Critique Today (Social and Critical Theory)

Critique Today Social and Critical Theory A Critical Horizons Book Series Editorial Board JEAN-PHILIPPE DERANTY, JOHN...

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Critique Today

Social and Critical Theory A Critical Horizons Book Series Editorial Board JEAN-PHILIPPE DERANTY, JOHN HEWITT, DANIELLE PETHERBRIDGE, JOHN RUNDELL, JEREMY SMITH, ROBERT SINNERBRINK

International Advisory Board WILLIAM CONNOLLY, MANFRED FRANK, LEELA GANDHI, AGNES HELLER, DICK HOWARD, MARTIN JAY, RICHARD KEARNEY, PAUL PATTON, MICHEL WIEVIORKA

VOLUME 3

Critical Today edited by

Robert Sinnerbrink, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Nicholas H. Smith, Peter Schmiedgen

BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2006

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Social and Critical Theory – A Critical Horizons Book Series provides a forum for the critical analysis of issues and debates within critical and social theories and the traditions through which these concerns are often voiced. The series is committed to publishing works that offer critical and insightful analyses of contemporary societies, as well as exploring the many dimensions of the human condition through which these critiques can be made. Social and Critical Theory publishes works that stimulate new horizons of critical thought by actively promoting debate across established boundaries. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Critique today / [edited by] Robert Sinnerbrink . . . [et al.]. p. cm. — (Social and critical theory, ISSN 1572-459X ; v. 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 90-04-14911-2 (alk. paper) 1. Sociology — Philosophy. 2. Critical theory. 3. Poststructuralism. 4. Social history — Philosophy. HM585.C76 2005 301.01 22

2005058134

ISSN 1572-459X ISBN 90 04 14911 2 © Copyright 2006 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill Academic Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS

Contents Chapter 1 Robert Sinnerbrink, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Nicholas Smith Critique, Hope, Power: Challenges of Contemporary Critical Theory

1

Chapter 2 Genevieve Lloyd Providence Lost: ‘September 11’ and the History of Evil

23

Chapter 3 Nicholas H. Smith Hope and Critical Theory

45

Chapter 4 Craig Browne Hope, Critique, and Utopia

63

Chapter 5 John Grumley Hegel, Habermas, and the Spirit of Critical Theory

87

Chapter 6 Pauline Johnson Habermas: A Reasonable Utopian?

101

Chapter 7 Shane O’Neill Critical Theory, Democratic Justice and Globalisation

119

Chapter 8 Emmanuel Renault Radical Democracy and an Abolitionist Concept of Justice. A Critique of Habermas’ Theory of Justice

137

vi • Contents

Chapter 9 Jean-Philippe Deranty The Loss of Nature in Axel Honneth’s Social Philosophy. Rereading Mead with Merleau-Ponty

153

Chapter 10 Paul Redding Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory

183

Chapter 11 Simon Lumsden Reason and the Restlessness of the Speculative: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Reading of Hegel

205

Chapter 12 Peter Schmiedgen Polytheism, Monotheism and Public Space: Between Levinas and Arendt

225

Chapter 13 Robert Sinnerbrink From Machenschaft to Biopolitics: A Genealogical Critique of Biopower

239

Chapter 14 Paul Patton Foucault, Critique and Rights

267

Notes on Contributors

289

Index

293

Robert Sinnerbrink, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Nicholas Smith Critique, Hope, Power: Challenges of Contemporary Critical Theory

In one of the final texts written before his death, an essay devoted to Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?,” Michel Foucault defined the ethos of modernity as a “permanent critique of ourselves.” By this Foucault meant a critical social ontology, an attitude of critical experimentation with the established limits of knowledge and social practice. Such a model of critique, Foucault argued, must be understood as an ethos, a “historico-practical test of the limits we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings.”1 The later Foucault’s qualified affiliation with the critical Enlightenment tradition can be fruitfully compared with the model of philosophical and social critique developed within the critical theory tradition. According to the latter tradition, a critical theory of society not only diagnoses the pathologies of modernity, reflecting upon the experiences of injustice motivating various social movements, but also attempts to offer a positive alternative to prevailing forms of social domination and political injustice. The challenge for critical theory today, as Axel Honneth remarks, concerns “the question of

2 • Robert Sinnerbrink, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Nicholas Smith

how we are to obtain the conceptual framework for an analysis which is capable both of coming to grips with the structure of social domination as well as with identifying the social resources for its practical transformation.”2 Such a model of critique implies a diagnosis of the present, an unmasking of the operations of power, an exposure of the disturbing proximity between instrumental rationality and social domination. Not only for Foucault and Adorno, but for Honneth as well, as Jean-Philippe Deranty argues in this volume, the point of a critique of rationality is to expose the subtle complicity between reason, power, and “the infliction of violence upon the human body.”3 These aims, of course, are very demanding, particularly in light of recent historical and political events. The profound upheavals in global politics in recent years, and burgeoning discussions of the ‘ethical turn’ in contemporary social philosophy, prompt a number of questions explored in the following collection of essays. What is the status of philosophical and social critique today? What forms of critical dialogue are possible between French post-structuralist and Critical Theory traditions? How can philosophy today most effectively submit our social-historical actuality—our ‘today’—to critique? The essays collected together in this volume address these and other questions by engaging in a philosophical confrontation with different aspects of our social and historical constellation. They are all contributions to the ongoing critical reflection on the history and the legacy, the defects and the possibilities, of the critical Enlightenment project. At the same time, all of the essays included here are informed by an acute sense of the challenges facing critical theory and social philosophy today. They respond to this challenge not by retreating from the possibility of a critical theory of society, nor by finding refuge in ethics as a substitute for social and political philosophy, but by fostering a productive engagement with different philosophical traditions in order to contribute to a ‘critical ontology of ourselves’. Critique Today is an attempt to reflect upon and explore these issues, to show the pertinence of a transfigured conception of philosophical and social critique for confronting some of the historical events and forms of social experience that demand our philosophical reflection. A number of themes recur throughout these essays: the ongoing dialogue between critical theory and post-structuralism, the productive appropriation of German and French traditions of thought, the relationship between philosophy and social theory,

Critique, Hope, Power: Challenges of Contemporary Critical Theory • 3

and the prospects for a critical engagement with modernity in light of global political transformations. The latter theme is explored in Genevieve Lloyd’s opening essay, which examines the fascinating Derrida/Habermas debate over terrorism, the Enlightenment, and globalisation from the perspective of the secularisation of the historical theme of providence and the history of philosophical conceptions of evil. Other themes also resonate throughout the volume: the importance of social hope for critical theory (the contributions by Nicholas Smith, Craig Browne, and Shane O’Neill); critical engagements with Habermas’ social and political philosophy (John Grumley, Pauline Johnson, and Emmanuel Renault); explorations of Hegelian theories of subjectivity and Honneth’s theory of recognition in connection with recent French philosophy (Simon Lumsden, Paul Redding, Jean-Philippe Deranty); critical interpretations of Foucaultian analyses of biopower and rights (Robert Sinnerbrink and Paul Patton). Taken together, these essays provide a rich cross-section of the dynamic convergences and divergences in recent social philosophy. They reflect some of the vibrant interest in critical theory outside of the more traditional locations of Germany, England, and the United States, notably in Australia, Ireland, and France. In this respect they contribute a welcome perspective on the increasingly cosmopolitan debates within critical social philosophy.

Critique, ‘September 11,’ and Social Hope According to a familiar model, critique involves the determination of rational standards of evaluation and the application of those standards to given modes of thought and practice. The main task for social philosophy, on this view, is first to clarify and justify the standards by which societies ought to be criticised, and then to apply these principles to the basic institutions of society. In this way, the validity or otherwise of a particular institution, or a basic social structure, can be subject to ‘critique’. For instance, institutionalised discrimination on the basis of race, gender or religious identity can be ‘critiqued’ for falling short of a principle of equal freedom (or equal dignity) justified by philosophical analysis. To give another example, a basic social structure that gives rise to massive economic inequalities can be ‘critiqued’ by appeal to a philosophically well-grounded principle of just distribution.4 In both these cases, the meaning of the object of critique—social discrimination and economic inequality—is relatively uncontroversial: one needn’t be


a philosopher or a social theorist to understand it. For the sake of this mode of critique at least, the empirical meaning of the object—say, sexism, racism, and poverty—is clear, though of course the details and extent of its occurrence are a matter for empirical investigation. What ‘critique’ brings to empirical social science, on this model, is a reflexively redeemable norm (or series of norms) against which the validity of a given social practice can be assessed. Critique Today opens with Genevieve Lloyd’s essay, “Providence Lost,” that articulates a complementary conception of the tasks of philosophical critique. According to this conception, critique aims not so much at the justification and application of norms, nor even the diagnosis of social pathologies. Rather, as Lloyd makes clear, it takes its departure from the occurrence of a particular historical event whose very meaning is in question, and develops a historical reflection on the meaning of the present in light of such an event. And there are certain events whose meaning is so problematic—as Lloyd discusses with reference to Susan Neiman as well as the debate between Habermas and Derrida—that they seem to challenge the limits of our received forms of historical intelligibility.5 These are events in which the ‘impossible’ happens; and in happening, they can force observers to reconsider their most basic assumptions about themselves and the world. The terrible events of November 1, 1755, the day of the Lisbon earthquake, provoked such philosophical reflection, as did the discovery of the unspeakable horrors of ‘Auschwitz’.6 According to Lloyd, ‘September 11’ signifies an event of comparable unintelligibility, in so far as it too elicits a ‘mind-numbing incomprehension’ which throws into question fundamental, for the most part unnoticed features of our self-interpretive scheme. Drawing on Habermas’ and Derrida’s reflections on the philosophical significance of ‘September 11,’ Lloyd connects these features to central themes of Enlightenment thought, especially its notions of providence and cosmopolitanism. As becomes clear in his discussion with Giovanna Borradorri, Habermas’ response to the event of ‘September 11’ is to emphasise that religious-political fundamentalism must be understood as a distinctly modern phenomenon. According to Habermas, it is a reaction against the Enlightenment ideal of a secularised public sphere, and the unequal distribution of the benefits and the burdens brought by mass communications and economic globalisation. As Lloyd observes, this means that the impact of terrorism, in Habermas’


view, can be analysed with reference to the ‘pathology of communicative disorders’. Religious fundamentalism is a distinctively modern disruption of the modern ideal of the secular public sphere as a space of rational communicative interaction; it poses an external threat to the ideal of secularisation that is intrinsic to the Enlightenment project. Hence the appropriate response to ‘September 11’, Habermas argues, is a reaffirmation of the ideal of a pluralistic public space of reason open to communicative contestation and social transformation, and an acknowledgement of the way that social and economic inequality generate religious-political fundamentalism as a response to globalisation. While Lloyd deals sympathetically with Habermas’ interpretation of the symbolic content of ‘September 11’, she suggests that Derrida’s response is more finely attuned to the singularity of the event and the challenge this presents to philosophy. For this challenge, as Lloyd reads Derrida, amounts to nothing less than a ‘total’ and ‘ongoing’ threat to ‘the world’, though in a peculiarly Derridean sense, indebted to Heidegger and Benjamin, that Lloyd strives to clarify through Derrida’s reflections on the ‘messianic’ structure of events, and the openness to futurity signified by the ‘to-come’. In addition to the empirical trauma of the people directly affected, ‘September 11’ is said to signify a kind of metaphysical trauma, a sudden realisation of the obsolescence of deeply entrenched concepts, ideals, and interpretive norms. It is as if the world not only changed that day, but in accordance with the logic of ‘autoimmunity’, it brought about its self-destruction as a world. As Lloyd observes, Derrida’s point here is hard to summarise, and we must be careful to distinguish the philosophical content of Derrida’s talk of worlddisintegration from the apocalyptic political rhetoric used to justify unrestricted war on some ‘threat without limit’. According to Lloyd, Derrida points to the way ‘September 11’ shows how fragile is the presumed invulnerability of the American ‘new world order’. It marks a threshold indicating the ongoing destabilisation of the post-Cold War world of American global triumphalism. The Cold War threat of nuclear proliferation between states has given way to an indeterminate threat of proliferation from anonymous and incalculable forces. This in turn generates an ‘autoimmune’ response, according to Derrida, in which Western democracies attack their own principles and institutions (international law, civil liberties, freedom of the press), while at


the same time generating precisely the kind of indeterminate terroristic threat that they are supposed to be suppressing in the name of ‘freedom’. Contra Habermas, this post-‘September 11’ condition of autoimmunity, for Derrida, evinces the perverse logic of the global ‘new world order’, which “ends up producing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm.”7 Lloyd’s subtle discussion of Derrida’s interpretation of the philosophical meaning of ‘September 11’ raises many provocative questions, among these the question of the threat posed by global capitalism itself. Indeed, if the event forces us to rethink further the Enlightenment ideals of cosmopolitanism and perpetual peace, perhaps we should be asking how good will between nations can be reconciled with a global economic system that makes man wolf to man. Ernst Bloch’s observation, made nearly fifty years ago, seems remarkably apposite today: namely, that “capitalist peace is a paradox which spreads fear more than ever and which enjoins nations to defend the cause of peace at the utmost.”8 If Lloyd’s essay concludes on a sombre note, perhaps it is because the loss of Providence that September 11 symbolises is also a loss of a ground of social hope. As she points out, Kant could draw on the idea of Providence to sustain his hopes for a future cosmopolitan world society. We still have the hopes, and we still tacitly rely on the idea of Providence to shore them up. If we no longer have that idea to lean on, what else can support the hopes for cosmopolitanism and other aspects of the Enlightenment ideal? This is the central question raised in Nicholas Smith’s essay, “Hope and Critical Theory.” As Smith points out, the idea of Providence is by no means the only resource we have for grounding radical social hope, and narratives of progress, which at some level are crucial for sustaining social hope, may be ‘providential’ in a variety of ways. Nevertheless, Smith accepts that we are going through a ‘crisis of hope’ which is connected to the ‘crisis of narratives’ of which Lyotard famously spoke.9 A symptom of this crisis, Smith suggests, is an emerging discourse of ‘ungroundable’ hope. Smith discusses Rorty’s views in this context, but a rationally unjustifiable hope of futurity has also been articulated in Derrida’s writings, as Lloyd points out. While the idea of ungroundable hope, or hope for the ‘impossible’, clearly resonates with many critical theorists and philosophers today, Smith insists that it does not supplant the need to justify social hope philosophically.


Craig Browne’s paper, “Hope, Critique, and Utopia,” contains a wide-ranging discussion of the recent revival of interest in the category of hope amongst philosophers and critical social theorists. He is, however, ambivalent about the worth of this development. On the one hand, Browne suspects that the ‘theological background’ to the category of hope undermines its theoretical value, a view he takes to be supported by Castoriadis’ work. In claiming this Browne departs from Smith, who maintains that hope and theology are only contingently—if, for us, powerfully—connected. On the other hand, Browne argues that the widespread thematisation of hope in theory as well as in everyday life tells us something important about the current state of capitalist society. Drawing here on Ulrich Beck’s analysis of the ‘risk society’, Browne suggests that the perception that social and economic development is out of control, or at least no longer amenable to conscious, rational steering and assessment, leaves a slack which can be taken up, however adequately, by hope. Browne also draws attention to the paradoxical processes of inclusion and exclusion whereby capitalist development promises abundance for all, thus generating hope, whilst indefinitely postponing the delivery. The changing significance of hope in what Browne calls the ‘capitalist imaginary’ is certainly a matter that deserves much further investigation. Another theme in Browne’s paper is the utopian dimension of Habermas’ critical theory. While Browne observes that Habermas’ reorienting of critique around the intersubjective procedures of democratic will formation retains utopian elements, he seems to agree with critics who regard Habermas’ discourse-theoretic approach as too limited in its conception of the radical democratic project.10 But as Pauline Johnson brings out clearly in her essay, “Habermas: A Reasonable Utopian?,” Habermas faces a real dilemma here. For in Habermas’ view, critique must be capable of expressing utopian aspirations for an emancipated future while at the same time undertaking reasonable, rationally justified analyses of present possibilities: without the latter, Johnson points out, critical theory would lose its engaged character, that is, its confrontation with actuality. It is only with this (hardly avoidable) dilemma between radicalism and reasonableness in view, Johnson argues, that we can appreciate the motivations behind Habermas’ conception of the tasks and methods of critical theory. While this interpretive strategy enables Johnson to present a strong defence of Habermas’ method, she also suggests that the


utopian vocation of critique may generate productive tensions with reasonableness that Habermas has not quite been ready to countenance.

German Critical Theory Today The question of ‘critique today’ obviously invites a reflection upon the current state of critical theory understood in the narrower sense of the Frankfurt School project of a post-Hegelian and/or post-Marxist critical theory of society. A significant number of contributions in this volume deal with the question of how this particular theoretical project might be pursued today, what specific conceptual, political and methodological challenges it faces and what potentialities it still harbours. To a great extent this question of ‘Critical Theory today’ remains the question of the interpretation of Jürgen Habermas’ work. Another central question emerges within these debates: it is less the interpretation and use of Marx today that is at issue, even though some articles clearly show post-Marxist concerns, but rather the interpretation and use of Hegel—one of the pressing philosophical issues of our time. In his article “Hegel, Habermas, and the Spirit of Critical Theory,” John Grumley revisits some of the key aspects of Habermas’ complex relationship with Hegel. Indeed, Habermas’ critique of Hegel raises problems and arguments that are still at issue in conceptualising a consistent critical approach to the modern world. These include Habermas’ critique of Hegel’s absolute idealism, his partial acceptance of the Hegelian critique of Kantian morality, and Hegel’s comprehensive theory of modern institutions. Grumley reminds us of Habermas’ scepticism towards intersubjectivistic interpretations of Hegel, clearly the dominant current in English-speaking Hegel scholarship.11 Such interpretations, Habermas claims, underplay the textual implausibility of a deflationary reading of absolute spirit and as a consequence they underestimate the subsequent methodological implausibility of such readings for contemporary theoretical concerns.12 What Habermas borrows from Hegel is the recognition that political theory must show how normative principles correspond effectively to ethical and institutional practices that engage individual subjectivities. However, as a result of his leanings towards a Hegelian solution to the ethical problem, Habermas also shares Hegel’s tendency to strive for ‘reconciliation with reality’. Grumley thus questions the capacity of Habermas’ most recent thinking to provide the proper normative and con-


ceptual tools for a thorough critical theory of the present. He remarks in conclusion that “a critical theory needs more than historical and institutional points of reference like those that issue from Habermas’ Hegelian reading of immanence: it needs to grasp these values in the context of the concrete constraints and alternatives making for their practical exercise.”13 With his article entitled “Critical Theory, Democratic Justice and Globalisation,” Shane O’Neill offers an original contribution to the debate about the adequacy, and, possibly, the required corrections and developments of Habermas’ latest theoretical framework.14 Drawing upon this framework, O’Neill argues that the realisation of justice is “best understood in republican terms, as the realisation of a democratic form of life in which free and equal citizens engage one another in the collective task of autonomous self-governance.”15 O’Neill insists on the social preconditions for the realisation of any such democratic form of life: “an egalitarian social structure is a precondition for the inclusion of all citizens as effective participants in the democratic process.”16 Since inequality affects individuals inasmuch as they belong to specific groups or classes, and since the latter play a central role in the political mediation of justice claims, contemporary critical theory needs to develop a coherent analytical and normative concept of ‘structurally constituted social groups’. The first part of the article proposes such a conceptual analysis, dealing particularly with the potential pitfalls of essentialism and individual oppression. This model allows O’Neill to take a critical stance on current postHabermasian models (mainly Fraser, Young, and Honneth). In the last part of the article, O’Neill shows that any discussion about institutional reform at the level of the nation-state must be framed within a broader discussion that takes into account the global aspects of social injustice and of struggles against it. O’Neill defends the thesis that the imperative of a necessary formation of a global public sphere should not lead to the conclusion that struggles at the national level are outdated. On the contrary, nation-states remain important political agents in the fight against global injustice; global struggles run the risk of entrenching local forms of injustice if they consistently bypass the national level. As O’Neill argues, true democratisation, with the challenge to social inequality that goes with it, is called for both within and amongst nation-states, and relies upon both global and international movements. With this, the Habermasian theory of justice receives a welcome extension of its scope.


Whereas O’Neill argues from within the Habermasian framework, Emmanuel Renault’s article, “Radical Democracy and an Abolitionist Concept of Justice. A Critique of Habermas’ Theory of Justice,” is a thorough challenge to that framework itself.17 Renault’s point of departure is informed by Axel Honneth’s objections against Habermas’ discourse theory of law and democracy. As Honneth has argued, the experience of social injustice is not limited to the experience of a contradiction between a social situation and abstract legal or moral principles; more often than not it is rather the experience of the narrowness or inadequacy of such principles.18 Secondly the demand that claims of justice be expressed in the universal grammar of practical reason runs the risk of misrepresenting or even ignoring the specificity of real, lived injustices.19 Renault systematises the critical perspective thus opened and focuses on the experience of injustice to develop a thorough critique of the Habermasian model, and through it, more generally, of liberal theories of justice.20 Against the commonly shared assumption that political theory is the search for the universal principles allowing a normative definition of justice, Renault suggests that justice is in fact an ‘abolitionist’ concept, that “its meaning is not defined by an abstract reference to equality, or to universality, but by the necessity to transform unjust social situations.”21 As a consequence, political theory must focus its analytical efforts on the experience which is the “logical and practical context of justice,” the experience of injustice.22 Renault describes this experience as ‘relational’, linked to a specific social situation; ‘qualitative’, lived as being unbearable in a particular way; and ‘dynamic’, as potentially triggering a practical reaction against the injuries it causes. We can retain the properly political dimension of justice, Renault argues—the critical and transformative dimensions entailed in the notion understood in an abolitionist sense—only if these three dimensions are not sacrificed in the search for universal principles that are required for the purpose of rational justification. In contrast, Habermas’ theory of democracy, with its emphasis on the universalisability of claims within public deliberations, produces a ‘decontextualisation’ of justice from the experience where it is grounded as a counterfactual claim. This decontextualisation, as in liberal theories of justice, leads to an abstract definition of the political, but also to the relativisation of social rights against formal and political rights. For individuals suffering from degraded conditions of existence, however, it is clear


that social rights are often not relative. In a social situation that is unbearable for the individuals involved, the qualitative, relational and dynamic aspects of the experience define a critical perspective upon the discourses of justification. This is why Renault argues for the specific cognitive and practical potential harboured in the experience of injustice. Finally, Habermas’ reduction of politics to deliberations within the public sphere does not sufficiently acknowledge the structural exclusion of some forms of injustice, often the most severe, from public debate. Renault’s article therefore advocates a radical departure from Habermas and suggests a new, alternative model of social and political theory grounded in the phenomenology of injustice and contemporary social movements. The potential and limitations of Honneth’s model are analysed in the contribution by Jean-Philippe Deranty, “The Loss of Nature in Axel Honneth’s Social Philosophy. Rereading Mead with Merleau-Ponty.” Deranty’s critical perspective on Honneth’s theory of recognition highlights a problem also afflicting Habermas’ critical theory, namely the lack of a full normative account of nature, and the lack of a proper consideration of non-human beings. Applying Honneth’s own method of immanent critical reconstruction, Deranty shows that the ‘loss of nature’ was not necessarily a consequence of Honneth’s initial project.23 This project aimed to overcome the abstractions perceived in Habermas’ model by returning to the tradition of German philosophical anthropology (Feuerbach, Gehlen, Plessner and Heller) and to the writings of American pragmatist, George Herbert Mead. With the help of arguments borrowed from these authors, Honneth wanted to develop a formal anthropology of ‘practical intersubjectivity’: namely, to study the minimal anthropological, indeed biological, preconditions of human action (hence ‘practical’), on the assumption, drawn from Feuerbach, Mead, and Habermas, that such preconditions are essentially intersubjective. The rationale for such a programme of research was gained chiefly from Honneth’s immanent critique of the theory of communicative action, according to which the restriction of the domain of normativity to linguistic practice generates major abstractions in Habermas’ social and political theory. A more ‘embodied’ version of the intersubjectivistic turn was needed. Honneth therefore saw the need to reframe the theory of social action, to elaborate a new theory of praxis, by grounding it in an anthropological


approach captured by the motto of the ‘humanisation of nature’, meaning the shaping of both outer and inner nature through social action. After retracing this journey, Deranty shows that Honneth’s mature model of the ethics of recognition abandoned this approach, and thus left no room, conceptually and normatively, for any being other than socialised human beings. In conclusion, Deranty suggests that a development of Honneth’s initial project could correct the abstractions found in his model of interaction that result from his ‘interpersonalist’ account of intersubjectivity. The central reference for such a continuation, Deranty argues, should be Merleau-Ponty, since his work can be read precisely as a successful attempt to develop an embodied theory of praxis, one which analyses in great detail the full scale of human interactions with nature, symbolic objects and non-human beings.24 Like Renault, but with a different emphasis, Deranty therefore advocates an informed return of critical theory to its historical-materialist origins. Paul Redding’s “Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory” shifts the focus from the tradition of German, post-Hegelian critical theory to the equally rich tradition of French social theory. Against the commonplace anti-Hegelian readings of Pierre Bourdieu’s structuralist and post-structuralist works, Redding highlights the deep similarities between Bourdieu’s and Hegel’s understanding of the logic of social integration and the origin and nature of social theory. The first such similarity, for Redding, is found in the parallel between Bourdieu’s logic of practice and Hegel’s theory of ‘immediate thought’. The mediating term between both is Kant’s crucial distinction between immediate representations in space and time (intuitions), and universal categories enabling any experience whatsoever (concepts). Bourdieu’s logic of practice, Redding argues, can be reconstructed as a critique of the neo-Kantian elimination (that can be traced in Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss) of Kant’s careful distinction between intuition and concept. Against the intellectualisation of the spatial and temporal embodiment of categorical systems, Bourdieu “attempted to reinterpret the type of binaristic grammar to which both Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss had appealed by showing its generation from responses of the body’s dispositional habitus to the practical demands of a socially codified everyday existence.”25 The second parallel between Bourdieu and Hegel appears when the two logics of social integration are rephrased in historical terms. The socialisation


within the family, leading to the acquisition of specific dispositions, can be interpreted as the remainder within post-traditional societies of the type of social integration along binary, body-centred categories prevalent in pre-modern societies. Reflective, objectivistic thinking, by contrast, emerges only within societies that have broken with mythopoetic thought. Thus Redding is able to compare Bourdieu’s genealogical account of the skhole, the leisurely activity severed from habitual life which, on the ground of its apartness from social necessity, can first aim at objective knowledge, with Hegel’s parallel theory about the emergence of modern social sciences within modern bourgeois-capitalist society. For Bourdieu, Hegel of course represented the kind of intellectualist approach that represses its historical and social contingency and projects its theoreticist prejudice upon its object domain, with the social categories informing social action being transformed into the conceptual categories of a ‘cosmic’ self thinking and realising itself through history. Redding, however, as a prominent advocate of the kind of post-Kantian, intersubjectivistic reading of Hegel that Habermas rejects, proposes a quite different perspective and conclusion.26 If, in a deflationary reading, spirit is interpreted as the gradual emergence of a “complex of recognitively mediated conditions adequate to human freedom,” what remains is Hegel’s attempt to mediate between ‘immediate’ and reflexive forms of ethical life and of thought.27 This is precisely the type of dialectic that Bourdieu used to describe the space where his reflexive sociology was to be rooted. Redding thus provides a vivid illustration of what a Hegelian critical theory looks like, while also defining a robust Hegelian critical perspective upon the great tradition of Durkheimian and post-Durkheimian sociology. Given the central importance of Durkheim for German as well as for French critical theory, one can see how fruitful an application of such critical Hegelian perspective could be.

The French-German Connection: Negativity, Biopower, Rights Manfred Frank once remarked that the important dialogue between German and French philosophical traditions still remained a task for the future.28 The essays in the final section of Critique Today make a significant contribution to fostering this dialogue, opening up new perspectives for thinking critically about reason, power, and rights. While there are many convergences between the perspectives developed here and other articles in the volume (Simon


Lumsden’s critical reading of Nancy’s Hegel, for example, resonating with Paul Redding’s neo-Hegelian reading of Bourdieu) there are also significant differences in critical orientation (Robert Sinnerbrink’s genealogical critique of Foucault’s concept of biopower dialoguing with Paul Patton’s Nietzschean defence of an ‘externalist’ reading of Foucault on rights). Taken together they provide a rich sample of the productive differences shaping debates in critical social philosophy today. Simon Lumsden’s essay, “Reason and the Restlessness of the Speculative,” continues the dialogue between neo-Hegelian theories of intersubjectivity and the post-structuralist critique of reason. Long vilified by post-structuralists as the paradigmatic thinker of totalising metaphysics, Hegel has again returned to prominence within recent French philosophy.29 Lumsden takes up this return to the ‘French Hegel’, presenting an illuminating discussion of Nancy’s provocative interpretation in light of the influential Anglophone ‘non-metaphysical’ reading of Hegel. To this end, Lumsden contrasts Nancy’s approach with the tendency among other post-structuralists to demonise Hegelian thought for exemplifying the identitarian subsumption of difference and alterity.30 Nancy, by contrast, takes seriously Hegelian speculative thought, above all the power of the negative—the disruptive, open, and restless aspect of thought—that Nancy presents as the power of speculative thought’s own self-transformation. Indeed, this self-transformative power of negativity, Nancy argues, is what ultimately shapes the more familiar Hegelian concepts of Spirit, dialectic, and speculative reason. Lumsden explores the self-surpassing character of Hegel’s conception of thought, bringing this to bear on Nancy’s interpretation of the negative and his reflections on the notion of sense (sens) as the unthematisable background condition of intelligibility. For all his Heideggerian rhetoric, Nancy should be regarded, according to Lumsden, as rejecting the crudely ‘metaphysical’ reading of Hegel largely responsible for Hegel’s reputation as a totalising thinker of identity. Indeed, Lumsden shows how Nancy’s ‘non-metaphysical’ reading complements recent Anglophone approaches to Hegel (Pippin, Pinkard, Redding) as a radical post-Kantian thinker concerned with the immanent development of rational cognitive, moral, and social norms. Along with other ‘non-metaphysical’ readers, Nancy’s Hegel also rejects the ‘myth of the given’, and proceeds to find


a way of overcoming the concept-intuition dichotomy by thinking spirit as a self-transforming power of negativity. Despite Nancy’s emphasis on the self-transformative power of the negative, Lumsden concludes with a criticism of Nancy’s neglect of any developed account of the ‘self-correcting’ character of reason, or indeed any sustained explication of the Hegelian conception of freedom. In order for subjectivity to be possible, particularly in the sense of self-determining autonomy, the power of negativity must also be a power of constructive unity. As Lumsden points out, the negative moment of Hegelian thought, which Nancy emphasises, must be complemented by the positive moment: Freedom is not only the power of the negative but also the power of autonomous reason as the capacity of freely assuming, but also transforming, historically articulated social norms and practices. Peter Schmiedgen continues the dialogue between French philosophy and the German tradition with his exploration of the relationship between Levinasian and Arendtian approaches to intersubjectivity and the constitution of public space. Levinas’ phenomenological reflections on dwelling, labour, and ethical alterity can be supplemented productively by Arendt’s more developed theorisation of labour, work, and political action. Indeed, the limitations of the Levinasian ethical critique of the sphere of politics, Schmiedgen argues, can be overcome by interpreting it within an Arendtian framework of human plurality. Schmiedgen’s essay thus proceeds to examine the contrast between the pluralist ‘polytheism’ of Arendtian political intersubjectivity and the ‘monotheism’ of Levinasian ethical intersubjectivity and its foregrounding of the singular encounter with the face of the Other. Arendtian political pluralism coupled with Levinasian ethical singularity, Schmiedgen concludes, provide a useful framework for reflecting on questions of public space, cultural difference, and democratic community. The question of ‘Critique Today’ also implies a historical reflection on concepts that have come to prominence in recent social and political thought. Robert Sinnerbrink’s “From Machenschaft to Biopolitics” thus presents a genealogical critique of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics, commencing with Heidegger’s reflections on ‘machination’ [Machenschaft], analysing Foucault’s account of biopower exercised over the biological life of the population, and concluding with Agamben’s meditations on bare life and the camp as paradigmatic of the biopolitical condition of modernity. Sinnerbrink


examines the prefiguration of Foucault’s conception of biopower in Heidegger’s discussion of machination or Machenschaft in his Nietzsche lectures of the late 1930s.31 For Heidegger, the concept of ‘machination’ describes the manner in which beings are disclosed in modernity as representable and manipulable resources. Not only living beings but also human beings are reduced to resources to be managed, optimised, enhanced, and produced. This theme is then transformed, in ‘ontic,’ socio-historical directions, through Foucault’s genealogical reflections on biopower as the social power exercised upon the biological life of populations. As has become increasingly clear, however, Foucault’s critical analyses of biopower soon gave way to his later interest in neo-liberalism as a form of governmental rationality oriented towards the efficient social management of populations. This turn towards analysing neoliberalism as a prevailing biopower regime, Sinnerbrink argues, provides the backdrop for understanding the later Foucault’s much vaunted ‘ethical turn’ during the early 1980s. Finally, Sinnerbrink shows how Agamben’s work on the biopolitical foundations of modernity articulates a middle way between Heidegger’s ontologically grounded conception of machination and Foucault’s historically particularist genealogy of biopower. Indeed, Agamben presents biopolitics— the originary breach between naked biological life (zoe) and organised social life (bios)—as the metaphysical foundation of Western political rationality in its historical unfolding from the Greeks to Auschwitz. The nihilism of contemporary liberal-democratic regimes, for Agamben, is indicated by the increasing presence of biopolitical figures, reduced to ‘bare life’, such as the refugee and ‘enemy combatant’ in so-called ‘detention camps’. Nonetheless, Sinnerbrink’s critique of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics in Foucault and Agamben underlines the tension they evince between ontological and ontic dimensions: a ‘short-circuiting’ of universalist and particularist dimensions resulting in a loss of concrete specificity in social and political analysis. Sinnerbrink thus questions Foucault’s exploration of the ethical possibilities of self-formation within neo-liberalism, and Agamben’s gesturing towards a messianic, utopian community to come, for their adequacy as political responses to the dangers posed by contemporary biopower regimes. The significance of a renewed Foucaultian sense of critique is elaborated in Paul Patton’s “Foucault, Critique, Rights,” an important contribution to the


philosophical and political understanding of Foucault’s recently published lectures on biopolitics and liberalism.32 Patton defends Foucault against the commonplace charge that his later work provides no normative foundation for social critique by presenting a Nietzschean account of Foucault’s historicist and naturalistic approach to rights. For Foucault, rights must be understood as socially sanctioned degrees of power whose validity is normatively justified according to historically available discourses of right. Patton argues that the later Foucault’s call for a non-sovereign, anti-disciplinary form of right is compatible with externalist theories of rights discussed in recent Anglophone political philosophy.33 According to the latter, the normative force and justification of rights resides in historically specific forms of social practice and institutional arrangements rather than in any putative universal property of human beings or ahistorical conception of the good life. Patton adopts this contemporary argument to defend the Nietzschean-Foucaultian view that rights are historically specific, grounded in social power relations, with their normative force being dependent upon historically available beliefs, norms, and discourses (using indigenous rights in Australia as an historical example). Following Nietzsche’s genealogical account of the origin of rights and duties, Foucault argues that rights can be understood in terms of power relations between individual and collective agents. As Foucault maintains, power itself is not simply repressive but productive; power relations signify the capacity to act in certain ways, to exercise strategic action upon the actions of others. On this Foucaultian view, rights are acknowledgements of capacities of power that are sanctioned and preserved for pragmatic reasons within a given social and historical context. Such rights are historically variable, open to social and political contestation, and subject to historical transformation given shifts in regimes of power. Patton thereby argues that a Foucaultian account of rights as recognised degrees of power navigates a course between an ahistorical foundationalism, which overlooks the concrete conditions necessary for the effective exercise of rights, and an extreme historicism that threatens to deprive rights of their normative force altogether. From this Foucaultian perspective, the normative force of rights can be derived only from historically available discourses of right. These discourses took two different forms historically: the revolutionary path of the American Declaration of Independence, Rousseau, and the French revolutionaries,


grounded in the universal rights of man; and the path of radical liberalism, grounded in a complex utilitarian calculus of individual and collective interests. Such historical discourses of right (roughly, revolutionary-universalist versus utilitarian and liberalist theories of radical interests) remain for us active and available forms of political legitimation and contestation. Foucault’s call for a non-sovereign, anti-disciplinary conception of right is thus grounded in a descriptive account of the rights already operating within modern societies, and in a normative claim that these rights “can provide an effective counterweight to disciplinary power.”34 Drawing on Foucault’s 1978-79 lectures on liberalism as a form of governmental rationality, Patton argues in conclusion that the normative bases of the critique of disciplinary power “must come from the liberal tradition of governmental reason” that Foucault analysed in his final years.35 Here we find the clues for understanding Foucault’s call for a non-sovereign, anti-disciplinary form of right that would provide a way of challenging established forms of political right. In this way, Foucault’s conception of critique as experimenting with going beyond the limits of what it is possible to say and do within a given milieu might provide, one presumes, an effective counter-discourse to the prevailing hegemony of global neo-liberalism. The essays in Critique Today present a rich sample of the converging, but also competing critical voices debating the legacy of Enlightenment thought and the prospects for critical theory. They inspire the sense that critical social philosophy, far from languishing in a condition of post-political quietism, or retreating into ethics as a critical disavowal of the political, remains a dynamic force concerned with confronting our contemporary historical actuality. In bringing thinkers from the German and French traditions into productive dialogue, they suggest the possibility of a philosophical ‘new wave’ of critique capable of comprehending some of the challenges facing us within the new global Empire. In this sense, they amply fulfil Foucault’s dictum that the ethos of modernity must be practised as a ‘permanent critique of ourselves’.

Acknowledgement We wish to express our sincere thanks to Danielle Petherbridge and John Rundell for their tireless efforts in encouraging, editing and supporting the


work in this volume. Many of the articles were first presented at the 2004 Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy Conference at Macquarie University, and we would like to thank Danielle and John for the opportunity to publish this work in this special issue of Critical Horizons.

Notes 1

M. Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in Ethics. Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, ed. P. Rabinow, London, Penguin, 1997, p. 316.

2

A. Honneth, The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, ed. C. W. Wright, Albany, State University of New Press, 1995, p. xiii.

3

Ibid., p. 122.

4

See N. Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Post-Socialist’ Condition,

5

See S. Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy,

New York, Routledge, 1997. Melbourne, Scribe Publications, 2002. 6

As Lloyd notes, however, Neiman goes on to argue that ‘September 11’ did not represent any fundamental shift in the history of conceptions of evil.

7

G. Borradorri, Philosophy in a Time or Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 99.

8

E. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. 2, trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice & P. Knight, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1959/1986, p. 897.

9

J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984.

10

See, for example, S. Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study in the Foundations of Critical Theory, New York, Columbia University Press, 1986.

11

See, for example, R. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism. The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989; T. Pinkard, Hegel’s Dialectic: The Explanation of Possibility, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1988; P. Redding, Hegel’s Hermeneutics, Ithaca & London, Cornell University Press, 1996.

12

See J. Habermas, “From Kant to Hegel and Back Again: The Move Towards Detranscendentalisation,” in Truth and Justification, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2003, pp. 175-210.

13

J. Grumley, “Hegel, Habermas, and the Spirit of Critical Theory,” p. 101 below.

14

As developed in Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms: Toward a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. W. Rehg, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996.

15

S. O’Neill, “Critical Theory, Democratic Justice and Globalisation,” p. 120 below.

20 • Robert Sinnerbrink, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Nicholas Smith 16

Ibid., p. 121 below.

17

This article is the first text written in English by this prolific young French critical theorist and provides a helpful introduction to his original work. See, for example, E. Renault, L’Expérience de l’Injustice. Reconnaissance et Clinique de l’Injustice, Paris, La Découverte, 2004; E. Renault, Marx et l’Idée de Critique, Paris, PUF, 1995.

18

See A. Honneth, “Moral Consciousness and Class Domination: Some Problems in the Analysis of Hidden Morality,” in The Fragmented World of the Social, Albany, SUNY Press, 1995, pp. 205-219.

19

See A. Honneth, “Die soziale Dynamik von Mißachtung. Zur Ortbestimmung einer Gesellschaftstheorie,” in Das Andere der Gerechtigkeit. Aufsätze zur praktischen Philosophie, Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp, 2000, pp. 88-109.

20

In this article, Emmanuel Renault develops some of the arguments he first articulated in his book, L’Expérience de l’Injustice. Reconnaissance et Clinique de l’Injustice, Paris, La Découverte, 2004. See in particular the first chapter (pp. 69-127), which expounds more fully the critique of liberal theories of justice in conjunction with the critique of Habermas.

21

E. Renault, “Radical Democracy and an Abolitionist Concept of Justice. A Critique of Habermas’ Theory of Justice,” p. 141 below. Renault borrows the term ‘abolitionist’ from Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality, New York, Basic Books, 1983.

22

E. Renault, “Radical Democracy and an Abolitionist Concept of Justice,” p. 144 below.

23

A. Honneth and H. Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, trans. R. Meyer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, and A. Honneth, The Critique of Power. Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, trans. K. Baynes, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1991.

24

See in particular Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on the philosophy of nature, Nature, trans. R. Vallier, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2003.

25

P. Redding, “Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory,” p. 188 below.

26

See Redding, Hegel’s Hermeneutics, Ithaca & London, Cornell University Press, 1996.

27

P. Redding, “Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory,” p. 199 below.

28

M. Frank, What is Neostructuralism?, trans. S. Wilke and R. Gray, Minneapolis, University of Minneapolis Press, 1989, p. 4.

29

See J.-L. Nancy, The Speculative Remark (One of Hegel’s Bon Mots), trans. C. Surprenant, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001; J.-L. Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the

Critique, Hope, Power: Challenges of Contemporary Critical Theory • 21 Negative, trans. J. Smith & S. Miller, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2002. See also C. Malabou, The Future of Hegel. Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans. L. During, London, Routledge, 2004; J. Lèbre, Hegel à l’Épreuve de la Philosophie Contemporaine: Deleuze-Lyotard-Derrida, Paris, Ellipses, 2002. 30

Deleuze’s remark is representative of an influential current of post-structuralist anti-Hegelianism: “All these signs [Heidegger’s philosophy of ontological Difference, the structuralist project, the modern novel, the power of repetition in psychoanalysis, language, and art] may be attributed to a generalised anti-Hegelianism: difference and repetition have taken the place of the identical and the negative, of identity and contradiction.” G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, New York, Columbia University Press, p. xviii.

31

See M. Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume 3. The Will to Power as Knowledge and Metaphysics,

32

See M. Foucault, Naissance de la Biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France 1978-1979,

33

See for example, D. Darby, “Two Conceptions of Rights Possession,” Social Theory

trans. J. Stambaugh, D. F. Krell, F. A. Capuzzi, San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1991. Paris, Gallimard/Seuil, 2004. and Practice, vol. 27, no. 3, 2001, pp. 387-417; Darby, “Unnatural Rights,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 33, no. 1, 2001, pp. 49-82; Darby, “Rights Externalism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 68, no. 3, 2004, pp. 34-62. 34

P. Patton, “Foucault, Critique, Rights,” p. 283 below.

35

Ibid., p. 284 below.

Genevieve Lloyd Providence Lost: ‘September 11’ and the History of Evil

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the philosophical significance of ‘September 11’ by relating it to attempts that have been made throughout the history of philosophy to read particular events as symbols of conceptual change. It draws especially on Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought and Giovanna Borradori’s dialogues with Derrida and Habermas, in her Philosophy in a Time of Terror, to relate ‘September 11’ to Kant’s versions of Progress, Providence and Cosmopolitanism. KEYWORDS: Providence, Evil, Terrorism, Kant, Derrida, Habermas

There are some events that take on a symbolic significance in the thought of philosophers— a meaning that may be grounded in, but goes beyond their place in history. Foucault has contributed a great deal to the development of strategies for reading historical events philosophically. But the idea is of course an older one. It is a central theme in Kant’s political essays; and Foucault in his paper “What is Enlightenment?” draws on Kant’s famous essay of that name in developing his ownversion of ‘Critique’. I will be discussing later the interesting ways in which both Habermas and Derrida have also drawn more recently

24 • Genevieve Lloyd

on Kant’s political essays to develop philosophical responses to the ‘event’ we know as ‘September 11’. They put the Kantian texts to work to explore themes of cosmopolitanism, tolerance and the ‘public sphere’. But I want also to get into the picture another connected, but less familiar, theme from Kant’s political essays: the idea of Providence. I want to argue that the idea of Providence—quaint though it may now have largely become—is important to the philosophical understanding of September 11. Providence lingers in our contemporary thought patterns, though its presence may be barely visible at the level of our explicit beliefs. And Kant’s version of Providence— like so much else in the thought of the Enlightenment—connects our thought in turn with older ideals articulated by the Greek and Roman Stoics. The idea of Providence is central to Kant’s reading of the philosophical significance of the crucial ‘event’ of his time: the French Revolution. Ideas of cosmopolitanism, providence and the emerging ‘public space’ of reason are interwoven in Kant’s reading of the significance of the Revolution. In his essay, “The Contest of the Faculties,” he says that what matters about that event is not its success or failure—not its place in ‘empirical history’, but rather what it arouses in the hearts and desires of its spectators. But this philosophical significance of the event as ‘spectacle’ demands a rather special set of observers. It is linked with Kant’s idea of a ‘public space’ of reason, which he invokes especially in the essay that interested Foucault: “What is Enlightenment?” This is the space within which ‘men of learning’ address ‘the entire reading public’—in contrast to the ‘private use of reason’, made in a particular civil post or office with which a person may be entrusted. Against that background, Kant says in “The Contest of the Faculties” that what matters about the French Revolution is “the attitude of the onlookers” who “sympathise with the exaltation of the revolutionaries” though “without the slightest intention of actively participating in their affairs.”1 What does all this have to do with Providence? For Kant, it was what allows the ‘event as spectacle’ to be read as a sign—and hence to take on philosophical significance. Providence is for Kant a temporal concept; it is reason unfolding in human history. Strange though the concept may be to us, it underlies something with which we are more familiar—the modern idea of progress. The French Revolution is for Kant a sign of moral progress. It is a historical event occurring in a particular place at a particular time. But it is also a ‘historical

Providence Lost: ‘September 11’ and the History of Evil • 25

sign’—revealing a ‘tendency’ towards moral improvement in the human race as a whole. In the “Contest of the Faculties” he sees the discerning of such signs as the task of what he calls ‘a prophetic history’. In Kant’s earlier essay, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” the connections with providence are more explicit: the development of reason in the human race is the unfolding of providence in human history. A philosophical mind, well acquainted with history, he says there, will discern providence at work in human affairs as a whole. Providence, thus understood, has a bearing on issues of conflict and peace, which Kant explores in the best known of his political essays—“Perpetual Peace.” But the connections are clearer in “The Idea for a Universal History”: providence is not refuted, but on the contrary confirmed, by the eruption of conflict. For conflict brings out human beings’ nascent capacity for reason. Without conflict, “all human talents would remain hidden for ever in a dormant state, and men, as good-natured as the sheep they tended, would scarcely render their existence more valuable than that of their animals.” Man may “wish concord,” but nature “knowing better what is good for his species, wishes discord.”2 ‘Nature’ and ‘Providence’ are here interchangeable. Providence, as ‘Nature’, has ends for the human race; and these ‘ends’ find expression in the eventual emergence of what Kant calls a ‘universal cosmopolitan existence’ which will at last be realised in the ‘great political body of the future’—the matrix within which all the original capacities of the human race will be able to develop. Kant discerns the rough outline of this future cosmopolitan world body beginning to emerge in his own times—as if ‘a feeling is beginning to stir’ in its future members, each of which has an interest in maintaining the whole. Out of the discord of war and revolution will come an eventual lasting peace, held in balance by ideals enshrined in practices and institutions of international justice. This is Kant’s version of the Enlightenment dream. Its magnetism still lingers in our own versions of cosmopolitan ideals, and in dismay at their apparent erosion in current unilateralist foreign policies and disregard of conventions of international justice. It is the legacy of Kant’s version of the cosmopolitan dream that forms the backdrop for Habermas’ and Derrida’s dialogues on the significance of September 11 in Giovanna Borradori’s recent volume, Philosophy in a Time of Terror.3 But to keep the theme of providence in view, I want, before discussing


that, to go back further in the modern history of the idea of Providence. I’m going to look now at another twist to the reading of September 11 as ‘event’, which has been offered in another recent book—Susan Neiman’s fascinating Evil in Modern Thought.4 In the concluding sections of that book Neiman discusses the significance of ‘September 11’ in the history of evil. Significant though the event is in other ways, it does not, she argues, represent any significant shift in the intellectual history of evil. To see why that is so—and to see what in the light of that is important in Habermas’ and Derrida’s response to September 11—we need to venture a little into Neiman’s history of evil in western thought—to see the kind of significance which a couple of other events have had in that history. On November 1, 1755, the city of Lisbon—one of the wealthiest, most beautiful and most cosmopolitan of cities—was struck by an earthquake, followed by a succession of fires and tidal waves. On conservative estimates, fifteen thousand lives were lost. There was also vast property damage. In addition to all the homes destroyed there were famous paintings lost, including works by Rubens and Titian, thousands of books and manuscripts, furniture and tapestries from churches and palaces. By any reckoning, the Lisbon earthquake was what we would now see as a devastating ‘natural disaster’. But it also became something more. It was a momentous event in intellectual history. As Neiman observes, the earthquake did not create out of nothing the debate which ensued; rather the earthquake happened in the midst of a debate that was already raging around themes of natural religion—about attempts to explain the world in ‘natural’ terms alone. That context can be difficult for us to now recapture. For what was at stake in it was not so much a matter of theism versus atheism. The existence of God was largely taken for granted. What was at issue was not whether God was present or absent from the world but, rather, how his presence should be construed. It was a dispute conducted within the assumed frame of a concept, which has largely ceased to be explicit in our own public discourse—the concept of Providence. On Neiman’s perceptive analysis of what was at stake in the debate on ‘Lisbon’, the important split was between two versions of Providence. On the one hand, there was the old idea of God’s ‘special’ providence—the idea that God intervenes in the course of events—whether to satisfy the demands of divine justice in response to human evil doing, or in response to the placatory prayers


of the devout. On the other hand, there was, as Neiman describes it, “the vague, general providence that Enlightenment thinkers loved—the idea that God’s goodness was manifest in the general system of order and harmony that could be discerned in the natural world.”5 The two versions of providence were not really inconsistent—not least because of the vagueness of ‘general’ providence. But they do reflect different attitudes towards the divine and towards the place of human beings in the natural world. To those who stressed general providence, it seemed self-centred to suppose that our misfortunes are sufficiently important to warrant cosmic attention in the form of divine attention. The concern with ‘special’ providence was seen by thinkers of the Enlightenment as unsophisticated and self-absorbed—as lacking due respect for the order of the whole, of which human beings are but a part. For those who saw the world in terms of ‘general’ providence, as Neiman observes, “the whole of nature was invested with meaning.” The ‘meaning and glory’ of nature were so great as to make belief in a ‘particular’ providence seem petty in contrast. Within this framework, nature itself was invested with moral authority. Hence the conceptual damage wreaked by the Lisbon earthquake. “Traditional theologians’ faith in miracles and wonders,” Neiman says, “was not what was threatened at Lisbon. What was shattered, rather, were liberal views about the miracle and wonder of nature itself.”6 The thundering theologians could of course make ready sense of the earthquake through their idea of special providence: the almighty was punishing the conspicuous wrongdoing of human beings. It was more difficult to make sense of the disaster in terms of the benign natural order of the world. Even apart from the impact of ‘Lisbon’ there were of course challenges from within the framework of Enlightenment thought to the idea of ‘general’ providence; and to the whole idea that the world should be understood in terms of notions of design or purpose. Hume challenged it in his Dialogues on Natural Religion. Voltaire famously satirised it in Candide. But ‘Lisbon’ played an important role in shaking the emotional grip of the idea of the natural world as imbued with meaning and order. ‘Lisbon’ shocked the eighteenth century in ways that later earthquakes did not shake the twentieth century. In our own times, in the prevailing discourse, an earthquake remains ‘only an earthquake’; it is not something to be read as a sign—not something with meaning to be interpreted. But ‘Lisbon’ became


the focal point for controversy over the whole idea of Providence at work in the natural world. All this is of course a simplified version of a rich and complex strand in intellectual history. There is much more that could be said both in defence of and in challenge to Neiman’s interpretations of the interconnected histories of western ideas of evil and providence. But my main interest here is in her strategies for reading the history of thought through the symbolic loading acquired by particular events. The Lisbon earthquake becomes on her analysis the symbolic marker of a conceptual shift that sees ‘natural’ events stripped of a kind of meaning that they could previously bear. ‘Lisbon’ marks a divide between a natural world imbued with meaning and a world seen as merely natural—with far-reaching consequences for how human beings make sense of their own pain; for how we manage to think the initially ‘unthinkable’ and live with the initially ‘impossible’. Neiman continues this strategy for telling the conceptual history of evil in a discussion of Auschwitz—another conceptually shattering event, which marks the disintegration of a way of thinking of evil of which ‘Lisbon’ marks the beginning: the understanding of evil as an explicit product of conscious human will. Drawing on and extending the interpretations offered by Hannah Arendt of the crimes of Eichmann, Neiman argues that Auschwitz confronted us with a new kind of evil, which is not readily understood through categories of direct intention. ‘Auschwitz’ taught us how easily crimes are committed through bureaucratic structures in which ordinary people can be caught up, without acknowledging exactly what it is they are doing. The point here is not to deny human responsibility for what happened at Auschwitz. On the contrary, it is to shed light on what is necessary if we are to be able to take responsibility in the face of a form of evil which undermines the conceptual structures through which we are accustomed to make sense of human suffering. What then are we now to make of ‘September 11’? Clearly this is another event that has quickly acquired a symbolic load that is difficult to unpack. The locution—the bare date without place, without even a specified year— demands that we recognise here a momentous chronological break. We heard in the American election campaign the derisory description of Kerry as having ‘a September 10 mentality’. We are encouraged to think of Sep-


tember 11 as a rupture, dividing us forever from a lost era. ‘The world’, we are told, ‘changed’ on September 11; and we are told it often. As one American wit observed, ‘it’s 9/11, 24/7’. But what world was it that changed so momentously? On Neiman’s analysis, this event—shocking though it undoubtedly was in many ways—was not conceptually damaging. In contrast with ‘Lisbon’ and ‘Auschwitz’, it did not challenge the structures through which we think evil; indeed the evil that was unleashed on September 11 was, she suggests, really quite ‘old-fashioned’ in being ‘awesomely intentional’. Those deeds involved massive, deliberate planning. Malice and forethought have rarely been so well combined: the clearest use of ‘instrumental rationality’, matched by the clearest flaunting of moral consideration. With no demand put forward for negotiation, there was not the flimsiest of excuses for the destruction of ordinary lives. All that seems right; and yet, I think, it can’t be the whole story. September 11 does seem to have stopped us in our tracks both emotionally and intellectually. We do experience in response to it something of the same intellectual shock that Neiman talks of as the response to ‘Lisbon’ or ‘Auschwitz’—a mind-numbing incomprehension that goes beyond difficulty in taking in the sheer scale of the disaster. Something has happened here that seems to bring us to the limit of our capacity to think what is happening. Perhaps the shift of tense there—our capacity to think what is happening—is a clue to the nature of the conceptual challenge. For of course things happened fast in that gap which supposedly opened up between ‘us now’ and all that had gone before. ‘September 11’ now carries as part of its symbolic load not only the terrible events of that day but also the responses that came in its wake: the shifts or intensifications in already existing tendencies in American foreign policy; the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; the increased unilateralism of the United States; the increased disregard—in Australia as well as in the United States— of established and emerging structures of international law; the rapid and dramatic contractions of civil liberties and rights we had come to take for granted. No sooner had we begun to absorb the rhetoric of ‘western civilisation under attack’ than we started to see what we had regarded as cherished elements of our Enlightenment heritage crumbling under the impact of measures taken in response to terrorism.


Our ‘world’ has indeed changed. But distinctions have become blurred between what happened and the responses supposedly justified by what happened. It is at the times when clarity is most needed that it can be hardest to find. And there is of course for many of us the added confusion of a shocked intelligentsia that finds itself sequestered, contained, corralled as an allegedly outof-touch special interest group—the ‘chattering elites’, whose bewilderment is perhaps exacerbated by an uncomfortable suspicion that there may be some truth in the charge. In such times it is difficult not to resort to bewildered bewailing about the fate of intellect. How welcome it is then to find Habermas and Derrida grappling with the conceptual challenges of ‘September 11’ by bringing to bear on it their understanding of Enlightenment philosophy, especially those political essays of Kant’s. For Habermas the focus is on religious fundamentalism as a reaction against the Enlightenment ideals of the secularised public space of reason. The fundamentalism we see expressed in global terrorism is, he argues, a distinctively modern phenomenon; we miss its significance if we see it as a simple return to a pre-modern way of relating to religion. It is rather a specific response against the modern way of understanding and practising religion. Although it may be a ‘panicked’ response—casting modernity, unnecessarily, as a threat rather than as an opportunity—it is a response nonetheless which is intelligible, Habermas thinks, in a world where the benefits and the damage of mass communication and economic globalisation are so disproportionately distributed. With developed nations, largely, getting the benefits, while the burden of destruction of traditional cultures falls on the undeveloped, it should be no surprise that fundamentalism responds with a repudiation of the Enlightenment ideal of secularism. Habermas’ analysis is directed partly against alternative approaches that try to interpret global terrorism in terms of Huntington’s talk of the clash of cultures. The philosophical thrust of his reflections becomes clearer in his broader discussion of what is really at stake in the Enlightenment version of secularism. Under conditions of modernity, he points out, religions had to let go of the universally binding character and political acceptance of their doctrine in order to coexist in a pluralistic order. Awareness of the plurality of nations—


and of pluralism within nations—makes untenable the exclusivity of absolute claims, whatever their source and however deeply they may be held. Religious belief is forced to reflect on its “nonexclusive place within a universal discourse shared with other religions and limited by scientifically generated secular knowledge.”7 Habermas’ focus here, as throughout much of his work, is on the conditions of belief, when beliefs are held in the public shared space of reason. His emphasis in reconstructing Enlightenment ideals of reason is less on the content of beliefs than on their modality—on the manner in which they are held and communicated. In this context he analyses the impact of terrorism in terms of a pathology of communicative disorders. Distortions in communication undermine validity claims, which are at least implicitly recognised in the public space where more or less good reasons hold sway. Habermas’ point of departure is Kant’s ideal of an actively involved public sphere, which Habermas sees as the definitive institution of democracy. Against that background, the achievement of a self-reflexive approach to belief—belief that has learned to see itself through the eyes of others—has had important political implications. The cognitive thrust of this self-reflexive awareness has made religious tolerance possible, as well as the separation of state and church. But Habermas thinks it is obvious that this awareness of a relativisation of one’s own position as one among others does not imply relativising one’s own beliefs. As Borradori observes, the freedom of agreeing or disagreeing on the basis of the strongest argument is for him both the formal feature of rationality and the founding principle of democracy. Habermas sees modernity in terms of a way of thinking and acting in line with undistorted communicative rationality. That is what allows him to see religious fundamentalism as a distinctively modern disruption. The threat that Islamic fundamentalism poses to liberal democracies does not come from any assertion of a rival culture or religion. It is a threat to the ideal of secularism that is our heritage from the Enlightenment—a threat that comes from without. But the threat and the risk are exacerbated by the distortions of communication that are already at work within modern democracies. The appropriate response to September 11 then is not a strengthened affirmation of ‘Christian’ values, whatever they might be, against an external rival


system. It is rather a reaffirmation and restoration of the Enlightenment ideal of a public space of reason, within which rival beliefs can find undistorted, self-reflective expression. The claim of a convergence of internal and external threats is more dramatically articulated in Borradori’s dialogue with Derrida. Where Habermas’ metaphors are drawn from the pathology of speech disorders, Derrida’s striking metaphors are drawn from autoimmune disease. He exploits them to offer a powerful picture of the convergence of external and internal threats to the heritage of Enlightenment ideals. Where Habermas puts his faith in a restatement and renewal of the programme of Enlightenment reason, Derrida tries rather to bring out the inner contradictions, the aporias, the self-destructive logic lurking within the Enlightenment ideals themselves. But both are committed to a positive rethinking of the heritage of the Enlightenment. Let us now look at Derrida’s reading of the symbolism of ‘September 11’. It is not easy to summarise, for it is one of those extraordinary conjunctions of dazzling conceptual dance and deeply engaged, politically informed analysis that we have come to expect in his later writings. The inseparability of style and content challenge the capacity to paraphrase. Rather than try to sum it up, I’m going to try to draw out from it some themes that I can put to work in developing my theme of providence in relation to ‘September 11’. Derrida’s reflections on September 11 start from the striking fact that I mentioned above—that an event should come to be identified by a date; and an incomplete date at that. It is a mark, he suggests, of the unthinkability of what happened: “something terrible took place on September 11, and in the end we don’t know what.”8 What is terrible is that “we do not know what it is and so do not know how to describe, identify, or even name it.”9 But the unusual naming of the event also represents our attempt to interpret, to comprehend the unthinkability, to assimilate it. Even in trying to think of September 11 as a ‘major event’, he observes, there is a certain denial at work; relegating it to being “just one event among others, one of the ‘major events’, if you will, in a long chain of past and future events.”10 Rather than go down that path, Derrida tries to offer, as he says, a ‘philosophical response’. The ‘prevailing discourse’—that of the media and of the official rhetoric—relies too readily on received concepts like ‘war’ or ‘terrorism’. What is demanded of


philosophers is a different kind of response that can try to articulate the singularity of September 11. For it is here that the conceptual challenge of the event resides. At the core of this ‘philosophical response’ to the unthinkability of September 11 is the Heideggerian theme of the singularity of ‘the event’ as such, which is a familiar theme in Derrida’s later writings, especially in The Politics of Friendship and Spectres of Marx. It is connected with his thoughts on temporality and with the idea of messianic structure. Derrida’s response to September 11 is continuous with his earlier concern with articulating a stance towards the future as something other than future present—with the thought of ‘the perhaps’. The event as such—any event, when we focus on its occurrence— has something of the unthinkable about it. The event is by definition ‘what comes or happens’. Coming at us, as it were, from nowhere, what happens calls out for appropriation, for interpretation, for comprehension. But “there is no event worthy of its name,” he says, “except in so far as this appropriation falters at some border or frontier.”11 There is a certain unappropriability about what comes or happens, as such. “The event is what comes, and in coming, comes to surprise me, to surprise and to suspend comprehension. . . .”12 So there is a basis of incomprehension, of singularity, of what is ‘to come’ about any event. But there are other, special layers of unthinkability that belong to September 11. Derrida unfolds them through a rich but not always luminous metaphor of aggressive processes of auto-immunity: that strange behaviour where a living being works to destroy its own protection. In September 11 we have an event that undermines the condition of its own intelligibility. The event of itself renders itself unthinkable. At the simplest level of operation of this metaphor of auto-immune disorder, we are forced to confront some aspects of September 11 which we have perhaps been all too ready to set aside—for a start, the disturbing reality of suicide as an act of organised aggression. I mentioned earlier that Neiman sees September 11 as a conjunction of absolute clear-mindedness and absolute malice—shocking in its degree of evil, but not of itself conceptually disturbing. Rather than challenging any ‘old fashioned’ conception of evil, September 11, on her approach, is shocking in its very simplicity—its chillingly intentional,


calculated evildoing. But I think Derrida’s metaphors help us to see something that is conceptually disturbing here: the distinctive kind of self-destruction that is part of the event. Spinoza famously thought the act of suicide was so far from being a rational act that it could not rationally be contemplated: suicide, he thought, must represent a failure of reason; to take one’s own life must be ‘weak-minded’. But, in arguing that, Spinoza was challenging a familiar, though not uncontroversial, Stoic ideal of the noble suicide. And we are familiar from more recent history—strikingly in the case of the Kamikaze pilots of World War II—of the patriotic suicide. (According to ‘Outfoxed’ it was precisely in order to avoid conjuring up such ideas of patriotic suicide, directed to achieving a particular national, political or military objective, that Fox media announcers were instructed to re-describe Palestinian ‘suicide bombers’ as ‘terrorists’.) We are familiar too with the aggressive suicides of the desperately unhappy, carried out in retaliation against those they hold responsible for making them unhappy. It is harder though to comprehend the aggressive suicide where there seems no specific end to be achieved, no specific demand to be met. At its simplest level, Derrida’s metaphor forces us to confront what is disturbingly unfamiliar here in the September 11 conjunction of self-destruction and aggression. Derrida’s analogy with autoimmune disorder forces us to confront other things too which prevailing discourse tends to ignore—the ways in which the US can be seen as unwittingly preparing the aggression against itself. It is not just the suicides of the terrorists that are brought into focus, but the self-destructive symbiosis between the aggressors and their target. Trained and prepared for the act within the US by the US, the hijackers, as Derrida says, “incorporate, so to speak, two suicides in one: their own . . . but also the suicide of those who welcomed, armed and trained them . . .”13 But there are other, more significant ways in which the analogy with autoimmunity illuminates the event: the ways in which the so-called ‘war on terrorism’ feeds the original aggression. There is, for example, the dependence on media coverage, which only the victim could provide, without which the attack on the twin towers could not have been the kind of aggressive attack it was. It was in the United States’ own interest, as well as in the interest of its enemies, to expose its vulnerability—to give the greatest possible coverage of the


aggression against which it wished to protect itself. The victim began to fight itself; and had to do so if it was to justify its own counter-aggressive strikes. By declaring the so-called ‘war on terror’, it gave its enemies renewed capacity to wound. The terrorists gained a status to which they had no real claim; rather than being criminals they became perpetrators in the cause of war. In the process of auto-immunity logic the victim’s efforts strengthen its enemy. But there are yet deeper, more philosophical aspects of Derrida’s use of his analogy—aspects which bear more directly on Derrida’s concern with temporality. I want to return now to that idea of a futurity that cannot be understood as a future present. The exploration of that theme in Derrida’s other writings on the ‘messianic structure’ was concerned with the hope of futurity, the hope of the ‘to come’, the ‘perhaps’. In the dialogue on September 11, that notion of futurity is now associated with dread. Derrida spells the point out with echoes of his reflections on ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’ mourning in the Memoires for Paul de Man. The ‘special ordeal’ of September 11 as event, he now says in the dialogue, has as its tragic correlate not what has happened in the past but rather the precursory signs of a future, which will perhaps be worse than anything that has already taken place. Imagine, he says, that the Americans, and through them the entire world, had been told: what has happened is an awful thing; but it won’t happen again. Mourning would then be possible. But this is not at all what happened. “There is traumatism with no possible work of mourning when the evil comes from the possibility to come of the worst, from the repetition to come—though worse. Traumatism is produced by the future, by the to come, by the threat of the worst to come rather than by an aggression that is over and done with.”14 What we are traumatised by, on this analysis, is not September 11 as a past event—a past present—but rather an unrepresentable future—a ‘threat without limit’—a threat which operates on the imagination of what is ‘to come’. It is ‘the perhaps’, the ‘to come’ that bears the sense of dread—not dread of a particular event, which might or might not happen, but a sense of the total disintegration of our ‘world’. “What is put at risk in this terrifying autoimmunity logic,” says Derrida, is “nothing less than the existence of the world, of the world-wide itself.” But the sense of ‘the world’ here needs to be spelled out. Has Derrida’s talk of the end of ‘our world’ taken us from ‘messianic structure’ to the apocalypse?


