Untimely Politics

Untimely Politics

Titles in the Taking on the Political series include: Polemicization: The Contingency of the Commonplace Benj amin Arditi and Jeremy Valentine

Post-Marxism Versus Cultural Studies Paul Bowman

Untimely Politics

Sarnuel A. Chambers

Cinematic Political Thought

Michael Shapiro

Politics and Aesthetics

Jon Simons

American Morality from 9/11 to Gul{ War 11 Cynthia Weber

Unti

ly

I i tics

Samuel A. Chambers

Edinburgh University Press

© Samuel A. Chambers, 2003 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in 11 on 13 Sabon by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh, and printed and bound in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wilts A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 1766 3 (hardback) The right of Samuel A. Chambers to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Vll

Introduction: 'Time is Out of Joint'

1

1 Language and the 'Burden' of Politics

10

2 Experiencing Language, Broaching Untimeliness

35

3 Spectral History, Untimely Theory

72

4 Untimely Reading: Foucault's Evasive Maneuvers

98

5 Untimely Agency: Having the Historical Sense to 'Bypass' Psychoanalytic Theory

127

6 The Untimely Politics of DOMA

155

Bibliography Index

1 76 193

For Jackie and Tim

Acknowledgements

I always thought authors were speaking figuratively when they made claims such as 'this book would not have been possible' without the help and support of all those listed in the acknowledgements . Now, as I reach the final stages of the proj ect, I sometirnes balk at the very idea of calling this book 'mine' . I suppose that is why the other cliche of the acknowledgements is to clairn responsibility for any remaining errors or weaknesses. In the end, I am left with only the mistakes - so much for authorial intention. Mike Shapiro helped this book to see the light of day well at the end of the project; for that, I thank him first. I am also grateful to Benj amin Arditi for his help and support, and for some very productive long-­ distance exchanges on political theory. I also thank Nicola Carr, at Edinburgh University Press, for keeping me informed and making the publication process as smooth as possible. I am grateful for the support, criticism, and dialogue produced by the numerous audiences to which I presented earlier arguments, drafts, and portions of the book. I owe debts to panel members over the years at the Midwest, Western, and American political science association meetings, particularly Steven Gerencser; to political science depart­ ment members at St. Olaf College; to panel mernbers at the 'How Queer are we Here ? ' conference at the University of Minnesota; and to audience members at the University of Delaware. I also thank the St. Mary's College of Maryland surnmer writing group for their enthu­ siasm. A much earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared in Theory and Event 3 .4 (2000), and a version of Chapter 4 appeared in Angelaki 6 . 3 (200 1 ) ; thanks g o t o the anonymous reviewers o f those journals and to the readers who offered feedback and criticism. A number of people read the complete manuscript, at various j unctures along the way, and their comments proved invaluable. I

vi i i

U nti mely Pol itics

thank Mary Dietz, Kennan Ferguson, Brian Mogck, August Nimtz, Naorni Scheman, Ed Schiappa, Greg Weight, John Zumbrunnen, and two anonyrnous reviewers at Edinburgh University Press. Ruth Fein­ gold has the dubious honor of going through the manuscript twice; her rneticulousness, her eye for language, and her capacity to cite the Chicago Manual of Style all prove second to none. Lisa Disch read too rnany drafts of too many chapters for either of us to be able to keep count. As I struggle, here, to come up with words that can express my gratitude to her, I find myself wondering if I can have her read a draft of the acknowledgements . I believe, though I honestly cannot recall with certitude, that the idea of untimeliness originally came fro1n her. I can say for certain that she will see pieces of her ideas, arguments, and phrasings all over the book. She already knows that what she has given to the project has made this a better book, but her writing, her example, her friendship, and her collegiality have all made me a better person. This book was sustained in many other ways, ones that often had little to do with reading drafts or arguing political theory. I thank Michael Warner for his powerful and critical reading of a much earlier draft of Chapter 5, but I owe my biggest debt to him for his insightful tips on how to describe the project after the fact. Sandy Schram always lifted my spirits when I was most certain I had reached the end of the road, and his own work is exemplary of the role a political theorist can play. I thank Roddey Reid for the not infrequent bra instorming sessions, and for his constant collegiality. This book looks quite a bit different than it 1night have, were it not for the work of David Halperin. I am greatly indebted to him for inspiring me with his own writing and for offering unflagging support for my scholarship. My own writing of the book depended on the support of so many individuals who had little or no involvement with the project itself. First, I want to acknowledge D an Hope, simply for his refusal to let political theory be anything less than the noble endeavor we had once all believed it to be. I thank Hal Janney for his friendship. Hal's confidence in both this book and in 1ny work as a political theorist never flagged, even though he saw both only from the outside. I also owe a debt to John Bies: in a way, this book would not have been possible without his help in navigating the waters of political theory within the academy. Finally, by dedicating the book to them, I try to express here some small portion of my overall gratitude to my parents . I doubt they expected this book, as the fruit of their sacrifices, and yet I know they will be proud of it.

Preface

1x

Without doubt, I owe my greatest debt to Rebecca Brown; indeed, that debt only continues to grow larger. No one has put more into this book than she; anyone who doubts that clairn should sitnply ask her, an art historian, to explain the ontological difference. Rebecca has carefully and perspicaciously read draft after draft, been a sounding board for even the craziest of argurnents, and, throughout, always remained certain of the future this book had. Her faith in this project mirrored her faith in me, and neither ever seems to wane - both facts that often completely bewilder me. In the future I plan to pay back some of my debts, and I hope for more bewilderment in !'a-venir.

Introduction: 'Time

iS

Out of Joint'

At the beginning of the twenty-first century political change happens quickly and the face of democratic politics transforms rapidly. As some corrnnentators have already noted, the loss of stable political referents occasioned by the end of the Cold War has created a shifting political landscape. That landscape is marked, on the one hand, by conflict, turmoil, and violence - frorn the continually renegotiated and re-interrupted 'peace' of the Middle East to the plight of the Balkans and, on the other, by political/media events of disproportion - from 0. J . Simpson to Monica Lewinsky. Writers atterr1pting to come to grips with the rneaning and implications of these constant changes have accused political theorists of being unable to keep up with the tirnes, of neglecting current political events in order to explore the latest arcane philosophical trend (Benhabib 1 995c; Rorty 1 9 8 6; Isaac 1 995; Seery 1 9 9 6 ) . Terence Ball, for example, goes so far as to 'wonder what is even remotely "political" about political theory' ( 1 99 5 : 54 ) . And when Jeffrey Isaac labels the failure of political theorists to address the revolutions of 1 9 8 9 a 'missed opportunity', he effectively accuses them of tardiness ( 1 99 5 : 6 8 2 ) . A t first glance, 'tardiness' does not sound like such a damning critique, but in this sense being 'too late' implies not merely political irrelevance but political irresponsibility - and there can be no graver indictment than that. Or can there be ? What must be presupposed about political theory, political agency, even language itself, to give this charge its force ? To condemn a theory or argument as being 'too late' presupposes a modern conception of political agency, one that takes its bearings from a linear notion of history, thought as a certain unfolding of events . Traditional conservatisrn, for example, firmly lodges the political agent within a historical tradition and then asks

2

U nti mely Pol itics

that agent to make only minor political corrections in response to the problems given up by history . Alternatively, liberal conceptions as­ sume (or sometimes simply neglect) a certain background of histori­ cally accumulated political meaning, but they insist that the political agent ren1ain free to act out of or against that background. The political actor in liberalism gets not only to respond to past problems but also to solve future ones, by dictating the course of history to c01ne. Finally, marxists typically conceive of agency with respect to history as an unfolding of stages that will lead to emancipation in the future. Despite the undeniably significant differences among then1, all of these cases presuppose history as a sort of linear movement and they characterize politics as a timely enterprise - one designed to solve the problerns created by history and/or chart its future progress . This book proposes to consider political theory and politics as untimely endeavors, thus it does not seek merely to discuss one particular type of already given politics. Untimely Politics names an effort to expand the very domain of the political. The contempor­ ary landscape is dotted with interlocutors who - drawing on the work of important twentieth-century philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and D errida - gesture towards what I will specify as an untirnely approach to political theory. Those thinkers who insist on denaturalizing given concepts and categories, who refuse to turn political thought into a problem-solving endeavor, all help to outline the contours of untimely theory . Lisa Disch suggests that Hannah Arendt saw political theory as an untimely pursuit, and that criticisms of Arendt's work tend to miss their mark precisely because they carry the expectation of timeliness ( 1 99 6 ) ; likewise, Bonnie Honig's recent work on the 'foreignness' at the heart of democracy expresses the very spirit of untimeliness that I wish to evoke here (2001 ). Diana Coole's recent rereading of a non-Hegelian dialectics relies on an implicitly untimely and ghostly conception of ternporality (2000 ) . Perhaps rnost significantly, Ernesto Laclau's project of reconceptualizing both free­ dom and universalism through a politics of hegen10nic articulations embodies the very thinking of untimeliness that I will try to articulate ( 1 990, 1 996, Butler et al. 2000 ) . It is significant to stress, however, that despite a handful of pr01nising remarks in scattered texts, a self­ conscious conception of untirneliness has not even begun to be built in political theory. This work begins that building process by explicitly articulating a political theory of untimeliness. Any straightforward explanation of untimeliness would, at this point, only run counter to my intended use of the concept within this

Introd u ction: 'Ti me is Out of Joi nt'

3

work. And since I hope for this proj ect to open the field toward further considerations of a politics of untimeliness, any simple definition could only serve to assimilate the meaning of untimeliness to our intuitive and everyday notions of time as linear progress. A more complex and subtle understanding of what untimeliness in political theory might mean will only begin to ernerge gradually within the project; for now, it will suffice to demarcate the field in which untirneliness might emerge or, in other words, to say what it is not rather than what it is . One must rigorously distinguish untirneliness from both the ahis­ torical and the a punctual. A politics of untimely agency would have to begin by rejecting the various linear understandings of history in its relation to the political agent that I enumerated above. The concern of a politics of untimeliness lies with the very possibility of history. Untiineliness therefore should not suggest a dismissal of history. But it also should not connote an arriving too late or too early, since both of these notions only make sense in relation to a linear notion of time. For example, the Soviet revolution rnight have come 'too soon' from the perspective of marxist theory, but it was not for that reason 'untimely' . 'Too soon' and 'too late' presuppose the very linear notions of history that untimeliness attempts to get past. Untimeliness, in contrast, requires a political theory of ghosts, and a ghostly theory of politics always proves proble1natic. That is, its sense of temporality means that an untirnely theory cannot simply solve problems produced along a linear model of time. Rather, an untimely theory holds the capacity to render problematic that which, in the current context, does not appear to be a problem. This capacity to problematize means that untimeliness may disturb our most assured convictions; it shakes even the solid ground of ontology by calling into question the very distinction between the actual and the spectral. A political theory of untimeliness operates in the reahn of hauntology, not ontology. Hauntology would serve as the theory of being for untimely politics, but, unlike traditional ontology, a hauntology grants the possibility that ghosts exist. An untimely political theory - a political theory that can speak to ghosts - will have to maintain a healthy skepticisrn about any simple distinction between the real and the unreal. In the face of recent efforts to narrow the domain of politics and to restrict the scope of contemporary political struggles, my work attempts to carve out a space from which a politics of untimeliness can flourish. I initiate this process, in Chapter 1, by surveying the terms of the \

4

U nti mely Pol itics

constructivist debate, which I take as the point of departure for rny proj ect. I begin by considering the paradoxical notion of 'construc­ tion', a word that has been thrown about so carelessly by recent writings in social, feminist, and political theory as to evacuate the term of any real rneaning. 'Construction' evokes the imagery of building, seemingly suggesting that a constructivist description of human sub­ jectivity or political agency would provide an account of a maste� builder, the one responsible for manufacturing subjectivity. Upon this comrnon-sense notion of construction, critics of constructivism have built forceful critiques of any philosophical investigation into lan­ guage; they argue that hermeneutic or genealogical analyses lead to a linguistic determinisrn by trapping the political actor within language. I relieve the 'political burden' placed on such investigations of language by showing that it is, in fact, an illusion created by the critics of construction, since their very arguments for cordoning off the political and literary realms depend upon an implicit, neo-Aristotelian theory concerning the relation between language and politics. This model silently invokes a rather instrurnental view of language, as it implicitly presupposes language as a tool to be used by political agents. Because it remains tacit, I refer to this as the as-if-objectified (AIO ) rnodel of language. I aim not to deny but to challenge the dominance of the AIO model and to enable the process of transform­ ing the discursive practices that it supports. This challenge, I maintain, must be seen not ( as the critics might have it) as a literary pursuit, but as an expressly political act. To talk about language is not, I show, merely to talk about or write literature. The political burden placed on philosophical investigations into language serves to constrain the terms of debate in political theory. I seek to reopen those debates, and, by lifting that burden, I can turn in Chapter 2 to one such close consideration of language. I look to the writings of Heidegger to find the first strands of an alternative to the AIO model of language. I sidestep traditional approaches to and critiques of Heidegger by tapping the resources of his later writings on language for my own political purposes. Within Heidegger' s later writings it is possible to excavate a coun­ ter-rnodel to the neo-Aristotelian notion of language as a faculty possessed by 'man', the rational anirnal. Heidegger insists that we can never really say what language is, for language may always prove to be j ust that which exceeds our grasp. In Heideggerian terminology, language can never be reducible to Being; language both makes possible and belongs together with Being - it is thus 'beyond Being'.

I n trod u ction: 'Ti me is Out of Joi nt'

5

This Heideggerian insight has crucial implications for my analysis. It irnplies that once one rejects the Aristotelian model of language as a faculty possessed by human beings, one must also abandon the notion that language could ever simply be used as a tool for political purposes . Language may have political implications and ramifications outside of the use to which a political actor puts it - an insight that serves to displace what I will describe as the timely constraints placed upon theories of politics. Language precedes human subjects not j ust temporally, but, more importantly, ontologically; therefore, the rela­ tion between the political agent and language can never be direct, instrumental, or timely. Conceiving of language in this manner urges a redirection of political analysis toward the level of language and its effects in history. I will show in the chapters that follow that these effects turn out to be rather untimely; they can never be predicted in advance or completely controlled after the fact. And Heidegger himself argues that 'all essential philosophical questioning is necessa­ rily untimely' ( 1 95 9 : 8 ) . Heidegger's alternative t o the AIO model lays the foundation for building a specifically untirnely approach to politics. I begin to theorize a politics of untimeliness in Chapter 3, by challenging Isaac's vision for the role of the political theorist. Isaac asks that political theory be precisely what Heidegger says philosophy can never be. He admonishes his colleagues in the discipline for their utter neglect and 'avoidance' of the revolutionary events of 1 9 8 9, arguing forcefully that political theory must eschew what he calls 'second-order inquiry' - the type of textual and interpretive work that concerns a large portion of the field. Instead, Isaac suggests that political theory turn toward 'first-order inquiry' : unmediated efforts to explain recent empirical events in order to facilitate resolution through a program of problem-solving ( 1 99 5 ) . Isaac insists that political theory remain timely by rej ecting philosophical fashions in favor of political ex­ IgenCies . I argue that the political problems we will face in the twenty--first century may well require political theorists to develop a much more subtle understanding of history than that offered by Isaac's first-order/ second-order dichotomy. Therefore, political theorists will have to play a much more expansive and variegated role than that of 'pro­ blem-solver', to which Isaac relegates us. In Chapter 3, I describe both that understanding of history - in the form of historicity - and that role for the political theorist, in the form of untimeliness. Carrying out each of these tasks requires an approach to language outside the

6

U nti m ely Pol itics

confines of the AIO model. Indeed, the conception of untimely politics that begins to emerge in this chapter rests upon the Heideggerian alternative to the AIO rnodel, so even though I leave direct meditations on language behind after Chapter 2, the problem of thinking language outside the terms of the AIO continues to inform my efforts at building a politics of untimeliness. Within the terms of the AIO model, unti1neliness can never even manifest itself, much less flourish. Isaac's categories and schemas prove overly restrictive for the field of political theory (the first-order/second-order dichotorny is a false one) because they rely on a notion of timeliness, and although language appears to be of no concern to Isaac, his sharp distinction between first--order and second-order inquiry tacitly relies upon the AIO rnodel of language. To break free of these timely categories, I turn toward Derrida's hauntology : a preliminary effort to formulate the notion of historicity as an alternative conception of history. Derridean hauntology proves to be 'beyond Being' in much the sa1ne way as Heideggerian language, and I use the latter in order to develop the former into a concept of spectral history. Spectral history requires a steadfast refusal to treat language either as an object of knowledge for the subject or as a tool for the political agent. Defined as 'the possibility of history itself', historicity provides s01ne of the underlayment for building a notion of untimeliness that can remain distinct fro1n linear notions of time. Untimeliness, that is, should be considered neither too late nor too early, but, as Hamlet says, 'out of j oint'. Chapter 4 concretely demonstrates one necessary implication of reconsidering political theory as untimely: rethinking the practices of textual interpretation that dominate the field. Through an in-depth explication of Foucault's work on reading, writing, interpretation, and history, I attempt to render problematic the most common method of intellectual historiography as practiced in the history of political thought. Precisely because political theorists research and teach through and in reference to this history, a set of implicit ground rules governs most approaches to authors in the canon. These un­ stated rules help to guide c01nmentators in their search for textual meaning: ( 1 ) by directing them to focus on those texts that seem to contain the most explicit theoretical and methodological statements on politics as such (this rule explains, for exa1nple, why an undeniably canonized text such as John Locke's Two Treatises of Government is almost never read in its entirety; instructors only assign the second of the two treatises ) ; (2) by emphasizing previous influences as the single biggest key to understanding (for example, Hegel serves to explain

I ntrod u ction: 'Ti me is Out of Joi nt'

7

Marx's notion of stages in history, Hobbes serves to explain Locke's state of nature) ; or (3) by, sometirr1es in contrast to (2), emphasizing the author's own life experiences to explain his or her text (so the seventeenth-century exclusion crisis and the Glorious Revolution not Hobbes - explain Locke's text). My reading of Foucault shows that all of the above rr1ethods of interpretation seek to situate an author and his or her work within a web of previous influences and intentionality, or sometimes within the author's own reuvre (hence political theory's numbering system: Wittgenstein I and II, Heidegger I and II) . Yet the writings of Foucault, along with those of a number of other contemporary authors, work against j ust this type of effort. What I call Foucault's 'evasive rnan­ euvers' constitute strategic attempts on his part to avoid being pinned down by the traditional interpretive approaches; he thereby challenges and changes the very ground rules of intellectual historiography that are so often presupposed by his critics. And yet, Foucault does not casually dismiss careful and sophisticated textual readings; in fact, his critique of interpretation simultaneously demands even more rigorous and prudent reading. This practice of reading - as brought to light by Foucault's evasive maneuvers - turns out to be an untimely one that follows the path of a text on its own terms (which does not necessarily mean outside its context) and draws political implications from those textual effects rather than from a set of pre-given categories. While Chapters 3 and 4 investigate the implications of untimeliness for the practice of political theory, Chapter 5 builds on those devel­ opments as I defend a specific conception of political agency. The argument centers on an extended engagement with, and critique of, Judith Butler's work on subj ectivity and political agency. In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler suggests that an adequate and tenable account of political agency depends upon reconciling Foucault's discursive analysis with the psychoanalytic theory of Freud and Lacan. I argue that Butler's attempt at reconciliation not only fails on its own terms, but also comes at far too high a political price. Butler's proj ect of j oining Freud to Foucault tends to dehistoricize Foucault's genea­ logical accounts of subjectivity, robbing those accounts of the Nietzschean 'historical sense' that gives thern their descriptive power and political efficacy. In rejecting Butler's effort to build what I call a 'timeless' theory of subj ectivity, I suggest that we follow Foucault in trying to hold on to a certain historical sense. Historical sense can play an important role in building an adequate account of political resis­ tance, an untimely understanding of agency more appropriate to

8

U nti mely Politics

today's untimely political struggles. This untimely conception of agency must maintain a keen Nietzschean sense of the effects of history. To build a philosophical 'theory of subject' Butler says we need Freud to prop up Foucault, but the politics of producing and transforrning historical subj ectivities depends upon a discursive, un­ timely conception of subjectivity embedded within history. In Chapter 6 I address the political battle over gay marriage in the US . I root the political payoff of my proj ect the advantages of an untimely theory - in an analysis of the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) by the 1 04th Congress. My account of DOMA tries to circumnavigate the narrow debate between tradition and rights as staged on the floors of the House and Senate - so as to ernphasize issues of structural and institutional heterosexism. In short, at the core of the politics of DOMA one finds a necessarily untimely battle over language. Simply denouncing D OMA as a homophobic act, as some on the left would like to do, fails to comprehend the rnanner in which this piece of legislation attempts, often unsuccess­ fully, to block the structural transformation of discursive practices that lesbian, gay, and sometimes academic communities have accom­ plished by recognizing and accepting relationships between people that are not legally 'marriages'. A traditional approach to the debate over and events leading up to this bill fails to grasp both the political stakes of DOMA itself and the political actions to which D OMA responds. I argue that the importance of DOMA cannot be reduced to tradition (the argument from the political right), rights (political left), or even homophobia ( academic left) . From the basis of my alternative conception of language, I interpret DOMA as a political act of structural and discursive heterosexism. DOMA attempts both to thwart and to turn back the changes in discursive practices that have been occurring throughout those corn­ munities that I refer to above. The act tries, through legislative decree, to prevent those uses of the terrns 'husband', 'wife', and 'spouse' that do not square with 'traditional' understandings of relationships and sexuality. The irony of the act lies in the fact that one can no more legislate the use of words (the French Academy notwithstanding) than one can legislate sexual practice. But the battle over changes in discursive practices is nonetheless a thoroughly political one, and the political stakes cannot be reduced to an effort to gain civil rights (though by no means do I deny the importance of those gains, if and when they come to gays and lesbians), because the issues of status, recognition, and often political subjectivity go beyond rights issues.

I n trod uction: 'Ti me is Out of Joint'

9

The effort to so reduce the political potential of D OMA amounts to an assirnilation of DOMA to the narrow political terms of the AIO model. The significance of DOMA for my purposes lies in its capacity to call the AIO model up short. Only an untimely political theory that pays close attention to the discursive politics of DOMA can move past the limited and limiting debate over tradition, rights, and even homophobia; only an untimely agency can continue the struggle against D OMA outside of the legislative and judicial arenas. But 1nost significantly, it is precisely an untimely approach to DOMA that reveals the politics in a discursive interpretation of this political battle. I end with some reflections on the issues of language, history, and untimeliness with which I began. How does one do political theory outside the confines of the AIO model ? How can political theorists maintain the ability to discourse with specters ? What, exactly, would a politics of untimeliness look like, and how could it expand our impoverished notions of politics at this particular historical j uncture ? My analysis o f DOMA provides the beginnings o f answers to important questions such as these. It serves to demonstrate that accusations of tardiness in political theory not only miss their mark but also deflect our attention from more helpful approaches to the issues we must face in twenty-first century politics.

1

languag

and the 'Burden' of Politics

This book contributes to a number of important debates that make up the field of contemporary political theory today, yet many of those debates can fairly be characterized as 'polernical' in the sense sug­ gested by Jacques Ranciere. Ranciere describes a pole1nic as occurring not when one party asserts X and the other party Y, but rather when each party construes the ground of the argument, the objects within it, and the very identity of the interlocutors differently (Ranciere 1 9 9 8 : xi; cf. Arditi and Valentine 1 9 9 9 ) . Obviously, polemics i n this sense make for poor debates, since the parties to the debates can hardly even be considered to be talking to one another. My overall project to build a politics of untimeliness will simultaneously attempt to speak across these divides - or, in Ranciere's terms, to reconceptualize the very terrain of the debate. The debate between constructivists and their critics certainly looks like a polemic, since one party to it sees language as central to any conception of politics, while the other envisions a fundamental dis­ tinction between language and politics. In this chapter I make my own polemical intervention in that debate, as I try to show that a specific, and rather unhelpful, model of the language/politics relation (the AIO model) holds sway in the field. My argument is not that the entire field has fallen under the sway of the AIO model. Rather, I aim to demonstrate that the impact this presupposed relation between lan­ guage and politics has on the field as a whole serves to make invisible the very interlocutors who would challenge or reject this 1nodel. Thus, I attempt to reopen this debate by carving out a space for those philosophical investigations into language to emerge . This effort operates by way of a description and critique of the AIO model.

La ng uage a n d the ' B u rden' of Politics

11

The L an g u a g e of C o n s tr u ction One hears a lot about 'construction' these days. In fact, given the rnultitude of references to the term, the unassuming reader who picks up a book in political, feminist, or cultural theory might make the honest mistake of thinking that he or she were reading a strangely written carpentry manual. If only it were that simple. For if 'con­ struction' were a basic matter of building something, and 'deconstruc­ tion' a matter of tearing it down, a great deal of contentious ( and often exasperated) debate might be eliminated from these fields. As matters stand now, the meaning of 'construction' as both a word and a practice proves far from clear, and yet many authors continue to employ the term as if its definition were as straightforward as I have jocularly suggested. Spending a bit more titne with recent works in political theory reveals that the term construction stands as a central issue of debate within these texts, with numerous authors condemning construction by arguing against the idea that it could be a viable asset to theorizing the political. A sensible set of criticisms flows directly from my brief and crude characterization of construction, 1 for if the practice of construction functioned as I have described it above, then any con­ struction would certainly require a 'constructor'. That is to say, if one takes construction as a simple matter of making something, then no doubt there must be a subject behind the making, 2 a subject doing the constructing itself - in sum, a subject in the fullest sense of the word. 3 However, as critics of constructivism have argued forcefully, it turns out that this constructing subject proves to be wholly lacking in the theories expounded by constructivists (Benhabib 1 995a; Fraser 1 995 ) . In short, the constructivists have failed to understand the very nature of construction, and thus they proceed to analyze the 'social constructions ' of various cultural and political phenomena while remaining wholly inattentive to the 'who' or 'what' that is doing the constructing (Taylor 1 9 85b, 1 995; Rorty 1 9 9 1 ) . Such criticisms thereby expose a certain irony at the heart of 'constructivism'; more irr1portantly, they charge constructivism with a significant political and ethical danger. 4 This danger is often brought into focus by citing a now infamous line from Jacques Derrida, who once wrote: 'there is nothing outside the text' ( 1 974 : 1 5 8 ) . 5 In context, this sentence constitutes one move among many within a complex philosophical argument, but out of its context the claim has had multiple deleterious effects 6 on the

12

U ntimely Pol itics

perception and understanding of a radical constructivist position. The sentence is taken to assert that there is nothing real but words, and it therefore provides evidence that the critique of the subject has gone too far. In attempting to deny the ultimate sovereignty and autonomy of a Cartesian subj ect, constructivism has eliminated the thinking and acting subject altogether. If the subj ect is but the product of language caused, created, and determined by discourse - then no room remains for the undeniable physicality of human beings nor for the unavoid­ able necessity of action by and for those individuals . Critics who hold to this line of argument take radical constructivists quite literally at their word when they suggest that 'sex' or 'nature' are the effects of language, produced by discourse ( see Halperin 1 9 9 0 ) . Pursuing this argurnent t o its logical conclusion, this criticism o f constructivism obj ects t o the idea that language could b e a first cause or a ground. 'If everything is discourse, what about the body ? ' (Butler 1 993 : 6 ) . How can one deny the irrefutable fact that bodies eat and sleep, live and die, and feel pleasure and pain ? These basic biological phenomena cannot be reduced to the mere effects of language. Viewed from this line of critique, constructivism turns into a sort of cultural determinism, with everything reducible to the source-point of lan­ guage, and with a great deal of irrefutable human experience thrown to the wayside. As Seyla Benhabib puts it, 'the subject thus dissolves into the chain of significations of which it was supposed to be the initiator' ( 1 995 a : 2 0 ) . Not only does this form of linguistic monism deny the materiality of the human being itself, its deterministic element eliminates all forms of human agency . Therefore, constructivism is said to undermine the ground of political action by putting language as the agent in the place of human beings acting together in the public (or any other) sphere. As if this criticism alone were not enough to rej ect the radical constructivist theory outright, coupled with it comes another formid­ able line of questioning: If the subject is a product of construction, then who stands behind the process doing the constructing ? Must there not be an agent that lies at the root of construction - for, as I suggested earlier, is not construction the very act of building some­ thing, and does not any building require a builder ? This argument turns the first obj ection to constructivis1n on its head by suggesting that a radical constructivist position in fact presupposes a voluntarist subject - an agent with free will who 'constructs' . Theories of gender as performativity provide the perfect target for this second line of critique: thinking of gender as something one performs tends to reduce

La nguage a n d the ' Bu rden ' of Pol i ti cs

13

to the idea that one acts freely (as a voluntary subject) to choose whatever gender one wishes . 7 Thus, those theorists who started out by criticizing a Cartesian, autonomous, and sovereign subject have been forced to rely (however tacitly) on precisely such a subject in order for their theories to retain even the slightest degree of intelligibility. 8 No matter which line of argument one chooses, one will wind up concluding that constructivist theories prove apolitical not only unconcerned with political matters, but also lacking entirely in any political significance or relevance. Constructivism might thereby lead to a sort of nihilism. That is to say, by focusing on the categories that constrain us, constructivist approaches to politics actually produce social determinism by robbing human beings of a free realm for choices and action, thus stripping them of political agency (a crucial political concept that I will grapple with in the text below) . Construction not only contributes little or nothing to politics, it also plays the role of a potentially dangerous antagonist to political action. By way of under­ cutting the ground for political agency - or worse, putting language in its place - constructivist approaches to politics and agency have little to offer politics ( in both theory and practice), and what they do offer proves to do more harn1 than good. On the grounds of these claims, critics of constructivisrn suggest that constructivist studies should remain in the realm of literary, not political, theory . Political B urdens These far-reaching criticisms of constructivism leave any attempt to theorize the relation between language and politics with a certain 'political burden'. My project here rests on j ust such an atternpt: I explore alternative approaches to language as an opening toward thinking political theory as untimely. But before I can even begin to take on these tasks, I must face squarely the 'political burden' left by these imposing and impressive critiques of constructivism. I will do so by demonstrating that the criticisn1s of constructivism rely upon a certain conception of language and its relation to politics; that is, the approaches to politics that criticize radical constructivism actually rest upon an unstated theory of the relation between language and the political agent. Uncovering this theory, as I will do below, proves that the relationship between language and the subject can no longer be taken as given; thus, a philosophical investigation of language that seeks to explore the question of agency will no longer appear to lie outside the realm of politics.

14

U nti mely Politics

Constructivism offers one (very broad) theory of this relation between the subj ect and language. To take an example, one can read Sitnone de Beauvoir's most famous line: 'one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman' ( 1 9 8 9 : 2 6 7 ) . Beauvoir expresses a key insight of constructivism by arguing that only 'civilization as a whole' not biology or psychology - can produce 'wornan' . Beauvoir suggests that the very category of 'woman' as a human subj ect is not a natural one that precedes that subject's entry into culture and language; rather, 'woman' as subj ect is produced by culture, society, and various 'myths of femininity' (267). Nevertheless, the lived existence of actual 'women' never corresponds directly or seamlessly with this social and discursive category of 'woman' (cf. de Lauretis 1 9 84 ) . The linguistic and discursive category of woman precedes but also exceeds the birth of a biological female. Beauvoir nicely expresses this complex relation between the bodies of women and the category of woman when she asserts that the 'body is not enough to define her as woman; there is no true living reality except as manifested by the conscious individual through activities in the bosom of society' ( 1 9 8 9 : 3 7) . It is only in this rather complicated sense that gender for Beauvoir is socially ( and therefore discursively) constructed.9 Constructivists wish to argue that human subjectivity cannot be conceived of as a given, nor assmned as a starting point. Far from being the ground from which all choices and actions proceed, con­ structivists argue that subjectivity results from a series of cultural, social, and linguistic processes . Subj ectivity and hence agency are the outcome of a process of construction, but this outcome is never a final product. Subjectivity and agency always remain caught up in a process of recreation, alteration, and even transformation. The terms of construction stay open to renegotiation. Subjectivity is thereby con­ structed, but not in the manner of building a house (d. Halperin 1 990: 4 1 -5 ) . Critics of constructivism fear that contemporary radical construc­ tivist accounts have gone too far in privileging linguistic categories over human action - from the grounds of this fear they build the critiques I summarized in the first section. 1 0 These critics respond to constructivist arguments by asking after the active agent responsible for this process of construction. And, if no agent can be found behind this process, then must construction not result in determinism? I think not. In response to these arguments, I want to suggest that the general criticisms of constructivism and this specific question both view agency itself through the lens of a certain kind of grarr1mar. That

La ng uage a n d the ' B u rden' of Pol itics

15

is, the critics of constructivism uncritically assume that any process of construction - just like any sentence - requires a subject, 'an "I" or a "we" who enacts or perforrns that construction' (Butler 1 993: 7 ) . Like any good US high school English teacher, critics of constructivism stringently prohibit the use of passive voice. Thus, for these instruc­ tors, the sentence 'gender is socially constructed' must be re-written in the active voice with an agent taking up the subject position. In refusing to modify their theories by editing out the passive voice of 'agency is constructed', critics suggest that constructivists make a mistake rnuch graver than grammar. However, this editorial demand for active voice (that is, the critical call for an agent doing the constructing) presumes that the process of construction either requires an active agent responsible for the process of construction or that construction renders that human agent utterly passive - immediately unappealing and ultimately nihilistic conclusions. I draw upon authors who have suggested a third choice, by trying to conceive of construction as a process that is neither active nor passive. The grammatical notion of the middle voice can help here to clarify the terms of this murky debate. Charles Scott argues that the passive and (especially ) the active voice dorninate not only western languages but also western philosophical thought. The middle voice which has almost no role in modern languages, though it can still be found in ancient Greek and Sanskrit ­ 'yields a different way of thinking that is marked by undergoing a movement rather than by either active assertion or passive reception' (Scott 1 99 0 : 1 9 ) . In the active voice, the action of the verb is carried out by a subject and usually refers to an other or others. In the passive voice, the verb itself 'acts on the subject', but (as almost all of our English teachers stressed) passive constructions can usually be rewrit­ ten in the active voice. For example, in the case of the sentence, 'the jewels are protected with a sophisticated alarm system', an instructor or editor (or computer prograrn) rnight suggest as an alternative, 'the museum curators protect the jewels with a sophisticated alarm sys­ tem. ' Critics of constructivism ask only for a similar change in response to the sentence, 'the subject is constructed', but however simple the request, it is still misplaced. I contend that the middle voice offers a richer and more fruitful way of conceptualizing the process of construction; constructivisrr1 is itself 'middle-voiced' . Scott argues that 'the middle voice is used when the subject is in some way specifically implicated in the result of the action but is neither the active subject nor the passive object of the action.,t 1

16

U nti mely Pol itics

Without making reference to the middle voice, many constructivists have recently argued that this formulation precisely captures the situation of the human subject within the process of construction . For example, There is no ontologically intact reflexivity to the subject which is then placed within a cultural context; that cultural context, as it were, is already there as the disarticulated process of that subject's production, one that is concealed by the frame that would situate a ready-made subject in an external web of cultural relations ...But to claim that the subject is constituted is not to claim that it is determined; on the contrary, the constituted character of the subject is the very precondition of its agency. (Butler 1995: 46)

In a sense then, the subject 'undergoes' agency without ever fully possessing it; agency is precisely that which is implicated in the process of construction. The metaphysical seduction of grammar seems to have prevented critics of constructivism from hearing such a response as an answer to their queries, but reconsidering construction through the terms of the middle voice provides a simple and also highly intelligible response to the set of criticisms I summarized in the first section above. By thinking of 'subjectivity as constructed' in terms of the middle voice (that is, not in the terms of the active or passive voices) one ends up with a tangible grasp on the process of construc­ tion while simultaneously specifying the actual dangers of the n1eta­ physical seduction of grammar ( something Butler and even Nietzsche often fail to do) . The grammar in which we norn1ally write and think (active and passive voices ) precludes a dear understanding of what is at stake in construction; that is to say, the 'ready-made subj ect', with which an analysis often starts, obscures the very conditions of its discursive production and reproduction. The subject always remains 'caught up' in language, never fully its possessor but never fully possessed by it. The middle voice - itself an element of grammar cannot free one from the metaphysical seduction of grammar, but it can help one to see a way out by capturing this extent to which the human subject is never simply subject nor object in the grammatical sense. 12 The AIO M o d el Does the above line of reasoning merely overlay a discussion of language on top of a fundamentally, and solely, political argument?

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17

To respond to this criticism requires one to see how a certain conception of language is itself constitutive of conceptions of politics. Language is thereby not merely a problem for politics but a problem of politics. This basic point goes back at least to Aristotle, but since his Politics rnany political theorists have implicitly presupposed the rela­ tion between language and political agency that he explicitly thema­ tizes. That is, the fact that a relation between language and politics is an explicit aspect of Aristotle's political theory provides conternporary readers with a rare glimpse of the implicit presuppositions of his translators/interpreters (that is, contemporary social and political theorists ) . 1 3 Aristotle's 'theory of the household' is well known. The polis, for Aristotle, is the natural conclusion in growth from the village and the farnily. Moreover, and most famously, he claims that 'man is by physis an animal intended to live in a polis' ( 1 95 8 : 5 ) . Or, in more commonly heard terms, man is a political animal; politics lies at the heart of what it means to be a human being and those creatures who fall outside of the polis (the proper realm of the political) can only be beasts or gods. Aristotle's crucial justification for his enormous claim about the nature of 'man' gets repeated somewhat less often, but it proves of utmost importance for my purposes. For Aristotle, the reason man must be taken as a political animal is 'evident', and he explains why in a passage that appears at line 1253a of the Politica ( 1 957). My concern in looking closely at the English translations of these passages lies not with what Aristotle 'meant to say', or what is in the text. Rather, I focus on what contemporary political theorists (explicitly or tacitly ) take from Aristotle. In looking at the translations of this passage I will simultaneously uncover a relation between language and politics that plays a dominant role in much current political theoriz­ ing. It is in this sense that one could suggest that many critics of constructivism are 'neo-Aristotelians ' : not because they are close followers of a theory of Aristotle's, but because they take up or simply presuppose a relation between language and politics that can be extracted from Aristotle's texts. 1 4 Ernest Barker, the rnost popular translator of Aristotle's Politics for use in teaching the history of political thought, translates the passage rather loosely. In Barker's text it reads as follows : Nature, according to our theory, makes nothing in vain; and man alone of the animals is furnished with the faculty of language.The mere making of sounds serves to indicate pleasure and pain, and is thus a faculty that

18

U ntimely Pol itics

belongs to animals in general ...But language serves to declare what is advantageous and what is the reverse. ( 1958: 6)

The more literal and classic translation, by Rackham, reads this way: For nature, as we declare, does nothing without purpose; and man alone of the animals possesses speech. The mere voice, it is true, can indicate pain and pleasure, and therefore is possessed by the other animals as well ... but speech is designed to indicate the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the right and the wrong; for it is the special property of man in distinction from other animals. ( 1944: line 1253a)

These translations characterize language as some quality of human beings (a 'faculty'), but also as something that people have and hold as a personal asset ( their 'property' ) . In these interpretations/transla­ tions, 1 5 then, Aristotle conceives of anthropos, the human animal, as the only being who 'possesses' the faculty of logos, reasoned speech. 'Man', for Aristotle ( or, at least for his translators), is that rational animal who holds the tool of language and can use it to distinguish between good and bad. 1 6 The idea o f the logos a s a property t o b e possessed turns language into an object, an entity that man comes to hold on to, thereby marking him as distinct from those other animals that can merely make sounds. In possessing this tool of language, man becomes the only properly political animal. Aristotle understands politics as an active engagement in the life of the polis that centers on the citizens' functions of deliberation and j udgement. Thus, politics for Aristotle is a matter of action (praxis) resting on phronesis as a practical form of knowledge directed toward the particulars in the world. For citizens to fulfill their functions - their telos as members of a polis - of j udgement and deliberation they need the tool of language; 1 7 only language can make j udgement and deliberation, indeed politics, possible. The very nature of the political thereby comes to rest upon a certain conception of language, because the political nature of Aristotle's citizens would prove unrealizable without language - the properly political faculty of man as a properly political animal. This received view of Aristotle provides its readers with a clear and concise formulation of the complex relation between language, the subject ( 'man'), and politics: man possesses language as a tool for engagement in politics. I propose that those who reject radical con­ structivism on the grounds of its political liabilities do so by silently presupposing a conception of language ( and its relation to politics and agency) similar to this one. They assume that language can be taken as

La n g u a g e a nd the ' B u rd e n ' of Pol itics

19

an obj ect - an object graspable, possessable, and usually controllable by human subjects. Numerous contemporary writers whose theories often diverge wildly in rnany other respects tend to share this approach to language as an obj ect. These writers do not usually focus on questions of language, so they rarely, if ever, try to theorize language as an obj ect like a book, a ball, or any other. Nevertheless, they still tend to treat language in j ust this way, focusing, sometimes only tacitly, on its use or function for human subjects. For the purposes of analytic clarity, and for lack of a better term, I will refer to this 'neo­ Aristotelian' understanding of the relation between language and the subj ect as the as-if-objectified model of language, or AIO for short. Few theorists intentionally attempt to develop this model, but, as I will show, numerous authors implicitly rely upon it when they assume that language can or should be put to a certain use. To reiterate: my concern lies not with the validity or tenability of this specific interpretation of Aristotle, and I have little interest in Aristotle's own intentions. What does concern me here is the way in which this, of all possible interpretations of Aristotle, plays a tacit role in criticisms of constructivism. These translations/interpretations of Aristotle prove significant because they can help to illuminate the AIO model of language - a model that, by definition, usually remains in the dark. But, even when shrouded in darkness, the AIO model provides criticisms of constructivism with critical leverage. If one takes lan­ guage to be a capacity or faculty - in short, an obj ect - that human beings possess and use for their own purposes, then one will neces­ sarily find the accounts of most radical constructivists wholly lacking since radical constructivists conduct their studies of language and discourse without describing the possessor of this language, or the user of it ( see, for example, Derrida 1 9 82 : 3 20 ) . The logic that rejects such studies proves straightforward: if language is a faculty possessed by human beings, then any account of language must include a direct discussion of the subjects who utilize that language. In short, the metaphysical seduction of language which tempts one to ask after the subject who is out there doing the constructing remains inextricably intertwined with a conception of language as an ownable and utiliz­ able object. 1 8 While its presence often proves less obvious, one can see appro­ priations of this model in contemporary thought. For example, in speech act theory, as Austin famously claimed in the title of his work, we, as human beings, do things with words ( 1 962; cf. Searle 1 969 ) . Speech, according t o Austin and certain writers who appropriate his

20

U nti m ely Pol itics

understanding, 19 is like action because we can use it to serve various human (often political) purposes. In speech act theory, language becomes an instrument for action. As Austin puts it: 'when we perform a locutionary act, we use speech' ( 1 962 : 9 9 ) . Thus, in saying 'the sidewalk is icy', not only do I provide a description (locution), I also act by warning you ( illocutionary force), and that action can have certain real (perlocutionary ) effects you rnight walk on the grass instead. As with the translation/interpretation of Aristotle articulated above, contemporary speech act theorists conceptualize a very specific and consequential relationship between language and politics. This understanding appears in the most unexpected of places. Even among those twentieth-century philosophers who hold anything but commonplace views, one can still see traces of the AIO model. For example, and despite some uncharitable critical interpretations to the contrary, Habermas holds an explicitly anti-instrumentalist and post­ positivist conception of human rationality, and his project valiantly seeks to treat all human subjects as ends rather than means. None­ theless, Habermas may well subscribe to the AIO model of language, for while he does not attempt to take language explicitly as an object, he continually and consistently presupposes that language is nothing more than that - something to be put to use by political actors in their search for consensus. In his theory of communicative action, inter­ locutors use language as a tool for the coordination of their action. Habermas's theory attempts to prove that 'the idea of coming to a rationally motivated mutual understanding is to be found in the very structure of language' ( 1 9 8 4 : 9 6 ) . Habermas goes so far as t o s a y that, i n coordinating their action comrnunicatively, individuals are able to 'master' the structure of language from within it. Language for Habermas plays a crucial role for politics, but it always does so in such a way as to serve the needs of political actors : 'language is thereby introduced as a mechanism for coordinating action' ( 1 9 84 : 94, emphasis added ) . Habermas's theory remains wedded to the AIO model, for, despite his rather sophisticated understanding of hurnan rationality, the fact remains that human beings in his theory both possess speech and use it as the fundamental instrument of politics 'communicative action presupposes language as the rnedium for a kind of reaching understanding' ( 1 9 8 4 : 9 8 ) . The example of Habermas can serve as a rej oinder to those who would wish to reject the AIO model out of hand, on the grounds that its very construction creates only straw figures to be knocked down. As one of the last we would expect to subscribe to the model ( intentionally or

La ng uage a n d the ' B u rden ' of Pol itics

21

not) , Habermas shows j ust how ubiquitous this conception really is ( see Flynn 1 992 ) . Even rnore startling might b e the case o f Ludwig Wittgenstein, a philosopher who, in rejecting any sirr1ple correspondence theory of language, provides his readers with the crucial insight that language is more than communication. Wittgenstein dismisses as mostly senseless the notion that language 'signifies', and he insists on the richer and more productive understanding of language as a form of life. His demand to focus specifically on the form language takes in human life leads Wittgenstein to analyze language only in its use by human beings . But in turning to language use, Wittgenstein may well allow the AIO model back on the scene. 2 ° For Wittgenstein, the 'more' in 'more than communication' means that language, as a form of life, has more functions than merely that of communicating; we can do more things with language than simply convey inforrnation from one person to another (or various others ) . Despite the important strides that Wittgenstein's understanding of language takes away from a crude notion of correspondence between signifer and signified, his analysis still rests on the idea that language works like an object with certain capacities and purposes, and that humans use this language to achieve their own ends. Wittgenstein goes so far as to tell his own readers to think of language as 'tools in a tool-box' - 'there is a hammer, a screw driver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws ' - and goes on to clairn that 'the functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects' (Wittgenstein 1 9 5 8 : 6e; Wittgenstein 1 970: 1, quoted in Shapiro 1 9 8 1 : 47). 21 The AIO model proves so commonplace that it undergirds not only the most substantial criticisms of constructivisrr1, but also the more sophisticated philosophies of Habermas, Wittgenstein, and others . This i s not (yet) t o criticize this understanding o f language o r those who employ it, but the analysis does illuminate one absolutely crucial aspect of the debate: namely, its fundamentally political nature. As the discussion of Aristotle and now of rr1ore contemporary theorists rnakes clear, one's circumscription of the realm of politics remains bound up with one's understanding of the nature of language and its relation to the political agent. More concretely, one cannot define politics without also saying - or, at the least, assuming - what language is and how language is related to the subject. Criticisms of radical constructivism therefore hinge upon their own conception of language, but this very conception often remains tacitly presupposed and thereby shielded from critical questioning. If one

