Radical Philosophy #162

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162 Editorial collective Claudia Aradau, Matthew Charles, David Cunningham, Howard Feather, Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie, Stewart Martin, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford, Chris Wilbert Contributors Haukur Már Helgason teaches philosophy at the Iceland Academy of the Arts. He is a founding member of the experimental literary band Nýhil.

Alberto Toscano teaches in the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (Verso, 2010).

Matthew Charles recently completed a PhD at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, Speculative Experience and History: Walter Benjamin’s Goethean Kantianism. Barbara Cassin is a director of research at CNRS (Centre Léon Robin, University of Paris–IV Sorbonne), author of L’effet sophistique (1995) and editor of Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies (Seuil/Le Robert, 2004).

Philippe Büttgen is a director of research at CNRS (Laboratoire d’Études sur les Monothéismes). His books include Lire Michel de Certeau: ‘La Formalité des pratiques’ (with Christian Jouhaud von Klostermann, 2008).

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philosophy july/august 2010

Commentary Inside a Charging Bull: Iceland, One Year On Haukur Már Helgason . .................................................................................. 2

article Everybody Thinks: Deleuze, Descartes and Rationalism Alberto Toscano .............................................................................................. 8

Imaginative Mislocation: Hiroshima’s Genbaku Dome, Ground Zero of the Twentieth Century Matthew Charles........................................................................................... 18

dossier  Universities The Performative without Condition, a University sans appel Barbara Cassin and Philippe Büttgen......................................................... 31

The University and the Plan: Reflections from Vienna.......................... 38 Case Study – From Fiasco to Carnival: The End of Philosophy at Middlesex?............................................................................................... 40 Occupation.................................................................................................... 46 Westminster, Sussex, King’s…  . .............................................................. 47

reviews

Copyedited and typeset by illuminati www.illuminatibooks.co.uk Layout by Peter Osborne, Matthew Charles and David Cunningham Printed by Russell Press, Russell House, Bulwell Lane, Basford, Nottingham NG6 0BT Bookshop distribution UK: Central Books, 115 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN Tel: 020 8986 4854 USA: Ubiquity Distributors Inc., 607 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217 Tel: 718 875 5491 Cover image: Solidarity Vote for Middlesex Philosophy, Porto, 2010

David Chandler, Hollow Hegemony: Rethinking Global Politics, Power and Resistance Stuart Elden, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty R.B.J. Walker, After the Globe, Before the World Peter Hitchcock . ........................................................................................... 48 Perry Anderson, The New Old World Michael Newman.......................................................................................... 52 Peter D. Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism Mark McNally................................................................................................. 56 Jean-François Lyotard, Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History David van Dusen .......................................................................................... 57 Ben Fine, Theories of Social Capital: Researchers Behaving Badly John Michael Roberts................................................................................... 59 Christian Kerslake, Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy: From Kant to Deleuze Joe Hughes.................................................................................................... 61

News Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd. www.radicalphilosophy.com

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Radical Philosophy Ltd

Beyond Copenhagen? World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, Cochabamba, 19–22 April 2010 Fuad Rahmat.................................................................................................. 63

Commentary

Inside a charging bull Iceland, one year on Haukur Már Helgason

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



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celebrated the conclusion, but the diplomat’s own description of the terms – ‘Iceland is taking on the sins of Europe, like Jesus on the crucifix’4 – did not convince the public, nor the ‘unruly faction’ of the Left-Green Movement, as social democrats refer to their anti-capitalist partners in government. ‘The sins of Europe’ refers to the general understanding that as the Icelandic banks operated according to European regulation, as well as under British and Dutch surveillance, Iceland was not solely responsible for their catastrophic failure. Iceland must, however, ‘drink that bitter cup’ of restoring faith in the whole banking system, which was considered at stake. Whether seen as lack of vigour or willingness to negotiate, the eagerness to conclude the matter can in part be ascribed to, if not Schadenfreude, then at least a pseudo-Christian sense of guilt and remorse: this is what you get for succumbing to the evil right so willingly and for so long. These two factually coherent but unsatisfying accounts remain caught in a loop of incessant but immobile talk, prolonged in January 2010 by the president’s veto of the contract known as IceSave II, and a subsequent referendum last March. This 10 per cent of the country’s debt still takes up 90 per cent of the debate. Why?

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

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



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

How to wash invisible hands While this single matter all but blocks out the attention of the media, Iceland undergoes complete restructuring from top to bottom. On the one hand, the government implements IMF strategies, making severe cuts in health care and education, paving the way for the country’s first private hospital (focusing on liposuction tourism), minimizing public broadcast services, and so on. On the other hand, ‘private enterprise’ is taking care of its own. When Iceland’s banks collapsed new ones were established overnight. As Geir H. Haarde, then prime minister, declared in October 2008, ‘This is not nationalization’ – meaning, this is done purely for the sake of private interests. Funded by the state, the new banks bought the old banks’ loans at a 50 per cent discount.9 One has already been handed over to creditors and investors; the others are set to be re-privatized as soon as possible. While the 60 per cent of businesses are at the mercy of the new banks, the government has no policy about their operations, or principled criteria for default and resuscitations. As the banks go about their business, piecemeal information gathers into a coherent image: those who already wore tailor-made suits retain the lucrative parts of business, while those who never got out of their jeans and sneakers – employed, self-employed and unemployed alike – foresee a future of paying back the infinite tailor’s bill.10 Ministers respond that they understand people’s anger and share their grievances. However, ‘more is needed than legislation, regulation or authorial orders’, as Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir explained in her recent address to the neoliberal lobby group Chamber of Commerce: ‘Manipulation is now considered the root cause of the bank collapse’, and so the government remains ‘absolutely opposed to politicians manipulating the financial system’ this time round. Let us make clear, before we move on to critique, that there is a world of difference between the current administration and the 1991–2008 administrations led by the Independence Party: the Independence Party and its businessmen are more akin to a highly organized criminal gang than a political party. As they held legislative power for so long, and as party members remain highly influential in business and society, it is uncertain what legal action can or will be taken – but let it suffice to describe one example, important but not unique, as a hint of the corruption at stake. When Landsbanki’s privatization was under way, in 2002, one man, Steingrímur Arason, resigned from the privatization committee, citing differences in opinion. Only after the



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



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

No more Mr Niceland In his splendidly researched Meltdown Iceland, Roger Boyes writes: By the spring of 2009, with the days longer and wetter, Skuggahverfi [‘the subpolar Man­ hattan’ district of Reykjavík] had become an urban graveyard. Someone had scrawled CAPITALISM R.I.P. on the side of one of the buildings. Squatters had moved in. One group converted an abandoned house into a cozy café, the kind of place where you could strum a guitar and check your e-mails. The Reykjavikers cheerfully welcomed the return of some kind of life to Skuggahverfi. The developers, however, did not approve. So, just after Easter, the riot police were sent in, men in black, with a chain saw to hack through barricaded doors and pepper spray to disable the young squatters. The cleanup was nasty, brutal, and short: it was the official end of Niceland.15

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



congressmen as ‘liebe Kameraden’ some openly oppose and ask him not to use that expression. But that’s a purely formal question, objects Mielke, and then makes history with the painfully pathetic exclamation: ‘Ich liebe doch, ich liebe doch alle Menschen!’ Congress burst out in laughter. That emperor never found his clothes again. The day after the IceSave referendum, leaders of all the country’s political parties made a thoroughly ‘Mielkian’ impression on television: almost every sentence uttered invited ridicule. What set the situation apart, however, was that no one present was capable of the mocking laughter – something taken care of by reinstating the national ‘we’ in the 2009 election. ‘The fact is’, the current leader of the Independence Party exclaimed, ‘what I’ve been trying to point out is that you’re wearing no clothes! You’re wearing no trousers, no shirt, no coat…’ As his mouth keeps talking his eyes are deeply anxious, begging as it were: please mock me, make me stop. ‘Now, that’s quite daring of you, isn’t it’ interrupts Finance Minister Sigfússon, ‘that’s very daring of a man who hasn’t worn any clothes for years, the leader of a party where no one, as it seems, has had clothes on for decades! If we are wearing no clothes, and I’m not saying this is the case, but if we are wearing no clothes, that’s your clothes that we’re not wearing. In your position, I would stay quiet.’

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

Notes

1. Editor’s blog, www.ruv.is/heim/frettir/innlendar/kosningar/2009/blogg/meira/store807/item261997/ (link is no longer active). 2. Culture journalist Hjálmar Sveinsson noted this first: http://blog.eyjan.is/hjalmarsveinsson/2010/01/26/8/ (accessed 13 March 2010). 3. Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir at the Iceland Chamber of Commerce’s annual congress, 17 February 2010, www.forsaetisraduneyti.is/media/frettir/Vidskiptating.170210.pdf (accessed 13 March 2010). 4. Svavar Gestsson interview with Morgunbladid, 8 June 2009. Summary: http://eyjan.is/blog/2009/06/08/ svavar-thetta-er-leid-ut-ur-fataektinni-en-ekki-leidin-til-fataektar/ (accessed 13 March 2010). 5. According to historian Gudni T. Jóhannesson, in Fréttabladid, 10 March 2010: ‘if deposits in the Icelandic banks had not been guaranteed we would have faced chaos … that was among the issues at stake in the so-called emergency law, the ‘f…k the foreigners-law’ as some of those who authored it called it amongst themselves.’ http://silfuregils.eyjan.is/2010/03/10/gudni-icesave-og-rikisabyrgdin/ (accessed 13 March 2010). 6. Cf. Egill Helgason, Reykjavík Grapevine, March 2010: http://grapevine.is/Features/ReadArticle/ David-Oddsson-On-The-Warpath (accessed 13 March 2010). 7. ‘We are succeeding because we are different, and our track record should inspire the business establishment in other countries to re-examine their previous beliefs.’ President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, ‘How to Succeed in Modern Business: Lessons from the Icelandic Voyage’, London, 3 May 2005. Full transcript, www.grapevine.is/Home/ReadArticle/How-to-Succeed-in-modern-business-OlafurRagnar-Grimsson-at-the-walbrook-club (accessed 13 March 2010). 8. Financial Times, 26 February 2010, www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a62e05b8–230f-11df-a25f-00144feab49a. html (accessed 13 March 2010). 9. http://eyjan.is/blog/2010/03/12/lan-voru-faerd-i-nyju-bankana-a-meira-en-helmingsafslaettilangmest-afskrifad-hja-arion/ (accessed 13 March 2010). 10. See, for example, http://eyjan.is/blog/2009/10/01/ar-lidid-fra-hruninu-audmennirnir-halda-enn-fyrirtaekjum-sinum/ (accessed 13 March 2010). 11. Around 1 trillion ISK were supposedly gained through these short positions, or €5–6 billion at current rates. http://eyjan.is/blog/2010/03/12/sedlabankinn-stod-ekki-vaktina-bankar-foru-offorsi-igjaldeyriskaupum-foru-gegn-landi-og-thjod/ (accessed 13 March 2010). 12. The Works of Lucian of Samosata, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1905, ch. 28. 13. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2009, http://tarnac9. files.wordpress.com/2009/04/thecominsur_booklet.pdf. 14. Slavoj Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Verso, London, 2004. 15. Roger Boyes, Meltdown Iceland, Bloomsbury, London, 2009, p. 186.



Everybody thinks Deleuze, Descartes and rationalism Alberto Toscano

In his 1968 book Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze famously stresses the violent, unnatural and shocking character of thought, counterposing his own anti-representational philosophy of difference to what he depicts as a dogmatic, humanist ‘image of thought’. In his own words: ‘“Everybody” knows very well that in fact men think rarely, and more often under the impulse of a shock than in the excitement of a taste for thinking.’1 In his commentary on Deleuze, François Zourabichvili has shown how this repudiation of the idea that thought is coterminous with human nature, that thinking is a natural and constant exercise of human beings’ ‘common sense’, plays a pivotal role in Deleuze’s association of thought with the notions of the ‘outside’ and the ‘event’. In Zourabichvili’s helpful summary: ‘thought affirms an absolute relation to exteriority, refuses the postulate of recognition, and affirms the outside in this world: heterogeneity, divergence. When philosophy renounces the activity of foundation, the outside abjures its transcendence and becomes immanent’.2 Deleuze’s sundering of the lineage of rationalism (pitting Spinoza against Descartes) can accordingly be understood as a split in the understanding of what it is to think in general, and to think being in particular. In order to examine this radical division of what goes by the abridged name of rationalism, and what Deleuze’s role is in the constitution of what some have seen as a kind of contemporary anti-Cartesian doxa in Continental philosophy and critical theory, 3 I will focus on the relatively subtle changes in Deleuze’s portrayal of Descartes as the purveyor of a ‘dogmatic image of thought’, and then move on to how Deleuze inflects and transforms the widespread condemnation of Descartes’s dualism. The chapter on ‘the image of thought’ in Difference and Repetition clearly prefigures What is Philosophy? (written with Félix Guattari) in posing the problem of thought as the problem of beginning to philosophize



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without presuppositions, a problem with an incontestable Cartesian pedigree. But does philosophizing without presuppositions surreptitiously mobilize certain varieties of philosophical pre-understanding, or prephilosophical understanding? In particular, the chapter on ‘the image of thought’ anticipates the engagement with Descartes in What is Philosophy? when it adumbrates, in what might be regarded as an anti-modernist vein, the theme of beginning in philosophy. Given the power and pervasiveness of the figure of Descartes as the inceptor of ‘modern’ philosophy, and the broadly anti-Cartesian orientation of Deleuzean philosophy, it is particularly interesting to see this trope at work. Of course, the theme of presuppositions is also closely linked to that of immanence, which might also be envisaged as something like an abandonment of all presuppositions. But is this what Deleuze is aiming at? Is the forsaking of presuppositions not instead a gesture redolent of the Hegelian movement of the concept which, whilst acknowledged as precursor of the project outlined in What is Philosophy?, remains a definite rival for Deleuze? Is immanence marked by a certain relationship to presuppositions rather than an absence or repudiation of them? After all, for Deleuze the singularity of philosophy should not be confused with its legislative autonomy and/or transcendence. One might wonder in this regard whether the later development of the idea of a plane of immanence, for instance in A Thousand Plateaus, is to be considered as an evacuation of presuppositions or on the contrary as a new use of presuppositions. Deleuze distinguishes between objective and subjective presuppositions. In the case of Descartes, according to Deleuze, we witness a kind of trade-off between the two forms of presupposition: Descartes abandons ‘objective’ presuppositions, which would locate the concept of the Cogito within an objective taxonomy of other concepts – for instance, presupposing rationality and animality in the definition of man

as a zoon logikon 4 – for the sake of an intensification of subjective presuppositions. This, of course, is the philosophical sin for which Deleuze chastises Descartes: going ‘too fast’ into the arms of ‘opinion’, as he tries to escape the ‘objective’ clutches of Aristotelian scholasticism. What Descartes’s philosophy brings to the fore – and what still powerfully abides, as Deleuze notes, in Heidegger’s ‘pre-ontological understanding’ – are ‘subjective or implicit presuppositions contained in opinions rather than concepts: it is presumed that everyone knows, independently of concepts, what is meant by self, thinking, and being’. 5 The ‘subjective’ is here the site of a kind of cloaked anticipation, whereby the subject of opinion – the one who tacitly knows just what it is, or what it is like, to be a cogitating subject – underlies the seemingly purified subject engineered by the internal theatre of the Meditations: ‘The pure self of the “I think” thus appears to be a beginning only because it has referred all its presuppositions back to the empirical self.’ This critique of the epitome of a modern beginning in philosophy opens up the question of the compatibility between the theme of immanence, so dear to Deleuze, and that of radical commencement, together with the repercussions of such a notion of commencement on his conceptions of subjectivity and the event. What is clear is that for Deleuze’s philosophy beginning cannot simply take the guise of a punctual caesura, a cut, an interruption, a wiping of the slate. Indeed, we could see in Deleuze’s repudiation of a certain modern notion of commencement his distance from the Christological or messianic thread that underlies much of the subjective and historicopolitical temporality of modernity. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze thus suggests the possibility that ‘there is no true beginning in philosophy, or rather that the true philosophical beginning in philosophy, or rather the true philosophical beginning, Difference, is in-itself already repetition’.

Common sense, good sense But Descartes, the philosopher of radical commencement, is also the philosopher of representation par excellence. In a manner that both resonates with and diverges from Foucault’s account in The Order of Things,6 and ignores the Derridean view of the cogito as ‘punctuated by a singular and unprecedented excess’,7 Deleuze brusquely encapsulates this logic of subjective presupposition in the following terms: ‘Everybody knows, no one can deny, is the form of representation and the discourse of the representative.’8 But who, and how, is the philosopher representing? What place is this elaborate philosophical drama – the

drama of the Meditations – supposed to let the philosopher occupy? To use the terminology of What is Philosophy?, which conceptual persona are we dealing with? In a sense – and we shall return to this feature of Descartes’s role in Deleuze’s overall characterization of philosophical practice – we are confronted with something like a degree-zero conceptual persona, a persona without personality, the idiot, the everyman, ‘the individual man endowed with his natural capacity for thought [as opposed to] the man perverted by the generalities of his time’. Not a man without qualities, but a ‘man without presuppositions’. The critique of Descartes demonstrates the extent to which Deleuze is unequivocally opposed to any philosophical anthropology founded on the elaboration of a theory of thought as a universally held capacity. His objection is precisely to that implicit, subjective presupposition which takes ‘the form of a natural capacity for thought which allows philosophy to claim to begin, and to begin without presuppositions’. And the paragon of such a ‘natural capacity’ is to be found at the very start of the Discourse on Method: Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world: for everyone thinks himself so well endowed with it that even those who are the hardest to please in everything else do not usually desire more of it than they possess. In this it is unlikely that everyone is mistaken. It indicates rather that the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false – which is what we properly call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’ – is naturally equal in all men, and consequently that the diversity of our opinions does not arise because some of us are more reasonable than others but solely because we direct our thoughts along different paths and do not attend to the same things. For it is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to apply it well.9

This passage weaves together an ascription of natural equality (‘everybody thinks’) and a more-or-less pedagogical teleology (good application and choosing the right path). For Deleuze, such a dogmatic–didactic image of cognitive equality requires the participation of both common sense, understood as the natural accord of the faculties,10 and good sense, conceived as the teleological (and ultimately moral or normative) determinant of such a natural usage. For Deleuze, ‘good sense is by nature eschatological, the prophet of a final compensation or cancellation’; it is an agency of distribution (‘on the one hand’, ‘on the other hand’); it ‘does not negate difference. On the contrary, it recognizes difference just enough to affirm that it negates itself, given sufficient extensity and time’; common sense is static and points beyond itself to



good sense as the ‘dynamic’ instance, which takes as its point of departure ‘a difference at the origin of individuation’; they distinguish each other like recognition from prediction, like a qualitative synthesis of diversity and a quantitative synthesis of difference. This de-differentiating, distributive, temporal function of good sense also has political overtones: ‘Good sense is the ideology of the middle classes who recognize themselves in equality as an abstract product.’11 On the issue of the natural equality of thought, as it transpires from the Discourse on Method, one might confront the Deleuzean critique of the image of thought with an entire radical tradition of political anthropology or egalitarian rationalism: with Feuerbach’s definition of man in terms of his power to think the infinite; with Chomsky’s anarchist and overtly Cartesian elaborations on the notion of human nature; as well as with the cognitive or intellectual egalitarianism of recent authors such as Rancière and Virno. A brief but illuminating comparison can be made here with the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, in which the couple good sense/common sense is also operant, and given a valence which is at once epistemological and political. Gramsci famously starts from a thesis of generic intellectuality. In the Eleventh Notebook, he bases this thesis on a difference in degree (quantitative) and not in kind (qualitative), between the spontaneous philosophy of the masses (or i semplici, the simple ones) and elaborate world-views or ‘philosophies’ proper. This is why it is necessary, as he puts it, ‘to demonstrate that all men are “philosophers”, defining the limits and features of this “spontaneous philosophy”, belonging to “everybody”’. This spontaneous philosophy of everyman, which comes in different socio-historic guises, is in turn to be found sedimented in language, in the couple of common sense and good sense, and in popular religion or folk belief. Although Gramsci is sometimes equivocal about the difference between good sense and common sense – with the terms sometimes treated as synonyms, while elsewhere common sense is given a fundamentally negative collective connotation (in the sense of popular ignorance or ideology; Gramsci calls common sense the ‘“folklore” of philosophy’, an incoherent and subaltern aggregate ‘where you can find whatever you want’) and good sense is more akin to a Cartesian capacity – his schema does combine the two notions which are given the names common sense and good sense in Deleuze’s attack on the dogmatic image of thought. In other words, Gramsci advocates a radical variant of the combination of a universal capacity with a requirement for pedagogy that Deleuze condemns. In

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Gramsci, this pedagogy is intrinsically linked to the fate of the political party, the ‘Modern Prince’ and to the cultural project of hegemony (defined as the task of ‘overcoming a determinate “common sense” to create another which is more adherent to the conception of the world of the leading group’).12 As Guido Liguori notes, Gramsci in this regard considers the ‘Enlightenment’ error to consist in inferring from the commonality of philosophy (the belief that everybody is a ‘philosopher’) the idea that men simply are equal. The gap between capacity and pedagogy is here the space for the political becoming of equality, which in Gramsci takes unabashedly vanguardist tones. In this regard, and contrary to the Deleuzean image of common sense merely as a bulwark for philosophies of transcendence and authority, Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis is aimed at the politicization of the category of common sense, and at envisaging it as the terrain of cultural, political and pedagogical transformation: This means that common sense is an equivocal, contradictory, polymorphous concept and that to refer to it as evidence of truth is nonsense … common sense is crassly misoneistic and conservative, and to have managed to inject it with a new truth is proof of the force of expansion and evidence of such a truth.13

Common sense is thus treated as in a sense preintentional and, as Liguori notes, Gramsci’s position is ‘anti-subjectivist’ in the sense of cautioning against a belief in the spontaneous equality of minds and instead advocating the necessity of a political subject to organize the passage from mass intellectuality to a transformed common sense. Before closing this interlude, to which we will return once we tackle Deleuze’s political attack on Cartesian dualism, it is important to note that the kind of political anthropology of thought put forward by Gramsci – and possibly by other radically different figures who are nevertheless preoccupied with analogous problems, such as Chomsky or Virno – is not founded on the imputation ‘everybody knows’ but rather on the axiom that ‘everybody thinks’.