The words can sound like apocalyptic scare mongering, not unlike the rhetoric that often accompanies the calls for pre-emptive counter-aggression we have come to expect as part of the ‘war against terror’. But Derrida is operating in a different conceptual space. He is not warning of probabilities—of what is likely to happen in a future present. The structure of the ‘auto-immunity logic’ he is describing is such that pre-emptive aggression against terror enacts the very catastrophe it is supposed to avoid. In talking of a threat to the very existence of the world, he is not envisaging an apocalyptic consequence in the future, against which we must guard. The disintegration is already with us. The auto-immunity metaphors bring out that what was—and remains—under threat is the rational order of ‘the world’ we have come to take for granted. Clearly more needs to be said to give content to this large claim; and Derrida provides it by elaborating on the more conceptual aspects of the familiar idea of a post-Cold War ‘new world order’—the emergence of the United States as a sole, unrivalled ‘superpower’. What is for us ‘the world’ has come to be bound up with the strength, the presumed invulnerability, of all that is represented by ‘America’. September 11 has made visible just how fragile is that ‘world’ that had previously seemed so solid and reliable; and the threat that ‘September 11’ conjures up is ongoing and ‘total’. For a large part of it is the threat of uncontrollable proliferation of nuclear capability—now in a form where there is no ‘balance of terror’. “From now on,” says Derrida, “the nuclear threat” no longer comes from a state but from anonymous forces that are absolute and incalculable.”15 The threat, the dread is ‘total’—not just in the extension of possibilities of actual nuclear destruction, familiar from the Cold War, but also in the threat to what is now supposed to sustain world order, to sustain the very possibility of our ‘world’—international law, a world market, communication systems. What holds it all together as a ‘world’ is under threat; and in response, we get “the perverse effect of the auto-immunitary itself,” which “ends up producing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm.” “And so many auto-immunitary movements, which produce, invent, and feed the very monstrosity they claim to overcome.”16 Let me now make some brief comments on the relevance for this sense of a disintegrating ‘world’ of the history of the idea of Providence. It has, after all, always been connected with the idea of ‘world order’. In Kant’s version


of providence, as we saw earlier, that connection yields a temporalised version of cosmopolitanism—the idea of progress towards a world order in which institutions and practices of international justice will image the relations which draw individual citizens into an ordered state. But the connections between providence and cosmopolitanism go back much further. ‘The world’ is so much with us that we can forget that it is itself a conceptual construct with a history; and the connections between providence and cosmopolitanism are much older than the Enlightenment juxtaposition which shaped modern western ideas of moral and political progress. Those connections can be hard to recapture when ‘cosmopolitanism’ has come to mean little more than smart city lifestyles, while ‘providence’ is confined to conventional piety. But the connections have a long history. Both ideas—Providence and Cosmopolitanism—and the connections between them, go back to ancient Greek thought, especially to Stoicism. It was in the mid-fourth century BCE that Diogenes the Cynic first described himself as a ‘citizen of the universe’, implying that he was at home nowhere, except in the cosmos itself. The Stoic doctrine of the cosmic city developed in explication of that idea. It came together with the idea of providence because of that idea’s connotations of the world as an orderly whole, regulated by necessary laws—a structured whole which serves as a model for human conduct. That idea of structured order, imbued with purpose, fed the idea of the universe as a cosmic polis—the common home of gods and men. The transitions in which older religious ideals of obedience to the gods give way to the ideal of a cosmic city—where gods and men alike must act in accordance with a natural order imbued with reason—are wonderfully presented in their tragedy, their poignancy and their hilarity, by the most philosophical of the Greek playwrights, Euripides. Plutarch quotes the description offered in Zeno’s Republic of a well regulated society: “our household arrangements should not be based on cities or parishes, each one marked out by its own legal system, but we should regard all men as our fellow-citizens and local residents, and there should be one way of life and order, like that of a herd grazing together and nurtured by a common law.”17 The theme was taken up in Roman Stoicism. Cicero attributed to the Stoics the view that “true law” is “right reason, in agreement with nature, diffused over everyone, consistent, everlasting . . .”18 Whoever does


not obey this law, he continues, “is fleeing from himself and treating his human nature with contempt; by this very fact he will pay the heaviest penalties, even if he escapes all conventional punishments.” The idea of the cosmic city is also invoked by Seneca. In On Leisure he talks of human beings as belonging to two communities: “the one which is great and truly common, embracing gods and men, in which we look neither to this corner nor to that, but measure the boundaries of our state by the sun; the other, the one to which we have been assigned by the accident of our birth.”19 I think that ancient idea of the world as cosmic city—as a providentially ordered polis—is still with us. Something of it survived its transformation into the Enlightenment idea of progress towards a cosmopolitan world order; and something of it has survived also the erosion of the Kantian vision of world order. Perhaps the deeper reverberations of the shock of September 11 come from a sense of the loss of the very old idea of an ordered world. What is threatened is not just a specific current political world order. There is movement in deeper layers, in clusters of concepts—a sense of the loss of something of which we were no longer even aware—the loss of Providence. ‘Order’, ‘world order’, ‘the order of the world’—is all this just a Derridainspired play of words? I think Derrida—for all the dazzling verbal play, the breathtaking slides between the literal and the metaphorical, the symbolic and the political—has given content to the notion of ‘the disintegrating world’ that is not entirely nebulous. The ‘world order’ he describes as imploding under its own auto-immunitory logic is a conglomerate of media constructions, the apparatus and rhetoric of global corporations, of international communications. It is a product of contemporary discourse but it resonates also with philosophical history—conjuring up a ‘world’ that prior to September 11 had seemed solid, beyond threat; and which now seems limitlessly vulnerable to forces, internal and external, that cannot even be identified in advance. If we see our threatened sense of ‘world order’ through the lens of ancient ideas of the cosmic polis, we might see what the terrorists did on September 11 as an even more ‘old fashioned’ kind of evil than Susan Neiman suggested— as a breathtaking defiance of cosmic order. But what is even more shocking is that September 11 has exposed the fragility of what has allowed our world


to hold together—the fragility that was there all along. We have seen how easily the frame can all come tumbling down. The ‘world order’ and its ‘loss’ are here both literal and metaphorical. When Derrida talks of the destabilising of our world he is talking, not primarily of a chain of political consequences, but rather of the disintegrating content of an intellectual construct. But that construct is nonetheless a real product of a number of real interdependent systems. What is threatened, as he says, is not only a great number of things that depend on the order that has been more or less assured by the status of the United States as superpower. “What is threatened more radically,” he says, “is the system of interpretation, the axiomatic, logic, rhetoric, concepts and evaluations that are supposed to allow one to comprehend and to explain precisely something like ‘September 11’.” What is disturbed is the discourse—the prevailing system which, he says, is “a combination of public opinion, the media, the rhetoric of politicians and the presumed authority of all those who, through various mechanisms, speak or are allowed to speak in public space.” September 11 as event is the visible shaking of the ‘world order’ presupposed in its own thinkability. Perhaps it has made visible the stark fragility of our contemporary version of the cosmic ‘world of gods and men’. The shifts between metaphorical and literal in all this do, I think, amount to something more than verbal play. But talk of ‘conceptual damage’, if it is pushed too far, can be an offensive response to the real damage of September 11—the real pain of the American survivors and bereaved; the ongoing miseries of Afghanistan and Iraq. Informed and imaginative re-readings of the history of philosophy are nonetheless an important way of engaging with the present and facing the future—for those of us who have the good fortune to be able to avail ourselves of such means. By re-reading and re-reinterpreting Kant’s political essays, Habermas and Derrida help us reconnect the inchoate residue of Enlightenment ideals in our own thought with their purer and stranger original forms. Such exercises can help us to re-imagine, and thus restore, something of the eroded public space of reason. But there is room for disagreement about where such reconnections take us. For Habermas the emphasis falls on trying to bring out and restore something of the original ideas that underlie our corrupted remnants


of the thought of the Enlightenment. His project is to continue the interrupted project of Enlightenment reason. The mood of Derrida’s philosophical response to September 11 is more complex. For him the rationale is not so much to continue the Enlightenment project as to confront the dislocations and hypocrisies within our contemporary versions of Enlightenment ideals, by bringing out their contradictions. In my concluding remarks, I want to say just a little about how he re-works Kant’s cosmopolitan ideal to bring out the limitations of our contemporary—all too self-congratulatory—version of ‘tolerance’. In his essay “Perpetual Peace” Kant talked of a cosmopolitan right to hospitality—the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory. There are for Kant limits to this right to hospitality. “The stranger,” he says, “cannot claim the right of a guest to be entertained . . . he may only claim a right of resort, for all men are entitled to present themselves in the society of others by virtue of their right to communal possession of the earth’s surface.”20 Such a limited right is implicit for Kant in the very idea of cosmopolitanism. Some aspects of that idea of hospitality survive in our contemporary version of tolerance. But it is an ideal that, on Derrida’s analysis, has deeper limitations than those Kant indicated. Shows of tolerance, Derrida says, are clearly to be preferred to shows of intolerance. But the discourse of tolerance is “most often used on the side of those with power, always as a kind of condescending concession . . .” “Tolerance,” he argues, is “actually the opposite of hospitality. Or at least its limit. If I think I am being hospitable because I am tolerant, it is because I wish to limit my welcome, to retain power and maintain control over the limits of my ‘home’, my ‘sovereignty’ . . .”21 Kant was of course writing in a very different context from that of current worldwide movements of refugees and migrants. But there is much that is relevant for us in Derrida’s analysis of the limitations of the Kantian version of the rights of the stranger. Tolerance, says Derrida, is a “conditional, circumspect, careful hospitality.”22 Pure, unconditional hospitality, in contrast— hospitality itself—opens to someone who is neither expected nor invited—a new arrival. Non-identifiable and unforeseeable, it is “a hospitality of visitation rather than invitation.”23 There are echoes here of Derrida’s other writ-


ings on the singularity of the event, the ‘perhaps’, the ‘to come’. And, as with those ideas, pure hospitality operates in a different conceptual space from the consideration of probabilities, of possible future presents. Hospitality of visitation is not meant as a recommendation on how actual immigration procedures should work, any more than Derrida’s talk of to come is about a probable future. This is not ‘applied philosophy’; it is not directed to forming public policy. But nor are such exercises of the philosophical imagination irrelevant to real politics. They are meant as conceptual correctives to the assumptions and the rhetoric of current policy. “I well recognize,” says Derrida, “that this concept of pure hospitality can have no legal or political status. No state can write it into its laws. But without at least the thought of this pure and unconditional hospitality, of hospitality itself, we would have no concept of hospitality in general and would not even be able to determine any rules for conditional hospitality (with its rituals, its legal status, its norms, its national or international conventions).”24 Derrida’s talk of a hospitality of visitation is not a recommendation for the automatic acceptance of all asylum seekers. But it is nonetheless about justice in response to the uninvited stranger. The exercise of imagining pure hospitality makes visible just how far removed current policies are from the ideals often evoked in appeals to our heritage from the Enlightenment; and opens up space for the imagining of other possibilities. Like Habermas’ re-imagining of Enlightenment ideals, it is a contribution to creating or restoring a viable public space within which ideas might be generated, communicated and put to work to produce new possibilities. It goes without saying that constructive policy change demands a great deal more than the imaginative rereading of history of philosophy. But the rethinking of old ideals in the face of new challenges and fresh horrors is an important task for philosophy. Considering the issue of who, today, deserves the name of ‘philosopher’, Derrida suggests that a ‘philosopher’— or, in his preferred term, ‘philosopher-deconstructor’—would be “someone who analyses and then draws the practical and effective consequences of the relationship between our philosophical heritage and the structure of the still dominant juridico-political system that is so clearly undergoing mutation.”25 Derrida, unsurprisingly, looks to a ‘new figure of Europe’ as the locus of hope for another discourse and another politics—a way out of the ‘double theologico-


political program’ in which current American rhetoric confronts Islamic fundamentalism. At the end of his essay on “The Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” Kant tries to imagine how we, the remote descendants of his own age, will manage to cope with the ‘burden of history’ that he and his contemporaries are bequeathing us. “No doubt,” he says, “they will value the history of the oldest times, of which the original documents would long since have vanished, only from the point of view of what interests them— that is the positive and negative achievements of nations and governments in relation to the cosmopolitan goal.”26 And so it will be in turn, he would say, for us too. Progress in relation to the ‘cosmopolitan goal’ will be the only real consideration in which we too can be honourably remembered in future ages. I doubt that we can really share Kant’s optimistic vision of the cosmopolitan goal—of Providence unfolding steadily as a narrative of moral progress in human history. But perhaps we owe it to him to at least try to understand our heritage of Enlightenment ideals, and to try to re-imagine some of them in response to our own dark times.

Notes 1

Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 183.

2

Ibid., p. 45.

3

Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press, 2003.

4

Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, Melbourne, Scribe Publications, 2002.

5

Ibid.

6

Ibid., p. 242.

7

Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, p. 31.

8

Ibid., p. 87.

9

Ibid., p. 94.

10

Ibid., p. 99.

11

Ibid., p. 90.

12

Ibid.

13

Ibid., p. 95.

14

Ibid., p. 97.

Providence Lost: ‘September 11’ and the History of Evil • 43 15

Ibid.

16

Ibid., p. 99.

17

A. A. Long & D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, Vol. 1, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 429.

18

Ibid., p. 432.

19

Ibid., p. 431.

20

Kant, Political Writings, p. 106.

21

Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, pp. 129-130.

22

Ibid., p. 128.

23

Ibid., p. 129.

24

Ibid., p. 129.

25

Ibid., p. 106.

26

Kant, Political Writings, p. 53.

Nicholas H. Smith Hope and Critical Theory

ABSTRACT In the first part of the paper I consider the relative neglect of hope in the tradition of critical theory. I attribute this neglect to a low estimation of the cognitive, aesthetic, and moral value of hope, and to the strong—but, I argue, contingent—association that holds between hope and religion. I then distinguish three strategies for thinking about the justification of social hope; one which appeals to a notion of unfulfilled or frustrated natural human capacities, another which invokes a providential order, and a third which questions the very appropriateness of justification, turning instead to a notion of ungroundable hope. Different senses of ungroundable hope are distinguished and by way of conclusion I briefly consider their relevance for the project of critique today. KEYWORDS: Social Hope, Social Criticism, Frankfurt School, Humanism, Rorty, Postmodernism

I. The Aversion of Theory to Hope For all their differences and disagreements, critical theorists presumably have at least one thing in common: hope for a better world. And yet, in comparison to concepts such as critique, rationality, justice, and even desire and memory, the idea of hope has received little attention. Kant, if we consider him for the moment as a founding figure in the tradition of ‘critique’, is exceptional in this

46 • Nicholas H. Smith

respect. For Kant, the question ‘what may I hope’ is as fundamental to our cognitive predicament as the questions ‘what can I know?’ and ‘what ought I to do?’: it unifies the basic ‘interests’ of human reason.1 But the philosophical significance Kant attached to hope usually goes unremarked, as much in discussions of Kant’s continuing relevance for critique as elsewhere. Ernst Bloch, of course, is another critical theorist who can hardly be accused of neglecting to deal with hope. But Bloch is a marginal figure in the history of the Frankfurt School and in any case his masterpiece, The Principle of Hope, is seldom read as an exemplar of critique today.2 Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope, admittedly an occasional and much less substantial study, has no contemporary presence at all.3 Looking beyond the Frankfurt School tradition, over the past couple of decades some excellent work has been done on hope—amongst philosophers, by Ronald Aronson, Joseph J. Godfrey and John Patrick Day especially—but the impact of this literature has been minimal.4 Certainly, it has done nothing to shape the course of contemporary debates in critical theory.5 Why does hope strike so many theorists as unworthy of serious consideration? Perhaps one reason is that there is something intellectually unsatisfactory about being in hope. We often express a hope in contexts where we are hesitant, uncertain, not fully convinced, or lacking in confidence about our ability to convince others. When my editor asks me if I will submit my typescript by a certain deadline, the honest answer may be ‘I hope so’, but I’d like to give a better, more definitive response. We tell our students to avoid using locutions like ‘in this essay I hope to show that . . .’ because, however truthful, it reads too much like ‘I can’t really say what the essay shows’. In intellectual matters, recourse to hope often reflects a lack of conviction, and in some contexts it can amount to an avowal of ignorance. To acknowledge that one merely hopes is to concede that one doesn’t really know. From the point of view of theory, then, hope can look very much second rate. Hope lacks the justification that self-respecting theorists demand of their convictions and beliefs. The realm of hope is vague and imprecise, and for that reason uninteresting. Hope’s lack of refinement is objectionable not only from a cognitive point of view, but also from an aesthetic one. There is something common, unsophisticated, amateurish about it. Think of the way expressions like ‘hit and

Hope and Critical Theory • 47

hope’ or ‘the hopeful ball’ are used in football talk. If you kick the ball hard enough up field, there’s a chance it will find one of your players. The long, hopeful ball may not be pretty but its effective, as the saying goes. The contrast here of course is with a skilful, controlled and self-possessed style, one that leaves minimum scope for luck, and hope. The hit-and-hoper, or the player of the hopeful ball, amateurishly leaves things to chance. Here, hope seems to mark the threshold of ability: a player, as much as an actor, musician or writer, starts to hope as she approaches and crosses (what she believe to be) the limits of her powers. ‘Those who can, do’, we could say, ‘those who can’t, hope’. Hope and hopefulness in these and other contexts signifies something crude, ugly and vulgar. Aesthetic aloofness about hope easily merges with moral qualms. Hope and hopefulness are often associated with a naïve and superficial optimism, acceptable perhaps for children and women but unbecoming for a philosopher.6 From the point of view of the philosopher, whose arduously attained freedom from illusion is such a cherished source of pride, hope can seem a lowly and demeaning form of comfort. Hope and hopefulness, from this perspective, are regressive dispositions that allow fantasy to predominate over reality. This is not only unedifying, it also has bad consequences for the hopeful person. By prolonging attachment to desires that cannot be satisfied, hope generates frustration, resentment, and a proneness to disappointment that can easily result in reactive violence and destruction. This is the reason for the Stoics’ negative evaluation of the hopeful disposition in ancient times, and it stands behind Nietzsche’s often quoted modern indictment of hope.7 One might also question the value of hope on the grounds that it deals with an unsatisfactory present not by practically engaging with it, but by projecting an imaginary future in which satisfaction is miraculously secured. The problem here is that, in functioning as a form of compensation, hope lends itself to passivity and indifference towards instigating change. To the extent that the hoper relates to a given desirable outcome simply by waiting for it, hope becomes problematic not just from an ethical but also from a political point of view.8 For these reasons amongst others, hope has been regarded as something of a false friend by philosophers, and this not just in modern times but throughout the ages.9 It is not surprising, then, that critical theorists in our day should


feel uncomfortable with talk about hope and want to distance themselves from it. But the most significant reason for the general neglect of hope in critical theory is surely something more specific: namely, the close association between hope and religion. There are too many interesting and important aspects of this association to explore in any detail here. But briefly to mention a few: there is the conceptual affinity (though of course not identity) between hope and prayer of petition (does the expression ‘hope and pray’ refer to two states of mind or one?). Second, the hoper, like the religious believer, acknowledges a dependence on a power beyond him. Hope features prominently in the Christian lexicon; it is of course one of the three theological virtues identified by St. Paul and Thomas Aquinas. In articulating for the first time the systematic philosophical significance of hope, Kant took himself to be at once spelling out the rational content of religion. Besides Bloch, the main writers on hope in the twentieth century have been the Christian existentialists Gabriel Marcel and Josef Pieper.10 Bloch himself was accused of crypto-Christianity on account of the philosophical significance he accorded to hope. The diamat philosopher Manfred Buhr denounced Bloch for embroiling Marxism with pseudo religious problems.11 Max Scheler allegedly accused Bloch of “running amok with God,” a minor offence compared with the “fornication with God” of which Siegfried Kracauer found Bloch guilty.12 Now Bloch, like Kant, was certainly impressed by the capacity of religion to frame or give form to human hope. Kant and Bloch also shared the thought that the idea of hope was as fundamental to philosophy as it was to religion. But it was precisely for this reason that the critique of religion was so important to them. The centrality of the idea of hope to their thinking does not of itself make their thinking religious or theological, at least as those terms are usually understood. But both thinkers have found the charge of regressive backdoor theism hard to shake off, so close is the association in our minds between religion and hope. I began by asking why critical theorists rarely attend explicitly to the idea of hope. I’ve tentatively suggested some reasons: a low estimation of the cognitive, aesthetic, and moral value of hope, together with an unwillingness to be saddled with the disreputable baggage of religion. At the same time, however, no critical theorist would like to think of himself or herself as without social hope. Leaving career critical theorists to one side, what’s the point of


doing critical theory if there’s no hope society can be better? Critical theory must give expression at some level to at least some residue of social hope for it to be more than an academic exercise. I now want to ask what strategies are available for justifying this hope.

II. The Grounds of Social Hope We should first distinguish the question of grounding social hope from two related problems. First, there is the task of describing the kind of society one hopes for. It seems proper to undertake this task before turning to the justification of social hope, since in describing the object of the hope we are giving the hope content, and without knowing the content of the hope it is hard to see how we can go about justifying it. Clearly, we have to have some idea of the kind of society we hope for before we can assess the grounds of that hope. But for present purposes, which only concern strategies for grounding social hope, it will suffice to work with a minimal formulation of the content of the hope, one that just about all critical theorists could assent to. Let me propose, following Rorty, that the object of this hope is “a global, cosmopolitan, democratic, egalitarian, classless, casteless society.”13 More minimally still, we can formulate it as a just and peaceful social order in which individuals are able to realise their capacity for autonomy. It is worth noting that such general, abstract formulations are hardly likely to activate or arouse social hope, though this may be the effect of more richly articulated conceptions of utopia. In any case, the imaginative articulation of the content of social hope is clearly an important task for critical theory, though I won’t say anything more about it here. Second, the question of grounding social hope should be distinguished from the task of grounding social criticism. The grounds of social hope complement but do not necessarily coincide with the grounds of social criticism, and the task of reconstructing the latter should not be conflated with the task of elucidating the former. The rational basis of social criticism has of course been systematically examined by Habermas and a generation of critical theorists inspired by his work.14 But it is clear from the results of those investigations that they do not in themselves address the grounds of social hope. It makes sense to appeal to notions like the unforced force of the better argument, or unavoidable structures of linguistic interaction oriented to reaching


understanding, or the performative contradiction involved in denying such structures, if the justifiability of basic communicative norms is at stake. It also makes sense to appeal to such norms for justifying the moral point of view. But it is far from clear what the reconstruction of the rationality potential of discourse—and so the justification of basic moral norms—tells us about the kind of society we can hope for. There is of course a utopian dimension to Habermas’ critical theory, but this is distinct from that aspect of it concerned with the rational basis of social criticism. Assuming that the content of the critical theorist’s social hope can be expressed minimally as a classless, casteless society, one in which individuals are able to realise their capacity for autonomy within a just and peaceful social order, is this a hope to which we are entitled? Is hope for such a society justified? Does it really matter if the hope is justified or not? Let me now distinguish three broad strategies for dealing with these questions. 1. One strategy, deployed in a variety of ways in the tradition of critical social theory, is to ground social hope in natural human capacities. We are entitled to hope for a society radically better than the one we currently inhabit, this mode of argument runs, because human beings are by nature capable of creating such a society, and would create it if it were not for the existence of powerful countervailing forces that appear beyond their control. On account of these forces, natural human capacities for social life fail to develop and human beings are unable to realise themselves through the exercise of those capacities. According to this approach—brilliantly summarised by Alasdair MacIntyre in his essay on Marxism and Christianity—the hope upon which Marxism (and critical theory more generally) rests concerns the ability of human beings to transform themselves, as MacIntyre puts it, once “certain barriers and frustrations are removed.”15 The persuasiveness of this strategy turns on its ability to identify precisely those barriers that prevent the development and exercise of the capacities in question: paradigmatically, of course, the domination of capital over labour that corrodes social bonds and foreshortens human expressive powers. But the strategy also requires, as MacIntyre points out, some sort of “humanistic belief in the possibilities and resources of human nature.”16 That is to say, it rests on a conviction that human beings would organise themselves into something like a casteless, classless society


given the chance. It is historically imposed impediments to the development of the relevant human capacities that frustrate our social hopes. We can legitimately hope for society to become better, according to this argumentative strategy, because of the natural but as yet unrealised human potential for social life organised by the principles of justice, peace and autonomous self-realisation. This ‘humanist’ approach to grounding social hope has many attractions, but it is currently out of favour amongst many philosophers and political theorists. In part this is due to scepticism about the very idea of human nature. If one rejects the notion that there is something ontologically distinct about human beings, or if one denies the validity of the distinction between actuality and potentiality, one will see little point in resorting to human nature to ground social hope. Again, if it is the human capacity to put in question and move beyond what is given to us ‘by nature’ that impresses us most, we may wonder why we need a notion of ‘human nature’ to back up hopes of what human beings may become. Other theorists, when pressed on the issue, may not so much deny there is a human nature as reject the idea that social life without classes or castes is within its power. Some argue that it is precisely the social inhibition of human nature that enables us to avert dystopia, and that’s as much as we may hope for. Others maintain that social hope should be separated from all talk of human powers and capacities, as it is the very rapaciousness of human agency that underlies the worst social fears. According to this line of thought, not only is the classical humanist model an inappropriate basis of social hope, it is actually responsible for the very phenomena the critical theorist hopes to overcome. 2. A second strategy, distinct from but related to the first, is to ground social hope by appealing to something like a providential order. The central feature of this strategy is the idea that history unfolds in a way that inherently tends towards the hoped for aim. The source of this tendency may be human nature, but it may equally be God’s will or some ‘invisible hand’ mechanism that operates behind the back of rational agents. The crucial point is to interpret the passage that history would have to undergo in order to realise radical social hopes as the culmination of a process that is already underway. It is the historical process as a totality that justifies social hope. The strategy thus involves the construction of narratives that connect present society with future


utopia in a way that at once makes intelligible the relation between present society and its past. Radical social hope, justified in this way, could be called historical hope. It is hope grounded in a conception of history as having a course and being on course. As a strategy of justification, it relies on the availability of convincing narratives that reveal the underlying direction of the historical process as a whole. It has become a cliché to say there is ‘incredulity’ towards such ‘grand narratives’ or ‘meta-narratives’ amongst philosophers and critical theorists.17 Postmodernists typically criticise narratives of progress on account of their supposed ‘linearity’, a feature that allegedly makes them hopelessly naïve from an epistemological point of view. Whatever the merits of that particular objection, there is no doubt that it reflects deep and widespread disenchantment with the providentialist strategy for justifying radical social hope. And it is just as certain that this disenchantment is fed as much by political developments as by epistemological reflection. As Jonathan Rée has suggested, the ‘crisis of narratives’ of which postmodernists speak has its roots in the failure of a certain kind of politics and a re-evaluation of what politics in general can achieve.18 Rée points out that belief in the inherent progressiveness of the historical process provides a powerful motivation for militant political activism. The militant could be reassured that despite the high personal costs of political action, long-term success was secured by the progressive movement of History. The thought that history has a definite, knowable, controllable and progressive shape is certainly an effective motivator of action, capable of overriding doubts that might otherwise debilitate the militant political agent. Where such a model of politics seems desirable and appropriate, epistemological and historical optimism is the order of the day. It is incredulity towards this fusion of political activity and historical hope—as manifest in Marxism as well as other ‘modernist’ political movements—which Rée suggests is characteristic of our ‘postmodern’, ‘post-socialist’ times. And rightly so, he argues, because what progress there has been owes little to this fusion of political action and historical hope (if it owes much to intentional action at all), and because action motivated by historical hope—while admirable—has, overall, been disastrously counter-productive. Realisation of this has ‘fractured’ the ‘whole structure of modern political hope’, leaving the epistemological and historical pessimists to pick up the pieces and “mourn the end of a deluded hope.”19


On this account, then, its not so much incredulity towards meta-narratives, disbelief in linear stories of progress, or scepticism about universal history that define the postmodern, post-socialist condition, as disillusionment with the political projects that take orientation from such notions. This is an important point. It is less clear, however, why the development sketched here amounts to a fracturing of social hope as such. The motivational structure that seems so dubious from the ‘postmodern’ or ‘post-socialist’ point of view involves the presence of an indefeasible, cast-iron certainty that the laws of history—the existence of which the epistemologically and historically optimistic activist has no doubt—are on the activist’s side. But such a psychic structure hardly deserves to be called hope. The hoper, like the militant activist, can have a desire for the ideal, and a belief that the future realisation of the ideal is really possible. But the hoper is precisely not sure that the ideal will come to pass. It is part of the structure of hope not to see the future as under one’s control. If it were not for the belief that the future is open, that it contains more than one possibility, there could be no hope. The hoper sees the future unfolding in multiple possible directions, one of which will satisfy the hoper’s desire. But the militant activist powered by historical hope, in the sense Rée rightly describes as problematic for postmodern and post-socialist sensibilities, conceives the future as already set on its pre-determined course, as bound to unfold in a way that, in the long run, will realise the political ideals. If historical hope is to have any meaning it has to be divorced from the historicist belief that history is on an unalterable, if zigzag course to human perfection. One doesn’t hope for something one knows will happen anyway. To be hopeful is to have a more modest, and we are all inclined now to say more realistic, relation to a desired future than historicism allows. Hope is attuned to the ineradicable contingency of human affairs. As such, it is a disposition that seems well-suited to the epistemological pessimism that Rée advocates. And it points to a third strategy for dealing with the grounds of social hope, one that deflates the significance of justification and emphasises instead the interconnections between hope, scepticism, contingency, anti-historicism and socialist ideals. Before moving to this third strategy, let me quickly observe that scepticism about historicism, or ‘philosophy of history’ that relies on the notion of a selfrealising universal subject, is by no means limited to postmodernism: it features


in several strands of critique developed within the Frankfurt School, and is a defining characteristic of the paradigm shift Habermas urges for critical theory.20 Habermas’ proposals for a differentiated model of historical change, observing a strict division between the logics and dynamics of development and between system and lifeworld rationalisation, are aimed at undermining the ‘teleological’ conception of history as pre-destined for utopia. And more generally, the providentialist strategy for justifying social hope on the basis of the direction of history as a whole is uncongenial to many political theorists who see it as tending to privilege the ‘story of the victor’, or the historical self-understanding of culturally (but also politically and militarily) dominant groups.

III. Ungroundable Hope Providentialism and reliance on a conception of natural human capacities probably represent the two dominant strategies for grounding radical social hope within critical theory. Their decline, however, has led some theorists to reassess the whole philosophical significance of social hope. The third strategy for thinking about social hope I briefly want to look at takes its departure from the failure of traditional attempts to provide a philosophical foundation for social hope; not with a view to correcting the means of justification, but with the idea of dropping the project of justification altogether. In other words, this third strategy denies that social hope can be grounded by appeal to human nature, the end of history, providence, or anything else. But this lack of justification should not be a source of concern: it is only what an epistemological and historical pessimist would expect. Far from blocking off hope, scepticism about its rational ‘groundability’ and attentiveness to the contingency of its fulfilment are just what we need to have hope, and it is what we need to have a proper understanding of the relation of social hope to philosophy and critical theory. Richard Rorty is the most eloquent and influential advocate of what we could call this ‘deflationist’ strategy for thinking about social hope. One of the central ideas of his work is that a pragmatist philosophical vocabulary—one that emphasises human finitude, sociality, contingency, and so forth—is better suited for thinking about the ‘liberal’ utopia of a classless, casteless society than one that has recourse to so-called ‘Platonist’ notions of human nature,


the inherent progressiveness of history, and so on.21 He invites us to acknowledge and embrace the contingency of liberal/socialist ideals, so as to see them as hopes rather than as written into the nature of things. For ‘hope’, Rorty says, “doesn’t require justification, cognitive status, foundations, or anything else.”22 The great merit of pragmatism, according to Rorty, is that it “allows room for unjustifiable hope, and an ungroundable but vital sense of human solidarity.”23 Even though we usually think of a pessimist as someone who expects the worst, and so as someone who lacks hope, Rorty’s unjustifiable hope fits the profile of the epistemological and historical pessimist well. The person with unjustifiable hope is not under the illusion that things must turn out for the best, that history is unfolding according to some secret principle of the best, or that the best is written into the nature of things. This kind of hope is not supported by dubious notions of a providential order or a perfectible human nature. Nor is such hope diminished by the realisation that history is not on the hoper’s side (it is not, from a pragmatist perspective, on anyone’s side). The person who grasps the philosophical ungroundability of social hope is also less prone to disappointment than the person who bases the hope on human nature or the inherent progressiveness of history. Rorty’s notion of ungroundable hope is meant to bring out the practical irrelevance of rational justification for social hope. Talk of grounding social hope in human nature or a providential order is at best a diversion that, in Rorty’s view, barely touches on the more important tasks of proposing concrete social ameliorations and imagining new liberal utopias. Rorty is not so much of a pessimist that he denies there are grounds for social hope, though this is an impression his effort at making room for ungroundable hope can give. His point is rather to free up the utopian imagination while advocating meliorism over what he considers to be the misguided metaphysical notion of utopia as transfigured humanity. This is why he calls his version of pragmatism ‘romantic utilitarianism’.24 In Rorty, the romantic (or existentialist) idea that radical social hope is in some sense hope in spite of probability, a kind of defiant resistance to what we have rational grounds to expect, only occasionally finds expression, being for the most part secondary to utilitarian, meliorist, liberal concerns. Other writers, however, have been less cautious in formulating their conceptions of ungroundable hope. John


D. Caputo, for instance, taking his lead from Derrida and St. Paul, has suggested that hope is “really hope only when things begin to look hopeless and it is mad to hope.”25 His paradoxical formulation that “hope is hope only when one hopes against hope” is meant to capture the radical absence of grounds that, in Caputo’s view, gets to the essence of hope.26 According to this (deconstructionist) line of thought, ungroundable hope has a purity qua hope, which is alien to hope based on likelihoods, demonstrable potentialities or historical evidence. Deconstructionist thinking about social hope shares Rorty’s pessimism about the possibility of philosophical grounding, but it departs from pragmatism in taking the impossibility itself as revelatory of the meaning of such hope. The deconstructionist ‘strategy’ in regard to social hope is thus to affirm its ungroundability in a form which intensifies our sense of ‘the ungroundable’ or ‘the impossible’. By making manifest the paradoxes and aporia attendant upon radical social hope, it seeks not to ground it but to elucidate its meaning as transcending conceptuality and possibility. Messianic hope for ‘the impossible’ has thus assumed a prominent place in deconstructionist discourse on social hope.27 One can grant a place for ungroundable hope without going so far as to say that only hope without reason is ‘really’ hope or that considerations of probability exclude or count against hope.28 As should already be apparent, the notion that social hope is ‘ungroundable’ can mean several things with different implications for the tasks of critique.29 First, there is a sense in which all hope is ungroundable insofar as it involves an act or a stance that is ultimately a matter of decision. However justifiable (in terms of probability) the object of hope may be, the subject may resolve to be hopeful or to maintain an attitude of hope if that is what seems appropriate. Perhaps critical theorists have a responsibility to sustain an attitude of social hope whatever justification they are able to muster for the object of hope. Talk of ungroundable hope can then serve as a reminder that what matters about social hope is a certain attitude to the present as open to the future. To the extent that simply keeping this openness in view has become an issue for us, it at least makes sense to consider the justification of specific future scenarios as of secondary significance. We can arrive at a sense of ungroundable hope by abstracting the subjective aspect of hope (the willing, desiring, and deciding aspect which is not amenable


to rational grounding) from the objective aspect (the probability or rational desirability of the hoped-for thing). But such abstraction would not be required if there were a mode of hope which did not have an objective aspect at all. That is to say, if there were a kind of hope that did not aim at any state of affairs in particular, it clearly would not be justifiable in terms of reasons for believing the state of affairs would (or ought to) obtain. Being without an object, such hope would a fortiori be without a justifiable object. Now the philosophical and theological literature on hope does contain repeated references to ‘ungroundable hope’ in this sense. Marcel, for instance, distinguishes “hope that . . .” which aims at particular objects and an objectless, unconditional hope which expresses an existential orientation of the subject over and above its particular engagements.30 The latter, which Marcel designates ‘absolute hope’, is said to transcend “every kind of representation whatever it might be.”31 Pieper articulates a similar thought when he distinguishes mundane hopes from a ‘fundamental hope’ aimed at something ‘nameless’ rather than representable, conceivable, or imaginable goals.32 This fundamental hope, Pieper writes, is possessed by someone who “holds himself in readiness for a fulfilment which goes beyond every imaginable human postulate.”33 The expression ‘fundamental hope’ is also a key term in Godfrey’s account of hope. Drawing on the work of Marcel and others, Godfrey persuasively argues for a distinction between hope as an untargeted openness to the future and a refusal to despair (fundamental hope) and ‘ultimate hopes’ that have various degrees of soundness or justification.34 What is the relationship between ungroundable hope as fundamental hope and social hope? The connection is not obvious since social hope as we have defined it does have an object (classless, casteless society) whereas fundamental hope does not. Nor is it clear how the idea of fundamental ungroundable hope connects with critique. Such hope is distinct from ultimate social hope, or hope for utopia, which is how hope typically features as a theme in critical theory. But there may be indirect ways in which ungroundable hope as fundamental hope is relevant for the project of critique. I have already alluded to the importance of keeping alive the very idea of social possibility, of society seen from the standpoint of its openness to the future. In addition, the notion of fundamental hope is suggestive of a philosophical anthropology according to which hope is a basic human capacity for positive self-relations over time.


If, as Axel Honneth has shown, positive self-relations and a capacity for autonomy emerge through structures of mutual recognition, perhaps the ability to relate to the future as a horizon of possibility through hope is also a formal requirement of the good life. Perhaps objectless hope has an ontological significance analogous to that claimed of objectless fear (angst). These are matters for further enquiry. It is unfortunate that till now the existential and anthropological significance of hope has only been considered at the margins of critical theory.35 The emergence of a discourse of ungroundable social hope, and the greater comfort many theorists seem to have dealing with this notion than with positive justificatory strategies, no doubt reflects a reduction in the sum of social hope circulating amongst theorists (and elsewhere).36 But it would be a mistake to discount such discourse as empty, merely subjective, or ideological. It gives expression to traces of social hope that might otherwise disappear. It would be an even bigger mistake, however, to abandon the project of positively grounding social hope, as if that project were irremediably corrupted by essentialism, foundationalism, providentialism or whatever. The task of grounding social hope that previous generations of critical theorists tackled remains with us today: namely, to understand the possibilities for progress inherent in the present and to identify the barriers that frustrate humane social life.37

Notes 1

See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp-Smith, London,

2

See Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice & Paul

3

See Eric Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Towards a Humanized Technology, New York,

4

See Ronald Aronson, Dialectics of Disaster: A Preface to Hope, London, Verso, 1983

Macmillan, 1933, A805/B833. Knight, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986. Harper & Row, 1968. and by the same author “Hope after Hope,” Social Research, vol. 66, no. 2, Summer, 1999, pp. 471-94; John Patrick Day, Hope. A Philosophical Inquiry, Acta Philosophica Fennica, vol. 51, Helsinki, 1991; Joseph J. Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human Hope, Dordrecht, Martinus Nijhof, 1987. 5

The situation may be changing. Ghassan Hage has outlined a sketch for a critique of the present organised around the idea of hope that is powerful and provocative in the current Australian context. See Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism.

Hope and Critical Theory • 59 Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society, Annandale, Pluto (London, Merlin Press), 2003. There also seems to be a renewed interest amongst sociologists and political theorists in the utopian dimension of critical theory, as the articles by Craig Browne and Pauline Johnson in this volume reflect. 6

The association of hope with women, weakness and an anodyne finds its archetype in the Pandora tale. For discussion see Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human Hope, and Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1.

7

“Hope is the worst of all evils, for it protracts the torment of man,” Friedrich Nietzsche, Human all too Human, vol. 1, trans. R. J. Holland, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986 (1878), p. 45.

8

For further discussion (drawing on Bloch’s influential views on this matter) see Ruth Levitas, “Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia” in Not Yet. Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, eds. Jamie Owen Daniel & Tom Moylan, London, Verso, 1997, pp. 65-79.

9 10

See Day, Hope, p. 36. See e.g. Joseph Pieper, Hope and History, trans. Richard and Lara Winston, London, Herder & Herder, 1969; Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator. Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope, trans. Emma Crawford, London, Victor Gollancz, 1951.

11

See Manfred Buhr, “A Critique of Ernst Bloch’s Philosophy of Hope,” Philosophy Today, vol. 14, Winter, 1970, pp. 259-71 (a translation of ‘Der religiose Ursprung Charackter der Hoffnungsphilosophie Ernst Bloch,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 4, 1958, pp. 576-98. In a concluding endnote, Buhr writes: “What remains to be done in reference to Bloch is to prove that the philosophy of hope is a manifestation of religious thought forms . . . and to point out the affinities and common points between philosophy of hope and similar currents in contemporary late bourgeois philosophy,” n. 49, p. 271.

12

See Rolf Wiggerhaus, The Frankfurt School, trans. Michael Robertson, Cambridge, Polity, p. 65, 69.

13

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1999, p. xii.

14

See, for example, Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 2 Vols, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Cambridge, Polity, 1984, 1987; Kenneth Baynes, The Normative Basis of Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls, Habermas, Albany, SUNY Press, 1991; Maeve Cooke, Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1994; William Rehg, Insight and Solidarity: The Discourse Ethics of Jürgen Habermas, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994; Shane O’Neill, Impartiality in Context, Albany, SUNY Press, 1997.

15

Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity, second edition, London, Duckworth, 1995, p. 89.

16

Ibid., p. 92.

60 • Nicholas H. Smith 17

See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984.

18

See Jonathan Rée, “Marxism and Hope,” in Post-Marxism and the Middle East, ed. Faleh A. Jabar, London, Saqi Books, 1997, pp. 203-11.

19

Ibid., p. 211.

20

See, for example, Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans.

21

See, for example, Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope.

22

R. Rorty, Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies, Chicago, Prickly Paradigm Press, 1998,

Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, Polity, 1987.

p. 58. 23

R. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1982, p. 208.

24

See Rorty, “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism,” in The Revival of Pragmatism, ed. M. Dickstein, Durham, Duke University Press, 1998, pp. 21-36. For further analysis of Rorty’s ‘romantic utilitarianism’ and its approach to social hope see Nicholas H. Smith, “Rorty on Religion and Hope,” Inquiry, vol. 48, no. 1, February 2005, pp. 76-98.

25

See John D. Caputo, “The Experience of God and the Axiology of the Impossible,” in Religion after Metaphysics, ed. M. Wrathall, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 123-45, 134.

26

Ibid., p. 134.

27

See e.g. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1997.

28

“If we follow probability there is no hope,” Isabelle Strengers, interview with Mary Zournazi, in Hope—New Philosophies for Social Change, ed. M. Zournazi, Annandale, Pluto Press, 2002, p. 245, cited by Craig Browne in his contribution to this volume.

29

I have examined the sense Rorty gives to the idea of unjustifiable hope in “Rorty on Religion and Hope.”

30

See Marcel, Homo Viator, p. 32f.

31

Ibid., p. 46.

32

J. Pieper, Hope and History, p. 25.

33

Ibid., p. 91.

34

See Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human Hope, esp. pp. 133-154.

35

For example, by Hinrich Fink-Eitel in “Das rote Fenster. Fragen nach dem Prinzip der Philosophe von Ernst Bloch,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch, vol. 95, no. 2, 1988. I thank Axel Honneth for alerting me to this piece.

36

As Rorty himself has remarked, “philosophy is responsive to changes in amount of political hope,” and the preoccupation amongst contemporary political philo-

Hope and Critical Theory • 61 sophers with notions of “the impossible” reflects a lack of social hope, and “an inability to construct a plausible narrative of progress.” Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, pp. 229, 232. 37

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2004 Philosophy and Human Sciences Colloquium in Prague and the 2004 Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy at Macquarie University. I thank everyone who discussed the paper with me on these occasions for their helpful comments.

Craig Browne Hope, Critique, and Utopia

ABSTRACT This paper assesses the extent to which the category of hope assists in preserving and redefining the vestiges of utopian thought in critical social theory. Hope has never had a systematic position among the categories of critical social theory, although it has sometimes acquired considerable prominence. It will be argued that the current philosophical and everyday interest in social hope can be traced to the limited capacity of liberal conceptions of freedom to articulate a vision of social transformation apposite to contemporary suffering and indignity. The background to these experiences is the structural changes associated with the injustices of globalisation, the mobilisation of the capitalist imaginary and the uncertainties of the risk society. The category of hope could assist in sustaining the utopianism of critical theory through conjoining normative principles with a temporal orientation. Yet, the paradoxes of the current phase of capitalist modernisation have further denuded notions of progress. Since the theological background to the category of hope constitutes a major limitation, the utopian orientation of critique is clarified in relation to the antinomies of the turn to social hope and the potential of Habermas’ discourse theory of democracy, law and morality. Despite Castoriadis’ profound critique of the category of hope, its present usage in social analyses will be seen to have affinities with Honneth’s conception of the struggle for recognition. KEYWORDS: Hope, Critical Theory, Utopia, Globalisation, Capitalism, Habermas

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During the course of the last century, the leading motif of historical change in critical social theory decisively shifted from emancipation to democracy. It is a shift that could be understood to entail a decline in utopian projections of alternative futures. Whilst such an interpretation underestimates the consequences of the radical democratisation of capitalist society, the very idea of a reduction in future alternatives has sometimes suggested the centrality of the category of hope to projects of historical change and emancipation.1 The contemporary questioning of the notions of progress and development has undoubtedly shaped recent interest in the category of hope and reconsiderations of the “politics of utopia.”2 Even so, there are substantial reasons why hope has never had a systematic position among the categories of critical theory. Notably, the cultural background of the category of hope is primarily theological and hope has been regarded with suspicion because these originally theological connotations may overwhelm other associations. Still, hope has on occasions been an explicit theme in the writings of the Frankfurt School circle and the philosophy of Ernst Bloch is obviously an exception in its attempt to found the entire project of critique in hope.3 The following analysis has the more modest aim of assessing the extent to which the category of hope assists in preserving and redefining the vestiges of utopian thought in critical social theory. It will suggest that the contemporary relevance of the idea of hope derives from the insights that it can provide into the injustices of globalisation and that critical theory needs to refine its analysis and diagnosis of these injustices. Similarly, it will be argued that it is not difficult to recognise the potential symbiosis between hope and the reflexive modernisation of the risk society, but that the corresponding reliance on the category of hope is partly due to an uncertainty about the appropriate methodological framework of critique. The risk society thesis compels revisions in the presuppositions of critique; it involves paradoxes that undermine the simple identification of critical theory with either of the alternative projects of the ‘transfiguration’ or the ‘fulfilment’ of modernity.4 The nexus between hope and utopia probably appears incontrovertible; it nevertheless needs to be established in a manner consistent with critical theory, because each category usually implies a negation of existing social circumstances. That is, hopeful and utopian negations could be independent of the assessment of the practical political possibilities for the transformation of these conditions and the substantive social analysis of them. In broad terms,

Hope, Critique, and Utopia • 65

critical social theory distinctively combines utopian projections with the explication of the needs of subjects that are unfulfilled and the empirical analysis of the developmental tendencies of capitalist society. It does not simply juxtapose an ideal state against existing conditions of oppression and inequality, critical theory seeks through this synthesis of normative and empirical analysis to disclose changes in the present that prefigure an emancipated or democratic society. Further, critical theory relates its perspective to that of the subjects that would seek to bring about this transformation. In Adorno’s opinion, critical theory even involves a certain prohibition against translating social hope into positive images of social utopia: Those schooled in dialectical theory are reluctant to indulge in positive images of the proper society, of its members, even of those who would accomplish it. Past traces deter them; in retrospect, all social utopias since Plato’s merge in a dismal resemblance to what they were devised against. The leap into the future, clean over the conditions of the present, lands in the past.5

Of course, these various methodological stipulates of critical theory have rarely been fully satisfied.6 In the case of The Frankfurt School, the rupturing of ties to political practice and the historical closure intrinsic to the idea of the dominance of instrumental reason resulted in critical theory becoming utopian in the negative sense of envisaging unrealisable alternatives.7 Bloch famously contrasted the compensatory function of unrealisable abstract utopias with the anticipatory character of concrete utopias that are grounded in the objective possibility of the present.8 By contrast, Habermas’ critical theory rectifies the deficiency of abstract utopia, but arguably at the price of compromising or even abandoning the utopian and anticipatory dimension of critique.9 In an acute analysis of alternatives present in his theory of communicative action, Benhabib anticipated Habermas’ subordinating of the utopian moment of transfiguration.10 Benhabib compared a democraticparticipatory conception of public life, oriented to the ‘utopian’ construction of a community of needs and solidarity, with a legal-juridical conception that sought the fulfilment of the normative promise of liberal democracy by effectively institutionalising the universalistic principles of rights and entitlements. However, this contrast cannot be maintained in quite this way in relation to Habermas’ discourse theory of law and democracy.11 It seeks to make the

66 • Craig Browne

‘legalistic-juridical’ and the ‘democratic-utopian’ conceptions interdependent, but how much remains of the utopian project of a community of needs can be gauged from the fact that the former definitively qualifies the latter. The typical historical complexion of utopian aspirations is displaced in Habermas’ recent reformulating of critique in terms of the ‘radical democratic’ project of realising the normative content of the democratic constitutional state and the system of rights that it embodies.12 In part, this reformulation is based on his assessment of the decline of most of the socio-political movements that sought to extend the ideals of the French revolution, such as anarchism and communism.13 It derives even more from his belief that legitimacy depends on the satisfaction of the procedural conditions of democratic discourse. For Habermas, the experience of state socialism convincingly demonstrated that processes of emancipation are conditional on democracy and that political action presupposes public dialogue for its justification. In his opinion, the discourse theory of deliberative democracy gives new vitality to the “old promise of a self-organizing community of free and equal citizens.”14 Despite its overestimating the capacity of law to translate communicatively generated normative principles into administrative power, substantial changes would no doubt ensue from institutionalising the discourse theory’s model of deliberative democracy. For instance, its conception of the mutual reinforcement of public autonomy and private autonomy implies a major alteration in the institutional divisions that structure gender relations in the advanced capitalist nation states. Significantly, discourse theory provides a broad justification for greater social equality on the grounds of its facilitating higher levels of democratic participation. Habermas believes that the changes ensuing from the discourse theory of democracy and law simply require the complete realisation of the established normative principles of a constitutional state, rather than the more utopian idea of democratic invention. He insists that the procedural paradigm of discourse does not present anything like a ‘utopia’; it only defines formal conditions. Its project of democratising society is therefore not an “ideal projection of a concrete form of life.”15 This model nevertheless contains the peculiar tension of amounting to nothing more but requiring nothing less than that “all the involved actors must form an idea of how the normative content of the democratic state can be effectively and fully exploited within the horizon


of existing social structures and perceived developmental tendencies.”16 On the one hand, discourse theory’s specification of how actors can understand themselves to be the authors of the laws to which they are subject is probably an unsurpassed clarification of how the normative principles of existing institutions can be best practically realised. On the other hand, it is not difficult to recognise that its restricted conception of popular sovereignty reflects Habermas’ belief that the utopian ambition of giving a more holistic meaning to the principles of discursive democracy risks undermining them. For many sympathetic critics, restrictions of this order are actually unwarranted concessions to the systems theoretical arguments of social complexity; such “deviations from radical democratic norms” are neither unavoidable nor necessary consequences of ‘social facts’.17 Utopian modes of critique have usually centred on the categories of needs and human fulfilment, discourse theory substitutes for these the counterfactual idealisations that structure communicative practices.18 Habermas considers that due to the complexity of modern society, critique cannot be founded on a philosophical anthropology of needs and an ethics of practical reason. Instead, communicative reason is appropriate, particularly because it establishes the validity basis of law and democratic procedures. In fact, Habermas claims “there is a conceptual or internal relation, and not simply a historically contingent association, between the rule of law and democracy.”19 From this standpoint, the principles of human rights and popular sovereignty, that underpin the legitimacy of modern law, comprise the nucleus for the radical democratisation of society. Now, this position may seem to suggest that the category of hope is redundant, however such a conclusion would be misleading in many respects. It will be argued that Habermas’ discourse theory redefinition of the problem of critique obtains its relevance from historical developments that his general social theory could not adequately explain, especially those associated with the late-modern changes of globalisation.20 Moreover, it is necessary to account for why the critical engagement with these changes has been articulated in terms of hope. This analysis will highlight the erosion of some of the social preconditions of the discourse theory model and the related decline in utopian modes of social critique. In addition, it will suggest that a connection could be forged between the philosophical anthropology of hope and the social diagnostic framework of Honneth’s conception of the struggle for recognition.21

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Given the qualifications of the discourse theory of law, democracy and morality, it may appear paradoxical that the persistence of utopian aspirations was integral to Habermas’ defence of the ‘project of modernity’ and his earlier attempts to uphold a notion of progressive historical change.22 Besides rejecting its key theses, Habermas regarded postmodernism as symptomatic of a waning of the ‘utopian energies’ that were associated with the project of the transformation of the conditions of social labour and the ‘new obscurity’ that arose from the recognition of the substantial limitations of the welfare state.23 In many respects, this analysis intersects with the suppositions that inform the recent social scientific discussions of the category of hope; these discussions have disclosed some further dilemmas that critique today confronts. In particular, the interest in the category of hope can likewise be traced to the limited capacity of liberal conceptions of freedom to articulate a vision of social transformation appropriate to contemporary experiences of suffering and indignity.24 In this sense, the motives underlying much of the recent literature on hope are similar to those that have shaped critical social theory. The category of hope has also achieved a certain prominence against the intentions of critical social theory: hope is embraced because of the loss of utopian alternatives and a lack of confidence in the value of transformation. Yet, if the appeal of hope derives from its apparent power to restore a belief in the prospect of change then the appeal to hope seems to risk undermining practical capacities for transformation. Hope, as Crapanzano suggests, has been considered the passive counterpart to active concepts like desire; hope often seems to refer to an agency beyond the capacities of subjects.25 From Ernst Bloch through to Richard Rorty, discussions of hope in philosophy and social theory have highlighted the significance of anticipation and the practical consequences of projections that simultaneously emerge in the present but point beyond it.26 In this way, the appeal of the category of hope derives from its seeming to conjoin normative principles with a temporal orientation. At the same time, Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” made it abundantly clear that the temporality of hope need not converge with the rationalised and quantified time that has structured modernist conceptions of progress and development.27 In many instances, recourse to the category of hope can be precisely attributed to disenchantment with the notions of development and the broader background social imaginary of


modern rationality. This partly explains why the category of hope has had a significant, though subordinate, place in the research of medical social sciences.28 It has been in the context of research into healing that the restorative powers of hope have often been worked out. Notions of pathology and suffering have also influenced the emergence of hope as a theme in recent discourses in the wider humanities and the social sciences. Hope is the counterpart to theoretically informed social diagnoses; for instance, it frames two recent responses to the disquieting Australian combination of national solidarity and neo-liberalism.29 Most of these recent analyses of hope involve some reconsideration of the notion of transformation and intimations of a different system of values. Contemporary critique need not endorse the conclusions ensuing from these reflections and diagnoses, nevertheless there are three primary reasons why it needs to situate its own standpoint in relation to them: each is relevant to critical theory’s “dialectic of immanence and transcendence.”30 First, there can be little dispute that the recent prominence of the category of hope is connected to discernible pre-theoretical needs and experiences of subjects. Second, without being explicit about it, many accounts locate hope in the tension between the experiences of self-formation and selftranscendence. According to Joas, these experiences are the basis of the emergence of values and value commitments.31 Third, the focus on hope itself reflects attempts to rethink the temporality of social change, especially in response to the temporal and spatial conjunctures of globalisation. These contemporary reflections on hope signal substantial changes in the points of reference of notions of transformation and the character of anticipation. In particular, utopian thought had constituted an extension of critique and part of its inspiration. It was through positing alternatives to existing social heteronomy and indignity that modern forms of utopian thought gave orientation to social actors and movements.32 By contrast, recent appeals to hope tend to be more circumspect and refrain from depicting some version of the ‘good life’ in a social order that has transcended the conditions of alienation. In my opinion, the connection between diagnoses of the dissipating of these ‘utopian energies’ and more recent social analyses of hope can be sourced to the experience of a paradox peculiar to contemporary capitalist societies.33 On the one hand, the condition of continued social progress seems to be bound to the extension of social relations through the networks and mobilities

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of globalisation.34 On the other hand, the dominance of neo-liberalism as the organising principle of these globalising processes results in a generalised deflation of expectations concerning social bonds and the limiting of the horizon of the future to the vocabulary of the present. The alternative to the present consists then in the hope that the future may be different, even though it is difficult to precisely or substantively define the conditions that would mean that the future would be better. In this way, one of the paradoxes of contemporary capitalist nation states has a certain analogy with the experiences of patients who can be healed but not necessarily cured.35 The utopian dimension of critique has regularly centred on the problem of rectifying the lack of coincidence between the values of freedom and equality. Critique intends to enlarge the meaning of both values through the creation of conditions for their practical reconciliation. In these terms, the welfare state represents a compromise between the utopian objectives of an autonomous society that institutionalises equality and the functional demands of a complex social system that can only indirectly ameliorate social injustice. In Habermas’ opinion, this ‘unresolved tension’ between capitalism and democracy shapes the class compromise of the welfare state and the constraints on social reform and wealth redistribution that derive from its dependence on capital accumulation, particularly for taxation revenue and sustaining full employment in the labour market.36 The tensions intrinsic to the welfare state subsequently receive indirect expression in the new modalities of social alienation that result from state interventions into citizens’ lifeworlds that contradict their intended goal of enhancing freedom and equality.37 Although the welfare state never directly embodied the original utopian ideals of social labour, such as the socialist utopias of collective ownership of property and Marx’s vision of the free association of producers, it did institutionalise some of the normative aspirations of a just and dignified life grounded in labour and its collective organisation. On this analysis, the welfare state is primarily an outcome of the social democratic project of extending the democratic and constitutional legacy of bourgeois emancipation movements. This project has always been qualified by structural limitations; the impasse in the contemporary period, Habermas argued, derives from an additional uncertainty. The project of social democracy, that lent a utopian dimension to the welfare state, was “based on the notion that society could act upon itself without risk, using the neutral means of political and administrative power.”38 This notion has


been called into question, with critiques of the welfare state’s bureaucratic, legal and therapeutic policies and interventions highlighting the capacity of administrative power to distort and undermine the goals it is supposed to serve. It led to the recognition that administrative power regularly operates according to its own logic; the welfare state was further charged with transforming citizens into the passive clients of institutions. These assessments of the discrepancy between the social democratic ideals of the welfare state and the factual limitations of its organisational form are quite different from the contemporary neo-liberal and neo-conservative assessments. In a sense, the latter critical assessments present a ‘counter-utopia’: of unregulated markets and radical individual freedom from the state and society.39 In the context of these alternatives, Habermas argued that it was necessary to continue the welfare state project at a ‘higher level of self-reflection’ and that regression would ensue from renouncing its attempt to give expression to universalistic values. The dilemma was that this reflection could obviously not be undertaken by the state administrative system itself, nor did the sphere of social labour contain the basis of continued reform. “The utopian idea of a society based on social labour had lost its persuasive power,” he argued, “above all, because that utopia has lost its point of reference in reality: the power of abstract labour to create structure and to give form to society.”40 This controversial thesis probably drew too heavily on interpretations of the consequences of a shift to a post-industrial economy and the ‘end of work’. It also too readily gave historical content to the philosophical change Habermas proposed from the production to the communication paradigm. A change that he believed was mirrored in the shift in ‘utopian accents’ and that was implicit in the practices, as much as the explicit themes, of new social movements.41 I want to suggest that Habermas’ arguments can be read in a complementary, but nonetheless different way, as concerning tendencies that were to influence a shift in critical reflections on late-modernity from the possibility of utopia to the problem of hope. It is a shift that coincides, on the one hand, with the apparent diminishing of the conditions that enabled the welfare state to extend the democratic rights of citizens and to raise standards of living for segments of the population. On the other hand, this experience of decline stands in a dialectical relationship to the contemporary mobilisation of the capitalist imaginary. Probably, the novel dimension of this deployment is the interconnection the contemporary capitalist imaginary

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establishes between the utopia of private consumption and the neo-liberal ideology of globalisation. The symbolic features of the capitalist imaginary disguise antinomies and give particular meanings to technological changes and exchange relations. One of the clearest contemporary manifestations of the power of this imaginary is the notion that globalisation necessitates a substantial change in the balance of the relationship of the state and the market. It is easy to recognise that this notion becomes effective through its very institution and that the neo-liberal policies of deregulating markets intensify the structural dilemmas of the welfare state. In his elucidation, Castoriadis suggests that a social imaginary simultaneously creates an interpretation of the institutionalised social order and some conception of its transcendence.42 Drawing on this perspective, it is plausible to suggest that the contemporary capitalist imaginary equally involves a projection of the factual transcendence, or the existence within itself of the means for the transcendence, of the tensions of the former social order of capitalism. Of course, in no sense is this imaginary positing that transcendence projected in socialist utopias, nor is it representing the instantiation of the normative content of socialism. It does not even imply the inversion typical of ideology, because the contemporary capitalist imaginary presents an interpretation of the present capitalist social order as constituting the negation of the conditions that produced the utopian aspirations of socialism. The fact that this fantasy is, so to speak, not merely fiction can be seen in assumptions that inform many recent critical discourses. Habermas’ arguments concerning the exhaustion of utopian energies exemplify several of them. In line with many accounts of late-capitalism, he claims that new divisions of social exclusion are overtaking the dialectic of interdependence and conflict that had underpinned the class compromise of the welfare state. Those disconnected from the process of production lack any leverage equivalent to the withdrawal of labour. That is, contemporary capital is not directly or really dependent on this ‘impoverished and disenfranchised’ minority for its reproduction. In this way, a feature of the dynamics of the global capitalist economic system is replicated within individual nation states. Now, it would be an exaggeration to consider that this tendency completely subsumes the geographical distinction between the capitalist core and periphery. However, in an analysis of a much longer historical period, Wallerstein


agrees that: “the core-periphery gap will become less and less seen or defined as a clearly geographical phenomenon, and more and more as a class phenomenon in all countries.”43 Wallerstein’s conclusion that this change occurs in the context of a massive historical increase in the scale of inequalities points to the paradox that has influenced the shift from the possibility of utopia to the question of hope: This is the worst of all situations for those interested in the political stability of the world-system. On the one hand, the populations in the South, who will still be the worst off and the most desperate, may be ready to contemplate more serious anti-systemic disruption. On the other hand, the bottom strata in the countries of the North will no longer enjoy some of the amenities which they had been invited to share in the post-1945 period, and even more importantly will no longer believe that it is certain that their children will enjoy a higher standard of living than they.44

Despite the significance of this analysis in detailing the predicament of the potential contradictory tendencies of globalisation, it basically remains framed by the concepts of political economy and the system of value that the modern social utopias of labour had sought to give expression. For this reason, it is unable to elucidate the degree to which globalisation extends these values and undermines them through dissolving the conditions for their determination. Of course, the confusion this may produce concerning notions of distributive justice does not in any real sense obscure the injustices of globalisation, nor does it undermine the grounds of their rational critique. In fact, it is the disparity of relations that are interconnected through the tendencies of globalisation that appears to generate the problems of determination. In any event, the capitalist imaginary has always concealed the indeterminacy of values and how they are bound to a social-historical institution of meaning.45 The current significance of these difficulties consists in their shaping the powerful counterfactual logic of the global order. That is, a logic founded in the dilemma that the gains and advantages of participation in the global system are highly uncertain, unless they are defined in terms of the neo-liberal concepts of market efficiency and comparative advantage, but where the risks of the potential consequences of the exclusion from this system appear to necessitate participation. The contrast between these alternatives presupposes that participation in the global order is a choice available to nation states and

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individuals; critiques of the democratic deficit of globalisation have tended to concentrate on a supposed reduction in the possibilities for effective selfdetermination. Of equal importance is the paradoxical reinforcement of this dilemma, that is, the contrary notion that globalisation enhances options does not necessarily alter the counterfactual logic. In a detailed analysis, Offe explicates the extent to which the systemic enhancement of options generates new levels of constraints and how types of inflexibility arise from the need to avoid risks and the possible distortion of intentions. In light of this analysis, Offe concludes that the “real utopia today lies in the freedom of the calculated zero option, of rational self-limitation in the face of the exponentially growing risks of interdependence.”46 Broadly similar considerations inform Giddens’ contention that contemporary critique should adopt the format of ‘utopian realism’. Political “radicalism,” he argues, “can no longer insert itself, as socialism did, in the space between a discarded past and a humanly made future.”47 These analyses raise questions about the grounds for identifying with either of the projects of the fulfilment or the transfiguration of modernity. The anxiety associated with this questioning is relevant to the concern with hope but the general continuity of critical reflection with modernity means that even greater precision is required to account for contemporary applications of hope in social diagnoses. In my opinion, the paradoxes outlined above achieve a special intensity when they take on anomalous forms and are thereby brought into the realm of more immediate experience, rather than as mediated through abstract systems, such as professional expertise and symbolic tokens.48 The situation of the refugee is probably the clearest exemplar of anomaly in the Australian context. Of course, these anomalies are still mediated in various ways but the experience of them has a special intensity, because of the manner in which they are now mapped onto subjectivity. Michael Kearney’s discussion of a transnational population movement brilliantly illustrates the experience of the paradoxes of contemporary capitalist nation states. For instance, the ‘alien’, he suggests: is desired as a body, or more specifically as labour power which is embodied in this person, by employers and indirectly by all who benefit economically and socially from this cheaply bought ‘foreign’ labour. But this alien as a legal person who might possess rights and prerogatives of a national, of a citizen of the nation, is the dimension of personhood that is denied.49


This type of ambivalence concerning the ‘alien’ is not dissimilar to those uncovered in Australian race and immigration policies.50 In fact, two of the recent Australian works on hope emerge out of this field of research. Hage’s analysis of the fantasy structure of Australian migration and multiculturalism shapes his interest in hope.51 The distinction between the narcissism of ‘worrying’ about the nation and the less defensive ‘caring’ is critical to his analysis of Australian ‘paranoid nationalism’.52 Hage argues that a reduction of hope promoted the shift towards increased worrying about the nation. It is not so much that those sectors of Australian society experiencing a diminution of hope are unwilling to share it, so much as that the decline and ‘scarcity’ of hope have made them less capable of extending it to others. Hage’s general thesis is “that societies are mechanisms for the distribution of hope, and that the kind of affective attachment (worrying or caring) that a society creates among its citizens is intimately connected to its capacity to distribute hope.”53 Hage is one of the interviewees of Mary Zournazi’s collection: Hope—New Philosophies for Social Change.54 Zournazi offers Zeitdiagnosen framed around the category of hope. Hope thereby becomes a collective category for all forms of counterfactual thought about the possibilities for social change. It seems that for Zournazi what is distinctive to the category of hope is the affective dimension that it can contribute to images of social transformation. On her analysis, this affective component is especially important, because it responds to the political left’s loss of faith.55 There is not a little of Bloch’s belief in the need for a theological addition to Marxism in this standpoint.56 The range of associations Zournazi reads into hope potentially dilutes the category, however a more substantial problem is the serious discrepancy between the normative appeal and the analytical value of the category of hope. It is not difficult to assent to the need for hope; it is rather more difficult to deploy hope in determining the stakes of the social, political and cultural projects of transformation. Like Hage, Zournazi appreciates that hope can be both asymmetrically appropriated and politically incapacitating. The capitalist imaginary has proven a powerful definer and distributor of hope. Hope is therefore far from an intrinsically critical category, it should be viewed instead as an orientation that animates critique. In Hage’s opinion, this orientation is not simply reducible to a positive disposition towards change: Spinoza importantly points out that hope (unlike wishing, for example) is an ambivalent affect, always laced with fear. For him hope is like a

76 • Craig Browne combination of desire for and fear of the future in which the desire for the future is more dominant.57

