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R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y

a journal of socialist and feminist philosophy

162 CONTENTS july/august 2010

Editorial collective
Claudia Aradau, Matthew Charles, Commentary
David Cunningham, Howard Feather,
Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie, Stewart Inside a Charging Bull: Iceland, One Year On
Martin, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne, Haukur Mr Helgason . .................................................................................. 2
Stella Sandford, Chris Wilbert
Contributors
Haukur Mr Helgason teaches philosophy article
at the Iceland Academy of the Arts. He is a
founding member of the experimental literary Everybody Thinks: Deleuze, Descartes and Rationalism
band Nhil. Alberto Toscano .............................................................................................. 8
Alberto Toscano teaches in the Department of
Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London. Imaginative Mislocation: Hiroshimas Genbaku Dome,
He is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of Ground Zero of the Twentieth Century
an Idea (Verso, 2010).
Matthew Charles recently completed a PhD Matthew Charles........................................................................................... 18
at the Centre for Research in Modern European
Philosophy, Middlesex University, Speculative
Experience and History: Walter Benjamins dossier Universities
Goethean Kantianism.
Barbara Cassin is a director of research The Performative without Condition, a University sans appel
at CNRS (Centre Lon Robin, University Barbara Cassin and Philippe Bttgen......................................................... 31
of ParisIV Sorbonne), author of Leffet
sophistique (1995) and editor of Vocabulaire The University and the Plan: Reflections from Vienna.......................... 38
Europen des Philosophies (Seuil/Le Robert,
2004). Case Study From Fiasco to Carnival: The End of Philosophy
Philippe Bttgen is a director of research at Middlesex?............................................................................................... 40
at CNRS (Laboratoire dtudes sur les
Monothismes). His books include Lire Michel Occupation.................................................................................................... 46
de Certeau: La Formalit des pratiques (with
Christian Jouhaud von Klostermann, 2008). Westminster, Sussex, Kings . .............................................................. 47

reviews
David Chandler, Hollow Hegemony: Rethinking Global Politics, Power and
Resistance
Stuart Elden, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty
R.B.J. Walker, After the Globe, Before the World
Copyedited and typeset by illuminati
www.illuminatibooks.co.uk Peter Hitchcock . ........................................................................................... 48
Layout by Peter Osborne, Matthew Charles Perry Anderson, The New Old World
and David Cunningham
Michael Newman.......................................................................................... 52
Printed by Russell Press, Russell House,
Bulwell Lane, Basford, Nottingham NG6 0BT Peter D. Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism
Bookshop distribution Mark McNally................................................................................................. 56
UK: Central Books,
115 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN Jean-Franois Lyotard, Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History
Tel: 020 8986 4854 David van Dusen .......................................................................................... 57
USA: Ubiquity Distributors Inc.,
607 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217 Ben Fine, Theories of Social Capital: Researchers Behaving Badly
Tel: 718 875 5491 John Michael Roberts................................................................................... 59
Cover image: Solidarity Vote Christian Kerslake, Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy: From Kant
for Middlesex Philosophy, Porto, 2010 to Deleuze
Joe Hughes.................................................................................................... 61

News
Beyond Copenhagen? World Peoples Conference on Climate Change
Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd.
www.radicalphilosophy.com and the Rights of Mother Earth, Cochabamba, 1922 April 2010
Fuad Rahmat.................................................................................................. 63

Radical Philosophy Ltd


Commentary

Inside a charging bull


Iceland, one year on

Haukur Mr Helgason

A
fter Icelands three banks collapsed in October 2008 a bankruptcy bigger
than Lehmann Brothers in a republic of 300,000 inhabitants the public
overthrew a neoliberal government through mass protest, precipitating a general
election. On election day, 25 April 2009, the conservative head of Icelands public radio
newsroom sighed his relief: Judging from the atmosphere this winter a revolution was
foreseeable in spring, some sort of revolution that something entirely different from
what we are used to would take over. Now we know better.1
We certainly do. Whenever someone mentions IceSave, an angel falls on an elf
and they both die. That pretty much does justice to the tedium amassed as this single
issue drags on: the debate about compensation for money lost by 300,000 British and
Dutch depositors has stifled any more radical discourse about change in Iceland for
almost a year. Totalling around 10 per cent of the debt accumulated through the good
years, the IceSave saving accounts scheme was established by Landsbanki in 2007,
four years after its privatization, in order to solve the banks liquidity problems, as
investors had become sceptical about its foundations. As democracy had given way to
finance, Icelands banks were at the time directly involved in every sphere of society.
Construction of a music hall in Reykjavk city centre, the cost of which was estimated
as around 2 per cent of the countrys GDP, had come to a standstill, but as soon as
the IceSave accounts started luring in customers with their promise of high yields,
construction began again, in full swing.2
Two narratives now compete for the interpretation of the situation or more
precisely, a narrative and a vision. According to the narrative upheld by the current
government, its a story of Pinocchio getting high with Icarus: whether seduced by
flat-screen televisions, large jeeps or yachts and jets (expensive drugs and prostitutes
remain at most alluded to), people fell for greed and hubris. The most excessive ones
must do some soul-searching and many must show humility, according to PM Jhanna
Sigurdardttir.3 It is time to grow up, take responsibility and compensate for the
damage we did in our drunken stupor. On the other hand, the vision upheld by former
mayor, former prime minister, former Central Bank manager and now newspaper editor
David Oddsson, and most members of his anti-EU republican Independence Party, sets
off with a gesture of dismissal: obviously something went wrong but now is no time
to dwell on the past, for Iceland is under siege! As the UK and the Netherlands demand
compensation, David has found his Goliath. What this country needs, his admirers
exclaim, is a Churchill!
Factually, neither account is false. Yes, those were greedy times. And yes, states seek
to preserve their interests. The original IceSave contract was negotiated in June 2009
by a diplomat assisted by a young UK-educated philosopher. The government at first

 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 2 ( Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 010 )
celebrated the conclusion, but the diplomats own description of the terms Iceland is
taking on the sins of Europe, like Jesus on the crucifix4 did not convince the public,
nor the unruly faction of the Left-Green Movement, as social democrats refer to
their anti-capitalist partners in government. The sins of Europe refers to the general
understanding that as the Icelandic banks operated according to European regulation,
as well as under British and Dutch surveillance, Iceland was not solely responsible for
their catastrophic failure. Iceland must, however, drink that bitter cup of restoring faith
in the whole banking system, which was considered at stake. Whether seen as lack of
vigour or willingness to negotiate, the eagerness to conclude the matter can in part be
ascribed to, if not Schadenfreude, then at least a pseudo-Christian sense of guilt and
remorse: this is what you get for succumbing to the evil right so willingly and for so
long.
These two factually coherent but unsatisfying accounts remain caught in a loop of
incessant but immobile talk, prolonged in January 2010 by the presidents veto of the
contract known as IceSave II, and a subsequent referendum last March. This 10 per cent
of the countrys debt still takes up 90 per cent of the debate. Why?

The f**k-the-foreigners law


Apart from ordinary local polemics, what makes the IceSave issue such a dilemma
is Icelandic authorities very first reaction to the collapse of the countrys banks: in
October 2008, the Independency Party-led government overnight pushed an emer-
gency law through parliament, fully securing all deposits in local accounts, while
unambiguously signalling to the UK Finance Ministry that foreign depositors would
get the leftovers at best. With the legislation, known among legislators as the f**k-the-
foreigners law, 5 the right-wing government made sure that local capitalists would not
bear an unnecessarily hefty burden of the crisis, buying them out, as one journalist put
it, of any subsequent social upheaval. The emergency legislation has mostly remained
beyond debate and no one has so far had to justify the policy behind it. If the matter
momentarily surfaces it is brushed off as inevitable: Anything else would have caused
unprecedented riots. In other words: You, the debt-ridden majority of no or little
savings, have already joined Europes precarious low-wage workforce, so that the upper
layers wont get angry at us. The anger of the upper layers is of a magnitude that you
cannot fathom (they have our private phone numbers), whereas your anger (noticeable
only when thousands of you gather and set fire to Christmas trees) is already under
control. Now, go serve the tourist industry (and dont leave your smile at home ;-).

The referendum
On 6 March 2010, a referendum was held on an improved IceSave deal, IceSave II.
Improvements included an upper limit on annual payments, set at 6 per cent of GDP.
The deal was rejected by a 94 per cent majority of those who voted. The 40 per cent
of voters who shunned the referendum included Prime Minister Sigurdardttir and
Minister of Finance Sigfsson. They and most of their supporters saw the process as a
silly spectacle, orchestrated by the opposition, spearheaded by David Oddssons all but
militarized daily, Morgunbladid, to divert attention from their own responsibility.6
Factually the vote was about details will we accept this particular deal, with its
particular interest rates and terms of payments, or will we negotiate further? However,
the deal being voted on was already obsolete at the time of the referendum, as Iceland
had already received yet another incrementally better offer. Voting yes would have
been absurd and so the republics first referendum became a purely gestural event,
a spectacle of solidarity aimed at the foreign press but solidarity against what?
According to the right, against foreign oppressors, of course.


Much is at stake. The scheduled return to normality in Iceland is dependent on IMF
loans, which are conditioned by traditional structural adjustments (cuts in welfare,
health etc.) and a solution to the IceSave crisis. Some also perceive the solution of
the matter as a criterion for Icelands will and capability to participate in the EU, for
which it has applied. But the anti-EU right-wing opposition is not the only opposition
to the deals drafted. The unruly faction of the Left-Green Movement has consistently
opposed IMF cooperation. Their reasoning, however, does not reach a wide audience.
That is not merely due to the media being pro-capital, which they are, but lies deeper.
In short, Asterix has been available in Icelandic translations far longer than Immanuel
Kant. Icelanders have been raised on a thorough conviction of their own singularity,
a sentiment that runs deeper in public discourse than any universal ideal.7 It is thus
mainly thanks to international media and their fortunate oversimplifications that the
referendum has been interpreted in terms of a universal anti-capitalist principle at all. A
Financial Times leader was far from unique in warning that the UK must settle a deal,
for the wrath of the Icelandic public raises the prospect of citizens elsewhere refusing
to pay for public debts seen as someone elses fault.8 The implications of a people given
legal authority to revolt against bank bailouts are explosive. What started, partly, as
a misinterpretation, an exaggeration of the referendums factual content, has the retro
active potential to become true.

How to wash invisible hands


While this single matter all but blocks out the attention of the media, Iceland undergoes
complete restructuring from top to bottom. On the one hand, the government imple-
ments IMF strategies, making severe cuts in health care and education, paving the way
for the countrys first private hospital (focusing on liposuction tourism), minimizing
public broadcast services, and so on. On the other hand, private enterprise is taking
care of its own. When Icelands banks collapsed new ones were established overnight.
As Geir H. Haarde, then prime minister, declared in October 2008, This is not
nationalization meaning, this is done purely for the sake of private interests. Funded
by the state, the new banks bought the old banks loans at a 50 per cent discount.9
One has already been handed over to creditors and investors; the others are set to be
re-privatized as soon as possible. While the 60 per cent of businesses are at the mercy
of the new banks, the government has no policy about their operations, or principled
criteria for default and resuscitations. As the banks go about their business, piecemeal
information gathers into a coherent image: those who already wore tailor-made suits
retain the lucrative parts of business, while those who never got out of their jeans and
sneakers employed, self-employed and unemployed alike foresee a future of paying
back the infinite tailors bill.10 Ministers respond that they understand peoples anger
and share their grievances. However, more is needed than legislation, regulation or
authorial orders, as Prime Minister Jhanna Sigurdardttir explained in her recent
address to the neoliberal lobby group Chamber of Commerce: Manipulation is now
considered the root cause of the bank collapse, and so the government remains abso-
lutely opposed to politicians manipulating the financial system this time round.
Let us make clear, before we move on to critique, that there is a world of difference
between the current administration and the 19912008 administrations led by the
Independence Party: the Independence Party and its businessmen are more akin to a
highly organized criminal gang than a political party. As they held legislative power
for so long, and as party members remain highly influential in business and society,
it is uncertain what legal action can or will be taken but let it suffice to describe
one example, important but not unique, as a hint of the corruption at stake. When
Landsbankis privatization was under way, in 2002, one man, Steingrmur Arason,
resigned from the privatization committee, citing differences in opinion. Only after the


2008 collapse did the nature of that difference become clear: Prime Minister David
Oddsson had decided, contrary to the committees advice, to hand Landsbanki over
to his allies, father and son Bjrglfur Thor and Bjrglfur Gudmundsson. Whereas
distributed ownership had up to that point been a catchphrase of privatization, a new
one was coined: ballast-investors. A single nautical metaphor seemingly moved the
issue beyond debate. The Bjrglfurs were said to have made their fortune with a beer
brewery in St Petersburg, and so had the financial means to provide the required ballast.
In 2009, however, it was revealed that half the purchase fee had been borrowed from
the other recently privatized bank, Kaupthing, the managers of which were reluctant
but gave in to political pressure. When both banks were returned, insolvent, into
state hands in 2008, father and son had not paid back a single krna of the loan. In
retrospect, the whole procedure amounts to an elected public official lending a bank to
his friends for a few years, to have some fun go buy yourselves an English football
team. Meanwhile, the debt collected through
Landsbankis IceSave accounts alone, the
payment of which Oddsson now vehemently
opposes through his newspaper, amounts
to more than sixty times the purchase
price the father and son pretended to pay
for the whole bank in 2003. The damage
done by the bank reaches further still, as
has recently been revealed: a great deal of
the Icelandic banks income in the twelve
months preceding their collapse was derived
from short-selling Icelandic currency that
is, essentially betting on the diminishing
total worth of the Icelandic economy.11 And
diminish it did.
There is no reason to suspect the current
government of any such corruption. It has,
however, taken on empirically verifying
Slavoj ieks postulate that whereas
conservative parties tend to represent some
particular (old) money, social democrats
are more apt to represent capital as such.
Minister of Finance Sigfsson, head of the
Left-Green Movement, represents the values
of ardent industriousness and integrity.
In spring 2009, he arrived at government
negotiations driving an ageing Volvo.
Meanwhile, the silent, dignified proletarian
Prime Minister Sigurdardttir serves as
the symbolic guarantor of fairness under
their insignia measures can be taken that would cause outrage if accompanied with
MBA portfolios and the stupid glee of their holders. But no matter how socialist their
aura, the fundamental political decision not to interfere with how the insolvent banks
redistribute the countrys wealth may be the biggest single act of laissez-faire imple-
mentation in Icelands economy yet. What remains left, as capitalism is brought back to
life with injections of public funds, are compassionate utterances of grief and scolding,
better defined as poetry than politics. Poetry in the pre-modern, romantic sense; poetry
before Rimbaud or Walt Whitman; poetry, to paraphrase Sren Kierkegaard, as so much
ornamental boo-hoo.


Letting off steam?
Kierkegaard famously elucidated the nature of poetry by analogy to an execution
device: a brazen bull-shaped kettle designed for the Sicilian tyrant Phalaris. The victim
was led through a door into the belly of the bull, the door shut, and fire set beneath,
roasting the prisoner inside. The diabolic detail of the design, however, was a system of
brass tubes attached to the bulls head, which turned the victims screams into the ten-
derest, most pathetic, most melodious of bellowings.12 Analogously, noted Kierkegaard,
the poets agony, by virtue of his expressive nature, sounds like music to others ears.
And, analogously still, we are all poets now. The lid on the social kettle is shut triple-
tight, and the pressure inside continues to build.13 Inside this kettle that unites us, you
have the right to remain silent, but anything you say can and will be interpreted as a
boo or a boo-hoo.
In his book about the Iraq invasion, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle,14 Slavoj iek
employs a well-known anecdote from Freud, about a man asked by his neighbour to
return a kettle he borrowed: Kettle? Which kettle? I borrowed no kettle, the kettle was
broken when I got it, and theres nothing wrong with it anyway. In much the same way,
for the last twenty or thirty years, whenever someone mentioned the kettle that confines
us, when someone spoke of capitalist oppression, a neoliberal Candide would be close
by to reply: Kettle? What kettle? There is no kettle, and anyway its a necessary kettle,
the best kettle you could be in, the temperatures just right, besides theres no way out,
so why bother? Kierkegaards analogy now describes a universal situation. Inside the
kettle: we, the people, linguistic creatures of flesh and blood. Outside the kettle: the
abstract tyrant of capitalism, operating beyond the symbolic field, beyond the scope of
words and meaning. Operating, that is, through violence.

No more Mr Niceland
In his splendidly researched Meltdown Iceland, Roger Boyes writes:

By the spring of 2009, with the days longer and wetter, Skuggahverfi [the subpolar Man
hattan district of Reykjavk] had become an urban graveyard. Someone had scrawled
CAPITALISM R.I.P. on the side of one of the buildings. Squatters had moved in. One group
converted an abandoned house into a cozy caf, the kind of place where you could strum a
guitar and check your e-mails. The Reykjavikers cheerfully welcomed the return of some
kind of life to Skuggahverfi. The developers, however, did not approve. So, just after Easter,
the riot police were sent in, men in black, with a chain saw to hack through barricaded doors
and pepper spray to disable the young squatters. The cleanup was nasty, brutal, and short: it
was the official end of Niceland.15

As Naomi Klein argues in The Shock Doctrine, from Haiti through Chile, Iraq and
China, neoliberalization has been backed up by brute physical force, at the hands of
police or military forces. On 11 March 2010, the end of Niceland noted by Boyes was
clearly underlined as the public prosecutor pressed the first charges related to the 2008
financial collapse. Corruption and fraud may have all but bankrupted the country, but
the people prosecuted were nine protesters, who in December 2008 entered the open
public benches of parliament, presumably to make noises. Among those select nine are
people who also took part in the lawless return of life to Skuggahverfi, so efficiently
quenched by police. Those nine are charged with threatening the safety, autonomy and
sanctity of parliament and public order, and face possible life imprisonment.
There was a famous moment during the collapse of communist East Germany, when
the Stalinist Erich Mielke, minister of state security head of the Stasi addressed
Congress to convince its members that the Stasi had a singularly good connection
to the public. It is November 1989. The members of congress laugh. Ja, wir haben
den Kontakt, ja wir haben den Kontakt, says Mielke, agitated. As he addresses the


congressmen as liebe Kameraden some openly oppose and ask him not to use that
expression. But thats a purely formal question, objects Mielke, and then makes history
with the painfully pathetic exclamation: Ich liebe doch, ich liebe doch alle Menschen!
Congress burst out in laughter. That emperor never found his clothes again.
The day after the IceSave referendum, leaders of all the countrys political parties
made a thoroughly Mielkian impression on television: almost every sentence uttered
invited ridicule. What set the situation apart, however, was that no one present was
capable of the mocking laughter something taken care of by reinstating the national
we in the 2009 election. The fact is, the current leader of the Independence Party
exclaimed,

what Ive been trying to point out is that youre wearing no clothes! Youre wearing no trou-
sers, no shirt, no coat As his mouth keeps talking his eyes are deeply anxious, begging as
it were: please mock me, make me stop. Now, thats quite daring of you, isnt it interrupts
Finance Minister Sigfsson, thats very daring of a man who hasnt worn any clothes for
years, the leader of a party where no one, as it seems, has had clothes on for decades! If we
are wearing no clothes, and Im not saying this is the case, but if we are wearing no clothes,
thats your clothes that were not wearing. In your position, I would stay quiet.

This effect of shared responsibility, this mutual hostage situation of critique, shows
democracy at its worst, democracy as a successful means to eliminate any outside.
As everyone involved has already invested in the route decided upon, there is no one
around to make the truth-gesture of pointing and laughing at the naked emperor, the
gesture assigned to a child in Hans Christian Andersons anecdote.

Notes
1. Editors blog, www.ruv.is/heim/frettir/innlendar/kosningar/2009/blogg/meira/store807/item261997/
(link is no longer active).
2. Culture journalist Hjlmar Sveinsson noted this first: http://blog.eyjan.is/hjalmarsveins-
son/2010/01/26/8/ (accessed 13 March 2010).
3. Prime Minister Jhanna Sigurdardttir at the Iceland Chamber of Commerces annual congress,
17 February 2010, www.forsaetisraduneyti.is/media/frettir/Vidskiptating.170210.pdf (accessed 13
March 2010).
4. Svavar Gestsson interview with Morgunbladid, 8 June 2009. Summary: http://eyjan.is/blog/2009/06/08/
svavar-thetta-er-leid-ut-ur-fataektinni-en-ekki-leidin-til-fataektar/ (accessed 13 March 2010).
5. According to historian Gudni T. Jhannesson, in Frttabladid, 10 March 2010: if deposits in the
Icelandic banks had not been guaranteed we would have faced chaos that was among the issues
at stake in the so-called emergency law, the fk the foreigners-law as some of those who authored
it called it amongst themselves. http://silfuregils.eyjan.is/2010/03/10/gudni-icesave-og-rikisabyrgdin/
(accessed 13 March 2010).
6. Cf. Egill Helgason, Reykjavk Grapevine, March 2010: http://grapevine.is/Features/ReadArticle/
David-Oddsson-On-The-Warpath (accessed 13 March 2010).
7. We are succeeding because we are different, and our track record should inspire the business estab-
lishment in other countries to re-examine their previous beliefs. President lafur Ragnar Grmsson,
How to Succeed in Modern Business: Lessons from the Icelandic Voyage, London, 3 May 2005.
Full transcript, www.grapevine.is/Home/ReadArticle/How-to-Succeed-in-modern-business-Olafur-
Ragnar-Grimsson-at-the-walbrook-club (accessed 13 March 2010).
8. Financial Times, 26 February 2010, www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a62e05b8230f-11df-a25f-00144feab49a.
html (accessed 13 March 2010).
9. http://eyjan.is/blog/2010/03/12/lan-voru-faerd-i-nyju-bankana-a-meira-en-helmingsafslaetti-
langmest-afskrifad-hja-arion/ (accessed 13 March 2010).
10. See, for example, http://eyjan.is/blog/2009/10/01/ar-lidid-fra-hruninu-audmennirnir-halda-enn-fyrir-
taekjum-sinum/ (accessed 13 March 2010).
11. Around 1 trillion ISK were supposedly gained through these short positions, or 56 billion at
current rates. http://eyjan.is/blog/2010/03/12/sedlabankinn-stod-ekki-vaktina-bankar-foru-offorsi-i-
gjaldeyriskaupum-foru-gegn-landi-og-thjod/ (accessed 13 March 2010).
12. The Works of Lucian of Samosata, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1905, ch. 28.
13. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2009, http://tarnac9.
files.wordpress.com/2009/04/thecominsur_booklet.pdf.
14. Slavoj iek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Verso, London, 2004.
15. Roger Boyes, Meltdown Iceland, Bloomsbury, London, 2009, p. 186.


Everybody thinks
Deleuze, Descartes and rationalism

Alberto Toscano

In his 1968 book Difference and Repetition, Gilles without presuppositions, a problem with an incon-
Deleuze famously stresses the violent, unnatural and testable Cartesian pedigree. But does philosophizing
shocking character of thought, counterposing his own without presuppositions surreptitiously mobilize certain
anti-representational philosophy of difference to what varieties of philosophical pre-understanding, or pre-
he depicts as a dogmatic, humanist image of thought. philosophical understanding? In particular, the chapter
In his own words: Everybody knows very well that on the image of thought anticipates the engagement
in fact men think rarely, and more often under the with Descartes in What is Philosophy? when it adum-
impulse of a shock than in the excitement of a taste brates, in what might be regarded as an anti-modernist
for thinking.1 vein, the theme of beginning in philosophy. Given the
In his commentary on Deleuze, Franois Zourabich- power and pervasiveness of the figure of Descartes as
vili has shown how this repudiation of the idea that the inceptor of modern philosophy, and the broadly
thought is coterminous with human nature, that think- anti-Cartesian orientation of Deleuzean philosophy, it
ing is a natural and constant exercise of human beings is particularly interesting to see this trope at work. Of
common sense, plays a pivotal role in Deleuzes course, the theme of presuppositions is also closely
association of thought with the notions of the outside linked to that of immanence, which might also be
and the event. In Zourabichvilis helpful summary: envisaged as something like an abandonment of all
thought affirms an absolute relation to exteriority, presuppositions. But is this what Deleuze is aiming
refuses the postulate of recognition, and affirms the at? Is the forsaking of presuppositions not instead
outside in this world: heterogeneity, divergence. When a gesture redolent of the Hegelian movement of the
philosophy renounces the activity of foundation, the concept which, whilst acknowledged as precursor of
outside abjures its transcendence and becomes imma- the project outlined in What is Philosophy?, remains
nent.2 Deleuzes sundering of the lineage of rationalism a definite rival for Deleuze? Is immanence marked by
(pitting Spinoza against Descartes) can accordingly be a certain relationship to presuppositions rather than an
understood as a split in the understanding of what it absence or repudiation of them? After all, for Deleuze
is to think in general, and to think being in particular. the singularity of philosophy should not be confused
In order to examine this radical division of what with its legislative autonomy and/or transcendence.
goes by the abridged name of rationalism, and what One might wonder in this regard whether the later
Deleuzes role is in the constitution of what some have development of the idea of a plane of immanence, for
seen as a kind of contemporary anti-Cartesian doxa instance in A Thousand Plateaus, is to be considered
in Continental philosophy and critical theory, 3 I will as an evacuation of presuppositions or on the contrary
focus on the relatively subtle changes in Deleuzes as a new use of presuppositions.
portrayal of Descartes as the purveyor of a dogmatic Deleuze distinguishes between objective and sub-
image of thought, and then move on to how Deleuze jective presuppositions. In the case of Descartes,
inflects and transforms the widespread condemnation according to Deleuze, we witness a kind of trade-off
of Descartess dualism. between the two forms of presupposition: Descartes
The chapter on the image of thought in Difference abandons objective presuppositions, which would
and Repetition clearly prefigures What is Philosophy? locate the concept of the Cogito within an objective
(written with Flix Guattari) in posing the problem of taxonomy of other concepts for instance, presuppos-
thought as the problem of beginning to philosophize ing rationality and animality in the definition of man

