Theory and the Common from Marx to Badiou

THEORY AND THE COMMON FROM MARX TO BADIOU

PREVIOUS PUBLICATIONS Paperspace: Style as Ideology in Joyce’s ―Ulysses‖ (1988) Telling the Other: The Question of Value in Modern and Postcolonial Writing (1992) Cinema, Theory and Political Responsibility in Contemporary Culture (1997) Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race (1997) Joyce beyond Marx: History and Desire in ―Ulysses‖ and ―Finnegans Wake‖ (2001) From ―Shane‖ to ―Kill Bill‖: Rethinking the Western (2006)

THEORY AND THE COMMON FROM MARX TO BADIOU Patrick McGee

THEORY AND THE COMMON FROM MARX TO BADIOU

Copyright © Patrick McGee, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-61525-0 ISBN-10: 0-230-61525-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McGee, Patrick, 1949Theory and the common from Marx to Badiou / Patrick McGee. p. cm. ISBN 0-230-61525-2 (alk. Paper) 1. Theory (Philosophy) 2. Common Sense. I. Title B842.M34 2009 190—dc22

2008037887

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: April 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

CONTENTS Foreword 1 Theory Postmortem: Derrida

vii 1

2 Political Sense and Sensibility: Gramsci to Bourdieu

23

3 Genealogies of Common Sense: Marx and Nietzsche

49

4 Folklores of the Future: Wilde and Lawrence

87

5 The Transcendental Ordinary: Wittgenstein to Badiou

125

Epilogue: Not a Manifesto

193

Notes

201

Index

213

FOREWORD

As a work in progress, the title of this book was ―The Importance of Being Common,‖ with two possible subtitles: either ―Theory from the Underground‖ or ―A Personal Journey through Theory.‖ These titles suggest the book’s hybridity as a work of critical thought and an intellectual memoir. Some readers may question the personal and even eccentric approach to the history of theory and the thought of common sense that this book lays out in a nonchronological order. For myself, I must confess that theory has always been a very personal thing. I came to it because I found answers—however provisional and hypothetical—to questions life imposed on me without my consent. There has never been anything neutral about my relation to theory, which has led me to question the significance of particular interests, including my own. I wrote this book for anyone who cares to read about theory from the perspective of someone who is not a master. I wrote it especially for academics and students who feel sometimes that the whole game of academic discourse is a masquerade that hides the one thing you really want to say. I’m not calling for an end to the masquerade. I only want the recognition that the truth may not be the face behind the mask but the mask behind the face. I want to thank Evander Lomke at Continuum Press for his encouragement at a critical moment in the history of this project. Most of all, I thank Palgrave Macmillan and my original editor, Farideh Koohi-Kamali, for taking the risk of sending the manuscript to a reader. Brigitte Shull, my final editor, has been extremely patient and helpful throughout the process. I thank Enda Duffy, who was my anonymous reader, for the best review of a manuscript I have received in my career. I am indebted to John Pizer for checking my paraphrases of particular passages from German texts. My conversations with Mustapha Marrouchi during the period I was writing strongly influenced this work. I owe special thanks to Dr. David Hayes for his friendship and guidance. I also enjoyed the strong support of my friend Tim Paulson, my wife Joan, and my son Sean. I dedicate this book to my students whose skepticism, wit, and independence of mind inspired

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me to discover my intellectual voice. To my father, I can only repeat the last two lines of a poem by James Joyce: ―O, father forsaken, / Forgive your son!‖

C

H A P T E R

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THEORY POSTMORTEM DERRIDA

Jacques Derrida is dead. To many in the world, this man was the greatest abuser of common sense in history. The term ―deconstruction‖ has become synonymous with a declaration of war on what is common in the language of each one of us. In reading and rewriting the words of scholars, philosophers, journalists, linguists, novelists, poets, and every kind of verbal magician, Derrida turned them on their heads—destroyed them in the view of some, reconstructed them in the view of others. He was a trickster constantly playing jokes on his readers, yet the key to the joke was that you were never quite sure that it was a joke, and if you were convinced, you were never sure if the joke was on you. Maybe the joke was on him. Some years ago, Derrida gave a talk at the university where I teach, later published as Monolingualism of the Other; Or, The Prosthesis of Origin. In that talk and subsequent work, he said that he had only one language, but it did not belong to him.1 That remark led the way to selective but interesting references to his history as a French-speaking Algerian Jew. His purpose was not to proclaim himself a representative of the third world in the manner of so many contemporaries who want to cash in (literally) on the West’s attempt to postpone its debt to the worlds it has robbed by robbing them again, this time of their intellectuals. For these intellectuals, the lure is high salaries, tenure, and social recognition at conferences that are parties where the cultural elite parade across the stage before the sea of nobodies and proclaim themselves subalterns—a term that has come to mean a nobody who is really somebody. For the rest of us run-of-the-mill nobodies, we emulate our new masters by mesmerizing our students with a mysterious

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use of words that is supposed to convince them that their language is not their own, but probably does the opposite. They think they have a language all their own, and we are completely out of it. Derrida made two propositions in the lecture I heard. He said we always speak only one language, and we never speak only one language. 2 This kind of paradox is the sort of thing that drives conservatives crazy because such a mind cannot bear the thought of a thought that is not self-contained. It must be either right or wrong. But the left also loses its cool at this sort of maneuver because when you take a stand for a cause, you don’t want to leave open the possibility that your decision was made on the ground of uncertainty—you don’t even want to leave the impression that a decision was necessary. Truth should be self-evident and without decision. In writing about his social origin, Derrida called it a prosthesis. A mechanical limb is a prosthesis, and the use of this word implies that Derrida’s origin is something that has to be constructed, a mechanism that takes the place of something that is missing. Derrida was a Sephardic Jew in Algeria. The Sephardim originally come from the Iberian Peninsula, from which they were expelled in 1492. In other words, the Jews of Algeria were not French imports but indigenous to North Africa, at least for hundreds of years. They received French citizenship in 1870, something denied the Muslims of Algeria. That citizenship was taken away during World War II under the pro-Nazi Vichy government. This situation lasted three years until, a year after the Allied invasion of North Africa, de Gaulle took control of Algeria. During that period, Derrida, along with other ―indigenous‖ Jews, was expelled from his French-speaking school, at which point he may have discovered that his language was not his own.3 At that school, he would have had the option of learning Arabic as a foreign language; but he, along with most of the other children, did not choose that option.4 No doubt, their families played a role in this decision. There were no rules against learning Arabic, but there was social censorship. For everyone in Algeria at that time—Arab, Berber, Jew, French, and others— the mother tongue was officially French, even if that was not true in practice, though it seems to have been true for Derrida. One should not fail to see the significance of this history and its impact on the relation to language that drives Derrida’s work and determines, to some extent, his relationship to literature and philosophy. Yet nowhere in this essay does Derrida claim authority for his work, voice, and style because of this history. One imagines that he stayed away from this topic for so long precisely to avoid a false authorization, the illusion of an origin that would authenticate a certain

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originality of viewpoint, which would explain the phenomenon of his writing, his particular use of the French language, as a political victory in and of itself, the triumph of the Other, who writes back from the margins, and decolonizes the master’s language. Such a claim produces another kind of loss, another colonization, another wound. For example, if you claim that an Algerian Jew who lost his French citizenship and regained it, and discovered in the process (or possibly, it was a delayed reaction, even for decades) that he has only one language, and that language is not his own— if you claim that such a man must necessarily write differently, write to liberate, himself and perhaps others, then you must posit a corollary thesis. There must be someone for whom the French language is natural, proper, and completely owned—who does not have to remake it to suit a particular circumstance and history, who is completely identical with the history of that language and its affiliation with empire, who does not, indeed, cannot write to liberate, at least not without making herself (or himself, but in this text I want to subvert the masculine universal a little) into something that she intrinsically is not. Such a person cannot be unique in this relation to the French language, which cannot be limited to a clique, a class or a nation. It must be ordinary and common—so that Derrida’s relation to the language can be extraordinary and uncommon. To postulate Derrida’s linguistic difference, his style, as expressing his particular history, one must assume that there is such a thing as a French speaker who has never been dominated by a language that is not her own. Can such a being exist? For Derrida, the answer appears to be negative. This takes nothing away from the particularity of his experience or history. It takes nothing away from his resentment of a ―free‖ French government that continued to enforce racial laws in Algeria for six months after the Allied landing in 1942.5 It takes nothing away from the man who publicly condemned French colonial policy in Algeria and once hoped for a compromise that would allow French Algerians (the pied noirs) and indigenous Algerians to live together.6 It takes nothing away from his later stand on Algeria with its quixotic condemnation of terrorism and plea for democracy.7 It also takes nothing away from the demand of those like Mustapha Marrouchi, who say that Derrida owed the world and Algeria something more—a politically committed tribute to his country of origin.8 Algeria was Derrida’s mother country, so to speak, though what the concept of ―mother country‖ really means remains to be examined. In saying that an idealized, pure relation to language (and, by implication, an idealized, pure relation to place of birth) cannot exist, Derrida does not minimalize his own history but

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recognizes the global implications of that history. He recognizes that the only path to the universal lies through the particular, in the concrete experience that upon analysis reveals a structural condition that cannot be particular or unique. Even the French language cannot be unique to the French. The condition of its being a language means that it is translatable, not only in the sense that it can be converted into another language through a specific procedure but also in the sense that it can be resituated in another context, appropriated by another people, and even imposed on another people. Translatable also means transportable. The colonizing force of the French language ironically derives from the fact that it cannot be owned, not even by the French. French remains French even when the French do not speak it, even when different people from different national backgrounds inflect its idioms differently. Idiom (idiome) is another important word for Derrida. In his essay on monolingualism, he refers not only to always speaking one language and never speaking only one language. He says the same thing about idiom, a term that is general enough to include different dialects within a language as well as different types of discourse such as philosophy, literature, journalism, and so forth.9 One could argue that abstract language is the idiom of theory, figurative language the idiom of literature, and literal language the idiom of journalism. Obviously, any of these categories can be deconstructed because, as Derrida teaches us, there is no philosophy that does not rely on metaphor, no literature that does not presuppose some abstract concepts, and no journalism that does not rely on abstractions that have become common sense or on dead metaphors, which, as Nietzsche understood, are the basis of literal language. Throughout Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida stresses that no particular relation to language is ever equivalent to another, even though no one’s relation to language is ever pure. One could give this a Lacanian twist and say that no person is identical with the language she speaks. Ever so subtly and implicitly, Derrida questions those who mourn the loss of a mother tongue by noting that such sorrow is always mingled with a certain pleasure, even pride in demonstrating mastery of a language that is not one’s own—including mastery of a mother tongue that is no longer one’s primary language.10 Obviously, when Derrida says he is monolingual, he means it in a special way, since besides French, he is known to have spoken several languages. He means, perhaps, that one’s relation to language as a whole, to all languages, is determined by one’s relation to one language, even if that one language is actually made up of several different languages,

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like Taglish in the Philippines. And even if there is such a thing as true bilingualism, it would not transcend a certain monolingualism in the speaking subject’s relation to language—the two languages would be for this subject the one and only language, the key to all the other languages. True bilingualism, if there is such a thing, depends on a monolingualism that would inhabit the space between two languages. Ultimately, there can be no true bilingualism without this monolingual relation. This interest in Derrida’s origins and background, including his relation to languages, is dictated by his reputation. Derrida is somebody even if we don’t know who that somebody is—even if, you could say, the real Derrida is the nobody that the somebody has veiled or hidden. Now that Derrida is dead, the nobody that he once was—the trace of which must always have remained, though it would have been unreadable by anyone except Derrida, and perhaps not even by the man himself, except as a feeling almost mystical, of something, a thing, in him, more than him, untranslatable, virtually unknowable—is no more. For those of us without a similar reputation, who are more nobody than somebody, there is no such demand for information about our lives, and certainly not a political demand of the sort confronted by Derrida, the demand to affiliate himself with this or that group, the Jews, the Algerians, the French, the Europeans, the third world, and so forth. What is the mother country of a nobody? To whom does it matter? My mother country cannot be the United States, though that is where I was born and live. Somehow, the more appropriate term for country of origin in the so-called first world, particularly for the country identified as the only superpower after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is fatherland. If I lost my national identity through forced exile or through expatriation in response to a social constraint or deprivation of freedom (say, going to Canada to escape the draft during the Vietnam War, or, better yet, leaving the country after having been blacklisted like some Hollywood writers and other creative artists during the communist witch hunt of the late forties and fifties), perhaps it would make sense to refer to the United States as my mother country, but I don’t really think so. The African-American author Richard Wright left this country for sound political reasons (any African-American in the United States during the middle of the last century had good reason to leave if they had the means to do so). Although Wright was not a nobody when he left, surely he would never have identified the United States as his mother country. Though it is different for a nobody like myself, it remains impossible to wrap

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the word ―motherland‖ or ―mother country‖ around a country like the United States. Unlike Derrida, I am monolingual in the restricted sense of the term, which is to say, I can only speak English, although I read French well enough and even some German with a little effort. I grew up in the South in a working-class Catholic family. At one point, there were eight of us living in a house that was about 1000 square feet. My parents had no higher education, although my mother had finished high school and read books when she had the time and the space (a precious commodity in our house). These were not great literary masterpieces, but Catholic literature like Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain or A. J. Cronin’s The Keys to the Kingdom. As a boy, I cannot remember giving any thought to the language I spoke, but the world did inculcate in me the feeling that my English was not quite right. School was difficult for me. Though I don’t remember having an insurmountable problem with learning how to read, it was not easy for me and required such an expenditure of energy that I didn’t bother with it unless it was necessary. Only when I discovered reading as a strange form of autonomy did I take it up in a serious way. In school, I was such a slow reader that it hindered my ability to do in-class assignments and led to embarrassing situations in which my teacher, usually a nun, accused me of laziness. Several teachers made fun of the way I moved my head back and forth when I read, which they saw as a lazy reading habit. Maybe they were right, but I still move my head back and forth to this day and am still a very slow reader. I always had a difficult time understanding words that were spelled out for me, and I couldn’t translate written words into spoken words easily, which meant that I mispronounced many words, a trait I inherited from my mother, who had a similar problem. In general, I saw language—primarily written language—as an oppressive force in my life, which explains why I had such a passion for movies. Visual language was liberating. One day I made a discovery in the form of a sudden realization. I was reading Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, in which I was completely losing myself, when I realized that there was nothing to prevent me from enjoying this book. It was one of the first books I had ever read without being required to do so by a teacher, either at school or at church. My reason for reading the book would have been suspect to my teachers because I had been inspired by the news that Marlon Brando, my favorite actor, was going to play in a new film version of the Bounty trilogy. I was attracted to the paperback because there were pictures from

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the unreleased movie on the covers. When I began to read the book, I was completely captured by the adventure of it and by my total identification with the character of Fletcher Christian, both a kind person (a gentleman, as the authors noted, though that word meant little to me) and a rebel, someone who stood up against a vicious and brutal form of authority. Since life on the Bounty resonated with my experiences at school, reading the book felt subversive to me. No doubt, this was a rather extreme extrapolation on my part, since the nuns at my grammar school did not keelhaul us or tie us to a mast so that they could force us to endure lashes as punishment for being stupid. Nonetheless, in Captain Bligh, I could see and hear the nuns who taught me to see education as a process of humiliation. If they told me to read something, they would soon demonstrate to me—and this almost seemed to be the reason for the assignment—my total ineptitude at reading anything, my total inability to understand the English language, which also reflected, as a side issue, my inability to speak that language correctly. At home, curled up in the top bunk bed in the tiny room I shared with my little brother—which felt like a tiny cabin on the Bounty far out at sea—I could shut out the world, including the noise in the kitchen on the other side of the paper-thin wall, through which, like all the walls in our house, you could hear everything, even a whisper, including the noise of my three sisters and brother (at that time) who took immense pleasure in disturbing what seemed to them the rather comical state of intense concentration I assumed in order to read a book, my head moving rhythmically back and forth, back and forth. Ironically, the immense concentration it took for me to read a book had the secondary effect of eliminating the awareness of anything else going on around me. In fact, reading was the least self-conscious act I did. When I realized nothing could stop me from reading such a book or any book (I was not yet aware of censorship), and that there was a seemingly infinite supply of books, more books than I could ever read given how slowly I read, and that in private I could move my head back and forth without worrying about nuns or anyone else who mattered (since my brother and sisters didn’t matter, as I knew how to lord myself over them whenever I wanted), I had an exhilarating sense of autonomy, though I would never have used that word. I had the sense that I could live inside my self, inside my own world, inside my own language, English, but not the English I was constantly being told I didn’t correctly pronounce, spell or write. Inside the shell that enveloped me when I read a book, I didn’t even have a self, I no longer existed. I was Fletcher Christian, and since I was not myself, there was

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nothing to despise in myself, nothing to be humiliated about, nothing that could hurt me, because there was no me. English became my language, my true home, only when it was not mine, when it was not me who was speaking or writing. Most of the nuns who taught me were from the North and more or less took it for granted that anyone with a southern accent was a second-class citizen in relation to English. Anyone growing up in the South fifty years ago would be familiar with this phenomenon, which of course is still with us, though not, I think, to the same extent. I have no doubt that this social situation was compounded by my family situation, that is, by conflicts between my father and mother and conflicts within my father and mother. I have already written at length about my childhood in a novelistic memoir that may not ever be published. Just as Derrida refers to his attempt to remember his origin in Algeria as a prosthesis, I know that any attempt to remember the past, particularly a traumatic past, requires an act of the imagination, the outcome of which cannot be treated as literal truth. The truth of the prosthesis, the artificial thing that takes the place of something missing, lies elsewhere than in the thing itself. For me, the trauma at the beginning of my life—something that may itself be a fiction, a prosthesis— sometimes takes the form of a nightmare about being locked in a dark closet. Maybe I was locked in a closet once (such an event in my family would have been possible), or maybe that is the screen memory of something more unbearable, impossible to remember—though unbearable and impossible not for the man I am now but for the boy I was then, the little nobody who keeps the secret locked away in the little space, the little closet, he continues to occupy somewhere inside me—in that place we call the psyche, the soul, the unconscious, and so forth. Throughout my life, some kind of trauma left its imprint on my relation to language. It may even be that my relation to language was the trauma. In order to explain this, I will need to say something about my mother. When I was a boy, my mother would talk to me as if I were an adult in a language that was unique to her, at least as far as I could tell. She was constantly theorizing about people, about politics, about God, about right and wrong, about justice, especially economic justice, about all the things that would become the obsessive concerns of my own life. Sometimes I think that everything I say and everything I’ve ever written, any insight I’ve ever expressed that seemed in any way noteworthy to anybody, goes back to those original conversations with my mother. She spoke in a southern accent that I later associated with her origin in a small town in northeast Arkansas. It was

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not like the southern accents I heard on television or in the movies, which always seemed exaggerated and ugly (except for the accent of Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, which didn’t sound like any southern accent I knew, but became in my mind an ideal southern accent that transcended the very concept of being southern). Normally, the southern accent was something you were supposed to be ashamed of, and I had such an accent, at least in theory, or in the mind of every person I had ever met from the North. My mother’s accent was soft and beautiful to me, almost musical in its rhythms, even if she mispronounced many of the words. At some point, my mother experienced her first psychotic episode, during which she confided to me all sorts of imaginary events, including the murder of a priest, in a language that was so powerful that nothing I read at that time could possibly have had the same impact on me as the voice of her madness. I am tempted to say that my mother tongue—possibly even my true mother country—lay in that voice, which became for me the voice of truth. It wasn’t that I believed everything she told me during her psychotic episode. I knew my mother’s character well enough to know she could not have murdered a priest or done any of the other things she accused herself of doing, but at the same time I also knew that she was incapable of lying, that she believed every word she uttered and that there was some truth in everything she said, sane or not. The truth was horrible, so horrible that her sane self could not bear the thought of it so she had to invent this insane self in order to unleash the force of this terrible truth that lay within her. I could feel that truth, but I didn’t know how to articulate it and still don’t know if I can articulate it, although everything I’ve ever written wants to put that truth into words. It had to do with violence—a violence against which one has no protection—a violence inherent to the human condition, something beyond reformation or revolution. Yet my mother’s insanity was a protest, an absolute refusal to accept the human condition on its own terms. Consciously, my mother was a pessimist, who could see what others could not see because they would not see. She witnessed the petty cruelty in everyday human relationships, the vicious betrayals that go unnoticed because they are so subtle, little attempts to put someone else down in order to enhance yourself, to make yourself seem more important than you are, the cruelty of social identities that constitute themselves by excluding others, the unconscious identification between members of a group because they find safety in numbers and fear anyone who doesn’t need that protection. She saw everything in a way that must have been unbearable at times, and made the world unbearable because there seemed to be no place

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for generosity, no location that suggested the possibility of change, no place of truth where people could be made to see the injustice they perpetrated against one another through their lies and fantasies of power. So outwardly she was a pessimist, while in her madness she protested all of this, refused it completely, and not only demanded change but brought it about through a kind of nightmarish revolution that spared no means, violent or not, to create a different world. My mother’s voice, both her madness and her wisdom, taught me that being normal was not synonymous with being right. And that was the meaning of her relation to language as well. The language of truth was not standard English. If anything, it was sui generis, in a class by itself. Though it was quite some time before I became drawn to ―serious‖ literature, it is probably no coincidence that the writers who spoke to me, who articulated my being in language, were authors who were sui generis in their relation to and use of words. James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, William Faulkner, Henry Miller, Thomas Pynchon, William Blake—these writers are difficult, even impossible to read, and my slow reading was fitted to them. Though I could never compete with others in the speed of my literary consumption, I learned that I had another gift as a reader, which was a certain doggedness that didn’t give up when confronted with a wall of impenetrable language. I neither leaped to the conclusion I understood what I had not yet understood (and I mean that in the active sense of constructing meaning rather than finding it), nor did I take personal offence against that which resisted my understanding, or destroyed the familiarity of language, the feeling of being at home in it and of owning it. It has always seemed to me that the leap I describe is the vice of experienced readers who enjoy the feeling dominating a language, and have lost the ability to feel outside of and alienated from it. The latter vice is common among beginners, who have a more innocent relation to language, which they see as their own, and are shocked by the discovery that in some sense, it is outside of them and not identical with who they really are. For me, language could never be identical with who I am. Each word I write (even at this moment, in this scene of writing) is something I have to drag out of myself—or rather, to be more precise (more theoretical, you could say), something I have to drag out of the world around me and somehow suture to my own being. There is nothing natural about this process, and it is never finished in the sense of perfected. Sometimes I feel as if I am always trying to say the same thing, but always fail to do it, and therefore have to keep trying, to keep inventing new ways of saying something I cannot say.

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Obviously, the experience of a working-class, southern ―white boy‖ in the United States should not be seen as the same as or even comparable to the experience of a Sephardic Jew in Algeria during the Second World War or to the experience of third-world people or ethnic subjects of the first world who have known the brutality of racism, economic domination, cultural displacement, or, to adapt the phrase of W. E. B. Dubois, multiple forms of consciousness through the mediation of languages socially defined as not their own. Still, while recognizing the incommensurable nature of these experiences, which means that the social import of one cannot be determined through reference to the other as a kind of standard or norm, one can postulate something that each experience has in common. Otherwise, there would be no way human beings could communicate these experiences across cultural and linguistic boundaries—indeed, there would be no way that two human beings could ever communicate even within the same culture, since no subject’s experience of a cultural situation is ever strictly identical with another’s. There will always be something singular in an individual’s experience, even if it is only the configuration of elements within it that makes her perception, understanding, and overall perspective different from another’s. On the one hand, no experience can ever be absolutely unique to an individual or it would be incommunicable, untranslatable, and even unknowable, since knowledge, even of one’s own experience, requires language, which is necessarily a social medium. On the other hand, no experience can be fully articulated in language, that is, beyond the need for interpretation, qualification, revision, or recontextualization. The resistance of language or any signifying medium to the total expression of an experience is what Jacques Lacan called the Real. One could say that resistance to communication, representation, and translation makes an event real. Derrida recognized that, without a minimal consensus, research and the communication of new knowledge or different points of view about knowledge would be impossible. 11 Yet what would a minimal consensus be? It could not be a prescribed set of meanings, a stable system of meaning, which would be universally true. On the contrary, it follows from Derrida’s remarks about minimal consensus and the practice of his writing that any such consensus must be contextually and temporally specific, and that a final inventory of the elements of consensus would not be possible because it would not take into account the historical nature of consensus, which must be in a state of constant change as it is inflected by shifts in the social context from which it arises. If consensus were fixed and universal, new thought would be impossible, and it would be impossible to imagine any transformation

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of social values. Yet though consensus cannot be reduced to the stable inventory of universal knowledge, it can be inferred from the fact of communication and the production of knowledge. In other words, there must be some minimal consensus that permits me to write what I am writing in a way that someone who is not me can understand. Understanding is not the plenitude of meaning in communication but rather the experience of recognition. It gives me the possibility of producing meaning, of translating that which is not me into my own language, my own monolingual relation to language, which cannot be contained by any given natural language. Nothing guarantees that such a consensus will survive the act of communication itself, but since all that is required is a minimal consensus, the possibility of communication remains as long as language is recognized as such. In other words, the meaning or significance of a communication may change, but its general communicability remains intact as long as the medium through which it is expressed can be recognized as language. Ultimately, general language as the body of all languages represents the possibility of communication and the existence of a minimal consensus that must be global to the extent that language itself is global. Such a concept of minimal consensus will not be much comfort to those who need to believe in a universal truth that exists apart from any kind of human action. It is not a truth, though there could be no truth, no articulation of a truth, without it. Since minimal consensus can only be inferred retroactively from the fact of communication, it can never be prescribed or made into the criterion for universal knowledge because the act of prescription violates the ground from which consensus emerged. In a sense, the minimal consensus can never be conscious because once it has become conscious through retroactive inference it ceases to be the minimal consensus. It ceases to be the ground of truth, though in fact it may be true in the sense of expressing the underlying presuppositions of a communication that has made sense in the past. But to recognize the minimal consensus on which particular knowledge depends already calls that knowledge into question, at least to the extent of determining its limitations. The minimal consensus is necessarily the unquestioned ground of any knowledge and to bring that consensus to consciousness forces one to question the knowledge that stands on it. With some hesitation, I want to identify minimal consensus with common sense, though in the course of this writing I hope to show that common sense must mean different things, and ultimately remains resistant to definition. Although common sense is not identical with language itself, one can infer common sense from the existence of language

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as a continuum of practices that can never be reduced to a natural or transcendent set of meanings, values, hierarchies, structures, idioms, truths or norms. The common language cannot be identical with ordinary language, even though the restitution of ordinary language to some degree of respectability in the company of abstract theoretical language or poetic literary language will be essential to grasping what is common to all language. When Derrida says that he is monolingual, even though he actually speaks and reads several different languages, he means—one can infer— that there is no transcendence of a common relation to language that is virtually monolingual. If I can be allowed a few tautological assertions, one only knows the language that one knows, even if that language is made up of several languages and even if one of those languages is the mother tongue. One’s relation to language is monolingual because one can never master the plurality of all languages, the plurality of all the different relations to language, even though a mother tongue opens the door to all language in the sense that it enables one to experience what is common to all language. Every language is language, any language possesses what is common to all language, and no language transcends the common language. Furthermore, there is no mode of discourse within language that transcends language itself. In other words, as both Derrida and Lacan repeatedly noted, there is no metalanguage, a language about language that transcends and circumscribes ordinary language. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas once attacked Derrida for challenging the distinction and hierarchical relation between philosophy and literature and, by implication, logic and rhetoric. 12 Strictly speaking, this criticism did not do justice to Derrida, who never argued against such a distinction. He never claimed that there is no hierarchical relation between these modes of discourse, since the gist of Derrida’s critique of logocentrism is that logic, in its historical condition, presupposes a kind of hierarchical relation to rhetoric. Philosophy would not be philosophy if it did not claim a certain superiority to literature or common sense with respect to truth. In his essay on the law of genre, Derrida made it perfectly clear that he was not arguing against such a law, but rather showing that the law of genre produces, as its inevitable by-product, the transgression of the law of genre. 13 Transgression makes no sense before there is a law. Once again, if there is a common language that makes it possible to mix philosophy and literature, it can only be known retroactively from the strict construction of the difference between philosophy and literature, just as only a strict practice of logic makes it possible to recognize the dependence

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of logical procedures on a certain kind of rhetorical practice, on certain assumptions about the nature of language itself, on the rhetorical premise of a pure language without figurative effects. The supremacy of logic, which entails its purity, is unthinkable without rhetoric as the condition that logic is meant to transcend and circumscribe. An absolute logic—which would be a logic that claimed to be the only logic—would lose its supremacy by losing its purchase on ordinary language. As my consideration of Alain Badiou in the last chapter suggests, there is more than one logic and rhetoric itself may be a kind of logic. Earlier I situated my own monolingualism in the specific context of the history of my relation to language. The value of such a disclosure, in my view, does not lie in what it could authorize. My history does not give me a relation to truth that I can automatically translate into intellectual capital on the academic marketplace. When someone like Derrida describes his historical origin in Algeria, his purpose is not to authorize himself as a spokesman for Algerians or Jews or subjects of the third world or victims of any sort. On the contrary, he drops for a moment the veil of his own intellectual authority as a philosopher who is famous and justly celebrated for his style as well as his thought; he steps outside the discourse of philosophy as it is commonly understood, its idiom—something that he rarely did in his early writings, though he made that move from time to time, starting with the ―Envois‖ section of La carte postale in 1980—and exploits one of the practices of ordinary language: confessional narrative. He tells his story and from that story works toward communicating a truth about the nature of language, the politics of language, and the structure of language that makes cultural violence possible and at the same time makes resistance to cultural violence possible. By engaging in such an act, Derrida does not betray philosophy but rather opens philosophy to its other, to the common language—a force that historically philosophy has wanted to exclude from itself, but that, as many of Derrida’s philosophical readings have shown, has all too often insisted its way into philosophy, or rather has made itself visible as philosophy, when philosophy discloses its language as language, which means that its specialized terms, its abstruse propositions, are shown to be nothing more than words, like any other words—words that can be translated into other words, and must be translatable in order to be meaningful, even if something is always lost in the translation. That last phrase is itself a bit of common sense, but I want to use it to formulate another phrase that I would like to see as an intervention in common sense, since there is no reason to assume that common sense is ever finished or beyond innovation, though such an intervention cannot claim any

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originality, at least in the romantic sense of that term. My phrase or proposition is this: if something is always lost in the translation, something else is always gained. In the essay on monolingualism, Derrida accuses himself, through the procedure of a dialogue with himself, of failing to produce common sense when he says that he has only one language and that language is not his own.14 I would argue that, on the contrary, in constructing such a paradox, Derrida has effectively entered the realm of common sense and has stated his case in the plainest language imaginable. By translating a complicated set of philosophical propositions into a paradox that anyone can understand, and by contextualizing that proposition through the telling of some personal history, he confronts philosophy with the necessity of ordinary language, with the requirement of a minimal consensus, and with the demand for communicability. Anyone who compares this essay with Derrida’s early writings, such as Of Grammatology, can recognize a radical difference of style that one could call more literary; but since it is almost impossible to distinguish the literary from the common—because literature draws much of its force from ordinary language, and can almost always be considered an intervention in the realm of common sense—one could also say that such an essay breaks out of the closure of philosophical idiom and moves in the direction of common sense. Or, it recognizes common sense as a necessary ground to any theoretical formulation, the ground of its translatability. Derrida’s historical experience convinced him that his language was not his own, even though French was his ―native‖ language, in the sense that, when he did not learn Arabic or Berber or Hebrew or some other language peculiar to his cultural, geographical or historical situation, he missed the opportunity to be truly bilingual in the strict sense of speaking two languages as if they were both one language, that is to say, one’s own language. Though Derrida’s history cannot provide a rational defense of his philosophy, it goes some way toward contextualizing it, toward explaining why this man—Jacques Derrida—would become obsessed with the question of language, with the idea of language as trace, as Other, as supplement or surplus, as something that differs from itself and defers itself, as not identical with itself or with the subject that speaks or writes it. He wasn’t the only one who had these ideas, however original his own formulation of them may have been. His story, however limited and unsatisfying it may be as the reconstruction of his origin in and relation to Algeria, is nonetheless concrete and translatable. Though it may not rationally vindicate Derrida’s philosophy, it puts it into a kind of circulation,

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sends it on a quest for a common meaning, however inadequate that may be from the viewpoint of specialized language. It recirculates, recontextualizes Derridean thought in such a way that it takes into account the dialectical other of its own idiom, language, and style. You only have one language—even if that language is a double or a plural language—which operates as a key to all languages and to language in general, and that one language is not your own. I can’t prove the truth of this proposition, and I’m not sure that Derrida has. But I can translate it into my own experience and recirculate it in the narrative I construct of my own life. I don’t want to use it to celebrate monolingualism in the strict sense. (I personally wish that I could speak and write fluently in all the languages that interest me. I could take the time out now to write the history of my education and all the opportunities I had and did not have in some futile effort to defend myself from accusations of stupidity or sanctioned ignorance or imperialist arrogance. It would serve no purpose because anyone who would judge me in those terms has already reduced me and my history to a specific value in the calculus of social distinctions. They have already erased the particularity of my experience and declined to translate it and recirculate it in their own language or languages, in their own history. Maybe with good reason, but that’s not an issue I will take up here.) Nonetheless, my experience of alienation from the only language I have, the English language, resonates with the politics of language that Derrida discovers in his own history. I said earlier that English could not be my mother tongue anymore than the United States can be my mother country. The term ―mother tongue‖—as it has been used in so many other discourses—simply won’t translate into my context, it fails to define my relation to the English language. For me, the English language is not the language that I speak or write but the language that I am supposed to speak or write. Even if, in the view of someone, I write the English language properly, I cannot feel that myself; and frankly it is feeling that a term like ―mother tongue‖ or ―mother country‖ is meant to convey. The United States is my fatherland, and English is the language of the fatherland. My relation to both is not terribly different from my relation to my real father, which was one of ambivalence informed by the conviction that I could not be like my father, did not want to be like my father, and could never please my father. My working-class father. My mother tongue was the voice of my mother who was just as monolingual as I am, since the words that came out of her mouth were English. Yet her English was inflected by a relation to language that could not claim ownership, even if the ownership of a language

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is always the illusion of power. Furthermore, my mother represented a kind of mother country for me, to the extent that she articulated a vision of what our country (hers and mine) should be, a vision that was always in contradiction with what the United States actually was. My father, like so many white blue-collar workers of his era, was a racist. Memphis, the town I grew up in, was a segregated community. As far back as I can remember my mother instilled in me, and in my brother and sisters, the view that the way things were in Memphis was wrong, and that my father, at least in this area of life, was wrong. So you see, if I later came to see my mother as something of a madwoman, I could not help but associate that madness with an ethical truth. My father may have been sane, but he was blind to the reality of the world in which he lived; and as such, he was fused in my mind with a fatherland that was somehow responsible for the violence of the vicious racial discrimination that I could see every day in my early childhood. To be fair, even as a small boy, I saw my father as a victim of the same system that had created racial segregation, which I always saw as a form of economic violence because black people to me represented poverty, a poverty that I feared my family and I could fall into. We seemed close enough to it already, and my mother was full of the experience of having grown up poor in Arkansas. When I saw the town where she grew up, it looked poor enough to me. My father was a member of a union that seemed to be always going out on strikes, and I could see the fear in his face whenever that happened. In the fatherland, as I understood it, workers had to go on strike and risk everything in order to avoid poverty; but in going on strike, they had to experience the very thing they were trying to avoid. I never knew a worker who really wanted to go out on strike. It terrified them. The fatherland hated workers, which I knew because you could see it on television and I heard it all the time from the fathers of my friends who were not working class. In the fatherland, strikes are wrong, and unions are the cause of all the problems. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why my father would identify with the fatherland (if in fact he did), since that country didn’t care about men like my father. The fatherland only wanted obedience and conformity. The mother country was different. Even though it was not what the world was but what it should be, it was not abstract or imaginary. To my mother, the United States was something different on the inside from what it was on the outside. She believed that the country wanted to be something different; and when I went to school and studied the history of my country and realized that my books and teachers made things seem much rosier than they appeared to be in everyday life,

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I thought that maybe this rosier vision of things was what everyone wanted the country to be. So I figured the mother country was real but hidden, buried away, though someday it would come back with a vengeance. As I grew up, slowly extricating myself from the family and reading things on my own (my head always moving slowly back and forth, back and forth), it became increasingly apparent to me that the mother country had been lost somewhere along the way. The mother principle, if you will, came to look more and more like a fantasy. All that remained of the mother country was my personal connection to things and people—and a very personal, even eccentric relation to language. You could love a place in the sense that it was a part of you, a part of your history, your makeup. I loved my mother’s voice and all the wisdom that came out of it, even when she was mad. I loved the streets of Memphis simply because each one of them contained millions of impressions that were a part of my being. As I grew up, I began to lose my southern accent, no doubt because I was ashamed of it, and in my everyday speech I avoided sounding like my mother. To that extent, I entered the fatherland, but my relation to that order of things was not love. When I tried writing in the mother tongue, my real voice, I felt lost and isolated, incapable of writing anything that anyone would ever want to read. Eventually I took up scholarship because this was the one area in which I seemed to be able to do something and say something. If I grew to love it, that was only because occasionally I could feel the other language, the other voice, the mother tongue, just on the edge of this proper voice, this institutional father tongue that became the medium of my craft. So you see that it is possible to be monolingual, even in the strict sense, and yet have two languages, two tongues, neither of which is your own because one has been lost and the other is the master language that you can never possess and make your own because it possesses and owns you. It goes without saying that as a boy I had no understanding whatsoever of the colonial world and of the incredible violence that had been perpetrated against the world by the West, which included my own ―fatherland.‖ Derrida implies that the colonial situation reveals a terrorism of language that could be said to operate within any culture, though colonial domination would be its most extreme form.15 As a child, I already possessed a bifurcated subjectivity. First, as a southern son of the working class, who was also Catholic, I was one of the nobodies, the people who need to learn to keep their mouths shut (since we sound funny when we talk anyway) and do what they’re told by the masters who give the orders because they’re smarter, work harder, and are beloved by God. We can organize

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if it’s absolutely necessary, but those organizations will only be tolerated as long as they don’t interfere with the freedom of the free market and the accumulation by wealth by those who have a right to it because they’re smarter, work harder, and so forth. Second, as a white southerner, I was not black, not poor (however close we came to it at times), and not subject to the explicit social, economic, and political exclusion as anyone who was black at that time. Though my mother had made it impossible for me to comfortably identify with that second subject position, which you could call the position of dominance, it was inevitable that it would become a part, even if it was the part that I despised, of who I was. Later, when I became conscious of what I first would call the third world and later the postcolonial world, I had to recognize the implication of my identity in the so-called first world (the West, empire) and in whiteness. Maybe I don’t own that identity anymore than I own the language through which it captures me, but I have to take responsibility for it nonetheless. In the meditations that follow, I will be coming back to these issues, but here I want to explain the method of this first ―essay,‖ this first attempt to enter the space between theory and common sense, which will hold more or less true for the subsequent chapters. I have laid down some practical rules to guide this project. Since it is an experiment, in the Nietzschean sense of that term, these rules are not meant to be generalized into a new universally applicable methodology. The better word for this procedure might be strategy. The reader will have noticed that I have not quoted any specific passages from Derrida’s or any other text in this writing so far. This is a conscious decision on my part, both methodological and stylistic. It may seem perversely ironic to apply a ban on quotation to a consideration of Derrida, who argued that the ethics of discussion demands accurate and sufficient quotation. However, Derrida also recognized, especially in his early work, that it is impossible to limit the concept of quotation to what can be contained between the spaces of inverted commas. In this writing, for reasons that I hope to make clear as I proceed, my first rule is to avoid relying on the words of others, even if I am directly referring to those words. Since one of the goals of this writing is to translate theory into common sense, even as I postulate an initial definition of common sense as the necessary translatability of any language, idiom, style, or voice, it follows that I must use words other than the words that I am translating. (There will be an exception to this rule when I feel the need to quote a few explicit words from a foreign language, the language of an original text. I will do this only when the issue of the translation itself is in question and has a bearing on what I want to say.) Bu t there

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is also a more personal reason why I would avoid direct quotation as much as possible. Though I have no illusion that the voice in which I am writing is my own or that the language out of which I construct my voice is my property in the sense that I have complete mastery of it, I want as much as possible to discipline my own tendency to fall back on the words of others, to find a hiding place in those words. When I was a boy, I found a safe haven in the words of others, and my training as a close reader leads to a similar kind of hiding, even masquerade. Though I value close reading in the form of textual commentary, I also recognize such a procedure as a strategy for creating critical authority without responsibility, in the sense that it attributes any claim to the production of meaning in language to the authority of another. Yet the alternative to this gesture or strategy of reading is not originality. In this writing, I cannot claim any originality for my thoughts and yet, at the same time, I cannot transfer responsibility for these thoughts to any other source. This doesn’t mean, however, that I cannot name my sources (even if I cannot remain faithful to them), and I do so by referencing their texts and by employing a rhetoric that postulates a distinction between primary and secondary texts, with my own writing playing the role of the secondary. The reader should not be taken in by this second rule. In a certain sense, all writing is primary, and in another, all writing is secondary. Even when I refer to ―my‖ thought and ―my‖ writing or ―their‖ thought and ―their‖ writing, there is a kind of illusion produced by those possessive pronouns. Overall, my strategy borders on being a stratagem. Nonetheless, I will posit a second working definition of common sense for this project, which is both its guiding principle and its goal: the thought I cannot claim as my own but for which I must take responsibility. When I was a graduate student in California nearing the completion of my dissertation, I attended a dinner party at a restaurant one evening with several faculty members, including my advisor, and several other graduate students. During the conversation, my advisor corrected my pronunciation of a word. Since he had done this many times before, it was hardly a shock to me, though he couldn’t know to what extent this kind of event had been a constant part of my life. Though I wasn’t aware of feeling any resentment, I was skeptical enough to wonder to myself, ―If he understood what I said well enough to know how I should have said it, then there was no failure of communication, only a failure to conform to somebody’s norm, to a rule that I had no part in writing.‖ Perversely on my part, I decided to confront him about this habit he had of correcting me, which I did in a joking way, though I’m sure he got the underlying message. When

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I asked him if he thought I was a southern bumpkin, he responded lightheartedly, ―Well, the way I see it, there’s white bread and there’s brown bread, and it’s not that one is better than the other, but they’re different.‖ He went on to clarify, but he didn’t need to tell me that I was the brown bread because I knew it as soon as he made the distinction. It was self-evident. A matter of common sense. When I thought about it, I realized that there probably was some stubborn will in me that refused to follow the rules. Since my mother had many of the same problems reading and pronouncing words as I did, I figured there was some kind of perverse loyalty to her that compelled me to mispronounce words and names (when with a little effort I could have avoided that) as if I wanted to blazon forth to the entire world my class background and the crazy history of my relation to my mad mother. In some perverse way, getting language wrong was my way of getting it right, of setting it aright, of vindicating my mother tongue, my mother country—my mother. In the essay on monolingualism, in a long footnote, Derrida notes that a mother can lose her reason and when she does, meaning itself, language as a kind of law—which includes the law of the subject, the origin of the self—becomes mad.16 Yet in my experience, madness can be the origin of common sense as a kind of check on reason, which can become too comfortable with itself, too protected in the sealed space of a privileged discourse. There is a madness of language—my language, the only language that I can really call mine, even if it isn’t mine—that challenges reason with a kind of sense that is common. It is common because it doesn’t belong to anyone and can’t be owned. It can’t lord itself over anyone, it has no authority, though for some reason it makes sense. It can be understood, translated, and communicated. A common sense that is mad is like Cassandra’s truth. Something of a curse. (Cassandra’s curse was that she would always tell the truth—indeed telling the truth would be a kind of obsession, a form of madness—but no one would believe her.) It makes sense, this mad common sense, but no one believes it because it doesn’t conform to the rules as people understand them. Derrida was a Cassandra, and like Cassandra he died with a mixed reputation. To many like me, he is possibly the greatest philosopher of the late twentieth century. To some journalists and media gurus, he was something of a mountebank. Unlike Cassandra, he was obsessed with writing, and through writing transformed the rules that produce common sense. If you confront common sense with its own mad version of itself, then maybe you can change the rules, and release the common sense of the other from the hegemony of the same.

C

H A P T E R

2

POLITICAL SENSE AND SENSIBILITY GRAMSCI TO BOURDIEU

In many ways, the idea for this project comes from the forty-eighth note in Antonio Gramsci’s third prison notebook, which was written in 1930.1 Under the heading ―Spontaneity and Conscious Leadership,‖ eventually the note was published in a collection of notes titled The Modern Prince.2 In it, Gramsci associates spontaneity with feeling shaped by common sense, and he attributes such feeling to the masses. Feeling is spontaneous only in the sense that it has not been produced by a systematic educational process and does not express itself through a specialized language. Gramsci defines common sense as the popular understanding of the world, though he insists that such an understanding should not be confused with a concept like instinct. In this note, Gramsci poses the question of whether theory and common sense are in opposition to one another. By implication, though he never formulates the problem in exactly these terms, he poses the same question about the relation between abstract meaning and feeling, or between sense and sensibility. He understands the spontaneous feelings of the masses to be the direct expression of common sense, but since no feeling can be known or communicated without the use of language (or without some kind of verbal or physical gesture, which is its own kind of language), then the real distinction here must be between a use of language that is specialized and abstract and a use of language that is ordinary and saturated with feeling. Furthermore, the title of the note suggests that the distinction between theory and common sense is also a distinction between conscious and unconscious meaning.