The category of hope has then an immediate application to the arguments and analyses of risk society and reflexive modernisation. Zournazi’s Hope and Hage’s Against Paranoid Nationalism are replete with the cognate terms used in the discourses over risk society. In particular, Beck argues that fear and safety become the organising values of individual action and group formation in risk society.58 Similarly, Giddens has highlighted the relationship between the ‘projecting ahead’ that shapes risk consciousness and anxiety.59 In his work on identity in late-modernity, Giddens too draws on the psychological categories of Winnicott and object-relations to illuminate the connections between the experience of absence and the formation of identity. Like Hage’s discussion of worrying and caring, Giddens’ analysis points to the connection between hope and trust. Giddens’ original theory of structuration has been described as formulating an ‘ontology of potentials’; clearly drawing on this perspective enables a more discriminating sociological analysis of hope.60 Hage’s inquiry into the distribution of hope already implies disaggregation, consideration of hope’s conjunction with other categories and its qualification by forms of capital. Based on the perspectives of Spinoza and Bourdieu, Hage claims that the common feature of hope is the capacity to augment being.61 Giddens’ generative conception of power is likewise critical to his ‘ontology of potentials’; it underpins his notion of the discontinuity of late-modernity. Specifically, Giddens presumes that the contemporary consciousness of risk reflects the dissolution of the ‘providential’ understanding of social change and a corresponding decline in fate as an ordering principle of social practices.62 Pursuing this line of analysis, Zournazi’s work is probably best considered an attempt to illuminate the rudiments of a ‘postprovidential’ conception of hope. In general, the category of hope can be related to the epistemological complexion of the arguments of reflexive modernisation and risk society. The perception of risk is shaped not just by the objective reality of risk but also by the awareness of possible future risks, like nuclear contamination. In this way, the notion of risk society bears upon the limits of rational assessment of dangers and the difficulty in calculating or quantifying consequences. According to Beck, the capacity for calculation underpinned the confidence in the


insurance principle of the first phase of ‘simple modernisation’.63 Reflexive modernisation may be the unintended and unanticipated consequence of development; however, for one perspective on hope, the problematising of rationality need not signal an impending crisis. Stengers perceives hope to be linked to a generalised and unpredictable creativity, that discloses ‘a possibility for becoming’. “I would say that hope is the difference between probability and possibility. If we follow probability there is no hope, just a calculated anticipation authorised by the world as it is. But to ‘think’ is to create possibility against probability.”64 Stenger’s interpretation of hope has pronounced affinities with Castoriadis’ account of the limits of identity logic; the idea of creation is central to his elucidation of the imaginary.65 At the same time, as will be detailed later, Castoriadis develops what is probably the most penetrating critique of the category of hope from the standpoint of the ‘project of autonomy’. It does not require a great deal of analysis to make a connection between the category of hope and social imaginary horizons of meaning. Crapanzano indicates this in suggesting that the categories of social and psychological analysis can never be fully divorced, despite the deconstructive force of the best of our ethnographies, from the structures and values of the society in which they are elaborated. Whether we give primacy to desire or hope, we have, in either case, to recognize the way their objects reflect as they precipitate a certain take on the world.66

Social imaginaries are especially important to the distribution of hope, they animate and legitimise, if not legitimate, this process. The creative capacity of the imaginary can be traced in relation to each of the three instances of hope Crapanzano examines: Christian theology, the phenomenology of experience, and the socio-cultural determination—illustrated by way of the symbolic evocation of the consumption of objects in Cargo cults. In each of these instances, the imaginary, as Castoriadis contends, is founded in neither real nor rational determinations.67 It could be suggested then that hope is a dimension of the operation of social imaginaries and, if we follow Ernst Bloch, it could be the decisive attribute. No doubt the relationship between alternative social imaginaries and Bloch’s interpretation of the significance of hope, especially in relation to future projection and the ‘not-yet’, is worth exploring.68

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But Castoriadis’ position on hope is significantly different. He claims that Ancient Greek, or properly Athenian, democracy owes its origins to an appreciation of chaos and the denial of the theological conception of hope in myths and drama.69 Now, this claim should also be understood in the context of Castoriadis’ critique of identity thinking and the belief in a correspondence between world image and the world itself. Indeed, this dual imaginary of identity thinking is, he believes, the cultural infrastructure of meta-narratives, other critiques of hope have also focussed on this feature.70 For Castoriadis, the Athenians answered Kant’s third question of interest to humanity, that is, what can we hope, with a resounding claim of ‘we can hope for nothing’. The destruction of the strongest sense of hope enabled the Athenians to reach a new understanding of the significance of their practices and to institute democracy for the first time. It is beyond the scope of this paper to assay the issues of cultural continuity and discontinuity, the question nevertheless poses itself of why hope in the form of correspondence between ourselves and world has been so rarely brought into question. Castoriadis traces the appeal of the theological interpretation of hope to the unconscious and to the undying—because the possibility of its own death cannot be acknowledged— response of the unconscious to the destruction of the monadic core of the psyche.71 However compelling Castoriadis’ critique of theological hope and its later ratiocination may be, it probably does not exhaust the value for critical social theory of the category of hope, or an equivalent for it. For a basic presupposition of critical theory is that a temporal orientation to the future is constitutive of social practices in the present. A different line of analysis then, which nevertheless parallels the current discourse on hope, would be to extend the sociological translation and transformation of categories of pragmatist and phenomenological analyses into explications of the potential and limitations of social practices. After all, hope, or an equivalent animating notion, is significant because it bears on the loss of clarity about the purpose of critique. Putting it bluntly, critique has to presume hope, otherwise it may become just criticism. In this sense, the category of hope has affinities with the notions that other contemporary authors in the tradition of critical theory have sought to develop and employ; for instance, Benhabib’s comments on utopias drew attention to the orientation critical theory draws from its


perspective on change.72 Hope would be a synonym for the positive, or more technically the anticipatory-utopian as distinct from explanatory-analytical, content that can be give to critical theory and which in turn serves to justify critique. Still, the limitations of assimilating hope to orientations that have an invariantly positive disposition has already been drawn attention to and accentuating this facet will hardly be able to account for an issue that has recently generated the theoretical and everyday interest in hope, that is, the indifference of the state to normative principles in the face of revelatory criticism. Of course, the state makes a claim to principles and values; only these apply selectively to its activities that are relevant to the paradoxes of the globalising transformations outlined above, such as in the denial of the human rights of refugees, the justification for military intervention, and the disciplining of the labour market. If this commentary has a certain degree of veracity then it points to a situation where counterfactual thinking affirms existing social reality. Hope becomes the alternative, rather than the anticipation of a projected change that can be put into practice. A different approach to grounding critical theory has been taken in the work of Honneth. He believes that critique can take its bearings from the disclosure of social and individual pathologies. A diagnosis of pathologies presupposes a normative basis and Honneth derives this from his ‘formal anthropology’ of intersubjective recognition.73 His anthropology also details the general preconditions and structures for subjects’ democratic participation in the constitution of the ‘good life’. Distinctive to this ethic is the sociological claim that conflicts are motivated by the suffering and injustices of experiences of disrespect and the denial of recognition. Honneth argues that struggles for recognition enlarge the moral grammar of society, yet the changes they anticipate develop in response to differing experiences of disrespect. Briefly, he suggests that love, rights and solidarity constitute variant forms of intersubjective recognition; they correspond to differing spheres of activity and involve the normatively anchored ‘practical relations to self’ of selfconfidence, self-respect and self-esteem.74 Struggles for recognition are, from this perspective, the most important determinant of the distribution of hope. In the language of moral philosophy, practical relations to self are the modes of subjects’ participation in the good life, or, in Hage’s terms, ways of ‘augmenting being’. It appears intuitively plausible then to claim that the denial

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of hope is a violation of the patterns of recognition. In my opinion, this claim reinforces Honneth’s contention that dignity and integrity are critical dimensions of the determination of justice today.75 Indeed, it has already been pointed out that the prominence of the category of hope in recent social science is largely due to contemporary capitalist nation states having generated and reinvented forms of exclusion and the denial of reciprocity. Interestingly, Honneth contends in a recent discussion that could be interpreted as reframing the question of hope, that the anthropology of recognition does more than articulate “unmet demands” in the present.76 It seeks to disclose, he suggests, a “quasi-transcendental”, or ever present, basis in social reality for the moral claims that orient critical theory. Talk of ‘transcendence within social immanence’—which is of religious origin—means more than that unfulfilled, and to that extent transcending social ideals and goals are still to be found within social reality at a particular time. Rather, it designates a normative potential that re-emerges in every new social reality because it is so tightly fused to the structure of human interests.77

Despite having forsaken the quasi-transcendental perspective of his early programme of knowledge constitutive interests, there can be little doubt that Habermas believes communicative reason to comprise a permanent potential for transcendence immanent within processes of social reproduction and that the principles of discourse effectively frame utopian hopes in the present.78 Honneth considers that Habermas’ alternative grounding of critical theory in the ‘discourse ethic’ is largely limited to the ‘normative reinforcement’ of the liberal-democratic tradition.79 This estimation suggests that the discourse ethic is necessary to the establishment of social justice, but that it is in itself insufficient for the task of transforming the conditions of injustice. Nevertheless, Habermas’ perspective on the formation of transnational civil solidarity offers a far more elaborated conception of how the paradoxes of globalising transformations could be reoriented than that so far presented in theories of recognition. Discourse ethics makes a case for the possibility of a cosmopolitan hope that could arise from the democratic institutionalising of human rights.80 In Habermas’ opinion, the universalistic perspective of discourse ethics is neither incompatible with the pluralism of multicultural societies, nor does the formal procedural complexion of the discourse theory of democracy and


law preclude an accommodation of the more substantive utopian demands of new social movements. Still, the fact that democratic law channels the utopian projections of movements for social change could be seen to amount to a defusing of these projections potential implications. The general tendency in this model for the translation of popular sovereignty and communicative power into citizenship rights may not compensate for the initial distance of Habermas’ critical theory from the practical-political struggles of movements. On balance, this is probably less significant than the way that discourse theory is able to sustain the possibility of social solidarity being realised in a legal form that has the power to resist some of the paradoxes of globalisation and their attendant injustices. Wellmer has drawn attention to the importance of this cosmopolitan hope in commenting that social developments associated with globalisation point to an emerging situation where what had formerly been considered a utopian elaboration of citizenship rights may become the minimum preconditions for the persistence of liberal democracy.81 It may seem implausible to suggest that a new version of secular hope could be immanent in the present development of society. On the one hand, there is the difficulty of envisaging how a normative political theory of cosmopolitan solidarity can have some purchase on reality when there is, to paraphrase Hage, the need to search for hope in a shrinking society. On the other hand, the capitalist imaginary is already an excessive producer of—largely unfulfilled—hope, and it has been noted how the capitalist imaginary reframes cosmopolitanism in an ideological form. Crapanzano’s reflections on Cargo cults highlight the relevance of hope to the symbolic reproduction of capitalism. In cargo, he states, “the source and object of hope are collapsed into one.”82 Moreover, Castoriadis’ questioning of social imaginaries suggests that the further development of the impulses associated with hope may depend on how they are pursued through other concepts. Even so, the explanatory value of hope is evident from the symbiotic relationship it has to the categories of the theory of the risk society and reflexive modernisation. The category of hope could also endow the normative content of intersubjective recognition with a temporal orientation to the future and thereby enhance the practices of communicative exchange and social being. Finally, my analysis implies that it is necessary to distinguish the appeal of social hope from the appeal to hope in recent discussions. It is only on this basis that the category

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of hope can assist in preserving the vestiges of utopian thought in critical social theory.

Notes 1

W. Benjamin, Illuminations, Suffolk, Fontana, 1970.

2

F. Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia,” New Left Review, 25, Jan.-Feb. 2004, pp. 35-54.

3

E. Bloch, The Philosophy of Hope, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986; E. Fromm, The Revolution of Hope, New York, Harper & Row, 1968; H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, New York, Vintage Books, 1955; H. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, London, Allen Lane, 1970.

4 5

S. Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia, New York, Columbia University Press, 1986. ˇ zek, London, T. W. Adorno, “Messages in a Bottle” in Mapping Ideology, ed. S. Ziˇ Verso, 1994, pp. 42-43, pp. 34-45.

6

H. Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1985; D. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas, London, Hutchinson, 1980.

7

A. Wellmer, “Reason, Utopia and the Dialectic of Enlightenment,” in Habermas and Modernity, ed. R. J. Bernstein, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1985, pp. 35-66; Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia.

8

E. Bloch, The Philosophy of Hope, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986.

9

J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1996; J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action Vol. 1, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press; J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action Vol. 2, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1987; Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia; J. Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1995.

10

Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia.

11

Habermas, Between Facts and Norms.

12

Ibid.

13

J. Habermas, “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure” in Between Facts and Norms, pp. 463-490.

14

Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 7.

15

Ibid., p. 444.

16

Ibid., p. 395.

17

J. Bohman, “Complexity, Pluralism, and the Constitutional State: On Habermas’s Faktizitat und Geltung,” Law and Society Review, 28, 1994, p. 900; pp. 897-930.

Hope, Critique, and Utopia • 83 18

A. Heller, A Radical Philosophy, New York, Basil Blackwell, 1984; R. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, London, Phillip Allan, 1990; Habermas, Between Facts and Norms. Idealisations enable intersubjective agreement over validity claims through the three-fold projection of a shared pragmatic orientation to rational consensus, the existence of a semantic identity over meaning, and a commitment to the ensuing normative obligations of mutual understanding. Significantly, idealisations transcend the actual context of communicative action and entail that processes of argumentative justification proceed according to standards of universal validity. These necessary underlying conditions of communicative action are far more consequential than just their facilitation of mutual understanding.

19


20

J. Habermas, “Globalism, Ideology and Traditions—Interview with Jürgen Habermas,” Thesis Eleven, no. 63, 2000, pp. 1-10.

21

A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995.

22

J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1987.

23

J. Habermas, “The New Obscurity” in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historian’s Debate, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1989.

24

V. Crapanzano, “Reflections on Hope as a Category of Social and Psychological Analysis,” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 18, no. 1, 2003, pp. 3-32; G. Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society, Leichhardt, Pluto Press, 2003; M. Zournazi, ed. Hope—New Philosophies for Change, Leichhardt, Pluto Press, 2002; D. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000.

25

V. Crapanzano, “Reflections on Hope as a Category of Social and Psychological Analysis,” pp. 3-32.

26

E. Bloch, The Philosophy of Hope; Rorty, R. Philosophy and Social Hope, London, Penguin Books, 1999.

27

W. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, W. Benjamin, Suffolk, Fontana, 1970, pp. 255-266.

28

C. Garrett, “Sources of Hope in Chronic Illness,” in TASA 2001 Conference Proceedings, eds. C. Browne, C. Edwards, V. Watson and R. van Krieken, Sydney, 2001.

29

Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism; Zournazi, Hope—New Philosophies for Change.

30

N. Fraser & A. Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, London, Verso, 2003; A. Honneth, “The Social Dynamics of Disrespect: On the Location of Critical Theory Today,” Constellations, vol. 1, no. 2, 1994, pp. 255-269.

84 • Craig Browne 31

H. Joas, The Genesis of Values, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2003.

32

K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, London, Routledge, 1949.

33

J. Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historian’s Debate, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1989; C. Offe, Modernity and the State: East, West, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996.

34

M. Castells, The Rise of Network Society, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996; J. Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies, London, Routledge, 2000.

35 36

C. Garrett, “Sources of Hope in Chronic Illness.” Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2; C. Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1984.

37

Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2.

38

Habermas, The New Conservatism.

39

R. Levitas, ed. The Ideology of the New Right, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1986.

40

Habermas, The New Conservatism.

41

Ibid., p. 68.

42

C. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1987.

43

I. Wallerstein, “The Global Possibilities, 1990-2025” in The Age of Transition—Trajectory of the World System, 1945-2025, eds. T. Hopkins and I. Wallerstein, Leichhardt, Pluto Press, 1996, p. 234.

44

Ibid., p. 234.

45

C. Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth, Sussex, Harvester Press, 1984.

46

C. Offe, Modernity and the State: East, West, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996, p. 26.

47

A. Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: the Future of Radical Politics, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994, p. 10.

48

A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990.

49

M. Kearney, “Transnationalism in California and Mexico at the End of Empire,” in Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers, eds. T. Wilson and H. Donnan, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 128; pp. 117-141.

50

E. Vasta, and S. Castles, eds. The Teeth are Smiling: The Persistence of Racism in Multicultural Australia, St. Leonards, Allen and Unwin, 1996.

51

G. Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, Leichhardt, Pluto Press, 1998.

52

Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism.

53

Ibid., p. 3.

54

Zournazi, Hope—New Philosophies for Change.

55

Ibid., p. 64.

56

W. Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch, London, Macmillan Press, 1982.

57

Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism, p. 24.

Hope, Critique, and Utopia • 85 58

U. Beck, Risk Society: Towards another Modernity, London, Sage, 1992; U. Beck, What is Globalisation, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000; U. Beck, Democracy without Enemies, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000.

59

A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, California, Stanford University Press, 1991; A. Giddens, “Living in a Post-Traditional Society,” in Reflexive Modernisation, eds. U. Beck, A. Giddens and S. Lash, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994, pp. 56-109.

60

I. Cohen, Structuration Theory: Anthony Giddens and the Constitution of Social Life, London, Macmillan, 1989.

61

Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism; P. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, Cambridge,

62

Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity; Giddens, Beyond Left and Right.

63

U. Beck, “The Reinvention of Politics: Towards a Theory of Reflexive Moderni-

Polity Press, 2000.

sation” in Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, eds. U. Beck, A. Giddens, and S. Lash, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994, pp. 1-55; Beck, Risk Society: Towards another Modernity. 64

Stengers, “A ‘Cosmo-Politics’—Risk, Hope, Change—with Isabelle Stengers“ in Hope—New Philosophies for Change, ed. M. Zournazi, Leichhardt, Pluto Press, 2002, p. 245.

65

Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society.

66

Crapanzano, “Reflections on Hope,” p. 19.

67

Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society.

68

Bloch, The Philosophy of Hope.

69

C. Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991; C. Castoriadis, World in Fragments, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997; P. Harrison, “Power, Culture and the Interpretation of Democracy,” Praxis International, vol. 11. no. 3, 1991, pp. 340-353.

70

For an overview see Crapanzano, “Reflections on Hope,” pp. 3-32.

71

Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society; Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy.

72

Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia.

73

Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition.

74

Ibid.; A. Honneth, “An Interview with Axel Honneth—The Role of Sociology in the Theory of Recognition,” European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 5. no. 2, 2002, pp. 265-277.

75

A. Honneth, The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy,

76

Fraser & Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?

Albany, State University of New York Press, 1995.

86 • Craig Browne 77

Ibid., p. 244.

78

J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 2nd Ed. London, Heinemann, 1978.

79

A. Honneth, “Reply to Andreas Kalyvas, ‘Critical Theory at the Crossroads: Comments on Axel Honneth’s Theory of Recognition,” European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 2. no. 2, 1999, pp. 249-252; Fraser & Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?; Honneth, “An Interview with Axel Honneth—The Role of Sociology in the Theory of Recognition,” pp. 265-277.

80

J. Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1998; J Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001; J. Habermas, “Globalism, Ideology and Traditions—Interview with Jürgen Habermas,” Thesis Eleven, 2000, no. 63, pp. 1-10; C. Browne, “Civil Solidarity and Social Struggles,” in Cultural Citizenship and Globalisation, eds. W. Ommundsen, M. Leach and A. Vandenburg, Brisbane, Hampton Press, forthcoming.

81

A. Wellmer, Endgames: the Irreconcilable Nature of Modernity: Essays and Lectures, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1998.

82

Crapanzano, “Reflections on Hope,” p. 25.

John Grumley Hegel, Habermas and the Spirit of Critical Theory

ABSTRACT This paper explores the complex relation between Hegel and Habermas. Centring the discussion around the key themes of philosophy, modernity and political philosophy, it argues for a gradual rapprochement of Habermas towards Hegel. In the final section on critical theory, it takes up the question of the spirit of this theory to offer a more trenchant critique of Habermas’ theoretical shortcoming from this perspective. KEYWORDS: Hegel, Habermas, Philosophy, Modernity, Critical Theory

Almost from the moment of his death there has never been any shortage of claimants to the spirit of Hegel. The dispute over his legacy soon broke out amongst the Right and Left factions of the Hegelian school and received other classic formulations in the early decades of the twentieth century with the works of Croce and Lukács. These attempts were driven by a compulsion to extract the living dialectical core from an allegedly dead metaphysicological system. Similar motives persist in contemporary Anglo-American appropriation. The latter continues to find great food for thought in various implications of Hegel’s sophisticated account of intersubjectivity while displaying equal discomfort with his idea of

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the Absolute that they view as an untimely metaphysical residue or prefer to interpret away altogether. The perennial nature of this contest over Hegel’s spirit is a measure of both his philosophical richness and of his politico-cultural ambiguity. From a contemporary perspective it is hard to think of another philosopher who occupies such a unique place in the history of philosophy. He is sufficiently distant to be numbered amongst the philosophical ‘mighty dead’ with all the implicit obsolescence this honorific generally entails. At the same time, his philosophical innovations seem so fresh, even today, so sophisticated that he remains our contemporary. It is hardly surprising that the same ambivalence of critical distantiation and enthusiastic approbation pervades the Hegel reception of Jürgen Habermas. After all, in him the Frankfurt School resistance to the idealist figure of totality collides with the Hegelian and Marxian aspirations to a comprehensive social theory. Hegel has remained a permanent presence in his thinking from Theory and Practice (1963) to Truth and Justification (1999); he has continually returned to Hegel as both a foil in the demarcation of his own paradigm and a rich source of substantial ideas and concepts. Yet, his initial emphatic retreat from Hegelian historicism to a form of transcendentalism has gradually allowed many concessions to be made to the spirit of Hegel. These concessions go far beyond his systematic aspirations, his dialectic mode of argumentation, his general reformist political aspirations and even his journalistic forays that are all so reminiscent of Hegel. Shortly before retirement his last Frankfurt students were wont to refer to him, I guess both in awe and irony, as the ‘contemporary Hegel.’ But, is this a fair judgement and if it is, what are its implications for critical theory? In the space of a single paper is not possible to do justice to the Hegel/ Habermas relation in all its breadth and complexity. However, in a brief and schematic way, I will attempt to elaborate some key points of contention and continuity under the headings of philosophy, modernity and political philosophy in an effort to evaluate Habermas’ Hegelian credentials. Finally, I will consider the implications of this ‘reconciliation’ with Hegel for the meaning and project of critical theory.

Hegel, Habermas and the Spirit of Critical Theory • 89

I. Philosophy One of the most enduring aspects of Habermas’ critique of Hegel is his deflation of philosophical aspirations. This is the place where the critique of totality he inherited from Adorno and Horkheimer’s denunciation of idealist abstraction and desire for an interdisciplinary exchange between philosophy and the special sciences reveals itself most forcefully. Hegel is viewed as the perpetrator of an illusory philosophical absolutism. His critique of Kantian transcendental reflection from the standpoint of historical dynamism issued in a phenomenology of historical forms of consciousness. But in Hegel’s hands this attempt to turn away from a subjectivist philosophy of reflection and its timeless structures of consciousness produces a dialectic of forms of consciousness that in the end only secured objective knowledge by the instantiation of another higher, absolute level of spiritual reflection. The necessity of the successive forms of consciousness is obtained when philosophy effects a grand conceptual synthesis in which the diverse contents of the other sciences are ushered to their appropriate logical place in the edifice of absolute spirit.1 Habermas’ response to this dialectical solution is twofold. Positively, he maintained that Hegel’s Jena writings with their emphasis on prior structures of language, labour and interaction tentatively demonstrated the way beyond transcendentalism. Yet, negatively, he contends the mature Hegel relapsed back into the philosophy of the subject when he incorporated the processes of natural evolution and world history into an absolute philosophical synthesis. As he puts it in Theory and Practice: The philosophic God, who, in spite of all appearances, did not surrender Himself entirely to history, is restored to himself in the philosophical reflection of absolute spirit, which, unaffected by the crisis and superior to it, therefore does not have to comprehend itself as critique . . . Instead, philosophy forms itself into its own totality; it is not critique but synthesis.2

Habermas has persisted with this view of the metaphysical Hegel despite a chorus of dissenting views coming from recent Anglo-American Hegel scholarship.3 He acknowledges that an exclusively inter-subjective reading of Hegel’s notion of Absolute spirit has the obvious affinity with the milieu of a disenchanted world and allows a seamless connection to post-Hegelian philosophical streams like pragmatism, hermeneutics and philosophy of

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language.4 However, he maintains that by Hegel’s own standards this interpretation is deficient in a double respect. The inter-subjectivist reading of spirit expunges the difference between a social world of inter-subjectively shared meanings and the objective world, as well as the tension between our contestable view of what is rationally acceptable ‘for us’ and what is unconditionally valid ‘in and for itself.’ For Habermas, this structural difference between intersubjectivity and objectivity/unconditionally rational constitutes a cultural gulf that separates Objective Idealism from post-metaphysical thinking. This is his major objection to the deflationary reading of Absolute spirit. For him, the learning process described for Hegel’s audience is not just of a series of transformations now behind them. The perspective of ‘in and for itself’ supposes a decisive step beyond modern consciousness where it become aware, as through a form of conversion, of the power of spirit.5 This spirit is no longer defined by its historical origins but by its ontological priority over nature.6 Our cultural distance from objective idealism signifies more than the difficulty in accessing Hegel’s worldview. In an increasingly secular culture, post-metaphysical philosophy has renounced even the aspiration to divine absolutism. In the wake of cultural rationalisation, philosophy can neither dominate nor operate alone but must work in harness with the sciences. While the idea of a division of labour between philosophy and science is not foreign to Hegel, he could assert the claims of philosophy to a higher form of rationality. By contrast, Habermas adopts the metaphor of the ‘translator’ for a new relationship between the two where philosophical claims are tempered by the rigorous epistemic demands of science while the results of the latter require philosophical reconstruction in order to render explicit their implications for the lifeworld of the modern everyday. The Habermasian reform of philosophical aspirations clearly represents a real deflation of the speculative and system demands of Hegel’s philosophy. He recognised that the emancipatory claims of the theory must be rigorously severed from teleology and ontology. Against the idealist fusion of progress and history in the philosophy of history, he posits a general anthropological vision grounded in the philosophy of language. This is the idea of ‘cultural learning processes’ now underwritten by the quasi-empirical reconstructive sciences like cognitive psychology and linguistics that purport to tap into the


deep underlying structures of social evolution.7 Habermas has effectively substituted humanity as the universal agent of moral evolution for the ‘Geist’ of the idealist tradition and the ‘proletariat’ of the Marxian. However, this remains only a weak substitute insofar as without teleological support it relies only on the scientific status of its claim. Despite these amendments astute commentators still hear idealist echoes of the philosophy of the subject lurking in the background.8 However this may be, it cannot be denied that Habermas’ vision of philosophy sustains the vital cultural role connected to the Hegelian desire that philosophy be the principle agent for collective rational self-reflection. For Habermas, philosophy has a vital role to play in the processes of our own cultural self-formation, in binding together cultural achievement and the quest for ethical self-understanding and clarification of identity. If we concede the essential historicity of spirit, this stance appears very much in the spirit of Hegel. Whether this is also sufficient to sustain a claim to legitimacy as the bearer of contemporary critical theory is a more difficult question to which I shall return in the concluding section of the paper.

II. Modernity We have already seen that Hegel’s early critique of transcendental reflection opened up what appears in retrospect to be an unusually rich vein in the project to introduce history and inter-subjectivity into the philosophical universe.9 Again departing from Kant’s differentiation of reason into the corresponding cultural spheres of science, morality and art, Hegel argued that these discursive differentiations were experienced in the traditional ethically integrated lifeworld as ‘diremption’.10 Rational understanding does produce subjective freedom, reflection and the power to demolish religious tradition but this abstract principle of subjectivity is also the bearer of its own instrumental violence. It allows fractured organic wholes to collapse into their discrete parts and is incapable of regenerating unified ethical worlds.11 But Hegel’s commitment to a more comprehensive mode of reflection could not be realised unassisted. Only after the dust settled from the French Revolution and the revolutionary wars that followed was he finally able in his mature political philosophy to reconceptualise the antagonistic forms of modern social disintegration in a new way. They now become comprehensible as the mechanisms

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of a historically unprecedented modern form of the realisation of reason and freedom. Here Habermas finds both inspiration and conceptual resources that will energise his own distinctive theory of modernity. As we have seen, Habermas reads Hegel’s Jena writings on the philosophy of spirit as a valiant effort to transcend the philosophy of the subject. His detailed analyses of both work and recognition in the context of intersubjectivity now provided the framework for truly profound insights into the dynamics of modern social evolution. Inflected in the light of Marx and Weber, these elements become the core of Habermas’ own theory of rationalisation with its distinction between societal and cultural rationalisation, system and lifeworld.12 It would be going too far to reduce his concept of cultural rationalisation to the processes of recognition. However, it is more than likely that he took from the latter the idea that the communicative interaction involves a process of moral learning and ethical self-understanding that is just as important as the instrumental/technical advances achieved by purposive rational action and functional reason. Here Habermas seems to reach back beyond his two great predecessors in the theory of rationalisation (Marx and Weber) to find in Hegel resources that will allow him to correct some of their most vitiating shortcomings and incorporate their insights into a more dialectical and comprehensive theory of modernity. The views of Marx and Weber are viewed as too one-sided focusing respectively on labour and purposiverational action. Moreover, Habermas reads Hegel’s replacement of the obsolete distinction between oikos and polis with the tripartite division between family, civil society and the state as more than just a decisive conceptual breakthrough in the history of modern political philosophy. The take-off of the social sphere— civil society—as the new engine of modernity and the bearer of profoundly ambiguous tendencies in need of specialised treatment requires a new science—political economy and later social theory. While Hegel could still aspire to integrate these disciplines into his total philosophical vision, Habermas has the benefit of hindsight. He sees in the methodological independence of these new sciences from philosophy the implicit collapse of philosophical hegemony. With this his own move towards a more interdisciplinary synthesis is provided with a historical precedent.


III. Political Philosophy At first sight Habermas’ venture into the domain of systematic political and legal philosophy appears more influenced by Kant. Habermas says as much in the Preface to Between Facts and Norms (1992) where, returning to the interdisciplinary theme already mentioned, he repudiates the Hegelian model that set “unattainable standards” in favour of a pluralistic approach combining the perspective of diverse disciplines.13 Pursuing this tack, he structurally separates reconstruction of the normative core of liberal democracy from empirical questions of its sociological operation. Nevertheless, beneath this curt repudiation lies a deep affinity with Hegel that, to my mind, renders Between Fact and Norms his most Hegelian work. To justify this opinion a few words about Hegel’s revolution in normative philosophy are necessary. The basis of Hegel’s innovation here lay in a fundamental reconsideration of the normative stance of traditional political philosophy. It is already evident from his critique of Kant’s transcendental reflection that he was especially sensitive to the context dependence of morality and other norms. The problem with unconditional norms is that they make no concessions to the conditions of practical success. For a norm to be successful and orient real practical conduct it must in some way imply the conditions and limits of its applicability. While Hegel does not abandon the normative role of political theory, he does modify its standards. If norms cannot be divorced from their background conditions of applicability, political philosophy must comprehend the total structure of conditions and institutions and specify the historically concrete structures that are inseparable from the meaningfulness and realisation of the norms. Hegel’s account of modern society as an integral whole composed of objective ethical powers and their corresponding subjective roles conforms to this demand.14 This revolution in normative political theory is especially pertinent in the light of Habermas’ own linguistic turn and the subsequent claim to ground his theory in the illocutionary validity claims of everyday language. The most obvious criticism of this controversial move was that the model of ideal speech extracted from these illocutionary claims was an unrealisable utopia bearing little relation to real everyday linguistic practice permeated by power relations. Despite Habermas’ own constant clarifications pointing out that ideal speech

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was a counterfactual rather than a concrete utopia, the abstract character of the reconstructive attempt to reveal the deep linguistic structures of action and cognition raised objections to the universality claims of communicative rationality. Here the Hegelian solution appeared an attractive option combating post-modern scepticism and also demarcating his theory from the purely normative kind like Rawls. On this view, participation in the political life and constitutional practices of the contemporary liberal democratic state presupposes we have already tacitly assumed the normative validity of these arrangements.15 In this instance, normativity is no impotent ideal or unattainable utopia. On the contrary, the learning processes that collectively constitute cultural rationalisation vitalise institutions, attitudes and normative self-understandings that, despite transgressions, still play a vital role in established liberal democratic culture to orient our struggles and determine goals.16 While there is no doubt that this manoeuvre puts Habermas on firmer grounds against the claim of utopianism, it does not render his transcendent credentials immune from criticism. That communicative reason and democratic institutions have become binding for the denizens of western modernity is not in doubt. What is at issue is whether this is the result of trans-historical, logical or cultural and contingent rationality. The claims of other cultures less inclined to reflexivity and argumentation, which rarely figure in Habermas’ justification, seem to suggest the latter.17

IV. Critical Theory Objections to Habermas’ universality claim is not the only concern raised by his resuscitation of critical theory. Even sympathetic commentators have also questioned the ‘uncritical’ character of his reading of liberal democratic institutional arrangements in Between Facts and Norms. This representative complaint is expressed well by William Scheuerman. He maintains that this “at times surprisingly moderate and even conciliatory picture” fails “to give adequate expression to legitimate unease and anxiety about ‘really existing’ democracy.”18 Of course, this charge would come as no surprise to those familiar with the historical reception of Hegel’s political philosophy. Habermas here commits crimes that radical critics like Marx and the other Left Hegelians long ago placed at Hegel’s door. The remarkable neglect of Hegel as a political philosopher especially in the Anglo-American world can at least in part be


put down to his conservative reputation.19 Fukuyama was not right about the end of history but he did at least go someway towards rehabilitating Hegel’s credentials to political contemporaneity. Yet, there can be no question that Hegel’s own ‘reconciliation with reality’ was ultimately bought at significant political and philosophical cost. His doubts regarding democracy and his philosophical retreat to a retrospective contemplation that ‘paints its grey in grey and cannot change the world’ are only too well known. Habermas has learnt this Hegelian lesson well. While he acknowledges the importance of utopian images and the energies that motivate social movements,20 he agrees with Hegel that a responsible philosophy cannot be reduced to mere subjective fancy. What Habermas provides in the middle chapters of Between Facts and Norms is a philosophical reconstruction of the main normative elements of liberal democratic constitutionalism. Philosophy still has a vital contemporary critical task to perform, of translation between modern cultural and institutional achievement and the everyday, of critical self-reflection. The spirit of modernity has already set before us a challenging task that is still incomplete. The constitutional principles of liberal democracy demand a synthesis of private and public autonomy that takes us to a democratic horizon that is still to be realised and may ultimately never be attained. Yet, for him, this is the contemporary ‘rationality of the real’ that we abandon only at our peril. Here is a combination of philosophical restraint and cultural optimism, of ambition and limitation that, while it may stray from the letter is very much in accord with the spirit of Hegel. It is not surprising, however, that those in tune with the legacy of critical theory remain discontent with this ‘reconciliation with reality’. Marx accused Hegel of a positivism that reproduced the bourgeois world exactly as it was.21 While it would be unfair and too crude to accuse Habermas in similar terms, it is easy to see the sources of his radical critics’ discontent. From the standpoint of critical theory, Habermas’ reformulation of critical theory has gone in two directions. Confronting the problems associated with the overt politicisation of the theory, Habermas’ most decisive move has been to take the proceduralist option of divorcing procedures from substantial issues and outcomes. Against the twin dangers of teleology and relativism, Habermas decided to defend rationalism by procedural means. The whole conceptual instrumentarium of

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communication rationality rests on this dualist distinction between communicative and strategic action, life-world and system. However, it is doubtful that this move is ultimately tenable. Numerous critics have pointed to the fact that in concrete contexts the categories of communicative and strategic action are so imbricated and fused that the distinction itself it undermined.22 Communicative relations like those of the family are hardly bereft of power and strategy while bureaucracy and the economy could not survive on instrumental functionality alone. However, from a critical theory perspective, more telling than conceptual fuzziness, is that rigidly divorcing procedures from outcomes allows real relations of power to become invisible. Without reference to questions of interest, imbalances of institutional power and economic inequality, the real external pressures on discourse disappear. The commitment to universals like law and discourse too easily forgets that their instantiation is always connected to particular forms of practice and particular interests. While Habermas is acutely aware of the economic pressures that have led to the dismantling of the welfare state in many contemporary liberal democratic societies, these nowhere receive philosophical expression in his version of critical theory. This lacuna is reflected in the abstract generality of phases like ‘colonisation of the lifeworld’ with little in the way of concrete analysis of its contemporary erosion.23 Moreover, subsequent retraction of the notion of colonisation with its linkages to the conceptual world of reification in favour of a more dialectical account of the relation between system and lifeworld seem like another concession to the ideology of liberal democracy without closer empirical scrutiny of its real dynamics.24 The second element of Habermas rehabilitation of critical theory has been his embrace of the category of ‘universalisability’. This is the concomitant of a theory that has placed abstract humanity in the position once occupied by the proletariat. However, the category of ‘universalisability’ does not provide criteria for moving from this description of the whole of society to a critique of its oppressive parts.25 It is incapable of dealing with intractable material interests. The category of universalisability works effectively when the issue is grounding specific rationalities. However it is incapable of specifying priorities amongst competing general concerns, material interest and confronting organisation questions.26 Stephen Bronner insists that choosing amongst generalisable interests is a substantive and political question. This is especially the case when the issues are economic inequality and intractable power


differentials. Furthermore, the social effectivity of discourse ethics depends not on insight into the rules of linguistic competence but on a commitment to put them into practice. The problem of the ‘free loader’ familiar to proponents of rational choice theory here raises its ugly countenance as an issue that remains un-addressed by Habermas’ assurances of the counterfactual status of the ethics of communicative action. We are well aware that the constitutional machinery of the liberal democratic state regularly produces real inequalities of outcome despite the existence of formally equal treatment before the courts and other arenas of political and social compromise. This fact suggests that an immanently critical theory must aspire to go beyond the formalism of the general values of our society and track the substance of their realisation. A critical theory needs more than historical and institutional points of reference like those that issue from Habermas’ Hegelian reading of immanence: it needs to grasp these values in the context of the concrete constraints and alternatives making for their practical exercise.27 Habermas’ theoretical achievement is unquestionable. He has relentlessly pursued the quest to grasp contemporary society as an integral and dynamic totality with potentials both of emancipation and threat. Against the strictures of the post-modernists, he has never lost sight of the necessity of compelling cultural meta-narratives. His theory of communicative action is a towering attempt to bring this practical cultural necessity into accord with an interdisciplinary program of philosophy and the human sciences and preserve a utopian moment duly constrained by immanence and political responsibility. Not even his harshest critics have been able to offer an alternative to his prerequisites for communicative action. This makes him a worthy successor in the tradition of Hegel, Marx and critical theory. Yet, it is questionable whether a conceptual instrumentarium drawn primarily from linguistic philosophy and functional sociology has all the equipment needed to address the problems mentioned above, preserve a critical edge and comfortably wear the mantle of contemporary critical theory. This requires all the means of conceptualising not just the general dynamics of cultural learning processes and their instantiated validity claims but also the concrete dynamics of contemporary social reality and the historically determinant quality of events. The magnitude of Habermas’ own contribution towards such a theory cannot disguise the fact that a great deal more needs to be done. Nevertheless, it is very much in accord with his spirit to acknowledge that while critical theory itself

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remains essential, it is also another aspect of the ongoing and perennially incomplete project of modernity.

Notes 1

J. Habermas, “Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter,” Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1990, p. 5.

2

J. Habermas, Theory and Practice, Boston, Beacon Press, 1973, p. 216.

3

See works by Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard and Paul Redding.

4

J. Habermas, Truth and Justification, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2003, p. 201.

5

Ibid., p. 202.

6

Ibid., p. 203.

7

J. M. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life, London, Routledge, 1995, p. 146.

8

S. E. Bronner, Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists, Oxford, Blackwell, 1994, p. 301.

9

See Habermas, Theory and Practice.

10

J. Habermas, “Conceptions of Modernity: A Look Back at Two Traditions,” Postnational Constellations, Oxford, Polity Press, 2001, p. 135.

11

Ibid., p. 136.

12

This point is well understood by William E. Scheuerman “Between Radicalism and Resignation” in Discourse and Democracy: Essays on Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms, eds. Rene Von Schomberg & Kenneth Baynes, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2002, p. 77.

13

J. Habermas, “Preface,” Between Facts and Norms, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1996, p. x.

14

On Hegel’s critique of traditional normativity, see György Márkus’ marvellous essay “Political Philosophy as Phenomenology: On the Method of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Thesis Eleven, no. 48, Feb. 1997.

15

J. Habermas, “Questions of Political Theory,” A Berlin Republic, Oxford, Polity, 1998, p. 132.

16

Ibid., p. 133.

17

Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life, p. 141.

18

Scheuerman, “Between Radicalism and Resignation,” p. 63.

19

For a more general analysis of the neglect of Hegel’s political philosophy, see Axel Honneth’s Suffering From Indeterminacy: An Attempt at the Reactualisation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Assen, The Netherlands, Van Gorcum, 2000.

20

Habermas, “Questions of Political Theory,” p. 134.

21

K. Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” The Marx/Engels Reader, Second Edition, ed. Robert Tucker, New York, Norton, 1978.

Hegel, Habermas and the Spirit of Critical Theory • 99 22

A. Honneth, The Critique of Power. Reflective Stages in a Critical Theory of Society, Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press, 1991, p. 298.

23

Bronner, Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists, p. 309.

24

See Habermas’ “Preface” to the third German edition of Theorie des Konnunikativen Handelns, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1985.

25

Bronner, Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists, p. 303.

26

Ibid., p. 306.

27

Ibid., p. 330.

Pauline Johnson Habermas: A Reasonable Utopian?

ABSTRACT Already by the mid-1980s, Habermas supposed that our utopian energies had been used up. Today, when a neoliberal ‘realism’ seems to be a virtually dominant ideology, the climate appears, if anything, yet more hostile to radical hopes. Even while he recognises the obstacles and is clear that we might never succeed in breaking through the ‘Gordian knot’, Habermas is not prepared to surrender to a proclaimed ‘end of politics’. This paper traces some of the ways in which his recent works theorise and attempt to balance twin legacies of a critical theory tradition. Habermas wants to mediate the radicalness of vision required by a critical theory with the perceived reasonableness of its standpoint that is also necessary if theory is to engage concrete actors. Many of his critics suppose that Habermas has not achieved the right balance and that his interest in the self-reforming potentials of liberal democracies weights reasonableness too highly. The following paper sets out to defend Habermas from some of these charges. However, ultimately it finds that his theory has identified the needs for autonomy that it seeks to critically connect up with too narrowly. This means that, to some extent, Habermas’ critical theory continues to ‘miss its mark’. KEYWORDS: Habermas, Critical Theory, Utopianism, Enlightenment, Romanticism

A few years back Habermas wrote the following: “The list of problems that confront anybody who reads a newspaper these days

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can, of course, only change into a political agenda for a public which maintains a degree of trust in the possibility of a conscious transformation of society—and which in turn can be entrusted with it.”1 This statement identifies the frame within which his engaged theory works. Habermas’ critical theory attempts to turn our problems into political agendas by helping us to reflect on the sense in which the present is able to act upon itself in terms of chosen values. This is a hybrid project that seeks to cross the exuberance of utopian thinking, which tries to open up alternatives for action, with historical thinking, whose saturation with actual experience seems destined to criticise utopian schemes. The fusion of future directed utopianism with a legacy of conscious historical thinking is not a mutual betrayal but an acknowledgement that, in an age that sees itself as dependent exclusively on itself, utopianism needs to be rehabilitated as a “legitimate medium for depicting alternative life possibilities seen to be inherent in the historical process itself.”2 Modern utopianism holds out hope not by “spinning out fantasies”3 and not by offering us a mere “dream without a method”4 but by its ability to help us interpret how a better future might be built from the ambiguous potentials of the present. Habermas does not minimise the extent of global problems, “the deprivation and misery of whole regions come to mind,”5 and he is only too aware that capitalist states oversee a structural violence within their own borders.6 He is, moreover, convinced that in an epoch dominated by neo-liberal ideologies, the vitality and focus of the new social movements has been lost to a mood “somewhat depressed, somewhat clueless the whole thing washed over by technopop.”7 Despite all this he continues to describe his theory as informed by ‘remnants of utopianism’. This is not a matter of a wilful optimism. Indeed, Habermas considers that optimism and pessimism are “not really relevant categories.”8 What is at stake is an interpretation of the appropriate role of critical theory. The older Adorno famously described critical theory’s loss of any hope that emancipatory potentials might have lodged themselves with modern public and institutional structures and its growing reliance on the unredeemed promise of art, culture and philosophy as equivalent to “throwing out a message in a bottle.”9 This is not a metaphor that Habermas can be comfortable with. It doesn’t suit him because he thinks that critical theory must engage. It has the task of connecting up critically with what ‘particles of reason’ it can uncover in the everyday praxis of modern democratic societies.

Habermas: A Reasonable Utopian? • 103

The theorist can’t be assured that these potentials will be taken up and developed. All that theory can do is to help concrete actors reflect on the choices that can be made. For Habermas, critical theory needs to extend our reflections on our capacity to make our own histories by clarifying the ambiguities in an Enlightenment commitment to the production of rationally self-legislating futures. A trade off seems to be built into a contemporary project of forging a utopian and engaged theory. If the hope for a future that is better than the past is to pass itself off as a reasonable aspiration, as one that we can do something with, it has to appeal to motivations that are recognisable within the conditions of a present in which a culture of reconciliation and accommodation seems to have seized the upper hand. As Maria Márkus has pointed out, if the horizon of the utopian perspective is “removed too far from the actuality of a given society, its mobilizing action-orienting effect might easily be lost.”10 At the same time, if it is to offer its perspective on the possibilities for a conscious transformation of society as a utopian hope, critical theory must help us to reflect upon futures that are sufficiently different from the present to be worth making the effort for. An engaged critical theory appears to be caught up in a zero sum game played out between the radicalism of its hopes and their reasonableness. Many of his critics are persuaded that Habermas’ critical theory has not managed to strike the right balance. They are convinced that he has given away too much and that his hopes are too moderate, too ‘joyless’ to be able to help us to develop a political response to our list of problems. Jeffrey Alexander, for example, thinks that the ‘rationalist bias’ of Habermas’ standpoint is too bound up with the search for continuities to effectively contest the fatalism of the age.11 Joel Whitebook12 and Martin Morris13 find more inspiration in Herbert Marcuse’s unreasonable transformative hopes than in Habermas’ sober attempt to reconstruct the neglected potentials of ambiguous Enlightenment legacies. The general complaint is that Habermas’ critical theory suggests an interpretation of ambiguous modernising potentials that is too blinkered and that fails to recognise the range of radical, emancipatory needs that have been unleashed. The following paper will explore some different formulations of this critique and weigh up their justice. The first part will elaborate aspects of Habermas’ recent formulation of his on-going interest


in the prospects of liberal democratic societies for substantial self-reform. This is a project that seeks to reconstitute the misunderstood normativity of such societies as the grounds of largely untapped critical motivations. In the last few years, Habermas has re-set the terms of his immanent critique to include an account of the prospects for translating neglected liberal democratic normativities into terms able to guide the creation of a globalised public sphere. Next I will weigh up two distinct critical assessments of Habermas’ capacity to adequately recognise and respond to the diverse character of emancipatory needs loosened by ambiguous modernisation processes.

Immanently Critical Potentials of Liberal Democracies First published in 1992, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy has been targeted as betraying a comfortable reconciliation with liberal democratic realities.14 Critics of the book suppose that Habermas upholds the attitude of a safe democratic reformist whose critical impulses have been eroded by the many concessions he has made to the real-existing political order of liberal democratic states. Habermas considers his own project as an attempt to unblock the radical implications of expectations that are counterfactually presupposed by the incompletely theorised normativity of liberal democratic politico-legal-institutions (the law and the constitutional state). The unblocking of these significances requires, in the first instance, a challenge to the adequacy of competing dominant interpretations of the foundations of legitimate political and legal power in liberal democracies. A liberal model appeals to already achieved rights invested in private subjects, the republicans suppose that political legitimacy refers to the already established will of a self-sovereign public. Against both, Habermas maintains that a comprehensive interpretation of the normativity that underpins politico-legal institutions in liberal democracies refers to their function as the formal, decision-making end of a public sphere that has its other axis in the informal processes of will and opinion formation in an active civil society. There is, he insists, an internal, not just contingent, relation between the rule of law and democracy. Habermas is not pretending that the normal operations of politico-legal institutions in liberal democratic states are exclusively or primarily governed by the task of responding to communicative flows of a modern public sphere. However, the point is that, while the liberals and


the republicans refer the legitimacy of liberal democratic institutions back to descriptions of supposed already achieved private or public rights, a comprehensive, dialectical interpretation of this normativity refers to the procedures through which a public will forms itself via the argumentative interactions between private subjects. Habermas builds his synthetic account of the potentials of the liberal and the republican models of democracy into an analysis of a complex set of interdependencies that govern the relations between informal processes of collective opinion and will formation and the administrative and decision-making functions of the political centre. He refers to this as a ‘two track’ model of representative democracy. The informal or ‘unorganised’ public sphere does not appear in the first instance as a set of institutions but as a “network for communicating information and points of view.”15 It describes processes whereby problems, formerly encountered privately, are attached to reasons through which their generalising significance can be recognised. In pursuit of their ambition to facilitate the shift of expressions of private dissatisfaction into the terms of effective claims, public spheres must then be “anchored in the voluntary association of civil society and embedded liberal patterns of political culture and socialisation.”16 Habermas’ account of the genesis and the reproduction of the informal public sphere describes the democratising potentials of the exercise of an interactive rationality in which legitimacy is generated via processes of argumentation. These finally appeal, not to the authority of tradition or power, but to a set of consensually elaborated principles. While discourse theory represents itself as a paradigm that has emerged from a reflection on the limits and a selective appropriation of the insights of rival theoretical reflections on liberal democratic normativity, Habermas also claims that his theory offers a conceptual elaboration of learning processes whose results are felt elsewhere: in the complex and ambiguous ‘lived’ histories of post-War democracies. Reformist practices evident in the functioning of the constitutional state and legal order suggest that each has learnt in the course of the twentieth century from inadequate, one-sided, descriptions of their normativity. For Habermas, the internal relation between the rule of law and democracy has been practically grasped by self-reforming constitutional states and legal institutions within liberal democracies in the


wake of the manifest failures of alternative descriptions of the sources of the legitimacy of the law. The disintegration in post-traditional societies of collectively binding ethics and world-views allows socially integrative functions not picked up by the steering mechanisms of money and bureaucratic power to be, partly, taken up by the law and constitutionally organised political systems.17 In such societies, the law stabilises behavioural expectations and “simultaneously secures symmetrical relationships of reciprocal recognition between abstract bearers of individual rights.”18 Between Facts and Norms suggests that the nature of the demands that this role of social integration places on the rule of law finally exposes the inadequacy of one-sided descriptions of its sources of legitimacy and fosters the practical recognition of its internal relation with democracy. In the post-War period the politico-legal systems of liberal democracies have been forced to respond to the empirical criticisms of marginalised populations at the exclusionary practices built into their legitimating selfdescriptions. These criticisms led to reformist practices that were based, not on a change in the normative premises of the state and the law, but only on the hidden presumptions of “a more abstract reading of them.” The post-war welfare state compromise was just such a self-reforming response to the constitutional state. Under conditions of organised capitalism dependent on the government’s provision of public infrastructure and planning, the idea that the legal order and the constitutional state could draw their legitimacy from their protection of a universally available capacity for self-determination was disclosed as a fiction. It became evident that, just as the socialist critique of liberal ideology had long protested, the universal right to equal individual liberties could no longer be guaranteed through the negative status of the legal subject. The constitutional state responded to this crisis by introducing the new category of basic rights which recognised that legal permission to do as one pleases is worthless without real freedom, the actual possibility of choosing between alternatives. This newly acquired responsibility of the welfare state in the distribution and protection of basic, not merely formal, rights did not complete the selfreforming tendencies of the post-War politico-legal systems in liberal democracies. The ‘golden age’ of the welfare project was to see a contradiction emerging between the goals and the methods of key liberal democratic


institutions. The self-described ambition of these institutions was to open up the ideals of individual self-realisation and the pursuit of private autonomy via the establishment of forms of life that are structured in an egalitarian way. But evidently the paternalism that clings to the welfare project also compromises the pursuit of this goal that cannot be reached via the direct route of putting political programs into legal and administrative form. The contradiction that is inherent in the post-War welfare state compromise has provided an excuse for winding back these reforms. Yet it can also provoke pressure towards a democratising reinterpretation of the welfare project in which private individuals seek practical and institutional support for their claim to be recognised as the legitimate interpreters of the rationality of their own need claims. Habermas by no means predicts that learning capacities unleashed within liberal democratic societies will engineer a victory for their potentials for rationality. Indeed, the final chapter of Between Facts and Norms seems to suggest not much hope that the tensions between the facts and norms that are necessary to the self-critique of liberal democracies can survive powerful counter-ideologies. Habermas discusses the extent to which a normative defeatism aggressively promoted by market ideologies seems to dominate the landscape of the future.19 The tension between normativity and facticity has all but collapsed and the habitual functioning of the system appears as “the unavoidable result of structural changes in state and society”;20 for all that, in a complex society developmental trends remain ambiguous. The discourse theory of democracy explores the challenges facing a critical politics aimed at investing the democratic potentials of really existing liberal democracies with effective, agenda-setting, power. Habermas insists that the pathway of double-sided communicative flows between informal, probleminterpreting negotiations operating within civil societies and formal problemsolving functions of a political centre need to be unblocked. This is not a task for a totalising, transformative politics but is a matter of making the most of the self-reforming potentials of liberal democratic institutions. Habermas considers that some of the self-reforms that have occurred within liberal democratic constitutional and legal systems clearly show that the internal relation between democracy and the rule of law can be seized as a radical, emancipatory potential. He is, for example, impressed by the way in which


Western feminist politics has exploited the self-critical capacities of institutional structures within liberal democracies.21 Empirical criticisms directed both at ascribed legal definitions of equality and at the paternalism of an undemocratised welfare state project has seen marginalised populations occasionally achieving practical recognition by liberal democratic institutions that those who are affected can best clarify the ‘relevant aspects’ that define equality and inequality in a given matter.22 Habermas’ attempt to make liberal democracies accountable to the democratic possibilities they sustain has been seen by some of its critics as too accommodating, as too uncritical of deep structural problems within these societies. The objectors fall into two major camps. On one side, there are those like William E. Scheuerman and John Sitton who suggest that Habermas has not broken sufficiently from liberal attempts to justify liberal democratic arrangements by an appeal to a constitutionally supported ideal of private right. The argument is that he does not acknowledge the extent to which the capacities and dispositions required to effectively participate in processes of democratic will formation have been eroded by the dominance of money and bureaucratic power in capitalist democracies. Habermas needs to offer a more searching account of how capitalist domination undermines democratic deliberation and to suggest how “some alternative to existing capitalism alone can allow deliberative democracy to flourish.”23 Others maintain that Habermas is too much the republican; they insist that the rationalist bias of his efforts to retheorise the normativity of liberal democratic societies means that he is too engaged with the search for the terms of consensual understandings to recognise the diversity of radical needs that might energise a critical politics with utopian motivations. In both cases, Habermas is accused of failing to get right the balance between the radicalism of hopes for a better future, required by the utopian motivations of critical theory, and their reasonableness, necessary to its engaged character.

Reconciliation with Liberal-Democratic Realities? Habermas has never been inclined towards a totalising politics devoted to the cause of the revolutionary transformation of capitalist democracies. His hopes lie with a project of radical democratic reform that seeks

Habermas: A Reasonable Utopian? • 109 a new balance between the forces of societal integration so that the socialintegrative power of solidarity—the communicative force of production— can prevail over the powers of the other two control resources, i.e. money and administrative power, and therewith successfully assert the practically oriented demands of the lifeworld.24

This agenda in no way contests the claim that radically unequal life chances distributed systematically by the market undermine the capacities of whole populations to operate as effective participants in democratic processes. This much even the post-War welfare compromise had acknowledged. The Keynesian project recognised that the market could not be relied upon to universalise the conditions of autonomy and had attempted to intervene, paternalistically, to make good this deficiency. While Habermas endorses the general ambitions of a welfare project that makes public authority responsible for securing the conditions of private autonomy, he stresses that we need to cease reproducing the contradictory logic that helped to erode the legitimacy of welfare states. The first point is, then, that Scheuerman and others overlook the extent to which Habermas’ attempt to rescue the democratic processes of a modern public offers itself as a critique of, and as a response to, the unequal life chances distributed by the logics of capitalism. Habermas makes quite clear his view that: “[f]rom the viewpoint of representation and ‘qualification for citizenship’, it is already important to secure the factual preconditions for equal opportunity to exercise formally equal rights.”25 The task of securing the “factual preconditions” for equal opportunity may, he believes, in some contexts require a basic guaranteed income which would permit the material basis for citizens’ self-respect and political autonomy to be “made independent of the more or less contingent success of the private individual on the labor market.”26 Habermas asserts that the radical potentials of the question posed by the welfare project: “how much strain can the economic system be made to take in directions that might benefit social needs, to which the logic of corporate investment is indifferent,” remain substantially untapped.27 The underdeveloped and embattled project of a democratised welfare system holds out the hope that democratic citizenship might ‘pay off’, not simply in terms of liberal individual rights and rights of political participation, but also in terms of the enjoyment of social and cultural rights.28 Habermas makes the point that: “[d]emocratic citizenship can only realize its integrative potential—that


is, it can only find solidarity between strangers—if it proves itself as a mechanism that actually realizes the material conditions of preferred forms of life.”29 Is this commitment to the democratisation and extension of the welfare project radical enough to effectively counter the force of Scheuerman’s objection? Scheurerman and Sitton are convinced that there can be no accommodation between the imperatives of capitalism and the expectations of democracy. The steering capacities of the former will always trump the practical conditions needed to realise the latter. Sitton stresses that the compromise agenda embraced by Habermas betrays the essentially revolutionary character of a project aimed at realising the conditions of a properly democratic state against the legacies of capitalism. Habermas fails to grasp the point that “the authenticity and effectiveness of the public sphere requires that we recognize that reason without revolution is not possible.”30 Yet Habermas has no time for a Jacobin politics in which a professed utopianism abandons the attempt to locate itself as a concrete potential of the present. For him, the history of the twentieth century has demonstrated the real dangers of any attempt to eradicate achieved structural differentiations within modern societies in the name of usurpation by politics of all steering functions. Scheuerman’s more moderate version of the critique is that Habermas’ proposal to offer his critical theory as a reconstruction of the neglected and misunderstood potentials of really existing liberal democracies fails to suggest any galvanising images of a radically transformed, better, future. He specifically objects to the seeming political timidity of Habermas’ proposition that social change responsive to new needs must be tempered by an attitude of ‘cautious experimentation’. Scheuerman thinks that a politics that responds to oughts that are framed within terms set by liberal democratic institutions cannot stir the imaginative leap, the free deed, of emancipatory political action. He is particularly at a loss because, as he sees it, Habermas fails to provide any specific illustrations of what might count as an imaginative refunctioning of existing institutional arrangements within liberal democracies. However, Between Facts and Norms does contain some, admittedly quite limited, imagery of the kinds of political actions that might count as an exemplary exploitation of tensions between the facts and the norms of within liberal democracies. As previously mentioned, Habermas counts the partial success


of feminist attempts to get legal recognition for newly established needs and rights as an illustration of how the interface between the layers of a modern public sphere can be negotiated in the direction of a democratic reform of the welfare project. Perhaps, then, it is not so hard to suggest examples of the imaginative refunctioning of liberal democratic institutions that might confirm the radical potentials of the internal relation between law and democracy referred to by Habermas. When in 1992 the High Court of Australia responded to a civil action and granted legal recognition of native title claims to traditional lands it seemingly clarified the Court’s capacity to function, not simply as protector to already achieved rights, but as, in the words of Axel Honneth, a mechanism for the distribution of “depersonalised social respect.”31 Scheuerman is not alone, though, in his misgivings about the lack of creative political imagery in Habermas’ account of the potentials of liberal democracies for self-reform. While Stephen Bronner acknowledges that “Habermas is a brilliant theorist of liberal democracy,” he insists that the “time for defensiveness has passed. A certain boldness is becoming increasingly necessary.”32 This type of assessment of the hesitant politics of Between Facts and Norms would, perhaps, now accept that Habermas’ recent contributions to the debate over the prospects for a trans-nationalisation of the public sphere do suggest that his critical theory is capable of a certain boldness. His proposal for an internationalisation of a democratic welfare project charged with the mission of politically taming an increasing globalised economy might well be described as a courageous vision. Habermas insists that it is now time to recognise that “‘Keynesianism in one’s own country’ just won’t work anymore” and that political institutions on the supranational level that are able to deal with the problems unleashed by the globalisation of commerce and communication, of economic production and finance need to be developed.33 The challenge is to try and translate the complex ‘two tracks’ of an informal opinion-forming sector of the public sphere and the problemsolving functions of a formal-legal centre into terms adequate to the new international scope of the democratic project in a globalising world. This project would require a radical refunctioning of existing international political institutions. Yet even this daring proposal for a globalised public sphere is anchored in Habermas’ conviction that the horizons of desired futures must be set by our


reflections upon the ambiguous potentials of our histories. Unlike Ulrich Beck and others, Habermas thinks that the task of building a global public needs to be guided, not by new normative commitments that seek to break with the idealisations that sustained the democratic politics of the nation states, but by a learning process that reflects upon the achievements, as well as the real limitations, of liberal democratic institutions. Habermas suggests that the emergent political structures of a globalised public do not face tasks that are different in kind from the difficulties that were confronted by democratic nation states in forging rational solidarities of citizens across diverse and unequal populations. We can learn from the successes as well as the mistakes of the nation states about how best to mobilise allegiances and set up structures adequate to the project of building a trans-national democratic politics. More is required of such an undertaking than the, in any case enormously difficult, task of building democratically constituted political-legal institutions at an international level. As already noted, Habermas insists that the project of globalising modern democracy requires nothing less that efforts to build a trans-nationalised welfare project. Yet are the critics correct that Habermas fails to finally get the balance right between the future oriented utopian commitments of critical theory and its ambitions to practically connect up with the present? We seem to be engaged here in a controversy in which subjective political taste will always want to have the last word. However, we can take the discussion somewhat further as an immanently critical analysis of Habermas’ attempt to reconcile two dimensions of a critical theory legacy via a project aimed at determining the potentials of liberal democracies for radical self-reform. It can again be emphasised that, for Habermas, the critical theorist is not in the business of providing blue prints. Indeed, nothing, he has said, makes him ‘more nervous’ than the suggestion that critical theory proposes an ideal of a rational society towards which we are to proceed.34 Communicatively acting subjects are the legitimate interpreters of their own needs and aspirations and all that theory can do is to help clarify the significance and implications of choices they make about the potentials of the present. Yet, even though Habermas abjures the role of legislator, his diagnosis of ambiguous modernisation processes might well be seen as providing a restrictive grid through which only particular constructions of our needs for autonomy can hope to pass and achieve recognition for their general political significance. Only those needs that are


able to establish their generaliseable significance, hence the reasonableness of their claims, can be embraced by the utopian agendas of Habermas’ critical theory. It seems that Habermas’ commitment to an expanded account of an incomplete Enlightenment project leaves his critical theory unable to respond to Romantic interests in autonomy that also claim recognition as radical needs that have been loosened by ambiguous modernisation processes.

Tensions Between Romantic and Enlightenment Legacies Habermas supposes that, in contrast to the one-sidedness of the dialectic of Enlightenment thesis, his own description of modernity’s ‘unfinished project’ of democratic Enlightenment indicates a real appreciation of diverse modernising trajectories. He seeks to expand our comprehension of the complexity of Enlightenment rationalising potentials and to promote the normativity of an interactive rationality that underpins the legitimacy of democratic power against the hegemonic tendencies of an instrumentalising reason. Yet some of his critics point out that this attempt to widen the interpretation of its rationality potentials fails to capture the full extent of Enlightenment’s impact on the scope of modern motivations and needs. They stress that a Romantic consciousness that is resistant to rationalising Enlightenment demands is also a powerful modernising legacy. A Romantic interest in autonomy signals a determination to interrupt, not complete, the rationalising project of modernity. It craves recognition for the beautiful uniqueness of sovereign particularity and discovers an intolerable authoritarianism in the Enlightenment’s insatiable demand for reasons. To be sure, Habermas himself has insisted that the reproduction of utopian energies requires the mutual integration of distinct types of emancipatory needs.35 He made this point quite clearly in his early discussion of the need to incorporate two separate types of transformative energies in the radical reform agendas set by the German student movements in the post-1968 period. While the utopianism of his own post-War generation wanted to redeem and to critically re-appropriate liberal democratic principles that had been shattered in Nazi Germany, Habermas recognised that these idealising investments in the potentials of democratic procedures found an important ally in the transformative motivations of a new generation that was calling for recognition of unconventional identities and their novel priorities. Habermas advised


that the meeting place for these two sets of radical needs could be found in a shared rejection of any complacent appropriation of the significance of the German past. Yet Martin Beck Matuˇstík is not persuaded that the utopianism of Habermas’ critical theory does adequately integrate distinct emancipatory needs. Habermas fails, in Matuˇstík’s view, to speak to the transformative hopes of the new social movements in terms that correspond to their own understanding of their utopian energies.36 Habermas brings himself to endorse the creative impulses of new social movements, bearers of novel identity needs, only insofar as, these transformative longings are finally “willing to become pacified by democratic procedures, law and civil order.”37 Matuˇstík is, in my view, right to point out a problem in Habermas’ attempt at a synthesising integration of double-sided utopian potentials. Habermas considers the significance of transformative longings in terms of the critical motivations they can contribute to a revitalisation of the ideal of the selfreforming society; he interprets the lasting significance of these energies in terms of the contributions they can make to a creative appropriation of neglected liberal democratic potentials. However, this attempt to synthesise a utopianism committed to the self-reform of liberal democracies with Romantic transformative interests in the liberation of new identities from all normalising conventions seems to supply the latter with an alienating telos. It is an imposed perspective on the significance of self-interpreted needs that have, in many cases, shaped themselves through resistance to the limiting construction of the ideal of autonomy suggested by liberal democratic normativity. Modern feminism’s misgivings about the adequacy of an immanently critical appropriation of liberal democratic traditions to the full range of the needs and hopes the movement carries are manifested in the enduring ties it has forged with some ‘unreasonable’ variants of post-modern theories. The danger is that if critical theory offers itself as a site of integration between emancipatory interests that are experienced by social actors as irreducibly distinct kinds of goals, then alienation between the theory and its addressees might take hold. This would not only deplete the relevance of the theory but also cut short a necessary dialogue between two types of emancipatory needs that could vitalise contemporary utopian energies. Habermas’ totalising purposes sees his critical theory slide from a merely interpretative role to one that ascribes an alienating end-goal to supposedly ‘undeveloped’ or ‘immature’


self-interpretations of emancipatory needs. A symmetrical danger also needs to be acknowledged. Theory that simply surrenders to the demand that it connects up with the already-achieved self-understandings of the everyday risks sacrificing any analytic and critical power. Yet perhaps we need to allow rather more here to the capacity of separate interpretations of the need for autonomy to develop insight into their mutual dependencies. Defensiveness about the distinctiveness of emancipatory needs does not entail blindness about the conditional character of their goals. As Jeffrey Alexander comments, it is quite possible that specific transgressive needs and identity claims are able to keep the exhilarating novelty of their identity claims in view while recognising the dependence of such claims on institutionally embedded pluralistic and egalitarian principles.38 While the energies of movements concerned with issues of, for example, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality draw substantially on the transformative needs of evolving particularistic identity descriptions, Alexander nevertheless thinks “it would also be strange if the energies of the sphere-specific idealizing movements did not inform, and were not periodically sustained by, some reference to a broader and more unifying ideal.” Perhaps it is its capacity to help foster awareness of this ‘strange’ affinity, co-dependence even, of two irreducibly distinct interpretations of the idea of an autonomous self-determining life that sets the main challenge for an engaged critical theory today. Habermas’ account of the role of critical theory as interpreter to the neglected ambiguous legacies and radical potentials of Enlightenment reason ultimately narrows the range of radical needs that the theory can effectively engage with. His supposition that the self-expressive, Romantic impulses of transformative politics offers a ‘useful training ground’ for a politics bent on the creative re-appropriation of liberal democratic normativity can only alienate utopian energies that have also played a significant role in the ambiguous cultural and political histories of post-Enlightenment societies. If critical theory relinquishes a synthesising mission and conceives itself instead as a sounding board for an exploration into the affinities and dependencies of quite distinct types of utopian motivations, it can place itself as a timely commentary on the dangers of the unchecked development of each and as an interpretive framework through which each might recognise the benefits of creative collaborations in terms consistent with the integrity of separate determinations of the meaning of autonomy.


