Fictive Theories: Towards a Deconstructive and Utopian Political Imagination

Studies in European Culture and History edited by Eric D. Weitz and Jack Zipes University of Minnesota Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, the very meaning of Europe has been opened up and is in the process of being redefined. European states and societies are wrestling with the expansion of NATO and the European Union and with new streams of immigration, while a renewed and reinvigorated cultural interaction has emerged between East and West. But the fast-paced transformations of the last fifteen years also have deeper historical roots. The reconfiguring of contemporary Europe is entwined with the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century, two world wars and the Holocaust, and with the processes of modernity that, since the eighteenth century, have shaped Europe and its engagement with the rest of the world. Studies in European Culture and History is dedicated to publishing books that explore major issues in Europe’s past and present from a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives. The works in the series are interdisciplinary; they focus on culture and society and deal with significant developments in Western and Eastern Europe from the eighteenth century to the present within a social historical context. With its broad span of topics, geography, and chronology, the series aims to publish the most interesting and innovative work on modern Europe.

Series titles Fascism and Neofascism: Critical Writings on the Radical Right in Europe Edited by Angelica Fenner and Eric D. Weitz Fictive Theories: Towards a Deconstructive and Utopian Political Imagination Susan McManus German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust: Grete Weil, Ruth Klüger, and the Politics of Address Pascale Bos Exile, Science, and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Intellectual Figures Edited by David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer Transformations of the New Germany Edited by Ruth Starkman The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Towards a New Critical Grammar of Migration Leslie A. Adelson Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima to September 11 Gene Ray

Fictive Theories Toward a Deconstructive and Utopian Political Imagination

Susan McManus

FICTIVE THEORIES

© Susan McManus, 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–6668–0 (alk. paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McManus, Susan. Fictive theories : toward a deconstructive and utopian political imagination / Susan McManus. p. cm.—(Studies in European culture and history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–6668–0 (alk. paper) 1. Political science––Philosophy. 2. Social epistemology. I. Title. II. Series. JA71.M345 2005 321’, 07–dc22 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May 2005 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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Contents Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction The Politics of Fictive Theories: Reading/Writing/Theory Part I

Speculative Beginnings

1 17

Chapter One

Hobbes: Restraining Fictions

19

Chapter Two

Rousseau: Conceiving the Inconceivable

37

Excursus

“Mere High-Flown Fantasy . . .?” (Kant on Holiday)

57

Part II

Fictions of Self-Evidence

Chapter Three Stirner (with Marx and Derrida): Neither Material nor Utopian? Chapter Four

77

Epiphany and / or Politics? Nietzsche

103

I. Reading/Writing Nietzsche II. Nihilism––and Beyond? Errors for Life III. Nietzsche’s Ressentiment? Or, What is Written on Zarathustra’s Tablets?

108 118

Part III Chapter Five

75

Fabricating the Future

Bloch’s Utopian Imagination: Fictive Theories

134 145 147

Toward a Conclusion: Fictive Theories and Creative Epistemologies of Possibility

167

Notes

171

Bibliography

209

Index

221

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Acknowledgments

I started working on this project as a doctoral student in the School of Politics at the University of Nottingham, U.K. My debts to Lucy Sargisson and Simon Tormey stem from this time, and simply (happily) could not be repaid. I also held the post of Economic and Social Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Politics at the University of Nottingham, during which time more of the work was completed. As well as Lucy and Simon, I would particularly like to thank Andrew Robinson for his theoretical and political acuity over many conversations. In August 2003, I moved to Queen’s University Belfast, and I would like to acknowledge the collegial and friendly welcome I received. Thanks in particular to Debbie Lisle, Vincent Geoghegan, and Shane O’Neil. I would like to express my appreciation to all the friends and colleagues who read sections of the manuscript. I would also like to thank Vincent, Ruth Levitas, and Lyman Tower Sargent for their support and encouragement at crucial points of this work. I thank the people who worked with me at Palgrave: especially the series editors, Eric D. Weitz and Jack Zipes; my editor, Farideh Koohi-Kamali and Lynn Vande Stouwe; Yasmin Mathew, in Production; Maran Elancheran at Newgen Imaging Systems, and Jayashree Aradhyam, for her careful, thoughtful, and thorough copyediting. Most importantly, my parents, Rose and John McManus, my brother, John McManus, and Angela Cohen, have gone through much of this endeavor with me with love, good humor, good advice, and indulgence. And finally, to Tom. For whatever its worth, I dedicate this to them. Some of the material in chapter five has been published in Utopian Studies 14/2 (2003), and I thank the editor for permission to republish this material here. Note on gendered language: as feminist political theorists have consistently pointed out, the subject of politics is not incidentally gendered masculine. I have not tried to efface this when directly quoting. However, in my own writing, I prefer the pronoun “she,” “her,” and so on, as a very small contribution to changing that long his-story.

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Introduction The Politics of Fictive Theories: Reading/Writing/Theory

There is no outside-text. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, 1997 I am. We are. That is enough. Now it is up to us to begin. Ernst Bloch, Spirit of Utopia, 1988 Without storytelling, there is no theory of ethics. J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading, 1987

This book is an exploration of the work of fictions in political theories: the epistemological status those fictions claim, on the one hand, and the effects that they secure, on the other. I propose that political theory has worked within epistemologically conservative forms of knowledge. In seeking to articulate grounded conceptions of order and justice, the claims to knowledge of political theory are at once claims to power, which work toward coherence, containment, and control. This mode of theorizing, however, is based on misrecognition or forgetting: in the attempt to ground political theory in substantive norms, such as nature, rights, or even knowledge of the “the real,” theory must efface, negate, and forget its own constitutive fictions. In this effacement of the fictions that make theory work inheres the reification of political theory into a legislative, authoritative, and programmatic mode. Put otherwise: epistemologies of “the given,” conservative and ostensibly authoritative modes of knowledge-production, are always already creative epistemologies, but creative epistemologies that efface their contingency and creative power in favor of their legislative and authoritative power. Tracing the fictions that lie at the core of political theory’s attempts to ground itself has profound ethical and political affects.1 If, as I seek to uncover in the chapters that follow, the “fictive” is the inescapable ground of political theory, then the disruption of the fictive is formidable. My deployment of the term “fictive” in contradistinction to the fictional is critical. In the first two chapters and excursus, exploring the constitutive fictions at work in Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant, the fictive is used critically, genealogically, negatively. My explorations are an excavation of programmatic and ascetic fictions, fictions that work toward discipline, that regulate, restrain, control: the Natural, the Leviathan, the Legislator, the Moral Law. As the engagement with Max Stirner and Friedrich

2 / fictive theories

Nietzsche shows in chapters three and four, the specters and spooks of idealism and of ideologies, or the life-negating affects of slave moralities can also be negotiated via the fictive. Interrogating, questioning, and excavating the epistemological status of fictions interrupt the work that they can do, the effects that they can secure: that interruption is vital. First, then, I propose that if it is a fiction that inaugurates and sustains the project of political theory, then the possibility of the conceptual separation and epistemological control of the opposition of fictions and reality is itself deeply troubled. The movement from the fictional to fictive is subtle but crucial: whereas the fictional relies upon an opposition to its other, the true or real, and is thus epistemologically positivist, the fictive is that term beyond the opposition. Second, I argue that such fictions, when recognized as such, cannot ground a politics that aims to secure a legislative and programmatic coding of the political. Finally, with Nietzsche, and especially with Ernst Bloch in chapter five, I argue that this impossibility of privileging the legislative and authoritative capacities of an epistemologically secured political theory opens the space for exciting new possibilities: I reconceive the project of political theory as an open-ended project grounded in a future-oriented imagination. The possibilities, in other words, point toward an inventive political imaginary that is both deconstructive and utopian. Here, the fictive takes on a self-consciously anticipatory mode, guided by creative epistemologies of possibility. Briefly for now: a deconstructive and utopian mode of political theorizing, self-consciously fictive theories, speak in a language that “does not speak about something or someone who already exists and for whom a language and representations are somehow available, previously codified. Rather, it tries to anticipate. . . .”2 This book, then, draws upon and interweaves three different ways of telling stories that each seek to make the status, aims, and task of politics intelligible: political theory, utopian theory, and deconstructive theory. The use of the singular to describe each of these discourses is nevertheless a necessary grammatical error, covering a multiplicity of difference. As well, it would be a mistake to assume that that I bring three autonomous or “self-governing” disciplinary knowledges together, for on a substantive level, political theory undoubtedly has its utopian moments, and utopian theory is inherently political in its evocation of an “elsewhere” from which a critical eye is cast over the (foreclosed) possibilities of any given ordering of any given political present. It would also be misleading to think of the interweaving through the different functions of the disciplines, one, political theory, insistent on programmatics, the others, utopian and deconstructive theories undisciplined, wayward, and so disruptive of that possibility. Rather, it is more productive to seek out the deconstructive and utopian moments that already inhabit political theories, inhering in their very conditions of possibility. Similarly, utopian theory is not without its problematic legislative or programmatic claims, aiming toward a closure of possibility; I argue that the metaphysical and political terrain within which utopias have been conventionally understood itself needs to be reconfigured. Finally, deconstructive theory has been criticized for erring in the opposing direction. Resisting certain moments in both political and utopian theory that seek to overcode and so contain the future, deconstructive theory, it has been argued, remains “blithely unspecific about normative orientation in the here and now” even as it “carries a persistent utopian hope of a ‘not-yet.’ ”3 I argue, instead, that deconstructive theory entails an unremittingly critical attitude toward the status, and stasis, of the claims of normativity itself.

introduction / 3

At stake is precisely the tension or ambivalence (rather than equivalence) between two significant moments in each of these discourses: the imaginative moment, with its production of critical and perhaps even unruly and disruptive knowledges, which utopian and deconstructive theories solicit, and the moment of (re-)founding, (re-)ordering, and (re-)coding of the political that political theory aims to favor. It is this ambivalence that I explore in this introduction, first, through an exploration of the ways in which the project of political theory has understood itself. Second, via discussion of the “deconstructive narratology” I deploy throughout the book, I explore the ungrounding effects of Jacques Derrida’s “undecidability,” and Roland Barthes’s “Textuality,” as both contribute to a rethinking of the epistemological and temporal problematic of theorizing. Finally, I gesture toward the ways this deconstructive narratology renders impossible the legislative and programmatic inscription of political theory. The aim of the chapters that follow, then, as well as singular readings of certain theorists, is also to extrapolate, weave, and inscribe a new mode of political theorizing. Specters of Moses? Or “. . . a system without end or center . . .”?4 There is, I have suggested, a productive ambivalence in the very self-understanding of the status, aims, and project of political theory. I am concerned with the ways political theory negotiates meaning and order in the world. Specifically, I am interested in the ways in which political theorists have made claims that justify particular construals of, and interventions in, the political. The predominant strategy of justificatory discourse has been to posit a place outside of contestation: nature, foundations, reason, objectivity, universality, materiality . . . I further suggest, however, that such positions are riddled with ambiguities that can be read. In part I of the book, “Speculative Beginnings,” through readings of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant, I suggest that the foundationalism at work in a certain mode of political theorizing is always already fictive. In part II, “Fictions of Self-Evidence,” I negotiate theory/fiction hierarchies such as reality/fiction, material/utopian to propose that while there are many and competing fictive strategies there is, in terms of political intelligibility, no “outside” the fictive. For now, I wish to pause to consider that mode of political theorizing that I contest. Two caveats first need consideration. In describing a particular mode of theorizing, characterized by epistemological authority, and programmatic or legislative closure, am I treading dangerously close to the very practice I contest in other theorists, that of falsely universalizing a contingent structure? On this drive in narrative studies, Roland Barthes writes: There are said to be certain Buddhists whose ascetic practices enable them to see a whole landscape in a single bean. Precisely what the first analysts of narrative were attempting: to see all the world’s stories (and there have been ever so many) within a single structure: we shall, they thought, extract from each tale its model, then out of these models we shall make a great narrative structure . . .5

My writing of a particular, contestable, mode of theorizing is not, however, a reductive one, distilling all of the stories theorists tell into one; rather, as I suggest this mode as such, I simultaneously withdraw its epistemological security as I am attentive to abyssal moments, attuned to hiatus. A structuralist language, however, would put it

4 / fictive theories

thus: while the substantive content of the stories change, the structural imperatives, or formal properties, exhibit a similar drive: to legislate. Yet I proceed here with caution: a certain delicacy is necessary to avoid reinstating the coherence and validity of the idea of an epistemologically grounded, foundational or otherwise, model of political theory whose status I contest throughout this book.6 By attempting to write its ambiguity back in, then, I want to bypass its own logics, as I sidestep, suspend, and unwork that recalcitrant paradigm. My insistence on the interruption of the “alwaysalready fictive” is vital to such a process. The second objection that might be raised is this: contemporary political theorists no longer operate within such a model, at least since Jean-François Lyotard declared our loss of faith in the grand récits of modernity, and insisted that those stories were, precisely, tall tales indeed, their epistemological privilege always a ruse and a trickery. This claim has, to be sure, lost much of its capacity to unsettle, whether through repetition, denunciation, or plain weariness with the postmodern moment it announced. But contemporary political theory has certainly witnessed a move away from epistemology toward, on the one hand, narrative, and on the other, forms of proceduralism. However, in the work of many of those theorists who recognize and privilege narrative, there is simply a displacement of the original paradigm: it is narrative that tends toward settling questions of meaning and hence narrative works as an “ordering” mode. For example: “story-telling and literary imagining are not opposed to rational argument, but can provide the essential ingredients in rational argument”; or consider the following: narratives are a useful “supplement” to political theory because narrative discourses are similarly “rule-governed.” Or, consider the claim that in the “desire for order and unity, narrative can be a powerful tool.”7 On these accounts, narratives secure the orderly claims of political theorists. Within these approaches, fictions are still predicated on their truth-value, and a theory/fiction hierarchy is simply reformulated, with fiction in the service of theories, rather than excluded from their domain. In the terms that I have already introduced: narrative simply takes the place of epistemologies of “the given” that seek to contain or construct settled forms of order and justice. I find this a premature foreclosure of the possibilities of fictions. In the procedural turn in recent political theory I find, on the other hand, a premature foreclosure of the possibilities of politics. Whether of the Rawlsian or Habermasian variants, the procedural turn in political theory has sought to turn away from substantive norms and instead ground politics in terms of procedures that allow for a variety of viewpoints and positions to be negotiated. There are two problems with this that I shall simply point to: one recurrent critique is that this is a particular and located, Western and liberal conception of the “good life,” and so proceduralism simply effaces its own substantive content; and the second is that the liberal commitment to proceduralism is yet another way of defusing the political via a legislative mode. The foreclosures of both these new turns in contemporary political theory need to be challenged, and I return to this question throughout the book. And one way of unpacking what is at stake in those foreclosures is rethinking the relationship between modes of making meaning, and modes of ordering in political theory. Generically, a (dis)orderly structure or dream of political theory, always-already undermined, can be extrapolated around the legislative functions of the discourse. As

introduction / 5

I suggest here, pick up again in chapter two with Rousseau, and most productively with Nietzsche in chapter four, the figure of the legislator is perhaps the master trope of political theory; yet, it is also the position where the always-already fictive status of political theories can be discerned. I want to suggest here that the figure or trope of the legislator is an exemplary moment in figuring out a crucial way that creative epistemologies become epistemologies of the given, conservative, and ordering knowledges. To begin mapping this tension, I draw upon some key statements of the scope, task, and aims of political theory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In his important 1969 essay, “Political Theory as a Vocation,” Sheldon Wolin, an influential American political theorist, aims to bring out the “distinctive nature” of the task of the political theorist through the characterization of political theory as “epic.”8 Drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s deployment of the phrase “extraordinary science,” Wolin argues that the task of epic political theory is to “inaugurate a new way of looking at the world, which includes a new set of concepts, as well as new cognitive and normative standards.”9 The effects of such a conception of the task of theory are, as John Seery describes it, “audacious”: “because of the magnitude of its scope and claims [. . . i]t has the vision to suggest alternatives that may be available, even if such possibilities appear distant and foreclosed under current conditions.”10 This is, for sure, a distinctly utopian characterization of the task of the theorist, and is so for two reasons. First, the emphasis is on the capacity of theory to articulate visions, possibilities, beyond the political and conceptual resources of the current order. But second, and even more crucially, Wolin emphasizes the inventive role of the theorist, and the creation of cognitive as well as normative standards. The knowledge-production of the political theorist is as much a political and politicized task as it is a task concerning epistemological security or certainty. As I articulate throughout this book, creative epistemologies of possibility “make up” such profoundly utopian ways of knowing and acting in the world, without being in thrall to the given. And yet, in other understandings of the task of the political theorist, something happens to this creative moment. For Adriana Cavarero is surely correct when she criticizes the “Platonic inheritance” inherent to the practice of political theory. This inheritance is twofold, combining an epistemological hierarchy with a disciplinary conception of politics: “to ‘save’ politics from the unpredictability and contingency of action, the task of discovering universal principles capable of regulating politics was entrusted to theoria [. . .] One of the most noteworthy results is that politics is subsumed by the central problem of order.”11 Cavarero points to the ways in which the work of theoria is both fictional and repressive in its ordering: “In traditional political theory, the ontology of fictitious entities [. . .] is functional to the centrality of the issue of order or, to use Foucault’s term, discipline, insofar as it is subjection, normalization.”12 Cavarero argues that this paradigm of depoliticizing political theory and politics through epistemological certainty continues even (or especially) as we “adopt [. . .] science as a true and incontrovertible model of knowledge.”13 The epistemological claims of political theory, on this account, are constitutively a “formidable metaphysical lie.”14 To reiterate thus far: I have suggested that when political theory is based upon epistemological certainty, it will necessarily be practiced via legislative and programmatic modes. Such modes foreclose the possibilities of politics. I have further suggested,

6 / fictive theories

however, that the “formidable metaphysical lie” that Cavarero roots out is always-already a reification of a creative or inventive knowledge-production. It is only by attending to both moments that the status and project of political theory can be reconfigured via the fictive. (In claiming the always-already fictive status of claims to knowledge/ power, I echo John Seery, whose provocative and disarming proposal reverberates through my own text: “But what if, just what if, this elaborate story now in vogue about the history of Western philosophy, beginning with Plato as the founder of the Forms, turns out to be deeply mistaken about Plato? What if Plato never really was a Platonist? The scandal would be enormous. How could we all have been so wrongheaded?”15) In fact, the most potent accounts of the status and task of political theory are alert to the tension that Wolin and Cavarero sketch out. Rather than drawing on incontrovertible principles, political theory, for Norman Jacobson, itself circumvents the abyss between a lack of meaning and lack or order (nevertheless, this very equation of meaning/order needs to be unworked and not simply inverted). With no little sense of a melancholy dignity, Jacobson writes, “political theory has been a heroic business, snatching us from the abyss a vocation worthy of giants.”16 Jacobson’s position is complex, and recognizes the ways in which theory, in shaping meanings, and the orders they justify, makes the contingent necessary (or, indeed, the fictive foundational). For example: “politics begins with a lack: hence, directives are needed, precepts discovered, deduced or invented; political theories are created.”17 The task of the political theorist on this account is to provide the necessarily insecure security of a ground over an abyss (and I return to this figure with Jacques Derrida later in this introduction). In the dual questions of meaning and order lies the dream of political theory, as well as the epistemological fault lines that make that dream impossible. I suggest that in the terrain reconfigured via the fictive, it is precisely these “fault-lines” that make theory—and politics—possible. I am now in a position to “embody” this contestable construction of political theory through its encapsulation in the figure or trope of the legislator. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, peculiarly alert to the paradoxes and tensions, writes: The Legislator [. . .] must have recourse to an authority of a different order [than either his own authority or that ordained by the people], capable of constraining without violence and persuading without convincing. This is what has, in all ages, compelled the fathers of nations to have recourse to divine intervention, and credit the gods with their own wisdom, in order that the peoples, submitting to the laws of the State as to those of nature, and recognizing the same power in the formation of the city as in that of man, might obey freely [. . .] This sublime reason, far above the range of the common herd, is that whose decisions the legislator puts in the mouths of mortals, in order to constrain by divine authority those whom human prudence could not move. But it is not anybody who can make the gods speak, or get himself believed when he proclaims himself their interpreter.18

(In the same text, more elliptically: “it would take gods to give men laws.”19) A “formidable metaphysical lie” indeed: the settled order of the polity is justified, made metaphysical, and naturalized all at once (“recognizing the same power in the formation of the city as in that of man”); based around an epistemic hierarchy (“far above the range of the common herd”); and yet is, as Rousseau reveals, a manifest piece of fabrication! Precisely at stake is the problematic epistemological status of an

introduction / 7

ostensibly authoritative discourse whose effects are disciplinary. Precisely to the extent that political theory must move from the philosophical stories it tells to political ordering, it is subject to the epistemological paradoxes of the legislator: such a position must be one of epistemological privilege, to secure its powerful effects; and yet such a position is impossible, unavailable (and, contra Jacobson’s melancholy and nostalgia, has never been available). The “truth” is a creation in the radical absence of the truth. It is in this context that Jacobson writes of the double bind of political theory: “it is as if political thought from the beginning has exclaimed, however tacitly on occasion, ‘the civic god is dead, all is permitted’ ”; and yet, “the specter of Moses [still] haunts the pages” of political theory.20 Political theory, I propose, needs to lose that residual desire for “solace,” certainty, and security of programmatic thought. Can a mode of political theorizing be articulated that openly acknowledges its fictive origins? Can the failure of knowledge provide a new (groundless) ground of political theory that overcomes the desire to code and contain the political through the delineation of incontrovertible principles, or the stasis of forms of normativity and codification of forms of proceduralism, for once and all? And can that mode of political theorizing still be adequate to the vital and bold substantive—but no longer legislative—tasks of “inaugurat[ing] a new way of looking at the world, which includes a new set of concepts, as well as new cognitive and normative standards?”21 Yes: fictive theories, when conceived as distinctly deconstructive and utopian, are able to move beyond a politics based around legislative claims, without conceding any loss of political affectivity, but indeed a gain. As I argue throughout, I claim political and ethical advantages for a mode of theorizing that recognizes its fictive modality. I turn now to questions of how. A New Imaginary? The Text is that social space which leaves no language free, outside, and no subject of the speech-act in a situation of judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder: the theory of the Text can only coincide with the practice of writing. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text”

To approach the texts of political theory qua texts is an approach at once immediate, blatant, and tangible; and yet, without unpacking the textuality of these texts, such an approach can remain insensible to the ruptures affected by this awareness. Attention to the writing of political theory provokes a different recognition of the perceived status and task of the project (and discipline) of political theory. Becoming attuned to writing and interpretative activity performs the dissolution of any attempted grounding of political theory. At stake throughout this book are the core questions of the status, aims, and validity of the writing of political theory. Since responding to political texts is also to read as rewriting (or to “countersign”) also at stake is the position of theorist/commentator in the task of reading/rewriting political theory. Attending to the textuality of the grounding moments of discourse is, as Jacques Derrida has taught us to recognize, tricky, and possibly slightly mad: Are we obeying the principle of reason when we ask what grounds this principle which is itself a principle of grounding? We are not—which does not mean we are disobeying it, either. Are we dealing with a circularity or an abyss? The circle would consist in seeking to

8 / fictive theories account for reason by reason, to render reason to the principle of reason, in appealing to the principle in order to make it speak of itself at the very point where, according to Heidegger, the principle of reason says nothing about reason. The abyss, the hole, the Abgrund, the empty “gorge” would be the impossibility for a principle of grounding to ground itself. This very grounding, then, [. . .] would have to hold itself suspended above a most peculiar void.22

Stepping outside of the parameters that a text would allow means asking about the ways in which texts are enabled to define their own parameters, or their own authorizing principles: probing or interrogating the grounding principles of texts means not stepping back from their abyssal moments (as Jacobson would perhaps urge) but testing their edges and limits in ways whereby the meaning of the text is no longer guaranteed. Rather than moving from questions of making-meaning to constructing order, I ask the question, by what means are meanings created? William Corlett puts it this way: Political theories can be thought of as providing order for the world(s) they seek to encounter. This is not to say that political theories impose these forms on the world; it is more accurate to see any imposition involved as an attempt at self-governance. Political theories, then, do not impose order on the world in the way, for example, a sculptor might give shape and vitality to unformed clay. Rather, these theories govern themselves by giving themselves structure or orders. [. . . But] there remains the question of how theories themselves are related to their order.23

By exploring the ways in which theories govern themselves, by looking for the mechanisms by which theories negotiate the construction (and indeed, the dispersal and reconstitution of meanings), it is possible to open theories to their own fictivity and reflexivity. This is not in preference to how those theories engage with “the world”; as I go on to suggest, attention to this formal or reflexive moment is not to the exclusion of the “properly political” moment, or the legislative, programmatic task; rather, as I turn to now and throughout the book, such an attention reconfigures this moment through radical openings. A deconstructive narratology of political theory provokes an epistemic rupture in relation to the aims, status, and validity of the discourse of political theory. The aim of political theory has been to close the field of the political; the status of such work is seemingly epistemologically secured; and the validity of the closure is dependent upon that security. Yet, this relies upon problematic hierarchical oppositions, and assumptions of reference and an ontologically given opposition between fiction and reality that deconstructive practices disrupt. In this section, I explore two such moments: Derridean “undecidability,” and Barthesian Textuality. I claim both as deconstructively political moments. Even so, in an interview with Richard Kearney in 1984, Derrida suggested that he has “never succeeded in relating deconstruction to existing political codes and programs,” because “the available codes for taking a political stance are not at all adequate to the radicality of deconstruction.”24 He continued: this “absence of an adequate political code to translate or incorporate the radical implications of deconstruction has given many the impression that deconstruction is opposed to politics or is at best apolitical”; but, “this impression only prevails because all our political codes and terminologies still remain metaphysical, regardless of whether they originate from the left or the right.”25 Derrida, I suggest, refers to a

introduction / 9

“metaphysical” political code where I refer to an ostensibly authoritative and legislative or programmatic inscription of political theory. This is, then, a useful place to pause Derrida, and to both catch up on and add a further twist to that mode of theorizing by considering its metaphysics. We have already encountered this model in the epistemological fault lines that negate/enable the dream of political theory: its claims toward epistemological certainty, and its difficulties in establishing those claims. In a deconstructive questioning of this model, responsive to the moment of the failure of knowledge, Cathy Caruth asks: “in what ways could we define a politics or ethics which derives from a position in which full understanding is not possible?”26 Drawing on the impossibility of the legislative model, or, “the relation between knowing and responsibly doing,” she argues that “the demand for responsible action arises most urgently in the impossibility of a pregiven self-understanding or knowledge.”27 Undecidability occurs when knowledge is not possible; and this, deconstructive theorists claim, re-politicizes political theory: Drucilla Cornell suggests that “Derrida’s text leaves us with the infinite responsibility undecidability imposes on us. Undecidability in no way alleviates responsibility. The opposite is the case. We cannot be excused from our own role in history because we could not know so as to be reassured we were ‘right’ in advance.”28 Political theory accepts its most intense responsibility when epistemological certainty no longer de-politicizes the moment of action. Thomas Keenan pulls these strands together when he writes: Reading is what happens when we cannot apply the rules. [. . .] We have politics because we have no reliable grounds, no reliable standpoints—in other words, responsibility and rights, the answers and claims we make as foundations disintegrate, are constitutive of politics. So “deconstruction” is not offered here as an antiauthoritarian discourse, an attack on grounds, but as an attempt to think about this removal as the condition of any political action.29

There are a number of points of note here: first, deconstruction is not an oppositional discourse; just as I insist on the always-already fictive nature of the grounding claims of political theory, so too a deconstructive narratology of political theory inhabits discourses, working within them rather than opposing from outside. While Caruth and Cornell deal with epistemological fault lines, Keenan also begins to articulate why reading is crucial to this reconfiguration, and why reading is, as Derrida has resolutely maintained, “transformational.”30 To anticipate: reading is the site where both the status and the stasis of ordering and normative principles can no longer hold. This needs explanation. It is within the field of literary theory that challenges have been posed to the hierarchical, disciplinary, epistemologically grounded divide that separates literature from philosophy. This distinction is itself contiguous with an entire problematic of reference in its mapping of terms of oppositions such as true and false, real and illusory, factual and fictional, and so on. However, referring to both literary and philosophical modes of production of texts, Michael Shapiro writes that “it must be recognized that the production of all texts (as well as their reading or consumption) involves acts of imagination. There are thus no firm boundaries between the two.”31 This recalls the tension between imagination and knowledge mapped by Wolin, Cavarero, and others

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previously. However, literary studies have gone further: Wolfgang Iser, for example, has “challenged the conventional distinction between fiction and reality by bringing them into play with the concept of the imaginary.”32 It is precisely this move that the narrative turn within political theory has only partly incorporated. Within a deconstructive narratology I find the critical resources by which to uncover and move beyond a recalcitrant foundationalism. But this means questioning the coherence of narratives themselves: as Andrew Gibson argues, “a particular set of structures [. . .]— subject and object, observer and observed, narrative text and pre-existent, narrated world—has dominated throughout thought about narrative representation. These structures are metaphors to which we are so profoundly accustomed that we can hardly keep their metaphorical status in sight.”33 But “reading,” as Roland Barthes obliquely suggests, “is the site where structure is made hysterical.”34 Just as Derridean undecidability politicizes theory in the absence of epistemological security, textuality as an epistemological proposition “utopianizes” theory: the possibility of becoming other is inscribed in the movement of textuality itself. This latter move is vital to a political imagination that is both deconstructive and utopian. Textuality, then, is an epistemological proposition with effects. As Michael Clark argues, Barthes’s reference to the revolutionary and utopian significance of the text as a “social” space is not simply allegorized. Like Lacan’s insistence on the materiality of the signifier, and like Derrida’s critique of the binary sign as idealist in its inherent subordination of the signifier to the signified, and like the “language games” that constitute social bonds in Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition, Barthes’s Text does not situate the word in the world, as the formalists might argue: it confounds those terms entirely by treating the word as world, by recognizing in the word the weighty materiality of its worldly existence as part of our lived experience.35

Barthes’s Text does not simply “recognize in the word the weighty materiality of the world,” however, but reinscribes that weighty materiality not as something given, but as a movement of possibility. This is important. To allegorize Text would be to remain within narratorial and metaphysical structures: it would be to insist on a “real” to which the Text stands opposed. This is not how the term functions for Barthes. Barthes introduces into the playing field of Text the terms (they are precisely not concepts) of the lisible (readerly) and scriptible (writerly); I explore here the concomitant disruption of structure, of subject/object, and of ontology, that their explication and exploration precipitates.36 This is important substantively, as well as methodologically. The type of distinction Barthes is making between the readerly and the writerly cannot be stated too soon: this is a problematic to be uncovered. The writerly is, nevertheless, privileged: “Why is the writerly our value? Because the goal of literary work [. . .] is to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text.”37 However, the “writerly” text has a tenuous existence, for it is not a book as such: “Where can we find them? Certainly not in reading (or at least very rarely: by accident, fleetingly, obliquely, in certain limit-works): the writerly text is not a thing, we would have a hard time finding it in a bookstore” (ibid., pp. 4–5). Now, the dominant approach to the texts of political theory is to view them as “readerly” where, as Barthes explains, “[t]he ‘reader’ is left with no more than the poor freedom either to

introduction / 11

accept or reject the text: reading is nothing more than a referendum. Opposite the writerly text, then, is its countervalue, its negative reactive value: what can be read but not written: the readerly.”38 The “readerly” approach to a political text views it as a fixed object with a fixed function, from which a meaning can be unproblematically elicited for legislative purposes. This is, Barthes argues, a “theological” approach, tied to “God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.”39 “Specters of Moses” (and many other strange specters and even monsters!) indeed haunt the texts and the readers of political theory. However, a core aim of my deployment of a deconstructive narratology is to change the model by which Text and specific texts are understood; to make the readerly text writerly. If these two types of texts do not “exist” ontologically, then it follows that the properties do not inhere within the texts. And, indeed, an important part of the readings of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant presented here is to disrupt the consensus that a message or a meaning can be unproblematically extracted for legislative purposes. Such readerly texts can, via the reading process, be made writerly. By reading through foundational moments, or indeed any moment of hypostatization, readerly texts become open to writerly re-appropriation and re-functioning (I explain this in a little more detail later). An important part of parts two and three of the book is to maintain the writerly aspects of Nietzsche and Bloch’s work. But what does this writerly re-functioning consist of? The importance of Barthes’s definitions here is that his distinctions are intransitive, verbal rather than ontological. This is clear when he writes about the writerly “model”: Further, its model being a productive (and no longer representative) one, it demolishes any criticism which, once produced, would mix with it: to rewrite the writerly text would consist only in disseminating it, in dispersing it within the field of infinite difference. The writerly text is a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would inevitably make it past) can be superimposed; the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world [. . .] is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages.40

The writerly text, then, is constructed via an active process of reading that cannot and should not be stabilized: “The writerly is [. . .] production without product, structuration without structure. But the readerly texts? They are products. . . .”41 Barthes is talking here about the ways in which meaning is created: the readerly text—or to approach a text as readerly—is to privilege “separation and control” at an epistemological and political level; the writerly text—or to approach a text as writerly—is to privilege and work to maintain “immersion and participation” in the processes of sense-making, and again, at the epistemological and political levels.42 “Ourselves writing” as process, “production” and “structuration” without aiming to secure “product” or “structure” is necessarily a post-representational (indeed, anticipatory) mode suited to temporal becoming. The “final point” that both criticism and a legislative political theory would desire to attain is continually deferred through an underlying commitment to processes of becoming. And further, Barthes asserts the openness of a reading that would not privilege any one point of entrance: “[T]his text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, not one of which can be authoritatively declared to

12 / fictive theories

be the main one. . . .”43 In interesting ways, the underlying structure of this model of reading/writing is one of disruption of linearity, beginnings, endings. The difference between the readerly and the writerly, then, is one of an active differential, a differential that is activated through the processes of making, creating, sense(s) of reading as rewriting. This is a discursively material operation: a self-reflexive, deconstructive narratology is utopian in the sense that rather than simply reflecting on its own limits, it in effect, opens the world as possibility. The deconstruction at work throughout this book is then already informed by a utopian commitment: as I explore in chapter five, it is Ernst Bloch’s insistence on reality as unfinished, and the not-yet as a category of the real that ultimately precludes the authority of epistemologies of the given underwriting legislative inscriptions of political theory. My alternative approach, guided by creative epistemologies of possibility, has a sense of becoming at its core: this is why the work of Derrida and Barthes is important. Both point toward ways of thinking and theorizing that are no longer guided by the desire for authority and closure, and so contribute at a very fundamental level to the rethinking of the status and the task of political theory. Indeed, Bloch has already pointed toward the necessity of thinking the substantive commitments of politics through a mode of becoming, or of thinking content through form, precluding a static mode of theorizing. In his Natural Law and Human Dignity, law is conceptualized as that moment of authoritative stasis, and revolution is theorized via becoming. However, for Bloch, the important political task was to rethink both these moments: the question of law and rights has, for the most part, been absent from the agenda of social revolution. [. . .] The conceptual frame that called for and accounted for change was largely resistant to the static demands of law and rights. Consequently, any effort to wed the demands of law and rights to the agenda of social revolution would require a fundamental rethinking of the structure of political thought in order to reconcile otherwise antagonistic intentions.44

Thinking beyond what has already become is vital to this mode of theorizing: undercutting any epistemological claims that would seek to close the movement of the political is central to this. In the chapters that follow, then, the object of my critique is not the theorists with whom I engage. Rather, the object of my critique is a particular mode of theorizing that can be characterized via the trope of legislation, which tends toward authority, toward closure, but that is, I argue, always-already fissured. In “Speculative Beginnings,” I focus my readings around the foundational paradox of founding theories on fictions, in the work of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant. The guiding narrative is that these theorists entered a space of imagination and speculation, a fictional space, in order to ground and sustain “the real.” Dominant modes of reading have, however, effaced the fictional space and moment. Nevertheless, while both Hobbes and Rousseau invoke the natural as the fictive/foundational moment, their modes of imagining and inscribing nature are radically different. This helps me address the questions of how, for example, does Hobbes turn a creative reading of “man” into the monstrous Leviathan? What traces of possibility remain to be reactivated? Hobbes helps me figure out both the logic and the dangers of an anti-utopian mode of theorizing. How does possibility still reside in the stories Rousseau tells of natural humanity? For

introduction / 13

in Rousseau’s inscription, I find a utopian reading of nature, coming close to a selfconsciously fictive mode: a transformative mode of theorizing works via creative epistemologies—a fictive mode—to free politics from epistemological dictates that are tied by forms of representational fixity to the given, by exposing and negating those restraining fictions. Rousseau is pivotal in figuring out that maneuver. My reading of Kant in the excursus is a reflexive moment concerning the guiding thematics of the book: through a close reading of some key Kantian oppositions—namely, reason/speculation, history/imagination, and, crucially, philosophy/fiction—I explore other kinds of “spaces” that Kant, reread via a deconstructive narratology, opens up: a very different space, not bound to the “real,” not already written by idealism, can be delineated. High-flown fantasy, indeed: but given the epistemologically complex nature of the space thus created, not merely so. I close this excursus and Part One with thoughts concerning these textual moments for fictive modes of theorizing. In “Fictions of Self-Evidence,” I explore Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche. Both are unruly, disorderly thinkers epistemologically as well as politically. Stirner rejects as “spooks” any attempts to epistemologically or ontologically secure the political: he rejects the idea of separating any kind of ideal or imaginary realm—past or future, transcendent or natural—that would exert guidance or control over humanity. I describe Stirner as neither material nor utopian since he refuses and indeed, works to negate a real/ideal opposition. In Stirner’s attempt to rid thought of all didactic and “superior specters,” though, I am concerned that he also closes off the prospect of utopian spaces of possibility. While I reject Kantian idealism, I think it is possible and indeed necessary to rewrite Kant laterally instead of hierarchically. I find the resources to do so in Friedrich Nietzsche. I explore Nietzsche’s critique of all forms of naturalization and normativity in relation to nihilism as a crisis of epistemic and ontological “faith.” Asking ethical or political questions of ontology, I suggest, is a mistake in the sense that the ontological is always-already a prior epistemological/ moral/psychological construct. This means that there is no meaning that is “proper” to nature that can guide human morality and politics. Nietzsche’s project can be described as a form of philosophical atheism. For Nietzsche, foundational fictions such as human nature and god have only worked to enslave humanity. However, drawing in part upon Nietzsche’s genealogy, an antinarrative form of critical unpacking of how things have come to be the way they are is also a narrative dispersal of those reified meanings, a decolonization. Spaces of future possibility are thus opened. Part III of the book, “Fabricating the Future(s),” articulates the space of a creative epistemology of the possible. Nietzsche’s recognition was that we are always-already fictionalizing creatures (though often—most often—we have mistaken “our” fictions for truths). This understanding of fiction, however, exceeded the boundaries of the epistemological: it becomes self-consciously fictive. It also reconfigures a hierarchical and dualistic understanding of the world. In Stirner’s language, Nietzsche’s “spooks,” or fictions do not dominate, but instead, enable participation and creativity within the world, negating a Kantian hierarchical understanding, while not attempting to reduce the possible to the real. The present, in Nietzsche, is fissured, open. In chapter five, I suggest, through and with Ernst Bloch, that the language of utopias is uniquely placed to articulate a “new plot and potential,” responsive to the moment of the foundation as abyssal depth. Utopia, as I write it with Bloch, can always only be,

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as Zarathustra/Nietzsche put it, a “half-written tablet.” Each chapter, then, explores different modes of fictive theorizing: the mode I privilege is self-consciously fictive, deconstructive, and utopian. I claim ethical and political advantages for a mode of theorizing that recognizes its fictive modality, and contemporary theoretical currents, I argue, can be thematized via fictive theorizing. Before turning to this, a word, however, on my uses of the canon of political theory. The “teleology” immanent to this book is to deny teleology as nothing more than another fiction. But with my choices of Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Stirner, Nietzsche, and Bloch, I simultaneously invite yet deny a canonical reading. My use of the canon is selective, appropriative, interrogative. I raid the canon, seeking not only a repository of hopes, fears, desires, values; but also, as Halperin puts it, seeking “our otherness to ourselves revealed,” seeking “sites of difference” that are also possible “sites of transformation.”45 The excavation of the fictive is, I argue, one such site, loaded with anticipation, whose reification needs to be undone. So, just as Derrida suggests, I am “explicitly and systematically posing the problem of the status of a discourse” by “borrow[ing] from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself.”46 The methodological “fiction” that I could exclusively and systematically justify the choices I have made is on a par with the other “fictions” explored and uncovered in this book. This remains, nevertheless, an interesting fiction, provoking alertness to the irreducible plurality that haunts a project such as this. Derrida has proposed that the choice of an example can never be justified absolutely, cannot be justified, either, “by way of anticipation and preface.”47 Through, with, and sometimes against the theorists I have chosen, I weave a story different, I think, to the one those theorists would recognize as their own, would sign their name to; with other examples, further stories could have been written. And yet, regardless of this contingency, as Hillis Miller writes of his Ethics of Reading, “does not the order of examples, whatever I say, magically generate narrative and seem to tell a story with beginning, middle and end, a logic and teleology of its own? What comes after presupposes what came before, and seems ‘deeper in’ or ‘further along’ toward some conclusion, so ingrained is the habit of narrative and its cognitive implications.”48 Freeing fictions, as I argue, generates its own political and ethical implications, and by way of a concluding, which can only be a further opening and a task, I shall for now do no more than gesture toward three significant points. At this historical juncture, work in political theory is embedded in a series of exciting new possibilities. The most significant recent works are a creative blending of political theory, philosophy, and utopian, cultural, and literary studies. In works such as Wendy Brown’s Politics Out of History and Jane Bennett’s The Enchantment of Modern Life, encountering the political is a simultaneously ethical, aesthetic, and indeed, a utopian encounter, however much the latter remains unarticulated. Imagination, and a willingness not to “sacrifice” theory by “capitulating to the demand that theory reveal truth, deliver applications, or solve each of the problems it defines” defines this new terrain that I argue can best be thematized via the fictive.49 The politics of creative epistemologies of possibility reside precisely in the alwaysalready political nature of the claims made in their name. I will be able to turn to this with greater clarity in concluding, but for now offer three guiding suggestions. The politics of fictive theories entails: viewing the political in terms of becoming

introduction / 15

rather than being (with Nietzsche, Bloch, Barthes, and Foucault) through finding the critical resources to resist all hypostatizations, whether temporal or epistemological; it means questioning the existing categories and organizations of the present (the critical-theoretical project); and vitally, it means seeing the world as unfixed and unfinished—as open (the utopian project). Fictive theories, then, can inform, guide, fabricate our desired futures, and it is to this task I aim the following chapters as a contribution.

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Part I Speculative Beginnings

The breeding of an animal which is entitled to make promises—is this not the paradoxical task which nature has set itself with respect to man? [. . .] But how much all this presupposes! [. . .] For that to be the case, how much man himself must have become calculable, regular, necessary, even to his own mind, so that finally he would be able to vouch for himself as future, in the way that someone making a promise does! Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, II, 2

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Chapter One Hobbes: Restraining Fictions

Nature it selfe cannot erre; and as men abound in copiousnesse of language; so they become more wise, or more mad than ordinary. . . . Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1968

I have argued thus far that all theorizing is a form of world-creation, and as such, is ineluctably fictive; but this does not mean that all modes of imagining tend toward creative possibility. This is the force of my claim that theories predicated upon epistemologies of the given (foundational modes of theorizing, or its epistemological “surrogates”) are always-already fictive, but fictive forms of thought that efface, negate, and forget their creative power in favor of their authoritative, and thus legislative and programmatic power. The “fictive” recognizes that foundational accounts are always and necessarily essentially narrational, imaginative, creative, and performative. The point of reading political theory with attention to its fictive groundings is to counter the negation that leads to a mode of theorizing that is legislative, characterized by authority and closure. One way of doing so is to find within that mode the representational sleight of hand that posits the given as such, as natural, or somehow necessary; and in so doing, to open that mode of theorizing to its own reflexive and creatively contingent moments. This is why I begin my exploration of the possibility of a deconstructive and utopian mode of political theorizing by working through Thomas Hobbes. The story that Hobbes tells, as conventionally narrated, is bleak and, despite the over seven hundred pages of Leviathan, surprisingly brief: the fundamental equality that exists among humans can be surmised from the equal capacity, if necessary, to kill one another. Given a world of scare resources, given each individual’s presumed preference for him or herself; given each individual’s right to judge what justice means in the absence of a sovereign political authority, an anarchic pre-political state prevails. There is no alternative: in order to prevent a life that would be “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short,” such subjects (at heart, Hobbes tells us, each one of us) would consent to an absolute political sovereign against whom there is neither a right of resistance, nor a right to question.1 Hobbes’s central concern is the excision of ambiguity, plural and competing meanings from the world. In this, even God, as intimation of the infinite, a realm beyond conceptualization, constitutes a rival. It is not simply that Hobbes’s Leviathan is a formidable exemplar of authority and closure in the practice of political theory; although it certainly is that. And I do not

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begin here simply to oppose, by arguing against, this literally monstrous construction. Neither does Hobbes represent, in some curiously perverse way, the utopian writing of an ideal commonwealth (he is too dark, disturbing, and oppressive for that). But neither does Hobbes stand in this book as a representation of utopia’s inversion, a dystopian and totalitarian nightmare (even as the political logic of his Leviathan forbids any questioning of the sovereign authority, and thus forbids any possibility of questioning the edges of the political community). Rather, the force of my argument in this chapter is that Hobbes exemplifies a logic of anti-utopianism itself, at the levels of ontology and epistemology, and in terms of his substantive political implications; and this while working within a fictive mode.2 Much, then, hinges on the crucial nexus between epistemology, representation, and intelligibility. This is an eminently political nexus. Representations of the world delineate what we can know about the world, and in so doing, make intelligible our political possibilities. My focus, then, is on the status and the effects of Hobbes’s particular way of making an ostensible “given”—nature, in this case—meaningful. In Hobbes’s persistent attempt to forcibly secure the stability of representations inheres a political logic of reduction and coercion. I explore this logic at various levels in Leviathan. After a brief exploration of the function of the state of nature exercise in political theory, I turn, in “Reading Hobbes Reading,” to tracing the ways in which Hobbes aims to persuade his readers that his rendition of the natural condition of humanity is the only possible reading. I then explore, in “Somatic Fictions,” Hobbes’s substantive claims concerning the material nature of the universe itself, the self, and how that self can know the world, through exploration of Hobbes’s construal of time and language. Hobbes seeks to foreclose possibility itself, ontologically, epistemologically, and politically. Despite his best efforts, ghosts nevertheless remain to haunt Hobbesian materialism; dreams threaten to undo both consciousness and conscience; the self who can promise—secure the future—is a fragile, fissured construct. I then discuss Hobbes’s explorations of the nature of knowledge as representation more broadly, and argue that there is in Hobbes a lateral tension wherein knowledge is both a naming and an invention of the given; and finally, I trace this tension through to the social contract and the nature of political representation in Hobbes. In each instance, pivotal for holding Hobbes’s authoritative political prescriptions together, Hobbes’s fictions aim toward restraint: but in tracing the shift from Hobbes’s assumption of representational stability, to a delineation of processes of stabilization, I trace the shift wherein the “always-already fictive” nature of the given is revealed. This is an important stage for the explorations of later chapters of this book, which argue that representational modes are always somehow post-representational, and so is an important moment in opening epistemologies of the given to their reflexive and contingent moments. However, that Hobbes exemplifies an anti-utopian logic while working within a fictive mode is perhaps less surprising than the conventional interpretive framework would assume. In many interpretations of Hobbes, particularly those that assume the “rational, self-interested individual” as the inescapable postulate and outcome of Hobbes’s work, there is a further reification involved, in the lack of attention given to the tensions that underlie such a reading.3 As Richard Kroll points out, “neoclassical texts [. . .] habitually reveal and examine the terms under which they construct themselves [. . .] their most distinctive device is to allude to and dramatize the reader’s

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necessarily contingent activity when faced with the text.”4 A different way of putting this is to propose that Hobbes knows the tension between the foundational and the inventive or fictional, creative and performative in his text. The logic of antiutopianism in Hobbes, then, is all the more serious. The fictive is always revealing: in the reading of Hobbes that follows, I trace the edges of the maneuvers by which the creative and performative task of the “artificing” of the political subject and the political community simultaneously reveals and denies its own status as fictive. Reading Hobbes, then, requires a kind of double-vision (that he is both aware of, and eager to elide into a single vision).5 To recall Barthes: Leviathan has been read as an exemplary lisible (readerly) text, wherein the reader seems indeed to be left with “no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text”; and in Hobbesian terms even the power of refusal is granted at a very high cost.6 And yet, Hobbes too can be read via the scriptable (writerly); this task means reactivating fictive traces. The object of my critique is a mode of theorizing that would efface those traces, which requires a reading strategy alert to them. Speculative States? The concerns of the early moderns certainly speak to the fissures of our “late” modern times.7 Then, as now, the intelligibility of the world, and the place of humanity within that world, and indeed, within the universe, could no longer be taken for granted. As William Connolly puts it, “[h]uman and non-human nature become material to work on. The world loses its earlier property as a text upon which the will of God is inscribed and through which humans can come to a more profound understanding of their proper place in the order of things.”8 The “project of philosophical atheism,” definitive of the aspiration of modernity to name and know itself in the face of God’s retreat from the world of humanity, is necessarily concomitant with a series of exciting openings.9 Throughout Europe, the intellectual and political landscape was radically re-shaped and irrevocably altered. In philosophy, skepticism and empiricism, a spirit of relentless questioning and of the privileging of the palpable rather than the metaphysical came to be articulated; in ethics, debates centered around new possibilities for human agency, autonomy, and will; in science, a confidence based, not so much around certain knowledge as the excitement of the venture still to come both opened the world as possibility, and configured the world as amenable to human shaping; in politics “the world turned upside down”—almost—as, radical and emancipatory ideas and practices challenged not only the medieval order of things, but also the emergent bourgeois, protestant order.10 The dynamics of modernity lie in the negotiation of competing tensions: possibility, flux, creativity coexist alongside a need for (a new) order, a re-founding, stability, control. The territory within which Hobbes is constructing his Leviathan is one in which the very conditions of knowledge and of political intelligibility are at stake and for the taking. It is in this context that a state of nature device is deployed. Its deployment can be seen as a secular successor to a kind of knowledge guaranteed by God. The use of a “state of nature” can be seen as a means of addressing, in the absence of a preordained meaning, the question of what it is to be human, and how political life should be ordered. Much, then, is at stake, concerning both the substantive concerns

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of political theory and the epistemological basis from which substantive claims emerge. Substantively, the state of nature has been conventionally invoked in political philosophy to provide answers to questions such as: to what ends should political life be directed? on what principle should politics operate? who should participate? how? In general terms, state of nature theses claim to be able to construct a rational and coherent political order that citizens are obligated to obey. Even if the state of nature is articulated critically in terms of existing society, as with Rousseau, the guiding impulse of such theses is to present and delimit the conditions of possibility of the political as such.11 The state of nature, then, aims to generate a form of knowledge that seeks authoritative and legislative status: seeking to articulate grounded conceptions of order/justice, its claims to knowledge are claims to power that work toward coherence, containment, and control. At the same time, however, what else can the state of nature be but a thought experiment, a heuristic fiction? Simultaneously foundational and fictional: epistemologically, the question that has been avoided, too quickly resolved, or passed over in silence, is not the state of nature, and its substantive implications, but the status of nature, and the theoretical implications of founding theory on fictions. For it cannot simply be coincidence, or purely a matter of the conventions of the time, that Hobbes (and later, Rousseau, and more problematically, Kant), theorists of reason (and therefore truth, knowledge, and right) and order (and therefore power and stability) had to begin by “laying all facts aside,” as Rousseau memorably wrote.12 These theorists began by entering a space of speculation and imagination to ground, and indeed, to inaugurate and to sustain the economy of the real. Perhaps the most striking manifestation of the narrative epistemology of political theory is in the social contract theorists use of “state(s) of nature” as a means to understand, to make known and, crucially, to make justifiable, conceptions of the political. The contention that the state of nature, the speculative space of founding, and the social contract generated from this space, was/is a fiction has been well established. David Hume, for example, referred to the “imaginary state which preceded society,” and argued in “Of the Original Contract” that it was absurd to infer binding political obligations from this fiction.13 Nevertheless, this kind of critique has tended not to invalidate the groundedness of the arguments of the social contract theorists, and even Hume can be seen to concede much of the substantive arguments of Hobbes and John Locke. In this chapter, and also in the following chapters on Rousseau and Kant, I want to pause at the absurdity that Hume impatiently brushed aside: the founding of a political theory on the basis of fictions. What kinds of fictionalizing do these imaginative and speculative spaces represent? Post-structuralist theorists are well attuned to the double-vision required to read the foundational and the fictional simultaneously (even as the perhaps occasionally over-earnest latter-day children of modernity we give too much credence to the stability of the former). For example, Judith Butler writes: “the political field is of necessity constructed through the production of a determining exterior [. . .] the very domain of politics constitutes itself through the production and naturalization of the ‘pre-’ or ‘non-’political.”14 The state of nature can certainly be read as one such “determining exterior” (but, of course, its production can be read, its necessity undermined). The natural, as Anna Yeatman explains, is “accorded a given ontological status” that

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determines the political.15 And indeed, the state of nature in Hobbes can be read as denoting essential or enduring characteristics of human nature.16 This is the predominant use of nature in Hobbes: at critical points in his argument, phrases like, “let him therefore consider with himself . . .,” clearly point toward the natural as a perennial, if submerged, condition that necessitates the restraining, educative, or the uncompromising force of the Sovereign of the Leviathan.17 Introspection, evident here, is also important to the force of Hobbes’s argument, and I return to this point. On this account, however, the connective movement between the natural state and the political state is one of direct and necessary, but inverse opposition: the “artificiall body” will remedy the defects and willfulness of the natural condition. In this sense, it is the essential (and essentialist) primacy of the natural condition that provides the structural, and by negative necessity, the substantive conditions of possibility of the political. The state of nature thus underwrites what Kirsty McClure, following Sheldon Wolin, has called the “architectonic impulse of the theoretician”: it is the foundational act that underlies the “world-creating” of political philosophy.18 However, following Wolin further, one might say that nature is a “metaphor” standing in for a “methodological requirement.”19 Inherent to the state of nature is a pivot between truth and invention. Is nature, the natural condition, ontologically given or/and a fiction? As I have suggested, the question that has been too quickly resolved, or passed over in silence, is not the state of nature, and its substantive implications, but the status of nature, and the theoretical implications of founding theory on fictions. The foundational and the fictional cannot simply be opposed; and so, the movement I trace in this chapter leaves behind an unproblematically “given” and an unproblematically “fictional” opposition, which recurs in both analytic and post-structuralist readings. Rather, I challenge, suspend, and transform it. The fictive is beyond such oppositions. Read in this way, nature affects a primary theoretical disruption: it becomes both empty and excessive, and ontotheological tales of origins and essences become precisely that: tales. This is not to say that stories such as Hobbes’s are “simply” false; but it is to negate foundational claims at the very moment they are made. And if philosophy’s claims to truth, which ground the power claims of politics, are simply the results of “telling stories,” then what happens when not only the story is changed, but different ways of telling stories (based on different epistemologies, different modes of representation) can be articulated? Reading Hobbes reading nature is a speculative venture into this reconfigured territory. Reading Hobbes Reading In the movement between the state of nature and the political state, then, inheres a sleight of hand: achieved not, perhaps, with smoke and mirrors, but certainly by means of some representational trickery that posits an exteriority as given, as necessary, and yet as always-already itself a form of world-creation. Hobbes is alert to this tension. But world-creating takes many and strange forms, often disconcerting, uncanny, and bewildering. Writing at the start of the modern age, before central organizing oppositions of the age have become entrenched and thus rendered invisible, what is fascinating about Hobbes is his refusal to oppose nature and artifice. This is

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evident in the Introduction to Leviathan, a formidable statement of intent. From the very start, politics is construed as a natural artifice. The opening sentence of Leviathan insists on this: “NATURE (the Art whereby God hath made and governes the World) is by the Art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal.”20 Immediately, the natural is precisely not a given that is prior to or more essential than the artificial. Rather, to artifice, to create, to shape, is viewed by Hobbes as a natural capacity. (Perhaps whenever we read “artificial” as a noun, we should read instead the process of artificing, as a verb.) Hobbes’s Leviathan, and his Leviathan—both text and sovereign political authority—come from nothing that could be articulated beforehand, no a priori: “They resemble that fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the creation.”21 So how, then, can Hobbes presume to write a natural condition, a state of nature, as something that is given? Interestingly, his language is first of all textual, but moves toward the explicitly performative, and toward the juridical. First, for Hobbes, the natural can indeed be read: There is another saying not of late understood [. . .] and that is, Nosce teipsum, Read thy self: [which was meant to teach us] that for the similitude of the thoughts, and Passions of one man, to the thoughts and Passions of another, whosoever looketh into himself, and considereth what he doth, when he does think, opine, reason, hope, fear &c; and upon what grounds; he shall thereby read and know, what are the thoughts, and Passions of all other men, upon the like occasions [. . .] He that is to govern a whole nation, must read in himself, not this, or that particular man; but Man-kind.22

This is Hobbes’s crucial statement in deciphering the natural state: read and know. Metaphors of textuality and representation ground and produce epistemological security. Hobbes interestingly and conspicuously mistranslates “nosce teipsum” as “read thyself ” rather than the more usual “know thyself.” Tracy Strong points out, Hobbes “goes on to suggest that such reading will cause the characters of our character to become ‘legible.’ Reading oneself is then Hobbes’s model for knowledge.”23 But what happens when “nature is implacably an artifice to be read?”24 What happens to the “givenness” of nature itself? Bruno Latour has suggested that the nature/culture opposition is itself productive in a complex way: he asks, did nature ever stand for “the realm of the given [. . .] defined in contrast to an artifactual realm of culture?” The opposition itself produces “creatures and concepts that are neither.”25 Latour provocatively suggests, complicating a nature/culture dualism from within, that humanity is a “weaver of morphisms,” which is to say, that humanity and the intelligibility of the natural themselves are, paradoxically, beyond nature/culture oppositions. But is not Hobbes pointing, however obliquely, to this very point, prior to that oppositions’ epistemic and political power? If the natural/artificial opposition is disrupted—if one inhabits the other, or if indeed “to artifice” is prior to the given— then what of those other oppositions that are laterally associated: the given/the created; the real/the fictional; necessity/freedom; determinism/agency? I find in Hobbes a most curious process of demonstration: Hobbes privileges a “given” that he must make intelligible before he can write; he recognizes his artificing in writing the nature of humans, yet upon this builds an authoritative and authoritarian politics. The implications of this palimpsest reverberate throughout modern political (authoritative, legislative)

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modes of theorizing, and the possibility of representing otherwise. What else have post-structuralist critiques been but an unearthing of this moment of contingency at the heart of foundationalist thought? Nevertheless, reading Hobbes also complicates the parallel that post-structuralism has drawn between foundational thought and closure and contingent thought and openness in political theorizing. For Hobbes is certainly aware of and alert to the contingency at the core of his Leviathan. So how, then, does Hobbes move from contingency to authoritarianism? The epistemological dilemma of what we can know is foregrounded at the heart of Hobbes’s political project. As I have suggested, nature comes to stand for the intelligibility of selves. Reading the natural is presented as a contemplative introspection, giving the “reader” access to the truth of selves. Followed by an imaginative comparison, an account of natural man should be generated. However, figures of unintelligibility quickly problematize this reading process: “the characters of men’s hearts, blotted and confounded as they are, with dissembling, lying, counterfeiting, and erroneous doctrines, are legible onely to him that searcheth hearts.”26 The problem of reading man is dual. First, idiosyncratic biases lie in the self who reads; but the self who reads is also the self who is read, a counterfeit, social person who lacks the necessary skills to render humanity intelligible, who interprets inadequately, or, as Hobbes puts it, “decypher[s] without a key, and [is] for the most part deceived, by too much trust, or by too much diffidence; as he reads, is himself a good or evil man.”27 Is there prior to the counterfeit a genuine, original, honest account of humanity that could act as a key to crack humanity’s coding? The difficulty of finding a vantage point “outside the text” of humanity is evident: when the nature of man is both the “matter” of the Leviathan as well as its “artificer,” and when to artifice is a natural capacity, we no longer have a simple dualism, but instead, a complex dialectical structure where nature can no longer stand as ontologically primary. What, then, is the “key” that allows Hobbes to “decypher” the natural? He (literally) closes his introduction by invoking a different terminology to supplement the textual metaphors relied upon thus far: “when I have set down my own reading orderly, and perspicuously, the pains left another, will be onely to consider, if he find not the same in himself. For this kind of Doctrine, admitteth no other Demonstration.”28 Hobbes’s story at this point becomes “performative” and “intellectually coercive.”29 Hobbes is enforcing an acceptance of his demonstration: the juridical connotations of “admitteth” include both to concede and to confess. As Silver puts it, “we need only to read to think we understand; for Hobbes leaves no reference or circumstance of the argument to the readers imagination,” by “so tightly regulat[ing] the course of discussion, defining, reiterating, expanding, and delineating.”30 But the acceptance is not simply a linguistic assent, but a somatic assent too. The Oxford English Dictionary lists several meanings for “admit.”31 First, as the “action of a voluntary agent,” it denotes permission, acceptance: “allow to enter.” Does the truth of Hobbes’s account inhabit the self? A secondary meaning listed is intriguing; figuratively, the following is listed: “To consent to the performance, doing, realization, or existence of; to allow, permit, grant.” These meanings are recorded as far back as the fifteenth century, and are thus available to Hobbes: and “to consent to the performance of ” the ostensible grounds of Leviathan is a remarkable reading, affectively entwining the reader’s response with his social actions, as he performs the “truth” of

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Hobbes’s account. As an “involuntary agent,” the recorded meanings are similar: to be a “channel of admission,” to “afford entrance to.” This all points to the necessary effects on the reader of Hobbes as the reader of man, and the nature of acceptance and embodiment of that reading by subjects, by his audience. Silver puts it thus: Hobbes’s “urgent concern [is] not simply for the intelligibility of his ideas, but for their admission by the reader”: and that admission is not purely an intellectual one.32 (On being inhabited by authoritarian ideas, or ideals of any sort, “spooks,” in Stirner’s idiosyncratic use, see chapter three, throughout.) Rather than simply assenting to a reading process, the connotations of “admitteth” are palpable and even bodily, affectively inhabiting Hobbesian subjects, in a strange kind of possession wherein Hobbesian subjects are embodied as such, inhabiting a fictive space posited by Hobbes. I suggested at the start of this chapter that closed, juridical, authoritative modes of theorizing the political can be opened by attention to their reflexive and fictive moments of grounding. In my exploration of the status of nature in Hobbes, I have suggested that the shift from reading and representation to “demonstration” is one such moment, wherein Hobbes privileges a “given” that he must make intelligible before he can write; and indeed, he recognizes his inventive artificing of humans is itself the vital originary gesture. It is time now to turn to substantive issues, of the restraining effects of fictive moments in the rest of Hobbes’s Leviathan, in his delineation of the “matter” of the Leviathan. Somatic Fictions If the state of nature is enigmatic, cryptic, indecipherable without strategies that render it intelligible, then such strategies will have a political import in delineating possibility. What, then, is the nature of nature for Hobbes? What possibilities reside in the ways Hobbes renders the universe intelligible for us? Put otherwise, what possibilities does Hobbes inscribe in nature? This is a significant question. Central to the project of the Leviathan is Hobbes’s “resolutive-compositive” method.33 The audacious proposition put forward by Hobbes is that the constituent components of the universe, of society, of humanity could be discerned, and recombined to form a revised (not, as we shall see, new) whole suited to “commodious living”: the Leviathan. In the Book of Job, Leviathan is described as a fearsome, awe-inspiring monster: “His heart is as firm as stone; yea, as hard as a piece of nether millstone. When he raiseth himself up, the mighty are afraid: by reason of breakings they purify themselves. [. . .] Upon the earth there is not his like, who is made without fear. He beholdeth all high things: he is king over all the children of pride.”34 This image, indeed, perfectly evokes the disciplining strength of the Leviathan as Sovereign. The Leviathan subdues the unruly matter of humanity; but as a composite image, is made out of that very matter. This poses the question of what kinds of imaginings or creations are possible in the Hobbesian universe? What kind of monster is the Leviathan, and how is it to be distinguished from other, spectral, creatures, such as ghosts, dæmons, and phantasms? Hobbes gives one oblique answer: “a man can fancy Shapes he never saw; making up a Figure out of divers creatures; as the Poets make their Centaures, Chimæras, and other Monsters never seen.”35 The monstrous Leviathan, according to this answer,

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can only be imagined or created because all its constituent parts are given in advance. “Fancy” or imagination constructs nothing new or other. Hobbes, it seems, would have us believe that the Leviathan, as a composite image constructed out of the “divers parts” of humanity in motion, is a mere reconfiguration of “the given” and nothing more: in this maneuver, I shall argue, inheres the deepest level of the logic of antiutopianism, where everything in the Hobbesian rendition of intelligibility works toward the preclusion of possibility. This needs much interpretive work on Hobbes’s part, to which I shortly turn. Nevertheless, a different response is possible: is there, rather, something perversely, strangely, quite magical about the creation of the Leviathan? Consider, as a lateral comparison with Hobbes’s resolutive-compositive method, Jane Bennett’s suggestive account of magic, drawing on Paracelsus, a fifteenth-century alchemist and medic: for Paracelsus, magic was a means by which the elements of the world could be made to form new alliances. Magic broke down the usual structure of a thing and then reconfigured the newly released parts with each other or with the disaggregated bits of other (former) wholes. The essence of such magic was mobility or the morphing transformations from one state, space, or form to another.36

There is, of course, a larger story that could be told here, concerning the shift from alchemical understandings of nature to Newtonian versions, wherein nature becomes passive, inert material to be worked upon, which could be further drawn out to suggest that a utopian understanding of nature writes a reconfigured alchemical vitality back in.37 What I find specifically productive for now, however, is recognition of an underlying conceptual shift that the comparison provokes. Magic, on this account, is explicitly a performative reshaping of the world, a creative way of knowing the world that always keeps open the possibility of “new alliances.” Magic is precisely fictive. For Hobbes, on the contrary, the magical reshaping of the world is effaced, as he aims to remove from the world the possibility of things other and new. Contrary to the plural becomings that magic evokes, the stasis of Hobbes’s “resolutive-compositive” method is neatly encapsulated in two associated claims: first, that “Imagination and Memory, are but one thing”; and second, “the Present onely has a being in Nature; things Past have a being in the Memory onely, but things to come have no being at all; the Future being but a fiction of the mind.”38 These are crucial moments in the work that Hobbes does to obviate the possibility of seeing the world otherwise. For if the imagination can only repeat what it already knows in memory, then the very idea of humanity as creative is precluded. Hobbes endeavors to repeat this gesture at the very molecular level of the stuff of the universe itself (for as we shall see, the matter of humanity, nature, and the universe, is the same). Similarly with the second claim, “the Present onely has a being in Nature”: the fabric and texture of the universe is such that, Hobbes would claim, alterity and potentiality are excised. And the only kind of fictionalizing he can allow for is a kind that will forever repeat that which it already knows. Magic allows for multiplicity; Hobbes allows for a singular, unitary story. But does this hold? What are the constituent parts of Hobbes’s universe? Hobbes’s central concern, then, is the creation of a bounded, finite ontology, and his metaphysical materialism, his conception the universe as composed of “matter in

