part of something bigger but also as facilitating the progress of history itself. The lonely individual can get lost—and thereby find himself—both in the crowd and in the sweep of history. Gaffney’s major contribution is her insistence that the regime we often identify as totalitarianism’s exact opposite—liberal democracy—prepares the ground for totalitarian thought and movements by isolating people from each other (147). She argues that the stark differences between these forms of political regimes should not obscure the fact that

the political structures that we have inherited from the liberal tradition—such as the emphasis on representation rather than deliberation, the anonymity of the vote, and the priority placed on securing and expanding the right to pursue private self-interest—have eroded the space of politics, leaving even those endowed with the full rights of liberal citizenship hidden from one another, unable to see themselves as belonging to a common world. (4)

Gaffney notes correctly that when thinking about the challenge posed by Arendt’s analysis of the elements that “crystallized” into totalitarianism, commentators tend to stress Arendt’s “right to have rights,” namely the fundamental right to belong to a political community, which is the only guarantee for human rights in the current “age of statelessness.” Gaffney points out that, while certainly an important Arendtian insight, this focus obscures Arendt’s more radical critique of the liberal tradition and its institutions (149). From a perspective critical of liberal democracy, the experience of alienation, exile, and abandonment characteristic of statelessness is but an extreme version of the basic loneliness that characterizes also citizens in the modern world (144). If we genuinely try to think with Arendt about our contemporary world, then we must consider not only the need to guarantee citizenship but also the need to guarantee a new kind of citizenship that would “return lonely individuals to themselves, the world, and others” (149) by allowing citizens to participate in a public space of appearance in which they could “see themselves and those around them in the fullness of their humanity” (150).

Gaffney clarifies that Arendt’s space of appearance is not about expressivity for the individual who is otherwise “hidden,” but about challenging the taken-for-granted conception of the individual as a “self-contained, self-interested subject that is endowed with pre-given, inalienable rights and liberties” (189). Indeed, Arendt sees this very conception in part as a result of the forgetfulness of “the political”— the unique experience of action and speech in the public sphere as equal decision-makers—and traces this forgetfulness to the beginning of political thought (108). For Arendt, Gaffney explains, the subject is always already constituted by others with whom they share the world, and their understanding of reality itself depends on the extent of their engagement with the unique perspectives of others about the common world (190). Gaffney convincingly shows that Arendt’s analysis is in many ways even truer today than it was when she wrote it. Citizens in liberal societies, Gaffney points out, struggle “not simply to converse, but even to see themselves as belonging to the same reality” (82). In today’s political discourse—about global warming or COVID, for example—even the most basic facts about the world (not to mention how to interpret them and what to do to address the challenges they pose) are contested by certain parties and movements, whether for political reasons or because they are true believers. Gaffney notes how our easy access to each other through social networks creates echo chambers rather than spaces for genuine conversation to the extent that we “barely recognize the humanity of those whose worldviews differ from our own” (82).

Gaffney reads the “hidden” Trump supporter who surprised so many in the 2016 elections through Arendt’s metaphor of the light that the public sphere sheds on those who participate in it and the darkness and “hiddenness” that characterize the private sphere:

[T]he very language of hiddenness points to a broader failure within our society to create robust political spaces for the appearance of speech and action. In the absence of such spaces, we tend to retreat into the lamplight of the private, creating echo chambers for ourselves that leave us hidden from one another. (181)

This isolation, which is accompanied by an extremely one-sided perspective on reality and an often Schmittian “friend-enemy” dichotomy between left and right, liberals and conservatives, nationals and foreigners, creates fertile ground for far-right movements. Using Arendt’s analysis in Origins, Gaffney suggests that Trump’s ability to build on these tendencies to amplify the echo chambers of the right allowed him to mobilize previously apolitical, slumbering majorities in key states (180).

Gaffney does not ignore other crucial factors that led to Trump’s election, including issues of race, gender, and class (160). As so much has been written about these issues, she is justified in focusing on loneliness. The question remains, however, whether the kind of loneliness she analyzes has the political significance she attributes to it. For cultural and political critics, there is a certain appeal to her interpretation because it points to a fundamental problem in the very politeia in which we live. But stressing loneliness as a significant factor behind phenomena like the rise of far-right movements or the inability to dialogue across political differences may run the risk of keeping the “hidden” Trump supporter hidden still, so it is worth raising some questions about it.

For example, Trump enjoyed broad support among Evangelicals. Whatever we think about these supporters, is loneliness the attribute that best describes them? Deep commitment to a cultural, religious, and political cause, and a sense of being a part a broad movement behind this cause, seems more accurate. Something similar, I think, can be said about many others in the Trump camp. If in-depth accounts such as Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in their Own Land paint an accurate picture, they are motivated by a strong sense of threat to their most fundamental cultural, social, and religious beliefs, and by a sense of a broad movement of which they are a part and which Trump represented. For the most part, they are rebels with a cause, highly politicized to the extent that even the most seemingly simple and factual actions, such as wearing masks against a highly contagious, airborne disease, become political issues. Have they been lonely? It is obviously hard to tell, but it seems likely that many of them felt ignored, sidelined, or excommunicated by the liberal discourse that rules the mainstream media. They might well have felt they were being actively hidden by the “system” or the “establishment” and found in Trump (or in Fox News) an outlet that finally brought their point of view to the fore and acted on it. But were they lonely in the sense that they felt alienated from the world, atomized, and isolated? I’m not so sure. There is a strong sense of solidarity and meaning in feeling marginalized by the political and cultural establishment, evident, for example, in the way that more radical progressives morphed into an incredibly energetic movement around Bernie Sanders. To reiterate, this is just to raise questions about an argument that I find convincing overall, at least as far as many citizens in contemporary liberal democracies are concerned.     

Whatever political significance we attach to loneliness, if liberal democracy itself lays the ground for totalitarianism by de-politicizing the polity and the citizens themselves, then the way out is to turn back to “the political” and provide citizens with what Arendt called “spaces of appearance.” While Arendt scholars often interpret the concept as allowing for various kinds of public spaces, to Gaffney’s credit, she recognizes that Arendt means this space quite literally, as one in which citizens appear to each other directly, face to face (192). This recognition adds a radical bent to Gaffney’s reconstruction of Arendt’s reflections on loneliness in relation to the loss of “the political”: in order to establish spaces of appearance where citizens can “announce themselves to the world” and see themselves as members of a common world (176), there has to be some kind of participatory democracy, radically different from the kind of depoliticized democracies we have today. Such a participatory democracy would provide spaces for joint action and deliberation, and a communal existence that is not totalizing and does not erase the plurality and individuality of modern citizens. Arendt pointed to the pre-revolution American townhalls and the tradition of council democracy that came out of the socialist movements of the 20^th century as examples that could allow the experience of “the political” for all citizens if they became an institutional part of modern democracies. In advocating such a radical revolution in our democracies—so radical that commentators often ignore this aspect of Arendt’s writings or dismiss it as unimportant and unrealistic—Arendt expressed her sense of the urgent need for what Gaffney calls a “politics of appearance . . . in which we come face-to-face with one another, engaging directly in the matters that go between us” (192).

As a form of government, this will probably remain a “people’s utopia” for the foreseeable future, as Arendt called this vision of participatory democracy. But as far as political activism is concerned, Gaffney suggests that while today’s protests and assemblies are important, they do not address the need to open spaces for speech and action that would make us visible to each other as individuals and citizens (193). She thus calls on all of us to rethink our obligation as citizens, to redefine it (also) as being responsible for making each other visible in the public sphere, and to find out what such a politics of appearance would look like in our political action. It is a worthy challenge for anyone who recognizes that today’s politics put not only justice and freedom but survival itself at stake, and who is awake to the possibilities of the new political awareness so many have experienced in the face of this unprecedented predicament.

Works Cited

• Hochschild, Arlie Russell. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New Press, 2016.

Britton Edelen (bio)

A review of Huffer, Lynne. Foucault’s Strange Eros. Columbia UP, 2020.

Lynne Huffer’s Foucault’s Strange Eros is a translation, but not in the usual sense. This original work translates not a text from one language to another, but a person: Michel Foucault. Huffer invites us to perceive Foucault differently, with slightly squinted eyes and perked ears, so that we may see the lacunae in and hear the “strange murmuring[s]” of the archive (1). Like all good translations, Huffer’s brings to light something that went unnoticed in the original—eros. Prowling for this, Huffer uncovers the ethopoietic movements in ourselves and in the world that pulse just beneath the surface and offer strange possibilities for inhabiting the present.

The change in our perception of Foucault issues from a change in designation: Foucault is not a philosopher, but something else. Huffer briefly characterizes the kind of philosopher that Foucault is not by referring to Simon Critchley’s 2013 New York Times essay “When Socrates Met Phaedrus,” which deals specifically with the presence of eros in philosophy. Critchley shows that the philosophical discipline’s longstanding commitment “to keeping everything but the rational mind outside its gates” is a quixotic, impossible dream (Huffer 31). Philosophy is not immaculate; the stain of irrational eros is always already there. But something is rotten in the philosophical eros that Critchley identifies. His reading of Plato’s Phaedrus “links eros to rhetoric, the art of persuasion . . . ‘the art by which the philosopher persuades the nonphilosopher to assume philosophical eros, to incline their soul toward truth.’” Philosophy’s task is to “tell people what they should do,” and eros is deployed in the service of this goal, which Huffer sees as dangerous because it “is a moralizing art bound up with the history of a rationalist violence” (31). Foucault, and Huffer with him, unequivocally rejects this moralizing. Huffer cites a 1980 interview in which Foucault exclaims, “I’m not a prophet; I’m not an organizer; I don’t tell people what they should do. I’m not going to tell them, ‘This is good for you, this is bad for you!’” (31). And if he isn’t a philosopher, someone who “tells people what they should do,” then what is he? There are numerous possible answers, but Huffer settles on one that, like eros, comes to us from ancient Greek sources. Foucault is the other of the philosopher: a poet. The poet and the philosopher stand on opposite ledges of a deep—but not uncrossable—chasm, and Huffer carries Foucault across (translatio). But is this reparative gesture necessary? Are philosophy and poetry distinct enough to require metamorphic translation? Huffer does not wade into this millennia-old debate or change its terms; she instead chooses, for better or worse, to take for granted the possibility of finding firm footing on the dichotomy’s now-shaky foundation.

By “translating him as a poet,” Huffer asks us to see Foucault’s works as poetry, a category she avoids explaining in concrete terms (1). She presents only two definitions: Poetry is “narrative’s circuit breaker, an erotic counterviolence that dedialectizes history” (89); and, citing Foucault, a form that “opens language to ‘the void in which the contentless slimness of ‘I speak’ [and] is manifested [as] an absolute opening through which language endlessly spreads forth, while the subject—the ‘I’ who speaks—fragments, disperses, scatters, disappearing in that naked space’” (74). Huffer thus highlights the concordance between poetry, a form literally and metaphorically formed by and conducive to rupture, and Foucault’s genealogical method, which carefully attends to “breaks, gaps, and discontinuities” (36). The strongest testimonial for Huffer’s redesignation comes from the “poet” himself. Foucault calls for this reading through his career-long assertion “that truth, history, and life itself—all fundamental elements of biopower—are made, fashioned, and invented” (10). Foucault’s word for this making is “fictioning”: “fictions can ‘induce’—or ‘fiction’—’effects of truth’” (11). Huffer asks us to listen to the murmur of Greek in the word poet(ry): “poiein, to make” (10). In this sense, Foucault is unequivocally a poet. Just as the poets of antiquity formed works from myth, Foucault fictions truths from the archive not by imagining them out of nothing, but by paying attention to and keeping watch over the archive. Huffer’s translation of Foucault takes a step beyond previous critical assessments of his relationship to literature, even Foucault’s own self-reflexive ones. His works have been immensely impactful to literary studies since the 1970s, and dozens of books have been written on his relationship to literature.¹ The Bibliothèque nationale de France’s 2013 opening of the Foucault collection and the subsequent release of previously unpublished transcripts of speeches and interviews have  revived the question of the literary in Foucauldian scholarship, leaving no doubt about the importance of literature to Foucault’s thinking.² Foucault’s Strange Eros derives its critical strength not from the application of Foucauldian theory to literary studies but from reading him as a poet.

But Foucault, Huffer asserts, cannot be compared to simply any poet. Like the distinction Huffer sets up between philosophy and poetry, there is another implicit partition made within the poetic genealogy between “traditional” poetry that aims toward smooth wholeness and more experimental poetry that rebels against this goal. Extending her stereoscopic gaze back several millennia, Huffer places Foucault in the company of a poet who, like eros,is “Greek, ancient, foreign”: Sappho (48). Huffer conjures her almost as the Platonic khora, a disintegrating void in the archive that gives form to Foucault’s poetic sensibilities, allowing us to read him against imperious philosophical moralizing. When Huffer makes this comparison, she does not suggest a similarity in content. She instead stakes the comparison on a phenomenal similarity grounded in the genealogical realities that structure Sappho’s appearance in the present. Sappho’s lyric output ostensibly existed during her lifetime as a complete set, some 10,000 lines. Two millennia later, this has been worn down to fragments, a paltry 650 lines. As such, a fissure emerges between two figurations of Sappho: the mythico-historical version and the contemporary archival one. Huffer’s description of Foucault’s methodology as Sapphic does not liken Foucault to the once-living Sappho (this would be impossible), but rather establishes a link to her (dis)figured appearance as an “infamous m[a]n” in our time (79). To bolster this claim, Huffer notes that scholars have had to contend with the much-lamented papyrological fact that the lines available to us today are themselves incomplete, worm-eaten, and hole-ridden. Those lines not lost fall prey to the erosive, corrosive workings of time. Consequently, “Sappho’s translators tend to represent that incompleteness with brackets: diacritical devices that designate absence” without proposing to fill it (36). This critico-translational move parallels the way Foucault’s method teaches us to approach his work and the archive. As Huffer notes, Foucault opens his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” with the proclamation that “[genealogy] operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times”; as a result, the genealogist’s task is to track events “when they are absent, the moment when they remain unrealized” (Foucault 369). Huffer’s redesignation of Foucault as a poet allows us to see the likeness between his genealogical method (his veillance of poèmes vies) and the deployment of brackets in Sappho scholarship.

Yet this comparison struggles under its own weight. Huffer “invoke[s] Sappho as a way to signal the Sapphic quality of Foucault’s famous genealogical ruptures,” but her invocation seems somewhat forced (36). Huffer conflates the fragmented appearance of Sappho’s poetry within the archive with the poetry itself, as if the ruptures were always there. This move raises two unanswered central questions: Does the destruction of Sappho’s corpus belong to the work itself, and how does the critical-translational work of Sappho’s translators figure into the Foucault-Sappho comparison? In asking these questions, we can see that the comparison breaks down precisely where Huffer sets it up: in the brackets. Though functional as opposed to ornamental, the marks are not original to the poems themselves. By not attending sufficiently to the documented differences between Sappho’s poetry in her time and how the fragments appear in ours, Huffer not only diminishes the import of the rhetorical decisions made by translators, but also erases the work of time and power on the Sapphic archive itself. The comparison to Sappho, then, can be reversed and displaced: Foucault is not a Sapphic poet, but Sappho’s appearance in our time through the work of translators can be read as akin to the uncovering of “infamous” lives in Foucault’s scholarship.

Or maybe the identification could be done away with altogether. The choice of Sappho seems largely motivated by the overwhelming presence of ancient Greece in the text. But, as Foucault warns, “We are much less Greek than we believe” (qtd. in Huffer, Foucault’s 48). Sapphic Foucault is thus a contingent fictioning, thereby open to alteration. We could theorize Foucault in apposition to other writers whose texts are more immediately (and intentionally) genealogical. Even Huffer seems to admit this tacitly through her engagement in the final chapter with Monique Wittig’s poetic writings, which offers the most direct and extensive poetic analysis in the book. Her reading of The Lesbian Body attends to all the same formal elements that she finds in Sappho but evades the twin problems of papyrological destruction and translational decisions because the brackets, scissions, gaps, and ruptures are all original to the text. Other poets’ works can be recontextualized similarly to show an affinity to Foucault’s method. We may, for example, turn to Tadeusz Różewicz and Charles Reznikoff; both wrote “after Auschwitz,” struggling to represent an event that escapes narrative logic while still attending to the lived-but-erased existences of the victims. The texts they wrote out of this struggle consisted largely of documents—newspaper clippings, legal transcriptions, etc.— found by prowling various archives presented in unadorned language. Różewicz declared that he attempted to write poetry made of “not verses but facts.” Is this not what Huffer describes Foucault as doing? Other comparisons can be drawn as well: M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, crafted out of an eighteenth-century trial transcription following the Zong massacre; or Saidiya Hartman’s method of “critical fabulation” that explicitly finds inspiration in Foucault’s “The Lives of Infamous Men”;³ or Rob Halpern’s deployment of a combination of bars and brackets ([——]) to mark how what cannot be perceived structures what is. While this incomplete list demonstrates that Foucault’s Sapphic status is open to refictioning, it also shows the veracity of one of Huffer’s central claims: that a structural isomorphy exists between the formation of an archive and the making of poetry.

By looking to other poets, we can more fully appreciate Huffer’s excavation of a central ethopoiesis, where prowling the archive produces an erotic, startling affect. Monitoring [surveillant] the “archives of infamy,” Foucault “bear[s] witness to a jumbled mass with no story, just ‘lowly lives reduced to ashes in the few sentences that struck them down’” (75). In exposing the ruptures of history, Foucault not only reformulates a conception of the past but also re-fictions the present. To read him reading the archive is to undergo “experiences of connection and rupture that both fix and free us into a historical present that is unstable” (Huffer, “Strange” 103–4). The Foucauldian testimony constantly reminds us that we are neither exempt from the machinations of power nor safe from becoming ashes strewn to the winds of history (75). Archival rifts are not effects of historical interpretation but part of the conditions that establish the archives that interpreters prowl. These assertions lead to the central object of Huffer’s argument: strange eros.

What is eros, and why is Foucault’s strange? Words seem to fail the term even as definitions proliferate. Huffer goes to great lengths to “address [the] perplexity” of this odd word (12). In her book there are many things that eros is not: the eros of modernity which is conflated with sexuality; the adjective “erotic” that is tacked onto nouns; an alternate to Greco-Christian forms of love like agape and philia; the opposition to Freudian thanatos. Eros is something else altogether: “Greek, ancient, foreign,” but also, in modernity, all-too-familiar. Huffer is aware that this seems vague, admitting at the outset that “[E]ros cannot appear in terms we might ‘get’” (12). For this reason, she never pins eros down, opting instead to draw a constellation of definitions that range from critical (a “deinstitutionalizing” “verb that suspends the lines of the grid” of the archive [21]; a “strange murmuring background noise out of which sexology extracts the language of sexuality and produces sexual subjects as objects of knowledge” [3]) to poetic (“eros is the Cheshire cat” [122]; it is, citing Anne Carson, “a verb” [19]). Most importantly, eros is strange. Like the eros it modifies, “strange” is never solidly defined, but is deployed consistently so that connotations begin to congeal. The constitutive component of the strangeness of eros appears to be that it revels in paradox: sweet andbitter; now and again; speaking andremaining silent. In relation to history, paradoxical eros “binds and unbinds us in relation to our time . . . [which] anchors us in the archive of our own knowledge and, at the same time, unmoors us into the fragmenting contingency of ‘temporal dispersion’” (48).

Huffer tracks this “temporal dispersion” in the second and third chapters. In the former, she shows how the archive holds a tension “between narrative continuity and poetic scattering” (75). Living in this rift, genealogists redeploy a past alterity to tell a story about the present, though they must carefully resist the urge to swing too far in either direction of refamiliarization (It’s always been like this!) or defamiliarization (It’s never been like this!). Prowling the archive “establishes the break, cut, or limit between us and what we are not; at the same time, it makes us coextensive with that limit as other” (83). The following chapter takes up the question of eros most directly, asking by what extractive mechanics it became sexuality. Following the figure of the “evil genius” from Descartes through Hegel to Foucault, Huffer uncovers the cost of telling the truth, that is, the cost of extracting intelligible sexuality from the unintelligible murmurs of eros. In doing so, she finds in Foucault an ontology of archival time that undoes the Hegelian invention of historical time in which “successive events . . . find their completion in the present, in us” (97). The evil genius, working erotically, “scrambles” temporal frames that differentiate past from present (110). A focus on sexuality’s origin in eros reveals that we can only conceive of “our own time from the perspective of ‘the border of time that surrounds our present, which overhangs it, and which indicates it in its alterity’” (83). Huffer’s concept of erotic time exposes the cuts that the present makes to extract itself from the past, as well as the scars they leave. Seeing them, we become attuned to the strangeness of our time. Here Huffer identifies Foucault’s ethical, non-imperative “directive” to “inhabit our present as strange” (63). Foucault asserts in an interview that although “[t]he time we live in is not the unique or fundamental or irruptive point in history . . . [it] is very interesting; it needs to be analyzed and broken down” (qtd. in Huffer, Foucault’s 14). The call to view the present as such enables us to see its silenced fictionality, bringing us a new strangeness: How is this directive able to function outside of a “rhetoric of persuasion” (63)? Huffer articulates this recursively, suggesting it is something we already do and have done for us. Because the world is produced, it can be reproduced in an alternative, strange form. We do so by heeding a call, not answering a demand. There are many ways to answer this ethical call and transform our everyday “practices of living” (8). Foucault did so through his genealogical method, but also in his work as a political activist in the Groupe d’information sur les prisons, as Huffer shows in the fourth chapter. Huffer responds the call herself in the final chapter by turning her stereoscopic gaze to what may be the most important ethical challenge facing us today: the destruction of the planet. Through a dazzling reading of Wittig against the language of speculative realism, Huffer reframes “the human/not human story of the Anthropocene” as a jumble of pronomial relations between living and (not quite) dead subjects in an ethopoetic matrix (170). Certainly strange, this section does not bend towards common ecoconscious demands. But Huffer writes neither from the position of a positivistic scientist nor from the philosopher’s pedestal. She writes as a genealogist, a poet “fictioning” a new reality on a damaged planet. The impulse here is heterotopian rather than utopian, but the hope offered is more than a crumb. The “fight for eros” appears in the most urgent issues of today: from environmental catastrophe to Black Lives Matter, from #MeToo and renewed struggles for reproductive rights to activism in support of refugees and against the violence of borders. Yet we need not look onlyto large-scale catastrophes to take up Foucault’s challenge. There are smaller ways of existing with one another strangely, erotically. These quieter practices gather under the French veiller: keeping watch over the ill, holding vigil over the dead, remaining awake with the dying without knowing when death will come. Huffer’s examples of Foucault’s “ethical attitude” all involve the act of watching something in its absence, gazing long into the abyssal brackets of history without wishing in vain that they be filled (33). Responding to the ethical call involves (s)training our eyes and ears to detect barely perceptible murmurings that echo all around us. In short, it is to become a poet. Foucault’s Strange Eros masterfully and hauntingly exposes the archival conditions that form the unwritable archive of the present, thereby opening us toward new horizons of living and ushering in the possibility of translating and refictioning ourselves into strange, erotic configurations.

Footnotes

1. For a more extensive analysis of Foucault’s connection to literary theory, see During and Blanco.

2. See Revel.

3. While Hartman uses Foucault and his theory of the archive to reimagine the story of the slave girl Venus and her place in the archive of slavery, she does not designate his work aspoetry. Citing his “Lives of Infamous Men,” Hartman writes, “I could say after a famous philosopherthat what we know of Venus in her many guises amounts to ‘little more than a register of her encounter with power’ and that it provides ‘a meager sketch of her existence’” (4).

Works Cited

• Blanco, Azucena G. Literature and Politics in the Later Foucault. De Gruyter, 2020.
• Critchley, Simon. “When Socrates Met Phaedrus: Eros in Philosophy.” New York Times, 3 Nov. 2013, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/when-socrates-met-phaedrus-eros-in-philosophy/. The Stone, Opinionator.
• During, Simon. “Literature and Literary Theory.” Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing, Routledge, 1992, pp. 67–89.
• Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 Volume 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Edited by James D. Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley, New Press, 1998, pp. 369–91.
• Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–14.
• Huffer, Lynne. “Strange Eros: Foucault, Ethics, and the Historical a Priori.” Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 49, no. 1, 2016, pp. 103–114.
• Revel, Judith. “Un héritage de Foucault. Entre fidélité et libres usages.” Theory Now: Journal of Literature, Critique, and Thought, vol 2. no. 1, 2019, pp. 182–193.

Bret Benjamin (bio)

A review of Bensaïd, Daniel. The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor. Translated by Robert Nichols, U of Minnesota P, 2021.

No honest history of capitalist modernity can fail to account for the violence of dispossession. Marx famously grapples with the distinction between the ideal operations of capital through which surplus value is extracted from waged workers at the point of production, and the regular and persistent applications of “direct, extra-economic force” (Capital 900) characteristic of the period of “so-called primitive accumulation,” when capital comes into the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (926). The relation between the economic and the extra-economic forms of violence, theft, enclosure, expropriation, and dispossession is ever in motion and, indeed, dialectically constituted. “Force,” Marx insists in his account of capital’s origins, “is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power” (916). Many of the most important thinkers in the tradition that bears his name—from Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin in the early decades of the twentieth century to David Harvey and Nancy Fraser today—have worked to define the precise theoretical and historical relationships between economic exploitation and the forms of dispossession which capital disavows.¹ To what degree is the persistent use of force and theft a necessary precondition for ongoing capital accumulation? Do the dispossessions of the present issue from a different set of determinants than those that characterized the pre-history of capital in its conditions of emergence? How might this relation between exploitation and dispossession shed light on the structural unevenness of the world market, felt most acutely by those who have historically borne the most vicious forms of violence: the victims of imperialism and racialized discrimination? Robert Nichols has made noteworthy recent contributions to this always urgent debate in his writings on primitive accumulation and in his recent book, Theft is Property.² As editor and translator of the brief but provocative The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor, Nichols makes a different sort of intervention, approaching the question of dispossession by pairing early writings by Marx with an essay by the eminent French public intellectual and activist Daniel Bensaïd.

Originally published in 1842 in the Rheinische Zeitung, the five articles by Marx collected in this volume offer a characteristically blistering critique of positions set forth by the state and landowners during the Rhineland Assembly’s debates on legislation that criminalized the gathering of wood by peasants. Marx’s articles are preceded by the volume’s eponymous essay, Bensaïd’s “The Dispossessed,” originally published in 2007. The texts represent opposite poles of each author’s career. Marx’s Rheinische Zeitung articles, which Nichols contends “have long languished in obscurity, particularly in the English-speaking world” (xiv), were penned just prior to his profound engagement with, and critique of, political economy (only fully evident, Bensaïd rightly suggests, in the 1844 Paris Manuscripts). Bensaïd’s essay, by contrast, was written just three years before the end of his life when his long battle with AIDS appears to have prevented the completion of more sustained intellectual projects.³ Marx’s articles offer fascinating but incomplete points of intellectual departure, suggesting lines of connection between the critique in these early essays and his more fully conceived later work; Bensaïd’s essay offers an erudite account of the intellectual history of property that draws out the political implications of Marx’s wood theft articles, but struggles to articulate a structural account of dispossession and the capital relation. The pairing of early Marx and late Bensaïd is bolstered by Nichols’s helpful introduction, which provides historical context for both and brings their analyses up to the present.⁴ Taken as a whole, the volume makes a valuable contribution to longstanding Marxist debates about dispossession. While neither Marx nor Bensaïd manages in these essays to develop a fully realized analysis of the relation between exploitation and dispossession under capital, both offer significant insights—particularly about the state, property, and class composition or fragmentation—and their pairing should prove generative to Marxists working to understand, and of course to transform, the conditions of the ever-growing ranks of the dispossessed under contemporary capital.

Many readers of Marx will know the wood theft essays primarily as an example of his “liberal rationalist”⁵ thinking from the period just prior to his break from the Berlin neo-Hegelians that corresponded with his developing critique of political economy. Indeed, Marx seems to appeal at times in these articles to the ideals of rational debate, a free press, and the principle by which the state might stand in as a universal arbiter capable of distributing justice equitably. Nevertheless, we also find in these early texts evidence of a rapidly sharpening critique of the modern representative state as an expression of bourgeois interests. For example, Marx highlights the implications of criminalizing a practice traditionally considered part of the commons. Firewood, previously understood as a free gift of nature harvested for the common good, is metamorphosed by the state into private property. Collection now becomes theft. Peasants who merely seek cooking fuel or protection from the cold are subjected not only to criminalization by the state, but also to the growing social control of the landowning class, to whom the new law requires the criminal to pay exorbitant fines and provide free labor. In language evocative of the fetishism section of Capital’s opening chapter, Marx declares that the “wood possesses the remarkable character such that as soon as it is stolen it secures for its owner state qualities it did not previously possess” (93). The state imbues the wood with properties that issue from its new legal form as property. By recharacterizing wood collection as theft, the state acts entirely on behalf of property-owners; in the process, the state is itself transformed from the universal representative of the citizenry to the mechanism through which an ownership class exerts social control:

The wood thief has robbed the forest owner of wood, but the forest owner has used the wood thief to steal the state itself. . . .  We are only surprised that the forest owner is not allowed to heat his stove with the wood thieves. (93-4)

These remarks may lack the analytical clarity of the 1848 Manifesto’s pronouncement that the “executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” (Marx and Engels 486). However, the Swiftian image of landowners heating their stoves with the bodies of peasants guilty solely of collecting firewood puts us squarely on the road to a full-throated critique of the class power enmeshed within the liberal-democratic state.