We have seen that Habermas suggests that a sceptical, reforming interest in the re-appropriation of a liberal democratic normativity can be promoted and vitalised by drawing upon the critical energies supplied by transformative emancipatory needs. It is also clear that he is persuaded that the bearers of transformative needs must be willing to respond to the requirement that the reasonableness of their claims upon shared and scarce resources, including the resource of tolerance, be justified. In the end, the expression of transformative longings requires protection from principles of plurality and equality just as their claims upon these principles promises to rework them, describing them with new and complex meanings. So Habermas does suggest some persuasive reasons why distinct interpretations of emancipatory interests need to take into account claims raised by alternative constructions of the meaning of autonomy. Yet these reasons remain inadequately exploited as reasons that are capable of shaping the developmental path adopted by each as long as a Romantic interest in the untrammelled self-expression of concrete particularity is simply represented as an episode within the rationalising trajectories of the developed utopian ambitions of democratic Enlightenment. Lesek Kolakowski makes the point that if contemporary utopian energies are to be revitalised we need to encourage a productive interchange between two relatively distinct types of motivations. As he sees it, open and decent modern societies need both ‘digger’ utopians that dream of a world of unfettered self-realisation, and ‘healers’, sceptics interested in a reflective appropriation of chosen continuities. It is the latter who attempt to: “keep us vigilant . . . not to let us be carried away by wishful thinking.”39 Unlike Habermas, Kolakowski does not encourage us to try and harmonise these diverse impulses within modern utopian thinking. We need to bear their differences in mind and to seek, not the subordination of one to the other, but an attitude mindful of their tensions and of their complementary commitments. As Kolakowski has said, ‘We need them both.’

Notes 1

J. Habermas, “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy,” The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001, pp. 58113, p. 59.

Habermas: A Reasonable Utopian? • 117 2

J. Habermas, “The New Obscurity: The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies,” The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historian’s Debate, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1989, pp. 48-70, pp. 48-50.

3

Ibid., p. 54.

4

Ibid., p. 50.

5

J. Habermas, “A Dialogue With Jürgen Habermas,” in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori, Chicago & London, The University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 25-43, p. 35.

6

Ibid.

7

Habermas “Learning from Catastrophe/A Look Back at the Short Twentieth Century,” The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 2000, pp. 38-58, p. 48.

8

J. Habermas, “Europe’s Second Chance,” in The Past as Future; Jürgen Habermas Interviews by Michael Haller, ed. P. Hohendahl, Lincoln & London, The University of Nebraska Press, 1994, pp. 73-99, p. 97.

9

L. Lowenthal “The Utopian Motif in Suspension: A Conversation with Leo Lowenthal,” An interview with W. Martin Luddke, in An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Lowenthal, ed. Martin Jay, Berkley, University of California Press, 1987, p. 237.

10

M. R. Márkus, “Decent Society and/or Civil Society?” Social Research, vol. 68, no. 4, Winter 2001, pp. 1011-1029, p. 1024.

11

J. Alexander, “Robust Utopias and Civil Repairs,” International Sociology, December 2001, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 579-591.

12

J. Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory,

13

M. Morris, Rethinking the Communicative Turn: Adorno, Habermas and the Problem of

Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1995. Communicative Freedom, New York, State University of New York Press, 2001. 14

J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1996.

15

Ibid., p. 360.

16

Ibid., p. 366.

17

Ibid., p. 448.

18

Ibid., p. 449.

19

Ibid., pp. 429-30.

20

Ibid., p. 430.

21

Ibid., p. 374.

22

Ibid., p. 420.

23

W. E. Scheuerman, “Between Radicalism and Resignation: Democratic Theory in

118 • Pauline Johnson Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms,” in Discourse and Democracy: Essays on Habemas’s Between Facts and Norms, eds. von Schomberg and Baynes, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2002, p. 69. 24

J. Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. C. Calhoun, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1992, pp. 421-462, p. 444.

25

J. Habermas, “A Conversation about Questions of Political Theory,” in Jürgen Habermas: A Berlin Republic Writings on Germany, ed. P. Hohendahl, Cambridge UK, Polity Press, 1998, pp. 131-158, p. 150.

26

Ibid., p. 142.

27

J. Habermas, “What Does Socialism Mean Today?”, After the Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism, ed. Blackburn, London, Verso, 1991, pp. 25-47, p. 39.

28

J. Habermas, “The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship,” in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, eds. Cronin and de Greiff, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1998, pp. 105-129, pp. 118-119.

29

Ibid.

30

J. Sitton, Habermas and Contemporary Society, New York & England, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, p. 156.

31

A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Cambridge, Polity, 1992.

32

S. E. Bonner, Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists, Oxford, Blackwell, 1994, p. 285.

33

J. Habermas, “Learning from Catastrophe? A Look Back at the Short Twentieth Century,” p. 51.

34

J. Habermas, “A Reply to My Critics,” in Habermas: Critical Debates, eds. J. Thompson & D. Held, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1982, p. 235.

35

See for example, M. Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas, UK, Polity, 1984, p. 467.

36

M. B. Matuˇstík, Jürgen Habermas: A Philosophical-Political Profile, Lanham, New York & Oxford, Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, p. 184.

37

Ibid., p. 128.

38

J. C. Alexander, “Robust Utopian and Civil Repairs,” p. 586.

39

L. Kolakowski, “The Death of Utopia Reconsidered,” Modernity on Endless Trial, Chicago & London, The University of Chicago Press, 1983, pp. 131-146, p. 136.

Shane O’Neill Critical Theory, Democratic Justice and Globalisation

ABSTRACT One way of providing a focus for critical theory today is to articulate those substantive and robust norms of egalitarian justice that would appear to be presupposed by the idea of a republican and democratic constitutional order. It is suggested here that democratic justice requires the equalisation of effective communicative freedom among all structurally constituted social groups (SCSGs) and that this will have far-reaching implications that entail the deconstruction of all social hierarchies in both domestic and global orders. This argument is presented in three sections. The first defends the focus on groups rather than individuals in theorising democratic justice. The second intervenes critically in contemporary debates surrounding the theoretical relation between various aspects of justice including the demands of redistribution, recognition and political empowerment. The third turns to the challenges for critical theory presented by a complex and multifaceted process of globalisation and it defends a qualified form of cosmopolitanism and highlights the need for a radical democratisation of the international order. KEYWORDS: Critical Theory, Equality, Democracy, Justice, Social Groups, Globalisation

Critical theory is concerned with human emancipation. But what can emancipation mean in this increasingly complex world of late modernity? As always, it means liberating

120 • Shane O’Neill

people from whatever causes them to suffer unnecessarily. The main causes of unnecessary suffering are the ways in which social, political and economic structures create, reproduce or exacerbate inequalities between groups of people, whereby some enjoy greater and more effective liberties than others in seeking to realise their full human potential. One way of providing a focus for critical theory, therefore, is to ask what might be involved in creating and maintaining a set of structures that could deliver equal and effective liberties for all. Given the continuing significance of the constitutional state in late modernity, this project is best understood in republican terms, as the realisation of a democratic form of life in which free and equal citizens engage one another in the collective task of autonomous self-governance. I want to begin by drawing attention to four basic features of democratic selfrule that have been explored recently by critical theorists, particularly in the model of democracy that has been elaborated by Jürgen Habermas.1 1) Inclusive public discourse releases communicative power as citizens engage one another in the open and unrestrained practice of discursive will-formation. 2) Constitutionally grounded decision-making procedures should be sensitive and responsive to the public sphere by ensuring that this communicative power can be effectively transformed into legitimate law. 3) The legitimacy of any formally generated outcomes will depend on the quality of the process of democratic will-formation. 4) The relevant standard of evaluation should be that the process is driven by reasons that free and equal citizens can come to share through public deliberation, and not by structural conditions that deny some social groups equal and effective opportunities to exert political influence. The effectiveness of our democratic procedures depends on the realisation of conditions of maximal social inclusion by securing equal and effective political liberties for all citizens in our constitutional arrangements. I will argue that this republican account of democratic legitimacy presupposes a substantive and robust conception of egalitarian justice. We can refer to the key principle of justice involved to require the equalisation of effective communicative freedom for all structurally constituted social groups in any constitutional state.

I will refer here to a structurally constituted social group as an SCSG. If an inclusive and vibrant form of democratic self-rule is to be achieved in modern

Critical Theory, Democratic Justice and Globalisation • 121

societies then it will depend on the creation of a social structure that allows all SCSGs to exercise their equal rights and liberties to good effect. This means that all SCSGs should have equal access, relative to the size of the group, to the informal flow of communication that filters through to the formal legislative process. An egalitarian social structure is, therefore, a precondition for the inclusion of all citizens as effective participants in the democratic process. Justice, as the equalisation of effective communicative freedom, requires the deconstruction of all hierarchical relations between SCSGs, a project that has radical implications for all modern states in terms of political empowerment, fair distribution and due recognition of particular group identities. No structural inequalities can be tolerated in such a democratic order since all SCSGs should be free to articulate their own perspectives on matters that affect them. Furthermore, they should be capable of articulating their distinctive perspectives with equal effectiveness. All SCSGs should, in other words, have ‘equal voice’, relative to their size, in public discussions about matters of shared concern. In this essay I will first ask why it is appropriate to focus on SCSGs rather than individuals in assessing the demands of democratic justice. Then I will outline briefly some key aspects of the demands of justice that are presupposed by the idea of inclusive self-government, and I will comment on some recent debates on such matters within contemporary critical theory. I will then turn to one of the main challenges facing any form of emancipatory politics today. This is the complex and multifaceted process of globalisation.2 The assumption that sovereignty resides in nation-states has been a distinguishing feature of the modern era but it has been clear for some time that the golden age of the nation-state as the lynchpin of political life has now passed. Stories of the demise of the nation-state remain, however, for now at least, fanciful exaggerations. Yet it is clear that the opposition between domestic and international politics is constantly being deconstructed in practice. The structures of the global order impinge ever more forcefully on local structures as all boundaries between the state and the global order in economic, cultural and political senses have become increasingly porous. If we are to take the republican project of radical democratisation as a normative guide to an emancipated form of life, then we need to conceive of it in a way that acknowledges the global transformations that have been experienced throughout the world in the later modern era.


A Non-Essentialist Conception of the Structurally Constituted Social Group John Rawls took the basic structure of society to be the primary subject of justice since the effects of this on the life-chances of any individual are so “profound and present from the start.”3 Rawls did not deliver an adequate account of social structures.4 Nor did he free himself sufficiently from liberal individualistic commitments that prevented him from getting to grips with the vital role that SCSGs play in democratic life.5 While social groups seem to appear in his version of political liberalism as those who share reasonable comprehensive doctrines, there is little appreciation of the non-discursive origins of many groups, or of their identity-forming power and the dynamics involved in democratic interaction between them.6 Nonetheless Rawls had, from the early stages of his career, correctly identified social structures, rather than say individual entitlements,7 or cultural traditions,8 to be the appropriate focus for theorists of justice. Individuals clearly stand in relations of relative advantage or disadvantage to other individuals as a result of their social location within the basic structure. This consists of the main political, economic, social and ethno-cultural institutions and arrangements in society, even if Rawls never considered directly issues or cultural or ethno-national justice. These various aspects of the basic structure intersect one another and impact on one another in complex ways that require, as we will see, sophisticated and analytically differentiated forms of critical exploration. The main point here is that each of us occupies a specific location within this basic structure from the start of our lives and while we grow and develop a clear view of our strengths and weaknesses, goals and aspirations, our social location can change quite considerably during the course of our lifetime. So too can the structures themselves change over time. While it is clear that many social structures are, within one generation at least, relatively stable (examples might be relations constituted by class, gender or racial differences), all can potentially be disrupted and modified though changing patterns of individual activity. Social groups are ‘structurally constituted’ if members are differentiated from one another by a social relation that impacts profoundly, and from the start of their lives, on the chances they have of realising their full potential. From the perspective of an account of justice, then, the key focus must be on the fact that the basic structure of all modern societies creates


and produces inequalities that result in the historical formation of relatively stable hierarchical group relations. SCSGs emerge historically, therefore, as a result of the inegalitarian consequences of particular aspects of the basic structure.9 So while golfers and tennis players could be referred to loosely as social groups, they are not SCSGs since they are not structurally differentiated from one another. It is hardly questionable to suggest that the impact of the basic structure on the lives of golfers and tennis players, as collectivities, has in most contexts been broadly similar. The same could not be said of relations between children born into families at opposite ends of the income spectrum, or between men and women, or gay and straight citizens. All members of any one SCSG (X) have had their life-chances affected in a similar way as a result of the operation of some aspect of the basic structure. Other citizens, who have been affected in very different or opposing ways by that same aspect of the basic structure, will also form an SCSG (Y), one that stands in a hierarchical relation to X. For this reason citizens who are members of X will share a common interest, one that will be opposed to the interest shared by members of Y, at least with respect to whatever particular aspect of the basic structure is the source of the differentiation of X and Y. Each member of X, and the same will go for Y, is also likely to see the commonality they share as a significant identity-forming bond, an affiliation that feeds into each one’s sense of self. Apart from class, gender, race and sexual orientation X could be differentiated from Y on the basis of religion, membership or immigration status, age, or ability/disability, amongst other things. It should be clear by now why we should seek to equalise effective communicative freedom among SCSGs rather than individuals. In democratic politics SCSGs play a vital role in mediating between the individual and the political community as a whole. We are focusing here on structural relations between groups rather than individuals, because it is these hierarchical relations that are the primary obstacles to the achievement of justice. Since individuals are always situated in a network of group affiliations, group memberships are unavoidable features of each individual’s identity-forming context. Furthermore, the structure of these affiliations is often the source of social antagonism and of conflicting political demands. These affiliations motivate citizens to engage in political activity and they help to shape the political agenda by engendering


particular struggles for justice. The sparks that keep the motor of democratic politics running are generated by SCSG relations and not by individuals as such. Individuals suffer social injustice (as opposed to say criminal injustice) not as individual people per se but rather as members of particular SCSGs. This is not to deny, however, that there are serious dangers attached to any normative analysis that relies on groups rather than individuals.10 Each of us has multiple SCSG affiliations and it is up to us individually to work out what kind of priority the various affiliations that are constitutive of our individual identities should be given at any particular time. No self-styled ‘group-leader’ can dictate to other group members that the source of that particular affiliation must take priority in their lives whether that is asserted as a necessity for a certain historical period, or indeed forever. Marxists, feminists, gay activists, leaders of black liberation movements, and of religious, national or ethnic groups—each have provided examples of how this kind of group essentialism can become oppressive of group members. It is dogmatic and oppressive to insist that national liberation must take priority over the demand for gender justice, or that resistance to religious or racial discrimination must be subsumed into class struggle, or that gays and lesbians who do not put first the struggle to end all forms of discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation are somehow disloyal to their group. Not only should it be left to each individual group member to work out how high a political priority to give to that particular affiliation, there must also be scope to distance oneself completely from the group. This potential is always present since individuals may find themselves drawn to a place where their priorities change and their identities shift. This might be due to new influences in personal relations with non-group members, or with a new awareness of a different group affiliation that cuts across that which had hitherto seemed most significant, or through a sense of no longer ‘belonging’ in the same way as before due to some perspective altering encounter with others that allows one to see things differently. All of these experiences lead us to relativise the importance of any specific SCSG affiliation. In certain circumstances such identity development could lead to an individual exiting a particular SCSG although this is more likely for groups structured by class, membership status or religious differences than gender, race, sexual orientation, age or ability.


The upshot of this is that we can only make adequate space for individual autonomy in this normative analysis of the requirements of justice if we operate with an anti-essentialist conception of the SCSG. It must be acknowledged that SCSG memberships are constituted by basic social structures, that they motivate political activity and shape the environment in which politics operates. In this way SCSGs, as noted earlier, play a crucial mediating role in the project of realising democratic justice. Yet SCSG memberships, if conceived of rigidly, dogmatically or in an essentialist manner, are potentially oppressive. For this reason, justice requires that ways be found to ensure that those who seek to represent group interests politically are accountable to all SCSG members. The equalisation of communicative freedom among SCSGs must be accompanied, therefore, by strong provisions for individual rights and by measures that ensure substantive equality of opportunity for all individuals. These civil rights should secure for each citizen adequate protections from discrimination and from all forms of identity-based oppression, whether they come from members of ‘other’ groups or from internal elites within their own group. We should not make the mistake of allowing the pursuit of equality to lead to a bolstering of internal group relations that are oppressive of some SCSG members.11 Having guarded against the dangers of essentialism by reiterating the central role that individual rights and equality of opportunity play in this account of democratic self-rule, it does, nonetheless, make sense to keep the focus of justice on SCSGs. We should seek to ensure that those groups, and not each individual citizen, enjoy equal and effective communicative freedom in democratic discourse. SCSGs will be made up of a range of diverse individuals with a wide range of talents, abilities and interests. Only some of these people will want to spend much of their time engaging in political activity and only some will have the leadership qualities and talents required to be effective in pursuit of the group’s political objectives. And while it is vital that individual group members are empowered to call their leaders and representatives to account, it is the group perspectives that will contribute to those forms of public discourse that feed into the legislative process. The important point is that if we are to achieve an effectively vibrant democracy then the perspective of each SCSG must be articulated clearly and effectively by some of that group’s own representatives on any issue that matters importantly to them.


We should eliminate any structural or systematic advantage that makes it more likely that members of one group will have the reasons and arguments put forward by their representative accepted or taken up by others. The reasons and arguments must speak for themselves if the outcome is to be democratically just.

Recognition, Redistribution and Basic Democratic Capabilities Effective communicative freedom can be understood in terms of the basic capabilities that are required if SCSGs are to engage constructively in public discourse. The idea of basic capabilities is central to the perspective on equality and justice that has been developed by both Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, but here we need to focus directly on democratic capabilities.12 If we are to equalise effective communicative freedom then we need to identify what basic capabilities are required that will empower SCSGs to articulate their perspectives on matters of mutual concern. Citizens who seek to articulate and represent their SCSG perspective, while engaging constructively in democratic debate, require at least three basic capabilities associated with political agency. We can refer to these as agenda-setting, assumption-questioning, and claim-evaluating capabilities. First, it is important that citizens from each SCSG in society should be able to contribute to the democratic agenda by introducing new themes into political discourse and by raising public awareness about issues that affect them, particularly those that impact on them in a disproportional way. Secondly, they should be able to question effectively any unwarranted assumptions or prejudices that dominate current discourse and that result in them, or other SCSGs, suffering a deficit of due respect. Thirdly, they should have the necessary cognitive skills that allow them to evaluate critically a variety of competing claims, including the ability to adopt a selfcritical perspective toward their own claims.13 As was noted earlier, inclusive justice requires not only that all SCSG perspectives must be taken into account, but also that they are articulated with equality of effectiveness. Only equality of effectiveness can ensure that outcomes will be just, as just outcomes should be driven by the weight of reasons put forward in discourse and not by the systematic advantages that one group may have over others.14 A focus on capabilities encourages critically minded social scientists to design research projects that assess the relative


effectiveness of various SCSGs with respect to the basic citizen capabilities of setting agendas, questioning widely held assumptions and participating in the critical evaluation of competing claims. From a normative-theoretical perspective, the priority is to help set such a critical research agenda by identifying the major structural inequalities that disadvantage some SCSGs by denying under current arrangements equal opportunities to influence the political process. Clearly the social structures that require critical attention include political, economic, cultural and other relations that differentiate SCSGs. There have been a number of important debates among influential critical theorists in recent years exploring various ways of analysing the requirements of justice. These have focused in particular on the relative merits of redistribution and the recognition of collective identities. Iris Young includes normative claims with economic and cultural dimensions in her account of five faces of oppression: exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence.15 Yet Nancy Fraser accuses Young of failing in her account of justice as the ‘politics of difference’ to integrate adequately recognition and redistribution, and of giving undue weight to the cultural recognition of group identities at the expense of the politics of redistribution.16 Fraser identifies potential tensions between the demands of recognition and redistribution and she puts forward the idea of ‘participatory parity’ as capturing more effectively the notion that economic distribution and cultural recognition are two irreducible aspects of justice.17 While many injustices will have both distributive and recognition related dimensions to them, Fraser believes that each can ultimately be traced back to either the economic structure or to the status order. Participatory parity requires that all citizens can interact with one another as peers and this provides a critical standard that can help us to order these claims. According to Fraser, just patterns of economic distribution provide the objective preconditions for participatory parity, while the intersubjective preconditions are provided by a just status order of cultural values. Young responds to this critique by suggesting that Fraser’s model exaggerates the tension between cultural and economic struggles for justice and that she relies on an implausibly sharp distinction between the demands of recognition and those of redistribution. Young perceives an unhelpful dualism in Fraser’s approach, and she suggests that too many different forms of injustice are


thrown together into the categories of the economic and the cultural and that this overlooks other forms of injustice to do with law or citizenship for example, that might be better described as being political.18 At the same time, in her more recent work, Young herself acknowledges that there is a danger that an over-emphasis on cultural differences may distract theorists of justice from their focus on those deep structural cleavages that are the source of entrenched political conflict.19 On the other hand Fraser has also engaged in recent debate with Axel Honneth, with the latter claiming that the concept of recognition, if properly differentiated, provides normative grounds for the critique of all forms of injustice including those associated with economics and distribution. Against this claim, Fraser insists that recognition is only one aspect of a larger social and systemic complex.20 What are we to make of these disagreements? It seems that all the participants in the recognition/redistribution debates share the aspiration to articulate and defend a substantively egalitarian account of justice that would be appropriate to a radically inclusive communicative democracy. All acknowledge there are various different forms of structural injustice and that these include material inequalities arising from the economic sphere as well as inequalities of status among identity-groups that arise from the cultural realm. Fraser is right to argue that the demands of recognition and of redistribution are not always in harmony and that to focus only on one would be to undermine some important struggles for justice. Furthermore, it is important to see that most significant injustices have, among other features, distributive and recognition-related aspects to them. There, does, however, seem to be little gained by insisting that we theorise the demands of justice only in terms of those two analytical perspectives that the categories of redistribution and recognition provide. Young is right, therefore, to suggest that a multi-faceted critical analysis is required. This allows us to tease out the various different aspects of structural injustice that could all be loosely connected to the economic realm: exploitation, deprivation, marginalisation and powerlessness for example. It also facilitates the critical analysis of structural injustices that seem to require say political empowerment as opposed to either redistribution or recognition as a primary remedy. Structural inequalities that concern decision-making processes, the operation of legal procedures or access to communication networks come to mind. It is clear that we need to maintain a flexible and


context-sensitive approach to the critical analysis of the multiple and complex forms of injustice in modern societies. By arguing for the equalisation of effective communicative freedom for all SCSGs I am hoping to provide an overarching conception of justice that is specifically directed to the achievement of a flourishing discursive democracy. Fraser’s notion of ‘parity of participation’ and Honneth’s idea of a just ‘recognition order’ also seek to provide some such overarching perspective on justice. The emphasis I place on equalising communicative freedom for SCSGs gives a shaper focus, however, to the necessary connection between democracy and justice, and to the central mediating role that SCSGs play in democratic politics. Furthermore, and in this I follow Young, my account should not be taken to imply that there is a determinate set of analytical perspectives that can help us to interrogate current injustices. For Honneth mutual recognition is all while Fraser argues for the perspectival dualism of recognition and redistribution. Such categories may constrain critical analysis unnecessarily by distracting us into tracing all injustices back to the recognition order or by assessing them all through economic or cultural lenses. If we focus our efforts on assessing how communicative freedom is to be equalised for all SCSGs by assessing the basic capabilities of political agency outlined above, we needn’t restrict ourselves in this way to these potentially limiting explanatory matrices. We should rather remain open to the possibility that most injustices will have multiple aspects and that each must be interrogated critically in context-sensitive ways that avoid reducing the complexity of the issue under consideration. Regardless then of the analytical perspective we adopt, it seems clear that the effort to equalise communicative freedom for all SCSGs will initiate a program of radical social transformation. The task of critical social science is to detail how such a program might be achieved.

Meeting the Challenge of Globalisation: Toward a Just International Order We now need to turn to the challenge of globalisation. I will assess briefly how the account of democratic justice I’ve defended here might apply at the global level. It is now impossible to theorise justice or democracy without attending to this multifaceted process of globalisation and to the complex


problems it generates. These include poverty, hunger and malnutrition and their relation to international trade, debt and North-South inequalities, war, systematic human rights abuses, international terrorism, cultural/national/ religious/ethnic conflicts, environmental degradation, gender inequality and HIV/Aids. From the perspective of critical theory, the challenge ahead is to democratise the process of globalisation by allowing all those affected by the transnational economic, cultural and political order to participate fully in managing these processes. But how are we to conceive of the equalisation of effective communicative freedom as a demand of justice, if the domestic and the international can no longer be distinguished from one another in ways that most assumed possible for much of the modern era? Must the project of radical democratisation we have been considering now be presented as a strongly universalist, cosmopolitan vision for a post-national era, or does the constitutional nation-state still have a significant role to play in achieving just democratic structures at a global level?21 I suggest that we should not think of this question in either/or terms but rather we should give partially affirmative answers to both of its parts. In order for the project of democratising complex processes of global transformation to get off the ground, progress is needed on two levels. First, we require a stronger global public sphere, a forum that can, by mobilising citizens across national boundaries, take some aspects of politics into a postnational realm.22 This global public sphere, which came alive for example in the protests across the world during the build-up to the 2003 war in Iraq, plays at the transnational level a similar role to that of the national public sphere within the constitutional state.23 Transnational groups and non-governmental organisations mobilise around issues of common concern and they mount protests and make demands on behalf of the world’s most vulnerable people. While activists and leaders of these transnational groups must remain accountable to all those they represent, their effectiveness depends on their developing the basic citizen capabilities required to set political agendas, question widely held assumptions and engage constructively in the critical evaluation of competing claims. But if this process of transnational deliberation and opinion formation is to be transformed into an effective system of just global governance, then we also need progress at a second level, that of the nation-state and the international political and legal order.


There is a tendency in the work of cosmopolitan theorists of a global civil society, to overlook the significance of institutional agencies of political transformation.24 Yet institutional networks of political and legal equality at both national and international levels are essential to the project of radical democratisation. We need to be wary of the danger that some demands for equality within the constitutional state could be undermined if the nation-state itself is bypassed as a site of political struggle. An exclusively post-national focus for protest might deprive disadvantaged SCSGs within states of some important opportunities to achieve justice. This occurs whenever talk of globalisation is allowed to obfuscate certain domestic hierarchies, thus rendering them more difficult to challenge and dismantle. Furthermore, since most transnational activists are based in relatively privileged Western societies, there is also a danger that new hierarchies will be introduced at global level and that these will further weaken and marginalise citizens of less privileged states by making them vulnerable to intervention from richer states.25 The governments of many ‘enlightened’ Western societies are more than happy to ride roughshod over the democratic will of less developed countries when it is in their interests to do so and they can use cosmopolitan arguments that undermine the sovereignty of these weaker states to rationalise such neo-imperialistic intervention. It would seem, therefore, that the international legal order, with its formal assumption of equality between self-determining states, may in some respects, offer better protection to the world’s least privileged people than would a complete abandonment of state sovereignty in favour of a Western dominated form of transnational politics. This is not to say that key international organisations such as the United Nations are not in need of radical reform, but rather to point out that vulnerable peoples may find a more effective voice through international as opposed to global networks of communication. So while it is vital that transnational organisations enjoy effective communicative freedom in articulating their perspectives, it is perhaps even more urgent that we attend to the current global structure of inequality between states. It is clear that national governments, and some supranational institutions like the European Union, remain the dominant actors in world politics. In fact, under current circumstances, only they can respond effectively as agents to the issues and problems that are brought to our attention through deliberation within global civil society. It is states that wage war on one another and states that


intervene militarily in other sovereign jurisdictions, sometimes on humanitarian grounds but often not. States negotiate treaties, or obstruct negotiations, on trade and international debt, the environment, global health concerns, gender inequalities and human rights. Without a constructively co-operative dialogue among nation-states and between them and non-governmental organisations, then little progress is likely on the agendas that are most pressing for many transnational groups and the people they represent. Only some such inclusive system of international co-operation can get to grips with the key challenges of the global era. The main obstacle to the emergence of this system of international co-operation is the current global basic structure. Just as SCSGs stand in relations of relative advantage or disadvantage to one another within the basic structure of a constitutional state, so nation-states stand in such relations to one another within the global basic structure. States can be considered, therefore, in the context of the structure of the global order, to be analogous to SCSGs within one constitutional state. So long as they remain accountable to their people, state representatives will play an essential role in the task of managing the process of global transformation and in establishing a just system of global governance. Indeed the identity-forming power of nation-states as legally constituted communities is such that on most issues of global significance they satisfy the demand for inclusion that forms the basis of legitimate democratic politics much more effectively than Western dominated transnational groups could do. States play a vital role in mediating between their domestic SCSGs and the global political community. We should, therefore, seek to equalise effective communicative freedom among constitutional nation-states in order to set in place an inclusive international dialogue that can begin to bring processes of global transformation under democratic control. Structural inequalities among nation-states are, however, so stark at present that this system of co-operation, with its promise of just global governance, has little or no chance of being established. When the outcome of international negotiations is driven by the systematic advantages that one participant enjoys over others as opposed to the force of reason, then we see the subversion of democratic procedures by illegitimate power. This is precisely the way the existing system of international co-operation is subverted at present. Particularly since 9/11, although things were hardly much different before that, the USA


asserts its might to act unilaterally as it sees fit in military, economic and political affairs as the one and only world superpower. It seeks support from a selected group of allies so as to increase the apparent legitimacy of its actions but has shown its willingness to go it alone if no such support is forthcoming. Organisations such as the United Nations, as currently constituted, remain hopelessly vulnerable, therefore, to the destabilising impact of power politics, and so the stronger states rule because they have the economic and military power to impose their will on others. In such a context, the warnings that might be generated by the global public sphere on a whole range of crucial issues will go unheeded. A more integrated Europe could, perhaps, develop into a normative counterweight to the dominance of the USA. This is the hope that Habermas, Derrida and several other leading European philosophers, expressed in a newspaper campaign launched at the time of the invasion of Iraq and at a delicate stage of negotiation concerning the EU Constitution.26 That counterweight to American dominance, while it would clearly represent a step in the right direction, hardly amounts to the kind of inclusive international order that justice requires. But should such a counterweight not emerge, and there is no sign of it doing so at present, then there is virtually no hope of the USA taking seriously any multilateral forms of international co-operation, at least for the foreseeable future. In spite of the apparently bleak state of affairs at present, it remains the case that the best way to meet the challenge of globalisation is to encourage the emergence of a vibrant global public sphere, and to complement it with the construction of a maximally inclusive global community of states. Each state should in the institutional context of such a global community, have equal and effective communicative freedom, relative to size of population, for its representatives to articulate its perspective on questions as to how various aspect of the globalisation process that impact upon its people should best be managed. This equalisation of effective communicative freedom represents the demands of inclusive justice at the global level and it should ensure that the outcomes of international democratic co-operation are themselves just. This then is the normative perspective that should guide any future reform of the United Nations. As well as dealing with the task of achieving this form of equality between states, while taking due account of the complex matter of differing population sizes, such reform will also have to connect this task of achieving international equality with an assessment of the quality


of democracy within each member state. Only those states that have in place effective measures to ensure equal voice for all domestic SCSGs can expect equal status in the global community of states. This is the only way to ensure that state representatives at global level are really accountable to all groups of citizens at home. Furthermore, equality in the international order will also depend on the effectiveness with which a state ensures for each of its individual citizens human rights and substantive equality of opportunity. This account of justice presents a challenge to all states, therefore, not only to those who are privileged by the political, economic and cultural structures of the current global order. The strengthening of domestic democracy and human rights provisions within each constitutional state should be thought of as a project that runs in parallel with the achievement of an egalitarian global order and a just system of international co-operation. Within such an international system the representatives of each state will be free to exercise those basic capabilities of political agency that allow them to participate fully as equals in this global dialogue. All of this requires radical transformation of the global basic structure and the next question to ask is how we are to identify what needs to be done in order to direct this process of transformation so that this normative vision can become a more realistic utopia. That will involve the kind of multifaceted critical analysis of globalisation processes that I advocated in the previous section for domestic basic structures when discussing the recognition/redistribution debates. While the injustices of the global basic structure will involve even more radically comprehensive strategies of transformation with regard to political structures of representation, the logic of economic distribution and the cultural order of recognition, we need not seek to impose any rigid set of analytical categories on this vast critical project. We should rather remain open to the multiplicity and interrelated nature of the various causes of global inequality, to the structure of any hierarchical relations between nation-states, and to the complexity of the many different remedies that might be required in order to address these injustices.

Notes 1

Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996.

Critical Theory, Democratic Justice and Globalisation • 135 2

See David Held and Anthony McGrew, eds. The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalisation Debate, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000.

3

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 7.

4

See Roberto Alejandro, The Limits of Rawlsian Justice, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

5

See Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1990.

6

See Shane O’Neill, Impartiality in Context: Grounding Justice in a Pluralist World,

7

See Robert Nozick, Anarchy State and Utopia, New York, Basic Books, 1974, and

Albany, State University of New York Press, 1997. Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights, Oxford, Blackwell, 1994. 8

See Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality, Oxford, Blackwell, 1983, and Alasdair MacIntrye, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, London, Duckworth, 1988.

9

Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 92-99.

10

Anne Phillips, Which Equalities Matter?, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1999, pp. 38-9. See also Susan Moller Okin et al., Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1999.

11

Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, Oxford,

12

Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press,

Oxford University Press, 1995. 1992, and Development as Freedom, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999; Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000. 13

See also Jack Knight and James Johnson, “What Sort of Political Equality Does Deliberative Democracy Require?” in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, eds. J. Bohman and W. Rehg, London, The MIT Press, 1997, 279, pp. 2989. See also in the same volume James Bohman, “Deliberative Democracy and Effective Social Freedom: Capabilities, Resources and Opportunities,” p. 321.

14

Ibid., pp. 302-304.

15

Young, Inclusion and Democracy.

16

N. Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Post-Socialist’ Condition, London, Routledge, 1997, pp. 189-205.

17

N. Fraser, “Social Justice in an Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition and Participation,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 1998; “Recognition without Ethics?,” Theory, Culture and Society, no. 18, 2001, p. 21.

136 • Shane O’Neill 18

I. M. Young, “Unruly Categories: A Critique of Nancy Fraser’s Dual Systems Theory,” New Left Review, no. 222, 1997, p. 147.

19

Young, Inclusion and Democracy, p. 82.

20

Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Philosophical Exchange, trans. Joel Golb, London, Verso, 2003.

21

See Simon Caney, “International Distributive Justice,” no. 49, Political Studies, 2001, p. 974.

22

Jürgen Habermas, “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy” in The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans. Max Pensky, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001, p. 58. See also Pablo de Greiff and Ciaran Cronin, eds., Global Justice and Transnational Politics, London, The MIT Press, 2002.

23

See Daniele Archibugi, David Held & Martin Kohler, eds., Reimagining Political Community, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1998; Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1998; Mary Kaldor, Global Civil Society: An Answer to War, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2003.

24

David Chandler, “New Rights for Old? Cosmopolitan Citizenship and the Critique of State Sovereignty,” no. 51, Political Studies, 2003, p. 332.

25

Ibid., pp. 344-7. See also Gideon Baker, “Problems in the Theorisation of Global Civil Society,” no. 50 Political Studies, 2002, pp. 928, 934-7.

26

Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, “Plädoyer zu einer Wiedergeburt Europas,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 31 May 2003.

Emmanuel Renault Radical Democracy and an Abolitionist Concept of Justice. A Critique of Habermas’ Theory of Justice1

ABSTRACT This paper asks whether or not normative political philosophy can face the challenge of the critique of the political.This question is addressed to theories of justice in general, but this paper considers Habermas’ position in particular. It advances the thesis that the main theoretical and political problem of theories of justice is that they have not really taken the abolitionist dimension of the concept of justice into account. As a consequence, they run the risk of reproducing in themselves the political abstraction that they should criticise. KEYWORDS: Rawls, Habermas, Justice, Democracy, Critique of the Political

Rawls and Habermas have played a great role in the rebirth of political philosophy in the last thirty years. After it was disregarded as a typical ideological discourse, political philosophy has led to the development of normative theories dealing with justice and democracy, and understanding justice principles as the presuppositions of democratic institutions. At the same time, Western democracies have experienced a growing lack of interest in politics. For Rancière this paradoxical conjunction between the development

138 • Emmanuel Renault

of political philosophy and the withdrawal of politics is nothing more than a particular expression of the incompatibility of politics and philosophy.2 But it might also be possible to argue that normative philosophy can be a means to struggle against this withdrawal. The lack of interest in the political can be understood as a consequence of the reduction of the political to merely technical questions. Rawls and Habermas provide exactly the sort of theoretical endeavours that aim to struggle against this kind of reduction in order to restore the political in its full right. But are their theories of justice truly able to develop a critique of such a withdrawal and of the social and institutional processes leading to such a disinterest in the political? There are surely many ways of explaining the disaffection towards the political. It results from a complex interplay where the globalisation of the political and of economic exchanges, the crisis of the welfare State and the growth of unemployment, as well as the pacification of public political space are at stake. But for many individuals, one result of this interplay has been the feeling of an increasing alienation from the institutionalised political sphere. In old Western democracies as well as in the new democracies of Eastern Europe, many individuals feel that the social problems that matter to them are not taken into account by political parties and parliamentary debates, so that what is labelled as political lacks a relationship with real social life; it seems difficult to consider this feeling as a mere illusion. For political philosophy, the question at stake is whether or not it is possible to develop a critique of this reduction of the political to abstraction. A philosopher like Habermas tries to fight against this reduction when he highlights the fact that democratic life is closely interconnected with collective deliberation on social justice and injustice, and when he tries to ground the project of a ‘radical democracy’ in a relation between parliamentary deliberations and the deliberative networks constitutive of civil society. But is this model of democracy able to take into account the point of view of those who feel themselves excluded from the political sphere because their claims are not taken into account? This question can be understood in a strong and in a weak sense. In a weak sense, it simply asks if the various types of existing social injustices, both those which are represented and those which are not represented in the political sphere, are taken into account by political theory. In a strong sense, it also asks whether or not the way the dominated

Radical Democracy and an Abolitionist Concept of Justice • 139

and the disadvantaged express their claims about justice and injustice is also taken into account, in other words, whether or not philosophical descriptions of injustice, contrary to those of institutionalised politics, fit in with the way the victims of social injustice feel about and express their own experiences of injustice. In this article, both of these questions are addressed to Habermas, but they could be addressed to theories of justice in general. In a first step, I show how Habermas provides indirect answers to these questions. In a second step, I advance the thesis that the abolitionist dimension of the concept of justice implies that social justice should be defined from the point of view of the experience of injustice. In a third step, I describe the problems that result from the fact that in Habermas, justice is not defined from the point of view of the experience of injustice.

I. The Critique of the Political as a Challenge It is worth noting that both Habermas and Rawls have tried to tackle the two parts of this problem. In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas points out that “a social theory claiming to be ‘critical’ cannot restrict itself to describing the relation between norms and reality from the perspective of an observer.”3 And it appears as a twofold justification of a political theory of democratic law. On the one hand, most declarations of fundamental rights are to be conceived of as reactions to experiences of injustice: “most articles in a bill of rights resonate with a suffered injustice that is negated word for word.”4 On the other hand, democratic deliberations can be understood as the process whereby individuals try to struggle against conflicts between normative expectations and social facticity: “if one conceives ‘socialism’ as the set of necessary conditions for emancipated forms of life about which the participants themselves must first reach an understanding, then one will recognize that the democratic self-organisation of a legal community constitutes the normative core of this project.”5 In this respect, Habermas’ approach is far from being equivalent with that of philosophical republicanism. If social injustices are criticised by the latter, it is either as an obstacle to political participation or as a possible cause of development of the social domination that political participation is supposed to struggle against. However, in experiences of injustice, unjust social situations are felt to be unbearable neither because they impede political participation, nor give room for the development of


social domination. Rather, they are felt to be unbearable as social situations and not as political inequalities. They are felt to be unbearable as present injustices and not as future domination. In philosophical republicanism, the social problems suffered by the dominated and the disadvantaged are criticised from a point of view that is external to their concerns. In this respect, a theory that tries to combine a theory of democracy and a theory of justice has a real advantage. This is what Habermas’ theory offers. Nevertheless, when Habermas states that a critical theory has to take into account the problems that participants reach an understanding about, instead of describing the philosophical language in which the principles of justice are to be defined, he is only introducing a methodological rule used for defining the point of view from which principles of justice are to be defined. For in his philosophy the definition of these principles rests on the theory of practical reason and not on a theory of the interests of the dominated and the disadvantaged. For Habermas, the moral use of practical reason defines the principles of democratic debates as well as the content of legitimate rights. The whole architecture of basic rights is reconstructed with regard to the moral capacity of citizens to adopt a universal point of view.6 But it is simply a fact that political claims emerging from the experience of injustice are not primarily expressed in the language of moral practical reason. Many experiences of injustice are only constituted by a feeling that a social situation is unbearable, and not by any consciousness that these situations are in contradiction with legal or moral principles. And even when such a consciousness arises, it is not necessarily within discourses or reasoning about what can be justified in respect to universality. As Honneth puts it, the social experiences that give rise to social conflicts “are not the result of a limitation of speech abilities, but construct themselves in the damaging of social expectations that are linked with identity.”7 It follows that Habermas’ theory of democracy cannot produce a critique of the abstraction of the political sphere in the strong sense. Is it able to develop a critique of political abstraction in its weak sense? Indeed, Habermas is striving to formulate in the language of practical reason claims that are about to be excluded from political space by the colonisation of market and administration.8 And, the fact that some social ills are not experienced as social irrationalities by individuals does not mean that they cannot be


described as contradictions between social situations and rational principles. Furthermore, the fact that social ills are experienced as injustices seems to legitimate Habermas’ attempt to define social criticism from the perspective of discussions about justice and injustice. Nevertheless, his approach to justice is undermined by the general problem of theories of justice (that is also the problem of theories of law). Since they assume that the issue of the definition of justice has priority over the characterisation of injustice, these theories have difficulties taking into account the features of the experience of injustice that are defining the very political meaning of justice, as well as the variety of claims emerging from the experience of injustice. However, there are good reasons to consider that, being intrinsically coupled to one another, the very notion of justice cannot be separated from that of injustice.

II. An Abolitionist Definition of Justice As with all main political concepts, justice is an abolitionist concept.9 Its meaning is not defined by an abstract reference to equality, or to universality, but by the necessity to transform unjust social situations. Since Habermas’ theory understands justice as the set of principles capable of giving a solution to conflicts between individuals or social groups, it seems able to take this abolitionist dimension into account. But in fact, such an approach reduces claims arising from the experience of injustice to claims oriented toward the enforcement of the principles that already coordinate social action.10 As a result, the experience of injustice is described as the experience of a contradiction with a principle of justification. Described in this way it loses its specific practical dimension as well as its critical potential. It is worth noting that the practical dimension of the political concept of justice is not determined only by the fact that it intersects with social justification and practical decisions, but also by the fact that justice claims emerge from the experience of unjust situations that individuals want to struggle against. As an abolitionist concept, justice deals not just with judgements on social situations contradicting principles, but also with specific practices oriented toward social transformation. These practices might be conceived of as the specific practical dimension of the political notion of justice in contrast with justification practices and decisions that are common to political, juridical and moral notions of justice. But theories of justice seem quite reluctant to


bring this practical dimension to the fore, and Habermas too gives more emphasis to collective justifications and decisions than to social practices of transformation. If justice is essentially an abolitionist concept, it is moreover because the very notion of justice is nothing else than an attempt to make explicit what is at stake in claims arising out of experiences of injustice. Outside of the specialised legal sphere, references to justice are always linked with attempts to formulate the fact that a social situation is felt to be unbearable and to explain the reason why it has to be transformed. Indeed, these attempts are political in so far as social groups differ in their evaluation of such situations. However, it is because justice is first of all a claim arising from experiences of unbearable social situations that it also can become, in a second step, a matter of political conflict. In other words, the experience of injustice has its own specific practical and cognitive resources, and the abolitionist dimension of justice should be conceived of through this specific productive dimension. This understanding of the experience of injustice leads to a particular understanding of the abolitionist dimension of the concept of justice. In theories of justice, it is only in a weak sense that justice is understood as an abolitionist concept: either because the motivations for references to justice are conditioned by unjust situations or because the uses of the notion of justice are oriented towards denunciation. Here, justice is understood as an abolitionist concept in a stronger sense: the reference to justice is nothing else but an expression of the practical reaction to lived injustice and an expression of the cognitive dynamics of claims. Not only the motivation and the nature of its uses, but the very meaning of the notion of justice depends on the experience of injustice. For a better understanding of the abolitionist dimension of the notion of justice, it might be useful to describe the role played by the feeling of injustice. The experience of injustice provides a good example of the principle according to which what matters to us is not always what we are able to describe in normative institutionalised language. It is not always possible to articulate our feelings of injustice and to explain why our problems belong to the domain of injustice. But the feeling of injustice as such strives to such articulations and explanations. In this respect, it can be considered as having cognitive


resources, or as being a claim in itself. The reference to the specific cognitive resources of feelings of injustice means that they cannot be reduced to some kind of internalisation of institutionalised principles of justice. For there is no reason to assume that feelings of justice can always be made explicit through socially valid principles of injustice, and there are situations where feelings of injustice lead to a critique of these principles and to the requirement of other definitions of justice.11 As a matter of fact, the feeling of injustice has a critical potential not only in regard to social situations, but also in regard to institutionalised definitions of the just. But for Habermas as well as for theories of justice in general, the feeling of injustice is either a sensibilisation of a principle of justice, or an inchoate matter that has to be rationally informed. In both cases, claims specific to the experience of injustice as such have to be made explicit by principles of justice elaborated independently, and the feeling of injustice has no positive contribution to such principles. Theories of justice do not take this fundamental role of experience into account, nor do they describe the specific nature of experiences of injustice. It is worth noting again that the experience of injustice is not always the experience of a contradiction with a principle of justice, but is always the experience of an unbearable situation. It follows that the experience of injustice has three components, the first of which is its qualitative aspect. A situation can fit more or less with a general principle, but it can never be felt to be more or less unjust: it is or it is not felt to be unjust. A second component is the relational aspect: individuals always relate their feelings of injustice to particular social situations. From the point of view of a general principle of justice, it is possible to speak of justice abstractly, or in relation to the society as a whole, but it is always in a particular social situation that a feeling of injustice emerges. It is only in a second step, that a consciousness of the structural causes of this particular injustice can occur and that a judgement on the whole society can be formulated. A third component results from the first two: it is the dynamic aspect of such an experience. The situation felt as unbearable is not only perceived as unjust, the experience of injustice is also the place of a practical reaction against injustice and offers the possibility for new understandings of the social normative principles that are associated with this situation. The very meaning of the political notion of justice rests upon these qualitative, relational and dynamic components of the experience of injustice. It


implies that the political meaning of justice is coupled not only to a definition of the political as a critique of social situations and of their justifications, but also to the political as social transformation. I have already pointed out that it is a common feature of theories of justice to define justice independently of the experience of injustice, and that they understand the abolitionist dimension of justice only in a weak sense. Hence, it appears that they also run the risk of losing the political meaning of the idea of justice, attributing to it another conception of the political. Understood as a contradiction with a principle, unjust social situations could no longer be understood as unbearable, but as more or less compatible with the principle (quantitative versus qualitative approach). Understood from the point of view of the universality of a legitimate social justification, the solution to conflicts about social justice would no longer rest on the diagnosis of a given social situation, but on the general validity of the principle (global versus relational approach). And instead of being involved in attempts at transforming institutions and social relations, this solution could be conceived of as a comparison between several institutional arrangements (comparative versus dynamic approach).12 Habermas’ conception of justice gives an example of such distortions. Starting with universality, he is led to understand justice as a compromise (when consensus is not possible)13 rather than as a refusal. On the other hand, instead of starting from the relational and dynamic dimensions of injustice, he approaches the issue of particular social situations from a consequentialist perspective,14 so that he replaces the issue of transformation with that of the comparison between possible institutional arrangements. Experiences of injustice define the logical as well as the practical context of justice and theories of justice proceed to a de-contextualisation that seems problematic. This decontextualisation is theoretically problematic firstly because such theories run the risk of losing that part of the practical meaning of the concept that is linked with the practical context of effective injustices, and of confusing it with the practical aspect specific to juridical or moral concepts, and secondly, because they run the risk of underestimating the critical potential of justice claims. This decontextualisation is practically problematic since such theories lose the polemical meaning we usually give to this essential concept of political language. These problems are related to meta-political questions, that is, questions that concern the way we philosophically describe the content


of political discourse. However, the decontextualisation that is specific to theories of justice also has direct political consequences, that is, consequences that concern the content of political discourse. It leads to alter not only the form of political claims emerging from experiences of injustice, but also the content of these claims, in so far as this content is defined by particular qualitative reactions to particular social situations. If so, might it not be difficult for theories of justice to help these claims be taken into account in the public political sphere? Might it not be suspected that these political theories suffer from the same abstraction that characterises the institutional political sphere, so that politics and political philosophy could be submitted to the same critique of the political? Might it not be suspected that the rebirth of normative political philosophy should be submitted to a critique of the political and of political philosophy carried in the same move, as for example in the critique of the young Marx?15 Philosophers like Rawls and Habermas assert that political philosophy has to make explicit the normative presuppositions of modern democracies and to conceive of philosophy itself through a democratic model. But if philosophy solely reproduces the logic of democracy, might it not run the risk of underestimating the injustices and pathologies that are compatible with this logic? Shouldn’t philosophy conceive of itself not only through a democratic model, but also through a model of critique of the political abstraction characteristic of contemporary democracies? Here again, Habermas’ theory of radical democracy provides a good illustration of these problems.

III. Procedural Approach of Justice versus Experience of Injustice Habermas understands justice to mean the application of the rule of universalisation in public deliberations. For him, the rule of universalisation defines an evaluative procedure rather than a method for deducing the content of principles of justice. Nevertheless, this rule enables one to deduce a system of basic rights that contains three types of rights: the rights of private autonomy (those linked with the freedom of individual action), the rights of public autonomy (connected to the process of the formation of political will), and the social rights which are understood as rights required as conditions for exerting the first two types of rights, so that they “can be justified only in relative terms.”16


This definition of social rights constitutes a first political problem for the Habermasian theory of justice. What is meant by Habermas when he advances that these rights “can be justified only in relative terms”? At the time of their historical emergence, the interconnected ideas of social rights and social justice had the political meaning of a critique of political liberalism. What appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century as the ‘social question’ was nothing but the fact that the respect of individual formal rights (rights of negative freedom) was not sufficient to define justice. The idea of social rights had a polemical meaning since it was associated with claims that justified the transformation of society once justified by formal rights. At first glance, it seems that Habermas captures this polemical meaning. He defines social rights as the claims to social conditions that are necessary for the realisation of formal rights. Hence, he argues that a society cannot be justified only by formal rights, but also by a commitment to social rights understood as materialisation of formal rights. But the political problem initially raised by the notion of social rights was that formal rights could not provide the highest form of legitimation. The polemical meaning of the very notion of formal rights was linked to the fact that capitalist societies produce a structural conflict between formal and social rights, and that claims connected to social rights can be justified even when they seem to contradict formal rights. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, political liberalism has constantly tried to refute this socialist thesis arguing either that social rights do not properly belong to the scope of rights, or that they must always be subordinated to formal rights since they can be defined as rights only in relation to the conditions for exercising formal rights. It can also be that, from the point of view of a normative theory of law which is adopted by Habermas when he deals with this problem, social rights cannot be described other than as “materialisation of rights.”17 Nevertheless, the socialist understanding of the ‘social question’ was that social rights not only refer to the social conditions necessary for exercising formal rights, but also to the basic social pre-conditions for a good life (employment, decent wages, healthy working and housing conditions, education, and so on); the socialist notion of a ‘right to existence’ gives a good example of the irreducibility of such claims. Understood in this way, social rights are not derived from formal rights, they are defined by a set of basic goods which are the precondition for the idea of justice (in its restricted liberal meaning) and for the idea of a good life (in its broad meaning as well


as in its liberal sense in which the good is conceived of as the other of justice). Understood in this way, there is no longer any reason to state that social rights are justified only when they are compatible with formal rights. Rawls’ theory of justice is certainly the most convincing contemporary attempt to sustain the liberal subordination of social rights to formal rights, a subordination that defines the relation of his two ‘principles of justice’. Habermas’ strategy is quite different since it tries to subordinate social rights not only to liberal rights but also to political rights (with his theory of the interconnection of private and collective autonomy).18 However, by proceeding in this way, he only gives a new form to the liberal relativisation of social rights, which continues to be one of the main arguments for the exclusion of demands for social rights from the political sphere. For people who lack jobs, proper housing, or healthcare, the legitimacy of social rights is not just relative, and these rights imply demands for a transformation of social situations whose injustice is not only relative. Indeed, all demands for social rights are not justified, but they can be justified even if they contradict some formal rights. This is at least what is highlighted by those Argentinean and Brazilian peasants (Piqueteros) who claim their right to appropriate properties that belong to others, or the French social movement (Droit au logement) who argue that the homeless have a right to appropriate unoccupied houses. To decide whether these claims are justified or not is a political issue that cannot be resolved by the single principle of the priority of the just over the good, or of formal rights over social rights. Such political issues need a broadened definition of justice that plainly recognises as justified the kind of claims connected to social rights. And it is precisely because the liberal definition of the domain of justice is too narrow to achieve this goal that the liberal criteria of justice cannot be used to decide whether or not a claim of this kind is just.19 Another political problem concerns the content of what Habermas defines as the conformity to justice. According to him, it is the dynamic of dialogue that is capable of overcoming the boundaries of private interest, of moving towards consensus.20 However, in order to reach a real universality, it is required that all individuals take part in the public deliberation: “All members of the political community have to be able to take part in discourses, though not necessarily in the same way.”21 This requirement provides a theoretical argument for the struggle against all restrictions of public space, and against all the


social structures that produce such restrictions.22 However, if the public space is effectively restricted, public deliberation can no longer be considered as a political means to struggle against this restriction, and Habermas is far from considering the various aspects of this very contemporary problem.23 Moreover, it might be suspected that when a thing is subject to social contempt, the language is usually lacking to describe it adequately and also, following a feminist critique,24 that the institutionalised normative vocabulary usually expresses a structural devalorisation of subaltern activities.25 In such conditions, it is the structure of the public deliberation itself, and not only a social or institutional restriction of its dialogical dynamic, that produces the exclusion of particular claims from the political space. Here, Habermas’ political theory might be misleading since it gives a definition of justice that seems compatible with the exclusion of various claims from the political sphere. Pointing out that it is the public sphere itself that has to define the content of justice, Habermas practically excludes the claims that are contesting the normative structures which frame the debate in the institutionalised public sphere, as well as in various public spheres of civil society. Since this normative structure is tied to the general justifications of our society and of the structure producing social injustice, it might be suspected that Habermas practically excludes the claims that are politically the most radical. In this case, he would restrict the social project of radical democracy to the struggle against residual injustices, in conformity with his general interpretation of modernity as rationalisation progress. It is the logical framework itself in which theories of justice are developed that is responsible for these kinds of political problems. Habermas takes for granted that a theory of justice has to define justice from a theoretical point of view external to the experience of injustice, so that he adopts a sideways view, that of legal theory, on the political claims emerging from it. As a consequence, he reproduces in his own political philosophy the very feature he is striving to struggle against, namely the abstraction of the political sphere. Indeed, Habermas refuses to adopt the point of view of the experience of injustice because he assumes that claims have a political legitimacy only when they pass the test of public justification.26 This assumption that is fundamental for a procedural theory of justice rests upon two main theses: the first is that an experience of injustice always presupposes a principle of public justification,


the second is that principles of public justification cannot prevent the expression of political claims. Both of these theses are questionable. It is certainly a fact that experiences of injustice are always conditioned by principles of public justification. But if the feeling of injustice is socially constructed, it also has the capacity to give rise to the critique of socially valid representations of justice. And if the feeling of injustice can sometimes lead to such a cognitive dynamic of critique, it is precisely because socially valid representations of justice, as such, can sometimes be obstacles to the expression of given claims against injustice. Basically, there are three types of experience of injustice. In the first, a situation is considered as unjust because it is in contradiction with an instituted principle of justice. In this case, the experience of injustice cannot be reduced to a mere contradiction with a principle, because the situation might also be felt as an unbearable situation. But the injustice can nevertheless be expressed with the help of this principle of justice either in a public space internal to an institution, or in the political public sphere. In the second type of experience of injustice, a socially valid principle of justice can help express the injustice of one situation only if its meaning is modified. This is the case when a principle of justice is socially institutionalised in a sense which is considered as restrictive by the victims of injustice, for instance with the various historical restrictions of the right to vote (exclusion of workers, women, foreigners), and in all situations where groups claim to have a right to rights that are supposed to be universal (right to juridical protection, to work, and so on). Here, the experience of injustice leads to a critique of this restriction and to the demand for a broadening of the meaning of the principle. The political conflict takes place within the language of the public sphere itself, so that the form of public justification becomes part of the political problem instead of being solely a means for its solution.27 But the experience of injustice can also emerge in situations whose injustice is absolutely un-representable by public justification principles. It is the case with social activities that are subject to social devalorisation (for instance, care activities), in the situation of populations facing social contempt (for instance, minorities, unqualified workers, the unemployed, the homeless), or in social situations linked with the structural inequalities upon which the


whole of society relies (in modernity, work as exploited activity and not only as employment contract). Here, the very content of public justification is at stake in the injustice itself, because the un-representability of the injustice of the situation is part of its injustice. Here, the experience of injustice demands a transformation of the principles of justice and not only their broadening.28 Theories of justice are able to take the first kind of experience of injustice into account. In the other cases, it is only at the end of a dynamic process of a) reaction to injustice, b) individual and collective expression (inside the internal public space of a social or political movement), and c) struggle against other public justifications, that normative expectations (left unsatisfied in the experience of injustice) will be able to find a possible expression in the institutionalised public political sphere. In this dynamic process, principles of public justification could provide tools (in the second case), but they could also constitute obstacles (in the third case). This is the reason why it might be useful to adopt the point of view of the experience of injustice: on the one hand, it enables us to take into account the qualitative, relational and dynamic dimensions of political claims; on the other hand, it also enables us to develop a critique of the principles of justification that are obstacles for an expression of political claims raised by the dominated and the disadvantaged. For the philosophical understanding of justice there is only one way to face the challenge of the critique of the political and of political philosophy: it is to transform theories of justice into the theory of the experience of injustice.

Notes 1

I wish to record my gratitude to the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion at Macquarie University (Sydney) where I was invited as a Visiting Scholar (JulyAugust 2004); to the Humboldt foundation who financed my stay for one year at the Institut für Sozialforschung at Frankfurt (September 2004-August 2005), and to Jean-Philippe Deranty and Peter Schmiedgen who discussed previous versions of this paper.

2

J. Rancière, La Mésentente, Paris, Galilée, 1995.

3

J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 1996, p. 82.

4

Ibid., p. 389.

See also his critique of the sociological approach of Law, p. 43.

Radical Democracy and an Abolitionist Concept of Justice • 151 5

Ibid., p. xli.

6

Ibid., p. 118.

7

A. Honneth, “Die soziale Dynamik von Missachtung. Zur Ortbestimmung einer Gesellschaftstheorie,“ in Das Andere der Gerechtigkeit. Aufsätze zur praktischen Philosophie, Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp, 2000, p. 98: “moralische Erfahrungen sich nicht an der Einschränkung von Sprachkompetenzen entzünden, sondern sich mit der Verletzung von sozialisatorisch erworbenen Identität bilden.“

8

Although Habermas seems to oscillate between two models, the first which gives to public deliberation the capacity to rule bureaucratic and market mechanism, whereas in the second one, democratic institutions exercise at best a limited check on market and administrative constraints; see W. E. Scheuerman, “Between Radicalism and Resignation: Democratic Theory in Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms,” in Habermas: A Critical Reader, ed. P. Dews, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 1999.

9

In the Introduction to Spheres of Justice, M. Walzer explained that the political concept of equality is an “abolitionist concept” but he does not give a systematic function to this thesis in his study of justice. See Spheres of Justice. A Defence of Pluralism and Equality, Oxford, Blackwell, 1982.

10

Implicitly or explicitly, in so far as the communicative constraints define the normative presuppositions of social life.

11

In other words, the study of the experience of injustice doesn’t only have sceptical consequences. For a sceptical opposition to theories of justice and the study of the experience of injustice, see J. Shklar, The Faces of Injustice, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1990. A. Honneth highlights the critical power of the negative experiences of denial of recognition as experiences of injustice in chapter 6 of The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1996, but he considers the study of the experience of injustice neither as a theoretical means nor as a principle for a critique of theories of justice.

12

This last point has been made by I. M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference,

13


14

Ibid., p. 107.

15

The rebirth of normative political philosophy can justify itself through the critique

Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1990, chap. 1.

of the lack of normative foundations in the late Marx. But the theory of the late Marx is rooted in the critique of the political and of political philosophy that was developed by the young Marx. This latter critique can be addressed to this rebirth itself. For a distinction between various model of critique in Marx, see E. Renault, Marx et l’Idée de Critique, Paris, PUF, 1995. 16

Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 123; see also p. 403: “From a normative

152 • Emmanuel Renault point of view, both the materialisation of private law and the new category of social entitlements are justified in a relative sense, namely, in relation to an absolutely justified equal distribution of individual liberties.” 17

Ibid., p. 401.

18

Ibid., p. 84.

19

See E. Renault, L’Expérience de l’Injustice. Reconnaissance et Clinique de l’Injustice, Paris, La Découverte, 2004.

20

J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 17.

21

Ibid., p. 182.

22

Ibid., pp. 175, 308.

23

See Scheuerman, “Between Radicalism and Resignation,” p. 160.

24

A critique that is not really taken into account by Habermas’ discussion of the feminist critique of liberal and welfare democracies, see Between Facts and Norms, p. 418.

25

C. Gilligan, In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1982.

26

N. Fraser ’s rejection of Honneth’s theory of recognition rests also on this Habermasian principle; see N. Fraser, A. Honneth, Anerkennung oder Umverteilung, Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp, 2003, pp. 233-237.

27

J. Rancière tried to develop the theory of these situations in La Mésentente.

28

J. Lyotard tried to study this kind of experience of injustice in Le Différend, Paris, Minuit, 1984, without taking its cognitive resources into account.

Jean-Philippe Deranty The Loss of Nature in Axel Honneth’s Social Philosophy. Rereading Mead with Merleau-Ponty

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the model of interaction at the heart of Axel Honneth’s social philosophy. It argues that interaction in his mature ethics of recognition has been reduced to intercourse between human persons and that the role of nature is now missing from it.The ethics of recognition takes into account neither the material dimensions of individual and social action, nor the normative meaning of non-human persons and natural environments. The loss of nature in the mature ethics of recognition is made visible through a comparison with Honneth’s initial formulation of his project. As an anthropology of intersubjectivity combining the teaching of the German philosophical anthropologists and G.H. Mead, his first model sought to ground social theory in the natural preconditions of human action. The last part of the article argues that a return to Mead’s theory of practical intersubjectivity informed by Merleau-Ponty’s germane theory of intercorporeity provides essential conceptual tools to enable the integration of the natural and the material within the theory of recognition. KEYWORDS: Honneth, Habermas, Mead, Merleau-Ponty, Praxis, Philosophical Anthropology, Intersubjectivity

This paper aims to contribute to the question of ‘critique today’ by conducting a critical discussion of Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition, one of the most sophisticated models of critical social theory available today. The

154 • Jean-Philippe Deranty

paper’s basic question for the ethics of recognition is whether the embrace of Habermas’ radical intersubjectivistic turn has led to the loss of nature in his accounts of socialisation, social integration, and social reproduction, a loss with seriously detrimental political implications. Honneth’s theory of recognition arose from the attempt to overcome immanently some of the perceived conceptual and political abstractions in Habermas’ theory of communicative action. As this paper will argue, prominent in this immanent critique was the diagnosis of the absence of the dimension of nature, indeed a naturalistic account of intersubjectivity, in Habermas’ theory. Honneth’s diagnosis pointed firstly to the specific problem of the disembodied aspect of a communicative action, and was further developed into the major attempt at a comprehensive shift in the grounding of critical theory, from the theory of language to a philosophical anthropology along the lines of a modernised philosophy of nature with natural-scientific credentials. The political, ecological, aspect of Honneth’s shift was presented in these early studies as not just an implication, but also a central inspiration for his regrounding of critical theory. Paradoxically, however, the autonomous model that arose from Honneth’s early critical studies appears to have reproduced the loss of nature it was supposed to correct. The paper starts by following the path that led to Honneth’s theory of recognition from its beginnings as an immanent critique of Habermas’ social theory (section I). The paradoxical omissions in Honneth’s own model are then highlighted (section II). Section III suggests that a return to MerleauPonty would allow for a more substantive model in which these omissions could be corrected, whilst maintaining Honneth’s initial programme. This recourse to the French phenomenologist can be justified, I argue, from within Honneth’s own theoretical impetus, by a comparison between Merleau-Ponty’s late work and the social psychology of Mead, the crucial reference in the early development of the ethics of recognition.

