Radical Philosophy 119, 2003

119
Radical Philosophy Ltd

Editorial collective
Caroline Bassett, Howard Feather, Peter
Hallward, Esther Leslie, Kevin Magill,
Stewart Martin, Mark Neocleous, Peter
Osborne, Stella Sandford, Alessandra
Tanesini
Contributors
Hyun Ok Park teaches in the departments
of East Asian Studies and Sociology at
New York University. Her book Two
Dreams in One Bed: Capital, Social Life
and Koreans in Manchuria is forthcoming
from Duke University Press
Andrew Norris is Assistant Professor
of Political Science at the University of
Pennsylvania. He has recently published
on Ernesto Laclau and Stanley Cavell
in Constellations and Political Theory,
respectively.
Dorte Andersen teaches European
ethnography at the University of
Copenhagen.
Nectarios Limnatis is a PhD candidate in
Philosophy in the Graduate Faculty, New
School for Social Research, New York.
He has taught in Moscow, New York and
Bremen.
Joseph McCarney is the author of Hegel
on History (Routledge, 2000).
Robert Bernasconi is Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Memphis.
He is the editor, with Tommy Lott, of The
Idea of Race (Hackett, 2000) and of Race
(Blackwell, 2001).
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Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd.
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R A D I C A L P H I L O S O P H Y
a j o u r n a l o f s o c i a l i s t a n d f e m i n i s t p h i l o s o p h y
MAY/JUNE 2003
COMMENTARY
Anti-Americanism and Realignment in the Two Koreas
Hyun Ok Park ...................................................................................................2
ARTICLES
The Exemplary Exception: Philosophical and Political Decisions
in Giorgio Agambens Homo Sacer
Andrew Norris ..................................................................................................6
The Paradox of The People: Cultural Identity and European
Integration
Dorte Andersen ..............................................................................................17
Globalization and Modern Philosophy
Nectarios Limnatis ........................................................................................25
EXCHANGE
Hegels Racism? A Response to Bernasconi
Joseph McCarney ..........................................................................................32
Hegels Racism: A Reply to McCarney
Robert Bernasconi .........................................................................................35
REVIEWS
Kristin Ross, May 68 and its Afterlives
Daniel Bensad ...............................................................................................38
Penelope Deutscher, A Politics of Impossible Difference:
The Later Work of Luce Irigaray
Monica Mookherjee ......................................................................................42
Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Foundations for a
Sociology of the Everyday
Ben Highmore ................................................................................................44
Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientic Mind
Nina Power .....................................................................................................46
John McMurtry, Value Wars: The Global Market versus the Life Economy
Mark Neocleous .............................................................................................48
Agnes Heller, The Time is Out of Joint: Shakespeare as Philosopher
of History
Alan Sineld ...................................................................................................49
Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars
James Smith ..................................................................................................50
Derrida, directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman
Michael Sperlinger ........................................................................................51
NEWS
Strategies for Language?
Colin Davis .....................................................................................................53
OBITUARY
CONTENTS
2 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 11 9 ( Ma y / J u n e 2 0 0 3 )
COMMENTARY
Anti-Americanism and
realignment in the two
Koreas
Hyun Ok Park
F
or all their differences, the expressions of anti-Americanism that erupted this
winter in South Korea and North Korea convey a common desire. They were
distinctly post-Cold War events, not just because Koreans are pursuing national
sovereignty independently of the USA, but more importantly because they are symp-
toms of an aspiration for a new northeast Asian capitalist community, which the two
Koreas and their neighbouring states have begun to envision for their collective future.
The appeal for a new northeast Asian community has emerged as a spatial and
temporal x to the crisis of capitalism in Asia, especially in South Korea and Japan.
Whereas South Korea emulated the USA and Japan during the Cold War, it is now
collaborating with Japan to congure a northeast Asian economic bloc comparable to
the European Union. The economic bedrock of the Cold War in the area was a series
of bilateral relationships between Asian countries and the USA that inhibited the
former from developing multilateral relations with other parts of the world, let alone
among themselves. National identity was either conated with or diametrically opposed
to US imperialism. Examples include the participation of Japan and South Korea in
the Korean and the Vietnam wars respectively, the anti-American movement in South
Korea during the 1980s, and the persistent discourse of the postwar that continues
to hold the US occupation accountable for social and cultural unevenness in Japan. If
neither the Koreans nor the Japanese had been capable of imagining an Asian economic
community during the Cold War, the emerging fetish of the Asian community under
the current economic crisis distinguishes the post-Cold War era. Restrictions on imports
to the US market have disrupted the economic growth of Japan since the late 1970s
and South Korea since the late 1980s. With the trauma of the 1997 IMF crisis and the
subsequent consolidation of neoliberal reforms, a northeast Asian community is now
seen as an alternative to dependence on US capital and markets.
In South Korea, participants and spectators of the current anti-American protests
have expressed both resolve and anxiety about the USA. Last November, about a
million candlelight protesters in South Korea ooded a central district of Seoul; and the
protest still continues on a smaller scale. At rst they demanded that South Korea and
the USA reform their State of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which, since the mid-1960s,
has granted a routine amnesty to thousands of US civilians and military personnel
guilty of crimes, including two soldiers responsible for the death of two schoolgirls last
June. The scale and the tone of this anti-Americanism have surprised Koreans as much
as the outside world. For the sceptics of the proliferating NGO movement, the protest
is a sign that political unity is still possible in the age of fragmented movements. For
others, who conate globalization with transnationalism, the recent anti-American
sentiment is a return to the nationalist chauvinism of the past. Afraid of undermining
an already contested relationship between South Korea and the USA, or discouraging
foreign investors, some politicians and intellectuals construe the protest as merely a
reaction to the past a move to offset the past hierarchical relationship between the
two countries.
Netizens
The most prominent sign of anxiety is, however, the call for spontaneity from indi-
vidual participants. Self-expression and unconventional forms of public protest must,
it is said, supersede the conventional practices of social movements. This orientation
is a trademark of the new virtual citizens or netizens who emerged as the organizing
force of the November candlelight vigil. Since June 2002, a long-standing unication
organization (Pomminryon), in collaboration with several dozen social movement
organizations and NGOs, endeavoured in vain to organize protests against the school-
girls deaths. However, it was not until November that the protest began to take off,
due to mobilization via the Internet. To express their opposition to the US war against
Iraq, netizens have opened the candlelight vigils to the global antiwar and peace
movement, distancing themselves from established movements that still focus on the
bilateral relationship between South
Korea and the USA. Fearing desertion
by this emergent netizen crowd, the
media, politicians and well-known
movement organizations have sought
to follow their voice. Accordingly,
the candlelight vigils have been given
the status of a new politics in which
participants lead the movement, revers-
ing the usual institutional formula for
social movements and signalling an
attempt to reclaim popular space from
organized politics.
The insistence on spontaneity
signies a desire for democratic
expression that conventional social
movements have failed to full.
Although this spontaneous politics is
linked to a worldwide youth culture,
the participation of diverse age groups
and a pervasive fascination with spon-
taneity situates the spectacle within a
social crisis that poses wider problems
of representation. The simultaneous
progression since the 1990s of long-
awaited democratization and sweeping
market liberalization has prevented
various established organizations from
comprehending the current situation.
Flourishing NGOs tend to espouse
liberalism instead of censuring it. For
instance, the economic concerns of
leading NGOs include the monopoly of

n
g
o
t
i
m
e
s
.
n
e
t
conglomerates, the rights of small stockholders of conglomerates, and corruption; only
recently have they begun to discuss the problem of the growing number of part-time
workers. Labour unions have abandoned the role they played in the 1980s and have
become more like interest groups for employees of conglomerates than a vanguard for
the majority of workers who are not unionized. Human rights organizations continue to
represent the victims of the previous authoritarian regime, such as tortured and long-
term prisoners and families of the disappeared. In this context, the candlelight protests
are opening a space for various groups and generations who have ambivalent and
contradictory feelings about neoliberal democracy.
This search for a new democratic expression involves a capitalist dream that includes
North Korea. The nuclear conict with the USA has successfully pressured North Korea
to stop procrastinating and start implementing its plan for market reform as a gesture
to offset the US portrayal of North Korean military ambition and to sustain ongoing
negotiations over economic cooperation with South Korea, Russia, China and Japan. In
South Korea this has rekindled public support for the states Sunshine Policy of engage-
ment with North Korea, implemented since 1998. The new policy of engagement centres
on economic cooperation between the two Koreas and is called national cooperation
(minjok kongcho). This is the post-Cold War replacement for the earlier South Korea
USA cooperation (hanmi kongcho) and North Koreas negotiations rst with the USA
and later with South Korea (sonmihunam). National cooperation further consolidates
capitalist hegemony over both the form and the process of Korean unication, which
has been increasingly economic since the 1990s. This is evident in the transformation
of national cooperation from trade and subcontracting, mediated by Korean diasporas,
to the direct investment of South Korean capital in the market reform in North Korea.
According to the South Korean business community, North Korean labourers are
cheaper yet better skilled than their Han Chinese or Korean Chinese counterparts,
whom South Korean rms have previously relied upon. North Korea emerges not just
as a market for South Korean surplus production but also as a promising new site for
investment in industrial production.
A new regional bloc
The enthusiasm of South Koreans for North Koreas imminent capitalist future is
marked by a distinctive historical time consciousness. Although economic liberaliza-
tion has failed to deliver on its long promised redistribution of wealth, the trauma of
the 1997 IMF crisis nonetheless invoked the spectre of developmentalism. Deregulated
foreign capital performed the dirty work for South Korean capital in mobilizing diverse
sectors of society to rally for national unity in support of capitalist expansion. In the
current historical juncture, where the nations cultural appeal is signicantly reduced,
the memory of the IMF transports the radiant dreams of the past into the future. Will
the opening of the North Korean market alleviate the social crisis, taming the neo-
liberal capitalist drive of the 1990s, which expanded the part-time labour force to more
than half the total labour force, eliminating job security, and reducing the size of the
middle class? When neoliberal reforms have emptied out the meaning of democracy
in the economic sphere, will the capitalist dream for North Korea help to reconcile
democratization and economic growth? While South Koreans are condemning US
imperialism, they are oblivious to their own fascination with North Korea, which may
not be as imperialistic as Americas, but is just as inequitable. The construction of the
American Other whether in the form of enchantment (the antiwar movement; the
internationalism of NGOs) or denunciation (anti-Americanism) deters Koreans from
confronting their own social reality in the present.
North Korea constitutes the last link in the chain of the northeast Asian economic
bloc. Whereas China and Russia steadily expanded their economic relations with South
Korea throughout the post-Cold war era, they only began to normalize relations with
North Korea in the late 1990s, pledging aid and further cooperation. Japan and North
Korea have reached a milestone in their process of normalization by agreeing on a
package of compensation, instead of reparation, for the colonial occupation of Korea by
Japan. (At present, ofcially, normalization is momentarily stalled because of Japans
fury over the abduction of Japanese nationals by North Korean security agents.) A
shared vision of a northeast Asian bloc has enabled each neighbouring country to form
trilateral relations with the two Koreas. This vision foresees the trans-Siberian freight
route linking the natural resources and manpower of Russia and North Korea with the
capital, technology and surplus production of South Korea, Japan, and even China.
An Asian economic community is projected not only to consolidate relations among
northeast Asian players but also to expand its power into Europe and Southeast Asia.
The actualization of this community is forestalled by other territorial disputes, competi-
tion for hegemony, and disagreement over the US war against Iraq. Yet the crisis of
capitalism in Asian countries invigorates the aspiration for unity. These are favourable
circumstances for South Korea, Japan, Russia and China to oppose US aggression
against North Korea, which they regard as threatening the sovereignty of North Korea
and the military power of China often said to be the true target of the US offensive
in North Korea as well as threatening their common interests, just as they are begin-
ning to coalesce.
Some of the interests of both the US and North Korea appear to have been fullled
already as a result of their nuclear stand-off, possibly obviating the need for what would
be a widely unpopular war between them. Heightened military tension accompanied
by a surge in anti-Americanism in the Korean peninsula might help the US kill two
birds with one stone. First, it gives the US administration a rationale to execute its plan
to withdraw its troops from South Korea without giving up this strategic post in Asia.
Second, it may enable the US to replace its groundforce-based security programme with
a missile defence programme. In addition to enabling North Korea to leverage more
US aid, the nuclear tension inadvertently enables North Korea to temper the speed of
national cooperation under the control of South Korean capital. It also offers North
Korea an opportunity to boost its declining legitimacy with the people of both South
and North Korea in the wake of North Koreas rampant famines. The peace treaty
with the USA demanded by North Korea is superior to the South Korean proposal for
making the Korean peninsula nuclear free. For whereas the South Korean proposal
requires the two Koreas to eliminate nuclear weapons, but fails to prohibit the USA
from bringing nuclear weapons to the peninsula in an emergency, the North Korean
proposal categorically prohibits the use of nuclear weapons by all sides including
the USA. The peace treaty is capable of lending North Korea political currency in
the process of putative national cooperation and the construction of a northeast Asian
economic community.
Anti-Americanism, a conscious distancing of oneself from it, and the insistence on
spontaneity, all suggest a crisis of representation. They highlight an undeniable desire
for a new national-popular space that has yet to be fully dened. The North Korean
state is an accomplice in the construction of neoliberal structures that are producing
these energies in South Korea and are propelling the countries of northeast Asia to
envisage their unity.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference Anti-Americanism: Its History and
Currency, at New York University in March 2003. The proceedings of this conference are available on
the website www.bordersphere.com. Some of the conference papers will appear in a forthcoming volume
edited by Andrew Ross and Kristin Ross.
The exemplary exception
Philosophical and political decisions in
Giorgio Agambens Homo Sacer
Andrew Norris
rights. More specically, the Nazi death camps are
not a political aberration, least of all a unique event,
but instead the place where politics as the sovereign
decision on life most clearly reveals itself: today it is
not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental
biopolitical paradigm of the West.
1

The Lager is a threshold in which human beings are
reduced to bare life; and the torture this life suffers
is nothing else but its exclusion from the polis as a
distinctively human life. The bare life that is produced
by this abandonment by the state is not biological life;
not simple natural life, but life exposed to death (bare
life or sacred life) is the originary political element.
2

This is the Muselmann as described by Primo Levi
in If This is a Man. One speaks of the Shoah as
industrialized mass death, and of the camps as facto-
ries of death. But the product of these factories is not
death but, as Arendt puts it, a mode of life outside of
life and death.
3
If for Arendt, however, the production
of Muselmnner is anti-political, in that the camps are
spaces in which plurality is foreclosed, for Agamben it
is the emergence of the essence of the political.
Such claims are difcult for political philosophy
to address, as they undermine so many of its guiding
assumptions. Instead of asking us to construct and
evaluate different plans of action, Agamben asks us to
evaluate the metaphysical structure and implications of
the activity of politics as such. Instead of asking us to
consider the true or proper nature of political identity,
Agamben asks us to consider a threshold state of the
non-identical, the liminal. And far from bringing con-
cepts such as rights, authority, public interest, liberty
or equality more clearly into view, Agamben operates
at a level of abstraction at which such concepts blur
into their opposites. He takes this approach because,
like Arendt, he believes that claims to justice can
only be made if one understands the ground of the
political upon which both justice and injustice stand. If
Foucaults goal was to make the cultural unconscious
Of all the beings that are, presumably the most
difcult to think about are living creatures, because
on the one hand they are in a certain way most
closely akin to us, and on the other are at the same
time separated from our ek-sistent essence by an
abyss.
Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism
In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
Giorgio Agamben draws upon metaphysics, philo-
sophical anthropology, set theory and the philosophy
of language to advance a number of radical polit-
ico-philosophical claims. In contrast to arguments
that understand political community as essentially
a common belonging in a shared national, ethnic,
religious, or moral identity, Agamben argues that the
original political relation is the ban in which a mode
of life is actively and continuously excluded or shut out
(ex-claudere) from the polis. The decision as to what
constitutes the life that is thereby taken outside of the
polis is a sovereign decision. Sovereignty is therefore
not a historically specic form of political authority
that arises with modern nation-states and their con-
ceptualization by Hobbes and Bodin, but rather the
essence of the political. Similarly, biopolitics is not,
as Foucault sometimes suggests, incompatible with
sovereign as opposed to disciplinary power; nor is it
a distinctively modern phenomenon. Instead it is the
original form of politics: the fundamental activity of
sovereign power is the production of bare life as origi-
nary political element and as threshold of articulation
between nature and culture, zoe and bios. Attending
to the etymology of the word decide one can under-
stand this sovereign decision as a cut in life, one that
separates real life from merely existent life, political
and human life from the life of the non-human. As
this cutting denes the political, the production of the
inhuman which is correlative with the production
of the human is not an activity that politics might
dispense with, say in favour of the assertion of human
apparent,
4
Agambens is that of bringing to expression
the metaphysics that our history has thus far only
shown. He argues that, properly understood, what that
history shows us is that politics is
the truly fundamental structure of Western meta-
physics insofar as it occupies the threshold on
which the relation between the living being and the
logos is realized. In the politicization of bare life
the metaphysical task par excellence the human-
ity of living man is decided [si decide]. There
is politics because man is the living being who, in
language, separates and opposes himself to his own
bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in
relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion.
5
What is perhaps both most intriguing and most prob-
lematic about Agambens work is that unlike, say,
that of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy
it brings these claims about metaphysics into dia-
logue with a specic set of quite concrete examples,
including refugee camps, hospital wards, death rows
and military camps. All of these are sites where, on
Agambens account, one can perceive the metaphysical
negation that allows for the afrmation of distinctively
human life: bare life, nuda vita.
One way to evaluate Agambens claims is to con-
sider how well they help us to describe and understand
such examples.
6
Another is to ask whether Agambens
claims are intelligible on their own account to
see, that is, whether they open themselves up to an
immanent critique. This approach has a number of
advantages, chief among which is that it does not
demand that we simply choose whether to accept or
reject Agambens approach in a global way. Instead
such an approach allows us to be open to a radically
different way of thinking about politics and political
philosophy while at the same time maintaining some
critical distance from it. In what follows I want to
pursue this option by way of considering Agambens
appropriation of the early decisionist political theory
of Carl Schmitt. I will argue that Agambens accept-
ance of Schmitts central claims regarding political
judgment make it impossible for him to weave together
his suggestive reading of examples from philosophy
and political history into a mode of political thought
that fulls his own ambition of returning thought
to its practical calling.
7
Agambens project hinges
upon the paradigmatic status of the camp. But on
his own account, there is an isomorphism between
the exception and the example or paradigm. Given
his acceptance of Schmitts analysis of the former
as the product of the sovereign decision, this makes
Agambens evaluation of the camp as the fundamental
biopolitical paradigm of the West into a sovereign
decision beyond the regulation of rule or reason. As
this casts his readers as either subject or enemy, it is
hard to imagine how the politics it might produce will
serve as a real alternative to that which it contests.
The human
It may be helpful, rst, to say a bit more about Agam-
bens central claims and the sort of valency they have
in the history of philosophy. In his insistence that the
history of politics must be understood rst and foremost
as the history of metaphysics, Agamben clearly follows
Heidegger. But Agambens differences from Heidegger
are as important as the similarities between them.
Crucial here is the fact that Heidegger does not the-
matize bare life or its relation to the political.
8
Indeed,
his work would seem to echo the inclusive exclusion
that on Agambens account produces it. Consider one
of Heideggers more political texts, his 1947 Letter
on Humanism, in which he proposes to think the
essence of action in a more decisive (entschieden)
way than had been previously achieved. Human action
the essence of the political is said by Heidegger to
be thinking in language. Thinking does not make or
cause; action is instead revelatory, it brings things out
into the open. What it brings out is that human beings
are related to Being in a completely different way to
animal life. Animals lack language, as they have no
world: Because plants and animals are lodged in their
respective environments but are never placed freely
in the clearing of Being which alone is world, they
lack language. Human beings, then, will become what
they really are only in so far as they make real this
distinction within themselves between their animal
life and their human dwelling in the house of being.
9

Heidegger is aware of the potential difculties this
entangles him in, but he does not directly address the
problem. Instead he only adds:
But in being denied language [plants and animals]
are not thereby suspended worldlessly in their en-
vironment. Still, in this word environment [Um-
gebung] converges all that is puzzling about living
creatures. In its essence, language is not the utter-
ance of an organism; nor is it the expression of a
living thing. Language is the clearing-concealing
advent of Being itself.
10
Without language, and yet not suspended in the
absence of the clearing of Being that is world and
whose advent is language, animal life is marginal
life, life that only a decisive thought can distinguish
from the human which as history shows is itself all
too easily collapsed into the oxymoron of the animal
rationale. Heidegger indicates the decision this thought
will make when he writes that animal life is never
freely placed in the clearing of Being which alone is
world. This suggests that it will be placed there,
of necessity, under coercion.
11
It is precisely the impli-
cations of this coercive, negative aspect of our relation
to our own embodied life that fascinates Agamben.
Even Hannah Arendt, who sees that the camps force
us to question the way we delineate the concepts of
humanity and life, fails to break free of what we might
term this logic of exuviation. As is well known, The
Human Condition repeats variations of most of the
gestures made by Heidegger in his letter on humanism:
what has been obscured in modernity is the crucial
importance to human life of action. Properly under-
stood, action is speech; and speech is what makes
possible a world. Speaking has a revelatory function,
and what it reveals in a public place that bears
obvious resemblance to Heideggers clearing of Being
is a public person, as opposed to a private individual.
The achievement of such personhood is freedom. What
is less obvious is that Arendt repeats Heideggers
marginalization or, perhaps better, liminalization of
animal life. This is obscured by her seeming rejection
of Being and Times analysis of being-towards-death:
since action is the political activity par excellence [and
since acting involves making a radical new beginning],
natality, and not mortality, may be the central category
of political, as opposed to metaphysical, thought.
12
But
this passes over the strange importance immortality
retains for Arendt.
The Human Conditions rst chapter which not
coincidentally shares the title of the book ends with
a section entitled Eternity versus Immortality. Here
Arendt argues that while participation in the innite
is the ideal of the philosopher, immortality is that of
the political actor. The rst is an atemporality that is
available only to the individual contemplative, who on
Arendts account experiences a kind of death in thus
leaving the world of men. Immortality in contrast is
endurance in time. It is sought by human beings in so
far as they are mortal:
Men are the mortals, the only mortal things in
existence, because unlike animals they do not exist
only as members of a species whose immortal life is
guaranteed by procreation. The mortality of men lies
in the fact that individual life, with a recognizable
life-story from birth to death, rises out of biological
life. This individual life cuts through the circular
movement of biological life.
13
It must do this, as the distinction between men and
animals runs right through the human species itself.
Hence Arendt silently accepts the judgement of the
ancient Greeks that only those who prefer immortal
fame to mortal things are really human.
14
Noting this
brings out the continuity of The Human Condition
with the earlier Origins of Totalitarianism, which
had argued that one of the decisive step[s] in the
[camps] preparation of living corpses [was] making
martyrdom, for the rst time in history, impossible.
Arendt cites a camp victim: To demonstrate when
death can no longer be postponed that is, to make
ones own decision on this question is an attempt
to give death meaning, to act beyond ones own death.
In order to be successful, a gesture must have social
meaning.
15
Politics where one struggles to become
a public person distinct from the private self is not
merely a sphere in which plurality is celebrated. As a
sphere in which one form of life gives birth to another,
it is also one in which life is placed into question; as
if, in Agambens words, politics were the place in
which life had to transform itself into good life and in
which what had to be politicized were always already
bare life. In Western politics, bare life has the peculiar
privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city
of man.
16

Agambens Homo Sacer proposed trilogy of
which only the rst and the third volumes have as yet
appeared is devoted to the justication of and elabo-
ration upon this claim. The title of the rst volume
names the three moments of Agambens analysis:
Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Homo
sacer is a gure from Roman law, life that cannot be
sacriced and yet may be killed.
17
This life as expo-
sure to death is what Agamben nds in the Lager:
The Jew living under Nazism is a agrant case
of homo sacer. The truth which is difcult for
the victims to face, but which we must have the
courage not to cover with sacricial veils is that
the Jews were exterminated not in a mad and giant
holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, as
lice, which is to say, as bare life.
18
The term holocaust describes the destruction of
European Jewry as a sacrice, suggesting that we
compare the extermination camps to holy altars upon
which burnt offerings are placed. It is for just this
reason that Agamben rejects the use of the term as
carrying with it an anti-Semitic history.
19
The camps
of the Shoah are better understood as sites for the
production of homo sacer, life that is, as the etymology
of sacred suggests, both blessed and cursed, both
included and excluded from the community and
ultimately both living and dead, both human and
inhuman. In the politicization of bare life in which
the humanity of living man is decided, the threshold
between the human and inhuman must be crossed,
and the two distinguished. The camps are where this
process is enacted most vividly: The Muselmann
marks the threshold between the human and the
inhuman.
20
As his title suggests, Agamben seeks to
explain the production of that threshold through the
concepts of sovereign power and bare life, concepts
he draws, respectively, from Carl Schmitt and Walter
Benjamin. I turn now to a discussion of Schmitt so
as to put us in a position to ask what implications
Agambens appropriation of his work might have for
Agambens own project.
The exception and the border
Carl Schmitt presents his inuential theory of sover-
eignty in Constitutional Theory and the rst volume of
his Political Theology.
21
For Schmitt, any legal system
rests upon a decision that cannot itself take the form of
law. Both the origin and the border of the law require
a political power that exceeds legal justication, and in
a state of emergency this power must re-emerge from
the system of positive norms appropriate to the normal
situation. The state of emergency is, however, for
Schmitt only an instance of the logic of the exception,
which is the expression of a spatial understanding of
concepts and conceptual borders as such. Since what is
within the legal system (norms and laws) is made pos-
sible (dened as being within the system) by a distinc-
tion between inside and outside that as such exceeds
the limits of the set of norms and laws, no norm can
make these distinctions. Hence a unied legal system
requires a political decision to give it (the system, not
the territory to which it is applied) borders as well as a
set of fundamental values. The decision on the excep-
tion is simply the re-emergence of this border-setting
power, the ability to make the decisive distinction that
can only be made by a sovereign authority. This is the
true force of Schmitts infamous dictum, Sovereign is
he who decides on the exception (Ausnahmezustand).
Recognizing this makes plain why Schmitt describes
the concept of the sovereign decision as a borderline
concept (Grenzbegriff ) that as such pertains to the
outermost sphere.
22

