polemos

U MBR a

U MBR a
EDITORS: Sue Feldman Theresa Giron Mikko Tuhkanen MANAGING EDITOR: Theresa Giron EDITORIAL COMMITTEE: Marina de Carneri Erica DeSanto Sue Feldman Theresa Giron Alla Ivantchikova Alissa Lea Jones Kyunghoon Jung Cristina Laurita Aranya Maritime Hugh Schaeffer Mikko Tuhkanen COVER DESIGN: Sam Gillespie IMAGES EDITOR: Hugh Schaeffer ADVERTISING MANAGER: Hugh Schaeffer DISTRIBUTION: Alissa Lea Jones FACULTY ADVISOR: Joan Copjec

A JOURNAL OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

2001

ISSN 1087-0830 ISBN 0-9666452-

UMBR(a) is published with the help of grants from the following organizations and individuals at the State University of New York at Buffalo: The Graduate Student Association The Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture The Group for the Discussion of the Freudian Field The English Department The English Graduate Student Association The Eugenio Donato Chair (Rodolphe Gasch) The Samuel Clemens Chair (Leslie Fiedler) The James H. McNulty Chair (Dennis Tedlock) The Buffalo Theory Group

Address for Editorial and Subscription Enquiries: UMBR(a) Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture SUNY-Buffalo 409 Clemens Hall Buffalo, NY 14260-4610 http://wings.buffalo.edu/student-life/graduate/gsa/lacan/lacan.html

WEBMASTER: Julia Dzwonkoski

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL: THE FIRST RULE OF POLEMOS...

The Universal
7 29
THEORY, DEMOCRACY, AND THE LEFT: AN INTERVIEW WITH ERNESTO LACLAU carlos pessoa, marta hernndez, seoungwon lee, lasse thomassen STAGE LEFT: A REVIEW OF CONTINGENCY, HEGEMONY, UNIVERSALITY: CONTEMPORARY DIALOGUES ON THE LEFT juliet ower mac cannell A PLEA FOR CIVILITY: AN ASIAN WOMANS REPLY TO SUSAN MOLLER OKINS IS MULTICULTURALISM BAD FOR WOMEN? sinkwan cheng

51

Hors Series
69
ANTIGONES FART marc de kesel

Truth and The One

79 91 107
TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE IN HEIDEGGER, LACAN, AND BADIOU kirsten hyldgaard NEIGHBORHOOD OF INFINITY: ON BADIOUS DELEUZE: THE CLAMOR OF BEING sam gillespie THE CONTRACTION OF BEING: DELEUZE AFTER BADIOU adi ophir and ariella azoulay

Hors Series
123
THE ENJOYING MACHINE mladen dolar

Sublimation & Homosexuality

141
THE STRANGE DETOURS OF SUBLIMATION: PSYCHOANALYSIS, HOMOSEXUALITY, AND ART elizabeth grosz PERVERSION, SUBLIMATION, AND AESTHETICS: A RESPONSE TO ELIZABETH GROSZ tim dean

155

166

BOOK REVIEWS

EDITORIAL:
The First Rule Of Polemos...
Polemos panton men pater esti, panton de basileus, kai tous men theous edeixe tous de anthropous, tous men doulous epoiese tous de eleutherous. War [polemos] is both father of all and king of all: it reveals the gods on the one hand and humans on the other, makes slaves on the one hand, the free on the other.
Heraclitus, Fragment 53

In order for thought to exist, it must be de-clared publicly and this declarationif it is truly thought that is declared is always a matter of polemos, an act of war. Polemos does not divide a previously united group; for there is no group prior to polemos. The advent of thought, then, does not force people who were in agreement to choose sides and begin to oppose one another. Polemos is both the father of all and king of all: polemos does not divide what was previously united, but rather unites that which did not exist before polemos. We must be precise about the status of this union: thought does not bring about a unity on the basis of compromise. Thought must never be reduced to a coming to terms or a settling of accounts. This assumes that thought works in the terms and economy already available within the eld of discourse. In fact, thought does not situate itself between two positions as the comfortable middle ground because thought is the opposite of this notion of compromise insofar as it is necessarily unsituated. This idea of compromise, of coming between two opposing positions in order to bring them together, is the ultimate case of situatedness. Everything about the compromised position must be carefully situated with respect to what already exists, that is,

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with respect to the two positions it seeks to unite. Thought must come as a break with what already exists, as something radically new and, thus, unsituated. Thus, the task of polemos as we have conceived it in this issue of Umbr(a) is not compromise but thought, is not to bring together, but to think, to cut across the very eld of discourse. When thought succeeds in cutting across what exists in this way, it breaks with everything that was situated before it and, therefore, unites the eld by appealing to it universally. Because polemical thought remains radically unsit-uated with respect to any differences or distinctions by which one might have oriented oneself prior to the polemos, it does not address the eld on the basis of these differences but rather addresses everyone equally. Thought that comes in the form of polemos is completely impartial not because it considers all possible sides and positions (as in compromise), but because it comes as a break with all sides and positions. Although compromise tries to account for all points of view and to regard all disagreements, something is bound to slip through the cracks out of which a new opposition can form. Thus, thought does not regard all positions equally but rather disregards them equally. Polemos, then, the declaration of thought, levels the ground; it is indeed the father and king of all not because it gathers everything together through a balancing of opposites but because it marks a reconguration of the very space of the debate in which previous oppositions are entirely disregarded. As a result, polemos is the introduction of something new beyond the debate and not simply the introduction of something new to the debate itself. Thus, as Heraclitus says, polemos

reveals the gods on the one hand and humans on the other, makes slaves on the one hand, the free on the other. First and foremost, polemos reveals the immortal, or the gods, and from there everything else becomes mortal, human. The appearance of the immortal is the emergence of this place beyond the debate: but the immortal is not a new position from which one may engage in the debate (as the place of compromise is); it is rather the place at which debate stops. Polemos, then, reveals this place from which one engages in the work of thought but which is nevertheless removed from the eld of discourse, the level of debate. In this way, it becomes clear that only polemos reveals thought as immortal and likewiseas the last words of Heraclitus fragment claimonly polemos makes thinkers free. In this time of cultural relativism in which freedom of thought is misrecognized as the multiplication of positions, only psychoanalysis seems to preserve the place beyond the terms of debate, from which a different idea of freedom is guaranteed. While this thoughtas-polemos undoubtedly traverses other disciplines, it is precisely because the very emergence of psychoanalysis corresponds to the naming of this place beyond the unconscious that it cannot but continue to remain faithful to the demands of thought. The articles in this issue attest to this delity in that they do not merely attempt to stake out another position on a number of ongoing debates multiculturalism, sexual difference, and so forthbut show that the impact of psychoanalysis on both the thinkers and the debates is nothing but the reconguration of the very elds themselves.

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THEORY, DEMOCRACY, AND THE LEFT: AN INTERVIEW WITH ERNESTO LACLAU

carlos pessoa, marta hernndez, seoungwon lee, lasse thomassen

Marxism is in shambles. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has become the most conspicuous political sign of Marxisms profound political and theoretical crisis. Many intellectuals have responded to this by turning their backs on politics altogether. Their arguments either too easily assume the impossibility of theorizing the postmodern condition, or postulate the radical defeat of Marxism by emphasizing the ineluctability of political particularisms. Others choose instead to support center-related ideologies such as the ones represented by the so-called European Third Way. In our opinion, however, the choices of all these intellectuals are indeed symptomatic of the same lack. They represent a yearning for the lost object of desire. Political mourning is indeed the afiction of our time, and it is also its danger, for mourning creates a hiatus in our actions, and the suspension of desire only leaves room for the Others desire to dominate. In our current political situation the desire of the Other is called neoliberalism, and with our mourning and our refusal to break the Marxist myth, we are indeed allowing the Other to shape our desire. There are nevertheless many other intellectuals who have chosen to reformulate that object of desire called Marxism, and Ernesto Laclau is one of them. Deeply inuenced by the semiotic mapping of social reality in discursive terms on the one hand, and by the postructuralist vision of metaphysics on the other, Laclaus endeavor has been to articulate a progressive political project adjusted to our present socio-economic conditions. His theory of hegemony, rst articulated in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, a seminal book co-written with Chantal Mouffe in 1985, is both a descriptive and a normative articulation of such a project. It is also an attempt to reconceptualize the notion of universalism by emancipating the particular from the traditional logic of the universal. This is made possible by positing a non-essentialist rendering of subjectivity whose conditions of existence are derived from the constitutive impossibility of its full realization.

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We have tried to examine some aspects of Laclaus theory by applying them to the new swiftly changing socio-economic conditions of the three main areas in which we work: Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Our examination of Laclaus work aims at interrogating the political crisis of the two signiers left and democracy in our contemporary world. In our view, Laclaus theory of hegemony is the most lucid and intellectually challenging articulation of a viable progressive political project.

THEORY
Question: Contingency is a key notion in your work. The term was quite popular in the 1960s on the Left, for instance in Sartres La Nause, but it can be traced all the way back to Georges Sorels La dcomposition du marxisme (1908). One can understand contingency as opposing the idea of a necessary logic within the boundaries of the social and/or as opposing the notion of a unique essence dening identity. How exactly do you use the notion of contingency in your work, and what fundamental role does it play in the logic of hegemony? Ernesto Laclau: I use the notion of contingency in its strict philosophical sense, as formulated within the Christian tradition. Contingent is that being whose essence does not involve its existence. Finitude is, in that sense, one of its dening dimensions. It is for that reason that I have tried to differentiate contingency from the category of the accident, which in Aristotle refers to an internal division in the being of an entity. In contemporary philosophy Richard Rorty has used the term contingency as more or less synonymous with accidentality, but for me the two categories have to be strictly differentiated. The notion of contingency is, for me, crucially linked to the discursive structuration of social spaces and to the impossibility of operating a nal closure around an ultimate transcendental signied. The result of that impossibility is the non-xity of the signier/signied relation, and the constitutive role of tropological displacements in the structuration of society. As for the hegemonic logics, it is clear that if the sedimentation of social relations prevailed to the point of making invisible the contingency of the acts of originary institution, no hegemonic displacement would be possible. To constantly reactivate the visibility of that originary contingency is a constitutive dimension of all hegemonic operation. Q: You claim that hegemony is constituted by a paradox, where what is achieved is the representation of the irrepresentable. You are probably familiar with the rhetorics of silence as a strand within postmodernist poetics, which are in fact based on the same principle. We could mention Paul Celan or Jos ngel Valente as examples of the rhetorics of silence. Yet, in this poetic movement, which works very much like mysticism itself, the signier signies nothing

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and communicates nothing, but makes something transparent that is beyond all expression.1 If it is the case that silence is the discursive kernel of a given subject, how can the citizen holding a representative political role be aware of the meaning of the silences of the subjects that he represents? How can he interpret those silences? Would it not be a mistake to consider the possibility of a silence beyond knowledge itself? EL: My approach is different from the kind of intellectual currents to which you refer. The representation of the unrepresentable, in the sense that I have used that expression, makes allusion to an object the fullness of society that is both necessary and impossible. So, we are not dealing with silence but with lack, with something that is very much present as that which is absent. The primary form of the presence of such a lack is, as I have tried to argue, through empty signiers, and the hegemonic operation consists in discursively articulating those signiers to wider discursive totalities. For that reason, I do not see the relation of representation as one in which the representative engages himself in a hermeneutic operation vis--vis those he repre-sents, but as a performative intervention in which, through the process of representation, the identity of the represented is constituted. The irrepresentable is represented: this means that, as it has no content of its own, it can only exist through representation that is, through a substitution that is strictly constitutive, for that which is being substituted does not exist. This is, I think, the catachresis inherent to all representation the substitution is certainly gural, but there is no literal term that could replace the tropos. And, because of that, hegemonic operations can be reversed, as the signiers representing the fullness of society are not the necessary form of that fullness, but only its contingent incarnations. Q: The Lumpenproletariat the group that represented the abject subject for Marx has been and remains a historical residue. Today, in an era of exible accumulation, where neoliberalism has a strong hegemonic presence as a world power, the Lumpenproletariat is still largely present. The Lumpenproletariat is also the subject that a sector of academic knowledge in the U.S. has chosen to call the subaltern. Following Alberto Moreiras characterization of subalternity, one might say that the subaltern is neither excluded nor included, while supposing, as Chantal Mouffe does, that democratic politics imply a double movement of inclusion and exclusion. For example, in the Schmittian pair of friend and enemy, the subaltern would be neither enemy nor friend. The subaltern is, on the contrary, the residue, that which remains in the originary locus of the inclusion/exclusion pair. Following this, the subaltern would still be a historical residue. According to this denition of subalternity, how could the theory of hegemony articulate this category into its logics? EL: I think that your question touches a very important point. Let me say, to start with, that I largely agree with Moreiras thesis that you have just mentioned. The subaltern is, precisely,

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neither the included nor the excluded. Why? Because a relation of exclusion is one way of dening negatively the identity of what is included. But the subaltern, as a residue of history, is, as you say, that which is beyond the opposition inclusion/exclusion. That is what happens with the Hegelian notion of peoples without history. And the Marxian notion of the Lumpenproletariat belongs to the same order of phenomena: the Lumpenproletariat does not have a history because, as a residual element, it can be found in the most diverse types of society. The problem, however, is more complicated, even in Marx himself, because he nds it very difcult to explain actual political developments without bringing to the fore of the historical scene precisely those residual elements. In a brilliant article on the role of the Lumpenproletariat in Marx, Peter Stallybrass analyzes the political logic of Bonapartism in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte and concludes that it depended on the active presence of social elements not organized around class interests, for they were not anchored in precise locations within the process of production. To put it in Stallybrass words: For Marx... heterogeneity is not the antithesis of political unication but the very condition of possibility of that unication. I suspect that that is the real scandal of the Lumpenproletariat in Marxist theory: namely, that it gures the political itself. [...] For the lumpen seems to gure less a class in any sense that one usually understands that term in Marxism than a group which is amenable to political articulation. And what group is not? Hence, the dizzying variety of social classes that, at one moment or another, seem to collaborate in Bonapartism and to give allegiance to the chief of the Lumpenproletariat. 2 Well, I will only add that the notion of subalternity understood in this sense as neither inclusion nor exclusion is something without which the category of hegemony would be entirely unintelligible, for if there were no residual elements we would only have a rigid frontier separating inclusion from exclusion, and in that case there would be nothing to hegemonize. The mobility of internal frontiers is a presupposition of hegemony, and such mobility requires the presence of marginal, residual, and unintegrated social sectors that new hegemonic strategies launch into the historical arena. Many Third-World theoreticians have emphasized this creative role of the marginals. Frantz Fanon, for instance, asserts: The lumpenproletariat, once it is constituted, brings all its forces to endanger the security of the town, and it is the sign of the irrevocable decay, the gangrene ever present at the heart of colonial domination. So the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed and the petty criminals...throw themselves into the struggle like stout working men. These classless idlers will by militant and decisive action discover the path that leads to nationhood. The prostitutes too, and the maids who are paid two pounds a month, all who turn in circles between suicide and madness, will recover their balance, once more go forward, and march proudly in the great procession of the awakened nation. 3 Let me add that the increasing marginalization of vast sections of the population by the conditions of global capitalism constantly produces and reproduces subalternity and, in this

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way, enlarges the area of operation of hegemonic practices. Q: Let us take the Kantian distinction between noumena and phenomena, where the former are not dened as objects of intuition, but are, rather, problems that are inescapably tied up with the limitations of our sensibility. There are, Kant says, illegitimate uses of noumena in theoretical reason. For example, one of them would be to objectify noumena, which for Kant would be to go from the realm where the object exists only in thought, to the realm where the object exists in itself and without regard to intuition. In this sense, concepts would be objectied when making a transcendent use of the pure concepts of the understanding, such as sub-stance, power, action, reality, causality, as if they were either noumena themselves or at least applicable to noumena. Taking into account one of the premises on which you base your theoretical apparatus, namely the fact that, for you, all social reality is discursive, how would you respond to Kants paradox of the illegitimate use of noumena? EL: I do not think that the Kantian dualism is linked in any meaningful way to the notion of discourse that I have used in my work. First, Kant was speaking about transcendental conditions of understanding, while I am speaking about signication (whose elementary form would be the sign). And, second, central to my conception of discourse is its performative dimension which brings it close to the Wittgensteinian notion of language games while the Kantian distinction between phenomenon and noumenon is something only relevant to a knowing subject. So the whole discussion about the Ding an sich is not really connected with my theoretical problematic. What would certainly be relevant to my discursive approach but has little to do with the Kantian tradition is the question of how language relates to reality whether there are ultimate names directly connected with things, as the analytical tradition originally thought; or whether Husserls motto to the things themselves! nds its adequate answer in a phenomenological description; or whether as in the heyday of structuralism we think that we can postulate a strict isomorphism between the order of the signier and the order of the signied. All these illusions of immediacy have dissolved, and they have been replaced by discourse theories of one type or the other and my own discursive approach is, obviously, part of this intellectual mutation. But to discuss that would take us in a very different direction than that at which your question was aiming. Q: As a result of the formalization that you have carried out of the Saussurean notions of the sign, the signied, and the signier, you have recently insisted that signiers, signieds, and signs should all be conceived of as signiers. 4 However, does the very possibility of meaning and society, however constitutively distorted, not presuppose that the play of signiers produce signieds that function as partial and only partial xations of meaning? In other words,
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does the possibility of meaning and society not presuppose this production of signieds, of which the play of signiers is simultaneously the condition of possibility and limit? EL: The passage that you refer to is actually a quotation from an essay by Jason Glynos that I quote in my text. The argument is as follows: If language, in the Saussurean sense, is form and not substance, the process of signication can only proceed in terms of formal differences between elements, independently of the fact that some of them are signiers and other signieds (a distinction that could only be maintained by reintroducing into the argument the substance phonic or conceptual). This formalistic tendency was later accentuated and rened with Hjelmslevs recasting of the structuralist model. So what Glynos is asserting in a somewhat provocative way is that alteration of meaning takes place not as a result of changes at the level of the signier or at that of the signied, but as a result of any formal alteration in the relations between elements of a signifying system, independent of the fact that such an alteration begins with the phonic or the conceptual substances. In the passage to which you refer I gave an example taken from Bruce Fink. For Freud, the Rat Man complex is formed through associations at the level of the signied (rat is associated with penis because rats spread venereal diseases) or at the level of the signifer the pure similitude between words that Freud called verbal bridges (Spielratten means gambling, and the Rat Mans father had incurred a gambling debt). It is the Rat Mans complex as a totality that xes meaning, and it is indifferent that its component elements have been brought together through either associations at the level of the signied or through verbal bridges. This is obviously relevant to politics. The unity of a hegemonic formation is the result of an overdetermination of elements that came together in the two ways just described. So the answer to your question is that the partial xation of meaning that you are talking about is certainly central to any hegemonic conception of social relations, but it results from the double process that I have mentioned, not from a dualistic scheme in which the cause would operate at the level of the signier and the effects at the level of the signied. Meaning does not simply mean signied, but a given structural arrangement in the signier/signied relation. That is why I nd some merit in Glynos attempt at treating signiers, signieds, and signs as all being signiers. Q: A basic premise of your notion of hegemony is the idea that power has an uneven and exclusionary character, which results in universalitys dependency on particularity.5 If power is uneven and exclusionary, then it seems that this character of power holds within any given relation between social agents. In the construction of a hegemonic discourse, where various particular groups enter into a relation of equivalence, how do the social entities relate to one another within such a chain of equivalence in light of this character of power? Does the metaphorically condensed operation governing such a hegemonic project put a hold on this character of power,
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or is there a different character of power within such an equivalent chain? EL: Let me explain, in the rst place, what it means to speak of the constitutive character of the unevenness of power. It involves rejecting two polar hypotheses which, paradoxically, come to almost identical conclusions. The rst is the postulate of a harmonious utopian society, from which power would have been entirely eliminated. The second is as in Hobbes a society entirely incapable of self-regulation; for, as the equality of men in the state of nature can only result in a war of all against all, the ensuing chaos could be only superseded by surrendering total power into the hands of the Leviathan. Both hypotheses come together in one point: for both of them power (and, as a result, politics) is radically eliminated. For a power that does not exist and a power that is total that is, not limited by any resistance are exactly the same. It is only if power, at the level of civil society, is uneven thus contradicting Hobbes hypothesis that civil society is capable of self-regulation. This point is important: it is only this unevenness of power that makes self-regulation possible for civil society. It follows that self-regulation and power require each other. The articulation of these two moments is what I call hegemony. As you rightly say, power requires exclusion. But, as I have tried to explain in my work, this exclusion is the condition of freedom. Without a frontier of inclusion/exclusion there could be no equivalence; but equivalence, in order to represent itself as a meaningful whole, requires that one element of the equivalential chain assume the hegemonic function of representing the latter as a totality. As you see, there are two moments in which the unevenness of power operates. First, in the construction of a frontier 0f inclusion/exclusion; second, in that the equivalential chain, to reach its own identity, has to privilege and thus universalize one of its particular internal links. So the advance of any equalitarian logic one that proceeds through the equivalence of a plurality of demands requires a complex hegemonic operation: the equivalence is impossible without the two moments of unevenness that I have just described. To inscribe the question of subalternity within this conceptual matrix is quite easy. Q: In your theory of hegemony, you draw on the works of the two Jacques: Lacan and Derrida. Contrary to, for instance, Slavoj iek, you believe that it is possible to combine Derridean deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In what precise way do you connect the work of these two theorists in your own work? How do you react to ieks assertion that it is not possible to combine Derridean deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis? Are there points in the works of Derrida and Lacan that you believe are incompatible? EL: Let us be precise. There is no theory that is entirely compatible with any other. You will always nd concepts that do not exactly overlap, different emphases, or, even, sheer incommensurability. To this you have to add that a theory is never entirely consistent with itself the

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author participates in a variety of discursive spaces, makes in them a plurality of interventions, and his theoretical language is never so much in control as to be able to entirely hegemonize the contexts within which it operates. Having said that, I have to add that I do not see the incompatibility between Derrida and Lacan in the same way iek does. I have already made this point crystal-clear in my book with Butler and iek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, and I do not want to repeat myself. I will only add that what I see as ieks misrepresentation of this matter does not amount to just a punctual and isolated issue: one can trace it back to ieks politico-intellectual project as a whole, a project that I am far from sharing. As for the part of your question concerning what I take from Derrida and what from Lacan, let me say, before answering, that I am neither a Derridean nor a Lacanian. I have my own agenda, which is the development of a theory of politics centered in the notion of hegemony. In order to do so, however, I had to question the ontological presuppositions of most current political theory, and in the process of doing so I found highly relevant some of the intellectual dmarches of both Derrida and Lacan as well as those of other authors like Wittgenstein and Heidegger. But the absorption of these intellectual inuences was made in terms of a theoretical interrogation that is my own. But lets go back to your question. To conceive politics in terms of hegemonic articulations involves showing 1) that sedimented social forms are inherently contingent; and 2) that the language games that it is possible to play starting from these contingent articulations presuppose relations between entities that far exceed what was thinkable within the implicit ontology of classical political theory. From this point of view, the notion of undecidability as developed by deconstruction is crucial. The infrastructures supplementarity, iteration, re-mark, and so on as systematized by Rodolphe Gasch are invaluable for rethinking the strategic operations presupposed by a hegemonic logic. They t nicely with my project of rethinking social relations as rhetorically constituted. This is the main aspect in which deconstruction has been an important inuence in my thinking. As for Lacan, his main interest for me lies in the central role that the notion of empty signiers plays in my approach to politics. I have found a set of Lacanian categories the real, the subject of the lack, the object a, and so on most inspiring for the development of my arguments. By comparing Lacans presentation of these categories to the issues I was trying to clarify, I have found a whole arsenal of new dimensions and nuances that helped me immensely in sharpening my own categories. Now, between what I am taking from deconstruction and what I am taking from Lacanian theory, I do not see any incompatibility at all especially because no eclecticism is involved in this exercise: each of the categories is redened in terms of my own theoretical questions. Q: In your work, the Lacanian notions of the real and the symbolic are the anti-essentialist

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conditions for explaining historical changes and the transformation of social formations. In your conceptualization of the real and the symbolic, how do you explain that one cannot be subordinated to the other, but are, rather, constitutively interacting? In other words, how can we explain the materialist and anti-essentialist continuity of the constitutive relation between the real and the symbolic? EL: As you know, certain Lacanians iek, especially have tried to assimilate the notion of antagonism, as presented in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, to the Lacanian real. I could go along with this assimilation, but only up to a certain point. There are two limits to it to which I want to refer. In the rst place the real is, for Lacan, that which is not symbolizable. But antagonism is a discursive construction and, in that sense, the attempt to symbolically master something in which the limits of objectivity are shown. It is for this reason that in my recent work I have spoken about dislocation as a deeper level, while conceiving antagonism as one of the possible attempts at discursively (Lacan would say: symbolically) mastering dislocation. Seen from this perspective, the Lacanian real is very close, indeed, to what I call dislocation.
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A second limit to the assimilation between the real and antagonism can be found in the fact that the notion of the real in Lacan is linked to a notion of jouissance that has not been present in my work. My approach has tended to focus on the internal aporias of the symbolic order on what Bruce Fink calls the kinks in the symbolic order. In Emancipation(s), for instance, the limits between the representable and the non-representable are discussed in terms of the internal inconsistencies of the notion of limit. It is not that I oppose the category of jouissance on the contrary, I think that something remains incomplete in my argument without a category such as jouissance (or another that plays a similar structural function). But at this stage of my theoretical elaboration, I am not in a position to tell you how much of that notion I would be happy to appropriate for my own purposes. I hope, anyway, that it is clear that I am prepared to go a considerable way with the Lacanian notion of the real, as it illuminates in very suggestive ways the dialectic between the representable and the unrepresentable that is at the root of hegemonic logics. Q: In your reading of capitalism, you distinguish between economic and extra-economic factors, and, in addition, you wish to abandon the core concepts in Marxism of superstructure and of economic determination in the last instance. How do you distinguish between economic and extra-economic forces in terms of capitalism? Can we not say that those economic factors are already symbolizing and condensing the processes of primitive (original) accumulation and of the social reproduction of the means of the capitalist production that are the very political, ideological, and bodily practices exercised in the sphere of everyday life? How, in your conceptualization of the matter, are those two forces of capitalism the economic and the extra-economic

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 combined with each other in the existence of all stages of capitalist accumulation? 6 EL: I see the distinction between two types of factors, economic and extra-economic, as entirely insufcient. In the passage that you quote, I assert: The conditions of existence of capitalist accumulation are provided by a set of factors which correspond to complex balances of forces partly economic, of course, but also political, institutional and ideological. None of them can therefore be conceptualized as a superstructure...the myth of a separate and denable economic instance must be abandoned. To be able to establish a sharp distinction between the economic and the extra-economic one would have to have a notion of the economic as entirely dominated by endogenous laws, while the notion of the extra-economic, if it is going to embrace in a single category referents which are comparable just by the negative fact of not being economic, would also require some positive grounding of that unity, grounding which is, of course, provided by one or another variant of the old fashioned base/superstructure model.7 It is for that reason that I reject, in the passage that we are referring to, the idea that the extra-economic is a unied category. So I never said, as your question suggests, that there are two forces of capitalism the economic and the extra-economic. As for the symbolizing and condens-ing functions to which you refer, they are only too real, but they are not a privilege of the economic factor: any social element or identity is always overdetermined and, as such, the condensation of a plurality of dimensions.

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DEMOCRACY
Q: Together with Chantal Mouffe, you have used the notion of radical democracy as part of your work. Precisely what would a radical democracy be for you? How do you see such a political project becoming possible and being developed in our present political situation? EL: To fully answer your question would require more space than we have in this interview. So let me just concentrate on a couple of important points. First, only that democracy that fully accepts the contingency of its own grounds, that does not postulate any content that is beyond the possibility of contestation and reversal, is radical. This involves that no principle or norm of collective organization has a sub specie aeternitatis validity. This is the reason why I think that theories trying to isolate a positive democratic minimum are a useless exercise. There is no point, for instance, in trying to separate as the Habermasians do procedural from substantive aspects, and grounding democracy only in the former. Procedural and substantial agreements cannot be separated that way: rst, the line separating the procedural from the substantial is an extremely blurred one; second, there is no procedural that is not as contingent as any substantive content. To keep alive the consciousness of the contingency of any social arrangement does not mean to institutionally x the management of that consciousness.

We must stress that consciousness of contingency which implies, as I said, the possibility of always changing social arrangements does not involve in the least any kind of everything goes attitude or pessimism. Rather, it involves the assertion that social interaction is the only source of our world, that the latter cannot ground its ethical or social principles in anything else but human actions, struggles, and arguments, and that, being nite, humans cannot give to their principles a metaphysical necessity that they do not have in their own being. Freedom and consciousness of our own contingency go together. Radical democracy is the full recognition of that fact and its translation into political forms which, if what I am saying is correct, cannot have the xity and atemporality of any utopian blueprint of society. Radical democracy can, in this sense, be seen as the culmination and, at the same time, supersession of the modern trend toward secularization. Classical modernity moved away from a theologically grounded social order but, in a rst step, attempted to retrieve for human beings its true essence which had been alienated in the divine attributes. The Young Hegelians, Feuerbach, and the early Marx are a clear expression of this transitional moment. Completing this transition to a fully secularized universe requires not accepting any fully-edged essence either divine or human and coming to terms with contingency and nitude. This does not involve falling into any kind of positivism but engaging in a guerrilla war with metaphysical categories that weakens them but, paradoxically, does not do away with them. Thus, essence is very much present in this new discourse as that which is absent (which names the place of a lack), sovereignty becomes hegemony, representation becomes an ambiguous game in which representative and those being represented mutually contaminate each other, agency becomes the locus of contradictory centering/decentering games, and so on. Empty signiers as the nodal points of hegemonic strategies become, in this way, a constitutive dimension of a radical democratic perspective. Q: Would you distinguish between democracy in general, liberal democracy, and radical democracy, and how would you make that distinction? Is it possible to isolate a democratic logic beyond and transcending concrete democratic regimes and conceptions of democracy? What would logic mean here? EL: Concerning democracy in general, the concept has been used in so many contexts, and with so many different and even contradictory aims, that we have to content ourselves with listing this variety of uses and establishing between them what Wittgenstein called family resemblances. So my answer to your query concerning the possibility of an ultimate democratic core under-lying all concrete regimes and conceptions, is negative: there is no such core. If democracy is, in some way as I think it is related to equality, the difference between a purely liberal and a radical conception of democracy becomes clear. In the former, the principle of equality only applies to the public space of citizenship, while in the latter it is extended to many spheres which, for liberals, are the exclusive domain of the private and escape communitarian regulation.

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Q: In mainstream theories of democracy and democratization, scholars have focused on studying the institutionalization of democracy as democratization based on the Schumpeterian procedural minimum of the formal democracy. However, radical democratic strategy seems to depend on constituting the political identities of new radical democratic citizens beyond any particular social formation and beyond the limits of any institutions by a radical expanding of liberty and equality. Nevertheless, does radical democracy not need at least some institutionalization (including a procedural minimum) of democracy for expanding the radical democratic horizon? If radical democracy must rely on processes of institutionalization of its limits and of its possibility in a certain discourse, how can the radical democratic strategy, at least, go beyond the institutionalization of democracy as the only game in town and the principle of contemporary representative democracy? EL: All the forms of insitutionalization that you mention make sense only in a particular type of framework, which is that which exists in liberal democracy. But democracy is a wider phenomenon than liberalism. It is linked, as I mentioned earlier, to extending the principle of equality to wider areas of social relations, to freeing the underdog. Now, if democracy is conceived in a wider sense, I can imagine not only imagine, actually see several contexts in which the advance of the democratic demands of the masses could only take place outside, even breaking with a liberal framework. (Think of many Third-World countries.) It is not that I am against that framework. I agree that in the type of societies in which you and I live one cannot do away with the liberal framework if one wants to advance democratic demands. But the important point is that the latter do not necessarily overlap with the former. This leads me to another issue linked to one of your questions that I have to some extent answered but not entirely so. It concerns the question of how to advance the project of a radical democracy in present day conditions. Let me say that, for me, the central issue we will be confronted with in the years to come is that of the articulation between particularity and universality. The last decades have seen an explosion of new antagonisms through which many previously submerged identities have started to demand their rights to equality, that is, to participate in a wider equivalential chain. The problem is that this pluralization of the demands of the underdog has taken place in a period in which, with the events of 1989 and its sequels, there has been a decit of wider, emancipatory discourses. The danger in this situation is that we could end with an actual opposition between punctual demands that are not articulated to any global equalitarian ideology and, thus, could easily be retrieved by the dominant system and a purely abstract universalism incapable of taking root in any actual struggle. We already have begun hearing some isolated voices coming from new born Leninists, launching themselves into a vociferous hate speech against feminism, multiculturalism, and in the academic sphere against postcolonial and cultural studies, in the name of an abstract return to class struggle which,

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of course, does not mean anything because they do not make the slightest attempt to link their discourses to workers demands. This kind of discourse is not, of course, very important, either politically or theoretically, but it is indicative of a certain impasse in which radical democracy nds itself today. Without a wider emancipatory discourse, punctual struggles are condemned to impotence; but without anchoring itself in the plurality of actual social struggles, universal discourse will not fare any better. The hegemonic approach to radical democracy is an attempt to mediate between these two dimensions that can be mediated but which, left to themselves, do not necessarily coalesce in any kind of harmonious unity. Q: You have stated that the Left should reformulate its vision in terms of radical democracy. However, for a leftist project aiming to bring together various political tendencies under its imaginary discourse, does not such a pre-determined vision act as an impediment to such a project? After all, there are various leftist political tendencies for instance, participatory democracy pointing to different possible visions that could become part of such a project. In other words, how does one make compatible various political visions that can become part of this leftist imaginary discourse with your predetermined prescription of moving towards radical democracy? EL: In the rst place, let us be clear about what is involved in the notion of a radical democracy. What is involved, to start with, is the awareness of the contingency of any social arrangement. Democracy is radical as far as it does not admit any source of its own validity other than the argumentative networks actually existing in a given community and, as a corollary, as far as it does not recognize any a priori dogma that would lead to a specic blueprint of society. Because of that, precisely, to defend radical democracy is neither to defend a particular political regime nor any other concrete institutional arrangement. In that sense, it does assert some of the preconditions of a political project that it would recognize as its own, but the latter will have to be richer and far more context-dependent than that which the mere notion of radical democracy could actually provide. For instance, it will have to establish exclusions and limits to the workings of an equalitarian logic that cannot be simply derived from the concept of radical democracy. As for the idea of a participatory democracy which was defended some years ago by C.B. Macpherson and Carole Pateman, among others, but which has largely been abandoned today it was formulated at a level of abstraction different from radical democracy. It was, for one, based on a notion of pluralism that postulated denite institutional arrangements. I am not particularly in disagreement with several of these arrangements, although I cannot follow the participatory approach in its refusal to give any creative political role to antagonism and social division. I think that, in the last instance, the discourse of the defenders of participatory democracy belongs very much to the tradition of a utopian search for the good society, a project with which

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I do not identify myself. But, as radical democracy is not the name of a specic political project, I do not see how the special incompatibility that you refer to could actually arise. Q: It follows from the theory of hegemony that there can be no political or social order without exclusion, and the question then becomes what exclusions are made. What must a radical democ-racy exclude in order to be a radical democracy? We are thinking here both of concrete examples, such as the extreme Right, and of the way in which these exclusions are made. Does radical democracy exclude less than other political regimes? If yes, is that why we should prefer radical democracy to other regimes, or should we prefer radical democracy because it relates to its exclusion in a way that is different from the way that other political regimes do? EL: I said before that radical democracy requires the assertion of the contingency of its own arrangements. I will now add that it also requires the extension of the logic of equality to increas-ingly wider areas of social relations. Let us be clear: it is not that equality should become a formal principle whose application should be universal, independently of any circumstance; what is asserted is rather that equality becomes a positive value as different from what happened, for instance, in the hierarchical societies of the European ancient rgimes. Without this positive value being attributed to the equalitarian principle, there could be no democracy radical or otherwise. But the principle of equality will necessarily nd limits that are going to be given not by its formal properties but by the concrete contexts in which it operates. I am prepared to extend the principle of equality within society to groups wider than other people do to cultural, sexual or racial minorities, for instance, or to economically disadvantaged sections of the population and, in that sense, my democracy is comparatively more radical, but this extension is not unlimited; there are always going to be demands that will not be met and exclusions that will have to be made. Does radical democracy exclude less than other political regimes? I do not know. That depends on the actual dangers that haunt democracy. In some cases a radical democratic government has to be more exclusionary than a merely liberal one when, for instance, one has to control monopolistic trends, or to put limits on the free circulation of capital, or to impede the free operation of hate speech. Here to exclude obviously means the same as in any other kind of exclusion, but that to be excluded will be different. Q: Is there a way to relate the democratic projects taking place in Latinoamerica (Southern cone, that is, Chile, Argentina and Brazil) and the Third-Way democratic regimes that are emerging in Europe? Do you think that Chile and Argentina are still going through a period of democratic populism? In what sense do you see your theoretico-political project in relation to the Latinoamerican scholarship (on Chile and Argentina)? Does your geopolitical position inuence your work at all? If so, how?

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EL: I am a strong critic of the Third Way and of the notion of a radical center as it has been formulated, among others, by the social-democratic governments of Britain and Germany. I see in these formulations little more than attempts at reconciling their societies with the neo-liberal model operating since the 1980s. This right-wing trend within social democracy is especially visible in the movement toward a purely consensual politics that would do away with antagonisms and social division. In this brave new world in which politics becomes administration, people are not presented with options and the possibility of choice the result has been an increasing process of depoliticization and an accumulation of unfullled demands which, in several cases, has favored the emergence of a right-wing populism. As for the Argentinian and Brazilian regimes it is too early to talk about the Chilean one one could only speak of democratic populism with a high sense of humor. What we have is merely a traumatic process of adaptation of their economies to the requirements of international nancial capital, with a social cost that is only too visible. This has led to a decreasing degree of democratic participation. If populism has any meaning, it refers to the dichotomization of the social space and the transformation of the underdog into an active political force. What we are witnessing is exactly the opposite. Q: For the last two decades, the capitalist forces have dramatically strengthened their coalition (despite their own bloody competition) and produced new fantasies in order to create various capitalist markets and to rejuvenate the accumulation of capital. These neo-liberal changes have caused a lot of serious social traumas, especially in terms of the degradation of human rights in everyday life, and have led to various anti-capitalist struggles in the world. These include, in recent years, for instance, the general strike with mass popular support against the neo-liberal labor exibility in South Korea (January, 1997), the massive struggles against the WTOs Millennium Rounds in Seattle (November, 1999), and in Prague (September, 2000), and such on-going struggles as the Mexican Zapatistas and the Brazilian landless movements. In this sense, if those anti-capitalist struggles should be situated on the radical democratic horizon, how can the hegemonic agent of the radical democratic strategy articulate the anti-capitalist struggles with the equivalential chain of radical democracy? What kind of political consequences should the radical democratic strategy involve for the current anti-capitalist struggles? EL: You have quite correctly pointed out some of the main dimensions of present day social struggles. Lets concentrate for a moment on the last point of your question. As I have tried to show in my work, any social antagonism is structured around three dening features. The rst is that it involves a demand, at the root of which there is the experience of a dislocated identity. The second is that, as the dislocation is constitutive, we cannot explain the antagonism through a causal model that would derive its concrete forms from the source of the dislocation. As we

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have always asserted, antagonisms are not objective relations but, instead, the limits of social objectivity. This non-objective character of the antagonistic relation cannot be derived from the objective, ontic features of the antagonizing force. That force, through its antagonistic effects, becomes a symbol of the negation and, as a result, of the incompletion of my own identity. This gap between ontic objectivity and symbolic incarnation of the antagonistic denial is what explains the third feature of the antagonistic relation: the ability of the antagonized forces to establish chains of equivalence between themselves. These are not based in any objective, necessary links between those struggles, but in the fact that they are all struggles of disad-vantaged (that is, blocked in their identity) people, and this fact of being disadvantaged, whatever the particular source of it, becomes the ground of that relation of solidarity that we call equivalence. This is important for the political issues that you are raising. For if being disadvantaged for whatever reason is the ground of an equivalential chain between very different struggles, the unity of the antagonizing forces (the so-called dominant discourses) is constructed in exactly the same way: through equivalential links. Between patriarchy, homophobia, and capitalist exploitation there are not necessary, objective links, but 1) social struggles themselves can create those links through their equivalence; and 2) the dominant, antagonizing forces, in order to create their own hegemony, will also attempt to build up their own equivalential relations. Even the unity of the phenomena subsumed under the label capitalist exploitation is constructed in the same way. The effects of globalized capitalism do not simply operate within the relations of production so that a unique emancipatory subject (the working class) would be its result but in a wider space: destruction of the environment, massive unemployment, social polarization between extremes of wealth and poverty, dislocations at all levels of social relations. This multiplies the points of antagonism and creates, as a result, the potential for wider equivalential chains. This globalization of social protest as materialized in the mobilizations that you mention and in various others that could be added to that list points in the direction of new forms of social struggle that are going to be very different from the class struggles of the past. It is no longer a question of the emergence of a homogeneous emancipatory subject, but of a plurality of them unied by global political imaginaries that made possible a unity in diversity. This is not something that you have to add to radical democracy: it is the very denition of what radical democracy actually is.

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THE LEFT
Q: You have associated yourself with the Left. However, would it be possible to move from a leftwing to a right-wing political position while retaining your theory of hegemony? In other words, would it be possible to subscribe simultaneously to the theory of hegemony and to a right-wing political position? What is at stake here is the character of the connection between, on the one

hand, a philosophical position and, on the other hand, a political position. Is there a necessary or a contingent relation between your philosophical position and your political posi-tion? To what extent can your philosophical position and your political position be dissociated? EL: I cannot agree with some of the presuppositions of your question. The very idea of a theoretical approach that would be neutral vis--vis the whole spectrum of possible political positions, takes for granted that there is a world of facts to which you have access in a purely contemplative way, quite apart from any practical involvement. But if you accept as I do the primacy of practice, things look entirely different. Primacy of practice means primacy of the elaboration of your relationship with the world, which is the only terrain in which facts could emerge. If I try to walk from here to the door, the table opposite me will be an obstacle; but if I try to protect myself from an attack, it could become a means of defense. Facts only emerge in the course of ones practical involvement in the world. So the event of a purely theoretico-discursive corpus being used unchanged by entirely different political projects is an utter impossibility. This does not mean, of course, that there is a one-to-one correspondence between theoretical contents and political approaches, so that the opposition between those approaches would be translated into entirely incommensurable theoretical universes. This does not happen, in the rst place, because political projects are not so entirely alien to each other. The social agents who are their bearers live, after all, in the same world, and share many social meanings, however important their disagreements about others could be. That is the reason why their disputes take the form of hegemonic displacements: some meanings are rearticulated, some others are dropped, and some entirely new ones are incorporated. The elaboration of the relationship with the world that these displacements involve presupposes continuities and discontinuities. But this is very different from the articial (and entirely impossible) operation that would consist in discriminating between descriptive and normative aspects in a theoeretical corpus, so that we have a purely descriptive system of categories that can be put to the most divergent political uses. Q: From the preceding question, a number of questions follow concerning the relation between the theory of hegemony and the idea of radical democracy in your work. Do any particular ethico-political positions follow from the theory of hegemony? If yes, how do you determine which ethico-political conclusions follow? If no, does that mean that the theory of hegemony is neutral vis--vis ethico-political positions? EL: For the same reasons that I have just explained, I do not think that the question can be formulated in those terms. Let us suppose that I ask: It is raining. Does it follow that I have to stay at home or that I still have to go to the University? And let us add the assumption that I request an answer quite independent of the context of enunciation. The absurdity of the question lies in the fact that, assuming (just for the sake of argument) that it is raining is a purely descriptive
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statement, it is evident that nothing follows from it concerning what my reactions to that fact should be. I bring this example to your attention because it shows the only conditions in which the indifference of the theory vis--vis its practical consequences could arise (and, for the reasons that I explained earlier, these conditions are never met). It is only if the theory of hegemony had the same status as it is raining that is, a purely constative status that its ethico-politico implications would be external to it. But this is not the case. The facts of the theory of hegemony were discovered in the course of a reection on the aporias that the classism of classical Marxism was nding and on the impasses of socialist strategy in the 1980s. These practical concerns established the terrain and governed the formulation of the more theoretical categories. Radical democracy was the beginning of a political answer and, therefore, cannot be separated from the theoretical dimensions. To do the opposite would be to ask whether it is possible to accept Das Kapital as a whole in order to promote an anti-socialist politics. A more relevant question would be whether some aspects or intuitions of the theory of hegemony can be used for entirely different theoretico-political purposes. This is always, of course, possible but only with the proviso that, in that case, we will no longer have the hegemonic theoret-ical approach that we have presented. Let us suppose that a liberal theorist tries to use our categories to rethink Rawls original position. This is, certainly, not impossible, but only if those categories are submitted to the structural pressure of a new theoretical context that will necessarily change them and will, I suspect, also change Rawlsian theory. Q: Socialism was a term that you used in your earlier work, as for instance in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985). However, in your later work, the term is completely absent. Does socialism still have a place in your work? If yes, what does it mean in relation to your work? If not, why should one discard this term? EL: Terms have to be redened according to changing historical conditions. If by socialism one means some form of social management of the production process preventing its control being entirely in the hands of globalized capitalism, of course I consider myself a socialist. But social control should not mean control by a State bureaucracy that is beyond any kind of democratic accountability. The experience of the economy being run by Eastern European nomenclatures and its disastrous results is present in the minds of everybody. The problem is that the constituencies that are supposed to exercise that social control are far more diversied than in the past, and that the forms of democratic social control that should be adopted in the contemporary world have not been devised. But it is urgent to do it: without them the word socialism lacks any precise meaning, and without some kind of politics representing an alternative to the existing economic order, there is no way of disputing the hegemony of the dominant neo-liberal model. No proliferation of issue-oriented politics can be a substitute for this essentially important task.