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Early in this note, Gramsci makes it clear that the consciousness he attributes to leadership never transcends common sense. Furthermore, he begins the note by insisting that there is no such thing as pure spontaneity, and by implication, one could also infer that there is no such thing as pure unconsciousness. Mass political movements depend on feelings—by definition, popular feelings—that have entered a state of conflict with the hegemony, that is to say, with the common sense that supports and legitimates the general direction of society and culture promoted by the dominant social group. In other words, the masses emerge as an autonomous political force when there is a crisis in common sense, which is no longer unified. One could argue that, from the perspective of logic, common sense is never unified; but its unity doesn’t lie in its propositional coherence but in the spontaneous feelings that saturate it. The British Marxist Raymond Williams argued that any hegemony necessarily includes within itself disruptions of common sense. These disruptions are ongoing movements toward a counterhegemony that the dominant social forces must constantly work to dissolve by renewing the consent of the masses for their leadership of society. Williams also makes a distinction between common sense as popular conceptions of the world and structures of feeling that precede a shift in the popular worldview.3 In any case, one can argue there is no absolute division between popular feeling, common sense, and conscious theories of leadership. The leaders of a mass movement, who derive their authority from the consent of the masses, cannot transcend common sense by inhabiting the realm of pure theory. What the masses consent to when they accept oppositional leadership, which in fact they have generated out of themselves, is a reformulation of common sense that feels right to them. In formulating the common sense of the masses, in translating their spontaneous feelings into propositions that have logical validity and practical effect, leadership translates the unconscious into the conscious, which for Gramsci means that they have educated the spontaneity of the masses. For Gramsci, therefore, theory cannot be in opposition to common sense, at least not intrinsically. On the contrary, the difference between theory and common sense is not qualitative but quantitative, a matter of degree that implies a reciprocal relation, and a continuum or passage between two poles of human language and discourse. Still, Gramsci knows perfectly well that in practice theory frequently opposes common sense, and he ends his note with a criticism of the academic viewpoint, which expects political movements in history to be fully conscious in the sense that they conform to and virtually illustrate abstract theories. Though there must be a continuum between

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theory and common sense—a dialectical relation—the passage from one to the other is not symmetrical. The task of the theoretician is to translate historical experience into theoretical language, but such a subject cannot access historical experience without passing through the mediation of a popular conception of the world that articulates itself in the common sense of ordinary language. The theoretician cannot dictate common sense, though that is exactly what was happening in the Soviet Union at the time Gramsci was writing in the thirties; and when he suggests that such an approach is academic, he is surely aware of the historical tendency of political leaders to separate themselves from the masses and attempt to harness common sense to the interests of a particular theory and group. When he refers to educating the spontaneity of the masses, he means rewriting common sense in order to expose the social significance of the historical shift that brings about new popular feeling and gives birth to a new political movement. In effect, theoretical language constrains common sense by eliminating its contradictions. It separates the new from the older formulations that hinder the movement of popular thought toward consciousness of its own political import. Ultimately, the goal of theory must be to make visible the good sense that lies within common sense; but though this should be the intention and effect of theory, good sense is not necessarily identical with theory. Before I consider what Gramsci means by good sense, I want to shift ground and try to rethink a seemingly innocent term like ―the masses.‖ Gramsci—particularly in his comments on the formation of intellectuals— suggests that political intellectuals are never separate from the masses.4 On the contrary, his theory of the organic intellectual suggests that such a political figure is the creation of a social group and represents the process by which the group can know itself and understand its own political desire, though this always remains a dynamic process subject to countless revisions and dialectical exchanges between the language of the masses and the specialized language of the intellectual. Clearly, the masses in Gramsci’s context means the body of people, the majority, who are subordinate to the dominant class that imposes direction on social life, a direction that legitimates their dominance and ensures the distribution of wealth sustaining it. The masses with whom Gramsci identified as an organic intellectual in the immediate sense were the proletariat, but in a broader sense, he reached out to the subaltern classes as a whole, which included not only workers but also peasants and other subordinate social strata. Though Gramsci refers to other locations in the world, he wrote primarily out of the Italian context in which his political writing and

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social activism as a communist led to his imprisonment by the Fascists in 1926. Ironically, as a prisoner, he produced the critical work that has had global impact and has demonstrated its universality precisely through its translatability into other contexts and social situations. Yet Gramsci’s prison writings resulted from and responded to the destruction of the Italian working-class movement at the hands of the Fascists. When he wrote in prison, was Gramsci writing as an organic intellectual who articulates and conceptually clarifies the popular feelings of the subaltern classes? Or, was he an isolated individual addressing a subject or group or class that no longer existed in the social field that contributed to his intellectual formation? Or, was he addressing the future, that is, a future social field, which includes contemporary readers from around the globe who find he articulates their political sense and sensibility? Is this global field unified, or is it a set of discrete social fields, each translating his work without relation to the other fields? And, are these social fields truly subaltern formations or are they intellectual fields whose claims of affiliation with subaltern political movements and desires are tenuous and possibly dubious? Certainly, if one accepts the Gramscian principle that all human beings are intellectuals, then there must be organic intellectuals of the subaltern classes wherever those classes have organized. All social and political movements generate leaders, strategists, and spokespersons that translate popular feelings into concrete political propositions that become directives for social action. Clearly, Gramsci, as a political leader, was such an organic intellectual for the Italian left before his imprisonment; but after his imprisonment, and after his death in 1937 (only days after the expiration of his prison sentence), what did he become then? And what kinds of intellectuals have followed his example? Concerning the last, let me consider my own position. In the first chapter of this book, I referred to myself as a nobody, perhaps with some degree of irony but not entirely. As a university professor in the United States, who has published a few books, I have some social status, and certainly any university professor in this country possesses a degree of autonomy that most people in the United States, much less the rest of the world, utterly lack. Karl Marx said that wealth is free time, that is, time over which one has some degree of control. 5 That control is the real meaning of autonomy. Compared to the average person on this planet, I have an enormous amount of free time; and though there are various constraints on my time like pressures to conform to certain protocols, avoid overly zealous commitments, and not engage in self-conscious speculations (such as the one I am engaged

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in at this very moment), or say too much about the social organization of the academic world itself (including its class structure, or, in the United States, its virtual caste structure), nonetheless I have the time and the freedom to risk myself, to push the edge of the envelope a little bit—even, if I want, to lay my head on a symbolic chopping block, because I know that if my head gets chopped off it will only be symbolic. I will not go to prison or lose my job (at least not for these reasons) and in all likelihood, I will have the opportunity to redeem myself and come back to the scholarly fold. Yet in the star system of the American academy, I am a relative nobody, certainly not a star; and since the academic star system is a global class of scholars—global at least in the distribution of their countries of origin but not necessarily in their work locations (people like Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Judith Butler, Cornell West, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Žižek, Antonio Negri, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, V. Y. Mudimbe, just to name the authors of some of the books on my desk)—I am a global nobody. Most of the stars of left academia, theoretically speaking, would never lend their authority to an ideology as conformist as the belief in a meritocracy; but their salaries, privileged relation to time, and silence on the academic caste system require an implicit appeal to merit in order to produce the legitimacy necessary to sustain their star status and their privileges. (This situation forces me to advise my graduate students about a job market in which their actual achievement, the quality of their work, will go only so far with a degree from a minor university, the sign of their caste.) Here we enter a troubling zone that requires me to address a number of questions about my own political ―sensibility‖ and the relation of my individual identity to the masses. First, why bother about my own feelings? What can they have to do with the liberation of the global masses? I would be lying if I did not admit to feelings of resentment toward the stars who dominate the intellectual field in which I work, resentment that may arise, to some extent, from the desire to be who they are, but also arises from the general feeling that their critical language, the sense of their words, is not addressed to me—does not even recognize my situation. As Jean-Paul Sartre noted, resentment may be the first step out of subjective conformity, a step toward the objective transformation of the world.6 Furthermore, I must admit to profound skepticism as to whether the writings of these so-called stars aim in any way to reach, articulate, or transform the common sense of the masses. This doesn’t mean that I have not learned anything from these theorists or that I consider every one of them to be a hardened elitist. Nor do I have the illusion that my own work, such

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as it is, transcends the contradictions I recognize in these academic intellectuals, particularly those of the left—especially the contradiction between their apparent desire for social liberation on a global scale and their intellectual practice, which includes their competition for placement within an institutional hierarchy that necessarily marginalizes the majority of intellectual workers rather than bringing them together in a social movement. I do not exclude from this situation those intellectuals whose social origins lie in the third world, even someone like the late Edward Said. While I cannot but admire Said for his public action on behalf of the Palestinians in their struggle for social and political autonomy against the dominance of Israel and the West, his work implicitly reinforces the belief that the masses are largely incapable of thought and that intellectual hierarchy is inevitable. Said was an intellectual and cultural aristocrat politically committed to a cause, and though he may have articulated the viewpoint of the Palestinians in a way that Western intellectuals and public figures could understand (even if they didn’t agree with it), and though he may even have constructed an image of the Palestinians that reflected back to them an affirmative sense of their own existence as a people, he nonetheless kept his distance from the masses and the global distribution of wealth that cuts across every national identity. Said exposed the West as a hegemonic machine that produces alterities as a form of social control, but he never addressed in a major way his own implication in the production of social alterities in the field of academic and intellectual production. He sometimes referred to his special insight resulting from his unique position between the West and the East, but his concept of life in the West largely derived from his privileged position at one of the most elite universities in the United States. Said had little knowledge of what it meant to be a drone in the U.S. academic caste system. Yet, among scholars of his rank, he was unique in risking not only his reputation but also his life for a cause that affected the concrete lives of one segment of the global masses. Yet who am I to write critically about Edward Said? Certainly, I am not anyone who can be said to transcend the contradictions that mark the work of this unique individual, who created the new academic field of postcolonial studies almost as the by-product of his concrete identification with the cause of the Palestinian people. I certainly can make no similar claim to political integrity; but from my position further down in the academic caste system, perhaps I can see a few things that Said (not to mention his less politically militant counterparts in postcolonial studies, feminism, queer theory, new historicism, and so forth) could not see. I may be able to recognize a bifurcation in my

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social identity that might have been just as true of Said as it is of me, but that I can recognize more easily because I am closer to the other side of the division than he was. For if Said was a militant in the cause of the Palestinians, it was because somewhere inside the aristocrat that he was, there was a subject that identified with the wretched of the earth, with the nobodies who have no voice—a subjective identity that was nurtured by his birth as a Palestinian, even if he was always, in some sense, a global Palestinian, who enjoyed the best there was to be had of both worlds, the East and the West. However you construe Said’s permanent exile from the land of his birth—a blessing or a curse?—it was a condition that not only gave him privileges he might never have attained otherwise but also forced him to recognize a wretchedness in his own soul that became his link to the Palestinian people. It is this situation, this psychic condition I am tempted to say, that makes Said such an important model for every intellectual in the current global situation—even intellectuals of the West. Even those intellectuals like myself who are not from a background as privileged as Said’s, who have not had a brilliant education, who do not know how to move in the social circles in which Said was comfortable, who cannot claim any great originality of thought or style—but who nonetheless may have something to say. Maybe the nobodies can speak after all. So many of Said’s imitators have embraced his cause without articulating a political passion of their own, one that rises out of their own experience just as Said’s came out of his personal history as a Palestinian. This is not a call for more identity politics, which I believe leads to a political dead end and which Said carefully avoided throughout his career. Near the end of his life, Said made his personal history public in a way that someone like Derrida always hesitated to do, but Said never rested his authority as a literary or political critic on his identity per se. His concept of secular criticism, which occupies the space between different cultures and translates one into the other, did not tolerate such a naïve reduction of intellectual authority to one’s ethnic or national identity. Yet he recognized that a person’s concrete history plays a determining role in her social commitments. To paraphrase the remark of the blinded Gloucester in Shakespeare’s King Lear, those who have not felt will not see—those who cannot get in touch with the feeling of being an outsider or having a voice that does not matter, cannot create a bond with the outsiders, the nobodies, and the wretched of the earth. Said never called himself subaltern in the manner of some contemporary postcolonial critics. This, in my view, is a sign of his integrity because if a term like ―subaltern‖ is to have any real use in mapping

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the global situation today it must have a socio-economic inflection. Gramsci gave new meaning to the term when he used it to designate those forces in society without political or economic power who could become the agents of change in a struggle to transform the hegemony. Gayatri Spivak once gave the term another twist when she argued that the subaltern cannot speak; and since in order to say this she had to speak and know that she spoke with a certain authority in the West and the East, she implicitly announced to the world that she was not a subaltern. Yet it was possible to read between the lines and discover a Spivak virtually imprisoned by her own education and social position—who, if she could not call herself subaltern, at least identified with the subaltern to the extent of identifying with a voice that cannot be heard by anyone in power, that can be shut out by the very attempt to articulate itself in the language of the dominant culture. As critics from Michel Foucault to Judith Butler have forced us to see, there is never a pure location that is absolutely outside of power, and in order for a person to emerge as an agent of social change, she must already be implicated in the configuration of power that governs the world at any particular moment in time. It is almost impossible to imagine the absolute subaltern, since a powerless, impoverished man may have power over his wife or his family; a woman may have power over her children, her husband or her lover; a child may have power over a smaller child, and so on. Yet there must be a continuum of subalternity that dominates those subjects who are most disempowered even as it crosses through every subject who has experienced marginality or who identifies with the subaltern position, not merely through an act of empathy but through the recognition of subalternity as a human reservoir of latent power that can transform the world. Consequently, if I refer to myself as a nobody, or suggest that intellectuals of the status of Said or Spivak harbor a nobody somewhere in their makeup, I am not claiming subaltern socio-economic status for these celebrated academics or me. On the contrary, we are all relatively privileged in contrast to the vast majority of the subaltern masses that populate this planet. Nonetheless, each of us harbors within ourselves the trace of the nobody we once were—a trace that may be the foundation of the sensibility that commits itself to oppositional thinking. The most privileged child experiences a void in its being when parents or other agents of community attempt to imprint the child with a socially integrating identity that never fully erases a presocial sensibility. The void itself—the feeling of being nothing, powerless, and speechless—can be invested with new values and incorporated into a critical sensibility through the privileged subject’s encounter with

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external forces and social conditions that call into question its place in society, its privileged relation to language or culture, its social distinction, and the accompanying symbolic and economic capital associated with that distinction. For whatever reason, Said’s encounter with his own memory of the lost Palestinian homeland, as well as his personal encounter with the Palestinian subaltern masses whose socio-economic condition he did not share, reawakened his sense of nothingness, the wretchedness of his origin as a nobody, and his identification with subalternity as both the threat of nothingness, of death itself, that haunts every life, and the reservoir of power to transform the world. Surely, one can look for specific events in Said’s life, some of them quite personal experiences of abjection and powerlessness having nothing to do with the cause to which he eventually committed himself, and recognize the critical elements that came to shape his political sensibility and the good sense to which it led. This is not to forget that such a process is necessarily overdetermined and cannot be reduced to a simple cause-and-effect formula. There is probably no one who in the process of becoming a subject, a person in society, does not experience abjection, which, as Julia Kristeva suggested long ago, is a structural condition of human identity. Nonetheless, for abjection to become political, it must be recharged by historical experience, by the kind of experience that brings a person face to face with their fantasy, with the limits of their understanding of the world—with the breakdown of common sense. In my case, the scenario has a familiar pattern, if I may pick up where I left off in the last chapter. Once I gained enough autonomy to engage in the elementary acts of reading and thinking for myself, I discovered that I could overcome some of the structural difficulties I had with reading, perhaps my bad wiring, through hard work. Furthermore, I could distinguish myself—at least within the narrow community of my largely working-class Catholic high school—as a ―smart kid.‖ This process had its ups and downs, and like most people who bear some traumatic history that is more than structural, I suffered from depression and engaged from time to time in acts of inexplicable self-destruction that grew out of the self-loathing that was my working-class inheritance. In spite of these setbacks, a general rule gradually emerged that guided me. Education and intellectual performance were the ticket, the one thing that worked for me despite my best efforts at subverting myself, and the path that promised a virtually unlimited horizon that kept expanding the further I pursued it. If anything disturbed this process, it was another outcome of my traumatic history, my political views and commitments. I dropped out of college, went to New

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York and became a communist, and eventually encountered the dead end of left-wing politics in a country without a real left-wing culture. Eventually, I got into the University of California at Santa Cruz for graduate work. Again, there were ups and downs, bouts of depression, periods of profound resentment; but when you have a family, as I did at that time, you learn to rechannel your energy, which had a salutary effect. I did well in graduate school and for the most part lived out the great dream of social mobility in the United States. At one point, I applied for a Fulbright to study in France. The committee that reviewed my application included a famous anthropologist who had introduced narrative theory into his field. After he edited my naively written personal history, it read like Horatio Alger. Naturally, I got the Fulbright. At Santa Cruz, I thought I was a star, but on graduation, the academic job market quickly put me back in my place. I was about to take a dive into the sea of abjection never far behind me when the chair of my program (who had played no role in my graduate education up to that point) made phone calls until he found me a one-year position. By the end of that year, I had a tenure-track job and a book contract. From that point forward, in the language of the real world, I had no right to complain. I was tenured early, promoted to full professor after six years; and though I hardly led the life of a professor at one of the elite universities, I had what most young scholars dream of, a job at a research university with a reduced teaching load so that I could write and publish. And I did just that. But my point in narrating this story would be defeated if I didn’t tell the whole truth, which exposes my political sensibility and the sense—good or bad, but certainly common— that derives from it. Though I had no right to complain, like most people I was not altogether satisfied with things as they stood. For one thing, I never intended to go back to the South, and there I was in the Deep South. For another, when I was hired, my new chair made it clear to me that I was far from their first choice, for which good fortune he expected a certain docility on my part; but, as he would learn, that just wasn’t in my social makeup. So while I became something of a maverick in my department (but a maverick who published), I soon began to look elsewhere for academic employment. In the next twenty years, I would publish six books at academically legitimate presses and a number of articles and reviews. Though as a teacher I was somewhat controversial and not always popular, I developed a good reputation over time and managed to win an award (along with a few other distinctions). But in the only arena that actually counts for true academic distinction (à la Pierre Bourdieu), at

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least while you’re alive, I completely struck out. In twenty-two years, I was on the job market every year except four or five at the most. During that time, I had no campus visits as an assistant professor (not even at the university where I got a job), one campus visit as an associate professor, and five campus visits as a full professor after 1992. Though I have been invited to apply for name chairs and senior professorships and frequently get to the second stage of screening, I rarely get beyond that and have not had a job offer in twenty-two years. For a while, my friends told me: the next book will do it. But after the fifth book, the idea finally sank into my head that I wasn’t going anywhere, at least not based on my record. Let me come to the point, which is my perception of the academic field in which I work. It took me nearly twenty years to realize how naïve I was, to what extent I was captured and driven by an illusion, even though all along I possessed the critical knowledge necessary to rid myself of this illusion, even though in some sense I knew that my illusion was an illusion. This illusion derived from the naïve assumption I made as the product of the working class that I could transcend my social origin through the production of critical work that would demonstrate my value on the academic marketplace. To be fair, this was not entirely an illusion, since I have transcended my social origin through academic work. However, the key to the illusion, the belief that kept me going and no doubt keeps thousands of others going year after year, resides in the conviction that social boundaries are movable according to a straightforward logic of achievement, that there are no limitations on how far you can go if you do the work. You can call my illusion a kind of bad faith, in the Sartrean sense of the term, which I have always interpreted as a belief without belief. It is believing, firmly believing, what you know not to be true. I always knew that meritocracy was a bogus ideology that covered the reality of what Pierre Bourdieu called the production of nobility. Yet this conscious knowledge offered no effective resistance to the force of my habitus (Bourdieu’s term), that is, my unconscious and habitual investment in an ideological view of the world that virtually enabled me to transform my life. And therein lies the final irony. Without this illusion of meritocracy, without the bad faith, I probably would not have been able to transform my life to the extent that I did; or, given the possibility that I might have become something more politically significant than what I am—such as union organizer, political activist of the left, artist—I might not have developed the intellectual skills that permit me to see through the meritocracy beyond visceral resentment or political dogmatism. Of course, I do feel resentment, as

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should be obvious, but I also have the analytical skills that enable me to objectify it to some extent. Furthermore, I can’t imagine any social or intellectual position that does not involve some bad faith or some form of ideological illusion. Even Gramsci after his imprisonment, in order to go on with the political struggle to which he was committed, had to transfer his activism to the intellectual field. He had to believe in the social effectiveness of such work to an extent that may be called into question by the history of the left in this century. Even his concept of the organic intellectual may have been a necessary illusion for him—necessary, I mean, to the production of his own critical work. Why do I expose my resentment and illusions? It isn’t to claim that my professional achievements are inherently superior and have been unjustly undervalued by the academic establishment. Such a claim would completely ignore what Bourdieu calls the ambiguity of achievement, the impossibility of determining quality as an intrinsic value beyond social calculations. No, my revelations serve one purpose only, which is to foreground my own participation in the life of the masses. I suggest that it is perfectly possible to be an intellectual in the sense of having learned how to negotiate with and decode abstract thought and language, to use the tools of critical thinking, on one side of the social equation, and nonetheless, on the other side, to be implicated in the sensibility of the masses, to feel one’s intellectual position differently from the way in which one might want to articulate it conceptually and rationally. Gramsci may have overinvested in a mentalist concept of rational truth that he derived from the idealist traditions he inherited as a European intellectual. José Nun makes such an argument in the most useful essay I have read on Gramsci’s distinction between common sense and good sense. According to Nun, Gramsci’s contradiction is that he recognizes a continuum between philosophy and common sense, but in the end, he attributes to philosophy alone the ability to produce coherent truth through logical rigor.7 Marcia Landy has produced another excellent dissection of Gramsci’s theory of common sense; and though she doesn’t come to the same conclusion as Nun, she recognizes the tilt in Gramsci’s cultural theory toward biases associated with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory in the thirties. These privilege the written word and dismiss new forms of mass culture like the cinema and radio.8 In principle, this sets up a dichotomy between the pure reason of theory and the irrationality of mass culture and the common sense that nourishes it. For my purposes, however, the issue is not really the limitations of Gramsci’s specific formulations, but rather how they translate into the contemporary context.

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Earlier I referred to Gramsci’s claim in The Modern Prince that the task of theory is to organize the good sense embedded in the contradictory realm of common sense. In the section ―Against Byzantinism,‖ Gramsci explicitly criticized the theoretical position that sees itself as a value in itself, as an autonomous intellectual act transcending its relation to social practice and the sensibility of the masses. He went so far as to claim that no truth, however universal it may appear to be as an abstraction, is effective if it cannot be translated into concrete social situations.9 In another section of the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci addresses the contradiction between two modes of theoretical consciousness in the individual member of the masses. One mode lies in the everyday activities that bind the individual to his group when they organize to transform an immediate socio-economic situation, while the other is a verbal inheritance, presumably a collection of ideas and rules of conduct.10 The inference is that the first mode is unconscious because actions rely on conceptual premises not fully grasped by the subject in question (though, as I have already suggested, it is not this simple, since it is possible to know something objectively without knowing it subjectively, that is, without knowing it in your lived relation to the world). The second mode is conscious because it derives from the cultural traditions of the hegemony that include values that serve the interests of the dominant social class. From the context, it is clear that for Gramsci there is no distinction between the struggle of the individual for critical consciousness and the struggle of the group. In fact, one can compare Gramsci’s point with Sartre’s theory of group formation in Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sartre argues that each individual in a group that moves toward critical self-consciousness operates as a third party, an autonomous subject who has broken free from seriality or the dualistic structure of hegemonic social identity, by which each individual sees itself as the reflection of its imaginary other. Such an autonomous individual collaborates with other free subjects in the struggle for social change, rather than conforming to the model each imagines defining the others, which is promoted by the cultural institutions that support the hegemony of the dominant classes. 11 Still, for Gramsci this process does not mean that each individual achieves full critical consciousness, but rather they come to critical consciousness in association with others and through the production of a group of intellectuals who have specialized in the elaboration of ideas—who have mastered the language of theory. 12 In effect, these intellectuals are able to take the common sense of the masses and pass it through the medium of theoretical language in order to produce good sense that commands the

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faith of the masses. According to Gramsci, faith is the psychological mode through which the masses experience and subscribe to a philosophical argument.13 In other words, if I understand Gramsci correctly, the common sense of the masses includes the sense implied by their social, political, and cultural practices (including interpretations of events) and the sense that derives from the social traditions of the hegemony, though in reality these two aspects of common sense are immeshed in one another and not easily distinguishable. Good sense derives from the elaboration of the political significance of those aspects of common sense that can be separated from the dominant culture and shaped into an alternative form of cultural thinking, into a political critique of the social system, including its socioeconomic foundations. However, when Gramsci suggests that the masses must produce an elite group of intellectuals in order to achieve critical selfconsciousness, he does not necessarily mean that such a group has a monopoly on critical thought or that there is an abyss between the elite group and the masses themselves. (In my view, the term ―elite group‖ is a misleading choice of words.) If the relation between common sense and theory is understood to be a continuum, then one can argue that every subject possesses some ability to theorize, has access to some language of theory, if not to the specialized language of abstract thought. For one thing, popular social acts and interpretations that lend themselves to counterhegemonic thinking are emergent expressions of theoretical consciousness even if they are not formulated in the language of pure philosophy. Furthermore, the truth of theory or philosophy is not immanent to those discourses but lies in their dialectical relation to common sense. A theory that cannot be translated into ordinary language cannot be said to possess any good sense because it cannot command the faith of the masses or check itself against experience. In the end, the masses include all of us, and even the most distinguished minds need faith in order to commit themselves to a political movement. As Gramsci noted at the end of his consideration of the philosophy of praxis in the Prison Notebooks, the masses frequently feel something that they don’t know how to articulate objectively, while the intellectuals may know something objectively without feeling it.14 In actual practice, I don’t think any intellectual can fully separate thought from feeling, sense from sensibility, though a thought that is presented as a critique of the dominant social system may be shaped at the level of its rhetoric by feelings that reflect the dominant viewpoint. Much contemporary critical theory—even that produced by

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some of its most radical figures, such as self-proclaimed Marxists like Jameson and Eagleton—is saturated with a sensibility that represents a structural position of dominance rather than a position that identifies with the sensibility of the masses. This doesn’t mean, of course, that these intellectuals secretly identify with the power of the dominant capitalist classes. On the contrary, I take their opposition to capitalism to be perfectly genuine and authentic; but they nevertheless occupy positions in the intellectual field, to use Bourdieu’s language, that indirectly reproduce a form of dominance that is homologous with—different in content but similar in structure—to the dominance that operates in the socio-economic field of the class system. This sensibility of dominance shows itself in a writing style that refuses emotional expression even when it clearly reflects the personal experience of the author—for example, when Jameson concludes his most celebrated work with the argument that all class consciousness is utopian, even the consciousness of the ruling classes, and certainly the consciousness of intellectual aristocrats, like Jameson himself, who are the products of the elite university system and who occupy positions in the highest academic caste in the United States. While the institutional field of the academic caste system legitimates itself by pointing to the achievements of its agents, it rarely makes visible the extent to which such achievement is a self-fulfilling prophecy in view of the fact that only those academics who have been pre-selected are given all the material means—in terms of time and resources—to realize the promise of their selection. Before translating Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology into an understanding of these issues, I must situate what I have just said. The reader would be mistaken to understand my criticism of the intellectual field that has produced Jameson and Eagleton, not to mention so many others in the U. S. university caste system (Butler, Bhabha, Gates, hooks, and so forth), as a call to ignore their writings or to minimalize the significance of their work. On the contrary, though the privileges that these figures enjoy are not exclusively the outcome of their merit or achievements, their achievements are the real outcomes of their privileges. While I hesitate to say that any of these figures (or anyone else in the academic field, including myself) can be construed as an organic intellectual in the Gramscian sense of the word, their critical works are intellectual acts that have political significance if they are tested by ordinary language and given the chance to dialectically interact with the common sense of mass culture. Disaffected members of the masses—by which I mean anyone who does not fully identify with the dominant culture of their nation and this globe, despite

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the inevitable contradictions of identity that enter into the makeup of each of us—must turn to whatever resources are available in order to develop a critical understanding of the world from which they are emotionally alienated. Committed intellectuals are committed to the liberation of the masses, not as a form of charity or altruist good will, but as the form of their own self-liberation; and if they have the training and experience that enables them to decode the intellectual works of the academic left, they have a responsibility to do so, though this responsibility should be performed in the spirit of Nietzschean gaiety. Furthermore, I see no reason to eliminate personal experience and a personal understanding of the institutions of hegemony from consideration (which bell hooks has long championed), as long as it is understood that the personal is never what it appears to be, that it is always the expression of collective social structures and histories. Eliminating the personal from political analysis (as a matter of principle, but certainly not as a tactical and methodological decision) mirrors the bourgeois habit of publicizing your tastes, your cultural predispositions, and your politics, while remaining utterly silent about your wealth, even to your friends, sometimes even to your spouse. Personal experience as a narrative form is one of the instruments of common sense; and while it may not convey much objective knowledge about the social situation to which it responds, it conveys better than statistics, abstract social analysis or philosophy, the feelings that lie within a social condition and animate the desire of the masses, which theoretical language objectifies. Bourdieu’s sociological analysis of the intellectual field sheds light on this issue, although even this must undergo a translation into the language of common sense if any good sense is to derive from it. In order to do this, I want to construct another brief personal history; but before I do that, I need to clarify one point. When I speak as a nobody, as one of the masses, I do not speak for the masses, subalterns or anyone else. Briefly, I formulate the problem this way: to speak as one of the masses, as a nobody, is to lose the power of the universal as a form of abstract generalization, through which one can claim to speak for all the members of a group. (In the last chapter, I will consider the universal as a form of address in a completely different way.) As an individual, I can only speak out of my own experience, history, education, and culture; and there is no way of predicting the translatability of this experience to other subjects, contexts, histories, and cultures. To state this point as simply and clearly as I know how, these words can express the views of other subjects only through their active participation, their investment of their own desires, feelings,

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and experiences. Such an act of participation, adoption, and investment requires another subject’s autonomous self-interpretation; and the only way such words can be universal for a group is through organization that includes dialogue, negotiation, and the construction of a minimal consensus that becomes the basis of communication and action. As an academic intellectual, one can speak universally in the sense of adopting an academic voice that articulates the discourse of the university, an organized institutional field, but that voice can never reach outside itself, outside its own institutional consensus, the linguistic community of the university, without crossing the border into the no man’s land of common sense. (Its universality, of course, is only the illusion of its power, but an illusion that has real social effects.) To break into common sense is also to break out of it. Gramsci frequently noted that every social group has its own common sense, from which one can infer that common sense taken as a whole belongs to no one. In order to transform common sense, one must take the risk of stepping outside of it—not simply by resorting to the specialized language of theory but by entering the no man’s land of the most general common sense, which is the contradictory realm of all the different subject positions, groups, and limited forms of consensus. To sum up, you never speak for any group or class. You merely articulate a position in language that can be understood by a group or class, and the members of the group either identify or do not identify, support or do not support, believe or do not believe what you say. As Gramsci stressed, the movement toward a new, coherent conception of the world—in other words, the production of good sense—requires you to pass through a phase of difference and separateness—indeed, isolation from the others with whom you seek to construct a new kind of social bond.15 Ironically, when I reconstruct the genealogy of my own relation to philosophy and theory, I realize that Gramsci played no significant role. The first philosopher to take hold of me was Wittgenstein. As I imagine it in retrospect, the psychological affinity that enabled his work to hit me like a thunderbolt had to do with my own alienated relation to language as well as the growing feeling of resentment that drove my resistance to intellectual hierarchy in two ways: conformity and nonconformity. On the one hand, whenever I knew that the door was shut in my face, I forced my way in by any means necessary, including mimicking the language games that seemed to contain the magic words that would open the door and let me into the sacred space of intellectual consecration. On the other hand, I could never masquerade as a bona fide member of the dominant intellectual or academic class, not in the way of so many of my working-class peers (never as

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many as you want to imagine). There was always something in me that held back and refused to play the game according to the appropriate rules. My second philosopher was Nietzsche. If Wittgenstein taught me that there were no values beyond the circumscribed games that we play with words, Nietzsche gave me a vision of the power of madness—not clinical insanity but a madness of language that knows the necessity and the impossibility of circumscribing the world with words. Though I resisted his use of words like ―slave‖ and ―noble,‖ I secretly triumphed in his understanding of the noble as an individual who creates his own values. I loved his view of words as forms of disguise, and of thought as a form of surrender, both a letting go and an overcoming of the self, rather than a form of selfenclosure, even self-consciousness. My third philosopher was Derrida, who somehow synthesized Wittgenstein and Nietzsche. His text was the most difficult to read, but through him I could navigate Western philosophy in a way that wasn’t simply academic, something beyond the intellectual tourism that conventional education mostly fosters. I was never under the illusion from any of these philosophers that the world was simply words, but Derrida affirmed the conviction derived from my experience that there was nothing beyond interpretation, nothing simply given that did not demand thought, decision, and commitment. For me, undecidable never meant ambiguity or indeterminacy. An undecidable proposition was one that demanded a decision, an interpretation, and assigned responsibility to the one who made the decision. Yet while I had been going through this philosophical evolution, I was also and always a Marxist of some sort. Marx came to me early, but I could not see him as a philosopher, or even a theorist, until much later. To me Marx was a social revolutionary, and his dissection of capitalist social relations and ideologies seemed almost self-evident, as if they were my own words coming back to me. I only had to look at my father the bluecollar worker, my mother the mad housewife, and the rest of my family to know the truth of Marx. Of course, I resisted Marx for a long time, but that had more to do with the social stigma attached to his thought by the dominant culture in which I grew up; and as that culture continued to lose its authority and legitimacy—for me and millions of others in the second half of the twentieth century—Marxism became nothing less than the alternative form of common sense. Usually, it wasn’t even Marx that I read. It was Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Guevara, Debray, and so forth. But what I couldn’t get out of the Marxists was a material understanding of my inner being, of what it felt like to

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be me, with my contradictory desires and ambivalent relations to the different spaces of the class structure. Though for years I was truly a nobody in the sense that I went from job to job, without any sense of direction or purpose in my life, I was not a blue-collar worker like my father; and when I began to look for a way out of my pointless existence, the only thing I could think of was the academic world, where words seemed to be more important than wealth. I didn’t have the ability (I thought) to be a poet or a novelist. So I went to the only intellectual place that would let me in. When I ended up at Santa Cruz, for the first time in my life most of the people around me were not from backgrounds similar to my own. Since I had a family now, I didn’t have time to obsess over the feeling of being out of place, especially since my weirdness seemed to work to my advantage in the competition for distinction in the classroom. My way of seeing the world was different enough to make me stand out in the crowd, but inside I was riddled with confusion about what I was doing and why I was doing it. One minute I felt like a traitor, the next like a spy. Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and Derrida had given me a way of understanding language as a field of struggle, not merely for class ascendance but for self-overcoming that also meant the transformation of the social bond with others, a kind of collective social identity, but the further I ascended (even though these were baby steps) the more I felt I was drifting away from real commitment. In order to develop the power of political thought, I had to sacrifice any kind of meaningful connection to the people with whom I felt an affinity. (I don’t mean those stereotyped versions of the working class that you hear from people who worked in a factory one summer and joined a union for a few weeks before heading off to Yale. I mean people like myself who grew up in the working class and struggled for years to get out of it, but along the way carved some limited critical consciousness out of their own resentment.) Anyway, when I learned that Professor Fredric Jameson was coming from Yale to visit for a quarter and that I would be his teaching assistant, I was thrilled at the possibilities. I had read The Prison-House of Language and sensed in Jameson a radical mind that could grasp the contradictions I was experiencing. Then I read The Political Unconscious and was deep into Freud, Lacan, Althusser, and all the French theorists. I figured this man, the militant intellectual Marxist from the Ivy League, could give me a sense of how one negotiates and even overcomes the contradictions of the academic system. But when I went to his office for the first time, all my expectations were savagely disappointed. After I nonchalantly told him what I

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wanted from him, he looked at me as if I were an F.B.I. agent, making it perfectly clear that material dissections of the academic system and its hierarchies were off the table for discussion. Still, I learned a lot from Jameson, and he was one of the professors who wrote the letters that helped me get a Fulbright to study in Paris in 1982. Once I managed to transport my family and get set up in Paris, I attended the lectures and seminars of Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, and Cixous, but the course I inadvertently stumbled into one day, was the one that had the greatest impact on my self-understanding. It was at the Collège de France, and the professor was Pierre Bourdieu. He lectured on the field of artistic production, which constituted my introduction to his theory of the social fields. For Bourdieu, there was no such thing as a pure aesthetic perception that did not express some form of social interest, but anyone who worked on poststructuralist theory in those days, or simply read Nietzsche, already had a critical view of the Kantian theory of disinterested aesthetic judgment. As I turned to his published work, particularly La Distinction and Ce que parler veut dire, both of which I struggled through in French, I discovered a dynamic concept of class that could explain the contradictions in my own life as well as the contradictions of the academic left. I had already discovered Gramsci through the mediation of Raymond Williams; but while the concept of hegemony offered a more flexible way of understanding the role of culture in social domination and the necessary participation of the dominated classes in their own domination, the category of social class in the field of cultural studies remained static and locked into the nineteenth-century logic of society’s division into two great classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, with a sort of no man’s class in between, the petite bourgeoisie, which could go one way or the other, though it usually gravitated toward the pole of social dominance. Bourdieu was less interested in the socio-economic categories into which individuals can be grouped according to birth, and more interested in the dynamic relations between an individual’s social origin and the different fields—both socioeconomic and cultural—that she passes through along a social trajectory that is determined in multiple ways by the dominant social system but that also involves specific individual decisions on the part of the subject that reflect competition within particular fields and between fields. 16 So, for example, with my blue-collar origin, I had made the decision to enter the intellectual field, which included the artistic field and the academic field with their own creative and critical sub-fields, simply because for me it was much easier to accumulate cultural and symbolic capital of the sort

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that the educational institutions offered than it was to accumulate economic capital. (In general, you could accumulate some cultural capital without having much cultural capital, but you couldn’t accumulate economic capital without having economic and cultural capital to start with.) But since each field and sub-field is semi-autonomous, and since all the fields compete for some degree of social dominance and economic privilege, it was never simply a matter of improving yourself and changing your class status without entering into forms of social conflict and competition that make each field a scene of class struggle but without the homogeneity of unified class consciousness. Though it was still possible at this time, even in the United States, to categorize people as belonging to the working class, it was pointless, in my view, either to postulate or try to construct a form of political consciousness that could embrace all the divisions within that class itself—between the unionized and the non-unionized, the skilled and the unskilled, blue collar and white collar, men and women, black and white, native and immigrant, legal and illegal, young and old, and so forth. Even the realm of unionized skilled labor was organized into hierarchies, and painters like my father were near the bottom. Furthermore, hardly anyone of my generation in the United States simply reproduced the social position of their parents without having explored other social fields—that is to say, without having followed a trajectory that led through other fields of economic and cultural production, even if that trajectory led them back to the point of origin. On many occasions in my twenties, after I had dropped out of college or when I had been rejected or simply not been given any economic support by the most prestigious graduate programs to which I applied, I almost retreated to my point of origin but discovered that for me that was not really an option. To go back would be to drop to a lower socioeconomic position than the one from which I had originated because I had missed the opportunity to develop the skills that would have given me a pass into the world of unionized skilled labor. Culturally, I was a contradiction. On the one hand, having entered the academic field on a trajectory from the working class, I started out with a conservative view of literary culture, which I saw in opposition to the forms of mass culture like popular fiction, film, television, pop music, and so forth. In other words, the choice to pursue literary culture constituted a rejection of the culture that was most familiar to me, the one from which I had derived. On the other hand, the more competent I became in the field of literary scholarship, the more aware I became of the hierarchies within that field, privileged locations that I could not attain simply through hard work,

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and this drove me toward the more radical positions within the field itself. In the late seventies, theory became the alternative to traditional literary study, particularly for someone like me, because competence in that field did not require access to the libraries of elite universities that possessed a near monopoly on intellectual wealth, including that portion of economic wealth that supported intellectual production. For a relatively small economic investment, almost anyone could earn cultural capital in the field of theory; but knowledge of theory also brought about a transformation of my understanding of the relations between high culture and mass culture, while reinforcing my left-wing predispositions that had gone dormant while I pursued cultural capital. However, as my encounter with Jameson and others taught me, I did not have the habitus—an embodied cultural practice or style—to operate very successfully at the most powerful levels of academic culture that were bending toward theory. Bourdieu’s course at the Collège de France was a turning point, but it took several more years of experience before the full impact of what I was learning could be transformed into reflexive knowledge. Nonetheless, Bourdieu, more than any other French theorist, completed my disenchantment with the hierarchy of discourse that privileged philosophy over every other form of language, including literary and ordinary language. During the seventies, I had read Heidegger, particularly sections of Being and Time, with an awesome respect, though never with the feeling that this stuff mattered much to me. Reading the sections on Heidegger in Ce que parler veut dire (which came from an earlier, more detailed monograph) convinced me that even philosophy with the greatest pretense to distance from ordinary language could harbor beneath its rhetorical surface meanings that were no more sophisticated than the ranting of conservative ideologues. Heidegger’s struggle to achieve distinction in the field of philosophy, at which he was spectacularly successful, coexisted with a hostility toward the welfare state of Germany in the twenties as well as a resentment of the philosophical establishment that was either bourgeois and liberal, on the one hand, or Jewish and socialist, on the other. Heidegger’s petit bourgeois habitus found its secret home in the conservative revolution of more popular thinkers like Spengler and Jünger who were eventually adopted by the Nazi regime. 17 As Bourdieu argued in Distinction, if the language of the masses explodes with expressiveness through its emphasis on content over form or style, any language that seeks to distance itself from the ordinary necessarily places emphasis on form, virtually refusing to communicate, rather in the manner of bourgeois politeness that never overtly says

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what it says all too clearly at the level of form.18 In order to succeed in the philosophical field, Heidegger had to repress his own expressive impulses, though these nonetheless asserted themselves through a complex process of euphemization and sublimation.19 Still, if Heidegger harbored within his abstract, experimental, and formalist language an ideology from which I was profoundly alienated, other difficult theorists like Derrida used philosophical language that could be translated into more left-wing, progressive expressions of the desire for social justice, the recognition of the needs of others, and the demand for a redistribution of wealth and social autonomy. Nonetheless, Bourdieu never suggested that Heidegger’s contributions to philosophy were thoroughly undone or negated by their entanglement in conservative forms of common sense. You can’t deny, for example, that Heidegger’s innovations within the field of philosophy also gave place to Derrida’s deconstruction of philosophy, with its implications for radical common sense. By the same token, left-wing theorists and philosophers, despite their conscious or unconscious attempts to transform common sense, were just as likely to legitimate institutional locations that gave ground to intellectual hierarchy. They opposed the dominant economic powers of capitalist society but indirectly legitimated that society by naturalizing inequitable distributions of symbolic and economic capital. To my mind, the real issue was not inequality in and of itself, since I couldn’t imagine any society that would not value, arbitrarily or not, the intellectual productions of some individuals over others. The real issue was the silence of leftwing academics on their implication in an academic caste system that virtually guaranteed that only those voices that emanated from the privileged academic locations, and which had been consecrated by the elite universities, would have the relative autonomy to produce critical discourse with the legitimacy to be heard, if only by those individuals in the relatively closed field of elite intellectual production. When Gramsci argued that the subaltern classes achieve selfconsciousness through the formation of an elite group of intellectuals, he surely did not have in mind the formation of a state nobility based on the consecrating functions of an elite university system that was tantamount to a caste system. When I began to read Bourdieu in 1982, I only partially grasped the implications of his work for the intellectual field and the institutions that I was struggling to enter. When I went on the job market for the first time in 1984, I quickly discovered the difference between cultural competence and symbolic capital, as individuals who had been no match for me in the limited intellectual field of the graduate seminar effortlessly surpassed me on the job

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market with their more privileged academic pedigrees and social backgrounds. Over the years, the complexities of this process never ceased to amaze me. Eventually, Bourdieu did justice to this complexity in his work on the French system of higher education that drives home the consecrating function of elite educational institutions.20 He concludes that the logic of academic consecration in modern industrial states resembles the logic of the governing classes during the ancien régime. It establishes differences of essence that cannot be reduced to differences of achievement and thus posits a form of nobility based on intellectual inheritance—perhaps not a nobility of blood guaranteed by birth, but a nobility that implicitly must have been there from birth, if only as an accident of nature.21 Ironically, the academic left has not been exempt from this process of consecration; and what I have referred to earlier in this essay as the star system is simply the American way of simultaneously expressing and disavowing the existence of an intellectual nobility. In many of his essays and books, Bourdieu warned his readers of the dangers of resentment as if he feared the effect his work might produce on the individual, even though he frequently expressed the hope that individuals would use his work in order to know themselves by reflecting on the social dynamics of their positions in society. To my mind, resentment is an unavoidable sensibility, particularly if you want to translate the objectifications of sociology or the abstractions of theory into a language that moves in the direction of those who are the objects rather than the subjects of academic discourses. By concluding this chapter with Bourdieu, I leave myself with a conundrum concerning the problem that Gramsci raised about the necessity of the organic intellectual to the process of class struggle that aims at the revolutionary transformation of society. As I suggested earlier, the organic intellectual may be an imaginary construction that served its purpose in Gramsci’s social and political context, and may still serve a purpose in many specific social locations in the world, but serves very little purpose in the academic field, with its increasingly global social makeup. However, one thing is clear. The academic field—however much it may have become a caste system— is still a field of struggle, and the struggle is not only for positions within the field but for a definition of the field itself. Cultural conservatives are quick these days to identify all academics as liberals if not Marxists, but they should be more cautious, because even if there is some partial truth in what they say, they fail to realize to what extent even the Marxists inadvertently legitimate the social system that they oppose by naturalizing and misrecognizing their own class difference. The only answer to this situation

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is a political one. In the United States, elite academics happily speak for third-world subalterns on whose lives they have little or no impact, but they largely ignore the social structure of their institutional locations or their social relation to other individuals in the institutional hierarchy. No doubt, even the least of us in this academic system are more privileged than the most wretched of the earth, but we can have little political impact on the dominant structures of global capitalism or on the hegemonic culture that legitimates it without organizing our own forces into an instrument of political change. The star system contributes nothing to such a political solution. The answer is not only what Jameson dramatically proclaimed: always historicize! The answer is that and one thing more: always organize. Even in this writing, I inevitably compete on the academic marketplace. My strategy may be, in the spirit of Bourdieu, to choose necessity—to translate my lack of distinction into a distinction. Still, there is no shame in bringing scholarship back into the realm of ordinary language in the struggle to transform common sense into good sense, even if one person’s good sense is another’s bad sense. In the realm of common sense, you have no choice but to take a position. But none of us can be above common sense unless we believe that the only good sense is the sense of those who are good—by essence, by birth, by consecration. Pace Nietzsche, whose politics of style I will address in the second half of the next chapter, the good does not come from the noble or superior class. You don’t legislate the good from above, you fight for it from below. Either the good and the noble are common, or they are the fantasies of power.

C

H A P T E R

3

GENEALOGIES OF COMMON SENSE MARX AND NIETZSCHE

By the use of the word ―genealogy,‖ I do not mean to imply that I am now going to write a history of the term ―common sense.‖ Rather, I want to reimagine a certain practice of language—a style—that breaks open the self-containment of philosophy, which has been understood, at least since the Greeks, even if in the guise of medieval theology and later early modern science, as the highest and purest form of natural language. Hegel represented the culmination of this linguistic perspective and therefore became the condition, or the occasion, of its breakdown. There are several names associated with this breakdown, and one of the more humorous is Max Stirner, the pseudonym of the man who was the object of Marx and Engels’s diatribe ―Saint Max‖ in The German Ideology. Not too long ago, in his belated reading of Marx, Derrida conjured up the spirit of Stirner in a way that cast him as Marx’s double, someone who had anticipated the Marxian exorcism of ideological specters.1 Stirner wanted to rid humankind of its ghosts—by which he meant their higher being or essence—by centering everything on a material ego that expresses the principle of selfownership. Another name for the unraveling of philosophical language after Hegel is Karl Marx. One recognizes the dominance of Marx’s voice in The German Ideology because of the pervasive use of sarcasm, most obsessively in the ―Saint Max‖ section. Though sarcasm is not unknown to philosophical discourse, it is an instrument of ordinary language that brings philosophical discourse down to earth. In the ―Feuerbach‖ section of The German Ideology, Marx asserts that language is virtually identical with social consciousness. Language and

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consciousness arise from the necessity of communication with other human beings. Language is consciousness as a practical reality that exists for any individual only as far as it also exists for other human beings.2 Marx implicitly anticipates the Wittgensteinian principles that there is no consciousness outside of language and that no language is private. Later, near the end of the ―Saint Max‖ section, he specifically equates language with thought and concludes that when philosophers attribute to their ideas independence and autonomy, they also attribute the same autonomy to language, and in particular to philosophical language. The secret of philosophical language lies in the illusory unity of thought and word; and to the extent that philosophy declares itself autonomous it declares its words to be their own content.3 One can argue that Marx also anticipates the poststructuralist or postLacanian attribution of primacy to the signifier. Still, although he equates consciousness with language, he sees a problem in a self-referential language that pretends to have transcended material conditions, or the process of life. Throughout The German Ideology, he insists that the illusion of autonomous thought or language is itself a product of the division of labor that enables ideologists and philosophers to systematize their thoughts and hence to imagine that their linguistic articulations exist outside of the concrete reality of social being. He refers to the descent from thought to actuality as a descent from language to life, but later he implies that ordinary language constitutes a mediating ground between thought and life. In the passage immediately following the one I just referred to, he notes that the dissolution of philosophical language into ordinary language reveals the former’s distortion of the actual world. Philosophical language is abstracted from ordinary language, and to translate it back into its source destroys the illusion that language is separate from reality. Thoughts and words are rather manifestations or utterances (Äußerungen) of real life.4 Marx’s point is not that ordinary language is the language of truth, while philosophy is an inherent distortion of such truth. It isn’t the truth that philosophy distorts through its abstraction of ordinary language but the relation of language to life processes. Ordinary language simply cannot erase this relation in the way that abstract language can. Furthermore, one can argue that ordinary language exposes its relation to real life precisely through its failure to systematize itself, through the contradictions of common sense that map out the conflicts of desire and interest that dialectically articulate the movement of life as a social process. In the penultimate paragraph of ―Saint Max,‖ Marx

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stresses that moving from thought to reality, or from language to life, is a problem only for philosophy.5 Marx’s satire of Stirner hinges on a particular moment in the latter’s discourse, a moment that erases the boundary between theory and common sense—even between language and life. In Stirner’s 1845 response to the critics of The Ego and Its Own, he summarized the problem of speculative thought as the attempt to find a predicate that is universal for everyone, but achieves this only by incorporating each individual subject, each concrete, particular being, into its signification. The term he comes up with is the Unique or Unique One, which gives a more literal meaning to the term translated into English as ―Ego‖ from the German title of Stirner’s book, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, published in 1844, a year or two before Marx wrote his critique. Critics of his book turned Stirner’s own rhetoric against him by arguing that the concept of the ―Unique One‖ is ―holy,‖ which is the term that Stirner himself used to designate any concept or social institution claiming to transcend his concept of self-ownership. In response, Stirner insisted that his phrase is empty and only signifies through a sort of nominalist gesture. Far from being holy or transcendent, the ―Unique One‖ is common and wants only to be real, actual, or effective. It can be distinguished from a philosophical term, or any sort of theological language, by the fact that it has no thought-content. It expresses nothing, even though it does something, it points to something; it addresses the other as you and says that this you is identical with itself.6 It names the other without giving the other a proper name. Or rather, it opens a slot in language into which any proper name can be inserted. It names every subject and is therefore universal, but it does not subordinate any subject to a general category that takes something away from its particularity. It is both proper and common and, as such, manifests a kind of absolute indetermination.7 It doesn’t refer to any other concept or word. It names like a proper name, which it is not, the unnamable, which is outside of language. It says only you to you. Since any proper name can be inserted into the slot of the Unique One, Stirner gives it a name. In responding to one of his three critics, Szeliga, the pseudonym of the young Hegelian Franz Zychlin von Zychlinski, Stirner lays the ground for Marx’s satire when he attempts to rebut his critic’s dismissal of the Unique One as referring to a phantom, the specter of specters. According to Stirner, Szeliga fails to see that he himself, Szeliga, is the content of the phrase. He is the Unique One, as are we all, precisely to the extent that we have nothing in common except our common incomparability. Szeliga is the content,

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the Unique, the absolute ―You.‖8 As are we all. Then Stirner makes the ultimate formulation of the thoughtless, contentless Unique. As the Unique One, Szeliga is both the Who and the What (der Wer, der Der) of the phrase itself, both the subject who speaks and the object of which he speaks.9 If science as the form of disciplined knowledge requires a distinction between subject and object, Stirner implies that the Unique One eliminates that division. For Marx, this formulation is the ultimate philosophical illusion, similar to Hegel’s absolute knowledge as the end of history. In The German Ideology, he refers to the ideologist—of which Stirner is exemplary—as a knight-errant on a quest for a word that would bridge the gap between language and life, and as such would cease to be a word in the conventional sense, which means that it would cease to have any content. It would not only show but virtually absorb the object it denotes. Marx describes Stirner’s Unique One as a word that operates in a metalinguistic manner (übersprachlicher Weise) because it plays the same role in the realm of words that the Savior who redeemed mankind by becoming a man plays in Christian fantasy.10 Marx does not spell out the implications of this analogy, but it has a bearing on the difference between language and life. For the incarnation to be possible, one must first postulate an absolute separation between the realms of the divine and the human. For language to become one with life through the mediation of a singular metalinguistic term there must already be an absolute metaphysical separation between language and life. When Marx says that thoughts and language are manifestations of real life, he doesn’t mean that life and language intersect on the same logical plane. Language has the same relation to life, though in a far more complex way, that a hammer has. A hammer cannot occupy an autonomous realm of its own outside of human life because its reason for being derives from its relation to the life process. It is not the metal or wood in the hammer that manifests life but rather the structure of the hammer as a tool that serves a purpose for human life. One could ultimately say the same thing about a computer and the forms of artificial intelligence that make a computer possible. These things are not living beings, but their existence as things depends on living beings. Perhaps, in the manner of science fiction, one could imagine a world in which new life would emerge in the form of a thinking machine; but even if a machine with all the characteristics of a life form emerged, there would still be a distinction between the materialization of consciousness as language and the life process itself. As the manifestation of life, a hammer or a computer or human language cannot be placed in opposition to the

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force that it manifests. Even when language expresses the desire for death, it manifests life as a process that includes death, since there is no absolute way to separate the will to life from the will to death, as Derrida points out in numerous places and as Nietzsche and Freud theorized long before him. Because language is not a living thing, it can be said to embody the death principle as the condition of life, and since the relation between life and death is dialectical, so is the relation between life and language. Without language, life cannot become conscious of itself, cannot know itself, and to that extent cannot be. And without life, language cannot be because there would be nothing to manifest. One can object that this viewpoint reduces language and consciousness to instrumental functions and denies the intrinsic properties of words that enable them to produce the effect of beauty or to articulate worlds and beings that do not exist. But there is nothing in such a thought that would deny the aesthetic or even the expressions of speculative consciousness. However, it suggests that no expression, no form of consciousness, can set itself up as transcending the life process, as occupying a ground above that process from which it can detach itself and then claim to govern its own ground. This is what led Marx to criticize the Hegelian illusion that reality is the product of thought. For Marx, consciousness, including philosophical language, cannot determine social being, but rather social being determines consciousness.11 But what is the relation of social being to life? Before I can offer my own speculative answer to that question, I need to return to ―Saint Max‖ and Marx’s deconstruction of the Unique One. Since the latter concept incorporates every subject into its signification and virtually erases any absolute distinction between subject and object, it makes it possible to substitute any subject for any other subject. To the extent that no subject can be strictly comparable to any other subject, no subject can be absolutely different from any other subject. One subject serves any context as well as another since none is distinguishable from another. This, of course, is not the intention of Saint Max. Based on his reading of Stirner’s response to his critics, Marx questions the identity of Szeliga, which, like the name Stirner, is a pseudonym. Since both names are fictitious—and since all proper names participate in the Unique and to that extent could be considered fictitious or without content—one can easily be substituted for the other without any loss of meaning. Furthermore, near the beginning of ―the book‖ (as both Stirner and Marx refer to Ego), Stirner had already announced that in so far as he (Stirner) is the Unique One, he is like God—that is to say, he is nothing, the creative nothing, out of which everything comes.12 Add to these propositions