I. Anthropology of Social Action An interesting way to reconstruct the stages that led Honneth to his theory of recognition is by reading retrospectively his first two books, namely Social Action and Human Nature, written with Hans Joas, and The Critique of Power,

The Loss of Nature in Axel Honneth’s Social Philosophy • 155

published in 1985. An impressive aspect of Axel Honneth’s thinking is the consistency with which he has been able to maintain the fundamental intuitions inspiring his thought. Despite important corrections and shifts over the twenty-five years since his first publications, these fundamental inspirations behind his work are still operative today. This reconstruction of Honneth’s journey towards the ethics of recognition aims to demonstrate how prominent the place of nature was in his initial project. Social Action and Human Nature offers a historical-conceptual reconstruction of the tradition of philosophical anthropology, from Feuerbach to Habermas. Anthropology is here understood in the sense of the twentieth-century German tradition, with the works of Arnold Gehlen, Helmut Plessner and Agnes Heller being the most famous references in the English-speaking world. It designates the study of anthropos in comparison with other forms of life, especially animals, as opposed to the diachronic-synchronic comparative study of the different ways of being human. The interest behind the reconstruction of this tradition of thought was anything but mere historical scholarship. Rather, applying the programme of critical theory, the two young authors justified their undertaking through the intertwinement of theory and practice, with the practical exigencies of the time providing the driving impetus for the theoretical work, the latter in turn having the task of guiding the practical: “Today, it is hardly necessary to give lengthy justifications for concerning oneself with anthropology in the German sense within the framework of the social and cultural sciences. The themes of various social movements lead all too clearly in this direction.”1 The theoretical contribution that is expected to arise from the reconstruction of German philosophical anthropology is the re-elaboration of a substantive notion of praxis, signifying both individual and social action. The key parameters guiding the reading of the ‘philosophical anthropologists’ are more or less entailed in the notion of praxis that was bequeathed by the tradition of ‘Western Marxism’, the approach to reading Marx that made praxis its central concept. The latter entails the ideas that individuals and groups are actively engaged in the reproduction and transformation of society, that society is reproduced by agents and groups struggling over the meaning of social norms, and that history is therefore an open context of action. Praxis Marxism places the accent on the agency of social groups and individuals, on the normativity inherent


in processes of social integration, on the openness of the historical field, and, as a consequence, the constitutive role played by social struggles. A reader familiar with Honneth’s later work, notably Struggle for Recognition, can easily see how much the first work published by the young scholar had already identified with amazing perspicacity and maturity the guiding threads of his later thought. The attempt at rethinking praxis implies a revision of historical materialism to identify the mistakes and illusions that hampered both previous interpretations of Marx and indeed Marx’s own thinking. The very last section of the book follows the early attempts by Habermas at a reconstruction of historical materialism. It is from Habermas’ social theory that the authors expect this successful revision of historical materialism and the redemption of praxis. In Habermas, they find the most developed current model of social theory defending a substantial notion of praxis, a defence both of the validity of the concept as such as well as of a practically oriented social theory. Habermas’ theory is premised upon the critique of the reductionism to be found in Marx’s mature writings, with his reduction of social action to the forces of production at the cost of a separate analysis of the social and cultural spheres, the sphere of the relations of production. Beyond Habermas’ critical readings of Marx, the young scholars also adopt Habermas’ conceptual framework. The call for an intersubjectivistic turn in philosophy, the concept of communicative action, and the adjunct notion of social evolution as gradual emancipation from domination, are interpreted as indispensable conceptual advances in social theory. Honneth and Joas also borrow from Habermas the thought that the correction of historical materialism, the unlocking of the transformative potential of social and historical praxis, requires recourse to anthropological arguments, a type of argument that was rejected by orthodox Marxism. In the Critique of Power, Honneth retraces in great detail the continuous line of anthropological arguments used by Habermas, from his very early attempts at a ‘reconstruction of historical materialism’ influenced by his reading of Arnold Gehlen and an anthropologically-minded interpretation of Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein, to the famous 1965 inaugural address in Frankfurt, where,2 following the ground-breaking advances made in Knowledge and Human Interests, the ‘transcendental-anthropological’ starting point of the first writings is transformed into the study of ‘knowledge-constitutive interests’.3


In Social Action and Human Nature, the authors focus critically on a different continuity in Habermas’ thought, one, however, that is linked directly with his use of anthropological arguments: his dualistic vision of society, split between the spheres of labour and interaction. Famously, in the limited context of the positivism debate, Habermas attempted to root the different types of scientific inquiry in fundamental human interests. On the one hand, “the natural sciences follow the cognition-directing interest in instrumental disposition over nature,” while on the other hand, “the social sciences allow themselves to be guided by interests in the preservation and expansion of intersubjective communication and agreement, an interest which became a matter of necessity for the survival of the species with its dependence on language.”4 Habermas generalised these epistemological considerations to make them the guiding thread of his theory of rationality and society. The “cognition-directed interest in instrumental disposition over nature” gives rise to the techniques and the natural sciences, but it also designates a dimension of rationality, the instrumental, or purposive one, and is linked to the material side of social reproduction. The other fundamental interest, the “interest in the preservation and expansion of intersubjective communication and agreement,” explains not just the emergence of social and cultural sciences, but, more profoundly, is the root of communicative reason; it is linked with the aspect of society that is best viewed in terms of interaction, or communicative understanding. Later on, the founding of social theory in an anthropology of knowledge is replaced by a grounding in universal pragmatics. But the quotation above already indicates that universal pragmatics is to some extent another form of anthropological foundation. If the interest in a communication free from domination ‘became a matter of necessity for the survival of the species with its dependence on language’, it is clear that the development of a theory of communicative action through the pragmatics of speech acts was already prepared by the first anthropological speculations. In his later philosophy, Habermas thinks of his theory of speech acts as delivering the structural invariants of all forms of human interaction. The theory of communicative reason is thus a kind of philosophical anthropology after the linguistic turn; it performs a linguistification of philosophical anthropology.5 This linguistic turn to philosophical anthropology, however, continues to underpin a dualistic


vision of society since the linguistic operations of communicative action are said to take place in lifeworlds that are opposed to the functional systems attending to the material side of social reproduction.6 The theory of the linguistic constitution of lifeworlds leads directly to the dualism of system and lifeworld, a dualism that reproduces the old dualism of labour and interaction. The second feature of Habermas’ theory of society critically highlighted by the authors is the fact that it is embedded in a conceptual reconstruction of the logic of social evolution. The interest in the developmental potentials inscribed in the structure of instrumental and communicative rationality, potentials that are, once again, conceived on the basis of “anthropologically deep-seated systems of rules,”7 led Habermas to his distinction between an evolution of society understood, on the one hand, as the norm-free and suprasubjective process of systemic complexification, and on the other, the evolution of society as ‘rationalisation of the lifeworld’. What the authors bemoan is the reconstructive method, which identifies formal levels of cognitive (instrumental-cognitive and moral-cognitive) learning, completely detached from historical events and social movements. The fundamental critical insight explaining the course of Honneth’s own model, is that both the dualism of system and lifeworld and the logic of social evolution, and worse still their combination, rob Habermas’ reconstructions of historical materialism of the very gift that was supposed to be delivered by them: namely, a rejuvenated, substantive, practically oriented theory of praxis, a theory of social action cured of historical and conceptual reductionisms and made practically relevant through its focus on communication. In the Critique of Power, one of the main critical threads followed by Honneth throughout the last two chapters is the dualism of system and lifeworld. Theoretically, it leads to the untenable fictions of conceiving of the economy and the political institutions as norm-free, and of the lifeworld as power-free domains of social reproduction. This reduces the critique of political economy and institutions to the diagnosis of encroachments of systemic logic upon the lifeworld, and subsequently to a skewed interpretation of contemporary political movements aiming at social transformation. With this, the practical relevance of social theory becomes problematic. Social Action and Human Nature emphasised more the ‘social evolution’ aspect of the critique, but the same negative outcomes were identified:

The Loss of Nature in Axel Honneth’s Social Philosophy • 159 If it were conceived as an evolutionary theory in this fashion, historical materialism would have relinquished every possibility of providing explanatory interpretations of history that intervene instructively in a present-day situation of social confrontations.8

Honneth’s project arises from the attempt to develop a social theory centred around the notions of normative interaction and social and historical agency, a reinvigorated historical materialism centred on praxis, which avoids the theoretical abstraction and practical shortcomings identified in Habermas’ social theory. With Joas, he hoped to fulfil that programme by the development of an alternative philosophical anthropology drawing on the German tradition. This tradition recommended itself because it provides a substantial fleshing out of the intersubjectivistic premise, and a full characterisation of praxis. The work of Arnold Gehlen is the first fundamental reference point. His thesis about the evolutionary underspecialisation and lack of determination of the human organism compared to its animal counterpart accounts in powerful naturalistic terms for the specificity of human action and the biological root of culture. Human beings’ organic deficiency is compensated for by the capacity/necessity to act. With the rise of the capacity for autonomous action detached from instinctual predetermination, the triangle of inner impulse-perception-motility which characterises the instinctual response of animal organisms to external stimuli is broken. This means that through action, human beings shape their own structures of instincts, perception and motility. Ontogenetically and phylogenetically, human beings always need to cultivate their natural endowments in order to survive, or to say it differently, their relatively underdetermined first nature forces them to survive through the development of a second nature. But Gehlen, despite his emphasis on the symbolic dimension of even the most basic human capacities, continues to use a solipsistic paradigm. The second crucial reference point is therefore the work of George Herbert Mead whose central contention is that all processes of ‘self-shaping’ that compensate for organic deficiency are structured socially. Like Gehlen, Mead defends a pragmatic premise, the idea that human capacities, from perception to conceptual thinking and life in institutions, arise from the exigencies of action. But his pragmatism is combined with a most thorough defence of the intersubjectivistic


premise: that the human capacity for action, down to the simple perception of the external world, depends structurally upon a capacity to take different perspectives upon the world, a capacity which is developed only during the constitution of the self in socialisation. Whilst the gesture of grounding social theory in anthropological arguments follows Habermas’ example, the tradition that Honneth and Joas reconstruct helps to overcome the abstractions found in his social theory. It can do this because it undercuts all structural dualisms by pointing to a unique, biological precondition for all types of social action, namely the specific constitution of the human organism and the specific types of action that it enables and requires. An essential aspect of the rejection of Habermas’ social theory will therefore target the linguistification of anthropology. A significant passage of Critique of Power, summarises this quite well: Habermas’ theory leaves behind the framework in which it had originally been grounded as anthropology of knowledge. The investigation of the basic structures of intersubjectivity is directed exclusively to an analysis of the rules of speech so that the bodily and physical dimension of social action no longer comes into view.9

Feuerbach’s sensualism already gives an indication of a more fully embodied and unified account of social interaction. Before Mead, it is in Feuerbach’s ‘anthropological materialism’, viewed now as the initiator of philosophical anthropology, that one finds a powerful, alternative way of writing an anthropology of intersubjectivity that finds its roots in the ‘sensuous’ aspect of anthropogenesis, and not in language: “Feuerbach,” they write, “rehabilitates sensuous pre-philosophical experience of the world not only as the foundation, but also as the medium and end of thought,” but he also “complements the idea of a sensuousness rooted in the human organism with the notion of an a priori intersubjectivity of the human being. He was the first to take into consideration both epistemologically and substantially the significance of the specifically human structure of intersubjectivity.”10 Feuerbach is viewed as the initiator of a line of inquiry that leads to Mead and Winnicott, a tradition that is seen by Honneth and Joas as the best way to defend the communicative turn in social theory without reproducing the abstractions of Habermas’ models.


In later texts, Honneth draws out other deleterious consequences of Habermas’ exclusive focus on language, notably the deficit in critical-theoretical potential that flows on from this: subjects do not engage primarily to defend their participation in communication, but react to experiences of injustice that are often caused by non-linguistic social phenomena, and are often experienced extra-linguistically. The turn towards the paradigm of recognition arises from the necessity to retain the full hermeneutic depth of experiences of injustice. This is, however, only the critical side to a positive, alternative account of ontogenesis. The recognition model arises from the necessity to be true to the pre- or extra-linguistic dimensions of social experience. The fundamental idea is that intersubjectivity has pre-linguistic and extra-linguistic origins and is sustained not just through linguistic means but all kinds of material phenomena, notably in and through the flesh of bodies.11 For example, in primary socialisation, the recognition model points to constitutive and normative moments that occur before language. In social life, the focus on recognition takes into account all those egregious social ‘gestures’ and institutional effects that harm subjects before or beyond language. Another passage in Social Action and Human Nature which gives a good characterisation, within a specific context, of the shift from a linguistic anthropology to an anthropology grounded in the biology of the human organism is a passage in which Honneth and Joas review Helmut Plessner’s anthropological account of the human capacity to express needs and emotions. The crux of Plessner’s model is the distinction between ‘being a body’, the idea that the human being is its own flesh, as opposed to ‘having a body’, the idea that the human being is able to relate to her own body instrumentally, for instance in language and in expressive gestures. This is the distinction that Husserl drew between the body as Leib, flesh, and the body as Körper, the objectual-instrumental body. Honneth and Joas quote Habermas’ critique of Plessner and his own version of the twofold nature of the human body: “would it be more plausible to derive the structure of the mirror-I directly from the structure of linguistic communication—and the formation of the self from the acquisition of linguistic competence, in particular from the practical acquisition of an understanding of the system of personal pronouns?”12 The rejection of this linguistic approach to the human body provides one of the defining negative arguments in Honneth’s later project:

162 • Jean-Philippe Deranty Habermas is mistaken when he too hastily identifies the fundamental structure of intersubjectivity with speech. It is, ontogenetically speaking, beyond all doubt that the acquisition of the ability to identify one’s objectualinstrumental body [Körper] as properly one’s own clearly precedes the ‘practical acquisition of an understanding of the system of personal pronouns’. Similarly, it cannot be maintained that the demarcation from each other of communicative and propositional content of utterances is prerequisite for the human being’s consciousness of his bodiliness under the twofold aspect of his organismal bodiliness [Leib] and his objectual-instrumental bodiliness [Körper]. A critique of Plessner’s anthropology from the standpoint of the theory of intersubjectivity must avoid narrowing a theory directed at the basic structures of intersubjectivity down to a theory of language and must develop its critique ontogenetically . . .13

Finally, this turn towards the biological preconditions of human interaction is not solely necessitated by the immanent progress of social theory, but more generally by the political situation. In the introduction to Social Action and Human Nature, as we saw, the two young scholars noted that the new political movements that had emerged and transformed the political situation, the “ecological, counter-cultural and feminist struggles,” are all linked to the fundamental question of nature and humans’ relationship to it, nature and human nature: “The legitimacy of the question of the relationship of the human being to nature and of nature in the human being is today beyond all doubt.”14 The political imperative commands the theoretical programme: to think afresh the relationship between human and nature. The return to the bodily roots of interaction is therefore framed by the more general question of the place of the human being in nature: Our approach to anthropology regards itself as self-reflection of the social and cultural sciences on their biological foundations and on the normative content of their bodies of knowledge, considered in relation to determinate historical and political problems, and its viewpoint is that of a humanisation of nature. This is to be understood in three ways. First, the human being humanises nature; that is, he transforms it into what is life-serving for himself and thereby creates (. . .) the cultural shapings of his nature. Second, the human being humanises nature within himself in the course of the long civilisation process that has been engaged in by the human species.

The Loss of Nature in Axel Honneth’s Social Philosophy • 163 Lastly, the human being himself is a humanisation of nature, being an upstart out of the animal kingdom; in the human being, nature becomes humane.15

The anthropological basis of social philosophy has been implicitly maintained in later developments. The ethics of recognition has been attacked for its reliance on strong anthropological arguments,16 and Honneth has accepted some of this criticism by distinguishing more sharply between the properly anthropological “grounding of recognition” and the historical variability of the forms of recognition.17 But if Mead is now no longer the central reference, Honneth continues to view German philosophical anthropology as an important contribution and regularly makes passing reference to it. The later developments, however, have lost the broad character of that tradition. Honneth today uses arguments drawn from genetic psychology, not just in the specific area of the theory of the subject, but as a genetic ground for the theory of normativity, and hence for the account of social integration in general. The anthropological programme has not been abandoned, but it is reduced to a social psychology that takes into consideration only human society and human communication.

II. The Loss of Nature Despite the continuing reliance upon arguments that are anthropological in nature, the shift from the programme of a strong anthropology of intersubjectivity to the ethics of recognition is thus characterised by the abandonment of most of the ‘natural’ dimensions that gave the impetus to the programme developed in the first critical study. The ethics of recognition, whether in the shape that it took in Struggle for Recognition, or in its current version, draws its normative conclusions from a theory of ontogenesis restricted to human society (the family and the community at large). The original anthropological theory of intersubjectivity was conducted within the general framework of a philosophy of nature made relevant by the recourse to current research in the natural sciences. This framework has now been totally abandoned: it has been replaced by the perspective of genetic psychology and social psychology, narrowly understood, for the constitutive aspects of the theory, and moral psychology and moral epistemology for the normative aspects. Animals, plants, Nature, and even to some extent the human body, have lost their place in the theory, both in genetic-constitutive and in normative terms. We need to


study these two aspects separately. A third dimension of the ‘loss of nature’ linked to the first two will then emerge. 1. The shift from anthropology to social psychology narrowly conceived has been noted. In working towards the alternative solution that will be presented in the third section, it is worth our while seeing how the shift could in fact already be detected in the different readings of Mead. This will illuminate the fundamental claim made in this article: that the model of interaction that has gradually emerged as the fundamental structure upon which the ethics of recognition is built, is restricted to intersubjectivity narrowly interpreted as ‘inter-human interpersonality’. In Mead, as we saw, Honneth found, much like Habermas, “the fundamental prerequisite for an anthropology of social action.”18 This is because of Mead’s insistence on the social dependency of ego in its constitution, not just in respect of moral and epistemic learning, but also including perceptual experience. Mead offered a sophisticated, naturalistic defence of the intersubjectivistic turn. The key argument underpinning his symbolic interactionism is well known: it states that the decisive difference between animal and human behaviour lies in the fact that with human beings and their relative lack of instinctual determination, the capacity for individual and social actions emerges, actions that are not regulated through instinct. Mead explains both modes of behaviour through the capacity to ‘take the role of the other’. This is the capacity to evoke in oneself the reaction of the other to one’s own behaviour. With this capacity, the human self is able to look at his own behaviour from the perspective of the other participant in action. It is easy to see how this argument accounts for the possibility of social action understood as communication. By being able to see within himself the reaction of the other to his own behaviour, the individual is able to understand the other’s reaction and to coordinate purposefully his action to the other’s action. One can also see the normative implication of the ‘taking the role of the other’ since the self is able to judge his own actions from the perspective of the internalised Other. Even more profoundly, Mead makes this decentring of the human agent the condition for the perception of objects in the world as permanent things. It is worth dwelling briefly on this aspect of Mead’s interactionism as it pro-


vides important arguments for the direction suggested below. How did Mead propose to justify the apparently extreme thesis that, as Honneth and Joas summarised: “knowledge gained from social experience is the precondition for the synthesis of ‘things’ out of the chaos of sense perception”?19 The first element of the answer is that “the contact experience that constitutes the reality of the thing comes from the inside of the thing, and it comes from an inside that can never be reached by subdividing the thing. This reveals simply new surfaces.” Mead argues that the thing is constructed as permanent and self-identical, as having an inside, through the resistance that it opposes to handling. The resistance that the object presents to contact or action is construed as the object’s own capacity to act, behind which a quasi‘subject’, with its self-identity, must be assumed. Mead gives the following example: “We are seeking the sort of resistance that we ourselves offer in grasping and manipulating things. (. . .) It is the sort of resistance which one hand offers to the other.”20 These experiences are illuminating because in them we can directly feel, from the inside so to speak, the power to resist an external pressure. These examples, however, are also misleading because, in Mead’s behaviouristic framework, there is no privilege accorded to inner experience, no pre-given self-acquaintance. In fact, the rule that objects are constituted as one and permanent only as a result of their power of resistance applies just as well to the organisms themselves: “The inside of the thing is the same stuff as the inside of the organism. It would, however, be a mistake to assume that the organism projects this content into the object (. . .), for, in the first place, the organism is but another perceptual object.”21 Organisms become reflectively aware of their having an inside, a self-identical unity, from the resistance that objects present to their actions upon them, in exactly the same manner that objects do: “It is the attitude of pressure appearing as an inside of the object and as the reaction to this object that constitutes the possibility of there being objects and physical selves over against the objects, and which constitutes the necessity of their reciprocal character.”22 The anticipation of a power to resist on the part of an external object cannot be explained in terms of the projection of an inner experience in the external world. Mead argues that it is explained by the role-taking capacity, the capacity to ‘take the attitude of the other’ which is at the heart of the social constitution of selves: by evoking in me the potential resistance to my action of the external


object, I constitute its identity, just as my ego gradually constituted itself by integrating the expected reactions of others to my actions. Importantly, since the anticipation of resistance is an anticipation of contact (the counterpressure to my own pressure), the distance senses elicit in the organism the very flesh of the objects, their qualitative, material sensuousness. It is as if my eyes were touching the object. Honneth and Joas describe elegantly this mechanism and its implications: “the distance senses can of themselves trigger in the human organism the reaction of the sensation of resistance corresponding to the manipulation of things (. . .) The object is then perceived as an anticipated datum of contact sensation: we ‘see’ the heaviness, the hardness, or the warmth of an object from its appearance.”23 Such a ‘social’ theory of perception is clearly a powerful vindication of the intersubjectivistic paradigm since even the experience that is most obviously structured as the encounter of subject and object is shown to be structurally conditioned by capacities acquired through social experience. However, this great progress made by his theory of perception also led, I now want to suggest, to a partial, purely ‘interactionist’ reading of Mead that left out of consideration the ‘natural’ sides of sociality. It is as though Mead’s social theory of perception had been taken as definitive proof of the intersubjectivistic turn without its material dimensions being retained. The restriction to Mead’s naturalism occurs in the different readings of Mead offered after Honneth and Joas’ 1980 book, notably in The Struggle for Recognition. Chapter Four of the latter aims to provide a ‘naturalistic’ reinterpretation of Hegel’s Jena theory of intersubjectivity via recourse to Mead. However, the account now focuses solely on the question of human individuation and socialisation. Interaction and the ‘social’, which in Mead designate firstly the field of proto-symbolic interaction amongst animals,24 have been reduced to the different types of interactions amongst human subjects. Interactionism now designates purely social, human relations. Mead’s constant comparison of human and animal forms of action emphasises the fact that human capacities, and in particular human sociality, are naturally conditioned, that is, made possible by natural endowments and required by the exigencies of survival in nature. Despite the qualitative, evolutionary discontinuity that Mead indeed constantly highlights, such discontinuity is also predicated upon a more pro-


found shared condition: the naturalistic character of organisms, which to a partial yet crucial extent, is shared by humans and other organisms. In many passages of his Philosophy of the Act, for example, Mead voluntarily uses nonspecific language that can apply to both animals and humans. By contrast, the implications of the tendency to read Mead anthropocentrically become especially clear if one reflects upon the place of the body in Struggle for Recognition. Contrary to Habermas, as we saw, Honneth wants to ground social action pre-linguistically. However, it can be argued that the body, in Struggle for Recognition and in the texts following, no longer occupies the same substantial place that it had in the earlier critical study. In this study, Honneth and Joas followed Mead whose ‘naturalism’ was crystal-clear: “while minds and selves are essentially social products, products or phenomena of the social side of human experience, the physiological mechanism underlying experience is far from irrelevant—indeed is indispensable—to their genesis and existence.”25 In the mature model of recognition, by contrast, the body plays no constitutive role in the processes of social interaction. The body is integrated solely as a material dimension that can be constituted by recognition, in other words express social recognition or suffer from misrecognition. The organism is no longer the root of social action, but one of its modes of expression. The constitutive dimension of organicity seems to disappear in Honneth’s later work. With its organicity, however, the human being betrays its natural origin, the fact that, if indeed she lives mainly in second nature, this is on the basis of having a first nature that is totally in and of nature in general, however underdetermined and plastic it might be. The natural aspect of human nature makes it always closer to animal nature than anthropocentric humanisms are willing to admit. 2. The normative implications of this exclusion of ‘nature’ from the theory of social action might be serious. If the ethical is defined as the series of conditions that are necessary for the self-realisation of socialised individuals, then there seems to be little room for any ethical duties towards non-human beings, except only indirectly. The preservation of a natural environment, the protection of non-human persons from pain and death, can only feature indirectly in such a model of ethics, as duties that are called for only for the fulfilment of human beings. This is obviously important, but it seems difficult to use the


ethics of recognition to account for the feelings of wrong and even injustice that human beings feel on the part of desecrated natural sites, tortured, massacred or industrially exploited animals.26 Of course, these remarks would be made completely irrelevant by the simple rejoinder that the ethics of recognition, unlike the theory of communicative action, is self-consciously limited in scope. It does not try to offer a phylogenetic counterpart to the ontogenetic narrative; its normative parts are voluntarily limited to human interaction, without prejudging other aspects of normativity. It is clearly conceived as a localised study in social theory restricted to social action understood as human action, with no claim to generalisation about norms, and no attempt at a systematic treatment of the classical Spirit-Nature problem as found in Hegel. Such a rejoinder, however, appears rather weak when compared with the arguments presented in the first part of this article. The revival of the tradition of German philosophical anthropology was deemed necessary for reasons immanent to the development of social theory, to overcome the inherent limitations of Habermas’ communicative theory of society, and also, and more pressingly, because of the active questioning stemming from contemporary social movements. From both directions, the programme of a renewed study of the relationship of the human to nature, both inner and external nature, was presented as a theoretical-practical imperative. In particular, if the ethics of recognition sets for itself as a criterion the capacity to be practically relevant for contemporary political debates, then the failure of its theory of normativity to frame meaningfully a discussion about the challenges of large-scale, expanding, ecological destruction, or the industrial treatment of animals, presents a significant problem. The necessity to develop a political response to the ecological crisis has clearly not diminished since 1980, and therefore neither has the necessity for normative philosophy to reject anthropocentric forms of humanism and to include in its scope the question of the animal, the elements, and the environment. Honneth’s response to this criticism was formulated in advance at the very end of Struggle for Recognition, with the reference to “an ecologically based asceticism” as one of the possible political applications of the ethics of recognition.27 The same phrase was already used in the introduction to Social Action and Human Nature.28 In both texts, Honneth rejects the idea that normative


theory can directly guide political struggles. Whilst theory, as we saw, has an irreducible practical dimension, its application can only be indirect. It is up to the social and political struggles of the day, in a particular situation, to take hold of the theory’s concepts and give them their precise social and political content. The problem with this response is that, whilst the possible link between an ‘ecological asceticism’ and the theory of social action was straightforward in the 1980 book, the same cannot be said about Struggle for Recognition. The 1980 book developed the programme of a substantive anthropology of intersubjectivity understood as the study of the ‘humanisation of nature’, in which the human being was therefore understood to be immanent to nature. The ecological perspective derived directly from this viewpoint. With Struggle for Recognition, the link is severed. How the necessity to develop a ‘post-traditional solidarity’ leads to an ecological programme is far from clear. In any case, it seems to imply that nature, the animal, have ethical relevance only indirectly, for the sole purpose of human “self-realisation,” and the upholding of “individual and collective difference.”29 The ability of the ethics of recognition to account for the intrinsic normativity of nature and natural entities remains questionable. 3. Regardless of whether this critique does injustice to the ethics of recognition by blaming it for not answering questions it does not intend to consider, the restriction of interaction to human inter-personality has other detrimental implications. Our focus shifts from the place of nature in social action to the nature of interaction. By following the thread of the place of nature, it has appeared that the model of interaction that is used in the ethics of recognition has been to a large extent reduced to a form of intersubjective interactionism. The type of communication between two agents that Habermas takes as the ideal case for his studies on speech acts, and which derives from Mead’s definition of communication, provides the basic structure in which all modes of interaction are conceptualised in Honneth’s ethics of recognition. In the words of the early Honneth, it is this “social action (. . .) conceived of as a communicative process in which at least two subjects co-ordinate their purposive actions with each other through agreement upon a shared definition of their situation, effected by means of symbols.”30 As a result of this fundamental definition, recognition is conceived of purely as relation between one agent and other agents, or in fact paradigmatically as the relation between


one agent and another agent. Interaction in the ethics of recognition is reduced not just to interaction amongst human subjects, but also to interaction between human person and human person. Even in the second and third spheres of recognition, the model of interaction linking the individual with society at large is interpersonal, the relation of one person to all other persons. Society is conceived of not as ‘social fact’, but as an aggregate of socialised individuals.31 Strikingly, the early anthropology of intersubjectivity had identified this reduction of Mead’s interactionism. In recounting the reception of Mead in Germany, Honneth and Joas wrote that his association with symbolic interactionism “gave the impression that (he) shared symbolic interactionism’s restriction of action to interaction, that he too considered the natural foundations of action to be only of trivial importance, whether these were the human being’s bodily endowment with needs, or an environment necessary to life.”32 In fact, it is precisely because Mead offers a substantial theory of human action, one where the ‘natural foundations of action’ are fully integrated, that he was used as a primary reference. As the authors remarked: “Mead does not at all accord central importance to the form of action termed interaction, but rather to human beings’ manipulation of physical objects. (. . .) Mead’s goal is, then, not a theory of interaction, or of instrumental action, but the linking together of both of these theories.”33 We can only agree with this. The intersubjectivistic turn should not lead to the loss of the object.34 There might be social preconditions to the constitution of the subject, but these are combined with a direct confrontation of the subject with a world of objectivity, and with the subject herself taking the position of the object. To identify the dangers of the subject-object paradigm, of the reduction of rationality to instrumentality, should not lead to the other extreme of an abandonment of instrumentality. Indeed, another of the abstractions in Habermas that the recourse to Mead could have corrected is the dualism of the forms of rationality. In Honneth’s mature ethics of recognition, however, instrumental reason, the interest in objective, material mediations, seems to have all but disappeared. This is not the place to attempt an extensive study of all the implications of this tendency of intersubjectivism. We can restrict ourselves to indicating the type of considerations that arise from it, and thus the type of account that is currently missing in the restricted version of interactionism upon which the current ethics of recognition is based. ‘Nature’ here will no longer mean the


common ground of all living beings, it is no longer considered as natura naturans, but more simply and more broadly, as natura naturata, dynamic reality as a whole when it confronts human subjectivity. This includes matter, but also formed matter, ‘things’, objects, natural and man-made, tools and machines for instance, and even organisms viewed from an external perspective. We can use as a guide the earlier summary of Mead’s theory of perception. According to Mead, as stated, the unity of the human organism arises as the unitary reaction opposed to the pressure coming from external objects. This focus on the role of objectivity in the constitution of the subject opens a wide field of investigation to complement the existing account of ontogenesis in the first sphere of recognition. Following this indication, the study of the constitution of personal identity would also study the interactions of the young child with the world of objects: objects to manipulate, objects that hurt, objects that provide pleasure, objects to climb, and so on. This immediately draws attention to the fact that the world of objects, by contrast with the world of intersubjectivity ideally conceived as reassuring (for example, the ‘being held’ stage in Winnicott), is a world of pleasure and pain, but more fundamentally a world of challenges, where the infant gradually gains the consciousness of her self through the constant experience of her limits and vulnerability, her inability to control and overcome, or even simply to defend herself. This surely plays an important structural role in cognitive-moral learning, and not just cognitive-epistemic learning. Consequently, there might well be important ‘objectual’35 dimensions to the need of young infants, and later still of adults, to momentarily reproduce the fusion with the significant Other: the need to escape from a world that is a constant challenge and threat, a world of scarcity and oppositionality.36 More profoundly, the role of the objective world in subject-constitution might not just be limited to being the negative origin of the need for fusion, since fusion itself is structured around ‘objective’ qualities. The reassurance an infant gains from suckling the mother’s breast is made possible by sensuous qualities, a taste, a smell, a touch. This might be an important insight given the importance in Honneth’s thinking of the early experiences of symbiosis to explain the irreducible asociality of socialised individuals.37 The periodical moments of fusion are not purely intersubjective, they are also moments of sensuous fusion. The crucial thought


is that fusion can actually occur only via the mediation of objects. The object is the material condition of intersubjectivity. Without the materiality of an object, be it a body or body part, there can be no reality to the intersubjective unity. The aim of fusion, even of pure intersubjective fusion, therefore always implies the search for a paradoxical Object that no longer objects; an object that is no longer an affront and a threat to the self, but an object that can materially carry or perform fusion. This leads us to ask speculatively if there might be ontogenetic origins to the myth of the reconciliation with Nature: namely, the flight from an obtrusive world and the experiences of happy reconciliation with privileged objects?38 If we turn towards the third sphere of recognition, it is striking how abstract the social conception of labour has become in the mature theory of recognition. The normative dimension of labour is interpreted by Honneth through the ‘achievement principle’: work matters to individuals because it is the way in which they can be recognised by the community, not for their general and abstract status as subjects of rights, but for their particular competence, as contributors to the social division of labour. Again, retaining the focus on the ‘objectual’, or material, side of work might be crucial to account for the full depth of its constitutive and normative importance to subjects. This would require for instance that attention be given to the object as a product of work, and to the interaction with tools, instruments and machines, and even with matter. Recognition in the third sphere is not just recognition of skills and abilities; it is effected to a large extent via the mediation of the recognition, or lack thereof, of the product of work. To point to an important sociological fact: even when workers’ rights are formally secured, the compromising of quality and safety standards that workers are forced to accept under productivity constraints can have the same damaging psychological effects as the direct misrecognition of their skills and identity. Again, as in the first sphere, the material aspect of work, the interaction with matter, also has constitutive importance. Work as a privileged form of praxis involves a direct encounter with matter, objects, machines. These dimensions carry their own specific normative weight and create particular forms of recognition underneath the general framework of society as a whole.39 Here, we can content ourselves with the mention of the rich tradition of properly materialist accounts of praxis in the early Marx, in the post-Marxist tradition, and also in Hegel. The loss of nature is also the loss of materiality and instrumentality. An


immense field opens before the ethics of recognition if it decides to be faithful to the tradition from which it grew and to focus more strongly on the expressive and instrumental dimensions of labour.40

III. Rereading Mead with Merleau-Ponty In the current version of the ethics of recognition, Mead no longer figures as the central reference. However, he was not abandoned for his naturalistic or behaviouristic methodologies, but on the basis of Honneth’s further elaboration of his moral epistemology, and because of some of the normative implications of his social psychology. In the mechanism of role-taking, Honneth now argues, recognition is not tied to the specific quality of the agent’s behaviour, which makes it impossible to precisely identify the normativity that occurs in recognitive relations.41 The immanent critique that I have developed in this article suggests that a rekindling of Mead’s inspiration would be beneficial, but as can be seen, this suggestion does not directly contradict Honneth’s new concerns with the normative implications of Mead’s social psychology. Rather, Mead’s naturalistic approach to interaction is taken here as an exemplary attempt to retain the focus on organicity and on the role of the object within the intersubjectivistic turn. I argue that attention must also be given to the materiality of recognition, which entails a broadening of the focus, from recognition as purely intersubjective to other forms of interaction, including interaction of the subject with the object. This shift in focus, I now want to briefly argue in conclusion, would be most beneficially complemented if the ethics of recognition confronted itself once more with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s own philosophy of praxis.42 A first justification for the return to Merleau-Ponty in the context of this discussion lies in the fact that his theory of social and historical praxis defends precisely the fundamental anthropological assumptions that were presented in the first section of this article. Moreover, these assumptions also shape the theoretical specificity of ‘praxis post-Marxism’, the tradition that Honneth believes is the most fruitful for a theoretically and practically relevant social theory. Merleau-Ponty’s writings on history and politics point to a conception of history as an open field of potentialities against the reductionism of the Marxist orthodoxy of the time, and to a conception of social action guaranteeing the normative agency of social subjects.43 This concept of historical and social


action relies on a theory of intersubjectivity that was already centred on the notion of communication, a communication that is pre-linguistically rooted but finds its full expression in language and symbolic realms.44 The substantial overlaps in background theoretical premises, methodology and conclusions between Mead and Merleau-Ponty have now been well established.45 Both engage in a philosophical critique of the reductionism of modern science from the premise of lived experience. This premise, however, is not developed through recourse to Erlebnis philosophy or hermeneutics, but through a pragmatic programme based on the idea of a structure of behaviour that is not reducible to material, causal processes, yet remains dependent on the constraints of action in a given environment. As a result, they both give genetic accounts of the symbolic realms, language, culture and history, through comparative studies of animal and human forms of action and interaction.46 In line with their critique of radical empiricism, they reject strict mechanistic models of animal behaviour by emphasising the feedback aspect of instinctual reaction, which implies that, as Mead puts it, “organic processes or responses in a sense constitute the objects to which they are responses.”47 Moreover, both view animal interaction as displaying the first traits of symbolic interaction.48 Most importantly, as a result of their grounding symbolic capacities in behaviour, they both make the body ‘symbolic of the world’, as Merleau-Ponty says. Mead’s naturalistic methodology foreshadowed the rise of cognitive science with the rooting of behaviour and psychological phenomena in their neurological basis.49 The combination of naturalistic and pragmatist arguments directing the study of the emergence and construction of the moments of action in the nervous system eventually leads to the idea that all forms of human dealing with the world have a bodily equivalent, that the ‘corporal schema’ replicates the world. This was well illustrated in the theory of perception: seeing an object is ‘seeing’ its heaviness and roughness, and since contact perception is rooted in organic responses, the anticipated contact experiences triggered by vision also trigger specific postures in the organism. This is true of course of animal perception, and more importantly, there is conversely a whole animal aspect to human perception. The specificity of the human organism that enables its superior mode of perception is that it is reflexive and open: it can see itself as an organism in the world,50 and on the


basis of the ‘circuit’ (Merleau-Ponty) that it thus opens up, it can ‘pick out’ elements in the environment. The idea that the corporal scheme replicates the world, that the world is echoed in our body’s attitudes, is obviously one of the most important results of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception.51 Much of Merleau-Ponty’s late work is dedicated to working out all the implications of this central thought. The fundamental conclusion is captured in the notion of intercorporeity: on the basis of its reflexivity and openness, “the body as touching-touched, as seeingseen,”52 is the “locus of a sort of reflection and is thus able to relate to something that is not its own mass, to close its circuit upon the visible.”53 This is the aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s late work that yields its most fruitful contribution in the context of this discussion. The first advance that the notion of intercorporeity allows concerns the problem of the animal, as it helps overcome anthropocentric humanism: “We study the human being in his/her body in order to see it emerge as different from the animal, not by addition of reason, in brief in the Ineinander with the animal (strange anticipations or caricatures of the human being in the animal).”54 Merleau-Ponty makes explicit the idea that is the basis of Mead’s naturalistic inquiries: the primordial commonality of human and animal forms of action and interaction on the basis of their shared organicity, the fact that “my body is made of their corporeity.”55 Merleau-Ponty eloquently emphasises the capacity of empathy, or Einfühlung, that this common organicity gives rise to: the capacity for human beings to feel an equivalent in their flesh of what happens to the flesh of other living beings, notably of animals.56 The normative implications of this are obvious. We return to the idea of an organic grounding of interaction. With this organic grounding, the recognition of the other as a being with particular interests that I must respect is no longer limited to beings of my species. It becomes the primitive recognition, felt before it can be expressed in consciousness or language, of the other being’s interest in continuing to live and in avoiding pain, and indeed the shared pleasure of its feeling pleasure and fulfilment. In fact, Merleau-Ponty’s formulations apply particularly well to the negative experiences that make the human-animal intercorporeity so overbearing: the ability of our flesh to feel from within the fear and suffering of non-human beings.


But the capacity of the human body to empathise is not limited to living beings, to animals in particular.57 More generally, given that the ‘circuit’ of the human body closes it upon itself via the mediation of the whole perceived world, Merleau-Ponty can conclude that “the flesh of the body makes us understand the flesh of the world.”58 We saw that Mead’s theory of perception could be taken in that direction. Merleau-Ponty came amazingly close to Mead’s theory of the organic response to visual perception through the anticipation of a contact experience. He put it in terms of an essential ‘libidinality’ of human perception, the fact that perception, by dealing with the inside of things, is always a form of introjection and projection of the things in us and of us in them. He thus describes perception as “penetration, at a distance, of the sensible things by my body,” a good, condensed formulation of Mead’s theory of perception.59 The conclusion is once again eloquently put by MerleauPonty: “Einfühlung with the world, with the things, with animals, with other bodies.”60 The openness and reflexivity of the human body’s corporal schema enables it to feel in its flesh the weight and specific quality not just of other living beings, but of all sensible entities, landscapes and environment, plants, and even inert objects. Beyond the immediate normative gain that is made with the inclusion of other living beings and natural entities in the model of interaction, the fruitfulness of a model demonstrating our ‘Einfühlung with things’ is only too clear in the context of a reappraisal of the role of the object. Merleau-Ponty’s theory of intercorporeity provides the conceptual framework that is needed for re-centring the theory of praxis on its properly material dimensions. It shows why ‘things’ matter to human beings, not just as symbols of social relations, but also for themselves, in their very materiality, why human beings depend on them as necessary tools and means (mediations) for the constitution of their identity and why they even have some normative importance, one that is not (or should not be) as great as that of living beings, of course, but one that is not null either. Merleau-Ponty’s theory of intercorporeity, complementing Mead’s theory of practical intersubjectivity, gives a crucial indication as to the way in which the paradigm of recognition can overcome its self-imposed limits and include in its analyses first of all those beings and natural entities that have (or should have) intrinsic value, but also the overbearing, material weight of the world, an aspect of reality that classical philosophers, and amongst them the great theorists of praxis, never let out of their sight.


Notes 1

Axel Honneth & Hans Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, trans. R. Meyer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 1.

2

Reprinted at the end of Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J. Shapiro, Oxford, Polity Press, 1987, pp. 301-350.

3

Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power, trans. K. Baynes, Cambridge, MA, & London, MIT, 1991, chapter 7, pp. 203-239, and the beginning of chapter 8, pp. 240-247.

4

Honneth & Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, p. 154. This analysis refers specifically to Theory and Practice, Boston, Beacon Press, 1973.

5

This explains the fact that Habermas continues to use anthropological arguments in his latest books, for example in The Future of Human Nature.

6

See in particular the second series of ‘Intermediate reflections’ in the Theory of Communicative Action, chapter VI, trans. T. McCarthy, Cambridge, Polity, vol. 1, 1984, vol. 2, 1987.

7

Honneth & Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, p. 161.

8

Ibid., p. 166.

9

Honneth, The Critique of Power, p. 281.

10


11

The most explicit discussion of this shift by Honneth, from a linguistic understanding of intersubjectivity to a ‘broader anthropological analysis’, can be found in “Anerkennungsbeziehungen und Moral. Eine Diskussionsbemerkung zur anthropologischen Erweiterung der Diskursethik,” in Anthropologie, Ethik und Gesellschaft, eds. R. Brunner & P. Kelbel, Frankfurt & New York, Campus Verlag, 2000, pp. 101-111.

12

The quote is taken from the German volume Kultur und Kritik, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp,

13


14

Ibid., p. 3.

15

Ibid., pp. 9-10.

16

Christopher Zurn, “Anthropology and Normativity: A Critique of Axel Honneth’s

1973, p. 234.

‘Formal Conception of the Ethical Life’,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 26, no. 1, 2000, pp. 115-24. 17

Axel Honneth, “Grounding Recognition: A Rejoinder to Critical Questions,” Inquiry, 45, 2002, pp. 500-503.

18


19

Ibid.

20

George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Act, Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press, 1938, pp. 143-144.

178 • Jean-Philippe Deranty 21

Ibid.

22

Mead, The Philosophy of the Act, p. 442 (my emphasis).

23


24

Although he is obviously interested in human communication, Mead finds the basic structure of ‘social acts’ already in the interactions between higher animals (the famous dog-fight example at the beginning of Mind, Self and Society).

25

George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviourist, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1934, Introduction, p. 2 (my emphasis).

26

I am particularly indebted to Stéphane Haber’s enlightening discussion of the ecological in Habermasian ethics. See “Ethique de la Discussion et Réconciliation avec la Nature,” in Où en est la Théorie Critique? eds. E. Renault and Y. Sintomer, Paris, La Découverte, 2003, pp. 219-234.

27

Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. J. Anderson, Cambridge, Polity, 1995, p. 179.

28

Honneth & Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, pp. 2-3.

29

Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, p. 179.

30


31

This has been well highlighted and rectified by Emmanuel Renault, see L’Expérience de l’Iinjustice. Reconnaissance et Clinique de l’Injustice, Paris, La Découverte, 2003, especially chapter 3, pp. 179-246. The retrieval of material mediations in the model of interaction used by the ethics of recognition is the pendant to Renault’s attempt to give more weight to institutional mediations.

32


33

Ibid.

34

The critical perspective presented here therefore differs greatly from those critiques, most famously expressed by Manfred Frank and Dieter Henrich, which attack ‘a priori intersubjectivism’ on the basis of the irreducibility of subjectivity.

35

This is the term used by the translator of Social Action and Human Nature to render gegenständlich as opposed to objektiv.

36

To recall, these aspects of the ‘objective’ world which praxis has to confront have been particularly well analysed by Sartre in the first book of the Critique of Dialectical Reason.

37

See Honneth’s contribution in the polemic with Joel Whitebook, “Facetten des vorsozialen Selbst. Eine Erwiderung auf Joel Whitebook,” Psyche, 55, 2001, pp. 790802; and also “Postmodern Identity and Object-relations Theory: On the Supposed Obsolence of Psychoanalysis,” Philosophical Explorations, 2, 1999, pp. 225-242; and “Das Werk der Negativität. Eine psychoanalytische Revision der Anerkennungstheorie,” in Die Gegenwart der Psychoanalyse—Die Psychoanalyse der Gegenwart, eds.

The Loss of Nature in Axel Honneth’s Social Philosophy • 179 Bohleber & Sibylle Dews, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 2001, pp. 238-245. 38

I obviously refer to Habermas’ famous early characterisation, and rejection, of the centrality of Nature in first generation Critical Theory: “In several passages Marcuse is tempted to pursue this idea of a New Science in connection with the promise, familiar in Jewish and Protestant mysticism, of the ‘resurrection of fallen nature’. This theme, well known for having penetrated into Schelling’s (and Baader’s) philosophy via Schwabian Pietism, returns in Marx’s Paris Manuscripts, constitutes today the central thought of Bloch’s philosophy, and, in reflected forms, also directs the more secret hopes of Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno,” Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’ in Toward a Rational Society, trans. J. Shapiro, Boston, Beacon Press, 1970, p. 85. Since Thomas McCarthy’s thorough review of Habermas’ early work, the place of nature is a well-known crux of Habermas’ thought. See T. McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas, London, Hutchinson, 1978, pp. 110-126. See also the article by Joel Whitebook, “The problem of Nature in Habermas,” Telos, Summer 79, pp. 41-69. See also the revisiting of these problems from the point of view of recent Schelling scholarship in Peter Douglas, “Habermas, Schelling and Nature,” in Critical Theory after Habermas, eds. D. Freundlieb, Wayne Hudson & John Rundell, Leiden & Boston, Brill, 2004, pp. 155-180.

39

Particularly enlightening on both dimensions is the work of French sociologist Christophe Dejours, for example Le Facteur Humain, Paris, PUF, 2002.

40

An important contribution was György Márkus’ reconstruction of Marx’s anthropology, Marxism and Anthropology: The Concept of Human Essence in the Philosophy of Marx, Assen, Van Gorcum, 1978. Social Action and Human Nature suggests that Márkus’ classical study provides the type of solution that Honneth is himself attempting to devise.

41

Honneth, “Grounding Recognition,” pp. 502-503. Importantly, Honneth does not want to abandon the focus and resources provided by philosophical anthropology.

42

Honneth and Joas recognised the value of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception but Honneth has not pursued this line further. See Social Action and Human Nature, pp. 114-115.

43

In fact the Phenomenology of Perception (trans. C. Smith, London, Routledge, 1962 (first edition), pp. 442-456) finished with a normative theory of praxis. More topically dedicated to these questions was of course the Adventures of the Dialectic.

44

Obviously the chapter on intersubjectivity in the Phenomenology of Perception (pp. 346-368) is the central text to find the explicit exposition of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of communication. In it, Merleau-Ponty sets philosophy the following task: “we must learn to find the communication between one consciousness and another

180 • Jean-Philippe Deranty in one and the same world,” p. 353. More broadly, however, given that for him communication is not restricted to linguistic exchange but is another word for the fundamental sharing of the world by the embodied subjects, the thematic of communication, encapsulated in the ‘co-’ words (coexistence, commonality, communion, consubstantiation, con-naissance as ‘co-birth’, etc.) runs through the whole book and in fact through all of Merleau-Ponty’s writings. 45

See Sandra B. Rosenthal and Patrick L. Bourgeois, Mead and Merleau-Ponty. Toward a Common Vision, New York, State University of New York Press, 1991.

46

This is obviously Merleau-Ponty’s methodology in The Structure of Behaviour, but also in his lectures at the Collège de France, which we will now refer to more specifically. See M. Merleau-Ponty, Nature, trans. R. Vallier, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2003. See also the ‘working notes’ at the end of The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1968, pp. 165-276. I focus especially on these lectures rather than The Visible and the Invisible because they illustrate perfectly the grounding of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of intercorporeity in contemporary natural sciences.

47

Mead, Mind, Self and Society, p. 77.

48

Merleau-Ponty follows Lorenz’s studies of the rituals amongst animals, and, like Mead who described animal “conversations through gestures” as “social acts”, argues that “one can talk of an animal culture” and of “animal institutions” (Nature, p. 198).

49

“We have to take into account (. . .) what goes on in the central nervous system as the beginning of the individual’s act and as the organisation of the act,” Mind, Self and Society, p. 11.

50

Only the external world can teach the I-body to see itself as an object-body. MerleauPonty argues in exactly the same way; see for example Phenomenology of Perception, p. 322.

51

Through a close reading of von Uexküll, he actually sees the emergence of this in the superior animals, see Nature, pp. 170-173.

52

Recall the example of the hand touching the other hand in Mead.

53

Merleau-Ponty, Nature, p. 209.

54

Ibid., p. 214.

55

Ibid., p. 218. One working note even uses the term ‘interanimality’, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 172. A vivid illustration can be found in one of Mead’s smaller articles, see G. H. Mead, “Concerning Animal Perception,” in Selected Writings, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1964, pp. 73-81.

56

However, Merleau-Ponty is at pains to stress that this ‘empathy’ is not to be equated with a fusional reconciliation with nature. Especially clear on this: The Visible and the Invisible, p. 127.

The Loss of Nature in Axel Honneth’s Social Philosophy • 181 57

We should not forget that ethnobotanics has described extensively the ‘companionship’ that has evolved between human beings and the plants surrounding them. See Pierre Lieutaghi, La Plante Compagne, Arles, Actes Sud, 1999.

58

Merleau-Ponty, Nature, p. 218. Logically, the relationship is reciprocal: “it is already the flesh of the things that speaks to us of our own flesh, and that speaks to us of the flesh of the other,” The Visible and the Invisible, p. 193. Once again, it is important to stress the rigorous scientific underpinning of Merleau-Ponty’s arguments and not to be fooled by their literary quality. On the scientific origin and aims of the theory of intercorporeity, see the working note of February 1959, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 182.

59


60


Paul Redding Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory

ABSTRACT This paper challenges the commonly made claim that the work of Pierre Bourdieu is fundamentally anti-Hegelian in orientation. In contrast, it argues that the development of Bourdieu’s work from its earliest structuralist through its later ‘post-structuralist’ phase is better described in terms of a shift from a late nineteenth century neoKantian to a distinctly Hegelian post-Kantian outlook. In his break with structuralism, Bourdieu appealed to a bodily based ‘logic of practice’ to explain the binaristic logic of Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist analyses of myth. Effectively working within the tradition of the Durkheimian approach to symbolic classification, Lévi-Strauss had inherited Durkheim’s distinctly neo-Kantian understanding of the role of categories in experience and action—an account that conflated two forms of representation—‘intuitions’ and ‘concepts—that Kant himself had held distinct. Bourdieu’s appeal to the role of the body’s dispositional habitus can be considered as a retrieval of Hegel’s earlier quite different reworking of Kant’s intuition-concept distinction in terms of distinct ‘logics’ with different forms of ‘negation’. Bourdieu commonly acknowledged the parallels of his analyses of social life to those of Hegel, but opposed Hegelianism because he believed that Hegel had remained entrapped within the dynamics of mythopoeic thought. In contrast, Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss, he claimed, by instituting a science of myth, had broken with it.This criticism of Hegel, however, relies on an understanding of his philosophy that has been rejected by

184 • Paul Redding many contemporary Hegel scholars, and without it, the gap separating Hegel and Bourdieu narrows dramatically. KEYWORDS: Bourdieu, Hegel, Durkheim, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Neo-Kantianism

Initially, the idea of linking the work of French ethnologist-sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to Hegel may seem surprising. Having emerged from the generation of structuralist thinkers in the 1960’s, Bourdieu can thereby be regarded to have come from an intellectual movement that virtually defined itself in opposition to an ‘Hegelian humanism’ exemplified by Sartre. For Bourdieu, as for contemporaries like Foucault or Althusser, approaches to the history of the sciences found in epistemological thinkers such as Gaston Bachelard and George Canguilhem1 replaced that humanistic variant of the Hegelian story of the teleological emergence of the essentially universal human subject. Moreover, in ethnography itself, Lévi-Strauss had explicitly opposed his structuralist thought to Sartre’s version of Hegelian humanism,2 and identified his approach as a type of “Kantianism without a transcendental subject.”3 Indeed, along with Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu can be thought of as continuing some of the features of late nineteenth-century French neo-Kantianism, thereby establishing a route ‘back to Kant’ which largely bypassed Hegel and other German idealists. Crucially, both Lévi-Strauss and Bourdieu were influenced by Émile Durkheim whose work showed strong neo-Kantian influences.4 And while Bourdieu’s ‘structuralism’ might have been relatively short lived,5 his ‘post-structuralist’ work looks no friendlier to Hegelianism.6 What we might regard as the first recognisably ‘Bourdieuan’ work, Esquisse d’une Théorie de la Pratique, published in 1972,7 had been conceived as a critique of LéviStrauss, but with this Bourdieu seemed to deepen his earlier critique of the ‘academic aristocratism’ of any totalising philosophy, drawing upon further types of philosophical ‘anti-philosophers’—‘ordinary language’ philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Austin, for example—who seem equally distant from Hegel’s systematising. Even the Marxist elements in Bourdieu’s work are commonly said to have a strikingly anti-Hegelian nature.8 After his turn away from structuralism, Bourdieu criticised Lévi-Strauss’ approach as suffering from a tendency to intellectualise the objects of its own field of study—the field of mythopoeic thought. Indeed, structuralism was seen

Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory • 185

as suffering from a form of logicism akin to Hegel’s, Bourdieu comparing LéviStrauss’ inquiry into the “universal laws which govern the unconscious activities of the mind” to Hegel’s account of the universal spirit that “thinks itself.”9 While Lévi-Strauss had looked to the structure of myth and ritual to disclose the universal structures of human thought, from Bourdieu’s post-structuralist perspective, an examination of the context within which mythopoeic thought was enacted revealed its ‘logic’ to be generated not from some underlying formal structure, nor from any mythopoeic version of ‘transcendental consciousness’, but from an ensemble of unconscious practically oriented bodily dispositions—what Bourdieu termed ‘habitus’—responsive to the demands of varying and particular circumstances within a socially encoded environment.10 Bourdieu’s move beyond structuralism can easily be seen as strengthening and deepening certain Kantian dimensions of his thought, as he was now concerned with criticising the hypostatisation of a form of thought—that of the scientific ethnologist—beyond the conditions of its own functioning. Like the pre-Copernican cosmologist, the scholastic ethnologist appeared to project the conditions of his own experience onto the object of inquiry. Bourdieu’s response was thus to extend Kant’s critique of pure reason into what he called a ‘critique of scholastic reason’. And yet this familiar anti-Hegelian reading of Bourdieu, I suggest, is confounded by the remarkable points of convergence one finds within Bourdieu’s work—often signalled by Bourdieu himself— with the thought of Hegel. It is such points of convergence that I want to broach here, first, that between Bourdieu’s ‘logic of practice’ and Hegel’s account of the structure of what can be termed ‘immediate thought’, and next, that between the respective accounts each give of the conditions under which systematic ‘reflective’ thought can break with the socially conditioned logic of practice. This is done not for the purpose of reducing Bourdieu’s remarkably innovative work to the status of repetition of a thinker regarded as having brought intellectual history to a close, but more to question the degree to which Hegel himself can be reduced to the image of that philosopher against which Bourdieu and his generation had reacted.

186 • Paul Redding

I. Practical versus Theoretical Logic and the Critique of Scholastic Reason After his break with structuralist formalism, Bourdieu came to regard LéviStrauss’ intellectualising analyses of mythopoeic thought as exemplifying a danger implicit in the very move which liberates scientific thought from the constraints of everyday life: the danger of a ‘scholastic forgetting’ of the historical specificity of those conditions allowing the reflexively epistemic orientation to the world characteristic of scholarship itself. While still maintaining his earlier positive ‘Bachelardian’ stance towards the establishment of the sciences in their break with the schemas of everyday life, Bourdieu’s attitude was now tempered by a sensitivity to the ambiguity of such epistemological breaks: “The fundamental ambiguity of the scholastic universes and of all their productions . . . lies in the fact that their apartness from the world of production is both a liberatory break and a disconnection, a potentially crippling separation.”11 In order to capture the peculiarity of the theoretical attitude and the conditions that underlie its emergence in various realms, as well as its inherent ambiguity, Bourdieu employed the notion of the ‘skholè’. Exploiting the etymological connection between scholarship and leisure, Bourdieu used this concept to refer to those historically created social contexts, which “liberated from practical occupations and preoccupations,” were able to provide the cultural spaces for the development of the type of scholarly/scholastic linguistic practice. For example, within the school it is “studious leisure” which becomes “the precondition for scholastic exercises and activities removed from immediate necessity, such as sport, play, the production and contemplation of works of art and all forms of gratuitous speculation with no other end than themselves.” These historically specific contexts liberating an activity from the immediate demands of economic and social necessity in turn foster the “scholastic disposition which inclines it possessors to suspend the demands of the situation, the constraints of economic and social necessity, and the urgencies it imposes or the ends it proposes” to meet the demands of detached and disinterested inquiry.12 More specifically concerned with the emergence of objective thought about the social field, Bourdieu’s telling of the story of the epistemological rupture


is further marked by the details of his own ethnographically derived account of the form of thought with which the scholarly language game breaks and with which it is to be contrasted—mythopoeic thought. Following Durkheim and Mauss,13 Bourdieu understands human practices as needing the articulation provided by socially generated symbolic systems that, in pre-modern societies, are objectified and transmitted in ritual and myth. Such mythopoeic thought thus reflects and reproduces just those types of “primitive classification” structuring social activity within pre-modern communities—those systems of “inseparably cognitive and evaluative structures that organise perception of the world and action in the world in accordance with the objective structures of a given state of the social world.”14 But going beyond Durkheim’s neoKantian formalism and in the direction of Marx, Bourdieu draws attention to the role played by such classifications in the articulation of relations of domination. It is in virtue of the evaluative dimension of such differences instituted in the world that they thereby articulate a type of social domination via a “symbolic violence” which constrains by neither overt force nor reason, but by something in between.15 The emergence of philosophy in classical Greece, which provides the skholè with its “ideal type,” exemplifies such a break with systems of mythopoeic thought. There “myths and rites ceased to be practical acts of belief . . . and became instead matter for theoretical astonishment and questioning, or objects of hermeneutic rivalry.”16 But as an ethnologist Bourdieu was interested in the break from mythical thought in the context of the inquiry into myth itself—a break, he claimed, which was not achieved until the work of Durkheim and Mauss, and, importantly, Lévi-Strauss. It was Lévi-Strauss’ achievement, Bourdieu tells us, to have “provided the means of completing the abandonment of recourse to the mythological mode of thought in the science of mythologies . . . by resolutely taking this mode of thought as his object instead of setting it to work, as native mythologists always do, in order to provide a mythological solution to mythological problems.”17 And yet, as we have seen, in his structuralist search for some universal grammar or ‘logic’ underlying the outputs of mythical thought, Lévi-Strauss had projected onto his subjects the disengaged dispositions of his own scholastic context—forgetting, and thereby universalising, the historical specificity of his own intellectual practice.


Following his break with structuralism, in works like Esquisse d’une Théorie de la Pratique and Le sens Pratique, Bourdieu attempted to reinterpret the type of binaristic grammar to which both Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss had appealed by showing its generation from responses of the body’s dispositional habitus to the practical demands of a socially codified everyday existence. These are the demands from which the scholastic disposition had itself abstracted, and which in so doing had become prey to a type of forgetting or repression of the peculiarities of its own conditions, projecting its own theoretical rather than practical orientation back onto the objects—in this case, the agents—it studies. This ‘logic’ of mythopoeic thought is fundamentally a logic of practice rather than thought. Reconstructed by the analyst as a structure holding among representations, it is effectively reconstructed as a form of thought, but this must not obscure the point that the primary field within which it seeks coherencies is one of actions, not representations.18 The practical logic of these systems, therefore, need not have the sort of coherence demanded of sets of concepts functioning in purely discursive theoretical domains. This practical logic . . . is able to organize all thoughts, perceptions and actions by means of a few generative principles, which are closely interrelated and constitute a practically integrated whole, only because its whole economy, based on the principle of the economy of logic, presupposes a sacrifice of rigor for the sake of simplicity and generality and because it finds in ‘polythesis’ the conditions required for successful use of polysemy.19

Moreover, the ‘illogicality’ of practice is not simply quantitative but qualitative as well. When one regards its reconstruction in terms of its structures and processes informing it, practical logic has a distinctly ‘illogical’ form, as it is effectively marked by principles of contrariety or polarity on the one hand, and analogical projection on the other. Furthermore, this is a ‘logic’ that is reflected in the Pythagorean “columns of contraries”20 which, as Geoffrey Lloyd has pointed out,21 are at work in the thought of the pre-Socratics more generally. Within such systems, “based on a fundamental principle of division which distributes all the things of the world into two complementary classes,”22 judgements about objects are usually expressed analogically by the use of vehicles drawn from a limited number of recurring contrary pairs—sun :


moon, dry : wet, hot : cold, and so on, which are mapped onto the fundamental social distinction, male : female.23 Easily learned, flexible and readily applied, such predicates work on the principle of ‘overall resemblance’: exactly which aspect of the metaphorical vehicle is relevant to the analogy—its ‘principle’—is neither explicit nor constant across different uses of the vehicle, rendering such thought redolent with contradictions when considered from a logical point of view: Ritual practice performs an uncertain abstraction that brings the same symbol into different relationships by apprehending it through different aspects, or different aspects of the same referent into the same relationship of opposition. In other words, it excludes the Socratic question of the respect in which the referent is apprehended (shape, colour, function, etc.), thereby obviating the need to define in each case the criterion governing the choice of the aspect selected and, a fortiori, the need to keep to that criterion at all times.24

Bourdieu’s insistent focus here is on the way that the primary products of such structures and processes—actions—are generated from ‘habitus’, that is, from “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organise practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.”25 It is this that gives his approach its radically anti-subjective, anti-Cartesian thrust. Thus practical belief, he stresses, “is not a ‘state of mind’, still less a kind of arbitrary adherence to a set of instituted dogmas and doctrines (‘beliefs’), but rather a state of the body.”26 This means, of course, that even “the language of overall resemblance and uncertain abstraction is still too intellectualist to be able to express a logic that is performed directly in bodily gymnastics, without passing through explicit apprehension of the ‘aspects’ chosen or rejected.”27 Thus we are to think of Durkheimian primitive classification as primarily working not at the level of the mind, but at that of the body “constituted as an analogical operator establishing all kinds of practical equivalences among the different divisions of the social world” by virtue of its postures, its reactions, and “gymnastics.”28


II. The Elements of Practical Logic in Bourdieu and Hegel Bourdieu acknowledges that the notion of ‘habitus’ is familiar from the work of “authors as different as Hegel, Husserl, Weber, Durkheim and Mauss.”29 In particular Hegel employed the notion in “an attempt to break with Kantian dualism and to reintroduce the permanent dispositions that are constitutive of realized morality (Sittlichkeit), as opposed to the moralism of duty.”30 Indeed, Bourdieu draws attention to the relevance of Hegel’s analyses for his own analyses of the life forms of pre-modern societies articulated by a logic of practice. For example, Hegel, he notes, “had a very acute intuition” of the “concrete liberty as ‘being at home’ (bei sich sein) in what is” characterising those “stable and relatively undifferentiated societies,” a liberty arising “from the quasi-perfect coincidence between habitus and habitat, between the schemes of the mythic vision of the world and the structure of domestic space, for example, organised according to the same oppositions, or between expectations and the objective chances of realizing them.”31 On examination, Bourdieu’s binaried and body-centred ‘logic of practice’ bears striking similarities to the categorial structure of the logic that Hegel takes as structuring ‘immediate’ or non-reflective cognition. At issue here is Hegel’s distinctive approach to what he called ‘determinate negation’, an idea that had its origins in elements of Kant’s thought, which did not survive the neo-Kantian interpretation. Like Kant, Durkheim had thought of ‘categories’ as concepts that somehow contributed to the pre-structuring of experience, but it is clear that what he had understood by this notion was not what Kant had intended. The most obvious difference here concerned Durkheim’s belief that a culture’s categorical structure derived from its social structure: “the classification of things” he claimed, “reproduces the classification of men,”32 while Kant (somewhat like Lévi-Strauss) held the categories to be universal.33 In this sense Durkheim’s thought was, in being more culturalist and historicist, more ‘Hegelian’ than Kantian. But equally importantly, Durkheim ignored Kant’s crucial distinction between structurally different forms of representation. For Kant, the categories were concepts that were so basic to cognition that they were presupposed by all meaningful experience and therefore could not be acquired from experience. But Kant distinguished concepts, qua general representations applied in judgements, from ‘intuitions’, which were singular and immediate representations, providing particular experiential contents to which concepts were applied. In


Kant’s taxonomy, space and time were a priori (or ‘pure’) intuitions, not concepts, in contrast to categories such as ‘causality’. Durkheim, however, counted space and time together with causality as among the ‘categories’. In conflating Kant’s intuition-concept distinction in this way, Durkheim was here simply following his neo-Kantian contemporaries who had abandoned this distinction, by eliminating ‘intuition’ and identifying all representations as conceptual. Like other post-Kantians in the decades following the appearance of Kant’s critical philosophy, Hegel too had been critical of Kant’s ‘intuition-concept’ distinction, but his transformation of Kant here had been very different to that of the late nineteenth-century neo-Kantian elimination of intuition. For Kant, the a priori synthetic truths of geometry and arithmetic were grounded in the form of pure intuition of space and time, but Hegel describes the space of geometry so conceived as “the existence in which the Concept [Begriff ] inscribes its differences as in an empty lifeless element, in which they are just as inert and lifeless.”34 For Kant, what is peculiar about the structure of space and time qua form of intuition concerns their singularity and immediacy, but from Hegel’s point of view, this Kantian approach to geometry “abstracts from the fact that it is the Concept which divides space into its dimensions and determines the connections between and within them.”35 There is another way of thinking of the Kantian structures of space and time, however, as both exhibit ego-centric polar oppositions: I understand space as organised around me in terms of the three sets of polar opposites frontback, up-down, and left-right, and I similarly understand time as organised around me in terms of the opposition future and past. Moreover, in some late pre-critical writings before his postulation of the intuition-concept distinction, Kant had thought of spatial and temporal representations in just this way and characterised them in terms of the peculiar type of ‘negation’ existing between their concepts. This negation or opposition he called ‘real’ negation, and he contrasted it with the negation that resulted from the denial of a concept’s applicability to an object, ‘logical’ negation.36 That is, Kant there seemed to conceive of space in terms of the egocentric polarly opposed concepts. In his account of the categories in the Critique of Pure Reason the same distinction between these two different senses of ‘negation’ is manifest in the three judgement forms corresponding to the three categories of quality:


‘affirmative’, ‘negative’, and ‘infinite’,37 and it is this third judgement form that gives the clue to the origin of Kant’s concept of ‘real’ negation: the notion of the ‘indefinite’ form of judgement found in Aristotelian and medieval logic.38 While in the tradition of propositional logic originating with the Stoics, ‘negation’ was an operation applying to a complete sentence or proposition, Aristotelian logic being a ‘term’ logic, employed two different forms of negation: one could deny rather than affirm some predicate of a subject—deny, rather than affirm, say, that Socrates is beautiful—or one could negate the term predicated of a subject with its contrary—affirm, say, that Socrates is ugly.39 Effectively, Hegel had adopted this taxonomy for representations, interpreting Kant’s real negation, the negation of infinite judgement, as ‘first’ negation and which works within the opposed conceptual determinations of ‘being logic’.40 In contrast, ‘logical negation’ was expressed in determinate negations of the ‘reflective’ thought of what he called ‘essence’ logic. In short, Kant’s ‘intuition-concept’ distinction became for Hegel a distinction within the order of concepts, effectively between two different but interacting conceptual systems. This in turn gave Hegel’s account greater flexibility as these two differently structured conceptual systems could interact in complex ways allowing for historical change and development within representational systems. It is just these ‘determinate negations’ of Hegel’s ‘being-logic’ that turn up in the classificatory systems structured by polar oppositions that Bourdieu inherited from Durkheim and Levi-Strauss and that he finds encodable in the spatial arrangements of the lived habitat.41 Bourdieu’s earliest ethnographic work had been concerned with the significance of the structuring of domestic spaces in the Berber culture of North Africa, and he commonly commented on the parallelism between habitus and habitat in such pre-modern cultures.42 That is, in pre-modern relatively undifferentiated societies one finds a type of rough isomorphism between the structures of Durkheimian social categories on the one hand and the organisation of physical space on the other. For his part, Hegel in the Philosophy of History had commented on the principle of ‘beautiful individuality’ structuring the world of the Greek polis. As Kant had regarded beauty as brought about by the ‘harmony’ of the spatio-temporal unities of the imagination and the conceptual unities of the understanding, that is, the harmony of the ‘faculties’ that Hegel regarded as the immediate and reflective functions of cognition, Hegel’s idea


seems to point to a similar feature of pre-modern societies. It was this harmony that made the members of such community feel ‘at home’ in the world, but the same harmony was, he thought, disrupted and destroyed by the introduction of ‘reflection’: Anaxagoras himself had taught that Thought itself was the absolute Essence of the World. And it was in Socrates, that at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, the principle of subjectivity—of the absolute inherent independence of thought—attained free expression. . . . The Greeks had a customary morality; but Socrates undertook to teach them what moral virtues, duties, etc. were. The moral man is not he who merely wills and does that which is right— not the merely innocent man—but he who has the consciousness of what he is doing. . . . The rise of the inner world of Subjectivity was the rupture with the existing Reality. Though Socrates himself continued to perform his duties as a citizen, it was not the actual State and its religion, but the world of Thought that was his true home.43

Socratic thought, which inquires into reasons underlying all claims, draws thought contents into a differently structured realm of relations, and utilises the resources of ‘essence’ logic. On Hegel’s account, it was not until the modern world, with the development of market-based relations of civil society, that stable social practices and institutions emerged that were capable of sustaining this ‘abstractly universal’ form of subjectivity pre-figured in the character of the reflective, questioning Socrates, and integrating it into social life. Civil society had differentiated out of the immediately family-based practices and institutions that structured the pre-modern world, resulting in two opposed forms of modern Sittlichkeit, the modern private family, on the one hand, with its immediate, affect-involving social bonds, and the mediated relations holding between abstractly individuated individuals recognised as bearers of universal rights on the other. For Hegel, these two opposed modes of ethical life, or Sittlichkeit, operated as contexts for distinct cognitive and moral styles, again marked by immediacy and mediation or reflection respectively.44 In turn these two forms of Sittlichkeit and the cognitive styles accompanying them were meant to be integrated (aufgehoben) by a process of mediation in the unifying institutions of the state. Although it did not come to find adequate institutional support for millennia, Hegel had effectively regarded the development of reflective thought as an


invention of the Greeks, and his account here is close to Bourdieu’s appeal to the ‘skholè’. The development of the practice of Socratic asking after grounds was clearly closely related that of dialectic, and Hegel relates reflective forms of thought back to the argumentative practices of the Sophists.45 Thus we might think of the practice of dialectic as a Bourdieuan “scholastic language game” in which each player tries to catch out their opponent in contradictions, each game requiring the players to keep track of what Robert Brandom refers to as the “inferential commitments” of their opponents.46 In turn, the development of logic starting with Aristotle can be regarded as the attempt to find the underlying universal patterns within such inferential relations. This type of reflective turn made possible by the Bourdieuan skholè opened the possibility for unprecedented degrees of critical reflection upon the existing structures of belief and practice—effectively creating the possibility of ‘enlightened’ public life that later started to emerge in eighteenth-century Europe. Beliefs and practices that had played a functional role in the reproduction of everyday life could now be made to answer the question of their justification, and to the logic of practice was now added an opposed logic of propositional coherence.