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Q: In a not-too-distant past, the Left was associated with issues related to class. One of the main aims of your work seems to be to release the Left of this remnant of essentialism. These days, however, the productivity of terms such as Left and Right has been severely questioned. Nevertheless, you have retained such a political position, best expressed in the subtitle of your latest book co-written with Butler and iek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. In relation to your work, what does it mean to be Left? Does the term Left play the role of an empty signier (as you call it) articulating various leftist tendencies? And, if this is the case, how does one account for those leftist tendencies that do not share your anti-essentialist reasoning? EL: Two points to answer your question. In the rst place, yes, I want to retain the dichotomy Left/Right and, as you correctly suggest, I dont think one should associate the idea of the Left with an a priori established content be it class or whatever. This means that the frontier separating Left from Right is constantly displacing itself. Broadly speaking, by Left I understand the expansion of an equalitarian logic crystallized around a political imaginary that would have, as you suggest, the features of an empty signier. I am thinking of the agglutinating role played, in the case of the Right, by terms such as moral majority, whose contents are imprecise, but that are very precise in terms of the political frontier that they try to establish. I know perfectly well what being on the Left involves in America or in Britain, but I could generalize those meanings to other contexts only in terms of family resemblances. But I do conceive the articulating role of those empty signiers as bringing together social struggles and not various leftist tendencies the latter being, in many cases, hopeless sects that would not share even the fundamentals of my political project. As Lacan said on a well-known occasion: I do not need too many people, and there are some people who I do not need at all. Q: In witnessing such phenomena as the direct political backlash of the transnational capitalists, and new transformed forms of the M-C-M relation of capitalism in everyday life, how, against the background of discourse analysis, can the Left interpret those contemporary movements of capital and capitalism beyond the classical Marxist frame? EL: To answer your question properly would require exploring so many aspects that we would need a second interview to go through them. So I will only concentrate on a couple of topics. Marxian economics shows a whole catalogue of logical inconsistencies which, in one way or the other, have been pointed out over the last century. Neither the labor theory of value, nor the transformation of values into prices, nor the transition from absolute to relative surplus value, nor the notion of absolute rent, can be accepted in the terms formulated by Marx. At a more general level, it is the whole idea of a capitalist economy governed by its own endogenous logic that is incompatible with the realities of contemporary capitalism. What we have today (and, in fact, not only today it was always the case) is an imbrication between factors that Marxism

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separated as economic, political, and ideological levels, which cannot even analytically be isolat-ed in that way. The realities of globalized capitalism require stressing a political dimension that is not secondary let alone a superstructure but is, on the contrary, an integral part of the very process of capitalist accumulation. This means also that the antagonisms generated by capitalism are far more widespread and heterogeneous than Marx thought would be the case. We have spoken earlier about this. This has several consequences, but there are two on which I want to insist. The rst is that the heterogeneity of antagonistic effects leads to a dispersion and autonomization of struggles. This means that, unless the latter are going to remain isolated and reduced to impotence, some kind of politically constructed link between them becomes imperative. As a result, the hegemonic mediation becomes strictly constitutive of political identities. But and this is the second consequence as no political identity exists but as being something more than the social demand from which it emerges, relations of representation are also constitutive of political identities. Needless to say, the same applies to capitalist forces, as far as the search for prots requires a mobility far more complex than anything that classical capitalism had to deal with.

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1.

These words by Gershom Scholem describe the articulation of the mystic symbol, but they also describe the signifying process of silence in the poetics of the two aforementioned authors. See Gershom Sholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 27.

2. Peter Stallybrass, Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat, Representations 31 (1990): 88. 3. Qtd. in Stallybrass, 89. 4. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj iek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), 70. 5. Ibid., 208.
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6. Ernesto Laclau, New Reections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), 25. 7. Ibid.
UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a)

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UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) 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STAGE LEFT:

A REVIEW OF CONTINGENCY, HEGEMONY, UNIVERSALITY: CONTEMPORARY DIALOGUES ON THE LEFT

juliet ower mac cannell

There is no universality which is not a hegemonic universality. Ernesto Laclau1 One has to admire Contingency, Hegemony, Universality for trying to jumpstart the Left out of its current paralysis, which Slavoj iek describes as the Lefts unwritten prohibition on political projects (127) and as the (im)possibilities of radical thought and action today (91).2 The book stages a respectful dialogue among iek, Judith Butler, and Ernesto Laclau to dramatize what the books triumvirate of authors calls their anti-totalitarian, radical democratic project. Any declaration of solidarity by theorists of a progressive bent is sure to be welcomed by the Left, and the project of a radical democracy certainly warrants the exposition the book means to provide especially now that recent electoral events in the United States make some stodgy democratic institutions appear radical indeed. The book is a gamble, though. First, it begs to be measured by the theoretical range of its three authors, which is only paralleled by the differences in their personalities. Their prefatory notes say the book hopes to establish the common trajectory of our thought, then add that the results reect the different intellectual commitments we have. While they reiterate their mutual concord, it is hard to discount the notoriously dissimilar styles of the authors, which are perhaps not unrelated to deeper degrees of theoretical and political differences. The unrufed style of Butler mirrors her inclination to mediate and reconcile incompatibles; the careful logic of Laclau convinces us that social change is both imminent and immanent; while ieks passionate impatience for political action uses earthy examples that cannot help but stir us up. The talk of solidarity also runs against the grain of the readers curiosity, which is more likely to be piqued by the issues that divide them than by the rhetoric that unites them. What links the authors together nonetheless deserves our fullest attention. Surprisingly (given how much out of favor he fell in the midtwentieth century) Hegel not Marx is what most generally ties them

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to each other, particularly Hegels labor of the negative. This return to Hegel constitutes one of the books larger stories. So does the trios common turn from Marxist views to the renement that Antonio Gramscis concept of hegemony brought to the analysis of ideology. The latter is less surprising than the Hegelian return, since Ernesto Laclau has long drawn on the Italians anti-fascist thinking for his own work with Chantal Mouffe. Finally, there is the authors shared focus on what is broadly postmodern theory, a general rubric that covers theories that broke openly with Marx (e.g., Foucault), inherently apolitical theories that nonetheless found a certain reception on the Left (e.g., Saussure, who was enthusiastically embraced by the rst generation of Russian revolutionaries). Yet what is really at issue here is integrating Lacanian psychoanalysis and poststructuralism (which all these authors have previously used to amplify their positions) into Leftist discourse. Because the Left politics of psychoanalysis and poststructuralism are not obvious, I suspect that the reader will need to keep working away at the book (which requires passage through densely self-referential argumentation) to reach an assessment of the contribution to radical democracy. Altogether, it is not an easy book to respond to simply. I have decided therefore to take the title seriously, and to read it with the intention of grasping both the overall effect of the book and engaging what each theorist and each theory may be bringing to the question of post-structuralism and psychoanalysis for the Left.
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HEGEMONY
Let me take up Gramscian hegemony and counter-hegemony rst. Gramsci originated the theory of hegemony in his fateful encounter with Italian Fascism and its new way of achieving political dominance. Hegemony for Gramsci was the process whereby the ruling class, to advance its own political ends, subtly guided the ruled classes, covertly dominating their most inward percep-tions and distorting their intimate, everyday relations. Through hegemonic practices, the ruling classes entrenched their position of power. Counter-hegemony is the practice of strategic resist-ance on the part of the ruled class to hegemonic power. One might recall the way Stendhal depicted Restauration France in The Red and the Black.3 The overt politics of the reactionary nobles in the novel usually run aground, but they succeed quite well in reacquiring ruling status and come to redominate the formerly revolutionary classes by imposing their own manners and mores on them as ideals. Since their former lordly privileges were severely curtailed under the Charter (the new constitution), the nobles thus hegemonically attain their ends by these new political means. (I apologize for my simplied description of Gramscis brilliant amendment to Marxist theory, but I feel the need to do so because Contingency, Hegemony, Universality complicates the concept in so many ways.)

Hegemony in Laclau: The most programmatic treatment of hegemony is Ernesto Laclaus. As he has done elsewhere, Laclau diligently updates Gramsci for postwar, post-Marxist Europe and for postmodern theory. Laclau displaces earlier ideas of who and what the ruling class is (e.g., the nobles, the bourgeoisie) and what the ruled or potentially counter-hegemonic class is (for Gramsci it was the Southern Italian peasants, whereas for Marx it was the urban proletariat). More crucial than these context-driven substitutions, Laclaus view is that class conict itself is no longer the central social antagonism it was for Marx and Gramsci. After all, the state has mutated, and in Gramsci hegemonic power over civil society was needed only to secure political control over the state, which in turn reinforced ruling class hegemony. Historical circumstances (such as the formation of the EU and global capital) have obviously altered the internal and external contours of the state, and the function and location of hegemony must correspondingly shift, too. For Laclau hegemony nevertheless remains an indispensable theoretical and practical tool for democracy. Hegemony indirectly serves structural social change through its differential operations: it produces a requisite third dimension to socio-political existence (56) without which there is no production of tendentially empty signiers (57) to undo (however provisionally) fundamental social antagonisms. Even though hegemonization has never really eradicated a single social antagonism, it permits the social order to embed a permanently open place, unconditioned, for counter-hegemonization to occupy. As the representation of an impossibility, hegemony keeps open a division between universal and particular: while maintaining the incommensurability between the universal and particulars, [it] enables the latter to take up the representation of the former (56-57). Hegemony surpasses (while being modeled on) class division and its role is to lay the foundations for future social change. Hegemony in Butler: Judith Butlers adoption of Gramscian hegemony is quite unlike Laclaus. Butler takes issue with the divisions, oppositions, and universals Laclau thinks crucial to the concept of hegemony (and crucial to social order itself). Butler repudiates hegemony structured as division (class division for Gramsci; universal/particular division for Laclau), and prefers a hegemony that forms two faces of a single coin, that is, it operates within the bounded sphere of discourse. For Butler, social and class antagonisms are not merely historically dpasss; they are quite likely the root of social disorders. It is almost wholly on a pragmatic basis then, that Butler values hegemony for how it can be used to consolidate Left gains and/or contest Left losses. Why does Butler resist division and opposition, which are (for Rousseau, Hegel and certainly for Laclau) the engines that drive social history? Adapting Gramsci in a synchronic, Foucauldian way, Butler extends hegemony to include anything that holds sway over the person (not just as a member of a class). In Butler hegemony assumes the guise of regulatory apparatuses (157), such as the various agencies of national and international governance, censorship boards, and

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even at one point, intellectuals (148). These regimes of power are not xated in any one faction or group but coterminous with social order itself. Butler locates hegemonic power in social ideals (norms), a prioris that impose identications that are reproduced in the unconscious (13; 279). These internalized norms are generated by tricks of linguistic opposition, meaning-effects produced wholly by languages differential operations (153). Yet they function hegemonically to shape citizen-subjects in the domain of representation (14). Language is for Butler the generative site not only of hegemony but also of counter-hegemony. Hegemonic and counter-hegemonic practices are not a matter, la Laclau, of generating new, even contestatory empty signiers, but of restructuring and subverting old ones. At the end of Butlers second intervention, On Competing Universalities, she writes: The task will be not to assimilate the unspeakable into the domain of speakability in order to house it there, within the existing norms of dominance, but to shatter the condence of dominance, to show how equivocal its claims to universality are, and track the break up of its regime (179). Butlers program is apolitical viewed from the standpoint of traditional politics: there are no warring factions, no struggles between politicized groups; there is only aggression toward regimes of power. Her program statement above will undoubtedly sound more than a bit Nietzschean (the transvaluation of all values) to Marxists and more than a bit over-general for radicals to whom she offers few pointers on where to aim their insurgent energies. (The generality of this quotation put me in mind of a journalistic comment I once read on Butlers writing in Lingua Franca complaining that it has no neighborhood, no nation, no epoch. This struck me, of course, as not specic to Butlers style but to the lifestyle-bans capitalism increasingly puts us under.) What is Left about hegemony for Butler? Can she be attacked for plunging hegemonys roots so deep into language only in order to skirt the problem of class and the divisions it brings? No, it is the other way around. Like Laclau, Butler rejects the notion that hegemony serves particular ruling class interests, but she does not reject it for the same reasons as Laclau (the world-historical shift in the conguration of the state). Butlers reasoning inserts class itself into a long list of the (unfortunate) effects of the linguistic power regime that arbitrarily structures personal and social identications. Her partial inventory of the choices imposed on us by language includes those that separate the person from the animal; distinguish between two sexes to craft identication in the direction of an inevitable heterosexuality and ideal morphologies of gender; and produce tenacious identications and disavowals in relation to racial, national and class identities (153). It may take the reader a moment to realize that Butler isnt simply, like Laclau, elasticizing hegemony to t changed sociopolitical circumstances. Butlers unexcited prose is really quite disproportionate to her ination of the concept and the destruction she is willing to inict on all claims to universality by its means. Hegemony becomes coextensive (coeval, perhaps?) with
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language, the source of all power not just ruling class power to shape and subordinate personal identities through naming and interpellation. Lest we imagine that languages pan-social force might thus lead her to political quietism (as Nussbaum has suggested4), Butler makes it plain that the destructive effects of language and ideal identication are to be met militantly, with disidenticatory resistance (150-153).5 The struggle to think hegemony anew is not quite possiblewithout inhabiting precisely that line where the norms of legitimacybreak down (178). Language users must deploy language to resist its destructive effects. In the round world of Butlers discursive power (and the social eld enclosed by it), the politics of hegemony involves the fact that it inevitably confronts its own counter-hegemonic face. While Butlers theory is complex, her political vision is extraordinarily simple this may be the basis of her popular appeal. She detaches counter-hegemony from class and frees it to circulate and operate at any point in the total social eld, though its value is surely highest at a local level where shatter[ing] the condence of dominance would be most visible. (I could picture it at work in small social circles but couldnt imagine it for large-scale national or international politics.) Still, Butler has more axiomatic concerns in sight. Observe what Butler once wrote about gender-identity: Consider the medical interpellation which shifts an infant from an it to a she or he, and in that naming, the girl is girled, brought into the domain of language and kinship through the interpellation of gender. 6 It is not impossible to extrapolate from her disjoining gender (a specic difference) from sex (an opposition) to see how discursive counterhegemony might begin at birth. Parents and medical personnel might refuse to label a newborn a he or a she, and instead label it an it. Counter-hegemony works for Butler primarily at this highly personal level; it appears to affect deeper political levels only by implication. Of course, Butler warns against thinking in levels, 7 and thus she meets one of the originating impulses of the New Left: to make the personal the political. Left political action no longer consists of nding out just exactly how some specic they is ruling you (as member of a socioeconomic class) and then acting against them in concert with others to foil their control. For Butler, Left political action is now a matter of realizing how regimes of power (151) compel us internally to consent to what constrains us (29), a matter of throwing off that compulsion, presumably by what the 60s called getting your head on straight. In resisting social interpellations and imposed identications, we spontaneously make a political statement and from what I see in Butlers essays here, it appears to be perhaps the only political pronouncement we can still make.8 Hegemony in iek: For iek, something else enters the picture of hegemony. Unlike Laclau and Butler, ieks Old Left concerns have not entirely faded away under postmodern conditions. The social eld to which he rearticulates Gramscian hegemony has little in common with the monologic one of Butler, and only slightly more so with Laclaus social structuring-in-process.

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iek agrees with Laclau that hegemony adds a crucial third dimension to social and political life indispensable to their analysis. Nevertheless, ieks hegemony mirrors his psychoanalytic commitment to levels, that is, to the fact of irreconcilable conicts. In ieks Lacanian eyes, hegemony represents radical social antagonism through the particular differences internal to the system of a social eld class, race, and so on. But it also additionally reveals a contingent, indirect presence that hovers eerily over all these representations. Any delineation of an intrasocial difference [within a social space], iek writes, is connected umbilically to another more radical difference: the limit that separates society from non-society (92). What makes iek insist on this limit, this radical opposition between society and what-it-isnot? While it may have something to do with Hegels dialectic of self and not-self, I suspect it has much more (if not everything) to do with the psychic life of power (to borrow Butlers title, but not its spirit). Put simply, iek rejects the poststructural position that is content to settle with the understanding that language is the origin of society (which no one can doubt), and that dismisses (like Derrida in Of Grammatology) the search for pre-linguistic origins as theological. iek poses a still more radical question: that of the origin and the cause of the drives. Though drives are a-social, they arise not from nature but from the very differential, linguistic structuring of the social from its symbolic designations, labeling, classications, and so on. ieks limit is quite a different one from the sensible limits deconstruction draws around language so as to be able to enjoy a denitive plunge into the linguistic medium. iek is not bracketing the (non-linguistic) symbolic, but confronting it. He thus opens up a political horizon quite unlike Butlers and Laclaus discursive domain. Instead, iek looks to what happens when language (the symbolic) fails to maintain hegemony over itself that is, when the symbolic, society, and language are threatened from within. The limit iek inscribes between society and non-society is not just a variable border, but a determinate one that marks where the symbolic-social begins and where it ends. ieks limit is an internal limit the disturbing point where the social self stops and the drives begin, where language confronts what it can never say. This point is what Lacan called the real. The specic political interest of this Lacanian point for iek is that the internal limit appears simultaneously in the social situation and in the individual. The internal limit is not merely a question of where you stop and the other guy begins, but where you stop being you, where your self (shaped by the signier) ends and your drives begin.9 When this internal limit is reached, it is felt as external compulsion, emanating from the Other. Here, we are as far from the bounded social space of Butler as from the open-ended one of Laclau. For iek, radical antagonism (between the social and the not-social) can only be represented in a distorted way through the particular differences internal to the social system in the space between the symbols, but also the space between individuals. This return of the

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real gets mapped onto intrasocial differences (between elements in a social space) in the guise of a difference (92). The real is thus an effect of the fundamental opposition language/not language (or social/not social or symbolic/real). But its erce encounter with the not-symbolic adds dimensionality to the at, imaginary representation of social classications as mere differences. It inserts a permanent non-place into symbolic-social-linguistic articulations. It is where imaginary and symbolic distinctions come to a halt. iek denes the real as hegemonic because it has the power to insert a distortion into the social relations shaped by symbolic articulations similar to the one Gramscis ruling class exercised. Gramscis political hegemony was external to civil society; ieks real radicalizes the distinction by having it exceed the merely social: a real limit is permanently sutured to the absolute nonreality (the ctionality) of the social (which has only a symbolic-contractual and linguistic existence and never anything more than that). Mapped onto social differences, this exorbitant real must be dealt with. iek has analyzed its effects in the phenomena of racism, fascism, communism, and perversion, employing both political and psychoanalytic methods.10 Language is not a solution to it, but is a part of the problem. It might still sound as if iek were pretty far removed from Old Left topics (like class conict) here. Yet he is the one who insists that class has never actually been exorcised from political congurations: for him it is the specic antagonism that overdetermines the rest even today (321). Indeed, iek insists that we must carry on the analysis of global capitalism by determining how classes are now reconguring themselves under capitalisms pressures (322-23) into symbolic, imaginary, and real fractions. How can we reconcile these directions in iek? I would guess that the link between ieks hegemonic real and his refusal to disavow class antagonism may have more to do with his embrace of the originating impulse of democracy than with some nostalgia for an aging Marxist theory that might ultimately be incompatible with psychoanalysis. Brief Excursus on Class: Before I attempt to reconcile this seeming contradiction in iek, however, I am going to make another simplied statement of the issues, this time regarding class. We cannot afford to forget that the feudal world was organized not by classes, but as a series of corporate social bodies (ones estate was ones social being). These were thought of as homogeneous, unied, separated, and self-enclosed. The corporatist way of organizing society came to an end (temporarily? I sometimes wonder) with the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century. These revolutions inaugurated a sense of society as whole body, organized now only by its differentiations, which included the most crucial difference of all division into classes. Corporatism had operated quite effectively by providing its members with a sense of their natural place and their natural birthright (although this was about the only right secured for the individual): ones estate, ones status was all. (There is always some lingering nostalgia for the general harmony that corporatist social organization seemed to offer.)

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The revolutionary overthrow of the establishment (estates) in favor of membership by class now meant that one was identied with a group whose interests were necessarily in conict with those of other such groups. The disharmony introduced by these divisions was further sustained by the sense that each member and each group also possessed certain inalienable rights. Only the conception of universal rights sustained the differentiated social body, preventing it from fracturing into warring components. To Marx, the necessary tension between class and universal found its rst radical expression in the French Revolution. Marx also believed that Hegel modeled his abstract dialectic of universal and particular on that revolution. iek, Again: Gramsci inspires us to move beyond taking Marxs class warfare too literally. Yet for iek, Gramscian hegemony can be exploited only if class divisions are still operative, even though now transposed from the nation to the transnational. iek openly chides his fellow authors for failing to contest the hegemonic practices of global capitalism and for failing to recognize it as the new ruling class that has issued the command to end all class antagonism. iek thus calls for a repoliticized analysis of the global economy (223; 321) by using a concept of hegemony supplemented with the resources of psychoanalysis (the power of the real). The corporate homogenization that distorts and (imaginarily) attens social life today requires the reminder of the real to disclose its actual dimensions and to ascertain capitalisms internal limit. iek seems unconcerned that we might revert to a politics of being (although he talks about how class differences are ontologized today). But he is concerned that the dissolution of class oppositions into postmodernisms proliferating particularities disavows the relation to the universal in a way that may unthinkingly subvert one of democracys crucial supports. Each particularity involves its own universality (316), iek declares, despite his awareness that class conict (and by extension, universality) are no longer fashionable terms of analysis. Yet his witty rst chapter, Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please!, refuses to equate democracy either with a society of economic class divisions, la Marx, or with contemporary post-scarcity society, in which class division is deemed irrelevant to its multiple political subjectivities (99). Thus we nd the following incompatibilities with respect to hegemony (and its corollary, class), which the book does not editorially clarify. The interlocutors keep us wondering just what the common project of radical democracy might actually mean. Weve heard from iek, for example, that class antagonism covertly remains fully implicated in the advance of global capitalism today (320) and that the global economy must be repoliticized. Weve heard from Laclau that traditional class antagonisms have been overtaken by the events of history, and that the task of the Left is to lay out the constitution for a social order open to change, ready to recognize and deal exibly with perduring social antagonisms (299). From Butler, we have encountered yet a third option (the one that has gained wide currency on the American academic Left). We are to undertake, pragmatically, issue-by-issue reviews of zones of oppression to exercise our practical reason.

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For example, Butler denes Left action as maintaining a political culture of contestation onissues, such as the legitimacy and legality of public zones of sexual exchange, intergenerational sex, adoption outside marriage, increased research and testing for AIDS, and transgender politics (161; this is no quietist). Butlers skeptical treatment of the content of earlier analyses of regimes of power (Marx, Gramsci) stems from her sense of the power of language to injure and cure. She encourages us to focus on those places where power is arbitrarily exercised and to denounce it as she herself does when she castigates intellectuals (unspecied) who argue against non-normative sexual practices (148) and collaborate, in effect, with state repression of gays. Note that the issues which draw Butlers active involvement have little or nothing to do with social antagonism and everything to do with false negations and unconscious disavowals at the personal level. The authors differences only magnify as the book progresses. iek begins by saying, my dialogue with [his two fellow authors] relies on shared propositions (91) and, even after their exhaustive debates, he maintains that he fully supports Butlers political aims (313). But his intensely politicized nish emphasizes dramatically the specic disagreements he has with Butler (and with Laclau to a milder degree) over their failure to see the persistence of Left issues not because of but despite their theories: to him, they avoidably underrate and seriously under-represent politics through their inattention to the contradictions of (or the internal limit in) socio-symbolic life. I continue to think, in the old Marxist vein, iek writes, that todays capitalism, in its very triumph, is breeding new contradictions which are potentially even more explosive than those of standard industrial capitalism. A series of irrationalities immediately comes to mind (322). For iek modern Lacanian psychoanalysis re-animates our sense of contradiction crucial to democracy and to the political critique of capitalism: The capitalist system isapproaching its inherent limit and self-cancellation. Frictionless capitalism (Bill Gates) is turning into a nightmare in which the fate of millions is decided in hyper-reexive speculation on futures (322-5). If we compare this statement with Butlers the eld of differential relations from which any and all particular identities emerge must be limitless (31), we can then see a very real difference. In iek, as in Butler, there is a personal level, but his is inseparable from the social and the political, caught as it is in a series of contradictions: it is a subject. Butler merges personal, social, and political into a single-level self (the term she uses increasingly as the book develops). As the book thus makes and unmakes its strange bedfellows, issue by issue, position by position, it only obliquely informs its readers about the potential political programs, actions, and outcomes of the Left theories exposited. We are left wondering where the Left is heading. Still, I want to continue to highlight the conceptual and practical distinctions in the book not to show the Left as troubled but to draw some instruction from what troubles it.

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UNIVERSALITY
Ive already touched on the nal term of the books title, universality, and mentioned historicist skepticism regarding universal claims and universal human rights. Each author acknowledges the contemporary critique of the universal (as a ruse for imposing imperialist dictates, and so on). Nevertheless, for Laclau and iek the universal remains the sine qua non of liberatory politics. Laclau and the Universal: Laclau recognizes Hegels deconstruction of the universal by a radical exclusion (207); but for Laclau the universals dependency on particularity is part and parcel of the universalist emancipatory project (207). For Laclau, the universal is a necessary moment of the social dialectic. Although its power has been battered by history and shattered by theorys devastating critiques, universality remains, for him, the authentic site of counterhegemony: universality resides literally nowhere, neither in civil nor in political society. The Lefts task is not to mount futile counter-hegemonic strategies but to use hegemonys universalizing resources against itself to recognize and attenuate the antagonisms endemic in society. In Laclau, hegemony paves the way for constructing universality (280 ff.) by creating the space/non-space of tendentially empty signiers. Butler and the Universal: For Butler the dependence of the universal on the particular (which secretes the former) not only vitiates the political and liberatory claims of the universal, but the exclusions essential to it stain, contaminate, and haunt it. Butler nds it more rational to go along with fellow critics Zerilli and Scott who have sought the universal only in the chain of signiers or in the undecidable coincidence between universal and particular (33). For Butler, the reach of language is sufcient to dispense with the universal. She is frankly suspicious of the universal as the place where sterile social oppositions and fatal political antagonisms secretly meet and marry.11 For her, hegemony has no inherent universalizing power and no need of it. Hegemonys sole usefulness lies in the extent to which it strengthens the Lefts current sway over our hearts and minds, and turns its power of regulation to emancipatory ends. (I suppose this is akin to political correctness.) And hegemony for Butler is nothing other than linguistic power. Compared with the relative absolutism of language, politics and the Law are mere partial hegemonies with far less reach. Language alone ensures the power of doing and undoing: in politics, Butler tells us, language is unsurpassable (279). Most importantly, language is precisely not a universal. Butlers is technically a culturalist viewpoint; and while the phenomenon of language is indeed anthropologically universal, it is always pragmatically used to distinguish one culture from another. To mediate between these two, Butler turns not to the universal but to cultural

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and linguistic translation (36-37). Butler replaces the universal, once essential to the denition of democracy, with language, and it is thus extremely important for her to link language to her radical democratic project. At rst this seems simple: she characterizes democracy now as a contestation over signiers. But hers do not work the way Laclaus signiers do, to generate the liberating, sweepingly empty force of the Next signier. Butler urges instead a stoppage of the signier-machinery: Sometimes you have to let certain signiers stand, assume a certain givenness at a certain moment of analysis when they become forbidden territory (269). Energy thus retrieved from freezing the differential thrust of language is of the same kind that Beltway Hegelians, such as Francis Fukuyama, drew off from the dialectical march of history (by ending the Cold War). Like dialectical materialist oppositions, linguistic oppositions need not drive social history any longer, and Butler turns then instead toward their own undoing. What works for Butler therefore is neither a progressive nor a regressive dialectic; it is a synchronic breaching of the identities formed by dialectical oppositions that opens them to innovative misuse by and for those who are not authorized in advance to make use of them (36). The merging of the linguistic with the social and the political (all subject to the counterhegemony of tropology) renders the universal nugatory for Butler. iek and the Universal: ieks viewpoint shares parts of both: the universal is both emancipatory, la Laclau, and contaminated by the particular, la Butler. However, it is precisely because it is contaminated that the universal is emancipatory. He writes, Capital sets a limit to resignication (223), asserting its hegemonic power to alter or even freeze social relations and displace the work of the universal. iek counters capital with the proposal that the inclusions/exclusions in the hegemonic notion of human rightscan be renegotiated and redened and the reference to universality can serve precisely as a tool that stimulates such questioning and renegotiation (102). Brief Excursus on the Universal: At this point, I would like to pause my review once more to recall something about the universal that seems to be falling outside the books explicit radar. The fact that there remains such an unbridgeable difference between Butler and her co-authors with respect to the universal really must concern us. Especially given that those on the Left who have stuck by the dialectical method of Hegel (even critically, like Marx or Sartre) and who have disclaimed (as Butler does not) Hegels aim of total knowledge, have never abandoned the universal. After all, not long ago, if someone raised the matter of universalism and particularism in Left politics, the concepts would have seemed perfectly easy to express and particularly helpful to social democratic causes. Consider how Marxs Hegelian eyes were once trained on a minor weavers revolt in Germany. Marx found this seemingly insignicant revolt to be of universal importance not an exemplar of economic class warfare but as an exemplar of social revolu-

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tion. Marx said, [E]ven though it be limited to a single industrial district, [it] affects the totality, because it is a human protest against a dehumanized life, because it starts from the standpoint of the single, real individual, because the collectivity against whose separation from himself the individual reacts is the true collectivity of man, the human essence.12 Social revolution, for Marx, always has a necessarily universal character. It reminds us that what lies beyond the compass of the social is the inhuman. The political soul of revolution has something of this inhuman character: it consists of a tendency of the classes without political inuence to end their isolation from the top positions in the state. Their standpoint is that of the state, an abstract whole, that only exists through a separation from real life. Thus a revolution with a political soul also organizes, in conformity with its limited and double nature, a ruling group in society to societys detriment.13 Marxs universal goes beyond class in order to reach the point where the social has encountered the non-social, the dehumanizing. To overcome, even in one small particular instance, the dehumanizing effect of the class antagonisms in politicized society (class antagonisms are just social relations distorted by ruling class interests) is to access the universal by way of the particular. This universal is what reminds us that civil society that is, the existence of the collective that denes us and thus makes us human14 must protest each and every effort to separate individuals and classes of individuals from life in common. Simply put, we could say that the particularity of the weavers revolt creates universality out of the very excess of its particularization, a particularization pushed to the point that it forces (social) non-being upon the weavers. So far this does not sound much different from Butlers desire to include the excluded. But her resistance to the universal leaves an essential element unaccounted for. When Marx speaks of a class so fully devastated, so excluded, so dehumanized, and so dispossessed that it is not merely relegated to haunting the society that denies it all standing, but is forced into becoming the universal, I doubt it would be very hard for anyone, philosopher or not, to miss his point. The weavers sense of fundamental banishment from the ranks of the human results not in their spectral return or their enjoyment of a revenge of the repressed, but the reverse. It is only in realizing their exclusion from the human that the universal is born, and that the human can be reconstructed. What the weavers revolt says to Marx (and this is its universal character) is that no one should suffer as we are suffering. This no one is a critical, negative universal. It conceals no petty self-interests. It has no particular content, even though its coming into existence depends entirely on the particular that has been squeezed down to become no more than a universal shout: No one should have to suffer this way. For Marx (as for others) it is this universal which recognizes an internal obstacle to the sway of political discriminations, that recognizes the point where the social and the not-social meet that drives all change in society, in the very society from

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which it has been separated and alienated. Awareness of ones deprivation of a place in human society is the sine qua non of a universality that simply can never exist within society. I think this is very much the same as ieks insistence on determining a point where the social and the not-social collide. I cannot imagine that Butler would really want to preclude in advance this power to move a self-satised social world off its dead center, this no one should have to. And was the universal not also the contribution to democracy that Rosa Parks made? When Parks stood rm and refused to move to the back of the bus, was she merely saying, Dont treat me like this because my identity as a person of color and as a woman is merely discursively imposed by racist society and thus you have no right to treat me like this just because I look to you as if I naturally belong to one or several of these categories when I know that I am free not to do so? No. Rosa Parks, by her eloquent gesture, was saying that no one might henceforward arbitrarily be deprived of the right to be treated as a human being by other human beings. She was also saying, more concretely, that not all people are being treated as I am here. We might quibble, and say that human is only a culturally relative distinction. But what we cannot do is use this cultural relativist stance to deate the power of the universal or to ignore that the humanity to which Parks gesture is referable means a humanity created wholly out of language and its social contract. Not just any local social contract which can easily dismiss or dene her out of existence, but the symbolic pact Peirces, Rousseaus, and so on. Marxs is a contestatory universal that treats individuals frozen out of social identications not as individualized victims, but as members of a new ex-class, one whose only existence resides uniquely in its articulation as the universal exclamation that no one should be forced to and not all are being forced to. Such a universal offers what nothing in society can: a standpoint with which to seize society as a whole. A particularity cast apart from the whole that is bent on eliminating its particularity, miraculously grows to the size of the universe, and grasps the whole as a nite totality. In Marx, the universal is the antagonist of what Sartre calls self-enclosed (totalitarian) society.15 When some particularity stands thus apart from the whole, and is alienated from it, its universality comes into being. In the case of Marx and Parks this apartness provides the drive for social revolution or even simply for social change. Classical democracy attempted to secure a permanent place for such a universal vantage point. iek likens its holding the place to the demos (the part of no part) that Jacques Rancire has written of, the people that exists nowhere: I am tempted to claim that this shadowy existence is the very site of political universality: in politics, universality is asserted when such an agent with no proper place, out of joint, posits itself as the direct embodiment of universality against all those who do have a place within [the] global order (313). This universal exceeds or falls

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short of every division of society into classes and every cataloguing of its members roles. Its is the only voice that can enunciate, see, criticize, and yet still speak for the whole. The demos is the internal limit of the whole and as the universal it casts its shadow over each and every social distinction. We can see this each and every mode (the ip side of not-all) in Sartres description below. Who, before postmodern principles of uncertainty, would have failed to see the universal as nothing but its impact on smug little social circles? Sartre writes:
If it is impossible to nd in every man some universal essence which would be human nature, yet there does exist a universal human condition. Historical situations vary; a man may be born a slave in a pagan society or a feudal lord or a proletarian. What does not vary is the necessity for him to exist in the world, to be at work there, to be there in the midst of other people, and to be moral there. Con16 sequently, every conguration, however individual it may be, has a universal value.

Butler and the Universal, Once More: Butler quibbles with the universal in the name of the global on the same grounds Sartre quibbles with the great maxims of Kantian ethics: The content [of the universal maxim] is always concrete and thereby unforeseeable; there is always the element of invention. But Sartre does not quibble with making freedom into the universal: The one that counts is knowing whether the inventing that has been done, has been done in the name of freedom. Its social realization is obviated in advance, yet its lack of (symbolic, social, linguistic) articulation is precisely its only source of power. Butler is prepared to universalize democracy in a completely new way, by incorporating the negative force of the universal into discursive reason. Democracy is secured, she tells us, through its resistance to actualization: it defers realization permanently it is essential to this practice to remain, in some permanent way unrealizable (268). And she rejects any opposition (such as Marxs distinction between the ideality of philosophy and the actuality of the world) that prevents conating ideality and actuality instead of maintaining a certain distance between the ideality of the ideal and the givenness of any modes of its instantiation (269). This conation makes the norm (the ideal) and deviations from it the length and breadth of any social or personal bone of contention. Butlers democracy can remain unrealized only because language is its life-blood. Language deals the original blow of idealization and then checks idealization with linguistic deviations (tropes, swerves). It unseats power and can make anyone powerful. As no one can use language without being interpreted, so no one can interpret without speaking otherwise than one intends (279).17 Nothing exterior to the social whole delimited by language needs to exist for this ongoing, democratic redistribution of power to operate in perpetuity. Is there a politics in Butler, then, in anything like its classic (Marx, Hegel, Rousseau, Gramsci) sense of a force that distorts human social relations? If there is, Butler locates it entirely in

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discourse. She makes hegemony and the universal yield premiere place to languages differential structure a structure that only language has the means to attack (with the ruses of rhetoric, irony, parody, or with the repeatable gure, the citation, the circulating trope [269]). Her nal paragraph concludes: Language will not only build the truth that it conveys, but will also convey a different truth from the one that was intended, and this will be a truth about language, its unsurpassability in politics (279). Given a delimited, manageable social setting (the metaphor of Aristotles stage comes to mind), Butlers stance can work quite well. We can dispense with extra-linguistic universality if democracy is universalized. Discriminations and contradictions can be sublated as contestations over mere signiers if democracy is hegemonic. To adapt the performative for picturing Butlers politics: we have a stage; some will get to go right on; others must wait in the wings (or on the margins, as Butler puts it). But the latter will one day be free to move to center stage. The emancipatory mechan-isms of this move are rhetorical and performative tropic deviations from the norm that (democrat-ically) will eventually grant anyone the power to alter his/her social standing.
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There is no need here for a universal standpoint to leverage a democratic totality already thus composed of a dynamic freeplay in which anyone can change roles and anyone can eventually become a star. Or is there? Butler is a cultural democrat who works to widen democracys range. Still, I wonder if Butlers radical democracy is anything more than cultural? Might we not ask if this performative democracy, with its staged identications, and re-staged universals (and quite a bit of stage business) isnt open to potential redenition by anti-democratic abuses of language and tropology? When she says that My understanding of hegemony is that its normative and optimistic moment consists precisely in the possibilities for expanding the possibilities for the key terms of liberalism, rendering them more inclusive, more dynamic and more concrete (13), she seems reluctant to imagine anything but a single expanding democratic culture, one never under threat of radical dissolution or attack by some altogether alien life form. But if democracy is hegemonic, why is the Left so hesitant to promote imaginative new programs within it (which it so obviously is), since there is nothing fundamental to fear from the opposition? One wonders, that is, why Butlers democratic stage is never deeply threatened by another stage eine andere Schauplatz that might be absolutely incongruent with it. It might be time then to ask how evolved Butlers sense of the social really is, in light of her disinclination to recognize antagonisms and their resultant political oppositions. In her democracy you are free to change your person/persona by realizing that the masks society has imposed on you are arbitrary and subject to change. Yet the choice of alternative masks (personae, masks, metaphors) seems culture-bound, limited to a very particular, very civil, already pretty much democratic social sphere. (ieks frustrated critique of the diminished political setting of Butlers work is that those who wait in the wings, excluded by the hegemonic symbolic regime, might easily be neo-Nazis rather than the disenfranchised, the disregarded [313]. Im

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sure Butler considers this unthinkable.)

LESSONS
Whatever the limitations we might see in her social and political theory, in this book (and possibly because of those limitations) Butler seems like a winner. She is classic and engagingly serene, making the other two look, by turns, romantic, brooding, modernist, dissonant, argumentative, and above all frustrated by her decorum. Butler triumphs here the way the uid heroes of French classical theatre triumph: by smoothly eluding denitive judgments. She parries iek and Laclau; she juggles multiple theoretical allegiances that refuse to add up to a singular perspective that would over-identify her with one or another theoretical stance.18 In this, she is not just being coy and hard to pin down, for her deepest political and theoretical allegiance is to the subversion of identiable positions through the masking and ambiguity that tropic language provides. Her difdent style might seem ill-tted to the dazzle of drag and the destabilized gender identities she promotes as models of subversion. But we need only remind ourselves that the neo-classical stage restricted the numbers of actors and limited the scope of its time, place, and action and that these severe stage-limits responded to a desire for circumscription in a society on the verge of revolutionary change. (One of the prime indicators of the coming change was that, off-stage, people had come to regard their social roles with distance and often horror. JeanJacques Rousseau described it this way: Although everyone preaches with zeal the maxims of his profession, each prides himself on having the tone of another. The magistrate takes on a Cavalier air, the nancier acts like a Lord, the Bishop makes gallant proposals; the Courtier speaks of philosophy; the Statesman of wit and letters; down to the simple artisan, who, unable to assume a different tone, dresses in black Sundays in order to look like a man of the palace. 19) Butlers own performance in this book is an almost perfect illustration of her strategy for securing democracy. Butler is unappably poised. She avoids argumentation over specics and serenely declines to engage in antagonistic debate. What she does do is to characterize the others work in ways that irritate them quite a bit. In rebuttal, Laclau and iek each quote her more and more extensively as the book progresses and the reverse is not the case. This casts the others in an almost hysterical light, as argumentative, defensive, quibbling over a word here or there (although in the closing chapters each regains his own footing). While this may not seem much of an achievement in the case of the exuberant iek, it is a monumental one in the case of the polished, logical Laclau. Butler becomes thus the de facto center of calm in this book. Hers is a tactical ascendancy not particularly supported by details of precise argumentation, but it is a stunningly successful performative effect. (Perhaps because American theory assimilated the postmodern attitude more rapidly than Europe did, its central discursive mannerism the dismissal of oppositions as fruitless and irrational comes much more naturally to Butler than

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to them. Perhaps.) Yet it is not the tactics she deploys so much as her overall hegemonic strategy that the Left must take to heart. For the concrete verbal demeanor of Judith Butler here is not a side issue; it carries the signicance and the force of her position (non-position). Butler has mastered the entire spectrum of postmodern discourses that her Left European interlocutors have only selectively and often painstakingly integrated into their pieces, as in Laclaus Structure, History, and the Political. Or else they have openly argued against them for theoretical or political reasons. iek is just as comprehensive as Butler its a Hegelian thing but Butlers way of integrating her knowledge20 rhetorically and performatively is distinctive, a postmodern procedure par excellence that encompasses structure, history, and the political at once. The number of theoreti-cal positions Butler is able to absorb, the uidity with which she adopts and adapts positions from theorists quite opposed to each other, amounts to a virtuoso performance: Kants a priori and conditions of possibilities here; Hegels criticisms of Kant there; Foucaults entrenched opposi-tion to Freud over sexuality on one side, and Freuds insights on gurative language on the other (151). Each citation is entirely apropos, yet overall the effect is one of her mastery her total knowledge. Her aim is, of course, not to display her virtuosity, nor is it even simply to win. What Butler becomes by using these procedures is the very gure of mediation itself, and this is my point. Though it was trivialized by McLuhan (The Medium is the Message) and crowned by twentiethcentury philosophys focus on its own means of expression, it is mediation that has wielded the most impressive conceptual and political authority in our times. (Think of Reagans Tear down the Wall, Mr. Gorbachev 21: to American popular consciousness, the utterance represented the performative power that speech act theory sees in its infamous Let the Games Begin.) It is the performative power of language used for and against itself (to which Butler resorts) that the Left must make some decisions about.22 Watching Butler gives us strategic clues on how to operate in a newly monologic political world, and we need to heed them very, very carefully. For, Butlers political Leftism consists in committing herself to harnessing the resources of language (rhetoric, irony, masking, ambiguity) for the purpose of eradicating the very movement of dialectical opposition itself. If once this strategy met popular demands for the end of the Cold Wars discrete blocs which vie with one another for control of policy questions (Butler 13-14), and if it still offers a ready-to-hand recourse for destabilizing political and other forms of oppositions, we should now question whether it remains politically effective for the cause of democracy. After the fall of communism, after the political map of the world has been redrawn one-dimensionally, is this still the best way to go? Indeed, destabilizing oppositions the postmodern procedure par excellence in a one-sided political world is already starting to feel like it blocks any way out, prevents universal protest. (I think thats why so many felt relief at the Seattle demonstrations.)

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Yet its a tough sell to act politically if one is successful at performing rhetorically. ieks strategy has been to up the ante on the performative and to carry his person as if it were that explosive universalizing voice that shakes things up. When Laclau says, there is no future for the Left if it is unable to create an expansive universal discourse, constructed out of, not against, the proliferation of particularisms of the last few decades. The task ahead is to sow the seed of universality, so that we can have a full social imaginary (306), his statement carries a silent rebuke to the restrained imaginary of Butlers discourse (and the perhaps over-full iekian one).23 For Butler consistently moves to freeze the dialectic just after an opposition has been stated, and just before it inevitably yields or mutates into synthesis, she stages it, then neutralizes its effects. Something vaguely unsatisfying and generic emerges from her discourse, while ieks, alternatively, can get so caught in engaging stories, anecdotes, and so on, that we cant always nd our way back to the logic of his political discourse. But there is one more lesson here. In this book, I felt Butlers heavy accent on mediation was one of the things that impelled iek (a fellow Hegelian who also subscribes to the logic of gurality, after all) to oppose her tone of reconciliation and to call instead for the Event an Event of the magnitude of the coming of Christ to enter the world stage. Its impossible to decouple his highly provocative statements (about forgetting the Holocaust and fears of the Gulags and of Linksfascismus so we can act and not merely perform politics once more) from his reaction to Butlers discourse. At rst he called to my mind a teenager who wants to break with his conformist parents by means of such shocking statements. But then it struck me that perhaps the very strategies of containment deployed by Butler (structurally similar to those of Third-Way politicians today, or the radical centre that Laclau denounces) was what was driving iek up the wall. If the balanced, down-to-earth Laclau might prefer to split the difference, the discordance between Butlers and ieks approaches also drives Laclau to make strong position statements opposed to the others, as when he rejects ieks resuscitation of class, or turns schoolmasterish with Butler. I then wondered how any of them would respond to the highly provocative and yet imaginatively democratic gesture of Bill Clintons choosing Harlem for his ex-presidential ofces. Not shocking, not pointing out its excentricity, yet by no means a gesture of mediation.
46 UMBR(a)

THE REAL RETURNS?

In the moments where, despite efforts to remain above the fray, commoner forms of antagonism break out, the book shows spirit. For all its potential pitfalls, the book reveals how all three theorists must/will have tried to confront the important hegemonic success of what Gramsci called the passive revolutions of our time (Italian fascism for him; the Reagan Revolution for us)

and the disappointing forms of institutionalized Marxist and democratic theory in Communist governments and Western nations. All three must/will have taken account of the unexpected quarters in which resistance to and for democracy has surfaced: in sexual revolutions, proletarian co-optation, Second- and Third-World conicts and practices and psychoanalysis. All three must/will have tried to confront the major theoretical revolutions of our time the linguistic turn in philosophy and social science and the challenge that psychoanalysis poses to all the major traditions of political and social thought. The deepest impulse in this book, and what constitutes its signicance, then, is precisely what would otherwise be questionable for the Left: its strong stress on theory and on language. Why make theory the special focus of a Left book? The answer is that events of a theoretical character have posed as many challenges to the post-New Left as the unprecedented historical events of the twentieth century posed to the Old Left (the 60s, the end of the Cold War, the decline of Marxism and Communisms exit from Eastern Europe, along with the recent stunning rise of conservatism in leading democratic nations). Theoretical perplexities have taken precedence in Left debate over the Holocaust, fascism, dictatorships, depressions the things the older Left easily recognized and oftentimes confronted. The implication of the book is, then, that the Left must settle with theory before it will be able to confront large-scale social, economic, and political changes now taking place, including the epidemic erosion of democratic principles of governance in the West. The theories whose ne points the authors carefully rehearse interject themselves into established Left theorizing without fully integrating Left theory per se, nor negotiating its relation to Left praxis yet. The real question of the book is whether contemporary theory and methods secure advantages to the Lefts commitment to democracy, and if so, how. Or, to the contrary, is there something about the discourse of theory that is blocking the Lefts ability to respond to these events? Thus, when the authors broaden their declaration of purpose to claim they have intended the book to confront what they call the problem of language, I have to admit I felt like putting the book on pause given my own long history of working in deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and political theory. It is the hyperinated status of language and language-like entities that the hard-nosed materialist Old Left has found most difcult to accept in these times, these authors, and these theories. Modern democracy and progressive social movements often began as manifestoes, declarations (of Independence or the Rights of Man), constitutions, and even moving speeches (the Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther Kings I Have a Dream). Few, however, would have predicted the degree to which language would come to dominate politics in the twentieth century, where the rst systematic political uses to which it was put were largely anathema to the Left (think Goebbels). The fact of its arrival as a major player on the political stage can no longer be ignored

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 from Roosevelts Fireside chats to spin doctors, from Hitlers Table Talk to Nixons love-affair with New Criticism, and the inexplicable Teonicity of the Great Communicator. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality thus might be considered a rst staging of the coming of age of a political debate that reects on the extent to which language now plays so capital a role in the art and performance of politics. What may turn out to be most instructive in this book is what it reveals about the discontents of the Left pluralism it honors and also about the limitations of language as a mode of radical democratic politics.