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Stirner’s insistence that as the Unique One he is both creator and creature, which is tantamount to saying that he is both the I and the You, one can conclude that in some sense Stirner and Szeliga are the same.13 Stirner is the Unique as creator, Szeliga as creation; Stirner claims ownership of the phrase ―Unique One,‖ while Szeliga is its content. Since Szeliga as the critic of Stirner appears not to know that he is an egoist—indeed that he is Stirner—one can conclude that he is what Stirner refers to as an involuntary egoist, which means that Szeliga imagines the creator in himself to be not him but something outside of himself.14 In ―Saint Max,‖ Marx puts all these elements together in order to conclude that Szeliga is a depraved, ruined Don Quixote, while Stirner is the holy Sancho Panza, the egoist in the ordinary sense, the common sense.15 As far as Marx is concerned, in The Ego and Its Own, Stirner, Szeliga, or Stirner-Szeliga is having a conversation with himself. Throughout ―Saint Max,‖ Marx conflates Stirner with Sancho Panza. To the extent that Marx identifies this literary figure with common sense, he recognizes that Stirner wants to dispel the spirit realm by dissolving philosophical language into the language of common sense, which will expose its distortions, as Marx himself argues. In Specters of Marx, Derrida argues that Marx is afraid of Stirner for producing a weird and subversive parody of his own thought. But Derrida also notes that, since Stirner took on the ghosts first, there is the danger that Marx is the ghost of Stirner.16 In Ego, Stirner comments that Geist or spirit is something other than the self, and he poses the question as to what this other is.17 Derrida calls this a good question that Marx is too quick to make fun of; and in another brief commentary on Stirner, Jean-Michel Rabaté claims that Marx is not only afraid of ghosts but of the concept of a relation without relation, of the Unique as a position that refutes the concept of positioning itself and thus deconstructs itself.18 One shouldn’t be too quick to criticize Derrida’s reading of Marx’s reading of Stirner since it is full of irony and has its own satirical thrust, especially when the author of Limited Inc insists that Marx shouldn’t make fun of Stirner or his excellent questions; but Rabaté misses the point when he attributes a deconstructive intent to Stirner. In the pages preceding the sentence that Derrida and Rabaté mention, Stirner criticizes the Feuerbachian argument that since, historically speaking, spirit is the name of an essence that is not identical with the subject, it has always been posited as inhabiting another world. Feuerbach’s philosophical act was to put spirit back in the human body by insisting that man himself is the only God. As far as Stirner is concerned, nothing is gained by such a

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gesture. Whether the divine is inside or outside of me, and the common Christian view is that it dwells both inside and outside of me, it is not me. I am no more identical with the spirit inside or outside of me than I am identical with my heart or my sweetheart in the sense that the things that relate to me are not the essence of me.19 Stirner’s concept of the Unique is not the deconstruction of positionality but the construction of the only position possible—the absolute position, the Unique that is One and the only one. Like God, it is nothing in itself, not even spirit; but it is the nothing out of which everything comes. A relation without relation turns out to be an absolute position that eliminates all other positions. Stirner rids himself of spirit as other by getting rid of all others. The Unique never deconstructs itself in the way Rabaté suggests. As for Stirner’s excellent question about what this other—a spirit that is not me—is, he answers it on the next page. It’s a ghost. And if you believe in ghosts, that is, in a world that has meaning outside of yourself, as Stirner finally concludes, then you make yourself into a spook.20 By identifying Stirner with Sancho Panza, Marx implicitly recognizes his own image in Stirner just as Derrida says he does. But rather than being afraid of the ghosts that Stirner conjures up, and fearing his own ghostly status as Stirner’s shadow in the battle against the holy, Marx may actually be more concerned with Stirner’s distorted use of common sense. In ―Saint Max,‖ Marx summarizes Cervantes’ characterization of the common when he notes that Sancho Panza arises to a certain heroic status in a manner quite different from his master. Sancho perceives the latter’s thoughts and imaginary projections for the vanities they are, but he offers nothing in their place, nothing that would change the world that Quixote naively tries to make sense out of. Similarly, Stirner perceives the nullity of the host of ―holy‖ thoughts that he opposes, but he never rises above mere perceiving; and in the end he leaves the existing world exactly the way it was, changing only his mental representation of it. He does not address things or material being but rather phrases, philosophical representations.21 Marx recognizes that any mode of discourse that attempts to translate philosophical language into ordinary language as the means of exposing the emptiness of philosophical language when it claims to transcend the material world will simply reproduce another and perhaps even more naïve illusion if it doesn’t recognize the limitations of thought as the limitations of language. From this perspective, one can argue that Marx fears in Saint Max (a name so close to the name Saint Marx) the limitations of his own critique, which depends on the

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language in which it is shaped and must constantly renegotiate its relation to the life process that it manifests but never fully expresses. One can also argue that Derrida fears the same problematic in his own writing, which is why, at the end of Specters of Marx, he makes such an issue out of Marx’s refusal of specters, which can be forgiven, he writes, because it is the common inheritance of everybody, especially philosophers. But he insists (perhaps with more irony than I recognize) that Marx (as well as Freud and Heidegger) should have been able to begin with the obsessional haunting that derives from consciousness and language, the thing that keeps coming back, like Hamlet’s father, to break down the division between life and death. Humanity pays a heavy price for believing that in history it can do without the concept of a human essence, including language as a universal element of what is human, by reducing it to the category of an arch-ghost.22 But if Marx encountered a force in Stirner that threatened the possibility of Marx’s own critique, Derrida does not escape a similar problem. To refer again to the issue of monolingualism, our thought is limited by our language, but there is no precise way to express that limitation or to measure it because there is no master language or metalanguage. How can one argue that the haunting, the specter—of the concept, the word, and language itself—precedes life? Yet what would life be without language, without consciousness, without the ghost of a concept? Is it the same thing to say that there is no life without the consciousness of—without a concept or word for—life, as to say that consciousness creates or causes life? Obviously, things live that have no consciousness or language (at least to all appearances, but here again we are limited by our perceptions, our common sense, like Sancho Panza). Unless Derrida would claim that philosophical or scientific language is, first of all, the essence of language, or its metalanguage, and second, that the essence of language must precede any presupposition of life because language would be the autonomous ground of life, its first principle, which means that it is absolutely separate from life, like God transcending his own creation, he cannot claim with authority that Marx should have started from the specter of philosophical language, that is to say, from the essence of language and its effects as the essence of the human. Ultimately, neither Derrida nor Marx (nor Stirner for that matter) can escape the problem Marx poses when he stresses that language and consciousness cannot be autonomous realms standing above life — they cannot master the force they manifest. This is not to say that human beings are not able to generate definitions, interpretations, and theories of life, and all of its many manifestation s, which include

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language itself. Even the word ―life‖ is an interpretation of the force it manifests. In a famous passage from the ―Feuerbach‖ section of The German Ideology, Marx argues that ideas, concepts, and consciousness are inseparable from—interwoven with or implicated in (verflochten in)—the processes of material intercourse that he calls the language of real life. The latter could be understood not as language that expresses real life with the most accuracy, but rather as language that emerges as the utterance of real life, bearing the same relation to the life process in general that a speech act bears to language as a system. The language of real life can be identified with ordinary language because it cannot hide its relation and subordination to the everyday practices that life itself conditions. When Marx argues, in the same passage, that ideology presents an upside-down view of human relations similar to the effect of a camera obscura, he suggests that an ideological form of linguistic expression is one that erases its subordinate relation to the life process (or whatever you want to call the force that drives it) and the material conditions that life gives rise to. When morality, for example, appears as the determination rather than the effect of human life and social conditions, it becomes an ideology. Marx insists that it is necessary to study material human conditions in order to show that human thoughts derive from human activities; and he refers, perhaps unfortunately, to these mental productions as reflexes or reflections and as echoes of the material process. However, he qualifies these terms as ideological. In other words, human conceptions and mental images become ideological reflections and echoes when they are treated as having a life of their own independent of the practices from which they derive. One can infer from this that any use of concepts or images that understands them not as autonomous forms of expression but as instrumental manifestations of life, human practice, material being, and so forth, grasps these forms of consciousness in a way that is not strictly ideological. Indeed, the English translation of The German Ideology that refers to these products of the human brain as phantoms actually translates the German word Nebelbildungen, which literally means ill-defined mental forms.23 In Ego, Stirner starts out from a similar analysis of concepts and images when he refers to thoughts that have become corporeal in the life of the subject and gives a few examples: God, emperor, Pope, and fatherland.24 One can argue after Stirner that all of these terms have a fetishistic value that makes them into something like Lacanian master signifiers. In the Encore seminar, Lacan argues that the signifier is stupidly corporeal (le signifiant est bête) in a way that resonates with both Stirner and Marx, and he suggests in other places that words

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certainly have the power to lead the human subject by the nose.25 Such master signifiers, according to Stirner, are ghosts; and the only way he can exorcise them is to destroy their bodily condition, which produces their ghostliness, by taking them back into himself and recognizing that he alone has a body, that he alone creates and owns these thoughts that seem to have their own body but are in fact only manifestations of himself. They are his property.26 Actually, for Stirner even the concept of society is a ghost that has to be abolished along with the human beings who supposedly make it up. Its place would be taken by the Alliance of Egoists, in which each individual would presumably confront every other individual as a ghost that it had best leave to itself in the interests of itself.27 So much for the deconstruction of positionality and the relation without relation. Marx at least insists that ideological concepts and images—or master signifiers—are the manifestations not of some absolute egological center but of an amorphous, unnamable thing or force, something impossible to circumscribe with language, that he calls life. Admittedly, such a term easily functions as what Kenneth Burke called a god-term, and Derrida attributes to Marx the desire to ground his exorcism of ideological specters in an ontology of presence that takes for granted an effective reality and objectivity.28 But the form of objectivity that Marx calls real life is a set of practices and actions. In the first thesis on Feuerbach, Marx argues that all previous materialisms, including Feuerbach’s, failed to see the reality and material being of the sensuous world as anything more than an object of contemplation, not as a human activity or practice. They failed to see it as subjective. In the same passage, he also notes that Feuerbach did not see human practice as objective, though the German word he uses is gegenständlich, which means objective in the sense of being a material thing encountered in experience through the mediation of a subject. Feuerbach’s apparent contradiction depends on the distinction between the German words Objekt, for the first case, and Gegenstand, for the second. Objekt refers to the logical form of the object abstracted from experience and the properties of the subject. Hence, it designates in language the thought of the thing in itself rather than the experience of a thing. In other words, to see something as an object in a purely philosophical sense is not to see it as a material practice that entails both subjective and objective determinations that necessarily implicate themselves in the conditions from which they arise and the ends at which they aim. Of course, determining those conditions (objectively) and postulating those ends (subjectively) necessarily involve the

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process of speculation, and these categories of material practice can never be ahistorical. Rabaté is finally right about Marx and the Marxists. The one thing they cannot think is a relation without relation, because such a relation does not deconstruct relations or positionality but rather hypostatizes the end of relationality in an absolute position whether it is God, ego, or Geist.29 The great One that subsumes all others is doubtlessly unique. Derrida is not wrong to see expressions within Marx that refer to an effective reality, but he does not fully take into account the axiological nature of Marx’s working hypothesis that language is a function of that reality. The ground of social critique as well as of philosophical abstraction, including the abstraction that we call reality, is something that we can only name through a decision, the postulation of an axiom. Marx calls it life, mostly with reference to individuals, but it becomes social being precisely through the intervention of language as the material ground of consciousness. Though Marx may not have formulated it in theoretical terms, one can argue that he understood life and reality in the way that Lacan understood the Real. Marx argued that the division of labor made possible the systematization of thought; but the history of philosophy, or the failure of such systematization to produce the one philosophy that would abolish common sense and all other philosophies, testifies to the limit of abstract thought, its inability to articulate the desires and social interests of all the classes and the individuals in those classes. When Marx refers to reality or life as the condition of theory, he employs the language of common sense. Perhaps he naively believes in such a reality, as Derrida suggests, but it hardly matters whether he believes in it or posits it as a working hypothesis for the purpose of action. His decision to articulate such a proposition is no more ungrounded than Derrida’s decision to rely on the language of philosophy to determine the limits of Marx’s own thought. In his writing, Marx never refuses the use of abstract language, but he reverses the tendency of philosophy to move from heaven to earth and moves in the opposite direction—from life and social being, through different modes of ordinary language, to theory. Theory, however, is not allowed to harbor the illusion of its autonomy. It must always go back to ordinary language, which testifies to the Real as the impossibility of any language or point of view within language that would master or represent not only what is beyond language and consciousness but itself as the material of consciousness. In that sense—that is to say, in its failure to master itself, to generate out of itself a metalanguage that can objectify and govern all of its operations—language is something

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real. To use the Lacanian figure of the Real, it misses itself. Though one is forced, as Marx was, to use the language of functionalism to describe the relation between language and life, just as Nietzsche wanted to philosophize with a hammer (however refined he wanted that hammer to be), language manifests life not in the relation of a subject to an object. Language is distinct but not divorced from life. Within language, it makes no sense to say that language is a living thing, or the cause or condition of life. At that same time, life itself is a meaningless process—in the literal sense of the word meaningless—beyond its manifestation as language. Language is a form of life, if we understand the word ―form‖ to mean not category but rather the material articulation of life, the way it shapes the appearance of the world. To borrow a figure from Yeats, you can’t know the dancer from the dance. I will need to say more about Marx as I proceed, but now I want to come down to earth after having stayed for so many pages in the realm of abstractions. This will carry me back to some of the concerns of the last chapter while opening the door to my fight with Nietzsche over the question of resentment. In the last chapter, I exposed myself to the accusation of personalism, resentment, lack of objectivity, and so forth in using my personal experience as the evidence for a critique of the academic intellectual and of the social structure of academia. To some extent, these references related to the context in which I was trying to show the impossibility of completely separating abstract thought from feeling, sense from sensibility, and theory from common sense. In this section, I want to use my own history to reconsider the meaning of social practice and its relationship to intellectual practice. In one of his early writings, Marx noted that only a material force can overthrow another material force; but he also recognized theory as a material force when it has been seized by the masses, which, to use Gramsci’s insight, means that the masses believe it.30 In the same context, Marx hypothesized the proletariat as the class that exists in civil society but is not of civil society because its exploitation is the condition of such society, and therefore its suffering is not a particular wrong that can be rectified within the system but a general wrong that is the condition of the system.31 In other words, correcting this wrong brings about the dissolution of all classes or the social division of labor. At least, that’s the theory. With reference to the radical use of such a theory, and presumably to his own commitment, Marx insisted that it took the form of a categorical imperative to overthrow the conditions in which human beings have been reduced to a contemptible existence.32 By implication, it was not human beings who are contemptible

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but their conditions. Such a position derives not so much from what Nietzsche would call pity as from the egoistic recognition (let’s not forget Stirner) that the suffering of others degrades my own condition to the extent I identify myself with the other as a fellow human being or even, potentially (in the case of animals), as another form of life. Still, Marx’s position can be distinguished from Stirner’s because Marx locates the ground of egoistic individuality in the community, since only there can the individual fully develop her gifts and achieve personal freedom.33 Ironically, without the division of labor that Marx would correct, neither Stirner nor Marx would have had the time to develop their thought and criticize the social systems in which they lived (since even Stirner saw himself as the enemy of every state). It goes without saying that my experience of growing up in the bluecollar working class is the emotional condition of my political commitments, such as they are, though I am not claiming that such an experience is required to make such a commitment. Still, what I do claim may sound controversial. Lacanian critics sometimes argue that all desire, including sexual desire, is singular and not reducible to general concepts like heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, or any other category that presupposes bi-symmetry in sexual being, the principle that two sexual beings are complementary and somehow make up for the lack in each other. To use two Hollywood formulas, the celebrated couple either complete each other or are made for each other. If one accepts the principle that all desire is singular, it follows that all political desire is singular. By saying this, I don’t mean to imply that it is impossible for human beings to collaborate to bring about social transformation. But I do question the view that there is an inherent state of consciousness that correlates with a particular social identity—such as working-class consciousness, ethnic consciousness, or gender consciousness—and creates an inevitable kinship between subjects from similar backgrounds and histories. Each one of us has a singular history; and though we share experiences and social conditions, these common elements are inflected differently in each individual case. There are family resemblances among different human subjects, but they cut in multiple directions, both horizontally within the same class and vertically between different classes, as in the case of Marx himself who aligned with a class from which he did not derive and whose history and experience were not his own. I don’t intend to address the singularity of Marx, though such a project would be worth undertaking, but the following should be clear: to the extent that Marx produced a new form of common sense, he had to produce a language that could give a voice to and organize a multitude

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of singularities, a voice that would not limit itself to one class as the repository of all family resemblances. When I look back on the process of my own conversion to Marxism, I recognize the subjective conditions that made such a transformation possible, conditions that derived from the singularity of my history and the history of those with whom I entered into some sort of relationship. You could even call it love. First, in using a word like conversion, I frankly admit that the force that drew me into this process cannot be reduced to a purely rational argument. I was not simply convinced by reason that my interests lay in such and such a direction. It could never have been that simple because even the most naïve form of common sense, such as the one I grew up with, has its own reasons that formal reason may not know; and though it is no great thing to challenge those reasons, it takes a special effort, in response to an external event, to withdraw one’s belief from the common reason and reinvest it in an understanding of the world that essentially changes the rules of the game. In my own case, the conversion to Marxism resulted from my encounter with others whose histories, though radically different from my own, nonetheless resonated with mine and had the effect of activating a ground or reason that must have already existed within me as a possible interpretation of my history. One man, in particular, stands out in my memory. Though he was not the one who most explicitly argued for a Marxist point of view, he played such a crucial role in my conversion that without him I can’t imagine I would have made the radical shift in my thinking that altered my relation to common sense. His name was Victor Smith, and I take this occasion to use his real name because I would like my writing to serve as a small testimony to his existence. He was a Vietnam veteran, and I vaguely remember that he claimed to have been a member of the special forces in that war. At any rate, on the rare occasions when he would talk about his war experience, he described it as one that required him to do unspeakable things, including the destruction of villages, which, in his own mind, brought about the deaths of countless victims, whom he originally thought he had come to liberate. By the end of his participation in that war, he concluded that the people he thought he had come to liberate were the ones his superiors called the enemy; and it was his job to destroy them. I saw Victor for the first time on a Memphis television station around the spring of 1968. The news was that a group of Vietnam veterans on the campus of the university in Memphis had organized an antiwar demonstration. The novelty of a group of radical vets with beards and wearing fatigues captured the eye of the local television cameras,

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and no doubt to the average viewer they looked like a gang of Cuban revolutionaries. Later, when I met Victor, I realized that he was far from being a caricature. Only nineteen years old at the time, I immediately saw Victor as a charismatic figure, who quickly became a kind of older brother to me. He was an English major pushing thirty, and he used to carry around a copy of the Selected Cantos of Ezra Pound, from which he was fond of quoting a line about the light that leads one back to splendor, which meant some form of joyous being that was far from Victor’s actual experience of life. When I met him, he was married and had a small child, but it wasn’t long after I met him that he separated from his wife. Though we were all nobodies at a non-prestigious university, Victor did well in school for a while, but eventually the depressions that pursued him finally caught up with him and he started drinking heavily. I can’t point to the moment in our friendship that made the difference in my attitude toward the dominant ideologies of the time. I do remember that on one occasion, probably after my mother had gone through another psychotic episode and I had failed once again in the attempt to get my father to take her to a doctor, I decided to enlist in the Navy, even though I didn’t believe in the war. I figured at least I would escape the insanity of my everyday life and naively thought that in the Navy I wouldn’t have to kill anyone. Fortunately, the recruiter wanted me to go home and think about it, but when I talked it over with Victor, he practically threatened to murder me on the spot if I ever contemplated such a thing again. It became something of a point of honor with him and the other vets I knew to keep me out of Vietnam. Victor called himself a socialist, but he wasn’t a theoretician by nature and his concept of socialism was simply the redistribution of wealth he thought would be the necessary condition for the development of individuality and personal freedom, which were the things he valued most in life. Ironically, despite his socialism and his resentment of the social system that, as far as he was concerned, had made the Vietnam War possible, he was an avid reader of Nietzsche. I remember that the words beyond good and evil were something more than a philosophical turn of phrase for him. In Vietnam, he had discovered the place beyond good and evil when the moralities that had sustained his life up to that point completely failed him. After that, he understood, along with Nietzsche, that human beings create their own values and have the power to change them. But he also understood something that Nietzsche could not grasp, which was that no human being was anything by himself. Though Vietnam was a nightmare from which Victor struggled to awaken, he had learned

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three things there—one terrible and two potentially redemptive. The terrible truth correlated with what Nietzsche had written about the herd instinct. Victor had discovered that by going along with the crowd when they are under the control of an unquestioned ideology, individuals are capable of any kind of brutality. There is no limit to what human beings can do to one another. Yet through the experience of his own capacity for violence, Victor was forced to confront what you could call his singularity, the part of him that could never completely fuse with the crowd, the remainder of his being after every kind of ideological determination had been subtracted by the trauma of war. Since, as I said, Victor was no theorist, he wouldn’t have used words like singularity and probably thought of this remainder as the real person, his real self. But in my conversations with him, he made it clear to me that this truth about himself was something he would not have known without the Vietnam experience or some other violent awakening. Ultimately, it led him to the discovery of his own power of self-creation and self-overcoming; but if this was the second thing he learned in the war, it was inseparable from the third thing, which had to do with the realization of brotherhood. Once all the idols of the American ideology had come crashing down and Victor was forced to either re-create himself or surrender to the herd, he also discovered the others, the men who had become his brothers because they all bore the marks of an irreversible experience. It was as if he hadn’t seen them before through the haze of mystifications that were the driving force behind the social identity that had organized their lives and brought them to the place where they were forced to confront who they really were. But once the veil had been lifted, he saw them for the first time, the singularity or irreducible individuality of each and every one of them. What he felt, I believe, was not pity but compassion and love. He saw the potential for self-creation in each one of them that would never be realized without the transformation of the material conditions of the world in which they lived. This was the thought that drove Victor’s political vision, perhaps not exactly in these words, but the substance of it. Victor’s life at the time that I knew him was a struggle on two fronts. In one direction, he wanted to change the world, and in the other, he had to kill the demons in himself before they killed him. One day he talked to me about Nietzsche and actually gave me a copy of Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist as an introduction. I remember that he was particularly fascinated and troubled by the theory of eternal recurrence. He liked the idea that the ultimate affirmation of life was to accept it all, everything good

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or bad that had happened to you or that you had done, and to accept the principle that you would be willing to do it again, that you could live with the thought that the same events, the same history, would recur over and over throughout eternity. He liked the idea because it also represented an absolute responsibility, that you are what you are, even though what you are is only a particular history, a sequence of events that you can never escape or disavow, because it must inevitably happen again in exactly the same way. Life, whether you referred to the life of the individual or of the community, was a work of art. You couldn’t separate the good from the bad as the Christians imagined that Christ would do when he returned at the end of time. Time would never end in the way the Christians imagined because the end of history would not be the final defeat of evil by good but the end of life, with everything good and bad about it. The good and the bad of life were inextricably interwoven and could never be separated any more than you could separate the horror from the beauty in Picasso’s Guernica. Anyway, thoughts of this sort haunted Victor and made him, at least in my eye, one of the noblest human beings I had ever known. It wasn’t, of course, that I believed then, anymore than I believe now, in the theory of eternal recurrence, but I understood the problem that such a philosophical experiment was meant to address. My own childhood had been something of a nightmare with my father’s cruelty and alcoholism and my mother’s schizophrenia (though for me the better word, the more poetic and truthful one, will always be madness). Whatever I was, for good or bad, remained inseparable from those experiences. In Victor’s case, the burden of history and personal experience was beyond my powers to imagine or fully understand, and eventually it destroyed him. Though he tried to create a political movement that would organize the singularities he could see in the individuals around him—and without his instigation there would have been no political movement at that time and in the place where I lived—he eventually withdrew from the movement and into himself until he was no longer willing to communicate with anyone, including myself. Years later, long after I had left Memphis and become a college professor, I ran into an old friend of Victor’s in a Memphis bookstore, another Vietnam vet who had since become a lawyer. I asked him about our friend, and he told me that for years Victor had worked as a bartender and restaurant manager until a few years earlier he had placed a loaded gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Perhaps someone will argue that Victor was not a noble figu re since he finally surrendered to his demons by taking his own life.

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Another will say he was an evil man who did evil things to the people of Vietnam under orders from his government that he should have disobeyed. The latter proposition is something that Victor might have said about himself, because he was a harsh judge of his own behavior and in the end that may have been what killed him. I doubt that over the years Victor believed in the theory of eternal recurrence any more than I did, but that concept articulates a dilemma that came out of his life and that he could never forget. Through his Vietnam experience, he had become an alienated but critical subject in the world, a subject at least capable of a political practice that struggled toward social transformation in collaboration with others. But he could never separate this critical consciousness from the history of his own violence, of his participation in what he himself considered to be crimes against humanity. Before you judge someone like Victor, you have to measure his life against the force it opposed and the goal at which it aimed. He opposed the social conventions that reflected the herd instinct and sought liberation as an act of creative responsibility. As I said before, this was a man who wanted to go beyond good and evil, which means to go beyond those moralities that operate as a program for which the individual bears no responsibility. Nietzsche had argued in two works, Beyond Good and Evil and On The Genealogy of Morals, that a noble human being did not operate through blind submission to moral laws but through judgments for which the individual alone bears the burden of responsibility, a creative responsibility after the death of God. Such an individual did not choose between good and evil as moral absolutes but legislated out of his own will that some things are good and others bad, almost in the aesthetic sense, as matters of taste and personal judgment. Once Victor’s conventional identity had been shattered in Vietnam, he could no longer attribute his actions as a soldier to higher authorities, including the God who is on our side. So one of the conditions of his critical consciousness was that he had to take responsibility for the actions that made this consciousness possible. He did something ―bad,‖ according to his own judgment, which empowered him to postulate something ―good‖—a good that entailed, on the one hand, a particular use of language that could produce a new common sense, and, on the other, actions or social practices that put the self in relation to others, through the mediation of common sense, in order to bring about social change. For Victor, his own self-overcoming could not be reduced exclusively to an act of will since he did not see how he could have achieved it without the shattering experience of the war. Yet, at the same time, his critical consciousness dictated that no change was possible, nothing

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good would ever come out of his nightmare, without decisions and acts of will that included his taking responsibility for actions he had not strictly chosen, at least with the full awareness of the meaning of that choice. When I learned of Victor’s death, I was tempted to feel pity for a man who clearly suffered for the crimes he thought he had committed. But rather than feeling such pity, I found myself remembering him with love and admiration. I realized that he was one of the conditions of my own social being and political consciousness. He had taught me two things. First, don’t be afraid of your own anger and alienation, whether it responds to the stupidity and injustice of the masses, to the power of those privileged individuals who work so hard to manipulate the masses, or to yourself in so far as you are one of the masses, one of the nobodies. Second, you have to transform that anger into a self-conscious decision to re-create yourself, to overcome yourself, which does not mean to retreat into yourself; for there is no individuality without community, no recognition of your own singularity without recognizing the singularity of others and their implication in every aspect of your individual being, which is necessarily social. In the language of theory, singularity is the Real. As such, it is unknowable except as the resistance to, the internal limit of, language, history, and society. Victor taught me to recognize singularity as the condition of my responsibility for the values that permeate the world in which I live. Even his death was noble, because if he failed to defeat his demons, it was a failure he had to risk in order to transfer to those of us who knew him the knowledge and consciousness, the possibilities of language and social practice, that would condition us to question our own social identities and the identity of the masses with a view toward Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values. But the latter would also require à la Marx, a transformation of the material conditions that facilitate the production of values, whether on an individual or a social scale. Victor’s death, even though it came years after his influence on me, was not a defeat but one of the conditions—even though an aftereffect—of the social transformation he brought about at least to the extent that he altered the consciousness of others, including myself. It wasn’t a necessary condition, but it was the risk he had to take. If I was able to survive, one reason was that I had not been to Vietnam, largely thanks to a generation of veterans like Victor, but had nonetheless benefited from what they had learned through the trauma of war. The purpose of this narrative detour is to drive home the fact that one comes to theory or critical consciousness only through the mediation

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of experience, even if it is impossible to theorize the ground of such experience. Certainly, it would be possible to construct a position, which Nietzsche would call a perspective, that rejects experience, life, and social being and posits language alone, particularly in the abstract forms that we associate with the superior register of philosophy, as the medium of a transcendent consciousness that shapes the exterior world. But as Derrida’s work has demonstrated repeatedly through detailed deconstructive analyses, such a position would remain just as groundless, or at least incomplete, as Marx’s postulation of life and social being as the ground of thought through the social instrument of language. Furthermore, the idealist position—or any position that relies on the authority of specialized language and refuses interaction with ordinary language as the very condition of its claim to truth—necessarily cuts itself off from the possibility of communicating with the masses. In the earlier chapters, I suggested that each one of us is a nobody, even those of us who have risen to fame, because there is a part of us that remains after we subtract all the social determinations that define our image in the eyes of others. In other words, we are nobodies because of the singularity of our desires, including our political desires. What Nietzsche called the herd instinct is the social force that works at erasing singularity by giving it a name and an identity and by substituting a fantasy of social desire—like national character, racial or gendered superiority, cultural elitism, the free market, stardom, and so forth—for the true object of desire, which is not a thing but a process, what Lacan called the desire for desire, but which we could also call life itself. Life is not a fantasy because it does not erase or destroy singularity by positing a general and abstract set of truths that constitute a closed system, but merely designates singularity as something that is nothing in itself, the thing that remains. The reader surely realizes that although I have not referred directly to any particular passage, already in the narrative and speculations that have filled the last few pages, I have been addressing the philosophy—if that’s the word for it—of Friedrich Nietzsche. Now I don’t pretend that my storytelling or my arguments constitute irrefutable proof or even a convincing rational argument in support of the Marxist challenge to the autonomy of philosophy or of theoretical discourse in general. My writing here is neither a work of philosophy nor a work of anti-philosophy. I would say that it occupies the ground between philosophy and ordinary language. Furthermore, I need to say emphatically that I am not trying to ―synthesize‖ the work of Marx and Nietzsche. Some time ago, Nancy S. Love engaged in a useful, though perhaps slightly naïve, point-by-point comparison of the

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central arguments of Marx and Nietzsche in order to demonstrate that they contradict one another and resist any kind of synthesis. She called all attempts to combine them schizophrenic.34 In the tradition of academic philosophy, she postulates two separate bodies of thought that can be reduced to coherent wholes conforming to the rules of logic and reason; and propositions that seem to be similar in content can be shown to be quite different when they are contextualized as expressions of the two wholes, which operate from dissimilar premises and aim at contrary conclusions. To sum up the difference in the manner of Love, when Marx criticizes the economic structure of capitalism, including the division of labor and the social relations of the class system, he embodies the ascetic psychology that Nietzsche criticized. By contrast, when Nietzsche criticizes the ascetic psychology—including the will to truth, to knowledge, and so forth that drives it—he unconsciously manifests the capitalist economic perspective that asserts the ideology of the free market, a force that posits itself as the natural social mechanism by which the strongest members of society become its masters, a view that Marx criticized and debunked.35 While I don’t think Love’s philosophical analysis is completely off base, she fails to take account of how philosophy enters into ordinary language and works at reshaping common sense. My argument is that common sense never incorporates or translates philosophy as a whole. At the level of philosophical coherence, it is impossible to incorporate the positions of Marx and Nietzsche into a unified logical perspective; but this completely ignores the historical impact of these thinkers and the family resemblances between their philosophies from the perspective of common sense. Though the rules of their separate discursive constructions may be irreconcilable and singular in the same way I have used that term to describe the history of desire in the case of the individual subject, they may still yield results in the form of propositions that reinforce each other in ordinary language without resolving the contradictions between the larger conceptual wholes from which they derive. Furthermore, at the level of common sense, the contradictions or apparent inconsistencies within a given philosophical discourse may be resolved or worked out without necessarily appealing to rules of logic. Common sense has practical ways of reconciling apparent contradictions, though there is no reason to assume that reason cannot play a role. In section 173 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche aphoristically comments on the difference between writers who are profound and writers who want to seem profound when he insists that the former strive for clarity (Klarheit) while the latter strive for obscurity ( Dunkelheit).

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The crowd, he claims, imagines that something must be profound if they can’t see to the bottom of it.36 Anyone who works in the university in the field of the humanities may find it difficult to read such a passage and not think of the rise of theory over the last forty years and wonder if what we have witnessed has been a new profundity in critical thought and writing, or the masquerade of profundity. But other aphorisms by Nietzsche suggest that no real distinction can be made between being and seeming, between ―real‖ depth and the appearance of it, since one can always deconstruct such binary relations. In section 381 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche addresses this question in rather different terms when he remarks that the difficulty of a book should not necessarily be an objection against it, since it may be the author’s intention not to be understood, or rather to make the difficulty of his text an instrument for selecting his readers. Here Nietzsche falls back on his concept of nobility again and suggests that there are writers who want readers who are intellectually akin to them, and this would be the source of the most subtle laws of style. Yet Nietzsche qualifies what he has said immediately with reference to his own case. With a good bit of irony, he insists that neither his ignorance nor his cheerful temperament should prevent him from being understandable to readers whom he addresses in the second person as his friends. His gaiety and liveliness force him to treat difficult problems like a cold bath, get in and get out quickly. In the view of some, this may prevent him from going to the depths, but such readers lack experience and fail to realize that the coldness of the water and the vitality of his own spirit make Nietzsche swift.37 If one puts the two aphorisms I have paraphrased together, one comes up with an understanding of Nietzsche’s style and its relation to ordinary language that has a bearing on our contemporary context. As I said, it raises questions about the theory revolution of our own time, which I will illustrate simply by referring to an experience that I suspect is rather common among academics these days. How many times have you attended a lecture that you could barely follow? And if it takes place in your own department, for example, among people whom you know, you look around while it proceeds and wonder who is getting anything out of this marvelous display of incomprehensible erudition. When the talk is over, there is a moment of silence, but then a hand flies up and the questions begin, though they don’t seem to connect with what you have just heard, and the answers to the questions do nothing to illuminate the darkness, Nietzsche’s Dunkelheit. Since you know and work with the people who have attended this lecture, you chat with them in the hallway for the next few days

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trying to find out exactly what anyone got out of this experience. You hear words like ―brilliant‖ (which, despite its semantic connection to the German word Klarheit, seems to mean almost exactly the opposite) and ―genius‖— words used so frequently these days that you begin to suspect that you must have come from a defective gene pool, since you are neither brilliant nor a genius when these qualities have become so ordinary. Did you hear one thought that insinuated itself into your consciousness and left an imprint? Shouldn’t brilliance at least have the effect of producing thoughts, ideas, concepts or some interesting response? Fortunately, the situation that I describe is not true of all difficult speakers; and there are speakers—perhaps not brilliant but worth listening to—who give talks that are meant to communicate, that are not meant to mesmerize the audience by turning one side of the room into a band of enchanted Don Quixotes and the other side into a group of clueless Sancho Panzas scratching their heads. But at least the Sancho Panzas have some doubts. Don’t misunderstand me. I have read and, in most cases, listened to Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Bourdieu, Badiou, Jameson, Habermas, Spivak, Cixous, Butler, Wittig, and so forth; and though the style of these writers and speakers can be quite difficult, you nonetheless—sometimes in ways beyond your own comprehension—learn from them, in the sense that you are able to write down a thought that seems interesting or at least valuable to you, that enhances your life somehow. Of course, there is always the conflict inside your own head between the Sancho Panza who knows that he doesn’t know and the Don Quixote who becomes so enchanted by each word wizard that he sees what he doesn’t know as if it were an objective thing staring him in the face. But the difference, I believe, between the saints of obscurity and the thinkers of the Real (to echo the phrase of Slavoj Žižek) is that the latter provoke a debate between the enchanted noble and the skeptical peasant in your head, they incite Sancho to question the selfcertainty of Quixote, to insist that he say exactly what it is that he sees in plain words that even Sancho can understand. Maybe the translation is imperfect, but in the case of ―real‖ thought there’s no denying the impact. Whatever you may think about Nietzsche, one of the things that make his thought so provocative is that it can be understood, which is not to say that it can be mastered. Because he can be understood, you can disagree with him, be outraged by what he says, and more or less translate his writing into the language of common sense, not without something lost, but without the sense of complete disjunction, without the feeling that one has simply m ade a shot in the dark. Now, to

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be fair, Nietzsche does not insist that everyone share his desire to be understandable (which was always a slightly devious strategy on his part anyway). He might have approved of someone like Lacan who insisted that his readers approach his work with a willingness to take a shot in the dark (arguing cryptically at one point that the way out of his work is the way in), who used his devious, disjunctive, joking, eccentric, and difficult aphoristic style to select his readers and followers carefully. One could argue that Lacan’s strategy didn’t work as well as he thought it did, at least to the extent that one can question the outcome and argue that those Lacanians who claim direct affiliation with Lacan and authorize themselves through reference to him are not the best readers he could have chosen for himself, and that a certain discourse of the master, an authoritarian and dogmatic style, has arisen in his wake that unfortunately founds itself precisely on the difficulty, the virtual impossibility of understanding what the master wrote. Yet even Lacan could not avoid the dictates of common sense, the lure of ordinary language, when he coined phrases that, though I will not quote them, say things like forget the sexual relationship because it doesn’t exist and by the same token and for the same reason forget woman as a universal category and never let go of your desire and you can’t stop hating the one you love and to love your neighbor as you love yourself is a formula for murder and so forth. In other words, Lacan, unlike Heidegger when he hides the banality of his own politics in the obscure style of philosophy, punctuates his Dunkelheit with moments of brilliance or Klarheit that let the cat out of the bag, so to speak. You may say, ―But wait a minute! None of the phrases you refer to and so oddly paraphrase agree with common sense, since most people, at least in my part of the world, agree there is a sexual relation, that woman exists, that you really should get a grip on your desires, that love is not hate, and that you should try to love your neighbor as you love yourself into the bargain.‖ And my answer would go something like this: Don’t you see that you can’t transform common sense and change its formulas without sinking to its level, without using its words, even if, through the use of a kind of deviant logic, you twist their meaning into something else, something that sounds at first like nonsense but can never be mistaken for the transcendent meaning that belongs to the pure atmosphere of philosophy. As Bourdieu demonstrated, Heidegger in Being and Time took some of the empty language of common sense about the German welfare state and translated it into the pure, inaccessible language of philosophy. Lacan, on the contrary, subverted his own language, his own practice of obscurity, with illuminating explosions of negative common sense—that is

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to say, common sense that had been turned inside out. In this way, he did not seduce and enchant, at least not exclusively, but provoked and challenged. In other words, writing can never achieve clarity without moving in the direction of common sense. In section 354 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche formulates a theory of the relationship between language and consciousness that bears a family resemblance to some of Marx’s comments in The German Ideology but also anticipates some of the principles of Wittgenstein’s thought that I will discuss more thoroughly in the last chapter. This is not to say, however, that these texts are in perfect agreement, and Nietzsche begins this remark with a position that appears to contradict what Marx and Wittgenstein, in radically different styles, have to say. Nietzsche argues that consciousness is coterminous with language and yet is superfluous in relation to the processes of thought, feeling, will, and memory. He compares consciousness in the form of language to a mirror image (Spiegelung) and insists that most of what we call life gets along without this kind of mirage.38 In Twilight of the Idols, he insists that if something can be put into words, it is no longer fundamental to human life. Language can only express what is average or communicable, which is to say as far as language is concerned, there is only common sense. 39 In section 354 of The Gay Science, he argues that consciousness and, by implication, language as its medium developed from the necessity for interhuman communication, particularly between those who command and those who obey. He refers to language as a binding net between human beings and insists, in a way that recalls Marx, that man acquires selfconsciousness only as far as he is a social animal. Since language is purely social, it can never ground that which is uniquely individual, what I have called singularity. According to Nietzsche, all that we can consciously know about ourselves is the social abstraction that subsumes the individual under the general category of the community. In effect, though he presupposes a thought outside of language, Nietzsche defines such thought, which is inseparable from feeling, willing, and memory, as a singularity that we can know consciously only as that which language itself has the effect of missing, as the internal limit of language. Nietzsche implies that thought beyond language is a form of action or practice, in other words, something that can be retroactively translated into a set of implicit propositions. But in translating these thought-actions into thought-language, the former in their full significance are excluded from appearing. He even goes so far as to say that the thoughts that exist outside of language are continually

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outvoted by language as the form of consciousness, which translates such thought back into the herd perspective.40 According to Nietzsche, the world that appears to us through the mediation of words is a surface without depth, common and mean, superficial and overly generalized. But the morally charged language he uses goes further to say that it is a form of absolute corruption, even perversity, as well as being a falsification or forgery. He concludes this section of The Gay Science with the observation that human beings know nothing directly and have no physical means, no organ, that gives them unmediated access to knowledge or truth. What we know is indistinguishable from what we believe or imagine and its usefulness derives from the interests of the human herd, though even the concept of usefulness is only a belief, ultimately a conceit (Einbildung), a form of the fatal stupidity.41 Overall, it seems consistent with the tendency of Nietzsche’s late philosophy and the overall force of his style to argue that whatever governs the relation between language and life cannot be a process of translation. Book V of The Gay Science, from which section 354 comes, was published in the work’s second edition, which came out after Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil in 1887. Nietzsche’s late philosophy has been described as a kind of monism that centers on the concept of the unitary will to power; but this would be a monism that does not posit any universal substance or constituting ground for all individual beings, but rather describes the movement of beings and the force that emerges through that movement. In Genealogy of Morals (second essay, section 12), Nietzsche equates the essence of life with the will to power, which means that the essence of life is a force that has no essence, no being apart from the things through which it can be said to manifest itself. In the same section, Nietzsche insists that the concept of life refers to activity, and criticized Herbert Spencer’s concept of adaptation (taken from Darwin) because it is reactive and necessarily presupposes a stable ground that precedes and conditions life. For Nietzsche, life embraces everything, including death and the dead world (which anticipates the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle); but because life has no being in itself—that is to say, apart from its activity—one can talk about adaptation only after one has posited a force that drives and reveals itself as both the individual organism and the external conditions that shape it and with which it must interact.42 In other words, the relation between life as activity and the language that operates as an instrument of life, particularly in the human communities that gave rise to language through the need for communication, cannot be one of translating from one medium into another.

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Nietzsche himself, on this point, fell victim to the seductions of common sense, to the ordinary view that our words never fully express our thoughts, feelings, desires or even memories. Yet the division of the life process by those terms is a function of language that is contradicted by the late Nietzsche’s insistence on life as a will to power. And even the concept of a will to power is nothing but language, nothing but the instrument or manifestation of a process that no name—not even the word ―life‖—can capture or fully master. Nietzsche’s judgments about the value of language vis-à-vis life itself are nothing more than manifestations of the life process, nothing more than matters of taste, of personal feeling, those determinations of ―good‖ or ―bad‖ that he attributes to the noble spirit—determinations that lie beyond good and evil as moral categories.43 In section 372 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche stresses that philosophers of the present and the future are not idealists but men of the senses, of the flesh; but then he immediately qualifies this statement to stress that he is not talking about a philosophical position that privileges sensation as the ground of all knowledge in the manner of eighteenth-century sensualists whom he dismissed at the beginning of section 370. Rather, the philosophers of whom he speaks are sensualists not in theory but in practice.44 In this passage, at least as I read it, Nietzsche illustrates his understanding of philosophy as a practice that can never be reduced to pure theory, which would be a completely selfreferential and autonomous form of language, but must always be related to the life process, to the material conditions that incite thought as an instrumental manifestation—a force implicit in those material conditions that are themselves nothing more than the means by which life expands, aggressively and spontaneously, and constantly produces new interpretations and gives new directions to itself. These last phrases echo the end of section 12 in the second essay of Genealogy of Morals, which, in elaborating the theory of genealogy, states emphatically that not one thing comes into being that can ever be fully explained or understood simply by describing its origin. Every institution, custom, political practice, aesthetic form, or religious belief constantly undergoes reinterpretation in different historical contexts, with the emergence of new actors, new movements, new desires, and new interests—in other words, new material conditions. This rule must also apply to forms of language, including everything from the highest philosophical concepts and systems to the lowest forms of ordinary language and common sense.45 One can argue that both Marx and Nietzsche—despite their differences—disrupted the relation between theory and common sense in a way that would not so much put an end to philosophy but force it to

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confront its own relation to life, desire, interests, and physical being. By implication, this meant forcing philosophy or theory to confront its implication in ordinary language, since without the appeal to a metaphysical ground outside of life and its linguistic manifestations, there is no way to justify the hierarchies of discourse except as forms of life that serve different purposes in different contexts. This doesn’t mean, of course, that either Nietzsche or Marx has refuted or resolved the metaphysical contentions or questions that have emerged from the history of philosophy. It doesn’t mean that their concepts of life, will to power or social practice represent grounds of certainty by comparison with the Hegelian dialectic of the spirit or the Kantian epistemology of the faculties. On the contrary, their starting point—even if in the case of Nietzsche, this can only be inferred implicitly—is that, as Marx formulated it in The German Ideology, the problem of the relation between thought and reality, or language and life, is the illusion of philosophical consciousness itself—that is to say, of philosophical language.46 Marx and Nietzsche both start from the presupposition that philosophy cannot answer the questions it poses by abstracting itself from the world of experience with its conflicts of interest. At its best, philosophy can only construct perspectives—provisional, perhaps even imaginary configurations of concepts that ultimately produce an evaluative articulation of the world that derives from and serves the interest of a particular experience, class, or way of life. Critics like Nancy Love are unquestionably right when they say that the political perspectives of Nietzsche and Marx are irreconcilable. Marx constructed his theory and his analysis of the capitalist mode of production not in the interests of pure scholarship but with the intention of overthrowing capitalist social relations, at least in the form in which he knew them. Nietzsche, by contrast, frequently made the argument that slavery, in one form or another, is the necessary condition for the production of a higher man, the overman, and that figure is the only justification of historical experience from his perspective. Of course, Nietzsche qualified these generalizations in numerous contexts, which demand careful consideration; but perhaps even more important was his recognition that philosophy is not impersonal, that it is never the articulation of an objective truth that transcends the personal being and history of the author. He says this in section 6 of Beyond Good and Evil, which in many ways anticipates Bourdieu’s critique of philosophical discourse through the example of Heidegger. Nietzsche notes that even the most abstruse philosophical language aims at some form of morality, some form of evaluative judgment, which, as his own work illustrates, almost always has social

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implications and can never be very far from some version of common sense, however much Nietzsche himself may dislike anything that reeks of the common.47 In section 193 of The Gay Science and section 19 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche claims that both Kant and Schopenhauer constructed their respective philosophies on the foundation of popular prejudice.48 But certainly the theory of master and slave moralities that Nietzsche develops at great length in Beyond Good and Evil and Genealogy of Morals, if it did not reflect a popular prejudice at the time Nietzsche wrote it (which I believe it did), has certainly become a popular prejudice since Nietzsche, particularly among academic intellectuals. Though Nietzsche’s reputation is still shadowed by the Nazi appropriation and distortion of his thought, one rarely hears any recognition of the extent to which the Nietzschean ethos has become the ethos of the academic community, particularly in the United States. One of the hallmarks of this ethos is a belief in the psychology of resentment. This perspective more or less dictates that the person who resents has by that emotion virtually justified the experience that would be its ground. Though objectively people may concede that resentment is a response to social constraint and exploitation, for example in the caste structure of the American academic system, they nonetheless imagine that these constraints can be and would be overcome if the subject in question could relinquish such resentment. Nietzsche implicitly saw the slave morality that he associated with the emergence of Christianity as the historical effect that legitimated its own cause. Nothing justified the Nietzschean concept of nobility and its ethos better than his historical vision of the slave. Only those who were slaves by nature would allow themselves to be enslaved; and the proof of that lay in the feelings of resentment that they harbored, which had the additional effect of making them liars, schemers, and finally destroyers, particularly of everything and everyone better than them.49 Most academics would refuse to posit something as blatant as the theory of slave morality or to argue that slavery should exist, but they have nonetheless appropriated the theory of ressentiment, which they use more or less in the same way Nietzsche did and have absolutely no problem with a division of labor within the academic system that disguises relations of exploitation in various ways. Furthermore, in critical practice, they more or less hold the view that resentment is inherently dishonest and discredits the perspective of the one who resents. It almost goes without saying that resentment can never be justified. Even Bourdieu, who recognized the determining structures that produce resentment across multiple fields of social activity, nonetheless feared its destructive effects,

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even in response to his own work. From these views, it follows that creative work in any field of artistic or critical production requires, as one of its conditions, the dissolution of resentment. In what I consider to be one of the best books ever written on Nietzsche, Henry Staten makes an important rhetorical observation about Nietzsche’s voice that goes to the heart of the academic rhetoric of our time. He begins with the claim that any writer’s authority derives at least partially from the tone of self-assurance that inhabits his or her style.50 This bit of common sense about authority, if one thinks about it, could never be subjected to any definitive proof except in the circularity of the claim itself. It is true only because so many people think it is true. Academics, as a rule, take selfassurance for authority, which has led to the continuous production of outrageous claims in critical study after critical study. These days even the most unoriginal studies claim to be the first to have done whatever they do, even though coming up with a completely new idea after almost forty years of intense theoretical and critical production (not to mention the rest of the history of human thought) has left little room for completely new ideas or methodologies. Staten argues that while the projection of self-assurance as a form of self-authorization is true in general for most intellectuals, in Nietzsche’s case it is true to an unprecedented degree.51 The originality of Nietzsche’s thought often lies in his making claims that can never be subjected to any kind of formal proof—such as his reconstruction of the history of slave morality as the articulation of resentment against nobility or his theory of eternal recurrence. This is not to say that Nietzsche does not make philosophical arguments that appeal to the authority of reason, but by his own admission, the will to power uses reason as its instrument and will go beyond reason to enhance itself whenever necessary. According to Staten, Nietzsche’s voice becomes more strident, more self-authorizing, in direct correlation with his isolation from any specific community of receptive readers. He frequently proclaims that he does not write for the present but for the future, as if he thumbs his nose at those who ignore him in his own time with the certain knowledge that in the future he will find his readers.52 In the last chapter, I articulated the theory that the university system in the United States—and probably in the rest of the world as well—is a virtual caste system. Aside from extrapolating the sociological research of Bourdieu on the French system to the U.S. situation, I didn’t supply any ―objective‖ evidence to support that view, which I offered only as a perspective that readers are free to validate or to reject based on their own experience. Bourdieu himself was aware of

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the subjective limits of objective evidence, which he addressed in the introduction to the ―Critique of Theoretical Reason‖ in The Logic of Practice, and in the process invoked the name of Nietzsche by citing a particular passage from Genealogy of Morals (third essay, section 12). In that passage, Nietzsche warned his fellow philosophers to be on guard against the fantasy of pure objectivity, which presupposes a perspective without perspective, an eye that does not act on its own, that does not interpret, since for Nietzsche such activity and interpretation is the very condition of seeing anything. Only a perspective sees and knows, and objectivity is enhanced not only by multiple perspectives, but also by the affects that lie behind them. As Nietzsche emphatically suggests, the more affects the better, and the effort to separate sense from sensibility has the effect of castrating the intellect.53 The sexual metaphor that he uses reflects a certain common sense that he may have disavowed in other contexts; but it is precisely common sense, or what Bourdieu called le sens pratique, a practical mode of knowledge, that Nietzsche posits as the foundation of any real objectivity. Bourdieu, in the introduction mentioned above, specifically distinguishes between a scientific discourse that rejects common sense as an inferior mode of thinking—and by implication a justification of academic privilege—and the production of the scientific knowledge of common sense and the logic of practice. A discourse that rejects common sense as inherently inferior without reference to social and political contexts or to the stylistic strategies of ordinary language blinds itself to the very thing it would objectify.54 By the same token, it must be possible to produce other discourses that would create the conditions of objectivity by making visible subjective processes and the social conditions that shape them. In order to illustrate my point about the academic caste system, I used the example of my own history as an academic, a history that I firmly believe cannot be unique to me. In doing so, I was not unaware of the intellectual environment in which I write and knew the problematic nature of what I was saying. Instead of trying to avoid the accusation of resentment, I decided to embrace it because I cannot accept the Nietzschean principle that resentment is always and necessarily destructive of some kind of higher nature. Resentment is a sensibility that produces awareness and can be the means to self-overcoming. I agree with Nietzsche and Bourdieu that it can be a destructive affect when it is internalized without sublimation, but it can always become a creative force. During the course of his writings, Nietzsche made many ridiculous claims that no doubt reflected his own insecurities and isolation, including fantasies of racial inheritance, such as the o ne in section

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264 of Beyond Good and Evil when he argues that children inherit their parents’ noble characteristics if their parents are aristocratic, or their plebeian corruption, by which he clearly means the tendency toward deceit and vicious moralism that he associates with the lower classes. Yet at the end of section 263 of the same work, Nietzsche admits that in the present context one may find more nobility of taste and reverence for things of value among uneducated peasants than among the educated middle class.55 In section 260, he argues that the master and slave moralities more often than not struggle with each other within a single human being.56 I will not duplicate here Staten’s excellent inventory of Nietzsche’s many selfcontradictions, but it does suggest to me that one may become more truly Nietzschean by refusing his ―moralization‖ of resentment and the aristocratic ethos. As I tried to show through the remembrance of my friend Victor, nobility as a sensibility is not inconsistent with feelings of resentment against a social system that has dominated and damaged you. Nietzsche’s aristocratic values were always something that he projected onto the past, because when he looked around the world of his own time he saw little that accorded with his concept of nobility, particularly among the most privileged and powerful members of society. Still, I think of Nietzsche as a noble figure because he transformed his resentments and contradictions into works that challenge common sense, not with some ridiculous abstraction that has no bearing on or translatability into the ordinary language of everyday social practice, but into works that remain readable and translatable into different social contexts and psychological perspectives. My friend Victor killed himself; and Nietzsche, even more completely than my mother, went mad. But I don’t think it is possible to judge madness or suicide apart from the total creative effect of these individual lives. In Genealogy of Morals (third essay, section 27), Nietzsche implied that the act of self-overcoming is necessarily a kind of destruction.57 One can argue that Nietzsche destroyed himself in producing a thought beyond good and evil. My friend Victor destroyed himself in the act of giving birth to a critical understanding of a tragic historical situation and perhaps could have saved himself by not taking conscious responsibility for his own actions. My mother’s madness also contained and fueled the essence of her wisdom, which became the condition of my own creative life—its language, so to speak. In Beyond Good and Evil, there is a passage that I read in a way that may not have been the intention of Nietzsche; and yet my reading would be impossible without the larger context of Nietzsche’s writing. Near the end of section 212, he refers to his historical context as a

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time when only the herd animal gains any social esteem and when the equality of rights turns out in practice to be the equal opportunity for committing injustices. He sees this as a common war on all those who are rare, or unusual, strange, or foreign (Fremden)—all those who are privileged, or higher in any possible sense—all those full of creative power and lordliness.58 Now I know that Nietzsche inflects this reading of his own context in class terms, that he has little or no sympathy for the masses or for the movements of his own time, such as communism, that attempt to articulate the perspective of the masses. I know that he despises the democratic movement, which he sees as nothing but the domination of the herd. Yet I interpolate this passage into my own context in a way that might make Nietzsche turn over in his grave but is nonetheless consistent with what I believe to be the historical force of his writing. For I too live in a time when social esteem—in the form of honors, privileges, and wealth— are given only to those who follow the rules and think according to the formulas of the moment. But the difference between my perspective and Nietzsche’s is that I can’t use his class-coded language with any degree of comfort, not only because of my socially determined commitments to social equality but because I see no direct correlation between class and creative social values in my world. First, as someone from a working-class background, I can offer my limited testimony to the fact that the people in that class position hardly resemble Nietzsche’s herd animals and almost never enjoy the experience of feeling that they are valued by the society in which they live. When I was growing up, it was my general observation that most working-class people not only have low self-esteem but they are systematically taught to see themselves as failures in direct correlation with their low incomes and lack of material freedom. Of course, there are many cheerful souls who manage to transcend the psychological violence of the class system through their wit and personal charm, but such cheerfulness is almost always a surface phenomenon that belies the real distress of their everyday lives. Much of the violence of lower-class existence—including alcoholism, child and spouse abuse, racism, homophobia, and other forms of violence against the self and others—derives from this fact. This is not to say that any of these phenomena are limited to the lower classes, but there is a different quality of experience when these things take place in an environment of economic constraint. People may weep for Marilyn Monroe or identify with Betty Ford, but nobody much cares about the fate of an overweight blue-collar alcoholic or the self-hating black man who leaves his wife and children.