22

U nti mely Pol i tics

takes the relation between language and the subject to be an essentially political one, then it proves impossible to rej ect any conception of language as apolitical from the outset. In this way the criticisms - on political grounds of radical constructivism actually wind up resting upon issues of language. And finally, this account also helps to substantiate the point I suggested above: if we cannot simply assume a certain relation between language and the subj ect, then a reconcep­ tualization of that relation can no longer be presurned to lie outside of the realm of the political. Political Returns My discussion thus far has focused on the relation between language and the subject, but a third term has made a periodic, yet unexplained appearance - agency. The word agency, referring almost always to political agency, proves to be a rather common terrr1 in studies of politics, but rarely do theorists find it necessary to define the term. Usually, agency stands for the capacity for action, as opposed to action itself. Thus, in an idealized view of democracy each and every citizen would always be endowed with political agency - the ability to participate freely and actively in the political community - but not every citizen would take political action, not every citizen would need to. With respect to the debate over constructivism, it is just this sort of agency that critics of constructivism feel is taken away by constructi­ vist theories of politics. Saying that constructivism robs subjects of their agency is just the opposite side of the coin that accuses con­ structivisrn of social determinism. Hence critics of constructivism recapitulate long-standing arguments in the structure/agency debates by arguing that constructivism privileges structure (that is, determin­ isrn) over agency. A political theory of untirneliness will show that agency, as that capacity to take political action, turns out to be possible without a strong, grounded theory of the subject. Subjectivity often proves to be a philosophical concern, dealing with existential and ontological matters; agency, on the other hand, is mostly a political matter. The conceptual confusion arises because rr1odern thinkers have too often conflated the two thinking that there can be no political agency without a theory of subj ectivity. Moreover, modern thought typically conceives of agency itself within the terms of the AIO model: a ready­ made subj ect who possesses language (and any other faculties neces­ sary for political action) then consciously and willfully chooses to act

La nguage and the ' B u rden' of Pol itics

23

i n the political realm. A politics o f untimeliness not only recognizes but also insists upon the distinction between subjectivity and agency. Outside the confines of the AIO model, and when thought concretely and simply as the capacity for action, agency becomes a rnuch less loaded tenn. How to elucidate these untimely conceptions of agency ? How to demonstrate that they do, indeed, rnatter politically ? To answer these questions I look here at the act of 'coming out' .2 2 On the AIO model, the subject precedes language, and language is thereby the instrument of liberation. As one commentator, describing the e1nerging gay move1nent of the 1 9 70s, puts it: 'we were discovering . . . our identities' through a 'willingness to burst out of the closet and to come out in a public, uncompromising way' (D'Emilio 1 992: xiv, emphasis added) . Within this instrutnental view, declaring one's authentic identity as gay is a liberatory act that dernonstrates self­ acceptance and simultaneously demands recognition from others. Language functions as the instrument of this act of freedom, just as it serves as a tool to coordinate political action within the public sphere. That is, the self-expressive capacity made possible by the faculty of language that the gay person possesses serves as the instrument for this act of emancipation much in the same way as the faculty of language served as a human tool for deliberating and judging within Aristotelian terrns . Coming out constitutes the para­ digmatic act of political agency within the terms of a gay liberationist model in which the political goal of gay people diverges little from that of straight people: all seek full civil rights and equality under the law. However, this is by no rneans the only way to theorize the political agency involved in coming out. Indeed, David Halperin argues that coming out is precisely not an act of liberation. With great emphasis, he writes : 'coming out is an act of freedom:> then:> not in the sense of liberation but in the sense of resistance' ( 1 99 5 : 3 0 ) . His intriguing formulation begs the question, of course, of the difference between liberation and resistance. For Halperin, the difference relies on Foucault's understanding of power relations : coming out does not liberate one from Power but instead allows one to enter into a different set of power relations than before. I would argue that we can better elucidate this distinction by seeing, as I have described above, that under the terms of the AIO model, coming out is liberation, but under a thinking of language and agency that rejects the instrumentalist tenns of the AIO model, coming out is resistance. By taking the history of homosexuality seriously and thereby taking

24

U n ti mely Pol itics

into account the transformation of discursive practices within the nineteenth century that, in fact, produced the stable category of the 'hmnosexual' (Foucault 1 97 8 : 4 3 ; cf. Edelman 1 994), we can see why corning out could never offer liberation, but might well involve the political action of resistance. If language is not merely a tool for use by political agents, if language - through the sedimentary effects of history and the changes in discursive practices - helps to create the very category of the homosexual, then corning out can no longer be seen as an act of authentic expression of identity by an already gay political subject. If a gay man finds himself caught up within a linguistic construction that forces him either into or out of the closet, then he can no longer straightforwardly use language to express an identity that is somehow already there?3 Outside the AIO model, then, there is no simple liberation, since the 'out' homosexual still takes up the position of marginality. The gay person who 'comes out' still retains a certain proximity to the closet as that dark, alien, and specter-like place of the in- or non-human ­ that the unrnarked heterosexual never has to confront, except, of course, through the medium of paranoia. To be 'out' of the closet is still to be associated with an abject space that heterosexual culture constantly reconstitutes and from which it continually distances itself. This position of the gay subject with respect to the closet recalls the middle voice. The gay subject, whether he or she is 'in' or 'out' of the closet, is always a lready implicated in a relation to the closet and caught within the discursive practices that construct the closet, but the gay subject is never wholly determined by that discourse nor the master of it. Corning out is neither an active escape from the closet, nor a passive confinement to it - the subj ect 'in' the closet is middle-voiced. But to reject the idea that corning out offers liberation is not to reject corning out as an act of political agency. Corning out precisely illustrates the capacity for political action (that is, agency) outside the terms of the AIO rnodel. Here we can return to John D'Ernilio's commentary and include sections previously edited out: 'we were discovering, even inventing, our identities - especially as gay or lesbian political beings' ( 1 992: xiv, emphasis added) . Thus, on this account corning out no longer designates an authentic proclamation of an ontologically-grounded identity, and it cannot constitute a simple declaration of freedom. Yet it does signify a form of political resistance to the very sets of heterosexist discursive practices that continue to reconstitute the category of the homosexual as the marked and binary other to the unmarked and natural heterosexual: 'It itnplies that

La nguage a nd the ' B u rden' of Pol itics

25

categories of homosexual and heterosexual are not imrnutable, not fixed, not given' (xxii-xxiii ) . Coming out i s a matter o f political action precisely because i t offers resistance to the very categories of sexuality and gender; by exposing the historically and discursively contingent nature of those categories, coming out can also strive to make possible their future transforma­ tion. The fact that the gay subject always 'undergoes' a relation to the closet makes possible the resistance involved in coming out. Coming out does not liberate the political actor. Thus, under the terms of the AIO rnodel, there would be no political agency. Outside that model we see that the political agency involved in coming out centers precisely on resistance, on a certain questioning of the discursive categories that are taken to be natural. At root, coming out is therefore a rnatter of politicizing those very categories. In doing so it draws every individual (straight or gay ) into a certain connection with the closet, into a certain relation to the homo/heterosexual rnatrix, 24 thereby revealing the constructed and contested nature of the category of heterosexual as well a term that only arose in discourse after homosexual ( Edelman 1 994 ) . The significance of this 'example' lies in its ability to reveal a different thinking of political agency that results from a different starting point with respect to conceptions of language. 2 5 And this starting point is also a point of departure for moving toward a politics of untimeliness. L a n g u a g e , Temp o r a lity , P o litic s I n this chapter I have tried to relieve the political burden o n investiga­ tions into language by denaturalizing the AIO model. Of course, there is nothing particularly new or necessarily unique about challenging the field of political theory for the mainstream treatment of the relation between language and politics . Just over two decades ago Michael Shapiro ( 1 9 8 1 ) also urged a reconsideration of what he calls the relationship between language and political inquiry, by suggesting that the study of politics continues to rely (implicitly or explicitly ) upon outdated and incorrect correspondence models of language. Almost a decade ago, Anne Norton recognized the political burden of language analysis and chastised the field of political science for repeatedly, unnecessarily, and counterproductively adding to that burden: 'the recognition that . . . in speech we are always, already part of the political order . . . extends the reach of political thought and reveals new fields of political action and analysis. The repeated

26

U nti mely Pol i tics

dismissal of those who recognize the constitutive power of language as apolitical is therefore inappropriate, if not disingenuous' (Norton 1 993 : 1 60 ) . And in recent writings, the debate over constructivism has been entered by countless authors, many of whom I have cited here. No doubt these proj ects certainly run parallel to mine. They lend support to my project here, and I would hope that my work, in turn, can further their general efforts . Yet my undertaking never really intersects with theirs, because lifting the political burden proves to be but the first step in the project of working out a political theory of untimeliness. What, then, is the connection between theories of language and temporality ? I will begin to draw out these links in the next chapter, as I read Heidegger's quasi-concept of Ereignis, a notion intirnately connected to both a non-AIO thinking of language and an untimely approach to history . It will prove helpful at this juncture, however, both to point out the constitutive link between language and temporality, and to point to some of those writings in contemporary political theory that are already working with and gesturing toward an untirnely conception of politics. This chapter has made a number of seemingly 'deconstructive' moves: it has denaturalized the AIO model; it has shown that the conditions of possibility for the critique of constructivism (a pre­ supposed model of language/politics) are also always already their conditions of impossibility; thereby, it has undone the critique that would seek to separate language from politics. It is important to specify, then, both the affinities with and distance from so-called deconstruction. Here I would follow Arditi and Valentine rather closely. They write: we are not engaging in yet another argument that proposes that decon­ struction should be linked to politics.In our opinion, the link is already there and in this sense we take deconstruction for granted in that we aim to deepen its presence. At the same time, we are mindful of the way that deconstruction is taken for granted in practice - for example, through its reduction to something like a method of analysis or explanation, or a verb or adjective.In not dwelling on deconstruction we simply seek to establish some distance from its reduction to a commonplace or popular position. ( 1999: xi)

I, too, wish to distinguish deconstruction from a popular conception of critique, but I am most concerned with the translation of that popular conception into political theory. That is, the distance I wish to rnaintain and to broaden is that between the writings of Derrida (the

La ng uage a n d the ' B u rd e n ' of Pol itics

27

very notion of differance) and a certain 'application' of 'deconstruc­ tion' to politics. 26 IVlore important for rny proj ect is the fact that within this difference between dif(erance and the application of deconstruction we see mirrored the distinction between a timely and an untimely politics. While I will not attempt to develop an untimely theory in earnest until Chapter 3, looking at examples here of timely and untimely projects will prove very helpful in mapping out that future trajectory. William Connolly's writings have proved most effective in applying the in­ sights of deconstruction to the field of political theory, yet there is something about the directness of his application of deconstruction to politics that leaves me uneasy, because it resonates too closely with the sort of timely politics from which I wish to distance my own project. In contrast, I will look to the work of Diana Coole - who, in fact, distances herself from poststructuralism - as an example of a reading of differance that illuminates the space of untimeliness that I will seek to probe. Connolly argues that a serious investigation of the identity/differ­ ence relation must transform the field of political theory. Every identity, he argues, necessarily establishes itself in relation to some set of differences, and every identity in fact requires these differences to maintain its own existence. In short, 'identity requires difference in order to be, and it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty' ( 1 9 9 1 a : 64 ) . Given this identity/difference problematic, democracy must be reconfigured in order to create spaces in which difference can establish itself as ' alter-identity' . Such a transformation thereby creates 'agonistic democracy', which 'affirms the indispensability of identity to life, disturbs the dogmatization of identity, and folds care for the protean diversity of human life into the strife and interdependence of identity\difference' (x) . Connolly's analytic o f 'identity\difference' tries t o reveal the critical political purchase of rethinking what we have previously understood as identity, and quite clearly the broad and profound influence of his work has provided a significant contribution to political science (and the rnultiple subfields to which Connolly directly speaks ) . 2 7 But might something be lost in this direct translation of 'deconstruction' to the political realm ? First, the negotiation of identity and difference that Connolly details tends to mask the historical and linguistic produc­ tions of those very categories of identity with which Connolly works. Connolly states that 'my identity is what I am'; and, while he seeks to understand how that identity creates otherness, he does not inquire

28

U nti mely Politics

into the conditions of possibility of the 'I am' in the first place. What creates the categories that make the being of the 'I am' possible ? For Connolly, identity actively creates differences by seeking out its own self-security, but this analysis obscures the ways in which the rela­ tional categories of identity and difference are constituted apart from that subj ect who seeks his or her own identity. Thus, for example, while the native citizen may in fact create the differences of foreigners in order to establish his or her own certain identity, it may also be the case that a set of discursive practices creates and maintains the categories of 'citizen' and 'immigrant' apart from the intentional acts of native citizens. Second, and building on this first forfeiture, Connolly's analysis also tends to obscure the very relationality of identity and difference because he conceives of the relation as an always active negotiation. Connolly thus views identity as self-same and autonomous, and through the transfiguration of democracy he seeks to create spaces in which difference can also manifest itself as a self-sa1ne 'alter­ identity' . Yet this formulation can quickly reduce to a simple for­ mulation of liberal tolerance, in which the rnaj ority atternpts to secure free spaces for a rninority (Helminski and Steiner 1 9 9 8 ) . What this political logic excludes is an analysis of the Derridean notion of the 'constitutive outside' ( 1 9 8 2 ) , helpfully appropriated by Laclau and Mouffe to show that, within relations of identity/difference, identity itself is always already transformed ( 1 9 8 5 ) . Thus it is not, as Connolly would say, that 'rr1y identity is what I am', but rather that 'my identity is only ever that which I am becorning in relation to a field of differences' . Inquiry into the very relationality of identity/difference may expose the impossibility of any self-same identity, may reveal the production of the abject other within any discursive or intentional creation of identity. 'There can only be a "politics of identity" in so far as the political dimension is located within identity itself, which is to say the existence of an identity is in question' (Arditi and Valentine 1 999: 8 9 ) . In short, Connolly's democratic agonisrn of identity and alter-identity may only be possible within the hopes of a liberal individualisrr1 that Connolly himself eschews . Connolly's thinking of identity proves too timely, such that in applying deconstruction, the importance of language, of writing, of discursivity, seems to have evaporated. Within Derrida's 'differance' ­ that concept that is not a concept, that word that is not a word - one can witness both the intrinsic politics of writing and a radical thinking of temporality ( 1 9 82 ) . The graphic mark of the a proves central to

La ng uage a nd the ' B u rden' of Pol itics

29

dif{erance, since in the spoken French the a cannot be heard, that is, there is no difference between difference and differance. Derrida thereby attempts, temporarily, tentatively, to invert the classical privilege of speech over writing; in speech, differance is nothing it is beyond Being and cannot be recuperated by ontology. The meaning of differance can never be fixed, but it suggests two separate infinitives : to differ (spacings ) and to defer (tirnings ) ( 1 9 8 1b, 1 9 82 ) . The difference o f differance i s thereby always already a temporal difference; differance gestures toward the radical thinking of histori­ city - a thinking that always undoes teleology and progressivism - that I will explore in the chapters that follow. As Coole writes, 'there is no progressive, temporal succession' (2000: 77); and, as Derrida suggests elsewhere, diflerance disrupts presence and comes 'before the alter­ native of presence and absence' ( 1 97 8 : 292; also quoted in Coole ) . Through this reading, w e witness here, a s w e will again i n the next chapter, the condensation of alternative theories of language with a radical thinking of time: differance is the writing of untimeliness. Coole is no mere Derridean, yet I point toward her reading of differance so as to maintain that space between the untimely thinking of Derrida and the timely application of deconstruction. Coole's own work makes no attempt to 'apply' Derrida 's thought, yet it proves exernplary in working with an untimely thinking of the political. In her broader thesis Coole insists that a politically productive thinking of negativity requires a dialectical rendering. But this is not the absolute closure of a certain Hegelian teleology. Indeed, Coole's reading of the dialectic consistently relies on a certain untimeliness; a generative negativity without closure, and a dialectics with no end of history, both require untimeliness. Coole does not specify this un­ timeliness, but she hints at it without fail through her continual references to rhythm and tempo . This 'differential rhythm' generates a negativity more attuned to the 'tempo of politics' (2000: 23 0 ) . I would suggest that this is an untimely negativity, since its 'differential tempo' continually thwarts the progressive telos of a totalizing dia­ lectic (244 ) . This and other 'untimely' writing i n political theory (for example, Ranciere 1 9 9 8 ; Honig 200 1 ) clearly goes on outside the confines of the AIO model of language, since the reading of differance already requires a displacement of that model. For precisely this reason, the stakes for relieving the burden of politics placed on investigations into language prove so high for my project of moving toward a politics of untimeliness. Yet, having relieved the burden of politics, I cannot

30

U ntimely Pol itics

move directly to untitnely theory. I need first to explore one specific alternative to the AIO 1nodel through what Heidegger will call an 'experience' with language. From the murky waters of Heidegger's later writings on language, I hope to dredge a conception of language wholly at odds with the one uncovered in neo-Aristotelian critiques of constructivism. Heidegger aims his work on language directly at all philosophies of language that attempt to describe language as an object (and Heidegger too sees this theory of language in Aristotle's writings); he thereby offers one of the starkest counter-exarnples to the AIO 1nodel. Moreover, through the thought of Ereignis, Heidegger's later writings on language will help me to begin germinating the nascent concepts of untimeliness and historicity - notions that I will argue in later chapters prove absolutely essential both to understand­ ing conte1nporary politics and to building a politics of untimeliness. N ot e s 1 . I borrow some insights into the various lines o f critique against 'construction' fr01n Judith Butler's discussion of critics of con­ structivism ( 1 993 ). Butler carries out her detailed discussion of the constructivism debate without ever really telling her readers who the players are. Unlike Butler, I try to point out a number of these players in the debate as I go along, but her discussion reveals a fundarnental point for my argument: natnely, that the debate is also about unexa1nined preconceptions concerning language and its relationship to politics. 2. Here I paraphrase Nietzsche ( 1 994: 2 8 ) . 3 . That is, a 'subj ect' a s i n a sovereign individual who acts, a s well as a grammatical 'subject', an 'I' or 'we' placed in the subject position of a sentence. 4. One sees precisely this charge directed repeatedly at Michel Foucault with his emphasis on discursive practices rather than human subjects. For examples, see Fraser ( 1 9 8 1 , 1 9 8 3 , 1 9 8 5 ) and Visker ( 1 995 ) . My discussions in Chapters 4 and 5 will address these issues in much detail. David Halperin argues in his intro­ duction to Saint Foucault that the strongest critiques of social constructivism in the field of queer theory are rooted in the fear of this danger ( 1 995 ) . In this context see also Mohr ( 1 992) and Bersani ( 1 995 ) . 5 . This sentence might b e better translated as, 'there i s no "extra­ text" .' Derrida hitnself clarifies the sentence as, 'There is nothing

La nguage a nd the ' B u rden' of Pol itics

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

31

outside of context' ( 1 9 8 8 : 1 3 6 ) . For an elucidation of the 'general text' see Positions ( 1 9 8 1 b ) . Rodolphe Gasche provides an intri­ guing discussion of the rneaning of this sentence within the context of Derrida's work, and an interesting assessrnent of those critics who tear it from that context ( 1 9 8 6 : 278-9 3 ) . I point t o these 'effects' i n a n oblique, but nevertheless important, way; it proves quite common for those who reveal the 'problems of construction' to cite Derrida as evidence of these problems. That is, taking Derrida out of his own philosophical context often constitutes a simple way to 'substantiate' one's criticis1ns of deconstruction. Habermas takes up the idea of the general text as a favorite target for his critique of Derrida (Habermas 1 992: ch 7; see also Rorty 1 9 8 9 ) . For a summary o f this critique, a s directed against her own work, see Butler ( 1 995 ) . Butler calls this the 'Cartesian ghost' that w e have inherited through Sartrean existentialism. The legacy proves to be a parti­ cular burden for fe1ninists who have had it handed down by Sirnone de Beauvoir (Butler 1 9 8 7) . For one of the strongest criticisms of performativity, see Tyler ( 1 9 9 1 : 5 3-4 ) . For contin­ ued debate on this issue see also (Butler 1 99 1 ; Cohen 1 9 9 1 ; Edelman 1 99 1 ) . Beauvoir, a s i s well known, rnaintains a fairly rigorous and natural distinction between biological males and fe1nales; gender is the social construction of nature, but nature re1nains nature. Here is not the place to go into the differences between con­ structivist accounts that hold on to a conception of nature that precedes culture and constructivist accounts that conceptualize the nature/culture distinction as itself a product of social dis­ course. Butler, Foucault, and Derrida are cited as common exarnples of 'going too far'. For example, see Charles Taylor's essays on language and agency, in which Derrida - whose texts are never read or discussed by Taylor frequently rnarks the li1nit that a discussion of politics and language should not reach. Taylor repeatedly echoes the trope that Derrida (along with others ) h a s 'crossed the line' ( 1 9 8 5 a ) . For example: 'Pacati i n the active voice o f Sanskrit means " (the cook) cooks ( something) for another. " Pacate in the middle voice means " (the cook) cooks for himself" ' (Scott 1 990: 1 9 ) . Therefore, I a m trying to d o more here than merely complexify

32

13. 14.

15.

16. 1 7.

18.

19.

U nti m ely Pol itics

the very grammar by which we are always seduced. The answer to the relationship between the subject and language lies not in a more sophisticated grammatical vocabulary, but in trying to think past the relationship that our ordinary gratnmar would suggest. The middle voice is but a first (albeit itnportant) step in this 'thinking past' . On this point, I owe a debt to Rebecca Brown. My thanks to John Zumbrunnen for help in formulating this important point. On a sirnilar distinction between ancient Greek sophists and contemporary neo-sophistic rhetoric, see Edward Schiappa ( 1 990 ) . Of course, I atn arguing that a t this point one need not distinguish between the translation of Aristotle's text by these translators and the interpretive appropriation of a certain relation between language and politics by a number of contemporary political theorists . The translation enables the interpretation, but the interpretation may also influence the translation. The hermeneu­ tic circle turns. In the end, a certain conception of language and politics emerges, and this conception re1nains my point of con­ cern. Hannah Arendt puts it even more succinctly: 'speech is what makes man a political being' ( 1 95 8 : 3 ) . Neither of the translations I cite uses the word 'tool', but I want to argue that this is j ust how language is thought of by certain contetnporary theorists who owe a debt of sorts to this Aristo­ telian conception. This argument already makes it possible to suggest that if one can think language without making it into a property to be owned and used, then the 'way out' of the metaphysical seduction of language may lie in reconceptualizing language itself. The various appropriations of Austin's initial insights have been diverse, to say the least. Sorne recent readings of Austin within contemporary social and political theory have atten1pted to develop a conception of perfonnativity that leads to a decentering of the subj ect. By etnphasizing the conventionality of all linguistic contexts, political theorists such as Butler and Honig articulate an understanding of action that occurs in the doing itself and not in the being of the subject - thereby displacing the subj ect into the contexts in which he or she may act. Putting Austin to these uses 1night make rny reading of speech act theory seem excessively narrow. This path, however, is not the only one that can develop

La nguage a nd the ' B u rden' of Pol itics

33

out o f Austin's work. More significantly, I find it important to stress that Austin's own arguments in his famous lectures on perforrnativity strive not to decenter the subject but to recenter and situate that subject within those contexts in which perfor­ rnativity is possible. Austin's text insists on locating perforrna­ tivity within what he calls 'the appropriate circumstances' ( 1 3 ) . If anything, Austin not only centers but also anchors the subject within the domain of intentionality, since for Austin all perfor­ Inative speech acts 1nust be traced back to the intention of the speaking or writing subject. Austin argues that a speech act cannot really count as proper without this intentionality : 'where . . . the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain thoughts, feelings, or intentions . . . then a person parti­ cipating in and so invoking the procedure must in f'a ct have those thoughts, feelings, or intentions' ( 3 8 , emphasis added) . Austin stresses that perforrnativity will be void if not spoken by the proper individual. The speech act is not enough to guarantee perfonnativity, and thus the doing cannot make it so without the validation of a being behind the doing. Austin is no Nietzschean. For developn1ents in Austin's theory which tend to remain faithful to this account of intentionality, see Skinner ( 1 9 8 8 ) . For devel­ opments that depart, sorneti1nes radically, from this model of intentionality see Davidson ( 1 9 84) and Martin ( 1 992). Finally, for appropriations of speech act theory used to decenter the subject, see Honig ( 1 9 9 3 ) , who ad1nittedly relies on Derrida 's deconstructive reading of Austin's text. This likely explains how on her reading Austin can contribute to a very Nietzschean project (Derrida 1 9 82 ) . The most radical approach to Austin that I know of, also influenced by Derrida, is found in Butler ( 1 997b ) . 2 0 . However, o n this point, see Michael Shapiro's rather radical rereading of 'use' in the work of the ordinary-language philoso­ phers ( 1 9 8 1 ) . 2 1 . Given my point o f departure concerning the question o f 'con­ struction', it can be taken as either ironic or serendipitous that Wittgenstein begins his Philosophical Investigations ( 1 95 8 ) by hypothesizing a simple language composed of only the few words necessary for use by carpenters in building a house. 22. D'Ernilio contends that 'it was the radicals of the Stonewall era who molded for the rest of us "corning out" ' - thereby politiciz-­ ing the act in a crucial way ( 1 992: xxviii) . Of course, 'the act of

34

23 . 24 .

25 .

26.

27.

U nti mely Pol itics

coming out' can still be a matter of accepting one's sexuality and sharing it either with other gay men and lesbians or with family and friends. For numerous examples of such acts see the anon­ yrnous letters in Eichberg ( 1 99 0 ) . My emphasis, however, will necessarily remain confined to the (post-Stonewall) possible rr1eanings of coining out as a political act, and the discussion in the text below therefore attempts to specify and contrast two different rr1eanings of coming out in this sense. For a very different argument against onto logically grounding sexual identity, see Derrida ( 1 9 8 3 ) . This point can b e exemplified just b y analyzing the way i n which 'the closet' has been appropriated by 'rnainstream' culture, so that one can be, for example, a 'closet Knicks fan'. Sedgwick argues that this is not simply a matter of separating the phrase from its gay origins, but of revealing the deep-rooted connections between western culture and the 'historical specificity of homosocial! h01nosexual definitions' ( 1 990: 72 ) . As Gregory Weight puts the connection, the person is 'not only a Knicks fan, but also a fag' ( 1 997: 7) . Upon these two different accounts of coming out as political agency one can also illustrate the important distinctions between 'gay' and 'queer' as they have been elaborated in (some) queer theory. 'Unlike gay identity, which, though deliberately pro­ claimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in the positive fact of h01nosexual obj ect-choice, queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality' (Halperin 1 9 9 5 : 62 ) . Derrida would argue that the latter thinking would rej ect the former proj ect outright: as Arditi and Valentine insist, 'the link is already there'. Connolly's efforts to theorize this agonistic forrn of democracy have taken him into the works of Foucault, through the field of democratic theory, up against the legacy of Augustinianism, and even into the fray of international relations theory ( 1 9 8 5 ; 1 99 1 b; 1 993a; 1 995b; see also Honig 1 993; Simons 1 995 ) .

C ha pter 2

Experiencing Lang u age, Broaching U ntim el iness

Positive appropriations 1 of Heidegger's philosophy in the field of political theory have tended to focus on a small number of particular ideas in his work that appear most relevant for politics . First, Hei­ degger's early quarrel with Descartes seems to offer a critique of subjectivity - a challenge to the modernist conception of man as standing apart fr01n, and then 1nastering, nature through the use of instrumental rationality. Heidegger's Being-in-the-world challenges Descartes' cogito ergo sum on the most basic of levels. In addition, some of Heidegger's later works question the role of modern technol­ ogy, exploring the relation between modern subj ects and the tools we wield - clearly a line of analysis still relevant for political theory today (see Villa 1 996) . The problem with these C01n1non political themes in Heidegger's work proves twofold. On the one hand, both of these positive political elements in Heidegger's writings have nasty undersides: Heidegger's critique of 'das Man' and 'the they' often seerr1s horribly elitist and anti-democratic, while his challenge to modern technology fails to offer any leverage for critique given that Heidegger dared to compare gas cha1nbers to combines. On the other hand, both of these the1nes for which Heidegger is co1nmonly known in political theory have been developed at much greater length - and without nearly so 1nuch negative baggage by the Frankfurt school Critical Theorists . If one wants resources for thinking about modern technology in the twentieth century, why turn to the few pages that Heidegger wrote when one has a wealth of writings fro1n Horkhei1ner, Adorno, and Marcuse (not to mention Weber and Marx) ? I turn to Heidegger in search of a c01npletely different sort of resource: namely, a different way to think about the relation between language and the subj ect. As the arguments from Chapter 1 should

36

U nti mely Pol itics

already make clear, this resource proves more difficult to locate in political theory. This chapter will suggest that one can find an alternative thinking of language in Heidegger's writing, and it will begin the arduous task of mining that resource. The payoff for this process will come in subsequent chapters, which use Heidegger's understanding of language to develop a political theory of untimeli­ ness. The possibility of untimely politics depends upon the exploration here of an alternative to the AIO model. Heidegger's understanding of language centers on what he calls an 'experience with language' . To think language nontnetaphysically means encountering or experiencing language, rather than 1nodeling language as a tool for human use. Heidegger refuses to develop such a 1nodel that would explain language; he rejects the request to tell his readers what language is. What Heidegger calls a nonmetaphysical thinking of language, I would prefer to think of as an alternative to the AIO tnodel of the relation between language and the subj ect described in the preceding chapter. Throughout this chapter I will take Heidegger's own terminology quite seriously, trying to show what it means for Heidegger to describe language as nonmetaphysical. But while I will insist that it is important to grapple with Heidegger's terminology, I see no reason to rnake it my own. The history of tnetaphysics was of utrnost concern to Heidegger, and to get at his understanding of language one needs to see how and why . But it is that alternative understanding of language - particularly in what it might have to offer to theories of politics ( in how it might enable a politics of untimeliness) - that will remain rny concern. Following the recom­ mendation that Heidegger makes, in his better mornents at least, I will try to leave metaphysics to itself. Heidegger provides a way into language that avoids the AIO rnodel because he consistently resists the tendency to take language as an object fit for human appropriation. Language, on the contrary, might be j ust that which cannot be reducible to Being. Language is 'beyond Being'. In conceiving of language in this way Heidegger works to exceed the clutches of a tnetaphysical conception that would take language as an object of knowledge. And by articulating what he wants to think of as a 'nonmetaphysical' conception of language, Heidegger sin1ultaneously develops a rich resource for reconsidering the relation between language and politics outside the terms of the AIO model.

Experi encing La ng uage, B roach i ng U nti mel i ness

37

The E n d of Metaphy s i c s ? By his own account, Heidegger writes at 'the end of metaphysics' . Some writers have taken this phrase t o mean that w e are now simply beyond rnetaphysics, that metaphysics is over and done with. On this view, metaphysics, like a movie, would have ended, and now some­ thing else shall begin. Or worse: meta physics, like a fashion, would be not only over but also out of style. Reading 'the end of metaphysics' in this vein informs those cavalier repudiations of all works in philoso­ phy that might be seen as not in step with the times . However, Heidegger's writings on the end of metaphysics have little if anything to do with suggestions such as these. For Heidegger, the end of metaphysics marks primarily a concern with, rather than a dismissal of, metaphysics. More importantly, 'the end of metaphysics brings the very sense of end - hence, its own sense - into question' (Sallis 1 995 : 1 7) . In claiming to write at the end of metaphysics Heidegger situates his work in the context of so many other authors who have taken metaphysics' end seriously; he does not, however, proclaim that metaphysics has stopped. Heidegger's references to the end of meta­ physics serve not to announce a termination but rather to contextua­ lize Heidegger's own thought. And this means that, for Heidegger, the 'end' of metaphysics does not rnake his own work nonmetaphysical by default. Rather, by placing his writings within the context of the end of metaphysics, Heidegger puts a greater weight upon the task of thinking ( 1 972 ) . Seen from Heidegger's location within the history o f Continental thought, it would seem that metaphysics has been ending for hundreds of years ( Sallis 1 995; cf. Bataille 1 9 8 5 ) . Kant may have been the first modern philosopher to announce - and, in his case, project the end of metaphysics as its completion. Metaphysics will end, according to Kant, not because it ceases to be, but because the project of rnetaphysics shall be completed through critique. Kant writes: 'metaphysics . . . will attain, and this in a short time, such completion as will leave no task to our successors' ( 1 96 5 : A xx) . Kant believes that the end of metaphysics as a philosophical endeavor will restore it to its proper place above the rest of the sciences, and he feels quite certain that his work accomplishes such completion (A xiii ) . Hegel, too, takes the end o f meta physics t o be its completion and he sets himself the task of carrying out this project - which, for Hegel (and despite Kant's proud claims to the contrary), remains unfinished. Hegel goes further, marking the very end of history : 'what 1nakes

38

U nti mely Pol itics

Hegel's grasp of the ending more profound is his awareness that the end cannot be extrinsic to the history that it cmnpletes . . . With Hegel, metaphysics would come to its end in the sense that its history would be gathered into the full actuality of spirit' (Sallis 1 995: 2 0 ) . The world--historical march of Geist completes rnetaphysics b y com­ pleting its history. While Kant tries to place metaphysics in its rightful place above the rest of the sciences, Hegel heightens the culminating moment of metaphysics, reaching its zenith with the Gennany of Hegel's day. In response to the difficulty of outdoing Hegel, Nietzsche announces (rather than projects ) the end of meta physics as its termination. Yet even this termination proves to be no simple matter: Nietzsche's writings consistently refuse to make the end of metaphysics either basic or uncomplicated. Instead, his work renders this ending both complicated and problematic at alrnost every turn? It is tempting to try to summarize Nietzsche's impact on philosophy with just those three little words, ' God is dead' - hence the termination of metaphy­ sics - but one cannot forget that for Nietzsche the death of God is a cmnplex affair. Rather than comfort, the end of rnetaphysics offers a whole new host of chores. In The Gay Science Nietzsche elaborates on these 'new struggles' : 'God is dead; but given the ways of rnen, there will perhaps be caves for millennia to cmne, in which his shadow will be shown. - And we - we still have to overcome his shadow too' ( 1 92 1 : 147, my translation; quoted in Sallis 1 995: 1 9 ) . Nietzsche, unlike Hegel, does not wish to cornplete the rnetaphysical project. But even Nietzsche's call for the tennination of metaphysics remains intimately related to rnetaphysics to the extent that a Nietzschean free spirit must continue, possibly 'for thousands of years', to fight against the long shadows cast by rnetaphysics . With Heidegger, one might say metaphysics continues to end. Heidegger is at pains to challenge any simple or singular under­ standing of end. End should not be thought as 'as a rnere stopping', much less as 'decline and irnpotence' ( 1 972: 5 6 ) . Heidegger appears to accept the notion of metaphysics' completion within German Ideal­ ism, but he rej ects the idea that the end of metaphysics marks its completion in the form of a classical telos . As Sallis puts it, 'it is not a rnatter of metaphysics' corning to an end in which its highest perfec­ tion would be attained. Its end is not the locus, the place, of its perfection but rather the place of a radically different kind of gather­ ing' ( 1 995 : 2 1 ) . Heidegger gives to the end of metaphysics the sense of this gathering.

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After Nietzsche, Heidegger is forced to reconceptualize what it will mean for metaphysics to end, so he refuses to think of end in any sort of linear sense of time. End is not an end point for Heidegger, not a telos . This notion of end gestures toward untimeliness. Heidegger writes in his own lecture on the end of philosophy: 'the end of philosophy is the place, that place in which the whole of philosophy's history is gathered into its most extreme possibility. End as completion means this gathering' ( 1 972: 5 7 ) . The sense of gathering that Heidegger wants here to attribute to end takes on the connotations of the death of Dasein in Being and Time. Heidegger calls death Dasein's 'ownrnost potentiality-for-being' ( 1 9 62 : 294 ) . Or, as Sallis paraphrases, death is 'Dasein's extreme possibility' ( 1 995: 22) . Death marks a limit that can never be sirnply transgressed; it is 'a possibility that withdraws all possibilities' . The end of rr1etaphysics is the gather­ ing of metaphysics into its own extreme possibility - an untimely end in that it cannot be fixed or located at any particular point in time (cf. Derrida 1 993 ) . Heidegger insists that h e writes a t the end of metaphysics because metaphysics' possibilities have been both exhausted and raised to their extreme by those writers who precede Heidegger himself. Metaphysics is not terminated or completed at its end, but gathered into this extreme-1nost possibility. Within this gathering, Heidegger attempts to delineate a nonmetaphysical conception of language. He does so not with a disregard for metaphysics or with the assumption that metaphysics has ended. Just the opposite: Heidegger, like Nietzsche, remains acutely aware that metaphysics at its end remains in some cases very much intact. Heidegger stresses this point in his lectures on Nietzsche, where he argues that in the future people will still live and think metaphysically ( 1 9 8 7: 1 4 8 ; partially quoted in Sallis 1 995: 23, and Flynn 1 992: 4). But the end means that 'the essential possibilities of rnetaphysics are exhausted' (Heidegger 1 9 8 7: 1 4 8 ) . Heidegger makes his case concerning the history o f metaphysics on the basis of historical claims, arguing that we remain 'above' neither history nor metaphysics ( 1 9 8 7: 1 49 ) . Placing Heidegger's arguments within the context of the recent history of Continental philosophy goes a long way toward showing why Heidegger wishes to character­ ize his conception of language as nonmetaphysical. However, before one can say how this is so, one will need to engage in a detailed reading of Heidegger's later writings in order to elucidate the ramifications of his thinking of language for politics and political theory, particularly as I reconceive therr1 as untimely endeavors.

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C ategori e s and S chemati c s : F o r e s t alling an Exp erience with L a n g u a g e 'The three lectures that follow bear the title "The Nature of Lan­ guage." They are intended to bring us face to face with the possibility of undergoing an experience with language' (Heidegger 1 97 1 b : 57) . The claim defended here is at once simple and complex: to grasp the import of Heidegger's thinking of language one needs only to rnake sense of what it rneans to undergo an 'experience with language'. And yet, 'bringing us before the possibility of an experience with language is not a matter of making things more concrete or more sensible' (Fynsk 1 99 6 : 6 5 ) . Understanding an 'experience with language' first requires placing these writings within the context of Heidegger's earlier departure from the analytic of Dasein and the project of fundamental ontology explicated in his most important work, Being and Time. Only then can one begin to consider Heidegger's critique of the metaphysical logic of identity, his thinking of relationality, and, most importantly, the event of appropriation, Ereignis. Once this background work has been carried out, a close reading of Heidegger's writings on language will throw 1nuch light on undergoing 'an experience with language'. Political theorists, however, have not even begun to do this work. Instead, most approach these dense writings on language by way of a shortcut. They begin not with a reading of Heidegger, but instead with a general framework or schematic for 'theories of language', only secondarily (and hastily) inserting Heidegger into one of these pre­ fabricated categories - a round peg in a square hole indeed. Richard Rorty's work offers an interesting example: his thoughts on Heidegger appear in a volume titled Essays on Heidegger and Others, which is ironic since they rarely address what Heidegger actually wrote ( 1 99 1 ) . Instead, Rorty seems content to read Heidegger only for what a pragmatist can get out of him (Spinosa 1 992: 270; cf. Rorty 1 99 1 : 2 7) - perhaps not a n illegitimate reading, but also not a helpful one in terms of approaching Heidegger's understanding of language. Rorty already has a cornplete model of language provided him by pragma­ tism, and his neo-pragmatist 1nodel of language is directly at odds with the conception of language that Heidegger seeks to articulate in his later writings. Indeed, Rorty's model rr1akes precisely the rnove diagnosed in Chapter 1 - of separating out the literary and the political when conceptualizing language. In short, Rorty does not 1nerely fall back upon the AIO rr1odel in a tacit way; because of his

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commitment to pragmatism, he goes so far as to instrumentalize language explicitly while simultaneously dismissing Heidegger's own thoughts on language as apolitical. Given their so-called tnystical fixation on the depths of Being and Language, Heidegger's writings on language can only be considered poetry, not politics, according to Rorty. A curious and intriguing symmetry develops between the accounts of language given by Heidegger and Rorty, for each author will see the other as trapped in the clutches of metaphysics . Rorty believes that language is nothing more than a game we play: he rejects any correspondence theory that would have language somehow represent­ ing a reality, out there. Language, for Rorty, can be open to a variety of descriptions, but in general it provides 'a reservoir of surplus symbols available for artistic or pragmatic consumption' (Thiele 1 99 5 : 122 ) . Of course, the notion that human speech remains subject to use and manipulation by human subj ects concisely characterizes metaphysics, in Heidegger's view. On the other hand, any under­ standings that give language a depth beyond such manipulation would characterize metaphysics, in Rorty's view ( Caputo 1 9 8 5 : 257). The importance of this intersecting conflict lies not in a debate over which author has the 'correct' view of metaphysics. The point is rather to demonstrate that Rorty's pragmatism requires him to reject Heidegger's understanding of language, and in this case precludes him from even engaging with Heidegger's notion of an 'experience' with language. Rorty's neo-pragmatist model of language rests on a simple prin­ ciple: 'language is a set of tools' ( 1 99 1 : 3 ) . 3 Rorty insists that we not allow language to become anything more than this. set of instruments, things useful for human needs, wants, and actions. Only tnysticistn and the 'reification of language' would prevent one from seeing the obvious : that language is 'capable of being described in the same terms in which we describe tables, trees, and atoms' ( 4 ) . For Rorty, language is an instrument that helps people (pragmatists, at least) do things, nothing more. Thus, Heideggerian philosophy proves inc01npatible with the political concerns of a pragmatist, since Rorty will draw a distinct line between philosophy and poetry. Rorty argues that only the pragmatist gives a political answer to the question of how 'we should conceive of our relation to the Western philosophical tradi­ tion.' The Heideggerian answer is purely poetic (Rorty 1 99 1 : 9 ) . 4 Rorty develops a scherne to explain Heideggerian thinking on language that proves so simple it can easily be reduced to a

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three-part mathematical fonnula : ( 1 ) A ::: Late Wittgenstein = Early Heidegger, (2) B = Early Wittgenstein = Late Heidegger, and ( 3 ) A > B. 5 Both the early Heidegger and the late Wittgenstein had a pragmatist's appreciation for the finitude of hmnan existence, while the late Heidegger and the early Wittgenstein made the mistake of thinking that the essence or structure of language itself was something that could transcend our own existence in the world (Rorty 1 99 1 : 50-65 ) . Rorty fills out the contours of this schematization, and he lays great stress on the merits of the pragrnatist strand found within these twentieth-century philosophers. However, when it comes to the 'reification of language' claim, Rorty makes no argmnent. Rorty provides but one quotation frorn all of Heidegger's writings, taking it as evidence that Heidegger turned language into a 'quasi-divinity' in his later years. Clearly, if one begins having settled the issue of language in favor of an instrumental conception, and if one presumes from the beginning that Heidegger' s philosophy is poetic, not political, then it really does not make much sense to spend time poring over phrases such as 'language speaks' . Heidegger says that his writings on language are designed to prepare us to undergo an experience with language, but Rorty's neo-pragmatist categories preclude such a possibility. Rorty's work exemplifies an effort to categorize Heidegger's writings without necessarily reading them, yet he is no straw man. Even Charles Taylor seems to bypass Heidegger' s own writings on language by placing them within a category created by Taylor himself. Taylor's approach to Heidegger on language begins with two questionable moves. First, he assumes that Heidegger's later writings can be viewed as containing a 'philosophy of language' ( 1 992; reprinted in 1 995: 1 00-2 6 ) . This description appears rather ironic, given that throughout those writings Heidegger is at pains to reject all philosophy of language and to distinguish his project from such an approach ( for example, 1 97 1 b : 5 8 ) . This move proves telling, because i t displays Taylor's tendency to ignore Heidegger's own philosophical project. 6 Taylor states rather unabashedly that Heidegger's 'doctrine of language' - which has 'language speaking, rather than human beings' - j ust does not make much sense (Taylor 1 992: 248 ) . One can therefore only understand what Heidegger is up to by placing him within the 'expressive-constitutive' tradition of thought on language . The expressive-constitutive tradition must be counterposed to 'en­ frarning' theories ? Enframing 'theories of language treat language in much the same manner as Rorty and other neo-pragmatists: "on this

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view language is conceived as a n instrument" ' (24 8 ) . Expressive­ constitutive conceptions of language allow for precisely what enfram­ ing theories exclude: they characterize the very framework of human life as partially constituted by and through language (cf. Shapiro 1 9 8 1 ) . I leave aside Taylor's rich description of this tradition, focusing only on the fact that the expressive-constitutivist view of language - as it has been developed by Herder, Hurnboldt, and Taylor himself rejects the enframing conception that limits language's capacity to its uses by human beings. Instead, language opens up new horizons of meaning and action and makes possible the very association of human beings; language allows for the constitution of meaning and the expression of hurnan needs, wants, feelings, principles, 8 and desires. 9 Taylor's interpretation of Heidegger can now be boiled down to a sentence: 'Heidegger is a constitutive theorist' ( 1 992: 25 6 ) . Taylor wants to argue that Heidegger's claims about 'language speaking' are actually much more modest claims about the nature of expression than they would first appear. Thus, Taylor suggests that when it comes to the issue of the 'nature of expression' Heidegger lines up quite nicely with the Humboldtian view concerning expression. Heidegger's radicality, Taylor contends, lies in the issue of the physical space of expression, or the clearing. To make this argurnent, Taylor invokes Heidegger's understanding of the ontological difference: the difference between actual beings in the world (like people, trees, and stones) and Being, the very existence of those beings. This is the distinction between the ontic and the ontological that Heidegger develops and relies upon from the very beginning of Being and Time. Taylor would like to apply the ontological difference to Heidegger's thinking of language ( or expression, as Taylor has translated it) as the linchpin of his argument. Heidegger's understanding of the power of expression fits squarely into the expressive-constitutive tradition, but Heidegger, according to Taylor, insists that the space of expression ­ the clearing (Lichtung) - remain ontologically grounded, not ontically founded. The space of expression is a space of Being, not of individual beings . The problem with Taylor's interpretation is that while the Lichtung plays a key role in the analytic of Dasein articulated by Heidegger within Being and Time, it has no centrality to Heidegger's later writings on language. More significantly, by applying the ontological difference to Heidegger's later writings on language, Taylor misses the very point of Heidegger's abandoning the project of fundamental ontology . In turning away from fundamental ontology Heidegger

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seeks to think Being outside the ontological difference. 10 The central point of Heidegger's later writings is to continue considering the question of Being, but to do so without relying upon the difference between beings and Being - the ontological difference. Heidegger drops the ontological difference precisely as he tries to prepare his readers to 'undergo an experience with language' . 1 1 Ignoring this move entirely, Taylor imposes on Heidegger's later writings a framework from his early work. This earlier framework will not fit Heidegger's later thinking; 1nore importantly, Heidegger strives in those later works to 'twist free' from that very context (see Sallis 1 9 90 ) . In short, Heidegger's statement that 'language speaks' simply cannot be reduced to a 'de-onticized view of the clearing'. Not only are the two not sirr1ply equivalent, but Heidegger's watchword is an explicit attempt to 1nove past the philosophical thinking of Taylor's formulation. To grasp how and why this transition occurs will require one to look deeper into the writings in which claims such as 'language speaks' occur, and this Taylor does not do. In refusing to take Heidegger's later writings on language on their own terms - rather than the terms and framework Taylor constructs - Taylor (much like Rorty) forestalls the possibility of an experience with language. The irony of this 1nove resides in the fact that in preparing his readers to undergo an experience with language Heidegger would like to think he is partially escaping the confining categories of thought imposed by 1netaphysical conceptions. The readings provided by Rorty and Taylor only serve to snare Heidegger in a new set of categorical constructs. In the end, the idea of preparing to undergo an experience with language goes not only unclarified, but totally unmentioned. It is now time to leave these categories and frarr1eworks behind. O n th e W a y to An Exp eri e n c e With L an g u a g e

Identity and The San1e Reading Heidegger's texts on language requires a number of steps back, all intended to help grasp a few crucial ideas that Heidegger develops in works not directly addressing language. In 'The Principle of Identity' Heidegger attetnpts a reformulation of the logic of identity 'the first law of thought' ( 1 96 0 : 1 3 ) . The principle of identity can be succinctly stated in the formula A=A, but Heidegger argues that such a formula properly defines the principle of equality - not identity. The equation of equality constitutes a mere logical truis1n in which one A

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equals another A, but in identity A is A. More to the point, each A with respect to itself is the same. Already, Heidegger rather dramatically claims, we have moved from an empty concept to a statement about Being itself: 'To every Existent as such belongs identity, oneness with itself' ( 1 6 ) . Hence, within the common, 'metaphysical' view, identity issues from Being. Heidegger, however, sees the potential for more 'boundless scope' in the notion of identity, and to meditate on this potential he returns to ancient Greek conceptions of the Same. 12 This move is necessitated by the emptiness of merely calling identity a product of Being or by repeating that every A is with respect to itself the Same. In Parmenides, Heidegger finds a more direct attempt to think the Same in its own essence: 'the Same is, to wit, Perceiving (Thinking) as well as Being' ( 1 960: 1 7) . Heidegger finds this a puzzling attempt to convey the meaning of the Greek to aut6, but, importantly, he sees it as 'a puzzle we ought not try to circumvent' ( 1 7) . In thinking through this puzzle Heidegger believes we may arrive at a deeper understanding of the principle of identity itself. In a first attempt to articulate the saying in the Parmenides fragment Heidegger arrives at the following formula : 'Thinking and Being together belong to the Sarne, and together they stem fro1n the Same' ( 1 8 ) . Already one can see that the Parmenidean conception of the Sa1ne makes it irnpossible to rely on the metaphysical understanding of identity as founded on Being, because Parmenides's formulation refuses to reduce thinking to Being. Thinking and Being here both 'belong to' and 'stem from' the 'Same', so thinking is not simply coordinated to Being. Rather, there is a 'belonging-together' of the two ( 1 8 ; cf. Heidegger 1 992b ) . Heidegger suggests two ways to think about this belonging-together which constitutes the Same. In the first, one places emphasis on the togetherness, that is, belonging-together. This way of viewing the term relegates belonging to togetherness and hence to unity; it thereby accomplishes a coordination of one thing to another. A more radical way to view the relationship lies in thinking of the belonging-together of belonging-together. In this way belonging determines the togetherness . This difference is not a mere play upon words, because it relates more primordially to the expression of Parrnenides's saying. Thinking and Being belong to the Sa1ne; it is not a unity or coordination that determines the relationship, for the belonging itself plays the essential role. One might legitimately view the argument thus far as mere question--begging. What does Heidegger mean by Being ? Or, for that

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rnatter, what does he mean by rnan? Yet, for Heidegger, these questions can only obscure the matter because they irnmediately return us to the realm of metaphysics from which he is trying to twist free. One cannot start with rnan 1 3 or with Being and then coordinate one to the other, for man is the relationship to Being and nothing more: 'The distinct feature of Man consists in that he, as that thinking being which is receptive to Being, is confronted by Being, ren1ains oriented to Being and thus corresponds to Being. Man in reality is this reference to correspondence, and that is all he is ( 1 960: 21; cf. Heidegger 1 962: 32). The crux of Heidegger's argument proceeds as follows : rather than attempting to think rnan or Being and then their coordination (and hence arrive at an understanding of the Same), we must first realize that man and Being belong to the Sarne and are detennined by this relationship of belonging-together. If it is only possible to understand man and Being as belonging to the Same, one may still be tempted to ask how we can understand the relation of belonging-together itself. In this essay Heidegger only hints toward a way. 1 4 To enter into the relation we must first leave behind metaphysical notions. One must take what Heidegger calls the 'step back', by refusing rnerely to adopt traditional concepts and categories. This step - precisely the move that Heidegger's inter­ preters often refuse to take - 'is a bounding away from and a leaving behind of the familiar concept of Man as the animal rationale, the rational animal' ( 1 960: 2 3 ) . The step back abandons the Aristotelian conception of Man as a rational animal who possesses language. From this point, Heidegger then makes the briefest remarks about belonging-together as made possible by the event of appropriation - Ereignis: 1 5 Er-eignis is the internally oscillating realm through which Man and Being touch each other . . . by divesting themselves of these determinations which metaphysics imputed to them ...In metaphysical doctrine identity is presented as a basic character of Being.But now it turns out that Being belongs together with Thought into an identity whose essence derives from that causative belonging-together which we call Ereignis. The essence of identity is a property of Er-eignis. (2 8 )

Heidegger has now radically transformed the principle o f identity with which he began. On this reading, identity can no longer be reduced to an empty concept or issuance from Being. However, Heidegger has given only a partial and preliminary sketch of Ereignis, a term that proves crucial to elucidating this transformation. To help clarify this

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notion I now want to turn to one of Heidegger's much later works, 1 6 i n which h e develops more fully the idea o f Ereignis.