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motion” is core to this: The World, (I mean not the Earth Onely [. . .] but the Universe, that is, the whole masse of things that are) is Corporeall, that is to say, Body; and hath the dimensions of Magnitude, namely, Length, Bredth, and Depth [. . .] and consequently every part of the Universe, is Body, and that which is not Body, is no part of the Universe: And because the Universe is All, that which is no part of it is Nothing; and consequently no where.39

This key statement of Hobbes works toward ruling out certain kinds of possibilities motivating human action (and remember, my concern here is with intelligibility, the rendering intelligible of possibility in the world-creating of theory through its strategies of making that world present to us). As we shall see, two crucial moments Hobbes aims to contain or discipline or render meaningless are the negation of ghosts (as cyphers of things past) and dreams (as cyphers of alternatives and alterity within the present and the future). But what, for now, is the significance of Hobbes’s materialism? His concern with corporeality is intriguing; for Hobbes, that which is corporeal signifies that which is real. Contrary to common misunderstandings that construe wind, for example, as non-corporeal, for Hobbes wind and breathe are also bodies, because they are part of the Universe, not “Spirits.”40 He vigorously denies any ontological status to those “Idols of the brain, which represent Bodies to us, where they are not, as in a Looking-glasse, in a Dream, or to a Distempered brain waking, they are [. . .] nothing; Nothing at all, I say, where they seem to bee.”41 Hence: “the proper signification of Spirit in common speech, is either a subtile, fluid and invisible Body, or a Ghost, or other Idol or Phantasme of the Imagination,” the latter of which, as incorporeal intangibles, impalpable, simply do not exist for Hobbes.42 The import of this, when read through to human bodies, is to deny a Cartesian mind/body dualism, whereby the mind is the locus and source of (incorporeal) agency, ideas, and freedom in contradistinction to a realm of material necessity. As he conceives of the universe as matter in motion, so too humanity can be inscribed within nature as such. This has caused no little concern amongst Hobbesian scholars who have worked within an interpretative framework that assumed such a mind/ body split. Samantha Frost has argued that by reading a mind/body dualism into Hobbes’s theory of the human subject, interpreters work to “safeguard a self-reflective subject and a voluntarist account of political action.”43 I have gestured to this problem in opening this chapter: those readings that assume the “rational, self-interested individual” as the inescapable postulate and outcome of Hobbes’s work neglect to pay attention to the processes by which that subject is constructed as such. Frost’s reading is a significant advance, as she rightly contends that “contrary to the misgivings that undergird twentieth-century rationalist readings of his work, Hobbes does not argue that desire and fear, and thus our actions, are simply the mechanistic reactions of an individual to environmental stimuli. Thinking-bodies are specifically thinkingbodies.”44 There are grave problems with Hobbes’s account of the human subject; but those problems are not to do with the materialism of his universe, but with its foreclosure of possibility. To draw out the logic and dangers of anti-utopianism in Hobbes, it is time now to turn to the body, and what it can know. While my reading of the Hobbesian subject is a critical one, I also want to remain alert to potentialities in his

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anti-essentialist and embodied account of subjectivity: for how else could we begin to understand a fictive subjectivity (a subjectivity attuned and alert to the future potential, the very temporal but yet material shivers and thrills of anticipation and dread, to say the least)? This means giving attention to the ways that Hobbes somatically disciplines his thinking-bodies, and interrupting the effects Hobbes aims to secure on those bodies. Human bodies, for Hobbes, exist as matter and nothing else. Interestingly prefiguring Nietzsche’s claim that “soul is only a word for something about the body,” agency, memory, and will, those aspects of the human self that are in many theoretical frameworks associated with the cognitive rather than the affective, or the ideal and rational rather than the carnal are in fact for Hobbes a manifestation of the bodily and somatic.45 Recent critical-theoretical work has turned back toward the body, interrogating the work that mind/body hierarchical dualisms have done. Elizabeth Grosz, for example, speaks of a “refiguring of the body [. . .] so that it can now be understood as the very stuff of subjectivity.”46 For, as Grosz continues, “the body is a peculiar thing. [. . .] If bodies are objects or things, they are like no others, for they are centers of perspective, insight, reflection, desire and agency. [. . .] Bodies are not inert; they function interactively and productively. They act and react. They generate what is new, unsurprising, unpredictable”—and so, in this unpredictability and newness, for Hobbes, those bodies need to be disciplined.47 In what ways? Subjects feel and thus know the world through the body. For Hobbes, from the most simple of sensual feelings, to the most complex train of thoughts, “there is no conception in a [man’s] mind, which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of Sense.”48 Sense is tangible: “The cause of Sense, is the Externall Body, or Object, which presseth the organ proper to each Sense, either immediately, as in Taste and Touch; or mediately, as in Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling: which pressure, by the mediation of Nerves, and other strings, and membranes of the body, continued inwards to the Brain, and Heart, causeth there a resistance, or counterpressure.”49 In this visceral depiction of the exterior to the interior of the subject, from object to subject and back again, Hobbes exemplifies Grosz’s depiction of “theorists of corporeal inscription,” who make lucid, and, indeed, palpable, “the inflection of the mind into body, of body into mind [. . .] problematizing and rethinking the relations between the inside and outside of the subject, its psychical interior and its corporeal exterior [. . .] not the fundamental identity or reducibility but the torsion of one into the other.”50 The Hobbesian subject makes sense of the world through material negotiations. Provoking or underlying any sort of consciousness (or indeed, conscience), “Vitall motion” differentiates human “matter” from other matter. Vital motion is not at all metaphysical, but is, instead, simply the movement toward that which aids life, and away from that which hinders: “This Motion, which is called Appetite, and for the apparence of it, Delight, and Pleasure, seemeth to be, a corroboration of Vitall motion, and a help thereunto; [. . .] and the contrary, Molesta, Offensive, from hindering, and troubling the motion Vitall.”51 For Hobbes, then, the processes of deliberation and willing are somatic: agency consists in that bodily negotiation of the matter of the world; and willing, the “rational” moment par excellence, is simply the end point of this negotiation: “In Deliberation, the last Appetite, or Aversion, [. . .] is that wee call the WILL.”52 In this rendition of the matter of bodies, Hobbes seeks to find the true, basic motion of humanity. The matter of the universe inscribes and circumscribes the

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matter of humanity, shaping and limiting the desiring animal. It is in this very maneuver that Hobbes aims to circumscribe or secure humanity within a perpetual present. This comes across most clearly in Hobbes’s discussion of the faculty of imagination. As the interior of subjectivity is created through the encounters with exteriority, the makings of interiority are fashioned. Hobbes puts it this way: “For after the object is removed, or the eye shut, wee still retain an image of the thing seen, although more obscure than when we see it.”53 In that the external “images” itself on the internal, Hobbes can elide imagination and memory: “IMAGINATION therefore is nothing but decaying sense.”54 The future can, for Hobbes, be nothing but a reworking of the present configuration, as “Imagination” can only rework “those things which have been formerly perceived by Sense.”55 Nevertheless, this attempt to somatically discipline and bind the subject is fissured in interesting ways. The sensual is not consolidated as Hobbes would wish, but is itself manipulatable: “as pressing, rubbing, or striking the Eye, makes us fancy a light,” the senses themselves can be deceived.56 Differentiation between subject and object needs to be established, rather than being self-evident, since the “apparence” of an “objective reality” is, “Fancy, the same waking, that dreaming.”57 The very definition of sense contributes to a radical loosening of the ontology that Hobbes would rather claim to be stable and unquestionable, and the matter of humanity becomes strangely fluid and abstract: “seeming, or fancy, is that which men call Sense”; or, “Sense, in all cases, is nothing els but originall fancy.”58 The complex of imagination, sense, fancy, and “apparence” resounds strangely in modern ears; and this defamiliarization is itself productive. “Apparence,” indeed, has connotations of both definiteness as well as falsity. So, despite the substantial nature of matter, the body remains a manipulable entity, consciousness itself is vulnerable, given no privileged epistemological status. For while there is indeed matter, a “visceral register” as Connolly has recently put it, “facts” that could be gleaned from that material are, to echo Nietzsche, precisely what there are not.59 If “Fancy” or thought is “the same waking as dreaming,” then Hobbes implicitly suggests that the very distinction between sleeping and dreaming is a constructed, rather than natural, distinction. Indeed, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogical excavations of how humanity has come to be the kind of creature capable of making a promise, thus rendering ourselves accountable for future actions, or securing, in some way, the future self the same as the self at the present of the promise, he has argued that the production of the distinction between waking “fancy” and dreaming “fancy” is crucial. Joshua Dienstag summarizes well: men of a “primeval” period (Urzeit) do not distinguish, or are incapable of distinguishing, as we do, between what they see while waking and sleeping [. . .]. Unable to banish dreams to their sleeping hours, they suffered (or enjoyed) them all the time, as visions, and reacted to them as sleepwalkers do. They could not perceive the “essential difference” between the two states that later people imagine. [. . .] By postulating consciousness as the barrier between waking and dreaming, and as something that has happened over the course of human history, Nietzsche argues that the wall between the two states has been built over time. [. . .] Nietzsche begins to wonder how these differences came about, how human beings came to possess consciousness. The historical account that responds to this query turns out to provide a narrative of morality and violence, a monstrous plot . . .60

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To recap thus far: I am arguing that in the very ways that Hobbes makes the universe intelligible inheres a deeply, profoundly anti-utopian logic. I have argued so far that fictionalizing is unavoidable. But the disciplinary strategies whereby Hobbes seeks to exclude certain types of experiences is indeed problematic and telling. So, my attention to both the status ascribed to the fiction of humanity as matter in motion and, just as importantly, to the effects secured by that fiction, is crucial in interrupting those effects. Is the somatic, the bodily matter of the universe, haunted by the possibility of other ways of experiencing the universe, other possibilities of intelligibility? The Hobbesian subject is not natural but a somatic fiction, as the construction of consciousness and thus conscience demonstrates. Hobbes’s attempt to limit the somatic experience of the body to the present and past only is symptomatic of the logic of anti-utopianism. The dangers of dreaming, for Hobbes, reveal how the sensual, experiential subject needs to be disciplined into rejecting as impossible night-time fancies and visions. For the distinction between sleep and waking is undoubtedly problematic and tricky for Hobbes: “because waking I often observe the Absurdity of Dreames, but never dream of the Absurdities of my waking thoughts; I am well satisfied, that being awake, I know I dreame not, though when I dreame I think myself awake.”61 The construction of consciousness and thus conscience is abbreviated and encapsulated in Hobbes’s remedying or entrenching of the distinction between sleeping and waking fancies: “For he that taketh pains, and industriously layes himself to sleep, in case any uncouth and exorbitant fancy come unto him, cannot easily think it other than a Dream.”62 Hobbes’s fear of the world of dreams, and their “uncouth and exorbitant fancies” provide a lateral fissure through which the construction of the Hobbesian subject can be glimpsed precisely as construction. The meanings of “exorbitant” that would have been available to Hobbes are similar to the present: “deviating from a specified rule or principle”; “wandering from the subject”; and following the term “exorbitas,” from Roman law there is: “Anomalous, not coming within the intended scope of a law”; “abnormal, not in accordance with general principle.” “Uncouth,” on the other hand, has epistemological implications that would be lost on present readers: the OED cites the following, now obsolete, meanings, “of facts or matters of knowledge: Unknown; also, not certainly known, uncertain.” A secondary meaning is listed as that “with which one is not acquainted or familiar,” which passes into the ontological sense of “places not commonly known or frequented, solitary, desolate, [. . .] rough” (an apt definition of the state of nature both as Book One and as concentrated in chapter 13).63 This uncouth and exorbitant place of imagination that Hobbes aims to contain in dreamtime points to a “deviating” or deviant subject, an “anomalous” self unrestrained by principles and laws; and a subject who cannot be known, who, indeed, ruptures the conceptual resources by which subjectivity pulls itself together as such, is constructed to be responsible, accountable, regular. As William Connolly has pointed out, rather than seeing “the self-interested individual,” as the problem, “it comes closer to being the solution that Hobbes offers for the problem he identifies”; and further, “every element in the Hobbesian system functions in its way to pull the self together.”64 Disciplining the subject out of the anomaly of taking dreaming seriously constructs the rule-governed, accountable subject. And yet, this is not via the somatic, for what else are dreams but another way of negotiating and experiencing the

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world? As the dream-time imaginings of the subject refigure the material (perhaps magically), there is an anticipation of Ernst Bloch’s utopian insight: “We live surrounded by possibility, not merely by presence. In the prison of mere presence, we could not even move nor even breathe.”65 More importantly for the moment, entrenching into consciousness the distinction between awake and asleep forms of dreaming suggests that personation is itself feigned. Nietzsche points to this insight: “actually, the waking human being is only clear about the fact he is awake thanks to the rigid and regular web of concepts, and for that reason he sometimes comes to believe that he is dreaming if once that web of concepts is torn apart by art.”66 Nietzsche crucially points toward the importance of intelligibility as conceptual creation; and further, to the necessary interconnectedness of dreaming and other forms of creative imaginings in maintaining the openness of the future as future (more of which in chapters four and five). The crucial tension that structures Book One of Leviathan, between defining the given or that which is the natural, or creating out of nothing, cannot be resolved by examination of the subject: on this account, the subject “beneath” to society is a strangely amorphous or even anomalous creature indeed. Hobbes reads “man”; but there is no tangible, hard, forming “real” under the complex of sense, imagination, fancy, and appearance. Bodies indeed matter; but intelligibility is artificed. It must be created. This suggests that when humanity puts a face on for the world, humanity constructs itself as such. Personation is itself a fiction—if we are artifice all the way down, then the ways in which that artifice is rendered intelligible is crucial. Ghosts, Phantasms, and dreams, nevertheless, remain inscribed in the Hobbesian text, if not as matter, then certainly as a disturbance or ruffle or fold through which something other than the foreclosure of the present can be glimpsed. Representational Trickery Revisited Let me begin to pull the political importance of this reading together. Rather than a representation of a true account of humanity, Hobbes’s text is post-representational: by this I mean rather than simply recording the given, Hobbes constructs the given as such, and is performative rather than referential. This has an important political resonance. The social contract in the Leviathan, the covenant that constructs the Leviathan, is described by Hobbes as follows: each individual should “conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men that may reduce all their wills to one” by each individual giving up their rights over their own person to institute and thus create the sovereign or “Mortall God.”67 Given that “willing” is somatic, or the last stage in deliberation, the institution of the political on this account is a violent matter. It is precisely this violence to which Nietzsche gestures when he writes, the breeding of an animal which is entitled to make promises—is this not the paradoxical task which nature has set itself with respect to man? [. . .] But how much all this presupposes! [. . .] how much man himself must have become calculable, regular, necessary, even to his own mind, so that finally he would be able to vouch for himself as future, in the way that someone making a promise does!’68

“Vouching for the future” in this sense means guaranteeing that the stability of selfrepresentation will not change. It means that Hobbesian subjects believe in their

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referential fixity, precluding the possibility of becoming other.69 But before Hobbes can secure this, he has some more work to do in stabilizing or constructing that very referential fixity: epistemological representation and political representation are curiously related. We have already seen that Hobbes rejects somatic alterity, dreams, and ghosts, in order to construct a “perpetual present” of referential fixity. What dreams and ghosts, and indeed, God and the future, all have in common is their resistance to conceptualization within that present: ghosts attest to temporal complexities as well as the motivating affects of the intangible. Hobbes is very clear that language can only inscribe the material: Whatsoever we imagine, is Finite. Therefore there is no Idea, or conception of anything we call Infinite. No man can have in his mind an Image of infinite magnitude; nor conceive infinite swiftness, infinite time, or infinite force, of infinite power. When we say anything is infinite, we signifie onely, that we are not able to conceive the ends, and bounds of the thing named; having no Conception of the thing, but of our own inability. And therefore the name of God is used, not to make us conceive him; (for he is Incomprehensible; and his greatnesse, and power are unconceivable;) [. . .] Whatsoever we can conceive, has been perceived first by sense, either all at once, or by parts; a man can have no thought, representing anything not subject to sense. No man can therefore conceive anything but he must conceive it in some place; and indued with some determinate magnitude.70

Sokoloff neatly puts it thus: “the future exceeds materiality,” and hence, for Hobbes, can only ever be a dangerous “fiction of the mind.”71 Again, the Hobbesian foreclosure is nevertheless evident here, as he excises from language the possibility of difference and alterity. The correct representation of things is critical for the Hobbesian project. Much of the natural condition is sensual, pre-linguistic, and language is given the critical task of constructing our understanding of the world (first individually, then collectively). The meaning of words in the natural state is, nevertheless, radically unstable. Language confronts the paradoxically empty and excessive nature. Empty, because there is nothing in nature to point toward a “correct” meaning: “for seeing all names are imposed to signifie our conceptions; and all our affections are but conceptions; when we conceive the same things differently; we can hardly avoyd different naming of them.”72 Nature is excessive, because of the plethora of meanings that can be imposed. The status of language prior to the social contract is as paradoxical as the status of the natural condition itself, as can be seen from these examples, first on the use of positive names, and second, on the use of language in thought. Naming is used to “mark somewhat which is in nature, or may be feigned in the mind of man, as Bodies that are, or may be conceived to be; or of Bodies, the properties that are, or may be feigned to be.”73 The tension between inherence and invention or counterfeit is made more evident in this example: “when imagining any thing whatsoever, wee seek all the possible effects, that can by it be produced [. . .] In summe, the Discourse of the Mind, when it is governed by Designe, is nothing but Seeking, or the faculty of Invention.”74 According to this account, causality is itself a human and linguistic fabrication. Much, then, relies upon Hobbes’s linguistic philosophy. What is crucial to note here, however, is that nature and science are analogous here: before nature can be read it must be written; and before science (linguistic philosophy) can be read,

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again, it must be inscribed in nature. Hobbes’s concern, rather than the correct representation of things, is instead the forcible stabilization of representation itself; and this constitutes rationality itself. For Hobbes, understanding is “nothing else, but conception caused by Speech.”75 Thus, reason consists of “not the finding of the summe, and truth of one, or a few consequences, remote from first definition and settled significations of names; but to begin at these.”76 With the right use of words, the Hobbesian ontology can be bounded, made finite. How does this affect the possibility of the social contract? In fact, the processes of securing the representation of words and the representation of the subject are similar, and similarly performative. Christopher Pye puts it like this: “The ‘Feigned person’ of the sovereign is capable of fully embodying any individual in the state because each individual is already a self-impersonator in a sense—a masked and mediated representation of himself.”77 The representational sleight of hand wherein naming is also invention is mirrored in the political representational sleight of hand of the social contract. Nevertheless, recognizing this means recognizing, not the necessity of the social contract, but its violence at the conceptual and political levels. As Bernasconi has pointed out, “in the Hobbesian state of nature, it seems that words can mean one thing today and another tomorrow. This would not only apply to a word like ‘justice’ or even a word like ‘good,’ but to every word. However, if words can mean whatever one wants them to mean, one’s promises are undone at the time of their formulation.”78 As Hobbes writes, For these words of Good, Evill and Contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: There being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common Rule of Good and Evill, to be taken from the nature of objects themselves; but from the person of the man (where there is no Common-wealth;) or, (in a Common-wealth,) from the Person that representeth it [. . .] whom, men disagreeing shall by consent set up, and make his sentence the Rule thereof.79

Thus, the meanings that the political contract secures are in no way inherently necessary, but pragmatically so. The political, on this account, is pure creation. This lends a slightly different nuance to Hobbes’s much-quoted assertion that, “Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.”80 The “unity of the Common-wealth” depends upon the people contracting to create the sovereign; but since it is the sovereign who determines meaning, this act is only valid retroactively: it is thus unsecured (as Rousseau would put it, discussed in chapter two, “the effect must become the cause”). In a similar context, Derrida writes of this structure: “The signature invents the signer. The signer can only authorize him- or herself to sign once he or she has come to the end, if one can say this, of his or her own signature, in a sort of fabulous retroactivity.”81 There is violence on every level, here: in the construction of the subject (securing a man); linguistic violence; and the threat of physical force, as Hobbes recognizes the purely arbitrary character of his construction. The status of the theoretical enterprise, for Hobbes, becomes one of construction, rather than of analysis; the status of the real, or the problem of reference, becomes a linguistic violence; and the logic of the construction of the political is shown to be aporetic, not linked by necessity, and preceded by a catachrestic narrative that simply tells of its impossibility. The nature of the Hobbesian state of nature and social contract, then,

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for it to secure its own self-reproducing future, would need to believe in its own referential fixity, whereas Hobbes reveals the processes of securing such fixity to be violent. Toward a conclusion: Hobbes’s representation is fundamentally performative; but the nature of his “demonstration” is perhaps similar to the nature of the conjuring trick. Utopia(n materialism), needing to always keep open the possibility of “new alliances,” needs a different kind of magic. I have suggested that world-creating takes many and strange forms: in an eerie reshaping of what his spectators believe to be the givens of their reality, Philip Pullman’s conjuror (inflected, for sure, by a certain Nietzsche?) speaks to this moment: He didn’t just perform tricks; he turned flowers into goldfish bowls, plucked cards from the empty air, and made solid silver candlesticks disappear just as ordinary magicians did, but the tricks were a means to an end in his performance, and that was the creation of a world. It was a world in which nothing was fixed, everything was changeable; in which identities merged and dissolved, qualities such as hard and soft, up and down and sorrow and joy changed into their opposites in the twinkling of an eye and became meaningless, where the only reliable guide was suspicion, the only constant theme mistrust.82

The conjuring trick, nevertheless, ends in a puff of smoke, and Kroll suggests something similar for Hobbes’s performative demonstration: Hobbes’s rhetorical practice in Leviathan reveals a Hobbes whose geometrical and demonstrative urge is belied by his assumption that the reader’s assent to the entire edifice of his argument is provisional. Because Hobbes treats as unique the workings of his own mind evinced in his treatise, they can only achieve suasive force when the reader provisionally accepts the analogy between his own and Hobbes’s mental fictions. At the end of Leviathan, indeed, Hobbes releases the reader from absolute submission to his argument, just as he sees himself as now free to continue with other, and different, projects.83

The forcible demonstration ends; and revealing the fictions that make Hobbes’s theory work simultaneously effaces any epistemological status to the closure of the political, and interrupts the effects that Hobbes would aim to secure. In chapter two, I refer to this post-representational moment as “catachrestic,” and suggest that the implications point toward there being no meaning that is proper to the political.

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Chapter Two Rousseau: Conceiving the Inconceivable

HAMM: Nature has forgotten us. CLOV: There’s no more nature. HAMM: No more nature! You exaggerate. CLOV: In the vicinity. Samuel Beckett, “Endgame,” The Complete Dramatic Works

What lessons have I derived from reading Hobbes, the theorist of referential fixity, as a cautionary tale, delineating the logic and the dangers of anti-utopianism? First, that such fixity is always feigned, always-already artificed; second, that alterity, potentiality, and temporal complexity should and must be theorized as “matter”; third, that some forms of conceptual creation efface the movement of différance (the difference that fissures self-identity, and its temporal processes that preclude the closure of identities) even as they reveal its (complicated) presence; most importantly, then: “there are many things we haven’t yet learned to read.”1 Hobbes (and Kant, as we shall see) are—radically different—examples of didactic and disciplinary fictive theorizing. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who I take, albeit warily for he is problematical and twisty, as an ally in my endeavor, sits between them in many ways. What does Rousseau add to my tale? Time and again, Rousseau complicates both the status and the effects secured by the work of fictions in theories—his own, as well as those of others. Through and with Rousseau, and sometimes just using his ideas as a spur for further musing, I find that I can trace the dual work of fictions: after Rousseau, it will be impossible to unthinkingly invoke nature as a substantive and evaluative category of being. And yet, via his critique or critical excavation of natural law, Rousseau proposes new ways of knowing, making humanity intelligible, via that very natural condition (as utopian anticipation). So, not only does he make it impossible to unreflexively believe the truth of natural accounts, but he simultaneously inscribes (or, perhaps better, “inflects”2) nature (as fiction) with other and different possibilities, provoking a radical rethinking of the situatedness of the natural with regard to humanity and human possibility. My reading of Rousseau, then, while attentive to the limits of how far he can take me, is candidly, unapologetically, and unequivocally utopian, in motivation, method, and in substance.3 As Wendy Brown has more recently put it: “connecting our work to political theory’s rich canonical past while

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honing it for the work of understanding a singular present” demands a strategic reclamation, a “deliberate art, at once tactical and open-ended, that emanates from an anti-hegemonic sensibility.”4 And so, just as Ernst Bloch’s revision of natural law theories was an “effort to retrieve the unclaimed heritages and unfulfilled forwardlooking impulses of the past,” I read Rousseau’s natural law in the spirit of Bloch: the model of the principles of nature cannot have anything about it which usurps the place of novelty and openness of history. Rather than being ordered after a sense of nature that is calculable and mathematically ordered [. . . r]adical natural law is [. . .] an emancipation into the openness of the future as the place of human hope and worth. [. . . I]t does not domesticate but rather liberates.5

To quickly reiterate the story so far: I have suggested that political theory has sought to work via the trope of legislation. Through Hobbes, I explored and exposed the ways in which political narratives seek to set boundaries, to close politicized interpretation, thus enabling the establishment of (a) definition(s) of the natural and human conditions. (Already, with the plural, the impossibility of this project is evident.) This/these definition(s) were to serve a justificatory function, as the necessary a priori of a concept of “the political,” and the properly political. On the basis of epistemological security, an ostensible epistemology of the given, a programmatics of the political is generated. It is this mode of theorizing that I am arguing is both epistemologically and ethically unsustainable. But as we have seen already with Hobbes, epistemologies of the given cannot be sustained as such, problematizing distinctions between the fictional and its others. This is why I prefer to deploy the idea of fictive theories. As I explore further in this chapter, reading Rousseau in this way forms an exemplary moment with broader implications for the whole enterprise of political theory, based as it has been around the legislative trope. The force of the fictive underpins the distinction I am teasing out between two different modes of theorizing: the legislative mode, and fictive theories. The first is operative via epistemologies of the given; but the second, which works via creative epistemologies of possibility, suggests that epistemologies of the given were always already creative epistemologies that effaced, negated, or forgot contingency and creative power in favor of legislative and thus authoritative power. We have already traced this moment in Hobbes. The political potential of this argument can be demonstrated in rereading the role and the status of the Legislator in Rousseau’s Social Contract (not, though, a reading that Rousseau would perhaps authorize) in concluding this chapter. Such a reading can be described as deconstructive; and the broad aim of this reading is to begin to delineate some of the contours of a new modality of political theorizing. In concluding this chapter, I gesture forward to Nietzsche and Bloch by suggesting the ways in which the fictive mode is always necessarily a utopian mode. The Fable of Humanity or a Fabulizing Humanity? In some remote corner of the universe, flickering in the light of the countless solar systems into which it had been poured, there was once a planet on which clever animals invented cognition. It was the most arrogant and mendacious minute in the “history of the world”; but a minute was all it was. After nature had drawn just a few more breaths the planet froze and

conceiving the inconceivable / 39 the clever animals had to die. Someone could invent a fable like this and yet they still would not have given a satisfactory illustration of just how pitiful, insubstantial and transitory, how purposeless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature; there were eternities during which it did not exist; and when it has disappeared again, nothing will have happened.6

The two texts of Rousseau’s that I explore in this chapter, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (hereafter, Second Discourse) and The Social Contract, are not unproblematically related. The epistemological dilemma of their relationship mimics the whole problem of the movement from the natural to the political, and the grounding of the political on that foundation. Yet, Rousseau’s method and aims bear a greater resemblance to Nietzsche’s genealogical scrutiny of how we have come to be the “clever animals” we are than they do to the conventional natural law tradition. Substantively, Rousseau’s concerns are thus: the Second Discourse does indeed try to imagine the complexity of the shift from natural to “clever animal,” that is, the emergence of humanity as such; but this is made overwhelmingly difficult by imagining the “eternities” in which the clever animal did not exist. Rousseau’s theory of human history is “catastrophic”: the emergence of humanity is made possible via eruptions into human history that cannot be accounted for immanently, or in terms of a linear narrative of development.7 In his exploration of the concurrent development of cognition and morality, Rousseau questions the status and the very value of knowledge in terms of how we now understand how we have come to be who we are, and what potential remains open to humanity. That which has been taken to be “essential” to humanity is, for Rousseau, supplementary, external, additional. In following these substantive concerns through Rousseau’s texts, we encounter an aporetic structure of impossibility: that is, Rousseau’s attempts to tell a sequential and causal narrative are continually frustrated, and the task of representation (which would work via referential epistemologies of the given) proves to be impossible, so far as humanity is concerned. To simply gesture toward The Social Contract for now, these aporias erupt around the figure of the Legislator, his status, and his task of law-giving. The Legislator emerges, on Rousseau’s account, as the “someone” who must “invent the fable” of humanity, and conceive what is on Rousseau’s account, inconceivable. There is a further level of complexity, however. If the fable of humanity does indeed remain to be invented, then we need to figure out what modes of fictionalizing are adequate to that task, and what ways of knowing (and thus creating) humanity will not compound the condition that prior fictions have consolidated and entrenched: for as Rousseau fervently and passionately shows in the Second Discourse, fictions have also underwritten the pathologies of modernity, the psychological, existential, moral, political, and economic inequalities and bourgeois relations of dependency that have thwarted and distorted humanity. Like Hobbes’s “counterfeit” social man who is artifice from the very start, however, Rousseau’s “human animal” is distortion from the outset. My second question, then, is critical: what effects do fictions secure, and how can those effects be interrupted (and interrupted via the fictive)? From Discourse to Contract? I have suggested that the relation between the texts I have chosen mimics the state of nature problematic: the problem of making known and justifiable a conception of the

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political founded upon human nature itself, and thus creating obligations that bind political subjects as citizens. However, in exploring the relationship between these texts, we see Rousseau attempting to uphold this model, that is, showing the natural to generate political axiomatics via the programmatic mode, but he also reveals its impossibility; that is, attention to Rousseau’s texts (attending to textuality) shows this to be impossible. Before exploring Rousseau’s substantive concerns, then, I pause to consider this textual relationship. One concise statement of the conventional understanding is “to consider Rousseau’s two texts as providing a single composite theory of the human condition in its relation to government and politics.”8 Jean Starobinski nevertheless suggests two possibilities as to how this composite works: first, a revolutionary, “Marxist” synthesis in the work of Friedrich Engels; second, an “idealist,” Kantian, educative synthesis. Common to both is the “reconciliation of nature and culture in a society that returns to nature and transcends the injustices of society.”9 Common to both accounts, then, is the introduction of linearity, immanence, and transcendence. The Second Discourse looks backward. It outlines the problematic of the “dialectic of enlightenment” (as Adorno and Horkheimer would later term a similar narrative), or the ambivalences of human “perfectibility” that turn into the historical enslavement and immorality of humanity even and especially when it thinks itself most free and just. (Later in this chapter I will suggest this is an important symptom of the problem of political modernity as it operates through programmatic modes.) The Marxist interpretation proposes “that the Social Contract can be read as the sequel to, indeed, as the denouement of, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.”10 While Rousseau’s texts do not explicitly engage with the question of historical grounding for a revolutionary reordering of society, this interpretation reads the Social Contract as the revolutionary resolution to the problems of bourgeois dependency. On the other hand, Rousseau’s narrative could be read as uncovering a natural form of human freedom and sociability, where human interaction is guided by a natural compassion, that could itself be reconfigured in the political terms of the prescriptive and futureoriented Social Contract. Hence the crucial opening section of Social Contract: “Man is [/was] born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer.”11 In the Kantian reading, natural freedom and equality is replaced by a moral freedom and a civic equality; or, as Kant puts it, “art, when it reaches perfection, once more becomes nature.”12 It is only via culture that autonomy can be achieved, not by any nostalgic, backward glance to the natural: The Social Contract, read alongside Emile, proposes education and the just institutions of a moral polity as a way of achieving such transcendence. So, also common to both types of synthesis is the necessary work outside of the texts, as it were, that has to be done to secure the synthesis. I wish, instead, to pause at the gap between the two texts. For Rousseau, the relationship—between his texts and between the natural and political conditions—is at once an epistemological, moral, and historical problem: “it would take Gods,” he markedly wrote, “to give men laws.”13 In the absence of such gods, we must pause to reread the opening

conceiving the inconceivable / 41

section of Social Contract and note that there is both a claim and a disclaimer. The claim? “Man is [/was] born free; and everywhere is in chains.” The disclaimer: “How did this change come about? I do not know.”14 I want to sidestep the problem of synthesis for the moment: the claim and disclaimer taken together suspend the conventional understanding of the relationship between the Second Discourse and the Social Contract, interrogating the epistemological status of the state of nature, and perhaps even the natural, compassionate equality narrated in the Discourse. Through a close reading of Rousseau’s reading of the state of nature, however, I argue that the disclaimer gives rise to an epistemological and political aporia such that, when (a particular kind of ) knowledge itself is the problem, this epistemological disclaimer may paradoxically provide the solution. This is an exemplary moment of the fictional inaugurating the real, and shows Rousseau to be an important moment in a broader problematic concerning the status of political theory more generally. In order to decide whether Rousseau does indeed practice a legislative and programmatic model of theorizing, we need to figure out what principle underlies Rousseau’s two texts, that is, whether the conventional relationship should be upheld, or whether we should prioritize the disclaimer. Core to addressing this problem is figuring out the status that Rousseau ascribes to the origin of humanity. In the preface of the Second Discourse, Rousseau connects nature and origin in the form of a series of questions to which the reader may anticipate the answers within the text: how shall man hope to see himself as nature made him, across all the changes which succession of time and place must have produced in his original constitution? How can he distinguish what is fundamental in his nature from the changes and additions which his circumstances and the advances he has made have introduced to modify his primitive condition?15

What was fundamental to humanity, suggests Rousseau, was easily discernible in his primitive condition; the loss of this condition is the cause of his present discontent: Discontented with your present state, for reasons which threaten your unfortunate descendants with still greater discontent, you will perhaps wish it were in your power to go back; and this feeling should be a panegyric on your first ancestors, a criticism of your contemporaries, and a terror to the unfortunates who will come after you.16

This disconcerting passage immediately disturbs an unreflexive reading of human history as a history of “progress,” and suggests in its place a history of decline that should invoke sheer dread to future generations. Nevertheless, it also implies that redemption can be sought by uncovering what is natural (historically and logically primary) in humanity: by doing so, Rousseau suggests, we can also discover the principles by which the political present is to be reformed. Rousseau then brings together three aspects of the natural condition: the chronological (because prehistorically first), ontological (because of the implication of essential primacy), and logical (since these provide the parameters of the reformation and salvation of humanity). In one of the most powerful statements of his critique and

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transformation of the state of nature thesis, he writes: If we look at society with a calm and disinterested eye, it seems, at first, to show us only the violence of the powerful and the oppression of the weak. The mind is shocked at the cruelty of the one, or is induced to lament the blindness of the other; and as nothing is less permanent in life than those external relations, which are more frequently produced by accident than wisdom, and which are called weaknesses or power, riches or poverty, all human institutions seem at first glance to be founded merely on banks of shifting sand. It is only by taking a closer look, and removing the sand and dust that surround the edifice, that we perceive the immovable basis on which it is raised, and learn to respect its foundations.17

The natural, to recapitulate this argument thus far, should be recuperable as lost origin, hidden essence, and thus exert a logical necessity in the process of correcting corrupt social and political institutions, wherein we “learn to respect the foundations” of human society. However, at the start of the Second Discourse, the very possibility of knowing man is put into question. This disrupts the connections that would otherwise conjoin the two texts, and thus enable the correct movement from the natural to the political. It also disrupts the epistemological security of the legislative and programmatic mode of theorizing within which Rousseau has been read. The first hint of this is Rousseau’s critique of the Hobbesian state of nature. For Hobbes, as we have seen, nature denoted essential or enduring characteristics of human nature. Rousseau argues that this category of human nature confuses the natural and the historical in a disingenuous and insidious manner: “in speaking of the savage, they described social man.”18 Such a categorical confusion makes essential what are contingent, historical, and social problems that, precisely as contingent, historical, and social, are open to political negotiation. Noting that “the philosophers, who have inquired into the foundations of society, have all felt the necessity of going back to a state of nature; but not one of them has got there,” Rousseau, significantly, points to the presumptuous epistemological error of thinking one has found and knows the natural.19 The “preface” to the Discourse refers to the same inscription of the Temple of Delphi as Hobbes referred to, this time more conventionally translated as “know thyself.” Nevertheless, like Hobbes’s figures of unintelligibility, Rousseau has his own metaphors denoting the problematic of how to know: Like the statue of Glaucus, which was so disfigured by time, seas, and tempests, that it looked more like a wild beast than a god, the human soul, altered in society by a thousand causes perpetually recurring, by the acquisition of a multitude of truths and errors, by the changes happening to the constitution of the body, and by the continual jarring of the passions, has, so to speak, changed in appearance, so as to be scarcely recognizable. Instead of a being, acting constantly from fixed and invariable principles, instead of that celestial and majestic simplicity, impressed on it by its divine Author, we find only the frightful contrast of passion mistaking itself for reason, and of understanding grown delirious.20

The statue of Glaucus is indeed “enigmatic.”21 The body has been distorted, passions distressed, weathered, scarred, reason inverted and perverted. Disfigured, dissembling man cannot be read or represented to even himself; as Nietzsche will later argue even

conceiving the inconceivable / 43

more forcefully, humanity has embodied its errors. Here, Rousseau aligns moral and epistemological failings with a distorted humanity, while problematizing the natural underneath the artifice. But there is a worse epistemological dilemma to be encountered: it is still more cruel that, as every advance made by the human species removes it still farther from its primitive state, the more discoveries we make, the more we deprive ourselves of the means of making the most important of all. Thus it is, in one sense, by our very study of man, that knowledge of him is put out of our power.22

Paul de Man interprets this passage to mean that “the specificity of man forever escapes our grasp”; but crucially, this is no ontological condition or necessity. We cannot “know man” precisely because, as Eli Friedlander powerfully puts it, “in our way stands no less than our knowledge.”23 The very tools we have to know ourselves only further distance us from ourselves, and thus compound the alienated state that Rousseau diagnoses.24 This is a complex but crucial moment, where Rousseau begins his journey away from the terrain of referential and representational epistemologies of the given, and moves beyond. Since we cannot use our knowledge—historical, logical, or ontological—to know ourselves, Rousseau embarks on his impossible narrative with the profoundly paradoxical statement, “Let us begin then by laying all the facts aside, as they do not affect the question [of humanity’s ‘proper’ nature] . . . The investigations we may enter into, in treating this subject, must not be considered historical truths, but only as mere and hypothetical reasonings, rather calculated to explain the nature of things, than to ascertain their actual origin.”25 Rousseau further insists that the state of nature is a no-place (but this is not the reason why I later suggest Rousseau writes in a utopian mode): “a state which no longer exists, perhaps never did exist, and probably never will exist.”26 What can this epistemological denial tell us about knowledge itself, what does it tell us about the relation between the Second Discourse and the Social Contract, and of the relation between the natural and the political conditions? Pointing toward the fictional status of Rousseau’s state of nature as well as his insistence that normative implications can be derived from such a state and such a fiction, Keith Ansell-Pearson writes that “Rousseau is ambivalent on the precise status of his description of the state of nature, informing us that it has merely the status of a legal fiction, but then proceeding to offer us a historical account of human nature as a basis for understanding, if not man’s real ‘origins,’ then at least his real ‘nature’. ”27 “Merely” a fiction? Capturing and continuing this paradox of fictions fabricating the real that Ansell-Pearson has gestured toward, Horowitz writes, curiously but aptly, that Rousseau’s “savage man” is the “hypothetically real starting point of a hypothetically real historical evolution,” insisting on a peculiar confusion or simultaneity of the hypothetical and the real.28 Responding to this idiosyncrasy, Paul de Man suggests, “Rousseau seems to want to have it both ways, giving himself the freedom of the fabulator but, at the same time, the authority of the responsible historian.”29 This is a compelling suggestion; but the two are nowhere near as opposed as de Man implies, as we shall see. I return to this in the context of the Legislator. de Man further comments, very few informed readers would today maintain that Rousseau’s state of nature is an empirical reality, present, past or future. Most commentators would agree that, at least up to a point, the state of nature is a state “that no longer exists, that has perhaps never

44 / fictive theories existed and that will probably never come into being . . .” It is a fiction; but in stating this, the problem has merely been displaced, for what then is the significance of this fiction with regard to the empirical world?30

I shall not yet attempt to offer solutions to this epistemological quandary, and indeed, epistemological displacement of the problem of “reference,” since to do so too quickly serves to obscure its significance and implications. Recalling that our knowledge stands in the way of knowing who we are (how we have come to be who we are, and who we could possibly be) Friedlander suggests: “calling Rousseau’s account hypothetical would merely serve to hide our ignorance and push back the problem since the question is precisely how Rousseau can have this vision of human nature on which to base his construction.”31 The state of nature is clearly not referential; it is exterior to, or perhaps itself inaugurates, factual/fictional, natural/artificial oppositions, and as such cannot be held within those binaries that would presuppose that logic preestablished. And indeed, an intriguing part of Rousseau’s account of the state of nature is the role that various forms of (bad) fictionalizing play within it. Rousseau’s fictive state of nature, then, is opposed to the true and the real in interesting ways. For as we shall see, humanity’s advent into history is, for Rousseau, also humanity’s advent into illusion, artifice, appearance, and evil. As Starobinski has argued, “the clash between appearance and reality is echoed in a series of other conflicts: between good and evil [. . .], between nature and society.”32 As I have suggested, we need to figure out what modes of fictionalizing are adequate to the task of rethinking ways of knowing (and thus creating) humanity that will not compound the condition that prior fictions have consolidated and entrenched. Paul de Man puts the question thus: “what kind of epistemology can hope to ‘know well’ a radical fiction?”33 To anticipate my response: fictions that come to believe in their own referential validity reify, whereas fictions that remain critical and open-ended are suited to post-referential, becoming creatures. The kind of epistemology that can hope to “know well” a “radical fiction,” then, is necessarily creative. This question cannot be addressed further without exploring the narrative difficulties with the Second Discourse itself, and the account of the state of nature, and so I turn now to explore the substantive concerns there. Change does happen within the state of nature, but its appearance is incomprehensible within the given structure. (“How did that change come about? I do not know.”) I shall suggest throughout this section that the task of representation (which would work via referential epistemologies) proves to be impossible, so far as humanity is concerned. Rousseau’s task is to account for the emergence of inequalities between humans. His first description of men is a sensuous one: if we consider him . . . just as he must have come from the hands of nature, we behold him as an animal weaker than some, and less agile than others; but, taking him all round, the most advantageously organized of any. I see him satisfying his hunger at the first oak, and slaking his thirst at the first brook: finding his bed at the foot of the tree which afforded him a repast; and with that, all his wants satisfied.34

This man is at one with the nature of which he is an indistinguishable part, and at one with himself: without the additions of society, he “carr[ies] one’s self, as it were, perpetually whole and entire about him.”35 This is an undifferentiated nature,

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within which (pre)humanity moves without cognition, without comparison, without awareness, without consciousness. In this condition, Rousseau imagines the self negotiating its encounters with others of its kind, though scarcely recognizable as such to the nascent self, on the basis of an unadulterated amour de soi, or self-love/preservation of self, combined with a preconceptual compassion, pitié, that precludes inflicting unnecessary suffering on other animals. Rousseau imagines these attributes, prior to conceptualization, prior to thought, and perhaps even to a basic instinctual recognition, simply in order to articulate an innocence prior to knowledge (or “morality”), and a lack of violence, aggression, or possession—neither of self nor of others. Keith Ansell-Pearson points to the “inconceivability” of amour de soi and compassion when he suggests that these concepts presuppose an “identification” of other human animals that Rousseau has said does not (yet) exist; in this context, nevertheless, I rather like Rousseau’s gentle, affective fictions, whose truth he comes to feel to be more true than his “given” societies. (Amour propre, on the contrary, depends upon recognition of, and comparison with others, and is thus already social, historical, unnatural: I explore this later.) Everything that prehuman animals need to survive is present, within reach. James Swenson describes this as “the adequation of needs, means and desires” that obviates the disjunctures that would necessarily provoke consciousness.36 Amour de soi, then, is that necessarily unacknowledged “principle” of preservation of a self that does not yet exist, and it remains unarticulated (but felt) within the state of nature; it is simply there, unalienated, unmixed. In this condition, Rousseau comments, who does not see, without recurring to the uncertain testimony of history that everything seems to remove from savage man both the temptation and the means of changing his condition? His imagination paints no pictures; his heart makes no demands on him. His few wants are so readily supplied, and he is so far from having the knowledge which is needful to make him want more, that he can have neither foresight nor curiosity.37

The absence of imagination indicates the unavailability of any understanding of temporality or the future: the first pre-clever animals do not have temporality: “His soul, which nothing disturbs, is wholly wrapped up in the feeling of its present existence, without any idea of the future.”38 How can life be experienced in this context? If at all, purely as a succession of instants: Rousseau’s original humanity is entirely subsumed by the present. Rousseau suggests the concepts that make change possible (both conceptually and empirically) are radically unavailable in the state of nature. The recurrent refrain of the Second Discourse is “it is impossible to conceive . . .”; Rousseau’s narrative is itself a profoundly paradoxical attempt to conceive the inconceivable. The “metaleptic” structure of the Social Contract, where “the effect would have to become cause,” also permeates the Second Discourse.39 For example, Rousseau’s accounts of both temporality and language display metaleptic properties, abyssal moments: “the more we reflect on this subject, the greater appears the distance between pure sensation and the most simple knowledge [and recall, if we can trust Rousseau at all, that knowledge will obfuscate knowledge itself ]: it is impossible indeed to conceive how a man, by his own powers alone, without the aid of communication and the spur of necessity, could have bridged so great a gap.”40

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And yet, in Rousseau’s natural condition, such “spurs” are unavailable. The human animal is selflessly sufficient. Consciousness of temporality and of language is crucial for social development. But again, language is itself part of a philosophical problematic that Rousseau considers when he writes of the “inconceivable pains and infinite space of time that the inventions of the first language must have cost.”41 In a state without recognition of self and thus of the other, Rousseau asks, “how can language have become necessary; for as there was no communication among men and no need for any, we can neither conceive of the necessity of this invention, nor the possibility of it, if it were not somehow indispensable.”42 As Rousseau describes the state of nature however, language is rendered unnecessary. Again, effect must become cause: “which was more necessary, the existence of society to the invention of language, or the invention of language to the establishment of society?”43 And the stabilizing of language, Rousseau comments, is “itself still more difficult to conceive, since such a common agreement must have had motives, and it seems that speech must have existed before its use could be established.” He continues, “I am so aghast at the increasing difficulties which present themselves, and so well convinced of the almost demonstrable impossibility that languages should owe their original institution to merely human means” that he leaves this problem unanswered, simply supposing the “first difficulty obviated.”44 So in response to the question of how the change from natural to human animal came about, Rousseau foregrounds unintelligibility. This is not to say he does not give a substantive answer, but it is to remind us once again of the epistemologically complicated nature of Rousseau’s answer. The awakening of “perfectibility” signals the birth of the human animal. Of course, Rousseau is ambivalent regarding the very value of perfectibility, as well as its unintelligibility in the natural order of things: “perfectibility, the social virtues, and other faculties which natural man possessed, could never develop of themselves, but must require the fortuitous concurrence of many foreign causes that might never arise, and without which he must have remained forever in his primitive conditions.”45 As Swenson has pointed out, human qualities remain “latent” or “virtual” in the state of nature.46 The discovery of temporality and imagination, and the “ever-increasing burden of artifice” mark human development; both underpin the growth of inequalities and relations of dependency.47 How? Rousseau continues his story: however inconceivably, humanity did awaken, and did become social. Small communities came to be established, bringing with them the possibility of new forms of social relationships, inextricably entwined with new dangers of dependencies. As sociability increased, so too did comparison: “each one began to consider the rest, and wish to be esteemed in turn; and thus a value came to be attached to public esteem. Whoever sang or danced best, whoever was the handsomest, the strongest, the most dexterous, came to be of consideration; and this was the first step toward inequality, and, at the same time, toward vice.”48 Even in this scene of innocence and enjoyment, Rousseauian ears detect a sinister shift: from amour de soi to amour propre, the kind of comparison that changes difference into inequality. “Natural” inequality is simply difference, and unacknowledged because it is necessarily unrecognized difference. I would argue that Rousseau, rather than referring to “natural” talents and “natural” inequalities, is actually at his most radical in this passage: he does not naturalize differential talents and abilities, since they themselves

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only gain meaning via comparison, which is always social and hence unnatural. Inequalities, I would argue, are always artificial. (The impossible hero of the state of nature is, perhaps, the one who would simply sit under the tree, at one with himself. But this hero is as impossible as the one who would have had the foresight to pull up the stakes of the first property claim, as we shall see.) So, on the one hand, people begin the (subtle, insidious, creeping) journey toward appearance and thus artifice taking priority over simply being. And structural factors combine to compound this imbalance: “the poets tell us it was silver and gold, but, for the philosophers, it was iron and corn, which first civilized men, and ruined humanity.”49 Technological factors entrench chains of dependence by introducing a division of labor, a further reification of “roles” that are an artificial yoke to the once natural animal. As the earth becomes cultivated, “civilized” people are trapped by their very own creations: “the cultivation of the earth necessarily brought about its distribution; and property, once recognized, gave rise to the first rules of justice; for, to secure each man to his own, it had to be possible for each to have something. Besides, as men began to look to the future [. . .] all had something to lose.”50 From nature to society; from good to evil; from unalienated being to relations of dependency among rich and poor alike; from free to enchained: Behold then all human faculties developed, memory and imagination in full play, amour-propre interested, reason active [. . .]. It now became the interest of men to appear what they really were not. To be and to seem became two totally different things; and from this distinction sprang insolent pomp and cheating trickery, with all the numerous vices that go in their train. On the one hand, free and independent as men were before, they were now, in consequence of a multiplicity of new wants, brought into subjection, as it were, and particularly to one another [. . .]. All these evils were the first effects of property, and the inseparable attendants of growing inequality.51

This is a devastating critique of modernity, at once economic, political, moral, existential, psychological, and even organic, or ecological in terms of humanity’s detachment from and dominance over nature. And from hereon in, with greater speed, and greater menace, Rousseau rewrites the Hobbesian/Lockean social contract as the most duplicitous, treacherous, and damaging fiction or artifice to ever secure a future. The most radically “bad fictive” moment is announced in the still compelling opening section of the second part of the Second Discourse: The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying “This is mine”, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling in the ditch, and crying to his fellows: “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody”. But there is a great probability that things had then already come to such a pitch, that they could no longer continue as they were; for the idea of property depends on many prior ideas, which could only be acquired successively, and cannot have been formed all at once in the human mind . . .52

To condense a long story:53 this moment has its political equivalent in the fraudulent social contract, where the chains of dependence are made illegitimately “legitimate,”

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or at least, legal, to the detriment of all: in the historical institution of government, and the protection thus afforded to private property. The “plausible arguments” that enchained humanity meant that “all ran headlong into their chains in the hopes of securing their freedom.”54 And the outcome is, as I have already suggested, that humanity, at this point, becomes enslaved and immoral—as both an epistemological and ethical error—even, and especially, when it thinks itself most free and just. This is of course a crucial historical moment. It is the codification of the modern political state and capitalist economy, the moment, historically, of a peculiar freeing of humanity from previous fictions (of, e.g., divinely ordained hierarchies in the name of natural rights); but also a moment of reification, as the programmatic side of modernity encodes and closed political spaces once more (yet this time in the name of freedom). To reiterate: fictions as appearance, evil, delusion are the problem; what kinds of fictionalizing can provide the solution? As Swenson points out, human qualities remain “latent” or “virtual” in the state of nature: “the state of nature is indeed the closed circle of self[less] sufficiency. [. . .] If we agree that the state of nature contains no principles that account for its end, then the causal factors that must be introduced will necessarily be external and fortuitous with respect to nature itself.”55 The force of this argument is to dissociate human “nature” from human history with interesting implications. Jacques Derrida comments: “there is something catastrophic in the movement that brings about the emergence from the state of nature and in the awakening of the imagination which actualises the natural faculties and essentially actualises perfectibility.”56 Further, the discourses that have “naturally” legitimated such a development simply have no priority, chronologically, logically, or essentially: “The Discourse sur l’inégalité as a whole,” argues Swenson, “designates the fact that human history is in no way an expression of human nature.”57 There is, to summarize the implications of the logic of the Second Discourse, more than catastrophe: the question of origin involves neither event nor structure; it escapes the simple alternatives of fact and right, of history and essence. The passage from one structure to the other—from the state of nature to that of society, for example—cannot be explained by any structural analysis: an external, irrational, catastrophic factum must burst in [. . .] And when history is incapable of determining this fact, or facts of this order, philosophy must, by a sort of free and mythic invention, produce factual hypotheses playing the same role [. . .] The passage from the state of nature to the state of language and society, the advent of supplementarity, remains, then, outside the grasp of the simple alternatives of genesis and structure, of fact and principle, of historical and philosophical reason.58

What is vital in Rousseau’s text are the ways in which he exposes philosophy’s “free and mythic inventions” as by no means a representation of humanity’s “nature,” since humanity is that which exceeds referential fixity. In this way, Rousseau opens a space within which we can think about other uses of the fictive in theorizing. The entry into history is the story of bad fictions; but as de Man notes, “The very conception of the future is linked with the possibility of a free imagination.”59 What this suggests, of course, is the necessity of conceiving humanity as necessarily fictive. I want to explore the broadly political implications of this discursive discovery. In Rousseau’s text, nonnecessity is inscribed in every development that he nevertheless presupposes must have happened. He no longer refers to any continuum between

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the natural and historical/political. Derrida asks, then, should we conceptualize the “birth of society, therefore, not [as] a passage, [but] a point, a pure, fictive and unstable, ungraspable limit?”60 On Rousseau’s account, we can no longer understand the political with the conventional disciplinary resources of political theory. I began this section by suggesting that Rousseau’s attempt in the Second Discourse was profoundly troubled by the paradoxical thought of attempting to write and know what is natural to humanity in order to generate just political principles, because our very knowledge stood in the way. James Swenson expands this point: One might say that Rousseau’s own definition of the state of nature is formed primarily by excluding, to as great an extent as possible, any elements of continuity between nature and civilization. If the state of nature is the logical presupposition of human history, if “it is necessary to have a correct understanding” of this fiction “in order to properly evaluate our present condition,” then that does not mean that the state of nature is in any way the cause of civilization. The concept of the state of nature makes causality and intelligibility radically discontinuous.61

Swenson suggests here that Rousseau’s theorizing works precisely as a transformative mode of theorizing works: by freeing politics from epistemologies that are tied by forms of representational and referential fixity to the given, and by means of creative epistemologies that expose and negate prior, constraining fictions. It is this that I call self-consciously fictive theorizing, both utopian and deconstructive. Rousseau’s investigation into radical humanity radically frees us from “given” constraints on fictive/future possibilities. This is why I propose that Rousseau inscribes a nature that is vital and alive; for it is a nature that is mobile and critical. This is also why the Social Contract begins with the epistemological disclaimer: the fictive point of origin, for Rousseau as Legislator must “freely and mythically” reconfigure society outside the parameters of a knowledge that is itself saturated with ideological, historical assumptions that can only compound and reproduce the existent, not recreate. It is only by the radical distancing that Rousseau inscribes between what is taken as knowledge of humanity that a very different reading of the Social Contract can be proposed. Louis Althusser was not the only critic to take Rousseau to task for his flight from history to fiction.62 However, this too can be read differently, and Rousseau can be read as problematizing the opposition between fiction and history itself. As Judith Still writes, “if the contemporary symbolic is understood as dominating the way we think, any questioning of it, any reaching out to another symbolic, necessarily involves a kind of leap, a disjunction in logic which is hard to think, and which always runs the risk of being incomprehensible in general, or risible in detail.”63 Rousseau’s state of nature works as the utopian mode works: via distancing, alterity, and critique, and by provoking, not merely different meanings to life, but changing the modes by which meanings are made, by thinking differently. Rousseau’s empty and excessive nature finds its parallel in the fictive moment of grounding the social contract, in order to negotiate such a disjuncture by negating what we thought our very knowledge was. Given that, in terms of conventional critiques of the totalitarian nature of the Social Contract, this may seem somewhat outlandish, the next task is to see in what ways, in the light of thinking about the social contract via a creative epistemology, conceptual—and political—spaces can be opened to contest those readings.

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The Social Contract Let me reiterate some of the main claims guiding this book before moving on. Political theory, as discipline and discourse, seeks to settle questions of justice and power through a legislative, programmatic mode, where the basis of such legislation, political programs, as well as other forms of juridical authority and institutionalization, are sought in truth or knowledge of the real. It is this mode that I argue is both epistemologically and ethically unsustainable: epistemologically, since certainty is sought in always-already fictional (reified) ways; and ethically, since such programs tend toward coherence, containment, and control, or closure of the political. This precludes possibility and human becoming (in the fictive mode.) Again, Rousseau is exemplary in illustrating how ways of reading (as rewriting) political theory are critical in changing the modality of theorizing. Now, central interpretative concerns of the Social Contract have been focused around the conflict between Rousseau’s democratic impulses and his totalitarian outcomes, embodied in the paradox of “forcing freedom.” Rousseau has been read and interpreted diversely within this dominant imaginary.64 “Forcing freedom,” however, is not an anomaly exclusive to Rousseau: it can be seen as the central contradiction of the legislative mode of theorizing. Indeed, even utopian political thought has been entwined in that paradox: as Ken Roemer has argued, the utopian dilemma, like the dilemma of political theory when practiced via the legislative, is that it is “born of two conflicting impulses—to enable change by disrupting given orders and to create peace and calm by establishing order.”65 (We return to this issue in chapter five.) However, to stay with Rousseau, if (social) knowledge has precluded understanding, then perhaps the creation of different spaces within which Rousseau can be read can be discerned by attending to the paradoxical moment of founding his legitimate political society in the Social Contract. In the Discourse Rousseau exposed as false (one, pejorative, sense of fictional) the fictions of the natural law philosophers in their presumptuous epistemological error of supposing they had found nature. His own account was radically fictive in the absence of a “true” account, and in the absence of methodological tools that would not work toward reifying the existent. Attention to the fictive moment in Rousseau, as that which is neither fictional (since the prior “norm” to which the fictional must refer has been thoroughly disrupted) nor (yet) real opens future possibilities, and disrupts conventional readings of Rousseau’s “forcing freedom.” In the Social Contract, Rousseau’s fictive moment of founding tends toward a process of opening. The structure is thus parallel to that of the Discourse, and Irene Harvey describes this parallel structure thus: “the improper will be shown to found the proper.”66 The impropriety of the epistemological disclaimer at the start of the Social Contract provides the very conditions of possibility for inaugurating a very different real to that outlined in the Second Discourse. In this section, then, I shall reread the role and status of the Legislator as creative, and as working on the basis of an unknowable future human potential, rather than as essentialist and dogmatic. This means that the Legislator can be shown to operate via a creative epistemology of the possible, rather than an epistemology of the given that can only reify, and reproduce relations of power. This error—reading Rousseau as foreclosing human possibility through the General Will, and thus engaging in an exercise that can only reproduce given relation of power—gives rise to the figure of the Legislator as authoritative; the

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former reading connects the legislative moment with an ongoing process, and thus an open and participatory democracy. As with the previous section, a crucial point again concerns the textual/historical/ political relationship between the two texts. The conventional reading runs thus: in the Second Discourse, Rousseau uncovers the “natural goodness” of humanity that has been corrupted, as humans became slavish, dependent creatures. The Social Contract works on a different level to transcend this condition, positing a second state of nature67 and an ideal resolution within which a social simulacrum of the natural condition can be generated and maintained. There is much in this depiction to suggest that the Social Contract is a blueprint for an ideal society—a utopia that works to change the people from this Second Discourse into the kind of people who could populate the ideal society. (I argue in chapter five that this definition of utopia is inadequate. On the contrary, utopia should be resolutely disruptive, not institutional or legislative: disruptive of thought that accepts the given realities as the only realities; disruptive of attempts at recuperation of the radical; and transgressive to any given order of things.) We have already seen, however, that the narrative in the Second Discourse did not lead to any coherent ordering of historical experience, but rather to a disruption of the necessity of what must nevertheless have happened. What can be taken unproblematically, however, is one significant outcome: Rousseau’s audience, the political community, is not receptive to his message. Exploring the problematic of founding the political community, and the intervention of the Legislator, further exemplifies the logic of fictions founding the real. The problem is one of collective action and community: “as men cannot engender new forces, but only unite and direct existing ones, they have no other means of preserving themselves than the formation, by aggregation, of a sum of forces great enough to overcome the resistance. These they have to bring into play by means of a single motive power, and cause to act in concert.”68 This would be necessary to overcome the disaggregation and fallacious individualism that stratifies “society” on so many levels, as the Second Discourse has already told us. Once the people have formed themselves as such, overcome such individualism, the social compact, the creation of the sovereign body of all the people can be described as follows: “At once, in the place of the individual personality of each contracting party, this act of association creates a cooperative and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly contains voters, and receiving from this act its unity, its common identity, its life and its will.”69 The social compact forms the political association that replaces unsecured natural liberty, or indeed, a legal but illegitimate state of alienation, with a moral and legitimate equality. The structure of the Social Contract is, however, curious. In the Second Discourse, we saw the metaleptic structure, whereby Rousseau’s desire to establish the correct “order of things” was continually thwarted. Similarly here: Rousseau first describes the act of total alienation involved in the moment of compact before discussing its necessary “precondition,” the preparation of the community who is to undergo the alienation that restores it to itself, or creates those selves for the first time. On the alienation, he writes, “the peculiar fact about this alienation is that, in taking over the goods of individuals, the community, so far from despoiling them, only assures them legitimate possession, and changes usurpation into true right, and enjoyment into

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proprietorship.”70 The problem is in fact similar to that diagnosed by Marcuse two centuries later: Freedom would become the environment of an organism which is no longer capable of adapting to the competitive performances required for well-being under domination, no longer capable of tolerating the aggressiveness, brutality, and ugliness of the established way of life. The rebellion would have taken root in the very “nature,” the “biology” of the individual; and on these new grounds, the rebels would redefine the objectives and the strategy of political struggle, in which alone the concrete goals of liberation can be determined.71

Like Rousseau, Marcuse inscribes the nature of humanity as potentiality. Potentiality is a fictive operator: attentiveness to the effects of the claim of potentiality appeals to a politics that speaks to the possibility of becoming-other, and this possibility is significantly connected to a radical politics of resistance. For Rousseau (as for theorists such as Marcuse) inscribing human nature as potential enables thought about the radical leap from who we are to who we could become. But for Rousseau, as for any radical politics, there is a further problem. How can creatures who are no longer capable of reproducing the power relations of the given be created? How to make the leap from the one to the other? The social compact is a one-off event; laws are necessary from the preservation of the community; but the people who must form the community are simply not so constituted as to be able to create, negotiate, and legislate, the just state. The “correct order of things” is impossible: For a young people to be able to relish sound principles of political theory and follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become cause; the social spirit, which should be created by these institutions, would have to preside over their very foundation; and men would have to be before law what they should become by means of law.72

And to reiterate, the lesson learned from the Second Discourse is that we simply cannot assume “presence of the effect within the cause,” which is to assume given or present categories are the only available ones, and thus preclude understanding of the new and the possible.73 The answer, for Rousseau, is a Legislator: a “superior intelligence” who knows, but is not of, humanity, and who, importantly, can negotiate the changes that his intervention will effect in humanity. But as I have discussed in my introduction, and as Zygmunt Bauman reminds us, the trope of the legislator “engenders an acute asymmetry in the deployment of social power.”74 The ostensible epistemic privilege of the legislator is a formidable lie, and a powerful one, with effects. “It would take gods,” Rousseau soberly avows, “to give men laws.”75 And in the absence of gods, The legislator [. . .] must have recourse to an authority of a different order [than either his own authority, or that ordained by the people], capable of constraining without violence and persuading without convincing. This is what has, in all ages, compelled the fathers of nations to have recourse to divine intervention, and credit the gods with their own wisdom, in order that the peoples, submitting to the laws of the State as to those of nature, and recognizing the same power in the formation of the city as in that of man,

conceiving the inconceivable / 53 might obey freely. [. . .] This sublime reason, far above the range of the common herd, is that whose decisions the legislator puts into the mouths of mortals, in order to constrain by divine authority those whom human prudence could move. But it is not anybody who can make the gods speak, or get himself believed when he proclaims himself their interpreter.76

But, Rousseau here has already decoded the ostensible epistemic privilege of the Legislator: the Legislator must use fictions, epistemologically dubious of status, in order to create the very people who can effectively listen to, and live, his words. To reiterate Derrida: when “history is incapable of determining this fact, or facts of this order, philosophy must, by a sort of free and mythic invention, produce factual hypotheses playing the same role, explaining the coming into being of a new structure.”77 What are the political implications of this? Irene Harvey describes the Legislator in the following terms: “nothing can authorize the legislation since he is essentially outside of constitutional legitimacy and propriety [. . .] He acts without example, without precedent; and in order to create, he creates ex nihilo and without authority—unlawfully founding the law.”78 The acts of the legislator are “already beyond actuality as such.”79 The Legislator, then, can also be read as that creative cypher of possible futures, beyond the given, beyond the logical, and beyond the factual. His creative epistemology is, for Rousseau, a way to create the conceptual and political spaces within which society, and its alienated subjects, can be transformed. There is a further implication, but here I too begin to work “outside” of Rousseau’s texts, outside a reading he may have authorized: what happens if we think of the Legislator, not in terms of a singular figure of epistemic privilege, but as a plural process? This is not so far fetched: Irene Harvey, for example, has suggested the Legislator is a “personification of General Will prior to its establishment.”80 Can the General Will be read itself as sustaining this creativity beyond the real and given? It is enough for now to be brief (the General Will, as we shall see, has been something of an interpretative problem). If the legislator founds the political community, the General Will is the more-or-less institutional set of processes or mechanisms by which the community is sustained and maintained. Of what, then, does the General Will consist, and what are its effects? The general will in Rousseau has been read as tyrannical, but Rousseau intends precisely the opposite: Therefore, in order that the social compact not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes the undertaking, which alone can give force to the rest, that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than he shall be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal dependence. In this lies the key to the working of the political machine; this alone legitimizes civil undertakings, which, without it, would be absurd, tyrannical, and liable to the most frightful abuses.81

The general will defines the parameters of the whole community; as such, it cannot be a purely formal process, not can it be a-temporal: “if then the people simply promises to obey,” which would be a submission to a static law, “by that very act it dissolves itself and loses what makes it a people; the moment a master exists, there is no longer a sovereign, and from that moment there is no longer a body politics.”82

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Steven Affeldt reads this important section as follows: “as essentially an act of willing, will cannot be equated with or ensured by any concrete embodiment in established laws.”83 Tracy Strong concurs: “sovereignty and thus the being of political society is held to exist solely in the present tense”; that is, laws that would assume an a-temporal validity, not subject to continual contestation and reaffirmation or otherwise in fact negate sovereignty and thus the political community.84 We have seen Hobbes try and fail to stabilize such a perpetual present. This recontextualizes some of the stranger things Rousseau has to say about the social contract, for example: “The clauses of the contract are so determined by the nature of the act that the slightest modification would make them vain and ineffective”; or, “The sovereign, merely by virtue of what is, is always as it should be.”85 I have suggested that a transformative politics works by freeing politics from epistemologies that are tied by forms of representational and referential fixity to the given. Rousseau associates the condition of referential fixity, of representation that is also and simultaneously reification, with an alienated humanity. The general will, however, moves beyond such representational actualities: “sovereignty, for the same reason as makes it inalienable, cannot be represented; it lies essentially in the general will, and will not admit of representation: it is either the same or it is other; there is no intermediate possibility.”86 Any kind of referential fixity is problematic for Rousseau; willing political communities is necessarily a temporal process. Just as the import of the legislator does not derive from the epistemological privilege of the moment of founding, neither is the general will of the community defined by the status accorded to law. “Forcing freedom,” then, becomes a more complex moment, less coercive and authoritative. Indeed, Affeldt comments that the general will is not equivalent to the common interest, and thus the threat of forcing freedom “may be operative even when individuals are scrupulously obeying what is conventionally but wrongly taken to be law. Indeed, for Rousseau, it is precisely in this form that this threat to society is mostly operative.”87 I have previously suggested that programmatic modes of theorizing are an important symptom of the historical enslavement and immorality of humanity even and especially when it thinks itself most free and just. Forcing freedom can be read so as to circumvent such legislative stasis. Rather than privileging the epistemic and authoritative force of given laws, as Affeldt argues, it means “active participation in the continuous constitution of a general will, rather than passive compliance [. . .] In the Social Contract Rousseau proposes the kinds of philosophical instruction, critique and self-presentation that the text itself contains as forms of force that constrains to freedom.”88 In this crucial sense, then, Rousseau can be read “as if ” he devolves the creative insights of the legislator to each citizen, gesturing toward the future that they could bring into being. And he does so with the simultaneous, no longer opposed, “freedom of the fabulator” and “authority of the historian.”89 In Rousseau, the impossibility of his foundational moments, both the state of nature and the legislator, has fruitful and productive implications for the status and task for political theorizing as an activity. However, have I simply legitimated the use of fictions in political theory without a means of controlling or evaluating them (thus calling to mind the excesses of, e.g., a Sorel, or the exclusionary fictions of, e.g., a Plato, or indeed, a Hobbes)? To echo Rousseau: that question I think I can answer.