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Nietzsche’s criticisms can be applied to the other social space to which I have had access, the world of academia. Having already addressed the caste structure of the academic system as a national and even a global phenomenon, here I want to consider the internal dynamics of the division of labor and the distribution of wealth in the individual academic units. For example, let me consider the English department of a research university— namely, my own department. One of the material conditions of creative intellectual work is free time. In fact, as Marx noted in numerous places in the Grundrisse, wealth is free time, and the latter is the condition for the development of individuality and creative autonomy.59 How is free time distributed in an English department? In the first place, if you’re at a research university, you already have more free time than most academics in the form of a reduced teaching load. Hence, there is a division of labor between those who mostly teach and those who are tracked from the beginning of their careers as research scholars. Occasionally, someone who starts out their career in the teacher track will write a book and struggle to change their status, but it is never an easy thing to do. Once you are tracked as a teacher, you are not expected to publish, and institutions are not inclined to change your status when you do publish, although it can be done. Still, within the research scholar track, there is certainly the desire for more free time, and scholars achieve this by applying for fellowships, grants, course releases, and so forth, either through agencies within the university or through both regional and national agencies outside the university. Personally, I will not pretend to judge the fairness of the procedures of these agencies, but I will subjectively assess their results. In my own department, there seems to be very little correlation between critical production and grants. Some individuals who have received numerous grants, sometimes three or four years of teaching release, have published virtually nothing, while others have published a lot. In general, as far as I can see, there are more of the former than of the latter. Then there are others who have published as much or more than the grantgetters but have never received any grants despite applying repeatedly. Normally, no one thinks of these issues in terms of the distribution of wealth and division of labor, but these actually constitute a critical aspect of the process. When someone gets three or four years of release time, someone else has to do the work of the department that the individual released from teaching or service duties would have done. If the individual without grants has published just as much or more than the individuals who have received the bulk of the grants and release time, it is fair to say that

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such a person has been exploited—that is to say, has produced wealth through his or her intellectual labor that went to someone else in the form of free time. (Anyone familiar with this system knows that a university rarely hires anyone for the exclusive purpose of replacing someone who is on leave.) One could also argue that those who are tracked as teachers only, even if they never publish, are the most thoroughly exploited because their time has been expropriated from the very beginning. Naturally, such a system for distributing free time justifies itself through the claim that it considers each case separately and each project without reference to the overall history of the individual’s creative production or potential. That may be true, but the common sense interpretation of the results would suggest that grants are awarded to people who write ―good‖ grant proposals (though by what criteria no one knows) and not to people who produce ―good‖ books and other forms of research that are supposed to be the goal of the grants. The reader can probably guess by now which category I fall into, though I promise not to pose the question, like Nietzsche, as to why I write such good books. But before I am accused of resentment once again (if only by the projection of my own imagination), let me say quickly that I know all too well the extent to which I have done this to myself. I may even be happy about it, because there is a certain freedom that one gains through the loss of another kind of freedom, which should in no way justify the loss. One can easily imagine the results of the kind of system I have just described. Intellectual work is not valued unless it has received the stamp of state approval even before it is written. This is the work of Nietzsche’s herd mentality in action. You may say, ―On the contrary, it is not the masses but the community of scholars who determine the distribution of public wealth for intellectual work.‖ This may be true, but the point is that the individual scholar or thinker has to get public sanction in order to gain the material means to produce, and this necessarily inhibits the development of creative autonomy. Yet here both Nietzschean and Marxist dialectics, however radically different, intervene to suggest a positive value that can come out of a system of exploitation even if it is in such a minor area of life and human activity. In my own case, the constant withholding of state and community sanction for my work becomes the condition for self-overcoming, for making the effort to break out of conventional scholarship and to wage class struggle, even if on a small scale, in the field of theory. Perhaps I will never succeed, but there is a kind of joyfulness that emerges from the effort to overcome every obstacle to your own creative energy. To paraphrase two

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of Nietzsche’s epigrams: first, you learn to love your desire more than the thing desired; and second, whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.60 Still, I have to distinguish my understanding of strength from Nietzsche’s class-inflected theory of greatness in section 212 of Beyond Good and Evil.61 For me, strength has nothing to do with being higher than somebody else; for if I consider myself higher, then I am still measuring myself against others; and creative self-mastery can never be the same thing as the mastery of others. If I can only master myself through the domination of others, then I need those others more than they need me, and their selfmastery will be the end of me. True self-mastery requires collaboration with others in order to produce as much social wealth as is required in order to give everyone enough free time to develop their individuality and creative autonomy. That last phrase may sound utopian, but it is no more utopian than the Nietzschean fantasy so prevalent in the ruling classes of the world today that people can live forever on the labor of others without consequences, without dialectical reversal (either of the Hegelian or the Marxist type), without what the CIA calls ―blowback.‖ Yet also in section 212, Nietzsche describes nobility in terms that make sense to me if you can extract the class fantasies out of the word. He describes it as a desire that seeks difference, independence, and isolation. He virtually idealizes someone who is the loneliest, the most hidden, the most deviating or irregular, beyond good and evil, and so forth—an individual who masters his virtues and has a surplus of will.62 To my mind, if one takes the concept of beyond good and evil seriously, mastering your virtues only means mastering your creative powers, and a surplus of will is simply a surplus of life. To be fair, I don’t think anyone, myself included, wants to be friendless, isolated, and completely hidden. I don’t think anyone, Nietzsche included, has ever written anything without the desire for readers and for the social recognition of the community. As Marx and so many thinkers after him have suggested, there is no individuality or autonomy without community, without interaction with others; and at the same time, one has to be willing to break from the community, to go it alone and place one’s faith in the future—in the possibility of readers and a community that will understand and even act on your principles—in order to say anything new, in order to articulate the voice of a community that does not yet exist. This break—this understanding of thought as action, as practice, and yes, like it or not, even in Nietzsche’s case, as social being—is what Nietzsche and Marx have in common. In Ecce Homo, at the beginning of section 4 under the heading ―Why I Write Such Good Books,‖ Nietzsche produces a statement

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on the nature of style that I quoted in the introduction to my first book. A style, he writes, communicates an inward state or condition, an inner tension of feeling, through the use of signs and the orchestration of their tempo. He refers to the multiplicity of his own stylistic possibilities—more styles than any other man has ever possessed—as communications of his many inward states. A style is good if it communicates the inward tension, or what I would call the internalized contradiction.63 In this chapter and the others, I have tried to interweave as many styles as I can in order to communicate the inward states of my own being, not because I am such an extraordinary fellow, but because it is the only way I know to get at the truth of social being, which is always singular. Social being is the multiplicity of singularities and truths, the multiplicity of styles that can never be subsumed under a conceptual category without losing the particularity of concrete experience, without losing the perspective. Furthermore, the contradiction between the individual and the social is the illusion of philosophy and abstract thought. In practice, you can’t think of one without the other. As Nietzsche implied in section 179 of The Gay Science, thoughts come from feelings and not the other way around. He called them shadows because they darken, empty, and simplify feelings.64 But these don’t have to be Platonic shadows, mirages cast by real things. Sense and sensibility are not strictly distinguishable. Life leaves traces or thoughts—shadows, according to Nietzsche—illusions and phantoms, even ghosts, according to Marx. But as expressions of life, these things are real. As Lacan implied, the non-duped always err when they think they can reach the truth, or the Real as he called it, without passing through the phantoms of everyday experience, including the thought of the masses. Common sense is the line we draw along the border between life and the instruments of its power. It is stratified and subject to change, but it articulates a relation that is all too real.

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FOLKLORES OF THE FUTURE WILDE AND LAWRENCE

To read either Oscar Wilde or D. H. Lawrence at the beginning of the twenty-first century is an astonishing experience. This is especially true if you are reading them not as literary figures who, in radically different ways, made names for themselves in the history of the sexual revolution of the last century but as critical moments in the history of a discourse that, first, challenges common sense with an alternative version of itself, and, second, calls into question the higher discourse of philosophy that extracts itself from the styles of ordinary language. They follow in the wake of Marx and Nietzsche, who may not have been the first thinkers to disrupt the hegemony of philosophical and scientific language as the language of truth, but who did so at a time and in a way that eventually achieved critical mass. Though Wilde and Lawrence are part of that critical mass, they did not consciously align themselves with their precursors (even if Lawrence had read early translations of Nietzsche), nor can they be said to have the same influence on the history of thought; nonetheless they represent a number of writers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who dissolved the boundaries between literature and theory, or, to put the case differently, wrote as if the condition of literary innovation were the reinvention of common sense— about sexuality, gender, class, race, human psychology, wealth, politics, art, and so forth. Such a reinvention means their works are necessarily theoretical, though they couch their theories in styles that are readable, translatable (in more than one sense), and ultimately, despite their claims to the contrary, designed to have an explosive effect on social life. Wilde’s aestheticism may seem to say exactly the opposite of what I have just said, but he also noted

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that life imitates art more than art imitates life, which suggests that art is a political force whether or not it intends to be so.1 Lawrence was more overt about his political aims, though there is a distinction to be drawn between the politics of his art and the contradictory political viewpoints he espoused within the frame of that art. Wilde’s career follows a trajectory almost the opposite of Nietzsche’s, which has some bearing on one of the final expressions of his thought, the long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas in 1897 from Reading prison that was later published under the title De Profundis.2 Though Nietzsche began his career with some academic success, his most important books were not widely read during his lifetime. Wilde, on the other hand, achieved fame for his writing and public lectures early in his career and then became even more popular for his plays, at least with the theater-going classes, in the years immediately preceding his trials and imprisonment in 1895. After that, his only significant writings are letters and one poem. Though it would be a mistake to argue that there is complete discontinuity between Wilde’s perspectives before and after his imprisonment, there is a shift in his sensibility, which recontextualizes his earlier perspectives. For example, in De Profundis, he identifies sorrow as the supreme emotion, the one incomparable truth that art can express. Suffering is life’s secret, the fundamental nourishment of the soul, which is the key to Wilde’s concept of individuality.3 This is a hard pill to swallow from the writer who, in ―The Soul of Man under Socialism,‖ written at the beginning of the same decade, argued that, while sympathy is an essential quality of individualism, it achieves its lowest form when it is sympathy with pain and suffering. In a Nietzschean moment that must seem ironic in an essay on socialism, Wilde implies that there is an element of selfishness in sympathy with pain and suffering, while the higher form of sympathy, that of the true individualist, is sympathy with joy, beauty, energy, health, and freedom, the very qualities that Nietzsche would associate with the character of nobility.4 Yet a careful reading of De Profundis suggests that Wilde’s perspective did not alter as much as might appear. For Wilde, prison life forces the individual into a state of rebelliousness—and by implication, resentment—a state that, in life as well as art, has a negative effect on the soul. At the same time, he insists that the brutality of prison experience produces its own dialectical reversal in nourishing the soul in a way that enhances its creative power. In other words, the real danger of rebelliousness and resentment, the emotions at the center of De Profundis, is the failure to transform these feelings into the conditions of self-overcoming—into creative forces. He refers to his prison life

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as a new life, in Dante’s sense of the term, and describes his previous history as the avoidance of something that he now recognizes as having its own creative power. Without regretting for a moment the pleasures he pursued in his life, he realizes that he avoided another side of human experience, the abasement and suffering that he was forced to endure in prison. Ironically, he admits that he anticipated his current situation in earlier works including ―Soul of Man.‖5 In that work, Wilde observed that misery and poverty degrade human beings and numb them to such an extent that they are no longer fully conscious of their own suffering. He has no tolerance for the virtuous poor and prefers those who are rebellious and disobedient and who respond to poverty by refusing to make the best out of their situation through frugality and quiet submission to the work ethic. With his usual wit, Wilde insists that recommending thrift to a poor man is like advising a starving man to go on a diet.6 Though he asserts in a Nietzschean vein that capitalist private property enables a few people to achieve a limited form of individualism and that there can be no civilization without slavery, he insists that human slavery must be abolished, in all of its forms, and replaced by the slavery of machines. To those who would say that these views are utopian, Wilde implies that the quest for utopia is one of the critical forms of ―human‖ experience and the condition of any valid notion of progress.7 In this view, he anticipates Marxist theorists of utopia like Ernst Bloch and Fredric Jameson. In prison, Wilde discovered for the first time what it felt like not to have any freedom or wealth, to have almost no creative autonomy, and to be reduced completely to the status of a machine, without even the compensation of believing that his labors might produce some good in the world. He did not even have the choice of being one of the virtuous poor. He subjectively understood what it meant to be alienated labor and completely in the power of a dominant class. Yet, in this environment, he was able to write De Profundis and the other letters of that period, some of his greatest writing. Though some readers have scoffed at the letter to Douglas as a testimony to the author’s self-pity, it should be read as a mental struggle against the brutality of the prison system, which, as Wilde finally understood, is an extension of the class system. He implies repeatedly throughout the letter that he can transcend his resentment only by expressing it, for the most powerful effect of the prison experience is to kill the feelings and, as he puts it at one point, to turn the heart into stone.8 He says that every day on which a prisoner weeps is not the opposite of happiness but of hardness; and it is against this hardness, this paralysis of affective being, that Wilde has to struggle. 9 This is why he tells Douglas

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that suffering, for the prisoner, is the means of existence, the only possible form of self-consciousness in an environment that is designed to kill consciousness.10 Some scholars have noted that Wilde’s indictment of Lord Alfred Douglas is unfair and slanted by the bitterness of his prison experience. Still, it hardly matters if every accusation is historically correct; the whole point of the letter is to insulate the subject from a prison environment by testifying to the existence of an inner life in order to reverse the process of desensitization and channel the force of resentment into something creative. Wilde’s inventory of Douglas’s wrongs serves one purpose only: to exorcise their imprint on his being. At the turning point of De Profundis, which comes roughly halfway through the text, Wilde explains to Douglas that he has no choice but to forgive him in order to remove the anger from his own heart.11 This is not simply an early version of the twelve-step program, but the drive of an artist to transform his social condition as a prisoner through a creative act, which is the letter itself. In ―Soul of Man,‖ Wilde argued, somewhat naively, that a prisoner can be free as long as his soul is free, as long as he pays no attention to public opinion.12 In practice, when Wilde became a prisoner, he found that this kind of freedom is more difficult to achieve than he thought. The most critical moment in De Profundis comes when Wilde feels compelled to explain to Douglas that he is not in prison because of his homosexual relations with the boys who testified at his trial. The government and society supposedly neither knew nor cared about such matters, he says; but the contemporary reader may speculate that the truth is more along the lines of Sartrean bad faith: they acted out of the firm belief that something did not exist, which they knew perfectly well did exist. Wilde concludes that, on the contrary, he was put into prison for trying to put someone else into prison—namely, Douglas’s father, the ninth Marquess of Queensberry.13 Though Wilde certainly had sexual relations with middle to late teenaged boys, he does not believe for a moment that these acts brought about his downfall. Richard Ellmann documents Wilde’s homosexual relations with boys and notes that, in most cases, they were already prostitutes and seem to have been treated extremely well by Wilde.14 He surely did not anticipate that his suit against Queensberry for libel would be turned into his own trial for indecent acts, but he had long since been leading a life that was divided between his public image as a disinterested artist and his not-so-well-hidden, illegal sexual behavior.15 Currently, in the United States, any form of sexual relations between adults and adolescents under eighteen is regarded as a serious crime and a form of sexual abuse on the part of the adult. In the world of Oscar Wilde, these

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moral categories were not so well articulated and were profoundly mixed up with class relations. Though Wilde was hardly a proletarian, he teased the British upper classes with light mockery in his plays and with his more suggestive and brutal dissection of their ethical bankruptcy in The Picture of Dorian Gray. He himself descended from the Anglo-Irish middle class, and though his father had been knighted, Wilde was in no sense an aristocrat on equal footing with someone like Queensberry. By entering into a legal contest with the latter, he crossed a critical class boundary and naively imagined that the law and the state—lack of faith in which he had already expressed in ―Soul of Man‖—would come to his rescue. When the tables were turned on him, as he put it, it must have come as quite a shock. In practice, one can’t separate Wilde’s sexual behavior from his criticism of the British class system. The society that condemned Oscar Wilde for sleeping with boys had no compunction about producing a social system that forced quite a large number of boys into prostitution. It goes without saying that Wilde participated in the exploitation of these children to the extent that he took advantage of their situation for his own pleasure. Nonetheless, Wilde directly linked his sexual behavior with his revolt against the philistinism of British society, which he came to associate with Douglas and his father. According to Ellmann, Wilde gave up sexual relations with Douglas sometime before the events that led to his trials and came to see their relationship as the expression of the Greek ideal.16 In De Profundis, Wilde counters his attack on Douglas’s philistinism with a reference to his own association with elements of the London underworld, whom he compares to panthers in a famous metaphor, and admits to enjoying the danger of the association. Was he patronizing these people? He says that he found them interesting; and in the end, they profited more from their association with him, through blackmail, than he took pleasure from them. Yet, when it was all over, Wilde felt no shame from the association with those who wanted to blackmail him, though he was profoundly ashamed of his association with lawyers when he attempted to pose as a champion of morality in art on Douglas’s behalf.17 But before one leaps to the conclusion that Wilde faulted poor Douglas more than was necessary, one must remember that Queensberry wanted to save his son from Oscar Wilde not because he could fairly blame the man for Douglas’s homosexuality but because Wilde’s lifestyle was dangerous enough to make visible that which should have remained invisible, according to the class mores of the time. Homosexuality was a relatively common phenomenon among the British upper classes, but it was only legitimate to the extent that

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it was invisible; and what distinguished bottom-class from upper-class homosexuality was visibility. Wilde simply wasn’t playing by the class rules, which ultimately left him vulnerable to an attack that would put him in his place by taking away all of his autonomy and making him lower than the lowest lumpen proletarian. In prison, he not only lost his free time—that is to say, time over which he had any creative control—but he could not even sell his time or his labor. In capitalist terms, he was a man reduced to the economic value of zero. In another critical passage from De Profundis, Wilde concedes that the use of paradox that characterized his thought dominated his passion in the form of perversity.18 His judgment on that perversity seems to be mixed, since he regards his relation to Douglas much more negatively than he regards his relation to boys or the underworld. Though one may judge Wilde for his sexual activity with adolescents, one must at least concede the possibility that some of the attraction was with their class identity and the relative innocence of their relation to the social system that Wilde both loved and despised, much in the way that he ultimately both loved and despised Douglas. James Joyce once referred to Wilde’s relationship to the British as that of a court jester in the tradition of other Anglo-Irish literary figures; and while this view seems harsh, it reflects the ambivalence toward the British upper classes that one sees in his plays, which, for example, are never as brutal in their dissection of class pretensions as the writing of Marcel Proust. In the same passage in which he relates paradox to perversity, Wilde describes himself as a flâneur and a dandy. These categories, as Walter Benjamin has taught us, represent a form of subjectivity shaped by capitalist social relations: the flâneur knows his status as a commodity in the social marketplace and tries to dictate his price as a form of self-valorization. As an allegorist, the flâneur understands that the meaning of the commodity is its price.19 In De Profundis, Wilde admitted to enjoying for a while the self-punishing idea of endless suffering, but he could not allow his life to be meaningless, even in prison. In other words, he refused to accept society’s determination of his social value and postulated the new value of humility as the condition of a new beginning, a new life. One could argue that Wilde’s humility means selfvalorization, since only by losing everything that he had, which constitutes his value in the eyes of the world, is he is left with nothing but his own singularity, which proves to be the thing of greatest value. You can’t give it away, and no one can give it to you. Furthermore, by implication, no one can take it away from you. For Wilde, it is pure self-realization.20

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Benjamin theorizes that the idleness of the flâneur is a protest against the division of labor, which makes it a criticism of the class system.21 In effect, the flâneur refuses not to enjoy the fruits of idleness along with the rich, whom he criticizes and yet with whom he also identifies. Wilde’s passionate perversity, both toward Douglas and toward the underworld, manifests the contradiction that could be considered the driving force behind the use of paradox in his writing. Wilde’s intimacy with boy prostitutes gave expression to his identification with their social position, since in a way he was prostituting himself to the British upper classes, even in his relationship with Douglas, which, in De Profundis, he came to see as a form of domination that required him to betray his autonomy as an artist.22 Wilde instinctively understood the point Benjamin made about the prostitute as a dialectical image of capitalism. If the prostitute is, as Benjamin stressed, the one who sells and the one who is sold, the commodity and the purveyor of commodities, she signifies, as an image, what any subject becomes under capital.23 Benjamin genders the flâneur as male and the prostitute as female, but for Wilde these categories necessarily cross in ways that are both paradoxical and perverse. His relation to boys resembles his relation to class. Concerning the latter, he desires not so much to enter another class as to expropriate the style of upper-class existence, its material quality of life, particularly its freedom in relation to time and work, just as he seeks to expropriate from the underworld and déclassé social strata their freedom from social morality and hypocrisy, particularly in relation to sexual identity and desire. In other words, Wilde wanted to turn his life into an image—perhaps what Benjamin would call a dialectical image—of what life could be by crossing the boundaries of class and mixing differences of desire and pleasure that derive from different social locations. It goes without saying there are enormous contradictions in such a strategy, which Wilde himself must have recognized since he suggested them in The Picture of Dorian Gray. The death of Sybil Vane epitomizes the danger of moving between classes without concern for the differences of power and the different modalities of social performance. Dorian is attracted to Sybil for her lack of artifice as an actress who takes the world on the stage for reality, and then he throws her away as soon as he has educated her on the difference between art and reality. In Wilde’s case, however, it is difficult to say if anyone was more damaged by his actions than he was. On the same pages of De Profundis in which Wilde discusses the parallel between verbal paradox and sexual perversity, he sums up his writing as an act that transformed art into philosophy and philosophy

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into art. In other words, there is a mixing of genres and a subversion of intellectual hierarchy in the practice of his writing just as there is a mixing of classes, genders, and sexualities in the practice of his life. In another Nietzschean turn, he says that in his art he gave space not only to the truth, but also to the false, since both are forms of intellectual being. He made art into the supreme reality and life into a fiction. He could reduce all systems of philosophy to a phrase, all existence to an epigram.24 Though Wilde certainly did not think of himself as common, in De Profundis he does not associate banality of thought only with the lower classes. He says that the thoughts of most people are secondhand, and he implies the same about their feelings. Their lives are forms of mimicry, their passions are quotations from the feelings of others. From other contexts in the letter, it is obvious that Wilde applied this rule to Douglas and most especially to Queensberry, if not to the entire British ruling class. In the passage in question, he constructs an image of Christ as one who pities the poor far less than he pities the rich, who have been enslaved by things. He does not suffer from any Nietzschean fantasy of a link between nobility of character and aristocracy. Wilde’s evaluation of Christ may seem antithetical to Nietzsche’s; but while admitting that the morality of Christ was about sympathy, he also insists that Christ was the individualist par excellence. Furthermore, in telling people to forgive their enemies, Christ did not mean, according to Wilde, that they should sacrifice their lives for others. Forgiveness is not for the good of the other but for one’s own good. Then Wilde makes two peculiar propositions, which are connected in ways that may not be immediately apparent. While insisting that Christ did not promote altruism, Wilde also insists that the meaning of his teaching comes down to this proposition: there is no fundamental difference between one life and another, between the self and the other. From this viewpoint, he infers that Christ expanded the realm of human personality by showing that the history of each individual contains within itself the history of the world.25 Wilde’s epigrams and aphorisms attempt to overturn traditional common sense even as they refuse the obscurity of philosophy. They can be translated, at least as one possibility of reading, into the following good sense. Art tells the truth when it exposes the world for what it is, just as Wilde imagined that in De Profundis he was exposing Douglas to the truth about his own personality and class identity. But at the same time, art produces something that is false, in the sense that it offers an image of human experience that is better than anything one can find in the real world, and therefore criticizes the world for failing to live up to the falsehoods of art. As Wilde implied in ―The Decay

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of Lying,‖ the content of art is a beautiful falsehood that nonetheless can become a reality, can even become the truth, to the extent that life, in its endless quest for expression, must turn to the falsehoods of art in order to overcome itself, which means to reinterpret itself as the technique of selfenhancement.26 When he claims that he has reduced all philosophical systems to a phrase, Wilde implies that none of the conceptual edifices that philosophical discourse has produced has any impact on life until it has been transformed into art, since only art has the power to seduce life to its expression, either by forcing life to look at the truth about itself in art or by winning life over to a view of itself that it could never have imagined on its own. But what is life except those individuals who are alive? Wilde understands the individual as a singularity that is never strictly knowable by the other and that can’t be substituted for another; and yet, there is no essential difference between the life of one singularity and that of another— since the condition of life is singularity. In other words, the thing that is truly common to all individuals is their irreducible difference from one another, since without that difference there could be no change, no expansion, and, in Nietzsche’s sense, no form giving with its implicit reinterpretation of the singularities that make up the world. If there were no singularity, then life would have fully expressed itself long ago and thus have burned itself out, because nothing new would have been able to come into the world. Something like this perspective is Wilde’s understanding of the message of Christ. In De Profundis, Wilde suggests that the artist usually gives expression to that which already has a voice—a more refined expression that enhances the beauty of life, revising the common sense that makes life into mimicry and quotation and making it into something new. Life’s selfexpression, or common sense, is reshaped or revised by the singularity of the artist. But Christ did something even more remarkable. He gave expression to that which has no voice, to those whom centuries later Frantz Fanon would call the wretched of the earth; and Wilde makes a direct connection between those beings and the ones who live in silent oppression in the world of the British prison system. Christ, according to Wilde, chose self-consciously like an artist to make himself into an image—the Man of Sorrows—because he knew that no idea has any value until it has been translated into an image that enters the common language in which it can be interminably retranslated and recontextualized. 27 The power of this image to transform an antiquated common sense into something new is the history, not so much of Christianity, but of Christ as the image of human singularity, an image that has been reinterpreted throughout

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the last two thousand years. You imitate Christ in the way that life imitates art, not by mimicking his actions, but by discovering and giving expression to the singularity of the person you are. In this way, each individual uncovers in herself the history of the world, which is the gradual unfolding, through expression, of the singularity of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call the multitude, or the set of irreducible singularities that survive from one genealogical transformation to the next. The multitude is not the essence of human life but the antithesis of that—the irreducible force that cannot be contained by any historical, cultural or economic determination.28 In The Antichrist, Nietzsche refused to equate Christ with Christianity and saw him as someone who taught men how to live through his example, through a practice. The meaning of the life of Christ has more to do with the condition of the heart, with a refusal of hatred and resentment, with everything in human psychology that would become the ground of the slave morality, as Nietzsche understood it.29 Wilde, of course, would have no use for the concept of a slave morality for he sees more resentment of creative power in the British ruling class with its moralism than in the wretched of the earth. It follows from his perspective that Christ taught humankind to follow the Lacanian dictum that one should never give ground with regard to one’s desire. For Wilde, any social force that inhibits or disavows the singularity of the individual—whether it be labor for the poor or property for the rich—damages every other singularity by blocking self-expression as style. As Wilde stresses in ―Soul of Man,‖ a work of art is healthy when it expresses the beauty of its material, which comes from the temperament or inner life—that is, the personality—of the artist. The opposite of this perfection would be a style that is common in the sense of producing what the public wants rather than what the artist is.30 Such a rejection of the common is not a rejection of the common people or the common language. If one reads ―Soul of Man‖ carefully, it becomes clear that for Wilde the public is not necessarily the majority but rather an extension of the state—the same state that has the positive function, for Wilde, of producing what is useful, while the responsibility of the individual is to produce what is beautiful.31 In my judgment, the beautiful means the expression of singularity. It is not the antithesis of common sense but the mode of its stylistic transformation as language as well as the transvaluation of all those values that find their repository in ordinary language. The repression of singularity in any individual or group has a damaging effect on everyone else because it puts a stranglehold on ordinary language that becomes a block to everyone’s self-expression through style. The

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barbarity of the public for Wilde lies in its submission to authority to such an extent that it can no longer tolerate individualism. He believes that those who make up the public, however they are constituted, can become something more than the slaves of social convention, but they are prevented from doing so by the domination of institutional authority. During his time, the dominant institution of public opinion was the press, but today we would have to consider the media as well as the expanded educational institutions. Wilde even notes that the submission he describes is not limited to the uneducated, since the educated are perhaps even worse in their attempt to force new art into conformity with the standard of what art has been in the past.32 In other words, for Wilde socialism is not only the liberation of the poor through a redistribution of wealth but also the liberation of singularity from the domination of social institutions and the rigid conventions they promote. ―Soul of Man‖ anticipates the perspective of late Marxism and prophesizes some of the tragedies of actually existing socialism in the twentieth century. First, Wilde argues that private property should never be used to solve the problems of social and economic violence under the domination of capital—a view that prospectively criticizes timid forms of socialism or Keynesian economics. He understands that capital is a subjective force, a will to power in Nietzsche’s sense, which demands exploitation as the condition of its own being. Such exploitation, for Wilde as for Marx, inevitably means the repression of individuality. At the same time, Wilde could never tolerate an authoritarian form of socialism, since it would also damage the individual by forcing him or her into a form of obedience to the state that would be the antithesis of the creative autonomy that true socialism or communism should achieve.33 It would solve the problem of enslaving one social group by enslaving everyone. 34 Furthermore, in ―Soul of Man,‖ Wilde thoroughly debunks the work ethic when he insists that there is no great dignity in manual labor, which is mentally and morally degrading to the individual precisely to the extent that it represents an expenditure of energy without pleasure. This perspective makes an implicit distinction between, on the one hand, the creative expenditure of energy in order to realize the object of your desire, which would be a form of self-realization, and, on the other, the submission to wage slavery, in which you work for subsistence under someone else’s command in a way that may or may not be socially useful, much less beautiful. The class system with its wage slavery puts men into competition with machines, and thus turns man into a machine, instead of using machines as far as possible to liberate human beings

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from the necessity of meaningless labor that is not motivated by the autonomous will of the individual subject.35 Wilde has largely been taken as a precursor of the gay liberation movement in what Alan Sinfield has called the Wilde century. Sinfield effectively demonstrated the extent to which the late twentieth-century characterization of Wilde as the paradigm of ―the queer‖ fails to take into account the effect of Wilde’s trials in producing the categories for which he would then become the typical example. Before the category of the queer had emerged into a coherent social stereotype, its elements had appeared in Wilde’s writing as the mixing of genders (effeminacy), of class identity (leisure, idleness, luxury, insouciance), of values (immorality), and of styles (decadence, aestheticism).36 If one looks carefully into his writing, one discovers at the origin of contemporary gay identity a revolt against the class system and an implicit understanding that sexual oppression is an effect of that system. Wilde’s sexuality expressed his singularity in such a way that it forced him to recognize the violence, both real and symbolic, of a social system that worked systematically at erasing the singularity of each individual human being, regardless of their socio-economic status and material conditions. If Wilde was skeptical about the ability of the lower classes to achieve any form of creative autonomy in their material circumstances, he had to reconsider that position as a result of his prison experience. He came to see the poor as a reservoir of latent creative power. By becoming one of them, he recognized the creative forces that lay buried beneath the institutions of social oppression, including most dramatically the prison system. (In this way, he anticipated the appearance of someone like Jean Genet.) His life demonstrates that class struggle is the struggle for individual autonomy, not exclusively or even primarily in the form of a redistribution of wealth—which, though necessary, may be nothing more than the attempt to use private property to cure the ills of private property if it does not question the system itself—but in the form of creating the material conditions of personal growth and self-overcoming in response to the commands of each individual’s own desire as the expression of their singularity. Better than Nietzsche, Wilde understood that any freedom that depends on the exploitation of other classes, on the control of other forms of autonomous desire, ultimately undermines itself by creating a dependence that destroys the ground of self-expression and self-overcoming. Whatever damages the singularity of one person damages the singularity of the multitude. Though Wilde’s impact on formal philosophy may not approach Nietzsche’s, his influence on the twentieth -century revolution in

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common sense, particularly in the realm of sexual values, cannot be overestimated. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, he created a character whose wealth, social power, and cultural distinction become forces of selfdestruction precisely through his inability to recognize the singularity of others. Yet even Dorian Gray expresses some of Wilde’s most common sense—a sense that also resonates with Nietzsche’s—when he thinks to himself that no theory of life can ever be a substitute for life itself, which he defines as action, but action that must always take the form of experiment.37 Though the novel can be read as a moral lesson, it is also an experiment in the risks that Wilde himself ran as an artist who was willing to cross class boundaries and transgress traditional sexual identities in order to achieve self-realization. Experiment, in this context, means that life is a practice that can never find justification through an appeal to something outside of itself. In the preface to Dorian Gray, Wilde said thought and language have an instrumental relation to artistic production, which means art does not express a thought as its message but uses thought to confront life with its own possibilities beyond good and evil, beyond any kind of moral or ethical program that would dictate the values of life in advance.38 Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde, or at least one of his possibilities; and his self-destruction through a failed experiment—including an experiment in thought—is the risk that life requires as one of its conditions. Stated differently, the paradox and perversity of Dorian Gray’s life as the expression of Oscar Wilde’s life call into question any strict separation of art and life. It is not that art mirrors life, which would contradict Wilde’s dictum in the preface; but rather art is the manifestation of life, which continually reorganizes its own material being into new forms of self-realization.39 Thought and language are really the same thing, elements of material being, and art is nothing but thought and language brought back into relation with life. The meaning of Dorian Gray is not the moral that one can derive from it but the enhanced understanding of the risks and possibilities of life that it articulates. Though this kind of experiment is crucial to all the modernist writing that comes after Wilde, the spirit closest to Wilde’s own—a spirit whose art explores the ground of life as experiment, as improvisation and performance with respect to class, gender, and sexuality—belongs to D. H. Lawrence. The thing that distinguishes Lawrence from the other great modernists who came after Wilde—James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, for example—is the need for theory. Not the need for theory on the part of critics in order to make sense out of the encrypted modernist text, but the need for theory as a driving force

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within literature that responds to a world in which the common sense of the present has failed. Such theory, however, is not a force that transcends life or substitutes for it. Rather, it is a manifestation of life that, by refusing the transcendence attributed to philosophy, necessarily operates as an attempt to rewrite common sense. A modernist like Joyce uses ordinary language as his material and exposes the limitations of that material in the manner of ideology critique. As Louis Althusser once argued, such a writer offers a view of ideology, rather than a challenge to or endorsement of it. In a book like Dorian Gray, Wilde does more than give us a view. He practices an ideology experimentally in order to discover where it will take him and the reader. Rather than creating distance, Wilde experiments with himself, with his own desires, values, and cultural capital. Joyce does that to some extent, but he still maintains a clear distinction between the artist and the art—a distinction technically defined by the use of irony in the construction of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and the many versions of himself in Finnegans Wake. Lawrence is closer to Wilde in the sense that with each new novel he reinvents himself with the aim of trying out a new identity, a new interpretation of who he is. Joyce explores the modalities of style in order to suggest the ontological ground that lies beyond language and remains irreducible to it. The object of Joyce’s writing never really changes, only the different modes of its representation. Lawrence, by contrast, is more interested in the appearance of things and constantly improvises and experiments with his own identity and the world of that identity in order to explore not the givenness of being but the process of life that stumbles forward without absolute truths except those it has invented in order to enhance itself. Because these Nietzschean improvisations and experiments almost invariably fail, they have the appearance of ideological constructions that the artist has made visible to us; but the discomfort that Lawrence systematically creates in the reader has to do with the awareness that the relation between his language and its ontological content is almost never truly ironic. With Joyce, there is no truth beyond the multiple perspectives of the decentered text. With Lawrence, each text is a provisional construction of the truth that will give ground to the next experiment only because this one has failed. Joyce exposes common sense, while Lawrence tries to rewrite it. The difficulty of understanding Lawrence has nothing to do with understanding the meaning of his words. On the contrar y, his words are so clear that they have outraged many groups, such as women, people of different races, nationalities, and religions, people of the left and of the right (if they ever read him), moralists and immoralists, and

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so forth. Any attempt to defend Lawrence against such accusations is useless, in my opinion; but then I also think it is useless to imagine that Conrad and Faulkner were anything but thoroughgoing racists, or that Mr. Leopold Bloom, the womanly man of Joyce’s Ulysses, is not at least partially a Jewish stereotype, just as his wife Molly, whose mother may have been Jewish, is a gender stereotype, the earth mother, with a tinge of the sensuality associated with anti-Semitic myths of Jewish women. The difference, however, is that Lawrence wrote all of his ideas down in the clearest possible language; and though he was never consistent and constantly called into question his own views, there can be little doubt about some of the nonsense that passed through his mind and out of his pen concerning sexes, races, classes, nations, and so forth. One of his most obsessive complaints was about democracy, and that may be the place to bring into focus his attempt to rewrite common sense even as he sought to distance himself from the masses, who would have been its foundation. In 1919, Lawrence wrote the essay ―Democracy,‖ which was his most succinct response to the experience of the First World War. ―Democracy‖ is divided into four parts: ―The Average,‖ ―Identity,‖ ―Personality,‖ and ―Individualism.‖ For Lawrence, the concept of the average man lies at the foundation of democracy and socialism, which are about promoting human equality at the risk of erasing human individuality. Such a concept in his view is a mathematical abstraction, which serves to compare one human being with another. It is like money when it is used to compare a leg of mutton with the poetry of John Keats. The average is an arbitrary measure. In other words, it is the outcome of what a Marxist like Georg Lukàcs would call reification, the social process by which human beings are reduced to a thing-like essence measured by a social calculus. Although Lawrence didn’t believe in strict equality, he certainly did recognize that all human beings have the same physical makeup, and he saw some value in the concept of the average when it referred to human material needs. Like Wilde, he saw the state as a glorified housekeeper that has the job of attending to the average—that is to say, seeing to it that everyone has the basic material requirements for life: clothing, food, housing, the space for sexual interaction and reproduction as well as for pleasure and play. The state exists to govern these material conditions of existence, which in effect means to manage the distribution of wealth. This is all that national identity meant to Lawrence. All the great nations serve no other purpose, or rather, any other purpose they serve is an expropriation of political power at the expense of the individual.40 Though he would have shunned a term like communism,

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he was a communist to the extent of believing that the condition of the greatest individuality is the highest collectivity, something yet to emerge in the modern world. Wyndham Lewis saw him as a primitive communist, without theory or any form of political indoctrination; but he did have a theory even if he did not couch it in the language of philosophy.41 In effect, Lawrence had nothing against the principle of social equality as long as it addresses the physical conditions for creative individuality. The average should never be taken as a thing in itself, or as a sort of general human nature to which people must be made to conform. When it becomes such a category, it alienates individuals from their own desires in the same way the abstract concept of labor power, in the Marxist theoretical paradigm, represents the alienation of workers from their own creative autonomy by reducing it to a commodity on the labor market. Lawrence’s critique of identity follows the same logic. He distinguishes between two forms of identity, one of which is related to the average and the other to its dialectical antithesis. He talks about a pitcher made in a factory as having a material identity precisely to the extent that each pitcher resembles every other pitcher. For Lawrence, this notion of identity may work for pitchers as things that serve the purpose of satisfying a material need; but if one applies the same principle to a human being, it perverts the other form of identity, which his own language would associate with the concept of singularity. Once again, human identity is singular to the extent that it is incommensurable, a quality that emerges only after you have subtracted every sort of abstraction, every social interpellation, from the individual. Lawrence argues that identity as such—this identity without concepts—precedes any form of knowledge, and this would suggest that he refers to a kind of raw vitalism, which he also calls a soul.42 One can argue that Lawrence has committed the error, as Judith Butler might point out, of positing the body as a material ground that escapes any form of cultural determination—that represents a kind of human essence, the immovable foundation of social being. There is some truth in this criticism, since Lawrence certainly did celebrate a kind of life force that he described sometimes as an excess—beyond the social—and sometimes as a void, a primal lack implied by raw desire that has no definable origin. However, you can hardly call something an essence that cannot be known, and the best one can do is to recognize that for Lawrence identity as singularity corresponds to something like the Lacanian concept of the Real. It is not a thing but a relation. It cannot be known, but it can be postulated as the impossibility of knowing. In Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, Lawrence defined the unconscious

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of an individual as unique; and though he used words that suggest an essence to human nature, he then went on to say that such an unconscious singularity cannot be defined, analyzed, or even conceived. If it cannot be conceived, then how can Lawrence formulate it or give it a name? His answer is simply that it is a matter of experience.43 I want to linger for a moment on Lawrence’s formulation of the relation between experience and language. In the forward to Fantasia of the Unconscious, perhaps his most problematic book for feminists and Marxists alike, he refers to his own philosophy, somewhat ironically, as amateurish and naïve when he cites some of the deprecating remarks of his critics. His ―philosophical‖ writings, he claims, are attempts to rethink the implications of his novels and poems, which flow directly out of his experience. He associates that experience with his passion, which implies that experience itself is not simply objective phenomena but something mediated by the subject and saturated with its feelings and desires. Yet he immediately contradicts himself by saying that art necessarily depends on a metaphysic, though he qualifies this remark by suggesting that such a philosophy may be unconscious. From the context, one can infer that by philosophy Lawrence in fact means common sense, for it is a thought that is indistinguishable from feeling, that all men can understand, and that governs their lives at a given moment in historical time.44 In Fantasia, Lawrence further postulates a Platonic theory of education with its presupposition of a natural hierarchy or class system. Since authentic common sense, or the philosophy of the masses, must derive from their spontaneous experience, he concludes that knowledge for the masses is a dynamic but mediated translation of experience into symbols and myth. Since these symbols and mythologies require interpretation in order to become practical directives for social organization and collective life, there must be, according to Lawrence, a designated class of individuals who specialize in mental consciousness but whose strength lies precisely in the fact that they never mistake the symbolic language of mental consciousness for the real thing, for spontaneous life.45 Lawrence’s concept of such a class resembles Gramsci’s notion of an elite group of organic intellectuals; and if this seems improbable, one must keep in mind that Lawrence’s idea has nothing to do with guaranteeing wealth and privilege to the few but rather with recognizing the necessity for some degree of specialization in intellectual work as one of the conditions of a collective life that would support the individualism of the many. In ―Democracy,‖ Lawrence insists that true identity cannot be expressed in language, or the logos, which suggests that life is a force

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beyond language, at its limit.46 Then he goes on to the question of personality, which curiously corresponds with the Lacanian category of the imaginary, since it refers not to what individuals are but to what they appear to be—how they project themselves to others. Though Lawrence’s language makes it sound as if this projection is the strategy of individuals, something they create to hide their true identity, he makes it clear, when he refers to it as something inherited from family and a preceding generation, that it comes from the outside—that it is the imprint of culture on the incommensurable identity of the individual. He sees it as a sort of mask and calls it an ideal, which would make it comparable to what Freud called the ideal ego—the image of social identity as a norm or regulatory principle that captures a subject from the outside. It is therefore an abstraction of authentic and unrepresentable being. Interestingly, Lawrence refers to someone with a recognizable personality as a materialist because she would be constructed out of ideals, which could be thought of as reified concepts or representations—in other words, Lawrence’s way of saying ideology. Certainly, Lawrence presupposes that beneath such a masquerade is the living self that would be authentic; and yet he would call into question any attempt to finalize the representation of such a being in language or any other form of expression.47 This means that one has to take everything Lawrence says about men and women, about races, nationalities, classes, and so forth, with a grain of salt, even from the perspective of his own philosophical understanding. When Lawrence concludes his essay with a meditation on individualism, he makes it clear that, while he disagrees with Walt Whitman’s concept of democracy to the extent that it idealizes the average and celebrates the masses as a unified identity or the One, he nonetheless takes from Whitman the idea that democracy is something that has never yet existed for the whole of humanity. It is a way of life based on new values that go beyond the ideals or norms of the past and that privilege the spontaneity of the individual. Lawrence completely rejects Oneness as an ideal or norm and posits in its place the supremacy of desire, which is always specific to the individual. By contrast with an ideal, desire comes from inside the individual and cannot be reduced to the part of a whole. On this latter point, Lawrence, like Wilde, anticipates the Lacanian ethic of desire and associates the ideal with something like the Foucauldian principle of the norm as a disciplinary force that governs individuals as if they were machines. Furthermore, he postulates what could be considered an anticipation of Lacan’s distinction between demand and desire in so far as he considers two forms of fall with respect to the autonomy of desire: lust

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and idealism, which really come down to two aspects of one process. In effect, desire’s autonomy is subverted when it is reduced to a raw appetite, lust, which is locked into an idealization such as the one that Lacan identifies with the proof of love. For Lacan, when the satisfaction of a need is consumed by its function as a proof of love, then the need in its particularity has been erased by demand, and desire as an irreducible movement toward a goal that cannot be named and always remains out of reach—desire, in other words, as the life force itself—is repressed. When Lawrence speaks of the lust for power, success, and love, he means something like what Lacan means by demand; and he implies that the satisfaction of any material need—including sexual satisfaction—becomes impossible when the individual is in the grips of lust because lust is inherently mixed up with idealization and the thing or experience in itself never matches that ideal.48 In a moment, I will illustrate this process through reference to one of Lawrence’s masterpieces, Women in Love. In the interest of brevity, rather than trying to sum up critical reactions to the work, I will describe my recent experience of teaching it at the graduate level. The responses of my students, though not always as sophisticated as some of the critical readings, nonetheless demonstrate the different reactions readers have to Lawrence and allow me to situate some of those reactions in a dialectical relation to Lawrence’s thought and language. My graduate seminar on Lawrence focused on the contradictions of class in his major novels, and my general intention was to treat Lawrence’s writing as a symptom of the class system that was entering a new crisis in the twentieth century. This crisis found manifestation in the fact that someone like D. H. Lawrence could even exist—that the son of English coal miner could become a significant and influential writer, whose works are considered contributions to high culture rather than mass culture. Yet, at the same time, some of the bizarre contradictions in Lawrence’s own discourse doubtlessly express contradictions in the class background that shaped his formation as a writing subject. Just as Bourdieu noted that one of the characteristics of working-class speech is expressiveness, by which he meant a refusal of subtlety and indirection in the practice of communication, one can argue that Lawrence has a tendency (in comparison with writers like Joyce, Woolf, or Henry James) to value direct expressions of social attitudes that can be identified with common sense. This inevitably leads to contradictions that are difficult to explain. For example, in the last section of ―Democracy,‖ Lawrence makes an important clarification of his criticism of the concept of equality when he notes that while there is no such thing as equality between men (the word he uses),