 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 2 ( Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 010 )
as a zoon logikon 4 for the sake of an intensification drama of the Meditations supposed to let the phil-
of subjective presuppositions. This, of course, is the osopher occupy? To use the terminology of What is
philosophical sin for which Deleuze chastises Des- Philosophy?, which conceptual persona are we dealing
cartes: going too fast into the arms of opinion, as he with? In a sense and we shall return to this feature
tries to escape the objective clutches of Aristotelian of Descartess role in Deleuzes overall characterization
scholasticism. What Descartess philosophy brings to of philosophical practice we are confronted with
the fore and what still powerfully abides, as Deleuze something like a degree-zero conceptual persona, a
notes, in Heideggers pre-ontological understanding persona without personality, the idiot, the everyman,
are subjective or implicit presuppositions contained the individual man endowed with his natural capac-
in opinions rather than concepts: it is presumed that ity for thought [as opposed to] the man perverted
everyone knows, independently of concepts, what is by the generalities of his time. Not a man without
meant by self, thinking, and being. 5 The subjective is qualities, but a man without presuppositions. The
here the site of a kind of cloaked anticipation, whereby critique of Descartes demonstrates the extent to which
the subject of opinion the one who tacitly knows just Deleuze is unequivocally opposed to any philosophical
what it is, or what it is like, to be a cogitating subject anthropology founded on the elaboration of a theory
underlies the seemingly purified subject engineered of thought as a universally held capacity. His objection
by the internal theatre of the Meditations: The pure is precisely to that implicit, subjective presupposition
self of the I think thus appears to be a beginning which takes the form of a natural capacity for thought
only because it has referred all its presuppositions back which allows philosophy to claim to begin, and to
to the empirical self. This critique of the epitome of a begin without presuppositions. And the paragon of
modern beginning in philosophy opens up the question such a natural capacity is to be found at the very
of the compatibility between the theme of immanence, start of the Discourse on Method:
so dear to Deleuze, and that of radical commence-
Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world:
ment, together with the repercussions of such a notion for everyone thinks himself so well endowed with
of commencement on his conceptions of subjectivity it that even those who are the hardest to please in
and the event. What is clear is that for Deleuzes everything else do not usually desire more of it than
philosophy beginning cannot simply take the guise of they possess. In this it is unlikely that everyone
a punctual caesura, a cut, an interruption, a wiping of is mistaken. It indicates rather that the power of
judging well and of distinguishing the true from the
the slate. Indeed, we could see in Deleuzes repudia-
false which is what we properly call good sense
tion of a certain modern notion of commencement his or reason is naturally equal in all men, and
distance from the Christological or messianic thread consequently that the diversity of our opinions does
that underlies much of the subjective and historico- not arise because some of us are more reasonable
political temporality of modernity. In Difference and than others but solely because we direct our thoughts
Repetition, Deleuze thus suggests the possibility that along different paths and do not attend to the same
things. For it is not enough to have a good mind; the
there is no true beginning in philosophy, or rather
main thing is to apply it well.9
that the true philosophical beginning in philosophy, or
rather the true philosophical beginning, Difference, is This passage weaves together an ascription of
in-itself already repetition. natural equality (everybody thinks) and a more-or-less
pedagogical teleology (good application and choosing
Common sense, good sense the right path). For Deleuze, such a dogmaticdidactic
But Descartes, the philosopher of radical commence- image of cognitive equality requires the participation
ment, is also the philosopher of representation par of both common sense, understood as the natural
excellence. In a manner that both resonates with accord of the faculties,10 and good sense, conceived
and diverges from Foucaults account in The Order as the teleological (and ultimately moral or normative)
of Things,6 and ignores the Derridean view of the determinant of such a natural usage. For Deleuze,
cogito as punctuated by a singular and unprecedented good sense is by nature eschatological, the prophet of
excess,7 Deleuze brusquely encapsulates this logic a final compensation or cancellation; it is an agency
of subjective presupposition in the following terms: of distribution (on the one hand, on the other hand);
Everybody knows, no one can deny, is the form of it does not negate difference. On the contrary, it
representation and the discourse of the representative.8 recognizes difference just enough to affirm that it
But who, and how, is the philosopher representing? negates itself, given sufficient extensity and time;
What place is this elaborate philosophical drama the common sense is static and points beyond itself to


good sense as the dynamic instance, which takes Gramsci, this pedagogy is intrinsically linked to the
as its point of departure a difference at the origin of fate of the political party, the Modern Prince and to
individuation; they distinguish each other like recog- the cultural project of hegemony (defined as the task
nition from prediction, like a qualitative synthesis of of overcoming a determinate common sense to
diversity and a quantitative synthesis of difference. create another which is more adherent to the concep-
This de-differentiating, distributive, temporal function tion of the world of the leading group).12 As Guido
of good sense also has political overtones: Good sense Liguori notes, Gramsci in this regard considers the
is the ideology of the middle classes who recognize Enlightenment error to consist in inferring from the
themselves in equality as an abstract product.11 commonality of philosophy (the belief that everybody
On the issue of the natural equality of thought, is a philosopher) the idea that men simply are equal.
as it transpires from the Discourse on Method, one The gap between capacity and pedagogy is here the
might confront the Deleuzean critique of the image space for the political becoming of equality, which in
of thought with an entire radical tradition of political Gramsci takes unabashedly vanguardist tones.
anthropology or egalitarian rationalism: with Feuer- In this regard, and contrary to the Deleuzean image
bachs definition of man in terms of his power to think of common sense merely as a bulwark for philosophies
the infinite; with Chomskys anarchist and overtly Car- of transcendence and authority, Gramscis philosophy of
tesian elaborations on the notion of human nature; as praxis is aimed at the politicization of the category of
well as with the cognitive or intellectual egalitarianism common sense, and at envisaging it as the terrain of
of recent authors such as Rancire and Virno. A brief cultural, political and pedagogical transformation:
but illuminating comparison can be made here with This means that common sense is an equivocal, con-
the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, in which tradictory, polymorphous concept and that to refer to
the couple good sense/common sense is also operant, it as evidence of truth is nonsense common sense
and given a valence which is at once epistemological is crassly misoneistic and conservative, and to have
and political. managed to inject it with a new truth is proof of the
force of expansion and evidence of such a truth.13
Gramsci famously starts from a thesis of generic
intellectuality. In the Eleventh Notebook, he bases this Common sense is thus treated as in a sense pre-
thesis on a difference in degree (quantitative) and not intentional and, as Liguori notes, Gramscis position
in kind (qualitative), between the spontaneous philoso- is anti-subjectivist in the sense of cautioning against
phy of the masses (or i semplici, the simple ones) and a belief in the spontaneous equality of minds and
elaborate world-views or philosophies proper. This instead advocating the necessity of a political subject
is why it is necessary, as he puts it, to demonstrate to organize the passage from mass intellectuality to a
that all men are philosophers, defining the limits and transformed common sense. Before closing this inter-
features of this spontaneous philosophy, belonging to lude, to which we will return once we tackle Deleuzes
everybody. This spontaneous philosophy of every- political attack on Cartesian dualism, it is important to
man, which comes in different socio-historic guises, note that the kind of political anthropology of thought
is in turn to be found sedimented in language, in the put forward by Gramsci and possibly by other radi-
couple of common sense and good sense, and in popular cally different figures who are nevertheless preoccupied
religion or folk belief. Although Gramsci is sometimes with analogous problems, such as Chomsky or Virno
equivocal about the difference between good sense and is not founded on the imputation everybody knows
common sense with the terms sometimes treated as but rather on the axiom that everybody thinks.
synonyms, while elsewhere common sense is given
a fundamentally negative collective connotation (in Image and plane
the sense of popular ignorance or ideology; Gramsci What, or rather who, does Deleuze oppose to this
calls common sense the folklore of philosophy, an representational universalism of a natural intellectual
incoherent and subaltern aggregate where you can find capacity? A kind of Bartleby-like figure, a conceptual
whatever you want) and good sense is more akin to a persona who it would be fair to call a real idiot.
Cartesian capacity his schema does combine the two This is the strange figure one would hardly call it a
notions which are given the names common sense and subject who escapes both subjective and objective
good sense in Deleuzes attack on the dogmatic image presuppositions; who not only refuses to acknowledge
of thought. In other words, Gramsci advocates a radical the agreed taxonomies of concepts (rational animal,
variant of the combination of a universal capacity with and so on), but who starkly undermines the very pre-
a requirement for pedagogy that Deleuze condemns. In supposition of cognitive universality. This individual

10
full of ill will is someone who neither allows himself for a thought that would be faithful to this radical
to be represented nor wishes to represent anything.14 critique of the image, that would find a true begin-
It is worth noting that this figure, who Deleuze sees ning, not in an agreement with the pre-philosophical
incarnated in the infamous and underground men of Image but in a rigorous struggle against this Image,
Shestov and Dostoevsky, is also accorded a kind of which it would denounce as non-philosophical.
diagonal temporal register: such a one is the Untimely, What happens in the shift from the hyper-critical
neither temporal nor eternal, neither the obedient child incursion into the subjective presuppositions of thought
of an objective culture nor the normal bearer of a lin- in Difference and Repetition to the pedagogical unfold-
guistic capacity. Against those who see emancipatory ing of the conditions of conceptual creation in What
potential in the subjective presupposition of cognitive is Philosophy? In other words, what happens between
universality (everybody knows), Deleuze promotes the image and the plane? Does Deleuze (here with
the suspicion that such presupposition (or perhaps we Guattari) live up to the task of a philosophical obsti-
should say such an imputation or ascription) of thought nacy with no ally but paradox, which he declared in
hides an interest, an interest precisely in represent- Difference and Repetition?
ing the supposedly general capacities of thought, in There, Deleuze had declared that what separates
speaking for others by speaking universally a subtle Descartes from the commonsensical version of
and eminently political machination which is founded common sense, what makes him a philosopher, is
on the treatment of thought as a natural faculty and the manner in which he erects the image of thought
the thinker as endowed with the good will to channel to a principle, so that even if everybody really
its natural exercise. What is even more insidious is knows that thought is a rare, unevenly distributed and
that such presuppositions are precisely not, in most difficult thing, it may nevertheless be the easiest in
cases, explicitly flagged; rather they are propositional principle. And what makes it easiest in principle is a
themes which remain implicit and are understood in a certain transcendental model which enacts the image
pre-philosophical manner.15 Where others might see via recognition. As Deleuze writes:
this universal faculty as corrosive of hierarchies and
Recognition relies upon a subjective principle
inequalities, Deleuze sees a depotentialization and
of collaboration of the faculties for everybody
normalization of thought in the implicit presupposi- in other words, a common sense as a concordia
tion of philosophy, the idea of a common sense as facultatum; while simultaneously, for the philoso-
Cogitatio natura universalis. It is against this idea of pher, the form of identity in objects relies upon a
thinking as a universally shared natural capacity that ground in the unity of a thinking subject, of which
Deleuze unceasingly advocates the notion that we do all the other faculties must be modalities. This is the
meaning of the Cogito as a beginning: it expresses
not yet know what it means to think or we do not
the unity of all the faculties in the subject; it thereby
know what thought can do (nor, indeed, who or what expresses the possibility that all the faculties will
it is that thinks, a matter that could benefit from an relate to a form of object which reflects the subjec-
exploration of the discussion of the brain in What is tive identity; it provides a philosophical concept
Philosophy?). In a sense, then, the image of thought for the presupposition of a common sense; it is the
is precisely something that cannot be seen, a kind of common sense become philosophical. For Kant as
for Descartes, it is the identity of the Self in the I
spectral presence that inhabits, in one way or another,
think which grounds the harmony of all the facul-
and accompanied by all sorts of resistances and per- ties and their agreement on the form of a supposed
versions, all of philosophy (except perhaps Spinoza or Same object.17
Nietzsche, though Deleuze and Guattari are ambiguous
on this count). It is worth noting that mirroring in As I have already suggested, a number of the anti-
a sense the unity and universality of thought that this Cartesian themes broached in Difference and Repetition
dogmatic, representational image promotes Deleuze return in What is Philosophy? But, just as Deleuze and
does not observe a plurality of prejudices and com- Guattari highlight both the history and the becoming of
promises with opinion and generality as corrupting a concept (whereby the first implies the borrowings and
philosophical practice, but rather a single Image in transformation of previous conceptual constellations,
general which constitutes the subjective presupposi- and the second the relation to concepts situated on the
tion of philosophy as a whole.16 This is perhaps the same plane), we could say that there is both a history
peak of Deleuzes Nietzschean intolerance towards the and a becoming to Deleuzes own relation to Descartes,
slavish collusions of philosophy with common sense, a set of shifts, ambivalences and short-circuits which
the moment for his call later dulled if not retracted prevent him from reverting to a merely dogmatic

11
anti-Cartesianism. In keeping with the most familiar Cogito as just another example of a generalized philo-
image of Descartes, Deleuze and Guattari introduce sophical creativity) clash with the elaborate process
him in terms of a discussion of what it is to begin in whereby, in Difference and Repetition, the I came
philosophy. They write: Even the first concept, the to be fissured and its place occupied by swarming
one with which a philosophy begins, has several factors of individuation?19 What does it mean to think
components, because it is not obvious that philosophy Descartess Cogito as the event of thought?
must have a beginning, and if it does determine one, We should not fail to notice both the apparent
it must combine it with a point of view or ground.18 capitulation of Deleuzes revolutionary project of a
Within this framework, the epitome of the concept of thought without an image and, at the same time, the
beginning and of a first concept the Cartesian Cogito sheer perversity of treating Descartes in this register.
is approached by Deleuze and Guattari as a kind of Rather than rehashing the condemnation of Descartes
testing ground for the constructivist phenomenology as the purveyor of an insidiously disempowering brand
of the concept which they trace in the first half of of universality, in which the clear and distinct shack-
What is Philosophy? Whereas the passage
from the Cartesian Cogito to the Kantian
subject might belong to the discontinuous
history of the concept (as tienne Balibar
has recently explored, pointing out that
the Cartesian subject, rather than Cogito,
is a retroactive post-Kantian invention),
Deleuze and Guattaris Example I is an
investigation of the timeless becoming of
the Cogito qua concept to be understood
in terms of its components or variations,
and the bridges that it may build towards
other concepts (world, God, and so on).
This micro-phenomenology of the concept
is particularly provocative inasmuch as it
eschews two other approaches to the Cogito
one which would take the becoming of
the Cogito in terms of the narrative course
of Descartess own Meditations and its
dramatic moments (e.g. I will now shut my
eyes, stop my ears, and withdraw all my
senses), and another which would see in it
the basis for an exacting formalism.
In shifting the framework from the criti-
cal to the constructive, Deleuze certainly
does not abandon some of the key per-
spectives on Descartes developed in his earlier work. les thought to representation and to the scientific
However, in proposing together with Guattari an all- demands of extensity, as well as the spiritual demands
encompassing theory of the concept, Deleuze obviously of interiority, Deleuze now reinterprets the very hinge
felt the need to put constructivism to the test, enlisting of the Cartesian system as articulated in terms of
his phenomenology of the concept in accounting for intensive ordinates, components that are arranged
what should have been the most recalcitrant concept, in zones of neighbourhood or indiscernibility that
the one that if we follow Difference and Repetition produce passages from one to the other and constitute
inaugurates the modern embodiment of the image their inseparability.20 The clear and distinct and the
of thought. Thus, in mapping the components of the foundation of mathematical extension and rational rep-
Cogito (doubting, thinking, being) and diagramming resentation are mined from the inside, bringing to the
their inner dynamics and condensation, Deleuze and surface something like Descartess repressed construc-
Guattari present the Cogito qua multiplicity. In what tivist unconscious. What is disarming, however, is that
sense does this seemingly ecumenical choice (the in this odd combination of dispassionate diagram and

12
subversive ventriloquism, from which the antagonism understanding. Once again, this intuitive understand-
of The Image of Thought is largely absent, there is a ing varies according to the way in which the plane
kind of absolute relativism at stake. As Deleuze puts is laid out. In Descartes it is a matter of a subjective
understanding implicitly presupposed by the I think
it: There is no point wondering whether Descartes
as first concept; in Plato it is the virtual image of an
was right or wrong.21 But does this not constitute a already-thought that doubles every actual concept.
kind of aestheticizing repudiation of the very radicality Heidegger invokes a preontological understand-
of a project for which truth and falsity, correctness ing of Being, a preconceptual understanding that
and inadequacy, were crucial concepts, ones not only seems to imply the grasp of a substance of being
involved in the internal becoming of the philosophy, in relationship with a predisposition of thought. In
any event, philosophy posits as prephilosophical, or
but part of a history which, if we follow recent research
even as nonphilosophical, the power of a OneAll
on the role of Cartesianism in the radical Enlighten- like a moving desert that concepts come to populate.
ment, was in many ways also political? When Deleuze Prephilosophical does not mean something preexis-
and Guattari write that Cartesian concepts can only tent but rather something that does not exist outside
be assessed as a function of their problems and their philosophy, although philosophy presupposes it.
plane, is this to say that we should simply bracket These are its internal conditions.23
the very exacting and totalizing demands they make Thus, rather than a critical dismantling of the dog-
on thought the manner in which Descartes wages matic image of thought, What is Philosophy? unfolds
war on problems which he thinks no longer have any an intra-philosophical theory of thought (and of the
right to exist? If a thought, such as that of Descartes, role of non-philosophy in the constitution of thought).
wants to wipe the slate clean of much of what it sees In this theory, Descartes has full rights of speculative
as corrupting verbiage and unthought, is it really citizenship, to the extent that the very element which
possible to investigate the constructivist machinations singled him out as the villain of Difference and
of his thinking, and at the same time assume that it Repetition the role of subjective presupposition as a
can be maintained on its own plane, with its own false beginning of a philosophy shorn of dependence
problems? Deleuze and Guattari ask rhetorically: Is becomes in What is Philosophy? paradigmatic of
there one plane that is better than all the others, or philosophical activity itself. Even though Spinoza
problems that dominate all others. Nothing at all can remains the Prince or Christ of philosophy, Descartes
be said on this point. Is this quietism a mere gesture is thus emblematic of the manner in which philosophy
or a subterfuge (behind which we can clearly see, in constructs a plane of immanence in presupposing and
What is Philosophy? itself, that Spinoza is better than introjecting its own outside.
Descartes, inasmuch as he included the thinking of
constructivism within his ontology and ethics)?
In any case, it is interesting that the very elements Dualism and its discontents
that served to damn Descartes in some of the earlier In tracking this shift within Deleuzes appropriation
work are recuperated here as bona fide philosophical of Descartes a shift which, by inserting Descartes
inventions; for instance, when Deleuze and Guattari into different philosophical problematics seems to
refer to the introduction of prephilosophical under- draw almost diametrical consequences out of the very
standing as a very novel distinction, a plane that same references and terms I have yet to confront
requires a first concept that presupposes nothing objec- head-on the issue of Deleuzes role vis--vis the kind
tive.22 In attending to the dynamics of conceptual of anti-Cartesian consensus that Slavoj iek, among
creation, rather than the image of thought, Deleuze others, famously lambasted as the very apex of uni-
and Guattari present the prephilosophical not as a versity ideology in the preface to The Ticklish Subject;
surreptitious enemy of thought, but as a plane, and, parodically writing of the Cartesian subject as the
we might suppose, a variety of immanence, thereby spectre haunting Western academia. The term which,
signalling a break of sorts, or at least a retreat, vis-- with Pavlovian inevitability, seems to set off the anti-
vis the unsparing critique of the image of thought in Cartesian reflex is of course dualism primarily as
Difference and Repetition: mindbody dualism, but also in its vague acceptation
as the stigma of hierarchy, domination, division, sepa-
If philosophy begins with the creation of concepts,
ration and sundry other terms marked by the spirit of
then the plane of immanence must be regarded as
prephilosophical. It is presupposed not in the way the age with a negative valence. Dualism, understood
that one concept may refer to others but in the way in particular in terms of the separation of the Cogito
that concepts themselves refer to a nonconceptual from the world, has however also had a number of

13
advocates, apologists or at the very least historical and possession of, the world, rather than accepting the
contextualizations. Within the panorama of contem- grim metaphysics of mechanicism and its acceptance
porary Continental philosophy, three interesting ways of transcendence and authority, as in Hobbes, whose
of defending dualism (or what more broadly we might polemic with Descartes Negri reads in these terms.
call a thesis of separation) against its holist, monist or The refusal of an unproblematic relation between the
materialist detractors can be identified. I and the world, the refusal of any utopia or myth
The first is historical-scientific and can be encoun- of possession, is an index, for Negri, of Descartess
tered, for instance, in Karl Lwiths God, Man and sober recognition of the separation of the bourgeois
World in Metaphysics from Descartes to Nietzsche. In subject in the world of the 1600s. Thus man, as a
this, one of his very last texts, written in 1967, Lwith thinking thing, is refounded in this separation and
prolongs his polemic with Heidegger into a spirited given ontological weight and potency in dualism. As
defence of Descartess dualism as a recognition of the Negri writes: if the general identity of essence and
externality, independence and objectivity of the world. existence, of the I and the world, and the univocal
In this interpretation Descartess dualistic separation universal predication of being are not possible, this
of the Cogito from the world is actually a far less new foundation of man nevertheless represents a solid
unworldly option than the one taken by Heidegger: starting point, a rich potential for development that is
only awaiting to unfold.25
Who then jumps over the world with both feet? The
A third manner of valorizing dualism is to be found
student of natural sciences Descartes, or rather the
ex-theologian Heidegger, who only counts those in the Lacanian return to Descartes and specifically
aspects of the world that can be referred to our in the version of this return recently advocated by
emotional situation, to anxiety and care? Which of Slavoj iek, who sees the Cartesian subject in its
the two unworlds the world? Descartes, who as a modern form not as a substantial res cogitans, but as a
naturalist takes his cue from the consistency of a
voided subject out of joint, excluded from the order
world that remains stable, or Heidegger, who would
of things, from the positive order of entities. iek
like to explain the world of nature on the basis of its
lost link with our environment?24 accordingly identifies the Cartesian subject as a purely
excremental subject, linked, importantly, to a political
In this conception, Descartess dualism has the natu- ontology of the proletariat:
ralist virtue of what Lwith calls an anti-historic
sensibility for the things themselves, by refusing to For Marx, the emergence of working-class subjectiv-
consider cognition as constitutive of the objective ity is strictly codependent to the fact that the worker
is compelled to sell the very substance of his being
world and even by incorporating certain elements
(his creative power) as a commodity on the market,
of a Christian thought which abstracts from worldly that is, to reduce the agalma, the treasure, the pre-
experience. cious kernel of his being, to an object that can be
A second political manner of valorizing or contex- bought for a piece of money there is no subjectiv-
tualizing Descartess infamous dualism is to be found ity without the reduction of the subjects positive-
in Antonio Negris Political Descartes, originally pub- substantial being to a disposable piece of shit
if the Cartesian subject is to emerge at the level of
lished in 1970. Unlike those who read Descartes as a
the enunciation, he is to be reduced to the almost-
mere mechanicist or theologian of transcendence, Negri nothing of a disposable excrement at the level of the
reads dualism (or separation) as an intra-philosophical enunciated content.26
effect of the collapse of the Renaissance humanist
attempt at thinking and practising an immanence of In significant respects, Deleuze seems to repre-
man to the cosmos; an experience which according to sent what is almost a caricature of the now tiresome
Negri has a clear class character the defeat of the attack on dualism, which, as iek aptly notes, has
emergent bourgeoisie as a hegemonic class. The sepa- become a rare point of agreement between the most
ration of the Cogito or subject is viewed in terms of disparate and otherwise hostile fractions of academia,
the struggle of bourgeois essence to project its power from cognitive science to feminism, from postcolonial
and productivity into worldly existence. Descartes studies to post-analytic philosophy. At the peak of his
provides the reasonable ideology of a bourgeoisie anti-dualist fervour, in his 26 March 1973 seminar
experiencing its post-humanist defeat because it affirms on Dualism, Monism and Multiplicities (Desire
its separation (the inefficacy of the bourgeoisie as a PleasureJouissance), Deleuze presents us with some
worldly power) but maintains the need to consolidate potent slogans: Dualism is what prevents thought;
its subjective potency and prepare its projection onto, Dualism always wants to deny the essence of thought,

14
namely, that thought is a process; The only enemy is The formula cogito ergo sum is what disengages
two; Wherever we leave the domain of multiplicities, the subject of enunciation from the subject of the
we once again fall into dualisms, i.e. into the domain statement, since from I walk (subject of the state-
of non-thought, we leave the domain of thought as ment) no subject of enunciation could be extracted. All
process. But what is the grounding structure of this dualisms, according to Deleuze, are corollaries of this
dualism? It is precisely the one indicated by iek fundamental dualism of enunciation. And the hatred of
himself which is, after all, not surprising, inasmuch dualism is deeply political (or, less charitably, moral)
as for Deleuze, today we are talking about Descartes, in kind. The sinister aspect of this seemingly formal
i.e. Lacan, thinkers joined by the repugnant thought of dualism is to be encountered at the level of the power-
the cogito. Dualism, in this seminar, is thus identified effects of the introduction of a gap in the subject the
as the dualism of a subject of enunciation and a subject very gap we encountered in the question of common
of the statement (or the enunciated). Moreover, dualism sense and good sense, and in the idea of a pedagogy of
intelligence that comes along with suppos-
edly egalitarian rationalism. Dualism is the
philosophy of democratic discipline whose
hypocrisy lies in the idea that it is you
who command, i.e. you who will accede to
the commandment to the degree that you
submit yourself to an order, which you are
not subject to without also being its legisla-
tor. This is the famous order of democracy.
You are the legislator insofar as you are the
subject. This is a point in which the history
of the subject, as the subject which subjects
himself to his own immanent-transcendent
legislation, leads straight from Descartes to
Kant. Not just the vicious circle of demo-
cratic sovereignty, but all social repression,
all its saloperies as Deleuze puts it, seems to
be founded on this dualism of the statement.
Deleuze takes the statement Me as a human
being as an example. As he writes
All social functions are constructed on that,
all repressive functions are constructed on
this cleavage; me as a human being, you
understand, but as a father, I must act! Me
as a human being; Im on your side; but as a
cop, I have to apply the law!28

But is dualism to be universally con-


is definitive of what Deleuze calls Western thought, demned, as the repugnant castration of desire in the
an apparatus whereby statements are taken to exist split subject? Again, if a lesson is to be drawn from
individually, and the production of these statements, the becoming of Deleuzes relationship to Descartes,
rather than originating in what he and Guattari dubbed it is that the shift in the problem which Deleuze is
a collective assemblage of enunciation, is produced in addressing in a given moment or text metamorphoses
and by a subject: the function and figure of the philosophers involved,
and this seems to affect Descartess standing in a
Cogito: this means that every statement is the
particularly strong manner. The advance of Kants
production of a subject. It means that firstly; and
secondly, it means that every statement splits the formulation of the subject over that of Descartes and
subject that produces it. Lacan is the last Cartesian. incidentally, we should note that iek himself accepts
Then every statement refers to a subject, and every that his own so-called Cartesian subject is profoundly
statement splits, cuts separates the subject that pro- post-Kantian is in fact based on the excess of sub-
duces it.27 stantiality and insufficient possibility for splitting and

15
thus for the proliferation of difference in Descartes. In conclusion we could say that there is a fracture,
The introduction of the determinable that is, of or rather a plurality of volatile and fugitive fault-
time between determination and the determined, lines, at work in Deleuzes several engagements with
and the consequent disjunction between spontaneity Descartess thought, a number of shifts which are
and receptivity, also split the subject but in a manner conceptual, on the one hand, and strategic or polemi-
which Deleuze thinks is a genuine progress in the cal, on the other. Attention to the motivations and
conception of subjectivity. effects of these shifts can perhaps attenuate the image,
stridently proposed by Deleuze himself at certain
It is the pure and empty line of time that traverses,
junctures, of his philosophy as a kind of prolonged
that operates this kind of crack in I Time has
become the limit of thought and thought does not anti-Cartesian war cry. Or, rather, it can allow us to
cease to deal with its own limit. Thought is limited differentiate what Descartes might stand in for when
from the inside. There is no longer an extended sub- it comes to what Deleuze regards as the transcendental
stance that limits thinking substance from outside, illusions of thinking itself. At this level, to address
and which resists to thinking substance, but the
the two concerns of this article, it seems that while
form of thought is entirely traversed, cracked like a
Deleuze can accommodate certain varieties of dualism
plate, it is cracked by the line of time. It makes time
into the interior limit of thinking itself, that is the and splitting, the very notion of a universal cognitive
unthinkable in thought one finds a kind of tension capacity remains anathema to his thought. If nothing
between two forms on the one hand the active else, that humanist-egalitarian image of reason remains
form of determination, on the other the intuitive or alien to any possible Deleuzean rationalism.
receptive form of the determinable time. The two
are absolutely heterogeneous to one another, and Notes
nevertheless there is a fundamental correlation: the
This is a revised version of a paper delivered at the con-
one works in the other. It is in itself that thought
ference Deleuze and Rationalism, Centre for Research in
harbours that which resists thought.29 Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, 1415
May 2007.
We are thus provided, at different points in Deleuzes
1. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Athlone,
oeuvre, with two splits, two dualisms, as it were, one a London, 1995, p. 132.
castrating dualism of hypocritical authority based on 2. Franois Zourabichvili, Deleuze: Une philosophie de
the linguistic split between subject of the statement lvnement, PUF, Paris, 1994, p. 17.
3. Slavoj iek, The Ticklish Subject, Verso, London,
and subject of enunciation, the other a temporal split, 1999.
or crack, between spontaneity and receptivity.30 While 4. The passage that Deleuze is referring to is the following:
the first subjects us to the authority in ourselves, in a What then did I formerly think I was? A man. But what
is a man? Shall I say a rational animal? No; for then
vicious circle of auto-subjection, the second introjects
I should have to inquire what an animal is, what ratio-
an outside, the unthinkable in thought, within the nality is, and in this way one question would lead me
very experience of thought. But we should note that down the slope to other harder ones, and I do not now
in this seminar, as well as others, it is fullness and have the time to waste on subtleties of this kind (Ren
Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. John
not dualism per se which is the stigma of Descartess Cottingham, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
thought, and, moreover, that the total political continu- 1996, p. 17).
ity between Descartes and Kant with regard to the 5. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 129.
self-imposition of authority is ignored in favour of the 6. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, Routledge, Lon-
don 2001, pp. 5564.
question of thoughts outside (even though, confusingly, 7. It is worth noting Deleuzes insensitivity, on this mat-
Deleuze also argues that the Meditations is the first ter, to that which in the cogito exceeds, or threatens
book that introduces time into philosophical discourse, to exceed, any premiss or presupposition, the risk that
haunts the experience of thought: The extent to which
as in the seminar of 28 March 1978). Here Descartes
doubt and the Cartesian Cogito are punctuated by this
is not a philosopher of a gap into which authority and project of a singular and unprecedented excess an ex-
teleology insert themselves, but a figure of plenitude, cess in the direction of the nondetermined, Nothingness
a bad egg, so to speak: or Infinity, an excess which overflows the totality of that
which can be thought, the totality of beings and deter-
mined meanings, the totality of factual history is also
there is a gap, a fracture in the Cogito. In Kant the
the extent to which any effort to reduce this project, to
Cogito is completely cracked. It was full like an
enclose it within a determined historical structure, how-
egg in Descartes, why? Because it was surrounded ever comprehensive, risks missing the essential, risks
and bathed by God. But with constitutive finitude I dulling the point itself (Jacques Derrida, Writing and
walk on two legs, receptivity and spontaneity, this is Difference, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980,
really the fracture at the heart of the Cogito.31 p. 57).