Any apparent universality of rights inhering to the abstraction of citizen is belied by the inequalities of class power mediated by the state. Marx has yet to work out the core theoretical basis of his critique of capital: the social abstraction of labor that makes it commensurate with all commodities. He certainly cannot see in these essays how a category such as citizenship might take on a form of appearance determined by the deeper abstraction of labor that structures the capital relation. Yet glimpses of this relationship are evident. Consider the following passage:

There was no attempt to afford equal protection to the forest owner and the infringer of forest regulations, only equal protection for the small and large forest owners. In the latter, legal equality is measured down to the minutest detail while in the former inequality is an axiom. Why does the small forest owner demand the same protection as the big forest owner? Because both are forest owners. But are not both the forest owner and the infringers of forest regulations citizens of the state? If small and big forest owners have the same right to protection by the state, does this not apply even more so to small and big citizens of the state? (77)

In due time, Marx comes to demystify the formal equality of the contract under which labor power is purchased on the open market, consensually and for its fair value; this “free” exchange conceals the fact that the laborer, dispossessed of all means of production, enters the contract “like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing to expect but—a tanning” (Capital 280). The passage above, I would suggest, can be read as an analogous critique, conceived in these early essays solely within the political sphere of state, law, and citizenship, but paving the way for his later critique of formal freedom under conditions of structural inequality that characterize the capital relation.

Also noteworthy in the passage above is Marx’s attention to the state’s role in managing differences between and among property owners or individual capitals. While the state establishes and enforces a relation of inequality between landowners and the propertyless (big and small citizens), it meticulously insists on legal equality between big and small property owners. Why? Again, we find the seeds of the dialectical critique that Marx develops over the decades ahead. The state’s insistence on equality among landowners anticipates an argument from the “Working Day” chapter of Capital, the section of Volume I in which Marx first turns his attention to an historical account of class struggles within the state, declaring that “the most fundamental right under the law of capital is the equal exploitation of labor-power by all capitalists” (405). Paradoxically, the universal conditions under which the abstraction of labor power will ultimately assume its determinate form are pressed into being in part through competition between and among branches of capital and individual owners. In his account of the Assembly debates, Marx cites a forest owner who laments that landowning farmers can rely on laws that punish those who steal food whereas he has no such protections against the gathering of wood. Marx dons the persona of the forest owner to express faux outrage at this inequitable treatment: “Farm owners, why are you so magnanimous where my interests are concerned? Because your interests are already taken care of” (86).

Rather than a sphere defined by the abstract universality of citizenship, then, Marx depicts the emerging bourgeois state as a formal structure of equality that masks the direct and forcible operation of powerful interests. He offers the following gem:

Interest has no memory; it thinks only of itself. The one thing about which it is concerned, itself, it never forgets. But it is not concerned with contradictions, for it never comes into contradiction with itself. It is a constant improviser, for it has no system, only expedients. (87)

One would be hard-pressed to find a better description of the political elite today: to denounce them as contradictory—or more typically as hypocritical—misses the more basic point that any “principles” they might espouse must be understood to be identical with their interests. No memory, no system, no principle—merely the expedient exercise of power in the self-interest of political actors. To argue, following Marx, that the state is fundamentally a site of interest rather than of universal equality is merely to recognize that it will invariably be the site of intense class struggle under capital, both between those who own property and those who labor and/or who have been dispossessed, as well as between and among sectors of the owning class. Class struggle, in political terms, is the struggle between interests. The wood theft articles illustrate the transformation of direct violence into state-mediated violence, which in turn lays the groundwork for the abstract forms of social domination that characterize the social relation.⁶

For Bensaïd, such struggles become most visible through the form of property, and his essay is particularly effective in situating Marx’s articles on wood theft within an intellectual history about the origins of modern capitalist conceptions of property. His concise but illuminating survey begins in 1647 with the Levellers who locate a constitutive “property-in-the-person,” where “[t]o be free is to own oneself and, by extension, the means and products of one’s labor” (21). Their “point of departure,” according to Bensaïd, is not “a critique of property, but rather a conception of equality buttressed by a theological argument” (21). On his way to an analysis of Marx’s contributions, Bensaïd reflects on Hegel, who affirms the right of necessity; Rousseau, who “positions the inalienable right to existence (to ‘life’!) against any right to private property” (8); and Locke, Hobbes, and Proudhon, whose influence on the wood theft essays is evident.⁷

In surveying this intellectual tradition, Bensaïd ably demonstrates that capital does not invent property, just as it does not invent money, markets, or the sale of labor; rather, it finds existing social forms and transforms them to such an extent that they bear only superficial resemblance to their previous instantiations. As the wood is transformed through its relation to the state, so is property transformed by its relation to capital. Having been reconstituted by the determinants of the capital relation, however, the concept of property contains within it the contradictions of a form at once of capital and antithetical to it: “The critique of property,” he writes, “is thus at the very birth and heart of all variants of socialism that arose in the nineteenth century in resistance to triumphant capitalism” (30). Bensaïd reads in Marx an attempt to draw out the “original meaning of the notion of property, as used by Locke, for whom ‘every man is the owner of his own person,’ or by the Levellers who saw in it the foundation of individual autonomy” (51). Specifically, Bensaïd excavates the original conceptions of property as a means to better understand Marx’s humanism, his utopian striving for a society capable of producing fully developed, non-alienated human beings. Drawing on (and quoting) the work of Paul Serini, Bensaïd argues: “Owing to the ‘acquisitions’ of capitalist development, the era of the private property of the individual worker is irredeemably lost, but an ‘individual form of possession in the broadest sense’ remains the condition of the ‘free development of each’” (51). Tantalizing if undeveloped, this sketch of a reanimated Marxist individualism posits an immanent critique of capital from within the essence of property, a concept central to capital’s self-image but here mobilized for quite divergent ends.

Bensaïd’s larger purpose in revisiting Marx’s wood theft essays is to reflect upon the contradictions of property in the era of globalization. Our era, he suggests, is characterized by the commodification and privatization of all spheres of social existence. We witness an accelerated enclosure of social wealth that had previously been understood as common, creating on the one hand an ever-more powerful capitalist class and on the other an ever-growing population of those who share the condition of dispossession. Bensaïd’s examples from 2007 fall in line with much of the literature on neoliberalism and globalization (his preferred term): the privatization of state and public or common goods, including even those goods that would seem to defy commodification such as ideas, knowledge, genes, water, the atmosphere, ecosystem, etc.⁸ “The extension of the commodification of the world to knowledge and life itself,” he writes, “poses with new acuteness the question of the public good and the common good of humanity” (46).

“The Dispossessed” therefore stands in conversation with that rich line of Marxist scholarship that considers the accumulation of capital in relation to both dispossession and exploitation. For instance, David Harvey, whose work Bensaïd cites approvingly, argues that contemporary class movements

are currently bi-furcated into movements around expanded reproduction . . . and movements around accumulation by dispossession in which everything from classic forms of primitive accumulation through practices destructive of cultures, histories and environments to the depredations wrought by contemporary forms of finance capital are the focus of resistance. (65)

Nancy Fraser, perhaps uncomfortable with Harvey’s expansive use of the term “accumulation” to describe practices that appear more akin to what Marx called the “centralization” of capital (that is, the upward redistribution of wealth rather than the expanding production of value; Capital 777), clarifies that “expropriation is accumulation by other means.” Expropriation—the term Fraser adopts rather than “dispossession”—necessarily implies that “the commandeered capacities get incorporated into the value-expanding process that defines capital. Simple theft is not enough” (166-67). Going further than Harvey, who merely suggests the need to find an “organic link” between exploitation and dispossession, Fraser offers a structural account of the relation between the expropriated and the exploited, which plays a constitutive role in the emergence and reproduction of capital and the capitalist state.⁹ She writes:

the subjection of those whom capital expropriates is a hidden condition of possibility for the freedom of those whom it exploits. Absent an account of the first, we cannot fully understand the second. Nor can we fully appreciate the nonaccidental character of capitalism’s historic entanglement with racial oppression. (166)

What, precisely, does Bensaïd add to this theoretical tradition? The answer is somewhat hazy. His analysis of specific examples of dispossession in the era of globalization is often penetrating. Consider his assessment of the conflicts that make capital incompatible with the planet’s climate and ecosystems:

Between market logic, where abstract labor time is the standard for all things, and the reasoned relations of time and space characteristic of natural conditions for the reproduction of the human species, there is no common measure. The incommensurability between market values and ecological values marks one of the historical limits of the capitalist mode of production. (56)

Such analysis is, sadly, as accurate and pressing today as it was in 2007. However, despite Bensaïd’s considerable expertise with both Marx and the tradition of political theory, the essay ultimately fails to develop an independent and sustained argument about the relation between dispossession and capital. It asserts that dispossession has taken on a new importance (who would doubt it?), but remains murky on the fundamental questions addressed more directly by Harvey and especially Fraser: whether dispossession is a structural feature of capital that exists alongside exploitation and accumulation, perhaps even as their condition of possibility, or whether dispossession should be understood to have superseded exploitation as the motivating force of contemporary capital.

Consider, for example, the following passage in which Bensaïd expands on Marx’s claim in Contribution to Critique of Political Economy that all realms of science, art, politics, and social life have been “captured and put at the service of capital.” He asserts, quoting from Contribution throughout, that:

as big industry grows, “the creation of real wealth becomes less dependent upon labour time and the quantity of labour employed than upon the power of the agents set in motion during labour time. And their power—their POWERFUL EFFECTIVENESS—in turn bears no relation to the immediate labour time which their production costs, but depends, rather, upon the general level of development of science and the progress of technology or on the application of science to production.” Thus, “the theft of alien labour time, which is the basis of present wealth, appears to be a miserable foundation.” This miserable base is the reason for the disturbances of the world. The law of value can no longer measure the excesses of the world except at the price of ever-increasing global outbursts of violence. (41-2)

How are we to understand this argument? Is Bensaïd equating “the theft of alien labour time”—which for Marx refers to surplus value extracted by capitalists from workers in production—with the privatizations and enclosures that he has been calling dispossession? Does he suggest that contemporary capital does away with the distinction between exploitation and expropriation? Is he merely asserting that violence underpins the production of value? That has always been true. Or are the “ever-increasing global outbursts of violence” to be understood as a symptom of slackening profitability and of capital’s increasingly desperate efforts to amass wealth in the absence of real accumulation?¹⁰ Does the violence of the contemporary moment illustrate something about capital’s requirement for uneven geographical development or racialized divisions, theorized respectively by Harvey and Fraser? Such arguments would be compelling to me, but I am hard-pressed to find evidence for such claims in Bensaïd’s remarks. The confusion continues in a subsequent passage:

These philosophico-legal puzzles are the result of contradictions between the growing socialization of intellectual labor and the private appropriation of ideas, on the one hand; between abstract labor, which underlies the market measure, and concrete work which is difficult to quantify, on the other. From these contradictions results a generalized disruption of the law of value as an increasingly wretched means by which to measure exchange and social wealth. (43)

Bensaïd’s pairing of exchange and social wealth is puzzling. He is surely right to decry the dehumanizing barbarity of capital, which transforms human labor into the abstraction of labor power and limits the complexity and richness of life to one value-producing activity. The law of value has always been a wretched means to measure social wealth. But what does it mean to say that the law of value is also a wretched means to measure exchange? Does this imply that exchange has kicked itself loose of the determinations of the value form, as suggested by Hardt and Negri and by other strands of post-Marxist thought, with which Bensaïd is certainly in conversation? Or could it imply that the accounting function of value becomes increasingly difficult to discern as wealth is centralized through forms of dispossession, even as new value production stagnates? More fundamentally, in these repeated but opaque references to the law of value, is Bensaïd suggesting that new forms of dispossession have replaced or superseded value or accumulation for capital? Or does he understand dispossession as an expression of the underlying contradictions of value as constituted by the capital relation? Bensaïd’s position seems closer to the former; my own is most certainly the latter. But I offer this series of questions because, frustratingly, the essay never develops a sustained thesis on these crucial theoretical points. I am not criticizing Bensaïd’s position so much as his lack of a position. Armed with considerable erudition and learning, he wades into the rich Marxist debate about exploitation and expropriation only to gesture rather than argue.

If the theoretical underpinnings of Bensaïd’s account remain hazy and underdeveloped, his call for political action is clear and compelling. Echoing both the Manifesto and Marx’s critique of interestin the wood theft articles,Bensaïd concludes on this ringing note: “Who will prevail: self-interested calculation or solidarity and common interest, property and an enforceable right to existence? Our lives are worth more than their profits: ‘Rise up, dispossessed of the world!’” (57). Bensaïd’s political challenge is blunt: the world’s crises demand swift and transformative action—which side are you on? More subtly, he evokes the intellectual tradition his essay so adroitly analyzes: individual as opposed to private property rights, in which one holds a property claim over oneself and the products of one’s labor. In this way Bensaïd situates property not on the side of capital’s self-interest but rather on the side of common interest and the right to existence; he uses the conjunction “and” rather than “or” to link property with life instead of pitting them against one another. Here we can see evidence of the sophistication and substance of Bensaïd’s essay, and indeed of the volume as a whole, mining Marx’s early writings for critical insights and positing the essential relevance of his (emerging) critique of political economy to the social conflicts of our time. Filled with perceptive analysis and provocation, alongside a few notable frustrations, the volume warrants careful study. It would be unrealistic to expect a brief volume of this sort to develop a fully conceived theory of dispossession and its relation to capital. More modestly, we can credit Nichols for his pairing of Marx and Bensaïd, which lays a few more conceptual planks into the foundation from which such a theory might arise.

Footnotes

1. See Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, Routledge, 2003; Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, LeftWord Books, 2010; David Harvey, especially pp. 41-68; and Nancy Fraser. Nichols identifies specific connections between Bensaïd and E.P. Thompson, Customs In Common, Penguin, 1991; Midnight Notes Collective, Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, Autonomedia, 1992; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard UP, 2000; and David Harvey. Supplementing these, the following very partial list serves to indicate the diversity of Marxist approaches to the question of dispossession, especially as it relates to a critique of imperialism, racism, and neoliberalism: Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism,U of North Carolina P, 1983; Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism,Columbia UP, 2017, especially pp. 47-60; Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, 2006; Michael Denning, “Wageless Life,” New Left Review, no. 66, Nov./Dec. 2010, pp. 79-97; “Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital,” Endnotes, no. 2, April 2010, https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/2/en/endnotes-misery-and-debt.

2. “Disaggregating Primitive Accumulation,” Radical Philosophy, vol. 194, Nov./Dec. 2015, pp. 18-28; Theft is Property, Duke UP, 2020.

3. Nichols cites Enzo Traverso’s statement to this effect, a hypothesis that seems to be echoed indirectly in the obituaries for Besaïd written respectively by Tariq Ali in The Guardian (“Daniel Bensaïd obituary”) and Alex Callinicos (“Obituary – Daniel Bensaïd (1946 – 2010)”), originally published on the Socialist Workers Party website and now archived on the Marxists’ Internet Archive.

4. Nichols’s updated translation of Marx’s wood theft articles does not appear to offer any major theoretical advances over that of Clemens Palme Dutt (Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 1, Lawrence and Wishart, 2010, pp. 224-263). However, the modernized syntax and vocabulary nicely accentuate the biting rhetorical style of Marx, whose withering critique of bourgeois logic is on masterful display in these articles.

5. Bensaïd approvingly adopts this term from Louis Althusser, For Marx, Verso, 1965, p. xxxiii.

6. See Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, Cambridge UP, 1993.

7. Five years after the wood theft articles, Marx breaks fully from Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy. Bensaïd does an admirable job summarizing the theoretical distinctions that underpin this split, not yet worked out in the wood theft articles:

For Marx, elementary individual work is at once social work, which presupposes a prior social accumulation of knowledge and expertise. While Proudhon opposed the virtues of original work to the misery of bonded labor—‘real value’ to ‘fictitious value,’ production to speculation—Marx discovered the contrary: the unity of concrete and abstract labor, of exchange- and use-vale, the open secret of the commodity and the enchanted world of capital. (33)

8. To the question of whether such goods should properly be called commodities, see Kevin Floyd, “Automatic Subjects,” Historical Materialism, vol. 24, no. 2, 2016, pp. 61-86, https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-12341470.

9. Crucially, Fraser introduces the inextricability of expropriation and racial oppression, drawing explicit connections between US racism and the history of capitalist imperialism. In his introduction to The Dispossessed, Nichols notes that despite Bensaïd’s extensive work in Latin America and his familiarity with Trotskyist conceptions of “uneven and combined development,” the question of colonial or imperial expressions of dispossession are referenced in his essay “but not given a full treatment” (xx).

10. See Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, Verso, 2006; Marxism and the Critique of Value, edited by Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown, M-C-M’ Press, 2014.

Works Cited

• Fraser, Nancy. “Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalism: A Reply to Michael Dawson.” Critical Historical Studies, Spring 2016, pp. 163-178.
• Harvey, David. Spaces of Global Capitalism. Verso, 2019.
• Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Fowkes,vol. 1,Penguin Books, 1976.
• — and Frederick Engels. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” Translated by Samuel Moore, Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 6, Lawrence and Wishart, 2010, pp. 477-519.

Matthew Flisfeder (bio)

Abstract

This article puts to question performative contradictions in theories developing a resistance to anthropocentrism in the context of rising interest in the Anthropocene narrative and Posthumanist theories seeking to evade human exceptionalism. By developing the aesthetic category of the hysterical sublime—a term first coined by Fredric Jameson in his early writing on postmodernism—this article challenges theoretical attempts to resist anthropocentrism and, instead, proposes a renewed conception of a universal and dialectical humanism as a methodological and ethical framework for grappling with contemporary crises such as climate change and the rise of digital automation.

I.

Posthumanism, according to the editors of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, is an umbrella term used to describe a range of theories and philosophies, with diverse histories, that are typically resistant to human exceptionalism or anthropocentrism (Rosendahl Thomsen and Wamberg 1). The term has a varied historical development and usage, but, as Rosendahl Thomsen and Wamberg remark, posthumanism ties together a general disdain for anthropocentrism. For instance, at the beginning of Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett notes that “for some time political theory has acknowledged that materiality matters. But this materiality most often refers to human social structures or to the human meanings ‘embodied’ in them and other objects” (xvi). Politics, she adds, is usually conceived of as an “exclusively human domain,” and “what registers on it is a set of material constraints or a context for human action” (xvi). According to Bennett, anthropocentric politics and materialisms too often forget the non-human, or the agency of matter. She therefore defines her own vitalist materialism as a “resistance to anthropocentrism” (xvi).

While Bennett insists on the difference between her work and object-oriented ontology (“Systems”), her vitalist perspective overlaps in some ways with the goals of philosophers like Graham Harman, whose first book, Tool-Being, opens with a declaration about ending the dictatorship of the human (2), and Levi R. Bryant, whose efforts to evade anthropocentrism involve theorizing all things as objects of different kinds to create what he calls a democracy of objects. As Bryant puts it, the aim of object-oriented ontology as a posthumanism is “to think a subjectless object, or an object that is for-itself rather than an object that is an opposing pole before or in front of a subject” (Democracy 19). Referring to Quentin Meillassoux’s conception of correlationism—which claims that, from a humanist perspective, no object can exist without a thinking subject—Bryant proposes, too, that the challenge for equality must be based on a resistance to anthropocentrism (Democracy 39–40). Noting that the earth sciences are now referring to our own geological period as an Anthropocene (Crutzen), Rosi Braidotti similarly acknowledges the need to “move beyond anthropocentrism,” which according to her is the central aim of contemporary posthumanist scholarship (50). In some cases, scholars, such as Bennett and Steven Shaviro (Universe) go so far as to defend the need for forms of anthropomorphism as a mechanism for evading anthropocentrism (Bennett, Vibrant 98–99; Shaviro, Universe 61; Shaviro, “Consequences”). It is worth noting that the brands of posthumanism identified here are not anti-humanist, but rather aim to demote human exceptionalism, placing the human back into its relative position within a chain of equivalence of all beings and objects. The perspectives described above, despite some of their differences, seek to move past the centrality of the human subject in order to evade a burdensome anthropocentrism. Resistance to anthropocentrism forms the core of their work.

However, many of these perspectives still concern themselves with the survival of humanity as a species, and critics have noted an intractable, performative contradiction that persists in attempts to resist anthropocentrism or human exceptionalism. As Daniel Hartley notes, for instance, resistance to anthropocentrism aims to demonstrate that the human has been fallaciously elevated above the non-human, despite the fact that the very concept of the Anthropocene would seem to suggest the opposite (158). Braidotti, for instance, notes that the Anthropocene refers to “the historical moment when the Human has become a geological force capable of affecting all life on this planet” (5); yet she also claims that human embodiment is not opposed to matter but continuous with it (35). Similarly, Gamble, Hanan, and Nail argue that, from their own posthumanist and new materialist perspective, human matter is not separate from all other nature, and, in fact, human agency is merely the self-performance of nature acting upon itself. As they explain, theirs is a notion of history “in which humans, when they are involved, are reading and writing as particular performances of matter reading and (re)writing itself” (127). It is difficult, then, to grasp how a conception of an Anthropocene separate from the rest of nature can be possible. From which subjectiveperspective do we grasp this fact of nature proposed by Gamble, Hanan, and Nail? Likewise, Richard Grusin notes that the Anthropocene “names the human as the dominant influence on climate” (vii), but then suggests that “the question of political or social change becomes a question of changing our relations not only to other humans but to nonhumans as well” (xviii), in which case it appears as though humans are singled out as the agents of ethical action. Borna Radnik points out that even the attempt to separate thought and being, or to go beyond the human subject, “necessarily involves conceptual determinations that are only intelligible to us as thinking [human] subjects” (51). Alenka Zupančič, too, argues that “by (im)modestly positing the subject as a more or less insignificant point in the universe, one deprives oneself of the possibility to think, radically and seriously, the very ‘injustice’ . . . that made one want to develop an egalitarian ontological project in the first place” (122). As Hartley, Radnik, and Zupančič all demonstrate, there is an underlying contradiction in the human attempt to evade anthropocentrism, since it is anthropocentrism itself that marks the territory for projects to develop equality and freedom.

To make further sense of this contradiction, I further develop in this essay an aesthetic category first introduced by Fredric Jameson (“Postmodernism”): the hysterical sublime. Jameson explains that for philosophers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the sublime names the human experience of the irrationality of an external nature. The hysterical sublime, by comparison, refers to our experiences in postmodern culture of the irrationality of technologies produced by late capitalism, best represented in popular sci-fi films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, The Matrix, The Terminator, and in a TV series such as Black Mirror. I employ the concept of the hysterical sublime in this essay to show how Anthropocene discourse and theories resistant to anthropocentrism repress their humanist and anthropocentric core. On the one hand, they extend and even displace the fear of technology onto the fear of the human. On the other hand, they maintain the centrality of the human subject as the ethical agent of change and transformation. My claim is that the repression of humanism that we so often find in posthumanism stems from attempts to distance positions from anthropocentrism rather than to make it the methodological and ethical center of our struggles. The hysterical sublime thus renews and defends a conception of universal humanism appropriate to our era of twenty-first century capitalism.

As an aesthetic category, the hysterical sublime provides a representational framework for thinking critically about the contradictions of human culture and society and about the way that our collective impact upon the non-human has resulted in a crisis of our own self-preservation and freedom, caught as they are between the twin crises of climate change and automation. This, too, is the product of political conflict and the implementation of systems of production that benefit the few over the many. The hysterical sublime lets us see our culture today not as anthropocentric but, as Jason W. Moore has proposed, as capitalocentric. The hysterical sublime surpasses simplistic humanisms to reflect the cultural contradictions of capitalism and its technological impact upon both nature and ourselves, and to show capitalism’s centrality in our present historical and existential dilemmas, such as the rise of automation and global climate change. These dilemmas, along with the discourse of the Anthropocene, have compelled some to question the human as a species. According to Timothy Morton, we only begin to see ourselves as a species at the moment we start to concern ourselves with other species (Humankind 39). Yuval Noah Harari echoes Morton by suggesting that we only begin to take an interest “in the fate of so-called lower life forms, because we are about to become one” (116). Harari is alluding to an assumed overtaking of humanity by smart machines, an argument popularized by different strands of automation theory and accelerationism whose most vocal proponent, Elon Musk, has argued that to stay relevant humans must become cyborgs (Solon). The once-radical perspective of Donna Haraway now provides the very substance of twenty-first century capitalist mantras.

For Harari, the posthuman moment occurs when we are about to become dominated by machines; and, in a way, both Morton and Harari are correct, but not because we are for the first time expressing concern for other species—in hunter-gatherer and early agricultural societies, Harari notes, humans have been animal and nature animists—or because we are about to become a “lower” life form. Rather, they are correct because we have now arrived at the moment in capitalist development when all of life has been completely objectified and commodified. We need only reflect on the various practices of objectification in contemporary culture to grasp this: the self-branding of social media influencers, cosmetic surgeries deemed to be necessary components of self-investment, the practice of medicine that treats the body as though it were a car needing a tune-up every few months as opposed to offering more holistic approaches to living and care, and so on. The body is treated like a technological object constantly in need of upgrades and repairs, and some theorists today imagine the equality of all objects in the same way: as just so many different kinds of machines (Bryant, Onto-Cartography). We may thus grasp historical progress today, as Mark Fisher puts it, “not in cultural shifts but in technological upgrades” (K-Punk 585). The middle class and its intellectual force concerns itself with objects at the very moment when people are about to become, or have already become, completely objectified, ourselves the product of capitalist processes of reification. We begin to see ourselves as potentially transforming into a lower life form against the rise in automation and artificial intelligence. It is only now that we aim towards a “democracy of objects,” where equality with the alterity of the nonhuman becomes a concern, because objecthood is deemed to be the basic condition of all things. Far from advancing radical theories, resistance to anthropocentrism, by downgrading the kind of human exceptionalism required to enact emancipatory ethics, is the ideological expression of twenty-first century capitalism. Resistance to anthropocentrism is becoming the norm, such that even the most vocal critics of new materialism, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology insist on resisting anthropocentrism much as the theories and theorists they criticize do.

II.

This last point requires clarification. For instance, in “New Materialism and the Labor Theory of Value,” Jennifer Cotter argues that new materialism is “an ideological articulation of commodity production and exchange relations that inverts its own historical conditions of possibility in human historical and social relations by representing the logic of exchange as an ontological condition of life as such” (172). Yet, despite her acute critique of new materialisms as mirrors of the market, Cotter is careful to distance herself and Marxism generally from any association with a humanist outlook: “historical materialism is not actually a form of anthropocentrism; rather, it understands that humans themselves are the evolutionary products of the dialectics of nature.” What she means by this is that human subjects are the products of “the dialectical praxis of labor” and that they “act to transform nature to meet their needs and in doing so transform their needs and their nature” (173). While I don’t dispute the claims she makes, it is difficult not to see her description of the dialectical praxis of human labor as anything but anthropocentric. It is a theory that still puts human labor at the center of production. Cotter recircles this point by remarking that in historical materialism it is not consciousness that determines social existence but social existence that determines consciousness. What she forgets, to borrow a phrase from Marx, is that people still make history, but they do so in conditions not of their own choosing. The trap to be avoided, then, is not anthropocentrism but feeling the need to avoid it. Attempts to do just that are bound to a performative contradiction that verges on a kind of inaction or withdrawal (to steal a term from object-oriented ontologists) based on a bad infinity that leaves intact existing relations of exploitation. Bad infinity is another way of explaining the kind of self-reflexive anxiety—of thinking problems and contradictions all the way down—that preemptively halts all activity. It is what Mark Fisher refers to as “reflexive impotence,” a self-fulfilling prophesy of cynical capitalist realism (Capitalist 21). Bad infinity thus transforms into a contemplative materialism or an idealism in the guise of materialism. Therefore, if posthumanisms such as new materialism, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology express an ontology of the reified space of the market, then their ethics is one of withdrawal, unreason, and inaction lest we give in to the spectres of Promethean anthropocentrism and hubristic pride.

Alexander Galloway shows that object-oriented ontology and speculative realism are, likewise, not merely mirrors of the market but of the algorithm. He makes this claim in relation to the origins of object-oriented philosophies in object-oriented programming, which designs software around objects rather than functions. It is worth noting that, just as neoliberalism objectifies us in the form of human capital, in the age of the algorithm, data and math make claims about the world from which they extract value (Galloway 358). These points are not insignificant and, again, like Cotter’s characterization of new materialism as reflecting the logic of the market, Galloway assesses object-oriented philosophy as expressive of an algorithmic ontology of data objects. In fact, both Morton and Harari use this very metaphor in their respective challenges to anthropocentrism: Morton proposes that the algorithm provides a snapshot of humankind (Hyperobjects 17), while for Harari humans are algorithms that reproduce by making copies of themselves (Homo Deus 98). The problem with posthumanist new realists such as these is that, unlike someone like Slavoj Žižek, they claim, as Galloway notes (357), that ontologies shouldn’t be political. Galloway’s retort is that any claim to lie outside of the political is one of the surest signs of being traversed by political antagonism. However, Galloway, like Cotter, takes time to distance himself from anthropocentrism and humanism.