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there is also no such thing as inequality. No one is equal or unequal to anyone else because, as he has already stressed repeatedly in this essay, true identity is unique and incommensurable. For Lawrence, comparison derives from the social, the world that he describes as material and mechanical— what I would call, after Marx, the economic foundation of society that would include both the social relations (the class system) and the means of production (including science and technology). He goes on to conclude that democracy—as he understands it, but not as the word is commonly used— has the purpose of allowing men and women—he distinguishes between the genders—to achieve spontaneous self-realization beyond any concept of equality or inequality, without comparison. He argues against the determination of one human being by another; and in the rest of the essay he makes it clear that such determination is necessarily socio-economic, particularly through what he calls the last or most important of all ideals— property. Lawrence doesn’t offer what you could call a scientific definition of property, but he clearly links the desire to possess property with the desire to prevent someone else from possessing it—hence the term ―private property.‖ This understanding may seem naïve, but it is a common-sense way of saying that a capitalist class cannot accumulate superfluous wealth without repressing the accumulation of wealth in other class locations and controlling any technology that could have the effect of producing more wealth and autonomy for the general population. Still, when Lawrence argues that no human being has the right to determine or limit the autonomy of another human being, he specifically mentions both genders. Not only no man, but no woman should be subject to determination by another human being.49 Yet, in Fantasia of the Unconscious and in other places, Lawrence does exactly the opposite of what he says one should do. He treats gender categories in the most reductive manner, and, near the end of Fantasia, calls for a sexual war between men and women that would force the latter to submit to male leadership. But then he adds that men should do this only if they have a basis for leadership, any social vision of where both men and women need to go. If men have no vision—and elsewhere in Fantasia he makes it clear that they don’t—they might as well let women go where they want.50 Nonetheless, he repeats ad nauseam throughout Fantasia that women have been corrupted by self-consciousness while implying that the natural leaders of mankind are those who can engage in some degree of self-consciousness, mental consciousness, without succumbing to the view that everything that really matters is in the head. Oddly enough, he calls himself a relativist, and here as elsewhere in his writing, distances

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himself from any form of absolutism in thought, while insisting that the individual is absolute in himself, as Max Stirner argued. Nonetheless, true individuality can be achieved—not through love, brotherhood, or any other relation that reeks of equality—but only through service and obedience to leadership, ultimately to an aristocratic class in a pyramidal social structure that culminates in the supreme leader at the top.51 Obviously, this smells of fascism, as well as misogyny, and thoroughly contradicts everything Lawrence says about the irreducibility of the individual man or woman. It is a fairly simple matter to find statements in Lawrence’s writing that qualify his more outrageous views. For example, in many of his essays, he distinguishes between the leadership he admires and the bullying he despises. In the essay ―Blessed Are the Powerful,‖ Lawrence criticizes the concept of the will to power when it refers to any kind of bullying. He makes fun of Mussolini (though he fails to recognize in the mid-twenties the real threat of Italian fascism) and defines power not as bossing, bullying, or lording it over others, but simply as the ability to do something, as is suggested by the French verb pouvoir. For Lawrence, power actually involves setting aside the will and submitting to something that comes to you from the outside—like a talent or a gift, a vision, and so forth. This kind of power transcends love, but it does not exclude love, which, one can infer, is itself a kind of power, an ability to engage in relationship. In its purest form, relationship necessarily entails equality, or, if you will, a balance of power. Power is necessarily unequal, while love requires equality; and though Lawrence does not spell this distinction out in great detail, he implies that relationship involves a mutual exchange, which is equal not in the sense that both partners have the same abilities but in the sense that their powers are not measured by any external standard.52 There is equality between two incommensurable and irreducible beings, each with their own forms of power. Women in Love was written after Lawrence became disillusioned by the First World War and by the new forms of mass propaganda and social manipulation that emerged in England in response to the wartime situation. It explores the issue of relationship and the question of power several years before Lawrence reached the formulations to which I just referred, though his theories are present in a form that is perhaps closer to his real thought as far as there is a dialectical interaction between his political sense and sensibility. The novel explores these issues through its focus on the love relationships between two couples, who also interact with each other. The two women are sisters, and the two men engage in a form of homosocial bonding that has

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strong overtones of homoerotic desire. When I recently taught this novel, the student reactions to it were diverse according to a specific pattern. Many of the women and some of the men thought, to greater and lesser degrees, that the women in the novel were stereotypes that reflected Lawrence’s growing misogyny during the period when he wrote the novel. Ursula Brangwen, despite her struggle toward independence in The Rainbow, appears in the later novel to occupy a shockingly dependent position in her relationship with Rupert Birkin, who is loosely based on Lawrence though the reader learns little about his social origin. He probably is not from a strictly working-class background since he has an independent income apart from his work as a school inspector. Gudrun Brangwen, who is a minor figure in The Rainbow, emerges as a much more complicated character in this novel. Many of the women in my seminar thought that she was demonized by Lawrence and ultimately blamed for the tragic end of the story with the implicit suicide of her lover, Gerald Crich, a member of the industrial bourgeoisie who has turned against his father’s paternalistic relation to the working class and uses his considerable managerial power in order to subordinate the coal miners to a more rigidly controlled system of production that reduces them, in a way that recalls the Fordist revolution in the United States, to the status of cogs in a machine.53 One can argue that Gerald’s managerial power has been abused, from Lawrence’s perspective, when it is used to exploit an entire class for personal profit. He doesn’t recognize his power as a gift that is meant to foster the enhancement of autonomy and individuality among the masses and uses it instead for the opposite purpose. This understanding of power also translates into his relation with Gudrun. Though he is sexually attracted to her and may feel some degree of love for her, he unconsciously tries to force her into becoming the instrument of his lust, not only the object of his sexual gratification but the answer to his demand for an absolute proof of love that would erase his fear of death and would fill the void in his being that derives from the instrumentalization of his own power for purposes of domination. In effect, Gerald is not the master but the slave of his power. By exploiting the coal miners who work for him, he destroys his ability (pouvoir) to enter into a social relationship and reduces the other—in this case, a class—to a mere instrument of his social position. In making the other into a thing, Gerald also makes himself into a thing. In my judgment, Lawrence always tacitly believed something that he articulated late in his life when he wrote a review of Trigant Burrow’s The Social Basis of Consciousness . Though Lawrence insisted on

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a radical concept of individualism, he never mistook the individual for a personality, which he saw as a masquerade. By the same token, individualism is not the expression of self-interest. For Lawrence, there is good individualism and bad individualism. The good individualism has no consciousness of itself, which ironically enables it to give free expression to the drive toward social relationship. In this review and elsewhere, Lawrence’s terms are confused; but his basic distinction is between a drive toward interaction with others that comes out of a desire that has not been conceptualized, and the feeling of alienation from others, a bad individualism, that derives from the process of normalization when human beings construct a picture of themselves and then try to force life and the incommutable being of the other to conform to that picture.54 Though Lawrence doesn’t formulate the problem this clearly, he seems to say that self-consciousness gives ground to false individuality that sets the self in opposition to the other, while social consciousness expresses the desire of a human being to meet the other on the common ground of their irreducible difference. In other words, the demand for the same, for uniformity and normality, produces alienation, while the acceptance of irreducible difference creates a pure form of relationship, which is the highest form of social consciousness for Lawrence. One could infer from these premises that self-consciousness produces the will to dominate the other, while social consciousness creates the condition for a relationship based on mutual respect between individuals. Gerald Crich cannot imagine a relationship that is not founded on domination in one form or another. From the beginning, his attraction to Gudrun has to do with the challenge she presents to him as someone who tacitly resists his power and confronts him with her own. This is not to say that the desire to love her in his case is inauthentic, but it cannot lead to a true relationship in Lawrence’s sense of that term. It can never transcend the war that requires one party to impose its will on the other. Gerald’s understanding of power does not allow for the possibility that there is any other kind of power than his own; so when he tries to create a relationship with Gudrun, he feels compelled to force her into some sort of submission and uses her as a kind of maternal substitute (since we know that his own mother is not very maternal). As I mentioned before, some of the women in my seminar thought of Gudrun as a misogynist caricature. Personally, it does seem to me that Lawrence expresses more compassion for Gerald than he does for Gudrun, though one also needs to keep in mind that Gudrun is the one artist in the quartet of characters and that Lawrence may be using

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her to examine some of his own ideas and feelings about the social situation of the artist. The relationship between Gerald and Gudrun reproduces the Hegelian master-slave relationship with its dialectical inversion of power. Gudrun starts out in the weaker position that Gerald tries to exploit when he hires her to teach drawing and sculpture to his sister Winifred. When she accepts the post, Gudrun knows that it is tantamount to becoming his lover; and their bond is initially expressed through a salary, which already makes Gudrun economically dependent on Gerald.55 Admittedly, when Ursula marries Birkin, they quit their jobs and intend to live on his small independent income; but this arrangement comes only after the two of them have worked through their relationship toward the recognition of mutual autonomy, and Birkin never uses his money as a means of controlling Ursula. To state it simply, she trusts in their relationship, a feeling that Gudrun never achieves with Gerald, who demonstrated earlier in the novel, after he had slept with Pussum, that he regulates his relationships with women through the use of money. 56 At the beginning of their attraction, when Gudrun watches Gerald demonstrate his mastery by abusively forcing his horse toward a moving train, she is angered but also thrilled by what she sees, which suggests that she is attracted to Gerald’s power in the negative sense—his power to dominate.57 This doesn’t mean, however, that she wants to be dominated but rather that she accepts the challenge of the contest because, like Gerald, she cannot understand power as anything but a form of domination. When she slaps him at the Water Party, Gerald responds that she has struck the first blow, to which she immediately answers that she will also strike the last.58 Later in the boat with Gudrun, Gerald momentarily submits to her control; but after the tragedy of his sister’s drowning, which he seems to blame on his loss of control, things are never the same.59 From that point forward, their relationship is a war; and even when Gudrun accepts Gerald into her bed on the night he walks through the mud of a graveyard on the way to the Brangwen home, she associates his power as well as his love with death. Indeed, Gerald comes to her, not so much in search of a relationship, as in response to his fear of death, which he cannot master. 60 Lawrence strongly implies that a refusal to submit to death as the inevitable end of life creates a strange kind of refusal of life as well as a passion for death, as if in making love to Gudrun, Gerald actually makes love to death via a kind of transference. Instinctively, Gudrun knows this, and this knowledge gives her power over this dominant man. Furthermore, Gudrun’s relation to art is similar to her relation to love. When she meets Loerke, she discovers art as a weapon that can be used to serve the interests of

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negative power—in this case, industrial capitalism—as well as a means for self-aggrandizement through the formation of an aesthetic elite, such as the one she and Loerke imagine they have formed through their bond. The fantasy of such an elite was always a temptation for Lawrence—hence his constant ranting against any concept of equality and his dream of a natural aristocracy. It should also be mentioned that Birkin expresses the view at one point that Loerke is probably Jewish, an anti-Semitic reduction that should not blind us to the fact that the aesthetic will to power that one finds in both Gudrun and Loerke is ultimately Lawrence’s. Like Loerke, Lawrence came from a lower-class background and had to struggle his way toward social recognition as an artist—a struggle that in some ways never ended as long as he lived.61 Gudrun, as my students recognized, comes off more negatively than Gerald does because the latter commits suicide. Had it been the other way around, their sympathies would probably have been reversed. But then there is also the question of Birkin’s love for Gerald, whether one takes it to be homosocial or plainly homosexual as I believe it is. Furthermore, the obvious failure of the relationship between Gudrun and Gerald creates the impression that Ursula and Birkin are a raving success, which belies the problems that still lie in their relationship, or any relationship, as Lawrence understands it. In the ―Mino‖ chapter, Birkin tells Ursula that he does not want love but something beyond love, while Ursula insists that love is all there is. When they watch Birkin’s cat Mino bully a stray female cat into submission, Birkin approves wholeheartedly of the act while Ursula is revolted. She calls it a Wille zur Macht; and Birkin agrees that the Nietzschean formula suggests something base and petty but insists that there is also a volonté de pouvoir that is different, because it understands power as ability rather than domination. Later Ursula catches him in the use of a metaphor suggesting that women are the satellites of men, but he rejects any such intention and counters with the celebrated Laurentian figure of the two stars that balance each other in a conjunction.62 My students felt that Birkin got the better of Ursula in these arguments, at least from the viewpoint of the author; but it seemed more complicated than that to me. By refusing to go along with Birkin’s endless speculations and efforts to transcend common sense, Ursula remains relatively practical and demands a more material understanding of what love and relationship can be. Yet at one point, she begins to think of submission to Birkin as a kind of death that she wants to embrace; and one can’t help but think that relationship, as Lawrence understands it, must necessarily be a kind of death in the sense that the individual is

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transformed by the relation to another.63 In contrast, Gerald’s passion for death is not a desire for transformation but an absolute refusal of change and even of death, which he makes into a frozen abstraction of life. In the ―Moony‖ chapter, Birkin realizes that if Gerald represents the possibility of death by cold abstraction, there is another way that is more free, one that he rather naively associates with the culture of sensation that he projects onto the African statuette in the London apartment he shares with Halliday. He imagines that such a culture involves submission to the other, which ironically becomes the condition of greater individuality.64 To Hermione Roddice, Ursula insists that she does not want to submit to Birkin’s theories when he asks her to marry him not for love but for some reason that he can’t put into ordinary language. Hermione likes the idea of being Birkin’s slave, though the novel has already made obvious that her submission would really be a strategy of domination.65 Ursula is more honest; and in the ―Excurse‖ chapter, she finally has it out with Birkin. She pinpoints the contradiction between his abstract spirituality and carnal corruption, which she associates with his relation to Hermione. Yet their conflict is resolved by an act of physical love that many critics regard as a form of anal sex with Ursula in the active role. Through this, she reaches the knowledge of a sexual relationship beyond love or passion and ironically achieves a displacement of Birkin’s phallic identity when she discovers another sexual source in his physical being.66 Far from being a doormat, Ursula—and Lawrence through her— already anticipates the criticism of Erica Jong and a generation of women who found Lawrence’s poetic idealizations of the sexual act to be wild, ridiculous, and even oppressive fantasies. Yet at the moment when Ursula apparently submits to these fantasies, she discovers something beyond the phallic—perhaps one could even say, something that deconstructs the binary opposition between so-called masculine and feminine sexuality. The novel never attempts to reconcile the differences between Ursula and Birkin—either of feeling or of thought—at the conceptual level, through what Lawrence would call mental consciousness. Rather, their relationship survives and thrives precisely on the dialectical tension between them that produces something new—not a new wholeness or being but rather newness in each individual that derives from the interaction with the other. By way of analogy, one could define their relation to one another as what William Blake called the relation of contraries, which creates a productive tension that makes progression or change possible. The relation between Gudrun and Gerald would be what Blake called negation. No productive tension is possible because the identity of one is constituted

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through the negation of the other. They must either separate or kill one another. By contrast, the final exchange between Ursula and Birkin reminds us that their relationship is never complete; it always remains open to challenge and a new beginning. Birkin refuses to believe that the love between a man and a woman is the only kind of love; and though ultimately he failed to develop the kind of relationship with Gerald that he wanted, he continues to believe in its possibility.67 Now from a twentieth-first-century perspective, one can see this as a subtle criticism of Ursula for being ideologically skewed when it comes to the recognition of different modes of sexual desire. Anyone familiar with Lawrence’s biography knows that he struggled with his own homophobia in real life, even as he explored the homoerotic feelings of his characters in several of his novels and short fictions, though most pointedly in Women in Love. Before her relationship with Birkin, Ursula had her own homosexual experience with one of her teachers in The Rainbow; and it ended when she had what could be called a homophobic reaction to her lover, which also involved a rejection of primitive feminism. Ursula cynically arranged the marriage between Winifred Inger and Tom Brangwen, her uncle, but still concluded that the former was a hypocrite whose progressive views on women would not prevent her from marrying the manager of a colliery and participating in the culture of the machine that dehumanizes the British working class, male and female alike.68 Ursula’s perspective in this context is probably that of Lawrence, and one could even take her reaction to Birkin’s mourning over Gerald’s death as the representation of Lawrence’s remaining ambivalence about homosexual love. Nonetheless, Birkin’s love for Gerald is unambiguously homoerotic, and though Gerald cannot openly reciprocate, the text suggests quite clearly that he has similar feelings about Birkin. The Prologue to an early draft of Women in Love makes Birkin’s homosexuality more or less explicit.69 Lawrence removed this text while completing what has come to be known as the first version of Women in Love in 1916.70 Interestingly, as one of my seminar students (Gordon Kuehl) noted in a paper, both the first and final versions of Women in Love strongly suggest the homoerotic feelings between Birkin and Gerald, though the difference is that, in the final version, Lawrence actually intensified some of the homoerotic imagery and reversed the relation between the two male characters. In the first version, despite his apparent homosexuality, Birkin resisted Gerald’s overt homosexual overtures, while in the final version Birkin becomes the one who is more open to a homosexual relationship, something Gerald cannot entertain for at

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least two reasons. The first is a conventionality that won’t allow him to admit, even between friends, to homosexual feelings. The second is his unwillingness to enter any relationship that would not permit him to assert his power as a member of the social and economic elite. Any relationship to Birkin would have to be on Birkin’s terms, at least to the extent that it would have to entail a refusal of the social calculus that makes Gerald superior to Birkin with reference to class. Furthermore, there is the strong implication that the class system undermines the sexual freedom of all these characters—not so much the freedom to do what they want (say, in the manner of Wilde’s Dorian Gray) but rather the freedom to pursue the desire for something that cannot be named, something beyond love and the desire to be one with another in the conventional sense. When Birkin refuses to go along with Ursula’s rejection of any other kind of love, he not only leaves the door open to another kind of relationship but also asserts the strength of their relationship, which is not founded on the hegemony of social convention or even the belief that the two of them can ever fully know each other in the sense of having mastered and fulfilled each other’s desire. They can never be One. The only character whose desire is fulfilled in this novel is Gerald’s because he is dead at the end. You might say that Gerald is finally done in by his own demand for the end of desire through its fulfillment. Birkin’s understanding of the relationship between a man and a woman isn’t that different from his understanding of the relationship between man and man (or presumably woman and woman) or any individual and the other members of society. Birkin articulates his politics with respect to class society early in the novel and in direct opposition to the positions of the two characters who represent the economically privileged classes, Gerald and Hermione. Gerald argues for the work ethic with the view that all members of society, male and female, are defined socially by the work they do, though his attitude toward the men who work for him suggests that Gerald happily confuses the general social good with that which benefits him privately by enhancing his wealth and social power. Hermione naively argues that all members of society are spiritually equal and that they are all One—a position that Birkin flatly contradicts. When he says that all human beings are unequal in spirit, he means that—if we take this to be a version of Lawrence’s own view in ―Democracy‖—they are not comparable to one another in terms of their abilities, neither equal nor unequal, though in any particular social context some abilities will be more valuable than others. All human beings, men and women, are equal only according to a statistical logic that pertains to their

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basic need for nourishment, shelter, sexual satisfaction, perhaps some aesthetic needs, and so forth—what Lawrence calls the average in the essay. The state, if it must exist, should be established on the fact of irreducible difference. No man or woman is better than any other, not because they are equal but because they are other, beyond comparison. Finally, Birkin tells Hermione that he wants every individual to have a proper share of the world’s wealth so they will leave him alone.71 In effect, he calls for a redistribution of wealth not in the interest of abstract justice but as the condition for absolute individualism. No one can be an individual unless everyone has the material capacity to develop the same relative autonomy. Lawrence’s racism, gender biases, and criticism of class warfare should be understood in relation to his general demand for the redistribution of wealth. This doesn’t mean that Lawrence supported communism—or Bolshevism, which is the term he would have used—at least in so far as he understood it. He didn’t support communism because he believed that it was fundamentally no different from capitalism in that it promoted the idealization of work and the worker and organized the whole of society into a factory instead of calling for the abolition of the division of labor. At the time that he was writing, there was little going on in the Soviet Union or in the programmatic demands of Western communists—at least those whose message might have reached Lawrence—that would have contradicted such a perspective. As early as his Study of Thomas Hardy in 1914, Lawrence made a clear distinction between creative work that enhances life—such as that of the artist—and the work that results from the division of labor. According to him, the latter transforms 99.9 percent of all human beings—including professionals like doctors, teachers, lawyers, and so forth—into machines that are anti-life.72 Though Lawrence believed that one of the goals of human labor as a collective process is to reduce the amount of necessary work, he still believed that some people can do no better than physical labor, while others have a greater capacity for creative life. He even admitted that machines are valuable to the extent that they reduce the amount of necessary labor. But he despised a system that uses machines not to reduce necessary labor time but to enhance the profit of the few. He did not blame capitalists exclusively but the system that makes personal wealth the goal of every individual, including the worker who is willing to slave away ten hours a day in pursuit of the fantasy that he or she too can become rich.73 This is why he did not always trust class warfare, because he thought that the working classes are usually motivated by the desire for personal wealth and not by the desire to transform the

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system. Though Lawrence’s reaction against his childhood sometimes made him insensitive to the concrete situation of wage laborers like his father, he was not completely wrong to recognize that the working classes participate in their own exploitation by giving their consent to the dominant ideologies, including the work ethic. In this way, he already anticipates Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, and similar views appear again in his later writings. For Lawrence in Study of Thomas Hardy, work is positively valuable when it extends human consciousness and produces pleasure; but its value becomes negative when it is driven exclusively by the desire for selfpreservation.74 In one of his late essays, ―Which Class I Belong To,‖ which was never published in its complete form in his lifetime, Lawrence’s racism emerges in the context of his particular kind of class-consciousness. His central idea is that, in what he calls the white world, which would include Europe and America, the gulf between the classes is greater than the gulf between the nations. It isn’t clear what he means by America—whether he would count the Europeanized nations of Latin America—as well as what he would make out of other settler-nations like Australia or the dominant white settler classes in places like the Union of South Africa and Kenya. The only other race he mentions by name are the Hindus, whom he excludes from his generalization because their relationship to the dominant European culture is one of mimicry, a view that anticipates V. S. Naipaul’s famous term and much writing by postcolonial critics.75 In the ―Royal Oak‖ chapter of Aaron’s Rod, which takes place early in the novel, Aaron Sisson has a brief conversation with an Indian doctor in the pub and inn of a mining village. Since Aaron is a miner’s checkweighman and secretary for the miner’s union, he is asked to discuss the situation of the miners, which he describes as a futile tug-of-war between the masters and the wage slaves over the issue of money. The proprietor of the house scolds Aaron and the other miners for not looking after each other and their own families better, but Aaron clearly distrusts this Jewish woman with whom he seems to have had some kind of sexual relationship. Then he asks the Indian doctor if things are any different in India. The doctor responds that the British colonial government of India makes things worse for the Indians by making them easier for them. They only have to earn a living, but they have no responsibility for the state of affairs in which they live. The doctor even goes so far as to say that the colonial government is better than any government that the Indians could make for themselves, but that is what is so bad about it. When Aaron questions this viewpoint, the doctor explains that if the Indians were allowed to rule themselves they would probably make a mess of it and

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start killing each other, but it would be their responsibility and no one else’s. When Aaron asks why it matters if they govern themselves or not, the doctor says that it matters a great deal since no race of people should be responsible for another, especially when the other race is much older than their rulers, and then he debunks the idea that the colonized are children. Aaron sees the same menace in this oriental, as he thinks of him, that he sees in the Jewish innkeeper.76 Aaron’s racism and sexism are surely Lawrence’s own, but these elements of Lawrence’s ideological composition have to be situated in the social trajectory of his life. In the essay ―Which Class I Belong to,‖ Lawrence makes a twofold point about the class system in the Europeanized world. First, he insists that there are only two classes, the middle class and the working class, because there is no longer any viable upper class, by which he probably means an aristocracy in the old sense of the term, the ancien régime. By middle class, he obviously means the capitalist class and those who work for it and support it by promoting its values. Lawrence believes that the middle classes of the ―white‖ nations are more or less homogeneous; and for this reason he sees a more significant antagonism between the middle class and the working class of that world than he sees between the nations themselves. His point about the Hindus and, by implication, the peoples of other colonized regions of the world is that the same rule may not apply, though Lawrence doesn’t seem to know much about the internal class structures of the colonized. In reference to the Hindus, he probably thinks that the caste system is not strictly comparable with the European class system, a point on which many postcolonial scholars today would probably agree. In any case, the point of Lawrence’s essay is that he himself has never been able to integrate successfully with the middle class of his own nation. While he stresses that the door has always been open for him, and the social ladder ready for his use, he has remained an outsider, virtually trapped between the classes, because while he cannot go back to the class he has left behind, he also cannot go forward into a class that he finds repugnant, primarily because that class is completely dominated by the possessive instinct, as he calls it. Though he criticizes the mass emotions of the working class, which result in prejudice and blindness, he nevertheless sees between working men like his father a social bond that he attributes to blood—by which he seems to mean physical consciousness rather than genetic inheritance—a bond that supersedes both the mental consciousness and possessive instinct of the middle class.77 In considering the contradictions of Lawrence’s social trajectory, his mother and father become a case in point. Despite his mother’s

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origins, which some biographers have argued should be considered working-class and were certainly not economically privileged, she promoted and instilled in her children middle-class values that came into direct conflict with the values of the class into which she had married.78 This led to a lifelong struggle within the Lawrence family. Certainly, Lawrence’s father abused this woman, and as a young boy, Lawrence primarily identified with his mother’s side in the conflict. As he matured and encountered the contradictions of the ―middle class‖ that he grew to know more intimately, he began to reinvest in his father’s relation to the world and to become more and more critical of his mother’s class pretensions. Even a character like Kate Leslie in Lawrence’s most problematic novel, The Plumed Serpent, has to be seen as a reflection of Lawrence’s view of his mother. The overt racism of Kate’s attitude toward Mexican Indians and peons, though hardly a view that Lawrence’s mother would have expressed, transposes the language that Lawrence came to apply to men like his father and the British working classes in general. The constant references in Kate’s mind to the darkness of their souls and their unconsciousness are exactly the words that Lawrence uses elsewhere to describe the inner life of working-class men, a view that reflected his maternal identification.79 He came to see his father as the embodiment of this unconscious life, which he more and more valued over the conscious life or mental consciousness that he associated with his mother. Nonetheless, this did not prevent him from exposing the prejudices and more violent effects of the class system on those who are its victims in every novel in which he represented the British working class from Sons and Lovers to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Even the phallocentrism that Lawrence expresses more and more emphatically in his late fiction has to be related to the class contradictions that encourage working-class men to overvalue sexual identity as compensation for the social and cultural disempowerment that results from their economic exploitation. When one reads through the three versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, one watches Lawrence struggle to produce a working-class identity that is not a stereotype; and the evolution of the Parkin character of the first two versions into Mellors in the final version represents the movement from a character who is strictly proletarian—even a communist at one point—to a character who comes closer to a version of Lawrence himself, someone trapped between the classes.80 I don’t want to whitewash Lawrence’s racism or misogyny, and there are many ridiculous generalizations about races and genders in Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent as well as in his other works. Furthermore, even in his own homeland, Lawrence could barely tolerate the existence of

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an organized working-class movement, which he regarded as another expression of the possessive instinct. Still, in order to understand Lawrence’s contradictions, one must recognize the compulsion he felt toward direct statement that can be related to his desire to transform common sense. Writers like James, Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf had a view of peoples in the colonized world that is just as flattened and dehumanizing as anything Lawrence could come up with. For James, the colonial world hardly existed, and he resisted recognizing the existence of the working class in his own world. Conrad, of course, has been accused of racism and defended against the accusation, but he never allows the colonized subject to talk back in the way Lawrence does even in Aaron’s Rod and The Plumed Serpent. Joyce has been seen by myself and others as a colonial or postcolonial subject, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the few images of other races that find their way into his work are mostly two-dimensional stereotypes with nothing to counterbalance them, and that would include even his construction of Jewish identity, which is hardly a break from Western anti-Semitic tradition. In earlier work, I myself argued that Woolf’s novels, particularly The Waves, are riddled with Orientalist and Africanist images that reduce the colonial other to a virtual non-being without voice or agency. Like his character Rupert Birkin, Lawrence had a compulsion to articulate and test everything that passed through his conscious mind, even though he also believed that the conscious mind was ultimately an unreliable source of values and desires. Like Wilde, he understood that between life and thought there can be no strict separation—that even the most innocent representations have implications in the world of social practice. Lawrence continues to pay a price in the academic world for saying too much and writing in such a way that his meaning cannot be mistaken for the effects of style. His technique was to write what he thought and then test that thought against the thoughts of others, as far as he could understand them and translate them into the language of his fiction. By this time, the reader must realize that I have a personal investment in Lawrence that derives from my own history. My father was a man who in the privacy of his home didn’t hesitate to express an unwavering racism toward black people and, as far as I could tell, an absolute indifference toward the exploited peoples of other parts of the world. Perhaps this indifference was really total ignorance, but, as Gayatri Spivak would say, it was sanctioned ignorance. My mother was almost the antithesis of Lawrence’s mother because not only did she not particularly encourage her children to become middle class, but when she began to recognize the effects of too much education on

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class consciousness, which for her was synonymous with her own special understanding of religious consciousness, she actively campaigned against it. She didn’t mind someone with a middle-class income as long as such a person didn’t glory in middle-class values, such as the elite culture that, in practice, my mother found to be antireligious. To be fair to her, she became extreme in these views after she had suffered from intermittent schizophrenia for a number of years. Unlike my father, however, she was profoundly antiracist and did everything in her power to fight racism against black people or anyone else she knew of until the day she died. The contradictions of working-class life came home to me in a rather ironic way while I was a graduate student at the University of California at Santa Cruz. That campus was profoundly feminist in the late seventies and early eighties; and though I had been a proponent of women’s liberation for years before I went there, Santa Cruz was my first exposure to middle-class feminism. Fortunately, the campus was also unusually left-wing, and many of the feminists were socialists who did not ignore class issues, particularly as they pertained to women. One night I was invited to a sort of socialistfeminist party; and during the course of the evening, the women had prepared political skits on pertinent feminist issues. As these things tend to be, most of the skits were satirical, with men as the butt of the joke. However, I couldn’t help but notice that the men who took the brunt of the humor and whose imitation solicited the loudest laughter and applause from the gathering were from the working class. Like Ralph Cramden and Archie Bunker, the men in the skits were loud-mouthed, overweight, and ultimately stupid in their treatment of the women who were usually their wives. In virtually every skit, it was obvious that the women were much smarter than their husbands, but the sign of this intelligence was that the working-class women were so much more like middle-class women than their husbands were like middle-class men. There were no professors in these skits, though I knew graduate students who had been harassed or humiliated in some way by a male professor, and the female professors were not exactly innocent of abusing their power either, at least according to some of the female graduate students who had talked to me. Professors, corporate executives, and other professionals simply were not as funny as ignorant, bombastic workingclass men. These skits would not have bothered me as much as they did if they had not represented something that I knew to be more or less true. Working-class men did make fools out of themselves, even more than these mostly middle-class women knew. But I also knew that the violence of sexism didn’t simply derive from the personal attitudes

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of a singular group of men but from a systematic structure that not only guaranteed masculine privilege but also had the secondary function of reinforcing the class structure by keeping men and women divided from one another. Women from the lower classes knew they had it worse than the men from the same class and sought their alliances wherever they could find them, including among middle-class men and women. Working-class men felt threatened by women who wanted the same degree of autonomy that the men had; and the result was that both genders felt betrayed by their opposites. Who could blame women for wanting to get out of the working class, since anyone in their right mind wanted the same thing; and, in my experience, the only working-class men who celebrated that existence were the ones who had given up long ago and found more hope for happiness in an alcoholic stupor or in religious devotion than in the fantasy of upward mobility—much less revolution, which, as everyone knew, was antiAmerican. Though working-class men had more economic autonomy than most working-class women did, this did not mean that they led better lives. Their autonomy came down to a choice between piety or a subtle form of self-destruction while they lorded it over the women; and just as Lawrence knew that someone economically empowered like Gerald Crich could also be the victim of the system that empowered him, I could see that skilled laborers like my own father were dehumanized by the work that gave them some limited economic power. Though my mother suffered from my father’s bullying, she managed to sustain some inner life and freedom of thought, even after mental illness had cut the ground from under her and damaged the little self-confidence and independence of mind she had held onto after a lifetime of relative poverty and class violence. It was easy for me to blame my father for all of my mother’s suffering—and my own for that matter. Everything in my society encouraged me to do so, rather than pin the blame where it truly belonged—on the social system itself. As time passed, however, I came to realize that what was missing from the popular view of working-class men and women that was so entertaining to people of all classes and political persuasions was a subjective understanding of the context of working-class lives. The middle classes had simply never had the experience, while people from the lower classes had suffered so much damage to their self-esteem that they identified with the viewpoint of the socially powerful. Lawrence was the first writer I read, and still one of the few, who expressed an insider’s perspective on the working-class life that I knew in growing up. And though I can easily imagine that someone from the middle or upper classes could question Lawrence’s subjective grasp of

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their lives—as Lady Ottoline Morrell did when she saw herself travestied in the character of Hermione Roddice—I can only say that Lawrence’s perspective on the upper classes, which never demonized them in the way that working-class men and women have been demonized, was a viewpoint with which I could feel a strong kinship, even if I had no experience with any traditional aristocrats, but only with the kind that Bourdieu writes about in his theory of the production of nobility in late capitalist societies. Furthermore, Lawrence’s explorations of sexuality between men and women and the homosexual feelings between men and between women— however uncomfortable he could be with that topic at times—directly addressed the world I lived in as a young man and still live in. In some ways, Lawrence, like Wilde before him, produced what Gramsci called the folklore of the future in the sense that he explored feelings and attitudes that were anomalous in his own time, except as social fantasies, but have become ordinary experiences in my world. The relationship between Connie Chatterley and Oliver Mellors was mostly a fantasy in Lawrence’s time, but today the movement of sexual desire across class boundaries is a relatively ordinary experience that finds a paradigm in Lawrence’s fiction. Furthermore, if homophobia is perhaps more rampant today than it was in Lawrence’s time, one of the reasons is that so many men and women are threatened by the fact that homosexuality and homosexual feelings have become an admitted part of everyday life. Despite the protests of the moral majority, more and more in our popular culture it has become a matter of common sense that men are sexually attracted to each other, while lesbian love has become one of the most popular and prevalent forms of pornography—and, according to some queer theorists, not just for men. Pornography itself has become more ordinary, no doubt to the chagrin of moralists from the left and the right. Both Wilde and Lawrence understood, both in their lives and in their writing, that sexuality and social class are intimately related categories. Wilde came from a relatively privileged middle-class background but nonetheless came to identify with the lower classes, even before his fall from grace; and the portrait of British aristocracy in his plays and in The Picture of Dorian Gray is already from the perspective of an outsider on the inside. Lawrence, even at his most homophobic in a 1915 letter to David Garnett, made no moral judgment on Wilde.81 Late in his life, in a letter to Aldous Huxley, he argued that Wilde, along with other homosexual artists, falsified phallic consciousness through intellectualization, a point on which Wilde might have agreed with him, given his retrospective interpretation of the relation

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between the paradox of his thought and the perversity of his life. In the letter, Lawrence identified phallic consciousness with common sense; but he probably underestimated the extent to which he had rewritten common sense through the creation of characters like Rupert Birkin and Oliver Mellors who discover a perversity in the ordinary that reveals to them new forms of life as possibilities of relationship.82 These new forms of life include homosexual feelings that Lawrence articulated and explored in spite of himself. Though Lawrence may have adopted shocking political views and psychological theories, including patriarchal gender theories and antiSemitism, he never presented these perspectives in his major fiction without setting them into conflict with other perspectives, without allowing for dialectical reversals that call into question any final or naturalized version of political authority or gender and racial identity. Through his openness to the conflicts of common sense and his struggle to create a fictional ground in which common sense and abstract theory can struggle toward some form of dialectical truth, Lawrence produced fiction that gives the contemporary reader a window into the cultural unconscious of the early twentieth century and points toward a future in which many of the propositions of that unconscious have become conscious as the contemporary folklore of sexual and social liberation. Wilde’s tragedy bears this resemblance to Lawrence’s ambivalent reputation. They both said more than they knew and produced a folklore of the future that would come back to haunt their work, both in a positive and a negative sense.

C

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THE TRANSCENDENTAL ORDINARY WITTGENSTEIN TO BADIOU 1.

In a note published in 1932 under the heading ―Tolstoy,‖ Wittgenstein considered the view that a thing (Gegenstand) is important only if it can be understood by everyone. While inclined to agree with this proposition, he saw one stumbling block to its truth. The problem was not that in order to understand such a significant and important thing it was necessary to master a specialized language or some kind of technical knowledge, but rather that there might be a conflict between understanding certain kinds of propositions and human desire. In other words, it might be difficult to understand something that you don’t want to understand when it conflicts with what you want to believe is true. He concluded that the most obvious thing—I would say, truth—may offer the greatest resistance to understanding. In other words, when truth is communicated, the will may resist more than the intellect. 1 To my mind, this thought sums up the essence of Wittgenstein’s style, his peculiar voice. He insisted on a point later echoed by ordinary language philosophers when he said that language bewitches us and we frequently get entangled in its web.2 The orthodox formulation of this view came in Gilbert Ryle’s famous 1932 essay, ―Systematically Misleading Expressions,‖ in which he made the claim that philosophy has the job of curing the disease of linguistic delusion, though philosophy itself is the disease’s worst victim. Ryle’s argument hinges on the curious assumption that only philosophers are misled

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by the grammatical confusion of ordinary language, since the ordinary users of such language know exactly what they mean—hence have no confusion. This implies a distinction between the subject of philosophy and the subject of ordinary language. The subject of philosophical language falls into error when she takes the confused grammatical form of ordinary language for the proper expression of a state of affairs. She fails to realize that the grammatical form of the statement from ordinary language doesn’t match the facts.3 Though Ryle rejects what he takes to be the position of the early Wittgenstein that the relation between grammatical and logical form must be natural rather than simply conventional, he nevertheless allows some room for the natural.4 In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein argued that facts have a logical form that corresponds to the logical form of reality. Facts are pictures of reality.5 He also called a proposition a picture of reality since it is the expression of a fact. Facts are made up of primitive signs—names, Wittgenstein calls them—that in and of themselves possess no sense. Such a name operates like a label in relation to an object (Gegenstand) or a thing (Ding). Wittgenstein also calls it a point. A name cannot be defined, but its meaning can be elucidated by usage. It does not make sense by itself, but its meaning emerges in the context of a proposition. Only propositions make sense; but one can infer that it is through the organization of names that thought is able to replicate the logical form of reality.6 It seems to my naïve and ―ordinary‖ mind that Ryle’s argument hinges on a confusion that is strange in a philosopher whose stated goal is to eliminate confusion. He insists that his goal is to clarify the meaning of ordinary language, by which he does not mean that he will analyze the confused concepts used by ordinary people—a category that includes everyone who uses ordinary language—that is to say, everyone—including any individual who calls himself a philosopher. Concepts are never confused and in need of clarification, according to Ryle, because if they are, they are not concepts.7 His goal is to restate the propositions of ordinary language in such a way as to reveal their correspondence with the facts to which they refer. These facts have a structure; and though the ordinary users of ordinary language know exactly what they mean when they say something, the syntax of their expressions may fail to exhibit the proper structure that correlates with the facts in question. Here, one may guess, is where convention must have entered the scene to produce syntactical patterns that make perfect sense to those who use them, or to any philosopher who understands how they are being used, but do not conform to the structure of the facts in question. 8 So when Ryle makes a statement

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to the effect that the proper relation between grammar and logic is mostly conventional but also somewhat natural (not exactly what he says but strongly implied), he perhaps means that the syntactical patterns of ordinary language are conventional in the sense that they are derived from usage, but that there is another language that is more natural in the sense that it can reformulate ordinary language in order to make visible its logical form, which, if it is logical, can be correlated with the logical form of the facts. Though Ryle never says this, the logical form of the facts must also correlate with the logical form of reality. How would the philosopher know that her restatement of the propositions of ordinary language are formally more proper to the facts in question if the facts were strictly matters of convention without any foundation in reality? In this essay, Ryle simply extends Wittgenstein’s view in the Tractatus that the purpose of philosophy is the logical clarification of thought as it appears in propositions or sentences. 9 But Wittgenstein also speaks of the impossibility of illogical thought and notes that all the constructions of everyday language are logically in order. He sees in such order not something that mirrors truth but the very being of truth in its totality (his phrase is die volle Wahrheit selbst).10 Wittgenstein insists that logic is transcendental, by which he means that it is the limit of the world and of language—and, presumably, not that it occupies another world of its own.11 Logic precedes experience and is the condition of any meaningful articulation of it, because the only condition for understanding logic is an experience that is not an experience—the realization that being can be attributed to something (daß etwas ist, Wittgenstein’s emphasis). 12 The one thing Wittgenstein does not do—even in the Tractatus—is to draw a strict line between what he calls everyday language and the language of philosophy. In this way, he already anticipates the technique of Philosophical Investigations and his other late writings. This doesn’t mean, however, that he does not recognize a procedure for recording logical propositions, but that the procedure does not involve a use of natural language that claims to be superior to the ordinary use. It rather constructs a matheme, a notation that is strictly symbolic, and which means, in the understanding of everyday language, absolutely nothing.13 It is a sign language, governed by a purely logical grammar and syntax, that requires, in order to describe the operations of logic, a particular multiplicity that is mathematical. Wittgenstein suggests that the notation itself determines the number of such operations it can describe.14 Hence, when he claims that logical necessity is the only necessity, he doesn’t apply this principle to phrases in the natural language that

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seem to correspond with the logical form of the facts, as Ryle suggests, or with the traditional rules of Aristotelian logic, but rather to mathematical notation that is purely formal and has no necessary bearing on the actual syntax of any use of natural language, whether it is ordinary or specialized.15 This is why Wittgenstein maintains that it is necessary to stipulate the truths of logic. This suggests that such truths are axiomatic propositions, strict constructions of thought that depend on the formal properties of the notation itself as the determining ground of its adequacy.16 As far as natural language is concerned, there can be no hierarchy of elementary propositions, which consist of the names of objects. Their formal properties do not make them more or less logical, but rather logic is the construction in a mathematical notation of their formal properties. The hierarchies of discourse—say, the distinction between philosophical and ordinary language—have nothing to do with reality.17 In a previous chapter, I referred to the fact that reading Wittgenstein was an event in my life. Since the present chapter aims to bring the philosophy of Alain Badiou into constellation with the other elements of this book, I mean to anticipate that perspective by using the term ―event‖ in a way that anticipates Badiou’s thought, even if that means trivializing it by deploying it in the framework of a personal history. Therefore, when I say that Wittgenstein was an event, I mean that reading him became a critical step in a truth procedure that the rest of my life has pursued in one way or another—both my life as a writer and as a teacher. After Wittgenstein came Nietzsche and then Derrida, and this series of events began in the late sixties and was more or less completed by the late seventies; after that, I can think of no other thinker whose work I experienced in a similar way until I came to Badiou in the present decade. As I noted in my unpublished memoir, in the act of reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus at the age of eighteen—which, by the way, I could barely make sense of—I was struck down by the famous proposition near the end of the book about the mystical. It is not how the world is—or, as I inferred somewhat freely in response to my own religious background as a Catholic, how it happened— but simply that it is, that it happened. To this illumination, Wittgenstein added the thought that the mystical was a way of feeling the world’s limit, which is how we experience the world as a bounded whole.18 Some things cannot be put into words, he concluded; and those things are mystical. My words, of course, cannot do justice to Wittgenstein’s beautifully constructed German sentences, or to the more literal translations of them. But however much my experience of those sentences constituted an event for me,

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their truth did not lie in themselves as an event, which was primarily an aesthetic experience, but in the process that came out of it. My first gesture toward the exposition of such truth was a dissension from the very propositions that so moved me. According to Wittgenstein, everything that can be said can be said clearly, and everything else must be passed over in silence.19 But I realized that, according to such a logic—and I mean this in the most naïve and ordinary sense of the words I use—almost everything worth talking or writing about, everything worth reading or thinking about, would have to be passed over. Indeed, Wittgenstein’s own sentences in those last few pages of the Tractatus are nonsense because they attempt to articulate the experience of the limit—both of the world and of language. The later Wittgenstein seemed to arrive at a similar conclusion when he began to explore the internal operation of language itself as the condition of meaning. As noted in the discussion of Marx, Wittgenstein eventually understood language as a form of life and argued in an early remark from Investigations that language is like an ancient city with its suburbs and neighborhoods, old houses and new houses, straight and irregular streets. In the same passage, Wittgenstein poses the question as to whether language is ever complete, and one can infer that his answer is negative since he refers to the emergence at different points in history of new suburbs in language, such as infinitesimal calculus and so forth.20 Yet later in the book, he insists that philosophy does not solve problems by adding new information to a situation but by arranging what is already there.21 In a sense, Badiou makes a similar point about philosophy even though he postulates Wittgenstein as his antithesis, particularly when it comes to the understanding of the mathematical proposition. But he also says of philosophy that it does not produce truths of its own but rather gathers up statements that have been produced in a truth procedure—a procedure that responds to, and would be impossible without, an event. Philosophy creates a space for understanding the interrelations between truth procedures at a given moment in historical time. Indeed, it puts them into a place that is common.22 A truth procedure is presumably not just a language game for the simple reason that a truth procedure involves an encounter with the Real in the Lacanian sense of that word. The Real is something in excess of language or any other form of representation—not the object of representation but what is missed and articulated as missing through a representation. Ironically, in practice it is difficult to distinguish the Real from what Wittgenstein calls the mystical in the Tractatus. When Wittgenstein says that the mystical is the experience

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of the limit—both of the world and of language—he revises the theological meaning of the word ―mystical‖ because for him it is not an experience, in the positive sense, of divinity, as it would be for, say, St. Theresa. It is the experience of the void. As I will argue, with respect to Badiou’s ontology, the void is not, strictly speaking, empty, though it is also not a presence either. The void is empty only in the sense that it has not been presented within a situation. Wittgenstein calls it the unsayable but far from being something that we must pass over in silence, it is something that we only become aware of in the momentary illumination of an event. The event is a force that ruptures the current state of a situation by blowing a hole in knowledge that forces those who exist in a world to witness the fact that the representation of what is presented is not complete—that something has not been included.23 Something appears that draws our attention to the incompleteness of the situation and, most importantly, to the failure of the dominant representations of that situation to express its totality, even though that is what they claim to do. Indeed, the event calls such a totality into question. In response to such an event, the truth procedure is the process by which the event receives its name and is translated into a proposition that redefines the world the event has disrupted. The event conditions the possibility of an intervention in the situation it disrupts in the sense that it articulates itself as the undecidable, something that cannot be accounted for by the current language of the situation and therefore requires a decision in the form of a proposition that testifies to the truth of the event. One can argue that such a truth procedure is a new language game in Wittgenstein’s sense; but Badiou argues in Being and Event that Wittgenstein’s view is constructivist in its presupposition that nothing really changes in any given situation—that nothing disrupts the language of a situation—from the outside. Nothing changes in a situation except language itself, as Wittgenstein implies in the reference to the ancient city as a metaphor for language. From this perspective, language has no way of articulating its relation to anything outside of it. In other words, according to Badiou, Wittgenstein has no concept of the Real. There is nothing beyond representation, nothing beyond language. If something can be named, then it must already have been known to exist in a given situation even if it had not previously been identified as such. It is as if one were to limit the possibility of change to the simple instance in which one person says to another, ―Have you noticed the existence of x?‖ And the other replies, ―No, I hadn’t noticed x, but now that you mention it, it is obviously true that there is x.‖ Such a view presupposes that truth

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is obvious because it is verifiable, and it is verifiable because nothing that is not already known to exist can possibly be true. As Badiou paraphrases Wittgenstein’s thought, there are different situations in the world only to the extent that there are different language games. But if truth is immanent to language without reference to anything outside of it, then whoever is the master of language is the master of truth. For Badiou, the state of a situation is the condition that derives from the reduction of everything presented in the situation to a specific and categorical representation. It exceeds the situation because it formulates all possible ways of recounting the elements of the situation, which means that individual elements can be counted more than once according to a variety of representations or language games. For Badiou, there is no necessary equivalence between the actual being of elements in a situation and their representation. Constructivism posits such equivalence. From this perspective, those elements represented by the state of the situation must be, and that which is must be represented; the master of language is the master of the situation. Badiou strongly implies that the State as a social institution (which from this point forward I will distinguish with a capital) both manifests and regulates the state of a situation, which includes the body of opinions and representations that are taken to be selfevident or matters of common sense—that is, the hegemony in Gramsci’s sense. Therefore, the State is the master of language.24 I am not convinced that Badiou’s reading does complete justice to Wittgenstein, though one must agree that the content of the latter’s thought follows the tendency that Badiou describes, not, however, without contradictions and resistances to its own direction. One sees an apparent example of his constructivism in a remark from Investigations, which, in its most common translation, seems to suggest that philosophy can only mirror in its statements what everyone says. A more literal translation would suggest that philosophy only arranges what everyone admits to it (Sie stellt nur fest, was Jeder ihr zugibt).25 This proposition comes close to Ryle’s view that philosophy has the job of rearranging ordinary language so that it won’t confuse the philosophical mind. However, Wittgenstein’s style contradicts that view, for he implicitly recognizes the Lacanian principle that there can be no metalanguage when he admits that in talking about language he has no choice but to use it according to everyday practice.26 Badiou’s criticism of Wittgenstein assumes that the latter does not allow for any concept of the event, and this would seem to be the truth if one were to go exclusively by the content of Wittgenstein’s thought. He wastes no time on the consideration of any specific

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events; and yet if one looks in the margins of his major philosophical writing, things may not be so self-evident. Though one can agree that for Wittgenstein there is no strict outside of language, one must also note that Badiou does not offer evidence that the subject as he understands it can ever be said to exist apart from a particular use of language in the truth procedure. While Badiou criticizes Lacan at the end of Being and Event precisely for making the assumption that there are always subjects—that where there is language there is a subject without the intervention of an event and the truth procedure that it conditions—the philosopher nonetheless identifies the truth procedure as a linguistic act of naming and drawing out the implications of an event, as I noted earlier.27 In itself, of course, such an event remains outside the representations of language, outside the rules of the game: it is, within the framework of a situation, sui generis, something that is a rule unto itself. Wittgenstein is not altogether unaware of the emergence of such things, however. In a note from 1929, he says that when people think of the future they tend to think of it as an extension of the present, as the way things will be if they continue going in their present direction.28 This is not a completely crazy way to look at historical situations if one keeps in mind Blake’s famous assertion that a prophet is simply someone who can see that if things continue as they are now, such and such will be the result.29 Yet Wittgenstein is aware of the fact that history does not continue in such a straight path—that its trajectory is more like that of a curve in the sense that it is constantly changing its direction slightly.30 Perhaps even the figure of the curve creates the illusion of more consistency than Badiou allows, but even Badiou recognizes that the subject of a truth is not a being who has transcended the realm of ordinary language as the medium of opinions or, to use my preferred term, common sense. Though a truth forces a situation to rearrange itself around a proposition that decides something that has heretofore been undecided and undecidable, it remains nonetheless homogeneous with the elements of the situation and does not cancel out a certain consistency between the original situation and the one that has resulted from the forcing of a truth.31 Hence, the figure of the curve makes perfect sense because it recognizes the introduction of forces that cannot be predicted based on the present situation but allows for continuity between a situation before and after an evental rupture. Leaving aside the question of whether or not Wittgenstein is truly a constructivist, his thought blew a hole in the common sense of my world for several reasons. As I suggested in an earlier chapter, I was prepared for this event by my alienated relation to language that