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UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a)

1.

Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj iek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), 193. Subsuquent references will appear parenthetically within the text.

way a singular signier acquires special, traumatic, and unknowable weight for a subject who suffers its proliferating effects. 9. Make no mistake; the drives postdate the advent of the signier. 10. In Dynamic Conclusions Butler equates ieks real with the truth that Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe/Nancy critiqued in Lacan a truth that misrecognizes the crucial medium of its own transmission: Indeed, this is nowhere more emphatically demonstrated than in ieks own work. Consider the use of assertion, of formulas, of anecdote, of dialectical demonstrationthere is no way to dissociate truth from the rhetoricity that makes it possible (278). iek denes the unmediatable real as a power to disturb the ction that social differences are merely symbolic, that is, that they are not laminated with the radically non-symbolic (the real). This is a crucial point of disagreement, marked by Butlers unaccustomed recourse to the ad hominem. She absolutely rejects the real as what drives language, the domain of power and control; for then the real would be precisely the obstacle to the limitless power of language that is the heart of Butlers theory. So when she says, This metaleptic function of [ieks] discourse works most efciently when it remains undisclosed (278), her heightened concern is reected in her attribution to iek of a calculating disingenuousness about the ruses of his own speech. 11. She calls Laclaus universalizing the particular the making of an empire of its local meaning and echoes Linda Zerilli and Joan Scotts belief that there is no possibility of extracting the universal claim from the particular (33). 12. Karl Marx, Critical Remarks on the Article: The King of Prussia and Social Reform, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, trans. and ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 126. 13. Ibid., italics added. 14. After Rousseau and Hegel, the fundamental principle of civil

2. Paul Bov has been credited with pronouncing Old Left and Liberal thinkers like Rorty, Taylor, Politt, Ehrenreich, and those who write for The Nation Left Conservatives because they do not take poststructuralisms critique of transparent communication and unmediated reality into account. 3. I present this in some detail in Stendhal and the Politics of the Imaginary, in Approaches to Teaching Stendhals The Red and the Black, eds. Stirling Haig and Dean de la Motte (New York: PMLA, 1999). 4. I obviously dont agree with this accusation, which Martha Nussbaum makes in The Professor of Parody, The New Republic 22 (February 1999). 5. And iek counters with false disidentication (103). 6. For me it retains overtones of the Freudian Id and the 1950s horror movie. Still, some doctors are now deferring assigning a sex to infants with somewhat ambiguous genitalia. Doubtless Butlers enunciation of the reach of power into gender (from her Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex [New York: Routledge, 1993], 7) has inuenced the re-thinking of gender labeling. 7. Butlers How difcult it is even on the conceptual level to keep the transcendental and the social apart (146), is followed by, I would warn against understanding fantasy as something which occurs on one level and social interpellations as something that takes place on another level (151). 8. Although some readers of Butler liken this process to psychoanalysis, (which also undoes a signiers inordinate prestige), the two differ quite fundamentally: Butlers signier is a public labeling, a symbolic naming; psychoanalysis works not with the commonly held symbols, but with the

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society is that the collective is responsible for (in all senses of the term) the human. (What Freud and Lacan add is that the non-human edge that seems to lie beyond the pale of humanity also inhabits it from within.) 15. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957). The cult of mankind ends in the self-enclosed humanism of Comte, and let it be said, of fascism. This kind of humanism we can do without (50). 16. Ibid., 38-39.
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21. Reagan considered the fall of the wall his most important symbolic accomplishment. A chunk of its concrete is housed in his Presidential Library. 22. Laclau notices this pattern of argumentation in Butler. He nds Butlers resistance to his argumentation on the concrete abstract (the universal) to be a result of her argument being so rooted in the Hegelian way of conceiving the articulation between the abstract and the concrete, which is one not of contamination but of reconciliation (191). But he limits the scope of his characterization to just this one theoretical point. 23. At one point, Butler equates universality with consensus based on local norms that must then be culturally translated to become universal (35). This pulls the rug out from under Laclau, who regards the totality as crushing the particular, with the third dimension, the universal being the particulars only recourse.
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17. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1964), spoke there of signs given (ones controlled and contrived performance) and signs given off (inadvertent slips). 18. Butler has been praised precisely for her volatility: see Michael Levinson, Speaking to Power, Lingua Franca (September 1998): 60-68. Levinson notes the terrible claustrophobia of Butlers early work, constructed brick by brick from the theorists whose work she cobbles together. Butler extracts theory from theory (63). But he gives her high marks for subsequent books in which she lays bare the processes by which she changed her mind and began rethinking her stances. 19. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Hlose, in Oeuvres Compltes, eds. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), vol. II, xiv, II:235. 20. It constitutes something like the total savoir that Hegel adumbrated (and which Lacan happened to critique strongly in Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire, in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Norton, 1977].)

A PLEA FOR CIVILITY:

AN ASIAN WOMANS REPLY TO SUSAN MOLLER OKINS IS MULTICULTURALISM BAD FOR WOMEN?

sinkwan cheng

Susan Moller Okins essay Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? has drawn enormous attention and triggered responses from major thinkers across genders, cultures, and disciplines, including Homi Bhabha, Martha Nussbaum, Joseph Raz, Will Kymlicka, Saskia Sassen, and Robert Post. Okin argues that many (though not all) of the cultural minorities that claim group rights are more patriarchal than the surrounding cultures. She does not stop at suggesting that group rights are harmful to women. According to her, minority women might be better off if the culture into which they were born were either to become extinct...or, preferably, to be encouraged to alter itself so as to reinforce the equality of women.1 Okins conclusion, I am afraid, is symptomatic of a lack of serious research into non-Western cultures, of faulty reasoning and argumentative methods, and of a forgetfulness of the basic spirit of democracy as the civil welcoming of differences. To be fearful of differences to the point of advocating the extinction or alteration of other cultures undermines democracy at its very foundation. Many critics have pointed out errors in Okins portrayal of non-Western cultures. I would like to focus instead on three topics unexplored by other critics. First, I will tackle Okins constant confusion of political ideals with cultural practices and the inconsistencies in her application of these evaluation categories to the West and the Rest(-of-the-World). Second, I will challenge Okins politics on her own terms by questioning if her proposal can really be considered liberal. Finally, I will situate Okins focus on cultures rather than on nations in the context of globalization and propose to replace Okins focus on cultures/civilizations with Etienne Balibars emphasis on civility as the democratic basis for championing feminism in the global era.

I. BETWEEN IDEAL AND REALITY, BETWEEN THE WEST AND THE NON-WEST
Okin attempts to give moral authority to her proposal by grounding her overall arguments on the political ideal of equality as it is upheld by a particular version of Western liberalism.2 The normative force of this libUMBR(a) 51

eralism rests on its prioritization of the right over the good, of empty formalism over substantive judgments, and of distributive justice over the value of various goods. It is on these grounds that Okin argues for gender equality as a universal injunction: By feminism, I mean the belief that women should not be disadvantaged by their sex, that they should be recognized as having human dignity equal to that of men, and that they should have the opportunity to live as fullling and as freely chosen lives as men can (10). So far, so good. If she had limited herself to saying that equality of gender is a universally binding morality3 and as such should be part of the legal and political principles of every country, I could not agree more with Okin. I would also raise no objection if Okin had studied all cultures carefully and demonstrated how all of them Western as well as nonWestern fall short of this political principle. Okins problem is her inconsistency in applying these categories to Western and minority cultures. Whenever Okin tries to prove the moral superiority of Western liberal societies, she is careful to limit herself to legal and political norms; in contrast, she references only cultural practices in non-Western societies, with no mention at all of their legal and political principles. This asymmetry in the categories she uses to judge Western and non-Western cultures is already evident in her thesis statement, where she poses the following question: what should be done when the claims of minority cultures or religions clash with the norm of gender equality that is at least formally endorsed by liberal states (however much they continue to violate it in practices)? (9, italics added). The rest of Okins essay continues to highlight the moral undesirability of minority cultural practices against the desirability of the legal and political norms of the West. From the beginning of her essay, she brackets both guratively and, as she does above, literally the issue of how liberal states continue to violate [the norm of gender equality] in practice. The repressed issue, however, returns at one point in her essay. After several pages of indictments against minority cultures for their sexist practices in the section titled Gender and Culture, Okin is obliged to also say a few words about the West. Her brief ten-line reprimand of sexism in Western culture, however, is quickly forgotten and displaced by the reassertion of Western legal norms, which stand out as innitely superior to non-Western cultural practices:
Western cultures, of course, still practice many forms of sex discrimination. They place far more importance on beauty, thinness, and youth in females and on intellectual accomplishment, skill, and strength in males. They expect women to perform for no economic reward far more than half for the unpaid work related to home and family, whether or not they also work for wages; partly as a consequence of this and partly because of workplace discrimination, women are far more likely than men to become poor. Girls and women are also subjected by men to a great deal of (illegal) violence, including sexual violence. But women in more liberal cultures are, at the same time, legally guaranteed many of the same freedoms and opportunities as men (17, italics added).

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Offenses committed on a daily basis against women in the West are conveniently made to look like contingent failings owing to the fact that Western law denounces them in an abstract way as

illegal. At the end of her cursory acknowledgement of shortcomings in the Wests patriarchal culture, Okin easily dodges further questions about the sexual inequalities in Western cultural practices by redirecting peoples attention to the Western legal system and its formal principle of gender equality. I do not deny the importance of maintaining the formal notion of equality as a regulative principle. However, I question why Okin makes no reference at all to formal policies about women in non-liberal societies particularly since many of these countries have very special laws about womens entitlement to health care, maternity leave, affordable childcare, and other issues that should catch the eye of any feminist.4 I nd Okins silence on the legislation of non-Western societies to be incomprehensible also because Okin repeatedly attempts to prove her point about the barbaric nature of non-Western patriarchy on the basis of information submitted as evidence for criminal defense procedures.5 Focusing on criminal cases as ethnographic evidence of gross subjections of women in minority cultures, Okin nonetheless seems to be either ignorant of, or unwilling to include in her arguments, the legal statutes of the cultures she alleges to be condoning or even encouraging crimes against women (18).6 Okins silence about the legal regulations of non-Western cultures is mirrored by her disregard of how gender relationships are actually lived in the West. Okin voices her outrage at how a Chinese immigrant man in New York who battered his wife to death for committing adultery and a Japanese immigrant woman in California who drowned her children and tried to drown herself because her husbands adultery had shamed the family relied on cultural defenses to win reduced charges (19). She is convinced that women are much better protected legally in the West (16) but does not explore the issue of crimes against women in Western culture or cite a single court proceeding involving a white defendant. Bhabha points out the high rate of crimes against women in England,7 which is still low compared to the daily cases of assault on women in the United States.8 One wonders why Okin does not compare domestic crime rates in the West to the rates of domestic violence in Japan,9 whose male chauvinist culture she accuses of driving women to commit mother-child suicide when shamed by their husbands indelity (19). These statistics raise the question: Is the legal system of Western cultures really more successful at protecting women from violence? Is the West in its daily practice truly less violent toward women than the rest of the world? And, outside the courtroom, the contrast between indelity rates in the West and those in traditional societies leads one to question Okins assumption that women are more respected in liberal than traditional societies. Okin avoids addressing the real differences between Western and non-Western cultures by limiting herself to the abstract principle of formal equality in the West while discussing concrete cultural practices in minority cultures (a subject about which she seems to have little knowledge).10 Addressing the ideal of equality in the West but the cultural practices in the Rest(-of-the-World), Okin ends up interpreting the discrepancies between ideals and practices as cultural differences
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rather than as categorical differences. This confused and confusing way of thinking gives rise to a stark contrast between an idealized, progressive West and a backward, non-Western world in Okins discourse.

II. EQUALITY FOR ALL AND RESPECT FOR THE INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM OF MINORITY WOMEN EQUALITY FOR ALL?
As a liberal who believes in political equality, Okin advocates eliminating unjust disparities between the life-chances of men and women. However, if she were really true to the principle of equality for all, she would have respected all cultures equal rights to exist and every nations equal right to self-determination. If she had really respected the principle of equality as morally binding, she would have been respectful of each cultures equal right and moral capacity to dene its own concept of the good life instead of arguing for its extinction or alteration. As the editors of Okins volume comment in the introduction on the moral foundation of the multiculturalist movement: human beings in other cultures, foreign or domestic, are human beings too moral equals, entitled to equal respect and concern, not to be discounted or treated as a subordinate caste (4). In arguing that the West is more advanced and progressive (16), Okin is really saying that non-Western cultures are morally inferior to the West. Far from allowing other cultures and peoples full membership and parity of participation in the world, Okin perpetuates institutionalized patterns of discrimination that constitute members of cultures outside the West as comparatively unworthy of respect or esteem. This self-presumed Western moral authority compels Okin to take on her White Womans Burden and advocate the extinction or alteration of other cultures. Okin could of course reply that it is precisely because she is operating within the politics of equality that she does not want to recognize cultural difference. Yet it is one thing to disregard cultural difference but quite another to advocate that other cultures become extinct or be altered to become like ones own. More important still, respecting other cultures mores does not necessarily contradict the politics of equality. If Okin had done even preliminary research on multiculturalism, she would have found that the multiculturalists demand for recognition had its origin in, and still derives part of its moral impetus from, the politics of equality and this despite the fact that multiculturalism nds the politics of equality inadequate to the task of guaranteeing the survival of minority cultures. It is the principle of universal equality the principle of equal respect for all participants and equal opportunity for achieving social esteem that allows minorities to denounce discrimination and refuse second-class citizenship. As Charles Taylor points out, the concept of equal dignity is the only one compatible with a

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democratic society.11 The fact that even communitarians such as Charles Taylor underscore the signicant role of the principle of universal equality in multiculturalist claims12 is indicative of the fact that minority cultures politics of recognition is, no less than the liberal politics of equality, a justice claim. Despite this shared ground, multiculturalism differs from liberalism by going beyond abstract, formal justice claims to making a substantive demand for equality. I am not trying to valorize group identities as some multiculturalists do. My argument is that not only do different cultures have equal rights to exist, but they also have equal rights to choose their own ways of life and to pursue their own happiness in their own distinct manners. In other words, all cultures should have equal rights to demand recognition for their distinctness. This demand is not only appropriate but a practical necessity if one wishes to ensure equal dignity of all peoples. Sander L. Gilman touches on a similar idea in his response to Okin: Intuitively, human rights are claims we make for the protection of our vital interests in bodily integrity, material well-being, and human dignity. To secure respect for our rights, we must concede the right of others to make similar claims for the protection of their vital interests.13 Nussbaum, too, regards the right to search for the meaning of life in ones own way as fundamental to a life that is fully human.14 Far from contradicting universal human rights, the equal right to assert ones distinctness is what honors the consistency and validity of this universal principle. As Taylor puts it, we give due acknowledgement only to what is universally present everyone has an identity through recognizing what is peculiar to each.15 The politics of recognition goes beyond abstract equality and seeks substantive justice by demanding reciprocal recognition of cultural distinctiveness.

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RESPECT FOR INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM?

In addition to realizing in concrete terms the abstract liberal idea of equality, the politics of recognition is also compatible with liberalisms respect for individual decisions. Contrary to Okins claim that respecting cultural differences is inconsistent with the basic liberal value of individual freedom (11), I would argue that Okins refusal to honor minority cultures own ways of life contradicts liberalisms respect for the individual. Okin seems unaware that the very idea of respecting each culture-bearing people on its own terms was actually developed out of Western respect for the individual, according to which [e]veryone should be recognized for his or her unique identity.16 Each individual has an original way of being human and has his or her own measure: This way of being cannot be externally derived, but must be inwardly generated.17 The individuals right to self-denition, self-fulllment, and self-realization gives rise to the idea of a peoples right to self-determination. Taylor points out how Herder applied his conception of originality at two levels, not only to the individual person among other persons, but also to

the culture-bearing people among other peoples. Just like individuals, a Volk should be true to itself, that is, its own culture.18 The compatibility between minority rights and liberalism is evident in the widespread support for minority rights among liberals in the nineteenth century and between the two World Wars.19 Okin is far from being liberal in recommending either the extinction or the alteration of minority cultures whose gender relationships are congured in ways different from those of the liberal West. This recommendation smacks not only of intolerance but even of cruelty. To cut off people from their own culture is to subject them to an extreme state of disempowerment and abjection. To be abruptly uprooted from ones tradition amounts to being cast into the impossible-unthinkableunsayable.20 Understanding that is, ones capacity to engage the world in some meaningful way cannot even take place without the horizon of ones own cultural tradition. This is a point that Gadamer and other hermeneuticians have repeatedly emphasized.21 Political theorists such as Will Kymlicka also underscore cultural membership as the precondition for an individuals capacity to develop self-esteem and to make personal choices.22 Culture, in other words, is the necessary and inescapable context of a persons life. No one can function in a cultural vacuum. Feminists ought to respect the different cultural backgrounds of women around the world as they go about promoting gender equality. As Abdullahi An-Na`im rightly states, compliance with human rights standards cannot be achieved in a principled and sustainable manner except through the internal dynamics of the culture concerned.23

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DOES OKIN RESPECT THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THIRD-WORLD WOMEN?

Ironically, even as Okin defends her program of extinction or alteration of non-Western cultures on the grounds of protecting the individual freedom of their female members, she has no respect for the individuality and individual decisions of minority women. There exist only two monolithic categories of non-Western women in Okins discourse: co-opted/older women and nonco-opted/younger women. Okin sets up these categories to circumvent possible resistance from Third-World women to her white feminist tutelage24 by labeling them in advance as co-opted voices of older women. Despite her claims to being a liberal, Okin has no reservations about practicing age discrimination in addition to cultural discrimination. Even if we set aside the discrimination issue, a purely factual focus would lead one to wonder about Okins capacity for careful and precise thinking in her unquestioning presupposition of a necessary relationship between age and co-optation. Okins reasoning would imply that established female scholars who have pursued years of rigorous learning and careful research would belong to the co-opted category given their relatively advanced age.

Okin simply cannot accept that Third-World women even established scholars and highly educated women can have minds of their own. Those who dont share Okins Western feminist view of what constitutes well-being are quickly dismissed as victims of a culturally generated false consciousness and in need of liberation by well-meaning outsiders.25 Robert Post points out how Okins repeated references to older women who are co-opted into reinforcing general inequality suggest that Okin would persist in this position even if minority women were to report that they did not view themselves as disadvantaged because they had freely chosen their lives, which they found fullling, and because they viewed themselves as having equal dignity with men, although that dignity was expressed through distinct social roles.26 Okins gaze on non-Western women, in other words, comes resolutely from above and elsewhere. Her version of liberal feminism shares something of the patronizing and stereotyping attitudes of the patriarchal perspective.27 Azizah Y. al-Hibri calls this patriarchal feminism. I would take this one step further: Okin is not merely patriarchal; her patriarchy is of the special form associated with colonialism. Okin makes no attempt to be conciliatory in her replies to critics regarding her association of co-optation with older women. It is impossible to persuade Okin to let go of her White Womans Burden.

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III. CIVILITY VERSUS CIVILIZATION: TOWARD A NEW DEMOCRATIC BASIS FOR FEMINISM IN THE GLOBAL ERA SAMUEL HUNTINGTON, SUSAN MOLLER OKIN, AND THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
Interestingly enough, Okin keeps referring to cultural rather than national differences in her essay. Her discriminatory discourse is not directed at nations but at cultures and shared ethnic origins on both international and intranational levels. Okin advocates policing not on, but across or inside, national borders. The following statement is typical of the cultural focus in her thinking: Many of the worlds traditions and cultures, including those practiced within formerly conquered or colonized nation-states which certainly encompasses most of the peoples of Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia are quite distinctly patriarchal (14). In the list of criminal cases Okin uses as proof of her ethnographic argument, her targets of attack are grouped mainly under ethnic-cultural rather than national categories:
the four types of cases in which cultural defenses have been used most successfully are: (1) kidnap and rape by Hmong men who claim that their actions are part of their cultural practice of zij poj niam, or marriage by capture; (2) wife-murder by immigrants from Asian and Middle Eastern countries whose wives have either committed adultery or treated their husbands in a servile way; (3) murder of children by Japanese or Chinese mothers who have also tried but failed to kill themselves, and who claim that because of their cultural backgrounds the shame of their husbands indelity drove them to

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the culturally condoned practice of mother-child suicide; and (4) in France though not yet in the United States, in part because the practice was criminalized only in 1996 clitoridectomy. (18)

28

Note that Okin makes national distinctions only when she discusses the West that is, France and the United States.29 The rest of the worlds peoples look to Okin like an undifferentiated mass vaguely divided into cultural categories. She makes an observation about Japanese or Chinese mothers (italics added) in the above-quoted passage. When she provides grounds for her assertion on the next page, it becomes obvious that the vague conjunction or is used by the author to cover her incapacity or reluctance to differentiate between the two countries. It turns out that Okins sweeping claim about Japanese and Chinese women is made on the basis of one case about a Japanese immigrant woman in California (19).30 Cultural difference is an easy way out for an author who has little knowledge of non-Western countries. Okins focus on cultures rather than nations also nds a friendly audience in the new Global Age, where attention has been turned from the conicts among nation-states to what Samuel Huntington calls the clash of civilizations and the politics of ethnic relations in the post-communist world. According to Huntington, what emerges in the twentieth century and particularly after the Cold War is no longer the conict between nation-states. Globalization brings peoples closer together on conictual as much as on commercial terms and is likely to be a force that crystallizes conicts between cultures.31 Okins argument sounds like a xenophobic, feminist extrapolation of Huntingtons thesis. Huntingtons theory follows from his concern about the decline of the West after the two World Wars and the process of decolonization. His preoccupation over the decline of the West is compounded by an anxiety over the rising economic, military, and political strength of Asian civilizations on the one hand and the demographic explosion in Muslim countries on the other. Above all, Huntington has misgivings about how non-Western civilizations generally are reafrming the value of their own cultures.32 Huntington concludes his book by recommending that the survival of the West depends on Americans reafrming their Western identity and Westerners... uniting to renew and preserve [Western civilization] against challenges from non-Western societies.33 Not surprisingly, Huntington is adamantly against multiculturalism (for example, within the United States), even though he argues against any attempt of the West to impose universal values, for fear that such endeavors will antagonize the non-West and set off fault line wars. Although Okin diverges from Huntington in her insistence on universalism (that is, universalizing her feminist program), both seem to be compelled to defend the values of the West. Huntington pursues this goal by advocating a strong alliance among Western societies against the challenges of the non-West. Okin is much more aggressive in her defense of the West with her recommendation of the extinction or alteration of other civilizations. In response to such xenophobia, Bonnie Honig warns against a feminist backlash directed at foreigners who come

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from somewhere else and bring their foreign, (supposedly) backward cultures with them.34 The kind of xenophobic tone that troubles Honig can also be found in the blurb on the back cover of Okins volume:
Polygamy, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, punishing women for being raped, differential access for men and women to health care and education, unequal rights of ownership, assembly, and political participation, unequal vulnerability to violence. These practices and conditions are standard in some parts of the world. Do demands for multiculturalism and certain minority group rights in particular make them more likely to continue and to spread to liberal democracies?(italics added)

Huntingtons defense of Western values and Okins militant assertion of Western feminism, in other words, are underpinned by fears that barbarism will spread to the liberal West. Huntington reduces the civilizations in conict to basically two worlds: Us and Them.35 Likewise, Okins feminist crusade is carried out by the West against the Rest, by the First World against the Third World.36 Okins war on gender inequality, in other words, is not waged on the peoples of Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia individually (14). Rather, these peoples are unied in Okins writings as the common enemy of the West. Under Okins gaze, these multiple cultures become one culture: the non-Western, Third-World culture. As Bhabha puts it, [Okin] allows herself to produce monolithic, though gender-differentiated, characterizations of minority, migrant cultures kidnap and rape by Hmong men, wife-murder by immigrants from Asia and the Middle Eastern countries, mother-child suicide among Japanese and Chinese provoked by the shame of the husbands indelity.37

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CULTURAL DIFFERENCE AND NEO-RACISM

Etienne Balibar rightly observes that racism is not receding, but progressing in the age of globalization. The dominant theme of the new racism in our times is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences. It postulates the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions; in short, it is what P. A. Taguieff has rightly called a differentialist racism.38 This neo-racism is highly pertinent for understanding the fear and hostility Huntington and Okin experience when confronted with multiculturalism. Balibar explains that neo-racism has decolonization as its specic historical context: The new racism is a racism of the era of decolonization, of the reversal of population movements between the old colonies and the old metropolises, and the division of humanity within a single political space.39 Decolonization is apparently very much on the minds of Huntington and Okin. For Huntington, a major cause of the decline of the West is former colonies declarations of independence, both politically and culturally. For Okin, barbaric patriarchy is associated with the Third World especially formerly conquered or colonized nation-states (14). The backward culture of the Third World is seen

as constitut[ing] obstacles or is itself established as [an] obstacle (by schools or the norms of international communication) to the acquisition of [respectable Western] culture.40 Hence Okins advocacy for the extinction or alteration of non-Western cultures.

FANTASIZING THE JOUISSANCE OF THE OTHER

The main factor fuelling neo-racism the kind of racism so prominent in Okins discourse seems to be ones fantasy and hatred of the Others secret enjoyment (jouissance). The sexual overtones in the term are by no means inappropriate in a discussion of racism. Racial discrimination cannot be reduced to sexual discrimination. Nonetheless, sexual dynamics are often involved in xenophobia. A good illustration of this is the Wests fantasy about the uninhibited plenitude available to primitive peoples. What Okin cannot tolerate is the Others excessive, ob-scene enjoyment.41 Her essay is full of incriminations of the Others jouissance. Witness, for example, her storm of outrage at the enjoyment of non-Western men a storm that sweeps quickly from veiling to polygamy to efforts to control female sexuality to the denial of maternal rights over children to the (paradoxically contradictory) enforcement of maternalism as womens proper role to clitoridectomy to child marriage to forced marriage to ones rapist to marriage by capture.42 This tumult of emotions culminates in Okins indignation at the prospect of immigrant men from Asian and Middle Eastern countries receiving dropped or reduced charges for wife-murders by using cultural defenses (18). Signicantly, it is not only the Third-World Mans secret enjoyment that provokes Okin. She is equally incensed by the Third-World Womans ob-scene jouissance for instance, the Asian Womans servility to men, and the special privilege of the cheated Asian Wife to have her crime of child-murder excused as culturally condoned practice in U.S. law courts (18-19). Jacques-Alain Miller gives an insightful diagnosis of the dynamics of jouissance inhabiting racism:
Racism is founded on what one imagines about the Others jouissance; it is hatred of the particular way, of the Others own way of experiencing jouissance. [The Other] takes his jouissance in a way different from ours. Thus the Others proximity exacerbates racism: as soon as there is closeness, there is a confrontation of incompatible modes of jouissance. [The Other] is always endowed with a part of jouissance that he does not deserve. Thus true intolerance is the intolerance of the Others 43 jouissance.

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Millers analysis sheds light on the kind of xenophobic feminism championed by Okin. The Others jouissance is what plagues the xenophobic feminist. Prior to the age of mass immigration, the Other that was held responsible for stealing the xenophobic feminists jouissance was the (white) man. With the process of globalization, however, the Other who lives in close proximity to the xenophobic feminist, threatening her with its secret jouissance,44 is no longer primarily the white man who, after all, shares her white values. Instead, the position of the Other is now

increasingly occupied by those with different cultural habits and dark, mysterious skin color. Okins obsession with the Others secret enjoyment can be seen in her relentless voyeuristic invasions into the private sphere and personal law of the Other (13). Her xation on unveiling45 the secret jouissance hiding in the home of the Other (13) reminds one of the practices of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, which showed an equal lack of respect for the distinction between the private and the public.46 Okin also seems to share the paranoia of totalitarian leaders. Take, for instance, her assumption that Third-World women who resist her judgment must be conspiring with their male patriarchal leaders: strict control of women is enforced in the private sphere by the authority of either actual or symbolic fathers, often acting through, or with the complicity of, the older women of the culture (22, italics added).

A PLEA FOR CIVILITY

In order to subdue the ob-scene jouissance of the Other, Okin proposes civilizing the Third World in the image of the West. Her campaign to Westernize the world turns out to be quite unnecessary since, even without her militant campaign, the Rest(of-the-World) is already becoming like the West. Unfortunately, the global exportation of Western culture, contrary to Okins theoretical argument, is not necessarily bettering the lives of women in developing countries. The solid research work of Zillah Eisenstein, a feminist legal and political theorist, reveals the stark reality of the exploitation of Third-World women by global capital from the Western liberal market: As global capital spreads, women work harder either in and from their homes and/or in specied Third-World markets. They become the third world of the Third World, and the third world of the First World. They are the cheapest of the cheap workers. Reebok and Nike hire the women in Indonesia for 16 cents an hour and the women in China for 10 to 14 cents an hour.47 Western feminism as a global export also carries a malign by-product despite its benign intentions. Okins discourse partakes of what Eisenstein pinpoints as a fantasy created by the media romanticizing the freedom of the West. Such discourse constructs fantasmatic images of progressive, healthy, and sophisticated Anglo-Western women symbolizing the freedom of the liberal market, while in reality globalization produces appalling forms of exploitation and subordination of women in developing countries.48 The ideology of beautiful, free and independent women in the West in contrast to the real wretched conditions of Third-World women is then re-presented by Okin and her colleagues as the contrast between the liberal West and the patriarchal Rest, thus contributing further to social dissatisfaction and tension in developing countries. Okin simply dodges the issue that global feminism has been appropriated by the global economy. Eisenstein astutely discerns how Western feminists are themselves being privatized by the market and reduced to self-help strategies, while women, especially poor women, are losing all forms of public help, as government programmes are dismantled under the inuence of the liberal market

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economy.49 The shrinking health benets for women in todays China is a case in point. Eisenstein notes a similar downsizing and privatizing of the U.S. government under the aegis of corporatist feminism: The market advertises the successes of feminism as justicatory of the rollback of an afrmative-action state. The rearticulation of racialized/sex/gender borders for the twenty-rst century are undermined by the global market, even as the boundaries of the fantasmatic East and West are re-encoded in the export version of feminism.50 Eisenstein further points out the colonialist implications of Western feminism an ideology that is marketed domestically, as well as offered as a part of colonialist and global politics.51 This diagnosis effectively explains why so many Third-World and racial minority thinkers nd Okins essay objectionable.52 Here we must ask where Okins program goes wrong. How does her civilizing project turn into a colonizing project? Okins attempt to intervene in the barbaric, patriarchal non-Western societies on behalf of the human rights of women53 resonates with the few military humanitarian interventions into the Third World in the global era, each pursued with the intention or pretension of preventing human civilization from degenerating into savagery. Why, even when these humanitarian interventions were carried out with the best intentions, did they often unsettle us with a certain dark ambiguity? Balibars recent work on violence, civilization, and civility offers great insight into the source of the problem. Balibar identies a certain cruelty left over from the dialectic of savagery and its negation in the civilizing process. This cruelty which psychoanalysis associates with the superego is heterogeneous and irreducible to either savagery or civilization, violence or counterviolence, even though it has a direct and immediate relation to both.54 Civilization, in other words, is intertwined with cruelty in a highly ambiguous manner. In the civilizing process, one has to be wary of this dark superego. Likewise, in the implementation of humanitarian ideals to save human civilization against the onslaught of savagery, one has to be mindful that any move that is made against violencewill have to come to terms with its backlash; it will not be reducible to a program of the elimination of violence.55 This backlash the dark leftover is precisely what Okin and her fellow humanitarian crusaders all avid believers in the integrity of civilization overlook. Okin is blind to the ob-scene jouissance in her insistence on (Western) civilization and its specic types of police, policy, and politeness.56 Such blind insistence, as Balibar points out, is often the cause of extreme violence.57 Okins advocacy of the extinction or alteration of other cultures is one instance of such violence driven by her idea, ideal, and idealization of (Western) civilization. Given the failings of Okin and her civilizing project, how are we to nd a democratic basis for realizing the vision of feminism in an age of both globalization and localization? The possible answer lies with Balibars concept of civility. Balibar proposes that, instead of responding to violence with counter-violence, thus running the risk of being caught in its backlash,58 we must civilize

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the state and all of its civilizing apparatus. This would include educat[ing] the educator and civilizing the civilizing process, as well as civilizing the civilized subject in its subjection and subjectivation.59 Civility, in other words, is like Slavoj ieks sacrice of sacrice.60 Both practices aim at enabling us to cope with the ob-scene superego lurking in the dark spot of civilization. Regardless of civilizations etymological and conceptual links to police, policy, and politeness, Balibars civility does not suppress conicts and antagonism. [M]uch the contrary, [civility] can and should mean rather the conditions for a political conict, a play of antagonistic forces capable of developing and creating historical effects.61 Furthermore, there does not exist anything like one single politics of civility.62 Civility has no xed pattern, and its conceptual antinomies compel us to keep the project of democracy open to ongoing democratic interrogation. This, then, is what I propose for the project of feminism in the global era. We should engage, on the one hand, the universal injunction of gender equality and, on the other, the radically singular situation of individual women and their cultures, in a constant process of critical dialogue. As Balibar puts it, democracy is fragile, precarious, and has to be continuously recreated through civility. Otherwise, we could easily end up in a state of war both within and across borders.

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1.

Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, eds. Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha C. Nussbaum (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 14-15, italics added. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically within the text. Okin is the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.

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2. Okin certainly departs from classical liberalism the kind of liberalism associated with Locke which interprets constraints on liberty as positive acts...that prevent people from doing what they otherwise could do (J. P. Sterba, Political Philosophy, in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Robert Audi [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], 628). 3. Note the contrast between morality-as-abstract system and ethics-as-praxis in Western philosophy. This distinction follows the well-known Aristotelian-Hegelian denition of ethics as a practical way of conducting ones life and a direct engagement with human affairs and the social-political world, as opposed to morality, which is an abstract system of codes and formal principles. 4. Paid maternity leave, which is so important to protecting the health of the mother and the child as well as promoting equal career opportunities for women, is non-existent in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Interestingly enough, the societies Okin condemns are by and large more progressive and committed than is the West both in legal principles and in practice to protecting womens opportunities to nd fulllment simultaneously as professionals and mothers. Brazil, for example, guarantees a 3-month paid maternity leave. China provides routine health care for women, including an annual 1-day leave for all women to undergo a free pap smear. All pregnant women are entit-led to periodic health checks and advice on diet and childcare. At least until the 1980s, pregnant women were also given a shorter working day and whenever possible the least

strenuous work. See Arthur W. Chung, Maternal and Child Health in China 1949-1976, in Advances in International Maternal and Child Health Care, eds. D. B. Jelliffe and E. F. Patrice Jelliffe (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981); and Victor W. Sidel, Serve the People: Observations on Medicine in the Peoples Republic of China (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974). These particular benets for women are gradually disappearing as China is altering herself to become like the West. The following important event in the history of the womens rights movement plainly reveals the naivet of Okins assumption that the West offers women better legal protections of their rights than other societies. On June 3, 2000, the United States voted against an international treaty, pressed for by womens groups from around the world, that would increase guaranteed maternity leave from 12 to 14 weeks. Australia, most Western European nations, and Japan the non-Western country most inuenced by the West in its political and economic structure joined the U.S. The treaty was originally ratied mainly by countries in South America and Eastern Europe countries whose cultures Okin recommends for extinction or alteration. See Women Press for More Maternity Leave, New York Times, 7 June 2000, late ed., A.14+. 5. Okin does not often document her information about minor-ity cultures. Judging from her footnotes, a signicant number of her sources turn out to be The New York Times or other peoples writings on minority cultures. There is no evidence that Okin has done any direct archival research on non-Western societies. 6. Okins specializations in Ethics in Society and Political Science, and the prestigious positions she holds in those departments, make her negligence look even more peculiar. 7. Homi Bhabha addresses his British experience as follows: The British civil liberty group Liberty would demur at Okins description of the egalitarian and empowering Western domestic scene. Human Rights and Wrongs, an alternative report to the UN Human Rights Committee,

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concludes that one-third of all reported crimes against women in Britain result from domestic violence and take place at home; in London, in 1993, one woman in ten had been assaulted by her partner. Adult women and children are overwhelmingly more likely to become the victims of violence at home than on the street or at the workplace (Bhabha, Liberalisms Sacred Cow, in Cohen et al. [eds.], 80). 8. The American Medical Association estimated that more than 4 million women were beaten by their partners in 1995 (M. Easley, Domestic Violence, Annals of Emergency Medicine 27: 6 [1996]: 762-763). M. K. Feldman notes that domestic violence is the single largest cause of injury to women in the United States more common than injuries from automobile accidents, muggings, and rape combined (Feldman, Family Violence Intervention, Minnesota Medicine 75 [1992]: 20-23). More disturbing still is that more than half of the women murdered in the United States were killed by their male partners (B. Parker and J. McFarlane, Identifying and Helping Battered Pregnant Women, qtd. in Linda Poirier, The Importance of Screening for Domestic Violence in All Women, The Nurse Practitioner 22:5 [1997]: 106). 9. The Ofce of Womens Affairs, in the Japanese Prefecture of Kanagawa, conducted a Survey on Society for Gender Equality in 1995, using anonymous mail questionnaires to sample 2,658 residents. According to this survey, 10 percent of married women reported having experienced physical violence from their husbands (Kanagawa-ken, Report of the Questionnaire Survey on Society for Gender Equality [Danjokyodoshakai nikansuru anketo chosa hokokusho], qtd. in Mieko Yoshihama, Domestic Violence in Japan: Research, Program Developments, and Emerging Movements, in Battered Women and Their Families: Intervention Strategies and Treatment Programs, ed. Albert R. Roberts [New York: Springer Publishing Co., 1998], 405-447). Another survey conducted by Yoshihama in Ota Ward, Tokyo in 1993 yielded similar rates.

10. Some of Okins incorrect generalizations about non-liberal cultures have been pointed out by critics such as Bonnie Honig, Azizah Y. al-Hibri, Sander L. Gilman, Abdullahi An-Na`im, Bhikhu Parekh, Saskia Sassen, and Martha C. Nussbaum. Their responses to Okin can be found in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? 11. Charles Taylor, Politics of Recognition, in Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 27. 12. Taylors communitarianism is not the same as multiculturalism. He favors a hermeneutic merging of horizons and is critical of some of the multiculturalists premature valori-zation of difference. Nonetheless, I would say that the politics of recognition the demand for recognition of both the equal dignity and unique identity of minority cultures and communities underpins both communitarianism and multiculturalism. 13. Sander L. Gilman, Barbaric Rituals?, in Cohen et al. (eds.), 62, italics added. 14. Martha C. Nussbaum, A Plea for Difculty, in Cohen et al. (eds.), 108. 15. Taylor, 39. 16. Ibid., 38. 17. Ibid., 30. 18. Ibid., 31. 19. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), ch. 4. 20. This expression is adopted from Jacques Derrida. 21. See, for example, Hans Georg-Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1993).

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22. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 165. 23. Abdullahi An-Na`im, Promises We Should All Keep in Common Cause, in Cohen et al. (eds.), 62. 24. Some Third-World womens objections can be found in the Responses section of Okins volume. 25. Bhikhu Parekh, A Varied Moral World, in Cohen et al. (eds.), 73. 26. Robert Post, Between Norms and Choices, in Cohen et al. (eds.), 66. 27. Bhabha, 82.
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33. Ibid., 20-21, italics added. See also 301-321. 34. Bonnie Honig, My Culture Made Me Do It, in Cohen et al. (eds.), 36. 35. Huntington, 32. 36. Okins supporter Katha Pollitt explicitly disparages multiculturalism for its connections to Third Worldism and the appeals Third Worldism makes to white liberal guilt (Pollitt, Whose Culture?, in Cohen et al. [eds.], 28). 37. Bhabha, 79. 38. Etienne Balibar, Is There a Neo-Racism? in Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, and Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991), 21. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 25. 41. The added hyphenation to the word ob-scene is to invoke the meaning of off-stage which Lacan associates with jouissance. 42. Honig, 35. 43. Jacques-Alain Miller, Extimit, Prose Studies 11:3 (1988): 125-126. 44. Miller points out how fantasies about the Others surplus enjoyment tend to be intensied by his or her proximity: the Others proximity exacerbates racism: as soon as there is closeness, there is a confrontation of incompatible modes of jouissance (ibid.). 45. It is interesting to note Okins repeated protests against the Muslim veil. 46. It is not surprising to see Okin, the Western liberal, endorsing totalitarian practices. The Clinton-Lewinsky trial is just one more example revealing the fragile boundaries between totalitarian statesmen and self-righteous bureaucrats in

28. My rst draft included a response to this ignorant, absurd, and xenophobic condemnation of Chinese women and culture. Unfortunately, I cannot nd the space to t that discussion into my paper and have to reserve it for my future work. 29. Note also Okins criticism of France does not have as its target the French culture which is part of the Western civili-zation; rather, she is complaining about the French gov-ernments inept tolerance of patriarchal Muslim practices such as polygamy and clitoridectomy. See, for example, her lengthy discussions of these issues on pages 9-11 of her essay. 30. Note that Okin provides no documentation of either this case or any other of her four examples of cultural defenses invoked by racial minority offenders. 31. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). Not surprisingly, Huntington draws particular attention to the conict between Islamic nations and the West. Okin also pays special heed to this fault line. 32. Huntington, 20. See Part II of Huntingtons book for details.

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the liberal West. For a brilliant analysis of conservative feminism and the politics of the Clinton trial, see Juliet Flower MacCannell, Politics in the Age of Sex: Clinton, Leadership, Love, Cultural Critique 46 (2000): 241-271. 47. Zillah Eisenstein, Womens Public and the Search for New Democracies, Feminist Review 57 (Fall 1997): 146-147. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 148. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. See, for example, the many responses included in Okins volume. 53. Okin highlights womens human rights as her main concern in her essay Feminism, Womens Human Rights, and Cultural Difference, Hypatia 13:2 (Spring 1998): 32-52. 54. Balibar, Violence, Ideality, Cruelty, New Formations 35 (1998): 12. 55. Ibid. 56. Balibar, Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence, a lecture given at Columbia University, April 11, 2000. 57. I would add here that such violence includes, but is not limited to, the dramatic clash of civilizations and the remaking of the world order. 58. Balibar, Violence, 7. This is precisely Okins problem when she fantasizes herself countering barbaric patriarchal cultures with a violent advocacy of their extinctions or alterations, only to nd herself caught in the jouissance of colonialism. 59. For details, see Balibars essay Subjection and Subjecti-va-

tion, in Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1994), 1-15. 60. In Okins case, it would entail the sacrice of her White Womans Burden. 61. Balibar, Specters of Violence, a lecture given at the School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University, July 14, 1998. 62. Ibid.