Image and plane What, or rather who, does Deleuze oppose to this representational universalism of a ‘natural’ intellectual capacity? A kind of Bartleby-like figure, a conceptual persona who it would be fair to call ‘a real idiot’. This is the strange figure – one would hardly call it a ‘subject’ – who escapes both subjective and objective presuppositions; who not only refuses to acknowledge the agreed taxonomies of concepts (‘rational animal’, and so on), but who starkly undermines the very presupposition of cognitive universality. This ‘individual

full of ill will’ is someone ‘who neither allows himself to be represented nor wishes to represent anything’.14 It is worth noting that this figure, who Deleuze sees incarnated in the infamous and underground men of Shestov and Dostoevsky, is also accorded a kind of diagonal temporal register: ‘such a one is the Untimely, neither temporal nor eternal’, neither the obedient child of an objective culture nor the normal bearer of a linguistic capacity. Against those who see emancipatory potential in the subjective presupposition of cognitive universality (‘everybody knows’), Deleuze promotes the suspicion that such presupposition (or perhaps we should say such an imputation or ascription) of thought hides an ‘interest’, an interest precisely in representing the supposedly general capacities of thought, in speaking for others by speaking universally – a subtle and eminently political machination which is founded on the treatment of thought as a natural faculty and the thinker as endowed with the good will to channel its natural exercise. What is even more insidious is that such presuppositions are precisely not, in most cases, explicitly flagged; rather they are ‘propositional themes which remain implicit and are understood in a pre-philosophical manner’.15 Where others might see this universal faculty as corrosive of hierarchies and inequalities, Deleuze sees a depotentialization and normalization of thought in ‘the implicit presupposition of philosophy’, ‘the idea of a common sense as Cogitatio natura universalis’. It is against this idea of thinking as a universally shared natural capacity that Deleuze unceasingly advocates the notion that we do not yet know what it means to think – or we do not know what thought can do (nor, indeed, who or what it is that thinks, a matter that could benefit from an exploration of the discussion of the ‘brain’ in What is Philosophy?). In a sense, then, the ‘image of thought’ is precisely something that cannot be ‘seen’, a kind of spectral presence that inhabits, in one way or another, and accompanied by all sorts of resistances and perversions, all of philosophy (except perhaps Spinoza or Nietzsche, though Deleuze and Guattari are ambiguous on this count). It is worth noting that – mirroring in a sense the unity and universality of thought that this dogmatic, representational image promotes – Deleuze does not observe a plurality of prejudices and compromises with opinion and generality as corrupting philosophical practice, but rather ‘a single Image in general which constitutes the subjective presupposition of philosophy as a whole’.16 This is perhaps the peak of Deleuze’s Nietzschean intolerance towards the slavish collusions of philosophy with common sense, the moment for his call – later dulled if not retracted

– for a thought that would be faithful to this radical ‘critique’ of the image, that would find a ‘true beginning’, ‘not in an agreement with the pre-philosophical Image but in a rigorous struggle against this Image, which it would denounce as non-philosophical’. What happens in the shift from the hyper-critical incursion into the subjective presuppositions of thought in Difference and Repetition to the pedagogical unfolding of the conditions of conceptual creation in What is Philosophy? In other words, what happens between the image and the plane? Does Deleuze (here with Guattari) live up to the task of ‘a philosophical obstinacy with no ally but paradox’, which he declared in Difference and Repetition? There, Deleuze had declared that what separates Descartes from the ‘commonsensical’ version of common sense, what ‘makes him a philosopher’, is the manner in which he erects the image of thought to a principle, so that even if ‘everybody’ ‘really’ knows that thought is a rare, unevenly distributed and difficult thing, it may nevertheless be ‘the easiest in principle’. And what makes it easiest in principle is a certain transcendental model which enacts the image via ‘recognition’. As Deleuze writes: Recognition … relies upon a subjective principle of collaboration of the faculties for ‘everybody’ – in other words, a common sense as a concordia facultatum; while simultaneously, for the philosopher, the form of identity in objects relies upon a ground in the unity of a thinking subject, of which all the other faculties must be modalities. This is the meaning of the Cogito as a beginning: it expresses the unity of all the faculties in the subject; it thereby expresses the possibility that all the faculties will relate to a form of object which reflects the subjective identity; it provides a philosophical concept for the presupposition of a common sense; it is the common sense become philosophical. For Kant as for Descartes, it is the identity of the Self in the ‘I think’ which grounds the harmony of all the faculties and their agreement on the form of a supposed Same object.17

As I have already suggested, a number of the antiCartesian themes broached in Difference and Repetition return in What is Philosophy? But, just as Deleuze and Guattari highlight both the history and the becoming of a concept (whereby the first implies the borrowings and transformation of previous conceptual constellations, and the second the relation to concepts situated on the same plane), we could say that there is both a history and a becoming to Deleuze’s own relation to Descartes, a set of shifts, ambivalences and short-circuits which prevent him from reverting to a merely dogmatic

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anti-Cartesianism. In keeping with the most familiar image of Descartes, Deleuze and Guattari introduce him in terms of a discussion of what it is to begin in philosophy. They write: ‘Even the first concept, the one with which a philosophy “begins,” has several components, because it is not obvious that philosophy must have a beginning, and if it does determine one, it must combine it with a point of view or ground.’18 Within this framework, the epitome of the concept of beginning and of a first concept – the Cartesian Cogito – is approached by Deleuze and Guattari as a kind of testing ground for the constructivist phenomenology of the concept which they trace in the first half of What is Philosophy? Whereas the passage from the Cartesian Cogito to the Kantian subject might belong to the discontinuous history of the concept (as Étienne Balibar has recently explored, pointing out that the Cartesian subject, rather than Cogito, is a retroactive post-Kantian invention), Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Example I’ is an investigation of the timeless becoming of the Cogito qua concept – to be understood in terms of its components or variations, and the bridges that it may build towards other concepts (world, God, and so on). This micro-phenomenology of the concept is particularly provocative inasmuch as it eschews two other approaches to the Cogito – one which would take the becoming of the Cogito in terms of the narrative course of Descartes’s own Meditations and its dramatic moments (e.g. ‘I will now shut my eyes, stop my ears, and withdraw all my senses’), and another which would see in it the basis for an exacting formalism. In shifting the framework from the critical to the constructive, Deleuze certainly does not abandon some of the key perspectives on Descartes developed in his earlier work. However, in proposing together with Guattari an allencompassing theory of the concept, Deleuze obviously felt the need to put constructivism to the test, enlisting his phenomenology of the concept in accounting for what should have been the most recalcitrant concept, the one that – if we follow Difference and Repetition – inaugurates the modern embodiment of the image of thought. Thus, in mapping the components of the Cogito (doubting, thinking, being) and diagramming their inner dynamics and ‘condensation’, Deleuze and Guattari present the Cogito qua multiplicity. In what sense does this seemingly ecumenical choice (the

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Cogito as just another ‘example’ of a generalized philosophical creativity) clash with the elaborate process whereby, in Difference and Repetition, the ‘I’ came to be fissured and its place occupied by swarming ‘factors of individuation’?19 What does it mean to think Descartes’s Cogito as the ‘event of thought’? We should not fail to notice both the apparent capitulation of Deleuze’s revolutionary project of a thought without an image and, at the same time, the sheer perversity of treating Descartes in this register. Rather than rehashing the condemnation of Descartes as the purveyor of an insidiously disempowering brand of universality, in which the ‘clear and distinct’ shack-

les thought to representation and to the scientific demands of extensity, as well as the spiritual demands of interiority, Deleuze now reinterprets the very hinge of the Cartesian system as articulated in terms of ‘intensive ordinates’, components that are ‘arranged in zones of neighbourhood or indiscernibility that produce passages from one to the other and constitute their inseparability’.20 The ‘clear and distinct’ and the foundation of mathematical extension and rational representation are mined from the inside, bringing to the surface something like Descartes’s repressed constructivist unconscious. What is disarming, however, is that in this odd combination of dispassionate diagram and

subversive ventriloquism, from which the antagonism of ‘The Image of Thought’ is largely absent, there is a kind of ‘absolute relativism’ at stake. As Deleuze puts it: ‘There is no point wondering whether Descartes was right or wrong.’21 But does this not constitute a kind of aestheticizing repudiation of the very radicality of a project for which truth and falsity, correctness and inadequacy, were crucial concepts, ones not only involved in the internal becoming of the philosophy, but part of a history which, if we follow recent research on the role of Cartesianism in the radical Enlightenment, was in many ways also political? When Deleuze and Guattari write that ‘Cartesian concepts can only be assessed as a function of their problems and their plane’, is this to say that we should simply bracket the very exacting and ‘totalizing’ demands they make on thought – the manner in which Descartes wages war on problems which he thinks no longer have any right to exist? If a thought, such as that of Descartes, wants to wipe the slate clean of much of what it sees as corrupting verbiage and unthought, is it really possible to investigate the constructivist machinations of his thinking, and at the same time assume that it can be maintained on ‘its own plane’, with ‘its own problems’? Deleuze and Guattari ask rhetorically: ‘Is there one plane that is better than all the others, or problems that dominate all others. Nothing at all can be said on this point.’ Is this quietism a mere gesture or a subterfuge (behind which we can clearly see, in What is Philosophy? itself, that Spinoza is better than Descartes, inasmuch as he included the thinking of constructivism within his ontology and ethics)? In any case, it is interesting that the very elements that served to damn Descartes in some of the earlier work are recuperated here as bona fide philosophical inventions; for instance, when Deleuze and Guattari refer to the introduction of ‘prephilosophical understanding’ as a ‘very novel distinction’, ‘a plane that requires a first concept that presupposes nothing objective’.22 In attending to the dynamics of conceptual creation, rather than the image of thought, Deleuze and Guattari present the prephilosophical not as a surreptitious enemy of thought, but as a plane, and, we might suppose, a variety of immanence, thereby signalling a break of sorts, or at least a retreat, vis-àvis the unsparing critique of the image of thought in Difference and Repetition: If philosophy begins with the creation of concepts, then the plane of immanence must be regarded as prephilosophical. It is presupposed not in the way that one concept may refer to others but in the way that concepts themselves refer to a nonconceptual

understanding. Once again, this intuitive understanding varies according to the way in which the plane is laid out. In Descartes it is a matter of a subjective understanding implicitly presupposed by the ‘I think’ as first concept; in Plato it is the virtual image of an already-thought that doubles every actual concept. Heidegger invokes a ‘preontological understanding of Being’, a ‘preconceptual’ understanding that seems to imply the grasp of a substance of being in relationship with a predisposition of thought. In any event, philosophy posits as prephilosophical, or even as nonphilosophical, the power of a One–All like a moving desert that concepts come to populate. Prephilosophical does not mean something preexistent but rather something that does not exist outside philosophy, although philosophy presupposes it. These are its internal conditions.23

Thus, rather than a critical dismantling of the dogmatic image of thought, What is Philosophy? unfolds an intra-philosophical theory of thought (and of the role of non-philosophy in the constitution of thought). In this theory, Descartes has full rights of speculative citizenship, to the extent that the very element which singled him out as the villain of Difference and Repetition – the role of subjective presupposition as a false beginning of a philosophy shorn of dependence – becomes in What is Philosophy? paradigmatic of philosophical activity itself. Even though Spinoza remains the Prince or Christ of philosophy, Descartes is thus emblematic of the manner in which philosophy constructs a plane of immanence in presupposing and introjecting its own outside.

Dualism and its discontents In tracking this shift within Deleuze’s appropriation of Descartes – a shift which, by inserting Descartes into different philosophical problematics seems to draw almost diametrical consequences out of the very same references and terms – I have yet to confront head-on the issue of Deleuze’s role vis-à-vis the kind of anti-Cartesian consensus that Slavoj Žižek, among others, famously lambasted as the very apex of university ideology in the preface to The Ticklish Subject; parodically writing of the Cartesian subject as the ‘spectre haunting Western academia’. The term which, with Pavlovian inevitability, seems to set off the antiCartesian reflex is of course dualism – primarily as mind–body dualism, but also in its vague acceptation as the stigma of hierarchy, domination, division, separation and sundry other terms marked by the spirit of the age with a negative valence. Dualism, understood in particular in terms of the separation of the Cogito from the world, has however also had a number of

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advocates, apologists or at the very least historical contextualizations. Within the panorama of contemporary Continental philosophy, three interesting ways of defending dualism (or what more broadly we might call a thesis of separation) against its holist, monist or materialist detractors can be identified. The first is historical-scientific and can be encountered, for instance, in Karl Löwith’s God, Man and World in Metaphysics from Descartes to Nietzsche. In this, one of his very last texts, written in 1967, Löwith prolongs his polemic with Heidegger into a spirited defence of Descartes’s dualism as a recognition of the externality, independence and objectivity of the world. In this interpretation Descartes’s dualistic separation of the Cogito from the world is actually a far less unworldly option than the one taken by Heidegger: Who then jumps over the world with both feet? The student of natural sciences Descartes, or rather the ex-theologian Heidegger, who only counts those aspects of the world that can be referred to our emotional situation, to anxiety and care? Which of the two ‘unworlds’ the world? Descartes, who as a naturalist takes his cue from the consistency of a world that remains stable, or Heidegger, who would like to explain the world of nature on the basis of its lost link with our environment?24

In this conception, Descartes’s dualism has the ‘naturalist’ virtue of what Löwith calls an ‘anti-historic sensibility for the things themselves’, by refusing to consider cognition as constitutive of the objective world and even by incorporating certain elements of a Christian thought which abstracts from worldly experience. A second political manner of valorizing or contextualizing Descartes’s infamous dualism is to be found in Antonio Negri’s Political Descartes, originally published in 1970. Unlike those who read Descartes as a mere mechanicist or theologian of transcendence, Negri reads dualism (or separation) as an intra-philosophical effect of the collapse of the Renaissance humanist attempt at thinking and practising an immanence of man to the cosmos; an experience which according to Negri has a clear class character – the defeat of the emergent bourgeoisie as a hegemonic class. The separation of the Cogito or subject is viewed in terms of the struggle of bourgeois essence to project its power and productivity into worldly existence. Descartes provides the ‘reasonable ideology’ of a bourgeoisie experiencing its post-humanist defeat because it affirms its separation (the inefficacy of the bourgeoisie as a worldly power) but maintains the need to consolidate its subjective potency and prepare its projection onto,

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and possession of, the world, rather than accepting the grim metaphysics of mechanicism and its acceptance of transcendence and authority, as in Hobbes, whose polemic with Descartes Negri reads in these terms. The refusal of an unproblematic relation between the I and the world, the refusal of any utopia or myth of possession, is an index, for Negri, of Descartes’s sober recognition of the separation of the bourgeois subject in the world of the 1600s. Thus man, as a thinking thing, is refounded in this separation and given ontological weight and potency in dualism. As Negri writes: ‘if the general identity of essence and existence, of the I and the world, and the univocal universal predication of being are not possible, this new foundation of man nevertheless represents a solid starting point, a rich potential for development that is only awaiting to unfold.25 A third manner of valorizing dualism is to be found in the Lacanian ‘return to Descartes’ and specifically in the version of this return recently advocated by Slavoj Žižek, who sees the Cartesian subject in its modern form not as a substantial res cogitans, but as a voided subject ‘out of joint’, ‘excluded from the “order of things”, from the positive order of entities’. Žižek accordingly identifies the Cartesian subject as a purely ‘excremental subject’, linked, importantly, to a political ontology of the proletariat: For Marx, the emergence of working-class subjectivity is strictly codependent to the fact that the worker is compelled to sell the very substance of his being (his creative power) as a commodity on the market, that is, to reduce the agalma, the treasure, the precious kernel of his being, to an object that can be bought for a piece of money – there is no subjectivity without the reduction of the subject’s positivesubstantial being to a disposable ‘piece of shit’ … if the Cartesian subject is to emerge at the level of the enunciation, he is to be reduced to the ‘almostnothing’ of a disposable excrement at the level of the enunciated content.26

In significant respects, Deleuze seems to represent what is almost a caricature of the now tiresome attack on dualism, which, as Žižek aptly notes, has become a rare point of agreement between the most disparate and otherwise hostile fractions of academia, from cognitive science to feminism, from postcolonial studies to post-analytic philosophy. At the peak of his anti-dualist fervour, in his 26 March 1973 seminar on ‘Dualism, Monism and Multiplicities (Desire– Pleasure–Jouissance)’, Deleuze presents us with some potent slogans: ‘Dualism is what prevents thought’; ‘Dualism always wants to deny the essence of thought,

namely, that thought is a process’; ‘The only enemy is two’; ‘Wherever we leave the domain of multiplicities, we once again fall into dualisms, i.e. into the domain of non-thought, we leave the domain of thought as process.’ But what is the grounding structure of this dualism? It is precisely the one indicated by Žižek himself – which is, after all, not surprising, inasmuch as for Deleuze, ‘today we are talking about Descartes, i.e. Lacan’, thinkers joined by the ‘repugnant thought of the cogito’. Dualism, in this seminar, is thus identified as the dualism of a subject of enunciation and a subject of the statement (or the enunciated). Moreover, dualism

The formula cogito ergo sum is what disengages the subject of enunciation from the subject of the statement, since from ‘I walk’ (subject of the statement) no subject of enunciation could be extracted. All dualisms, according to Deleuze, are corollaries of this fundamental dualism of enunciation. And the hatred of dualism is deeply political (or, less charitably, moral) in kind. The sinister aspect of this seemingly formal dualism is to be encountered at the level of the powereffects of the introduction of a gap in the subject – the very gap we encountered in the question of common sense and good sense, and in the idea of a pedagogy of intelligence that comes along with supposedly egalitarian rationalism. Dualism is the philosophy of democratic discipline whose hypocrisy lies in the idea that ‘it is you who command, i.e. you who will accede to the commandment to the degree that you submit yourself to an order, which you are not subject to without also being its legislator. This is the famous order of democracy. You are the legislator insofar as you are the subject.’ This is a point in which the history of the subject, as the subject which subjects himself to his ‘own’ immanent-transcendent legislation, leads straight from Descartes to Kant. Not just the vicious circle of democratic sovereignty, but all social repression, all its saloperies as Deleuze puts it, seems to be founded on this dualism of the statement. Deleuze takes the statement ‘Me as a human being’ as an example. As he writes All social functions are constructed on that, all repressive functions are constructed on this cleavage; me as a human being, you understand, but as a father, I must act! Me as a human being; I’m on your side; but as a cop, I have to apply the law!’28

is definitive of what Deleuze calls ‘Western thought’, an apparatus whereby statements are taken to exist individually, and the production of these statements, rather than originating in what he and Guattari dubbed a collective assemblage of enunciation, is produced in and by a subject: Cogito: this means that every statement is the production of a subject. It means that firstly; and secondly, it means that every statement splits the subject that produces it. Lacan is the last Cartesian. Then every statement refers to a subject, and every statement splits, cuts separates the subject that produces it.27

But is dualism to be universally condemned, as the repugnant castration of desire in the split subject? Again, if a lesson is to be drawn from the ‘becoming’ of Deleuze’s relationship to Descartes, it is that the shift in the problem which Deleuze is addressing in a given moment or text metamorphoses the function and figure of the philosophers involved, and this seems to affect Descartes’s standing in a particularly strong manner. The advance of Kant’s formulation of the subject over that of Descartes – and incidentally, we should note that Žižek himself accepts that his own so-called Cartesian subject is profoundly post-Kantian – is in fact based on the excess of substantiality and insufficient possibility for splitting and

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thus for the proliferation of difference in Descartes. The introduction of the determinable – that is, of time – between determination and the determined, and the consequent disjunction between spontaneity and receptivity, also split the subject but in a manner which Deleuze thinks is a genuine ‘progress’ in the conception of subjectivity. It is the pure and empty line of time that traverses, that operates this kind of crack in I … Time has become the limit of thought and thought does not cease to deal with its own limit. Thought is limited from the inside. There is no longer an extended substance that limits thinking substance from outside, and which resists to thinking substance, but the form of thought is entirely traversed, cracked like a plate, it is cracked by the line of time. It makes time into the interior limit of thinking itself, that is the unthinkable in thought … one finds a kind of tension between two forms … on the one hand the active form of determination, on the other the intuitive or receptive form of the determinable – time. The two are absolutely heterogeneous to one another, and nevertheless there is a fundamental correlation: the one works in the other. It is in itself that thought harbours that which resists thought.29

We are thus provided, at different points in Deleuze’s oeuvre, with two splits, two dualisms, as it were, one a castrating dualism of hypocritical authority based on the linguistic split between subject of the statement and subject of enunciation, the other a temporal split, or crack, between spontaneity and receptivity.30 While the first subjects us to the authority in ourselves, in a vicious circle of auto-subjection, the second introjects an outside, ‘the unthinkable in thought’, within the very experience of thought. But we should note that in this seminar, as well as others, it is fullness and not dualism per se which is the stigma of Descartes’s thought, and, moreover, that the total political continuity between Descartes and Kant with regard to the self-imposition of authority is ignored in favour of the question of thought’s outside (even though, confusingly, Deleuze also argues that the Meditations is ‘the first book that introduces time into philosophical discourse’, as in the seminar of 28 March 1978). Here Descartes is not a philosopher of a gap into which authority and teleology insert themselves, but a figure of plenitude, a bad egg, so to speak: there is a gap, a fracture in the Cogito. In Kant the Cogito is completely cracked. It was full like an egg in Descartes, why? Because it was surrounded and bathed by God. But with constitutive finitude I walk on two legs, receptivity and spontaneity, this is really the fracture at the heart of the Cogito.31

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In conclusion we could say that there is a fracture, or rather a plurality of volatile and fugitive faultlines, at work in Deleuze’s several engagements with Descartes’s thought, a number of shifts which are conceptual, on the one hand, and strategic or polemical, on the other. Attention to the motivations and effects of these shifts can perhaps attenuate the image, stridently proposed by Deleuze himself at certain junctures, of his philosophy as a kind of prolonged anti-Cartesian war cry. Or, rather, it can allow us to differentiate what Descartes might stand in for when it comes to what Deleuze regards as the transcendental illusions of thinking itself. At this level, to address the two concerns of this article, it seems that while Deleuze can accommodate certain varieties of dualism and splitting, the very notion of a universal cognitive capacity remains anathema to his thought. If nothing else, that humanist-egalitarian image of reason remains alien to any possible Deleuzean rationalism.

Notes

This is a revised version of a paper delivered at the conference ‘Deleuze and Rationalism’, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, 14–15 May 2007. 1. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Athlone, London, 1995, p. 132. 2. François Zourabichvili, Deleuze: Une philosophie de l’événement, PUF, Paris, 1994, p. 17. 3. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, Verso, London, 1999. 4. The passage that Deleuze is referring to is the following: ‘What then did I formerly think I was? A man. But what is a man? Shall I say “a rational animal”? No; for then I should have to inquire what an animal is, what rationality is, and in this way one question would lead me down the slope to other harder ones, and I do not now have the time to waste on subtleties of this kind’ (René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. John Cottingham, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p. 17). 5. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 129. 6. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, Routledge, London 2001, pp. 55–64. 7. It is worth noting Deleuze’s insensitivity, on this matter, to that which in the cogito exceeds, or threatens to exceed, any premiss or presupposition, the risk that haunts the experience of thought: ‘The extent to which doubt and the Cartesian Cogito are punctuated by this project of a singular and unprecedented excess – an excess in the direction of the nondetermined, Nothingness or Infinity, an excess which overflows the totality of that which can be thought, the totality of beings and determined meanings, the totality of factual history – is also the extent to which any effort to reduce this project, to enclose it within a determined historical structure, however comprehensive, risks missing the essential, risks dulling the point itself’ (Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980, p. 57).

8. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 130. 9. René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugand Murdoch, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985, p. 111. 10. Admittedly, Deleuze’s treatment of common sense relies more on his discussion of Kant (Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1985, p. 21) than on Descartes’s texts, where it is used relatively sparingly, either as the generically held capacity or to describe the specific functioning of the pineal gland as the transducer between mind and brain. For the ‘common’ sense as pineal gland, see Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, pp. 41, 161. For the more generic meaning, see The Search for Truth: ‘Provided we have proper direction, all we need for discovering the truth on the most difficult issues is, I think, common sense, to give it its ordinary name’ (René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugand Murdoch and Anthony Kenny, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, p. 412); ‘The only master he follows is common sense, and his reason has not been marred by any false preconceptions’ (ibid., p. 420). 11. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp. 223–7. 12. Guido Liguori, ‘Senso comune’ e ‘buon senso’ nei Quaderni del carcere, 2005, www.gramscitalia.it/senso.htm, p. 12. ‘After having based oneself on common sense to show that “everybody” is a philosopher and that it is not a matter of introducing ex novo a science into the individual life of “everybody” but to innovate and make “critical” a pre-existing activity’ (ibid., p. 16). 13. Ibid., p. 10. Incidentally, it is interesting to note that Gramsci specifically links the concept of common sense to a French historical frame: ‘In French philosophical culture there are more treatments of “common sense” than in other cultures: this is due to the “nationalpopular” character of French culture; that is to the fact

that there intellectuals tend, more than elsewhere, because of determinate historical conditions, to get close to the people to guide it ideologically and keep it tied to the leading group’ (ibid., p. 12). 14. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 130. 15. Ibid., p. 131. 16. Ibid., p. 132. 17. Ibid., p. 133. 18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, Verso, London, 1996, p. 15. 19. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 257. 20. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 25. 21. Ibid., p. 27. 22. Ibid., p. 26. 23. Ibid., 1996, p. 41. 24. Karl Löwith, Dio, Uomo e Mondo nella metafisica da Cartesio a Nietzsche (1967), Donzelli, Rome, 2000, pp. 42–3. 25. Antonio Negri, Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project, trans. Matteo Mandarini and Alberto Toscano, Verso, London, 2007, pp. 216–17. 26. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 157. 27. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Dualism, Monism and Multiplicities (Seminar of 26 March, 1973)’, Contretemps 2, 2001, p. 93. 28. Ibid., p. 104. 29. Gilles Deleuze, seminar, 28 March 1978, Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze, www.webdeleuze.com. 30. On Deleuze’s own proliferation of dualisms, especially in his work with Guattari (between the molar and the molecular, the smooth and the striated, the nomad and the state, and so on), and their tendency to reify into ethical and ideological binaries, see Fredric Jameson, ‘Deleuze and Dualism’, in Valences of the Dialectic, Verso, London, 2009, pp. 198–200. 31. Gilles Deleuze, undated 1987 seminar on Leibniz, available at www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte. php?cle=132&groupe=Leibniz&langue=1.

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Imaginative mislocation Hiroshima’s Genbaku Dome, ground zero of the twentieth century Matthew Charles The average Westerner … was wont to regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace: he calls her civilized since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on Manchurian battlefields.

Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea, 1906

The controversy that erupted in March over the publication of Charles Pellegrino’s account of the atomic bombings of Japan, The Last Train from Hiroshima, suggests that the historical legacy of the first military use of atomic weaponry is still fiercely contested in the USA.1 The spat is merely the latest conflict in a long war over the significance of the bombings, which resurfaces with each new book, exhibition or programme that appears. When the ruins of the Genbaku (Atomic Bomb) Dome – formerly the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall – were nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995, the United States objected on the basis of concerns over a ‘lack of historical perspective’, arguing that the ‘events antecedent to the United States’ use of atomic weapons to end World War II are key to understanding the tragedy of Hiroshima’.2 The appeal to historical facts by both US diplomats and, more recently, military veterans contrasts with the dehistoricized emphasis of other Western cultural responses to Hiroshima. But what both kinds of reception share is an occlusion of the prehistory of capitalist liberalism, colonialism and imperialism which produces Japanese modernity, a prehistory which is itself built into the Genbaku Dome’s concrete structure, and an afterlife of nuclear pacification which produces the global context of terrorism as the continuation of war by other means.

The dome The Aioi Bridge spans the point where the Kyu Ota and the Motayasu rivers converge in downtown Hiroshima, resulting in its distinctive T-shape where it connects three abutting sections of land. This feature

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

marked it out as the visual target for the bombing raid on 6 August 1945. Because of its proximity to the bridge, and because the atomic bomb was slightly off-target, what was then the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotions Hall was almost directly beneath the atomic blast when the bomb exploded in the air above the city. The 120 governmental and related staff working inside the building were all killed instantly, but the shell of its central structure remained largely intact, in part because of its location beneath this downward (rather than sideways) blast of the explosion, but also because of its Western-style design, utilizing steel and concrete reinforcing. Flames blew from the dome which crowned the central section of the Hall, melting the copper plating to leave only a skeletal steel skull. As the ruined Hall was one of the few buildings left standing directly beneath the immediate area of the explosion – later termed ‘ground zero’ by American investigators – the frame of its dome could be seen from some distance within the shattered city.3 The first recorded instance of its new name, the Genbaku or ABomb Dome, occurs in newspaper articles from 1951, suggesting that it had become common parlance by the end of the 1940s.4 By this point it had already become a tourist site for visiting Japanese Americans, Allied troops stationed in Japan, and local school excursions, looming over the land designated for a Peace Memorial Park on the opposite side of the river. Despite censorship of public discussion of the atomic explosion by Occupation authorities after the war, the General Headquarters of the Allied Forces enthusiastically supported the construction of the park as a site which promoted the association of the bomb with peace. 5 For UNESCO, which placed the Dome on the UNESCO World Heritage List in December 1996, its ‘mute remains symbolize on the one hand the ultimate in human destruction but on the other … a message of hope’.6 The justification for the inclusion of the Dome

nificance of the bomb because when atomic weaponry has ‘the power to make everything into nothing’ this should be symbolized by nothingness itself.8 But these alternative experiences tend to be occluded by the dominance of that testified to in the UNESCO statement, which enacts a series of transitions from the ephemeral and particular to the eternal and universal, from the inexperienceable and supposedly unrepeatable magnitude of destruction and suffering to its aesthetic exhibition, and from war to peace. This article focuses on one particular consequence of this view: the conceptual tendency to elide war and peace through an ideology of progress, which works to silence cultural critique. In order to resist the continuing reception of Hiroshima according to an idealist philosophy of historical progress, the following seeks to juxtapose this pre- and after-history to construct an image of the Dome as the ground zero of our current ‘war on terror’. This serves to supplement some broader reflections on the ideological function of what will be termed the ‘historical sublime’, which codes the aesthetic reception of the Genbaku Dome in the West and underpins the idealist philosophy of history.