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derived both from my maternal identification and from my material makeup as a reader. You could call that material condition a disorder, but that wouldn’t have been my lived experience of it, and I see no reason to privilege a medical interpretation over the understanding that actually shaped my experience. During the period when I first read Wittgenstein, I was in the middle of a sort of crisis in the sense that the values with which I had grown up had all ceased to have any meaning for me. First, I lost faith in religious propositions, for the simple reason that I saw no relation between ethics and religion in my world. I don’t mean that I had no ethical commitments, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish those commitments from what I understood to be politics. Though in high school I had been relatively successful despite my self-destructive impulses, things caught up with me when the time came to go to college. One of my two best friends went off to the University of Chicago and the other to Georgetown University. Chicago rejected my application and, though I was admitted to Catholic University in Washington with financial aid, I couldn’t muster the courage to go there when my parents made it clear to me that they would not give me any financial or psychological support and strongly discouraged my pursuing a goal that, from their view, was impossible. I realize that this story borders on being a cliché and that I probably could have overcome these obstacles had I known more about how the world works. Still, at the time I felt the ground fall out from under me. Whatever identity I had managed to construct for myself in high school collapsed, and I felt myself regressing to an affective state of being that recalled earlier periods of my life. One of the results of this situation involved a turn toward radical political positions. My ethical values included a firm belief in social equality, a view that had been instilled in me by my mother long before I had any conceptual understanding of what it meant. When my friends left me behind while they went on to attend good colleges, I felt like a failure, at least at first. But I soon began to rechannel that feeling of defeat into critical anger—critical in the sense that it was self-conscious and focused rather than unconscious and diffuse. I couldn’t blame my friends for their successes, and I had every reason to blame myself for lack of initiative in pursuing a goal, but I found that I could forgive everyone concerned by analyzing the situation in the political terms that were available to me. Long before I had read Bourdieu, I began to realize that college admissions were neither a random nor a rigorous process of selection for intellectual ability. Though at the time my understanding of this situation was primitive, I was evolving the view that the purpose

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of the selection was not to identify ability, even if ability—measured almost exclusively by standardized tests—was a criterion for selection. The real purpose of the selection was to guarantee success. My friends were selected for success, and I was not. One of my friends was an ―A‖ student who graduated the valedictorian of the class. The other had a lower grade point average than I had but had scored high on his SAT examination, particularly in math. I could see that there was logic to the selection process even if I thought it was grossly unfair and narrow in its construction of intellectual ability; but the real purpose of the selection did not come home to me until I realized its result. One of the events provoking that recognition was the return home of the friend in Chicago for the Christmas break. He was the one who actually incited me to read Wittgenstein for the first time when he told me about the courses he was taking at the University of Chicago. In an introduction to logic, he had read the Tractatus and some of Philosophical Investigations in a course taught by then Ph.D. candidate Ted Cohen. Though I have never met Professor Cohen, I still feel that he had an enormous impact on my life through the mediation of my friend, who communicated to me the enthusiasm for Wittgenstein that Cohen communicated to him and that none of the professors at the state university I was attending had conveyed to me. In my philosophy classes, the textbook was an anthology with fragments of texts that were too short and on which we spent too little time for anyone to development an enthusiasm, or to see this process as anything more than a hurdle to jump over on the way to getting a degree that neither the professors nor the students believed would be worth all that much. Ironically, when my friend unintentionally made clear to me how different in quality our educations were to be, it fired up something in me—perhaps at first a resentment, but eventually a stubborn refusal to let fate take its course, to accept the verdict of a system that was determined to legitimate itself by systematically controlling the dissemination of knowledge, not through an organized conspiracy, but through a set of pedagogical norms that slated people like me, the preterites, if you will, for a second-rate education that would keep us mystified and largely ignorant of the intellectual practices we would miss. With this mind-set, I plunged into the Tractatus, which, as I said before, I could barely make sense of, but which shook the foundation of my world as I understood it. It forced me to contemplate my existence as something that was not simply given, a mere fact. A fact was something that appeared according to a particular logical structure. A person is a fact to the extent that they can be counted in

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compliance with this or that logic. A census would take the facticity of a person into account well enough, as would other forms of identification. As someone not selected for success by American higher education, I was a fact; but there was something in me that was not a fact, something that escaped the different logics bent on categorizing me, which meant pinning me down to a specific logical place. As I understood Wittgenstein, a proposition guarantees the existence of a logical place by virtue of its constituents, the facts that it organizes; but those facts exist only as possibilities of what is real and not as the thing itself.32 Such a logical place is coordinated with a specific social space. All the facts that could be ascertained about me could not erase my knowledge—the word I would have used at the time, though now I would say, the truth—of what cannot be stated clearly about me, of what should be passed over in silence—at least, as far as the status quo is concerned. In saying that there are things that cannot be stated clearly and that should be passed over in silence, we posit something beyond a fact; and in making such a statement, we have, in a sense, stated clearly what cannot be stated clearly and therefore has not been passed over in silence. The truth of any given existence is not the sum of the facts that we attribute to it. The truth is what the facts prevent us from saying clearly, but clearly, there is no real existence without the recognition of something that cannot be reduced to a fact. Our real being asserts itself by breaking the silence. I realized, of course, that my reading of the Tractatus could not have been Wittgenstein’s strict intention; but I thought that I found more support for my view of it as I worked my way through the Investigations—which I thought then and still think doesn’t represent an absolute break from the earlier work but rather a refinement. It refines what for me was the real discovery. For the first time in my life, language became opaque and plastic, it assumed material being, and this did not mean, as many would later claim about this and other theories, that everything was language. Wittgenstein gave me my first glimpse of the Real, as I would call it after reading Lacan. When he explores pain as a function of the language game, he doesn’t vanquish the reality of pain, for I was still capable of feeling it; but he does imply that when you claim to recognize another’s pain or to know pain objectively, even your own pain, there is no absolute correlation between the real event out there—whether we call it a sensation, a feeling or an experience—and the words that you use to picture it to yourself or to represent it to others. 33 Elsewhere in the Investigations, Wittgenstein says there are no meanings running through our heads that are something in addition to the words that we use. But how can

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he know this? The truth is that he can’t, which doesn’t mean that he is wrong, but that language, in relation to what we call thought, is not the medium of something that is not language.34 Back then, all I could think was that thinking is just the words we use that we ourselves or someone else would call thinking. Maybe the words I’m using now are not the words I would have used then. At that time, instead of the word ―Real‖ with a capital, I would have said something like ―that which is the case‖ or ―the thing that is‖—even the Kantian thing-in-itself—beyond everything that we can say about it. The difference between a fact and ―the thing that is‖ would be something like the difference between knowledge that can be organized and taught and knowledge of the limit, of that which cannot be said within the rules of the game as they currently exist. You know that you have reached some kind of truth when the official language of the social institutions that define you begin to fail you—when you realize that the words they use are part of a game, and that the game is only viable (at least for you as an individual) if you agree to play by rules that were made by someone else and for reasons that may completely escape you and certainly do not enhance or facilitate your desire. Of course, whether you play by the rules or not, the rules still apply to you; but there was one principle that Wittgenstein did not discuss very much—except, by implication, in the occasional aphorism like the one I referenced at the beginning of this chapter. The language game works best when it works unconsciously. There’s not much to be gained in everyday life from realizing that the things you hold to be true about yourself and the world are part of a complex language game, because if you believe that, and if you understand the use of the word ―game,‖ then you have to believe that these rules are relatively arbitrary, which doesn’t mean that they don’t serve a purpose or have an instrumental function. Let’s assume that there’s a language game that tells you that you’re not intelligent enough to receive the best possible education, that you have been slated by the social authorities, maybe not for failure but certainly not for success. Now if you confront the authorities with the arbitrariness of this situation, they will probably tell you that no selection process is perfect, that it would be naïve for anyone to think that the process of selection for higher education is foolproof. They will probably tell you that you should never have been so naïve as to imagine that any selection process was a viable judgment of your worth as an individual. You should never have taken your SAT scores or any other scores on standardized tests (including those old IQ tests that may have labeled you a dunce in grade school) as an authentic measure

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of your ―intelligence.‖ These are merely instruments, necessary tools that the State—and I use that word in the broadest possible sense and not merely with reference to the government—has developed in order to select those individuals most likely to succeed in higher education. (One suspects, however, that privately these same representatives of the State think that someone so naïve as to attribute injustice to these necessary though imperfect instruments probably wouldn’t have done well on the tests anyway. To question the tests and their social use is already the sign of a certain lack that the tests were meant to identify. So in the end the tests prove their worth by identifying those who are stupid enough to question their purpose. It’s a catch 22.) These days, of course, most institutions claim that they pay less and less attention to these tests, though this word does not seem to have reached the middle classes who start preparing their children for the hurdle race as early as possible. No matter what the authorities say, you learn from your own experience what these numbers mean in your life. What the authorities do not tell you is that it is all a game, because if they said that, they would call into question the legitimacy of their own selection process. As far as they’re concerned, it is not a game with arbitrary rules, but an imperfect measurement. It works most of the time, and the proof is that those who are selected usually succeed and those who are not do not succeed at those professions that require academic success. But the problem, as I suggested earlier, is that the educational system more or less guarantees this outcome. People are not selected for failure but for success. At the time that I was reading Investigations, I gave a lot of thought to the use of the word ―intelligence.‖ Until I was around twelve years old, I had lived under the impression that I was a dunce. The only thing that interfered with this perception derived, once again, from my peculiar relationship with my mother. Because she talked to me constantly about matters of consequence, subjects that I touched on in the first chapter of this book, I gradually discovered my own gift for conversation. Ironically, even at a time when I rarely read books except for school assignments, I had an uncanny ability to engage in conversations, usually with my aunts and uncles, which gave me a reputation that contradicted my reputation at my elementary school. In school, I was a dunce, but among my relatives, I was considered a savant. In retrospect, I don’t think my aunts and uncles altogether approved of my ability to sound like an adult when I spoke to them at the age of nine or ten, but they could not hide either their admiration or their secret suspicion that I was a freak like my mother. In any

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case, by giving me that identity, they enabled me to construct a kind of dual existence for myself. I lived in two worlds—the private world that included only myself, my family and relatives, and a few friends, and the public world of the school. In private, I was special, in public I was a dunce. Somewhere along the way, this situation began to change a little. A teacher in the sixth grade became suspicious of me and tried to convince my mother that I was intentionally underachieving, though for what purpose she never made clear. In any case, I did begin to improve in school at that time, but ironically, the thing that really changed my view of myself, or at least made a dent in the old view, was a standardized test. I took it in the eighth grade and did well on it. One day, much to my surprise, the elementary-school principal came into my classroom and announced that two others and I had won scholarships to the local Catholic high school based on these tests. So I have to admit that I became the beneficiary of objectification. When I went to high school, I was assigned to the ―A‖ class, which was that school’s version of an honors class, and overnight I became one of the smart students. This boost to my self-esteem changed my world, though it did not eliminate the feeling that I was secretly a dunce, which continued to haunt my inner life. Still, if anyone had tried to tell me that the outward signs of my intelligence were just the products of a language game, I would have scoffed at the judgment. Though I knew that I was plugged into several different worlds, I wasn’t about to surrender the one that gave me the most symbolic capital, the most public distinction—to use words that I would never have used back then. You could say that I mistook the symbolic for the real, which is why I was in for a rude awakening when the same language game made a wreck out of me four years later. Near the end of Investigations, Wittgenstein comments that the diversity of the language games that operate in our daily lives do not enter our consciousness because everything in language appears to be cut from the same cloth. He actually refers to the material appearance of language as its clothing and notes that we are deceived by the appearance of uniformity.35 These metaphors contradict the view that Wittgenstein deconstructed the relation between the use of language called thinking and the inner process of thought. Actually, he doesn’t deny that there is a mental process because that would be to deny that there is a particular use of language that could be called remembering or thinking, a language game that produces the appearance of inner process as its effect.36 In other words, the idea that there is a metaphysical distinction between thought and language derives from the fact that we mistake a material distinction in the language game

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for something else. One can infer, therefore, that the reason language games are unconscious is that we have not learned the language game about language games, we have not mastered, if you will, the markup language, as in computer science, that makes the operation of thought possible. The material of language always appears the same, but the uses to which the same words and grammatical structures are put can be quite different. Each word has one face (ein Gesicht) that can assume different characters depending on the context.37 For me, these thoughts had a profoundly empowering effect, though they may also have contributed to a sort of neurosis. They enabled me to set aside social judgments on things like my intelligence and creative abilities, not without a struggle, of course, because you are always objectified to some extent by the world in which you live and no single idea by itself is going to reverse that process. Furthermore, I imagine that for a philosophical proposition or practice to constitute an event in a person’s life, there must already be something there, perhaps another event, or at least a force that inclines or even compels such an individual to resist the language games that have betrayed something in them, something for which they may not have the right words or for which there is as yet no markup that would allow them to select the words for this particular use. The best term for what I am trying to get at here may be trauma, though I don’t necessarily use this word in its strictly clinical sense. I don’t want to theorize about any particular trauma that I personally may have experienced as a small child. One can easily spend an entire lifetime exploring the traces of what appears to have been a traumatic event without fully recovering the memory of the event itself. Even people who have experienced one of the great traumas of history, such as the death camps during the Holocaust, can be alienated from the memory of the event, even though they are fully aware of the objective evidence of what took place and of their own presence in the situation. As I learned from my former graduate student, Dr. Sylviane Finck, who wrote a dissertation on the writing of the French Holocaust survivor Charlotte Delbo, the mature survivor of such a horrific trauma frequently relates to the event through a fragmentation of the self, so that the memory of the trauma becomes embodied in a being that is separate from, and can never be fully integrated with, the person who lives in the present. For Delbo and the others for whom she tried to speak, there were three separate beings—the person before the experience in the concentration camps, the person who experienced the concentration camps, and the survivor in the present. The first person is lost forever, virtually unrecoverable, except as the memory of

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another life that might as well have belonged to another person. By contrast, between the person who experienced the trauma and the person who survived it, there is almost a constant war. They find it difficult to coexist. Either the person who experienced the trauma overwhelms the survivor, so that there is the feeling that the present is an illusion that hides another being stuck in time and unable to escape the horror of the camp; or the survivor objectifies the person she was in the concentration camp and feels as if there can be no connection between the two of them.38 I certainly don’t want to claim that my childhood is comparable to the experience of a Holocaust survivor. My point is simply that my relation to language—my willingness to resist or refuse to operate within the rules of a particular language game—may have been driven at least partially by events in my life that had a disruptive effect on the unconscious operation of the dominant language games within the social context from which I derived. Normally, traumatic events are associated with intense feelings. These feelings may be disavowed by or disassociated from the person who had the experience, but the common sense on this subject usually says that an overwhelming and necessarily painful feeling will accompany the recovery of a traumatic experience by the memory, at least initially. In the Investigations, Wittgenstein writes a lot about the feelings, though to my mind he doesn’t really know what to do with them or how to account for them in the theory of language games. He can’t deny their existence any more than he can deny the existence of inner thought in the sense that one can say, ―I had this thought while I was playing chess or listening to your speech or giving my dog a bath.‖ Nonetheless, as I noted before, the distinction here is not metaphysical, and the inner thought is necessarily an effect of a language game. Concerning feeling, he says something quite similar in positing the priority of the language game and insisting that what we call feelings are interpretations or different ways of inflecting the rules of such a game.39 In another section, he at least suggests that when the ordinary application of a language game fails to work for some reason, the subject of that game becomes conscious of the particular use of words and the picture of the world that they project. Language, in effect, becomes naked (he refers to der Naktheit der Worte).40 It seems to me that a traumatic event has the effect of disrupting the language games by subverting the operation of their rules and forcing into consciousness the knowledge that the common sense about the world with which we operate on a daily basis is governed by rules that can be changed, ignored, or simply interpreted in a way that we had not expected—even in ways that

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completely undermine or destroy any personal feeling of security in the world. Hypothetically, one can imagine that a traumatic event in the life of a small child can have a peculiar effect on that individual’s relation to language for the rest of her life, in the sense that there could be a consciousness of the arbitrariness of language and the rules that govern its use, an arbitrariness of the values and pictures of the world that language circulates. The experiences of my own childhood may not have been traumatic in the strict sense, but were part of a spectrum of experience that includes trauma at its most extreme. I would compare them—to the extent that I remember them—to the experiences of someone like D. H. Lawrence, recorded in his autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers, as well as in the early version of that work, Paul Morel. To sum it up briefly, I witnessed some domestic violence against my mother by my father and experienced some violence against myself. The extent of it I can’t remember, though I do remember specific events. In my judgment, the physical violence was fairly limited; but when there was violence, usually associated with alcohol consumption, my mother strongly resisted it, and always struggled to protect her children from its worst extremes. However, she could not protect her children or herself from my father’s constant and unrelenting verbal abuse. Even in these acts, my father did not act in such a way as to guarantee his control, but rather abused his family as a form of self-abuse, his tendency to belittle and humiliate himself and everything associated with him, including his family. I have yet to read anything in the psychological literature that accurately describes the situation we lived through, but I can testify to the damaging results. For my mother, my siblings, and me, verbal abuse was a daily experience that went on for years and eroded any ―normal‖ self-esteem that any of us could have developed. Ironically, though my mother may have been the only force that saved her children from psychological annihilation, she also contributed to the problem to the extent that she suffered from extremely low self-esteem herself that I now believe related back to her own childhood experience. Overall, the effects of this situation can be seen in my siblings and me to this day. Though many of the insights I have just expressed about the history of my family did not become evident to me until much later in my life, even at the time that I read Wittgenstein in the late sixties and early seventies, I had already come to the conclusion that the abusive if not traumatic experiences of my childhood were not simply the fault of my parents but were the product of the social structure that had determined their lives. In other words, m y trauma was not simply

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mine but could be directly correlated with the history of a society. During the early seventies, my mother began to undergo psychiatric treatment, though that in itself would be a long struggle to determine the right diagnosis and to find the right medication. (Intensive psychotherapy was out of the question, because she didn’t have the financial resources to sustain it and wasn’t debilitated enough to get it for free.) My father never underwent any treatment because as far as his world was concerned—by which I mean the world of the blue-collar working class—there was nothing wrong with him. Meanwhile, I had to struggle with setbacks in my own history that reinforced a psychological predisposition to see myself as worthless. At the time that I read Wittgenstein, I also read William Blake, who wrote in his poem Jerusalem that you must create your own system or submit to someone else’s.41 This thought moved me, but it also seemed to be rather impractical, since I had already seen in my mother’s schizophrenic episodes examples of creating your own system, and I wasn’t quite ready to cut myself off completely from the world in which I lived. Wittgenstein’s language games appealed to me more than the thought of creating an alternative system because they allowed for the possibility of change in the way one operates in the world without completely destroying the current state of play and starting over again from scratch. In the Investigations, Wittgenstein argued that there is no one thing that all the language games have in common, though they can be related to one another in many ways. These similarities between the games form a network of intersections and overlaps that can be called family resemblances.42 To me, this meant that it was always possible to alter the rules of a language game without destroying its family resemblance to the other games and to its own earlier manifestation. My mother’s case may illustrate my point. There were several ways in which I could have approached her intermittent schizophrenia. I could accept the common-sense view that she was mentally ill and that nothing she said in one of her psychotic states should be taken seriously. That wasn’t the point of view I took. I thought she was mad all right, but when I listened to what she said in her madness, I was never convinced that the words she spoke did not express some kind of truth, the same sort of truth that I might find in the poetic visions of Blake. When she spoke to me during one of her psychotic states and described the visions she was having, I found her words profound and meaningful, even if they were also terrifying. They were terrifying because, on the surface at least, they had shattered the rules of all the language games with which I was familiar and with which I was

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comfortable. In his seminar on the psychoses, Lacan made the point that the psychotic subject no longer inhabits language in the manner of a neurotic but rather is inhabited or possessed by language.43 The reader should not take what I am about to say as a close reading of Lacan, but it seems to me that he insists on a certain proximity, a certain continuity between the discourse of psychosis and so-called normal discourse. At one point, he notes that the difference between normality and insanity lies in the art of not taking things seriously that if we did take seriously in our speech would quickly convey to everyone around us that we had gone mad.44 That was exactly the impression that my mother made upon me when she spoke in her psychotic state. So much of what she said in a state of delusion conveyed to me a view of the world that could well be true but that it was not wise to take seriously in the way that she did. Lacan goes further when he notes that in any given discourse there are certain terms that are pinned down to specific meanings that stabilize the totality of the discourse. These anchoring points (points de capiton in French, sometimes translated as ―quilting points‖ and ―button ties‖) may be the key to the difference between psychotic and normal discourse, which leads Lacan to speculate that normal discourse—or rather, the discourse of someone who appears to be normal—may require a minimal number of these insertions of the signifier into the signified, which is always a relation of signifier to signifier.45 I suggest that these anchoring points function very much like the rules of the language games, insofar as the rules themselves depend on specific social agreements about meaning, specific ways of understanding the words of others—what Derrida might call the minimal consensus. When I listened to my mother’s psychotic speech, it wasn’t that there were no rules governing her use of language, because had there been no rules, I wouldn’t have been able to make any sense out of what she said. Rather, it was that the rules kept changing, that there was no coherence to any language game, that one language game seamlessly blended into another without transition but also without connection, and without the appearance of any controlling center that one could call the subject. The family resemblances between the different language games had disappeared in the sense that language had become something uncanny, as if the words I was hearing, though I could still recognize them, no longer had anything in common with the same words when they were used in ordinary discourse. At the time, I read R. D. Laing, who suggested to me that in a world gone mad, which he considered ours to be, it was only the sane who would appear to be mad.46 That point of view was very attractive, because I

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did sense in my mother’s mad language a revolt against social hypocrisy, but at the same time, I realized that she suffered her difference. As a result, I didn’t want to isolate myself completely from the ―insane‖ world in which I lived but rather to find some pivotal ground that would allow me to explore the border between madness and sanity, between a consciousness of the language games that could drive one insane and the unconsciousness that was one way of understanding the common sense of the everyday world. My mother’s first psychotic episode came when I was about to enter high school and had attained a whole new sense of my self-worth through developments, already described, that I would designate today, after Lacan, as entirely imaginary. In retrospect, I realize that the former event, for which I was the primary witness, must have been traumatic, though for some reason I remember it and the time after it as the period of my life when I began to fight back, with some degree of success, against a world that seemed determined to identify me as worthless. During those highschool years, I began to tell the story of my family—at least in a limited way—to a few teachers who took an interest in me and to a few of my friends. In other words, I began to develop a narrative that could make some sense out of the emotional violence in my family situation—a narrative that enabled me to reconstruct the past with the aim of postulating a future that seemed redemptive. This model turned out to be rather fragile, probably because of its foundation in the imaginary. When I was declared ―smart‖ at the end of the eighth grade, I fell for the image of myself that was projected by that social interpellation; and frankly it may well have done me some good in the sense of giving me a defense against the collapse of another powerful image that had operated in my life—that of my mother. If I may put it this way, my father’s words, his discourse, had constructed an image of me that was without value, someone who could and would never be anything, someone without any intrinsic worth, a sort of monster. It was his image, the one that had been imposed on him by a history that I could only glimpse from time to time. This image, however, was counterbalanced by the image of me that my mother had constructed, which was the image of someone who is special though different, someone who might not ever amount to much in the eyes of the world but who could discover in himself an intrinsic value that would express itself through an ethical relation to the world. This was the image she struggled to have of herself, and she gave it to me. When I witnessed her psychosis, that image collapsed—not its truth, but the image itself. I witnessed her vulnerability and the horrors of her unconscious discourse, now made

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conscious in her psychotic speech. Fortunately, there was another image to take its place—that of the model student who could evolve into the intellectual rebel. As a way of proceeding, I need to clarify another condition of the discourse I am producing. The language I use to map out my history owes a great deal to the psychoanalytic writing of Jacques Lacan, which I have not been hiding. The reader might speculate that in fact my perspective on Wittgenstein has been influenced by my reading of Lacan, however problematic that reading may be. One could even formulate the hypothesis that it wasn’t Wittgenstein who was the event in my history but rather Lacan, whose discourse has shaped my reconstruction of this past. Certainly, Lacan’s text was an event in my intellectual history, but not in the same way as Wittgenstein’s or, more currently, Badiou’s. Today there is no question that Lacan’s writing is a far greater influence on my discourse than Wittgenstein’s; in fact, it requires a certain discipline on my part to go back to Wittgenstein’s text and make the effort to elaborate its significance to my life. For me, however, reading Lacan never had the disruptive and transformative effect on my understanding of the world—indeed on my common sense—that Wittgenstein had, though I believe that the event of Wittgenstein in my life created the conditions for the more ordinary intellectual events that would be Derrida and Lacan. ―Ordinary,‖ in this context, does not mean insignificant. Since this essay is not meant to be a primer on any of these thinkers, I will simply express this history through the following formulation and try as I proceed to clarify the significance of the terms through my use of them. My reading of Wittgenstein enabled me to transform the imaginary into the symbolic. I mean that the images that captured me as a child and then as a young adult could be contextualized with reference to the language games that had produced them. The image of my father as the monster of self-hatred and the image of my mother as the saint and martyr of ethical truth, along with their synthesis into my adolescent self-image as the tortured intellectual rebel, could be understood with reference to the rules and symbolic values that governed the production of these images. It was as much as to say that these images had a history, and it was not a strictly personal history; and yet even this history was shaped by particular language games, which meant that there was more than one version of history just as there was more than one language game. Neither my father nor my mother had invented all by themselves the language games they played, and these games bore family resemblances to other games with which they intersected. Class, religion, national identity, gender, education, local culture, and

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various subsidiary histories—all of these forces were composed of and contributed to the language games that came to make up the world of my parents, which was the starting point of my world. When I started reading Lacan in the late seventies, though I found his language baffling and demanding of a degree of participation on my part that I was unaccustomed to, I still found that his writing introduced another level of coherence to what I had already come to see as the truth about my world. It wasn’t an event for me as much as testimony to the truth of an event that had already taken place. If I could make any sense out of the concept of the discourse of the Other, with a capital, it was that such a discourse amounted to all the language games taken as a whole, even though they could never add up to a totality because they were constantly changing, new rules were constantly being invented. One could not enter the world—by which I mean any world, because there is more than one, as I will try to argue later—or assume an identity in the world outside of the medium of language or those symbolic things that are structured like a language. Any assertion of identity always addresses the Other because there can be no identity without the recognition of the Other, which means that no identity is readable that has not taken the rules and practices of the language games into account in its construction and performance. In order to be recognized by the Other, as Lacan frequently observed, one had to recognize the Other. One of the first things you learn in reading Lacan is that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other. I won’t pretend that I can entirely make sense out of that formula, or that anyone who has tried has entirely made sense to me. Still, when I first encountered the phrase, it did not seem foreign to my common sense, in the way that Freud’s theory of the unconscious always did. Wittgenstein had suggested, in a work that I was able to read long before I read Lacan, that Freud’s concept of the unconscious was a myth that worked not on the basis of any definitive evidence but because it made sense out of some things that did not make sense in any other way. He even went so far as to suggest that when the psychoanalyst challenges the delusion of the patient, there is no way of determining whether the result of that challenge is not itself another delusion. 47 Though I found Freud’s theory of the unconscious intriguing, Wittgenstein’s criticisms were also compelling. Then, after beginning to read Lacan, it seemed to me that there was a way of understanding the unconscious that was not strictly scientific but that was not strictly mythological either, unless all of Wittgenstein’s discourse was mythological. The discourse of the Other is the meta-language-game that I referred to earlier, the

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language game about language games, though in order to make this model work from the Lacanian side you would have to include in the language games those games that are devised from the use of things that are structured like a language, as in sports, fashions, body language, symptoms, and so forth. Lacan argued, of course, that there is no metalanguage, but the meta-language-game is nothing more than the language of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations along with the other works that followed from it and supplemented it. Lacan himself—in one of his earliest and most accessible seminars, ironically the one on the psychoses—had insisted that all language is a metalanguage, precisely to the extent that it is translatable.48 All language speaks about language. Retrospectively, the following proposition seems true to me. Either Wittgenstein’s late philosophy was bordering on psychosis or it was the discourse of the Other, a language game that inflected language in such a way as to make it speak of itself and reveal its mechanisms. When I read Wittgenstein in the early seventies, I came across a statement that I now realize prepared the way for Lacan and made my reception of the latter less of an event and more of a testimony to the truth of an earlier event. Wittgenstein said that a language game contains a whole culture.49 How is such a thing possible? At the time, what occurred to me was that even though no language game was strictly identical with another, Wittgenstein’s concept of the family resemblances between the language games meant that each game depends on the entire structure of all the language games in order to sustain its familiarity, its kinship with elements of everyday life, which is the condition of its legitimacy, the thing that enables it to operate without a conscious decision on the part of the language user. The language games operate as a form of common sense as long as they seem to be ordinary, as long as they bear some resemblance to all the other language games with which we are familiar, even though strictly speaking, one is not translatable into another. This was the meaning of ordinary language. It was not some kind of linguistic essence that represented the bottom line of discourse. Rather, language was ordinary when it was unconscious—that is to say, when it seemed familiar and related to all the other uses of language, to all the other language games that one knew how to play. It was ordinary when you could use it without having to think about it too much. It wasn’t the words or concrete discourse that was unconscious but rather the rules that governed their use. To that extent, you could say that it was the structure of language that was unconscious. Later I would read Lacan’s assertion that the whole structure of language can be found in the unconscious. 50

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Furthermore, from numerous assertions that Lacan made throughout his work, it was clear that the unconscious contained not only the whole structure of language but also everything that was structured like a language—that is, the whole of culture. When Wittgenstein said that the language game contained the whole of culture, he meant—as far as I was concerned—that the whole of culture was a language game, though in thinking of culture as a whole it was necessary to give the broadest possible sense to the word ―language.‖ The critic Marjorie Perloff has noted that Wittgenstein strictly challenged the hierarchy of discourse that is the common assumption of the twentieth-century practice of theory.51 I have already referred to passages that support this perspective, including the reference at the beginning of this chapter to Wittgenstein’s insistence that the key to understanding any significant truth or proposition is not the mastery of a specialized vocabulary. Furthermore, as I have also noted, Wittgenstein insisted that his philosophical style required the use of ordinary language, since, by implication, he could only reveal the existence of the language game through the exhibition of its deployment in everyday practice. In the same passage already mentioned, Perloff cites a specific section of Wittgenstein’s Cambridge lectures in which he distinguishes between the way certain words are used in philosophical discourse and the way those same words can be used in everyday practice. Wittgenstein refers to the everyday language games as the home or origin of the particular words in question, though this would imply that there is a kind of hierarchy between ordinary and specialized language, with the latter always derivative from the former; and I don’t see any reason to presuppose that the most ordinary words necessarily originate from the most ordinary language games. Even philosophy is a language game, though it may not be the language game of everyday practice. Among the words Wittgenstein lists as having a special meaning in philosophy is the first-person pronoun ―I.‖52 Perloff refers to an early version of Investigations in which Wittgenstein comments that there is nothing grammatically special about the word ―I,‖ which suggests that it can hardly refer to some sort of essence, but rather operates in those language games that virtually create or construct the ordinary self. Perloff sees this as a critique of individual consciousness; but as with memory and internal thought, Wittgenstein’s argument is not with the concepts in themselves but with the origins of their meaning.53 In other words, if individual consciousness exists, it exists as a function of the language games. Knowing that the self is constructed through the use of language in a cultural context

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takes nothing away from the phenomenological experience of being a self. Perloff argues that when the first-person pronoun is analyzed as an ordinary word that signifies through its use in a language game, it ceases to be invisible, or rather its operation in the language games of everyday life ceases to be unconscious. She adds that Wittgenstein’s text disavows the use of the ―I‖ as it could be said to operate in a confessional discourse, a rhetorical mode that he systematically avoids because it creates the illusion of something that remains invisible, something hidden beneath the surface of the linguistic subject.54 However, based on Wittgenstein’s own thinking in the Investigations, it makes little sense to suggest that any language game is inherently discredited solely on the basis of its adequacy or inadequacy as a representation of something that is taken to be real. Wittgenstein never strictly says that there is no experience of inner thought or memory, anymore than he says that there is no world outside of language. When he says, in the passage from the Cambridge lectures already cited, that we need to take words out of their metaphysical context in traditional philosophy and rediscover their everyday use, he does not suggest that the difference between philosophical language and ordinary language correlates, respectively, with an essentialist and a utilitarian understanding of discourse.55 Philosophy of any sort is a language game, even if the rules of traditional philosophy serve to create the impression that words enable us to understand the essence of a thing. Wittgenstein may oppose a metaphysical or philosophical use of language to its everyday use; but if a philosophical use of language means correlating words with the essence of a thing, then traditional philosophy must be fairly ordinary because one will have no difficulty finding an everyday language game that does more or less the same thing, particularly if one limits consideration to the use of words like ―I‖ or a proper name. I can only expose the illusions of the first-person pronoun through a use of it that operates as if those illusions were real. And they are real from the perspective of a language game that can’t posit any ground beyond the effects that it produces. By avoiding a particular language game that is pervasive in everyday life, Wittgenstein appears to withdraw from the space of ordinary language that he claimed was a necessary condition of his philosophical practice. In a curious reversal, however, Perloff notes that paradoxically Wittgenstein’s style of philosophical discourse could be considered strictly personal, even if it is not confessional in its rhetorical mode. It is personal because of its reliance on phrases and statements that can

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be identified with a particular class, gender, nation, profession, as well as historical or cultural context. One could probably specify this list indefinitely, even to the inclusion of race and sexual orientation, not to mention political views.56 It follows from Perloff’s observations that one reason why Wittgenstein would avoid confessional discourse has to do with his own background as an offshoot of the wealthy Jewish professional classes of Vienna near the turn of the century. If discretion was no longer an aristocratic virtue, as Benjamin noted, it was and still is one of the virtues of middle-class intellectualism.57 Perloff begins her own book by pronouncing it her most personal and relating it to her upper-middle-class Viennese childhood, though she notes that her family’s wealth was inferior to that of the Wittgensteins.58 My point is simply this. A first-person confessional discourse, though it may be a language game, need not be excluded from use as a technique for exploring the truth that may exist only at the limit of language. In the wake of Wittgenstein, Lacan, Derrida, and so many others, including Perloff, I know that my construction of the past, including the history of my intellectual development, does not derive from something I can access directly in order to put it into a discourse that is adequate to the Real. Things may not have happened exactly as I remember them, and there may be a certain foolishness in trying to reconstruct such a history. Nonetheless, it is equally foolish to imagine that the parameters of an institutional discourse that values discretion has some sort of direct access to the Real through the methodological production of objectivity, the result of which may be just as much of an illusion as the fantasy that there really is such a thing as an inner life quite apart from the social and linguistic games, performances, and masquerades that produce that perception. As Lacan noted, sometimes it seems as if the point of discourse—including academic discourse, despite its restricted field of operation—is to repeat what everyone else says, though with enough of a difference in style and voice to indicate that the one who says it or writes it is definitely not a nobody.59 In my own history, for what it’s worth, my mother’s psychotic speech and Wittgenstein’s philosophical writing were encounters with language that had this much in common. They didn’t seem to say what everyone else said—or rather, they addressed and through that address exposed or made visible something that I took to be the truth. It was at this time in my life that I developed the working theory—though it was probably more like an intuition— that the truth is not something that can be verified but rather the thing that you don’t want to know. I don’t refer to the circular banality that if someone tells you something about yourself you don’t like or agree with, it must be

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true. The truth is something the ignorance of which makes ordinary life possible—even, if you will, ordinary happiness. At the same time, however, a truth can become a driving force, if not an obsession, that reorganizes a life, once it has made itself visible through an event that forces a subject to confront its own singularity through a process of subtraction. I don’t mean that the veils are lifted in order to reveal the true identity of an individual but rather that, as I’ve noted before, the social objectifications and determinations are subtracted in such a way as to reveal the void of being on which a social identity is constructed. That void is not simply an emptiness, but represents the ground common to all individual beings, which could be described in a more affirmative way as the infinity of possible forms of existence (forms of life, as Wittgenstein would say) and of possible worlds that give ground to such existence. With these last few sentences, I have already begun the transition to a consideration of Badiou, since the truth of truth is something that has only recently entered my life through the event of his text. Before I make that shift, however, I need to articulate, as well as I can, not only the truth that my mother’s voice and Wittgenstein’s writing conveyed to me but also the difference in their respective discourses—the discourse of madness and the discourse of philosophy or theory—that ultimately became a choice on which hinged, as far as I can see, the possibility of my own survival through the production of a discourse that, if it could not resolve the contradiction between truth and what everybody else says, could at least produce a sense that was common enough to enable me to go on with my project. And that project was the desire for truth, a desire that both took truth as the goal of desire and understood that truth was not an object but a process, not the end of desire but the condition of a desire for desire. It was nothing less than the quest for something eternal—something in me more than me. It comes back again to what Wittgenstein in the Tractatus calls the mystical that I think remains indistinguishable from what Lacan calls the Real. However, I want to try as well as I can to reimagine how this problematic struck me before I had knowledge of Lacan’s or Badiou’s writing. There are two occasions here, my mother’s first two psychotic episodes, which took place when I was fourteen and nineteen, respectively. As I said earlier, I will not try to recreate her words, which I can only do ineffectively, but rather to evoke my hearing of them. My mother spoke in a way that was delusional from the perspective of what I would have expected her to say, and what she said was not like what I knew anyone else would have said. To me, her delusion was more disturbing than her difference, because I was accustomed to the

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idea by the time I was fourteen that my mother did not talk or think like everybody else. Yet, even though this voice did not sound like her voice, I could not avoid hearing a certain truth in her speech that did not lie in the referential truth of her narrative, to the extent that there was one. On the first occasion, her narrative focused on a delusional act, something that she imagined she had done to someone else, and though at that time I don’t think I had access to a word like ―unconscious,‖ it was not difficult to see that she was articulating her own desire both to strike out at someone and to demand something from them that they were not willing to give. Such a desire could easily have been integrated into the more ―normal‖ life of my mother, but it would have been something that was not consistent with her personal value system and the communal values through which she operated. It was something to which she would not have been able to admit. On the second occasion, she virtually produced a kind of delusional history of the world, a paranoid interpretation that harbored a kernel of truth about everything that mattered to her, but a truth that she clearly found so unbearable that even to contemplate it evoked every kind of nightmarish association that she had ever experienced or imagined. This referential truth was basically that the world as it presented itself to her on an everyday basis was not what it appeared to be—that many of the feelings that were conveyed to her by others were social formalities and even out-and-out deceptions that denied or negated her very existence because she did not find in others any recognition of who she was to herself. Even the institutions with which she was most strongly affiliated, like the Catholic church, had no language for representing this thing that she felt in herself—this thing that she thought she was. The external image that came closest to symbolizing what she felt in herself was probably the satanic, which of course would have been horrifying and destructive to her symbolic makeup. Even at the age of fourteen, I knew that the world was indeed deceptive, though I could not fathom the depth of the pain that this knowledge seemed to cause my mother. By the time I was nineteen, I had been through enough disillusionment and had developed my own symbolic armor to such an extent as to realize that anyone who approaches the world with the need to be understood on their own terms—what I might have been able to call the terms of their history and its imprint on their inner life, the existence of which I took for granted— is bound to encounter a shattering rejection. Yet this did not explain my mother’s discourse or the horrors that it conveyed to me, nor did it explain the difference between my mother’s so-called ―normal‖ identity and her madness. What was the ultimate reference point of her psychotic

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speech? What was it that the world could not see that came back to her in the form of this discourse? As a witness, the thing that I could hear in her speech—with such force that it was almost as if I could see it—was not a presence but an absence. The message of her psychotic speech, quite apart from its narrative or referential content, was that there was nothing—no real self, no spiritual identity, no soul. As I suggested earlier, for the first time, in a concrete way, I could see what Wittgenstein called the language games. But the experience of that knowledge was uncanny. Since I had not read Freud’s essay ―The Uncanny,‖ I use that word retroactively, if you will, to describe the impression that my experience as a witness registered. If a machine that you take for granted in everyday life runs amok, you suddenly become aware of its mechanical nature; and sometimes if you witness the human body enter a dysfunctional state, such as a heart attack or a seizure, you recognize something uncanny in the experience. It’s as if your normal perception has been shattered by the exposure of mechanisms that contradict its interpretive foundation. You have been taught to see the human body as an organic life form that somehow transcends the world of machines, but when you see it in a state of breakdown, it looks like a machine whose parts have worn out or broken down in some way. My mother’s psychotic speech was not meaningless, but it was dysfunctional to the extent that it exposed the rules that governed the language games precisely through its transgression of those rules. It exposed the foundation of my mother’s personality—the existence of the person I knew and loved—as a set of language games that were governed by rules and practices as arbitrary as the rules that govern any masquerade or performance. Once these rules and practical norms were made visible, the thing on which they stood also became visible; and that was nothing but a void. The first time I witnessed that void at the age of fourteen, I don’t think I had a clue as to what to make out of it, and it only appeared to me as an object of terror, something that threatened to destroy the fragile foundation of a world that had already been damaged by other forces in my life. Fortunately, my mother recovered, and I found another fantasy to stuff into the hole that had been blown in my world. The second time I witnessed a similar but much more dramatic event at the age of nineteen, my fantasy had already failed me, but I had by that time begun to discover Wittgenstein and a few other writers—most notably the poet William Blake and the novelist D. H. Lawrence—who gave me the intellectual means to understand the void as something more than an emptiness. Though I no longer believed in a God whom some of my friends called

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the bearded legend, nor could I accept the existence of a soul that my grade school catechism had compared to a milk bottle, I realized that if there was anything eternal, and, at the same time, anything that was truly universal and common to all human beings, it was that void. My mother had suffered the knowledge of this truth, whereas Wittgenstein had revealed the same truth through a use of language that, from the perspective of normality, was probably just as mad, but did not entail the same degree of suffering—or delusion, which I somehow associated with the suffering. Delusion was suffering—and the opposite, a kind of manic happiness, was only the other face of suffering—because it attempted to negotiate a relation to the void that could not be separated from the terror of its revelation through trauma. By the time I was nineteen, I suspected—subjectively I was certain—that my mother had experienced something traumatic in childhood, something that tore apart the fabric of her reality in a way that exposed the face of the void that was forever associated in her mind with the violence of the event. Later her psychiatrist more or less validated that view, but it would be foolish for me to claim that as the basis of my own conviction. In a sense, my conviction was a decision. For Wittgenstein, the void to which I refer was not threatening in the same way, which doesn’t mean, of course, that he did not have his own experiences from the spectrum of trauma, or that he never suffered. It means, rather, that he found another way to approach the void, to make language itself speak of its own limit. In the Investigations and those works related to it, Wittgenstein constructed the meta-language-game that was nothing more than a strategy for making language articulate its limit, but it was also a way of exorcising language of the bad spirit that comes from a tendency to fill the void beyond the language game itself with fantasy, a dream of meaning. Wittgenstein insisted that when we see what a proposition does as something strange and unusual (etwas Seltsames), we are duped into the pursuit of an illusion.60 He went on to note that, though there was nothing extraordinary about any particular use of language, it was impossible for philosophy to give language a foundation.61 Yet Wittgenstein argued repeatedly that philosophy has the job of bringing language back to the real world by concentrating on its everyday use. This leaves him open to the very criticism he made of Freud when he argued that the analysts combat the delusions of those who come to them with something that cannot be shown not to be a delusion.62 How does one know that Wittgenstein’s minimalist construction of the language game according to its everyday use is not the ultimate delusion?

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In his critique of G. E. Moore’s theory of certainty, he insisted that however strong may be someone’s conviction that something is the truth, such a conviction is only an unsteady or wavering foundation (eine unwakende Grundlage) of his or her language games.63 This unsteadiness of foundation means that a language game is unpredictable—neither reasonable nor unreasonable. In this respect, it is like life itself, he says.64 In the same work, he concludes that an event can make it impossible to go on with a language game by destroying the feeling of its Sicherheit, which can be translated as certainty, or trustworthiness, or perhaps reliability.65 In the Investigations, he had already suggested that truth is something you feel, and that based on such a feeling concepts in language merge with or flow into one another (ineinander fließen).66 In other words, they form networks of relations that could be said to underlie the language games. In an early note, Wittgenstein said that one has reached the limit of language when it is impossible to describe a fact of reality to which a sentence refers without repeating the sentence itself.67 But in the critique of Moore, he strongly implies that any language game presupposes some kind of decision about its ground—but a ground that cannot be certain empirically.68 In other words, though Wittgenstein must be counted among those whom Lacan would call the non-duped who err—those who, as Žižek describes them, keep their distance from the symbolic in order not to be duped—he is not, as Žižek would conclude, psychotic. 69 Through his own erring discourse, he maps out language, without ever totalizing it, in such a way as to force the knowledge of its limit, of the void it fails to master, of the Real it misses. One could say that, as the condition of his constructivist philosophy, he turns his back on the Real that he nonetheless continues to feel as the very condition of the meta-language-game that he tries to practice. He feels it perhaps most when he says that he cannot say anything about it in the Tractatus. But he also feels it when he says that he can only repeat what he has already said without ever getting any closer to the thing that corresponds to what he says. I did not have all of these thoughts so long ago, but I did realize or decide this much. In using a word like the mystical for that which must be passed over in silence, Wittgenstein had recognized something like a void such as the one I heard in my mother’s speech when she was no longer duped, though the movement of her language in that state was perhaps a desperate struggle to find her way back to the illusions of everyday consciousness, sometimes known as common sense. Still, the word ―mystical‖ implied something else about the void that I tacitly understood even as I came to reject the other implications of the word

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itself. There was a void in my world, but its emptiness had some positive content, as I have already suggested. It was full of possibilities, things that are but have not been brought into existence.

2. If I now refer to Badiou’s philosophy (like Wittgenstein’s) as an event in my life, I have already violated something in Badiou’s thought, since for him, technically, philosophy cannot be an event or, for that matter, a truth procedure. Yet, in his own writing, he sometimes refers to intellectual events; and certainly, Georg Cantor’s elaboration of set theory, for example, constitutes such an event that becomes the ground of a truth procedure and one of the conditions of Badiou’s philosophy. What would be the singular moment of the event that becomes set theory? The event itself cannot be reduced to the language that names it or draws out its implications. An event is something that happens and becomes the ground of a new form of subjectivity as the effect of a truth procedure. It is something that one recognizes only retroactively through the way it forces a reorganization of a situation for the subject who affirms it and is constituted as subject by that affirmation. As something that appears and disappears, it can never be identical with its own trace or consequences. For the practicing philosopher, the act of philosophy is never an event; and for Badiou it is not even a truth procedure because it does not establish any truth but rather summons the truth procedures of a given time to a common location in which they can be situated in relation to each other.70 Yet it seems to me that any thought, including the thought of philosophy, can become an event for someone who does not already live in the world of that thought. For the non-philosopher, philosophy is an event when it becomes a member of its own set, and insofar as it can be said to exist, of its own world. This last proposition relies on Badiou’s theories of being and of appearance, about which I will have more to say as we go along. All of his thought derives from the axiomatic decision that mathematics as the thought of being is identical with being, and in particular that set theory presents being as the inconsistent multiple that can never be one in itself, though its presentation requires the operation of the count as one. In a sense, ontological discourse is nothing but that count. As Badiou notes early in Being and Event, being in itself is neither multiple nor one, but rather presents itself as the inconsistent multiple through the mathematical operation of a count that constructs the one as its result and postulates the inconsistent multiple as

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that which is presented through the count.71 In effect, mathematics is all that can be coherently known or said about being. For my own purposes, I will say simply that philosophy becomes an event to the subject that it founds when some element of it becomes a condition of its own theory, and thus disrupts the normal discourse or common sense of philosophy. Since the event itself appears and disappears, it cannot be strictly identical with the content or systematic structure of any particular philosophical work. In other words, a philosophical thought or proposition is an event when it is something that happens to someone in such a way as to transform her world and, in the process, condition the birth of a new subject. For Badiou, set theory—or rather the postulation of an infinite multiple— is an event. That doesn’t mean that he witnessed the event but that he retroactively posits it through his recognition of the truth procedure that testifies to it—such as certain critical moments in the recent history of mathematics. He distinguishes something like set theory as a truth procedure from philosophy proper as that which makes the truth procedure visible in its relation to other truth procedures. For my purposes, I will distinguish Badiou as the name of a body of writing that can be called philosophy proper from Badiou as the name of an event, or rather as the name of a discourse that strongly implies the disruptive occurrence of an event. Badiou’s philosophy, however original it may be, nonetheless presupposes the situation and world of philosophy—including the history of philosophy— that is constituted by a canon of significant texts. It also presupposes the knowledge of the conditions of philosophy—most critically in his case, the knowledge of advanced set theory, which I personally cannot claim to have. By contrast, Badiou as the name of an event articulates a force that I am trying to construct retroactively through the consideration of his work. In Being and Event, Badiou argues that an intervention that would seek to name an event always presupposes another event of which the intervention itself is a consequence. The intervention as such, which is another word for the truth procedure, operates in the interval between two events, the one that conditions it as a consequence and the one that it seeks to name. The intervention as an act effectively decides the undecidable, which means that it locates the event within a situation against the law that determines what must be included and excluded from any given situation. The event itself, though it conditions the decision of the truth procedure, remains undecidable. It is only the truth procedure that is able to sustain itself in a situation as the consequence of a decision. 72 In Logiques des mondes, the second volume of Being and Event, Badiou articulates

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the nature of the event in a slightly different way that will illuminate my understanding of his own work as an event. I will translate Logiques des mondes as Logics of the Worlds and refer to it henceforth as Logics. Already in the preface to the English edition of his Ethics, Badiou pointed out that he could no longer understand a situation simply as a multiple or set without taking into account the relations that organize it into something that appears in the form of what he will come to call a world.73 Presumably, a world derives from the organization of the elements of a situation into phenomena, each of which is the effect of a transcendental evaluation or index that determines the relationship of each element in the world to each of the other elements that appear with it through a network of dyadic relations.74 This transcendental index corresponds, in my view, with what Derrida calls the minimal consensus, though it must be understood that such a consensus is not a matter of agreement between already constituted subjects of language but the condition not only of any possible communication between subjects but of the possibility of any kind of experience or meaningful perception of the world. The ordinary subject, or that which we usually refer to as a person, is something that appears to us through the effect of a transcendental index. The subject of a truth, as I will note later, is something rather different. In Logics, the first condition of an event (not temporally but logically) is the appearance of a site, which is a particular kind of object. The ordinary object is a multiple that has been counted as one in appearance, or rather that has been indexed by the transcendental evaluation. Every element or atom of such an object is real in the sense that it is the element of an inconsistent multiple. Badiou describes the object as a point of conjunction or reversibility between the ontological and the logical, between the invariance of a multiple and the variation of its appearance in a world.75 An event produces a change or transformation of the object through the local alteration of the transcendental of its world. 76 A site is an object that has come to count itself within the referential field of its own transcendental indexation. 77 In effect, the site manifests the beingthere or appearance of its own being. To me, this suggests that the being that supports the appearance of an object has become its own index. One could say that being has shown its face, but since being is nothing in itself—an inconsistent multiple—it can only appear as a void, something that would be entirely meaningless from the perspective of the normal state of things. In Ethics, Badiou says that the event names the void insofar as it names that which is not known in a given situation.