Sovereignty operates at the outermost sphere; it is
here, at the borderline, that it establishes and violates
limits. If sovereignty decides upon its own limits, its
decision must necessarily be unlimited (unbegrenzte).
The sovereign is the unlimited power that makes limits
or, in other words, the ungrounded ground of the
law. Schmitts sovereign is a creature of the border:
although he stands outside the normally valid legal
system, he nevertheless belongs to it, for it is he who
decides when the constitution needs to be suspended
in its entirety.
23
But while it seems to range back and
forth over it, this movement is in fact the oscillation
of the border itself. Though it makes sense in one
way to speak of the sovereign overstepping the limits
it lays down, in a deeper sense it is the limit, and
hence carries the limit with it in its movement as it
carries itself. As Agamben notes, the exception die
Ausnahme is what is taken outside; it is the inclusive
exclusion.
24
The decision and the exception it concerns
are never decisively placed within or without the
legal system, as they are precisely the moving border
between the two.
A state of emergency is the product of the collapse
of the normal order; but the normal order is only
the absence of a state of emergency. In Agambens
words:
The exception does not subtract itself from the rule;
rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the
exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the
exception, rst constitutes itself as a rule. The
sovereign decision of the exception is the originary
juridico-political structure on the basis of which
what is included in the juridical order and what is
excluded from it acquire their meaning.
25
Agamben concludes from this that What emerges
in the limit gure is the radical crisis of every pos-
sibility of clearly distinguishing between membership
and inclusion, between what is outside and what is
inside, between exception and rule.
26
Here the logic of
borders is used to deny that borders can be condently
identied by anyone other than the sovereign, who does
not identify borders so much as establish them by at.
Having played upon a conception of the legal system
as a unit dened by distinctions made between in and
out, the Schmittian logic of the decision now proceeds
to deconstruct and hence full itself by denying that
there is a real distinction (to be made by anyone other
than the sovereign) between the core and the marginal.
For Schmitt, once the rule acknowledges that it gives
rise to exceptions for which it cannot legislate, every
case can, in principle, be understood in these terms.
To avoid this conclusion one has to argue that, even
in those cases where the rule cannot legislate, it still
does legislate in some impoverished sense. One would
have to argue, that is, that exceptional cases are clearly
dened as such by the rule itself a paradoxical
position. Hence Schmitt concludes that all law is
situational law.
27
As Agamben puts it, Schmitts
analysis of the sovereign shows us that the law is
outside itself, and that in its formalism it has Geltung
ohne Bedeutung validity without signicance.
28
Though Agamben himself has not noted this, the
author of this analysis of the aporias of law also
advances one of the purest expressions of the logic of
exuviation discussed above: The Concept of the Politi-
cal. Here the decisive point is the relation between
the way of life protected by the polity and the life
demanded of the soldiers who serve in that protection.
For Schmitt, the concept of the political is dened by
the criteria of friends and enemies, as the concept of
the moral is dened by that of good and evil, and that
of the aesthetic by beauty and ugliness. What makes
friends friends and enemies enemies is something only
the parties involved can recognize:
Only the actual participants can correctly recognize,
understand, and judge the concrete situation and set-
tle the extreme case of conict. Each participant is
in a position to judge [entscheiden] whether the ad-
versary intends to negate his opponents way of life
and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to
preserve ones own form of existence.
29
In response to such threats the political unit has the
right to demand from its members the readiness to
die. This is one of the most important features of the
Schmittian state: It is by virtue of [its] power over
the physical life of men [that] the political community
transcends all other associations or societies.
30
Where
for Hobbes the common life comes into being in the
service of the individuals embodied life, Schmitt
follows Hegel in decisively subordinating the latter to
the former. Given his non-Hegelian refusal to describe
the goods advanced by the political entity, this produces
the phenomenon described by Agamben in which the
political way of life is dened by its negation of bare
life. The citizen gives his life in resistance to the
public enemy because his true life is the common
Art von Leben.
31
For Schmitt, in the absence of such a
commitment life is reduced to mere life, an essentially
animal existence. It is because he nds this a form
of nihilism from which we need to be redeemed that
Schmitt does not pursue his own suggestion that life
might in itself attain a metaphysical status. He writes
in Political Romanticism:
Today different and, indeed, mundane factors have
taken the place of God: humanity, the nation, the
individual, historical development, and even life for
its own sake, in its complete spiritual emptiness and
mere dynamic. This does not mean that the attitude
is no longer metaphysical. Metaphysics is some-
thing unavoidable.
32
But this suggestion is left undeveloped, and lifes
role in metaphysics is, in line with Agambens analysis,
that of an inclusive exclusion, the exuviation of which
allows for the emergence of the political.
33
The camp and the law
The bare life that politics sloughs off is never pre-
cisely dened by Agamben. He focuses instead upon
presenting examples of this inclusive exclusion such
as Versuchspersonen, Karen Quinlan, people in over-
comas, refugees, and so on. But his central example
is the Muselmann of the Nazi death camps. [T]oday
it is not the city but rather the camp that is the funda-
mental biopolitical paradigm of the West is the crucial
claim for Agamben. It gives his work a great deal of
pathos, and allows him to argue that the history of
metaphysics is not an arcane subject worthy of dusty
libraries, but in fact the most pressing and important
ethical and political topic of our time. In reading
his work, Agamben suggests, we are confronting the
truth of the political and of the most horric events
in modern history in a way that mere political actors
never could. That one of his stated ambitions is to
return thought to practical calling implies that thought
is now impractical, and that practice is thoughtless.
Though this thoughtlessness can take many forms, on
Agambens account they all share a common essence
that is exemplied by the Nazi death camps. All of
politics, including liberal regimes devoted to human
rights, is implicated in and can be understood in
terms of the Shoah.
34
If this claim is not accepted one
might turn ones attention to, say, people on Texan
death rows, and argue that their marginal status is
an institutional rather than a metaphysical problem.
Or one might argue that the common element in
most of the examples listed above is the quite formal
distinction between life and the good life that founds
Socratic ethics and Aristotelian politics. Agamben
in contrast wants to reveal the limitations of these
modes of philosophical reection upon practice by
implicating them in one of the greatest catastrophes of
the twentieth century. Without the claim for the para-
digmatic nature of the camps Agambens arguments
are marginalized, and politics and law become again
a matter of communities, interests, conveniences, and
so on. But what makes the camps and their victims the
best examples of homo sacer? And what problems are
raised for Agambens analysis by the claim? Why, for
example, arent the camps of Stalins Soviet Union the
paradigm of the political?
Agamben uses the term camp in a quite broad
sense that suggests a deep commonality between the
camps of Germany, the Soviet Union, the former
Yugoslavia and other unspecied regimes. If this is
an apparent acceptance of Arendts maligned notion
of totalitarianism,
35
it is made more problematic by
the fact that Agamben, unlike Arendt, does not engage
in any comparative analyses that might defend the
claim of a substantial commonality. Almost all of
his detailed analyses are of National Socialism, with
occasional reference to the former Yugoslavia, where
female bodies have been the focus of a political deci-
sion to commit mass rape. It remains, then, an open
question how his schema might apply to, say, Pol
Pots Cambodia or Maos China, both of which go
entirely unmentioned. Of course, even if Agambens
analysis is not helpful in these cases, this would imply
nothing about its potential explanatory power regard-
ing National Socialism. However, if he were to narrow
his focus he would obviously also have to adjust his
analysis radically.
But this is not the only way of asking whether
Agamben is right to make the camps the paradigm of
the political. One might also wonder whether the camp
system can exemplify a phenomenon that includes
constitutional, legally governed polities. Agamben him-
self emphasizes that the state of exception comes
to be confused with juridical rule itself in the Nazi
state in part because the juridical basis for internment
was not common law but Schutzhaft, a kind of state
of exception.
36
This might suggest that what is needed
is the reinstatement of legal protection rather than a
critique of law that it is the fascist imitation of law
that results in the inclusive exclusion of life, and not
law itself. Such suspicions are only heightened by
Agambens reliance on the erstwhile Nazi Carl Sch-
mitts account of the sovereign decision. So it might be
helpful to note that one legal system of unblemished
merit appears to produce much the same anomaly as
the Nazis Schutzhaft: John Lockes account of the
God-given law of nature and reason. Here I have in
mind not Lockes quite reasonable defence of executive
prerogative, though that too is surely relevant to this
question, but instead the way the logic of his argument
drives Locke to allow for a horric form of slavery
even as he asserts that we are by nature free and can
never consent to our own enslavement.
Locke begins the second of the Two Treatises of
Government by identifying political power with a
Right of making Laws with Penalties of Death, and
consequently all lesser penalties for the preservation
of property and the commonwealth for the Publick
Good.
37
Locke grants this political power to all men
in the state of nature, and argues that those who
would violate these rights put themselves into a state
of war with those they would subject. In judging
when another has put himself in such a state of war
with me, I should, according to Locke, look rst to
the defence of my liberty. Indeed, it is Lawful for a
Man to kill a Thief, who has not in the least hurt him,
nor declared any design upon his Life, any further
then by the use of Force, so to get him in his Power.
He that in the State of Nature, would take away the
Freedom, that belong to any one in that State, must
necessarily be supposed to have a design to take away
every thing else, that Freedom being the Foundation
of all the Rest.
38
This might be only a speculation
on Lockes part as to what is likely to happen. But
in fact it is closer to an identication of life with
freedom. This Freedom from Absolute, Arbitrary
Power, is so necessary to, and closely joyned with a
Mans Preservation, that he cannot part with it, but by
what forfeits his Preservation and Life together.
39
This
robust, normative identication of life with individual
freedom is part and parcel of Lockes defence of our
ability to recognize when a political ruler has put
himself into a state of rebellion, and to depose him.
And it sounds reassuringly far away from the bare
life of the Muselmnner. But the hinge of freedom as
life serves to open up a less familiar scene in Lockes
political universe.
Because life is essentially freedom, a Man, not
having the Power of his own life [which belongs to
God], cannot, by Compact or his own Consent, enslave
himself to any one.
40
And yet, on precisely the same
grounds, slavery is nonetheless possible. How can this
be? Lockes reasoning is as follows: if someone tries
to take away my freedom, he has as good as tried to
kill me. Being guilty of (attempted) murder, he forfeits
his life; that is, he enters a zone in which he has no
power over his own life and is in fact already dead.
As the living dead, he loses the rights and powers of
the living, and may be treated as a slave:
Indeed, having, by his fault, forfeited his own Life,
by some Act that deserves Death; he, to whom
he has forfeited it, may (when he has him in his
Power) delay to take it, and make use of him to
his Service, and he does him no injury by it. For,
whenever he nds the hardship of his Slavery to
out-weigh the value of his Life, tis in his Power,
by resisting the Will of his Master, to draw on him-
self the Death he Desires.
Locke can speak of the slave as drawing on himself
the Death he Desires without contradicting his claim
that man does not have the right to take his own life
only because he is assuming that the slave is already
dead. Like the Versuchspersonen of the camps, Lockes
slave lacks almost all the rights and expectations that
we characteristically attribute to human existence, and
yet [is] still biologically alive; it thus comes to be
situated at a limit zone between life and death, inside
and outside, in which [it is] no longer anything but
bare life [nuda vita].
41
Even a writer as profoundly
out of temper with Agamben as Locke, and one who
seeks to identify human life with a substantive vision
of law-governed free activity, can become entangled
in what I have termed the logic of exuviation. Indeed,
it is because Locke is loath to identify human beings
with their bare life in a Hobbesian manner that he in
the end reduces a class of people to that life.
42

If there is a moral here, it may be that simply assert-
ing that we are not bare life and eschewing sovereign
power as much as possible in favour of the rule of
law will not allow us to avoid the dilemmas to which
Agamben draws our attention. But there remains a
more difcult problem, one that cannot be addressed
by nding parallels between Agambens claims and
those of others in the tradition, since here his reliance
upon Schmitts decisionism is crucial.
Authoritarian decision
Early on in Homo Sacer Agamben makes explicit his
commitment to what I have described as the spatial
and etymological understanding of logical categories
when he writes, The example is truly a paradigm in
the etymological sense: it is what is shown beside,
and a class can contain everything except its own
paradigm.
What the example shows is its belonging to a class,
but for this very reason the example steps out of its
class in the very moment in which it exhibits and
delimits it. If one now asks how the rule applies
to the example, the answer is not easy, since the
rule applies to the example only as a normal case
and obviously not as an example.
43
This is a very particular account of what it means to
be exemplary. We can easily contrast it, for instance,
with the Critique of Judgments enormously inuential
discussion of the exemplary status of genius and taste.
Kants genius lays down the rule for future acts of
genius by establishing a model that can be followed
only by those who refrain from slavish imitation. But
the rule is only demonstrated by the genius, not articu-
lated into denite criteria. Hence Kants reference to
this rule is indeterminate if not metaphoric: genius
displays itself, not so much in the working out of a
projected end in the presentation of a denite concept,
as rather in the portrayal, or expression, of aesthetic
ideas.
44
Similarly, the necessity of the pleasure we take
in the beautiful is exemplary in that it is a necessity of
the assent of all to a judgment regarded as exemplify-
ing a universal rule incapable of formulation. The
condition of this necessity is, Kant argues, the idea of
a common sense. We are suitors for agreement from
everyone else, because we are fortied with a ground
common to all, a sensus communis aestheticus.
45

The ip side of this is that neither genius nor taste
are features of determinate concepts or rule-governed
acts and institutions. Neither the moral agent nor the
person successfully making cognitive claims needs to
be a genius or to take her guidance from exemplars as
opposed to precepts. In stark contrast, Agamben makes
it plain that the exceptional status of the example as
something taken outside the class in order to demon-
strate that class is a necessary feature of classes as
such, be they classes of the product of artistic genius
or classes of rules. In every logical system, just as in
every social system, the relation between outside and
inside, strangeness and intimacy, is this complicated.
In every case belonging to a class can be shown only
by an example.
46
Examples precede classes just as, for
Schmitt, decisions precede norms.
I have referred to Schmitts logic of the decision
as a spatial one because it conceives of concepts in
terms of groups in space with borders that need to
be dened and patrolled. This is signicant because
if concepts are seen, following Frege, as functions, it
is much less obvious that they can be understood in
these terms. It is not obvious, that is, that functions
have borders that are revealed by being crossed. This
may help explain our sense that Agambens is a fairly
problematic account of, say, set theory. But Agambens
position not only relies upon a metaphor of boundaries
that is at the very least debatable; in so doing it under-
mines itself. The clear implication of Agambens own
explanation of what makes something exemplary or
paradigmatic is that in claiming a paradigmatic status
for the camps he is and can only be making an unregu-
lated decision which cannot be justied to his readers
in a non-authoritarian manner. Since the example
precedes and denes the rule, Agamben cannot appeal
to an independent rule or standard to justify his claim
that the camps are exemplary of anything. The deter-
mination that the camp is representative of the rule
is one that is made and not in any substantive sense
recognized.
47
The paradigm or example mirrors the
structure of the exception: as the one is an inclusive
exclusion, so is the other an exclusive inclusion.
Indeed, Agamben explicitly draws the inference that
exception and example are correlative concepts that
are ultimately indistinguishable.
48
This directly implies
that the claim that something is exemplary is as much a
product of a Schmitt-style decision as is the claim that
something is an exception. In each case the decision is
primary and the rule is derived from it. For this reason
in each case the decision, in Schmitts words, becomes
instantly independent of argumentative substantiation
and receives an autonomous value.
49
Here the contrast with the example of Kant is strong
indeed. In Kants judgements of taste there is a wooing
of the assent of others who share your common sense
of the matter. In Agamben, there is a decision that is
imposed upon others.
50
The third chapter of Agam-
bens 1990 The Coming Community, The Example,
argues in Hegelian fashion that language involves
an antinomy of the individual and the universal, in
that language tries to capture particular things with
its general terms and in the attempt always loses
their particularity. All linguistic reference involves the
presentation of a particular as representative of a class
and of other particulars, neither of which are this given
particular. The example escapes this antinomy in that
it is neither particular nor universal but
a singular object that shows its singularity. Hence
the pregnancy of the Greek term, for example:
para-deigma, that which is shown alongside.
Hence the proper place of the example is always
beside itself, the space in which its undeniable and
unforgettable life unfolds. This life is pure linguistic
life. Only life in the word is indenable and unfor-
gettable. Exemplary being is purely linguistic being.
Exemplary is what is not dened by any property,
except by being-called. Not being-red, but being-
called-red; not being-Jakob, but being-called-Jakob
denes the example.
51
The exception and the decision both go unmentioned in
this text, and the suggestion is left open that something
like Kants sensus communis allows us to recognize
what shows itself as being exemplary. Indeed, the use
of the language of universals, particulars and singulari-
ties from Hegels logic suggests that the example is a
concrete universal that displays itself as such to the
highest form of reason, and not merely the sovereign
decision.
52
In part this reects the fact that The Coming
Community focuses upon the possibilities opened up
by non-identical, liminal being, rather than upon the
idea that the camps are where the best examples of
such being is found.
53
It is only in Homo Sacer that
Agamben relates this analysis of the example to the
inclusive exclusion of the Muselmann, and in so doing
attempts to ground an analysis of the political upon the
nature of the camps. Because the nature of language
alone can hardly explain the historical emergence of
the camps (life in which is considerably different from
life in the word), Agamben appeals to a Schmittian
decision. But since he remains committed to an etymo-
logical analysis of example (lesempio) and exception
(leccezione) in which there is an isomorphism between
the exclusive inclusion and the inclusive exclusion, he
is forced into the awkward position of deciding in an
authoritarian fashion that politics is a matter of the
decision on life as enacted in the camps.
It is one thing to suggest, as philosophers like
Heidegger working in the phenomenological tradi-
tion are bound to do, that one is giving descriptions
rather than arguments. It is quite another to say that
the aptness or accuracy of a description is something
that is appropriately determined only by a sovereign
decision. To say the latter is to say that we are not
returning to the things themselves, but rather con-
stituting them. It follows from this that if Agamben is
correct about the logic of politics a claim that I have
already suggested may be too broad to be sustained
he cannot be right that this logic necessarily applies
to or is enacted in philosophy as well. If he were,
his philosophical claims about the political would be
the expression not of the truth of the political, but of
his own sovereign decision. This makes it impossible
for Agamben to offer a genuine alternative to the
bloody nomos of the earth producing the potential
biopolitical catastrophe that he describes in such
harrowing terms.
54
As a repetition of what it sets out to
condemn, Agambens work falls into the trap that the
closing sentences of Political Theology claim awaits
all attempts to deny the arche of the decision:
Every claim of a decision must be evil for the
anarchist, because the right emerges by itself if the
immanence of life is not disturbed by such claims.
This radical antithesis forces him of course to
decide against the decision [sich selbst entschieden
gegen die Dezision zu entscheiden]; and this results
in the odd paradox whereby Bakunin, the greatest
anarchist of the nineteenth century, had to become
in theory the theologian of the antitheological and
in practice the dictator of an antidictatorship.
55
For Agamben to escape this unwelcome paradox he
would have to relax the identication he asserts between
philosophy and politics. He would, in other words,
have to justify a mode of evaluation that escaped the
limitations he attributes to logic.
Now, it is clear that the central features of Agambens
project in the Homo Sacer trilogy are incompatible
with the familiar distinction between philosophy as an
arena of impartial rational argumentation and politics
as one of potentially deceptive rhetoric driven by the
interests of the various factions competing for power.
His focus upon the rst book of Aristotles Politics
makes this plain enough: Aristotle argues there that the
polis is the place where citizens can realize their telos
as language users by deliberating and deciding together
what counts for them as just. Politics, that is, does the
work of Socratic philosophy.
56
And, as noted above,
Agambens characterization of the transcendence of
mere life by the good life of the polis is that politics
appears as the truly fundamental structure of Western
metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on
which the relation between the living being and the
logos is realized. The polis is the site of the enactment
of metaphysics. Consequently, Agamben cannot appeal
to an Aristotelian philosophical discourse wherein he
might justify his claim for the paradigmatic status of
the camps in a non-political (viz. non-decisionistic)
way. But it remains open whether such discourse
exhausts the resources of the philosophical.
Agamben himself suggests a distinction within
philosophy between the metaphysical and the non-
metaphysical: the politicization of bare life [is] the
metaphysical task par excellence (emphasis added).
Given his close association with Heidegger and Jean-
Luc Nancy, we might take the use of the word meta-
physical here to suggest that true, non-metaphysical
philosophy will be a variant of Heideggerian Gelassen-
heit letting be. But while something like this is found
in The Coming Community, this is not an accurate char-
acterization of Homo Sacer. Moreover, what the above
analysis suggests is not the need for a more poetic or
poietic mode of thinking, but one that can escape the
decisionist implications of Agambens understanding
of the logic of the political and still make judgements
concerning what politics is and should be. This is
something that the later Heidegger shies away from,
and it is the return to the question of practice outside
of philosophical reection that makes Agambens work
appear as a revitalization of the Heideggerian tradition.
Unfortunately, Agambens acceptance of Schmitts
decisionism makes it impossible for his analyses to
claim any general validity. Perhaps worse, it puts him
in the position of deciding upon the camp victims one
more time, thereby repeating the gesture of the SS in
precisely the way he wishes to avoid.
57
If the parallels
and correspondences to which Agambens work draws
our attention are to be more than suggestive in
particular, if they are to be the object of judgements
that can carry any sort of authority Agambens own
methodological commitments will have to be either
radically modied or abandoned outright. This is a
decidedly unwelcome conclusion for this style of politi-
cal philosophy, for it implies that the very strength of
its insights demands a mode of argumentation of which
it is itself incapable.
Notes
I am grateful to Andrew Benjamin, Tom Dumm, Yasemin
Ok, Simona Sawhney, Eric Wilson and the editors at Radical
Philosophy for help with this essay.
1. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford Uni-
versity Press, Stanford, 1998, p. 181. Oritingal edition,
Homo Sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, Giulio
Einaudi, Turin, 1995.
2. Homo Sacer, p. 88.
3. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1966, p. 444.
4. Michel Foucault, Rituals of Exclusion (an interview
with John Simon), Foucault Live, Semiotext(e), New
York, 1989, p. 71.
6. I have attempted this in my essay Giorgio Agamben and
the Politics of the Living Dead, Diacritics, vol. 30, no.
4, Winter 2002.
8. On this point, see in particular the sixth chapter of
Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans.
G. Bennington and R. Bowlby, University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 1989.
9. Agamben says that for Heidegger man is not a living
being who must abolish or transcend himself in order
to become human. But he immediately goes on to say
that Heideggers work represents a radicalization with-
out precedent of the state of exception, implying that
Heidegger has not after all broken free of this demand
for transcendence (Homo Sacer, p. 153).
10. Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, Martin
Heidegger: Basic Writings, revised edn, Harper, San
Francisco, 1993, pp. 217, 230; ber den Humanismus,
Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt, 1991, pp. 5, 1718.
11. Compare the discussion of mans essential violence in
the earlier Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. R. Man-
heim, Yale University Press, London, 1959, especially
pp. 146ff.
12. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958, p. 9.
13. Ibid., pp. 1819, emphasis added. This life-story, as the
term implies, emerges in language. Compare Heidegger
in On the Way to Language: Mortals are they who can
experience death as death. Animals cannot do so. But
animals cannot speak either. The essential relation be-
tween death and language ashes before us, but remains
unthought (trans. P. Hertz, Harper, New York, 1971, p.
107). These lines are cited by Agamben in the opening
pages of Homo Sacer.
14. The Human Condition, p. 19. Arendt may have also been
inuenced here by her friend Walter Benjamins 1936
essay The Storyteller, which discusses the decline of
both the thought of death and communicability (Mit-
teilbarkeit), Arendts privileged term for the analysis of
political judgement a capacity she famously describes
as also being in decline. See Walter Benjamin, The
Storyteller, in Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt, Schocken,
New York, 1969, sections IV and X.
15. Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 451. The best discussion
I have seen of this aspect of Arendt is the exchange
between George Kateb and Fred Dallmayr, Death and
Politics and Public or Private Freedom? Social Re-
search 54, no. 3, Autumn 1987.
17. Ibid., p. 82.
18. Ibid., p. 114.
19. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive,
trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Zone Books, New York,
1999, pp. 2831.
20. Ibid., p. 55.
21. My discussion of Schmitts decisionism follows that of
my article, Carl Schmitts Political Metaphysics: On
the Secularization of the Outermost Sphere, Theory and
Event, vol. 4, no. 1, Summer 2000.
22. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the
Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, MIT
Press, London, 1985, p. 5; Politische Theologie, 7th
edn, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, 1996.
23. Ibid., p. 7.
24. Homo Sacer, p. 18. One could speak of the difference
that makes a difference, playing upon the root of differ
in differre, to carry apart. The way in which Arendts
natality remains within this compass is brought out if
one reects upon the root bher as carrying, bearing chil-
dren.
25. Ibid., pp. 18, 19.
26. Ibid., p. 25.
27. Political Theology, p. 13.
28. Giorgio Agamben, The Messiah and the Sovereign: The
Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin, in Potentialities,
trans. and ed. D. Heller-Roazen, Stanford University
Press, Stanford, 1998, pp. 161, 170.
29. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George
Schwab, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996,
pp. 26, 27; German references are from Der Begriff des
Politischen, Dunker & Humblot, Munich, 1932.
30. Ibid., pp. 46, 47.
31. Ibid., p. 28; this is not the dominant interpretation of
Schmitt. I defend it in Carl Schmitt on Friends, En-
emies, and the Political, Telos 112, Summer 1998.
32. Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes,
MIT Press, London, 1986, pp. 1718.
33. To some extent this lack is made good by the suggestions
of Walter Benjamin, of whose collected works in Ital-
ian Agamben is the editor. If it is Schmitt who fur-
nishes Agamben with the basic structure of his analysis
of sovereignty, it is Schmitt seen through the prism of
Benjamin. Benjamins often-cited but incredibly opaque
and inconclusive 1921 On the Critique of Violence
introduces the concept of mere life that Agambens work
develops. Unfortunately, it is impossible to say what
Benjamin means by this phrase.
34. This is argued most directly in the third part of Homo
Sacer, The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm of the Mod-
ern.
35. For a witty version of the many attacks on this idea,
see Slavoj Z
iek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?,