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ANTIGONES FART:

SOME NOTES CONCERNING SIMON CRITCHLEYS COMEDY AND FINITUDE1

marc de kesel

You will nd a certain unconscious pride at the core of the laughters thought. That is the point of departure. Look at me! I am not falling. The comic and the capacity for laughter are situated in the laughter and by no means in the object of his laughter. The man who trips would be the last to laugh at his own fall, unless he happened to be a philosopher, one who had acquired by habit a power of rapid self-division and thus of assisting as a disinterested spectator at the phenomena of his own ego. But such cases are rare. Charles Baudelaire, On the Essence of Laughter 2 For Simon Critchley, the most important task of modern thought is to recognize our human nitude. Since Immanuel Kant, thought has given up all its metaphysical claims and become aware of its intrinsic limits (once and for all, the thing itself is out of the reach of our knowledge). Whats more, modernity has to invent methods to recognize this nitude. This is not so easily done since to think nitude threatens to be the same as to neutralize, to sublate nitude, as Hegels concept of Aufhebung has taught us. To avoid this dialectical trick of reason a strong post-Kantian tradition limits such an afrmation of our nitude to the domain of aesthetics. Only art and particularly sublime art is able to show us the limits of our thought without neutralizing them. In this, tragedy is a paradigm and functions as such in the work of many thinkers after Kant, up to the present: Schiller, Schelling, Schlegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy. Lacan also ts into that picture, especially with his famous commentary on Antigone in his seminar on ethics. In his essay Comedy and Finitude Simon Critchley focuses on that commentary to elaborate his criticism of what we can call the primacy of tragedy in our modern recognition of nitude. Critchleys point is

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that tragedy supposes too strong and valiant a subject, a hero, who only because of his heroism seems able to afrm his nitude. Critchley argues that this kind of heroism disgures a real, and therefore more modest and less idealized, recognition of our nitude (220). The alternative he proposes is comedy. Because none of us are really heroes, comedy is more appropriate to our experiences of being nite. Against the tragic heroic paradigm, Critchley is promoting the comic anti-heroic paradigm, which is a weaker and ever-weakening conception of nitude (221-222). More than heroism, it is humor that recalls us to the modesty and limitedness of the human condition, a limitedness that calls not for tragic afrmation but comic acknowledgment, not heroic authenticity but laughable inauthenticity (224). Finitude calls for a laughter that recognizes that nitude is not something to be afrmed, but acknowledged (224). Furthermore Critchley species that it calls not for a manic laughter (like Nietzsches laughter from the mountain tops), but for a sardonic one, like that of Frankie Howerd and Tommy Cooper: a laughter that arises out of a palpable sense of inability, inauthenticity, impotence and impossibility (225).3 Consider Antigone. By violating Creons order, she is afrming the nitude of the political law as well as the nitude of human society and human being as such. But she remains a hero, an unapproachable sublime person who even in the realm of death seems pure, sovereign, and inexible. Therefore, Critchley says, heroism remains in contradiction with the nitude it wants to afrm. Break this heroism, and she will appear as a more modest acknowledgment of our human nitude. Make her less pure, and she will give us a more appropriate image of our limitedness. Let her break wind on the way to her death (230), as Critchley lets slip in his essay, that is, let her fart, let us laugh at her anal slip, and her severe heroism will be broken! Sure. But by noticing that she too is but a banal anal windmaker, will we really become more aware of our nitude? By hearing this wind, will we have better acknowledged our human condition? I am not so sure and I want to begin to explain why. Without underestimating the power of laughter, humor, and comedy, I nevertheless want to be for a while the advocate of those who claim the primacy of tragedy like Lacan and others do. Or at least I want to focus on the way Lacan argues for this primacy in his seminar on ethics and investigate the reason why Lacan, though not afraid to utter the most provocative things, nevertheless does not let Antigone break wind on the way to her death. I have the impression that Critchley has missed an important accent in Lacans reasoning here, and that therefore his criticism falls into a certain Hegelianism. My point is that Critchleys making comedy primary rather than tragedy shares more with Hegel than with Schlegel and the whole tradition of irony after him. The acknowledgment he proposes as an alternative for afrmation is in my opinion too Hegelian a gure to be an adequate way to recognize our nitude.
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Lets turn to Antigone and the way her tragedy functions within Lacans seminar on ethics. There Lacan tries to explain what the ethics of psychoanalysis implies. Finitude is the crucial point. Ethics concerns mans search for the good. And according to Lacan, the new insight Freuds psychoanalysis brought here is that we essentially cannot obtain the good for which we are longing. Our longing, our desire, our lust for what is good is structurally limited, and this limit is not an accident but the very basis of our being. We are desire and that means that were only living because our desire will never really be satised, although we just as structurally do not want to know that. If there is one thing the libidinal beings we are must repress, it is precisely the fact that we are but an insatiable desire. The demand that impels a person to visit a psychoanalyst is in fact always a demand for the good (Doctor Im doing badly, please make me feel better) and the typically psychoanalytic ethics begins from the awareness that the analyst cannot give the good for which that the person is asking. The only thing the analyst can do is to help the analysand nd her desire unconsciously (and deconstructively) at work in her demand. For in every demand, the analysand is repressing her desire, a desire that person is. To put it in Lacanian terms: the analysand takes herself for the I, for the Ego she thinks she is, and she is therefore denying the subject she is, that is, the fact that she is the subject (the support, the hypokeimenon) of the desire of the Other. Indeed, according to Lacan we arent even our own desire, but the desire of the Other. At the level of pure drive, the little baby we were was too helpless to win pleasure (in German Lust, which, according to the Freudian theory, is indispensable for life) and could only win it by relying unconditionally on other human beings. The helpless baby had to exchange the lack it was on the level of pure being for a lack on the level of language (to formulate the basic insight of Lacanian psychoanalysis). It exchanged a negative impossible lack for a positive operational one, namely the lack on the level of the symbolic order of signiers. From then on the little libidinal being had to nd itself its identity exclusively in the language others were speaking. It could only locate itself as being something others spoke about without ever succeeding in making it present. The pure (ontological) lack it was at rst has now become the (symbolic) lack of the Other, an Other which, because of that lack, is nothing but desire. From now on, the little libidinal baby will have to nd itself as the subject of the desire of the Other. All this makes it clear that desire and law are not really opposites. Desire itself is a kind of law because we always have to desire, since we never will realize or satisfy it. Moreover, we desire to listen to a law coming from the Other because we have to realize ourselves within that symbolic Other. Although we feel the repressive power of the ethical law, we can do nothing but desire to listen to its commands. It is the law of the (incomplete) Other that makes us desire. However, this is only one side of the picture. Not only does the Other make us desire, we too make the Other and his law desire. We structurally situate ourselves at that place where the Other shows a lack,

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and by taking this position, we make the Other desire. Our own desire, however inauthentic it is, makes the Other incomplete and therefore desiring. The position just mentioned is exactly what Lacan wants to illustrate with Antigone in his seminar on ethics. She too is the subject of the desire of the Other in the sense that she needs the Other and his law to make her desire (and, which amounts to the same thing, to make her live). In the play, however, she appears instead as the one who afrms that the Other and its law are also nothing but a desiring Other and therefore radically incomplete. In her tragic act she takes the position of the very point where the order of the law (the symbolic order) is irrevocably incomplete, where the law confronts its own structural nitude and must become aware of the fact that it cannot give the good we believe it promises. According to Lacan, this is precisely the issue at stake in Sophocles play. After the death of the two legal pretenders to the Thebean throne Oedipus two sons who killed each other in their ght for power that power comes to Creon. He becomes the new subject of the law. From then on it is Creon who is responsible for the good of the Thebean polis and in this function he condemns Polynices, the one who threatened that polis by waging war against it. Creon forbids the burial of Polynices body, an order that is consciously violated by Antigone. The Lacanian interpretation does not see this scene as a struggle between two different kinds of law, the one of the family against the one of the state, as for instance Hegel did. According to Lacan, this scene shows us the nitude of the law as such. It lets us see the normally unseen and repressed lack of the law and because of this, the scene reveals the laws desiring and radically nite status. Creon stands for the one who denies or neglects the nitude of the law. He thinks the law has no limits and reigns over all, even those who are dead. Therefore he does not hesitate to condemn the dead body of Polynices. Thus he condemns it to what Lacan calls a second death. Antigone stands for the one who situates herself on the very position of that death. Yet her rst words in the play betray that she already has assumed her death and that she will not give way on her desire to bury her criminal brother. She makes clear that even in the deadlock of that fatal position one can desire, and by this she shows that desire can transgress the reach of the law. Even condemned to death by the law within which I had to realize the desire I am, I still can desire. And by the same gesture, I reveal that the law, which made my desire possible, is radically nite. That law too is in fact but desire, that is, an instance which, its true, wants to reign the universe, but nevertheless only can want, desire that. Creon takes the law for an innite power that can realize the good it promises and he takes himself for the one and only subject of that law. But what is he forced to see when the play ends in its tragic catastrophe? That he is not exactly that subject of the law he thought he was. That the real support of the law is desire, and that in this case the most adequate subject of this desire was not him but Antigone. In her it becomes clear that from rst to last the law is incomplete, nite desire.

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Creon believes the law is able to realize the good it promises. Antigone shows the real status of the good that Creon (and every one of us) is longing for: a thing that, when reached, instead of realizing our desire, kills the subject of desire that we are. The law cannot give the good it promises, it can only give our desire for that good. For ethical reasons, one has to afrm the radical nitude of ethics. The ethical law must try to give, in place of a supreme good, our desire (for that good or for whatever it may be). According to Lacan, it seems as if it is no longer the good that has become the object of ethical rules and commands, but desire. Is his commentary on Antigone then a moral plea for desire? Is this tragic protagonist showing us, to quote Critchley from the preceding chapter, the categorical imperative of Freuds Copernican revolution do not give way to your desire (202)? Is Lacan giving us in Antigone an example and a model for a new, psychoanalytic kind of ethics? Anyway, this is what almost every article on Lacans seminar on ethics presupposes. They all interpret ethics of desire as an alternative to a classical kind of ethics, and they see in Antigones behavior an exemplary paradigm for that new moral attitude. And precisely here, at least in my opinion, they mostly go wrong. The point they miss is that Lacan is not criticizing, but decentering classical ethics, and this makes a great difference. Psychoanalysis does not criticize existing ethics (in the strictly, that is, Platonic sense of the word: detecting the false mimesis in order to liberate the underlying true essence); it only decenters the position of the subject in that existing ethics in order to uncover the desire by which one is unconsciously bound to the ethical order in which one has always lived. The thing a psychoanalyst tries to avoid most is supplying the analysand with any norm, giving her some advice, or drawing up a guideline. According to the analyst, the analysands problem is not so much that she is looking for new and better norms or rules, but that she has lost herself that means the desire that she is in the norms and rules to which she has always been bound. Feeling bad, she is no longer able to recognize herself in the things she is doing (for instance in the symptoms she unwillingly is producing). The purpose of a psychoanalytic cure is that the analysand nds herself back in the strange, alienated life she is hanging on to. In other words, she has to nd herself back as the subject of the desire of the Other, that is, as the subject of the desire by which she is simultaneously bound to the symbolic order and alienated in it. But the point in that order where she can nd herself is exactly the point where that order does not answer her demand. It is the point where that order itself gives evidence of a structural inconsistency, an irreparable lack, a radical nitude. This is the point where Antigone is situated in Sophocles tragedy of the same name. At that impossible, tragic point, one discovers oneself as subject of pure desire. Does that mean that, for ethical reasons, we must do just like Antigone and follow her example? Certainly not for what else could this be but a mere command to commit suicide? Antigone

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does not show us what we must do; she only shows us where our position as pure desire is, whatever we do. She let us see the repressed, unconscious desire we are, no matter what we say or do. Therefore she is anything but an example to follow. Or to put it in German terms: she is not a Vorbild but only a Bild, not an example but only an image. Shes not an ideal I have to follow, but an image that decenters or deconstructs my tendency to follow ideals. According to Lacan, what the audience experiences by seeing this tragedy parallels the experience of an analysand in a psychoanalytic cure. Both are crossing an ideal (self-)image in order to face the limit and the lack of that image as the very kernel of their beings.

Critchleys critique of Lacans foregrounding of tragedy rather than comedy is only possible because of his unarticulated presupposition that Lacan interprets Antigone as an example, as a moral model. Critchley objects that the afrmation of nitude she is standing for is too heroic. It creates the impression that only a hero is able to realize this. According to him there is a better model, a more appropriate example to follow in order to afrm our radical nitude: comedy. There we identify with more humble, that is, more human characters. My claim here is that Lacan does not indicate which model we have to follow in our afrmation of nitude, but that such an afrmation asks for a decentering or a deconstruction of the very logic of modelling itself. What Antigone shows us is a desire that escapes any kind of model, a radically singular desire that in principle cannot function as a categorical imperative or any other kind of universal law, but nevertheless has to be ethically afrmed. What the analysand is demanding in the cure is in fact her very singular desire that no law (no universal order) can give her. Psychoanalysis departs from this impossibility with the intention of setting up a communicative process where this impossible singular desire can be given a chance. This singular desire can appear in comedy as well as in tragedy (or in several other kinds of art). To this extent, Critchley rightly calls attention to comedy. Indeed, an afrmation of nitude does not necessarily need to bathe in the rigid and ponderous atmosphere of tragic accidents. But the question is whether Critchley is calling attention to comedy for the correct reasons. His argument is that comedy, in opposition to tragedy, does not appeal to a strong, sovereign subject. It supposes a more humble and human subject, someone more like all of us. Unfortunately, Critchley has passed too quickly over Lacans long and often repeated reection on comedy, and therefore has neglected to discuss the fact that, concerning comedy, Lacan comes to exactly the opposite conclusion. It is comedy, not tragedy, that supposes (and even produces) a strong subject. Let us illustrate this by elaborating Critchleys own suggestion to transform Antigones tragedy into a comedy. We only have to imagine that, when striding to the grave where she will be buried

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alive, Antigone suddenly breaks wind, farts. What does the audience experience when, in that most tragic moment, they hear the protagonist fart? Certainly they will burst out laughing. But is this laugh to be interpreted as a form of irony as Schlegel and the whole tradition after him had in mind? Is this laugh an afrmation of human nitude and of the impossibility of being heroic subjects? After Freuds and Lacans analyses of humor and laughter, this claim seems rather difcult to maintain. For, according to psychoanalytic theory, jokes, humor, and laughing are forms of repression (Verdrngung) that protect the libidinal subject against traumatic eruptions of the unconscious. It is true that at rst sight a joke seems to break repression. It confronts us suddenly with something that normally remains unconscious. Unexpectedly, something that ought to be strictly censured appears and compels our attention. For a moment, our repression meets its nitude and loses control over our unconscious. Or, to put it in Lacanian terms, for a moment we cease to be the subject (the support, the bearer, the hypokeimenon) of the unconscious libidinal economy that we are. The traumatic unconscious threatens to take power over our psychic apparatus and to blow the subject away. But the very function of laughter is then to neutralize immediately the threatening trauma: it simply laughs it away and restores the subject in its (imaginary) power. Moreover, it even has a healthy inuence on repression, for it permits the apparatus to let off a little steam. For a moment the machine of signiers has broken down and threatens to be overrun by the traumatic (nonsymbolizable) real, but the laughter keeps the machine going and re-establishes us as masters subjects in our own houses. Certainly, psychoanalysis is very interested in humor and its cure lets the analysand willingly tell jokes. But when, in such a cure, Im making jokes or funny slips of the tongue, the whole point is precisely not only to laugh at them, not to laugh the joke away, but to linger over it, to dwell upon the gap made in my discourse, to analyze this gap and to look for myself in this gap, to search for the subject of that gap and to acknowledge that it is this very gap by which Im supported. That gap is the subject that I am. Then I realize that the support (the bearer, the subject) of what I am is not what I think I am but the very nitude of that thinking, that is, that which structurally escapes my conscious self-image. Sure, comedy reveals the gap I am as the subject of the unconscious, but this revelation is immediately undone by its effect. It is simply laughed away. When we let Antigone break wind on the way of her death, the gap, the lack, the nitude she reveals, is immediately covered up by our laughing. Indeed, in that case we should recognize in her, instead of that unapproachable hero, the humble normal human being we ourselves are, but this recognition would be but a mconnaissance, as Lacan calls it. We recognize in her the (imaginary) egos we think we are, and by this, we repress or deny the subjects we are.

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In Hegelian terms, humor, comedy, and laughter function as the sublation the Aufhe-bung of the radical negativity revealed in the tragic confrontation with the unconscious. Critchleys idea of a primacy of comedy is in that sense a Hegelian one and, instead of deconstructing the subject, restores it. It restores the subject in the very dialectical sense of the word: by laughing with this negativity we become masters over that negativity, we acknowledge it: it becomes the object of our knowledge. We interiorize it and thus become the conscious bearer, the conscious subject of that negativity. It is true that we acknowledge that our knowledge, our consciousness, is limited and nite, but that acknowledgment doesnt disturb, decenter, or deconstruct our knowledge; it rather forties it and makes it innite. Here, negativity no longer stands for our radical nitude, but for its force, its ability to sublate itself: it has become the power of the negative (die Macht des Negativen), as Hegel calls it. Do I have something against comedy? Certainly not. But I claim that, just like desire and tragedy, it cannot be the object of a rule, a law. Therefore it is in my opinion senseless to weigh tragedy and comedy against each other. Both refer to a radical singularity that represents the very kernel of our being but radically escapes our reach, including the reach of our most ethical intentions. To save the singular power of my laugh, I must avoid making it into a universal rule, including a rule that says I should laugh at all rules and never take them that seriously. This singularity can only be approached strictly aesthetically and this aesthetic approach this aestheticism cannot be transformed into a kind of new aesthetic ethics.

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1.

This essay was originally given as an intervention during a seminar on Simon Critchley in Ghent, Belgium on May 27, 2000. It is a response to Critchleys Comedy and Finitude: Displacing the Tragic-Heroic Paradigm in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, in Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity (London: Verso, 1999), 217-238. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically within the text.

2. Charles Baudelaire, On the Essence of Laughter, and, in General, On the Comic in the Plastic Arts, in The Mirror of Art: Critical Studies by Charles Baudelaire, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1955), 139-141. 3. One of the questions to be discussed is: what exactly is the meaning of the conceptual distinctions Critchley makes here? What distinguishes afrmation from acknowledgement (a difference that is strictly connected to tragedy and comedy respectively)?

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UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a)

TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE IN HEIDEGGER, LACAN, AND BADIOU

kirsten hyldgaard

We have abolished the true world. Which world is left over? Perhaps the world of appearances? But no! When we abolished the true world we also abolished the appearances. Friedrich Nietzsche1 Lacan disentangles truth from knowledge by dening truth as that which makes a hole in knowledge. Since the disentanglement of these two terms undoubtedly originates with Heidegger, I will examine the similarities among Heideggers, Lacans, and Badious conceptions of truth. In the twentieth century the status of the concept of truth has been more than precarious truth has become nearly defunct. Today, one speaks ironically of so-called truth. According to Alain Badiou, however, truth is the name of the invariable that conditions philosophy, and the procedures that condition philosophy are procedures of truth art, love, science, and politics. Badious position sets itself against an overwhelmingly inuential trend of the last century whereby all philosophical problems tended to be reduced to a question of language; the question of Being thus became synonymous with the question of language. An avowed Platonist, Badiou names the representatives of this inuential tradition Sophists. The common denominators of the Sophist tradition are the reduction of thought to an effect of language games or discourses and the attempt to replace the idea of truth with rules and regimes of power. Badiou has called a halt to these games by insisting that without the concepts of the subject, being, and truth, there is no such thing as philosophy. Another predicament of modern philosophy is its becoming tied or sutured to one, and only one, of its procedures. Philosophy exists only against the background of the four distinct procedures of truth. What makes Plato the originator of philosophy is his articulation of these four conditions, none of which may be lacking if thought is to deserve the name philosophy. Epistemology is a reduction of philosophy to science; Marxism, a reduction of philosophy to politics; and deconstruction (as

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represented by Derrida and Rorty), a reduction of philosophy to literature or art. Finally, psycho-analysis represents the modern conceptualization of love: it is the procedure that presents the truth of the disjunction of the sexual positions. Lacans work and his crucial proposition that there is no sexual relation is the modern answer to Platos Symposium a procedure of truth that has yet to form a suture. The quotation from Nietzsche cited above could imply a subscription to the traditional interpretation of Nietzsche as instigator of a historicist trend.2 But the standard opposition between truth as, on the one hand, universal or one, and, on the other hand, relative, historically variable, multiple (and as such given up as a central concept of philosophy), rests on a common presupposition: that truth is a matter of correctness or correspondence. Traditionally truth has its place in judgment, in the proposition; truth is predicative truth. Predicative or propositional truth is rooted in the accordance between a determining assertion and what the assertion is about. Truth is a question of correspondence between a proposition and that to which the proposition refers. This implies that truth is essentially connected to a question of the correctness of a representation. This is what Badiou calls instead veracity, which implies correctness and even righteousness.3 Historicists assume truth is a matter of correspondence and universality and then jettison the notion in favor of an examination of historically variable discursive practices. The quotation from Nietzsche calls this historicist maneuver into question. Ultimately, historicists remain in a world of mere appearances.

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AS FAR AS TRUTH IS CONCERNED, ONE NEVER KNOWS It is possible to read Heideggers entire work as an incessant effort to dissolve within meta-physics the constitutive opposition between the true world and the world of appearances. While in Nietzsche the abolishment of the true world also leads to a destruction of the world of appearances, and thus to a dissolution of their opposites, it is only in Heidegger that truth becomes the guiding thread of an entire philosophy, a xed idea through which one can chart both the crucial shifts and continuity within Heideggers work.4 In Being and Time, the idea of truth as propositional truth, as a question of correspondence between statement and matter, rests on a prepredicative concept of truth that founds all predicative truth. This prepredicative truth has to do with the mode of mans being, or Dasein. Mans being is to be there the Da of Dasein in the world, open to the world, (in-der Welt-sein and Erschlossenheit). And the way the world is open to Dasein is truth. Truth is here no longer a question of cognition, but of how mans way of being is an understanding and interpretation, an openness, an unconcealedness (in contradistinction to being rst a subject and then having this understanding). Truth means the same as matter (Sache) and that which reveals itself (Sichselbstzeigendes). Truth is thus used terminologically to determine the difference between

beings and Being. Truth stands in an original connection to Being.5 Contrary to the modern idea that the place of truth rests in the proposition, Heideggerian truth stands in an original relation to Being. Heidegger hereby unties the knot between truth and knowledge.6 Heidegger sticks to this revelatory denition of truth throughout his work, but after the famous Kehre that is, after Being and Time and his turning away from phenomenology a shift toward a conictual conception of truth can be detected. Now truth is no longer just a question of Daseins openness and being-in-the-world; now the essence of truth becomes a conict between revealing and concealing. Truth is translated from the ancient Greek a-letheia, and means unconcealedness, revelation, and un-forgetting, and not, as was already stated, correspondence. This point is made in Heideggers reading of Plato and it is at this point that the inuence on psychoanalysis is obvious, for the symptom is dened as an effect of the unconscious the symptom qua symptom is a failed repression, a compromise that both reveals and conceals the truth of the subject. The idea of truth as correspondence implies harmony, correctness, or identity between two entities. Truth conceived as event, on the contrary, implies disruption, conict, or at least dynamics. An event is distinct from what Badiou calls a situation, which is any structured multitude, any state of affairs. According to Badiou, if no event supplements the situation with something that cannot be integrated or conceptualized within the situation a surplus sig-nier, a surplus name there is no question of truth, only of truthfulness, veracity. The psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious and its effect, the symptom, can serve as a paradigmatic example of an event as surplus name or supernumerary name both at the level of Freuds theory as a procedure of truth and at the level of the subject. The unconscious as name did not belong to the scientic situation of Freuds time. The unconscious was, to be sure, not an unknown concept, but what Freuds concept sought to name was until then foreclosed from knowledge.7 It did not t and could never be integrated into the given situation, the science of psychology and neurology of Freuds time. The concept of the unconscious named, rather, holes in knowledge both at the level of scientic discourse and at the level of the subject. What differentiates procedures of truth, or generic procedures, 8 from the accumulation of knowledge is the fact that truth is an event, a moment of truth. A moment is to time what the geometrical point is to space, that is, it has no extension. It is a point of transition between the future and the past. There is a before and an after a moment; the moment is irreversible, a point of no return. As long as nothing happens to disrupt the given rules and state of affairs, knowledge, cognition, and correct statements are at play, yet such a state is never a question of truth strictly speaking but, to repeat, is merely one of veracity. As far as truth is concerned, one can never know truth disrupts the well-known. Truth cannot be integrated or assimilated into the given structure or the established vocabulary of the situation, and it is radically unpredictable
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in contrast to the veracity of propositions concerning the ideal of consistent chains of causes and predictable future effects.

TRUTH IN PLATOS CAVE

Heidegger nds the distinction between truth as aletheia and truth as orthotes (what is right, as in orthodox and orthography) in Platos parable of the cave. Heideggers basic claim is that in this allegory a transition takes place from a nonmetaphysical, or pre-Socratic, conception of truth to a proper metaphysical one, that is, from a conception of truth as correspondence and correctness to one of unconcealedness. The elements in this allegory are images of different experiences of beings.9 Here is a short summary of the parable: People are tied up in a cave. A re behind them casts shadows on the wall facing them. The re is an image of the sun and the tied-up people perceive the shadows on the wall as reality, as an image of the human condition and the entities that surround people. Though the people are prisoners, they feel at home and are condent in their surroundings. The beings outside the cave are images of the Being of beings, the Being of everything about which it can be said that it is, how Being shows itself, its appearance. The Greek word for appearing is idea. What is outside the cave are the ideas without which people could not see and perceive this or that entity a house, a number, a god as this particular entity house, number, and god, and what is commonly understood to be real, the shadows on the wall of the cave, are only shadows of the ideas. Ideas are the condition of possibility for anything to be perceivable or calculable. In other words, ideas are not images a subject can have. The sun outside the cave is an image of that which makes the ideas intelligible, the Idea of ideas, or the idea of the Good. The idea of the Good makes this world perceivable and familiar. Visible or perceivable does not mean that a being is depicted on a subjects retina; rather, the ideas make it possible to see something as something. Platos realism consists in the fact that ideas are real. The important point of this allegory, according to Heidegger, is not, however, the conditions inside and outside the cave, but the transition from one state to another: getting accustomed to, rst, the re in the cave, then, the daylight and, nally, the return into the darkness of the cave. These transitions, these processes of habituation, are what Plato designates as paideia, formation. These transitions and formations concern the very being of mankind, the very change of being. The allegory of the cave illustrates a process of formation. And in Heideggers interpretation of the allegory, the change in the concept of truth makes the process of paideia possible.10 Paideia means bildung, formation, education but with a view to an ideal, a Vorbild, which in Germanic languages means an image (Bild) that precedes (Vor) and guides the formation (in Lacanian terms: an imaginary ideal). So formation and education do not presuppose that man is an empty

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container wherein knowledge can be accumulated, but designate a process whereby the being of man is transformed. There is a before and an after paideia. Formation designates a conversion of man in the sense that everything that previously seemed evident appears now in a new light. The undisguised, the self-evident, changes. This is what the trip out of the cave and especially the return back into the cave are supposed to illustrate insofar as paideia is under an obligation to oppose what is given as the ruling truth, as reality. Truth is not something that is seen once and for all, as when one sees the light, but is the result of an incessant wrestling from a state of occultation. A parallel to this can be found in Badious idea of an events demanding delity. To designate an event as a point of no return calls for a proviso, namely that it needs someone to keep it alive, so to speak. Lacans return to Freud is an example of delity toward the Freudian unconscious as an event, a passage out of the cave, and his seminars, the transmittance of the analytic experience, constitute a return into the cave the Freudian cause (la cause freudienne) is the slightly pompous but nevertheless signicant title of one of the many schools of psychoanalysis.
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PAIDEIA AND THE ANALYTIC DISCOURSE

Lacans distinction between an act and acting out can clarify what is meant by paideia. Acting out consists of the miming of what cannot be articulated by, or integrated in, a chain of signiers; it is what is unheard-of. An act, however, has nothing to do with performing anything. Anyone may stumble, forget, or misplace things, but such slips are acts, in the psychoanalytical sense, if they 1) raise a question (I wonder what it means?) and 2) occasion an analysis that reveals that the slip was a metaphor for a repressed connection between signiers. Therefore it is only appropriate to talk about an act and a symptom in the psychoanalytical sense, in the past tense: it was an act, it was a symptom. The psychoanalytic act implies a new start. An act is an event, an unexpected and unpredictable occurrence. No act is one in and of itself; no act means anything specic. To start or end an analysis may be a true act, or just another lap on the nomadic route of therapy. An act is an acting out, a symptom, if it is a compromise between avoiding and asking for an interpretation, of being understood by the Other. Perverse acts can be difcult to distinguish from neurotic acting out. The crucial difference is that the perverse act does not ask to be interpreted or understood, since it disavows any question, and thereby disavows any lack. An act is a true act when desire is no longer limited by the fundamental fantasy; this means that the matrix, the clich is broken. A true act is not a repetition. The analytic intervention or interpretation of speech is a true act if, and only if, it is not repetitive. An interpretation is a singular act; it cannot be generalized in manuals or methods of analysis. It is a singular experi-

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ence, and its very singularity creates a problem for the transmission of psychoanalytic thought, or what constitutes psychoanalytic thinking. The analytic discourse exists only in the singular, nongeneralizable moment: this moment where the bond between the analysand and the analyst has reached a point of no return is a passage out of the cave and back; it is Platos paideia. The analysts acts cannot always be analytical; his interventions may also be formed by the discourse of the university in which case they are explanatory, giving sense to this, that, or the other or of the hysteric in which case they are questioning, demanding. When psychoanalysis is analytic, the truth of the subject occurs; he is shaken to his very foundation, as the expression goes. A true act unchains the people in the cave and drags them out of their safe prison; a true act contests the power of the fundamental fantasy, and thereby the ruling shadows of a reality. An act challenges and transgresses the law. In Plato, man begins to have a relation to beings as he must develop the right eye for beings in order to be able to see the light, to see the truth. In the allegory of the cave, the transition from one state to another consists in a disciplining of the eye. Truth is now a question of being and seeing correctly, of the eyes being in accord with that which is, in contrast to the pre-Socratic notion of truth as disclosure or revelation, an opening of the world and the familiar surroundings given to man. In pre-Socratic times mans being was this disclosure, this familiarity with the surroundings. After Plato the surroundings are not just surroundings but something to which one has a relation. Before truth was a quality or trait of the surroundings, the beings in themselves. Now truth is a question of the orthodoxy (orthotes) of the gaze. In Platos text, however, there is a tension or conict between truth as unveiling, undisguising, or unconcealing and truth as correctness, rightness, or orthodoxy and this tension inaugurates nothing less than philosophy proper, that is, metaphysics in Heideggers terms. This conict is the starting point of both a break from the ancient concept of truth and the origin of a modern concept of truth. The Being of beings is transferred to the idea. Hereby the ontological difference between beings (objects, entities, qualities, relations, values, ideals) and the question of the Being of beings is forgotten through a trick that answers the question of Being with the idea, another thing about which you can say that it is. Thinking as metaphysics becomes both ontology and theology in Plato. Nietzsches true world has been created. When truth becomes a question of the orthodoxy of the gaze, man becomes the starting point, background, and center of rotation, which is why the beginning of metaphysics is also the beginning of humanism, according to Heidegger. Metaphysics is that which places man in the middle of things without necessarily making him the highest being. This is what humanism proper does (now without inverted commas). In this sense the conception of truth in Heideggers Being and Time remains humanistic; that is, truth is relative to the being of Dasein.11 The forgetting of the question of Being, the question of ontological difference, starts with Plato,

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who answers the question. Metaphysics becomes a sequence of substituting centers idea, God, cogito, the will to power. Yet what remains constant is the notion that essence is one, eternal, outside time, unchangeable, absolute. The eternal recurrence of the same means that Being is thought of as the unchangeability of Being. This change in the Being of truth is what Heidegger calls historical presence (geschichtliche Gegenwart). It is present in the denition of truth as a question of certainty and in the fact that the conict or ambiguity in Platos text is a conict or ambiguity of our time. The past is a mirror placed in front of us. The ancient concept of truth as unconcealedness, as something that interrupts a continuity, has returned in contemporary thinking and created the conict of our present day. Truth has become performative rather than constative. And the conict that results can, to repeat, be found in Lacans denition of truth as that which makes holes in knowledge, that which resists knowledge. As does the unconscious. In metaphysics, the Other exists as foundation, as subject in the philosophical sense. The question of Being is not irreducible; it can be reduced to idea, God, history, subject, discourse, or language. The Other is not lacking. This is because metaphysics has closed, covered up, forgotten, denied, or disavowed the question of Being with one of these answers: idea, God, history, and so on that cover over the lack in the Other. By calling philosophy metaphysics, Heidegger wishes to expose this cover up and reawaken the question of Being. If the pseudo-clinical categories of neurosis, perversion, and psychosis are equivalent to the Existenzialen of Heideggers Being and Time, that is, formal conditions of possibility for beingin-the-world, as some have claimed, one is justied in asking in what sense these categories serve to present the problem of the Others lack. We will claim that the psychoanalytic concepts of repression (Verdrngung), disavowal (Verleugnung), and foreclosure (Verwerfung) are, rst, three variations on the theme of the forgetting of the question of Being, and, second, that neurotic repression, as opposed to disavowal and foreclosure, creates the possibility of recognizing the question of Being as a question, in other words, of recognizing a lack of knowledge as lack; neurotic repression creates the possibility for an un-forgetting or reawakening of the question of Being. There is no automatism at play here. The disavowal of lack is exemplied by the savant, the encyclopedic attitude that believes that any lack, any hole, can at least in principle and in due time be closed by the accumulation of knowledge, thus preserving the stability of the situation.

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HEIDEGGER THE MOST SUBLIME OBSESSIONAL

The neurotic is troubled by knowledge: he doubts, he inquires. This is the reason why he may try to obtain truth through the analytic experience, but not necessarily. With respect to neurosis, a

distinction must be made between a hysterical and an obsessional relation to knowledge. The difference depends on whether knowledge can or cannot be attributed to the other (at the level of the imaginary). As Denise Lachaud has said: The obsessional structure can be regarded as a true illness of knowledge. The hysteric attributes a superior or failing knowledge to the Other; the obsessional takes complete responsibility for the difculties concerning his position regarding knowledge and thereby relieves the Other of this problem. The more he believes, the more he doubts.12 Unlike the hysteric, the obsessional does not put the particular other in the position of the Other; he relieves the other of this task. He is thus in constant doubt. When anyone offers to be of assistance to him, to ll in his lack of knowledge with authoritative answers, the obsessional is prepared to double up on the question by saying, Yes, very well, but this answer only raises the question.... This is just what Heidegger does in Being and Time, where, in the nal paragraph, he poses three questions regarding being and time.13 Heidegger did not answer his question of the Being of beings because it stays a question, not a lack in the ontic sense, something that in principle could be answered by the learned encyclopedist, but a lack in the ontological sense, something that must be recognized as a question. Metaphysics is the denial or disavowal of this question as such. The question is the precondition for what Heidegger calls thinking. In order for events to happen in thought, a neurotic relation to knowledge must be presupposed. It demands a focus on the question whether a new element should surface, whether something should occur, should show up that could be recognized as something that could not be tted into the given situation. In Letter on Humanism, Heidegger claims that you have to be able to wait in order to think.14 Uncertainty or doubtfulness is the precondition for thinking. Heidegger is, in other words, like all true philosophers, a neurotic. But while the hysteric believes in absolute knowledge, the obsessional doubts and asks questions without believing in the Other. Just as Hegel was the most sublime hysteric, according to Lacan and later Slavoj iek,15 so Heidegger was, as evidenced by the unanswered and rhetorical questions everywhere in the body of his work, the most sublime obsessional.16 The question of the meaning of Being does not expect an answer; rather, any effort to answer this question only demonstrates an embarrassing and fundamental misunderstanding of the question, yet another version of the very forgetting of the question of Being that characterizes metaphysics.17 Heidegger incessantly circles the question of the emptiness of Being. In What is Called Thinking?, what is to be thought is that which withdraws (Entzug) or is withheld (Vorenthalt), and to withhold is what is called an occurrence, an event (Ereignis):
Withdrawal is an event. In fact, what withdraws may even concern and claim man more essentially than anything present that strikes and touches him. Being struck by actuality is what we like to regard
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as constitutive of the actuality of the actual. However, in being struck by what is actual, man may be debarred precisely from what concerns and touches him touches him in the surely mysterious way of escaping him by its withdrawal. The event of withdrawal could be what is most present in all our

presents, and so innitely exceeds the actuality of everything actual.18 Denial is a symptom when, like all symptoms, it functions as a failed repression, a failed withdrawal. Truth is at the same time withheld and that which touches us, attracts us. Truth as a-letheia, the un-veiled, the non-hidden, the un-forgotten occurs (ereignen). The privative a, like the privative un in the unconscious, implies an oscillation between revelation or unveiling, on the one hand, and withdrawal, on the other. Thinking, as distinct from accumulating knowledge about the world, concerns itself with thinking this withdrawal, and metaphysics, thus the history of philosophy, consists of variations on the theme of thinking and naming this withdrawal. This is one of the reasons why it does not make sense to talk about progress in philosophy. Philosophy is nothing but the effort to think this thing that is not an entity, an object, but Being. Badiou explicitly disassociates himself from any reduction to historicism of an alleged Heideggerian stamp. For Badiou, Being is not a question of philosophy but rather of mathematics. While a faithful presentation of this original point would demand a careful presentation of the mathematical arguments of Ltre et lvnement, we can only say here that the project is consonant with Lacans naming mathematics the science of the real. According to Heidegger, the mathematical stems from the Greek mathesis, which means to learn and mathemata, what can be learned. The mathematical is a general question of how beings appear, while mathematics is only a specic version of the mathematical. Traditionally, the mathematical is identied with the question of numbers, but it is undecided whether this is due to the fact that the essence of mathematics is numbers or, on the contrary, that the essence of numbers is mathematical. According to Heidegger, the latter is the case: the mathematical concerns learning what we already know. When we see a plant, we see it only because we already know what a plant is, though only in a vague, undetermined, and general way. When we acquire knowledge about particular sorts of plants, numbers, or things in general, we learn something that we already know: the plant-like about the plant, the number-like about the number, the thing-like about the thing. As far as the mathematical is concerned, we do not learn anything new but get to know what we already know. This is the reason why the number is a model of the mathematical. We do not learn what the natural number 3 means by studying three roses, three apples, or three objects. We can only count three objects because we already know the natural number 3. The number 3 is not the third but, rather, the rst number. When we have two objects, for instance a fork and a knife, we say a pair or both. When we add the spoon, we begin to count. The third gives the rst its place in the sequence of natural numbers. An order, a sequence of numbers, is not established until the third element is considered. Then the previous pair becomes the rst and the second. At least three elements are required to establish an order such as the natural numbers; similarly,

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the symbolic order demands as a minimum three elements.19

TIME AND BEING

Truth becomes a question of the historicity of Being and involves the crucial concept of the event (Ereignis) in the late Heidegger. Can Heidegger be cited in support of the abandonment of truth in favor of a question of historically variable discursive practices? His inuence on one of, if not the greatest historicist of the last century, Foucault, can hardly be underestimated. But both an afrmative and a negative answer demand reservations. Heidegger is not a historicist in the sense that neither truth nor the question of Being are historically reducible in his later writings. To reduce Heidegger to a historicist position is to miss the point of his (and Nietzsches) dissolving of the traditional conict between truth as universal and truth as a historically variable state of affairs. Being and Time did attempt to reduce Being to time; time was the horizon of Being. This text was nevertheless a traditional, systematic project, that is, it was a presentation of the formal conditions of possibility for being-in-the-world in distinction to a historiographic project, the approach of the history of philosophy. This systematic and phenomenological approach was given up after Being and Time. Now, as has been repeatedly remarked, Heidegger was supposed to write a book with the reversed title Time and Being. He didnt. Instead he wrote an article by the same name, and throughout this article he presented Being and times respective irreducibility, or to be more precise, he argued that the event (Ereignis) is not an inclusive term for Being and time, that Being and time cannot be reduced to the event.20 Being and Time could be called a historicist effort if the questions at the end of the work and paragraph 70 are considered, but Heidegger is not a historicist who has taken sides on the classical metaphysical opposition between being and appearance. The historicist will claim that everything is reducible to a contingent, historically variable, discursive practice. But being is not time. There is something that is not reducible to time and historicity. But this something is neither in the form of the good, old condition of possibility or foundation for time, nor is it nothing. This something that is not nothing is what thinking is about insofar as it is both revealing and withdrawing. What counts is the quiet, lets wait and see responsiveness to anything that does not t into the given order. The attitude is unobtrusive, but it is a kind of passive attitude that is anything but dwelling on bygone days. As already mentioned, to Heidegger the past is like a mirror placed before oneself: the past is something to which one speaks and something with which one has a conversation. It is never a question of either extracting sense from the past, what was it really like? nor is it a question of attributing sense to the past in a nominalist way. Heideggers reading of Platos allegory of the cave serves as an example; his outstanding readings of Nietzsche could serve as another. This is why Heidegger speaks in a remarkably untroubled way about essences (Wesen),

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and not least about the essence of truth. Traditionally, Wesen means the unchangeable kernel of an entity, but etymologically it also originates from the verb, that is, a word that incarnates process, dynamics. Das Wesen west is not simply cryptic; it is an oscillation between occurrence and withdrawal, Being and Time. What speaks against reducing Heidegger to a historicist position is the parallel that is easily established between Heideggers question of Being and Lacans question about the real and the object a. Historicity is the different ways of thinking this Wesen, this real that withdraws from being thought, makes holes, and resists sense. Similarly, the object a cannot be represented, but only presented in the form of a partial object that can stand in for this absence. The real is not outside or before the symbolic, but is rather introduced by and dependent on the symbolic in the form of that which withdraws, even by that which is expelled and nevertheless keeps coming back to the same place.
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1.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici, ed. Dr. Oscar Levy (New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1964) vol. XVI, 25. [Translation modied]

the horizon of Being? (Heidegger, Being and Time, 488). 14. Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, in Heideggers Basic Writings: From Being and Time to The Task of Thinking (1964), ed. David Farrel-Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). 15. As expounded especially in Slavoj iek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991). 16. In What Is Metaphysics? the question of the Being of beings remains an open question: What is Called Thinking? For questioning is the piety of thought (Denn das Fragen ist die Frmmigkeit des Denkens), Heidegger writes in The Question Concerning Technology, in The Question Con-cerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 35. 17. And if this were not enough, in The Nature of Language, Heidegger casts doubt on the question of the question: What do we discover when we give sufcient thought to the matter? This, that the authentic attitude of thinking is not a putting of questions rather, it is a listening to the grant, the promise of what is to be put in question. (On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz [New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1971], 71). 18. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 9. 19. See Jacques Lacan, Le sminaire sur la lettre vole, in crits (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1966), 47, and Marc Darmon, Essais sur la topologie lacanienne (Edition de lAssociation Freudienne), 111, where this point is presented by the most simple example: heads or tails. 20. His argument in Time and Being is that Appropriation is not the encompassing general concept under which Being and time could be subsumed (On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh [New York: Harper & Row, 1972], 21).