Prehistory centred on three aspects relating to the uniqueness of the ruined structured. First, the report states, it ‘stands as a permanent witness’ to the first military use in history of an atomic weapon, suggesting it confers a physical permanence and timelessness to a singular and passing moment that would otherwise slip from our comprehension. Second, the Dome ‘is the only building in existence that can convey directly a physical image of the tragic situation immediately after the bombing’. The survival of the semi-ruined building amid such utter destruction provides a tangible, aesthetic representation of the otherwise unintelligible physical devastation and human misery of such an attack. Third – and as a consequence of these conditions – it is said to stand as a ‘universal monument for all mankind, symbolizing the hope for perpetual peace’.7 Other experiences of the Dome’s historical significance are possible: in a 1956 article on his visit to Hiroshima, Hugh M. Gloster recalls being guided towards ‘the towering skeleton of a shattered steel and concrete structure which was once the proud Industrial Exhibition Hall of Hiroshima’ and feeling that its ‘ghastly’ ruins signify nothing more than humanity’s capacity for war, destruction and hate, whilst an unnamed Japanese history professor in Robert Lifton’s Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima suggests that the memorial fails to symbolize accurately the true sig-

The origin of the Genbaku Dome lies in the period of intense modernization in Japan associated with the Meiji Restoration. The extreme isolationist foreign policy known as Sakoku, which had been imposed in the seventeenth century as a response to ongoing European colonialism in the Far East, came to an end in the mid-nineteenth century when Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States navy secured trading relations with Japan through a literal act of ‘gunboat diplomacy’. The commercial treaties of 1854 and 1858 ‘opened the door’ to the forces of Western, capitalist modernity, to which some within responded by seeking to re-establish the sovereignty of the imperial line. For over five centuries the dynasty had been excluded from any political role, but on 3 January 1868 samurai from a number of southwestern han or feudal domains seized control of the Imperial Palace in Kyoto and restored the emperor to power.9 Whilst the han of Hiroshima remained on the periphery of this coup d’état, the sweeping political and economic reforms that followed in the wake of the restoration contributed to dramatic changes in the outlook and landscape of the region.10 In 1870, as part of a broader attempt to achieve economic and military parity with the dominant European and American powers, the autonomy of the han was abolished and the land taken back and restructured into centralized ken

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or prefectures, with Hiroshima prefecture becoming one of the 305 newly established politico-geographical regions.11 Initially, the Japanese economy remained primarily agrarian and the light industry that began to develop in the larger cities was fuelled by capital generated from the newly imposed land tax.12 When initial attempts to revise the Western-imposed treaties which granted foreign nations extraterritorial rights and tariff autonomy failed, the newly established government imposed an ambitiously intense process of modernization.13 Production was increased through land-tax reforms and investment in manufacturing industry, and supplemented by a process of bunmei kaika (‘civilization and enlightenment’) pursued through the revision of legal codes and the introduction of a European-style education system. This shift from agriculture to light industry eventually contributed to a mass migration away from the countryside and to the rapidly expanding cities. Hiroshima was one of the first to be granted city status, and a government-sponsored cotton mill was established during the 1870s which would have most likely have employed low-wage agricultural workers from the surrounding countryside.14 Soon, ‘the entire apparatus of Western material civilization seemed to find some reproduction, some kind of echo, in Japan’, to the extent that desirable Western objects were recited to the bounce of a ball in a popular children’s song of 1878 (‘gas lamps, steam engines, horse-carriage, cameras, telegrams, lightning conductors, newspapers, schools, letter-post, and steam-boats’).15 Industrialization and colonization were regarded as the parallel tracks for Japan’s entry as a significant power onto the world stage; each fuelled the other and intensified the development of Japanese ‘modernity’, the index of its standing with the West. During the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–95, Hiroshima city’s geographical location secured its central importance as Japan’s ‘military capital’. Tokutomi Soho, a journalist who travelled with Emperor Meiji to the new headquarters in Hiroshima on 13 September 1894, exhorted his readers: ‘We must remember that we are fighting before the whole world … we are fighting to determine once and for all Japan’s position in the world.’16 But to pursue its military ventures against China and Russia, Western capital was required and soon began pouring into Japan.17 Subsequent victories boosted Japan’s status as a military and economic power, encouraging further foreign investment. Simultaneously, increased spending on armaments and war-related industry shifted the economic focus of the country towards heavy manufacturing.18

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A suggestion for the construction of a commercial exhibition hall – in which the newly produced commodities manufactured in the city and its surrounding areas could be displayed and sold – was first put forward after the end of the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, but postponed due to inadequate funding.19 In 1910 a joint proposal to finance the construction of the hall on land owned by the city using funding provided by the prefecture was agreed, and over the next few years the General Affairs Division of the Hiroshima City Hall set about purchasing, acquiring and exchanging land for the site on the banks of the Motayasu river. Preparation work began on 1 April 1911 and proceeded at a steady pace for the next two years. The arrival of the new prefectural governor, Sukeyuki Terada, in spring 1913 was significant for the architectural design and building material of the completed exhibition hall, a factor which – along with its location – explains its ability to withstand the initial blast of the atomic bomb and the subsequent firestorm that incinerated the rest of the city. Terada had previously been mayor of the Miyagi prefecture, where he had commissioned the Czech architect Jan Letzel to design the Matsushima Park Hotel.20 Whilst the Matsushima Park Hotel was being completed in the summer of 1913, Sukeyuki invited Letzel to visit Hiroshima and start work on designs for the exhibition hall. 21 Despite Japan’s rapid growth, prior to 1913 its industries were unable to compete with developed capitalist nations in the world market and the expense of the Russo-Japanese war was taking its toll on the economy.22 The outbreak of World War I and Japan’s subsequent entry into the Allied coalition rescued the country from fiscal collapse.23 More importantly, since Japan played little part in other wartime activities, it could supply much-needed munitions, shipping and manufactured goods to Allied forces, developing its large-scale heavy industry to take advantage of British, German and French inability to meet demands in the domestic and Southeast Asian markets. 24 Three days after the declaration of war against Germany, Britain drew on the cordial relations established by the AngloJapanese Alliance to request Japan’s intervention to destroy the German fleet based at the naval base of Tsingtao (now Qingdao), at that time a colony leased by China to Germany.25 In line with its imperial ambitions, Japan not only attacked the fleet, but seized the colony, placing Tsingtao under military rule. 26 On 5 April 1915, construction was completed on the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall, a three-storey brick building, with exterior walls partially reinforced by stone and cement plaster. 27 The

central, steel-framed core consisted of an atrium which extended to five storeys, housing an oval staircase which led to a steel-framed, copper-clad elliptical dome. The building was surrounded by a Western-style garden with a pond and fountain, as well as a more traditional Japanese garden.28 After the inauguration ceremony the site housed part of the first Hiroshima Prefecture Promotion Fair, before a more permanent display – the Prefectural Products Exhibition Hall on the second floor – was opened on 15 August 1915. At the opening ceremony of the Hall, Terada declared that ‘the building will serve to further promote and improve the prefecture’s products and contribute to the development of related industries’.29 In the first eleven months of the exhibition 157,000 people visited the hall and commissioned sales totalling 9.79 million yen. 30 By the 1920s, chemical and heavy industry led economic development, whilst ‘the construction of hydroelectric power stations and the facilities for high-powered transmission of electricity provided the driving-growth’ for related electrical industries, and the motorization of weaving, tea refining and lumber firms (two such lumber corporations were operating from offices in the Hiroshima Exhibition Hall in the year before its destruction). 31 The global depression of the late 1920s spurred on Japan’s colonial ambitions, as the Chinese continent promised access to new export markets, material resources and cheap labour.32 During the 1930s, as military expansion and trading opportunity continued to grow, the Hiroshima Prefectural Hall joined the network of representative offices that stretched from Kobe in Japan, across north-east China to Shanghai, with the aim of promoting the Prefecture across the empire. 33 The ‘incident’ in Mukden – when the Japanese military attacked Chinese troops on the pretext of an alleged attempted sabotage on the South Manchurian Railway – was followed by the expansion of military power across Manchuria, even whilst those in government were giving international assurances to the contrary. 34 In 1932, as fighting broke out in Shanghai between the Chinese 19th Route Army and the Japanese naval landing party stationed in the city, the Exhibition Hall was the site for a second Japan–Manchuria Trade Exhibition. With the deepening of Japan’s military involvement in the East, it was decided in 1933 to rename the building the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall to reflect the shift in its activities and function away from commercial exhibition. Regular art exhibitions had been held since its opening (including a very popular exhibition of ‘Dolls from America’ in 1927); in 1937, as the fighting that

had broken out in Shanghai that August intensified, the Promotion Hall held an exhibition of ‘Holy War Art’, a reflection of increasing nationalism which was to find its most extreme expression in the atrocities carried out against the Chinese inhabitants of Nanjing during the capture of the city in December of that year.35 This nationalism of the 1930s can be traced, in part, to the uneven economic and socio-political development of Japan in the preceding bouts of industrial and capitalist development. The tensions buried in the original policy of sacrificing the countryside for the city – evident in the story that the initial resentment of the outlying towns and villages over the allocation of prefectural funding to the Hall had to be appeased by the promise of ‘two stud horses and two bulls’ to each county – began to re-emerge in the discourses on modernity in the late 1920s and early 1930s. 36 This took the form of ‘refiguring the folk and resuscitating their beliefs, customs, and practices in order to preserve the last but lingering traces of a prior existence and to reactivate in the present the kernel of community life needed to negotiate the troubling presence of modernity’. 37 In 1940, with the agreement of the Vichy government of France, Japan occupied French-controlled Vietnam, joining forces with the German–Italian Axis. Japan’s advance into Southeast Asia had been justified under the rubric of the ‘Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’: the object of the war, as described by Prime Minister Tojo Hideki, was to establish ‘an order of co-existence and co-prosperity based on ethical principles with Japan serving as its nucleus’. 38 Such talk was buoyed by the unanticipated swiftness of Japan’s military successes, with troops sweeping across Southeast Asia – where they were tentatively regarded at first as delivers from colonialism – and occupying most of the islands of the western Pacific. 39 It also helped paint over the inherent tensions between the ‘new’ Western-style modernity and ‘old’ Japanese traditionalism: Japanese intervention could be seen as the reinvigoration of ‘East Asian’ cultural and economic dominance over Western colonialism. In practice, the ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ sought the exploitation of raw materials abroad to aid Japan’s war effort. This deepening military involvement led to the closures of the Hiroshima Prefecture’s outlying representative offices from May 1941. With the tide of war beginning to turn, by 31 March 1944 all commercial activity was halted and the Prefectural Hall was taken over by government offices and associated agencies, including the Ministry of the Interior’s Public Works Office and

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the Hiroshima District Lumber and Japan Lumber Control corporations.40 Most of the smaller, wooden traditional Japanese-style structures that surrounded the Hall when the atomic bomb was dropped were either instantly destroyed by the thermal blast or in the subsequent firestorm that razed the city (90 per cent of Hiroshima’s houses were tightly clustered wooden dwellings).41 In her excellent book Hiroshima Traces, Lisa Yoneyama records that of the 142 major public buildings within 5 kilometres of the central blast area, around 80 survived the bombing. In the aftermath of the war, there were calls to halt postwar development and leave the ruins of Hiroshima completely untouched, but commercial interests ensured that redevelopment of the city commenced.42 The prefecture had allocated financial resources for the reconstruction of the building in the 1950s, but concerns that it was dangerously close to collapse meant the funds were returned and in 1953 the ruins were donated to the city. Hibakusha (A-Bomb survivor) groups were initially divided over whether to remove or preserve such reminders, although many did later petition for the Dome’s preservation.43 As the preservation movement grew stronger a wire fence was erected to seal off the building, and, after architectural surveys and a budgeting of funds, Hiroshima City Council finally passed a resolution for the preservation of the structure on 11 July 1966.

Mythologizing Hiroshima: Kant and the historical sublime How the skeletal shell of the devastated ruin might serve as any kind of universal monument for UNESCO, let alone one capable of symbolizing perpetual peace, becomes comprehensible if the series of transitions enacted in its description are understood in relation to a concept of the historical sign coded by a Kantian aesthetics of the historical sublime. Kant insists that it is not the object that should be classed as sublime but the rational Idea evoked within us, which the object is merely suitable for exhibiting.44 In the mathematical sublime, it is our incapacity to estimate aesthetic magnitudes beyond the limits of sensible intuition that provokes the imagination to turn to the numerical concepts of the understanding, capable of successively advancing to infinity. Reason, however, ‘seeks to approximate the unity that is possible empirically’, and demands ‘a multiplicity in a unity (of intuition rather than thought)’.45 This felt compulsion to collapse the temporal condition of the infinite into the simultaneity of an instant nonetheless indicates a supersensible power within us, Kant argues, which points to the non-

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empirical and ideal ground of magnitude: the absolute and unconditioned whole of nature (CJ 255). Similarly, the suitability of the Dome for exhibiting the magnitude of the devastation and suffering is conceptually conditioned by the very impossibility of such representation. Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay B-29, which deployed the bomb, recalls the explosion in terms which anticipate the wider context of a nuclear warfare: ‘What I saw was of a magnitude and carried with it a connotation of destruction bigger than I had really imagined.’46 Recalling the Dome’s ‘architecture of remembrance’ in a more recent article, Robert Ginsberg focuses on ‘the terrible dynamism’ of the explosion still ‘pressed into the stone’, which forces itself upon ‘the human heart’.47 Kant’s description of the dynamic sublime evokes our physical impotence before the destructive power of nature precisely in order to recover our supersensible superiority over it. The mathematical conflict between the sensible and the rational is reduplicated here between the spectator’s imagined fear, associated with empirical self-preservation, and an excited fearlessness which reveals our practical vocation: a higher human dignity, connected to the Idea of freedom, that endures above our empirical concerns with ‘property, health, and life’ (CJ 261–2). There is, however, a problem with the antinomy on which Kant’s argument hinges: there is nothing contradictory in being able to imagine a freedom from the danger of nature when – from the perspective of a safe distance necessary for the experience of the sublime – the individual is ‘free’ from such danger. In other words, the higher practical freedom Kant seeks to rescue with his appeal to the sublime is the result of an imaginative mislocation.48 Kant’s anticipation of such an objection compounds the error by turning the fallacy into a virtue: the ‘liking concerns only our ability’s vocation, revealed in such cases, insofar as the predisposition to this ability is part of our nature’, he responds, ‘whereas it remains up to us, as our obligation, to develop and exercise this ability’ (CJ 242). This problem repeats itself in Kant’s discussion of the ‘historical sign’. Indeed, to properly understand the elisions involved in the reception of the Dome it is necessary to understand how this aesthetics of the sublime, with its flight from empirical destruction to the Idea of freedom, implicitly structures an idealist conception of history. In the ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’, Kant utilizes a teleological argument to the effect that since humanity as a species possesses a unique capacity for practical reasoning, we must assume the species is

to develop in accordance with this rational purpose and its political organization, becoming increasingly autonomous.49 If the historian is unable to find any evidence of such regularity and lawfulness in collective human action, we must therefore attribute this to our cognitive limitations and look for indirect signs of such purposiveness in nature itself (IUH 42). Kant discovers this in the principle of ‘unsocial sociability’, which is responsible for the competitive drive through which individuals and nations seek to develop their talents and progress in culture, taste and enlightenment (IUH 45). War is the international expression of this ‘pathologically enforced social union’, and therefore the necessary precondition for the eventual cooperation of nations in a great, cosmopolitan federation of states (IUH 47–8). The second part of the Conflict of the Faculties develops this account by drawing on Kant’s attitude towards the revolution in France and his account of the sublime to theorize the further existence of a ‘historical sign’ itself. This would demonstrate a purposive tendency in the human race as it is currently divided into nations and states, one ‘undetermined with regard to time, and which would allow progress toward the better to be concluded as an inevitable consequence’. 50 It is not the revolution in France that is itself progressive, however, although we might say it is suitable for exhibiting the moral character in the mind of the spectator who enthusiastically follows the events from a distance. It is the excitement of the spectator, with its universal but disinterested sympathy for the actors, which for Kant indicates its innate, moral character. Any factors that might limit the rational autonomy and universal humanity of the events (such as, Kant suggests, violence and suffering so severe that no one would willingly repeat the actions) are explained by the compression of the successive character of historical progress to the simultaneity of an instant. Like the conceptual structure of the sublime, ephemerality, particularity, destructiveness and empirical limitation point beyond themselves to an infinite, universal, serene Idea of cosmopolitan humanity. The treatise concludes with Kant’s assertion that the economic and moral ill consequences of war will eventually provide a salutary lesson to nations, such that a cooperative and peaceful international order will be established, paving the way for what Kant elsewhere calls a ‘perpetual peace’. 51 The problem of imaginative mislocation threatens to repeat itself here in the distancing from any analysis of the empirical, material and historical conditions of conflict and struggle, which permits claims of progres-

siveness to be indiscriminately attributed to all sorts of historical events. The ideological complicity between the history of the sublime and the sublimity of history apparent in Kant’s aesthetics of history is also manifested in the way the reception of the ruined structure of the Dome enables a flight from the real into its ideal opposite, from the violent destruction of war to the serene hope of peace. This kind of sublime logic is prevalent not only in the UNESCO nomination of the Dome, but serves as a metonym for much of the cultural reception of the events. The notion of transforming Hiroshima into a historical symbol of peace appears to have been raised first by Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a survivor of the bomb, whose experience is dramatized in John Hersey’s famous New Yorker article from 1946. On the back of his fame, Tanimoto toured American churches lecturing on ‘The Faith that Grew Out of the Ashes’. He advocated the idea for a peace memorial that was ‘enthusiastically endorsed’ in an editorial by the Saturday Review of Literature in March 1949. 52 Asked to open the prayer for a session of the US Senate in 1951, Tanimoto thanked God for ‘the great blessing Thou hast granted American in enabling her to build in this last decade the greatest civilization in history’ and that ‘Japan has been permitted to be one of the fortunate recipients of American generosity. We thank Thee that our people have been given the gift of freedom, enabling them to rise from the ashes of ruin and be reborn’. 53 Something akin to the ‘unsocial sociability’ driving Kant’s concept of history also seems to function in the Allied response to the bombings. Initial American reactions to the attack on Hiroshima tended to reinforce the technological accomplishment of the Manhattan Project that developed the bomb as a triumph of social progress and a harbinger of international peace. 54 In his biography Tibbets recalls how on the homeward journey back from Hiroshima he had reflected on the wonders of science and rejoiced that the new weapon had surely made future war unthinkable.… Each technological advance in weaponry had made war more hideous but so far had not persuaded mankind to abandon this means of settling quarrels between peoples. Now certainly we had developed the ultimate argument for keeping the peace.55

Furthermore, the Truman administration promoted the bombings of the largely civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as helping save a million American lives, an idea that is often expanded to include also the Japanese lives ‘saved’ by the avoidance

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of invasion. 56 An imaginative mislocation is again involved here, and whilst the development of the bomb is justified as necessary against an imagined atomic attack by Germany, its deployment is justified against an imagined invasion of the Japanese mainland by America. Two significant factors are at stake in such a response to the bomb. Robert Jay Lifton has argued that for the Japanese there is a psychological comfort enacted in the equation of destruction and peace: ‘the general tendency to use “Atomic Bomb” and “Peace” almost interchangeably in naming these monuments suggests the psychological effort to equate the two in the sense of the latter springing from the ashes of the former’. 57 This comfort is problematic since it has a tendency to pass over issues of Japanese nationalism and imperialism, particularly relevant given Hiroshima’s status as a military capital during the imperial expansion into Asia. At the same time, this Japanese response to the events has certainly been encouraged by the Allied countries, for whom this equation of war and peace serves as a moral justification for the use of indiscriminate atomic weaponry against a civilian population and the basis for a rhetoric of pacification. This obscures both the West’s involvement in what Kakuzo Okakura’s epigraph sardonically calls the

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‘civilizing’ of Japan and the Far East and its continuing involvement in such projects in the Middle East. Identifying the sublime logic implicit in the idealist reactions to the Dome, and Hiroshima more generally, is valuable in drawing out the problematic character of such a response, which continues to operate in more recent appropriations. It also relies on a practice of preserving decaying ruins that is less prevalent in Japan than the West, a practice itself reinforced by the Western tradition of writing on the sublime. 58 Three theoretical implications of such a response will be discussed here, and justified in the context of the cultural reception of the bombing: 1. The ‘universalizing’ of such responses, which encourages both the homeward movement of suffering in the American imagination and, consequently, its expansion to a ‘globalized humanity’, which works to conceal ongoing political divisions. 2. The ‘naturalizing’ of the response, which posits a ‘timelessness’ that prioritizes the mythical over the historical and induces a fatalism into the concept of progress, which reverberates in the myth of pacification. 3. The ‘idealism’ of such arguments, which involves a problematic concept of freedom derived from

the dualism between ‘nature’ and ‘history’. This dualism posits the bombing as historically and technologically unique and obscures the continuity of violence inherent to such pacification.

Shikata ga nai John Hersey’s 1946 article in the New Yorker that dramatized the stories of the six survivors of Hiroshima quickly became a paradigmatic text in the American reception of the atomic bombing. 59 Whilst Hersey sometimes depicts humane acts of compassion as occurring despite, not because of, the devastation, one notable exception involves a German priest, Father Kleinsorge. In the aftermath of the bombing, he encounters a Japanese woman who hands him tealeaves to quench his thirst, a gesture which made him ‘a little hysterical’, Hersey reports, because ‘for weeks, he had been feeling oppressed by the hatred of foreigners that the Japanese seemed increasingly to show’.60 This little act of care is supposed to suggest that the suffering wrought by the bomb enables a kind of universal humanity to emerge amid the devastation. This pattern is repeated in the more recent and overtly psychological works on Hiroshima, which have a tendency to universalize the suffering through the deployment of Jungian archetypes. Here, the Kantian sublime and its cosmopolitan humanity are rejuvenated via the Jungian theory of the collective unconscious. Michael Perlman’s Imaginal Memory and the Place of Hiroshima is indicative of such a response, arguing as it does that images associated with the place of Hiroshima embody unsuspected psychological values beyond their role as reminders of the concrete horror of nuclear war. The remembering of these values is crucial to a deeper-going commitment to peace and to contemporary psychological life in general.61

What is troubling about Perlman’s efforts to find what he calls a ‘home’ for the mnemonic images of the dead is the way in which the memories of the Japanese victims are ‘re-housed’ primarily within the paradigms of Western culture: the mythical landscape of ancient Greek legend.62 For example, the wounds of Father Kleinsorge that repeatedly reopen are connected with the pain and suffering of Dionysus, whilst Kiyoshi Tanimoto becomes the ferryman piloting the vessel of the dead.63 Perlman concludes by evoking the ‘timeless’ theogonic time of Hesiod’s Muses, arguing that commemorating Hiroshima in this way encourages a ‘universality’ which becomes utterly inclusive only by its obliteration of boundaries and forgetting of nationalism.64 In Perlman’s version the particular

is transformed into the universal, nationalism turns into cosmopolitanism, and because we all become the ‘victims’ of Hiroshima, war – to use one of Perlman’s favoured images from Jung – alchemically transmutes into the stimulus for peace. Robert Jay Lifton’s Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima and The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat (with Eric Markusen) are more precise about recording the experiences of those affected in their own words. However, they share with Perlman a preoccupation with the universal value of the atomic experience, hijacking the concept of ‘species consciousness’ in the treatment of Hiroshima.65 Lifton argues that the scale and the destruction and the kind of weapon involved in the bombing involve ‘the dimension of totality, a sense of ultimate annihilation – of cities, nations, the world’, which transcends geographical and national boundaries and prompts us to think of humanity as a totality.66 For example, he quotes a Japanese philosopher and atom bomb survivor who argues that as a result ‘peace [would be seen as] no single country’s problem [but] a matter of life and death for mankind [requiring] a movement which could be said to be spiritual … not tied to politics … [but] connected only with humanism’.67 One of the problems with Kant’s account of the dynamic sublime is that the humanity and immortality evoked by destruction depend upon a conflict between empirical self-interest and a higher disinterest, which, because it is merely imagined, may have an existence that is merely imaginary. Despite the author’s intentions, Perlman’s ‘imaginal memory’ or Lifton’s ‘species consciousness’ threaten to reassert national self-interest at a global level under the guise of international humanitarianism. Thus, for Lifton, species consciousness is ‘not just a distant ideal but a practical and realizable state of mind’, which is manifested in the ‘principle of ‘common security’ – of no nation being secure unless all are’.68 The humanity imagined in Kant’s sublime arises out of a violent act of reduction. In Hersey’s Hiroshima, the points of identification dramatized are small acts of generosity, heroic exploits of bravery, merciful gestures of compassion, and the calmly described horror of individuals reduced to bodies stripped of skin, clothing, property, language and other such distinguishing marks: aggression, nationalism and politics are beaten out of its victims. This produces a mythological concept of humanity, a pacified humanity that arises as a consequence of imperial warfare and not one that posits, even if it must be through violent struggle, any genuine alternative to it.