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We can discern in Rousseau the contours of a post-representational, post-referential mode of theorizing. This deconstructive way of reading Rousseau opens these utopian spaces. Derrida for one has, always tried to expose the way in which philosophy is literary, not so much because it is metaphor but because it is catachresis. The term metaphor implies a relation to an original “property” of meaning, a “proper” sense to which it indirectly or equivocally refers, whereas catachresis is a violent production of meaning, an abuse which refers to no anterior norm. The founding concepts of metaphysics—logos, eidos, theoria, etc.—are instances of catachresis rather than metaphors.90

Just as Rousseau uncovered the natural condition as a fiction with no “proper” meaning, so too, the political can have no “proper” meaning except as a process of contestation and becoming. What is meant by fiction here? The word itself has various connotations that we have traversed in this chapter with Rousseau, ranging from the pejorative— untruth, falsehood, a lie, inauthentic—to the connotations of imagination, fantasy, fanciful, mythical, make-believe—through to the performative—made-up, improvised, fabricated, invented, created. To read the fictional in this former sense is to place it in a binary opposition with truth, in such a way that the problematic of reference is in no way disrupted. This is precisely what I want to avoid, since foundational supports are not something that is confused with fictive or narratorial accounts, but are inhabited by the fictive and narratorial at the very core. I propose, then, that we read these narratives in the second sense, which works beyond truth and lies: as acts of imagination and creation, as fundamentally performative. Two modalities of political theorizing have been suggested. But, epistemologies of the given (and foundational thought) are always-already fictive thought that effaces, negates, and forgets its contingency and its creative power in favor of its legislative and thus its authoritative power. Rousseau’s critique of the fictional state of nature of Hobbes, for example, uncovers this. A deconstructive narratology of political theory provokes an epistemic rupture with relation to the aims, status, and validity of the discourse of political theory. The aim of political theory has been to close the field of the political; to reiterate Bonnie Honig’s arguments, most political theorists [. . .] confine politics (conceptually and territorially) to the juridical, administrative, or regulative tasks of stabilizing moral and political subjects, building consensus, maintaining agreements, or consolidating communities and identities. They assume that the task of political theory is to resolve institutional questions, to get their politics right, over and done with, to free modern subjects.91

The status of such work is seemingly epistemologically secured; and the validity is dependent upon this security. Yet, these terms rely upon a whole series of hierarchical oppositions that are dependent on assumptions of reference, particularly, of an ontologically given opposition between fiction and reality, which deconstructive practices and utopian temporalities disrupt. As we see in chapter four, Nietzsche gently chides that we are always-already fictionalizing creatures; and thus that epistemologies of the “given” are creative epistemologies that have forgotten or negated their creativity, or, put otherwise, have become reified. Nietzsche’s recognition was

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that we are always-already fictionalizing creatures (though often—most often—we have mistaken “our” fictions for truths). Rousseau provokes us to recognize such reifications as politically repressive and constraining. By entering a space of imagination and speculation to inaugurate the real, Rousseau does indeed “force freedom.”92 And yet, dominant approaches to Rousseau have tended to elide or negate critical tensions and openings via programmatic modes of thought that aim to code and contain. Rousseau’s fictive thought, however, is transformative: freeing politics from epistemologies that are tied by forms of representational and referential fixity to the given. Rousseau’s investigation into natural humanity paradoxically, radically, frees us from “given” constraints on fictive/future possibilities. The fable of humanity remains to be invented: and the language that political theory can and should use is a fictive language. Utopian and post-referential, this language, as Gilles Deleuze suggests, supports thinking in its most valuable function: “not to direct or methodically apply a thought which pre-exists in principle and in nature,” but to “create,” to “bring into being that which does not yet exist.”93 Before we can continue with this task, however, we must encounter the guardian of modernity and of reason, and thus the keeper of the core metaphysical dichotomous boundaries we are engaged in deconstructing: those between the real and the fictional, reason and speculation, history and imagination, and—crucially—the philosophical and the fictional: could Immanuel Kant possibly be read via a fictive mode of theorizing?

Excursus: “Mere High-Flown Fantasy . . .?” (Kant on Holiday)

The true world—unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it— a consolation, an obligation, an imperative. (At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.) Nietzsche, “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable,” in Twilight of the Idols Not magnitude, not lavishness, But form—the site; Not innovating wilfulness, But reverence for the archetype. Herman Melville, “Greek Architecture,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry everything goes past like a river and the changing tastes and various shapes of men make the whole game uncertain and delusive. Where do I find fixed points in nature, which cannot be moved by man, and where I can indicate the markers by the shore to which he ought to adhere? hand-written by Immanuel Kant, in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime

The Strange Case of the Double Life of Immanuel . . . From Rousseau’s impassioned critique, and his ardent, affective, and creative fictions, I move, but without quite coming back to earth, to Immanuel Kant, abstemious, austere, literally self-denying, who, like Hobbes, I see as a further (but also potentially productive) writer of disciplinary and didactic fictions. I again pose the dual question of what modes of imagining underlie theoretical world creation, and what those imaginings make possible. In fact, opinion is sharply divided, and the innocent reader casually glancing through the books on the library shelves may find herself somewhat bewildered that, in addition to all the various dualisms that organize Kant’s texts, curiously, Kant himself seems to have left a bifurcated or dualistic legacy to modern philosophy; or rather, she may find herself unsure as to which is the real Kant, and which the doppelganger (the double or forbidding ghostly apparition . . .?). For example, Nietzsche sinisterly (or perhaps impishly, but most likely both) writes that Kant’s

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“categorical imperative gives off a whiff of cruelty,” and for Theodor Adorno, Kant is “repressive.”1 And yet, in an altogether different tenor and key, Ernst Bloch claims for Kant’s categorical imperative the attempt to think “a Humanum which is so little merely abstractly general and so clearly also anticipatorily general that it is not accommodated with its human landscape in any class society.” For Bloch, the categorical imperative contains a utopian forward impulse toward solidarity and away from violence, so that it “seems almost like an anticipatory formula directed toward a nonantagonistic society, that is, to a classless one, in which real generality of moral legislation is possible for the very first time.”2 More simply, in accord with Bloch, Jane Bennett writes, “one of the most enchanting claims of modern ethics comes from Kantian lips.”3 Is it possible to decide which is the true Kant? For Walter Benjamin proposes, “it is of the greatest importance for the philosophy of the future to recognize and sort out which elements of the Kantian philosophy should be adopted and cultivated, and which should be reworked, and which should be rejected.”4 In the space of this excursus, I shall do no more than suggest that the strange case of the double life of Kant is entwined with the structuring oppositions within Kant’s work: the supersensible world of the noumenal is privileged over the sensible phenomenal world; reason is privileged over both feeling and body; the moral is privileged over and above the empirical and merely contingent. I further explore, however, whether this hierarchical, dualistic organization of the world of the senses and the worlds of cognition and morality can itself be grounded, is foundational for Kant, or whether, in fact, the hierarchical reason/affect, moral/empirical that negates the body and all that is merely contingent is somehow inaugural, creative, or productive of a certain kind of (ascetic) subjectivity. If the latter, then, again, this ascetic mode of imagining can be interrupted: and working through the “whiff of cruelty” could then open up the possibility of new or refigured conceptual spaces. Ian Hunter has recently suggested that “to approach philosophy as a way of working on the self means to begin not with the experience it clarifies and the subject it discovers, but with the acts of selftransformation it requires, and the subjectivity it seeks to fashion”: this precisely points, not to the veracity of the representation of the self to the self, but with the productive and yet disciplinary, creative yet didactic fictive moment at work in Kant.5 It is this I seek to unearth and rework. In this excursus, I wish to explore liminal moments in Kant’s work. Liminal, first, because the texts I choose to explore are off the recognizable track of Kant’s major works, such as the Critiques, particularly of pure and practical reason, which deal with epistemology and ethics respectively. I also wish to explore ethics and epistemology; but even when Kant tells us he is on holiday (as he does in the “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History,” the first text I turn to), there are ethical and epistemological implications. The explicitly fictional narrative logics of the “Conjectures . . ,” begin to delineate the logics of the second text I turn to: Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals. This delineation can be described as liminal because reading via the (e)strange(d) perspective of the first text precipitates a disruption of the moment of universality and transcendence in the second work, a moment that Kant would otherwise insist as necessary for an ethical act. Bringing these two texts together, however, is intended as a speculative, gestural moment concerning the guiding themes of this book, more than an intervention in Kantian moral philosophy. Such an intervention

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would require a vaster engagement that I provide. This excursus, then, deals with Kant only insofar as these two texts impinge upon the argument of the book: concerning, first, the function of foundations, or the status of Kant’s theorizing; second, the effects secured via the status accorded to Kant’s narrative; and third, to continue to articulate the territory within which “fictive theories” can begin to function, beyond foundationalism, empiricism, or any accounts of the given. A brief review of what has previously been suggested in each of these areas before turning to Kant shall prove valuable. In the introduction, I was concerned to avoid reinstating a singular paradigm of “foundationalism,” accepting, instead, as a provisional definition that foundations were moments (always-already within discourse) that attempted to guarantee stability of judgment, or provide incontestable (or de-politicized) starting points for generating certain political conclusions, or grounding the acceptance of certain political principles and programmatics. I wanted, then, to simultaneously uphold this as a model, and yet also suggest it was always internally fissured; foundations work differently dependent upon function, or upon context. Indeed, my first two chapters, by drawing on the natural as a foundation (a foundation which I read as problematic) I have insisted upon this fissured moment. First, the natural was simply read differently by Hobbes and Rousseau, as essence and as origin respectively. Second, that which the natural was meant to found, to secure, and to justify along a (narrative) logic was, I suggested, impossible: Hobbes’s narrative shifts from reading, discovering, to inventing without reference to this natural, prior norm, without a grounding principle in nature. A structurally similar impossibility was manifested for Rousseau at three moments. First, the narrative logic itself, as that which would hold together nature and history, in the Discourse was ruptured, inconceivable. Second, nature as providing the structural conditions of freedom of which political society should have been a simulacrum could not be logically upheld—the Discourse was disowned by the Contract. Third, just as Hobbes’s Leviathan was shown to be created, so too, with Rousseau: the fictive, and no longer simply fictional legislator provided a tenuous, epistemologically dubious—and necessarily creative—security over this abyss, a fictive foundation that could only be futural, forward-looking. I used the term “catachrestic” to describe this suggestion that there is no meaning that is proper to nature or the political. The point, then, is that foundations (always a curious metaphor) move (as Hobbes looked inward, Rousseau looked back), are fictional or fictive. For Kant, as we shall see, the “foundational” moment, to further mix already problematic metaphors, is the moment of transcendence. Stanley Fish (a “card-carrying antifoundationalist”) writes the following: By foundationalism I mean any attempt to ground inquiry and communication in something more firm and stable than mere belief or unexamined practice. The foundationalist strategy is first to identify that ground and then so order our activities that they become anchored to it and thereby rendered objective and principled. The ground so identified [. . .] must be invariant across contexts and even cultures; it must stand apart from political, partisan, and “subjective” concerns in relation to which it must act as a constraint.6

According to such a definition, a transcendent universalism is ostensibly operative according to foundational “logics,” read in the first, unproblematic, sense, as that

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which works to secure, to justify; but this logic, as we have seen, and as I continue to demonstrate by exploring another, again very different speculative beginning, is not univocal or singular. I have further suggested the functional entwinement of two sets of discourses. First are those discourses that claim epistemological privilege (the discourse of the “natural condition,” or, in Kant’s case, the discourse of rationality, and a freely willing will). The second type of discourses are those which, while not claiming such privilege, are also sense-making narratives, and are centered structures that tend toward resolution, coherence. I suggested the latter can act as the epistemological surrogate of the former.7 Kant is exemplary in his articulation, in the two texts I have chosen to examine, in outlining this elision. Subsequently, outlining the contours of the epistemologically grounded discourse, on the one hand, and the fictional (its perceived opposite) on the other, the fictive—the term beyond the opposition—becomes demarcated.8 In this sense, this section on Kant acts as a demonstration of the logic that has gone before in previous chapters, and a link to what is to come. Choosing Kant for this demonstration, however, is by no means an innocent choice, given his pivotal position in Enlightenment thought.9 Simply reading these two short texts is an attempt to circumvent, and then perhaps rethink that over-determined and canonical history. I return, in concluding this section, to some thoughts on the status of the theoretical act; the status of the real it ostensibly grounds and guides; and the narrative logic of the construction of the political rather than its epistemological security. Addressing such questions is informed throughout this book by the deconstructive narratology I present. “Conjectures . . .” After Rousseau, the status of the natural condition can be nothing other than fiction. Kant, in his short text, “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History,” writes a “brilliant satire”10 on the convention of state of nature narratives, self-consciously framing his narrative around the biblical story. However, the intent is just as serious as the exercise was for Hobbes and for Rousseau. Reflecting on a similar problematic to Rousseau’s, on the decadence of culture in comparison with a postulated natural innocence and inherent drive to freedom and respect active within humanity, Kant writes, The very impulses which are blamed as the causes of vice are good in themselves, fulfilling their function as abilities implanted by nature. But since these abilities are adapted to the state of nature, they are undermined by the advance of culture and themselves undermine the latter in turn, until art, when it reaches perfection, once more becomes nature—and this is the ultimate goal of man’s moral destiny.11

“Nature,” then, is both speculative beginning and moral end, the origin and telos, of Kant’s ethical thought. Kant suggests a dialectical contest between nature and culture, via our natural emergence to art-ifice that attains a transcendence and reconciliation between the forces of nature and art. Kant makes the natural condition in its temporal, or chronological phase fictional, opting for speculation and conjecture in the absence of historical records. I later argue for the stronger claim that even in the

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Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant cannot escape the fictional and narrativity, and that this structural status of the natural is mimicked in the status of the Categorical Imperative—that natural artifice that could become perfection—and in its deduction. In his “Conjectures . . .,” Kant uses as a “map” the biblical text of Genesis to structure his historical account of the emergence of man as a political creature. Kant terms this the “transition [. . .] from the guardianship of nature to the state of freedom,” and thus his concomitant concern is with rationality and autonomy: living, as Rousseau put it before Kant, in “obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves” that alone is freedom.12 (I turn, in chapter three with Max Stirner, to the problem of the ways in which if this law is given only once, it becomes dogmatic, enslaving, a fetter or a “spook.”) Delineating the move from nature to politics (and its parallels in the move from living in accordance to impulses, whims, transitory desire, to living in accordance with morality and rationality, universal imperatives) is Kant’s aim; his method, however, is curious. The chronological, developmental account given by Kant is profoundly ironic; or perhaps better, both profound, and ironic. Presented explicitly as a “conjectural history” this account nevertheless holds certain verifiable claims.13 However, there is already the possibility of a dual reading here: are these conjectures on history, on an available account and record? Or do the conjectures stand in for history, are Kant’s conjectures the only available history themselves? Again, however, Kant needs to do some explicatory groundwork, which, as with Hobbes and Rousseau, has more of an ungrounding effect. This (non)groundwork reveals that the conjectural narrative Kant is endeavoring to establish will provide a sequential account of humanity’s transition described above: “To introduce conjectures at various points in the course of a historical account in order to fill gaps in the record is surely permissible; for what comes before and after—i.e. the remote cause and the effect retrospectively—can enable us to discover the intermediate causes with reasonable certainty, thereby rendering the intervening process intelligible.”14 Kant is clear here: an imaginary narrative will efface the historically unavailable gaps in a chronological, sequential process by imagining what could have happened, and thus lend intelligibility, continuity, and coherence. Aware that this move may strike his readers as problematic—it is, after all, an elision of the imaginary with both the actual, historical account and with the moral narrative (which must of necessity remain unconfined by the limits of historicity)—Kant suggests “what it may be presumptuous to introduce in the course of a history of human actions may well be permissible with reference to the first beginning of that history, for if the beginning is a product of nature, it may well be discoverable by conjectural means.”15 Kant is here talking about human nature as much as nature as origin, which is why he can suggest that the origin can be conjectured. We have encountered this idea already: the origin is simultaneously temporally/ historically prior, as well as essential through time; and furthermore, exerts a foundational primacy. Kant’s twist in this tale is that he writes it as precisely that: a tale. The speculative, however it is read, and I shall shortly turn to this, provides a strange kind of narrative reassurance, the paradoxes of which Kant is not blind to. Indeed, he goes on to claim that “to base a historical account solely on conjectures would seem little better than drawing up a plan for a novel. Indeed, such an account could not be

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described as a conjectural history at all, but merely as a work of fiction.”16 Kant, however, is not attempting to write that novel; he intends, rather, to uphold (and yet play with, bring into contact, to uphold as in to suspend) the generic boundaries between history and fiction, nature and narrative, reason and speculation or imagination. However, in order to proceed, these generic boundaries have to be elided, and this is precisely what Kant is doing when he suggests that the “first beginning [. . .] may well be discoverable by conjectural means.”17 This gives rise to a series of linked questions. Either it is nature, or it is narrative, which provides the conditions for understanding how humanity can become rational, autonomous; or, put otherwise, the chronology of nature may itself be inhabited by the narrative imaginary, by speculation, and it is this that provides intelligibility. I shall return to this point. It is the nature of that elision and opposition— the suspension of generic boundaries that Kant here performs—that can address the two parallel sets of questions I have gestured toward: does conjecture merely fill in gaps in a historical process? Or do these conjectures stand in for, constitute, an absent history? Can we understand reason and autonomy by natural means? Or by narrative (and thus imaginary, speculative, fictional, and potentially fictive) means? These sets of linked questions begin to define the problem (but shall not be answered yet). Reading between Kant’s “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History” and his Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals further confirms the relation between the natural, the historical, and the moral. The Groundwork, which works to assert the moral primacy of a good will in the categorical imperative, raises this reservation: There is [. . .] something so strange in this idea of the absolute worth of a mere will in the estimation of which no allowance is made for any usefulness, a suspicion must yet arise that its covert basis is perhaps mere high-flown fantasy and that we may have misunderstood the purpose of nature in assigning reason to our will as its governor.18

Although nature is antithetical to reason, Kant also reiterates the assignation of nature as the “cause” of rationality. Nevertheless, Kant also raises the suspicion that the notion of duty, a good will, the categorical imperative, may not be rationally grounded (rationally grounded via nature), but may rather be the product of “highflown fantasy.” A formulation of the categorical imperative is: “Act as if the maxim of your action were by your will to turn into a universal law of nature.” Derrida, reading Kant’s categorical imperative alongside Kafka’s fable, “Before the Law,” writes: I was concerned with the “as if ” (als ob) in the second formulation of the categorical imperative [. . .]. This “as if ” enables us to reconcile practical reason with a historical teleology and with the possibility of unlimited progress. [. . . Yet,] it almost introduces narrativity and fiction into the very core of legal thought, at the moment when the latter begins to speak and to question the moral subject. Though the authority of law seems to exclude all historicity and empirical narrativity, and this at the moment when its rationality seems alien to all fiction and imagination [. . .] it still seems a priori to shelter these parasites. [. . .] A space, then, in which it is difficult to say whether [. . .] pure practical reason contains an element of the fantastic or of narrative fiction.19

Derrida puts forward an undecidable claim here, parallel to those I have already suggested: although, then, his question is finally directed to Kafka’s fable of the law,

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it can be equally posed to Kant, before his law. The undecidable claim is whether pure practical reason is “generically” pure, or whether it does contain traces of the “fantastic,” or of “narrative fiction.” By following the first clue given by Kant, that nature assigned reason as our governor, structures of narrative and imagination can be shown to inhabit the rational from the first, the “Conjectural Beginning.” Although reason is necessary to achieve morality, the emergence of reason is ambiguous: as Kant puts it, “the history of nature begins with goodness, for it is the work of God; but the history of freedom begins with evil, for it is the work of man.”20 It is also the work of nature. The first man, like Rousseau’s, “must have been guided solely by instinct, that voice of God which all animals obey,” and inhabited a prerational, undifferentiated, sensual world of nature.21 Contrary to Rousseau, however, Kant’s first “couple”22 can already talk and think. In an odd move, Kant assumes that language, although not innate, has already been acquired: “for I merely wish to consider the development of human behaviour from the ethical point of view, and this necessarily presupposes the skills in question already present.”23 This move seems to rather beg the question: given that the intelligibility of rationality is itself at stake, to presuppose meanings already articulated and articulable seems “metaleptic.” However, rationality emerges in four stages in Kant’s account, the first relating to food: “reason soon made its presence felt and sought to extend his knowledge of foodstuffs beyond the bounds of instinct.”24 Instinct guided humanity toward naturally good sustenance; reason disrupts the continuity of nature and instinct, but does not do so alone. There is a concomitant first mention of the imagination: “it is a peculiarity of reason that it is able, with the help of the imagination, to invent desires which not only lack any corresponding natural impulse, but which are even at variance with the latter.”25 This development is itself double-edged, ambiguous, but Kant does not distinguish between the capacities of reason and imagination in the creation of “unnatural inclinations [and] lasciviousness”: “the outcome of that first experiment whereby man became conscious of his reason as a faculty which can extend beyond the limits to which all animals are confined was of great importance, and it influenced his way of life decisively.”26 Important to note is that both reason and imagination are “unnatural.” Via imagination, or at least concomitant with imagination, reason invents the human animal. I return to this with Nietzsche, who radicalizes and also undermines Kant’s account by suggesting that, yes, we are the clever animals who invent the fable of knowledge—but only within fables.27 For Kant, however, the disruptive affects of reason/imagination means that a “momentary gratification [. . .] was inevitably followed by anxiety and fear [. . .] given that he did not yet know the hidden properties or remote effects of anything.”28 Indeed, as “an infinite range of objects now opened up,” the task of reason and imagination is to create a bounded and rational ontology, to provide reassurance (just as Hobbes’s introspection was intended to, but did not textually maintain, such security): man “stood, as it were, on the edge of an abyss”; an abyss invented by the combination of reason and imagination.29 This differentiation from animal nature (Kant terms it superiority, a designation which has turned out problematic to say the least) is continued in his second stage, where rationality and imagination again combine to control and enhance sexual instinct: “Man soon discovered that the sexual stimulus, which in the case of animals

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is based merely on a transient and largely periodic urge, could in his case be prolonged and even increased by means of the imagination.”30 Imagination, when used in this way, “already displays a consciousness of some rational control over the impulses, and not just an ability, as in the first stage of rationality, to obey the impulses to a greater or lesser extent.”31 Interestingly, imagination used in this way, provides control, and with it, discipline: “refusal,” a “sense of decency,” and “concealment” are all invoked by the rational Kantian imagination, as figures of reassurance against the abyssal bodily lust, constraining a random and capricious sexual appetite by the invention of love.32 As with other appetites, as soon as a new world is opened, reason and imagination conjointly work to secure, to close it again. For Kant, the primacy of the body, its hungers, desires, and lusts can only be a “primitive” stage for humanity; the controlling and shaping forces of the moralizing and imaginatively rational tale of love “justifies” the desirous body. This pattern is continued in the third stage of rationality, which emerges as the dual problematic of anticipation of the future and anticipation of death: the annihilation of the self. With the opened vistas of reason/imagination, already the structure of temporality, and its disciplining, has been touched upon. Kant writes that this is “the most inexhaustible source of cares,” that “both [men and women] foresaw with apprehension [. . .] the fate which must befall all animals but which causes them no concern, namely, death; and they seemed to reproach themselves for, and regard as a crime, that use of reason which had brought these ills upon them.”33 This time, it is reason that provides the guilt and discipline, while imagination provides a tentative sense of continuity and reassurance: “perhaps the only comfort and reassurance they had was the prospect of living through their off-spring.”34 This tentative reassurance provided by imagination is disrupted in a footnote, which emphasizes the discontinuity in progress: for just when the most fortunate of thinkers is on the verge of the greatest discoveries which his skill and experience entitle him to expect, old age intervenes; he loses his acuteness, and must leave it to the next generation (which starts once more from ABC and must again traverse the entire distance which had already been covered) to take a further step in the progress of culture.

This is, of course, central to the Kantian theory of progress that asserts that while progress is possible for the species as a whole, it is not possible for the individual.35 The larger point, though, is that it is not by reason alone that such progress can be made known, and that the imaginative, or speculative is crucial in such a narration. The fourth step is the realization that man is the “true end of nature.”36 End as telos; end as death: the nature that, by its very recalcitrance, provoked humanity to rationality, is finally dominated by that humanity. Bennett comments, a “key point at least with regard to noting the wonders of Kantian philosophy, is not only that we are ‘right’ to treat nature as purposive, we must do so. Reason demands it, and reason has what seems to me to be the magical power to get what it demands.”37 As a result of the intrusion of reason and imagination into the Edenic temporal immediacy, humanity is provoked to a progress “toward perfection”: this progress is, however, discontinuous, inhabited by figures of fear, anxiety, the abyss that reason and imagination both create and negotiate.

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I have deferred thus far dealing with central questions posed earlier: whether nature or narrative provides the conditions for understanding how humanity can become rational, autonomous; I shall now suggest that the chronology of nature is indeed inhabited by the narrative imaginary, by speculation, and it is this that provides intelligibility. Related questions concerned the nature of the elision and opposition—the suspension of generic boundaries—that Kant performs: does conjecture merely fill in gaps in a historical process? or do these conjectures stand in for, constitute, an absent history? Can we understand reason and autonomy by natural means? or by narrative (and thus imaginary, speculative, fictional, and potentially fictive) means? What is the relation between nature and narration, speculative imagining and reason in this account? Bonnie Honig, noting that progress is discontinuous, “not smoothly evolutionary,” suggests that it is, “like the subject matter of Kant’s fable of beginnings, a series of discrete events separated by gaps. But man’s future, like his past, can be turned into a continuous and univocal narrative by way of the very mechanisms that enable Kant to write his speculative history.” That is, it is conjecture, or speculation, “imagination in the company of reason,” which “produces an ordered, continuous—hence a therapeutic narrative—of a past that makes sense of and gives purpose to a deeply alienating and aporetic condition.”38 Reason and imagination are those sense-making mechanisms. Speculation, reason, and imagination together both create humanity as humanity; and also create the means by which Kant can write this tale. Is it possible that reason and imagination are different names for the capacity in humans to look beyond the given? Nevertheless, it is by all these means that the promise of moral perfection—that would be the end of the narrative, in a dual sense (telos, and no more narrative)— is given by Kant. Reason and imagination together create the conditions for the Kantian moral narrative, each simultaneously disruptive, but each promising the means to complete the narrative, reach the perfection that Kant sees as, “the ultimate goal of man’s moral destiny.” So, the means by which morality can be understood are by no means unproblematically natural: perhaps it is only by writing the kind of fiction that Kant has written here that a rational purposiveness can be generated. It is, in effect, narrative, and not nature that provides intelligibility; or, nature only constitutes itself as the origin of rationality insofar as it is made intelligible by the narrative imaginary that rationality begins to both constitute and then to read in nature. Humanity’s moral history, and possible moral future, then, is constituted on this basis: reason itself is inhabited by an imaginative and narrative component, and the genres—of an originary nature, and an uncontaminated rationality—will not remain pure. The further question of whether there is or can be a (meaningful or significant) ontological distinction between nature and narrative in philosophical (epistemological) contexts remains to be explored via Stirner and Nietzsche. This reading of Kant’s “Conjectures . . .” recontextualizes the comments made by Derrida, earlier, by situating narrativity and speculation at the center of Kant’s moral political theory: precisely where Kant does not want them to be. For, as we have discerned in Kant’s “Conjectures . . .,” reason is not merely disciplinary, but has its creative, magical, imaginative moments: can such moments also be unearthed in Kant’s deduction of the Categorical Imperative in his Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals? And, again, to what effect?

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Action Without Self or Words? Kant’s Categorical Imperative I have written that the structural status of a fictional natural condition is mimicked in the deduction of the categorical imperative: that is, for the categorical imperative to be made intelligible (even in its unintelligibility, as we shall later see), it will need to be inhabited by a narrative imaginary. In this section, I shall outline the problematic to which the categorical imperative is a response, and suggest that reading Kant’s deduction is also to (re)write the categorical imperative as a fantastic invention. My concluding remarks concern, then, the generic relationship and distinction—troubled, suspended— between Kant’s fictions and his philosophy as exemplified in the two texts I have chosen; and the implications of these textual moments for fictive theories.39 Kant opens the Groundwork with a division of philosophical labors: philosophy is constituted by three sciences, physics, ethics, and logic. The philosophy of ethics has two parts: if based “on the grounds of experience [it] can be called practical; but insofar as it sets forth its teachings simply from a priori principles, it can be called pure philosophy.”40 This is a crucial moment for Kant: he explains, “physics will therefore have its empirical part but it will also have a rational part; so too will ethics, though here the empirical part might be given the name practical anthropology, while the rational part might properly be called morals.”41 So, the task for the metaphysics of morals is, “to work out for once a pure moral philosophy, completely cleansed of everything that may only be empirical and that belongs to anthropology.”42 However, Kant’s metaphors are suggestive of the problems encountered in his attempt to write the metaphysics of morals: we see philosophy put in fact in a precarious position, which is to be firm even though there is nothing from heaven or on earth from which it depends or on which it is based. Here philosophy must manifest its purity as sustainer of its own laws, not as herald of laws that an implanted sense or who knows what tutelary nature whispers to it, all of which—though they may always be better than nothing at all—can still never yield basic principles that reason dictates and that must have their source entirely and completely a priori and, at the same time, must have their commanding authority from this: that they expect nothing from the inclination of human beings but everything from the supremacy of the law and the respect owed it or, failing this, condemn the human being to contempt for himself and inner abhorrence.43

The metaphysics of morals must be firm, even though as ethereal as an angel; must be commanding, even though, as we shall see, it is without voice. This is a complete statement of Kant’s aims. The metaphysics of morals is the “deduction” of the law that commands respect purely for its own sake, detached from self-interest, pleasure, or any other motive that could be attached to the self, its needs and desires (this is the pure “good will”). To follow its dictates is what Kant calls “duty,” which again is purged from all hint of “anthropology,” inclination, or the merely human; thus the concept of duty cannot be derived from our experiences of responding to the moral law. Further, this law must be entirely rational, grounded in and governed by the processes of reason. And, for Kant, this “precarious position” of philosophy constitutes its necessary ground: “the present groundwork is [. . .] nothing more than the search for an establishment of the supreme principle of morality”; and again, the “doctrine of morals is grounded on metaphysics.”44 Kant’s framing of the problem of the ultimate

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principles of morality within metaphysics is such that all empiricity and contingency is expressly excluded; even such contingency as humans themselves are.45 In this work, Kant is clearly no longer on holiday. And yet, the search for the categorical imperative seems to partake of a different genre; perhaps that of the detective story: “a metaphysics of morals is indispensably necessary [. . .] because morals themselves remain subject to all sorts of corruption as long as we are without that clue and supreme norm by which to appraise them correctly.”46 We encounter the idea of philosophy as a detective trail in Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s philosophical detective trail is epitomized as, “to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers. . . .”47 Nietzsche’s method is to shadow in order to expose the philosophical solution presented by Kant (see chapter four). The Groundwork, however, is undeniably compelling: it is a densely plotted philosophical adventure. Tracing and following Kant’s search for this clue, however, gives rise to a very different type of venturing from that in “Conjectures . . .,” however analogous, ultimately, the means to get there is. The structure of the Groundwork is telling: Kant moves progressively further from the world of experience, narrating what the good will and duty are like as subjective motivations, through to the “critique of pure practical reason,” the metaphysical deduction of the categorical imperative in all its philosophical complexity.48 It is worthwhile extrapolating the problems Kant raises in the first section, as he goes on to resolve these in the second and third. First, however, a word is necessary on the world in which, for Kant, humanity lives. As already encountered in Kant’s “Conjectures . . .,” we live in a purposeful world: nature purposively awoke reason; reason is purpose in itself, and as reason is the highest end of humanity, we too are rational and purposive creatures. (Nietzsche will later characterize those who live in this world, full of a wholly imagined hidden design, as living in the “shadows” of the dead god: “God is dead [. . .] and we—we still have to vanquish his shadows too.”49 Max Stirner, who I turn to next, would most likely have agreed, as we shall see.) The principle of purposiveness (or shadow of the dead god) is articulated by Kant thus: “in the natural constitution of an organized being, that is, one constituted purposively for life, we assume as a principle that there will be found in it no instrument for some other end than what is also most appropriate to that end and best adapted to it.”50 (This intuitively strikes me as a crazy assumption!) The assumption of purposiveness has direct implications throughout Kant’s text; and thus, the Stirnerian, Nietzschean, or indeed, Derridean, critique of thinking of this kind, by reading through, questioning, or dissolving the foundations on which it is based, has direct substantive implications for the whole system it supports. The implications of “Conjectures . . .” regarding the emergence of reason as expanding human vistas and thus leading to a greater insecurity, to fear, to multiplied and thus potentially unsatisfiable and thwarted desires for humanity are reiterated by Kant here. His point is that if reason is our uniquely rational—not merely human— instrument given by nature, then we cannot have as an end simply self-preservation, or welfare, or happiness.51 In order to purge the human (and all too human) from the concepts of a good will, duty, reason, and morality, Kant insists that the moral law calls equally to all rational beings, not just humans (metaphysics meets science fiction!).

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In order to avoid morality being merely “practical anthropology,” angels and aliens populate Kant’s text, “pure intelligences, only some of which are human”; and indeed, Ian Hunter proposes that we see the categorical imperative as the “performative personification of this purified intelligence.”52 I return to this fascinating proposition. The assumption of a naturally distributed purposiveness in the world, combined with the priority of reason, leads Kant to the following review and conclusion: Since reason is not sufficiently competent to guide the will surely with regard to its objects and the satisfaction of all our needs (which it to some extent even multiplies)— an end to which an implanted natural instinct would have led much more certainly; and since reason is nonetheless given to us as a practical faculty, that is, as one which is to influence the will; then, where nature has everywhere else gone to work purposively in distributing its capacities, the true vocation of reason must be to produce a will that is good, not perhaps as a means to other purposes, but good in itself, for which reason was absolutely necessary.53

The assumption of purposiveness itself leads Kant to deduce why reason exists. From this, Kant extrapolates the concept of duty in responding to the call of the moral law. In the first section of his deduction he begins to define duty for “common” purposes, as the moral worth of a good will. I shall move quickly through this territory, selecting just one telling example. Acting from genuine moral worth is difficult: indeed, in contrast to the incredible detective and deductive skill of the rest of the Groundwork, there is something almost miserly and certainly joyless—indeed, ascetic—in Kant’s description. For example, Kant imagines, in a typically eighteenth-century example, a philanthropist: Suppose [. . .] that the mind of this philanthropist were overclouded by his own grief, which extinguished all sympathy with the fate of others, and that while he still had the means to benefit others in distress their troubles did not move him because he had enough to do with his own; and suppose that now, when no longer incited to it by any inclination, he nevertheless tears himself out of this deadly insensibility and does the action without any inclination, simply from duty; then the action first has its genuine moral worth.54

The purity of the motive (the “maxim,” or “subjective principle of volition”) is crucial; and further, it does not matter if the philanthropist even benefits anyone, for moral worth, to summarize, lies solely in “the principle of the will without regard for the ends.”55 Therein however, lies Kant’s first problem: one can live “in conformity with duty” without necessarily living “from duty.”56 This is important because Kant suggests that his examples of actions done from respect for the moral law, rather than other, nonmoral motives, will “bring out [the concept of a good will] by contrast, and make it shine more brightly.”57 Instead, however, the territory becomes that of the difficulty of recognizing a good will, and when an action is done out of duty—or just looks that way. The moral proposition that “duty is the necessity of an action from respect for law” is, at this stage, tenuous, unreadable.58 Kant deals with this problem in section two, “transition from popular moral philosophy to metaphysics of morals.” Nevertheless, attempting to purge the (empirical, anthropological, desiring) self from the concept of duty is troublesome: “if we look more closely at the intentions and

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aspirations in [our actions] we everywhere come upon the dear self, which is always turning up; and it is on this that their purpose is based, not on the strict command of duty, which would often require self-denial.”59 This gives rise to a strange stratification and disciplining of the self, where duty and reason have a volition apart from the self, and push in one direction toward the all-encompassing moral law, which again constrains in another direction.60 Put otherwise, the “dear self ” is trained to perform in a certain way: recalling Hunter’s suggestion, the self learns how to imagine its actions differently. Again, the centrality of the modes of imaginings that underlie theorizing is critical: what is imagined, and how is it imagined? Reason, on this account, is an affective will-to-power; and as Nietzsche knows, asceticism is also creative of subjectivities. Duty must work beyond the boundaries of the self, and this thus requires governance of that self by reason. Kant thus proposes two formulae for acting morally, for understanding the categorical imperative. These are: “Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.” And the universal imperative of duty: “act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature.”61 J. Hillis Miller refers to these moments as “radically inaugural,” by which he simultaneously suggests foundationalism and creativity.62 I shall return to this suggestion. Miller also points to a further troublesome moment for Kant, where he tries to define the feeling of “respect” before the law: Kant insists that it is a feeling “self-wrought” by recognition of the rationality of the law, but Miller points to the connotations of the sensible world of inclination and desire behind that feeling. As with the difficulties in separating reason from imagination, this time, it is the moment of “respect” that “eludes both poles of the binary opposition reason/feeling that inaugurates Western metaphysics.”63 This is a complex moment, worth pausing over. Kant writes that, “The mere concept of a categorical imperative [. . .] also provides its formula containing the proposition which alone can be a categorical imperative.”64 A categorical imperative contains an “ought” that nevertheless is no compulsion, and is not felt ascetically, Kant argues, since it is self-willed. I have already referred, via Derrida, to the “as if ” formulation of the second expression of the categorical imperative. This would seem to depend upon the possibility of narrating the law to oneself, and defining one’s actions in accordance with its imperatives. However, Kant wants to deny this possibility of simply narrating the law: For, since the imperative contains, beyond the law, only the necessity that the maxim be in conformity with this law, while the law contains no condition to which it would be limited, nothing is left with which the maxim of action is to conform but the universality of the law as such; and this conformity alone is what the imperative properly represents as necessary.65

To conform to the categorical imperative is to conform to universality as such (in chapter three, I explore Max Stirner, who refers to this attempt to realize the infinite or the universal “non-sense” within a sensual, finite being as unbearable, intolerable, and violent). Conformity to universality rules out the possibility of narration, telling ethical tales; this would be particularity (purely practical). Further, Kant raises the following issue: “if all imperatives of duty can be derived from [the categorical imperative] then,

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even though we leave it undecided whether what is called duty is not as such an empty concept, we shall at least be able to show what we think by it and what the concept wants to say”: what the concept would say if it could speak.66 Rather, as we saw earlier, it can only circumscribe its universality as empty and unfillable, and yet powerfully compelling and constraining for Kantian subjects. The categorical imperative simultaneously writes and erases the law: it is itself the reaching out to construct the universal through the very moment of thinking it, which is also the very moment of realization that it cannot be thought except formally: a strange thought indeed. The logic of the “practical rules,” then, in comparison with the moral law, can be described thus: “In whose comparison all whites are ink/ Writing their own reproach”: the narration, the moment of writing, is the reproach, the point where the moral law degrades itself to the status of a practical rule.67 The difference between the reading Kant intended, and this reading, then, is that I do not presuppose a purposive design—a universal law that can be reached via the categorical imperative—is already existent. Could such a purposive design be thought of as to be created, however obscure that moment of reaching for the universal is described by Kant? For, the narrative moment does not work except to erase its own particularity—it is an impossible way of writing or narrating. I shall suggest, following Kant’s further problematization of the categorical imperative, that the narrative moment is nevertheless necessary; but in an “inaugural” rather than simply representative way; and thus it is epistemologically creative rather than grounded. To say that the moment of grounding the categorical imperative is “inaugural” is to see that moment as founding; but founding in a very different sense. Gibson writes, “the concept of ‘inauguration’ is radically opposed to any thought of the work as reflection. [. . . I]t resists all thought of the work in terms of either ‘empirical origin’ or ‘essential province.’ ”68 Drawn from narratology, this term thus denotes, instead of representation, creativity; perhaps even the new. The movement away from empiricity is also important, and I shall return to this in my concluding comments. Derrida writes of this moment: “it takes place properly and only in the work”; this would mean, as I have already suggested, that the categorical imperative is thinking the thought itself, attempting to create through that thought the moment of universality—not seeing that moment as already “out there”—within which it would make sense. (This is precisely to suggest that if the categorical imperative is a powerful form of imagining—could it be imagined differently?) This is not, then, end of the story; for Kant, always critical and questioning within his own text, asks: “is it a necessary law for all rational beings always to appraise their actions with such maxims as they themselves could will to serve as universal laws? If there is such a connection, then it must already be connected (completely a priori) with the concept of the will of a rational being as such. . . .”69 In order to answer the question of proving that the categorical imperative is binding, Kant introduces the concepts of autonomy and heteronomy. Given his initial postulate of purposiveness, humanity, insofar as we are rational, and all rational beings, are defined as “ends in themselves,” and only in this way can we be a “ground of determinate laws.”70 In suggesting “the will of every rational being as a will giving universal law,” Kant radicalizes Rousseau’s idea that, “obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves” alone is freedom.71 “Autonomy” is thus defined by Kant as the property of giving the law to

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oneself apart from heteronomous causes, such as natural necessity, inclination, desires, or any other cause in which the “dear self ” has an interest: “in it and it alone would lie the ground of a possible categorical imperative, that is, of a practical law.”72 Again, we have the very construction of the universal from will and from reason, both of which are given an agency beyond the human self and its language (the universal, we recall, cannot speak, and indeed, must erase its words if it so limits itself ). To return to Kant’s plot, however: having discerned the relationship between autonomy, rationality, and morality, Kant closes his second section. The third section, “Transition from metaphysics of morals to the Critique of Pure Practical Reason,” opens with that very relationship. Having postulated that we must obey the law because in doing so we obey our rational freedom, and act in accordance with a universal law giving good will, Kant suggests his plot may be circular, and thus, “we cannot yet see how [a categorical imperative] is possible, and hence on what grounds the moral law is binding”: It must be freely admitted that a kind of circle comes to light from here from which, as it seems, there is no escape. We take ourselves as free in the order of efficient causes in order to think ourselves under moral laws in the order of ends; and afterwards, we think ourselves as subject to these laws because we have ascribed to ourselves freedom of will: for, freedom and the will’s own law-giving are both autonomy and hence reciprocal concepts, and for this very reason one cannot be used to explain the other or to furnish a ground for it . . .73

How to escape this circularity? How to bind free subjects to a moral law that they both construct and obey? Kant’s answer, as is well known, is the rupture of the world into two, the production of another world in which freedom makes sense. In this act of rupture, Kant severs the world of experience from the world of rationality, or, the world of sense (subject to the laws of nature and heteronomy) from the world of understanding (the intelligible world, governed by rational laws wherein autonomy can be understood). It is in the latter where the ideas of freedom and rationality belong, aporetically separate from the “determining causes of the world of sense”: Even with the most strenuous attentiveness and distinctness that the understanding can ever bring [. . .] we can achieve only cognition of appearances, never of things in themselves. As soon as this distinction has once been made (perhaps merely by means of the difference noticed between representations given us from somewhere else and in which we are passive, and those which we produce simply from ourselves, and in which we show our activity) then it follows of itself that we must admit and assume behind appearances something else which is not appearance, namely things in themselves, although since we can never become acquainted with them but only with how they affect us, we resign ourselves to being unable to come any closer to them, or even to know what they are in themselves [. . . Man] must count himself as belonging to the intellectual world, of which however he has no further cognizance.74

This is a phenomenal (or rather—“noumenal”) passage: freedom, morality, universality are precisely beyond knowledge, the foundation is that which we have no “further cognizance of.” (Which is not to say it does not have effects!) Further, the production of this world comes entirely from self-activity that creates, imagines, and produces the

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realm in which such ideas can make sense. As Kant calls it, “pure self-activity”—but governed by something that precisely is not and cannot be knowledge. For Kant, however, this aporetic rupture of the world provides the solution to the whole problematic of a freely willing good will being bound to the universal law via the categorical imperative: The suspicion that we raised above is now removed, the suspicion that a hidden circle was contained in our inference from freedom to autonomy and from the latter to the moral law—namely that we perhaps took as a ground the idea of freedom only for the sake of the moral law, so that we could afterwards infer the latter in turn from freedom, and that we were thus unable to furnish any ground at all for the moral law but could put it forward only as a petitio principii well disposed souls would gladly grant us, but never as a demonstrable proposition. For now we see that when we think of ourselves as free we transfer ourselves into the world of understanding as members of it and cognize autonomy of the will along with its consequence, morality.75

Kant has transported us from one world to another in order to understand without comprehending our freedom within law. The dear self lives only in the world of appearances; the rational self alone lives in the true world. I suggested earlier, with Hillis Miller, that this movement was “radically inaugural,” not representative; and epistemologically creative rather than grounded: Kant’s very language here suggests that he recognizes this. He writes, “in the case of the categorical imperative or law of morality the ground of the difficulty (of insight into its possibility) is [. . .] very great. It is an a priori synthetic proposition,” meaning that it is pure, necessary, and universal, without demonstration; but it is also radical otherness.76 From where does the voice of reason speak: “from man, from the perfected voice of his own reason, or [. . .] from an other, whose essence is unknown to us . . .”?77 Reason, Kant writes: restlessly seeks the unconditionally necessary and sees itself constrained to assume it without any means of making it comprehensible to itself [. . .] It is therefore no censure of our deduction of the supreme principle of morality, but a reproach that must be brought against human reason in general. Thus we do not indeed comprehend the practical unconditioned necessity of the moral imperative, but we nevertheless comprehend its incomprehensibility.78

This ending is indeed aporetic: in the words of Beardsworth, “the aporia of the law emerges from the impossibility of finding, or inventing the origin of law. The origin of law is an ‘impossible’ invention, and the condition of all inventions of law.”79 The origin of the law, on this account, can only be the impure but productive activity of the very selves Kant wished to deny. * * * I suggested in opening this excursus that the explicitly fictional logics of “Conjectures . . .” provided an e(strange)d perspective by which an other logic of Groundwork could be read. This is why I called this a liminal reading. By way of concluding this section on speculative natural beginnings, and opening on to the next,

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comprising Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche’s questioning of any manifestation of foundationalism, I shall address the larger thematic questions within which this reading of Kant found its relevance. Focusing on the function of foundations and the function of narrative within political theory led to a set of three questions. These concerned the status of the theoretical act; the status of the real that it (should?) ground and guide; and the narrative logic of the construction of the political as opposed to its epistemological security. Further, the logic of narrative is itself a problematic question. The specific manifestation of these questions concerning Kant related to the performance of a generic suspension of the boundaries between nature and narrative in “Conjectures . . . .” In order to write the emergence of humanity from nature to reason, Kant used both reason and imagination, just as, for the first couple in his fable, both reason and imagination operated to provoke awareness of the uniquely human condition. In that context, I argued that the chronology of nature was itself inhabited by a narrative imaginary that provided its intelligibility. This reading, however, provoked awareness of Kant’s desire to maintain the purity of generic boundaries—such as between nature and narrative, between history and conjecture—and also, crucially for Groundwork, between philosophical rationality, and thus morality, and an imaginative narrative. What I would like to suggest in concluding, and in drawing more clearly the liminal moment, the analogy between the method of “Conjectures . . .” and of Groundwork, is that for Kant, this philosophic rationality had to be itself inhabited by an imaginative narrative of a special type. Put simply, I have so far worked toward suggesting that Kant the deductive detective is also Kant on holiday: is the Kant who works to create and transport humanity, or rather, rationality, to a very different space. Does this mean that the categorical imperative is “mere high-flown fantasy”? Yes; but also no. I shall return to Derrida to explain this. Derrida wrote, “though the authority of the law seems to exclude all historicity and empirical narrativity, and this at the moment when its rationality seems alien to all fiction and imagination [. . .] it still seems a priori to shelter these parasites.” Derrida then posed the following question to Kafka; I want to pose it to Kant: does his work “propose [. . .] a powerful philosophical ellipsis” or, does “pure practical reason contain [. . .] an element of the fantastic, or of narrative fiction”?80 Answering this suggests why Kant’s deduction both is and is not mere high-flown fantasy. The idea of the categorical imperative as inaugural resists both fiction and philosophy. It resists fiction, because, while creative, its space must remain uninscribed; any narrative account unduly limits and thus negates its universality. This imaginative narrative does not merely allow us to represent our actions to ourselves as moral, but also produces the kinds of subjects who could think that thought. ( Just as Kant’s “Conjectures . . .” used the very mechanisms to write a coherent narrative that the first couple used to explain and understand their alienation from nature.) However, it also resists philosophy, since in order to be thought in the first place, an attempt at narrating must be made. The moment of thinking the categorical imperative, then, as the moment of reaching out to construct and create the universal, can only be fictive: it must not rely on knowledge; it must not rely on empiricity or historicity. I shall suggest in later chapters that this space is itself stratified, and can be called utopian.

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High-flown fantasy, indeed—but given the epistemologically complex nature of the space thus created, not merely so. A very different kind of space—not bound to the real, and not already written by idealism—can be thought from this point onward. Just as Derrida has argued that the moment of undecidability (that attests to both alterity within the present and the temporal movement toward an unknown, radical futurity) precludes the political from being reduced to programmatic calculations, Kant too effectively negates the given as foreclosing possibility through the codification of a program. As Jane Bennett writes, this is perhaps what should be saved from Kant: I am ambivalent about the “over” or “above and beyond” connotations of meta, as in a Kantian metaphysics of the supersensible. Etymology does seem to warrant the thesis that meta can also mean “that which bridges” [. . .]. There is, however, also a bit of Kant’s meta that I wish to retain. I like its utopian gesture, aura, or scent, that is, its willingness to venture above and beyond, onto the plain of virtual things and not-yet-realized possibilities.81

I like Hobbes’s privileging of the bodily, the somatic, even as I like Kant’s opening up of alter-spaces within the present, spaces of alterity that rupture the self-presence of the present. What I want to reject, through a critical excavation of the constitutive fictivity, and hence contingency, is their effects, and the binaries they then work within to circumscribe their fictions: Kant’s rejection of the bodily and sensual, Hobbes’s rejection of the cyphers of possibility in the present, and more so for the future. A utopian subjectivity is necessarily fictive, alert to radical alterity, grounded in her bodily possibilities, even as that soma is itself part of the possible. I propose, however, that new possibilities can be inscribed in those imaginative spaces. If Hobbes attempts to write once and once only the “tablets” of political theory; if Rousseau uncovers layers and layers of bad fictionalizing on those very tablets; Kant blanks them out with a white ink too pure for the merely human. Nevertheless, Kant, following Rousseau, laid “all facts aside” and created a space that can be described, at the moment, as neither material nor utopian. With Bloch, in this space we shall see that “no absolute objections to utopia can be raised by merely factual analysis.”82 Tracing the possibilities of a utopian fictive further, in the next section, drawing on the work of Max Stirner, Karl Marx, and then extensively, Friedrich Nietzsche, I argue that even the “real” cannot give rise to its own literal story.

Part II Fictions of Self-Evidence

One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted— One need not be a House— The Brain has Corridors—Surpassing— Material Place— Emily Dickinson

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Chapter Three Stirner (with Marx and Derrida): Neither Material nor Utopian?

Prisons are built with the stones of Law, Brothels with the bricks of Religion. Eternity is in love with the productions of time. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 8, Proverbs of Hell The “true world”—an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating—an idea which has become useless and superfluous—consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it! (Bright day; breakfast; return of bons sens and cheerfulness; Plato’s embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.) Nietzsche, “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable,” in Twilight of the Idols

Political theory is haunted. Max Stirner is prepared to dispel and exorcise the monsters, specters, demons, ghosts, and phantasms, rational or otherwise, that stalk its pages, inhabit its subjects, and foreclose human potentiality. To read Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own, Marx (and Engels) reading of Stirner in The German Ideology, and Derrida’s readings of both these texts in his Specters of Marx is to explore the problematic that the attempt to read the “real” literally gives rise to. It is also to read a tale of hauntings, obsessions, accusations; a battle to reclaim the real against the illusory. Stirner, haunted by illusory forms of authority, the “superior specters” haunting brains and bodies that are simultaneously embodied yet fantastic and spectral, writes an “ego-logical” critique where, in a radically defined “real,” the sole source of authority is an inarticulable profoundly creative “I”; and Marx, through two-thirds of The German Ideology rewrites this “undisguised ghost story,” attempts to exorcise Stirner’s specters in order to reclaim the really real.1 As for Derrida . . .? At stake in this part of the book are both the possibility and the politics of a post-representational epistemology. There are nevertheless potential dangers in such a project that working through Stirner helps to illuminate. In this chapter, I argue that Stirner aims to perform, through his egological critique, a post-representational renaming of the world. His endeavor is significant and important, and the politics of “insurrection” provocative and necessary. Nevertheless, Stirner’s post-representational renaming of the world is dissociated from a transformative praxis just at the moment when the politics of

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insurrection seems to demand such a thing (which is not to say, as I shall argue, that he cannot help me figure out “strategies of resistance”).2 If I am claiming for the “fictive” a politics that is both post-representational and transformative, then Stirner is clearly important but flawed. Marx’s (admittedly obsessive) critique of Stirner suggests two reasons why. First, the ontological problem: Stirner, Marx claims, has chased so many ghosts he can now only fight “imaginary” monsters. Second, the praxis problem: while Stirner portrays actual social phenomenon as being reductively interpreted through the narrowing lens of their “spook” concepts, Marx argues that Stirner’s position effectively entails a reinterpretation of the world but does not mean changing those actual social phenomenon.3 At stake in both these points, then, is the politics of the real. For Stirner and Marx, the beginning of philosophy, its “premise” or “presupposition” (and these terms, as we shall see, are important) had to be the “real.”4 After Stirner and Marx, the final part of this chapter explores the status of the real with Derrida, pointing toward—and back—to Nietzsche, and the possibilities of utopianism with Bloch. Stirner and Marx, in spite of, and because of their closeness, seem to mark two irreconcilable positions, but these positions come from a search for a real on which to ground, guide, and sustain political action. In the cases of both Stirner and Marx, this search for the materially real is paradoxical, difficult. But, if the very domain of the political is shown to be dependent upon a particular logic of the narrative of the real, is this not one foundation that cannot be said to be contingent? Combating Phrases or Intriguing with the World? First, then, to clarify schematically and quickly a complex, multilayered word, the “real,” and to suggest what is at stake this strategy of founding, and its undoing. The real, like the natural, is invoked as a status word, conferring authority, privilege. Moving from the questions of truth that preoccupied Kant, to questions of the accuracy of representations, the real denotes a “positivist” or empiricist insistence on actuality, on the tangible, solid, concrete, the real, as we have seen with Hobbes, speaks the language of materialism.5 However, the real also connotes the language of truth, of authenticity, of genuineness. The real is the given, that-which-cannot-be-denied (and occasionally, that which evades, or is prior to the linguistic): thus, at the level of ontology, the real opposes intangibles, the immaterial, while at the level of epistemology, it opposes falsehoods, untruths, lies.6 Opposing the real, then, are idealism and utopianism—and it is this organization of reality I wish to challenge and disrupt. For the language of reality is always political language, and the real functions in political discourse as a strategy of founding. If the real acts as a “guarantee,” however, just what does it guarantee? Political theory deals with questions of knowledge: it “combats phrases.”7 Questions of existence and truth, of interpretation and meaning must lead to, invoke, initiate questions of justice. In his younger years, Marx wrote that, “there are moments when philosophy turns its eyes to the external world, and no longer apprehends it, but, as a practical person, weaves, as it were, intrigues with the world, [. . .] and throws itself on the breast of the worldly siren.”8 Political theory, then, must deal with questions of doing, of action, of actualization: with the actually material and real. This is of particular importance for emancipatory and transformative politics.

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The relation between theory and practice, on this account, is again nevertheless one in which epistemic privilege is invoked, and accounts of political action revolve around the oppositions of truth and falsity, materiality and immateriality, idealism and speculation, or the materially real. At the end of the previous section, with and against Kant, I gestured toward a fictive space that was neither material nor utopian. With Stirner, and with Marx’s critique of and response to Stirner in The German Ideology, I delineate in this chapter a little more about this space via the opposition of the material and the utopian. I am not presupposing a definition of the utopian: this would be to allow the priority of “the real” to construct and delimit utopian spaces. To anticipate: following Stirner’s paradoxical grounding of the real (his “presupposition” is self-consuming), we find in Marx a critique of any speculative, idealistic, and utopian attempts to engage with the world. The debate between scientific socialism (real, material, determined) and ethical or utopian socialism (idealistic, speculative) nevertheless relies heavily on the over-determined opposition of the material and the utopian. However, I work toward undoing this opposition; this is why I begin with Max Stirner.9 To invoke Stirner already one might say that the problem of meaning is provoked when we no longer have a system of meaning and belief that relies upon a structure of foundations and transcendence. In terms of political theory, the model I have drawn out in the introduction, and especially with Rousseau and with Kant, is simple, but not, as I read and re-wrote it, untroubled: it is the model of an epistemologically grounded political theory, the model of knowing before responsibly doing. I have suggested this model is both authoritative and legislative, and thus best understood via the trope of the legislator. A certain failure in this model can be expressed in terms of a crisis in the link between meaning and justice. For Marx, this crisis can only be resolved through a transformation of the world: as Marx’s Thesis Eleven states, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”10 But what kind of knowledge makes this transformation possible? Is it representational (an accurate representation of the real) or post-representational? “An interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets,” is Jacques Derrida’s post-representational definition of a performative interpretation, and it is clear that Marx’s Thesis Eleven demanded (and still demands) its own performance.11 The disappointment—indeed, the failure—of Thesis Eleven encompasses the dual disappointment of politics in terms of the problem of meaning and interpretation, its function in generating its own performance, generating meaningful political action and change. The problematic of both Stirner and Marx’s texts is precisely, as Derrida puts it, “the question of the idea, the question of the concept and of the concept of the concept [. . .] (nominalism, conceptualism, realism, but also rhetoric and logic, literal meaning, proper meaning, figural meaning),” the economy of the speculative and ideal (the rationally real), opposed to the economy of the materially real.12 I have already suggested that the material and the utopian map—but are not reducible— to oppositions such as the real and the fictional, the actual and the speculative (in chapter five, I read utopia in a very different way). In this critical debate, the very relation between words and the world, between knowing and doing, between meaning and justice is put on trial. Further, Derrida suggests that Marx, in his pursuit of Stirner, “pursues relentlessly someone who almost resembles him to the point that we

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could mistake one for the other: a brother, a double, thus a diabolical image. A kind of ghost himself. Whom he would like to distance, distinguish: to oppose.”13 There is implicit here a warning on my own pursuit—in order to dissolve, or make evident the fictivity of—foundations, which I have suggested, provokes a different recognition of the perceived status and task of the project and discipline of political writing, it will not do to simply oppose. Supplement This debate between Stirner and Marx is analogous with a contemporary debate whose terminology, despite the passing of almost one hundred and fifty years, deals with similar questions of the status of the real, the status of the theoretical act, and the place of the real within theory. Richard Rorty, in a typically brisk manner puts the challenge to Derrida in the following terms: Deconstruction is marginal to politics [. . .] If you want to do some political work, deconstructing texts is not a very efficient way to set about it. Getting rid of phallogocentrism, metaphysics and all that, is an admirable long-term cultural goal, but there is still a difference between such goals and the relatively short-term goals served by political deliberation and decision.14

Rorty’s challenge to the possibility of a deconstructive politics (which would be a post-representational politics) is interesting in two respects: he points to the complex relationship between words and worlds first; but second, Rorty is further concerned to sever the relationship between projects of self-creation (associated with the creation of a private language) and projects of social justice through arguing that the creation of a self is necessarily a private project, while justice is public. The mutually reinforcing sets of oppositions within this rendition of a post-representational politics are instructive: self-creation opposes justice, private opposes public, and so his endorsement of the inventive power of imaginative language is curiously apolitical in effect, precluding the power to generate new political concepts. As I explore through Stirner’s politics of insurrection, this is politically dubious to say the least. I suggest at the close of this chapter that Rorty’s project of “redescription,” while post-representational, remains that of a “critical critic” in the face of Derrida’s “spectral” Marxism. For now, it is enough to suggest that a similar movement occurs in the preface to The German Ideology. Here, Marx levels this charge to the Young Hegelians: “The Young Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly ‘world-shattering’ phrases, are the staunchest conservatives,” and in opposition to these “young conservatives,” Marx privileges “the real”: The most recent of [the Young Hegelians, namely, Feuerbach, Bauer, and Stirner] have found the correct expression for their activity when they declare they are only fighting against “phrases.” They forget, however, that they are opposing nothing but phrases to these phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are combating solely the phrases of this world.15

This supplements the conceptual mapping that I have been drawing out: a new level has been added, where combating phrases (deconstructing texts?) is opposed to

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“combating the real existing world.” (I have suggested, in my introduction, however, that attention to this formalist moment reconfigures the “properly political” moment, undoes or suspends the opposition that many critics would otherwise insist on—at stake is what Derrida has said does not yet exist: a “code” that is not metaphysical, and within which deconstruction and politics are not opposed.) That Derrida’s first extended engagement with Marx (and by implication, with “real” politics—the proper name “Marx” carries these implications)16 should be in the context of The German Ideology, with all those implications, is unsurprising. The issues raised and addressed in these debates, and the placing of them in proximity, are crucial to the selfunderstanding of the enterprise of political theory, of its form and function. This is a challenging claim, at the heart of the doing of politics, addressing three important issues: first, the more formal question, what is the status of the theoretical act, and how does it generate meaning? Second, the functional and substantive question, how can a political theory generate its performance? And finally, what happens to the political when, to jump ahead and temporarily align Derrida with Stirner, epistemological questions cannot be answered, when foundations and transcendence are so many “specters” or “fictions,” simply other texts (in Stirner’s and Derrida’s “phrases” respectively) that we can no longer rely on?17 In Marx’s voice, in our political theorizing, are we simply combating phrases, and thus working in a wholly idealistic or utopian mode, or are we intriguing with the world, and thus acting within materiality, the “really” real? And is there any space within, between, or beyond this opposition? Stirner, Marx, and Locating the Real Let me turn in more depth, then, to the first debate, and Marx’s encounter with Stirner. A cursory glance through the existing literature makes them appear strange bedfellows. Literature on Stirner is rare, while perhaps too ironically, Marx and Marxism have spawned an industry. Substantively, the contrast between them is stark: indeed, Marx depicts Stirner, in that worst of insults, as “a decadent Hegelian [. . .] the speculative spokesman for the petty bourgeois.”18 Others variously depict him as an anarchist, individualist, solipsistic, proto-existentialist, proto-Nietzschean, inveterate capitalist, radically anti-capitalist, libertarian, or indeed, bypass the problem altogether by the de-politicizing gesture of labeling him insane.19 McLellan, a prominent commentator on Marx and the Young Hegelians, points to the increasing marginalization of Stirner, despite his historical importance: “the fact that the book was very much a product of its time and that its interest has therefore largely disappeared should not obscure its great importance for its contemporaries.”20 (The problem of categorizing Stirner is one I am sure he would be pleased about; in his critique of all forms of domination, he also seems to resist the closure of the category.) Marx, on the contrary, despite and because of the vast literature and critical disagreements needs no introduction. I want to challenge this critical dismissal of Stirner. I have already said that the problematic of these texts is the question of meaning and that the Stirner–Marx debate can be seen as the conflict between the speculative, the ideal, and the utopian (the space, for now, is similar), on the one hand, and the material and the real on the other, as two differing, and indeed, on Marx’s account, opposed registers for political action. The German Ideology, according to Althusser, is a text of Marx’s “transition”: it marks an “epistemological break,” during which Marx

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changed from speaking the language of the Young Hegelians, the language of idealism and thus of ideology, to the mature Marx, who spoke with the language of materialism as science.21 Although this is a much-disputed interpretation, it has set the agenda even for those who disagree. McLellan, for example, denies an epistemological break, but agrees Marx uses different “voices”; Nancy Love argues that Marx turns to historical materialism as science to answer the questions of justice—the humanist questions—he had previously set, and that these questions are constant.22 More concisely yet, Hobsbawm writes that Marx’s vision, the development of bourgeois society, and its conclusion, this society’s overthrow by the very working class it generated, “did not derive from the same analysis.” “The aim of communism,” writes Hobsbawm, “adopted before Marx became a Marxist, was derived, not from the analysis of the nature and development of capitalism, but from a philosophical—indeed, eschatological— argument about human nature and development.”23 Lobkowicz argues that the encounter with Stirner actually provoked Marx to his first mature articulation of historical materialism. John E. Seery, on the contrary, argues in a more provocative manner that the very idea of an epistemological break in Marx’s career underestimates the extent to which Marx was always an activist, a precisely political writer, who believed that people could be provoked to action all the more effectively if they believed that history was on their side (the myths of Rousseau’s legislator find a resonance here). I return to Seery, as he raises very interesting questions of self-reference that a deterministic understanding of materialism cannot deal with.24 Dealing with the narrative of Marx’s career, a task that nevertheless lies outwith the bounds of this book, means dealing precisely with the changes in status of the real. I shall gesture toward this, however, via the common inheritance of the Young Hegelian movement. In common with the Young Hegelians, both Marx and Stirner wanted to rid philosophy and consciousness of the illusion and phantoms that constituted, first, the reactionary heritage of Hegel, and second, the ideology of idealism itself.25 The project of the Young Hegelians was concerned with the ways in which consciousness could become realized, fully and rationally. The Young Hegelians, to summarize all too briefly, accepted Hegel’s method, but saw in his philosophy simply an idealization of the existing world: instead of transfiguring reality he had described it as already rational, not in need of change. Meaning and reason were implicit in the real, in the existing institutions and values. The Young Hegelians, on the contrary, saw themselves as dissident intellectuals, as radicals opposed to existing values and institutions. Thus, when Feuerbach wrote that “the beginning of philosophy is the limited, the finite, the real,” he begins to describe the movement by which Hegel was radicalized, translating Hegel’s language, as an idealized description of the world, into “the language of ideals to be achieved.”26 Again, all too briefly, these were ideals of selfrealization, and an unmasking of the illusory forms of authority, both idealism and ideology, which precluded this development. Precisely at stake, is the terrain on which the real is to be sought, and even fought for: the logical or the empirical, the philosophical, or the socioeconomic. Stirner and Marx, then, share a common heritage. Both are concerned with the status and effects of idealist philosophical discourses. The spaces of idealist philosophy, for the Young Hegelians, are also the spaces of ideology, of a misrecognition of the material. And so, for both, began the “curious reversal” of Hegel’s method: “while Hegel found the ‘truth’ of each universe of discourse

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in a ‘higher’ type of discourse, the Left Hegelians began to discover the ‘truth’ of each universe of discourse in a ‘lower’ one. [This constituted] a radical disenchantment and profanization of Hegelian ideas [from the] speculative and mystical [to the] language of everyday experience and common sense.”27 The relevant questions, then, can be posed as, what are the conditions in which a particular kind of alienated individuality exists, and what are the conditions of possibility for overcoming this alienation? For both Stirner and Marx sought the same end: “a society of free men who are each, therefore, unique”; nevertheless, Marx “had to demonstrate that this end could not be achieved without a real political and revolutionary struggle, led by those who least resembled the type outlined by Stirner.”28 At stake, then, the structural position and status of “the real,” and the kinds of actions that different conceptualizations of the real can generate. “Man your head it spooks . . .” Stirner’s position is, I suggest, fictive and self-consciously so to the extent that he uncovers and rejects other forms of “bad fictives.” Stirner can be called the theorist of a uniquely individual politics grounded only in a groundless desire, and for him, this groundless desire constitutes all that can be said about “the real.” Dealing with the relation between the real and the true, the material and the ideal, the empirical and the speculative, Stirner’s relentless critique of all strategies of foundation, and of all attempts to stabilize representations of the real, gives rise to an epistemological anarchism, and thus precisely, an unconventional but nevertheless political expression of anarchism (it is with reluctance that I impose the closure of the category). I shall detail this reading in the following two sections, dealing first, with Stirner’s discussion and dismissal of the “unreal” in all its complexities; and second, I turn to his “presupposition” that paradoxically grounds his alternative (the inaugural “I”). I shall illustrate this reading with regard to Stirner’s conception of property. Stirner puts the self radically into question in a very different manner to Kant, and we shall find a similar movement in Nietzsche’s genealogical unpacking of the subject as a political re-reading and re-writing. While outlining this, I shall highlight the points on which Marx was most vulnerable: Stirner’s critique of communism, from the standpoint of a different “real” clearly provoked Marx, since the debate between utopian and scientific socialism depends precisely on claims made about the nature of a material reality rather than an ideal or illusory real, a fantasy, motivating political action. The crucial point of conflict between the two is precisely the presupposition versus the premise. The opening of Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own is an explicitly inaugural moment: What is not supposed to be my concern! First and foremost the good cause, then God’s cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally, even the cause of mind and a thousand other causes. Only my cause is never to be my concern.29

The language of idealistic striving pervades the term “cause.” In opposition to this, Stirner writes, “I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything. Away, then, with every concern that is not altogether my

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concern! [. . .] Why, I myself am my concern, and I am neither good nor bad. Neither has meaning for me.”30 Stirner is concerned, however, with limitations, constraints, definitions, and concepts, which work to discipline and subordinate the individual will, the “I” (the “creative nothing,” to which I return), to an “idea.” Within his critique of the paradigm of idealism(s), Stirner deals with the logic of abstraction, which is also the logic of alienation: “Every higher essence, such as truth, mankind and so on, is an essence over us.”31 So, for example, Kant’s noumenal world involves for Stirner the creative positing of a categorical imperative that is immediately alienated, hypostatized, and granted disciplinary power over the subject. Abstraction, for Stirner, is inherently a category of mastery. There is a double movement involved here, however. Abstraction does not simply involve domination by an external source; it also estranges the world in an internal displacement. Stirner continues, “Alienness is a criterion of the ‘sacred.’ In everything sacred there lies something ‘uncanny,’ that is strange, such as we are not quite familiar and at home in.”32 In Stirner’s reclamation of the real from the uncannily estranged, however, the real and unreal do not constitute a symmetrical opposition; therefore, I shall explore the “unreal” and its “origins” first. Stirner lives in a world that has become spectral, phantasmal, unearthly, and “unearthy,” alienated through the bad fictive of rational idealism, as well as any idea of idol that negates or limits the “creative nothing”: Yes, the whole world is haunted! Only is haunted? Indeed, it itself “walks,” it is uncanny through and through, it is the wandering seeming-body of a spirit, it is a spook. What else should a ghost be, then, than an apparent body, but real spirit? [. . .] Look out near or far, a ghostly world surrounds you everywhere; [. . .] Everything that appears to you is only the phantasm of an indwelling spirit, is a ghostly “apparition”; the world to you is only a “world of appearances,” behind which the spirit walks. You “see spirits.”33

In this dense passage, the material, the sensuously real, has been transformed into the spectral, to a semblance, the truth of which has to be “uncovered.” Indeed, this section is a most concise critique of Kant’s deduction of the intelligible world that haunts the actions of the moral subject. The sensuous is “inhabited” and disciplined by the power of idea(l)s and the abstractions of idealism, possessed by a truth other than the “in-itself.”34 For Stirner, the “spirit” has no claim to either reality or truth: indeed, truth itself is another spectral form, born of a rationalist, or Hegelian, faith in thinking (a curious notion: a rationalist faith). In a dialogical section of the text, Stirner asks his inscribed textual other, presumably an imaginary Young Hegelian, “So, I suppose, you strive at all times to recognize the truth?” The faithful reply is, “To me truth is sacred. It may well happen that I find a truth incomplete and replace it with a better, but the truth I cannot abrogate [. . .] Nothing transcends it, it is eternal.”35 Stirner argues that the universal and eternal simply cannot be combined with the fleeting, ephemeral, particular: “You, who let yourself be filled and led by this sacred thing, are yourself hallowed. Further, the sacred is not for your senses—and you never as a sensual man discover its trace.”36 Stirner points to more than a category error on, for example, Kant’s part: as the subject thinks of herself as part of the noumenal world, Stirner argues, there is a precisely corporeal violence.