Although the concluding section of his essay centers on the Heidegger-Sartre debate over humanism, Galloway makes sure to avoid being accused of anthropocentrism. In a footnote he writes, “[m]y argument is not an elegy to humanism, Sartrean or otherwise, at the expense of the nonhuman. This debate is false.” The true debate, he says, is between realism and materialism: “The issue is not objects versus humans but rather the real versus history” (364n28). Galloway is right to inquire about the politics of object-oriented philosophies, but I remain puzzled by his and Cotter’s urge to distance themselves from humanism and anthropocentrism. Isn’t history and our making of it precisely the human, subjective, and radical core of historical materialism? Isn’t the point for us not merely to contemplate the world but to change it? When Fredric Jameson tells us to “Always historicize!” he explains that the objective path of history is bound up with a subjective dimension “of the concepts and categories by which we attempt to understand [the historical origins of things themselves]” (ix). I raise this point not merely to claim that history is simply the product of human subjective intervention. There is objective history, but it intersects with an ethical dimension only along the lines of the “concepts and categories” by which it is known.

Cotter and Galloway are not alone in maintaining critical distance from humanism or anthropocentrism, even in their poignant challenges to new materialism and object-oriented ontology. In a piece that begins with a critique of the post-critical stance of Bruno Latour, Judith Butler claims that even the early Marx of the 1844 manuscripts, notorious for its (immature, according to Althusser) humanism, is not in fact anthropocentric. Her claim rests on the fact that, echoing Morton, Marx reflects on the inorganic alongside the human. Butler attacks Latour for his positivism but then doubles back to show that Marx—even the early Marx—was not anthropocentric (Butler, “Inorganic Body”). And why don’t we add Jameson himself to this resistance to humanism? In Allegory and Ideology, Jameson defends his career-spanning assertion, here against the aesthetics of “posthumanist” spaces, that allegory and representation are foundational—not as the grounds for meaning but for thought. The aesthetic dimension is the very ground against which all thought reacts and on which it reflects, a position with which this essay aligns itself. However, in his next move, Jameson characterizes the distinction between allegory and symbolism as like that between science and humanism, like Althusser’s distinction between science and (humanist) ideology. He aligns symbolism with humanism, since it is in the pursuit of meaning that interpretation of allegorical representation upends scientific investigation. Jameson equates to the symbolic pursuit of depth and meaning, something against which we must turn (Allegory 37). In short, even some of the staunchest critiques of posthumanism, new materialism, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology continue to run away from humanism. Where do we go from here?

III.

I now turn to a theory of the hysterical sublime to provide a fuller description of the concept as I use it, and to explain its significance for thinking through the contradictions present in theories aimed at resisting anthropocentrism and humanism more generally. Jameson first introduces the hysterical sublime in his early writings on postmodernism. The concept has irked me somewhat since first discovering it, but even though Jameson does not delve into the meaning behind his use of the term “hysterical,” I find the concept useful for my analysis and argument. Because Jameson does not develop the concept any further in his own work, it is useful to do so here: I propose that the psychoanalytic understanding of the hysterical neurotic shows us how anthropocentrism becomes the stumbling block of Anthropocene discourse and thought.

Jameson develops his conception of the hysterical sublime by comparing the postmodern sublime to the accounts of the sublime developed by Burke and Kant. It is, therefore, useful to explain how it functions in their writing before developing further Jameson’s concept of the hysterical sublime, below. For Burke (1998 [1757]), our experience of the sublime emerges from sensations of fear and terror in the face of the dangers of the natural world. We experience these sensations with delight in those moments when we feel safe and secure. The sublime is thus, for Burke, the pleasure garnered from the painful experience of danger, but which is nevertheless kept at a distance where we can perceive it in safety and respite. For Kant (2000 [1793]), however, the sublime is not merely the product of our experiencing the dangers of nature from a safe distance and remaining in awe of them. Rather, the sublime is brought to bear on our aesthetic enjoyment in the moment when we experience our own affirmation of a limit, one that we put in place ourselves to assert our own power. Such a limit is self-affirming at the same time that it creates and puts in its place the sublime as a negative pleasure.

The human subject’s affirmative placement of the sublime is called visually to mind in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), when Mal (Marion Cotillard) places her totem, forever spinning, inside a toy house, which creates for her the illusion of the dream reality as the real thing. The scene is useful for grasping the way that, in the psychoanalytic sense, our approach to reality is always already framed by the fantasy scenario we create in our relation to it. Similarly, the creation of the sublime positions for us our very own relation to the reality of the world in the very form of our affirmation of it as limited. We can understand in this way the Hegelian thesis that, “behind the curtain of phenomena, there is only what we put there” (Less 282). The limit that we apply serves as a heuristic, a regulative idea against which the capacity to reason is established. By positing the heuristic limit, we are made capable of reasoning the aesthetic experience of the sublime, which is nowhere present in reality until that moment when it is represented in our thinking it. The latter, we can say, marks the point of origin, the positing of the presuppositions, in the Hegelian sense, that pivots towards the establishment of the system of philosophical inquiry, thinking, and rational cognition, which is a totality closed on one end by the affirmation of the limit, and on the other by its ends and goals, or by its teleology. I argue that the latter is only a secondary moment of the dialectic, however, since we are subjectivized through the curvature of the negation of the negation that returns us to our starting point, but from an inverse perspective in the aesthetic.

According to Jameson, the sublime occupies an alternative imaginary in the context of postmodern capitalism. For Jameson, the other of postmodernity is not nature but technology, which figures the representation, or the aesthetic limit, of reality. Jameson is careful to note that for him the hysterical sublime refers not necessarily to technology, but that technology serves as an aesthetic shorthand for our experience of the global network of advanced capitalism (“Postmodernism” 77; 79). It is because productive technology exists as congealed dead labor that we can come to experience it as an alienated power that we set against ourselves (“Postmodernism” 77). It is this sublime other, an aesthetic figuration of late capitalism, that we encounter in representations of technology. For instance, according to Jameson, even in the early 1980s, the computer comes to represent  the general global network of the financial stage of capitalism. We can also say that this stage finds expression in popular culture genres such as cyberpunk, where the digital, virtual realities, artificial intelligence, androids, and replicants extend the panic mode of the sublime in everything from HAL 9000 and Roy Batty to the matrix and black mirrors. Yet even here technology and the digital in the context of Anthropocene discourse don’t capture the sublime other of our present. Compared with technology itself, or even the capitalist mode of production, the hysterical sublime is more readily readable and located in the human subject. After all, it is the human subject that transforms nature through the dialectical praxis of labor, submitting it to the human will in the process of developing the tools that build human civilizations. The hysterical sublime, I claim, thus expresses our fear and panic and even our awe and terror of ourselves as we are faced with a confrontation with overwhelming anthropocentrism. The hysterical sublime corresponds to human self-loathing that we place behind the curtain of phenomenal reality, ourselves. The concept of the hysterical sublime, as I now appropriate it from Jameson, thus represents the rising resistance to anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism that I’ve described above. However, there is also a psychoanalytic sense that I wish to add to Jameson’s initial diagram of the hysterical sublime, related to conceptions of the thinking and reasoning human subject, and through which we can understand the concept of the hysterical sublime in another way.

In a reversal of the terms “hysteric” and “sublime,” we might begin by asking why, according to Lacan, is Hegel “the most sublime hysteric” (Lacan, Other Side 35;Žižek, Most Sublime)?  The psychoanalytic discourse begins by investigating a constitutive (as opposed to contingent) alienation of subjectivity, similar to the Hegelian reading of the subject in Phenomenology of Spirit. We can, for instance, read the entirety of Hegel’s text as one long narrative of “that’s not it,” as we move from the moments of sense-certainty and perception, to understanding, consciousness, and self-consciousness; from the dialectic of the Lord and Bondsman, to the Unhappy Consciousness and the Law of the Heart and the Beautiful Soul—all of the scenarios in Hegel’s text depict the pursuits and impasses of trying to grapple with the inevitability of contradictions towards which we are driven. Similarly, desire in the framework of Freudian psychoanalysis is grasped as the continuous pursuit of the lost object that will supposedly satisfy the subject’s enjoyment. However, as analysis explains, the object pursued is never truly a material object that actually exists. Its positive existence is merely that of being lost, which is why no concrete object will satisfy the subject’s desire. In this way, the hysterical neurotic symptom is one of metonymically reaching out to every material object, which it subsequently cancels as the object “that’s not it.” For Lacan, the subject’s desire is always the desire of the Other—that is, the subject hopes to satisfy its own desire by fulfilling the desire of the Other. However, since no positive object is ever it, the hysterical subject, according to Lacan, ultimately reaches the point of frustration, demanding to know from the Other, “ché vuoi?”—“what do you want from me?” In the Lacanian paradigm, hysterical neurotics, through the constant pursuit of the lost object, and by reaching the point of frustration in their demand to know what to do, produce for analytical discourse the very knowledge upon which it is founded (Lacan, Other Side 14; 31-38). The hysterical subject is, in this sense, the producer of knowledge, and it is in the production of the analytical discourse that the hysteric aids in the development of the very language—the interpretive language, or the Symbolic—that enables the process of the talking cure. It is then through the recognition on the part of the subject that every positive object is bound to failure that the cure enables the subject to retroactively transform its relation to its enjoyment and to grasp the constitutive fact of alienation. It is, in other words, the psychoanalytic moment of the negation of the negation.

When we then think about the various examples and dramatizations in the Phenomenology of Spirit, from the Lord and Bondsman to the beautiful soul and the law of the heart, we see that every scenario raises new and irreconcilable contradictions. As Žižek puts it, Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit tells us again and again the same story of the repeated failure of the subject’s endeavour to realize his project in social Substance . . . the story of how the ‘big Other,’ the social substance, again and again, thwarts his project and turns it upside-down” (Ticklish 76). As Žižek has also argued, it is then at the point of Absolute Knowing that the subject “finally accepts ‘contradiction’ as an internal condition of every identity” (Sublime Object 6). Alienation is less the problem to be solved (and here the humanisms of those like Lefebvre [2009] or Fromm [2011] fail); alienation and negativity are, instead, the very constitutive dimensions of subjectivity and freedom. By alienating ourselves from nature, by negating our natural determinants as well as our social and cultural ones, we enact our freedom, which constantly plagues us. It is only by reconciling ourselves with this fact—the fact of alienation and the inevitability of contradiction—that we come to see things in their totality, or as the bigger picture that counts as Absolute Knowing, which overlaps in Hegel’s Logic, with the moment of the negation of the negation, or the true infinite (119). As Žižek puts it, “in the negation of the negation, the subject includes itself [its own alienation] in the process” (Less 299).

The production of the new concept (or, in semiotic terms, the new signifier) is thus the very way in which the Symbolic is meant to have an effect in the Real. The production of the new—affirming the new concept—is the method by which the free subject gives structure to its freedom. The foundation of our collective freedom is built upon the production of aesthetics and structures, a production that makes this collective freedom possible. The hysterical sublime is thus, on the one hand, the figure of the human subject itself, which bears the marker of being the stumbling block of sense in a posthumanist ethics resistant to anthropocentrism; on the other hand, it is the manner in which the human subject produces the new in the realm of the Real. Through the production of discourse that properly grasps the object of the Real, the discursive or Symbolic knowledge that the subject produces makes possible our transformation of our material reality and the conditions of our existence. This, after all, is the sense in which Jameson first coins his concept of “cognitive mapping”—which he describes as an aesthetic, “which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system”—and, he does so in precise Lacanian terms, noting the way that the Symbolic (as interpretation; narrative as a socially symbolic act) has an effect in the Real, a point missed in the Althusserian reference to ideology as an imaginary representation of the subject to its real conditions of existence (“Postmodernism” 92). It’s on this point that historical materialism and psychoanalysis overlap. Leaving aside the fact that humanisms have created deleterious interactions with the world, we start to arrive at the point where our interpretive relation to the world is also our salvation from ourselves. If the dialectics of nature means anything, it is that although we are made by nature we at the same time also transform nature to meet the needs of our historically conditioned freedom. It is thus futile to attempt a reconciliation with nature, since alienation is the foundation for our understanding of the conditions in which we exist. To grasp this we require universal humanist concepts that allow us to represent the aesthetic as well as the ethical conditions we need to enact, or even to limit and regulate our relation to nature, which is also a relation to ourselves.

IV.

What evidence is there to support the claim that the human subject is the sublime other—the hysterical sublime—of posthumanist critical theories resistant to anthropocentrism? For the sake of brevity, I’ll refer here to a single example, noting that the theory I present is the beginning of a broader investigation. It is significant that Graham Harman in his aesthetic theory explicitly rejects the category of the sublime. Object-oriented ontology, he writes, “does not really distinguish between the beautiful and the sublime” (Art 47). For him, the two different experiences of the beautiful and the sublime are simplified into the allure of the object. Harman’s object-oriented ontology denies the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, because this would detract from the formal equivalence and flatness of aesthetic objects. From the standpoint of object-oriented ontology, Harman continues, “aesthetics must treat the apples of a still life and the awesome power of a tsunami in precisely the same way” (47). What he denies, therefore, is the very subjective form of translating aesthetic pleasure into the subject’s instituting power to reason. At the same time, however, he ignores his own positing of the human subject as that very other against which his own reasoning in object-oriented philosophy is founded. In other words, what he misses is the human fantasy framework that allows us to consider the formal equality of objects, the criteria by which they can be judged. They are made equivalent only insofar as their measurement is reflected by some foundational regulatory and heuristic limit, which I am here calling the hysterical sublime.

            Harman has responded to this critique in his reading of Marx (“Object-Oriented”). One of the chief claims of object-oriented ontology is that even though human subjects may think their relations to objects or to the noumenal, even as a limit (it is typical of anthropocentricism), they ignore the relationship between objects. For Harman, this bias returns in the Marxist account of the commodity as congealed human labor. However, his response to the criticism that OOO is fetishistic in the same way as commodity fetishism nevertheless avoids confronting the central ideological dimensions of Marx’s conception of the commodity. Harman focuses instead on the dimensions of value production and the emphasis in Capital on the social dimensions of commodity production as the congealing of socially necessary labor time in the commodity. Commodities, he says quite rightly, are objects with social value and are therefore still the product of an anthropocentric constellation (“Object-Oriented” 32-33). What Harman ignores is the ideological aspect underlying commodity fetishism, which is not too far off from his own disavowed position of enunciation, which is the very basis for the market reification of value. Both the market and perspectives resistant to anthropocentrism disavow the human social dimensions present in their reflections on the world of objects, be they commodities or otherwise. This is a crucial point not to be missed: while Harman criticizes the responses to OOO as fetishistic on the grounds that commodity fetishism still relies on the social, noting that OOO is different for its critique of anthropocentrism, he fails to see that his own position is also inherently anthropocentric, relying on the social.

            Recall here Marx’s description in Capital, Volume 1 of the imaginary scenario of commodities communicating with each other in the market:

If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us a objects, however, is our own value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it. We relate to each other merely as exchange-values. Now listen to how those commodities speak through the economist:

            ‘Value (i.e. exchange value) is a property of things, riches (i.e. use values) of man. Value, in this sense, necessarily implies exchanges, riches do not’.

            ‘Riches (use-value) are the attribute of man, value is the attribute of commodities. A man or a community is rich, a pearl or a diamond is valuable . . . A pearl or a diamond is valuable as a pearl or a diamond’.

            So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond.” (176–177)

The scenario as Marx lays it out is meant to demonstrate the fact that the exchange value congealed in the commodity is not its intrinsic value, but its value insofar as it is expressed in human social relations of exchange. The fantasy of the intercourse between commodity-objects is not far off from Harman’s conception of noumenal intercourse. In the case of commodity exchange, the scenario is bound to money as its universal equivalent. Money measures equivalent value in the commodity and is the universal point of signification against which all commodity-objects, including commodified human labor, waged or otherwise (slave labor, social reproduction), find their equivalence as objects. It is this fantasy scenario itself, or what Slavoj Žižek calls the sublime object of ideology, that informs the necessary subtext to the proper fetishistic functioning of money (Sublime Object). The hysterical sublime likewise provides for posthumanist resistance to anthropocentrism the same kind of subterranean point of reflection, first in its ability to lay claim to the equivalence of all objects (or, even, in its attempt to theorize all substance as equivalent), and second in its attempt to dispel the instituting binary logic of anthropocentrism. This, however, nevertheless dismisses the fact that the non- or posthuman subject is itself a binary other of the human and humanisms, which are its target. By “target” I mean both that which forms its focal point of attack and, paradoxically, that other human subjects are precisely those whom it aims to convince—of what?

            This brings us back to Harman’s reaction to Kant, both in terms of his aesthetics as well as his ethics. The two are inherently related to the extent that the positing of the needed presuppositions required to produce and create the background of the sublime very much pertains to the kind of freedom that is anticipated in the categorical imperative. Only a free human subject can create the internal limits required to posit the sublime as the negative pleasure against which we perceive and experience beauty. Similarly, only a free subject, for Kant (2015 [1788]), is capable of an ethical act since, as he argues in the second Critique, an ethical action must be taken as free from punishment and reward. Ethical actions are self-authorizing, but only insofar as the subject acts freely while at the same time acknowledging the conditions that make possible its own freedom. Harman is quick to counter, arguing that ethics are never merely the human subject acting on an object, but rather the hybrid formation of the compound entity between the agent and the object (“Object-Oriented” 34). He relies, even, on the Heideggerian difference between ready-at-hand and present-at-hand to make this case. Present-at-hand entities, he writes, are inherently relational, but not in the same way as exchange-value, because exchange is a wholly social relation, unlike Heideggerian presence (Ibid). But Harman might betray himself here when thinking the correlate between the intercourse of noumenal objects and the presence of the subject to such a scene. For Harman, the problem with anthropocentrism is that it remains idealist and anti-realist in the sense that, for him, it cannot perceive reality apart from human contact with it. But this is not the point of dialectical materialism, which is at its most basic a theory of the political ethics of the subject, insofar as it relates to the dynamics of the human knowing, reasoning and acting upon the reality and materiality of the world. As Žižek notes, at its core dialectical materialism concerns the way that human knowledge is tied to our interactions with the real world: “[t]he idea that knowing changes reality is something quantum physics shares with psychoanalysis (for which interpretation has effects in the Real) as well as with historical materialism, for which the proletariat’s acts of acquiring self-consciousness (of becoming aware of its historical mission) changes its object—through this awareness, the proletariat in its very social reality turns into a revolutionary subject” (Incontinence 228). To this list I would add, perhaps somewhat ironically, object-oriented ontology as one example of its various approaches. To be more blunt: what is this resistance to anthropocentrism if not a theory of knowledge aimed towards changing not merely the object but our own social relation to reality? Who precisely is the target of Harman’s polemic? Who is he trying to convince and for what action does he call? If the aim is to persuade other human subjects to move beyond a contemplative materialism, then perhaps these are the grounds upon which we might begin to rethink an implied posthumanist ethics in more precise humanist rhetoric and aesthetics.

V.

Having now set some of my contentions alongside perspectives resistant to anthropocentrism, I would like to provide a provisional conclusion and offer a way forward that proposes a renewal of humanism through the concept of the hysterical sublime. There are three ways that resistance to anthropocentrism relies on humanist dimensions: the methodological dimension; the ethical dimension; the conceptual-aesthetic dimension. Methodologically, a constitutively alienated human subjectivity is the position from which we are able to grasp the situation. My conception of humanism thus departs from an older Marxist humanism—found in the work of Erich Fromm or Henri Lefebvre, for instance—that sought dis-alienation as its goal. Instead, for me, humanism remains the methodological and ethical measure of our actions, graspable only from conditions of inherent alienation and negativity. Ethically, then, we have to assume that resistance to anthropocentrism expects free action on our part—why else would the discourse be arguing for a critique of humanism if it genuinely felt that we were unable to act, or abstain from action, freely? In other words, why engage in polemical critiques of humanism if freedom in the humanistic sense is deemed to be illusory? What is the point of receiving information if we are not driven to act on it? It is not enough to “understand the passions,” as Rosi Braidotti puts it (Posthuman 47). Our very act of thinking is already our subjective investment in them.

Finally, it is only by relying on humanistic concepts such as humility, accountability, responsibility, equality, equity, and freedom that we can begin to make sense of our relations with the nonhuman and our impact on the world. Resistance to anthropocentrism is in this way at least productively antithetical, but it is so only in the sense that we come to grasp the centrality of the human subject and the role that we humans play in the production of the world. Humanism may be differently grasped as the for-itself—or the coming into self-consciousness and awareness—of the Anthropocene. As Jameson puts it in Allegory and Ideology, “[i]f the human age is to be celebrated, and the Anthropocene given its due, it is in terms of its production of reality and not its transformation into an aesthetic image. It is the perspective of human activity (Tätigkeit), of Marxist productivism, of the construction of nature as well as of human reality, that is the truly exhilarating vision” (36). He concludes that “[t]he glory of the Anthropocene . . . has been to show us that we can really change the world. Now it would be intelligent to terraform it” (348).

The aesthetic is at the same time the ethical to the extent that the foundational representation is an ethical gesture whereby the subject posits a self-limit in the form of the representation itself (the movement from Vorstellung—or static image—to Darstellung, as the dialectical presentation or unfolding of the concept, for instance). Representation is a heuristic that provides the ground for thinking, and it is against the imposed limit that all thinking and reasoning takes place. When this occurs, the subject is able to grasp the freedom it also has to posit and represent new limits, making possible a newly-freed ethical act capable of transforming the very conditions of the subject’s existence. The conditions of experience, in other words, are subject to transformation. Embracing new limits, producing new aesthetic forms, as Anna Kornbluh puts it, is the condition of freedom (154). Thinking creates its own forms, or, as Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda put it, “there is no form outside of the act of formalization. There are no pregiven forms of rationality waiting to be discovered: there is nothing to see behind the curtain except for what we ourselves put there. The forms of thought produce themselves in the process of being formalized” (21). Likewise Reza Negarestani suggests that thinking is equivalent to giving structure to the universe: it is “the very register of intelligibility” (Intelligence 1). Rationality, as Ray Brassier explains, is “simply the faculty of generating and being bound by rules,” which are not fixed in advance but historically contingent and mutable (485). This means that we create and set the limits that are necessary for our thinking as well as acting. It’s not by lifting or negating limits that we set ourselves free, as in the project of permanent criticism set out by Foucault in “What is Enlightenment?” It is by imposing new ones against which we relate. Or, as Negarestani puts it, we cannot critique norms without at the same time producing them (“Labor” 439).

When anti-correlationists write off reason and assume unreason as an absolute ontological priority, as Meillassoux does for instance (53), they establish, by way of reasoning, a new norm of unreason. But this is not liberating, since we are today plagued by a lack of reasoning. On the one hand, unreason potentially signals a turn towards some quasi-mystical reliance on the divine, since freedom becomes meaningless if the only necessity is contingency itself, as Meillassoux (2008) puts it in the subtitle to his book, After Finitude. On the other hand, privileging unreason sets up the conditions for the kind of competition that neoliberalism takes as its own quasi-naturalist presuppositions—a lack of a common truth makes competition and a “will to power” the only means of asserting and defending the actual. Underlying all of this, however, is the universal form of the commodity as the disavowed universality that centers reality in the capitalist terms of the present ideology. Instead, it makes sense to posit the practical limits that, given our particular historical conjuncture, set the rules for our material freedom in the form of something like the social state, the kind of prometheanism that Brassier, for instance, defends as the rational engineering of ourselves and the world (not artificially, but through laws that serve the public good over private interest), or the kind of project that Jameson above calls terraforming. But ultimately it is human subjects who set these limits for ourselves (not the divine, not a ruling class). Thus, as Kate Soper puts it, humanism is “about getting human beings to recognize their unique responsibilities for creating and correcting environmental devastation, both for themselves and for other species” (377).

This is how we have to grasp the kind of humanism reflected in the paradoxical status of the hysterical sublime: humanism it is not a theory of dominance, but there is no way for us to exist beyond the methodological as well as the aesthetic and ethical centrality of human subjecthood. Human centrism has erroneously been claimed as ideological hubris that preaches superiority. But centering the human subject merely recognizes that we are the ones whose ideas, motives, and desires make us act in the world. We define the rules, concepts, and values by which we think people should live, and according to which we judge ethical action, including our way of relating to nature and the nonhuman. The hysterical sublime is thus a call to build an aesthetic that reflects our ethical conditions in the face of ecological catastrophe and the built-in obsolescence of automated capitalism. Any sense of a communist or socialist ethic against capital must take the methodological, aesthetic, and ethical principles of humanism into account.

Returning to the avowed resistance to anthropocentrism, then, the first question to ask is an obvious one: why must we tear down the dictatorship of the human? Why make this assumption at all? The problem is the following: who will do this tearing down? Who is the agent of this opposition to the dictatorship of human beings? In Lacanian terms, the enunciated content is here undermined by its position of enunciation. The very act of reasoning the nonhuman only in reference to the human subject shows us that the underlying thrust of a resistance to anthropocentrism is itself inherently anthropocentric. Of course, it is commendable that posthumanist critical theories draw our attention to the nonhuman in the way that they do, precisely at the moment when we face the existential question of our demise in the face of climate change and rising concerns over digital automation and artificial intelligence. But the truth of this crisis is evident only to the human subject and can only be acted upon by it. Even if we anthropomorphize the nonhuman to the extent that we claim such an awareness on its part, we are the agents at whom posthumanist polemics and criticisms are aimed. We cannot, in other words, convince a rock that it is noumenal. We need to convince ourselves of our own rational and ethical centrality. If “posthumanism” means merely taking the nonhuman into consideration within our ontological and ethical frameworks, then it is questionable why this premise is outside the contours of humanism and the values of accountability and responsibility it espouses. Maybe we can extend agency to the nonhuman, but it is a different question when it comes to the ethical implications of human subjectivity and accountability.

We mustn’t confuse the rationalization of the planet with mere technologization or re-industrialization. We don’t need a “fourth industrial revolution,” nor do we need to rely on technology to flatten our relations with the nonhuman. We need a social revolution that privileges the public good over private interests. We don’t need to accelerate technology, and we mustn’t think technocratically. We must think humanistically. When we place ourselves at the methodological and ethical center of knowledge and understanding our thinking has the capacity to reason; and, when we reason, we go from decentering to re-centering the collective to act. To renew universal humanism it is necessary to begin by foregrounding a humanist commitment to freedom, responsibility, accountability, respect, and equity, but also to make critical reasoning and human subjectivity central to our ethical endeavours. I also argue for a conception of humanism connected to class struggle. As I’ve tried to demonstrate, resistance to anthropocentrism reflects market ideology and its processes of reification. Human subjectivity is nevertheless the methodological and ethical center of the dilemmas we face in the Capitalocene. It is because the human subject is constitutively alienated that we require the construction of conditions for a freedom that is mutually satisfiable, between human subjects, collectively, as well as between the human and the nonhuman environment that sustains our freedom. Humanism, to be effective politically as well as ethically, must be based on a perspective that is universal: emancipation is universal or it is nothing. What I am calling the hysterical sublime, as a representational device, allows us to perceive the positing of the conditions that puts humanist conceptions of freedom and accountability, as well as the methodological dimensions of human subjectivity, front and center. Without this human and humanist perception, the earnest goals of posthumanist and new materialist approaches to imagining the planet equitably, which includes seeing the human as one species among others, cannot be accomplished. Attempts at resisting anthropocentrism cannot help but produce performative contradictions. The renewal of humanism must take ownership of this dilemma to facilitate universal emancipation.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to express his deep appreciation for the thoughtful feedback and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article from the anonymous reviewers, as well as the meticulous commentary and assistance on the preparation of the final version from the general editors. This article draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

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Christopher Chamberlin (bio)

Abstract

Democracy becomes modern after it abolishes slavery and assumes its primary feature—race. Paradoxically, political theory cannot formalize a notion of democracy that incorporates the ex-slave or a post-slavery democracy that does not prescribe racial genocide. This essay shows that this paradox is structural, and tracks its transformation from Alexis de Tocqueville’s and Gustave de Beaumont’s nineteenth-century meditations on the specter of abolition to UNESCO’s postwar statements on race, particularly through Claude Lévi-Strauss’s and W.E.B. Du Bois’s subsequent critiques of racial capitalism. It concludes by reflecting on the ethics of war as a materialization of the impossibility of multiracial democracy.

The true significance of slavery in the United States to the whole social development of America lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy. What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States? . . . This was the great and primary question which was in the minds of the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States and contin­ued in the minds of thinkers down through the slavery controversy. It still remains with the world as the problem of democracy expands and touches all races and nations.