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This risk is exacerbated by the fatalism attached to the naturalizing of historical events. Expressions of such fatalism by the victims is frequently reported in the American literature, encapsulated in the Japanese phrase Shikata ga nai: ‘It can’t be helped’.69 Similarly, the novelistic form of Hersey’s Hiroshima article, which interweaves the different perspectives of six survivors, induces a kind of temporal repetition whose moment of simultaneity is centred on the millisecond of the explosion like an inevitable catastrophe. But it is also implicit in the more recent responses to the suffering. Perlman describes his ‘devotional’ practice of memory as involving a painful masochism reminiscent of the medieval submission to the powers of Fate.70 Just as in the mathematical sublime Kantian reason demands a simultaneity which steps outside the additive temporal progression into infinity, so in the historical sublime the past is brought into simultaneity with the present in a way which does not pragmatically emphasize the contingency of the present, but eternalizes the present in its empathetic rehousing of what has occurred. The mythological concept of fate tacitly utilized in such responses to the bomb facilitates the recasting of the city and its people as the sacrificial victims of a higher progress: the inevitable cause of peace. However, the peace brought about by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a silence enforced by an act of violence designed to be so brutal it would shock the government, its people and the wider world into submission. Those who take up the memory of the victims as a universal stimulus to continued global cooperation and security seem to possess a peculiarly mythological understanding of pacification, one shared with those who insist on the necessity of the bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the end of the Second World War. Their peace is the present conclusion of history as it is narrated by the victors, one that smooths over the legacy of imperialist violence and economic liberalism. It is only at a superficial level that the remembered or imagined threat of atomic or nuclear annihilation might provoke an appeal to human dignity, because the humanity it hopes to evoke is undermined by the very technological and hence human-made status of the destruction it reflects upon. In the Kantian sublime it is the common response to a natural threat that engenders a sense of indestructibility by distinguishing us from empirical nature. Consequently, because the Kantian concepts of freedom and history depend upon a dualism that has a tendency to exclude the technological, contemporary reflection upon destructive technology necessitates the introduction of a further

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dualism at the level of the rational and historical, if the affirmative flight into idealist progress be retained. This is figured in the cultural reception of Hiroshima through the sublime image of a historical-technological break or rupture. It can be observed in accounts that become scientifically obsessed with the precise details of the moment of the attack: The bomb’s detonator activated 1,890 feet above ground. At exactly 8.16 am, forty-five seconds after falling from the Enola Gay, having travelled a distance of nearly six miles, the atomic bomb missed the Aioi Bridge by 800 feet, and exploded directly over Dr. Shima’s clinic … In the first milli-second after 8.16 am – a time-fraction too small for any watch in Hiroshima to measure – a pinprick of purplish red-light expanded to a glowing fireball hundreds of feet wide. The temperature at its core was 50,000,000 degrees.71

The value of the word ‘exactly’ is significant here. It encapsulates the triumph of technology, from the Manhattan Project scientists that developed the first atomic bomb, the refitted B-29 bombers that carried it, the watches that timed the explosion, and the photographic equipment that captured the mushroom cloud. Whilst the suffering and devastation wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by nuclear technology is to be acknowledged, there are two problematic ideas that arise in this focus on the singularity of the technological. First, it disguises precisely the areas of continuity and overlap with other moments of wartime violence preceding and following 6 August 1945, including the second attack on Nagasaki three days later. Whilst the devastation wrought by the single atomic bomb was massive, initial Japanese reports mistook the destruction for that caused by a squadron of B-29s. In Hersey’s account, one of the doctors assumes it must have been a ‘“Molotoffano hanakago” – a Molotov flower basket, the delicate Japanese name for the “bread basket”, or self-scattering cluster of bombs’.72 American military strategy had deployed relentless squadrons of low-flying bombers using incendiary bombs designed to cause maximum devastation upon the wooden factories and houses of Tokyo and other cities.73 The fire-bombing of Tokyo in March 1945 was, Richard Storry points out, ‘probably the most appalling air-attacks, in terms of loss of life, of the whole war’.74 The experience of technological sublimity evoked in such responses to the event of Hiroshima therefore works to conceal rather than expose the historical continuity of atrocities carried out on all sides during the last world war. Robert McNamara, at the time a captain in the Army Air Forces’s Office of Statistical

Control, has suggested that the efficiency of the firebombing of major Japanese cities had already rendered the necessity of atomic weaponry redundant, and that the subsequent devastation caused by the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have been disproportionate enough to justify General LeMay’s prosecution as a war criminal.75 The sublimity attached to Hiroshima is in this sense an act of reassurance: the bombing becoming an abnormality whose conditions may be pored over in scholarly detail, whilst those implicated as responsible remain comfortingly small in number. The dramatic and traumatic sublimity of such responses to nuclear destruction also work to efface what was exceptional about nuclear weaponry: the lingering effects of radiation. In Ruin from the Air, Thomas and Morgan-Witt, describing the actions of a fighter pilot who attempting to pursue the Enola Gay in a plane damaged ‘as if … warped by some supernatural power’, comment that: ‘Yasuzawa was now flying in and out of the pall, unaware of the risk to which he was subjecting himself and his passenger.’76 The repression of the word ‘radioactivity’ here, and its excision from the book except a brief sentence in the penultimate chapter, indicates the extent to which nuclear weaponry has a tendency to be characterized by the power and scale of its explosive effect, rather than consideration of its unique radioactive legacy.77 Any consideration of the human cost of the attack must also include the lingering radioactive legacy that continues to claim many of those who survived the initial effects of the bombing.78

Afterlife Hiroshima was spared the intensive fire-bombing campaigns that devastated other Japanese cities in the first six months of 1945 because the city had already been nominated as a possible target for an atomic attack. Among the factors contributing to the selection of Hiroshima were its importance as a military and industrial base, the absence of any significant number of Allied prisoners of war, the absence of surrounding hills which may contribute to containing the effects of the blast (and therefore limit the quantifiable extent of the devastation), and the presence of a large number of homes and buildings useful for measuring the magnitude and strength of the explosion (and which had been intentionally spared from conventional bombing for this purpose). It is generally agreed that the Truman administration’s primary purpose in the deployment of the

bomb was to help demoralize Japan into unconditional surrender, preventing the future requirement of full-scale invasion of the Japanese mainland, although controversy still surrounds the perceived necessity of the atomic bombings for hastening such surrender and over the projected military cost of any such invasion.79 The timing of the Allied bombing, days before the Soviet invasion of Manchuria on 9 August 1945 and whilst Japan was engaged in tentative peace negotiations via Russia, was also significant in this respect: a demonstration of America’s new military capability would also have significant political benefits for post-war negotiations with Russia, a factor which many argue had an important influence on the decision to utilize atomic weapons to end the Pacific war.80 It is worth considering Peter Schwenger’s suggestion that America must confront the fact that the ‘apparently innocent virtues’ of ‘Yankee ingenuity and Yankee Doodle patriotism’ resulted in ‘an act of overwhelming terror, a terrorism that from then on will hold hostage the world, including America itself’.81 Schwenger’s words, written in 1994, were intended to recall the destructive act that was initiated with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, but that subsequently cast a shadow over the whole world, reaching the height of its terror during the Cold War. But the nuclear physicist and Nobel peace laureate Professor Joseph Rotblat draws out what might be taken as a more recent connotation for Schwenger’s claim, arguing that the terror attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 had ‘not appeared out of the blue’, for ‘its seeds were planted at the very beginning of the nuclear age’.82 The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the pre-emptive first strike of the Cold War. The concept of nuclear diplomacy might therefore be extended to those strategic military gains in the twentieth century achieved through the same ‘gunboat diplomacy’ by which Japan was opened to liberalism and capitalism in the nineteenth. The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been influential on the development of a war that may be thought of as ‘nuclear’ to the extent that it defies the possibility of the nuclear. The nuclear war that ‘never was’ not only produced the ‘many nests of terrorism’, the ‘numerous schools of terrorism [that] were spread around the world’, but also established the strategies of conflict that such combatants would deploy.83 Hannah Segal suggests that ‘the 11th September bombing was highly symbolic’ because it served as a counterexample to the notion that because of America’s

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technological sophistication, its ability to wage war from a distance, from the sky and not the ground, it could remain invulnerable.84 Despite the sophisticated levels of information, planning and communication required to carry out attacks such as those on New York, Madrid or London, the attacks themselves were technologically crude in their method. The lack of technological sophistication is in turn a reflection of the geopolitical situation out of which terrorism is waged. For, regardless of the extent to which terrorism can be traced back to supposedly ‘external’ ideologies and foreign countries, the capacity to wage terrorist attacks effectively relies on the ability to threaten its target internally, from within. Moreover, this disruption of the geographical supremacy of nuclear totalization effects the very ‘uselessness’ of nuclear technology. Nuclear warfare cannot be actually used against an enemy within, nor – outside of the context of a world war which nuclear weaponry has supposedly rendered impossible – at an enemy scattered within another population. The problematic legacy of its radioactive uniqueness means it has a limited effectiveness for a warfare that requires intervention or occupation. In this way, nuclear weaponry enforces a technological retrogression not only on those who fight against nations that possess it, but also on those states that possess the capacity for nuclear warfare. None of this has prevented the repeated threats of nuclear attack against its political enemies, which, as Joseph Gerson’s Empire and the Bomb lays out in detailed historical analysis, has underwritten the USA’s diplomatic and military foreign policy on at least forty occasions since 1945.85 The political essayist Dwight Macdonald, editor of the Marxist journal Politics, lambasted the early glorifications of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a series of articles published between August 1945 and November 1946 which suggested that atomic power had rendered the very concept of ‘progress’ obsolete.86 Both socialist and conservative responses to atomic power, Macdonald argued, rested on a platitude about atomic fission ‘based on a faith in Science and Progress’, a belief which ‘blunts our reaction to the present horror by reducing it to an episode in an historical schema which will “come out all right” in the end’.87 Against the utopianism of progress, he admonishes that ‘we do not dream of a world in which atomic fission will be “harnessed to constructive ends”’, for the ‘new energy will be at the service of the rulers; it will change their strength but not their aims’.

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Notes

1. Concerns about its veracity were raised, among others, by the Veterans of the 509th Composite Group, who flew the bombers involved in the raids on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (www.enolagay509th.com/Veterans509th. pdf). Publication was halted, forcing Hollywood director James Cameron, who had optioned the book in preparation for a forthcoming film on Hiroshima (clearly recognizing the potential for another sentimentalized techno-hubristic romance), to speak out in defence of the author, whom he had previously employed as ‘scientific’ consultant on Titanic and Avatar. ‘Avatar Director James Cameron Defends Hiroshima Author’, BBC News, 4 March 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8549036.stm. 2. Annex V, 20th session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, 1996, http://whc.unesco.org/archive/repco96x.htm. 3. The term ‘ground zero’, which resurfaced in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, originated as a military term to describe the hypo­centre of the explosion used by the scientists of the Manhattan Project. 4. Shinobu Amano Kikuraku, ‘From A-bomb damage to repair’: ‘History of the A-Bomb Dome’, http://ww2. enjoy.ne.jp/~kikuraku/files/history4.htm. 5. Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory, University of California Press, Berkeley and London, 1999, p. 20. 6. UNESCO World Heritage List No. 775, Hiroshima: Nomination of Hiroshima Peace Memorial, 28 September 1995, www2.unitar.org/hiroshima/programmes/whs07/ materials/Utaka-%20ABD_and_Itsukushima.pdf, p. 3. 7. Ibid., p. 1. 8. Hugh M. Gloster, ‘Hiroshima in Retrospect’, Phylon, vol. 17, no. 3, 1956, pp. 272, 278; Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1991, p. 278. 9. Richard Sims, Japanese Political History since the Meiji Restoration: 1868–2000, Hurst, London, 2001, p. 1. 10. Cf. W.G. Beasley, The Rise of Modern Japan: Political, Economic and Social Change since 1850, 2nd edn, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1995, pp. 51–2. 11. Chushici Tsuzuki, The Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan: 1825–1995, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, p. 63. 12. Jean-Pierre Lehman, The Roots of Modern Japan, Macmillan, London, 1992, p. 174; Richard Storry, A History of Modern Japan, Penguin, London, 1990, p. 122; Lehman, The Roots of Modern Japan, p. 174. 13. Christine M.E. Gruth, ‘Japan 1868–1945: Art, Architecture, and National Identity’, Art Journal, vol. 55, no. 3, Autumn 1996, p. 17; Storry, A History of Modern Japan, p. 107. 14. Tsuzuki, The Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan, p. 72. A similar mill in Osaka sought farm girls, who were housed in company dormitories and worked up to twelve hours a day in conditions where tuberculosis was rife (ibid., p. 147). 15. Storry, A History of Modern Japan, p. 107; G.B. Sansom, The Western World and Japan, Cresset Press, London, 1950, p. 401, cited in ibid., pp. 107–8. 16. Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan, p. 173, cited in Tsuzuki, The Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan, p. 37.

17. Lehman, The Roots of Modern Japan, p. 174. 18. Beasley, The Rise of Modern Japan, p. 111. 19. Shinobu Amano Kikuraku, ‘Making of the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall’, History of the A-Bomb Dome, http://ww2.enjoy.ne.jp/~kikuraku/files/ history1.htm. 20. Shinobu Amano Kikuraku, ‘Commercial Exhibition Hall and Jan Letzel’: ‘History of the A-Bomb Dome’, http://ww2.enjoy.ne.jp/~kikuraku/files/history2.htm. 21. Zdenek Lukes, cited in Jan Velinger, ‘A Look at the Czech Architect Who Built Hiroshima’s Industrial Promotion Hall’, Radio Praha website, www.radio. cz/en/article/69210. 22. In the period 1870–1914, among the major industrial powers – the UK, Germany, France, the USA and Japan – Japan’s annual rate of growth was second only to that of the United States (Lehman, The Roots of Modern Japan, p. 181). 23. Cf. Crawcour, ‘Industrialization and Technological Change, 1985–1920’, The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 6, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988, p. 436. 24. Between 1914 and 1918, Japan’s real gross national product rose by 40 per cent (Tsuzuki, The Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan, pp. 193–4). Between 1915– 1919 manufacturing output related to heavy industry and machinery increased by 72 per cent, with labour employment increasing by 42 per cent. Between 1909 and 1929 manufacturing relating to textiles almost quadrupled, to metals and machinery grew about the same, to chemicals and ceramics increasing around eight-fold, and to electricity and gas around twentyfour-fold (Beasley, The Rise of Modern Japan, p. 111). 25. Tsuzuki, The Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan, p. 188. 26. Ibid., p. 189. 27. UNESCO World Heritage List No. 775. 28. Ibid; cf. also Kikuraku, ‘Commercial Exhibition Hall and Jan Letzel’. 29. Shinobu Amano Kikuraku, ‘Transformation of the Hall’, History of the A-Bomb Dome, http://ww2.enjoy.ne.jp/ ~kikuraku/files/history3.htm. 30. Ibid. 31. Tsuzuki, The Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan, p. 233. 32. Joseph Gerson, Empire and the Bomb, Pluto Press, London and Ann Arbor MI, 2007, p. 44. 33. Kikuraku, ‘Transformation of the Hall’. 34. Storry, A History of Modern Japan, p. 188. 35. Ibid., p. 294. 36. Kikuraku, ‘Making of the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall’. 37. Harry D. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2000, p. 293. 38. Lebra, Japan’s Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, pp. 78–81; quoted in Beasley, The Rise of Modern Japan, p. 204. 39. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, p. 34. 40. Liaison Conference, May 1943, quoted in Tsuzuki, The Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan, p. 323; ‘Virtual Museum: A-Bomb Building’, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum official homepage, www.pcf.city.hiroshima. jp/. 41. Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts, Ruin from the

Air: The Atomic Mission to Hiroshima, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1977, p. 323. 42. Kyo Maclear, Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima–Nagasaki and the Art of Witness, SUNY Press, Albany NY, 1999, p. 51. 43. Although Yoneyama notes that during the late 1960s ‘survivors were known to be generally less supportive of retaining this painful visual reminder of destroyed buildings’ (Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces, p. 70). 44. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Hackett, Indianapolis, 1987, Ak. 245 (hereafter, CJ) 45. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Hackett, Indianapolis, 1996, Ak. A567/B595; CJ 258. 46. Quoted in Thomas and Morgan-Witts, Ruin from the Air, p. 432. 47. Robert Ginsberg, ‘Aesthetics in Hiroshima: The Architecture of Remembrance’, in Michael H. Mitias, ed., Philosophy and Architecture, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1994, p. 223. 48. Cf. Frances Ferguson, ‘The Nuclear Sublime’, ‘Nuclear Criticism’, Diacritics, vol. 14, no. 2, Summer, 1984, p. 7. 49. Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, in Kant: Political Writings, trans. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, p. 42 (hereafter IUH); Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1992, p. 148. 50. Ibid., p. 153. 51. Ibid., p. 171; cf. Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’, in Kant: Political Writings, pp. 93–130. 52. Norman Cousins, The Saturday Review of Literature, 5 March 1949, quoted in John Hersey, in Hiroshima (1946), 2nd edn, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1986, pp. 176–7. 53. Hersey, Hiroshima, p. 181. 54. Cf. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1994, pp. 111–14. 55. Paul W. Tibbets, with Clair Stebbins and Harry Franken, The Tibbets Story, Stein & Day, New York, 1978, p. 230. 56. Ibid., pp. 1–2. Former secretary of war Henry L. Stimson published an article in Harper’s magazine early in 1947, in which the claim is made that the atomic attacks had prevented the one million American casualties anticipated in the invasion of Japan, repeating a claim made by Churchhill (Joseph Gerson, Empire and the Bomb, Pluto Press, London and Ann Arbor MI, 2007, p. 47). Truman later drew upon Stimson’s explanation, but halved the figure. Paul Tibbets repeats these figures in his biography, observing that, ‘Depending on whose estimates you accept, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved a half-million or possibly a million lives, both American and Japanese.’ Historical research now shows that the pre-surrender estimates never exceeded 20,000, and the worst-case prediction estimated a loss of no more than 46,000 lives (J. Samuel Walker, ‘The Decision to Use the Bomb: A Historiographical Update’, in Michael J. Hogan, ed., Hiroshima in History and Memory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p. 11). 57. Lifton, Death in Life, p. 271.

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58. Yoneyama notes how hibakusha invoked this argument of inappropriateness during the first stage of preservation during the late 1960s, cf. Yoneyama, p. 70; and Hibaku Kenzobutsu o Kangaeru Kai, ed., Hiroshima no hibaku kenzobutsu: hibaku 45shunen chosa hokokusho, Asahi Shinbun Hiroshima Shikyoku, Hiroshima, 1990, pp. 121–2. 59. ‘Hersey’s essay had an immediate and profound impact. The book version became a runaway best-seller. The Book-of-the-Month Club distributed free copies to many of its 848,000 members. A reading of the entire work, in four half-hour segments, over the ABC radio network won the Peabody Award for the outstanding educational broadcast of 1946’ (Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, p. 204). 60. Hersey, Hiroshima, p. 70. 61. Michael Perlman, Imaginal Memory and the Place of Hiroshima, SUNY, Albany NY, 1988, p. viii. 62. Ibid., p. 82. 63. Ibid., pp. 87 and 118. 64. Ibid., p. 160. 65. Cf. the preface to Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, as well as the concluding chapter of Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen, The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat, Macmillan, London, 1990. 66. Lifton, Death in Life, p. 14. 67. Ibid., p. 294. 68. Ibid., p. xii. 69. ‘As for the use of the bomb, [Mrs Nakamura] would say, “It was war and we had to expect it.” And then she would add, “Shikata ga nai”, … “It can’t be helped. Oh, well. Too bad.” Dr. Fujii said approximately the same thing about the use of the bomb to Father Kleinsorge one evening, in German: “Da ist nichts zu machen. There’s nothing to be done about it”.’ (Hersey, Hiroshima, p. 117); ‘Perhaps the best example of this difficulty is the attitude of resignation (akimare) and of “it can’t be helped” (shikataganai or shoganai) expressed to me by large numbers of hibakusha’ (Lifton, Death in Life, pp. 186–7); ‘One one occasion a gentleman acquaintance, while talking about the use of the A-Bomb and the outcome of the war, fatalistically declared, “Shi-Kata ga nai” (“It can’t be helped”)’ (Gloster, ‘Hiroshima in Retrospect’, p. 274). 70. Perlman, Imaginal Memory and the Place of Hiroshima, p. 144. 71. Thomas and Max-Witts, Ruin from the Air, pp. 423, 427. 72. Hersey, Hiroshima, p. 32. 73. In Errol Morris’s documentary, The Fog of War, the US secretary of defence Robert McNamara, then serving as a captain in the Office of Statistical Control, describes how Air Force General LeMay ‘focused on only one thing: target destruction … [in a] single night, we burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo: men, women, and children … 50 square miles of Tokyo were burned. Tokyo was a wooden city, and when we dropped these firebombs, it just burned it … And he went on from Tokyo to firebomb other cities. 58% of Yokohama. Yokohama is roughly the size of Cleveland. 58% of Cleveland destroyed. Tokyo is roughly the size of New York. 51% percent of New York destroyed. 99% of

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the equivalent of Chattanooga, which was Toyama. 40% of the equivalent of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya. This was all done before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, which by the way was dropped by LeMay’s command.’ (Errol Morris, director, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (Sony Pictures, 2004), transcript available at www.errolmorris.com/film/fow_transcript.html). My thanks to Peter Kapos for drawing my attention to this. 74. Storry, A History of Modern Japan, p. 122; Lehman, The Roots of Modern Japan, p. 228. 75. ‘Why was it necessary to drop the nuclear bomb if LeMay was burning up Japan? … Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve. I don’t fault Truman for dropping the nuclear bomb. The U.S.–Japanese War was one of the most brutal wars in all of human history … Was there a rule then that said you shouldn’t bomb, shouldn’t kill, shouldn’t burn to death 100,000 civilians in one night? LeMay said, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?’ (Morris, The Fog of War). 76. Thomas and Morgan-Witts, Ruin from the Air, pp. 433, 435. 77. Hersey’s additional chapter corrects this omission, detailing the psychological and physiological effects of ‘A-Bomb Disease’. Apart from a discussion of the archetypal images of ‘unhealing wounds’, where he includes the ‘disintegrative processes in the body resulting from radiation sickness’, Perlman chooses not to dwell on the effects of radiation (Perlman, Imaginal Memory and the Place of Hiroshima, p. 88). 78. Tsuzuki, The Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan, p. 317. 79. Gar Alperovitz’s 1965 Atomic Diplomacy put forward the ‘revisionist’ position that the primary motivation was not military but rather political: ‘dropped to impress the Soviets rather than defeat the Japanese’ (Walker, ‘The Decision to Use the Bomb’, p. 13). 80. Cf. Gerson, Empire and the Bomb, p. 13. 81. Peter Schwenger and John Whittier Treat, ‘America’s Hiroshima, Hiroshima’s America’, Boundary 2, vol. 21, no. 1, Spring 1994, p. 248. 82. Hanna Segal, ‘From Hiroshima to 11th September 11 2001’, in Psychodynamic Practice, vol. 9, no. 3, August 2003, p. 257. 83. Ibid., p. 261. 84. Ibid., p. 263. 85. Cf. Joseph Gerson’s Empire and the Bomb; see also Joseph Gerson, With Hiroshima Eyes: Atomic War, Nuclear Extortion and Moral Imagination, New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, 1995. 86. Dwight Macdonald, Politics (August 1945), republished in The Responsibility of Peoples, Gollancz, London, 1957, p. 103. 87. Ibid., p. 106.

dossier  Universities

The performative without condition A university sans appel Barbara Cassin and Philippe Büttgen

‘Responsibility’ and the homonymy of autonomy ‘Take your time but be quick about it, because you don’t know what awaits you’, said French philosopher Jacques Derrida in 1998 at Stanford.1 Indeed. He would not have expected to be cited like this by Valérie Pécresse, French Minster for Higher Education and Research, in January 2009: We are taking all the measures to ensure that a new ethic founds the autonomy gained by the university community in the conduct of its own destiny. … ‘To profess is to pledge oneself’ writes Jacques Derrida in ‘The University without Condition’. The hour has come to recognize fully this engagement that is at once individual and collective, to have confidence in the university and in academics.2

One can truncate a citation, deform an aim, pervert its spirit.3 But perhaps one should in the first place rejoice that a French government minister knows her Jacques Derrida – unlike a president of the republic who hadn’t heard of Anne of Cleves. Derrida said that something awaited us. In 1998 one could not have known what. Now we know. The law supposed to institute the ‘autonomy’ of universities is entitled ‘The Freedoms and Responsibilities of the Universities’4 – an entire vocabulary: ‘ethic’, ‘autonomy’, ‘community’, ‘destiny”, ‘engagement’, ‘confidence’. These are the words of Valérie Pécresse. One can read some of them in Derrida too, and in the same general sense: ‘and what matters here is this promise, this pledge of responsibility’. 5 I am thus referring here to a university that would be what it always should have been or always should have represented, that is, from its inception and in

principle: autonomous, unconditionally free in its institution, in its speech, in its writing, in its thinking.6

It is the ethic of responsibility that strikes, in a really Pétainist fashion today, when candidates for professorial positions are evaluated for their competence to ‘act as a civil servant [ fonctionnaire d’État] and in an ethical and responsible fashion’.7 Not, however, the same responsibility, because Derrida’s ‘without condition’ is grasped in the ethic of desaississement, of non-mastery, of the always-excessive event,8 in short of masculine hysteria. On the other hand, ‘autonomy’ (that of our ministers, in any case) is grasped in the ethics of performance – in other words, the culture of results. ‘Autonomy is essential for the university because autonomy is the culture of the result. If the minister decides, it is irresponsibility’; ‘it is necessary for us today to admit that the culture of results should be a part of the university’.9 As the icing on the cake, Pécresse added: ‘for the first time, a government will judge the universities, finance them, equip them as a function of their real performances’. Autonomy, then, is a ‘culture of results’ in so far as that culture is judged heteronomically. The university is autonomous when it suits the government, in itself the only judge of ‘real performances’. The university is quite literally ‘irresponsible’ (dependent on the minister) where it is said to be autonomous. Today and in itself, then, autonomy is the mask under which everything that we do not want progresses – that is to say, the evaluation of performance. And if we have begun with Derrida–Pécresse, it is because it is very difficult, hic et nunc, to call into doubt the ethics of responsibility, even when it results in the requirement of evaluation. Do you refuse to be

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

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evaluated? Do you want to be inefficient [non-performants]; or, as our Agency for the Evaluation of Research and Higher Education says, ‘non-productive’? A knot to be untied then: responsibility, evaluation, performance. Derrida unties it in advance, by speaking not of performance but of the performative. The performative intervenes three times in ‘The University without Condition’. The first time, in the principle of an unconditioned University, frank/free, that is to say, set free of everything, and in particular of all ‘territorial (thus national) rootedness’.10 It performs itself in affirming itself, in ‘the place of the self-presentation of unconditionality that will go by the name “Humanities”’.11 Affirmation, ‘self-presentation’ – one might be tempted to say Selbstbehauptung (self-assertion) but for the difference of nationality, which is no small thing. Ecce Heidegger: Battle alone keeps this opposition open and implants in the entire body of teachers and students that basic mood which lets self-limiting self-assertion empower resolute self-examination to genuine self-governance.12

The second time, in the declaration of principles of the professor. ‘To profess or to be professor’ is to ‘promise to take a responsibility that is not exhausted in the act of knowing or teaching’; the ‘affirmation’ of the declaration of principles ‘in effect closely resembles a performative speech act’.13 As we know, ‘to profess is to pledge oneself’, say the minister and our two philosophers, Derrida and Heidegger, calm, uneasy. The final, contemporary, time: ‘at the moment that one takes into account not only the performative value of the “profession” but where one accepts that a professor produces ‘œuvres”’. That is to say, when, at the heart of the ‘transformed humanities’,14 between literature and philosophy, one thinks as a poet, as Heidegger – once again – would say. After Derrida-and-Pécresse, Derrida-and-Heidegger? An old cliché, evidently false. One can dismantle its falsity in more than one philosophical language: Kantian, Austinian and Levinasian. In Kantian language: Derrida – a child of the Republic with the Crémieux decree – is Kantian when he speaks of autonomy. He is moral and a universalist where Heidegger, speaking of Selbstverwaltung, is a national bureaucrat. Besides, a Kantian thinking of the autonomy of universities exists. It is neither moral nor bureaucratic but rather industrial and commercial,

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and is expressed in the first pages of the Conflict of the Faculties, those pages which Derrida precisely doesn’t comment on. Whoever it was that first hit on the notion of a university and proposed that a public institution of this kind be established, it was not a bad idea to handle the entire content of learning … by mass production, so to speak – by a division of labour, so that every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee, and all of these together would form a kind of learned community called a university (or higher school). The university would have a certain autonomy (since only scholars can pass judgement on scholars as such).15

In Austinian language: almost all the way. The distinction between performative speech acts and constative speech acts, in play from the start of the profession of the professor, ‘will have been a great event in this century – and it will first have been an academic event’, ‘in the university’, via ‘the Humanities, that made it come about and that explored its resources’.16 Evidently it is not same thing ‘when, performatively, one professes’17 like Derrida, and when one responds to the call of Being. In Levinasian language: ‘In the face of what arrives to me, what happens to me, even in what I decide … in the face of the other who arrives and arrives to me, all performative force is overrun, exceeded, exposed’.18 It is the Other, in (the) place of Being, which, for Derrida, makes the ‘event’. (Ereignis all the same – Levinas as Jewish Heideggerian?) Is this a motive for finally abandoning the performative? We will come back to this. We are moving too fast, and in play. But through these caustic remarks we have wanted to show that, once predicated of the university – in the trembling Heidegger/Kant – autonomy is a fundamentally homonymic notion. We now want to show that the performative is a good way to outsmart the performance imperative and the ‘culture of results’, on condition that one thinks it to the very end – without stopping, like Derrida, at the doubtful ethics of the ‘event’.