On Time and Being: Ereignis In On Time and Being ( 1 972 ) Heidegger seeks to move beyond the ontological difference by thinking Being without regard to any grounding in terms of beings . In this way, the title does mark the reversal of Being and Time in that the analytic of Dasein has been abandoned. However, such a reversal does not constitute a rejection of fundamental ontology; it is rather an atternpt to complete the project inaugurated by fundamental ontology . The ernphasis on Being re­ mains the same, but Heidegger now believes that the ontological difference, which had earlier made it possible to reawaken the ques­ tion of the meaning of Being, must now be left behind in order to inquire into Being rnore deeply. This move requires overturning the concepts of Being and Time, but without rejecting the fundamental project of that text. And to 'overturn' those concepts requires they be thought in a more originary manner - not merely rejected out of hand. 1 7 On Time and Being provides one effort at reconceptualizing the metaphysical concepts of time and Being in a nonmetaphysical way. What is Being ? What is time ? And how are they related? For Heidegger, the questions seerr1 rnisplaced, for their answers can only lead us to a metaphysical understanding of the terms . The metaphy­ sical answers may be briefly stated as follows. Time, since Aristotle, is conceived of as the succession of nows . Being is presencing, that is, what is present, is . Being is determined by presence in time. Moving beyond these fonnulations, however, requires one to question the questions . The first question asks what Being is, but is Being at all? My computer is, this printed paper is, but is Being ? Any search for Being will only be in vain, for 'nowhere arr1ong things do we find Being' ( 1 972: 3 ). To the extent that Being is, we can only say that it is in time. As for tirr1e, one can conceive of it as that in which things perish. Everything has its time; time and the temporal are that within which beings pass away . Yet, though time itself passes away, it does so constantly - time always remains as time . To remain would be to presence, and time would therefore be determined by a kind of Being. We thus arrive at a brief sketch of time, Being, and their relationship: 'Being is not a thing, thus nothing temporal, and yet it is determined by

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time as presence. Time is not a thing, thus nothing which is, and yet it remains constant in its passing away without being something temporal like the beings in ti1ne' ( 3 ) . Being and time are therefore the matters for discussion, but the argument thus far forces Heidegger to be cautious about declaring what they are. We cannot say Being or time is, rather we formulate the idea as 'there is Being, there is time'. 1 8 Es gibt (It gives) Being; es gibt (It gives) time. Much like the transition from identity to the Same, Heidegger has here only changed wording, but this transition makes it possible to think Being and tirne in their own 'essence', that is, to think Being without regard to beings. Heidegger will attempt to work out this task by meditating on the It that gives Being and the It that gives time. In 'It gives Being' we can hear Being as the gift of the It that gives. As such, this gift shows itself as what Heidegger calls 'letting-presence' : 'To let presence means: to unconceal, to bring into openness' ( 5 ) . Heidegger urges his readers to resist the metaphysical temptation to think of this letting-presence only as Being - that is, as presence itself. 'It gives' is the letting-presence that grants the gift of Being, but because the It that gives always withdraws in favor of its gift - Being western metaphysics always thinks Being with regard to beings rather than as a gift granted by the letting-presence of the It that gives. The history of Being is the sending or destining of the gift of Being: 'the history of Being means destiny of Being in whose sendings both the sending and the It which sends forth hold back with their self­ manifestation' ( 9 ) . Yet Heidegger still has not answered explicitly what the It is which gives Being. One might find time as the obvious answer to this question, and it is this possibility that leads Heidegger into a discussion of time, and of the It that gives time. In 'It gives time' we hear time also as a gift of the It that gives. In this case the giving is the 'nearing nearness' in which time extends itself and opens up tirne-space. The di1nensionality that Heidegger describes here serves as a precursor to untimeliness: 'dimensionality consists in a reaching out that opens up, in which futural approaching brings about what has been, what has been brings about futural approaching, and the reciprocal relation of both brings about the opening up of open­ ness' ( 1 4 ). The unity of this three-dimensionality of time consists in the interplay of each dimension toward the others, and this interplay constitutes the fourth dimension of true time as well as the It that gives time itself. 1 9 In giving the gift of time itself, true time withdraws and conceals in the very act of giving. Metaphysics concerns itself only

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with time as an uninterrupted series of now-points because it remains oblivious to the It that gives time. 'As extending is itself a giving, the giving of a giving is concealed in true time' ( 1 6 ) . The giving in 'It gives time' lies in the extending and opening of the dimensionality of time what Heidegger calls 'the four dimensional realm' . This discussion of the It that gives time may seem to have passed over the question of time as the It that gives Being. On the contrary, it has rnade an answer to this question possible, for as itself granted by a gift, time cannot be simply considered the giving of Being. As Heidegger puts it, 'The destiny in which It gives Being lies in the extending of time. Does this reference show tirr1e to be the "It" that gives Being ? By no means. For time itself remains the gift of an "It gives" whose giving preserves the realm in which presence is extended' ( 1 7) . Thus, after such a lengthy discussion of the giving of both time and Being, the puzzle of the 'It' that gives still rernains . Heidegger argues that the preceding discussion has shown, if anything, that the It that gives cannot be thought in isolation from the gift that it gives . To think the essence of the It we must think it in relation to the gift of time and Being. Here one should see striking similarities to the discussion of man and Being in 'The Principle of Identity' ( 1 9 6 0 ) . Heidegger says one must think the pair (whether it be man and Being or Being and time) in their relation if one wants to gain a greater understanding of their essence. Therefore, Heidegger's discussion of time and Being turns directly to the question of their relation - both to each other, and to the It that grants them as a gift. My preceding discussion of identity has already prefigured the answer to the question of the relation of time and Being. Heidegger makes the transition as follows: How else are we to bring the 'It' into view which we say when we say 'It gives Being', 'It gives time'? Simply by thinking the 'It' in the light of the kind of giving that belongs to it: giving as destiny, giving as an opening up which reaches out.Both belong together, inasmuch as the former, destiny, lies in the latter, extending opening up. ( 1972: 19, emphasis added)

With my emphasis on belong, one already sees Ereignis at work, so to speak: 'What determines both, time and Being, in their own, that is, in their belonging together, we shall call: Ereignis, the event of appro­ priation' ( 1 9 ) . The It that gives both Being and time in their relation of belonging-together turns out to be Ereignis?0 Yet, though this state­ ment strikes at the heart of the matter, it also obscures the matter in posing Ereignis as a being. We cannot ask what is Ereignis, for in

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doing so we ask for Ereignis in terms of Being. But Being itself belongs together with time to Ereignis. At his most frustrating moments Heidegger will say only the following about Ereignis: 'das Ereignis ereignit' (Appropriation appropriates) (24 ) . At other moments, Heidegger does open a way toward under­ standing Ereignis. While Ereignis cannot be understood as sorne general logical construct that subsumes Being and time, it must be understood in the way it makes both of them possible. In this way Heidegger again demonstrates his striving to twist free from meta­ physics - without, of course, overcoming or ignoring metaphysics . In the following passage, Heidegger argues that to take Ereignis as simply another species of Being is to misunderstand it. Ereignis does not constitute just a different way of thinking Being, for Being itself belongs to Ereignis: If we do what was attempted, and think Being in the sense of the presencing and allowing-to-presence that are there in destiny - which in turn lies in the extending of true time which opens and conceals - then Being belongs into Ereignis. Giving and its gift receive their determination from Ereignis. In that case, Being would be a species of Ereignis, and not the other way around. (21)

As belonging together within Ereignis, neither time nor Being can determine the other. Ereignis is the It that gives the gift of both time and Being, yet in the very act of giving it withdraws and conceals itself in favor of its gift. Therefore, Being itself 'belongs into Ereignis'. With this formulation, Heidegger has gone a great way toward a new (nonmetaphysical) conception of time and Being. To put it simply, he has elucidated and illuminated the 'matters' of tirr1e and Being without saying what they are, or even that they are, as a metaphysical account would have to do. Ereignis sets the stage for a new experience with language. But Ereignis - to anticipate my argument to come in the following chapters - also points toward untimeliness: the belonging-together of Being and time prevents precisely any timely determination of Being. In both disclosing Being and withdrawing in that very dis­ closure, Ereignis opens Being into a historicity that can never be determined or fixed by a linear time. The temporality of Being as determined by Ereignis consists in the mutual belonging-together of Being and time, a belonging-together that Heidegger insists can never be reduced to a coordination of Being to time ( or vice versa ) . The metaphysical coordination of Being to time, requires a linear concept

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of time, while the temporality of Being in Ereignis suggests a nonlinear untimeliness .

Language Speaks In his works on language Heidegger almost never fails to mention the 'conventional view', a view that will clearly fall within the broad outlines of the AIO model. Our first intuition about language is that it is an expression - an expression of rnan. Everywhere we look we encounter language and always as the result of some human activity ( 1 97 1 a : 1 92 ) . On this view, language exists as the external expression of something internal to human beings . This metaphysical view has flourished since its first articulation by Aristotle: 'Now, what (takes place) in the making of vocal sounds is a show of what there is in the soul in the way of passions, and "what is written is a show of the vocal sounds' ( 1 971 b: 1 14; quoting Aristotle 1 949 ). Language is always merely the mimesis of what is found in the soul. As such, language is always the faculty of human beings : 'Language manifests itself in speaking, as a phenomenon that occurs in man' ( 1 97 1 b : 9 6 ) . Speech is the activity of man man speaks, and he always speaks some language or languages ( 1 97 1 a: 1 92 ) . Heidegger suggests that this conventional conception of language can be found in Aris­ totle and the Greeks, but it is not merely an antiquated view: it finds its clearest expression in Humboldt's nineteenth-century writings . From this perspective language itself must be subordinate to the Being of beings. 2 1 That is to say, primordial human understanding of the world phenomenologically precedes man's use of language. Language is subordinate to Being, and is, in fact, almost derived from it. Within the view that Heidegger designates as metaphysical, then, we see language as secondary to Being and speech as a possession of man as the rational animal ( 1 9 77: 2 1 0 ) . It i s precisely the distance that Heidegger takes from the conven­ tional view, along with his rejection of the Aristotelian conception that I discussed in Chapter 1 , that makes Heidegger's thought a valuable asset for reconsidering the relation between language and politics; it also makes Taylor's reading untenable. 22 To reiterate, by forcing him into a tradition from which he wishes to depart, Taylor's approach to Heidegger only forestalls the possibility for which Heidegger would like to prepare his readers. Heidegger wants to show that once one accepts the conventional view of language, one makes possible a whole set of discourses about language. If language is relegated to

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the service of communication ( 1 977: 1 9 6 ) , then all sorts of information­ gathering proj ects about language become prorninent. That is to say, the philosophy of language is necessarily shot through completely with metaphysics. 23 In discussing the philosophical project of produ­ cing 'metalinguistics' Heidegger concludes: 'that sounds like meta­ physics - not only sounds like it, it is metaphysics' ( 1 97 1 b: 5 8 ) . Heidegger has n o intentions o f doing philosophy o f language, for to do so would be to accept the conventional/metaphysical view of language. Just as in the discussion of identity ( and the meditation on tirne and Being), Heidegger will attempt to move beyond meta­ physics - again, without completely rej ecting it. To do so, Heidegger's conception of language requires what I will call a ' doubling' of language. This doubling allows Heidegger to distance his conception from the conventional view while also pre­ venting the creation of a new metaphysical construct, subject to the same metaphysical questions of 'what is' discussed earlier. Heidegger will have to demonstrate a double movement of language - a transla­ tion of language into 'language' - in order to keep twisting free from metaphysics and to prepare his readers to undergo an experience with language. In contrast to the metaphysical conception of language, Heidegger will first boldly propose an inversion of the understanding of language as something that man has. 24 In the essay 'Language' Heidegger uses as a guide word the claim that 'Language Speaks'. It is not human beings that bring about language, but rather language that brings about rnan. Just as metaphysics always thought Being in relation to some beings, it also always tries to think language as the possession of man. But, in attempting to think language qua language, 2 5 Heidegger will come to the radical conclusion that language itself speaks. If we try to consider language itself we are forced down this path: 'we speak of language, but constantly seem to be speaking merely about lan­ guage, while in fact we are alrea dy letting language, from within language, speak to us, in language, of itself, saying its nature' ( 1 9 7 1 b : 8 5 ) . I n speaking, language brings m a n into his own Being - ' it i s language that first brings m a n about, brings him into existence' ( 1 9 7 1 a : 1 92 ) . Heidegger repeatedly quotes the final line from a Stefan George poem: 'where word breaks off no thing may be' ( 1 9 7 1 b ) . Only the word (language) can first make Being possible. Here we see an explicit reversal of the conventional view, and in it language becomes phenomenologically prior to any Being of beings . Yet what can it really mean to say that language speaks, other

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than a s a n empty poetic metaphor ? Some would wish to relegate Heidegger's thoughts on language to just that level. However, the background provided by my preceding discussion of time and Being as belonging together in the Same of Ereignis, allows for a more rigorous articulation of Heidegger's conception. To state the conclusion bluntly in the language of metaphysics that it resists, one would say the following: language is the It that gives Being and time. But, of course, one cannot say that language is . Therefore, one must hear the calling of language as the mode of Saying in Ereignis. Saying, for Heidegger, 'tneans to show, to let appear, to let be seen and heard [and] the essential being of language is Saying as Showing' ( 1 971 b: 1 22-3 ) . As a Saying-Showing, language can let be seen, can unconceal Being. This letting-be proves to be the granting of the gift of Being: 'Language, as Saying, is the mode of Ereignis' ( 1 3 5 ) . Through Ereignis language grants the gift of Being; thus, the way to language is Ereignis. Heidegger draws the crucial connection to Ereignis as follows: The moving force in Showing of Saying is Owning (Eigenen) . It is what brings all present and absent beings each into their own, from where they show themselves in what they are, and where they abide according to their kind.This owning which brings them there, and which moves Saying as Showing in its showing we call Ereignis. ( 1 27)

Ereignis 'operates', for lack of a better word, through the Saying­

Showing of language. Or, in less instrumental and more Heideggerian language, the happening of Ereignis occurs through the force of language. In this manner language - not man - speaks. Heidegger thus presents language as the It that gives Being. In the 'Letter on Humanism' Heidegger had already said this explicitly : 'In its essence language is not the utterance of an organism; nor is it the expression of a living thing. Language is the lighting-concealing advent of Being itself ( 1 977: 206, emphasis added) . At first glance, it seems quite simple: language speaks, and in so doing it brings about Being itself. The metaphysical conception of language has therefore been toppled. However, such a straightforward inversion of meta­ physical constructs only lands one back in the realm of metaphysics. Fran�oise Dastur makes the point as follows : 'such a reversal of the metaphysical viewpoint could only lead - as Heidegger himself points out in the Letter on Humanism with the example of Sartrean ex­ istentialism - to a new form of metaphysics and not at all to its destitution' ( 1 993 : 363 ) . If Heidegger only inverts the conventional view then he has merely provided a new ground, that is, the essence of

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language. Yet, as I will attempt to show, Heidegger's thought proves rnore cornplex than the simple notion that language speaks. Heidegger's way to language is certainly not the search for a new ground; this fact becomes clear when we focus on the movement of Ereignis rather than the guide word 'Language speaks' . In analyzing Ereignis Dastur argues that 'the way to language' can no longer be conceived as an ahistorical essence of language, but must be thought historically ( 3 64 ) . In granting the gift of Being Ereignis always with­ draws and conceals itself. As a happening-occurrence that appears and withdraws, Ereignis anticipates the ghosts of the next chapter: both are untimely events. This ghostly quality of Ereignis prevents it from ever functioning as a Inetaphysical ground, for Ereignis cannot exist as a ground - it cannot be reduced to a being that presences. We cannot ask for that ground as such, because we cannot ask what Ereignis is . Even Being itself becomes exposed to the 'happening of lighting' of Ereignis that draws Being and man into their own. The notion of Ereignis atternpts to rnove past all such metaphysical grounding. Most importantly, as the mode of Ereignis, language is that which grants the gift of 'language' . That is to say, through Ereignis there comes about a doubling of language itself (cf. Sallis 1 990: 1 9 5 ) . One language withdraws with Ereignis in favor of the gift that it gives. 'The peculiarity of language, accordingly, conceals itself in the way in which Saying allows those who listen to it to reach language' ( 1 97 1 b : 1 2 6 ) . But while this language withdraws and conceals itself with the It that gives, it sends its own gift and grants us a second 'language'. Our language (here without the quotes ) thus belongs together with Being as a response to language. Heidegger hints toward both of these points in the following passage: 'thus our saying - always an answering remains forever relational. Relation is thought of here in terms of das Ereignis, and no longer conceived in the form of a mere reference' ( 1 97 1 b: 1 3 5 ) . While language speaks it grants the gift of 'language' even as it withdraws and conceals itself in favor of this gift. When we speak, we are always responding to this gift: 'Language speaks. Man speaks in that he responds to language' ( 1 97 1 a : 2 1 0 ) . 'Language' belongs together with Being to the Same as the gift of language. There is, it gives Being; there is, it gives 'language'. Or, as Heidegger puts it: ' "There is the word" - we mean "by virtue of the gift of the word there is, the word gives . . . " ' ( 1 97 1 b : 8 8 ) . Only 'language' (the doubling of language, the ghost of language) can ever appear as the sending gift of language. Through Ereignis and the doubling of language Heidegger again

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works to twist free frorn 1netaphysics. Yet, even as the gift of language, 'language' is no longer secondary to Being or rnan, for 'language' itself is in the relation of belonging-together with Being. Man thus responds to language through language (and now I drop the quotes entirely) , but, because he rnust respond, language can n o longer b e relegated to subsidiary status : 'The being of language, as Saying that shows, rests on Ereignis which makes us humans over to the releasement in which we can listen freely' ( 1 97 1 b : 1 3 0 ) . Ereignis makes language and Being possible; we might therefore say that only through language may we find the way to language. By translating language into language (our language) 26 Heidegger goes well beyond a mere inversion of the traditional metaphysical notions. Because of this doubling, language is not a ground, but through its translation in Ereignis language grants both the gift of Being and the gift of language ( in its relation with Being) with which man can respond to language. In reading language through Ereignis, Heidegger' s conception allows one to get past the dead-end debate, discussed at length in Chapter 1, between language as a mere object or language as its own agent (cf. Butler 1 99 3 ) . ' Our' language is never wholly ours because it always remains a 'taking up' of something already said, which is why Heidegger asserts that our saying is always an answering. We do not merely use language, nor are we defined and determined by language. That is to say, on the one hand, we are not free to put language to any and every use we see fit, because our language forever rerr1ains a response. On the other hand, language does not attain pure agency either - it belongs together with rr1an through the gift-granting of Ereignis. Neither language nor the agent comes 'first', because the relation retains priority?7 Koto

Ba

To experience language in this Heideggerian sense, one 1nust grasp the belonging-together of human beings and language. We 'experience' language when we appreciate this belonging-together. But even this way of putting the matter obscures it somewhat, since this experience happens to us rather than depending upon us . We experience language by responding to the language that precedes us our way to language always runs through this call. Our relation to, and experience of, language can never be direct it is always untimely so in a sense we can only ever be on the way to an experience with language since that very experience is never something that we could properly have.

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Reading Heidegger's conceptualization of Ereignis and the doubling of language prepares one for an experience with language, and the essay 'A Dialogue on Language' shows its readers what an experience with language might look like. The dialogue form of this essay proves significant because it pre­ vents Heidegger from taking language as a mere obj ect of knowledge, one to be probed, experimented with, and eventually explained - an approach Heidegger will always reject (for example, 1 97 1 b : 1 3 ) . Heidegger refuses to write a straightforward expository argument because that form of essay undermines the possibility of an experience with language: 'Speaking about language turns language almost inevitably into an obj ect' ( 5 0 ) . The best alternative to speaking about language is to speak from language. The need to speak from language therefore prescribes the literary style: 'a speaking from language could only be a dialogue' (5 1 ) . Heidegger thus returns to the Platonic form for doing philosophy, but he does so in a rather ironic that is to say, wholly non-Platonistic - way . 'A Dialogue on Language' has but two characters, a 'Japanese' man and an 'Inquirer' (with the latter surely standing in for Heidegger himself) , whose discussion walks back and forth along two different paths - hermeneutics and language. The conversation wanders be­ tween the 'Inquirer' (Heidegger) asking questions concerning the Japanese notion of language, and the 'Japanese' asking questions about hermeneutics. Significantly, in the investigation on hermeneu-c tics language always arises, and in the discussion of language herme­ neutics constantly appears. The gradual movement from one topic to the other prevents either subj ect of the dialogue from becoming an object of knowledge. The Inquirer makes it clear from the outset that he has never abandoned the hermeneutic proj ect, for even in Being and Time his investigation was only on the 'way'. However, in order to describe hermeneutics he feels compelled to turn to the question of language, since in the beginning his ' questions circled around the problem of language and Being. ' This problem determined the path his thinking took from the beginning ( 1 97 1 b : 6-7) . Thus, as far back as his dissertation, even when his writing did not engage language explicitly, he says, 'it seems to me that the fundamental theme, "Language and Being," stayed there in the background' ( 6 ) . From the outset of the dialogue it becomes clear that language was always at issue, even when Heidegger's work seerned most 'hermeneutical'. The Inquirer's suggestions here thus call into question those accounts of Heidegger's

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work that would locate a drarnatic break between Being and Time and the later writings on language (see Rorty 1 99 1 ) . At this point, the focus o f the discussion turns - though not abruptly, it wanders - to the attempts by members of Japanese society to use European languages to express the experience of Japanese art and poetry . Both interlocutors keep returning to the inherent danger that the European language might destroy that primordial experience itself. The conceptual categories of western language and thinking might distill the experience of Japanese art, but only in a way that strips it of what remains most important. The Inquirer repeatedly draws parallels between this hazard and the danger of discussing language in a nonmetaphysical way, for the discussion itself threatens to destroy the possible experience with language - hence the need for a dialogue rather than a formal argument ( 1 97 1 b : 1 5 ) . European aesthetics, the interlocutors agree, rests on the metaphysical distinc­ tion between the sensuous and the suprasensuous, so a discussion of Japanese art in this language will always force the experience with that art to conform to metaphysical norms. Likewise, any discussion about language runs the risk of turning language into an obj ect, rather than allowing a speaking or Saying that comes from language. Taking language as an object of knowledge cuts off the possibility of our saying-response to language. The Inquirer wants the Japanese to tell him the Japanese word for language because he seeks a word that can illuminate the showing force of language without reducing it to a forrnal concept. But the Japanese hesitates, afraid of the dangers they have rnentioned - afraid that the translation into western terms will rob the word of its essence, will prevent an experience with language that the term rnight otherwise make possible. In this hesitation the dialogue makes its way back again to hermeneutics. The Japanese feels that the term hermeneutics helps to describe the originary Saying of the Japanese word for language, but the full force of the term rerr1ains puzzling to him. He asks the Inquirer to provide more detail about the meaning of the term and the Inquirer's early use of it. 'By a playful thinking' the Inquirer returns to the Greek sense of the term in order to bring its meaning into brighter light. 2 8 Here the two paths of the dialogue begin to intertwine: J: Why do you stress this original sense of hermeneuein ? I: Because it was this original sense which prompted me to use it in defining the phenomenological thinking that opened the way to Being and Time for me.What mattered then, and still does, is to bring out the Being of beings - though no longer in the manner of metaphysics, but

58

U nti mely Pol itics such that Being itself will shine out, Being itself - that is to say: the presence of present beings, the two-fold of the two in virtue of their simple oneness.This is what makes its claim on man, calling him to its essential being.

Language defines the hermeneutic relation. J: Thus when I ask you about hermeneutics, and when you ask me what our word is for what you call language, we ask each other the Same. ( 1971b: 30, emphasis added)

At this j uncture the dialogue reaches the crux of the matter - the

relation between language and hermeneutics - and it is here that one

may glimpse an experience with language. Heidegger links the dis­ cussion of language back to his work from B eing and Time by relating hermeneutics to the god Hermes, the divine messenger: 'Hermeneuein is that exposition which brings tidings because it can listen to a message' ( 1 97 1 b : 2 9 ) . As the above section on language makes clear, only through language can man listen to this message and respond to the call of the two-fold. Language defines the hermeneutic relation because it makes possible a response to this call ( see Caputo 1 9 8 7 ) . Hermeneutics only becomes possible as man's language responds to the two-fold, responds to the gift of language through Ereignis. The Japanese thus calls hermeneutics and language the Same, and this exchange in the dialogue brightly illuminates the relation between the two. One will be tempted to hear in this claim the belonging­ together of language and hermeneutics - and rightly so, for later on in the dialogue the J apanese will make this point unambiguous : 'herrr1e·· neutics and language belong together' ( 1 97 1 b : 42 ) . Through the attempt to make possible a new nonmetaphysical experience with language, Heidegger performs a repetition and rewriting of his earlier hermeneutics. In belonging--together, hermeneutics and language each make up separate sites along the 'way' of thinking toward an experi­ ence with language. And, through their belonging-together, neither can be thought without the other neither can be derived from, nor merely correspond with, the other. 29 Heidegger drops the use of the term hermeneutics ( in his writings after B eing and Time) not to change standpoints, but to move along this 'way' ( 1 97 1 b: 1 2 ) . Now that the Inquirer h a s expanded upon his notion o f herme­ neutics, the way of the dialogue will turn back to the Japanese word for language which the Inquirer hopes can help to capture the relationality of language. In the exchange between the two concerning the word for language, an experience with language comes about. The

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Japanese can withhold the term no longer; it is Koto ba. He elaborates: ba means leaves, including and especially the leaves of a blossom petals. Think of cherry blossoms or plum blossoms . . . [as to what Koto means,] it is easier now to attempt an answer because we have ventured to explain Iki: the pure delight of the beckoning stillness. The breath of the stillness that makes this beckoning delight come into its own is the reign under which that delight is made to come.But Koto always also names that which in the event gives delight, itself, that which uniquely in each unrepeatable moment comes to radiance in the fullness of grace. ( 1971b: 45)

The Inquirer immediately follows this definition that goes beyond the bounds of definitions by saying: 'Koto, then, would be the appropriating occurrence of the lightening message of grace' (45 ) . 'Appropriating occurrence', i n attempting t o translate Koto, itself translates Heidegger's Gerrnan, Ereignis. Koto ba, the Japanese word for language, returns us to Ereignis as the event of appropriation that makes possible both man in his relation to Being, and language - the It that gives the gift of man and the language that 'he' speaks. The Inquirer goes further in drawing the parallels between this 'wondrous word' and his own term Saying. Both point in a non­ metaphysical way to the happening lighting-concealing of Being by language. The 'dialogue' stages the interaction, the relationality, between the hermeneutic relation (or Saying) and 'the petals that stern frorn Koto'. The back and forth movement of the dialogue, the wandering frorn path to path, brings forth an experience with lan­ guage. But here again, experience must be conceived of in a different light. An experience with language is not the Erlebnis of metaphysics ­ an experience that an individual would have as his or her own. It must instead be understood as an Erfahrung, something that comes over subj ects and happens to them, an experience that one undergoes. 30 This distinction plays an important, if subtle, role in Heidegger's move away from metaphysical understandings and toward an experience (Erfahrung) with language. 3 1 Christopher Fynsk elaborates on Heidegger's understanding of 'experience' in the following way: 'when we speak of undergoing an experience, Heidegger says, we designate not an occurrence of which we are and remain the subject but rather an event by which something comes over us, overwhelms and trans­ forms us' ( 1 99 6 : 3 9 ) . Language, far from being a tool for our use or an obj ect for our manipulation, must be conceived as something with which we undergo an experience. Language, thought here as Koto ba, overwhelms us, transforms us, and grants the gift of Being.

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L an g u a g e , M e t a p hy s i c s , and Political Philo s ophy Heidegger articulates a non1netaphysical language, even while he refuses to offer up a concrete model for what language is or does indeed, this refusal is a fundamental part of his conception. In these writings Heidegger grants his readers the capacity to conceive of language outside the simple set of choices often offered to political theorists . In preparing to undergo an experience with language, one comes to see language beyond the designative, constitutive, and expressive options provided by Taylor (see also Connolly 1 9 8 7) and outside the terms of the AIO model. Once one reconsiders the relation between Being and language in the radical way Heidegger suggests, then one calls into question any simple configuration of the relationship between language and politics. On his own terms, then, Heidegger has developed (or at least hinted at) a nonmetaphysical conception of language, but he refuses to identify or categorize this conception. He will argue that the rnove­ ment is away from metaphysics. But toward what does it move ? 'We leave it without a name' ( 1 97 1 b : 3 0 ) . Rather than naming the non­ or postrnetaphysical Heidegger will attempt to write at the end of metaphysics . To do so means, for Heidegger, atternpting to think philosophically at that moment in history when metaphysics has met its most extreme possibility. Heidegger wants to avoid the recapitula­ tion of the metaphysical concepts whose resources have already been exhausted (that is, completed ) by German Idealism. In An Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger does ( at least) two things : he presents a detailed discussion of 'the question of metaphy­ sics' and he attempts to ask that question in a serious manner. Heidegger opens the book by suggesting that the question of meta­ physics is: 'why are there beings rather than nothing ?' ( 1 95 9 : 1 ) . 32 As a philosophical investigation that inquires specifically into the realm of beings, this question opens into the territory of metaphysics. Heidegger explains by drawing on the Greek: 'in Greek, "beyond something" is expressed by the word meta. Philosophical inquiry into the realm of Being as such is meta ta physika; this inquiry goes beyond beings, it is metaphysics' ( 1 959: 1 7) . Heidegger argues that 'why are there beings rather than nothing? ' asks the fundamental question of metaphysics - itself the 'core of all philosophy'. Heidegger wishes to give a description of metaphysics that locates it within his own framework of fundamental ontology from Being and Time. In articulating this fundamental question Heidegger

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argues that metaphysics asks the question of Being; it goes beyond ' beings' to Being. However, in a transformation of his argu1nents within Being and Time, Heidegger now suggests that metaphysics can only raise the question of Being within the confines of the ontological difference. Metaphysical questioning concerning Being remains trapped by the ontological difference and thereby forced to raise the question of Being always and only in terrns of beings. Heidegger would now like to take a step past Being and Time and consider the question of Being as such . That is, he would like to contemplate Being outside and beyond the terms of the ontological difference - to think Being itself rather than the Being of particular beings . Moreover, he wants to distinguish this new sort of inquiry from metaphysics by arguing that metaphysics can only raise the question of Being in the terms of the ontological difference. This discussion merely recapitulates the work of On Time and Being, where the thought of Ereignis serves to think Being outside the ontological difference, that is, nonmetaphysically. Heidegger suggests that within the ambit of metaphysics, the question of Being merely repeats the question of beings. In other words, within the terms of metaphysics no fruitful discussion of Being can take place because all such discussions will be limited by the framework of the ontological difference. All questions concerning Being will be relegated to the terms of beings, so within the confines of the ontological difference the question of Being will merely repeat a set of questions about beings . Heidegger applies this very criticism to his own work in Being and Time because that text failed to see the possibility of thinking Being outside of the ontological difference. Therefore, it had no right to accuse metaphysics of remaining forgetful of the question of Being: 'it is pointed out - quite correctly that metaphysics inquires into the Being of beings and that it is therefore an obvious absurdity to impute a forgetfulness of Being to metaphysics' ( 1 95 9 : 1 8 ) . However, Heidegger continues : 'if we consider the ques­ tion of Being in the sense of an inquiry into Being as such [that is, not an inquiry into the Being of beings] , it becomes clear . . . that Being as such is precisely hidden from metaphysics, and remains forgotten' ( 19). Heidegger's writings o n language all strive t o disclose Being, to ' inquire into Being as such', by conceptualizing Being outside of the ontological difference. Heidegger's discussion illuminates and clarifies his characterization of these later works as 'nonmetaphysical' . By trying to articulate the b elo nging together of Being and language -

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through the quasi-concept of Ereignis, Heidegger provides a way to think about Being outside of the terms of the ontological difference. Thus, he refuses to allow either Being or language to be reducible to beings . Being is not always the Being of beings, and language is not the possession of human beings. Through Ereignis, language can grant the gift of Being without itself being coordinated directly to beings. The language of beings, 'our' language, always remains a response, an answering. As Heidegger puts it, 'our saying remains forever rela­ tional' and the relation between language and our saying-response to it can never be circumscribed by the ontological difference. Ereignis reveals the relation of belonging-together between Being and language in a way that can never be determined by, or lirnited to, the speaking of human beings . Language through Ereignis asks the question of the meaning of Being ( it thereby continues the work of Being and Time), but it does so outside the terms of the ontological difference (thus overturning the terms of fundamental ontology) . By asking the ques­ tion of Being in this more radical way, Heidegger seeks to twist out of the grips of 1netaphysics. However, Heidegger has no desire whatsoever to overturn, over­ come, or transcend metaphysics - this task is not j ust futile, but thoroughly rnetaphysical. One misconstrues Heidegger if one thinks that he wishes the complete end of metaphysics, for he is the first to realize the impossibility of any such attempt: 'our task is to cease all overcoming, and leave metaphysics to itself' ( 1 972 : 24 ) . Heidegger's articulation of a nonrnetaphysical conception of language plays a part in leaving 'metaphysics to itself' , but it has little to do with any grand schemes to surpass the entirety of the history of western philosophical thinking. Heidegger does, however, have a particular vision for a philosophical thinking that exceeds metaphysical con­ cepts . In building from the ground of Heidegger's nonrnetaphysical articulation of language we rr1ove toward a vision, elucidated in the next chapter, of untirneliness. Following Nietzsche ( but not citing him), Heidegger argues that 'all essential philosophical questioning is necessarily untimely' ( 1 95 9 : 8 ) . 3 3 Because of its untimeliness, philosophy can never have a specific and directed task; philosophy cannot be applied. For Heidegger, untimely philosophy still holds an important force and a significant weight. Yet the fact that it can never be applied directly to solve the problems of the day leads to two misinterpreta­ tions of philosophy. The first sterns from the demand that philosophy provide the foundations from which the goals of a culture and a

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society can proceed. Heidegger replies, ' but this is beyond the power of philosophy . . . Philosophy can never directly supply the energies and create the opportunities and rnethods that bring about a histor­ ical change' ( 1 95 9 : 1 0 ) . However, this does not make philosophy trivial or insignificant. Philosophy, under Heidegger's understand­ ing, can be great even without being useful in any ordinary sense of the word: 'What philosophy essentially can and must be is this: a thinking that breaks the paths and opens the perspectives of the knowledge that sets the norms and hierarchies ' ( 1 0 ) . Philosophy, for Heidegger, does not confirrr1 the Being of beings: 'It is in the very nature of philosophy never to make things easier but only rnore difficult' ( 1 1 ) . In contrast, we will see in the next chapter that, through solving problems, a timely political theory tries precisely to make things simpler, easier. Throughout this discussion of the role of philosophy Heidegger never once uses the word 'critical' or 'criticism', but his articulation undoubtedly resonates with an understanding of philosophy as carry­ ing out a critical task. Certainly Heidegger sees philosophy performing a critical role, but he refuses to reduce his understanding of philosophy to this role. Philosophy for Heidegger must be allowed to remain greater than the use that any human subjects rr1ight put it to (even a critical one); philosophy's inquiry into Being as such moves it beyond j ust such a reduction to beings . One must resist the urge to respond directly to those whose derr1ands on philosophy misunderstand it in the first place: You hear remarks such as 'Philosophy leads to nothing', 'You can't do anything with philosophy', and readily imagine that they confirm an experience of your own.There is no denying the soundness of these two phrases, particularly common among scientists and teachers of science. Any attempt to refute them by proving that after all it does 'lead to something' merely strengthens the prevailing misinterpretation to the effect that the everyday standards by which we judge bicycles or sulphur baths are applicable to philosophy ... granted that we cannot do any­ thing with philosophy, might not philosophy, if we concern ourselves with it do something with us ? ( 1959: 12)

In sharing with his readers his understanding of the role of a nonmetaphysical philosophy, Heidegger provides no easy outlines to trace in considering a nonmetaphysical political philosophy. This is probably for the best, since I have no intention of modeling a concep­ tion of political theory directly upon Heidegger's remarks. 3 4 I do believe, however, that Heidegger's articulation of what he calls a

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'nonmetaphysical' conception of language provides an alternative to the AIO model of language that proves to be both dominant and, ironically, implicit in contemporary political theory. Heidegger's 'ex­ perience with language' offers a starting point from which to develop the theme of historicity and to begin to elaborate on the significance of untimeliness for the study of politics. Without remaining in Heidegger's realm any longer, and as a means of beginning to process the ore that I have mined here, I will now turn toward a recent contemporary debate that takes up a number of fundamental issues in political theory. With the political burden now lifted and with the Heideggerian alternative to the AIO model of language in place, I can approach this debate as a vehicle for working toward a politics of untimeliness . Notes 1. I leave aside entirely the absolutely enormous quantity of criticism in political theory directed toward both an elucidation of Heideg­ ger's personal involvement in National Socialism and an explora­ tion of the possible affinities between his philosophy and fascism. I do so for two interrelated reasons. First, this topic has been exhaustively debated already (Farias 1 9 89; Wolin 1 990; Spanos 1 993 ). Second, and possibly more important, the question of Heidegger's relation to Nazism proves most pertinent if one wishes to achieve some sort of direct application of Heidegger's work to politics, and this, in no uncertain terms, is not my intent. Any such effort at directly applying Heidegger to politics will likely stumble upon Heidegger's own attempt to apply his thought to politics, via National Socialis1n, but it will also bump against Heidegger's more consistent claims that his philosophy cannot and should not be applied in this way to begin with. Finally, I point interested readers in the direction of Leslie Paul Thiele's recent work ( 1 995 ) . Thiele tries valiantly, as the book j acket claims, to 'make Heidegger's philosophical works speak directly to politics in a postmodern world'; along the way, Thiele gives a concise overview of the Nazi controversy and a brave response to the criticisms. It will become clear as my own conception of untimely agency begins to develop that I disagree profoundly if not with Thiele's arguments then certainly with the spin given them on the back of his book, but for readers in political theory interested in Heidegger and National Socialism Thiele's book has 1nuch to offer. See also Neske and Kettering ( 1 990 ) .

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2. I am trying to suggest here that it is both possible yet highly 3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

implausible to take from Nietzsche the idea that 'rnetaphysics is no more ! ' (Sallis 1 99 5 : 1 8 ) . For Rorty, the only alternative to thinking o f language in this obviously instrumental fashion is to reify it, and the problem with the reification of language (something Rorty simply never defines except in the circular sense of attributing this reification to the work of Heidegger and Derrida ) lies in its capacity to mask the proper understanding of language as tool. Many years before Rorty drew such distinctions, Sarah Kofman suggested that they were invalid. Kofman argues that, starting with Nietzsche, a nonmetaphysical philosophy must risk being mistaken for poetry: 'Nietzsche inaugurates a type of philosophy which deliberately uses metaphors, at the risk of being confused with poetry. Such a confusion would not be regrettable in Nietzsche's eyes: for the opposition between philosophy and poetry derives from metaphysical thinking' ( 1 99 3 : 1 7) . Though he does not address the issue directly, Shapiro ( 1 9 8 1 ) seems to imply that the we can find an affinity between the later Wittgenstein and the later Heidegger. Despite Shapiro's provo­ cative suggestions, Rorty's (and many others' ) pragmatic appro­ priation of Wittgenstein makes it extremely difficult to reconcile Wittgenstein and Heidegger on language - a task I will not attempt. The essays on language within Taylor's more recent collection ( 1 995 ) all build upon, refine, and often modify Taylor's earlier arguments ( 1 9 8 5 b ) . I have chosen to emphasize only Taylor's more recent writings because, in part, they are developments of the earlier ones and because rny focus here is not to trace the development of Taylor's thought, but to capture its current formation. Taylor's 'expressive-constitutive' versus 'enframing' schema re­ places his earlier framework of 'expressive' versus 'designative'. In a footnote to his more recent formulation Taylor suggests that 'expressive', 'constitutive', and 'expressive-constitutive' are all appropriate terms for this tradition of thought. In another at­ ternpt at creating categories for conceptions of language, William Connolly ( 1 9 8 7) tries to distinguish between 'constitutive' the­ ories, which he very loosely associates with Heidegger, and 'expressive' theories, which he directly ties to Taylor. I will not atternpt to disentangle the overlaps and/or inconsistencies

66

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

U nti mely Pol itics

between these different naming schemes; 1nine will be an effort to call into question the schemes thernselves . I include 'principles' in this list to emphasize the Aristotelian point, which Taylor wholeheartedly endorses, that language is the human faculty that rnakes it possible to distinguish not just between good and bad, but between right and wrong, just and unj ust. Normativity derives from the faculty of language. In Taylor's 'expressive-constitutivist' model, the former term always, in the final analysis ( and despite Taylor's vacillating terminology), retains precedence over the latter; the constitutive aspects of language can always be drawn back to the expression of human subj ects. Heidegger disagrees. While Taylor will insist that humans must be ultimately responsible for these meanings, principles, and intentions, Heidegger sees no reason to remain dogmatic on this point. In his otherwise illuminating discussion of Heidegger on lan­ guage, Thiele seems either unable or unwilling to recognize this fundatnental point. Thiele stresses 1nany of the same central themes and principles that I focus on here - most importantly, that Heidegger's notion of language is meant primarily as an alternative to the dominant manner of thinking about language as if it were a tool for use by humans ( 1 995 ) . However, Thiele never acknowledges that Heidegger's developrr1ent of this understand­ ing of language goes hand in hand with the effort in his later writings to think Being outside the ontological difference - a crucial connection for my analysis . Sometitnes Heidegger goes so far as to propose a 'new difference' : the difference between the Being o f the ontological difference and a Being outside that difference. He writes that his work appreci­ ates 'with full clarity the difference between "Being" as "the Being of beings," and "Being" as "Being" in respect of its proper sense, that is, in respect of its truth' ( 1 97 1 b : 20 ) . 'The identical, i n Latin idem, i s called i n Greek to aut6. Translated into the German language, to aut6 is called das Selbe, the Sarr1e' ( 1 960: 1 3 ) . Once Heidegger moves to the Greek notions he usually refers to 'the Same', but his concern lies with the philo­ sophical (not j ust linguistic) translation from Identity to the Same. Heidegger's approach necessitates the use of a singular term to represent hurnan beings, yet because of the importance of 'being' for Heidegger's thought the term 'human beings' will not work. I have chosen to follow Heidegger's own texts and use the term

Experi encing La n g uage, B roa c h i ng U nti mel i ness

14.