III. Spheres of Sittlichkeit as Cognitive Contexts As spheres of modern Sittlichkeit, the family and civil society are educative realms within which agents’ culturally transmitted ‘second natures’ are acquired. For Hegel, as for Durkheim, social relations require that agents recognise each other in terms of the social categories articulating society. And just as Durkheim distinguished between the ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’ forms of social cohesion distinguishing traditional from modern societies,47 Hegel utilised the idea of differently structured realms of recognitive interaction to account for qualitative differences between these ‘educative’ processes and their products—the types of knowing and acting subjects produced. Hegel’s suggestions in the Philosophy of Right as to the difference in cognitive styles, although brief, are consistent with his systematic approach to cognitive function in both the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Logic. The family is the context in which agents are inducted into the processes of immediate cognition. It is a realm continuous with pre-modern society, a realm into which the Durkheimian world of ‘mechanical solidarity’ has shrunk. Modern civil society, in contrast, is that in which they are inducted into the practices of reflective cognition.


Within the context of the family, education (Bildung) raises the child out of the singularity of its immediately given—here natural—state into an immediate and concrete realm of objective spirit structured by its recognitive interactions. Here substantial unity prevails over subjective differences, and the educative process is focused on the transmission of an immediate and substantial content: parents, says Hegel, constitute (ausmachen) the universal and essential elements of things for their children,48 and the ethical is to be given to the children “in the form of feeling” and “without opposition.”49 We might say that by being born into a family the child becomes the inheritor of certain common ways of making sense of and living in the world—some set of criteria, transmitted by the parents by both word and, crucially, deed, for governing the child’s behaviour towards those things. In discussing ‘feeling’ as that which mediates the relations within the family Hegel clearly regards it as the vehicle of a type of ‘intentional’ orientation to the world in which the subject’s orientation towards things and others has a non-reflective and immediate character. Such an intentional analysis of feeling brings out the element of implicit conceptuality involved in the determination of that intentional content—one loves one’s father as a father, one’s sister as a sister, and so on. Such categories are clearly not simply descriptive but also ‘action-guiding’: there are definite conventionally encoded ways to treat fathers, sisters and so on. And added to the generally asymmetrical bipolarity of these categories (wife-husband, sister-brother, mother-daughter, and so on) is their egocentricity: my father exists for me immediately just as ‘father’— not a father (an instance of an abstract universal who also happens to be mine). While clearly there is an element of conceptuality involved (my father behaves and is behaved towards as a father) it does not, Hegel says, ‘subsume’ the individual as mere instance of that category. This is the world of the articulated particularity of Durkheimian categories of ‘primitive classification’ and Kantian ‘real opposition’—the world articulated by Hegel’s ‘being-logic’, and it is the world to which the modern public world, ‘civil-society’, stands opposed. Civil society, says Hegel, provides a second context for the education of individuals from out of the “immediacy” and “natural simplicity” characterising the identity received in the family,50 and Bourdieu too notes how the “acquisition of the specific dispositions demanded by a field” depends on how “new entrants bring in dispositions previously constituted within a socially situated


family group.”51 Essentially this form of education means that their theoretical and practical intentionality is developed in the direction of an ‘objective’ movement away from the local, perspectival and immediately evaluative culture and thought. Because agents here have to take into consideration a range of others who do not share their perspectives, satisfaction of their own ends will be achieved “only in so far as they themselves determine their knowledge, volition, and action in a universal way and make themselves members in this articulated sequence.”52 This is the world of formal equality and material disparity. Here, structural inequalities of power can become invisible because the ubiquity of parallel habitus and habitat has been broken. Modern civil society is the material condition for the existence of science. While simple qualitative perception grasps the singular thing as an immediate instantiation of some familiar universal, in the type of judgement that exists within the new discursive space of justification, the object is determined in terms of some ‘underlying’, essential and initially non-apparent universal. Such properties are dispositional ones that require the mediation of a third object for their manifestation. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel describes how the arableness of land is expressed only in the context of our planting of crops,53 while in the Encyclopaedia Logic he gives as an example the property of being curative predicated of certain plants.54 It is this same appeal to some mediating third object which likewise is what characterises the structure of the sorts of recognitive interactions at the heart of the realm of civil society—the mutually equilibrating commodities of free market exchange. With its distinctive outlook, then, it is not surprising that modern civil society should give rise to a scientific account of its own functioning—Adam Smith’s science of political economy, “one of the sciences which have originated in the modern age” and for which the modern age supplies the “foundation” or “ground” [Boden].55 Hegel is in no way dismissive of such empirical social science, noting that political economy’s capacity to discover the ‘necessity at work’ in the field of economically interacting individuals ‘does credit to thought’. What he objects to is its hypostatisation beyond the reflective form of modern life found in civil society, to other spheres such as the family and the state itself. Hegel’s attitude to Smith thus effectively anticipates that of Bourdieu to Lévi-Strauss, and Hegel’s epistemic contextualising of science within civil society anticipates Bourdieu’s idea of a ‘reflexive sociology’.


IV. Bourdieu Contra Hegel Bourdieu’s move beyond the neo-Kantianism of structuralism involved a Hegel-like appeal to the historical conditions of the skholè allowing the constitution of the social scientist’s own field as a true object of scientific inquiry. It is this that allows the social scientist to be reflectively critical of her own tendency to universalise her own reflective form of subjectivity, and this would appear to give a further decidedly Hegelian twist to Bourdieu’s peculiarly inflected Kantianism. Kantian transcendental self-consciousness, one might say, needs to become historical self-consciousness, and yet Bourdieu resists the familiar historical relativism that often appears here. Social science, along with other sciences, is not just another ‘discourse’ that has arisen— it is a form of rationality. Historical consciousness cannot, then, be seen to terminate in what Hegel would regard as a formally universal point of view which locates its own society as just one more instance of society abstractly conceived, thereby relativising and so de-normativising its claims to knowledge. In our historical consciousness we must somehow return, from out of our ‘reflected’ point of view, to ourselves. But such a ‘return to self out of otherness’ is a familiar Hegelian image of what is called for. What then is it that separates Bourdieu’s outlook from that of Hegel? The most obvious reply here is the one that follows from Bourdieu’s claim that Durkheim, Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, in instituting the science of the field of mythology, thereby broke with mythological thought itself. Lévi-Strauss, it will be remembered, takes this mythological mode of thought as an object “instead of setting it to work, as native mythologists always do, in order to provide a mythological solution to mythological problems.”56 Hegel thought of philosophy as consisting of the scientific (conceptual) treatment of the same content that was otherwise given in mythology—religion. From Bourdieu’s perspective, then, Hegel’s philosophy will look like a ‘setting to work’ of myth rather than a breaking with it—a diagnosis that largely repeats that of Marx for whom Hegel’s philosophy, like all philosophy, was really an instance of religious thought rather than a scientific break with it. Regarded as mythology philosophy would thereby do the work of all mythologies “of grounding in reason the arbitrary divisions of the social world, and especially of the division of labour, and thus of providing a logical or


cosmological solution to the problem of the classification of humans.”57 Hegel, then, is surely the exemplification of that “philosopher-king who, by assigning them an essence, claims to enjoin them to be and to do what it behooves them by dint of such definition.”58 We might think, for example, of Hegel’s generation, from out of the resources of his logic, of the various social divisions proper to the modern state. What Bourdieu calls for is a study of the historical and social conditions underlying the epistemological breaks allowing the irruptions of reason, but while Hegel appears to historicise philosophy, what we get is philosophy rather than history, that is, a mythology of thought rather than thought about thought: Philosophy is identified with its history not in order to reduce it to the historical history of philosophy, less to history as such, but so as to annex history to philosophy, making the course of history an immense course in philosophy . . . The philosophical history of philosophy is a re-appropriation that is performed in and through a selective, unificatory awakening of consciousness which supersedes and conserves the principles of all the philosophies of the past. As an Erinnerung it is a theoretical redemption, a theodicy, which saves the past by integrating it into the ultimate and therefore eternal present of absolute knowledge.59

Read in this way, history as “the process of development and the realization of Spirit” is, as Hegel states at the conclusion of his lectures on the Philosophy of History, “the true Theodicœa,”60 because it is an account of God’s selfactualisation. Hegel’s dehistoricisation of history is thus a consequence of the globally enframing subjectivism of his approach: all of Hegel’s social and psychological insights (which Bourdieu clearly appreciates as insights) are ultimately contextualised, he thinks, within a theocentric metaphysical monism telling the story of the development of a cosmic self-consciousness distributed over the consciousnesses of individuals and groups regarded as its vehicle. On this view of Hegel’s philosophy, the categorial structures studied by Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss or those more reflective structures found in the fields of science constituted after Bachelardian breaks, are not merely the categories within which the experiences and judgements of particular embodied subjects are shaped, they are the categories for the thought processes of a divine “thought thinking itself.”61 Thus Bourdieu notes of Hegel that “the necessary sequence of philosophies, which is that of Mind developing accord-


ing to its own law, has primacy over the secondary relationship between the various philosophies and the societies from which they arose.”62 Recently, however, readings of Hegel have become available which refuse the traditional understanding presupposed here.63 While diverse, such readings share a common commitment to a view of Hegel as a post-Kantian. That is, they see Hegel as a thinker who radicalised Kant’s own critique of ‘dogmatic metaphysics’ but moving Kantianism beyond a set of residual ‘dogmatically metaphysical’, and so essentially mythological, ‘binaries’ constituting its field—in particular, Kant’s distinction between ‘appearance’ and ‘thing-initself’. My suggestion here is that the shape of Hegelianism so understood does indeed bear remarkable similarities to Bourdieu’s own way beyond the limitations of neo-Kantianism. On this non-metaphysical, post-Kantian reading of Hegel, the categorical structures found in non-differentiated pre-modern societies on the one hand, and modern societies on the other, should not be thought of as stages in the development of some single subject—neither the God of traditional ‘rightHegelian’ theological interpretation, nor the universalised human subject of ‘left-Hegelian’ anthropological or ‘humanist’ interpretation. From the perspective of a non-metaphysical conception of spirit, what is ‘actualised’ in history is the complex of recognitively mediated conditions adequate to human freedom. While all social existence is for Hegel founded on recognitive relations, not all forms of society allow freedom to the same extent. The Greek enlightenment introduced the type of reflective orientation to life allowing the progressive rationalisation of social existence, but it was only with the differentiation from the immediate structures of social life of the reflective and reciprocal forms of recognition of modern social institutions that such rationalising processes could be universalised. But it is not as if the abstractly universalised aspect of human subjectivity developed in modernity represents the flowering of some human ‘essence’. Hegel recognised that these structures cannot be effectively lived in isolation from the more immediate forms of recognition, and so in his account of the structure of the modern state he attempted to ‘mediate’ the reflective structures of civil society with the more immediate ones of the family. What the ‘principle of subjectivity’ allows is, rather, a continuing critical transformation


of the elements shaping lived immediacy such that pre-reflective life can become compatible with a social existence in which ‘all’ rather than ‘some’ or ‘one’ can be free. It is within these structures of modernity that a place emerges for the Bourdieuan ‘reflexive’ sociologist who provides empirical social existence with the conceptual rather than mythical description that makes possible what Frederick Neuhouser has referred to as an immanent yet substantive critical transformation of the institutions of modern society.64 On the other hand, this all only makes sense for Hegel against the background of the demand that history be interpreted philosophically as the realm in which the essence of spirit—philosophy’s successor notion to religion’s notion of god—is actualised. Without that Bourdieu, from Hegel’s point of view, could only resist the relativism that threatens post-structuralism with a dogmatic affirmation of the ‘rationality’ of science. The real difference between Bourdieu and Hegel would seem come down to the relation between historical and philosophical modes of explanation.65

Notes 1

See, for example G. Bachelard, Épistémologie; textes choisis par Dominique Lecourt, 2e éd. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1974, and G. Canguilhem, Études d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences, Paris, Vrin, 1979.

2

C. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1966, chap. 9.

3

C. Lévi-Strauss, “Réponses à quelques questions,” Esprit, no. 322, Nov. 1963, p. 663.

4

Durkheim is generally thought to have been most influenced by the neo-Kantianism of Charles Renouvier and Émile Boutroux. See S. Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1973, pp. 54-7. For an interpretation which stresses the neo-Kantian aspects of Bourdieu’s approach see the introduction to Derek Robbins, Pierre Bourdieu, London, Sage, 2000, vol. 1.

5

Bourdieu refers to his article on the Kabyle house written in 1963 (“The Berber House or the World Reversed,” Social Science Information, IX, vol. 2, 1970) as perhaps his last work written “as a blissful structuralist.” P. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. R. Nice, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990, p. 9.

6

Bourdieu’s approach shows features in common with the work of Foucault and other ‘post-structuralists’, but it is distinguished by maintaining the more positive orientation to science characteristic of the work of the earlier structuralists.

Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory • 201 7

Translated as Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977.

8

For example, in Robbins, Pierre Bourdieu, p. xiv.

9

Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, p. 37.

10

Ibid., p. 94.

11

P. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. R. Nice, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000, p. 15.

12

Ibid., p. 12.

13

E. Durkheim and M. Mauss, “Essai sur quelques formes Primitives de Classification,” L’Année Sociologique, vol. 6, 1903, pp. 1-72.

14


15

Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, ch. 5.

16

Ibid., p. 18.

17

Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 5.

18

Thus the degree of coherence demanded of those symbolic systems expressed in mythical products and required for practice need then be no greater than that of the practices they inform. “If ritual practices and representations are practically coherent, this is because they arise from the combinatorial functioning of a small number of generative schemes that are linked by relations of practical substitutability, this is, capable of producing results that are equivalent in terms of the ‘logical’ requirements of practice.” Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, p. 94.

19


20

Ibid., p. 210.

21

G. E. R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1966.

22


23

For the significance of such polarities in the perpetuation of sexual inequality see P. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, trans. R. Nice, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001.

24

Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, pp. 87-88.

25

Ibid., p. 53.

26

Ibid., p. 68.

27

Ibid., p. 89.

28

Thus, for example, Bourdieu speaks of bodily dispositions as “political mythology realized, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable way of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling and thinking. The opposition between male and female is realized in posture, in the gestures and movements of the body, in the form of the opposition between the straight and the bent, between firmness,

202 • Paul Redding uprightness and directness (a man faces forward, looking and striking directly at his adversary), and restraint, reserve and flexibility.” Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, pp. 69-70. 29

P. Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990, p. 12.

30

Ibid.

31

Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, p. 147.

32

Durkheim, “Essai sur quelques formes Primitives de Classification,” p. i.

33

This aspect of Durkheim’s divergence from Kant is explored in W. Schmaus, Rethinking Durkheim and His Tradition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.

34

G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977, § 45.

35

Ibid.

36

In particular, in the 1763 paper, “Attempt to introduce the concept of negative magnitudes into philosophy,” in Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770, trans. & eds. D. Walford & R. Meerbote, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 203-241.

37

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. & eds. P. Guyer & A. W. Wood, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, A70/B95. The category corresponding to infinite judgement is ‘limitation’.

38

Aristotle, De Interpretatione, trans. H. P. Cooke, in The Loeb Classical Library: Aristotle 1, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1938, chap. 7.

39

These, of course, are not equivalent. Denying Socrates is beautiful does not imply that he is ugly—he may be neither. For an invaluable comprehensive review of the nature and fate of Aristotle’s account of negation see Laurence R. Horn, A Natural History of Negation, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1989, especially chapters 1 & 2. Thus Horn points out that for Aristotle “there is strictly speaking no external, propositional negation as such, but two syntactically and semantically distinct types of internal negation,” ibid., p. 21. Much of my general orientation towards the changing role of negation in the history of logic here owes much to his analysis.

40

In the Encyclopaedia Logic Hegel describes the ‘first’ negation as that in which “only the determinacy” of the universal predicate is negated: “‘The rose is not red’ implies that it does have some colour—obviously some other colour, which when identified would be just another positive judgement” (G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I of the Encycopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Sutching & H. S. Harris, Indianapolis, Hackett, 1991, § 173).

Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory • 203 41

The member of the Durkheim school who most explicitly pursued the issue of spatial polarity in primitive classification systems was Robert Hertz in his classic paper on the role of right-left polarity, “Le Prééminence de la main Droite: Étude sur la Polarité Religieuse,” Revue Philosophique, vol. 68, 1909.

42

See, for example, the quote above at footnote 31.

43

G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, New York, Dover, 1956, p. 269.

44

I develop this point is developed in Hegel’s Hermeneutics, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1996, chap. 9.

45

Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 268.

46

R. B. Brandom, Making It Explicit, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1994.

47

Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. G. Simpson. New York, The Free Press, 1933. Durkheim’s use of the metaphors of ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’ should not be confused with the rather different (and in some ways, reversed) uses to which they were put by romantic social theorists in Hegel’s time, and on which Hegel drew.

48

G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge,

49

Ibid., § 175.

50

Ibid., § 187 Anmerkung.

51


52

Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, § 187, translation modified.

53

Ibid., § 61 Zusatz.

54

Ibid., § 174, Zusatz.

55

Ibid., § 189 Anmerkung.

56


57

Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. 180.

58

Ibid.

59


60

Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 457.

61

Hegel appeals to Aristotelian figure of “thought thinking itself” (from Metaphysics,

Cambridge University Press. 1991, § 174 Zusatz.

book 12) at the conclusion to his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. 62


63

See especially the important works of Robert Pippin (Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989 and Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Terry Pinkard (German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002). I have argued for a similarly post-Kantian reading in Hegel’s Hermeneutics.

204 • Paul Redding 64

F. Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2000.

65

An earlier version of this paper was presented at a seminar on “Hegel and Social Critique” at the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy (ASCP) annual conference, December 2004, at Macquarie University, Sydney. I wish to thank other participants at the session, and in particular, Jay Bernstein, John Grumley, and Simon Lumsden for helpful feedback, as I do also an anonymous referee for Critical Horizons.

Simon Lumsden Reason and the Restlessness of the Speculative: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Reading of Hegel1

ABSTRACT This paper examines Jean-Luc Nancy’s interpretation of Hegel, focusing in particular on The Restlessness of the Negative. It is argued that Nancy’s reading represents a significant break with other post-structuralist readings of Hegel by taking his thought to be non-metaphysical.The paper focuses in particular on the role Nancy gives to the negative in Hegel’s thought. Ultimately Nancy’s reading is limited as an interpretation of Hegel, since he gives no sustained explanation of the self-correcting function of reason. KEYWORDS: Hegel, Nancy, Reason, Negativity, Poststructuralism

I. Heidegger’s interpretation of Hegel exerted a powerful influence on the way the key figures in post-1968 French philosophy interpreted Hegel. Deleuze, Lyotard, Levinas, and Derrida all, to varying degrees and in different ways, interpreted Hegel’s thought as the pinnacle of the philosophy of presence. That interpretation has ranged from conceiving his project in terms of an economy of totalisation (Derrida), to seeing his thought as effecting, through negation, opposition or contradiction

206 • Simon Lumsden

the complete reduction of the empirical and singularity to mediated conceptual relations (Deleuze). What characterises all these interpretations of Hegel is that they consider his project to be an essentially consumptive enterprise: consumptive of otherness, the empirical, difference and so on. Throughout the career of Jean-Luc Nancy there has been a consistent engagement with the full spectrum of Hegel’s thought: religion, political philosophy, ethical thought, philosophy of mind and Spirit and his logic. The early concern with Hegel in The Speculative Remark2 and all the subsequent essays, chapters and comments on Hegel recently culminated in a short work: Hegel: the Restlessness of the Negative.3 In contrast to most of the other significant figures in what has come to be known as post-structuralism, Jean-Luc Nancy has adopted a far more nuanced reading of Hegel’s thought. Rather than reading sublation [Aufhebung], dialectic, negativity and reason as weapons in the armoury of Spirit’s or the Concept’s self-satisfaction, Nancy considers all these notions through the lens of the negative. From this perspective these central and influential notions are in fact disruptive, restless and open. Rather than focusing on Hegel’s speculative project as Spirit’s reconciliation with itself, Spirit should, he argues, instead be seen as restless and genuinely postmetaphysical. There is no foundation to thought, no given; everything has always already begun and is in motion. Understood in this way, he says: “Hegel is the opposite of a ‘totalitarian’ thinker.”4 Thought, Spirit, self and meaning are all constantly being revised in the ongoing labour and turmoil of their self-relation. Nancy’s style shares little in common with the stylistically restrained world of Hegel scholarship, nevertheless his overview of Hegel, by shunning both the crudely metaphysical view of Spirit and rejecting the dialectic as the tool of totalisation, is in harmony with much of the leading scholarship in Germany and the English speaking world.5 In both cases they place at the centre of Hegel’s post-Kantian credentials his rejection of the given. Nancy has written extensively on loss: of community, of a foundation for knowledge, of sense and so on. Despite the pervasiveness of this theme in his writing he is not seeking a new unity or reconciliation, but rather he sees in the very idea of loss something of the movement of thought itself. In Hegel’s thought he finds the first thinker to embrace alienation as the mark

Reason and the Restlessness of the Speculative • 207

of the liberation of human thought from the given. Hegel’s thought explicitly engages with and embraces the instability of thought. Rather than seeing that instability in the service of a presupposed plan, which is how the dialectic had often been represented, Nancy presents the power of the negative as thought’s self-transformation. Thought is constantly unsettled, it rethinks its ground and is aware that thought itself is groundless, because reason itself is the “exigency of the unconditional.”6 Reason in this case cannot appeal to anything beyond itself for justification, but this does not mean that reason has somehow then become the already expressed and satisfied absolute, rather it means that reason must explain its own self-determining capacity. In Hegel’s case there is a self-consciousness that this process is infinite, that thought’s self-grasping is its own self-surpassing. This paper examines the self-surpassing character of Hegel’s thought. It situates Hegel’s expression of the movement of thought in relation to Nancy’s view of the negative and his idea of sense. It is argued that Nancy gives a persuasive and evocative account of how Spirit transforms itself. The movement of Spirit and thought is possible only because of two key features of Hegel’s thought: the rejection of the given and the way Hegel overcomes the concept-intuition dualism. Ultimately however, despite Nancy’s focus on the negativity of thought, he is incapable of explaining both reason’s selfcorrecting capacity and why Hegel conceives freedom as self-determination.

II. Modernity at Home with the Negative Nancy argues that Hegel is “the inaugural thinker of the contemporary world” since he liberates “sense” (a notion about which we shall have something to say shortly, but which provisionally can be understood as meaning) from the “religious bond of a community.”7 It might be argued that the Enlightenment achieved the conceptualisation of this liberation much earlier. For Nancy, however, the Enlightenment liberates sense and knowledge from the strictures of religious orthodoxy and parochialism only to re-inscribe it again in the finite totality of reason. While reason is presented as the saviour from prejudice, the dogmatism of its rational method presents reason as an end in itself. Whatever might be one’s reservations about this as an interpretation of enlightenment reason, the innovation of Hegel’s thought, and why it represents a


shift from the circumscribed domain of pre-Enlightenment communities, is that knowledge cannot be considered, from the Hegelian perspective, as ‘meaningful totalities’ of reason or religion. Hegel separates sense and knowledge from a finite, yet total organisational system. Changes of knowledge within these systems are neither able to be conceived as grounded in a transcendent domain nor by the internal coherence of these knowledge systems. By collapsing the uniformity of reason and homogeneous traditional community as sources of meaning the criteria for grounding the experience of self and world are thrown open, accordingly the uniformity of ‘community gives way to society’. Civil society marks the emergence of a society “which knows itself as separated from itself.”8 Hegel shifts the focus from understanding itself to changes in collective self-understandings. Civil society with its competing interests and representative institutions cannot sustain any claim to the ‘givenness’ of its meanings and values. Civil society represents a self-consciousness of the instability of the way things come to get their meaning. “What Hegel calls ‘knowledge’ or ‘science’ and ‘absolute knowing,’ opens modernity as the age of the world that can no longer posit the relation to sense or truth as either immediate or mediate.”9 Hegel transforms the notion of truth by incorporating the process of truth-making itself into the very idea of thought. His thought exposes the specific ways in which things come to be meaningful. He examines the ways in which the categories that allow experiences are developed. His thought opens modernity and thinking itself, since he realises that none of our objects, procedures, knowledge and so on are ends in themselves. For Nancy, Hegel’s rejection of any appeal to the given exposes us to a present that is unstable, as no ideal is posited for the future and there is no nostalgia for the past to deliver a system of readymade meaning. In the modern world Hegel says: “Spirit has not only lost its essential life: it is also conscious of this essential loss, and of the finitude that is its content.”10 Modern society has lost the form of life that could be reconciled with its faith and that allow it to identify unquestioningly with the norms of its community. Pre-modern society is characterised by the unreflective manner in which its subjects were at home in their world. They existed in a ‘natural’ harmony expressed in religion, culture and art. The idea of returning to this harmony


lost in the fall or returning in the aftermath of the emergence of modern society to some perceived unified world such as Hellas or a nature untainted by alienation has been a persistent motif in modern cultural life. Reconciling humans and world or even reconciling humans and the transcendent has been a persistent theme of philosophy, and it is a metaphor that is central to Hegel’s thought. While Hegel preserves the idea of what can be loosely translated as being at home [bei sich], in Hegel’s hands that quest because it embraces the negative is not nostalgia. At first sight it seems that the idea of home and the destructive power of the negative seem incompatible. The way in which this apparent tension can be reconciled is articulated clearly by Nancy. Hegel’s idea of self, Nancy remarks, “finds itself in its ordeal and by way of its restlessness, not in the solace of edifying discourse.”11 Rather than reaching a point at which the self is reflected to itself in the world, the alienated self instead finds itself at home in the very instability of thought itself. It does not find itself pre-empted in a metaphysical given. How this takes place is best exemplified by exploring the way in which Hegel’s account of the conscious subject in the Phenomenology of Spirit transforms itself through its attempts to give an account of its knowledge of itself and world.

III. Selfhood and Negativity Early modern attempts to conceive the character of selfhood consistently conceive it as an isolated individual. From Descartes to Locke a reflective method is employed to capture this individual idea of self. This reflective method involves the mind attempting to take notice of its own activity. The preferred method of the foundational quest of early empiricism and rationalism was limited to a self-focus, to an examination of one’s own mental activity which in turn was to provide a secure footing for knowledge, either by presenting the appropriate faculties of the mind or by grounding knowledge on an indubitable rational fact such as the cogito.12 With Kant that entire strategy is cast into doubt. The empiricist and rationalist accounts of knowledge and selfidentity were polarised between the diversity of representations given by the senses and a unifying rational subject. Cognition rather than being grounded on either receptivity or spontaneity came to be considered in Kant’s critical writings as two aspects of the same knowing. Kant argued there is a continuity between representations, the content of representations and the subject doing the experiencing. The synthetic activity that makes experience possible


is a form of self-awareness that allows us to know that what is being experienced is our own. The unifying condition of experience Kant termed the transcendental unity of apperception.13 Hegel in general is sympathetic to this strategy, in particular to the idea that a central feature of any relation to an object or any experience requires a unifying self-relation. They differ in the status they give to the conditions that are constitutive of experience. What Hegel objects to, among other things, is the subjective character of the categories.14 Those categories (as well as notions like autonomy) ought instead to be conceived in terms of a broader notion— Spirit—rather than the spontaneity of the single subject. The categories have to be objective if thought is not to be isolated from world. If they cannot be shown to be objective we are lead straight back to the dualism of empiricism and rationalism. It is not our concern here to examine the ways in which Hegel reconfigures Kant’s transcendental categories. For our purposes, examining Nancy’s interpretation of Hegel, and in particular how he interprets negativity in Hegel’s thought, it is useful to present briefly how the natural consciousness, the protagonist of the Phenomenology, unpacks, through its experience, the conditions that allow its experience. Through this an increasingly complex picture of those conditions and categories is described. From Hegel’s Jena writings onward his strategy had been to reconfigure the character of our self-relation such that the conditions of knowing come to be understood as self-determined. The path consciousness takes through the Phenomenology is described most famously as “the way of the Soul which journeys through the series of its own configurations as though they were the stations appointed for it by its own nature, so that it may purify itself for the life of Spirit.”15 This path of self-knowledge, in the case of the Phenomenology, is not able to be limited to an inquiry of the self by the self. Consciousness can only understand itself by seeing itself as other; in so doing it recognises that its sense of self is the result of a very complex set of relations (intersubjectivity, family, Spirit, morality, religion, language and so on). It is only when it understands itself in terms of these conditions that it will “achieve finally, through a completed experience of itself, the awareness of what it really is in itself.”16 This “completed experience of itself” does not leave the individual ‘I’ intact. The natural consciousness comes to understand itself in relation to


and in fact in the [external] determinations that make possible its comprehension of itself and the world. The Phenomenology evolves by a process of self-examination, and though this is not the way natural consciousness itself experiences each moment of the text, nevertheless, the movement is at the hands of the natural consciousness. What natural consciousness dogmatically asserts as the truth of the object is shown to be limited. The natural consciousness itself ‘corrects’ its own truth claims; in the correction what was taken to be true is sublated. This process builds an increasingly comprehensive account of the way in which consciousness experiences objects. What the Phenomenology will show is that the meaningful relation of consciousness to the world is only possible because consciousness is implicitly self-transcending. Consciousness and its relation to itself and its objects, is determined by a conceptual horizon that necessarily transcends the singularity of consciousness. The path of the Phenomenology leads consciousness beyond itself. This negative and self-transcending movement of Hegel’s account of the conscious subject is emphasised in Nancy’s reading of Hegel: The Hegelian subject is not to be confused with subjectivity as a separate and one-sided agency for synthesizing representations, or with subjectivity as the exclusive interiority of a personality. . . . In a word the Hegelian subject is in no way the self all to itself. It is, to the contrary . . . what (or the one who) dissolves all substance.17

The character of its self-relation is one of dissatisfaction with the conditions that mediate and allow its experience. In order to examine and verify these conditions they must be broken apart from the whole and then appropriated explicitly by consciousness—this is the labour of the negative. Nancy embraces this self-transcending character of consciousness: “self is precisely without return to self; self does not become what it already is: becoming is becoming being outside of self—but such that this outside, this ex-position, is the very being of the subject.”18 Two issues emerge from this passage: firstly it is clear that the metaphysical picture of Hegel is completely abandoned by Nancy and the second is the role that negativity plays in abolishing any conception of the absolute as


given. For Nancy, the chapters of the Phenomenology disclose, in various forms or shapes of consciousness, increasingly complex forms of self-relation. Consciousness’s self-relation and its judgements of experience come to be mediated through community, art, religion, language and so on. Hegel does not begin the Phenomenology by attempting to delineate what the self or consciousness is. It is only with the progressive unfolding of what appears to be external to consciousness that its self-relation is in fact understood. The Phenomenology as we have seen moves forward by a process of consciousness’ examination of its claims to know. Consciousness is transformed in this process: it will no longer see itself as a subject engaging with an object that is purely other. In comprehending both itself and the conditions for its knowing relation to the world, consciousness is itself transformed. We can only gesture toward understanding the way in which consciousness’ relation to itself and the world are re-configured. What is at issue in this paper is the manner in which the Phenomenology moves, in particular the role of negativity in that movement. The trajectory of the Phenomenology involves a dislocation and reconfiguration of the conscious subject’s self-relation, such that consciousness cannot be conceived as “a self all to itself.”19 For Nancy this disassembling and unpacking undermines the stability of selfhood and this instability is its experience.

IV. Experience Nancy in the Experience of Freedom20 inflects his account of experience with a clearly Hegelian sensibility. In that work experience is conceived as “trying the self at the self’s border, the immediate testing of the limit which consists in the tearing apart of the immediacy by the limit.”21 Experience on this view is understood as self-surpassing and self-examination. Conceived in this way experience serves as a summary of the movement of the Phenomenology expressed in the previous section. The transition from one position to another involves finding the truth of the first point in the other, so that experience is a constant unsettling of thought’s and the conscious subject’s own ground. This movement of constantly retreating into the ground and re-establishing the ground is the work or labour of the negative. On Nancy’s reading, Hegel explicitly distances his project from one that appeals to knowledge or faith. What Hegel calls ‘knowledge’ is no longer positioned in relation to the given but rather


is open to the “instability of becoming. . . . The point of the present is neither to be believed nor known it is to be experienced.”22 The truth of thought shifts from being grounded on the sensible content or the revelation of God or faith to a notion of experience that opens consciousness to what is other to it and in the process “unsettles its own ground.”23 The unsettled character of experience is expressed in the description of it in the Phenomenology’s preface: Experience is the name we give to just this movement, in which the immediate,24 the unexperienced, i.e. the abstract, whether it be of sensuous [but still unsensed] being, or only thought of as simple, becomes alienated from itself and then returns to itself from this alienation, and is only then revealed for the first time in its actuality and truth, just as it then has become a property of consciousness also.25

Consciousness, once it tries to reflect on either its knowing or its own self, is “driven beyond itself.” It can, for example, only make judgements about or reflect on objects in the universal medium of thought. When I think about what I am as a self, I reflect upon my singularity, I am aware that I occupy space and time. In this reflection I experience myself, but in so reflecting my immediacy is eliminated, because in this reflection I am ‘communing’ with and through the mediated conceptual realm of thought. This realisation is unsettling as my singularity appears to be dissolved in the mediations of conceptuality, but the realisation of the necessary relation of my thought to the universal penetrates into both how meaning is necessarily framed and results in a constant revision of one’s self-understanding. The drive to understand itself collapses the limited platforms of self-understanding by which consciousness had characterised experience, and this leads to constant revision of its self-understanding. Whatever is confined within the limits of a natural life cannot by its own efforts go beyond its immediate existence; but it is driven beyond it by something else, and this uprooting entails its death. Consciousness, however, is explicitly the Concept of itself. Hence it is something that goes beyond limits, and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself . . . Consciousness suffers this violence at its own hands; it spoils its own limited satisfaction.26


Consciousness wants each new shape of consciousness to be ‘The Truth’, but it cannot rest with that new truth and simply accept this as true, as “thought troubles its thoughtlessness, and its own unrest disturbs its inertia.”27 Thought and the categories that are the conditions for consciousness’s experience are representative of Spirit, but they also constitute the subject’s self-relation. The conscious subject’s experience is advanced by thought, because thought is not simply the singular subject’s but is part of Spirit. In this sense as Nancy comments “thought must take the self out of itself.”28

V. The Negative The history of philosophy might be understood as successive attempts to express the absolute in various guises: the thing in itself, God, that all is one, determinate nature and so on. The shapes of consciousness expressed in the Phenomenology can be understood as those various attempts to think the absolute, and the various chapters of the Phenomenology and especially the preface all demonstrate various failures to think the absolute and thereby the failure of reconciling self and world, through religion, the faculties of mind, the correct tools of epistemology or scientific method and so on. All these approaches are motivated to overcome the self-other relation. In Hegel’s case this problem is overcome by conceiving the absolute as the “self-originating and self-differentiating” Spirit.29 The crudely metaphysical reading of Hegel largely conceived this self-producing spirit as able to reconcile mind and world by reverting to a pre-Kantian metaphysics. On this view, Spirit can be self-producing and self-differentiating because it is the expression of some kind of divine intelligence.30 Nancy like much of the best scholarship on Hegel in recent years completely distances his account from any metaphysical view of Hegel that considers Spirit, thought or the concept as an expression of some kind of spiritual, natural or rational given. Reason cannot appeal to a transcendent realm of ideas such as a Platonic idea or a thing-in-itself; it must instead be conceived as determining its own norms by virtue of a self-correcting capacity. While Nancy would not refer to this movement as self-correction, since his concern is with the openness of the movement of thought, the feature that Nancy takes to be central to thought’s and Spirit’s self-producing and self-differentiating capacity, a capacity that does not appeal to a metaphysical foundation, is the negative.


One of the persistently critical readings of Hegel takes his thought to reinscribe instability in a dialectical system of contradiction and opposition. In Difference and Repetition, for example, Deleuze presents Hegel’s dialectic as replacing difference with a logic of mediation and double negation. Otherness is transformed through a mediated relation into the image of a self-identical subject or is dissolved as a determination of Spirit. All difference is appropriated to establish identity. Hegel’s account of difference, on this view, because of the logic of the dialectic, excludes multiplicity.31 The dialectic is the annihilator of all difference and the subject comes to find itself in and through the other because Hegel presupposes its identification with the whole. Spirit in this case is a giant coil of determinations rolling themselves out over time in which the self slowly alienates itself and then through the dialectical manoeuvres recovers the whole by seeing itself as an expression of the whole. The self progresses to full self-consciousness only by a kind of metaphysical tyranny of recognition in otherness. Nancy’s account of the dialectical movement could not be more different: “to know oneself . . . is to be, concretely before the insufficiency and incompletion of the self, and by this very lack, to be in relation to the other . . . it is to be already in movement, to become.”32 What has been of concern here is to show that the conception of consciousness that emerges in the Phenomenology cannot be conceived as an individual, enduring entity—consciousness is both self-producing and determined from without. The way in which consciousness apprehends what is other to it is the key to understanding the relation of consciousness to its conditions. It is in understanding the manner in which consciousness grasps its objects that consciousness comprehends its own self; only then are the determinate aspects of its relationship to itself and other discernible. The subject’s self-relation is continually re-established through the other as the other is inscribed in the very conditions that allow self-awareness. From the start, the subject’s self-examination is inscribed with the other as intersubjectivity. The self occupies a place in which its self-world relation is constantly re-negotiated because as Nancy puts it: “the world of separation is that world in which the terms of a relation of sense—terms such as ‘nature’ gods or community—are no longer given.”33 Because of the preeminence of the dislocating power of the negative, ‘sense’ is open and constantly transforming.


We have seen the essential way in which Nancy’s reading of Hegel brings out the relation between self and negativity. It is the energy of this subject’s investigation of its self-relation and knowledge claims that unfolds the determinations of thought and transforms the subject itself. The way I have described the movement of the Phenomenology above, in particular the way in which the character of human self-relation is expanded, tries to bring out the negative character of consciousness’s journey. Through its experience consciousness comes to understand the conditions of its self-consciousness and the categories of its thought not as a faculty of mind or mental activity but rather as a selfrelation that always involves conditions, categories and so on that are largely determined from without, by the play of forces that constitute Spirit. Its selfrelation is stripped of its straightforward identification of subject and object. What emerges from Nancy’s reading of Hegel is that the restlessness and force of the negative is the central feature of human thought and selfhood. As will be discussed below, Nancy’s account of the negative ignores what is for Hegel the unique quality of modern self-consciousness: that it comes to be identified with a new way of considering reason. Reason does not have a methodologically regulative role, but rather is the self-correcting capacity of the concept of Spirit and the Idea. The motor of this self-correcting capacity is the negative and it is intimately tied to the subject’s own attempt to make sense of itself and the world.

VI. Sense and Thought The dualism of concept and intuition is arguably the single most important conceptual division that post-Kantian philosophy sought to reconcile. Kant’s thought had tried to reconcile the division between empiricism and rationalism arguing that intuition and the intellect were separate components of a single knowledge. The intuitive component of cognition was responsible for the reception of sensory information. The intellect shaped that ‘sensory manifold’ into meaning. For post-Kantian German idealism, this division of responsibilities produced a fundamentally divided knowledge, since it was still based on a division of mind and world. The crudely metaphysical reading of Hegel argues he resolved this dualism by reverting to a pre-Kantian metaphysics, which effectively denied the intuitive by presenting the conceptual determinations that constitute the world and allowed human experience


of the world as the expression of a monistic spirit. In opposition to this view, Nancy argues that Hegel preserves something like intuition but it is stripped of its association with a given objective reality delivered through the senses. There is considerable debate in the literature about exactly how to understand intuition once the nature of its opposition to conceptuality can no longer be considered dichotomous.34 What is important for our understanding of Nancy’s non-metaphysical reading of Hegel is that thought and the true cannot rely on something given to ground them, they are as Nancy describes them wholly immanent: “the world is only this world, it has no other sense . . . (. . . it does not itself have a sense that would bring it to an end).”35 The term ‘sense’ has a technical meaning in Nancy’s thought. It is designed to conceive of a non-metaphysical process of meaning creation; it evokes the conceptual, intuitive and affective quality of thinking. Sense is also the term he uses to translate Hegel’s central term ‘Concept’. The term sense is adopted from Hyppolite’s interpretation of Hegel.36 In Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative and in Nancy’s other writings ‘sense’, echoing Hyppolite’s use of the term, expresses the process of meaning creation in a way that does not simply reduce sense to pure concepts, but includes the relation between sensibility and thought. His notion of sense attempts to think through meaning at the level of Spirit. It evokes the movement of the negative and the self and the meaning produced through that movement. We can analyse this concept [of sense] as signification, understanding, meaning, and so forth. But what is implied, articulated and exploited in all these analyses . . . can’t simply be the concept of something that would stay put, set within an exterior reality, without any intrinsic relation to its concept.37

The crucial feature of sense is that it grasps itself as sense, and is in fact produced in this very grasping itself: “what makes sense about sense, what makes it originate is that it senses itself making sense. . . . sense apprehends itself, grasps itself as sense.”38 There is in this way no surplus to sense, there is no object as thing-in-itself that a concept is trying to express the truth of: “its concept and reference are indissociable.”39 Sense is the self-consciousness of the self’s and thought’s meaning making and sensing capacity and is the production of meaning and sense itself. Sense, as with Hegel’s Concept, refers to the central philosophical distinction between sensibility and intelligibility.


The Concept (and sense) preserves the tension between concept and intuition and allows them to penetrate from one into the other.40 Nancy prefers the notion of sense to Hegel’s Concept because it maintains the sensibility and affectivity of the intuitive and the sensible while (as in the phrase: ‘x makes sense’) it can also mean the conceptual or discursive. Sense does not collapse intuition into concept but involves the constant movement of one into the other. That tension is central to thought’s self-advancement or self-production. In order to understand this self-transforming capacity of sense (or of thought and the Concept in Hegel’s terminology), the key features of the dialectical movement, the features that give them their characteristic restlessness, have to be sketched: reason and the understanding. This will also help us to see ultimately the limitations of Nancy’s project of taking the heart of Hegel’s project to be governed by the negative. For Nancy, the movement of sense is achieved by thinking the limits of its meaning, pulling apart claims to know and to understand. Thinking requires “that it touches on its own limit and its own singularity.”41 In Hegel’s technical language it is the understanding [Verstand] that pushes the limit, it holds a position and asserts its truth. It functions as an abstract understanding that categorises and holds onto a position until the bitter end. But the limit of the understanding is that while it can explore a determination of thought or a claim to know in detail and with conviction, it cannot see the limit of its claim. It is reason that reconciles differences and functions as the motor of thought’s self-correcting capacity. Reason is, at least in part, the source of the instability, as it is dissatisfied with any claim to know. Reason can only be dissatisfied because it appeals to determinations or significances that are beyond the limits of the posited position.42 It is this movement that reason effects that gives Hegel’s texts (and Spirit) their characteristically self-correcting quality. The self-correcting capacity of reason is however ignored by Nancy. Nancy conceives sense, and by implication Spirit, as a domain of meaning or meaning potential that can be appealed to or drawn from through the dynamism of the negative, through its constant self-transformation. Thinking relates to itself through the other but its self-producing and self-discriminating capacities cease once the other is identified with the same. This identification is never complete as there is “part of sense that resists, reinstates [sense], and opens it once again.”43 That part of sense is, as we have seen, reason. Nancy


provides a progressive account of the restlessness of the negative and a persuasively non-metaphysical reading of Hegel’s speculative project. Hegel’s idea of thought, Nancy remarks, “consists in passing into the element of the speculative—which designates for Hegel the relation of ideality to itself insofar as it wrests itself away from every given.”44 However, the crucial issue is exactly why reason is dissatisfied—why thought moves forward, why does it ‘wrest itself away from every given’? What remains difficult to determine on Nancy’s account is why the various positions held and the determinations expressed come to be seen as insufficient and how they are then redetermined. Nancy contrasts his interpretation of sense with the traditional view of Hegel: “Hegel has often been read as if he exhibited the auto-development of an anonymous subject or reason, foreign to us, the big other of an autistic self.”45 The truth revealed by the movement of the negative should in contrast to this view be understood as one in which truth “finds or happens upon itself as us.”46 The absolute, truth and sense only have sense ‘between us’, precisely because of the unrest of the self. The self hovers outside of itself with others and between ‘us’: the absolute is this self-transforming instability. Nancy concludes that the absolute is in “the passage of sense: as the interval of time, between us, in the fleeting and rhythmic awakening of a discrete recognition of existence.”47 The absolute is meaningful only because of us and for us and in the movement of and between selves: “Each with others, each near the others: the near of the absolute is nothing other than our near each other.”48 In this case the movement of sense is achieved not because of some given character of reason but is embodied in the restlessness of the self and the self-other relation; what is between us is “the sharing of singularities in movement.”49 The consequence of this unrest is a persistent questioning of the fixity of our claims to know. That movement involves exposing us to ourselves, dislocating ourselves and our ‘self-certainty’. What this account leaves unexplored is the way in which the transformation of sense or the Concept is actually achieved. Nancy is clear that the movement of sense involves overcoming limits, which means mediating and collapsing determinations. He remarks that “sense is not given: it is the demand that it be given. . . . Sense must interrogate itself anew . . . it must make demands on itself, call to itself, ask itself, want itself, desire itself, seduce itself as sense.”50


However, without some kind of criteria for establishing the grounds of the evaluation or the ‘interrogation’, then the reflective capacity of Spirit and of ourselves is restricted to a recognition of the restlessness of the negative. This fails then to establish the concrete ways in which, for Hegel, reason’s role is that of evaluating our concepts, norms and commitments. Nancy gives a more comprehensive picture of Spirit and experience than those for whom Spirit is really nothing more than the normative commitments that we hold ourselves to and for which others also make us accountable.51 Spirit and reason are more than an intersubjectively constituted process of commitment making, nevertheless an important part of the sociality of sense and Spirit is giving reasons and holding each other to account for our actions and our reasons. What we need from Nancy is more than just the realisation that we are part of an ungrounded Spirit but that this realisation involves a developmental trajectory that appreciates the full implications of selfdetermination: how we come to understand ourselves in terms of those rules, conditions and so on that we have deliberatively, that is intersubjectivity determined. Nancy does claim that “[Freedom] is indeed autonomy, but the law it gives itself is precisely itself: it therefore gives itself the law to have no law.”52 In Nancy’s case he associates the law with the understanding and freedom with the negative. In so doing he divides the understanding and reason. Hegel’s notion of a self-determining subject is bound to both these notions. This restricted interpretation of autonomy, as the rejection of the given, betrays the fundamental limitation of Nancy’s Hegel interpretation. Autonomy and freedom are more than expressions of a self-transformative power, that transformation involves commitments to laws and norms and those commitments are mediated through our relations with others and institutions. This is where Hegel differentiates himself from Kant as the self-determining subject is on Hegel’s account unable to be conceived in isolation from its sociality, indeed self-determination is only possible with the emergence of civil society and modern forms of government. The Concept is developed in and through social and institutional relations. The norms that define our selfunderstanding, as Nancy makes clear, cannot reflect some grand divine being but are developed through a complex and self-evolving set of relations that are always more than we can say of them and that is why things keep transforming.53 Nevertheless, how we come to consider ourselves in the specific


ways that we do is because of determinate weaknesses in previous claims, for example, as to how freedom should be considered and how it is practically realised. In order to understand ourselves we need a story that explains why we come to take those earlier claims and realisations of freedom to be insufficient. In Nancy’s case freedom is identified exclusively with the movement of the negative, he remarks that “freedom is the position of negativity as such.”54 But Hegelian freedom must involve more than recognising that nothing is given, it must be understood as self-determining. One needs a story as to why one comes to identify with certain norms as adequate, why one would act as if one were their author and so on. Nancy does not give an account of the determinate path by which we come to understand ourselves in the specific ways that we do and why we act freely only if we act as if we were the authors of those laws, even though in Hegel’s case that identification and authorisation is mediated through social relations and democratic institutions. Without an account of the complex process by which norms are rejected, modified and transformed by reason and then embodied in our actions, Nancy’s restless negative runs the risk of making the negative another version of a metaphysical Spirit. In Nancy’s examination of the negative, how things come to be re-determined or rethought and the commensurate changes in self-understanding that result from this process are left unexplained beyond asserting that their source is the negative. What is needed is more than an examination of the instability of thought. If the role of reason is neglected in the transformation and openness of sense then the negative that Nancy takes to be the defining feature of Spirit takes on a strongly ontological value that threatens to undermine the very revival of Hegel that he wants to effect.

Notes 1

The research project of which this paper is a part was funded by an Australian Research Council post-doctoral fellowship. Thanks to a reviewer from Critical Horizons for their detailed and insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

2

J.-L. Nancy, The Speculative Remark (One of Hegel’s Bon Mots), trans. Céline Surprenant, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001.

3

J.-L. Nancy, Hegel: the Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith & Steven Miller, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

222 • Simon Lumsden 4

Ibid., p. 3.

5

See, for example among those writing in English: Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self Consciousness, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1989 and his Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997; Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: the Sociality of Reason, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994 and Paul Redding Hegel’s Hermeneutics, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1996.

6

Nancy, Hegel: the Restlessness of the Negative, p. 23.

7

Ibid., p. 3.

8

Ibid.

9

Ibid., p. 14. This is a point that is reiterated in Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson & Anne O’Bryne, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000. There he describes Hegel’s transformation of the idea of truth as the “truth of the event beyond every advent of meaning” p. 162.

10

G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977. Volume 9 of Gesammelte Werke, ed. by H.-F. Wessels & H. Clairmont, Hamburg, Meiner, 1988, (PhG § 7/7). German page numbers follow paragraph numbers from the English translation.

11

Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, p. 4.

12

See Pippin’s discussion of this issue in Hegel’s Idealism, especially chapter 4.

13

Robert Pippin has been instrumental in understanding Hegel’s project as continuing the Kantian critical tradition. See his Hegel’s Idealism.

14

G. W. F. Hegel. The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. T. F. Garaets, W. A. Suchting & H. S. Harris, Indianapolis, Hackett, 1991, § 42.

15

Hegel’s Phenomenology, § 77/p. 60.

16

Ibid.

17

Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, pp. 4-5.

18

Ibid., p. 57.

19

While I cannot discuss this issue here, one can see the similarity between this issue and the way Nancy reconfigures Heidegger’s notion of being-with [mitsein] in The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

20

The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald, Stanford, Stanford University Press 1993, “experience itself, because it neither gathers nor produces anything: it decides its law and its transgression” p. 85.

21

Ibid., p. 87.

22


23

Ibid.

Reason and the Restlessness of the Speculative • 223 24

The immediacy of the object, in the beginning of sense-certainty, is something that consciousness always keeps as a standard to be finally expressed, but it is simply not possible, as the course of the Phenomenology shows, to account for this immediate ‘experience.’

25

Hegel, Phenomenology, § 36/p. 28 (trans. amended).

26

Ibid., § 80/pp. 62-3.

27

Ibid., § 80/p. 63.

28


29

Hegel, Phenomenology, § 15/p. 12.

30

For a contemporary version of this interpretation of Hegel see Paul Guyer’s “Absolute Idealism and the Rejection of Kantian Dualism” in the Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

31

“Hegel betrays and distorts the immediate in order to ground his dialectic in that incomprehension, and to introduce mediation in a movement which is no more than that of his own thought and its generalities.” Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York, Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 10.

32


33

Ibid., p. 4.

34

See for example, Terry Pinkard German Philosophy 1760-1860, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002; Sally Sedgwick, “Hegel, McDowell, and Recent Defences of Kant,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 31, pp. 229-247.

35


36

Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor & Amit Sen, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1997, see in particular p. 20.

37

Nancy, A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks, Stanford, Stanford University Press 2003, p. 5.

38

Ibid., p. 92.

39

Ibid., p. 5.

40


41

Nancy, A Finite Thinking, p. 5.

42

Nancy captures this movement of reason well in remarking that “to think mediation is to think the impossibility of keeping determinations isolated” in Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, p. 52.

43

Nancy, A Finite Thinking, p. 6.

44


45

Ibid., p. 76.

46

Ibid.

47

Ibid., p. 78.

224 • Simon Lumsden 48

Ibid., p. 79.

49

Ibid., p. 78.

50

Nancy, A Finite Thinking, p. 93 (my emphasis).

51

See for example Robert Brandom, “Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism,” European Journal of Philosophy, vol. 7, 1999, pp. 164-189.

52


53

For a more detailed discussion of this issue see my “Satisfying the Demands of Reason: Hegel’s Conceptualization of Experience,” Topoi, vol. 21, no. 1, 2003, pp. 41-53.

54

Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, p. 68. “the truth of sense is the affirmativity of the restlessness of the negative: its insistence in itself, without renunciation or evasion, its praxis, and the conatus of its being” ibid., p. 31.

Peter Schmiedgen Polytheism, Monotheism and Public Space: Between Levinas and Arendt1

ABSTRACT In this paper I argue that the Levinasian opposition between the violence of the production of identity and self-presence and its undermining in a charitable disburdening of the self for the sake of the monotheistic ethical other, is unable to provide all the resources required for a politically motivated critique of the present. As a critique of Levinas’ almost Manichean opposition between identity and difference, I argue, by appealing to the Arendtian model of public space, that Levinas underestimates our capacity to build and open up societal spaces within which a non-violent polytheistic political difference can proliferate. The identity of the built and legislated can constitute a non-violent stage upon which discursive political differences are played out. KEYWORDS: Levinas, Arendt, Monotheism, Polytheism, Public Space In polytheist systems . . . even a god, no matter how powerful, cannot be sovereign; only under the assumption of one god (“one is one and all alone and evermore shall be so”) can sovereignty and freedom be the same (Hannah Arendt).2

Monotheism signifies . . . human kinship, this idea of a human race that refers back to the approach of the Other in the face, in a dimension of height, in responsibility for oneself and for the Other (Emmanuel Levinas).3

226 • Peter Schmiedgen

Between Levinas and Arendt One of the contested issues raised by the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas is whether or not we can understand ethics to be an adequate ground for politics. Related to this is the further question of what sort of politics such an ethics would imply. I argue in this paper that with the rise of the monotheistic political fundamentalisms that currently dominate the contemporary political scene, we should be careful before we commit ourselves to a politics grounded on the language of Levinas’ ethical monotheism. My argument here is concerned not so much with the question of whether or not Levinas’ ethics presupposes, or requires a theological foundation, as Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou argue, but rather with the idea of monotheism as a founding metaphor for the just life.4 I will argue that we would do better to conceptualise politics and indeed justice itself, in terms of a polytheistic metaphor such as that to be found within the Arendtian model of public space. Further to this, I will argue that the commitment which one finds in Levinas’ ethics to a charitable giving to the other is not a commitment which has an obvious critical potential in the world of late modern economic rationalism which we inhabit. Indeed it would seem that it is most often the foot soldiers of economic ‘reform’ themselves who now espouse the language of individual charitable giving to the other. This turn towards the charitable and indeed also in many cases the return to the religious provision of charity, is one of the very symptoms of the dismantling of the welfare state itself. However, as Zygmunt Bauman has pointed out in recent reflections upon Levinasian ethics, there does not appear to be within our world any great motivation for the rich and powerful to be charitable.5 The powerful may speak the language of religious monotheism, but they do not fear going to hell as their mediaeval precursors did. Most often we do not feel ourselves to be traumatised by the other, hostage to the other, or responsible for the widow, the orphan and the stranger. The turn to charity is the return to a world in which the weak and the poor are simply at the random mercy of the strong and the wealthy and in which monotheism seems to encourage not a spirit of mercy, but rather one of violence, aggression and the suppression of political differences. I intend to develop this argument between monotheism and polytheism as grounding political metaphors by articulating the argument between the

Polytheism, Monotheism and Public Space • 227

respective models of production and labour, and hence also of the habitation of sites and places which one finds in Levinas and Arendt. From Levinas’ perspective, the act of bearing witness to the monotheistic ethical other by charitably giving is understood to be the inversion of the identitarian logic of the production of place. In comparison, for Arendt production is understood to be the condition of the possibility of a reciprocal public, political polytheism. My central thesis is that we will better understand both the political limitations and potentialities of Levinas’ conception of the ethical violence of world production, and hence also of Levinasian ethics itself, by interpreting it within the framework, or against the background of, the more internally differentiated Arendtian analyses of the relations between production, world and mutual intersubjective appearing. I would argue that Levinas’ understanding of production provides a good analysis of the subjective experience of societies and subjects dominated, or largely dominated, by exchange and consumption. Nevertheless this Levinasian analysis does not capture the full emancipatory potentialities inherent within production understood as production of the inhabited environment in particular. In contrast with Arendt, Levinas lacks a strong appreciation of the capacity of production to provide the conditions of possibility for a kind of en-worldedness within which non-violent reciprocal, public intersubjectivity is possible.6 It is just such a space of non-violent mutual recognition that Arendt gives an account of in terms of the political and public space of appearing. The Arendtian space of public appearing is an en-worlded plural political space, in contrast with the a-symmetrical relation to the singular other that is the primordial mode of encountering ethical exteriority from a Levinasian point of view. However, I am also concerned with the debate regarding the distinctions between those modes of being-in and constituting-a-world, or producing-a-world, and discursive or public, political activity. For Levinas, there is a distinction between labour as a primarily non-discursive activity and asymmetrical prophetic discourse, whilst for Arendt, there is a distinction between labour, work and interaction. Although work, for Arendt, is a form of human activity that fashions the built space of public appearing, the primary focus for her is interaction, understood as political and hence discursive and reciprocal action.


For both of these thinkers production or labour alone will never be sufficient to ground an account of our humanity. For both of them the anthropological account of the human being as a self-expressive labourer or worker is inadequate as a way of grounding an account of the individuality or singularity of the individual.7 In the case of Arendt, the expressivist labour anthropology of Marx is re-conceptualised as the condition of possibility of reciprocal political action rather than as the completion or end of the unfolding of human potentiality.8 However, Levinas also brings this conception into question in the name of the a-symmetrical ethical relation to the other understood both as hospitality and prosaic ethical discourse. The encounter with the other either fulfils and redeems the products of labour, or brings their ownership into question and causes their charitable dispersal for Arendt and Levinas respectively. Overall these differences can be articulated in the following way. One finds here a contrast between the polytheism of Arendtian democratic public political intersubjectivity and the monotheism of Levinasian ethical intersubjectivity with its concentration upon the face or the saying of the singular other. Either the work of building and legislating is fulfilled in the enactment of a polytheistic democratic plurality, or it is brought into question by the voices of the singular others who come from beyond its borders.9 My discussion here will take the following form. To begin with I will discuss labour and work as modes of production and, then, following from this, discuss the public sphere of exchange, understood as an experientially impoverished, socially constructed sphere of immanence that Arendt posits upon the ground of work. Finally, I will discuss political action, which Arendt understands to be the mode of enactment of political difference within built, or worked public space itself. This idea provides Arendt with the means of overcoming both the reduction of the sphere of public appearing to nothing more than an economic sphere and the Levinasian turn towards a radical, or theological other. It can be understood to open up an immanent intersubjective transcendence as a ground of critique.

Labouring Bodies, Working Hands and the Durable World Levinas’ post-phenomenological analyses posit an account of labour and dwelling as an egoistic taking possession of both the social and natural worlds.