‘Ethics’ and the homonymy of performance After the homonymy of autonomy, we will take as our new point of departure the homonymy of performance. New European politics evaluates the university. It evaluates it on its ‘real performances’. Such is the ‘culture of results’ into which the university is invited to enter. This is to say, very officially, that those who

evaluate the university are external, foreign to it, and intend to remain so. The president of the French republic, Nicolas Sarkozy, is not a university type. On the other hand, he is a big theorist of the link between evaluation, performance and the culture of results. The university served as a privileged example for him for a while.19 He barely altered his formulas as a result of the global economic crisis. He may even have toughened them up.20 As for us, less speculatively, we will ask: what is understood – here and elsewhere – by ‘performance’? Let us take out our dictionaries. Klein’s Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language tells us that the English forged performance on the [model of the] old French parfournir (from the Medieval Latin perfurnire) and/or parformer, before the French borrowed it, at least three times, if Alain Rey’s Dictionnaire Culturel de la langue française is to be believed. In 1869, by analogy with the language of horse racing, ‘performance’ signifies the ‘manner of developing a subject, of executing a work in public’. In 1953, it signifies the ‘individual result in the accomplishment of a task’. In 1963, and in the wake of Chomsky, it is opposed to ‘competence’. It is a moving, bi­lingual form, which unites sport (performance-record), technique (performance-efficiency of a machine), psychology (performance-test), linguistics (performance/competence) and modern art (performance-happening – without forgetting theatrical representation in English). It is difficult not to add that today performance occupies centre stage in Europe, along with evaluation and the culture of results. So, as a consequence let us continue with our definitions. In the language of received – and thus uncontroversial – opinion (that is, Wikipedia): ‘evaluation is a method that allows a result to be evaluated and thus the value of a result that can’t be measured to be known. It is applied in numerous domains where results are expected but not measurable.’ Neither research nor health can be measured, and that is precisely what evaluation says when it talks of the ‘performance’ of a hospital or a system of research. The challenge of quantifying the unquantifiable is met thanks to performance. What is magical about performance is that it is enough to transform more into better, quantity into quality, cardinal into ordinal. It comes at the right moment then: it is the synthesis of quality and quantity. The tension internal to the concept derives from the fact that it designates at the same time the most objectively measurable (the performance indicators of a machine) and what is most singular about the

individual act, the performance of a horse, a champion, an artist – that which is unrepeatable. Not only does performance measure the unquantifiable and make the most singular enter into the most objective, but that gives it the democratic look of a numerical figure without being arbitrary. ‘To exit a purely mechanical, legal, egalitarian, anonymous approach’ so as to promote genuine equality, genuine equality and not egalitarianism, says Sarkozy.21 What is that to say? Genuine equality is not the equality of opportunity; it is the equality of compensation for an equal performance. When we perform well, we are each and every one of us like a racing car, a top-level sportsman, even a champion in bed. Visible and thus profitable. If now we get closer to performance evaluation in the university sector, we come across two things: the search engine and the evaluation form. Do you think that we exaggerate? Look at how we work already, with Google on-screen, and how they want us to work when we apply for research funding or evaluate research projects. Research and the Search Engine. Google, then, is a model of evaluation by performance. With Google, basic research and the research of a search engine no longer have anything homonymic about them. The PageRank algorithm that ranks the page responses to a query and is one of the things that gives Google its great superiority, functions – if Bryn and Page are to be believed – according to the academic model of the citation: pages that are clicked or cited the most are ranked first.22 It is even a question here of a doxa raised to the power two: at the top of the page ranking are the sites that are most cited by the sites that are most cited – a ‘cultural democracy’, according to Google, with a balancing mechanism, however, which gives this democracy a star system; a link from a site that is not cited much is worth more than a link from one cited a great deal. Now, this ranking mechanism is precisely that put into operation by Hirsch’s famous H-index or impact factor, more or less amended to avoid absolute ridicule (no matter what neo-Nazi negationist is evidently ranked higher than Lévi-Strauss). It determines the admissibility of the applications for senior researcher submitted to the European Research Council in Brussels.23 It classifies researchers, for example, by the number of their publications, in journals that are themselves classified and rated, by balancing them with the number of citations that are made of these publications in journals that are themselves classified and rated. The classification of journals is evidently the object of a fierce national and international battle, since it forms

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part of the barometer. ‘Tell us how many articles you have published in journals with editorial board A and how many times these articles have themselves been cited in journals with editorial board A, and we will tell you what you are worth!’ Of course, we will not take into account the linguistic bias, which means that you may not necessarily be publishing in English – or rather in globish – and that maybe it is necessary to ensure that continuing to speak in French or German (thus maintaining them as languages and not simple dialects) doesn’t penalize you. Of course, we will not take into account either the disciplinary bias, which means that the human and social sciences, unless they are strictly cognitive, can require publications that are lengthier and take longer to write (did you say ‘books’?). Nor the fact that it might be a matter of reading and of thinking, even when evaluating; nor the practice of citing one’s own little clique, or accounting for the impact that is forgotten tomorrow. That such a treasure may make Google’s fortune – which subordinates everything, including so-called cultural democracy, to ‘legitimate commercial goals’ – is the name of the game, or at least of a certain game. But for this kind of ‘research’ – such as it is practised by a ‘search engine’ – to become the regulatory norm for the evaluation of basic research is something that must be opposed by every possible means and to the very end, because it evidently contradicts the very idea of emerging research. By definition, the (too singular) base of a Gaussian curve is invisible. Performance and the Hfactor are incapable of measuring originality as such. As Lindon said apropos Beckett: one doesn’t notice the absence of an unknown. Now innovation would like researchers to produce prototypes, not stereotypes: there is no H-factor that could ensure either its rating or its conformity. Language and the ethic of forms. Let us now come to the form.24 Performance has its calculus, as we have just seen. But it also has its ethics, the ‘responsible’ ethics of ‘autonomous’ universities. It is interesting that this ethic has to pass through the sections of a form. What is it a question of? Phenomenologically, the form is the primary perception of evaluation. The project leader, the leader of the research team being evaluated, completes an ‘evaluation form’. The evaluator of the project or of the research team completes another form. What is called evaluation may be

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described – phenomenologically still – as the passage from one form to another. Why the form? We propose two answers.25 First, the form is the point of contact between language and evaluation. It is composed of sections that must be completed one after the other. The first function of the form is to sequence: it transforms the object evaluated – the illness of a patient and his or her being taken into care, for example – into analogous portions that can be costed on a per action basis according to a pre-established protocol. The ‘personal appreciation’ or statement of the evaluator is itself a section – generally the last one, because it is the least important. After evaluation, as the passage from one form to another, a closer description makes evaluation appear as the passage from one section to another. What do we do when we pass from one section to another? It is dif-

ficult to say. In any case we do know what we don’t do, or don’t do any more: we don’t write or write up any longer; we don’t develop ideas any longer. We progress in the form by separating, segmenting and sequencing. Unlike the topoi of Ancient Greek rhetoric, which – although decried – constituted a reservoir of arguments for invention that one was free to assemble in the most appropriate, and singular, manner each time, the form is a fixed sequence. Second, the form is the point of contact between evaluation and morality. From the point of view of the evaluated, more and more frequently it contains the moment of self-evaluation, with the previous noting and identification of one’s ‘strong points’ and ‘weak points’. In laboratories and research centres one frequently ironizes the similarity between self-evaluation and the confession of sins (or Maoist self-criticism, depending on one’s preferences). That sort of irony is

easy. What is happening in reality is very serious. If you can only find ‘weak points’, it is because you really must have a problem; but if you only credit yourself with ‘strong points’, in a sense this is even worse. What self-evaluation tests is your ability to acquire the Anglo-Saxon and Protestant virtue of fairness. What is fairness? It is exactly that which remains of the subjectivity of the researcher who puts his work through the grid of the form: just enough subjectivity not to be confused with a computer. It is the same for both evaluator and evaluated. The form is what assures me that no-matter-what evaluator would have made the same decision as me. Here once again is fair play and something to soothe my conscience: the idea that I might have shown judgement, even taste, was in fact a source of deep insecurity. Who am I to judge when I am no longer elected by my colleagues and my task is to return my correctly completed form before the deadline? The form, with its neatly ordered sections, gives at least a momentary response to my anxiety, until the moment when I have to compare my form to those of peer evaluators with as little legitimacy as me. But even at this stage, that of the so-called ‘update meeting’, the comparison of forms will not require any more than the minimum of subjectivity that was required of those being evaluated. There will be trouble for me if I talk beyond the confines of the sections on the form: I will have come close to insider dealing, or – as the evaluation agencies call it – a ‘conflict of interest’. The language of forms is thus transparent and honest, consensual, euphemistic and gentle. Its transparency is guaranteed by the procedure: the justice of evaluation is a procedural justice, à la Habermas. Fairness is ensured by process. That is why those in charge of the national and European evaluation agencies are generally decent, competent and above all profoundly cooperative people: they will always encourage you to sit down next to them in order to ‘refine the criteria’, as they say; to multiply them if necessary. The essential point is that this refinement of criteria only ever leads to a longer form. Just try getting away from forms: you will find yourself talking into thin air, for your own amusement. 26 You will be considered irresponsible.

The performative versus performance To finish, let us posit – delicately, provisionally, because it is where all the difficulty lies – a universitarian ‘we’, a university thought as (a) ‘we’. There are two ways in which to call ‘ourselves’ to ‘responsibility’: either by designating for ourselves the historical mission

of the university – that is the old formula, born with Humboldt, continued deformed by Heidegger, and the incantation of Selbstbehauptung – or, by summoning ourselves, at last, to ‘perform’ efficiently – to publish, to be ‘productive’, and, even more so, to be ‘evaluated’. This is the call that is coming from our government ministries, our evaluation agencies, our states today. In one case, we will have to answer for the university, as one answers for an idea that is greater than oneself. In the second, it will be necessary for us to ‘defend’ our university (each one his or her own university, different and in competition with all the others, co-petitive, as Google says), in the way that one defends one’s team, one’s business, one’s country: our responsibility will be to respond to calls for tenders. Always responding. Those are the two current discourses on the university. Sometimes they seem to be opposed. Most often, as with Valérie Pécresse, they reinforce each other. What the present moment of the university shows us is that the ethics of responsibility has been unable to do anything against the culture of results; quite the contrary, in fact. Here, we rediscover our initial knot: responsibility, evaluation, performance. In 1998, Jacques Derrida’s ‘The University without Condition’ was barely touched by the fever of evaluation. Performance was not yet completely the university’s business. Derrida placed the performative in the face of responsibility. In our knot, then, one of the threads splits in two: performance and performative. That is without doubt the strangest thing that we discovered in ‘The University without Condition’. But how the devil did we pass from the performative university to the performances of the university, judged by the criteria of a ‘culture of results’? One can answer in two ways. The first is the simplest. It consists of two toponyms and some slogans: the ‘Bologna process’, the ‘Lisbon strategy’. Both make the university the primary motor in the transformation of Europe into a ‘knowledge-based economy’. A chronology may be sketched out here. Bologna (June 1999) and Lisbon (March 2000) separate us from Derrida’s lecture at Stanford (April 1998). 1998–2010: two universities, separated by a world. But other evolutions have taken place. From the performative to performance, the journey sums up two centuries of the European university. In Derrida, for a time at least, the performative saves the ‘university without condition’ from Selbstbehauptung and the pathos of destining. For Derrida, the unconditioned and the absolute are said performatively,

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so as to avoid repeating Humboldt’s lesson and even more so its being led astray by Heidegger. In affirming itself without any condition, the university fabricates itself [se fait] – is constituted as university – in anticipation of any merely transmitted knowledge. The idea of the university becomes a language act, that of the professor who knows that his or her freedom is not exhausted by the ‘pure technoscientific knowledge’ that it accompanies.27 In a word, the performative university is no longer the essence that one contemplates and that one endeavours to realize. It is the act that one performs, the university that starts all over again with each lecture course. The performative as a support for and vector of a knowledge – that of the university: we must hold this to be something the topicality of which is still and always established. To tell the truth, we must maintain it for much longer than Derrida. Because for Derrida the performative is rapidly directed towards a ‘place where it fails’. 28 Derrida designates this place as ‘event’. The event ‘disregards the performative’. It has to ‘dissociate’ the Humanities from ‘every phantasm of indivisible sovereignty and of sovereign mastery’ shortly after the same Humanities has been associated with ‘engagement’ and the ‘promise’ of a profession of faith characterized as performative.29 That is what we called masculine hysteria: an apology for impotence through fear of the counter-performance (‘without power’ or ‘without defence’ – Derrida’s quotation marks30); the poetry of desœuvrement versus the ‘masterable possible’, with a definition of the event – in a dialectico-phenomenological patois – that is evidently oxymoronic as ‘impossible possible’ (‘only the impossible can happen’); the normative exacerbation of this impossible possible as the only ‘event worthy of the name’; and the final choice of the event as the antonym of the performative. 31 The whole argument is summarized in the superbly forged formulation ‘the force of an event is always stronger than the force of a performative’.32 The performative obliges us here to judge things by effects. The effect is that eight years after its appearance, ‘The University without Condition’ finds itself cited by a French government minister who has the whole of the university against her. Certainly what is at stake here, as usual, is an appropriation of the other, not for the fundamentals of what they say but for the emblem, self-designated as ‘opening’ – whether it is a matter of Jaurès, of the signifier Mitterrand, or of Derrida. What is at stake is a governmental ventriloquism in which no word, no idea, comes out unscathed.

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However, we find a real convergence where the philosopher is most philosophical and the minister most political. Valérie Pécresse paraphrases: ‘to profess is to pledge oneself, wrote Jacques Derrida’.33 For his part, Derrida wanted to ‘exceed pure techno-scientific knowledge in the pledge of responsibility’.34 On the one hand, there is engagement, 35 thought as motivation in the horizon of an ‘ethics’ (the word the minister uses) of responsibility; on the other, for the philosopher, is an ‘ethico-political responsibility’, the principle of the ‘unconditional resistance of the university’. 36 Two concepts of responsibility, doubtless, and two ethics also, but in both cases an appeal, an exhortation, a paraenesis. The university without condition that, for our part, we are demanding, is a university without appeal (sans appel). Without appeal covers without ethics, without responsibility, but also without the dilemma between an autonomy desirable for every corporation and a heter­onomy that is necessary to bring the university out of itself. Is it worth specifying here that to reject the in­junction to responsibility is not to vindicate irresponsibility – or immorality – for oneself. (Should one say ‘non-ethics’?) In fact, our response, like Derrida’s in his time, is strategically determined. It has nothing to do with a perennial, timeless – that is to say ‘essential’ – definition of ‘the’ university. In this sense, it is not ‘responsible’ (ethico-ontologically responsible); or responsibility must be understood here as the strength to respond ‘no’. As it happens, in fact, we respond ‘no’ to the responsibility that is ideologically hammered out, as the responsibility of the citizen professor and citizen student of a techno-scientific neoliberal state concerned with performance. And we protest – this is what we are maintaining – that this performance is radically counterproductive on all levels: but first of all on that of knowledge and invention, including the invention that is the transmission of knowledge. 37 Just as the performative utterance – the university thought in the form of an enlarged perlocutory – has been able to get the university out of an autonomy reduced to Selbstbehauptung, so – thought all the way through – it will serve us as a provisional arm for subtracting us from an autonomy confused with the performance of a manager. Its other name is: ‘let us continue the combat’. A ‘veritable’ autonomy, then? Of course, it is this ‘ethic’ that we will begin by breaking with. Translated by Andrew Goffey

Notes

Originally published in French at www.appeldesappels. org, March 2010. 1. Jacques Derrida, ‘The University without Condition’, in Without Alibi, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 2002, p. 237. 2. Valérie Pécresse, ‘Ce que je veux dire aux enseignantschercheurs’, Libération, 27 January 2009. 3 It is worth noting that the original French of the expression that Pécresse cites is ‘Professer, c’est s’engager’. The verb s’engager can mean ‘to take a stand’, ‘to commit oneself (to something)’. Derrida plays on the verbal form engager and the nominal expression en gage (pledge). (Trans.) 4 See Law 2007–1199 of 10 August 2007, Journal Officiel de la République Française, 11 August 2007, relative to the freedoms and responsibilities of universities. 5. Derrida, ‘The University without Condition’, p. 215. 6. Ibid., pp. 213–14. 7. New modes of organization relative to the ‘concours’ for the recruitment of academics (the agrégation, CAPES, CAPET, etc.), contained in the decrees of 28 December 2009. See the Journal Officiel de la République Française, 6 January 2010. 8. Derrida, ‘The University without Condition’, pp. 234–7. 9. Valérie Pécresse on ‘Dimanche soir politique’, France Inter, 12 January 2009. 10. Derrida, ‘The University without Condition’, p. 213. 11. Ibid., p. 208. 12. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Self-Assertion of the German University and the Rectorate 1993/34. Facts and Thoughts’, Review of Metaphysics, vol. 38, no. 3, March 1985, p. 479. In the French translation that the authors cite, Gerard Granel translates Selbstvertwaltung (here, ‘self-governance’) as autonomie. They comment that for a French academic today, this makes one do a ‘different kind of somersault’. 13. Derrida, ‘The University without Condition’, p. 217. 14. When Derrida ultimately interrogates himself about the nature of his discourse, in ‘The University without Condition’, he asks: ‘is it philosophy or literature? Or theatre? Is it an œuvre or a course, or a sort of seminar?’ Ibid., p. 237. 15. Immanuel Kant, Der Streit der Fakultäten (1798), Einführung, AK VII, 17. Quoted in translation from The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1979, p. 23. 16. Derrida, ‘The University without Condition’, p. 209. 17. Ibid., p. 209. 18. Ibid., p. 235. 19. Thus, ‘Personally, I see in evaluation the compensation for performance. If there is no evaluation, there is no performance.’ (Speech given by the President of the Republic on the occasion of the launch of the reflection on the National Strategy for Research and Innovation at the Palais de l’Elysée, 22 January 2009.) Or: ‘the culture of results and of performance has always been at the centre of my action. We should not have any taboo with regard to figures and I have always advocated the greatest transparency.’ (Speech given by the President of the Republic at a meeting with the main actors in security, prisons and national education, 28 May 2009.) All of Nicolas Sarkozy’s speeches can be read online at www. elysee.fr. 20. ‘I have a deep conviction: we will not change our

behaviour if we don’t change the measure of our performance. And our behaviour absolutely must change.’ (Speech of the President of the Republic at the International Conference for the Presentation of the Conclusions of Commission for the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, at the Sorbonne, Paris, 14 September 2009.) The measure changes, perhaps. However, it remains a measurement of performance. See on this point Barbara Cassin, ‘L’État schizophrène, Dieu et le nous raisonnable’, in Roland Gori, Barbara Cassin and Christian Laval, L’Appel des Appels. Pour une insurrection des consciences, Editions Mille et une nuits, Paris, 2009) pp. 351–74, especially pp. 373–4; and Philippe Büttgen, ‘D’ailleurs toute activité sans evaluation pose un problème’, MethIS, Spring 2010. 21. Speech by the President of the Republic during a visit to the Institut Régional de l’Administration, Nantes, 19 September 2007. 22. See Sergey Bryn and Lawrence Page, ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Online at http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html. Referred to in Barbara Cassin, Google-moi. La deuxième mission de l’Amérique, Albin Michel, Paris, 2007. See in particular pp. 94–104. 23. Eugene Garfield created the Journal Impact Factor in 1960 to support the Garfield Impact Factor in selecting reviews for the Canadian Medical Association. We insist on the fact that the H-factor constitutes the unwarranted extension, even the uncontrolled importing, of a practice that has its place in bibliometry, introduced in Canada for the well-controlled and numerically significant collections of medical publications. 24. The term that the authors use is grille, which in this context can be translated as ‘form’, ‘grid’ or ‘questionnaire’ (Trans.). 25. On this and the previous aspects, see Philippe Büttgen and Barbara Cassin, ‘“J’en ai 22 sur 30 au vert”. Six theses sur l’évaluation’, Cités 37, 2009, pp. 27–41. 26. The expression that the authors use is pour le plaisir. It is an oblique reference to Cassin’s work on the sophistry and the plaisir de parler (Trans.). 27. Derrida, ‘The University without Condition’, p. 215. 28. Ibid., p. 209. For the rest of the argument one would have to measure exactly the impact of the debate between Searle and Derrida: the mention of ‘Signature, Event, Context’ and of Limited Inc has an important part to play in Derrida’s destitution of the performative (see p. 301 n6). 29. Ibid., p. 235 (Derrida’s italics) – a sequence that sketches out one of the principal trajectories of ‘The University without Condition’. 30. Ibid., p. 206. 31. Ibid., pp. 234–5. 32. Ibid., p. 236. 33. See n2 above. 34. Derrida, ‘The University without Condition’, p. 215. 35. See n3 above (Trans.). 36. Derrida, ‘The University without Condition’, p. 218. 37. On performance as the principle of an economic thought bankrupt since 2008, see Barbara Cassin, ‘L’État schizophrène, Dieu et le nous raisonnable’, cited in L’Appel des appels. This ‘appeal of appeals’ has for its first function an appeal to say ‘no’, from the heart of each trade [métier], and, in particular, to say ‘no’ to performance. In its own way it too is without appeal.

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The university and the plan Reflections from Vienna The immediate causes of the current protests by students, lecturers and academic researchers in Europe are contingent; they are directed at individual educational institutions or administrators, and the demands they make are capable of being met over the short term.* But on a second level, one that cannot be separated from the immediate events, protestors are concerned with fundamental changes made to systems of education and training in circumstances of massive underfunding, processes of de-democratization and ‘practical mistakes’ made in introducing new BA and MA structures as a result of the Bologna guidelines. In relation to this, protest is generally directed at ministries of education and research or at governments, and it is possible to imagine that demands made at this level could essentially be met and acted upon over the medium term – assuming, that is, that the demands are taken seriously. This second level in particular has received a great deal of attention and vocal support in the media, although uncommitted declarations of solidarity have often also had the effect of weakening its impact. A third level, which was part of the protests from the beginning, was either widely ignored by the media or at best dismissed as mere fantasy: it includes everything that the rather vague demands for ‘changing the whole of society’ tried to express. There was a reason why these terms were so imprecise: put simply, it has now become difficult to identify and describe exactly what the ‘whole’ social structures are that need to be changed. In what follows, we attempt to analyse the current conflicts and paradoxes in order to formulate more concrete demands at this third level – in the hope that starting points for a theory of society might emerge. At the current stage of capitalist socialization in Western countries, there remain only a few areas of life where individuals can become aware of their common political interests with others – that is to say, of their political and economic interests. Interest groups of

the kind commonly recognized by the state, such as employees’ organizations, student unions, trade unions and reform-oriented parties, rarely prove to be the initiators of social struggles, not least because their own bureaucratic structures are designed to balance corporate interests. When struggles do arise, they generally do so outside of them. This is partly because economic competition, consumer individualism and the reorganization of industrial production have helped create a situation where people either no longer go through, or are no longer aware of, the classic collective experiences of politicization. But there is another reason as well: as fields of production and work become increasingly immaterial, demand has risen for workers with uniquely individual abilities – indeed, with carefully cultivated idiosyncrasies, stylish quirks and personal (physical) attractiveness. The self is no longer a place of retreat but a productive force, obliged to operate on deregulated markets, deploying as many unique selling points as possible. The result is an encroachment of the working day into traditional leisure activities: going to parties, concerts, exhibitions and the cinema or engaging in the never-ending (in)voluntary rounds of networking become mere opportunities for honing this constructed self further. These processes of individualization and compulsory Bohemianization gradually take hold of the entire individual, affecting ever more areas of his or her life. Those subject to them must maintain a good mood in order to appear creative and original – survival depends on it. As semi-self-employed small entrepreneurs running their own businesses, or as precariously employed workers, they represent the new proletariat of deregulation and neoliberalism. The situation in the universities, by contrast, looks very different. Here it is not deregulation that is the problem, but increasing regulation; the trend is not towards compulsory selfinvention and self-management, but external controls, bureaucracy and the dumbing-down of courses.