–W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction

Two Axioms

Modern democracy is radically racial. Because race was the essential ingredient that made slavery modern, distinguishing it from ancient and feudal iterations of domination, the same clause applies to the form of power that supersedes it. This will be our first axiom: in the act of bringing slavery to an end, democracy contracts its main feature—race—which now permeates it. This connection between race and democracy is complicated by black radical thought insofar as it theorizes the constitutive elements of slavery as a mode of power and deliberates how those same elements survive abolition. This premise destabilizes the successionist narrative about the relation between premodernity and modernity that our first axiom projects, challenging the possibility of answering the following in any straightforward way: When did slavery end? And when did democracy begin?

In the epigraph, W.E.B. Du Bois frames the slave as the definitive horizon of modern politics, a disturbance that reveals the truth of democracy’s relations of power and a figure of negativity constitutively excluded from its domain. In his midcentury writings, Du Bois sees the transcendence of slavery as a long unfinished task, a project violently interrupted a century before by the quashing of radical reconstruction. A new chance to defeat the color line presented itself in the project for an industrial democracy that would be both multiracial and international in scope, a vision crafted out of Du Bois’s increasingly apparent engagement with the work of Marx and his growing understanding of the “dark world” as a revolutionary vanguard (Dusk of Dawn 134-62;Balfour 182n18). It is precisely against this nomination of the sexually undifferentiated laborer as a telos of black freedom that Saidiya Hartman presents the female slave as an untranscendable horizonof democratic thought. In contradistinction to the situation of productive labor, “sexual violence and reproduction characteristic of enslaved women’s experience,” Hartman writes, “fails to produce a radical politics of liberation or a philosophy of freedom” (167). The depiction of the passage from subjection to political agency through the act of the general strike, as in Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (55-83), sidelines the centrality of sexual and reproductive labor to slavery. It also elides black women’s labor as a highly compromised site of political resistance.

The inability to elaborate a politics of freedom in the wake of the violence constitutive of the historical experience of black women renders a philosophy of democracy that includes them unthinkable. This can be stated the other way around: only through the categorical exclusion of slavery’s reproductive labor—that is, the transgenerational repetition of blackness as a status of absolute exclusion—does democracy become philosophically coherent, precisely because “[f]or the enslaved, reproduction does not ensure any future other than that of dispossession nor guarantee anything other than the replication of racialized and disposable persons” (168). Democracy encounters a limit to its powers in an abstract and material labor that “replicates the fate of the slave across generations” (169) and reproduces racial blackness as an entity unassimilable to political representation (be it liberal or revolutionary). The labor of the female slave, as Hartman describes it, is a constitutive element of slavery that also resists induction into a regime of equality. The structural excess that Hartman nominates under the heading of “black women’s labors,” or what Amber Jamilla Musser calls the “fleshy limit of theory” (176), figures here as the interminably receding verge of a democratic praxis.

Modern democracy brings slavery to an end but possesses no remedy for undoing the sexual mode of reproduction that replicates its inequality. Slavery’s reproductive labor survives, repressed, within the democracy that follows it, and in which it perpetually returns. This creates the impasse that defines democracy in the modern conjuncture. An inherent difficulty consequently plagues the attempt to formally represent or concretely propose multiracial democracy, a difficulty, I want to suggest, that is determined by the same deadlock that prevents the delineation of a politics of liberation from the sexual dimension of slavery. I mean this in the most basic sense: no social or political theory can formulate either an account of democracy that incorporates the ex-slave or a vision of post-slavery democracy that does not presume or prescribe racial genocide. Invariably, democracy and multiracialism emerge as an impossible combination. We are therefore faced with the need to couple the opening proposition with a second axiom that negates it: modern democracy is on one level radically racial, and on another level, radically notracial.

In this essay, I will trace out this impossibility of multiracial democracy, resulting from the contradictory and simultaneously racial and non-racial form of modern democracy, as it manifests in two signal statements on Western democracy, one from the nineteenth century and the other from the twentieth. The first is contained in the observations made by Alexis de Tocqueville and his intellectual co-conspirator, Gustave de Beaumont, concerning the specter of abolition. The second is contained in the declarations on racial equality issued by the United Nations after World War II, particularly as elaborated and critiqued by one of its philosophical standard-bearers, Claude Lévi-Strauss. The question of the “ultimate relation of slaves to democracy” (Du Bois, Black Reconstruction 13) is raised by both of these radical attempts at formulating the scope and nature of its post-slavery form, where slavery comes to represent both an origin of and a limit to democracy. My interest lies not only in showing how this limit is theorized before and after the advent of abolition, but in tracking how the impasses of multiracialism mutate after the American form of democracy expands from a national dilemma into a global project.

To be clear, it is not my argument that Tocqueville, Beaumont, Du Bois, and Lévi-Strauss lack the critical acumen to conceive a political form properly inclusive of the figure of the female slave, but that their formulations are limited by the inability to account for an irresolvable structural feature of modern democracy: the persistent reproduction of racial inequality after slavery. This structural limit of multiracialism reveals itself in the radical temporal (that is, historical) or spatial (that is, geographical) fixes that my symptomatic readings of these nineteenth- and twentieth-century documents propose for addressing racial inequality but that perversely end up converting democracy into a program for racial violence. These theoretical models serve as test-cases for my main claim that race has no democratic solution. In the final part of this essay, I suggest instead that multiracial democracy can and must fail. To that end I reconsider war as a possible realization of democracy’s inherent contradictions, a failure that is dismissed or repressed in the various solutions to multiracialism that this essay examines.

Imaginary Equality: Tocqueville and the Paradox of a Free Black Population

Alexis de Tocqueville’s self-confessed inability to imagine democracy surviving the end of racial slavery illustrates a core problem in modern political thought. In the two volumes comprising Democracy in America,¹ the French jurist sets out to survey American civil and political society and describe its unprecedented break with the European political order. The Old World was encumbered by the decay of aristocratic society, and its previous experiments with democracy, as in the French example, were too sudden and destructive to effect a deeper change in the “laws, ideas, customs, and manners which were necessary to render such a revolution beneficial” (1: 6).² Tocqueville credits the contrasting success and stability of American democracy to a firmly established “imaginary equality,” a belief, rooted in common mores (moeurs) or customs, in the fundamental equality of men (2: 217). This imaginary equality in the “public mind” is necessary to establish the general equality of conditions that strikes Tocqueville as “the central point at which all [his] observations constantly terminated” (1: 1). Just as importantly, this imaginary equality serves as a political seismic damper, mitigating the resentments that arise from the exacerbation of the “real inequality” of conditions between masters (the rich) and servants (the poor) (1: 361). For Tocqueville, the importance of democratic institutions in the United States, particularly the mores that underwrite them, lies almost exclusively in their capacity to curtail the mutual hostilities that inequality breeds and the violent impulses those resentments precipitate. Equality is for Tocqueville thus neither a good in itself nor a natural endowment of humanity, but rather an illusion that apprentices the poor to their subordination. These are important aspects of the democratic imaginary, but they are not essential to its function. Imaginary equality acts as a way to neutralize the turmoil of economic inequality and to prevent the accumulation of wealth from reaching unsustainable proportions.

Democracy specifically disperses the passions released by the inequalities unleashed by the institution of the right to property—the advent of which, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s account, is coterminous with the invention of modern civil society (44). In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau assigns the cause of the social degeneration of Europe to the mutual valuation, reciprocal regard, and contractual commitments that are required by the exigencies of modern commerce (65-71). This increasing qualification of humanity, the new valuation of subjects’ prestige and social reputation, is part and parcel of the division of labor that institutes inequalities of “wealth, nobility or rank, power and personal merit” (66). The abstract nature of market relations (especially contract relations) suppresses the “natural” and restraining sentiment of pity that once moderated aristocratic inequality, multiplying in its place the modern passions: love, envy, shame, and contempt. In sum, the universal qualification and comparative evaluation of man’s values (prestige, authority, abilities, and so on)in civil society precedes and inevitably leads to the inequality of man. The modern passions make the inequality of man dangerous. Property is the vortex of these evils, writes Rousseau, insofar as this abstract social form externalizes the minor inequalities of ability inherent in nature into major and enduring inequalities in power and possession (53). Property becomes a proxy for human value, and after an expectation of an equal right to the latter becomes universal, “it was no longer possible for anyone to be lacking it [property or human value] with impunity” (49). “When both the most powerful and the most miserable made of their strengths or their needs a sort of right to another’s goods, equivalent, according to them, to the right of property,” concludes Rousseau, “the destruction of equality was followed by the most frightful disorder” (55).

While Rousseau sees no practical way of stopping this spiral of inequality and affect, which he would not live to see lead toward the triumph and terror of the French Revolution, Tocqueville presents American democracy as having developed a happy counterweight to the passions released by the right to property. Imaginary equality—as it exists in the “mass of those ideas which constitute [the] character of mind” (1: 299) or in the “moral and intellectual characteristics of social man taken collectively” (1: 318)—suppresses the love, envy, shame, and contempt that arise out of the division of labor and the inequality of material conditions. Against Rousseau’s moral denunciations, Tocqueville sees the more-or-less equal distribution of property under democracy as a bulwark against a desire for revolution—that “other” modern passion. When everyone has something to lose, Tocqueville reasons, no one wants to risk losing it all in a revolution (1: 301-16). Democracy is, in his estimation, less a form of realizing social equality than a mode of managing the passions released by privacy, possession, and privation.

Even so, Tocqueville locates in the peculiar order of property in the Southern United States a glaring exception to these considerations, one that abruptly suspends his entire line of inquiry. “All that I have just said [about democracy],” writes Tocqueville, “is consequently inapplicable there” (2: 218). Slavery repulses Tocqueville. He sees it as a calamity, a vestige of premodern power that violates democracy’s ethos of equality. Tocqueville rejects the idea of innate and permanent inferiority as unscientific, deeming it incapable of either explaining the inequalities of slavery or of justifying its existence (an inclination that led him to break with his former protégé, Arthur de Gobineau, when the latter published The Inequality of Human Races in the 1850s [see Painter 9n16]). Tocqueville is also certain that slavery will not last the century, that it will either be abolished by decree or that slaves will violently seize freedom for themselves (1: 382). He therefore ultimately understands slavery as incidental and contradictory to democracy, but also neither as fatal to its constitution nor necessary for its survival. Because he understands slavery as spatially and temporally separate from democracy (seeing it as contained geographically to the South and as historically waning), Tocqueville does not believe that slavery presents an obstacle to the historical propagation of the democratic form or to its formal theorization. Rather, nothing threatens the fact and idea of American democracy more than the terminationof slavery. Why? The “abstract and transient fact of slavery,” Tocqueville argues, has the concrete and permanent consequence of forging an association between servility, inferiority, and color in the collective mind (1: 355). “Slavery recedes,” writes Tocqueville, referring to its gradual abolition in the Northern states, “but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary” (1: 356-57). Inequalities in law, social status, and material conditions could hypothetically be abolished by rescinding slavery and redressing its injuries, but no democratic instrument could abolish the imaginary inequality that slavery implants in the manners and mores of the public mind. “God alone can obliterate the traces of its existence,” he writes exasperatedly (1: 355). The hardwiring of racism in the mind of the collective subject undercuts the political will to work through and eradicate its effects. For all intents and purposes, Tocqueville concludes, one can make an abstract “accurate distinction between slavery itself, and its consequences,” but this connection cannot be undone in practice (1: 354-55).

Perplexed, Tocqueville observes that the consequences of slavery survive its abolition and that formal and imaginary inequality have an inverse relationship:

Whosoever has inhabited the United States, must have perceived, that . . . the prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states which have abolished slavery, than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known. (1: 357).

For Tocqueville, not slavery but the creation of a free black population threatens to plunge democracy into an abyss. The “free slave” magnifies the problem of slavery by synthesizing the contradiction between symbolic equality and imaginary inequality. In contrast to a system of overt bondage, post-slavery democracy amplifies the consequences of slavery because it activates a moral animus against the living embodiment of inferiority, the ex-slave, who is now formally included among the ranks of the “free.” This racial prejudice makes it impossible to integrate the ex-slave into a political community founded on sentiments, habits, and passions that do not differentiate between blackness and slavery.

Tocqueville concludes that the imminent end of slavery will lead to two possible consequences, both of which he freely admits are not tenable: blacks and whites will either have to “wholly part or wholly mingle” (1: 370). The former would involve the outbreak of a race war in which these factions would either destroy each other in an apocalyptic showdown or form separate monoracial nations, as was roughly the case in the recently concluded Haitian Revolution. The latter case, the so-called “commingling” of the races (1: 371) seems to be an even more remote possibility:

I do not imagine that the white and the black races will ever live in any country upon an equal footing. . . . A despot who should subject the Americans and their former slaves to the same yoke, might perhaps succeed in commingling their races; but as long as American democracy remains at the head of affairs, no one will undertake so difficult a task; and it may be foreseen that the freer the white population of the United States becomes, the more isolated it will remain. (1: 370-71)

If the ascendance of despotism “might perhaps” force the sexual commingling of the races in the same political space, then a democratic solution to multiracialism seems unimaginable for Tocqueville, since he believes that only a monoracial post-slavery society can be democratic and that only a despotic regime could facilitate a multiracial society. Tocqueville considers theimaginary inequalityproduced and maintained by racial prejudice too malignant to produce any other distribution of outcomes.

Real Inequality: Beaumont and the Impossibility of Post-Slavery Amalgamation

The imaginary inequality between black and white people—which cannot be symbolized, formalized, or written in a democratic formula—portends the existence of real inequality, provided that we define it differently than Tocqueville does when he uses this same term to refer to “actual” disparities in the material conditions between owners and laborers. Rousseau, for instance, understands material and symbolic inequality to be integral aspects of the relations of property intrinsic to modern civil society. Tocqueville, however, finds the critical relationship in American democracy to be that between its formal institutions and the manners and customs that enable those institutions to subsist. Additionally, for Tocqueville, the life of institutions and that of the public mind do not mutually constitute each other. He staunchly maintains that mores are the “real cause” of the democratic system of governance, which allows him to explain the survival of slavery’s customs and manners after abolition (1: 321). The respective symbolic-material (Rousseau) and imaginary (Tocqueville) forms of inequality are therefore distinct.

Real inequality denotes not a relative difference between the symbolic or imaginary qualities of man but the very negation of the slave’s humanity, not a negation of any determinate features of the slave (such as “wealth, nobility or rank, power and personal merit” [Rousseau 66]) but a negation of personhood. The immeasurable distance between persons and slaves under racial slavery can neither be expressed in terms of a common value nor bridged in the imagination. Real inequality names both an image of racial blackness that, as Michel Foucault argues, “expresses without formulating” (Foucault 36) hierarchy and an unquantifiable gap within the field of human quality that cannot be symbolized. Human equality, which Rousseau presumes to be a general and uniform process of valuation that attends the formation of civil society, only persists through this exclusion of the real inequality between person and slave. Finally, insofar as status is transmitted from mother to child under a racial regime of slavery, the “sexual violence and reproduction characteristic of enslaved women’s experience” (Hartman 167) is the primary vehicle for the reproduction of real inequality.

For these thinkers, the abolition of slavery and the incorporation of the ex-slave into democracy would consequently trigger a catalytic reaction in the chemistry of democracy. The enfranchisement of the slave attempts to “count” the antithesis of human equality among the field of values generated from its exclusion, and thereby opens an absolute and volatile misalignment withinthe democratic imaginary. This imaginary inequality is one that “Abolition-democracy” creates (Du Bois, Black Reconstruction 83), but that its symbolic and material powers of inclusion cannot remedy. Through this symptomatic reading of Tocqueville’s writing, we can see that the ex-slave does not primarily name a sociological position, material condition, or object of the public imagination, but a structural obstacle to the symbolic totalization of democracy. To slightly reframe Du Bois’s formulation, there isnoultimate relation between slaves and democracy because the status of the slave is reproduced through the process of racialization that follows abolition. Racializing the slave into a species of democratic personhood therefore has the effect of making the consequences of slavery—the production of blackness as a being inassimilable to the community of the free—those of democracy’s own. Slavery is thereby transformed, through abolition-racialization, from an external negation of democracy into its internal obstacle. What was for Tocqueville merely incidental to and unnecessary for democracy becomes, through the overdetermined cancellation of slavery and under the counterfeit of racial blackness, retroactively constitutive and irresolvable.³

            Tocqueville’s close friend and collaborator, the lawyer Gustave de Beaumont, composes his own thoughts on the structural failure of racialization under democracy in the form of a sociological novel. Marie, or, Slavery in the United States holds the distinction of being “the first abolitionist novel to focus on racial prejudice rather than bondage as a social evil” (“Overview”). Blending the conventions of romantic tragedy with empirical analysis, Beaumont declares himself to be “offering truth under the veil of fiction” (3), a method more appropriate for speculating on the conundrum of antiblack animus than the new political science deployed byTocqueville in his comparative analysis of democratic institutions. “It is, above all, these secondary consequences of an evil whose first cause has disappeared [i.e., slavery] which I have endeavored to develop,” writes Beaumont (6). Marie is a mundane love story about the romance between a French sojourner to the United States, Ludovic, and Marie, the white-appearing daughter of Baltimorean gentry who is revealed in the course of events to be a woman of color. The tragedy of the narrative is supposedly double: the first is the “flaw” of her “mixed” origin, magnified by the absurdity of its social significance due to her ability to pass as white, and the second is her eventual death as the result of the persecution the couple suffer for their interracial relationship. The sociological and literary dimensions of Marie align with the two tragic post-slavery scenarios imagined by Tocqueville, which Beaumont treats separately. The empirical analyses in the book’s appendices establish the political and economic unfeasibility of setting up a black nation separate from the United States, whether in the Americas or through the Liberian colonization scheme (206-16). The romance, meanwhile, explores the cultural impossibility of interracial marriage, which would be the “best . . . means of fusing the white and black races” and “the most obvious index of equality” (245). The post-slavery promise of “mingling” the races obtains in Beaumont’s novel its truer meaning. To force the races to “wholly mingle” (Tocqueville 1: 370) is to deploy a system of controlled breeding that dilutes the blackness of blackness until racial homogeneity is regained and democracy re-won.⁴ Yet even what we can describe with Jared Sexton as an “amalgamation scheme” would be impossible (Amalgamation Schemes). Marie not only dies of racist persecution before this hypothetical purification can be completed, but she is herself the product of a century of eugenic engineering. Her “complexion [is] even whiter than the swans of the Great Lakes” (58), but it does not grant her immunity from what society perceives as the general dishonor of blackness.

If there is a point on which Tocqueville and Beaumont offer strikingly differing assessments, it is in their respective diagnoses of the nature of racism’s persistence after slavery. This difference depends on the definition of “color,” which transforms the imaginary inequality of the slave into its post-slavery status. Whereas Tocqueville despairs at the probability of “seeing an aristocracy disappear which is founded upon visible and indelible signs” of color (1: 356), Beaumont directs his readers’ focus to the invisible yet equally indelible signsof color that mark Marie and that are reproduced, in the novel, as an artifact of social relations: society rumor, legal tradition, or pure fabulation. These different accounts of race—understanding it either as a visible or as an invisible sign—speak to the limits of representing real inequality. Indeed, this epistemological conundrum becomes acute after partus sequitur ventrem, the law of slavery that determines the sexual reproduction of status, ends. For Beaumont, the indelible nature of color and its unbreakable link to inferiority is ultimately not determined by law (because the law of slavery can and would be abolished), cultures of perception (because race can be invisible), or sex or sexual reproduction (because inferiority is imposed laterally, not genealogically, through acts of social misrecognition). Beaumont’s ideal realization of equality through a “fusing [of] the white and black races” (245) is revealed as an unattainable eugenic project. Not even a hypothetically successful erasure of the “signs of color” over the course of several generations would eradicate the violence of racism. The failure of this temporal solution to real inequality reproduces, again, the impossibility of multiracial democracy.

As a consequence of the nature of the racism they witnessed, the violent separation or destruction of one race (to “wholly part”) or the complete unification of both by a despotic state (to “wholly mingle”) become the two impossible solutions that Tocqueville and Beaumont are compelled to imagine as the only possiblefate of American democracy. We know that an unholy mixture of these two scenarios came to pass. The mass enlistment of slaves into the Union Army proved decisive to the outcome of the Civil War, while the reconstruction project carried out by the Freedman’s Bureau after the war attempted to impose a form of multiracial society in the South against the popular sentiments of whites, before it was abandoned. A third and worse compromise came to pass. Slavery was abolished, only to be replaced by the legal regime and extralegal violence of Jim Crow, a form of “reenslavement under another name” (Du Bois, Black Reconstruction 180). This refractory relationship between inequality across its real, symbolic, and imaginary registers would define the color line that Du Bois understands to be the defining ontological crisis of democracy in the twentieth century.

UNESCO and the Scientific Preservation of Multiracial Democracy

One of the most ambitious attempts to dislodge the ontological crisis of multiracial democracy emerged after World War II, when a new international order of civil society elevated racial equality to a fundamental principle of global justice. This was a watershed moment in the history of liberalism. “The principle of racial equality,” writes the historian Domenico Losurdo, “became a constitutive element in liberal identity only from the mid-twentieth century onward” (322). Since the signing of the United Nations charter in 1945, the writings of this international body have addressed racial prejudice repeatedly, identifying it not only as incompatible with global democracy but as corrosive to its very foundation. This consensus arose in response to war and racial genocide in Europe, as well as to decolonial and civil rights movements globally that drew attention to the similarities between racial fascism and the practices of Western democracy. Racism could no longer be tolerated or understood as ineradicable. In order to survive, democratic institutions had to actively remove racial prejudice from their body politic. Analyses of national socialism generated by Frankfurt School theorists argued that democratic societies that tolerate, cultivate, and mobilize racism subvert their own institutions and devolve into fascism, war, and self-destruction. If multiracial democracy once seemed like an impossible future project to observers like Tocquevillle and Beaumont, a new postwar consensus now proclaimed that its immediate realization was both possible and necessary.

The UN issued a trove of proclamations on the relation of race to democracy, and mobilized an international group of social and natural scientists—including biologists, anthropologists, and sociologists—to articulate and thereby move toward addressing the obstacles to a global democratic order. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was formed to lead this effort. Founded only a few months after the signing of the UN charter in 1945, it recognized racism as the principal social evil that the international system of democratic governance was brought into existence to combat. The threat racism posed to the maintenance of international peace made the globalization of democracy necessary. This is how the UNESCO charter diagnoses the nature of this evil:

the “war which has now ended was . . . made possible by the denial of the democratic principles of the dignity, equality, and mutual respect of men, and by the propagation, in their place, through ignorance and prejudice, of the doctrine of the inequality of men and races.” (qtd. in “The Race Question” 1)

The relation between racism and democracy is one of mutual negation: as a doctrine of inequality, racism contradicts the principle of equality. Articulated in this charter is also a new solution to prejudice. If racism was once thought to be fueled by passions and customs that only despotism could contain, then the experience of world war suggested that racism posed a more immediate threat to democracy than despotism, one that had the ability to survive the defeat of fascism. The advent of fascism thus changed official understandings of the concept of racism from an ineradicable custom to an effect of racial propaganda. Perhaps eliminating its connection to the imaginary was still impossible, but racism could and must be actively managed through an anti-propaganda campaign, through education and the dissemination of scientific research. A “Division of the Study of Racial Questions” was set up within UNESCO’s Department of Social Sciences in 1950 and assigned the task of waging an educational offensive against the misconceptions of race.

The most resounding statement to come out of this early effort was the pamphlet “The Race Question” issued by UNESCO in 1950. Its stated intention was to replace the myths surrounding race with facts. Its powerful denunciation of the extant science of racial biology ignited a public firestorm in the scientific community and set the terms for a long-running controversy over the nature of race among biologists, geneticists, and evolutionary anthropologists (see Brattain). This fifteen-point document was co-authored by an international cohort of social scientists, including luminaries like Ashley Montagu, E. Franklin Frazier, Gunnar Myrdal, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. “The Race Question” sought to do nothing less than make a scientific case for multiracial democracy and to locate the ethics of antiracism in human nature. The “first requirement of modern man,” the pamphlet contends, is to recognize the unity of mankind as a natural fact and racial differences as superficial groupings of physical appearance that have no fixed social, cultural, or biological determinants (8). Citing Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, the authors claim that racism comprises an artificial resistance to the natural extension of sympathies across differences of race and nation, an inclination for which all hitherto existing human and natural history stands as evidence. If there is no biological basis for racial supremacy or racial purity, then “universal brotherhood” doeshave a biological basis: “man is born with drives toward co-operation” that must be satisfied lest “men and nations alike fall ill” (9).

While condemning biological race science as it stood, “The Race Question” does not foreclose the possibility that race has a basis in natural biology and defends questions about the nature of race as scientifically valid. Drawing on a new consensus that had formed in antiracist anthropology over the past decade, the authors insist on an indelible and irreducible tension between the natural ontology of race and knowledge about it, thus retaining a claim on nature while preserving race as the object of an indefinite rational inquiry. They acknowledge, for example, that the then-prevailing taxonomy of humans—its division into “Negroid, Caucasoid, and Mongoloid groups”—captures “dynamic, not static” biological processes, which scientific classification can only embalm by convention into arbitrary categories but that it can never categorically know for certain (6). As such, the idea of biological race—and of nature—does not disappear, but neither do these concepts emerge unaltered by their purification of the myths of racialism. As scholars have pointed out, this conception of racial biology enabled a postwar colonialism founded on a cultural and psychological, rather than typological, understanding of racial differences (see Gil-Riaño), and the UNESCO statement’s narrow definition of racism, offers little in the way of critiquing anti-black oppression (see Bernasconi). But this does not exhaust the pamphlet’s political philosophy. Neither a determinate scientific fact nor pseudoscientific illusion, “race” is transformed by “The Race Question” into an internal limit of scientific epistemology and absolute knowledge. Race becomes a quantum of nature about which nothing definite can be known.

Why, then, does “The Race Question” ultimately preserve this tension between the ontology and epistemology of race—which seems so counterintuitive, and satisfies neither the conservative demand for colorblindness (i.e., that race does not exist in culture) nor the more radical critique of the naturalization of race (i.e., that race does not exist in nature)? Because multiracial democracy and the confrontation with racism depend on it. Race has to be preserved by the scientific community (and the democracy it serves) as a scientific fiction, as a formal epistemological gap, so that racism can be addressed. And that is because scientific uncertainty about the nature of race is a powerful method through which racism can be named and condemned. By conserving its status in the unknowable “real” of nature, any knowledge of race can only be approximate and speculative, damning any political formation based on the certainty of the meaning of race as both scientifically illegitimate and ethically bankrupt. Maintaining race as a biological unknown enables all racism, or “certain” propositions about race, to be condemned as antibiological. Against over a century of scientific racism, and the prewar position of scientific neutrality taken by its liberal wing, UNESCO sought to press science into the service of multiracial democracy. It did so by aligning multiracialism with nature itself and by re-conceiving democracy as the social form of the biological inclination for human cooperation and the political form of the natural fact of universal brotherhood. The genocidal and segregationist scenarios prophesied by Tocqueville and Beaumont stemmed from a compulsion that UNESCO was seeking to avoid, namely to understand democracy as a solution to the aftermath of slavery. The final solutions pursued by the Nazi regime—“wholly mixing” the races (i.e., a eugenic program to eradicate racial otherness) and “wholly parting” them (i.e., genocide)  as answers to the “race question”—were conclusively revealed to be violent subversions of democracy. After the globalization of multiracial democracy, such solutions had to be condemned, deterred, and prohibited if democracy was to survive in its intrinsic irresolution. Rather than a problem to be eliminated once and for all, race, in UNESCO’s formulation, has to be preserved as a perpetual question for democracy. The great gambit of “The Race Question” was not to realize multiracial democracy but to make its failure sustainable. This called for the riskiest of maneuvers: defending race asan ontologically impossible object of power-knowledge.

Lévi-Strauss and the Diversification of Racial Capitalism

Claude Lévi-Straus was one of the principal architects of the idea of scientific democracy promulgated by UNESCO. His early career was steered by UNESCO’s political concerns and profoundly influenced the organization’s theoretical foundations, even if their relationship was one fraught by substantive disagreements. Lévi-Strauss helped draft “The Race Question” in the same year that he completed his Les Structures élémentaires de la Parenté (1949). Shortly thereafter, he helped develop UNESCO’s International Social Science Council, serving as its inaugural Secretary General from 1952 to 1961. In The Savage Mind (1966), Lévi-Strauss famously contends that “primitive” and “modern” thought are equally rigorous in their symbolic method. An anchoring entry to Structural Anthropology (“The Place of Anthropology”) was first commissioned by UNESCO, and Lévi-Strauss made regular contributions to The UNESCO Courier in the 1950s and 1960s, the international body’s flagship journal that hosted interdisciplinary debates on global issues in the human sciences (Stoczkowski). So dense was the collaboration between UNESCO and Lévi-Strauss that structural anthropology merits recognition as the theoretical infrastructure of Western postwar democracy.