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The realm of the infinite has inhabited and possessed the finite, the body of the individual: [T]o you the whole world is spiritualized, and has become an enigmatical ghost; therefore do not wonder if you likewise find in yourself nothing but a spook. Is your body not haunted by your spirit, and is not the latter alone true and real, the former only the “transitory, naught” or a “semblance?” Are we not all ghosts, uncanny beings that wait for “deliverance”—namely, “spirits?” Since the spirit appeared in the world, since “the Word became flesh,” since then the world has been spiritualized, enchanted, a spook.37

Fredric Jameson argues: it is a question of how abstract ideas get replaced by real bodies: we are thus at an opposite pole to the problematic of Feuerbach and his speculations as to how images of the divinity are projected out of human potentialities [. . .] Here it is a matter of how the abstractions of the mind as it were illicitly become incorporated in their existential bodies.38

However, Jameson’s use of “replacement” in this context seems too weak to deal with Stirner’s text: in a process of ontological and epistemological confusion, the abstract and spectral inhabit and possess the real, where this possession by the untruth and unreality of idealism constitutes a radical loss, “enchantment,” estrangement; but also a moment of domination.39 The real and the unreal thus do not constitute a symmetrical opposition because it is through the real becoming inhabited by the perceived greater reality of the unreal (the Kantian idea, e.g., or Hegelian Geist) that the corporeal—Stirner’s preferred real—itself becomes ghostly, a spook. From this moment, there is no easy return—no simple inversion or purging of the idea from the self—to corporeality or the materiality of the embodied self. This becomes clearer in Stirner’s critique of the three dissident movements of his time, political liberalism (humanism), social liberalism (philosophical communism), and humane liberalism (“critical criticism”). The movement in each critique is similar: Feuerbach, Hess’s communism, Bauer’s critical criticism, as Paterson puts it, had all stopped short at some crucial point: at the last moment they had admitted the presence of some transcendent object in the scheme of things—not, indeed, a God in the sense of a personal deity, but a “Humanity,” or a “Society,” or a “Morality,” all of which were as fictitious and as autocratic in their claims upon the individual human being as any personal God had been [. . . The] project of philosophical atheism remained to be carried through to its conclusion.40

The ambivalent status of the term “fictitious” here is important: Paterson refers here to that alienated creative positing that returns and “walks,” the bad fictive kinds of authorities. And yet, I insist upon the ambivalence, since at stake is not just the status of those authorities but also their “autocratic” effects. Fictions remain suggestive of the possibility of moving beyond fictional foundations in an enabling rather than solely negative way: these are all pointers toward a “creative epistemology of the possible,” an “atheist” space that is, nevertheless, not tied solely to empiricity. I return to the project of philosophical atheism, and its relation to foundationalism, authority, and epistemologically or ontologically grounded sense-making narratives

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with Nietzsche. To remain with Stirner, however, the problem with political liberalism is that it asserts freedom only once: then limits, binds, and makes subservient the political subject whom it claims to have freed. Stirner’s arguments here are dependent upon an ontological individualism, but, as I go on to argue, of an uncommon type. Stirner extrapolates a definition of liberalism drawing on Hegel, the philosopher of the bourgeoisie: “liberalism is nothing other than the knowledge of reason applied to our existing relations.”41 However, Stirner cannot read “rationality” as a quality of persons: “if reason rules,” he argues, “then the person succumbs.”42 (Recall, however, that Kant did not read rationality as a quality of persons either; Stirner inverts the value accorded to rationality.) Similarly, freedom of religion, of conscience, a free state for Stirner means that “these despots make me a slave, and their liberty is my slavery.”43 This would be the implication of a certain way of reading Kant. Power has become authorized as “sheer, uncanny ‘spirit,’ as an idea.”44 To invoke a later thinker on ideology, it is a means by which the political subject, hailed by an authority (s)he misrecognizes, “works by itself,” internalizes, and believes to be its own “property” the voice of ideology, the idea(l).45 Similarly with “social liberalism” (“like the ‘nation of the politicians,’ it will turn out to be nothing but a ‘spirit,’ its body only semblance”46): Stirner criticizes the communism that Marx was also to castigate as “utopian,” a communism based on a moral ideal, as a normative cause. If communism exists as the language of an “ideal to be achieved,” then for Stirner, this does not overcome the paradigm of the spectral, and does not overcome its concomitant uncanny, inhabiting authority. Stirner argues this with regard to the concept of equality. Alluding to Marx’s use of the term “real generic being” (see “On the Jewish Question,” but also the Paris Manuscripts), Stirner objects to the language by which the “essence” of “man” is separated from corporeal man, as something to be achieved, demanded. More extensively, Stirner writes, community as the “goal” of history hitherto, is impossible. Let us renounce every hypocrisy of community and recognize that, if we are equal as men, we are not equal for the very reason that we are not men. We are equal only in thoughts, only when “we” are thought, not as we really and bodily are. I am ego, and you are ego: but I am not this thought-of ego; this ego in which we are all equal is only my thought. I am man and you are man: but “man” is only a thought, a generality; neither you and I are speakable, we are unutterable, because only thoughts are speakable and consist in speaking.47

Equality, in Stirner’s terms, is an abstraction or spook that thus inhabits in order to regularize, discipline, standardize the individual. Thus, the “world of mind, of ideas, of thoughts, of concepts, of essences,” are now so many spooks, so many phantasmagoric creations alienated from their individual creators, and now held as ideals to be achieved.48 The critique of critical criticism has two, by now familiar, parts: one shows Stirner’s preference for the sensual human body, the other denying the “humane” that “critical criticism” wants to attain is in any way “real.” Briefly, the critic, “cannot criticize away the private person himself, since the hardness of the individual person resists his criticism”; and “there arises a new faith, faith in humanity.”49 For Stirner, a “new faith in humanity” reinstates a guarantee of meaning (and order) outside of the self, and therefore maintains a reactive structuring of subjectivity in relation to that external guarantor. As Paterson correctly notes, for Stirner the

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conflict between the real and the ideal cannot be resolved: at least, not “until one annihilates them both.”50 At stake, however, is the intelligibility of the real; and this Stirner also denies. Realizing the Non-Sense, or, Grounding a Groundless Desire? The gesture that defines philosophy, according to Stirner, is the pursuit of the ghost, and the desire to “make the spook comprehensible, or to realize non-sense.” The gesture of conceptualizing the sensuous is for Stirner, quite literally, non-sense, to attempt to transcend what can only be abolished: “the contradiction of two natures, the divine and human, the ghostly and sensual.”51 The sensual can only be made sense of through a “private” language: What haunts the universe, and has its occult, “incomprehensible” being there, is precisely the mysterious spook that we call the highest essence. And to get to the bottom of this spook, to comprehend it, to discover reality in it [. . .]—this task men set to themselves for thousands of years; with the horrible impossibility, the endless Danaid-labour, of transforming the spook into a non-spook, the unreal into something real, the spirit into an entire and corporeal person—with this they tormented themselves to death. Behind the existing world they sought the “thing in itself,” the essence; behind the thing they sought the unthing.52

We have witnessed this seeking for the unreal world in Kant. But what, then, is Stirner’s alternative? Will he be compelled to repeat this gesture of philosophy all over again, or with the “Unique One” has “all conceptual evolution come [. . .] to an end”?53 What, indeed, can the status of this philosophy, and of the real become? I suggest that Stirner is compelled to repeat the gesture of philosophy over again; but with a difference: to overcome the “uncanny,” alienation, Stirner does need to relocate a real—he needs to “be at home in the world”; however, his “heimat” is, as Nietzsche will put it, “beyond good and evil,” beyond the “fictional” because false foundational reality of both the idealists and the materialists, to the fictive foundation beyond truth and lies. He does not quite get there—Nietzsche gets far closer—but his idiosyncratic rendering of this endeavor is fascinating. Let me turn my attention, then, to Stirner’s inaugural philosophical gesture: his “presupposition”: I on my part start from a presupposition in presupposing myself; but my presupposition does not struggle for its perfection, but only serves to enjoy it and consume it. I consume my presupposition, and nothing else, and exist only in consuming it. But that presupposition is therefore not a presupposition at all [. . .] I do not presuppose myself because I am every moment just positing or creating myself, and am I only by being not presupposed but posited, and, again, posited only in the moment when I posit myself; that is, I am creator and creature in one.54

Stirner is embarked on the same project as Marx, as Feuerbach, as Bauer—even as Kant and Hegel: he wants to locate the real, he repeats this task, but with a difference. This real is an unarticulable performance of potentialities, of energies, of the ephemeral and fleeting, transitory existence. Posited, rather than presupposed, there

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is a radical freedom from fixity and reification. This is an energetic real: it is the self as a space of action; time is entwined in the very fabric of the sensual self. Rather than the paradoxical temporal stasis of Hobbes’s matter in motion, Stirner anticipates what I shall call a fictive subjectivity, where the very matter of the body precisely embodies temporality. This transitory, temporal, yet paradoxically absolute ego, nevertheless, does not overcome Stirner’s problematic of the spectral without encountering its own difficulties in terms of reality and unreality. To take two further “definitions” of the status of the “I”: “It is not my thinking, but my thoughtlessness, or I the unthinkable, incomprehensible, that frees me from possession [by the spectral]. But the monstrous significance of unthinking jubilation could not be recognized in the long night of thinking and believing.”55 This clear reference to, and rejection of, Hegel would suggest an “I” as jouissance, as sensuous, bodily, undetermined by the priority of reason, which would attempt to restrain “the body and its pleasures.” This reading of the “I,” then, is indeed decentred, willful, unconstrained: “ ‘What am I?,’ each of you asks himself. An abyss of lawless and unregulated impulses, desires, wishes, passions, a chaos without guiding light or star!”56 Stirner’s “I” is an inaugural event, a process that cannot be stabilized, an event and process of events that cannot be contained in terms of logic, rationality, conceptuality, which it exceeds and evades. It happens. Ontological existence of the self is at one with its creative activity; there exists no dualism, or moment of fictitious transcendence. Unless, of course, the whole project is a fictitious transcendence: “To be free is something I cannot truly will, because I cannot make it, cannot create it: I can only wish it and—aspire toward it, for it remains an ideal, a spook. The fetters of reality cut the sharpest welts in my flesh every moment. But my own I remain.”57 If this is the “I,” the sensuous self, the body, liberated from the spectral possession, and thus the domination of ideals and idealism, which sees only meaninglessness in every critical stance, there still exists, in Stirner, a recalcitrant ontological reality impervious to the will and creativity of the “I,” a reality that hurts the “I,” a real that evades the creative renaming, or indeed the evasion of naming, of the “I.” After a brief detour through the Unique One’s “property,” I suggest that the criticism of “bourgeois” thinking is wrong, but that the residual paradox of Stirner’s position—that it changes everything and nothing—is irresolvable. For Stirner, alienating and autocratic authorities, or idols “exist through me; I need only refrain from creating them, then they exist no longer.”58 However important this gesture is (and I suggest its import again with Nietzsche) Marx is right to point to a missing praxis in Stirner’s account. Recognizing the constitutive fictivity of authoritative fictions does not simply negate their effects, however crucial and necessary that stage of interruption is in undermining the necessity of any given ordering of things. The status of the “I” is enacted through the status of its “property” or “possession.” Stirner’s critique of bourgeois private property is radical: if property is grounded in law, then it has become nothing other than a “fixed idea,” which Stirner rejects. Indeed, commenting on Proudhon, Stirner argues that “property is theft” is simply the binary opposite to private property, and is thus grounded in the validity of the very property he wants to abolish. In contrast, Stirner writes, “private property lives by grace of the law. Only in the law has it its warrant—for possession is not yet property, it becomes ‘mine’ only by assent of the law; it is not a fact, not au fait as Proudhon

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thinks, but a fiction, a thought.” It is worth recalling Rousseau: The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying “This is mine,” and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”59

This is, as we have seen, the exemplary moment of Rousseau’s “bad” fictive. If bourgeois private property is a fiction, in the sense that its grounding has become (is alwaysalready) radically contingent, and indeed, violent, then “possession,” or the property of the Unique One is fictive in its groundlessness, with surprising consequences: “When the world comes in my way—and it comes in my way everywhere—I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but—my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you [. . .] We owe each other nothing.”60 Elsewhere, he writes, “What then is my property? Nothing but what is in my power! To what property am I entitled? To every property to which I—empower myself. I give myself the right of property in taking property to myself, or giving myself the proprietor’s power, full power, empowerment.”61 It has been argued that this gives rise to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all of possessive aggressive individuals: while the language used by Stirner would lend strength to this reading, I am not convinced. Recalling the discussion of Hobbes in chapter one, Hobbesian disciplining only works via the forcible stabilization of representations, and the subject’s belief in those representations, through somatic disciplining on a conceptual and corporeal level; these bases are thoroughly challenged by Stirner. The nature of his “I,” his radical questioning of the self-conscious ego, precludes any institutions being grounded in it. While Thomas, following Marx, writes, “Stirner seems to be the theorist par excellence of what C.B. MacPherson was to call ‘possessive individualism,’ ” K.E. Ferguson writes, “For all his talk of ownership, his whole conception of selfhood stands as an explicit rejection of possessive individualism; the self is not an object that can be exchanged for wages and commodities because it is not a fixed entity at all.”62 Stirner’s self does indeed devour, possess, assimilate, consume; but does not and cannot “fix” a property in its always temporary and contingent possession; for as Raoul Vaneigem reminds us, echoing Stirner, “Whatever you possess possesses you in turn.”63 Fixing property, then, creates specters. In turn, the “creative nothing” or ego cannot enslave another: by enslaving, dominating, the ego would also enslave himself by negating the transmutability and openness of social relations. Using the language of his day, Stirner also goes beyond it—leaving us, paradoxically, in the same position as Kant did; with the “tablets” of political theory blank. In reply to his critics, he writes: “What Stirner says is a word, a thought, a concept; what he means is no word, no thought, no concept. What he says is not what he means, and what he means cannot be said.” Of note here is his reference to himself, peculiarly, in the third person—as though even his very name, and perhaps even his own book, now that it has been written, have become “spooks” of which he has taken leave, no

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longer having need of them. A central premise of the “possessive individual” thesis is a “secured” individual, with interests, aims, objectives; a proper name, a centered self.64 Nothing can be secured by Stirner’s “I,” and this is not its aim: this would result in a “fixed idea,” not a use-in-process by the diffuse energies of the ego. Stirner does not present a vulgar ontology of the individual; in a ground-breaking sense, Stirner’s inaugural “I” is radically inconceivable. This leads to intriguing, paradoxical (and frustrating!) politics. As David Leopold notes in his introduction to the 1995 edition of The Ego and Its Own, the book was banned at the time of its publication, but the confiscated copies were released when the Saxon Minister for the Interior realized that it was “ ‘too absurd’ to constitute a danger to social and political order.”65 Can the “absurd” also function as a political, destabilizing category? The politics of Stirner’s work are those of insurrection: Revolution and insurrection must not be looked upon as synonymous. The former consists in an overturning of conditions, of the established condition or status, the state or society, and is accordingly a political or social act; the latter has indeed for its unavoidable consequences a transformation of circumstances, yet it does not start from it, but from men’s discontent with themselves, is not an armed rising, but a rising of individuals, a getting up, without regard to the arrangements that spring from it.66

Stirner does not see insurrection as a political act, but rather, as an act of reconstructing one’s subjectivity actively, without any external guarantee of the meaning and order of the self. Even as his descriptions clearly invoke changing power relations and structures, it is unclear what would happen, if anything, to “actually existing” governments and power relations: the revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on “institutions.” It is not a fight against the established, since, if it prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only a working forth of me out of the established. [. . .] Now, as my object is not the overthrow of an established order but my elevation above it, my purpose and deed are not a political or social but (as directed toward myself and my ownness alone) an egoistic purpose and deed.67

Put more briefly: “the insurgent strives to become consitutionless.”68 I have suggested that Stirner’s post-representational renaming of the world is dissociated from a transformative praxis just at the moment when the politics of insurrection seems to demand such a thing. Nevertheless, the importance of Stirner’s work seems to me to be suggested by Vaneigem when he writes, “Power cannot be overthrown like a government. [. . .] To know how to live is to know how to fight against renunciation without ever giving an inch. Let nobody underestimate Power’s skill in stuffing its slaves with words to the point of making them slaves of words.”69 I return to this point with Nietzsche and Bloch: it points beyond the framework of Stirner, and into the ethos of resistance without ressentiment. The Stirnerian moment is also crucial for my attempt to think through the possibility of a politics of resistance that does not operate through authoritative and programmatic modes: I return to the political effort to become “constitutionless” at the end of chapter five.

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Some concluding thoughts on Stirner, then: I have proposed that he can be described as neither material nor utopian. Perhaps paradoxically, in collapsing the spaces where “superior specters” lurk, he has also collapsed potentially utopian spaces, where new meaning and possibilities can be collectively inscribed. I described Marx’s critique of Stirner as twofold: ontological and praxis-related. While I reject the first critique (as I go on to explain this criticism is dependent upon Marx’s access to the “real”), the second has force. Conceptual and political recreation, of the self, of social possibilities, necessitates the conception of new kinds of political concepts that locate political struggle in a social and critical mode rather than a legislative/juridical mode—this necessitates the fictive as that which refuses referential and conceptual fixity—but it also necessitates an understanding of the transformative that negotiates the material/utopian opposition rather differently. With this in mind, I turn to Marx. An “Undisguised Ghost Story?” Marx on Stirner Marx read in Stirner one who had carried post-Hegelianism reductionism through to its farthest point: those conclusions, however, undermined, and indeed, precluded, the very communism that Marx saw as the “riddle of history solved,” and thus the overcoming of the contradictions between the individual and the collective that enabled Stirner’s Unique One to exist.70 At stake in this debate, then, is an ontological moment.71 Lobkowicz see a choice arising from the conflict between Stirner and Marx: “either Stirner is right, and then every critical stance is meaningless—this is the starting point of Marx’s historical determinism. Or else communism and the humanization of man is an ideal inviting men to action—and in this case Marx’s attempt to translate his ideals into a historical necessity is self-defeating.”72 This is suggestive, and deals with problems of self-reference in Marx that materialism cannot simply deal with. With Seery, I go on to suggest that the material is intelligible only by means of a politicized, post-representational, transformative interpretation. To deal, first, then with the extent to which Marx can be considered a typical Young Hegelian, and thus with the function of the ideal/material, or ideology/science oppositions. Marx wrote, The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it is gripped by the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But for man the root is man himself.73

Earlier still, in 1842, Marx had written: We are firmly convinced that the real danger lies not in practical attempts, but in the theoretical elaboration of communist ideas, for practical attempts, even mass attempts, can be answered by cannon as soon as they become dangerous, whereas ideas, which have conquered our intellect, and taken possession of our minds, ideas to which reason has fettered our conscience, are chains from which one cannot free oneself without a broken heart; they are demons which human beings can only vanquish by submitting to them.74

This is precisely the paradigm that Stirner argued simply continued an alienated state. Theory is given an autonomous role; man is essentialized; and the communist

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“idea” is depicted (in Stirnerian terms!) as a “demon” that has possessed and subordinated the individual. According to Marx, Stirner begins his critique in the wrong place, with consequences that are disastrous in that Stirner’s philosophy has, simply put, no consequences at all. This is made clear in the “preface,” where Marx ironically parodies by repetition the Young Hegelian radical political proposals: Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, about what they ought to be. They have arranged their relations according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The products of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, the dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against this rule of concepts. Let us teach men, says one [Feuerbach], how to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; says another [B. Bauer], how to take up a critical attitude to them; says the third [Stirner], how to get them out of their heads; and existing reality will collapse.75

Where Stirner has gone wrong, according to Marx, is in trusting the ghosts too much. There is much in Stirner that Marx can agree with: the “fantastic and spectral form” that power can assume;76 however, as Jameson persuasively points out, Marx’s dramatic insight lies in the identification of [Stirner’s] allegedly concrete existential body as itself a phantom, an imaginary body (“he makes his own body into a body of specters”). The attempt to conquer and achieve concreteness via the expulsion of the specters only leads to the construction of an even more imaginary entity, which I think of as my “self ”: the existential path thereby leads, not into reality, but into an even more intricate unreality.77

Marx argues that Stirner has performed a “conjuring trick” typical of the German ideologists, whereby the world is “all gone”: “while the real, empirical history that forms the basis of this ghostly history is only utilized to provide bodies for these ghosts; from it are borrowed the names required to clothe these ghosts with the appearance of reality.”78 Thus, in doing so, Stirner has taken that which he (on one level) knows to be false, and dealt with it as if it were true: as Marx puts it, “St. Max has again displayed his gigantic faith. He has again taken as literal truth all the illusions of German speculative philosophy; indeed, he has made them still more speculative and abstract.”79 Marx agrees that the German ideology is false; he agrees that alienation does exist as a result of the dominance of the “unreal”; but, that unreal is not a result of a false philosophy as Stirner argued. While Stirner negated the dominance of the idea of the human, of “causes,” and so on, as expressions of alienation and thus mastery, Marx argues, “he forgets that he has only destroyed the fantastic and spectral form assumed by the idea of ‘Fatherland,’ etc., [. . .] but that he has still not touched these ideas, insofar as they express actual relations. Far from having become the master of ideas—he is now only capable of arriving at ideas.”80 The monstrosity of idealism has been taken as false—but real in its effects by Stirner, and Marx would agree with this; but Stirner’s belief that he has transcended philosophy with his Unique One is “just as imaginary.”81 A “false” philosophy, according to Marx, is

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instead the result of a materially actualized alienation, not simply ideal or speculative, of a “false state-of-affairs.” It is in this context that Jameson continues: Marx does not offer a counter therapy, but the rest of The German Ideology (in particular the section on Feuerbach) is there to suggest that for him individual reality is to be found and achieved there where social reality is also to be found, namely, in production itself, or in other words by going around before the invasion of the cerebral and reified conceptual phantoms, and beginning again from their point of production; by circumventing them rather than traversing them into what is vainly hoped and fantasized as being a truer reality after the reign of the phantoms themselves.82

While for Stirner, the point was to exorcize the spooks and phantoms, the point, for Marx, is to find the stage before there were phantoms, the reality from which they emerged. Jindr¸ich concurs with this analysis: he argues, “Marx distances himself from Stirner’s anti-substantial critique [. . .] because it is only apparently radical; it helps in reality to conserve a life with alienated products of human praxis, hence relations in which metaphysical illusions of ‘substance’ and the unconditioned ‘subject’ necessarily arise.”83 The language of an unconditioned, creative agency that Stirner ended with is to Marx just as false as the symbolic action of ideas within an alienated and misrecognized reality. Marx’s fundamental critique of Stirner, then, echoed in the “preface,” is that, “all his great deed is confined to a mere perception which in the end leaves everything existing as it was, changing only his conception, and that not even of things, but of philosophical phrases about things.”84 This speaks precisely to the point of whether, when political theorists redescribe the world, we are working toward transformative action? And what, anyway, is the relation between theory and practice? Marx can certainly be read here as posing a thorough challenge to my own preferred fictive position; but only if we suppose that Marx is “intriguing with the world” rather than “combating phrases.” For the moment, Marx is most insistent on the following point: that Stirner only combats phrases and thus only fights imaginary monsters from imaginary premises: “we are prepared to allow” that Sancho does not think before he thinks, and that he and everyone else is in this respect a thinker without premises. Similarly, we concede that he does not have any abstract thought as the premise of his existence, i.e., that he was not created by thoughts. If for a moment Sancho abstracts from all his thoughts—which with his meager assortment cannot be very difficult—there remains his real ego, but his real ego within the framework of the actual relations of the world that exists for it. In this way he has divested himself for a moment of all dogmatic premises, but now for the first time the real premises begin to come to light for him. And these real premises are also the premises of his dogmatic premises [. . .] So, despite all imaginary freedom from premises, this premise will remain with him as long as he fails to overcome its real premises.85

Without the knowledge that materialism generates, any end of alienation, relations of domination, fixity, and reification will itself be purely illusory, Marx argues. For Marx too, then, the battle between the real and the ideal cannot be resolved within philosophy: the ideal, and the idealism of the German ideologists, is a moment of ideology generated by the real as false consciousness at a particular stage in its development.

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And so, to return to the preface: “Th[e] demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret the existing world in a different way, i.e., to recognize it by means of a different interpretation.”86 What, however, is the force of this argument? Lobkowicz, to anticipate the problem of self-reference, wrote: seeing that Marx no longer asks us to pursue ideals, but rather predicts their inevitable realization, this is certainly a very curious criticism. Marx accuses the Left Hegelians of restricting themselves to changing their ideas about the world, of not wanting to change the world itself. But if Marx really meant what he wrote, namely that communism is not an ideal, that it is nothing that ought to be established, then he seems as little willing to change the world as the Left Hegelians do.87

The question is: is materialism real or interpretation? Representational or postrepresentational? Material or utopian? True or fictive? Combating Phrases or Combating the Real? The first section of The German Ideology is therefore a response comprising two main strategies: the first is Marx’s (and Engels’s) articulation of the “real premises” from which “combating the real existing world” must begin; the second part outlines a whole historical development of which communism is viewed as the “real movement” implicit within it, and not as a spurious and autocratic ideal to be achieved that would negate the singularity of the individual. For Marx to comprehensively negate and thus supersede Stirner’s arguments, the materialist turn must be exclusive, and negate other means of comprehension. After reviewing the understanding of materialism given in The German Ideology, I suggest, drawing out the relation between the material and the intelligible, that this cannot be the case. Like Stirner, as Derrida points out, Marx shows a preference for the living, human, particular body: “The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both those that they find already existing and those produced by their activity.”88 Marx’s historical narrative moves from the first moments of self-recognition, through to a historically defined self-realization. The defining category in this development is the mode of production, which is, “a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part.”89 The point against the German ideologists is that consciousness of being cannot be a premise on which to overcome alienation. On the contrary, “consciousness can never be any more than conscious being, and the being of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.”90 Despite the metaphor of natural necessity (the inversion of objects on the retina cannot be changed), “real knowledge” takes the place of ideology if this materialist premise is understood. Thus, “the phantoms formed in the brains of men,” that is, men as falsely described by means of consciousness, can only be negated and exorcised when it is recognized that, as Marx’s famous axiom puts it, “it is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.”91

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The materialist conception of history, as is well known, performs an inversion in terms of its relation to German ideology: philosophy, as Marx puts it, should not “descend [. . .] from heaven to earth,” but on the contrary, “ascend [. . .] from earth to heaven.”92 The result of this is that “history ceases to be a collection of dead facts”; “empty phrases about consciousness end”; and “a self-sufficient philosophy loses its medium of existence.”93 The importance of the end of philosophy in Marx’s context is that historical necessity is introduced, whereby the idealist narrative of the Young Hegelians is wholly negated.94 History, although having no agency of its own, is progressive: the development of the productive forces itself provides the material basis for communism: “communism is not for us a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”95 Two of Stirner’s conclusions are thus also “inverted”: where Stirner saw social fixity and reification as a result of conceptual domination, Marx here argues that such fixity is a material result of the division of labor. The real abstraction and reification comes from the material: “this fixity of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into a material power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development till now.”96 This means that liberation must also be historically and socially performed: revolution, not insurrection, and the abolition of private property as the ontology of the capitalist mode of production that sustains the condition of alienation. And more specifically, one consequence of the division of labor, important in terms of the role and function of philosophy is the historically determined division between manual and mental labor. Marx argues that it is “from this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real.”97 In political terms, in making intelligible the connection between the real and the “ought” of speculative philosophy, or the “is” of Stirner’s, any recourse to consciousness alone will be false. Questions of meaning, of representation, cannot be detached from questions concerning the productive forces. The opposition between science as materialism, as the really real, and idealism as ideology works in Marx’s texts to translate his vision of a future justice into a historical necessity: it performs the function of grounding.98 Instead of traversing idealism’s phantoms, Marx outlines a whole historical and material movement, within which is implicit the development of communism, and the overcoming of the division of labor, private property, and alienation. This, however, gives rise to certain questions concerning the status of Marx’s texts. For example, Lobkowicz argues that since Marx “no longer asks us to pursue ideals, but predicts their inevitable realization,” the criticisms of the Young Hegelians both in Thesis Eleven and in the preface to The German Ideology—that they only change their interpretations of the world rather than changing the world itself—gives rise to an ambiguity. Can communism both be historically necessary and open to debate? John Evan Seery relates this problem to the problem of self-reference in Marx: [The German Ideology] begs several questions, all of which revolve around the problem of self-reference, of Marx’s theoretical relation to his own works: if ideas reflect the

96 / fictive theories dominant material relationships and reflect the interests of the ruling class; if change comes about as a result of certain developments in the productive forces; if liberation is a historical, not a mental act; if communism is not an “ideal” to which reality must adjust but is actually the “real” movement now operative; why, oh why, then, is Marx writing at all? [. . .] What is the status of Marx’s writing in relation to that hard history?99

At stake is precisely the relation between materiality and intelligibility, and thus a meaningful political reality and theory: why did Marx write at all? To begin to answer this question, I turn to Marx’s discussion of the way in which the material becomes intelligible. It is necessary to return to the realm of consciousness. According to Marx, consciousness emerges as the “fifth historical act,” after the production of means to satisfy needs. This is the “production of material life itself,” “eating, drinking, housing, clothing,” and is thus the first “premise”; then, the creation of new needs; procreation; and the production of life as both natural and social.100 Marx then writes, Only now, after having considered four moments, four aspects of primary historical relations, do we find that man also possesses “consciousness.” But even from the outset, this is not “pure” consciousness. The “mind” is from the outset afflicted with the curse of being “burdened” with matter that makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only, therefore, does it exist for me.101

When does language become the “language of reality”? When can the knowledge that materialism generates become known? The peculiar difficulty with language is that it is at the same time, the language of reality and the language of ideology, of speculative philosophy: One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as the philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm. This is the secret of philosophical language, in which thoughts in the form of words have their own content. The problem of descending from the world of thoughts to the actual world is the problem of descending from language to life.102

These two excerpts indicate a profound problem with Marx’s inversion, a problem that is located precisely at the level of the ability to comprehend this inversion. There is an excess of meaning in the material, whereby consciousness can never fully comprehend its own shaping forces, and language can never quite tell of its own origin because its status is always in doubt. Andrei Warminski formulates this point in the following terms: “materialism [. . .] cannot simply be the chiasmic inversion of idealism. [. . .] Instead, materialism understands life to over-determine consciousness in a way that consciousness cannot master. Accordingly, consciousness is not the other of life [. . .] Consciousness transforms life into a figure for consciousness. The only authoritative ground for this transformation, however, is the system of consciousness itself.”103 In other words, the ontology of the capitalist mode of production cannot

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give rise to a literal meaning, cannot tell a literal story: cannot, in short, “work by itself.” Why did Marx write? Because even materialism cannot tell a literal story: the point before the emergence of the phantoms and spooks cannot be conceptualized even via the materialist route. Materialism itself, however, is not simply to “recognize the world by means of a different interpretation,” but to actively construct the intelligibility of the material. Comprehension of the materialist “premise” is itself a moment of political interpretation that reconfigures the world as malleable to intervention.104 Marx’s “materialism” is not opposed to his “mythology,” nor quite ungrounded by it, and nor is it a theoretical “choice” that can be made. Rather, the intelligibility of the material actively depends upon the “between.” Seery puts it like this: I never cease to be amazed at how often I hear the old saws repeated in criticism of Marxism—that it represents “economic determinism,” “scientism,” “utopianism,” “secular eschatology”—when precisely those excesses where the charges that Marx leveled against his opponents, the bourgeois capitalists, the political economists, the Young Hegelians, the utopian socialists, the mystic anarchists. If one listens carefully, one can almost still hear an ironic ring to Marx’s use of the term “materialist” in his interpretation of history, as if he were echoing the rules and rhetoric of the “capitalist materialists,” while turning their own supposedly immutable laws against them.105

In this way, Marx’s real can be read as a contingent, activist, interventionist, utopian, and a fictive—but not simply fictional—foundation. Rather than having to choose between “combating phrases” and “intriguing with the world,” Marx combats phrases precisely in order to transform the world. Christopher Voparil has recently pointed to the importance of post-representational politics: in his words, Marx’s writing is precisely post-representational in the sense that it does not “mirror” reality, but instead acts as a “lever,” is itself an “instrument of change”; and it is precisely this creatively transformative power of Marx’s writing that suggests he can be properly read via the critical and fictive.106 Supplementary Anticipations: Derrida on the Space of “Neither/Nor.” To return now to the contemporary debate with which I opened this chapter. At stake are the politics of post-representational ways of knowing the world, where redescribing the world is a performative and transformative interpretation of the world. Richard Rorty, nevertheless, refuses this second move. Philosophy, for Rorty, should recognize its status as simply criticism, as an ethical project, a large part of which is changing the status of foundational claims to knowledge and truth to contingent, historical narratives, but one that is detached from the public and political project of attempting to embody these redescriptions of creative autonomy in the political. In Rorty’s words, the liberal ironist (the erstwhile philosopher) can “redescribe, but not empower.” Rorty’s characterization of Derrida’s deconstructive project, then, mirrors the terms that we are now familiar from Marx’s critique of Stirner (with the evaluation nevertheless inverted): the dispersal of the centered subject, the refusal of truth or meaning outside of the determinations of the willful ego, is simply the creation of a private language with no public or political implications. Again, at stake are the ontological moment, and the possibility of praxis. To explore this further, I turn, finally, to Derrida.

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The following reading of Derrida’s Specters of Marx, by doubling his own intervention in the Stirner–Marx debate, aims to contribute more generally to the debate on the place of the political in deconstruction, and the place of deconstruction in the political, expressed in terms of questions relating to the capture of the real and the generation a political narrative of meaning and justice. What questions does Derrida pose? What questions can be answered by way of Derrida’s “deconstruction”? Simon Critchley, in his review of Specters of Marx, asks, What force does Marxism retain if we set to one side its materialist account of life, production, praxis and history? I completely agree with Derrida that there are certain ontologies that we can do without—for example, the Marxist-Leninist economic determinism of dialectical materialism—and that we must constantly resist the temptation to ossification and dogmatism into which Marx’s discourse can fall. [. . . But] can we do without ontology or, better, an ontological moment if we are Marxists, even deconstructive Marxists?107

Derrida’s text deals with questions of the status of key terms, and the ways in which their unfixing affects the economy of the system, and affects systematics. His intentions in Specters . . . are (at least) triple. First, he chooses a moment timely in its very untimeliness to open a dialogue with Marx.108 Second, he implicates the movement of deconstruction with a marxist narrative: “Deconstruction has never had any sense or interest, in my view at least, except as a radicalization, which is also to say in the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.”109 Third, by reading through texts of Marx and Stirner, Derrida articulates thoughts on “deconstruction as justice,” independent of an ontological fixity: “what remains irreducible to any deconstruction, what remains undeconstructable as the possibility itself of deconstruction is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; it is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism, an idea of justice. . . .”110 Such ontological fixity is defined by way of Marx, and Derrida’s comments here suggest his work begins in the space between Stirner and Marx, both of whom attempt to negate the idea of justice: however alive, healthy, critical, and still necessary [Marx’s] burst of laughter may remain and first of all in the face of the capital or paternal ghost, [. . .] that is the general essence of Man, Marx [. . .] perhaps should not have chased away so many ghosts too quickly. Not all of them or not so simply on the pretext that they did not exist (of course they do not exist, so what?).111

Derrida’s reading of Marx can be defined as provocatively Stirnerian, with conclusions that are not unproblematic given the irreconcilable nature of their respective “philosophical” positions, but highly suggestive given my earlier comments that Stirner is the irreconcilable yet necessary supplement to Marx. It is reading “the logic of the ghost” that further suggests that justice cannot simply be based on what is real and knowledge thereof.112 Hauntology, then, is the between, possibly the beyond, the opposition of material and utopian. Derrida’s commitment to the “logic of the ghost” or “hauntological” rather than the ontological attests to three crucial moments for a post-representational politics.

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First, it attests to the “excess of time” that marks and undermines the ontological and the material; second, it attests to the radically open nature of the future, rather than its calculability; and third, while insistent on something called justice, it resists the epistemological certainty that would underpin a programmatic or legislative mode of political theorizing. He proposes: “Wherever deconstruction is at stake, it would be a matter of linking an affirmation (in particular, a political one) if there is any, to an experience of the impossible, which can only be a radical experience of the perhaps.”113 This ethical relation between knowledge and justice is itself inverted in Derrida: the utopian, or to use his own terminology, the “messianic without messianism” comes from a suspension of ontology and epistemology: “This not-knowing is not a lacuna. No progress of knowledge could saturate an opening that must have nothing to do with knowledge.”114 In his readings of Stirner and Marx, Derrida, as Caputo puts it, moves beyond critique only by first moving through it: he “proceeds by way of shaking the assured distinctions of the ontology upon which Marxist critique rests; between the real and the unreal; between the effective actuality of economico-material forces and the unreal or fantastic; between full presence and absence.”115 It is salient to read Derrida’s critique in the terminology of the paradigm of alienation: whereas Stirner and Marx both argued that alienation could be overcome by exorcising the ghost, Derrida sees the ghost as the very condition for justice.116 A recurrent refrain throughout Specters is Hamlet’s “The time is out of joint”: while this is suggestive of alienation, of a wrong state of affairs, for Derrida this cannot be “set right” by invoking full presence, self-conscious mastery. In Derrida’s reading of Marx, he believed too much in the “dividing line” between “ghost and actuality” as both “real limit and conceptual distinction”: “he believes enough in the dividing line of this opposition to want to denounce, chase away, or exorcise the specters, but by means of critical analysis and not by some counter magic.”117 How, Derrida asks, did Marx “bind the ghost to an ontology,” and what are the effects of this?118 Derrida argues that it is “critical but pre-deconstructive”: “this critical ontology means to deploy the possibility of dissipating the phantom [. . .] as the representative consciousness of the subject, and of bringing this representation back to the world of labor, production and exchange, so as to reduce it to its conditions.”119 Effectively, binding the ghost to an ontology closes once again spaces of alterity that could also be spaces of ideology, on the one hand, and utopian anticipation on the other. Recalling the political importance of this excess of time Vaneigem reproaches those who would organize [. . .] the past, dividing it up along time’s official line [. . .] these easy-to-use categories put past events into quarantine. Solid parentheses isolate and contain them, prevent them from coming to life, from rising from the dead, and running through the streets of our daily lives. The event is, so to speak, deep-frozen. It becomes illegal to retrieve it, remake it, complete it, or attempt its transcendence . . .120

Specters can also motivate and move political action (as Hobbes feared): Vaneigem would argue that there are traces of social struggles in the past that can be reactivated. And indeed, both Derrida and Vanegeim speak to Bloch’s utopian critique of empiricism and actuality: Bloch, too, invokes a utopian excess of time, a stratification of past into future, future into present, that moves beyond a closed materialism: “Where

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the prospective horizon is omitted, reality only appears as become, as dead, and it is the dead, namely naturalists and empiricists, who are burying their dead here.”121 Derrida points toward, rather than invoking the full presence and understanding of the political, a practice of writing that is a “technique of strategic re-location in order to rescue what we need of the past in order to trace paths of transformation of our own lives here and now”; it is “akin to what Foucault called countermemory; it is a form of resisting assimilation or homologation into dominant ways of thinking.”122 I suggested earlier that Rorty remains a “critical critic” in the face of Derrida’s spectral Marxism: Rorty too quickly forecloses the possibilities of post-representational forms of thinking politically, and limits his understanding of political action to the public/ private understanding of contemporary liberalism. This, too, must be questioned. To sketch briefly Derrida’s suggestion on the effects of this, then to move on to the “politics” of hauntology. First, the focus “purely” on the finite is limiting: “the dead cannot bury the dead,” as Marx would have it, and a Derridean responsibility goes, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead [. . .] Without this noncontemporaneity with itself of the living present, without that which secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there, of those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living, what sense would there be to ask the question “where?” “where tomorrow?” “whither?”123

The paradigm of alienation, to use a different terminology, is one that cannot be overcome, but one that can be worked from within: the openness toward a responsibility to what cannot be known pure and simply constitutes, Derrida claims, the prior basis not only of Marx’s work, but also of his own. The “real” as ground is simply never enough. Nevertheless, the conclusions that Derrida draws from this have been seen as problematic (and almost Stirnerian) in their near-disembodiment. Derrida calls for a “New International”: It is a link of affinity, suffering, and hope, a still discreet, almost secret link, as it was around 1848, but more and more visible, we have more than one sign of it. It is an untimely link, without status, without title, and without name, barely public even if it is not clandestine, without contract, “out of joint,” without coordination, without party, without country, without national community (International before, across, and beyond any national determination), without co-citizenship, without common belonging to a class . . .124

The New International of Hope, nevertheless, can and should be read as a further “transformative lever,” and one that speaks affectively and in anticipation to a history that is still being formed, that is unfinished, whose possibilities do not reside in what has already become, and yet that seeks to redeem the struggles of the past. As an International of hope, the New International is, then, a further fictive operator that seeks to become part of an unfinished cartography of the future without negating the struggles of the past. Messianic affirmation existing alongside foundational critique—the spectral, neither Geist nor Gespenst, becomes the condition for a messianic affirmation between materialism and utopia.

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Very briefly, the status of this politics is precisely what is in question. Nancy Fraser, for example (although in a different context), writes in a disapproving tone: “to deconstruct the political and essential belonging-to-one-another of the political and the philosophical is not to take a political position; it is rather to question the very position of the political. The task, in other words, is not to institute a new politics, but rather to think the institution of the political.”125 Bennington points out that “one cannot simply demand of deconstruction that it present its ethical and political titles without presupposing that one already knows what ethics and politics are, whereas that is just what we are trying to interrogate here, laughing at the edifying naiveté informing such a demand.”126 Paradoxically, Fraser also insists that “you can’t get a politics straight out of an epistemology” while demanding of deconstruction that it produce a politics of institution.127 With Stirner, such singularity led to an anarchic project; the final section of this thesis, drawing on a deconstructive utopianism, suggests the necessary reconciliation of Stirner and Marx via, instead, the work of Nietzsche and Bloch. Derrida’s political narrative, then, cannot “work by itself ” but has to be “written” newly each time a decision is made. At stake, here and through Nietzsche and Bloch, is the legislative moment, the mode of political theorizing. If, as Derrida has suggested, political theory lacks “an adequate political code to translate or incorporate the radical implications of deconstruction,” it is precisely because of this demand for a moment of legislation and institutionalization.128 A deconstructive utopian imagination, however, also resists the hypostatization of the legislative moment. I return to this debate, then, in concluding both chapters four and five.

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Chapter Four Epiphany and/or Politics? Nietzsche

on the one hand, knowledge is that which can invent the fable; but on the other hand, this knowledge is itself an invention—it is invented just like the fable, but in the fable. Warminski, “Towards a Fabulous Reading” Ascend beyond the sickly atmosphere To a higher plane, and purify yourself By drinking as if it were ambrosia, The fire that fills and fuels emptiness . . . C. Baudelaire, “Elevation” Labour is blossoming or dancing where, The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? W.B. Yeats, “Among Schoolchildren,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of existence and his relations with his kind. Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Preface: Placing Nietzsche The figure of Nietzsche stands at the center of this book, interrogating what has gone before, anticipating other and different ways of thinking and being and becoming to come. I have so far explored the ways in which political theory that seeks to ground its legislative impulse in epistemologically privileged ways, in knowledge of nature or of the real, is always-already fictive thought. It is, however, fictive thought that must (and can only attempt to) efface, negate, and forget its contingency and its creative power in favor of its need for truth and universality, and thus its juridical, legislative,

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and authoritative power. Eliciting the traces of this necessarily incomplete effacement and negation was the subject of exploration of part I of this book. There, I explored the foundational paradox of the substitution of the (actually) imaginary for the (illusory) real in the state of nature narratives of Hobbes and Rousseau. In Hobbes, the programmatic Leviathan was disrupted; but more positively in Rousseau, I suggested that the contours of a different modality of theorizing could be discerned. In the excursus on Kant, I explored his “brilliant satire” on state of nature narratives; and suggested that the explicitly fictional logics of Kant’s “Conjectures . . .” creates an estranged perspective by which his Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals can be read. Just as the chronology of nature was inhabited by a narrative imaginary that provided the conditions of intelligibility, so to, in the deduction of the Categorical Imperative, a narrative and fictive moment is indeed necessary. Two important metaphysical distinctions, between nature and narrative, and between philosophy and fiction, were shown to be resistant to such separation. In Stirner’s attempt to separate philosophical fictions from the “really” real, we have also seen that fictions, while they can indeed be reifying, also provide conditions of intelligibility. With Nietzsche, then, we reach a pivotal moment in this book as a whole: important in himself, he is also a critical figure in political modernity in unpacking and refunctioning the notion of fictions and the fictive. So far, then, we have explored and exposed the ways in which political narratives seek to set boundaries, to close politicized interpretation, thus enabling the establishment of (a) definition(s) of the natural and human conditions. (Already, with the plural, the impossibility of this project is evident.) This/these definition(s) were to serve a justificatory function, as the necessary a priori of a concept of “the political,” and the properly political. Tracing the fictive that inhabited the core of these foundational narratives amounted to, I suggested, a primary theoretical disruption. This disruption manifested itself in the paradoxical and impossible moments of founding, and the impossibility of securing boundaries. But I also suggested that as a result of eliciting the traces of effacement and negation of the creative power of such narratives, which is my task as a commentator (reader/rewriter) of political theory, any attempted closure was an unstable task. This is important because the task of foundational thought within political theory has been to find that which is incontrovertibly true, and can be known as such, in order that the categories of the permissible and the impermissible, and the status of these categories, may be determined in an incontestable way. To express this quickly: the narratives of political theory gain their legislative and juridical authority from an epistemologically grounded narrative. I have argued, however, that the kind of knowledge upon which the political rests is by no means foundational, but is linked, instead, to creative, fictive, logics that cannot be representational, but are, rather, post-representational. Arguing, then, that foundational supports are not something that is confused with the narratorial and the fictive, but that the foundational is inhabited at its core by the narratorial, creative, and the fictive, disrupts the epistemology of the political in such a way that the categories of the permissible and impermissible, and the status thereof, are no longer incontestable. A further implication is the loosening of the legislative and juridical authority of political narratives in favor of an exploration of their creative and fictive import. At stake, then, is the dual problem of the status, and the validity of the effects secured, by the stories by means of which

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the political has been understood, constituted, and acted within: these stories become questionable in both a negative and a positive sense. Founding theory on fictions: the implications—and possibilities—are dizzying. It is at this juncture that Nietzsche proves to be both my indispensable guide and companion. As I have worked through the texts I have raided from the canon of political theory, I have interrogated their liminal moments. Pausing at and questioning the points where claims cannot be secured (where the epistemological becomes politicized and thus open to contestation), I have suggested that other and different possibilities can be revealed. I have intervened in the processes by which meanings have been produced, and traced other ways of thinking, suggested that other stories could be told. It is this very process that I explore in Nietzsche’s work, for Nietzsche is particularly attentive to the ways meanings are made. At this broad, epistemological level, Nietzsche’s interventions circle around the core of what has been forgotten: the textuality of the very project of political theory. Persistent concerns with the style of Nietzsche’s writing thus provide the context for rewriting and rereading what constitutes the project of political theory, framing the beginning and ending, the opening section and conclusions, of this chapter: Who writes? Who reads? What is read and how is it read? Can fictive origins be acknowledged? Can creativity also legislate? If so, what kind of knowledge can be said to emerge from a narrative that does not efface its fictive origins? These questions are core, and beginning to answer them via Nietzsche provides a “bridge,” to use one of Nietzsche’s favored images, from the worldview based on reification, negation, and effacement, to the possibilities and differences that lie beyond. To this end, I have proposed that a deconstructive narratology of political theory has effects. I have rested upon, worked between, and brought into question a series of implicit, often oppositional, structures underlying and supporting foundational methods of thinking the political. Political theory, as discipline and discourse, thinks it can settle questions of justice and power through a legislative, programmatic mode, where the basis of such legislation, political programs, as well as other forms of juridical authority and institutionalization, are sought in truth or knowledge of the real. It is this mode that I argue is both epistemologically and ethically unsustainable: epistemologically, since certainty is sought in always-already fictional ways, fictions that are nevertheless reified and made static, held in thrall to the given; and ethically, since such programs tend toward coherence, containment, and control, or closure of the political. This precludes possibility and human becoming (in the fictive mode). There are formal and structural implications for ways of thinking and being for narratives that explicitly acknowledge and perform their fictivity and creativity, their openness to a future that is not merely a reproduction of the present. I also suggest some necessary and substantive implications. To state this case in broad terms: I present the possibility that a political narrative that performs its fictivity allows for, in Lorraine’s words, “immersion and participation rather than separation and control.”1 It also enables, as Thomas eloquently writes, both the giving of “a different meaning to life,” and further, it “gives meaning differently.”2 In this chapter and the next, on utopian ways of thinking and being in the work of Ernst Bloch, I reintroduce the term “creative epistemology of the possible,” and suggest that these implications can be best approached by an appreciation of what this can mean. It is only through the dissolution of the foundational moment that this becomes a living possibility.

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For now, however, let me begin to unpack, through, with, and sometimes against Nietzsche, certain mechanisms that have privileged “separation and control.” The very concept of the true (in various guises) is one such mechanism. Nietzsche both precipitates and points beyond a by now familiar (all-too-familiar?) problematic. As Ansell-Pearson summarizes, Nietzsche, “sees Western civilization caught in the grip of a debilitating and demoralizing nihilism in which our most fundamental conceptions of the world are no longer tenable. Nihilism is thus a condition which affects the metaphysical and moral languages through which we fabricate an understanding of the world and on which we base our acting in the world.”3 Nihilism, then, by disrupting the connection between our moral understandings of the world and our actions within it, is clearly an aspect of the situation where foundations can no longer be found. This is a double-edged problem for Nietzsche, for as he also shows us, it is not enough simply to reinstate a newer, more relevant “God”; the very act of positing such a reified Other (from a transcendental realm to an instrumentalized and “scientist” worldview) is another means of separation and control. In the work of the theorists of the preceding four chapters, a concern with “truth” has been a priori; epistemological concerns guided and controlled a permissible political narrative; epistemology separated. In this new, Nietzschean terrain (anticipated in my reading of Rousseau), I explore the ways in which truth and falsehood no longer exist in opposition. I also explore the singular creativity to which this gives rise. Throughout the second section of this chapter on nihilism, I explore Nietzsche’s genealogical unpacking of the related and mutually reinforcing sets of foundational oppositions of: true/false, real/unreal, good/evil. As many commentators note, and as I explore in the first and final sections, truth and style are inextricably linked: not just within Nietzsche’s writing, but also as Nietzsche claims, in all writing (political, philosophical, ethical, literary). Consideration of these issues, then, recurs in each section of the chapter, foreshadowing the ways in which repetition is a vital writing strategy within the Nietzschean corpus: the economy of repetition (and there is no repetition without a certain difference) mimics the ways in which a central thought of Nietzsche’s (/Zarathustra’s), that of eternal recurrence, shapes his narrative in a surprisingly literal fashion. His work is not a linear exposition of concepts, but a narrative of an altogether different kind. A crucial aspect of the undoing of the concept of truth is Nietzsche’s exploration of the self as an embodied error. Throughout the book, I have been concerned with subjectivities, how the self is understood, how the self understands the world. With Nietzsche, there is an exploration of, as Miller succinctly puts it, “the way in which the fiction of the self survives its dismantling”; that is, the subject is “undone,” but lives on.4 This reading of the subject is at the center of this chapter, and is pivotal in three senses. First, the logics of the subject’s undoing (the deconstruction of the subject in a more familiar language) must be read reflexively, in the terms of the kinds of subjectivities that other theorists have allowed for. Nietzsche is thus a pivotal point in thinking about subjectivity for this book as a whole. Second, in Nietzsche’s explorations of subjectivities, there is critical force from which to privilege a particular political narrative of liberation, which I term epiphanic, rather than the often pointed to narrative of hierarchy and domination, which privileges separation and control. This is crucial for reading Nietzsche’s politics. Third, to point forward, this discussion of an open, processual subjectivity anticipates Bloch’s opening of a space for

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an ungrounded, utopian, creative subject. Throughout this chapter, then, I follow Nietzsche’s exploration of the processes by which we, as sense-making and creative creatures, can look to the possibility of an existence that is not mediated by errors that maintain separation and domination: as Nietzsche provocatively articulates: “We have to learn to think differently—in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.”5 The guiding terms of epiphany and/or politics are traced throughout this chapter. This maps to Nietzsche’s major reverberations on the theory/practice pairing, which is profoundly unsettled by the dissolution of foundational truths, and the disruption of the legislative model. This model, guided by the thought of application of its principles to settle the political, aims to fix new forms of order. Combining the epiphanic and the political moments of Nietzsche’s explorations brings us closer to politics as an open process. Bammer describes this as follows: it is a process by which the “construction of the new is always at the same time a de(con)struction of the already established. A revolution, in other words, is not accomplished by creating a new set of structures, but rather by continuously resisting the processes by which meanings, identities, and relations of power are fixed.”6 At stake, then, is precisely the question of how to avoid referential fixity in the epistemologies that underpin political theory; or, as Braidotti puts it, “how can one produce [emancipatory] knowledge without fixing it into a new normativity?”7 Following Stirner and Marx, I continue to question the relationship between political theory and political practice. Resisting the mode of principled application, the problem, then, is what kind of practice a theory generates, if any at all. With Nietzsche, I explore the possibilities of reformulating the political whereby this opposition—that significantly maps to others, such as self-creation versus justice as I have briefly discussed via Richard Rorty in chapter three—loses conceptual, and oppositional, hold. The “and/or” of “epiphany and/or politics” becomes a participatory and conjoining device, rather than a device that is exclusionary and oppositional. I also argue that this is as a result of the dissolution of the foundational moment. To this end, section three extrapolates two stories within Nietzsche. His thought, particularly in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is epiphanic; liberating, insightful, and inciting, provocatively contradictory, to the extent of being almost didactically anti-didactic. This is in tension with the model of the political presented in certain fragments (privileged in “political” readings of Nietzsche) in particularly On The Genealogy of Morals, or Beyond Good and Evil, where the “pathos of distance” attempts, but as I argue, fails to stabilize a hierarchical and potentially violent, oppressive class or caste system.8 Exploring the reasons why this narrative of exclusion and hierarchy must fail links the discussion of nihilism with the discussion of the self who survives its nihilistic undoing with the questions of style and of the textuality of political theory. The question of what kind of writing political theory is and can be after Nietzsche, in turn, links the discussion more broadly with the thought of a creative epistemology of the possible. I close the chapter with a consideration of the ways in which Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence provokes these reflections, and functions as an absent, abyssal, or “self-consuming” center to Nietzsche’s work; and yet, such a center, with the rethinking of the nature of time it provokes, is curiously, tremendously, productive of the future.9

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Reading/Writing Nietzsche But do you understand this? Indeed, people will have trouble understanding us. We are looking for words; perhaps we are also looking for ears. Who are we anyway? Nietzsche, The Gay Science

I have characterized the readings presented in this book as active, and explained throughout the force and affects of deconstructive readings. With Nietzsche, I am in an apt place to reopen this discussion. More explicitly than any writer considered in previous chapters, Nietzsche constantly calls attention to the status of his writing; he critiques (with severity), praises (with arrogance or passion), and reflects on his aims, his language, and his audience. This is not simply tangential, but core. In this section, I have two distinct but related aims. First, I explore the kind of commentary that can be written on Nietzsche, and suggest that his text both resists interpretation, yet demands a certain interpretative violence wherein the reader/rewriter must begin to self-consciously theorize or thematize her own disciplining or informing “investments” in the production of the reading. Second and related to this, I follow the claims made by Nietzsche about his work mainly from a series of retrospective prefaces written in 1886. I begin to show how the riddles of reading and writing, interpretation and sense making, of language and listening, stand at the nexus of the problematic status of the task of theorizing. “Do you understand me yet?”; “Do you follow me?”; “Have I been understood?”10 These questions insistently punctuate Nietzsche’s work, affectively engaging the reader, and forcing a self-questioning in the confrontation with the text. “My patient friends, this book desires for itself only perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well!”11 What would it be like to be able to answer these questions affirmatively? In figuring out whether we have understood Nietzsche this question is prior to, and concomitant with, the process of interpretation. He does not innocently, unknowingly, or unreflexively tell us, “every philosophy is a foreground philosophy [. . .] Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding place, every word a mask.”12 Nietzsche poses reading as a problem, and in the process immediately foregrounds the textuality of his work. Reading, and certainly understanding Nietzsche, cannot simply be a passive project of transcribing, condensing, and translating. Rather, it is a process of decipherment, within which suspicion of surface assertions is necessary; it is a philosophical detective trail: “to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers. . . .”13 The criterion that governs Nietzsche’s readings is demanding, and it demands of us, while reading him, a similar energy. The very notion of ordering his fragmentary discourse into some kind of totality is both suggested and elusively refused by Nietzsche, who asks: “Do you think this work must be fragmentary because I give it to you (and have to give it to you) in fragments?” And, “given that it is the problem of the order of rank [of values] of which we may say it is our problem,” ordering and evaluating meaning immediately ties the political project to the interpretative project.14 This is important because it begins to point, once again, to the politics of making intelligible, making meaningful (and, to anticipate, to the fictive as an informing principle that is no longer concerned with disciplining meaning). Before explaining my own “style” of reading Nietzsche, I shall outline some reasons for rejecting the prevalent contemporary approaches.