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

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The sociologist and management consultant Armin Nassehi recently wrote an article (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 25 November 2009) supporting the students’ protests ‘in their substantive points’, while at the same time denying that there is any connection between the Bologna system – which he considers to have been rightly criticized – and neoliberalism. Instead, he saw the much-criticized mania for regulation more as a return to socialist five-year plans. Even Adam Soboczynski, in his otherwise very sympathetic tribute to the old-school system’s tradition of long-term study (Die Zeit, 26 November 2009), found that the Bologna regulations smacked of Leninism. Drawing analogies between educational and economic policy on the basis of structural similarities is a category error that is commonly made. For, in the neoliberal paradigm, the increasing regulation of universities and decreasing regulation of money flows go together, in much the same way as the increasing control of migration goes together with decreasing control of capital movements. Both are different ways of serving the same end, namely of intensifying exploitation and reducing costs. The only difference is that monadized, independent micro-entrepreneurs can more effectively be exploited outside the colleges, while within universities cost reduction can only be achieved by bureaucratic methods. Of course, this principally applies to the large state-run universities, whose unmanageable size and organizational overload constantly force them to produce guidelines that can guarantee the quality of their industrially manufactured educational product, including evaluations, credit points, micro-managed curricula, and so on. Thus while post-Fordist deregulation is everywhere on the offensive, and while the function of disciplining and controlling labour is no longer exercised by bosses and authority figures but has become internalized by working subjects themselves, a neo-Fordist system of discipline is, as it were, gradually being imposed in the universities, with the Bologna process as part of it. However, this also has the result that, like factory workers of the past, students are now able to experience themselves and those in the same position as them as a class. While exploitative relationships are elsewhere becoming increasingly less visible, they have become strikingly more so in the large-scale university’s structures of power and control. The advantage of this visibility as a basis for mobilizing students and other participants within universities has been clearly demonstrated; at the same time, there is little doubt it has also contributed to a

readiness to express solidarity with other movements outside them. Its disadvantage is that the unevenness of these developments makes them hard to express in the form of demands. Anti-authoritarian and antihierarchical demands – however justified they may be against Bologna and the transformation of universities into factories – are, in the cultural industries outside the universities, instances of preaching to the converted. Thus, for example, Magnus Klaue could write in the weekly newspaper Freitag (25 November 2009) that the students were demanding what was effectively already happening. This unevenness characterizes not only the difference between the neo-Fordist Bologna university and post-Fordist (cultural) work, but also the position of artistic and academic staff, of lecturers and researchers. Increasingly partially and precariously employed, the latter are now responsible for finding their own funding, attracting external funds and promoting themselves through constant networking. In this sense, they too are subject to experiences similar to other cognitive proletarians. At the same time, however, they are part of the university’s management and are involved in implementing the reforms that are turning it into a factory; entangled in its functions of control, they develop phantom professorial traits. Social and political demands must take the ambiguity of their position into account; if they don’t, they run the risk of degenerating into a nostalgic, anti-authoritarian spectacle of defiance, consoling themselves with empty gestures of support and solidarity from the media. At the same time, we should be asking whether the moment has come to reconsider and revise the nature of the ‘clear’ public demands that are regularly being called for, but whose political effectiveness is arguable. Long before the start of the protests, work had begun on an intensive critique of contemporary conditions; it argued that such phenomena as deregulation and disciplining, the pressure to stand out and the pressure to conform, demands for excellence and the precarization of work, the propaganda of labour mobility and the control of that mobility, the myth of horizontal hierarchies and the reality of dismantling democratic forms, were not contradictory but rather complementary processes. The analysis is of the circumstances in which hegemonic powers are attempting to promote the ‘knowledge society’ and ‘creative cities’ as ideological role models for the present political and economic reality. It has developed practices and slogans that both the media and politicians have been quick to denounce as absurdly unrealistic demands for grassroots democracy. In so doing, these practices and slogans best

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demonstrate how the production of a theory of society works – namely, by (and through) the discussion of very concrete problems of discrimination and exclusion, by organizing learning, teaching and everyday life, and by observing administrative and managerial practices and their legitimating discourses. The self-organized production of political critique and self-empowering gestures made in and through educational institutions are themselves a form of social and political theory. This new production of activity is not least a reaction to the neoliberal production of

passivity, which manifests itself as the individualized performance of undirected and at best self-referential virtuosity. By deliberately not behaving as a mere consumer or service provider in the new university factories (or edu-shopping malls), but rather as an impatient and irritated historical subject in the most different, unpredictable constellations, associations and organizational forms, we can turn social theory into an anti-hegemonic, anti-neoliberal praxis of the subjects of these institutions. Translated by Nathaniel McBride

Case study

From fiasco to carnival The end of philosophy at Middlesex? On 26 April, the Dean of the School of Arts and Education announced the decision to close recruitment to all undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in Philosophy at Middlesex University, London, including research degrees in the highly regarded Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) – the top research-rated unit in the University. News of the announcement quickly generated a widespread outpouring of concern and support. Within days an online petition demanding the reversal of the decision had already received several thousand signatures, whilst a ‘Save Middlesex Philosophy’ Facebook group set up by students had begun attracting members, garnering messages of solidarity from other departments and institutions – notably, in the UK, from similar campaigns at Sussex, Essex and King’s College London – and organizing campaign meetings. At the time of writing (9 June), the group has over 13,500 members and the petition has in excess of 18,000 signatures. The press attention provoked by the closure began with an article by Nina Power published on 29 April in the CommentIsFree section of the Guardian online. This placed the recent events within the context of wider threats to Philosophy departments across the UK, but also took care to single out the particular intellectual and political concerns at stake in terminating Philosophy at Middlesex, with its critical emphasis upon European philosophy and political thought and its place within a post-92 university. The same day the

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New Statesman’s ‘Cultural Capital’ website attacked the decision as a more general ‘Assault on the Humanities’ which lacked any ostensible rationale or justification. The Times Higher Education website picked up the story on 1 May, and followed up five days later in its weekly edition with a more detailed analysis of the underlying relationship of the announced closure to the strategic promotion of business, scientific and vocational subjects – at the expense of the humanities – by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE)’s funding banding system. It also published a letter – signed by thirty leading international academics, including Badiou, Balibar, Butler, Hardt, Negri, Rancière, Spivak and Žižek – calling on the University to ‘reverse this damaging and ill-judged decision’ and ‘to renew its commitment to widening participation in education and to excellence in research’. By this point, students had grown impatient with the University management’s refusal to justify their decision or to address these concerns. On 4 May, when the only meeting the management had called with them to discuss the implications for their ongoing study was cancelled at short notice, students protested by converging outside the office of the Dean of Arts and Education, who had recommended the closure, and electing to wait for him there. The wait lasted two days. At which point a rally was held outside the building, joined by supportive staff and students from other universities (including Étienne Balibar), and the sit-in expanded in terms of number of participants and

space, from the boardroom and administrative corridor to a full occupation of the main ‘Mansion’ building on the University’s Trent Park campus. When, on 6 May, the deferred meeting ended with the management’s refusal to enter into any negotiations concerning the reversal of their decision, students returned to the occupied building and declared it an open space for workshops, reading groups, presentations, poetry and film screenings. Over the following ten days a busy schedule of events was attended by researchers, teachers, students, artists and others sympathetic to the students’ cause. This culminated in a rally outside the

occupied ‘Mansion’ at which Tariq Ali, an editor of New Left Review, spoke of the need to resist what he called ‘Kentucky Fried Education’: ‘you swallow it, barely digest it, then excrete it’. The last students left the occupation on 15 May under the threat of a High Court injunction that the management had served the previous day. During this period their action had generated a number of articles in the British press, including further comments in the Guardian and THE, as well as the Observer and London Review of Books and a brief discussion on the BBC World Service’s Sunday News Hour.

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A perfect storm Even more significant, perhaps, and indicative of the way in which contemporary political organization has sought to exploit the immediacy and mass reach of the Internet and social-networking sites as effectively and creatively as the corporations and institutions they are often poised against, is the way in which the campaign took root and proliferated online. Countless online journals and blogs sought to dissect and diagnose the events and their underlying causes, typically with more critical acumen and insight than the press itself: most notably, the comments appearing on the influential Leiter Reports blog and John Protevi’s article on ‘Why Middlesex Matters’ for the US-based website ‘Inside High-Ed’. Meanwhile, the campaign’s Facebook group has provided a virtual space in which solidarity and encouragement could be publicly passed on to the occupying students in the form of messages of support and assembled videos and artworks, whilst organization and collaborative action could be collectively discussed and delegated. This intensifying loop of real-world protests, social networking and blogging, and predominantly online journalism with its ‘reader’s comments’, has nonetheless been triggered by what John Protevi has described as a ‘“perfect storm” of academic resistance’. In many ways, however, it is the University management’s own ambiguity concerning the rationale for the closure that has allowed this storm to grow. The Dean initially explained the decision as ‘simply financial’, emphasizing the low recruitment to the single-honours undergraduate programme. However, this explanation contradicted the strategy, previously endorsed by managers, to concentrate recruitment on postgraduate programmes and research degrees. The postgraduate community had flourished, with 48 MA students in 2009–10 (the largest cohort of Philosophy MA students in the UK) and 15 PhD students (with 5 PhDS awarded last year). The financial viability of the combined programmes had been strengthened by significant annual Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) income and external research funding, including a recent large AHRC project grant, 2006–09. Consequently, staff had been confident their subject group could meet the required contributions demanded by the University. One of the ironies of the situation turned out to be that it was the CRMEP’s success in generating RAE income that had made it prey to the short-term ‘asset-stripping’ of its financial resources, which will be collected by the university from HEFCE until the end of the funding cycle (2014, at the earliest)

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in the absence of the very researchers who generated the funding. As many commentators have pointed out, notably in the THE, the ‘financial’ imperative behind this decision is closely tied to a prematurely enacted anticipation of changes in the HEFCE’s funding streaming, an important source of revenue per student. HEFCE provides different levels of funding per student depending on the subject band, providing the most to what it perceives as more expensive training-based courses (the highest band being clinical medicine), and the least to classroom-based subjects such as those in the humanities. This difference is intended to reflect the higher level of spending necessitated by the course of study, yet many commentators have understood the closure of Philosophy at Middlesex as part of a wider strategy to generate additional income by switching from humanities to more vocational, training-based subjects without matching the increased spending expected of such degrees. This is taken by many as a symptom of

a disturbing trend in the funding and management of universities, which takes place against the backdrop of an imminent Tory–Liberal emergency budget seeking to make £200 million in spending cuts to university budgets and provide 10,000 fewer university places than announced in Labour’s last budget. Such measures can only bolster the threats being made by the elite Russell group of universities to the government that if the cap on tuition fees is not removed they should expect a wave of privatizations by the prestigious universities, which threatens in turn regressively to transform the study of the humanities once more into the preserve of the privileged few.

Capitalistic dread What is most telling about the decision to close the philosophy programmes at Middlesex is the Dean’s claim that the department’s reputation made no ‘measurable’ contribution to the university; indeed, that reputation has ‘no financial value’. During ‘Who’s Afraid of Philosophy?’, an event hosted on 19 May by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in support of the campaign, Peter Osborne, Director of the CRMEP, spoke of Middlesex as the ‘current focal point for an intensifying attempt to get rid of philosophy, in particular, and to reduce the humanities in general’ across a whole segment of UK universities. There is an existential dimension to this phenomenon, he argued, whereby philosophy has become the ‘temporary resting place of a capitalistic dread’ of the unmeasurable. This anxiety is held at bay by the precisely quantified commercial out­goings of the managers who are closing down Philosophy departments upon branding exercises, marketing and consultancy fees, and the swelling of their own bureaucratic regimes. At Middlesex, £3.5 million was spent on consultants and external advisers in 2008–09 alone. And whilst the number of academic staff has been falling, that of ‘administrative’ staff (which includes managers) has been increasing – the ratio is now 733 : 860 – and senior managerial staff earning in excess of £100,000 a year have almost doubled.

Spasm of managerial self-destruction Yet the management of the closure has been a fiasco – a corporate slasher movie remade in the style of an Ealing comedy. The hapless Dean, in particular (now known internationlly for the 42-second clip of his promo performance to camera about Work-based Learning, circulating on the web), has lost all credibility among academic staff. Recent attempts to silence the sonorous contempt for his regime, by disciplining staff in the School for sending emails pointing out mis­information contained in management pronouncements, served only to strengthen staff resolve to build on the campaign to save the Philosophy programme, and to address broader issues of managerial practice, such as lack of consultation and the intimidation and bullying of staff. On Thursday 20 May, students and staff, including those from a number of other endangered programmes in the humanities, staged a second sit-in, this time over a single night, in the university library. In the following days, three CRMEP staff and four students on

the Philosophy programmes were suspended pending investigation of their roles in the occupations. The staff suspensions barred them from entering University premises ‘without the prior permission of the Dean or a member of the University Executve’ and from ‘contacting in any way any University employee or student’, while nonetheless, confusingly, insisting they were ‘expected to carry out all reasonable duties specified by the University’ in relation to the delivery of their roles. This new ‘spasm of managerial selfdestruction’, as Osborne described it to the Evening Standard, finally jolted the local UCU branch into action. And at an Emergency General Meeting on 28 May – which the suspended staff were explicitly denied permission to attend – a motion was passed giving the University until noon on 2 June to lift the suspensions, or the union would enter into a dispute – which it duly did. Meanwhile, however, events took an unexpected turn. The following day, 3 June, Osborne announced to a meeting of students and staff that four members of the Research Centre – himself, Peter Hallward, Éric Alliez and Stella Sandford – had been offered the opportunity to move to Kingston University, in southwest London, along with all continuing postgraduate students, to re-establish the CRMEP there. In the face of the intensifying intransigence of Middlesex management, they had decided to accept the offer. A formal announcement setting out the situation appeared on the campaign website (www.savemdxphil.com) on 8 June; and the two universities have confirmed they are in discussion over details of the transition, although the three staff remain suspended.

Escape to Kingston The move has been hailed as a significant, if partial, victory for the campaign. The core of the Centre will be held together, and its distinctive postgraduate programmes preserved. It is moving to a far more hospitable environment. However, the transfer will leave the undergraduates and the two remaining staff adrift at Middlesex, with the future of philosophy teaching there uncertain, beyond the teaching out of the final two years of the BA programmes. The campaign to reopen undergraduate recruitment to philosophy at Middlesex will thus go on, as part of a growing movement against the ongoing cuts in higher education. The CRMEP has been saved, but the struggle being waged over the future of universities, in the UK and elsewhere, has only just begun.

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Occupation No-one expected news of the closure of the Philosophy programmes at Middlesex to be met with resignation, but neither could anyone have predicted the resistance that followed. A group of people, many of whom had only previously stood together to queue for the printer, suddenly found themselves living – and fighting – side by side. After management failed to turn up to discuss the closure with the students, we took the meeting to them. At the doors of the School management area, we were greeted by security guards. En masse we entered, securing access to the boardroom and adjoining corridor. But management was far away in another campus. The closest we got to them was the president of the Middlesex Student Union, who told us she did not support our occupation – so we asked her to leave. Security called the police, but after deciding that nothing illegal was taking place, they also left. Determined to stay the night, we organized a rally for the next day to coincide with a London lecturers’ strike. Realizing we need not stop there, we used the rally as cover for the expansion of the occupation to the whole building: we secured the mansion stairwells while people outside rushed into the ground floor through the windows. Overwhelmed by numbers, security had no choice but to leave. Now free of

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management, police, the ‘student union’ and security guards, the space was ours. We agreed that the space would remain ours until management reversed their decision. Even though this was a defensive demand to return to the recent past, we began to feel a different future – a sense that we could never quite go back to the same. Undergraduates and postgraduates became equals, working collaboratively in meetings; campus staff and local activists brought us food and messages of support; students from other universities shared stories and strategies; a panelled room was used for evening takeaways; the boardroom TV showed films into the night; students and visiting academics held seminars on topics from Marx to mathematics, from the architecture of occupation to international politics; and the out-of-bounds roof became a place to hang banners and hang out. Colleagues became comrades, offices became bedrooms, windows became doors and tables became barricades. Unfortunately, we had not quite reached the stage at which management’s High Court injunction had become just a bit of paper. Twelve days into the occupation, the last people left eight hours after the injunction came into effect. But this was not the end: we occupied the campus library for a night, after which the university suspended

five students and half the Philosophy staff, only increasing our determination to fight on. We responded by establishing a camp for displaced students and academics on the front lawn of the main campus, and staging a protest at a Middlesex event in Central London. Our struggle continues as we resist another wave of spurious suspensions and stand against the cuts at large. For we have not only established alliances within Middlesex, but with groups in other universities and workplaces across the country, allowing us to put the cuts to education at Middlesex, and our fight against

them, into a national context. In solidarity, we have joined forces with others who are fighting cuts, such as the BA cabin crew, Right to Work, UCU, Greek Workers, and Stop the Cuts campaigns. We hope and believe that as these cuts expand, similar resistance will spread across the country, and the links we have established with groups from Essex, Westminster and Sussex universities, Goldsmiths, SOAS, King’s and others will widen and deepen. We look forward to many more late-night dinners in occupied buildings in the years to come. The Middlesex Occupiers

Westminster, Sussex, King’s… On 5 May, thousands of lecturers went out on strike across London, including staff from King’s College London, Westminster and Sussex universities, and eleven further education colleges, including CONEL and Hackney, supported by many of the students they taught. Earlier in March, students from the University of Westminster had stormed a meeting of the board of governors and occupied the vice chancellor’s office to protest against planned cuts and job losses. Lecturers at Sussex University had, also in March, voted in favour of strike action in response to the announcement of the closure of the Modern Languages faculty, drastic cuts to the English and History departments, and the planned loss of 112 jobs. In support of this decision, Sussex students staged a sit-in inside the university’s main administrative centre, a situation that escalated when members of administrative staff locked themselves inside an office and riot police were called. The university secured a High Court injunction against the occupying students and two days later suspended six of the students involved in the sit-in. This in turn provoked a week-long occupation of a lecture hall by a much large number of students, which coincided with one-day strike action by staff, and the eventual reinstatement of the suspended students pending disciplinary hearings. In April, lecturers at King’s College London went on strike against massive cuts, £1.52 million of which were to be made in the School of Arts and Humanities. Academics there feared that the managerial vision of

‘financially viable academic activity’ indicated a significant threat to their subjects, which may be sidelined in favour of HEFCE’s higher funded, training-based subjects. An open letter signed by 2,700 students and friends of the Philosophy Department at King’s College London objected to the ‘restructuring’ of the School of Arts and Humanities, on the grounds that it would result in job losses for a number of valued academics, and would require all faculty members to compete against each other in reapplications for their own posts. It rejected the lack of transparency in the consultation process and the absence of any proposed alternatives. In May the hearings for the suspended Sussex students were held against the backdrop of national student protest, a motion of support by the University and College Union (UCU) and an open letter condemning the university management’s actions signed by academics, union leaders and the first elected Green MP, Caroline Lucas. Only the minor charge of ‘conduct injurious to the academic or administrative activities of the university’ was upheld, whilst all the more serious allegations relating to violent and threatening behaviour were dropped. Staff and students have vowed to continue their protest against the cuts, with further strikes being mooted. Meanwhile, staff and students working in Arts and Humanities at King’s have claimed an important victory in the wake of the protests: when the final consultation document was published on 18 May, it transpired that cost savings could be made in the school without any forced redundancies. MC

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reviews

World enough? David Chandler, Hollow Hegemony: Rethinking Global Politics, Power and Resistance, Pluto Press, London, 2009. 272 pp., £60.00 hb., £17.99 pb., 978 0 74532 921 5 hb., 978 0 74532 920 8 pb. Stuart Elden, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2009. 304 pp., £46.50 hb., £15.50 pb., 978 0 81665 483 3 hb., 978 0 81665 484 0 pb. R.B.J. Walker, After the Globe, Before the World, Routledge, London and New York, 2009. 368 pp., £75.00 hb., £22.99 pb., 978 0 41577 902 9 hb., 978 0 41577 903 6 pb. The field of global politics is much contested, in part because the forces of globalization have thrown open a conceptual disarray about the meaning of ‘world’ in philosophy, politics and economics. If a system of states often still appears rooted to the founding apparatuses of the Peace of Westphalia, the current complex of state relations, overdetermined to a great extent by transnational capital, seems wildly inconstant and sovereignty hovers more like a ghost in contemporary formulations. Each of the three books under discussion here offers explication of the ambiguities of contemporary global polity while also revealing, symptomatically, conceptual ambivalences in the structure of their own disciplines: political science, international relations and geography respectively. It is understandable that knowledge systems born of nationstate polity might now chase the conceptual horizon of a properly globalized world; what is more interesting, however, is the extent to which reading the world distils a new creative grammar of the globe, at once responsive to the lacuna of conventional disciplines while articulating the shape of new formulations of knowledge production. For his part, Walker is the most sensitive to the trials of philosophical oscillation in the current conjuncture and the book offers many provocative insights into the logic of inclusion/exclusion that structures the current world system. Walker maintains a notable incredulity about the move from international to world politics, not because the force of the latter is not evident, but because its constitutive principles appear unable, in his account, to understand fully how ‘boundaries, borders and limits of a politics’ are negotiated between international and world. At first glance, this move is laudable because too many ‘global’ critiques skip over how the world maintains borders and obfuscate its adherence to older, sedimented genealogies of inside/ outside. Basically, Walker’s argument is a warning about brave new ‘world’ philosophies that eschew the

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pivot of border rationality, especially when it comes to the thorny issue of sovereignty. This means recourse to tracking the traditions of modern thought on subjectivity, rationality and sovereignty with Hobbes and Kant to the fore, juxtaposed with elements of Walker’s alternative genealogy in Cassirer, Bachelard, Foucault, Deleuze and the history of science. Increasingly, however, the methodology comes down to the original warning so that the perspicuous deconstruction of inclusion/exclusion circles around the repetition of the political as possibility and impossibility. This pattern is set by the ‘prelude’, which is then seen writ large in the rest of the book. My point is not that an introduction should not lay out the foundations of the project, but that in resisting scaling up from international to global Walker’s argument also resists building on its initial distinctions, except to ‘run in many different directions’ as itself a form of resistance. For instance, in the space of a few pages the ‘prelude’ offers the following chorus on possibility/ impossibility: ‘this book is constructed … to frame claims about political possibilities and impossibilities’; the argument ‘simultaneously imagines the possibility and impossibility of a move across the borders, boundaries and limits distinguishing itself from some world beyond’; ‘we have been encouraged to think about boundaries, borders and limits as if they were indeed just simple lines distinguishing here from there, now from then, normal from exceptional, possible from impossible’; ‘They [clichés] speak to the way we have come to imagine the possibilities and impossibilities of liberty and inequality within and under necessity’; ‘Whatever else may be said about the possibilities of other ways of thinking about future political possibilities, there can be no other such possibilities without attending to the multiple ways in which the drawing of lines as boundaries, borders and limits has been a more complicated and contested affair’; ‘the possibilities and impossibilities of a modern system of sovereign states’;

and, finally, ‘While I am aware that such claims may seem abstract and remote, I am persuaded that they speak to the principles of authorization and authorization of principles that must be engaged in one way or another by any attempt to reimagine our political possibilities and impossibilities, or to reimagine who we are as political actors able to reimagine our possibilities and impossibilities as political actors.’ It often seems in Walker’s argument that the hesitation between international and world comes down to an assessment of the border as itself the ground of all things possible, and impossible. It is never clear, however, why the mantra of possibility/impossibility could not apply to ‘world’ as concept, rather than by dancing on the line that apparently resists its effulgence. Indeed, it has to be said that one can quite easily use the possibility/impossibility gambit to describe absolutely any concept of political theory in its practice. As a more or less constant rhetorical trope in the ‘prelude’ this is a demonstrable non-starter. This is not just a stylistic quibble (although I think if you removed all instances of circling repetition the book would be half its current length) but a comment about the tizzy ‘world’ has produced under actually existing globalization. Obviously, there are few clear breaks in modern political theory, just as, in economics, capitalism does not submerge feudalism overnight. The serious question Walker’s book poses, consciously or not, is whether this kind of hedging is itself a heur­ istic, a teachable moment about the kinds of change that produce a disciplinary crisis in knowledge (one can discern similar discomfort, for instance, in Comparative Literature’s hand-wringing over the ‘world’ in world literature which has mutated considerably from Goethe’s initial formulations). As Walker puts it, ‘We are, moreover, supposed to know more or less what we are talking about when we deploy such terms’ (‘international relations’ and ‘world politics’), but doubt pervades every instance of possibility and impossibility, including the imagination of a world outside international relations, so we are left only with a kind of circling song as a philosophical guide. The second chapter begins more promisingly with a call to reimagine politics (although not outside international politics), but quickly the polemic lines up obvious empty signifiers for political theory – ‘talk shows, the best seller lists, the quick sound-bites, and the executive summaries’ – and their associated clichés. Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze have been turned into ‘sites of interrogation’ and this ‘keeps theorists amused and off the streets’. I am not sure of the audience for such statements but in general this section offers a

useful discursive sense of modern politics, particularly international politics, which is never ‘co-extensive with the world’. Circling hesitancy returns in the third chapter (‘possible ways of … political possibilities’, etc.) and resistance is posed as the attempt to move ‘in two directions at once’. The ‘we’ of this chapter is particularly grating – ‘We are all modern people’ – as if the world cannot bear a little uneven development. This chapter offers a thesis for the book: ‘I do not think anyone is able to offer more than very tentative and humble responses to the kinds of questions about political possibilities that might emerge out of various scepticisms about the claims of the modern sovereign state and states system.’ In this reviewer’s humble opinion, the book is utterly disabled by this tack, and the articulate discussions of Hobbes and Kant in relation to sovereignty are rendered as ‘preludes’ to yet more hand-wringing. Even when Walker describes a dozen key lines of inquiry into the assumptions that gird the sovereign nation-state to political life the argument is freighted by the subjunctive, weighed down by a polemic ‘in two directions at once’ that leaves ‘the globe before the world’ in suspended animation. A blurb calls this ‘a profound meditation’; the reader should decide which side of possibility/impossibility such judgment resides. David Chandler’s Hollow Hegemony takes up an incredulity towards the global similar to that gestured towards by Walker, but is an altogether different book in terms of both audience and argumentative edge. Rather than hedging, Chandler reads the problem of scaling up from the international to the global as a form of negative capability; that is, the globalization of politics is produced by a ‘political disconnection between state elites and societies, and a popular disengagement from mass politics’. Globalism, as such, ‘is a lack rather than a presence. It is the lack of clear sites and articulations of power, the lack of clear security threats, the lack of strategic instrumental policy-making and the lack of clear political programs or movements of resistance which drives the conceptualization of international relations in global terms.’ To some extent, globalism is an effect of the very polemic Walker’s book performs, even if he would agree that globalism is a ‘hollow hegemony’ in terms of explanatory power. The problem for Chandler is not that globalism fails to attract but that, in its negativity, it attracts too well (although Lacan does not feature in the critique, globalism bears something of the relationship of lack to desire). Its ideology attempts to disable counterhegemony through abstraction; indeed, political acts as abstraction. In contrast to Hardt and Negri’s emphasis