15.

16.

1 7.

18.

19.

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'man', since it makes little sense to try to attribute to Heidegger a gender inclusivity that he probably never intended. While in my own writing I would prefer to use gender-neutral terms, I have no desire to either defend or alter Heidegger's text so as to deflect what may well be valid critiques of the gendered aspects in his writings. Heidegger constantly refers to his later work as on the 'way' or the path of thinking. 'The way allows us to reach what concerns us, in that dornain where we are already staying' ( 1 97 1 b : 92-3 ) . If one looks up Ereignis i n a German-English dictionary, one will discover words such as 'event, occurrence, happening' (Betteridge 1 96 6 : 63 ). The tenn has been variously translated as 'e-vent', 'con-cern', 'manifestness', and 'owning', but most Heidegger scholars now accept 'event of appropriation' (though always in the singular) as the most plausible English translation for Ereignis. However, it has become more common merely to leave the term untranslated, much like Dasein. See, for example, Emad ( 1 99 3 ) ; hereafter, I too will not translate the word. The complex relation between the early and later Heidegger has been tnuch debated. Willia1n Richardson went so far as to propose the categories 'Heidegger I' and 'Heidegger II' in order to simplify tnatters. However, the relation is by no 1neans this straightforward and Heidegger hitnself complicated it by arguing for a reverse diachrony - understanding 'Heidegger I' frorn 'Heidegger II' - in his 'Letter to Richardson', which stands as the preface to Richardson's book ( 1 963 ) . O n nmnerous occasions Heidegger states that to leave meta­ physics behind one cannot simply create or adopt an altogether new language - 'the metaphysical manner of forming ideas is in a certain respect unavoidable' ( 1 97 1 b: 25 ) . 'There i s ' translates the German idiom 'es gibt' - literally 'It gives' as I use it in the text. However, much like il y a in French, it retains the idiomatic rneaning of 'there is' without using the verb 'to be' . These two expressions come a s close a s modern languages can to replicating the middle voice. The notion of historicity as I discuss it in Chapter 3 resonates with the opening up, interplay, and dimensionality of time that Heidegger ernphasizes here. Thus, Heidegger's language of 'true time' - as an effort to think the 1netaphysical concept of time in a more originary, that is, nonmetaphysical, manner - will be displaced later by the concept of untimeliness .

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20. Given the rather pej orative connotations, in English usage, of the word 'appropriation', it may sound like a strange translation of that which determines a 'belonging-together'. Rather than hear­ ing a form of taking in the word appropriation, one needs to focus on a determination of that which is proper, an owning, as in the German Eigenen. 2 1 . Some interpreters have even read this conception of language back into Heidegger's own Being and Time; see Ricoeur ( 1 99 1 ) . 22 . Taylor says that Herder, Humboldt, and Hamann created a theory that 'has been taken up in our day by Heidegger' (Taylor 1 9 8 5b: 255 ) . On the contrary, Heidegger explicitly contrasts his conception with Taylor's metaphysical view: 'though it had its beginnings in Greek antiquity . . . this [conventional] view of language reaches its peak in Wilhelm von Humboldt's reflections on language . . . Humboldt puts language into language as one kind and fonn of the world view worked out in human sub­ jectivity. Into what language ? Into a series of assertions that speak the language of the rnetaphysics of his tirne' ( 1 971 b : 1 1 6-9 ) . 2 3 . Hence the obfuscation created b y Taylor's references to Heideg­ ger's 'philosophy of language'. To borrow from the jargon of psychoanalysis, 1netaphysics is not 1nerely interjected, but intro­ jected into the philosophy of language - so one could never hope to remove metaphysics from philosophy of language. Heidegger did not c01ne to this position only late in his career: 'philosophical research will have to dispense with the "philosophy of language" ' ( 1 962: 209 ) . 24 . This first step o f inverting the concepts o f 1netaphysics parallels Derrida's first move1nent of deconstruction (Derrida 1 9 8 1 b ) . 25 . 'When we reflect o n language qua language, we have abandoned the traditional procedure of language study' (Heidegger 1 971 b: 1 19). 2 6 . It must b e stressed that even this translation o f language - our language - is in no way equivalent to the conventional view. This language cannot be derived from Being, because it belongs together with Being in Ereignis. 2 7. Butler has tried to work out of the impasse of agency by calling on a similar relational notion in Althusser's understanding of the 'call'. Butler concludes her reading of Althusser by suggesting that the relation to language remains antecedent to both the subject who speaks a language and to the discourse within which the subject always finds him- or herself. Butler's reading of the 'call' in

Experi encing La ng uage, B roac h i ng U nti mel i ness

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

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interpellation and Heidegger's writings on the 'response' to the saying-showing of Ereignis both serve to emphasize this relation and its priority (Butler 1 997a: ch 4 ) . Heidegger i s well aware that the story o f Hermes, used t o define the word hermeneuein, is in all likelihood apocryphal, but he still finds it useful to appropriate this story in elaborating on his own meaning in using the term. For Heidegger, the originary sense of the term hermeneutics defines the hermeneutic relation as a responding to a sending or destining, and thus it cannot do without language. Man can only respond to the gift of Being (or language, or the two-fold, etc . ) through language. Language must always be caught up within the hermeneutic relation through man's responding to the call in Saying ( 1 97 1 b : 3 2 ) . Gadamer places a great deal o f philosophical weight upon the distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung by looking back at the history of its use ( 1 9 8 9 : 55-8 1 , 3 4 1-62) . For an elaboration on the distinction between an experience as something you have (Erlebnis) and something you undergo (Erfahrung), see Weinsheimer and Marshall's preface to Truth and Method ( 1 989: xiii-xiv ) . Erfahrung, as a process, once again recalls the rniddle voice: an Erfahrung is a thoroughly middle-voiced experience. Heidegger, unlike Gadamer, does not present a fonnal discussion of the words Erlebnis and Erfahrung, but both he and Gadamer point to Dilthey's Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (Experience and Poetry) for examples of the use of Erlebnis. See Gadamer ( 1 9 8 9 : 6 1 ; cf. Heidegger 1 9 7 1 b : 3 5 ) . Simply put, translating Heidegger i s a nightmare. Faced with myriad problems, Manheim chooses to translate Seindes by coin­ ing the word 'essents' . This allows him to sidestep the confusion of having three or four different variations of 'being' in the English translation. Even Macquarrie and Robinson decide to translate Seindes as 'entities' so as to minimize confusions . How­ ever, Heidegger remains centrally concerned throughout his writ­ ings with the ontic/ontological difference: the difference between das Seinde (that which is, beings ) and das Sein (that by virtue of which beings are beings, Being) . The question of why there are Seindes rather than nothing relates directly to the difference between beings and Being. To translate Seindes as 'essents' or even 'entities' obscures this focal point. Therefore, I will add 1ny own translation of Seindes simply as ' beings' (or sometimes

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'being' with a lowercase 'b') to elucidate and sirnplify my reading of Heidegger concerning his position on the ontological difference in his later writings. To avoid more confusion, I have also followed Macquarrie and Robinson in translating Sein as 'Being' (with a capital 'B' ) . This makes it possible to distinguish in English between das Sein and das Seinde. 3 3 . Heidegger takes this point to its extreme: 'when a philosophy becomes fashionable, either it is no real philosophy or it has been misinterpreted and misused for ephemeral and extraneous pur­ poses' ( 1 959: 8 ) . Heidegger seetns to echo here Nietzsche's views on Schopenhauer's status in Gennany. At any rate, it seems plausible to gain some insight from Heidegger's conception of philosophy as an important force that rr1ay not be directly useful in an instrumental sense, without, however, accepting Heideg­ ger's somewhat elitist conception of philosophy as only accessible by the few. 34. Because he insists upon finding a direct and integral relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and his politics, Habermas appears to treat Heidegger's philosophy in precisely the manner that Heidegger warns his readers about. Dana Villa, on the other hand, rejects Habermas' attempt to collapse the political and the philosophical in Heidegger, and he refuses to accept Arendt's effort at fully separating the two spheres through her later claim that Heidegger is simply an apolitical thinker. Heidegger's thought, Villa shows, contains resources that can be appropriated for the task of rethinking politics. However, Villa looks to Heidegger to reconsider praxis, an area of thought that, on my reading, was of almost no concern to Heidegger. Villa seems to allow for a political appropriation of Heidegger's work only if that appropriation runs through Arendt, so the overall structure of Villa's argument winds up reducing the political possibilities in Heidegger solely to those elements of his thought that either influenced, or help to illuminate, Arendt's retrieval of praxis. The benefits this approach yields in Villa's radical rereading of Arendt against the teleological tradition proves substantial, but the cost comes with Villa's apparent eagerness to accept the Haberrnasian and Arendtian critiques of Heidegger, thereby rej ecting the salience of the vast maj ority of his work as a resource for political theory. In short, I fear that Villa sacrifices many other resources in Heidegger's thought so as to make his reading of Arendt through Heidegger 1nore palatable to his skeptical readers,

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that is, those already convinced that nothing in I-leidegger's thought could prove valuable for political thinking. Along the way, it seems that Villa spends more time mired in the various Heidegger debates than he does highlighting his important inter­ pretation of Arendt. My own effort to take Heidegger's sugges­ tions about untimeliness seriously lead me to avoid those debates and to focus on language as a resource in Heidegger's philosophy that was of great concern to him and can have significant i1nplications for politics (even if those implications were not Heidegger's concern) .

C ha pter 3

S pectral H istory, U ntimely Theory

It would probably be self-defeating for members of the discipline of political theory to reiterate those claims, mentioned by Heidegger in the preceding chapter, that 'philosophy leads to nothing', since, after all, they are political philosophers. Nevertheless, I think one finds an echo of these suggestions in recent remarks by political theorists who demand from the field a greater emphasis on real, concrete, historical and political events in the world, and who castigate their colleagues for always arriving on the scene of politics too late. Indeed, their criticisms cry for theories of politics to become and remain more 'timely', and it is thus a certain sort of 'untimeliness' that comes under attack from these commentators. In this chapter I will challenge the notion that political theory must be a tirnely endeavor, and I will offer an alternative conception of untirnely theory, one that I think can better achieve even the ends sought by those who demand timeliness. An untimely politics can do more, for it greatly exceeds the narrow vision of 'timely' theorists, a vision that often focuses solely upon a restricted set of problems to be solved. A political theory of untimely agency may also 1nake it possible to see new or different political ends than those imagined on the problem-solving model. When considered in a new light, untimeliness can move beyond problem-solving toward a richer and less confining understanding of politics and history. This conception of untimeliness that I wish to fortify must be placed and viewed in stark contrast to the 'too late' (or even 'too early') that recent commentators have criti­ cized. This distinction between, on the one hand, untimeliness as falling on the wrong point along a linear model of time, and, on the other, untimeliness in the sense that time is 'out of j oint', depends upon thinking of history in the sense of historicity. Historicity, as an understanding of history that both rejects a Hegelian philosophy of

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history and rej ects the thesis that history has come to an end, under­ girds the untimely theory of politics that I wish to defend. But historicity can only be thought, and untimely theory can only be done, outside the terms of the AIO model of language. So the work of the preceding two chapters proves preparatory to my efforts to articulate a politics of untimeliness. As I demonstrated in Chapter 1 , the AIO model o f language lends itself easily to a theory o f politics that centers on parliamentary practices and pluralist compromise. The timely conceptions of politics that I will challenge in this chapter rest implicitly on the assumption that the relationship between language and politics has been settled. Precisely in unsettling that assumption and in reconsidering that relation can one move toward an untimely politics. Untimeliness, as I introduce it in this chapter and develop it in those that follow, will always depend upon and continually reanimate noninstrumental (Heidegger would say nonmetaphysical) conceptions of language. To put it starkly: only after and through an experience with language can one speak effectively to ghosts . In both cases one must operate 'beyond Being'. As a way of explicating the notions of historicity and untimeliness, I begin this chapter by looking closely at Jeffrey Isaac's recent demand for an attention to history that will produce timely theory. Isaac's particular argmnents are not so much my concern, but they exemplify the tendencies I have alluded to above. His critique of the field for avoiding the revolutionary events of 1 9 8 9 serves to reopen the fundarnental question of the role of political theory and theorists ( 1 995 : 6 8 2 ) . I see no reason to rehash the debate over that essential question, but I do want to take as my point of departure Isaac's call for political theory to turn toward 'concrete, empirical, historical work' ( 645 ) . In calling for a shift in the direction of 'first-order inquiry', Isaac makes a number of significant assumptions about the very nature of theory and of history, and he goes on to specify a certain conception of their appropriate relation. Along the way, I will argue, Isaac partially articulates and partially presupposes a theory/history relation that proves debilitating to political theorists because it forcibly locates them on one side or the other of such sterile oppositions as that between 'first-order' and 'second-order' inquiry. To lever the political theorist out of such oppositions requires the articulation of a more subtle and sophisticated understanding of history than that which Isaac rests upon; it will therefore demand untimeliness.

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D emanding H i s tory : Timely Theory The notion of 'demanding history', as it has been suggested by Geoff Bennington ( 1 9 8 7), provides a helpful lens through which to view the arguments of Isaac and his interlocutors without entering into the very debate that they stage. The phrase 'demanding history' can be read, straightforwardly enough, in two different ways. In the first, demand­ ing modifies history to give us a type of history, a difficult, troubling, and constantly problematic one. History as historicity will turn out to be history of a very demanding sort. At this point I want to focus on the second way of reading the phrase: in it, we hear demanding no longer as an adjective but as a gerund, so that the phrase becomes an action, a demand itself: 'Here history is not the sender of the demand, but only its referent: an unspecified sender says, "Talk about history," to an unspecified addressee' (Bennington 1 9 8 7: 1 6 ) . This formulation proves significant for my purposes because the demand to 'talk about history' often takes the form of a demand for timeliness, saying not simply to discuss history but to respond to history in a timely fashion. In his plea to his colleagues to answer the problems of 1 9 8 9 Isaac clearly takes the position of the sender of the demand as he calls for a turn toward 'historical inquiry', 'first-order questions', and 'actual politics' . Isaac demands that political theory take seriously the monu­ mental historical events that the revolutions of 1 9 8 9 constitute. Or, 1nore to the point, he asks a question and lays a charge after the fact: 'why haven't you talked about history, and isn't this a probletn ? ' Isaac realizes that his demand circles back upon its sender as a part of the addressee; in demanding history of political theorists he dernands it of himself ( 6 8 2 ) . Isaac's interlocutors attack, defend, and modify his position on a number of different fronts, but they all fail to address, in any direct 1nanner, the nature of this demand. 1 Thus, they beg what for my argument remains the most important question: is history something that can be dernanded of the field of political theory? Does the demand presuppose a certain, timely conception of theory ? In short, what motivates such a demand, and what version of theory and history does this demand necessarily entail ? Isaac tells his readers clearly in his 'rej oinder' that he caine to write 'The Strange Silence of Political Theory' after finding himself shocked at the paucity ( if not absence) of interpretations of the revolutions of 1 9 89 in the 1naj or j ournals of political theory. This discovery led him to a discussion of the basic question of 'what political theory is and should be.' For Isaac, the field of political theory has become a

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stagnant pool of Kuhnian 'normal science', 'focusing on approved topics' and 'following acadetnic conventions' ( 642; cf. Seery 1 996: 3 ) . Rather than remaining academic 'puzzle solvers', fixated on secondary textual issues, Isaac exhorts political theorists to solve our own real­ world problems . Engaging in first-order inquiry for Isaac means turning toward 'practical political problems' and 'confronting poli­ tical reality' (643, 645 ) . In sum, It is thus incumbent upon us to acknowledge this world as a source of intellectual and practical problems, to engage it in all of its empirical and historical messiness, to demonstrate that our categories help to illuminate this political reality and even, dare I say, to improve it ...Real political problems ought not to be the pretext for scholarly investigations of other things; they should be what drives our inquiries. ( 646)

The main text of the political theorist ought to be the 'real' world, since this is the only text that produces problems worthy of our attention. The political theorist, according to Isaac, must face this world through first-order engagements, rather than hiding fro1n that world in the texts of others, thereby reducing political theory to a second-order pursuit (see Gunnell 1 9 9 8 ; Schram 2002 ) . 2 While theory should not be an activity concerned with solving the puzzles of Kuhnian normal science, it turns out that it must strive to solve proble1ns - the problems it confronts in actual political reality. 3 We can also tease Isaac's conception of history (and concomitantly, time) out of this formula for describing what political theory should be. If theory is designed to solve problems, then history is that raw material that both creates these problems and also affords theorists the tools needed in order to solve them. In assuming that history both offers up problems and gives us the chance to fix them, Isaac appears to fall back on what Habermas has called 'modern time­ consciousness', in which time is 'a scarce resource for the mastery of problems' (Habermas 1 9 8 7: 6 ) . Whether we think of time/history as a line, a circle, or even a dialectical movement, this understanding of the two insists upon a timely conception of theory. That is, it insists that theory respond 'at the right time' - not too soon or too late to solve the (political) problems that constantly arise within titne/history. Within this etnerging understanding, 'untimeliness' can only be assimilated to 'at the wrong time' either too late to do any good, or too early (as so many obituaries describe a person's death) . Isaac makes a series o f tacit assumptions while formulating his critique of the field. As he demands history and urges timeliness, Isaac

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repeatedly strings together the practical, the empirical, and the histor­ ical - at least implicitly suggesting a chain of equivalence between history and the empirical. And yet (the question almost arises from within the assumption), can one so easily equate the empirical with the historical? What if, as Derrida will suggest, history proves to be full of ghosts, and what if history - precisely because of its ghostly nature ­ prevents us from telling the difference between the empirically given and the nonreal or nonactual ? If history turns out to be of the demanding variety, if it turns out to be a spectral history, then a timely theory that responds directly to concrete events in history becmnes no longer possible or desirable. For one can never speak directly to ghosts, and one never knows when they will appear. Putting aside for now both these possibilities and questions, I want first to note that Isaac himself ignores these issues by way of a rather offhand dismissal. Isaac cuts off any questioning of the conception of history which he presupposes by rejecting those thinkers who might provide the theoretical resources for thinking history differently. Isaac presents this dismissal in the forrn of another criticism of American political theorists . He writes: 'many American theorists remain cur­ iously caught in the orbit of Heidegger and Habermas, Foucault and Derrida, working through the offshoots of a critique of a rnarxism that is now for all practical purposes dead' ( 64 8 ) . According to Isaac, in focusing on the philosophical proble1ns in the works of these authors rather than on the 'real' political problerns in Central Europe, Amer­ ican political theorists remain second-order theorists solving Kuhnian puzzles (concerning 'offshoots' of an outdated theory) rather than first-order theorists who would solve real problems . Thus, Isaac's rhetoric would imply the following: having reached the death of marxism, one no longer needs to engage critically with alternative ways of theorizing history . History after H e g e l : H i s t o ri city Within Isaac's schema such latter alternatives are nothing more than second--order issues, so Isaac's formula - whether or not one sub­ scribes to theses about the 'death' or 'end' of history - tends to relegate any serious theoretical consideration of conceptions of history to inferior status . The subordination of a theory of history to the second-order, coupled with Isaac's strenuous urgings to focus on first-order inquiry, tends to reduce one's choices concerning history to two: history can be taken either as the teleological unfolding of

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world reason (Hegel or Marx) or as the messy, empirical world that confronts the theorist with problems. But if one forages into the realm of second-order theorizing (and risks the dangers lurking therein), it might be possible to locate within the legacy of marxism a thinking of history that subscribes neither to Hegelian or marxist teleology nor to naive assumptions about the 'death' or 'end' of those very philoso­ phies of history. I will proffer a reading of Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx his own response to the extraordinary events of 1 9 8 9 - that helps me to explicate just such a thinking of history. Derrida's notion of 'histori­ city' provides my analysis with the conditions for reconstructing a different conception of theory in its relation to history . Historicity provides the underlayment for my effort to consider the possibilities of an untirnely political theory . Derrida's own work on history begins (and some would say, ends ) by considering Hegelian philosophy in all seriousness - 'taking Hegel at his word' (Martin 1 992: 4 7). In bringing the philosophical thought of Reason to the study of history, Hegel rather (in)famously suggests that the world-historical rr1arch of Geist 1nust sacrifice individuals for its grander purposes. Derrida succinctly synthesizes as follows: 'man . . . is the site of teleological reason's unfolding, that is, history' ( 1 9 8 2 : 1 22 ) . The 'end' o f history dubiously achieved by Hegel depends on his own contemporary context, on his assumption that the inauguration of modernity in western Europe provides the conditions of possibility for the 'completion' of history . Hegel views the culminating point of world-history, the fulfillment of its telos, lying within the horizon of the Germany of his day. Nietzsche puts a critical and ironic edge on this Hegelian position, yet still 1nanages to summarize it helpfully: 'for Hegel the climax and terminus of the world-process coincided with his own existence in Berlin. Indeed, he ought to have said that everything that came after hi1n was properly to be considered merely a musical coda to the world-historical rondo or, even more properly, as super­ fluous' ( 1 9 8 3 : 1 04 ) . In less sarcastic tones, Hegel believed that by reaching the fourth level of human historical development (the 'Christian' world), 'the stage is set for this completion' of history ( 1 9 8 8 : 92-8; cf. Martin 1 992: 3 4 ) . That very completion only lacked the philosophy of history that Hegel himself set out. But what can we say, today, about the status of these conditions for the completion of history ? What has happened to world history and philosophical/political conceptions of history after this supposed completion of history ? Some would suggest that we conceive of this

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continuation of history after its Hegelian end as postrnodernity (Martin 1 992 ) . But the name or category seems unimportant: recall Heidegger's refusal to narne the nonmetaphysical and his insistence to think at the end of metaphysics . If history has gone on ( and it surely seems to us that it has gone on), then how has it done so and how have people thought history after the Hegelian philosophy of history announced its imrninent ending ? Calling the continuation of history 'postrnodernity' helps us little in trying to corne to grips with a way to conceptualize history after Hegel. 4 Derrida's understanding of 'historicity' constitutes an attempt to accornplish just this task, and the relation of historicity to theoretical/philosophical inquiry speaks clearly - though rather indirectly - to the important questions raised by the Political Theory symposium. Most significantly, the notion of a spectral history as an interpretation of historicity allows me to broach a more serious consideration of the possibilities for, and irnplications of, untimely theory. In Specters of Marx Derrida makes his most explicit effort to articulate a post-Hegelian understanding of history by way of his reading of the tradition of marxism and his thinking of 'historicity', 5 yet thirty years earlier Derrida had already used the word in a specific and unique way within his critique of Foucault's Folie et deraison ( 1 9 6 1 ) . 6 Because it offers a rather radical alternative to our intuitive approaches to temporality and history, 'historicity' serves as the hub out of which I will spin both my challenge to the conception of political theory as a timely, problem-solving discipline, and my beginning efforts to formulate a coherent conception of untimeliness. But describing the meaning, content, and implications of historicity turns out to be no simple task, precisely because traditional under­ standings of history prove so intuitively ingrained - in our common­ sense understandings and in the field of political theory. Entering into the debate between Derrida and Foucault on the question of writing history can both serve to distance us frorn our everyday thinking with respect to history and go a long way toward clarifying what a post­ Hegelian theory of history might look like. The point here is not sirnply to show what Derrida does for Hegel and history, nor is it intended to decide the old ( and now possibly stale) debate between Foucault and Derrida. Rather I aim to demonstrate what that rethink­ ing of Hegel and history, historicity, might do for the field of political theory, to show how it can help to fashion a conception of untimely theory. Derrida begins where Foucault begins, reading him as follows:

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'Foucault wanted to write a history of madness itself, that is madness speaking on the basis of its own experience and under its own authority, and not a history of madness described frorn within the language of reason' ( 1 97 8 : 34 ) ? On this main point, Derrida poses a fundamental question to Foucault, summarized by one helpful com­ mentator as follows: 'if history is a rational concept, how is it possible to write a history of madness ? ' (Wordsworth 1 9 8 7: 1 1 7). Derrida's critique, and his understanding of historicity, hinges upon the un­ folding of this query. Derrida emphasizes a point that Foucault freely admits: one cannot write this history of madness itself without engaging with the history of reason. One can unravel Derrida's argument by focusing on this very phrase, 'history of reason'. Foucault has a sophisticated under­ standing of the phrase, but also a specific understanding of it. Foucault knows well that reason has a history (reason's history ) : most of his earlier works can be understood as an attempt to explicate, fore­ ground, and critically question this history with its episternological breaks, ruptures, and transformations . Derrida emphasizes, however, another way of reading the phrase the genitive is clearly double here. Derrida does not deny reason's history, but he wants to emphasize history's reason - Reason is in history (as Hegel says ), history is of Reason. Most importantly, exactly this Reason of history renders highly problematic the endeavor to write a history of madness itself, outside of the language of reason. I will quote Derrida's most important argument here at length, for it foreshadows, and is haunted by, a spectral history: The misfortune of the mad ...is that their best spokesmen are those who betray them best; which is to say that when one attempts to convey their silence itself, one has already passed over to the side of the enemy, the side of order, [the side of reason] ...The unsurpassable, unique, and imperial grandeur of the order of reason, that which makes it not just another actual order or structure, is that one cannot speak out against it except by being for it, that one can protest it only from within it; and within its domain, Reason leaves us only the recourse to stratagems and strategies. The revolution against Reason, in the historical form of classical reason (but the latter is only a determined form of Reason in general.And because of this oneness of Reason the expression 'history of reason' is difficult to conceptualize, as is also, consequently, a 'history of madness'), the revolution against reason can be made only within it, in accordance with a Hegelian law to which I myself was very sensitive in Foucault's book. ( 1 978: 36)

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To write a history of madness itself Foucault knew that he also had to write a history of reason ( hence his engagement with the Cartesian cogito) , but if ( 'taking Hegel at his word' ) reason is in fact in history then there can be no simple history of reason - Reason is of history and no sirnple history of madness either. According to Derrida, Foucault's attempt to write a history of unreason (deraison) cannot avoid its implication within the Hegelian law of Reason in history. 8 Derrida hereby implicates the entire proj ect of archaeology: 'a history, that is, an archaeology against reason doubtless cannot be written, for, despite all appearances to the contrary, the concept of history has always been a rational one' ( 1 978: 3 6 ) . The cunning of reason would appear to have appropriated the project of archaeology for its own grander purposes . From the position of this, his strongest criticism, Derrida hints at an alternative angle for approaching this problematic: 'It is the meaning of "history" or archia that should have been questioned first, perhaps' ( 3 6 ) . This claim constitutes Derrida 's initial move toward the formulation of historicity as an attempt to think the historical nature of reason without getting caught up in a Hegelian dialectical movement that would subsume this thinking into the Reason of history. To exceed Hegel's grasp, he suggests, we must question his concept of history directly. Thus, Derrida and Foucault share the 'goal' of understanding the historical nature of reason, and for this very reason Derrida's conception of historicity develops out of Foucault. Derrida states plainly that 'historicity [is] the possibility of history itself' ( 3 1 0, note 2 8 ) . One can take a first step toward clarifying this fon11ula by viewing historicity as Derrida's effort to translate part of Foucault's arguments into the frame of Derrida's own thinking. 9 Foucault argues that an epistemological break occurred between the medieval and classical periods : before the classical period reason and madness were never sharply, dichotomously distinguished, but the Age of Reason was founded upon the silencing and exclusion of madness ( 1 965, 1 973a; cf. Wordsworth 1 9 8 7 ) . The banishment and exile of madness (that is, the banishment and exile of the mad in the form of their incarceration) created the autonomy and sovereignty of reason. Foucault attributes this monumental shift to a great partage, a deciding gesture that separated madness from reason. 1 0 Derrida emphasizes this partage by quoting Foucault as follows: 'the necessity of madness, throughout the history of the West, is linked to the partage which detaches from the background noise,. and from its continuous monotony, a meaningful language that is transmitted and

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consummated in time; briefly, it is linked to the possibility of' history' (Foucault 1 9 6 1 ; quoted in Derrida 1 97 8 : 42) . 1 1 Of course, just this possibility interests Derrida the rnost. To follow a Derridean convention by stating the conclusion at the beginning, one could say: the fundamental difference between Derrida and Foucault lies in their reading of the partage. Foucault presents the partage as a moment within history a moment that inaugurates the classical age (the Age of Reason) while Derrida tries to think the partage in its structural systematicity. As Foucault says, the partage is linked to the very possibility of history, what Derrida will call historicity . Yet Foucault also argues that we see the partage as an event within the boundaries of history. Derrida suggests otherwise by arguing forcefully that the partage cannot both inaugurate historicity (the possibility of history itself) and be merely a moment of history. In short, historicity can have no proper history. To anticipate the argument to come, one might say that the partage is too untimely to be taken as a single point in time. Derrida asks: 'if this great partage is the possibility of history itself, the historicity of history, what does it mean, here, "to write the history of this division ?" To write the history of historicity ? To write the history of the origin of history? ' ( 1 9 82: 43 ) . The very possibility o f history can only b e thought, Derrida claims, on the structural level that inquires into the conditions of possibility (and impossibility) of history itself. In Derrida's reading of the above quotation, Foucault claims that he has found the possibility of history within history, but to do so he would have to presuppose history itself otherwise he would be unable to write a history of madness, or of reason. Derrida argues, as I suggest above, that in presupposing history Foucault unwittingly entangles himself in a Hegelian concep­ tion of history as the world-historical march of Geist. An archaeology thus cannot approach an understanding of historicity: 'if there is a historicity proper to reason in general, the history of reason cannot be the history of its origin (which, for a start, demands the historicity of reason in general), but must be that of one of its determined figures ' ( 4 3 ) . B y reading the partage i n its systematicity that i s , b y thinking the partage as a structural condition of history - Derrida provides a conceptual understanding of history that can evade the Hegelian reach. In other words, as the possibility of history itself, historicity makes possible the same history that Hegel would appropriate to the Reason of philosophy. Historicity as a structural possibility therefore comes 'before' Hegel, without taking the place of some sort of authentic origin - that is, without attempting to out-Hegel Hegel.

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In sum, historicity as a non--Hegelian approach to history comes 'before' and 'after' Hegel. Historicity is untirr1ely. S p e ctral History It therefore becomes possible, after a necessary deferral, to turn to Derrida's most direct statements concerning a conception of history (as historicity ) in its relation to the role of the theorist/philosopher. Derrida's concern in Specters of Marx lies both with a reflection on the events of 1 9 8 9 and with a thinking of the very notion of the event in light of the discourse of the end of history. Derrida will argue that only by assuming a certain 'inheritance of Marxism' can one come to understand our responsibility to the revolutions of 1 9 8 9 . This in­ heritance, I will argue, requires untirr1eliness; it requires a thinking of history 'beyond Being' .12 How to think the continuation of history past its end ? How to conceptualize history after Hegel without falling prey to Hegel's very philosophy of history ? Derrida weaves an answer to these questions with the warp and weft of Hamlet and Marx. He begins with Hamlet (I, iii ) : Hamlet waits for the return of the ghost, his father. In this scene, Hamlet will see the ghost, the ghost of his father, for the first time. Yet, this is no appearance pure and simple - it will quickly become obvious that there can be no brute sense-data of the ghost for the ghost has already appeared the night before. He appears this time only by returning, by coming again. Derrida insists that the specter always returns, the specter is a revenant: 'one can never distinguish between ta-venir (the future-to-come) and revenant (the coming back) of a specter' ( 1 994: 3 8 ) . This scene then marks the appearance of the ghost, the return of the ghost, and the return of Hamlet's father in/as the ghost. As Hamlet will say ( and Derrida will often repeat), the time is already 'out of joint', for his father, the ghost, appears for the first time only by appearing again. The specter can only be considered untimely, and this untimeliness broaches the possibility of history, historicity. 'Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event as question of the ghost' ( 1 0 ) . 1 3 To conceptualize the event as ghostlike means to conceive of the event after the end of history, and therefore to conceptualize history after Hegel without recapitulating a Hegelian philosophy of history: 'If we have been insisting so much since the beginning on the logic of the ghost, it is because it points toward a thinking of the event that necessarily exceeds a binary or dialectical logic' (Derrida 1 994: 63 ). A

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binary o r a dialectical logic must assume that history moves i n a timely fashion that involves either a linear progression (or regression), or a dialectical rnarch upward from stage to stage, with negative mornents being subsumed along the way. But what Derrida refers to here as the 'logic of the ghost', and what I am calling a spectral notion of history/ 4 interrupts this timely movement of history because the ghost can never be located, placed, or fixed in time. Since the specter's appearance always turns out to be a reappearance, that very appear­ ance can never be found within a timely conception of history. The untimeliness of the specter calls for an untimely thinking of history. Derrida gives a name to the thinking that would work through this logic of the ghost. He calls it historicity or hauntology: 'it would harbor within itself, but like circurnscribed places or particular effects, eschatology and teleology themselves . It would comprehend them, but incomprehensibly. How to comprehend in fact the discourse of the end or the discourse about the end ? ' ( 1 0 ) . To 'comprehend incom­ prehensibly' means to think beyond Being by developing a notion of history after Hegel without trying to exceed ( in metaphysical fashion) Hegel's philosophy of history . My previous elaboration on the idea of historicity can throw some light on these claims; historicity incom­ prehensibly cornprehends the discourse on the end because historicity lays the conditions of possibility for a Hegelian philosophy of history without attempting to outdo the Hegelian Aufhebung. 15 The question of the ghost (the ghost as event, the event as ghost) supplements this first understanding of historicity by building upon it. Derrida draws two conclusions about spectral history: ( 1 ) to think the event after the end of history requires us to consider the event in its ghostlike appearance, in its spectrality, but (2) and most importantly, the 'scholar' will always wish to avoid any association with ghosts. 1 6 The scholar - the philosopher, the theorist refuses to seriously consider that ghosts rnight appear, that is, reappear. The dismissal of ghosts as falling outside the purview of serious investigation (out­ side the realm of knowledge) is one of the first steps of 'scholarship': There has never been a scholar who, a s such, does not believe i n the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being ('to be or not to be', in the conventional reading), in the opposition between what is present and what is not, for example in the form of objectivity. (Derrida 1 994: 1 1 )

Or, to continue the trope, there has never been a scholar who, as a scholar, did not believe in the fundamental nature of the distinction

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between 'first-order' and 'second-order' inquiry, 'the concrete, em­ pirical world' and the 'meta theoretical level', the 'actual political world' and 'remote theoretical constructs' . I have no desire to accuse Isaac of any sort of naive empiricism, but clearly the conception of political theory as problem-solver entrenches itself on this foundering foundation of the actual/inactual distinction. As a scholar, Isaac tells the field to stop playing with ghosts and get down to the serious business of political theory, but one concrete implication of a spectral history may lie precisely in illuminating the importance of untimely theory as a 'serious' endeavor. To take seriously the notion that historical events might retain a certain ghostly or spectral quality requires one to reconsider the role of theory beyond merely its relation to past problems that history has given us to solve. Spectral history demands a theory that considers the ghosts of the past and the specters (and events ) to come. In other writings ( 1 992b ) Derrida has made a subtle but crucially important distinction between the future as simply future present and the future as the yet-to-come, avenir. The future as future present is nothing more than a point 'upstream' in the river of time, a point that will soon arrive and become present; it is the future as thought through a linear or dialectical conception of time. Of course, almost all conceptions of time and of history must contain some notion of the future, but a spectral history eschews the future present for an avenir, a yet-to­ come, since ghosts might always return or disappear. One could say that specters are always yet-to-come, but the present tense, 'are always', would rob the sentence of its sense of avenir. Thus, one rr1ight do better to write specters are always already yet-to-come. Conj oining 'always ' and 'already' serves to highlight the untimeliness of specters. 1 7 In his discussion of Hamlet, Derrida augments this notion by writing l'a-venir, which the translators choose to render in English as the future-to-come. That is, the future to come, the future not in the sense of a future present but in the sense of a yet-to-come. L'a-venir, an untimely future. At this point Derrida brings in the writings of Marx, arguing that they contain their own sense of untimeliness through a notion of l'a-venir. Marx and Engels call for the very transformation of their theories in the future, in a future that is yet-to-come. Writing in 1 994, Derrida cites as one example the case of ' Engels' Preface to the 1 8 8 8 re-edition' of the Manifesto ( 1 3 ), 1 8 and today one can also look to Eric Hobsbawrr1's reintroduction to the 1 5 0th anniversary edition of the Manifesto. Hobsbawm points out that a number of the theses

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enumerated i n the Manifesto 'became obsolete almost immediately' ( 1 99 8 : 1 1 ) . In a sense, then, the Manifesto was not timely, as it could not solve the political problems of the day, and Marx and then Engels continued to reprint the Manifesto even though it contained references to practical politics that were no longer valid or meaningful. None­ theless, Hobsbawm rerr1ains convinced that Marx's critique of capi­ talist society proves even more significant today, in the face of the collapse of Soviet-style communism after the revolutions of 1 9 89, than it did in the mid-nineteenth century. Derrida echoes this sentirnent, and he also highlights what is so important about the untimeliness of the Manifesto: I know of few texts in the philosophical tradition, perhaps none, whose lesson seemed more urgent today, provided that one take into account what Marx and Engels themselves say about their own possible aging and their intrinsically irreducible historicity. What other thinker has ever issued a similar warning in such an explicit fashion? Who has ever called for the transformation to come of his own theses ? ( 1994: 13)

In other words, what makes the Manifesto's message so compelling today - and so important for contemporary politics - is precisely its untimeliness, its ability to await the return of specters to come. While Marx and Engels certainly addressed the pressing political issues of their own time directly, they insisted that the 'problems' their theories would solve might well be future problems - future in the sense of l'a-venir, a future-to-come witnessed only by their ghosts. One has to inherit the untimely spirit in marxisrr1 in order to 'keep faith with what has always rnade marxism in principle and first of all a radical critique, namely a procedure ready to undertake its self­ critique. This critique wants itself to be in principle and explicitly open to its own transformation, re-evaluation, self-reinterpretation' ( 8 8 ) . This openness to l'a-venir constitutes one of the primary marks of untimely theory; it gives that theory the ability to negotiate and even converse with specters, without trying vainly to silence or eliminate them - or worse, to pretend they are not 'there', that is, that they will not return. To believe in the distinction between first-order and second-order inquiry - or, more naively, to think that history could come to an end ­ one would have to presume that ghosts could be arrested and silenced so that their meanings could be exhaustively interpreted once and for all. Derrida comments at length on this theme in Hamlet, noting the guards' repeated request for Horatio to call out and question the

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specter of Ha1nlet's father: 'thou art a scholar, speak to it, Horatio'. As a scholar himself, Isaac's concern often centers on denying the spectral quality of history, as he calls on political theorists to get the rneanings in history sorted out. Isaac speaks repeatedly of theorists' 'reticence to interpret current events' and continually criticizes theorists for not offering up their 'interpretation' of the 'meanings of 1 9 8 9' ( 1 995 : 63 7, 63 9 ) . For Isaac, theory must rernain timely . I t must solve the problems that the 'actual political world' confronts it with in the present. It must answer these problems at the right time, and in the present. And to 1naintain this timeliness, political theory must ignore the traces of ghosts and assume that time could never be 'out of j oint' . Given the persistence of this theme in his argument, Isaac construes any lack of timeliness as tardiness . He assumes that if theory is not on time, it can at best be too early, while at worst, and more often, it will be too late. He writes, for example, 'the failure of political theory to address [the revolutions of 1 9 8 9] represents a missed opportunity' ( 649 ) . Unless theory remains attentive to the problems that the political world gives up, Isaac argues that it loses its significance. And yet, surely a space can and should be carved and preserved for theory as an untimely endeavor that both opens up a thinking toward the future and calls into question any assured interpretations of the meanings of the past. Once untimeliness is thought - along the lines I have been suggesting ­ outside the terms of a linear or dialectical conception of history, it can no longer be so easily dismissed as rnerely arriving on the scene too late. Untimely political theory calls our attention to political problems that we never foresaw; it stays attentive to l'a-venir, aware that the specter, as a revenant, might always return. So even the problerns that seem 'solved' may still contain lurking ghosts. Isaac's framework has no patience for these games with ghosts; it seeks, if not to eli1ninate untimely theory altogether, then at least to relegate it to 'second-order' status. However, the 'problem' with being sure that one can simply interpret the events of 1 9 8 9 (or any other events in history ) and explain their meaning lies in the way this approach leads one to rest one's position, along with that of other 'scholars', upon the actual/ inactual distinction - irnplying along the way at least a weak version of the end-of-history thesis . Derrida suggests that this discourse on the end of history, re-invigorated by the events of 1 9 89 and Francis Fukuyarna's interpretation of them ( 1 992), seems itself to have come a bit late - it lacks timeliness given the proclamations of the 'ends of

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man', 'end of Marxism', 'end of history', and 'last man' as far back as the 1 95 0s ( 1 994: 1 4 ) . Derrida frames this phenomenon as follows: As for those who abandon themselves to that discourse [on the end of history] with the jubilation of youthful enthusiasm, they look like late­ corners, a little as if it were possible to take still the last train after the last train and yet be late to the end of history.How can one be late to the end of history? A question for today. It is serious because it obliges one to reflect again, as we have been doing since Hegel, on what happens and deserves the name event, after history; it obliges one to wonder if the end of history is but the end of a certain concept of history. ( 15)

Derrida's ironic reference to being 'late to the end of history' serves to highlight the connections, which have been present throughout this discussion, between historicity and untimeliness . Only by focusing on untimeliness not as 'missing the train' but in the sense of Hamlet's lament that 'the time is out of joint' does one begin to glitnpse historicity as the possibility of history itself. How can one be late to the end of history ? If the time is out of j oint, then maybe one will always already be late to the end of history. If the time is out of joint, how could one ever arrive at the end of history on time? In a linear or dialectical model of time, the end of history would have to be just that: the end point on the line or the culmination of the dialectic. But if history continues to go on - and given the popularity of Fukuyama's work, continues to end then one can only understand how it does so by turning to a different thinking of tirne. Thus, Heidegger's response to the continual ending of metaphysics, that is, a nonmetaphysical thinking of language, serves as a clue to an untirr1ely response to the end of history. As I have repeatedly suggested, both Heideggerian 'language' and untimeliness are 'beyond Being' in the sense that they are outside the metaphysical terms of an instrumental conception and outside the linear stream of time. A spectral thinking of the historical event tends to strengthen the point I only hinted at above: namely, that Isaac's conception of theory and history in the particular relation he articulates cuts off the very possibility of proposing a different concept of history after Hegel. And, if the path has been blocked for theorists to think history differently, then we are faced with the totally debilitating choice of either endorsing a Hegelian conception of history or loudly announ­ cing its utter demise (which amounts to the same thing, since to propose the end of history also means to accept a I-Iegelian history a point exemplified by Fukuyama, who does both explicitly ) .