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It becomes the condition of a truth that punches a hole in the current state of knowledge.78 In the long version of his essay ―The Event as Trans-Being,‖ Badiou refers to an event as a fragment of being, which means that it is a part of a given situation that enters into the makeup of a world. This situation is the evental site. For example, with reference to Badiou’s own work, the history of philosophy is the situation of which it is a part, though the situation should be understood not as a temporal continuum but as a collection of texts in a cultural location. In the evental site as a multiple, the elements of its elements do not belong to the site, which means that the elements of the site are on the edge of the void. Something in them is not counted. Badiou creates an analogy for this situation by referring to the liver cells of a cat, which are organic elements of the liver that is part of the cat. However, the liver cell becomes a site at the level of its molecules, which are neither organic nor alive in the same sense as the feline liver cells or the cat itself.79 In effect, the molecular structure of a cat’s liver cell is generic. This analogy falls apart if one presupposes that there is a unique material entity, such as an atom or subatomic particle that is the ultimate limit of the material world. A better way of understanding this generic part is through the recognition that the closer one comes to the limit of the known world, the more one has to rely on the language of mathematics to describe that which cannot be reduced to ordinary language. In modern physics, the study of subatomic particles relies completely on mathematics in order to decide on the existence of that which does not appear. In effect, subatomic particles can be said to appear in a world—in this case, the world of quantum physics—only in the form of statistical probabilities expressed in mathematical models. In other words, quantum physics could be described as a site in which mathematical being becomes the index of itself. All the elements of the site are on the edge of the void, not in the sense that they are literally the smallest units of matter beyond which there is nothing, but in the sense that they are generic multiples that can be made to appear only in the form of mathematical models. The object of quantum physics, the mathematical model, is an element of its own set. Stated as plainly as I know how, quantum physics studies a mathematical object or generic situation—in effect, a statistical probability as the count as one of an inconsistent multiple that is never completely reduced to the unity of that count. Such a site, according to Badiou, is the material condition of an event.80 Ironically, since mathematics presents being as the inconsistent multiple, though only through the operation of the count, it requires

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a limit case that cannot be reduced to mathematical language. According to Badiou, the event is this limit. Since being is not One, it remains inconsistent in spite of the count that presents it, and the sign of this inconsistency is the event. The implication might seem to be that there is something beyond being—beyond inconsistent multiplicity—from which something like an event could emerge. I believe that this would be a misreading of Badiou, though I will have to risk a rather liberal paraphrase in order to suggest what I think his work implies for a common subject such as myself. At the beginning of Being and Event, Badiou postulates simply that being is not one or that it is a multiple without one, but this doesn’t mean that there is no oneness. There is oneness as the effect of an operation, a count. The one is a number, pure and simple.81 Ontology is, if you will, the science of the number. In effect, ontology or mathematics is all that we can know or say of being; it is the thought of being. However, ontology is also a world that appears to us in the form of mathematical propositions. In effect, being as being appears as mathematics. The transcendental index of this appearance would be the operation of the count-as-one that mathematics produces. The foundation of this appearance, however, is the Real of being, the inconsistent multiple that the count itself operates on. Mathematics has articulated this inconsistency, at least since Kurt Gödel’s undecidability theorem concerning the inconsistency of arithmetic and Paul Cohen’s demonstration of the inconsistency of some of the fundamental axioms of set theory since Cantor.82 I will not pretend to understand what I do not understand, but the significance of these problems is not to reduce mathematics to chaos but rather to show that consistency, which is the essence of mathematics, depends upon repeated decisions concerning the axiomatic foundation of mathematical thought. In one of his essays, Badiou argues that being, thought, and consistency are identical in mathematics, which I take to mean inside a mathematical or ontological world. He also notes that the name of being in set theory would be the empty set or the void.83 In effect, the void is the name of the inconsistent multiple insofar as it can be made to appear within the consistent world of set theory. As he puts it in the preface to Logics, mathematics as the discourse of ontology forces the consistency of being in order to expose the inconsistency on which it is founded.84 In set theory, every set can be said to contain an empty set, which merely reflects the universality of the void. As Badiou puts it in Being and Event, the unpresentable can only be expressed in language as the void, or the multiple of nothing. The void is the set to which nothing belongs. In effect, Badiou postulates that the first

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existence, which is the foundation of all existence or appearance, is the presentation of the unpresentable as the multiple of nothing. Being as the inconsistent multiple is sutured to the presented multiple in the subtractive mode because the initial existence is the negation of existence. Since the multiple is that to which something belongs, and since existence is coextensive with belonging, then the foundation of existence is the empty set as the existence of the inexistent.85 Badiou does not mean that something belongs to the empty set, to which nothing belongs, but rather that the empty set belongs to every set. In set theory, this idea is formulated as the axiom of foundation, which states that for every multiple there is a multiple that belongs to it but whose elements do not belong to it. In other words, every multiple contains a site as its foundation, a multiple that lies on the edge of the void. The site is not identical with the empty set, but it localizes the empty set within the field of presentation. Badiou suggests that such a set—that is, the site—constitutes the big Other insofar as it is in absolute disjunction from the set to which it belongs. Ironically, this means that, though one can postulate the infinity of some sets in accordance with the axioms of set theory, the foundation of every set lies outside of itself and thus puts a limit on the infinite regression of existence or presentation in mathematical terms. The foundation of every set, infinite or not, is finite, in the sense that the elements of the site cannot be counted in the situation in which the site appears, which makes it the mark of history.86 In Logics, Badiou suggests that appearance is governed by logic, which is synonymous with the consistency of a phenomenon. By contrast with the way that the consistency of mathematics forces the exposure of the inconsistency of being (since the former itself is founded on a certain inconsistency à la Gödel and Cohen), logic reveals the consistency of worlds that may appear to be inconsistent or disordered. 87 A world is more than the count-as-one of ontological discourse. Though the countas-one would be the transcendental legislation or operation that makes being appear as the inconsistent multiple, the ontological world is an exceptional case. It is a world without relations, which is the only way in which being as itself and nothing but itself can be made to appear. To be counted as one in appearance, which constitutes the object, requires something else in order to be recognized as part of a non-ontological world, what you could call the world of ordinary experience that could be expressed by ordinary language rather than mathematics, though its ontological expression would be the formalization of mathematical logic. Such a world can be recognized ontologically by the real basis of what appears

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in it, the elements of a multiple, and logically by the relations between the elements that appear in the form of objects.88 Furthermore, the object in such a world is marked by contingency to the extent that its elements, its being as a multiple, could be made to appear elsewhere or not to appear at all. In other words, contingency represents the possibility of other worlds that would include some of the elements in any given world. According to Badiou, the objects of a world reveal this contingency through a particular relation that suggests that no multiple of being is ever fully delivered over to appearance as an object. There is a reserve of being that leaves a trace in the object, that marks the existence of the object—the degree of intensity of its appearance in a world—with a point of inexistence.89 The elementary and invariant structural relations that make up any world include a relation of order that would identify the differences of intensity of existence between different elements of a world, and the existence of a minimum. To the extent that some elements can be said to possess the maximum degree of existence according to the transcendental index of a particular world, there must be a minimum degree of existence, and this degree is always antithetical to the infinite measures or gradations of appearance in a world. To the infinite, it poses the unicity of the minimum.90 This relation marks the existence of the inexistent within every particular world as the sign of its being insofar as being appears in a world only in the form of the non-being of appearance. The trace of being identifies the contingency of a world. 91 From this perspective, a site would be an object that has subverted its own transcendental index by forcing the appearance of what had been the minimum degree of existence. It alters the transcendental index by forcing the multiple to index itself. Though Badiou doesn’t put it precisely in this way, the site collapses the distinction between being and being-there through its revelation of the void, which, so to speak, is made to appear. Such an occurrence violates the law of being insofar as the thought of being is identical with set theory, which states axiomatically that a set cannot be a member of its own set. Consequently, as I’ve already noted, an event can only appear in order to disappear. It cannot be sustained in a world. However, it can produce consequences, and in Logics, these consequences take the place of simply naming the event, as he had described the origin of a truth procedure in Being and Event. To understand the significance of these consequences, one needs to understand Badiou’s distinction between an ontological situation and a logical world, though he does not always draw the distinction between situation and world in the way I will here. The emphasis should be on the difference

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between ontology and logic, or being and appearance. The foundation of a world is the inconsistent being of the ontological situation, which is only the collection of multiples that belong to the world.92 Such a collection is infinite because the parts of a set, which consist of all the possible ways of associating the different elements of the set, are always greater than the elements. Furthermore, the elements of a set are themselves sets with more parts than elements, and the same is true of those elements and the elements of those elements, ad infinitum. It is impossible to establish a finite number for the totality of the set or to divide the set into all possible component parts. More effectively than I am able to demonstrate here, Badiou shows that the ontological foundation of a world can be expressed by the idea of an infinite cardinal number that is inaccessible because it cannot be reduced to an operation that would mathematically formalize the count. The world of such a number is closed, which means that if one applies the mathematical laws of being to the ontological situation that supports the world, one reaches neither an accessible number nor an exit from the world. The inaccessibility of the infinite cardinal guarantees that the world is closed.93 What Badiou calls the transcendental index of a world is one of the multiples in the ontological situation that supports the world. This multiple contains the logic of the world in question. One could almost think of it as like the operating program of a computer system. Such a program is a separate multiple, a multiple among other multiples. As a program, it is different from every other program—though this difference only means that it contains elements that are not in other programs—elements that translate into practical operational differences. In set theory, the axiom of extensionality says that two sets are equal, or virtually identical, if they contain the same elements. Therefore, even the difference of one element means that there are two different sets in question. In our analogy, different programs perform different tasks. The operating program, however, organizes the other programs in the system so that they will work and appear on the computer screen. On the screen, which is the world of the computer, everything that appears has been inflected by the operating program, and the world of the computer is organized by a set of relations that are the properties or elements of the operating program. One could remove the operating program from the computer, and the other programs would still be there on the hard drive and they could even be made to appear as a raw computer language to a programmer (who, in this case, would be analogous to the mathematician-ontologist), but they would not appear to the ordinary subject or user in the computer’s world. The

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relations that organize their appearance on the screen would be gone. The logic of the world would be missing, and therefore the programs would not appear. They would not work. As Badiou summarizes the logic of a world, the transcendental index, or the transcendental algebra as he names its formalization, produces an order that is partial (because the inexistent or void within it cannot be ordered). This order means that the elements in the world have greater and lesser degrees or intensities of existence. With respect to these degrees, there is a minimum of existence that constitutes the location of the inexistent within the world, or that which does not appear in it. There is also a maximum degree of existence, which produces the stability of a particular world and also designates any given world as this world and not the world as a totality. Within a world, there are conjunctions of different elements that share elements that are subsets of both. For example, one could consider the categories ―male‖ and ―female‖ as a conjunction within the world of human physiology because both genders have bodily organs and genetic codes in common that are subsets of their overall biological composition. Nonetheless, this conjunction is not the same thing as identity. The envelope, which might be said to correlate with the concept of identity, would be a degree of intensity in the transcendental index that governs the degrees below it.94 The category ―human physiology‖ would be the envelope of the biological categories ―male‖ and ―female‖ in the example that I’ve been using. However, Badiou insists that the only thing that appears in a world is the transcendental. There is no natural order to things.95 Even the structural difference between ―male‖ and ―female‖ bodies is an appearance that cannot be attributed to a natural law. Think of it in this way. At the most generic level of being, bodies are nothing but organizations of subatomic particles that can only be thought through mathematical propositions. To designate one set of subatomic particles as a female body in disjunction from another set of subatomic particles that would be a male body already entails a set of relations—conjunctions and disjunctions—that do not exist at the generic or subatomic level. Furthermore, as Judith Butler has argued, bodies only become totalities in themselves through an idealization that is sustained through time by a sexually marked name, such as a ―male‖ body or a ―female‖ body.96 For Badiou, such an idealization is a function of the transcendental that produces a particular world as appearance. It could be compared with a Platonic Idea or pure form with this significant difference: there is no totalized world that is governed by a unique and absolute set of pure forms. There is no absolute idea of ―male‖ and ―female‖ that, along with

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other ideas, would constitute one world—a world that incorporates all the possibilities of existence. The transcendental categories ―male‖ and ―female‖ govern a particular world because, however broadly this world may be defined in terms of its operation, and even if all known human beings could be said to exist in this world, the transcendental itself is never anything more than an element of the ontological situation, of the inconsistent multiple that can never be one in itself. The transcendental appears, but there is always something in the situation that does not appear in the transcendental.97 At this point, I need to withdraw to some distance from Badiou’s language and his philosophical system in order to articulate some relation to it from the perspective of ordinary language, namely the language of my own experience, even though I will need to qualify the use of the word ―experience‖ in this process. I want to return once again to what for me was the primary event of my life. In Logics, Badiou distinguishes between objective phenomenology as a principle of exposition and the strict formalization of mathematical logic.98 In the English translation of the section to which I refer, this phenomenological principle of exposition is qualified by the word ―vulgar.‖99 I will tell the reader quite frankly that the relation between vulgar phenomenology and mathematical formalization in Badiou’s writing is not clear to me. One might be inclined to assume that the formalizations of mathematical logic constitute the real proof of Badiou’s philosophical assertions about the organization of worlds, but in effect logic does not prove the existence of such a world but is rather the discourse that articulates its immanent structure and follows from the axiomatic decision to recognize mathematics as the discourse of being. 100 Logic is the thought of appearance, but appearance is an intrinsic property of being. As Badiou argues in his essay ―Being and Appearance,‖ since being as being is not whole or One, it can only be thought locally, which means that all being has the property of being-there. Existence is beingthere or appearance, and being as a whole does not exist. Being as being is unbound, which means it remains inconsistent and without any internal links between multiples that constitute relations. Yet insofar as it is in the nature of being to appear, it must necessarily assert the relation of the pure multiple to something that is not whole, namely another multiple. Appearance is identical with relation, and insofar as being can be localized, it must appear in the form of relations between multiples. 101 This explains why Badiou asserts that only the transcendental appears as a world, because if appearance is the localization of being as a set of relations, then the pure multiple in itself never appears except as the ontological

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thought of mathematics. What appears is the relation of one multiple to another and never the multiple in itself. Yet appearance is Real because what appears is the transcendental, which is a pure multiple as far as the logical relations of a world are the elements of a set.102 The transcendental of the ontological situation, of being-as-being, which is what appears as the thought of being or mathematics, would be a classical logic that incorporates both the principle of the excluded middle and the principle of non-contradiction. But there are other worlds—the worlds of being-there— that appear through the operation of logics that are not classical, either because they operate without the principle of the excluded middle or without the principle of non-contradiction.103 Though I suspect that Badiou would never formulate it in this way, I would argue that the worlds (for there is not and cannot be one world) of non-classical logics are worlds that one could describe as ordinary in the sense that these are the worlds that appear to us in a way that can be subjected to the descriptions of a ―vulgar‖ phenomenology. I mean to express no humility when I say that I want to direct my discourse toward a vulgar or common experience, the consistency of which involves the appearance of an ordinary or non-classical transcendental logic, or the transcendental ordinary. This primary event in my life is my mother’s so-called mental illness—in particular, her first psychotic episode, though, as I’ve said before, I cannot separate that first episode from her second one. I call this event primary because I am still struggling to articulate the truth of this event and its consequences in my own history—a truth that also inflects and organizes the other significant events that came later, including this contemporary encounter with Badiou’s writing. The question I want to formulate is the following: What kind of world did I live in before that event and how was that world altered or rewritten by the event itself? Before attempting to answer that complex question (which will necessarily generate other questions), I must confess first that any attempt to write that truth will necessarily have the structure of a fiction.104 This Lacanian insight seems consistent with Badiou’s philosophy because the event itself can never be sustained in the world that it alters. It can only be formulated retrospectively through a truth procedure that has the structure of a fiction not in the sense that it is false or make-believe but because it necessarily breaks with the reality of a given social situation and attempts to reinvent the world in a way that approaches or discloses the Real. The truth that the event conditions is ultimately a mathematical infinity, and Badiou refers to such an infinity when he argues that truths are eternal. The being of truth is eternal, and for

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that reason it is also generic, which means that it contains a little of everything that can never add up to a totality because it is subtracted from the power of the One.105 However, the truth can take place—that is to say, can be brought into existence through localization in a world—only through the act of a subject that is necessarily finite and expresses the truth in the future perfect.106 Hence, truth has the structure of a fiction. At the level of Freudian common sense, the event is not something you can bring back because you never really experienced it. As Freud argued in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a traumatic event—and I would argue that any significant event in Badiou’s understanding of the term is necessarily traumatic—leaves a profound memory trace precisely because it is not experienced at the level of consciousness, which filters all external stimuli according to what could be construed as categories of predictable experience.107 One could correlate Freud’s notion of consciousness with Badiou’s theory of appearance and argue that an event will necessarily fail to register as part of reality precisely to the extent that it violates the transcendental index that governs the degrees of existence within a world. Furthermore, one can argue that the transcendental index of a world is the unconscious that underlies every ordinary perception—the unconscious that, as Lacan insisted repeatedly, ex-sists or rather lies outside of the subject. The transcendental index can be said to be structured like a language, though Badiou might be inclined to qualify that formula with the understanding that the transcendental index is the condition for any kind of language that would operate in a given world. In the case of the event in my own life that I want to approach again, I must repeat, from the first chapter, that it can only be constructed retroactively through what one would have to call, in ordinary language, an act of imagination. I am not saying that I have no memory of the facts of the situation, which would be what happened on a certain day roughly at a certain time, but rather that the event itself is not identical with those facts. It lies within them but cannot be reduced to them. Furthermore, as I suggested earlier, there may well be another event that I cannot remember that governs my experience of the later event. Even the word ―primary‖ may be fictional but not for that reason without truth. Let me hypothesize about the kind of world I lived in before my mother’s psychosis. It was a world that took itself for granted, and it was one world. Or rather, I had no inkling that there was more than one world, more than my world, which I took to be the same world for everyone and everything. This doesn’t mean that I was unaware

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of social differences that could be alienating to an extreme degree, since even at an early age I thought that I was different even as my mother was different from most people, but this difference was merely an external circumstance. Sometimes I enjoyed our difference, and sometimes I hated it, but one could say that this love hate (what Lacan called hainamoration in his Encore seminar) constituted the jouissance of my world—the kind of investment that produced an economy of pleasure and pain in order to define the world into which I could be said to fit even if the mode of my fitting was not perfect, even if I was at odds with the world into which I nonetheless fitted.108 My mother had been raised as a Southern Baptist from her early childhood in New Orleans through her growing up in an Arkansas small town until she moved to Memphis after World War II and met my father. Then she converted to Catholicism and became extremely committed to her new faith and religion. However, her experience had convinced her that the particularities of a religion were not the fundamental issue, and she taught me and my siblings to tolerate other people’s religious beliefs as merely the external form of one common expression of faith in a God who was the source of the world’s meaning and who was the only one who could change that meaning. Though human beings could modify some of the external conditions of this world, which gave me hope that I wasn’t condemned to a lifetime of monstrous difference, they could not alter its structure. Only God could do that. Consequently, justice was an ideal that could never be fully realized, and yet this ideal or conviction was the thing in every one of us that linked us most directly to God. I may have gotten some of these principles from my Catholic education, but the particular inflection they took in my life was from my mother. Both my mother and my father gave me a view of the human individual as something vulnerable and incomplete from the very earliest periods of my life. My mother, of course, was formally subordinate to my father in the sense that she more or less accepted him for what he was and tried to organize her life around his. As I have already mentioned, this doesn’t mean that she accepted his social values, including his racism; and she certainly taught her children not to accept those values; but she also taught us unfailingly to respect our father and not to judge him at face value. She seemed to argue for the view that people—all people—were fundamentally good, even though they might be blind to the injustice of their own beliefs about other people and even about themselves. It was common knowledge in my family that my father hated himself, and if he seemed to hate us, it was because of this self-hate that surely had its own history of which we got glimpses

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from time to time but never the whole picture. My mother even speculated that maybe the war had something to do with it; but my father vehemently denied that anything terrible had happened to him in the war, and, during the inevitable scenes of self-criticism and pleas for forgiveness after some violent family scene, he blamed whatever flaws he had on his personal worthlessness, though he also never let his wife and children forget that they were equally worthless by association with him. In other words, as far back as I can remember, neither my mother nor my father were able to embody images of authority or completeness; they could not offer their children either the reality or the illusion of a world in which the individual has control over her own life, destiny, or whatever you want to call it. This doesn’t mean that they didn’t exhibit strength and character at times, but there was never the illusion that character or personal will were enough to overcome the constraints that bind individuals to a particular situation in their world. My father was a good worker, and he was known among the men who worked with him and in the union that organized their labor as a man of skill and integrity who was incapable of cheating or of doing anything less than the best work of which he was capable. Nonetheless, he sometimes had to deal with contractors who wanted him to cheat on the materials for which they had contracted, which led him to walk off a few jobs; and though he was never without work for very long, he was not overly popular with the contractors as a group for these acts of integrity, and this had some effect on his economic well-being. At the same time, he was occasionally victimized by the union that he loyally supported because he did not go along with some particular rule they were trying to enforce or, in one case, because he became the scapegoat in an internal power struggle within the union. Ultimately, as I noted in the first chapter, the thing he feared most in life was the strike, though I have to emphasize that he understood perfectly well how necessary the strike was to the survival of all the workers in his union. Though he would never have used this language, he understood that the only thing that prevented a worker from being an out-and-out wage slave was the power of the strike. In other words, my father had limited power over his life, which was driven home to us repeatedly in our experiences as a family. Furthermore, this lack of autonomy was intensified by his feelings of worthlessness and the things he did to numb the pain he felt as a result of these feelings and his other life experiences. My father was not the master of his world, and my mother was dependent on my father. As a child and an adolescent, I was concerned that my father was supposed to be in charge of things, and it was obvious to me and my

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other siblings that he couldn’t entirely live up to that function, that he was—to borrow a Lacanian formula—not everything. According to Lacan, it is the woman’s side of the sexual-difference equation that is noteverything, not-all (pas tout); but it has always seemed to me that his diagrammatic presentation of sexual difference (which can be found at the beginning of chapter 7 in the Encore seminar) represents a particular cultural inflection of an equation that operates more globally within cultures that are organized as social hierarchies (which would be all the cultures that I’m familiar with).109 In Badiou’s mathematical ontology, being as the inconsistent multiple is inherently not-everything, not-One; but to the extent that a dominant gender or class or nation imagines itself as a universal norm that can measure every other social formation according to its degree of conformity to its own image, it postulates its being as unified and selfidentical, which, as something that appears, means that it represents the maximum degree of existence within a particular world. To the extent that women exist within a patriarchal world, they do not represent the maximum degree of existence because there is something in them that does not exist in that world and has not been represented. This is the meaning of Lacan’s infamous statement that Woman (la femme as a universal category) does not exist. Women exist, but Woman as one thing, a universal, does not exist in the world of men. From the perspective of Badiou’s philosophy, this formula starts to make sense. Only something with the maximum degree of existence in a particular world can be articulated as an object that counts itself as One in that world. The object is real to the extent that the ontological elements that constitute it are real. However, these elements only appear because they have been indexed by the transcendental logic of the particular world. 110 Hence—and I am speculating because Badiou never says exactly what I am about to say—Man as an objective category can be said to exist only in a world that has legislated his existence as the purest or maximum form of self-identity. In a patriarchal world, this category is real because the elements that constitute Man as an object are real; and all men who exist in that world can be said to form the atoms or real elements of that object. By contrast, women on their own in that world cannot enter into a unified object or universal category not because they have no being as elements of the situation but because the category ―Woman‖ as object does not exist. Rather, women exist as far as they enter into the object Man. But there is something in each individual woman that does not exist for the object Man, and this inexistent element of such a woman’s being means that she is not everything. Though Lacan does not specify the possibility of

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more than one world, one can argue that he has mapped out the transcendental legislation of a patriarchal world—a world that excludes women by its nature, which, he says, is determined by language.111 Badiou presumably would go further and argue that it isn’t just words but the material condition of words, which is the transcendental legislation without which even words could not exist. The proof of this is that words fail us, even the words of patriarchy. There are indiscernible elements that cannot be brought into existence through the formulation of a particular phrase or proposition or social rule.112 For example, in a patriarchal world, the proposition that man is greater than woman leaves elements in the being of individual women indiscernible. As Lacan puts it, it is not that each individual woman is not wholly in the phallic function because, in so far as she exists in a patriarchal world, she is there. But there is something more to her than that.113 Something that does not exist in such a world. There are other worlds. Or at least the possibility of other worlds, which would be guaranteed by the fact that the elements that enter into a world are ontologically real and can theoretically exist in more than one world. Furthermore, elements that don’t exist in a particular world can be made to exist in that world if an event occurs that brings about a change in its transcendental index. One can argue that the woman’s movement has been the struggle to rewrite the transcendental index of the patriarchal world; but I would argue that the same logic applies to other forms of inexistence within a particular world. If my father seemed to fall on the side of the noteverything, the site of castration, it wasn’t because he wasn’t technically a man but because the concept of Man as a global object in a capitalist patriarchal order does not account for all the ontological elements that go into the makeup of individual men. In other words, my father was not everything, and to some extent he knew it, though he experienced that knowledge from the perspective of the object Man that he never called into question, and never failed to identify with even if that identification took the form of a disjunction, something he should be but could not be, which forced him into the relation of abjection vis-à-vis one of the dominant objects of his world. Already, in the world before my mother’s first psychotic episode, which I will call the world of my father, I had a similar relation to this dominant object, whose existence was maximal, and which was imposed on me as the construction of my inadequacy, my failure to conform to the idea of what I should be. Like my father, I was an abject, not an object. Even though I didn’t use these forms of language, I knew perfectly well that my father, my mother, and my whole family were abjects of this

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world—that we were in it but not quite of it. To put it plainly, we just didn’t matter all that much. Our existence was of little consequence to anyone outside of our family; and even within our family, we seemed to be of little consequence to the dominant representative of the outside world, my father. Furthermore, though we suffered and resisted our abjection in various ways, we also found comfort in it, learned to be at home in it, and more or less accepted the situation according to the common-sense logic that the evil you know is better than the evil you don’t know. The difference between my mother and my father did not lie in the knowledge of castration, but in their different relations to that knowledge. Though she accepted the hegemony of my father’s world, which meant accepting the hegemony of my father, she nonetheless experienced social castration differently from the way that he did. For one thing, she knew from her relation to my father that the dominant object of his world was not what it appeared to be—that Man as a universal object that incorporates the totality of human existence was not whole or complete. Obviously, I am speculating about a knowledge that would have been tacit. She would never have said this, and in terms of her practical everyday discourse, she would have gone along with the idea of the subordination of her existence to his existence, of the subsumption of women by the object Man. But, in my view, her submission was formal with a reserve of skepticism as to its truth, whereas for my father it was something that he took to be reality itself. My father punished himself for his own failure to live up to the norm that he took to be the only measure of viable existence, and he punished the rest of us for our connection with him. His logic was thoroughly consistent with the logic of his world. If he was less than Man, then those who were less than him in the sense that they were dependent on him, both symbolically with reference to social distinction (for example, class) and economically in terms of material support, were even less worthy of respect than he was. Furthermore, he could only sustain whatever degree of existence he enjoyed in his world by keeping those who were beneath him in their place. For my mother, it was different because as a woman who existed in the world of men, so to speak, she had been given an identity that bore a disjunctive relation to the norm of Man that nevertheless claimed to incorporate her. In other words, her identity as a woman consisted in not being universal, not being whole, as the condition of her incorporation by the universal that guaranteed her existence in the world she inhabited with my father. In the world of men, the individual woman becomes a site of possible change because there is something

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in her that cannot be subsumed, something that does not exist in that world. In the universal Man that subsumes all women, Woman (with a capital) is the name of that which occupies the place of the inexistent. Curiously, since the inexistent of an object is always univocal, then Woman names the inexistent not only for all women but also for all men in such a world. Let me try to translate this into plainer language. Though contingency marks every object in a world to the extent that every object is sutured to being through the inexistent, women know this contingency more directly than men do because of their inherent displacement within the world of men, to the extent that such a world can be said to exist.114 Their condition of inclusion is exclusion. In my view, this doesn’t mean that a man like my father could not have recognized the contingency of his own existence and entered into a truth procedure that might have altered his world and himself, but such an act would have required an event that might not have happened or been apparent to him. The grace of the event may not have come to him for whatever reason. Furthermore, the contingency that any woman probably experiences in such a world was intensified for someone like my mother by her historical experience of quasi-poverty, masculine violence, and social marginality. My father’s inability to integrate with the dominant social norm he identified with and the absence of any event in his life that might have altered his relation to that norm aggravated the disjunction between himself and my mother in such a way that it may have resurrected an event from her life. She was required by the logic of her world to integrate with a social norm that may have failed her more than once already, something that finally forced her to encounter Man from outside the process of incorporation, which, as Lacan said, can only take place in psychosis.115 My point is not that my mother was destined to be psychotic. Each case is singular in Badiou’s sense of that term. It seems to me that most women survive something like a patriarchal social structure in one of three ways. First, they can identify with the father and accept their own castration—that is, structural incompleteness—as the condition of their incorporation into the universal Man. (By the way, this mode of accommodation is more or less parallel with what most men do, since the vast majority of them probably cannot sustain the fantasy of the paternal One any better than women can.) Second, they can dis-identify with the father, which presupposes his symbolic authority. Such a move displaces that authority—in Lacanian terms, it subverts the master signifier—by constructing another signifier, another authority, another master, whether it be, for example, the movement

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itself (such as feminism) or some other symbolic construction that can situate the subject in a discourse. The names have changed, but the structure remains more or less the same. (For obvious reasons, this maneuver would be redundant for a man, unless, symbolically speaking, he ceased to be a man.) The third way is what Badiou calls a political sequence. The ordinary subject becomes the subject of a truth by subtracting itself from the interpellation of the state of the situation, including the name of the father as the signifier of universal identity. Historically, the second response to the patriarchal social structure begins as a political sequence—say, in the women’s movements of the sixties and seventies—but betrays that sequence to the extent that it substitutes for a generic truth that is addressed to everyone a new bond, whether it be all women, or all lesbians, or all mothers, and so forth. The separation from the name of the father and the unbinding of the identity that it structures produces a generic truth in the form of a prescription for social change that is unbound or addressed to everyone.116 All of these responses to the patriarchal signifier have one thing in common. They all start from the presupposition of a symbolic law of the father as one of the names for what Badiou would call the state of a situation, or the State itself in its institutional form. For myself, before my mother’s first breakdown, this would have been everything that I took for granted in my situation despite the obvious contradictions of which I was only partially aware. In retrospect, I can see how even my consciousness of my father’s symbolic weakness and social limitations nonetheless became the condition of a strengthening of my attachment, my binding if you will, to a patriarchal social identity that also had the secondary effect of legitimating my family’s class identity. Two events in 1963, which was the date of my mother’s first psychotic episode, illustrate this point. One took place before and the other after the episode. The first event was the death of Pope John XXIII, which had a strangely powerful effect on me that resulted in my going to church and praying. It is the prayer that I remember so well. This ecumenical pope had been the subject of continuous discourse between my mother and me, and there was the general feeling among us Catholics at the time that he was bringing the church into a new world. Whatever his real historical significance, the pope represented the idea of fatherhood, and, from my mother’s perspective, which I adopted, this idea included the opening of the church to a universal address. The pope spoke to everyone in the way that the ecumenical Church belonged to everyone. The Church belonged not only to all of its members, but to those who were not its members, who did not

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necessarily accept its particular religious doctrines. My belief at the time, which was endorsed by some of my teachers but particularly by my mother, was that the Church addressed and embraced all men who struggled toward goodness, which would be any human action driven by faith, hope, and charity. The address of faith, of course, was to God, but in my understanding, it also referred to a belief that all human beings were part of the mystical body of Christ as long as they acted in a way that was consistent with the life, death, and resurrection of the redeemer. In other words, faith was addressed to the Christ in every human being, which was that part that had been resurrected from the fear of death and had separated itself from its own self-interest to the extent that it could act out of the love of others and the demand for justice. The latter meant, to my mind, that whatever our social differences, all human beings are spiritually the same. It didn’t matter if they believed in a religious doctrine, or even in the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ, as long as they acted on the principles that lay behind it. Charity was simply the love that responded to the demand for justice. To act out of charity was not to look down on someone but to recognize that all people are the same, and that anything that separates them from one another, including differences of wealth and well-being, should be cast aside. Hope was the refusal to give up on these principles at a time when the world seemed bent on destroying itself. This may not be an accurate view of ecumenism, but it describes my state of mind only a few weeks before my mother’s first psychotic episode. When I went to church to pray for Pope John, I was seized by a horrible and paralyzing fear. I have no idea what motivated this fear anymore, though perhaps there were things going on at home, anticipations of what was about to happen, that were already destabilizing my world. The content of my plea to God had to do with a very simple proposition. Please God, I said, do not let me become a communist. I have no idea why, at the age of fourteen in the summer of 1963, I was mortally afraid that I would be tempted to become a communist, particularly considering what I must have understood by that term at the time. Like young Lee Harvey Oswald, my view of communism had been shaped by programs like the notorious I Led Three Lives that had been aired on television throughout the mid-fifties. But maybe I understood implicitly that communism was a name for the unimaginable world that would destroy the world in which I currently lived; hence, it signified the possibility of other worlds. I would speculate that in the realm of affects, which might be another way of saying the unconscious, I already implicitly understood something that I would

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learn from Nietzsche in the next decade—namely, that any new idea for a new world, a legislated good of the future for which the present is not yet prepared, will appear in the present as something evil, if not utterly inexistent or impossible to conceive. The idea of the father, which the pope embodied much more effectively than my own father, was the force that underpinned my world at that time. Because my father could not sustain our world, but rather revealed its incompleteness and perhaps the impossibility of any justice within it, I could only sustain my belief in that world by locating the name of the father in a higher register. In this act, the pope became the name of the father that my own father participated in but could not live up to, and this name reassured me that the breaches in my world that had already revealed something of the void at its foundation could be filled up with the presence of his paternal authority. This authority reduced the void to inexistence except as the evil thought of any force that would destroy the world as I knew it. My mother’s first breakdown momentarily shattered whatever security I took from this version of the name of the father, but trauma itself created the conditions that enabled me to bind myself back into the world of my family and religion, though never again with the same degree of faith. As the pope and religion receded for me, other forms of paternal and moral authority took on enhanced significance. A few months after my mother’s first breakdown, I was at high school when the principal announced over the intercom that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. Another name of the father, JFK took on even greater symbolic significance after the assassination, and for me this significance was compounded by the loss of my mother to a mental illness that had already revealed something that my mind was not yet ready to embrace. During this period, Kennedy became nothing less than an obsession that crystallized in the fantasy of a lost Camelot with its uncrowned king. The dead president became fused in my mind with the fictional father Atticus Finch whom I had seen Gregory Peck portray earlier that year in the film based on the novel by Harper Lee, which I had read during the summer. Again, the key to these figures in my imagination was the universality of their address. I did not yet see the contradictions in Kennedy’s ―political‖ approach to the civil rights movement or the idiocy of the Vietnam debacle that he initiated. Rather, he appeared to address everyone as the same, American or Soviet, black or white, rich or poor. The fictional Atticus Finch defended a black man against the sexual fantasies and fears of white racists, and when he asked the jury of white men in judgment on a black man to do their duty, he used a voice that

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was the antithesis of the racist hysteria I saw everyday in the South, a voice that was soft without a trace of stridency and yet terrifying in its righteous demand for justice. These paternal figures were able to sustain my identification with the name of the father and the patriarchal world that it anchored. Furthermore, they naturalized the class system by suggesting a correlation between nobility of spirit and social class, whether it was the patrician demeanor of JFK or the intellectual nobility of Atticus. Later, between my mother’s first and second psychotic episodes, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy would enter this lineup of fathers, and for completely different reasons these figures signified a weakening of the authority of class that made their address more universal in my mind. Though there were other, contradictory images from mass culture and politics running through my head in those years, these figures operated like sutures, or perhaps the better figure would be band-aids, that tried to close or at least cover over a gaping wound in my psyche that was the trace of my mother’s madness. Within this wound lay the forces of class resentment and social alienation that erupted when these anodyne figures of patriarchal authority were not enough keep it contained, when the world of the good fathers could no longer make sense out of the imperfect world of my real father. At such a moment of crisis, I was forced to recognize the possibility of another world altogether, even if I could only imagine that world as a threat, something absolutely mad, like the mad world of my mother. This leads me to the event itself, which the reader may be disappointed to learn, once again, that I am not going to narrate in detail. I’ve already done that as well as I can in the unpublished memoir, but such a narration necessarily falls short of the event itself, and so I will only reference it obliquely. I am even tempted to use the term that Badiou borrows from set theory and say that I can express it only through a diagonal procedure. As I’ve already implied, the trace of this event—in Badiou’s sense of the mark that subsists in a world, which means, for me, in my memory—was my mother’s psychotic speech. 117 The first consequence of that speech was certainly not the revelation that might suit those who would like to dismiss my own writing as another version of the postmodern dementia that would reduce everything to language or imagine that language somehow produces the world. On the contrary, the effect or consequence of this speech was to force on me and my situation the realization not that language is the all-powerful creative force, but rather that it is only one element of the Real—one set of elements, as Badiou might say—that could not be governed exclusively by any particular grammar

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or set of rules that were taken to be logically coextensive with its existence. Like every other ―real‖ element in my world, language could be subjected to or governed by a different set of rules. No element or set of elements that appears in a world is illogical, though its logic may not be conventional. But when a form or use of language appears in a world in such a way as to overthrow the use of language that had appeared as the logical expression of that world, the former can be called trans-logical.118 The first thing that impressed me about my mother’s psychotic speech was the absence of my mother. As a subject, she was no longer there. She had ceased to exist. Yet something was there, something continued to speak out of her body, with her voice. Something had come into existence that had not existed before and occupied the place of my mother. Eventually, I would be able to integrate this something, a virtual monstrosity, with my mother, but initially it was as if the world I knew, a world that centered on my mother, had collapsed. With that voice so familiar to me, this other being spoke of horrors, of the things it had done, the crimes it had committed, and though I knew that my mother had to be incapable of these acts, I also knew that she would never have spoken maliciously, she would never have claimed something to be true that was not true, and so I had to verify what she said to me, and when I did so I found out that none of it had ever happened. The world outside the small house where this new voice revealed itself had not changed. The words she spoke, the language, no longer had a relation to that world, and yet there was some other world that it addressed. Until that day during the summer of 1963, my mother had been an individual with unique characteristics, someone who was special to my siblings and me, someone who was different from everyone else, and yet she was a mother. My mother was a mother. She was a member of a category. However different she may have been, she participated in something that was bigger than she was, something that identified her without becoming identical to her. My mother was a mother like all the other mothers, but she was not motherhood itself. Motherhood, if you will, was the set that could not be a member of itself, and to the extent that my mother fell into that category, she was bound to a world that was also my world, she was part of a situation that was stable and predictable. But on the day when her mad voice appeared with its strange stories and histories, she became sui generis. I still called her ―Mother,‖ but the word had taken on a new inflection because something had broken or disrupted the category itself. ―Mother‖ now signified something that Badiou

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would call a singularity. The name ―Mother‖ belonged to a reflexive set because my mother had become the set that is a member of itself. Obviously, I didn’t think this at the time. Insofar as I can reimagine the experience of it, I was struggling to pull the two beings back together, the being in front of me and the being I had known all of my life. Nevertheless, to the extent that this event became the condition of a truth procedure that subjected me for the rest of my life, there is no reason why its truth cannot be resurrected in the present context. In Logics, Badiou argues that the first condition of an event is the emergence of a site, which I have already described. The ontology of the site has three critical properties. First, it is a reflexive multiplicity, a set that belongs to itself and hence violates the law of being. In her madness, my mother became a site on that day in 1963. The second property of the site involves the revelation of the void through the momentary lifting of the separation between being and being-there or appearance. And the third property describes the peculiar temporality of the first two properties. The site appears in order to disappear, because neither the void nor the reflexive set can sustain itself in a world whose foundation is the law of being expressed through the axioms of set theory.119 The site and the event it makes possible are always in the order of an exception. And yet, as Badiou writes at the end of his book on Saint Paul, only the exception that is immanent to a situation can be universal.120 I ended the first part of this essay with the assertion that my mother’s psychotic speech revealed the void to me, though not strictly as an emptiness. As I noted earlier, in his seminar on the psychoses, Lacan suggests rather tentatively that there are probably a minimal number of anchoring points between the signifying chain and the signified required to produce the effect of ordinary discourse associated with the appearance of being normal, and I compared these anchoring points with Derrida’s idea of the minimal consensus. The absence of these points or minimal consensus produces the appearance of psychosis. 121 Badiou borrows the concept of the anchoring point in Logics when he formulates his first postulate of materialism, which states that the units or logical ―ones‖ that make up the appearance of an object in a world are real in the sense that every component (composante) in the transcendental that governs the appearance of a world or of an object in a world is directly sutured to an element of the being-multiple. Every atom of appearance is bound to an atom of being.122 For Badiou, language in itself is not the condition of a world but an object that can be correlated with the world’s transcendental logic. What could disrupt the operation of language in a world to such an

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extent that it loses its connection with everyday reality? The answer is that something that did not exist has come into existence in such a way that it has rewritten the transcendental index and subverted that which had a maximal existence in the particular world. Let me offer my own hypothesis: language becomes strange, alienated from itself, even psychotic, when it has been relocated to the space opened up by the disruption of one world without the appearance yet of an entirely new world that has been stabilized by the logic of its transcendental. In this space of transition, which may be the space of the event as Badiou understands it, what is referenced by language is the void. The appearance of psychosis is one way in which the void or the inconsistent multiple can be said to appear, though its appearance is at the same time a disappearance. As I said, in her madness my mother had ceased to exist as the woman I knew, one of the anchors of my world. That woman would never return to me because, though an appearance that resembled her would gradually reemerge as she recovered from the psychotic episode, something else continued to exist that altered the overall configuration of her presence. I would now call that new existence a trace of the void itself, though not in the raw form in which it initially appeared to me. During her psychotic episode, my mother described a world to me that was vicious and cruel, but the primary instrument of that cruelty lay in the manipulation of love. As I noted earlier, Lacan argued that one way of distinguishing the psychotic from the normal view has to do with the way a psychotic takes things seriously that a normal person would not. In her psychotic speech, my mother was able to penetrate the falseness of the world around her; she saw as complete fabrications the masquerade of everyday life with all of the social conventions that create the impression of care and concern for others. The conventional understanding of charity as the condescending generosity of the privileged toward those with nothing revolted her. Though her voice would not formulate it in these words, she understood love as a form of universal address exactly as Badiou would later describe it in his book Saint Paul.123 This perspective appeared in all of her psychotic hallucinations. If I had to reduce these apparently bizarre and paranoid fantasies to one singular proposition that would be her truth, it was this: everyone is the same. Everything that is good belongs to everyone. Everything that is true is true for everyone. And any force—whether it is an institution, a person, or a social arrangement—that blocks the realization of this truth is evil. In her hallucinatory visions, my mother was none too subtle in her articulation of this evil, which she frequently associated with the

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priesthood of the Catholic church and with specific priests whom she actually knew. These visions and hallucinations suggested that religion was a particularly vicious form of the social masquerade because it betrayed the truth that was its singular reason for being. If Jesus stood for anything, it was for the principle that everyone is the same, that all men are good to the extent that they recognize this fact about themselves. The only prescription of Christianity that was truly universal was the command to imitate the life and message of Christ, which meant to address everyone as the same and to refuse all social principles that contradict that address even unto death. To enter into the resurrection of Jesus Christ was to lose the fear of death in the pursuit of this truth. In my experience of her madness, I never took my mother’s visions to be anything less than truthful expressions, even though there was nothing terribly original about her truths. Overall, I’m not convinced that an infinite truth, as Badiou formulates it, is necessarily something that will appear to be completely original in every given context. The truth of a truth lies in the conviction, the address, and the procedure of a subject of truth more than in the self-evident or verifiable nature of the truth. As Badiou suggests throughout his work, truth procedures are rare, even though the possibility of truth is always present; but the content of a truth may seem relatively commonplace, something familiar to us that we’ve never acted on. For example, when Badiou summarizes the truth that emerged from the event of the Paris Commune in 1871, it is nothing more than the elementary principle that the working masses have the political capacity to govern themselves.124 This truth has been resurrected repeatedly since that time, if only to be betrayed, as in the case of the U.S. and European plutocracies, or transformed into a simulacrum of itself, as in the case of the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, this truth persists in the contemporary world as something that is possible, according to the following principle: that which is nothing in the political field can become everything.125 My mother had never read Max Weber or R. H. Tawney on the relation between Christianity and the rise of capitalism, but she had resurrected a truth that these men also resurrected to the extent that they recognized a conflict or contradiction between the teachings of Jesus Christ, or Saint Paul, for that matter, and the historical appropriation of those teachings by the social systems that came later, including the one that I would now call class society. Yet the deeper truth of her psychotic speech lay in something else. If my mother addressed everyone as the same, as her equal in the eyes of a God whom she believed drew no distinctions between individuals, she was not answered with

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the same address. My mother wasn’t stupid, and even in her madness she knew that different people had different abilities and creative talents. She was too eccentric herself not to believe in the uniqueness of the individual. It was only in relation to truth and the good that everyone was the same. If something was good, it belonged to everyone. If something was true, it was true for everyone. But my mother’s madness, for whatever reason, articulated her discovery of the void in this way: if the address of her love was universal, the negation of that address by the world in which she lived forced her into the recognition of the inexistence of her own being. It forced her into the face-to-face encounter with the void. In my judgment, this revelation scared the hell out of her, and its effect on me was not too subtle. I realize that, phenomenologically speaking, psychosis probably has its roots in a genetic predisposition with its attendant biochemistry. But from an ontological perspective, those are merely elements of a situation that only appear to us through the mediation of a transcendental logic. Let’s say that the interaction of my mother’s truth procedure, biochemistry, and world led her to the discovery that the thing in her that was most singular and most universal did not exist—not in the sense that it was not, but in the sense that it did not appear in the normal world, or could only be made to appear in the form of monstrosity, something that the world could not understand or categorize, something that the world feared. In her psychotic state, a world that was sui generis, that which normally existed in her world as her own appearance, the entity that bore her name, that which the world took her to be, had ceased to exist through the eruption of her singularity, which was a void. But this void, or the empty set of Badiou’s ontological thought, was only empty from the perspective of the normal situation, the world of everyday appearance. From the perspective of the inconsistent multiple, it was the name of being itself and represented the infinite possibilities of truth. In Ethics, Badiou strongly implies that a subject of truth is never purely a subject of truth. In his philosophy, the truth does not make you whole, but on the contrary has the effect of splitting the human individual between the truth procedure and the context of their ordinary world with its common sense in the form of knowledge, opinions, and all the social identities that are enforced by the state of the situation, including the State itself. It is precisely these identities that give someone the illusion of being ―one‖ in terms of gender, class, race, nationality, and so forth. Most important of all, they give one the illusion of being ―one‖ as someone who exists, a person or personality.