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Within philosophical and political interpretations of Nietzsche, two extremes can easily be identified: the attempt to totalize, and the attempt to disperse meaning.15 The first is perhaps best exemplified by Kaufmann, who argued that the “will to power” became the single informing principle in Nietzsche’s later work, and that while his aphoristic style can be characterized as “monodialogic” he is effectively a “dialectical monist.”16 So while Kaufmann allows for a plurality of effects (hence dialectical), he argues these effects issue from the same source, that is, the will to power. The textual practice encouraged by this kind of reading, then, is what Magnus has termed “lumper”: that is, a reading that presupposes an ontology, a single “text” and a single theory, and so that totalizes and from which significant grounding principles can be extrapolated. Heidegger also read Nietzsche as the last metaphysical thinker, who remains within the metaphysical logic he attempts to untangle.17 At the other extreme, readings influenced by, for example, Derrida, reject the possibility of totalizing, and so transforming Nietzsche’s work into a new normativity. Derrida’s reading in Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, tracing the complex of linkages between the figures of women/Woman, style, and truth, explores ambiguities in the very question of meaning. To do an injustice to Derrida’s inventive and innovative essay, I shall here simply extract its significant propositions. First, then, Derrida writes, “the concept of the fragment, however, since its fracturedness is itself an appeal to some totalizing complement, is no longer sufficient here.”18 The fragment, that is, does not rely on its other of a pre-given but now broken wholeness to constitute it. While I continue to use the term “fragment,” it must be read with Derrida’s caveats in mind: it must be read as part of a whole that is always absent, never available, and this not as a flaw or lack (this is already to point to the possibility of future meanings informing present meanings, since the present is never already “full”). The fragment does not deviate from wholeness because such wholeness is yet another “philosophical mythology.” Second, Derrida proposes: if Nietzsche meant to say something, might it not be just that limit to the will to mean, which, much as a necessarily differential will to power, is forever divided; folded and manifolded. To whatever lengths one might carry a conscientious interpretation, the hypothesis that the totality of Nietzsche’s text, in some monstrous way, might well be of the type “I have forgotten my umbrella” cannot be denied. Which is tantamount to saying that there is no “totality to Nietzsche’s text,” not even a fragmentary one.19

This reading is strategically crucial and guides my discussion of a manifestation of nihilism as a failure of meaning. As I show in section two, however, it is only half of a possible story. A further prevalent approach, which attempts to negotiate these extremes, and with which I also have disagreements, can be identified within the more “properly” political literature. Coole, reviewing Warren, Ansell-Pearson, and Conway describes this approach: “Against deconstruction, they elicit a coherent existential meaning (by reading him ‘conservatively,’ analytically, systematically) in order to achieve Nietzsche’s political resonance. Against his own reactionary politics, they try to reconstruct a plausible alternative from his philosophy which actually looks rather postmodern. But against the conservatism attributed to a relativist postmodernism, they infuse this with elements of radical democracy.”20 I have a great deal of sympathy with these attempts,

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and indeed, I also read “Nietzsche against Nietzsche.” My problem lies in the first move made: eliciting a “coherent existential meaning,” which implies constructing a totality in order to deconstruct. This is an unnecessary and politically dubious way of reading Nietzsche, without reference to the means by which Nietzsche reflects on this very process of constructing coherence and meaning. As I have argued, this demands to be dealt with as we engage with reading and understanding Nietzsche, which is why the issue of the very possibility of a commentary precedes, and (in)forms, my own commentary. As I suggest in my political commentary, a radical democratic impulse can be gleaned from Nietzsche; but not without first going through the dissolution of the foundational moment. Nietzsche’s “reactionary” politics can be seen to attempt to refoundationalize (a clumsy but fitting phrase for a clumsy maneuver), and this is at odds with the transformative impulse expressed throughout his work. My approach, then, attempts to follow an internal logic of reading within Nietzsche’s texts, a logic that is delineated by the context of nihilism, which can for now simply be defined as a loss of natural or self-evident meaning. This approach is more aligned with that of Rey, who writes: his is a multivalent text that cannot be reduced into thematic snippets such as the “will to power,” “eternal return,” the “death of God,” and the “overman” [. . .] Nor can it be reduced into a network of themes: Nietzsche’s is a text that introduces a break (rupture) into philosophical discourse and that, as such, cannot be subject to a classical commentary.21

A classical commentary would privilege uniform meaning over its loss, when it is that loss that must be explored; the gesture of classical commentary thus evades the problem of meaning via a recuperative gesture of mastery over meaning, rather than exploring its dispersal. My negotiation of the extremes of totality and dispersal approaches Nietzsche through the question of the very possibility of commentary. I make the opposite assumption, then, from a reader like Schacht, who writes, “it would be unwarranted [. . .] to assume that Nietzsche’s recourse to [the fragment] is indicative of the absence of any underlying unity and coherence of thought and intention.”22 This is to reintroduce the very standards that Nietzsche is questioning. Rather, following Shapiro, I suggest that “in the wake of Nietzsche and the radical questioning of philosophical modernity by thinkers like Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida, we are not yet in a position to say what a genuinely persistent or coherent thinking is, or in what forms we ought to expect it to manifest itself.” 23 Thus, to put it briefly for now, Nietzsche questions the very expectations of how a text should be read, and by what standards it can be judged. Shapiro writes, “to stop at the level of an aphoristic and epigrammatic reading of Nietzsche is to see the decentred nature of his discourse, but to ignore the playing field within which makes such decentring [sic!] possible and delightful.”24 It is this “playing field”—nihilism as the loss of natural and self-evident meanings—that constitutes part of any “meaningful hermeneutic horizon” by which Nietzsche both creates meaning, and reflects on the processes by which certain meanings are possible and desirable or undesirable. Issues of the “political” Nietzsche are, then, approached via issues of the textual Nietzsche. As my preface has implied, Nietzsche does not so much open a new problem, as make explicit the hidden textuality of political theory. In doing so, he disrupts traditional models of reading practices, and more subtly, the epistemology (of referential fixity,

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with all its implications) upon which they rely. This proves crucial in understanding the political import of Nietzsche, whereby he creates “an image of thinking as an integrative practice meant to bring about a transformation of consciousness at both the corporeal and conceptual levels.”25 (This insistence on both the corporeal and conceptual levels is intriguing: classical commentary cannot be integrative in this way.) As Kelly Oliver writes, a Nietzschean reading “is a way of reading that opens onto the other of a text”; that is, a way of reading that is irreducibly plural, gestural, evocative and transformative.26 Crucially, it is a reading that resists the juridical and legislative matrix of one authoritative meaning. To read “the meaning” of Nietzsche as he read the problem of “meaning” is, then, a complex issue, but an issue that is central to the Nietzschean and nihilistic problematic: the problem of meaning and how meaning is generated. (And, of course, this is crucial for my book as a whole.) Nietzsche writes that “man,” “did not know how to justify, explain, affirm himself, he suffered from the problem of meaning [. . .] His problem, however, was not suffering itself, but rather an absence of an answer to his questioning cry: ‘Why do I suffer?’ ”27 Importantly, this passage appears in the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, an essay that Nietzsche poses as an interpretation of an aphorism from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “Brave, unconcerned, mocking, violent—thus wisdom wants us: she is a woman and always loves only a warrior.”28 The Third Essay itself explores the ways in which an ascetic “no” to life is often a hidden or thwarted “yes”; it thus explores the paradoxical ambiguity of the ascetic ideal,29 an ideal that both informs nihilism and is nihilistic, by means of reading. How does Nietzsche read asceticism? How can this reading process also be seen as a way of evading or moving beyond the nihilism that ascetic practices give rise to? And how can we read Nietzsche in this context? Alan Schrift comments that Nietzsche’s use of the term “meaning” is used “not in the epistemological sense, of uncovering the true referent or accurate representation of a state of affairs, but rather in the psychogenealogical sense of deciphering the significance which these ideals hold as symptoms of the will to power that has posited them as ideals.”30 This is important because Schrift is pointing to both the status and the effects secured by discourse, suggesting that Nietzsche’s interrogation of the production of meaning is an important questioning of the effects secured, and an interrogation of the desires that inform the creation of meaning. (Consider the desire that informs Kant’s self-negation and asceticism, for example, and disciplines the kinds of meanings he produces). Kelly Oliver, developing and problematizing Schrift’s analysis, suggests that Nietzsche is reading, and can be read, in both the epistemological and psychogenealogical senses. In a reflexively neat association, she contends: Just as Nietzsche proposes an active [master] and reactive [slave] morality in Genealogy, he proposes an active and reactive reading. [. . .] Unlike the slave, the master affirms himself directly without a hostile external world. He is unconcerned about differences, and that is his potency. [. . .] Active reading is distinguished from reactive reading in that it involves a recognition of the investment the reader makes in the text’s meaning, and diagnoses the symptoms of that investment.31

To explain: the main claim here, supported by these commentators, is that a certain mode of reading is a way of deciphering the symptoms of nihilism; it is also a means of pointing beyond this condition. Meanings are not “found” but created; and too often created unreflexively. Nietzsche’s active mode does not accept the given as

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given, but as constituted, intentionally, or more often that not, in accordance with unknown or sublimated, or already given imperatives (“it involves a recognition of the investment the reader makes in the text’s meaning,” and diagnoses that very investment); and since this active reader is “unconcerned about differences,” she can accept plurality, and accept the responsibility to create without external informing principles. The initial premise, then, is that the given, in a complex sense, has to be constituted as an object before it can be read. This clearly operates at the very level of how we make sense of Nietzsche prior to eliciting a “coherent existential meaning.” To return to Nietzsche, however: what can an active reader do? The active reader, through that very process, has the ability, if you like, to change contexts, to denaturalize and de-fetishize (in a very Nietzschean sense), without reference to an a priori, a prior norm (textual or existential) to which we should return. In Twilight of the Idols, he writes: We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and a doing; it believes in the will as the cause; it believes in the ego as being, the ego as substance [. . .] I am afraid we are still not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.32

Cause, being, substance are forms of crude fetishism because they conceptually (and so corporeally) fix both temporally and substantively that which is in process. So, Nietzschean “fetishism” is the false separation and division of subject from object in an oppositional manner: the self from its actions; and, indeed, the text from its interpretation; it is that which privileges separation from the processes of life. It is also a reified category of referential fixity: as Holloway argues, “the separation of subject and object, doing and done, inevitably involves a hypostatization of the present, a fixation of the present.”33 Fetishism (as God’s grammar) makes static a process. The context of object/subject when seen in this dualistic way is for Nietzsche the most invidious mechanism that detaches us from embodied existential experience, and from recognizing our always-already existent “investments” in the sense-making process. This context is, then, connected in a significant sense with the aphorism from Zarathustra, and with Nietzsche’s privileging of “wisdom” over knowledge. The construction of a “body” of knowledge is a curiously nonsensual, abstract, conceptual procedure in its conventional sense: it is a body of knowledge constructed by the denied and bruised bodies of the “ascetic priests,” who think we could “know the dancer from the dance.” It is, in this way, another expression of asceticism. Challenging and reproaching the philosophers—in particular, Kant—who deal with this knowledge, Nietzsche writes: From now on, my dear philosophers, let us beware of the dangerous old conceptual fable which posited a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject,” let us beware of the tentacles of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason,” “absolute spirituality,” “knowledge in itself ”;—for these always ask us to imagine an eye which is impossible to imagine, an eye which supposedly either restrains or altogether lacks the active powers of interpretation which first make seeing into seeing something—for here, then, a nonsense and non-concept is demanded of the eye. Perspectival seeing is the only kind of seeing

epiphany and/or politics? / 113 there is, perspectival knowing the only kind of “knowing”; and the more feelings about a matter which we allow to come to expression, the more eyes, the different eyes through which we are to view this same matter, the more complete our “conception” of it, our “objectivity” will be.34

A conventional approach to knowledge (mind over body, reason over substance, contemplation over activity: the fiction, or “conceptual fable” of objective, disinterested knowledge) does not acknowledge its own investment in ordering, its own intervention in the construction of its “object” (Nietzsche is, then, an important precursor in the political challenge to epistemology that comes via “situated knowledges”). Nietzsche points to the implication and co-implication of subject and object: the field of subject/object, rather than being oppositional and dualistic, is rather, one that can be traversed, is stratified, lateral. For Nietzsche, to the extent that these “false” metaphysical divisions are inherent in the very language we use, we are all philosophers: and as we have already disturbingly encountered with Max Stirner, “our epistemology rests in us, we incarnate it. [. . .] Any significant change in our epistemology will have to be a change in the sorts of beings who maintain themselves with this epistemology.”35 We can, then, be said to be always-already “written.” However, this is not to negate the potentialities of a creative or fictive rendering of subjectivity: as Lorraine argues, Nietzsche’s “integrative practice [. . .] bring[s] about a transformation of consciousness at both the corporeal and conceptual levels.”36 What is this integrative practice? As Magnus puts it, Nietzsche’s own style of reading and writing “embodies a philosophic choice.”37 Not dissociative, and thus fetishistic, nihilistic; Nietzschean wisdom wants something different: “whoever writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read but learned by heart.”38 Nietzsche reads and writes to “expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body”; but he proposes that we have been written by the didactic and disciplinary fictions of others—and those fictions are real in their effects—so as to unpack those coercive narratives, reveal possibilities beyond them.39 He writes to show the embodiment of a philosophy of false, ascetic, divisions whilst also gesturing toward another understanding, and another space within which our very language, and thus our existential experience is felt and understood differently.40 To “learn by heart” is the metaphor by which we can approach this wisdom. As Oliver perceptively comments, “Wisdom does not want a reader, her reader is impossible [reading here implies ‘conceptual fables,’ ‘philosophical mythology’]; she wants (her desire) to be known by heart. This Weib wants a carnal knowledge not a conceptual knowledge. Her love is a sensuous passion far from Platonic love. . . .”41 The use of blood and violence is no mere rhetorical flourish on Nietzsche’s part, but a philosophic strategy with corporeal affects. To “learn by heart” is to rupture the dualism and opposition of subject and object. For Nietzsche, the idea that we could “know the dancer from the dance,” in Yeats evocative image, is one that immediately distances us from our embodied existential experience, and our (hitherto unrecognized, or not fully explored) implication in the sense-making project. To “learn by heart” is to reconfigure the field of knowledge itself; it speaks to the kind of incorporation of a different sense of the possible for which Nietzsche argues in The Gay Science: “the task of incorporating knowledge,

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and making it instinctive”; nevertheless, we need to be attentive to which fictions we incorporate.42 To interpret Nietzsche can itself become a form of activity that works to overcome an ascetic nihilism. Danto gets this absolutely right when he writes, “we are missing what is taking place when we merely read the words,” as if Nietzsche’s text(s) was itself a discrete “object” from which meaning could unproblematically be elicited.43 Crucially for what follows, the task of ordering Nietzsche’s fragments, of deciphering and figuring out what Nietzsche is saying and doing (and these terms cannot be understood separately) has a quality that mimics Nietzsche’s own work. As Thomas contends, Nietzsche “demands of his readers an interaction with his texts that goes beyond any surface level of meaning. [. . .] Reading [. . .] is never simply about knowing or understanding, about piercing through a text to discover a level of meaning [as a recuperative practice]: it is about personally engaging with a text, it is about emotion, pathos, dramatic tension, and mood.”44 “Knowing” has always been implicated with these other drives. Schrift goes further: Nietzsche does not so much want to be understood as to incite. His writings are incendiary devices. [. . .] He seeks readers who will not merely be consumers of his texts, but experimenters, [. . .] “monster[s] of courage and curiosity; moreover, supple, cunning, cautious; both adventurer[s] and discoverer[s].” He seeks, in other words, to free his readers from the constraints of a textual economy that demands that they occupy a place as passive beneficiary/consumer of the text rather than its active co-producer.45

As I demonstrate in the proceeding two sections, this active reading means that, as Nietzsche’s texts resist as well as demand interpretation, “interpretation is always being challenged at the very same time as it is being enabled, until the very possibility of understanding in the conventional sense is itself contested”; cause, being, substance, those fetishistic moments of referential fixity, are transfigured into living, becoming, doing.46 Nietzsche’s transformative task demands we become “active co-producers” of meanings. The status accorded to the practice of reading/writing Nietzsche’s text is then significant. Previous political readings have gone astray in misunderstanding the textual ontology; in anticipating and presupposing a textual and thus “proper” politicophilosophical ontology where none is given in advance; indeed, where none is given at all. In Barthesian terms, then, a crucial problem in the interpretation of Nietzsche is to maintain the lisible, writerly aspects of his text: “production without product, structuration without structure.”47 The moment of product or structure, the hypostatized moment that claims the truth or reality of a text and so closes the possibility of other meanings (and so attempts to close down future writerly reappropriation) reifies and closes. Nietzsche, and Barthes, privilege and inscribe in their texts (within their fragments) a process of becoming: “our reality, at any given moment, ‘is merely a [. . .] pause between many realities’ [. . .] We who are in the process of becoming.”48 And just as the “text” is composed of a multiplicity of codes, so too is the subject: the reader as rewriter is neither the origin nor the telos of meaning, but merely the site where those meanings interweave. As that site, the reader can nevertheless intervene and interrupt the production of meanings: part of this reading-practice, then, encourages reflexivity on the codes, texts, narratives that have already written us.

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Such a practice is crucial for Nietzsche’s genealogical critique. I read strategically, then, in what follows, from Nietzsche’s corpus, following the Barthesian insight that the distinction between the “readerly” and the “writerly” is one of an active differential, a differential that is activated through the process of making, creating, sense(s), of reading and/as writing. It is, then, precisely to do with the affects of different modes of reading/rewriting, on thinking and being. This is central to Nietzsche’s “radical pluralization” after the death of monotheistic habits: as Shapiro notes, in Nietzsche’s writing strategies and in the strategies used to read Nietzsche can be found “the marks of a much larger project of radical pluralization, a praxis of writing directed towards shaking and decentring fixed points.”49 To return briefly to sum up my criticisms of the project as described by Coole: it is in working through the dissolution of the foundational moment as an interpretative problem that already gives rise to a radically changed situation analogous to the destructive aspects (there is no meaning) and creative aspects (there are a plurality of meanings) of nihilism.50 The possibility of a commentary creates an activity and a freedom that does not reinstate Nietzsche as another authority figure: “This is my way,” Zarathustra tells his disciples: “Where is yours? [. . .] For the way—that does not exist.”51 There is, now, one further aspect of the linkages between questions of truth and questions of style that needs exploration: what is the status of Nietzsche’s writing for Nietzsche? Is his understanding of “transfiguration” simply another political model within which the thought of “beyond good and evil” is simply another simile for truth, another normative model, and thus another idol or statue (which could slay us)?52 We embody philosophies via the languages we use to articulate the experiences of our selves and/in the world. Nietzsche, however, finds his voice and his language strange—and at times, not strange enough. In the 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy, he writes that he sought “fellow enthusiasts [. . .] to entice them onto new and secret paths and places to dance [. . .] At any rate,” he continues, “a strange voice was speaking here [. . .] which stammers in a strange tongue [. . .] almost as if undecided whether to communicate or conceal itself. . . .”53 The “stammering” of the book gives rise to a question and a regret: “I wonder if the reader understands which task I was already daring to undertake with this book? I now regret very much that I did not yet have the courage (or immodesty?) at that time to permit myself a language of my very own for such personal views and acts of daring . . . .”54 Again, in the preface to Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, he stresses place and understanding: In this book, you will discover a “subterranean man” at work, one who tunnels and mines and undermines. You will see him—presupposing you have eyes capable of seeing this work in the depths—going forward very slowly, cautiously, gently, inexorably [. . .] Does it not seem as though some faith is leading him on? As though he desired this prolonged obscurity, desires to be incomprehensible, concealed, enigmatic, because he knows what he will thereby acquire: his own morning, his own redemption, his own daybreak . . .55

Nietzsche’s metaphors here precisely suggest the foundational critique as a kind of genealogical interrogation and excavation of entrenched and reified meanings. While

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archaeological metaphors stress the nature of his work at the foundation of meaning, the language of riddle and enigma, the incomprehensible and the strange, pervasive in Nietzsche, complicate the notion of mining the depths as a search for the finally true meaning of existence.56 The true and the good is not the terrain on which Nietzsche is working. The preface to Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, brings together the concerns with understanding, language and reference. I quote extensively as the context of the “free spirit” is significant: My writings have been called a schooling in suspicion, even more in contempt, but fortunately also in courage, indeed, in audacity. And in fact I myself do not believe that anyone has ever before looked into the world with an equally profound degree of suspicion [. . .] I have sought shelter in this or that—in some piece of admiration or enmity, or scientificality or frivolity or stupidity; and why, where I could not find what I needed, I had artificially to enforce, falsify and invent a suitable fiction for myself (—and what else have poets ever done? and to what end does art exist in the world at all?) [. . .] What do you know, what could you know, of how much cunning in self-preservation, how much falsity I shall require if I am to continue to permit myself the luxury of my truthfulness? Enough, I am still living; and life is, after all, not a product of morality; it wants deception, it lives on deception . . . [. . .] Thus when I needed to I once also invented for myself the “free spirits” to whom this melancholy-valiant book is dedicated . . .57

The suspicions of the subterranean man, the mining of the foundations of meaning and morality: Nietzsche links the fiction of the free spirit directly to the thematic of his epistemological and moral genealogies (which struggle against the fixity conferred by cultural and other codes). Like Rousseau’s critical fictions, the free spirit is both a fiction, a falsehood, and deception, and an invention that is the condition of Nietzsche’s “truthfulness.”58 The conceptual space “beyond good and evil,” then, it can be imagined, is also the conceptual space beyond truth and falsity, and beyond a static subject/object separation: a fictive space.59 Nietzsche continues, “ ‘free spirits’ of this kind do not exist, did not exist [. . . and for him they are] merely phantoms and hermit’s phantasmagoria.”60 Nevertheless, a cautiously prophetic voice takes over: free spirits “could one day exist [. . .] and perhaps I shall do something to speed their coming if I describe in advance under what vicissitudes, upon what paths, I see them coming—.”61 The Nietzschean narrative (to borrow Shapiro’s neat phrase) also aims to bring into existence that which it fictively creates. Irigaray’s description of pre-Socratic speech, with which she aligns Nietzsche’s texts (in particular, Thus Spoke Zarathustra) delineates the space within which Nietzsche works: “Would you say that Zarathustra is fiction? For me, it is absolutely not fiction [. . . but a poetic language] that does not announce the truth but which makes the truth, that acts, but not at all in a fiction/theory hierarchy.”62 Indeed, when the status of foundations is put into question, a theory/fiction hierarchy has no grounding. Foundation is the moment par excellence that fixes political theory; thus we need ways of reading that frees theory from fictions of referential fixity. This “space” is a thematic as well as a structural and stylistic concern: as he asks us in Beyond Good and Evil: “Why could the world which is of any concern to us—not

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be a fiction? And he who then objects, ‘but to the fiction there belongs an author?’— could he not be met with the retort: Why? ” 63 A more interesting objection, to which Nietzsche would also retort “Why?” would perhaps be, “but to the fiction there is opposed a world of truth?” I explore this in the second section on nihilism. As narrative, however, constant attention is paid to the juncture of where we are now (i.e., in a world given meaning via the privileged binaries of real/fictional, truth/falsehood, good/evil, subject/object) and what could possibly come (the beyond metaphysics). Nietzsche works within that juncture—hence we cannot label the free spirit as fictional, as opposed to the “real” philosopher, if the world “as it concerns us” is itself a complex and multilayered fiction. This is why the status of Nietzsche’s writings is perplexing, troublesome. The performative contradiction of relying on a value judgment or a truth claim to be able to say there is no value, or there is no knowledge does not hold in this reading of Nietzsche: the beyond to which he gestures cannot be judged or conceptualized by the standards of foundational thought. To reiterate Shapiro’s thought-provoking suggestion, a complex moment that links Nietzsche, deconstruction, and the thought of a “creative epistemology of the possible”: “in the wake of Nietzsche and the radical questioning of philosophical modernity by thinkers like Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida, we are not yet in a position to say what a genuinely persistent or coherent thinking is or in what forms we ought to expect it to manifest itself.”64 This tension most clearly manifests itself in Nietzsche in his use of certain key terms. For example, just as his readings can be both epistemological and psychogenealogical, so too, he often uses “false” to designate something beyond the opposition of truth and false, “wicked” often designates something beyond good and evil, and sometimes he is using the conventional definition foremost; always however, allowing for the play between these terrains. Similarly, his use of the term “error” must be understood as not implying false (which would rely on a notion of truth), but as error that does not articulate or presuppose a prior correct view or perspective.65 Shapiro articulates this juncture well: “Nietzsche’s thinking and writing maintains a constant vigilance with regard to the possibility and limits of narrative [and, I would add, language itself ]. [. . .] For Nietzsche, narratives are among the hinges and junctures by which thought circulates from classical ontological formulations, to engaging with the abyss, the chaotic, the sheerly perspectival.”66 To summarize: for Nietzsche, to overcome nihilism is to change the conceptual and corporeal structures by which we experience the world. In the journey through nihilism, all is brought into question, but this questioning provides a glimpse beyond metaphysics, toward the new spaces his affective readings and writings open. The praxis of reading that this generates is active, and that the possibility of reading Nietzsche “conservatively,” of “eliciting a coherent existential meaning” can only be done at the expense of ignoring his own comments on the very process by which meaning is generated. This movement or logic of interpreting Nietzsche is repeated in, and prefigures, the logic of the political. I have also suggested, however, that this theoretical disruption affects the “shape” of the Nietzschean narrative: the logic of beginnings and ends no longer fits, and the possibility of eliciting a legislative and juridical political theory is displaced by the potential of a creative epistemology of the possible. Further exploration of nihilism suggests why.

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Nihilism—and Beyond? Errors for Life If we simply called ourselves, using an old expression, godless, or unbelievers, or perhaps immoralists, we do not believe that this would even come close to designating us: We are all three in such an advanced stage that one—that you, my curious friends—could never comprehend how we feel at this point. Ours is no longer the bitterness and passion of the person who has torn himself away . . . We know it well, the world in which we live is ungodly, immoral, “inhuman”; we have interpreted it far too long in a false and mendacious way. We are far from claiming the world is worth less . . . Nietzsche, The Gay Science

The ways in which any possible Nietzschean narrative can “circulate from classical ontological formulations to engaging with the abyss” depends upon a thorough engagement with and journey through nihilism. The experience of nihilism discloses the “hinges” on which the “beyond” turns. Three such hinges, which for the moment appear peripheral, or seem to displace the political stories, can be traced. The first hinge is a constellation of linked moments. A moment of realization: “the trust in life is gone: life itself has become a problem.”67 This is a tragic recognition, of the “terrible truth” or “tragic knowledge,” where meaninglessness, inaction or paralysis, and injustice are entwined: ethical questions can no longer be answered.68 It is also, in Nietzsche, the collapse or failure of the “old” philosophy, which relied on the stasis of origin, essence, truth. This leads to the second hinge: a constellation of stories about our selves. “We remain unknown to ourselves, we seekers after knowledge,” writes Nietzsche, preceding his critique of the value of moral values.69 Yet, Nietzsche disrupts expectations here. For far from simply telling another story, offering a narrative/ knowledge of the self, he questions the expectation that we should demand such a thing; self-knowledge thus becomes a dual process whereby the explanatory and justificatory narratives we habitually use are unpacked, and a space for a new type of story (the Übermensch?) is created (this unpacking of the “old” stories to create spaces for the new is, of course, the method of this book). As Thomas puts it, “to understand Nietzsche’s ‘new’ philosophy one must understand the dialectic he develops between the falsity of metaphysical judgments and their perceived necessity.”70 It is in the story of the self as an “embodied error,” and a moral error, and the reevaluation provoked by this thought that the “battle over metaphysics, ontology, and philosophy itself is to be fought.”71 The third hinge, then, is an exploration of the dialogue between destruction and creation, narrative and antinarrative: this leads to a futureoriented, “comic” perspective, but a perspective that undoes the narrativizing that led to it as it moves beyond “old” modes of sense-making. At this point, nihilism is reconfigured from desperate situation, the inevitable outcome for the search for truth in its multifarious guises, to an imaginative task. What is at stake in locating the experience of nihilism in these three hinges, or constellations of fragments? First is an answer to Nietzsche’s own question, eloquently posed in Human, All Too Human: But will our philosophy not thus become a tragedy? Will truth not become inimical to life, to the better man? A question seems to lie heavily on our tongue and yet refuses to be uttered: whether one could consciously reside in untruth? [. . .] For there is no longer

epiphany and/or politics? / 119 any “ought”; for morality, insofar as it was an “ought” has been annihilated by our mode of thinking [. . .] The whole of human life is sunk deeply in untruth [. . .] Is it true, is all that remains a mode of thought whose outcome on a personal level is despair and on a theoretical level a philosophy of destruction?72

Philosophy will not become a tragedy, but will be refigured. Throughout the exploration of the first hinge of nihilism, I trace a subtle change in direction, from nihilism as a type of knowledge that inheres in the objective world through to nihilism as an (inter) subjective capacity to recognize “truth” as always already a form of artifice, but an artifice that is not simultaneously ontological falsification. This is crucial for the dissolution of foundations, and the possibility of a “philosophy of the future.” Second, this exploration, with the expanded notion of nihilism that I develop, focuses on, and circles round, the politically crucial knowledge/subjectivity/agency triad, the dissolution of this in Nietzsche’s work, and their possible rearticulation. In chapter three we already saw Derrida’s rearticulation that politics is only possible in the face of uncertainty; otherwise, “politics” would merely be the calculation of a program. If the “terrible truth” is that there is no truth, this still does not result in Nietzsche’s definition of nihilism being “a philosophical doctrine (there exist no objective grounds for truth) from which follows an ethical doctrine (there exist no objective grounds for moral judgment).”73 My reading of nihilism opposes the Dostoyevskian reading, “if God is dead, all is permitted”; rather, if God is dead, nothing can be permitted any longer, as the very concept of “permission” removes itself from our discursive horizons.74 Nietzsche’s task—to uncover the fictions that have thus far created order, meaning, security—leads to this conclusion. The “comic” perspective of a possible “philosophy of the future” gestures well beyond despair and destruction. I unpack the political implications of this in the third section. Hinge One: Nihilism as Unintelligibility; from Ontology to Creation If, as we shall soon see, constructing justificatory and explanatory narratives is part of the problem of nihilism, perhaps one way beyond is not to attempt to force Nietzsche’s fragments into an explanatory or justificatory process; rather, by ordering, or narrating, the shift I have suggested, I resist the recuperative moment, and follow the political implications of Nietzsche’s struggle against meaning. As early as his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had linked the concerns of knowledge, subjectivity, and agency in the context of a perceived decline in the “health” of nineteenthcentury German culture. The implications of the book are, however, far wider than this context. In the 1886 preface, he states that here he began to articulate “a new problem [. . .] science itself grasped as something problematic and questionable.”75 Nietzsche’s framework, in this text, is dualistic, and to that extent, metaphysical; but he begins to formulate the troublesome lack of connection between meaning and action, truth and its performance. He builds up a series of oppositions in this essay, where the “scientific method” is aligned with the theoretic optimism of Socratic philosophy, and opposes to this the pessimism of Greek tragic culture, with its associated fragmentation of subjectivities. I do not intend to explore these oppositions in any depth here; for my purposes, they simply preface what de Man refers to as the thorough

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“shaking” of our “ontological confidence,” that is, the shaking of our belief that a truth can be generated from knowledge of human nature, or grounding can be sought in knowledge of the real.76 Such “shaking” is referred to again in the preface: “is the scientific method perhaps no more than a fear of and flight from pessimism? A subtle defense against—truth? [. . .] Is it a form of cunning?”77 Interpretative issues are already crucial to Nietzsche, but at this stage, interpretation, as form-giving and sense-making, is always already a kind of metaphysical or essential falsification: Dionysiac man is similar to Hamlet: both have gazed into the very essence of things, they have acquired knowledge and they find action repulsive, for their actions can do nothing to change the eternal essence of things; they regard it as laughable or shameful that they should be expected to set to rights a world so out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires one to be shrouded in a veil of illusion [. . .] It is not reflection, it is true knowledge, insight into the terrible truth, which outweighs every motive for action.78

Paralysis, inaction, a sickening, nauseating, lack of reason and purpose: the first (Dostoyevskian) manifestation of nihilism. Nietzsche here inverts the Socratic/ Kantian framework, whereby understanding leads to the correct form of action; but as yet, without disrupting the notion of linear progression from knowledge to action (or, in this case, inaction as the appropriate response to knowledge). Indeed, the politics of the postmodern have been criticized for such a cynicism. It is the moment of insight into the “terrible truth” that paralyzes and makes action of the Socratic type impossible: that which should heal or redeem an out of joint world. In this scenario, error and falsification are opposed to a “truth” characterized as “Dionysian.” The figure of Dionysus initially appears as a fundamental truth, or ground, of Being. It is a kind of primal, excessive, formless energy (an in-itself ), given expression by the hidden controlling and shaping forces of Apollo.79 The kind of nihilism that effects the Dionysiac man/Hamlet, then, is a radical form of cognitive dissonance or dislocation, an estrangement combined with an awareness: the awareness that the boundaries of conceptual frameworks do not hold. The “principle” of Dionysus even disrupts that felt security of the embodied self, exceeds individualization, recognizes that this is itself a construct and not a given reality. Those ordering frameworks, which had hitherto been invisible, become visible and thus deeply, profoundly, questionable. Nietzsche describes this moment of recognition in the following: There is an infinite number of points on the periphery of the circle of science, and while we have no way of foreseeing how the circle could ever be completed, a noble and gifted man inevitably encounters, before the mid-point of his existence, boundary points on the periphery like this, when he stares at that which cannot be illuminated. When, to his horror, he sees how logic curls up around itself at these limits and finally bites its own tail, then a new form of knowledge breaks through, tragic knowledge, which, simply to be endured, needs art for protection and medicine.80

It is contemplating the ontological chaos that no conceptual framework could ever encompass, express, or represent, a chaos that exists within the self as much as in the world, and, indeed, obfuscates the boundaries between the two, that horrifies.

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Dionysus “knows” that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.”81 As de Man somberly notes, this “should not be taken too serenely, for it is an indictment of existence rather than a panegyric of art.”82 The world, here, is “worth less”; life needs the dissimulating, controlling, and palliative aid of art; Dionysian forces rely on Apollo for expression; the only affirmation possible is courageous (a refusal, not of the chaos itself, but of its horror) precisely because of this terrifying absence of meaning; the world is thus out of joint: nihilism is clearly seen as the loss of natural and self-evident meanings.83 Seeing through or seeing the boundaries of the ordering conceptual frameworks, however, is also a moment analogous to seeing the “fictive.” For Nietzsche, the processes whereby meaninglessness becomes meaning are always artistically mediated: One can certainly admire humanity as a mighty architectural genius who succeeds in erecting the infinitely complicated cathedral of concepts on moving foundations, or even, one might say, on flowing water [. . .] By these standards, the human being is an architectural genius who is far superior to the bee; the latter builds with wax which she gathers from nature, whereas the human being builds with the far more delicate material of concepts which he must first manufacture for himself.84

The subtle shift that can be discerned in Nietzsche’s work is from Hamlet/Dionysian man who looks for answers from ontology, to the recognition that that is itself a mistaken endeavor. That is to say, asking ethical questions of ontology is a mistake, in the sense that that ontological “plane” is always already a prior epistemological/moral/ psychological construct: we have already constructed the concepts that make the unintelligible intelligible. Nietzsche is typically provocative here, and the picture he paints of the metaphysical philosophers looking for and finding truth is comical: “If someone hides something behind a bush, looks for it in the same place and finds it there, his seeking and finding is nothing much to boast about; but this is exactly how things are as far as the seeking and finding of ‘truth’ within the territory of reason is concerned.”85 This description should certainly bring to mind Kant’s search for the categorical imperative, which we followed in the excursus, as one of the philosophers Nietzsche had in mind. Origins, essences, truths: finding what we have already constructed and placed there—but “forgotten”: a devastatingly simple critique of metaphysics. If “the world” is out of joint, then, if meaning has been lost, this must be rearticulated within epistemological/moral/psychological terms, as a problem. The second manifestation of the movement of nihilism is, simply, recognizing that the problem of meaning in the world is, precisely, our problem. Nietzsche disparages those “idealists” who cry, “ ‘(life could not be endured if its foundation lacked an ethical significance!’—therefore [. . .] existence must have an ethical significance)! The truth, however, is merely that he who is accustomed to these notions does not desire a life without them [. . .] but what presumption it is to decree that whatever is necessary for my preservation must actually exist! ”86 (We could think here of, e.g., the Kantian assumption of purposiveness, and hence rationality, in nature as a manifestation of this. A Nietzschean reading would suggest that this assumption suggests a desire rather than a truth, which needs to be deciphered as a symptom of a certain will-to-power.) Simply put, Nietzsche proposes that we will not discern ethical significance in the given. Within this context, Nietzsche’s statements aligning life with injustice can be understood differently.

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Many ontological statements Nietzsche makes oscillate between stressing the chaotic nature of “existence” (descriptively) and its injustice (evaluatively). Yet one of the “lessons” to arise from nihilism is that precisely such evaluative statements can no longer be made. In a crucial passage from The Gay Science, Nietzsche urges, “God is dead [. . .] and we—we still have to vanquish his shadows too.” He goes on to explain what these “shadows” are: The total character of the world [. . .] is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms [. . .] But how could we reproach or praise the universe? Let us beware of attributing heartlessness or unreason, or their opposites [. . .]. None of our aesthetic or moral judgments apply to it. Nor does it have any instinct for self-preservation [. . .] and it does not observe any laws.87

The task, then, is to de-deify the world: Nietzsche’s philosophical atheism means questioning the given in all its forms, and continuing the process of estrangement from a type of knowledge. The task is to refuse the “known,” whereby “something strange is reduced to something familiar,” and instead, to “stand in the midst of this ‘discordant concord of things,’ and of this whole marvellous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence”—and ask questions.88 Nietzsche’s descriptions of “life” are indeed strange: “Life alone, that dark, driving, insatiable self-desiring force . . .”; or “Life—that is: continually shedding something that wants to die. Life—that is: being cruel and inexorable against everything that is old and weak. [. . .] Life—that is, then: being without reverence for those who are dying, who are wretched, who are ancient? Constantly being a murderer?—And yet old Moses said: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”89 Despite the fact that this passage is unresolved, left as a question and a puzzle, it is still among the most problematic of Nietzsche’s ontological statements, where an evaluative narrative that is potentially merciless and ruthless comes to the fore, one that could lend support to a “dangerous” political Nietzsche. However, this would be to ignore a further moment in the dissolution of that which could act as a foundation to stabilize such a reading and a politics. Such a will-to-power, even if “life-itself ” is like that (and life-itself is, remember, that which cannot be spoken) still means nothing: You want to live “according to nature?” O you noble Stoics, what fraudulent words! Think of a being such as nature is, prodigal beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without aims or intentions, without mercy or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain; think of indifference itself as a power—how could you live according to such indifference? To live—is that not precisely wanting to be other than nature? Is living not valuating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And even if your imperative “live according to nature” meant at bottom the same thing as “live according to life” how could you not do that? Why make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be? 90

This is a rich passage, with much to unpack. First, it reiterates the extent to which the problem of meaning is wholly our problem: “man designated himself as the being who estimates, values, who evaluates and measures, as the measuring animal.”91 Nature, life, ontology, is precisely “without measure,” without evaluative propensities, and hence unintelligible, and there is nothing in it that could guide us, or solve the problem of

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meaning. Its “injustice” is precisely the extent to which it is unintelligible to us and for us. Injustice, in this crucial context, then, is the inability to ask ontological questions.92 States of nature, categorical imperatives, are attempts to shift the question and problem of human meaning onto an ontologized exterior; but for Nietzsche, and for this book, such a procedure is epistemologically and ethically suspect. The extent of Nietzsche’s questioning here is radical. It is not just that he questions those definitions of, as in the example here, the natural condition to which, according to some philosophies we should conform to, or according to others, we should constrain and change. When Nietzsche asks, “Why make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be” he is questioning the very idea that a regulative principle, a determining ontologized exterior can and should be generated from any such definition. This has to be read in the context of Nietzsche’s own comments on what life means, such as the aphorism above. The power of any such “ought” is invalidated. Nietzsche explicitly reflects on the processes of evading responsibility in theorizing where evading responsibility is not recognizing or reflecting upon the theorists’ ordering investments in the production of meaning. Let me begin to pull out some implications of this “hinge” before following further. With the perception that there is no necessary meaning, nothing in-itself, comes a radical freedom, and a changed perspective. Nietzsche expresses the radical freedom thus: This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realize that what things are called is incomparably more important that what they are [. . .] How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin [in appearances and in language, naming, rather than essences] and this misty shroud of illusion in order to destroy the world that counts for real, so-called “reality.” We can destroy only as creators—But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new “things.”93

Nietzsche’s claim here is important: he is not simply implying that changing language changes “reality” as such. Recall, for Nietzsche, that language and action are inextricably linked. He instead points toward a transformative project that is profoundly utopian, wherein “new estimations” and “new probabilities” make intelligible a new sense of possibility. We can destroy only as creators: an imaginative renaming of the world must be part of a process of collective transformation of that world. Thinking differently, and embodying new senses of possibility via creative epistemologies, is a vital component of this process. The significance of the work of Nietzsche, as it informs this task, is manifest. To reiterate: “the construction of the new is always at the same time a de(con)struction of the already established. A revolution, in other words, is not accomplished by creating a new set of structures, but rather continuously resisting the processes by which meanings, identities, and relations of power are fixed.”94 Theorizing fictively is precisely about resisting those very processes. Ontological questions, then, are for Nietzsche, always-already epistemological/ psychological/moral questions. This revelation forms part of what it means to be “beyond good and evil.” The “fictively true” may as yet not exist; but it is a critical concept in problematizing the necessity of any given ordering of things, and as such, is also a transformative and always temporal concept. As Schutte puts it, “an alliance

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between philosophy and nihilism is at work whenever philosophy accepts a theory of truth and value which is rooted in the Platonic need to separate a ‘real’ world of truth from the temporal nature of existence [the apparent world].”95 As Nietzsche continually insists, “truth” is not something that can be found: it must always be made. Thus, in effect, he opens the world as possibility by returning humanity’s creative capacities to them; not, however, without a concurrent recognition that this task, working at the level of epistemology, morality and temporality, is a complex and entrenched one.96 Strong articulates this “transfigurative” vision: he “seeks to show us that a world we have thought familiar has, in fact, become strange, even though we have yet to fully acknowledge this. Then, having shown us that we have and will become strangers to ourselves, he would show us a world where we might, once again, and for the first time, come to be ourselves.”97 If the world of meanings is a fiction without an author; if truths are illusions whose origins we have forgotten; and if such illusions are all there are; then sense-making and self-making projects are deeply entwined in one another. This leads me to the second “hinge,” the stories of our selves. Hinge Two: Becoming Who We Are? Who Are We? “Subtract the phantasm and every human contribution from [‘reality’], my sober friends! If you can! ”98 Strong, in a useful comparison of phenomenology with genealogy, writes: “phenomenology [. . .] is an exhortation to ‘bracket’ all that is casuistically human and interpretive in order to arrive at the ‘things themselves,’ a world of direct and non-mediated experience”; genealogy, on the other hand, “brackets the things themselves so as to be left with only the constituting human element.”99 While this is a heuristically useful comparison, for Nietzsche, there is no such thing “in-itself” to bracket: the (reified and alienated) human contribution is the sense and meaning. This is, then, the force of Nietzsche read in conjunction with Stirner, who, as we have seen, thought that the “phantasms,” fictions or “spooks” could indeed be “subtracted” to leave us the “real.” After such a profound questioning of ontological precepts, we too are in question. Nietzsche’s disturbing and dizzying “discovery” is that we live mired in falsity: All judgments as to the value of life have evolved illogically and are therefore unjust. The falsity of human life derives firstly from the condition of the material to be judged, namely, very incomplete, secondly from the way in which the sum is arrived at on the basis of this material, and thirdly from the very fact that every single piece of this material is the outcome of false knowledge and is so with absolute necessity.100

Recall my discussion of injustice: it is the inability to ask meaningful questions of ontology. We live mired in falsity, but again, Nietzsche is as attentive to the effects of falsity as much as to the moral or epistemic status accorded to the given. Again, the process of figuring out the falsity is crucial. And here we find some crucial reasons. Nietzsche sees the world precisely as process, as unfinished, incomplete; humanity, too, is unfinished. Falsity, in this context, is a significant part of what it means to be human, in the world. For a false judgment sometimes means simply the selective element in human perception; that is, the necessary interpretive work that human eyes, ears, and senses do in constructing sense and intelligibility (those “eyes that first make seeing into seeing something”). This work is necessarily

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contextual and temporal and embodied rather than universal or atemporal. More broadly, but relatedly, Nietzsche’s use of the term “false” is already an indictment and an inversion: an indictment of a metaphysical or Kantian worldview: Our fundamental tendency is to assert that the falsest judgments (to which synthetic judgments a priori belong) are the most indispensable to us, that without granting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a continual falsification of the world by means of numbers, mankind could not live—that to renounce false judgments would be to renounce life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life: that, to be sure, means to resist customary value-sentiments in a dangerous fashion; and a philosophy which ventures to do so places itself, by that act alone, beyond good and evil.101

The good (“customary value-sentiments”) and the true (“the unconditional . . .”): these are errors, and, moreover, errors that are necessary for humans to live. This is a massive claim. In unpacking what Nietzsche can mean by this, and what he does with it, it would be fallacious to presuppose a singular narrative locating the origins of truth and/as error, thus enabling a further counter-error, or a new “truth” purged of its previous falsity. This would be the way of the ascetic, who “treats life as a wrong track along which one must retrace one’s steps to the point where it begins; or as a mistake which one rectifies through action—indeed, one should rectify: for he demands that one should follow him.”102 Rather, in a manner that anticipates a deconstructive reading, error and falsity come to be understood without reference to their conventional opposites, becoming in this way extraordinarily disruptive terms. “We remain unknown to ourselves, we seekers after knowledge.” The initial expectation raised is that self-knowledge can be (re)constituted via readings of “the whole hieroglyphic text, so difficult to decipher, of humanity’s moral past.”103 However, as On the Genealogy of Morality and Twilight of the Idols in particular consistently and provocatively manifest, we fail to recognize the polyvalences of error that constitute the psychic/social economy of the self. As if to compound this problem, deciphering—making sense—is not the solution, but also part of the problem of nihilism and asceticism. Nietzsche’s analyses, as Shapiro reminds us, “confront the disintegration and dissolution of the ordinary self, rather than its ideal unification and transfiguration.”104 The process of deciphering the narratives, morals, codes by which we live is ambiguous: while cipher means code or symbol, it also denotes nonentity, nothing. To decipher, then, rather than cracking these codes, could equally mean to discover the nothingness, the absence of meaning, underlying all human attempts to meaningfulness. If “founding presupposes self-knowledge,” then such analyses that “attack the integrated self ” in this way “render Nietzsche’s thought truly uncanny and abysmal (abgrundlich: lacking a foundation).”105 The project of selfknowledge becomes, in this way, antinarrative, in that it does not offer coherence to the self; but as this antinarrative is itself narrated, Nietzsche exemplifies the claims made in my introduction, that narrative “negotiates the dispersal of meaning rather than as well as its construction.” (In more Nietzschean terms, narrative is both Dionysiac and also Apollonian.) This is not to deny the self, but to reconfigure it. To anticipate the place of eternal recurrence in Nietzsche’s work, it is enough for now to gesture toward Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche, whereby “individuals find a real name

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for themselves [. . .] only through the harshest exercise in depersonalization, by opening themselves up to the multiplicities everywhere within them, to the intensities running through them.”106 I have already suggested that it is in the story of the self as an “embodied error,” and a moral error, and the “questions of valuation” provoked by this thought that the “battle over metaphysics, ontology, and philosophy itself is to be fought.”107 Putting substantive issues of moral “content” on hold for now (these issues recur in the next section), I explore, first, the structural imperatives (the metaphysics, the ontology, the philosophy) by which Nietzsche proposes the self has been understood and constructed. This is important for the possibility of a structurally different, irreducibly plural matrix and “grammar” of the self, within which, to anticipate, the “theologians” no longer use the concept of “‘moral world order’ to infect the innocence of becoming by means of ‘punishment’ and ‘guilt.” Such a grammar and matrix, that is, would work beyond a punitive grammar of ressentiment.108 I consider a series of tangential, at times contradictory, fragments. I suggest that we view these strategies of arguing/narrating as exemplars of the impossibility (and, for Nietzsche, undesirability) of countering error and falsity (once again) with truth viewed as a singular narrative. This would be to stay within the bounds of nihilism. The connections, however, between the ontological and the substantive are complex: indeed, as Miller comments, his is a “powerful polemic,” of which such strategies are weapons in the “patient and constantly renewed process of disarticulation, for which there is no ‘central expression.’ ”109 This necessitates the multilayered structure of my argument, where each section reinforces the others. There are three significant moments to trace here: first, to unpack the ways in which the clever animal invents the fable of knowledge; second, to argue that Nietzsche sees humanity as always-already fictionalizing; and third, to propose that through the analogy of dreaming and waking, Nietzsche moves from the terrain of the fictional to that of the fictive. First, then, what does it mean, to say we are errors? Nietzsche explains by means of a further fiction, this time a fable: Let us return to our problem: for our discussion of the other origin of good, good as conceived by the man of ressentiment, requires its conclusion.—That lambs bear ill-will toward large birds of prey is hardly strange: but it is no reason to blame large birds of prey for making off with little lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves: “These birds of prey are evil; and whoever is as little of a bird of prey as possible, indeed, rather the opposite, a lamb—should he not be said to be good?,” and there can be no objection to setting up an ideal like this, even if the bird of prey might look down a little contemptuously and perhaps say to themselves: “We bear them no ill-will at all, these good lambs—indeed, we love them: there is nothing tastier than a tender lamb.”110

The “moral” of this strange, disturbing, yet absurd fable is, of course, “morality itself.”111 On the surface, what happens is clear: the value of “good” is created via reaction, for the purpose of first positing, then explaining and negating an “evil” principle. From a position of powerlessness, by the introduction of concepts such as responsibility and blame, the lambs invent their own power.112 There is, however, a deeper “fable” here, which Keenan and Warminski recognize. As Warminski writes: “the fable of the clever animals inventing knowledge is not just

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any fable, but the fable of fable itself: the clever animals not only ‘speak and act like human beings,’ they also invent the difference between human being and animal, themselves and animals. They invent, in short, the difference between fable and nonfable, fable and argument, literature and philosophy.”113 The “in/justice” of the lambs’ suffering only becomes a question after the linguistic, conceptual, and interpretative invention of the lambs. Nietzsche’s implicit alignment with, or preference for, the perspective of unmediated, unalienated action of the large birds of prey is itself problematic and provocative. It is not clear why they should be made idols (ideals) or principles (“Why make a principle out of what you are and must be?”). Nietzsche could be read here as making the very mistake he warns about.114 My strategic decision to explore Nietzsche’s moral critique via the fable, then, has the advantage of foregrounding what will become crucial: the creative impulse is itself inaugural (ex nihilo?), not secondary. This can easily be missed if Nietzsche’s substantive critiques are examined first. For the importance of this fable is this: attention to the means by which the animals “invent” morality (which consists of the constellation of guilt, punishment, and revenge). This invention can be said to be “error” in the sense that it performs a (mis)interpretation of the inescapable. Intriguingly, this mythic, originary interpretation is a misinterpretation only in the sense that a “correct” interpretation is, precisely, impossible: and here the territory of good/evil, and true/false are ineluctably entwined. Nietzsche’s linking of the epistemological and ethical terrains here suggests that not only is morality such a misinterpretation, but all interpretations, insofar as they rely on privileged categories of responsibility and agency, are themselves moralized. There is, then, a further sense in which morality can be said to be error: language itself is the “story” of morality (and the fable of the fable). Nietzsche writes, A quantum of force is also a quantum of will, drive, action—in fact, it is nothing other than this driving, willing, acting, and it is only through the seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason petrified in it)—language which understands and misunderstands all action as conditioned by an actor, by a “subject”—that it can appear otherwise. [. . .] Popular morality distinguishes strength from expressions of strength, as if behind the strong individual there were an indifferent substratum which was at liberty to express strength or not express strength. But no such substratum exists; there is no “being” behind doing, acting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction imposed on the doing—the doing itself is everything.115

Again, this is the paradigm of fetishism, or the “petrification” or reification of moments of becoming into being: “fiction,” in this context, means the error of attributing agency to an autonomous subject, who can then be disciplined by means of ascetic or moral discourses. This is a fascinating error; denying the autonomy of the subject could be, and has been, said to be detrimental to the very possibility of agency and political action itself. Nietzsche is, however, not claiming this. He is, rather, pointing to the effects secured by a particular mode of fictionalizing, and simultaneously, undermining that very construction. At the same time, he opens the possibility of agency, an active and creative subjectivity, for whom disciplining and guilt-inducing “superior specters” no longer function. For it is not the moment of invention per se that troubles Nietzsche, but what has been invented; the imaginary

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character of the revenge of morality negates human potentiality, “cripples” and burdens the human.116 As Keenan explains: “Nietzsche explains the moral—morality itself— as resulting from the exploitation of a purely linguistic resource and approaches the story as at once a fabulous narrative about language and how it gets turned—with animals playing its roles—into an ethical and epistemological system, and the medium of exploitation, the putting to use or abuse of a linguistic possibility.”117 Grasping this point is crucial: for one of the purposes of the fable is to remind us, or to provoke us to recognize for the first time, that we are those fantastic (and resourceful) animals. The “philosophical mythology [that] lies concealed in language,” or, more elliptically and idiosyncratically, “God’s grammar” that underlies both ressentiment and nihilism can now be more fully appreciated.118 The story of morality, as Nietzsche tells it, is the story of self-construction. To the extent that this self-construction is a creative act, the ethical and epistemological model upon which such self-construction proceeds is via narrative. However, this model also underlies the drive toward nihilism: as Strong writes, “the hidden linguistic imperatives of the categories men now live under force them toward nothingness,” which is to say, the drive for truth in morality undermines anything that could stand as truth, and so leads to the radical loss of meaning we have been circling.119 In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche both tells this story and tells of its undoing. The ways in which we are that fable can be unpacked by following Nietzsche through his telling of the “Four Great Errors,” and “How the True World Became a Fable.” The “Four Great Errors” that Nietzsche unpacks have precisely to do with the construction of subjectivity via the transmutation of causality into guilt; causes and consequences exist, but are “mis”perceived through moralizing, the “bad fabulizing” of morality. For example, religions, Nietzsche argues, promise virtue as an ascetic form of happiness through forms of discipline. Nietzsche simply inverts this: “virtue is the effect of happiness.”120 Second, the conception of the autonomous willing subject is an error; Nietzsche argues that “motivation” as the origin of willing and decision or promising as the telos are imaginary, constructed narratives. Interesting to note is the complication in Nietzsche’s account: if causality is false, why would its inversion yield a “true” account of the subject’s intentionality? Nietzsche in fact goes further and asserts the imaginary nature of all causality. The logic of the dream is also the logic of subjective intelligibility: often, a whole little novel [is constructed] in which the dreamer turns into the protagonist. The sensation [Nietzsche’s example is of a far off cannon shot] endures meanwhile in a kind of resonance: it waits, as it were, until the causal instinct permits it to step into the foreground—now no longer as a chance occurrence, but as “meaning.” The cannon shot appears in causal mode, in an apparent reversal of time.121

To reiterate: the problem of meaning is, for Nietzsche, an all too human problem, but the dominant narratives have hypostatized and alienated the production of meaning. Nietzsche uses the example of the dream in order to reopen the question. This error can be seen to compliment the other errors, in the sense that it asserts the “imaginary” nature of all causality. Yet, it also disrupts the positing of causal sequence on which they are based by positing not an event, but an imagining. It is worthwhile pausing

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here, as Nietzsche asserts that it is this error upon which “the whole realm of morality and religion belongs.” Nietzsche “explains”: With the unknown, one is confronted with danger, discomfort, and care; the first instinct is to abolish these painful states. First principle: any explanation is better than none. Since at bottom it is merely a matter of wishing to be rid of oppressive representations, one is not too particular about the means of getting rid of them: the first representation that explains the unknown as familiar feels so good that one “considers it true.” [. . .] Thus one searches not only for some kind of explanation to serve as a cause, but for a particularly selected and preferred kind of explanation—that which has most quickly and most frequently abolished the feeling of the strange, new, and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual explanations.122

As creatures who seek intelligibility, we are always-already fictionalizing creatures. Nietzsche’s critique is finally not directed against causality as such, but against ways of rendering human experience intelligible that have made “causes into sinners and consequences into executioners.”123 The final error of “free will” is, for Nietzsche, error because it is a punitive fiction: “becoming has been deprived on its innocence [. . .] men were considered ‘free’ so that they might be judged and punished—so that they might become guilty. . . .”124 The point of the importance of this story for Nietzsche is that we live out, embody, these moral errors. He expresses this as the radically unsettling insight that we are indeed “unknown to ourselves,” because, perhaps, there has not yet been a self to know: We are none of us that which we appear to be in accordance with the states for which alone we have consciousness and words, and consequently, praise or blame [. . .] We misread ourselves in this apparently most intelligible of handwriting on the nature of our self. Our opinion of ourself, however, which we have arrived at by this erroneous path, the so-called “ego,” is thenceforth a fellow-worker in the construction of our character and our destiny.125

The problem, however, is not that morality has misrepresented our self to ourselves; rather, through mechanisms of cruelty and inversion, morality has written us, and we then perpetuate this construction by, simply, living it. Indeed, Nietzsche uses the metaphor of the dream narrative to suggest that we are always-already fictionalizing every time we attempt to create meaning or sense: Waking life does not have this freedom of interpretation possessed by the life of dreams, it is less inventive and unbridled—but do I have to add that when we are awake our drives likewise do nothing but interpret stimuli and, according to their requirements, posit their “causes?” that there is no essential difference between waking and dreaming? [. . .] that our moral judgments and evaluations too are only images and fantasies based on a physiological process unknown to us, a kind of acquired language for designating certain nervous stimuli? That all our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text? [. . .] What, then, are our experiences? Much more that which we put into them than that which they already contain! Or must we go so far as to say: in themselves they contain nothing? To experience is to invent?126

Recall that for a theorist such as Hobbes, the alter-spaces that dreaming opens had to be disciplined, rendered meaningless. For Nietzsche, the inverse is true. Dreaming is

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the archetype for how humans understand the world. A “fantastic commentary” on a “felt” bodily “text”: Nietzsche, typically, leaves this as a question, an interrogation on the ways in which we humans make sense of the world; he leaves open spaces of possibility and rethinking precisely by not giving answers. To the extent that to experience is to invent, however, does not mean it is any less “real,” or any less “felt.” This textualizing of the body is not to dismiss its ontological status; it is precisely to reinstate spaces of intelligibility as spaces of possibility, and we can clearly note the difference between a Hobbesian and Nietzschean inscription of the body. Simply put, Nietzsche insists time and again, in different ways, that we organize and negotiate the world via fictions that are misunderstood as truth. By means of this, humanity has been made “calculable, regular, necessary” as Nietzsche concurrently recognizes that these very material, violent fictions have made society possible (see chapter one).127 If, however, this is error, are we, then, in a situation where everything is permitted? I have suggested we are not. Nietzsche writes, I deny morality as I deny alchemy, that is, I deny their premises: but I do not deny that there have been alchemists who believed in these premises and acted in accordance with them.—I also deny immorality: not that countless people feel themselves to be immoral, but there is any true reason so to feel. It goes without saying that I do not deny—unless I am a fool—that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged—but I think the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto. We have to learn to think differently—in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.128

This is important: Nietzsche points to both the status of moral-claims as well as their effects and argues that attention to rethinking both is necessary. New stories are needed; and those stories have to be thought very differently, a point to which I return. To summarize for now: the “Four Great Errors,” essentially, points to one great error: “humankind is prone to direct the apparently natural impulse to create narratives towards seriously punitive ends.”129 But how can we “learn to think differently”? How can fictionalizing happen without a punitive reification of those fictions? Nietzsche affects the structural and grammatical matrix by which the narrative logic of self-construction works. However, how does Nietzsche, or “we, whose task is wakefulness itself,” wake up within this all-pervasive fictionalizing?130 For morality is a falsification, but this inversion and indictment no longer amounts to a compelling reason for rejecting it on Nietzschean terms. We cannot simply “renounce false judgments,” because these, in this reconfigured sense, are all there are. Can we articulate dissident new fictions that do not reify and hypostatize, or insist on their natural necessity? Nietzsche puts it this way: “gradually, man has become a fantastic animal who has to fill one more condition of existence than any other animal: man has to believe, to know, from time to time, why he exists; his race cannot flourish without a periodic trust in life—without faith of reason in life.”131 This drive to know (or create), these errors, have “made mankind so profound, tender and inventive as to produce such a flower as the arts and religion.”132 The movement between invention (the creation of such truths by which to live) and forgetting (that these are precisely inventions) can be interrupted: the moment of forgetting is also the moment of idealization and reification. This also parallels the larger story of this book: the old mode of theorizing fictionalized but

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reified its fictions; the fictive is self-conscious and reflexive. What resources does Nietzsche suggest in this endeavor? Or, as Shapiro puts it, do “Nietzsche’s views allow for a truly awake, non-dreamlike awareness of the world?”133 I suggest that they do not, but that this recognition itself forms part of what it means to be “beyond good and evil.” To follow this, I turn to “How the ‘True World’ Became a Fable.” In this “History of an Error,” Nietzsche undoes the last remnants of the opposition between real and apparent, true and false, the binary that informs the true reality/ fictional narrative and also the wide-awake/dream-like oppositions. This is another fable, this time of the history of philosophical discourse itself in six stages, of which I shall pick out four. Nietzsche begins (again) with a simple, unmediated, singular Truth: “I, Plato, am the truth.”134 The Kantian “dream” is described thus: “The true world—unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it—a consolation, an obligation, an imperative. (At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.)”135 With the “disappearance” of truth—its temporal displacement—it is reinscribed as both a promise and a rule, despite its current unintelligibility. The movement through positivism—that I have earlier implied is where that unique free spirit Max Stirner could perhaps be placed in this narrative—is also revealing: “The ‘true’ world—an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating—an idea which has become useless and superfluous—consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it! (Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato’s embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.)”136 Bright morning, breakfast: have we woken up?137 This would seem to be the “natural” end of the narrative of philosophy: it has created fictions of an “other” world that have negated this world, taken revenge on the world of becoming. At this stage, there are no longer any dreams that fabulizing could guarantee the truth. But Nietzsche refuses this, and adds a sixth stage: “The true world—we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one. (Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)”138 This stage is necessary because by destroying one side of an opposition the other is profoundly destabilized. This is not a conclusion that makes sense of all that has gone before.139 The axes that have organized sense-making projects have been hierarchical and binary. A comparison with Stirner helps delineate this new territory with greater clarity. Whereas Stirner wanted to abolish what Nietzsche has (ironically) called the “true world” in order to be at home in a wholly real, “apparent” world, freed from the spooks and specters, Nietzsche’s insight is that this “real” (the apparent world to, e.g., Kant) is constituted via the fictions or spooks of the real world. However, we can inhabit those fictions, Nietzsche would argue, in a very different, lateral, nonhierarchical, and creative way. Fabulizing is inescapable for Nietzsche because that is all we have by which to make the world meaningful; the point of Nietzsche’s genealogical explorations (ethically as well as epistemologically), is that it is an exercise in both giving different meanings and giving meanings differently: How wonderful and new and yet how gruesome and ironic I find my position vis-à-vis the whole of human existence in the light of my insight! I have discovered for myself that the human and animal past, indeed, the whole of the primal age and past of all sentient

132 / fictive theories being continues in me to invent, to love, to hate, to infer. I suddenly woke up in the midst of this dream, but only to the consciousness that I am dreaming, and that I must go on dreaming lest I perish! [. . .] What is “appearance” to me now? Certainly not the opposite of some essence . . .140

In chapter five, I delineate the contours of this new situation via Bloch and the concept of a utopian “creative epistemology of the possible,” where dreaming is vital; for now, it is enough to return to Nietzsche, and extrapolate from him a caution: We have thought the matter over and finally decided that there is nothing good, nothing beautiful, nothing sublime, nothing evil in itself, but that there are states of soul141 in which we impose such words upon things external to us and within us. We have again taken back the predicates of things, or at least remembered that it was we who lent them to them:—let us take care that this insight does not deprive us of the capacity to lend, and that we have not become at the same time richer and greedier.142

A singular situation, and a new kind of responsibility is articulated here. The project of self-creation, as conceived by Nietzsche, is a political project: a transformative renaming of the world attentive to fluidity, processes of formation and transformation, and always open to future possibility. Resisting codification, Nietzsche instead defines a new situation in which generosity and affirmation become central to a new, processual subjectivity. Hinge Three: Beyond Tragedy To recap: the tragedy of philosophy, for Nietzsche, was the loss of meaningful ontological informing principles; “the realization that delusion and error are conditions for human knowledge and sensation [. . .] would be utterly unbearable. Honesty would lead us to nausea and suicide.”143 But tragic, Dionysian knowledge is a misrecognition. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche aligns sickness and tragedy with a teleological desire for guaranteed meaning and closure; a desire for God or his modern replacement, “science”: these are dissociative norms that give meaning stingily, meanly, and punitively. Nevertheless, our sickness and tragedy now inform our possibilities; we have to work through layers of reification to uncover possibilities. A grinning Nietzsche, this time, suggests that the “great tragedians” have time and again given way, and “returned to the eternal comedy of existence [. . .] laughter [. . .] makes the required corrections, human nature has nevertheless been changed by the ever new appearance of teachers of the purpose of existence.”144 When “life itself has become a problem,” the response need not be paralysis, despair, inaction. As the fictionalizing creatures that humanity is, “as an aesthetic phenomenon, life is still bearable for us [. . .] we should be able to stand above morality—and not only to stand with the anxious stiffness of a man afraid of slipping and falling at any moment, but also to float above it and play.”145 Lest it should seem as though I deviate from the political, I point here to a vital ethos as in-forming principle, and to a necessary fluidity rather than the disciplinary nature of principles. Raoul Vaneigem points to this when he rebukes those without an “understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive about the refusal of constraints—such people have a corpse in their

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mouth.”146 Indeed, this Nietzschean moment can be traced through an alter-canon that would certainly include Stirner, and move forward through Emma Goldman, who insisted that revolutionaries must also dance, through Vaneigem, Deleuze, and so on. Such thinkers insist upon this revolutionary (or insurrectionary?) vitality of a subjectivity sans ressentiment. Nietzsche posits a child-like, but also highly reflexive, highly alert, sense of easiness beyond (importantly, not prior to) this tragic response: In the end, lest what is most important remain unsaid: from such abysses, from such severe sickness, also from the sickness of severe suspicion, one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin [part of Nietzsche’s metaphor for the incorporation of “errors”], more ticklish and malicious, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a tenderer tongue for all good things, with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times more subtler than one has ever been before . . .147

This is a crucial part of theorizing differently, and in changing the mode of political theory. It is not incidental that Nietzsche here is sensual, bodily, teasingly voluptuous. The human and all too human no longer stands as a disparagement. Part epistemological critique, part ethical injunction, comedy provides an alternative epistemological and thus ethico-political path. Kathleen Higgins expresses this well: the alternative perspectives of tragedy and comedy involve radically assessments of one’s own goals, even though the specific tasks are not, in kind, so different. Stressing the individual’s position in the project of knowing, Nietzsche reminds us that it can be seen as limiting to the point of hopelessness, or as a unique advantage for gaining insight and aesthetic delight. [. . .] The latter is the possibility for the knower who accepts this incongruity [that the individual is “incongruously ill-suited to the task of true cosmic vision”] and continues the enterprise, not as a striving against the gods, but as a part of the dream.148

The project of the genealogist, then, is to see our judgments as, in Deleuze’s term, “forces,” rather than absolutes. This is part of giving meaning differently to life. We paradoxically “transcend” the reified, unsubtle, crass, narratives of good and evil, with their punitive effects, by means of a “structurally different grammar” that emphasizes self-creation without a consolatory transcendental realm, and that emphasizes a degree of mastery over the narratives within which we are constituted and that we use to negotiate the world by a letting go of the myth of complete mastery. Comedy sees the future as temptation with a renewed sense of the innocence of becoming. Comedy, indeed, also provides a means of bypassing the asceticism associated with the uncovering of errors as nihilism: rather than the punitive angst of a further denial of morality (the way of the ascetic—demanding a return to the origin). Nietzsche’s laughter releases the subject from punitive narratives, toward narratives of becoming. This section has aimed to unpack post-foundational modes of theorizing, drawing in part upon Nietzsche’s genealogy. This is an anti-narrative form of critical unpacking of how things have come to be how they are, and is also a narrative dispersal of those reified meanings, a decolonization. Spaces of future possibility are thus opened. Nietzsche’s political solution to the problem of nihilism, however, does not always

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take on board these creative, comedic, and epiphanic insights. It is to this I now turn, before suggesting the ways in which precisely the creative, the epiphanic, and the comedic are themselves politically crucial. Nietzsche’s Ressentiment?; Or, What is Written on Zarathustra’s Tablets? Legislating the Future? When Nietzsche’s Zarathustra emerges from his years of solitude and hermitage, waiting to return to humanity, to political and communal life, he waits to return as a legislator: “Here I sit and wait, surrounded by broken old tablets and new tablets half-covered with writing. When will my hour come?”149 The resonance with Plato, Moses, Lycurgus (Rousseau’s favored example), and other great philosophico-political legislators is unmistakable; these are precisely the “broken old tablets” of which Nietzsche/Zarathustra demanded the de(con)struction. But why are Zarathustra’s tablet’s only “half-covered” with writing? This image returns us to the core of Nietzsche’s political narrative, and to what is at stake in the project of political theory. Now, it is necessary to address the structural and substantive issues simultaneously. More precisely, after Nietzsche, what kind of writing is political theory? I have already suggested that via Nietzsche, a creative space is opened; a refusal of the reification of the creative moment emerges through the dissolution of the foundational moment, which the journey through nihilism, no longer mourning the loss of natural or selfevident meanings, accomplishes. We have so far gestured toward an alternative mode of theorizing, and reactivated, as it were, traces of that mode with Rousseau. With Nietzsche, we see explicitly that the task of legislation—the juridical and authoritative moment of political theory—is predicated on a reification. The text, or the tablets of political theorizing have demanded conceptual stability, separation and control, answers and authority; still, as I have argued, this cannot be maintained without willful forgetting and negation. Can there be extrapolated from Nietzsche a political narrative that resists the moment of reification (which would be the Barthesian writerly text, and a further critical moment in my broader problematic)? With this in mind, this section tackles two related problems. First, I explore the ways in which such a “traditional” political model can be extrapolated from Nietzsche’s fragments. In this model, an authoritative voice speaks; Nietzsche commands. This voice, however, is linked with a narrative of domination and control. The hierarchical narrative that emerges via this kind of (passive) reading reinstates punishment and ressentiment. I call this tablet one. However, by keeping in mind the insights of the previous two sections: of the possibility of an active reading, of the impossibility of the oppositional structure of subject and object, where both are co-implicated in process of becoming, and of the radical and comedic creativity that Nietzsche articulates after the dissolution of foundations, I suggest, through the sketching of another possible tablet, that the creative and comedic aspects of Nietzsche’s work thoroughly disrupt the articulation of tablet one. The thus far deferred encounter with the thought of eternal recurrence completes this discussion of the possibilities that Nietzsche opens toward other and different ways of thinking and being on both a structural and grammatical, substantive and irreducibly plural

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matrix. I return the epistemological discussion to the ethical through Nietzsche’s thoughts on the friend. Throughout, however, I maintain a focus on the linkage between the questions of style and questions of authority with which I opened this chapter: it is in the impossibility of transforming Nietzsche’s work into a set of principles (the impossibility, to continue my trope—the trope of the project of political theory—of Zarathustra’s tablets being fully written) that supports a particular model of the political where his crucial political import lies. First, though, I turn my attention more fully to what Nietzsche is creating with the trope of the legislator. As I have suggested, legislation is a troubled concept for the project of a fictive political theory. Nietzsche’s remarks on this concept, scattered throughout his work, are linked to the future beyond the nihilistic crisis he diagnosed. Indeed, it is only the legislator who can perform such a diagnosis: “only the man who builds the future has the right to judge the past.”150 Similarly, in the preface to Human, All Too Human Nietzsche writes: “it is the future which regulates our today [. . .].[I]t is the problem of the order of rank of which we may say it is our problem, we free spirits. . . .”151 For Nietzsche, then, the journey through nihilism is the task of the legislator, and the ability to create possible futures is the precondition of such a journey: given that Nietzsche’s attention has been to the modes by which humans have made life meaningful, this is a significant moment. Now, I would argue that the epistemologically creative cannot be tied to a politics of domination. However, at times, Nietzsche’s politics can be scathing, sneering, dismissive, and seem to state the necessity of “slaves” in order for there to be “masters” or “higher men.” Rather than simply dismiss these moments, I want, instead, to see if the mode of evaluation underpinning them is congruent with what Nietzsche says elsewhere about his preferred modes of evaluation and making-meaningful. For Nietzsche’s vision is also disruptive, potentially unruly, pointing toward a future that cannot be named, but can only tempt: A new order of philosophers is appearing: I shall venture to baptize them by a name not without danger. As far as I understand them, as far as they allow themselves to be understood—for it is their nature to wish to remain something of a puzzle—these philosophers of the future might rightly, perhaps also wrongly, claim to be designated as “tempters.” This name itself is after all only an attempt, or, if it be preferred, a temptation.152

Cautious, speculative, experimental, exploratory—and, Nietzsche would wish, seductive: these are certainly a-typical depictions of the legislator. Magnus et al. suggest that this vision is pervasive in Nietzsche’s work, especially in his titles: The provisional, tentative, and future-oriented character of [. . .] the subtitle “Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future” [. . .] suggests that Nietzsche’s text itself neither constitutes a philosophy of the future—since it is its prelude—nor envisions that future philosophy. Nor does it express hegemony [. . .] Beyond Good and Evil is a prelude to a philosophy of the future, not to the philosophy of the future. It is a prelude to one of many conceivable future philosophies.153

Significantly, for the future to be future, the possibility of alterity must remain open; otherwise, the project of naming the future is a hegemonic, power-ridden project.