UNESCO eventually commissioned Lévi-Strauss to follow up on his contribution to “The Race Question” with an extended statement. This sequel, “Race and History,”was widely distributed in pamphlet form and is now regarded as a “classic of antiracist literature” (Stoczkowski 5).⁵ While it did not explicitly contradict the UNESCO scientific community, the pamphlet attempted to work out how UNESCO’s declarations on universal racial equality would logically reproduce racial inequality on another, higher level. Lévi-Strauss points out the relation between the globalization of multiracial democracy and modern racial capitalism, a paradox that he traces to the reliance of UNESCO’s fix for democracy (the globalization of racial equality) on a universalist theory of human development that lacks a provision for thinking difference. In the process, Lévi-Strauss produces one of the earliest outlines of a structuralist theory of history, which he gears toward asking a question that was on the minds of the representatives of the so-called Third World: how did “white man’s civilization” consolidate its global power in the twentieth century in the first place?

 Lévi-Strauss begins by outlining the paradox that UNESCO’s formalization of multiracial democracy presents. “The strength and the weakness of the great declaration of human rights,” he writes, is its promotion of the ideal of universal equality, which, in either condemning or denying otherness, struggles to reconcile itself to the “factual diversity” of racial difference (“Race and History” 102). Modern political thought has striven in vain to articulate a compromise that can “account for the diversity of cultures while seeking, at the same time, to eradicate what still shocks and offends [it] in that diversity” (102). In naturalizing universal equality against the scientifically baseless belief in racial inequality, the United Nations’ philosophy of global democracy logically needs to concretely determine human nature and/or teleologize human development. These propositions are implicated in an older theory of social evolutionism that underwrites the racialism of anti-miscegenation laws, genocidal programs, and colonial slavery. That is because this concept of social evolutionism—insofar as it conceives of all human societies as inhabiting “phases or stages in a single line of development, starting from the same point and leading to the same end” (102)—can imagine human diversity only as a false or transitional stage, can recognize human difference only in order to observe its historically provisional nature or to intervene and eliminate those differences, thereby recognizing and eliminating human otherness in the same conceptual movement.

For Lévi-Strauss, evolutionary schemas such as developmentalism and social Darwinism amount to a “false evolutionism” (102): defective theories of human history that authorize ethnocentric accounts of primitive and advanced societies. He insists that these schemas all fundamentally misapply a notion of sexual reproduction to cultural development (102-3). Evolutionary biology correctly assumes that (say) a horse begets another horse, that physical characteristics are determined by genetic heredity and are subject to the variability of sexual permutation. But cultural innovations do not sexually reproduce. An axe does not beget an axe, and therefore the appearance of one cannot serve as evidence for a genealogical development of culture. Rather, for Lévi-Strauss, the achievement of any culture exclusively indexes the singularity of the general conditions and extant dilemmas in which that achievement emerges as a social solution: “the originality of each culture consists . . . in its individual way of solving problems” (115). Rather than abandon a theory of history in favor of a synchronic analysis, Lévi-Strauss introduces a combinatory logic of historical development as an antidote to social evolutionism, borrowing key features of his reasoning from lateral innovations in the field of population genetics (Müller-Wille 3). In this structuralist understanding, any cultural “achievement” is subject to the “relative probability of a complex combination,” which characterizes each culture as a type of unconscious and collective gambler (“Race and History” 124). For Lévi-Strauss, then, history is stochastic, not developmental. Its features are the product of contingency, its cultural inventions the outcome of chance combinations, accomplishments that are for various factors either accumulated (and retained, to be “transferred” to another wager) or lost. Not only does this schema of historical development render a qualitative measure between cultures unfeasible, but it allows Lévi-Strauss to posit the goodof cultural alliances and the superiorityof open cultures. What he calls “coalitions” enable disparate cultures to “pool” their resources across different historical bets, increasing the chances of hitting the jackpot of cultural mutation. The most “cumulative” histories are thus not produced by autarkic (that is, racially homogenous) cultures but by syndicates, “cultures which, voluntarily or involuntarily, have combined their play and, by a wide variety of means (migration, borrowing, trade and warfare) have formed . . . coalitions” (126).

Yet those “superior” coalitions, in the course of collaborating, erase the differences that originally made their alliance fruitful. Through repeated interaction, the resources of syndicated cultures are homogenized, the diversity of their bets centralized, and a new stagnation emerges. An incorporation of diversity destroys otherness; open cultures are therefore also a detriment to human progression. If Lévi-Strauss’s understanding is correct, contemporary Western civilization, as represented in the United Nations, is now the principal violator of human advancement, not only because of its status as a global hegemon but because of the compulsory terms of its means of confederating all societies. “Western civilisation has stationed its soldiers, trading posts, plantations and missionaries throughout the world; directly or indirectly, is has intervened in the lives of the coloured people,” compelling subjugated cultures to “imitate Western ways sufficiently to be able to fight them on their own ground” (117). With this statement, Lévi-Strauss implicitly warns UNESCO about the way in which the globalization of democracy becomes an accessory to the destruction of diversity or to cultural/racial genocide on a planetary scale. Across the centuries, he continues, the West has pursued two spatial fixes, two strategies for preventing global homogeneity and the triggering of its own homeostasis. The first is to “increase internal diversity,” or introduce social inequalities within a new global democratic space that increase the “development of the exploitation of man by man” (131). Lévi-Strauss describes this “solution” as capitalism. The second spatial fix is to increase its external diversity by assimilating human otherness from outside the global democratic space, to “admit new partners” to its hegemony. This solution is captured by “the history of imperialism and colonialism” (131).

In understanding equality to be coextensive with nature, UNESCO’s project for global democracy reproduces racial inequality absolutely. What Lévi-Strauss describes as a mode of imperial capitalism is a combination of two strategies of diversification: of the “internal diversification” of culture through social inequality and of the “external diversification” of global democracy through empire. Implicitly, these two strategies are themselves alternatives to two specters of homogeneity that modern democracy cannot countenance: the pursuit of genocide as the destruction of otherness and the implementation of slavery as the preservation of an otherness outside the democratic relation. Not only does the sexual theory of human history that this globalization of multiracial societies presumes elide the history of white supremacy, as Lévi-Strauss reveals, but a structuralist account of history reveals the logic of racial capitalism. His conclusion is that under racial capitalism social inequalities or racial extermination increase in direct proportion to the realization of global democracy.

Du Bois puts a finer point on this discrepancy between “color” and “democracy” in Color and Democracy. He excoriates the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks Conference that outlined the ambitions of the soon-to-be founded United Nations, criticizing the Western powers’ unwillingness to reckon with the role of colonialism in the causes of World War II (Du Bois also joined the American delegation to the inaugural United Nations conference in San Francisco in 1945).For Du Bois, the pronouncements of postwar democracy were increasingly overdetermined by the imperial dynamics of racial capitalism. UNESCO’s politicization of the human sciences is in his reading inconsequential to a new mode of racial power that operates outside scientific epistemology:

these facts [of science that dispute racial hierarchy] do not affect our actions today, because government and economic organization have already built a tremendous financial structure upon the nineteenth-century conception of race inferiority. This is what the imperialism of our day means. (Color and Democracy 54)

The logic of capitalist accumulation “encourages by reason of its high profit to investors a determined and interested belief in the inferiority of certain races” (56). The moribund ideas of nineteenth-century racialism—like a dead (as opposed to extinct) language that has users but no native speakers—organize social practices that may encourage but do not require its practitioners to gain fluency in its tongue. The idea of race therefore does not function as conscious knowledge, does not need to be philosophically coherent or scientifically justified to enable the economic valorization of racial inequality. According to Du Bois, the capitalization of a “nineteenth-century conception of race” proceeds regardless of contemporary challenges (scientific or otherwise) to the precise meaning of race; economic activity (the realization of surplus value) on the basis of racial inequality requires no basis in the order of ideas because it follows the blind law of capitalist accumulation. Capital, coupled to a colonial project that is itself heir to a racial schema that it does not possess, shares with the new multiracial democracy its form as a global project. But racial capitalism has an advantage that multiracial democracy does not: it does not operate as a formally consistent philosophy, working only through a disparate web of commercial codes, laws of contract, and terms of exchange, none of which require any conceptual unification. Racial capitalism “thinks” outside formalization in a process so general that it exceeds any form of knowledge or human cognition. In contrast to UNESCO’s tactic of preserving the epistemological uncertainty of race in “The Race Question,” which is promoted as a means to prevent the resurgence of international aggression, Du Bois sees in the holding pattern that maintains the irresolution of multiracial democracy a guarantee of its subversion in a revolt—in the last instance, in a war between the West and the “dark world.”

War: A Better Failure of Multiracial Democracy?

            My analysis has focused on a limit to the democratic form, rather than a limitation of the democratic imagination. This amounts to something more dire than an impoverishment of political philosophy or the historical failure to realize a democratic ideal. Indeed, we are accustomed to describing actually-existing democracy as lacking vision, as a watered-down practice of collective politics that accommodates existing arrangements of power at the expense of more radical articulations of international solidarity and multiracial coalition. Our critical reflexes are trained to describe a fictitiously universal demos as an imagined community that only coheres around the spoken or unspoken exclusion of a perpetual outsider, one that requires the racial or sexual contract underwriting the social contract to be disassembled. A progressive appraisal may even understand democracy as a constantly changing and inherently unattainable ideal that does not—and has never—existed in any substantial sense at all but that nonetheless requires the lines of exclusion it imposes to be constantly deliberated and redrawn. This marks democracy as an unfinished historical project, a perpetual struggle to renew its egalitarian principles and practices. Democracy appears here as an open question, although one that also views racialization as an inessential development of its essential (that is, nonracial) form.

But everything in this essay hinges on being precise about the nature of this impossibility: a world of difference lies between the historical notion of impossibility, which proposes an unbridgeable gap between a set of principles and their practical implementation, and a structural notion of impossibility. In contrast to the former, a structural notion of impossibility sees the coincidence between the idea and the practice of multiracial democracy as perfectly possible—but only as the very act of its undoing. Not only is multiracial democracy possible, in other words, it has already happened. What Tocqueville and Beaumont confronted in nineteenth-century slavery, I would venture, was an earlyactualization of multiracial democracy, a “solution” to the impossible relation between the slave and democracy. The inevitability of abolition confronted Tocqueville and Beaumont with the problem of coming up with a new“solution” to multiracial democracy. They mistook its structural impossibility for an historical one. But their alternatives also avoided a third, seemingly worse solution. Their proposal to “wholly mix” or “wholly part” white and black were alternatives to a coincidence between race and democracy that Tocqueville believes could only portend war: “as [freemen] cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily declare themselves as enemies” (1: 375). War—the breakdown of a multiracial polity in an irresolvable antagonism between “friends” and “enemies”—is in this reading a possible realization of democracy, but one that is also its undoing.

If democracy’s actualization can only result in a program of racial violence—as the foregoing symptomatic readings of Tocqueville, Beaumont, and UNESCO’s writings on race suggest—then the difference between its success and failure is invalid, both critically and politically. This calls for a redirection of our attention to the differences between democracy’s forms of failure. Global, multiracial democracy cannot ethically be pursued to its logical ends, but are there ways to imagine or enact a better failure? One failure, and a possibility that has been peremptorily dismissed or conspicuously ignored in the accounts critiqued so far, is precisely the one that Tocqueville feared would be an inevitable outcome in the absence of a scheme for black “expatriation” to Africa or compulsory racial amalgamation after slavery: a war between ex-slave and ex-master. If the outbreak of war is a failure of democratic procedure, what are its political implications? How does war differ from—how might it even comprise a better failure of democracy than—multiracial and international coalition (Lévi-Strauss), the preservation of the epistemological uncertainty of race (UNESCO), or the “dual visions of black freedom and peace” (Dusk of Dawn xxvi) that Du Bois’s staunch pacifism maintained throughout the 1950s and 1960s? War is a collective action. But the “war” I am after here is distinct in nearly every other way from the sovereign version of the term. As a failure of democracy, or rather a materialization of its emergency, this war is not waged in the name of a government, on behalf of a people, or for the attainment of an ideal. As non-sovereign, this war is not a state of exception and does not declare an enemy. Bloodshed is not a necessary component (although it is not excluded either). By extension, this war does not have any conditions of victory or strategic objectives—defensive, offensive, or preemptive—aiming only to realize the inner tendencies of multiracial democracy in a manner differentfrom the actually existing failures of democracy in segregation and genocide, in the various forms they continue to take today. I would venture that war in this sense can only be defined as a repetition of the war that terminated slavery, a political act more general and diverse than the general strike Du Bois recognizes as a tipping point in the Civil War, and which he erroneously categorizes as the act sufficient to incorporate the ex-slave as a subject of political representation. Slaves’ “general strike,” their abandonment of Southern plantations en masse, was necessary for Union victory in 1865, but it was also alone insufficient, failing as it did to enfranchise what Hartman describes as the figure of the female slave. As a repetition of the violence of abolition with a possible difference, this notion of war, then, repeats the traumatic origin of modern democracy, a war that works-through the very resistance to a war between master and slave, a rearticulation and displacement of democracy’s structural antagonism. The outcome of this confrontation cannot be guaranteed in advance, and the material conditions that result may be no better than those under which it began. The opposite may even be the case. Actualizing multiracial democracy in war may well “replicate the fate of the slave” (Hartman 169). But it also opens the possibility of a fate otherwise. Precisely in this sense might this failure of democracy be a better one, in which the issue of slavery’s sexual labor cannot be determined in advance.

Footnotes

1. For the most part, I limit my discussion of Democracy in America to the problem of multiracialism. For more expansive accounts of Tocqueville’s commentary on the race question, see Mitchell and Chapter 6 of Fredrickson.

2. Margaret Kohn suggests that “democracy” as used in this text blends notions of equality, political liberty, and bourgeois society that we would today refer to specifically as “liberal democracy.”

3. To put a finer point on it, we could specify blackness as the residue of racialization, that remainder in the racial division of democracy by slavery that cannot be enumerated.

4. Until that feat is achieved, it also means exchanging the relations of racial domination under slavery for the relations of gender domination between husband and wife.

5. Its spiritual successor, “Race and Culture,” a paper presented by Lévi-Strauss nineteen years later to a stunned audience at a global antiracism summit, would be more explicit in its criticism of UNESCO’s global ambitions (Visweswaran).

Works Cited

• Balfour, Lawrie. Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W.E.B. Du Bois. Oxford UP, 2011.
• Beaumont, Gustave de. Marie, or, Slavery in the United States. 1835. Translated by Barbara Chapman, Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.
• Bernasconi, Roberto. “A Most Dangerous Error: The Boasian Myth of a Knock-Down Argument Against Racism.” Angelaki, vol. 24, no. 2, 2019, pp. 92-103.
• Best, Stephen. None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life. Duke UP, 2018.
• Brattain, Michelle. “Race, Racism, and Antiracism: UNESCO and the Politics of Presenting Science to the Postwar Public.” American Historical Review, vol. 112, no. 5, 2007, pp. 1386-413.
• Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880. Free Press, 1935.
• —. Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace. Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1945.
• —. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. 1940. Oxford UP, 2007.
• —. In Battle for Peace: The Story of My 83rd Birthday. 1952. Oxford UP, 2007.
• Foucault, Michel. “Dream, Imagination and Existence.” Dream and Existence, by Ludwig Binswanger, edited by Keith Hoeller, Humanities Press International, 1993, pp. 31-80.
• Fredrickson, George M. The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements. U of California P, 1997.
• Gil-Riaño, Sebastián. “Relocating Anti-Racist Science: The 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race and Economic Development in the Global South.” British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 51, no. 2, 2018, pp. 281-303.
• Hartman, Saidiya. “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labor.” Souls, vol. 18, no. 1, 2016, pp. 166-73.
• Kohn, Margaret. “The Other America: Tocqueville and Beaumont on Race and Slavery.” Polity, vol. 35, no. 2, 2002, pp. 169-93.
• Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Place of Anthropology in the Social Sciences and the Problems Raised in Teaching It.” Structural Anthropology, translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf,Basic Books, 1963, pp. 346-81.
• —. “Race and History.” 1952. Race, Science and Society, edited by Leo Kuper, Columbia UP, 1975, pp. 95-134.
• —. The Savage Mind. U of Chicago P, 1966.
• —. Les Structures élémentaires de la Parenté. Presses Universitaires, 1949.
• Losurdo, Domenico. Liberalism, A Counter-History. Translated by Gregory Elliott, Verso, 2011.
• “Overview of Marie or, Slavery in the United States: A Novel of Jacksonian America.” Johns Hopkins University Press, https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/marie-or-slavery-united-states, accessed 7 Dec. 2021.
• Mitchell, Harvey. America After Tocqueville: Democracy Against Difference. Cambridge UP, 2004.
• Müller-Wille, Staffan. “Claude Lévi-Strauss on Race, History, and Genetics.” Biosocieties, vol. 5, no. 3, 2010, pp. 330-347.
• Musser, Amber Jamilla. Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism. New York UP, 2014.
• Painter, Nell Irvin. “Was Marie White? The Trajectory of a Question in the United States.” The Journal of Southern History, vol.74, no. 1, 2008, pp. 3-30.
• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. 1755. Translated by Donald A. Cress, Hackett Publishing, 1992.
• Sexton, Jared. Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. U of Minnesota P, 2010.
• Stoczkowski, Wiktor. “Claude Lévi-Strauss and UNESCO.” The UNESCO Courier,no. 5, 2008, pp. 5-9.
• Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. 1835. Vol. 1, translated by Henry Reeve, 3rd ed., George Adlard, 1839.
• —. Democracy in America. 1840. Vol. 2, translated by Henry Reeve, Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1862.
• UNESCO. “The Race Question.” UNESCO and its Programme, no. 3, 1950, UNESCO House.
• Visweswaran, Kamala. “The Interventions of Culture: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race, and the Critique of Historical Time.” Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy, edited by Robert Bernasconi with Sybol Cook, Indiana UP, 2003, pp. 227-48.

John Mowitt (bio)

Abstract

This essay approaches the theme of “impasse and democracy” through the motif of the American dream, a dream, as many have noted, unfulfilled both at home and abroad.  This lack of fulfilment is here read as a structural impasse within democracy, as a sign that democracy dreams, or is a dream, because it cannot come into its own.  Building toward a sustained reading of a typically neglected volume in the Freudian corpus, his collaborative study (with William C. Bullitt) of Woodrow Wilson, this essay teases out the theoretical and political implications of thinking the dream that America remains, ambivalently idling, from a psychoanalytical point of view.

Democracy is always an unrealizable dream.

–Wendy Brown in conversation with Robert Johnson, New Economic Thinking

This afternoon I would like to speak on the subject, “The Negro and the American Dream.” In a real sense America is essentially a dream—a dream yet unfulfilled.

–Martin Luther King in North Carolina

For the sake of argument let us entertain the possibility that there is a real relation between America and democracy. Not America as a national territory, but America as a self-designated exception, however troubled. Further, let us accept that this relation is oneiric, and that organizing this relation is what Brown calls “the unrealizable,” and what King calls “the unfulfilled,” both, I will argue, iterations of “impasse.” In the remarks that follow I will essay the concept of impasse by considering the several ways it articulates the relation between democracy and the dream; not primarily in terms of dreams dreamt by members of unsatisfying democratic regimes, or dreams voiced by those struggling against anti- democratic ones, but dream as a concept designating how democracy perennially fails to realize itself. As this might suggest, dream here assumes technical qualities attributed to it within the discourse of psychoanalysis, inviting one to consider that insofar as the latter has produced the dream as a concept, it is itself entangled in the impasse that leaves democracy unfulfilled, even unfulfillable. In this, these remarks engage a literature antagonistic to democracy, not because democracy empowers the “herd,” or because it tyrannizes minorities, or because it legitimates regime change at home (Trump) and abroad (Bush), but because even if it were to arrive from or with the future, it will have been at odds with itself. It would, in effect, remain a dream, not now in the sense of an illusion, or even a wish, but in the sense of a structure of incompletion. Impasse. Although Freud’s thought, especially what he referred to as the metapsychology, is indispensable to grasping the structural significance of the dream, its relation to his troubling of democracy (whether French, Russian or American) has not been attended to carefully enough. To that end, I will orient what follows toward a reading of Freud’s collaborative encounter with Woodrow Wilson, a text in which the place of psychoanalysis as a technique of reading is woven tightly into its articulation of the impasse that sacrificed America and the world to a future war, the very one that compelled Freud’s expatriation from Vienna. Former president Trump is only the most recent example of a statesman from whom analysis might have shielded the world, but in just this way analysis threatens to suspend or interfere with the will of the demos. In sensing this, Freud both radicalized what it means to speak of the dream of democracy and to acknowledge the role of his science in securing this radicalization. Plague indeed.

I will work to “earn” the locution of my title, but suffice it to say at this early juncture that its oddity is designed to suggest that “the impassable” might be an alternative spelling of what Jacques Derrida explores under the heading of “the impossible” and perhaps especially when thinking about whether a “democracy to come,” is any more likely to arrive than Godot.¹ Given such animating concerns it is fitting, perhaps even obligatory, to acknowledge that, on the pages of Looking Awry, Slavoj Žižek sets out what are surely some of the more recent touchstones and watchwords for a theoretical discussion of these issues. Although the text is broadly framed as a discussion of how the teachings of his mentor Jacques Lacan might actually be on offer from various popular cultural platforms, the analysis of democracy zeroes quickly in on the problem of the impassable. He writes:

What to do, then, once we are confronted with this fundamental impasse of democracy? The “modernist” procedure (the one to which Marx is attached) would be to conclude—from such an “unmasking” of formal democracy, i.e., from the disclosure of the way the democratic form always conceals an imbalance of contents—that formal democracy as such has to be abolished, replaced by a superior form of concrete democracy. The “postmodernist” approach would require us, on the contrary, to assume this constitutive paradox of democracy. We must assume a kind of “active forgetfulness” by accepting the symbolic fiction even though we know that “in reality, things are not like that.” The democratic attitude is always based on a fetishistic split: I know very well (that the democratic form is just a form spoiled by the stain of “pathological” imbalance), but just the same (I act as if democracy were possible). (168)

The impassable here refers to a deadlock between form and substance. Deadlock in the sense of antagonism: form assumes its rigor from the substance it brackets; substance takes on its texture from the form it sets itself off against. In effect, the universality of democracy, its radical fungibility, must, in principle, be empty. It must be devoid of any particulars that could compromise its cosmopolitan promise by grounding it in, for example, Europe, or as Žižek (following Arendt) has it, the nation state. Democracy must be an empty form precisely so that it can be filled with the rights and aspirations thought to be enshrined in state constitutions whether written or not.

The problem is not, whence Žižek’s invocation of impasse, that democracy is unachievable, but that even when most perfectly realized it is blank. In this democracy, precisely to the extent that it offers to name the preferred if not ideal, thus formal, reconciliation between individual and collective interests is not just another form of government. It is the just form. Although democracies and dictatorships share practical, administrative roots in oligarchy, dictatorships are filled with particulars like blood, soil, affiliation. They offer what democracies foreclose in principle. The well-known Lacanian formula, “man’s desire is the Other’s desire” (690), may be said to provide the template for the structural frustration of democracy, even if neither Lacan nor Žižek has precisely declared himself on whether psychoanalysis is thus an imaginary construct, a reflection, of democracy in all its emptiness. Be that as it may, in the context of Looking Awry this state of affairs is deployed to complicate all critiques of popular culture that bemoan its pseudo- democratization of cultural experience. Facebook is not a compromised form of community because access to it is obstructed, but because what circulates there is communication formally emptied of all substance—and this apart from the abuses of which Cambridge Analytica stands accused. At the risk of feckless hyperbole one might propose that John Cage sketches the formula for socially mediated exchange when in his “Lecture on Nothing” he states: “I have nothing to say / and I am saying it” (109).

“Democracy can never be identified with a juridico-political form. This does not mean it is indifferent to such forms. It means that the power of the people is always beneath and beyond these forms” (Rancière, Hatred 54). These lines from Jacques Rancière’s The Hatred of Democracy restate (without acknowledgement) Žižek’s critique of democratic formalism, but instead of appealing to the concept of impasse, his analysis invokes “paradox” (94). Two things would appear to be at stake in this distinction. On the one hand, Rancière is keen to hold onto a certain utopian potential in what above he calls the “power of the people.” If democracy must insistently be hated, it is because the egalitarian and anarchic excess that all states exploit must, paradoxically, be left unrealized. Anger then focuses on the deferred realization of what is as yet unrealized. Crucial here is the status of politics and Rancière has steady but quiet recourse throughout Hatred to his discussion in Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (and clearly “hatred” is an acute form of disagreement), where he elaborates the concept of the “police” as the heading under which to subsume all political activity that is oriented around the struggle to control and administer a state. By contrast, “politics” designates all those forms of activity that resist this capture by refusing the reduction of “the political” to, in effect, the electoral. The obstinacy of this refusal provokes hatred among those who insist upon reducing democracy to a form of governing that is either embodied (or not . . . yet) in the state apparatus. Rancière is especially eloquent about intellectuals whose disdain for democracy concentrates precisely on its expressions that take the form of contesting the state’s subordination of civil society. If one grants Rancière’s distinction between the police and politics, then it is not difficult to see that the democracy problematized by Žižek is chiefly that of a state form. If, further, one accepts the corollary that to reduce democracy to a state form is a manifestation of hatred toward it (a demand that it provide more, or block less), then one glimpses what sort of pickle Žižek has got himself into, especially if the symmetry between democracy and desire is consistently Lacanian.

On the other hand, and somewhat less obviously, what is also at stake in the distinction between impasse and paradox is the status, perhaps even the pertinence, of psychoanalysis in thinking the structure of democracy. Although one of Lacan’s partisans, Jean-Claude Milner, figures prominently in the early pages of Hatred,and despite Rancière’s explicit recourse to the concept of aporia (80) and to the dream of overcoming what obstructs the realization of democracy (9), he insistently avoids any sort of discourse on politics that depends on a figure resembling an analytical subject for its conclusions. In fact, Milner is expressly faulted for arguing that a Jewish embrace of kinship and power derived from birth is what demands that it be scapegoated by a democracy inhibited by its failure to manage the excess that sustains it, an argument Rancière treats as far too wedded to a logic of policing and its insistent channeling of excess through sexual difference and social reproduction. Implicit here, I would argue, is the notion that psychoanalysis, precisely to the extent that it affirms a structural mode of aggressivity, not only attends to impasse, but realizes it in its own functioning. It holds us before and within an antagonism that cannot be overcome through its projection onto the aggressions of a particular other. This invites an extension and complication of the concept of impasse (or, in Greek, aporia) to which I will later turn.

In the spirit precisely of disagreement, it is appropriate to remark that Rancière, despite his hesitations regarding the pertinence of psychoanalysis to a theory of democracy, is not committed to treating hatred as devoid of an affect whose force is technically speaking unconscious. The resistance that protects politics from the police is not a resistance that, in accord with the classical formula of denial, authorizes Rancière to utterly avoid the discourse of psychoanalysis. As evidence, consider his sustained engagement with Freud in The Aesthetic Unconscious. Originally conceived as two lectures, it is clear from where the second lands that this material gives articulation to his disagreement with Jean-François Lyotard about the politics of psychoanalysis. The elaboration of this disagreement takes the form of delineating two different critiques of Freud’s understanding of aesthetics.

In an inaugural series of moves, Rancière teases out a distinction between art and aesthetics, stressing that what interests him in Freud is why psychoanalysis, otherwise so keen to secure its properly scientific credentials, had such insistent recourse to the interpretation of works of art. At bottom, the proposition is that Freud recognized an echo between the way works of art and psychoanalysis staged the encounter and tension between thought and non-thought. If aesthetics names the cognition of this relation, then the interpretation of dreams belongs to the history of aesthetics, a history that situates Freud in relation to a distribution of the sensible wherein taste, as an expression of “liberal individualism” (Rancière Aesthetic, 7), has reduced art to form and severed its relation to the enigma of unthinking thought. Although Rancière does not link liberalism and democracy explicitly, his rhetoric urges one to approach the relation between psychoanalysis and democracy as tense. Freud, despite his “conservative tastes” (a charge levelled by Lyotard among others), is precisely trying to theorize a mode of interpretation that subordinates taste to a regime of thought in which what matters is what that regime cannot think while thinking. Unconscious thought, precisely of the sort manifest (and latent) in dreams, is what is distributed beyond or outside the sensibility of individualism. Testing this is the work that consumed Freud in his thinking about literature, painting and sculpture. Although the details of their disagreement warrant more attention than I can give here, Rancière is keen to demonstrate that despite Lyotard’s impatience with Freud’s “classicism,” his insistent affirmation of form and figuration ends up paradoxically falling in line with a theory of art that Freud had properly problematized. I suppose, to invoke a well-known quip of Adorno’s, their disagreement rotates around how liberal individualism, democracy, is to be hated properly. Is it because it essentially is a dream of the sort comprehended by psychoanalysis? One of the virtues of the collaborative study of Wilson is that it suggests why one would answer in the affirmative.

But I have deferred for too long a justification of my title, “The Impassable Dream,” which evokes the song likely familiar to the audiences of high school choirs and community groups in the US as “The Impossible Dream.” Some members in any given audience will recognize the song from the mid-sixties Broadway musical, Man of La Mancha, Wasserman, Darion and Leigh’s improbable setting of Cervantes’s satiric masterwork for the stage. As a brazen re-casting of Quixote’s picaresque tenacity as an aspirational fantasy of persisting against all odds, the song, especially when sung in the context of a high school, indirectly but implicitly casts secondary education as a test those who do not or cannot dream risk failing. As a liminal institution, high school (and now even more college) marks the threshold between “life” and the preparation for it. It marks where an impossible dream and the dream of democracy converge as students anticipate entry into the actual world of unevenly distributed opportunity, dreaming that whatever obstructs their access to the fruits of democracy is not impassable. But there is more to this particular song’s relation to democracy and its history.