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My reading of Derridean historicity as untimeliness provides po­ litical theorists with an alternative way to approach history and therefore a less constrictive way of considering what 'theory is and should be' . However, it proves absolutely crucial to stress here that Derrida's 'alternative' proves neither programmatic nor explicit. Historicity gives us a way to conceptualize and understand history after Hegel (and in his wake) ; it gets us out of Isaac's confining binaries, but where we go from there remains an important choice, a deciding gesture (partage) . Derrida gives some suggestions for possible directions, and most importantly he insists that historicity makes possible a future history - possibly even a 'post-history' - full of its own specters: Whatever may be its indetermination, be it that of 'there must be the future-to-come' [ 'il faut l'a-venir'] , there is some future and some history, there is perhaps even the beginning of historicity for post-historical Man, beyond man and beyond history such as they have been represented up until now.We must insist on this specific point precisely because it points to an essential lack of specificity, an indetermination that remains the ultimate mark of the future: whatever may be the case concerning the modality or the content of this duty, this necessity, this prescription or this injunction, this pledge, this task, also therefore this promise, this necessary promise, this 'it is necessary' is necessary, and that is the law. This indifference to content here is not an indifference, it is not an attitude of indifference, on the contrary.Marking an opening to the event and to the future as such, it therefore conditions the interest in and not the indifference to anything whatsoever, to all content in general.Without it, there would be neither intention, nor need, nor desire, and so on. (73, translation modified)

If 'there is some future and some history' beyond any pronouncement of their ends, and if that future--to-come retains the possibility of ghosts, then we cannot ignore the possibility that one of those specters will be that of Marx. For Derrida, we cannot but consider our possible inheritance of a certain spirit of marxism. This inheritance, this thinking of temporality, makes possible a future historicity, a continuation of history beyond its end. 1 8 But this future history necessarily demands a future responsibility, a respon­ sibility to the future-to-come, il faut l'a-venir. Spectral history requires a responsibility to ghosts, and this responsibility concomitantly entails untimely theory, since one can never be on time when it comes to the specter. Derrida suggests that such responsibility might entail a challenge to the triumphal discourse of the end of history and the

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death of marxism. With the hegemony of these discourses comes an enervating narrowing of political choices, as only political liberalism seerns a viable option ( 5 2 ) . Derrida argues with sorne urgency that we are witnessing the installation of a dominant discourse, 'an unprece­ dented form of hegemony', that takes the death of marxisn1 and the end of history as its substructure. Only by taking the event of the 'end of history' in a different theoretical trajectory can one open the space for political resistance to this hegemony - thereby finding a place for the responsibility to an untimely future. Thus, Derrida suggests that 'where history is finished, there where a certain determined concept of history comes to an end, precisely there the historicity of history begins, there finally it has the chance of heralding itself' (7 4 ). As Nietzsche says, only after the death of God does His shadow begin to play on the walls of the cave ( 1 92 1 : 1 4 7). The ending of history does not make history simply over and done with; it gathers history into its extren1e possibility. The shadows of history, the continuation of history beyond its end, actuates historicity. And just as the death of God called for new struggles on the part of Nietzschean free spirits, the shadows at the end of history require that political theorists grapple with historicity - an untimely encounter indeed. The struggle against the hegemonic triumph of western liberal capitalism must take the form, according to Derrida, of the possibility for the New International. Following from the lengthy quotation above, this New International lacks a substantive content in Derrida's argument precisely because it remains open to a future histor( icit)y, and because it refuses to accept the received (end of history ) view of the past. Derrida 's inheritance of a certain spirit of marxism insists that the attempt to bury marxism forever will necessarily fail. This for two reasons: first, because, echoing Marx, 'never, never in history, has the horizon of the thing whose survival is being celebrated (namely, all the old models of the capitalist and liberal world) been as dark, threatening, and threatened' ( 72 ) ; and second, because even from the grave (that is, as ghosts ) Marx and marxism will wield an undeniable power ( 9 7 ) . Derrida's untin1ely approach to the end of history declines to assun1e either a stable meaning of the past or a stable direction for the future, but 'at the same time' it refuses to eschew the responsibility to history a history full of ghosts, a spectral history . I contend that Derrida's differently-oriented thinking of history, after the 'end' of history, makes possible exactly this untimely re­ sponsibility to history as historicity. In order specifically to keep open

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this type of responsibility, spectral history refuses to accept any sort of clean distinction between the real and nonreal, the actual and nonactual. Ultimately, accepting such dichotorr1ies only 'locks up, neutralizes, and finally cancels historicity' ( 74 ) . When he rests his argument so heavily upon the first-order/second-order distinction, Isaac does j ust this. He demands a timely response to historical events that either ignores ghosts or tries to arrest them. But a conversation with ghosts can never be titnely since we never know when they are going to show up, nor if they will even speak when they do appear. In ignoring the possibilities for untimeliness, Isaac's argument relegates the role of the contemporary theorist to a (only marginally different) form of the Kuhnian puzzle-solver now problem-solver - of which he is so rightly critical. The critical force of political theory thereby slips out from under the political theorist, and with it goes the possibility of practical change that Isaac so urgently calls for. The responsibility of the theorist must be something more, and maybe something less, than simply a response to the 'problems ' that the real, actual world gives up. An Untimely R e s p o n s ib ility to 1 9 8 9 Derrida will elaborate on his own version of responsibility in a variety of ways, rnany of which prove significant for the responsibility of the political theorist to history in general, and to the events of 1 9 8 9 in particular. Moreover, it would appear, strangely enough, that when it comes to the question of responsibility, Derrida and Isaac may actually have quite a bit in common. Underlying Isaac's critique of the discipline of political theory one detects the overwhelming sentiment that we owe a certain responsibility to the events of 1 9 89, as well as to the emerging and fragile democracies created by those events . As I discuss above, Isaac articulates the importance of this responsibility by expressing his 'shock' at finding almost no attention paid to these events within the political theory literature. Derrida, too, will repeat­ edly emphasize political responsibility to 1 9 89, and here their texts converge. But the convergence proves both temporary and illusory, because of the nature of the responsibility that each author defends. It is in fact the differences between them that prove rr1ost helpful in confronting the issue - broached by Isaac but far exceeding the scope of his arguments of the role of the political theorist. Isaac urges a responsibility to 1 9 8 9 that turns out to be a responsibility to the

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present, to solving political problems today. For this reason, Isaac accuses political theorists of tardiness, of not responding at the right tirne; for Isaac, time is running out. On the other hand, the political responsibility urged by Derrida can be appropriated to help develop an understanding of political theory as an untimely enterprise. For an untimely theory, the concept of political responsibility must include a responsibility not only to the present and past but also to the future - a responsibility to l'a-venir. Derrida's point of departure lies in a certain responsibility to respond to the events of 1 9 8 9 - his reading of Marx and Hamlet appears in the form of a keynote address to a conference organized specifically to focus on the international political environment constituted in the wake of the revolutions of 1 9 8 9 and for just this reason his presentation takes the tack of inquiring into the very possibility of 'the event', in light of those particular events . More specifically and more significantly, Derrida continually affirms the necessity of maintaining a certain political responsibility in his reading of Marx. He aims his criticisms at those who would take the ' death of Marxisrr1' as an opportunity to re­ appropriate Marx for the halls of academe, at 'people who would be ready to accept the return of Marx or the return to Marx, on the condition that a silence is maintained about Marx's inj unction not just to decipher but to act and to make the deciphering (the interpretation) into a transformation that "changes the world" ' (32; quoting Marx 1 97 8 : 1 4 5 ) . Derrida characterizes this move as an attempt to choose Marx over marxism - or Marxology over either (Nimtz 2000) - with its long and tumultuous political history. This sort of appropriation operates precisely by denying the untimeliness of marxism. As I show above, what Derrida points to as radical in the thought of Marx and Engels - their calls for the transformation of their own arguments are exactly those untimely elements of their writings. But choosing Marx over marxism runs the risk of 'neutraliz[ing] ' or at least 'muffl[ing] ' the 'political imperative' in their work, because it freezes that work in place, puts it in a time capsule, and squeezes it into a particular corner of the canon. In contrast, Derrida will suggest the necessity of maintaining a responsibility to the political gesture always present in Marx's work ( and, Derrida would argue, in his own as well) : to insist even more on what commands us today, without delay, to do everything we can so as to avoid the neutralizing anesthesia of a new theoreticism, and to prevent a philosophico-philological return to Marx from prevailing. Let us spell things out, let us insist: to do everything we can so that it does not prevail, but not to avoid its taking place, because it

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remains just as necessary. This will cause me, for the moment, to give priority to the political gesture I am making here. (32)

Only a certain vigilance in retaining this gesture will prevent the above appropriation of Marx into the canon of 'great philosophers', and simultaneous removal of his thought and work from the political field. No doubt, the understanding of the political that Derrida stresses here lies a great distance fro1n the problems to be solved by politics in Isaac's conception. Derrida urges responsibility not j ust to the past events of 1 9 89, but to the future as well. And again, this future cannot be merely a future present, it must be an avenir. Thus, Derrida urges a responsibility to the ghosts of 1 9 8 9 that may return again (including the specters of Marx) . In short, he wants to articulate a political responsibility while simultaneously refusing to play the scholar who would attempt to extract a specific meaning from those events or develop a programmatic form of politics. This sort of responsibility depends upon a politics of untimely agency, and its untimeliness makes such responsibility appear necessarily quite distinct from that advocated by Isaac. Nevertheless, untimely responsibility, il {aut l'a-venir, re1nains a crucial political responsibility exactly because it can never have matters over and done with. The responsibility of an untirnely politics consists of the need to remain ever vigilant, given its commitment to the possible (re)appearance of specters. The untimely theorist might go so far as to reread Jefferson's famous quote, 'eternal vigilance is the price of liberty', as a reference to the ghosts that democracy nourishes and sustains . Attentiveness to historicity must thereby heighten our political responsibility, while insisting on the untimeliness of that responsibility as well - an absolutely central point that Derrida captures with the repetition of the phrase that I too have begun to echo, il {aut l'a-venir. Historicity cannot be demanded in any exact form since it is not an object that could ever be given up in its full presence. Ghosts can never be fully arrested and interrogated, and even the meaning of their appearance can never be fixed once and for all. Yet one can remain attentive to the effects of historicity and one can still discourse with the ghosts of 1 9 89 ( but only, of course) while remaining aware that they are ghosts. And ghosts, like shadows on the wall, may return, or disappear, or never even show up at all: 'ha's this thing appear'd againe tonight? ' ( 1 1 ; citing Hamlet: I, i ) . From Isaac's point o f view this would make Derrida's political gesture an untimely one in the sense of being too little too late -

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because it provides no direct answers to the pressing political problems faced by the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe and the fonner Soviet Union. Derrida's reading - as Isaac might emphasize it, and as I will emphasize in the next chapter 1 9 - of Hamlet and Marx would thereby constitute a second-order form of inquiry, and therefore yet another 'missed opportunity'. Maybe so. But an untimely theory of politics in the sense that time is 'out of joint' - provides an entirely new lens for viewing Derrida's position here: to characterize Derrida's political gesture as untimely should not lead one to conclude (as Isaac might want to) that his argument can thereby be relegated to the sphere of the non- or apolitical. The untimeliness of Derrida's claims and contentions prevents one from listing their specific political content, but precisely this openness to an unspecifiable ( and ghostly ) future, coupled with a putting-into­ question of the past, prevents one from foreclosing the political domain in Derrida's writings. Indeed, it is exactly the untimely openness, an openness to l'a-venir, that expands the political im­ plications of those writings . For Derrida, the events of 1 9 8 9 will always return to haunt not only contemporary political theorists but also current political events - the very locus of concern for Isaac and his respondents. This perpetual recurrence makes Isaac's attempt to arrest the events, to speak to them, and to 'interpret the[ir] meaning' ineffective and ill-advised. The constraints applied to the political theorist by the distinction between first-order and second-order inquiry prove too restrictive for the field. Isaac's desire to respond to the events of 1 9 8 9 is an admirable one, but turning political theory into a problem-solving activity that confronts the 'real world' will not serve to achieve Isaac's goals of changing that world. History must be taken as something much more than simply a scarce resource for solving problems; political theorists must consider seriously its spectral effects. This irnplies that theory must be able to look to these spectral effects of historicity, to communicate with ghosts without trying to arrest thern. By thinking carefully and critically through a non-Hegelian approach to history, political theorists can relieve themselves of the burden imposed by Isaac's recapitulation of a Hegelian conception and begin to consider the possibilities offered by a politics of untimeliness. Only then maybe, finally, can theorists begin to examine or possibly solve certain problems in the world. More importantly, only then can political theory break free both from the disciplinary confinements that Isaac criticizes and from the problem-solving matrix that he tries to impose.

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Only then can political theorists start to render problen1atic that which in the present does not even appear as a problem. [Enter Ghost] HAMLET:

Angels and ministers of grace defend us! B e thou a spirit o f health or goblin damn'd, Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou comest in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee: I'll call thee Hamlet, King, father, royal Dane: 0, answer me! Let me not burst in ignorance; but tell Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death, Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre, Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn'd, Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws, To cast thee up again. What may this mean, That thou, dead corpse, again in complete steel Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous; and we fools of nature So horridly to shake our disposition With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls ? Say, why is this ? wherefore? what should we do? [Ghost beckons] Act I, Scene v.

N ot e s 1. Connolly's ( 1 995 a ) concern lies with the addressee of Isaac's piece, by asking why Isaac's charges seem directed rnainly at a group of 'posties' ( Connolly's word) . McClure ( 1 995) asks about the very scope of political theory: should it be confined to what gets published in narrowly-defined theory j ournals, or might the field be better defined by the work done by those who call themselves political theorists ? Connolly broaches an important internal debate and McClure raises some important questions about interdisciplinary and multi-genre work, but neither respon­ dent investigates the core of Isaac's demand directly. 2. One is led to wonder to what extent Isaac's first-order/second­ order distinction privileges the work of contemporary political theorists. Would the work of someone who studies Thucydides or Montaigne automatically be relegated to second-order status ?

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3 . Before moving on, one could intervene here with a 'practical' set of questions for Isaac and problem-solving theory: does political theory really ever solve political problems ? Does the political theorist provide policy prescriptions that allow politicians to overcome legislative impasses ? Or, are 'real, practical' problerns always grappled with inside of 'the political arena' ? Doesn't the political theorist ask questions ? Doesn't the political theorist rnake it possible to think a bout political problems from a new or unique perspective, or to see what is problematic (or even political) in a different light - and simultaneously, to allow students (whose cornplete absence in the debate over the role of the political theorist strikes me as somewhat strange) to think differently/critically/carefully ? None of this is to say that what the political theorist does will not somehow, sorneday, lead to the solving of problems, but whether solving problems ought to be the first task of the theorist is another question entirely. More­ over, if Isaac takes his own conception of political theory ser­ iously, it seems highly conspicuous that rather than solve problems himself he tends to rnerely call on his colleagues to read a different set of authors ('Havel, Michnik, Lipski, Konrad, Szelenyi, Sakharov and others' (63 9 ) ) than the ones 'we' read now. Within Isaac's own framework for understanding political theory this would seem to constitute not a shift from second-order to first-order inquiry, but merely a switch from one type of second-order inquiry to another. 4. Martin suggests many diverse authors who have proposed various versions of post-Hegelian history: Marx, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Althusser, and finally Derrida. But after setting up this context, Martin provides little to fill in Derrida's concept of history as post-Hegelian; instead, he turns to other tasks . See also Gasche ( 1 9 8 6 ) . 5 . Like differance and all the other Derridean infrastructures, historicity is neither a word nor a concept: 'no longer simply a concept, but rather the possibility of conceptuality, of a concep­ tual process and system in general . . . not simply a word, that is, what is generally represented as the calm, present, and self­ referential unity of concept and phonic material' ( 1 982: 1 1 ) . 6. I cite the French edition because i t first appeared with a n eleven­ page preface to which most of Derrida's criticisms refer. The second French edition ( 1 972a) changed the title of the work and completely eliminated this preface. The English translation ( 1 965)

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

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is based upon the first edition, but it is also an abridged version of the text and most of the key passages to which Den·ida refers have been edited out. Therefore, the brunt of Derrida's critique of Foucault focuses on passages that have never, to my knowledge, been published in English. Foucault writes: 'what is in question is not a history of knowledge but rather the basic rnovements of an experience. A history, not of psychiatry, but of madness itself in its vivacity, before any capture of knowledge' ( 1 96 1 : vii, quoted in Cook 1 99 3 ) . I presurr1e that this translation is Cook's herself, but she does not note this explicitly. Foucault also remained sensitive to the length of the shadow cast by Hegel. In his inaugural lecture at the College de France Foucault defined the rnodern condition by its effort to escape Hegel's pervasive influence ( Cook 1 99 3 : 2 ) . This translation comes a t a price: i n gaining a more general understanding of historicity, Den·ida sacrifices Foucault's histor­ ical specificity. Of course, the partage is not the 'deciding gesture' of an indivi­ dual or group of individuals; rather, it marks a structural shift at the level of discursive practices. Derrida fails to provide the page number for the citation. In the end, historicity and untimeliness will prove to be opposite sides of the same coin: 'what is said here about time is also valid, consequently and by the sa1ne token, for history' (Derrida 1 994: 18). A further point that Derrida fails to mention: Hamlet and the ghost share the sarr1e nan1e, as Hamlet says to the ghost 'I'll call thee Hamlet.' So, in a sense, Hamlet himself is the ghost; his agency must already be untimely. Here I owe a debt to Gregory Weight. It should be noted from ahnost the outset that a 'spectral' history is itself a history of spirit, of esprit - that is, of Geist, of Hegel. Spectral history, in opposing itself to a Hegelian philosophy of history, certainly 'takes Hegel at his word' . Meaning, all a t once, t o lift up, relieve, cancel out, and annihilate, Aufhebung is often translated as sublate, and even more often left untranslated. The Aufhebung constitutes the dialectical logic that characterizes the teleological movement of Geist, because the Aufhebung can comprehend and synthesize all the positive and negative elements in history that precede it. Only through the

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1 6.

1 7. 18.

19.

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Aufhebung can history reach its c01npletion in Hegel's philoso­ phy. For this reason, a reconsideration of history after Hegel requires one to both reflect on the Aufhebung and avoid reiter­ ating it in another guise. 'There has never been a scholar who really, and as scholar, deals with ghosts. A traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts' (Derrida 1 994: 1 1 ) . Derrida writes, 'what i s the time and what i s the history of a specter ? Is there a present of the specter ? ' ( 1 994: 3 9 ) . I d o not tnean the empirical fact o f history's end, but rather the structural litnits of the philosophical conception of history announced by Hegel and consciously or unconsciously reiterated by so many others . As the discussion of Foucault, above, makes clear, history's end in this sense certainly could not occur in history. Isaac's hypothetical emphasis on reading would serve to distin­ guish reading frorn doing, second-order inquiry from first-order inquiry . In Chapter 4, I will try to distinguish reading from interpreting, not in order to separate two different sorts of second-order inquiry, but to articulate a different type of political criticistn. Having already rejected Isaac's first-order/second-order distinction, I will e1nphasize reading so as to develop this vision of political criticisn1 as a different way of doing political theory. While Isaac and I are definitely not following the same path, to the extent that we share this latter goal we are certainly headed in the same direction.

Cha

4

Untimely Reading: Foucault's Evasive Maneuvers

The standard practice of intellectual historiography in the field of political theory tends to rema in 'timely' to the extent that it follows an established, often canonized, timeline. Teaching the history of political thought chronologically necessarily draws instructors of political philosophy toward a focus on influence, prolepsis, and the creation of coherent doctrines. How did author A influence or anticipate the work of author B? How does the work of both authors contribute to a certain political doctrine ? These sorts of questions presuppose time­ liness because they assmne a certain inevitability to the doctrine in question. Of course, those who study the history of political thought have already critically challenged this approach on the grounds that it imposes a backward-looking and false coherence upon disparate texts. 1 Nevertheless, from the perspective I wish to articulate here, the alternative method of intellectual historiography - a focus on historical context seeking to uncover the actual intentions of the author - falls prey to the same, timely, problems : both 1nethods of intellectual historiography atternpt to situate an author and his or her work within a rather rigid web of influence or meaning. Explicitly or implicitly, then, these methods uphold a notion of general interpreta­ tion that can eventually exhaust the rneaning of not just the author's writings but even the author as well. It is with these broader questions of intellectual historiography in mind that I would like to consider the problem of reading the writings of Foucault. Gary Gutting has recently remarked that the works of Foucault call immediately for sorne sort of general interpretation, 'but the need to interpret Foucault sits ill with his own desire to escape general interpretive categories' ( 1 994: 1 , emphasis added ) . 2 The compulsion to play the intellectual historian in reading Foucault proves particularly strong among those who have treated the relation

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of Foucault to Nietzsche. In particular, attempts to place Foucault within the history of thought often end up tracing Foucault's position back to Nietzsche. By resting the interpretation of Foucault upon his 'Nietzscheanisrn', this kind of intellectual historiography functions as an enabling device for the strongest and most compelling criticisrns of Foucault. After all, most of these accounts take Nietzsche's supposed skeptical-relativism as a given; so if Foucault turns out to be a Nietzschean he also turns out to be a 'cryptonormativist' at best, a nihilist at worst. No sensitive reader of Foucault attempts to reject all of his insights, but many, especially political theorists, tend to turn sharply away frmn Foucault precisely as Foucault himself turns toward Nietzsche. As Jiirgen Habermas, possibly Foucault's best critic, puts it: 'only in the context of his interpretation of Nietzsche does Foucault yield to the farniliar melody of professing irrationalism' ( 1 9 8 7: 277 ) . 3 This chapter provides a closer reading of Foucault that calls into question both the reduction of his thought to Nietzscheanism and the very practice of interpretation by which his thought is so reduced. Foucault engages in a set of maneuvers that evade the atte1npt to pin him down in this way; he thus challenges precisely the rules of the game of the intellectual historian to which Habermas and others subject him. Charting the course of these evasive maneu­ vers 1nakes it possible to grasp the nature of Foucault's challenge to interpretation and therefore to render problematic the dominant criticisms of Foucault within political thought. Those criticisms, I will suggest, presuppose ti1neliness, while Foucault's writings on history, authorship, and interpretation lead to a notion of 'untimely reading' that can provide a key cmnponent for a politics of untimeli­ ness. R e a ding F o u cault, Rej e cting Nietz s ch e There i s nothing necessarily new about resisting the tendency to call Foucault a 'Nietzschean', since no one was more averse to such a strategy of labeling than Foucault himself: 'the only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche's is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest. And if commentators then say that I atn being faithful or unfaithful to Nietzsche, that is of absolutely no interest' ( 1 9 8 0 a : 53-4 ) . Yet this remark by Foucault has not deterred his 'cmnmentators' in the least. Many of them have been concerned not merely to test the authenticity of his appropriation of Nietzsche, but, more significantly, to use this ostensible appropriation as a tool for

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dismissing Foucault's work - and specifically for maligning its poli­ tical significance. The practice of such commentary leads to a rejection of Foucault and a denunciation of his political relevance via a pre­ supposed critique of Nietzsche ( see Gutting 1 9 8 9 : 277; cf. Allen 1 99 1 ) . This tendency t o read Foucault and reject Nietzsche i s shared both by some of Foucault's most important critics (Rorty 1 9 86; McCarthy 1 990b; Habermas 1 9 8 7; Taylor 1 9 8 6 ) and even his apparent defen­ ders (Norris 1 995; Visker 1 995; Simons 1 995 ) . Critics use the rejec­ tion of Nietzsche as a critique of Foucault, while defenders use Nietzschean epistemological problerns as the limit of Foucault's thought - the place where they part company with Foucault. In briefly documenting this pattern of reducing Foucault to his Nietzscheanism, I will focus only on the former group, since the latter tacitly assu1nes the validity of the fonTler's critique. Taylor probably a1nasses more references to Foucault's Nietzscheanism than any other commentator (with at least fifteen in his brief article) , but Rorty's corntnentary offers perhaps the most straightforward case of reading Foucault and rejecting Nietzsche. Rorty argues ( 1 9 8 6 ) , against Hacking ( 1 979), that Foucault's early engagement with Kant ( 1 973 a ) cannot produce a coherent and tenable epistemology. Close readers of Foucault tnight wish to question Rorty's very point of departure, since Foucault consistently insisted that he sought not a 'theory' of knowledge or of power but an understanding of their historical and dynatnic interdependence; Foucault's writings offer cautionary tnethodological prescriptions and historical analytics, never theories . Yet Rorty's argument may prove illuminating none­ theless, particularly in what it reveals about the tendency to reduce Foucault's thought to the supposed relativism of Nietzsche. Rorty divides epistemology into three possible branches - Cartesian, Hege­ lian, and Nietzschean and then suggests that we might think of Foucault as a Hegelian epistemologist, who rejects the fixed and obj ective reality of Cartesianisrn and argues instead that rationality always remains historically and sociologically constructed. But Rorty quickly dismisses this possibility: his argument turns critical when he explains that Foucault's epistemology is, in fact, Nietzschean. One might j ustifiably ask how Rorty makes the transi­ tion frorr1 the possibility that Foucault is a Hegelian to the conclusive claim that he is a Nietzschean. The answer appears to be that Rorty stacked the deck against Foucault, since Rorty only toys with the idea that Foucault's epistemology would prove Hegelian; the Nietzschean

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conclusion seems inevitable in Rorty's interpretation. Rorty's own emphasis here is clear: 'Foucault's Nietzschean attitude towards the idea of epistemology is that there is nothing optimistic to say . . . The Nietzschean wants to abandon the striving for objectivity and intui­ tion that Truth is One, not to redescribe or to ground it' (Rorty 1 9 8 6 : 4 6 ) . I n short, according t o Rorty, because Foucault i s truly a Nietzschean he 'abandons' obj ectivity, truth, and rationality and therefore has 'nothing optimistic to say'; following Rorty, 'we' will therefore have no reason to follow Foucault in his Nietzschean nihilism. Given what Rorty sees as the tainted status of Foucault's 'Nietzschean' claims, Rorty himself has very little optimistic to say about Foucault's thought. Rorty sweepingly dismisses Foucault's 'Nietzschean bravura' as 'so-called "anarchism" ', 'self-indulgent ra­ dical chic', and 'anarchist claptrap' (47). I am not the first to question Rorty's excessive reading or his excessive rhetoric; even Foucault's most careful and cautious biographer submits that Rorty's judgement 'suggests little concrete knowledge and a lot of credit in hearsay' (Macey 1 99 3 : 43 1 ; see also Halperin 1 995 : 24). My main point of ernphasis here lies in showing that only where Rorty turns Foucault into a Nietzschean does he both rej ect Foucault philosophically and slander him rhetorically . Within Rorty's argument, Foucault's lack of a coherent epistemology, his absence of a positive political theory, and his nihilistic political tendencies all hinge on his Nietzscheanisrn. Habermas's reading of Foucault may well be the starkest example of this same phenomenon of repudiating Foucault for his Nietzschean­ ism, but it also proves the most cornplicated. Habermas's critique of Foucault must be traced back to his reading of Hegel as that thinker who first identified modernity as a 'problem' . Hegel thereby left to us 'late moderns' a choice of paths to follow. The first trail attempts to resurrect reason in 'a more modest fashion' and it has been followed closely by the thinkers of the Frankfurt school (Habermas : 1 9 8 7: 43 ) . All other paths derive from two Nietzschean strategies - skeptical genealogy and deconstruction - both designed to 'reduce everything that is and should be to the aesthetic dimension' and thereby to do away with reason in its entirety (95 ) . Habermas thus erects a complex and sophisticated framework that makes Foucault an heir to one of the failed trajectories (via Bataille) that develops out of Nietzsche. As such, Foucault is predestined to the 'relativism, presentism, and cryptonormativism' of which Habermas accuses him. Habermas's placement of Nietzsche within 'the philo-

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sophical discourses of modernity' as the denier of reason, and there­ fore 1nodernity itself, constitutes the very bedrock of his critique of Foucault - not to 1nention his critique of Heidegger, Derrida, and Bataille. As descendent to the legacy of Nietzschean irrationalism, it only makes sense that Foucault himself would prove to be 'incoherent' (cf. Fraser 1 9 8 1 ) . Habermas's reading of Foucault and rej ection of Nietzsche proves quite nuanced and cmnplex. Nonetheless, his cri­ tique of Foucault only holds if Foucault is in fact the Nietzschean that Haberrnas makes hi1n out to be ( see also Taylor 1 9 8 6; Connolly 1 9 85; Patton 1 9 8 9 ) . I a m not making a general o r empirical clairr1 that all political theorists who criticize Foucault do so based upon the claim of his Nietzscheanism; I am only trying to establish the primary significance of Foucault's Nietzscheanism to some of the most irnportant critiques of Foucault. But in 'documenting' this trend to read Foucault and reject Nietzsche, one must resist taking up the very role of corrlmen­ tator that Foucault calls into question. In 'L'ordre du discours', Foucault delineates the three internal mechanisms of discourse that police and order its structure. The first of these is commentary, an internal rule of discourse that upholds the hierarchy of primary and secondary text even as it pretends not to: cmnmentary 'gives us the opportunity to say something other than the text itself, but on condition that it is the text itself which is uttered, and in some ways, finalized' ( 1 972b: 22 1 ) . I have characterized Rorty and Habermas as 'commentators' in order to suggest that their interpretations of Foucault follow these very rules of corr1mentary, by describing Foucault's texts as secondary relative to Nietzsche's. The rule of commentary therefore dictates that while Foucault may appear to say something unique or new, he really only, in the end, winds up repeating the skeptical relativism of Nietzsche. In their work on Foucault, the readings of Habermas, Rorty and Taylor all follow this rule of commentary. Yet, in trying to document the trend to reduce Foucault to Nietzsche I am seduced into the very same interpretive tactic that I want to argue Foucault atterr1pts to evade: the practice of tracing intellectual influences and authorial relations, and then posi­ tioning Foucault within this network. The dangers of this seduction only raise the stakes for assessing the practice of interpretation that goes largely unquestioned in efforts to situate Foucault within the history of political thought. Thus, it becomes indispensable to turn to Foucault's writings on that practice and to reconsider his own challenges to its ground rules.

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Who i s F o u c ault ? ' Wh at is an Author ? ' Challenges to Interpretation If critics of Foucault tend to 'read Foucault and reject Nietzsche' then the rnost obvious way to refute their pervasive critiques would likely consist in disentangling Foucault from Nietzsche - thus asking the question 'are Nietzsche and Foucault really equivalent? ' The best site for this type of hermeneutical work is undoubtedly Foucault's widely­ read essay, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History'. Yet, when political theorists do turn to this essay, they tend to interpret it as a clear methodological guidebook for understanding Foucault's practice of genealogy - once again taking Foucault as a n1ere advocate of a thoroughly Nietzschean exercise. 4 These commentators often presu1ne that the 'genealogy' in the title of the piece refers directly to Foucault's genealogies; this assumption allows then1 to take passages from the article as evidence of Foucault's self-description of his own project. Rudi Visker, for exa1nple, refers to the essay as 'Foucault's explicit methodological thoughts on the status of genealogy' ( 1 99 5 : 60, emphasis added ) . Taking 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' as a state­ ment by Foucault concerning his own method only provides support for the reduction of Foucault's writings to 'Nietzscheanism' that I recounted above. Thus, this essay turns out to be rather 'timely' for the intellectual historian who takes it as paradig1natic for his or her practice of interpretation; 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History ' gives a window onto the very locus of the Nietzschean 'influence' on Foucault. Such an interpretive tendency may well have been encouraged by the original presentation of 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' to an English-reading audience. The essay was first published in the widely­ read anthology Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. The editor of that volume, Donald Bouchard, introduces the piece by saying in a footnote that, together with the introductory chapter to the Archae­ ology ol Knowledge, 'this essay represents Foucault's atte1npt to explain his relationship to those sources which are fundamental to his development. Its importance, in terms of understanding his objectives, cannot be exaggerated' ( 1 977b: 2 3 9 ) . My emphasis on Bouchard's words serves here to highlight the inclination toward an intellectual historiography that traces a linear, timely path that travels from Foucault's early influences toward his end goal. No doubt, this is merely an editor's note (one which reappeared, unchanged, in the re­ publication of the essay in The Foucault Reader) , but it does seern to

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suggest to a reader who is looking for Foucault finally to provide some clear insights into his methodology that he or she has found the right place. 5 But tracking the causes of this tendency really only begs the question: does 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' constitute a clear methodological statement on Foucault's behalf, thereby j ustifying the critiques of his Nietzscheanism? 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' presents those readers seeking methodological reassurance with a significant problem, for Foucault's direct and in-depth engagement with Nietzsche makes it difficult to tell when Foucault is speaking and when Foucault is allowing Nietzsche to speak. As I hinted at above, it is for j ust this reason that one might wish to challenge the dominant approach to the essay with an exegetical effort to extricate Foucault from Nietzsche (or vice versa ) . This interpretive work would require that one locate within Foucault's essay on Nietzsche two separate and distinct voices, one Nietzschean and one Foucauldian. Taking up 'disentangling' as an interpretive strategy would allow one to counter the distorting reading of 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' as a meth­ odological statement. Holding up a distinction between Foucault and Nietzsche might thereby clarify the issues at stake. However, Foucault's persistent elusiveness, especially on questions of method, calls into question not only the interpretation of 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' as a set of methodological principles, but also the very attempt to disentangle Foucault from Nietzsche, to separate the two voices and coherently distinguish between them. Rather than countering one error in reading (methodological state­ ment) with another one ( disentangling), I want to read Foucault's own effort to delegitimize any effort at pinning down the author (either by equating Foucault with Nietzsche or by drawing a clear line between them) . Foucault's text renders problerr1atic the very ground of inter­ pretation that his commentators must, however silently, invoke when they try to situate him - either in relation to other 'authors' or in the history of political thought in general. No doubt 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' contains Foucault's reading of Nietzsche. Does it, however, provide a methodological statement by Foucault regarding his own genealogical practice ? Just two years before the publication of 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' Foucault undermined the very idea of interpreting a text as if it were a self-revelation of the author ( 1 977b; also published in 1 9 84b ) . In so doing, he issues a challenge to both of the interpretive strategies that I sumtnarized above. Foucault claims that in contemporary writing the

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type of questions to which those strategies seek answers will no longer hold: 'we would no longer hear the questions that have been rehashed for so long: Who really spoke ? Is it really he and not someone else ? ' ( 1 984b: 1 1 9 ) . Foucault suggests that contemporary writing - o f which his own writing is no doubt a part - renders invalid either the search for the truth of the author, or the attempt to distinguish between the voice of that author and the voice of his or her object of study . What is the condition of 'today's writing' 6 such that it might undermine the possibility of general interpretation ? Foucault enlpha­ sizes not the 'death' of the author per se, but the 'disappearance' of the author into the web of discourse that he or she creates, modifies, transfonns, criticizes, and often rejects. As a practice, rather than an originary expression of a subject, writing has some central character­ istics, according to Foucault. First, writing plays out like a game7 that unfailingly breaks and transforms its own rules. Writing thus has less to do with signified content than with the always changing relations among signifiers . The disappearance of the author unmoors the text, prompting a shift in analysis from the sign/signified relation to the relation among signs themselves. Jacques Derrida emphasizes the 'iterability' of writing, the capacity for all writing to be 'cited' and thereby removed frorn one context and placed into another. 8 For Foucault, this citationality of writing - writing as an 'interplay of signs' - tends to remove writing from the confines of 'the dimension of expression' by a specific subject, that is, an author ( 1 984b: 1 02). A space thereby opens up between the subject of a series of statements and the 'author' who first wrote those statements . Thus, no matter how rigorous the method of interpretation, the 'author' may always slip away in this space: 'In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subj ect constantly disappears' ( 1 02 ) . Foucault, I will argue below, struggles constantly t o open and maintain this space. But even in this formulation my own language comes up short, by flatly (and falsely) ascribing to 'Foucault' the very causal power that this text seeks to challenge. I see no unmistakable way of assuring in advance that this slippage in language will not occur, since the rnetaphysical seduction of language will always te1npt us to conflate the subject of the sentence with 'the subject' writ large. Repeatedly referring to Foucault in n1y text risks that very conflation; it tempts us to exalt 'Foucault' as author. And despite the heuristic powers of the middle voice in helping us to resist this seduction and

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begin to see past it, we are still required to write in a language that lacks the 1niddle voice. The only option available to us therefore rests on an approach to writing that refuses to reduce language to the AIO rnodel, refuses to assume that language or writing could ever be completely controlled by human subjects . Even this option is by no means risk-free, but Foucault's texts insist that there can be no writing or reading without risk. Foucault exposes one such risk in the exarr1ple of 'the work'. He notes that the above conception of writing proves rather common­ place 'philosophy took note of the disappearance . . . of the author some time ago' - as his contemporaries place less and less interpretive emphasis on the privileged place of the author ( 1 984b: 1 0 3 ) . Yet Foucault argues that certain notions have arisen that serve to maintain that very privilege. Critical attention has shifted away from the expressive function of the author, but in its place one finds a new focus on 'the work' .9 Thus, one analyzes not the relation of the work to the author, but the internal structure and form of the work itself. But what, Foucault asks almost imrr1ediately, is the 'work itself' ? From what does the work's supposed unity derive if not from the authority of the author, the very subject whose legitimacy and unity modern writing supposedly questions, and rejects ? If iterability and citation­ ality remain fundamentally intrinsic to all writing, then this aspect must underrnine not only the priority of the author but also the very possibility of a unity to any work of writing. The possibility of 'citing' renders any closed or fixed horizon for the work untenable, because to cite is to remove frorr1 one context and place in another - 'there is nothing outside of context.' 1 0 The concept of the work only smuggles back into an interpretive approach precisely what the 'disappearance of the author' should have already rejected. 1 1 Foucault concludes his analysis of this notion of the work by drawing out an example that appears innocuous (or even random) but proves significant for my purposes here. He writes : The problem [with the work] is both theoretical and technical. When undertaking the publication of Nietzsche's works, for example, where should one stop ? Surely everything must be published, but what is 'everything' ? Everything that Nietzsche himself published, certainly. And what about the rough drafts of his works? Obviously. The plans for his aphorisms ? Yes.The deleted passages and the notes at the bottom of the page? Yes.What if, within a workbook filled with aphorisms, one finds a reference, the notation of a meeting or of an address, or a laundry list: Is it a work, or not ? Why not ? ( 1984b: 103)

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Certainly this passage works to play out Foucault's point; the unity of the work proves undeniably problematic. It serves another purpose for my reading, because in referring to Nietzsche's laundry list this text, of 'Foucault's', again crosses a text of 'Derrida's'. I will first cite this intersection and then try to unpack its importance. Recalling a previous encounter between himself, Roger Laporte, and an un­ disclosed third party, Derrida writes: 'we found ourselves . . . in disagreement with a certain herrr1eneut who in passing had presumed to ridicule the publication of Nietzsche's unpublished rnanuscripts . "They will end up," he said "publishing his laundry notes and scraps like 'I have forgotten my umbrella' " ' ( 1 979 : 1 3 9 ) . 12 This junction containing Nietzsche's publications and his laundry lists is situated precisely at the point where Foucault and Derrida make their most rigorous arguments against interpretation. 13 We simply cannot know 'for sure' what Nietzsche might have meant to say with 'I have forgotten my umbrella' ( 1 2 3 ) . It might be possible, one day in the future, to reconstruct the various contexts of this short note, to situate Nietzsche's writing of it in a certain horizon of intention and mean­ ing. 1 4 But this potentiality goes hand in hand with another one: 'it is always possible that the "I have forgotten my umbrella" detached as it is, not only from the milieu that produced it, but also from any intention or 1neaning on Nietzsche's part, should remain so, whole and intact, once and for all, without any other context' ( 1 2 7 ) . 1 5 The herrneneutic horizons both of historical context ( Nietzsche's 'milieu' ) and o f originary intentional meaning (what Nietzsche 'meant to say') may never be reproducible. Nietzsche might well have had a secret code in which 'I have forgotten rny umbrella' conveyed a special 1neaning, but, as Derrida writes, 'we will never know' ( 1 27) . Most importantly, even if we could know, even if the first possibility could become a reality and we could reconstruct such a horizon, our very reading of the note would rip it from that context and pull it into another: 'Reading, which is to relate to writing, is to perforate such an horizon or the hermeneutic sail' ( 1 27). Reading always undermines the assured ground of any hermeneutic interpretation. The citational capacity of any piece of writing including the note from Nietzsche now under scrutiny underrnines the hermeneutic project by shaking the foundations of any interpretive strategy that relies on the ground of reconstructible meaning. 'Because it is struc­ turally liberated from any living meaning, it is always possible that it means nothing at all' ( 1 3 1 ) . The secret of writing is therefore not some hidden truth that the hermeneut can eventually uncover; the secret 'is

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rather the possibility that indeed it might have no secret' ( 1 3 3 ) . The possibility exists that the very iterable structure of writing might prohibit it fr01n having any truly secret meaning, and this conclusion, Derrida claims, must prove quite distressing to the hermeneut. Such a conclusion challenges the notion, foundational for certain herrneneu­ tics, that there is always a deeper 1neaning to be found. Derrida takes the principle of interpretive charity - the idea that misunderstanding can only take place against a background of massive understanding and turns it on its head. Davidson ( 1 9 8 4 ) claims that extensive background agreement is a transcendental requirement of all inter-· pretation ( see also Weinsheimer 1 9 8 5 ), but Derrida's arguments suggest just the opposite. Perhaps understanding only takes place at the unlikely intersection of a series of conflicting and disparate discursive contexts - that is, against a background of rnassive mis­ understanding. The background of understanding, the hermeneutic horizon, presupposes some sort of closed context, but we rnay never secure such a context. Derrida suggests that this possibility might perforate the hermeneutic horizon. Nevertheless, the response to such a conclusion is not to give up, but to read. Derrida argues: 'if the structural limit and the remainder of the simulacrum which has been left in writing are going to be taken into account, the process of decoding . . . must be carried to the furthest lengths possible' ( 1 3 3 , emphasis added) . The very structure of writing that makes any assured meaning, any final interpretation, impossible also calls for a vigilant and rigorous reading of the text in question. The fact that the hermeneutic horizon will always be punctured by the practice of reading does not entail that one stop reading. On the contrary, this fact calls for more reading, for persistent reading and continual rereading. Since the meaning can never be fixed once and for all, the practice of reading ( and therefore writing) can never be brought to a halt. For his part, during the critical self-dialogue that forms the con­ clusion to Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault remarks (to himself) : 'As you know, I have no great liking for interpretation' ( 1 972b: 202 ) . Derrida and Foucault expose interpretation - a s the ground for the hermeneutic practice of uncovering a hidden originary meaning produced by the intending and expressive subject - as an act to which the author is subjected. Interpretation therefore 'pins' the author down within language. Undoubtedly, through genealogy and decon­ struction Foucault and Derrida carry out their own types of inter­ pretation. The difference between the interpretations they challenge

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and the readings they practice is that the latter are untimely precisely in that they resist the seduction to fix the meaning of an author in a particular time and place. By tracing the space or thicket 'into which the writing subj ect constantly disappears', an untimely reading refuses to 'unmask' the author and insists on n1erely following the web that still retnains after his or her 'disappearance'. In following the traces created by writing, an untimely reading opens up new 'imaginative' political possibilities, while the hermeneut is reduced to the status of sententious critic. In the next section I will carry out rny own untirnely reading of Foucault, contrasting it along the way with a tirnely interpretation. E v a s iv e Maneuver s : R e a ding F o u c a ult R e ading N ie tz s ch e 'Genealogy i s gray, n1eticulous, and patiently docun1entary. It oper­ ates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times' (Foucault 1 977b: 1 3 9 ) . On this basis, it seems clear that critics of Foucault are wrong to depict the history of political and philosophical thought in terms of a linear development. 1 6 This essay makes such an effort ever n1ore difficult, since in it one will not find a clear and succinct statement by Foucault that can be made to fit into a certain grid of thinking. On the contrary, to read 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History ' is to encounter a maze, a web of disparate texts, phrases, staten1ents, and claims . Indeed, trying to interpret Foucault on Nietzsche is a little like trying to arrest a ghost; one can only discourse with a ghost once one accepts that it may not even show up at all. Perhaps the first spectral clue can be found in the density of footnotes in the first few pages of the essay . 1 7 At least from the perspective of the Foucauldian 'happy positivist', the sheer nutnber of references that Foucault 1nakes to Nietzsche in this text proves quite striking. Foucault has become famous for writing grand historical/ theoretical narratives that fail to cite enough archival sources. 1 8 This style increased the number of both his followers and his detractors in France, while it led to somewhat outlandish caricatures of Foucault in the USA, for example, 'he doesn't do any research, he just goes on instinct' (Friedrich 1 9 8 1 : 5 8; quoted in Macey 1 99 3 : 43 1 ) . Such a claim seems dubious at best, yet the fact remains that Foucault was never a fan of copious endnotes. However, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' surprises its reader with note after note, citing Nietzsche's

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The Genealogy of Morals, The Gay Science, Human, All Too Human, Twilight of the Idols, Daybreak, The Wanderer and His Shadow, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, Beyond Good and Evil, and, of course, Untimely Meditations. All in all, Foucault cites Nietzsche fifty-three

ti1nes in the span of a twenty-page essay. 1 9 One can compare this number to the total of only twelve notes in the remaining eight essays in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Even more significantly, ten of those twelve notes appear in 'Theatrum Philosophicum' Foucault's review essay of two of Deleuze's books. I will not atte1npt to demonstrate the 'statistical significance' of these n,umbers, but the differential does suggest that something unusual is going on in 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History'. With Foucault incessantly slipping away into 'Nietzsche', it proves less than straightforward to take this essay as a statement by Foucault concerning his own genealogical method. One can start to follow the traces of Foucault's writing by noting that in his reading of Nietzsche, Foucault engages in his own philo­ logical effort by offering a very subtle argument concerning Nietzsche's use of language in the Genealogy ( 1 967). At specific points in his texts, according to Foucault, Nietzsche attempts to make a crucial analytical/linguistic distinction that is not present at all in other places. When referring to 'origin' Nietzsche often freely ex­ changes the words Enstehung, Herkunft, Abkunft, and Geburt, but in certain arguments he stresses the word Ursprung (Foucault: 1 977b : 1 40 ) . Foucault goes on to show that Nietzsche uses Ursprung to characterize 'the 1niraculous origin sought by 1netaphysics', whereas Herkunft is 'more exact' in 'recording the true objective of genealogy' ( 1 40, 1 4 1 ) . Thus, through an analysis of Herkunft, Nietzsche can advocate a historical sense that remains attentive to 'origins' while simultaneously rej ecting both a Hegelian philosophy of history, which seeks truth in the march of Geist, and the history of the historian which, crablike, looks and believes backward ( see Nietzsche 1 954: 470 ) . Therefore, 'the genealogist refuses to extend his faith in meta­ physics' (Foucault 1 977b: 1 42 ) . But who i s the genealogist? When will h e show hirr1self? Or, will his appearance only ever be the reappearance of a revenant - the appear­ ance of Foucault in/as the ghost of Nietzsche ? Does Foucault or Nietzsche (or both) refuse to extend faith in rr1etaphysics ? While Foucault writes so as to evade just these sorts of questions, one must recall that it is Nietzsche who constantly remains vigilant against the 'comfort of metaphysics' and the 'metaphysical need' of human beings

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( 1 9 8 6 : 3 3 ) . Foucault rarely, if ever, evinces a concern with metaphy­ sics in his discursive analyses, and so Foucault himself seems to be reading Nietzsche here, not simply making his own declarations. To complicate matters further, Foucault concludes this section on origins with a remarkable, untimely, statement: 'truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history' ( 1 977b : 144 ) . The claim proves extraordinary because o f the presence o f the word 'undoubtedly', a word that allows Foucault to e1nbrace precisely the sort of 'performative contradiction' that Habermas fundamentally rejects in his 'Discourse Ethics' ( 1 99 1 a : 42-1 1 5 ) . The locution of the sentence categorizes truth as a type of error, but a type that simply remains closed off from the possibility of refutation. Yet in its illocutionary force, the statement presents itself' as irrefutable and therefore as the same sort of error. 2 ° Foucault thus invokes truth as an error at the same tirne as he tries to make a supposedly 'true' claim about truth as an error. Such a speech act is simply precluded from pragmatic redemption within the world of Habermasian discourse ethics. But Foucault does not naively or innocently fall into the trap of a perforrnative contradiction (as the bumbling 'skeptic' almost always does within Habermas's descriptions ) . Foucault is precisely embracing what would appear to be a perforrnative contradiction from the perspective of Habermas and others. This is why 'undoubtedly' proves so central to Foucault's formulation of Nietzsche's argument about truth, and this is undoubtedly why Foucault's reading proves, always already, to be untimely. By simply stating that truth is an error that cannot be refuted, Foucault would, of course, meet the minimal conditions for a performative contradiction. Yet Foucault's essay exceeds the bounds of a merely forrnal piece of logical reasoning: its untimeliness calls into question that very logic. When Foucault suggests that truth is undoubtedly this sort of error he sirnultaneously highlights the 'performative contradiction' and rejects it as a charge. The logical charge of performative contradiction rests upon the ground of a linear temporality; while Foucault appears to be opening himself up to that charge, he is actually challenging that very ground. 21 In the world of untimely writing that Foucault and Nietzsche inhabit performative contradictions cannot be prohibited by mere decree. Exploring the untimeliness of this declaration by Foucault should give the reader reason to pause before assuming that Foucault

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means his staten1ent as a methodological claim of the sort, 'in Foucauldian genealogy, truth always equals error' . What, one must again ask, does this characterization have to do with Nietzsche ? It seems clear that Foucault sees truth, as does Nietzsche, as a product of historical forces, but it is Nietzsche, not Foucault, who refers to truth as an error. This theme runs throughout Nietzsche's writings : for example, Nietzsche asks, more than rhetorically, 'Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth ? . . . how could anything originate out of its opposite ? for example, truth out of error ? ' Moreover, exactly because 'truth is an error that cannot be refuted', Nietzsche goes on to describe 'untruth as a condition of life' (Nietzsche 2002: 5-7; see also Nietzsche 1 954; cf. Nehamas 1 9 8 5 ) . On the other hand, Foucault prefers to talk about the production of truth within a certain 'regime of truth' made up by discursive practices ( 1 972b ). He does not, however, use the language of error to describe truth. It thus begins to become clear - or maybe just opaque - that Foucault's reading of Nietzsche serves to undermine any attempt to pin Foucault down, especially on (what his interpreters take to be) crucial methodological issues. To read 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' as Nietzsche himself would recommend - that is, 'slowly, deeply, with consideration and caution' ( 1 9 8 2 : preface) requires that one enter into the maze of connections between Foucault's text and the multiple texts of Nietzsche. The type of reading that enters into this maze works to illuminate the writings of Nietzsche and Foucault, but only as it simultaneously destabilizes those writings and renders any fixing of their position untenable?2 This is an untimely reading, one that works with, rather than against, the shifting and variable meaning of the text. The untin1eliness of Foucault's writings can also help in reading a passage that has struck some of its interpreters as, at best, odd and, at worst, highly obscure and problematic. Foucault writes: 'truth or being do not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents. This is undoubtedly why every origin of morality from the moment it stops being pious and Herkunft can never be - has value as a critique' ( 1 9 77b: 146; also quoted in Visker 1 995: 6 0 ) . 23 On first reading, this passage from Foucault seems a bit peculiar because of the emphasis placed on the word 'pious' . How­ ever, rather than focus on such peculiarity one might first ask if Foucault is alluding to the conception of 'piety' that plays a pivotal role in so many of Nietzsche's writings. In The Gay Science Nietzsche asks 'how we, too, are still pious',

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going on to argue that science in general seems to reject convictions and blind faith - to do away with piety ( 1 9 74 : 2 8 0 ) . Yet, in order for science to begin as science it had to maintain one ultimate conviction that never went questioned. Nietzsche suggests that 'there simply is no science "without presuppositions" ', since science must hold on to an unconditional will to truth as its very condition of emergence as a science ( 2 8 1 ) . Nietzsche suspects a sirnilar piety lies at the core of the existence of even the free spirits that he seeks to cultivate, and he implies that their future lies in recognizing (and thereby overcoming ? ) this last vestige o f piety: it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests - that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.(283)

Ceasing to remain pious thus entails the final resistance of the 'metaphysical need' found in all human beings even Nietzschean free spirits . When Foucault claims that 'Herkunft can never be [pious] ' he turns back to the distinction he wants to draw in Nietzsche' s writings between Herkunft a n d Ursprung. Herkunft can never be pious because Ursprung is the glorious origin sought after by meta­ physics, the origin that would always be pious because its very existence rests upon a metaphysical faith in divine origins. Ursprung is timely, if not timeless. Herkunft can never be pious because it entails the nonmetaphysical analysis of descent; it 'does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity' ( 1 977b: 1 4 6 ) . Her­ kunft, like historicity, offers a thinking of history that refuses time­ liness, that rej ects the piety of the Ursprung. Foucault makes the connections here himself: 'The genealogist needs history to dispel the chimeras of the origin, somewhat in the rnanner of the pious philo­ sopher who needs a doctor to exorcise the shadow of his soul' ( 1 44 ) . Genealogical history, a thoroughly untimely history, provides an antidote to a pious, metaphysical philosophy of history. Nietzsche's writing on piety sheds light not only on a genealogical understanding of history but also on a conception of critical thinking. In Genealogy Nietzsche himself cites the very aphorism that I have tried above to unpack, and he goes on to argue that if his 'new philosophers' or 'free spirits' (or, who knows, 'Foucauldian geneal­ ogists') can relinquish their final vestiges of piety then they will finally be able to turn to the more profound problem of value. Here Nietzsche

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points to the critical implications of genealogy: 'from the moment faith in the God of the ascetic ideal is denied, a new problem arises: that of the value of truth. The will to truth requires a critique - let us thus define our task - the value of truth rnust for once be experimentally called into question' ( 1 967: 1 5 3 ) . Once 'we, too' are no longer pious, once we no longer rest upon a pious metaphysical faith in truth, then truth can itself be questioned - the very task of critique, according to Nietzsche. We thus discover, after a long and complex detour, that the issue of piety links back up with the question of critique. This discovery requires an untimely reading; it simply cannot be reached without the aid of Nietzsche, without realizing that Foucault's text weaves its way into and out of the labyrinth of Nietzsche's text. At some points Foucault's own voice is made to 'disappear', and its reappearance can only ever be spectral that is, untimely. Moreover, the question of piety only proves the first step in elaborating upon the seemingly strange passage from Foucault on Herkunft and piety. At the end of that passage, Foucault does cite Nietzsche but he references none of the works I have been discussing above. Instead he cites a section of Twilight described by one reader as follows : 'in these five short sections, five long aphorisms, we encounter genealogy as critique; indeed, we encounter genealogy promising the realization of the critique of reason' (Mahon 1 992: 1 1 ) . Nietzsche accuses philosophers of lacking in historical sense precisely to the degree that they have faith in reason. Nietzsche refers to this philo­ sophical trait as Egypticism: 'all that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been concept-mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive' ( 1 954: 479 ) . Because of the metaphysical faith in eternal being - because of their insistence on timeliness - philosophers turn against all things in the state of becoming. They turn against history and the senses - against, in fact, all 'things' entirely ( since for Nietzsche the world is made up by the continually flowing flux of appearances ) . Yet, for Nietzsche all things have a history and the senses do not lie. It is the lack of historical sense and the faith in the unity of reason, the linearity of time, that produces the very lie that philosophers blame on the senses : 'they [the senses] do not lie at all. What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies: for example, the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence. "Reason" is the cause of our falsification of the testi­ mony of the senses' ( 4 8 0 ) . Nietzsche goes further t o show the link between reason and 'the metaphysics of language'. The everyday use of language promotes the

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false belief in reason, a belief that the Egyptian philosophers raise to the level of an eternal faith - 'I'm afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar' (48 3 ) . 24 Only historical sense which takes the form of genealogical analysis, for Foucault, and untimeli­ ness, for me - can resist this temptation and reveal the falsification and distortion carried out by reason and the metaphysics of language. The untimeliness of genealogy (of the analysis of descent) rej ects the seduction of a metaphysical, objectified model of language, a model that would impose timely impiety upon the untimely flux of history. 'A genealogy of rnorals, thus, reveals the will at the heart of our pre­ ference for reason, at the heart of our falsification of sensual evidence, or our preference for being over becoming. A genealogy of morals, thus, promises the realization of the critique of reason' (Mahon 1 992: 1 1 1). A critique such a s this does not begin with a n Ursprung-like pursuit of epistemological foundations . Instead, through Herkun{t - a gen­ ealogical-historical analysis of descent - it seeks the history of those regimes of truth and the moral will that undergirds them. Foucault's philological discussion of Herkunft serves to highlight just these aspects of Nietzsche's writings on genealogy and history : 'the search for descent [Herkunft] is not the erecting of foundations: on the contrary, it disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself' ( 1 977b: 147). Thus, as Foucault reads Nietzsche, Herkunft, which can never be pious, offers an untimely historical investigation that unravels the philosopher's concept-mummies; Herkunft is a critique of reason. An untimely reading of 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' tracks Foucault's evasive maneuvers without, of course, unmasking Foucault the author. Through this reading we see that the essay can be taken neither as a methodological statement by Foucault, nor as a mere commentary on Nietzsche. In the end, the crossing of Nietzsche's texts with Foucault's serves to demonstrate that Foucault's intervention in Nietzsche's writings will remain untirr1ely, ghostly. This type of read­ ing, however, is also both rigorous and productive, since it exposes the very vision of critique that so many of Foucault's critics have called for.