Verso, London, 2001.
36. Homo Sacer, pp. 168, 167.
37. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1963, p. 268.
38. Ibid., p. 279.
39. Ibid., p. 284.
40. Ibid.
42. The irony of this is compounded when one observes
the similarities between Lockes slave and the subject
of Hobbess despotical dominion.
44. Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.C. Meredith, Claren-
don Press, Oxford, 1989, p. 180.
45. Ibid., pp. 813.
47. The Schmittian sovereign is he who decides on the ex-
ception. This decision must be made by a single person
because there is no common sense among members of
the community as to when the constitution needs to be
suspended in its entirety. Hence Schmitt does not write
We are sovereign when we agree to decide upon the
exception. Peter Fitzpatricks suggestive argument that
Agamben misleadingly downplays the ubiquity of law
is vitiated by his attempt to elude this and make the
activity of Schmitts sovereign more like common law
precedent than it is. For Schmitt it is not true that the
exception becomes unexceptional (Fitzpatrick, Bare
Sovereignty: Homo Sacer and the Insistence of Law,
Theory and Event, vol. 5, no. 2, 2001, para. 16). That
said, Fitzpatricks argument that homo sacer is a legal
category (para. 5) conrms features of the argument I
make here concerning the limits of the extra-legal deci-
sion.
48. Homo Sacer, pp. 22, 21.
49. Political Theology, p. 31. Alain Badious polemic against
the general use of the Shoah as the unique and privi-
leged example of radical evil suggests another reason for
this unfortunate result in Agambens case. On Badious
account, the assertion of the exemplary status of the
Shoah asserts both that it is the standard by which evil
is to be judged in our time and that, as the paradigm,
it is beyond such comparison with other, less radical
forms of evil. As a result, the extermination and the
Nazis are both declared unthinkable, unsayable yet
they are constantly evoked. The measure must itself
be unmeasurable, yet it must constantly be measured
(Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding
of Evil, trans. P. Hallward, Verso, London, 2001, pp.
623).
50. This difference is not noted by Steven DeCaroli in his
otherwise interesting Visibility and History: Giorgio
Agamben and the Exemplary, which follows Agambens
own earlier discussions of the topic. Though DeCaroli
refers in passing to Agambens discussion of refugees,
the sacred, and the camps, there is no specic reference
to either of the Homo Sacer texts, and there is no con-
sideration of Agambens application of the logic of the
inclusive exclusion to these political horrors. Instead the
emphasis is on eighteenth-century aesthetics and Renais-
sance humanism; ironically, it is for this very reason that
DeCaroli does not see how different Agambens analysis
is from Kants, to which he compares it. Unlike moral
rules or normative principles, DeCaroli writes, what
the example promises cannot be adequately legislated
and, therefore, ones response to the exemplary can-
not be a simple matter of rational obedience a mere
adherence to reasonable principles.

Nothing this mild
could be said of the decision for the camps, which is
far indeed from anything like Kants common sense.
DeCaroli, Visibility and History: Giorgio Agamben and
the Exemplary, Philosophy Today, vol. 45, no. 5, 2001,
p. 11.
51. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans.
Michael Hardt, University of Minnesota Press, London,
1993, p. 10; La communita che viene, Giulio Einaudi,
Turin, 1990.
52. On the commonalties between the Kantian and Hegelian
approaches, see Robert Pippin, Avoiding German Ideal-
ism, in his Idealism as Modernism, Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, Cambridge, 1997.
53. These pure singularities [of what in the example escapes
linguistic classication] communicate only in the empty
space of the example, without being tied by any common
property, by any identity. [T]hey are the exemplars of
the coming community (The Coming Community, pp.
1011).
54. Homo Sacer, pp. 38, 188.
55. Political Theology, p. 66.
56. I discuss the conuence of the Socratic and Aristotelian
and its signicance for Agambens work in Giorgio Ag-
amben and the Politics of the Living Dead, pp. 44f.
57. Remnants of Auschwitz, pp. 634.
The current discussion of a future juridical struc-
ture for the European Union is turning into a quest
for a new European political culture.
1
Along with
the discussion of the juridical structure an image of
European values is emerging, according to which the
European continent comprises tolerant, democratic and
peace-loving citizens. As well as being humane in their
attitude towards others, these new Europeans are
more than simply interested in politics; they also know
the function of and can inuence the highly complex
system of decision-making that is the EU.
2

The image of a new European political culture is,
however, emerging alongside the promotion of col-
lective values that are very hard to distinguish from
those of a culture particular to Europe. It is, for
example, considered a historically determined fact
that democracy and human rights are values of which
the merit would be immediately understandable to
any European citizen. The European Commission pub-
lication A New Idea for Europe claims that
The European Union derives its strength from com-
mon values of democracy and human rights, which
rally its people, and has preserved the diversity of
cultures and languages and the traditions which
make it what it is.
3
The same publication also appears to suggest, further,
that peace-loving European citizen represents a realiz-
ation of the very nature of the European peoples. On
the enlargement of the European Union one reads:
Could one have foreseen this immense desire for
democracy and peace which ultimately brought
down the Berlin Wall and put the responsibility for
their destinies back into the hands of the people of
central and eastern Europe ?
4

Moreover, EU bureaucrats and most inuential
European politicians rely on a fairly traditional liberal
understanding of culture and the nature of cultural
identities. The few Union documents on culture exhibit
The paradox of the people
Cultural identity and European integration
Dorte Andersen
an Enlightenment understanding of culture in which
culture promotes dialogue and cooperation between
social actors, and advances social integration, demo-
cracy, peace and freedom of speech.
5
An important
reason for sustaining the traditional liberal image of
culture as educational and immune to politics is the
belief that in so doing it is also possible to avoid the
fundamentalism determining the various nationalist
criticisms of the European project. Indeed, nationalist
tendencies are never mentioned when the EU deals
with the issue of culture. Instead, any talk of cultural
values in the EU rests on a positively formulated
Enlightenment understanding of culture, tensely avoid-
ing any discussion of the political fundamentalism
which can develop in the relation between politics
and culture. However, the general national scepti-
cism towards the European project cannot simply be
reduced to unimportant reactions from the borderline
of the European populations. If the European project is
to appeal to European populations, there is an urgent
need for political engagement with both the structural
and the practical problems related to questions of
cultural identity.
Habermas: from peoples to publics
The German philosopher Jrgen Habermas is both
the best and the most inuential representative of the
liberal democratic strand determining the understand-
ing of culture in discussions of a future European
politics.
6
Habermas is also among those who think
in optimistic terms about the possibilities offered by
the European project. In the introduction to The Post-
national Constellation he writes:
I see the only normatively satisfactory [political
alternative to global competition] as a socially and
economically effective European Union, constituted
along federalist lines an alternative that points
to a future cosmopolitan order sensitive both to
difference and to social equality. Only a Europe in
which the domestication of violence engages each
and every form of society and culture would be
immune from the postcolonial relapse into Euro-
centrism. And an intellectual discourse on human
rights provides the terms in which a truly decentred
perspective must prove itself.
7

Habermas is an advocate of a European Union which
is legally based on the federal constitution and the
protection of human rights. He also recognizes the
need for the further development of social integration
if a European public sphere is to emerge. According to
Habermas, social integration is necessary if European
politics is to develop in and through a democratically
justied legal framework.
But what are the implications of the federal con-
stitution for the diversity of cultural identities? In a
discussion with the German professor of law Dieter
Grimm, Habermas argued that within the federal con-
stitution cultural identities can be preserved, at the
same time as the constitution would be the condition
of possibility for the unied political culture necessary
for a European public sphere to emerge.
8
It would not,
according to Habermas, threaten the cultural diversity
of European ethnic and national identities if Europe
were to become a federation of states. Rather, the
federal constitution could and should be based on
these human rights that protect the preservation of
cultural identities.
The question of the preservation of national and
ethnic identities in Europe also arises in discussions
between pro-Europeans and Euro-sceptics. According
to the Euro-sceptics, a democratic constitution should
have the same legitimacy as the nation-state where the
constitution provides a political framework for a popu-
lation that understands itself as culturally homogenous.
Euro-sceptics claim that a European public sphere
cannot emerge without the collective consciousness
of a European people. Further European political
integration can therefore never become democratically
legitimate if the European peoples are not unied
through the construction of a history common to
all Europeans,
9
and European cultural homogeneity
would in turn threaten the cultural homogeneity of
the nation-state.
To counter this argument, Habermas makes a dis-
tinction between the democratic legitimacy of the
nation-state and the idea of a people. In Why Europe
Needs a Constitution Habermas claims that
A nation of citizens must not be confused with a
community of fate shaped by common descent,
language and history. This confusion fails to capture
the voluntaristic character of a civic nation, the col-
lective identity of which exists neither independent
of nor prior to the democratic process from which it
springs.
10
The collective consciousness of the politically emanci-
pated and reective citizen capable of associating with
fellow citizens has a different status for democratic
politics than does the collective consciousness of a
people, which is based on an idea of common descent,
language and history. And because the collective con-
sciousness of the citizen is an essential element in
the already existent public spheres of the individual
European states, a common European political culture
can now develop in dialogue between the various
national public spheres. A European political culture
would therefore not rely upon the construction of a col-
lective consciousness according to which all European
citizens share a common European history.
Habermas unties the national constitution from the
Romantic idea that a nations democratic legitimacy
is its foundation in a population of common descent.
Accordingly, even if it would be practically difcult
to develop a European public sphere, the possibility
already exists for a common political culture to emerge
in Europe, a political culture, which could condition
a more democratic European politics. Habermas also
recognizes, however, that the Romantic idea of nation-
hood was an important element in the emergence of the
public spheres in individual European nation-states. In
the early modern European state the construction of
the collective consciousness of a people was a pre-
liminary step for the population towards achievment
of a consciousness of citizenhood. Cultural identity
thus had a privileged role to play in the process which
enabled subjects to recognize themselves as partici-
pants in public debate. Cultural identity helped bridge
the gap between the self-understanding of those who
were simply subjected to The Law and the self-under-
standing of citizens who knew they had the right to,
and were capable of, interference with the law through
political participation. In The Postnational Constella-
tion Habermas writes:
Democratic self-determination can only come about
if the population of a state is transformed into a
nation of citizens who take their political destiny
into their own hands. The political mobilization of
subjects, however, depends on a prior cultural
integration of what is initially a number of people
who have been thrown together with each other.
11

It is important to recognize how, according to
Habermas, cultural identity and this includes the
idea of shared national and ethnic belonging, which
is historical and often also territorially determined
helps political mobilization. Cultural identity occu-
pies a space at the brink of the political, a space that
opens the possibility for new participants to attain a
voice in public debate. This proposition also grounds
Habermass claim in The Postnational Constellation
that
in general, demands for national independence are
legitimate only as a response to the repression of
minorities whom the central government has de-
prived of equal rights, specically rights to cultural
equality.
12
Despite, therefore, the signicance of the concept
of a people in the political emancipation of a popu-
lation, Habermas understands the concept to have
become politically redundant where a population has
become accommodated to a given political culture.
He thus understands the cultural identity developed
to legitimize national constitutions as necessary for a
more general political awareness to have emerged in
Europe, but this identity is not a necessary condition
for the existence of a public sphere.
Habermass attempt to retain a role for cultural
identity including ethnic and national identities in
politics is the result of a double-headed attempt to
delimit the political signicance of culture. Habermass
understanding of the concept of a people is symptom-
atic of a liberal understanding of culture, according
to which cultural identities are both immune from
and related to the public sphere. Cultural identity,
that is, is taken to be a form of group identity, which
can provide an opportunity for individuals to achieve
the self-understanding of those who participate in
public debate; at the same time, the cultural issue
ought to be excluded from politics when it occurs in
the form of political fundamentalism. When it founds
a political fundamentalism cultural identity obstructs
the possibility of engaging in dialogue the dialogue
which is, for Habermas, the necessary condition for
participation in the public sphere.
Habermas defends his ambivalent understanding
of the political signicance of cultural identity by
distinguishing between the accommodating politi-
cal culture that includes cultural differences and the
culturally determined political culture that assimilates
and destroys them. But what happens when a national
culture is represented, as it often is by European
national populists, as a repressed cultural artefact
being destroyed by the mobility of the global popula-
tion? When exclusion is the criterion for the inclusion
of issues of cultural identity into politics, how should
it be decided when a particular cultural identity should
be regarded as repressed, legitimizing cultural identity
as a means of political emancipation? Deciding for
or against the inclusion within politics of arguments
based on cultural issues appears in liberal thought to
be a decision that cannot be taken on logical grounds.
A paradoxical relation between politics and cultural
identity is situated right at the heart of liberal thought,
which cannot, as a consequence, identify exactly how
and why exclusion occurs. The question then arises: is
this ambivalence embedded in the liberal understand-
ing of culture itself?
Becoming homogeneous
One of the things responsible for the paradoxical place
of cultural identity in liberal thought is, as mentioned
above, the political status this form of identity is
granted. Cultural identity works as, or in relation to,
a form of reective educational process leading the
subject to realize him- or herself as citizen. Culture
is thereby granted a relation to politics in so far as
it provides a preliminary step for subjects to become
committed participants in public debate. But, as Max
Pensky points out, In the context of multicultural
democratic states, is it even possible to distinguish
between cultural groups accommodating to a common
political culture, as opposed to a cultural group being
generated by modernisation processes themselves?
13

More precisely: if cultural identities are not only
supportive of, but also constructed by the political
structure of the modern state, then the question arises
of the extent to which the construction of modern
cultural identities is politically determined.
To understand the extent to which modern cultural
identities develop in relation to political decisions and
political administration it is necessary to determine
more precisely the distinctive characteristics of the
concept of a people. As a people, a cultural identity
is, as Habermas reminds us in Why Europe Needs a
Constitution,
14
constructed in relation to the structure
of modern democratic politics. A people does not
denote a natural substance determining ethical life. A
people is a construction based on the vocabulary of
modern identity construction tied to the structuring of
modern societies. The concept of the people thus con-
stitutes a bond between modern identity construction
and modern political administration.
If liberal theorists and politicians want to change
the European understanding of the relation between
cultural identity and the political framework of the
modern constitutional state, it will be necessary to
recognize the cultural mechanisms associated with the
occurrence of the early Western European democracies.
For the change in the form of the European state
from absolute monarchy to constitutional democracy
depended on the possibility for various state popula-
tions to associate with each other through national nar-
ratives constructed around aspects of history, language
and territory. The concept of a people developed
in early attempts at legitimizing state administration
through popular sovereignty, and it would be impos-
sible to separate the concept completely from the
political structure of the modern European state.
Moreover, the concept of a people supports popular
sovereignty in that it facilitates the state-administra-
tion of a population. If a state population is not only
represented as homogeneous but also represents itself
in homogeneity, then the administration of the demo-
cratic state is signicantly strengthened. Unity based
on descent represents a form of solidarity without
which the modern European state would probably not
have developed successfully. And even at the points
where a more plural picture occurs and the interests
of different groups become more varied, the idea of
cultural identity nevertheless represents a useful tool
for the functioning of the modern state. This is not
simply because of the idea of shared descent, language
and history. More signicantly, a cultural identity
unites the individual with state institutions in so far
as it is a form of representation that can unify a state
population and can penetrate into the individuals
self-understanding.
The concept of the people thus supports the political
structure of the modern European state, but another of
its features simultaneously conicts with the model of
state administration. The concept of a people, that
is, is a locus of solidarity for those excluded from the
socially dominant classes. As well as naming the centre
of power in the state governed by popular sovereignty,
the people also names the exact opposite: those
groups in society without access to state power.
15

Around the time of the French Revolution the
understanding of the people as those excluded from
the centre of power was intimately related to the
development of the modern idea of direct democracy.
The concept of the people was mobilized in a process
of emancipation according to which those excluded
from political inuence could be included within a
given power structure. This specic understanding of
the term was central to revolutionary discourse to the
extent that the purpose and aim of the French Revo-
lution was to bridge the gap between inclusion and
exclusion
16
(and Enlightenment named the process
through which those who were excluded from the
power centre in the various European nation-states
could be included within the dominant classes).
This second understanding of the people returns
us to what Habermas describes as the constructive
aspect of the concept. For Habermas this specic
type of cultural identity refers to the processes of
understanding through which the populations of the
early European nation-states rst became aware of
themselves as not simply subjected to the Law in
their respective states. Even in its later deployment, in
complicity with a Romantic belief in the beauty of soil
and descent, the concept of a people rst referred to the
sometimes violent process of enlightenment through
which more and more social groups became accepted
and came to understand themselves as citizens in the
various European nation-states.
Had it not been for the concept of the people there
would be no democratic core to the modern con-
stitutional state. However, the conceptual ambiguity of
the people reveals a paradox situated at the core of
ideas of democracy and popular sovereignty. On the
one hand, the existence of the collective consciousness
of a people is a useful tool in the functioning of the
democratic state as an administrative structure. The
concept supports the hegemonization of individual
differences within a state so as to make the state
apparatus effective. On the other hand, the people
represent those who are immediately excluded from
that same administrative structure supposed to include
the state population. The people are those who do not
have the power to decide for themselves, those who are
always-already excluded from the decision making of
the political administration.
Even when the concept of the people was developed
to support a specic idea of how best to administer a
population within the territorial state, the concept itself
points to its own limitations. The concept expresses the
impossibility of total inclusion of all differences within
a given state administration. As Giorgio Agamben
puts it, the concept cannot be included in the whole
in which it is a part and [it] cannot belong to the set
in which it is already included. It is what already is
and yet must, nevertheless be realized; it is the pure
source of every identity but must, however, continually
be redened and puried through exclusion, language,
blood, and land.
17
The awareness that parts of a state
population are excluded from the centre of power may
rightly generate concrete processes through which
subjects are liberated politically. But it is more impor-
tant to recognize that the conceptual status of the
people is such that processes of political emancipation
cannot come to a halt in the state based on popular
sovereignty. The paradox expressed in the concept of
the people illustrates that the realization of popular
sovereignty is a process of constant becoming.
Integration as exclusion
Conceptually, the idea of the people expresses a
tension between inclusion and exclusion which is
situated in the relation between cultural identity and
modern democratic politics. If European liberal poli-
ticians aim to make the European project a democratic
project, they would do well to pay attention to the
paradoxes involved in speaking of common European
values. In modernity the unication of consciousness
through cultural values inevitably expresses a paradox
which complicates the ways in which such a con-
sciousness could relate to a future European political
structure.
In Empire Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri iden-
tify yet another important feature in the construction
of European cultural identity:
The more important of [the operations that con-
tribute to the construction of the notion of a peo-
ple] are the mechanisms of colonial racism that
construct the identity of European peoples in a
dialectical play of oppositions with their native
Others. The concepts of nation, people, and race are
never far apart.
18

Contrasting Habermass liberal understanding of cul-
tural identity, where the people represent processes of
enlightenment through which individual consciousness
is shaped, Hardt and Negri understand the concept
of a people exclusively in terms of mechanisms of
exclusion. The two understandings are mutually exclu-
sive; the mechanisms of exclusion Hardt and Negri
identify eliminate the very possibility of the reective
processes of enlightenment. The mechanisms of exclu-
sion are, in other words, the answer to the question
as to why cultural identity construction may result in
the political fundamentalism liberal thinkers want to
avoid. In its relation to a state structure the people
is a form of cultural identity reliant on an imaginary
plane that hides or eliminates differences, and this
corresponds on the practical plane to racial subordina-
tion and social purication.
19

It is, therefore, also an inherent element of the
cultural identity of a people that it may develop into
political fundamentalism. In its relation to popular sov-
ereignty, the cultural identity of the people expresses
the possibility of being both an active means for
political emancipation and an active means for differ-
ent forms of political fundamentalism: due to its para-
doxical core of inclusion and exclusion, the concept
of the people can turn either way. If the concept of
the people is a recognized means for processes of
political emancipation, it also has to be recognized
that political emancipation and political fundamental-
ism are both fundamental elements in the concept
that constitutes the core of popular sovereignty. It is
therefore not sufcient simply to follow Habermass
suggestion and distinguish between the accommodat-
ing political culture that includes cultural differences
and the political culture that eliminates them.
According to the argument made here, the modern
constitutional state cannot function without exclusion,
either way. Without recognition of some who are
excluded from the centre of power there is, as already
mentioned, no opening for the process of political
emancipation, which is fundamental to the realization
of popular sovereignty.
20
When the EU administra-
tion and EU politicians refer to common European
values the aim is obviously to set in motion reective
processes in which culturally diverse European popula-
tions may unite around a single set of political norms.
There is, it is true, a logical possibility that the inclu-
sion/exclusion dichotomy involved in the construction
of such values may actually generate processes of
enlightenment. In relation to potential processes of
political emancipation, however, the problem is that
the target of European integration has already been
dened as the already realized universal values of
peace, democracy and the protection of human rights.
Because the process of integration is assigned this
teleological structuring, where the integrating political
norms must remain unquestioned, it cannot, in fact, be
regarded as a process of political emancipation. In the
process of European integration the inclusion/exclusion
dichotomy that could set in motion processes of politi-
cal emancipation has, it is presupposed, already been
overcome. If the presupposition among liberal thinkers
and EU politicians is that the European population
consists of citizens who already have the right to par-
ticipate in political debate, then the exclusion of parts
of the European population from the centre of power
in Europe is obviously not recognized. An element
fundamental to the process of political emancipation
is thereby lost. There are no people external to the
centre of power the people have united with the
political administration itself.
Without any excluded people to include within a
democratic political system the only exclusion left for
the political system to emphasize in the elaboration
of the common values of its populations is that of
the totalitarian society. At the level of EU politics
restrictions are thus imposed upon prospective new
members of the EU and Third World countries; pros-
pective new member states and Third World countries
must prove they represent true democracies and they
have to prove they protect the human rights of the
individual. According to this logic none other than
the Union states can claim to be truly democratic and
only Union citizens can be said to have been through
those processes of political emancipation making the
values of the political system understandable to them.
The EU states (Western Europe) are the only states
that have historically been capable of providing all
parts of their population with the rights necessary to
be citizens in democratic states. And this ability is
now what distinguishes us from them, and it is what
makes our world superior to theirs.
Any reference to unied European values involves
a paradox, which was once the very condition of pos-
sibility for democracies to emerge in Europe. However,
in presupposing that the democratic state is a realized
historical fact in Europe, the European values of
peace and democracy can now only condition a future
totalitarian European society where one must accept a
European Idea if one is to be or remain included. The
European Idea represents an ideal of democracy and
the protection of human rights an ideal that can be
used pragmatically to legitimize any political purpose
whatsoever. To talk of European values is thus to
describe the collective consciousness necessary for the
European populations to conform to the criteria set by
liberal politics. It also infers that there are others who
must still be shaped through the EU model of tolerant,
democratic and peace-loving citizens. By predetermin-
ing the political norms of the totality as the universal
ideals of peace, democracy and human rights, the
ideals become culturally specic and other parts of
the world are necessarily excluded from the idea of the
totality. In order to sustain the collective consciousness
of the European people others are necessarily excluded
and inevitably conceived as undemocratic; violaters of
the human rights of the individual.
Risking Europe
The paradoxical concept of the people is situated
at the core of the modern idea of popular sover-
eignty, whose only realization is a process of constant
becoming. The continuity of the process depends upon
recognition of the fact that those who are excluded
from a given centre of power must become included.
The necessity of exclusion, however, means that the
concept of the people inevitably carries the seed of
political fundamentalism, making it a dangerous tool
in the political unication of a population. Because of
this, culture cannot be regarded as an apolitical and
purely educative phenomenon. Identities achieved in
cultural processes of understanding may undoubtedly
develop into different forms. But even when some of
these forms are more admirable than others, there
are no mechanisms built into the process of identity
construction that prevent culture from being used by
extremists as a weapon in political struggles.
Nothing constructive can be said about the relation
between culture and politics if we remain trapped
within an understanding of culture according to which
the confrontation with and between cultural identities
is necessarily enlightening for the individuals self-
understanding. This stereotypical understanding of
culture appears in Habermass writings when he speaks
of the learning process founding the cosmopolitan
political culture that he would like to see realized
in Europe. According to Habermas, the confronta-
tion between various cultural identities helps achieve
a new attitude to culture, which is signicant for
the self-understanding of the cosmopolitan citizen.
In The Postnational Constellation he claims that the
cosmopolitan identity arises through the practical
confrontation between various culturally constructed
identities.
The proliferation of anonymous relations with oth-
ers and the dissonant experiences with foreigners
have a subversive power. Growing pluralism loosens
ascriptive ties to family, locality, social background,
and tradition, and initiates a formal transformation
of social integration.
21