In the plaza of San Jose in Antique province in the Philippines one will come upon a large commemorative statue. It is of Evelio Javier, a former governor of the province, murdered in 1986 for agitating against then president Ferdinand Marcos. His death helped catalyze the People Power Revolution that brought Corazón Aquino to power later that year. Apparently, “The Impossible Dream” was at the very top of Javier’s playlist, so much so that the Darion lyrics are inscribed on a plaque mounted on the base of this public monument. “To march into hell for a heavenly cause,” indeed. If a key property of democracy is its global fungibility—a point presumed and betrayed with the US adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan—then its emergence in the Philippines, mediated through Broadway and Cervantes, certainly encourages political scientists to take seriously the resonance between the song and political struggles of the most principled, that is, anti-tyrannical sort. Even the Democratic candidate for the presidency, George McGovern, could see this connection although, in the end, he succumbed to the unbeatable foe.

In Man of La Mancha, “The Impossible Dream” is performed three times, ultimately narrating Quixote’s resolve as he awaits interrogation by the Inquisition. What invites my precise distortion of the title is the tension within the lyrics between lines stressing negative morphemic structures (and here is the full list): im-possible, un-beatable, un-bearable, un-rightable, and un-reachable; while other lines invoke the motif of persistence, for example, trying when one’s arms are too weary, loving purely and chastely from afar, etc. What is so striking about these lines taken together is how they hold listeners in a deadlock, an impasse structured by personal aims that can neither be abandoned nor achieved. The name given to this impasse is “the impossible dream,” a dream that has somehow happened without happening. Or is an impossible dream, especially one that inducts individuals into a life in which they are “free” to make the most of themselves, the name for a threshold that is impassable, or even unknowable?

To appreciate what might be at stake in taking the dream as such as an impasse, it is worth lingering over the notion of impasse itself. In the Western tradition it reaches back to what Plato meant, in invoking his conceptual persona Socrates, when speaking of aporia. In her remarkable tracing of this concept, Sarah Kofman, in “Beyond Aporia?,” reminds us that the Greeks (so not simply Plato) define impasse in a rather specific way, namely as being lost at sea. Poros, when linked to metis, or cunning, casts aporos or aporia as difficulty, but difficulty in the rather specific sense of eluding cleverness, of lacking a way out or ahead. In effect, Sartre’s Huis clos might also have been titled aporia. More specifically still, Kofman establishes that the risk of having no way ahead is philologically defined with reference to being unable to navigate a body of water, whether a sea, or, as she puts it, an “ocean of discourse” (11), thus making aporia as much about life as about meaning. If one recalls, to bring this digression abruptly back to the status of impasse in psychoanalysis, that the epigraph to the Interpretation of Dreams specifically compares psychoanalysis to “stirring the depths” (movebos Acharonta), then interpreting dreams is pitched as a tactic by which to navigate a sea agitated by its own movement. Freud is here citing the early German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle’s citation of Virgil, indicating that he grasped the parallel between organizing a workers’ party and analyzing the work of the unconscious. The fact that the one consistent ‘platform’ of Lassalle’s party was universal suffrage, a cornerstone of democracy with a socialist face, might well indicate that Freud was already here noting a convergence between politics and properly scientific work on dreams (Schorske 345). Although Freud demurs on drawing the relevant political conclusions, in The Interpretation of Dreams he does present what he calls “the navel of the dream” (Standard 4: 111) as the place where interpretation reaches its impasse in the tangled mycelial depths of the dream. Doubt arises. Can an impasse be surpassed and can we know?

A more recent debate over the politics of dreams will help further trace the ties between impasse/aporia and dream. I am thinking of the killjoy dispute between Derrida and Foucault over the relation between madness, a silent absence of a work, and dreaming in Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy. I say “killjoy” because the sustained ferocity of this dispute (rejoined in Derrida’s late, “To Do Justice to Freud: the History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis”) immediately complicates and belies the very notion of “post-structuralism” that everyone from Terry Eagleton to Jordan Peterson brandishes in order to produce an atmosphere into which to fire their rhetorical retro-rockets. Of course, things did not start this way. They rarely do. When Derrida, at Jean Wahl’s invitation, read “Cogito and the History of Madness” in 1963 at the Collège Philosophique, Foucault was in the audience, presumably out of courtesy to his student. A week after its delivery, Foucault wrote to Derrida praising the argument, acknowledging its force and pertinence, and concluding with the sentence: “And please believe in my deepest and most faithful friendship” (Peters 132). The “trouble,” manifested in Foucault’s stinging reply, “My Body, this Paper, this Fire,” sounded like a delayed rifle report nine years later. Friendship had degenerated into enmity and a feud that had initially only manifested as a philological dispute—does Descartes exclude or merely displace madness—erupted between the teacher and his student. “O, my friends, there is no friend.”

As the details of this argument have been combed elsewhere (perhaps most notably in Said’s “Criticism Between Culture and System”), I can turn directly to what about the exchange most matters here. Two tines of Derrida’s reading deserve mention. On the one hand, as if chiding Foucault for thinking that separating oneself from Descartes is any easier than separating oneself from Hegel, Derrida tries to show that the dream is the far more threatening phenomenon for Cartesian reason to contend with. This is partly due to its commonality—many dream, few imagine that their bodies are made of glass, etc.—but also to the aporia it produces, an aporia accelerated and intensified by the hypothesis of the malin genie, that is, the incarnation of radical doubt, the possibility that one only thinks one is dreaming, a situation wherein the cogito’s intimate relation to certainty is bracketed. Perhaps I am only ever dreaming that “I think.” On the other hand, if the dream rather than madness poses the more acute philosophical problem, then Foucault’s historical appeal to the “classical age,” the event of the great confinement etc., falls prey to a shabby historicism that his evocation and later theorization of “archaeology” (not to mention “genealogy”) is precisely pitched to overcome. Taken together, Foucault’s reading is effectively stowed away on a “ship of fools” deprived of, as Kofman would say, a poros, a way across the ocean of discourse. In this sense, the dream, precisely as a figural condensation of doubt (thinking the unthought as Rancière put it), operates as an impasse, reminding us that it figures prominently in Western philosophy’s (whether political or not) struggle to think the limits of its reasoning, an incapacity that impinges upon philosophy’s ability to think, among other things, the conditions of a proper republic. From this angle, Brown’s proposition (vis. the epigraph) that democracy is always an unrealizable dream assumes a more haunting, more consequential epistemological valence. To wit, maybe the concept of a democratic republic always only arises in a dream whose specifically oneiric character vanishes in the dream’s unrealizability, the sense of its not having taken place at all. Impasse now emerges as the puzzle whether a dream is happening or not, and whether, in the dream, its limit can be made subject to action either practical or theoretical. Its structural character has extended from the challenge of representing the deadlock of form and substance, to the question of assessing whether one can know whether universal suffrage is in fact universal; whether democracy is happening to us or not.

Let us bring this relation between dream and impasse to bear more patiently, more philologically, on what Freud has to say about dreams, authority, and modes of governing. I am thinking of a letter to Maxime Leroy from 1929 where Freud briefly interprets some of Descartes’s dreams, a venture missed, and suggestively so, by both Foucault and Derrida. The precise paleographic evidence is unclear—the dream (or dreams) are reported/paraphrased by a third party from a translation, etc.—but in the printed version one finds the following material:

He [Descartes] then woke up with twinges of sharp pain in his left side. He did not know whether he was dreaming or awake. Half-awake, he told himself that an evil genius (malin genie) was trying to seduce him, and he murmured a prayer to exorcise it. He went to sleep again. A clap of thunder woke him again and filled his room with flashes. Once more he asked himself whether it was a dream or a day-dream, opening and shutting his eyes so as to reach a certainty. (Standard 5: 200)

What is staged here plainly enough is what earlier I characterized as the impasse threatened by the malin genie, namely, the challenge to clear and distinct reasoning represented by the dream’s capacity to problematize the distinction between it and wakefulness. Although the paleographic controversy about whether we are dealing with one dream or several tends to puzzle over whether there is a sequence of dreams, one might here entertain the abyssal effect of several dreams within one another. Descartes wakes up, but into a state where whether he is awake or dreaming immediately preoccupies him. This manifests within the dream(s) in a way that echoes significantly in Freud’s remarks.

The cited material continues:

With his brain on fire, excited by these rumors and vague sufferings, Descartes opened a dictionary and then a collection of poems. The intrepid traveler dreamt of this line: “Quod vitae sectabor iter.” Another journey in the land of dreams? Then suddenly there appeared a man he did not know, intending to make him read a passage from Ausonius beginning with the words, “Est et non.” But the man disappeared and another took his place. (5: 201)

Striking here—and Freud notes it in his “analysis”—is the dreamer’s effort to interpret the dream from within it,inviting one to consider that at the very end of the series of strange men handing Descartes texts (and note the principle of individuated equality) might appear another strange man handing him a copy of something called Die Traumdeutung. Less fancifully, what appears in the dream especially around the motif of the life journey and the “it is and is not” is precisely impasse, aporia. If it makes sense to say that Freud echoes this situation, thus inserting himself into the series of interpreters, it is because, after authoritatively labeling the dream an example of a “Traumen von oben” (a dream whose contents could just as well have been thought in waking life), Freud writes: “The philosopher interprets them himself and, in accordance with all the rules for the interpretation of dreams, we must accept his explanation, but it should be added that we have no path open to us which will take us any further” (5: 204, my emphasis). The impasse repeats, first as radical doubt (am I in the dream synthesizer of the malin genie?), but then again as “the navel,” the knot through which interpretation cannot pass. Impasse, via the onto-epistemological problem posed by the dream, sucks everything into its vortex, including the dream of interpretation itself, making analysis an aporetic poros. Way, no way.

What then can be said more directly about the impasse of the dream for psychoanalysis and democracy, either as formally impossible (Žižek) or a possible object of hatred (Rancière)? Readers of Freud will know that “democracy” is not a word one comes upon often in the corpus. If one is inclined, as am I, to hear Communism as expressed in the oft-repeated formula—from each according to his ability and to each according to his need—as a radical realization of the will of the demos, thus a democracy, then Freud’s comments in Civilization and its Discontents might be given a certain representative status: “The communists believe that they have found the path to deliverance from our evils” (Standard 21: 112). Freud goes on to expose this path, this poros (Freud writes “Weg”) as an “untenable illusion” (perhaps an impossible dream?) from a psychological point of view. Why? Because the elimination of private property, the holding of “all wealth in common” (21: 112), cannot alter the nature of human aggression. Later in the same text, Freud turns his critical gaze on America—a more “go to” incarnation (even in the 1930s) of democracy— and denounces it for cultivating a certain psychological poverty of groups, that is, a horizontal, and thus equal, dispersion of neighborly love, that stimulates a structure of identification compared by Nietzsche to that of a herd (Herde).² In a final pass over the Russian “experiment,” Freud notes that its attention to property is however preferable to a purely moral response to inequality, reserving, in effect, special scorn for America even to the point of tempering his own rhetoric: “But I shall avoid the temptation of entering upon a critique of American civilization; I do not wish to give the impression of wanting myself to employ American methods” (21: 116). In effect, he decides, as we say, not to “go there.” As stated earlier, he and Jung had already gone and brought “the plague” to America in 1909, so here Freud stops himself from thinking like an American, as if to foreground the impasse between democracy and the practice that comprehends its haunting incompletion.³ Given that the Russian (or Asiatic) Flu pandemic of 1889-90 loomed large in then recent European memory, the evocation of “plague,” however ambivalent, feels decisively more epistemological than epidemiological. To not think like an American is thus to think what constitutes its democratic way of life unrealizable. Essentially a dream.

The footnote with which chapter five of Civilization concludes transfers readers directly to the aforementioned Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. But rather than turning down this well-worn path, I propose that we take up a text routinely forgotten, in some cases disavowed, by Freudians (especially those loyal to the daughter), namely, his co- authored study of Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the self-designated prince of peace and defender of American democracy. What this text answers is the question begged above, namely, how does at least one American think? But perhaps even more importantly this text, unlike the more familiar Group Psychology, urges consideration of how analysis itself stumbles and stalls when conflating, through the concept of the Ego-Ideal, a president and a father about whom the son is aggressively ambivalent.

If the Freud/Bullitt collaboration is not included in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud it is not because it has the same status as the early book On Aphasia or the voluminous correspondence. It has been omitted because the matter of Freud’s authorship has long been a matter of controversy. In addition, there is the vexed matter of his collaborator William C. Bullitt, a wealthy East Coast cosmopolite who once worked as an editor at Paramount Studios, married the widow of John Reed (Louise Bryant) and became the first US ambassador to the Soviet Union after the war. His relation to the Communism of which Freud wrote in 1930 was through Lenin. Bullitt met Freud on the couch at 19 Bergassestrasse in 1923. Moreover, the “status” of the text is not helped, to say the least, by the fact that formulations like the following abound:

We have seen that in laying down the laws of orderly assembly for the Lightfoots [a debate club at the University of Virginia] Wilson was both obeying his father and imitating his father, he was finding outlet for both his passivity to his father and, through identification, for activity toward his father. He found satisfaction for the same desires in preparing the Covenant of the League of Nations. Wilson’s share in founding the League of Nations has been exaggerated; but in so far as he was its “father,” the League of Nations was the grandchild of the Reverend Joseph Ruggles Wilson, the Professor Extraordinary of Rhetoric, whose interests in words and the rules of speech so bored his acquaintances, and so impressed his son. (Bullitt and Freud 89)

Read without benefit of the didactic “introductory lecture” on the fundamentals of psychoanalysis and Bullitt’s obsessive biographical chapter on Wilson, this passage appears to careen from a university to an international peace conference, enabled by thin expository recourse to a perpetual desire to passively identify with one’s loquacious father. For those accustomed to Freud’s more measured and subtle exposition this is difficult to recognize and thus accept as his. Moreover, despite the disclaimer that the study is not an exercise in character assassination, more than one reader—Anna Freud in particular—felt that the assertions insistently advanced by this text did the Freudian cause little good in North America.⁴ Bullitt and Freud argued that one of the most highly regarded US presidents of either party was clinically deranged, implying that analysis might usefully be classed among the modes of expertise with which Americans need to be more patient.

That said, recent scholarly work—beginning with Paul Roazen’s “Oedipus at Versailles,” and culminating with J.F. Campbell’s “To Bury Freud on Wilson” from 2008—has rather definitively settled the matter of authorship. The cache of manuscripts examined by Campbell shows clearly that Freud was deeply involved in the writing of the text and not merely that portion of it titled, “Introduction by Sigmund Freud.” Even bits from the last-minute changes initially refused by Bullitt—for example, the startling evocation of the “compulsion to repeat” in German (Wiederholungszwang) in chapter XXXIV—appear in print. There is no justification for insisting that this “psychological” study of the leader of the Democratic Party, precisely as it turned in its modern, “liberal” direction, tells us nothing of value about how psychoanalytic practice illuminates the aporia, the impasse, that holds democracy in a dream state. On the contrary, this study uniquely helps us appreciate that democracy is “only a dream” because it is unrealizable. It is for all and for no one, simultaneously. In addition, readers more satisfied by an earlier Freud can only be heartened to discover that in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego Freud turns directly to the collaborative study of Wilson, writing:

If the importance of the libido’s claims on this score [love of a leader/father/deity] had been better appreciated, the fantastic promises of the American President’s Fourteen Points would probably not have been believed so easily, and the splendid instrument would not have broken in the hands of the German leaders. (Standard 18: 95)

A similar formulation occurs in the “Dissection of the Psychical Personality” lecture, written although not delivered in 1933, thus two years after the collaborative project with Bullitt (Standard 22: 72-3). The question for us is whether this is where “psychoanalysis” belongs, whether it can “go there,” whether it can analyze a democratically elected president (not a pope or a general), making all textual references in the study to blocked paths and roads not taken highly resonant adumbrations, both about Wilson’s journey and about Freud’s case study itself.

Doubtless, more pressing still is the question of what the collaborative study of Wilson has to teach us about the status of democracy within psychoanalysis and the impassable dream, after all, the “via regia” to the unconscious and thus to psychoanalysis itself. This text situates psychoanalysis within the discipline of psychology, defining its constitutive difference in terms of its scientific concern “with the deeper psychic facts” (Bullitt and Freud, xiv). Like Freud’s study of other conjured analysands/artists—Christof Haizmann, Michelangelo, da Vinci etc.—this study uses the occasion of a certain therapeutic mourning to ponder the nature of analysis. With such broadly reflexive theoretical motifs in play, I turn, then, to think about the text’s evocation of the “undreamt.”

This evocation occurs in Freud’s introduction and it attracts attention both because in a psychological study that otherwise makes comparatively scant reference to dreams (I will return to consider a decisive exception) this stands out, and because it evokes, if faintly, the philosophical problem of the Cartesian dream that may or may not be a dream. The relevant passage reads:

Through a long laborious evolution we have learned to set frontiers between our psychic inner world and an outer world of reality. The latter we can understand only as we observe it, study it and collect discoveries about it. In this labor it has not been easy for us to renounce explanations which fulfilled our wishes and confirmed our illusions. But this self-conquest has repaid us. It has led us to an undreamed-of mastery over nature. (Bullitt and Freud xii)

Prudence is called for here because, plainly enough, “undreamed-of mastery” has a certain colloquial force that, if rephrased, might be simply rendered as “a mastery beyond our wildest dreams,” where dream has a more anodyne, putatively non-analytical sense. But given the framing of the formulation, a framing that repeats the terms of Descartes’s dilemma (is he awake in the outer world, or “awake” in the inner one) where among other things science is groping around for its certainty, the notion that the fixity of nature’s frontier is secured through a mastery whose semantic authority resides in being “undreamed-of” gives the colloquialism a depth it might otherwise be said to lack. It might then make sense to hear in this passage, especially if we scan slowly over the “has led us to” (xii), the motif of passage, of achieving a limit, of leading “us” to what is undreamed—in effect, to the place of the dream in our thinking the unsteady and thus radically dubious frontier between the inner and the outer, the private and the public, psychoanalysis and politics.

And this is only (in) the beginning. Throughout this study one finds near compulsive attention paid to the topic of impasse. Most typically, this takes the form of commentary like, “Graduated from Princeton in June 1879, he went in the autumn to the University of Virginia to study law, not because he wished to become a lawyer but because he considered law the ‘sure road’ to statesmanship” (89), or, in a different tonality, “his dyspepsia and headaches barred him from the path he hoped would lead to a career as a statesman until the spring of 1882. . . . The road to statesmanship seemed closed to him” (91). Given the narrative logic of all stories of Bildung, these figures are not uncommon, but such commentary also leads quickly to rather more tangled formulations of the sort we now recognize as bearing the imprint of a certain psychoanalytical reflection. The observation that his road seemed closed is followed by: “The flow of his libido through the channels of his activity toward both his father and mother was blocked” (91), a summative formulation that both stratifies the terrain over which Wilson is traveling (again, the inner and the outer; the latent and the manifest), and, through the language of flows and channels, situates the inner, as it were, at sea. Kofman’s teasing out of the aporia acquires renewed relevance as the impassable path to becoming a stateman begins to sound like the work of analysis. Although Freud spent far more time fleeing states than leading them, the drama of his leadership of the “movement” often thematized the matter of method, a drama transferred to epigones like Lacan who insistently and repeatedly entwined technique and tendency.

The reader at this juncture knows to refer the preceding invocation of “activity both toward his father and his mother” back to the early chapters of the study where the authors (although here the material seems plainly written in the same hand that was composing the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis) are introducing the then fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, specifically the concepts of primary narcissism, the libido, object choice, constitutive bisexuality, repression as opposed to sublimation, among several others. With a surprising, even brash frankness, the authors insist on human bisexuality, arguing that human civilization would be impossible without it, adding, in doctrinal fashion, that by sexuality is meant behavior, namely, being active, thus masculine, or passive, thus feminine. By virtue of this transposition, bisexuality loses its provocative relation to sexual difference. Just the same, in the characterization of Wilson’s activity toward both his father and his mother being impassable, what we realize is that his behavior toward them is deprived of a distinctly “masculine” discharge. Much of what the authors go on to do is to trace how tenaciously Wilson was haunted, even incapacitated by his struggle, typically unconscious, to reconcile his desire to be both active and passive in relation to his “incomparable father” (an epic simile that studs the study). Among the many things left unspoken by Bullitt and Freud is the oft-suggested proposition that Wilson was a homosexual, “an invert,” wanting desperately to be “loved” by his father while psychically masquerading as his mother. Restated in the language of Group Psychology, Wilson here is depicted as paralyzed as to which ‘Ego-Ideal’ to identify with, a stasis that divided his own position from itself, rendering the formation of the group/family unreal.

The twin motifs of the impossible and the impassable dart in and out of the text, with the former most characteristically appearing when addressing Wilson’s Super-Ego. For example:

In many cases this exaggeration is so excessive that the father with whom the little boy identifies himself, whose image becomes his Super-Ego, expands into the Almighty Father Himself: God. Such a Super-Ego continually demands the impossible from the Ego. No matter what the Ego may actually achieve in life, the Super-Ego is never satisfied with the achievement. It admonishes incessantly: You must make the impossible possible! You can accomplish the impossible! (Bullitt and Freud 41-2)

While such expostulations certainly suggest an uncredited lyricist for “The Impossible Dream,” they also gesture toward, in the twisted topography of making the impossible possible, one of Freud’s great inventions: ambivalence. This concept appears toward the end of Freud’s introduction and it, “the fact or principle of ambivalence,” is used to designate the law that who one loves, say Wilson’s paternal Ego-Ideal, is at the same time (so not on different days, as it were) who one hates, say, the insatiable Super-Ego of the same person. Little more is said about ambivalence as such in the study, but readers of Freud will recognize “ambivalence” as a crucial theoretical operator in Totem and Taboo and, on that basis, know why this early text figures prominently in Group Psychology (see chapter X) where, as has been noted, Freud invokes the Wilson study directly, folding it into the completely incomplete Standard Edition. As if sending up a flare to illuminate the passable terrain ahead, ambivalence is what does and undoes what Wendy Brown has called the demos.⁵

A thorough and thus responsible discussion of how Freud produces the concept of ambivalence in Totem will take me far afield, but since Derrida, with his characteristically brilliant perversity, has drawn attention to what innervates me about the problem of ambivalence, I turn there instead. It occurs in the middle of Before the Law,a text ostensibly about Lyotard’s Au juste (“just gaming” [playing fairly/only playing] in the Weber translation) and delivered at a Cerisy colloquium dedicated to Lyotard’s thought. Derrida there turns to Freud to link the latter’s account of the founding of moral law in Totem, to the predicament of Kafka’s “man from the country” in his confrontation with the law, represented by an open portal and a guardian posted “before” it. Much hangs on the chronotope of Kafka’s Vor dem (in advance of, as opposed to, in front of) in the title. Ostensibly commenting on the burning issue of whether Freud believed that an actual primal hoard actually murdered an Urvater, the alignment of Freud and Kafka pivots on the matter of the impasse, the impossible. Elaborating on Freud’s account of the “ambivalence” of the murderous sons, Derrida writes:

Morality is therefore born from a pointless crime that, at bottom, kills no one, that occurs too soon or too late, that puts an end to no power, and that, in truth, inaugurates nothing since it would have been necessary for repentance, and therefore morality, to have been already possible before the crime. (Before 45)

Grafting this to Kafka’s narrative Derrida continues:

If the law is fantastical, if its original location and its taking-place partake of the fabulous, it is understandable that “das Gesetz”should remain essentially inaccessible. . . . From being a quest to reach it, to stand before it, respectfully face to face, to be introduced to it and into it, the narrative becomes the impossible narrative of the impossible. The narrative of prohibition is a prohibited narrative. (47)

The final sentence would appear to be yet another glancing riposte to Foucault who, in the mid-seventies, began to insist that law operated solely as a prohibition and could thus not serve as a general model of power. But more consequential is the way ambivalence (the sons’ love and hatred for the father) fans out into impasse, that is, the far from inconsequential matter of whether in Totem the “passage” from nature to culture is even possible. From the point of view of political philosophy, the vexed status of so-called natural law hangs in the balance here, as does Lévi-Strauss’s risky inclination, noted by Lacan, to think culture as a second nature.

Now, if one considers that ambivalence designates not only the conflicted drives of the sons, but the entire passage from horde to a social group capable of moral self-governing, then the ambivalence so relentlessly and assiduously tracked in Wilson is no small thing. It is not idiosyncratic, and may well be part of the very structure of any social group, any demos whatsoever. This puts a rather different, but not irrelevant, spin on Bullitt and Freud’s repeated assertion that Wilson’s actions (or inactions) had world historical importance. When on 2 April 1917 President Wilson addressed both houses of the US Congress to declare war on Germany, he justified this proposed course of action—one he had been assiduously trying to avoid—by insisting that war was necessary to make the “world safe for democracy.” This Orwellian twining of war and democracy was framed precisely as of consequence for “the world.” Because “the peace without victory” ineptly negotiated by Wilson committed all parties to future war (simple ambivalence radicalized and projected diachronically), Bullitt and Freud, as if succumbing to Wilson’s self-delusion, conceded the worldly character of his policies, but hinted (passim) this derived from the psychoanalytical insight that, in fact, no social group (and not merely the church or the army) can cohere without ambivalence, without some insistent iteration of the impossible. From Derrida’s “Kafkaesque” perspective, psychoanalysis, as a human science, a sub-discipline of psychology, thus becomes the fabulous narrative of prohibition that narrates this impasse and thus acquires a fundamental, if foreclosed, status within democracy as such. To invoke George McGovern a final time: his credibility as a potential leader of the “free world” was seriously weakened, if not entirely undermined, when his running mate, Thomas Eagleton, was revealed by the press to have been therapeutically treated for depression. He was in analysis and democracy would not, could not be served by that.

But I said earlier that a decisive (rare) dream in Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study deserved further comment. Now is the time. Technically, the dream is recurrent. Freud and Bullitt characterize it as one Wilson had from his days at Princeton until his death in Washington. Significantly, the dream is also only ever recounted in any detail in a letter written to his wife, Ellen Louise Axson. The letter reads:

I did not realize until I got here [Bermuda] how hard hit my nerves have been by the happenings of the past month [the struggle over the formation of a Graduate College at Princeton]. Almost at once the days began to afford me relief, but the nights distressed me. The trouble latent in my mind came out in my dreams. Not till last night did the distress—the struggle all night with college foes, the sessions of hostile trustees, the confused war of argument and insinuation—cease. (qtd. in Bullitt and Freud 138)

Aware that, in writing about Princeton (from the then British Overseas Territory of Bermuda), Wilson had asserted that “sinister influences” dominant at Princeton were manifesting as “dark forces” blocking his way, Freud and Bullitt interpret (and surely the notion of “latent” trouble attracted their attention) the adversary in the dream not simply as his colleague and former friend Andrew West, but in the guise of “the big dark man,” as Wilson’s father, the one who consistently demanded the impossible of him (121). Like Descartes’s dream populated by a series of men, each one offering to make sense of the dream, Wilson’s dream, in which figures a colleague and a father, is made sense of by two more men, Freud and Bullitt, by seeing the dark, aporetic forces as the agency in the unconscious of a “big dark man.” Significantly, this figure is, strictly speaking, a construction of analysis. It appears twice in the text and in neither instance is it attributed directly to Wilson. As this invites consideration of what Wilson’s dream occasions as a presentation of psychoanalytical practice, it deserves attention.

Those irritated by Freud and Bullitt’s collaborative text may certainly point to, among many other things (some already mentioned), its apparent self-serving justification for Bullitt’s decision to resign from Wilson’s service in the wake of his failed diplomatic mission to Moscow. Bullitt’s entire resignation letter (complete with salutation and signature) takes up much of chapter XXXI. But even more problematical and thus far more irritating is the text’s deafening silence on the figure of the “big dark man.” Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in 1856, four years prior to the Confederate raid on Fort Sumter. He was raised in Georgia by an “incomparable father” who was an ardent convert to the Confederate cause. His family owned slaves and his “Ego-Ideal” as a statesman (rather than the minister preferred by his father) was William Gladstone, Queen Victoria’s prime minster who declaimed eloquently (by the way, one of several voices captured on Edison’s phonograph)⁶ in defense of his family’s sugar interests in the “West Indies.” While attending Johns Hopkins University, Wilson befriended Thomas Dixon Jr. and, as film scholars will know, permitted David Wark Griffith to cite from Wilson’s work on the title cards in his adaptation of Dixon’s novel, The Clansman. During the early diplomatic maneuvering triggered by the German sinking of the Lusitania, Wilson even arranged to have The Birth of a Nation screened as part of the cultural events hosted by the White House. As a career diplomat and studio hack, Bullitt would almost certainly have known these “facts.”