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(I suggest with Bloch in chapter five, however, that this inability to name the future ensures a transformative politics.) So, in line with Nietzsche’s pluralizing strategies, this could be seen as a prelude to many (not simply one of many) conceivable futures, a prelude that is as fractured as the plural futures it ushers into being.154 Nietzsche’s titles, that is, do not contain the “whole,” but are, rather, gestural, and point beyond themselves. In chapter five, we see more clearly that the way to avoid the asymmetry of power in the vision of the legislator is by privileging plurality in creating the future: “Not guide, but merely one of the many directions which lead to tomorrow,” and to a tomorrow toward which everyone must be able to walk.155 Otherwise, power relations are simply reproduced. Nietzsche has not yet solved this problem, however. This polyvalence within the category of the philosophical legislator creating the future(s) is expressed by the following: The real philosophers, however, are commanders and law-givers; they say “Thus it shall be!” They determine first the Whither and Why of mankind, and thereby set aside the previous labor of all philosophical workers and subjugators of the past—they grasp at the future with a creative hand, and whatever is and was, becomes for them thereby a means, an instrument, and a hammer. Their “knowing” is creating, their creating is a law-giving, their will-to-truth is—Will to Power.—Are there at present such philosophers?156

The genealogical unpacking—how we have come to be who we are—is here for Nietzsche also a form of utopian and fictive fabrication. But why a “law-giving” exercise? Important here is the elision between knowledge and creation. For now, I wish to let the tension between the task of legislating as an epistemologically grounded enterprise for political theory, and the emergent notion of legislation as creation, as a potentially creative epistemology of the possible future, remain. Tablet One. Pathos of Distance: Masters/Slaves or Masters Without Slaves? Where can Nietzsche be said to be affirming within the nexus of his political writings? Which strategy/ies can be said to have his approval (if any at all)? The first paradigm is of domination by the “higher men” in pursuit of “grand politics,” and is informed by the “pathos of distance.” This can be gleaned from Nietzsche’s critique of the radical political movements of his day: socialism, liberalism, and democrats all based their political programs around the idea of equality. This is anathema to Nietzsche: Every elevation of the type “man,” has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society and so it will always be—a society believing in long scales of graduations of rank and differences of worth among human beings, and requiring slavery in some form or another. Without the pathos of distance, such as grows out of the incarnated difference of classes, out of the constant out-looking and down-looking of the ruling caste on subordinates and instruments, and out of their equally constant practice of obeying and commanding, of keeping down and keeping at a distance—that other more mysterious pathos of distance could never have arisen, the longing for an ever new widening distance within the soul itself, with the formation of ever higher, rarer, further, more extended, more comprehensive states, in short, just the elevation of the type “man,” the continued “self-surmounting of man” to use a moral formula in a supramoral sense.157

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It is clear that in fragments such as these, Nietzsche instrumentalizes the concepts of higher politics and higher culture in order to justify a ruling elite for the sake of whom basic humanity is denied to the others. A material and socioeconomic division of labor underpins a psychological difference that is precisely to do with a subject’s sense of possibility. The concept of the pathos of distance operates as the space that maintains the opposition and hierarchy. Why? And can this hierarchy be sustained? Nietzsche’s critique of equality needs to be seen in the light of the hierarchical construction of difference that the pathos of distance sustains. Put briefly and simply, equality renders the dissimilar similar via comparison; it is a reactive logic suited to the “small,” the “rabble,” and the “little men”; equality is the logic of the herd or the slave.158 What, then, are the modes of making meaningful of master and slave moralities? The paradigmatic modes of evaluation Nietzsche refers to can be seen to take the form of a series of, as we shall see, highly unstable oppositions: master/slave, active/reactive, will to power/ressentiment, healthy/sick, expending/self-preserving, sensual/intellectual, forgetting/remembering. The master creates values and meanings by acting in the world, and by perceiving no clear opposition between his self and his world only insofar as he shapes and creates it unreflectively. He “expends” his energy, he “forgets” insults and blockages, he is sensual and bodily. By contrast, “the slave revolt in morals begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and ordains values: the ressentiment of creatures to whom real reaction, that of the deed, is denied, and who find compensation in imaginary revenge.”159 The slave internalizes: he reacts to an external world in which his creative impulses are ineffective. Further, the slave remembers, compares, uses cunning to preserve his energies. The slave, Nietzsche suggests, reacts by positing guilt, blame, and responsibility, as I have already discussed, and not only by attributing these to the “other,” the master who (unwittingly?) impedes, but also to the self. The creation of an additional layer of meaning compounds suffering, and this is a large part of what Nietzsche means by ressentiment. Ressentiment structures a reactive subjectivity, who then invests in the very identitystructure that precludes moving beyond the power-relations of the present: as Wendy Brown puts it (although in a different context), “keep[s] alive a certain investment in the marked identity” that can then function as “a source of political paralysis, a constraint on a subject’s willingness to surrender this investment.”160 Or, as Jack Reynolds puts it, ressentiment “is an attitude that develops following the conviction that the future is circumscribed (e.g., the master’s will always be dominant) and is bound to be contiguous with the past and present.”161 Slave moralities and ressentiment bind the subject to the present and the given. This is indeed problematic; but does the master morality and master mode of evaluation as posited by Nietzsche overcome this? For if masters need slaves in order to assure themselves of their status as “higher men,” then the mode of evaluation of the masters is itself contaminated by slavish comparison. Where Nietzsche begins with oppositions that are potentially hierarchical, and asserts the value of domination, he reaches a point where these oppositions can no longer hold; he effectively undermines the premises of his own arguments, and by doing so, creates something potentially new. The pathos of distance has indeed been part of a process of construction; but its logic is hierarchical and reactive, the very logic Nietzsche would wish to move beyond. Difference, then, can thus become lateral instead of hierarchical, fluid rather than fixed, contingent rather than essential.

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The pathos of difference can be thus transformed through reading, interpreting, participating in constructing Nietzsche’s “tablet,” from a gap that separates in order to control, to a differential that itself creates; from two to many. Nietzsche’s argument, to extrapolate, suggests that if a transformative politics is bound to a reactive morality or subjectivity, then that politics will be imbued with a spirit of revenge. Nietzsche sought to pose the idea of a master morality as a response to the problem of a reactive subject, for a reactive subjectivity cannot be a transformative subjectivity. However, if the mater mode of evaluation is also reactive, since it implicitly operates via comparison, then it is an inadequate response. It is, instead, through the encounter with eternal recurrence that Nietzsche points to an ethos of resistance without ressentiment. Tablet Two: The Friend, and an Encounter with Eternal Recurrence Nietzsche introduces the Übermensch in the prologue to Zarathustra: “I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?”162 The similarity and difference between this idea and the higher men, masters, or nobles in the preceding section is well construed by Schutte, and it relates precisely to the core questions of what kind of narrative political theory both is and can become. Schutte is asking the question of why the Übermensch does not appear more often in Nietzsche’s work. She suggests, the idea belongs to a poetical text. To begin to give a discursive interpretation of this idea, or an explanation that is amenable to the rules of logic is to fall below the spirit of übermenschenlichkeit conveyed by the symbol itself. The über/mensch is above and beyond the structure of divided thinking [. . .] When logic attempts to appropriate the idea [. . .] it seems to end up with the notion of a superior human being, rather than a symbol of humanity, affinity with life.163

I have gestured to the problem of seeming to find, in Nietzsche, the idea of a superior human being via my discussion of master and slave moralities. There is still, however, an implicit opposition underlying Schutte’s comments, that a poetical interpretation can be opposed to a discursive (and hence political, and hence hierarchical) interpretation. In this final section, I wish to suggest, following Irigaray,164 that beyond the fiction/theory hierarchy, there is, in Nietzsche, a narrative that is both epiphanic and political, but political in different ways than tablet one. Through exploration of the friend and eternal recurrence, I shall suggest that Nietzsche provides the critical resources to articulate a political economy of the gift, which can be expressed in terms of a subjectivity capable of conceiving a creative epistemology of the possible. Such a discourse, and such a subject, impossible within the confines of foundationalism, reconfigures the self-image and task of political theory. The Übermensch is that form of selfhood that lies beyond humanity; it is another cipher by means of which Nietzsche throws into relief our current decadence, another provocation to revaluation. There is, however, another such figure, which Nietzsche describes as “an anticipation of the overman.”165 This figure is the friend, and it is through this more neglected cipher that I wish to explore the transfigurative impulse in Nietzsche: the friend is beyond the slavish, she rejects the discourse of mastery, and

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yet she is not beyond the human; she oscillates between what we are and what we can be, and as such, performs the act of “bridging” that we are. “The friend has,” as Nietzsche puts it, “appeared as a problem worth solving.”166 The possibility of difference without center or pathos and an affirmative and generous ethos of solidarity among differences, rather than contempt, illuminates Nietzsche’s work here. The friend, for Nietzsche/Zarathustra, goes beyond egalitarianism and reactive logic, expressing a necessary plurality without hierarchy or equivalence: Are you a slave? Then you cannot be a friend. Are you a tyrant? Then you cannot have friends. [. . .] Alas, behold your poverty, you men, and the meanness of your souls! As much as you give the friend, I will give even my enemy, and I shall not be any the poorer for it. There is comradeship: let there be friendship!167

For the friend, the boundaries of self and other are fluid: differences, rather than being something to fear and oppose, provide the precondition for intersubjective relations. Throughout Zarathustra, the marketplace is emblematic of a kind of subjectivity that can only work via the generation of equivalences; the marketplace is also complacent, accepting the range of options already existent. It is here that slavish “neighbors” feel safe, at home: You cannot endure yourselves and do not love yourselves enough: now you want to seduce your neighbor to love, then guild yourself with his error. Would that you could not endure all sorts of neighbors, and their neighbors, and then you would have to create your friend and this overflowing heart out of your selves. [. . .] Your bad love of yourselves turns your solitude into a prison. [. . .] I teach you not the neighbor but the friend. The friend should be the festival of the earth to you and an anticipation of the overman. I teach you the friend and this overflowing heart. But one must learn to be a sponge if one wants to be loved by hearts that overflow. I teach you the friend in whom the world stands completed, a bowl of goodness—the creating friend who always has a completed world to give away. And as the world rolled apart for him, it rolls together again in circles for him, as the becoming of good through evil, as the becoming of purpose out of accident.168

The friend does not need the reactive gaze of the neighbor to consolidate a sense of selfhood or subjectivity. A multiple subjectivity, the friend can make the discontinuous flux of existence, if not coherent and rational, meaningful as process. The friend stands in this passage as the possibility both of generosity, affirmation, and of becoming-other. But more importantly, as this passage suggests, it is the friend whose selfhood can encounter the thought of eternal recurrence. This suggests that the thought of eternal recurrence is pivotal in overcoming a dissociative, nihilistic logic in thought, subjectivity, and action. The context in which eternal recurrence stands as the most “abysmal thought” is that of redemption.169 Redemptive schemes are those that have created a narrative of origin (causal, responsible agent) and end (the telos, where suffering is explained and atoned for). Redemption was needed because the will was thwarted; put simply, an afterlife, religious or political, was invented that simultaneously made this life bearable, but only to the extent that it was also denigrated. This can be located as the existential crisis that Nietzsche deals with in the formulations of eternal recurrence. First, the

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last demon of this book comes from The Gay Science: What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every nought and every sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, you speck of dust!”

A malignant demon indeed . . . Nietzsche poses a dual response, that tests one’s sicknesses, one’s reactive or affirmative attitude toward life itself: “Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ ”170 Nietzsche argues that this thought is transformative. But in what ways?171 Eternal recurrence, to put it simply and briefly, provokes a temporal reevaluation of one’s life: instead of necessity, contingency recurs; instead of self-identity, difference to one’s self recurs; and yet in the midst of the flux of the thought, rather than closing the future, the future is precisely opened as the possibility of the new. As we have already seen with a Derridean temporality, and as we shall see in chapter five with a utopian temporality, “the past is as unpredictable as the future”: “To redeem those who lived in the past and to recreate all ‘it was’ into ‘thus I willed it’—that alone should I call redemption.”172 Eternal recurrence provokes a stratification of temporality, where what has gone before (read genealogically) provides the conditions of possibility for the new, thus overcoming the opposition of free will/determinism. Nietzsche suggests that precisely this formulation can overcome ressentiment. I turn, then, to some suggestions on what occurs to the subjectivity that thinks the thought. One such suggestion from Nehamas is that eternal recurrence enables an “active process of interpreting and reinterpreting our lives as if we were fictional characters” and in this way we gain control of the processes by which our lives are rendered “meaningful.”173 While this interpretative drive is crucial, it does not work in this direction. Shapiro contests this reading since it reconfirms and centers the self as subject. Rather, according to Shapiro, “the thought of eternal recurrence, unlike typical ideas of religious and philosophical importance, does nothing at all to strengthen the identity of the one who affirms it.” The link between self-knowledge and meaningfulness is problematic: “to the extent that I affirm the thought I affirm also my error and ignorance of it [. . .] Any attempt to use the thought in order to make my life history into a meaningful development runs into the danger of complicity in that general revenge which the human race yearns to practice upon ‘time and its “it was.” ’ ”174 The matrix of linearity and its causality, and the drive to meaningfulness form the deep structure of nihilism. However, as Higgins points out, given recurrence, time has no starting point, and the temporal sequence folds back on itself. Accordingly we will not reach a beginning if we inquire backwards through time about previous causes. Time is simply the structure of our experienced world. The demon’s alternative gives no special status to a first moment. No particular moment is uniquely decisive for the entire sequence that follows, as the moment of creation paradoxically seems to be on the creation account. Every moment is as important to the existence of the whole as every other one.175

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With no origin and no telos, meaning becomes a question of open processes of becoming. (In his fictions, Pullman elliptically gestures toward this: “perhaps the future affects the past in some way we don’t understand [. . .] There are many things we haven’t yet learned to read.”176) Tasmin Lorraine, through her reading of Deleuze and Irigaray on Nietzsche, approaches the paradox whereby the dissolution of the subjectivity in the flux of eternal recurrence is also that process by which a self can be created (for the first time): “speaking in one’s own name turns out not to be about positing a self, a person, or a subject that speaks in his own name. Instead, a genuine proper name is acquired by the individual through a radical exercise in depersonalization in which that individual opens herself to the multiplicities that traverse her.”177 Eternal recurrence, as a strategy, is complimentary to the genealogical process, or rereading and rewriting oneself, but with a productive difference. As Oliver writes, the eternal return operates as the mechanism for the self-overcoming of reactive forces. In this way, the eternal return makes a gift of oneself possible insofar as self-giving is also a process of self-destroying. Through the eternal return, a new “self ” is continually emerging. Through this process of continual self-destroying and self-creating, the never-ending process of othering takes place. The self becomes other.178

This process is the subjectivity who can negotiate eternal return, who can move beyond nihilism. The thought of eternal recurrence performs the negation of any world of truth other than the world as process that we inhabit; it provides a critically creative impetus whereby a self can become immersed in this world (of becoming) without dualities, and in particular without the duality of subject and object. In my opening section, I suggested Barthes’s textual ontology provided a language and a structural matrix by which to approach Nietzsche; I would now like to suggest that the subjectivity that Nietzsche calls the friend can accept “production without product, structuration without structure,” that can negotiate “everything signif[ying] ceaselessly and several times, but without being delegated to a great final ensemble, to an ultimate structure” is the affect of the thought of eternal recurrence. By way of conclusion, I shall propose ways in which Nietzsche suggests a positive answer to the question of whether there is a necessary connection between a grounded and thus hierarchical, authoritative narrative, and an ungrounded, creative epistemology of the possible, which is enabling and liberatory. This requires a brief retelling of the links between the preceding sections, and their relation to the status and aims of the project of political theorizing. I began by suggesting that in Nietzsche’s very writing strategies lay his political import, in that he overcomes a dualism of detachment that is maintained by the subject/ object opposition. By implicating his readers in an active process of constructing his narrative, he already questions the given ontological status of the text (of his own text, and more broadly, of any text, including those of political theory). I then suggested that Nietzsche can be read as viewing the status of his work as fictive, in that he also beckons to the future, beyond a further binary of true/false. Throughout the second section, I followed a particular nihilistic but interrogative logic. I asserted that nihilism is that tragic position of recognition that to ask moral or epistemological questions of ontology is always already to ask the wrong questions. Thus the creative impulses of humanity were foregrounded. The second hinge followed the dissolution

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of the possibility of any foundational moment, and thus the immersion of the world of being into that of becoming. This necessitated a new attitude to life, designated by Nietzsche as the comic. In this attitude, creativity and fluidity of boundaries are celebrated rather than refused. This gave rise, however, to a problem for political theory, in terms of its legislative role. To be more exact, two problems were highlighted: one for Nietzsche in particular, at the times when his own discourse negates the creative, comic, and epiphanic insights in favor of a hierarchical logic seen as necessary given the decadence of the subject; and a broader problem, whereby the very possibility of writing the legislative tablets of political theory was questioned. I suggested the thought of eternal recurrence is the thought that finally changes the project of political theory, that finally negates the necessity of any given ordering of things. I proposed that we view the friend as prior to the Übermensch; Bennett is correct when he suggests, the Übermensch is located Elsewhere, at the far end of a bridge; but it is a bridge that, for our purposes, has no end, no beginning, no approach, a bridge that takes shape not in our knowledge or belief or desire but in our mere existence, a bridge (or tightrope) that we are [. . .] The whole notion of realization or application misses the point in Nietzsche.179

If we are always the bridge, or the process, then we are never the beginning, nor the end, and these points can only work to reify. Any reification, and any idolization/ idealization of Nietzsche misses the point. Such a logic does suggest that grounding, stabilizing, fixing will be necessarily hierarchical, authoritarian. This does not mean, however, the project of political theory has ended. Via Nietzsche and Deleuze, Tomlinson suggests the following, which takes on board the creative insights of the journey through nihilism: The different parts of a narrative are woven into the storyline in different ways. Their relations are not “logical” ones, although there are narrative consistencies and narrative entailments. [. . .] A narrative is still a theory in the sense that it advances an “explanation,” but an explanation that can never claim to be final or definitive. [. . .] There is a new relationship between theory and practice. “The relationships between theory and practice are partial and fragmentary [. . .] Practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another.” A narrative is a theory that does not claim general application. “A theory does not totalize; it is multiplied, it multiplies. . . .”180

Beyond the problematic of application, we get close to the description (if not the detail) of Deleuze’s Nietzsche, which provokes and implicates us within a creative epistemology of the possible. What is most important in Nietzsche for Deleuze is, the radical transformation of the image of thought that we create for ourselves. Nietzsche snatches thought from the element of truth and falsity. He turns it into an interpretation and an evaluation, interpretation of forces, evaluation of power.—It is a thought-movement, not merely in the sense that Nietzsche wants to reconcile thought and concrete movement, but in the sense that thought itself must produce movement, bursts of extraordinary speed and slowness [. . .] To think is to create: this is Nietzsche’s greatest lesson.181

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Nietzsche leaves us with a mode of evaluation that is necessarily active, where responsibility descends as far as the individual who must reread and rewrite her relation to the forces by which she is constructed, and in doing so, negate the enabling authority that allowed her to do so. The violent production of meaning without reference to a prior norm, the double movement of destruction and creation, and a move away from the paradigm of “tragic” philosophy constitutes Nietzsche’s political narrative. However, a conclusion such as this can no longer pretend to have monotheistic aspirations, and can certainly not be used to fix identities, power relations, or a new normativity: Nietzsche can be read in one order, but eventually has to be thought of in many different orders. The fragments can be continually woven, rewoven, and recomposed by differential “investments” in the economies of reading. This is only one possible story. As Nietzsche once more tempts, provokes, and implicates his reader: “You retort that this, too, is only interpretation? Well, so much the better . . .!”182

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Part III Fabricating the Future

. . . out of hopeful green stuff woven . . .

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Chapter Five Bloch’s Utopian Imagination: Fictive Theories

Thinking means venturing beyond. Ernst Bloch, Principle of Hope I suddenly woke up in the midst of this dream, but only to the consciousness that I am dreaming and must go on dreaming lest I perish! Nietzsche, The Gay Science Production without product, structuration without structure . . . Barthes S/Z

“What occurs,” Louis Marin asks, “if the foundation is not firm ground, but, as Bloch wrote, abyssal depth?”1 Through and with Nietzsche, I read the impossibility of any form of hypostatization. This is, I have suggested, intensely liberating; and indeed, for Nietzsche, this is the moment of possibility for “a new plot and potential for the Dionysian drama. . . .”2 Nietzsche’s recognition was that we are always-already fictionalizing creatures (though often—most often—we have mistaken “our” fictions, or the restraining fictions of others, for truths). This understanding of fictions is, I suggest, beyond the epistemological, is temporal, and carries with it political and ethical implications. In a Stirnerian language, Nietzsche’s “spooks” do not dominate, but instead enable participation and creativity in the project of making worlds meaningful; a Kantian, hierarchical understanding is made lateral and plural, while the real is not reduced to simply the given or the possible. The present, in Nietzsche, was fissured, open. In the introduction to this book, I made the following claims: attending to the fictions that make political theory work interrupts both the status those fictions claim and the effects they can secure. I have argued that such fictions, when recognized as such, cannot ground a politics that aims to secure a legislative and programmatic coding of the political. I reconceive the project of political theory as an open-ended project grounded in a future-oriented imagination, pointing toward an inventive political imaginary that is both deconstructive and utopian. Here, the fictive takes on a selfconscious and anticipatory mode, guided by creative epistemologies of possibility.

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I argued that the politics of creative epistemologies of possibility reside precisely the always-already political nature of the claims made in their name. In this chapter, through and with Ernst Bloch, I seek to show the ways in which the language of utopias is uniquely placed to articulate such a “new plot and potential.” Utopia, as I write it with Bloch, can always only be, as Nietzsche/Zarathustra put it, a “half-written tablet.” With Rousseau, Stirner, and Marx, I have already begun to gesture toward the territory within which utopias have been conceptualized, and suggested other and different ways of understanding what utopia “is” and “does,” the conceptual (ontological and epistemological) spaces within which it is operative. My reading of Bloch contributes to this rearticulation. Utopia is resolutely disruptive, inherently transgressive, profoundly performative, and fundamentally creative as text, and as practice. As such, to say the least, utopias are and should be a disorderly influence within and outside political theory. And yet, the conceptual spaces within which utopias have conventionally been understood work via certain privileged binary oppositions: utopia as fantasy is opposed to the real political present; utopia as impossibility is opposed to the practical politics of action. Real/ideal, rational/fantastic structures work to contain and domesticate the force of the fictive utopia.3 The insistence on the priority of the real has led to attending to the task of making utopias fit the possibilities of the world; rather, I propose, attention should be on criticizing the forces that foreclose utopian possibilities. Ernst Bloch’s depiction of existence as experienced under “the continuing spell of static living and thinking” stands as a diagnosis, a warning, and, vitally, a response; it is an “iconoclastic rebellion against [. . .] reification” that is polyvalent and pervasive.4 Opposing the static spell, and thinking the world as possibility lies at the heart of Bloch’s utopia(n vision). The aim of this chapter is not simply definitional (utopia according to Bloch) although that task will form a crucial part. Rather, this chapter is a political intervention that forms the end of my exploration of the possibilities of fictive modes of theorizing. In short, I argue that utopianism is necessary to a transformative politics; and when a Blochian creative epistemology of the possible is posited as the central utopian dynamic, then the modality of political theorizing changes from a potentially legislative, substantive mode, to a “fictive” mode of process. So far, not much new. I further argue that the politics this generates resolutely resists any attempt to reduce the possible to the given. This means utopia cannot blueprint or legislate a polity. Again, not much new; indeed, debates in utopian studies cover this area.5 But I conclude that this post-Nietzschean or deconstructive moment in political theory is by no means a political concession or a weakening of political and utopian thought. Rather, when the lines of thought that underpin theory change direction from future perfect to intransitive verb, this does not mean any loss of political affectivity, but indeed a gain. As I have argued throughout, I claim ethical advantages for a mode of theorizing that recognizes its fictive modality. Utopia is invoked by those who are “not content to accept the bad which exists, do [. . .] not accept renunciation.”6 The space of the Blochian response I want to delineate is complex, epistemologically, temporally, and politically; and it concerns, precisely, “social dreaming.”7 Following Nietzsche, this Blochian response can be situated in a terrain where dreaming works beyond its customary opposition to a wide-awake, real state.

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For as we came to discover with Nietzsche (on the epistemological level): “I suddenly woke up in the midst of this dream, but only to the consciousness that I am dreaming and must go on dreaming lest I perish! ” In closing this chapter, we encounter an example of political rebellion that exemplifies the political possibilities of fictive theories: as Subcommandante Marcos, of the Zapatista rebellion knows, politically, “the great world power has not yet found the weapon to destroy dreams. Until it does, we will keep on dreaming, that is to say, we will keep on triumphing. . . .”8 In delineating this space of social dreaming, I want, through and with Bloch among those others, to write part epistemological critique, and part political manifesto. Both parts are crucial: as Gunn argues, “revolution entails not merely a social reordering but an apocalyptic deconstruction of the linear clocktime in which history—that is, the history of alienation—unfolds.” He continues, for Ernst Bloch, as for Walter Benjamin, “our experiences of such fundamental ontological structures as time and space must be placed at issue in a transformation” that opens the future as something other than the reproduction of the present, or the given.9 Bloch is disruptive on three mutually reinforcing levels of engagement (which nevertheless remain irreducible to one another). First, then, I explore temporality in Bloch: his thinking is profoundly and radically temporal, such that “the divisions between future and past thus themselves collapse, unbecome future becomes visible in the past, avenged and inherited, mediated and fulfilled past in the future.”10 A stratified temporality such as that conceived by Bloch vis-à-vis the alienated time of capitalism has unruly effects on linear clocktime. Bloch’s understanding of time as possibility reconfigures the word itself: as we have already seen, it is not enough to change how we think about the world; we must also change everything about the way we think. It is a question of “giving meaning differently.”11 To state the case in broad, Nietzschean terms, I have already argued that we give meaning differently when we use a political language that performs its fictivity allowing for, in Tamsin Lorraine’s words, “immersion and participation, rather than separation and control.”12 Knowledge of the world can no longer be fallaciously conceived via various epistemologies of the “given,” and becomes, instead, a creative epistemology of the possible. That this epistemology is both utopian and deconstructive, and capable of working beyond the “continuing spell of static living and thinking” without mere opposition, will be the force of the second level of arguments concerning the constitutive “fictivity”— epistemologically as well as temporally complex—of Bloch’s utopianism.13 Finally, turning to utopia as political praxis, I suggest that Bloch’s utopianism can only be operative as it resolutely opposes any reproduction of the given or the present; that is to say, it is only operative as it opposes a form of social reordering that will lapse into another static spell. After the epistemological exploration, the ethical moment of fictive theories can finally be written in more detail. There are political implications for a mode of thinking and being that is not referential but creative, exceeding the given. To anticipate: when we “agree to go on a journey without knowing our path in advance,” as Lefort characterizes the political in modernity, an imperative component is to resist participating in the reproduction of power relations (alongside, as Foucault has it, to resist becoming the “bureaucrats of revolution and civil servants of truth”).14 I close by referring to two discrete examples as contemporary exemplifications of the ethical-political claims made for creative epistemologies of the possible, for utopia as

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a fictive mode of theorizing. I return to the debate left off at the end of chapter three, on the politics of the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida; and finally I argue that the concrete utopia of Zapatismo performs this process. All That is Solid . . . As I have gestured toward in chapter two with Rousseau, in the excursus through Kant, and in chapter three with Max Stirner, utopia is by no means simply imaginary, fictional, the good/no-place. Indeed, as we saw in particular with Kant and Stirner, imaginary places populate thought about politics. Linking utopia with a deconstructive moment in theorizing in fact means it is neither a place nor a no-place (simply the inversion and still conceived substantively) at all, but rather a process (a verb, rather than a noun, no longer held in stasis by “God’s grammar,” as Nietzsche may have idiosyncratically put it). To anticipate the argument of this chapter, which is also the final stage in delineating the fictive: utopia should be resolutely disruptive of thought that accepts the given realities as the only realities; disruptive of attempts at recuperation of the radical; and transgressive to any given order of things. That is to say, utopia should always be composed of at least four elements: those of alterity and critique, and those of prefiguration and transformation. The utopian spaces of rupture within the present and the given—alterity and critique—generate prefiguration and fuel transformation of the given, without, however, closing the spaces of alterity and critique. In chapter two, I referred to Ken Roemer who argued that the utopian dilemma, like the dilemma of political theory when practiced via the legislative, is that it is “born of two conflicting impulses—to enable change by disrupting given orders and to create peace and calm by establishing order.”15 We can now appreciate that this dilemma can be rewritten via the epistemologies that underpin utopian theorizing. The legislative or institutional moment is that conceived via epistemologies of the given; but the disruptive moment is the moment that I privilege. The four elements within utopian thought, then, can be seen as two utopian moments: the disruptive and the institutional. The second moment, of institutionalization, must itself always be subject to the disruptive and imaginative moment. This is the utopian necessity for epistemologies of the given to be subject to creative epistemologies of the possible. For now, however, I wish to focus on the ways in which this second moment has politically eclipsed the first. For the first part of the “continuing spell of static living and thinking” that must be undone is that which has been woven around utopia itself. In the most adverse of ironies, it is utopia that, in a commonplace but all too pervasive (mis)understanding, has been accused of the stasis that is not merely temporal but also epistemological and political. In her review of the “shifts in the content, form, location and function of utopia” in late capitalist society, Ruth Levitas talks of the tendency “to think of utopia as either a totalitarian political project, or as a literary genre of fictions about the perfect society.” (She neatly adds a definitional expansion of utopia: “the expression of the desire for a better way of being” is “singularly and properly unhelpful in setting boundaries for utopian studies”; that is, a definition that itself resists closure in the category of utopia.)16 The problem with thinking about utopia in terms of a project is the

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axes along which it comes to be defined: realizability, implementation, and feasibility. Guy Debord points out the dangers of this mode of thinking: “those driven by the abstract wish for immediate efficacity obey only the laws of the dominant forms of thought, and adopt the exclusive viewpoint of actuality.”17 The danger, then, is that programmatic modes of thought preclude the radical leap in imagination and action that utopianism is. Freeden, for example, describes utopianism as “a massive leap of faith and imagination, an emotional as well as intellectual effort to claim that what never has been. . . .”18 Programmatic thought, on the contrary, can only act in accordance with the “dominant forms of thought,” the “given” that precludes the new. In a wonderful conversation between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno, utopia is discussed as that which resists the “exclusive viewpoint of actuality.” Bloch describes “the transformation of the topos [of utopia] from space into time.” After Thomas More, in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century utopians, utopia was “transposed [. . .] more into the future.”19 Adorno points out a paradox with this: I would like to remind us right away that numerous so-called utopian dreams—for example, television, the possibility of traveling to other planets, moving faster than sound—have been fulfilled. However, insofar as these dreams have been realized, they all operate as though the best thing about them had been forgotten [. . .] As they have been realized, the dreams themselves have assumed a peculiar character of sobriety, of the spirit of positivism . . .20

This is precisely a warning on conceiving utopia via the axes of realizability, implementation, and feasibility: when utopia becomes the “given” it is no longer utopian. When utopia is “cast in a picture,” “one is thus deceived”: “there is a reification of ephemeral or non-ephemeral tendencies [. . .] as if the day were already there.”21 This suggests that the institutional moment of utopia signals its end. Such a way of thinking about utopia—via the substantive and the static—has dubious implications, both epistemologically and politically. An important part of utopia is its temporal complexity, and thus ontological disruptiveness. In the same conversation, Bloch refers to the “terrible banalization” of utopia. Adorno names this the “strange shrinking of utopian consciousness”: what “people have lost subjectively in regard to consciousness is very simply the capability to imagine the totality as something that could be completely different [. . .] people are sworn to this world as it is, and have this blocked consciousness vis-à-vis possibility.”22 This “repressive reduction of the future to the present,” in Andrew Robinson’s phrase, is double edged, for utopia is not only precluded, but, worse, utopia is implicated in static modes of thought rather than disruptive to them.23 As Bloch tells us, in an argument that retains its force in the contemporary milieu, and contra, for example, Fukuyama: “there is a very clear interest that has prevented the world from being changed into the possible.”24 Utopia can thus be co-opted by the existing and given order of things (by capitalist orders). Utopia can be (mis)conceived as the very repressive reduction that it should resist (conceptually, temporally, politically): of the future to the present, of the possible to the actual. Legislative, programmatic forms of thought can only act in accordance with fallacious epistemologies of the given. Utopia has (but need not) become operative in accordance with a static mode of living and thinking; and the very proximity of utopia—it is “here,” in the category of

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the given, the present—is the problem itself. An anti-utopianism can thus be operative within the category of utopia itself. The political implications of this mode of thinking, then, are evident: when the “spirit of positivism” captures utopia, the spirit of the possible is negated. Put otherwise, utopia’s second moment (programmatic transformation) “overcodes,” captures space instead of opening spaces, and “territorializes,” thus precluding utopian becomings.25 Two examples must suffice here. Guy Debord, following the Marx and Engels of the Manifesto, and the Engels of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific argues that utopian socialists “deny history”; they “deny the struggle that exists, along with any movement of time beyond the immutable perfection of a happy society.”26 This is indeed a political, temporal, and conceptual stasis. More recently, Simon Critchley has maintained, “Utopia [. . .] understand[s] the future as a modality of presence.”27 He means by this that utopia, while at present at a remove—logically, temporally, spatially—is nevertheless understood as a space that can be fully actualized, and realized: the bad present can become the future perfect (but, like an ineffective Nietzschean, Critchley here shows too much faith in grammar, and its inherent metaphysics). This is to understand utopia as an ontological space, as an ontology of being.28 In this mode of thinking about utopia, it works by means of inversion: the impossible will become possible, the fantasy will become reality, the ideal will become the real. And the problem therein is that with the moment of inversion (a linear movement) comes the closure of resolution (the revolutionary moment of radical discourse). However the problem lies in this whole mode of thinking within which utopia has been implicated, instead of exposing. What is crucial is that in this mode of thinking, utopia is understood legislatively, and solely so—an understanding that closes the spaces of alterity and critique, reducing once again the horizon. This is the “banalization of utopia” within the category of utopia. What if utopia is understood, simply, as not that space? So, the other question to be posed is similar, but more serious. The problem is not the realization of utopia, the awakening of “social dreaming”—it is in thinking that the realization is still utopian! Pointing to utopia as a gap—a space of possibilities in the present and future—Jack Zipes encapsulates Bloch’s project when he writes that Bloch’s task is “to name the unnameable final destination, to construe the unconstruable question about the meaning of human existence”; but he recognizes that Bloch also had to “cultivate a language commensurate with the [necessarily unfulfillable nature of ] his task.”29 Debates on utopia as impossibility speak to this moment, and can be rethought through this moment. For Tom Moylan, for example, “the strength of critical utopian expression lies not in the particular social structures it portrays, but in the very act of portraying a utopian vision itself.”30 And Fredric Jameson suggests the following: the “nature and function of the utopian genre” is, “to bring home, in local and determinate ways, and with a fullness of concrete detail, our constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself, and this, not owing to any individual failure of imagination, but as a result of the systemic, cultural and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners.”31 Further, “the utopian narrative might be described as one which [has come] into being by a radical act of disjunction [. . .] The ultimate subject matter of utopian discourse would then turn out to be its own conditions of possibility as discourse [. . .] Utopia’s deepest subject, and the source of what is vibrantly political about it is precisely our inability to conceive it.”32

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The concern of Ruth Levitas is that such theorizations of utopia, responsive to its first moments of alterity and critique, or of “estrangement and defamiliarization” also “reflect a weakening of the transformative potential of utopia.”33 The weakening is the legislative moment of utopia: it is “no longer to be seen as providing an outline of a social system to be interrogated literally in terms of its structural properties, to be treated as a goal [. . . or] a plan for the future.”34 The weakening of the “literality” of the legislative moment is indeed a consequence. For Louis Marin, Bloch has inspired much of this: as Hill explains, “For Bloch, the utopian is the power of the negation; an anticipatory dialectic, it specifies those nodes of the present which, in their very selfdivision, mark the spot of an as yet unspecifiable transformation of the social world.”35 Again, the emphasis here is on utopia as a way of dismantling the present order through the creation and eruption of spaces of alterity and critique; the future-to-come, however, remains “as yet unspecifiable.” We have met this in chapter four with the insistence on the simultaneity of a critical and genealogical unpacking of how we have come to be who we are, alongside the anticipation of other and better ways of living and being: the “construction of the new is always at the same time a de(con)struction of the already established. A revolution, in other words, is not accomplished by creating a new set of structures, but rather by continuously resisting the processes by which meanings, identities, and relations of power are fixed.”36 This is precisely what fictive theories can accomplish; echoing Braidotti, theorizing must be mobile in order to produce “[emancipatory] knowledge without fixing it into a new normativity.”37 Louis Marin writes, “utopian practice establishes itself in the distance between reality and its other: it traverses this discontinuity which is that of transgression itself, by producing the term which neither reduces nor annuls the discontinuity as do a social ideal or a political project, but which dissimulates and reveals the discontinuity: the utopian figure.”38 Again, it is the legislative moment—the moment of the social ideal or political project—that is weakened. But the gain is that all such projects become subject to the alterity and critique of the utopian horizon: when utopia is thought within temporality the second moment, the institutional moment, is also and necessarily the end of utopia; the second moment “fixes” identities, meanings and power relations, and this is precisely what a fictive theory and a creative epistemology of the possible resists. Utopia is located in the distance between “reality” (construed via an epistemology of the given) and its “other” (construed via a creative epistemology): it is that fissured and complex moment. The “given-to-come” is utopian as it is Not-Yet; but not as it is given. Utopia is impossibility in this sense simply because it will never be the given reality: we cannot live in utopia substantively or statically, because that would be to close the spaces of alterity and critique that are also utopia. This does not preclude transformation, and indeed, I am claiming ethical and political advantages for fictive theories that resist programmatic modes. Through and with Bloch, and those three registers of utopia(n vision)—the temporality of utopia, utopian knowledge (its constitutive fictivity) and the politics thereof—I suggest that the politics are just as strong, if not stronger, in that certain forms of legislative activity are resolutely precluded. The Utopian Counter-Spell Ernst Bloch is vital to thinking the politics of utopia, and thus of the fictive, with time, within temporality, rather than legislatively, and yet without precluding utopia’s

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transformative function. Indeed, his forceful critique of forms of philosophical thinking is the “forgetting” of the category of the future: The huge occurrence of utopia in the world is almost unilluminated explicitly. Of all the strange features of ignorance, this is one of the most conspicuous. In his first attempt at a Latin grammar, M. Terentius Varro is said to have forgotten the future tense; philosophically, it has still not been adequately considered to this day. This means: an overwhelmingly static thinking did not name or even understand this condition, and it repeatedly closes off as something finished what has become its lot.39

The guiding potential of the future is always present in Bloch’s work, understood as that potential that stratifies, illuminates, confronts, opens up, and disrupts the acceptance of given realities as the only realities. Experience of the present, for Bloch, is complex and temporally stratified, and this strongly affects any possible sense of the truth of any self-definitions. Bloch is very clear on the aims of his work, and the displacing of time and truth is core to these aims. He wants to provide a philosophy and a hermeneutics of hope and desire in order to pierce through the injustices and banalities of the present, to illuminate what he calls the “darkness of the lived moment.”40 This is a category of manifold and overlapping alienations, simultaneously personal and political, existential and epistemological, as well as temporal. The beautiful account of “hope, longing, expectation” Bloch gives us forms the basis of any possible sense of the utopian, that which is at work within this present, and in this darkness.41 It is via the principle of hope that the future is opened as possibility. From the perspective of utopianism as an epistemological problem, however, what is the possible status of this as a principle? It is clearly vital for Bloch: for while his work is futureoriented, it is not so in a simplistically linear sense. He uncovers from the past and present “undischarged” utopian impulses—that he finds everywhere, from political theory, to the fashion industry to architecture, from adventure stories to medical science—in order to both redeem them, and to use them as a category of judgment. Implicit in his work, then, is a highly normative “glance from nowhere” that functions to distinguish between “good” and “bad” utopian impulses without, however, lapsing into a static normativity.42 The status of the utopian, then, is multifaceted: it consists of an injunction, to us, to search for and develop utopian traces; it consists of a story of the self, whereby utopianism is discovered to be latent in the cognitive potential of all humans; it consists of a highly distinctive definition of the real and realism that includes that which is “not-yet,” and is thus beyond the ontologically given. Alongside this, there is also a claim of “authenticity,” defined in terms of potential rather than essence, future possibility rather than past wholeness, and which is thus always subject to the “not-yet” in order to judge the value of the substance of the utopian. Finally, the wishful, hopeful, and temporal aspects of the self are constantly disruptive of the possibility of final judgment, of the closure, end, or full selfpresence of the utopian. “Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What are we waiting for? What awaits us?”43 The magnitude of these questions, the demand for the truth of who we are, of what we can do and hope for, defines the “limits” of Bloch’s project. Yet, in answering them, the possibilities are limitless.

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“Ecstatic Subjects”—Utopians in Time Bloch’s first call to us is to recognize ourselves as what and who we are: this is a bold call, already a call against an anti-utopian “ignorance,” and already a chiseling and dismantling of reification. (Recognizing ourselves does not mean “knowing” ourselves; for reasons that I expand upon in the next section, and have already implied both in this chapter, and with Rousseau and Nietzsche, this is impossible knowledge.) In The Principle of Hope, this call takes place in the context of “a book [which] deals with nothing other than hoping beyond the day which has become”: as Bloch affirms, “only thinking directed toward changing the world and informing the desire to change it does not confront the future (the undisclosed space for new development in front of us) as embarrassment, the past as spell.”44 As such, the driving concepts by which Bloch’s philosophy of hope is made operative, or dynamic, is the constellation or triad of concepts by which the agency of the subject or self is described. These concepts—hunger, hope, the not yet—can only be understood as temporal events, and open the way to seeing a utopian mode of becoming within the self. Philosophy, as Deleuze reminds us, deals with concepts and with systems. However, “concepts don’t turn up ready made, they don’t preexist: you have to invent, create concepts, and this involves just as much creation and invention as you find in arts and sciences. [. . .] A concept’s full of a critical, political force of freedom. . . .” Bloch’s “system” is precisely of this “open” kind, dealing with “events rather than essences.”45 For, Richard Gunn summarizes: “Bloch offers an ontology of human existence [. . .] we are already, as human, what we are not-yet [. . .] What Bloch means by this (and it is an insistence that he shares with, amongst others, Hegel and Marx) is that we exist ‘ecstatically’ in the literal sense of standing out ahead of ourselves toward an open future which we ourselves actively determine and toward which our hoping is addressed.”46 This is a dense summary, which the rest of this section will do no more than unpack and begin to think through some implications. Bloch’s “ontology of human existence” is, of course, dynamic, magically material, and this is not his only similarity with Nietzsche. This is important: the notion that a political truth can be generated from a view of human nature has proved problematic to say the least. Commentators on Bloch have suggested, nevertheless, that “the search for utopia is primarily a search for the true self.”47 Hudson argues that the problem of utopia in Bloch is “the problem of an authentic relation to the Now of the moment”; indeed, for Hudson, “self-cognition is the world problem itself.”48 What is absolutely crucial, however, is precisely to understand the “authentic” self as the self in time. In this way, as Moylan argues, the categories of “home” and “finality,” just like “truth,” “essence,” and “authenticity” are “provocative utopian tropes,” rather than “categorical imperatives which order all that comes before them.”49 (Recall that interrupting the status of Kant’s Categorical Imperative put into question its disciplinary effects, and suggested the possibility of it being rethought as that which enables a critical distance to the given.) We, as human subjects, are not “given”; we cannot “find” the truth of ourselves, but must discover and create it. Claude Lefort suggests that “human beings have embarked upon a voyage of self-discovery [. . .] they create themselves by discovering and instituting rights in the absence of any principle that might allow us to decide as to their true nature. . . .”50 He speaks precisely to the

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moment Bloch is speaking to: self-cognition is also self-creation, and so is a process of becoming rather than a statement about being. As Hudson recognizes, “Bloch does not so much supply an image of man, as a negative anthropology which emphasizes the need to actively oppose closure in the theory of human nature.”51 Bloch’s negative anthropology circles around hunger, hope, and the not-yet, each level deepening, driving, and reinforcing a utopia of process. By positing an essentially variable drive in hunger, he works toward locating a utopian capacity at the very core of our selves, and explicating a utopian mode of being which is constituted by a similar temporal and epistemological displacement and lack.52 Hunger, in Bloch, is a manifold category. It encompasses that physical hunger and necessity of which Engels said, “mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion,” while also being omnipresent is these other, “later” activities.53 However, Bloch is careful not to “over-determine” this category: “[e]ven for hunger there is no ‘natural’ drive structure, for the simple reason that the kind of perception assigned to it, and consequently the stimulus world, is also historically variable.”54 Blochian hunger is absence making itself felt, and it is present in every human pursuit. Its transformative capacity is precisely that it stands as that figure of lack in the present that we strive to fill, but can never fill completely, since hunger is always necessarily self-renewing: “hunger [. . .] must continually run throughout history, so that through work it is and becomes. History is, as possible gaining of man, the metamorphosis of man precisely also in view of our core, of the self which is only developing.”55 Hunger, then, figures the whole Blochian reality: as Levy puts it, it is a “flagrant manifestation of reality.”56 (The extent to which this is already a utopian understanding is discussed more fully later.) That hunger, the protean, shifting, empty space that motivates us and moves us, can never be “properly” filled, suggests that Bloch’s conception of alienation is similarly plural.57 Hunger makes humanity forward-looking, and the political, if contingent effect of this is, as Bloch puts it, hunger becomes rebellious, and can act as “an explosive force against the prison of deprivation.”58 In his The Revolution of Everyday Life, Raoul Vaneigem talks of “dawning lucidity,” the ways in which “daily life always produces the demand for a brighter light.” When this is denied, or when “inauthentic life” feeds of “authentically felt desires” lucidity becomes “combative.”59 This speaks directly to the Blochian, transformative moment. Recall Moylan’s proposal: these are political rather than ontological claims that reconfigure a claim that would previously read as become and closed into one that is temporal and political, figuring the absent but felt utopian horizon, and so actively directing political action. Hunger as political alienation figures the utopian absent horizon that is active in the present, and becomes the “decision to abolish all conditions in which man is an oppressed and lost being,” in order to instantiate “more appropriate and more authentic states for our unfolding self.”60 The emphasis on “unfolding” in this passage, with its concomitant sense of continual self-creation, highlights the extent to which even the definition of authenticity is reliant on future possibilities. This all depends, however, on learning hope, and Bloch’s discussion of hope as the utopian imagination precludes the possibility of considering utopia as a final, static end-state. Just as hunger defines us as mobile and forward-looking, Bloch’s discussion of the emotions augments and expands this aspect of our selves. It is worthwhile pausing

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over Bloch’s definitions, for insight can be gleaned from this concerning his ontological precepts. He privileges (almost Nietzschean-like) what he terms the “expectant emotions,” such as anxiety and belief, fear and hope, over “filled emotions,” like greed, envy, and admiration. Again, a comparison with Hobbes is useful here: for unlike Hobbes, but like Stirner, Bloch inscribes and entwines temporality in the very fabric and make-up and “soma” of the self. He explains why: All emotions refer to the horizon of time, but the expectant emotions open out entirely into this horizon. All emotions refer to the actually temporal aspect in time, i.e., to the mode of the future, but whereas the filled emotions only have an unreal future, i.e., one in which objectively nothing new happens, the expectant emotions essentially imply a real future; in fact that of the Not-Yet, of what has objectively not been there.61

Emotions are both somatic and psychic and social: Bloch here points to the anticipatory matter of the soma: the shiver of anticipation, the thrill of dread, the possibility of becoming other at the core of the human subject. It is enough for now to simply point to the uniquely utopian definition of the real Bloch articulates here: the real is the not-yet, rather than the reproduction of the existent. Hope is, of course, the most important expectant emotion, one that refers to, and helps create, the most “real” future. Levy suggests that “this is where the concept of the utopian makes its entrance, because hope appears in the beginning as something utopian. Hope, indeed, expresses the vision, or the foresight, of the possibility to realize something which is not yet anywhere.”62 I would suggest that the very description of hunger is utopian in this sense. Hope, as an anticipatory emotion envisages and thus helps bring into being a new future. It is through hunger, desire, and the hope that can contingently arise with this that the utopian is itself possible. Hope in Bloch is simultaneously a highly creative as well as a cognitive capacity. As well as a political alienation, the basis of Bloch’s marxism, there is also what could be termed a pervasive existential alienation that is expressed by hope, by the desire that things could be otherwise. Bloch writes, “Hope [. . .] is therefore the most expectant of all mental feelings [. . .] It suits that appetite of mind which the subject not only has, but of which, as unfulfilled subject, it still essentially consists.”63 The subject, then, not only has hope, but hope is posited as an essential (though not essentialist, in the sense that it is open, extending, uninscribed) capacity of the human self. It is at this point that any notion of utopia as end-state or telos must be given up: in this end-state, we would no longer possess hope, which Bloch terms “the most human of all mental feelings.”64 Utopia as end-state would essentially dehumanize us.65 Further, Bloch also writes of the “melancholy of fulfillment,” anticipating that the utopian is always that which is on the horizon of the present, indicating the lack within the present, illuminating the darkness of our alienation; it can never be wholly filled and defined.66 Like Derrida’s “différance,” the utopian, expressed as hope and as movement, is always not quite here, not quite that (always different as well as deferred) and so necessarily a temporal category of multiplicity and plurality. Derrida’s difference and deferral becomes utopian alterity/potentiality: a formidable critique of closure via substantive norms. The utopian subject, then, is always the “I” who is not-yet: as Bloch puts it, “our self remains, with its hunger and the variable extensions of this hunger, still open, moved, extending itself.”67

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Nevertheless, that the self, and utopia, is “not yet” also means that it is right here, right now: temporality itself is stratified, and we live both in the present and given, as we live out how we have come to be who we are and project toward the horizon. Utopia is a gap—a space of possibilities—in the present that is as “material” as the given. To reiterate: “we are already, as human, what we are not-yet [. . .] we exist ‘ecstatically’ in the literal sense of standing out ahead of ourselves toward an open future.” The real is not closed. This brings me to the second level of arguments, the constitutive fictivity of utopia. Utopian Knowledge: Creative Epistemologies of the Possible Bloch’s “ontology of Not-Yet-Being,” as Vincent Geoghegan aptly puts it, is radically disruptive to epistemologies of the given.68 In a lecture titled “Man as Possibility,” Bloch said, “we live surrounded by possibility, not merely by presence. In the prison of mere presence we could not even move nor even breathe.”69 As Gunn explains, “our possibilities are as ontologically real as what, at any present moment, we find ourselves to be.” This means “we exist as the possibility of becoming something irreducibly and fundamentally new [. . .] our possibilities are our utopias; these possibilities are what we are; hence, in the present, we exist always-already as utopians.”70 Bloch’s insistence on reality as essentially unfinished and the not-yet as a category of the real underpins constitutive fictivity and open possibility. Within this reading, the content of the utopian subject changes into form and process, showing the utopian as that which must remain partly uninscribed, at work in the present to change it, but also always on the horizon. Bloch himself, at times, desires to stop the utopian movement: he writes, “the genuine utopian will is definitely not endless striving, rather: it wants to see the merely immediate and thus so unpossessed nature of self-location and being here finally mediated, illuminated and fulfilled happily and adequately. This is the utopian frontier-concept which is implied in the “ ‘Stay awhile, you are so fair’ of the Faust scheme.”71 However, writing on the “aporias of realization” he proposes: “in each fulfillment, insofar and inasmuch as this is even possible totaliter, there remains a peculiar element of hope whose mode of being is not that of existing or currently existing reality, and which is consequently left over together with its content.”72 The extent to which utopia is this temporal and epistemological displacement can be seen even at times of fulfillment: “victory is properly grasped as task and thus the happy present is simultaneously grasped as a pledge for the future.”73 To affirm: the content of the utopian is changed into the form of an elusive potential; utopia is not presence, but promise, and a promise to which we can never fully respond since that would work to close and negate utopian spaces of possibility. And crucially, transformation itself maintains and multiplies the spaces of alterity and critique in resisting the given. Turning to Bloch’s most important “discovery” can strengthen this reading, also located within the cognitive potential of humans: that of the “Not-Yet-Conscious.” Bloch develops this concept both with and against the Freudian unconscious. While Freud’s discovery of the unconscious was radical, it was also backward looking. While it meant that the given, the surface, was not accepted as the whole, it led to interventions that worked on the belief that the truth was inside us, and in the past, not in the

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world, to be created. I have shown some of the ways in which hope, questioning both lack and satisfaction, ruptures the present with the future, based on desires for something better. However, Bloch claims more: he claims that “this hope is not to be taken only as emotion [. . .] but more essentially as a directing act of a cognitive kind.”74 It is with the function of the concept of the Not-Yet-Conscious that Bloch can lay claim to a kind of thinking that incontrovertibly, though controversially, does “venture beyond”; in other words, to a creative epistemology of the possible. The very possibility of “new truths” is dependent on the Not-Yet-Conscious: “the Not-Yet-Conscious as a whole is the psychological representation of the Not-YetBecome in an age and its world, on the Front of the world.”75 This capacity creates a space for individual subjects to begin to viscerally grasp the collective future: “The Not-Yet-Conscious is thus solely the preconscious of what is to come, the psychological birthplace of the New.”76 The Not-Yet-Conscious in Bloch negotiates between subjects as they affect the objective world; it functions as an intersubjective praxisoriented concept. Conceptual creation and recreation are thus its central components: “the Not-Yet-Conscious in man belongs completely to the Not-Yet-Become, Not-Yet-Brought-Out, Manifested-Out in the world. Not-Yet-Conscious interacts and reciprocates with Not-Yet-Become, more specifically with what is approaching in history and in the world. [. . .] From the anticipatory, therefore, knowledge is to be gained on the basis of an ontology of the Not-Yet.”77 The Not-Yet is, however, also at work within the present, located ontologically and epistemologically as the “other” of the real while itself being within the real. Louis Marin wrote, “utopian practice establishes itself in the distance between reality and its other: it traverses this discontinuity which is that of transgression itself by producing the term which neither reduces nor annuls the discontinuity as do a social ideal or a political project, but which dissimulates and reveals the discontinuity: the utopian figure.”78 For Bloch, the “other” of reality is perhaps (“only seemingly paradoxically”!) reality’s most important part. Articulating this is “transgressive” because it draws on conceptual, political, imaginary, and other resources that are negated within this “bad” present when seen as a closed totality. A “political project or social ideal” is not utopian in this sense because such projects seek to fill the present once again, seek to make static and present a different totality, thus again introducing a closure of the rupture and discontinuity introduced by the futurity that is expressed in the here-and-now by the not-yet. It is thus crucial to recognize that, for Bloch, utopia is this temporal and epistemological disruption and play. The “utopian figure” does not smooth out contradictions like this, and in this sense, Bloch’s work can be seen both as an exploration of, as well as itself being a manifestation of, such a utopian figure. It is only recently, Bloch suggests, that a vocabulary has been available to articulate this. Philosophy, politics, and so on have been dominated by epistemologies analogous to “Plato’s theory, according to which all knowledge is merely anamnesis, a reremembering of something seen before [. . .] solely geared toward Been-ness. . . .”79 This is, as I have suggested throughout, and as Geoghegan has noted, “epistemologically conservative, precluding new knowledge since all knowledge lies in the past.”80 Part of the value of Marx’s work for Bloch, then, is this: “Front, Novum, Objective Possibility, which are inaccessible to anamnesis, remained without a theory of categories in the

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world before Marx [. . .] Marxism, above all, was first to bring a concept of knowledge into the world which no longer essentially refers to Becomeness [that is, to given reality as complete and closed] but to the tendency of what is coming up.”81 It is the form of Marxism, and a language appropriate to human becoming, that influences and inspires Bloch, as much as he takes his ethics from its substantive content. Weissburg writes, “Bloch does not outline his philosophy as a closed system. He narrates it, and one is tempted to say, enacts it. Learning hope becomes a process of telling stories.”82 But Bloch calls for a further enactment through a creative epistemology of the possible, and is at his most utopian here. The creative epistemology of the possible was precluded not only by bourgeois ideology, but also by any epistemology that accepts only the given, from Plato to Hegel. I suggest that it is through reading Bloch’s Not-Yet-Conscious that it can be argued that Bloch does not “discover” something that already exists; this would mean, his account, like Freud’s, looks inwards for truth. Rather, the discovery—from now on, it can perhaps be called the “invention” of the Not-Yet-Conscious—shows Bloch enacting and performing the very creative epistemology he is describing. This is why it is also important to remember that Bloch’s project is a hermeneutical one as well as a philosophical and political one. It is also in this way fundamentally creative: he tells us a story about our selves and about the world whereby we are constituted as subjects who can act within an infinitely alterable reality. And how is it possible to produce new truths? How is it possible for the individual subject to dream the collective future? By a thorough deconstruction of the real/ideal, rational/fantastic oppositions, whereby the utopian Not-Yet-Conscious is not a description of a capacity that already exists, but a creative space where the possible world is fabricated: in this sense, Bloch gives us a creative and contingent ground for future action without the need for an ontological moment, or epistemological security.83 The status of this creative knowledge is precisely fictive, in the sense that it works beyond a foundational/fictional opposition. As Bloch fabricates new selves, utopian subjects, his “anticipatory commentary” reaches out for us to fabricate the future.84 Utopia—the utopia that we are and live—is constitutively fictive: guided by, but not grounded in, creative epistemologies of the possible. This precludes utopia and hope as being “but the calculation of a programme”; that is, fictivity precludes legislative utopianism, but does not preclude transformation.85 Utopia, then, is the “other” of reality that already exists by negation within reality, and needs new words, bridges, and is thus continuously transformative. It exists as part of the Not Yet of reality. It is located as the epistemological and ontological “other” of reality while itself being within the real. This mode of understanding and engaging with the world is fictive (beyond metaphysics). Lacoue-Labarthe writes, “in principle, the fictional is that which is not true, that which, in the language of metaphysics, is not real: that which is not. [. . .] To think fiction is not to oppose appearance and reality. . . .”86 Beyond the language of metaphysics, however, the fictional becomes the fictive: there is no prior norm that is not simply reified possibility to which it refers for its artifice and falsity. The fictive is thus creative fabrication, the only real worth having and being and becoming. Bloch’s understanding of the real is precisely anti-metaphysical in this way: Blochian reality exceeds such metaphysical definitions, as it exceeds, explodes ontological or positivist definitions. The “only real future” is the unknown

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future: “all emotions refer to the actually temporal aspect in time, i.e., to the mode of the future, but whereas the filled emotions only have an unreal future, i.e., one in which objectively nothing new happens, the expectant emotions essentially imply a real future; in fact, that of the Not-Yet, of what has objectively not yet been there.”87 Bloch and Louis Marin both understand utopia as fictive in this sense: existent on the horizon, as alterity, critique, prefiguration, and transformation, utopia remains irreducible to the present (even to the transformed present). The final section thus explores the politico-epistemological implications of utopia as fictivity. The Politics of Fictive Utopian Theories Earlier in the present chapter, I drew attention to the concern that a theorization of utopia as process (and thus as impossibility) involved a political weakening of its transformative function. I suggest, however, that what is instead happening is a repoliticization, and one with implications for theorizing as a whole: as Derrida points out, “a repoliticization always involves a relative depoliticization, an awareness that an old conception of the political has, in itself, been depoliticized or is depoliticizing.”88 The latter clause here is crucial: that an old conception of the political has itself been depoliticizing. I have previously drawn on Bonnie Honig’s argument against the precisely anti-political strategy of closure in the writing of political theory. By confining politics to programmatic tasks of consolidating or constructing order, the political task, the agonistic, plural, and active moment is effaced. This leads to a mode of political theorizing that is passive, static, and thus legislative, whose task is to master the “real,” and close the space of the political.89 Utopia as conceived in the present chapter and book, however, finds a perhaps unexpected, and certainly unintended ally in Derrida. An “old” concept of the political—that structured by programmatic and legislative forms of thought—has itself tended toward an ostensibly authoritative closure of the political, effacing contingency and creative power in favor of authoritative and legislative power and programs. But the politics of utopia are surely dependent upon comprehended hope, and concrete utopia. Yes; but via two concluding examples, I wish to implicate comprehended hope and concrete utopia—with the epistemologically secure and substantive implications of these metaphors—into the mode of utopia as process, as epistemological and temporal disruption and play. The first example is theoretical, the second practical, but both are responsive to utopia as the international of hope, as an eminently political moment, and both locate a Blochian utopianism firmly within contemporary politico-theoretical developments. As implied, Derrida has rejected the (“common-sense”) term utopia, on the basis of its demand for an ontological moment, and its demand for a secure institutionalization. His preference for the term “messianic,” however, speaks precisely to the utopian moments I have discerned in Bloch.90 He writes: “Messianicity [. . .] is anything but utopian: it refers, in every here-now, to the coming of an eminently real, concrete event, that is, to the most irreducibly heterogeneous otherness. Nothing is more realistic. . . .”91 This, however, is the Blochian real—as possibility that is not reducible to given possibilities, but is irreducibly other. He also writes, that this is an “anticipation against the backdrop of a horizon, but also exposure without horizon

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and therefore an irreducible amalgam of desire and anguish, affirmation and fear, promise and threat.”92 The necessary lack of epistemological security means a singular political responsibility: as Drucilla Cornell has suggested, “We cannot be excused from our own role in history because we could not know so as to be reassured we were ‘right’ in advance.”93 Derrida further writes, “anything but Utopian, messianicity mandates that we interrupt the ordinary course of things, time and history here-now; it is inseparable from an affirmation of otherness and justice. As this unconditional messianicity must thereafter negotiate its conditions in one or another singular, practical situation, we have to do here with the locus of analysis and evaluation, and therefore of a responsibility.”94 Messianism, then, is fictive (epistemologically) and lays claim to affecting or functioning inside of political transformation. My aim in referring to this is not to elide utopia and messianism, but simply to point out structural and formal similarities in modes of thought. Derrida’s “messianism” is responsive to the political moment from the perspective of a “deconstructive” politics. To reiterate: Jacques Derrida suggested that he has “never succeeded in directly relating deconstruction to existing political codes and programs,” because “the available codes for taking a political stance are not at all adequate to the radicality of deconstruction.” He continued, this “absence of an adequate political code to translate or incorporate the radical implications of deconstruction has given many the impression that deconstruction is opposed to politics or is at best apolitical.” However, “this impression only prevails because all our political codes and terminologies still remain metaphysical, regardless of whether they originate from the left or the right.”95 The challenge posed, then, is precisely to programmatic modes of thinking politically, which would aim to reduce the possible to the actual, or the possible to the given. Taking on board Derrida’s challenge changes the modality of political theorizing itself that can no longer operate as a legislative and authoritative discourse, concerned with conceptual stability and control; that is to say, can no longer reify possibility. The possibilities, in other words, point toward an inventive political imaginary that is both deconstructive and utopian. Derrida is an inadvertent utopian, his messianism reinforcing a concrete utopia: “thus the only seemingly paradoxical concept of a concrete utopia would be appropriate here, that is, of an anticipatory kind which by no means coincides with abstract utopian dreaminess, nor is directed by the immaturity of merely abstract utopian socialism.”96 But for the politics of concrete utopia to be shown to be resistant to legislative modes of politics, and resolutely opposed to a revolution that is simply a form of social ordering, we must turn to my final example, the practical politics of protest, struggle, and rebellion that is the Zapatista revolution. I argue that the utopian moment of Zapatismo precludes the reification and reproduction of power relations, which programmatic and legislative forms of thought, concerned as they are with containment and coding, are always vulnerable to. Utopia, then, gives us an ethical and evaluative marker by which to judge.97 Marcos, the (masked) public/intellectual (inter)face of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) articulates Zapatismo as “the revolution that makes revolution possible”: it is what Marcos calls the “antechamber looking into the new Mexico. In this sense,” he continues, “the revolution will not end in a new class, faction of a class, or group in power. . . .”98 Against the closure of legislative and substantive

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approaches, Holloway suggests that this “is not seen as an end-point, but as a start, as a basis for moving onto other areas of change, but also a basis for taking the movement forward, a basis for breaking out.”99 In a style reminiscent of Foucault’s warning that we should not become “bureaucrats of revolution and civil servants of truth,” Marcos states, “against the international of terror representing neoliberalism, we must raise the international of hope. [. . .] The international of hope. Not the bureaucracy of hope, not the opposite image and thus the same as that which annihilates us. Not the power with a new sign or new clothing.”100 Utopia remains, with all of its transformative power, a productive impossibility, a precisely transformative impossibility, or an “undefined revolt,” as Holloway puts it: and undefined because it is in process, responsive, moving.101 The politics lie within the process. Moylan instructively cites Bookchin: “utopian dialogue in all its existentiality must infuse the abstractions of social theory. My concern is not with utopistic ‘blueprints’ (which can rigidify thinking as surely as more recent governmental ‘plans’) but with dialogue itself as a public event.”102 The insurrectionary moment of “becoming constitutionless,” of refusing a reactive ordering of both the subjective and the political is evident here. The struggles of the Zapatistas will not be resolved by the concretization of any particular order and will not be resolved by the stasis of any institutional rearrangement. This reading of utopia as temporal and epistemological disruption and transformative openness maps precisely to the way in which Marcos describes dignity, the term that motivates the Zapatista rebellion. In Pueblo, on the way to Mexico City in 2001, the Zapatistas chose this word to walk with: A word which speaks tomorrow. [. . .] A word which is only spoken together, which demands that everyone be able to walk it in order for it to be able to be pronounced. “Dignity” is how this word speaks. And dignity is a bridge. [. . .] The One and the Other are on the bridge which is dignity. [. . .] Dignity, therefore, is bridge and looking and respect and recognition. Therefore dignity is tomorrow. [. . .] Dignity, therefore, does not yet exist. Dignity, therefore, is struggling so that dignity might finally be the world. A world where all worlds fit.103

For the Zapatistas, then, dignity is at once critical (for why does dignity not yet exist? What forces have precluded a wholly lived dignity?); it is substantive (it demands that “everyone be able to walk it”); it is transformative (“dignity, therefore, is struggling so that dignity might finally be in the world”); and it is temporal (dignity is a “bridge” and “is tomorrow”). Dignity is an exemplary fictive-utopian concept; as Bloch’s “Not-Yet” stratifies and opens the present moment, whether that moment is one of exhaustion and defeat, or of success in the struggle, so too, the not-yet of dignity, while not precluding substantive evaluative markers, precludes the final institutionalization or closure of the utopian moment of resistance. It is through the politicotemporal inflection of dignity that the demands of the Zapatista insurrection themselves demand to be read, and this is critical on the political-strategic level as well as significant for a radical, deconstructive, and utopian political theory.