Developing a cosmopolitan identity would thus be
dependent upon the practical confrontation between
various cultural identities.
But the relation between the cultural identity of
a people and the state based on popular sovereignty
should make us wary of this Enlightenment under-
standing of cultural identities, according to which
they are processes of self-understanding driven by a
sense of collective belonging and necessary both for
the structuring of society and for the individual as
an educational process. Understood as a structure of
narration giving meaning to the individual and his
or her life-world, cultural identity is obviously not a
wholly negative phenomenon. But its imbrication with
the ambiguous concept of the people means that
cultural self-understanding cannot be limited to these
positive features.
Moreover, the practical awareness that, in mod-
ernity, cultural identities have all too often turned into
political fundamentalisms is not sufcient knowledge
if the aim is to prevent political fundamentalisms
from occurring again. It is not sufcient because the
legitimacy of a constitutional democracy is linked
to an idea of popular sovereignty that harbours such
latent fundamentalisms. The prevention of political
fundamentalism demands a rethinking of democratic
legitimacy. In legitimating the democratic political
structure it should be taken into account that it is only
in the individuals transcendence of culture in a con-
ceptual realization that identity construction concerns
the self-understanding of the individual (rather than
of a group of people) and that social solidarity must
base itself on something more, or something else. Only
then is it possible to move to a level where cultural
uniformity and the modern political state are no longer
mutually dependent.
It is almost impossible to promote cultural unity
as a means for the individuals entry into a social
context, at the same time as wanting to eliminate the
fundamentalism latent to cultural identities. Given
the recurrence of European nationalism, the least one
could ask for in a European context is that our social
life is not tied to a specic, geographically bound
historical tradition with its historically determined
political norms. In contrast to what EU politicians may
think, it is impossible to combat nationalism if the
historical and territorial background is still ascribed
a privileged position in relation to the individuals
construction of his or her identity. Moreover, there are
no real means available to prevent social stigmatization
because of place of birth (and therefore often also of
colour), if we cling to the traditional liberal presup-
positions that only cultural identity generates human
differences and that cultural identity is a necessary
means for social integration.
To combat fundamentalism each and every indi-
vidual needs to understand the foundations of cultural
identity construction. But it is also just as necessary
that at the organizational level people are provided with
the space and the tools to create forms of self-under-
standing that do not rely upon a culturally grounded
education. Social solidarity should not have to be con-
structed in a process of understanding through which
the cultural foundation of any identity is realized
before being conceptually transcended. Other means
have to be regarded as legitimate ways for individu-
als to cultivate themselves; indeed, true differences
can actually only occur when the individual has the
opportunity to choose between means. Perhaps, then,
it is time to risk something in Europe: to try to think
radically differently about socialization, which means
nally abandoning the idea that it is a cultural privilege
to belong to a Western European tradition.
Notes
1. For the discussion of a new juridical structure for the
European Union, see www.europa.eu.int/comm/press_
room/presspacks/convention/pp_convention_en.html.
2. For the European plans for developing a European
knowledge society see White Paper on Education and
Training, European Commission, July 2002, http://eu-
ropa.eu.int/scadplus/printversion/en/cha/c11028.htm.
3. Pascal Fontaine, A New Idea for Europe The Schu-
man Declaration 19502000, European Commission,
Brussels, 2000, p. 7.
4. Ibid., p. 5; emphasis added.
5. See for example, the Treaty Establishing the European
Union, 151, and the ofcial commission documents on
the area of culture.
6. In order to understand the practical implications of Hab-
ermass reections on the future of European Union poli-
tics, it is important to recognize the tremendous impact
Habermass theories have upon international relations
today.
7. Jrgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, MIT
Press, Cambridge MA, 2000, p. xix.
8. I refer to Dieter Grimm, A Constitution for Europe,
and Jrgen Habermas, Reply to Dieter Grimm, both
in The European Law Journal, vol. 1, no. 3, November
1995.
9. Attempts have been made in the EU since the 1980s to
construct a common European consciousness. See Cris
Shore, Building Europe, Routledge, London, 2001.
10. Why Europe Needs a Constitution, New Left Review
11, SeptemberOctober 2001, p. 15.
11. The Postnational Constellation, p. 64; emphasis
added.
12. Ibid. p. 72.
13. Max Pensky, Cosmopolitan Identity and the Solidarity
Problem, Constellations, vol. 7, no. 1, March 2000,
p. 71.
14. See Why Europe Needs a Constitution, p. 16.
15. As Hannah Arendt has pointed out in On Revolution,
the very denition of the word [people] was born out
of compassion, and the term became equivalent for mis-
fortune and unhappiness le peuple, les malheureux
mapplaudissent, as Robespierre was wont to say; le
peuple tojours malheureux, as even Sieys, one of the
least sentimental and most sober gures of the Revo-
lution would put it (On Revolution, Viking, New York,
1963, p. 70).
16. As Susan Buck-Morss puts it in Dreamworld and Ca-
tastrophe, Robespierre embodied the logic of revo-
lutionary sovereignty. His relation to the Terror was
to produce the sovereign unity that democracy de-
manded: He was the people to the sections, he was the
people to the Jacobin club, he was the people to the na-
tional representative body; it was continually necessary
to establish, control and restore the perfect t between
people and the various assemblies that claimed to speak
in its name , for without that perfect t there would
be no legitimate power, and the rst duty of power
was to maintain it: that was the function of Terror
(Dreamworld and Catastrophe, MIT Press, Cambridge
MA, 2000, pp. 1112).
17. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford Uni-
versity Press, Stanford CA, 1998, p. 178.
18. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge MA, 2000, p. 103.
19. In Empire, Hardt and Negri also operate with a differ-
ent understanding of difference from Habermas. The
two authors are inspired by Gilles Deleuzes Spinozian
understanding of real differences, which is expressed
as the multitude. The multitude differs from insti-
tutionalized differences because there is no centre of
power determining the relation between differences:
The multitude is a multiplicity, a plane of singulari-
ties, an open set of relations, which is not homogeneous
or identical with itself and bears an indistinct, inclusive
relation to those outside of itself (Empire, p. 103).
20. For a good account of the dialectic of inclusion and
exclusion signifying processes of political emancipa-
tion in the modern state, see Christoph Menkes essays,
Critique and Self-reection: The Problematisation of
Morality, Constellations, vol. 7, no. 1, 2000, and Libe-
rale Demokratie und Ausgrenzung, Deutsche Zeitschrift
fr Philosophie 49, 2001, p. 5.
21. Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, pp. 823.
While the need for the renovation of critical social
theory has been evident for decades, radical critique
has disappeared among leading philosophical schools.
Mainstream social criticism, having silently accepted
the rules of the game, has turned itself to the other side
of the same, to a critical ally of capitalism. As one
modern critic puts it, postcolonial discourse generated
in the First World academies turns out to be one
more product of exible, post-Fordist capitalism, not
its antithesis.
1
After the collapse of the Soviet bloc
and the triumphal and seemingly unconditional victory
of capitalism, it has become fashionable to talk about
all-human values, universalistic morality, discourse
ethics, public discourse, and similar concepts, as well
as of the unlimited perspectives that await us in the
light of modern technological revolutions.
Indeed, there are serious conrmations for such
a view. If one were to generalize its underlying
assumptions they would be the following: there exists
a relatively embedded democratic system; there exists
a relative economic prosperity; there exists a relative
social stability; the modern technological revolution
promises a permanent growth. When combined, all
of these promise further improvement in transcending
the caution expressed in the word relative. Hence,
the feeling is that the details can be worked out from
within the system. This is most emphatically expressed
in the recent collapse of the Marxist option, the most
serious challenge to the system. The old claim of the
status quo about the lack of realistic alternatives now
seems to be justied.
One cannot but remember Popper here. For Popper
too, the injustice and inhumanity of the unrestrained
capitalist system described by Marx cannot be ques-
tioned. The problem consists in interpreting the situ-
ation. Freedom under capitalism is indeed what Marx
and Marxists call merely formal freedom. However,
such merely formal freedom is a realistic foundation
and the only warranty for democracy in an open
society. It makes it possible to control capitalism and
exploitation, and this is better than any other alterna-
tive. On such matters, says Popper, one must think in
more pragmatic terms than Marx. One must realize
that control over physical power and exploitation is not
only an economic but also a central political problem.
So, in order to establish democratic control, one has
to establish that merely formal freedom,
2
offered by
capitalism. Poppers claim is not that we live in the
best world in general, but as if agreeing with Leibniz
that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The
outcome of such reasoning turns out to be identical:
although this world is far from perfect, one may work
to improve it, but it is not worth taking the risk of
radically altering it. Note that this argument was raised
at the time of a serious challenge to capitalism.
Today, the legendary erce attacks on Popper by
the Left in the 1960s and early 1970s have ceded their
place to a peculiar agreement about the post-com-
munist era.
3
Besides some rhetorical and linguistic
differentiations, today sections of both Left and Right
share Poppers assessment. Hence, modern discourse
rotates around the revived notion of civil society,
4
of
its discontents, its nature, its perspectives, and so on.
As Rorty sarcastically remarks in his recent Achieving
Our Country, the modern Left, having historically
suffered from Marxist radicalism
5
has been today
transformed into a Cultural Left specializing in what
they call the politics of difference or of identity or
recognition. He adds:
When the Right proclaims that socialism has failed,
and that capitalism is the only alternative, the cul-
tural Left has little to say in reply. For it prefers not
to talk about money. Its principal enemy is a mind-
set rather than a set of economic arrangements a
way of thinking which is sometimes called Cold
War Ideology, sometimes technocratic rationality,
and sometimes phallogocentrism (the cultural Left
comes up with fresh sobriquets every year). It is a
mind-set nurtured by the patriarchal and capitalist
institutions of the industrial West, and its bad effects
are most clearly visible in the United States.
6

Globalization and
modern philosophy
Nectarios Limnatis
I would add one signicant comment to these remarks.
The choice of reply is not just a matter of taste. The
modern Left does not opt to deal with something else.
To the contrary: it deals with something else because
it has nothing to say in reply. Its theoretical impotence
in the eld of political economy and the abandonment
of the latter makes inevitable the turn to other elds
of criticism.
In the last few decades critically oriented philosophy
has changed its role; it ceases to challenge capitalism
as such, and loses sight of a realistic alternative.
Its social and political involvement is now grounded
on liberal ideals of Kant, Locke and Rousseau. In
revitalizing the forgotten in the 20th century notion
of civil society
7
critical philosophy thus appropriates
what was earlier considered precisely the theoretical
background of capitalism.
This reorientation is matched with a specic focus
on and understanding of the forgotten social prob-
lems of capitalism that globalization brings to the
surface. I will argue that modern critical philosophy
has an explicitly Western vision and fails to assess
the proper dimension of globalization and to evaluate
capitalism at both its periphery and in its centres. As
the most celebrated leader of the second generation
of the Frankfurt School (which had once emerged as a
neo-Marxist), Habermas represents, one might claim,
the best of what recent social criticism has produced.
8

He is also known for his political involvement. His
work therefore offers a paradigmatic case for the
critical purposes of this article.
Compulsory cosmopolitanism
A core aspect of globalization is the abolition of the
nation-state. For Habermas the dilemma is one of
Annulment or Sublation?
9
The former means abo-
lition via domination (through the neoliberal policies
of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank,
etc.), whereas the latter represents a democratic trans-
formation. Habermass support for the latter and his
proposals for its methodological elaboration are pre-
sented in his discussion of Kants essay On Perpetual
Peace.
10
Habermas suggests that a potential world
commonwealth should develop obligatory policies
at the expense of member states inner and outer
sovereignty. Although it has been ercely criticized,
the idea of the compulsory character of international
decisions could be extremely fertile as it is based on
the acknowledgement of the substantial, organic unity
of the world. The democratically minded Habermas is
by no means unaware of the Kantian concern about a
global graveyard of freedom. Yet this concern does
not annihilate the global perspective: in the same way
that policies are obligatory within a separate nation-
state today, they should eventually be obligatory
for unied humanity dealing with its internal prob-
lems.
The process of globalization is far from smooth and
linear. Habermas mentions its negative potential and
observes that in a stratied world society the asym-
metric interdependence between developed, newly
industrialized and underdeveloped countries seems
to produce irreconcilable opposition of interests.
11
A
radical critique could emerge from this remark; but
it does not. According to Habermas, such irreconcil-
ability applies only under the conditions of the absence
of relevant organs for global governance that would
express a transnational will-formation and administer
the obligatory policies mentioned above. Habermas
claims that the problem of economic disparities would
be solved through the conscientious raising of the
standard of living in poor countries, introducing the
idea of compulsory solidarity (Zwangssolidarisi-
erung): The decisive question, therefore, is whether
in civil societies and political public spheres of largely
developed regions there can emerge a consciousness
of compulsory solidarity.
12
Habermass suggestion
adequately expresses his Kantian moralistic view on
politics.
Habermass assessment of global unity is thus contra-
dictory. On the one hand, the problem is touched upon
at its centre: both the perspectives of global unity and
the results of current stratication are acknowledged.
On the other hand, the suggestions and expectations
that he expresses are clearly based on an optimistic
view about the dynamics of modern capitalist democ-
racy, presuming that it will affect the world community
and reorganize international economic relationships.
The evaluation of modern capitalism and its potential
is the point at which the whole Habermasian strategy
stands or falls. Habermas has certainly been a realist
thinker, often discerning the utopian facet of political
radicalism. But his current call for a cosmopolitan
compulsory solidarity is no less utopian (no tendency
to enforce such a measure is in place or expected to
emerge any time soon).
Apart from posing the dilemma, Habermas does not
offer an answer to the question of why the current situ-
ation should change. His view represents a moralistic
assessment, whereas a critical social science would
reveal necessity in social processes and thus would
unite the is and the ought. Seen from that perspec-
tive, the difculty that Habermass assessment faces
is twofold. Not only is his ought utopian; the is is
not accidental. The modern status quo is the result of
hard necessity, formed by the social and economic
interests of world corporations coinciding with the
interest of the masses in the capitalist centres. The
relative stability of these centres is sustained by the
resources brought from the periphery, and counterbal-
anced by the instability in the periphery. The fragile
public support for the capitalist system in its centres is
directly related to existing (also fragile) welfare. The
change of strategy towards the Third World would
negatively affect such welfare, and thus the social and
economic structures of the masses in the capitalist
centres.
The solution of world contradictions will thus not
come from a social solidarity movement, reminiscent
of Christian morality, but from a resistance move-
ment created from within Third World countries; that
is, conceived by those who are directly negatively
affected. A realistic concern about the abolition of
world inequalities demands a theoretical scrutiny of
such resistance, its social and economic roots, and its
shape and potential. Modern social theory, instead of
assuming a post-capitalist view, should thus question
the objective nature of capitalism as a global socio-
economic system as well as the varieties in its centres
and the periphery. As long as the dispute is not brought
to the surface, resistance in Third World countries will
inevitably be exploited by local nationalist movements,
religious fundamentalisms and other inverted forms
of protest.
Let us consider Habermass notion of the develop-
ment of international obligatory policies. A common
objection to the possibility of world integration main-
tains that the existing local particularities exclude
organic unity. The objection is clearly unsupported as
the tendency towards unication and obliteration of
particularities is more and more evident worldwide.
The problem, however, is not unity as such but its
current negative potential, the way the unity advances
today. It actually forms the substance of antiglobalist
phobia. Such negative potential has to do with the
system itself. Although Habermas acknowledges and
discusses the current Machtpolitik, he contrasts only
neoliberal policies with other policies within the system
of capitalism. However, under the conditions of the
power of the market, globalization becomes repression
independently of who is in power in capitalist centres,
neoliberals or social democrats. During the past few
years the world community has witnessed the (ab)use
of slogans about democracy and human rights under
which interventions in the Persian Gulf, Yugoslavia,
Afghanistan, Somalia were carried out. Of course, the
situation in those places called for some involvement.
However, interventions were undertaken not to solve
the existing problems but to use them (if not create
them) in order to enhance Western strategic positions.
In other cases, notably the Middle East conict, the
Western reaction ranges from mild to cynical, to say
the least.
Habermas offers no theoretical insight about why
this happens or why it should change. The same contra-
diction between is and ought applies: Habermas
poses the problem and juxtaposes its morally right
solution, but critical social science needs to demon-
strate the necessity of both.
The entire Third World issue rests on an underlying
economic exploitation that is not difcult to discern.
Occasionally, Habermas implies that the roots of the
predicament are of such nature.
13
Nevertheless, those
instances do not exhaust the matter. One needs to
analyse it systematically, to assess its importance,
to explain its inevitability and to outline its solution.
Habermas does not, having long ago replaced the
essence with the surface of social process by initially
complementing and then simply substituting the
importance of the labour process with that of communi-
cation (respectively, the role of political economy with
that of communicative reason). The assumption is that
the latter proceeds independently of the former, and,
even more, that it is able to determine instead of being
determined. Habermass vision is the Western vision.
It is in the West that democratic consensus, conict
resolution and peaceful transformation have become
possible, where the power of public opinion affects
policies, and the power of democratic institutions as
interceding transformations is given. What Habermass
assessment overlooks is that this democratic consensus
is not the cause but merely the effect. Democratic
consensus becomes possible in the West only under
certain economic arrangements, namely, the stability
reserve offered by unequal relationships with the Third
World. For the Habermasian assessment, however, it
is a vicious circle: the stability reserve changes the
view of capitalism as being capable of democratic
transformations, and this view does not discern the
stability reserve.
It is not, then, accidental that in those rare cases
when Habermas attempts a socio-economic critique,
he does so by employing old and inefcient schemes,
especially that of an alleged increasing impoverish-
ment in the capitalist centres. Here is a lucid example:
The sources of social solidarity are drying up so
that the living conditions of the former Third World
expand in the centres of the First, resulting in the
creation of a new underclass.
14
Habermas reiterates
common arguments about the widening of the gap in
the living conditions of the employed, underemployed
and unemployed,
15
quite in accord with Rortys ideas
on this question. Rorty claims that globalization will
negatively affect the US population: The new eco-
nomic cosmopolitanism, he writes, presages a future
in which the other 75 percent of Americans will nd
their standard of living steadily shrinking. Rorty
further draws a dramatic picture in which the status
quo plots to keep the masses distracted from their
true problems:
The aim will be to keep the minds of the proles
elsewhere to keep the bottom 75 percent of
Americans and the bottom 95 percent of the worlds
population busy with ethnic and religious hostilities,
and with debates about sexual mores. If the proles
can be distracted from their own despair by media-
created pseudo-events, including the occasional brief
and bloody war, the super-rich will have little to
fear.
16