The issue here is not whether Wilson was a white supremacist (he is known to have disliked the film), but clearly the jump cut from “big dark man” to “father” is a precipitous construct. Considering, as they write in detailing Wilson’s embrace of Gladstone, that his father “wore the face of Gladstone” (Freud and Bullitt 84), the oneiric series traced in his letter to Ellen Axson running from West, to the “big dark man,” to his father might well imply that the “big dark man,” too, wore the face of Gladstone, that is, the face of a statesmen and phono-genic orator committed to channeling “dark forces.” Put differently, where precisely is the “big dark man”: the dream, the letter, the text, the analysis? Here the work of analysis itself stands forth as a locus of ambivalence, work where “father” (whether primordial or ordinary) races to foreclose what might otherwise become an interminable analysis, a quality of analysis that specifically invites the antemetabolic pairing: interpretation of dreams/dreams of interpretation. The interminable is its own impasse not only because it equates therapy and that hotel in California from which one can never leave, but because it holds interpretation at the dubious impasse of thinking the un-thought.

The Freud and Bullitt collaboration leads us to the threshold of a problematic that suggests that the relation of analysis as a therapeutic practice to an actually existing democracy is essentially that of a dream. Democracies tend to treat the form of governmentality they embody as the dream content of all their citizens, without, however, taking very seriously what it means to treat this content as dreamed. At best they identify with the dreamers in John Lennon’s “Imagine,” forgetting that he had also publicly apologized for his domestic violence. There is a link there that analysis constructs at its peril. It foments radical doubt about living in the world as one. The moment of the Wilson study falls at the early end of a therapeutic trajectory that sees Freud’s reticence about the treatability of psychosis exploited as a justification for preferring other means, notably pharmaceutical (but not only), for protecting democracy from its “enemies” within.⁷ Perhaps then a dim anticipation of the extra-clinical fate of psychoanalytical interpretation motivates the following from the introductory material signed by Freud:

To be sure, when I was led through the influence of Bullitt to a more thorough study of the life of the President, this emotion [antipathy and distrust] did not remain unchanged. A measure of sympathy developed; but sympathy of a special sort mixed with pity, such as one feels when reading Cervantes for his hero, the naïve cavalier of La Mancha. (Bullitt and Freud xiii)

Freud is attempting to reassure readers that the collaboration with Bullitt is not motivated by uninformed hostility (“anti-Americanism”) and for that reason unworthy of their attention. Completed in the early thirties and, thus, when it was becoming increasingly obvious that the war to end all wars was rapidly precipitating others, his antipathy to Wilson is impossible to deny. But, as if anticipating the formulation about the “undreamed-of mastery” that results from a psychoanalytically guided tamping down of aggression, Freud in this passage invokes his response to the dreamer of the impossible dream: sympathy mixed with pity. Quixote emerges as Christ’s ambivalent twin. Freud and Bullitt are convinced that because Wilson insisted on being taken as the latter, Wilson the Redeemer, his love of democracy expressed itself as hatred, his willingness to sacrifice it. Perhaps even unthinkingly, but certainly as an expression of what we glibly call “his issues.” The ambivalence of Freud’s response to Quixote leaves unstated the outcome of his joust with the windmills of the mind, but the temptation is strong to read him as urging one to restate Descartes’ doubt: is this really existing democracy, or it is it a dream synthesized by the malin genie? While hesitating at this doubtful impasse Wilson’s America can ask, who or what is this malin genie obstructing “our” path to democracy and how do we think where we cannot think to think? Stated less pessimistically, what finally is a dream and why is it such a common way to name America’s vanishing present?

Footnotes

1. Many readers will be aware that I am here summoning several themes common in the work of the “late” Derrida. Each deserves, and in some cases has received, essays of their own. Having heard Derrida lecture on “forgiveness” at UC Irvine shortly before his death, it feels appropriate to tease out the motif of impossibility by way of reference to this term. If one accepts that forgiveness is more than an ordinary solicitation of compassion or empathy, that it is, in some sense, a special request, then one is obliged to acknowledge that what makes the request special is the demand it imposes on the other, the one from whom forgiveness is sought. The limit case of such a demand is the request to be forgiven for the absolutely unforgivable (e.g. the atrocities of Apartheid). Anything short of that is commonplace, perhaps even trivial, in effect, unworthy of the request. Derrida concludes that to forgive what is unforgivable, thus what is solely worthy of forgiveness is impossible. Not because it is too much to ask, but because no response, even Bartleby’s (“I would prefer not to”), is either adequate or avoidable. Such is the impossible possibility of forgiveness. See Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness.

2. The reader of Freud will recognize here an evocation of the analysis of group psychology to be found in his study from 1921, Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego, a text treated by many as Freud’s most decisive statement on psychoanalysis and society. All philological matters aside, what does appear in this intertext is a homology linking America to the libidinal formations of the church and the army, a homology that brings democracy and fascism into precisely the constellation later bemoaned and interrogated by many figures affiliated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. This, of course, is a way to think about the impasse of democracy that while not making explicit reference to the dream whether possible or impossible, recognizes in the psychic formation of groups the explicit day residues that populate dreams with “big men.” A recent issue of The European Journal of Psychoanalysis, through a commemorative reading of Die Massenpsychologie (1921 – 2021), has explored these matters in considerable detail.

3. In his seminar on the Freudian thing, Lacan invokes the locution “They don’t realize we are bringing them the plague,” attributing it directly to Jung with whom he claims to have spoken. Given the fateful significance attributed to his always having missed an encounter with Freud, we have no particular reason to doubt Lacan on the matter, even as we may demur on the question of whether the locution is verbatim. See “The Freudian Thing” in Ecrits (336).

4. In “To Bury Freud on Wilson,” Campbell goes into some detail about Anna Freud’s role in attempting to suppress information about Freud’s contribution to the project. Reporting on Anna Freud’s interactions with the editor at Houghton and Mifflin, Alick Bartholomew, Campbell quotes from a letter in which Bartholomew writes: “Miss Anna Freud feels most strongly that publication of the manuscript as it is [deemed “repetitious”] would be harmful to her father’s contribution to scientific thought” (52), adding later that she worried that the book would also appear too “un-American” (53).

5. In her 2015 study, Undoing the Demos, Brown carefully traces the emergence of neoliberalism, showing how it aggravates the liberal distinction between democracy (as a form of government) and capital (as an economic system), ultimately sacrificing democracy (undoing it) to a logic of financialization that seeks to subordinate all human activity to markets whether local or global. Here the proposition that markets are best administered through democratic polities is obliged to assert and hold the opposite, namely that markets operate most purely when all democratic encroachments (whether social, political or cultural) are undone. Strictly speaking then, the neoliberal relation between democracy and capital is ambivalent. In my epigraph, Brown summarizes by stressing that democracy becomes unrealizable. Her evocation of the “dream,” however, invites the transposition of the unrealizable as the impassable, underscoring, even faintly, the pertinence of a more analytically inflected sense democracy’s dream. Democracy is dreamed because we are blocked from living it; we are blocked from living it, because it is only (“essentially’) a dream. Although Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz can be read as a “mourning-play’ about the loss of gold as the “general equivalent,” Fleming’s film is a clear and widely popular allegory about the no-place of home (middle America) and the dream that mediates Dorothy’s relation to it. This time the malin genie, like surviving sister, turns out to be good.

6. Many of Edison’s recordings have been preserved by the National Park Service of the United States. They are held in New Jersey at the National Historical Park in West Orange. Gladstone speech is titled, “To Edison from Colonel Gourand, Introducing Mr. Gladstone—‘The Phonograph’s Salutation’.” Its object catalogue number is EDIS 39852. As this might suggest, the speech is one made for the device, not a speech recorded live by the device, a specification called for both by the relay of voices and the notion that the phonograph is conducting a greeting to the speaker.

7. Jonathan Metzl in The Protest Psychosis has traced how the psychosis of schizophrenia morphed within clinical discourse to become the means by which to understand the violent elements of the Civil Rights Movement, thus neutralizing psychoanalytic therapy in principle with regard to thinking the impasses of US democracy in the fifties and sixties.

Works Cited

• Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Zone Books, 2015.
• —. “How Neoliberalism Threatens Democracy.” Conducted by Robert Johnson, YouTube, uploaded by New Economic Thinking, 25 May 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMMJ9HqzRcE.
• Cage, John. “Lecture on Nothing.” Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage, Wesleyan UP, 1973, pp. 109-27.
• Campbell, J. F. “To Bury Freud on Wilson: Uncovering Thomas Woodrow Wilson, A Psychological Study, by Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt.” Modern Austrian Literature,vol. 41, no. 2, 2008, pp. 41- 56.
• Derrida, Jacques. Before the Law. Translated by Sandra Van Reenen and Jacques de Ville, Univocal, 2018.
• —. “Cogito in the History of Madness.” Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, U Chicago P, 1978, pp. 31-63.
• —. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Translated by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes, Routledge, 2001.
• “Webinar on the Centennial of Sigmund Freud’s Massenpsychologie un ich-analyse.” European Journal of Psychoanalysis, journal-psychoanalysis.eu. Accessed 14 Jul. 2021.
• Foucault, Michel. The History of Madness. Edited by Jean Khalfa, translated by Jean Khalfa and Jonathan Murphy, Routledge, 2006.
• —. “My Body, This Paper, This Fire.” Translated by Geoff Bennington. Oxford Literary Review, vol. 4, no. 1, Edinburgh University Press, 1979, pp. 9–28. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43973606.
• Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited and translated by James Strachey, Vintage, 2001.
• —, and William C. Bullitt. Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study. Transaction, 1999.
• King, Martin Luther. “The Negro and the American Dream.” Address at the Annual Freedom Mass Meeting of the North Carolina State Conference of Branches of the NAACP, 25 Sept. 1960, Charlotte, North Carolina, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/negro-and-american-dream-excerpt-address-annual-freedom-mass-meeting-north. Excerpt. Accessed 10 Nov. 2021.
• Kofman, Sarah. “Beyond Aporia?” Post-structuralist Classics, edited by Andrew Benjamin, Routledge, 1988, pp. 7-44.
• Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Translated by Bruce Fink, Norton, 2009.
• Metzl, Jonathan. The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease. Beacon Press, 2009.
• Peeters, Benoît. Derrida: A Biography. Translated by Andrew Brown, Polity, 2013.
• Rancière, Jacques. The Aesthetic Unconscious. Translated by Debra Keates and James Swenson, Polity, 2009.
• —. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Translated by Julia Rose, Minnesota UP, 2004.
• —. Hatred of Democracy. Translated by Steve Corcoran, Verso, 2006.
• Said, Edward. “Criticism Between Culture and System.” The World, the Text, and the Critic, Vintage, 1991, pp. 178-225.
• Schorske, Carl E. “Politics and Patricide in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.” The American Historical Review, vol. 78, no. 2, 1973, pp. 328-47. U of Chicago P, https://doi.org/10.2307/1861171.
• Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. MIT Press, 1992.

A. Kiarina Kordela (bio)

Abstract

This essay examines the relation between neoliberalism and the alt-right, showing that their shared cynical amoralism elevates irresponsibility to the level of absolute morality, such that the Democrats’ exhortation to shame proves counterproductive. The alt-right’s outrage-inducing effect on the Democrats is due to its double relation to biopower: insofar as biopower governs the society of shameless jouissance, the alt-right conforms to the biopolitical rules and flaunts its own modes of jouissance; but insofar as biopower must hide its political nature, the alt-right breaks the rules by revealing biopower’s hidden (sovereign) underside. This raises the question of whether resistance should operate according to the rules of overt or covert sovereignty.

Politics of Cynicism and Shame

In a 2018 Current Affairs article titled “The Politics of Shame,”¹ Briahna Joy Gray explains the Democrats’ practice of shaming the alt-right by noting that “Trump’s policies hurt people,” and

given the easy-to-anticipate consequences of their votes, Trump voters do seem like bad people who should be ashamed. . . . [A] high level of outrage is appropriate to the circumstances. If you’re not outraged, you’re not taking seriously enough the harm done to the immigrant families torn apart by ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement].

Whereas in general “we’re often encouraged to engage more civilly with ‘people who disagree with us’,” Gray adds, what sets our current situation apart is that

 the divergent value systems reflected by America’s two major political parties cut to the core of who we are. They are not necessarily mere disagreements, but deep moral schisms, which is why . . . [m]ere fact-based criticisms of various policy positions feel inadequate, as if they trivialize the moral issues involved. . . . [V]arious beliefs, themselves, are shameful. No wonder, then, that the shared impulse isn’t just to disagree, but to “drag,” destroy, and decimate. (Gray)

Gray’s reference to morality points to a tendency toward what we might call the moralization of politics, but we should not misinterpret such a moralization as a slackening of the political itself. Rather, Gray’s reference to the existence of a current “moral schism” between two inimical, belligerent American parties indicates that today’s conflict has become properly political, at least if we follow Carl Schmitt’s definition. According to Schmitt, the “criterion of the political” is “the distinction of friend and enemy” insofar as it “denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation” (Concept 26). The “friend” and “enemy . . . concepts refer to the real possibility of physical killing,” or “war,” as “the existential negation of the enemy,” which “is the most extreme consequence of enmity” (33). To be sure, as the criterion of the political, war “does not have to be common, normal, something ideal, or desirable. But it must nevertheless remain a real possibility” (33). He continues:

It is by no means as though the political signifies nothing but devastating war and every political deed a military action. . . after all, could not the politically reasonable course reside in avoiding war? . . . War is neither the aim nor the purpose nor even the very content of politics. But as an ever present possibility it is the leading presupposition which determines in a characteristic way human action and thinking and thereby creates a specifically political behavior. (33-4)

“Political” for Schmitt means “polemical”: “a friend-enemy grouping” that couldlead to “war or revolution” (30), but does not need to result in actual war or revolution. If, to repeat Gray, the “shared impulse” in today’s “moral schisms” is to “destroy, and decimate,” then morality too has become political. Indeed, Schmitt notes, “the political can derive its energy from the most varied human endeavors, from the religious, economic, moral, and other antitheses” (Concept 38). Like the economic or religious or other “human endeavors,” the moral does not detract from the political but provides one possible antithesis through which the political emerges. Any human antithesis can “become the new substance of the political entity” if it is “in a position to decide upon the extreme possibility” of war (Schmitt, Concept 39). In Schmitt’s words: “the political entity . . . is the decisive entity for the friend-or-enemy grouping; and in this (and not in any kind of absolutist sense), it is sovereign. Otherwise the political entity is nonexistent” (39). For instance, “a class in the Marxian sense ceases to be something purely economic and becomes a political factor . . . when Marxists approach the class struggle seriously and treat the class adversary as a real enemy and [fight] him” (37). If it were possible, Schmitt continues,

to group all mankind in the proletarian and bourgeois antithesis, as friend and enemy in proletarian and capitalist states, and if, in the process, all other friend-and-enemy groupings were to disappear, the total reality of the political would then be revealed, insofar as concepts, which at first glance had appeared to be purely economic, turn into political ones. (38)

If class is the decisive entity that draws the line between friend and enemy when the political manifests itself as an economic antithesis, then what is the decisive entity that makes the two major American parties enemies in today’s manifestation of the political qua moral antithesis? We should be able to respond to this question by the end of this section.

Despite her reference to Trump’s policies, Gray asserts that the “feature that makes Trump unique, and the focus of a particular kind of outrage and contempt, is not his policy prescriptions or even his several hundred thousand character failings,” but “his shamelessness”—an evidently rampant shamelessness, because “even when it appears as if Trump is on the verge of an apology or admission, he quickly lapses back into shamelessness.” She observes that “Trump is not the first president or popular public figure to be accused of sexual assault—it’s a crowded field these days,” and “God knows plenty of presidents have been horrible people.” But,Gray continues, “he was the first” who, “instead of following the prescribed political ritual for making amends after being caught . . . chose to go on the offensive.” Or, to take another of Gray’s example,

nepotism may be as old as the Borgias, but the boldness with which Trump has appointed family members and their agents to positions of authority still manages to stun. And while nuclear brinksmanship was a defining feature of 20^th century presidencies, never before has the “leader of the free world” literally bragged about the size of his big red button and attempted to fat-shame the leader of a rival nuclear power.

And the list of examples goes on. This shamelessness does not accompany unprecedented or extraordinary acts of cruelty or corruption. Rather, these are expectable, quasi-routine acts perpetrated by politicians, but disrobed of the conventional observance of established moral decorum. This practice shares the same logic Peter Sloterdijk calls “postmodern cynicism,” namely the attitude that “takes into account the particular interest behind the [professed] ideological universality,” in Slavoj Žižek’s succinct formulation (Sublime 29). For instance, when “confronted with . . . robbery,” cynicism responds “that legal enrichment is a lot more effective and . . . protected by the law,” as in Bertolt Brecht’s “what’s the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?” (30). Postmodern cynicism unreservedly acknowledges the violence, exploitation, and corruption perpetrated by sovereign power, and constitutes a prevalent strategy among the alt-right today.

The strategy of postmodern cynicism is also distinct from all other moral systems’ insofar as it claims to lie beyond morality, or—to put it in the terms of one of the first theorizers of this amorality—beyond good and evil. Friedrich Nietzsche’s amoralism is based on the assumption that economy rather than morality constitutes the essence of humanity; morality is a derivative of the human economic essence. In Nietzsche’s words, we find “the first indication of human pride, of a superiority over other animals” at the very moment when man saw himself as the being that measures values, the “assaying” animal. Purchase and sale, together with their psychological trappings, antedate even the rudiments of social organization and covenants. From its rudimentary manifestation in interpersonal laws, the incipient sense of barter, contract, guilt, right, obligation, compensation was projected into the crudest communal complexes . . . together with the habit of measuring power against power. The eye had been entirely conditioned to that mode of vision . . . [and] early mankind soon reached the grand generalization that everything has its price, everything can be paid for. Here we have the oldest and naivest moral canon of justice. (202-03) 

Accordingly, Nietzsche continues, “punishment, being a compensation, has developed quite independently from any ideas about freedom of the will” (194), the latter being the precondition of morality. Rather, “culprits” whose status was originally that of a “debtor” (203) were not

punished because they were felt to be responsible for their actions; not, that is, on the assumption that only the guilty were to be punished; rather, they were punished . . . out of rage at some damage suffered, which the doer must pay for. . . . [as if] for every damage there could somehow be found an equivalent, by which that damage might be compensated—if necessary in the pain of the doer. (195)

In short, the “moral term Schuld (guilt) has its origin in the very material term Schulden (to be indebted)” in the economic sense (194). Out of this “ancient, deep-rooted . . . equivalency between damage and pain”—characteristic of “the basic practices of purchase, sale, barter, and trade” (195), “with the help of custom and the social straight-jacket” (190), and “liberally sprinkled with [the] blood” (197) of violent coercion and discipline—what we now call “conscience” (192) was developed: specifically, “‘bad conscience’” or “the consciousness of guilt” (194). The result is “man . . . tamed . . . but by no means improved; rather the opposite” (216). Nietzsche “take[s] bad conscience to be a deep-seated malady to which man succumbed under the pressure of the most profound transformation he ever underwent—the one that made him once and for all a sociable and pacific creature” (217). In this transformation it is not that the “old instincts had abruptly ceased making their demands”; rather, “they had to depend on new, covert satisfactions” (217) as they had to “turn inward,” which Nietzsche calls “man’s interiorization” (217). In this way, “hostility, cruelty, the delight in persecution, raids, excitement, destruction all turned against their begetter” and “man began rending, persecuting, terrifying himself, like a wild beast hurling itself against the bars of its cage” (218). This is the foundation of the rich array of feelings of remorse, shame, compunction, scruples, and penitence as a reaction to one’s own evil-doings—doings that, if they did not exist, would have to be invented to satisfy the demands of the old instincts. Therefore, according to the amoralist explanation of morality, one is a priori guilty.

            This inference is shared by thinkers as diverse as Augustine of Hippo and Franz Kafka, but the conclusions derived from it differ widely. The cynical amoralist concludes that, in order to free oneself from the cage of guilt and its bad conscience, one would first need to have “relegated both good and evil to the realm of figments” (Nietzsche 216)—that is, to imaginary notions like the ones people construct when they want to explain their fate as the manifestation of God’s will. Nietzsche summarizes Spinoza’s notion of God’s will as “subordinating God to fate,” which “result[s] in the worst absurdity” because God is supposed to be absolutely free (216). If a stone falls on my head and kills me, this accident is neither an evil (unjust or undeserved) occurrence nor a good one (just and deserved as punishment for some wrongdoing of mine) (see Spinoza’s Ethics, Part I, Appendix). Human freedom depends on the recognition of God’s absolute freedom. It would follow that the only person who is truly free—and hence ethical—does not fall prey to the fictions of good and evil constructed by the manufacturers of bad conscience who cater to social norms. According to our current social norms, evil policy prescriptions and character failings include torturing people, separating families, ignoring environmental destruction, committing sexual assault, and practicing nepotism and brinksmanship. These actions are supposed to incite feelings of bad conscience in those caught committing them. But the reasoning of cynical amoralism provides a model through which we can understand how the alt-right may perceive itself as “truly ethical” insofar as it appears to act beyond good and evil by showing no remorse and proceeding without shame. Note also that, as follows from the above line of thought, appearing to act beyond good and evil amounts to appearing to act beyond fiction and ideology—a point to which we shall return below. If this is the case, then the response to Gray’s question (“How effective is shame as a tactic?”)—that is, how effective is the Democratic attempt to instigate shame in the alt-right for its actions?—is clearly negative. The Democrats’ exhortation to shame is not simply ineffective but also counterproductive, because shame or any feeling indicative of bad conscience would be evidence of the alt-right’s defeat in their struggle against (the imaginary construct of) bad conscience. The morality of postmodern cynicism is simply immune to bad conscience, shame, and their cognates because postmodern cynicism deems them all products of ideology and considers itself to be above ideology.

Parenthetically, Gray also argues against the politics of shame for psychological reasons that remain within the framework of a conventional moralism that, unlike both Nietzsche’s and Kant’s, ignores the possibility of morality’s overlap with cruelty.² Her reasoning is based on the findings of social science that show that “shaming is an ineffective strategy for motivating moral behavior”:

[t]he person experiencing shame thinks “what a horrible person I am,” and searches for a way to preserve [his or her] self-esteem. . . . Feeling their entire self-image under attack, shame-prone individuals are more likely to externalize blame and lash out destructively, including physically and verbally. . . . shamed individuals are prone to “turn the tables defensively” and direct their anger toward “a convenient scapegoat.”

For this reason, Gray differentiates between shame and guilt, championing the latter because shame “provokes a holistic negative self-evaluation” that “impedes one’s ability to internalize and learn from bad behavior” and “is uniquely hard on the ego,” which can have “disastrous” results. By contrast, guilt “causes us to isolate and rehabilitate a specific ‘bad’ behavior,” and “evokes ‘other-oriented empathy,’” which “is more likely to lead to behavioral change.” Gray concludes that “in practice,” the politics of shame “is a mistake” because the concept of “bad behavior” is meaningful only if the perpetrator of the act and the judging voice that declares the act to be bad share a value system as to what is bad and what good. If I consider what you judge as “bad behavior” to be good based on my own value system, then I can neither think that “I am a horrible person” (the purported effect of shame) nor that “I did a bad thing” (the purported effect of guilt). In fact, even if we share the same value system, I could still deem good an admittedly bad behavior toward somebody if, for instance, I were to perceive it as a just punishment that I inflict on them (the foundation of any legal system). Therefore, the otherwise important distinction between guilt and shame—or any other feelings one could relate to what Nietzsche calls “bad conscience”—is irrelevant in this context.³ Instead, cynical amoralists will give up their actions (policies or behaviors) only if it becomes evident either that they fail to amass more power (Nietzsche’s point) or if the ground of amoralism itself—the assumption of operating beyond good and evil—is destroyed, forcing them to acknowledge that they have never extricated themselves from the realm of conscience (or, put differently, that they never left the realm of ideology).

The fundamental fallacy in this reading of Nietzsche (and, a fortiori, of Spinoza) lies in assuming that there is a political space beyond ideology.⁴ The false assumption that we are in a post-ideological era governed exclusively by objective laws—primarily those of the market—constitutes the trunk of neoliberalism, of which the alt-right is one branch. The (ostensibly post-ideological) logic that enables the invocation of the “laws of the market” as the last decisive instance of all action also claims the obsolescence of any distinction beyond good and evil in any action. But because of the fallacy in this logic shared by neoliberalism and the alt-right, their pretense to post-ideological amoralism cannot be taken at face value. In fact, if anything can undermine the alt-right, it would be not shame but its own ideological presuppositions. We shall return to this in the last section. For now, we can conclude that the response to our initial question—“What is the decisive entity that makes the two major American parties enemies in today’s manifestation of the political qua moral antithesis?”—is double. One the one hand, as with the case of the economic antithesis, that entity is class, understood to mean different strata of various forms of power (in economy, representation, visibility, virality, etc.). On the other hand, it is the acknowledgment or denial of the ubiquity of ideology. If one denies the ubiquity of ideology, one perceives power as the sole political motivation; and if one acknowledges the ubiquity of ideology, one considers it the means of obtaining not the glorification of a God or a State, but power.

Sovereignty, Biopower, and Enjoyment           

Another aspect of Trump’s uniqueness relates to the Democrats’ frequent comparison of his politics with those of a totalitarian leader of the fascist or Nazi type. When in office, Trump often presented his policies (and his own actions) as those of a sovereign rather than as those of a leader of a properly biopolitical power. As Michel Foucault says, by the nineteenth century, “sovereignty’s old right . . . to take life or let live . . . came to be complemented by a new right . . . or rather precisely the opposite right,” namely biopower, which “is the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die” (History 241). Biopower operates, in Foucault’s words, on the principle that the function of political power is to “exert . . . a positive influence on life,” to “optimize and multiply it,” “to take control of life, to manage it . . . to explore and reduce biological accidents and possibilities” (History 136-40; “Society” 261). In short, biopower’s outmost “object and objective” is to protect and enhance human life as such, unconditionally, when death is proven to be humanly and technologically inevitable. Contemporary political power is marked by a tension between sovereignty and biopower, and contemporary democracy presents itself as operating exclusively through biopower (not sovereignty) the more illegitimate its acts of killing become: “How will the [sovereign] power to kill and the function of murder operate in this technology of power [biopower], which takes life as both its object and its objective?” (“Society” 254). Foucault responds that biopower can legitimately designate its enemy only through a “racism” of an “evolutionist” kind. If racism is generally a “way of introducing . . . the break between what must live and what must die,” evolutionist or biopolitical racism does so through the logic that “‘the more inferior species die out . . . the more I—as a species . . . —can live, the stronger I will be’” (“Society” 254-55). Biopolitical racism segregates inferior from superior species by constructing the former as a form of subhuman life that must die or be banned in order for (superior) human life to continue to live and thrive. This racism is indispensable in biopolitics because when all human life is deemed sacred, the only life that can legitimately be destroyed cannot be human; it must be subhuman. Therefore, Foucault concludes, this racist “play is . . . inscribed in the workings of all . . . modern States” (“Society” 260), because biopower cannot exercise its sovereign right to kill unless its victims—the “enemy”—are constructed as subhuman.⁵ Indeed, as I argue elsewhere, America’s military targets in the post-Cold-War era are increasingly constructed as the enemies of the values that the same biopolitical discourse presents as constituting human dignity: freedom, democracy, individualism, human rights, etc.⁶ As the opponents of these intrinsically human values, enemies are constructed as subhuman—“terrorist” being one of the most popular designations. However, Trump and the alt-right do not always seem invested in constructing the “enemy” as subhuman. For example, immigrants must be kept away (or confined) in order to “make America great again”—that is, explicitly for the sake of American sovereignty. The alt-right selects its enemies according to the criteria of sovereignty, which openly disregard human life as such.⁷ In other words, part of the alt-right’s shameless and shocking demeanor includes revealing what in biopower must remain hidden: the fact that, pace its denial, biopower is a form of political power, which includes the sovereign right to kill (humans). Trump’s tragicomic exhibition of sovereign conduct scandalously exposes the political nature of biopower.⁸

This exposure is a fundamental infringement of biopower—because biopower depends on its ability not to present itself as a form of political power. Jacques Lacan makes this crucial point in seminar XVII (1969-1970), arguing that the modern shift from the “discourse of the Master” (whose form of power is sovereignty) to the “discourse of the University” (biopower, as the form of power proper to capitalism) entails a radical shift in the relation between power and knowledge. The new, modern, or capitalist face of authority is knowledge itself, by which is meant “not knowledge of everything . . .  but all-knowing [non pas savoir-de-tout . . . mais tout-savoir],” that is, “nothing other than knowledge,” not mastery or power, but pureknowledge, which is said to be “objective knowledge” or “science,” or what “in ordinary language is called the bureaucracy” (Le Séminaire. Livre XVII 34; Book XVII 31). Lacan defines biopower as the form of power that denies its political character and presents itself not as the bearer of mastery but as the body of an unquestionable knowledge because it consists of objective, scientific, or purely procedural truths, whether in the form of bureaucracy, science, or the laws of the market. It is a power that hides its nature behind what passes as, in Marie-Hélène Brousse’s words, the “globalizing logic of the market and procedures” (259), whereby, per Alenka Zupančič, “political struggles and antagonisms . . . try to hide behind supposedly neutral laws of economy or intelligence reports” (176). Biopower endeavors to depoliticize the political, both (in the Schmittian sense) by pretending that it has no (human) “enemies”—because all human life is unconditionally sacred—and (in the Lacanian sense) by presenting itself not as a body of power but as a scientifically neutral body of knowledge. Neoliberalism is a natural child of biopower, and here the alt-right branches off from neoliberalism despite their common “post-ideological” trunk insofar as the former flaunts its sovereign rights.⁹

It is no accident that Lacan’s opposition to biopower pivots around the invocation of shame, specifically the shame that results from the loss of one’s honor. Prior to biopower’s elevation of life as such to the highest value, it was considered a virtue for people to value their honor more highly than their lives. In 1970, Lacan draws attention to the irreconcilability of biopower and shame by opening “his final lesson of The Other Side of Psychoanalysis” with the phrase “to die of shame” (Lacan qtd. in Miller 11). To be willing to die of shame—to be willing to kill oneself or others out of shame—presupposes that one elevates honor over life as such, which is a strictly anti-biopolitical ideal. As Jacques-Alain Miller remarks in his essay “On Shame,” contemporary power places “what is traditionally expressed as primum vivere” (“Live first”) over honor; or, inversely, the shift of power from sovereignty to biopower is accompanied by “the disappearance of honor” insofar as biopower “instates the primum vivere as supreme value,” saving “the ignominious life, the ignoble life, life without honor” (18). One may think that the two phenomena required for the dominance of biopower—the decline (or concealment) of sovereignty and the disappearance of honor—have as their corollary the demise of the aristocracy and the nobility as the primary representatives and bearers of mastery and honor. Yet in that 1970 seminar, Lacan exemplifies dying of shame by referencing François Vatel, who was not a noble but a servant who in 1671 committed suicide by running himself through two or three times with a sword he had fixed to the door handle of his room. His reason for doing so was his sense of dishonor for failing to complete the preparations for a three-day feast that the Prince de Condé had ordered for the entire court, of which Vatel was in charge. Evidently, as Miller notes, Lacan’s choice of Vatel “is there to tell us” that when honor is placed above life, not only the nobility but also “a valet can sacrifice his life for the sake of honor” (18).  