16
8. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 130. that there intellectuals tend, more than elsewhere, be-
9. Ren Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Des- cause of determinate historical conditions, to get close
cartes, vol. 1, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff to the people to guide it ideologically and keep it tied to
and Dugand Murdoch, Cambridge University Press, the leading group (ibid., p. 12).
Cambridge, 1985, p. 111. 14. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 130.
10. Admittedly, Deleuzes treatment of common sense relies 15. Ibid., p. 131.
more on his discussion of Kant (Gilles Deleuze, Kants 16. Ibid., p. 132.
Critical Philosophy, University of Minnesota Press, Min- 17. Ibid., p. 133.
neapolis, 1985, p. 21) than on Descartess texts, where 18. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What is Philosophy?,
it is used relatively sparingly, either as the generically Verso, London, 1996, p. 15.
held capacity or to describe the specific functioning of 19. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 257.
the pineal gland as the transducer between mind and 20. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 25.
brain. For the common sense as pineal gland, see Des- 21. Ibid., p. 27.
cartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, pp. 41, 22. Ibid., p. 26.
161. For the more generic meaning, see The Search for 23. Ibid., 1996, p. 41.
Truth: Provided we have proper direction, all we need 24. Karl Lwith, Dio, Uomo e Mondo nella metafisica da
for discovering the truth on the most difficult issues is, I Cartesio a Nietzsche (1967), Donzelli, Rome, 2000, pp.
think, common sense, to give it its ordinary name (Ren 423.
Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 25. Antonio Negri, Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology
vol. 2, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugand and the Bourgeois Project, trans. Matteo Mandarini and
Murdoch and Anthony Kenny, Cambridge University Alberto Toscano, Verso, London, 2007, pp. 21617.
Press, Cambridge, 1991, p. 412); The only master he 26. iek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 157.
follows is common sense, and his reason has not been 27. Gilles Deleuze, Dualism, Monism and Multiplicities
marred by any false preconceptions (ibid., p. 420). (Seminar of 26 March, 1973), Contretemps 2, 2001, p.
11. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp. 2237. 93.
12. Guido Liguori, Senso comune e buon senso nei Quad- 28. Ibid., p. 104.
erni del carcere, 2005, www.gramscitalia.it/senso.htm, 29. Gilles Deleuze, seminar, 28 March 1978, Les Cours de
p. 12. After having based oneself on common sense to Gilles Deleuze, www.webdeleuze.com.
show that everybody is a philosopher and that it is 30. On Deleuzes own proliferation of dualisms, especially
not a matter of introducing ex novo a science into the in his work with Guattari (between the molar and the
individual life of everybody but to innovate and make molecular, the smooth and the striated, the nomad and
critical a pre-existing activity (ibid., p. 16). the state, and so on), and their tendency to reify into
13. Ibid., p. 10. Incidentally, it is interesting to note that ethical and ideological binaries, see Fredric Jameson,
Gramsci specifically links the concept of common sense Deleuze and Dualism, in Valences of the Dialectic,
to a French historical frame: In French philosophical Verso, London, 2009, pp. 198200.
culture there are more treatments of common sense 31. Gilles Deleuze, undated 1987 seminar on Leib-
than in other cultures: this is due to the national- niz, available at www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.
popular character of French culture; that is to the fact php?cle=132&groupe=Leibniz&langue=1.

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17
Imaginative mislocation
Hiroshimas Genbaku Dome,
ground zero of the twentieth century

Matthew Charles

The average Westerner was wont to regard Japan marked it out as the visual target for the bombing
as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts raid on 6 August 1945. Because of its proximity to
of peace: he calls her civilized since she began the bridge, and because the atomic bomb was slightly
to commit wholesale slaughter on Manchurian
off-target, what was then the Hiroshima Prefectural
battlefields.
Industrial Promotions Hall was almost directly beneath
Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea, 1906
the atomic blast when the bomb exploded in the air
The controversy that erupted in March over the pub- above the city. The 120 governmental and related staff
lication of Charles Pellegrinos account of the atomic working inside the building were all killed instantly,
bombings of Japan, The Last Train from Hiroshima, but the shell of its central structure remained largely
suggests that the historical legacy of the first military intact, in part because of its location beneath this
use of atomic weaponry is still fiercely contested in the downward (rather than sideways) blast of the explosion,
USA.1 The spat is merely the latest conflict in a long but also because of its Western-style design, utilizing
war over the significance of the bombings, which resur- steel and concrete reinforcing. Flames blew from the
faces with each new book, exhibition or programme dome which crowned the central section of the Hall,
that appears. When the ruins of the Genbaku (Atomic melting the copper plating to leave only a skeletal
Bomb) Dome formerly the Hiroshima Prefectural steel skull.
Commercial Exhibition Hall were nominated as a As the ruined Hall was one of the few buildings left
UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995, the United standing directly beneath the immediate area of the
States objected on the basis of concerns over a lack explosion later termed ground zero by American
of historical perspective, arguing that the events investigators the frame of its dome could be seen
antecedent to the United States use of atomic weapons from some distance within the shattered city.3 The first
to end World War II are key to understanding the recorded instance of its new name, the Genbaku or A-
tragedy of Hiroshima.2 The appeal to historical facts Bomb Dome, occurs in newspaper articles from 1951,
by both US diplomats and, more recently, military suggesting that it had become common parlance by the
veterans contrasts with the dehistoricized emphasis of end of the 1940s.4 By this point it had already become
other Western cultural responses to Hiroshima. But a tourist site for visiting Japanese Americans, Allied
what both kinds of reception share is an occlusion troops stationed in Japan, and local school excursions,
of the prehistory of capitalist liberalism, colonialism looming over the land designated for a Peace Memo-
and imperialism which produces Japanese modernity, rial Park on the opposite side of the river. Despite
a prehistory which is itself built into the Genbaku censorship of public discussion of the atomic explosion
Domes concrete structure, and an afterlife of nuclear by Occupation authorities after the war, the General
pacification which produces the global context of Headquarters of the Allied Forces enthusiastically
terrorism as the continuation of war by other means. supported the construction of the park as a site which
promoted the association of the bomb with peace. 5
The dome For UNESCO, which placed the Dome on the
The Aioi Bridge spans the point where the Kyu Ota UNESCO World Heritage List in December 1996, its
and the Motayasu rivers converge in downtown Hiro- mute remains symbolize on the one hand the ultimate
shima, resulting in its distinctive T-shape where it in human destruction but on the other a message of
connects three abutting sections of land. This feature hope.6 The justification for the inclusion of the Dome

18 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 2 ( Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 010 )
nificance of the bomb because when atomic weaponry
has the power to make everything into nothing this
should be symbolized by nothingness itself.8
But these alternative experiences tend to be occluded
by the dominance of that testified to in the UNESCO
statement, which enacts a series of transitions from the
ephemeral and particular to the eternal and universal,
from the inexperienceable and supposedly unrepeatable
magnitude of destruction and suffering to its aesthetic
exhibition, and from war to peace. This article focuses
on one particular consequence of this view: the con-
ceptual tendency to elide war and peace through an
ideology of progress, which works to silence cultural
critique. In order to resist the continuing reception
of Hiroshima according to an idealist philosophy of
historical progress, the following seeks to juxtapose
this pre- and after-history to construct an image of the
Dome as the ground zero of our current war on terror.
This serves to supplement some broader reflections on
the ideological function of what will be termed the
historical sublime, which codes the aesthetic recep-
tion of the Genbaku Dome in the West and underpins
the idealist philosophy of history.

Prehistory
centred on three aspects relating to the uniqueness of The origin of the Genbaku Dome lies in the period
the ruined structured. First, the report states, it stands of intense modernization in Japan associated with the
as a permanent witness to the first military use in Meiji Restoration. The extreme isolationist foreign
history of an atomic weapon, suggesting it confers a policy known as Sakoku, which had been imposed
physical permanence and timelessness to a singular in the seventeenth century as a response to ongoing
and passing moment that would otherwise slip from our European colonialism in the Far East, came to an
comprehension. Second, the Dome is the only building end in the mid-nineteenth century when Commodore
in existence that can convey directly a physical image of Matthew Perry of the United States navy secured
the tragic situation immediately after the bombing. The trading relations with Japan through a literal act of
survival of the semi-ruined building amid such utter gunboat diplomacy. The commercial treaties of 1854
destruction provides a tangible, aesthetic representation and 1858 opened the door to the forces of Western,
of the otherwise unintelligible physical devastation capitalist modernity, to which some within responded
and human misery of such an attack. Third and as a by seeking to re-establish the sovereignty of the impe-
consequence of these conditions it is said to stand as a rial line. For over five centuries the dynasty had been
universal monument for all mankind, symbolizing the excluded from any political role, but on 3 January 1868
hope for perpetual peace.7 samurai from a number of southwestern han or feudal
Other experiences of the Domes historical sig- domains seized control of the Imperial Palace in Kyoto
nificance are possible: in a 1956 article on his visit and restored the emperor to power.9
to Hiroshima, Hugh M. Gloster recalls being guided Whilst the han of Hiroshima remained on the
towards the towering skeleton of a shattered steel and periphery of this coup dtat, the sweeping political
concrete structure which was once the proud Industrial and economic reforms that followed in the wake of
Exhibition Hall of Hiroshima and feeling that its the restoration contributed to dramatic changes in the
ghastly ruins signify nothing more than humani- outlook and landscape of the region.10 In 1870, as part
tys capacity for war, destruction and hate, whilst an of a broader attempt to achieve economic and military
unnamed Japanese history professor in Robert Liftons parity with the dominant European and American
Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima suggests that the powers, the autonomy of the han was abolished and the
memorial fails to symbolize accurately the true sig- land taken back and restructured into centralized ken

19
or prefectures, with Hiroshima prefecture becoming A suggestion for the construction of a commercial
one of the 305 newly established politico-geographical exhibition hall in which the newly produced com-
regions.11 modities manufactured in the city and its surrounding
Initially, the Japanese economy remained primarily areas could be displayed and sold was first put
agrarian and the light industry that began to develop in forward after the end of the Russo-Japanese war in
the larger cities was fuelled by capital generated from 1905, but postponed due to inadequate funding.19 In
the newly imposed land tax.12 When initial attempts 1910 a joint proposal to finance the construction of the
to revise the Western-imposed treaties which granted hall on land owned by the city using funding provided
foreign nations extraterritorial rights and tariff auton- by the prefecture was agreed, and over the next few
omy failed, the newly established government imposed years the General Affairs Division of the Hiroshima
an ambitiously intense process of modernization.13 City Hall set about purchasing, acquiring and exchang-
Production was increased through land-tax reforms ing land for the site on the banks of the Motayasu river.
and investment in manufacturing industry, and sup- Preparation work began on 1 April 1911 and proceeded
plemented by a process of bunmei kaika (civilization at a steady pace for the next two years.
and enlightenment) pursued through the revision of The arrival of the new prefectural governor, Suk-
legal codes and the introduction of a European-style eyuki Terada, in spring 1913 was significant for the
education system. This shift from agriculture to light architectural design and building material of the com-
industry eventually contributed to a mass migration pleted exhibition hall, a factor which along with its
away from the countryside and to the rapidly expanding location explains its ability to withstand the initial
cities. Hiroshima was one of the first to be granted city blast of the atomic bomb and the subsequent firestorm
status, and a government-sponsored cotton mill was that incinerated the rest of the city. Terada had previ-
established during the 1870s which would have most ously been mayor of the Miyagi prefecture, where he
likely have employed low-wage agricultural workers had commissioned the Czech architect Jan Letzel to
from the surrounding countryside.14 Soon, the entire design the Matsushima Park Hotel.20 Whilst the Matsu-
apparatus of Western material civilization seemed to shima Park Hotel was being completed in the summer
find some reproduction, some kind of echo, in Japan, of 1913, Sukeyuki invited Letzel to visit Hiroshima and
to the extent that desirable Western objects were recited start work on designs for the exhibition hall. 21
to the bounce of a ball in a popular childrens song Despite Japans rapid growth, prior to 1913 its
of 1878 (gas lamps, steam engines, horse-carriage, industries were unable to compete with developed
cameras, telegrams, lightning conductors, newspapers, capitalist nations in the world market and the expense
schools, letter-post, and steam-boats).15 of the Russo-Japanese war was taking its toll on the
Industrialization and colonization were regarded economy.22 The outbreak of World War I and Japans
as the parallel tracks for Japans entry as a significant subsequent entry into the Allied coalition rescued the
power onto the world stage; each fuelled the other and country from fiscal collapse.23 More importantly, since
intensified the development of Japanese modernity, Japan played little part in other wartime activities, it
the index of its standing with the West. During the could supply much-needed munitions, shipping and
Sino-Japanese war of 189495, Hiroshima citys geo- manufactured goods to Allied forces, developing its
graphical location secured its central importance as large-scale heavy industry to take advantage of British,
Japans military capital. Tokutomi Soho, a journalist German and French inability to meet demands in the
who travelled with Emperor Meiji to the new head- domestic and Southeast Asian markets. 24 Three days
quarters in Hiroshima on 13 September 1894, exhorted after the declaration of war against Germany, Britain
his readers: We must remember that we are fighting drew on the cordial relations established by the Anglo-
before the whole world we are fighting to determine Japanese Alliance to request Japans intervention to
once and for all Japans position in the world.16 But to destroy the German fleet based at the naval base of
pursue its military ventures against China and Russia, Tsingtao (now Qingdao), at that time a colony leased
Western capital was required and soon began pouring by China to Germany.25 In line with its imperial ambi-
into Japan.17 Subsequent victories boosted Japans status tions, Japan not only attacked the fleet, but seized the
as a military and economic power, encouraging further colony, placing Tsingtao under military rule. 26
foreign investment. Simultaneously, increased spend- On 5 April 1915, construction was completed on the
ing on armaments and war-related industry shifted Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall, a
the economic focus of the country towards heavy three-storey brick building, with exterior walls par-
manufacturing.18 tially reinforced by stone and cement plaster. 27 The

20
central, steel-framed core consisted of an atrium which had broken out in Shanghai that August intensified,
extended to five storeys, housing an oval staircase the Promotion Hall held an exhibition of Holy War
which led to a steel-framed, copper-clad elliptical Art, a reflection of increasing nationalism which was
dome. The building was surrounded by a Western-style to find its most extreme expression in the atrocities
garden with a pond and fountain, as well as a more carried out against the Chinese inhabitants of Nanjing
traditional Japanese garden.28 After the inauguration during the capture of the city in December of that
ceremony the site housed part of the first Hiroshima year.35
Prefecture Promotion Fair, before a more permanent This nationalism of the 1930s can be traced, in part,
display the Prefectural Products Exhibition Hall on to the uneven economic and socio-political develop-
the second floor was opened on 15 August 1915. At ment of Japan in the preceding bouts of industrial
the opening ceremony of the Hall, Terada declared and capitalist development. The tensions buried in the
that the building will serve to further promote and original policy of sacrificing the countryside for the
improve the prefectures products and contribute to the city evident in the story that the initial resentment
development of related industries.29 In the first eleven of the outlying towns and villages over the allocation
months of the exhibition 157,000 people visited the hall of prefectural funding to the Hall had to be appeased
and commissioned sales totalling 9.79 million yen. 30 by the promise of two stud horses and two bulls to
By the 1920s, chemical and heavy industry led each county began to re-emerge in the discourses on
economic development, whilst the construction of modernity in the late 1920s and early 1930s. 36
hydroelectric power stations and the facilities for This took the form of refiguring the folk and
high-powered transmission of electricity provided the resuscitating their beliefs, customs, and practices in
driving-growth for related electrical industries, and order to preserve the last but lingering traces of a prior
the motorization of weaving, tea refining and lumber existence and to reactivate in the present the kernel
firms (two such lumber corporations were operating of community life needed to negotiate the troubling
from offices in the Hiroshima Exhibition Hall in the presence of modernity. 37
year before its destruction). 31 The global depression of In 1940, with the agreement of the Vichy govern-
the late 1920s spurred on Japans colonial ambitions, as ment of France, Japan occupied French-controlled
the Chinese continent promised access to new export Vietnam, joining forces with the GermanItalian Axis.
markets, material resources and cheap labour.32 During Japans advance into Southeast Asia had been justified
the 1930s, as military expansion and trading oppor- under the rubric of the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity
tunity continued to grow, the Hiroshima Prefectural Sphere: the object of the war, as described by Prime
Hall joined the network of representative offices that Minister Tojo Hideki, was to establish an order of
stretched from Kobe in Japan, across north-east China co-existence and co-prosperity based on ethical prin-
to Shanghai, with the aim of promoting the Prefecture ciples with Japan serving as its nucleus. 38 Such talk
across the empire. 33 The incident in Mukden when was buoyed by the unanticipated swiftness of Japans
the Japanese military attacked Chinese troops on the military successes, with troops sweeping across South-
pretext of an alleged attempted sabotage on the South east Asia where they were tentatively regarded at
Manchurian Railway was followed by the expansion first as delivers from colonialism and occupying
of military power across Manchuria, even whilst those most of the islands of the western Pacific. 39 It also
in government were giving international assurances to helped paint over the inherent tensions between the
the contrary. 34 new Western-style modernity and old Japanese tra-
In 1932, as fighting broke out in Shanghai between ditionalism: Japanese intervention could be seen as the
the Chinese 19th Route Army and the Japanese naval reinvigoration of East Asian cultural and economic
landing party stationed in the city, the Exhibition Hall dominance over Western colonialism. In practice, the
was the site for a second JapanManchuria Trade Co-Prosperity Sphere sought the exploitation of raw
Exhibition. With the deepening of Japans military materials abroad to aid Japans war effort. This deep-
involvement in the East, it was decided in 1933 ening military involvement led to the closures of the
to rename the building the Hiroshima Prefectural Hiroshima Prefectures outlying representative offices
Industrial Promotion Hall to reflect the shift in its from May 1941. With the tide of war beginning to
activities and function away from commercial exhibi- turn, by 31 March 1944 all commercial activity was
tion. Regular art exhibitions had been held since its halted and the Prefectural Hall was taken over by
opening (including a very popular exhibition of Dolls government offices and associated agencies, including
from America in 1927); in 1937, as the fighting that the Ministry of the Interiors Public Works Office and

21
the Hiroshima District Lumber and Japan Lumber empirical and ideal ground of magnitude: the absolute
Control corporations.40 and unconditioned whole of nature (CJ 255).
Most of the smaller, wooden traditional Japa- Similarly, the suitability of the Dome for exhibit-
nese-style structures that surrounded the Hall when ing the magnitude of the devastation and suffering is
the atomic bomb was dropped were either instantly conceptually conditioned by the very impossibility of
destroyed by the thermal blast or in the subsequent fire- such representation. Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola
storm that razed the city (90 per cent of Hiroshimas Gay B-29, which deployed the bomb, recalls the explo-
houses were tightly clustered wooden dwellings).41 In sion in terms which anticipate the wider context of a
her excellent book Hiroshima Traces, Lisa Yoneyama nuclear warfare: What I saw was of a magnitude and
records that of the 142 major public buildings within 5 carried with it a connotation of destruction bigger
kilometres of the central blast area, around 80 survived than I had really imagined.46 Recalling the Domes
the bombing. In the aftermath of the war, there were architecture of remembrance in a more recent article,
calls to halt postwar development and leave the ruins Robert Ginsberg focuses on the terrible dynamism of
of Hiroshima completely untouched, but commer- the explosion still pressed into the stone, which forces
cial interests ensured that redevelopment of the city itself upon the human heart.47 Kants description of
commenced.42 The prefecture had allocated financial the dynamic sublime evokes our physical impotence
resources for the reconstruction of the building in the before the destructive power of nature precisely in
1950s, but concerns that it was dangerously close to order to recover our supersensible superiority over
collapse meant the funds were returned and in 1953 it. The mathematical conflict between the sensible
the ruins were donated to the city. Hibakusha (A-Bomb and the rational is reduplicated here between the
survivor) groups were initially divided over whether spectators imagined fear, associated with empirical
to remove or preserve such reminders, although many self-preservation, and an excited fearlessness which
did later petition for the Domes preservation.43 As the reveals our practical vocation: a higher human dignity,
preservation movement grew stronger a wire fence was connected to the Idea of freedom, that endures above
erected to seal off the building, and, after architectural our empirical concerns with property, health, and life
surveys and a budgeting of funds, Hiroshima City (CJ 2612).
Council finally passed a resolution for the preservation There is, however, a problem with the antinomy
of the structure on 11 July 1966. on which Kants argument hinges: there is nothing
contradictory in being able to imagine a freedom from
Mythologizing Hiroshima: the danger of nature when from the perspective of
Kant and the historical sublime a safe distance necessary for the experience of the
How the skeletal shell of the devastated ruin might sublime the individual is free from such danger. In
serve as any kind of universal monument for UNESCO, other words, the higher practical freedom Kant seeks
let alone one capable of symbolizing perpetual peace, to rescue with his appeal to the sublime is the result
becomes comprehensible if the series of transitions of an imaginative mislocation.48 Kants anticipation
enacted in its description are understood in relation of such an objection compounds the error by turning
to a concept of the historical sign coded by a Kantian the fallacy into a virtue: the liking concerns only our
aesthetics of the historical sublime. Kant insists that it abilitys vocation, revealed in such cases, insofar as the
is not the object that should be classed as sublime but predisposition to this ability is part of our nature, he
the rational Idea evoked within us, which the object responds, whereas it remains up to us, as our obliga-
is merely suitable for exhibiting.44 In the mathemati- tion, to develop and exercise this ability (CJ 242).
cal sublime, it is our incapacity to estimate aesthetic This problem repeats itself in Kants discussion of
magnitudes beyond the limits of sensible intuition the historical sign. Indeed, to properly understand
that provokes the imagination to turn to the numerical the elisions involved in the reception of the Dome it
concepts of the understanding, capable of succes- is necessary to understand how this aesthetics of the
sively advancing to infinity. Reason, however, seeks to sublime, with its flight from empirical destruction to
approximate the unity that is possible empirically, and the Idea of freedom, implicitly structures an idealist
demands a multiplicity in a unity (of intuition rather conception of history. In the Idea for a Universal
than thought).45 This felt compulsion to collapse the History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, Kant
temporal condition of the infinite into the simultane- utilizes a teleological argument to the effect that since
ity of an instant nonetheless indicates a supersensible humanity as a species possesses a unique capacity for
power within us, Kant argues, which points to the non- practical reasoning, we must assume the species is

22
to develop in accordance with this rational purpose siveness to be indiscriminately attributed to all sorts
and its political organization, becoming increasingly of historical events.
autonomous.49 If the historian is unable to find any The ideological complicity between the history of
evidence of such regularity and lawfulness in collec- the sublime and the sublimity of history apparent in
tive human action, we must therefore attribute this to Kants aesthetics of history is also manifested in the
our cognitive limitations and look for indirect signs way the reception of the ruined structure of the Dome
of such purposiveness in nature itself (IUH 42). Kant enables a flight from the real into its ideal opposite,
discovers this in the principle of unsocial sociability, from the violent destruction of war to the serene hope
which is responsible for the competitive drive through of peace. This kind of sublime logic is prevalent not
which individuals and nations seek to develop their only in the UNESCO nomination of the Dome, but
talents and progress in culture, taste and enlightenment serves as a metonym for much of the cultural reception
(IUH 45). War is the international expression of this of the events. The notion of transforming Hiroshima
pathologically enforced social union, and therefore into a historical symbol of peace appears to have
the necessary precondition for the eventual cooperation been raised first by Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a survivor of
of nations in a great, cosmopolitan federation of states the bomb, whose experience is dramatized in John
(IUH 478). Herseys famous New Yorker article from 1946. On
The second part of the Conflict of the Faculties the back of his fame, Tanimoto toured American
develops this account by drawing on Kants attitude churches lecturing on The Faith that Grew Out of the
towards the revolution in France and his account of Ashes. He advocated the idea for a peace memorial
the sublime to theorize the further existence of a that was enthusiastically endorsed in an editorial by
historical sign itself. This would demonstrate a pur- the Saturday Review of Literature in March 1949. 52
posive tendency in the human race as it is currently Asked to open the prayer for a session of the US
divided into nations and states, one undetermined Senate in 1951, Tanimoto thanked God for the great
with regard to time, and which would allow progress blessing Thou hast granted American in enabling her
toward the better to be concluded as an inevitable to build in this last decade the greatest civilization in
consequence. 50 It is not the revolution in France that history and that Japan has been permitted to be one
is itself progressive, however, although we might say of the fortunate recipients of American generosity. We
it is suitable for exhibiting the moral character in the thank Thee that our people have been given the gift
mind of the spectator who enthusiastically follows of freedom, enabling them to rise from the ashes of
the events from a distance. It is the excitement of the ruin and be reborn. 53
spectator, with its universal but disinterested sympathy Something akin to the unsocial sociability driving
for the actors, which for Kant indicates its innate, Kants concept of history also seems to function in
moral character. the Allied response to the bombings. Initial American
Any factors that might limit the rational autonomy reactions to the attack on Hiroshima tended to reinforce
and universal humanity of the events (such as, Kant the technological accomplishment of the Manhattan
suggests, violence and suffering so severe that no one Project that developed the bomb as a triumph of social
would willingly repeat the actions) are explained by the progress and a harbinger of international peace. 54 In
compression of the successive character of historical his biography Tibbets recalls how on the homeward
progress to the simultaneity of an instant. Like the journey back from Hiroshima he had
conceptual structure of the sublime, ephemerality,
reflected on the wonders of science and rejoiced that
particularity, destructiveness and empirical limitation the new weapon had surely made future war un-
point beyond themselves to an infinite, universal, serene thinkable. Each technological advance in weap-
Idea of cosmopolitan humanity. The treatise concludes onry had made war more hideous but so far had
with Kants assertion that the economic and moral ill not persuaded mankind to abandon this means of
consequences of war will eventually provide a salutary settling quarrels between peoples. Now certainly we
had developed the ultimate argument for keeping the
lesson to nations, such that a cooperative and peaceful
peace.55
international order will be established, paving the way
for what Kant elsewhere calls a perpetual peace. 51 Furthermore, the Truman administration promoted
The problem of imaginative mislocation threatens to the bombings of the largely civilian populations of
repeat itself here in the distancing from any analysis Hiroshima and Nagasaki as helping save a million
of the empirical, material and historical conditions of American lives, an idea that is often expanded to
conflict and struggle, which permits claims of progres- include also the Japanese lives saved by the avoidance