These arguments are reminiscent of a desperate
radicalism with which neither Habermas nor Rorty
would probably like to be associated. It is a radicalism
unconsciously reproduced in the face of a theoretical
dead end: the inability to assess capitalism as a global
system and capitalism as a global system. For the
undeniably contradictory nature of modern Western
societies is today subordinated to the broader contra-
diction(s) of global capitalism.
The old orientation towards the worsening problems
of and declining life standards in capitalist centres
does not take into account the new reality of the
particularities of class struggle within the centres,
and the differences in the periphery. While relative
impoverishment (that is, the broadening gap between
rich and poor) is beyond question, it has a quite specic
content at the beginning of the new century, a content
which includes accessibility to a whole spectrum of
social goods, radically affecting social behaviour.
The nineteenth-century argument about the abso-
lute impoverishment of the working class does not
sufce when applied to realities of the twenty-rst-
century capitalist centres. In the epoch of global
capitalist production, absolute impoverishment affects
entire nations on the periphery, but is by no means
massive within the centres. Starvation on a world
scale has never been more widespread, but this affects
the Third World exclusively. This is precisely where
sources of social solidarity dry out. Not only does the
Habermasian argument underestimate what the masses
in the West have achieved; it also has no way to explain
their apathy other than to attribute it to manipulation.
It resorts to a conspiracy-theory version of history as
the result of class connivance and, once again, rejects
the necessity of social process. However, if 75 per cent
of the population were truly economically unstable
(with, say, unemployment rates of between 20 and 30
per cent, annihilation of social benets, a decline in
the affordability of basic goods), there would be no
ground for the distraction by ethnic and religious
hostilities and the like, as Rorty claims. There would,
instead, be catastrophic social instability. There is in
fact a real ground for the existing conformity to the
system. The conformity of the working mass is the
result of the positive outcome of its struggle. But the
fragile social stability and welfare within the capitalist
centres was not achieved by class struggle alone. The
struggle has been successful in the centre because of
the redistribution of additional resources offered by
the periphery. This success makes possible for the
masses to go on accepting the system, and is reected
in the weakening of social criticism. There is no con-
spiracy in that, but unity and difference of interests
in the time of global capitalism. Neither Habermas
nor Rorty seems to see that.
17
Furthermore, within
their proposed conceptual frameworks universalism
is in fact lost. The real concern is not humanity as a
whole, but just a part of it the West viewed from
the perspective of an exaggerated internal conict. The
true issue is occasionally mentioned, but nevertheless
bypassed as something of secondary importance. The
Third World is remembered to the degree that some
of its negative characteristics are reproduced in the
capitalist centres.
These references to Habermas should not create the
impression that he focuses on the conicting make-
up of globalization, world political economy, Third
World matters. In his voluminous work one nds very
few references to these issues. However, even fewer
references can be found in the works of other leading
academics. One of the most widely discussed works
in the last decade was Charles Taylors Multicultural-
ism,
18
in which an interesting argument on the road to
the further embedment of democracy, tolerance and
mutual recognition in multi-ethnic Western countries
is advanced. The principles of a democratic common-
wealth are proposed, however, with the Third World
simply absent, as if social and economic processes
in the West take place entirely independently. Hab-
ermass latest collection of essays spanning the past
ten years revolves around similar problems, with the
focus on a unied Europe taken as a model (instead
of Canada, as in the case of Taylor). Habermas dis-
cusses the prospect of a world citizen [Weltbrger]
on the basis of expanding the European model. He
discusses the democratization process, the problem
of mutual understanding, the problem of the public
sphere and its moral principles. The Third World is
mentioned again parenthetically. Habermas points
out the need to bridge the divide between developed
and undeveloped countries: the long-term goal should
be to overcome, step by step, the social split and
stratication in world society without the impairment
of cultural particularities.
19
Habermas is surely right
about the long-term goal. But with the problem being
mentioned only at the very end of one of his articles
(and being impressively absent from the rest of the
book) it is clear that the multidimensional Third World
issue is not adequately perceived as the key concept
in evaluating Western society. Instead, in an inverted
scheme, the West plays the role of an exemplar, and
Western problems are represented as universal.
Globalization from the South
Within this intellectual framework which, with few
exceptions,
20
characterizes the orientation of many
leading political philosophers the voices from the
dissident academy are drowned out, along with those
of the starving in the Third World, protesting against
their economic suffocation by Western states. More-
over and not without a contribution from the media
protest against the negative results of globalization,
although granted some initial moral justication, is
represented overall as protest against any form of
globalization in general. It is thus branded as regres-
sive and utopian; as based on an emotional reaction
instead of intellectual substantiation; as marginal in
inuence, politically extremist and irresponsible.
The moral justication of the protest is granted in
accord with the rules of absolute morality, and with
the acknowledgement of the existence of the Third
World problem, without considering the production
and reproduction of Third World hardships by the
West. The assertion of absolute morality is reconciled
with tolerance towards immorality, with double stand-
ards and indifference. At a time when the additional
resources needed to provide basic health and nutrition
for everyone in the world are less than what Europeans
and Americans annually spend on pet food,
21
no one
would seriously claim that the value of life is the same
in the West and in the Third World.
In the so-called digital age large areas of the Third
World still contain societies that have maintained
much of their medieval scaffolding and social struc-
ture. Economists have attempted long ago, not without
success, to explain how global capitalism embraces and
squeezes large regions of the planet, by holding them
at a precapitalist stage of development, and using them
according to its own needs.
22
It would not be correct to
call these societies genuinely precapitalist, since they
are a part of the world economy. On the other hand, a
society in which the majority of the population is still
occupied in agriculture cannot be called a genuinely
capitalist society. In the Third World there is today a
mosaic of societies existing at various stages of capital-
ist development as well a mosaic of fractional capitalist
structures in each one of them taken separately. These
societies remain undeveloped not because of their
own lack of dynamic, but primarily because of their
inclusion in a system of unequal economic dependen-
cies. Their low economic growth, and the anarchy of
their own fractional capitalist structures are not to
be identied with their pauperization within global
capitalism and its consequences. These two sides are,
however, matched; the former exploited and magnied
by the latter.
Despite its nefarious political intent, the clash of
civilizations argument is based on the observation of
an immense divide in a globalized world. It is a clash
between dominant world capitalism, with its culture
and mentality, and the feudal remnants still resisting
in the capitalist periphery. Western economic policies
rapidly broaden the economic and cultural chasm
between the two.
Technological advances offer unprecedented oppor-
tunities to overcome many of the problems of poverty,
hunger, illiteracy, that plague the modern world. Tech-
nology alone does not have the power to transform
mentalities and cultures rooted for centuries.
23
The
problem demands a permanent, systematic effort for
structural change in the long term. Furthermore, any
attempt to restructure international economic relation-
ships must be aware of the economic and social cost
for the developed nations, although the possibilities
of growth offered by new technologies might make the
burden of redistribution lighter for those who will
lose, and a systematic and planned restructuring of
world economic relations would create greater growth
possibilities than those existing now.
The challenge for modern capitalism is whether
it will be able to integrate the whole of the planet in
a constructive way, and not barely as a by-product
to accommodate the needs in capitalist centres. It is
utopian to expect that this will occur as a result of
some good will or unfolding of democratic process in
the West alone. The ofcial assessment of the events
of September 11 fails to understand the core of the
problem, and, despite the claims of those immediately
affected in the Third World and of some moderates
in the West, the response of the status quo tends
towards a restitution of the previously existing order
without any change. If there is any change on the
horizon, it is aiming at stricter control and preventive
mechanisms (created for preventing terrorism, but
potentially preventing any resistance). Nevertheless,
the problem is not simply the inability to assess the
real roots of the predicament, and the reaction of the
status quo is not accidental. If one accepts that Western
economic prosperity and social stability (fragile as it
is), are largely based on the exploitation of the Third
World, it follows that the system is unable to solve the
problem, because it is the problem itself that is the
ground of the maintenance of the system. It is created
and perpetuated by the system.
As precapitalist structures (in the South) are
combined with postcapitalist elements (mostly in the
North), the latter magnied by the reserves offered
by the South, the misleading impression of a techno-
logical super-civilization is created. The view of the
whole has been overshadowed even in philosophy.
Despite the acknowledgement and condemnation of
the contradictions between the is and the ought,
the theoretical search for alternatives to capitalism
and control over the powers of the market has been
abandoned by critical philosophy as utopian. Follow-
ing a mistaken re-evaluation of the nature of modern
Western societies, the discourse has been derailed
from the tracks of radical socio-economic critique to
cultural and moralistic interpretations and reections
on an abstractly, often even irrationally, understood
human condition.
Current critical philosophy indulges in consider-
ations and assessments of an articial and articially
dened world. This world is articial because it is
based on a multifaceted exploitation of Third World
countries (raw materials, intellectual resources, cheap
labour force, and so on), not to mention the unsolv-
able contradictions of current energy consumption
and environmental damage. This world is articially
dened because it consists of roughly 20 per cent of
the population of the planet. Current philosophical
assessments of capitalism as a social system fail to take
into account 7580 per cent of the worlds population.
The internal problems faced by the West, no matter
how serious, are small in relation to the problems of
the Third World and certainly misleading for evaluat-
ing modern society. The contradictory nature and the
importance of social problems in the capitalist centres
are not to be reduced. However, for the theoretical
evaluation of capitalism as a global social-economic
system a broader view is needed.
Globalization changes the optical angle. It refocuses
on the forgotten Third World problem and the part
it must play in any understanding of the nature of
modern society. Critically oriented social philosophy
will remain at its dead end until it overcomes this loss
of focus.
24
The question now is whether philosophy
will be able to discern the real roots of the current
crisis of globalization or will remain within the logic
of anti-terrorist campaigns, and unwillingly provide
theoretical coverage for conservative interventions for
in the name of freedom and democracy. This is
not to turn philosophy into politics or to pursue new
utopias, but to detach it from academic inwardness and
a new provinciality, so that philosophy might have the
chance to comprehend its time.
Notes
1. E. San Juan, Beyond Postcolonial Theory, St. Martins
Press, New York, 1998, p. 8.
2. K.R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2,
The High Tide of Prophesy: Hegel, Marx and the After-
math, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1962, pp. 124,
128.
3. Offering his version of kratos dikaiou, in a work which
he proposes as his own Philosophy of Right, Habermas
writes:
Marx and Engels, satised with allusions to the
Paris Commune, more or less left aside questions of
democratic theory. If one takes into consideration the
formative philosophical background of both authors,
then their blanket rejection of formal right, and even
the sphere of right as a whole, could also be explained
by the fact that they had read Rousseau and Hegel too
much through the eyes of Aristotle, failed to appreci-
ate [verkannt] the normative substance of Kantian
universalism and the Enlightenment, and miscon-
ceived the idea of a liberated society as something
concrete.
J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions
to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans.
William Rehg, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1996, p. 478.
Translations from German have been modied when
appropriate.
4. Cf. A. Arato and J.A. Cohen, Civil Society and Politi-
cal Theory, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1995, esp. the
chapter The Contemporary Revival of Civil Society,
pp. 2182.
5. Marxism was not only a catastrophe for all the countries
in which Marxists took power, but a disaster for the re-
formist Left in all the countries in which they did not.
R. Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in
Twentieth-Century America, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge MA, 1998, p. 41. Although Rorty grants that
Marxist thought has contributed in encouraging us to
look for such [moral] purity (p. 45), it would still be bet-
ter if the next generation of American leftists found as
little resonance in the names of Karl Marx and Vladimir
Ilyich Lenin as in those of Herbert Spencer and Benito
Mussolini (p. 51).
6. Ibid., p. 79.
7. See C. Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, Harvard Uni-
versity Press, Cambridge MA, 1995, pp. 20424.
8. The critique applies also to his early work. For Habermas
the Third World problem never gained central importance,
even at times when it was central in leftist discussions.
See, for example, J. Habermas, Legitimationsprobleme
im Sptkapitalismus, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am
Main, 1973.
9. berwindung des Nationalstaates: Abschaffung oder
Aufhebung?, in J. Habermas, The Inclusion of the
Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. Ciaran Cronin
and Pablo de Greiff, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1999,
pp. 1247.
10. Ibid., pp. 165201, esp. 179 ff. See also Between Facts
and Norms.
11. J. Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political
Essays, trans. Max Pensky, Polity Press, Cambridge,
2001, p. 54.
12. Ibid, p. 55.
13. Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, pp. 226 ff., esp.
231.
14. Ibid. pp. 1223.
15. Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, p. 50.
16. Rorty, Achieving Our Country, pp. 86, 88.
17. This should not overshadow their signicant differences.
Rorty claims that the current leftist habit of taking the
long view and looking beyond nationhood to a global
polity is as useless as was faith in Marxs philosophy
of history, for which it has become a substitute. Rorty,
Achieving Our Country, p. 98.
18. C. Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of
Recognition, 2nd edn, Princeton University Press, Prince-
ton NJ, 1994; See also S. Benhabib, ed., Democracy and
Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political,
Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1996.
19. J. Habermas, Zeit der bergnge. Kleine Politische
Schriften IX, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main,
2001; see, especially, Euroskepsis, Markteuropa oder
Europa der (Welt-)Brgern, pp. 85103.
20. Notably, Noam Chomsky, Terrorizing the Neighbor-
hood: American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War
Era, Pressure Drop Press, San Francisco, 1991; Acts
of Aggression: Policing Rogue States, Seven Stories
Press, New York, 1999; The Umbrella of US Power:
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the
Contradictions of US Policy, Seven Stories Press, New
York, 1999.
21. Americans and Europeans spend $17 billion a year on
pet food $4 billion more than the estimated annual ad-
ditional total needed to provide basic health and nutrition
for everyone in the world, Ko Annans Astonishing
Facts, New York Times, 27 September 1998.
22. For Samir Amins basic argument that local capitalism
has been made impossible, see his Unequal Develop-
ment: An Essay on the Social Formations of Periph-
eral Capitalism, Monthly Review Press, New York,
1976; also his recent Les Ds de la Mondialisation,
LHarmattan, Paris, 1996.
23. The idealization of the immediate potential of all masses,
including those in the periphery, is the most common il-
lusion of leftist critics, especially Marxists. The historic-
ity of the question, the transformation of subjectivity, on
the one hand, and its relation to objective technocratic
aspects (relevant to social structure, automatization, cre-
ativity of labour process, etc.), on the other, are over-
looked. See A. Dirlik, Postmodernitys Histories: The
Past as Legacy and Project, Rowan & Littleeld, New
York, 2000, esp. pp. 1961; V.A. Vazuylin, Logika Is-
torii. Voprosi Teorii I Metodologii (The Logic of History:
Questions of Theory and Methodology), Moscow State
University Press, Moscow, 1988.
24. For a recent interesting Marxist critique see A. Dirlik,
The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the
Age of Global Capitalism, Westview Press, Boulder CO,
1997.
Robert Bernasconis article in RP 117 has harsh and
important things to say about some philosophical
heroes of the Enlightenment, especially Kant, and it
deserves serious critical attention.
1
This response is not
directly concerned with the central claims of the article
but with a marginal, though still signicant, aspect: its
treatment of Hegel. It will be argued that Bernasconi
has overreached himself here and that Hegel should
be moved out of the range of his criticism. To show
this would in one way do Bernasconi a service, for it
would allow what is truly integral to his case to stand
out more clearly. It must be admitted, however, that,
as is perhaps only to be expected, his dealings with
Hegel cannot simply be excised without affecting the
rest. They reect back on the main project, suggesting
grounds for viewing it with a certain reserve.
It seems all too easy to cite considerations that
should have induced Bernasconi to be more discrim-
inating in his targets. If, for instance, Kant, as he
claims, failed to express disapproval of, while Locke
accepted, black slavery, Hegels considered verdict
stands in sharp contrast.
2
It can be given in a formu-
lation that is familiar to Bernasconi since he quotes it
elsewhere: reason must maintain that the slavery of
the Negroes is a wholly unjust institution, one which
contradicts true justice, both human and divine, and
which is to be rejected.
3
This judgement might surely
have sufced of itself to give Bernasconi pause in
claiming that the issues raised by Hegels racism
are ultimately no different from those raised in the
case of Kant.
4
The subject of anti-black racism needs,
however, to be taken a little further since it is the
primary focus of Bernasconis article.
A starting point is provided by a reference to my
book, Hegel on History. Bernasconi expresses surprise
at nding me defend Hegel from the charge of racism
on the grounds that he was a geographical determin-
ist.
5
It would be pointless to dwell here on the fact that
this is but one strand of the defence, not, as Bernasconi
EXCHANGE
Hegels racism?
A response to Bernasconi
Joseph McCarney
implies, the whole of it. The same is true of the fact
that I do not actually use the term geographical
determinist of Hegel, preferring to speak of his geo-
graphical materialism.
6
What is worth dwelling on is
the fact that Hegels geographical thesis is understood
and applied by him with an impartiality that, so far
from providing a cloak for racism, seems incompatible
with it. The relevant claim is that in some regions of
the globe, nature, in the form of terrain or, more espe-
cially, climate, presents too great an obstacle to the
development of spirit. This is no less true of the frigid
than it is of the torrid zone: The frost which grips
the inhabitants of Lapland and the ery heat of Africa
are forces of too powerful a nature for human beings
to resist, or for spirit to achieve free movement.
7
Thus,
these forces are too powerful for human beings in
general for white Europeans no less than for black
Africans. It is, one might say, ironic that, as we now
know, Africa was the birthplace of Hegelian spirit, of
the distinctively human consciousness he interpreted
through that concept, and remained its sole home
for all but a small portion of its life on earth. Hegel
would, however, have had no difculty in showing this
truth the respect he habitually accords the ndings of
science. Among many other indications there is the
claim, hard to square with geographical determinism,
that the Greeks derived the materials for the develop-
ment of their art and religion from, among other
non-European sources, Egypt, while Egypt probably
received its culture from Ethiopia.
8
On the strength of
these observations Hegel might reasonably be regarded
as a precursor of Black Athena. It is at the very least
odd to nd a thinker who inclines in that direction
accused of being an anti-black racist.
Hegels account of the Greeks deserves a closer
look, for it constitutes virtually a hymn to racial
impurity. Thus, he insists that it is supercial and
absurd to suppose that their beautiful and truly free
life could arise as the development of a race [Gesch-
lecht] keeping within the limits of blood relationship
and friendship. On the contrary, the Greeks developed
themselves from a colluvies, a conux of the most
various nations [Nationen], and the beginnings of
their cultural development are connected with the
advent of foreigners in Greece.
9
The terminology is
signicant here. In Hegels standard usage a nation
is a group united by common descent, in accord with
the kind of fact of etymology to which he attaches
great signicance, the derivation of the word natio
from nasci (to be born).
10
Thus, nation may be seen
as cognate with, perhaps as a narrower specication
of, race.
The important point for present purposes is that a
nation has to be distinguished from a people (Volk).
A people is a spiritual individual, a community con-
stituted through a distinctive form of spirit, that is, a
distinctive form of consciousness and self-conscious-
ness, its self-consciousness in relation to its own
truth, its essence, or what might broadly be termed
its culture.
11
Hegel makes the relevant point by telling
us that in so far as peoples are also nations, their
principle is a natural one.
12
Thus, we are in touch
once more with an aspect of the distinction between
nature and spirit, a distinction that belongs to the
very architecture of his thought and has an especially
crucial role in the philosophy of history. For history
is precisely, in one aspect at least, the escape of spirit
from nature, its overcoming of all natural determinants
such as common descent or blood relationship. As is
to be expected, it is peoples and not nations, spiritual
and not natural entities, who are the vehicles of this
process. Indeed, groups whose principle is a natural
one, such as nations, tribes, castes and races, cannot
as such gure as historical subjects. It follows that,
for Hegel, there literally cannot be a racist interpreta-
tion of history. History is an object which can never
be brought into focus through racist categories, and
racism is incompatible with historical understanding.
Turning from Hegels philosophy of history to his
philosophy of right yields a smaller range of material
combined with an even clearer enunciation of anti-
racist principle. The key idea is that in the modern
state A human being counts as such because he is a
human being, not because he is a Jew, Catholic, Prot-
estant, German, Italian, etc.
13
It is, rather obviously,
the case of the Jews that is most pertinent at present.
In this passage, as elsewhere, Hegel is setting himself
against the most powerful form of racism of his time
and place. This manifested itself in, for instance, the
fulminations of J.F. Fries against the Jewish caste
and in the movement to exclude the members of this
caste from civil and political rights. In the face of
such tendencies, Hegel insists that Jews are primarily
human beings, adding that the demand for their exclu-
sion has proved in practice the height of folly while
the way in which governments, and more particularly
the Prussian government, have acted in this regard has
proved wise and honourable.
14

It is curious that Bernasconi, in his dealings with
Hegels racism, allows him no credit for his stand as
a principled opponent of anti-Semitism. The oddity
is the greater if one contrasts his treatment with that
of Heidegger. The issue at stake on each side of the
contrast is that of the supposed connection between
philosophy and racist views. Where Heidegger is con-
cerned, Bernasconi is tentative and circumspect: his
anti-Semitism, although undeniable, is not so easily
associated with his philosophy, although an argument
along these lines can be formulated.
15
In dealing with
Hegel such judiciousness is cast aside, though an argu-
ment to connect his alleged racism with his philosophy
would be at least as difcult to formulate.
Bernasconi formulates no such argument while
tending to proceed as if he had. It may possibly be
symptomatic in this regard that he is content just to
situate disparagingly, by prefacing with an astonished
it is even suggested that, the claim made in Hegel
on History that Hegelian spirit provides an unrivalled
theoretical basis for the fundamental equality of
human beings.
16
There is, of course, no reason why he
should engage in particular with my statement of the
case for Hegelian spirit. Yet he surely needs to engage
seriously with that case in some form. For, on the face
of it, to speak of the fundamental equality of human
beings is simply to spell out what that spirit plainly
implies. It is, after all, the spirit whose substance is
freedom, a substance to be achieved only through the
freedom of each individual since we know that all
human beings as such are free, that the human beings
as human being is free.
17
To note this is to be brought
in contact with what Bernasconi calls moral univer-
salism, an aspect of the legacy of the Enlightenment
which Hegel accepted and took forward. Bernasconi
constructs a vigorous, sceptical rhetoric around this
doctrine, once again without providing an argument on
the key question, its supposed inner link with racism.
What he does instead is to focus on the seemingly
related idea of Kantian cosmopolitanism and offer
an argument against that. He then simply runs the
two ideas indifferently together as a couplet, moral
universalism or cosmopolitanism.
18

This procedure would be unsatisfactory even if
the argument against cosmopolitanism were more per-
suasive. All it essentially relies on, however, to estab-
lish the link with racism is a supposed biographical
fact about Kant. The hypothesis is that his cosmo-
politanism made his racism even more pronounced
because the racial inferiority he already recognized
now struck him as an offence against all humanity,
an offence against this very cosmopolitanism.
19
What
is needed, however, is a theoretical argument about
concepts, not an appeal to individual psychology. The
problem would scarcely be worth noting were it not
for the example set for Bernasconi by Hegels stance
on the same issue. For Hegel distinguishes between
the two Enlightenment doctrines now in question,
and in retaining the one while rejecting the other
suggests at least the germ of a rational ground for his
preference. He does so, signicantly, in the section of
the Philosophy of Right cited earlier, in close proximity
to its celebration of the inclusiveness of the modern
state. What is suggested there is that cosmopolitan-
ism represents a fake, merely abstract, universalism,
a xed position of false homogeneity that abstracts,
in particular, from the concrete life of the state
with its variety of peoples and their dening spirits.
20

Bernasconi might have found in this at least a model
for the kind of argument against cosmopolitanism he
requires.
A different kind of point should be made by way
of conclusion. It is prompted by the wholly admirable
sense that pervades Bernasconis writing of the practi-
cal signicance of ideas, and, more specically, by the
contrast he alludes to between the real world of racist
injustice and oppression and that of contemporary
discourse about racism.
21
In part the point consists
simply in questioning the wisdom in this context of
a strategy of damning the Enlightenment even in its
highest ights of moral universalism. The mention of
Heidegger should be enough to suggest that the prec-
edents here are not encouraging, and that a Hegelian
balance and realism in this area might serve the cause
of antiracism better. The point may be put in a more
general form. This involves the view that, however
hard to articulate, there is an indispensable distinc-
tion of some kind to be acknowledged between what
belongs to the structure of a philosophy and what does
not, between contingent facts about the lives and opin-
ions of some Enlightenment thinkers and what is of
the essence of Enlightenment philosophy. Bernasconis
work is a salutary reminder of the complexity of such a
distinction, specically of the dangers of relying on it
for a facile airbrushing of the great gures of the past.
It also suggests, however, the dangers of an answering
facility on the other side.
The distinction in question is needed because,
without it, disreputable opinions or even incidental
remarks, instead of being judged to be incompatible
with the logic of a philosophers position, a sad decline
from her best insights, are liable to engulf the whole.
Our antiracist critique will then end up proving far
too much. The test it proposes is one that Hegel will
certainly not pass, not least in view of what I have
called the obnoxious and shocking character of his
aspersions on non-European peoples, with their residue
of cultural prejudice, complacency and arrogance.
22

Neither, however, just to consider the spectrum of
his nineteenth-century successors, will Marx, Mill
or Nietzsche. Indeed, it is doubtful whether many
European thinkers whose opinions and attitudes were
formed before, say, the 1970s would emerge unscathed.
The entire canon of Western philosophy from Aristotle
to Wittgenstein is likely to stand convicted. This is to
render the history of philosophy in a paranoid style
that seems to mirror, at least in its monocular obses-
siveness, the fantasies of the racists.
This outcome may be tolerable for the historians
themselves, conrming them in their role as the valets
to whom, in Hegels epigram, no man is a hero. They
may even enjoy the frisson of making their own,
and our, esh crawl with frightful stories, secure in
the inner conviction that, ensconced in the liberal
academy, they cannot themselves fall victim to the
evils they so readily conjure up. For the actual victims
of racism, however, the implications are different. Such
an intellectual construct cannot possibly empower but
rather serves to crush them under the weight of history.
Those whom it empowers can only be the racists, con-
veying to them the assurance that the entire tradition of
Western philosophy is, whatever surface protestations
it may make, really on their side. The whiff of a kind
of treason of the clerks hangs in the air here. A proper
sense of clerkly responsibility would require them
instead to deny racism the least shred of intellectual
legitimacy or credibility and exhibit it as the vicious
stupidity and unreason it is. In that task Hegel should,
as this discussion has tried to show, be recognized as
a resourceful ally.
Notes
1. Robert Bernasconi, Will the Real Kant Please Stand Up:
The Challenge of Enlightenment Racism to the Study
of the History of Philosophy, Radical Philosophy 117,
January/February 2003, pp. 1322.
2. Ibid., pp. 15, 16.
3. G.W.F. Hegel, Prefatory Lectures on the Philosophy of
Law, trans. Alan S. Brudner, Clio, vol. 8, no. 1, 1978,
p. 68. See Robert Bernasconi, Hegel at the Court of
the Ashanti, in Stuart Barnett, ed., Hegel after Derrida,
Routledge, London and New York, 1998, p. 58.
4. Bernasconi, Will the Real Kant Please Stand Up, p. 21
n15.
5. Ibid., p. 22, n38.
6. Joseph McCarney, Hegel on History, Routledge, London
and New York, 2000, p. 144.
7. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World His-
tory: Introduction, trans. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, Cambridge, 1975, pp. 154, 155, translation
slightly modied.
8. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Si-
bree, Dover, New York, 1956, pp. 237, 201.
9. Ibid., pp. 2267. For the original text, see G.W.F. Hegel,
Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Geschichte, ed. E.
Moldenhauer and K.M. Michel, Theorie Werkausgabe,
vol. 12, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, pp. 27880.
10. Hegel, Lectures, p. 56.
11. Ibid., p. 96, translation modied. For the original text,
see G.W.F. Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, ed.
J. Hoffmeister, Felix Meiner, Hamburg, 1955, p. 114.
12. Hegel, Lectures, p. 55, translation modied; Die Ver-
nunft, p. 64.
13. G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right,
trans. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press, Cam-
bridge, 1991, p. 240.
14. Ibid., pp. 2956.
15. Bernasconi, Will the Real Kant Please Stand Up, pp.
1314.
16. Ibid. p. 22 n38.
17. Hegel, Lectures, pp. 545, translation modied.
18. Bernasconi, Will the Real Kant Please Stand Up,
p. 20.
19. Ibid., pp. 1819.
20. Hegel, Elements, p. 240.
21. Bernasconi, Will the Real Kant Please Stand Up,
p. 18.
22. McCarney, Hegel, pp. 142, 151.
Hegels racism
A reply to McCarney
Robert Bernasconi
Some of Joseph McCarneys criticisms of my Will
the Real Kant Please Stand Up arise only because he
misidenties the issue I discuss there. As I explain in
my opening paragraph, I wrote the essay to call into
question the way philosophers today address or often
fail to address in a serious way the racism of some
of the most exalted gures of the history of Western
philosophy. I make it clear that the aim of the essay is
not to establish the racism of those gures, although I
do rehearse some of the evidence for the convenience
of readers not familiar with my earlier essays on the
subject. It is our racism, not theirs, that my essay pri-
marily addresses. Or, more precisely, I am concerned
with the institutional racism of a discipline that has
developed subtle strategies to play down the racism
of Locke, Kant and Hegel, among others, with the
inevitable consequence that, for example, in the United
States philosophers are disproportionately white. So
if, as McCarney puts it, I tend to proceed as if I had
formulated an argument linking Hegels alleged(!)
racism with his philosophy, this is because I have done
so elsewhere, as I explain in note 15.
However, even if my essay in Radical Philosophy
does not focus on Hegels racism, I am happy to take
this opportunity to defend what I have said elsewhere
about it, not least because McCarneys response to
Will the Real Kant Please Stand Up exemplies
many of the tendencies I want to expose. McCarney
objects to my statement in note 15 that the issues
raised by Hegels racism are ultimately no different
from those raised in the case of Kant, but he misses
the target when he attempts to counter this claim by
showing that Hegel, unlike Locke and Kant, explicitly
opposed slavery.
1
The paragraph to which that note is
attached is not about slavery, but about the tendency
of analytic philosophers to ignore historical evidence
when they interpret philosophical works from past
eras. My point is not that Kants racism is the same as
Hegels, but that their racism, however different, raises
the same set of issues for us today, not least because
philosophers tend to use the same strategies to avoid
addressing their racism.
One of the most common of these strategies is to
ignore the specics of the historical context, while at
the same time proclaiming, without appeal to histori-
cal evidence, a child-of-his-time defence. There is,
in other words, lip service to history, but no attempt
to follow through on it. McCarney himself is not
immune to this tendency. On McCarneys account,
Hegels superiority over Locke and Kant is established
be sustained and has been perpetuated only because
historians of philosophy have not done their home-
work. That McCarney explicitly persists in the image
of a Hegel who follows the best scientic evidence,
when I have shown the contrary, is troubling.
The purpose of the stories Hegel fabricated about
Africans was to support his contention that they were
not yet ready for freedom. He manufactured a case
against Africans to support his claim that slavery had
improved blacks. It is always possible that McCarney
thinks that this has nothing to do with Hegels phil-
osophy, and, while I am inclined to think that this is
hardly a marginal question for a philosopher for whom
freedom is such a central concept, I concede that,
for a certain style of philosophizing, it is a matter of
course to eliminate what is subsequently regarded as
embarrassing. This is another of those strategies that
in Will the Real Kant Please Stand Up I identify as
a way of playing down a philosophers racism. To be
sure, from that perspective, which has already turned
its back on the historical philosopher, there is no clear
criterion by which to decide what is or is not integral.
So, rather than debate the importance of this case, let
me introduce another which is even harder to dismiss
and which again runs directly counter to McCarneys
interpretation.
McCarney understands Hegel to have said that
groups whose principle is a natural one, such as
nations, tribes, castes and races, cannot gure as his-
torical subjects. My problem is not with that claim as
such, but with McCarneys suggestion that it follows
that for Hegel there literally cannot be a racist interpre-
tation of history. But it is not enough to notice that,
for Hegel, the subjects of history are peoples. It is
also relevant that he believes that only certain races
produce peoples. Indeed, not all races even divide
into specic national spirits.
5
Furthermore, in my
essay With What Must the Philosophy of History
Begin?, I explain that this was why Hegel judged
that history proper begins only with the Caucasian
race.
6
As I cite this essay in the same note, note 15,
to which McCarney takes such exception, I would
have expected him, in his response to my essay, to
address the textual evidence that Hegel uses race as
a category to exclude all but Caucasians from being
historical subjects in the full sense. Even if McCarney
was unaware of the clear textual evidence that I have
marshalled in support of this interpretation, I would
have thought that the notorious exclusion of Africa
proper from world history would have alerted him to
it. But this is not part of McCarneys Hegel. McCarney
writes: For history is precisely, in one aspect at least,
on the basis that he alone explicitly attacked the
African slave trade. But it is entirely illegitimate for
McCarney to juxtapose the different treatments of
slavery in Locke, Kant and Hegel, as if they were
contemporaries. Hegels rejection of chattel slavery
does not have the same meaning that it would have
had, had it been written in a different period. When
Hegel denounced slavery, the decisive questions, at
least among Europeans, were less whether slavery
should be abolished and more how and when it should
be abolished and whether this episode in European
history should be allowed to undermine its sense of
its own moral superiority. In fact, Hegel was clear
both that chattel slavery should be abandoned only
gradually and that the enslavement of blacks should
be regarded in retrospect as a necessary moment in
the transition towards a higher stage of development.
2