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As Badiou implies, nobody ever expresses or becomes identical with an eternal truth, but rather the truth passes through what I will call the ordinary subject or person. The subject of a truth, which is distinct from the ordinary subject, is a subject in the process of becoming.126 Furthermore, insofar as it sustains its fidelity to a truth, it remains such an incomplete subject for at least two reasons: first, a finite truth procedure can never measure the infinity of a truth; and second, the infinite truth itself can never add up to One, since it is in the nature of infinity to be irreducible to an absolute count. The infinite is always not-everything, not-whole, not-complete. As Badiou notes in Being and Event, the veridical can be distinguished from an infinite truth precisely to the extent that the former has been counted and represented within a specific situation. The truth is the infinite part of a situation that cannot be discerned or classified as knowledge, which cannot be reduced to the count-as-one, to an identity that is coherent and operative within a world.127 My initial response to the perception of the void that constituted my mother’s singularity was fear and disavowal; but of course, the truth continued to assert itself through the mechanisms of my own avoidance. I would argue that my mother’s response to her situation was the same. The truth of the void that constituted her being was unbearable because it called into question the everyday world in which she operated, and even if that world had caused her pain, it was nonetheless something familiar to her, something with which she had come to terms. For years, though these are all retrospective perceptions, I struggled against this knowledge, which in my mind took the form of struggling to be a normal person, to be like everybody else. For my mother, it took the form of channeling her creative energy and the truth she harbored even against her own will into a religious perception of the world, though this perception had been bent and reshaped by the truth that was buried within it. My mother’s religious conviction bordered at times on intolerance, not because she was vicious in her exclusion of those who did not share her beliefs, but because she was adamant in the belief that the truth, if there was any, belonged to everyone, and that there was never any reason to apply a rationale to the world that would privilege one person’s relation to truth over another. My mother’s intolerance was usually aimed at her own children, particularly her daughters, because she expected every one of them to adopt the same relation to others that she had adopted, and she rarely took their side against others if there was any question of possible injustice. During the sixties, the Memphis public schools were beginning to integrate, while the Catholic schools began

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to reverse their previous commitment to keeping tuition low so that all Catholics would have access to that denominational form of education. When my mother pulled my brother and sisters out of Catholic schools and transferred them to public schools, she expected them to be models of antiracist behavior in a racist environment. On a few occasions, my siblings felt as if they had become victims of the conflict itself, but when they solicited my mother’s sympathy and understanding, they received a cold response because she expected them to endure these contradictions as the price of social justice. Technically, I think she was right, but she should have realized that her children had been thrown into a situation that was ripe for small acts of violence that would go under the radar. She was right to believe and fight for the principle that all people, regardless of race, have the ability to think and deserve the same education to the extent that it nurtures the development of thought and knowledge as far as possible in each individual case. She was wrong to force her conviction on her children without regard for their own singularity that would have to find its own way to truth. My siblings were not racist, but they encountered the effects of racism in the tension between groups that had never been in such close proximity to each other, a situation that intensified for the younger ones with the onset of busing in the seventies. In other words, my mother needed to pay more attention to the universality of her address with respect to her own children by recognizing and coming to terms with the common sense of their situation and experience. Not to recognize their situation and experience would be to leave her truth unaddressed, which means, as Badiou shows in Saint Paul, to refuse the traversal of common sense that is the path of the truth procedure in practice. It is to fall back on mysticism, or the notion of a truth that is transcendent in the religious sense of the word. Such a transcendent truth requires no address except for God.128 I don’t mean to imply that I did any better than my mother at entering into the truth procedure for which the event of her madness had been the condition. In my life, the thought of the void altered me and my world and, in the process, transformed itself into something quite different from my first impression, which, of course, was one of fear because the void appeared to me only as the negation of my world and everything that was familiar to me in that world. The void signified a pure and absolute loss, which initially took shape in the conviction that I had lost my mother to what society called a mental illness. Over time, however, and through the mediation of my unconscious participation in the truth procedure, I began to see that the void was not empty but represented all the excluded possibilities of existence

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in my world—or rather the possibility of an infinite number of other worlds. My mother was not the person I took her to be but a set of infinite possibilities. In her psychotic episodes, particularly the one that took place when I was nineteen years old in the summer of 1968, my mother appeared to suffer immensely from her madness, and I believe now just as I believed then that her suffering was real. I would have done anything to have spared her and have no desire to idealize her pain. Nonetheless, it would also betray the truth of the situation to imagine that her suffering was merely an internal glitch without relation to her situation and the world in which she lived. As far as I’m concerned, my mother’s situation included both her internal physiology and the social structure of the world outside of her, and though I have little doubt that she would have been a singular being under any circumstance, the particular form her madness took and the suffering it caused her can be directly correlated with the social order in which she lived, an order that can rarely imagine or tolerate any form of existence outside of itself. The dominant world usually relies on the claim that no other world is possible. My mother’s madness revealed a force of intellect and a power of perception that were staggering, and it was obvious to me that in her everyday existence this element of her internal makeup had been kept under strict controls so that she could appear to be what she was supposed to be—a woman from the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum, a mother of six kids, someone who was all too common. My mother may have suffered a traumatic experience as a young woman that had answered the intensity of her intellect and passions with a violation of her person in such a way as to block her from the free expression of her being, by which I mean from the exploration of the borders of her world and the conditions of her existence. Perhaps the same thing could have happened to another person, someone without my mother’s biochemistry, and it would never have led, even in the worst of circumstances, to a form of madness. It may also never have led to the revelation of any truth. As Badiou stresses repeatedly, an event always takes place in a specific situation from which it cannot be separated with respect to the truth it conditions. Furthermore, my mother’s madness did not simply reveal a few unique gifts peculiar to her. It revealed the infinite possibilities of what this ordinary woman could have been, of what anyone could be. In her singularity, stripped of the categories that had defined her existence and evaluated her social worth, my mother was more than herself. She was everything and nothing. She was pure infinite possibility. Ironically, when the void could be made to appear through such an event, it revealed the thing that is most common and most

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ordinary—more common than common sense, more ordinary than ordinary language. The void that was an object of fear at first became something that liberated me from the necessity of a certain mode of social conformity. I’ve already discussed the effects of this truth on my life in this chapter and in earlier chapters, but at the risk of some redundancy I want to bring it all together as well as I can. The discovery of the void forced me to enter the subjective form of a truth on two counts at least. First, I implicitly understood, and came to understand more consciously and critically over time, that there is more than one world. Second, every world is founded on the void of the infinite possibilities that it excludes. Two insights that seized me as a boy—unconsciously perhaps, but implicitly in my thought and behavior—generated a whole series of perspectives that I would describe, after Badiou, as a truth procedure. From these two axioms, if you will, I was able to extend the truth to the principle that a possibility is not something outside the realm of being. Everything that is possible is real in the sense that it can be brought into existence through the alteration of a world. I never suffered from the delusion that the world in which I lived was something imaginary or fantastic. It was real. But part of that reality rested on those elements of the world that had a minimal or zero degree of existence. Through her madness, my mother forced something into existence that had existed minimally in her world before that event. To my mind as a witness, it was the power of intellect and social vision that may have been driven to a mad expression of itself but from which I could easily enough extract a critical thought about the world as it existed that was coherent and potentially universal. Ironically, through the subtraction of all the categories that had shaped the appearance of my mother in our world, her singularity made itself visible as the force of her creative autonomy and as the quality she shared with all other human beings. By the time of my mother’s second major psychotic episode, I had read Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Morris, who all said in one way or another that all men are poets. This thought resonated with my own experience. It wasn’t that I thought my mother could write great poetry, or make art in some way, if she had been given the chance. It was rather, as Blake wrote, that no human being can speak from the core of their being, which he called the heart, without intending truth.129 In the void that is each person’s singularity, the concept of the artist as a social category no longer exists, or rather no longer governs the principle of human creative autonomy. All human beings are poets or share in the poetic genius in the sense that all are creative

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and there is no way to measure one human being’s creativity against another’s. A world that refuses to recognize the creative autonomy of each individual as the singularity that they all have in common forces an element of being into the state of inexistence. The proof of this truth is that worlds are in states of constant flux and change because that which inexists within each one of them keeps coming back, keeps forcing the existence of the inexistent in such a way as to transform the world from which it has been excluded. As the witness of my mother’s madness, I did not discover that she had the potential to be a poet or an artist or a thinker. It wasn’t a potential but something real. She wasn’t a poet, an artist, or a thinker in the socially conventional sense that would have required for her a certain education that would have instilled in her a certain use of language or other technical skills that would have categorized her as this type of person in the eyes of her world. But in her singularity the raw material that constituted the essence of thought and, as far as I was concerned, beauty itself, was already there. In her singularity, my mother became a sort of universal subject because her voice addressed all people with the truth that there was no measure or limit to their creative being and capacity for truth. Obviously, I am summarizing thoughts and an understanding of the event that evolved over a long period of time. Though my mother suffered through her psychotic visions, she also meditated on them and learned from them in those states that most people would have called ―normal.‖ Those of us who knew her well, of course, knew that she was never normal, but there was an ongoing struggle on her part to grasp the truth of her own vision, a struggle that sometimes caused her pain and sometimes filled her with joy. In this quest or procedure, with respect to the rest of us, she could be cruel and she could be incredibly tender. I wish I could say that everything that followed from the truth of her madness was positive, but I don’t think a truth procedure works in that way. In Ethics, Badiou describes all the pitfalls into which a truth procedure can lead the subject of a truth. The simulacrum emerges from the transformation of the infinite void into a positive entity such as Hitler’s master race or other versions of national superiority that subvert the universal address of a truth procedure. As U.S. President Bush has recently demonstrated, even democracy can be transformed into a simulacrum of itself when it becomes identical with U.S. foreign policy and the rule of the capitalist class. Like every simulacrum, it transforms truth into the instrument and rationale of terror and the domination of all those who do not subscribe or submit to its absolute authority. Betrayal is the second pitfall of a truth procedure, and it is

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perhaps the most common. In my view, it is almost impossible not to turn your back on the truth procedure on the occasions when the seduction of social norms and everyday common sense beckon one to return to the fold of those who fear anything that threatens to alter the world as they know it. The third pitfall of the truth procedure is to imagine that a truth is allpowerful and that it can name and incorporate every element of a world to the extent of eliminating for the last time any form of inexistence or the unnamable.130 Badiou uses large and significant historical examples to support his theory of evil, such as the Nazis or the communist Red Guards in China, but my point is that the pitfalls of a truth procedure can also enter into the microhistories of individuals. As I’ve already suggested, my mother was no saint, and to make her into one would actually betray the truth that she came to stand for in my life. At one time or another, she stumbled over all the pitfalls of the truth that had seized her. For reasons probably having to do with her personal history of sexual violence, she came to associate the truth of her being with the exclusion of any form of sexual pleasure. In the blind effort to save her daughters from what she believed to be the brutality of the masculine world, she taught them that it was their duty to submit to sexuality as a purely masculine impulse but never to enjoy it, and when they resisted her discipline in this respect, she terrorized them both physically and psychologically with the manipulation of her love and affection. In her mind, I believe, submission to patriarchal authority and masculine sexual dominance was the condition of existing in the world, and the only chance a woman had for some degree of social and creative autonomy was to learn to be in that relationship without being in it fully—particularly without taking pleasure from it. In effect, she constructed a simulacrum of the truth in the form of a sexually pure woman who withheld the truth of her being from any contact with the dominant world of men even as she submitted to its authority. Her betrayal of the truth took the form of religious dogmatism, something to which she could uncritically subscribe on some occasions and challenge in the most emphatic way on others. Finally, to the extent that she took the truth that passionately drove her to be absolute, she could insist on her interpretation of every element of her world to the exclusion of any consideration that there were forces and experiences in the lives of her children and of other people around her that she could not understand. She sometimes named the unnamable and violated the singularity and creative autonomy of others. In this description, my mother may sound like a monster, but none of these acts defined her completely. Even during periods when her religious

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dogmatism was most pronounced, I was able to have conversations with her that incited me to thoughts that I brought to radically different conclusions from the ones she would have desired. Since, according to Badiou, the truth, if it is to have any effect, must traverse common sense through its universal address, it produces the effect of what I will call trans-common-sense, or the instance of transition and transformation of the logic of a world. The generic truth that seizes even as it constitutes a subject produces a world that is taut (tendu) rather than atonal.131 A taut world is one that contains what Badiou calls points, which can be described as instances within a world that test the appearance of a truth by forcing a decision about what can or cannot exist, a decision that can bring about the creative transformation of the transcendental logic and hence of the world.132 For example, to declare that my mother was a mad woman whose madness produced a truth that has seized and transformed the lives of her children is quite different from saying that she was mentally ill and that my siblings and I are those who have survived those childhood traumas with various symptoms. This history should not be seen as the mark of anyone’s superiority, but I do believe that the event in question forced a decision, at least in my life, either to resituate my mother and her children in the atonal world of everyday social categories or to affirm their singularity in relation to those categories. To call them victims or the products of a dysfunctional family would safely locate them within the infinite nuances of a stable, atonal world. It would naturalize and depoliticize the social hierarchies and categories that constitute the state of the situation, or what Gramsci called the hegemony, which would include the inequitable distributions of wealth and social autonomy that we call the class system. Furthermore, by recognizing the incorporation of each of us— my mother, my father, my siblings, and myself—into the subject of the truth in question, I recognize that even the words I write here are not exclusively mine, according to the logic of personhood, authorship, copyrights, and intellectual property. In particular, though my brother and sisters may recognize nothing of themselves in these pages, they are still sutured to the subject of the truth that drives this discourse. My words, however limited and provisional they may be, belong to all us. In Logics, Badiou develops the notion of resurrection by which the truth of an event resurges in a new context, a new world, through the incitement of a new event. 133 In my own history, the names of these events would include Wittgenstein, Marx, Nietzsche, Wilde, Lawrence, Derrida, Lacan, Gramsci, Bourdieu, and Badiou (more or less in that order), though this would be to limit the events of my intellectual

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history through which the subject of a truth has been resurrected and kept alive. Furthermore, this generic truth that unbinds me from the categories of everyday social existence creates the condition for a universal address that recognizes the one thing that all human beings have in common, the foundation of their existence on the void of infinite possibilities, however different the import and significance of the events that force human beings into the subjective formation of a truth. For example, the Holocaust survivor, the victim of torture in Iraq, the political prisoner, the innocent and probably the guilty at Guantanamo, the terrorists and those who survive their terror, the cancer patient whose insurance won’t cover a treatment, the bulimic who has to lie in order to get health care, the raped woman and possibly the rapist, not only the victims of child abuse but the perpetrators who were themselves abused, the displaced and exiled, and all the usual suspects that would include the poor, the exploited, the homeless, and so forth—such people are not merely victims or perpetrators but potential subjects of truth, even though the truth they bear is usually prescribed to inexistence by the hegemonic state of the situation that names them. Even they themselves usually evade the truth by accepting the categorical judgments of the State. It is always easier and more negotiable to be a victim or a perpetrator than to insist on the methodical exposition of the truth that has derived from the event, however negative, that transformed a person into a subject. I don’t mean to say that all these experiences are the same or of equal value in the world as it currently exists. Still, there is no reason to wait for an apocalyptic event that would guarantee the universal disclosure of the truth. The events that make truth possible by forcing the inexistent into existence are everywhere, and the only true universal is the subtractive power of the void that has the creative-destructive power to force a change of base, a change of the transcendental ordinary.134 In the earlier chapters of this book, I exposed myself to the accusation of resentment and tried to challenge or interrogate its truth. My argument was not that I am a man without resentment, since if we have learned anything since Nietzsche, who in his last works proved himself to be everything he criticized, we have learned that there is no resistance or critical ground for challenge to any situation without resentment. However, the larger point and purpose of this essay is to suggest that the truth of an event will not persist at the level of mere resentment. The truth of an event is precisely what constitutes the subject as the power to overcome resentment in the struggle to transform the world itself, which is always one of an infinite number of possible worlds. Ironically, because the truth is infinite, there can never be

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a best of all possible worlds. There is only, as Badiou puts it, the invariance of the inconsistent multiple that is being in itself and the variation of its worldly unfolding in appearance.135 Marx’s class struggle, Nietzsche’s selfovercoming, Wilde’s perversity and paradox, Lawrence’s sexual folklore, Gramsci’s counterhegemony, Wittgenstein’s curve, Lacan’s ellipsis, Derrida’s deconstruction, Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology, and Badiou’s metapolitics—these are all the names of truth procedures that aim at the transformation of the transcendental ordinary. No doubt, in the lives of all these thinkers, there were events that incited them to the procedures that laid out the consequences of a truth. Sometimes these may have been great historical events, and at other times events that would have gone unnoticed had not a truth impressed itself on a particular person. It seems naïve to claim that any truth procedure necessarily invalidates the possibility of another. In my own case, if my mother had not gone mad, I might have found a truth in some other way. But it was my mother’s madness that forced me into the process of interrogating the values of my society and world. It gave me the means to understand my father and the working class with which he would always be associated in my mind. It taught me that all human beings are more than their material conditions, and that whatever their condition in a particular world they are all capable of the thought that allows them to transform themselves as well as their world. It taught me that the only property common to all human beings is the singularity of the truth that says, We are nothing, so let us be everything.

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A manifesto is what we need, but this is not it. Such a writing, like Marx’s famous manifesto, is an event in itself, something that decides an undecidable and forces the emergence of a truth. Nonetheless, it seems to me that it is cowardly not to risk a few postulations about what such a manifesto might contain. This is risky because it anticipates the alteration of a world without identifying the event that would occasion it. Furthermore, the more specific you are about the political program that confronts the current state of the situation, which also means the State, the more likely you are to say something that will seem ridiculous to the vast majority who currently cannot imagine any other world. Even Marx had to take this risk at the end of section two of his great manifesto when he listed ten practical measures that the victorious proletariat would need to implement after it had won the battle for democracy and centralized production in the State.1 Today, in light of the failures of actually existing socialist states, it is difficult not to see this moment as Marx’s most critical error, but an error that arose precisely from the universality of his address and the attempt to traverse the field of common sense with a transformative truth. Badiou has argued for a radical principle of democracy that operates by keeping itself at a distance from the State and by affirming the truth of a collective freedom that subtracts itself from the common sense and consensus that the State enforces.2 Nonetheless, he does not argue for withdrawal to some kind of utopia beyond the control of the State but rather for a political organization that struggles based on axiomatic principles, or prescriptions, to force the State into rewriting its norms, regulations, and policies.3 He valorizes democracy only as far as it is something distinct from the State, something that is bound to the universality of a political prescription.4 In effect, democracy is not the rule of the majority through the mediation of the State. It is

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the struggle to transform a specific situation through the implementation of a political prescription that is universally addressed. Even a minority— indeed even a single individual—can formulate a universal political prescription that derives from a truth procedure. In this epilogue, I will try to elucidate a few political prescriptions that have a universal address but do not overshoot the field of common sense. One can easily formulate more ostentatiously radical principles; but the ones I’ve formulated here, in my judgment, have the power to force a transition that can produce radical effects in the political field of the United States. Since the United States is the last superpower, transformation of its political field inevitably has global impact. Despite their political differences, both Badiou and Negri have argued for the necessity of going beyond class politics in the traditional Marxist sense of the term.5 I will not enter into the details of their differences, except to say that they seem to me far from insurmountable once you get outside the field of academic disputation. For the purposes of what I want to say here, however, I will accept Negri’s concept of the multitude, which consists of all those who are dominated by capitalist social relations and resist its rule.6 As far as I’m concerned, that means anybody—even the rich—who can be won to the support of a political prescription that is universally addressed. The more serious and problematic question that derives from the notion of politics at a distance from the State, however, has to do with violence. Peter Hallward has argued, in a tentative way, that a true break from the State and its monopoly of violence is not to practice another form of violence but rather to commit oneself to an organized form of nonviolence.7 This strikes me as a very bold statement, but Hallward does not draw out its full implications. First, nonviolent struggle in the name of a political prescription that derives from a truth procedure makes sense because if a truth becomes the rationale for violence against another who refuses to accept it, then the truth has effectively betrayed itself by subverting the universality of its address and insisting on a distinction between the elect who can see and the preterites who are blind. The State, after all, operates through a hegemony that dominates common sense, so that it is never simply the bureaucracy, the police, and the military that one opposes but the population that tacitly consents to the legitimacy of their authority. Second, nonviolent political struggle can be effective only when there is a willingness on the part of the militant to risk the possibility of injury or death without violent resistance. Personally, I don’t see any point to revolutionary suicide, so there has to be a principle of tactical retreat in a situation that can produce no positive result;

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and since nonviolence, as I understand it, is not a religious principle but a political axiom, I see no reason why people shouldn’t engage in defensive violence when they are confronted with a violent State that has foregone any universal address or justice. Of course, it is notoriously easy to justify aggressive violence as defensive, witness George W. Bush on one side and those who promote suicide bombing as a political tactic on the other. My point is simply that a truly effective act of nonviolent struggle will not always be able to predict the response of power. The more effective the political act is, the greater the risk of brutal response from the State. Third and finally, the organization of a nonviolent struggle can never be fully identical with a political mass movement, for once it has reached the level of a mass movement the discipline required to engage in active nonviolence is severely limited. Things could go peacefully in the unlikely event that the State accepts the need for change, or they could erupt into a revolutionary event that would no longer limit itself to disciplined nonviolent political action. The organization of nonviolent militants could put pressure on the mass movement as well as on the State, but it should never presuppose the identity of the mass movement with itself. This simply means that nonviolence as a political prescription addresses the masses with its truth but betrays that truth if it tries to substitute itself for the political goal of the masses. It produces a simulacrum of itself that substitutes the means for the end of social liberation. Nonviolent struggle is consistent with political goals that have a universal address. There’s no way to struggle nonviolently for a U.S. way of life that depends on that population’s disproportionate consumption of energy vis-à-vis the rest of the world, but it is possible to struggle nonviolently for national and global health care. One can postulate as axiomatic that medicine and quality health care belong to everyone. This is not a right based on some appeal to transcendent authority, but a prescription whose address is unequivocally universal. Furthermore, one can argue that the wealth of the world belongs to everyone. This goes beyond the narrow principle that wealth is the product of labor and should be redistributed fairly among its producers. Even Marx recognized that capital was the product of a social activity that included everyone in society, and since his time it has become increasingly apparent that the production of capital requires unemployment, underemployment, and alternative sources of cheap labor in order to control the demand for higher wages and to subordinate labor as a whole to the interests of capital.8 Furthermore, in the manifesto that represented Marx’s most sustained attempt to transform the common sense of his world, he said that the proletarian

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movement was the autonomous movement of the majority.9 Since the industrial proletariat was nothing like a majority of the population at the time that Marx was writing, it follows that he understood by that term, at least on some occasions, something like what Negri means by the multitude. Therefore, it follows that those of us in the United States who seek the universal address of justice should struggle for a living wage that would replace what is currently called the minimum wage and, furthermore, for the institutional organizations that would allow the masses to determine the true definition of the economic standard of living, which would be a social standard and not mere subsistence. The goal would be to guarantee as high a quality of life as is consistent with our collective resources and wealth. Such a wage should apply to everyone in the country who works, including immigrants, whether they are legal or illegal. Furthermore, the definition of work itself must be socially determined, so that it no longer means labor that produces wealth for another but any creative activity that is consistent with the well-being of the multitude. Inevitably, people would want to come to this country for a wage that would guarantee a high quality of life, and if the axiom that wealth belongs to everyone derives from a truth, then it should also be true that national borders are not the natural divisions of wealth or labor. Though the ultimate address of such an axiom must be the globe, one can begin, as a matter of practice, with the demand for a North American Union of States that would work toward equalization of wages, health care, and education. These propositions surely sound ridiculous to those who believe that there is only one world and that any change is a monstrosity or a form of terror. I doubt that I am the best person formulate a political program, but you have to begin somewhere. Though it would be the betrayal of any truth to limit its address to something purely local, it seems to me more of a betrayal never to begin a truth procedure or a political sequence with the argument that unless you can immediately embrace the whole world with your truth, you shouldn’t embrace anyone or do anything. Every beginning is necessarily local, and one has to struggle within the framework of a political sequence to keep its address universal by formulating prescriptions that genuinely can and should apply to all people. I don’t see anything to be gained from accepting a local injustice because universal justice cannot be achieved immediately. For me, the local situation is the field in which I work. Though it is a myth that nearly all professors are liberals or even Marxists, it is true that there is a significant cadre of political intellectuals who at least claim some connection with progressive thought and who have repeatedly associated themselves with the demand for

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social change. These cadres need to organize; and, furthermore, they need to create some organizational structures that can be inclusive of as broad a range of teachers, intellectuals, scholars, and artists as possible. Though I believe that a small organization of intellectuals committed to a nonviolent political struggle for some of the goals that I have already suggested would be an important development, I also believe that one of the goals of such a movement from within the community of intellectuals and teachers should be the unionization of the national professoriate in affiliation with other teachers’ unions. Though this sort of proposal is often labeled by traditional Marxists as reformism, it seems to me that the very concept of a profession that organizes itself in order to achieve political and economic goals is democratic in the sense that it postulates the relation of equality as the condition of its own movement or organization of people for the immediate transformation of a situation or world. Though there are numerous ways in which unions can be corrupted by the State, that is no reason to block such an organization that could become a new field of struggle for other truth procedures and their axioms. Unions in their current form are not effective political organizations because of their centralization. In this way, they imitate the structure of the State and subordinate the interests of their constituencies to the goals of State power. Radical unionization, whether it takes place inside or outside traditional organizations, should aim to transform this situation by decentralizing organizational structures and enhancing the autonomy of constituencies. For example, if there were a national union of professors, this would be a field in which one could struggle for a transformative understanding of education and scholarship that could include axioms such as the following: 1. Knowledge belongs to everyone, and everyone should have access to as much knowledge as they desire and are capable of. Therefore, education should be equitable and free. 2. Knowledge is not static and constantly undergoes transformation through its encounter with truth procedures or thought. Therefore, all teachers, at every level of education, need time for research and thought; and since truth operates outside the norms, common sense, and selfevident knowledge propagated by the State, time for research and thought should be liberal, unaccountable, and equitable. 3. In line with the previous axiom, the goal of education should not be static knowledge but truth that critically addresses the current state of knowledge. Therefore, achievement should be assessed not by objective measurements that normalize knowledge outside the field of truth but by the actual consequences of the educational process. If individuals seem to achieve nothing, then one should look at the

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broader social context, and not exclusively at the educational institutions themselves. 4. Since intellectual work cannot be performed in isolation from other forms of work, an organization of intellectuals and teachers should address the situation of all those workers who make intellectual work possible. They should facilitate the organization of all workers, the multitude, in order to maintain both the local autonomy of organizational structures and the global unity of the multitude through the affiliation of organizations. 5. Since all people are intellectuals, as Gramsci stressed, a national union of professors should facilitate constant dialogue and intellectual exchange between people from different social locations and areas of work. 6. A national union, though its structure ought to be decentralized, should still seek affiliations and cooperative relations across national borders in the effort to propagate axioms of education, scholarship, aesthetic production, and political organization that are universally addressed. If something is good for us, it should be good for everyone. If it is not good for everyone, or if the universal realization of a principle is considered to be bad for us, then either the axiom itself is flawed or the truth has been betrayed. I realize how outlandish these proposals will sound to the bureaucratic mind, including the minds of knowledge bureaucrats. Perhaps they are even more outlandish to the political radical who sees anything short of total revolution as temporizing. Furthermore, the astute reader is likely to see a contradiction in the idea of a national union of professors. Why limit it to professors? Why not include everyone involved in the teaching profession under one umbrella, including teachers at all levels of education, as well as janitors, cooks, secretaries, and all the other employees of the universities and schools? I’ve heard this argument many times over the years, and it usually turns out to be a rationalization for not organizing rather than the opposite. The goal ultimately should be ―one big union,‖ as the Wobblies used to say, but not a centralized union, which lends itself much more easily to corruption and cooptation by the State. A decentralized organization of the multitude means that every organizational division is autonomous, though the different locals and unions can affiliate and work toward common projects that are related to the universal axioms that derive from their own local struggles. Such decentralized autonomy is necessary because a political truth must traverse the field of common sense, and it would be naive to ignore the self-interest of different groups promoted by the current division of labor. Self-interest is the common sense that truth traverses and attempts to transform. There is no guarantee that any organization of those who work within a given

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field will not betray itself, or the truth that founded it. When a group formulates a demand for equality, such as the demand of women for equal wages or the demand of African-Americans for equal access to education, they are positing their own generic humanity beyond racial, gender, class or other social divisions. To limit the address of their demand would be to undermine the principle of generic humanity on which the demand was based. Though interest must be engaged in the organization of women or other groups to resist exploitation, it is ultimately engaged only to be transformed by the universal address of its generic truth. Two great examples of this thought in U.S. history can be found in the political truth procedures of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Though these leaders were quite different in their political techniques and commitments, they both gradually came to the position that specific group interests, which they had struggled to organize in different ways, must be transcended, without the surrender of autonomy, in the direction of a universal address to generic humanity. To put it rather simply, the demand for a concrete form of freedom constitutes a truth only if it is addressed universally. As Badiou stresses, equality is not the goal but the axiom of a political struggle.10 The question still remains about what to do with the State. Neither Badiou nor Negri nor any of the hard theorists of the State seem to be able to imagine a world beyond it. Soft theorists, like Wilde and Lawrence, postulate the concept of the State as a glorified housekeeper, and while I frankly admit that such a view appeals to me, one can hardly imagine that any concentration of power in a managerial body or institution will not inevitably lend itself to corruption from the perspective of true democracy. Expediency and self-interest will always enter into the procedures of management and politicize them. If true democracy is the struggle of people for political prescriptions that are universally addressed, then there will always be a tension if not contradiction between democracy and the State, which means that the only form of social revolution worth considering must be a permanent revolution that takes the State, as long as it is impossible to live without it, as a necessary compromise that must be subjected to constant challenge and revision. The State should never be confused with democracy in itself. Though voting may be a necessary tool for reaching collective decisions and compromises, the U.S. system powerfully demonstrates the ease with which a plutocratic order that controls mass media can dominate democratic procedures when they are seen as nothing more than the right to vote. Furthermore, though I can’t embrace Badiou’s argument that political militants should not vote,

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stand for office, or affiliate with political parties, there must never be confusion between democracy as a political sequence and representation through electoral politics.11 Democracy lies in the content of the political prescription and not in the procedure through which it is implemented or defeated. It seems to me that voting and some intervention in electoral politics can be a tactic within the political sequence of democracy, but only if it is seen not as an end in itself but as an element within a larger strategy that recognizes the State as a form of inertia that must be galvanized by the force of true democracy that exists outside of it and its procedures. If there is any thought in this book, it derives from a history that exposed me to the generic humanity of my singular being. Oscar Wilde once implied that something objective in appearance is usually subjective with respect to what it really is. In the same passage, he asserted that a personal voice is the least truthful because people only tell the truth when they wear a mask.12 I would challenge this statement somewhat. If an objective voice is the most personal, a personal voice may be the most objective in the sense that it forces us to traverse the object that we are in a given world in order to get to the other side of it. Therein lies our singularity and generic being, the mask behind the face. Ironically, from the perspective of my singularity, the words I’ve written here are not exclusively mine, and I refer not only to those authors whose words I have paraphrased and whose thoughts I have borrowed. As I have already suggested, my mother’s madness contained a thought that seized me and the other members of my family with a truth. This truth forced me to realize, at different points in my life, that I am common, a nobody, but also that, while I could struggle to rise upward according to the logic of the everyday world, the logic of conformity, it is perhaps more important to look into the heart of that which is most common in order to discover something in me more than me, a kind of mask perhaps, but one that belongs to everyone. As Badiou argues, truth is indifference to differences.13 Justice and the desire for it are unthinkable without truth, but no truth will emerge before one has come to terms with the importance of being common.

NOTES CHAPTER 1 1. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; Or, the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1. 2. Ibid., 7. 3. Ibid., 15–17. 4. Ibid., 37–38. 5. Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 326–27. 6. Ibid., 330. 7. Jacques Derrida, ―Taking a Stand for Algeria,‖ trans. Boris Belay, College Literature 30.1 (2003): 115–23. 8. Mustapha Marrouchi, Signifying with a Vengeance: Theories, Literatures, Storytellers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 85–132. 9. Derrida, Monolingualism, 8. 10. Ibid., 2, 35–36. 11. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 146. 12. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT, 1987), 185–210. 13. Jacques Derrida, ―The Law of Genre/La loi du genre,‖ trans. Avita Ronnell, Glyph 7 (1980): 202–32. 14. Derrida, Monolingualism, 2. 15. Ibid., 23, 39. 16. Ibid., 88–89.

CHAPTER 2 1. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, vol. 2, ed. and trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 48–52. 2. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 196–200. 3. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 108–14; 128–35.

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4. Gramsci, Selections, 5–14. 5. See chapter 3. 6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Vintage, 1968), 97–98. 7. Josè Nun, ―Elements for a Theory of Democracy: Gramsci and Common Sense,‖ boundary 2 14.3 (1986): 197–229. 8. Marcia Landy, ―Cultural Politics and Common Sense,‖ in Film, Politics, and Gramsci (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 73–98. 9. Gramsci, Selections, 200–201. 10. Ibid., 333. 11. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Verso, 2004). See, in particular, chapter 2 of book I and chapters 1– 3 of book II. 12. Gramsci, Selections, 334. 13. Ibid., 339. 14. Ibid., 418. 15. Ibid., 333. 16. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1984. See, in particular, chapter 2. 17. Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 18. Bourdieu, Distinction, 33–34. 19. Bourdieu, Political Ontology, 70–87. 20. Pierre Bourdieu, The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, trans. Lauretta C. Clough (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). 21. Ibid., 151.

CHAPTER 3 1. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 139–40. For the original French edition consulted here and below, see Spectres de Marx (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993). 2. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, in Collected Works, vol. 5 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), 44; henceforth GI. For the German edition consulted here and below, see Die deutsche Ideologie, in Werke, Band 3 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1959), henceforth DI. 3. GI, 446. 4. Ibid.; DI, 30. 5. GI, 449. 6. Max Stirner, ―Stirner’s Critics,‖ abridged and trans. Frederick M. Gordon, The Philosophical Forum 8.2–4 (1977), 68–69. For the German edition consulted here and below, see ―Rezensenten Stirners‖ (Sept. 1845), in

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Parerga, Kritiken, Repliken, ed. Bernd A. Laska (Nürnberg: LSR-Verlag, 1986), 147–205. 7. Ibid., 67. 8. Ibid., 70. 9. Ibid.; Stirner, ―Rezensenten,‖ 155. 10. GI, 449; DI, 435. 11. The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 4. 12. Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, ed. David Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 7. 13. Ibid., 135. 14. Ibid., 37–38. 15. GI, 270; DI, 251. 16. Derrida, Specters,139–40. 17. Stirner, Ego, 35. 18. Derrida, Specters, 121; Jean-Michel Rabaté, James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 50–53. 19. Stirner, Ego, 34. 20. Ibid., 35–36. 21. GI, 191–92. 22. Derrida, Specters, 175. 23. GI, 36; DI, 26. 24. Stirner, Ego, 17. 25. Jacques Lacan, Encore, book 20 of Le séminaire, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 24. 26. Stirner, Ego, 17. 27. Ibid., 161. 28. Derrida, Specters, 170. 29. Rabaté, James Joyce, 51. 30. Karl Marx, ―Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,‖ in Early Writings, trans. and ed. T. B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 52. 31. Ibid., 58. 32. Ibid., 52. 33. GI, 78. 34. Nancy S. Love, Marx, Nietzsche, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 17. 35. Ibid., 18, 200. 36. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 201–2; Werke in Drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlecta, Band 2 (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1954), 144. 37. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 343. 38. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 297–99; Werke, 219–21. 39. The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 530–31.

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40. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 298–99. 41. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 299–300; Werke, 221–22. 42. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 78–79. 43. Ibid., 25. 44. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 327, 332. 45. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 77–79. 46. GI, 449. 47. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 13–14. 48. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 205–6; Beyond, 25. 49. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 25–31. 50. Henry Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 32. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 34. 53. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 119. 54. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 28. 55. Nietzsche, Beyond, 213–14. 56. Ibid., 204. 57. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 161. 58. Nietzsche, Beyond, 138–39; Werke, 678. 59. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 634, 704–6 and passim. 60. Nietzsche, Beyond, 93, sec. 175; Portable Nietzsche, 467, sec. 8. 61. Nietzsche, Beyond, 139. 62. Ibid. 63. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 265. 64. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 203.

CHAPTER 4 1. The Artist as Critic: The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), 311. 2. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert HartDavis (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 683–780. 3. Ibid., 737–38. 4. Artist as Critic, 285–86. 5. Wilde, Letters, 739–40. 6. Artist as Critic, 258–59. 7. Ibid., 257, 269–70. 8. Wilde, Letters, 739. 9. Ibid., 757.

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10. Ibid., 696. 11. Ibid., 728. 12. Artist as Critic, 265. 13. Wilde, Letters, 718. 14. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1988), 389–91; 406–7; 443–44. 15. Ibid., 390, 436. 16. Ibid., 436. 17. Wilde, Letters, 758–59. 18. Ibid., 730. 19. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap, 1999), 10, 42, 369. 20. Wilde, Letters, 730–31. 21. Benjamin, 427. 22. Wilde, Letters, 685, 730. 23. Benjamin, 10. 24. Wilde, Letters,729. 25. Ibid., 744–45. 26. Artist as Critic, 320. 27. Wilde, Letters, 745–46. 28. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), passim. 29. The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 607–12, sec. 34–38. 30. Artist as Critic, 270, 275. 31. Ibid., 268f. 32. Ibid., 279. 33. Ibid., 256–57. 34. Ibid., 260. 35. Ibid., 268–69. 36. Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (London: Cassell, 1994), 3. 37. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 133. 38. Ibid., xxiii. 39. Ibid., xxiv. 40. D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 63–68. 41. Wyndham Lewis, Enemy Salvoes: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. C. J. Fox (London: Vision, 1975), 121. 42. Lawrence, Reflections, 69–74. 43. D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 214–15. 44. Ibid., 15.

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45. Ibid., 76–77. 46. Lawrence, Reflections,73. 47. Ibid., 74–78. 48. Ibid., 78–79. 49. Ibid., 80–83. 50. Lawrence, Fantasia, 191–92. 51. Ibid., 182. 52. Lawrence, Reflections, 321–28. 53. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (London: Penguin, 1995). On Gerald as industrial capitalist, see chapter 17, ―The Industrial Magnate.‖ 54. D. H. Lawrence, Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 331–36. 55. 55. Lawrence, Women, 234. 56. Ibid., 81, 95–97. 57. Ibid., 110–13. 58. Ibid., 170–71. 59. Ibid., 177–84. 60. Ibid., 337–45. 61. Ibid., 425–28. 62. Ibid., 145–51. 63. Ibid., 191–94. 64. Ibid., 254. 65. Ibid., 293–95. 66. Ibid., 306–9; 313–14. 67. Ibid., 481. 68. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (London: Penguin, 1995), 310–27. 69. For the original Prologue, see Lawrence, Women, 499–516. 70. D. H. Lawrence, The First “Women in Love,‖ ed. John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 71. Lawrence, Women, 102–4. 72. D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 33–34. 73. Ibid., 36–37. 74. Ibid., 41. 75. D. H. Lawrence, Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 35. 76. D. H. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins (London: Penguin, 1995), 18–25. 77. Lawrence, Late Essays, 35–40. 78. John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (London: Allen Land, 2005), 3–5. 79. D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), passim. See, in particular, 148.

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80. D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ed. Michael Squires (London: Penguin, 1994). 81. The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 97. 82. Ibid., 387.

CHAPTER 5 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 17–17e. 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958; originally published by The Macmillan Company, 1953), 47e, remark 109; and Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 462. Henceforth, for all of Wittgenstein’s texts, references are to numbered remarks (italicized) unless page numbers (not italicized) are indicated. 3. Gilbert Ryle, ―Systematically Misleading Expressions,‖ Collected Papers, vol. 2: Collected Essays, 1929–1968 (London: Hutchinson and Company, 1961), 39–62. 4. Ibid., 59–60. 5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961; originally published in German, 1921), 2.1–2.18. 6. Ibid., 3.144–3.23, 3.26–3.33, 4.22. 7. Ryle, 40–41. 8. Ibid., 61. 9. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 4.112. 10. Ibid., 5.5563. 11. Ibid., 5.6–5.61. 12. Ibid., 5.552. 13. Ibid., 5.43. 14. Ibid., 3.325, 5.474–5.475. 15. Ibid., 6.37. 16. Ibid., 6.1223. 17. Ibid., 4.21–4.22, 5.556–5.5561. 18. Ibid., 6.44–6.45. 19. Ibid., 4.116, 7. 20. Wittgenstein, Investigations, 18. 21. Ibid., 109. 22. Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, ed. and trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 37; and Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), lvi–lvii.

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NOTES

23. Badiou, Ethics, 67–69; 134–35. 24. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 286–94. On the distinction between a situation and its state, see Meditations 7 and 8, 81–101. 25. Wittgenstein, Investigations, 599. 26. Ibid., 120. 27. Badiou, Being and Event, 434. 28. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 3e. 29. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, newly revised ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 617. 30. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 3e. 31. Badiou, Being and Event, 416–17. 32. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 3.4–3.411. 33. Wittgenstein, Investigations, 300–304. 34. Ibid., 329. 35. Ibid., 224. 36. Ibid., 306. 37. Ibid., 181–181e. 38. Sylviane Finck, ―Reading Trauma in Postmodern and Postcolonial Literature: Charlotte Delbo, Toni Morrison, and the Literary Imagination of the Aftermath‖ (Diss. Louisiana State University, 2006), http://etd.lsu. edu/docs/available/etd-11132006-203732/unrestricted/Finck_dis. pdf. 39. Wittgenstein, Investigations, 656. 40. Ibid., 349. 41. Blake, 153, plate 10, ll. 20–21. 42. Wittgenstein, Investigations, 65–67. 43. Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses 1955–1956, book 3 of The Seminar, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), 250. 44. Ibid., 123–24. 45. Ibid., 268–69. On points de capiton, see Jacques Lacan, Ècrits (Paris: Èditions du Seuil, 1966), 503; Ècrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2005), 419; Ècrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 154. 46. R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1983). 47. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 43–44. 48. Lacan, Psychoses, 226. 49. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, 8. 50. Lacan, Ècrits, Fink translation, 413. 51. Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 72.

NOTES

209

52. Ibid. See Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge 1930–32, from the notes of John King and Desmond Lee, ed. Desmond Lee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 116. 53. Perloff, 72–73. 54. Ibid., 78. 55. Wittgenstein, Lectures, 1930–32, 116. 56. Perloff, 78. 57. Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 180. 58. Perloff, Ladder, xi. 59. Lacan, The Psychoses, 207–8. 60. Wittgenstein, Investigations, 93–94. 61. Ibid., 124. 62. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, 44. 63. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 403. 64. Ibid., 559. 65. Ibid., 617. 66. Wittgenstein, Investigations, 544. 67. Wittgenstein, Culture, 10e. 68. Wittgenstein, Certainty, 146, 198, 200, 230, and 368. 69. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 79. 70. Badiou, Manifesto, 37. 71. Badiou, Being, 24. 72. Ibid., 209–11. All of meditation 20 in Being and Event is relevant to this context. 73. Badiou, Ethics, lvi. 74. Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes, L’être et l’événement 2 (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 212–13. 75. Ibid., 233, 245–46. 76. Ibid., 235. 77. Ibid., 383. 78. Badiou, Ethics, 69–70. 79. Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum, 2004), 101. 80. Ibid. 81. Badiou, Being, 23–24. 82. Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 340–48. 83. Badiou, Writings, 57, 60. 84. Badiou, Logiques, 48. 85. Badiou, Being, 66–67. 86. Ibid., 186–87. 87. Badiou, Logiques, 48.

210

NOTES

88. Ibid., 320–21. 89. Ibid., 338–39. 90. Ibid., 169–72. 91. Ibid., 339–41. 92. Ibid., 357. 93. Ibid., 322–26. 94. Ibid., 119–52; 169–80. For a translation of book II, section 1 of Logiques, see Writings, 192–226. 95. Badiou, Writings, 186, 188–89. 96. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (NewYork: Routledge, 1993), 72. 97. Badiou, Writings, 189. 98. Badiou, Logiques, 139, 144. 99. Badiou, Writings, 214, 219. 100. Ibid., 173. 101. Ibid., 174–75. 102. Badiou, Logiques, 158; Writings, 232–33. 103. Badiou, Logiques, 195–99. 104. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, book 7 of The Seminar, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 12. 105. Badiou, Writings, 109. 106. Ibid., 117. 107. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1990), 28–37. 108. Jacques Lacan, Encore, book 20 of Le sèminaire, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 84, 90; for the English translation, see On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–73, book 20, Encore, of The Seminar, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 90, 98. 109. Lacan, Encore, 73; Feminine Sexuality, 78. 110. Badiou, Logiques, 219–23; 233–34. 111. Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, 73. 112. Badiou, Writings, 107. 113. Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, 74. 114. Badiou, Logiques, 338–41. 115. Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Norton, 1990), 40. 116. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005), 68– 77. 117. Badiou, Logiques, 399. 118. Ibid., 535. 119. Ibid., 389.

NOTES

211

120. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 111. 121. Lacan, Psychoses, 268–69. 122. Badiou, Logiques, 207–8, 231. 123. Badiou, Saint Paul, 86–92. 124. Badiou, Logiques, 384–85. 125. Ibid., 400. 126. Badiou, Ethics, 45–46. 127. Badiou, Being, 333. 128. Badiou, Saint Paul, 98–99. 129. Blake, 1. 130. Badiou, Ethics, 72–87. 131. Badiou, Logiques, 443–46. 132. Ibid., 421–22. 133. Ibid., 74. 134. Ibid., 400. 135. Ibid., 246.

EPILOGUE 1. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Frederic L. Bender (New York: Norton, 1988), 74–75. 2. Badiou, Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005), 85. 3. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 98. 4. Badiou, Metapolitics, 87–90. 5. Badiou, Ethics, 97; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 103–7. 6. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 106. 7. Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 269. 8. Marx, Manifesto, 68. 9. Ibid., 65. 10. Badiou, Metapolitics, 99. The whole of chapter 6 is relevant to this discussion. 11. Badiou, Ethics, 99. 12. The Artist as Critic: The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), 389. 13. Badiou, Ethics, 28.

INDEX

Althusser, Louis, 41, 100 bad faith, 33-34, 90 Badiou, Alain, 14, 71, 128-32, 145, 151, 156-67, 170-71, 17374, 177-91, 193-94, 199200 Beckett, Samuel, 10 Benjamin, Walter, 92-93, 150 Blake, William, 10, 112, 132, 142, 153, 186 Bloch, Ernst, 89 Bourdieu, Pierre, 32-34, 37-38, 4247, 71-72, 76-79, 105, 122, 133, 189, 191 Burke, Kenneth, 58 Burrow, Trigant, 108 Butler, Judith, 27, 30, 37, 71, 102, 164 Cantor, Georg, 156, 160 caste, academic, 27-28, 37, 45-46, 77-79, 82 Cervantes, Miguel de, 55 Cixous, Hélène, 42, 71 class, social, 25, 35, 37, 39, 42-43, 45-46, 59-62, 69, 76, 80-81, 84, 89, 91-94, 97-99, 103-8, 114-22, 172, 177, 181, 189, 199 Cohen, Paul, 160-61 Cohen, Ted, 134 common sense, 12-15, 19-21, 23-25, 3436, 38-39, 45, 47, 49-51, 54-55, 5962, 69, 71-73, 75-80, 85, 87, 94-96,

98-101, 103, 105, 119, 123, 131-32, 140-41, 144, 147, 155, 182, 184, 186, 189, 193-94, 197-98 Conrad, Joseph, 101, 119 counterhegemony, 24, 36, 191 Delbo, Charlotte, 139 democracy, 3, 101, 104, 106, 187, 193-94, 199-200 Derrida, Jacques, 1-6, 8, 11-16, 1819, 21, 29, 40-42, 45, 49, 53-56, 58-59, 68, 71, 128, 143, 145, 150, 158, 179, 189, 191 division of labor, 50, 59-61, 69, 77, 82, 93, 115, 198 Dubois, W. E. B., 11 Eagleton, Terry, 27, 37 Ellmann, Richard, 90-91 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 186 Engels, Friedrich, 40, 49 event, concept of, 128-32, 135, 13941, 145-47, 151, 155-60, 162, 166-67, 171, 179-81, 185, 18990, 193 Fanon, Frantz, 95 Faulkner, William, 10, 99, 101 form of life, language as, 60, 76, 129, 151 Foucault, Michel, 30, 42, 71 Feuerbach, Ludwig A., 54, 58 Finck, Sylviane, 139

214

Frankfurt School, 34 Freud, Sigmund, 41, 53, 56, 74, 104, 146, 153-54, 167 Gegenstand, 58, 125-26 Genet, Jean, 98 Gödel, Kurt, 160-61 good sense, 25, 31, 34-36, 38-39, 47, 94 Gramsci, Antonio, 23-26, 30, 34-37, 39, 42, 45, 46, 60, 103, 116, 122, 131, 189, 191, 198 Habermas, Jürgen, 13, 71 habitus, 33, 44 Hallward, Peter, 194 Hardt, Michael, 96 Hegel, G. W. F., 43, 52-53, 76, 84, 110 hegemony, 24, 30, 35-36, 38, 42, 116, 131, 172, 189-90, 194 Heidegger, Martin, 44-45, 56, 72, 76 hooks, bell, 37-38 ideology, 57-58, 100, 104 individualism, individuality, 61, 6364, 67, 82, 84, 88-89, 97, 101-4, 107-9, 112, 115 James, Henry, 105, 119 Jameson, Fredric, 27, 37, 41-42, 44, 47, 71, 89 Jong, Erica, 112 Joyce, James, 10, 92, 99-101, 105, 119 Kant, Immanuel, 42, 76-77, 136 Kristeva, Julia, 31,42 Kuehl, Gordon, 113 Lacan, Jacques, 4, 11, 13, 41, 50, 5761, 68, 71-73, 85, 96, 102, 104-5, 129, 131-32, 135, 14348, 150-51, 155, 166-68, 17071, 173, 179-80, 189, 191

INDEX

Laing, R. D., 143 Landy, Marcia, 34 language game, 39, 129-31, 135-36, 138-40, 142-50, 153-55 Lawrence, D. H., 10, 87-88, 99-119, 121-23, 141, 153, 189, 191, 199 Lewis, Wyndham, 102 life, as concept, process, force, 5053, 56-61, 68, 73-76, 8485, 88, 94-96, 99-100, 102-5, 155 Love, Nancy S., 68-69, 76 Lukàcs, Georg, 101 Marrouchi, Mustapha, 3 Marx, Karl, 26, 40, 49-62, 67-69, 73, 75-76, 80, 84-85, 87, 97, 102, 106, 129, 189, 191, 193, 195-96 metalanguage, 13, 56, 59, 131, 147 meta-language-game, 146-47, 154-55 Miller, Henry, 10 minimal consensus, 11-12, 15, 39, 143, 158, 179 Moore, G. E., 155 Morris, William, 186 multiple, being as inconsistent, 156, 158-61, 165, 170, 180, 182, 191 multitude, 96, 98, 194, 196, 198 Naipaul, V. S., 116 Negri, Antonio, 27, 96, 194, 199 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 40-42, 47, 53, 60-61, 63-85, 87-89, 94100, 111, 128, 176, 189-91 Nun, José, 34 Objekt, 58 ontology, 58, 130, 156, 158, 160-63, 165-66, 170-71, 179, 182

215

INDEX

ordinary language, 13-15, 25, 36-37, 44, 47, 49-50, 55, 57, 59, 68-70, 72, 75-76, 79-80, 87, 96, 100, 125-28, 131-32, 147-49, 159, 161, 165, 186 organic intellectual, 25-26, 34, 37, 46, 103 Perloff, Majorie, 148-50 philosophy, 2, 4, 13-14, 34, 36, 38-39, 44-45, 49-51, 59, 68-69, 72, 75-76, 85, 87, 93-95, 98, 100, 102, 125-27, 129, 131, 14849, 151, 154, 156-57, 159 Picasso, Pablo, 65 points de capiton (anchoring points), 143, 179 Pound, Ezra, 63 property, private, 89, 97-98, 106 Proust, Marcel, 92 Pynchon, Thomas, 10 Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 54-55, 59 Real, the, 11, 59-60, 67, 71, 85, 102, 129-30, 135-36, 150-51, 155, 160, 166, 177 resentment, 27, 46, 60, 77-80, 8890, 96, 190 Ryle, Gilbert, 125-28, 131 Said, Edward, 28-31 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 27, 33, 35, 90 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 77 set theory, 156-57, 160-63, 177, 179 Sinfield, Alan, 98 singularity, 61-62, 64, 67-68, 73, 92, 95-99, 102-3, 151, 179, 182-89, 191, 200 site, 158-59, 161-62, 172, 179 Spencer, Herbert, 74 Spivak, Gayatri, 27, 30, 71, 119

State, as a social institution, 61, 91, 96-97, 101, 115, 131, 137, 174, 182, 190, 193-95, 197200 Staten, Henry, 78, 80 Stirner, Max, 49, 51-58, 61, 107 subalternity, 25-26, 29-31, 38, 45 Szeliga (Franz Zychlin von Zychlinski), 51-54 Tawny, R. H., 181 theory, 4, 19, 23-25, 34-36, 39, 44, 46, 51, 59-60, 67-68, 70, 75-76, 83, 87, 99-100, 123, 148, 151 transcendental, 158, 160-67, 170-71, 179-80, 182, 189-91 trans-logical, 178 trauma, 8, 139-41, 154, 167, 176, 189 truth procedure, 128-30, 132, 15657, 162, 166, 173, 179, 18184, 186-88, 191, 194, 19697, 199 Weber, Max, 181 Whitman, Walt, 104 Wilde, Oscar, 87-101, 104, 114, 119, 122-23, 189, 191, 199200 Williams, Raymond, 24, 42 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 39-41, 50, 73, 125-42, 145-51, 153-56, 189, 191 Woolf, Virginia, 10, 99, 105, 119 work ethic, 89, 97, 114, 116 Wright, Richard, 5 Yeats, W. B., 60 Žižek, Slavoj, 27, 71, 155