23
of invasion. 56 An imaginative mislocation is again civilizing of Japan and the Far East and its continuing
involved here, and whilst the development of the bomb involvement in such projects in the Middle East.
is justified as necessary against an imagined atomic Identifying the sublime logic implicit in the idealist
attack by Germany, its deployment is justified against reactions to the Dome, and Hiroshima more generally,
an imagined invasion of the Japanese mainland by is valuable in drawing out the problematic character
America. of such a response, which continues to operate in
Two significant factors are at stake in such a more recent appropriations. It also relies on a practice
response to the bomb. Robert Jay Lifton has argued of preserving decaying ruins that is less prevalent
that for the Japanese there is a psychological comfort in Japan than the West, a practice itself reinforced
enacted in the equation of destruction and peace: the by the Western tradition of writing on the sublime. 58
general tendency to use Atomic Bomb and Peace Three theoretical implications of such a response will
almost interchangeably in naming these monuments be discussed here, and justified in the context of the
suggests the psychological effort to equate the two in cultural reception of the bombing:
the sense of the latter springing from the ashes of the
former. 57 This comfort is problematic since it has a 1. The universalizing of such responses, which
tendency to pass over issues of Japanese nationalism encourages both the homeward movement of suffer-
and imperialism, particularly relevant given Hiroshi- ing in the American imagination and, consequently,
mas status as a military capital during the imperial its expansion to a globalized humanity, which
expansion into Asia. At the same time, this Japanese works to conceal ongoing political divisions.
response to the events has certainly been encouraged 2. The naturalizing of the response, which posits a
by the Allied countries, for whom this equation of war timelessness that prioritizes the mythical over the
and peace serves as a moral justification for the use historical and induces a fatalism into the concept
of indiscriminate atomic weaponry against a civilian of progress, which reverberates in the myth of
population and the basis for a rhetoric of pacification. pacification.
This obscures both the Wests involvement in what 3. The idealism of such arguments, which involves
Kakuzo Okakuras epigraph sardonically calls the a problematic concept of freedom derived from

24
the dualism between nature and history. This is transformed into the universal, nationalism turns
dualism posits the bombing as historically and into cosmopolitanism, and because we all become the
technologically unique and obscures the continuity victims of Hiroshima, war to use one of Perlmans
of violence inherent to such pacification. favoured images from Jung alchemically transmutes
into the stimulus for peace.
Shikata ga nai Robert Jay Liftons Death in Life: Survivors of
John Herseys 1946 article in the New Yorker that Hiroshima and The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holo-
dramatized the stories of the six survivors of Hiro- caust and Nuclear Threat (with Eric Markusen) are
shima quickly became a paradigmatic text in the more precise about recording the experiences of those
American reception of the atomic bombing. 59 Whilst affected in their own words. However, they share with
Hersey sometimes depicts humane acts of compassion Perlman a preoccupation with the universal value of
as occurring despite, not because of, the devasta- the atomic experience, hijacking the concept of species
tion, one notable exception involves a German priest, consciousness in the treatment of Hiroshima.65 Lifton
Father Kleinsorge. In the aftermath of the bombing, argues that the scale and the destruction and the
he encounters a Japanese woman who hands him tea- kind of weapon involved in the bombing involve the
leaves to quench his thirst, a gesture which made him dimension of totality, a sense of ultimate annihila-
a little hysterical, Hersey reports, because for weeks, tion of cities, nations, the world, which transcends
he had been feeling oppressed by the hatred of foreign- geographical and national boundaries and prompts us
ers that the Japanese seemed increasingly to show.60 to think of humanity as a totality.66 For example, he
This little act of care is supposed to suggest that the quotes a Japanese philosopher and atom bomb survivor
suffering wrought by the bomb enables a kind of who argues that as a result peace [would be seen as]
universal humanity to emerge amid the devastation. no single countrys problem [but] a matter of life and
This pattern is repeated in the more recent and death for mankind [requiring] a movement which could
overtly psychological works on Hiroshima, which have be said to be spiritual not tied to politics [but]
a tendency to universalize the suffering through the connected only with humanism.67
deployment of Jungian archetypes. Here, the Kantian One of the problems with Kants account of the
sublime and its cosmopolitan humanity are rejuvenated dynamic sublime is that the humanity and immortality
via the Jungian theory of the collective unconscious. evoked by destruction depend upon a conflict between
Michael Perlmans Imaginal Memory and the Place empirical self-interest and a higher disinterest, which,
of Hiroshima is indicative of such a response, arguing because it is merely imagined, may have an exist-
as it does that ence that is merely imaginary. Despite the authors
images associated with the place of Hiroshima intentions, Perlmans imaginal memory or Liftons
embody unsuspected psychological values beyond species consciousness threaten to reassert national
their role as reminders of the concrete horror of self-interest at a global level under the guise of inter-
nuclear war. The remembering of these values is national humanitarianism. Thus, for Lifton, species
crucial to a deeper-going commitment to peace and
consciousness is not just a distant ideal but a practical
to contemporary psychological life in general.61
and realizable state of mind, which is manifested in
What is troubling about Perlmans efforts to find the principle of common security of no nation
what he calls a home for the mnemonic images of being secure unless all are.68 The humanity imagined
the dead is the way in which the memories of the in Kants sublime arises out of a violent act of reduc-
Japanese victims are re-housed primarily within the tion. In Herseys Hiroshima, the points of identification
paradigms of Western culture: the mythical landscape dramatized are small acts of generosity, heroic exploits
of ancient Greek legend.62 For example, the wounds of bravery, merciful gestures of compassion, and the
of Father Kleinsorge that repeatedly reopen are con- calmly described horror of individuals reduced to
nected with the pain and suffering of Dionysus, whilst bodies stripped of skin, clothing, property, language
Kiyoshi Tanimoto becomes the ferryman piloting the and other such distinguishing marks: aggression,
vessel of the dead.63 Perlman concludes by evoking the nationalism and politics are beaten out of its victims.
timeless theogonic time of Hesiods Muses, arguing This produces a mythological concept of humanity,
that commemorating Hiroshima in this way encour- a pacified humanity that arises as a consequence of
ages a universality which becomes utterly inclusive imperial warfare and not one that posits, even if it
only by its obliteration of boundaries and forgetting must be through violent struggle, any genuine alterna-
of nationalism.64 In Perlmans version the particular tive to it.

25
This risk is exacerbated by the fatalism attached dualism at the level of the rational and historical, if the
to the naturalizing of historical events. Expressions of affirmative flight into idealist progress be retained.
such fatalism by the victims is frequently reported in This is figured in the cultural reception of Hiroshima
the American literature, encapsulated in the Japanese through the sublime image of a historical-technological
phrase Shikata ga nai: It cant be helped.69 Similarly, break or rupture. It can be observed in accounts that
the novelistic form of Herseys Hiroshima article, which become scientifically obsessed with the precise details
interweaves the different perspectives of six survivors, of the moment of the attack:
induces a kind of temporal repetition whose moment
The bombs detonator activated 1,890 feet above
of simultaneity is centred on the millisecond of the
ground. At exactly 8.16 am, forty-five seconds after
explosion like an inevitable catastrophe. But it is also falling from the Enola Gay, having travelled a dis-
implicit in the more recent responses to the suffering. tance of nearly six miles, the atomic bomb missed
Perlman describes his devotional practice of memory the Aioi Bridge by 800 feet, and exploded directly
as involving a painful masochism reminiscent of the over Dr. Shimas clinic In the first milli-second
medieval submission to the powers of Fate.70 Just as in after 8.16 am a time-fraction too small for any
watch in Hiroshima to measure a pinprick of
the mathematical sublime Kantian reason demands a
purplish red-light expanded to a glowing fireball
simultaneity which steps outside the additive temporal hundreds of feet wide. The temperature at its core
progression into infinity, so in the historical sublime was 50,000,000 degrees.71
the past is brought into simultaneity with the present
in a way which does not pragmatically emphasize the The value of the word exactly is significant here. It
contingency of the present, but eternalizes the present encapsulates the triumph of technology, from the Man-
in its empathetic rehousing of what has occurred. hattan Project scientists that developed the first atomic
The mythological concept of fate tacitly utilized in bomb, the refitted B-29 bombers that carried it, the
such responses to the bomb facilitates the recasting watches that timed the explosion, and the photographic
of the city and its people as the sacrificial victims equipment that captured the mushroom cloud.
of a higher progress: the inevitable cause of peace. Whilst the suffering and devastation wrought on
However, the peace brought about by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by nuclear technology is to
Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a silence enforced by be acknowledged, there are two problematic ideas that
an act of violence designed to be so brutal it would arise in this focus on the singularity of the technologi-
shock the government, its people and the wider world cal. First, it disguises precisely the areas of continuity
into submission. Those who take up the memory of and overlap with other moments of wartime violence
the victims as a universal stimulus to continued global preceding and following 6 August 1945, including the
cooperation and security seem to possess a peculiarly second attack on Nagasaki three days later. Whilst the
mythological understanding of pacification, one shared devastation wrought by the single atomic bomb was
with those who insist on the necessity of the bombings massive, initial Japanese reports mistook the destruc-
of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the end of the tion for that caused by a squadron of B-29s. In Herseys
Second World War. Their peace is the present conclu- account, one of the doctors assumes it must have been
sion of history as it is narrated by the victors, one that a Molotoffano hanakago a Molotov flower basket,
smooths over the legacy of imperialist violence and the delicate Japanese name for the bread basket, or
economic liberalism. self-scattering cluster of bombs.72 American military
It is only at a superficial level that the remembered strategy had deployed relentless squadrons of low-flying
or imagined threat of atomic or nuclear annihilation bombers using incendiary bombs designed to cause
might provoke an appeal to human dignity, because maximum devastation upon the wooden factories and
the humanity it hopes to evoke is undermined by the houses of Tokyo and other cities.73 The fire-bombing
very technological and hence human-made status of of Tokyo in March 1945 was, Richard Storry points
the destruction it reflects upon. In the Kantian sublime out, probably the most appalling air-attacks, in terms
it is the common response to a natural threat that of loss of life, of the whole war.74
engenders a sense of indestructibility by distinguishing The experience of technological sublimity evoked
us from empirical nature. Consequently, because the in such responses to the event of Hiroshima therefore
Kantian concepts of freedom and history depend upon works to conceal rather than expose the historical
a dualism that has a tendency to exclude the tech- continuity of atrocities carried out on all sides during
nological, contemporary reflection upon destructive the last world war. Robert McNamara, at the time a
technology necessitates the introduction of a further captain in the Army Air Forcess Office of Statistical

26
Control, has suggested that the efficiency of the fire- bomb was to help demoralize Japan into uncondi-
bombing of major Japanese cities had already rendered tional surrender, preventing the future requirement of
the necessity of atomic weaponry redundant, and that full-scale invasion of the Japanese mainland, although
the subsequent devastation caused by the attacks on controversy still surrounds the perceived necessity of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have been dispropor- the atomic bombings for hastening such surrender
tionate enough to justify General LeMays prosecu- and over the projected military cost of any such
tion as a war criminal.75 The sublimity attached to invasion.79 The timing of the Allied bombing, days
Hiroshima is in this sense an act of reassurance: the before the Soviet invasion of Manchuria on 9 August
bombing becoming an abnormality whose conditions 1945 and whilst Japan was engaged in tentative peace
may be pored over in scholarly detail, whilst those negotiations via Russia, was also significant in this
implicated as responsible remain comfortingly small respect: a demonstration of Americas new military
in number. capability would also have significant political bene-
The dramatic and traumatic sublimity of such fits for post-war negotiations with Russia, a factor
responses to nuclear destruction also work to efface which many argue had an important influence on the
what was exceptional about nuclear weaponry: the decision to utilize atomic weapons to end the Pacific
lingering effects of radiation. In Ruin from the Air, war.80
Thomas and Morgan-Witt, describing the actions of It is worth considering Peter Schwengers sugges-
a fighter pilot who attempting to pursue the Enola tion that America must confront the fact that the
Gay in a plane damaged as if warped by some apparently innocent virtues of Yankee ingenuity
supernatural power, comment that: Yasuzawa was and Yankee Doodle patriotism resulted in an act of
now flying in and out of the pall, unaware of the risk to overwhelming terror, a terrorism that from then on
which he was subjecting himself and his passenger.76 will hold hostage the world, including America itself.81
The repression of the word radioactivity here, and Schwengers words, written in 1994, were intended to
its excision from the book except a brief sentence in recall the destructive act that was initiated with the
the penultimate chapter, indicates the extent to which atomic bombing of Hiroshima, but that subsequently
nuclear weaponry has a tendency to be characterized cast a shadow over the whole world, reaching the
by the power and scale of its explosive effect, rather height of its terror during the Cold War. But the nuclear
than consideration of its unique radioactive legacy.77 physicist and Nobel peace laureate Professor Joseph
Any consideration of the human cost of the attack Rotblat draws out what might be taken as a more
must also include the lingering radioactive legacy that recent connotation for Schwengers claim, arguing
continues to claim many of those who survived the that the terror attack on the World Trade Center on
initial effects of the bombing.78 11 September 2001 had not appeared out of the blue,
for its seeds were planted at the very beginning of
the nuclear age.82
Afterlife The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the
Hiroshima was spared the intensive fire-bombing cam- pre-emptive first strike of the Cold War. The concept
paigns that devastated other Japanese cities in the first of nuclear diplomacy might therefore be extended to
six months of 1945 because the city had already been those strategic military gains in the twentieth century
nominated as a possible target for an atomic attack. achieved through the same gunboat diplomacy by
Among the factors contributing to the selection of which Japan was opened to liberalism and capital-
Hiroshima were its importance as a military and ism in the nineteenth. The attacks on Hiroshima and
industrial base, the absence of any significant number Nagasaki have been influential on the development of
of Allied prisoners of war, the absence of surrounding a war that may be thought of as nuclear to the extent
hills which may contribute to containing the effects of that it defies the possibility of the nuclear. The nuclear
the blast (and therefore limit the quantifiable extent of war that never was not only produced the many nests
the devastation), and the presence of a large number of terrorism, the numerous schools of terrorism [that]
of homes and buildings useful for measuring the mag- were spread around the world, but also established
nitude and strength of the explosion (and which had the strategies of conflict that such combatants would
been intentionally spared from conventional bombing deploy.83
for this purpose). Hannah Segal suggests that the 11th September
It is generally agreed that the Truman adminis- bombing was highly symbolic because it served as a
trations primary purpose in the deployment of the counterexample to the notion that because of Americas

27
technological sophistication, its ability to wage war Notes
from a distance, from the sky and not the ground, it 1. Concerns about its veracity were raised, among others,
could remain invulnerable.84 Despite the sophisticated by the Veterans of the 509th Composite Group, who
flew the bombers involved in the raids on Hiroshima
levels of information, planning and communication and Nagasaki (www.enolagay509th.com/Veterans509th.
required to carry out attacks such as those on New pdf). Publication was halted, forcing Hollywood director
York, Madrid or London, the attacks themselves were James Cameron, who had optioned the book in prep-
aration for a forthcoming film on Hiroshima (clearly
technologically crude in their method. The lack of
recognizing the potential for another sentimentalized
technological sophistication is in turn a reflection of techno-hubristic romance), to speak out in defence of
the geopolitical situation out of which terrorism is the author, whom he had previously employed as sci-
waged. For, regardless of the extent to which terrorism entific consultant on Titanic and Avatar. Avatar Direc-
tor James Cameron Defends Hiroshima Author, BBC
can be traced back to supposedly external ideologies News, 4 March 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/enter-
and foreign countries, the capacity to wage terrorist tainment/8549036.stm.
attacks effectively relies on the ability to threaten its 2. Annex V, 20th session of the UNESCO World Heritage
target internally, from within. Committee, 1996, http://whc.unesco.org/archive/rep-
co96x.htm.
Moreover, this disruption of the geographical 3. The term ground zero, which resurfaced in the after-
supremacy of nuclear totalization effects the very math of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center,
uselessness of nuclear technology. Nuclear warfare originated as a military term to describe the hypocentre
of the explosion used by the scientists of the Manhattan
cannot be actually used against an enemy within,
Project.
nor outside of the context of a world war which 4. Shinobu Amano Kikuraku, From A-bomb damage to
nuclear weaponry has supposedly rendered impossible repair: History of the A-Bomb Dome, http://ww2.
at an enemy scattered within another population. enjoy.ne.jp/~kikuraku/files/history4.htm.
5. Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and
The problematic legacy of its radioactive uniqueness the Dialectics of Memory, University of California
means it has a limited effectiveness for a warfare Press, Berkeley and London, 1999, p. 20.
that requires intervention or occupation. In this way, 6. UNESCO World Heritage List No. 775, Hiroshima: Nom-
nuclear weaponry enforces a technological retrogres- ination of Hiroshima Peace Memorial, 28 September
1995, www2.unitar.org/hiroshima/programmes/whs07/
sion not only on those who fight against nations that materials/Utaka-%20ABD_and_Itsukushima.pdf, p. 3.
possess it, but also on those states that possess the 7. Ibid., p. 1.
capacity for nuclear warfare. None of this has pre- 8. Hugh M. Gloster, Hiroshima in Retrospect, Phylon,
vol. 17, no. 3, 1956, pp. 272, 278; Robert Jay Lifton,
vented the repeated threats of nuclear attack against
Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, University of
its political enemies, which, as Joseph Gersons North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1991, p. 278.
Empire and the Bomb lays out in detailed historical 9. Richard Sims, Japanese Political History since the
analysis, has underwritten the USAs diplomatic and Meiji Restoration: 18682000, Hurst, London, 2001,
p.1.
military foreign policy on at least forty occasions 10. Cf. W.G. Beasley, The Rise of Modern Japan: Politi-
since 1945.85 cal, Economic and Social Change since 1850, 2nd edn,
The political essayist Dwight Macdonald, editor Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1995, pp. 512.
of the Marxist journal Politics, lambasted the 11. Chushici Tsuzuki, The Pursuit of Power in Modern
Japan: 18251995, Oxford University Press, Oxford,
early glorifications of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 2000, p. 63.
a series of articles published between August 1945 12. Jean-Pierre Lehman, The Roots of Modern Japan, Mac-
and November 1946 which suggested that atomic millan, London, 1992, p. 174; Richard Storry, A History
of Modern Japan, Penguin, London, 1990, p. 122; Leh-
power had rendered the very concept of progress
man, The Roots of Modern Japan, p. 174.
obsolete.86 Both socialist and conservative responses 13. Christine M.E. Gruth, Japan 18681945: Art, Archi-
to atomic power, Macdonald argued, rested on a tecture, and National Identity, Art Journal, vol. 55, no.
platitude about atomic fission based on a faith in 3, Autumn 1996, p. 17; Storry, A History of Modern
Japan, p. 107.
Science and Progress, a belief which blunts our 14. Tsuzuki, The Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan, p. 72.
reaction to the present horror by reducing it to an A similar mill in Osaka sought farm girls, who were
episode in an historical schema which will come housed in company dormitories and worked up to twelve
out all right in the end.87 Against the utopianism of hours a day in conditions where tuberculosis was rife
(ibid., p. 147).
progress, he admonishes that we do not dream of a 15. Storry, A History of Modern Japan, p. 107; G.B. Sansom,
world in which atomic fission will be harnessed to The Western World and Japan, Cresset Press, London,
constructive ends, for the new energy will be at 1950, p. 401, cited in ibid., pp. 1078.
16. Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan, p. 173, cited
the service of the rulers; it will change their strength
in Tsuzuki, The Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan,
but not their aims. p.37.

28
17. Lehman, The Roots of Modern Japan, p. 174. Air: The Atomic Mission to Hiroshima, Hamish Hamil-
18. Beasley, The Rise of Modern Japan, p. 111. ton, London, 1977, p. 323.
19. Shinobu Amano Kikuraku, Making of the Hiroshima 42. Kyo Maclear, Beclouded Visions: HiroshimaNagasaki
Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall, History of the and the Art of Witness, SUNY Press, Albany NY, 1999,
A-Bomb Dome, http://ww2.enjoy.ne.jp/~kikuraku/files/ p. 51.
history1.htm. 43. Although Yoneyama notes that during the late 1960s
20. Shinobu Amano Kikuraku, Commercial Exhibition survivors were known to be generally less supportive
Hall and Jan Letzel: History of the A-Bomb Dome, of retaining this painful visual reminder of destroyed
http://ww2.enjoy.ne.jp/~kikuraku/files/history2.htm. buildings (Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces, p. 70).
21. Zdenek Lukes, cited in Jan Velinger, A Look at the 44. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S.
Czech Architect Who Built Hiroshimas Industrial Pluhar, Hackett, Indianapolis, 1987, Ak. 245 (hereafter,
Promotion Hall, Radio Praha website, www.radio. CJ)
cz/en/article/69210. 45. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner
22. In the period 18701914, among the major industrial S. Pluhar, Hackett, Indianapolis, 1996, Ak. A567/B595;
powers the UK, Germany, France, the USA and Japan CJ 258.
Japans annual rate of growth was second only to that 46. Quoted in Thomas and Morgan-Witts, Ruin from the Air,
of the United States (Lehman, The Roots of Modern p. 432.
Japan, p. 181). 47. Robert Ginsberg, Aesthetics in Hiroshima: The Archi-
23. Cf. Crawcour, Industrialization and Technological tecture of Remembrance, in Michael H. Mitias, ed.,
Change, 19851920, The Cambridge History of Japan, Philosophy and Architecture, Rodopi, Amsterdam,
vol. 6, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988, 1994, p. 223.
p.436. 48. Cf. Frances Ferguson, The Nuclear Sublime, Nuclear
24. Between 1914 and 1918, Japans real gross national Criticism, Diacritics, vol. 14, no. 2, Summer, 1984,
product rose by 40 per cent (Tsuzuki, The Pursuit of p.7.
Power in Modern Japan, pp. 1934). Between 1915 49. Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a
1919 manufacturing output related to heavy industry Cosmopolitan Purpose, in Kant: Political Writings,
and machinery increased by 72 per cent, with labour trans. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press, Cam-
employment increasing by 42 per cent. Between 1909 bridge, 1991, p. 42 (hereafter IUH); Immanuel Kant,
and 1929 manufacturing relating to textiles almost The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor,
quadrupled, to metals and machinery grew about the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1992, p. 148.
same, to chemicals and ceramics increasing around 50. Ibid., p. 153.
eight-fold, and to electricity and gas around twenty- 51. Ibid., p. 171; cf. Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical
four-fold (Beasley, The Rise of Modern Japan, p. 111). Sketch, in Kant: Political Writings, pp. 93130.
25. Tsuzuki, The Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan, 52. Norman Cousins, The Saturday Review of Literature,
p.188. 5 March 1949, quoted in John Hersey, in Hiroshima
26. Ibid., p. 189. (1946), 2nd edn, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1986, pp.
27. UNESCO World Heritage List No. 775. 1767.
28. Ibid; cf. also Kikuraku, Commercial Exhibition Hall 53. Hersey, Hiroshima, p. 181.
and Jan Letzel. 54. Cf. Paul Boyer, By the Bombs Early Light: American
29. Shinobu Amano Kikuraku, Transformation of the Hall, Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age,
History of the A-Bomb Dome, http://ww2.enjoy.ne.jp/ University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1994,
~kikuraku/files/history3.htm. pp. 11114.
30. Ibid. 55. Paul W. Tibbets, with Clair Stebbins and Harry Frank-
31. Tsuzuki, The Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan, en, The Tibbets Story, Stein & Day, New York, 1978,
p.233. p.230.
32. Joseph Gerson, Empire and the Bomb, Pluto Press, Lon- 56. Ibid., pp. 12. Former secretary of war Henry L. Stim-
don and Ann Arbor MI, 2007, p. 44. son published an article in Harpers magazine early in
33. Kikuraku, Transformation of the Hall. 1947, in which the claim is made that the atomic attacks
34. Storry, A History of Modern Japan, p. 188. had prevented the one million American casualties an-
35. Ibid., p. 294. ticipated in the invasion of Japan, repeating a claim
36. Kikuraku, Making of the Hiroshima Prefectural Com- made by Churchhill (Joseph Gerson, Empire and the
mercial Exhibition Hall. Bomb, Pluto Press, London and Ann Arbor MI, 2007, p.
37. Harry D. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: 47). Truman later drew upon Stimsons explanation, but
History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan, halved the figure. Paul Tibbets repeats these figures in
Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2000, p. his biography, observing that, Depending on whose es-
293. timates you accept, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima
38. Lebra, Japans Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity and Nagasaki saved a half-million or possibly a million
Sphere, pp. 7881; quoted in Beasley, The Rise of Mod- lives, both American and Japanese. Historical research
ern Japan, p. 204. now shows that the pre-surrender estimates never ex-
39. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, p. 34. ceeded 20,000, and the worst-case prediction estimated
40. Liaison Conference, May 1943, quoted in Tsuzuki, The a loss of no more than 46,000 lives (J. Samuel Walker,
Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan, p. 323; Virtual Mu- The Decision to Use the Bomb: A Historiographical
seum: A-Bomb Building, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Update, in Michael J. Hogan, ed., Hiroshima in History
Museum official homepage, www.pcf.city.hiroshima. and Memory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
jp/. 1996, p. 11).
41. Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts, Ruin from the 57. Lifton, Death in Life, p. 271.

29
58. Yoneyama notes how hibakusha invoked this argument the equivalent of Chattanooga, which was Toyama. 40%
of inappropriateness during the first stage of preserva- of the equivalent of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya.
tion during the late 1960s, cf. Yoneyama, p. 70; and This was all done before the dropping of the nuclear
Hibaku Kenzobutsu o Kangaeru Kai, ed., Hiroshima no bomb, which by the way was dropped by LeMays com-
hibaku kenzobutsu: hibaku 45shunen chosa hokokusho, mand. (Errol Morris, director, The Fog of War: Eleven
Asahi Shinbun Hiroshima Shikyoku, Hiroshima, 1990, Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (Sony
pp. 1212. Pictures, 2004), transcript available at www.errolmor-
59. Herseys essay had an immediate and profound impact. ris.com/film/fow_transcript.html). My thanks to Peter
The book version became a runaway best-seller. The Kapos for drawing my attention to this.
Book-of-the-Month Club distributed free copies to many 74. Storry, A History of Modern Japan, p. 122; Lehman, The
of its 848,000 members. A reading of the entire work, Roots of Modern Japan, p. 228.
in four half-hour segments, over the ABC radio network 75. Why was it necessary to drop the nuclear bomb if
won the Peabody Award for the outstanding educational LeMay was burning up Japan? Proportionality
broadcast of 1946 (Boyer, By the Bombs Early Light, should be a guideline in war. Killing 50% to 90%
p. 204). of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing
60. Hersey, Hiroshima, p. 70. them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in
61. Michael Perlman, Imaginal Memory and the Place of the minds of some people, to the objectives we were
Hiroshima, SUNY, Albany NY, 1988, p. viii. trying to achieve. I dont fault Truman for dropping the
62. Ibid., p. 82. nuclear bomb. The U.S.Japanese War was one of the
63. Ibid., pp. 87 and 118. most brutal wars in all of human history Was there
64. Ibid., p. 160. a rule then that said you shouldnt bomb, shouldnt kill,
65. Cf. the preface to Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of shouldnt burn to death 100,000 civilians in one night?
Hiroshima, as well as the concluding chapter of Robert LeMay said, If wed lost the war, wed all have been
Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen, The Genocidal Mental- prosecuted as war criminals. And I think hes right.
ity: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat, Macmillan, He, and Id say I, were behaving as war criminals.
London, 1990. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be
66. Lifton, Death in Life, p. 14. thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes
67. Ibid., p. 294. it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
68. Ibid., p. xii. (Morris, The Fog of War).
69. As for the use of the bomb, [Mrs Nakamura] would 76. Thomas and Morgan-Witts, Ruin from the Air, pp. 433,
say, It was war and we had to expect it. And then she 435.
would add, Shikata ga nai, It cant be helped. Oh, 77. Herseys additional chapter corrects this omission, de-
well. Too bad. Dr. Fujii said approximately the same tailing the psychological and physiological effects of
thing about the use of the bomb to Father Kleinsorge one A-Bomb Disease. Apart from a discussion of the arche-
evening, in German: Da ist nichts zu machen. Theres typal images of unhealing wounds, where he includes
nothing to be done about it. (Hersey, Hiroshima, p. the disintegrative processes in the body resulting from
117); Perhaps the best example of this difficulty is the radiation sickness, Perlman chooses not to dwell on the
attitude of resignation (akimare) and of it cant be effects of radiation (Perlman, Imaginal Memory and the
helped (shikataganai or shoganai) expressed to me Place of Hiroshima, p. 88).
by large numbers of hibakusha (Lifton, Death in Life, 78. Tsuzuki, The Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan,
pp. 1867); One one occasion a gentleman acquaint- p.317.
ance, while talking about the use of the A-Bomb and the 79. Gar Alperovitzs 1965 Atomic Diplomacy put forward
outcome of the war, fatalistically declared, Shi-Kata the revisionist position that the primary motivation
ga nai (It cant be helped) (Gloster, Hiroshima in was not military but rather political: dropped to impress
Retrospect, p. 274). the Soviets rather than defeat the Japanese (Walker,
70. Perlman, Imaginal Memory and the Place of Hiroshima, The Decision to Use the Bomb, p. 13).
p. 144. 80. Cf. Gerson, Empire and the Bomb, p. 13.
71. Thomas and Max-Witts, Ruin from the Air, pp. 423, 81. Peter Schwenger and John Whittier Treat, Americas
427. Hiroshima, Hiroshimas America, Boundary 2, vol. 21,
72. Hersey, Hiroshima, p. 32. no. 1, Spring 1994, p. 248.
73. In Errol Morriss documentary, The Fog of War, the 82. Hanna Segal, From Hiroshima to 11th September 11
US secretary of defence Robert McNamara, then serv- 2001, in Psychodynamic Practice, vol. 9, no. 3, August
ing as a captain in the Office of Statistical Control, de- 2003, p. 257.
scribes how Air Force General LeMay focused on only 83. Ibid., p. 261.
one thing: target destruction [in a] single night, we 84. Ibid., p. 263.
burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo: 85. Cf. Joseph Gersons Empire and the Bomb; see also
men, women, and children 50 square miles of Tokyo Joseph Gerson, With Hiroshima Eyes: Atomic War, Nu-
were burned. Tokyo was a wooden city, and when we clear Extortion and Moral Imagination, New Society
dropped these firebombs, it just burned it And he Publishers, Philadelphia, 1995.
went on from Tokyo to firebomb other cities. 58% of 86. Dwight Macdonald, Politics (August 1945), republished
Yokohama. Yokohama is roughly the size of Cleveland. in The Responsibility of Peoples, Gollancz, London,
58% of Cleveland destroyed. Tokyo is roughly the size of 1957, p. 103.
New York. 51% percent of New York destroyed. 99% of 87. Ibid., p. 106.