In my view, this places Hegel on the wrong side of
the debate to which he was actually contributing, a
debate of genuine political signicance at the time he
was writing.
Things only get worse when we turn to Hegels use
of the travel literature of his day in order to establish
his portrait of Africans in the Lectures on the Phil-
osophy of History. In Hegel on History, McCarney
defends Hegel by blaming his sources, even while
showing himself to be willing to concede that the
histrionic temptations of the lecture theatre may have
led him to select the most lurid and blood-curdling
of the tales available to him.
3
But in Hegel at the
Court of the Ashanti, which I cite in note 15, I show
that Hegel cannot be portrayed as a victim of his
sources. Hegels portrait of blacks as cannibals was not
simply a stereotype that Hegel unthinkingly repeated. I
demonstrate, I believe for the rst time, that the stories
Hegel told his students about Africans were his own
invention, in so far as he took published accounts and
exaggerated the details. For example, whereas Hegels
source records that the king of Ashanti crushed the
bones of his dead mother in rum and water, he reported
that the bones were washed in blood.
4
Hegel also
included other stories, especially about cannibalism
and mindless massacres, that either are without any
known source or are greatly exaggerated. McCarney
has read my essay on Hegels distortion of his sources:
he refers to it indirectly in his response but he does not
take the opportunity either to answer my argument or
to modify his defence. Indeed, it does not even lead
him to pause when he presents us with a Hegel who
respects the ndings of science. The idea that Hegels
racist portrayal of Africa can be excused because it
simply followed the best knowledge of the day cannot
the escape of spirit from nature, its overcoming of all
natural determinants such as common descent or blood
relationship. Contrast that with what Hegel himself
wrote: each particular principle of a people is also
subject to natural determining.
7
In Hegel on History
McCarney writes that a rmer theoretical basis for the
fundamental equality of human beings than Hegelian
spirit provides can scarcely be conceived.
8
I would
suggest that a rmer theoretical basis might have been
found had Hegel had a different account of natures
relation to spirit than the one he actually had.
Instead of debating my textual arguments about
Hegels racism, McCarney fantasizes about a Hegel
who might reasonably be regarded as a precursor of
Black Athena. This assertion is made on the strength
of Hegels observation that the Greeks derived the
development of their art and religion from, among
other non-European sources, Egypt, while Egypt prob-
ably received its culture from Ethiopia.
9
However, it
should be recalled that one of Martin Bernals major
claims in the rst volume of Black Athena is that the
thesis of an Egyptian source for Greek culture, the
Ancient Model, was rst seriously challenged between
1815 and 1830, especially by Karl Otfried Mller in
the 1820s.
10
Hegel was writing at a time when the idea
that Egyptian art and religion was one of the sources
of Greek art and religion was still very much alive. I
am therefore at a loss to know what McCarney means
when he describes Hegel specically as a precursor
of this view. What is clear is that Hegel was having
trouble reconciling the widely shared admiration of
his day for things Egyptian with the growing tendency
to try to correlate the hierarchy of civilizations with
a hierarchy of races, given that the ancient Egyptians
were at that time widely thought of as black. The
African component of Egypt is very much in evidence
in Hegels discussion, even while he insisted that Egypt
did not belong to Africa proper.
Locke, Kant and Hegel did not simply reect the
prejudices of their time. They reinvented those preju-
dices by giving racism new forms. Locke played a
role in formulating the principle that masters have
absolute power and authority over the Negro slaves
at a time when the form of North American slavery
was far from having been decided. Kant was the rst
to offer a scientic denition of race, and he himself
appealed to this idea of race in order to legitimate
prejudices against race mixing. Hegel was a precursor
of the mid-nineteenth-century tendency to construct
philosophies of history organized around the concept
of race, such as we nd in Robert Knox and Gobineau.
The fact that Locke, Kant and Hegel also played a
role in formulating emancipatory ideas constitutes
the problem I am concerned with. It does not make
it disappear. This is because the annunciation of ne
principles the philosophers stock in trade is no
guarantee that one is not at the same time undermining
or negating those principles.
I do not see that as an indirect result of my work
in this area the actual victims of racism will be
crushed by racists newly empowered to learn that the
entire tradition of Western philosophy is on their side.
Nor do I share the vision McCarneys nal paragraph
conjures up, according to which attention to racism
within the Western philosophical canon will lead
scholars to adopt a paranoid approach to the history
of philosophy that will result in them becoming secure
in the inner conviction that, ensconced in the liberal
academy, they cannot fall victim to the evils they so
readily conjure up. I do not share that vision because
philosophers for the most part seem already to have
that inner conviction about themselves, while ignoring
the institutional racism of their discipline. I thought it
was clear that I presented the failings of Locke, Kant
and Hegel to encourage us to think harder about our
own philosophical procedures, not in order to generate
self-satisfaction. I am sorry that McCarney did not
accept my invitation.
Notes
1. Robert Bernasconi, Will the Real Kant Please Stand
Up, Radical Philosophy 117, January/February 2003,
p. 21.
2. G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der
Weltgeschichte, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister, Felix Meiner,
Hamburg, 1955, p. 226. trans. H.B. Nisbet, Lectures on
the Philosophy of World History, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1975, p. 184.
3. Joseph McCarney, Hegel on History, Routledge, Lon-
don, 2000, p. 143.
4. Robert Bernasconi, Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti,
in Stuart Barnett, ed., Hegel after Derrida, Routledge,
London, 1998, p. 46.
5. G.W.F. Hegel, Enzyklopdie der philosophischen Wissen-
schaften III, Theorie Werkausgabe 10, Suhrkamp, Frank-
furt, 1970, p. 65; trans. William Wallace, Philosophy of
Mind, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1971, p. 47.
6. Robert Bernasconi, With What Must the Philosophy of
World History Begin? On the Racial Basis of Hegels
Eurocentrism, Nineteenth Century Contexts 22, 2000,
pp. 1834. I address an argument that is remarkably
similar to McCarneys at pp. 1878.
Weltgeschichte, p. 187; trans. Lectures on the Philosophy
of World History, p. 152, translation modied.
8. McCarney, Hegel on History, p. 145.
Geschichte, Theorie Werkausgabe 12, Suhrkamp, Frank-
furt, 1970, p. 248; trans. J. Sibree, The Philosophy of
History, Dover, New York, 1956, p. 201.
10. Martin Bernal, Black Athena, Volume 1, Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, New Brunswick, 1987, p. 31.
Kristin Rosss lucidly written book on the survivals
of May 68 tackles the memorial management of
May, those games of memory and forgetting that make
the event a prisoner of its successive representations.
This book has the great merit of dismantling, with the
utmost clarity, the laborious exercise of ideological
mine-clearing which in thirty years of celebrations
from interpretations to commemorations has ended
up turning the greatest general strike in French history
into a mere students procession or a spring cleaning.
In the staging of 68 each anniversary decade marks
yet another phase of intellectual and moral collapse.
In 1978, the Right was still in power and the pre-
tenders of 68, some of them already converted to Mit-
terrandism, remained in the antechamber. The ofcial
Left presented its own union around the Common Pro-
gramme of Government as the logical consequence of
May. In 1988, the disavowal of Third Worldism and of
any lyrical illusions had already taken its toll. Having
ignored Rousset, Ciliga or Victor Serge, the nouveaux
philosophes discovered the Gulag with Solzhenitsyn.
The opposition between totalitarianism and democracy
replaced class struggle and anti-imperialism on the
ideological screen. Bruckner recommended that we
stie the white mans sob and get rid of the burden
of colonial guilt. The repentant ex sixty-eighters
had become the eulogists of Mitterrands modernity.
Making honourable amends, the various Kouchners,
Webers and other converts to social democracy now
equated 68 with violence and only wished to retain
from it a great movement for liberal-libertarian reform.
In 1998, the exes, in France as well as in Germany,
had been denitively converted to the realism of the
Third Way; 1968 had become nothing but the upsurge
of the vigour of youth, now evoked with tender con-
descension.
This methodical undertaking culminated in the
formula of the German sociologist according to which
nothing happened in France in 1968. This stance
consisted in arguing that the false event or nonevent of
May masked the authentic event of the Prague spring.
This rewriting to which several actors of May
actively contributed, preoccupied with legitimating
their successive trajectories in turn accompanies
and nourishes the ideological offensive of the liberal
counter-reformation.
Ross rightly underlines the fact that this historical
revision constitutes above all an exercise in depoliticiz-
ation and dehistoricization. Far from opening up an
unexpected eld of possibilities, the event is inserted
as a simple link within an ineluctable process of
modernization and cultural aggiornamento. Instead
of revealing the explosive contradictions at the heart
of contemporary capitalism, the social irruption of 68
would represent the fullment of its deepest desires:
Following this teleology of the present, ofcial history
thereby eliminates the memory of past alternatives
in which we could get a glimpse of outcomes other
than the ones that actually took place. The temporal
rupture disappears into the repetition of the same.
Clearly, nothing took place that could have upset the
unchanging order of works and days.
Ross targets two complementary discourses that
contribute to this political neutralization. On the one
hand, we nd a sort of (auto)biographical appropri-
ation, in which May 68 is represented as the revolt of a
generation or as a generational drama. The advantage
of this operation is twofold. It allows one to exorcise
the spectre of class struggle in favour of the recurrent
conict of generations: as the saying goes, youth
will have its ing! It also allows the establishment
of media-friendly spokespersons for the generation
in question as the (sole) legitimate interpreters of the
event: in accordance with an implacable biological
law of ageing, which would constitute a matura-
tion and progress in what concerns both wisdom and
reason, the bohemians would have become bourgeois
REVIEWS
Red and black
Kristin Ross, May 68 and its Afterlives, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2002. 238 pp.,
19.95 hb., 0 226 72797 1.
and the Cronopes would have turned into the Famous.
Order nally reigns in the best of all possible capitalist
worlds.
Taking her cue from the pioneering work of Karl
Mannheim, Ross expertly dismantles the ideologi-
cal function of the concept of generation and the
use of the royal we among the repentant witnesses:
We invented the Third World, declares Jean-Pierre
Le Dantec (former director of La cause du peuple);
We discovered the Third World, echoes Bernard
Kouchner. Already in 1985 Guy Hocquenghem rose up
against this generational glue, which in the name of an
age class imposes a sort of connivance or complic-
ity between people who nevertheless nd themselves
from some time back in opposing camps of the
social struggle.
According to Ross, the other great neutralizing
procedure directed against May resides in sociological
anaesthesia. Sociological recuperation would dissolve
the singularity of the event in statistical quantication
and the ponderous tendencies of the longue dure.
On a smaller scale, this approach would repeat the
ideological exercise that was applied with a certain
degree of success to the French Revolution on the
occasion of its bicentenary. In the midst of a histori-
cally determined process of modernization, an accident
would have proven necessary (the stubbornness of the
kings incompetent advisors in 1789, the blunders of
the police in 1968) in order to send the situation skid-
ding off the rails, only for history then to resume its
normal course. According to this theory of the skid,
the evental bifurcation and the plurality of possibili-
ties disappear under the crust of the real, effaced by
the ineluctability of the fait accompli: after a simple
detour or an unfortunate setback history returns to its
course, like a long and tranquil river.
These schools of thought, moreover, are the same
ones which, not content with simply banalizing the
event, make it responsible for all of societys atavisms
and delays. By opposing the course of modernization,
the French Revolution would have created a country of
small rural proprietors, with hundreds of cheeses and
wines, to the detriment of industrialization. Likewise,
May 68 would have generated the social rigidities that
stand in the way of the necessary liberal reform.
The liberalization of moral standards, the right
to contraception and abortion, narcissistic hedonism,
individualism without individuality, have ended up
imposing themselves, after a few years, in all devel-
oped societies. The French singularity of May 1968
the fact that ink and saliva are still shed in its name,
that books and essays continue to be written about it
is to a great extent the consequence of the inter-
national context (its simultaneity with the Tet offensive
in Vietnam, the Prague spring, the student uprisings
in Mexico or Pakistan), but, above all, of the general
strike. Between 7 and 9 million strikers, according to
statistics? No matter, we are indeed dealing with the
biggest general strike of the twentieth century. The
last of a cycle, some might remark so as to reassure
themselves: the nal bouquet of the workers struggles
begun in the nineteenth century, the last convulsion of
a world in the process of disappearing, as symbolized
by the workers fortress of Renault-Billancourt and by
an old philosopher perched on a barrel to harangue a
species of worker on its way to extinction (in an extinct
world, where pedestrian crossings [passages clouts]
were still covered in nails [clous], where cops wore
leaden pelerines, and telephones had round dials). Yet
we can argue with just as much (if not more) verisi-
militude that it was the rst civic and social strike
of the twenty-rst century, the beginning of a new
cycle of resistances and protests against commodity
reication. The strike constituted a general uprising of
the salaried society in an urban country, in which the
peasantry represents a mere 7 per cent of the active
population, and in which the salaried workforce makes
up 80 per cent. This explains the movement which
starts from the universities and the factories then to
penetrate all pores of society, agitating the worlds of
culture, communication and even sport; and also the
aspiration whose extent is new to autonomy, self-
management and the democratic control of struggles.
Rosss book has the indisputable merit of resituat-
ing the sequence of May from 3 May (the student
explosion) to 30