            Clearly the shame invoked by Lacan is not the same as the kind that Democrats would like to instigate among the alt-right. Lacan’s is the shame of putting survival (life as such) above honor, power, or any other ideal an individual (or a group or a society) may have, whereas the shame that the alt-right refuses to show is that of disrespecting human life as such. The fate of shame in biopower is to decline in its Lacanian sense and thrive (through both its absence and the demand for its presence) in the sense of shame for disrespecting human life as such. Indeed, while Lacan argues that, far from being the prerogative of the nobility, honor and shame for failing ideals belong to everybody, his stance toward the 1969 Paris student movement indexes his premonition that biopower eventually deprives everybody of both. Miller pursues this line of thought by noting that Lacan’s position on shame is determined by the fact that his “fundamental debate” is with “globalization . . . Americanization or . . . utilitarianism, that is, with the reign of what Kojève calls the Christian bourgeois” (27), whose characteristics are first defined by Hegel and then elaborated in detail by Max Weber in his Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism. When, in his 1959-1960 seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan says, “without any objections being raised” at that moment, that “the movement the world we are living in is caught up in . . . an amputation, sacrifices, indeed a kind of puritanism in the relationship to desire” (qtd. in Miller 12), his referent is the world of precisely this Christian bourgeoisie. While up to 1960 “it was still possible to say that capitalism . . . was coordinated with Puritanism,” by 1969-1970, in his seminar The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, “this diagnosis . . . is . . . outdated,” for “the new mode . . . is rather that of permissiveness” (Miller 12).  A new era has begun in which “what can sometimes be the cause of difficulty is the prohibition on prohibiting,” all of which makes evident the fact “that capitalism has disconnected itself from Puritanism” (12). Thus, “in the final chapter of The Other Side of Psychoanalysis,” Lacan’s discontent with the capitalist civilization finds expression “in the statement ‘There is no longer any shame’” (12). And in the famous impromptu at Vincennes in December of 1969, Lacan reproaches (and, in fact, attempts to shame) the students of the day for advocating for a world with no shame and for putting themselves “in a place of impudence” (26). Lacan’s diagnosis that by 1970 “there is no longer any shame” means that “we are at the time of an eclipse of the Other’s gaze as the bearer of shame” (15). Instead of making us ashamed, by the end of the 1960s, the Other clearly exhorts us to “Look at them enjoying!”—and by “them” is meant all of us, because in the society of the spectacle “the look that one solicits” is “turning reality into a spectacle” (15). The internet, Facebook, Twitter, and “selfies” today seal what had already transpired in Lacan’s television days: that the society of the spectacle aspires to be a reality show. Fifty years after Vincennes, the death of shame has been sealed for good, as the students’ unconscious motto at the time (“Look at them enjoying!”) has today become “the dominant discourse [that] enjoins one not to be ashamed of one’s jouissance” (Miller 27). The primacy of life as such has as its corollary the demand for universal tolerance of jouissance.

And the paradox of the right to one’s jouissance begins with the fact that extending this universal injunction (for everyone to publicize their own mode of jouissance and, consequently, to tolerate others’ modes) to its logical conclusion permits any mode of jouissance. The same imperative—“do not be ashamed of your jouissance!”—entails as much the demand to respect religious and cultural differences or to legitimize LGBT+ rights as to respect the license to enjoy, say, chauvinism, homophobia, misogyny, racism, nationalism, or any other conceivable mode of jouissance. In this light, what Gray and others describe as Trump’s and the alt-right’s shameless attitude reveals itself as the logical counterpart of the very socio-sexual politics of tolerance and shameless enjoyment supported by the Democrats or, more accurately, by the logic of biopolitics. To be sure, in the eyes of the Democrats, the chauvinist mode of jouissance is as morally inferior as the practice of abortion (or a transsexual or an alien who alloys the purity of the nation) may be for the alt-right. But both the Democrats and the alt-right play according to the rules of biopower and the society of the spectacle: the rules of one’s right to shameless enjoyment. This is an innovative change in the rules of the game, because the traditional Right has always defined itself in opposition to (shameless) jouissance. What infuriates today’s Democrats is that the alt-right no longer plays according to these traditional, moralizing rules, but according to the rules of the by-now dominant discourse—the rules of the shameless enjoyment of one’s jouissance—which the Democrats had in the past taken for their own exclusive prerogative. The paradox of the right to any jouissance reveals the self-contradiction in the politics of tolerance, owing to the fact that jouissance cannot be equally distributed.¹⁰ There is a “reservation implied by the field of the right-to-jouissance” for the simple reason that one’s jouissance gets in the way of, restricts, or offends the jouissance of another (Lacan, Book XX 3). To recapitulate, the alt-right’s outrage- and hostility-inducing effect on the Democrats results from its double relation to biopower: insofar as biopower governs the society of shameless jouissance, the alt-right adopts the rules of the biopolitical game and flaunts its own modes of jouissance; but insofar as biopower must hide its political nature, the alt-right breaks the rules of biopower by revealing its hidden (sovereign) underside.

Struggle in Biopower

Perhaps because jouissance cannot become the object of equitable distribution, democracies have traditionally tried to keep any (at least explicit) reference to it outside the domain of the political. But neoliberal populism seems to have effected a shift whereby some commentators speak of the replacement of the political with a discourse on matters reminiscent of jouissance.¹¹ In an article in the German newspaper Die Zeit, Bernd Stegemann writes of the “biopolitical perfecting of everyday life”:

The central purpose of liberal populism is the promotion of subjective optimization and the concealment of all systemic inequalities. For capital does not fear anything more than suddenly becoming visible…. For where capital can no longer be held responsible, the interests of the people can no longer be enforced. The systematic irresponsibility of bankers and politicians is a concrete consequence of this policy. And the compensation for economic inequality takes place in the symbolic order by promoting individual liberties in the field of identity politics. To put it bluntly: the biopolitical perfection of everyday life and the language rules of political correctness have taken the place of class struggle. While the bourgeois middle is pleased with the uplifting of general morality, all others have been robbed of the language to formulate their class interests. (my trans.)

Stegemann’s observations indicate a clear class discrepancy between the “bourgeois middle” and “all others,” but his further analysis complicates things by pointing to a shift in morality that relates directly to cynical amoralism. Unlike the traditional bourgeois morality that we know from Henrik Ibsen’s plays, whose heroes were

culpable for their actions and hoped that their guilt would not come to light, the bourgeois subjects of postmodernism today are frank about their guilt. Of course, everyone knows that slaves need to work for our smartphones and that our wealth is based on the exploitation of the whole world. But the paradox of this knowledge today is that those who most loudly acknowledge their complicity benefit most from public recognition. This paradoxical effect is only possible because the connection between culpable action and personal consequences seems to have been dissolved. (Stegemann, my trans.)

In the face of a radical absence of personal responsibility, the sole remaining moral act consists in the honest acknowledgment of one’s complicity, so that the more complicit one is, the more moral one appears to be.

The key point here is that the dissolution between “culpable action and personal consequences” effectively means the dissolution between complicity and any sense of guilt. This happens in a somewhat convoluted way. First, the (bourgeois) guilt is both universal and a priori because the exploitation is taken for granted, as a state of affairs both necessary and impossible to change. Next, therefore, the bourgeoisie has only two options: either admit that it benefits from this exploitation or pretend that it does not. With sincerity on its side, the former is perceived as moral, the latter as amoral. Moreover, what aggravates things further is the increasingly unstable boundary between “bourgeoisie” and “slaves,” both in the popular imaginary and in historical consciousness. Depending on the perspective, the slave may be some worker in an outsourced factory, an Amazon employee or Uber contractor, one of the 72 million American millennials who “have 4.6 percent of U.S. wealth” or, for that matter, anybody outside the “50 richest Americans [who] hold as much wealth as half of the United States” (Hedges 2020). The haziness of social-class stratification—both organic and contrived—contributes further to the universalization of guilt over one’s complicity (in the exploitation of the whole world) to the point that it ceases to be merely human and becomes superhuman, even divine. As Walter Benjamin (drawing on Nietzsche) puts it in his fragment on “Capitalism as Religion”:

Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement. In this respect, this religious system is caught up in the headlong rush of a larger [ungeheuren] movement. A vast [ungeheures] sense of guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal, to hammer it into the conscious mind, so as once and for all to include God in the system of guilt and thereby awaken in Him an interest in the process of atonement. . . . The nature of the religious movement which is capitalism entails endurance right to the end, to the point where God, too, finally takes on the entire burden of guilt, to the point where the universe has been taken over by that despair which is actually its secret hope. . . . It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation. (288-89)

Universal guilt is another name for no one’s guilt; there can be guilty people only if there are also innocent people. The burden of guilt has been removed from humanity, which is why—arriving at the final point of this convoluted logic—the ultimate dissolution in question is that of the connection between complicity and guilt: to acknowledge one’s complicity does not mean to assume the guilt of being complicit. Therefore, the acknowledgement in question is not confession as a means of expiation but a straightforward claim to morality that obviates the defilement of guilt by immersing the whole universe in it. The new element that characterizes the neoliberal postmodern manifestation of cynical amoralism is its perceived highly moral attitude. In fact, it is perhaps the sole remaining moral position sanctioned by all branches of neoliberalism, and Trump’s election reaffirmed its prowess as a political strategy. (For example, in an interview with ABC News, Trump cited his claimed net worth of more than $10 billion as one reason for being qualified to run for President—and several other slogans could be invoked in support of this point.) The real peril of the neoliberal dissolution between guilt and complicity (including in, though not limited to, profiteering) lies in its potential to colonize current historical (un)consciousness across the entire spectrum of class interests, so that instead of attempting “to start a reflection that wants to account for the dissolution of responsibility” and “taking this step towards a systemic critique of capitalism,” in Stegemann’s words, we arrive at a situation in which “people demand general values, then complain about the impossibility of following them in their own lives, and then demand moral recognition for their honesty” in admitting that they break these values. This is the generalized paradox of a society that elevates utter irresponsibility to the level of absolute  morality.

            To spell out the paradox philosophically, the core of amoralism, which initially appeared to be a non-ideological aloofness beyond good and evil, is in truth its ostensible opposite: outright moralism. And the root of this paradox lies in the fact that the amoral will to power coincides with the fundamental means of maintaining morality: punishment. This coincidence is already discernible in Nietzsche’s line of argumentation, where the debasement of others and cruelty toward them, which in the development of civilization comes to constitute the moral system of punishment, is conceived as the primary, most authentic characteristic of humans prior to being tamed and confined in the cage of bad conscience and our moral system. Prior to the existence of the “moral universe of guilt,” in the world of purely economic “contracts,” the debtor could settle his debt through suffering. But this is possible only if making the debtor suffer was “a supreme pleasure” for the creditor (197). The “infliction of pain [can] provide satisfaction” because “cruelty constituted the collective delight of older mankind . . . it was an ingredient of all their joys” and the “oldest and most thorough human delight” (197-98). Primary joy in the suffering of others made possible “this entire method of compensations” (196) in which “the moral universe of guilt, conscience, and duty (‘sacred’ duty) took its inception” (197). In “place of material compensation such as money, land, or other possessions, a kind of pleasure” is given to the creditor, a “pleasure [which] is induced by his being able to exercise his power freely upon one who is powerless”: the “pleasure of faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire [inflicting pain for the pleasure of inflicting it], the pleasure of rape” (196, my translation). In “‘punishing’ the debtor, the creditor shares a seignorial right,” because the most thoroughly human pleasure consists in being “given a chance to bask in the glorious feelings of treating another human being as lower than himself” (196-97). This ultimate “pleasure will be increased in proportion of the lowliness of the creditor’s own station” because “it will appear to him as . . . a foretaste of a higher rank” (196). In short, the desire for morality is the desire for moral superiority. Far from operating beyond good and evil, the neoliberal cynical amoralist position reasons as follows: We are evil, and so are you (because “everybody knows” that the current economico-political state of affairs requires slaves to maintain it), but we acknowledge it, and this makes us superior to those who do not. Thus, the good-evil opposition shifts from whether or not one is an exploiter, to acknowledging or failing to acknowledge one’s (a priori and universal) function as an exploiter—but the fact is that the opposition remains. Nevertheless, this shift indicates that in today’s so-called post-ideological era, ideology no longer functions through the invocation of ideals but through what we should perhaps call affect, such as the affect of moral superiority (which, as we have seen, is obtained through the paradoxical elimination of guilt through its universal deification).¹²

            Let us recall that the proponent of the alt-right who operates on the basis of sovereignty has no need to see others as subhuman or as morally inferior in order to treat them as an enemy. Nevertheless, the above examination reveals that, because it constructs its enemy as subhuman (morally inferior), the cynical amoralist position can perfectly interpellate not only the person who subscribes to the principle of sovereignty, but also the person who gives primacy to the biopolitical principle of the primum vivere—whence the much wider success of neoliberalism compared to the alt-right’s. Were the sheer recognition of one’s position as exploiter to become the exclusive socially-recognized remaining moral value, then neoliberalism would triumph. Let us also pause to foreground the fact that, because the cynical amoralist position clearly takes the distinction between good and evil as its point of reference, it remains within ideology. This is evident in the logic of cynical amoralism, which serves to reproduce the established hierarchy of social ranks (the given relations of production) by providing “a foretaste of a higher rank” (Nietzsche), an Ersatz on the moral level. Indeed, recalling Louis Althusser’s words, it is in the very definition “of the ideology of the ruling class that the relations of production in a capitalist social formation, i.e. the relations of exploited to exploiters and exploiters to exploited, are largely reproduced” (156). Ideology has always claimed to be non- or post-ideological; it has always been the case that the “mechanisms which produce this vital” reproduction of the relations of production “are naturally covered up and concealed by a universally reigning ideology,” that is, “an ideology which represents” its venues “as a neutral environment purged of ideology” (156). But insofar as cynical amoralism remains within the distinction between good and evil, it also remains to be explained how it is possible that one acknowledges this brutal “exploitation of the whole world” not as something that should cause us remorse but as a desirable or at least inevitable condition. Only a Marxist view of capitalism acknowledges that this brutal exploitation (illegal immigrant labor, underpaid labor, outsourcing, unemployment, and so on) is an integral part of the system itself. As a result, Marxism cannot conceive of the abolition of exploitation without the abolition or fundamental restructuring of the capitalist mode and relations of production. Wouldn’t the sole counter-response to cynical amoralists who feel moral superiority for acknowledging their position as exploiters of the world be this very same acknowledgment accompanied by the demand to end exploitation? Yet, as the Left in the era of global capitalism increasingly withdraws from this demand and is satisfied by the mere gesture of acknowledgment, more and more people turn to the compensatory discourse of individual liberties and betterment, while those who discern the hypocrisy of this move increasingly turn to the alt-right. Thus, both neoliberalism and the alt-right profit from the adoption of the by now largely orphaned Marxist explanatory model, not as a means of challenging capitalism, but as a means of providing a new morality—which is also to say a new ideology—that can best reproduce and sustain the established relations of production.  

Let us return one last time to the common and divergent elements of neoliberalism and the alt-right. First, both claim to be post-ideological; second, only the alt-right openly espouses the principle of sovereignty; third, neoliberalism shares with the Democrats the biopolitical principle of the primum vivere. This means, among other things, that alt-right cynical amoralists do not need to degrade morally or consider as subhuman either their enemies or the “slaves” whom they acknowledge that they exploit. These “slaves” may be one’s equals, including moral equals, who have been defeated in the struggle for power due to historico-political circumstance. And if, for whatever reason, any form of further violence against the “slaves” (or the enemy) is required to maintain this power hierarchy, the alt-right cynical amoralist has no scruples in applying it to these equals (i.e., humans) because their premise is sovereignty, not biopower. By contrast, whoever operates on the primacy of biopower can justify violence only against a subhuman. This in turn means that they have to construct their enemy as subhuman in the first place, which is what the claim to moral superiority endeavors to do (whether in the Democrat or the neoliberal mode). Anyone who denies the political nature of biopower is forced to engage in this moralization of politics and the construction of their opposition as morally inferior, because this is the only political act that remains to them—as long as they follow the rules of biopower. For biopower (the logic of the primum vivere) claims by definition to be a pacifist form of power, and the construction of the enemy as subhuman is the precondition of any division between friend and enemy that a pacifist power could justifiably invoke. To return to Schmitt’s words from 1932, the “particularly promising [besonders aussichtsreiche] way of justifying wars” today is “pacifism” (Concept 36; Begriff 34). That is to say, pacifism is forced by its own logic to present its war as a “war against war,” a war to end all wars, “the absolute last war of humanity” (Concept 36), the assumption being that pacifism constitutes the highest level in the development of human life and that the last war aims to destroy only (subhuman) life that, for whatever reason, has not attained this level of development. In other words, pacifist war aims to destroy those willing to kill themselves and others in the name of some value which, for them, is higher than human life pure and simple. Consequently, Schmitt concludes, “such a war”—the pacifist or biopolitical war—“is necessarily unusually intense and inhuman because” it must “degrade the enemy in moral and other terms and is forced to make of him a monster that must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed [vernichtet]” (Concept 36; Begriff 35), according to the biopolitical logic by which “‘the more inferior species die out . . . the more I . . . as [a] species . . . can live’” (Foucault, “Society” 255).¹³

The morality of biopolitical pacifism requires that the ultimate criterion for defining the (subhuman) enemy is the moral inferiority of not respecting human life as such. This would put in the same subhuman boat the alt-right and anyone who takes any antithesis seriously enough to fight in its name. But if a group that supports one side of an antithesis succeeds in constructing its enemy as subhuman (say, on the basis of moral inferiority), then this group’s militancy could appear biopolitically legitimate. Is this what neoliberalism wants to attain by attempting to elevate itself morally, on the one hand above the Democrats by acknowledging its own cynical amoralism, and on the other above the alt-right by denouncing the latter’s sovereign gestures? Is this what the Democrats endeavor to do in attempting to shame the rest for their sovereign gestures and cynical amoralism? Ironically, the acceptance of biopolitical pacifism seems to indicate that the practice of politics (that is, of designating one’s enemy) is possible today only by refusing to acknowledge the political character of power and playing according to the rules of the biopolitical game. Indeed, with the exception of the alt-right, this is largely what is happening.  We have identified here the two current paths of this biopolitical practice. On the one hand, the Democrats shame their enemy for disregarding moral decorum, not because this will change them but because it makes them legitimate targets in the eyes of their opponents. On the other hand, the cynical amoralism of current neoliberal practice also shames its enemy, this time for not being amoral enough to acknowledge evil as the sole remaining moral value. The possibility of resisting biopower’s exploitation of “slaves” (the “whole world”?) thus faces a dilemma. According to which rules should resistance play—the rules of overt or covert moralism? But this question is logically preceded by a deeper dilemma: should resistance play according to the rules of overt or covert sovereignty (or biopower)? The latter question amounts to knowing whether resistance today needs an ideal other than sustaining life as such. In our effort to respond to this more primary question, let us keep in mind that pacifism is not the struggle’s other but merely one way to justify that struggle, whether war or revolution.

Footnotes

1. Current Affairs describes itself as a left-wing magazine edited by Harvard sociology graduate student Nathan J. Robinson. Briahna Joy Gray is Senior Politics Editor at The Intercept, and her article was included in a special issue on “Shame: Its Uses and Abuses.”

2.  Referring to the “beginnings” of “the sphere of contracts and legal obligations,” Nietzsche remarks that they “were liberally sprinkled with blood” because in them “the sinister knitting together of the two ideas guilt and pain first occurred, which by now have become quite inextricable.” To this he adds: “And may we not say that ethics has never lost its reek of blood and torture—not even in Kant, whose categorical imperative smacks of cruelty?” (197). The link between Kant and cruelty has famously been elaborated by Lacan in “Kant with Sade.”

3. For instance, Silvan Tomkins’s conceptual distinction of shame from guilt—even as “they are one and the same affect” (Sedgwick and Frank 133)—on the basis of his observation that, unlike guilt, shame does not presuppose any prohibition, may, as Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank have argued, be useful in grasping the decentralized character of the self, but remains irrelevant to the political function of bad conscience. Tomkins’s own examples actually point to the reason why. For instance, the shame one may feel when “one started to smile [at somebody thought “to be familiar”] but found one was smiling at a stranger” (Sedgwick and Frank 5) is indeed provoked not because of a prohibition, but because of a sense of improperness—yet this concept is itself based on the very social norms that also constitute bad conscience. That is, the opposition between proper-improper, like that between good-evil, need not depend on a prohibition. More generally, the various and otherwise important accounts of the difference between shame and guilt are irrelevant to discussions of their political function as long as their political effects are indistinguishable. The political exchangeability of shame and guilt becomes evident in the fact that their valorization can be inverted, as in Paul Gilroy’s argument, cited by Karyn Ball,

that among the painful obligations that attend the task of working through the “grim details of imperial and colonial history” is the transformation of “paralyzing guilt into a more productive shame that would be conducive to the building of a multicultural nationality that is no longer phobic about the prospect of exposure to either strangers or otherness.” (Ball 70-1)

Paralysis seems to shift arbitrarily between guilt (Gilroy) and shame (Gray). In her response to Gilroy’s suggestion, Ball offers a psychoanalytically-inflected expression of the common political function of shame and guilt: “I question whether such shame can be detached from a sadomasochistic imaginary that precipitates liberal guilt” (71).

4. I have argued elsewhere that Spinoza’s work explicitly indicates that such a non-ideological space is impossible both practically (as his political writings indicate) and theoretically (insofar as it would be impossible to have the third kind of knowledge [intuition] without it being mediated through both the second [reason] and first [imagination] kinds of knowledge, as his Ethics indicates). See $urplus: Spinoza-Lacan and “Spinoza’s Immanent Sovereignty: Fantasy and the Decision of Interpretation” (authored with Joseph Bermas-Dawes).

5. Foucault’s line of thought regarding the indispensability of racism as the façade under which any modern biopolitical State can legitimize its own killings (i.e., its own exercise of sovereign power) acknowledges that biopower and sovereignty are intertwined, albeit opposite forms of power: “sovereignty’s old right . . . to take life or let live . . . came to be complemented by a new right . . . or rather precisely the opposite right” of “the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die” (“Society” 241, my emphasis). Biopower does not replace sovereignty. Rather, it encompasses it, having to keep it hidden within itself because sovereignty opposes its own principle (of the unconditional respect for human life). This is why Foucault does not consider twentieth-century totalitarianisms to constitute exceptions to the biopolitical modern State: “racism is bound up with the workings of a State that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power. . . . Controlling the random element inherent in biological processes was one of the [Nazi] regime’s immediate objectives” (258-9), “in accordance with the themes of natural selection and the struggle for existence” established by the theories of “evolutionism,” which ensures “war will be seen not only as a way of improving one’s own race by eliminating the enemy race . . . but also as a way of regenerating one’s race,” for “more and more of our number die, the race to which we belong will become all the purer” (257). Accordingly, Nazism, “this universally disciplinary and regulatory society, was also a society which unleashed murderous power, or in other words, the old sovereign right to take life. This power to kill . . . ran through the entire social body of Nazi society,” for it “was granted not only to the State . . . the SA, the SS, and so on,” because “[u]ltimately, everyone in the Nazi State had the power of life and death over his or her neighbors, if only because of the practice of informing, which practically meant doing away with the people next door, or having them done away with” (259). He concludes:

We have, then, in Nazi society something that is really quite extraordinary: this is a society which has generalized biopower in an absolute sense, but which has also generalized the sovereign right to kill. . . . Nazism alone took the play between the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of biopower to this paroxysmal point. But this play is in fact inscribed in the workings of all . . . modern States. (“Society” 260)

The tension between biopower and sovereignty becomes a focus in Giorgio Agamben’s work. For my account of the relation between Agamben’s and Foucault’s conceptions of biopower in relation to sovereignty, see my article on “Biopolitics, From Tribes to Commodity Fetishism.” The fact that in biopower the sovereign right to kill humans must be covered up means that biopower must cover up the fact that it is a form of political power tout court, insofar as the political presupposes the friend-enemy grouping.

6. See my Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology or “Monsters of Biopower: Terror(ism) and Horror in the Era of Affect.”

7. In this context it should be noted that the alt-right’s alliance in the USA with the Christian right and their shared pro-life position should not be read as motivated by the biopolitical unconditional sanctity of human life—as evidenced by the frequency with which one sees on the same car an anti-abortion bumper sticker side by side with one that invites us to “support our troops.” It is part of sovereignty’s agenda to foster a large army, which presupposes increasing its own population. This having been said, nothing would impede a person of more biopolitical ideological inclinations from also applying both bumper stickers, if the person has been convinced that our embryos are humans worth living, unlike the subhumans killed by our troops.   

8. Or, referring back to the above note on Foucault and Nazism, we could say that while Nazism employed at its maximum the biopolitical strategy of constructing its enemy as subhuman in order to legitimize its exercise of violence (sovereignty), Trump and the alt-right are less invested than the Democrats in doing so. And this is part of what reveals Trump’s administration as a straightforward appeal to sovereignty, and makes it more reminiscent of totalitarian regimes such as Nazism—only because most people associate the latter more with sovereignty than with its bio-racist strategies.

9. Can the alt-right’s infringement of the code of biopower act as a form of resistance capable of undermining that very power? Some consequences of exposing the political nature of biopower, at least in the USA, include a general sense of instability, uncertainty, and fear regarding possible (market, war, and other) catastrophes and the more or less militant re-politicization of life. Whether these are signs of biopower’s faltering or of systemic crises—ostensible crises required for the sustenance and reinforcement of biopower—remains an open question.     

10. Several writers have exposed the contradiction, or rather the hypocrisy, of the politics of tolerance. For instance, Žižek addresses the topic through “multiculturalism,” pointing out that it “is, stricto sensu, ‘Eurocentric.’” In his words: “actual multiculturalism can emerge only in a culture within which its own tradition, communal heritage, appears as contingent; that is to say, in a culture that is indifferent towards itself, towards its own specificity” (Metastases 157). Accordingly, multiculturalism’s call for tolerance is a disguised manifestation of intolerance toward any culture not indifferent to its own specificity, that is, any culture that does not consider culture to be an arbitrary construction. Wendy Brown also foregrounds the fact that self-proclaimed secular tolerance in truth incites an intolerance of religious intolerance (notably, in the face of the militant Islam).

11. This is not the place to address the otherwise important question of Left populism.

12. I elaborate in more detail on this shift in the workings of ideology (and its relation to biopower) in “Monsters of Biopower: Terror(ism) and Horror in the Era of Affect.”

13. Schmitt’s criticism of the “pacifist” degradation of the enemy, and his call to treat the enemy as equal, form an implicit critique of the Nazi agenda to exterminate Jewish people as “lice”—something that may relate to the fact that Schmitt was accused by the SS of fake anti-Semitism and of undermining Nazism’s racial theories (particularly in a series of articles published in the SS newspaper Das schwarze Korps in 1936; see also Bendersky).

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