30
dossier Universities

The performative
without condition
A university sans appel

Barbara Cassin and Philippe Bttgen

Responsibility and the homonymy of principle: autonomous, unconditionally free in its in-
autonomy stitution, in its speech, in its writing, in its thinking.6

Take your time but be quick about it, because you


It is the ethic of responsibility that strikes, in a
dont know what awaits you, said French philosopher
really Ptainist fashion today, when candidates for pro-
Jacques Derrida in 1998 at Stanford.1 Indeed. He would
fessorial positions are evaluated for their competence
not have expected to be cited like this by Valrie
to act as a civil servant [ fonctionnaire dtat] and
Pcresse, French Minster for Higher Education and
in an ethical and responsible fashion.7 Not, however,
Research, in January 2009:
the same responsibility, because Derridas without
We are taking all the measures to ensure that a new condition is grasped in the ethic of desaississement,
ethic founds the autonomy gained by the university of non-mastery, of the always-excessive event,8 in short
community in the conduct of its own destiny. To of masculine hysteria.
profess is to pledge oneself writes Jacques Derrida
On the other hand, autonomy (that of our ministers,
in The University without Condition. The hour has
come to recognize fully this engagement that is at in any case) is grasped in the ethics of performance
once individual and collective, to have confidence in in other words, the culture of results. Autonomy
the university and in academics.2 is essential for the university because autonomy is
the culture of the result. If the minister decides, it is
One can truncate a citation, deform an aim, pervert its
irresponsibility; it is necessary for us today to admit
spirit.3 But perhaps one should in the first place rejoice
that the culture of results should be a part of the uni-
that a French government minister knows her Jacques
versity.9 As the icing on the cake, Pcresse added: for
Derrida unlike a president of the republic who hadnt
the first time, a government will judge the universities,
heard of Anne of Cleves.
finance them, equip them as a function of their real
Derrida said that something awaited us. In 1998 one
performances. Autonomy, then, is a culture of results
could not have known what. Now we know. The law
in so far as that culture is judged heteronomically. The
supposed to institute the autonomy of universities is
university is autonomous when it suits the government,
entitled The Freedoms and Responsibilities of the Uni-
in itself the only judge of real performances. The
versities4 an entire vocabulary: ethic, autonomy,
university is quite literally irresponsible (dependent
community, destiny, engagement, confidence.
on the minister) where it is said to be autonomous.
These are the words of Valrie Pcresse.
Today and in itself, then, autonomy is the mask
One can read some of them in Derrida too, and in
under which everything that we do not want progresses
the same general sense: and what matters here is this
that is to say, the evaluation of performance. And
promise, this pledge of responsibility. 5
if we have begun with DerridaPcresse, it is because
it is very difficult, hic et nunc, to call into doubt
I am thus referring here to a university that would
be what it always should have been or always should the ethics of responsibility, even when it results in
have represented, that is, from its inception and in the requirement of evaluation. Do you refuse to be

R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 2 ( Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 010 ) 31
evaluated? Do you want to be inefficient [non-perform- and is expressed in the first pages of the Conflict of
ants]; or, as our Agency for the Evaluation of Research the Faculties, those pages which Derrida precisely
and Higher Education says, non-productive? doesnt comment on.
A knot to be untied then: responsibility, evaluation,
Whoever it was that first hit on the notion of a uni-
performance. versity and proposed that a public institution of this
Derrida unties it in advance, by speaking not of kind be established, it was not a bad idea to handle
performance but of the performative. The performa- the entire content of learning by mass produc-
tive intervenes three times in The University without tion, so to speak by a division of labour, so that
Condition. every branch of the sciences there would be a public
teacher or professor appointed as its trustee, and all
The first time, in the principle of an unconditioned
of these together would form a kind of learned com-
University, frank/free, that is to say, set free of every- munity called a university (or higher school). The
thing, and in particular of all territorial (thus national) university would have a certain autonomy (since only
rootedness.10 It performs itself in affirming itself, in scholars can pass judgement on scholars as such).15
the place of the self-presentation of unconditionality
that will go by the name Humanities.11 Affirmation, In Austinian language: almost all the way. The
self-presentation one might be tempted to say distinction between performative speech acts and con-
Selbstbehauptung (self-assertion) but for the differ- stative speech acts, in play from the start of the profes-
ence of nationality, which is no small thing. Ecce sion of the professor, will have been a great event in
Heidegger: this century and it will first have been an academic
event, in the university, via the Humanities, that
Battle alone keeps this opposition open and im- made it come about and that explored its resources.16
plants in the entire body of teachers and students Evidently it is not same thing when, performatively,
that basic mood which lets self-limiting self-asser-
one professes17 like Derrida, and when one responds
tion empower resolute self-examination to genuine
to the call of Being.
self-governance.12
In Levinasian language: In the face of what arrives
The second time, in the declaration of principles to me, what happens to me, even in what I decide
of the professor. To profess or to be professor is to in the face of the other who arrives and arrives to me,
promise to take a responsibility that is not exhausted all performative force is overrun, exceeded, exposed.18
in the act of knowing or teaching; the affirma- It is the Other, in (the) place of Being, which, for
tion of the declaration of principles in effect closely Derrida, makes the event. (Ereignis all the same
resembles a performative speech act.13 As we know, Levinas as Jewish Heideggerian?) Is this a motive
to profess is to pledge oneself, say the minister and for finally abandoning the performative? We will come
our two philosophers, Derrida and Heidegger, calm, back to this.
uneasy. We are moving too fast, and in play. But through
The final, contemporary, time: at the moment that these caustic remarks we have wanted to show that,
one takes into account not only the performative once predicated of the university in the trembling
value of the profession but where one accepts that Heidegger/Kant autonomy is a fundamentally homo-
a professor produces uvres. That is to say, when, nymic notion.
at the heart of the transformed humanities,14 between We now want to show that the performative is a
literature and philosophy, one thinks as a poet, as good way to outsmart the performance imperative and
Heidegger once again would say. the culture of results, on condition that one thinks it
After Derrida-and-Pcresse, Derrida-and-Heidegger? to the very end without stopping, like Derrida, at the
An old clich, evidently false. One can dismantle doubtful ethics of the event.
its falsity in more than one philosophical language:
Kantian, Austinian and Levinasian. Ethics and the homonymy
In Kantian language: Derrida a child of the of performance
Republic with the Crmieux decree is Kantian when After the homonymy of autonomy, we will take as our
he speaks of autonomy. He is moral and a universalist new point of departure the homonymy of perform-
where Heidegger, speaking of Selbstverwaltung, is a ance. New European politics evaluates the university.
national bureaucrat. Besides, a Kantian thinking of It evaluates it on its real performances. Such is the
the autonomy of universities exists. It is neither moral culture of results into which the university is invited
nor bureaucratic but rather industrial and commercial, to enter. This is to say, very officially, that those who

32
evaluate the university are external, foreign to it, individual act, the performance of a horse, a champion,
and intend to remain so. The president of the French an artist that which is unrepeatable. Not only does
republic, Nicolas Sarkozy, is not a university type. On performance measure the unquantifiable and make
the other hand, he is a big theorist of the link between the most singular enter into the most objective, but
evaluation, performance and the culture of results. The that gives it the democratic look of a numerical figure
university served as a privileged example for him for a without being arbitrary. To exit a purely mechani-
while.19 He barely altered his formulas as a result of the cal, legal, egalitarian, anonymous approach so as to
global economic crisis. He may even have toughened promote genuine equality, genuine equality and not
them up.20 egalitarianism, says Sarkozy.21 What is that to say?
As for us, less speculatively, we will ask: what is Genuine equality is not the equality of opportunity; it
understood here and elsewhere by performance? is the equality of compensation for an equal perform-
Let us take out our dictionaries. Kleins Comprehensive ance. When we perform well, we are each and every
Etymological Dictionary of the English Language tells one of us like a racing car, a top-level sportsman, even
us that the English forged performance on the [model a champion in bed. Visible and thus profitable.
of the] old French parfournir (from the Medieval Latin If now we get closer to performance evaluation in
perfurnire) and/or parformer, before the French bor- the university sector, we come across two things: the
rowed it, at least three times, if Alain Reys Diction- search engine and the evaluation form. Do you think
naire Culturel de la langue franaise is to be believed. that we exaggerate? Look at how we work already,
In 1869, by analogy with the language of horse racing, with Google on-screen, and how they want us to
performance signifies the manner of developing a work when we apply for research funding or evaluate
subject, of executing a work in public. In 1953, it research projects.
signifies the individual result in the accomplishment Research and the Search Engine. Google, then, is
of a task. In 1963, and in the wake of Chomsky, it a model of evaluation by performance. With Google,
is opposed to competence. It is a moving, bilingual basic research and the research of a search engine no
form, which unites sport (performance-record), longer have anything homonymic about them. The
technique (performance-efficiency of a machine), PageRank algorithm that ranks the page responses to
psychology (performance-test), linguistics (perform- a query and is one of the things that gives Google its
ance/competence) and modern art (performance-hap- great superiority, functions if Bryn and Page are to
pening without forgetting theatrical representation be believed according to the academic model of the
in English). It is difficult not to add that today per- citation: pages that are clicked or cited the most are
formance occupies centre stage in Europe, along with ranked first.22 It is even a question here of a doxa raised
evaluation and the culture of results. to the power two: at the top of the page ranking are
So, as a consequence let us continue with our defini- the sites that are most cited by the sites that are most
tions. In the language of received and thus uncontro- cited a cultural democracy, according to Google,
versial opinion (that is, Wikipedia): evaluation is a with a balancing mechanism, however, which gives
method that allows a result to be evaluated and thus the this democracy a star system; a link from a site that
value of a result that cant be measured to be known. is not cited much is worth more than a link from one
It is applied in numerous domains where results are cited a great deal.
expected but not measurable. Neither research nor Now, this ranking mechanism is precisely that put
health can be measured, and that is precisely what into operation by Hirschs famous H-index or impact
evaluation says when it talks of the performance factor, more or less amended to avoid absolute ridi-
of a hospital or a system of research. The challenge cule (no matter what neo-Nazi negationist is evidently
of quantifying the unquantifiable is met thanks to ranked higher than Lvi-Strauss). It determines the
performance. admissibility of the applications for senior researcher
What is magical about performance is that it is submitted to the European Research Council in Brus-
enough to transform more into better, quantity into sels.23 It classifies researchers, for example, by the
quality, cardinal into ordinal. It comes at the right number of their publications, in journals that are them-
moment then: it is the synthesis of quality and quan- selves classified and rated, by balancing them with the
tity. The tension internal to the concept derives from number of citations that are made of these publications
the fact that it designates at the same time the most in journals that are themselves classified and rated. The
objectively measurable (the performance indicators classification of journals is evidently the object of a
of a machine) and what is most singular about the fierce national and international battle, since it forms

33
part of the barometer. Tell us how many articles you described phenomenologically still as the passage
have published in journals with editorial board A and from one form to another. Why the form? We propose
how many times these articles have themselves been two answers.25
cited in journals with editorial board A, and we will First, the form is the point of contact between lan-
tell you what you are worth! Of course, we will not guage and evaluation. It is composed of sections that
take into account the linguistic bias, which means that must be completed one after the other. The first func-
you may not necessarily be publishing in English or tion of the form is to sequence: it transforms the object
rather in globish and that maybe it is necessary to evaluated the illness of a patient and his or her being
ensure that continuing to speak in French or German taken into care, for example into analogous portions
(thus maintaining them as languages and not simple that can be costed on a per action basis according to a
dialects) doesnt penalize you. Of course, we will not pre-established protocol. The personal appreciation or
take into account either the disciplinary bias, which statement of the evaluator is itself a section generally
means that the human and social sciences, unless the last one, because it is the least important. After
they are strictly cognitive, can require publications evaluation, as the passage from one form to another,
that are lengthier and take longer to write (did you a closer description makes evaluation appear as the
say books?). Nor the fact that it might be a matter passage from one section to another. What do we do
of reading and of thinking, even when evaluating; nor when we pass from one section to another? It is dif-
the practice of citing ones own little
clique, or accounting for the impact that
is forgotten tomorrow.
That such a treasure may make
Googles fortune which subordinates
everything, including so-called cultural
democracy, to legitimate commercial
goals is the name of the game, or at
least of a certain game. But for this kind
of research such as it is practised
by a search engine to become the
regulatory norm for the evaluation of
basic research is something that must be
opposed by every possible means and to
the very end, because it evidently contra-
dicts the very idea of emerging research.
By definition, the (too singular) base of
a Gaussian curve is invisible. Performance and the H- ficult to say. In any case we do know what we dont do,
factor are incapable of measuring originality as such. or dont do any more: we dont write or write up any
As Lindon said apropos Beckett: one doesnt notice longer; we dont develop ideas any longer. We progress
the absence of an unknown. Now innovation would in the form by separating, segmenting and sequencing.
like researchers to produce prototypes, not stereotypes: Unlike the topoi of Ancient Greek rhetoric, which
there is no H-factor that could ensure either its rating although decried constituted a reservoir of argu-
or its conformity. ments for invention that one was free to assemble in
Language and the ethic of forms. Let us now come the most appropriate, and singular, manner each time,
to the form.24 Performance has its calculus, as we have the form is a fixed sequence.
just seen. But it also has its ethics, the responsible Second, the form is the point of contact between
ethics of autonomous universities. It is interesting evaluation and morality. From the point of view of the
that this ethic has to pass through the sections of a evaluated, more and more frequently it contains the
form. What is it a question of? Phenomenologically, moment of self-evaluation, with the previous noting
the form is the primary perception of evaluation. and identification of ones strong points and weak
The project leader, the leader of the research team points. In laboratories and research centres one fre-
being evaluated, completes an evaluation form. The quently ironizes the similarity between self-evaluation
evaluator of the project or of the research team com- and the confession of sins (or Maoist self-criticism,
pletes another form. What is called evaluation may be depending on ones preferences). That sort of irony is

34
easy. What is happening in reality is very serious. If of the university that is the old formula, born with
you can only find weak points, it is because you really Humboldt, continued deformed by Heidegger, and the
must have a problem; but if you only credit yourself incantation of Selbstbehauptung or, by summoning
with strong points, in a sense this is even worse. ourselves, at last, to perform efficiently to publish,
What self-evaluation tests is your ability to acquire to be productive, and, even more so, to be evaluated.
the Anglo-Saxon and Protestant virtue of fairness. This is the call that is coming from our government
What is fairness? It is exactly that which remains of ministries, our evaluation agencies, our states today. In
the subjectivity of the researcher who puts his work one case, we will have to answer for the university, as
through the grid of the form: just enough subjectivity one answers for an idea that is greater than oneself. In
not to be confused with a computer. the second, it will be necessary for us to defend our
It is the same for both evaluator and evaluated. The university (each one his or her own university, different
form is what assures me that no-matter-what evaluator and in competition with all the others, co-petitive, as
would have made the same decision as me. Here once Google says), in the way that one defends ones team,
again is fair play and something to soothe my con- ones business, ones country: our responsibility will be
science: the idea that I might have shown judgement, to respond to calls for tenders. Always responding.
even taste, was in fact a source of deep insecurity. Those are the two current discourses on the univer-
Who am I to judge when I am no longer elected by sity. Sometimes they seem to be opposed. Most often,
my colleagues and my task is to return my correctly as with Valrie Pcresse, they reinforce each other.
completed form before the deadline? The form, with What the present moment of the university shows us
its neatly ordered sections, gives at least a momentary is that the ethics of responsibility has been unable to
response to my anxiety, until the moment when I have do anything against the culture of results; quite the
to compare my form to those of peer evaluators with contrary, in fact.
as little legitimacy as me. But even at this stage, that Here, we rediscover our initial knot: responsibility,
of the so-called update meeting, the comparison of evaluation, performance.
forms will not require any more than the minimum In 1998, Jacques Derridas The University without
of subjectivity that was required of those being evalu- Condition was barely touched by the fever of evalua-
ated. There will be trouble for me if I talk beyond the tion. Performance was not yet completely the univer-
confines of the sections on the form: I will have come sitys business. Derrida placed the performative in the
close to insider dealing, or as the evaluation agencies face of responsibility.
call it a conflict of interest. In our knot, then, one of the threads splits in two:
The language of forms is thus transparent and performance and performative. That is without doubt
honest, consensual, euphemistic and gentle. Its trans- the strangest thing that we discovered in The Univer-
parency is guaranteed by the procedure: the justice sity without Condition. But how the devil did we pass
of evaluation is a procedural justice, la Habermas. from the performative university to the performances
Fairness is ensured by process. That is why those of the university, judged by the criteria of a culture
in charge of the national and European evaluation of results?
agencies are generally decent, competent and above One can answer in two ways. The first is the sim-
all profoundly cooperative people: they will always plest. It consists of two toponyms and some slogans:
encourage you to sit down next to them in order to the Bologna process, the Lisbon strategy. Both make
refine the criteria, as they say; to multiply them if the university the primary motor in the transforma-
necessary. The essential point is that this refinement tion of Europe into a knowledge-based economy. A
of criteria only ever leads to a longer form. Just chronology may be sketched out here. Bologna (June
try getting away from forms: you will find yourself 1999) and Lisbon (March 2000) separate us from
talking into thin air, for your own amusement. 26 You Derridas lecture at Stanford (April 1998). 19982010:
will be considered irresponsible. two universities, separated by a world.
But other evolutions have taken place. From the
The performative versus performance performative to performance, the journey sums up two
To finish, let us posit delicately, provisionally, because centuries of the European university.
it is where all the difficulty lies a universitarian we, In Derrida, for a time at least, the performative
a university thought as (a) we. There are two ways saves the university without condition from Selbstbe-
in which to call ourselves to responsibility: either hauptung and the pathos of destining. For Derrida, the
by designating for ourselves the historical mission unconditioned and the absolute are said performatively,

35
so as to avoid repeating Humboldts lesson and even However, we find a real convergence where the phil-
more so its being led astray by Heidegger. In affirming osopher is most philosophical and the minister most
itself without any condition, the university fabricates political. Valrie Pcresse paraphrases: to profess is
itself [se fait] is constituted as university in antici- to pledge oneself, wrote Jacques Derrida.33 For his
pation of any merely transmitted knowledge. part, Derrida wanted to exceed pure techno-scientific
The idea of the university becomes a language knowledge in the pledge of responsibility.34 On the one
act, that of the professor who knows that his or her hand, there is engagement, 35 thought as motivation in
freedom is not exhausted by the pure technoscientific the horizon of an ethics (the word the minister uses)
knowledge that it accompanies.27 In a word, the per- of responsibility; on the other, for the philosopher,
formative university is no longer the essence that one is an ethico-political responsibility, the principle of
contemplates and that one endeavours to realize. It is the unconditional resistance of the university. 36 Two
the act that one performs, the university that starts all concepts of responsibility, doubtless, and two ethics
over again with each lecture course. also, but in both cases an appeal, an exhortation, a
The performative as a support for and vector of paraenesis.
a knowledge that of the university: we must hold The university without condition that, for our part,
this to be something the topicality of which is still we are demanding, is a university without appeal (sans
and always established. To tell the truth, we must appel). Without appeal covers without ethics, without
maintain it for much longer than Derrida. Because for responsibility, but also without the dilemma between
Derrida the performative is rapidly directed towards a an autonomy desirable for every corporation and a
place where it fails. 28 Derrida designates this place as heteronomy that is necessary to bring the university
event. The event disregards the performative. It has out of itself.
to dissociate the Humanities from every phantasm Is it worth specifying here that to reject the
of indivisible sovereignty and of sovereign mastery injunction to responsibility is not to vindicate irre-
shortly after the same Humanities has been associated sponsibility or immorality for oneself. (Should
with engagement and the promise of a profession of one say non-ethics?) In fact, our response, like Der-
faith characterized as performative.29 That is what we ridas in his time, is strategically determined. It has
called masculine hysteria: an apology for impotence nothing to do with a perennial, timeless that is
through fear of the counter-performance (without to say essential definition of the university. In
power or without defence Derridas quotation this sense, it is not responsible (ethico-ontologically
marks30); the poetry of desuvrement versus the mas- responsible); or responsibility must be understood
terable possible, with a definition of the event in a here as the strength to respond no. As it happens,
dialectico-phenomenological patois that is evidently in fact, we respond no to the responsibility that
oxymoronic as impossible possible (only the impos- is ideologically hammered out, as the responsibil-
sible can happen); the normative exacerbation of ity of the citizen professor and citizen student of
this impossible possible as the only event worthy of a techno-scientific neoliberal state concerned with
the name; and the final choice of the event as the performance. And we protest this is what we are
antonym of the performative. 31 The whole argument maintaining that this performance is radically
is summarized in the superbly forged formulation the counterproductive on all levels: but first of all on that
force of an event is always stronger than the force of of knowledge and invention, including the invention
a performative.32 that is the transmission of knowledge. 37
The performative obliges us here to judge things by Just as the performative utterance the university
effects. The effect is that eight years after its appear- thought in the form of an enlarged perlocutory has
ance, The University without Condition finds itself been able to get the university out of an autonomy
cited by a French government minister who has the reduced to Selbstbehauptung, so thought all the
whole of the university against her. way through it will serve us as a provisional arm
Certainly what is at stake here, as usual, is an for subtracting us from an autonomy confused with
appropriation of the other, not for the fundamentals the performance of a manager. Its other name is: let
of what they say but for the emblem, self-designated us continue the combat.
as opening whether it is a matter of Jaurs, of the A veritable autonomy, then? Of course, it is this
signifier Mitterrand, or of Derrida. What is at stake is ethic that we will begin by breaking with.
a governmental ventriloquism in which no word, no
idea, comes out unscathed. Translated by Andrew Goffey

36
Notes behaviour if we dont change the measure of our
Originally published in French at www.appeldesappels. performance. And our behaviour absolutely must
org, March 2010. change. (Speech of the President of the Republic at
1. Jacques Derrida, The University without Condition, in the International Conference for the Presentation of
Without Alibi, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, the Conclusions of Commission for the Measurement
2002, p. 237. of Economic Performance and Social Progress, at the
2. Valrie Pcresse, Ce que je veux dire aux enseignants- Sorbonne, Paris, 14 September 2009.) The measure
chercheurs, Libration, 27 January 2009. changes, perhaps. However, it remains a measurement of
3 It is worth noting that the original French of the expres- performance. See on this point Barbara Cassin, Ltat
sion that Pcresse cites is Professer, cest sengager. The schizophrne, Dieu et le nous raisonnable, in Roland
verb sengager can mean to take a stand, to commit Gori, Barbara Cassin and Christian Laval, LAppel des
oneself (to something). Derrida plays on the verbal form Appels. Pour une insurrection des consciences, Edi-
engager and the nominal expression en gage (pledge). tions Mille et une nuits, Paris, 2009) pp. 35174, espe-
(Trans.) cially pp. 3734; and Philippe Bttgen, Dailleurs toute
4 See Law 20071199 of 10 August 2007, Journal Officiel activit sans evaluation pose un problme, MethIS,
de la Rpublique Franaise, 11 August 2007, relative to Spring 2010.
the freedoms and responsibilities of universities. 21. Speech by the President of the Republic during a visit
5. Derrida, The University without Condition, p. 215. to the Institut Rgional de lAdministration, Nantes, 19
6. Ibid., pp. 21314. September 2007.
7. New modes of organization relative to the concours for 22. See Sergey Bryn and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of
the recruitment of academics (the agrgation, CAPES, a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Online
CAPET, etc.), contained in the decrees of 28 Decem- at http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html. Re-
ber 2009. See the Journal Officiel de la Rpublique ferred to in Barbara Cassin, Google-moi. La deuxime
Franaise, 6 January 2010. mission de lAmrique, Albin Michel, Paris, 2007. See
8. Derrida, The University without Condition, pp. in particular pp. 94104.
2347. 23. Eugene Garfield created the Journal Impact Factor in
9. Valrie Pcresse on Dimanche soir politique, France 1960 to support the Garfield Impact Factor in select-
Inter, 12 January 2009. ing reviews for the Canadian Medical Association. We
10. Derrida, The University without Condition, p. 213. insist on the fact that the H-factor constitutes the unwar-
11. Ibid., p. 208. ranted extension, even the uncontrolled importing, of a
12. Martin Heidegger, The Self-Assertion of the Ger- practice that has its place in bibliometry, introduced in
man University and the Rectorate 1993/34. Facts and Canada for the well-controlled and numerically signifi-
Thoughts, Review of Metaphysics, vol. 38, no. 3, March cant collections of medical publications.
1985, p. 479. In the French translation that the authors 24. The term that the authors use is grille, which in this
cite, Gerard Granel translates Selbstvertwaltung (here, context can be translated as form, grid or question-
self-governance) as autonomie. They comment that for naire (Trans.).
a French academic today, this makes one do a different 25. On this and the previous aspects, see Philippe Bttgen
kind of somersault. and Barbara Cassin, Jen ai 22 sur 30 au vert. Six
13. Derrida, The University without Condition, p. 217. theses sur lvaluation, Cits 37, 2009, pp. 2741.
14. When Derrida ultimately interrogates himself about 26. The expression that the authors use is pour le plaisir. It
the nature of his discourse, in The University without is an oblique reference to Cassins work on the sophistry
Condition, he asks: is it philosophy or literature? Or and the plaisir de parler (Trans.).
theatre? Is it an uvre or a course, or a sort of seminar? 27. Derrida, The University without Condition, p. 215.
Ibid., p. 237. 28. Ibid., p. 209. For the rest of the argument one would have
15. Immanuel Kant, Der Streit der Fakultten (1798), Ein- to measure exactly the impact of the debate between
fhrung, AK VII, 17. Quoted in translation from The Searle and Derrida: the mention of Signature, Event,
Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor, Univer- Context and of Limited Inc has an important part to
sity of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1979, p. 23. play in Derridas destitution of the performative (see p.
16. Derrida, The University without Condition, p. 209. 301 n6).
17. Ibid., p. 209. 29. Ibid., p. 235 (Derridas italics) a sequence that sketches
18. Ibid., p. 235. out one of the principal trajectories of The University
19. Thus, Personally, I see in evaluation the compensation without Condition.
for performance. If there is no evaluation, there is no 30. Ibid., p. 206.
performance. (Speech given by the President of the Re- 31. Ibid., pp. 2345.
public on the occasion of the launch of the reflection on 32. Ibid., p. 236.
the National Strategy for Research and Innovation at the 33. See n2 above.
Palais de lElyse, 22 January 2009.) Or: the culture 34. Derrida, The University without Condition, p. 215.
of results and of performance has always been at the 35. See n3 above (Trans.).
centre of my action. We should not have any taboo with 36. Derrida, The University without Condition, p. 218.
regard to figures and I have always advocated the great- 37. On performance as the principle of an economic thought
est transparency. (Speech given by the President of the bankrupt since 2008, see Barbara Cassin, Ltat schizo-
Republic at a meeting with the main actors in security, phrne, Dieu et le nous raisonnable, cited in LAppel des
prisons and national education, 28 May 2009.) All of appels. This appeal of appeals has for its first function
Nicolas Sarkozys speeches can be read online at www. an appeal to say no, from the heart of each trade [m-
elysee.fr. tier], and, in particular, to say no to performance. In
20. I have a deep conviction: we will not change our its own way it too is without appeal.