May (de Gaulles speech announcing
general elections) in both space and time. In time:
it recalls the deep links between the radicalization
of 68 and decolonization, the war in Algeria; she
underlines the role of ditions Maspero, of the books
by Fanon, Sartre, Nizan. In space: it insists on the
international context, the Cuban revolution, the death
of Che in Bolivia, the liberation struggle in Indochina,
the Cultural Revolution. It is these conditions and this
context that make the event a political event, a moment
of crystallization of possibilities, and not a religious
miracle pure and simple. Where supercial journal-
ism only wants to see a lightning ash without either
antecedents or premisses, the event instead reveals the
potentialities harboured by an undecided situation, a
situation that is determinate but not predictable.
The post-68 legend thus represses precisely that
which accounts for the singularity of May 68 (as
compared to the student revolts on American or
German campuses), to wit, the May of the prole-
tarians. Without the general strike, who would still be
interested in this date? Ross correctly remarks that the
revisionist enterprise dissolves the gure of the worker
(and, to a lesser degree, that of the anti-colonialist
militant), preferring to it that of the sole student leader.
Herv Hamon and Patrick Rotmans book, entitled
precisely Generation (published at the beginning of
the 1990s) is exemplary in this regard. Diametrically
opposed to the Annales tradition, or to Daniel Gurins
vision of the French Revolution, Hamon and Rotmans
book proposes an anecdotal history, centred on the
biographies of a few actors (all of them products
of the student movement); in other words, a history
made by the princes, captains and great men of this
world. It is signicant, moreover, that when it comes
to evaluating the impact of the event in terms of the
number of dead, media commentaries insist upon the
fact that there were no victims in 68. If it is certainly
true that restraint, sometimes going to the extent of
producing a mere simulacrum of conict, was remark-
able on both sides (as testied by the memoirs of chief
of police Grimaud or those of the union leaders), it is
just as signicant that in general this count forgets
the deaths not only of the lyce student Gilles Tautin
but also of the two workers murdered in the grounds
of the Peugeot factory at Sochaux.
A large part of the critique developed by Ross
is thus both corrosive and salubrious. However, the
repoliticization that she calls for against the depoliticiz-
ation practised by the dominant discourses remains
inconsistent. Essentially, it can be summed up in a
handful of debatable generalities, whereby the political
dimension of 68 would revolve around the political
opening to alterity, the encounter with the colonized,
the deconstruction of social identities, and so on.
Ross never approaches the situation from the stand-
point of the political strategies at play. The balance
of power between classes is at no point the object of
analysis, any more than the balance of power between
political currents or the debates over the orientation of
the general strike and its consequences. The authors
overt contempt for sociological research comes back to
haunt her. By haughtily ignoring (as the bibliography
attests) an entire literature which in any case does not
constitute an apologetics, she ends up supporting her
argument with references taken from very fragmentary
and supercial accounts (drawn in particular from the
book by Nicolas Daum). The result is a very deformed
image of reality. If the sudden appearance of the
Neighbourhood Action Committees can be considered
an interesting symptom of a territorialization of the
struggle and of an aspiration towards local democracy,
the phenomenon nevertheless remained very limited,
dispersed, and was far from being capable of contest-
ing the union leaderships hold over the majority of
the movement. The Maoist practice of the workers
enquiry is accorded disproportionate importance,
whilst at the same time it is presented in an uncriti-
cal manner; in fact, much could be said about the
demagogic populism that this practice often dressed
up with falsely erudite considerations. If it is indeed
very pertinent to recall the original work produced for
some years by the journal Rvoltes logiques (edited by
Jacques Rancire), there is not a single mention of a
whole host of publications like the journals of the PSU
or Critique Communiste or the Cahiers de la Taupe, or
of the far Left newspapers of the 1970s. Paradoxically,
this refusal of sociological research ends up playing
into the hands of the generational narrative, by giving
it a central, albeit critical, role in the refutation. Thus,
the often very intelligent recourse made to cinematic or
literary manifestations cannot but remain supercial.
An ideological critique of ideology is not enough to
restore the political dimension of controversy.
If the activity of the far Left (too readily identied
by Ross with its Maoist components which in fact
remained quite ephemeral) does indeed anticipate
transformations at work in the long term, the political
scene in 1968 remained largely dominated by the
strategies of traditional organizations, and of the Com-
munist Party (PCF) in particular. It is not enough to
observe that the gains of the general strike (which
were substantial in terms of salaries and union rights)
remained symbolically very inferior to those of 1936
or 1945, whilst the level of mobilization was actually
greater. Of course, one can condemn the compromise
made by the union leadership during the Grenelle
negotiations. Nevertheless the question remains why
these disappointing results did not provoke greater
fractures within the unions and the majority parties
(there is nothing here that could compare to the crisis
that followed the Renault strikes in 1947). May 68 is
the starting point for a molecular process that erodes
the grip of the traditional apparatuses over the workers
movement, but it is still necessary to measure the
amplitude and rhythm of these phenomena.
Unable to raise themselves above their own sub-
jective perception of the event, some have made a
mountain out of 68, turning it into their hour of
personal glory, their most intimate altar. Conversely,
for others it is today a question of good manners to
forget the general strike and to retain from May 68
only a student escapade on the way to liberalliber-
tarian modernization. The reality is in fact situated
somewhere between these two stances: we are dealing
with a general strike that had a political impact, in
which the elements of a duality of power remained
embryonic, and whose breadth of demands was limited
by the absence of any real political continuation on the
part of an essentially respectful Left.
Instead of according this question of power in
68 the importance it deserves, Ross turns it into the
symptom of its ebb and regression. The question of
power thus does not even pose itself in the heat of the
event, emerging only when the event has turned to
ashes. Refusing to get involved in the dispute between
Raymond Aron and Pierre Goldmann, for whom the
absence of an armed confrontation would sufce to
mark the limits of the situation, Ross afrms that
the real question lies elsewhere, and is alien to the
parameters of a revolution, whether failed or other-
wise: why did something happen rather than nothing?
According to her, the theme of the conquest of power
would remain prisoner to a narrative determined by
the logic of the State. Her presentation of the oppo-
sition between an imaginary Lenin and an equally
imaginary Rosa Luxemburg does not go beyond clichs
and platitudes. Her own tale of May, often very subtle
when it comes to deciphering cultural symptoms (with
regard to the lm La Reprise, for example), thus ends
up opposing one discourse of depoliticization with
another. In this perspective, the strategic problem of
May would nd itself reduced to the failed meeting
between workers and students, and to the desynchro-
nization between the respective temporalities of the
world of workers and the world of students.
It is not surprising that in this way Ross moves
from the necessary and legitimate rehabilitation of the
event to its fetishized hypostasis; and it should elicit
no surprise that she nds the formula for this absolute
and unconditioned event in the work of Alain Badiou:
something that takes place by excess, beyond any
calculation. Such an approach in no way prepares us
to follow and comprehend political currents and their
trajectories, throughout the 1970s and beyond. It is as
if politics, once reduced to the strong time of the event,
were to be extinguished along with it.
The last part of the book briey signals the fact that
in the wake of the strikes of winter 1995, the scene of
the debate has once again changed. Without actually
turning crimson (to borrow from the title of a lm by
Chris Marker), the air has begun to gain some colour.
The activity of social movements testies to this, but
also the rebirth of a socially aware cinema and the
results achieved by the far Left during recent French
elections. It would not have been in the least otiose to
deal with the question of the links between this recent
renewal and the heritage of another 68 whoever
its messengers may be since it is indeed true that
there is no rupture (and in particular no generational
rupture) without an element of continuity. But Kristin
Rosss unilateral approach to the memorial manage-
ment of May does not prepare her to reconsider the
balance sheet of 68 from this angle.
Daniel Bensad
Translated by Alberto Toscano
The importance of being-two
Penelope Deutscher, A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray, Cornell University
Press, Ithaca, 2002. 256 pp., 26.95 hb., 11.95 pb., 0 8014 3825 X hb., 0 8014 8797 8 pb.
whole. This seemingly arises out of Irigarays early
work on the phallocentrism of Western philosophy
and psychoanalysis in her classic works of the 1970s,
This Sex Which is Not One and Speculum of the
Other Woman. Reading such texts through the optic of
Irigarays French and Anglo-American commentators,
Deutscher emphasizes that Irigaray has always been
concerned to show that the Wests relentless dismissal
of femininity as the atrophy, negativity and trope
of masculinity renders entirely impossible a positive
symbolic expression of womens bodily (and, by exten-
sion, pscychological or spiritual) integrity. Within this
economy of the same, the problem is that women have
nothing to do or say as women.
While the impossibility of sex neologism might
seem attractive, it seems to miss something funda-
mental in Irigarays vision. As Deutscher herself con-
cedes, in the Irigarayan scheme the fact of systematic
exclusion logically suggests that there is something
real to exclude, namely sex itself. To this extent, one
might question the utility of characterizing the material
reality of sex in Irigarayan terms as either impossible
or possible. Deutschers argument is that in Irigarays
later texts such as An Ethics of Sexual Difference and
Je, Tu, Nous, womens awareness of the impossibility
of their genuine sexual representation provides the
very ground for the possibility of a transformation of
the symbolic; it anticipates an adequate feminine repre-
sentation of bodily integrity through legal institutions
such as the much debated Irigarayan bill of sexuate
rights; and ultimately it evinces the possibility for
sexed agency and citizenship in a reconceived ethical
public sphere.
This may seem a productive reading at a certain
level, but the interpretation is persistently problematic
in that it treats sex uniquely as symbolic interpreta-
tion, and hence risks underestimating the force of
Irigarays most basic ontological claims. For example,
in Chapter 2 (and, indeed, in many places elsewhere
in the book), Deutscher takes up the familiar debate
about the essentialism of Irigarays works. Since,
she claims, Irigaray has nothing but the standard
feminist contempt for traditional notions of the eternal
feminine, she concludes that the concept of sexuate
rights should only be understood rhetorically that
is, as a protest against a culture in which sexual differ-
In this stimulating new study of Luce Irigarays
later work, Penelope Deutscher seeks to assess the
coherence of the now frequent charge that Irigaray
unjustiably prioritizes sexual difference over issues
of race and multiculturalism. The issue is pressing
not only because it relates to the central debate among
Irigarays readers in the mid-1990s on the nature of
her purported essentialism. As Deutscher suggests,
the matter is of wider importance given the recently
intensied debate, particularly in liberal feminist
circles, about the possibility of integrating concerns
for gender equality and cultural recognition within
a unied theoretical perspective. Thus, this study is
at once a contribution to Irigarayan scholarship and
an attempt to place Irigarays feminism within wider
theoretical debates about gender and the conditions of
postcoloniality.
That Irigaray herself would wish to be placed within
such a context is borne out by the publication of her
recent book, Between East and West: From Singularity
to Community, the text which appears to have motiv-
ated Deutschers inquiry. In this work, Irigaray rst
aspires to deepen her earlier claim that sex constitutes
the most important difference within each and every
culture, and second she claims that the post-colonial
West has much to learn from pre-Aryan Eastern trad-
itions. Using these claims as a point of departure,
the rst stages of Deutschers book provide a careful
if critical endorsement of the continuity between Iri-
garays earlier abstract work and her later more politi-
cally engaged writings. However, ultimately the book
is critical of the later work for two reasons. First, she
questions Irigarays apparent desire to present the
category of sex as an ever more specic and concrete
entity, rather than a site of creative becoming that
has been rendered culturally impossible by masculin-
ist universalism. Second, she expresses a connected
concern about the apparent cultural essentialism in
Irigarays latest work on multiculturalism. Ultimately,
since both of these worries centre on difculties with
the Irigarayan concept of tre-deux or being-two, the
success of Deutschers thesis depends on the cogency
of her criticism of Irigaray in this regard.
The charge of double essentialism against Iriga-
rays later work arises out of what Deutscher takes
as the impossibility of sex in her philosophy as a
ence cannot be actively or positively expressed. Thus,
according to Deutscher, Irigaray is not concerned to
ask What are women really like? Yet, inescapably,
the basic claim grounding the entire project of sexuate
rights is one of sex as fundamental to the very nature
of human existence. In brief, by dealing with sex exclu-
sively as symbolic representation, Deutscher avoids
addressing head-on the most controversial implications
of Irigarays basic philosophical claim.
Nevertheless, one of the books strengths is to
respond to both French and Anglo-American feminist
critics charges of political naivety against Irigaray,
by offering sympathetic readings of her treatment of
political issues from the early 1990s onwards. This is
helpful not only for the Irigaray specialist, but also for
those approaching Irigarays work in this area for the
rst time. Alluding to her critique of dominant con-
ceptions of equality as they are embodied in the French
states explicit policies of parit, Deutcher explains
that such policies are insufcient for Irigaray, because
they force women to exchange a role of other for the
role of equivalent, with the result that they remain
symbolically colonized and annihilated. In such a
culture, genuine equality is impossible because women
are faced with having to accept the minimum social
equality constitutional rights currently guarantee, at
the disproportionate existential or psychic price of
making do, for instance, with male working patterns
and routines which are blind to their (sex-) specic
needs. The problem, as Deutscher explains it, is that
in an equality-as-equivalence economy, women have
no language in which to articulate these costs publicly.
As a result, womens civil identity refers to an identity
that does not exist. As Deutscher expresses the point,
Irigarays bill of sexuate rights represents justice for
women as an anticipated, abstract possibility, which at
once mimics traditional representations of women
so as to render them exorbitant.
In recent years, Irigaray has had much more to say
about the conditions of citizenship in Europe than is
expressed by her (often puzzling) bill of sexuate rights.
Given Deutschers overall aim, however, one should
not be too critical that she does not engage in greater
detail with, say, Irigarayan perspectives on sexually-
differentiated citizenship in, for example Democracy
Begins Between Two. While this would have been
desirable for those readers seeking primarily to assess
Irigaray as a political theorist, this subject alone would
have constituted sufcient material for another book.
Aiming, instead, to treat Irigarays corpus holistically,
Deutscher turns in subsequent chapters to
areas of Irigarays thought largely neglected
by Anglo-American political philosophers:
namely, the relationship between language
and social justice and the concept of the
feminine divine. Here, she highlights the
transformative potential of Irigarays recon-
ceptualization of female divinity as the very
ground of egalitarian justice, in the sense
that it enables a transformed mode of com-
munication, not only between women of
different cultures, ethnicities and religions,
but also between the two sexes. As Deut-
scher observes, Irigaray is concerned to
undermine the traditional Western, secular
liberal account of divinity based on what she
takes to be a God-Different economy. This
economy is decient for its unsatisfactory
account of womens relationship with the
sacred and the innite. But more than this,
through its valuation of a masculine-pater-
nal god, it entrenches unsatisfactory identity
structures for women and men generally.
The strength of Deutschers thesis lies in
these chapters. Here she succeeds more clearly
than Irigaray herself in integrating the various
aspects of Irigarays corpus. In defending
the pluralism inherent in concepts of divinity and
sexed genre, Irigaray is convincingly portrayed as a
profoundly political thinker, whose unsettling of the
identity structures implicit in the philosophical works
of Levinas, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty anticipates a
just, non-appropriative mode of being and of communi-
cation across the lines of fundamental difference. The
core theme permeating these diverse areas of Irigarays
work is the concept of being-two, or tre-deux. This
is the recognition that adequate Iyou communication
must involve a strong but non-appropriative conception
of difference. Being-two must be strong in the sense
that it relies on the notion of fundamental difference;
and it is non-appropriative in that it refuses to assimi-
late or to cast the other as the trope or atrophy of ones
own material being.
In spite of this productive understanding of being-
two, Deutscher is concerned about Irigarays tendency
to vacillate between a conception of sex as a site of
abstract hypothetical possibility and her increasing
desire to present a more xed denition of annihilated
femininity. This is exemplied by Irigarays attempt
to provide a systematic ontology of sexual difference
through research into sexed language in To Be Two, a
project that seeks to establish consistently masculine
or feminine patterns of linguistic usage. Deutscher is
worried about the essentialist implications of this
move, and thus seeks to foreground instead what she
takes to be the most convincing reading of the concept
of being-two: namely, the minimal generative
ground, as specied earlier, on which non-appropriate
communication across difference may occur.
In Chapter 10, Deutscher nds Irigarays recent
work on multiculturalism, Between East and West,
to be equally problematic from the perspective of her
preferred conception of being-two. This time, Irigaray
is guilty of cultural, rather than sexual, essentialism.
Briey, Irigaray holds that the West can look to yogic
cultures, particularly those of India, for a benign
paradigm in which a creative ethic of sexual difference
based on a respect for breath, nature and femininity
has been preserved. Here, Irigaray uses the East to
buttress her own long-standing criticism of the noise,
ecological failures and persistent social and political
problems of the West. Deutscher, however, charges
her with the inconsistency of criticizing traditional
accounts of the essential or eternal feminine, while
paradoxically evincing the politically naive desire to
reify the East. In arguing that the west is cultur-
ally impoverished, her work contributes to an ideal-
ized depiction of the east; and that some time must
elapse in Irigarays corpus before she comes to ask
if, say, Hinduism, might not also be subjected to her
deconstructive analysis. The idea of transparent under-
standing between Irigaray and the East can hardly
be accepted as ideal.
Prima facie, Irigarays theses in Between East and
West do seem to depend detrimentally on cultural over-
determinations of a kind that anybody with knowledge
of, say, India would surely contest. Yet it is equally
worth noticing that, originating in a 1995 contribution
to the world conference on womens inequality and
global responsibility in Beijing, Irigarays thinking on
multiculturalism is more self-conscious and politically
engaged than Deutschers account suggests. In fact,
as a whole, Between East and West seems to respect
exactly the kind of minimal conception of being-two
that Deutscher extrapolated from Irigarays corpus
earlier in her book.
In sum, while this is a much needed contribu-
tion to debates about Irigarays feminism, it is a pity
that Deutscher focuses principally on the somewhat
circular debates about essentialism. One may criticize
Irigaray, as Deutscher does, for failing to specify the
mechanisms that could institute the transformation of
thought necessary for genuine being-two, but it is
unlikely that the mere charge of impracticability will
undermine the appeal of Irigarays imagined goals.
Monica Mookherjee
On the run
Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 2:
Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans.
John Moore, Verso, London and New York, 2002. 380
pp., 22.00 hb., 1 85984 650 5.
Henri Lefebvres critique of everyday life reaches
across the second half of the twentieth century as a
paean for radical change and an attempt by philosophy
to lay hold of actuality. Lefebvre offers a denition
of philosophy as an attempt to bring the greatest
possible quantity of present-day human experience,
the experience of our so-called modern era, along
with the practical experience of love, political action
or knowledge, into a set of reections and concepts.
Such a project (at least in 1961 when this book was
rst published in France) recognized the need for
a radical alteration of the everyday, and among the
results of such alteration was to be the dissolution
of specialized activities such as philosophy and art.
Indeed, the radical alteration of the daily and the dis-
solution of philosophy are intimately and dialectically
connected: were we to change the process of the
philosophical becoming of the world into the process
of the world-becoming of philosophy, would that not
be to metamorphose everyday life?
The projected critique of everyday life, then, is
nothing if not ambitious and it crackles and zzles
with the same kind of energy that animates the early
humanist writing of Marx, so admired by Lefebvre.
Given that Lefebvre wrote in the region of seventy
books, and several hundred articles, it is hardly sur-
prising that this book is not characterized by the kind
of overly careful, fully cogitated writing that marks
most academic production. Instead you get a form of
thinking on the run that simultaneously grapples with
abstract, philosophical concepts and attempts to grasp
the living actuality of modern life. At times the think-
ing runs away with itself. For instance, in his discussion
of womens liberation and womens magazines the kind
of dialectical manoeuvres that he performs in regard
to other phenomena are short-circuited, and the critical
potential of liberation gets blurred into the spurious
claims of French magazine journalism. Lefebvre has
quite rightly been criticized for his short-sighted and
phallocentric response to feminism. Yet even here he
manages to suggest a productively inventive approach
to media analysis: within women-oriented magazines
practical texts (such as recipes, menus, dress patterns)
read like dreams, and conversely the imaginary
texts read in a practical fashion. There is the echo
here of Lefebvres former enthusiasm for surrealism,
but also a strong link to the critical theory of Adorno,
who in the 1950s was similarly claiming that astrology
columns were instruction manuals in disguise.
Lefebvre is faced with a world where the manu-
facturers of consumer goods do all they can to manu-
facture consumers, and where to a large extent they
succeed. As a critical response to such a situation he
continues to employ concepts central to the traditions
of Marxism. As in earlier formulations of his critique,
alienation is productively extended to describe not
just the modern workplace, but the everyday world
more generally. Underlying Lefebvres assessment of
capitalist modernization is the understanding that it
always articulates an uneven development. In char-
acteristic fashion this allows Lefebvre some truly
inspiring revelations. Rather than simply employing
uneven development to highlight the conicts and
contrasts between two distinct but related phenomena
(between nations, for instance, or classes), he uses
it to discuss the uneven developments and effects
within phenomena. For example, domestic technologi-
cal development is initially seen in contrast to other
industrial and military developments, which results in
the critical assessment that the everyday lags behind
these more instrumental sectors of society. The revo-
lutionary spark here is the idea of diverting the massive
budgets, resources, expertise, and so on, away from
this militaryindustrial complex into the realm of the
everyday world. What kind of revolutionary imagi-
nation would this ignite? But such analysis is pushed
further. Television, for instance, is seen as producing
varying, uneven effects: it allows access to a massively
extended social world, but in a manner that condemns
people to a reprivatized realm. Succinct, prescient and
incorrigibly dialectical, Lefebvre pithily observes that
globalization is being achieved in the mode of a
withdrawal.
It is perhaps in the nal chapters of the book
that Lefebvre announces his most suggestive projects.
One of these is a reformulation of semiotics, which
is here named semeiology, in order to distinguish it
from the structuralism of current semiology, which
for Lefebvre was a technicist and moribund project.
Lefebvre suggests his own social semiotics in which
the object is the entire semantic eld or social text
made up of a varying mix of signs, non-signiers
(unnoticed, yet expressive elements within a culture),
images, symbols and signals. It is the rise of the signal
in modern culture that Lefebvre diagnoses, and, as he
was to show in later works, is vividly demonstrated
by the postwar planning of new towns. For Lefebvre
our communicative environment, or social text, needs
to negotiate between the dull legibility where the
signal has triumphed (the triumph of redundancy)
and one illegible because overloaded with symbolism
and overowing with information. Always an incipient
urban planner, Lefebvre suggests that a good social
text which is legible and informative will surprise its
subjects; it is the lack of surprise that the saturation
of signals articulates reduced to signals, it collapses
into perfect banality.
The nal chapter is titled the theory of moments
and makes a case for the importance of activities and
states of mind that attempt to achieve the total realiz-
ation of a possibility, even if they have little chance
of success. It is the importance of these moments (and
here he seems to be deliberately distancing himself
from Debord and the privileging of situations) that
reveals a different possibility for radical politics. For
Lefebvre while certain forms of political action might
provide a moment marked by a characteristic mix of
clarity, negativity, absolutism and partial disalienation,
the theory of moments will also nd these features in
more everyday activities. So while the day of global
demonstration against war on Iraq can be conceived of
as a moment, so too can falling in love and forms of
play. It is here that you get an inkling of what a critical
activity might look like that fulls philosophy while
superseding it. However, this chapter is relatively brief
and closes the book with a feeling of anticipation.
As the title tells us, this is not Lefebvres rst outing
into the critique of everyday life, but nor is it, strictly
speaking, his second. The translation of the rst volume
(also by John Moore and published by Verso in 1991)
included a foreword that was itself a substantial piece
of work, nearly as long as the original volume. Thus
the rst volume is made up of two distinct sections:
the foreword rst published in 1958 and the original
book initially published in 1947. This second volume
followed three years later in 1961, to be followed in
turn in 1968 by Everyday Life in the Modern World
(a kind of interim report which also included many
reformulations). In 1981 came the third volume De la
modernit au modernisme: pour une mtaphilosophie
du quotidien (which Verso still plans to publish in
English). It is also worth mentioning that Lefebvre
thought of his posthumously published lments de
rythmanalyse (1992) as a fourth volume of the critique.
Indeed, reading this second volume with this in mind
allows one to see just how central rhythm-analysis
always was to the critique of everyday life.
Taken as a whole the project offers the historian
of ideas an idiosyncratic seismometer for registering
the shockwaves of twentieth-century history as they
reverberate within and across the various books. The
continuities and discontinuities, the adjustments and
reiterations, evidence one of the most vivid examples
of a dynamic philosophy of modernity. It also provides
an example of tenacious revolutionary zeal that refuses
to acquiesce in the face of the intensifying coloniza-
tion of the everyday by capitalism: as for revolution
in general we say of it what Rimbaud said of love:
Revolution must be reinvented.
Ben Highmore
Error against obstacles
Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientic Mind, trans. Mary McAllester Jones, Clinamen Press,
Manchester, 2002. 258 pp., 55.00 hb., 16.99 pb., 1 903083 23 0 hb., 1 903083 20 6 pb.
Long overdue for English publication, Bachelards
crucial 1938 text, The Formation of the Scientic
Mind (his best-known in France, as McAllester Jones
points out in her concise but useful introduction) is
as relevant as ever. Its concern to do battle with the
minds conservative instinct, to unpick and undermine
the epistemic obstacles that block scientic thought,
lays waste to innumerable tendencies that have mul-
tiplied during the scandalously long stretch of time
between its rst French publication and its appear-
ance in English. McAllester Jones has provided the
best possible translation: clear, attentive to Bachelards
polemical yet subtle style, and accompanied by a series
of informative footnotes that avoid being intrusive.
She and Clinamen must be congratulated once again
(the translation of Bachelards 1936 study of Bergson
and time, The Dialectic of Duration, was published
in 2000) for introducing Bachelards important epis-
temological works to the English-speaking world.
(McAllester Jones has elsewhere published various
extracts from these texts, with commentary, in her 1991
book Gaston Bachelard, Subversive Humanist.) It is
a sorry indictment of the Anglo-American approach
to European philosophy that while the majority of
Bachelards works on the imagination and poetry
have been available for many years, only a smattering
of his philosophy of science has been party to the
same treatment: The Philosophy of No and The New
Scientic Spirit both of which are extremely hard to
nd. With luck, a renewed interest in this often noted
but little read thinker will lead to the translation of
his other works on, inter alia, rationalism, atomism,
relativity, chemistry and time.
Bachelard is often acknowledged to be a key
inuence on Canguilhem, Foucault, Althusser, Serres
and others seeking to differentiate themselves from
various forms of phenomenology and the lure of sub-
jectivity. It is less clear how this inuence actually
manifests itself, and what the problems with it are.
What, then, makes this particular text so relevant?
The main importance of the book lies in the dis-
cussion of the epistemic obstacle in its multifarious
manifestations: those inhibitory modes of thought that
lie at the heart of cognition itself. The specicity of the
term obstacle should be stressed and differentiated
from the notion of coupure so beloved of Althusser,
taken from elsewhere in Bachelard. However, there
is an initial break posited at the beginning of The
Formation of the Scientic Mind between scientic
experiment and everyday experience. It is particular
manifestations of the confusion of the two that concern
Bachelard. Thus, we have a chapter each devoted to
the obstructive nature of primary experience, general
knowledge, the over-extension of familiar images
(in this case, the sponge), unitary and pragmatic
knowledge, substantialism, animism, the libido and
digestion. While Bachelard casts his critical net far
and with intention eclectically, his ultimate aim
is clear:
we must put scientic culture on the alert so that it
is always ready to move, we must replace closed,
static knowledge with knowledge that is open and
dynamic, and dialecticise all experimental variables.
It is the dialectical nature of Bachelards framework
that perhaps intrigues most here. While Bachelards
aim appears to have much in common with certain
strands of Deleuzo-Guattarianism or contemporary
Bergsonism (and, indeed, there are fruitful points of
comparison), it is the constitutively dialectical aspect
that distinguishes Bachelards account of knowledge
and feeds into his broader account of the necessary role
of error and discontinuity in rationality; a rationality so
far removed from any naive or linear characterizations
that it ultimately entails the reconstructing of all
knowledge at every moment, and the necessary muta-
tion of the human species on the basis of the mental
revolutions required by scientic invention.
In order to give weight to his analysis of each
epistemic obstacle, Bachelard turns to a wide array
of texts. In his discussion of the libido and objec-
tive knowledge, for example, he refers to, among
other things, Martin Bubers Ich und Du, Mallarms
brilliant line from Brise marine, The esh is sad,
alas! and I have read all the books, and an anony-
mous seventeenth-century treatise on alchemy. What
is remarkable is the way that his argument (essentially,
libidinal thought guides neutral scientic endeavour
far more insidiously than might at rst appear) con-
vinces, without reducing the force of the original
textual sources. Indeed, for all his defence of boring-
ness and his privileging of the asceticism of abstract
thought, Bachelard possibly succeeds too well in his
various presentations, making his case studies inter-
esting for all sorts of unintended reasons, though this
is hardly a negative point. As he himself claims, truly
scientic thoughts are nothing other than thoughts that
suggest other thoughts.
It is by psychoanalysing the common obstacles
of cognition that Bachelard hopes to move beyond
their stiing grasp and to reinvigorate the sense of the
problem being posed in each case. Truth for Bachelard
lies, then, in the dynamics of the problematic; it is
never static, nor purely utilitarian, nor beyond revision
there is no truth until an error has been rectied.
When he discusses the obstacle of unity (the declar-
ation of one general principle of Nature, the thought
that everything is the cause of everything), he makes
it clear that knowledge that seeks to determine itself
as beyond contradiction, as complete, as absolutely
true, is as harmful to dynamic scientic knowledge
as the thought that seeks to quantify minutely elements
in their fragmented isolation without understanding
their relations to larger epistemological problematics.
Bachelard presents his own position as open to attack