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on the flight from sovereignty as a creative if paradoxically positive subtraction, Chandler’s intervention is to draw attention to a global politics that substitutes abstraction for action and semiosis for social grounds. This is not to say Hardt and Negri represent the consensus on globalism, but for Chandler there are alternative strategies available among those who take globalism on board. As with Walker, globalism signifies a general crisis in political subjectivity but one where its avatars see the nation-state as the problem rather than the contributions made by the reification and mystification of the global itself. The latter includes the supposition that territory no longer matters as much since a great deal of human interaction, economically and communicatively, occurs through scales of time/space that defy a territorial ground (this will be important for Elden’s book also). On the one hand, we have proponents of globalism who extol the virtues of globalization as a kind of integrative efficiency (this would include global civil society theorists); on the other hand, we have globalists like Hardt and Negri who critique globalization but from a position that emphasizes forms of biopolitical resistance as an irreducible multiplicity without romantic assumptions about unity or group identity. To borrow from the language of Walker’s argument once more, what sounds inclusive actually excludes the possibility of a mass action exercising a specific political subjectivity. It also excludes normative foreign policy, which ironically makes both hedge fund managers and Hardt and Negri happy. How did this odd collocation come about? In part a globalization of power through intense financialization, for instance, was shadowed by a necessarily deterritorialized counter-critique: ‘if power was located at the global level then resistance was as well.’ Again, Chandler’s position is not that global forces do not exist but the jump to this scale elides how the politicization of the global works, how its principles are framed, how its analytic concepts perform the very process that is its object. On one level, Chandler correctly sees a technological determinism at work in which globalization exists because, well, there is a global network; on another level, globalization theory appears underequipped to understand the crude inter-

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nationalism of hegemonic states, particularly the USA after 9/11. In short, Chandler seeks to separate the ideological confusions of a globalization of politics from the theoretical problem presented by global politics, which is a useful distinction between process and subject before the troublesome concept of ‘world’. Chandler organizes his argument well, with the first few chapters probing the prominent policy discourses that appear to suture a global episteme: security/ development, state-building, and a specifically human security discourse. These are obviously cornerstones of internationalism but the point is they have been naively recalibrated to represent a properly global interconnectedness. The chapter on the merging of security and development discourses is particularly noteworthy, although Chandler does have a tendency to brand every instance of globalizing politics ‘hollow’ before exegesis

might suggest otherwise. The central chapters are devoted to the crux of Chandler’s approach: namely, that the global functions as an abstract substitute for liberal norms (of community, of war) and expresses the limit or lack of a global subject for politics, particularly one with agency. Chandler finds in arguments for global civil society a paradigmatic tautology of the globalization of politics, and on the whole the criticism is appreciable (especially in contrast to the work of Falk, for instance). Since Hardt and Negri are also voluble critics of global civil society, Chandler then complicates his approach by challenging their adherence to a ‘flight from sovereignty’ as a deterritorializing strategy. For those who have wondered about the logic of Hardt and Negri’s strategy, Chandler’s

criticism is pointed: their view endorses a retreat from political engagement and community to communication ‘without purpose’. This is not altogether hollowness, however, since part of the political effect of Hardt and Negri’s procedures is to short-circuit precisely the regressive power formations Chandler identifies. The question comes down to whether alternatives are meaningfully agential if representational politics is simply ejected? It is this aspect of hollowness that leads Chandler to a pertinent and often persuasive discussion of sovereignty. It is not that Deleuzeans or Spinozists eschew sovereignty, but that questioning sovereignty does not necessarily distil a politics of its transformation or sublation. Since sovereignty’s impress on global war, particularly the war on terror, is also the subject of Elden’s book, one should not underestimate its importance to the aforementioned disciplinary crises over the subject of territoriality and the world (the latter, by the way, is not discussed conceptually in any of these three books but one may adduce its pivotal philosophical purchase in recent work by Nancy and Badiou). Liberal constructivist approaches have clearly provided an alibi for sovereign extension within globalization, and when that does not work a brute appeal to superior ‘values’ is made, as Chandler explicates by reference to a speech by Tony Blair. Rather than take a Gramscian or Foucauldian route by way of response, Chandler interestingly takes up the early work of Marx on the disjunctions between ideas and practice, ideologies and state formation in Germany at that time. The lesson of Marx is that forces structured in dominance (or a will to dominance, like the German bourgeoisie of which he writes) can mask their material interests by appeals to values as an abstraction. This certainly undoes the Blair strategy, but does it explain the hollowness in much global theorization? The conceptual key is sovereignty, which is the subject of Chandler’s final chapter. Briefly, if the appeal to the global reflects an absenting of political responsibility, then the claims of sovereignty are submerged even when they may dictate the decisions in play. In other words, globality is not the battleground of the political but is the hollow metonym of sovereignty as the true site of political contestation and purposeful acts. I like this formulation not because it endorses sovereignty as a norm but because it continues to question its insinuation in otherwise value-laden discourses of the global with a concomitant persistence of territoriality in its suasion. One of the problems of globalism is its abject declarative force, as if terminological insistence means the revolution has already happened (and

nobody really wants to miss one of those). In contrast to Walker’s hobbling hesitation, Chandler offers the heuristic of the hollow that, even when it overstates the case, is a call for reflexive theoretical clarification in the study of international relations. Elden’s contribution takes a different tack from the other two even as it remains similarly sceptical of the claims of global politics. The novelty of the text is not necessarily its spirited defence of conceptions of territoriality but the test case it brings to bear on the polemic: an analysis of the spatiality of sovereignty through the recent histories of terror and terrorism. Right from the start Elden signals the advantage of this approach because it requires simultaneously a mapping of terrorist events, geographically and historically, against a logic that is putatively deterritorialized vis-à-vis sovereignty and the state. In effect, it answers naive globalists in familiar terms they are then called on to take into account (thus when Rumsfeld bemoans a lack of metrics to see whether the war on terror is being won, Elden’s text immediately establishes the coordinates between terror and territory with maps, and etymologies, to underline the point). This is a refreshing take on territory because it shows via concrete examples how concepts of territoriality and sovereignty are woven through the most prominent scene of contemporary global politics: the war on terror itself. Having established the pivotal role of territory in globality, Elden then examines what this might mean to the forms of Islamism seen to feed specific terrorist movements, most obviously al-Qaeda (keeping in mind the network was to some extent produced by effects of long-standing Western foreign policies in West and Central Asia). By re-reading the history of the group’s development, including the statements of its leaders and ideologists, Elden is able to track the force of territorial and sovereign rights in its otherwise stateless, virtual or networked manifestations. The point is not an either/or stratagem, but the pursuit of an explanatory framework adequate to territory’s actual meaning for al-Qaeda. To foreground this condition simultaneously reveals the territorial commitments of a global politics in response; not a muddle, nor a lack, therefore, but a material synergy of territorial aims between nation and the world. The chapter on weak states attempts to deepen the polemic by considering the relationship between weak/failing states and the development or harbouring of terrorist groups. I think the challenge of weak states goes beyond contesting international law or facilitating havens for non-state actors. As I have argued, failed

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states in particular dispute conventional narratives of decolonization not because state polity has been lost, but because it may not have been found or founded. True, this may indicate a failure of state structure, but even in the most extreme example, Somalia, local and entrenched modes of social organization and trade have attempted to maintain communities even among the ravages of civil strife and foreign intervention, however this is measured. Thus, international frameworks of polity not only fear lawlessness and terrorist ferment, but modes of polity with their own conditions of right and responsibility. From this perspective the failed state is also a logic of state failure inaugurated by the Peace of Westphalia (a response to the Holy Roman Empire as failed state). For many, Elden’s chapter on Iraq will prove the most provocative, and one cannot help but admire his ability to sift through vast amounts of secondary material produced on the subject. Others, however, may find themselves submerged by such documentation, particularly when it is drawn from a seemingly endless procession of UN resolutions on the Iraq invasion.

Nevertheless, beyond the symptomatic paradox, Iraq was invaded, its sovereignty suspended and its territorial integrity breached in defence of sovereignty and territorial integrity. Elden uses his critique to sharpen the overall thesis of the book regarding the global order’s continuing pivot on sovereignty (even when contingent) as demonstrably spatial. The last chapter and ‘coda’ broaden the lessons of the Iraq example both to return to terrorism as a problem from and within sovereignty and to accentuate Elden’s notable position that the deterritorializations of globalization are not divorced from equally discernible processes of reterritorialization. In the end, this does not provide us with a working definition of contemporary regimes of globality but it does at the very least reveal Elden’s consummate ability to take global politics as itself a dynamic interrogation of his geographic zeal. While I agree with all three writers that globalization is overblown, this does not preclude the possibility that certain disciplinary analytic models are effete. To that extent, the philosophical disposition of world must also be actively contested. Peter Hitchcock

Europe endless Perry Anderson, The New Old World, Verso, London and New York, 2009. 592 pp., £24.99 hb., 978 1 84467 312 4. The New Old World is a weighty volume of some 550 pages, which contains five chapters on Europe and European integration, three on the ‘core’ countries of France, Germany and Italy, one on Cyprus and one on Turkey. There is much here that is highly stimulating and the conclusion makes a valiant effort to pull it all together. Yet, in the end, Anderson’s stated rationale for his selection of topics is unconvincing. He does not, he writes, regret the omission of Britain, ‘whose history since the fall of Thatcher has been of little moment’. Similarly, because so much attention had been paid to Eastern Europe, ‘it seemed better to look further East’. But, in fact, the majority of the essays in The New Old World have already been published elsewhere and it seems very unlikely that they were originally conceived as a single book. Rather, Anderson presumably chose his subjects for the quite understandable reason that they captured his interest. As such, while there are certainly some recurrent themes and complementarities in The New Old World, it should not be read in the expectation of finding any pronounced overall coherence.

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In each of the three long chapters on the contemporary history of France, Germany and Italy, Anderson reaches a rather sombre conclusion about the present situation while discerning some forces for radical renewal. The discussion of France is the most ambitious and, in my view, the least successful. Here he is really seeking a holistic explanation for the decline of both Gaullism and the Left by emphasizing the transmutation of French culture and society into an increasingly Atlanticist mould. But even if it is granted that intellectuals have played a particularly important role in France, he surely attributes excessive weight to certain thinkers (Pierre Nora, François Furet and Pierre Rosanvallon) in undermining earlier assumptions about the revolutionary and republican traditions, and the implication that this shift in high culture has had a major impact on current French identity and politics seems implausible. In this chapter his otherwise magisterial style also sometimes degenerates. Instead of presenting a clear argument in which the reader remains partially unaware of the extent of thinking and research that lies behind it, Anderson veers towards

the other extreme, displaying his scholarship on his sleeve without always achieving clarity. Still, some of his comments are very perceptive: for example, the results of the March 2010 regional elections uphold his point that, however much the political elites unite in arguing that ‘modernization’ demands retrenchment, the French electorate always rejects governments that seek to implement neoliberalism. The chapter on Germany also includes some discussion of intellectual currents, but here Anderson concentrates on more narrowly defined questions – the impact of unification, the move of the capital to Berlin, and the way in which Schroeder’s (and then Merkel’s) policies weakened trade unions and workers’ living standards. All this provides an explanation of the rise of Die Linke, and Anderson succeeds in demonstrating some basis for optimism about a revival of the Left across the former East–West boundary. I found the chapter on Italy particularly interesting because the focus is sharper and the analysis more trenchant. Here he seeks to explain the paradox of the Italian search for ‘normalcy’ culminating in Berlusconi’s supremacy. While the theme may be familiar, Anderson includes some fascinating and alarming detail about such issues as the tawdry nature of the justice and prison systems, and the role of the corrupt and discredited former socialist prime minister, Bettino Craxi, in launching Berlusconi. But perhaps most compelling of all is the way that he extends a critique of the PCI in the forty-five years after the war into the post-Cold War era, suggesting that this enabled former Fascists and the Northern League to climb back into power under Berlusconi’s umbrella. Yet it is not the chapters on France, Germany or Italy but the closely interconnected chapters on Cyprus and Turkey that are the most powerful in the book. Here Anderson offers an alternative, critical argument to those of his bête noire: bien pensant liberals. The result is polemical in the best sense of the word, for Anderson has a clear case to argue, one that contradicts conventional wisdom and challenges those who disagree to say where he is wrong. The mainstream view has been that it is time to bring about a settlement in Cyprus and that external forces and institutions should do everything possible to ensure that the island is peacefully reunited. Hence the fervent attempt by the then UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, under British and US influence, to seek such an agreement before Cyprus entered the EU in 2004, and the exasperated frustration in all EU capitals, except Greece, when the Greek Cypriots rejected the plan. Anderson provides an engaged, historically informed refutation

of the assumptions underlying such policies. Britain, he argues, was the major ‘guilty party’ before and after Cyprus gained independence, provoking Turkish opposition to Greek ascendancy both on the island and on the Turkish mainland. As a guarantor power in 1974, Britain had the primary responsibility to prevent the Turkish invasion, but failed to act against this or the partition and ethnic cleansing that followed. Subsequently, the government of Cyprus constructed a successful state in the southern part of the island, while the North was an artificial colony maintained by Turkish subsidies and settlers. Nothing was done to bring about a Turkish withdrawal, primarily because of the Anglo-American support for Turkey in NATO. By what right, then, had Britain, the USA, the EU or the UN to demand, through the various versions of the Annan plan, that Cyprus should agree to the dismantling of its state so as to accommodate an illegal occupation by Turkey? This leads directly to Anderson’s analysis of Turkey. The USA has promoted Turkey’s membership of the EU so as to strengthen its key strategic base (apart from Israel) in the Middle East and Central Asia. Bien pensant liberals have, however, supported this project in the belief that Turkish membership will secure the EU’s credentials as a multicultural, multi-faith entity while also demonstrating that Islam can be moderate and democratic. Anderson’s aim is to demolish such claims. Kemalism, he suggests, was not a secular movement, but created a dictatorial regime in which Islam was both controlled and used to reinforce state power and Turkish exclusivist nationalism. The Kurds and Alevis have been massacred and dissident movements have been repressed. Nor has the shift from Kemalism to more prominent manifestations of Islam under the present AKP government been as significant as is generally thought, for there has been much continuity in foreign policy, exclusivist nationalism and genocide denial. Anderson is satisfied that the massacres of the Armenians during the First World War did constitute genocide, that this was perpetrated intentionally by those close to Kemal, and that successive Turkish governments have known what happened, but have continued to honour those responsible for it, while persecuting those wanting to acknowledge what was done. Nor can this be regarded as a matter of ‘history’: on the contrary, it is fundamental to Turkey’s self-definition, which is why the Turkish state makes threats whenever there is any international attempt to raise the question, invariably leading (as with Obama) to a climbdown. Thus genocide denial, coupled with the annexation of Cyprus and the treatment of the

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Kurds and Alevis, make Anderson adamant that Turkey should not be allowed to join the EU. In the Foreword, he records his continuing enthusiasm for the architects of the Community in the early postwar years: ‘Their enterprise had no historical precedent, and its grandeur continues to haunt what it has since become.’ The three chapters on Europe and European integration at the beginning and two at the end form the heart of the book and also demonstrate the Union’s fall from grace in Anderson’s eyes. For the most part, I agree with his attitude to the general trajectory. Anyone on the Left must surely condemn the way in which the EU has become increasingly dominated by a neoliberal economic agenda, has rallied to the support of the USA, and has been marked by elitism and secretive inter-state horse-trading. Yet Anderson seems to go too far, after the first chapter (written in 1995), which provides an effective critique of the Treaty of Maastricht and its aftermath. For although the second essay (originally published in 2007) fulfils a useful purpose in counteracting the simplistic celebratory tone of many works, it goes to the opposite extreme in bundling all the negative aspects of Europe into an overall denunciation. It is here, too, that the subjectivity that Anderson’s style seeks to occlude is actually so marked. If there are certainly deeply negative contemporary features in the EU, this was also true at its origins, when the Community was partly a Cold War formation in an era of anti-Left persecution at home and colonial wars abroad. Seeking to counteract an over-simplified positive account by offering an oversimplified negative one is not particularly persuasive. One of Anderson’s strengths has always been his ability to pinpoint the essence of theories and ideas and to evaluate them critically, and he does this in two chapters in particular. In ‘Theories’ he dissects some recent American mainstream and right-wing studies of integration quite brilliantly. Yet the chapter is also a lost opportunity in the sense that he makes only a passing comment on alternative left-wing and Marxist theories, and puts forward few notions of his own. ‘Antecedents’ is an interesting attempt to review current tendencies in the light of earlier ideas about Europe. Following the collapse of the Enlightenment, which stressed cultural and intellectual unity on the one hand and balance and division between relatively small states on the other, Anderson sees Saint-Simon as the founder of three separate traditions. The first was a legacy of revolutionary interventions and slogans for a united Europe; the second was a conception of desirable social change based on the work of scientific

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and industrial elites reforming society from above; and the third was a deeply conservative tradition that sought to recast Europe in a higher harmony of belief. Anderson argues that all three traditions play a part in the current EU, while the older Enlightenment emphasis on diversity is still discernible. Whether this kind of history of ideas actually elucidates twenty-firstcentury developments may be arguable, but the essay certainly provides some stimulating reminders about past debates: for example the question of whether European peace can be a defining aspiration for the Left, and whether or not the goal of a united Europe undermines the search for world unity. Despite its success in identifying common themes in the book, and in summarizing his negative critique of the current tendencies, Anderson’s final chapter (‘Prognoses’) is disappointing. This is partly because he fails to provide the sustained development of his own arguments that it would be reasonable to expect at this point. Thus he wants to argue that it is the abandonment of class conflict by the collapse of the Left and the corruption of social democracy that have led to the current failings in Europe. But beyond observing that the cause of all this is the transformation of capitalism, he offers little explanation of the ways in which this structural shift has been projected through social, cultural and political practices. Perhaps he believes that his separate chapters on France, Germany and Italy provided sufficient insights, but these were too uneven and specific to fulfil this function. However, a second weakness is that he sometimes offers too much sustenance to those whose values and goals are quite opposed to those of the Left. Ever since the relaunch of New Left Review in 2000, Anderson has emphasized the importance of much right-wing thought and its frequent superiority to ‘standard progressive pieties, usually shared by pillars of respectable liberalism’ (‘Renewals’, NLR 1, January–February 2000). This sometimes leads him to adopt surprising positions. Here he suggests that, in the absence of class conflict, ordinary people turn to the only available substitute: opposition to immigration. Workers were not consulted about large-scale migration to Europe and their major remaining opportunity for contesting the priorities and values of elites lies in mobilization on this issue – hence the rise of the populist xenophobic Right across most of Europe. In itself, this argument is unexceptionable, but his assault on bien pensant liberals now takes him too far. Just before the publication of The New Old World, Christopher Cauldwell, on the US Right, produced his Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (2009), pillorying

Europe for the mass migration of Muslims which, he argues, has fundamentally changed its character. Of course, Anderson seeks to dilute his endorsement of Cauldwell’s position by repeating some classical arguments of the Left about exploitation, discrimination, world inequality, and the non-religious causes of Muslim dissatisfaction with European societies. He also suggests that the issue of immigration has had a disproportionate salience in contemporary politics. But this is equally true of the way Anderson treats it here, and this is perhaps related to a more general point about his approach. Anderson writes with complete authority, but this might give a misleading impression that he has a clear theoretical position. Most readers will assume that he remains on the Marxist left and is launching his attacks on bien pensant liberals from this position. But there are two reasons for doubting whether this is actually the case. The first clue lies in his choice of ‘heroes’ in the book, one of whom is Jean Monnet, a key architect of the Community. Monnet was not really on the Left, but Anderson frequently praises him and compares the subsequent deterioration of European integration with the aspirations that Monnet had entertained for it. The other figure who is frequently cited with approval (and to whom the book is dedicated) is Alan Milward, an eminent historian of European integration, who has occupied a broadly social-democratic position on the political spectrum. However, both Monnet and

Milward combined vision with pragmatism. Monnet undoubtedly sought to create a new semi-supranational Europe that would bring about peace and prosperity, but his method was to suggest a series of piecemeal practical steps that would create new realities. Similarly, Milward had no doubt that European integration was a colossal achievement, but he insisted that it was created by hard-headed politicians and civil servants who sought to strengthen the nation-state rather than supersede it. The second clue to Anderson’s position lies in the subjects on which he really writes with passion – the genocide of the Armenians, Turkish behaviour in Northern Cyprus, the war against Iraq, the treatment of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, and extraordinary rendition. Liberals might be expected to feel equally strongly about such matters, but have often equivocated. By contrast, Anderson is surely insisting that opposition to such crimes must be an overriding issue. If, therefore, we consider both those whom he respects and those whom he denounces, it seems that his target may not be liberalism per se but bien pensant thinking. Similarly, his own perspective is probably more heterodox than Marxist. From this position he is capable of extraordinarily trenchant analysis and also vehement condemnation of political crimes. But sometimes he simply attacks orthodoxy from the indeterminate position of the maverick. His writing is invariably clever but not always wise. Michael Newman

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Of Gramsciology Peter D. Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism, Brill, Leiden and Boston MA, 2009. 477 pp., £104.00 hb., 978 9 00416 771 1. According to Peter Thomas, Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (1929–35) contain ‘a vision of Marxist philosophy, radically different from many previous and contemporary formulations, which may permit a new generation of Marxists to recommence the elaboration of Marx’s legacy in a new philosophical form’. The book thus firmly situates itself within a new body of literature that takes as its point of departure the necessity to revitalize the Marxist tradition today. The ‘vision of Marxist philosophy’ that Thomas believes has most to contribute to this agenda is Gramsci’s ‘philosophy of praxis’, and in this comprehensive analysis and assessment of its key elements, and of its principal critics, the author mounts an authoritative case for placing Gramsci right at the centre of any resurgence of contemporary Marxism. Thomas’s journey begins with two influential critiques of Gramsci’s work by Louis Althusser (Chapter 1) and Perry Anderson (Chapter 2), before moving on, in the subsequent chapter, to attack what he regards as their flawed accounts of Gramsci’s Marxism by delineating the extensive and meticulous scholarship that has been carried out on the Prison Notebooks (mainly by Italian scholars) since the appearance of Althusser’s Reading Capital (1965/1968) and Anderson’s ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’ (1976). Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are principally concerned with the Gramscian categories of ‘passive revolution’ and ‘hegemony’. Anderson remains a continuous presence here as Thomas engages in a blow-by-blow refutation of his attempts to identify Gramsci with the reformism of Karl Kautsky and a genre of Western Marxism that set him apart from his Bolshevik contemporaries. It is, however, the final three chapters of the book which constitute its most original contribution to current scholarship, as Thomas engages in a penetrating analysis of the constituent elements of Gramsci’s ‘philosophy of praxis’, and focuses on his insistence that Marxism made a unique contribution to Western philosophy through its ‘absolute historicism’, ‘absolute immanence’ and ‘absolute humanism’. Here it is Althusser who plays the role of major foil, as Thomas demolishes the early Althusser’s identification of Gramsci’s thought with the ‘Hegelianization’ of Marxism, the abandonment of Marxist science, and a