37
The university and the plan
Reflections from Vienna

The immediate causes of the current protests by stu- the kind commonly recognized by the state, such as
dents, lecturers and academic researchers in Europe employees organizations, student unions, trade unions
are contingent; they are directed at individual educa- and reform-oriented parties, rarely prove to be the ini-
tional institutions or administrators, and the demands tiators of social struggles, not least because their own
they make are capable of being met over the short bureaucratic structures are designed to balance corpo-
term.* But on a second level, one that cannot be rate interests. When struggles do arise, they generally
separated from the immediate events, protestors are do so outside of them. This is partly because economic
concerned with fundamental changes made to systems competition, consumer individualism and the reorgani-
of education and training in circumstances of massive zation of industrial production have helped create a
underfunding, processes of de-democratization and situation where people either no longer go through, or
practical mistakes made in introducing new BA and are no longer aware of, the classic collective experi-
MA structures as a result of the Bologna guidelines. ences of politicization. But there is another reason as
In relation to this, protest is generally directed at well: as fields of production and work become increas-
ministries of education and research or at governments, ingly immaterial, demand has risen for workers with
and it is possible to imagine that demands made at this uniquely individual abilities indeed, with carefully
level could essentially be met and acted upon over the cultivated idiosyncrasies, stylish quirks and personal
medium term assuming, that is, that the demands (physical) attractiveness. The self is no longer a place
are taken seriously. This second level in particular has of retreat but a productive force, obliged to operate on
received a great deal of attention and vocal support deregulated markets, deploying as many unique selling
in the media, although uncommitted declarations of points as possible. The result is an encroachment of
solidarity have often also had the effect of weakening the working day into traditional leisure activities:
its impact. going to parties, concerts, exhibitions and the cinema
A third level, which was part of the protests from the or engaging in the never-ending (in)voluntary rounds
beginning, was either widely ignored by the media or at of networking become mere opportunities for honing
best dismissed as mere fantasy: it includes everything this constructed self further.
that the rather vague demands for changing the whole of These processes of individualization and compul-
society tried to express. There was a reason why these sory Bohemianization gradually take hold of the entire
terms were so imprecise: put simply, it has now become individual, affecting ever more areas of his or her life.
difficult to identify and describe exactly what the whole Those subject to them must maintain a good mood
social structures are that need to be changed. In what in order to appear creative and original survival
follows, we attempt to analyse the current conflicts and depends on it. As semi-self-employed small entrepre-
paradoxes in order to formulate more concrete demands neurs running their own businesses, or as precariously
at this third level in the hope that starting points for a employed workers, they represent the new proletariat
theory of society might emerge. of deregulation and neoliberalism. The situation in the
At the current stage of capitalist socialization in universities, by contrast, looks very different. Here it
Western countries, there remain only a few areas of life is not deregulation that is the problem, but increasing
where individuals can become aware of their common regulation; the trend is not towards compulsory self-
political interests with others that is to say, of their invention and self-management, but external controls,
political and economic interests. Interest groups of bureaucracy and the dumbing-down of courses.

* This is a translation of a German-language article from a reader Was passiert? Stellungnahme zur Lage der Universitt, in the series
Unbedingte Universitten, edited by a Munich-based student collective and published by Diaphanes, Zurich/Berlin, 2010. The text reflects
discussions in January 2010 among several people who, in one way or another, are involved in the Akademie der Bildenden Knste, Vienna.
Contributors to this version include Fahim Amir, Sabeth Buchmann, Diedrich Diederichsen, Tom Holert, Jakob Kramertisch and Ruth
Sonderegger.

38
The sociologist and management consultant Armin readiness to express solidarity with other movements
Nassehi recently wrote an article (Frankfurter Allge- outside them. Its disadvantage is that the unevenness
meine Zeitung, 25 November 2009) supporting the of these developments makes them hard to express
students protests in their substantive points, while in the form of demands. Anti-authoritarian and anti-
at the same time denying that there is any connection hierarchical demands however justified they may be
between the Bologna system which he considers against Bologna and the transformation of universities
to have been rightly criticized and neoliberalism. into factories are, in the cultural industries outside
Instead, he saw the much-criticized mania for regula- the universities, instances of preaching to the con-
tion more as a return to socialist five-year plans. Even verted. Thus, for example, Magnus Klaue could write
Adam Soboczynski, in his otherwise very sympathetic in the weekly newspaper Freitag (25 November 2009)
tribute to the old-school systems tradition of long-term that the students were demanding what was effectively
study (Die Zeit, 26 November 2009), found that the already happening.
Bologna regulations smacked of Leninism. This unevenness characterizes not only the differ-
Drawing analogies between educational and eco- ence between the neo-Fordist Bologna university and
nomic policy on the basis of structural similarities post-Fordist (cultural) work, but also the position of
is a category error that is commonly made. For, in artistic and academic staff, of lecturers and research-
the neoliberal paradigm, the increasing regulation of ers. Increasingly partially and precariously employed,
universities and decreasing regulation of money flows the latter are now responsible for finding their own
go together, in much the same way as the increasing funding, attracting external funds and promoting them-
control of migration goes together with decreasing selves through constant networking. In this sense,
control of capital movements. Both are different ways they too are subject to experiences similar to other
of serving the same end, namely of intensifying exploi- cognitive proletarians. At the same time, however,
tation and reducing costs. they are part of the universitys management and are
The only difference is that monadized, independent involved in implementing the reforms that are turning
micro-entrepreneurs can more effectively be exploited it into a factory; entangled in its functions of control,
outside the colleges, while within universities cost they develop phantom professorial traits. Social and
reduction can only be achieved by bureaucratic political demands must take the ambiguity of their
methods. Of course, this principally applies to the position into account; if they dont, they run the risk
large state-run universities, whose unmanageable size of degenerating into a nostalgic, anti-authoritarian
and organizational overload constantly force them to spectacle of defiance, consoling themselves with empty
produce guidelines that can guarantee the quality of gestures of support and solidarity from the media.
their industrially manufactured educational product, At the same time, we should be asking whether the
including evaluations, credit points, micro-managed moment has come to reconsider and revise the nature
curricula, and so on. of the clear public demands that are regularly being
Thus while post-Fordist deregulation is everywhere called for, but whose political effectiveness is arguable.
on the offensive, and while the function of disciplining Long before the start of the protests, work had begun
and controlling labour is no longer exercised by bosses on an intensive critique of contemporary conditions;
and authority figures but has become internalized by it argued that such phenomena as deregulation and
working subjects themselves, a neo-Fordist system of disciplining, the pressure to stand out and the pressure
discipline is, as it were, gradually being imposed in to conform, demands for excellence and the precariza-
the universities, with the Bologna process as part of tion of work, the propaganda of labour mobility and
it. However, this also has the result that, like factory the control of that mobility, the myth of horizontal
workers of the past, students are now able to experi- hierarchies and the reality of dismantling democratic
ence themselves and those in the same position as forms, were not contradictory but rather complemen-
them as a class. While exploitative relationships are tary processes. The analysis is of the circumstances in
elsewhere becoming increasingly less visible, they which hegemonic powers are attempting to promote the
have become strikingly more so in the large-scale knowledge society and creative cities as ideological
universitys structures of power and control. role models for the present political and economic
The advantage of this visibility as a basis for reality. It has developed practices and slogans that both
mobilizing students and other participants within uni- the media and politicians have been quick to denounce
versities has been clearly demonstrated; at the same as absurdly unrealistic demands for grassroots democ-
time, there is little doubt it has also contributed to a racy. In so doing, these practices and slogans best

39
demonstrate how the production of a theory of society passivity, which manifests itself as the individualized
works namely, by (and through) the discussion of performance of undirected and at best self-referential
very concrete problems of discrimination and exclu- virtuosity. By deliberately not behaving as a mere
sion, by organizing learning, teaching and everyday consumer or service provider in the new university
life, and by observing administrative and managerial factories (or edu-shopping malls), but rather as an
practices and their legitimating discourses. impatient and irritated historical subject in the most
The self-organized production of political critique different, unpredictable constellations, associations and
and self-empowering gestures made in and through organizational forms, we can turn social theory into an
educational institutions are themselves a form of social anti-hegemonic, anti-neoliberal praxis of the subjects
and political theory. This new production of activity of these institutions.
is not least a reaction to the neoliberal production of Translated by Nathaniel McBride

Case study

From fiasco to carnival


The end of philosophy at Middlesex?
On 26 April, the Dean of the School of Arts and New Statesmans Cultural Capital website attacked
Education announced the decision to close recruitment the decision as a more general Assault on the Humani-
to all undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in ties which lacked any ostensible rationale or justifica-
Philosophy at Middlesex University, London, includ- tion. The Times Higher Education website picked up
ing research degrees in the highly regarded Centre for the story on 1 May, and followed up five days later in
Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) its weekly edition with a more detailed analysis of the
the top research-rated unit in the University. News underlying relationship of the announced closure to the
of the announcement quickly generated a widespread strategic promotion of business, scientific and voca-
outpouring of concern and support. Within days an tional subjects at the expense of the humanities by
online petition demanding the reversal of the deci- the Higher Education Funding Council for England
sion had already received several thousand signatures, (HEFCE)s funding banding system. It also published a
whilst a Save Middlesex Philosophy Facebook group letter signed by thirty leading international academ-
set up by students had begun attracting members, ics, including Badiou, Balibar, Butler, Hardt, Negri,
garnering messages of solidarity from other depart- Rancire, Spivak and iek calling on the University
ments and institutions notably, in the UK, from to reverse this damaging and ill-judged decision and
similar campaigns at Sussex, Essex and Kings College to renew its commitment to widening participation in
London and organizing campaign meetings. At the education and to excellence in research.
time of writing (9 June), the group has over 13,500 By this point, students had grown impatient with
members and the petition has in excess of 18,000 the University managements refusal to justify their
signatures. decision or to address these concerns. On 4 May,
The press attention provoked by the closure began when the only meeting the management had called
with an article by Nina Power published on 29 April with them to discuss the implications for their ongoing
in the CommentIsFree section of the Guardian online. study was cancelled at short notice, students protested
This placed the recent events within the context of by converging outside the office of the Dean of Arts
wider threats to Philosophy departments across the and Education, who had recommended the closure,
UK, but also took care to single out the particular and electing to wait for him there. The wait lasted
intellectual and political concerns at stake in terminat- two days. At which point a rally was held outside the
ing Philosophy at Middlesex, with its critical emphasis building, joined by supportive staff and students from
upon European philosophy and political thought and other universities (including tienne Balibar), and the
its place within a post-92 university. The same day the sit-in expanded in terms of number of participants and

40
space, from the boardroom and administrative corridor occupied Mansion at which Tariq Ali, an editor of
to a full occupation of the main Mansion building on New Left Review, spoke of the need to resist what he
the Universitys Trent Park campus. When, on 6 May, called Kentucky Fried Education: you swallow it,
the deferred meeting ended with the managements barely digest it, then excrete it. The last students left
refusal to enter into any negotiations concerning the the occupation on 15 May under the threat of a High
reversal of their decision, students returned to the Court injunction that the management had served the
occupied building and declared it an open space for previous day. During this period their action had gener-
workshops, reading groups, presentations, poetry and ated a number of articles in the British press, including
film screenings. Over the following ten days a busy further comments in the Guardian and THE, as well
schedule of events was attended by researchers, teach- as the Observer and London Review of Books and a
ers, students, artists and others sympathetic to the brief discussion on the BBC World Services Sunday
students cause. This culminated in a rally outside the News Hour.

41
42
43
A perfect storm in the absence of the very researchers who generated
Even more significant, perhaps, and indicative of the the funding.
way in which contemporary political organization has As many commentators have pointed out, notably in
sought to exploit the immediacy and mass reach of the the THE, the financial imperative behind this decision
Internet and social-networking sites as effectively and is closely tied to a prematurely enacted anticipation of
creatively as the corporations and institutions they are changes in the HEFCEs funding streaming, an impor-
often poised against, is the way in which the campaign tant source of revenue per student. HEFCE provides
took root and proliferated online. Countless online different levels of funding per student depending on
journals and blogs sought to dissect and diagnose the the subject band, providing the most to what it per-
events and their underlying causes, typically with more ceives as more expensive training-based courses (the
critical acumen and insight than the press itself: most highest band being clinical medicine), and the least to
notably, the comments appearing on the influential classroom-based subjects such as those in the humani-
Leiter Reports blog and John Protevis article on Why ties. This difference is intended to reflect the higher
Middlesex Matters for the US-based website Inside level of spending necessitated by the course of study,
High-Ed. Meanwhile, the campaigns Facebook group yet many commentators have understood the closure
has provided a virtual space in which solidarity and of Philosophy at Middlesex as part of a wider strat-
encouragement could be publicly passed on to the egy to generate additional income by switching from
occupying students in the form of messages of support humanities to more vocational, training-based subjects
and assembled videos and artworks, whilst organiza- without matching the increased spending expected of
tion and collaborative action could be collectively such degrees. This is taken by many as a symptom of
discussed and delegated.
This intensifying loop of real-world protests,
social networking and blogging, and predominantly
online journalism with its readers comments, has
nonetheless been triggered by what John Protevi has
described as a perfect storm of academic resist-
ance. In many ways, however, it is the University
managements own ambiguity concerning the rationale
for the closure that has allowed this storm to grow.
The Dean initially explained the decision as simply
financial, emphasizing the low recruitment to the
single-honours undergraduate programme. However,
this explanation contradicted the strategy, previously
endorsed by managers, to concentrate recruitment on
postgraduate programmes and research degrees. The
postgraduate community had flourished, with 48 MA
students in 200910 (the largest cohort of Philosophy
MA students in the UK) and 15 PhD students (with
5 PhDS awarded last year). The financial viability a disturbing trend in the funding and management of
of the combined programmes had been strengthened universities, which takes place against the backdrop of
by significant annual Research Assessment Exercise an imminent ToryLiberal emergency budget seeking
(RAE) income and external research funding, includ- to make 200 million in spending cuts to university
ing a recent large AHRC project grant, 200609. budgets and provide 10,000 fewer university places
Consequently, staff had been confident their subject than announced in Labours last budget. Such measures
group could meet the required contributions demanded can only bolster the threats being made by the elite
by the University. One of the ironies of the situation Russell group of universities to the government that
turned out to be that it was the CRMEPs success in if the cap on tuition fees is not removed they should
generating RAE income that had made it prey to the expect a wave of privatizations by the prestigious
short-term asset-stripping of its financial resources, universities, which threatens in turn regressively to
which will be collected by the university from HEFCE transform the study of the humanities once more into
until the end of the funding cycle (2014, at the earliest) the preserve of the privileged few.

44
Capitalistic dread the Philosophy programmes were suspended pending
What is most telling about the decision to close the investigation of their roles in the occupations. The
philosophy programmes at Middlesex is the Deans staff suspensions barred them from entering Univer-
claim that the departments reputation made no meas- sity premises without the prior permission of the
urable contribution to the university; indeed, that Dean or a member of the University Executve and
reputation has no financial value. from contacting in any way any University employee
During Whos Afraid of Philosophy?, an event or student, while nonetheless, confusingly, insisting
hosted on 19 May by the Institute of Contemporary they were expected to carry out all reasonable duties
Arts in support of the campaign, Peter Osborne, specified by the University in relation to the delivery
Director of the CRMEP, spoke of Middlesex as the of their roles. This new spasm of managerial self-
current focal point for an intensifying attempt to get destruction, as Osborne described it to the Evening
rid of philosophy, in particular, and to reduce the Standard, finally jolted the local UCU branch into
humanities in general across a whole segment of action. And at an Emergency General Meeting on
UK universities. There is an existential dimension to 28 May which the suspended staff were explicitly
this phenomenon, he argued, whereby philosophy has denied permission to attend a motion was passed
become the temporary resting place of a capitalistic giving the University until noon on 2 June to lift the
dread of the unmeasurable. This anxiety is held at suspensions, or the union would enter into a dispute
bay by the precisely quantified commercial outgoings which it duly did.
of the managers who are closing down Philosophy Meanwhile, however, events took an unexpected
departments upon branding exercises, marketing turn. The following day, 3 June, Osborne announced
and consultancy fees, and the swelling of their own to a meeting of students and staff that four members
bureaucratic regimes. At Middlesex, 3.5 million of the Research Centre himself, Peter Hallward,
was spent on consultants and external advisers in ric Alliez and Stella Sandford had been offered the
200809 alone. And whilst the number of academic opportunity to move to Kingston University, in south-
staff has been falling, that of administrative staff west London, along with all continuing postgraduate
(which includes managers) has been increasing the students, to re-establish the CRMEP there. In the face
ratio is now 733:860 and senior managerial staff of the intensifying intransigence of Middlesex manage-
earning in excess of 100,000 a year have almost ment, they had decided to accept the offer. A formal
doubled. announcement setting out the situation appeared on the
campaign website (www.savemdxphil.com) on 8 June;
Spasm of managerial self-destruction and the two universities have confirmed they are in
Yet the management of the closure has been a fiasco discussion over details of the transition, although the
a corporate slasher movie remade in the style of three staff remain suspended.
an Ealing comedy. The hapless Dean, in particular
(now known internationlly for the 42-second clip of Escape to Kingston
his promo performance to camera about Work-based The move has been hailed as a significant, if partial,
Learning, circulating on the web), has lost all credibil- victory for the campaign. The core of the Centre
ity among academic staff. Recent attempts to silence will be held together, and its distinctive postgraduate
the sonorous contempt for his regime, by disciplining programmes preserved. It is moving to a far more
staff in the School for sending emails pointing out hospitable environment. However, the transfer will
misinformation contained in management pronounce- leave the undergraduates and the two remaining staff
ments, served only to strengthen staff resolve to build adrift at Middlesex, with the future of philosophy
on the campaign to save the Philosophy programme, teaching there uncertain, beyond the teaching out
and to address broader issues of managerial practice, of the final two years of the BA programmes. The
such as lack of consultation and the intimidation and campaign to reopen undergraduate recruitment to
bullying of staff. philosophy at Middlesex will thus go on, as part
On Thursday 20 May, students and staff, including of a growing movement against the ongoing cuts in
those from a number of other endangered programmes higher education.
in the humanities, staged a second sit-in, this time over The CRMEP has been saved, but the struggle being
a single night, in the university library. In the follow- waged over the future of universities, in the UK and
ing days, three CRMEP staff and four students on elsewhere, has only just begun.

45
Occupation
No-one expected news of the closure of the Philosophy management, police, the student union and security
programmes at Middlesex to be met with resignation, guards, the space was ours.
but neither could anyone have predicted the resistance We agreed that the space would remain ours until
that followed. A group of people, many of whom had management reversed their decision. Even though this
only previously stood together to queue for the printer, was a defensive demand to return to the recent past, we
suddenly found themselves living and fighting side began to feel a different future a sense that we could
by side. never quite go back to the same. Undergraduates and
After management failed to turn up to discuss postgraduates became equals, working collaboratively
the closure with the students, we took the meeting in meetings; campus staff and local activists brought
to them. At the doors of the School management us food and messages of support; students from other
area, we were greeted by security guards. En masse universities shared stories and strategies; a panelled
we entered, securing access to the boardroom and room was used for evening takeaways; the boardroom
adjoining corridor. But management was far away in TV showed films into the night; students and visiting
another campus. The closest we got to them was the academics held seminars on topics from Marx to math-
president of the Middlesex Student Union, who told us ematics, from the architecture of occupation to inter-
she did not support our occupation so we asked her national politics; and the out-of-bounds roof became
to leave. Security called the police, but after deciding a place to hang banners and hang out. Colleagues
that nothing illegal was taking place, they also left. became comrades, offices became bedrooms, windows
Determined to stay the night, we organized a rally became doors and tables became barricades.
for the next day to coincide with a London lecturers Unfortunately, we had not quite reached the stage
strike. Realizing we need not stop there, we used at which managements High Court injunction had
the rally as cover for the expansion of the occupa- become just a bit of paper. Twelve days into the
tion to the whole building: we secured the mansion occupation, the last people left eight hours after the
stairwells while people outside rushed into the ground injunction came into effect.
floor through the windows. Overwhelmed by numbers, But this was not the end: we occupied the campus
security had no choice but to leave. Now free of library for a night, after which the university suspended

46
five students and half the Philosophy staff, only increas- them, into a national context. In solidarity, we have
ing our determination to fight on. We responded by joined forces with others who are fighting cuts, such
establishing a camp for displaced students and academ- as the BA cabin crew, Right to Work, UCU, Greek
ics on the front lawn of the main campus, and staging Workers, and Stop the Cuts campaigns. We hope and
a protest at a Middlesex event in Central London. believe that as these cuts expand, similar resistance
Our struggle continues as we resist another wave will spread across the country, and the links we have
of spurious suspensions and stand against the cuts at established with groups from Essex, Westminster and
large. For we have not only established alliances within Sussex universities, Goldsmiths, SOAS, Kings and
Middlesex, but with groups in other universities and others will widen and deepen. We look forward to
workplaces across the country, allowing us to put the many more late-night dinners in occupied buildings
cuts to education at Middlesex, and our fight against in the years to come.
The Middlesex Occupiers

Westminster, Sussex, Kings


On 5 May, thousands of lecturers went out on strike financially viable academic activity indicated a sig-
across London, including staff from Kings College nificant threat to their subjects, which may be sidelined
London, Westminster and Sussex universities, and in favour of HEFCEs higher funded, training-based
eleven further education colleges, including CONEL subjects. An open letter signed by 2,700 students and
and Hackney, supported by many of the students they friends of the Philosophy Department at Kings College
taught. London objected to the restructuring of the School
Earlier in March, students from the University of of Arts and Humanities, on the grounds that it would
Westminster had stormed a meeting of the board of result in job losses for a number of valued academics,
governors and occupied the vice chancellors office to and would require all faculty members to compete
protest against planned cuts and job losses. Lecturers against each other in reapplications for their own posts.
at Sussex University had, also in March, voted in It rejected the lack of transparency in the consultation
favour of strike action in response to the announce- process and the absence of any proposed alternatives.
ment of the closure of the Modern Languages faculty, In May the hearings for the suspended Sussex
drastic cuts to the English and History departments, students were held against the backdrop of national
and the planned loss of 112 jobs. In support of this student protest, a motion of support by the University
decision, Sussex students staged a sit-in inside the and College Union (UCU) and an open letter condemn-
universitys main administrative centre, a situation that ing the university managements actions signed by
escalated when members of administrative staff locked academics, union leaders and the first elected Green
themselves inside an office and riot police were called. MP, Caroline Lucas. Only the minor charge of conduct
The university secured a High Court injunction against injurious to the academic or administrative activities of
the occupying students and two days later suspended the university was upheld, whilst all the more serious
six of the students involved in the sit-in. This in turn allegations relating to violent and threatening behav-
provoked a week-long occupation of a lecture hall by iour were dropped. Staff and students have vowed to
a much large number of students, which coincided continue their protest against the cuts, with further
with one-day strike action by staff, and the eventual strikes being mooted.
reinstatement of the suspended students pending dis- Meanwhile, staff and students working in Arts
ciplinary hearings. and Humanities at Kings have claimed an important
In April, lecturers at Kings College London went victory in the wake of the protests: when the final
on strike against massive cuts, 1.52 million of which consultation document was published on 18 May, it
were to be made in the School of Arts and Humanities. transpired that cost savings could be made in the
Academics there feared that the managerial vision of school without any forced redundancies.
MC

47
reviews

World enough?
David Chandler, Hollow Hegemony: Rethinking Global Politics, Power and Resistance, Pluto Press, London,
2009. 272 pp., 60.00 hb., 17.99 pb., 978 0 74532 921 5 hb., 978 0 74532 920 8 pb.
Stuart Elden, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty, University of Minnesota Press, Min-
neapolis, 2009. 304 pp., 46.50 hb., 15.50 pb., 978 0 81665 483 3 hb., 978 0 81665 484 0 pb.
R.B.J. Walker, After the Globe, Before the World, Routledge, London and New York, 2009. 368 pp., 75.00 hb.,
22.99 pb., 978 0 41577 902 9 hb., 978 0 41577 903 6 pb.