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For while the definition of dignity always remains subject to alterity, potentiality, and critique, the struggle for dignity even as it resists closure also entails substantive political commitments. Agreeing “to go on a journey without knowing our path in advance” means “making the way by walking.”104 This new mode of thinking politically also engages with this task. This mode is poetically articulated in one of Old Antonio’s stories. Marcos and Antonio (Marcos’s mentor, or, indeed, utopian guide) have become lost in the jungle, and all of the apparatus of Marcos’s guerrilla training have proved less than helpful: You thought [says Antonio] the road was already there somewhere and your gadgets were going to tell you where it was. But no. And you thought I knew where the road was, and you followed me. But no. I didn’t know where the road was. We had to make the road together. And that is what we did [. . .] We made the road. It wasn’t there [. . .] You tried to find a road that did not exist. We had to make it.105

Allusively and elusively, Antonio gestures here toward the two opposed understandings of the world with which we have been concerned throughout this book: one in terms of an epistemology of the given, in which the road exists; and another, in terms of a creative epistemology of the possible, where the road is made by walking. As I have argued, with Nietzsche and with Bloch, we are always-already fictionalizing creatures; and thus epistemologies of the given are creative epistemologies that have forgotten or negated their creativity, or, put otherwise, have become reified. So, the substantive and the formal aspects of Antonio’s tale must be taken together: just as the future is there to be made, so it is there to be made collectively—“separately, but together, and in agreement,” which is the way the Zapatistas define their own process.106 There is no epistemic authority inherent in the given, and so, this mode of thinking resolutely resists viewing the future as mere reproduction of the present, and also resolutely resists the reification and institutionalization of power relations. In creating ways toward the future(s), the Zapatistas see themselves as only one way, as expressed in the Fifth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, “not as a vanguard or guide, only as a part”; or, as they put it in March 2001 on their arrival in Mexico City, “not light, but merely a glimmer. Not path, but merely a few steps. Not guide, but merely one of the many directions which lead to tomorrow,” and to a tomorrow toward which everyone must be able to walk.107 So, the goals toward which political activism is directed is limited both epistemologically and politically: substantive political claims become precisely contingent, subject always to the utopian horizon and their own becomingother, while the institutionalization of unequal relations of power is resolutely precluded by this utopian politics. The praxis of dignity, as relational, as tending toward openings, as irreducible plurality, is an enactment and a performance of utopia-as-process. It is a reconfiguration of the world in political practice and thought, which changes the whole conceptual structure and modality of theorizing from a mode based on the given, and closing the present (as legislative, authoritative); rather, this mode “does not cling to the given, but finds it appropriate, whenever it sees the visible which exists, not quite to— believe it.”108 The form of this utopian politics is inseparable from the content. Dignity is the utopian moment par excellence for Zapatismo: it is the negation that is also transformative, and transformative “ecstatically,” in the struggle to create it.

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Holloway concurs: “dignity is the lived experience that the world is not so, that that is not the way things are. It is the lived rejection of positivism, of those forms of thought which start out from the assumption that ‘that’s the way things are.’ It is the cry of existence of that which has been silenced by ‘the world that is,’ the refusal to be shut out by ‘is’-ness.”109 Already, the “lived rejection of positivism” maps to Bloch’s understanding of Heimat, or homeland. Rather than the teleological moment that ends political contestation, it is indeed a place to begin, as “working, creating human being[s] who reshape and overhaul the given facts,” and thus create spaces where Heimat can illuminate and stratify our present, itself as not-yet, just as, for the Zapatistas, “dignity [. . .] is struggling so that dignity might finally be the world.”110 Alterity, critique, prefiguration, and transformation are vital components to thinking utopia via a creative epistemology of the possible that is constitutively fictive in its refusal of reified modes of thought and action. Concrete utopia and comprehending hope is the process of iconoclastic rebellion, epistemological as well as political, of struggle, within which possible futures are fabricated. The institutional moment is the closure of politics; the utopian grasping of the future, the opening. Some conclusions, then, can now be sketched. A fictive mode of theorizing based on a creative epistemology of the possible suggests the following. First, that political theory, practiced as an authoritative and legislative discourse is epistemologically and ethically unsustainable. Second, the links and connections between theory and practice should be seen (as Deleuze puts it), where “practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another.” The task and function of the political theorist beyond the legislative mode “is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of ‘knowledge,’ ‘truth,’ ‘consciousness,’ and ‘discourse.’ In this sense, theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice.” In this sense, theory cannot reify: “theory does not totalize; it is an instrument for multiplication and it also multiplies itself.”111 Theory can resolutely oppose existing “bad fictives”; but its futural gestures must remain open, lateral, contingent, plural, and reflexive. Third, the necessary and concomitant utopian commitment precludes the reification and reproduction of power relations, in viewing politics as an open process, gives us an evaluative and ethical marker by which to judge. This suggests three crucial criteria by which the fictive mode can be used to thematize and assess currents in contemporary political theory, and it is to this we turn in concluding. First, it means viewing the political in terms of becomings rather than being (e.g., with Nietzsche, Bloch, and Foucault). Second, the emphasis must be on questioning the existing categories and organizations of the present (the critical-theoretical enterprise). Third, it means seeing the world as unfixed and unfinished—as open (the utopian enterprise). I turn to these in concluding.

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Toward a Conclusion: Fictive Theories and Creative Epistemologies of Possibility

It is of time and becoming that the best parables should speak. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche We must fight to come to exist [. . .] to be the future that happens. Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

Time and again, in very different ways, Rousseau and even Kant, Stirner and Marx, Nietzsche and Bloch, among the other voices on whom I have drawn in this book, have echoed the cry that is common to all resistance: “It doesn’t have to be this way!”; “We can live differently!” In the introduction, I asked: Can a mode of political theorizing be articulated that openly acknowledges its fictive origins? Can the failure of knowledge provide a new (groundless) ground of political theory that overcomes the desire to code and contain the political through the delineation of incontrovertible principles, or the stasis of forms of normativity and codification of forms of proceduralism, once and for all? And can that mode of political theorizing still be adequate to the vital and bold substantive—but no longer legislative—tasks of “inaugurat[ing] a new way of looking at the world, which includes a new set of concepts, as well as new cognitive and normative standards?”1 I answered that fictive theories are able to move beyond a politics based around legislative claims, without conceding any loss of political affectivity, but indeed effecting a gain. I have argued that a fictive mode of political theory, in-formed by creative epistemologies of possibility—a utopian and deconstructive mode of political theory—moves beyond a politics based on the stasis of legislative claims. This involves a move from a political-theoretical mode concerned with models of governance to a critically utopian mode, concerned with emancipatory knowledges and resistance. Fictive theories make two claims regarding political knowledge-production: first, the fictive is disruptive of ways of rendering the world intelligible that work through oppositions such as reality/fictionality, material/utopian, the real and given, and their various fantastical others; and second, thought as substantive political anticipation is necessarily fictive when confronting the future precisely as open, the “undisclosed space ahead of us” that remains to be created. As such, I have proposed that the fictive is the necessary mode for a transformative

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politics. Although the fictive chastens the claims made by theorists, it does not chasten politics, but rather liberates and opens spaces of action. Let me revisit some pivotal moments in the story (or stories) I have been telling. We saw the dangers and limitations of an anti-utopian mode of political theorizing through Thomas Hobbes’s attempt to once and only once present the “tablets” of political theory. The fundamental gesture of an anti-utopian logic, in thought and in practice, is the refusal of the possibility that the world can be otherwise. I suggested, nevertheless, that for Hobbes to be able to make this gesture required much disciplinary interpretative work on his part, work that had left traces behind. Reading those traces interrupted both the status of the Leviathan and the effect of representational fixity that Hobbes had sought to secure. With Rousseau, I argued, we could see the contours of a transformative mode of political theorizing that freed politics from epistemologies that are tied by forms of representational and referential fixity to the given. Rousseau’s investigation into natural humanity, I suggested, paradoxically and radically, freed us from “given” constraints on fictive/future possibilities. The fable of humanity remains to be invented: and the language that political theory can and should use is a fictive language. Utopian and post-representational, this language, as Gilles Deleuze suggests, supports thinking in its most valuable function: “not to direct [. . .] a thought which pre-exists in principle and in nature,” but to “create,” to “bring into being that which does not yet exist.”2 I then ventured, with Kant, through ethics and epistemology. Through following Kant’s densely plotted deduction, I proposed that the categorical imperative simultaneously wrote and erased the law. I liked Kant’s opening up of alter-spaces within the present, spaces of alterity that rupture the self-presence of the present, and argued that the spaces Kant theorizes needed to be thought laterally rather than hierarchically. Reason need not always be didactic and disciplinary, and indeed, has imaginative, creative, and potentially magical moments. I then turned to Max Stirner, a unique free spirit in political theory. The importance of Stirner to the story I wanted to tell was his alertness to the disciplinary power of fictions (such as Hobbes’s and Kant’s). However, in exorcising political theory of the didactic demons and superior specters that stalk through its pages, disciplining its subjects, and foreclosing its spaces of potentiality, Stirner nevertheless remains troublesome for my project. His rendition of the subject is wonderful: the self is a space of action; time is entwined in the very fabric of the sensual self. Rather than the paradoxical temporal stasis of Hobbes’s matter in motion, Stirner anticipated a fictive subjectivity, where the very matter of the body precisely embodies temporality. And yet, like Rorty’s philosopher who speaks a “private language” of self-creation, Stirner’s imaginative renaming of the world remained dissociated from a project of collective transformation of that world. My concern with Stirner, then, is that he renders himself silent and singular just when the politics of insurrection—a rooting out of the specters of idealism and ideology—seemed to demand a collective praxis. As I am claiming for fictive theories a politics that is both post-representational and also transformative, I turned to Nietzsche, and then to Ernst Bloch. I argued that thinking and enacting the world as possibility provokes a transformation at the conceptual and the corporeal levels; a transformation that is at once epistemological-temporal and ethical-political; a transformation that refigures the world as plural becomings.

toward a conclusion / 169

The importance of Nietzsche cannot be overstated: his insistence that we “can destroy only as creators” alongside his articulation of an ethos of subjectivity sans ressentiment is crucial to any post-foundational politics that no longer invests in the very psychosocial structures it seeks to resist. However, for a politics of fictive theories that is transformative with substantive evaluative markers by which to guide political action, the utopianism of Bloch is also vital. Why have I insisted that a post-representational, fictive language that tends toward praxis, works as a fictive organizer? Raoul Vaneigem offers one answer: “my knowledge of the world exists effectively only at the moment when I act to transform the world.”3 An active knowledge of the world is necessarily post-representational, and this is a claim for creativity, on the one hand, and against reification, on the other. Indeed, many writers now acknowledge the necessity of some kind of affective, creative, or aesthetic engagement with the political. For example, Sheldon Wolin insists upon the political theorist’s capacity for “astonishment”; Gilles Deleuze and Luce Irigaray seek a language that is both creative and anticipatory, alert to a Blochian utopian surplus, that does not attempt a “seizure of the real”; Antonio Negri exposes the reification inherent to “constituted power” in order to focus attention to the forces that are continually shaping and reshaping the world via (a radical and emancipatory) “constituent power.” I locate the force of the fictive alongside such a focus on the capacity to see the world differently or otherwise, that focuses on the ways in which we have come to be and what we can become, rather than a focus on who we are. Jane Bennett has argued for “efficacious fictions,” or telling “exemplary stories [. . .] in the hope of enchanting bodies and inflecting imaginations toward them”; just as Rosi Braidotti has argued for “the potency and relevance of imagination, of mythmaking, as a way to step out of the political and intellectual stasis of these postmodern times.” As Braidotti puts it, “Political fictions may be more effective, here and now, than theoretical systems.”4 These arguments, and others like them, are not simply, however, a theoretical choice, but are, rather, a recognition of a political-epistemologicaltemporal necessity. In various ways, such political and critical theorists are pointing toward a mode of theorizing that is both powerfully light and gently compelling in terms of the political-epistemological-temporal nature of the claims made, or stories told. Let me finally reiterate the political gains that I claim for this mode of theorizing. In a temporally and politically complex maneuver, Bloch’s utopia exists as a pocket of possibility within the totality of relations that compose the present: “Reality without real possibility is not complete, the world without future-laden properties does not deserve a glance.”5 Existing simultaneously in the contested moment of the political present, as well as, in that moment, speaking to the radical alterity within that present moment and that of the future that is possible, utopia thus confounds any opposition between possibility and impossibility: that which is rendered impossible by the dominant organization of the political (and social and economic and conceptual and subjective) order and their corresponding modes of thought is radically possible (while also radically different, other, better) by means of the evaluative markers of fictive-utopian epistemologies of possibility. The task of a utopian and deconstructive political theory is thus to render visible hitherto unseen or unknown possibilities that have been rendered invisible by dominant ways of seeing, knowing, and organizing the world.

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Resisting the apparent imperative simply to speak directly, via a legislative mode, to organized or institutionalized forms of justice and power, a utopian and deconstructive political theory seeks, instead, to theorize critical and political practices of freedom. I have insisted throughout this book on the necessity of post-representational creative epistemologies of possibility as vital to this task. Anticipatory, prefigurative, transformative: as a deconstructive and utopian political theory interprets the world, it seeks to bring the new and better world into being, to fabricate that future. Attention, then, is on negating and superceding the forces that foreclose alterity, potentiality, the possibility of becoming-other. This double move, I argue, enables a mode of theorizing that is attuned to practices of freedom rather than settled forms of justice and power. A deconstructive and utopian political theory also needs to be attentive to its modes of producing knowledge, attentive to reconfiguring conceptuality via process. By this I mean that my preferred mode of political theory must seek to express the movement of thought, to be active, to intervene. Its concepts, like dignity for the Zapatistas, must be alert to alterity and potentiality within themselves, in order to speak to the possibility of becoming-other, to make-happen. In the Blochian “darkness of the lived moment,” such theory calls for an active mode of political theorizing attentive to delineating the movement of possibility in the world. This move, however, needs an ethos to match. A utopian ethos speaks to ethics in a grain that is against the grain; it produces a structure of feeling that is critical, generous, affirmative. A utopian ethos needs to be principled and tactile and lived. A deconstructive and utopian politics, then, entails a reconfigured conceptuality, one that leads to different and other ways of thinking, knowing, and becoming that do not reify, that are attuned to the horizon, and that further resist privileging already constituted powers over creative constituent power. The force of the fictive as the mode of utopia enables and attunes vision to process, to the constitutive, to the “boundaries where the real and the possible meet, where resistance creates room for alternatives”; or, put more pointedly by Marcos: “Wisdom does not consist in knowing the world, but in imagining the ways it should go to become better.”6 Programmatic modes of political theorizing risk reifying the codes of the present. By resisting programmatic forms of thought, fictive theories actively work to maintain the openness of a future to come (to echo Derrida’s formulation). By resisting seeing the future as the same as the present, the possibility for seeing otherwise, and more importantly becoming otherwise, is inscribed in the very movement of thought. While Michel Foucault has told us that there is no outside of power relations, a vital component of fictive theories is the capacity to resist domination and work toward insurrection. Alert to the ideological coding of subjectivity, fictive theories dare to dream beyond that coding. Finally, in these maneuvers, theory itself is not instrumentalized, so as to serve the given and present ordering of things. On the contrary, the spaces of theory can indeed be imaginative, creative, transformative. This means, with Foucault and with Nietzsche, viewing the political in terms of multiple becomings rather than being. It means choosing the critical-theoretical project of questioning the existing categories and organizations of the present. And it means foregrounding the utopian project of seeing the world as unfixed and unfinished—as open. Political theory fit for resistance must be simultaneously alert to the not-yet of the present, articulating it, without capturing and containing its most dangerous dreams.

Notes

Introduction

The Politics of Fictive Theories

1. See work by Linda Zerilli and Bonnie Honig: Linda Zerilli speaks to the first moment, the epistemological status of political theory when she writes: “Political theory appears to describe ‘things as they are,’ but it actually constitutes meaning and is emphatically performative: it uses language to determine what shall count as a matter of political concern and debate; it uses tropes and figures to bring about certain effects in the reader . . . ,” Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p.2. Bonnie Honig speaks to the second moment of coding and containing the political, which is dependent upon this reification of the constitutive role of fictions, when she claims: “most political theorists [. . .] confine politics (conceptually and territorially) to the juridical, administrative, or regulative tasks of stabilizing moral and political subjects, building consensus, maintaining agreements, or consolidating communities and identities. They assume that the task of political theory is to resolve institutional questions, to get their politics right, over and done with, to free modern subjects” Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p.4. 2. Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhácek (London: Continuum, 2002), p.vii. 3. Stephen White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p.90. White argues that a normative orientation does indeed depend upon “weak” ontological commitments that inflect, nuance, or tend toward specific, ethical ways of acting and being in the world. My own commitment to an “ontology of becoming” precludes substantive normative or political claims being made from ontology: political claims are always precisely political, to be defended and judged as such. The utopian “not-yet,” as I go on to argue in particular in chapters four and five, mean that no substantive claim can be deemed above political and temporal (re-)evaluation. I have drawn on Tom Moylan’s argument in “Denunciation/ Annunciation: The Radical Methodology of Liberation Theology,” in, Cultural Critique 20 (Winter, 1991–92), pp.33–64, where he proposes that the “deconstructive” or critical moment of “denunciation” must also contain or create space for the utopian moment of annunciation (pp.44–45). 4. Drawn from Norman Jacobson’s noteworthy book, Pride and Solace: The Function and Limits of Political Theory (Berkley and London: University of California Press, 1978): “the pride of the theorist in the act of creation, the solace of the reader in the act of discovery,” (p.ix). Later in this section, I discuss the hierarchical ordering implicit in this characterization of political theory in terms of its ordering of writers and readers in a legislative paradigm. The play, notably recognized by Foucault, of subject and subjection is implicit here. (To anticipate: such a problematic, as old as Plato, can only be overcome by going through Nietzsche.) The aphorism is taken from Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1989), p.59.

172 / notes 5. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p.3. 6. These comments are informed by Derrida’s writings on the histories of metaphysics, which he never invokes as a unitary, consistent phenomenon: see, e.g., “a work of literary criticism is not, any more than a philosophical discourse, simply ‘governed by metaphysical assumptions.’ Nothing is ever homogenous. Even among the philosophers associated with the most canonical tradition, the possibilities of rupture are always waiting to be effected,” (Jacques Derrida, “ ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), p.53. There is no one history of metaphysics that is not itself metaphysical. 7. Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p.xiii; Susan Mendus “ ‘What was left of self, I wonder?’ The Narrative Self in Political Philosophy,” in, Literature and the Political Imagination, ed. John Horton and Andrea T. Baumeister (London: Routledge, 1996), p.59; and Maureen Whitebrook, “Taking the Narrative Turn: What the Novel has to offer Political Theory,” in, Literature and the Political Imagination (London: Routledge, 1996), p.40, respectively. 8. Sheldon Wolin, “Political Theory as a Vocation,” in, The American Political Science Review 63/4 (December 1969), pp.1062–1082. 9. Ibid., p.1078. 10. John Seery, “Political Theory in the Twentieth Century,” in, Contemporary Political Theory: A Reader and Guide, ed. Alan Finlayson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), p.42. 11. Adriana Cavarero, “Politicizing Theory,” in, Political Theory 30/4 (August 2002), pp.506–532, 511. 12. Ibid., p.514. 13. Ibid., p.509. 14. Ibid., p.507. 15. John Evan Seery, “Spelunkers of the World Unite!,” in, The Politics of Irony: Essays in SelfBetrayal, ed. Daniel W. Conway and John E. Seery (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992), p.8. 16. Jacobson, Pride and Solace, pp.2–3. 17. Ibid., pp.9–10. 18. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G.D.H. Cole (London: Everyman, 1993), p.216. 19. Ibid., p.213. 20. Jacobson, Pride and Solace, p.10, p.xii. See also Tracy Strong, who argues that political theory “betrays its ongoing debt to theology,” in, The Idea of Political Theory: Reflections on the Self in Political Time and Space (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), p.112. Simon Critchley has argued that modern philosophy begins with a religious “disappointment” in Very Little . . . Almost Nothing (London: Routledge, 1997). 21. Wolin, “Political Theory as a Vocation.” Thanks to Ruth Levitas for forcing me to rethink a previous political error of eliding the legislative and substantive modes of theorizing. A utopian political theory worthy of the name certainly, as Levitas has forcefully and eloquently argued, needs to provide the critical tools of both critique and transformation; transformation necessitates the articulation of substantive visions, and substantive visions need agents and plans: “The dream becomes vision only when hope is invested in an agency capable of transformation. The political problem remains the search for that agency and the possibility of hope,” The Concept of Utopia (London: Phillip Allen, 1990), p.200. In the conclusion, I discuss issues of the relationship between theory, practice, and agency. 22. Jacques Derrida, “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils,” trans. Catherine Porter and Edward P. Morris, in, Diacritics 13 (Fall 1983), pp.3–20, 9. 23. William Corlett, Community without Unity: A Politics of Derridean Extravagance (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989), p.12. 24. Jacques Derrida and Richard Kearney, “Deconstruction and the Other,” in, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p.119.

notes / 173 25. Ibid., p.120. 26. Cathy Caruth, “The Insistence of Reference,” in, Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995), p.1. 27. Ibid., p.5. 28. Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992), p.169. 29. Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp.1–2. 30. Derrida and Kearney, “Deconstruction and the Other,” p.120. 31. Michael Shapiro, Reading the Postmodern Polity: Political Theory as a Textual Practice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p.17. 32. As Brook Thomas puts it, in “Restaging the Reception of Iser’s Early Work, or, Sides Not Taken in Discussions of the Aesthetic,” in, New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 31/1 (Winter 2000), pp.13–43, 21. 33. Andrew Gibson, Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p.87. 34. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, p.43. 35. Michael P. Clark, ed., Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p.7. 36. In his Scraps of the Untainted Sky (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000) Tom Moylan discusses a “readerly” critical and potentially transformative paradigm that certainly maps to the Barthesian moment I draw on here. 37. Barthes, S/Z, p.4. 38. Ibid., p.4, second emphasis mine. 39. Barthes, The Rustle of Language, p.54. 40. Barthes, S/Z, p.5. 41. Ibid. 42. Tamsin Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), p.48. 43. Barthes, S/Z, p.5. 44. As Dennis J. Schmidt puts it in his Introduction to Natural Law and Human Dignity, by Ernst Bloch (Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1987), p.vii. 45. Cited in Melissa Lane, “Interpreting Political Thought,” in, Contemporary Political Thought: A Reader and Guide, ed. Alan Finlayson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), p.79. 46. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1978), p.282. Siep Stuurman has written very sensibly on contemporary reorderings of the canon of political thought sensitive to socialist, feminist, and occidental critiques of exclusivity. He suggests we need to replace the concepts of “linearity” with “non-synchronicity,” “great ideas and theories” with contestation and argument, and to extend, open up, the canon. See “The Canon of the History of Political Thought: Its Critique and a Proposed Alternative,” in, History and Theory: Studies in the History of Philosophy, 39/2 (2000), pp.147–166, 166. 47. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p.97. See also Irene Harvey, who writes, “the examples offer us evidence of something more than [. . .] accidental [. . .] That examples are not arbitrary interchangeable but rather integral to the constitution of the ‘as such’ as such is what is at stake here.” See “Exemplarity and the Origins of Legislation,” in, Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity, ed. Alexander Gelley (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995), p.249. The examples constitute the possibility of the whole narrative; but their status as “mere” examples problematizes that very construction. This play and ambiguity is evident throughout. 48. Miller, Ethics of Reading, p.11.

174 / notes 49. Wendy Brown, “At the Edge,” in, Political Theory, 30/4 (August 2002), pp.556–576, 574. See also Jon Simons, who argues that “the term ‘fictive theories’ indicates a reaction to excessive epistemological and foundational concerns of Critical Theory, but does not propose in its place the sort of empty relativist skepticism according to which any account of what is going on in this world is as good as any other.” Explaining further with reference to the work of Michel Foucault, he proposes that “the question is not whether his account is adequate to ‘reality’, but whether his perspective is adequate to his resistance to the mode of power that subjects us.” See, “The Critical Force of Fictive Theories: Jameson, Foucault and Woolf,” in, Reconstituting Social Criticism: Political Morality in an Age of Scepticism, ed. Iain MacKenzie and Shane O’Neill (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1999), pp. 85, 92.

Chapter One Hobbes: Restraining Fictions 1. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson (London: Penguin, 1968), chapter 13. 2. See Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky, for important differences between the utopian, dystopian, and anti-utopian. 3. Samantha Frost gives an analysis of the “Hobbesian subject qua rational actor” in, “Reading the Body: Hobbes, Body Politics, and the Vocation of Political Theory,” in, Vocations of Political Theory, ed. Jason A. Frank and John Tambornino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 4. Richard W.F. Kroll, The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press), p.53. 5. Of a kind that Hobbes would thoroughly disapprove of: for example, in the claims that religion can supercede the temporal political authority of the Sovereign, Hobbes writes, “Temporall and Spirituall Government, are but two words brought into the world, to make men see double and mistake their Lawfull Soveraign” (p.498); elsewhere, Hobbes compares the epistemic authority of the Pope with the Kingdom of the Fairies (see p.712). 6. Barthes, The Rustle of Language, p.54. 7. Common to both is, I think, a recognition of the artificiality of language and hence intelligibility. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984) where the “post” signifies a critical interrogation of the founding assumptions of modernity. See also Richard W.F. Kroll, who suggests, as “Michel Foucault intuits, neoclassical discourse is conscious of its own artificiality,” The Material Word, pp.3–4. 8. William Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p.2. 9. See Ronald W.K. Paterson, The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p.61 for this phrase. Political theorists are still trying to find ways to guarantee or underwrite ethical and political action in the loss of a providential worldview. 10. The title of Christopher Hill’s classic text, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Maurice Temple Smith Ltd., 1972). 11. See, e.g., Michael Lessnoff, Social Contract (London: Macmillan, 1986) and Social Contract Theory (ed.) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). In her exploration of the ways in which generic Man is exclusionary and gendered man, feminist political theorist Carole Pateman also focuses on substantive issues: see The Sexual Contract (Oxford: Polity Press, 1988). In much of this work, the problematic status of nature is elided. One contemporary reply to Hume’s critique, which I refer to below, runs along the following lines: “the idea of the contract seems either historically absurd (if it is based on actual agreement) or morally insignificant (if it is based on hypothetical agreement); however, the contract device and the state of nature could be read not as an ‘anthropological claim about the presocial existence of human beings,’ but rather as representing a ‘moral claim about the

notes / 175

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

absence of subordination among human beings,’ ” Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.60. This is simply a displacement, or further abstraction, of the problem of the initial claim. None of these critiques or reformulations, such as John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), begins to come to terms with the fictivity inhabiting the very device and the theoretical implications of this. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, p.51. See David Hume, Theory of Politics, ed. Frederick Watkins (London: Nelson, 1951), p.52; Selected Essays, ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p.277. Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’ ” in, J. Butler and J.W. Scott, eds. Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge, 1992), p.20n1. Anna Yeatman, Postmodern Revisionings of the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p.ix. For alternative accounts of the status of nature, see R. Bernasconi, who argues that “Hobbes is best understood as offering a double account of the state of nature, first as an immemorial past and then as a historical condition of war that always threatens to return,” in, “Opening the Future: The Paradox of Promising in the Hobbesian Social Contract,” in, Philosophy Today 41 (Spring 1997), pp.77–86. Mary Dietz, “Hobbes’s Subject as Citizen,” in, Mary Dietz, ed., Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1990) argues that the state of nature “make[s] quasi-permanent a depersonalized memory of civil war” (p.149n36). When taking the state of nature to be simply chapter 13 of Book One of Leviathan these accounts are accurate; but if the state of nature is taken to be the whole of Book One, as I argue, then the status of nature becomes more complex. In the next chapter, I refer to Rousseau’s critique of this position, encapsulated here: “in speaking of the savage, they described social man” (The Social Contract and Discourses, p.50). C.B. Macpherson’s highly influential thesis of “possessive individualism,” reading Hobbes’s natural man as naturalized, bourgeois man, remains one of the most important works in this direction. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Hobbes, Leviathan, p.186. Kirsty McClure “The Issue of Foundations: Scientized Politics, Politicized Science, and Feminist Critical Practice,” in, J. Butler and J.W. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political, p.341; Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1968). Sheldon Wolin, “Hobbes and the Culture of Despotism,” in, Mary Dietz, ed., Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, p.32. Hobbes, Leviathan, p.81. Ibid., p.82. Ibid., last emphasis mine. Strong continues, “how can this happen, that I find a text in myself, that I (know that I) am a text? How then can I know that you have found the same text and that we have thus found each other, that this text is the same authority and our common community?” See “How to Write Scripture: Words, Authority, and Politics in Thomas Hobbes,” in, Critical Inquiry 20/1 (Autumn 1993), pp.128–178, 143–144. He thus displays those concerns not only with security but also a sympathy for the difficulty of creating it. My own use of text is, however, different to Strong’s. Richard Kroll, The Material Word, p.37. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p.96; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Harlow: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p.137.

176 / notes 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

Hobbes, Leviathan, p.82. Ibid., p.83. Ibid. Gary Shapiro writes that “Hobbes is a crucial case in determining the interplay of philosophical themes and literary modes,” and also associates Hobbes with the performative mode in philosophy, where “the writer undertakes to perform a certain act,” which is the construction of the “Mortall God.” See “Reading and Writing in the Text of Hobbes’s Leviathan,” in, Journal of the History of Philosophy 18 (April 1980), pp.147–157. Hobbes’s “intellectual coercion” has been commented upon by, among others, Miriam Reik, cited by Victoria Silver, who writes of the “almost intellectually coercive” nature of Hobbes’s rhetoric, “The Fiction of Self-Evidence in Hobbes’s Leviathan,” in, ELH 55 (1988), pp.351–379, 351, 372n4. Wolin asks if there is a “correspondence between political structures and theoretical discourse? Is it sufficiently pronounced that we might say that the political structure of a theory intimates/imitates a corresponding form of rule?,” (in Deitz, ed., 1990, p.13). See “Hobbes and the Culture of Despotism,” in, Mary Dietz, ed., Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, p.13. Hobbes’s very acts of imagination and understanding in his political theory are juridical and ostensibly closed: I go on to show the Hobbesian state of nature narratives to be profoundly, if ironically, resistant to closure. Hence, the answer to Wolin’s question is yes, but also no. Silver, “Fiction of Self-Evidence,” p.354. Given Hobbes’s desire for correct definitions, I am here simply following Hobbes while probing definitional limits. All definitions are taken from the OED online: http:// dictionary.oed.com, correct as of June 2001. Silver, “Fiction of Self-Evidence,” p.355. See C.B. Macpherson, Introduction Leviathan, pp.26–27 for a useful summary. King James Bible, Book of Job. 41: 24–25, 33–34. Hobbes, Leviathan, p.669. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, p.98. Paracelsus (1493–1541) was an alchemist and physician. For a useful survey of the place of nature within political theory, see John Barry, Environment and Social Theory (London: Routledge, 1999). See Vincent Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch (London: Routledge, 1996) for a utopian understanding of nature, where nature itself is a vital part of a “spectacular cosmology” of becoming. Hobbes, Leviathan, p.97. Ibid., p.689. On debates between the plenists and the vacuists, see, among others, Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, and Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Hobbes, Leviathan, pp.428–429. Ibid. Ibid., pp.429–430. Samantha Frost, “Faking It: Hobbes’s Thinking-Bodies and the Ethics of Dissimulation,” in, Political Theory 29.1 (February 2001), pp.30–57, 31. Frost, “Faking It,” p.34. “The awakened and knowing say: body I am entirely, and nothing else and soul is only a word for something about the body,” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “On the Despisers of the Body,” in, The Portable Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann (New York and London: Penguin, 1976), p.146. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p.ix. Friedrich Nietzsche, Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault are obviously the crucial influences on body-politics. See also Samantha Frost, “Faking It.” Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p.xi.

notes / 177 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75.

Hobbes, Leviathan, p.85. Ibid. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p.xii.. Hobbes, Leviathan, p.122. Ibid., p.127. Ibid., p.88. Ibid. Ibid., p.89. Ibid., p.86. Ibid. Ibid. William Connolly, Why I Am Not A Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Joshua Foa Dienstag, Dancing in Chains: Narrative and Memory on Political Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp.89–90. Hobbes, Leviathan, p.90. Ibid., p.91. The distinction between being awake and dreaming is an immensely suggestive and rich problem in modern philosophy, from Descartes to Nietzsche. I can only touch on this here, but develop more fully with Nietzsche in chapter five, section two, “hinge two.” Concomitant with this distinction, however, are others: the clarity of daylight and reason versus the irrational, dark dreamtime world (Nietzsche goes beyond this); autonomous and self-conscious subjectivity versus the polymorphous, infinitely desiring id; the world of objectivity and facts, versus the world of illusion, fictions, and narratives. For a brief comparison of Descartes and Nietzsche (who, I stress, are not representatives of the opposing sides), see Gary Shapiro Nietzschean Narratives (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp.26–27. All definitions are taken from the OED online: http://dictionary.oed.com, correct as of June 2001. William Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity, p.30. Ernst Bloch, “Man as Possibility,” in, Cross Currents 18 (1968), pp.273–283, 281. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” in, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Guess and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Hobbes, Leviathan, p.227. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp.39–40. Contrast the positivity of the contract with the “something so new, so deep, so unprecedented, so enigmatic and pregnant with the future came into existence,” Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, pp.65–66. Hobbes, Leviathan, p.99, last emphasis mine. William Sokoloff argues that ghosts troubled Hobbes because “the force of imagined fears might eclipse fear of the state.” So, “Hobbes was troubled by irrational and superstitious fears of non-corporeal bodies to the extent that they could be used as a means to manipulate the credulous in order to incite a revolt against the secular sovereign”; or, put more pithily, “Hobbes feared ghosts, but only for political reasons.” See “Politics and Anxiety in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan,” in, Theory and Event 5/1 (2001): online edition, June 2001: http://swets2.nesli.ac.uk/link/access_db?issn⫽1092-311X. As ciphers of temporal complexity as well as a motivating intangibility, I think Hobbes’s fear of ghosts runs deeper than this account suggests. Hobbes, Leviathan, p.109. Ibid., pp.107–108. Ibid., p.96. Ibid., p.109.

178 / notes 76. Hobbes, Leviathan, p.112. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision, writes that Hobbes’s state of nature is characterized by an “anarchy of meanings” (p.257): I would agree with this at the individual linguistic stage, but, as I have shown, there is also a pre-linguistic aspect to the natural condition. 77. Christopher Pye, “The Sovereign, the Theater, and the Kingdome of Darknesse: Hobbes and the Spectacle of Power,” in, Representations 8 (Autumn 1984), pp.84–106, 91. 78. Robert Bernasconi, “Opening the Future: The Paradox of Promising in the Hobbesian Social Contract,” in, Philosophy Today 41 (Spring 1997), pp.77–86. 79. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp.120–121. 80. Ibid., p.223. 81. Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” trans. Tom Keenan and Tom Pepper, in, New Political Science 15 (1985), pp.7–15, 10. 82. Philip Pullman, The Shadow in the North (London Scholastic Ltd., 1999), p.62. 83. Kroll, The Material Word, p.7.

Chapter Two Rousseau: Conceiving the Inconceivable 1. Phillip Pullman, Lyra’s Oxford (Oxford and New York: David Fickling, 2003) (preface, NP). 2. Jane Bennett, in The Enchantment of Modern Life, suggests an apt word of caution regarding “those ways of marking nature’s internal relation to artifice” that “overstate the earth’s pliability,” such as accounts that stress the “social production” or “linguistic production” of nature. Bennett is rightly concerned that such accounts “tend to write nature as inert matter without a will of its own,” p.191n9. In this book, with Rousseau as well as drawing on Nietzsche’s wonderful rendition of nature as wild, alive, bound by no laws, I suggest the possibility of a rendition of nature that “treads lightly,” attentive to the effects secured in its name, and is thus political in the broadest sense. For more on this, in relation to Ernst Bloch (who, incidentally, was also drawn to Paracelsus), see Vincent Geoghegan on Bloch’s “spectacular cosmological speculations”: “Bloch’s philosophical starting point is the dynamic creativity of the material. It was his conviction that the adventure of the material universe had only just begun” Ernst Bloch (London: Routledge, 1996), p.133). 3. My utopian reading of Rousseau nevertheless differs from the utopian interpretative framework of, e.g., Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969) and Jean Starobinski, Jean Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) whose emphasis on Rousseau’s fictions I nevertheless find helpful. 4. Brown, “At The Edge,” in Political Theory 30/4 (August 2002), p.574. 5. Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press) p.xvi. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” p.142, emphasis mine. 7. On Rousseau’s catastrophic or discontinuous theory of history see, e.g., Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology and James Swenson, On Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000). As I explore, this is a crucial notion both in distancing himself from a Hobbesian conception of humans as naturally aggressive, and also in freeing the fictive moment of grounding from closure to plurality and potentiality. 8. M. Lessnoff, Social Contract, p.76. 9. Jean Starobinski, Transparency and Obstruction, p.31. 10. Ibid., p.29. 11. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, p.181. On the issues of translation and tense, it has been suggested by Cole in the introduction to this edition that “man was born free” is “arguably more accurate. Either translation fits Rousseau’s general meaning, which is both historical and moral” (p.349n2). Both should then be kept in mind, but both the

notes / 179

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

historical and the moral are of dubious status in Rousseau’s narrative. On the issue of the legitimacy of the chains of enslavement and dependency, I read Rousseau’s aims here, not in the sense of making the chains legitimate (which, after all, was the task of the fraudulent liberal or Lockean contract), but in a Marxian sense: “criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not in order that man shall bear the chain without caprice or consolation but so that he shall cast off the chain and pluck the living flower,” “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in The MarxEngels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), p.54. My Rousseau is close to Tracy Strong’s, who finds in Rousseau the capacity to articulate “that idea that one knew what it would be like to live a life that was not exploitative [. . .] the dream that a life would be possible in which one did not have to say no to the human in another human,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications Inc., 1994), p.xxii. Immanuel Kant, “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History,” in, Kant’s Political Writings ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p.228. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, p.213. Ibid., p.181. Ibid., p.43. Ibid., p.51. Ibid., p.48, emphasis mine. Ibid., p.50. Ibid. Ibid., p.43. Starobinski, Transparency and Obstruction, p.16. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, p.43. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), pp.139–140; Eli Friedlander, “Rousseau’s Writings on Inequality,” Political Theory 28/2 (2000), pp.254–272, 254. Friedlander relates this directly to Rousseau’s desire to avoid the confusion of nature and history: a lesson still learned only with difficulty, since, as Roland Barthes would much later put it, “in short, in the account given of our contemporary circumstances, I resented seeing Nature and History confused at every turn, in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse which, in my view, is hidden there,” Mythologies, selected and translated by Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 1993), p.11. On the counter-positivity of the utopian mode, see Ernst Bloch who opens the present thus: “the concrete imagination and the imagery of its mediated anticipations are fermenting in the process of the real itself and are depicted in the concrete forward dream; anticipating elements are a component of reality itself.” And thus, “no absolute objections to utopia can be raised by merely factual analysis.” See chapter five, where I discuss The Principle of Hope Vol. I, translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p.197. The Frankfurt School also launched powerful critiques of positivist epistemologies. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, pp.50–51. The “facts” that Rousseau explicitly admits throwing aside come from three competing narratives concerning the origins of the species. First, he rejects the scientific biological-historical explanations on the grounds that “comparative anatomy has made too little progress, and the observations of scientists are too uncertain, to afford an adequate basis for any solid reasoning.” Rousseau further comments, “on this subject, I could form none but vague and almost imaginary conjectures,” an ironic comment in the light of Rousseau’s own narrative to say the least! Ibid., p.52. Most importantly, he rejects those accounts that implicitly presuppose what they should explain, that read the contingencies of history into the natural. His examples

180 / notes

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

are that previous philosophers have inferred ideas of justice, property, and authority as the reasons why institutions based on these concepts came into being without explaining why the concepts themselves came into being; Rousseau suggests that these concepts could not be understood without first being practiced; but that they could not be practiced without first being understood. Third, he rejects the biblical narrative, as the state of nature contradicts scripture: “a paradox which . . . would be very embarrassing to defend, and quite impossible to prove,” ibid., p.50. Ibid., p.44. Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche Contra Rousseau: A Study of Nietzsche’s Moral and Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.65, emphasis mine. Asher Horowitz, Rousseau, Nature and History (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1987), p.67. Horowitz’s reading of Rousseau is left-Marcusian, and asserts that Rousseau “ceases to oppose nature and humanity,” ibid., p.32. He argues this in order to propose a dialectical and thus dynamic concept of human nature in Rousseau’s work. However sympathetic I am to this general argument, Rousseau does not do this: his fiction of the natural is as Strong puts it: “what kind of book is nature, such that one may read it without risking the kind of representational fixity that is the source of so many errors,” such as Hobbes, or indeed, all natural law philosophers, introduced into the category? See The Politics of the Ordinary, p.31. By arguing that nature does not cause history, contrary to Horowitz’s interpretation, Rousseau achieves the ends of the avoidance of fixity that Horowitz would wish to claim for his argument. Rather, the force of Rousseau’s argument is to make us realize that “human history is in no way an expression of human nature,” Swenson, On Jean Jacques Rousseau, p.114. A necessary corollary to this is that future possibilities are radically open if only we do not remain trapped within reified ideological and psychosocial structures that are just as “real,” however false, as political institutions. This is one of the most significant consequences of the constitutive fictivity of theorizing, as I discuss in concluding. P. de Man, Allegories of Reading, p.137. Again, the force of Rousseau’s argument is to suggest that the only responsible history is at the same time a fabrication of the future, a task of fabulation, as the discussion of Bloch in chapter five of this book emphasizes. P. de Man, Allegories of Reading, p.136. E. Friedlander, “Rousseau’s Writings,” p.255. Starobinksi, Transparency and Obstruction, p.4. de Man, Allegories of Reading, p.137. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, p.52. Ibid., p.54. J. Swenson, On Jean Jacques Rousseau, p.103. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, p.62. Ibid., p.62. Ibid., p.216. Ibid., p.62. Ibid., p.64. Ibid., p.64. Ibid., p.70. Ibid., pp.69–70. Ibid., p.83. Swenson, On Jean Jacques Rousseau, p.96. Starobinski, Transparency and Obstruction, p.12. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, p.90. Ibid., p.92 Ibid., p.94. Ibid., pp.95, 96.

notes / 181 52. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, p.84. 53. Another Rousseauian maneuver: “hurried on by the rapidity of time, by the abundance of things I have to say, and by the almost insensible progress of things in their beginnings, I pass over a multitude of ages; for the slower the events were in their succession, the more rapidly they may be described,” ibid., p.87. 54. Ibid., p.99. 55. J. Swenson, On Jean Jacques Rousseau, pp.96, 105. 56. J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p.258. 57. J. Swenson, On Jean Jacques Rousseau, p.114. Tracy Strong concurs: for Rousseau there is no “rational or necessary” link between the categories of natural and human (in contrast to, e.g., Hobbes, who uses the natural to invoke a political closure). See The Politics of the Ordinary, p.34. 58. J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp.258–259. 59. de Man, Allegories of Reading, pp.140–141. 60. Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp.266–267. 61. J. Swenson, On Jean Jacques Rousseau, p.114. 62. Louis Althusser, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx: Politics and History, trans. by Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1982). See also, e.g., K. Ansell-Pearson, who suggests that Rousseau “loses faith in history,” and thus the social contract is an “attempt to transcend history altogether,” Nietzsche Contra Rousseau, p.77. 63. Judith Still, Feminine Economies: Thinking Against the Market in the Enlightenment and the Late Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p.3. 64. The classic statement of this reading can be found in J.L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952). For an excellent critique of this position that generalizes a “natural seeming interpretation” drawing on, e.g., Arthur M. Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau’s Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) and James Miller, Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), see Steven G. Affeldt, “The Force of Freedom: Rousseau on Forcing to Be Free,” Political Theory 27/3 (2000), pp.299–333. The basic gist of such interpretations is that individuals owe obedience to the laws of the just political state, which would be that governed by the social contract; and that disobedience to these laws invokes the notorious “forcing” of freedom, hence the paradoxical combination of democracy and totalitarianism. Affeldt contests this reading from a different perspective from the one presented here, but with similar implications for reading and understanding Rousseau. On a similar note, Ansell-Pearson suggests that Rousseau was among the first to articulate “antinomies of modern political life,” such as individual versus society, man versus citizen, autonomy versus authority, freedom versus necessity, Nietzsche Contra Rousseau, p.22. Put simply, if this is indeed the case, then Rousseau cannot be read as if he presupposes these antinomies that have now become entrenched in our political vocabulary. The reading I suggest of the social contract, then, negotiates the tensions between these terms, but suggests possible ways of understanding them precisely not as antinomies. 65. Roemer, cited in Angelika Bammer Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s (New York: Routledge, 1991), p.15. 66. Irene Harvey, “Exemplarity and the Origins of Legislation,” in, Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity, edited and introduced by Alexander Gelley (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995), p.213. 67. The starting point for the social contract is described by Rousseau thus: I suppose men to have reached the point at which the obstacles in the way of their preservation in the state of nature show their power of resistance to be greater than the resources at the disposal of each individual for his maintenance in that state. That

182 / notes primitive condition can then subsist no longer; and the human race would perish unless it changed its manner of existence, The Social Contract and Discourses, p.190.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

This is clearly disassociated from the narrative of the Discourse, which has already culminated in the fraudulent contract; the supposition is, therefore, that this new contract is set somewhere in the future, after a second state of nature. Given Rousseau’s strong arguments that the first contract is fraudulent, it could be supposed that the illegitimate state that we inhabit is a second state of nature. Ibid., p.191. Ibid., p.192. Ibid., p.198. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp.4–5. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, p.216, emphasis mine. J. Swenson, On Jean Jacques Rousseau, p.114. On the paradoxes of the legislator, see, e.g., L. Althusser, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx ; de Man, Allegories of Reading; Geoffrey Bennington, Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction (London: Verso, 1994); and K. Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche Contra Rousseau. Althusser invokes the difference between the “real” and the fictional to close the text, whereas I see possibilities for opening; and Bennington, following de Man and Derrida, focuses on the impossibility of the social compact. I am concerned to further this enterprise, and see how the new concepts generated are themselves politically enabling. Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: Modernity, Post-modernity and Intellectuals (Oxford: Polity Press, 1990), p.12. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, p.213. Ibid., p.216. To follow Rousseau here, he cites Machiavelli: “In truth, there has never been, in any country, an extra-ordinary legislator who has not had recourse to God; for otherwise his laws would not have been accepted: there are, in fact, many useful truths of which a wise man may have knowledge without their having in themselves such clear reasons for their being so as to be able to convince others” (from Discourses on Livy, cited in Rousseau, p.216). The truth, for Rousseau, is either unspeakable, or cannot be heard by “common” ears (Nietzsche’s plaint, but in a vastly different context of what that truth consists of and to what ends). Alternatively, the words are false, but the orders and practices they found are entirely valid; or the legislator speaks falsely, and the orders and practices he founds are illegitimate. The legislator is invoked as an answer to these questions and problems of justification and knowledge; but it is more a displacement of the problem if read via epistemologies of the given. J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p.258, emphasis mine. I. Harvey, “Exemplarity,” p.217. Ibid., p.220. Ibid., p.223. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, p.195. Ibid., p.200. S. Affeldt, “Forcing Freedom,” p.306. T. Strong, The Politics of the Ordinary, p.91. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, pp.191, 194. Ibid., p.266. S. Affeldt, “Forcing Freedom,” p.311. Ibid., pp.313, 318. de Man, Allegories of Reading, p.137. Derrida and Kearney, “Deconstruction and the Other,” pp.122–123. Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, p.2. See Affeldt, “Forcing Freedom.”

notes / 183 93. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition trans. Paul Patton (Columbia University Press, 1994), p.147.

Excursus

“Mere High-Flown Fantasy . . .”? (Kant on Holiday)

1. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p.47; Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1973), p.232, and throughout. 2. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 2, p.874. 3. Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, p.42. 4. Walter Benjamin, “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy,” in, Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p.3. 5. Ian Hunter, “The Morals of Metaphysics: Kant’s Groundwork as Intellectual Paideia” in, Critical Inquiry 28 (Summer 2002), pp.908–929, 908. 6. Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp.342–343. I have insisted that this book is neither “pro-foundationalism” nor “anti-foundationalism,” since to organize this field into camps—to create the foundationalist moment as singular and monolithic—is to miss the moment of rupture that comes from reading foundations. To be simply anti-foundationalist is to presuppose and work to create the very monolith of foundationalism. I would rather, as I have suggested already, maintain the status of the “always already” fictive quality of foundations; this nevertheless means occasionally drawing on the kinds of characterizations such as Fish provides. 7. I am concerned, especially with Nietzsche, to think political theory, and the possibility of answering its questions, when this position is no longer available. As Arthur C. Danto puts it in relation to Nietzsche, “it is plain that God did not die on order that something else should take his place; rather, he meant for the place to die with the occupant.” See “Some Remarks on The Genealogy of Morals,” in, Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s On The Genealogy of Morals, ed. Richard Schacht (London and California: University of California Press, 1994), p.47. What happens when structures of foundation and transcendence, which function in similar ways (Nietzsche encapsulates this history in “How the True World Finally Became a Fable”—I discuss this in chapter four), collapse into one plane? 8. This is particularly important in demarcating the reconfigured field within which utopianism, as a creative epistemology of the possible, works, as I suggest in chapter five and in concluding. 9. J. Hillis Miller is acutely aware of this in opening his The Ethics of Reading with a chapter on Kant: Already that choice involves a complex set of moves or placements, even “political” commitments, if not ethical choices, in the sense that we speak of academic “politics.” To put all I have to say under the aegis of Kant by choosing to speak of him first, as though all I have to say might flow from what I have to say about him, or from what he said himself, is so far from innocent that it involves me in a whole set of complicities at once, whether I wish them or not, am aware of them or not, complicities which I might require a more or less interminable analysis to untangle. (p.13) Notleast of the “complicities” involved here is the acceptance of Kant as pivotal, enlightenment, rational, modern figurehead, which I want to neither confirm nor deny, but simply put on hold for the pages of this excursus. 10. As described by Allen Wood, Introduction, The Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals in, Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.xxi. Wood locates the text as satire of Herder’s work on human nature and social development, which it undoubtedly is; however, my own contextualizing of the

184 / notes

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

“Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History” with other state of nature narratives is also relevant. Although not described by Kant as a satire, Wood’s perhaps off-hand comment is worth pausing over, particularly when considering the status of the theoretical act. See Michael Seidel, who writes, “the satiric representation or fiction refuses to entertain notions of the accommodating, idealizing lie”; it is, in fact, the “monstrous” that gives birth to “terrible knowledge.” See, Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais to Sterne (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp.3, 5. For Kant, however, it is clear that his satire is indeed intended to ground what Nietzsche would later refer to as such monstrous and idealizing lies: this would be an interesting characterization of the theoretical enterprise to say the least. Kant, “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History,” in, Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. by H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.228. “Conjectures . . .,” p.226; Rousseau, Social Contract and Discourses, p.196. “Conjectures . . .,” p.221. Ibid., p.221. Ibid., p.221. Ibid. Ibid. Groundwork, p.50, emphasis mine. Derrida, “Before the Law,” in Acts of Literature, pp.190–191. Kant, “Conjectures . . . ,” p.227. Kant, then, correctly understands Rousseau’s “apparently contradictory” statements on the dialectic of nature and culture, and how it is only via culture that autonomy can be achieved, in contrast to those romanticists who would read Rousseau as yearning for a return to the unadulterated simplicity and immediacy of nature (“Conjectures . . .,” p.227). In this respect, both Rousseau and Nietzsche have been seriously misread, one as yearning for the noble savage, the other for the blond beast. See chapters two and four of this book. Ibid., p.223. “If we are not to indulge in wild conjectures, we must begin with something which human reason cannot deduce from prior natural causes—that is, the existence of human beings. These human beings must also be fully developed, for they have no mother to support them, and they must be a pair in order that they may reproduce their kind” (“Conjectures . . .,” p.221). Although this conjecture is necessarily due to the biblical text Kant is using as a map (it is obviously Adam and Eve), it reads strangely as though the very existence of humans is a leap of faith for Kant. This postulate is mirrored in the deduction of the categorical imperative, where the existence of human beings as ends in themselves forms the supreme principle on which it rests. Ibid., p.223. Ibid., second emphasis mine. Ibid. Ibid. See the epigraph to chapter four of this book, from Andrei Warminski: “on the one hand, knowledge is that which can invent the fable; but on the other hand, this knowledge is itself an invention—it is invented just like the fable, but in the fable.” See, “Towards a Fabulous Reading: Nietzsche’s ‘On Truth and Lies in the Extra-Moral Sense,’ ” in, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 15/2 (1991), pp.93–120, 112. In Kant’s fable, each opening is followed by a closure, or a securing of the new territory; Nietzsche does not provide such a closure, making him somewhat more dangerous. Kant, “Conjectures . . .,” p.224. Ibid., p.224, emphasis mine. Ibid. Ibid.

notes / 185 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

Ibid., pp.224–225. Ibid., p.225. Ibid. Ibid., p.228n. “The individual therefore has cause to blame himself for all the ills he endures and for all the evil which he perpetrates; but at the same time, as the member of a whole (of a species), he has cause to admire and praise the wisdom and purposiveness of the overall arrangement” (“Conjectures . . .,” p.227). The shift wrought by rationality awakening, then, while beneficial to the species in Kant’s teleological account, can actually be detrimental to the individual. Ibid., p.225. Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, p.42. Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, p.23, emphasis mine. Since the Groundwork, although short, is a remarkably dense text, and since this is merely an excursus, I have taken the liberty of bypassing the vast amounts of secondary literature on Kant. However, I must acknowledge my debts to the following accounts: Howard Williams, Kant’s Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); Onora O’Neill, Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Miller, The Ethics of Reading; Paul Guyer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Honig (1993), Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics; Kimberley Hutchings, Kant, Critique and Politics (London: Routledge, 1996); Christine M. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Andrew Kaufman, “Reason, SelfLegislation and Legitimacy: Conceptions of Freedom in the Political Thought of Rousseau and Kant,” in, The Review of Politics 59/1 (Winter 1997) pp.25–52. Groundwork, p.43. Ibid., p.44. Ibid. Ibid., p.77. Kant’s concern here with the purity of morality in the face of corruption and contempt can be read unsympathetically, as an attempt to sterilize, make hygienic, the human. However, when these concerns are read alongside the epigram I have chosen from Observations . . ., we see a different face of Kant, a yearning, sad, perhaps lost face that provokes in this reader at least a greater degree of sympathy. Groundwork, pp.47, 63. Kant insists upon universality and transcendence for the moral law: see, e.g., “everyone must grant that a law, if it is to hold morally, that is, as the ground of an obligation, must carry with it absolute necessity” (p.44); and, “the ground of obligation here must not be sought in the nature of the human being or in the circumstances in which he is placed; but a priori simply in the concepts of pure reason; and that any other precept, which is based on principles of mere experience—even if it is universal in a certain respect—insofar as it rests in the least part on empirical grounds, perhaps only in terms of a motive, can indeed be called a practical rule but never a moral law” (ibid., p.45). Ibid., p.45, emphasis mine. Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, ed. Maudmarie Clark and Brian Leiter, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Preface, 5. Each of the three sections of the Groundwork, then, could be read by a different audience: the first section, entitled, “Transition from common rational to philosophic moral cognition” being the most basic and most readily understandable—and thus practical—to a “common” understanding. Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kauffman (New York: Vintage, 1974), IV, 108. Groundwork, p.50. Ibid., pp.50–52. See, for examples, Groundwork, pp.45, 56, 63, 79, 81, 95.

186 / notes 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

Hunter, “The Morals of Metaphysics,” p.922. Groundwork, pp.51–52. Ibid., pp.53–54. Ibid., pp.56, 55. This is, of course, a classical statement of a deontological ethics: “For, the will stands between its a priori principle, which is formal, and its a posteriori principle, which is material, as at a crossroads; and since it must still be determined by something, it must be determined by the formal principle of volition as such when an action is done from duty, where every material principle has been withdrawn” (p.55). Ibid., p.53. Ibid., p.57. Ibid., p.55. Ibid., p.62, emphasis mine. On this classical account of positive and negative freedom, where to be positively free is to be governed by the rational self, see Isaiah Berlin’s essays on liberty: Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). While dealing with the problems this account generates is beyond the confines of this book, I would simply like to note that Kant seems to confer agency on rationality and willing that is beyond the boundaries of the self. Groundwork, p.73. The Ethics of Reading, p.29. William Sokoloff, “Kant and the Paradox of Respect,” in, American Journal of Political Science 45/4 (October 2001), pp.768–779, 770. Groundwork, p.73. Ibid. Ibid. William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (London: Penguin, 1987), I.i.57–58. Gibson, Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative, p.88. Groundwork, p.76. Ibid., p.78. Ibid., p.81; Rousseau, Social Contract and Discourses, p.196. Groundwork, p.81. Will, for Kant, is not “merely subject to the law but subject to it in such a way that it must be viewed as also giving the law to itself and just because of this first subject to the law (of which it can regard itself as the author)” (p.81). Again, this is impersonal, and the volition comes from those concepts not contained within or by the self (rather, the relationship is the other way round). This clearly maps to Rousseau’s work; if, however, the legislator was necessarily fictive, what is the status of Kant’s “causal” factors here? Ibid., p.97. Ibid., pp.97, 98, emphasis mine. Ibid., pp.99–100. Ibid., p.72. “On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy,” cited in Sokoloff, “Kant and the Paradox of Respect,” p.774. Groundwork, p.108. Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996), p.31. “Before the Law,” in, Acts of Literature, pp.190–191. Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, p.89. See chapter five, and the discussion of The Principle of Hope, p.197.

Chapter Three Stirner (With Marx and Derrida) Neither Material Nor Utopian? 1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in Collected Works Vols. I, III, V (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), p.130. Hereafter cited as MEGA, volume number and page reference.

notes / 187 2. Saul Newman has argued that Stirner’s politics of insurrection begin with “a rebellion of the subject against himself, against his subjectified, ideologically constructed identity.” I appreciate the value of this, but the problem of singularity remains. See, “Specters of Stirner: A Contemporary Critique of Ideology,” in, Journal of Political Ideologies 6/3 (2001), pp.309–330, 327. 3. Thanks to Andrew Robinson for this formulation. Private correspondence. 4. The core of the Stirner-Marx debate, which for Marx (and Engels) forms the bulk of their The German Ideology, revolves around Stirner’s “presupposition” and Marx (and Engels) “premises”: this will prove to be crucial in defining the “real,” and thus “what can be done.” These textual beginnings, logical starting points, are by no means unproblematic, however, even apart from the heated and occasionally disingenuous diatribe Marx launches against Stirner. 5. Roy Bhasker draws distinctions between the empirical, the actual, and the real, “where the latter is conceived as a stratified structure of powers manifested in sequences of events (the actual) which may or may not be experienced by human subjects (the empirical).” Cited in Alex Callinicos, Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), p.40. His point, expressed by Callinicos, is that Marx’s materialism does not rely on the real as self-presence. As I argue later on, language and consciousness preclude this. 6. The ‘real’ can thus be shown to function at both the level of the speculative and the level of the material, important in terms of the Young Hegelian debate. 7. MEGA, V, p.30. The full citation, later in this chapter, links the project of The German Ideology directly with that of Thesis Eleven; in terms of my own concerns here, it directly links questions of knowledge and meanings to questions of justice. 8. MEGA, I, p.491, emphasis mine. This is taken from Marx’s doctoral dissertation, completed in 1839. The excerpt continues, “That is the carnival of philosophy, whether it disguises itself as a dog like the Cynic, in priestly vestments like the Alexandrian, or in fragrant spring array like the Epicurean. It is essential that philosophy should wear character masks” (emphasis mine). Despite Althusser’s rather disparaging dismissal of the dissertation in his For Marx as “still the work of a student” in his own thesis that Marx was “never strictly speaking a Hegelian,” I still find this a fascinating and incredibly suggestive passage suggesting not simply the extent to which the real is in need of being made intelligible, but also on the ambiguous and equivocal relation between truth, knowledge, and action (bearing in mind the epistemological implications of the phrase—the real): see For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1996), p.35. For an opposing view to Althusser’s, which reads the dissertation in ironical terms as an attempt to work out how to break from the philosophical past “when that past includes a series of attempts to break from the past,” see John Evan Seery ‘Deviations: On the Difference Between Marx and Marxist Theorists’, in, History of Political Thought 9/2 (Summer 1988), pp.301–325. 9. See, e.g., on utopian and scientific socialism, Zygmunt Bauman Socialism: The Active Utopia (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976), Lawrence Wilde Ethical Marxism and its Radical Critics (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1988), and essays by Kellner and Longxi in, Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective, ed. Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenburg (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). 10. MEGA, V, p.5. 11. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p.51. 12. Ibid., p.147. 13. Ibid., p.139. 14. Richard Rorty, “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” in, Deconstruction and Pragmatism ed. Chantal Mouffe (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p.45. Rorty does not follow through on his provocative epistemological insights in this critique of deconstruction. See my introduction, where through Barthes, I suggest textuality is an epistemological proposition, and thus related to questions of authority and intelligibility;

188 / notes

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

and thus to reading practices (not, as Rorty implies, through the choices of particular novels to read). MEGA, V, p.30. See the Symposium in Radical Philosophy 75 ( January/February 1996), articles by Kate Soper “The Limits of Hauntology,” pp.26–31, and Alex Callinicos “Messianic Ruminations: Derrida, Stirner and Marx,” pp.37–41, for examples of the elision of Marx and “politics proper.” (Some of these pieces express a “proprietorial” claim on Marx, without the ironic self-awareness exhibited by a similar expression of possessiveness by Gayatri Charkravorty Spivak’s “Ghostwriting” in Diacritics 25/2 (Summer 1995), pp.65–84). Koch articulates a typical concern about what happens when politics is no longer foundational: “if politics cannot be grounded around truth because it lacks transcendental grounding, and politics cannot be organized around justice because its representation reflects the interests of those who define it, then politics is reduced to an expression of power.” However, if foundations have always already been expressions of power, then Koch’s concerns no longer provide the rhetorical force to persuade us to remain within the boundaries of foundationalism. See: “Poststructuralism and the Epistemological Basis of Anarchism,” in, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 23/2 (September 1993), pp.327–351, 335. L.S. Stepelvich, “Max Stirner as Hegelian,” in, Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1985), pp.597–614, 597. See Kathy E. Ferguson, “Saint Max Revisited: A Reconsideration of Max Stirner,” in, Idealistic Studie 12/3 (1982), pp.276–292, and Stepelvich, “Max Stirner as Hegelian.” As I argue, it would be difficult to show Stirner justifying the upholding of the institution of private property, capitalism, or, indeed, any other institution. David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (London: Macmillan, 1969), p.130. Althusser, For Marx, p.34. David McLellan, “Marx and the Missing Link,” in, Encounter 35 (November 1970), pp.35–45, and Nancy Love, Marx, Nietzsche and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction,” in, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition (London: Verso, 1998), p.22. N. Lobkowicz, “Karl Marx and Max Stirner,” in, Demythologizing Marxism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969). Seery’s argument, however, does not preclude Lobkowicz’s: Seery simply suggests the fictive nature of the break, stresses the political and politicized function of “historical materialism” rather than its supposed epistemic or ontological status (which can be de-politicizing). For a much wider reading and historical analysis than I have space for, see, e.g., Louis Dupré, The Philosophical Foundations of Marxism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966); Lobkowicz, Demythologizing Marxism; George Lichtheim, From Hegel to Marx and Other Essays (London: Orbac and Chamber, 1971); Ronald K.W. Paterson, The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner (London: Oxford University Press, 1971); John Carrol, Break-Out from Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974); Margaret Rose, Reading the Young Marx and Engels: Poetry, Parody, and the Censor (New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978); Z. Jind¸rich, The Logic of Marx, trans. Terrell Carver (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980); James D. White, Karl Marx and the Intellectual Origins of Dialectical Materialism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). The importance of this debate in my context is that it is precisely a debate over the location of “the real,” and the function of philosophy. Lobkowicz, “Karl Marx and Max Stirner,” p.85. Ibid., p.83. Rubel, cited in Paterson, The Nihilistic Egoist, p.116, emphasis mine. Rather interestingly, in a letter from Engels to Marx, Engels is enamored of Stirner to the extent that he writes that they were communists first of all because they were egoists in Stirner’s sense.

notes / 189

29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

Unfortunately, Marx’s reply is not preserved; however, it seems that Marx was the first to notice the radical nature of Stirner’s “egoism” that threatened the very communism Engels thought it could support. Engels, however, initially saw the need to bring together Stirnerian “insurrection” and communist revolution. See Lobkowicz, “Karl Marx and Max Stirner,” p.70. For Stirner and Marx, this is impossible. There is a fuller discussion of this later in the chapter. We came across the term “inaugural” in the excursus on Kant, where I read Kant’s categorical imperative as inaugural rather than representative. The difference here is that Stirner would explicitly invite this reading in an anti-Kantian maneuver. Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, ed. by David Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.5. Ibid., p.7. Ibid., p.38. Ibid. Ibid., p.36. Stirner’s text is constructed around a “genealogy” of the modern, with a tripartite division of experience into historical (world history and “a human life”) and logical categories (coterminous and stratified): the world of the ancients, of childhood, and of realism; the Christian world, idealism, and youth; and the egoistic future. I am mainly concerned with his analysis of idealism and egoism, and therefore have erased the references to the ancients in this extract. The use of “in-itself ” here suggests an “essentialist” Stirner: I argue later that this cannot be the case; the “in-itself ” then holds a similar epistemological status to the “inaugural ‘I.’ ” Ibid., p.37. Ibid. Ibid., p.36. Fredric Jameson, “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” in New Left Review 209 (1995), pp.75–109, 101. In chapter four, I discuss Nietzsche’s contention that the self is an “embodied error”: we have incorporated, Nietzsche argues, the false and ascetic divisions of life-negating philosophies. Nietzsche argues that the incorporation of new boundaries, different limits, is the task of the free spirit. See chapter four. Paterson, The Nihilistic Egoist, p.61. Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p.95. Ibid. Ibid., p.96. Ibid., p.97. I am using Althusser’s phrase, by which he designates the working of ideology as power, drawing on the dual meaning of “subject” as both that with intentionality, creativity, and agency, and that which is subjected to a higher authority. See “Ideology and the State,” in, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). Carrol, in Break-Out from Crystal Palace, also draws parallels between Stirner’s work and the work of the Frankfurt School on, e.g., the “authoritarian personality” thesis. The Ego and Its Own, p.105. Ibid., p.275. In 1872, Marx can be read as agreeing with precisely this point: equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor. But one man is superior to another physically or mentally and so supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time, and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker [. . .] It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like

190 / notes every right. Right, by its very nature can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard in so far as they are brought under an equal point of view, taken from one definite side only, for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another not [. . .] To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal would have to be made unequal.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

See, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” in, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), pp.530–531. I return, then, to Rubels point, that it is because Stirner and Marx both sought the same end, which is a society of free individuals, that they conflicted so radically. The Ego and Its Own, p.59. Ibid., pp.129, 121. Paterson, The Nihilistic Egoist, p.61. The final stage in Nietzsche’s “How The ‘True World’ Finally Became A Fable” deals exactly with this movement: I do not think Stirner achieves this moment, precisely because of his dependence on a residual reality of the self, whereas I argue in chapter four that Nietzsche does, because of his willingness to concede the fiction of the self in its entirety—but, without losing it. See chapter four throughout. The Ego and Its Own, p.41. Ibid., p.40. Cited in Paterson, The Nihilistic Egoist, p.94. The Ego and Its Own, p.135. Ibid., p.133. Ibid., p.146. Rereading and rewriting the structures that have disciplined, constrained, and negated the self, Nietzsche/Zarathustra obliquely tells us, “I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves” (Thus Spake Zarathustra, I, “Prologue,” 5). The Ego and Its Own, p.143, first emphasis mine. Ibid., p.282. Ibid., p.223; Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, p.84. While Stirner would balk at the collectivist implications of Rousseau, here, I argue that Stirner’s property cannot be “fixed” on the basis of his “I,” which has at most a fictional or ghostly coherence; Rousseau also shows, in his fictional originary narrative, the sheer contingency of property ownership. The Ego and Its Own, p.263. Ibid., p.227. P. Thomas, “Karl Marx and Max Stirner,” in, Political Theory 3/2 (May 1975), pp.159–179, 169; Ferguson, “St. Max Revisited,” pp.282–283. Raoul Vaneigem, Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicolson-Smith (London: Left Bank Books and Rebel Press, 1983), p.154. As I read Hobbes, this secured and centered self was created by coercive means, however, a reading that Stirner would possibly agree with, since the self is secured by being inhabited or possessed by Hobbes’s very own reading of its capacities. See chapter one. David Leopold, Introduction, The Ego and Its Own, p.ix. The Ego and Its Own, pp.279–280. Ibid., p.280. Ibid., p.280. Vaneigem, Revolution of Everyday Life, pp.102–103. MEGA, III, pp.196–197. See also Thomas, who writes, Marx attempted to demonstrate that communism and individuality, properly understood, are anything but incompatible, despite Stirner’s conviction that the two were

notes / 191 incommensurate; and that his own critique, far from condemning the present or its Young Hegelian vindications in the light of some abstract categories or principles, was embodied in the real movement of history itself. Marx further aimed to demonstrate that history as a rational process transcends all purely philosophical critiques and standards, and that communism transcends the Kantian is/ought distinction that Stirner, in his bizarre way, had resuscitated.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

95. 96. 97. 98.