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naive humanism on a par with Sartre’s ‘exaltation of human freedom’. The great strength of Thomas’s book is the authority that he brings to the subject: one is in no doubt that he has painstakingly dissected the Prison Notebooks and the philological literature in exhaustive detail. Thomas puts this scholarship to work effectively in his confrontations with Anderson and Althusser. Among the most fertile and convincing encounters with Anderson is, for example, Thomas’s refutation of the former’s charge that Gramsci’s concept of hegemony ‘slid into’ a genre of reformism by suggesting that the crucial ramparts of the capitalist state were located in civil society, and revolutionary strategy should accordingly be confined to the battle for mass consent here. Against this reading, Thomas provides a persuasive exposition of the ‘dialectical’ relationship between civil and political society defended in the Prison Notebooks and captured above all in Gramsci’s conception of the ‘integral state’. Anderson’s ‘spatial’ account of Gramsci’s hegemonic theory of the capitalist state and revolutionary strategy is thus rejected for a ‘functional’ approach that foregrounds the ‘integral’ nature of the relations between civil and political hegemony in the capitalist state and maintains that the revolutionary ‘practice of consolidating social forces and condensing them’ in civil society necessarily ‘presents an

immediate challenge to the attempt by political society [i.e. the existing capitalist state] … to “enmesh” the same’. Indeed, for Thomas’s Gramsci, ‘civil hegemony has to progress towards political hegemony in order to maintain itself’. It is, however, the final section of Thomas’s book (Chapters 7–9) that is likely to be of most interest to a philosophical readership. Here, its most illuminating and original contribution is to be found in its exploration of the conception of ‘absolute immanence’ in the Prison Notebooks. Against Althusserian charges that Gramsci was guilty of abandoning the science of Marxism by failing to theorize any possibility of a position of externality for it in the historical process, Thomas convincingly links Gramsci’s conception of science to immanent critique (as opposed to transcendence) and maintains that, for Gramsci, modern science had in fact made ‘a decisive contribution to the elaboration of the philosophy of praxis’. Such scientific praxis was not, however, to be associated with some imaginary access to ‘naked objective knowledge’, but to its ‘practical-experimental relationship … with nature’, which Gramsci took as a model for the necessity of revolutionary Marxism itself to emerge from practice; that is to say, to emerge from within the everyday experience and problems of the proletarian masses which it would render ‘coherent’, thereby increasing their ‘capacity to act’ collectively. While there may be no doubting the quality of the scholarship in The Gramscian Moment, there are those who will nonetheless question whether this work would not have reaped even greater dividends via a broader engagement with the literature on Gramsci outside of the Marxist tradition. This is not to say that Thomas ignores this literature completely. It is rather to point out that in his determination to demolish Anderson’s and Althusser’s ‘Gramscis’ there is necessarily much less space for confronting those other scholars who undoubtedly have a much greater claim to authority in this area – having benefited from much of the same philological work as Thomas – than either of his two key Marxist adversaries. Indeed, some may even regard the latter as decidedly passé and peripheral to contemporary debates on Gramsci. This is especially problematic given the virtual absence of any serious authorial criticism of Gramsci’s own work in this book. For example, we can only speculate as to what Thomas makes of Gramsci’s more recent critics who call into question his commitment to democratic politics – as in the work of Richard Bellamy and Darrow Schechter or Carl Levy – or of those, including Laclau and Mouffe, who have interrogated Gramsci’s more unreflective

presuppositions: for example, the centrality and validity of class analysis; the residual Marxist teleology that continues to mark his work; and the notion that only the proletarian class can lead a revolutionary hegemonic alliance. These presuppositions in particular undermine Gramsci’s claims to ‘absolute historicism’, ‘absolute immanence’ and ‘absolute humanism’ and suggest that there is a lot less consistency in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks than Peter Thomas maintains. If these are issues which Thomas may well have felt were beyond the remit of this book, we can certainly look forward, with a justified sense of expectation, to a broader engagement with such critics. For, despite its limitations, The Gramscian Moment has clearly established Thomas as one of the leading experts in the field, and the book will no doubt become essential reading for all serious students of Gramsci’s work. Mark McNally

Susceptibility Jean-François Lyotard, Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 2009. 67 pp., £41.50 hb., £16.50 pb., 978 0 80473 897 2 hb., 978 0 80473 899 6 pb. In this slim volume, published in English translation more than a decade after his death, Lyotard reissues Kant’s call, in his preface to the first Critique, for a ‘critical tribunal’, and denounces ‘perpetual peace … by the death of the capacity to judge’. Critique, Lyotard argues, sets a limit to the pretensions of political, no less than metaphysical, illusion. The Kant interpretation Lyotard sketches here, relative throughout to the question of ‘the political’ and to the name ‘Wittgenstein’, proceeds along several converging lines of enquiry: how it is that the critical is ‘analogous to the political’ (Chapter 1); how it is that judgement, in Kant, is less a ‘faculty’ than a constitutively inconclusive ‘power of [finding] “passages” between the faculties’ (Chapter 2); how it is that judgement retrieves a sign of ‘the Idea of freedom’ from the affect of ‘historico-political enthusiasm’ (Chapter 3); and how it is that this judgement, as a critical sensitivity to what is ‘delivered up by our time’, serves to ‘sanction the coexistence of what is heteronomous’ (Chapter 5). The ‘heteronomous’ is basically coterminous with Lyotard’s ideal of ‘ethical culture’ in this work, but that the word here has only a lexical relation to heteronomy in the second Critique

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is indicative of a radical shift in problematic. Lyotard seeks the ‘trace of freedom within reality’ in the wake of a ‘sublime feeling’, and not in practical reason as such. It is out of the formlessness of insurgency and the suspense of historico-political purposiveness, rather than respect for a pure ‘form of lawfulness’, that judgement comes to concern itself with the possibility of emancipation. A critical ‘discourse of emancipation’ – whose precondition, here citing Kant, is an ‘Empfänglichkeit to Ideas’; and thus ethical culture – takes a surge of purposive lawlessness as its inaugural sign. The translator orients us in his preface to the occasion for this study, a version of which Lyotard presented in 1981 to a recently convened ‘Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique’ in Paris, on the invitation of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. Lyotard opens the volume with an ‘Argument’ that names Wittgenstein, and the name resurfaces at decisive points in his text. It is Wittgenstein who inspires Lyotard’s substitution of ‘phrases’ and ‘phrase families’ for the Kantian terminology of ‘presentations’ and ‘faculties’ (which never entirely disappears). A paragraph from his 1983 essay ‘Wittgenstein “After”’ illuminates this linkage – this decision – which remains quite obscure in Enthusiasm: this Viennese from the beginning of the century continues to sense the malaise of his time. Nietzsche had thought that it was a sickness of the will. But Wittgenstein is a republican, like Kant. Like Kant, he thinks that the time is diseased by language. Kant did not know capitalism, however, while Wittgenstein had been immersed in it. The examination of language games, just like the critique of the faculties, identifies and reinforces the separation of language from itself. There is no unity to language; there are islands of language, each of them ruled by a different regime, untranslatable into the others. This dispersion is good in itself, and ought to be respected. It is deadly when one phrase regime prevails over the others.

However impossible – or, in the vulgar sense, uncritical – this series of ‘passages’ may seem, it beautifully

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anticipates the structure, basic concern and leitmotifs of Enthusiasm. As a single instance of this: Lyotard’s reference to ‘islands of language’ here recalls ‘the archipelago’, a figure to which he devotes the second chapter of Enthusiasm. But it is in the 1983 Wittgenstein essay, and not in Enthusiasm, that Lyotard intimates how the very form of Wittgenstein’s investigations may have provided him with this figure of the archipelago, according to which he reconceives Kant’s faculties and the factions of the various antinomies. And, clearly, Lyotard does reconceive Kant. The valorization of ‘Kantian critique’ in this volume is a renovation, a recalibration: despite the volume’s subtitle, Lyotard produces an unapologetically post-Kantian ‘critique of history’. What intrigues is the way in which it appears to be post-Kantian in the strictest sense: displaying a less marked affinity to Marx and Wittgenstein, perhaps, than to certain preoccupations in German philosophy in the last decade or so of the eighteenth century. Enthusiasm is a ‘metacritique’ or perhaps a ‘Romantic critique’ of the historico-political in Kant – to echo a polemical title of J.G. Hamann’s and the aspirations of the early German Romantics (while avoiding, as Lyotard does, the moribund term ‘postmodern’). And these allusions are not a distraction. On the contrary: having recourse to Hamann and the Frühromantik, respectively, could perhaps have clarified for Lyotard – and can clarify in retro­spect – the provenance of this work. Hamann’s Metacritique of the Purism of Reason was written in response to the typesetter’s proofs of Kant’s first Critique (it is unclear how they came into Hamann’s possession). Its sole relevancy here is this: Hamann accuses Kant of glossing over, perhaps of repressing, critique’s material and its crux – namely, language. Where Lyotard has Kant recognize that his ‘time is diseased by language’, Hamann has Kant suffer from the disease of idealistic philosophy in their time: a disdain for language. Thus, in his very concern to

revisit critique as a ‘philosophy of phrases’, Lyotard – however disparately and indirectly – is perhaps not executing Kant’s ‘unannounced program’, but what Hamann desired in the Metacritique. It is, incidentally, Hamann who also fore-echoes Lyotard’s figure of the archipelago (while Kant envisions a perilously solitary island in the first Critique). In Socratic Memorabilia – a work he dedicates to Kant, among others – Hamann writes: ‘On this occasion Socrates spoke of readers who could swim. A confluence of ideas and feelings … made his [Heraclitus’] statements into an archipelago, perhaps, for whose communication bridges and ferries of method were lacking.’ It is this figure that Hamann very consciously employs against the architectonic impulse that Kant would profess in the first Critique and pursue thereafter. Lyotard decides – less convincingly, and less instinctively – to interpret Kant’s architectonic as archipelago. One laudable result of this decision, however, is Lyotard’s attention to Kant’s minor works, and the most impressive instance of this is his reflection on the ‘Conjectural Beginning of Human History’ in Chapter 4. This 1786 essay has been wrongly neglected, and here Lyotard’s instinct – which is that the ‘strange “manner” in which [it] is written’ has not been exhausted, or even seriously investigated – is sure. And yet: Lyotard imposes a ‘novelistic phrase’ on Kant’s speculative reconstitution of the myth of the Fall, when Kant here – an admirer of Rousseau’s novels, at the very least – has no more concern with the roman as a genre than with holy writ as revelation. By way of contrast, Hölderlin and Novalis, in the years immediately following the publication of the third Critique, set their hands to novels and novellas; and Hyperion would more likely answer to Lyotard’s desire that the novelistic phrase be seen as ‘a legitimate fashion’ in which to ‘phrase the historico-political’. The questions could thus become: Why does Lyotard valorize Kant when the Enlightenment ‘has become obsolete’, rather than Counter-Enlightenment figures such as Hamann? Why does he conjure an archipelagic, linguistic Kant rather than revisit the Metacritique and the early German Romantics? And why plead that Kant drafted some species of novella in 1786, rather than appeal to Novalis’s and Hölderlin’s genuine efforts a decade later? And there are less extrinsic questions that could follow. In what phrase-regime could an injunction ‘to judge justly, without criteria’ serve as an injunction? What could ‘justly’ here enjoin that is not said in ‘judge’? Perhaps only this: that the word ‘judge’ must conserve within itself an Idea of justice; and, as

Lyotard cites Kant, ‘all that our Ideas make known to us really is that we know nothing’. In the end, it is against the oscillations of sensitivity and insouciance in this work, elegantly translated throughout, that such questions are raised. It retains its beauty and its capacity to keep us alert in the Kantian corpus, and in history, to a ‘vigorous emotion’ which is, so Lyotard suggests, the only moral passion. David van Dusen

It’s the way he tells them Ben Fine, Theories of Social Capital: Researchers Behaving Badly, Pluto Press, London, 2010. 271 pp., £75.00 hb., £27.50 pb., 978 0 74532 997 0 hb., 978 0 74532 996 3 pb. In stand-up comedy circles, as in journalism, there’s a well-known phrase with which to characterize the work of some comedians: ‘hack’ material refers to subject matter peddled by those comics who are content to regurgitate clichéd, dull, formulaic, obvious, oft-repeated, staid and tired observations about the world. (A typical example of a hack comic premiss is the remark that food on aeroplanes is awful.) In his new book, Theories of Social Capital: Researchers Behaving Badly, Ben Fine suggests that it is equally possible to identify hack academics. Unsurprisingly, considering his intended target, those academics who utilize the middle-range concept of social capital are held up by Fine as particularly definitive. Social capital, to simplify, is associated with networks of reciprocity and trustworthiness in communities through which individuals create bonds and bridges with one another. For example, many people help out freely in their communities by, for example, sitting on school boards, getting involved in a local sports club, or taking part in a local campaign. In these instances, so some argue, social capital is being created in communities by ordinary people coming together to help out one another by bonding together around particular concerns or enjoyments and by (in many cases) constructing bridges of reciprocity and trustworthiness between different individuals and groups. Fine argues that those academics that study and (critically) endorse social capital more often than

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not engage in hack analyses because they take an easy-to-apply and all-encompassing concept – social capital – and then add some other variable to it in order to claim originality. Building on and developing his previous critical analysis of social capital in his 2001 book Social Capital versus Social Theory, Fine’s aim in part is to explore how such hack practices came to prominence in the social sciences and to dissect the ideological and practical effects these practices have had in various social science disciplines. The book is divided into nine chapters, and each discusses a quite stunning array of sources. Indeed, the chapters serve, if nothing else, as invaluable critical literature reviews of particular areas concerned with social capital. Fine demonstrates that social capital emerged as a buzzword during the 1990s from the dual retreat of the excesses of neoliberalism and postmodernism. Social capital was perceived by many as a way to think about non-market responses to imperfectly working (neoliberal) markets. At the same time it offered up an opportunity to move beyond the postmodernist concern with (relativistic) attributes like cultural identity and instead bring back in more conventional analytical categories such as social class. But Fine also demonstrates that those who champion social capital have often attempted to invent an intellectual history for it that stretches back to the beginning of the twentieth century, though evidence for such a history tends to be based on the work of a handful of social scientists who had in fact remained relatively obscure before their work was ‘discovered’ by more contemporary theorists. Given this, it should not surprise us, as Fine notes, that the vast majority of historians have managed to ignore the analytical potentials of social capital. While Fine’s arguments on these issues are firstrate they might have been strengthened if more had been said about social capital’s role and unique position in the history of theories of civil society and political culture. At the end of the final chapter Fine does note that those claims which state that social capital offers something new to the study of civil society are erroneous because the latter is already so extensive as to render superfluous anything that social capital has to offer to it. Nonetheless, it would have been helpful if a little more detail had been given on the intellectual and theoretical history of studies of civil society in order to provide a more robust defence of this claim. If it is true that each chapter remains a self-contained review of social capital research areas, this does not detract from the book’s coherence as a whole. One

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continuing theme of the book, it seems to me, is to critique social capital as a middle-range theory. In practice, a middle-range theory places social capital between systematic understanding and methodological individualism. It is thus interested in how social capital produces specific outcomes (e.g. how greater levels of social capital – trust, reciprocity, and so on – might lead to a more positive outcome for education). Problematically, argues Fine, by squeezing in between systematic understanding and methodological individualism, social capital theorists tend to ignore deeper determinants of capitalism as a systematic whole along with other outcomes. At the same time, however, social capital theorists do in fact bring in other factors and variables into social capital’s explanatory framework by translating them into middle-range observable and measurable categories. Subsequently, those ignored deeper determinants can be accounted for in social capital literature by ‘bringing back in’ various middlerange categories when the need arises, to show the limitations of existing theories of social capital whilst developing and extending analytical boundaries. One of Fine’s compelling arguments throughout the book, then, is to illustrate how social capital has a gargantuan appetite that swallows other categories and variables into its rather ill-defined framework. Indeed, Chapter 4 looks in detail at how various categories are brought back into the social capital framework. Another continuous theme evident in the book is social capital’s relationship with neoliberalism. Fine correctly observes that social capital shares similar ideals to neoliberalism, such as a focus on rational choice theory. He also shows that social capital arose as one way in which a more human face might be painted on neoliberalism. For example, the World Bank initially demonstrated a marked interest in social capital during the 1990s as one way in which to respond to non-economist critics of its neoliberal programmes in developing countries. As Fine notes, the World Bank has used social capital as a pretence to encourage community self-help programmes in developing countries so as to make privatization schemes in those very same countries a success. However, the World Bank soon dropped social capital once it had served its purposes of engaging non-economists within its development programmes and once social capital as an analytical category itself had slipped beyond its confines to other academic and research institutions where it was (re)defined in a plethora of often competing ways. A final theme of the book is an outright rejection of the category of social capital itself. This might

seem self-evident given the critical nature of the book. However, Fine demonstrates that even those social scientists and social researchers who express a degree of scepticism towards social capital nevertheless often attempt to salvage its analytical and theoretical potential by rethinking its usefulness in some way or another. Fine is unsparing in his criticisms of those who attempt to rescue social capital in this manner, and this goes even for those who work within his own preferred theoretical framework of Marxism. For example, Fine believes that any attempt by Marxists, as has in fact been the case, to make social capital more

applicable to the exploitative realities of capitalism only results in a series of rather obvious observations about power within and across social classes, which can in fact be made without introducing social capital in the first place. The strength of Theories of Social Capital is that the main arguments in favour of this elusive concept are knocked down with vigour, while also taking the reader beyond the immediate confines of scholarship in the field, highlighting links between social capital and a variety of other pressing concerns such as neoliberalism and the practices of the World Bank. John Michael Roberts

Grounded Christian Kerslake, Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy: From Kant to Deleuze, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2009. 334 pp., £65.00 pb. 0 748 63590 4. Deleuze never gave us a real indication as to how to understand his philosophical project. There is no discourse on method. There is no account of the practice of ontology. We might know that being is multiple, but what we do not know is why we know that. Kerslake puts it this way: ‘in Deleuze’s published writings we appear to find no key, foundational texts whose predominant concern is to produce and account for philosophical method in, say, epistemology, the study of subjectivity, or ontology.’ The itinerary of Deleuze studies is a good testimony to this. Deleuze has been read as a pre-critical philosopher, as a Kantian, as a phenomenologist, as a radical or not so radical vitalist, as a philosopher of mathematics or contemporary physics (or both at once), as a Lacanian, a Marxist, or, more often, simply as a machine for the production of neat-sounding concepts. Kerslake’s book is an attempt to end this ambiguity and show us once and for all what Deleuze was up to. What is surprising is that he apparently succeeds. Kerslake’s argument is the most convincing account yet of the nature and assumptions behind Deleuze’s philosophical project. These basic ‘assumptions’, Deleuze’s ‘real questions and problems’, are, for Kerslake, fundamentally post-Kantian in nature. ‘The main claim of this book is that the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze represents the latest flowering of the project, begun in the immediate wake of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, to complete consistently the “Copernican

revolution” in philosophy.’ This is a compelling claim, but like any claim it needs to be grounded. The circumstantial evidence for this argument is strong. Kantian and post-Kantian themes arise with a surprising consistency throughout Deleuze’s early work. In his very first book he reads Hume as a proto-Kantian who thinks the subject as both ground and self-transcendence, ultimately finding its unity in a system of ends. Proust’s Bergsonism is spread across a theory of the faculties which received its theoretical elaboration in Deleuze’s 1963 essay ‘The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Esthetics’. Not only does Deleuze’s Nietzsche rewrite the Critique of Pure Reason, calling it instead Genealogy of Morals, but, when, at the end of Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze reads Zarathustra as the principle of a hypothetical positing which opens the way, finally, for Dionysius, an unconditioned positing, he is reading the movement of Nietzsche’s work as a whole through Kant’s elliptical claims at the end of the Opus postumum that ‘Zoroaster’ represents ‘philosophy in the whole of its complex, comprehended under a principle’. Difference and Repetition is arguably a rethinking of the central Kantian concepts and problems: synthesis, intensity, Ideas, representation, schematism, and, as Kerslake emphasizes, grounding. All of this evidence, however, remains deeply suspect in the light of Deleuze’s free-indirect philosophizing and the broad and spotty distribution of these

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allusions across Deleuze’s works. We know that the readings of Hume, Nietzsche and Proust are not of the same sort as the literal, good-willed commentary we would conventionally expect, and this forces us to submit all of the allusions to an initial suspicion: how do we know it’s not Kantianism that’s being taken from behind here? Further, what would allow us to say that these scattered allusions are not simply allusions to the Kantian project, but the real questions, problems and assumptions animating Deleuze’s work? Kerslake avoids these difficulties by grounding his claims in a recently discovered transcription of a 1956 course given by Deleuze at the Lycée Louis le Grande: What is Grounding? This lecture course isn’t an ideal ground given the pressing textual problems surrounding it (how accurate and complete are the notes?), but the course is remarkable for a number of reasons, and Kerslake’s long introduction is both an excellent summary of the course and a very persuasive argument for its centrality to our understanding of Deleuze’s philosophical project. Kerslake emphasizes that this is the only lecture course in which Deleuze is not ‘ventriloquizing’ another thinker. Here he is working through a fundamental philosophical problem – what is a ground? – and, rather than ironically paraphrasing another author so as to let an indirect content slip through, Deleuze’s characterizations seem to be surprisingly accurate and reliable. For this reason, we can grant it priority over virtually all of Deleuze’s other texts. Second, the course reveals a deep and original engagement with Kant, the post-Kantians and Heidegger. Kerslake convincingly shows that it is specifically within this tradition and its assumptions that Deleuze is posing his questions and determining his philosophical problems. In the engagement with these thinkers the central Deleuzean concepts which we find scattered throughout his later works are unified around two problems raised by Kant’s critical project: (1) the problem of metacritique, or the project of accounting for the possibility of reason’s self-critique, and (2) the problem of immanence, or the possibility of completing the critical project by obtaining some mode of access to the absolute from the standpoint of our constitutive finitude, thus realizing, as Kerslake puts it, the promise that ‘thought is capable of being fully expressive of being’. It is well known that these problems occupied the post-Kantians, but Kerslake doesn’t tell the usual story in which Hegel appears at the end of the narrative as the inevitable destination of Kantianism after the

valiant efforts of Fichte and Schelling. Instead, he argues that Deleuze goes back to Kant himself, and ‘re-excavates’ Kant’s ‘original ideas concerning the self-critique of reason’. The heart of Kerslake’s book is thus occupied by a lengthy and highly original rereading of Kant in which Kerslake directly addresses the problems of metacritique and immanence as they arise across Kant’s work and are reconfigured by Deleuze in What is Grounding? and in Difference and Repetition. Kerslake’s reading of Deleuze’s published texts turns on Deleuze’s description in Difference and Repetition of the third synthesis as ‘the final end of time’. According to Kerslake, this means that just as Kant ascribed a set of ends to reason, Deleuze will claim that ‘an internal teleology can be ascribed to the synthesis of time itself’. In Deleuze’s case, however, the end of this internal teleology, the final end of time, is not reason’s pursuit of a still more perfect unity, but is a transcendental ‘apocalypse’ in which a ‘regrounding of the subject in a properly ontological and creative “life”’ is accomplished. This transformation was already secretly animating Kant’s reformulations of reason’s ends across the three critiques and the Opus postumum, but it took Deleuze actually to see it and to follow through its implications. In doing so, Deleuze is able to ‘transform Kantianism from within’ and ‘produce a self-grounding post-Kantian system of complete self-differentiation … in which spiritual creativity and “becoming” take over as the true “ends” of thought’. Kerslake has done something here which, to my knowledge, has not yet been attempted in Deleuze studies, at least not at such a level of argumentation. He has provided a well-grounded­ account of Deleuze’s fundamental philosophical problems. He has convincingly identified something like a key, foundational text which can account for the method directing Deleuze’s epistemology, his study of subjectivity, and his ontology, and he has reinforced that text with an admirably lucid reading of its historical sources. This is invaluable and it should transform Deleuze studies. It is also incomplete. What Kerslake cannot do – understandably, given the nature of the project – is get into the details of Deleuze’s texts and show how the particular concepts created in each work together to realize the apocalyptic ends of thought. In straining at the limits of Kantianism, he is also straining at the limits of Deleuzism. What we now need to do is show how this project animates the specific configuration of concepts in Deleuze’s major works. Joe Hughes

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News

Beyond Copenhagen? World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, Cochabamba, Bolivia, 19–22 April 2010

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he World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia, 19–22 April 2010, was essentially organized and promoted by the government of Evo Morales as a response to the failures of Copenhagen. The conference sought to provide an open platform for critical discussion about the environmental crisis and to make visible the plight of the communities that are most immediately damaged by it. The conference attracted more than 30,000 participants, twice the number anticipated, and included politicians, activists, scientists, farmers, academics and artists from across the globe. The political and intellectual range of views represented was remarkable, with amicable exchanges across gender, class and cultural demographics. The conference managed to avoid the exclusivist omission of voices that marred COP15. It was not unusual for a panel to receive comments from university professors and a campesino in the same set of exchanges. The mood throughout was positive with a readiness to listen and accept critique. Although much of the publicity focused on projects such as a bill of rights for Mother Earth and a climate tribunal to investigate those responsible for environmental damage, these were organized around demands for a ‘new system’ to ‘restore harmony with nature and among human beings’. This motivation to address structural changes was one noteworthy feature of the conference omitted from most mainstream reports: its overt anti-capitalist orientation. This was apparent from the onset, with nearly all panels and working groups forthright in their call for an alternative polity. That polity would be anti-imperialist (environmental degradation was considered as a form of imperialism), it would recognize its citizens for who they are as opposed to ‘what they own’, and it would work towards ‘collective well being and the satisfaction of the basic necessities of all’. Thus the goals envisioned transcended mere policy changes in North–South relations, or even reparations for environmental damages. There was a call for bold steps towards new and emancipatory ways of doing politics. This was one reason for endorsing Morales’ philosophy of ‘living well’, which urged us to reflect critically on the global environmental implications of our daily consumer impulses. Indeed, the recognition of quotidian concerns was constant throughout the discussion. There was resounding agreement on the fact that the desired structural changes cannot occur without first confronting our complicity with the damages done to the environment; the daily need to cultivate a responsible living routine was stressed alongside calls for environmentally responsible government. Thus capitalism was perceived, rightly, as not simply an economic system of exchange but a particular way of life. The everyday was emphasized as a site of resistance. Disagreements, however, were as intriguing as they were frequent. Nowhere was this more apparent than on the question of industrialization. One concern was that problems of capital were too frequently simplified and equated with problems of industrialization in general, limiting the scope of discussion on concrete alternatives to the crisis. We were reminded that the socialist fight against capital has never entailed a rejection of industry and that the workings of capital are far too complicated to be understood and overcome by emotive appeals for a union with nature. This absence of theoretical depth can be read as a reflection of the conference’s prevalent indigenous trajectory. The working group on Structural Causes, for instance, opened with a

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

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EVENTS The Hole in Time: German-Jewish Political Philosophy and the Archive 23 and 24 June 2010, University of Westminster, Little Titchfield St, W1W 7UW Speakers include: Howard Caygill, David Cunningham, Nitzan Lebovic. The Whitechapel Salon: Performance Matters 1 July 2010, Study Studio, Whitechapel Art Gallery, E1 7QX with Gavin Butt, Adrian Heathfield, Lois Keidan How We Became Metadata Exhibition 9 June–5 September 2010, 309 Regent Street, W1B 2UW Artists include: Eduardo Kac, Thomson & Craighead, Eunju Han, susan pui san lok.

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