The field of global politics is much contested, in part pivot of border rationality, especially when it comes to
because the forces of globalization have thrown open the thorny issue of sovereignty. This means recourse
a conceptual disarray about the meaning of world to tracking the traditions of modern thought on sub-
in philosophy, politics and economics. If a system jectivity, rationality and sovereignty with Hobbes and
of states often still appears rooted to the founding Kant to the fore, juxtaposed with elements of Walkers
apparatuses of the Peace of Westphalia, the current alternative genealogy in Cassirer, Bachelard, Foucault,
complex of state relations, overdetermined to a great Deleuze and the history of science. Increasingly,
extent by transnational capital, seems wildly inconstant however, the methodology comes down to the original
and sovereignty hovers more like a ghost in contem- warning so that the perspicuous deconstruction of
porary formulations. Each of the three books under inclusion/exclusion circles around the repetition of the
discussion here offers explication of the ambiguities political as possibility and impossibility. This pattern
of contemporary global polity while also revealing, is set by the prelude, which is then seen writ large in
symptomatically, conceptual ambivalences in the the rest of the book. My point is not that an introduc-
structure of their own disciplines: political science, tion should not lay out the foundations of the project,
international relations and geography respectively. It is but that in resisting scaling up from international to
understandable that knowledge systems born of nation- global Walkers argument also resists building on its
state polity might now chase the conceptual horizon of initial distinctions, except to run in many different
a properly globalized world; what is more interesting, directions as itself a form of resistance.
however, is the extent to which reading the world For instance, in the space of a few pages the
distils a new creative grammar of the globe, at once prelude offers the following chorus on possibility/
responsive to the lacuna of conventional disciplines impossibility: this book is constructed to frame
while articulating the shape of new formulations of claims about political possibilities and impossibilities;
knowledge production. the argument simultaneously imagines the possibil-
For his part, Walker is the most sensitive to the trials ity and impossibility of a move across the borders,
of philosophical oscillation in the current conjuncture boundaries and limits distinguishing itself from some
and the book offers many provocative insights into the world beyond; we have been encouraged to think
logic of inclusion/exclusion that structures the current about boundaries, borders and limits as if they were
world system. Walker maintains a notable incredulity indeed just simple lines distinguishing here from there,
about the move from international to world politics, now from then, normal from exceptional, possible from
not because the force of the latter is not evident, but impossible; They [clichs] speak to the way we have
because its constitutive principles appear unable, in come to imagine the possibilities and impossibilities
his account, to understand fully how boundaries, of liberty and inequality within and under necessity;
borders and limits of a politics are negotiated between Whatever else may be said about the possibilities of
international and world. At first glance, this move is other ways of thinking about future political possibili-
laudable because too many global critiques skip over ties, there can be no other such possibilities without
how the world maintains borders and obfuscate its attending to the multiple ways in which the drawing of
adherence to older, sedimented genealogies of inside/ lines as boundaries, borders and limits has been a more
outside. Basically, Walkers argument is a warning complicated and contested affair; the possibilities and
about brave new world philosophies that eschew the impossibilities of a modern system of sovereign states;

48 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 2 ( Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 010 )
and, finally, While I am aware that such claims may useful discursive sense of modern politics, particularly
seem abstract and remote, I am persuaded that they international politics, which is never co-extensive
speak to the principles of authorization and authoriza- with the world. Circling hesitancy returns in the third
tion of principles that must be engaged in one way chapter (possible ways of political possibilities,
or another by any attempt to reimagine our political etc.) and resistance is posed as the attempt to move
possibilities and impossibilities, or to reimagine who in two directions at once. The we of this chapter is
we are as political actors able to reimagine our pos- particularly grating We are all modern people as
sibilities and impossibilities as political actors. It often if the world cannot bear a little uneven development.
seems in Walkers argument that the hesitation between This chapter offers a thesis for the book: I do not
international and world comes down to an assess- think anyone is able to offer more than very tentative
ment of the border as itself the ground of all things and humble responses to the kinds of questions about
possible, and impossible. It is never clear, however, political possibilities that might emerge out of various
why the mantra of possibility/impossibility could not scepticisms about the claims of the modern sovereign
apply to world as concept, rather than by dancing on state and states system. In this reviewers humble
the line that apparently resists its effulgence. Indeed, opinion, the book is utterly disabled by this tack,
it has to be said that one can quite easily use the and the articulate discussions of Hobbes and Kant in
possibility/impossibility gambit to describe absolutely relation to sovereignty are rendered as preludes to
any concept of political theory in its practice. As a yet more hand-wringing. Even when Walker describes
more or less constant rhetorical trope in the prelude a dozen key lines of inquiry into the assumptions that
this is a demonstrable non-starter. gird the sovereign nation-state to political life the argu-
This is not just a stylistic quibble (although I think ment is freighted by the subjunctive, weighed down
if you removed all instances of circling repetition the by a polemic in two directions at once that leaves
book would be half its current length) but a comment the globe before the world in suspended animation.
about the tizzy world has produced under actually A blurb calls this a profound meditation; the reader
existing globalization. Obviously, there are few clear should decide which side of possibility/impossibility
breaks in modern political theory, just as, in econom- such judgment resides.
ics, capitalism does not submerge feudalism overnight. David Chandlers Hollow Hegemony takes up an
The serious question Walkers book poses, consciously incredulity towards the global similar to that gestured
or not, is whether this kind of hedging is itself a heur towards by Walker, but is an altogether different book in
istic, a teachable moment about the kinds of change terms of both audience and argumentative edge. Rather
that produce a disciplinary crisis in knowledge (one than hedging, Chandler reads the problem of scaling
can discern similar discomfort, for instance, in Com- up from the international to the global as a form of
parative Literatures hand-wringing over the world negative capability; that is, the globalization of politics
in world literature which has mutated considerably is produced by a political disconnection between state
from Goethes initial formulations). As Walker puts elites and societies, and a popular disengagement from
it, We are, moreover, supposed to know more or less mass politics. Globalism, as such, is a lack rather than
what we are talking about when we deploy such terms a presence. It is the lack of clear sites and articulations
(international relations and world politics), but doubt of power, the lack of clear security threats, the lack of
pervades every instance of possibility and impos- strategic instrumental policy-making and the lack of
sibility, including the imagination of a world outside clear political programs or movements of resistance
international relations, so we are left only with a kind which drives the conceptualization of international
of circling song as a philosophical guide. relations in global terms. To some extent, globalism is
The second chapter begins more promisingly with an effect of the very polemic Walkers book performs,
a call to reimagine politics (although not outside inter- even if he would agree that globalism is a hollow
national politics), but quickly the polemic lines up hegemony in terms of explanatory power.
obvious empty signifiers for political theory talk The problem for Chandler is not that globalism
shows, the best seller lists, the quick sound-bites, and fails to attract but that, in its negativity, it attracts too
the executive summaries and their associated clichs. well (although Lacan does not feature in the critique,
Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze have been turned into globalism bears something of the relationship of lack
sites of interrogation and this keeps theorists amused to desire). Its ideology attempts to disable counter-
and off the streets. I am not sure of the audience for hegemony through abstraction; indeed, political acts as
such statements but in general this section offers a abstraction. In contrast to Hardt and Negris emphasis

R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 2 ( Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 010 ) 49
on the flight from sovereignty as a creative if paradoxi- nationalism of hegemonic states, particularly the USA
cally positive subtraction, Chandlers intervention is after 9/11. In short, Chandler seeks to separate the
to draw attention to a global politics that substitutes ideological confusions of a globalization of politics
abstraction for action and semiosis for social grounds. from the theoretical problem presented by global poli-
This is not to say Hardt and Negri represent the consen- tics, which is a useful distinction between process and
sus on globalism, but for Chandler there are alternative subject before the troublesome concept of world.
strategies available among those who take globalism on Chandler organizes his argument well, with the first
board. As with Walker, globalism signifies a general few chapters probing the prominent policy discourses
crisis in political subjectivity but one where its avatars that appear to suture a global episteme: security/
see the nation-state as the problem rather than the development, state-building, and a specifically human
contributions made by the reification and mystification security discourse. These are obviously cornerstones of
of the global itself. The latter includes the supposition internationalism but the point is they have been naively
that territory no longer matters as much since a great recalibrated to represent a properly global intercon-
deal of human interaction, economically and communi- nectedness. The chapter on the merging of security
catively, occurs through scales of time/space that defy and development discourses is particularly noteworthy,
a territorial ground (this will be important for Eldens although Chandler does have a tendency to brand every
book also). On the one hand, we have proponents of instance of globalizing politics hollow before exegesis
globalism who extol the virtues of
globalization as a kind of integra-
tive efficiency (this would include
global civil society theorists); on
the other hand, we have globalists
like Hardt and Negri who cri-
tique globalization but from a
position that emphasizes forms
of biopolitical resistance as an
irreducible multiplicity without
romantic assumptions about unity
or group identity. To borrow from
the language of Walkers argument
once more, what sounds inclusive
actually excludes the possibility
of a mass action exercising a
specific political subjectivity. It
also excludes normative foreign
policy, which ironically makes
both hedge fund managers and
Hardt and Negri happy. How did this odd collocation might suggest otherwise. The central chapters are
come about? devoted to the crux of Chandlers approach: namely,
In part a globalization of power through intense that the global functions as an abstract substitute for
financialization, for instance, was shadowed by a nec- liberal norms (of community, of war) and expresses
essarily deterritorialized counter-critique: if power the limit or lack of a global subject for politics,
was located at the global level then resistance was particularly one with agency. Chandler finds in argu-
as well. Again, Chandlers position is not that global ments for global civil society a paradigmatic tautology
forces do not exist but the jump to this scale elides how of the globalization of politics, and on the whole the
the politicization of the global works, how its princi- criticism is appreciable (especially in contrast to the
ples are framed, how its analytic concepts perform the work of Falk, for instance). Since Hardt and Negri are
very process that is its object. On one level, Chandler also voluble critics of global civil society, Chandler
correctly sees a technological determinism at work then complicates his approach by challenging their
in which globalization exists because, well, there is a adherence to a flight from sovereignty as a deterrito-
global network; on another level, globalization theory rializing strategy. For those who have wondered about
appears underequipped to understand the crude inter- the logic of Hardt and Negris strategy, Chandlers

50 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 2 ( Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 010 )
criticism is pointed: their view endorses a retreat from nobody really wants to miss one of those). In contrast
political engagement and community to communica- to Walkers hobbling hesitation, Chandler offers the
tion without purpose. This is not altogether hollow- heuristic of the hollow that, even when it overstates
ness, however, since part of the political effect of Hardt the case, is a call for reflexive theoretical clarification
and Negris procedures is to short-circuit precisely in the study of international relations.
the regressive power formations Chandler identifies. Eldens contribution takes a different tack from the
The question comes down to whether alternatives are other two even as it remains similarly sceptical of the
meaningfully agential if representational politics is claims of global politics. The novelty of the text is
simply ejected? not necessarily its spirited defence of conceptions of
It is this aspect of hollowness that leads Chandler territoriality but the test case it brings to bear on the
to a pertinent and often persuasive discussion of sov- polemic: an analysis of the spatiality of sovereignty
ereignty. It is not that Deleuzeans or Spinozists eschew through the recent histories of terror and terrorism.
sovereignty, but that questioning sovereignty does not Right from the start Elden signals the advantage of
necessarily distil a politics of its transformation or this approach because it requires simultaneously a
sublation. Since sovereigntys impress on global war, mapping of terrorist events, geographically and histori-
particularly the war on terror, is also the subject of cally, against a logic that is putatively deterritorialized
Eldens book, one should not underestimate its impor- vis--vis sovereignty and the state. In effect, it answers
tance to the aforementioned disciplinary crises over the naive globalists in familiar terms they are then called
subject of territoriality and the world (the latter, by the on to take into account (thus when Rumsfeld bemoans
way, is not discussed conceptually in any of these three a lack of metrics to see whether the war on terror
books but one may adduce its pivotal philosophical is being won, Eldens text immediately establishes
purchase in recent work by Nancy and Badiou). Liberal the coordinates between terror and territory with
constructivist approaches have clearly provided an alibi maps, and etymologies, to underline the point). This
for sovereign extension within globalization, and when is a refreshing take on territory because it shows via
that does not work a brute appeal to superior values concrete examples how concepts of territoriality and
is made, as Chandler explicates by reference to a sovereignty are woven through the most prominent
speech by Tony Blair. Rather than take a Gramscian scene of contemporary global politics: the war on
or Foucauldian route by way of response, Chandler terror itself.
interestingly takes up the early work of Marx on the Having established the pivotal role of territory in
disjunctions between ideas and practice, ideologies and globality, Elden then examines what this might mean
state formation in Germany at that time. The lesson of to the forms of Islamism seen to feed specific terrorist
Marx is that forces structured in dominance (or a will movements, most obviously al-Qaeda (keeping in mind
to dominance, like the German bourgeoisie of which the network was to some extent produced by effects
he writes) can mask their material interests by appeals of long-standing Western foreign policies in West and
to values as an abstraction. This certainly undoes the Central Asia). By re-reading the history of the groups
Blair strategy, but does it explain the hollowness in development, including the statements of its leaders
much global theorization? and ideologists, Elden is able to track the force of ter-
The conceptual key is sovereignty, which is the ritorial and sovereign rights in its otherwise stateless,
subject of Chandlers final chapter. Briefly, if the appeal virtual or networked manifestations. The point is not
to the global reflects an absenting of political respon- an either/or stratagem, but the pursuit of an explanatory
sibility, then the claims of sovereignty are submerged framework adequate to territorys actual meaning for
even when they may dictate the decisions in play. In al-Qaeda. To foreground this condition simultaneously
other words, globality is not the battleground of the reveals the territorial commitments of a global politics
political but is the hollow metonym of sovereignty as in response; not a muddle, nor a lack, therefore, but
the true site of political contestation and purposeful a material synergy of territorial aims between nation
acts. I like this formulation not because it endorses sov- and the world.
ereignty as a norm but because it continues to question The chapter on weak states attempts to deepen
its insinuation in otherwise value-laden discourses of the polemic by considering the relationship between
the global with a concomitant persistence of territorial- weak/failing states and the development or harbouring
ity in its suasion. One of the problems of globalism is of terrorist groups. I think the challenge of weak states
its abject declarative force, as if terminological insist- goes beyond contesting international law or facilitating
ence means the revolution has already happened (and havens for non-state actors. As I have argued, failed

R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 2 ( Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 010 ) 51
states in particular dispute conventional narratives of Nevertheless, beyond the symptomatic paradox, Iraq
decolonization not because state polity has been lost, was invaded, its sovereignty suspended and its territo-
but because it may not have been found or founded. rial integrity breached in defence of sovereignty and
True, this may indicate a failure of state structure, but territorial integrity. Elden uses his critique to sharpen
even in the most extreme example, Somalia, local and the overall thesis of the book regarding the global
entrenched modes of social organization and trade have orders continuing pivot on sovereignty (even when
attempted to maintain communities even among the contingent) as demonstrably spatial. The last chapter
ravages of civil strife and foreign intervention, however and coda broaden the lessons of the Iraq example
this is measured. Thus, international frameworks of both to return to terrorism as a problem from and
polity not only fear lawlessness and terrorist ferment, within sovereignty and to accentuate Eldens notable
but modes of polity with their own conditions of right position that the deterritorializations of globalization
and responsibility. From this perspective the failed are not divorced from equally discernible processes of
state is also a logic of state failure inaugurated by the reterritorialization. In the end, this does not provide
Peace of Westphalia (a response to the Holy Roman us with a working definition of contemporary regimes
Empire as failed state). of globality but it does at the very least reveal Eldens
For many, Eldens chapter on Iraq will prove the consummate ability to take global politics as itself a
most provocative, and one cannot help but admire dynamic interrogation of his geographic zeal. While
his ability to sift through vast amounts of secondary I agree with all three writers that globalization is
material produced on the subject. Others, however, may overblown, this does not preclude the possibility that
find themselves submerged by such documentation, certain disciplinary analytic models are effete. To that
particularly when it is drawn from a seemingly endless extent, the philosophical disposition of world must also
procession of UN resolutions on the Iraq invasion. be actively contested.
Peter Hitchcock

Europe endless
Perry Anderson, The New Old World, Verso, London and New York, 2009. 592 pp., 24.99 hb., 978 1 84467
312 4.

The New Old World is a weighty volume of some 550 In each of the three long chapters on the contempo-
pages, which contains five chapters on Europe and rary history of France, Germany and Italy, Anderson
European integration, three on the core countries of reaches a rather sombre conclusion about the present
France, Germany and Italy, one on Cyprus and one on situation while discerning some forces for radical
Turkey. There is much here that is highly stimulating renewal. The discussion of France is the most ambi-
and the conclusion makes a valiant effort to pull it all tious and, in my view, the least successful. Here he is
together. Yet, in the end, Andersons stated rationale for really seeking a holistic explanation for the decline
his selection of topics is unconvincing. He does not, he of both Gaullism and the Left by emphasizing the
writes, regret the omission of Britain, whose history transmutation of French culture and society into an
since the fall of Thatcher has been of little moment. increasingly Atlanticist mould. But even if it is granted
Similarly, because so much attention had been paid that intellectuals have played a particularly important
to Eastern Europe, it seemed better to look further role in France, he surely attributes excessive weight
East. But, in fact, the majority of the essays in The to certain thinkers (Pierre Nora, Franois Furet and
New Old World have already been published elsewhere Pierre Rosanvallon) in undermining earlier assump-
and it seems very unlikely that they were originally tions about the revolutionary and republican traditions,
conceived as a single book. Rather, Anderson presum- and the implication that this shift in high culture has
ably chose his subjects for the quite understandable had a major impact on current French identity and poli-
reason that they captured his interest. As such, while tics seems implausible. In this chapter his otherwise
there are certainly some recurrent themes and com- magisterial style also sometimes degenerates. Instead
plementarities in The New Old World, it should not of presenting a clear argument in which the reader
be read in the expectation of finding any pronounced remains partially unaware of the extent of thinking and
overall coherence. research that lies behind it, Anderson veers towards

52 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 2 ( Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 010 )
the other extreme, displaying his scholarship on his of the assumptions underlying such policies. Britain,
sleeve without always achieving clarity. Still, some of he argues, was the major guilty party before and
his comments are very perceptive: for example, the after Cyprus gained independence, provoking Turkish
results of the March 2010 regional elections uphold opposition to Greek ascendancy both on the island
his point that, however much the political elites unite and on the Turkish mainland. As a guarantor power
in arguing that modernization demands retrenchment, in 1974, Britain had the primary responsibility to
the French electorate always rejects governments that prevent the Turkish invasion, but failed to act against
seek to implement neoliberalism. this or the partition and ethnic cleansing that followed.
The chapter on Germany also includes some dis- Subsequently, the government of Cyprus constructed
cussion of intellectual currents, but here Anderson a successful state in the southern part of the island,
concentrates on more narrowly defined questions the while the North was an artificial colony maintained
impact of unification, the move of the capital to Berlin, by Turkish subsidies and settlers. Nothing was done to
and the way in which Schroeders (and then Merkels) bring about a Turkish withdrawal, primarily because
policies weakened trade unions and workers living of the Anglo-American support for Turkey in NATO.
standards. All this provides an explanation of the rise By what right, then, had Britain, the USA, the EU
of Die Linke, and Anderson succeeds in demonstrating or the UN to demand, through the various versions
some basis for optimism about a revival of the Left of the Annan plan, that Cyprus should agree to the
across the former EastWest boundary. I found the dismantling of its state so as to accommodate an
chapter on Italy particularly interesting because the illegal occupation by Turkey? This leads directly to
focus is sharper and the analysis more trenchant. Here Andersons analysis of Turkey.
he seeks to explain the paradox of the Italian search The USA has promoted Turkeys membership of
for normalcy culminating in Berlusconis supremacy. the EU so as to strengthen its key strategic base (apart
While the theme may be familiar, Anderson includes from Israel) in the Middle East and Central Asia. Bien
some fascinating and alarming detail about such issues pensant liberals have, however, supported this project
as the tawdry nature of the justice and prison systems, in the belief that Turkish membership will secure the
and the role of the corrupt and discredited former EUs credentials as a multicultural, multi-faith entity
socialist prime minister, Bettino Craxi, in launching while also demonstrating that Islam can be moderate
Berlusconi. But perhaps most compelling of all is and democratic. Andersons aim is to demolish such
the way that he extends a critique of the PCI in the claims. Kemalism, he suggests, was not a secular
forty-five years after the war into the post-Cold War movement, but created a dictatorial regime in which
era, suggesting that this enabled former Fascists and Islam was both controlled and used to reinforce state
the Northern League to climb back into power under power and Turkish exclusivist nationalism. The Kurds
Berlusconis umbrella. and Alevis have been massacred and dissident move-
Yet it is not the chapters on France, Germany or ments have been repressed. Nor has the shift from
Italy but the closely interconnected chapters on Cyprus Kemalism to more prominent manifestations of Islam
and Turkey that are the most powerful in the book. under the present AKP government been as significant
Here Anderson offers an alternative, critical argument as is generally thought, for there has been much
to those of his bte noire: bien pensant liberals. The continuity in foreign policy, exclusivist nationalism
result is polemical in the best sense of the word, for and genocide denial. Anderson is satisfied that the
Anderson has a clear case to argue, one that contradicts massacres of the Armenians during the First World
conventional wisdom and challenges those who disa- War did constitute genocide, that this was perpetrated
gree to say where he is wrong. The mainstream view intentionally by those close to Kemal, and that succes-
has been that it is time to bring about a settlement in sive Turkish governments have known what happened,
Cyprus and that external forces and institutions should but have continued to honour those responsible for it,
do everything possible to ensure that the island is while persecuting those wanting to acknowledge what
peacefully reunited. Hence the fervent attempt by the was done. Nor can this be regarded as a matter of
then UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, under British history: on the contrary, it is fundamental to Turkeys
and US influence, to seek such an agreement before self-definition, which is why the Turkish state makes
Cyprus entered the EU in 2004, and the exasper- threats whenever there is any international attempt to
ated frustration in all EU capitals, except Greece, raise the question, invariably leading (as with Obama)
when the Greek Cypriots rejected the plan. Anderson to a climbdown. Thus genocide denial, coupled with
provides an engaged, historically informed refutation the annexation of Cyprus and the treatment of the

R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 2 ( Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 010 ) 53
Kurds and Alevis, make Anderson adamant that Turkey and industrial elites reforming society from above;
should not be allowed to join the EU. and the third was a deeply conservative tradition
In the Foreword, he records his continuing enthusi- that sought to recast Europe in a higher harmony of
asm for the architects of the Community in the early belief. Anderson argues that all three traditions play a
postwar years: Their enterprise had no historical part in the current EU, while the older Enlightenment
precedent, and its grandeur continues to haunt what it emphasis on diversity is still discernible. Whether this
has since become. The three chapters on Europe and kind of history of ideas actually elucidates twenty-first-
European integration at the beginning and two at the century developments may be arguable, but the essay
end form the heart of the book and also demonstrate certainly provides some stimulating reminders about
the Unions fall from grace in Andersons eyes. For past debates: for example the question of whether
the most part, I agree with his attitude to the general European peace can be a defining aspiration for the
trajectory. Anyone on the Left must surely condemn Left, and whether or not the goal of a united Europe
the way in which the EU has become increasingly undermines the search for world unity.
dominated by a neoliberal economic agenda, has Despite its success in identifying common themes
rallied to the support of the USA, and has been marked in the book, and in summarizing his negative critique
by elitism and secretive inter-state horse-trading. Yet of the current tendencies, Andersons final chapter
Anderson seems to go too far, after the first chapter (Prognoses) is disappointing. This is partly because
(written in 1995), which provides an effective critique he fails to provide the sustained development of his
of the Treaty of Maastricht and its aftermath. For own arguments that it would be reasonable to expect at
although the second essay (originally published in this point. Thus he wants to argue that it is the aban-
2007) fulfils a useful purpose in counteracting the donment of class conflict by the collapse of the Left
simplistic celebratory tone of many works, it goes and the corruption of social democracy that have led
to the opposite extreme in bundling all the negative to the current failings in Europe. But beyond observ-
aspects of Europe into an overall denunciation. It is ing that the cause of all this is the transformation of
here, too, that the subjectivity that Andersons style capitalism, he offers little explanation of the ways in
seeks to occlude is actually so marked. If there are which this structural shift has been projected through
certainly deeply negative contemporary features in social, cultural and political practices. Perhaps he
the EU, this was also true at its origins, when the believes that his separate chapters on France, Germany
Community was partly a Cold War formation in an and Italy provided sufficient insights, but these were
era of anti-Left persecution at home and colonial too uneven and specific to fulfil this function. However,
wars abroad. Seeking to counteract an over-simplified a second weakness is that he sometimes offers too
positive account by offering an oversimplified negative much sustenance to those whose values and goals are
one is not particularly persuasive. quite opposed to those of the Left.
One of Andersons strengths has always been his Ever since the relaunch of New Left Review in
ability to pinpoint the essence of theories and ideas 2000, Anderson has emphasized the importance of
and to evaluate them critically, and he does this in much right-wing thought and its frequent superiority
two chapters in particular. In Theories he dissects to standard progressive pieties, usually shared by
some recent American mainstream and right-wing pillars of respectable liberalism (Renewals, NLR 1,
studies of integration quite brilliantly. Yet the chapter JanuaryFebruary 2000). This sometimes leads him to
is also a lost opportunity in the sense that he makes adopt surprising positions. Here he suggests that, in the
only a passing comment on alternative left-wing and absence of class conflict, ordinary people turn to the
Marxist theories, and puts forward few notions of his only available substitute: opposition to immigration.
own. Antecedents is an interesting attempt to review Workers were not consulted about large-scale migra-
current tendencies in the light of earlier ideas about tion to Europe and their major remaining opportunity
Europe. Following the collapse of the Enlightenment, for contesting the priorities and values of elites lies
which stressed cultural and intellectual unity on the in mobilization on this issue hence the rise of the
one hand and balance and division between relatively populist xenophobic Right across most of Europe. In
small states on the other, Anderson sees Saint-Simon itself, this argument is unexceptionable, but his assault
as the founder of three separate traditions. The first on bien pensant liberals now takes him too far. Just
was a legacy of revolutionary interventions and slogans before the publication of The New Old World, Christo-
for a united Europe; the second was a conception of pher Cauldwell, on the US Right, produced his Reflec-
desirable social change based on the work of scientific tions on the Revolution in Europe (2009), pillorying

54 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 2 ( Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 010 )
Europe for the mass migration of Muslims which, Milward combined vision with pragmatism. Monnet
he argues, has fundamentally changed its character. undoubtedly sought to create a new semi-supranational
Of course, Anderson seeks to dilute his endorsement Europe that would bring about peace and prosperity,
of Cauldwells position by repeating some classical but his method was to suggest a series of piecemeal
arguments of the Left about exploitation, discrimina- practical steps that would create new realities. Simi-
tion, world inequality, and the non-religious causes of larly, Milward had no doubt that European integration
Muslim dissatisfaction with European societies. He was a colossal achievement, but he insisted that it was
also suggests that the issue of immigration has had created by hard-headed politicians and civil servants
a disproportionate salience in contemporary politics. who sought to strengthen the nation-state rather than
But this is equally true of the way Anderson treats it supersede it. The second clue to Andersons position
here, and this is perhaps related to a more general point lies in the subjects on which he really writes with
about his approach. passion the genocide of the Armenians, Turkish
Anderson writes with complete authority, but this behaviour in Northern Cyprus, the war against Iraq,
might give a misleading impression that he has a clear the treatment of prisoners in Guantnamo Bay, and
theoretical position. Most readers will assume that he extraordinary rendition. Liberals might be expected
remains on the Marxist left and is launching his attacks to feel equally strongly about such matters, but have
on bien pensant liberals from this position. But there often equivocated. By contrast, Anderson is surely
are two reasons for doubting whether this is actually insisting that opposition to such crimes must be an
the case. The first clue lies in his choice of heroes in overriding issue. If, therefore, we consider both those
the book, one of whom is Jean Monnet, a key architect whom he respects and those whom he denounces, it
of the Community. Monnet was not really on the Left, seems that his target may not be liberalism per se but
but Anderson frequently praises him and compares bien pensant thinking. Similarly, his own perspective
the subsequent deterioration of European integration is probably more heterodox than Marxist. From this
with the aspirations that Monnet had entertained for it. position he is capable of extraordinarily trenchant
The other figure who is frequently cited with approval analysis and also vehement condemnation of political
(and to whom the book is dedicated) is Alan Milward, crimes. But sometimes he simply attacks orthodoxy
an eminent historian of European integration, who from the indeterminate position of the maverick. His
has occupied a broadly social-democratic position on writing is invariably clever but not always wise.
the political spectrum. However, both Monnet and
Michael Newman

R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 2 ( Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 010 ) 55
naive humanism on a par with Sartres exaltation of
Of Gramsciology human freedom.
The great strength of Thomass book is the authority
Peter D. Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, that he brings to the subject: one is in no doubt that he
Hegemony and Marxism, Brill, Leiden and Boston has painstakingly dissected the Prison Notebooks and
MA, 2009. 477 pp., 104.00 hb., 978 9 00416 771 1. the philological literature in exhaustive detail. Thomas
puts this scholarship to work effectively in his con-
According to Peter Thomas, Antonio Gramscis Prison frontations with Anderson and Althusser. Among the
Notebooks (192935) contain a vision of Marxist most fertile and convincing encounters with Anderson
philosophy, radically different from many previous and is, for example, Thomass refutation of the formers
contemporary formulations, which may permit a new charge that Gramscis concept of hegemony slid into
generation of Marxists to recommence the elaboration a genre of reformism by suggesting that the crucial
of Marxs legacy in a new philosophical form. The ramparts of the capitalist state were located in civil
book thus firmly situates itself within a new body society, and revolutionary strategy should accordingly
of literature that takes as its point of departure the be confined to the battle for mass consent here. Against
necessity to revitalize the Marxist tradition today. The this reading, Thomas provides a persuasive exposi-
vision of Marxist philosophy that Thomas believes tion of the dialectical relationship between civil and
has most to contribute to this agenda is Gramscis political society defended in the Prison Notebooks
philosophy of praxis, and in this comprehensive and captured above all in Gramscis conception of
analysis and assessment of its key elements, and of its the integral state. Andersons spatial account of
principal critics, the author mounts an authoritative Gramscis hegemonic theory of the capitalist state and
case for placing Gramsci right at the centre of any revolutionary strategy is thus rejected for a functional
resurgence of contemporary Marxism. approach that foregrounds the integral nature of the
Thomass journey begins with two influential cri- relations between civil and political hegemony in the
tiques of Gramscis work by Louis Althusser (Chapter capitalist state and maintains that the revolutionary
1) and Perry Anderson (Chapter 2), before moving on, practice of consolidating social forces and condens-
in the subsequent chapter, to attack what he regards ing them in civil society necessarily presents an
as their flawed accounts of Gramscis Marxism by
delineating the extensive and meticulous scholarship
that has been carried out on the Prison Notebooks
(mainly by Italian scholars) since the appearance of
Althussers Reading Capital (1965/1968) and Ander-
sons The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci (1976).
Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are principally concerned with
the Gramscian categories of passive revolution and
hegemony. Anderson remains a continuous presence
here as Thomas engages in a blow-by-blow refutation
of his attempts to identify Gramsci with the reform-
ism of Karl Kautsky and a genre of Western Marxism
that set him apart from his Bolshevik contemporar-
ies. It is, however, the final three chapters of the
book which constitute its most original contribution to
current scholarship, as Thomas engages in a penetrat-
ing analysis of the constituent elements of Gramscis
philosophy of praxis, and focuses on his insistence
that Marxism made a unique contribution to Western
philosophy through its absolute historicism, abso-
lute immanence and absolute humanism. Here it
is Althusser who plays the role of major foil, as
Thomas demolishes the early Althussers identification
of Gramscis thought with the Hegelianization of
Marxism, the abandonment of Marxist science, and a