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Evasive Maneuvers 2 : R e ading F o u c ault R e a ding D eleuze R e a ding Nietz s che The above examples help to explicate Foucault's and Nietzsche's thoughts on genealogy, history, and critique. In this way they lead to interpretive understanding of Foucault and Nietzsche, but they also undermine those interpretive strategies that would seek to know 'for ' sure what either Nietzsche or Foucault meant to say - or to pinpoint who is who within the essay. The lattice-work of crisscrosses, inter­ sections, and entanglements between texts by Foucault and texts by Nietzsche exemplifies 'contemporary writing' as that which creates 'a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears. ' This formulation in 'What is an Author ? ' turns out to be the conclusion of 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' as well: 'It is no longer a question of judging the past in the name of a truth that only we can possess in the present, but of risking the destruction of the subject who seeks knowledge in the endless deployment of the will to knowledge' ( 1 977b: 1 64 ) . This alone would see1n t o b e enough to trouble the hermeneut, the commentator, or the intellectual historian who wishes to pin Foucault down as the subject of writing and place him in his proper position in the history of thought. And yet, Foucault's evasive maneuvers go significantly beyond the scope of the examples from the previous section; it turns out that Foucault's text ostensibly 'on Nietzsche' pushes the envelope of interpretation and explodes the practice of commentary. Foucault approaches Nietzsche's writings with an ever­ complex reading, spinning out rnultiple levels of textuality that produce a rather spectral discourse - one without a clear author­ function ( it cannot simply be 'Foucault' ) and belonging to no parti­ cular ceuvre (would it be Foucault's, Nietzsche's by way of commen­ tary, or perhaps someone else's ? ) . 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' proves even more complicated because of the trace (cf. Derrida 1 974) of another set of discourses - those of Gilles Deleuze. Foucault hides himself as author behind Deleuze while he concomitantly hides Deleuze. In the process, the space between the author and subject only grows larger, and the practice of commentary or general inter­ pretation only grows more futile. Claiming Deleuze as a key figure in this text rnay strike the reader as somewhat bizarre, since in 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' Foucault never once cites or mentions Deleuze in any capacity. This, in spite of the fact that Deleuze's book on Nietzsche ( [1 962] 1 9 8 3 ) quite simply

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changed the way that French intellectuals approached the thought of Nietzsche. It is not an overstatement to say that in France in the late 1 960s and early 1 9 70s it would have been almost impossible to approach the writings of Nietzsche except by going through Deleuze's book. And yet Foucault rnakes absolutely no mention of that book, in spite of the fact that it 'had greatly impressed [him] ' (Macey 1 99 3 : 1 09 ) . Moreover, Foucault and Deleuze were already well-acquainted and had connected intellectually precisely on the writings of Nietzsche. They had met at a conference in which Foucault presented a paper on Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche that continually praised Deleuze. And Deleuze went somewhat out of his way to return the favor by cornplimenting Foucault in his closing remarks ( Foucault 1 9 8 6c; cf. Macey 1 99 3 : 1 5 2-4 ) . Perhaps most irnportantly, at the time of the publication of 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' Foucault and Deleuze had been working for some years together on a collaborative effort to produce 'a French version of the Colli-Montinari edition of Nietzsche' (Macey 1 99 3 : 1 5 3 ) . Such a collaboration might well have provided the motivation for Foucault to publish a review article of two of Deleuze's books in which Foucault goes so far in his praise of Deleuze as to suggest that 'perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian' (Foucault 1 977b : 1 65 ) - grand remarks that appeared j ust one year prior to Foucault's essay on Nietzsche. This mounting evidence from biographical and publishing history could serve to establish beyond any reasonable doubt that Deleuze's life and work had an impact on Foucault and his writing, particularly his writing on Nietzsche. That is, a standard approach to intellectual history could locate a significant 'influence' here. It could do so if it were not for the fact that 'intellectual influence' is precisely what Foucault's texts radically problematize (cf. Foucault 1 972b) . In other words, if Foucault had sought to acknowledge the typical intellectual influence, he would have certainly cited Deleuze in the notes; he would have likely discussed Deleuze's writings in the text; and he might have even paid his thanks to Deleuze in a line of acknowledgement. Foucault does none of these things; he is evasive. Rather than take up an approach that rny reading of Foucault has already called into question, I will read this 'influence' as, in fact, another stratagem of escape for Foucault. Such an approach proves much more consistent with the essay itself and with the fact that Deleuze is never mentioned, though he has left his traces all over Foucault's text. His presence is thoroughly untimely, utterly spectral. The textual clues to such traces sornetimes seem simple enough, but

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finding evidence for the appearance of these Deleuzian ghosts proves at other titnes rather difficult and complex. I will track these connec­ tions to Deleuze through three (increasingly intricate) examples. One can begin by noting the heavy significance that Deleuze places on terminology in all of Nietzsche's works . He argues that we 1nust be precise with terminology in reading Nietzsche, since 'all the rigor of his philosophy . . . depends on it' ( 1 9 8 3 : 52-5 ) . Since Nietzsche creates new terms for new concepts, Deleuze insists that one can only under­ stand the latter by paying close attention to the former. As I outlined above, Foucault frames his entire reading of Nietzsche through an analysis of Nietzsche's terminological distinctions among words that all translate as 'origin' . Thus, Foucault has certainly taken this Deleuzian emphasis to heart, and Foucault writes more like a philol­ ogist when engaging with Nietzsche than with any other author he encounters - this helps to account for the numerous notes. Terminology might seem a minor issue (though Deleuze, of course, would reject that characterization), but it sets the stage for more significant connections. Foucault follows Deleuze rnuch more subtly in the opening of his essay, by conjuring up the imagery of Zarathustra plagued by a monkey who follows him along. Deleuze makes precisely the same reference to Zarathustra on just the third page of his book; thus, each author places the image of Zarathustra and the monkey at the outset of their engagements with Nietzsche (Foucault 1 977b: 1 4 3 ; Deleuze 1 9 8 3 : 3 ) . Moreover, Foucault also draws o n the Zarathustran symbol of the 'divine spider' who spins the web of the world. It would hardly be noteworthy in and of itself that both Foucault and Deleuze refer to Zarathustra or that they both discuss the 'divine spider', but, curiously enough, Foucault invokes such Zarathustran irnagery with­ out ever citing Zarathustra. In fact, Foucault never cites Zarathustra in the entire essay, though he persistently draws on such tropes. Once again, there is not necessarily anything new to be found in Foucault's failure to cite a source, but, as I mentioned above, in 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' Foucault cites almost every single maj or work of Nietzsche except for Zarathustra. This discrepancy deserves some degree of explanation. The mystery starts to unravel when one brings in the absent, but seemingly ever-present, figure of Deleuze. It turns out that Deleuze not only cites Zarathustra, but, in fact, cites the passage from Nietzsche that mentions the spider (Foucault 1 977b: 1 5 5 ; Deleuze 1 9 8 3 : 25 ) The textual links that Foucault's essay draws to Zarathustra can only be completed by weaving their way, in a rather untirnely fashion, through

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the heart of Deleuze's text. Furthermore, Deleuze's very citation of the passage on the spider comes during his discussion of the 'Dicethrow', a Nietzschean metaphor made famous by Deleuze and strongly empha­ sized by Foucault (Foucault 1 9 77b : 1 5 5 ; Deleuze 1 9 8 3 : 25 ) . One could go so far as to call Deleuze a revenant, appearing in Foucault's text only by reappearing. This urnnarked, ghostlike presence of Deleuze often proves rnuch more complicated and significant, and thus even rnore conspicuous, by its formal absence. To return to the language of Chapter 3, it would appear that Deleuze haunts the text of Foucault. He casts an im­ portant shadow even though he can never be seen in full presence. Deleuze cannot be arrested and interrogated within Foucault's text. He cannot be seen, yet still he is there - unless of course, as Horatio suggests, "tis but our Fantasie' . Reading this essay not merely as Foucault, and not only as Foucault reading Nietzsche, but as Foucault reading Deleuze reading Nietzsche, can help to clarify a number of the passages about which Foucault has been taken to task . For example, as many of Foucault's critics have emphasized, his reading of Nietzsche focuses markedly on the role of the body and its irnpression by the process of history. Deleuze also places great importance on understanding the role of the body within Nietzsche's work. At one point in the essay, Foucault suggests that 'descent attaches itself to the body' and then goes on to cite Nietzsche's The Gay Science. Some interpreters extrapolate a line of logic here which reaches the con­ clusion that Foucauldian genealogy presupposes the body as a prior ontological ground, one that only later becomes exposed to historical processes (Butler 1 9 8 9 a ) . But it cannot be that simple, since, strangely enough, the Nietzsche passage that Foucault cites upon making this clairn never rnentions the body at all; indeed, the passage to which Foucault refers appears to have nothing to do with the body. How­ ever, in that section of The Gay Science Nietzsche does cite Spinoza . If one then consults the passages in Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche devoted specifically to the body, one finds that De leuze uses Spinoza as his point of departure for an exegesis on Nietzsche's understanding of the body (Foucault 1 977b: 1 47; Nietzsche 1 92 1 : 2 8 5 ; Deleuze 1 9 8 3 : 3 9-40; on the spider see Kofman 1 99 3 : 6 9 ) . According to Deleuze, Nietzsche thinks of the body in a way that challenges Spinoza . To summarize then, Foucault's essay makes a claim about Nietzsche's understanding of the body and, as evidence, cites a passage where Nietzsche criticizes Spinoza. The reference appears

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utterly obtuse, since it says nothing about the body - until we bring in the uncited work of Deleuze in which the Nietzschean critique of Spinoza helps to explain Nietzsche's understanding of the body. And this understanding, as it turns out, can by no means be reduced to the notion of the body as a tabula rasa. The Deleuzian reading of Nietzsche's critique of Spinoza, to which Foucault tacitly refers, insists: 'we do not define [the body] by saying it is a field of forces, a nutrient medium fought over by a plurality of forces. For in fact there is no "mediutn" ' (Deleuze 1 9 8 3 : 3 9 ) . It would thereby be a misreading to take Foucault's claim that Herkunft 'attaches ' to the body to irnply a definition of the body as a neutral mediurn. Foucault not only reads Nietzsche in 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, His­ tory', but reads him through Deleuze's reading. Interpretive strategies of both 'influence' and 'disentangling' thereby become ever more futile. Deleuze's 'Nietzsche' ( and, one might say, Foucault's 'Deleuze' ) consequently provides Foucault with yet another strategy - this tirne a dense, cornplex, and subtle one - for avoiding any interpretive effort to pin him down. In a sense, Foucault hides his reading of Nietzsche behind Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche. Yet even this formulation proves too simple, since Foucault hides Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche as well. Foucault's efforts at evasion are complex, often because they are untimely; this may account for the fact that they are successful and the fact that they are misrecognized. However, I would like to end by suggesting, first, that such misrecognition should not masquerade as successful criticism, and second, that such criticism should not blind us to Foucault's own vision of critique. The Untimelin e s s o f R e ading Those who play the game of the intellectual historian in their inter­ pretive approach to Foucault's texts often come to rather damning conclusions about his 'work'. Thus, by situating Foucault within a timely lineage of skeptical thought that starts with Nietzsche and wholly rejects all forms of reason, Habermas accuses Foucault of 'relativism' and 'cryptonorrnativisrn'. Both charges come down to rejecting Foucault's conception of critique because it rests on so-called 'Nietzschean' foundations and thus has no rational grounding. An alternative, untimely reading of Foucault - as opposed to a systematic, timely interpretation - shows that he may well have a worthwhile conception of critique. But even more important for my reading, it shows that Foucault's challenge to interpretation and to 'authorship'

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leads to a change in the very rules that Habermas and others must presuppose in their critiques of Foucault. Habermas's criticisms presuppose the very set of ground rules (on which interpretation is based) that Foucault's texts problematize, and this is why Haberrnas misrecognizes Foucault's maneuvers and takes them for mistakes . Foucault's writing seeks to change the nature of criticisrn itself, and in so doing it evades and undermines the position of his strongest critics : I can't help thinking of the critic who would not try to judge, but bring into existence a work, a book, a phrase, an idea. He would light the fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, snatch the passing dregs in order to scatter them. He would multiply, not the number of judgements, but the signs of existence; he would call out to them, he would draw them from their sleep. Would he sometimes invent them? So much the better. The sententious critic puts me to sleep. I would prefer a critic of imaginative scintillations. ( 1989a: 3 04 )

Foucault's critic o f 'i1naginative scintillations' eschews the game o f intellectual historiography so as t o engage i n the practice o f reading. This practice turns out to be an untimely enterprise because even the most careful and responsible of readings can never fix or locate an author and his works upon a specific tirneline. Reading can never determine once and for all who or what influenced an author, nor can it limit a work to a specific set of historically-confined problems to be solved. But an untirnely political theory will depend heavily upon the continued and responsible exercise of the practice of reading. What does reading have to offer a political theory of untimeliness ? I would suggest that this particular understanding of the practice of reading provides political theorists with the possibility of accon1plishing the very task that Foucault sets for contemporary philosophy: 'to kno\v how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known' ( 1 9 84a: 9 ) . While i t seems obvious, i t i s still significant t o note that the practice of reading (as a component of untimely theory) bears little resem­ blance to first-order inquiry (as a version of timely theory) that I criticized in Chapter 3 . Untimely reading not only eschews first-order inquiry but also, in its critique of intellectual historiography, tends to cross or blur the never-so-clear line between the first-order and the second-order. Moreover, changing the ground rules for interpretation in the history of political thought is but the first ingredient within a larger project of fashioning a politics of untirneliness . This shift provides a platform from which to investigate and elucidate one of

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Foucault's most important contributions to political theory: his under­ standing of political agency as resistance. To grasp the significance of Foucault's politics of resistance, to see it as rnore than merely reac­ tionary, requires viewing it from the perspective of untimeliness. Doing so, in turn, requires an unti1nely reading of Foucault's texts . Conversely, and more importantly for my purposes, to continue building a politics of untimeliness requires negotiating some of the debates over agency that arise from Foucault's writings . In the next chapter I detail a certain conception of untimely political agency by taking up my own reading a necessarily untimely reading - of Foucault's later works and the queer political theory found within them. Notes 1. The debates over strategies of interpretation have a long and multifaceted history - from the battles between Straussians and Skinnerians to those between realists and Gadamerians . My purpose here is neither to enter those debates nor even to summarize and synthesize them. For a recent text in political theory that does both, see Ball ( 1 99 5 ) . 2. I follow Gutting i n allowing interpretation t o stand for general interpretation as 'interpretive efforts [that] typically put forward smne single unifying rnethod or vision as the key to understanding an author's ceuvre' (24 ). Gutting notes that interpretation may also stand simply for any sort of explication of a text - a type of interpretation that I will later try to characterize as 'reading'. David Macey may be the only Foucault biographer truly to take this issue seriously; the first page of his work thus echoes Gutting: 'alive, [Foucault] would surely have rejected the advances of any biographer; in death, he still struggles to escape thern' ( 1 9 9 3 : xi) . See also Halperin ( 1 995 ) . 3 . I refer t o Habermas as Foucault's ' best' critic precisely because Haberrnas plays the role of the intellectual historian exceedingly well. 4. Once again, Gutting's work is one of the very few readings of Foucault that questions this move ( 1 9 8 9 : 277-8 ) . 5 . Even greater encouragernent for approaching Foucault's texts for methodological guidance likely stems from the dominant reading of Foucault - sometirnes, in fact, taken to be the definitive reading - provided by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Dreyfus and

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Rabinow state on the very first page of their book that Foucault's is an effort 'to develop a method for the study of human beings and to diagnose the current situation of our society' ( 1 9 82 : xvii, emphasis added) . The key to Foucault's new 'method', they argue, lies in his turn to Nietzsche and the concomitant subordination of archeology to genealogy . Interestingly, Ha bermas relies precisely on this subordinating move as part of the justification for his critique of Foucault ( 1 9 8 7) - hence the Nietzschean critique of Foucault returns full circle here by connecting at both ends, with Foucault as both the heir to Nietzsche and as an explicit adopter of Nietzschean genealogy. Thus, the 1nagical new rnethod - which Dreyfus and Rabin ow argue Foucault develops - centers itself on genealogy. Genealogy is the rnethod according to this view, so it seems only intuitive to approach 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' as a guide to that method. 6 . With the notion of 'today's writing' I take Foucault to refer, almost all at once, to contemporary theories about writing and language, the work of contemporary writers, and to the very notion of writing (ecriture) that was so important in France at the time of Foucault's initial presentation of 'What is an Author ? ' to the French Society of Philosophy in 1 96 9 . 7. Both Bouchard and Simon (Foucault 1 9 77b ) and Josue Harari (Foucault 1 9 84b) translate jeu in Foucault's text as 'game'. The more common translation of the word is 'play' ; hence the for­ mulation of my paraphrase in the text. Derrida 's remarks on the dangers of taking jeu in the sense of nonserious, radical 'freeplay' likely apply in the context of Foucault's use of the word as well ( 1 9 8 8 : 1 1 5-1 8 ) . 8 . While I a m certainly suggesting that Foucault's conception of writing here traverses the same ground as the work of Derrida, it hardly bears repeating to note that on a great many issues Foucault and Derrida thoroughly disagree. Their now ( in)fan1ous public dispute on the topics of Freud, reason, and history (Derrida 1 97 8 ; Foucault 1 979) has highlighted if not overblown their differences, particularly for their French audience and readership. More obviously, Derrida's main concerns have always been philosophical, focusing on the structural level of language, while Foucault constantly looks to the particulars of history to drive his investigations. Their renowned intellectual quarrel is but one particularly stark example of these more general differences. I therefore have no desire to link their projects together or to try to

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10.

11.

12.

13.

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draw influences - clearly a counterproductive move for my purposes. But despite these disagreements - indeed, despite what­ ever their 'authorial intentions' might be ( since these are j ust what are called into question here) - the texts of Foucault and Derrida take much the same tack on the question of writing, and therefore so1ne of Derrida's texts can function as helpful heuristic devices to sharpen the conception of writing and the challenge to interpreta­ tion that we see emerge in Foucault's works. This claim could be taken as an allusion to New Criticism, an Anglo-American development of the 1 940s of which Foucault was well aware. See Macey's discussion of Foucault's time in Hungary ( 1 79-8 1 ) . This line constitutes Derrida's own clarification of his earlier clairn that 'there is nothing outside the text' - a sentence, as I suggested in Chapter 1 , that might be better translated as, 'there is no "extra-text" ' (Derrida 1 9 8 8 : 1 3 6 ) . 'The word work and the unity that i t designates are proba bly as problematic as the status of the author's individuality' ( Foucault 1 9 84b : 1 04 ) . Some would suggest that the 'undisclosed hermeneut' t o which Den·ida's text refers so dismissively might, in fact, be Foucault ­ thereby taking Spurs as an attack on Foucault. There can be little doubt that Derrida's arguments appeared many years before he and Foucault would finally reconcile, but, as I show in the text below, Derrida's and Foucault's texts rnake much the same points whether or not their personal dispute had been resolved. More­ over, Derrida himself has said that the 'undisclosed hermeneut' was Jean Beaufret, not Foucault. On this last point I am very rr1uch grateful to personal communications with David Halperin, and to Didier Eribon and Jacques Derrida. In the Archaeology Foucault again brings up the issue of Nietzsche's laundry ' bills' in a discussion that tightly parallels 'What is an Author ? ' In this former discussion, Foucault chal­ lenges the unity of the cruvre, arguing that its coherence can never be presumed a priori but rather comes about as a product of an interpretive act ( 1 972b: 22-3 0, esp . 24 ) . According t o Derrida, this process o f reconstruction i s not pos­ sible now given our lack of knowledge of those contexts. Derrida also points to the inability of the editors of the French translation of Nietzsche's The Gay Science to say more about notes such as this one. For one recent work that does try to reconstruct a

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1 7.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

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historical context for Nietzsche's intentions and meaning con­ cerning this very umbrella, see Strong ( 1 9 8 9 ) . However, even Strong admits that his h istorical evidence does little to change or challenge Derrida's point. Without any other context, that is, aside from the ones in which Derrida, I, or anyone else cite it. Here I paraphrase Foucault's next line: 'on this basis, it is obvious that Paul Ree was wrong to follow the English tendency in describing the history of Inorality in terms of a linear develop­ ment' ( 1 3 9 ) , and I refer most directly to Habennas's depiction of the history of modern thought ( 1 9 8 7 ) . A n even earlier clue might lie i n Foucault' s reference t o Paul Ree in the third sentence of the essay. Of course, Paul Ree is the author of The Origin of the Moral Sensations, a book that Nietzsche takes, in the preface to The Genealogy of Morals, as a paradig-­ matic example of the wrong approach to the study of the history of human rnorality. Already Foucault displaces the reader from his text and into Nietzsche's, yet he does so indirectly and obliquely - without (at least at this point) citing Nietzsche or Ree. See Nietzsche ( 1 994: 6 ) . Even Macey notes this tendency: 'characteristically, Foucault gives no reference for his quotation' ( 1 99 3 : xviii) . The essay has a total o f fifty-four notes b y Foucault with the extra one citing Paul Ree's text that Nietzsche cites in the Genealogy. Bouchard adds ten editorial notes to his version, while Rabinow cuts this number down to three. The essay covers twenty total pages of text in The Foucault Reader. My thanks to Lisa Disch for seeing this argument within my writing long before I had any intention of making it. On the subject of performative contradiction in Nietzsche, see Coole ( 1 9 9 8 ; cf. 200 0 ) . Therefore, those authors who unquestioningly cite 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' as a clear staternent by Foucault about his own genealogical method fail to grasp the significance of Foucault's evasiveness . For example, Flynn ( 1 994a ), in arguing for the dis­ tinctiveness of genealogy, suggests that 'its concern is the descent (Herkunft) of practices as a series of events' ( 3 3 ) . Certainly Fou­ cault says just this about genealogy, but, as the above discussion demonstrates, what Flynn takes to be a simple description of Foucault's genealogical method actually turns out to be a compli­ cated, dense, and sophisticated reading of Nietzschean philosophy.

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23 . Visker proceeds with harsh criticis1n for Foucault, suggesting in rather mocking tone that Foucault shows no connection between critique and a rejection of piety. As I will show in the text below, there is, in fact, a very close - if quite complicated - connection between the two. 24 . I italicize 'faith' here to emphasize the connections to the previous discussion of piety .

C h a pter 5

U ntimely Agency: H aving th H istorical Sense to 'Bypass' Psychoanalytic Theory

Lack of historical sense is the family failing of all philosophers; many, without being aware of it, even take the most recent manifestation of man, such as has arisen under the impress of certain religions, even certain political events, as the fixed form from which one has to start out.

They will not learn that man has become . . . Nietzsche ( 1986: 13, emphasis added)

Foucault's tactics of evasion, as disclosed in the preceding chapter, demonstrate one important implication of untirneliness for political theory. By demanding a shift in our approach to texts in the history of political thought, the untimely practice of reading can both alter the textual landscape out of which contetnporary political theory emerges and provide valuable resources for today's ( and tomorrow's ) political contests. But before the field can move in the direction of a politics of untirneliness, it will first be necessary to draw out some of the substantive connections between untimeliness and agency . How does untimeliness - as a certain understanding of tetnporality and histori­ city - relate to the more concrete and complex issue of political action ? What would it mean to call agency untimely ? In this chapter I form a first response to questions such as these. In doing so, I hope to describe rnore clearly the political action cmnpo­ nent of an untirr1ely political theory. To develop the notion of untimely agency will, of course, depend upon the untimely approach to texts that I articulated in Chapter 4. I take my cues from Nietzsche, an author who insisted on characterizing his own texts as untitnely, and his notion of historical sense. The epigraph to this chapter offers but one rather lucid example of Nietzsche's continual castigation of philosophers for their inability to smell, as it were, history. According to Nietzsche, philosophers take the real events of history and wrap thern in ideal 'concept-mummies' until they can hardly be said to exist

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at all, or until they exist only in timeless form. Nietzsche saw his own writings as untimely precisely because he refused to play the idealist game of philosophers, because he insisted on analyzing even the most vaunted of the philosophers' concepts - free will, morality, truth itself - as historical productions. The search for a philosophical truth, a comprehensive definition, or a definitive theory could only go on at the expense of historical sense: 'only that which has no history is definable' (Nietzsche 1 967: 8 0 ) . To maintain a historical sense is to c01nrnit oneself to a certain untitneliness. Throughout this chapter I will bring a sense of both history and untimeliness along, as I survey, confront, and challenge Judith Butler's important, powerful, and expansive work on philosophical subjectiv­ ity and political agency. I will focus most closely on Butler's recent attetnpt to weld together the work of Freud and Foucault. Butler wishes to build a more adequate - and, indeed, comprehensive theory of subjection, and she insists that a proper theory of political agency requires bringing in the psychoanalytic concept of the psyche in order to prop up the sags and bridge the gaps in Foucault's discursive approach to subj ectivity. According to Butler, only a psychoanalytic approach can lead us out of Foucault's thicket. Her argurr1ent strikes at the heart of Foucault's project, since in La volonte de savoir ( [1 977] 1 978 ) , a work whose title he describes as his one 'extravagant homage' to Nietzsche ( 1 9 9 8 : 445 ), Foucault strongly urges his readers to resist psychoanalytic approaches to thinking about sex. 1 He does so, not on the grounds of the theoretical or philosophical inadequacies of psychoanalytic theory - though he has his suppositions about this as well - but rather as a sort of metho­ dological, 'cautionary prescription' in the interest of advancing a more viable critical political intervention into theories of sexuality. Despite rhetoric that might suggest otherwise, Foucault never claimed to have refuted psychoanalysis, or to have offered a superior theoretical/ philosophical account of (sexual) subj ectivity. Quite the opposite, in fact. I would suggest that the genius of Foucault's insights into politics and sexuality, and his relevance for contemporary theoretical debates and political struggles, lies precisely in his persuasive motion to resist psychoanalysis. 2 Foucault consistently chose to side-step debates over the nature of subj ectivity, so that he could get on with his research into the historical constitution and political implication of various discursive subject positions. Only by refusing the possibility ­ involved in any psychological reduction - of obscuring the historical and (therefore ) political dimensions of sexuality did Foucault believe it

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1night become possible to conceive of 'a new economy of bodies and pleasures' ( 1 978 : 1 5 7). Butler ( 1 997a) ignores Foucault's recomrnendations. 3 She does so neither naively nor unthinkingly, but rather in a purposeful attempt to build a theory of subj ectivity that can adequately account for a subj ect's tendency to seek out its own subj ection. Such a theory, she contends, requires a reconciliation between Freud and Foucault. I will argue here that this reconciliation (and others like it) c01nes at far too high a price: ( 1 ) it radically dehistoricizes Foucault's genealogical accounts of subjectivity, thereby stripping those accounts of the Nietzschean 'historical sense' that gives the1n their analytical acuity and political potency; (2) it depends upon a monolithic (and often solely juridical) conception of power that must ignore precisely Foucault's most i1nportant insights into the political workings of power/knowledge relations. Today the need to maintain a historical sense - to heed Foucault's recornmendations and resist the urge to forward a quasi-transcendental conception of subjectivity - proves all the more pressing given the importance, as both Foucault's critics and supporters stress, of locating an account of political resistance that resonates with contemporary political struggles. I hope to deinon­ strate here that such an account can only be an untimely one, for those very struggles get ignored or rnarginalized by 1nodels that insist on timeliness (or ti1nelessness) . Wedding Foucault to Freud 1night lead to an enticing philosophical 'theory of subjection', but it does little to help us understand the very political struggle to create, 1naintain, and transform historical subjectivities. In fact, the psychoanalytic turn 1nay only serve to obscure the political dirnensions of interventions into discursive practices in his­ tory, to impede both our access to and understanding of some rather untimely forms of politics. By consistently rooting his understanding of political subjectivity within history, Foucault's genealogical ap­ proach to the study of both history and agents contributes directly to an attempt to build an account of untimely agency . Butler's critique proves so significant because her effort to build a philosophical 'theory of subj ection' signals an abandonment of Nietzschean historical sense and a rej ection of the untimely element in Foucault. In searching for a proper theory of subj ection founded on the psychoanalytic concept of the psyche, Butler actually seeks out a timeless notion of agency. Contrasting Butler's effort to attain timelessness with Foucault's consistent historical sense, his untirneliness, tends to reveal the super­ ior political efficacy of the latter; in other words, that difference can

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help to illustrate exactly the shape and significance of untimely agency. The P s y chic Life of Power ? Bypassing as it were the repressive hypothesis ...It is not a question of denying the existence of repression. Foucault ( 1978: 13)

Butler has been a careful, insightful, and often critical reader of Foucault for many years now. In all of her writings, Butler continually asks after the political potential in conceptualizing the body as a site of cultural construction, contested meaning, and radical resistance. What are the political stakes of rethinking the ontological and material status of the body in relation to gender, sex, and sexuality ? How does an understanding of 'sex' as a product of discursive practices alter the terms in which a politics of gender or sexuality can be theorized ? Though her early works focus on just these sorts of questions, The Psychic Life of Power would appear to have abandoned the body as site of political resistance in an effort to recuperate the psyche as a space for 'postliberatory' political agency.4 This step 1narks a very significant point of departure in Butler's writings, and an i1nportant one for readers of Foucault. In one of her earliest published essays, Butler implored feminist theorists to rej ect Julia Kristeva's Lacanian theorization of the maternal body, and to turn instead to Foucault for insights into the discursive construction of sex/gender and subjectivity: 'Foucault's framework suggests a way to solve some . . . epistemological and political difficulties' (Butler 1 990a: 92 ) . Many of Butler's most important works in fe1ninist and queer theory since then have followed this path - tapping Foucauldian resources in order to theorize feminist and queer politics . Perhaps Butler feels she has exhausted those very assets; The Psychic Life of Power turns toward the psyche as a site of resistance precisely because, as a recent reviewer succinctly puts it, 'the theorists of productive power (Nietzsche, Althusser, and Foucault) have led her to a dead end with respect to agency' (Disch 1 99 9 : 552 ) . For Butler, Foucault's genealogical path, once fresh, promising, and untrodden, would appear to have run its course. But the dead end Butler believes she has found proves to be a product of her own making, a result of choosing a path that did not even lead in the direction she wanted to travel. It goes almost without

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saying that Foucault's writings will not provide Butler with a 'rnodel' or a proper theory of subj ection, but once one strips away, as Butler does, the historical texture of Foucault's archaeological and genea­ logical accounts, very little remains . This is the case exactly because Foucault always eschews any sort of transcendental account of sub­ jectivity; in fact, he goes so far as to characterize, retroactively, the entirety of his work as an effort to maxi1nize the distance between his project and the phenomenological account of the subj ect ( 1 99 8 : 43 8 ) . Only b y dehistoricizing Foucault's work can Butler then fault him for failing to account for agency . Butler accomplishes this former task very subtly, by asking questions of Foucault that he not only never intended to answer, but also overtly and decidedly sought to avoid. Foucault's historical sense leads him to dodge j ust such questions, not merely because he feels incapable of responding to them, but because the questions themselves prove rnislaid, as their design contributes to the games of truth that Foucault sought to evade so that he might focus on the political effects and historical function of those very games. Asking such questions of Foucault's work serves only to displace the ethical and political dimension of his historical investiga­ tions . Butler begins The Psychic Life of Power with just such a query: 'What is the psychic form that power takes ? ' ( 1 997a: 2 ) . The inquiry appears banal to the extent that psychoanalytic theory has already offered up answers to it, yet it strikes the reader as strange to the extent that a Foucauldian conception of power would avoid or ignore such a question in the first place. Butler tends to characterize this avoidance as a blind--spot in Foucault's writings, a gap that needs filling; for this reason she considers 'Foucault's theory of power' (something that Foucault always swore he never had nor ever intended to produce) to lead nowhere. I contend, on the contrary, that this avoidance was prudently considered, carefully constructed, and, in the end, crucial to Foucault's work. Even before taking up a consideration of h ow Foucault dispenses with the question of 'the psychic life of power' - and this directly concerns the issue of how Foucault can account for the historical process of subject-making without relying upon or presupposing any such notion of the psyche - one needs to understand why he eschews this line of inquiry from the beginning. Asking after the psychic conditions of existence for power runs the risk of mystifying power, capitalizing the 'P' in a way that Foucault consistently wished to avoid. Foucault's arguments concerning power prove complex,

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s01neti1nes contradictory, and always much-debated, yet his writings on power insist on at least two central points. First, Foucault contends that there is no such thing as 'power itself' - 'power as such does not exist' ( 1 9 8 3 : 21 7). Second, he argues that all his references to power must be understood as references to power relations, because in human relations 'power is always present' ( 1 994: 1 1 ; see also 19 78 : 92-1 02 ) . On Foucault's terms, then, the notion of a 'psychic life of power' is ill-conceived not only because it conceptualizes power outside the domain of human interaction the very locus of all power relations - but also because it places power within the psychic realm, thereby re1noving it from discursive practices - that site where 'power and knowledge are joined together' ( 1 978 : 1 0 0 ) . Inquiring into the psychic life o f power leads Butler t o trace the process by which, 'power . . . assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject's self-identity' ( 1 997a: 3 ) . Foucault avoids this line of inquiry - with its confine1nent to the psyche and its focus on identity because it threatens to turn desire (especially same-sex desire) into the truth of our identity. Foucault's worries see1n appropriate in the context of Butler's arguments, since her questions concerning the psychic life of power lead her to emphasize heavily the role and telos of desire in the process of subjection ( 1 8-23 ). I am not suggesting that Butler reduces subjectivity to desire, for she maintains that the psychic is always already social. Nevertheless, by centering her account on desire - by continually returning to the trope of our desire for our own subj ection - she does threaten to retie (however complicated) a knot that will link desire to identity . Foucault's later works, on the other hand, make a diligent effort to untie this knot. He consistently questions the notion that desire could constitute the truth of our identity, or that our identity itself could be uncovered by seeking knowledge of our desires. Foucault wanted to challenge the very idea that the riddle 'who am I ? ' could be transparently solved by asking 'what is my desire ? ' ( 1 9 8 9 b ) . For precisely this reason, Foucault proposed the distinction between desire and pleasure. As he puts it: I am advancing this term [pleasure] , because it seems to me that it escapes the medical and naturalistic connotations inherent in the notion of desire. That notion has been used as a tool, as a grid of intelligibility, a calibration in terms of normality: 'Tell me what your desire is and I will tell you who you are, whether you are normal or not, and then I can validate or invalidate your desire' . . . Desire is not an event but a permanent feature of the subject: it provides a basis onto which all that psychologico-medical

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armature can attach itself. ( 1 996: 40; quoted in Halperin 1995: 93-4; quoted in Macey 1993: 365 )

As a term for understanding that discursive production which is human sexuality, desire served ( and serves) as an enabling device for the disciplinary techniques of the medical and psychological discourses. Through its function as a nonhistoricized and perrnanent feature of the subject, desire can solve the riddle of identity only by fixing that identity in place. Desire transforms sexuality into the truth of one's identity, and therefore through the scientifico-Inedical dis­ courses 'the nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him . . . the homosexual was now a species' ( 1 9 78: 43, e1nphasis added ) . The method employed by Foucault in order t o 'disconcert' his readers on this point, to defamiliarize them with the notion that desire equals identity, is, as always, genealogical: 'the answer will have to come out of an historical inquiry' (72 ) . For just this reason, Foucault will never ask Butler's question, 'what is the psychic form that power takes ? ' Foucault asks instead, what discursive and histor­ ical relations of power/knowledge have operated so as to 1nake desire into the truth of identity ? What are the historical configurations of the very notion of a psychic life for power ? Michael Mahon and J a1nes Bernauer ( 1 994) have given a title to this line of inquiry, 'the archae­ ology of psychoanalysis', and they illustrate this process through a comparative reading of Freud's and Foucault's interpretations of the tragedy of Oedipus . 5 As is well known, Freud directly aligned Oedi­ pus's search for truth with the work of the psychoanalyst. Like a modern subject, Oedipus 'relentlessly pursues the truth of his identity, which is hidden far from his conscious awareness and shows itself tied to the di1nension of desire and sexuality' (Mahon and Bernauer 1 994: 1 4 8 ) . Whereas Freud takes the Oedipus story to hold a key insight into man as a desiring animal, a secret truth about ourselves, Foucault narrativizes the story of Oedipus - that is, he throws it into sharp relief as a discourse. Foucault reads the Oedipus story as an important discursive tool in the hands of the psychoanalyst: 'an instrument of limitation and compulsion that psychoanalysts, since Freud, utilize in order to calculate desire and to make it enter into a familial structure

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which our society defined at a deterrnined mornent' (Foucault 1 9 8 0b; quoted in Mahon and Bernauer 1 994: 1 49 ) . Through an 'archeology of psychoanalysis' Foucault exposes the foundations of psycho­ analysis as discursive constructs, not transcendental truths. He refuses to answer Butler's questions precisely because those questions can only set the agenda for resuturing desire to identity, for dehistoricizing the discursive production of modern subjectivity. The S ou l , The Pri s o n , The P s y che The soul i s the prison of the body. Foucault ( 1977a: 30)

Butler faults Foucault for failing to answer her questions, but, as one can clearly see, these are her questions, specifically designed to aid Butler in advancing her own project. In asking - rhetorically, I suppose - for Foucault to provide such answers, Butler does very little to incriminate Foucault's investigations into the constitution of the subj ect. She does, however, clarify the assumptions that she brings to her own undertaking: 'such a proj ect requires thinking a theory of power together with a theory of the psyche, a task that has been eschewed by writers in both Foucauldian and psychoanalytic orthodoxies' ( 1 997a: 3 ) . Butler's earlier work relies heavily on the genealogical insights and language of discursive analysis provided by Foucault's writings, while it also draws from the principles of psycho­ analytic theory. This tension has therefore always been present in Butler's writings ( see Benhabib 1 995b), but with The Psychic Life of Power Butler seeks to set matters straight through an active negotia­ tion of the tensions between Foucault's thought and the tenets of psychoanalytic theory. The essay entitled 'Subjection, Resistance, Resignification: Between Freud and Foucault' serves as the centerpiece of the book. In it, Butler atternpts to substantiate her starting point that understanding 'the psychic life of power' requires the resources of both psychoanalytic and discursive analysis, both Freud and Foucault ( 1 997a: 8 3-105 ) . Butler's argument emerges out o f the paradoxical doubling of assujettissement - a word best translated as 'subjectivation', but referring more to a process in which the individual becomes a subject precisely through being subjected. 6 How is it, Butler asks, that the establishment of subj ectivity - and therefore of political agency remains bound up with a process of subj ection and subordination ?