2. To Badiou it is art, or to be more precise, the poem that returns in Nietzsche (and Heidegger) through an antiPlatonic retroaction (Manifesto for Philosophy, ed. and trans. Norman Madarasz [Albany: SUNY Press, 1989], 43). But this is another discussion. Here we are more concerned with the question of historicism. 3. Ibid., 37. 4. I have done this in Heidegger og teknikkens tidsalder (Heidegger and the Age of Technics), (Aarhus, 1990). 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, eds. John McIntyre and Ian T. Ramsey, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robin-son (London: SCM Press, 1962), 256. 6. See 44: Dasein, Disclosedness, and Truth, in Being and Time. 7. Badiou, Forclos du savoir, in Ltre et lvnement (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 363. 8. Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 35. 9. As it is customary, I will translate Sein with Being, in Latin esse, and das Seiende, understood as that which is, in Latin ens, empirical realities, abstract ideas, mathematical formulas, God as beings. 10. Heidegger, Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997), 19. 11. Because the kind of Being that is essential to truth is of the character of Dasein, all truth is relative to Daseins Being (Heidegger, Being and Time, 270). 12. Denise Lachaud, Lenfer du devoir: Le discours de lobsessionel (Paris, Editions Denol, 1995), 160. [Authors translation] 13. How is this mode of the temporalizing of temporality to be interpreted? Is there a way which leads from primordial time to the meaning of Being? Does time itself manifest itself as
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NEIGHBORHOOD OF INFINITY:

ON BADIOUS DELEUZE: THE CLAMOR OF BEING

sam gillespie

In his polemical monograph on Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou wastes no time confronting the reader head-on. That Deleuze is a great thinker of the multiple, that his philosophy liberates its reader from the limitations of unity and negation, that the new can emerge only as a perpetual refolding of the past: these assumptions are challenged at the outset. Yet Badiou is no neutral critic of Deleuze, and this is what makes Deleuze: The Clamor of Being a notable contribution to the expanding canon of Deleuze studies. Deleuze is a philosopher who presents Badiou with a formidable challenge on many fronts. Clearly, both orient their thought toward conceptions of novelty, multiplicity, and the event; one could even say that as a philosophical category, the new goes hand in hand with an ontology of the multiple. What matters, for the present, is precisely how these categories are to be thought. For Badiou, Deleuzes system must, by necessity, fall back upon general tropes of a refashioned metaphysics of the One. In many ways, this interpretation is already present in Deleuzes philosophy, and the question of whether or not Badiou accurately reads Deleuze is beside the point. The stakes of the debate should rather concern the conditions in which philosophy encounters the new. Deleuze assumes the capacity for creation at the outset: it is there in the immanence of a chaotic (if not organic) multiple that creates sinuous paths and divisions among the things of the world. Now if philosophy accounts for the force endemic to creation through erecting new concepts, novelty becomes tantamount to a description of the world.1 For Badiou, by contrast, novelty emerges only in the rarity of a vanished event that is drawn from the absolute neutrality of the void. In this respect, Badious ontology and philosophy are resolutely opposed to the tenets of the worldly. While there is not enough time to account for the advantages or setbacks of either philosophers approach, I hope that the following can outline the terms under which a dialogue can be continued. Events for Badiou have effects that resonate in any given situation; their presentation is never direct and their effects are local and always

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supported by the action of a militant subject. Such action takes the form of an intervention that has the effect of undermining and overturning previous practices and forms of knowledge. An open question for Badiou is whether or not an event belongs to the situation, that is, whether an event is a category of being or non-being. Whatever the case, the outcome is felt, qua intervention, in the redistribution of knowledge internal to any given situation. As Badiou writes in Ltre et lvnement: The essence of intervention consists in the open eld through an interpretive hypothesis concerning the there is of an event of which the presented object is the site (thus a multiple on the edge of the void), in naming that there is, and in deploying the consequences of that nomination in the space of the situation to which the site belongs. 2 Taking this into account, with particular attention to the consequences that any intervention will produce in a particular situation, I think that there is nothing here to prevent one from nding, in Badious writings, traces of events that have provoked huge debate within the arid situation of contemporary philosophy. Dont his books themselves constitute the overturning of philosophical assumptions that we have become all too comfortable with accepting as manifest facts? Do his works not, in and of themselves, establish events? Ltre et lvnement, for example, thwarts the Heideggarian assumption that Being and Time was the nal word on the forgotten question of Being and does so by virtue of its own declaration that mathematics, and only mathematics, can present Being qua Being to thought. For the cultural Levinasian, contemporary ethics must be founded upon a recognition of and respect for (cultural, racial, sexual) differences in order for a subject to be called into obligatory ethical action. Badious response, as given in his books Ethics, Saint Paul, and Abreg de metapolitique, is that far from being the ideal aspirations through which all forms of racial hatred can and should be counteracted cultural otherness and differences are the obstacle to any emancipatory politics, which instead should be established from a predicateless equality or sameness. Rather than arguing that differences constitute a radical opposition to the hegemony of white male heterosexual Eurocentrism, Badiou maintains that what has not yet been thought is ultimately the more difcult question of how to recognize the same. Philosophically, if the other doesnt matter it is indeed because the difculty lies on the side of the Same. The Same, in effect, is not what is (i.e., the innite multiplicity of differences) but what comes to be.... [I]t is a truth. Only a truth is, as such, indifferent to differences.3 In like manner, while a Foucauldian could dismiss love as a psychologically-laden, heterosexist/bourgeois construction that only serves to frustrate any real ability to experience pleasures of the body, Badiou proposes, by way of Lacan, a return to the Platonic idea of love as a particular philosophical category of truth founded on the co-existence of two unique (sexuated) positions of experience.4 Finally, there is the case of Gilles Deleuze, the thinker of difference, repetition, and becomingother. If you asked a random philosopher who Deleuze is, the answer would most likely be that Gilles Deleuze, co-author of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, was the philosopher who argued against the colonization of the ego through the Oedipal complex, so as to allow for the

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free-ow of libidinal surpluses in the form of lines of ight, deterritorializations, and schizoidnomadic ows. And, by and large, that would be correct, if Deleuze is read selectively, that is, looking only at the most restricted registers of meaning in his texts. The common reading of Deleuzes books consists in an analysis of the local or molecular level in order to focus on what is apparently dynamic in his system (the ows, the becomings, and so on), leaving the question of totality (in the form of, for instance, the Bergsonian virtual, the plane of immanence, the Spinozian substance) safe in the background. What matters in this type of reading is what can be divided and dispersed. But if we put the cyber/queer/cultural Deleuzianism aside and remain within a strictly philosophical reading of Deleuze, we see that the situation does not change much. For example, it is clear that Deleuze prefers Spinoza to Descartes because substances in the latter are distinguished from each other only in distilled, mathematical terms. Only through abstracting from the substantial differences between the attributes of thought and extension are the primary differences between the two determined on a more elevated register of two substances (res cogitans, res extensia). But for Spinoza, as read by Deleuze, this amounts to nothing more than a denial of difference as something that is real. The logic runs as follows: for something to exist, it must have a cause, either internal or external. Numerical distinction, for example, is external: if only twenty men were to exist in the world, the cause or reason for this would be external to the men themselves. As Spinoza writes, the true denition of man does not involve the number 20.5 To apply this logic to substance, which should only be dened in and of itself, and thus to posit two or more substances, is to ascribe an external cause to account for such a distinction. For Deleuze, however, to apply external causality to substance is to make it operate in a sort of indeterminate void.6 The void would be the emptiness of the distinction at hand. We know that for Spinoza, the attributes of a substance differ from one another in an actual way that depends upon a ground common to all. Deleuze, in making differences internal to a singular substance in the form of its diverse attributes, allowed for differences to become real. This ultimately constitutes a refusal of the quantitative distinction between substances so as to allow for a qualitative distinction of the attributes of that substance. As Deleuze says, Detached from all numerical distinction, real distinction is carried into the absolute, and becomes capable of expressing difference within Being, so bringing about the restructuring of other distinctions.7 Along the same lines, one should consider Deleuzes paradigmatic opposition between Hegel and Nietzsche. The generation of Hegels system is rooted in the internalizing, negative movement of positing and reection upon the abstract ground of causality. In contrast, Nietzschean becoming extends from the afrmation of a bodys capacity to act, to afrm difference as a generative power inherent to becoming itself. Nietzsche thus afrms that the power of difference between two dialectical oppositions is force itself, while the Hegelian process of sublation amounts only

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to a weakening of that force. The dialectics, Deleuze notes, certainly reects on difference, but, it inverts its image. For the afrmation of difference as such it substitutes the negation of that which differs; for the afrmation of self it substitutes the negation of the other, and for the afrmation of afrmation it substitutes the famous negation of negation.8 And this inversion qua negation of what differs would be meaningless if it were not in fact animated by forces with an interest in doing so.9 Deleuze clearly has a preference for thinkers such as Nietzsche and Spinoza who eschewed the abstract and negative unity in favor of a concrete or embodied multiplicity. And Deleuze would unquestionably appear to be the preeminent philosopher of difference, privileging becoming over sublation, productive desire over desire as lack, and immanent force over abstract transcendence. In his monograph on Deleuze, Badiou overturns these assumptions from the outset. Coming as an outsider to Deleuzes system a system that he readily admits is foreign to his own Badiou proclaims early on that Deleuzes fundamental problem is most certainly not to liberate the multiple, but to submit thinking to a renewed concept of the One.10 From this contentious beginning, the entirety of Deleuze: The Clamor of Being is devoted to upholding this thesis. The metaphysical One validated in Badious text has little in common with the One as the cornerstone of ontotheology (that is, the One as a discrete, centralized unity, or punctual point of clarity). Rather, the metaphysics of the One is present in Deleuzes system in order to provide for the best possible multiplicity, which should be understood in terms of ontological immanence. There is only one multiple in Deleuze because nothing can inhere outside multiplicity as such (no void, in other words). For to propose the existence of a void as such would be to fall back upon the abstractions of the negative that Deleuze ostensibly opposes. Immanence is not a concept foreign to Deleuze: it is usually taken as an anti-Hegelian (or anti-Lacanian) afrmation of corporeal power, a capacity to act or be affected that is inherent in any being. But for Badiou, this concept is inseparable from an idea of a totality of Being that is immanent to any singular being in its worldy manifestation. Badiou points out that Deleuze himself equates immanence and univocity.11 While Badious presentation of Deleuzes philosophy may be unrecognizable to some, he proposes his model in order to ask the ultimate Deleuzian question: what is the Being expressed by multiplicity? In other words, on what grounds is the multiple multiple? The answer Badiou gives is that for Deleuze, Being, in and of itself, is essentially unied in its multiplicity. Despite the divergent forms in which it appears, Being itself becomes singular through the neutralization of properties qua virtualization, which itself is inseparable from the disjoining of beings from their particularity.12 Deleuze describes this singularity of Being as a single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same ocean for all the drops, a single clamor of Being for all Beings.13 For Badiou the Deleuzian oppositions (virtual/actual, chance/eternal return, plane of imma-

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nence/singularities) presuppose the univocity of Being, and thus, a metaphysics of the One.14 It is, in fact, this presupposition of Being as univocal that allows precisely for the dynamic nature of Deleuzes philosophy; the movement from Being to beings presupposes its redistribution as it is divided, stratied, and dispersed across many singular cases. Conversely, lines of ight, deterriorializations, and even desire in its Deleuzian guise, are nothing other than movements away from individuation back onto an ever-changing, ever-evolving whole expressed in and of these singularities, a virtual totality. So while Being can be divided, varied, and polyvalent in its manifestations, this is only so by virtue of its essentially unied character. Badiou clearly recognizes this quality in Deleuzes philosophy when he remarks that when we have grasped the double movement of descent and ascent, from beings to Being, then from Being to beings, we have in fact thought the movement of Being itself, which is only the interval, or the difference, between these two movements (40). But from what would this difference between these two movements derive if not from the difference between the One and the multiple thus, from the presupposition of the One? To elaborate his position, Badiou devotes four chapters of his book to an analysis of Deleuzes primary doublets the virtual and the actual, time and truth, eternal return and chance, the outside and the fold in order to test the manner in which the univocity of Being is properly upheld.
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I. THE VIRTUAL AND THE ACTUAL

For Deleuze the virtual and actual are co-extensive with one another because there is no Platonic opposition between the two that one would nd in a distinction between reality and appearance. The virtual is always expressed in its various actualizations, as a subtracted part of the image. A consequence of this, at least for Badiou, is that the splitting of Being into the two voices of virtual and actual is only a requisite for afrming the univocality of Being. Being as One is said on two counts: once in its actuality, and once in the expression of its immersion in the virtual. This parallels the ascending/descending movement of Deleuzes philosophy: the actual afrms its Being as a transitory modality of the One, conceived in its virtuality that the actual actualizes (50). In this respect, the virtual is both the ground for the actual and its own ground insofar as it is the totality in which all virtualities in their various modalities inhere. Far from being opposed to each other, the actual is merely the virtual in singular form, while the virtual is nothing other than the principal name of Being. In order to illustrate the above point, consider Paul Thomas Andersons recent lm Magnolia. At the most immediate level, the lm is simply a descriptive account of one day in the lives of two dozen, seemingly unrelated individuals in southern California. There is a distraught housewife and her dying husband, a lonely police ofcer, a young drug addict, an elderly game show host,

a young game show contestant and his domineering father, a former child game show contestant who is now a nancially-strapped, closeted gay man, and so forth. These individuals could be seen as non-related singularities in the Deleuzian sense, all pursuing the course of their lives in the shared space of one lm. But shortly into the lm, it becomes evident that the scattered nature of the narrative presupposes an original relatedness that, at a previous point in time, many of these characters committed actions that affected one another. For example, Claudia, the young drug addict, is the daughter of a game show host who, years ago, molested her. From this familial conict we can then draw a tangential line connecting it to the predicaments that face several generations of that game shows contestants. Divergent lines are thus traced from the singularity of the protagonists to their multiple inter-relatedness. Here, we can witness the Deleuzian distinction between differentiation and differenciation. Differentiation indicates the determination of the virtual content of an idea, that is, in the case of the lm, the relations at the level of familial history that pose the problems that the protagonists now face. Differenciation, on the contrary, would be the actualization of that virtuality in the form of species or distinct parts that in the lm take the form of the chaotic courses constituting the breakdown in communication between the various protagonists. In other words, the differentiated relations at the level of the virtual past determine the differencial relations of the protagonists in their actual, diffuse present. We could go further and say that if the familial histories that the narrative discloses posit a virtual problem, then the actualizations in the lmic present dont pose a solution to the problem as much as they actualize an image of the virtual as problem. Actualization casts the virtual as a problem as long as these characters remain haunted by the history that incessantly throws its shadow over the present. In fact, the most banal reading of the lm would suggest that the only way for the protagonists to escape the past is to confront what is repressed: the Tom Cruise character must reconcile himself with his estranged father, Claudias father must confront the truth of his incestuous relation with his daughter, and so on. But to remain at this level of analysis risks conating the Deleuzian virtual with an empirical past. The virtual is not simply any particular past, but the whole of time, the past that co-exists with the present. At the lms beginning, three short stories are related that tell of a unique coincidence of events that culminated in death. For example, a young man jumping to his death would have been saved by an underlying awning were it not for the fact that at the moment of his fall, his mother tried to kill his father with a bullet that, by missing its intended target, kills the boy in mid-air. The intention of the brief vignettes is, of course, to frame the narrative of Magnolia with an underlying theme: there are no accidents, the chaotic randomness that could be seen as purely accidental has a causal justication not only in the individual pasts of each protagonist, but also on a higher level of convergence, or nality, that traverses time as a whole. Now, the unication of Magnolias narrative with this true virtual occurs toward the lms end, when the narrative is interrupted for three minutes with a surreal cascade of raining frog

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corpses. Is not the odd eruption within an otherwise straightforward narrative a presentation of the Deleuzian virtual, the clamor of Being, in direct form the powerful inorganic life that envelops the world?15 The lms characters nd a point of convergence, or shared existence, not in a singular event (as would be the case at the end of Robert Altmans Nashville), but rather in the fundamental coincidence of these singular stories in a swarm of esh. Why does this narrative rupture intrude into the space of the lm if not to show that the literal relations drawn between the protagonists only suppose a more elementary type of relation that can only be expressed in an undifferentiated mass of raining frogs? Thus, Andersons strategy is quintessentially Deleuzian, because it shows that every relation and every xed distribution must therefore, insofar as they are indifferent to the terms that are arrayed within them, dissolve and cause thought to return to the neutrality of what Deleuze calls extra being (34).

II. TIME AND TRUTH

Because it is articulated through the virtual, truth, for Deleuze, is necessarily given as power. This power in turn is marked through the double movement of ascent and descent: the descent toward the One/true and the re-ascent toward the multiple/false, that is, toward the simulacrum. As a substitute for the classical category of truth, Deleuze resolutely afrms the powers of the false, which are of the order of time. But Badiou, as a reader of Deleuze, asserts that the temporal powers of the false cannot be anything other than the eternity of the true.16 He bases his assessment on the triple circuit that Deleuze establishes moving from time to truth, from truth to virtuality, and from virtuality to the absolute basis of the past as eternity. Time moves to truth because it effectively replaces truth, truth moves to virtuality because it is as virtual that the truth of time moves beyond its designation as mere empirical nitude, and the absolute past of the virtual is inseparable from eternity. This latter point is the most difcult one to follow, both in Deleuze and Badiou. Essentially, the totality of the virtual cone that Deleuze borrows from Bergson is at once the ground of time, yet in itself, it is atemporal. It does not move in a linear fashion; rather, it inheres. But why is this totality that founds time atemporal? Here Badiou seems to make a surreptitious jump from the whole of time as relation to the whole of time as thought under a concept from which all temporal dimension has been eliminated (62). If, for example, we take a strip of lm, it can only be dened as moving if we conceive it as a totality. To break the lm down into individual frames leaves us only with a series of unrelated, immobile section[s] of duration, which Deleuze qualies as components of abstract time. A single frame does not move and therefore it cannotin itself bear a relation to an other object because no pure present can communicate with any other (63). It is only insofar as there is time, or a form of time, that one present can pass into another and into the past. And this form of time is not only that which
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creates time; it is what makes successive presents bear a relation to one another in the whole of time the relation is this whole. Thus, Badiou says that because this whole is a relation, it is therefore atemporal. This appears to be a weak point in Badious otherwise strongly argued polemic. It is clear that there is an empty form of time that accompanies the actualization of a present and that can be called a whole, but why call it atemporal? In every opposition that Deleuze has employed to qualify time (actual/virtual, Chronos/Aion, Eros/Thanatos) its true that the former category, and thus each repeated present, is accompanied by a second repetition that serves as the quasicause, or passage, of the former. The rst repetition takes the form of a contracted, or bound, segment of time, while the second repetition appears as an open whole. Cinematically, we can see how a projected frame needs to be followed by an interstice, or icker, in order for the next frame (next present) to come. In modern cinema, which allows for a direct presentation of time, the interstice, or cut, gains a certain autonomy, as for instance in the use of montage, of jumpcuts in the lms of Godard and Straub/Huillet, or in the temporal discontinuity of successive images in Resnais. Two disjunct shots together form a relation that effects an open meaning, but only insofar as the relation itself is external to the individual terms. For Deleuze, this whole as relation amounts to a refutation of the One: the whole undergoes a mutation because it has ceased to be the One-being in order to become the constitutive and of things, the constitutive between-two of images.17 For Badiou, who founds his multiple on the separation of the void and the inconsistency of the continuum where God inconsists, the whole as relation cannot be anything other than a One. Badious conclusion underscores a primary difference between himself and Deleuze. First, truth for Badiou is essentially non-related, or subtracted from the situation of which it is nonetheless a part. Second, truth is outside time; it is what within time exceeds time,18 even if the determination of a truth depends on a temporally retroactive maneuver (such that there will have been a truth in the situation). Truth in Badious system is the undoing of time, an interruption (64). Furthermore, Badious doctrine of truth dispenses with the whole while maintaining the multiple and refuses relation while rmly accepting that truth is immanent to its particular situation.

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III. THE ETERNAL RETURN AND CHANCE19

Deleuzes notion of repetition is rmly grounded in the repetition of difference what is repeated is never the same. By the same token, what returns is not the same, but rather the pure contingency that extends from a unique, singular throw of the dice an afrmation of the totality of chance in one singular dice throw (74). And this is the case because multiple throws annul chance. For example, the more a coin is tossed, the more likely it is that it will come up heads

as often as it will tails. Thus, what returns from a single throw is pure chance itself, since the dice have been thrown once and for all. What are we to understand by this? Badious answer is clear: chance is the chance of the One itself and by extension, this is nothing other than the radical contingency of being (73). The fact that the totality of Being can have no logical basis, or outside cause, means that it is purely contingent unto itself; it does not receive its law from elsewhere.20 By extension, the multiple virtualities that afrm possibility do not have multiple possibility as their ground or foundation. Different virtualities can be formally distinct, even if they originate from a singular cast. The ground for possibility is ultimately that of the One of the unique throw, the One of Being as it is afrmed. In turn a cyclic relation between possibility and necessity is established. The fact that there can be only one dice throw entails that there can be only one world, our world. Nietzscheans who understand the eternal return as the abnegation of ressentiment follow this logic perfectly; ressentiment always amounts to a cursing of ones fate. Small wonder, then, that the weak feel the need to posit another world (an afterlife) where their suffering will be vindicated, both in their own future happiness and in the damnation of their oppressors. We can perhaps better understand then how an afrmation amounts to saying yes to the world as it is, that is, saying yes to necessity. As Deleuze says, What Nietzsche calls necessity (destiny) is thus never the abolition of chance but chance itself. Necessity is afrmed of chance in as much as chance itself is afrmed.21 It is only through the path of ressentiment that we avoid chance though positing other worlds in which other outcomes are possible. This would be the ressentiment of the repetition of throws.22

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IV. THE OUTSIDE AND THE FOLD

These are the two fundamental concepts of the late Deleuze, derived from Foucault and Leibniz. With these concepts, Deleuze is less concerned with the ontological univocity of Being than with the relation between Being and thought. His work on these concepts could even be seen as a development of a theory of relation in his work. Moreover, it is a particular notion of the subject that will occupy a primary role in this trajectory the subject as a unique point of view from which a thought of the outside persists (62). It is easy to recognize the Foucauldian implications of the concept of the fold and the outside: the outside is a play of forces that serves to constitute a subjective interiority, the subject being nothing other that the effect of these relations (the fold of the outside). A fold can be understood in a variety of ways: as an event, an envelope, a splitting in two, or a constitution of depth from a two-dimensional surface. For both Badiou and Deleuze, what matters is that the fold is the activation of the outside via the constitution of an inside the fold

is what erects a limit between the two. The point to be retained is that the agent of folding is nothing other than Being acting upon itself, the auto-affection of the outside. This is a typical Foucauldian perpetual motion machine: power, the outside relation of forces, produces itself. Badiou adds that from these readings, it is even possible to name this folding a self and even, if one insists, a subject (90). It is at this moment of the constitution of a subject that thought enters the picture. What can be thought is the outside as relation from the perspective of the inside as fold. Ill return to the example of lm: how does one select among images and sounds in order to compose a lm, a lm that could have been composed of other images, sounds and narratives? What unies, or relates, elements that are formally distinct? A specic example could be found in lms that are composed of competing narratives, such as Kieslowskis Blind Chance or the more recent (and less interesting) Run Lola Run. In both lms, three different takes on the same narrative, each involving the same character(s), unfold in the space of one lm, leaving the question of a singular veracity irrelevant, or at least open to doubt. Blind Chance tells of three possible sequences of events that could occur to a man about to catch a train to Warsaw. By catching the train, his life follows one course (working for the Polish Communist Party); by bumping into a police ofcer on his way to the train, he is arrested and thrown in jail (thus becoming a worker for the resistance); by missing the train, he retires to a quiet, apolitical life as a local doctor (who eventually dies in an airplane explosion). This is exteriority in extreme form, an ironic take on the Leibnizian divine perspective. There is no single world in which one thing could be said to occur instead of another: the protagonist could live or die, rebel or nd love. The problem thus posed here is by what procedure can one cover the conguration of forces that populate the outside? (89). How can these external worlds be encompassed by one mind, one thought? In the case of these two lms, we can see that the limit that traces an inside is the procedure by which the protagonists remain the same despite the different narratives and circumstances that befall them. The limit, in other words, could be seen as the thread that is traced from the rst Lola in Run Lola Run to her appearances in the second and third segments; the same follows for Blind Chance. Clearly Kieslowskis intent was to establish a cohesion among the different manifestations of the same character: even if the main protagonist is forced, in different narratives, to assume various political stances (for the Party, for the opposition, apolitical), his inherent goodness as a person will allow him to remain the same regardless of the circumstances. Here, the subject of the lm is the limit to the outside, the convergence of specic singularities that populate diverging narratives. Of course, a Foucauldian may object that the subject cannot preexist the outside relations of force, thus making the question of the inherent goodness of a human being obsolete, but this is not the point. What is signicant is that the constitution of this internal space of a protagonist is what puts thought in the image by solving a problem introduced from the outside. By what means can thought establish connections and relations

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(thinking) within pure exteriority (being)? Badious conclusion then is unequivocal: we can say that the subject (the inside) is the identity of thinking and being (90). But what does this have to do with the One? Are we not, in the example of Kieslowski, dealing with multiple worlds that mutually exclude one another? We could turn to Deleuzes use of Leibniz, who posited an innity of worlds from which God selected the best possible. The above question could be restated: how is the unrelated related? In The Fold, Deleuze notes that there are four things to be considered in this instance. First, there are the multiple worlds themselves. Then there are the singularities of events, acts, objects and so on that comprise one or several worlds. Third, there are the souls or monads that express the world (and Deleuze notes that the world cannot exist outside the monads that express it). Finally, there is the divine perspective from which the best possible world is chosen. For Deleuze, in Leibniz we begin with the world as if with a series of inections or events: it is a pure emission of singularities.23 These singularities converge with other singularities that inhabit the same world, and diverge with those that occupy other possible worlds. The concentration or convergence of these singularities serves to dene an individual. In the case of Adam, the rst man, Deleuze offers four singularities: being the rst man, living in a garden of paradise, having a wife derived from his rib, and having sinned. The possibility of a fth singularity, resistance to temptation, marks a ssure that does not coincide with the rst four it belongs to another world (where Adam does not sin). The incompossibility of diverging worlds is thus dened in Deleuze not through contradiction, but through the proliferation of singularities. This concept of the world as an emission of singularities is upheld by Leibniz only in as much as it serves the purposes of a God who selects among the best possible worlds, and thus among the best possible singularities. The justication for our world appears to be tautological: if this world exists, it is not because it is the best, but because rather the inverse: it is the best because it is the one that is.24 This problem phrased in terms of a question is: how is human freedom possible in a world where history and events appear to be pre-constituted and justied as such? Now, Deleuze nuances his argument with the concept of inclusion; that is, what contains and constitutes the intrinsic determination (in the past and future) of a subject by way of the present. As Deleuze says, Because it includes what I am doing right now what I am in the act of doing my individual notion also includes everything that has driven me to what I am doing, and everything that will result from it, all the way to innity. 25 In Blind Chance, for example, it is clear that the future determinations of the protagonist, Vitek, hinge upon the singularity of the event of catching a train, an occurrence of pure chance. But the diverging worlds themselves coalesce at an end point that hinges upon another decision, whether or not to board an airplane to France. This nal decision that confronts Vitek in all three versions of the narrative will determine his fate in the different instances, breaking the narrative apart anew into further possibilities;

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Viteks breakdown in the rst narrative may determine a new beginning, while his decision to board the plane in the third may end his life. Unity enters the picture in the coalescence of the past and future in the present of an act; here Deleuze is quite explicit:
When Leibniz appeals to the perfect or completed act (entelechia), he is not dealing with an act that inclusion would require us to consider as past, and that would return to an essence. The condition of closure, of being shut off, has an entirely different meaning: the perfect, completed act is that which receives from the soul that includes it the unity proper to a movement that is being made. [The] act 26 is free because it expresses the whole of the soul in the present.

It should now be clear what was meant in the earlier assertion that immanence is univocity. That the soul is immanent to its actions entails that the totality of the soul is expressed in the present of an act; conversely, the act is an immanent expression of the totality of the soul. Now, for Badiou, the problem is not simply that the interiority of the subject must assume the form of both the One and the multiple (although this clearly is a problem for him). The problem is also that the act that expresses the One has been reduced to a fact; the subject represents the unity of this world as the best possible world and the divine perspective.27 However, the all that is expressed in the act negates any outside term (even that of God) that could limit the free act. The free act, in other words, is the coincidence of the individual with God. One could say that the amplitude of the soul in the act is an imitation of God.28 That the event is a fact (that it is expressive of our world as it is) is what, for Badiou, abolishes chance. Badious alternative, on the contrary, is that the event always implies a separation from our world.29 How, asks Badiou, is truth possible in a world where nothing new can occur, where the event has been reduced to fact, and where chance and necessity are the same? How can the new be new if everything is merely a fold of the past? Is it not rather the case that absolute beginnings are derived from the void, as opposed to the totality of the past, even if they are the return of what differs? And nally, are we really to believe Badiou when he states that the conict at hand is merely an issue of personal taste, a choice of one philosophy over another? My partisan nature can hardly consent to such a cordial gesture. If there is an advantage to Deleuzes system, it is that he has thought through relation (this is particularly true of the later works). The unfortunate downside of this is that relation is conceived only in terms of everything, a whole truth is merely the description of this everything. This ultimately is what constitutes the stakes of the debate, and I side easily with Badiou. Despite all we hear about the creative or generative nature of Deleuzes philosophy (the fact that it makes its own object and truths), are we not generating these truths from the pure descriptive-

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ness of what is, the world counted as one? Is Deleuzes philosophy not nally derived from the presence of life, of the world, to which considerations of truth are ultimately subordinate? With Badiou, I maintain that it should be possible to say that a truth is always opposed to the worldly: a truth is action, and not presence. 30 The most obvious objection that one could make to Badiou is that he overstates the point without considering the advantages of Deleuzian unity. Isnt it the case that this unity is present only because it presupposes the best possible multiplicities, the greatest lines of ight? Deleuzes Spinozianism rears its head at this point. The multiple is One because, in pre-Cantorian terms, there cannot be more than one innity nor, for that matter, can the innite be composed of parts (as Spinoza remarks, if we divide an innite expanse into feet, on the one hand, and inches, on the other, we would have one innity twelve times greater than the other).31 Badiou no doubt prides himself on being a great thinker of multiplicity as well, maybe even a formidable competitor for Deleuze on this count, and we could, point by point, correlate the Deleuzian conceptions of event, subject, series, relation, and truth to Badious own to see in what manner they differ. But I will curtail this comparison. We do not have at our disposal the resources with which to assess the usefulness and advantages of set theory as a gure of multiplicity. Sufce it to say that while Deleuzes event is continual expression, Badious event is rare punctuality. While Deleuze considers Being as an organic totality that founds and is expressed by the multiplicity of this world, Badiou will only tolerate a set-theory ontology founded exclusively on the void that appears in subtracted form in the situation. And while we could see the subject in the later Deleuze as a gure of complete interiority, an inection of the outside, Badious subject is only the nite status of a procedure of truth. There is still too much Badiou that has not been read in this country and, by extension, there is still too much that will be left to misunderstanding in the otherwise polemical nature of the works that have been translated into English. For all his contentiousness, Badiou is also a complex thinker who weaves Cantorian set theory, Maoist politics, Lacanian antiphilosophy, and Mallarms poetics among other things into a philosophical system that can easily meet the challenges posed by Heidegger, Levinas, and Deleuze. This complexity of Badious own system has yet to be assessed in the English-speaking world. I will not go any further into the clarity of Badious argument, except to say that his book is a strongly argued depiction of someone who, for Badiou, was a great challenge. Yet Badiou and Deleuze share several concerns, not least of which is the desire to conceive philosophy beyond the supposed limits of human temporal nitude and the constructions of language so as to propose a future for thought freed from the grips of a philosophical object. For both Deleuze and Badiou, philosophy has no object: neither Being, nor language, nor the particularity of a given situation or alliance (for example, the history of philosophy). Philosophy involves thought itself recognized in its proper capacity either to generate concepts deduced from the observation of the world (the crux of Deleuzes unique empiricism) or to ultimately equate Being with math-

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ematical formalization as in Badious ontology. Despite the obvious differences, Badiou and Deleuze share the effort of liberating the thought of Being in its inherent multiplicity. The fact that Badiou chooses an ontology grounded in Cantorian set theory, and Deleuze instead opts for an organic, vitalistic vision of Being wholly immanent unto itself, only illuminates a difference that is endemic to philosophy itself. In Deleuze: The Clamor of Being what we witness is not the tearing down of someone who, for many, is the great champion of plurality. We have rather an exchange between two thinkers who can only speak to each other from divergent perspectives. From Badious perspective, reading Deleuze can only force ones thinking in a direction that assumes often unrecognizable forms. This is not the Deleuze we learned in school. Yet, as we know from Badiou, it is this forcing that allows us to communicate with, and gain knowledge of, what is foreign to ourselves. The price to be paid for that knowledge however, may be the sacrice of the previous opinions in which we all too frequently take comfort.

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1.

I derive this point from an essential comparison between Deleuze and Badiou (written four years prior to the publication of The Clamor of Being). See Franois Wahls introduction to Badious Conditions (Paris: Seuil, 1992).

13. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 304. Cited in Badiou, Deleuze, 11. 14. It should be noted that Badiou subscribes to a theory of univocity as well: that of the void. He also rigorously maintains that his theory of truth upholds a concept of immanence. So it is not the case that Deleuze is a thinker of unity simply because he thinks Being in terms of univocity and immanence. It is rather that his conception of multiplicity cannot tolerate anything excessive to the ontological resources of presentation. 15. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 81.
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2. Alain Badiou, Ltre et lvnement (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1988), 225. [Authors translation] 3. Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 27. 4. See Badiou, What is Love?, Umbr(a) (1996): 37-53. Reprinted in Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 263-281. 5. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, in A Spinoza Reader, trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994), Book I, Proposition 8. 6. See Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 32. Ironically enough, in his own reading, Badiou will fault Spinoza precisely for what he (Badiou) calls the foreclosure of the void. The consequence of this foreclosure is that the void will reappear in Spinozas text in the empty form of innite modes. See Badiou, Ltre et lvnement, 129-139. 7. Deleuze, Expressionism, 39.

16. Truth is classically eternal, whereas the category of time the coming to be of a truth is forever dependent on the contingency of empirical circumstances. For example, there is nothing inherently true in the statement X may happen tomorrow; it is entirely dependent on the passage of time from the present to tomorrow. Time thus places the cate-gory of truth into crisis, and the primacy of time in Deleuzes philosophy amounts to an afrmation of the powers of the false that directly belong to it. 17. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 180.

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8. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 196. 9. Ibid., 196. 10. Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 11. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically within the text. 11. See Badiou, Court trait dontolgie transitorie (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1998), 62. 12. Ibid., 62.

18. Badiou, Being By Numbers: An Interview with Lauren Sedofsky, Artforum 33.2 (October 1994): 87. 19. This is a rather cursory treatment of the following Deleuzian dyad. For a far more extensive treatment of the eternal return and chance in Badiou/Deleuze/Nietzsche, see Ray Brassiers Stellar Void or Cosmic Animal? Badiou and Deleuze, in Pli 10 (2000). 20. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 28. 21. Ibid., 26.

22. Ibid., 27. 23. Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 60. 24. Ibid., 68. 25. Ibid., 70. 26. Ibid., 70-71. 27. Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and The Baroque, trans. T. Sowley, in Gilles Deleuze and The Theatre of Philosophy, eds. Constantin Boundas and Dorethea Olkowski (New York: Routledge, 1994), 68. Of course, I am conating act with event the latter clearly being seen, by Badiou, as a fact. The entirety of this argument cannot be given in the present. It seems, however, to be the case that the singularities that constitute this world converge in the unity proper to an act. There is thus, for the purposes of my argument, a doubling between the terms event and act, and soul/monad and world, which is clear enough in Deleuze. 28. Deleuze, The Fold, 73. 29. Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, 65. Shouldnt we rather ask what are the conditions of an event for almost nothing to be an event? (ibid., 56). 30. Ibid., 69. 31. Spinoza, Ethics, Book I, Proposition 8.

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THE CONTRACTION OF BEING: DELEUZE AFTER BADIOU

adi ophir and ariella azoulay

Alain Badious reading of Deleuze is based on and organized around a single thesis: for Deleuze, philosophy is ontology and ontology is nothing but the explication of the univocity of Being. There has only ever been one ontological proposition: Being is univocal, says Badiou, quoting Deleuzes Difference and Repetition.1 The univocity of Being does not mean that there is one single entity that comprises all entities; rather, it means that there is one single Event that happens to the most diverse things that are said to be (or about which being is said), a unique Event in which all events communicate (11). Being is the same for all, for everything that happens and for everything that is said. It is said of all beings in a single and same sense and this sense is ontologically [and not only formally] identical for all the distinct entities. This is what is essential for philosophy (25). In order to explain this ontological proposition in its peculiar Deleuzian form, Badiou includes a thirty-page appendix to his book in which he presents selected passages from Deleuzes Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense, Cinema (1 and 2), and Foucault. In this appendix one nds the very core of Deleuzes thought (24), its ontological nucleus. Badiou presents this nucleus and from there he unfolds, in a kind of spiral movement, what are for him the main layers of Deleuzes thought: method, doctrine of the event, epistemology, doctrine of action, and doctrine of the subject. This elegant construction is encircled by a triple ring, which is external to Deleuzes thought itself. The triple ring is formed in the books concluding chapter where Badiou contextualizes Deleuzes philosophy in three enveloping circles. Here again Badiou moves from the inside outward, from Deleuzes politico-cultural milieu in France in the sixties and seventies to the entire history of Western philosophy. The mediating ring between these two scenes the concrete political scene and the more abstract philosophical doctrines is twentieth-century French philosophy, from Bergson and Brunschvicg to Deleuze and Badiou himself. The latter is always the one who takes the picture but is also somehow present

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in it. Indeed, for Badiou, presenting Deleuze is a form of self-presentation and self-positioning. The reader understands this from the very beginning: What a strange story my nonrelationship with Gilles Deleuze makes (1). For our purpose here, it is worthwhile locating Deleuze within the history of Western philosophy. Placing Deleuze in this context means, rst of all, placing him among the Greeks: an heir to Parmenides, an ally to the Stoics and Lucretius, and a major rival of Plato. Overturning Platonism was a philosophical battle cry for Deleuze,2 who preferred the indenite games of the surface to the depth of unlimited matter or the height of perfectly measured ideas. The real challenge to Plato, according to Deleuze, is not a philosophy that inverts the relation between appearances and ideas, but one that accepts appearances as simulacra, and replaces the binary division of Being with a triple one: things and persons, meanings, and sense (or the phenomenal, the ideal, and the virtual). His ontology rehabilitates the simulacra by turning sovereign ideas into mere effects and placing them under the jurisdiction of a eld of virtual possibilities. Nevertheless, according to Badiou, Deleuzes rift with Plato does not go deep enough, because he never abandons the distinction between concepts and their accidental moments, or what Deleuzes calls cases (14). He is therefore declared a Platonist and included in the long tradition of philosophers who give primacy to the One over the many. Hence, when Badiou concludes his argument, the unfolding of Deleuzes thought reaches its outer limit, and here one encounters those Greeks with whom it ontology, the one and single ontological proposition all started. The nucleus is also the outer envelopment; the end is also the beginning. After almost equating Hegel and Deleuze on the question of truth and memory, Badiou not surprisingly concludes his book with a Hegelian gesture: great conceptual creations return. And the singularity of Deleuze functions as a power of reception for this return. [He] is no doubt the rst philosopher to have activatedthe ahistorical history of the One-thought (100). We should not be misled by the fact that Badiou compares this unhistorical history of philosophy to Heideggers rather than Hegels way of dealing with the history of philosophy. It is not the particular method of writing the history of philosophy that is Hegelian but the relation between the ontological nucleus and its historical unfolding. Badiou says, It is therefore possible to read historically the thesis of univocity, and this is indeed why Deleuze became the (apparent) histor-ian of certain philosophers: they were cases of the univocity of Being (24). For Badiou, Deleuzes series of monographs on the great thinkers of the One (Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson) functions like the Phenomenology of Spirit, while his The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition are on par with Hegels Logic. Deleuzes entire philosophical trajectory treats the whole of philosophy as an absolute detemporalized memory (100, translation modied). The thought of the One is always also the memory of the thought of the One, which is nothing but the memory of one thought: the thought of the univocity of Being.
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But there is no One. The there is is multiple and the One is not (64). Hence Deleuzes entire edice collapses. There are only two philosophical options, according to Badiou: there is either the One or the many. Is Being One or multiple? This is the rst decision every ontology and hence every philosophy must make. Is the multiplicity of Being but a simulacrum that hides its oneness or is the One but a chimera projected upon the multitude by a thought that cannot withstand radical, irreducible differences? The choice between these two options is the most radical, far-reaching philosophical decision. The only way to make this decision is not by a piecemeal critique of arbitrary texts or arguments, but by taking a philosophical position to its ultimate conclusion and experimenting with its effects. Badiou thinks that among contemporary philosophers Deleuze is the deepest, most creative and sophisticated thinker of the One; Deleuze himself, on the other hand, wishes to become the paradigmatic thinker of the multiple. For this reason Deleuze is Badious best rival. Hence Badious Deleuze is by no means a critique of Deleuze but an exercise in the concept of the enemy, an attempt to give it its clearest, most consistent but also most schematic and most general representation, in order to show it as a place in which thought cannot or should not dwell. In such an exercise one does not look for the variety of interests, genres of writing, or nuances of argumentation in a philosophical corpus but for its organizing concept, the quasi-organic consistency of [its] conceptual connections (17). Hence the importance of the ontological nucleus, the total indifference to so many other facets of Deleuzes work, and the reduction of the entire Deleuzian corpus to a thirty-page appendix. It is a presentation guided by a certain idea of the One, a single philosophical decision that yields one conceptual system that is supposed to guide and give meaning to an entire corpus of philosophical writing. Badiou may be a philosopher of the many, but as a reader and interpreter he is certainly a monist and reductionist. The immediate effect of this monistic reading is a systematic disregard for a large part of Deleuzes work and a reduction of its varied nature to its ontological nucleus. This reduction has been responsible for some of the outraged reaction to Badious book.3 But considering the task he has set out for himself, this kind of critique has no justication, because Badiou preempted it with an explicit account of the function of the case from Cinema to Masochism, from Lewis Carroll to Francis Bacon in Deleuzes thought. According to Badiou, the study of a case has a two-fold function for Deleuze: to provide each case with an innovative concept, which would eventually become or reiterate part of the entire conceptual system (that is, Deleuzes thought). The case is thus integrated into the system and at the same time presented as one of its accidental moments; its only non-accidental function is to provide thought with another opportunity to express itself (15-16).4 And yet, we believe that Badious Deleuze is a false book, as Villani called it. It is a false

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book not because of the many things that Badiou disregards in Deleuze, but because of a simple, straightforward yet crucial mistake that underlies and undermines his effort to systematize Deleuzes thought. The mistake consists in not taking tre as a verb in the innitive form; following a distinguished tradition in philosophy, Badiou ignores the grammatical form of tre and is quick to assume its philosophical usage. That is, Badiou takes the word as a noun, a quasisubstance that may lack the materiality of an entity and behave like a force, but which has the form, presence, and permanence of a something that underlies everything. The reication of tre is then completed by Badious quick transition from a discourse of Being to a discourse of the One. For example, Deleuze distinguishes between real and formal distinctions with regard to Being, while Badiou says: The multiple acceptations of being must be understood as a multiple that is formal, while the One alone is real, and only the real [that is, the One] supports the distribution of sense (which is unique) (25, italics added). While Deleuze, here as elsewhere, uses single and same as predicates of sense and Being and never turns these predicates into a superseding substance (the One), Badiou presents Being and sense as almost accidental moments or names of that singleness or sameness that he calls the One. Badiou may have good reason for this reication of Being and for the equating of it with the One, or even the replacement of the former with the latter. First of all, this is the way the question of Being in general and of the univocity of Being in particular has been formulated ever since Aristotle. Aristotles maxim, Badiou reminds us, is: Being is said in various senses, in various categories (23). Even Heidegger, whose role in the contemporary renaissance of the question of Being cannot be overestimated, continually evokes that maxim. According to Badiou, Deleuze opposes this plurality of senses or categories that divide Being, which in turn implies that Being is a kind of substance to which all categories are said to apply. However, Deleuze opposes precisely this application of a plurality of categories to Being. Here Badiou uses sense and category as synonyms despite the fact that Deleuze insisted that category is a predicate of Being and that sense and predicate are distinct. However, it is also true that Being according to Deleuze is not divided into categories. Such a division is the sedentary work of the much denigrated common sense or good sense, which is always caught in this or that regime of representation. Nomadic thought should overcome this sedentary work in order to grasp the ideal game in which things are deployed across the entire extensity of a univocal and undistributed Being.5 This last phrase may sound like a straightforward rejection of Aristotles maxim in which Being is still conceived as a kind of substance that has different modalities and is predicated by different categories. Since he fails to make the crucial distinction between noun and verb, and between sense and predicate, and because his own interpretation is still caught up in the Aristotelean concept of Being qua substance, Badiou fails to realize how radically Deleuze departs from this notion of Being.