from all angles:
we would like to take up an intermediate position
between realists and nominalists, positivists and
formalists, between advocates of facts and of signs.
We are therefore laying ourselves open to criticism
on all sides.
It is the subtle way in which the work is shot
through with an awareness of error, discontinuity and
the revisable nature of reason that makes it so reward-
ing. Bachelards pedagogical, but never dictatorial,
style is as much at home discussing Strindberg as
Heisenberg; his careful and often entertaining dis-
cussions of the pitfalls and constitutive blind spots of
thought deserve a wide readership.
Nina Power
Immanuel Icke
John McMurtry, Value Wars: The Global Market
versus the Life Economy, Pluto Press, London, 2002.
xxv + 277 pp., 50.00 hb., 15.99 pb., 0 7453 1890 8
hb., 0 7453 1889 4 pb.
John McMurtrys books always seem to appear with
lots of pre-publication praise. His Cancer Stage of
Capitalism (Pluto, 1999) was described by Susan
George as deeply learned, relentlessly logical and
corrosively liberating, while McMurtry himself was
described as an unconventional, idol-smashing phil-
osopher imbued with passion and urgency. This new
book comes with similar praise in no fewer than four
back-cover plaudits. In one of these, G.A. Cohen des-
cribes McMurtrys work as combining a philosophical
perspective in the deepest sense, a perspective of
continuity with the historical preoccupations of phil-
osophy, both East and West; a novel and compelling
general conception of the capitalist global market as
an ethical system; and a wealth of scholarly reference
across many disciplines in the humanities and social
sciences. Think of a book written by George Monbiot
and Naomi Klein after they had spent a year studying
Kant and the early Marx and you might get some idea
of why people are fond of these books. Unlike all
those snarling critical critics, here is a writer who at
least tries to lay down the principles for an alternative
system.
It is sad, then, that this is one of the more unreadable
texts on the market. It may have the verve, swagger,
and passion lacking in many other books, but try
this:
The regulating value-set of the life-ground ethic se-
lects for means of life capital growth, not means of
money capital growth, as societys properly regulat-
ing principle of governance across generations.
Likewise, the regulating value of the proposed life
economy is said to turn life into more vitally com-
prehensive life by means of life. Such formulations are
resonant more of David Icke than Kant or Marx. Simple
words are always given some rhetorical embellishment.
And words such as totalitarian, fanatic, terrorist
and psychopath are used to describe things McMurtry
opposes, without any sense that adopting such termi-
nology developed by the ruling ideology may generate
certain problems.
The style is compounded by McMurtrys assump-
tion that he is the only writer brave enough even to
consider some of the issues in the book. Few dare to
name the game, as he puts it with an eye to his own
swagger. In his discussion of prisons and criminality,
for example, he claims that we must see through the
category of criminal which even critics assume as
given, and asks where anywhere in legal studies,
criminology or philosophy of law do systematic cor-
porate and state crimes arise as even a question? Its
a rhetorical question of outrageous ignorance. Not only
is there a body of political and scholarly work which
has raised the question, and even tried to answer it, but
some of this work has appeared with McMurtrys own
publisher. This ignorance masquerading as bravery is
far from being a one-off:
one can examine any mass media organ from 1985
to 2002 to see if even once the evidence against
the global market experiment arises as an issue of
concern. Has the certitude of the fundamentals
[of the global market] been once questioned by a
mass information system?
The rhetorical gesture completely obscures the fact that
liberal broadsheets regularly carry such items; indeed,
McMurtrys own footnotes are full of citations from
mass media organs such as the Guardian and some of
its regular contributors, such as Monbiot.
This looseness with the work of others is carried
over into McMurtrys occasional excursions into the
history of ideas. Again, an example: it is suggested that
scientic management and behaviorist technology
build on the rst systematic control of human beings,
rst explicated by Machiavelli. But Machiavelli is
a poor candidate for such a position, should one be
needed, since his idea of order was founded on a
dialectic of love and fear rather than in any systematic
control. Why waste all that time and money on surveil-
lance to achieve obedience when the butchered body
of an unpopular local leader left in the town square
does the trick just as well?
McMurtrys opposition to the global market lies
in his notion of the life-economy, currently repressed
beneath the abyss of no alternative. What this life-
economy consists of is initially unclear, since it often
appears in terms suitable for New Age Monthly or
Spiritual Times:
Consider all that is real which does not follow
invariant sequences. This is the inexhaustible eld
of the living moment which is continuously new.
It includes human thinking itself, the felt side of
being alive of any being in whom blood runs, and
the innitude of the internal universe of images and
thoughts to which awareness at any moment can
open.
But it soon becomes clear that while the argument
appears to be pitched against capital it is, like most
new-agery, pitched against money-capital.
The argument is not anti-capital, but anti-money-
capital. The proposed life economy turns out to
be founded on capital life capital. Life capital is
dened as
the generic and non-consumed bearer of means of
life in an economys overall life sequence of value
through generations. Thus life capital includes
physical capital, natural capital, and social capital,
as well as money capital, so far as each serves this
macro life sequence of value, and is not spent away.
In other words, its capital, but not as we know it. It
is capital in which interest rates and a more general
sovereignty over the money supply are used as inter-
ventionist measures for life, and a general Well
Being Index is used to measure a societys economic
performance. Such an index is to measure things
such as sufcient nourishing food, health care, access
to clean water and so on (all items on current inter-
national indices and all items over which political
struggles currently take place).
What is clear, then, is that despite the books sub-
title, what is being discussed is not an argument for
an alternative to the global market, but rather a set of
principles around which capital might be reorganized.
The value war is over the humanization of capital.
Regardless of its passion, verve and swagger, the book
is little more than a long demand that capital really
should be nicer to people.
Mark Neocleous
A ne mind mulled
Agnes Heller, The Time is Out of Joint: Shakespeare as Philosopher of History, Rowman & Littleeld, Lanham
MD, 2002. 375 pp., 65.00 hb., 24.00 pb., 0 7425 1250 9 hb., 0 7425 1251 7 pb.
According to the back cover, The Time is Out of
Joint handles the Shakespearean oeuvre from a philo-
sophical perspective. Mainly this means taking up a
theme of broadly philosophical character such as
nature and history, character and identity, acting and
disguise, outsiders, love and families, time, good and
evil and tracing it through some Shakespearean
plays. Occasionally and usually briskly, writing by
philosophers is invoked. There is almost no reference
to the efforts of academic Shakespeare critics; indeed,
there are no citations at all, there is no bibliography,
and no index.
There should be advantages in observing a ne
mind mull over the Shakespearean corpus without
the constraints of professional academic criticism.
Heller comes up with some good ideas. She derives
her account of Shylock from a production by Robert
Afoldi in Budapest. Picking up on Portias rst words
in court, Which is the merchant here? and which the
Jew? Heller infers that Shylock (so far from displaying
distinctively Jewish manners and garb, as actors and
directors have assumed) is indistinguishable from the
others. This is because he has harboured assimilation-
ist expectations. Nothing makes him different, in fact,
other than the determination that he should be named
a Jew. The hatred of Venetian patricians has no other
basis.
The downside to Hellers innocence of literary
scholarship is a tendency to reinvent the wheel. In
King Lear, for instance, It is not just a storm. It is
a symbolic storm (just as in The Tempest). Again:
Cleopatra is not a French cocotte, as she is some-
times played. She is the queen of Egypt she is
Egypt. (Antony frequently calls her Egypt). Lady
Macbeth is by nature a woman, and hence deeply
compassionate.
A leading question, in Hellers view, concerns two
rival concepts of nature. One identies tradition with
nature; so, for example, daughters should obey their
fathers. The other concept nds it natural that every-
one succeed according to his talents and not according
to his rank. Heller is unaware that this issue has
often been addressed, since the classic study by John
F. Danby, Shakespeares Doctrine of Nature (1949).
Indeed, Danbys version might be thought the more
philosophical, in so far as he stages the matter as a
debate between Hooker and Hobbes.
Hellers philosophers do not include post-
structuralists, who might be specially mistrustful of
treating characters as if they were gures in a realist
novel. Sometimes her comments on character are sur-
prising and ill-supported, for instance when she asserts
that Macbeth never thinks before acting. Interpreters
of the play have usually viewed Macbeth, contrariwise,
as notably given to cogitation. Look, how our part-
ners rapt, Banquo exclaims, as Macbeth ponders the
Witches prophecy. In a famous soliloquy he assesses
the pros and cons and decides against killing Duncan;
it is his wife who prefers action to thought.
Also, The Time is Out of Joint contains a sequence
of casual errors, suggesting that some of the plays
have been read in haste. It is Mowbray, not Mortimer,
who is accused of killing Gloucester in Richard II.
It is Angelo, not Antonio, who is made the Dukes
deputy in Measure for Measure; in the same play, it is
Isabella, not Mariana, who is to marry the Duke. It is
Edgar, not Edmund or Albany, who disguises himself
as Poor Tom in King Lear.
In times when expertise is ever more specialized,
it is perhaps to be welcomed that Shakespearean texts
offer themselves as one site where a traditional intel-
lectual may express herself without hindrance. Even
so, professionals might have had something useful to
contribute.
Alan Sineld
Importexport
Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars, edited by Paul Patton and Terry Smith, Power
Publications, Sydney, 2001. 119 pp., US$10.95 pb., 1 86487 433 1.
In August 1999 Jacques Derrida, visiting Australia
for the rst time, presented two public seminars in
Sydney with the aim of introducing aspects of his post-
1990 work to a predominantly non-specialist audience.
Deconstruction Engaged is the collected transcripts of
these seminars, published to provide clear, systematic
and highly accessible introductions to recent issues in
Derridas thinking. Derrida is presented in discussion
with a panel of experts and his audience, covering
topics such as the mass media, visual arts, tech-
nology, justice and hospitality. The seminars also allow
Derrida several opportunities to offer his thoughts on
specically Australian political and cultural issues,
providing examples of deconstruction engaged with
contemporary political questions.
The discussions in Deconstruction Engaged bring
into focus a number of concerns that have been emerg-
ing in Derridas writing over the past decade. During
this time, Derridas work has undergone an impor-
tant shift, away from obscurities of his earlier texts,
towards more concrete engagements with such topics as
ethics, friendship, inheritance, technology, politics and
Marxism, in a phase that has been dubbed afrmative
deconstruction. The problem with this new political
focus is that, while Derrida may have claimed that
deconstruction has always functioned as a form of
radicalized political critique, its actual afrmative
political use is still open to serious question, as the
recent controversies over Specters of Marx (collected
in Michael Sprinkers Ghostly Demarcations, 1999)
amply illustrate.
Similar questions haunt Deconstruction Engaged.
Some of the most interesting debate in the seminars
occurs when Derrida is asked to comment on contem-
porary political issues in Australia, particularly as he
seems remarkably averse to engaging in such debates.
In discussions with Terry Smith over the spectrality of
the media, Derrida details how, in an interview with
an Australian newspaper, he was reluctantly drawn into
the debate over the conditions of indigenous Austral-
ians and the propriety of the Australian government
offering a formal apology for past injustices. Derrida
states that he tried to avoid the question by telling the
reporters that this is a problem for Australians, for the
Australian government to take on its own responsibil-
ity, before nally conceding that it might be better if
the government did apologize, but that is up to you.
So much for Derridas bold call in Specters for a New
International, which promised fearlessly to advocate
the extension of human rights and international law
beyond the sovereignty of States!
In another instance, Penelope Deutscher asks
Derrida how his recent writing on hospitality could
be applied to issues surrounding Australias history
of colonial violence. Derrida pauses briey to address
this issue, considering how those who continue to
benet from the history of colonialism must also
accept responsibility for the original violence and
exploitation, and not simply dismiss it as occurring
before our time. This seems a fruitful area, but
Derrida does not follow through; and before we know
it, he leaves these questions aside and is off again on
a long, introspective pondering on the concepts of res-
ponsibility and decision, and his point is lost in a sea
of wordplay and garbled sentence construction.
The panel approach adopted for these seminars
has its advantages and disadvantages. At its best, this
interaction helped to break down Derridas tendency
to verbosity, allowing brief yet thorough excursions
into Derridas recent thought. Terry Smiths chapters,
covering Derridas views on visual art, technology and
media, achieve this admirably. Smith engages in a suc-
cinct discussion with Derrida over the central concerns
of Derridas publications such as Memoirs of the Blind,
The Truth in Painting and Specters of Marx, and draws
useful parallels between the themes of these works
and those of Derridas earlier publications, such as Of
Grammatology and Writing and Difference. However,
some of the panel members seem to get carried away
when sharing the limelight with Derrida. The worst
offender here is David Willis, who seems desperate
to out-Derrida Derrida by launching into a painfully
convoluted and self-referential question, opening with
the statement: By way of a parenthetical introduction,
Id like to say that the question I am going to put to
Jacques Derrida are double. Ill repeat it: the question
I am going to put to Jacques Derrida are double.
Willis probably thought he was offering a sophisticated
deconstructive performance, but it reads as if he forgot
to run a spellcheck.
James Smith
Derrida: the movie
Derrida, directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering
Kofman, 2002.
If, like Jacques Derrida, what you would really like to
see in a documentary about a philosopher is their sex
life, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofmans portrait is
likely to disappoint. While Derrida himself repeatedly
associates the idea of autobiography in philosophy
with indecency, Derrida remains thoroughly prim and
proper. The tone is set when Derrida himself concedes
that, were a camera crew not following him around,
he would probably be philosophizing in his dressing
gown.
We do not see Derridas dressing gown in Derrida.
Nor do we see anything else which satisfyingly matches
what Derrida himself claims he would like to see in a
documentary that is so say, those things which the
philosophers writings exclude. One reason for this is
fairly straightforward, though you would not know it
from watching the lm: Derrida maintained the right
to the nal cut. And one of the scenes that he appar-
ently dispensed with? The scene in which he demanded
the right to the nal cut.
There is a simple dishonesty to the lms failure
to acknowledge this self-censorship on the part of its
subject, but it really only masks a more fundamental
disingenuousness in the lmmakers original con-
ception. Dick has said, We discussed how we didnt
want this to be a primer or a standard biopic. We did
want this lm to be very ambitious theoretically; to
give a sense of Derridas work and at the same time
make it cinematic and pleasurable, and funny as well.
Funny it sometimes is, though this owes much to the
subject himself, who is urbane and twinkly. But the
gap between primer and biopic, and the failure to
nd a third term, hobble the lm. In fact, rather than
neither, the lmmakers have opted for both, watering
down both theory and portrait in the process.
The theory appears in discrete, paragraph-sized
chunks, read in air-hostess tones over off-the-peg
poetic imagery. These are unlikely to prime anyone
for anything except boredom. One wonders what the
lmmakers would have done had the subject of their
lm been an important particle physicist read the
rst paragraph of some of his major research papers?
The lm seems gently to mock the New York students
who attend one of Derridas lectures in the hope that
hearing his philosophy in his own voice, sheer prox-
imity even, will elucidate the texts; but Derrida itself
seems secretly to share this hope and remains incapable
of reecting on what relationship the man might have
to the writing which is surely its only justication.
A more ambitious lm might have rejected using the
texts at all, or indeed any justication of its subjects
inherent importance, but there is a thoroughly pre-
philosophical awe for Derrida and deconstruction at
the heart of Dick and Ziering Kofmans project.
According to Dick, Derridas very rigorous. If you
ask him a question he will address it from all angles
and these answers would be very fascinating, but
sometimes they would go on for ten minutes, and you
knew you couldnt use it. Where the knowledge that
a ten-minute take couldnt be used might come from,
or whether it is knowledge at all, is never clear. For
Dick and Ziering Kofman, documentary lm seems
to have no inherent philosophical, or political, content
of its own everything is considered from the point
of view of a naively conceived layman audience, and
adjusted accordingly. The lmmakers enjoy the conceit
of lming Derrida watching rushes of the lm, and
then lming him watching himself watching. This
kind of self-consciousness is repeatedly substituted
for thinking. When, at the end of a lecture on recon-
ciliation and forgiveness, a South African student
suggests to Derrida that his position covertly justies
the indifference of the white middle class to which his
audience belongs, Derridas answer is cut short and
he is allowed to reconstruct the argument later, at his
leisure and away from any more difcult questions.
Derrrida is certainly not likely to face any difcult
questions from his biographers (unless which phil-
osopher would you like to have been your mother?
counts). Ziering Kofman characterizes her approach
in the following way: You know, its nice to listen to
philosophy. Even if its not in your training, its nice to
have someone sit down and say, Hey what does love
mean? And indeed, her questions throughout seem to
construct Derrida as a kind of exotic, jeu desprit ing
philosophe, of the type from which Derrida himself
has so clearly distanced himself in his comments on
Sartre. Her questions seek to draw out the kind of
aperus that would be at home in Alain de Botton,
which is to say musings on the Big Questions: phil-
osophy is to be a virtuoso improvisation on familiar
themes. Derridas own occasional irritation with this
is mostly manifested in long, rambling digressions on
why he cannot answer the question.
If there is an indecent omission in Derrida, it is
its failure to conceive of the biographical philosopher
outside of a thoroughly nineteenth-century framework
of unexplained genius. There is no reection, for
example, on the peculiar history of deconstruction in
the United States, where much of the lm takes place.
Nor do any other contemporary philosophers gain
more than a mention a real layman would assume
that Derridas contemporaries were Kant, Hegel and
Heidegger. Towards the end of the lm, a few other
talking heads appear in order to detach Derrida from
his background and biography entirely his brother
explaining how he just doesnt know where Jacques
gets all these ideas and the philosopher nally
remains, like Ryuichi Sakamotos much-praised sound-
track, a polite enigma.
Michael Sperlinger
www.radicalphilosophy.com
NEWS
Strategies for language?
B
eing a modern linguist is a pretty rotten business. Applications to study modern
languages in UK universities have fallen by over a third in the last decade.
Whilst Spanish and to a lesser extent Italian have fared reasonably well,
other languages are in rapid decline. University applications have directly reected
falling numbers taking languages at UK secondary schools. In 1996 there were over
50,000 A-level entries in modern languages; in 2002 the gure had fallen to just over
30,000. Overall GCSE entries in 2002 were higher than in the previous year, though
in French and German they were down by 8,500 and 9,000 respectively. Fewer GCSE
entries means fewer A-Level candidates and fewer university applicants. The Arts and
Humanities Research Board knows that it is not funding enough postgraduate student-
ships in modern languages to enable us to train researchers and future university teach-
ers who would be equipped to replace staff due to retire over the next few years; but
for the moment nothing is being done to remedy the situation. Whereas multilingualism
is the norm in most of the world, the UK is becoming more resolutely monoglot than
ever. English shields us against an outside world perceived as hostile at a time when
anxieties about immigration and the fear of terrorism are rife. In consequence, language
departments across the country are shrinking. In the most successful departments,
vacancies are frozen; the ones perceived by their vice-chancellors to be unsuccessful
are being closed down or limping on under the threat of closure.
The UK governments National Languages Strategy, launched in December 2002, states
that the government is committed to improving language learning, and that it aims to
increase the number of people studying languages in further and higher education as well
as in other contexts ranging from primary school to the workplace. The strategys aim is to
create the appetite for learning whilst broadening and enriching the options available, and
it outlines a number of measures designed to achieve this. The language assistants scheme
will be extended and revitalized; a qualication in Teaching a Foreign Language will
be created; voluntary recognition systems and support networks will be established; every
primary school will have a language coordinator, and by the end of the decade all primary
pupils will have the opportunity to study at least one foreign language; the use of informa-
tion technology will be extended; a National Director for Languages will be appointed; and
all this will be supported by 10 million per year direct investment. But these measures go
together with one major change which is causing concern among language teachers at all
levels: it will no longer be compulsory for pupils to study a language for GCSE.
The National Languages Strategy is an object lesson in the new political discourse.
Everything is proposed in terms of opportunities, options, entitlements and exibility. In
a modern liberal democracy we know that coercion is wrong, so instead of forcing people
to study a language the strategy is geared towards motivating and creating the appetite
to learn. In the supermarket of life, the National Languages Strategy adds to the dazzling
range of options and opportunities available to us, and no choice is compulsory. You would
have to be a moron or, heaven forbid, a socialist to object to this extension of our options.
The language of choice and entitlement is so powerful that it undercuts any possible dissent.
How could anyone deny that the freedom to choose is an absolute good and a fundamental
democratic right? This discourse is subtly insidious because it brooks no opposition; its
permissiveness is in its way deeply intolerant. Furthermore, we can see here how the
rhetoric of education policy reects the same ideological condence apparent in the War
Against Terrorism: it is all about freedom and choice, and the willingness to stamp out any
form of opposition to it.
To say that everyone is entitled to learn a language is the same as saying that no one
is required to. There is no doubt at all that the National Languages Strategy will result
in fewer pupils studying a language to GCSE level. This may not entirely be a bad thing.
Some pupils who have no interest in or aptitude for languages will be able to study subjects
which may suit them better. The governments wager is that those pupils who exercise
their entitlement will be more committed and therefore more likely to continue to study
languages at A-level and beyond. Inevitably, though, the attempt to increase the numbers
studying languages in higher and further education by decreasing the numbers learning
them for GCSE involves a risk, perhaps even a reckless one. In consequence it is hard to
be enthusiastic about the National Languages Strategy. The introduction of top-up fees in
2006 is likely to weaken the position of language degrees even further, since most of them
are four-year courses rather than three, so the debt incurred by students who enrol for them
will be higher than for other subjects. The National Languages Strategy may work; but if it
doesnt, by the time a new strategy can be formulated it will already be too late for many
language departments.
Does this really matter? Since I teach in a French department it wont be surprising that
I think it does. One of the disappointing elements about the National Languages Strategy
is that, whilst insisting repeatedly on the importance of language learning and the govern-
ments commitment to it, it fails to make a coherent case for why anyone should bother.
After all, we know full well that English is on the way to becoming a universal language.
We pay lip service to lamenting the decline in language skills, but lets be honest: it suits
us very well. English is the medium of global capitalism; and however we align ourselves
politically, we endorse the new imperialism whenever we take for granted that we can
order our coffee in English when in Rome or on a Greek island. The use of English is not
ideologically neutral; it is tied to the exercise of economic power which forces the other to
speak in our language.
The National Languages Strategy lacks any sense that the study of languages is and
should be an intellectual undertaking rather than only the acquisition of a useful transfer-
able skill. One of the major achievements of university modern languages departments over
recent decades has been their role in studying and propagating the ideas of an imposing
array of thinkers whose work has gone on to be a key inuence in numerous other disci-
plines thinkers such as Bakhtin, Adorno, Habermas, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan,
Levinas, Lyotard, Deleuze, Gramsci, Vattimo or Agamben. By reading such authors in
their original languages and intellectual contexts, modern linguists have a perspective on
their work which has been indispensable. In general, whether modern linguists are engaged
in traditional scholarship or innovative criticism, the key issue is the relation to cultural,
intellectual and linguistic otherness. This is not to say that language learning does not
also provide a valuable transferable skill with important consequences for commerce and
industry. But language learning constantly revolves around the difculties of translation and
communication; and in both teaching and research, language departments are involved in a
particularly acute way with the problem of encounter with the other.
Like many others involved in teaching languages, I am deeply anxious that the govern-
ments National Languages Strategy will not succeed in encouraging more people to study
foreign languages and cultures. The measures it outlines are no doubt well meant; but it
is hard not to be lled with gloom when one of the key means of increasing numbers in
higher and further education turns out to involve allowing the number of those taking
GCSEs to fall even further. Moreover, whilst the strategy offers a potpourri of measures, it
gives little sign that the government has any real view of why it is important now, still, to
learn languages.
Colin Davis
OBITUARY
Ian Craib, 19452002
O
an Craib, who has died at the age of fty-seven, had a long association with
Radical Philosophy. He wrote extensively for the journal in the early years,
especially through his reviews, and was a member of the editorial group in
those days. He was appointed as a lecturer in sociology at Essex University in 1973, and
was promoted to a chair in 1997. Despite his personal modesty, the continuous stream
of books, articles and reviews which he authored over more than twenty-ve years
earned great respect both in and beyond the academy.
A mark of his originality was his commitment to
asking the large and important questions which neces-
sarily transgress disciplinary boundaries. In Ians case,
philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis and social theory
were all called upon in the making of his contribu-
tion. He considered himself to be at the margins of
sociology, but perhaps because of this he had a deeper
understanding than most of both its indispensability
and its limitations. His early work most notably his
rst book, Existentialism and Sociology explored
the relationships between philosophy and sociology, a
connection to which he remained committed through-
out his career. Through the 1970s his advocacy of a
humanist Marxism, inspired by Sartres existentialism, sustained his political activism,
rst in the International Socialists, and then (uncomfortably) within the Labour Party.
In his work as a sociology teacher and writer, he resisted the tide of structuralist
thought which swept the humanities and social science disciplines at that time. In a
characteristic critique of one T. Benton, he argued:
The power of theory is its ability to transform consciousness, to change people not neces-
sarily by intellectual conviction but by enabling them to grasp their own world and their
own experience in a radically new way and to become aware of ways of changing the world.
If Marxist theory is to do this, then it must be able to live inside everyday representations
of the world, to take them as the starting point of its argument, and it must be able to
transform those representations into an adequate understanding of the world. (RP 10, Spring
1975, p. 29)
By the end of the 1970s, a combination of personal difculties and political despair had
provoked a retreat from organized politics into a prolonged personal and intellectual engage-
ment with psychoanalysis.
In the mid-1980s Ian became a trainee psychotherapist, but he still did not abandon his
commitment to social theorizing. The rst synthesis of these twin engagements was his
Psychoanalysis and Social Theory (1989). It was the subtitle of this work The Limits of
Sociology that signalled Ians most abiding sociological argument. The shift from existen-
tialism to psychoanalysis turned out to be a way of bringing new intellectual resources to
maintain the central concern of his earlier humanism: the claim of the inner life of indi-
viduals to be respected and defended from reductive simplications. Using an image offered
by one of his patients, he acknowledged that we might eventually be able, as sociologists, to
explain the hand of cards each of us is dealt in life. But much depends on how that hand
is played, and there is something imponderable and wonderful about the creativity indi-
viduals show in surviving against the odds. Intellectual approaches which fail to recognize
this are to be opposed because they threaten to close down human possibilities.
The 1980s saw Ian swimming against powerful currents of thought. In the face of
fashionable denunciations of large-scale theorizing and avant-garde dismissals of the
sociological classics, he published extensively on sociological theory. His Modern Social
Theory (1984) was an outstanding example of his ability to communicate complex and
difcult ideas in a direct and accessible way, but still conveying the sense of excitement
and bewilderment of never quite grasping them. Intended as student texts, they were
immensely successful and valued as such, but they were also more than is commonly
understood by that. Ian both demonstrated and argued for the importance of engaging with
the major thinkers of the past if we are to understand both the present and its thought. His
Classical Social Theory (1997) made this case eloquently. But these were more than just
textbooks in another important sense: they were an extension of Ians central commitment
to his role as a teacher. In them one gets a glimpse of his distinctive, challenging but still
empathic educational philosophy.
At the same time, Ians interest in psychoanalysis deepened. He trained as a group psy-
chotherapist, qualifying in 1986, and continuing to work as a psychotherapist in the local
NHS alongside his job as university teacher. His therapeutic practice was also a source
of inspiration for his thinking about the relationship between psychoanalysis and social
thought, and he began to make distinctive contributions both to the specialist psycho-
analytic literature, and to the understanding of critical interconnections between the two
disciplines. Written through his rst diagnosis and operation for cancer, The Importance of
Disappointment (1994) was and remains Ians deepest and most personal statement.
But this public presence, signicant as it has been, is perhaps not what Ian would
most wish to have recalled. He came to Essex University in the mid-1970s and could
hardly have found a more stimulating or congenial environment. He latterly paid tribute
to the policy of a department unafraid to recruit staff from its fringes and from other
disciplines. He engaged passionately in the political and theoretical debates of the time,
and the subsequent retreat from organized politics was not an abandonment of politics as
such. He recently recognized that while trying to be a serious Marxist he had always
been a very unserious Marxist: closer, perhaps, to anarcho-syndicalism (though, typically
Ian, he added that he wasnt quite sure what this meant!). True to his early humanism, his
politics expressed itself in his later years in his devotion to teaching and to his therapeutic
work, as well as in his writing. For him, the insistence on opposition, argument and
thought were what had given us such limited freedoms as we enjoy, and it was in evoking
and educating these capacities in himself and others that his political values continued to
express themselves.
He stressed the importance, in therapy, as well as in the process of becoming a
sociologist, of learning to tolerate anxiety, contradiction, paradox and uncertainty and
inner conict and to make something of it all. His teaching was a process of challenging,
sometimes disconcerting, exploration of possibilities. He could not have been more at odds
with the prevailing ethos of higher education under New Labour, according to which its
value is dened in terms of enhanced lifetime earnings, and every course must have its
predetermined aims, objects and outcomes. Paradoxically, for one who insisted on the
unachievability of identity, Ian was always and inimitably himself, a colleague of unfal-
tering integrity: implacably rigorous, usually iconoclastic, wickedly insightful, but uniquely
honourable, generous and forgiving. His characteristically impish, subversive chuckle never
left him, even in the dark days of his nal illness.
Ted Benton

Radical Philosophy 119, 2003

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