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Why must one be subject to power as a condition for the possibility of exercising power ? Butler notes that 'many conversations on the topic have become mired in whether the subj ect is the condition or the impasse of agency', a bottleneck she wishes to avoid ( 1 997a : 14, 1 7) . T o bypass the stagnation o f these debates o n subj ectivity, Butler must find a way to show the following: 'that agency is implicated in subordination is not the sign of a fatal self-contradiction at the core of the subject[, for] if the subj ect is neither fully determined by power nor fully determining of power ( but significantly and partially both), the subject exceeds the logic of noncontradiction, is an excrescence of logic' ( 1 7) . Butler seeks to account for agency's potential to exceed the power that founds it by describing the capacity for resistance that lies at the heart of assujettissement. Butler adtnits that her discussion of the process of subj ectivation and the turning or doubling that it entails - relies heavily on the insights of Foucault. However, at this crucial juncture in the argu­ tnent, at the very point of providing an account of resistance, Butler claims that she must 'rej oin the discourse of power with the discourse of psychoanalysis' ( 1 8 ) . The attempt to wed these two seemingly inc01npatible discourses proves to be the linchpin of Butler's philo­ sophical argument, and - because it articulates the conditions of possibility for resistance - the crux of critical political purchase. And yet, Butler's own 'desire' to bring Freud and Foucault together appears much stronger than her theoretical j ustification for the logical or political 'need' to do so. She writes: 'Foucault is notoriously taciturn on the subject of the psyche, but an account of subj ection, it seems, must be traced in the turns of psychic life' ( 1 8 , emphasis added ) . But why does 'it seem' that the psyche 'must' play such a foundational role in an 'account of subj ection' ? My question stems not only frotn Foucault's own tendency to deny such a foundational role to the psyche, but also from his claim, in an interview given j ust months before his death, that subjection, 'has always been my problem' ( 1 994: 1 ) . Needless to say, if the process of subjection proves central to Foucault's work ( at least on his own historical reconstruction), it does so only under the conditions that such an account not have recourse to the psyche (or 'the turns of psychic life' ) . Precisely this antagonism in Foucault's writings between assujettissement and psychoanalytic categories such as the psyche makes Butler's 'it seems' itself seern a bit strange and quite counter­ intuitive. However, the counterintuitive can never provide sufficient grounds for rejecting a philosophical argurnent, so we need to ask why

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Butler believes that psychic life proves so essential to any under­ standing of subjectivation, as that process that both subordinates and enables individuals. Recourse to the category of the psyche is necessary for Butler because it allows her analysis to answer questions to which she thinks Foucault's work sirnply cannot respond. For example, Butler finds herself in general agreement with Foucault's account of normalization through the discursive practices of a disciplinary regime. She takes Foucault's genealogy of the prison as a historical account that can serve to illustrate a more general theory of internalization: through the mechanism of the panopticon the prisoner internalizes the norms of discipline in the same way that the subject more generally internalizes all norms . It seems worth emphasizing here a point that Butler's reading rnay overlook: Foucault's genealogy always takes those 'mechanisms of the panopticon' as both physical/institutional and discursive. One plausible explanation for Butler's turn to the psyche is that it allows her to engage the corporeality of power. But in insisting that Foucault's account takes in both the physical and the discursive, I would suggest that this move turns out to be unnecessary in the first place. I emphasize both the physical/institutional effects of the panopticon and the discursive impact of it not to suggest that everything Foucault analyzes can be reduced to an instance of discourse. That thesis, when and where one finds it implied - it is never, to my knowledge, explicitly formulated or defended - rests on a rather naive, and possibly facile, idealist understanding of language. Butler herself rej ects such an idea under the helpful title of 'linguistic monism' the notion that everything in reality could be reducible to the source point of language. But Foucault, despite the overriding importance of language for his works, had little interest in such a theory. From his earliest work onward, Foucault always remained concerned with both discursive and nondiscursive practices - from the effect of physical incarceration of those deemed 'mad' to the effects of physical training and abstinence ( from sex and food) on the Greeks. Nevertheless, the significance of this distinction between the discursive and the institu­ tional should by no means entail a dichotomy between the two. On the one hand, discursive practices always and only become intelligible against an institutional background, and, on the other, institutional power structures always operate through discursive practices. Given this relation between the institutional and the discursive, Foucault advises his readers to study history with an eye to discourse, while

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always considering the position of discursive practices in history - this was Foucault's version of historical sense. In this vein, he suggests early on that 'discourse . . . is not an ideal, timeless form, that also possesses a history; . . . it is, from beginning to end, historical', and then suggests in a later work that 'it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together' ( 1 972b: 1 1 7; 1 97 8 : 1 00 ) . So the mechanisms of the panopticon produce effects upon the subj ect (as prisoner) that are indeed physical, but these effects are, nevertheless, carried out within and through discursive practices for example, the description of the prison timetable that follows the account of torture at the opening of Discipline and Punish ( see also Shapiro 1 9 8 1 ) . In preparing her readers for the turn to the psyche, Butler approaches Foucault's account of internalization with yet another critical question: 'how are we to account for the desire for the norm and for subj ection more generally in terms of a prior desire for social existence, a desire exploited by regulatory power ? ' ( 1 997a: 1 9; see also Brown 1 995: 64; cf. Horowitz 1 9 8 7 ) . According to Butler, Foucault's work can only begin to provide a response to this sort of question by way of his argurnent that 'the soul is the prison of the body' (Foucault 1 977a : 30; Butler 1 9 9 7a : 8 5 ) . Butler argues that Foucault's understanding of the soul, as a discursive product of a disciplinary regime, serves the psychic function of nonnalization. In other words, Foucault's theorization of the soul can come to substitute for the more robust concept of the psyche; the soul in Foucault's genealogy, like the psyche in Butler's en1erging theory, allows the subj ect to seek its own subjection. Butler thereby reads into Foucault's work the very creation 'of psychic identity, or what Foucault will call a "soul" ' ( 1 997a: 8 5 ) . And, as Butler would have it, Foucault's theori­ zation of the soul allows him to cheat, as it were, in order to account for 'the psychic life of power'. However, for Butler, Foucault's sub­ stitution of the soul for the psyche is but a poor one indeed, because it eliminates the possibility of resistance - given that Foucault 'appears to be privileging the metaphor of the prison to theorize the subj ectiva­ tion of the body' ( 8 5 ) ? And Butler, as we will see, contends that resistance is precisely what the psychoanalytic concept of the psyche rnakes possible. Butler questions the tenability of Foucault's substitute theory of the soul because the imagery of domination and irnprison­ ment holds significant limitations when it con1es to Butler's proj ect ( a project never shared b y Foucault) o f developing a n adequate philo­ sophical theory of subj ection. This is not the first time that Butler has offered a reading of

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Foucault's infamous phrase, 'the soul is the prison of the body.' Indeed, it is her fifth published interpretation of the enigmatic passages that surround the phrase ( see Butler 1 9 89a, 1 990a, 1 990b, 1 993 ) . Further, i t appears that i n Butler's eyes time has not been kind to Foucault's work; each of her successive interpretations grows less charitable. In a very early article, Butler writes the following, which I quote at length to preserve her reading: The figure of the interior soul understood as 'within' the body is produced through its inscription on the body; indeed, the soul is inscribed on the surface, a signification that produces on the flesh the illusion of an ineffable depth ...The soul requires the body for its signification, and requires also that the body signify its own limit and depth through corporeal means. Furthermore, the body must signify in a way that conceals the very fact of that signifying ... The effect of the soul as a structuring inner space is produced through the signification of a body as a vital and sacred enclosure. The soul is precisely what the body lacks; hence, the body presents itself as a signifying lack.That lack which is the body signifies the soul as that which cannot show.In this sense, then, the soul is a surface signification that contests and displaces the inner/outer distinction itself, a figure of interior psychic space inscribed on the body as a social signification that perpetually conceals itself as such. In Foucault's terms, the soul is not imprisoned by or within the body, but inversely, 'the soul is the prison of the body'. ( 1 989a: 605-6)

The power of this passage lies in its capacity to impart rr1eaning to Foucault's puzzling and paradoxical claim that 'the soul is the prison of the body', without undennining or downplaying its importance. To say that the soul imprisons the body is not simply to reverse our intuitive understanding of the body as outside and the soul as inside; it is to ' [displace] the inner/outer distinction itself' . By unraveling that distinction (without merely erasing it) , Butler reads the Foucauldian body as a lack that signifies the soul - a soul that is written on, and therefore capable of imprisoning, the body. The soul can i1nprison the body only through being written on the body, thereby bringing to intelligibility the very inner/outer distinction that we typically and retroactively use to describe the relation between body and soul. 8 The claim that 'the soul is the prison of the body' only startles its readers because it seems to contradict our traditional understanding of the soul as inner and the body as outer; Butler unravels the paradox as soon as she displaces that distinction. Over the years, Butler takes a very different tack on Foucault's notion of the soul by suggesting that it allows Foucault to rework the

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Aristotelian relation between soul and body. Whereas, for Aristotle, the soul represents the actualization of the body, giving form to the unrealized potential of matter, for Foucault, the soul 'becomes a normative and normativizing ideal according to which the body is trained, shaped, cultivated, and invested' ( Butler 1 9 9 3 : 33 ). With her recent work, Butler's reading has been so shortened that she simply presumes that 'we can understand Foucault's references to the soul as an implicit reworking of the Aristotelian formulation in which the soul is understood to be the form and principle of the body's matter' ( 1 997a: 9 0 ) . With this assumption in hand, she tends toward ques­ tioning Foucault rather than engaging with him. To that end, she asks: 'does the reduction of the psychoanalytically rich notion of the psyche to that of the imprisoning soul eliminate the possibility of resistance to normalization and to subj ect formation . . . ? If Foucault understands the psyche to be an imprisoning effect in the service of normalization, then how might he account for psychic resistance to normalization ? ' ( 8 7) . The problem with Butler's recent questions is that, in light of her own earlier interpretations of Foucault, they are nonquestions. By taking the soul as a regulatory ideal to which the body must conform ­ 'forcing the prisoner to approximate an ideal' Butler recreates the very inside/outside distinction that she had previously (in her first reading of Foucault's passages on the soul) so incisively called into question. Butler has moved from her earlier displacement of the inner/ outer distinction to a critique of Foucault that assumes that the prisoner can be trapped inside an ideal or norm that is somehow outside, pressing in on the prisoner and forcing him or her to conform. If the soul is but the psyche, 'an irnprisoning effect in the service of normalization', then it rnust be j uxtaposed to, and analytically sepa­ rated from, the body that would resist it - exactly the move that Butler's earlier reading rules off-lirnits . Because she insists on reducing Foucault's notion of the soul to a rnere, and inadequate, approxima­ tion of the 'psychoanalytically rich[er] ' concept of the psyche, she fails to grasp the conceptual work that can be done with a soul that imprisons the body. The soul imprisons the body not by trapping it and forcing it to conform to a regulatory ideal. The soul, in Foucault's genealogical analysis, proves to be a product of rnodern discursive practices of science, psychoanalysis, Christianity, and punishment. These institu­ tions have historically seized directly upon the bodies of those subjects whose souls they wish to 'improve'. The soul has a 'historical reality'

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(and not a metaphysical or psychoanalytic one) because it is 'born . . . out of methods of punishrnent, supervision, and constraint' (Foucault 1 977a: 2 9 ) . While the soul has no substance and no ontological existence, it remains 'real' precisely because of its history, because of what it enables to happen in history, and because it 'is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy. ' Only the functioning of power in and through history could give us the modern 'soul': 'this real, noncorporal soul . . . is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the rnachinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power' (29 ) . Undoubtedly, the power relations articulated b y modern discur­ sive practices of punishment are nonnalizing, but Butler seerns to conflate or at least flatten an irnportant (if implicit) distinction in Foucault between normalization and conformism. In her criticisms of Foucault, Butler insists that normalization requires a psychic desire for the nonn. However, one can be judged, measured, calculated, and disciplined in relation to a nonn, even il one resists normalization. Clearly one need not desire norrnalization in order to be subject to its effects; the process of nonnalization operates well outside the scope of our 'desire for the norm'. A norm does not need a psychic desire for its sustenance, for normalization functions not simply in spite of but because of our resistance to it - and this important point need not undercut the significance of that resis­ tance. In other words, one need not conform, nor want to conform, in order to be subject to normalization. Non11alization proves to be at least as much a matter of institutional and discursive practices as it does individual desire. Moreover, cornplete confonnism would eliminate normalization, as there would then be no distance between the subj ect and the nonn, no space of j udgement and normalization. The concept of normalization connotes statistics, as Foucault makes clear; it ought, I contend, to conj ure up a normal bell curve, and every normal curve contains significant and consistent percentages of deviations that lie at the edges of the bell. To flatten that curve into a straight vertical line (conforrnism) would eliminate the process of normalization in which every member of society can always be judged in relation to the norm. Foucault's most direct statement on the process of normalization comes late in Discipline and Punish, where he writes:

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normalization becomes one of the great instruments of power at the end of the classical age.For the marks that once indicated status, privilege and affiliation were increasingly replaced or at least supplemented - by a whole range of degrees of normality indicating membership of a homo­ geneous social body but also playing a part in classification, hierarchiza­ tion and the distribution of rank. In a sense, the power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialties and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another. It is easy to understand how the power of the norm functions within a system of formal equality, since within a homogeneity that is the rule, the norm introduces, as a useful imperative and as a result of measurement, all the shading of individual differences. ( 1977a: 184)

Conformism, then, would require complete homogeneity and an erosion of individuality. But the process of norrnalization, as Foucault e1nphasizes, is also responsible for individualizing, for shading in all the small gradations of differences between and among individuals . Norrnalization, in fact, requires individualization, since the latter makes judgement in relation to the norm possible. Butler insists that Foucault si1nply cannot account for resistance because he has no theoretical armature that will enable him to handle the psyche, but she fails to note that in the passages she interprets with such frequency, Foucault offers a description of the soul as a product of modern discursive practices - a description that explicitly accounts for the psyche. Foucault calls the soul a 'reality-reference', a point de passage 9 for relations of power/knowledge: 'On this reality-reference, various conceptions have been constructed and don1ains of analysis carved out: psyche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness, etc . ' ( 1 977a: 29-3 0 ) . Contrary t o Butler's claims that Foucault's impover­ ished notion of the soul provides but a mere substitute for the psyche, it would seem that the reality-reference called 'soul' is precisely that construct of discursive practices onto which notions such as the psyche are later projected. Foucault's articulation of the soul as that which displaces an inner/ outer distinction (for example, between mind and body) allows him to do without psychoanalytic theory because he can account for the psyche on his own terms. The psyche, for Foucault, is but one of those conceptions that has been constructed upon the 'reality-reference' called the soul. Butler's attempt to demonstrate Foucault's latent need for psychoanalytic theory therefore proves misplaced from the start (cf. Butler 1 99 3 : 1 8 9 ) , since Foucault's arguments cmnprehend the psyche within the terms of a soul that 'is the prison of the body'. Butler

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thereby ends up seeking an account of resistance that on her own tenns can only ever be intrapsychic resistance. Along this path, she turns to Lacan's distinction between the subj ect and the psyche. Lacan takes the Freudian ego-ideal and defines it as the 'position' that the subj ect takes within the symbolic. Such a normalized position becomes inscribed within language and therefore 'culturally intelligible' . The psyche is that which resists such a normalized position. The psyche 'exceeds the imprisoning effects' of the normalized subject position. In short, 'the psyche is what resists' ( 1 997a: 8 6 ) . According to Butler, Foucault's discursive account of subjectivation thereby clearly needs the psyche. Only a psychoanalytic 'correction' to Foucault can overcome Foucault's facile reduction of the psyche to the soul ( 8 6 ) . For Butler, such a reduction eliminates precisely the space of resistance, since 'there is a resistance to identity at the very heart of psychic life' (Rose 1 9 8 7: 90- 1 ; quoted in Butler 1 997a : 97). This argument likely holds a good bit of truth, so far as it goes. 1 0 Nonetheless, with it Butler brings multiple difficulties on board in her effort to provide a 'theory of subjection' that can 'account for resistance'. In the simplest terms, Butler sets up her problem as follows: given that subj ect-formation depends upon the power of norms, how is resistance to the norm possible ? Her critique of Foucault lies, obviously enough, in the suggestion that Foucault cannot answer this question without the help of Freud and Lacan. But Foucault's inability to answer the query ought, in fact, to be seen as a strength of his work, given how poorly Butler has constructed the problem. The failings of her formulation lie in the manner with which it reduces resistance to a lirnited psychic condition that is always already (and only) in opposition to identity. Because Butler's analysis obscures the subtle distinction between normalization and confor­ mity, it cannot take notice of the fact that a 'norm' is, almost by definition, contrary to certain states of affairs. No individual can ever actually embody a norrn, for the norm functions as an ideal-type and not as an e1npirical fact. Norms can only be approximated, and for this reason a resistance to norms remains intrinsic to the very process of normalization. Michael Warner makes the point succinctly: 'if there isn't resistance, it isn't a norm' ( 1 999a: 1 55 ) . 1 1 As Foucault makes clear on a number of occasions, the operation of normalization always contains its own stumbling blocks, so that, in general, power relations 'depend on a multiplicity of points of resistance' ( 1 978: 95 ) . And, for Foucault, these resistances can be individual, social, and political, but never merely psychic.

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The 'problem' of resistance only becomes problematic for Butler because her accounts of subj ect formation tend to be carried out in an abstract, ahistorical, even acontextu al 1nanner. Against her better wishes, she thereby continually smuggles into her analysis an almost transcendent conception of power. Power in its psychic life is only ever concerned with identity, subj ectivity, and resistance, but never with political struggles, historical transformations of discursive practices, or temporal change. The social and political institutions through which power relations can be expressed go unnamed and unnoticed in Butler's theory. The few political examples Butler does offer often tend only to strengthen my point. Her repeated emphasis upon the interpellation of homosexual identity remains, despite her constant references to it, an abstract and ahistorical illustration of her theory of subjection - directly contrasting with Foucault's writings on homo­ sexual identity as a product of nineteenth-century medical and scien­ tific discursive practices. In Excitable Speech Butler would appear to offer a more concrete historical case when she rnakes a brief reference to Rosa Parks's actions as an example of insurrectionary agency that lays claim to a right for which it has no prior authorization ( 1 997b: 14 7-8 ) . However, Butler even manages to flatten out the political and institutional complexity of the Montgomery bus boycott - ignoring the organizational context of dissident citizenship that made Parks' s actions possible i n the first place, and giving the story the typical (yet inaccurate) 'individualistic spin' ( Sparks 1 997: 9 1 ; see also Disch 1 999 ) . Butler asks, 'how might [Foucault] account for psychic resistance to normalization ? ' But Foucault's understanding of power as a diverse set of historical power relations moves past this question before it can even be asked. In its actual historical operations through social, institutional, and discursive practices, power always encounters re­ sistance: 'where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. Should it be said that one is always "inside" power, there is no "escaping" it . . . ? This would be to misunderstand the strictly relational character of power relationships. Their existence depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance' ( 1 97 8 : 95, emphasis added ) . The point, therefore, is never simply to 'account for resistance' through a theory of 'subj ection', but to analyze the historical config­ urations of these various points of resistance, and possibly even to provide a theoretical intervention that enables 'the strategic codifica­ tion of these points of resistance' - that which 'rnakes a revolution

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possible' ( 96 ). This sort of 'account' of resistance can only ever be historical and political, not psychic. Foucault insists on this point not because it is wrong to say that 'the psyche is what resists', but because it is so uninteresting and unhelpful to say so. When Butler suggests that 'the question of a suppressed psycho­ analysis in Foucault . . . might be raised more precisely as the problem of locating or accounting for resistance', she sets out to find in Foucault (or to show why we cannot locate in his corpus ) exactly the sort of resistance in which he had no interest ( 1 997a: 8 7 ) . In other words, the problems Butler encounters in her project of giving a general, philosophical account of resistance turn out to be a nonissue when interpreted through Foucault's genealogical lenses. Foucault always rernains focused on the historical practices of resistance, and the attempt to develop a sort of ontology of resistance ( if that is indeed Butler's final goal) would have likely never interested him. Foucault would certainly have resisted Butler's attempt to impose the agenda of her proj ect onto his work; he 1night even have been cavalier in his dismissal of that project, as it seeks a goal that Foucault could never share. Rather than ignoring Butler's important work, I would like to inquire a bit further into the tenability and possible payoff of her project. In the end, however, I will show that even on Butler's own terms her effort to join Foucault and Freud together will fail, and this fact only dramatizes the urgency of Foucault's warning to bypass psychoanalytic theory. P s y c h o a n a l y s i s and the Pre d i s cursive I don't know what will happen with psychoanalysts but I am afraid they will take as 'anti-psychoanalysis' something that is only meant to be genealogy. Foucault ( 1989c: 2 12)

Butler's readings of psychoanalytic texts have proved strikingly con­ sistent on one point: Butler insists that any element placed or forced outside of the symbolic or discursive realm must be understood as produced by or in relation to the symbolic itself. Thus, Butler shows how the binary thinking imposed by the heterosexual rnatrix produces 'sex' as the natural and prediscursive 'outside' of a gender that is socially rr1olded and manifested. And, of course, the very purpose of such work lies in exposing the cultural and social work done by the heterosexual matrix, and thereby revealing the discursive nature of sex

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( 1 990a ) . The sex/gender distinction itself proves to be a discursive product, and sex is therefore gender all the way down. Given the trajectory of this type of argument, Butler takes a highly critical and deconstructive stance vis-a--vis those authors who attempt dichoto­ mously to oppose the sy1nbolic to its outside. For Butler, any psycho­ analytic theory must carry a Foucauldian sensibility that grasps the 'prediscursive' as precisely that which discourse rnakes possible. This logic explains Butler's critique of both Kristeva ( 1 990a) and Slavoj Zizek ( 1 993 ) . Butler accuses Kristeva of setting up the semiotic as a prediscursive 'before the law' in such a way as to undermine the political possibility of challenging that law. And Zizek comes under attack for placing the Lacanian 'real' outside of and prior to the symbolic realm, such that, again, the real becomes shielded from critical scrutiny and political transformation. These previous chal­ lenges to psychoanalytic theorists hold great relevance for Butler's more recent writings on Foucault and the psychic power of resistance, since they entail that, for Butler, we can have psychoanalysis (and, indeed, productively appropriate it) as long as we eschew reliance on the semiotic or the real within psychoanalytic theory - as long as, that is, we maintain a historical sense that thereby prohibits recourse to the prediscursive. The very status of the prediscursive always serves to preclude it from historical, cultural, and political analysis; the prediscursive al­ ways plays the role of the given that lies outside of analysis. But a keen historical sense can reveal that the category of the prediscursive itself always proves to be constituted historically by discursive practices; the notion of a 'prediscursive' always circulates within a particular historical discourse. Thus, no critical theory can allow itself to rule off-limits - that is, beyond the bounds of critical analysis - the political and theoretical move involved in discursively constructing a predis­ cursive. In light of her reworking of Freud and Foucault, the question for Butler thus becomes : is it possible to appropriate the psyche without allowing it to become j ust another prediscursive rnyth that obscures genealogical investigation of its very genesis ? As I will show, despite this past history of challenges to any psychoanalytic presup­ position of the prediscursive, Butler makes the same n1istake herself while trying to establish a workable theoretical partnership between Freud and Foucault. In short, the position and function of the psyche in Butler's recent argurnents leads her into the same traps as the ones she has uncovered in the work of Zizek and Kristeva. Butler makes it clear that she has no intention of unthinkingly

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appropriating a transhistorical or universal conception of the psyche. Therefore, while she repeatedly emphasizes the need for a psycho­ analytic 'correction' to Foucault, Butler also has aspirations to correct certain elements of psychoanalytic theory. Butler wants to bring the psyche to bear on Foucauldian thought while she simultaneously reads the psyche discursively as a category that can never be 'before the law'. She underscores this argument: 'j ust as the subject is derived from conditions of power that precede it, so the psychic operation of the norm is derived, though not rnechanically or predictably, from prior social operations' ( 1 997a: 2 1 ) . This passage serves to emphasize that Butler's Freudian conception of the psyche must, in her mind, be rigorously distinguished from Kristeva's or Zizek's Lacanian notions of, respectively, the semiotic and the real. But Butler's protestations may well beg the question: if the psyche turns out to be a thoroughly discursive social production, then why, again, does a Foucauldian analysis of discursive practices need the psyche in the first place ? What critical theoretical purchase does the psyche provide ? The answer to these questions underrr1ines the very trajectory of Butler's arguments, suggesting instead that Foucault's decision to side-step psychoanalytic theory turns out to be a wise one. Recall that, according to Butler, Foucault's description of assujettisse­ ment could not account for the very desire for subjection. In a passage I quoted earlier, she asks : 'how are we to account for the desire for the norm and for subjection more generally in terms of a prior desire for social existence, a desire exploited by regulatory power ? ' ( 1 9 ) . Only the psyche makes such an explanation possible, because the psyche explains a subj ect's prior and enduring desire for social existence at all costs, a desire that leads the subject to seek its own subjection. Moreover, while Butler has emphasized the nontranscendental nature of her conception of the psyche, I would suggest that one must critically scrutinize Butler's presupposition of 'a prior desire for social existence' . Butler may well resist appropriating the psyche as a Freudian prediscursive category, but this is only possible because of her recuperation of Spinoza's prediscursive 'desire to exist'. From almost the beginning of The Psychic Life of Power, Butler implicitly rests her analysis on the Spinozan 'desire to exist' by continually err1phasizing the significantly exploitable nature of the pervasive 'desire to survive, "to be" ' . Then, she candidly asks her readers to 'accept Spinoza's notion that desire is always desire to persist in one's own being' ( 7, 2 6 ) . These are not merely offhand or casual remarks; Butler has recourse to this 'prior' desire for existence

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throughout the book, and it plays a foundational role in her logic

of subjectivation. In fact, she goes so far as directly to connect this Spinozan tenet with the writings of Hegel, Freud, Foucault, and Nietzsche. For example: 'desire has as its final aim the continuation of life itself - and here one might link Hegel, Freud, and Foucault all back to Spinoza's conatus' ( 6 2 ) . Later she suggests that 'the desire to be' 'preoccupied' both Spinoza and Nietzsche. Other examples can be found scattered throughout this rather short book. At this point my summary of Butler can no longer suppress the pressing question: where does this 'prior desire for existence' come fr01n ? 12 One need not look far to locate the highly problematic nature of the Spinozan postulate that Butler invokes. Because Butler's own argu­ ments never seem to admit this principle into the discursive realm, and therefore into the space of analysis and criticisrn, such a universal desire to be - especially as it functions in the philosophy of Spinoza partakes of just the sort of 'metaphysics of substance' that Butler calls into question in her previous books ( 1 990a; 1 9 93 ) . Moreover, Butler never questions the status of this Spinozan principle, as she does the Freudian psyche, nor does she offer any semblance of an account of its discursive and social production. In fact, the desire to exist functions in Butler's text as an explanation for the subj ect's turn toward its own subj ection within the social realm, but that desire itself always seems to come from elsewhere, to remain outside of the analysis and ' before' the discursive production of subjectivity. For example, she writes: 'subj ection [itself a social process] exploits the desire for existence, where existence is always conferred from elsewhere' ( 1 997a: 20-1 ) . Butler wants t o rnake sure that her conception o f psychic life rerr1ains a part of the social realm that produces it (thereby avoiding the mistakes of Kristeva and Zizek) yet she still presupposes a presocial and prediscursive 'desire to exist' that always remains shielded from genealogical analysis and therefore preserved from political transfor­ mation. Most importantly, this prediscursive and unchallenged desire sets the conditions of possibility for the socially constructed and discursively bound psyche. Mimicking the move that Butler makes in response to both Kristeva and Zizek, I will argue, against Butler, that the 'invariant' desire to exist must itself be 'admitted into discourse' so that it can be critically questioned. Ironically, one of those authors who, according to Butler, supposedly ascribes to the Spinozan view, actually gives a genealogical account of its origins an account that serves to challenge Butler' s position. Butler argues that the 'desire t o exist' c a n link u p both

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Foucault and Nietzsche with Spinoza, but careful attention to just one text of Nietzsche's throws great doubt on such a claim. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche argues the following: The wish to preserve oneself ['to persist in one's being'] is the symptom of a condition of distress, of a limitation of the really fundamental instinct of life which aims at the expansion of power and, wishing for that, frequently risks and even sacrifices self-preservation.It should be considered symp­ tomatic when some philosophers - for example, Spinoza who was con­ sumptive - considered the instinct of self-preservation decisive and had to see it that way; for they were individuals in conditions of distress.( 1974: 291-2; see also Kofman 1993: 68-71) 1 3

I n this passage, Nietzsche exposes the thoroughly historical roots o f the principle o f a 'desire for existence' and thereby underrnines any claims to its transcendental or invariant nature. 'The desire to exist', j ust like the poetic imaginings of the semiotic and the foreclosed realm of the real, must remain situated within the historical and cultural discourses that create and often sustain it. By placing it outside of those contexts as an enabling condition for her own arguments Butler obscures the 'desire to exist' from cultural and political critique. The Nietzschean counterexample does much more than merely expose a contradiction at the center of Butler's arguments, because by placing the 'desire to exist' outside of discourse Butler rests her argument on a presocial 'Subject' (with the capital letter serving to show that this subj ect has no identity or history outside of its place in Butler's theory ) . In making this move Butler abandons any real sense of history, and when detached from history her theory of subjection becomes a somewhat empty philosophical doctrine, one unable to serve as the basis for an intervention into the politics of subjectivation. I take Nietzsche's notion of historical sense quite seriously as j ust that - a sixth sense (of which few are capable) that remains attentive to history . Most philosophers, according to Nietzsche, make the mistake of sneaking into, or beginning their analyses with, a notion of 'man' as they think he 'is ' : 'lack of historical sense is the family failing of all philosophers' ( 1 9 8 6 : 1 3 ; see also 1 954, 1 966, 1 9 8 2 ) . In the case of Butler's argument, good historical sense would require a careful attentiveness to the historical conditions that produce a given subject with an ever-pressing 'desire for existence'. How has man as a desiring animal become ? What formation of discursive practices can account for this desire ? The terms of Foucault's genealogical analyses serve to answer just these sorts of questions, but Butler's psychoanalytic

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account has lost its nose for history . Butler falls prey to the family failing of philosophers to such an extent that Butler's 'Subject' would appear to have inverted Patrick Henry's famous slogan 'Give me liberty or give me death'. As Butler herself says in explaining the nature of this Subject: 'I would rather exist in subordination than not exist' ( 1 997a: 7) . In other words, 'give me unfreedom any day, just do not give me death'. The problem with this doctrine is that the subject who professes it can hardly spur a politics of resistance. If this desire to exist is always figured by Butler as a given aspect of the subject, then any resistance to the subordination involved in psychic identity can itself only prove to be psychic. From Nietzsche's perspective, Butler's subject remains in a continual condition of distress; governed by the desire for existence, the subj ect can do no more than struggle for psychic preservation. Butler forecloses the possibilities of opening up the 'desire to exist' to historical understanding, cultural critique, and political transformation - her lack of historical sense translates into a lack of political sense. Historical S e n s e , U ntimelin e s s , and Political Agency Political analysis and critique, for the most part, have to be invented - but so do strategies that will allow both modifying these relations of force and coordinating them in such a way that this modification will be possible and register in reality . . . the problem is not really defining a political 'position', but to imagine and to bring out new schemas of politicization. If 'to politicize' means going back to standard choices, to pre-existing organizations, all these relations of force and these mechanisms of power that analysis mobilizes, then it's not worth it. The great new techniques of power must be opposed by new forms of politicization. Foucault ( 1989c: 2 1 1)

Foucault concludes 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' by outlining three possible 'uses' for historical sense (all directed against Platonic con­ ceptions of history) ; in my critique of Butler I hope to suggest a fourth, specifically political, use. Because it helps one to resist Butler's efforts at building a universal theory of subjection, historical sense can open up a space for an untimely conception of agency. Butler's reliance on and refusal to interrogate the psychoanalytic notion of the ' desire to exist' renders that desire a prediscursive within Butler's theory of subj ectivity. In contrast, Butler's own, earlier insistence on subj ecting all such notions of the 'prediscursive' to scrutiny - as themselves

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produced within the discursive, social realm - amounts to a rather keen historical sense. Foucault's understanding of political agency proves to be untimely precisely because he holds on to the historical sense at just the point where Butler abandons it - that is, at psycho­ analytic theory. Foucault consistently dernands that we understand political agency as produced, limited, enabled, and constrained by the intersection and overlap of various sets of discursive practices. He rej ects the search for a philosophical theory of subj ection, and chooses instead to study those historical moments in which political action becomes possible. As I have previously defined it, agency is that possibility for political action; for Foucault, then, the scope and nature of agency must always be transforming, as discursive practices thernselves change. Political agency must remain untimely, precisely because political action can­ not find foundations in a transcendental theory of the subject. This lack of foundations has led many commentators to accuse Foucault of robbing the political actor of agency. Without rehashing these debates, I would only point out what should be clear from the preceding analysis : the critique of Foucault for 'ignoring' agency relies upon, and borrows its force frorn, a conception of politics as tirnely. Foucault can only be said to deny agency to political actors if one presupposes that agency must be timely. That is, only if one assumes that political agency rests on the ground of a timeless philosophical subj ectivity can one deny a theory of agency in Foucault's work . The critique of Foucault assumes that political action can only proceed from a stable, grounded, and historically rooted position ( for example, 'I act because I am authorized to do so by constitutional guarantees, historical precedent, j uridical decree, etc . ' ) . But any working knowl­ edge of Nietzschean historical sense will tell us that action always and only occurs in media res; political action is always reaction, response, and transformation. And that action can be oriented in a number of different directions - toward present problems, but also toward future possibilities and past ghosts . Political agency, thought simply as the capacity for political action, is always untimely. Foucault's work clearly creates a space for untimely agency. This is not to say that in Foucault we find a full-blown and developed conception of a politics of untirnely agency. To my knowl­ edge, Foucault, unlike Nietzsche, never even provided any reflections on the notion of untimeliness, and, as so many of his critics have pointed out, Foucault's specific remarks on the question of political agency prove rather scattered and thin. In other words, while Foucault

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rarely theorizes political agency he never makes the distinction between agency and subjectivity that I rely on here - and while he does little to shed light on the notion of untimeliness, it is possible to employ the understanding of untimeliness that I have developed in the preceding chapters in order to catch a glimpse of untimely agency within Foucault's work. By allowing Nietzsche's historical sense to guide us through Butler's critique, I think it is possible to see in Foucault's understanding of historical subjectivity a few of the con­ stitutive elements needed to produce a thinking of untimely agency. I have tried to highlight those very components in my response to Butler. Because her argument strives for a certain timelessness, because it tries to offer a theory of subjectivation as a ground for agency, Butler's work helps to throw untimely agency into ever sharper relief. This is only the first step, however, in building a politics of untimeli­ ness: we must exit the realm of theories of subjection in order to look at political action itself. In the next chapter, then, I turn to a recent, concrete, and some might say banal, example of politics: the legislative and cultural debate over gay marriage. My analysis of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) will serve to focus the issues at stake in untimely agency and to fill in some of the larger gaps in the effort to build a politics of untimeliness . N ot e s 1 . I refer t o the French title i n the text so as t o emphasize the connection to Nietzsche's work. A literal translation of the title into English would be 'The Will to Knowledge', a title that resonates with Nietzsche in a way that 'History of Sexuality' never will. One of the primary, if somewhat implicit, goals of this chapter will be to distinguish this sort of political intervention from an attempt to offer up an alternative theory of sexuality. Foucault has no such theory in mind; for an elucidation of this point, see David Halperin's 'Forgetting Foucault', forthcoming. 2. The idea of 'resisting psychoanalysis' seems intrinsically proble­ matic, given that 'psychoanalysis' is far from a unitary, mono­ lithic, or even coherent entity (Derrida 1 99 8 : 20) . Foucault, of course, never avoided the problematic, and he had worries about both the historical practice of the analytic method and the system of norms that makes up psychoanalytic theory. While Foucault never had the time to complete his arguments against the former ­ though he did intend to - his writings leave us with a fairly clear

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position on the latter. What we should 'resist' in 'resisting psycho­ analysis' is not our own desire for psychotherapy, nor any other set of individual notions . My reference to 'resisting psycho­ analysis' tries to capture an ethos that I think Foucault hirnself suggested: we need to make the methodological decision to rnove beyond the terms of psychoanalytic theory, terms that reduce structural heterosexism to individual homophobia, terms that depoliticize by personalizing, terrns that could be taken to reduce the history of discursive practices concerning sexuality to the promotion and also rejection of the repressive hypothesis . 3 . Butler is by no means the only author who tries to combine, compare, or merge Freud's and Foucault's thoughts on sexuality and subjectivity, but I will focus almost exclusively on her attempt to stake out a position between Freud and Foucault while she draws on the insights of both authors. Butler's work in this area stands out because reconciliation of Freud and Foucault is truly her goal. Yet along the way, and in order to rnove Foucault toward Freud, she rnust offer up her own 'psychoanalytic critique' of Foucault. Against this critique and in the name of resisting a 'psychoanalytic correction to Foucault', I forward my strongest challenge to Butler. For other Freudian critiques, see Bersani ( 1 995; cf. Derrida 1 99 8 ) and de Lauretis ( 1 994, 1 9 9 8 ) . 4 . It i s important a t this point t o circumscribe the scope o f my critique of Butler: it focuses solely on her attempt within The Psychic Life of Power to build a proper 'theory of subjection' that depends upon the psyche. Here she makes her strongest critique of Foucault, and it is here, I argue, that her conception of subj ectivity falls prey to the 'family failing' of philosophers. It lacks historical sense; by seeking timelessness it fails to be untimely. More recently, in her work with Laclau and Zizek (2000), Butler would appear to have dropped her fascination with Lacan and her critique of Foucault. In this new work she makes some of the very same arguments against Zizek that I will make against her in the pages that follow; she insists on a sense of historicity that is anything but timeless. For a reading of Butler's recent work as highly critical of Lacanian subjectivity, see my 'Ghostly Rights' (2003 ) . My argument here is designed to illuminate further the shape and contours of a politics of untimeliness by drawing out a conception of untimely political agency, and the criticisms of Butler should therefore be seen as a means to that end - not as an attempt to reject her work in its entirety.

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5 . I rely here on the work of Mahon and Bernauer simply because

6.

7.

8.

9.

they have provided ample quotations of Foucault's lectures on the Oedipus legend that he gave at the College de France on 1 6, 23, and 30 January 1 9 8 0 . These lectures have not, to my knowledge, been published in either English or French. For a different reading of Oedipus offered by Foucault, see 'Truth and Juridical Forms' (2000: 1-8 9 ) . Both this translation and understanding o f assujettissement - i n Butler's account and i n mine remain indebted to Foucault's writings on the historical and discursive constitution of subjec­ tivity as both a disciplining and enabling process . The key to this twist in Butler's argument lies in her belief that psychoanalytic theory can provide a better argument for resis­ tance to disciplinary normalization. However, the turn itself seems hardly justified within Butler's account, since she only discusses Foucault's work in Discipline and Punish . Thus, when Butler asks, 'what are we to make of imprisonment and invasion as the privileged figures through which Foucault articulates the process of subjectivation ? ' ( 8 5 ), one might want to respond by showing that within the context of a genealogical account of 'the birth of the prison' the privileging of these figures seems merely appropriate to the historical subj ect matter . As I will show below, when Butler takes the time to look at Foucault's other texts that theorize subj ectivation she finds a whole different set of meta­ phors - ones that may, in fact, prove capable of sustaining a politics of resistance. With this critical turn Butler echoes (though in a different key) the liberal critics of Foucault. See, for example, Fraser ( 1 9 8 1 ) , Taylor ( 1 9 8 6 ), and Rorty ( 1 9 8 6 ) . While Taylor and Fraser are best known, respectively, for their comrnunitarian and feminist critiques of liberalism, they share with liberalism their understanding of the separation between freedom and power. Thus, their famous critiques of Foucault can be safely called liberal, even if they themselves are not really liberal authors. From this reading, we can see that 'the homosexual became a species' in Foucault's account at that very moment that his body became a signifying lack signifying, that is, a soul that was the truth of his identity. Most of Foucault's translators render point de passage as 'transfer point' . David Halperin translates it as 'point of traversal', arguing that 'Foucault's image has less to do with switching from one line

1 54

10. 11. 12.

13.

U nti mely Pol itics

to another than it does with forced routing through a single point' (Halperin 1 995 : 1 9 5 ) . His point is well taken, though I am not sure what would be wrong with translating point de passage as point of passage. For a more direct critique of this same argument in Lacan, see Arditi and Valentine ( 1 999: 97-9 ) . I a m indebted t o Michael Warner for help i n formulating the arguments of this and the following paragraph. One might go so far as to suggest that Butler focuses on the psyche only as a strategic move designed to enable political agency - a variant of strategic essentialism. If so, this move would still fail for the same reasons that I delineate and it would still seem unnecessary given the aspect of agency in Foucault that Butler covers over. But I doubt the plausibility and tenability of such an interpretation because it goes against the entire thrust of The Psychic Life of Power and its effort to build a broad 'theory of subjection' . Walter Kaufmann's note ( 1 974) points out Nietzsche's explicit desire to challenge the 'rnore fashionable' doctrine of a will to survival.

C ha pter 6

The U ntimely Politics of DOMA

I have suggested from the very beginning of this work that a politics of untimeliness will not necessarily serve as a direct, problem-solving response to the issues of the day. The role of the political theorist cannot be reduced to that of solving problems (though it should not exclude that role), and an untirnely political theory must eschew that task in order to accomplish others . After providing descriptions of and arguments for an untimely conception of agency and an untirnely approach to the history of political thought, I could, in this final chapter, seek to enumerate a long list of possible directions for a politics of unti1neliness to take. Such a list could serve as an outline for further research in developing the politics of untimeliness that this work inaugurates. But it should be clear by now that such a programmatic and forrnal approach toward describing the ingredients of untimely political theory would be, if anything, timely. The content of an untimely politics cannot be specified in advance; a programmatic detailing of the future would only cut off our attentiveness to historicity and preclude the possibility of discoursing with the very ghosts that may appear in the future-to-come ( l'a-venir) . In order to keep those possibilities alive, as it were, I will take a very different tack toward conclusion in this chapter. I will do so through a close analysis and an unti1nely reading of the sometimes controversial and sometimes simply ignored Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) . DOMA constitutes a n exemplary case i n rny effort to resignify the notion of untimeliness - from mere prematurity or tardiness, to sophisticated historical/political understanding. That is to say, some have already called DOMA untimely in the former, pej orative sense that I wish to rej ect, while I will try to demonstrate the untimeliness of DOMA in the latter sense. Those who have called D OMA 'untimely'

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up to now have suggested that the question of gay marriage raises the issue of equal civil rights for gays and lesbians prematurely; it is 'not the right time' because the tradition of American political culture is not yet ready for this equality . But calling DOMA untimely because the questions it raises seem 'premature' actually requires that one view DOMA frorn a linear temporal/historical perspective. This perspective narrows the possible meanings of D OMA, leading to a rather timely interpretation. And to stop with such an interpretation (even if that interpretation has validity) is to rob the event that is D OMA of precisely its most important political i1nplications. A timely, pro­ blem-solving version of political theory proves unhelpful in under­ standing and unproductive in responding to DOMA for two reasons : ( 1 ) because a timely politics may not even see DOMA as 1nuch of a problem, and (2) because, even if it does, it can only discern that problem dimly and in narrow terms and, consequently, it holds few assets that one might call upon in formulating a response. The politics of DOMA, as I hope to show, turn out to be rather entrenched, complicated, and quite problematic, but DOMA cannot be reduced to a problem to be solved. Coming to terms with both theoretical debates and contemporary political battles such as DOMA requires the resources of a politics of untimeliness. In my analysis of DOMA I hope, on the one hand, to describe an example of untimely politics, and, on the other, to illustrate the significance of a politics of untimeliness - the consequence of an untimely understanding of this very example. In other words, the title to this chapter, 'the untirnely politics of D OMA', should connote both the untirneliness of this piece of legislation and my untimely reading of the act. My entrance into the debate over the 1neanings and iinplica­ tions of DOMA will serve as a substitute for the programmatic outline that I rej ected above. I will argue that the politics of DOMA demand to be understood as untimely. Thus, I will offer my own untimely reading of the Congressional debate, the act itself, and the response to its passage. I design this reading so as to defend a conception of untimely political theory and to illustrate what a politics of untimeli­ ness rnight look like. This approach to D OMA will require an attentiveness to language, a focus on the discursive politics of D OMA, and a further rejection of the AIO model. Both the AIO model of language and the supporters of DOMA wish to confine DOMA to a timely domain, one in which its political implications can be properly circumscribed. Such approaches, however, neglect or circumvent the radical potential of language that D OMA brings to the fore. It is

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precisely in rnoving past these understandings that the untimely politics of DOMA can be brought to light. D efen ding M arri a g e : T r aditi o n a l , Timely Interp r etations On 11 July 1 996 D OMA, a bill designed to 'define' the institution of marriage, was brought before the House of Representatives. A mere two rnonths later, after the bill passed in the House and Senate by landslide votes, President Clinton signed D OMA into law on 20 September. 1 By Washington's standards, the bill's passage would be called more than ti1nely - it was carried through at lightning speed. Many argued (then and now) that this bill was proposed and passed so quickly for solely 'political' reasons, 2 but the purported purpose of the bill was clear: DOMA meant to respond to an important Hawaii Supreme Court decision that made it appear that same-sex marriage would eventually become legal in that state. 3 Most legal experts agreed that once Hawaii legalized same-sex marriage, numerous court cases in other states would follow, as couples who were married in Hawaii fought to protect their rights under the Constitution's Full Faith and Credit Clause. 4 For the bill's sponsors, these circumstances constituted the 'threat' against which marriage needed to be defended. The bill has two 'operative provisions' ( Canady, H744 1 ) . Section two of the bill makes a unique, specific, and categorical exception to the Full Faith and Credit clause by stating that no state shall be required to recognize or legally honor a same-sex marriage from another state. Section three of the bill goes further in taking the unprecedented step of defining marriage. It reads as follows : I n determining the meaning of any Act o f Congress, or o f any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word 'marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word 'spouse' refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife. (H.R. 3396)

This section of the bill is designed to forestall any arguments that 1night suggest marriage could mean anything but a union between a man and a woman 'as husband and wife'. In so doing, this provision serves to deny federal recognition (for example, in the forms of Social Security or Medicare benefits ) to the same-sex 'spouses' of people who marry in Hawaii.