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Deleuze himself adds to the confusion when he speaks about the univocity of Being in terms of the presence of a certain vague and illusive something which is equal for everything that takes part in it, just as white (le blanc) includes various intensities, while remaining essentially the same white.6 Hence, it is not being that is distributed according to the requirements of representation, but all things that are divided up within being in the univocity of simple presence (the One-All). [E]qual being is immediately present in everything, without mediation or intermediacy, even though things reside unequally in this equal being.7 Elsewhere in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze seems to imply even more explicitly the reication of Being and its equation with the One. Coming back to the theme of univocity and invoking Duns Scotus and Spinoza, he writes: we are told [in the Ethics] that the attributes are irreducible to genera or categories because while they are formally distinct they all remain equal and ontologically one, and introduce no division into the substance which is said or expressed through them in a single and same sense.8 But consider the following statement, which is again taken from Difference and Repetition and which Badiou includes in his appendix:
What is important is that we can conceive of several formally distinct senses which none the less refer to being as if to a single designated entity, ontologically one.We must add that being, this common designated, in so far as it expresses itself, is said in turn in a single and same sense of all the numerically distinct designators and expressors. In the ontological proposition, not only is that which is designated ontologically the same for qualitatively distinct senses, but also the sense is ontologically the same for individuating modes, for numerically distinct designators or expressors: the ontological proposition involves a circulation of this kind (expression as a whole). (106)
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The one and only ontological proposition asserts that there is one reference that is, one Being for all of the multiple, formally distinct senses, but also one sense (of being) for all of the multiple, formally distinct propositions that individuate being or express the being of individuals. It seems that there are (at least) two Ones, a One for the referent of the ontological proposition, and another One for its sense. Deleuze asserts them both, in a conjunction not only this one, but this one as well that implies the difference between them. The univocity of Being means that Being has one sense in all the cases in which the being of something an individual or a category is asserted; but it also means that in all these cases, when the senses of the proposition are quantitatively distinct, the referent (Being) remains the same. There is always one sense of Being, not only one Being. The oneness of Being must be said twice (at least): once with regard to Being and once with regard to its sense. When Badiou quotes the above passage, he says that the univocity thesis is not only, or even not mainly, about Being as the denotation of the ontological proposition, but about its sense. Badiou notes in passing a difference between these two moments of sameness, but never considers its

meaning or ontological status. Deleuze, on the other hand, thought it necessary to spell out this difference as he was presenting the thesis of univocity. Deleuzes monism seems bifurcated at the very moment of its assertion. If this is true, Badious monistic reading of Deleuze disappears in the hollow created by the split. How can Badiou reassert the unity of the One? Badiou says that Being needs two names, and has to be said twice, once with regard to the unity of its power [puissance] and once with regard to the multiplicity of divergent simulacra, the ephemeral actualization of this power (45). This division does not threaten the unity of Being but follows from it: an underlying unied Being is set against a plurality of simulacra. However, this is not the division that concerns us here; for we are interested in the division between two moments of sameness, that of Being and that of the sense of Being. Badiou maintains his monism, despite the fact that he has no basis for claiming that Being (conceived as a substance of sorts) is the sense of Being or that the sameness of Being and the sameness of its sense are one and the same. He also has no resources for accounting for their appearance as two different moments of the ontological proposition. Is the sameness of the sense of Being but a linguistic reection of the sameness of Being, or is it precisely the former that makes possible and assures the latter? Badiou says little about the sense of Being or sense in general. Of the uni-vocity of Being Badiou takes only the uni and forgets about the voice, about those sounds that sense has already freed from the body that produced them. The proposition does not interest him either, despite the fact that the thesis of the univocity of Being is presented by Deleuze as a thesis about the ontological proposition. This lack of interest in matters of language in Deleuzes philosophy should be read together with Badious dismissal of the linguistic turn as a sidetrack in twentiethcentury philosophy. This century, he claims, can be said to have been stamped and signed, in philosophy, by the return of the question of Being (19), as if the ontological turn in Heidegger or Deleuze was never related to a radically new awareness of the irreducibly linguistic aspects of (the question of) Being. To entertain the question of Being in Deleuze outside the linguistic context is like examining a sh out of water. At best one can examine a corpse and Badiou, we have already seen, goes straight to the bones and leaves most of the Deleuzian corpus for others, who are not really interested in what for him is the real stuff of thought, that is, ontology. Therefore his reductionist interpretation could never explain how the sh swims back and forth between the unity of sense and the unity of reference, between one same and another, and also between the One and the many, between one case and another, or between the empirical cases and their transcendental superstructure. Badiou might argue that the difference created by the split in the ontological proposition is but another formal distinction that this proposition itself overcomes or suppresses. Being is

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said of the sense of Being in the same way that it is said of any other entity or being. He might add that the sameness of Being is not identical to the sameness of its sense, but the difference between them is not one between two categories of Being but between being and its representation in language. However, for Badiou it is neither Being nor its sense but the oneness of Being and its sense that counts in Deleuze. The fact that Being is the same for all its modalities must somehow reect, or imply the fact that the sense of Being is the same for all the numerically distinct designators. From where does this necessity come, if it is a necessity at all? What is the relation between these two moments of sameness and what is the nature of the difference that keeps them apart? In order to explain the equivocal status of the thesis of the univocity of Being, Deleuzes theory of sense must be reintegrated into his ontology. If this is done, Badious interpretation fails twice: rst, because it does not account for the split at the heart of the ontological proposition and the proliferation of oneness that such a split implies; and second, because it ignores the fact that Being and sense are related through a proposition and therefore it cannot account for the difference that sets them apart and for the link that keeps them together. Because the ontological proposition is a thesis about the sense of Being, it presupposes a theory of sense; such a theory is spelled out systematically in The Logic of Sense. Let us briey present some of its main points. Sense is one dimension of the proposition, along with three others, though it is very different in kind. The three conventionally agreed upon dimensions are dened as relations between the proposition and certain entities outside it: the relation between a proposition and an inner state (intentions, desires, or beliefs) of a speaking subject, a person who expresses herself in the proposition, which Deleuze calls manifestation; the relation of the propositions words to general concepts (through which it is also related to other propositions), called signication; and the relation between the proposition and an external state of things about which a proposition is said, called denotation. Note that these three relations always refer to things corporeal or incorporeal, physical or psychical, real or ideal and always in the present. In relation to the great division between Being and becoming, all three elements to which the proposition is related belong to the rst class. The proposition freezes anything it touches. When one explains what is becoming (signi-cation), or talks about the growth of a child (denotation), or expresses a creeping pain (manifestation), in short, whenever one gives a name to becoming, one forces it into a sequence of present moments and arrests the ow of time. Sense, the fourth dimension of the proposition, is very different. It is not a thing that exists among other things; it is neither an image nor an idea, and it is neither the relation of the proposition to an external or internal state of things, nor its relation to a concept, an image, or an idea. Sense is what the proposition as a whole, with the three distinct relations of which it

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consists, expresses (but not what any of its components mean), and at the same time it is what the proposi-tion attributes to a state of things (but not that state of things itself). For this reason, no proposition can denote or predicate its own sense. The sense expressed by one proposition can only be the object of another proposition, and so on, ad innitum. Therefore any interpretative attempt to x sense once and for all falls into an innite regress, as Lewis Carroll, the hero of The Logic of Sense, playfully demonstrates. The expressed of the proposition does not exist in the proposition, insofar as the attribute is not an aspect or an element of the things to which it is attributed. Sense inheres in the proposition and hovers at the surface of things, turning one side towards things and one side towards propositions. But it does not merge with any of them; it is exactly the boundary between proposition and things that keeps them together but separate.9 It is not something that is present in things but something that happens to them; it is the proposition conceived of as the occurrence of an event, the event of coming to be in language. Whatever the components of the proposition and its threefold relations have frozen into presence, sense releases into the ow of time. The distinction between sense and the rest of the proposition overlaps precisely with Deleuzes distinction between two readings of time time as Chronos and time as Aion. In Chronic time only the present exists, and every existence is in the present, while the past and the future are but more or less remote regions in an ever-extending present. In Aionic time the present is constantly negated, and only the past and future inhere in time, divid[ing] the present at every instant and subdividing it ad innitum into past and future.10 Chronos is the time of things and ideas, of concepts and images; Aion is the time of the event that which never is, but only happens; that which, like sense, subsists in language, buthappens to things.11 In fact, the event is sense itself, and therefore Aion is the time of sense, the time in which it endures as an inherence in the proposition that expresses it and an occurrence to the things to which it is attributed. The proposition contains the verb, the specic element that expresses the sense and envelopes the event. The verb introduces a binary division into the proposition: On the one hand, there are singular proper names, substantives, and general adjectives which indicate limits, pauses, rests, and presences; on the other hand, there are verbs carrying off with them becoming and its train of reversible events and innitely dividing their present into past and future.12 Hence the four dimensions of the proposition actually collapse into a duality that divides them into the denotation of things and the expression of sense. This basic ontological duality that Deleuze borrows from the Stoics and takes as his point of departure is duplicated in the proposition. But then this duplication is itself duplicated exactly where sense inheres, at the level of the verb: The verb has two poles: the present, which indicates its relation to a denotable state of affairsand the innitive, which indicates its relation to sense or the event.13
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A productive dualism is active throughout Deleuzes system and is responsible for the proliferation of pairs of radically different yet inseparable elements. On the one side we include being in all its substantive forms, the present, Chronos, denotation, manifestation, signication, and the verb in its present tense; on the other side we include becoming, events, the past and future, Aion, expression, and the verb in the innitive, most importantly, the innitive to be. The reigning logical operator is the conjunction: the radically different elements are asserted together. The paradox of sense lies precisely in the fact that it takes a denite side in this binary order but at the same time functions as the connector of the opposing elements: Sense is never only one of the two terms of the duality which contrasts things and propositions, substantives and verbs, denotatives and expressions; it is also the frontier, the cutting edge, or the articulation of the difference between the two terms.14 Hence it is due to sense that propositions relate to the state of things; events occur to things; and the conjugation of an innitive into a tense, a mode, and a person is made possible. Finally it is sense, the sense of Being, that relates Being and becoming, for the sense of Being is the event of Being, the being said of being that which occurs to Being when it comes into language. And at the same time, like the verb or the event, the past and the future, sense has a certain being of its own. It is not easy for Deleuze to say what this being is. Sense is this something, this aliquid at once extra-Being and inherence, that is, this minimum of being which bets inherences. It is in this sense that it is an event: on the condition that the event is not confused with its spatiotemporal realization in a state of affairs.15 Extra-Being and insistence are two aspects of sense. Sense is both extra-Being because it is not a thing or a state of things, and it is a minimum of being because it has no more being than what is necessary for its inherence in the proposition.16 Extra-Being is not a negation of Being but its diminution. The difference between inherence (of a sense in a proposition) and existence (of this or that thing among other things) as two states of being is quantitative, not qualitative. Hence there is no ontological distinction between the being of events or sense and the being of things. However, the difference is signicant: for it creates two perspectives from which to look upon the being of sense. Sense has an extra-being when looked upon from the perspective of the things to which it is attributed and a minimum of being when seen from the perspective of the proposition in which it inheres. Being has only one sense here, and sense has only one manner of being, but the duality of perspectives and the proliferation of dualities that ensues are no less essential than the oneness of either sense or Being. We can return now to the univocity thesis. The ontological proposition must be asserted twice once with regard to Being and once with regard to sense because it is governed by the same duality that inheres in the entire Deleuzian system and separates yet keeps together things and propositions, causes and effects, and (in this particular case) the designated Being and the

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expressed sense of the ontological proposition. Being must be said twice, as a substance and as a verb, with respect to the two readings of time, the two sides of causality, and the two moments of sense. In fact, it is precisely because and insofar as it is said, that it has to be said twice. For it is the event of language, which is itself split according to the bifurcation of the proposition into the substantive and the verbal, that bifurcates Being, and lets beings be in the rst place. But how is it possible that this proliferating duality and this split at the heart of Being does not constitute an ontological difference? Why doesnt this split divide Being into two categories and double its sense? How is it possible that things and words (and also the virtual and the real, or the body and its phantasms) take part in Being in one and the same way? What does it mean that only a diminution of Being, that is, only a quantitative difference sets the being of sense apart from the being of things? The answer to all these questions hinges, we believe, on the grammatical form of the word tre as a verb in the innitive: to be. The being of to be is the being of sense, of the event. The innitive is a pure verb that expresses the univocity of languagewithout person, without present, without any diversity of voice. [I]t expresses the event of language.17 This event is the coming to be of something in language. This coming to be is inscribed on the virtual plane, already abstracted from and still open to its specic individuation and predication, like a verb in the innitive that is abstracted from any inection. It is to be itself that has a minimum of being in the pure form of the Aion, while the Being of things and persons, eternal ideas and universal concepts is the limited actualization of the pure event and the specic inection of the innitive to be, bought at the price of the reication of being and its arrest into a Chronic present. To be is said in one and the same sense of everything of which it is said, because to be is indifferent to that of which it is said, in the same way that any verb in the innitive is indifferent to the inections that it makes possible. Its sense does not change from one event actualization to another, because its sense is the very event of coming into language, the moment in which sense makes propositions their denotation, manifestation, and signication, and more generally the articulation of a state of things possible. This moment is the same for every event; it poses the same boundary and the same difference between things and proposition. This is a difference without a concept, an occurrence without a model, that returns in the same way whenever being is said. The eternal recurrence of the same is nothing but the indenite repetition of the same to be, of the same sense and the same pure event that takes place in a preindividual, apersonal, and acosmic plane of immanence (which Deleuze would later call life).18 This pure event and transcendental plane precede and make possible the spatio-temporal materialization of any and every individuated event inscribed in a particular state of things. Therefore to be is the Event in which all events communicate, a unique event for everything that happens to the most diverse things, Eventum tantum for all events; therefore the univocity

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of to be signies that to be is Voice that is said.19 And nally, it is for this reason that
Univocity means that it is the same thing which occurs and is said: the attributable to all bodies or states of affairs and the expressible of every proposition. Univocity means the identity of the noematic attribute and that which is expressed linguistically. Univocity raises and extracts Being, in order to distinguish it better from that in which it occurs and from that of which it is said. It wrests Being from beings in order to bring it to all of them at once. Univocal Being inheres in language and happens to things. It is extra-Being, that is, the minimum of Being common to the real, the possible, and the 20 impossible.

Univocal being is an extracted being, a plurality of substances, nouns, names, things, and ideas that is purged and abstracted into a verb in the innitive, being turned into sense. Because univocal being has turned into sense, it is possible to assert simultaneously the sameness of Being and the sameness of its sense. For in the ontological proposition the sameness of sense is identical with the sameness of Being, and this sameness of the two moments must be asserted together with the difference between them. This difference that lacks a concept is the difference of sense that makes the proposition possible. Hence it is necessary to say the ontological proposition twice, once with regard to what it expresses and once with regard to what it designates, and at the same time to insist that the two occurrences of the proposition are the same. The ontological proposition relates being and sense. It then equates the being of to be with the being of sense and the sense of the univocal to be with the sense of sense, which is the identity of the noematic attribute and that which is expressed linguistically.21 Finally, it makes this double equation the essence of that about which it speaks, that is, Being as one single event for all events. These three determinations are enclosed within a single proposition that circulates them as repetitions of the same, whose differences cannot be erased. The avalanche of propositions in ontological texts, in Deleuze as well as in the entire tradition to which he refers, is merely the unfolding of that single proposition. In itself, ontology merges with the univocity of Being.22 The ontological proposition is quite unique. It is a proposition in which sense and denotation are the same, a proposition that turns its own sense into that about which it is said, and says what it expresses. This makes the ontological proposition nonsensical. Nonsense is dened by Deleuze as a word that denotes exactly what it expresses and expresses what it denotes. It expresses its denotatum and designates its own sense,23 and this is precisely the way the ontological proposition functions. One should have suspected the paradoxical nature of the ontological proposition from the very beginning, when Deleuze declares that there is only one of its kind.24 As we have noted, sense expressed by one proposition can only be designated and predicated by another. No proposition can posit, talk about, or take care of its own sense. Ontology, for Deleuze, is not a philosophical tradition that consists of layers of interpretation; it consists of one, single proposition. Hence,

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instead of an innite regress we have a proposition that must take care of its sense by its own resources. In order to take care of the sense of the ontological proposition it must be said twice, but as we have shown, these two ways of asserting the univocity of Being are equivalent. This equivalence is both the essence of the ontological proposition and the root of its paradoxical nature. Nonsense is neither the opposite of sense nor its lack but its excess; it does not negate sense but exists at its frontier. Nonsense shows itself at the moment this frontier is encompassed within that space that sense covers. This is precisely what the attempt to posit the totality of Being within the scope of a single sense means: the revealing of a nonsensical moment at the heart of the discourse of Being. The aim of philosophical discourse is not to get rid of this moment but to let it show itself alongside sense, presiding over both good sense and common sense, not as the dreadful end of sense, but as that which enacts the donation of sense.25 Nonsense reveals itself when that irreducible difference at the heart of both the event and sense, that difference between things and the proposition which sense relates, appears in and of itself, as a pure difference that has no preexisting identity by which it can be determined. This is precisely the difference that we revealed between the two assertions of the ontological proposition, between the to be of sense and the sense of to be, which we, following Deleuze, can equate, only because we have assumed their difference. There is no ontological difference between the sense of the ontological difference and its designated Being; a minimum of being is attributed to both in the same way. But the oneness of Being is completely contaminated by the duality of sense and nonsense, which also pervades all the other dualities we have noted, because they are all binary pairs divided by a difference without a concept and related by the same event of coming into language. To extract, as Badiou does, the univocity of being from this transcendental duality of sense and nonsense, and from all the proliferating, no less transcendental dualities unfolding from it, is to build an imaginary and useless foil. Badious exercise in the concept of the enemy fails because he dismisses Deleuzes philosophy of language, does not concern himself with the innitive form of the verb, and fails to understand the meaning of the transcendental bifurcation of Being. Badiou is right about the relation between the Oneness of an abstract Being wrested from beings and the multiplicity of the simulacra that instantiate it; it is not at this level that one should counter his reading. Badiou is wrong not because he denigrates the simulacra but because he disregards or misinterprets the multiplicity of transcendental binary relations in which Being is immersed in its plane of immanence. This proliferation of dualities precedes the materialization of Being into beings, state of things, categories, persons, and worlds, and acts as a condition for the possibility of this materialization. The oneness of Being should not be opposed to the multiplicity of simulacra or things, but to the multiplicity of its own transcendental bifurcations. It

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is only because all these dualities rest on a difference without a concept and their expression is enveloped by nonsense that Being can remain unied. Yet it is unied in a very limited sense. This limitation of Being makes possible its univocity. The unity of Being and its existence as One-All is made possible by its contraction. Like the kabalistic God that has contracted itself in order to create the world, Deleuzes Being contracts itself in order to supply the multiplicity of all possible worlds with a common being that serves as its transcendental ground. This contraction is crucial; it condenses ontology into one proposition and frees entire regions of its reign. These vast regions of language, art, politics, and inner life are all said to be in the same sense, but this says very little about what they are. Deleuzes two most important works, Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, may be read as the heroic unfolding of the ontological proposition, but at the same time they should be read as the no less heroic effort to free the world of the question from Being and let nomadic thought wander again in the vast regions that the contraction of ontology has opened. Philosophy is freed from the question of Being in order to generate concepts, create ideas, experiment with new questions, and experience new risks, that ancient ontology would have never allowed. Deleuzes later works were not case studies in which the univocity of Being was unfolded again and again, in order to demonstrate the eternal recurrence of the same. Rather they were experiments in precisely this nomadic thought made possible by the overcoming of the question of Being, and whose wealth we are far from exhausting.

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1.

Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 24. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically within the text.

14. Ibid., 28. 15. Ibid., 22. 16. Extra-Being and inherence are terms that Deleuze borrows at the outset of his discussion from the Stoics and from Meinung. See The Logic of Sense, 22, note 12. 17. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 185. 18. Deleuze, Limmanence: une vie,Philosophie 47 (1995). 19. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 179. It is not a coincidence that in The Logic of Sense the Twenty-Fifth Series of Univocity that ends the transcendental genesis of sense is followed by the Twenty-Sixth Series of Language that opens the dynamic genesis of sense. The univocal to be is also the moment in which sounds produced by a body are differentiated into syllables that make sense, in which a voice separates sounds from their bodies and endows them with sense. 20. Ibid., 180. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 179. 23. Ibid., 67. 24. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 35. 25. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense.

2. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 59ff., 66-67, 126128, and The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia UP, 1990), 7, 265-266. 3. For criticism of Badious reductionist reading of Deleuze, see Eric Alliez, Badiou/Deleuze; Arnaud Villani, La mtaphysique de Deleuze; Jos Gil, Quatre mchantes notes sur un livre mchant, Futur Antrier 43 (1997-98). 4. Badiou has also been criticized for overlooking key passages that give different meaning to the texts he does cite and analyze (see Gil). This sort of complaint is also at least partly beside the point, for if some passages undermine the consistent conceptual scheme Badiou is trying to reconstruct they should be omitted indeed. After all, Badiou is not trying to spell out the intricacies of Deleuzes intellectual itiner-ary but only to reconstruct the very structure of a Deleuzian conceptual scheme. 5. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 36-37. 6. Ibid., 36. Note how the predicate white has become a noun in this quotation. 7. Ibid., 37. [Translation modied] 8. Ibid., 303. 9. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 22. 10. Ibid., 164. 11. Ibid., 24. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 184.

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UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) 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UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a)

UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a)

THE ENJOYING MACHINE

mladen dolar

In his seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan writes the following remarks on the function of the chorus in Greek tragedy:
When you go to the theater in the evening, you are preoccupied by the affairs of the day, by the pen that you have lost, by the check that you will have to sign the next day.... Your emotions are taken charge of by the healthy order displayed on the stage. The Chorus takes care of them. The emotional commentary is done for you.... Therefore you dont have to worry; even if you dont feel anything, the Chorus will feel in your stead. Why after all can one imagine that the effect on you may be achieved, at least a small dose of it, even if you didnt tremble that much? To be honest, Im not sure if the 1 spectator ever trembles that much.

This is indeed a most curious device: we can delegate our terror and pity onto the chorus, who feels for us, grieves for us, trembles for us, and frees us of our burden of participation and emotion. Whatever we may be thinking or feeling while attending the performance, we objectively experience terror and pity via our stand-ins. This point was taken up by Slavoj iek in Enjoy Your Symptom!, where he proposed some other instances of the same device such as the women hired to mourn and cry over the dead in the place of the mourner, a practice still followed in certain parts of the world; the prayer wheels of the Buddhist monks; and, to come closer to our everyday experience, the canned laughter that accompanies various TV sitcoms. In this bizarre phenomenon, the machine laughs instead of us and frees us, so to speak, of the burden of enjoyment. The moment one starts to look, the examples keep springing up; the phenomenon suddenly appears to be widely present without bearing a name. It was nally given a name by Robert Pfaller with his felicitous invention of the concept of interpassivity, and under this banner a gradually spreading international discussion followed.2 Among the advantages of this term, interpassivity, is that it counteracts interactivity and points out its reverse side. Interactivity is one of the slogans of the day, the password for dealing with the new media and praising

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their alleged advantages, as well as the motto of a series of new artistic forms and practices that involve participation by the audience. On the other hand, interpassivity aims at a certain kind of enjoyment disguised by interactivity. What kind of enjoyment can be derived from something like canned laughter? Surely its rather an unavowable sort of pleasure to be indulged in private, something clearly bordering on perversion, a guilty pleasure, a secret enjoyment. One can present oneself as a hero of interactivity, taking things into ones own hands, not letting oneself be imposed on, striking back, as it were, that is, being a subject (although in the rather dubious sense of a peasant in the global village). But interpassivity? This notion hardly seems glamorous; moreover, there is even something shameful about it. For it seems that, in order to be a subject, one must at least oppose passivity. One could say that interpassivity is the reverse side of the subject, a constant peril that could engulf subjectivity and also something presenting itself as a lure, the song of the Sirens, a constant temptation to submit to this unavowable enjoyment. (However, in order not to be passively seduced by the song of the Sirens, the active strategy, in this case, strangely consists in being helplessly tied to a mast. So there you are.) Ultimately, there seems to be a dilemma, an alternative: either you are a subject, actively shaping the world around you, interacting with it, or you give way to enjoyment, entrust yourself to (inter)passivity, let the things laugh and cry instead of you. Either the subject or the (passive, perverse) enjoyment.

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ROUND ONE: LA CLAQUE

Let me start with a brief prehistory of interpassivity. There is a short piece that can perhaps be seen as the birthplace of canned laughter and of the entire idea of interpassivity. It is a brief text called La machine gloire (The glory-producing machine), written by the nineteenth-century author Villiers de lIsle-Adam. He was of aristocratic origin, a fact which seems to have dened his basic stance and demeanor throughout his life and work. For the one thread that runs through virtually all his writing is a horror and rejection of bourgeois civilization (for him a contradiction in terms), its spurious values, its idea of progress, and its lack of spirit, character, or valor. The piece on the glory machine tells us about a marvellous invention by Baron Bathybius Bottom, an English engineer (whose English name, apart from the obvious anal allusion, also recalls the immortal ass-headed Bottom of A Midsummer Nights Dream). This new machine, which infallibly produced nothing less than glory, is an extension of a very old phenomenon, which I suspect might be as old as the invention of theater itself, and which in French has an unmatchably economical and evocative name, la claque. It designates organized applause, the group of hired hands in the audience who applaud by prearrangement, most often for nancial reward. The French word is so excellent that the English and the German had no choice but to borrow it.3 Quite appropriately, its primary meaning in French is a smack, a slap in the face, a

box on the ear, and among its other meanings we also nd the brothel to say nothing of its vicinity to the cloaca (la cloaque). The claque, to be sure, doesnt involve just applause: it can cover a vast variety of reactions, both positive and negative. A well-organized claque can proffer, in Villiers picturesque terms,
Cries of frightened ladies, mufed Sighs, telling True Tears, sudden Small Chuckles, immediately contained, of a spectator who is slow in getting the point (six pounds extra), Clicking of tobacco boxes, into whose generous depth the raptured man must take refuge, Clamour, Suffocations, Encores, Oncalls, silent Tears, Threats, On-calls with Yelling, Signs of approbation, divulged Opinions, Crowns, Principles, Convictions, moral Tendencies, epileptic Attacks, Childbirths, Hissing, Suicides, the Crackle 4 of discussion (Art for Arts sake, the Form and the Idea), and so on.

This hilarious inventory is immediately followed by a warning: Let us stop here. The spectator might be led to imagine that he himself, unwittingly, is part of the claque (which is an absolute and incontestable truth); but it is better to leave some doubt in his mind about that (100).
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The claque presents a strange logical counterpart to the chorus of Greek tragedy, which served as one of the paramount instances of interpassivity. The chorus is the spectators stand-in or representative on stage, relieving her of terror and pity, which it feels and expresses in her place. The claque is her representative in the audience taking care of her appropriate reactions off stage clapping, booing, laughing and crying for her, taking the burden of feeling and enjoyment off her shoulders. The spectator can relax; the claque will attend to the rest. But then, can one ever draw the line between the claque and the audience? Does not the claque surreptitiously inltrate the audience and its reactions, so that nally the two coincide? Is there an audience outside the claque? Villiers sees very well that the claque is not unrelated to the unconscious: the spectator is part of it without knowing it; he is bound against his will to this Other sitting next to him with which he shares the space and the time of the spectacle and from which he cannot simply disentangle himself. One could say that in the unconscious a claque, perhaps even before a parle, or that a claque is the model and the epitome of a parle. Can the spectator ever say, Away with the claque! I want to rely on my own authentic reactions!? But this turn has already been anticipated by the claque itself: The latest stage of the Art is proffered when the claque itself cries out: Away with the claque! and then pretends to have been itself moved (entrane) and applauds at the end of the play, as if it were the real Audience and the roles reversed; it then restrains the overzealous exaltation and imposes restrictions (100). So the claque is intractable because its boundaries are constantly blurred and it cannot be assigned to a limited space. It can incorporate its own criticism and perhaps functions at its best when it shouts, Away with the claque!, taking on the battle-cry against itself. The claque is itself and also its own negation, and the self-negation makes it stronger and omnipresent. The

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spectator can indeed relax, since even her feelings against the claque are taken care of by the claque. One may frown at Villiers inveterate contempt for the crowd and its inability to make up its own mind or form its own judgment, but the mechanism of the claque goes well beyond his bias. For the question is: how does one extricate the authentic from the contrived? Is there an unequivocal line? Hasnt one always already been part of the claque? Has there ever been a theater without the claque, or indeed any form of art without some counterpart of it? Can one be rid of the claque? One must extend the notion of the claque even to that which surrounds the performance the publicity, the reviews, the criticism, the media coverage and which has driven us to the theater in the rst place. But its forms are far more insidious: there are people, forming strange groups of claqueurs over the centuries, who have seen the plays, read the books, admired the paintings, and listened to the music all before us, and who have produced an inaudible claque. They have seen it all, heard it all, and enjoyed it all before us. Would one ever set foot in a theater without the invisible claque spreading the rumor that this is what one should do? Isnt the claque another name for tradition? Is there a culture without the claque? Are there any standards of authenticity that would not, at some point, have recourse to the claque? Can one ever form an authentic judgment independently without some support of the claque even when one imagines to oppose it? Opposition to it, as we have seen, has already been taken care of by the claque. So there is an organized applause that has been going on for centuries and there is no easy way of discerning its bias and partiality. What would we be without that bias? Can there be an enjoyment of art without some backdrop of the claque enjoying it for us? Without being entran? The point is not that there are no intrinsic values, but rather that the very notion of intrinsic values has to rely, at some point, on the claque. One has to suppose that the claque knows. And if one replaces a certain value, induced by the claque, by another supposedly more genuine one, it is perhaps the case of substituting one claque for another. The claque is supposed to know, but it is also in its nature to contradict itself. Only a small step separates this from interpassivity: why bother going to the theater at all, since the claque, past and present, has been and is enjoying it in our place? Perhaps the only authentic stance would be to stay at home, relying on the claque to attend to the troublesome business of culture instead of us, delegating our enjoyment to it, while we can relax at home and do what? Watch the sitcoms with canned laughter? Is there an enjoyment outside the claque? This doesnt apply solely to art and culture. The claque produces glory in all its forms: Every glory has its claque, that is, its shadow, its part of artice, of mechanism and of nothingness (97). So any glory is constantly and inextricably accompanied by its claquing shadow, the applauding double, which might have become invisible and inaudible as the background noise of history despite the fact that it has been long since forgotten who hired it, and for what reward. Or rather

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perhaps it has never been properly hired at all: perhaps it has itself been always already entrane; it was always just following the claque whose origin escapes us. Instead of asking the paranoid question, Who hired the claque?, one should rather ask, How does the claque function so well without being hired? This is the part of glory that dooms its valor to contrivance, fabrication and deceit, its shining to darkness, its being to nothingness, while at the same time securing its success and survival. The claque is glorys part of spanking, of the brothel, and of the cloaca. Culture, tradition, and history all seem to be permeated with the claque. La claque what a formidable name for the big Other! Returning to Villiers text, the ingenious Baron Bottom had the brilliant idea to turn the claque into a machine something that it had always already been anyway: In fact, the claque is a machine made of humanity, and hence perfectible (97). The imperfect human machine can be perfected, its contingencies eliminated, and its human material replaced by the accuracy and predictability of a mechanical device. The machine could be incorporated into the theater hall itself, into its very architecture: phonographs would be placed into the orices of statues and decorations, and at the appropriate moment they would emit the wow-wows, the Cries, the Out with the cabal!, the Laughter, the Sighs, the Encores, the Discussions, the Principles, the Clicking of tobacco boxes, and so on, all the sounds of the audience, but perfected (102, italics added). The machine could be further perfected by the emission of gases, dispersing in turn tear gas and laughing gas as the occasion demanded; by the attachment of wooden hands to every seat; by the installation of devices that throw owers and laurels on the stage, and so on. All this would be operated from a sophisticated control room placed in the prompters pit, which would thus turn into a veritable cock-pit. There can be no doubt that once any play had entered this tremendous machine, it would be condemned to success; there could be no accidents. All resistance would be in vain. On top of that, an extension of Bottoms machine could also take care of theater criticism. The recycled clichs and commonplaces could be mechanically assembled, with the appropriate names being inserted in the blank spaces, and the ensuing results would by far surpass all modest human endeavours. Criticism has always been part of the claque anyway; it is just as mechanical in nature. The spirit is a machine, and the claque can be seen as another instance of Pascals advice: rst the machine, and the spirit will follow. It is no coincidence that Bottom has been named after Shakespeares Bottom, the weaver. Like the new Bottom, the old one was also a mastermind of theatrical trickery. But there is a crucial difference: the old Bottom believed in theaters intrinsic magic and its sway over the audience, which turned him into a Brechtian avant la lettre. He wanted to disenchant the audience: This is only a play, these are not real swords and lions.5 He believed, with innite credulity, in the innite credulity of the audience. For him the theater was too convincing in itself to need a claque,

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so the duty of the actors was quite the opposite: to fend off too much enthusiasm, to break down the illusion. Whereas the new Bottom, knowing very well that all magic is contrived, has the opposite concern: how to arouse the audience and make it believe. His tricks are no less crude and obvious than the old Bottoms, but one cannot but be taken in. The audience, under a spell like the fairy Queen Titania, has no choice but to fall head over heels in love with the asss head. So the enigma of glory has found its nal resting place with our bottomless Bottom: This Sphinx has found its Oedipus (107).

ROUND TWO: DESIRE

Several problems arise from Villiers text. First of all, are we dealing with a genuine case of interpassivity? There is a ne line between true interpassivity and what one nds in the case of the claque, though the question is whether the demarcation line can be maintained all the way through. It can be approached through Villiers crucial term entraner to induce, to impose, to provoke, or to prompt. The point of the machine, for him, is to induce in the audience the reactions rst emitted by the claque (whether in its human or mechanical shape). The claque has to contaminate the spectator with laughter, tears, and opinions, which rst arise in their articial forms pretending to be the real things. The claque applauds in order to make me applaud; it laughs to make me laugh. The spectators authentic feelings are provoked by artice, so that she herself is no longer able to tell the difference. The point of interpassivity, however, is slightly different from that of this apparatus: in interpassivity, the devices, whether human or mechanical, take upon themselves the reactions instead of us; they feel for us, so that we are freed from the burden of enjoyment, or rather, so that we can indulge in the bizarre enjoyment of delegating enjoyment to the (human or mechanical) other. Canned laughter doesnt make us laugh; rather it prevents us from laughing. Villiers stops short at this twist. There is nothing extraordinary in delegating a human activity; indeed one could say that an activity rst becomes specically human by being delegated, either to a thing, such as a tool man often being dened precisely as a tool-making animal or, to another man, a speaking tool, Aristotles designation of the slave. These two ways of transferring ones activity to another are the very stuff of history, the substance of the progression of technology and the concomitant development of class relations (the means of production and the relations of production, to nostalgically recall the Marxist terms). The gesture of delegating an activity both denes mans nature and, by the mediation it introduces, exposes it to alienation. So human activity is, by denition, always inter. That one could delegate ones passivity is far less obvious, and one of the many problems it involves is knowing if a clear limit could be set up between activity and passivity. Can one unproblematically put such things as laughing, crying, or praying under the simple heading of passivity?

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Where does passivity start, and activity stop? Is laughing passive? Surely it is generally provoked: it is by its nature a reaction to something, but then again, is there ever an action that would not also be a reaction? Can one perform an unprovoked action? Is even the Kantian causa noumenon of the notorious third antinomy in the Critique of Pure Reason, a cause that wouldnt itself be an effect? Even in the extreme case of perception, with our senses merely being affected by external stimuli, one can hardly maintain, at least after the Kantian turn, that it is simply passive Kants point being precisely that the subject always already contri-butes to the constitution of what she perceives. Delegating laughter to another is certainly paradoxical, but perhaps not primarily by virtue of its passivity. It is rather laughters incalculable character that makes it so, the way in which it can be seen as intimately human (and indeed another common denition of the human is the laughing animal), so irreducibly human that it cannot be delegated. Whereas the tool-making animal necessarily delegates, the laughing animal doesnt at least not until the recent invention of canned laughter. So is feeling ever simply passive? If it is initially a reaction (but this is true of any activity), it is itself only palpable by actively expressing itself, by being acted out, made visible, externalized in one way or another, worked-through, and thus by itself becoming a cause for other reactions, so that the line is always blurred. Perhaps the crux of the matter doesnt lie so much with passivity, whose boundaries can never be strictly established, but rather with the concept of enjoyment. Enjoyment is what lies at the bottom of those intimate feelings enumerated in the catalogue of interpassivity. On the one hand, enjoyment is something untransferable (ultimately incalculable and immeasurable),6 and on the other, a bonus, a reward, a gain, a benet, a blessing so why on earth would one want to delegate it at all? Perhaps instead of interpassivity one should speak of inter-enjoyment. This brings us back to the point with which we started: enjoyment (in passivity) as the reverse side of the subject (as activity). The crux of passivity is the enjoyment it involves. Nevertheless the problem is thus displaced, since one can easily conceive of getting enjoyment from activity, but is it of the same kind as the unavowable and shameful enjoyment in passivity? And is enjoyment simply passive? Here the intervention of psychoanalysis is called for, and I suppose inevitable. To be brief, lets say that if enjoyment is what people are after, then it can and should be complemented by the concept of desire. We thus obtain the conceptual pair, desire and enjoyment, which can perhaps substitute the somewhat dubious pair, activity and passivity. But do they t? Is desire really after enjoyment? Does desire seek enjoyment? In the crits, we nd the following brief sentence, one of Lacans notorious proverbs: For desire is a defence, a defence against the transgression (outre-passer) of a limit in enjoyment.7 This elementary psychoanalytic insight desire is a defence against enjoyment seems considerably to complicate our problem, or perhaps to utterly simplify it.

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The very nature of desire is to be interactive. There is no desire that is not at entran, provoked by the other. One desires by relying on the desire of the other, so there has to be an elementary identication with the other for desire to emerge. Lacan never tired of repeating that the subjects desire is the desire of the Other, and we can paraphrase: the subjects desire is the desire of the claque. One can easily see that with the claque ones reactions, judgments, and opinions are always framed in some way by the claque, which offers the entries, the attitudes, the proper ways of responding, and which instigates our wish to participate in the rst place. One has always already unwittingly started participating. If desire necessarily takes support in identication, its crucial form is the identication with the desire of the other. Surely there is a paradox here. If one only desires what one lacks, the identication with the desire of the other entails an identication with what the Other lacks. In desire, one is dragged into activity in order to gure out what has dragged the other into activity (this is at the core of its interactivity). What makes the Other tick? What is it after? How and why does it desire? How does it enjoy? Or does it enjoy at all? One can only nd this out by adopting the desire oneself, which is thus indeed nothing but the desire of the Other. Apart from assuming that the Other (of the claque) knows, there is also the supposition that the Other enjoys, so one follows the claque, one goes through the motions indicated by the claque, in the hope of being awarded the prize of enjoyment. But here is the rub. Desire is coupled with identication, but it doesnt result in enjoyment it is maintained by being perpetually dissatised. The supposition that the Other enjoys does not lead to enjoyment; it prevents it. The lack has to be maintained if desire is to be sustained. The subject loves her lack; she would give up anything to keep it. Should she attain enjoyment, her very status as subject would collapse, insofar as subject and desire are here synonymous. The rst form of interpassivity follows from this. If desire is but a defence against enjoyment, then an ingenious way of defending oneself consists in entrusting enjoyment to the other. The other enjoys, so I want to enjoy as well leads directly to The other enjoys, so thank God I dont have to! Let the claque do what it is supposed to do anyway, that is, enjoy instead of me. Let the video watch my favorite movies for me, for otherwise I would have to enjoy them myself, and that would be unbearable. I can see in advance the disappointment that this would bring; I can see that I can never measure up to the supposed enjoyment. By leaving satisfaction to the other, I can continue to suppose that there is such a thing as the satisfaction of desire. Were I to enjoy myself, hope would vanish, so if the other enjoys for me, I can maintain and preserve my desire by defending myself against enjoyment, in accordance with the nature of desire. It is not difcult to recognize here the strategy of the obsessional neurotic, the direction that Pfaller has admirably explored.

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ROUND THREE: DRIVE

Yet, this line of reasoning still places interpassivity in the realm of interactivity: it is a possible

strategy to circumvent the impasse of desire and a way to prolong it. It is the point where desire, as essentially interactive, presents its limit-case, but which follows from its logic as one of its possible outcomes. Desire mimes passivity in order to deal with the deadlock of its inherent interactivity. It mimes passivity to avoid enjoyment but does it not yield some enjoyment nevertheless? If the subject is by denition the subject of desire, and if desire is a defence against enjoyment, can the subject nevertheless obtain some bit of enjoyment? Does she get what she defends herself against? Can one enjoy by letting the other enjoy and thus resign oneself to ones own incurable dissatisfaction? And since I propose to replace interpassivity with interenjoyment, one can further ask: is enjoyment inter? If desire is essentially inter, does the same go for enjoyment? It is here that the psychoanalytic concept of drive should be introduced. To put my thesis in somewhat simplied terms, I would say that the key to interactivity lies with desire, while the key to interpassivity lies with the drive. And since we disposed desire and enjoyment in a neat pair of opposites, it follows that enjoyment is placed on the side of the drive. For if desire is maintained by being constantly unsatised, then drive is something which, alarmingly, always nds its way to enjoyment and satisfaction.8 Lets take an example from Lacan, which in fact faithfully follows Freuds argument: Even when you stuff the mouth the mouth that opens in the register of the drive it is not the food that satises it, it is, as one says, the pleasure of the mouth.9 What satises hunger? Apart from the trivial necessity of eating in order to survive, how can we place hunger in our dichotomy of desire and drive? It might seem rather strange to treat hunger as an instance of desire, but once the need to eat becomes inected with demand, as it necessarily does in the earliest stage demand for attention, demand for love it gets inextricably caught in the web of desire. The argument has been made often enough; it forms the backbone of the well-known dialectical progression need-demand-desire.10 One could well ask if hunger, insofar as it involves desire, depends on the claque. This may appear a bizarre suggestion, but there is indeed the massive presence of the mothers claque (the mother being the rst instance of the Other), her approval and delight with the babys eating. One eats not simply to satisfy ones need, but also to satisfy the mothers desire, which ultimately coincides with the subjects own. One cant even eat without some applause, as it were. But insofar as hunger is desire, it is always unsatised; whatever and however much one eats, it is not it. The various bulimic and anorexic disorders present spectacular proof of this. However much one stuffs the mouth of desire, it never gets enough; any food turns out to be the wrong kind of food and the satisfaction of hunger highlights all the more the falling short of enjoyment. Desire is that which remains hungry despite the amount or quality of food. Drive is different: it is a satisfaction, an enjoyment that one gets as a by-product, so to speak, of the dissatisfaction of desire. One hasnt satised desire, but one has enjoyed anyway it is

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a surplus enjoyment, an additional enjoyment surreptitiously sneaking into the very process of vainly seeking enjoyment. In the case of the oral drive, oral pleasure has been added regardless of the dissatisfaction of desire and even because of it. The object consumed is never it, the real thing, but some part of it is necessarily produced in the very act of consumption and this bit is the object of drive.11 So if desire can never reach enjoyment (indeed it does everything to avoid it through the pretense of pursuing it), then the problem of the drive is the very opposite: one can never be rid of enjoyment. It is a curious kind of enjoyment provided by the drives not reaching its goal and by an object that is indifferent. Freud has already seen this in his famous paper on the drives: [The object] is what is most variable about an instinct and is not originally connected with it.... It may be changed any number of times in the course of the vicissitudes which the instinct undergoes during its existence.12 If the object is not important, then how does the drive get its satisfaction? The oral drive may seem to be rmly coupled with the breast as its object, but the breast is ultimately not essential to it; rather, the drive is satised by circling it, as Lacan says, without reaching its goal.13 The drive is satised through its being thwarted, inhibited in its goal (zielgehemmt), but nevertheless it doesnt miss its aim. Lacan actually uses the English distinction between aim and goal, which is indiscernible in the French le but:
Here we can clear up the mystery of the zielgehemmt, of that form that the drive may assume, in attaining its satisfaction without attaining its aim. When you entrust someone with a mission, the aim is not what he brings back, but the itinerary he must take. The aim is the way taken. The French word but may be translated by another word in English, goal.... If the drive may be satised without attaining what...would be the satisfaction of its end...it is because...its aim is simply this return into circuit.... The objet petit a is not the origin of the oral drive. It is not introduced as the original food, it is introduced from the fact that no food will ever satisfy the oral drive, except by circumventing [circling around] 14 the eternally lacking object.

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The drive reaches its aim without attaining its goal; its arrow returns from the target, like a boomerang. However, contrary to what Lacan suggests, it doesnt return back to the subject because the subject is essentially the subject of desire, as we have seen, while the drive, with its bit of surplus enjoyment, has no subject (at least not in any ordinary sense, not even the Lacanian one).15 There is no subject at the origin of the drive; there is only the subject of desire emerging from its entanglement with the Other and enjoyment is but its by-product. The drive has no origin and no end; its only subsistence is in the circular movement yielding a tiny bit of enjoyment but an enjoyment that cannot satisfy desire or ll the lack, an enjoyment from which desire ees. All this appears to be at odds with the usual representation of the drive as a biological or somatic pressure, as a reservoir of energy or a eld of forces the notions that we nd abundantly scattered throughout Freuds writing. Lacan proposes another model, that of the drive as an organ. It is a strange kind of organ, situated in relation to the true organ,16 but nevertheless an ungraspable

organ, [an] object that we can only circumvent, in short, [a] false organ...whose characteristic is not to exist, but which is nevertheless an organ.17 Lacan continues: This organ is unreal. Unreal is not imaginary. The unreal is dened by articulating itself on the real in a way that eludes us, and it is precisely this that requires that its representation should be mythical....18 So Lacan produces his own myth, a parody of Aristophanes myth of the missing half: the missing half that would complement a human being (as sexed) and make him or her whole, is a lamella, something extra-at, which moves like the amoeba.... It goes everywhere...survives any division...can run around....19 Furthermore, If you want to stress its joky side, you can call it lhommelette.... And it is of this that all the forms of the objet a...are the representatives, the equivalents.20 So in order to imagine the object of the drive, one has to conceive of an organ that is lost or missing, but that nevertheless prolongs the body, being moulded by the bodys orices and borders (all the objects a stem from there). The object is innitely pliable, yet never tting and never graspable, except through the circuit of the drive. So in our case of the oral drive, the breast is not the organ of libido; rather, the lamella is this extra-at, extra-thin foil that always comes to interpose itself between the open mouth and the breast. It is lhommelette that always prevents us from simply eating an omelette. One can provisionally sum up with another Lacanian proverb: Desire comes from the Other, and enjoyment is on the side of the Thing.21

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ROUND FOUR: THE KNOCKOUT

So where does that leave us with our problem of interpassivity? By approaching the problem in our terms of drive and enjoyment, as opposed to desire, it appears that both sides of inter-passivity inter and passivity have to be transformed or abandoned. To start with, it seems that the drive cant be reduced to the division between active and passive. To be sure, Freud, when considering the vicissitudes of the drives, shows that some of their major transformations consist in reversals between activity and passivity, but he nevertheless maintains that at the core every instinct is a piece of activity; if we speak loosely of passive instincts, we can only mean instincts whose aim is passive.22 Passivity would thus gure as a derivative subdivision of drives inherent activity. Lacan seems to agree: In fact, it is obvious that, even in their supposedly passive phase, the exercise of a drive, a masochistic drive, for example, requires that the masochist give himself...a devil of a job.23 Yet, I think it can be argued, on the basis of Lacans own account, that the proper mode, or the proper voice, of the drive is the middle, a grammatical notion between the active and the passive voices. The drive evolves neutrally, indifferently, though it can bring about both active and passive expressions. It is something that happens or takes place without a subject actively

striving for it or passively submitting to it: perhaps both activity and passivity pertain to the realm of desire and its vicissitudes, whereas passivity gures as the limit-case of activity. One can perhaps cautiously propose another classication of the verbal voices. Whereas, at rst sight, the major division appears to be between the active and passive voice, with the middle as an awkward appendix, a second look reveals a more crucial divide between inclusion and noninclusion of the subject into what the verb describes. On that account, both the active and the passive voice (with the subject either acting or being acted upon) would fall into one category, while the middle voice would form the other one.24 Second, enjoyment is perhaps not inter at all. Drive doesnt care about the Other; it doesnt worry about the claque. Neither does the drive need the claque to show it the way nor does it call for any identication. It doesnt get entangled in the desire or (supposed) enjoyment of the Other; it rather refuses and dismisses the Other as such, utterly indifferent to its tricks. So there is an enjoyment outside the claque and it is precisely this enjoyment that psychoanalysis seeks. This is what causes the problem. If interpassivity in the rst sense, in its obsessional neurotic variety, remains inherently inter, delegating enjoyment to the other, then in the second sense, it keeps all enjoyment for itself except there is no self for which it would be kept or to which it could be ascribed. Thus, there is no sense in keeping it, both because it is not a quantum to be stocked, and because one gets it anyway whether one wants it or not. So in this second sense interpassivity, deprived of both inter and passivity, appears indeed as the shadow of interactivity. In this second sense one cannot delegate enjoyment, but one cannot keep it either. There is an it enjoys where both the subject and the Other vanish. To be sure, there is a delegation of enjoyment in a sense but not to the Other (other subjects, machines, or the phantom of the big Other) a delegation to an it that eludes the Other, as it also eludes our own body. The lever of enjoyment, as it were, is that unreal bodily organ that one doesnt possess, but of which one also cannot be rid. With this second sense of interpassivity, it seems that our topic has disappeared. Interpassivity, instead of being localizable, limited to certain curious, rare, and outstanding phenomena, has become omnipresent and universal. If we thus make it synonymous with the basic mechanism of the drive, if it coincides with the drive all together, then one may well ask whether there is any human phenomenon that wouldnt fall under the heading of interpassivity.25 Is eating, to prolong our example, a case of interpassivity? In our second sense, yes, and indeed very prominently, since it is the very earliest one, and perhaps a model for all others to come. Insofar as drive can be seen as the shadow side of desire, interpassivity sneaks into every human endeavor as its hidden reverse. While in the rst sense, it only appeared in some select instances, as a peculiar, but consequential extension of the obsessional logic, in this second sense one cannot be rid of it at all. One cannot choose enjoyment in the drive; one doesnt enjoy the way one would like to.

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Can the two senses be brought together? Is there a possible transition, a bridge between the two? One could say that the very process of psychoanalysis is precisely such a bridge. Lacan sees it along those lines when he conceives of analysis as a transition from the structures of desire to those of drive. First of all, drive introduces a dimension beyond the pleasure principle, while desire, with its defense against enjoyment, remains rmly within the realm of the pleasure principle, all its dissatisfaction notwithstanding. Lacan says, What is at issue in the drive is nally revealed here the course of the drive is the only form of transgression that is permitted to the subject in relation to the pleasure principle. The subject will realize that his desire is merely a vain detour with the aim of catching the jouissance of the other.26 The aim of analysis is to inect desire toward this point from which it has been eeing to produce something that cannot be directly desired, since desire is indirect by its very nature (it can indeed be epitomized by the formula, the desire to desire). That something produced is precisely enjoyment, in which the by-product comes to the fore and is laid bare from under the cover of fantasy. As Lacan explains, After the mapping of the subject in relation to the a, the experience of the fundamental fantasy becomes the drive. What, then, does he who has passed through the experience of this opaque relation to the origin, to the drive, become? How can a subject who has traversed the radical fantasy experience the drive? This is the beyond of analysis, and has never been approached.27 It is perhaps a bit too much to tackle the tricky problems of fantasy at this late stage. In brief, one can say that fantasy is the support of desire, and the point of analysis is to traverse the fantasy that has been supporting desire, that is, to take that support away. And what is left then, without that buttress, is the drive. Both the traversing of the fundamental fantasy and the destitution of the subject (should one say the knockout of the subject?) two formulas Lacan gives for the end of analysis coincide in the drive. In the nal analysis, that is, at its end, fantasy is dislodged by the drive. Desire as the defense against enjoyment collapses, and what emerges is the unthinkable beyond of desire, which is also beyond analysis, something that has so far never been approached, according to Lacan. One can conceive of the beginning of analysis as interactive: the patient enters it with the supposition that the analyst is the other who knows, and who in particular knows the way to enjoyment. There is an attempt at identication with that other and at guring out his desire. But here the analytic mechanism departs from the common ways of desire: there is no claque. The analyst, that gure of the Other, doesnt applaud, although he is admittedly being hired and rather well paid. The analyst is anti-claque someone not to applaud. And since there is no claque to follow (or to oppose), no claque on which to base ones desire, interactivity eventually loses its footing and desire is referred back to itself, to its own vagaries that lose their ground.