This labouring-as-taking-possession-and-interiorising can be understood as a movement of both individual and social totalisation.10 This is a movement in which a-symmetrical ethical difference is effaced by the imposition of both an economy of private, familial, or national property rights and reciprocal exchange relations. The effacement of difference theorised by Levinas corresponds to the kind of identity thinking that Adorno and Horkheimer theorise in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. I will argue that Arendt’s work helps us to identify some of the limits of total critiques of intersubjective reciprocity such as those to be found in Levinas’ and Horkheimer and Adorno’s works.11 For Levinas, there is a radical opposition between the reciprocity of this totalised network of economic exchange relations and the a-symmetry of the ethical giving which brings it into question.12 In Arendt’s work one finds, by contrast, a social ontology that posits an intra-societal field characterised, at least potentially, by the enactment of difference within the open identity of a symmetrically structured public intersubjectivity. Public appearing as political appearing is, for Arendt, a kind of difference founded on, and manifested within, a shared legal and architectural, or built, identity. In Arendt’s terms, non-violent intra-societal relations of mutual non-economic interaction are possible. Hence, an immanent political transcendence, rather than a radical ethical transcendence of the constituted social order is also possible. For Levinas, production is essentially a totalising act of imposing economic identity at the cost of ethical difference.13 However, for Arendt, who has a more differentiated categorisation of human productive activity, labour (the first mode of production which she discusses) is that which we must do in order to fulfil basic human needs and hence the needs of the private realm and life alone.14 Work (the second mode of production), on the other hand, is the means by which we construct a durable world and impose form upon life understood as a sphere of mere repetition.15 It is within the durable sphere produced by work that the polytheistic identity within difference of political intersubjectivity can flourish. It is in relation to both the account of work and also of action, that one can see Arendt’s categories as providing a framework for a critical interpretation of Levinas’ less internally differentiated categorical framework. For Arendt the body is the locus of repetitive biological life that transpires within the private realm, and which labour caters to. Working hands are the


means of moving out of this sphere and of transcending its needs towards the realm of public appearing, which is the context for either exchange or non-economic self-enactment. In contrast to Arendt, for Levinas both body and hands remain caught up within and constitutive of economic interiority alone, and do not allow any transition to a reciprocal public intersubjective realm other than the realm of economic exchange. For Levinas there is only either the closed grip of labouring hands or the open-handedness of ethical giving or teaching. For Arendt, though, one must distinguish between the labouring body, working hands, and the public political body that appears before others and which enacts and constitutes the self. The labour of the body is at the lowest level of the hierarchy of human activities that Arendt distinguishes in her social ontology. According to Arendt, we do not engage in the activity of labour to produce things that will have a long lasting life within, or as constitutive of, a world. Rather we engage in labour in order to eliminate our hunger and satisfy our basic biological needs. Such labour is understood by Arendt to be unproductive since it leaves nothing behind. Whatever labour produces is produced simply in order to be consumed and as such labour is a process of devouring. Labour is that which we do in order to produce our daily bread, but not in order to manufacture the table at which we eat. In this sense, labour, correctly understood, produces nothing but life. It is the means by which life alone is produced and reproduced. Such ‘life and nothing more’ is marked by an over-arching repetitiveness. Life is cyclical and characterised by an eternal recurrence of the same events. Following from this, labour is also to be understood as a cyclic and repetitive process. Levinas posits that production in general is always nothing more than a process through which I and we take possession, consume and impose a totalising and repetitive Odyssean identity upon it as well as those who are around us.16 In Arendt, this totalising repetition is characteristic of only one of the forms of productive activity and indeed of only the least of these forms. Levinas’ account of the violence of taking up and en-worlding a place and of the exchange that follows from such productive activity is only an account of the repetitive violence of production directed towards nourishing life alone, rather than an account of the highest potentialities of production. Such labour is production directed towards satisfying the needs of only our bodies and


life alone, and not towards making possible the greatest possible articulation of our humanity as it is embodied in the enactment before each other of our irreducible differences. When we make the transition to the next level of productive capacity according to Arendt, we find a strong contrast with the stark Levinasian opposition between the open handedness of generosity and giving, and the repetitive and Odyssean closed handedness of production and exchange. Arendt argues that work is not simply a mode of taking-possession, getting-a-firm-gripupon, or consuming-as-functionalising, but also the condition of possibility for the construction of durable entities and also to some extent a means of self-expression.17 Just as labour can be understood to be that activity which leads to the making of the bread that we eat, so work also issues in the table upon which we eat and, more generally, in the whole plurality of durable works. It is these very use objects (rather than the objects of consumption produced by labour), which form the continuing framework of the various intersubjective and public worlds that we inhabit. It is the collectivity of these various entities and their relations that constitutes a home for us in the midst of the repetition of the natural process of life itself and the contingency of the actions of the others around us. This collectivity also constitutes the background against which we are able to enact both our freedom and our individuality.18

The Public Space of Appearing: Political Polytheism and Individual Difference Such networks of worldly entities do not simply, in Arendt’s terms, establish the privacy of a private dwelling, or as I have suggested above, an internally undifferentiated collective dwelling as they appear for Levinas. They also open up indefinitely plural, public spaces. The world opens up for us because there is a field of things between us. The world is between us in just the same way in which the table is.19 The works that the worker produces are the things that divide us, and the world is best understood as an in-between. This network of things relates and separates us at the same time, rather than simply relates to us in a totalising way. For there to be a public realm we must be both distinct and yet also available for communication.20 From this


point of view works of art are not the greatest possible expressions of the self, as the romantics would have us believe, but merely the most enduring elements of the public stage.21 And so the public space of appearing is not exemplified solely by the closed grip of possession, or by the open hands of giving. Most exemplary of such shared public space is for Arendt the architectural space of the market place. However, Arendt also notes that public space cannot only be a market place as a sphere of exchange; it can also be a political space. In contrast to Levinas, who understands the public sphere of the producing subject solely as a sphere of exchange and instrumental or totalising activity, for Arendt it is also possible to approach the other with the loosened grip of the political actor without doing violence. Indeed one might say that this is a grip that is able to gather the other and the others, rather than simply either effacing the other for its own sake, or effacing itself for the sake of the other. This approach is the moment of communication and interaction for Arendt. In approaching the other and others in the public space of appearing we speak to the other and hence convey ourselves to the greatest extent possible. In beginning to speak in the public space of appearing we enact our singularity and manifest our capacity to begin anew. Indeed we only lapse into violence when we cease to speak and simply instrumentally engage the other and reason as homo faber would. The Arendtian notion of work, then, is that of an activity that does not so much simply appropriate and take possession of, but rather open up. Working is opening a space and indeed taking possession of a space that many can share at once. In this sense, public space need not simply be the space of exchange and conspicuous consumption as it so often is for us. The public plaza may be a space within which one shows off one’s wealth; and yet it can also be a space within which we act before the others as individuals rather than simply being either commodities (labour power), consumers of commodities, or those who bring commodities to exchange and sell. For Arendt the singularity of the self, the other and the social plurality is enacted in a shared visual and auditory space opened up by working, a space that is the built and legislated city.22 The public space of appearing is for Arendt a stage upon which we enact the selves we may be remembered for. It is upon this public stage that we both man-


ifest our presence to others and indeed constitute ourselves as the selves who we are. The Levinasian conception of the other is as an agent of dispersal, that is, as causing the charitable dispersal of that which we have taken possession of in producing it and by so doing, bringing into question the right of possession of the producer over his or her products. In contrast, for Arendt, there is a sense in which political action is the fulfilment of production. For her, production can be understood as the condition of the possibility of either a totalising effacement of difference (the reduction of the public space of appearing to a space of exchange alone), or the opening up of a space within which difference and singularity can be both expressed and nurtured. The public space of appearing, for Arendt, makes possible a symmetrical and polytheistic intersubjectivity, in contrast to the a-symmetrical ethical monotheism of Levinas. The Arendtian model of public appearing posits a form of intersubjectivity that always has a single centre, but never an absolute centre. In other words, there are many voices. Democratic seeing and being seen, hearing and being heard, always flows from person to person within the gathering of those who enact themselves before each other within this public space of appearing. Such democratic political appearing is both irreducibly intersubjective and irreducibly plural.23 In other words, and drawing on Arendt’s work, production can also be understood to be a means of defining the boundaries of a world within which a polytheistic political plurality, rather than simply an egoistic economic identity, can unfold. From this perspective, the city is an architectural, legislative and geographical space that does not violently show a total world or total identity, but which rather opens a space within which a differentiated world can happen in between social and political actors. We ought not to inhabit the ethical space of the desert within which one wanders, as Levinas says, adoring “God in a transportable temple,” without any certainty of encountering the other, and without any certainty of a world being spun between the actors in question.24 The life of the city as well as the life of the nation state need not simply be marked by the imposition of economic identity without difference. It can instead make possible the very enactment of those differences,


which constitute us as the individuals who we are within the incomplete, and evolving identity of the city itself. To be sure Levinasian categories help us to understand the underlying dynamic of an egoistic economic rationalism that reduces us to nothing more than economic entities, however they do not provide an account of the potentialities of a completely fulfilled production. However, the other of this pathologically egoistic world is not the a-symmetrical ethical other to whom we relate when we charitably give, or the theological other by whom we are prophetically taught. We have grounds for both hoping for and striving to bring about the immanent, plural intersubjective other of the social worlds we inhabit as well. However, I would like to mention a few closing words about the limits of the symmetrically intersubjective Arendtian position just outlined and also of symmetrically structured intersubjectivity in general. Despite the rather pro-Arendtian argument I have established here, it is clear that the Arendtian space of publicity/privacy, regardless of the ways in which it opens up a non-violent political space, can nevertheless itself be understood to be in certain respects a Levinasian dwelling. Even though the many-eyed and many-eared Arendtian democratic collectivity has no centre, and in that sense could be inclusive of all those within the city who choose to enact themselves within it, it does have boundaries. It is enacted within a particular and finite identity that is the result of both production and action. These boundaries of the spaces of appearing are defined most obviously through work as the architectural space of public appearing and also through the creation of a legislative framework for political and legal action.25 In literal terms, one might say that it is the boundaries of the city that delineate these limits, as well as the distinctions between public and private and hence political and a-political spaces and also the non-political spaces beyond the city. There is a potential for egoism and violence inherent in every instituted intersubjective order that distinguishes both the public from the private and the citizen from the non-citizen. The public space of appearing is never common to all and sundry, but rather only to very specific groups. The groups in question are both those who are able to withdraw into the warmth and security of a private realm when they leave the light of the public realm (the property owners and hence the shareholders in the state


enterprise), and also those who have the privilege to be understood as singular individuals rather than simply as types, or as ‘social problems’ (like ‘the homeless’, ‘the single mother’, ‘the asylum seeker’) when they are within it. As much as every common is a space of inclusion it must necessarily also be a space of exclusion. As I have argued, even though Arendt is not committed to a totalising particularism of exchange, her understanding of political plurality is nevertheless inadequate without an attendant account of those who it may and often does exclude. I would suggest (without developing it here) that there is also a creative and critical tension between the political polytheism of Arendt and the ethical monotheism of Levinas as captured through his idea of gifting. The dimension of exclusion can be seen as the tension between the reciprocal intersubjective action which, I have argued, fulfils production, and the prosaic, fragmented and prophetic discourse of the singular (if not theological) other who interrupts and brings into question political action and discourse enacted within the instituted realm of appearing. The gifts that we have to offer, and ought to offer the other are not only the gifts of material sustenance and moral accountability, but also ones of positive rights themselves. Our a-symmetrical responsibility to the other is in the end also a responsibility to include the other and to give the other the gift of participation within the polytheism of reciprocal political intersubjectivity itself.

Notes 1

I would like to thank the reviewers of Critical Horizons for their editorial suggestions and comments on an earlier version of this paper.

2

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press, 1958, pp. 234-5.

3

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Duquesne University Press, 1969, p. 214.

4

Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1978; Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward, London & New York, Verso, 2001. See in particular Chapter 2, “Does the Other Exist?”

5

Zygmunt Bauman, “The World Inhospitable to Levinas” in Philosophy Today, vol. 43, no. 2/4, Summer, 1999, pp. 151-167.

236 • Peter Schmiedgen 6

Which might be compared with civil society (Hegel, The Philosophy of Right), the public sphere (Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere), or the Benjaminian urban crowd, depending upon one’s theoretical commitments.

7

Whether the self-expression in question is that of the individual or the group, the great artist, or proletarian labour.

8

On the relationship between Marx’s and Arendt’s categories see for example, Bikhu Parekh “Hannah Arendt’s Critique of Marx” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill, New York, St Martins Press, 1979.

9

In using the term ‘polytheism’ as the social and political opposite of ‘monotheism’ I am harking back here to some extent to Nietzsche’s contrast between polytheism and monotheism in The Gay Science. See section 143, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York, Vintage Books, 1974.

10

Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 156-162. That this is a movement that can be understood in both collective and individual terms is particularly suggested by the analyses of roots and rootedness that one finds in “Simone Weil Against the Bible,” Difficult Freedom, p. 137. Also “A Religion for Adults’ Difficult Freedom,” p. 23. Both texts in Difficult Freedom, trans. Sean Hand, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. It is clear that not only the individual but also the collectivity may have roots in this sense.

11

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, London, Verso, 1986.

12

Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 171-172.

13

On money and economy in Levinas, see for example, “The Ego and the Totality,” pp. 38-39, where Levinas tells us: “The ego’s relationship with a totality is essentially economic.” Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Duquesne University Press, 1987.

14

See Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 88, 98, 115.

15

See Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 94, 136-139.

16

For the distinction between Abrahamic wandering and odyssean repetition see, for example, Levinas’ “The Trace of the Other” in Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, ed. Mark C. Taylor, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986, p. 348. On Ulysses see also Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 27.

17

Although there is ambiguity in Arendt over whether we ought to understand as an example of action the founding and framing of the basic legal order within which we might come to appearance, for the sake of my discussion here I will follow her account in The Human Condition. Even if one wishes to assert that the framing of constitutions is a manifestation of action, there is still a distinction between such framing and the action that transpires within this framework. But

Polytheism, Monotheism and Public Space • 237 it is also evident that the idea of work is more general than the idea of collective legislative acts, which is at the centre of Arendt’s concerns in “On Revolution.” See Hannah Arendt, “On Revolution”, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1990. But also Seyla Benhabib “Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition and Jürgen Habermas” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun, Cambridge, MA, & London, UK, MIT Press, 1999. 18

Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 134.

19

Ibid., p. 52.

20

The opposite of such relating and separating is the collapse into the warmth and friendship of the pariah which Arendt also notes in “On Humanity in Dark Times Thoughts about Lessing” in Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1973, pp. 19-21.

21

Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 167-168.

22

In using this term I am gesturing away from Arendt and towards Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre’s account of the city as a work in progress, or oeuvre, rather than a completed product as such would be a useful complement to the Arendtian model here. The city is at its best a collective and on going self-articulation. See Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans. & eds. Eleonore Kofman & Elizabeth Lebas, Oxford, Malden, MA, Blackwell, 1996, pp. 65-6, 75-7. This incompleteness and vagueness of the city as designed and legislated is also brought out in the work of Michel De Certeau. In “Walking in the City” De Certeau analyses the ways in which the random walking of pedestrians is in fact an inscription of their individuality upon the face of a city organised for ‘no one in particular’. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley, California, University of California Press, 1984.

23

And so one can say with some justice that Arendtian democratic space is a decentred space, just as indeed the discursive space of Habermas’ discourse ethics is a space that both requires and tends to produce decentred subjects.

24

Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom, trans. Sean Hand, London, Athlone, 1990, p. 22.

25

That we should be concerned about the ways in which built and legislated environments both allow others to appear and indeed also manipulate the ways in which these others are enabled to appear for each other is more than confirmed by Foucault’s many investigations of the power dynamics of just this field of relationships.

Robert Sinnerbrink From Machenschaft to Biopolitics: A Genealogical Critique of Biopower

ABSTRACT This paper develops a genealogical critique of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics in the work of Foucault and Agamben. It shows how Heidegger’s reflections on Machenschaft or machination prefigure the concepts of biopower and biopolitics. It develops a critique of Foucault’s account of biopolitics as a system of managing the biological life of populations culminating in neo-liberalism, and a critique of Agamben’s presentation of biopolitics as the metaphysical foundation of Western political rationality. Foucault’s ethical turn within biopolitical governmentality, along with Agamben’s messianic gesture towards a utopian community to come, are questioned as political responses to biopower regimes. KEYWORDS: Biopower, Biopolitics, Modernity, Heidegger, Foucault, Agamben

The concepts of biopower and biopolitics have become increasingly prominent in recent political thought, particularly within the European tradition of social and critical philosophy. Here one can mention Foucault’s first volume of The History of Sexuality,1 Agamben’s appropriation of Foucault’s concept of biopolitics in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life,2 and the recent deployment of the concept of the biopolitical in Hardt and Negri’s critique of global capitalism, Empire.3 The theoretical

240 • Robert Sinnerbrink

significance of the concept of biopolitics undoubtedly lies in its synthesis of processes such as the technological manipulation of our biological existence, the management of biological life as a resource, and the administration of human populations as the objects of social and political power relations. While Foucault is the first to develop an explicit concept of biopolitics, one can certainly find precedents in modern thought where the increasing politicisation of the biological life of human beings is taken to be a defining characteristic of technological modernity. In what follows I present a genealogical critique of the concept of biopower, commencing not with Foucault but rather with Heidegger. I argue that one can find an important anticipation of the concept of the biopolitical in Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures of the 1930s and 40s, and in his posthumously published Beiträge or Contributions to Philosophy.4 Foucault and Agamben, the most important theoreticians of biopolitics, appropriate this Heideggerian theme of a convergence between biological existence, technology, and sociopolitical power relations, but submit it to quite different conceptual transformations. Foucault retains a more Nietzschean perspective on biopower as one pole of the biopower/disciplinary power regime characteristic of modernity, yet turns in his later (post-1976) work to subsuming biopolitics to the problematic of ‘governmentality’, turning to analyses of classical liberalism and contemporary neo-liberalism as systems aimed at the bio-social management of the population.5 Agamben, by contrast, presents a more Heideggerian perspective in conceptualising biopolitics as the metaphysical foundation of the history of Western political rationality commencing with the Greek division between zoe and bios (biological life and social existence). Politics is grounded in the tension between bare life and sovereign power, a process culminating in the state of exception becoming the norm. The ‘camp’, Agamben claims, thus becomes emblematic of the biopolitical condition of modernity.6 This metaphysical narrative of a biopolitical essence grounding Western political rationality, so I shall argue, generates similar difficulties for Agamben as it did for Heidegger. There is a tension within the biopolitical paradigm between the ontic level of social interaction and the ontological level of historical world-disclosure, without a clear sense of the relationship between these levels of analysis, or how to specify the practical-normative dimensions of life within biopolitical regimes. The responses to biopower proposed by

From Machenschaft to Biopolitics: A Genealogical Critique of Biopower • 241

Foucault and Agamben present us with starkly opposed alternatives: either to acknowledge the ethical practices of freedom within neo-liberalism understood as a rational system of regulative biopower; or to challenge biopolitical nihilism by gesturing towards a messianic overturning of law that would heal the breach between bare life and politics and redeem humanity within a utopian community to come.

Heidegger on Machenschaft (Machination) Heidegger’s meditations on the essence of modern technology present an important, if neglected, starting point for reflection on the concepts of biopower and biopolitics. Indeed, in his final interview, Foucault made the intriguing remark that “[m]y whole philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger,” leaving obscure the ultimate significance of Heidegger in Foucault’s work.7 Agamben too is indebted to Heidegger, politicising Heidegger’s history of Being into the history of the biopolitical ordering of bare life.8 Yet Heidegger barely mentions ‘life’ in the best known of his writings on technology (“The Age of the World Image” and “The Question concerning Technology”). Nonetheless, I want to argue that Heidegger prefigures the convergence of technological ordering, biological existence, and enhancement of power, that are constitutive of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics.9 This prefiguration of the theme of biopower is most apparent in Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures, particularly his 1939 lecture course on “The Will to Power as Knowledge.”10 It is also articulated in sections of Heidegger’s posthumously published Beiträge zur Philosophie (Contributions to Philosophy), written between 1936 and 1938.11 Here I shall confine myself to reconstructing Heidegger’s anticipation of the theme of biopower from scattered remarks in these texts, emphasising the connection between biological life, technology, and politics in modernity, and suggesting that the roots of more recent conceptions of biopolitics can be found in Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysics of modernity. At various points in Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures, one can find clear anticipations of his later meditations on modern technology as en-framing or Ge-stell (the complete disclosure of beings, including human beings, as a


totality of resources). During the 1930s, Heidegger discusses ‘machination’ or Machenschaft (rather than en-framing or Ge-stell) as defining the representational and productionist model of disclosing beings in modernity.12 Machination or Machenschaft defines the modern world-interpretation in which entities are disclosed solely as representable for a subject and as objects of theoretical comprehension or practical manipulation.13 Departing from the ordinary sense of machination as human plotting or contriving, Heidegger emphasises the ontological sense of Machenschaft as referring to making (poesis, techne), which in turn points to a more basic conception of beings as ‘make-able’, indeed as self-making.14 Entities come to be understood as makeable, either of their own accord or else according to a technical procedure. This line of thought begins with the Christian conception of the ens creatum and God as causa sui, and culminates with the modern causal conception of the natural self-production and technical re-production of beings. In this respect, Heidegger contends, the “mechanistic and the biological ways of thinking are always merely consequences of the hidden interpretation of beings in terms of machination.”15 For Heidegger, modernity is blind to Machenschaft, to the simultaneous objectification and subjectification of beings, including human beings in their social existence, a process that taken together defines technological nihilism: Be-ing [Seyn] has so thoroughly abandoned beings and submitted them to machination [Machenschaft] and ‘lived-experience’ [‘Erleben’] that those illusive attempts at rescuing Western culture and all ‘culture-oriented politics’ must necessarily become the most insidious and thus the highest form of nihilism.16

As Heidegger will later make explicit, the result of this technological nihilism is the thoroughgoing quantification and objectification of all reality, a process that human beings initially appear to master but which involves, on the contrary, our reduction to ‘human resources’ instrumentalised within the technological ordering of world.17 What of ‘Life’ within this dire diagnosis of modernity? Life, according to Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, is above all concerned with “maintaining itself and being perpetually secured in its constancy [Bestandes].”18 Modern


Western humanity is defined by its quest to understand human life as “the securing of its own permanence [Bestandsicherung seiner selbst],”19 which in turn generates an understanding of beings as permanence [Beständigkeit]. This securing of human life and of nature as a stockpile of resources [Bestand] involves a new conception of knowledge, truth, and practice. Within the modern age, the meaning of truth is transformed into that of “the securing [Sicherung] of beings in their perfectly accessible disposability [ausmachbaren Machbarkeit].”20 Beings as a whole are defined in terms of their accessibility, disposability [Machbarkeit], malleability [Machsamkeit], and produce-ability by way of “unconditioned planning,” securing, and calculating.21 Machination or Machenschaft describes this modern horizon of world-disclosure in which all beings show up as ‘make-able,’ everything is ‘do-able,’ and even human beings begin to show up as part of the ordering and securing process of life-enhancement. Modernity is thus for Heidegger the age of machination or technological nihilism. It is the age of the reduction of beings to manipulable resources and of human beings to subjects establishing their “unconditioned hegemony over all sources of power on the face of the earth.”22 It is the age in which not just society but Life itself is “totally mobilized” according to self-posited ‘goals’ or values dedicated to the “sheer expansion of power and valued purely according to their estimated use-value.”23 Modern Western humanity’s selfimposed will to master life and our own finitude results in the promulgation of ‘worldviews’ (Nazism, ‘Americanism,’ Stalinism) dedicated to the sheer expansion of power and the instrumentalisation of human beings and of beings in general. In short, Heidegger engages here in a withering critique of the socio-political dimensions of the instrumentalisation of Life in modernity. In a striking anticipation of the biopolitical ordering and management of human social existence, Heidegger writes: Whatever beings in their individual domains may be, whatever used to be defined as their quiddity in the sense of the ‘Ideas,’ now becomes something that the self-instauration [of human beings] can reckon with in advance, as with that which gauges the value of every productive and representative being as such (every work of art, technical contrivance, institution of government, the entire personal and collective order of human beings).24


This calculative ordering and management of human social, cultural, and political existence is a manifestation of the nihilism of Western modernity. The modern age of machination is defined by the disclosure of beings as disposable resources, and of human beings as subjects whose subjectivity is grounded in this very ordering of Life as resource. Modern self-empowering subjectivity “is fulfilled in the calculability and manipulability of everything that lives, in the rationalitas of animalitas.”25 Life itself, not to mention human life, becomes the object of rational calculation, planning, and ordering. Let us summarise this brief discussion of Heidegger’s anticipation of biopower. The concept of machination or Machenschaft presents an ontological interpretation of the way beings are disclosed in modernity as representable and manipulable resources. Central to machination is the reduction of beings and human beings to resources to be managed, optimised, enhanced, and produced (through technical and social means, Nietzsche’s ‘breeding’). Finally, this self-perpetuating process of power enhancement operates beyond the purview of individual subjects since it defines the horizon of intelligibility that discloses the world itself in terms of machination. Together, these features of Heideggerian Machenschaft define the nihilism of technological modernity. They also anticipate central aspects of Foucault’s concept of biopower and Agamben’s concept of biopolitics. As we shall see, both Foucault and Agamben submit this Heideggerian theme of machination to significant transformation. For all his anticipation of the biopolitical, however, Heidegger does not explicitly connect the biological existence of human beings with the operation of power in modernity, nor does he articulate machination as a specifically political phenomenon. Machination describes an ontological account of the way beings are disclosed and rationally ordered in modernity. While Heidegger hints at the significance of life, understood as will to power, as an element of power and technological control, this connection becomes explicitly articulated only with Foucault’s conception of biopower, to which I now turn.

Foucault on Biopower During the mid 1970s Foucault turned his attention to the analysis of power understood as ensembles of strategic, corporeal, productive, and reversible


relations operating throughout the social field, from the micro level of social interactions to the macro level of institutional and social practices.26 Modern regimes of power function in a manner that goes far beyond traditional models of sovereignty or of state power, and hence demand a concrete and historically specific analysis of their functional effects and systemic operation. Foucault thus identified two related dimensions of modern power: a disciplinary power exercised upon the bodies of individuals through techniques of training, surveillance, spatial distribution, examination, and normalisation; and a regulatory biopower exercised upon the biological existence of a population grasped as an object of management, administration, and control. The contrast is noticeable in the transition from the analysis of disciplinary power in Discipline and Punish (1975) to the new concept of biopower—power exercised on the biological life of the population—in the first volume of the History of Sexuality, La Volonté de Savoir (1976). Rather than provide an exhaustive survey of the development of Foucault’s thinking, here I wish only to outline Foucault’s concept of biopower as presented in the last chapter of La Volonté de Savoir and in the 1976 Collège de France lectures “Society must be Defended” (particularly Lecture Eleven of March 17, 1976). I shall then briefly discuss the connection Foucault discerns between biopolitics and governmentality, which culminates in his later interest in neo-liberalism as a biopolitical form of governmental rationality oriented towards the efficient management of populations of rationally motivated economic agents.27 My focus will be on how Foucault transforms the concept of biopower in an ‘ontic’, rather than ontological, direction, providing a Nietzschean genealogical perspective on the historically specific techniques of biopower applied to human populations. This Nietzschean genealogical moment, however, gives way to Foucault’s later interest in neo-liberalism as a regime of governmentality grounded in a biopolitics of populations.28 This turn towards liberalism as a form of modern governmentality provides essential background, I suggest, for understanding Foucault’s ‘ethical turn’ during the 1980s towards the ‘care of the self’ as a practice of freedom. Foucault commences his analysis in the chapter “Right of Death and Power over Life” by indicating the transition from a pre-modern regime of sovereign power, defined as the power of the sovereign to decide life and death, to the modern regime of power over life (the power to ‘make live’ and to ‘let


die’).29 Since the seventeenth century (in respect of disciplinary power), and the latter half of the eighteenth century (in the case of biopower), the manner in which power operates upon both individual bodies and populations in Western societies has undergone a dramatic shift. Rather than suppress, constrain, or destroy, power now operates to “incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimise, and organise the forces under it.”30 The sovereign exercise of the power of inflicting death is transformed into the regulatory power to manage life, “to administer, optimise, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.”31 In short, modern power develops into an anatomo-politics of the human body, organised through disciplinary techniques aiming at the optimisation of the body’s capabilities, forces, usefulness, and docility; and it develops into a biopolitics of the population, a regulatory power centred on the species, “the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes.”32 Foucault identifies a number of important features of biopower that distinguish it from disciplinary power. 1) Biopower takes as its object the population rather than the individual body, a multiplicity of human beings as a biological species subject to conditions such as propagation, births and mortality, health, illness, and disease, life expectancy and longevity, risk and security, management and control. 2) Biopower functions in tandem with different relevant bodies of knowledge such as demography, statistics, studies of fertility, morbidity, epidemiology, illness, mortality, public health and hygiene, urban planning, and so on. And 3), biopower develops distinctive techniques or ‘technologies of power’, discursive practices of including forecasts, statistical estimates, overall measures of long-term trends, and so forth. As Foucault remarks in his lectures, for biopower to function properly “security mechanisms have to be installed around the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as to be optimise a state of life.”33 Biopower, in short, is a power of regularisation designed to optimise the socio-biological capacities of a living multiplicity of human beings. One might be struck here by the affinities with Heidegger’s Machenschaft, the disclosure of beings as resources to be ordered, regulated, and controlled. Nietzsche’s metaphysics of life as will to power, as rendered by Heidegger, is transformed into Foucault’s historicist analysis of biopower exercised upon the biological life of human multiplicities. Nietzsche’s grosse Politik is trans-


figured, via Heidegger, into Foucault’s biopolitics of the population. At a general level of conceptualisation, Foucault’s conception of biopower finds a precursor in Heidegger’s diagnosis of machination in modernity, now applied to the biological existence of human multiplicities. While commentators such as H. Dreyfus and T. Rayner have remarked upon the affinities between Heidegger and Foucault in this respect, I would suggest that it is nonetheless the differences that are more significant, since they point to important ways in which Foucault challenges the Heideggerian diagnosis of modernity.34 There are three points I would like to make concerning the relationship between Heideggerian Machenschaft and Foucaultian biopower. First, biopower refers to the exercise of regulatory power over the biological existence of the population, rather than a more generalised reduction of beings to a totality of calculable resources. For Heidegger, biopower would be just one specific ontic manifestation of the deeper ontological condition of generalised machination in modernity. Second, Foucault’s biopower is not an ontological concept grounded in a meta-narrative of the history of Being (coinciding with the beginning and completion of metaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche). Indeed, Foucault explicitly rejects any teleological narrative of historical development (including the inverted Hegelianism of Heidegger’s Verfallsgeschichte of the forgetting of Being).35 Instead Foucault presents a Nietzschean genealogy of concrete social practices more adequate to the specificity and complexity of modern power relations. Third, Foucault’s concept of biopower is no longer connected with any explicitly Nietzschean/Heideggerian account of the nihilism of modernity, whether as the devaluation of life-affirming world-interpretations or the forgetting of Being in the epoch of modern technology.36 Moreover, the late Foucault moves beyond the critical paradigm of biopower/biopolitics, originally presented as a complement to disciplinary power, and embraces a more neutrally descriptive account of political liberalism and neo-liberalism as biopolitical systems of governmentality aimed at the management of populations.37 This turn towards a biopolitical understanding of neo-liberalism is then supplemented by Foucault’s more well-known ethical turn, which now posits a


Nietzschean/late modernist conception of the subject freely engaging in practices of ethico-aesthetic self-formation—the very conception of the subject earlier put into question in Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary society.38 The earlier critical sense of biopower as a complement to the regime of disciplinary power gives way to a neutrally descriptive account of liberalist regimes of governmental socio-bio-management that allow for ‘non-political’ forms of ethical self-fashioning.39 Finally, although Foucault talks of ‘technologies’ of power, this is at the decidedly ontic level of concrete social practices, assemblages of bodies, discourses, institutions, and systems of norms. In Foucault’s analyses, technology is reduced from the Heideggerian ontological level of world-disclosure to the explicitly ontic level of organised techniques of power (deployed through regimes of knowledge, truth, normativity, and processes of subjectification). This shift from an ontological thesis concerning the technological ordering of life to a historically specific analysis of the biosocial management of populations generates a much more precise theorisation of how systems of power actually function in modern societies. In this respect Foucault’s concept of biopower can be understood as an historically oriented transposition of the Heideggerian theme of machination to the level of the biological life of human populations. For all the increase in historical specificity, Foucault’s concept of biopower raises questions of its own. What of Foucault’s conflation of biopower and biopolitics? Foucault consistently uses these terms as synonyms for the regulation of the life of populations.40 The sense of politics at issue here is descriptive rather than normative: an account of how the biological life of populations is managed and controlled in contemporary social and political regimes rather than how these regimes may be the site of practical contestation and social struggle. In other words, Foucault appears to use ‘politics’ here in the restricted sense of what Jacques Rancière has called the police, precisely the reduction of ‘politics’ to socio-economic management that has supplanted politics in the proper sense (the antagonistic demand for universal equality and justice) within modern liberal democracies.41 Foucaultian biopolitics has little to do with politics in the sense of an antagonistic struggle or a normative dissensus within an unjust social and political order. It may be more precise, therefore, to speak of ‘biopower’ in a descriptive sense, to describe the functional biomanagement of the population, and to reserve ‘biopolitics’ in the normative sense for forms of political contestation, driven by the experience of injus-


tice, that are manifest in social struggles against dominant forces structuring biopower regimes. Such a distinction is absent in Foucault’s analyses. Be that as it may, to this objection one might point to the possibility of a Foucaultian biopolitics of local strategic interventions. As Foucault tirelessly repeated, within any field of social power relations there can be no exercise of power without a corresponding form of resistance. Power is coextensive with resistance and presupposes the recognition of subjects as free, as having the capacity to effect “actions upon the actions of others.”42 What kind of resistance, then, could we say is exerted in relation to the regulative effects of biopower? One possibility might be to take Foucault’s enigmatic remarks about another economy of “bodies and pleasures” as gesturing towards sexual sub-cultural practices resistant to prevailing forms of biopower.43 But this would be to burden a very specific form of sub-cultural practice with a hopelessly enormous task (resisting the bio-socio-economic management of the population). As Agamben observes, even the ‘body’ and ‘pleasure’ can be regarded as functional elements of systems of biopower rather than sites of a utopian, or rather heterotopian, resistance.44 Another possibility might be to take various movements concerned with, for example, euthanasia, abortion, AIDS activism, animal rights, radical environmentalism, the anti-GM lobby, and so forth, as disparate examples of the multifarious forms of social and cultural resistance to contemporary biopower. For all their significance, however, it is very difficult, to see how such disparate interest groups could form a coherent form of resistant politics apart from the most fleeting ‘coalitions’ loosely bound by mutual self-interest. Indeed, in keeping with the paradigm of political liberalism, the struggles between such competing interest groups can certainly challenge particular aspects of the socio-bio-management of the population; but they do not challenge the fundamental basis of the prevailing socio-economic order. They do not raise particularist claims to the level of the ‘impossible’ demand for universal equality and political justice made by those suffering injustice within exclusionary regimes. In this sense, Foucault’s conflation of biopower with biopolitics accurately reflects the collapse of the properly political sense of biopolitics into a (liberalist) governmentality oriented towards sociobio-management of the population.


Drawing on Axel Honneth’s criticism, one could also argue that Foucault’s concept of biopower presents the ‘systemic’ operation of power in respect of population regulation, but that it fails to provide any real account of the action-theoretic perspective of individual or collective agents capable of resisting biopower regimes.45 Here one must ask what is the specific injury, harm, or injustice suffered by subjects subjected to regulatory biopower? We need an account of why the efficient management of the socio-biological life of human beings might also deform, dissolve or destroy our possibilities for corporeal agency, or cultural and social self-definition. Lacking such an account we are left with only an intuitive, under-theorised sense of what strategies of resistance might be necessary or justifiable in response to contemporary biopower regimes. And this remains a desideratum of any critical theory of society that claims to be more than a neutral description of the power mechanisms within neo-liberal biopower regimes. To sum up, Foucault transforms the Heideggerian theme of machination into an historical analysis of the operations of modern biopower. But Foucault too echoes some of the difficulties encountered in Heidegger’s approach. We remain at the systemic level of population management, detailing various techniques of social control, without providing any action-theoretic perspective on how biopower is traversed by an antagonistic struggle between social agents. Nor do we find any normative account of why the neo-liberal biosocial management of the population might be something to criticise, question, or reject. To be sure, the disturbingly violent aspects of biopower are obvious in the case of Nazism as the most brutal biopolitical regime in history. But here too Foucault echoes Heidegger, as does Agamben, in reducing the historical, economic, and political distinctions between Nazism, Socialism, and liberal-democracy to the formal universality of biopower as a regulatory ‘power over life’.46 As I earlier mentioned, Foucault soon abandoned the theme of biopower in favour of the problematic of governmentality, defined as forms of political rationality oriented towards the ‘conduct of conduct’. He then turned his attention in the late 1970s towards the problems of security, territory, and population management within the history of classical liberalism and contemporary neo-liberalism.47 This turn from the critical diagnoses of disciplinary and biopower as forms of bio-social management of ‘docile bodies’ to


political rationalities of governmentality working in tandem with various ethical practices of freedom suggests that Foucault, at least for a time, regarded neo-liberalism as providing an adequate form of the bio-socio-management of the population. At the very least, Foucault abandons the more explicitly political analysis of biopower in the mid 1970s in favour of his celebrated ‘ethical turn’ during the 1980s, a turn reflecting the abandonment of a critical-theoretical perspective on biopower in favour of a genealogical exploration of the aesthetico-ethical practices of self-fashioning that might be available within liberal democracies. Apart from theoretical and political objections one might have to Foucault’s account of neo-liberal governmentality, Foucault’s analysis of biopower raises another question. Should biopower be regarded as a contingent feature only of modern political States, in particular of liberal democracies? Or is biopower immanent within the (teleological) history of Western political rationality commencing with the Greeks and leading to the merging of totalitarianism and liberal democracy? This is precisely the question that Agamben poses, rejecting Foucault’s ‘sequential’ historical analysis of the supersession of sovereign power by biopolitical governmentality, and arguing instead that biopower, exercised upon bare or naked life (la nuda vita) of human beings, discloses the ‘inner truth’ of the history of Western political rationality as such.

Agamben on Biopolitics Agamben’s eclectic synthesis of Foucaultian biopower, Benjaminian messianism, Schmittian decisionism, and the Heideggerian critique of modernity is the most sophisticated recent theorisation of biopower/biopolitics as defining the origin and telos of Western political rationality. Agamben develops this analysis in Homo Sacer, a text conceived as “a response to the bloody mystification of a new planetary order.”48 He commences the third part, devoted to “The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern,” with a contrast between Foucault and Arendt. The later Foucault analysed biopolitics but maintained his theoretical focus on “‘processes of subjectivisation,’” and thus failed to confront the relationship between biopolitics and totalitarian states, above all the role of the concentration camp.49 Arendt, on the other hand, squarely confronts the decisive political question—the origins of


totalitarianism—and even points to the link between totalitarian rule and the rise of the concentration camp; but she fails to discern the importance of biopolitics for understanding the nature and function of totalitarianism.50 That two such important political philosophers failed to connect biopower with totalitarianism clearly shows the difficulty of the problem at hand. Agamben thus seeks to analyse this connection between biopower and totalitarianism from the perspective of the concept of ‘bare life’ [nuda vita]: the human being reduced to ‘natural life’, a being abandoned by law who is thereby exposed to sovereign violence, a being who can be killed with impunity by the exercise of sovereign power but not sacrificed. “Life that cannot be sacrificed yet may be killed is sacred life.”51 The fundamental political problem of modernity, for Agamben, is to understand the intimate relationship between sovereign power and bare or naked life, the deadly symbiosis between biological existence and political control. For Agamben, the state of exception (the suspension of law and right) has increasingly become the norm in modernity, governing all of us as potential homo sacers abandoned by law and exposed to sovereign violence. This disturbing feature of the exercise of modern sovereign power makes redundant all political theories grounded in human rights or principles of justice, since these remain blind to the essentially biopolitical foundation of modern political rationality and social-historical existence. While Agamben appropriates Foucault’s concept of biopower, he also confronts the question I posed in the previous section. Is biopower a phenomenon peculiar to Western modernity? Or is biopower the secret origin and destiny of Western political rationality from the Greeks onwards? Foucault opts for the former, a Nietzschean genealogical approach to biopower as a contingent development of the history of Western political rationality. Indeed, Foucault even remarks that the rise of biopower is prompted by the inability of sovereign models of power “to govern the economic and political body of a society that was undergoing both a demographic explosion and industrialization.”52 Similarly, in the History of Sexuality Volume I, Foucault describes the crucial role of biopolitics in the development of modern capitalism. Inverting Weber, it is the operations of biopower, rather than the spirit of Protestantism, that provided the optimisation of bodily capacities and management of the population necessary for the economic and social development of capitalism.53


On this issue Agamben parts company with Foucault. Far from situating biopower as a contingent development of Western modernity since the Enlightenment, Agamben ontologises biopolitics as the metaphysical foundation of Western political rationality from the Greeks to Auschwitz. In so doing, Agamben reinscribes the logic of biopower within a ‘Heideggerian’ metaphysical narrative of the origin of biopolitics in the difference between zoe and bios—exposed naked life and recognised socio-political life—and the ambivalent category of the sacred, of sacred life, as articulated in Roman law. This “originary biopolitics” is elaborated and intensified by the paradoxical logic of exception, analysed by Carl Schmitt, which ‘grounds’ politics in the ungrounded sovereign power of suspending of law and right through the imposition of a state of exception.54 Finally, the explicit politicisation of bare life and normalisation of the state of emergency concludes with the exercise of sovereign-biopolitical violence, most brutally in the death camps of Auschwitz, but also manifest in contemporary avatars of bare life (the refugee, the ‘enemy combatant,’ the overcomatose patient, the human being reduced to experimental resource, and many others). In this respect Agamben implicitly rejects Foucault’s failure to provide a critical account of the neo-liberal governmentality of biosocial population management, arguing that liberal democracy represents an even more subtly pernicious form of biopolitical control sharing many affinities with totalitarian biopolitical regimes. Indeed, twentieth-century totalitarianism, Agamben claims, “has its ground in this dynamic identity of life and politics,” in the “politicisation of life and treatment of a natural given as a political task.”55 In this sense, Agamben takes biopolitics to be fundamental to the origin and development of Western political rationality as such, and not simply, as Foucault had argued, representing an historical specific formation superseding earlier sovereign models of power. For Agamben, biopolitics thus delineates the metaphysical destiny of the West, the ontological grounding of modernity. To understand the political space of modernity we must grasp the fundamental role of biopolitics, along with the increasing symbiosis between state and the various functionaries of biopower, “the jurist, the doctor, the scientist, the expert, and the priest.”56 This means rethinking the political history of modernity (including phenomena as disparate as the declaration of human rights, National Socialist


eugenics, and contemporary debates over legal and medical definitions of death) as grounded in the operations of biopolitics and its dark shadow thanatopolitics. It also means rejecting theories of political right grounded in principles of justice or equality, which miss the fundamentally biopolitical grounding of the modern social and political global order. Indeed, modernity, according to Agamben, must be understood through the increasing normalisation of the state of exception, and the generalisation of the biopolitical zone of indistinction, that which confounds the opposition between zoe and bios, bare life and political life, exclusion and inclusion, life and death. For these reasons the biopolitical paradigm of modernity is not the city but the camp, the biopolitical space of exception and zone of indistinction par excellence. We should not hear the rumble of war behind the civic peace, as Foucault claimed, but rather see the outline of the concentration camp behind the hospital ward, the detention centre, or the ‘humanitarian intervention’. Echoing Heidegger, Agamben too emphasises the metaphysical sameness uniting the Nazi concentration camp with the asylum seeker detention centre, the Auschwitz survivor with the overcomatose patient. Agamben thus amplifies Heidegger’s notorious remark—deleted from the published 1955 version of the essay “The Question Concerning Technology”—that modern industrialised agriculture is “in essence the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the starving of nations, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.”57 For Heidegger, all of these are instances of technological en-framing, machination taken to a nihilistic extreme. For Agamben, all are instances of the politicisation of naked life, with the camp, the space that maintains bare life in a state of ‘inclusive exclusion,’ now representing the biopolitical paradigm of modernity. It is tempting to suggest that Agamben’s thesis on the biopolitical essence of modernity represents a kind of quasi-Hegelian Aufhebung of the Heideggerian thesis concerning technological ordering of beings, and the Foucaultian thesis concerning the exercise of biopower upon populations. From this point of view, Agamben’s meditations on biopolitics temper the overly formalist character of Heidegger’s diagnosis of the nihilism of machination by appropriating the historically particularist approach of Foucault’s genealogies of biopower. While tempting, however, this account must be modified by acknowledging the vital role of Arendt, Schmitt, and Benjamin in Agamben’s theory


of biopolitics.58 It must also recognise Agamben’s powerful critique of the theory of rights, and his criticisms of the failure of political philosophy to produce an adequate comprehension of the philosophical and historical significance of Auschwitz.59 Having said that, however, I want to suggest that Agamben nonetheless does transform the Foucaultian concept of biopower/biopolitics in a more ‘Heideggerian’ direction, emphasising the ontological significance of biopower as a defining feature of modernity, and characterising biopolitics as both the source and the culmination of the history of Western political rationality. Indeed politics, according to Agamben, “therefore appears as the truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on which the relation between the living being and the logos is realized.”60 The politicisation of bare life, which reaches its violent apotheosis in modernity, is “the metaphysical task par excellence” in which the very meaning of the humanity of living human beings is decided.61 Politics is metaphysical and metaphysics is political: metaphysics and politics are related in the sense that human beings attempt, through language and thought, to separate and oppose themselves to our own bare life, yet maintain themselves in this relationship through the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of life within the political community.62 The distinction between modernity and antiquity thereby collapses: modernity simply executes the metaphysical-biopolitical task of producing the human both as natural life and as political being. Thus Western politics, Agamben remarks, “is a biopolitics from the very beginning”: politics has always been biopolitics, which means that “every attempt to found political liberties in the rights of the citizen is, therefore, in vain.”63 In vain, Agamben argues, because the fundamental activity of sovereign power is not to enshrine and uphold rights, but to produce, and then optimise and manage, bare life as the “originary political element and as threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zoe and bios.”64 Agamben’s provocative theses on biopolitics deserve more conceptual elaboration and critical scrutiny than I can attempt here.65 Nonetheless, in summary form we can characterise Agamben’s transformation of Foucault’s concept of biopower/biopolitics as follows. Foucault’s concept of biopower


is transformed into Agamben’s conception of biopolitics, where the latter is understood to provide the ontological and historical conditions of political rationality as the exercise of sovereign power (the sovereign ‘ban’ or inclusion by exclusion) over bare life. Human beings are transformed into homo sacer, human life that is abandoned by law and exposed to sovereign violence; hence human beings become the living objects of biopolitical management, control, or destruction in the name of ‘life’. In modernity, the figure of homo sacer enters a zone of indistinction in which the bare life of the concentration camp survivor, the Versuchsperson (experimental (human) subject), camp inmate, refugee, overcomatose patient, all merge as exemplars of the biopolitical exercise of sovereign power, the universalisation of the state of exception. This chilling extension of the biopolitical control to all levels of social and biological existence might indeed suggest such a zone of indistinction, the sheer reduction of human beings to living material for biopolitical manipulation. At the same time, one should acknowledge that Agamben does have a positive response to modern biopolitical capture. It is to evoke a Benjaminian “messianic politics” that gestures towards the possibility of a new “form-of-life,” one that might provide the ground for a coming politics “over and against the bloody nexus of sovereign violence and biopolitics.”66 Whatever the prospects of messianic politics, Agamben’s claims concerning the biopolitical foundations of modernity, I want to argue, share strong affinities with the Heideggerian metaphysical critique of modernity: the development of metaphysical nihilism commencing with the Greek division between zoe and bios, culminating with the camp as the most explicit manifestation of the biopolitical essence of modernity. To be sure, Agamben appropriates the Foucaultian aspect of specific genealogical analysis of biopower as immanent in various social-political institutions; but he then grounds this analysis in Heideggerian ontological thesis concerning the biopolitical essence and destiny of Western political being. Foucault, for his part, moved away from the systemic perspective of disciplinary control and biopolitical management, modifying his critical-theoretical perspective in favour of a more neutral analysis of neo-liberalism as a biopolitical system of governmentality. For the later Foucault, liberalism involves forms of political rationality oriented towards the efficient management of the life of the population, but that also afford a ‘non-political’ space for indi-


vidual ethical self-formation and practices of freedom. In doing so, however, Foucault severely undermines the critical character of his analysis of modern power and subjectivity, such that it is difficult to reconcile his earlier analysis of disciplinary-biopower with the later turn towards ethical practices of selfformation within neo-liberal forms of governmentality. Agamben, by contrast, subsumes both liberal democracy and totalitarianism as related manifestations of the biopolitical ‘fracture’ defining the condition of modernity. This fracture originates with the Greek schism between zoe and bios, which institutes politics by the inclusive exclusion of zoe from bios within the sovereign space of the polis. In so doing, Agamben transposes the properly political dimensions of biopower—the forms of resistance, social struggle, and normative challenges to biopolitical control—into a messianic politics that invokes not only a (non-Marxist) Benjaminian messianism but also a (postpolitical) Heideggerian Gelassenheit. Agamben’s messianic politics confronts biopolitical nihilism by awaiting, much like Heidegger, the truth-event of being that would overturn law in its totality and ground an utterly new human community, thus redeeming the torn relationship between law and life, politics and being, defining the history of Western political existence.67 In so doing however, Agamben retreats into a gestural, ontological politics that seems vastly removed from the ontic politics of normative contestation and social struggles. To conclude, we can identify three movements in this stylised genealogy of biopower. Heideggerian Machenschaft or machination describes the generalised instrumentalisation and control of beings, human beings, and biological life, definitive of the nihilism of technological modernity. Foucaultian biopower refers to the specifically modern (Western) emergence of regulatory and normalising power over the biological life of populations, culminating in political neo-liberalism as the prevailing form of biopolitical rationality. Finally, Agambenian biopolitics suggests a kind of ‘synthesis’ of these moments, transforming the Heideggerian meta-narrative of Being into a meta-narrative of biopolitics. The latter takes the exposure of bare life to sovereign violence, exemplified by the camp, as manifesting the fundamental ontological structure of Western political modernity, a parlous condition that can only be overcome through a messianic overturning of existing law and politics in favour of a utopian community to come.


The problem with all three accounts is that they each, in different ways, evince a tension between ontological and ontic levels of analysis. This tension emerges, as we have seen, in explicating the relationship between the ontological aspects of biopower as the ground of politics in modernity, and the ontic dimension of specific social practices and collective political action within historically specific biopower regimes. Despite its breathtaking historical sweep, the biopolitical paradigm displays a marked loss of specificity in its analyses of contemporary biopolitical phenomena. Universal and particular dimensions of biopower (or ontological and ontic levels) collapse into each other such that there is no substantive difference between, for Heidegger, mechanised agriculture and Nazi concentration camps, or for Agamben, between the Muselmann, the refugee, and the overcomatose patient.68 The metaphysical articulation of the concept of biopolitics, in sum, generates a kind of conceptual short-circuit between ontological and ontic levels of analysis that renders inoperative a genuinely political conception of biopower.69 We are left with ‘biopolitics’ in the sense of bio-policing or bio-management in Foucault’s account of the biopolitical governmentality of neo-liberalism. Or we remain within Agamben’s biopolitical nihilism in which all distinctions between biopolitical phenomena and regimes are subsumed within a generalised ‘zone of indistinction’. This condition of biopolitical nihilism, in turn, can only be redeemed by a messianic event of historical and political transfiguration, by the radical overcoming of the originary ontological breach between politics and being. Foucault and Agamben leave us with a stark alternative: either to take the ethical turn towards practices of freedom compatible with neo-liberalist governmentality, or accelerate biopolitical nihilism in the hope that a messianic overcoming of the breach between bare life and sovereign power will institute a redeemed human community. In short, affirm pragmatic practices of ethical self-formation, or prepare for the messianic overcoming of biopolitical domination. These alternatives, however, seem partial and inadequate. Foucault’s turn to ethics and liberalism underplays the political urgency of confronting societies of biopolitical control; this is a point not lost on Deleuze and taken up by Hardt and Negri in their neo-Marxist version of biopolitical production.70 Agamben’s despairing account of biopolitical nihilism, on the other hand, overemphasises the ontological ‘sameness’ of biopower regimes, and retreats from concrete politics into a metaphysical messianism prophetically gesturing towards a utopian community to come.


What my brief genealogy of biopower and biopolitics suggests, then, is the need to find a path between these alternatives. We should retain the Foucaultian emphasis on a critical analysis of biopower without acquiescing to an ethical accommodation with neo-liberalism. And we ought to affirm Agamben’s profound questioning of the biopolitical foundations of modernity without succumbing to a utopian metaphysical messianism. We also need to question the Heideggerian metaphysical critique of modernity that has profoundly marked both Foucaultian and Agambenian conceptions of biopower and biopolitics. Finally, this genealogy suggests the need to restore the experience of injustice, the suffering of human beings, to any philosophical account of biopolitics, and to articulate political responses to biopower that go beyond ethical acquiescence and metaphysical longing.

Notes 1

See M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, New York, Vintage, 1980, pp. 135-157; M. Foucault, “Society Must be Defended” Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-76, eds. M. Bretani & A. Fontana, trans. D. Macey, London, Penguin, 2003, pp. 239-264. See also the course resumes for “Security, Territory, and Population” and “The Birth of Biopolitics” in Foucault, Ethics. Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, ed. P. Rabinow, trans. R. Hurley, London, Penguin, 2000, pp. 67-71 and pp. 73-79.

2

G. Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998, pp. 119-188; Agamben, Means Without Ends. Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti & C. Casarino, Minneapolis & London, University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

3

M. Hardt & A. Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA, & London, Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 22-41 and pp. 364-367.

4

M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume 3, The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, trans. J. Stambaugh, D. F. Krell, F. A. Capuzzi, San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1991; Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. P. Emad & K. Maly, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1999.

5

See in particular, M. Foucault, “Governmentality” in The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality, ed. G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller, London, Harverster/ Wheatsheaf, 1991, pp. 87-104, and the helpful introduction by C. Gordon, “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,” in The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality, pp. 1-52, which provides an overview of Foucault’s Collège de France lectures dealing with security, territory, population, governmental rationality, and

260 • Robert Sinnerbrink neo-liberalism. See also T. Lemke, “‘The Birth of Bio-Politics’: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality,” Economy and Society, vol. 30, no. 2, May 2001, pp. 190-207, for a thorough exegesis of Foucault’s hitherto unpublished 1979 lecture on German and American neo-liberalism. 6

G. Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 119-188. See also Agamben’s most recent reflections on the history of the state of exception as a paradigm of contemporary government: G. Agamben, State of Exception, trans. K. Attell, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004. For more detailed discussions of Agamben’s biopolitics see the collection of articles on Agamben in Contretemps 5, December 2004.

7

Cf. “Heidegger was always for me the essential philosopher. . . . But I recognize that Nietzsche prevailed over him. . . . I tried to read Nietzsche in the fifties, but Nietzsche by himself said nothing to me. Whereas Heidegger and Nietzsche—that was the philosophical shock!” M. Foucault, “The Return of Morality,” Michel Foucault—Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, p. 250.

8

See Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, pp. 59-61, and Agamben’s remarks on the biopolitical basis of Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism, pp. 152-153.

9

We should note in passing that these concepts should not be conflated, as happens with Foucault, or used synonymously for both Foucault and Agamben, as I shall argue presently.

10

See M. Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume 3, The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, trans. J. Stambaugh, D. F. Krell, F. A. Capuzzi, San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1991.

11

M. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. P. Emad & K. Maly, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1999.

12

We should note briefly the difference between Heidegger’s earlier conception of Machenschaft and his later, post-metaphysical conception of Ge-stell. Machenschaft includes humans as productive beings or representing subjects, while Ge-stell conceives of human beings as resources caught up in the totalising technological disclosure of reality.

13

Machenschaft means “that interpretation of beings as re-presentable and re-presented,” which includes beings as “accessible to intention and calculation” as much as brought forth “through pro-duction and execution.” Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, p. 76.

14

Ibid., p. 88.

15

Ibid., p. 88.

16

Ibid., p. 98.

From Machenschaft to Biopolitics: A Genealogical Critique of Biopower • 261 17

See M. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt, San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1977.

18

Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume 3, p. 61.

19

Ibid., p. 62.

20

Ibid., p. 174.

21

Ibid., p. 174.

22

Ibid., p. 175.

23

Ibid., p. 175. The reference is to Ernst Jünger’s concept of Totalmobilmachung; Jünger was a profoundly important source for Heidegger’s thinking on technology, nihilism, modernity, and Nazism. See M. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity. Technology, Politics, Art, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1990, pp. 46-112.

24

Ibid., p. 176.

25

Ibid., p. 181.

26

See M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan, New York, Pantheon, 1977, and The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. For a defence of Foucault’s account of productive power and its relationship to the subject see P. Patton, “Foucault’s Subject of Power” in The Later Foucault. Politics and Philosophy, ed. J. Moss, London, Sage Publications, 1998, pp. 64-77.

27

For a more detailed reconstruction of Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and the theme of governmentality see M. Dean, Governmentality. Power and Rule in Modern Society, London, Sage Publications, 1999.

28

See Lemke’s discussion of Foucault’s analysis of the pre-WWII German Ordoliberalen and the American Chicago School, a movement enormously influential on contemporary neo-liberal economic rationalism. T. Lemke, “‘The Birth of BioPolitics’: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality.” Economy and Society, vol. 30, no. 2, May 2001, pp. 190-207.

29

Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, pp. 135 ff.

30

Ibid., p. 136.

31

Ibid., p. 137.

32

Ibid., p. 139.

33

Foucault, “Society Must be Defended” Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, p. 246.

34

See H. Dreyfus, “Being and Power: Heidegger and Foucault” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 1996, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 1-16 and T. Rayner “Biopower and Technology: Foucault and Heidegger’s Way of Thinking,” Contretemps 2, July, 2001. Both Dreyfus and Rayner emphasise the affinities and shared way of thinking evinced by Heidegger and Foucault but also overlook the important ways Foucault’s analyses of power-knowledge and subjectivity are implicitly at odds with

262 • Robert Sinnerbrink Heideggerian Seinsdenken, and, conversely, how Heidegger would have found Foucault’s Nietzschean genealogy far too ontic and nihilistic (forgetting the question of Being). 35

See Foucault’s criticism of Heideggerian ontology as a questionable figure of the modern episteme that reinvokes a return to originary being in response to the retreat of ‘man’. Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. A. Sheridan, New York, Vintage, 1970, pp. 328-335.

36

While the young Foucault (in Madness and Civilisation) did flirt with a neo-Nietzschean aesthetic affirmation of the harbingers of a post-nihilistic age to come (Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Artaud), the mature Foucault drops any such crypto-eschatological metanarrative underpinning his critical diagnoses of modernity. The same cannot be said of Agamben, as I shall argue presently.

37

See Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect, pp. 87-104, and also M. Dean, Chapter 5, “Bio-Politics and Sovereignty” and Chapter 6, “Liberalism,” in Governmentality. Power and Rule in Modern Society, pp. 98-130.

38

Lemke notes that Foucault’s analysis of neo-liberalism links it with the rise of ‘technologies of self’ oriented towards an ethic of ‘entrepreneurialism’ and the minimalisation of political governance by the state: “Neo-liberalism encourages individuals to give their lives a specific entrepreneurial form. It responds to stronger ‘demand’ for individual scope for self-determination and desired autonomy by ‘supplying’ individuals and collectives with the possibility of actively participating in the solution of specific matters and problems which had hitherto been the domain of state agencies specifically empowered to undertake such tasks.” Lemke, “ ‘The Birth of Bio-Politics’: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality,” p. 202. As an instance of such technologies of the self, Lemke points to the rise of the ‘self-esteem movement’ in the United States, which applies neo-liberal rationality to the distinction between public and private, “heralding a revolution—not against capitalism, racism, the patriarchy etc. but against the (wrong) way of governing ourselves” p. 202. We recognise here a familiar instance of the orthodox neo-liberal ideology that has become hegemonic within Western liberal democracies. What is surprising is Foucault’s uncritical analysis of these new forms of neo-liberal ideology as interesting new developments in modern governmental rationality and technologies of the self.

39

In this respect, Deleuze, Hardt and Negri, reject Foucault’s ‘ethical turn’ and follow instead Foucault’s pre-1976 emphasis on the critique of disciplinary society, extending this to a critique of biopower within contemporary ‘societies of control’. See G. Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies” in Negotiations, trans. M. Joughin, New York, Columbia University Press, pp. 177-182. See also Hardt

From Machenschaft to Biopolitics: A Genealogical Critique of Biopower • 263 and Negri’s attempt to restore a materialist basis to Foucaultian biopolitics, Chapter 2 in Hardt & Negri, Empire, pp. 22-41. 40

“What does this new technology of power, this biopolitics, this biopower that is beginning to establish itself, involve?” Foucault, “Society Must be Defended,” p. 243.

41

See J. Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose, Minneapolis, ˇ zˇ ek, The Ticklish Subject. The Absent University of Minneapolis Press, 1999; S. Zi

42

See M. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism

Centre of Political Ontology, London & New York, Verso, 1999, esp. pp. 187-205. and Hermeneutics, H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1983, pp. 208-226. 43

Cf. “The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.” Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume I, p. 157.

44

Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 187.

45

See A. Honneth, The Critique of Power. Reflective Stages in a Critical Theory of Society, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

46

As an example of this formalist generality, compare Foucault’s claim that Nazism makes more explicit the basic operation of biopower to be found in most political states: “The final solution for the other races, and the absolute suicide of the [German] race. That is where this mechanism inscribed in the workings of the modern State leads. Of course, 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 States. In all modern states, in all capitalist States? Perhaps not. But I do think that . . . the socialist State, socialism, is as marked by racism as the workings of the modern State, of the capitalist State.” Foucault, “Society must be Defended,” pp. 260-261. In quasi-Hegelian fashion, racism is presented as a strategy of power that ‘reconciles’ the biopolitical imperative to manage life with the sovereign power to inflict death in the name of the biological preservation of the race. Important elements of Nazi ideology—such as antiSemitism and the Judaeo-Bolshevist ‘conspiracy’—are lost in this account.

47

See the recently published 1978 Collège de France lecture course, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, Paris, Seuil/Gallimard, 2004.

48


49

Ibid., p. 119.

50

Ibid., p. 120.

51

Ibid., p. 82.

52

Foucault, “Society must be Defended,” p. 249.

53

Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume I, p. 141. This quasi-Marxist moment in

264 • Robert Sinnerbrink Foucault’s genealogical analysis, however, is undercut by the more Nietzschean, even Heideggerian, moments that foreground the contingent birth of biopower as an ungrounded event of disclosure. 54

Citing Schmitt’s dictum “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception,” Agamben argues that the biopolitical threshold of modernity is crossed once the state of exception—the transformation of political and social beings into bare or naked life—becomes the norm, dissolving the form of state power and consolidating the biopolitical capture of bare life. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 11 and pp. 15-29.

55


56

Ibid., p. 122.

57

Heidegger included this passage in a draft version of the “Origin of Technology” essay, delivered on December 1, 1949. It was first cited by W. Schirmacher in Technik und Gelassenheit, Alber, 1983, p. 25. For an interpretation of Heidegger’s remarks see J. Young, Heidegger, Philosophy Nazism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 171 ff.

58

See the essays on Benjamin, Heidegger, and Deleuze in Agamben’s Potentialities. Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999. Agamben’s essay on Deleuze, “Absolute Immanence,” concludes with the call for “a genealogical inquiry into the term ‘life’” and provides a genealogical diagram contrasting transcendent (Kant, Husserl, Levinas and Derrida) and immanent (Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Foucault) philosophies of life. Agamben, Potentialities, pp. 238-239. The ‘mediating’ figure in Agamben’s genealogy of philosophies of life is none other than Heidegger, confirming my claim that the genealogical critique of biopower/biopolitics must begin with Heidegger (and Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche).

59

See G. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, New York, Zone Books, 1999.

60


61

Ibid., p. 8.

62

Ibid., p. 8.

63

Ibid., p. 181.

64

Ibid., p. 181.

65

For detailed, and contrasting, discussions of Agamben’s biopolitics see C. Mills, “Agamben’s Messianic Politics: Biopolitics, Abandonment and Happy Life” and B. Neilson, “Potenza Nuda? Sovereignty, Biopolitics, Capitalism,” both in the “Giorgio Agamben” issue of Contretemps 5, December 2004.

66

C. Mills, “Agamben’s Messianic Politics: Biopolitics, Abandonment and Happy

From Machenschaft to Biopolitics: A Genealogical Critique of Biopower • 265 Life” Contretemps 5, December 2004, p. 42. Mills argues that critiques of Agamben generally miss the Benjaminian messianic dimension of his work “in which [Agamben] argues for the total overturning of the condition of abandonment, understood as imperfect nihilism, as the necessary condition for redemption from biopolitical capture” p. 42. The question is whether messianic politics is an adequate critical response to, or metaphysical retreat from, the normalisation of the ‘state of exception’ in biopolitical modernity. 67

G. Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. M. Hardt, Minneapolis, University of Minneapolis Press, 1993.

68

As J.-P. Deranty has argued, this is a political instance of the infamous Schellingian Absolute that devours all concrete differences, the theoretical and political ‘night in which all cows are black’. See J.-P. Deranty, “Agamben’s Challenge to Normative Theories of Modern Rights,” Borderlands, vol. 3, no. 1, 2004.

69

Compare S. Critchley’s Levinasian criticism of the “blockage” of the passage between ethics and politics in Derrida’s deconstruction and Nancy’s work on community. S. Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, 2nd ed., Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Library, 1999.

70

See note 39.

Paul Patton Foucault, Critique and Rights

ABSTRACT This paper outlines Foucault’s genealogical conception of critique and argues that it is not inconsistent with his appeals to concepts of right so long as these are understood in terms of his historical and naturalistic approach to rights. This approach is explained by reference to Nietzsche’s account of the origins of rights and duties and the example of Aboriginal rights is used to exemplify the historical character of rights understood as internal to power relations. Drawing upon the contemporary ‘externalist’ approach to rights, it is argued that the normative force of rights can only come from within historically available moral and political discourses. Reading Foucault’s 1978-1979 lectures on liberal governmentality in this manner suggests that his call for new forms of right in order to criticise disciplinary power should be answered by reference to concepts drawn from the liberal tradition of governmental reason. KEYWORDS: Foucault, Critique, Rights, Power, Externalism, Liberalism, Governmentality

In several versions of a comparison with Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault endeavoured to spell out his conception of philosophy as a certain kind of critique. In effect, he offers three distinct but overlapping characterisations of critique. In his 1978 talk to the Société Française de Philosophie, “What is Critique?,” he defined critique in terms of

268 • Paul Patton

a concern with not being governed, or at least with not being governed so much or in particular ways.1 In a 1983 lecture at the Collège de France, published as “Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution,” he defined critique as the problematisation of the present. The critical philosopher asks: “What is happening now? And what is this ‘now’ which we all inhabit?”2 In contrast to the quest for conditions of possibility that led to the ‘analytic of truth’ outlined in Kant’s first critique, this question pointed towards an ontology of the present moment in history. Finally, in an essay first published in English in 1984, “What is Enlightenment?,” he defined critique as the concern to find points of difference or exit from the present. More precisely, he defined his own practice of genealogical critique as the attempt to identify contemporary limits to present ways of thinking and acting in order to go beyond them. In these terms, Foucault’s critique asks: “in what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints?”3 Despite the variations between these definitions of what he refers to as the critical ethos of modernity, all three texts reiterate the difference between the kind of critique practised in Kant’s major works of that name and Foucault’s preferred model of critique. Kant inaugurated the kind of critique that interrogates “the legitimacy of possible modes of knowing” or looks for “universal structures of all knowledge (connaissance) or of all possible moral action.”4 Although “What is Critique?” does point to the historical importance of appeals to natural law as one of the ways in which limits were set to the right to govern, Foucault’s own practice of critique deals not with universal structures but with particular, evental or event-like configurations of power and knowledge. These include the dispositifs of madness, punishment, sexuality or government that emerge at a particular time and place and on the basis of particular, contingent, historical conditions which enable them to operate within a given social context. For this reason, “What is Critique?” insists on the “pure singularity” of the modern systems of punishment and sexuality and denies that these may be criticised by appeal to any foundational or pure form.5 “What is Enlightenment?” seeks to establish a link between the limits described in genealogical terms and “specific transformations” underway in the present rather than any universal tendencies of society or history.6

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This preference for the particular over the universal, for the ‘event-like’ character of both the systems of power and knowledge through which we are governed and the forms of contestation to which they give rise, appears to rule out any appeal to right or to rights, since these are typically understood to rely upon universal features of human nature or the human condition. Foucault is well known for his reluctance to rely upon any such universalist concept of human nature or human essence. By contrast, the predominant approach to the nature of rights in contemporary moral and political philosophy supposes that these inhere in individuals by virtue of some universal ‘rights bearing’ feature of human nature, such as sentience, rationality, interests or the capacity to form and pursue projects. In this manner, for example, Alan Gewirth argues along Kantian lines that the capacity to form and pursue projects ensures that all humans have a right to freedom and well being since these are necessary conditions of such agency.7 My aim in this paper is to argue that the apparent tension between the particularism of Foucault’s preferred form of critique and the universality supposedly implied by the appeal to rights disappears once we abandon the universality condition and understand rights as historical and contingent features of particular forms of social life. I argue that not only is this way of understanding rights implicit in Foucault’s historical and naturalistic approach but that it finds support in elements of the ‘externalist’ understanding of rights defended by a number of Anglo-American political philosophers. In contrast to the attempts to ground rights in a particular feature of individual human beings, these theorists take the view that whether or not a body (individual or collective, personal or corporate) possesses rights will depend on facts about how that body is able to act and how it is treated in a given social milieu.8 Despite his reticence with regard to concepts of human nature and despite the initial impression that genealogical critique is inconsistent with appeals to any kind of right, Foucault makes frequent use of the concept of right. For example, in “What is Critique?” he defines critique as “the movement through which the subject gives itself the right to question truth concerning its power effects and to question power about its discourses of truth.”9 In interviews and political essays, he often called for new forms of right or for reliance upon rights that are not yet widely recognised or established. For example, in a 1982 interview on the issue of gay rights, he advocated the creation of

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new forms of relational right that would recognise same sex relationships.10 In a 1983 interview on Social Security, he endorsed the idea of a right to the “means of health” and also a right to suicide.11 Finally, in a 1984 speech in support of non-governmental organisations attempting to protect Vietnamese refugees being attacked by pirates in the Gulf of Thailand, he spoke of the right of international citizens to intervene in matters of international policy hitherto reserved for governments. He further suggested that the suffering of individuals “founds an absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power.”12 How are we to make sense of such appeals to right in Foucault’s political interviews? How can such appeals avoid the charge that they contradict the explicit particularity of critique as he describes it? I think there are at least three essential elements of an adequate answer to this question. First, we must appreciate that Foucault’s ontological commitment to the view that all social relations are power relations does not disqualify him from appealing to a concept of right. Second, we must acknowledge that the manner in which Foucault historicises and therefore particularises discourses of right is also consistent with appealing to rights in particular contexts. Third, drawing upon the argument of one of the externalist theorists of rights mentioned above, we must understand the normative force of rights claims as derived from historically available discourses of right.