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Both sides in the D OMA debate tended to rehearse a set of well­ worn arguments; here we see rather timely, in the sense of traditional, approaches to DOMA. Sponsors of the bill argued for its common­ sense simplicity, stressing that the legislation was not far-reaching, for it simply sought to reiterate what 'every American' already knew: that marriage was a union between a man and a woman and 'always' had been. Congress, in this sense, was only seeking a simple federal declaration of an already known 'fact' . There were a few examples of scripture-quoting damnation rhetoric, but such cases were the exception to the rule; the vast majority of those who favored D OMA chose to focus on the straightforward nature of defining marriage and then either to deflect attention away from any discriminatory rami­ fications of the bill or merely to deny them outright. DOMA, accord­ ing to the maj ority of those who voted for it, was 'a Bill to define and protect the institution of marriage' - nothing more, nothing less. Frorr1 this side of the debate, the bill was not really about gays and lesbians; it was not a politically divisive issue (even President Clinton had said he would sign it 5 ) ; it was a simple matter of federal clarification over the terms 'rnarriage' and 'spouse' - and the simplicity of the bill assured its passage by overwhelming numbers. DOMA, then, merely sought to maintain and preserve the timeless traditions of heterosexual marriage and the nuclear family. Those opposed to DOMA launched a series of sometimes passionate rebuttals against the above arguments, but they agreed that the meaning of DOMA was straightforwardly simple and the issues at stake un­ complicated. Congressman Kennedy, the first to speak against D OMA in the house debate, put it succinctly: 'this debate really is about a sirr1ple question, a question of equal rights . Marriage is a basic right. It is a basic human right' (H7442; see also Gutierrez, H7443 ) . Over and over again, those opposing D OMA argued that the act constitutes a violation of equal civil rights. In imposing a Federal law that explicitly restricts the scope of marriage to heterosexual people, DOMA infringes on the rights of gays and lesbians. Rather than maintaining tradition, then, DOMA seeks to stop the timely march of progress . One side sought to preserve the past; the other side tried to maintain a projected future; both sides presumed politics to be a tirnely affair. Homop h ob i a ? Many left-leaning commentators would argue that DOMA is straight­ forward, but that it has little to do with a legal defense spurred by the

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case in Hawaii and everything to do with a defense of marriage against gays and lesbians . In short, DOMA is a suprerr1e example, on the Federal political level, of homophobia. 6 As such, it requires our disdain, not our attention and analysis. Clearly such a simple ex­ planation will resonate with many readers, and the idea that DOMA is homophobic can be quickly justified simply by analyzing the paranoia involved in calling the act a 'defense' of marriage. DOMA preserves both heterosexual identity and the heterosexual understanding of marriage by defending that image against its other - in this case the perversity of hmnosexual marriage. It does not take a brilliant analyst to tell that even though the act does not mention gays and lesbians, it is really all about gays and lesbians. D OMA is obviously and intuitively homophobic; this explanation appears so simple that it hardly needs to be argued. Nevertheless, precisely in its intuitive simplicity does this 'homo­ phobia explanation' run the risk of obscuring the political significance of DOMA. If we take homophobia to apply to the level of individual psychology, then the effort to psychologize D OMA will go hand in hand with an effort to de-politicize it (Sedgwick 1 990; Halperin 1 9 9 5 ) . The problem with the otherwise appealing explanation-by­ way-of-homophobia lies in the extent to which it narrows the political scope of the act, attributing it merely to the actions of homophobic individuals . Senator Kennedy's comments were probably the strongest and most pointed attack on DOMA. They prove quite telling in that they point obliquely toward the untimeliness of D OMA, toward a political dimension unnoticed by the common-sense, timely ap­ proaches. Kennedy uses the language of psychology, while uninten­ tionally exposing the discursive politics of the act: 'I regard this bill as a mean-spirited fonn of Republican legislative gay-bashing' (S 1 0 1 0 1 ) . ' Gay-bashing' is, obviously, a very strong word, implying not just discrimination but a virulent form of homophobia that suggests (and is often expressed through) violence. After all, while 'gay-bashing' may include the rhetorical, it usually means physical force, referring often to hate crirnes perpetrated against gays and lesbians . But is DOMA really a matter of Republican gay-bashing ? Many on the left (especially outside of Congress ) would want to say yes, yet most supporters of D OMA went out of their way to avoid direct attacks upon gays and lesbians . Kennedy's use of the word gay­ bashing therefore proves significant because it points vaguely toward a significant eletnent within DOMA, while at the same time failing to capture what really went on in the debate or what really proves to be

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at stake in the act. During their displayed support for the bill, very few Republican supporters of the act engaged in what could fairly be called gay-bashing. The individualizing and psychologizing terms 'homophobia' and 'gay-bashing' prove ineffective in trying to explain the element of 'discrimination' that is going on here. The notion that DOMA can be boiled down to a collective act of discrimination by homophobic individuals presupposes a certain timely coordination of individuals to acts ? The homophobia explanation ignores the un­ timely element in D OMA; it ignores the fact - which I will explore below - that Congress is fighting with ghosts. Kennedy himself admits that something is wrong with presuming homophobia, saying in his very next breath: 'I do not mean to say that opponents of same-sex marriage are intolerant, or bigots' ( S 1 0 1 0 1 ) . One rnust necessarily ask, then, what does he 1nean to say ? How can one 'gay-bash' in a tolerant or unbigoted manner ? Is it even 1neaningful to speak of gay­ bashing without homophobia ? DOMA passed by decisive margins in both Houses of Congress, 8 and such nmnbers im1nediately call into question the explanation of DOMA as simply ho1nophobic. Are 342 House members and 8 5 Senators ( including large numbers of Democratic party 1nembers ) sin1ply homophobic? 9 And what about the dozens of state legislatures around the country who have passed their own DOMA bills by similar 1nargins: are these legislative bodies also filled with homophobes ? 1 0 Again, to reduce the political irnportance of D OMA to the individual psychologies of these legislators is not only to misunderstand the significance of DOMA as a political act, but also to underestimate those legislators. Evidence for both of these clai1ns can be found in another set of vote numbers : the Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA), a bill designed to support the employment rights of gays and lesbians, was only defeated in the Senate by the closest vote possible, 50 to 49. 1 1 The fact that so many Democratic (and Republican) Senators supported ENDA yet still voted for D OMA points to an enormous ambiguity in the debate over both of these bills. It exposes the spectral quality of this debate. The explanation of DOMA by way of homophobia cannot account for this ambiguity; it cannot discourse with ghosts, for it is too timely. Of course, hornophobia need not be exclusively confined to the realm of individual psychology, and it appears obvious that in inter­ preting the political meaning of DOMA I a1n trying to maintain what I see as a crucial distinction between the homophobic and the hetero­ sexist. As a way of holding on to some historical sense (of paying

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attention to historicity and keeping untimeliness in play) I will try, at least for the purposes of analysis, to keep the discursive and psycho­ analytic approaches separate - thus the definitional distinction be­ tween homophobia and heterosexism. I arn not suggesting that, as an explanation, heterosexism serve as a substitute for homophobia. Indeed, one could go so far as to take homophobia as a purely political phenomenon, such that, parallel to racism and sexism, every­ one can be considered homophobic. From the untitnely perspective I a1n trying to articulate here, such an approach proves disadvanta­ geous not because it lacks analytical validity, but because it lacks political potency. To consider everyone hotnophobic, or to consider society in general homophobic, implies a malaise-ridden interpreta­ tion of DOMA as merely a general symptom of an already (and unavoidably) homophobic society. But this understanding proves just as politically impoverished as a purely psychological understanding, because neither approach is capable of articulating the specific poli­ tical datnage done by DOMA. If all of society is homophobic, then calling DOMA a homophobic act gets the analysis nowhere in trying to assess the political itnplications that DOMA has and will have upon the lives of lesbians, gays, and possibly even sotne unmarried straight couples. Indeed, if society is largely and generally homophobic, then DOMA turns out to be a terribly unremarkable piece of legislation. I am not implying that society is somehow not homophobic, but 1nerely suggesting that such a claim does nothing for the analysis. Any theorist of untimeliness must see the homophobia indictrnent as an utterly unhelpful political starting point. For these reasons, my analysis of DOMA urges a shift in perspective that focuses concretely on the heterosexist implications of DOMA as an intervention into discursive practices. In analyzing this discursive heterosexism, however, I am not so much displacing the understanding of D OMA as homophobic as I am elaborating that very explanation. Thus, while I oppose both psychological and psychoanalytic interpretations of DOMA, I cer­ tainly do not deny the homophobia of the act. But I do refuse to rest with it. An Untimely Re ading : D i s cu r s iv e H e tero s ex i s m Only a rather untimely discursive analysis c a n grasp the structural heterosexism constituted by D OMA without reducing that hetero­ sexism to either the individual psychology of 1nembers of Congress, or the general (homophobic ) nature of society. This type of reading of the

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political stakes of D OMA need not apologize for those rnembers of Congress who supported D OMA, precisely because such an analysis can explain the heterosexism of DOMA without, on the one hand, individualizing it or, on the other, totalizing it. This explanation can, in turn, uncover possible challenges to DOMA, which means it may serve to open DOMA and the politics surrounding it to a certain future to come, l'a-venir. A discursive account, which as I will show below must necessarily be an untimely account (il (aut l'a-venir), can also move past the straightforward arguments advanced by both supporters and opponents of the act. Thus, while I refuse to psycho­ analyze members of Congress, I have no intention of just taking the1n 'at their word' .12 The debate over DOMA does concern much more than rights or tradition, but the explanation by way of homophobia fails to register the i1nportance of what lies beyond those comrnon tropes - it fails to discourse with ghosts. And who are these ghosts ? They are the members of lesbian and gay, academic, and other com1nunities who are participating in same­ sex marriage ceremonies or eschewing marriage altogether, who are using the word spouse in 'illegal' ways. The discursive heterosexism of DOMA co1nes to light when one sees that the act itself constitutes a direct attempt to intervene in a set of discursive practices that are already in the process of change. Such an intervention involves efforts to define specific subject positions, to delineate and circumscribe acceptable contexts, and to control through definition elements of language. The aporetic tensions in the debate (the remainder left over from the DOMA/ENDA division) arise precisely because of this protracted effort to control discourse, something never fully controllable. The emphasis placed by me1nbers of Congress on defining marriage only tends to obscure this central point: D OMA constitutes a Congres­ sional intervention that concerns not only meaning in language but also subject positions within discursive practices. With D OMA, Congress is not passing legislation that would affect the publication of dictionaries by Webster or Random House. Indeed, numerous members of Congress turn to the dictionaries as sources of authority and legitimacy for their own attempt to modify and constrain dis­ cursive practices . The act is not 1nerely a rnatter of definitions, because the definitions Congress offers serve to preclude (not just other definitions, but) perforrnativity itself. That is, the act intends to preserve a certain purity of the speech acts involved in the ceremony of marriage, to render the1n unassailable from unconventional

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contexts . 1 3 DOMA states, in effect, that certain words can only be properly used in certain contexts and that to use them otherwise is not merely to break with linguistic convention but to break the law itself. DOMA does not simply define - the dictionary can do this anyway. DOMA tries to limit discursive practices by circumscribing the set of appropriate contexts for specific speech acts. A discursive approach to DOMA provides a richer understanding of the act than do any of the more parsimonious explanations/ arguments (that is, tradition, rights, and homophobia ) . Indeed, the passage of DOMA attests dramatically to the widespread and hege­ monic nature of societal heterosexism, precisely as its defenders deny any traces of homophobia in that society. The discursive heterosexism involved in the passage of DOMA can only be brought to light through careful attention to the effect that the bill is intended to have upon discursive practices and upon discursive politics. This discursive heterosexism cannot be grasped at the individual level of homophobia but only at the level of discourse itself, 14 because it targets not individuals but subject positions. The many discussions of the word 'spouse' help provide an excellent example of this type of targeting. DOMA is meant to define 'spouse' ; section three of the act amends the United States Code by adding to § 7 a 'definition of "marriage" and "spouse" ' . However, Congress's so-called definition proves to be less an issue of saying what the word spouse 'means' and more a matter of rejecting the discursive use of that word in ways with which the members of Congress disagree. Clearly, then, we are not facing a timely politics. Congress seeks to legislate not so much the actions of individuals as the performativity of words. For example, the second part of section three of DOMA reads: 'the word "spouse" refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife' (H.R. 3 3 9 6 ) . This piece of the legislation does not really define spouse; it prescribes the proper use of the word spouse by excluding improper ones . DOMA constitutes an intervention in, and an attempt to transform, a set of discursive practices in which 'spouse' might refer to something other than a husband or wife of the opposite sex. This aspect of DOMA certainly comprises an attempt to define, but DOMA does not define a word, it defines a subject position - or, better, a position of subjectivity . 1 5 DOMA does not say what 'spouse' means; it says who gets to 'be' a spouse, with all the concomitant recognition and sometimes privilege that subj ect position entails. In other words, D OMA seeks to modify the rules of access to the position of subjectivity called spouse. This

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attempt to modify or control discourse can only be called homophobic in the rnost general sense, since - as so may supporters of DOMA argued - it does not target individual lesbians and gays. Yet it is undoubtedly heterosexist, because it strives to block the structural transformation of discursive practices which would allow lesbians, gays, or 'nontraditional' straight people to take up the subject position that Congress wishes to reserve for 'traditional' heterosexuals . DOMA seeks to prevent any changes in discursive practices, changes that might call into question the grid of cultural intelligibility that naturalizes gender and sexual differences into binaries (cf. Butler 1 990a ) . B y attempting, institutionally, t o obstruct any alterations i n dis­ cursive practices, Congress can be understood, in Foucault's terms, as engaging in an act of domination. 1 6 Foucault's distinction between relations of power and relations of domination proves invaluable for understanding the political ( in a sense that goes well beyond the juridical) stakes of DOMA. Congress is attempting to stabilize a strategic relation through governmental intervention, to take an open power relation and rigidify it into a form of domination. Or, to look at it from the other side, Congress's intervention can be understood more precisely as a counterattack (a ' defense' ) against attempts on the part of lesbians, gays and nontraditional heterosexuals to loosen a set of previously stabilized power relations. Congress is fighting back against a cultural politics ( see Schram 2000; 2002 ), one that would seek to do precisely what Foucault says is always possible: change discourse. Congress wants not only to stop, but in a technical sense to criminalize, the practice by which I refer to my partner (to whorn I am not married) as rny spouse. 1 7 Upon further reflection, one can see that this practice of effecting changes in discursive practices rnust, of necessity, be a rather untimely one. I have tried, above, simply to provide a clear articulation of my analysis of the act as discursive heterosexism, but it should be more than apparent by now that this was always already an untimely reading. Shifting the analysis away from either the rights or homo­ phobia of individuals (or the tradition of communities) onto varie­ gated sets of discursive practices simultaneously displaces linear or progressive concepts of either the individual or of history itself. As Foucault stresses, discursive practices always prove to be saturated by history, but they can never be understood to move in history in a linear, cyclical, or any other predictable pattern. Understanding DOMA as an act of discursive heterosexism forces one to admit that

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a repeal of the act (or even an across-the-board legalization of gay marriage) must be taken as yet another move to shift or change discourse. But the direction of that shift is never clear-cut; the terms 'progress' and 'decline' are forced to drop out of, or at least recede from, the analysis. Discursive heterosexism constitutes an untimely reading of DOMA, but, even more significantly, this analysis suggests that the future (as yet-to-come, avenir) politics of D OMA will remain untimely. L 'a-venir (the future-to--come) of this untirnely, discursive politics will depend upon the efficacy of DOMA (and other legislative acts like it) to stop the shifts in discursive practices that would allow greater access to certain strategically situated subj ect positions. But this politics will hinge on the ghostly (re )appearance of that cultural politics in other realms and other communities perhaps in Hawaii or Vermont, perhaps in Hollywood or Silicon Valley. These specters will be just as much responsible as Congress for shaping the political landscape to come, because they have the capacity to challenge that legislative attempt to fix language and pin down subject positions. As revenants, they may further open the political terrain by, again, changing discourse. Untimely P olitic s : DOMA and B ey o n d I would even submit that some comrnentators o n DOMA ( and the question of gay marriage) demonstrated awareness of the untimely politics of DOMA, but only in a disguised and frustrating way. In other words, these critics misrecognized the untimeliness of DO MA in that they recognized something in the act and the debate as terribly frustrating - its very terms could not even be held in one, timeless place. For example, in an article that was adrnitted into the official Congressional Record by DOMA supporters, Florence King laments the fact that ' "Husband" and "wife" are yielding to "spouse",' and she goes on to describe this as 'a vague usage that benefits no one but gays' ( 1 996, emphasis added) . Indeed, it is the vagueness of 'spouse' that gives it the critical potential to undermine what seem like certainties. The gender ambiguity of the word spouse an ambiguity that DOMA tries valiantly but unsuccessfully to eliminate - rnakes it all the more difficult to pin down and fix, once and for all, the discursive construct of marriage. Discourse is always already too untimely to ever be finally fixed in place. Because it conceals or veils gender, 'spouse' tends to allow footholds into sexuality to crumble as well: the certainty of sexuality rests directly upon the opacity of

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gender. This sort of argument has been made in its strongest possible sense by Butler, who suggests that 'perhaps this construct called "sex" is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all' ( 1 990a: 7) . King's diatribe against the use of the word spouse proves exceptionally perceptive to the extent that it picks up on just this notion that sex is always already gender. It goes almost without saying that the analytical acuity of King's argument stands directly opposed to the spirit and thrust of it - and it goes against her better wishes in a way that she would probably never want to admit. Moreover - and despite King's suggestions to the contrary - it is patently untrue that the word 'spouse' benefits 'no one but gays' . King wishes to narrow the possible effects that the increased usage of the word spouse might have, but the untimeliness of changing discursive practices dooms this effort from the start. The word benefits any person who wishes to take up the subject position of spouse a subject position that holds a great deal more legitimacy, respect, and recogni­ tion than that of, say, 'significant other' - but who will not or cannot allow that subject position to converge with that of 'man or woman as husband or wife'. The discursive heterosexism of DOMA consists exactly in the attempt to control the undecidability of 'spouse', and this undecidability brings with it a sort of untimeliness, since, j ust like the revenant, one never knows when 'spouse' might show up again. No doubt, the members of Congress whom I quoted earlier forced the words spouse and marriage into quotation marks to denote their resistance to allowing the words' meanings to become multiple or plural. Thus, they use 'spouse' to try to distinguish the 'real' spouse, as DOMA defines it, frorn any other 'spouses' out there. 1 8 Implicitly relying on their own version of the AIO model, members of Congress, as prominent and legitimate political authorities, seek mastery over language. The effort at defining spouse in such a way that pins it down to particular times, places, and usages looks to be the work of a 'scholar' - one who insists on rnaking the distinction between the real and the nonreal, the actual and the apparent. But, j ust like any other specter, 'spouse' continually confounds that distinction. The untimeliness of DOMA lies in the very discursive politics that so frustrates those members of Congress who would like to have meanings set in place, who would like to establish a clear distinction between the real and the unreal. D OMA tries to eliminate the un­ decidability of the term spouse - to return it to its proper, traditional

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place in ti1ne - and to reduce the probable dissemination of 1neaning created by the possibility of legalized same-sex marriage in Hawaii. In other words, DOMA seeks to freeze a discursive formation and prevent its transfonnation - a transformation with the possibility to create what Foucault called 'a new relational right' ( 1 9 82: 3 9 ) . In trying to freeze this fonnation, members of Congress try to recreate a timely, ordered understanding of marriage and spouse. But discursive practices can never be stopped in their tracks and located along a fixed position in time and place: they are always already untimely. What the supporters of DOMA fear, of course, is their inability to control these changes in discursive practices. Members of Congress find thernselves very uncomfortable negotiating with ghosts. I would suggest that what they fear most is the inadequacy of D OMA as a response to the cultural politics that has led to both the proliferation of gay 'marriages' (as DOMA supporters might insist I write it) and the increased use of familial terms in untraditional manners and contexts. But DOMA proves inadequate because it insists on timeliness - on the fixation of meaning in time and place even and precisely as it enters a rather untimely battle. DOMA tries to secure a context once and for all, thereby preventing 'marriage' or 'spouse' ( or even 'husband' and 'wife' ) from being ripped from their proper context and transposed to another - preventing, that is, the proliferation of discursive practices that make room for '1narriages' beyond the bounds of this very Congressional definition. Yet Congress fights a losing battle here, because it is a battle against the iterability and citationality of language; it enters a battle of discursive politics, one that can never be waged solely in the halls of Congress. 1 9 The specters haunting DOMA can easily move in and out of those halls . The legislative act cannot foreclose the politicization of these words in other contexts, and it cannot regulate extra-legal changes in discursive practices. It cannot control shifts and rnovements in discursive practices, since legal definitions can only ever constitute one small part of a broader movement of discourse. Congress can control rights, but discursive practices (or something as radical as relational rights ) will always exceed its reach. The repeated claims, made by literally dozens of members of Congress, to the effect that 'I can't believe we are really doing this' marks this fear of the untimely politics of D OMA the fear that if the implica­ tions of language could be controlled, D OMA would have never been necessary in the first place. 2 0 This is a fear of ghosts. Even though D OMA sets out to regulate the use of discourse and the meaning of

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language, it cannot exclude the possibility that discursive practices will continue to thrive in which 'spouse' (as a revenant) does not refer to a member of the opposite sex who is a husband or wife. D OMA constitutes a significant move in this particular battle of discursive politics, but it is not the final move. II y a l'a-venir. Therefore, the discursive heterosexism unearthed in this reading of DOMA will not be countered by a legislative act such as ENDA. ENDA, or another bill like it, can of course counter the deleterious effects on the civil rights of gays and lesbians created by D OMA. However, as a rather timely and 'appropriate' response to D OMA, ENDA does not cancel out DOMA entirely. The effects of DOMA as an act of discursive heterosexism exceed the infringement on civil rights that ENDA would counter. There is a remainder in the division, found in the 35 Senators who voted for both bills, and it comes in the form of a discursive hetero­ sexism that must be fought on a nonlegislative, though nevertheless political, level. This remainder is a revenant; it might always come back to haunt both supporters and critics of DOMA alike. Most significantly, all of these challenges and counter-challenges presuppose an understanding of the discursive heterosexism involved in DOMA, and therefore they presuppose an untimely approach to DOMA. Understanding the significance of DOMA in the broadest sense possible requires one to read the debate in terms of untimeliness. Without that reading, we are left with the options offered within the hallowed ( and maybe haunted) halls of Congress, and with the simple but politically quite useless interpretation of DOMA as an example of homophobia. I am not suggesting that a discursive approach and an untimely understanding are somehow more 'correct' than any of the other interpretations (rights, tradition, and even homophobia cer­ tainly make up parts of DOMA), but the discursive analysis I have provided here highlights the untimeliness of D OMA. Doing so brings to light crucial and thoroughly political ramifications of the act ramifications that cannot be collapsed into rights issues, nor under­ stood through the lens of psychology. D OMA involves a set of stakes much higher than rnany would suspect, but those stakes remain obscured if one settles for a timely interpretation. Only by uncovering the discursive politics in DOMA - that is, by having the historical sense to n1ove beyond traditional, timely explanations - does one locate the politics in DOMA. The political potential lodged in Fou­ cault's stress on 'the possibility of changing discourse' can only be found by recognizing the politics of discourse, or more precisely, discursive politics . This means, finally, that a discursive approach to

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DOMA is not the only possibility admitted by a political theory of untirneliness. There can be no singularity when it comes to the time of the ghost. 21 And discursive politics will always be a politics of untimeliness. Which is not to say that untimely politics must be exclusively dis­ cursive, but rather to illustrate concretely the importance of untimeli­ ness to the politics of both the past and the present - and, most importantly, to l'a-venir. The case of DOMA demonstrates the sig­ nificance of a politics of untimeliness, because in the difference between the timely interpretation and the untimely reading of DOMA lies the politics of DOMA. This is an untimely, and at tirnes ghostly, politics; to understand it, to grapple with it, requires historicity and an attentiveness to language outside the terms of the AIO model - in short, untimely theory. The case of D OMA should also serve to vindicate my choice not to specify in advance the programmatic outlines of a politics of untimeliness, since the appearance or reap­ pearance of ghosts can never be predicted or patterned. But this is not to say that there can be little more than an amorphous description of untimely political theory. My discursive analysis of DOMA offers a focused example of just such theory; it therefore provides a concrete description of untimely politics. Future examples may, of course, look quite different, but if the future is to be thought as l'a-venir then we will need a politics of untimeliness to help us face it. Notes 1 . Defense of Marriage Act, 1 04th Congress, second session, Sep­ tember 1 996, H.R. 3 3 96, Congressional Record, H7441-H7449, H74 8 0-H7506, S 1 0 1 00-S 1 0 1 25, S 1 0 1 2 9 . 2. Many rnembers o f Congress and political experts alike suggested that DOMA was an attempt on the part of Republicans to create a 'wedge issue' at a time when the party's support was flagging. Republicans vigorously denied this. 3. Such a conclusion appeared much more inevitable at the time of the debate and passage of D OMA than it does now. The 'Hawaii case', as it is often referred to in the press and in the Congressional debates, is actually a series of trial court and Supreme Court cases. The original suit was brought against the state of Hawaii for refusing to issue marriage licenses to three same-sex couples. The trial court initially upheld the State's denial of marriage licenses, but this decision was appealed to the Hawaii Supreme Court in

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the case of Baehr v. Lewin ( 1 993 ) . The Hawaii Supreme Court overturned the trial court's decision, ruling that the refusal to issue rnarriage licenses to members of the same sex appeared to violate the state's constitution, with its strong protection of civil rights and guarantees of equal protection. This decision in Baehr v. Lewin is the 'landmark' decision to which both sides in the debate gesture; it appeared at the time that it would pave the way for the legalization of same-sex marriage in Hawaii. However, the Hawaii Supreme Court did not make a final ruling in the case. Instead it sent the case back to the trial court with directions to find a 'compelling state interest' for state discrimination on the basis of gender or, if not, to overturn the decision to ban the issuance of marriage licenses to same-sex couples. While the debate in the US Congress over D OMA went on, Judge Chang was preparing to hear arguments in the trial court case of Baehr v. Miike ( 1 996 ) . In December of 1 996, Judge Chang upheld the rights of same-sex couples to marry, arguing that the State was unable to show any 'compelling interest' whatsoever. However, Chang also immediately granted a stay of the ruling (upon request of the State) until the case could be appealed (again) to the Hawaii Supreme Court. While briefs were filed in that Supreme Court case, a timely decision was never rnade, as the Justices in this case denied requests by the plaintiffs to expedite the ruling and by the State to delay it. The State wanted a delay until the 1 998 elections, and though they were not formally granted this time by the court, it would seem that they got their wish. On 5 November 1 99 8 , voters i n Hawaii overwhelmingly passed a state Constitutional amendment explicitly outlawing same-sex marriage, and on 1 0 December 1 999 the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that the deci­ sion of sarne-sex marriage had been rnade by the voters of the state. Not one single same-sex couple has married in Hawaii. 4. 'Full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, Records and j udicial Proceedings of every other State' (US Constitution: Article IV, Section I ) . The bill's sponsors located most of the 'threat' to marriage in claims made by Lambda Legal Defense that the Hawaii case marked a 'landmark victory' for gay rights, and that they would seek to expand this victory by a strategy of pursuing cases in other states. According to Congress­ men Abercrombie and Canady, Lambda Legal Defense chose not to try the Hawaii case in the first place and even turned down requests for help from those in Hawaii (H748 9-H7490 ) .

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5 . In order to support their own point that this was a nonpartisan issue, supporters of DOMA relied heavily on the fact that Clinton went on record as saying he would sign it. However some detractors, insistent on the idea that D OMA was a wedge issue, would argue that Republicans initially hoped that Clinton would veto the bill, thereby rallying support for Bob Dole j ust weeks before the presidential election. According to this view, it was only after Clinton forestalled that strategy by promising to sign the bill that Republicans decided to use that fact as evidence of bipartisan support. 6. For one incisive and compelling interpretation of DOMA as homophobic, see Schram (2000: 1 1 1-7) . 7. Because it tends to presume sovereign individuals situated at a specific point in time, psychology already follows a certain time­ liness . Could there even be a psychology of the ghost? How could we seek out causal explanations of human behavior without insisting that ghosts do not exist? 8 . In the House, the act passed by a margin of 342 to 67; the victory was even greater in the Senate, with final numbers of 8 5 to 14. 9. Of course, depending upon how strongly one defines the term 'homophobic', it may not be completely implausible to say that 427 rnembers of Congress are homophobes. I am not all that concerned with whether or not the label can be made to stick because, no matter what the result, the quarrel over categories will prove politically inefficacious, and in the end amount to little more than name-calling. Homophobic or not, an effective poli­ tical analysis of DOMA must assess the political impact created by the votes of those members. 1 0. As of May 2000, 37 states had passed some sort of legislation or amended their constitutions to prevent legal marriages between nonheterosexual couples. Eight states also had similar legislation pending. 1 1 . This is the closest vote possible to manage defeat. A 5 0-50 tie would have been broken by Vice President Gore, who would have surely voted for ENDA. 12. The point being that one can go beyond their own explanations, without going beneath their clai1ns to the level of the psyche which, on some psychoanalytic accounts, is the very locus of truth. 1 3 . Austin ( 1 962) argues that all speech acts have the capacity to be cited outside of their normal and most appropriate contexts.

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Austin refers to this possibility as an 'ill which infect[ s] all utterances', but he goes on to argue that such usages are 'parasitic' upon normal usage. Austin therefore wishes to 'exclude from consideration' all speech acts that occur outside of their proper context, designating these uses as 'nonserious' and therefore not genuine performatives. Derrida ( 1 982), on the other hand, em­ phasizes Austin's own admission that this possibility is intrinsic to every utterance. Indeed, it ' is a structural characteristic of every rnark' in general. One cannot arbitrarily ( or even legally and institutionally) limit the contexts in which performativity can go on, for the structure of every locution includes this possibility for iterability, for citation outside of 'proper' contexts. See also Honig ( 1 993 ) . 14. By 'discourse itself' I refer t o Foucault's so-called 'happy positi­ vism'. That is, I refer to Foucault's arguments that the study of discursive practices requires that one look not to the subj ect who speaks, but to the discursive formation that creates the position that any subj ect must take up in order to speak. A discursive practice rr1ust be analyzed in its positivity, since it is not the creation of a phenomenological subj ect. Foucault says that if in rejecting a transcendental subject 'one is a positivist, then I am quite happy to be one' ( 1 972b: 1 2 5 ) . But, of course, on Foucault's own terms there is no such thing as 'discourse itself'. There are only various sets of discursive practices at any historical and political juncture. In the end, Foucault's 'positivism' is at best a rnisnomer, since his version of positivisrr1, his careful attention to the positivity of discursive formations, remains marked by an acute historical sense (that leads, at most, to nominalism). If Foucault was a positivist, he was a Nietzschean positivist who had little interest in scientific empiricism. Foucault's 'positivism', then, was always alrea dy untimely (cf. Gutting 1 9 8 9 ) . 1 5 . Some explanation for m y use o f the term 'subject position' might be in order, especially given its irnportance to my analysis here and to Foucault's theory of discourse. 'Subj ect position' ought to stand in opposition to Butler's 'theories of subjection', for it has little to do with an exalted explanation of how an individual comes to attain the standing of subjectivity . Rather, like 'dis­ course itself', the concept of a 'position of subjectivity' focuses the analysis away from speaking subj ects and toward those condi­ tions that create a place in discourse from which any individual can speak. Foucault puts it as follows: 'I shall abandon any

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attempt, therefore, to see discourse as a phenomenon of expression . . . instead, I shall look for a field of regularity for various positions of subjectivity' ( 1 972b: 5 5 ) . Later, he goes on to define subject in the very terms of subj ect position ( 1 1 5 ) . Certain positions of subj ectivity, such as that of 'man' and 'woman', can operate on a general level that intersects with larger notions of subjectivity. But other subj ect positions, such as 'student', 'pa­ tient', or 'customer', may seern relatively trivial. The addition of the word 'subject' to these positions is not rneant to imply some sort of grand theory, nor is it intended to introduce unneeded j argon into the discussion. Instead, these positions must be under­ stood as subject positions because they are positions within discursive practices that certain individuals can, and certain others cannot, take up. To take up one of these subj ect positions also means to take on the recognition, status, and responsibility associated with that position and one can take up a variety of subject positions in any given day. 'Spouse', 'husband', and 'wife' need to be understood as subject positions in order to make it clear that DOMA attempts to effect changes in discursive prac­ tices that will alter the rules of access to those positions of subjectivity - DOMA is all about those 'certain conditions' Foucault mentions that determine which individuals can fill which subject positions. 1 6 . In one of his final interviews, Foucault suggests a crucial distinction between power relations and relations of domina­ tion. He argues that institutionalized and therefore fixed rela­ tions of power can be conceived as ' domination' once governmental technologies intervene to rigidify those relations. 'Power' as a term ought to be reserved for the relations themselves - relations that always prove inescapable, but not therefore 'evil'. Political and philosophical analysis of power relations can therefore offer leverage for critique of those relations that have become crystallized. This, I think, is a forrn of the distinction for which Foucault's critics have been plead­ ing for so many years. While those critics were likely correct in pressing Foucault to articulate this distinction, it seems unfor­ tunate that many of them have continued to ask for the distinction (or to criticize Foucault for being a relativist based on the assumption that he did not or could not make such a distinction) even after Foucault made it. See Foucault ( 1 994: 3 8 ; cf. 1 9 8 3 : 2 1 2; see also Coole 2000: 1 2 0 ) .

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1 7. Of course, within those communities that commonly contain gay or unmarried straight couples the word 'partner' tends to remain the common usage. But try using the word 'partner' in contexts that fall outside of those cornmunities and you will quickly find yourself answering questions about law firms, business interests, and bridge games. At precisely those moments, the word 'spouse' conveys a weight and legitirr1acy incomparably greater than that of partner, while the latter is relegated into that group of lesser terms that include 'boyfriend' and 'girlfriend' . To put it otherwise, within lesbian, gay, and possibly academic cmn1nunities, 'partner' may often performatively refer to a subject position on par with that of 'husband' or 'wife'; in other communities only 'spouse' has such referential potential. This potential is j ust what worries Florence King in the text below. 1 8 . The proclivity to use quotation marks in the state and national debates over DOMA laws rivals Derridean literary theory, parti­ cularly within informational websites and pamphlets designed to spur the passage of more state--level DOMA laws. 1 9 . It seems prudent to emphasize that members of Congress were not consciously fighting a battle against language; obviously, legal rights and (only secondarily) social status comprised their targets. Yet, in analyzing DOMA through the lens of discursive practices, it becomes clear that members of Congress, whether they know it or not, can only strive to achieve their goals through a regulation of discursive practices - through, that is, a conflict that involves language. The fact that they unwittingly end up in a fight with language shows just how ghostly is their opponent, just how untimely is the battle. 20. Members of Congress also seem to fear what Derrida would call the 'communicability' of language. 'Communicability' refers not to the capacity of language to transport a fixed meaning, but to the danger that any discourse can implicate and contaminate its subjects . Language may well convey meaning but language also proves contagious; it infects subjects in a way that their 'use' of it cannot control. This infectious component of language makes DOMA but a limited response to the politics of gay marriage; it makes that politics untimely. 2 1 . I argue vehe1nently and consistently for the important contribu­ tion that an untimely approach to politics can make both to political theory (and related fields ) and to our understanding of politics more generally, but untimeliness will not provide a unique

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method for the study of politics. Discourse-theoretical approaches are political precisely because they are untimely. But a politics of untirneliness does not lead necessarily, in sorne linear order, to a discursive analysis. At the heart of an untimely rendering of political theory lies the notion that there is no inherent linear, logical connection between a theoretical approach and political conclusions . I not only admit that another theoretical approach might lead to the sarne conclusions, I embrace that fact. The sort of theory that would provide its own unique political position is precisely the sort of theory that an untirr1ely approach eschews.

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Foucault, Michel ( 1989a), 'The Masked Philosopher', interview conducted by Christian Delacampagne, in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1 96 1 1 9 84, edited b y Sylvere Lotringer, New York: Semiotext(e): 302-7 Foucault, Michel ( 1989b), 'Friendship as a Way of Life', interview with Rene de Coccatty, Jean Danet, and Jean le Bitoux, in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1 96 1 -1 984, edited by Sylvere Lotringer, New York: Semio­ text(e): 308-12 Foucault, Michel ( 1989c), 'Power Affects the Body', interview with Lucette Finas, translated by Jeanine Herman, in Foucault Live, edited by Sylvere Lotringer, New York: Semiotext(e): 207- 13 Foucault, Michel ( 1991), Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Tombadori, translated by R.James Goldstein and James Cascaito, New York: Semiotext( e) Foucault, Michel ( 1994 ), 'The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom', in The Final Foucault, edited by James Bernauer and David Rasmussen, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press: 1-20 Foucault, Michel ( 1996), 'Le Gai savoir', La Revue H 2: 40-54 Foucault, Michel ( 1998), 'Structuralism and Post-structuralism', interview with Gerard Raulet, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, edited by James Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley and others, New York: The New Press: 433-58 Foucault, Michel (2000), Power: Essential Works ol Foucault 1 954-1 984, Volume Three, New York: The New Press Fraser, Nancy ( 1981), 'Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions', Praxis International 1.3: 272-87 Fraser, Nancy ( 1983), 'Foucault's Body-Language: A Post-Humanist Poli­ tical Rhetoric?', Salmagundi 6 1: 55-70 Fraser, Nancy ( 1985), 'Michel Foucault: A "Young Conservative? " ', Ethics 96.1: 165-84 Fraser, Nancy ( 1995), 'False Antitheses: A Response to Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler', in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, New York and London: Routledge: 59-74 Friedrich, Otto ( 1981), 'France's Philosopher of Power', Time 6: 157-8 Fukuyama, Francis ( 1992), The End ol History and the Last Man, New York: The Free Press Fuss, Diana ( 1991), 'Introduction', in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, edited by Diana Fuss, New York and London: Routledge: 1-10 Fynsk, Christopher ( 1996), Language and Relation . . . that there is lan­ guage, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press Gadamer, Hans-Georg ( 1982), 'Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy', in Reason in the Age ol Science, translated by Frederick G. Lawrence, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press: 88-112 Gadamer, Hans-Georg ( 1989), Truth and Method, second, revised edition,

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Walzer, Michael ( 1986), 'The Politics of Michel Foucault', in Foucault: A Critical Reader, edited by David Couzens Hoy, Oxford: Blackwell: 5 1-68 Warner, Michael ( 1999a), 'Normal and Normaller: Beyond Gay Marriage', GLQ 5.2: 1 19-71 Warner, Michael ( 1999b), The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, New York: The Free Press Weight, Gregory ( 1997), ' Queering the Bogeyman: (Dis) Organizing Closet Space', unpublished manuscript Weinsheimer, Joel ( 1985), Gadamer's Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press Weinsheimer, Joel and Donald Marshall ( 1989), 'Preface' to Gadamer's Truth and Method, New York: Crossroad Wittgenstein, Ludwig ( 1958), Philosophical Investigations, third edition, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, New York: The Macmillan Company Wittgenstein, Ludwig ( 1961), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, New York: Humanities Press Wittgenstein, Ludwig ( 1970), Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Beliefs, edited by Cyril Barrett, Oxford: Basil Blackwell Wolin, Richard ( 1990), The Politics o{ Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger, New York: Columbia University Press Wood, David ed. ( 1993), 0{ Den-ida, Heidegger, and Spirit, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press Wordsworth, Ann ( 1987), 'Derrida and Foucault: Writing the History of Historicity', in Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, edited by Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young, Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press: 1 16-25

Index

action, 32-3n.19 Age of Reason, 80, 81 agency, 13-16, 22-5, 12� 143 , 149-51 Althusser, Louis, 68-9n.27 appropriation see Heidegger, Martin, Ereignis (appropriation) Arditi, B. and Valentine, J., 10, 26, 28, 34n.26, 154n.11 Arendt, Hannah, 2, 70"-1n.34 Aristotle, 17-19, 51, 139 notion of language, 4, 5 Austin, John, 19-20, 32-3n.19, 171-2n.13 Barker, Ernest, 17-18 Beauvoir, Simone de, 14 Being see Heidegger, Martin, Being (Dasein) Benhabib, Seyla, 1, 11, 12, 134 Bennington, Geoff, 74 Bouchard, Donald, 103 Butler, Judith, 68-9n.27, 144-51, 166 Excitable Speech, 143 on Foucault, 128, 129-32, 133 , 134, 13 5, 136, 137-9, 141-2, 143 , 144, 145 The Psychic Life of Power, 7-8, 130, 134, 146 Clinton, Bill, 157, 171n. 5 communication, 51, 5 2 communicative action, theory of (Habermas), 20 conformism, 140, 141

Connolly, William, 27, 65n.7, 94n.1 'construction', 4 language of, 11-13 constructivism, 4, 10, 11-16, 21-2 Coole, Diana, 2, 2 7, 28 Critical Theorists, 3 5 Davidson, Donald, 108 deconstruction, 26-7 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), 8-9, 15 5--69 Deleuze, Gilles, 110 on Nietzsche, 116-19, 120 D'Emilio, John, 24 Derrida, Jacques, 6, 11, 26-8, 76, 78-81, 90, 91-4, 105 , 107, 108-9, 1234n.8 communicability, 174n.20 dif{erance, 27, 28-9 hauntology, 3 , 6, 83 Specters of Marx, 77, 78, 82-4, 85-7, 88-90 Descartes, Rene, 3 5 desire, 132-4; see also existence, desire for dialectic, 2, 29, 75 , 80-7 differance (Derrida) , 27, 28-9 difference, 27-8 Disch, Lisa, 2, 125n.20, 130, 143 discourse theory, 136-7, 145 , 1723n.14, 172-3n.15, 174-5n.21 discursive practice, 4, 8, 24, 28, 30n.4, 96n.10, 112, 129-43 , 146, 148, 150, 152n.2, 161-7, 172n.14, 173n.15

1 94

U nti mely Pol itics

domination (Foucault), 164, 173n.16 Dreyfus, Hubert, 122-3n. 5

George, Stefan, 52 Gutting, Gary, 98

Employment Nondiscrimination Act, 160, 168 enframing theories, 42-3 Engels, Friedrich, 84, 85 equality, 44-5 existence, desire for, 146-9

Habermas, Ji.irgen, 20-1, 70-1n. 34, 75, 99, 101-2, 120-1 communicative action, theory of, 20 'Discourse Ethics', 111 Halperin, David, 23, 153-4n.9 hauntology (Derrida), 3 , 6, 83; see also historicity Hegel, G. W. F., 6-7, 37-8, 77-8, 81-2, 87, 101 Heidegger, Martin, 4-5, 3 5 , 37-64, 78 Being and Time, 39, 40, 43, 47, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61 Being (Dasein), 39, 45-51, 5 3 , 54, 55, 57-8, 60, 61-2 'A Dialogue on Language', 56-60 An Introduction to Metaphysics, 60 Ereignis (appropriation), 30, 40, 46-7, 49-51, 5 3 , 54-5, 59, 62 Erfahrung ( experience), 59 'Language', 52 'Letter on Humanism', 5 3 Lich tung, 43 National Socialism, 64n.1 'nature of expression', 43 On Time and Being, 47-51 'The Principle of Identity', 44--7, 49 hermeneutics, 57-8, 107-8 heterosexism, 160, 161-2, 163-5, 168 historicity, 5-6, 72-3, 74, 77, 78, 80, 81-2, 83, 87, 88, 92 historiography, 6-7, 98 history, 3, 5-6, 7-8, 72-3, 74, 75-90, 98 spectral, 82-90, 93 Hobbes, Thomas, 7 Hobsbawm, Eric, 84 homophobia, 159-61, 163 homosexuality, 133 coming out, 23-5 see also marriage, same-sex human beings, 46, 51-2 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 43

first order/second order dichotomy (Isaac), 5, 6, 73, 74, 84, 85-6, 90, 93 Foucault, Michel, 6, 7, 8, 23, 98-107, 108-22, 128-44, 145 , 146, 148, 149, 150-1, 164, 167, 168 The Archaeology of Knowledge, 103 , 108 and Deleuze, 116-20 discourse theory, 136-7, 172-3n.14, 172-3n.15 Discipline and Punish, 140-1 domination, 164, 173n.16 Folie et deraison, 78-81 La volonte de savoir, 128 'L'ordre du discours', 102 and Nietzsche, 106-7, 109-11 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', 103 , 104, 109-10, 112, 115, 116, 117, 120, 149 Nietzscheanism, 99-102, 103 , 104, 120 positivism, 172n.14 and psychoanalytic theory, 128-9, 133-4, 135, 142, 144 and sexuality, 128-9, 130 soul, 137-40, 141-2 'Theatrum Philosophicum', 110 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 8, 128, 129, 133, 134, 142, 145 Fukuyama, Francis, 86, 87 Fynsk, Christopher, 59 gay marriage see marriage, same-sex gay-bashing, 159-60 Geist, 38, 77, 81, 96n.14, 96n.15 , 110 gender, 12-13 , 14, 144-5, 164, 166; see also homosexuality; sexuality

identity, 27-8, 44-6, 132-3 imprisonment, 136, 138, 139, 142 individualization, 141

Index Isaac, Jeffrey, 73-6, 84, 86, 87, 90-1, 92-3 first order/second order dichotomy, 5 , 6 , 73 , 74, 84, 85-6, 90, 93 'The Strange Silence of Political Theory', 74 Kant, Immanuel, 37, 38, 100 Kennedy, Congressman, 15 8 Kennedy, Senator, 159-60 King, Florence, 165, 166 Kofman, Sarah, 65n.4, 119, 148 Koto ba, 59-60 Kristeva, Julia, 130, 145 , 146, 147 Lacan, Jacques, 7, 142, 152n.4, 153n.5 , 154n. l l the real, 14 5-6 Laclau, Ernesto, 2, 152n.4 Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal, 28 language, 4-6, 51-60 AIO ( as-if-objectified) model of, 4, 5 , 6, 10, 19, 20, 21, 22-3 , 24, 25, 51, 73 communicability (Derrida), 174n.20 constructivist, 11-13 enframing theories, 42-3 expressive-constitutive tradition, 42-3 Koto ba, 59-60 of marriage, 162-4, 165-8, 174n.17 middle voice, 15-16, 24, 32n. l2, 67n.18, 69n.30, 105 nonmetaphysical, 36, 39 and politics, 10-30 Language, Counter-Memory, Practice,

103, 110 Laporte, Roger, 107 liberation, 23-4 linear time/history, 1-3 , 6, 39, 50-1, 72, 83-7, 103, 111, 115 , 125n. l 6, 156, 164, 175n.21 Locke, John, 6, 7 madness, 79-80 Mahon, Michael and Bernauer, James, 133 Manifesto, 84-5

1 95

marriage, 157-8 language of, 162-4, 165-8, 174n.17 same-sex, 8-9, 156, 157, 158, 159, 162, 169-70n.3 Marx, Karl, 7, 82, 84-5, 88, 89, 91-2 metaphysics, 36, 37-9, 41, 48-9, 51, 52, 60-1, 87 middle voice, 15-16, 24, 32n.12, 67n.18, 69n.30, 105 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7, 8, 62, 77, 89, 106-7, 109-20, 127-88, 147, 148-9 The Gay Science, 38, 112-13 , 119, 148 The Genealogy of Morals, 110, 113 Thus Spake Zarathustra, 118-19 see also Foucault, Michel, Nietzscheanism normalization, 137, 139, 140-1, 142 Norton, Anne, 25-6 Oedipus legend, 133 Parks, Rosa, 143 Parmenides, 4 5 performativity, 32-3n.19 pleasure, 132-3 political theory, 72-6, 86, 88, 90-1, 93-4, 95n.3 power, 131-2, 13 5, 143, 149, 164, 173n.16 problem-solving theory, 75 , 95n.3 psych� 128, 130, 132, 134, 135-6, 137, 139, 141-4, 145-6 psychoanalytic theory, 7, 128-9, 133-4, 137, 141-2, 144-9 Rabinow, Paul, 122-3n.5 Ranciere, Jacques, 10 reading, 107, 108 reason, 77-82, 101 critique of, 114-15 Ree, Paul, 125n.16, 125n. l 7, 125n. l 9 resistance, 13 5 , 137, 139, 141, 142-4 Rorty, Richard Essays on Heidegger and Others,

40-3 , 44 Foucault, reading of, 100-1, 102

1 96

U nti mely Politics

Sallis, J., 38, 39 Scott, Charles, 15 sexualiry, 128-9, 130, 133 , 144-5, 1656; see also homosexualiry; marriage Shapiro, Michael, 25 soul (Foucault), 137-40, 141-2 speech act theory, 19-20, 32-3n.19, 171-2n.13 Spinoza, Benedict de, 119-20, 146-8 subjection, 134-5, 136, 137, 142, 143 , 149 subj ectivation, 134-5, 136, 142 subjectiviry, 13-16, 22-3, 134-5, 163-4, 172-3n.15, 174n.17 Taylor, Charles, 42-4, 51, 100, 102 telos, 18, 29, 39, 77, 132 temporaliry, 26, 47-51 Thiele, Lesley Paul, 64n.1 time, 47-51 is/as 'out of joint', 6, 72, 82, 86, 87, 93 untimeliness, 2-9, 26, 39, 49-51, 54-5, 72-3, 81, 119, 128, 15 5-6, 160-1

and AIO ( as-if-objectified) model of language, 73 agency, 22-5, 127, 129, 149-51 and differance, 27-30 discursive politics, 161-6 genealogy/history, 114-15 ghosts and specters, 82-93 , 117, 166-9 Hamlet, 82-4, 87 Heideggerian philosophy, 5, 62-4 and history, 81, 113, 129 Marxism, 84-5, 88-90 performative contradiction, 111 and political theory, 2, 72, 74-5 , 8693 , 98-9, 155-6 reading and interpretation, 108-9, 112, 114, 120-2 Villa, Dana, 70-1n.34 Visker, Rudy, 103, 126n.23 Warner, Michael, 142 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 21, 42 writing, 104-6 Zizek, Slavoj , 145 , 145, 146, 147