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It emerges as groundless, that is, grounded only in the contingency of fantasy, and once this is shattered, the only thing remaining is the by-product, the drive: something that is not interactive at all, that is without substance and without a subject, in a manner of (Hegelian) speaking. The rst sense of interpassivity may well appear within the rst part of this process, as a defense against what analysis is after. One defends oneself against the analyst, that horrible alien, and one of the strategies of doing this can be the interpassive one. One not only assigns enjoyment to the other, but one also offers oneself as the tool of it. As long as the other enjoys, I dont have to, so I must secure his enjoyment. Ones mission is to be in the analysts secret service. The analysis is at some point always on the edge of a love affair, or a master-slave liaison.28 Should it really turn into one, the subjects desire would have scored a victory, and one would eventually wind up with a new marvel of interpassivity, the canned analyst. But if analysis is up to its task, then it should dismantle this mechanism of interpassivity in order to make it pass into the other one, the one aligned with the drive. The emergence of the drive is the endpoint of analysis, and what lies beyond has never been approached, as Lacan said in 1964. But a few years later, he will propose a very precise mechanism for envisaging that beyond: the mechanism known as la passe, the passage from the position of the analysand to that of the analyst. And this is the ultimate point: the emergence of a new kind of desire from the drive, the desire of the analyst. One of Lacans key papers on the problem appropriately bears the title On Freuds Trieb and the psychoanalysts desire.29 One could say: the birth of the analysts desire from the spirit of the drive, or rather from its complete lack of spirit. Does this new desire avoid the traps of the old desire? Is it a desire liberated from the claque, or is it necessarily accompanied by a new variety of the claque, one that has formed the very substance of the history of psychoanalytic movement through the past century?

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1.

Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 252.

but Bottom the weaver; this will put them out of fear. 6. The fact that enjoyment is essentially incalculable presses us all the more to attempt to calculate it. There has been a whole line of thinking, during the Enlightenment, obsessed with the calculus of enjoyment, with some hilarious results. See, for instance, Jeremy Bentham. 7. Lacan, crits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 825. 8. See Jacques-Alain Miller, Commentary on Lacans Text, in Reading Seminars I and II, eds. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Marie Jaanus (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 426: What Freud calls the drive is an activity which always comes off. It leads to sure success, whereas desire leads to a sure unconscious formation, namely, a bungled action or slip: I missed my turn, I forgot my keys, etc. That is desire. Drive, on the contrary, always has its keys in hand. I will come back to the question of the drive being an activity. 9. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 167. 10. See Lacan, crits, 691: Thus the desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction [as in need] nor the demand of love, but the difference resulting from the subtraction of the former from the latter.... The simplest formula is: desire is demand minus need. 11. For many insights concerning this issue I am very much indebted to the work accomplished by Alenka Zupancic in Ethics of the Real (London: Verso, 2000), 238 ff. and passim, and in a more elaborate form in her work published so far only in Slovene. See also Miller. 12. Sigmund Freud, Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), vol. XIV, 122-123.
^ ^

2. See Interpassivitt, ed. Robert Pfaller (Vienna: Springer, 2000), which summarizes his long-standing efforts on this theme. Two international conferences were organized about it in Linz and Nrnberg in 1998, and Pfaller provides the best summary of this discussion. For ieks further reections on the theme, see The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1998). 3. Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, always up to its task, gives the following description: A body of hired applauders at a theatre etc. said to have been originated or rst systematized by M. Sauton who in 1820 established an ofce in Paris to secure the success of dramatic performances. The manager ordered the required number of claqueurs, who were divided into commissaires, those who commit the piece to memory, and noisily point out its merits; rieurs, who laugh at the puns and jokes; pleureurs, chiey women who hold their handkerchiefs to their eyes at the emotional parts; chatouilleurs, who are to keep the audience in good humour; and bisseurs, who are to cry bis (encore). The phenomenon appears to have been so ubiquitous in the nineteenth century that numerous authors have spoken about it well before Villiers (most extensively Emile Souvestre in Le monde tel quil sera in 1846). In December 1842 an anonymous note in Revue et gazette musicale already suggested the replacement of the claque by a machine, pretending that this device already existed in England and should be imported. 4. Villiers de lIsle-Adam, Contes cruels, ed. Pierre Citron (Paris: Garnier-Flammerion, 1980), 100. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically within the text. 5. See Shakespeare, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Act III, Scene 1. Bottom says, Write me a prologue; and let the prologue seem to say, we will do no harm with our swords, and that Pyramus is not killed indeed: and for the more better assurance, tell them that I Pyramus am not Pyramus,

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13. See Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 168: As far as the oral drive is concerned...it is obvious that it is not a question of food, nor of the memory of food, nor the echo of food, nor the mothers care, but ofthe breast.... If Freud makes a remark to the effect that the object in the drive is of no importance, it is probably because the breast, in its function as object, is to be revised in its entirety. To this breast in its function as object...we must give a function that will explain its place in the satisfaction of the drive. The best formula seems to me to be the following that la pulsion en fait le tour.... Tour is to be understood here with the ambiguity it possesses in French, both turn, the limit around which one turns, and trick. In the footnote in the English translation, the proposed English equivalents for the French phrase are the drive moves around the object and the drive tricks the object. 14. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 179-180. 15. I am here leaving aside the tricky problem of the subject of the drive. The least one can say is that it is not a subject in the standard Lacanian sense of the barred subject, but something that Lacan somewhat mysteriously calls a headless subject, for want of a better word: what I have metaphorically called a headless subjectication, a subject-ication without a subject, a bone... (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 184). One cannot but recall here Hegels notorious dictum that the Spirit is a bone should one say the bone of headless enjoyment seeking a subject? The headless subject as a by-product of a by-product? 16. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 196. 17. Ibid., 196-198. 18. Ibid., 205. 19. Ibid., 197. 20. Ibid., 197-198. 21. Lacan, crits, 853.

22. Freud, Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, 122. 23. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 200. The example doesnt quite work by Lacans own standards, since he has spent much time and effort demonstrating that the drive is not to be confused with perversion. Masochism, like any perversion, proceeds from a subject seeking enjoyment, and as in every perversion, the dimension of the Other looms very large, since the enjoyment that is at stake in perversion is the enjoyment of the Other. (See, for example, Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 185: the sadist himself occupies the place of the object, but without knowing it, to the benet of an other, for whose jouissance he exercises his action as sadistic pervert.) The drives bondage, on the other hand, is not with the Other. 24. I am well aware that I am twisting Benvenistes famous account of the medium, or middle, here for the current purpose. 25. See Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 166: It is clear that those with whom we deal, the patients, are not satised, as one says, with what they are. And yet, we know that everything they are, everything they experience, even their symptoms, involves satisfaction. They satisfy something that no doubt runs counter to that with which they might be satised, or rather, perhaps, they give satisfaction to something. They are not content with their state, but all the same, being in a state that gives so little content, they are content. The whole question boils down to the following what is contented here? 26. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 183. See also crits, 851: This gap is the gap desire encounters at the limits imposed upon it by the principle ironically called the pleasure principle, which relates it to a reality for which one can say it is here but the eld of praxis. It is from precisely that eld that Freudianism rends desire, whose principle essentially consists in impossibilities. 27. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 273.

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28. The master-slave relationship, at least the way Lacan reads it, can be taken as a case of obsessional interpassivity. See Lacan, crits, 314: In fact the obsessional subject manifests one of the attitudes that Hegel did not develop in his dialectic of master and slave. The slave has given way in the face of the risk of death in which mastery was being offered to him in a struggle of pure prestige. But since he knows that he is mortal, he also knows that the master can die. From this moment on he is able to accept his laboring for the master and his renunciation of enjoyment in the meantime; and, in the uncertainty of the moment when the master will die, he waits. It is perhaps rather ironic to see interpassivity in the attitude of someone who works very hard, who is indeed slaving, and appears to be anything but passive, but the hard work is conditioned and framed by the delegation of enjoyment that is what keeps it going: Let the other enjoy so that I dont have to. If striving for enjoyment demands strenuous activity, this is but a trie compared to the hard labor one has to perform in order to prevent enjoyment. 29. Lacan, crits, 851-854.
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UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) 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THE STRANGE DETOURS OF SUBLIMATION:

PSYCHOANALYSIS, HOMOSEXUALITY, AND ART

elizabeth grosz

As with the rest of his work, Freuds contributions to rethinking and complicating the domain of aesthetics are often contradictory, confusing, undecided, and half-formulated in the most enticing and seductive of ways. On the one hand, he seems committed to the most conservative conceptions of art and art practices, upholding what I believe are rather romantic and elitist conceptions of art as the product of creative genius. This view is probably most clearly witnessed by his most explicit anal-yses of artists and their art in his study of the conicted relations between knowledge and creativity in Leonardos painting or in his reections on the ambiguities of Michelangelos depiction of Moses.1 On the other hand, through the peculiar, aporetic, or paradoxical nature of his understanding of sexuality, drives, and the unconscious, particularly as they are elaborated in papers that deal less directly with questions of aesthetics, he develops an intriguing mode of undermining the notion of the creative individual or artistic genius by attributing to the drive, rather than the subject, the elusive power of both the production of pleasure and the evasion of censorship which, taken together, are necessary ingredients of social creativity. In order to develop the more wayward and disturbing of Freuds implications regarding the arts, and cultural production more generally, I thus turn to the wonderful and productive strangeness of a series of concepts and terms that underlie Freuds account of art: the notion of the sexual drive and its inherent, indeed constitutive, capacity for sublimation. Sublimation is perhaps the strangest of the deviations or vicissitudes that Freud twists into his understanding of the drive. It signals the inher-ent dependence of sexuality, the sexual drive, on representation and fantasy, its potentially innite capacity for displacement, and thus the clear and complex alignment of sublimation not only with cultural, artistic, and intellectual achievement, but also, paradoxically, with sexual perversions (most notably homosexuality). It is the extraordinary lability of the drive that deviates it inherently or constitutively from its implied or assumed normative, reproductive function. This lability enables

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and makes possible both cultural production and the perversions (by which, following Freud, I mean those nonnormative, nonreproductive, nongenital, or nonheterosexual aims, objects, and sources that characterize components of all forms of sexuality, and not simply those classied as homosexuality or, more archaically, as inversion). Here, I propose to problematize the conventional relegation of psychoanalytic theory to the role of artistic biographer and to develop the compulsive strangeness of Freuds understanding of sublimation and, implicitly, of the sexual drive. While concentrating primarily on Freuds own writings, I will also acknowledge the debt that my reading owes to the work of Lacan on the sexual drive, primarily as he develops it in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.

SLIPPERY DRIVES
What kind of a thing is sexuality such that, on the one hand, it is incapable of abandoning satisfaction even while it abandons the aims and objects that appear to provide it with satisfaction; and, on the other hand, that whatever satisfaction it gets, even when it attains its preferred and desired aims and objects, is never enough, never completely fullling or satisfying? What kind of enigmatic processes, energies, and movements does Freud have to presume in his postulation of the instinctual vicissitude of sublimation? For Freud, sublimation is the capacity for exchanging a sexual for a desexualized aim. Sublimation
consists in the sexual trend abandoning its aim of obtaining a component or a reproductive pleasure and taking on another which is related genetically to the abandoned one but is itself no longer sexual and must be described as social. We call this process sublimation, in accordance with the general estimate that places social aims higher than sexual ones, which are at bottom self-interested. Sublimation is, 2 incidentally, only a special case in which sexual trends are attached to other, non-sexual ones.

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Sublimation is a defensive process which transforms erotic and corporeal drives from the role of procurement of self-contained and self-oriented pleasures into the production of culturally recognized, sublime objects. How is it possible for a drive to elevate itself, surpassing itself as drive to become something else? How and why does it desexualize itself, given that it nevertheless attains a gratication that is in some sense always and only sexual? If desexualization is the removal of the drive from the circuit of gratication that nds its culmination or telos in sexual reproduction, does this mean that sexual reproduction or heterosexual genitality are always already the provisional, deferred, displaced satisfaction of drives, no more natural, inevitable, or gratifying than other forms of pleasure (organ-pleasure, the partial drives, fore-pleasure, polymorphous perversity are some of the names Freud uses to describe these other pleasures)? The amenability of the drive to its own transmutation, its duplicity in both renouncing and, through this renunciation, gaining satisfaction, suggests that the drive is unhinged or loosened

from any telos or normative purpose and, hence, less natural and more deranged than may seem evident in the cultural pathologization of perversion. The drive is inherently perverse; that is, by its very structuring it is oriented away from a real object or natural need toward fantasy and hallucination. Sexuality results from the insinuation of a constitutive and founding instability, of lack, into the ways the object of desire aims to ll and thereby satisfy desire. This is the lack in whose space fantasy operates. The attainment of a heterosexual, copulative sexual aim the norm presumed in culture is the product of this fantasy structure, and is no more real, direct, or unmediated than any other libidinal aim or object. In what ways, then, is sublimation itself still sexual? That is, in what ways are cultural productions of various kinds, including those productions we designate and value as art, still modes of gratication of sexual impulses? This presupposes another, related question: in what ways is sublimation a deection of the sexual gratication of the drive? Freud makes it clear even in his early works, from Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) and The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) on, that sexuality does not tolerate renunciation, that it goes to ingenious lengths to ensure a measure of partial satis-faction for every drive or impulse, even if it must abandon the hope of complete fulllment. Freud insists that, rather than abandoning sexual pleasure, the subject merely displaces or substi-tutes one object or aim for another. This leads Freud to argue that the difference between infancy and adulthood is not the difference between the satisfaction of the pleasure principle and the deferral implied by the reality principle, but is the result of substitution, an ironic claim insofar as even in infancy, there is no originary or real object: the very rst object is already a deection or substitution for an impossible and retrospectively constructed intrauterine plenum: whoever understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for a man than to give up a pleasure which he had once experienced. Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate.3 The original aim and object of the drives, from the moment of their rst appearance, are modes of repetition and replacement of the objects of biological need. The mythic rst object of the oral drive is already a retracing and displacement of the satisfaction of the hunger instinct. In short, if the sublimation is the deection and displacement of sexual aims and objects, and if the sexual drive, with its dening aims and objects, is itself the deection and transformation of biological instincts whose function is the preservation of life, the cultural achievements attained by sublimation may prove, instead of being a desexualization, to be as sexual as any other sexual, that is, genital and nongenital, activities. The fundamental mobility regulating the drive, ironically, is the condition of its healthy functioning: instead of arguing that heterosexual copulation is the necessary or inherent aim

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of the drive, Freud demonstrates that any xation, even to an exclusively focused heterosexual genitality, is potentially pathological. Not only does the lability of the drive ensure a healthy variety of aims and objects, but it is also the condition under which those energies primarily or initially directed by the infant to its own autoerotic pleasures become channeled into socially validated and productive relations; for civilization is founded on the deection of sexual energies into apparently nonsexual outlets. Freud even postulates that it may be the very strength, intensity, and constancy of human sexuality relative to the largely instinctive regulation of a cyclical or periodic sexuality in the animal world that explains mans capacity for civilization. It is only this surplus energy sexuality takes up over and above the needs of the survival of the species, indeed, the overwhelmingly disproportionate fascination sexuality holds in human life, that signals the possibility of sublimation:
The sexual instinct...is probably more strongly developed in man than in most of the higher animals; it is certainly more constant, since it has almost entirely overcome the periodicity to which it is tied in animals. It places extraordinarily large amounts of force at the disposal of civilized activity, and it does this in virtue of its especially marked characteristic of being able to displace its aim without materially diminishing in intensity. This capacity to exchange its originally sexual aim for another one, which is no longer sexual but which is psychically related to the rst aim, is called the capacity for sublimation. In contrast to this displaceability, in which its value for civilization lies, the sexual instinct may also exhibit a particularly obstinate xation which renders it unserviceable and which sometimes causes it 4 to degenerate into what are described as abnormalities.

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Sublimation is a consequence of the potentially endless displaceability of the drive from any particular or given context, aim, or object, the drives relentless capacity to attain pleasure or satisfaction independent of the limitations provided by a particular situation. Some satisfaction, it seems, can be gained from any activity, even from the renunciation of pleasure a concept that seems to render the idea of celibacy itself paradoxical. (According to psychoanalysis, at best, celibacy is the abandonment, or non-attainment, of genital satisfaction, but not the abolition of all sexual activity. It is the transformation, and not necessarily even the repression, of sexual impulses.) For psychoanalysis, the sexual order cannot be abandoned or given up. Sexual satisfaction, if it is not obtained in one way, will be gained in another. This indeed is the paradox or enigma of the drive from Freuds earliest articulations of it in The Three Essays: pleasure functions only through tension or unpleasure. It can only thus attain a partial or incomplete satisfaction and thus it can give rise to a need for a greater pleasure.5 In pleasure itself, then, there is both a lack of and in satisfaction, and a deviation within satisfaction, a tendency always to another pleasure. This movement towards another pleasure is the very signature of desire itself. Perhaps more signicantly, Freud seems to suggest that too close an attachment to parti-cular sexual aims and objects occurs at the cost of the capacity for sublimation. As with his understanding of the distinction between ego-libido and object-libido in On Narcissism: An Introduction,

it seems that there is a nite amount, a xed quantity of libido, available for each individual:
[W]e must bear in mind that the sexual instinctual impulses in particular are extraordinarily plastic, if I may so express it. One of them can take the place of another, one of them can take over anothers intensity; if the satisfaction of one of them is frustrated by reality, the satisfaction of another can afford complete compensation. They are related to one another like a network of intercommunicating channels lled with a liquid; and this is so in spite of their being subject to the primacy of the genitals 6 a state of affairs that is not at all easily combined in a single picture.

On such a hydraulic model, the more libido or liquid used for one purpose, the less available for another. And particularly, there is a mode of release or satisfaction that is equated by Freud with sexual discharge: even the polymorphous, preoedipal partial drives are regulated toward specic pleasures that are triggered or released by a reex path7 that discharges them. This discharge resembles and in some ways pregures the emission of sexual substances in genital sexual relations. (In this sense at least, Freuds model never adequately touches on or explains the form or structure of female desire.) There is immense individual variability, not only regarding the amount or intensity of libido available for sexual and self-preservative purposes, but also regarding the suitability of various drives for sublimation.8 This leads Freud to assert that some individuals may be constitutionally unsuitable for sublimation and that the capacity to tolerate less sexual satisfaction is not open to them:
To extend this process of displacement indenitely is...certainly not possible, any more than the transformation of heat into mechanical energy in our machines. A certain amount of direct sexual satisfaction seems to be indispensable for most organizations, and a deciency in this amount, which varies from individual to individual, is visited by phenomena which, on account of their detrimental effects on 9 functioning and their subjective quality of unpleasure, must be regarded as an illness.

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Thus a certain quantity or perhaps quality of excitation can or should be diverted from sexual outlets, while another portion should persist in its explicitly sexual forms of gratication. Freud is unclear about whether he means that some of the component instincts lend themselves well to sublimation and others do not, or whether he means that there is a single libido which can afford to direct only a certain percentage of its unspecied impetus to sublimation and must devolve the rest for sexual gratication. If all sexual attention is directed towards a single outlet, whether a xed aim or object, or a compulsive desexualization, the mental health of the subject is at stake. So-called normal sexuality is considered to function in the service of civilization twice over, rst by propagating the species by unifying the components of sexuality under genital and reproductive aims and objects, and second by freeing a certain degree or amount of libido for specically cultural, that is, sublimated, purposes.10

PERVERSE SUBLIMATION
While Freud presumes and privileges the heterosexualization of desire, he does not preclude homosexuals from access to sublimation nor indeed does he refrain from granting homosexuality an especially privileged role in sublimatory capacities and achievements. The sublimation of an erotic attachment that has its roots in fellow-feeling can be linked to group psychology, but also to passionate attachment to cultural achievements. Freud attributes the possibility of a special aptitude for cultural sublimation11 to homosexuals or inverts (presumably he means men rather than women) because their libidos remain relatively detached from the culturally valorized commitments to a singular, lifetime monogamy, and because less of their libidos are bound up with reproductive aims. Yet, on the other hand, there can be no general rule linking the capacity for sublimation to homosexuality or perversion: Freud makes it clear that for many inverts or perverts, especially those for whom the sexual drives are not overwhelmingly powerful, the capacity for cultural sublimation remains limited insofar as the libido which could have been transformed through sublimation into cultural aspirations must be utilized, as counter- or anticathexis, to contain the drives. And those for whom the sexual drive is powerful seem precluded from either the desire or the capacity for sublimation:
More pronounced forms of perversions and of homosexuality, especially if they are exclusive, do, it is true, make those subject to them socially useless and unhappy, so that it must be recognized that the cultural requirements...are a source of suffering for a certain portion of mankind.... [W]here the sexual instinct is in general weak[,] perverts succeed in totally suppressing the inclinations which bring them into conict with the moral demands of the civilization. But this, from the ideal point of view, is also the only thing they succeed in achieving; for, in order to effect this suppression of their sexual instinct, they use up the forces which they would otherwise employ in cultural activities. They are, as it were, 12 inwardly inhibited and outwardly paralyzed.

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If an excessively strong homosexual or perverse sexual investment cannot lead to sublimation because it remains tenaciously focused on overtly sexual aims and objects, and if a weaker and more conicted homosexual or perverse investment precludes the libidinal investment which sublimation converts into a non-sexual outlet, it becomes more and more difcult to see what special link Freud wants to forge between homosexuality and cultural accomplishment. Perhaps what he has in mind is a repressed or latent homosexuality. If the repressed homosexual libido of men could be transformed into the desexualized fellow-feeling or perhaps into the male bonding constituting social and cultural life, then the energy of sublimation would not have to be invested in fending off homosexual impulses. Those impulses themselves, rather than the defense against them, become the source of sublimated energies. The investments of libido in love objects, whether heterosexual or homosexual, binds libidinal energy too closely to its object to be very easily transformed into nonsexual activities. This, ironically, seems to preclude

active homosexuals from sublimation, making the cultural the arena of would-be or repressed homosexuals that is, heterosexuals. The more energy is bound to aims and objects, the less is available for sublimation. It is for this reason that Freud seems to privilege those repressed, perverse impulses which have had to be abandoned or must give way to the primacy of the reproductive function, those preoedipal impulses which, if acted upon, would produce the subject as perverse but whose suppression both allows them to become subsidiary impulses to genitality, and to become excessive to sexual pleasure so that they can be rerouted to nonsexual outlets. Here heterosexuality is preserved as the privileged modality of sexual gratication and what is harmful and threatening the repressed perverse or homosexual impulses is channeled into socially valorized forms of cultural production: [During infantile development from auto-eroticism to object-love] part of the sexual excitation which is provided by the subjects own body is inhibited as being unserviceable for the reproductive function and in favorable cases are thus to great extent obtained through the suppression of what are known as the perverse elements of sexual excitation.13
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Perverse impulses and energies, whose repression is necessary for the subjects constitution as heterosexual, provide the raw materials for sublimation and for cultural achievement. While in some feminist and militant homosexual circles it has long been recognized that culture is homosocial (while at the same time functioning as homophobic), this now seems conrmed by Freud himself. It is the binding of what would have been homosexual desire to desexualized aims and objects that ensures both the reproduction of civilization through heterosexual intercourse and the production of cultural objects, artifacts, and values through the sublimation of homosexual impulses. Could it be that, to willfully paraphrase and transform Nietzsche, all things great and noble in culture, cultures highest accomplishments, are the products of a forbidden perversion? If sublimation owes its impetus or raw materials to homosexual and perverse impulses, it is clear from Freuds murky and complex understanding of drives themselves that there is something inherently perverse about the drive. Freud singles out three characteristics: drives are indifferent to how satisfaction is obtained; drives are almost entirely malleable, plastic, or displaceable, having no xed form, preferred aims, or privileged objects but only a series of corporeal sources; and one drive can take over the force and satisfaction of another. Indeed, there is a remarkable similarity between the malleability of the contents of the unconscious in their striving for conscious expression (and thus partial satisfaction) and the operations of libido and drives. In noting this homology and convergence, Lacan is led to postulate that the reality of the unconscious is sexual.14 The drives exhibit the same opportunistic expediency as the unconscious, unable to acknowledge negation, happy with inconsistency, organized outside forms of temporality, and dominated by the pleasure principle. In this sense, sexuality functions and is

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comprehensible only through the deles of the signier, the deections produced by representation. Could it be that the unconscious takes these characteristics because what it represses are drives and their ideational representatives?
It seems a plausible view that this displaceable and neutral energy, which is no doubt active both in the ego and in the id, proceeds from the narcissistic store of libido that it is desexualized Eros. (The erotic instincts appear to be altogether more plastic, more readily diverted and displaced than the destructive instinct.) From this we can easily go on to assume that this displaceable libido is employed in the service of the pleasure principle to obviate blockages and to facilitate discharge. In this connection, it is easy to observe a certain indifference as to the path along which the discharge takes place, so long as it takes place somehow. It was in studying the dream-work that we rst came upon this kind of looseness in the displacements brought about by the primary process. In that case, it was the objects that were thus relegated to a position of no more than secondary importance, just as in the case we are 15 now discussing, it is the paths of discharge.

If sexual instincts are regulated by vicissitudes, by wild uctuations and variations, if they have no inherent delity to given aims and objects, if they achieve heterosexual and copulative normality only tenuously and as a result of the transformation of perversions (either through partial repression into neurosis or through sublimation into cultural, artistic, and intellectual achievements), then there is something perverse about the very form and structure of desire, regardless of its aims and objects, including heterosexual ones, on which it may xate. For Freud, this means that cultural accomplishments and he explicitly includes the activities of thinking as well as artistic production are bound up in ways we may be reluctant to admit with perversion:16
If this displaceable energy is desexualized libido, it may also be described as sublimated energy: for it would still retain the main purpose of Eros that of uniting and binding in so far as it helps towards establishing the unity, or tendency to unity, which is particularly characteristic of the ego. If thought processes in the wide sense are to be included among the displacements, then the activity of thinking 17 is also supplied from the sublimation of erotic motive forces.

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The eroticization of thought and culture is as much an effect or a product of the drives inherent waywardness or perversity as of the desexualization of the drive. What then is it that distinguishes the artist, whose sublimations are presumably, to some extent at least, successful, from the pervert or the neurotic, even on the assumption that the distinction between them is not entirely clear-cut? Freud suggests that there are really only two factors, neither of them dependent on the nature or intensity of the drives: the capacity of the artist to shape his or her products in the form of guiding collective fantasies and erotic desires (that is, a technical and formal ability); and the ability to remove these products from the founding fantasies and desires that made them possible. The technical capacity is the way in which the artist is able, by skills and abilities, to represent unconscious wishes and desires whose artful representation yields a

secondary pleasure able to outweigh the force of repression.18

LACANS LINGUISTIC INFLECTION OF THE PERVERSE DRIVE

Lacan further details the paradoxical nature of sexuality; its deviation from the norms of biology, chemistry, and physics; and its fundamental reliance on the structure of signication. He wants to make clear that sexuality cannot be understood on the biological model of an instinct (as Freud at times tends to do), but rather, that even biology itself must be or can be understood in terms of signication. Following Jakobson, he calls combinatory the relations of selection and combination that govern all representation, including those on which biology relies, even the most elementary features of the cell itself. The splitting and mixing of cells in sexual reproduction (in which the chromosomes of the male and female are split in half and combined together to restore the right number) is nothing but another version of the combinatory. Lacans claim is that biology is, as it were, hijacked by representation, forced to veer off its natural course, and made to function at the beckoning of the signier. In a certain sense, then, as Freud acknowledged in Repression and Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, sexual drives, or libido, cannot be repressed (only the ideational representative of a drive can be); rather, drives are deected, sent on a meandering detour. The function of desire is a last residuum of the effects of the signier in the subject. Desidero is the Freudian cogito.... Note well what Freud says of this eld, in which the impulse is satised essentially by hallucination.19 Hallucination is, in a sense, the reality of desire. How is it that hallucination can satisfy a drive? What is this peculiar disengagement of the subject from the real, from natural need, such that it is no longer or not ever real objects that are sought or found satisfying, but fantasmatic objects (in the mode of hallucination)? This is because desire and the modes of satisfaction that are proper to it are fantasmatic, that is to say, detachable from any given context and transformable across any range of contexts. Hallucinatory satisfactions are the function and effect of signication: desire is what makes hallucination, deection, detour, and renunciation possible. (This is the only thing that can explain anorexia: why the absence of food satises the subjects desire more than food satises the subjects need.) Each of the deviations or vicissitudes of the drive indicates that there is nothing natural or xed about its functioning there is no norm for its operations, no xed aim or object, no inherently privileged sources, no given outlet for its impetus or force. Of all the vicissitudes, sublimation is particularly paradoxical and thus fascinating for Lacan: sublimation is the desexualization of the drive, its deection into nonsexual aims and objects. Yet, sublimation satises the drive, even though it inhibits its aim:
In other words for the moment, I am not fucking, I am talking to you. Well! I can have exactly the same satisfaction as if I were fucking. Thats what it means. Indeed, it raises the question of whether in

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fact I am not fucking at this moment. Between these two terms drive and satisfaction there is set up an extreme antinomy that reminds us that the use of the function of the drive has for me no other 20 purpose than to put in question what is meant by satisfaction.

The indifference of the drive to either aim or object, the fact that it can be satised even through deliberate nonsatisfaction, means that it does not function in the order of natural need or biological requirement. This is because desire is not for an object but is articulated only through the Other, only through the deles of the signier and the structures of representation which take it further and further away from an unmediated reality. This is why the privileged mode of satisfaction of the drives is hallucinatory; why the objects of desire, whether fantasmatic or material, become libidinally invested only through lack and signication, that is, through desexualization; and why reality as such can be dened only through desexualization.21 Lacan makes explicit Freuds paradoxical understanding of the drives capacity to nd satisfaction even in the inhibition of its aim. If its goal is satisfaction, it can attain satisfaction even from failing to attain this goal. Why is this so? Because, as Lacan suggests, the aim involves not only the attainment of a specic object, but a particular mode of attainment, an itinerary the drive must undertake in order to access its object or to gain satisfaction from some other object in its place. There is always a pleasure in this detour indeed this is what pleasure is, a movement rather than a possession, a process rather than an object. There is a pleasure in the how of attainment as much as or more than the what. Lacan evokes a brilliant and striking image derived from Freud which makes clear the diversionary or detour-like structure of drives, and thus of sublimation, an image which shows both the fantasmatic dimensions of desire and the ways in which desire, rather than being supported by an object, produces an object for itself through the supporting structure of fantasy: the image is that of the mouth kissing itself, an intermediary self-referential position mediating between auto-eroticism and object-love. His point is that the drive tricks its object (la pulsion en fait le tour),22 producing another object for itself in the process of failing to satisfy its given or selected object. This is why the image of the mouth kissing itself both pregures object-love, oral desire, with appropriate orally incorporable objects, while always linking it to a structure of primordial corporeality or bodily pleasure for the subject. In kissing itself, the mouth is no longer oriented to food, to need. Rather, food is now comprehended and understood as such only through the structuring of the subjects desire.

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PERVERSE CULTURE
Lacans reading reveals that sublimation and the other vicissitudes of the drive are not aberrations or deections it undergoes that are capable of being distinguished from its normal, copulatory functioning and thus, in need of special explanation. Lacan describes the drive as montage and collage,23 fundamentally eclectic rather than mechanical or hydraulic. It does not, cannot,

function in the register of need, of biological functioning, but is of the order of desire, and thus of signication. If it makes cultural production, through the processes of sublimation and desexualization, possible, this is because, as a mode of desire, the drive is already cultural, already signicatory, already bound up with the order of representation, lack, and fantasy. It can sublate itself, sublimate itself, raise itself to pure desexualized cultural achievement only because it is always already cultural, even in its paradoxical and impossible genesis. The concept of sublimation now seems considerably more complicated than the notion of a simple transformation from sexual to desexualized aims; from private, personal obsession to public, cultural product; from erotic to artistic object, insofar as the rst, subjective term must always contain within itself the seeds or traces of the inhabitation of the second, cultural term. Sublimation does not work to desexualize a full and self-contained instinct but to rework its already worked over constitution. If we can no longer attribute an inherent normativity to the drive if it has no particular afnity with reproduction or genital copulation then it is this genital normativity, rather than its wayward, meandering capacity that seems to require explanation. If the drive is inherently perverse,24 rather than perverse only in its extreme functioning, then the links Freud posits between perversion/homosexuality and sublimation/cultural production need to be rendered more complex and entwined than any simple division into culturally productive heterosexuality and individually perverse homosexuality allows. The hetero-sexual and homosexual components of erotic attachments are not as readily separable as they seem. Both Freud and Lacan suggest that underlying an ostensibly heterosexual erotic investment there may be earlier homosexual impulses and love objects. Moreover, it is no longer clear, as I have been arguing, that sublimation is in fact a desexualization rather than simply another modality of displacement of the drives impetus. If sublimation is not simply a desexualization of what is originally sexual, if its sources are not simply normal impulses but repressed wishes and desires, then we must ask if art still can be seen as the noble, elevated, privileged activity of cultural production that Freud originally suggested. If we take seriously Freuds understanding of sublimation, many features of this romanticized understanding of the gure of the artist are problematic. For one thing, it becomes clear that the gap between artistic and intellectual or scientic production becomes more tenuous and difcult to maintain: epistemophilia, the love of knowledge, the passion for research, which is clearly Freuds own preferred form of sublimation, is as culturally signicant as the passion for the production of art, and is structurally and psychically homologous to it. The desire to know retains its sexual origins as much as the desire to paint or sculpt. Furthermore, it is no longer clear that the elevated cultural activities (like art and knowledge) can be readily separated from other, more debased sexual activities, or that high art can be easily distinguished from low culture (including, say, pornography), or that the ne line dividing art from neurosis and perversion can be maintained.

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This complexication of the more orthodox understanding of Freuds account of sublimation, and of the relevance of psychoanalytic theory to understanding art, may require a careful rethinking of the ways in which art can and should be theorized as well. If psychoanalytic theory has tended to function post facto as a mode of analysis of the psyche, motivations, and life history of the artist, or the genesis and production of the work of art, there is no reason why it should continue to operate as a mode of (projected) psychobiography. There are other ways in which psychoanalysis can usefully explore and help to rethink art. One possible path, if contemporary lm theory may provide a clue, is the movement away from an analysis of the creative subject toward the question of the desire at work in the reception and circulation of the art object, the place of the art object not in the artists life history but in the history of art itself. What desire does the art object arouse, what fantasies does it hook into, what in the subjectivity of its audience does it appeal to? These questions may not require the individualizing nesse of a psychobiographical account. Indeed, the analysis of any particular viewing subject, while it may have psychological interest, will not be of an aesthetic value. Rather, it will need to explain what it is in a specic work of art that captivates the desire of an audience, and how a work of art speaks to a constituency. Art, in other words, must be regarded as a mode of seduction, of sexual address. This is why Freud believes that artists and writers have as great an access to the unconscious as analysts.25 And nally, if my suggestions regarding the contributions of the sexual perversions, particularly homosexuality, to cultural production are appropriate, then it may be worth stressing the social and cultural debt all production, all creation of the new, owes to the liberation of formerly repressed homosexual and perverse impulses, in other words, the cultural debt to what is designated as antisocial, anticultural, hostile to civilization. Civilization in general, and art in particular, participate in and help to veil and render invisible the very social injustices meted out to homosexuals and queers while nonetheless relying on and siphoning off their energy and impetus. What is needed is an acknowledgment of this debt and thus a transformation of the heterocentric character of the criteria by which social and cultural production is understood and valorized. Psychoanalysts, and psychoanalysis, need to decide whether they remain on the side of that normalization process which elevates art at the expense of the marginalization or pathologization of homosexuality and perversion, or whether they choose to use psychoanalysis, as one is perfectly able to do, to problematize the proper, the obvious, the apparent, and the expected, to question the normal with the aim of showing what underlies it and makes it possible.

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1.

Sigmund Freud, Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), vol. XI, 57-137 and The Moses of Michelangelo, in SE, vol. XIII, 209-238.

2. Freud, Some Thoughts on Development and Regression Aetiology, in SE, vol. XVI, 345. 3. Freud, Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming, in SE, vol. IX, 145. 4. Freud, Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness, in SE, vol. IX, 187. 5. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in SE, vol. VII, 210. 6. Freud, Some Thoughts on Development, 345. 7. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 210. 8. The original strength of the sexual instinct probably varies. It seems to us that it is the innate constitution of each individual which decides in the rst instance how large a part of his sexual instinct it will be possible to sublimate and make use of. In addition to this, the effects of experience and the intellectual inuences upon his mental apparatus succeed in bringing about the sublimation of a further portion of it (Freud, Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness, 187-88). 9. Ibid., 188. 10. Ibid., 191. 11. Ibid., 190. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 188-189. 14. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 150. 15. Freud, The Ego and the Id, in SE, vol. IXX, 44-45.

16. Elsewhere, however, Freud is at pains to distinguish the more cerebral accomplishments of thought from the more robust corporeal production of artists: The relationship between the amount of sublimation possible and the amount of sexual activity necessary naturally varies very much from person to person and even from one calling to another. An abstinent artist is hardly conceivable; but an abstinent young savant is certainly no rarity. The latter can, by his self-restraint, liberate forces for his studies; while the former probably nds his artistic achievements powerfully stimulated by his sexual experience. In general I have not gained the impression that sexual abstinence helps to bring about energetic and self-reliant men of action or original thinkers or bold emancipators and reformers. Far more often it goes to produce well-behaved weaklings who later become lost in the great mass of people that tend to follow, unwillingly, the leads given by strong individuals (Freud, Civilized Sexual Morality, 197). 17. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 45. 18. Freud, The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms, in SE, vol. XVI, 376. 19. Lacan, 154. 20. Ibid., 165-166. 21. Ibid., 155. 22. Ibid., 168. 23. Ibid., 169. 24. This claim is in conformity with elements of both Freud and Lacan, as represented in the writings of Jean Laplanche and Teresa de Lauretis: see Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) and Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 25. Jean-Luc Nancy, In Statu Nascendi, in The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 215.

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PERVERSION, SUBLIMATION, AND AESTHETICS:

A RESPONSE TO ELIZABETH GROSZ

tim dean

Some years ago, in a controversial exchange with Teresa de Lauretis regarding the viability of Freudo-Lacanian models for understanding lesbian sexuality, Elizabeth Grosz characterized psychoanalysis as a discourse whose time has come by which she meant a discourse whose time was up, a discourse whose political efcacy had been exhausted, and therefore a discourse that, at least for the purposes of queer critique, should be declared dead. The question which needs to be asked here, she claimed in her aptly subtitled interrogation of The Practice of Love, is: Does de Lauretis function to provide a political rationale and credi-bility for psychoanalysis as it lies dying? Does she, Grosz continued, and do other lesbian theorists who have tried to appropriate psychoanalysis for lesbian projects, serve to prolong the agony of this dying discourse, giving it hope for remission when in fact it should be buried?1 Answering these questions in the afrmative, Grosz claimed that de Lauretis argument to the contrary notwithstanding, psychoanalysis remains constitutively unable to account for lesbian desire; according to Grosz, psychoanalysis cannot explain precisely that which it must exclude in order to constitute itself as a mode of knowledge.2 By offering such an astringent critique of psychoanalysis one that, moreover, was launched in response to another lesbian feminists careful appropriation of French Freudianism Grosz seemed to be bidding good riddance to this dying discourse. Hence it was with some surprise that I read her subtle analysis of Freudian drive theory in The Strange Detours of Sublimation, an essay in which Grosz nds the psychoanalytic account of perversion indispensable to her queer critique of aesthetics. Groszs report of the death of psychoanalytic discourse appears to have been greatly exaggerated. Might we characterize her use of psychoanalysis in this piece on sublimation as an index of Groszs own return to Freud? And could this unexpected return tell us something about the cultural persistence of psychoanalysis, its discontinuous durability in the face of numerous death knells, resistances, domestications, and deformations? I have argued elsewhere that the repudiation of psychoanalysis

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within gay and lesbian theory often leads to queer reinventions of basic psycho-analytic concepts, such as subjective conict, the paradoxical mobility and intransigence of erotic attachments, and hence the constitutive perversity of desire.3 Queer theory cannot live with psychoanalysis, but it cannot live without it either. Perhaps psychoanalysis is revivied rather than buried by the extensive and varied reformulations it undergoes at the hands of its queer critics. In The Strange Detours of Sublimation, Grosz reveals just how fruitful a queer engagement with psychoanalysis can be. By nding in the lability of drive an explanation of perverse sexuality and cultural production alike, Groszs account offers a welcome opportunity to think harder about aesthetics, a category that many practitioners of literary and cultural studies tend to view as moribund. Is there any connection between the politically motivated penchant for declaring psychoanalysis dead, on one hand, and a widespread conviction that the aesthetic as a sphere devoid of political interest has been fully discredited, on the other? Certainly both psychoanalysis as a mode of cultural inquiry and the aesthetic as a mode of value have been demoted in recent years by various forms of historicism; it is therefore fascinating to witness Groszs reconsid-eration of aesthetics via a queer perspective on Freudian theory. Following Freud, Grosz discerns intimate connections between homosexuality and art; but she also recognizes that the most interesting psychoanalytic account of aesthetics paradoxically must be extrapolated not from Freuds writing on art but from his theory of drive. In order to construct a viable aesthetic theory, we are compelled to use Freud against himself and, once again, to read psychoanalysis against the grain. The fact that the Freudian intervention made in the name of drive has been commanding the attention of psychoanalytic critics lately suggests a readiness to return to the hardest problems of psychoanalysis problems that are, in fact, constitutive of psychoanalysis.4 In his epochal seminar of 1964, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan identies drive (pulsion) as one of the four fundamentals or bases from which psychoanalysis makes its advances. Following Lacan, who in that seminar speaks of fundamentals (fondements), not fundamental concepts, I am inclined to characterize drive as an intervention in even an interruption of established scientic epistemologies, rather than characterizing it merely as a new concept.5 Drive represents less a fundamental concept of psychoanalysis than an anti-concept, a wedge driven into the mechanisms that make conceptual closure possible. Thus drive troubles not only the human subject by virtue of its functioning with complete disregard for his or her well-being; drive perturbs also those productions of consciousness that the subject puts forth in order to conceptualize or encapsulate drive.6 If I speak somewhat awkwardly of drive instead of referring more conventionally to the drive, it is because the denite article is conjoined with the noun drive somewhat misleadingly. Strictly speaking the drive does not exist, because every drive is a partial drive: there is no whole or uni-

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fying drive, only uncoordinated fragments of force. To integrate these fragments into a single, unidirectional propulsion the drive is to think in terms of instinct (Instinkt), precisely the notion that drive (Trieb) was introduced to displace. Instinct serves the species, but drive does not. We might say that although drive is a result of evolution in the sense that its the product of a highly developed organisms encounter with language (symbolic networks denature animal instinct into the partiality of drive), nevertheless drive does not serve evolutionary ends. On the contrary, drive is antithetical to progress and development; it cannot be assimilated to any developmental theory of subjectivity or sexuality, but functions instead as an obstacle to whatever might be deemed progress. Indeed, progressivist thinkers regularly intuit that drive represents a part of the Freudian edice that must be jettisoned from psychoanalytic theory in order to construct an account of intersubjectivity palatable to contemporary American sensibilities. For example, Stephen Mitchell, the late founder of the relational school, argued repeatedly that a deeper understanding of intersubjective relations would enable psychoanalysis to move beyond what is often construed as the one-body psychology of Freudian drive theory.7 Mitchells mistake and in this respect his argument typies a widespread misconception lies in taking drive as a sign of Freuds residual biologism, rather than as a sign of his repudiation of that nineteenth-century legacy. In all fairness to Mitchell, we should acknowledge that Freud himself often made the same mistake regarding the status of drive in his thinking. His recourse to organic metaphors in Beyond the Pleasure Principle has tended to obscure the distinction between drive and instinct, thereby enabling drive to be counterposed to intersubjectivity (as in the idea of one-body psychology), instead of seeing how drive comes into being as a consequence of the encounter with an Other. This confusion has been claried by Jean Laplanche in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, a reading of Freud to which virtually all contemporary work on drive including mine and Groszs remains heavily indebted. Like Lacan, Laplanche has been concerned throughout his career with re-establishing the fundamentals of the psychoanalytic project; he has produced the most illuminating account of drive that we have, and he has done so not from the perspective of onebody psychology, but, on the contrary, from the vantage point of what he calls the primacy of the other. Concluding his reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Laplanche contends that the death drive does not possess its own energy. Its energy is libido. Or, better put, the death drive is the very soul, the constitutive principle, of libidinal circulation.8 Hence the death drive is simply a term to describe how drive operates in the human subject; calling it the death drive is a way of indexing just how dysfunctional the drive becomes once it is fragmented into uncoordinated partial components. It is not that the death drive runs counter to some healthier, vitalist drive (the sex drive, the self-preservative drive, the ego drive, and so on), but rather that every drive by virtue of its partiality, its uncoordinated insistence

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partakes of the quality of unregulated compulsion that serves no vital purpose and therefore seems to threaten the subjects life. To some extent every drive is death-bound; there is no drive in the human subject other than the death drive, which is thence revealed as something of a misnomer, a redundancy. Every drive is virtually a death drive, Lacan declares in Position of the Unconscious, using the word virtually (virtuellement) to mean for all intents and purposes.9 This aspect of failing to serve life (except perhaps inadvertently) denes drive and thus distinguishes it from instinct. Far from a biologistic concept, drive denotes that which in the human subject functions independently of and, indeed, often countermands the biological dictates of organic existence. If drive, characterized by uncoordinated lines of insistence, remains antithetical to subjective harmony and social progress, nevertheless drive can be enlisted in projects that may be deemed progressive in their attempts at interrupting heterosexual normativity.10 The psychoanalytic account of drives partiality reveals the popular notion of an inborn heterosexual drive to be a palpable absurdity. Heterosexist ideology must imaginarily totalize the disintegrative subjective effects of drive in order to adapt what is constitutively dysfunctional to the reproduction of the social. Another way of putting this would be to say that heterosexism must normalize to the point of invisibility the libidinal strangeness that drive makes apparent. Grosz is attracted to this strangeness, particularly as it manifests itself in sublimation perhaps the strangest of the deviations or vicissitudes that Freud twists into his understanding of the drive because she sees in it something queer. By re-examining the vicissitudes of drive, Grosz correctly infers that queer theory, an ostensibly new phenomenon barely one decade old, in fact reaches back a full century to Freuds theory of perversion.11 Partializing drive and recognizing that it is only contingently soldered to its object, Freud drove a wedge into the functional understanding of sexual drive that dominated sexological, psychiatric, and popular thinking in his time. His Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality challenged embedded assumptions regarding drives functionality, arguing that far from an accident befalling drives otherwise natural telos, perversion was in fact drives natural state. Inverting the relation between perversion and norms, Freud showed that in Jacques-Alain Millers words perversion is the norm of the drive.12 In this way, the Freudian theory of drive becomes a potential ally of those projects that question normativity from the vantage point of the queer. Indeed, we might say that Freud was the rst to queer drive, revealing its radical dysfunctionality. But the signicance of Freuds intervention was not to reveal that drive which had been considered an irreducible sign of mans natural state, according to the model of animal instinct was in fact cultural. This is the conclusion that Grosz draws toward the end of her essay (the drive is already cultural), but it is not one that I endorse. Rather, as Charles Shepherdson has shown in Vital Signs, a good part of the signicance of psychoanalytic fundamentals (such

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as drive) lies in their outmoding the nature/culture dichotomy. Teresa de Lauretis has also argued, in a very interesting recent piece on Freud and Foucault, that Freuds notion of drive undermines and actually undoes the opposition between constructionism and essentialism, as well as the opposition between culture and nature that subtends it.13 The difculty but also the specicity of basic psychoanalytic notions stems from their inassimilability to our familiar conceptual frameworks. The category of sublimation is exemplary in this regard. Ostensibly a familiar term that explains how culture comes into being via the transformation of libidinal impulses into something that is no longer directly sexual, sublimation in fact represents one of Freuds most difcult and undertheorized ideas. By detaching sexuality from genitality and describing it in terms of the unconscious, Freud confounds the category of the sexual almost to the point of unintelligibility, thereby exacerbating our difculty in adjudicating whether something should be counted as sexual or nonsexual. Grosz sees that sublimation would be described better as a degenitalization than as a desexualization; and this enables her to argue that cultural accomplishments including highly valued aesthetic creations result from the same perverse libidinal impulses as does homosexuality. In arguing thus, Grosz is basically following Freuds own claims and unfolding the often conicted logic in his description of drives vicissitudes. But the twist in her argument and the point at which she turns psychoanalysis against itself comes when Grosz contends that the social privileging of art is made at the expense of homosexuality or queerness, which she claims are socially devalued precisely to the extent that aesthetic creations are socially esteemed. This crucial step in her argument deserves quoting in full:
[I]t may be worth stressing the social and cultural debt all production, all creation of the new, owes to the liberation of formerly repressed homosexual and perverse impulses, in other words, the cultural debt to what is designated as antisocial, anticultural, hostile to civilization. Civilization in general, and art in particular, participate in and help to veil and render invisible the very social injustices meted out to homosexuals and queers while nonetheless relying on and siphoning off their energy and impetus. What is needed is an acknowledgment of this debt and thus a transformation of the heterocentric character of the criteria by which social and cultural production is understood and valorized. Psychoanalysts, and psychoanalysis, need to decide whether they remain on the side of that normalization process which elevates art at the expense of the marginalization or pathologization of homosexuality and perversion, or whether they choose to use psychoanalysis, as one is perfectly able to do, to problematize the proper, the obvious, the apparent, and the expected, to question the normal with the aim 14 of showing what underlies and makes it possible.