56 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 2 ( Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 010 )
immediate challenge to the attempt by political society presuppositions: for example, the centrality and valid-
[i.e. the existing capitalist state] to enmesh the ity of class analysis; the residual Marxist teleology that
same. Indeed, for Thomass Gramsci, civil hegemony continues to mark his work; and the notion that only
has to progress towards political hegemony in order to the proletarian class can lead a revolutionary hege-
maintain itself. monic alliance. These presuppositions in particular
It is, however, the final section of Thomass book undermine Gramscis claims to absolute historicism,
(Chapters 79) that is likely to be of most interest to absolute immanence and absolute humanism and
a philosophical readership. Here, its most illuminating suggest that there is a lot less consistency in Gramscis
and original contribution is to be found in its explora- Prison Notebooks than Peter Thomas maintains.
tion of the conception of absolute immanence in If these are issues which Thomas may well have felt
the Prison Notebooks. Against Althusserian charges were beyond the remit of this book, we can certainly
that Gramsci was guilty of abandoning the science look forward, with a justified sense of expectation, to
of Marxism by failing to theorize any possibility of a a broader engagement with such critics. For, despite
position of externality for it in the historical process, its limitations, The Gramscian Moment has clearly
Thomas convincingly links Gramscis conception of established Thomas as one of the leading experts in
science to immanent critique (as opposed to trans- the field, and the book will no doubt become essential
cendence) and maintains that, for Gramsci, modern reading for all serious students of Gramscis work.
science had in fact made a decisive contribution to the
Mark McNally
elaboration of the philosophy of praxis. Such scientific
praxis was not, however, to be associated with some
imaginary access to naked objective knowledge, but to
its practical-experimental relationship with nature,
which Gramsci took as a model for the necessity of
Susceptibility
revolutionary Marxism itself to emerge from practice;
that is to say, to emerge from within the everyday Jean-Franois Lyotard, Enthusiasm: The Kantian Cri-
tique of History, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele,
experience and problems of the proletarian masses
Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 2009. 67 pp.,
which it would render coherent, thereby increasing 41.50 hb., 16.50 pb., 978 0 80473 897 2 hb., 978 0
their capacity to act collectively. 80473 899 6 pb.
While there may be no doubting the quality of the
scholarship in The Gramscian Moment, there are those In this slim volume, published in English translation
who will nonetheless question whether this work would more than a decade after his death, Lyotard reissues
not have reaped even greater dividends via a broader Kants call, in his preface to the first Critique, for a
engagement with the literature on Gramsci outside of critical tribunal, and denounces perpetual peace
the Marxist tradition. This is not to say that Thomas by the death of the capacity to judge. Critique, Lyotard
ignores this literature completely. It is rather to point argues, sets a limit to the pretensions of political, no
out that in his determination to demolish Andersons less than metaphysical, illusion. The Kant interpretation
and Althussers Gramscis there is necessarily much Lyotard sketches here, relative throughout to the ques-
less space for confronting those other scholars who tion of the political and to the name Wittgenstein,
undoubtedly have a much greater claim to authority proceeds along several converging lines of enquiry:
in this area having benefited from much of the how it is that the critical is analogous to the political
same philological work as Thomas than either of his (Chapter 1); how it is that judgement, in Kant, is less
two key Marxist adversaries. Indeed, some may even a faculty than a constitutively inconclusive power of
regard the latter as decidedly pass and peripheral to [finding] passages between the faculties (Chapter
contemporary debates on Gramsci. This is especially 2); how it is that judgement retrieves a sign of the
problematic given the virtual absence of any serious Idea of freedom from the affect of historico-political
authorial criticism of Gramscis own work in this book. enthusiasm (Chapter 3); and how it is that this judge-
For example, we can only speculate as to what Thomas ment, as a critical sensitivity to what is delivered up by
makes of Gramscis more recent critics who call into our time, serves to sanction the coexistence of what
question his commitment to democratic politics as in is heteronomous (Chapter 5). The heteronomous is
the work of Richard Bellamy and Darrow Schechter or basically coterminous with Lyotards ideal of ethical
Carl Levy or of those, including Laclau and Mouffe, culture in this work, but that the word here has only
who have interrogated Gramscis more unreflective a lexical relation to heteronomy in the second Critique

R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 2 ( Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 010 ) 57
is indicative of a radical shift in problematic. Lyotard anticipates the structure, basic concern and leitmotifs
seeks the trace of freedom within reality in the wake of Enthusiasm.
of a sublime feeling, and not in practical reason As a single instance of this: Lyotards reference to
as such. It is out of the formlessness of insurgency islands of language here recalls the archipelago,
and the suspense of historico-political purposiveness, a figure to which he devotes the second chapter of
rather than respect for a pure form of lawfulness, that Enthusiasm. But it is in the 1983 Wittgenstein essay,
judgement comes to concern itself with the possibility and not in Enthusiasm, that Lyotard intimates how
of emancipation. A critical discourse of emancipation the very form of Wittgensteins investigations may
whose precondition, here citing Kant, is an Emp- have provided him with this figure of the archipelago,
fnglichkeit to Ideas; and thus ethical culture takes a according to which he reconceives Kants faculties
surge of purposive and the factions of
lawlessness as its the various anti-
inaugural sign. nomies. And,
The transla- clearly, Lyotard
tor orients us in does reconceive
his preface to the Kant. The valori-
occasion for this zation of Kantian
study, a version critique in this
of which Lyotard volume is a reno-
presented in 1981 vation, a recalibra-
to a recently con- tion: despite the
vened Centre de volumes subtitle,
recherches philos- Lyotard produces
ophiques sur le an unapologeti-
politique in Paris, cally post-Kantian
on the invitation critique of
of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. history. What intrigues is the way in which it appears
Lyotard opens the volume with an Argument that to be post-Kantian in the strictest sense: displaying
names Wittgenstein, and the name resurfaces at deci- a less marked affinity to Marx and Wittgenstein,
sive points in his text. It is Wittgenstein who inspires perhaps, than to certain preoccupations in German
Lyotards substitution of phrases and phrase families philosophy in the last decade or so of the eighteenth
for the Kantian terminology of presentations and fac- century.
ulties (which never entirely disappears). A paragraph Enthusiasm is a metacritique or perhaps a
from his 1983 essay Wittgenstein After illuminates Romantic critique of the historico-political in Kant
this linkage this decision which remains quite to echo a polemical title of J.G. Hamanns and the
obscure in Enthusiasm: aspirations of the early German Romantics (while
avoiding, as Lyotard does, the moribund term post-
this Viennese from the beginning of the century
continues to sense the malaise of his time. Nietzsche modern). And these allusions are not a distraction.
had thought that it was a sickness of the will. But On the contrary: having recourse to Hamann and the
Wittgenstein is a republican, like Kant. Like Kant, Frhromantik, respectively, could perhaps have clari-
he thinks that the time is diseased by language. fied for Lyotard and can clarify in retrospect the
Kant did not know capitalism, however, while provenance of this work. Hamanns Metacritique of
Wittgenstein had been immersed in it. The examina-
the Purism of Reason was written in response to
tion of language games, just like the critique of the
faculties, identifies and reinforces the separation of the typesetters proofs of Kants first Critique (it is
language from itself. There is no unity to language; unclear how they came into Hamanns possession).
there are islands of language, each of them ruled Its sole relevancy here is this: Hamann accuses Kant
by a different regime, untranslatable into the others. of glossing over, perhaps of repressing, critiques
This dispersion is good in itself, and ought to be material and its crux namely, language. Where
respected. It is deadly when one phrase regime pre-
Lyotard has Kant recognize that his time is dis-
vails over the others.
eased by language, Hamann has Kant suffer from
However impossible or, in the vulgar sense, uncritical the disease of idealistic philosophy in their time: a
this series of passages may seem, it beautifully disdain for language. Thus, in his very concern to

58 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 2 ( Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 010 )
revisit critique as a philosophy of phrases, Lyotard Lyotard cites Kant, all that our Ideas make known to
however disparately and indirectly is perhaps not us really is that we know nothing.
executing Kants unannounced program, but what In the end, it is against the oscillations of sensitiv-
Hamann desired in the Metacritique. ity and insouciance in this work, elegantly translated
It is, incidentally, Hamann who also fore-echoes throughout, that such questions are raised. It retains its
Lyotards figure of the archipelago (while Kant envi- beauty and its capacity to keep us alert in the Kantian
sions a perilously solitary island in the first Critique). corpus, and in history, to a vigorous emotion which
In Socratic Memorabilia a work he dedicates to is, so Lyotard suggests, the only moral passion.
Kant, among others Hamann writes: On this occa-
David van Dusen
sion Socrates spoke of readers who could swim. A
confluence of ideas and feelings made his [Hera-
clitus] statements into an archipelago, perhaps, for
whose communication bridges and ferries of method
were lacking. It is this figure that Hamann very
consciously employs against the architectonic impulse
that Kant would profess in the first Critique and pursue
Its the way
thereafter. Lyotard decides less convincingly, and
less instinctively to interpret Kants architectonic
he tells them
as archipelago.
Ben Fine, Theories of Social Capital: Researchers
One laudable result of this decision, however, is
Behaving Badly, Pluto Press, London, 2010. 271 pp.,
Lyotards attention to Kants minor works, and the most 75.00 hb., 27.50 pb., 978 0 74532 997 0 hb., 978 0
impressive instance of this is his reflection on the Con- 74532 996 3 pb.
jectural Beginning of Human History in Chapter 4.
This 1786 essay has been wrongly neglected, and here In stand-up comedy circles, as in journalism, theres
Lyotards instinct which is that the strange manner a well-known phrase with which to characterize the
in which [it] is written has not been exhausted, or work of some comedians: hack material refers to
even seriously investigated is sure. And yet: Lyotard subject matter peddled by those comics who are
imposes a novelistic phrase on Kants speculative content to regurgitate clichd, dull, formulaic, obvious,
reconstitution of the myth of the Fall, when Kant here oft-repeated, staid and tired observations about the
an admirer of Rousseaus novels, at the very least world. (A typical example of a hack comic premiss is
has no more concern with the roman as a genre than the remark that food on aeroplanes is awful.) In his
with holy writ as revelation. By way of contrast, Hld- new book, Theories of Social Capital: Researchers
erlin and Novalis, in the years immediately following Behaving Badly, Ben Fine suggests that it is equally
the publication of the third Critique, set their hands to possible to identify hack academics. Unsurprisingly,
novels and novellas; and Hyperion would more likely considering his intended target, those academics who
answer to Lyotards desire that the novelistic phrase be utilize the middle-range concept of social capital are
seen as a legitimate fashion in which to phrase the held up by Fine as particularly definitive.
historico-political. Social capital, to simplify, is associated with net-
The questions could thus become: Why does Lyotard works of reciprocity and trustworthiness in commu-
valorize Kant when the Enlightenment has become nities through which individuals create bonds and
obsolete, rather than Counter-Enlightenment figures bridges with one another. For example, many people
such as Hamann? Why does he conjure an archipelagic, help out freely in their communities by, for example,
linguistic Kant rather than revisit the Metacritique and sitting on school boards, getting involved in a local
the early German Romantics? And why plead that Kant sports club, or taking part in a local campaign. In
drafted some species of novella in 1786, rather than these instances, so some argue, social capital is being
appeal to Novaliss and Hlderlins genuine efforts a created in communities by ordinary people coming
decade later? And there are less extrinsic questions together to help out one another by bonding together
that could follow. In what phrase-regime could an around particular concerns or enjoyments and by (in
injunction to judge justly, without criteria serve as an many cases) constructing bridges of reciprocity and
injunction? What could justly here enjoin that is not trustworthiness between different individuals and
said in judge? Perhaps only this: that the word judge groups. Fine argues that those academics that study
must conserve within itself an Idea of justice; and, as and (critically) endorse social capital more often than

R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 2 ( Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 010 ) 59
not engage in hack analyses because they take an continuing theme of the book, it seems to me, is to
easy-to-apply and all-encompassing concept social critique social capital as a middle-range theory. In
capital and then add some other variable to it in practice, a middle-range theory places social capital
order to claim originality. Building on and developing between systematic understanding and methodologi-
his previous critical analysis of social capital in his cal individualism. It is thus interested in how social
2001 book Social Capital versus Social Theory, Fines capital produces specific outcomes (e.g. how greater
aim in part is to explore how such hack practices came levels of social capital trust, reciprocity, and so on
to prominence in the social sciences and to dissect the might lead to a more positive outcome for education).
ideological and practical effects these practices have Problematically, argues Fine, by squeezing in between
had in various social science disciplines. systematic understanding and methodological individu-
The book is divided into nine chapters, and each alism, social capital theorists tend to ignore deeper
discusses a quite stunning array of sources. Indeed, determinants of capitalism as a systematic whole along
the chapters serve, if nothing else, as invaluable criti- with other outcomes. At the same time, however, social
cal literature reviews of particular areas concerned capital theorists do in fact bring in other factors and
with social capital. Fine demonstrates that social variables into social capitals explanatory framework
capital emerged as a buzzword during the 1990s from by translating them into middle-range observable and
the dual retreat of the excesses of neoliberalism and measurable categories. Subsequently, those ignored
postmodernism. Social capital was perceived by many deeper determinants can be accounted for in social
as a way to think about non-market responses to capital literature by bringing back in various middle-
imperfectly working (neoliberal) markets. At the same range categories when the need arises, to show the
time it offered up an opportunity to move beyond limitations of existing theories of social capital whilst
the postmodernist concern with (relativistic) attributes developing and extending analytical boundaries. One
like cultural identity and instead bring back in more of Fines compelling arguments throughout the book,
conventional analytical categories such as social class. then, is to illustrate how social capital has a gargantuan
But Fine also demonstrates that those who cham- appetite that swallows other categories and variables
pion social capital have often attempted to invent an into its rather ill-defined framework. Indeed, Chapter
intellectual history for it that stretches back to the 4 looks in detail at how various categories are brought
beginning of the twentieth century, though evidence back into the social capital framework.
for such a history tends to be based on the work of a Another continuous theme evident in the book is
handful of social scientists who had in fact remained social capitals relationship with neoliberalism. Fine
relatively obscure before their work was discovered correctly observes that social capital shares similar
by more contemporary theorists. Given this, it should ideals to neoliberalism, such as a focus on rational
not surprise us, as Fine notes, that the vast majority choice theory. He also shows that social capital arose
of historians have managed to ignore the analytical as one way in which a more human face might be
potentials of social capital. painted on neoliberalism. For example, the World
While Fines arguments on these issues are first- Bank initially demonstrated a marked interest in social
rate they might have been strengthened if more had capital during the 1990s as one way in which to
been said about social capitals role and unique posi- respond to non-economist critics of its neoliberal pro-
tion in the history of theories of civil society and grammes in developing countries. As Fine notes, the
political culture. At the end of the final chapter Fine World Bank has used social capital as a pretence to
does note that those claims which state that social encourage community self-help programmes in devel-
capital offers something new to the study of civil oping countries so as to make privatization schemes
society are erroneous because the latter is already so in those very same countries a success. However,
extensive as to render superfluous anything that social the World Bank soon dropped social capital once it
capital has to offer to it. Nonetheless, it would have had served its purposes of engaging non-economists
been helpful if a little more detail had been given on within its development programmes and once social
the intellectual and theoretical history of studies of capital as an analytical category itself had slipped
civil society in order to provide a more robust defence beyond its confines to other academic and research
of this claim. institutions where it was (re)defined in a plethora of
If it is true that each chapter remains a self-contained often competing ways.
review of social capital research areas, this does not A final theme of the book is an outright rejection
detract from the books coherence as a whole. One of the category of social capital itself. This might

60 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 2 ( Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 010 )
seem self-evident given the critical nature of the book. applicable to the exploitative realities of capitalism
However, Fine demonstrates that even those social only results in a series of rather obvious observations
scientists and social researchers who express a degree about power within and across social classes, which
of scepticism towards social capital nevertheless can in fact be made without introducing social capital
often attempt to salvage its analytical and theoretical in the first place.
potential by rethinking its usefulness in some way or The strength of Theories of Social Capital is that
another. Fine is unsparing in his criticisms of those the main arguments in favour of this elusive concept
who attempt to rescue social capital in this manner, are knocked down with vigour, while also taking the
and this goes even for those who work within his reader beyond the immediate confines of scholarship
own preferred theoretical framework of Marxism. For in the field, highlighting links between social capital
example, Fine believes that any attempt by Marxists, as and a variety of other pressing concerns such as neo-
has in fact been the case, to make social capital more liberalism and the practices of the World Bank.

John Michael Roberts

Grounded
Christian Kerslake, Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy: From Kant to Deleuze, Edinburgh University
Press, Edinburgh, 2009. 334 pp., 65.00 pb. 0 748 63590 4.

Deleuze never gave us a real indication as to how to revolution in philosophy. This is a compelling claim,
understand his philosophical project. There is no dis- but like any claim it needs to be grounded.
course on method. There is no account of the practice The circumstantial evidence for this argument is
of ontology. We might know that being is multiple, but strong. Kantian and post-Kantian themes arise with
what we do not know is why we know that. Kerslake a surprising consistency throughout Deleuzes early
puts it this way: in Deleuzes published writings work. In his very first book he reads Hume as a
we appear to find no key, foundational texts whose proto-Kantian who thinks the subject as both ground
predominant concern is to produce and account for and self-transcendence, ultimately finding its unity
philosophical method in, say, epistemology, the study in a system of ends. Prousts Bergsonism is spread
of subjectivity, or ontology. The itinerary of Deleuze across a theory of the faculties which received its
studies is a good testimony to this. Deleuze has been theoretical elaboration in Deleuzes 1963 essay The
read as a pre-critical philosopher, as a Kantian, as a Idea of Genesis in Kants Esthetics. Not only does
phenomenologist, as a radical or not so radical vital- Deleuzes Nietzsche rewrite the Critique of Pure
ist, as a philosopher of mathematics or contemporary Reason, calling it instead Genealogy of Morals, but,
physics (or both at once), as a Lacanian, a Marxist, or, when, at the end of Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze
more often, simply as a machine for the production of reads Zarathustra as the principle of a hypothetical
neat-sounding concepts. Kerslakes book is an attempt positing which opens the way, finally, for Dionysius,
to end this ambiguity and show us once and for all an unconditioned positing, he is reading the move-
what Deleuze was up to. ment of Nietzsches work as a whole through Kants
What is surprising is that he apparently succeeds. elliptical claims at the end of the Opus postumum that
Kerslakes argument is the most convincing account yet Zoroaster represents philosophy in the whole of its
of the nature and assumptions behind Deleuzes philo- complex, comprehended under a principle. Difference
sophical project. These basic assumptions, Deleuzes and Repetition is arguably a rethinking of the central
real questions and problems, are, for Kerslake, fun- Kantian concepts and problems: synthesis, intensity,
damentally post-Kantian in nature. The main claim Ideas, representation, schematism, and, as Kerslake
of this book is that the philosophical work of Gilles emphasizes, grounding.
Deleuze represents the latest flowering of the project, All of this evidence, however, remains deeply
begun in the immediate wake of Kants Critique of suspect in the light of Deleuzes free-indirect philoso-
Pure Reason, to complete consistently the Copernican phizing and the broad and spotty distribution of these

R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 2 ( Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 010 ) 61
allusions across Deleuzes works. We know that the valiant efforts of Fichte and Schelling. Instead, he
readings of Hume, Nietzsche and Proust are not of argues that Deleuze goes back to Kant himself, and
the same sort as the literal, good-willed commentary re-excavates Kants original ideas concerning the
we would conventionally expect, and this forces us to self-critique of reason. The heart of Kerslakes book
submit all of the allusions to an initial suspicion: how is thus occupied by a lengthy and highly original re-
do we know its not Kantianism thats being taken from reading of Kant in which Kerslake directly addresses
behind here? Further, what would allow us to say that the problems of metacritique and immanence as they
these scattered allusions are not simply allusions to arise across Kants work and are reconfigured by
the Kantian project, but the real questions, problems Deleuze in What is Grounding? and in Difference
and assumptions animating Deleuzes work? Kerslake and Repetition.
avoids these difficulties by grounding his claims in Kerslakes reading of Deleuzes published texts
a recently discovered transcription of a 1956 course turns on Deleuzes description in Difference and Rep-
given by Deleuze at the Lyce Louis le Grande: What etition of the third synthesis as the final end of time.
is Grounding? According to Kerslake, this means that just as Kant
This lecture course isnt an ideal ground given the ascribed a set of ends to reason, Deleuze will claim
pressing textual problems surrounding it (how accurate that an internal teleology can be ascribed to the
and complete are the notes?), but the course is remark- synthesis of time itself. In Deleuzes case, however,
able for a number of reasons, and Kerslakes long intro- the end of this internal teleology, the final end of time,
duction is both an excellent summary of the course is not reasons pursuit of a still more perfect unity,
and a very persuasive argument for its centrality to but is a transcendental apocalypse in which a re-
our understanding of Deleuzes philosophical project. grounding of the subject in a properly ontological and
Kerslake emphasizes that this is the only lecture course creative life is accomplished. This transformation
in which Deleuze is not ventriloquizing another was already secretly animating Kants reformulations
thinker. Here he is working through a fundamental of reasons ends across the three critiques and the
philosophical problem what is a ground? and, Opus postumum, but it took Deleuze actually to see
rather than ironically paraphrasing another author so it and to follow through its implications. In doing so,
as to let an indirect content slip through, Deleuzes Deleuze is able to transform Kantianism from within
characterizations seem to be surprisingly accurate and and produce a self-grounding post-Kantian system
reliable. For this reason, we can grant it priority over of complete self-differentiation in which spiritual
virtually all of Deleuzes other texts. creativity and becoming take over as the true ends
Second, the course reveals a deep and origi- of thought.
nal engagement with Kant, the post-Kantians and Kerslake has done something here which, to my
Heidegger. Kerslake convincingly shows that it is knowledge, has not yet been attempted in Deleuze
specifically within this tradition and its assumptions studies, at least not at such a level of argumentation.
that Deleuze is posing his questions and determining He has provided a well-grounded account of Deleuzes
his philosophical problems. In the engagement with fundamental philosophical problems. He has convinc-
these thinkers the central Deleuzean concepts which ingly identified something like a key, foundational text
we find scattered throughout his later works are unified which can account for the method directing Deleuzes
around two problems raised by Kants critical project: epistemology, his study of subjectivity, and his ontol-
(1) the problem of metacritique, or the project of ogy, and he has reinforced that text with an admirably
accounting for the possibility of reasons self-critique, lucid reading of its historical sources. This is invalu-
and (2) the problem of immanence, or the possibility able and it should transform Deleuze studies. It is also
of completing the critical project by obtaining some incomplete. What Kerslake cannot do understand-
mode of access to the absolute from the standpoint of ably, given the nature of the project is get into the
our constitutive finitude, thus realizing, as Kerslake details of Deleuzes texts and show how the particular
puts it, the promise that thought is capable of being concepts created in each work together to realize the
fully expressive of being. apocalyptic ends of thought. In straining at the limits
It is well known that these problems occupied the of Kantianism, he is also straining at the limits of
post-Kantians, but Kerslake doesnt tell the usual story Deleuzism. What we now need to do is show how this
in which Hegel appears at the end of the narrative project animates the specific configuration of concepts
as the inevitable destination of Kantianism after the in Deleuzes major works.

Joe Hughes

62 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 2 ( Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 010 )
News

Beyond Copenhagen?
World Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights
of Mother Earth, Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1922 April 2010

T
he World Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth
in Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1922 April 2010, was essentially organized and promoted
by the government of Evo Morales as a response to the failures of Copenhagen. The
conference sought to provide an open platform for critical discussion about the environmental
crisis and to make visible the plight of the communities that are most immediately damaged
by it. The conference attracted more than 30,000 participants, twice the number anticipated,
and included politicians, activists, scientists, farmers, academics and artists from across the
globe. The political and intellectual range of views represented was remarkable, with amicable
exchanges across gender, class and cultural demographics. The conference managed to avoid
the exclusivist omission of voices that marred COP15. It was not unusual for a panel to receive
comments from university professors and a campesino in the same set of exchanges. The mood
throughout was positive with a readiness to listen and accept critique.
Although much of the publicity focused on projects such as a bill of rights for Mother Earth
and a climate tribunal to investigate those responsible for environmental damage, these were
organized around demands for a new system to restore harmony with nature and among
human beings. This motivation to address structural changes was one noteworthy feature of
the conference omitted from most mainstream reports: its overt anti-capitalist orientation.
This was apparent from the onset, with nearly all panels and working groups forthright
in their call for an alternative polity. That polity would be anti-imperialist (environmental
degradation was considered as a form of imperialism), it would recognize its citizens for who
they are as opposed to what they own, and it would work towards collective well being and
the satisfaction of the basic necessities of all. Thus the goals envisioned transcended mere
policy changes in NorthSouth relations, or even reparations for environmental damages. There
was a call for bold steps towards new and emancipatory ways of doing politics.
This was one reason for endorsing Morales philosophy of living well, which urged us
to reflect critically on the global environmental implications of our daily consumer impulses.
Indeed, the recognition of quotidian concerns was constant throughout the discussion. There
was resounding agreement on the fact that the desired structural changes cannot occur without
first confronting our complicity with the damages done to the environment; the daily need
to cultivate a responsible living routine was stressed alongside calls for environmentally
responsible government. Thus capitalism was perceived, rightly, as not simply an economic
system of exchange but a particular way of life. The everyday was emphasized as a site of
resistance.
Disagreements, however, were as intriguing as they were frequent. Nowhere was this more
apparent than on the question of industrialization. One concern was that problems of capital
were too frequently simplified and equated with problems of industrialization in general, limit-
ing the scope of discussion on concrete alternatives to the crisis. We were reminded that the
socialist fight against capital has never entailed a rejection of industry and that the workings
of capital are far too complicated to be understood and overcome by emotive appeals for a
union with nature.
This absence of theoretical depth can be read as a reflection of the conferences prevalent
indigenous trajectory. The working group on Structural Causes, for instance, opened with a

R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 2 ( Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 010 ) 63
local ritual of blessing coca leaves. The working group on Living in Harmony with Nature
began its work by burning a baby llama with beer. While such rituals were congruent with the
conferences parallel objective to recover the values of indigenous people, they were also part
of a larger push to centralize certain indigenous ideas. The main problem, as it turns out, was
not just the heavily gendered connotations to such frequently used terms as Mother Earth and
its ensuing analogies (the rivers as her milk, for example); it was that particular indigenous
assumptions about nature were taken to be of universal import and embedded into the central
claims of the conference. For example, there was little clarity regarding how exactly we are to
understand Mother Earth as being entitled to rights or how she teaches us to live.
Many were willing to overlook the particularities of such terminology for the larger goal of
articulating a comprehensive statement and agenda for resolution of the current impasse. But
the terminology with its specific allusions does raise the issue of the conflicts between
the differing political visions latent in the discussions. Socialism was constantly touted as an
alternative, but what kind of socialism exactly? Whose history, or which legacy, of socialism
is to be continued or revived? The push for a global referendum through which newer agendas
for climate change can be discussed with genuine consensus is a significant attempt to develop
the critique of capital. But the question of the purpose of such critique, and the political
imagination from which the concepts derived, received very little reflection. At stake is the
very value of universal progress that has historically defined the Lefts project.

Fuad Rahmat

INSTITUTE FOR MODERN AND


CONTEMPORARY CULTURE

COURSES
MA CULTURAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES MA VISUAL CULTURE
Capitalism and Culture Creative Digital Technology
Knowledge, Cultural Memory, Archives Interpreting Space
Reading Contemporary Culture Production and Display
Reading the Nation Representing World Cultures
Sexuality and Narrative The Human Image
Urban Cultures Theoretical and Critical Perspectives
RESEARCH AND PhD STUDY
Expert supervision in a range of cross-disciplinary fields. Current major research projects
on Biocultures; New Media Theory; Archiving Cultures.

EVENTS
The Hole in Time: German-Jewish Political Philosophy and the Archive
23 and 24 June 2010, University of Westminster, Little Titchfield St, W1W 7UW
Speakers include: Howard Caygill, David Cunningham, Nitzan Lebovic.
The Whitechapel Salon: Performance Matters
1 July 2010, Study Studio, Whitechapel Art Gallery, E1 7QX
with Gavin Butt, Adrian Heathfield, Lois Keidan
How We Became Metadata Exhibition
9 June5 September 2010, 309 Regent Street, W1B 2UW
Artists include: Eduardo Kac, Thomson & Craighead, Eunju Han, susan pui san lok.
instituteformodern.co.uk

64 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 2 ( Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 010 )

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