Rights and Power Nietzsche’s genealogical account of the origin of rights and duties provides a precedent for understanding rights in terms of relationships of power, or perceived power, between individuals and collective agents. On the basis of the broad view of power as the capacity of individual or collective agents to act in certain ways—the same view that is implied in Foucault’s definition of power as “action upon the actions of others”13—he advances the hypothesis that these originate as “recognised and guaranteed degrees of power.” My rights, he argues in Daybreak 112, “are that part of my power which others have not merely conceded me, but which they wish me to preserve.”14 The reasons that might lead others to wish me to preserve a part of my power will vary according to whether or not those others are stronger than I am. In the case in which rights are derived from a stronger other party, these might


be simply conceded where the other enjoys such a superfluity of power that they do not mind what the weaker party does. Or rights might be extended on the basis of particular economic or political interests as in the case of the rights of conquered peoples or the rights of slaves.15 In the case where the relevant others are not obviously stronger, the basic civil rights that we associate with modern democratic political communities might be supposed to follow from one or other of the mutually beneficial range of reasons which are typically taken to justify entering into the social contract. Others might choose to respect a right to non-interference in my pursuit of my projects in expectation of my respecting a similar right on their behalf, or they might do so because to not respect my right to non-interference would lead to perilous and potentially costly struggle, or they might do so in order to maintain my power and the possibility of my allegiance with them in opposition to hostile third parties. Nietzsche sums up this kind of reasoning by suggesting that the part of my power that others wish me to preserve is that part which they undertake to respect “through their own prudence and fear and caution.”16 In contrast to the individualism of much of the liberal tradition’s approach to rights, Nietzsche’s suggestion that rights are that part of our power that others wish us to preserve reminds us that rights essentially involve the ways in which individuals and groups are allowed to act, or are acted upon by others in a given social context. In this sense, he offers an ‘externalist’ account of rights in the manner defined by Darby. Whereas individualist approaches tend to treat rights as inherent properties of individuals which then set limits to the power of others, Nietzsche treats rights as a matter of relations between individual and collective bodies, including the relations between rulers and ruled. Rights are essentially defined as effective rights, in the sense that they only exist when particular powers or ‘degrees of power’ are ‘recognised and guaranteed’ by other agencies. Further, what rights there are in a given social milieu will also be a function of beliefs about such things as the actual or legitimate capacities of particular agents, or the purpose of particular ways of acting or being acted upon. Nietzsche points to this doxastic dimension of rights and duties in suggesting that these are properly understood as a consequence of the relationship between the sense of agency or feeling of power of the parties involved rather

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than their actual power. The rights of others, he says, “constitute a concession on the part of our sense of power to the sense of power of those others.”17 Since this sense or feeling of power crucially involves beliefs about the power of the agents involved, it follows that the rights of others and our duties towards them relate to what they and we believe lies within our respective powers, and to what they and we believe ought to lie within our respective powers, rather than what actually does so. In short, Nietzsche’s analysis of rights in terms of the sense of power of those involved implies that the historical existence of rights will be determined in part by the beliefs and values that effectively orient the actions of particular agents.18 Nietzsche’s conception of rights as recognised and guaranteed degrees of power implies a strongly historical understanding, not only of the origin of rights in relations of power, but also of the manner in which these may be transformed, even to the point of disappearing, as power relations change. It follows from the dependence of rights upon relations of power that when the power relationships involved in maintaining a given regime of rights undergo significant alteration then old rights can disappear and new ones come into existence. The disappearance of the rights of slave-owners, like the disappearance of many of the rights which husbands formerly held over wives, or the dismantling of the forms of legal apartheid that existed in colonial countries, may be seen to be in part the effect of such changes in relations of power. The contemporary emergence of new rights such as the right of individuals to suicide, or the right to hold state officials to account for war crimes, or the right of intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states when the basic human rights of citizens are at stake, may also reflect wider changes in social power relations. Moreover, in accordance with the general principle of Nietzsche’s genealogical method that the purposes that governed the emergence of an institution or social practice may be quite different from the purposes that it currently serves, we can appreciate the possibility that rights that emerged in one historical context may take on a very different political significance in another context. Consider the example of Aboriginal legal rights to land and other traditional resources. These rights came into being in the context of British colonial law during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As well as legal rules relating to the constitutional status of colonies and the applicability of English


law, this body of law included rules governing the status of native peoples, their laws and customs and their entitlement to their traditional lands. Together these rules formed a body of unwritten law known as the doctrine of Aboriginal rights.19 This doctrine was elaborated entirely within the unequal power relations between colonisers and colonised. It provided a means to ensure stable property relations and to manage relations between indigenous and settler populations. It embodied rights granted by the colonial authorities in the interest of effective colonial government. At the same time, since these were colonies governed by law, the legal doctrine of Aboriginal rights provided one of the few available peaceful means through which colonised peoples could act to recover something of their traditional land and way of life. Once taken up in the late twentieth century context of changed beliefs about the relative cultural superiority or inferiority of peoples and cultures and the undesirability of discrimination on racial and cultural grounds, these same legal rules acquire a new critical potential for reconfiguring the relations between colonised and colonisers. In this context and accompanied by a resurgence of Indigenous cultural and political activism, the political valency of the rights they embody is radically altered. From being an instrument of colonial rule the doctrine of Aboriginal rights has become a means by which colonised peoples can reassert a degree of economic and political control over their lands. In the changed context of an industrial economy in which access to natural resources has become crucial, it has allowed the elaboration of new legal rights and led to the development of new legal mechanisms to protect Indigenous interests in land or in the pursuit of other activities that previously would not have given rise to legal rights. For this reason, common law Aboriginal rights have become the subject of extensive jurisprudence in countries such as Australia and Canada since the nineteen-seventies. This jurisprudence demonstrates the kind of historicity and internality to power relations that is highlighted by Nietzsche’s externalist conception of rights. Considered historically, we can see the discourse of Aboriginal rights as exemplifying what Foucault calls the rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses. It has undergone a strategic reversal in a manner that parallels the late twentieth century reversal of nineteenth century pyschiatric and legal discourses about homosexuality.20 His 1975-1976 course, Society Must Be Defended, treats discourses of political right in a similarly historical manner. For example, in his lecture of 14 January, in the course of explaining why the juridical

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theory of sovereignty continued to function as an ‘ideology of right’ long after it had ceased to represent the effective mechanisms of government, he points to the manner in which this theory of sovereignty served both defenders and critics of monarchical power during the political struggles from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, and eventually underwrote the democratisation of sovereign power: On the one hand, the theory of sovereignty was, in the seventeenth century and even the nineteenth century, a permanent critical instrument to be used against the monarchy and all the obstacles that stood in the way of disciplinary society. On the other hand, this theory, and the organisation of a juridical code centred upon it, made it possible to superimpose on the mechanism of discipline a system of right that concealed its mechanisms and erased the element of domination and the techniques of domination involved in discipline, and which, finally, guaranteed that everyone could exercise his or her own sovereign rights thanks to the sovereignty of the State.21

Another example of this tactical polyvalence of discourses of right occurs in the lecture of 21 January. In the course of describing the general features of the discourse of social relations as a form of war, which he repeatedly refers to as the first “historico-political discourse” in postmedieval Western society, Foucault points out that this was also a discourse of right. The adversarial subject asserts or demands a right that is grounded in history and that takes a different form from the universality associated with sovereign juridical right: “These are singular rights, and they are strongly marked by a relationship of property, conquest, victory, or nature. It might be the right of his family or race, the right of superiority or seniority, the right of triumphal invasions, or the right of recent or ancient occupations.”22 This historico-political discourse of right appeared in England at the end of the sixteenth century, where it served both bourgeois and aristocratic polemics against absolute monarchy. It reappeared in France at the end of the seventeenth century, where it served the French aristocracy in their struggle against “absolute-administrative monarchy.” Finally, it re-appeared in social Darwinian and eugenic discourse in the late nineteenth century.23 One of the strategic purposes served by the discourse of the rights of civilised races, which Foucault does not discuss, was to deny rights that more tolerant colonial administrations had previously granted to Indigenous peoples.


Rights and Normativity Nietzsche’s qualifying phrase ‘recognised and guaranteed’ degrees of power refers us back to the systems of belief and value that provide normative justification for particular rights. Even so, the objection will be made, this only takes the beliefs and values that sustain particular rights into account in an historical and descriptive manner. It does not tell us why certain ways of treating others, or certain ways of being treated, should be considered matters of right rather than mere matters of fact. This is a problem for purely externalist accounts of rights since a distinctive and important feature of rights claims is that they function normatively “as relatively insistent or peremptory moral considerations.”24 To say that someone has a right to something is to say that they have a particular kind of entitlement such that others are under an obligation to provide or at least not to prevent their obtaining it. Yet there appears to be nothing in the externalist conception of rights that accounts for this normative force of the appeal to rights. A standard response within contemporary moral and political philosophy is to argue that rights only exist if an acceptable moral argument for them can be provided. Many philosophers believe that if something is a moral right then it has always been a right, even if people have failed to recognise this right, or failed to extend it to others (typically those they believe to be inferior beings such as ‘savages’ or women) because of mistaken beliefs about them. While they are happy with the idea that institutional rights evolve over time in response to changing beliefs and attitudes, they think that to believe that moral rights are subject to historical change is to confuse rights with mere beliefs about rights, or to confuse the object of moral philosophy with that of historical sociology. This view relies upon an implicit distinction between institutional or legal rights and the underlying moral rights that find expression in legal form. It accords with the language of discovery commonly employed in speaking about rights.25 It also provides a clear rationale for the critical function of appeals to rights, since one of the reasons frequently given for drawing a distinction between legal or institutional rights and moral rights is that we often criticise laws and other institutions for not recognising rights, or for recognising rights that they should not. The criticism of laws and constitutions for their denial of

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civil rights to minority groups is taken as evidence that there are rights that exist in some sense outside of or apart from their legal enactment.26 Similarly, the fact that there are cases in which we would agree that the rights of individuals or groups have not been respected, even though they were treated in accordance with the law, is taken to imply that rights exist independently of their institutional expression. In this manner, it could be asserted in 1987 that “. . . black South Africans have the moral right to full representation even though this right has not been accorded legal recognition, and in saying this we mean to point to the right as a moral reason for changing the legal system so as to accord it recognition.”27 However, this way of explaining the critical function of appeals to rights comes at a cost since it leads to a conception of moral rights as insensitive to historical circumstances. Speaking about human rights, Gewirth provides an extreme statement of the view of those who believe that, since the acceptability of a moral argument has nothing to do with the actual beliefs of individuals, there is a sense in which, if a particular right exists, then it must always have existed: The existence of human rights depends on the existence of certain moral justificatory reasons; but these reasons may exist even if they are not explicitly ascertained. Because of this, it is correct to say that all persons had human rights even in ancient Greece, whose leading philosophers did not develop the relevant reasons. Thus, the existence of moral reasons is in important respects something that is discovered rather than invented.28

Such an a-historical conception of rights is implausible because it pays no attention to the conditions of something being an effective moral right in a given society at a given time. In so far as we now accept that Indigenous people have a moral right to their traditional lands and ways of life, it is implausible to suggest that this right always existed and that people were simply ignorant or unaware of their existence. In the Australian context, given what we know about the theories of property entitlement, racial hierarchy and the conditions of civilisation that were common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and given what we know about the levels of ignorance with regard to Aboriginal culture, it beggars belief to say that Aboriginal people had an effective moral right to their land at that time. Of course there


were dissenting moral views, but the overwhelming weight of public opinion was informed by versions of the terra nullius principle, under which the supposed cultural inferiority of Aboriginal people denied them any justified entitlement to their lands or ways of life.29 By contrast, such prejudicial beliefs have become more difficult to sustain and justify in recent years. The commitment to equality has become stronger and more extensive. As a result, it makes sense to say that new moral rights have come into existence, just as old ones have disappeared. It is important to acknowledge that there has been real moral change on these issues, because this has been the result of considerable intellectual, moral and political effort on the part of many people, but also in order to remain open to the possibility that there will be such moral change in the future. An explicitly historical concept of moral rights, as well as the forms of their legal and institutional expression, reminds us of what is required to bring this about. We therefore need to find a way to navigate between the equally unappealing alternatives of an a-historical foundationalism and a historical externalism that deprives rights of their normative force. At this point, some of the arguments of recent externalist theorists of rights may help us to make sense of rights in a manner consistent with Foucault’s historical approach. These theorists offer a range of different formulations with regard to precisely which facts about the social milieu are relevant for the existence of rights. Darby suggests that ‘institutional respect’ for the behaviours in question is required for them to be considered rights. Rex Martin offers a looser characterisation in describing rights as “established ways of acting or established ways of being acted toward, ways of being treated.”30 All agree, however, that a further condition is necessary in order to account for the normative dimension of rights: in order for an established way of acting or being acted upon to constitute a right it also must be justified in moral terms. This additional requirement immediately raises the question what kind of justification is necessary for an established way of acting to constitute a right and what such justification amounts to. Darby limits his definition to the claim that rights are socially recognised ways of acting or being acted upon that are justified in terms of some substantive moral theory or other.31 While recognising that this calls for further specification of what might constitute an adequate moral theory, he presents it as a virtue of his account that it

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leaves open the question what kind of moral theory might provide an acceptable justification. However, this response leaves out something important from an historical point of view. Darby supposes that the moral force of rights derives only from their being supported by some form of moral argument, independently of historical questions about the availability of such argument to actually existing agents. By contrast, Martin argues that it is not sufficient that there be some form of moral justification for the right in question: the justification must also be accessible to agents on the basis of their actual moral and other beliefs. His reason is that the moral force of rights claims implies that they involve some normative direction of the behaviour of agents, for example that others must provide or at least not impede our access to the good in relation to which we have a right. For this to be the case, however, the reasons for such normative direction must be available to the agents involved. In this manner, Martin interprets the normatively binding character of rights to mean that people can only be supposed to have duties of which they are or could in practice become reflectively aware: For obligations or duties that cannot be acknowledged in a given society, or that cannot be shown to follow, discursively, from accredited principles of conduct which are at least reflectively available to persons in that society, cannot be regarded as proper duties which could normatively bind conduct in that society.32

On this view, if the acknowledgment of something as a duty is blocked by beliefs about the incapacity or unworthiness of those to whom the duty would be owed, then there is no duty. This is arguably what occurred in relation to those colonised peoples who were considered to be, in the words of one member of the Privy Council, Lord Sumner, “so low in the scale of social organisation that their usages and conceptions of rights and duties are not to be reconciled with the institutions or the legal ideas of civilised society.”33 By contrast, if there is now widespread agreement that Indigenous people have a right to exclusive possession of their traditional lands, this is because the depth and complexity of the relationship to land in Indigenous cultures is better understood and because they are now counted among those who are entitled to things that are of deep cultural significance to them. In this sense, there is real moral change and a genuine historical dimension to the existence of rights.


Foucault’s appeals to particular rights or to particular forms of rights, I suggest, may be understood in the manner of Martin’s condition for the normative force of rights, that is, as appealing to historically available discourses of right. Consider his 1984 comments uttered on the occasion of the creation of an international committee to act in support of Vietnamese refugees. He argues that the right of private individuals “to effectively intervene in the sphere of international policy and strategy” is a new right that has emerged within the power relations between governments and governed.34 As we would expect in the light of the historical conception of rights outlined above, his comments point to two distinct kinds of conditions of the emergence of this right. First, he points to the role of NGOs such as Amnesty International, Terre des Hommes, and Médécins du Monde in the creation of this right. Not only their existence but also their relative independence of governments constitute novel elements in the field of international policy and strategy. These organisations and the international citizenry they represent possess sufficient organisational and financial power to give them access to news media, and therefore significant political leverage over governments. This gives them the power to act in support of those who are poorly governed or, as in the case of stateless refugees, not governed at all. The fact of being appointed by no one renders explicit this independence of governments and it is for this reason that Foucault says that it “constitutes” the right of these private international citizens to speak and to act.35 Second, he points to the role of widely accepted beliefs about the role and purpose of government in providing moral leverage. It is the fact that “we are all members of the community of the governed,” he argues, that makes us all parties to an international citizenship and that obliges us “to always bring the testimony of people’s suffering to the eyes and ears of governments.”36 This new right arises partly because governments of all persuasions believe and would have others believe that they are concerned for the welfare of their citizens. It is because the governed accept that their welfare falls within the sphere of governmental power that governments have a right to act in this regard. Conversely, to the extent that governments rely on this shared belief to justify their actions, they thereby make themselves accountable for their action or inaction. This mutually accepted relationship between

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governors and governed is one of the conditions that enables governments to be held responsible for the suffering of citizens and allows the emergence of a duty on the part of the international citizenry to speak out against abuses or derelictions of power. Of course, widely accepted views about the undesirability of unnecessary suffering provide another background condition of the moral force of the claims advanced on behalf of the refugees. Foucault’s 1978-1979 lectures provide further support for the suggestion that the normative force of rights can only be derived from historically available discourses of right. Although this course was entitled “Birth of Biopolitics,” it focused on a particular form of governmental reason, namely liberalism and its post-World War Two neo-liberal variants. As he explained at the outset, the analysis of liberalism undertaken in these lectures was directed at the forms of rationalisation and reflection on the techniques of government rather than its justification in political philosophical terms. However, while the question of the legitimation or justification of political power is put to one side, this is not in order to deny the existence or the efficacy of normative or juridical concepts. Rather, it is in order to explain what form these took and how as a matter of fact the practice of government was justified within the particular forms of governmental rationality available during particular historical periods. In this sense, Foucault’s approach to the normative bases of political power parallels Martin’s approach to the normative force of particular rights. The first and second lectures of this course address the question of legitimation obliquely by contrasting reason of state and modern liberal governmentality with respect to the limitation of political power. For the former, the only limitation on the domestic exercise of sovereign power was the law and associated notions of right, including the natural rights of individuals. For the latter, by contrast, the new science of political economy provided a different kind of intrinsic limit to the exercise of political power, namely the question of what it was useful for government to undertake, given its aims and given the self-regulating character of the economic process on which the achievement of those aims depended. Foucault acknowledged that this was a limitation of fact rather than right, “even if law will find itself one day under an obligation to transcribe this limitation into rules which should not be transgressed.”37


In the second lecture on 17 January 1979, he returned to the question of how this limitation would be presented in juridical terms. Within the framework of liberal reason, he asks, what is the basis and legitimate extent of public law (droit public)? He suggests that, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, two ways of answering this question were followed. The first, which he calls the revolutionary, ‘juridico-deductive’ path, sought to arrive at the limits to the legitimate functions of government on the basis of a theory of the originary or natural rights of individuals. This was the path followed by the American Declaration of Independence, by Rousseau, and by the French revolutionaries. Foucault summarises it as the attempt to delimit the powers of government on the basis of a conception of the rights of man, by way of an understanding of the constitution of sovereign power.38 The second path was the one followed by English radicalism at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. It began not with the rights of man and government but with the practice of government and with the question of what it was useful or futile for government to undertake. In practice, this turned into a calculus of interests since it was the concept of interest that linked the liberal concern with self-regulation markets and the utility of public policy. Government now aimed at increasing both the forces of the state and the well-being of its citizens, and at achieving this through the free operation of the market, thereby ensuring that individuals are governed as little as possible. The justification and the limits of government are henceforth understood in terms of a complex interplay of individual and collective interests.39 Foucault suggests that, while the utilitarian conception has been dominant, both the revolutionary theory of human rights and the radical theory of human interests remain active and available forms of legitimation and limitation of government throughout the modern period. Moreover, these correspond to two distinct but interrelated concepts of freedom: a juridical concept based on the imprescriptible rights of individuals and a utilitarian concept based on the necessary independence of the governed from those who govern. It is for this reason, he points out, that the contemporary problem of human rights can take either the juridical form of basic rights or the utilitarian form of affirming or demanding independence on the part of the governed.40 As we saw above, in his comments in support of humanitarian intervention to assist refugees, Foucault relies on this utilitarian principle of the independence of the governed in asserting the right of private individuals

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to intervene in matters of international policy. This points to an important feature of his history of governmentality and indeed of his practice of genealogical critique in general. To the extent that he inquires into the emergence of present conceptions of the nature and limits of government, he cannot be supposed to speak from a purely external and descriptive position. Since genealogical critique aligns itself with ‘specific transformations’ underway, it inevitably relies upon particular normative choices available within the present.

Conclusion At the end of his lecture of 14 January 1976, in a passage that is often quoted and equally often misunderstood, Foucault calls for a new form of right that would be emancipated from the principle of sovereignty and that would serve as an effective discursive weapon against disciplinary power. It is worthwhile examining more closely this passage since it is ambiguous with regard to whether Foucault invokes this new form of right in a purely normative, and universalist, or a purely descriptive, and particularist, sense. He poses the question of appropriate discursive means of resistance to disciplinary power in concrete normative terms. What do we do in real life when we want to object to the effects of disciplinary knowledge and power? We invoke the rights of citizens that are, he suggests, derived from sovereign right. As a result, we find ourselves in an impasse: “having recourse to sovereignty against discipline will not enable us to limit the effects of disciplinary power.”41 The recourse to sovereign right in this context is ineffective because of the way in which forms of sovereign right function in concert with disciplinary mechanisms as part of the general apparatus of power in modern society. In other words, the basis of Foucault’s criticism of the recourse to sovereign right appears to be descriptive and historical rather than normative. It is on this basis that he offers the following conditional advice: “if we are to struggle against disciplines, or rather against disciplinary power, in our search for a non-disciplinary power, we should not be turning to the old right of sovereignty; we should be looking for (ce vers quoi il faut aller) a new right that is both anti-disciplinary and emancipated from the principle of sovereignty.”42 ‘Heading for’ might be a better translation than ‘looking for’, but however we translate this sentence there remains an ambiguity at the heart of the strategic imperative expressed. Some commentators take him to be suggesting


that we need a new form of right capable of providing normative opposition to disciplinary power, while at the same time denying that his work provides any basis for such universalistic theory of right.43 In contrast, I suggest that we can read the sentence at once both in a descriptive and in a normative sense. It is descriptive in suggesting that we should be seeking out other forms of right that already operate in our present. It is normative in the sense that these should provide effective counter-arguments to the techniques, justifications and goals of disciplinary power. Foucault’s 1978-1979 lectures on the successive forms of liberal discourse on government provide some indication of the kinds of right that might fulfil these requirements. The utilitarian theory of government elaborated in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries clearly provides a conception of political right that is emancipated from the principle of sovereignty in that the basis of government is not sovereign individual right or social contract but rather the interplay of individual and public interests. This conception of government accepts that the independence of the governed, and therefore their freedom, is a condition of ensuring the maximal satisfaction of interests. At the same time, however, the manner in which economic liberalism and disciplinary techniques were combined in Bentham’s utilitarian theory of government suggests that the independence of the governed does not by itself provide a sufficient counterweight to disciplinary power. On the contrary, a classical liberal understanding of society required disciplined and obedient subjects of economic processes. For an effective counter to the techniques of disciplinary power, it may be necessary to make use of concepts of autonomy and responsibility that are more prominent in neo-liberal theories of government, as Foucault does in his 1983 interview “The Risks of Security.” In the course of this interview, he reaffirms his belief that all human relationships are relationships of power and that they always entail certain risks. Among the risks mentioned, however, are the ‘perverse effects’ of social security systems that serve to maintain forms of dependency. In this context, Foucault acknowledges a legitimate demand for a form of social security that allows flexibility in our relations with others and ourselves while ensuring each of us ‘real autonomy’.44 In short, if it is correct to say that Foucault’s recourse to notions of right must always be understood in the historical and local sense outlined above, then

284 • Paul Patton

perhaps we should accept that the normative bases of the critique of disciplinary power must come from within the liberal tradition of governmental reason to which he devoted these last years of his own political reflection. This does not imply a global endorsement of neo-liberal governmentality, nor does it rule out the possibility that this particular form of governmental reason might undergo transformation or that new forms of right might emerge. However, it does imply that appeals to new rights or new forms of right will always rely upon concepts that may be found within or derived from existing discourses of moral or political right. Critical appeals to new rights or new forms of right will always be incremental and experimental. In the terms of Foucault’s definition of critique in “What is Enlightenment?” they will always involve working on the limits of what it is possible to say and to do within a given milieu, in order to identify and assist ways in which it might be possible and desirable to go beyond those limits.

Notes 1

M. Foucault, “What is Critique?” in What is Enlightenment? ed. J. Schmidt, Berkeley & Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1996, 382-398, p. 384.

2

M. Foucault, “Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution,” trans. C. Gordon, Economy and Society, vol. 15, no. 1, 1986, pp. 88-89.

3

M. Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Volume 1, Ethics, ed. P. Rabinow, trans. R. Hurley and others, New York, The New Press, 1997, p. 315. This essay was first published in ed. P. Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, New York, Pantheon, 1984.

4

Foucault, “What is Critique?”, p. 393; “What is Enlightenment?”, p. 315.

5

Foucault, “What is Critique?”, p. 395.

6

Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”, p. 316.

7

A. Gewirth, “The Epistemology of Human Rights” in Human Rights, eds. E. Paul, F. Miller and J. Paul, Oxford, Blackwell, 1984.

8

D. Darby, “Two Conceptions of Rights Possession,” Social Theory and Practice, vol. 27, no. 3, 2001, p. 387. See also Darby, “Unnatural Rights,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 33, no. 1, 2001, pp. 49-82; “Rights Externalism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. LXVIII, no. 3, 2004, pp. 620-634; R. Martin, A System of Rights, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993; L.W. Sumner, The Moral Foundation of Rights, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987.

9

Foucault, “What is Critique?,” p. 386.

Foucault, Critique and Rights • 285 10

M. Foucault, “The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will” in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Volume 1, Ethics, ed. P. Rabinow, trans. R. Hurley and others, New York, The New Press, 1997, pp. 157-162.

11

M. Foucault, “The Risks of Security,” in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Volume 3, Power, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others, New York, The New Press, pp. 365-381.

12

M. Foucault, “Confronting Governments: Human Rights,” in Essential Works Volume 3, pp. 474-475. For more detailed comment in this speech, see P. Patton “Power and Right in Nietzsche and Foucault,” International Studies in Philosophy, vol. XXXVI, no. 3, 2004, pp. 54-58.

13

M. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Essential Works, Volume 3, p. 341.

14

F. Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 67. Nietzsche’s analysis of the origin of rights and duties is analysed further in Patton, “Power and Right in Nietzsche and Foucault,” pp. 47-51.

15

See F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 49-50 (Para 93: “Of the rights of the weaker”). In his lecture of 21 January 1979, Foucault points to another scenario in which rights are conceded to the governed in the interest of a form of governmental reason articulated in terms of political economy. Here, individual freedom is conceived in terms of the necessary independence of the governed rather than in terms of a set of fundamental juridical rights. See Naissance de la Biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France 1978-1979, Paris, Gallimard/Seuil, 2004, p. 43.

16

Nietzsche, Daybreak, p. 67.

17

Nietzsche, Daybreak, p. 67.

18

I. Shapiro, The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, suggests a quadripartite structure of rights along four axes: subject, substance, justification and purpose of the relevant entitlement. Like Foucault’s characterisation of regimes of exercising power over others or over the self, this schema allows us to envisage change along each of the four axes. Thus, we can see that the disappearance of many of the rights of husbands over wives came about in part because of the political empowerment of woman, but also because of challenge to the beliefs about sexual difference which sustained social practices in relation to the family and sexual division of labour. Or we can see the (still contested) emergence of rights to abortion and suicide, as in part as a consequence of changing views about the nature and value of human life.

19

B. Slattery, “Understanding Aboriginal Rights,” The Canadian Bar Review, vol. 66, no. 3, 1987, p. 737.

286 • Paul Patton 20

M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley, London, Allen Lane, Penguin, 1979, pp. 100-101.

21

M. Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-76, trans. D. Macey, New York, Picador & London, Penguin, 2003, p. 37. See also the first lecture of Foucault’s 1978-9 course Naissance de la Biopolitique, pp. 13-15 where he summarises the manner in which, from the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, law conceived in various ways served as the universal principle for establishing limits to the power of the State.

22

Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” p. 52.

23

Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” pp. 49-50.

24

Sumner, The Moral Foundation of Rights, p. 12.

25

For example, in relation to the recent history of ‘Indigenous rights’ lawyers and historians often speak of the acknowledgment that Aboriginal people possess certain rights or the recognition of those rights by the law. See J. Chesterman and B. Galligan, Citizens Without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 193, 199.

26

J. Feinberg, cited in L. Hinman, Ethics: A Pluralistic Approach to Moral Theory, Second Edition, Fort Worth, Texas, Harcourt Brace, 1998, p. 269.

27

Sumner, The Moral Foundation of Rights, p. 13.

28

Gewirth, “The Epistemology of Human Rights,” p. 000.

29

In the sense that I use the term here, the principle of terra nullius refers to an organising principle of Australian law and society rather than a legal doctrine. It refers to all of the ways in which the laws, culture and society of Indigenous peoples were regarded as inferior to European ways.

30

Martin, A System of Rights, p. 41.

31

Darby, “Two Conceptions of Rights Possession,” pp. 407-408; “Unnatural Rights,” p. 68.

32

Martin, A System of Rights, p. 78.

33

Re Southern Rhodesia 1919 AC 211, pp. 233-234.

34

Foucault, “Confronting Governments: Human Rights,” Essential Works, Volume 3,

35

Foucault, “Confronting Governments: Human Rights,” Essential Works, Volume 3,

36

Ibid.

37

Foucault, Naissance de la Biopolitique, p. 6.

38

“In other words, in clear and simple terms, this procedure consists of departing

p. 475. p. 474.

from the rights of man in order to arrive at the delimitation of governmentality in passing through the constitution of the sovereign,” Foucault, Naissance de la Biopolitique, pp. 40-41.

Foucault, Critique and Rights • 287 39


40


41

Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” p. 39.

42

Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” pp. 39-40.

43

R. Mourad, “After Foucault: A New Form of Right,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 29, no. 4, 2003, pp. 453, 456.

44

Foucault, “The Risks of Security,” Essential Works, Volume 3, p. 366.

Notes on Contributors Craig Browne teaches in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at The University of Sydney. He works in the area of critical social theory. His research interests include social change, processes of global transformation, subjectivity, intersubjectivity and perspectives on democracy. He is currently working on a comparison of pragmatist notions of creative democracy with ideas of democratic creativity in contemporary French social and political thought. Recent publications include “Civil Solidarity and Social Struggles” in Cultural Citizenship and Globalisation, eds. W. Ommundsen, M. Leach and A. Vandenburg, Hampton Press, 2005, and “Castoriadis on the Capitalist Imaginary,” in Modern Greek Studies (Australia and New Zealand), forthcoming. Jean-Philippe Deranty is a Lecturer of Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney (Australia). He has translated Hegel’s first lectures on the philosophy of right (Droit Naturel et Science de l’Etat, Paris, Vrin, 2002) and written a number of articles and reviews on Hegel’s political philosophy and aesthetics, the most recent being “Hegel’s Social Theory of Value,” The Philosophical Forum, 2005. His other research interests are in contemporary continental thought. He has published a number of articles on Jacques Rancière and Giorgio Agamben. His current research focuses mainly on the theory of recognition, with his latest publication “Injustice, Violence and Social Struggle. The Critical Potential of Honneth’s Theory of Recognition” appearing in Contemporary Perspectives in Social and Critical Philosophy, eds J. Rundell, D. Petherbridge et al. (Brill, 2005). He is completing a book on Axel Honneth to be published by Brill in 2007. John Grumley teaches in the Philosophy Department at The University of Syney. He publishes primarily in contemporary critical theory and theory of modernity. Amongst recent publications are Culture and Enlightenment: Essays for György Márkus (Ashgate, London, 2002) and Agnes Heller: Moralist in the Vortex of History (Pluto, London, 2005).

290 • Notes on Contributors

Pauline Johnson teaches in the Sociology Department at Macquarie University. Her new book titled Habermas: Rescuing the Public Sphere will be published by Routledge in 2006. Recent publications include an essay titled “Romantic and Enlightenment Legacies: Habermas’ Postmodern Critics” in Contemporary Political Theory. Pauline is beginning work on a new research project that will focus on issues around the structural transformation of the intimate sphere. Genevieve Lloyd is Emeritus Professor in Philosophy at the University of New South Wales. Her main areas of research are history of philosophy— especially seventeenth century philosophy—philosophy and literature, and feminist philosophy. Her publications include: The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (Methuen and University of Minnesota Press, 1984; 2nd edn. Routledge, 1993); Being in Time: Selves and Narrators in Philosophy and Literature (Routledge, 1993); Part of Nature: Self-Knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics (Cornell University Press, 1994); Spinoza and the ‘Ethics’ (Routledge, 1996); Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present, (with Moira Gatens), (Routledge, 1999); Spinoza: Critical Assessments (edited collection), 4 vols., (Routledge, 2001); Feminism and History of Philosophy (edited collection), (Oxford University Press, 2002). Simon Lumsden teaches Philosophy at the University of New South Wales. He has published on German idealism, phenomenology and poststructuralism. Among his articles are “Fichte’s Striving Subject,” Inquiry, 47, 2004, “Deleuze, Hegel and the Transformation of Subjectivity,” The Philosophical Forum, 2002, and “A Subject for Hegel’s Logic,” International Philosophical Quarterly, 2000. His current research is concerned with the development of self-consciousness in German Idealism and the critique of the subject in Heidegger and Poststructuralism. Shane O’Neill is Professor of Political Theory and Head of the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. He has published numerous articles and essays on a range of topics in critical social theory and political philosophy. His books include Impartiality in Context: Grounding Justice in a Pluralist World (SUNY Press, 1997) and (as co-editor) Reconstituting Social Criticism: Political Morality in an Age of Scepticism, (Palgrave, 1999). His main project at present is to develop a critical theory of ethno-political conflict.

Notes on Contributors • 291

Paul Patton is Professor of Philosophy at The University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Deleuze and the Political (2000), editor of Between Deleuze and Derrida (with John Protevi, 2003), Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (with Duncan Ivison and Will Sanders, 2000), and Deleuze: A Critical Reader (1996). His current research interests are in political philosophy, especially at the borders of poststructuralist and contemporary liberal political theory. Recent publications include “Foucault” in Political Thinkers: From Socrates to the Present, eds. David Boucher and Paul Kelly (Oxford University Press, 2003), and “After the Linguistic Turn: Poststructuralist and Pragmatist Political Theory,” to appear in The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, eds. John Dryzek, Bonnie Honig and Anne Phillips (Oxford University Press, 2006); “Agamben and Foucault on Biopower and Biopolitics” to appear in On Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, eds. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (Stanford University Press, 2006). Paul Redding teaches Philosophy at the University of Sydney. His main research interests are in German idealism, pragmatism, and the role of emotion in practical and evaluative reason. He is the author of Hegel’s Hermeneutics (Cornell University Press, 1996) and The Logic of Affect (Cornell University Press, 1999), and is currently completing a book on the relations between the German idealist and analytic philosophical traditions. Emmanuel Renault teaches Philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lyon (France). Amongst his books are: Marx et l’Idée de Critique (Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), Hegel. La Naturalisation de la Dialectique (Vrin, 2001), Mépris Social. Ethique et Politique de la Reconnaissance (Editions du Passant, 2nd edition 2004), and L’Expérience de l’Injustice. Reconnaissance et Clinique de l’Injustice (La Découverte, 2004). He is also the editor of “Philosophie de la Nature”, Revue Epistémologiques (with J.-J. Szceciniarz, 2002), and Où en est la Théorie Critique? (with Yves Sintomer, La Découverte, 2003). He is currently completing a book on social suffering. Peter Schmiedgen is currently teaching at Macquarie University. His main research interests are in the areas of phenomenological and post-phenomenological social philosophy and critical theory. His most recent research has centred around the critical potentialities of Levinasian ethics. His latest publication, “Abraham and the Flaneur: Levinas, Benjamin and Urban Space” has just appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of Philosophy Today.

292 • Notes on Contributors

Robert Sinnerbrink is a Lecturer in the Philosophy Department of Macquarie University. His areas of research interest include the relationship between critical theory and post-structuralism, social philosophy, Hegel and Heidegger, history of aesthetics, and philosophy of cinema. Recent publications include “Recognitive Freedom: Hegel and the Problem of Recognition” in Critical Horizons (2004), “Cinematic Ideas: On David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive” in Film-Philosophy (2004), and “Heidegger and the ‘End of Art’” in Literature and Aesthetics (2003). He is currently completing a book, Understanding Hegelianism, on the significance of French and German Hegelianism for contemporary social philosophy. Nicholas H. Smith teaches Philosophy at Macquarie University. He is the author of Strong Hermeneutics: Contingency and Moral Identity (1997) and Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals and Modernity (2002). He is the editor of Reading McDowell: On Mind and World (2002).

Index abstraction 12, 57, 138, 140, 145, 148, 159,

107, 109, 112–116, 125, 145, 147, 210, 220, 262, 283

189 action communicative

11, 65, 83 n. 18, 97,

154, 156–158, 177 historical

102

individual

76

instrumental political

136 n. 25

Baynes, Kenneth Beck, Ulrich

170

belief

52, 110 92

11–13, 141, 153–158, 160–162,

164, 167–169, 173, 178 n. 35 strategic

226, 235

Baker, Gideon

Bauman, Zygmunt 226, 235 n. 5

purposive-rational social

Badiou, Alain

76, 85 n. 58, 112

66–68, 75, 78, 187, 189–190, 194,

275–276, 279, 283 Benhabib, Seyla

Adorno, Theodor W.

2, 82 n. 5, 89, 102,

Agamben, Giorgio

16, 239–241, 244,

5, 82 n. 1, 83 n. 27,

179, 254, 264, 291 Bernstein, Jay M.

179 n. 38, 236 n. 11

19 n. 10, 65, 82 nn.

4, 7, 9–10, 85 n. 72, 237 n. 17 Benjamin, Walter

96

59 n. 14

biopolitics

98 nn. 7, 17, 204

15–17, 239–241, 243,

249–258, 259 n. 2, 260 nn. 6, 8–9, 262

245–246, 248–258, 260 n. 6, 261 n. 27,

n36, 263 nn. 44, 48, 264 nn. 54–55,

263 n. 40, 264 nn. 58, 65–66, 280,

59–60, 65–67, 289, 291

291

agreement 37, 83 n. 18, 157, 169, 278 Alejandro, Roberto

135 n. 4

Alexander, Jeffrey P.

103, 115, 117 n. 11

anthropology 11, 57, 67, 79–80,

biopower

3, 14–16, 239–241, 244–259,

262 n. 39, 263 nn. 40, 46, 264 nn. 53, 58, 291 Bloch, Ernst 19 n. 8, 46, 48, 58 n. 2, 59

153–155, 157, 159–164, 168, 170, 177

nn. 6, 8, 11, 64–65, 68, 77, 82 nn. 3, 8,

n. 16, 179 nn. 40–41, 228

83 n. 26, 85 n. 68

Arendt, Hannah

28, 225, 227–233, 235,

235 n. 2, 236, 236 nn. 8, 14–15, 237 nn. 17, 18, 20–22, 251, 254 Aronson, Ronald

46, 58 n. 4

art 21, n. 30, 91, 102, 186, 208, 212 Auschwitz

4, 16, 28–29, 253–255,

264 n. 99

body 2, 13, 74, 161–163, 167, 172–176, 180 n. 50, 187–190, 201 n. 28, 229–230, 246, 249, 253, 269 Bohman, James

82 n. 17, 135 n. 13

Borradori, Giovanna

27, 31–32, 42 n. 3,

43 n. 21 Bourdieu, Pierre 12–14, 76, 85 n. 61,

autoimmunity 5–6, 34–35

183–188, 190–192, 195–198, 200, 200

autonomy 15, 49–50, 58, 66, 77, 95, 101,

n. 4, 201 nn. 8–9, 11, 14–15, 17, 201

294 • Index nn. 18–19, 22–24, 28, 202 nn. 28–29, 31, 203 nn. 51, 56–57, 59, 62 Brandom, Robert 194, 203 n. 46, 224 n. 51

Crapanzo, Vincent 68, 77, 81, 83 nn. 24–25, 85 nn. 66, 70, 86 n. 82 Critchley, Simon critique

Bronner, Stephen E.

96, 98 n. 8, 99

nn. 23, 25, 111

265 n. 69

1–4, 7–8, 10–12, 14–15, 17–18,

20 nn. 20, 23, 45–46, 48, 56–57, 58 nn. 1, 5, 63–65, 69–71, 73–75, 77–79,

Browne, Craig 3, 7, 59 n. 5, 60 n. 28, 86 n. 80, 289

87, 89, 91, 93, 96, 98 n. 14, 103–104, 106–107, 109–110, 127–128, 137,

Buhr, Manfred

48, 59 n. 11

139–140, 144–146, 148–150, 150 n. 3, 151 nn. 11, 15, 152 n. 24, 153–154, 156,

camp 15, 240, 251, 254, 256–257

158, 160–162, 169, 173–174, 184–186,

capitalism

191, 199, 225, 228–229, 239–241, 243,

6, 63, 72, 80–81, 106,

108–110, 239, 252, 262 n. 38 Caputo, John D. Caney, Simon

56, 60 nn. 25, 27

136 n. 21

Castells, Manuel

84 n. 34

Castoriadis, Cornelius

265, 267–270, 282, 284, 290–291 genealogical

136 n. 24

Chesterman, John and Gallingan, Brian 286 n. 25

Darby, Derrick 21, 271, 277–278, 284 n. 8, 286 n. 31 Day, John Patrick 46, 58 n. 4 Dean, Mitchell

Cohen, Ira J.

85 n. 60

communication

30–31, 36, 71, 96, 111,

121, 128, 131–133, 157–158, 161, 163–164, 169, 174, 178 n. 24, 179 n. 44, 231–232

237 n. 22

Dejours, Christophe

179 n. 39

Deleuze, Gilles

21 n. 30, 205–206,

215, 258, 262 n. 39, 264 n. 58, 290–291 134, 145

136 n. 23, 139, 147, 163, 172, 193,

deliberative

206–208, 212, 215, 239, 241, 255,

liberal

257–258, 265 nn. 67, 69, 279 consciousness

66, 108, 138, 220

65, 80–81, 93–97, 101, 104–116,

248, 250–251, 253, 257, 262 radical 137–140, 145, 148

140

representative

philosophy of

89, 290

risk 76 consensus

5, 261 n. 27, 262 n. 37

De Certeau, Michel

democracy 10, 31, 120, 125, 128–129,

community 15–16, 65–66, 123, 132–134,

moral

15, 269

immanent 11, 97, 104, 112, 114, 154

63, 77–78, 81, 84

n. 45, 85 nn. 65, 67, 69, 71, 289 Chandler, David

251, 255–256, 259, 262 n. 39, 264 n. 58,

democratisation

105, 253 9, 64, 67, 110, 119, 121,

130, 274 83 n. 18, 144, 147

contingency 13, 53–55, 231, 292 Cooke, Maeve

202 n. 38

Cosmopolitanism 80–81, 119

4, 6, 23–24, 37, 40,

Deranty, Jean-Philippe

2–3, 11–12,

150 n. 1, 153, 265 n. 68, 289 Derrida, Jacques

3–6, 23, 25–26, 30,

32–36, 38–41, 56, 133, 136 n. 26, 205, 226, 235 n. 4, 264 n. 58, 265, 291

Index • 295 Diogenes the Cynic

37

discourse ethics

124, 137, 139–145, 148–150, 151 n. 11, 152 n. 28, 160–161, 164–167, 171–172,

80, 97, 228, 237

principle

67, 80

rational

174–176, 183–185, 190, 198, 208–214, 216, 220, 222 n. 20, 223 nn. 24, 53, 227,

7, 197

242, 248, 259

theory 7, 10, 19, 63, 65–68, 80–81, 104, 107, 134 distribution

facticity 107, 139

3–4, 75–77, 79, 106, 111,

121, 127–128, 134, 152 n. 16, 245 domination

1–2, 50, 108, 139–140,

156–157, 187, 258, 274 Douglas, Peter

179 n. 38

Dreyfus, Hubert 247, 261 n. 34, 263 n. 42 Dubiel, Helmut 82 n. 6 Durkheim, Émile

12–13, 183–184,

Feinberg, Joel Feminism

286 n. 26

114, 290

Feuebach, Ludwig 11, 155, 160 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 290 Fink-Eitel, Hinrich flesh

60 n. 35

159, 161, 166, 175–176,

181 n. 58 Foucault, Michel

1–3, 14–18, 19 n. 1, 21

187–192, 194–195, 197–198, 200

n. 32, 23, 24, 184, 200 n. 6, 237 n. 25,

n. 4, 201 n. 13, 202 nn. 32–33, 203

239–241, 244–259, 259 nn. 1, 5, 260

nn. 41, 47

nn. 7, 9, 261 nn. 26–29, 33–34, 262 nn. 35–39, 263 nn. 40, 42–43, 46, 52–53,

ecological

154, 159, 162, 168–169, 178

economy, political

73, 92, 158, 196, 280,

285 n. 15

264 n. 58, 267–270, 273–274, 277, 279–284, 284 nn. 1–2, 6, 285 nn. 10–15, 18, 286 nn. 20–25, 27–28, 287, 291

Enlightenment 1–6, 18, 19 n. 1, 23–25, 27, 29–32, 37–42, 82 n. 7, 101, 103, 113, 115–116, 199, 207–208, 229, 267–268, 284, 289–290 environment 125, 130, 132, 153, 167–168, 170, 174–176, 185, 227, 237 n. 25, 249

Frank, Manfred

8, 13, 20 n. 28, 150

n. 1, 151 n. 7, 152 n. 26, 156, 177 nn. 11–12, 178 n. 34 Fraser, Nancy 9, 19 n. 4, 83 n. 30, 85 n. 76, 127–129, 135 nn. 16–17, 136 n. 20, 152 n. 26 freedom

3, 5–6, 13, 15, 31, 47, 63, 68,

equality 3, 5, 9–10, 20 n. 21, 65–66, 70,

70–71, 74, 91–92, 106, 117 n. 13,

96, 108, 116, 119, 125–126, 130–131,

119–121, 123, 125–126, 129–133,

133–134, 151 n. 9, 196, 201, 248–249,

145–146, 199, 204 n. 64, 207, 212,

254, 277

220–221, 222 n. 20, 225, 231, 236 n. 10,

essentialism

9, 58, 124–125

event 2, 4–6, 23–24, 26, 28–29, 32–35,

237 n. 24, 241, 245, 251, 257–258, 269, 281, 283, 285 n. 15, 292

39, 41, 50, 73, 97, 158, 202, 230,

French Revolution

257–258, 264, 268–269

Fromm, Erich

experience

1–2, 10–12, 29, 63, 66, 68,

69–71, 74, 76–77, 79, 91, 102, 114, 121,

17, 24, 66, 91, 281

46, 58 n. 3, 82 n. 3

fundamentalism

4–5, 30–31, 42, 226

future 6–7, 13, 25, 32–33, 35–36, 39,

296 • Index 41–42, 47, 51, 56–58, 64–65, 70, 74,

150 n. 3, 151 nn. 8, 13, 16, 152 nn. 20,

76–78, 81, 102–103, 107–108, 110–112,

24, 153–162, 164, 167–170, 177 n. 5,

133, 191, 208, 277

179 n. 38, 236 n. 6, 237 nn. 17, 23 Hage, Ghassan

Garrett, Catherine

83 n. 28, 84 n. 35

Gehlen, Arnold

11, 155–156, 159

Gewirth, Allan

269, 276, 284 n. 7, 286

n. 28

81, 83 nn. 24, 29, 84 nn. 51, 57, 85 n. 61 Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio 239, 258, 259 n. 3, 262 n. 39,

Giddens, Anthony 74, 76, 84 nn. 47–48, 85 nn. 59, 62 Gilligan, Carol

152 n. 25

Godfrey, Joseph J.

46, 57, 58 n. 4, 59

n. 6, 60 n. 34 good life

58 n. 5, 75–76, 79,

85 n. 69

Harvey, David

83 n. 24

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

8,

12–14, 87, 88–95, 97, 168, 172, 183–185,

17, 58, 69, 79, 146

globalisation

265 n. 67 Harrison, Paul

3–5, 30, 63–64, 67, 69–70,

190–200, 202 nn. 34, 40, 203 nn. 43, 45, 47–48, 52, 60–61, 204 n. 65, 205–212,

72–74, 81, 111, 119, 121, 129–131,

214, 215–217, 219–221, 221 n. 3, 222

133–134, 135 n. 2, 138, 289

nn. 6, 10–11, 14, 222 nn. 17, 22, 223

governmentality 239–240, 245, 247, 249–251, 253, 256–258, 261 nn. 27–28, 262 nn. 37–38, 267, 280, 282, 284, 286 n. 38

nn. 52, 54, 236 n. 6, 290–292 Heidegger, Martin

5, 16, 21 n. 31,

239–244, 246–247, 250, 254, 257–258,

group 54, 196, 198, 234, 236, 271, 276 affiliation

123–124

interest 30, 249 social

nn. 25, 28–35, 40, 42, 233 n. 44, 224

Guyer, Paul

130–132

202 n. 37, 223 n. 30

Habermas, Jürgen

nn. 17–18, 34, 264 nn. 57–58, 290, 292 Held, David and McGrew, Anthony

9, 119–120, 122, 141–142, 155

transnational

259 n. 4, 260 nn. 7, 10–11, 13, 261

3–11, 13, 19 nn. 12,

14, 20 n. 20, 23, 25–26, 30–32, 39, 41,

135 n. 2 Heller, Agnes

11, 83 n. 18, 155, 289

Henrich, Dieter

178 n. 34

Hippolyte, Jean

223 n. 36

Hölderlin, Friedrich Honneth, Axel

236 n. 9

1–3, 9–12, 19 n. 2, 20

49–50, 54, 59 n. 14, 60 n. 20, 63, 65–67,

nn. 18–19, 23, 58, 60 n. 35, 63, 67,

68, 70–72, 80–81, 82 nn. 9, 11, 13, 14,

79–80, 83 nn. 21, 30, 85 nn. 73–76, 86

17, 83 nn. 18–20, 22, 23, 84 nn. 33,

n. 79, 98 n. 19, 99 n. 22, 111, 118 n. 31,

36–38, 40, 86 nn. 78, 80, 87, 89–97, 98

128–129, 136 n. 20, 140, 151 nn. 7, 11,

nn. 1–2, 4, 9–10, 13, 15, 20, 99 n. 24,

152 n. 26, 153–156, 158–161, 163–173,

101–105, 107–116, 116 n. 1, 117 nn. 2,

177 nn. 1, 3–4, 7, 9–11, 13, 16–18, 178

5, 7–8, 14, 24–25, 27–28, 33–34, 120,

nn. 23, 27–30, 32, 37, 179 nn. 40–42,

133, 134 n. 1, 136 nn. 22, 26, 137–148,

250, 263 n. 45, 289

Index • 297 Horheimer, Marx 89, 179 n. 38, 229, 236 n. 11

institution(s)

144, 149, 151 n. 8,

158–159, 180 n. 48, 193, 199–200,

hospitality 40–41, 228

208, 220–221, 243, 248, 256, 272, 275,

Hudson, Wayne

278

84 n. 56, 179 n. 38

human being 11–12, 16–17, 25, 27–28,

interaction

5, 12, 49, 89, 92, 122,

38, 50–51, 159–164, 167–170, 175–176,

153, 157–160, 162, 164, 166–175, 178

228, 240–244, 246, 250–253, 255–257,

nn. 24, 31, 194–196, 227, 229, 232, 240,

259, 260 n. 12, 269

245

human capacity 51, 57, 160–161 humanism

45, 167–168, 175, 184

intercorporeity 153, 175–176, 180 n. 46, 181 n. 58 intersubjectivity 11–12, 14–15, 87,

I (personal pronoun) absolute

90, 92, 153–154, 160–164, 166,

8, 31, 33, 36, 88–90, 149,

152, 193, 198, 207–208, 211, 214, 219, 223 n. 30, 233, 263, 264 n. 58, 265 n. 68, 270, 274

169–172, 174, 176, 177 n. 11, 179 n. 44, 210, 215, 220, 227–229, 233–235, 289 intuition

acquisition of 13, 161–162, 195 constitutive dimensions of

12, 15, 183, 190–192, 207,

216–218

167, 223,

290–291

Jameson, Frederic

Idealism, German

216

identity 76–78, 83 n. 18, 91, 114–115,

82 n. 2

Jay, Martin

118 n. 35

Joas, Hans

20 n. 23, 69, 84 n. 31, 154,

122–125, 128, 132, 140, 165–166,

156, 159–161, 165–167, 170, 177 nn. 1,

171–172, 176, 178 n. 37, 195, 215, 225,

4, 7, 10, 13, 18, 178 nn. 23, 28, 30, 32,

229–230, 233–234

179 n. 42

ideology 72, 96, 101, 106, 179 n. 38, 262 n. 38, 263 n. 46, 274 imaginary immanence

9, 69, 80, 97, 228

individuality 192, 228, 231, 237 n. 22 inequality 3, 5, 9, 65, 96, 108, 130–131, 134, 201 n. 23 64, 73, 79, 81, 127–129, 134, 9–10, 70, 124, 138–139, 148

experience of

79, 140, 142, 144–145,

148–150, 259 feeling of

212–213 justice democratic

142–143

119, 121, 125

distributive egalitarian

141, 143, 168, 249–250 social

judgement 88, 141, 143, 188, 190–192, 196, 198, 202 nn. 37, 40,

capitalist 7, 71–73, 75, 81, 289

injustice

Jünger, Ernst 261 n. 23

73, 127–128 9, 49, 107, 115, 119–120,

128, 134 international theory of justification

25, 37

9, 140, 146–148 4, 10–11, 17, 45–46,

49–50, 52, 54–57, 66, 79, 94, 139, 141–142, 144, 148–150, 155, 173, 194,

298 • Index 196, 207, 275, 277–278, 280–281, 283,

Levitas, Ruth

285 n. 18

liberalism

Kant, Immanuel

1, 6, 12, 23–25, 30–31,

36, 39–40, 42, 42 n. 1, 43 nn. 20, 26,

critique of

59 n. 8, 83 n. 18 18, 239

neo-liberalism

16, 18, 69–70,

45–46, 48, 58 n. 1, 78, 89, 91, 93,

239–241, 245, 247, 250–251, 256–258,

183–185, 190–192, 199, 202 n. 37,

260 n. 5, 262 n. 38

209–210, 220, 223 n. 34, 264 n. 58, 267–268, 284 n. 2

political

122, 146, 247, 249

Lieutaghi, Pierre 181 n. 57

kantianism

life

15, 16, 115, 159, 170, 199, 208, 210,

Neo-Kantianism 184, 197, 199, 200 n. 4

229–231, 241–247

Post-Kantianism

bare 15, 240–241, 252–256

Kearney, Michael knowledge

199 74, 84 n. 49

1, 31, 89, 156–157, 160, 162,

biological chance

240–241, 248, 257

109, 122–123

165, 196–198, 206–210, 212, 216, 241,

democratic

243, 246, 248, 261 n. 34, 268, 290

ethical

122, 138

13, 193

Kolakowski, Lesek 116, 118 n. 39

everyday 7, 186, 194

Knight, J. and Johnson, J.

form(s) of

Kymlicka, Will

135 n. 13

135 n. 11

good labour

15, 50, 68, 70–74, 79, 89–90, 92,

9, 13, 110, 120–121, 139,

155, 190, 208 17, 58, 69, 79, 146

human

243, 256, 285

157–158, 172–173, 197, 206, 211–212,

modern

196, 209

227–232, 236 n. 7, 285 n. 18

natural

213, 255

Lacan, Jacques

248, 289

political

language nature and

154, 157, 161, 184, 210

intersubjectivity and 210

social

50–51, 58, 138, 151, 161, 193,

199, 269 way of world

common

273

modern rule of

65, 194

154, 160–162,

law

love

67

94, 121, 254

public

37, 273, 277 96

79

Lowenthal, Leo

67, 104–107, 145, 273

Lefebvre, Henri

237 n. 22

Lemke, Thomas

260 n. 5, 261 n. 28,

262 n. 38 Levinas, Emmanuel

117 n. 9

Lukács, Georg 87, 159, 184 Lumsden, Simon

3, 14–15, 204 n. 65,

205, 290 Lyotard, Jean-François

15, 205, 225–233,

6, 19 n. 9,

60 n. 17, 152 n. 28, 205

235, 235 n. 3, 236 nn. 10, 12–13, 16, 237 n. 24, 264 n. 58, 291 Levi-Strauss, Claude

192

Machenschaft (machination) 15–16, 239, 241–244, 246–247, 257, 260 nn. 12–13

Index • 299 MacIntyre, Alasdair Mannheim, Karl

50, 59 n. 15

84 n. 32

Marcel, Gabriel

48, 57, 59 n. 10, 60 n. 30

Marcuse, Herbert 82 n. 3, 103

morality 91, 93, 190, 193, 210 Morris, Martin

103, 117 n. 13

Mourad, Ronney 287 n. 43 Mythopoetic thought 13, 183–188, 197–199

Márkus, György 98 n. 14, 179 n. 40 Márkus, Maria R. 103, 117 n. 10 Martin, Rex 277–278, 284 n. 8, 286

Nancy, Jean-Luc 205–206 nation-state

nn. 30, 32 Marx, Karl

92, 94–95, 97, 98 n. 21, 145,

151 n. 15, 155–156, 172, 179 n. 40, 187,

14–15, 20 n. 29,

9, 121, 130–131

nature 11–12, 27, 153–155, 157–159, 161–165, 167–170, 179 n. 38, 180 n. 56 needs

197, 228 materialism

156, 158–160

Matuˇstík, Martin B.

114, 118 n. 36

Mead, George Herbert 11, 159, 177

emancipatory 103, 113–116 human

229

negative, the

14–15, 21 n. 30, 151 n. 11,

192, 202 n. 36, 205–207, 209, 211–212,

n. 20, 178 n. 25 meaning 3–4, 27–28, 73, 77, 83 n. 18,

negativity 13–15, 205–207, 209–212,

216–218, 222 n. 9 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice

214–221

11–12,

216, 221

153–154, 173–176, 179 n. 44,

Neilson, Brett 264 n. 65

180 nn. 45–46, 48, 50

Neiman, Susan

metanarrative metaphysics

257, 262 n. 36 14, 199, 203 n. 61, 214,

216, 241, 246–247, 255 Mills, Catherine misrecognition

264 nn. 65–66 167, 172

critique of

post-

251, 256, 259

71, 76, 119

political

33, 38, 42 n. 4 neo-conservative

71

Nietzsche, Friedrich

16, 59 n. 7, 236

n. 9, 240–242, 247, 259 n. 4, 260 nn. 7, 10, 262 n. 36, 264 n. 58, 271, 285 nn. 14–17

modernity late

4, 19 nn. 5–6, 26–29,

256 n. 66, 257

94, 97, 114

theory of

92

Western 243–244, 252–253, 257 monotheism 15, 225–226, 228, 233, 235,

nihilism

16, 241–244, 247, 254, 256–258,

261 n. 23, 265 n. 66 norms

4–5, 14–15, 17, 41, 50, 67, 104,

106–107, 110–111, 119, 139, 155, 168, 208, 214, 220–221, 248 Nozick, Robert 135 n. 7 Nussbaum, Martha

126, 135 n. 12

236 n. 9 Objectification

moral

Offe, Claus

agents 278 principles progress

10, 140 24

242

74, 84 nn. 33, 36, 46

Okin, Susan Moller openness

135 n. 10

5, 56–57, 175–176, 214, 221

300 • Index O’Neill, Shane

3, 9, 59 n. 14, 119, 135

n. 6

political theory 8, 10–11, 81, 93, 138–139, 148

order

politics

international political

129, 131, 134

121, 130

transnational world

2, 11, 41, 52, 64, 101, 107–108,

110–112, 115, 121, 125, 127, 129–133, 137–139, 145, 173, 226, 240–242,

130, 132

5–6, 37–39

248–249, 253, 255–258, 264 n. 65, 265 nn. 66, 69 polytheism

Parekh, Bikhu

236 n. 8

15, 225–228, 231, 235, 236

n. 9

parity, participatory 127, 129, 196

positivism

participation

postmodernism

66, 73, 79, 94, 109, 129,

139, 161, 235 3, 14, 16–18, 21 n. 34, 223

n. 31, 261 n. 26, 267, 285 nn. 12, 14 perception

45, 53, 68

poststructuralism

pathology 4–5, 31–32, 69, 79 Patton, Paul

95, 157

159–160, 164–166, 171,

174–176, 179 n. 42, 180 n. 55, 210

power

205

1–2, 13–18, 93, 96, 104–109, 113,

132–133, 151 n. 11, 158, 196, 237 n. 25, 240–241, 243–253, 255–258, 261 nn. 26, 34, 263 nn. 40, 46, 264 n. 54, 267–275, 279–284, 285 nn. 12–14, 18, 286 n. 21

phenomenology 11, 77, 89, 194, 209–216

pragmatics

157

Phillips, Anne

production

71, 109, 111, 156, 186, 225,

135 n. 10, 291

philosophy

227–231, 233–235, 242, 258

critique of moral

2–3, 151 n. 15

79, 275

normative political

104–105, 110–111, 120, 130, 133,

93, 137–138, 168

148–149, 228, 232, 236 n. 6

2–3, 17, 91–94, 137–138, 145,

148, 150, 255, 275 postmetaphysical postmodern social

public sphere 4–5, 9, 11, 24, 31,

rationalisation 206

52–53

2–3, 14, 18, 153, 163

transcendental 89, 91, 93 Pieper, Joseph

48, 57, 59 n. 10, 60 n. 32

Pippin, Robert B.

14, 19 n. 11, 98 n. 3,

203 n. 63, 222 nn. 5, 12–13 Pinkard, Terry 14, 19 n. 11, 203 n. 63, 222 nn. 5, 34

54, 90, 92, 94, 148, 158,

199, 280 Rancière, Jacques Rawls, John

94, 122, 135 n. 3, 137–139,

145, 147 Rayner, Tim

247, 261 n. 34

rationality, reason communicative instrumental

plurality 15, 30, 116, 228, 231–233, 235

practical

Plutarch

15, 31, 80 37

31, 67, 80, 94, 96,

157–158

Plessner, Helmut 11, 155, 161–162 pluralism

137, 150 n. 2, 152

n. 27, 248, 263 n. 41

2, 29, 65, 157, 170

10, 67, 140

reciprocity 80, 229 recognition

Index • 301 ethics of

12, 153–155, 163–164,

168–170, 173, 178 n. 31 political social

18, 108–111, 117 n. 23, 152 n. 23

8, 112, 119, 154, 168–169

reciprocal

106, 199

Schmitt, Carl

253–254, 264 n. 54

science

167

natural

struggle for theories of

Scheuerman, William E. 94, 98 nn. 12,

63, 67, 156, 163, 166–169 11, 80

social

Rée, Jonathan

52–53, 60 n. 18

Rehg, William

59 n. 14

157, 163, 180 n. 46

reconstructive

90

4, 13, 69, 80, 129, 155, 157,

162, 196–197 secularisation

3, 5

reification

96

Sedgwick, Sally 223 n. 34

relativism

95, 197, 200

self

religion

26, 30–31, 48, 123, 193, 197,

200, 206, 208, 210, 212, 214, 236 n. 10 Renault, Emmanuel

3, 10–12, 20

nn. 17, 20–22, 151 n. 15, 152 n. 19, 178 nn. 26, 31 139–140

197–198, 207–208,

215–217 51, 107, 116, 167, 169

self-reflexivity 31

responsibility 28, 97, 235, 283 25, 93, 110, 262 n. 38, 268

rights

self-relation

57–58, 206, 210–212,

214–216 self-understanding 54, 91–92, 94, 115,

cultural

109

208, 213, 220–221

externalist accounts of

14, 17, 267,

269–271, 273, 275, 277 106, 146–147

human

67, 79–80, 130, 132, 134,

individual

17, 286 n. 25

political

27–28, 165, 190, 195, 206–208,

September 11

3–6, 19 n. 6, 23–26,

28–36, 38–40 Shklar, Judith

106, 109, 125

individualist accounts of

126, 135 n. 12

214–221, 223 n. 24, 224 n. 54

252–253, 272, 276, 281, 285 n. 12 Indigenous

Sen, Amartya sense

formal

social

n. 38, 285 n. 18 self-consciousness self-realisation

republicanism revolution

3, 79, 123, 164, 171–172, 197,

212–217, 219, 225, 230, 232, 245, 262

Sitton, John 271

10, 147

10–11, 145–147

Skhole

13, 186

Slattery, Brian critique

Rorty, Richard

field

6, 49, 54–56, 59 n. 13, 60

285 n. 19

social

romanticism 101 nn. 21–24, 29, 36, 68, 83 n. 26

151 n. 11 108, 110, 118 n. 30

1–2, 17, 67, 204 n. 65

186, 245

integration

12–13, 106, 154, 156, 163

life 50–51, 58, 138, 151 n. 10, 161, 183, Sartre, Jean-Paul scepticism

178 n. 36, 184

8, 51, 53–54, 94

Schapiro, Ian

285 n. 18

193, 199, 269 movement 1, 11, 95, 102, 114, 147, 155, 158, 168

302 • Index philosophy 2–3, 14, 18, 153, 163 psychology 154, 163–164, 173 relations

69, 144, 176, 194, 221

reproduction

80, 154, 157–158

subject critique of modern

3

199, 208–209, 216, 242

suffering

situation

10–11, 139–145, 147, 149

bodily 167

struggle

81, 156, 248–249, 257

human

theory 2, 12, 50, 63–65, 67–68, 82, 92, 139, 153–154, 156–160, 162, 166, 168, 173

social

28, 120, 259 68, 120

Sumner, Leonard W. nn. 24, 27

socialisation

12, 105, 154, 160–161, 166

society

system social

civil

92, 104–105, 131, 138, 148,

193–196, 199, 208, 220, 236 n. 6 imaginary institution of multicultural

72, 77, 81

70

symbolic

187, 201 n. 18

theory 67 welfare 109

80

risk 7, 63–64, 76, 81

terra nullius, doctrine of

sociology 13, 97, 196, 275

terrorism

solidarity 55, 65, 79–81, 86 n. 80, 169,

theology 7, 77

194

tolerance

sovereignty 40, 67, 81, 121, 131, 225, 245, 262 n. 37, 274, 282–283 space, public

5, 15, 24, 30–32, 39, 41,

147–150, 225–228, 231–234, 237 n. 17 Spinoza, Benedict de

34, 75–76, 264

n. 58 spirit 8, 13–15, 87–92, 168, 185, 194–195, 198–200, 206–210, 214–218, 220–221, 252 state constitutional

66, 104–106, 120,

130–132, 134 democratic modern

24, 31, 40, 116

totalitarianism tradition

121, 198–199, 263 n. 46

226

277, 286 n. 29

3–4, 23, 29–32, 34, 130

251–253, 257

11–13, 15, 18, 45–46, 50, 78,

80, 83 n. 20, 86 n. 80, 91, 97, 98 n. 10, 105, 122, 155, 159–160, 163, 168, 172–173, 183, 192, 222 n. 13, 237 n. 17, 239 critical

1, 2, 101

liberal

267, 271, 284

liberal democratic

114

transcendence

69, 72, 80, 228–229

transcendental

80, 89, 91, 93, 156,

184–185, 197, 210 transformation

66, 94, 97, 104, 110

welfare 68, 70–72, 96, 106–109, 138,

2–3, 5, 14, 17, 38, 63–65,

68–69, 75, 78–80, 90, 102–103, 108, 121, 129–132, 134, 141–142, 144, 146–147, 150, 155, 158, 199–200, 207, 218–221, 240, 255, 268, 282, 284

Stengers, Isabelle Stoics

278, 284 n. 8, 286

77, 85 n. 64

24, 37, 47, 192

stoicism

37

unconscious

78, 185

universalisation, principle of

145, 256

Index • 303 universality 10, 94, 140–141, 144, 147, 250, 269, 274

Whitebook, Joel

82 n. 9, 103, 117 n. 12,

178 n. 37, 179 n. 38

unthinkability 32–33

Winnicott, Donald W.

76, 160, 171

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 184 validity 3–4, 17, 31, 51, 67, 83 n. 18, 93–94, 97, 144, 156

world disclosure 240, 243, 248

Vasta, Ellie and Castles, Stephen

order

5–6, 36–39

84 n. 50 Violence

2, 47, 91, 102, 127, 187, 213,

225–227, 230, 232, 234, 252–253, 256–257

Young, Iris Marion

9, 127–129, 135

nn. 5, 9, 15, 136 nn. 18–19, 151 n. 12

Von Uexküll, Jacob 180 n. 51

Young, Julian

Wallerstein, Immanuel

Zimmerman, Michael E. ˇ zek, Slavoj 263 n. 41 Ziˇ

Walzer, Michael

72–73, 84 n. 43

20 n. 21, 135 n. 8, 151

n. 9

261 n. 23

Zournazi, Mary 60 n. 28, 75–76, 83

Weber, Max 92, 190, 252 Wellmer, Albrecht

264 n. 57

81, 82 n. 7, 86 n. 81

nn. 24, 29, 84 n. 54, 85 n. 64 Zurn, Christopher

177 n. 16

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