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Having followed Grosz up to this point that is, having felt wholeheartedly allied with her political commitments, her skeptical deployment of psychoanalysis, her interest in aesthetics, and

her investment in challenging heteronormativity I cannot remain on board for this nal turn in her argument. The terms of the choice she proposes between art and normalization, on one side, and homosexuality or queerness, on the other do not in my view do justice to the account of sublimation she has elaborated. While queerness and normalization clearly oppose each other and although psychoanalysis seems sometimes to belong on the side of queerness thanks to its theory of perversion, while at other times it joins hands with the forces of normalization via its commitment to Oedipus I would like to suggest that art has more to do with queerness than with regulatory norms. Ill develop this contention about the queerness of art by taking a hint from Groszs essay at the moment when, invoking precedents in lm theory, she suggests that psychoanalysis might theorize aesthetics less from the vantage point of the artist than from the perspective of the spectator or audience. In other words, she recommends a shift of focus from the vectors of cultural production to those of cultural reception. Film theory and, more broadly, cultural studies have utilized psychoanalysis to develop more or less sophisticated accounts of cinematic spectatorship and the cultural circulation of aesthetic objects, showing how popular media activate cultural fantasies and, indeed, how even socially normative representations can be consumed in ways that undermine their ostensibly normalizing agendas.15 Usually these psychoanalytically inected accounts of cultural reception focus on popular aesthetic forms, such as cinema and genre ction, rather than on high art. Grosz seems to be suggesting and in this she is not alone that elite aesthetic forms acquire their cultural prestige at others expense. She sees a connection between the cultural hierarchy that subordinates popular aesthetics to high art and the sociosexual hierarchy that subordinates to heteronormativity all those instances of what Michael Warner calls nonstandard intimacies, including homosexuality and, more broadly, sex outside the couple.16 This intuitive connection between sexual and cultural hierarchies seems to nd conrmation in the historical associations between popular aesthetic forms such as melodrama, pornography, kitsch, camp and queer communities. As a result of the important role these popular forms have played in the development of perverse sensibilities and queer communities, we are inclined to suspect that any disruption of aesthetic hierarchies might help to destabilize the sociosexual regime that enforces heteronormativity. As much as I share a gay affection for certain low cultural forms, however, I wish to undermine this intuitive connection between aesthetic and sexual hierarchies. In many respects, I nd the culturally privileged aesthetic forms that Grosz wishes to demote queerer more resistant to normalizing imperatives than the lesbian- and gay-friendly popular culture that conventionally is less valued. The pleasure derived from popular aesthetic forms such as melodrama, pornography, genre ction, and musicals is the pleasure of the familiar, the readily accessible; these popular forms provide pleasures of recognition by offering narratives that facilitate audience identication. (This is the case even when as in the

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stereotypical example of gay mens identifying with the melodramas diva audience identication entails crossing various socially regulated boundaries.17) It is precisely their capacity for producing the easy pleasures of recognition that makes these cultural forms popular. It is also, of course, what makes them mass marketable; indeed, corporate media-sponsored transnational capitalism relies on the appeal of this comparatively easy access to aesthetic pleasure. In other words, the psychoanalytically inected accounts of aesthetic reception toward which Grosz gestures are quintessentially theories of consumption. But what about those aesthetic forms that actively resist consumption and, in their determined inaccessibility, may appear elitist? What about art that inhibits rather than soliciting its audiences identication? What of those high cultural forms that can be made reassuringly familiar only by means of considerable hermeneutic violence? I have in mind here the difcult art of practitioners as various as Mark Rothko, Alain Resnais, Emily Dickinson, and Hart Crane, all of whose strangeness or queerness has less to do with its makers homosexualities than it does with their aesthetic challenges to intelligibility.18 Art that radically resists normalization by virtue of its confounding sense would seem to represent a far stronger ally of queer politics than the products of mass culture that readily make sense and, in so doing, confer subjective and social recognition. By identifying processes of normalization with schemes of intelligibility and thus by aligning difcult art with queerness I am suggesting that certain aesthetic forms possess an alterity that renders wholly inadequate theories of cultural reception based on consumption. Psychoanalytic accounts of aesthetics that focus on cultural production are as useless in this context as psychoanalytic accounts of cultural consumption. And it is necessary to acknowledge that the notion of sublimation points psychoanalysis in the direction of cultural production, a direction from which it is much harder to appreciate aesthetic alterity. Freuds strongest contribution to aesthetics comes when he focuses not on production but on reception that is, with his theory of aesthetic effects offered in The Uncanny, an essay contemporaneous with Freuds discovery of the death drive. It is in the domain of das Unheimliche, when art becomes disquietingly unfamil-iar, that Freud comes closest to registering what I call the otherness of art. Of course, Freud has at his disposal a hermeneutic framework capable of refamiliarizing aesthetic strangeness though many commentators on The Uncanny have noticed how inadequate that framework is to the aesthetic effects it aspires to comprehend. It is only when psychoanalysis takes on board postHegelian philosophies of alterity and moves beyond the dialectics of recognition that it becomes equipped to think about the otherness of art in ethical terms. In order for psychoanalysis to respond ethically to the inhuman strangeness of difcult aesthetic forms, it must resist the hermeneutic imperative that founds psychoanalysis as a practice. To not make difcult art mean that is, to defy the impulse to transform aesthetic

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opacity into more intelligible terms poses perhaps a greater challenge for psychoanalysis than for other institutions of interpretation. Contra Grosz, it may be easier to situate art on the side of the queer than to maintain an alliance between queerness and Freudianism. Nevertheless, in the Lacanian category of the real that which resists meaning and interrupts interpretation we may nd the conceptual means for articulating a psychoanalytic ethics responsive to the otherness of art. As poet Susan Howe says in her meditation on the unregulatable economy of Dickinsons difcult art, the other of meaning is indecipherable variation.19 Although what Howe intends by indecipherable variation has nothing to do with homosexuality or with what some critics have gamely tried to establish as Dickinsons lesbianism, indecipherable variation could be taken as a synonym for queerness.20 Once erotic practices, fantasies, and desires are acknowledged as variable to the point of indecipherability and when schemes of intelligibility such as Lacans structures of desire are recognized as wholly incommensurate with erotic variation then psychoanalysis nally will have separated itself from the social apparatus of normalization. At some future point psychoanalysis might become an aesthetic and ethical practice, rather than a predominantly therapeutic and hermeneutical one. This dying discourse may return in strange forms.

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Elizabeth Grosz, The Labors of Love: Analyzing Perverse Desire: An Interrogation of Teresa de Lauretiss The Practice of Love, Differences 6 (1994): 278. This essay is also a chapter in Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995), 155171. See also de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). De Lauretis response to Groszs critique appears as Habit Changes, Differences 6 (1994): 296-313.

10. For more on the notion of queer research as a practice of interruption, see William Haver, Queer Research; or, How to Practise Invention to the Brink of Intelligibility, in The Eight Technologies of Otherness, ed. Sue Golding (New York: Routledge, 1997), 277-292. 11. As I argue in Beyond Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), queer theory originates not with Foucault, as most of its current practitioners seem to believe, but with Freud. 12. Jacques-Alain Miller, On Perversion, in Reading Seminars I and II, eds. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 313. 13. De Lauretis, The Stubborn Drive, 858; see also Shepherdson, Vital Signs.
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2. Grosz, The Labors of Love, 287. 3. See Tim Dean, On the Eve of a Queer Future, Raritan 15:1 (1995): 116-134. 4. See, for example, the special issue of Umbr(a) on the drive: Umbr(a) 1 (1997); Teresa de Lauretis, The Stubborn Drive, Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 851-877; and Charles Shepherdson, Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2000), esp. 187-195. 5. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 1-5. 6. Leo Bersani makes a version of this point when arguing that Freud describes precisely those mental forces that derail any theoretical project and thereby confound the realization of his own metapsychology. See Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 7. See Stephen A. Mitchell, Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic, 1995). 8. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 124. 9. Jacques Lacan, Position of the Unconscious, trans. Bruce Fink, in Reading Seminar XI: Lacans Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, eds. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 275.

14. See Grosz, 152 in this volume. 15. A classic instance of this kind of work may be found in Constance Penley, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture, in Cultural Studies, eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 479-500. 16. Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999), 106. 17. Much has been made in queer theory of such cross-identications, which often are taken as signs of queerness, thanks in part to the etymological and conceptual connections between queering and crossing. See, for example, Judith Butler and Biddy Martin, Cross-Identications, introduction to a queer special issue of Diacritics 24: 2-3 (1994): 3; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Foreword: T Times, in Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), xixvi; and D. A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). In my view, cross-identication regardless of which socially regulated boundaries are transgressed remains within the pale of the normal by comparison with that which thwarts all identication and thereby foils recognition.

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18. On Rothko and Resnais, see Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); on Dickinson, see Susan Howe, These Flames and Generosities of the Heart: Emily Dickinson and the Illogic of Sumptuary Values, in The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993); on Crane, see Allen Grossman, Hart Crane and Poetry: A Consideration of Cranes Intense Poetics with Reference to The Return, English Literary History 48 (1981): 841-879. I should note that these various critical accounts do not explicitly connect with queerness the forms of aesthetic difculty they anatomize, though they do make available the terms that enable this connection.
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19. Howe, These Flames and Generosities of the Heart, 148. 20. I develop this argument in Normalizing Emily Dickinson, an unpublished manuscript that, together with this response to Grosz, may be taken as an elaboration of the nal sentence of my book Beyond Sexuality, where I claim that beyond sexuality lie the myriad possibilities of aesthetics (279).

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BOOK REVIEWS

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Boovic takes on this question of the place of God in the modern world: namely, how does the work of early modern philosophers allow for a movement from the medieval idea of God as pure creator to a decidedly modern notion in which the invention of the apparatus brings into being not only reality, but God as well. For example, early in his book, Boovic describes Malebranches fascination with the smallness of insects. Malebranche marvels at the sheer complexity of the insect body for instance, the several thousand crystalline lenses in the eye of a y but what the
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In the past, God belonged to the realms of religion and philosophy: the former insofar as it depended upon a supremely living God and the latter insofar as it called for an entirely dead God. For, if only a living God can guarantee the ultimate sense of human life and thus nourish a properly religious encounter, then only a dead God constitutes proof of the innite distancing of totality from the world and the nal nitude of the human. In religion, God appears only in the immediate possibility of a subjective encounter with him; in philosophy, God is in the distant, impossible place of objective truth. What Miran Boovic offers in his recent book is a third notion of God and I would argue a properly psychoanalytic notion of God that is neither subjective nor
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Despite the fact that God has been denitively declared dead on more than one occasion, it seems that psychoanalysis nds it impossible to do away with him altogether. This seems surprising given that both Freud and Lacan notoriously broke with or overturned conventional assumptions at every step of the way. Are we to conclude, then, that the persistence of the notion of God betrays a symptomatic religiosity in psychoanalysis, or is the God that returns in psychoanalysis radically different from the conventional notions of God that preceded it?

AN UTTERLY DARK SPOT: GAZE AND BODY IN EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY Miran Bozovic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 139 pp.
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objective, neither a presence nor an absence, but rather an encounter with truth. Boovics readings develop an idea of the mere place of God, a god without ethics, without faith, without belief: God as a construction of the apparatus of the unconscious. This notion is structurally different from both the God of the philosophers and the one of religion in that the innite, whether possible or impossible, living or dead, is not guaranteed beyond the world, but rather the place of God is that which innitizes the world. The God Boovic presents can never be reduced to a notion of the God of the beyond and, as a result, the world itself is no longer guaranteed by a purely external cause. In fact, for Boovic, any notion of God that depends upon a realm beyond the world fails to live up to the demand of modernity. In his readings of early modern thinkers such as Spinoza and Malebranche, Boovic repeatedly demonstrates that the true dilemma of modern thought is nothing less than creating a place for God within the limits of the nite world.

We see that the invention of the apparatus, the microscope, creates not only the new reality that we see the delicate structure of the ys eye but it also creates God, that is, it creates the creator. However, it is a mistake to believe that Galileo is this creator. Galileo is not God insofar as he is rather the creator of God: that is to say he invents the position of God in the form of the viewer who peers through the lens of the microscope. If, as Johann Faber declares, Galileo literally creates, brings into being, the things that are made visible under the lens of his microscope, then their creation lies not in their material existence which preceded the invention of the microscope but which nonetheless was completely inaccessible to human percep-

If what is at issue on the side of things is not their material existence but their being seen, on the side of God, too, the apparatus secures not the real existence of God but the mere place of God as that utterly dark spot within the eld of the visible. For the age of the apparatus replaces the medieval preoccupation with ontological proofs of God the concern with God on the order of his exist-ence with the new problem of the mech-anical construction of the place of God, the creation of God on the level of the concept, of reason. Furthermore, this creation of the place of God does not necessarily lead to the actual existence of God; in fact, it makes of God what Bentham calls an imaginary nonentity, that is, something that functions not despite the fact that it does not exist, but rather precisely because of the fact that [it] do[es] not

philosopher nds most alarming about these creatures is that all their complexity seems to be deliberately hidden from the human gaze. Indeed, the smallest of things are utterly imperceptible to the human eye without the aid of a microscope; or rather, before the invention of the microscope, these things were not only invisible but literally did not exist. The advent of the apparatus, then, comes as a moment of creation: Boovic quotes Johann Faber who praises Galileo as a kind of creator, having exhibited something no one before had known to have been created (15). At this point in Boovics argument, the implications of Fabers comment are not fully realized; however, after his investigations of both Malebranche and Bentham, one realizes that in fact this small story sets up the crucial problem of his book.
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tion but in their being made visible. If this is true, the existence of these microscopic things is dependent upon the position of the viewer: not to be gazed upon is not to exist. Or, as Boovic will later say of Jeremy Benthams notorious, unrealized panopticon, Without a God who sustains it with his allseeing gaze,this body [the articial body of the panopticon] would certainly collapse (115). Although the place of God is what supports visible reality, it does not do so because God precedes and creates that reality as its sovereign and external cause; in the invention of the apparatus, reality and the place of God come into existence at the same time. In other words, for the visible to be visible, there must be a viewer but this viewer takes place only within and by means of the visible.

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Boovic makes this point clear when he examines the problems posed by Malebranches occasionalism. He says that, according to Malebranche, That which is immediately accessible to the mind, that is, what we immediately see and sense, is simply the idea of the body that is in God, and not its ideatum in the external world. There is an innite difference separating the bodies that we immediately see, that is, the idea of the bodies or intelligible bodies, from the bodies we look at, that is material bodies (69). Again we see here that there is a sharp distinction between the material existence of bodies and bodies as they are seen, or what Malebranche will call the idea of bodies; and again it is not the material body that is at stake here because, as Boovic points out, even when bodies exist, we hallucinate them (73). This hallucination of bodies is the creation of
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What Malebranche suggests is that, while God creates the ideas that give us (our only) sensible knowledge about the world, he cannot give us sensible knowledge of himself. For, Boovic explains, sensible knowledge of God himself would invincibly attach [man] to God (57) and thus turn him irrevocably away from the world. God then cannot appear as a sensible presence but only as a hole in the world of sensible presence and causal efcacy. Of what could this hole in the hallucination of bodies consist? Certainly the hallucinated world of things, that is, the idea of things, will not be disrupted by a material existence. For, the material existence of bodies is totally inaccessible except as another hallucination and thus, any disruption must be logically prior to the material world. The hole in hallucinated presence comes not by way of a real presence but through the presence of an absence, the appearance of the invisible hand of God, which Malebranche calls the grace of feeling. This hole is always a blot on the surface of reality, a place at which the world exceeds itself internally, and not by leaping into the beyond. Thus although Boovics book appears to concern itself primarily with the careful
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exist (96). In the panopticon, for instance, a prison-er can be absolutely certain that he is always being watched only as long as he never knows for sure when he is being watched. The moment when the place of the utterly dark spot becomes reducible to some particular object (as in the real person of an inspector), it loses its hold, it can no longer be truly omnipresent. In other words, what is effective in the panopticon what guarantees certainty is neither the presence nor absence of the inspector, but rather the presence of his absence, the making visible of an invisi-bility. The creation of the place of God, then, is this opening up of an invisibility, which functions nevertheless in order to guarantee the very possibility of visibility.

reality, the creation of the visible, but where is the lining of invisibility, the place of God, around which any visibility should form? Appropriately, in Malebranche, this moment of the appearance of the invisible comes not as a pure possibility but as an impossibility: as the presence of sensible knowledge of God acting on man.

reading of specic texts, what cuts across all these readings is a forceful new notion of God that develops in response to the dilemma of mod-ernity: of which God does one speak when one says, God is dead, and how is it that he returns? Theresa Giron
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BEYOND SEXUALITY Tim Dean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 304 pp.
Queer theory emerged as a separate eld of inquiry in the 1980s with two primary goals: to establish the centrality of sex and sexuality as a fundamental category of historical anal-ysis, and to theorize sexuality outside the terms of gender. Over the past twenty years, however, it has become exceedingly clear that the same Foucaultian theory of sexuality that has enabled queer theory to accomplish its rst goal has also severely inhibited its ability to tackle the second. While Foucaults theory of sexuality has helped queer theorists to successfully address the cultural production, dissemination, and vicissitudes of sexual meanings at various historical junctures, most have had precious little to say about the subject of desire. In Beyond Sexuality, Tim Dean convincingly argues that developing a nonnormative, nonheterosexist theory of desire to challenge the current deployment of sexuality requires more than a commitment to the standard Foucaultian position that sexuality is a historical rather than a natural phenomenon (269) it requires an engagement with, not a dismissal of, psychoanalysis. Claiming that psychoanalysiss greatest potential for a progressive critique of sexuality continues to be obscured by the work of those queer theorists most noted for their use of Lacan (namely Judith Butler), Dean sets out to recover the

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UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a)

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importance of Lacans work, and specically his concept of the object, for queer theory and queer politics. Dean argues that Lacans concept of the object a, the object cause of desire that is also the object of unconscious fantasy, not only shows that desire emerges independently of gender, and thus heterosexuality; it undermines our assumption that sexuality involves other persons. Beyond Sexuality seeks to push the critique of sexual identity politics in another direction, toward an understanding of the radical impersonality of desire (17), in order to disarticulate the connection between sexuality and selfhood. If, as Dean claims in one of two chapters devoted to thinking psychoanalytically about the AIDS epidemic, Sex has become literally worth dying for, [it is] because the deployment of sexuality scripts sex as the ground of our onto-logical identities (168). Ultimately, Beyond Sexuality attempts to show how a certain version of psychoanalysis may contain within itself the conceptual means for taking us beyond sexuality (272), that is, beyond the intransigent, systemic assumption that sex confers the principal guarantee of subjective truth (21). While Dean is thus clearly interested in reconciling psychoanalysis with Foucaults critique of sexuality, he distinguishes himself from other queer theorists attempting to bring Foucault and Lacan together by his refusal to assimilate psychoanalysis to the now standard constructivist position (or what Dean terms the rhetoricalist position), which maintains that sexuality is discursively constituted. In-

stead, in his chapters Transcending Gender and Bodies that Mutter, Dean critiques the work of Butler and Lee Edelman to expose the numerous paradoxes and misconceptions produced by the attempt to align psychoanalysis with both rhetoricalist and gender performance theories. Dean shows how explicitly queer-identied theories such as Butlers and Edelmans, which reduce sexual-ity to an effect of discourse and fail to consider what in discourse exceeds language, ulti-mately end up evacuating desire from their accounts: by assimilating the category of sexuality to imaginary and symbolic formations, Butlers and Edelmans accounts paradoxically produce queer bodies bearing egos but devoid of subjective desire. That is, their accounts describe subjects of the signier, not subjects of desire (187). For Lacan, however, the subject of desire emerges not when an identication (with the father, the mother, or a signier) is made, but when it fails to be made (187); that is, sexuality for psychoanalysis pertains more to the real and the unconscious than to the symbolic or the imaginary. By reducing subjectivity and sexuality to a function of the ego, and by ignoring both the productive and disruptive potential of the real and the unconscious, Butlers and Edelmans positions, Dean argues, not only oppose Lacans most basic ideas, they also unwittingly participate in the very normalizing practices they seek to critique and contest. Without an appreciation of the unconscious, Dean argues, queer sexualities themselves become normalizing (paradoxical though that sounds), insofar as sexuality becomes wedded to identity (6).

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Despite their loudly proclaimed awareness of constructedness and contingency, lesbian and gay egos by virtue of being egos are no less paranoid or aggressive than heterosexual peoples egos (192). Deans critiques of Butlers theory of performativity and her interpretation of Lacans concept of the real are particularly incisive and valuable, though impossible to fully recapitulate here. His main objectives, however, are to expose the limitations of any strategy for resistance which grounds subjectivity in the ego and which ignores the intractability of the real, for such an approach, he argues, only leads to a paranoid and psychotic style of queer politics. Beyond Sexuality, by contrast, seeks to contribute to the development of a more radical and workable sexual politics by resuscitating the subject of desire for queer theory. Lacans concept of the object a here proves crucial to Deans efforts, for unlike rhetoricalist theories that ground subjectivity in language, psychoanalysis grounds subjectivity in objects a, which serve as the cause of desire. Beyond Sexualitys originality and boldness derives from the way Dean develops and deploys Lacans concept of the object a to show how this concept provides a model for a non-heterosexist theory of desire that renders Lacans earlier concept of the phallus largely obsolete and displaces the signicance of sexual difference as the prime mover of desire (88) in psychoanalytic theory. Dean argues that by conceptualizing the cause of desire in terms of multiple, partial objects that have no a priori relation to gender, Lacan helps to free desire from normative heterosexuality (216). The

object a shows that desire emerges independently of gender, that the gendering involved in object-choice must be a secondary process performed on objects that precede gender (253). The secondary status of gender, as well as the fact that there is no signier for sexual difference in the unconscious, leads Dean to suggest that we move beyond sexual difference as the principal explanatory framework for theorizing desire (88), since sexual difference does not organize or determine sexual desire (87).1 Deans stance on sexual difference, undeniably one of the more controversial aspects of Beyond Sexuality, is a point I will return to later, once his full use of the object a comes into view. For in Deans argument, the object a not only serves as a model for a nonhetero-sexist theory of desire, it becomes the ration-ale for an impersonalist conception of sexuality that aims to disarticulate the connection between sexuality and personhood. As the cause of desire and the object of unconscious fantasy, the object a reveals how our relations with individuals are mediated by a more primary structure of relationality that remains stunningly oblivious to both persons and gender (263). According to Dean, It follows that if desire is, in the rst instance, impersonal, then our primary relations arent with other persons. We start to see that, harsh though it may sound to say so, other people provide merely contingent supports for psychical relations that are at bottom impersonal (274). In his chapter Safe-Sex Education and the Death Drive,

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Dean argues that recognizing the impersonality at the heart of sexual relations proves crucial to understanding and working through the unconscious fantasies underlying unsafe sexual practices. The pervasive fantasy that imaginary, symbolic and real impediments to relationship may be overcome by fucking without protection (150) that jouissance can be regained through sexual relations with others becomes more difcult to sustain once the function of the Other in sexual relations, and the constitutive inaccessibility of the Others jouissance, is acknowledged. Recognizing interpersonal relations as predicated on an impersonal relation to the Other, Dean argues, enables us to grasp how jouissance remains irreducible to sex (171). For historical reasons we aim at jouissance through sex, but this is a result of the deployment of sexuality rather than an invariable necessity. Indeed, an impersonalist theory of sexuality shows that interpersonal relations offer only one arena for engaging the truth of our being (278). In arguing for an impersonalist conception of sexuality, Dean is essentially calling for a broader understanding of sexuality and a more expansive sense of gayness, one that departs from the post-Stonewall ideal of sex-ual freedom that makes genital activity the sole basis of gay identity and politics. Dean argues that by insisting on the specicity of genital contact as the basis for all political work (172), queer theory continues to mystify sex by drastically overestimating its potential. In this respect, many queer theor-ists are far less

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Foucaultian than they imagine themselves to be (169). Rather than ideal-izing sex as the form of power that makes queer lives, Dean stresses the importance of divesting sexual acts of their redemptive signicance, for it is precisely this overvaluation of sex that makes unsafe sex so hard to renounce. We might get beyond sex as the truth of being, Dean argues, by thinking harder about sexuality in nongenital terms, by inventing more imaginative ways of ap-proaching jouissance and new relational ways of being gay. An impersonalist conception of sexuality that acknowledges the irreducibility of jouissance to sex opens a space for us to imagine different congurations of bodies and pleasures (195), and, ultimately, a different deployment of sexuality. A certain innovative potential lies in projects whether they be psychoanalytic or queer that defamiliarze what we mean by sex and sexuality (271), Dean writes in his conclusion. Beyond Sexualitys innovative-ness extends to the way in which Dean de-familiarizes both psychoanalytic and queer theory in the process of developing a psychoanalytically-informed queer theory of desire and sexuality. Beyond Sexuality offers a compelling critique of the limitations of Fou-caultian positions in queer theory, exposing the paradox that has characterized queer theory to date: namely, that for all its talk about sex, queer theory has ultimately had very little to say about what psychoanalysis recognizes as sexuality or desire. At the same time, in attempting to recover for queer theory the importance of psychoanalysis, and particularly that of Lacans work, Dean

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provides a gay critique of psychoanalysis that radically calls into question the validity of the phallus and sexual difference as the principal psychoanalytic concepts for theorizing desire. Dean, indeed, defamiliarizes Lacans theory of sexuality to push it to a new place, yet it is worth pausing to question what has been sacriced in the process. My main concern with Beyond Sexuality lies in the way Deans argument implies that theorizing sexuality outside the terms of gender also requires theorizing sexuality outside the terms of sexual difference. In arguing that because the object a shows that desire emerges independently of gender, sexual difference is secondary (267), Dean conates gender with sexual difference and implies that sexual differences conceptual relevance is limited to the realm of interpersonal relations, as opposed to the subjects impersonal relation to object a. While desire may emerge independently of gender and heterosexuality, this does not mean that desire emerges independently of sexual difference, for the very reason that it is always a sexed subject who desires.2 Nor is it correct to assume that just because sexual difference does not serve as the cause of desire, sexual difference does not organize or determine sexual desire (87). While Dean shows how the object a frees desire from the constraints of gender and heterosexuality, he fails to address the way in which the subjects relationship to object a is nonetheless highly organized and constrained by that subjects sexual position, by the position the individual assumes in relation to the

symbolic order (not the subjects anatomy). Stated another way, sexual difference may not cause desire, but it does structure the way the subject relates to his or her own desire and jouissance. My objection to Deans treatment of sexual difference lies not in his lack of delity to a more orthodox Lacanian position, but in my belief that he presents an unrealistic vision of desire free from all structural constraints, particularly the constraints imposed by sexuation (not gender). My ultimate concern, however, is with the way in which Dean, by conating sexual difference with gender, implies that this concept must be abandoned or at least rendered secondary to arrive at a nonheterosexist model of desire, and the consequences this bears for not only addressing the specicity of gay and lesbian desire, but also for queer theorys ability to address feminist issues. As Butler notes in her essay Against Proper Objects, queer theorys move to separate the study of gender from the study of sexuality has tended to create a false symmetry between lesbians and gays that dovetails with mainstream conservatism and male dominance.3 The concept of sexual difference, I believe, proves crucial to challenging this false symmetry and articulating the difference of the woman in a way that does not merely reduce women to their cultural construction. The relationship between queer theory and feminism has become an increasingly vexed one, and while this is not necessarily a concern addressed by Dean in Beyond Sexuality, his project nonetheless carries important im-

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plications for the future of this relationship. Indeed, it is precisely because Beyond Sexuality proves so successful in uniting Foucault and Lacan and providing us with a model of desire freed from the constraints of gender and heterosexuality that this work occasions pause for reection on the future direction of queer theory. To the two primary goals that have guided queer theory to date, perhaps it is time to add a third, one that works to challenge the false symmetry between lesbians and gays that has emerged in the eld, one that works to rebuild the eroding relationship between queer theory and feminism. Sue Feldman

DESIRING WHITENESS: A LACANIAN ANALYSIS OF RACE Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (London: Routledge, 2000), 182 pp. THE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF RACE Christopher Lane (ed.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 445 pp.
It is possible to isolate two problematic trends in the history of psychoanalysis in terms of subaltern histories and cultures, be they African-American or those of the colonial world. First, beginning with Freud, psychoanalysis has posited an analogy between savagery and infantilism.1 This is perhaps best evidenced by Octave Mannonis Prospero and Caliban (1950), whose justication of colonialism as a response to the psychic dependency complex of the natives has become an exemplary case of the political misappropriation of psychology and psychoanalysis. Already in 1955, Aim Csaire notes that the Eurocentric investment in these disciplines is evident in their insistence on depicting Negroes-as-big-children.2 Second, the possible contribution of psychoanalysis to an investigation into race has more often than not been completely dismissed as nonexistent or irrelevant because, as opposed to issues of sexual difference, there is very little in either Freuds or Lacans writing that explicitly refers to questions of race or seeks to explain racism. While there is an emerging field of psychoanalytic criticism

1.

Dean problematically conflates gender and sexual difference, an issue I will address toward the end of the review. 2. While I understand Deans interest in disarticulating sexuality from gender, identity, selfhood and personhood, it is unclear to me if this also involves disarticulating sexuality from the subjects sexual position. Dean seems to focus exclusively on questioning the gender of the object/object choice, ignoring the question of the subjects gender and sexual position. 3. Judith Butler, Against Proper Objects, in Feminism Meets Queer Theory, eds. Elizabeth Weed and Naomi Schor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

that discusses race, we have not quite established a decisive break from older models of applied psychoanalysis that, unwittingly or not, perpetuate the kind of approach to questions of race and colonialism that Mannoni represents.3 Two recent volumes that perhaps point to the beginning of a new understanding of the relation between psychoanalysis and race are Kalpana Seshadri-Crookss Desiring Whiteness and The Psychoanalysis of Race, a collection of essays edited by Christopher Lane. Seshadri-Crooks and a number of contributors to Lanes volume argue that, without an understanding of our psychic investment in racial identication, we merely repeat the symbolic structures that rely on racial difference for their functioning. For them, socio-historical analyses of race are insufcient: the tenacity of race the fact that, despite challenges that announce it as a construction and a myth, it still orders the symbolic in powerful ways suggests that our investment in it is not reducible to material or historical conditions (Seshadri-Crooks, 2; see also Lane, 3; Penney in Lane, 129). Psychoanalysis, the writers argue, is imperative for critical race theory if we are to understand the unconscious resiliency of race (Seshadri-Crooks, 14; see also Lane, 1; Marriott in Lane, 429). Seshadri-Crooks emphasizes that her study is not an application of psychoanalysis to the regime of race, nor is it a foray into the politics of psychoanalysis (Jacques Derrida contributes to this eld of study in his article in Lanes book). Instead, Desiring Whiteness is an

investigation into the symbolic structur-ation of race and the position of the real therein; its central question, then, is why do we need race (3-4)? Seshadri-Crooks reads race into Lacanian theory by beginning with the most familiar and central of Lacanian concepts: sexual difference. Fortunately, however, she does not crudely set up sex and race as analogies to one another. Instead, according to her argument, race, unlike sexual difference, does not pertain to the real. Consequently, We can deconstruct race as performativity, but not sex. ... Unlike sexual difference, which is founded on the real-symbolic law of the prohibition of incest, the law of racial difference is thoroughly historical and historicizable (42-43).4 However, this historical status does not mean that race is reducible to culture (4). Seshadri-Crooks follows Joan Copjecs argument that sexual difference names the irredeemable splitting and the sovereign incalculability of the subject5 and suggests that Whiteness, the master signier of race, attempts to totalize the subject and produce a sense of wholeness that covers over the split of sexual difference. Race depends upon the sexed subject for its effectivity (21): it promises the fantasy of oneness, the fantasy of recov-er[ing] the missing substance of ones being (59), whereby the subject would ll in the gap in the Other, occupy the position of the gaze in the eld of the Other, and hence annihilate difference (59). This argument of Whiteness as that which completes the subject, promising complete mastery, selfsufciency, and the jouissance of Oneness (7), is perhaps the most original insight in

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Seshadri-Crooks book. What seems to be a common concern for her and a number of Lanes contributors is an attempt to delineate something like an ethics of psychoanalysis in the realm of racial identications and race prejudice. This search for an ethics does not name an effort to elaborate a psychoanalytically informed socio-political program to counter racism. Instead, in seeking such an ethics, the writers want to confound our rst liberal impulses when faced with racism. They suggest that, rather than struggling for equality, we should investigate the roles that, for example, multiculturalism and antiracism play in the perpetuation of racial categories. Indeed, Seshadri-Crooks argues that a number of antiracist approaches reveal the need for the survival of race, that by condemning and challenging the most atrocious forms of race prejudice, civil society can guarantee the symbolic reinscription of race itself (9). Similarly, she points to the connection between Eurocentrism and multiculturalism both covertly share the logical assumption of an organic relation among language, culture and biology (49) and claims that contemporary identity politics have continued the debates over hereditary race and, hence, express and perpetuate our belief in race (12). While one cannot glibly dismiss identity politics, one must recognize how it strengthens the very cate-gories whose insidious symptoms it seeks to address (158-59). In fact, the rst ethical move that SeshadriCrooks and numerous contributors to Lanes collection effect is to denounce programs of consciousness-raising that assume racism to

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be the result of bad ideology. Instead, both volumes suggest that racism is not a malignant outgrowth of civil society but in fact an integral necessity to its symbolic formation. Both Lane and Seshadri-Crooks suggest that bolstering the ego through race consciousness or identity politics does not challenge racism and colonialism. Lanes project seeks to open an opportunity to displace the ego, allowing nonidentitarian and noncom-munitarian arguments to surface in its place (11). And as Seshadri-Crooks writes, One must throw into doubt the security and belief in ones identity, not promote more fulsome claims to such identity (36). To argue for such moves as our basic ethical imperatives is to situate oneself in opposition to dominant modes of sociology and historiography. Unlike the latter, this ethics takes into account the real. It does not supplement traditional historiography but shows its blind spots. This emphasis surfaces in the two most engaging essays in The Psychoanalysis of Race, Tim Deans reading of Conrads Heart of Darkness and Merrill Coles reevaluation of Nat Turners slave rebellion as the symbolically unassimilable event of the real. As Dean writes, When taken together, literature and psychoanalysis rather than standing as the poor cousins of more sociological approaches in cultural studies are in fact more historical than conventional historiographical methods (310). Taking issue with Paul Gilroys reguring of Eurocentric narratives in his The Black Atlantic (1993), Cole similarly argues that psychoanalysis does not complement

UMBR(a)

historiographical accounts of history (Gilroys included) but renders visible what is always necessarily scotomized in them: With attention to the disruptive event, to what it terms the symptom, psychoanalysis reconsiders trauma in a way that continuist historiography, however diligent and all-embracing, necessarily cannot (262). Even when he provides a counter-narrative to Eurocentric Enlightenment progress that is structured around slave experience, Gilroy, in Coles view, produces a historicist retelling of Eurocentrism that does not escape the blind spots of progressivist historiography. Cole deems it symptomatic that Gilroy cannot account for, or even directly acknowledge, the slave rebellion of 1831, which he sees as one of the events that traumatize linear and redemptive conceptions of history (262). Response to Turners bloody rebellion, Cole continues, reveal[s] a symbolic system grappling with the Lacanian real (268). Here, then, Cole articulates what seems to be the focal point for the reguring of race and subaltern histories in Desiring Whiteness and The Psychoanalysis of Race: the question of Lacanian ethics. As he notes, psychoanalysis teaches us the ethical value of paying constant attention to the operations of desire (279). Cole reminds us that Lacanian ethics includes a double movement in terms of the real: as ethical subjects, we must remain in a constant negotiation with desire and the real, retaining our desiring relation to the objet a, the piece of the real unassimilable to the symbolic order, but simultaneously refuse too close a proximity to it. Here we nd, too, that

Nat Turner, while revealing the disruptive, ethical imperatives of desire, fails in sustaining this trajectory precisely because of his lack of distance from the real; as Cole writes, he lacks distance from [the] voice enjoining him to kill (271). On the other hand, a refusal of this movement condemns one to immobility and blindness; here Gilroy, according to Cole, fails to conceive an ethics of race. For one to sustain an ethical relation to the real, it is imperative that one heeds eruptions that cannot be sutured back into symbolic representation. It is here, with Cole, that we nd the movements of desire and the proximity of the real that are ineradicable components of ethics in psychoanalysis (see also iek in Lane, 160-61). It is here, too, that Seshadri-Crooks and many of Lanes contributors converge in arguing that socio-historical programs, in their adherence to models of equality-in-difference, are incapable of articulating an ethics of race. For them, psychoanalysis is crucial in negotiating the processes of identication and abjection that underlie formations of race and racism. Mikko Tuhkanen

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1.

See, for example, Mary Ann Doanes discussion in Dark Continents: Epistemologies of Racial and Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 209-248.

tradict Seshadri-Crooks by arguing that race is (in) the real (see Shepherdson in Lane, 46; iek in Lane, 169). 5. See Joan Copjec, Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason, in Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 208.

2. Aim Csaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1955), trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 40. 3. The dialogue between psychoanalysis and race has largely been conned to psychobiographical works. As examples, we can take two texts that focus on Richard Wright: there is Margaret Walkers biography Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man, a Critical Look at His Work (New York: Amistad, 1988), which at times uses some pseudo-psychoanalytical ways to read Wright and his work, and, more notoriously, Allison Daviss chapter on Wright in his Leadership, Love and Aggression (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 153-80, which is illustrative of the so-called psychobiographies at their most arrogant and reductive. As Slavoj iek suggests in his contribution to The Psychoanalysis of Race, what is problematic in a number of earlier psychoanalytic approaches to questions of race is their glib attribution of clinical categories to social phenomena (iek in Lane, 154); here, Joel Kovels ground-breaking White Racism: A Psychohistory (1970; rpt. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) remains the best-known example. 4. Charles Shepherdson and iek seem to con-

UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a)

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CONTRIBUTORS

ARIELLA AZOULAY teaches visual culture and contemporary French philosophy at the Cultural Studies Program at Bar Ilan University and at Camera Obscura School of Arts. She is the author of Deaths Showcase (MIT, 2001) and TRAining for ART (Hakibutz Hameuchad and The Porter Institute Publishers, 2000; in Hebrew), and the director of two documentary lms, A Sign from Heaven and The Angel of History. SINKWAN CHENG is Carl H. Pforzheimer Professor of English at the City College of New York, CUNY. She has in print/forthcoming eleven articles on French and German critical theory, interdisciplinary legal and cultural studies, and twentieth-century British and postcolonial literature and currently has four book projects in progress. Her edited volume Law, Justice, and Power, consisting of essays by Joan Copjec, Juliet Flower MacCannell, Julia Kristeva, J. Hillis Miller, Nancy Fraser, Ernesto Laclau, and Alain Badiou, has been solicited by Stanford University Press. TIM DEAN is Associate Professor of English and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is author of Beyond Sexuality and coeditor of Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (University of Chicago Press, 2001). He is currently completing two books, The Otherness of Art and Modernism and the Ethics of Impersonality. MARC De KESEL teaches at the Arteveldhogeschool in Ghent. He is the author of several articles in Dutch on Bataille, Lefort, Derrida, and Lacan. In English, one of his articles appears in Sic 2: Cogito and the Unconscious. Recently he nished a book, in Dutch, on Lacans The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. MLADEN DOLAR is Professor of Social Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and author of The Bone in the Spirit: A Lacanian Reading of Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, published in German and Slovene and forthcoming in English from Verso Press. He has just completed, with Slavoj iek a book-length manuscript on opera, which will be published shortly by Routledge. SAM GILLESPIE has been a member of the Umbr(a) collective since 1995. He has published elsewhere on Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze and is currently writing a dissertation on the work of Badiou at the University of Warwick. ELIZABETH GROSZ teaches Comparative Literature and English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and is the author of Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, and Space, Time, and Perversion. Her book Architecture from the Outside is forthcoming from MIT Press.

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MARTA HERNNDEZ is currently enrolled as a Ph.D. student in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University, where she specializes in Latin American cultural studies and literature. KIRSTEN HYLDGAARD holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and teaches at the University of Copenhagen. She is the author of From Fantasy to Powerlessness: Seven Chapters on Lacan and Philosophy (Museum Tusulanums Forlag, 1998) and Heidegger and the Age of Technics (Aarhus, 1990), both of which are published in Danish. ERNESTO LACLAU is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Essex and Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of Emancipation(s); New Reections on the Revolution of Our Time; The Making of Political Identities; Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (with Chantal Mouffe); and Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (with Judith Butler and Slavoj iek). SEOUNGWON LEE is presently working on his Ph.D. on democracy and human rights in South Korea in the Doctoral Programme in Ideology and Discourse Analysis, University of Essex. JULIET FLOWER MacCANNELL is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, and most recently visiting professor at Stanford. She is the author of The Hysterics Guide to the Future Female Subject (Minnesota, 2000), The Regime of the Brother (Routledge, 1991), and Figuring Lacan (Nebraska/Routledge, 1986). ADI OPHIR teaches philosophy at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel-Aviv University. He is the founding editor of Theory and Criticism, an interdisciplinary journal of critical theory dedicated to Israeli culture and society, as well as the author of Platos Invisible Cities: Discourse and Power in the Republic (Routledge, 1991) and Speaking Evil: Toward an Ontology of Morals (Am Oved, 2000; in Hebrew). CARLOS PESSOA is presently doing his doctoral research on the Brazilian Workers Party in the Doctoral Programme in Ideology and Discourse Analysis, University of Essex. LASSE THOMASSEN is working on a Ph.D. on the concept of democracy and the problem of exclusion in the Doctoral Programme in Ideology and Discourse Analysis, University of Essex. He was a visiting research scholar at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the Fall 2000.
180 UMBR(a)

CALL FOR PAPERS UMBR a 2002

ON SAMENESS
For a long time, differences sexual, cultural, racial, historical have absorbed most of our attention and have even brought into being new elds of study. Recently, however, a new vocabulary seems to have emerged: we have begun paying attention to things that oppose themselves to, or remain indifferent to, difference: the impersonal, the generic, the same. Umbr(a) 2002 seeks to bring together essays that discuss these concepts, the particular timeliness of their emergence, and, perhaps most importantly, the possible connections between them. What is the meaning of this subtle refocusing of critical attention on such terms? Does it oppose or supplement the study of difference? Do these terms constitute a trend? Does the notion of the generic in the political philosophy of Alain Badiou, for example, have any relation to the notions of the same and the impersonal that appear in Leo Bersanis and Guy Hocquenghems (queer) theories of sexuality? How are these terms affecting theories of passing and identity? relationality and community? repetition and difference? What are the political implications of their emergence? Submissions should be 1,500-6,000 words in length, must be submitted on a 3.5 diskette (MSWord) and in hard copy, and must be received no later than December 1, 2001. Please send all submissions to: UMBR(a) c/o Mikko Tuhkanen The Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture 409 Clemens Hall SUNY-Buffalo, North Campus Buffalo, New York 14260-4610

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(a): the journal of culture and the unconscious

The Etiology of Innocence, Bernie Lubell

articles on psychoanalysis, art, and how we deal with them

(a) I Fall 2000: Ariella Azoulay Gabriel Riera Bernie Lubell Kwai-Cheung Lo Alfredo Carrasquillo-Ramrez Kirsten Hyldgaard Tracy McNulty Am Luski Lyat Friedman Yannis Stavrakakis Manya Steinkoler

on Hiroshima & Visibility / Badiou & The Age of Poets / The Etiology of Innocence / Face-Off / Puerto Rico & Hysteria / Sartre & Lacan / Klossowski / Horizontal Camera # 1 / Freuds Project / Laclau & Lacan / What a Woman Wants to Date

(a) II Spring 2001

on Mishima / Amenabar / Toy Story / Museums and Memory / Sandemose / Science and Death Drive / Laclau revisited / Lacan and Plato / French Africa / et al (a) III Fall 2001 special issue on Letters and the Unconscious

$25 per year / published twice yearly by the California Psychoanalytic Circle 916 Ashbury Street, San Francisco, California 94117
Juliet Flower MacCannell, Editor

UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) UMBR(a) 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