See “Karl Marx and Max Stirner,” p.160. Since I read Marx’s materialism only insofar as it constitutes a response to Stirner, I focus on The German Ideology. Lobkowicz, “Karl Marx and Max Stirner,” pp.94–95. MEGA, III, p.182. MEGA, I, pp.220–221, last emphasis mine. MEGA, V, p.23. Ibid., p.127. Jameson, “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” pp.101–102. MEGA, V, p.185; ibid., p.130. Ibid., p.171. Ibid., p.127. Marx labors this point throughout the section on Stirner, as when he writes, “he actually believes in the domination of the abstract ideas of ideology in the modern world; he believes that in his struggle against ‘predicates,’ against concepts, he is no longer attacking an illusion, but the real forces that rule the world” (ibid., p.237). It is precisely in the laboring of this point that the “break” with the philosophy of the Young Hegelians can be seen, and as I show later, Marx also believes he has found the “premise” of their “premises.” Ibid., p.120. Jameson, “Marx’s Purloined Letter” p.102. Jind¸rich, The Logic of Marx, p.160. MEGA, V, p.191. Ibid., p.434. Ibid., p.30. “Karl Marx and Max Stirner,” p.94. MEGA, V, p.31. Ibid. Ibid., p.36. Ibid., pp.36, 37. Ibid., p.36. Ibid., p.37. Even the language of The Holy Family still works along the lines of the proletariat needing to become conscious of its historical mission, thus still leaving a place for the philosopher: “as philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapons in philosophy” (MEGA, III, p.187). As Lobkowicz comments, “When he read Stirner’s denunciation of ideals, Marx probably became aware of the fact that his only possible defense consisted in describing the proletariat’s salvific deed as completely independent of philosophical ideas,” “Karl Marx and Max Stirner,” p.88. MEGA, V, p.49. Ibid., p.47. Ibid., pp.44–45. A “dual” voice in Marx has been recognized by many writers: I have already mentioned Hobsbawm, Love, and Althusser. Robert Tucker stresses the mythic elements in the Marxist grand narrative of alienation and salvation, and argues that while earlier scholars concerned themselves with the question of whether Marxism was true, important questions have to be asked about its status as a set of ethical questions; see, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961). Louis K. Dupré (1966) argues that Marx’s “scientific socialism” was the “realistic” solution to Hegel’s “romantic”

192 / notes

99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

problem; The Philosophical Foundations of Marxism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966). Andrzej Walicki updates this narrative, depicting Marx as a “social scientist and gnostic mythologist,” arguing that “despite his own conviction that historical materialism provided a scientific base for communism, Marx’s final idea could not be derived from historical materialism as a method and a theory of history.” See Marxism and the Leap into the Kingdom of Freedom (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995), p.97. Kellner and Longxi (both in Magnus & Cullenburg Whither Marxism? ), among others, argue that Marxism as a normative force—consisting of a method, perspectives, values and vision—is the “spirit of Marxism” that can be retained. Where my perspective differs is in a close reading of the grounding of materialism in one particular text, and the suggestion that the opposition that all these readings rely upon cannot be secured: that materialism cannot be made intelligible via the determinist route; and that Marxism can thus exist as an opening “between” materialism and utopia. Seery, “Deviations,” p.320, emphasis mine. MEGA, V, p.43. Ibid., p.43, emphasis mine. Ibid., p.446. Andrzej Warminski, “Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life,” in, Hegel After Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p.32. See Terrell Carver’s insistence on Marx as a political writer: The Postmodern Marx (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). Seery, “Deviations,” p.324. See, Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity; Christopher Voparil, “The Problem with Getting It Right: Richard Rorty and the Politics of Antirepresentationalism,” in, Philosophy and Social Criticism 30/2 (2004), pp.221–246, 222. Simon Critchley, “On Derrida’s Specters of Marx,” in, Philosophy and Social Criticism 23/1 (1995), pp.1–30, 5–6. In Positions, he says, “We cannot consider [Marx’s, Engels’s, and Lenin’s] texts as completely finished elaborations [. . .] In saying this I am not advocating anything contrary to ‘Marxism,’ I am convinced of it. These texts are not to be read according to a hermeneutical or exegetical method which would seek out a finished signified beneath a textual surface. Reading is transformational [. . .] But this transformation cannot be executed however one wishes. It requires protocols of reading. Why not say it bluntly: I have not yet found any that satisfy me,” trans. Alan Bass (London: Athlone Press, 1981), p.63. Untimely, then, in that this dialogue has been demanded a long time ago; untimely, also, since Marx is dead (again); and thus for this very reason timely: “To the rhythm of a cadenced march [a new hegemony and dogmatics] proclaims: Marx is dead, communism is dead, very dead, and along with it its hopes, its discourse, its theories and its practices. It says: long live capitalism, long live the market, here’s to the survival of economic and political liberalism!” (Specters, p.52). See also p.88, where he writes, invoking questions of a sedimented authority “What is certain is that I am not a Marxist, as someone said a long time ago, let us recall, in a witticism reported by Engels. Must we still cite Marx as an authority in order to say ‘I am not a Marxist’? What is the distinguishing trait of a Marxist statement? And who can still say ‘I am a Marxist’?” Specters, p.92. Ibid., p.59. Ibid., p.174. Ibid., p.63. Ibid., p.33. Ibid., p.37. In my reading of Kant, I suggested that the space of the categorical imperative was not merely high-flown fantasy. I return, in chapter five, after Nietzsche and with utopias and Ernst Bloch, to a further articulation of this complex territory.

notes / 193 115. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp.119–120. 116. Throughout Derrida’s oeuvre a similar movement can be analyzed in terms of différance, the logic of the trace, supplementarity, iterability, and so on: my concern here is solely with Specters. 117. Specters, pp.38–39, 47. 118. Ibid., p.89. 119. Ibid., p.170. 120. Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, p.231. 121. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p.223. 122. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp.6, 25. 123. Specters, p.xix. 124. Ibid., p.85. 125. Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p.79. 126. Geoffrey Bennington, Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction (London: Verso, 1993), p.194. 127. Fraser, Unruly Practices, p.6. 128. “Deconstruction and the Other,” pp.119–120.

Chapter Four Epiphany and/or Politics? Nietzsche 1. Tamsin Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze, p.48. 2. Douglas Thomas, Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically (London and New York: Guilford Press, 1999), p.3. 3. Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as a Political Thinker: The Perfect Nihilist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p.7. 4. J. Hillis Miller, “The Disarticulation of the Self in Nietzsche,” in, The Monist, 64, 2 (April 1981), pp.247–261, 261. 5. Nietzsche, Daybreak, II, 103. 6. Angelika Bammer, Partial Visions, p. 133. 7. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p.31. 8. My reading is therefore compatible with, e.g., Ofelia Schutte’s reading, which traces the ways in which “whenever Nietzsche followed the authoritarian mode of reasoning, both the resentment and the nihilism that he sought to overcome become reinstated in his own thoughts and teachings.” See, Ofelia Schutte, Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche Without Masks (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p.4. A central concern of much of the literature on Nietzsche is the coexistence of two such irreconcilable faces: see also Tracy Strong Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, expanded edition, with a new introduction (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Mark E. Warren Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1988); Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche Contra Rousseau, and An Introduction to Nietzsche. 9. Bernd Magnus, Stanley Stewart, and Jean-Pierre Mileur, Nietzsche’s Case: Philosophy and/as Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) argue that Nietzsche’s work is “self-consuming,” but my reading of this is a productive one. 10. See, e.g., Ecce Homo (“Why I am a Destiny,” 7, 8, 9) [Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1992)]. On the Genealogy of Morality: “Do you follow me? Have you been following? . . . Certainly not! Sir! ” (III, 1). The emphasis can be different: melancholy, lonely, arrogant, demanding, challenging, exacting, insistent, or coaxing; even slippery, devious, cunning, or perhaps surprised . . . 11. Nietzsche, Daybreak, preface, 5.

194 / notes 12. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), p. 289. The context of this quotation is also telling, as I explore in section three of this chapter. To stay within this context, however, in Human, All Too Human, he writes, “a philosophical mythology lies concealed in language,” Human, All Too Human, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), “Wandered and his Shadow,” 11): contextually, this also relates to the self as an embodied error, and as such, I defer discussion of this aspect of language until section two. 13. Daybreak, preface, 5. 14. Human, All Too Human, “Assorted Opinions and Maxims,” p. 128, emphasis mine; Human, All Too Human, preface, 7. 15. Later in this chapter I refer to the “political economy of the gift.” This is connected to dispersal. In the wake of, e.g., Derrida, Irigaray, and Cixous, to name the most prominent and important theorists here, these methods have been characterized respectively as the economy (or logic) of the proper/gift: conceptualizing, naming, restricting, or engaging in the play or multiplicity of identities and language beyond an either/or logic (gift/proper) cannot, however, be understood themselves in terms of oppositions, as I imply. On this, see Derrida, who writes, “But—if the form of opposition and the oppositional structure are themselves metaphysical, then the relation of metaphysics to its other can no longer be one of opposition,” Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp.117–119. That Nietzsche gives rise to thought in this area almost goes without saying: particularly in Zarathustra, a concern with “holding on” versus “letting go” can be sketched that parallels the above schematic and that can be traced through a series of thoughts (the comedy that results after the death of the paradigm of tragedy; the Dionysian, or the abyss that is productive after the destructive impact of the “death of God” is worked through) all of which point toward the ways in which the economy of the gift plays a crucial a-foundational role in thought after Nietzsche. Zarathustra also calls “unnameable” the “gift-giving virtue” (Thus Spake Zarathustra, III, “On the Three Evils,” 2). These concerns are especially prevalent in “continental” feminist approaches, which tend to engage at an epistemological level. It is with regret that I do not engage with the work of Georges Bataille—that would have to be a project for a different time. However, he is another exemplar of the rethinking of the status and task of theory: as Arkady Plotnisky writes, “Nietzsche’s revolutions—his ‘reevaluations of all values,’ and his ‘reasons other than hitherto’—can serve and have served as a ‘model,’ interactively, for theoretical and political subversions, for a complex and exuberant, and at times dangerous, play. The ‘model,’ however tentative and preliminary, is also powerful and productive. In the intersection of Nietzsche and Marx, Bataille’s vision remains perhaps the greatest, if in turn a not always unproblematic example of a theory— general economy—of the intersection of the political and theoretical, and the artistic or Dionysian,” Reconfigurations: Critical Theory and General Economy (Florida: University Press of Florida, 1993), p.191. See also note 45 to this chapter. 16. Walter A. Kauffman Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, World Publishing Company, 1956), pp.62, 204. “Monodialogic” is defined to “crystallize the tendency of each aphorism to be self-sufficient while yet throwing light on almost every other aphorism.” An interesting characterization, which does justice to the interrelated and juxtaposed concerns of Nietzsche, but avoids the “problem of the order of rank.” I suggest that this problem is not resolved by the single principle of will to power acting as foundation. 17. See Magnus et al., Nietzsche’s Case: Philosophy and/as Literature, pp.35–46: an important aspect of those readings that presuppose, argue for, or constitute a single ontological “text”/argument is the reliance on Nietzsche’s unfinished, indeed, unwritten text, The Will to Power. To anticipate my own position, I do not use this work, put together as it was by Nietzsche’s sister after his death.

notes / 195 18. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, p.125. Precisely “inventive”: Derrida’s thesis is that there is no meaningful hermeneutic horizon within which Nietzsche’s text(s) can be interpreted; yet his own reading traces this thought meaningfully and creatively. This is not to say that Derrida’s reading is contradictory, but that he recognizes, like Nietzsche, the investment made in meaning; which is to say: Derrida performs meaning as process. 19. Ibid., p.133: “I have forgotten my umbrella.” As Derrida explains, “these words were found, isolated in quotation marks, among Nietzsche’s unpublished manuscripts. [. . .] There is no infallible way of knowing the occasion of this sample or what it could have been later grafted on to” (p.123). Another way into the question of meaning, “proper” meaning. 20. Diana H. Coole, “The Politics of Reading Nietzsche,” in, Political Studies 46 (1988), pp.348–363. Reviewing: Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought, Ansell-Pearson Nietzsche Contra Rousseau, An Introduction to Nietzsche; and Daniel Conway, Nietzsche and the Political (London: Routledge, 1997). 21. Jean-Michel Rey, “Commentary,” trans. Tracy B. Strong, in, Nietzsche’s News Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Tracy Strong and Michael Gillespie (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp.91–92n2. “Classical commentary” in my reading is equivalent to “coherent existential meaning,” which is the reconstruction of a particular narrative logic of beginnings and endings into which Nietzsche in no way fits. In On The Genealogy of Morals, to point out just one instance, the very idea of beginnings and ends is subject to a complex genealogical critique (itself a form of reading and rewriting). The “violence” for which I argue in reading Nietzsche does not mean coercing him into the very paradigm he is questioning, probing the limits of, effectively deconstructing. 22. Schacht, “Introduction,” Human, All Too Human, p.xi. 23. Gary Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), p.3, emphasis mine. 24. Ibid., p.49. 25. Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze, p.115. Lorraine is here referring to the work of Irigaray and Deleuze; but both these thinkers, as Lorraine extensively comments, and as I turn to my section on the thought of eternal recurrence, presuppose Nietzsche, and are themselves influential commentators (readers/writers) of/on and with/against Nietzsche. 26. Kelly Oliver, Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy’s Relation to the “Feminine” (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p.20. 27. Genealogy of Morality, III, 28. The double question, then, is both of suffering and of the prior question of why. These two strands are picked up again in section 2(ii), on the “grammar” of causality and explanation, the implicit and pervasive epistemology that underlies sense-making with punitive effects, and in section 3(ii), on the politicized context of ressentiment and redemption that Nietzsche tries to push us beyond. I introduce this problematic here because in the very reading practices Nietzsche encourages (and which have been, as I have suggested, radically misunderstood by those commentators who thought Nietzsche could have said what he wanted to say in a different, more “coherent” manner) are already disrupting the causal, punitive, dissociative epistemology. Even a sensitive commentator like Conway can write that Nietzsche “did virtually everything in his power to encourage confusion and misunderstanding,” Nietzsche and the Political (p.119). See Warminski “Towards a Fabulous Reading,” p.96 in particular, on the refusal to “read” Nietzsche. 28. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, “On Reading and Writing.” 29. Again, I explore this term further throughout the chapter. An important aspect of Nietzsche’s work is that he never rests content with a single definition, but rather opens his readings up to the plural motivations of meanings. The ascetic ideal, to anticipate, is a form of negating “life,” where life connotes, for example, sensuality, which is, Nietzsche suggests, bound to fail, because something must affirm in order for denial to exist at all: as he ends the essay: “man would rather will nothingness than not will at all . . .,” (Genealogy

196 / notes

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

of Morals, III, 28). Asceticism is itself an interpretative frame, however, a mode of evaluation that would only allow one story; so reading this is necessarily plural, or else the reading of asceticism is itself ascetic. Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1990), p.173. Oliver, Womanizing Nietzsche, pp.18, 20. Twilight of the Idols, “ ‘Reason’ in Philosophy,” p.5. John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today (London: Pluto Press, 2002), p.50. Genealogy of Morals III, 12, first emphasis mine. Strong, Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, pp.71–72. Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze, p.115. Magnus et al., Nietzsche’s Case: Philosophy and/as Literature, p.11, emphasis mine. Thus Spake Zarathustra, I, “On Reading and Writing.” Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1984), p.83. The extent to which we must “feel differently,” to which language is somehow inadequate, dull, flattening of this experience is captured, paradoxically richly, at the end of Beyond Good and Evil: Alas, and yet what are you, my written and painted thoughts! It is not long ago that you were still so many-coloured, young and malicious, so full of thorns and hidden spices you made me sneeze and laugh—and now? You have already taken off your novelty and some of you, I fear, are on the point of becoming truths: they already look so immortal, so pathetically righteous, so boring! [. . .] no-one will divine from these how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude, you my old beloved—wicked thoughts! (9, 296).

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

See also The Gay Science: “I caught this insight on the way and quickly seized the rather poor words that were closest to hand to pin it down lest it fly away again. And now it has died of these arid words . . .” (IV, 298). Oliver, Womanizing Nietzsche, p.20. The Gay Science, I, 11. Arthur C. Danto, “Some Remarks on The Genealogy of Morals,” in, Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s On The Genealogy of Morals, ed. Richard Schacht, p.39. Douglas Thomas, Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically, p.5. Schrift relates this to Cixous’s concern with the possibility of “writ[ing] and liv[ing] within a textual/libidinal/political economy freed from the constraints of the law of return.” See, “On the Gynaecology of Morals: Nietzsche and Cixous and the Logic of the Gift,” in, Nietzsche and the Feminine, ed. Peter Burgard (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1994), p.216. Magnus Nietzsche’s Case: Philosophy and/as Literature, p.22. Nietzsche is not read, or deciphered, interpreted, understood, as if his writing style was simply, as Strong puts it, a “container for his ‘message,’ in, Nietzsche’s News Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Tracy Strong and Michael Gillespie, p.167. Barthes, S/Z, p.5. Bammer, Partial Visions, p.70. Gary Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives, p.2. Interestingly, in the same passage as he writes about Wisdom as a woman who “loves only a warrior,” and about “learning by heart,” and which has often been interpreted and disregarded as a statement of an “illiberal” elitism, Nietzsche writes: It is not always easily possible to understand the blood of another: I hate idling readers. Whoever knows the reader will henceforth do nothing for the reader. Another century

notes / 197 of readers—and the spirit itself will stink. That everyone may learn to read, in the long run, corrupts not only writing but also thinking. Once the spirit was God, then he became man, and now he even becomes rabble. (Thus Spake Zarathustra, I, “On Reading and Writing”)

51.

52.

53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63.

I suggest, however, that this passage be read in the spirit of Barthes: a reading that does not question, does not confront or engage with the text, but approaches it as a discrete coherent object containing “answers” (approaches the text humbly as one would approach the authoritative legislator) is precisely what Nietzsche despised, as this does not even begin to pose the questions that would enable us to confront the nihilistic situation that Nietzsche saw us facing. And, in a sense, it does not matter which reading Nietzsche “intended”; I simply want to counter a stultifying “elitist” reading with one that is far more provocative, that opens, rather than closes. Further, I see no reason to castigate Nietzsche for not providing us with answers that we can work through ourselves; this goes for each of the theorists I encounter in this book. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, “On the Spirit of Gravity,” 2). “I am a railing by the torrent: let those who can, grasp me! Your crutch, however, I am not” (Ibid., 1, “Pale Criminal”). This succinctly yet allusively expresses the possibility of controlling the chaotic flux of existence without reinstating an external authorial figure. “You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware lest a statue slay you” (Ibid., I, “On the Gift-Giving Virtue,” 3). The link with Stirner is particularly evident here, in the dangers of setting up another ideal (idol) with which to negate, divide, deny, or subjugate the self. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, preface, 3. “Strange,” uncanny, alien are all connotations of the German term Nietzsche uses. See The Birth of Tragedy, Spiers, Introduction, p.6n10. The Birth of Tragedy, preface, 6. See also The Genealogy of Morality, where Nietzsche admits to beginning his critique on the origins of “moral prejudice” “without my own particular language for these particular things” (preface, 4). Perhaps this language is impossible; but Nietzsche does, as Derrida writes of Beckett, “make the limits of our language tremble.” See, “That Strange Institution Called Literature,” in, Acts of Literature, p.60. Daybreak, preface, 1. Magnus et al. express this strikingly, with the tale of Plato’s “promissory note”: “among all the competing self and world descriptions one and only one could be picked out as the vocabulary reality would itself choose to describe itself, if it could. And yet, although that promissory note remains uncashed, the binary oppositions of knowledge/opinion, logic/rhetoric, truth/persuasion, derive their force entirely from the assumed value of the promissory note” (Nietzsche’s Case: Philosophy and/as Literature, p.18). But the real, as we have seen, cannot tell its own story—and why, as I have stressed via Barthes, only one? Human, All Too Human, preface, 1–2, second emphasis mine. As I explore in section 2, however, Nietzsche always conceives of “knowledge” as predicated on error, fiction, or falsehood. The ways in which his “wisdom” differs is in its self-conscious nature, and in his reconfiguration of what knowledge is for. My use of the term “conceptual space” must be qualified by both the fictive aspects, and the critique of conceptuality that rests on a subject/object opposition, as explored earlier. I stress again here that my use of the term fictive also denies a fiction/theory or fiction/true hierarchical opposition. Human, All Too Human, preface, 2. Ibid. Frances Oppel, “ ‘Speaking of Immemorial Waters’: Irigaray With Nietzsche,” in, Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory, ed. Paul Patton (London: Routledge, 1993), p.92, emphasis mine. Beyond Good and Evil, II, 34.

198 / notes 64. Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives, p.3. 65. Hence, as previously suggested, “interpretation is always being challenged at the same time it is being enabled, until the very possibility of understanding in the conventional sense is itself contested,” Magnus, Nietzsche’s Case: Philosophy and/as Literature, p.22. 66. Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives, pp.3–4, emphasis mine. 67. The Gay Science, preface, p.3. 68. The Birth of Tragedy, 7, pp.40, 15, 75. 69. The Genealogy of Morality, preface, 1. 70. Thomas, Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically, p.3. 71. Ibid., p.34. 72. Human, All Too Human, I, 34. The soothsayer in Zarathustra is emblematic of this response to nihilism as a lack of meaning and necessity. 73. Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought, p.13. On this point, see Warren’s illuminating discussion of Adorno’s recognition that Nietzsche reformulated the terrain of nihilism by his radical grasp of it. As I suggest, nihilism disrupts the movement of the conventional definition, from theory to practice from what is essentially an anti-epistemological claim, which grounds a nonmoral type of action. As Adorno implies, Nietzsche uses the term in such a way as to problematize the “metaphysical standards to which nihilism is linked,” and not as a simple inversion (p.13). As such, Warren’s discussion of nihilism as “a symptom of dissolving subjectivity, disintegrating power, failing mode[s] of living and acting, [and] an increasingly untenable relation between the basic tenets of western culture and modern experience” (ibid.) is important and noticeably influences the reading presented here. However, while, as Warren also argues, the “root cause of nihilism is not the loss of a metaphysically grounded realm of truth” (ibid., emphasis mine), the disorientation between being and doing, knowing and acting (which does not exist in the above definition) has implications for the epistemology of morality and the political that need to be explored. 74. Mitya, in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, puts it thus: “how is man to fare [. . .] without God and without a life to come? After all, that would mean that all things are lawful, that one may do anything one likes,” trans. David McDuff (London: Penguin, 1993), p.679. 75. The Birth of Tragedy, preface, 2. 76. de Man, Allegories of Reading, p.123. 77. The Birth of Tragedy, preface, 1. 78. Ibid., 7, p.40. 79. I unpack these terms directly no further—they stand, like Life, Wisdom, even the “death of God,” as figures of that which cannot be immediately approached, unproblematically or singularly named. 80. The Birth of Tragedy, 15, p.75. 81. Ibid., 5, p.33, and 24, p.113. 82. de Man, Allegories of Reading, p.93. When this same phrase recurs in The Gay Science, the opposition is not to a terrible existence, but to those other fictions that I unpack through the second “hinge” section here: thus, there is no ontological questioning later, as there is here; metaphysics is broached and breached. 83. “In tragedy, even though the ultimate truth is Dionysian destruction, Apollonian ‘appearances’ offered individuation and beauty so that man could find temporary meaning in the midst of a terrible truth. [. . .] individuation and form allow life to be meaningful and beautiful; but within individuation is a formless flux which persists as a continual destruction of form”: see, Lawrence Hatab, “Laughter in Nietzsche’s Thought: A Philosophical Tragicomedy,” in, International Studies in Philosophy 20/2 (1988), pp.67–79, 69. These tropes negotiate both the creation and the dispersal of meaning. 84. “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” p.147. There’s an implicit reference to Democritus; and coincidentally, the bee was one of Marx’s referents too.

notes / 199 85. 86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91. 92.

93. 94. 95. 96.

97.

Ibid. Daybreak, I, 90. The Gay Science, IV, 108, 109. Ibid., V, 355. That this is a “task,” as I have described it, can be perceived from an early section of The Gay Science: “But to stand in the midst of this ‘discordant concord of things,’ and of this whole marvellous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding them faintly amusing— this is what I feel to be contemptible” (I, 2). The evaluation, in this instance, is of the self who refuses the estrangement of nihilism. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in, Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p.10; The Gay Science, I, 26. Beyond Good and Evil, I, 19, last emphasis mine. The Genealogy of Morals, II, 8. This is only one aspect of injustice: but, as I return to in the political section, it is an aspect that profoundly destabilizes a “justice” of hierarchy and domination. Many commentators have noted Nietzsche’s profound destabilizing of ontology. Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, De Man, Allegories of Reading, Nehamas, Life as Literature, Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, and Strong, Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, all accept versions of this. However, what is important in my reading is that I begin to stress the problem of judgment and justice as inseparable from the interpretative problem. As Babich puts it, “Judgment is possible—or, better, unavoidable—on this [perspectival] basis, but such judgment is ineluctably interpretive.” See, Babette E. Babich, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Grounds of Art and Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p.94. To a certain extent, this defines Nietzschean “injustice.” The Gay Science, II, 58, last emphasis mine. Bammer, Partial Visions, p.133. Schutte, Beyond Nihilism, p.1. Nietzsche’s contribution to debates on alienation is oblique, but pivotal: in an important sense, he provides the critical vocabulary to articulate what alienation could mean in a context where the “truth” of what it means to be human is not at stake. He also, and crucially, provides a way of talking about temporality and possibility whereby this afoundational notion of alienation can be worked through without relying on its conventional opposite. Strong, Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, p.19, emphasis mine. It should be mentioned that Nietzsche does link the “free spirit,” with its fictive, post-metaphysical qualities, directly to a context where alienation is not experienced: “The expression ‘free spirit’ should here be understood in no other sense: a spirit that had become free, that has again seized possession of itself ” (Ecce Homo, 4, Human, All Too Human, 1). Just as Stirner associated “spectrality” with alienation, in a definition Nietzsche would not contest, Nietzsche then goes on to posit his spirit as having taken possession of itself once again. As I have suggested above, Nietzsche’s understanding of what it would be like to not be alienated is complex indeed, and the logic of “spectrality” is an interesting way of approaching this issue. Claire Colebrook, defining the link between alienation, spectrality, authority, and autonomy, writes, “a specter emerges when an activity of the imagination is hypostatized and then seen as an authority to which human beings ought to submit.” See, Ethics and Representation: From Kant to Poststructuralism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p.19. Writing here on Blake, Colebrook’s definition applies equally well to Stirner, and also shows the movement of creating ideals as idols that unites Stirner with Nietzsche. However, Nietzsche’s unique contribution are his thoughts the kind of “real” body that is not alienated, not spectral, yet not “real” either.

200 / notes 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106. 107. 108.

109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133.

The Gay Science, II, 57. Strong, Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, pp.54, 47. Human, All Too Human, I, 32. Beyond Good and Evil, I, 4. The Genealogy of Morality, III, 11. Ibid., preface, 7. Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives, p.87. Ibid., pp.37, 87. Hillis Miller writes, “in question is [. . .] an insight, present in one way or another at all times in our history, into the fact that the self may never have been there in the first place except as a social or linguistic fiction,” (“Disarticulation of the Self,” pp.247–248). Nietzsche’s depiction of the multivalent nature of this fiction is a most disturbing insight. As Kelly Oliver puts it, Womanizing Nietzsche, p.22. Thomas, Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically, p.34. Twilight of the Idols, “The Four Great Errors,” 7. As I have stressed throughout, Nietzsche’s terms are polyvalent, resist definition: my task, here, is to show that such terms are operative on different “levels,” and the meanings that they hold (psycho-social, epistemological, moral, and so on) will hopefully unfold throughout such discussions as I propose. Miller, “Disarticulation of the Self,” p.249. The Genealogy of Morality, I, 13. Keenan, Fables of Responsibility, p.59. I defer until section three discussion of the inversion performed here, and the value of a value created via reaction. These aspects of ressentiment compound the deep, structural, and indeed, grammatical, punitive “errors” that I unpack in this section. Warminski, “Towards a Fabulous Reading,” p.113. For example: “judgments concerning the value of life, for it or against it, can, in the end, never be true: they have value only as symptoms; in themselves, such judgments are stupidities” (Twilight of the Idols, “The Problem of Socrates,” 2). To read Nietzsche in this spirit, the values of strength and weakness are provocative and circular. The Genealogy of Morals, I, 13. Told as a parable, the ass is burdened with false values, the lion roars them away, but it is only the child who can live in a new, knowing innocence. Keenan, Fables of Responsibility, pp.59–60. Human, All Too Human, Wandered and his Shadow, 11. “I am afraid” says Nietzsche, “that we are not yet rid of God because we still have faith in grammar” (Twilight of the Idols, “ ‘Reason’ in Philosophy,” 5). Strong, Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, p.77. Twilight of the Idols, “Four Great Errors,” 2. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 5. Daybreak, iv, 208. Twilight of the Idols, “Four Great Errors,” 7. Daybreak, II, 115. Ibid., II, 119. The Genealogy of Morality, II, 1. Daybreak, II, 103. Magnus et al., Nietzsche’s Case: Philosophy And/As Literature, p.74. Beyond Good and Evil, preface, 1. The Gay Science, I, 1. Human, All Too Human, I, 29. Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives, p.28.

notes / 201 134. 135. 136. 137.

138. 139.

140. 141.

142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154.

Twilight of the Idols, “True World,” 1. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 5. Continuing Nietzsche’s comedy, Magnus et al., Nietzsche’s Case: Philosophy And/As Literature, p.131, write, God took six days to create the world with humankind in it. Philosophy has droned on for over two thousand years, inscribing as wisdom a single error, making humankind miserable in the process. But in a mere six brief paragraphs, figuratively representing only a half-day, Nietzsche overcomes God by creating Zarathustra, prophet and forerunner of the race which will replace mankind. And while doing this, the author dispatches the problems of Western metaphysics as preserved in philosophy as well. Twilight of the Idols, “True World,” 6. Shapiro: “the final position that would be occupied in the biblical metanarrative tradition by an apocalyptic revelation or in the philosophical one by a Hegelian or Marxist transformation of that into the realization of freedom and knowledge is here filled by the inscription ‘INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA’. That is, just where we might expect a conclusion of the story that would comprehend and make clear all its earlier stages, we get a reference to another story and [. . .] that story will not complete a metanarrative,” Nietzschean Narratives, p.30. The Gay Science, I, 54. As Zarathustra says, “The awakened and knowing say: body I am entirely, and nothing else and soul is only a word for something about the body” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, “On the Despisers of the Body”). This is important; otherwise, Nietzsche would be idealizing our physiological/creative embodied existence; rather than a body/soul duality, Nietzsche posits an embodied (and only in this embodiment, a singular) plurality. Daybreak, IV, 210. The Gay Science, II, 107. Ibid., I, 1. Ibid., II, 107. Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, p.26. The Gay Science, preface, 4. Kathleen Higgins, Comic Relief: Nietzsche’s Gay Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.65. See also Lawrece Hatals. Thus Spake Zarathustra, III, “On Old and New Tablets.” “History for Life,” p.21. Human, All Too Human, preface, 7. Beyond Good and Evil, II, 42. Magnus et al., Nietzsche’s Case: Life And/As Literature, p.9. Zarathustra also links epistemology, temporality, and judgment with a possible place he can be(come?):

Alas, where shall I climb now with my longing? From all mountains I look for fatherlands and motherlands. But home I found nowhere; a fugitive I am at all cities and a departure at all gates. [. . .] Thus I love only my children’s land, as yet undiscovered, in the farthest sea: for this I bid my sails search and search. In my children I want to make up for being the child of my fathers—and to all the future, for this today (Thus Spake Zarathustra II, “On the Land of Education”). 155. http:// struggle.ws / mexico/ ezln/ccri_5_dec_lj_july98 .html accessed 10/06/02; Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos Our Word is Our Weapon: Selected Writings, ed. Juana Ponce de León (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), pp.158–159. 156. Beyond Good and Evil, VI, 2.

202 / notes 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164.

165. 166. 167. 168. 169.

170. 171.

172. 173. 174. 175.

Beyond Good and Evil, IX, 257. See, e.g., Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I “On the Flies of the Market Place.” The Genealogy of Morality, I, 10. Brown, Politics Out of History, p.56. Reynolds, “Derrida and Deleuze on Time, the Future and Politics,” Borderlands Ejournal 3/1 (2004): http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/reynolds_ time.htm. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “prologue,” 3. Schutte, Beyond Nihilism, p.124. To reaffirm: Irigaray’s description of pre-Socratic speech, with which she aligns Nietzsche’s texts (in particular, Thus Spoke Zarathustra) delineates the space within which Nietzsche works: “Would you say that Zarathustra is fiction? For me, it is absolutely not fiction [. . . but a poetic language] that does not announce the truth but which makes the truth, that acts, but not at all in a fiction/theory hierarchy,” in, Frances Oppel, “ ‘Speaking of Immemorial Waters’: Irigaray With Nietzsche,” in, Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory, ed. Paul Patton (London: Routledge, 1993), p.92, emphasis mine. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, “On the Love of the Neighbor,” emphasis mine. Human, All Too Human, VI, 354. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, “On the Friend.” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, “On the Love of the Neighbor.” As I go on to explore, the importance of the thought of eternal recurrence is in the thinking: I thus approach this through a commentary on its various constructions in the relevant literature rather than directly; such an approach misses the dialogue the thought necessarily generates. It is also perhaps more in fitting with the spirit of Nietzsche not to ask “what is the meaning of . . .,” and ask, instead, which meaning? How are these meanings generated, and what are they used for? And of course, my own “reading” is participating in constructing a further set of affects. The Gay Science, IV, 341. “Was that life? Well then! Once more!”: This is perhaps the most bleakly nihilistic moment: it is the impossibility of the “once more” that Nietzsche cannot overcome. With Nietzsche, I do not follow this thought further. A classic statement of eternal recurrence is in the chapter of Zarathustra titled “The Vision and the Riddle.” Many of the comments I make can also be made with reference to that more complex and emblematic chapter. For useful surveys of the relevant literature on eternal recurrence, see Magnus Nietzsche’s Case: Life And/As Literature, and David Wood, “Nietzsche’s Transvaluation of Time,” in Exceedingly Nietzsche: Aspects of Contemporary Nietzsche-Interpretation, ed. David F. Krell & David Wood (London and New York: Routledge, 1988). Dienstag, Dancing in Chains, p.131; Thus Spake Zarathustra, III, “On Redemption.” I don’t here review cosmological versions of eternal recurrence, but see note 175, for a hint of why it might be interesting to do so in a way that does not assume the return of “the same.” Cited in Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives, p.87. Ibid., p.90. Kathleen M. Higgins, Comic Relief: Nietzsche’s Gay Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.142. Interestingly, modern science can be seen to be very much aware of its own investment in creating and constructing ontological order. For a non-ontological scientific reading that eternal recurrence seems to have anticipated, see Ferguson: if we were able to travel backwards toward what we have been assuming was the beginning, (the singularity) we would find, just short of reaching it, that (in imaginary time) it would become meaningless to talk about the past at all. In a situation where there are four space dimensions and no time dimension, chronological time—with its well-defined past, present and future—would not exist, and with it would go all the vocabulary for describing chronological time. No more

notes / 203 yesterday, or always, or past. Discussion about a beginning or before the beginning would also have no meaning . . .

176. 177. 178. 179.

180. 181. 182.

Kitty Ferguson, Measuring the Universe: The Historical Quest to Quantify Space (London: Headline Book Publishing, 1999), p.286. John McManus directed me to this literature, and helped me understand what is going on here. Phillip Pullman, Lyra’s Oxford (Oxford and New York: David Fickling, 2003). Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze, p.143. Oliver, Womanizing Nietzsche, p.106. Benjamin Bennett, “Bridge: Against Nothing,” in, Nietzsche and the Feminine, ed. Peter Burgard, p.295. This provides an unusual “application” of Stanley Rosen’s argument that “Zarathustra is [. . .] at once a handbook of revolution and a confession by its author that revolutions must always fail,” The Mask Of Enlightenment: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.xv. Hugh Tomlinson, “Nietzsche on the Edge of Town: Deleuze and Reflexivity,” in, Exceedingly Nietzsche: Aspects of Contemporary Nietzsche-Interpretation, ed. David F. Krell & David Wood, p.159. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983), pp.xiii–xiv. Beyond Good and Evil, I, 22.

Chapter Five Bloch’s Utopian Imagination 1. Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play trans. Robert A. Vollrath (London: Macmillan, 1984), p.xxii. 2. The Genealogy of Morality, preface, 7. 3. See, e.g., Marx and Engels of The Communist Manifesto: “The significance of criticalutopian socialism and communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and theoretical justification” (p.74). 4. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p.139, emphasis mine; Bloch and Adorno, “ ‘Something’s Missing’: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing (1964),” in, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, p.11. 5. For debates on utopia as social dreaming and impossibility or more decisively didactic, see, e.g., Levitas, The Concept of Utopia; Moylan Demand the Impossible Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York and London: Methuen, 1986), “Bloch Against Bloch: The Theological Reception of Das Prinzip Hoffnung and the Liberation of the Utopian Function,” in, Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, ed. Jamie Owen Daniel & Tom Moylan (London: Verso, 1997); Lucy Sargisson, Contemporary Feminist Utopianism (New York and London: Routledge, 1996); and Lyman Tower Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” in, Utopian Studies 5/1 (1994), pp.1–37. 6. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p.3. 7. Sargent, “Three Faces,” p.1. 8. Marcos, Our Word is Our Weapon, p.97. 9. Richard Gunn, “Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope,” in, New Edinburgh Review 76 (1987), pp.90–98, 92. 10. The Principle of Hope, pp.8–9. 11. Thomas, Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically, p. 3.

204 / notes 12. Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze, p.48. 13. Louis Marin also regards utopia as a fictive discourse: “Utopia is a critique of the dominant ideology to the degree to which it reconstructs present or contemporary society by displacing and projecting the latter’s structures into a fictive discourse [. . .] Utopia [. . .] displaces and projects [the ideological and totalizing expression of existing] reality into the form of a non-conceptual fictive totality. . . .” See, “Theses on Ideology and Utopia,” in, Minnesota Review 6 (Spring 1976), pp.71–76, pp.71. Fictive, when understood contra ideology, cannot mean simply fictional, for where is the prior true or real from which it deviates or which it represents? Hence my use of the word “fictive” is epistemologically and temporally disruptive, and can only be understood via the category possibility. It is thus a utopian term. 14. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), p.3; Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, p.xii. 15. Roemer, cited in Bammer, Partial Visions, p.15. 16. Ruth Levitas, “For Utopia: The (Limits of the) Utopian Function in Late Capitalist Society,” in, The Philosophy of Utopia, ed. Barbara Goodwin (London: Frank Cass, 2001), p.27. 17. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), p.220. 18. Cited in Mike Kenny, “Socialism and the Romantic ‘Self ’: The Case of Edward Thompson,” in, Journal of Political Ideologies 5/1 (2000), pp.105–127, 107. 19. “Something’s Missing,” p.3. 20. Ibid., p.1. 21. Ibid., p.11. 22. Ibid., pp.3, 3–4. 23. Andrew Robinson (drawing on Herbert Marcuse) in “Constructing Revolutionary Subjectivities,” in, Utopian Studies (forthcoming). 24. Bloch and Adorno, “Something’s Missing,” p.7. Terry Eagleton points to the difficulties of simply opposing disorder to the ordering mechanisms of capitalism: In a mutual thwarting, the anarchic operations of capitalism threaten to undercut the established political, ethical and juridical regime on which they depend; but conversely, capitalism’s creative powers are shackled by that same dispensation. Whichever way round we view the deadlock, we must come to terms with the fact [. . .] that fantasy, desire and disruption are in some sense actually part of the given order. And if this order is structurally self-undoing and plunged in perpetual tumult, how does this affect the idea of rebellion against it? Nevertheless, it is, as I have been concerned to argue, important to desire differently, and to desire without the reification of creativity or the reproduction of power relations. See, “Capitalism and Form,” in, New Left Review 14 (March–April 2002), pp.119–131, 121. 25. Many thanks to Simon Tormey for this Deleuzean reading of the problem within utopia. I return, however, to why I think the second moment is necessary politically, but must always be subject to creative epistemologies, or “deterritorialization.” 26. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, p.53. Part of the problem, however, lies in the way the nineteenth-century utopian socialists have been read and understood, which is via the static rather than via the exploratory, the experimental. See, e.g., Roland Barthes reading of Fourier. Barthes comments, “the detailed inflections of utopian systems return to our world like lamps of desire, of possible exultation. If we could be more alert to them, they would prevent politics from solidifying into a totalitarian, bureaucratic, moralizing system.” Barthes writes that Fourier’s work is “simultaneously arrogant and dilatory”: arrogant in its detail, but dilatory and delaying, slippery and equivocal in its promise. The arrogance of the blueprint (and its potential political dangers of overcoding and territorializing) is then only one aspect of a utopia that is itself disrupted its entry into

notes / 205

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

temporality by deferral, and its own creativity as resolutely fictive: “the work is never anything but the meta-book (the anticipatory commentary) of a future work which, not actually getting written, becomes the work itself: Proust, Fourier only ever wrote Prospectuses’ of this sort.” See Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes trans. Richard Howard (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp.174–175 (translation modified). Simon Critchley, “The Other’s Decision in Me (What are the politics of friendship?),” in, Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Levinas, Derrida and Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso, 1999), p.280. See, e.g., J.L. Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952) for the “tragic paradox of utopianism” (p.95), and more recently, Yannis Stavarakakis has argued that “the naivety—and also the danger—of utopian structures is revealed when the realization of this fantasy is attempted. It is then we are brought close to the frightening kernel of the real: stigmatization is followed by extermination. This is not an accident. It is inscribed in the structure of utopian constructions”: Lacan and the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p.100, emphasis mine. I have, of course, been arguing that this is a misconstrual of utopia in the first place. Jack Zipes, Introduction, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, pp.xxvii–xxviii. Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible, p.26. Fredric Jameson, “Progress versus Utopia: Or, Can We Imagine the Future?,” in, Science Fiction Studies 9/2 (July 1982), pp.147–158, 153. Fredric Jameson, “Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopia Discourse,” in, Diacritics 7 (Summer 1977), pp.2–21, 21. Levitas, “For Utopia,” pp.39, 25. Ibid., p.39. Eugene D. Hill, “The Place of the Future: Louis Marin and his Utopiques,” in, Science Fiction Studies 9 (1982), pp.167–179, 169. Bammer, Partial Visions, p.133. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p.31. Cited in Hill, “The Place of the Future,” p.175. See also Marin, “Theses on Ideology and Utopia.” Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p.6. Ibid., p.290. Ibid., p.6. Ricoeur’s characterization is instructive and interesting: the utopian image is “productive, an imagining of something else, the elsewhere [. . .] It is always the glance from nowhere [. . .] Utopia has the fictional power of redescribing life,” in, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p.266. Nevertheless, I have previously pointed to the limitations of a redescription that is not also politically transformative. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p.3. Ibid., pp.10, 8. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp.32, 25. Gunn, “Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope,” p.93, third emphasis mine. Thomas H. West, Ultimate Hope Without God: The Atheistic Eschatology of Ernst Bloch (New York: P. Lang, 1991), p.25. Wayne Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (London: Macmillan, 1982), p.53, p.26. Tom Moylan, “Bloch Against Bloch,” p.114. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, p.21. Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch, p.53. Bloch’s utopia is constituted by lack, but its energies are not derived from resentment; rather, it gains meaning and movement from a potential plenitude, from the “no-where.”

206 / notes 53. Friedrich Engels, “Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx,” in, The Marx-Engels Reader, p.681. 54. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, pp.68–69. 55. Ibid., p.69. 56. Ze’ev Levy, “Utopia and Reality in the Philosophy of Ernst Bloch,” in, Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, p.176. 57. Alienation is a fascinating category that does not need any notion of a prior unalienated state from which to make sense; see, e.g., Guy Debord’s commentary: “time is a necessary alienation, being the medium in which the subject realizes himself while losing himself, becomes other in order to become truly himself.” This is not the same as social alienation, which has “forbidden and petrified the possibilities and risks of a living alienation within time” (The Society of the Spectacle, pp.115–116). Nietzsche refers to a similar alienation in “On the Uses and Disadvantages of a History for Life.” 58. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p.75. 59. Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, pp.21, 138, 34. 60. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, pp.76, 69. 61. Ibid., pp.74–75. 62. Levy, “Utopia and Reality in the Philosophy of Ernst Bloch,” p.176. 63. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p.75. 64. Ibid., p.75. 65. I shall return to the concerns of Ruth Levitas in the final section of this essay, but should clarify here that Levitas’s concern is with hope as concrete utopia, or as Bloch puts it, “a directing act of a cognitive kind ” (The Principle of Hope, p.12). 66. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p.193. 67. Ibid., p.69. 68. Vince Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch, p.32. 69. Bloch, “Man as Possibility,” p.281. 70. Gunn, “Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope,” p. 94. 71. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p.16. Tom Moylan suggests that the “dialogical tensions in The Principle of Hope indicate [. . .] that Bloch’s method includes the necessary elements for preventing this sort of hypostatization,” (“Bloch Against Bloch,” p.114). 72. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p.186. 73. Ibid., p.188. 74. Ibid., p.12. 75. Ibid., pp.129, 127. 76. Ibid., p.116. 77. Ibid., p.13. 78. Cited in Hill, “The Place of the Future,” p.175. 79. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p.140. 80. Vincent Geoghegan, “Remembering the Future,” in Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, p.21. Vincent Geoghegan, writing on the possible utopian functions of memory, clarifies the kind of memory that Bloch opposes to this: “Anagnorisis, in contrast, involves recognition, not recollection. In anagnorisis memory traces are reactivated in the present, but there is never simple correspondence between the past and present, because of all the intervening novelty. The power of the past resides in its complicated relationship of similarity/dissimilarity to the present” (“Remembering the Future,” p.22). I would like to add to this definition by suggesting that, like utopia itself, these terms be read intransitively rather than referentially: that is, a memory itself cannot be defined as either one or the other “objectively,” but this instead relies upon the performance or activity of remembering, and the hermeneutical intentionality or agency of the subject. 81. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p.141. 82. Liliane Weissburg, “Philosophy and the Fairy Tale: Ernst Bloch as Narrator,” in, New German Critique 55 (Winter 1992), pp.21–44, 29.

notes / 207 83. Bloch himself writes, “almost every utopia in fact, whether medical, social, or technological, has paranoiac caricatures; for every real innovator there are hundreds of fantastic, unreal, mad ones . . .” (The Principle of Hope, p.88). 84. Thanks are due here to John McManus for the lively and articulate exchanges that led to this formulation. 85. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p.169. 86. Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Subject of Philosophy, trans. Thomas Trezise (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p.4, emphasis mine. 87. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p.75 emphasis mine. 88. Derrida, “Marx and Sons,” in, Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1998), p.223. 89. See Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Claude Lefort puts it thus: “The fact that something like politics should be circumscribed within social life at any given time has in itself a political meaning,” i.e., what counts as politics is itself a political question. See, Democracy and Political Theory, p.13. 90. Derrida’s understanding of messianism is not (simply) theological, just as Benjamin’s understanding of messianism was politically complex. For Derrida, messianism (without a messiah) structures emancipatory thought within the deconstructive endeavor: “what remains irreducible to any deconstruction, [. . .] is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; it is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism, an idea of justice . . .” (Specters of Marx, p.59). This “promise” comes from a suspension of ontology and epistemology: “This not-knowing is not a lacuna. No progress of knowledge could saturate an opening that must have nothing to do with knowledge” (Specters of Marx, p.37). Derridean messianism, then, is intended to evoke an emancipatory promise that rejects the given facts as the only facts, and that also rejects the transcendence or authority of a messiah. It is, then, another way of thinking through the political without lapsing into positivist or authoritarian modes of thought. The constitutive fictivity of the term thus interests me, and suggests an ally with utopian work. Further exploration of “messianism without messianism” lies beyond the boundaries of this book, but interested readers could do worse than refer to Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. Thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers for Utopian Studies for this clarification. 91. Derrida, “Marx and Sons,” p.248. 92. Ibid., p.248. 93. Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992), p.164. 94. Derrida, “Marx and Sons,” pp.248–249. 95. Derrida and Kearney, “Deconstruction and the Other,” pp.119, 120. 96. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p.146. 97. Thanks to the insights of the other anonymous reviewer for Utopian Studies for forcing me to address more closely the ways in which fictive theories preclude the reproduction of power relations and reification, and so in this way give us ethical and evaluative markers, and for suggesting the link between “dignity” and Heimat. A parallel formulation to that of the Zapatistas might be: “Heimat is struggling so that Heimat might eventually be in the world,” for it is only when humans recognize themselves as the beings who “overhaul [. . .] the given facts” (The Principle of Hope, pp.1375–1376) that the possibility of Heimat illuminating and stratifying the present as not-yet is possible. 98. Marcos, Our Word Is Our Weapon, p.46. 99. John Holloway, “Dignity’s Revolt,” in, Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico, ed. John Holloway and Eloine Peláez (London: Pluto Press, 1998), p.173. 100. http://struggle.ws/mexico/ezln/ ccri1st_dec_real.html, accessed 11/06/02. 101. Holloway, “Dignity’s Revolt,” p.165. 102. Moylan, Demand the Impossible, p.197. 103. http://struggle.ws/mexico/ezln/2001/ccri/ccri_puebla_feb.html, accessed 08/09/02.

208 / notes 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111.

Marcos, Zapatista Stories, trans. Dinah Livingston (London: Katabis, 2001), p.118. Ibid., p.118. Ibid., p.93. http:// struggle.ws/ mexico/ezln/ccri_5_dec_lj_july98.html accessed 10/06/02; See also, Our Word Is Our Weapon, pp.158–159. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p.1371. Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, p.169, emphasis mine. See Bloch, The Principle of Hope, pp.1375–1376. Gilles Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,” in, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. D.F. Bouchard and S. Simon (Cornell University Press, 1977), p.208.

Toward a Conclusion 1. Wolin, “Political Theory as a Vocation.” The Concept of Utopia (London: Phillip Allen, 1990), p.200. 2. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (Columbia University Press, 1994), p.147. See also Irigaray, The Way of Love, and the search for a language that “does not speak about something or someone who already exists and for whom a language and representations are somehow available, previously codified. Rather, it tries to anticipate . . .”; this language then, no longer corresponds “to something or someone who already exists, and is already in the past, or put into the past by what is said. The task here is different. It is a question of making something exist” pp.vii, viii. 3. The Revolution of Everyday Life, p.97. 4. Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, pp.147, 148; Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p.4; see also Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p.7. 5. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p.223. 6. Marcos, Zapatista Stories, p.76.

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Index Entries in bold refer to extended discussions of the theorist or concept. agency, 21, 24, 28–9, 71, 93, 119, 127, 155, 172n21, 186n60, 189n45 always-already fictive, 3, 5–7, 9, 19–21, 55, 103 anticipatory thought, 2, 11, 58, 147–8, 153, 157–61, 162, 169–70, 205n26; see also Bloch, Ernst; post-representational thought; utopian theory anti-narrative, 13, 39, 51, 117–18, 125–6, 133 Dionysus/Apollonian, 125 see also narrative; Nietzsche, Friedrich anti-utopian mode, 12, 20, 28–31, 37, 152, 155, 168, 174n2; see also Hobbes, Thomas; representation artifice, 23–5, 32, 37, 39, 43–4, 46–7, 61, 119, 160, 178n2 artificial bodies, 23–4 see also Hobbes, Thomas ascetic fictions, 1–2, 58, 68–9, 111–14, 125, 127–8, 133, 189n39, 195–6n29; see also didactic and disciplinary fictions; fictions; Nietzsche, Friedrich Barthes, Roland, 3, 8, 10–12, 21, 114–15, 134, 141, 204n26 lisible/scriptable (readerly/writerly), 10–12, 21, 114 see also textuality becoming-other, 10, 33, 52, 139, 157, 170; see also anticipatory thought; not-yet; post-representational thought; temporality; textuality; utopia Bennett, Jane, 14, 27, 58, 74, 169, 178n2 The Enchantment of Modern Life, 14, Bloch, Ernst, 2, 12, 13–14, 32, 38, 58, 74, 90, 99, 106–7, 132, 136, 147–65, 168–70, 178n2, 179n24

anticipation, 2, 14, 37–8, 58, 147–8, 153, 157–9, 160, 161–2, 167, 169–70 becoming, 12, 14–15, 149, 152, 154, 155–60, 164, 165 concrete utopia, 161–5 emotions as temporal and material, 157 hope as cognitive, 159 hunger, 155–7 impossibility of programmatic coding of political, 2, 147, 151–3, 161–2, 170 Natural Law and Human Dignity, 12, 38 not-yet, 12, 153–61, 163, 165, 170 possibility, 148, 149, 151, 152–3, 154, 157, 158, 161–2, 163, 168–70 reality as unfinished, 12, 15, 158, 165, 170 “social dreaming” (Sargent), 148, 152, 203n5 temporality, 149, 155–8 transformative, 148, 153, 156, 160, 161, 163–5, 167–70 see also utopian theory bodies, 28–30, 31, 42, 58, 64, 85, 88, 94, 112–13, 130, 168, 201n141; see also subjectivity Brown, Wendy, 14, 37–8 Politics Out Of History, 14 Butler, Judith, 22 Caruth, Cathy, 9; see also epistemology: failure of categorical imperative, 58, 62, 66–72, 73, 84, 121, 123, 155, 168 “as if ” formulation, 62, 69 circularity of, 71 constraining effects of, 69, 70 creativity of, 58, 65, 69–70, 71–2, 73–4 as ethical tale, 69–70

222 / index categorical imperative—continued fantastic nature of, 62–3, 66, 73 imagined differently, 70, 73–4 resists fiction and philosophy, 73–4 as space of alterity, 74 as universality, 58, 61, 69–70, 71–2, 73 unthinkable nature of, 70–2 Cavarero, Adriana disciplinary conception of politics, 5 epistemological hierarchies, 5–6 coding the political, 2, 3, 8–9, 38, 40, 50, 74, 147, 162, 171n1, 204–5n26; see also anti-utopian mode; metaphysics; political theory: programmatic, legislative, authoritative Cornell, Drucilla, 9, 162; see also responsibility; undecidability creative epistemologies of possibility, 1, 2, 5–6, 12, 13, 14, 19, 27, 38, 49, 55–6, 123, 147–8, 149, 150, 160, 164, 167, 170 invention, 2, 5, 38–9, 48, 53, 55–6, 66, 72, 80, 116, 126–32, 147, 155, 160 critical knowledges, 2–3, 14–15, 22, 37, 44, 74, 91, 97, 123, 133, 153, 155, 163–4, 167, 170, 174n49; see also deconstruction; utopian theory deconstruction, 2–3, 7–12, 14, 38, 49, 55–6, 80–1, 97–101, 105, 106, 108, 117, 125, 147–8, 149, 160, 161–2; narratology, 3, 8–13, 55, 60, 105 see also coding of the political; Derrida, Jacques; foundations; metaphysics; responsibility; undecidability depoliticization, 5, 161 Derrida, Jacques, 3, 7–9, 12, 14, 34, 48–9, 53, 55, 62–3, 73–4, 79, 80–1, 97–101, 109, 157, 161–2 hauntology, 98–100 messianism, 98–9, 162 New International as unfinished cartography, 100 see also deconstruction; undecidability didactic and disciplinary fictions, 5–7, 31–2, 37, 57, 58, 65, 84, 113, 132, 168 différance as alterity and potentiality, 157 temporal complexity of, 37

dreaming, 30–2, 126, 129–30, 131–2, 148–9 in Hobbes, 30–2 in Nietzsche, 126, 129–30, 131–2 utopias as “social dreaming,” 148–9 “elsewhere,” 2, 142, 205n42; see also utopian theory epistemologies of “the given,” 1, 4, 5, 12, 13, 19–20, 27, 32, 38–9, 43, 49, 54–6, 59, 78–9, 111–12, 124–5, 149, 150–1, 153, 158, 160, 164, 168 epistemological positivism, 2, 78, 131, 151–2, 160, 165, 179n24 see also reification epistemology, 1–15 conservative, 1, 5, 159 failure of, 7, 9, 79, 109, 167 politics of knowledge-production, 14 see also creative epistemologies of possibility; epistemologies of “the given”; reification fabrication, 6–7, 15, 33, 43, 55, 136, 160, 165, 170; see also telling stories fictions claims to power of, 1–2, 4, 6, 7, 19–21, 22, 23, 50, 52, 69, 70, 80, 84–6, 103–5, 126, 168 constitutive fictions, 1–2, 5–6, 74, 88, 149, 158, 160, 165, 170, 171n1 dual work of, 1–2, 5–6, 20, 37, 39, 54–6, 59, 85, 104, 124, 130, 147, 155, 168 fiction/reality binaries, 2, 8, 10, 55, 58, 78, 123, 152, 153, 158–60, 167, 169–70 fiction/theory hierarchies, 3–4, 8, 9, 55, 116, 131, 138; see also narrative; oppositional thought fictive mode of theorizing alterity, 37, 49, 74, 135, 150, 152–3, 157, 161, 164–5, 168, 169–70 as epistemological interruption, 2, 4, 29, 31, 39, 58, 88, 114–15, 130–1, 147, 162, 168 and fictions, distinguished, 2, 60 as genealogical critique, 1–2

index / 223 inescapable ground of political theory, 1–2, 12, 19, 22, 70, 72, 103–5 see also oppositional thought; postrepresentational thought fictive theories politics of, 1–2, 7, 14–15, 54–6, 77–8, 98–100, 107, 138, 148, 161–5, 168–70 Foucault, Michel, 15, 100, 149, 170 foundations ambiguous, 59–60 constitutively fictive, 9 dissolution of, 9, 81, 106, 116, 119, 134 “outside” of contestation, 3 see also political theory genealogy, 124, 125–6, 133–4 Geoghegan, Vincent, 158, 159, 178n2 God death of, 110, 119 God’s grammar, 112, 128, 150 as impossible law-giver, 6, 40–1 living in the shadows of dead God, 67, 122 Grosz, Elizabeth corporeal inscription, 29 see also bodies Hobbes, Thomas, 19–35 anti-utopian mode, 20, 28, 31 bodies and subjectivity, 26, 28–34 corporeal inscription, 29 counterfeit, 25, 33 deviating subjects, 31 disciplining subjects, 28–31 dreaming, 20, 28–33 foreclosure of possibility in, 28, 32, 33 ghosts, 20, 26, 28, 32, 33 juridical metaphors in, 24, 25–6 magic, 27 matter/materialism, 26–32 memory/imagination elided, 27, 30 performative, 19, 21, 25–6, 27, 32–5 promising, 32–3 referential fixity, 33, 35 representational trickery in, 33, 35 resolutive-compositive method and making monsters in, 26–7

social contract, 22, 32, 33–5 status of Hobbes’s fictions, 20–1, 22–3, 26, 31, 34–5 Honig, Bonnie, 55, 65, 161, 171n1 human nature, 23, 40, 42–4, 48, 52, 61, 120, 155–6 Hume, David, 22 idealism, 13, 74, 78, 79, 82, 84–5, 92–3, 95–6, 168 ideologies, 82, 86, 91–7, 99, 152, 160, 168, 170 imagination creativity, 2–3, 9, 14, 48, 63 knowledge, 5–6, 9, 30 modes of imagining, 4, 12, 19, 26–7, 55, 57–8, 62, 65, 69, 70, 74 intelligibility, 2–3, 20, 21, 24–8, 31, 32, 37, 61–2, 65, 91, 94–7, 104, 108, 121, 122–3, 128–30, 167 Irigaray, Luce, 2, 116, 169, 194n15 Jacobson, Norman, 6–7 Jameson, Fredric, 92–3, 152 Kant, Immanuel, 57–74 ascetic subjectivities, production of, 58, 68, 69 autonomy/heteronomy in, 61, 62, 70–2 disciplinary fictions in, 57, 58 ethics and epistemology in, 58, 66 foundational, 58–9, 61, 67, 69, 71–2 hierarchical binaries in, 58, 69, 74 narrative, 58–63, 65–6, 70, 73 philosophy, troubled status, 66 purposiveness, assumption of, 64, 65, 67–8, 70 reason and rationality in, 61, 62–3, 65, 66, 67, 70–3 see also categorical imperative; moral law Keenan, Thomas reading, 9 removal of foundations as constitutive of politics, 9 see also undecidability legislator, the always-already fictive, 5–7

224 / index legislator, the—continued creative epistemologies, 5–7, 50, 53, 54, 135–6 epistemic privilege of, 7 master trope of political theory, 5, 79, 134 social power of, 7, 52–3 see also Jacobson, Norman; Nietzsche, Friedrich; political theory; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Levitas, Ruth, 150, 153, 172n21 literary theory, 9–12; see also fictions: fiction/theory hierarchies; oppositional thought Lyotard, Jean-François grand récits, 4 magic, 27, 32, 35, 64–5 de Man, Paul problem of reference in Rousseau, 43–4 see also Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Marcos, Subcommandante, 149, 162–4, 170 dignity, 163–4 wisdom, 170 see also Zapatistas Marin, Louis, 153, 159 Marx, Karl as activist, 82, 97 epistemological break, 81–2 post-representational, 97 on power, 92, 95, 97 see also ideologies; materialism, intelligibility of materialism, intelligibility of in Derrida, 98–100 in Hobbes, 20, 27–30 in Marx, 82, 93–7 in Nietzsche, 123 temporal complexity of “matter,” 37, 88, 99–100, 157 and utopia, opposed, 78–9, 81–2, 83, 91, 94 metaphysics, 9, 55, 66–9, 74, 112, 117, 118, 121, 126, 152, 160; see also coding of the political Miller, J. Hillis, 69, 72 story-telling, contingency of, 14

modernity, 4 and political theory, 4, 21–2, 23–5, 39–40, 47–8, 55, 56, 149 moral law, 57–74; see also categorical imperative; Kant, Immanuel morality, 39, 40, 45, 57–74, 85, 111, 116, 126–30, 137–8 Moylan, Tom, 152, 155–6, 171n3 narrative, 58–65, 68, 70, 73, 85–6, 104–5, 114–19, 125, 128–32, 139, 142, 160 rational ordering discourse, 4 and social contract theory, 22 theory, 3, 4, 10, 14, 55 see also fictions: fiction/theory hierarchies natural condition, 21–32, 39–49, 60, 123; see also human nature nature state of nature as determining exterior, 22–3, 44, 123 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 103–43 affirmation in thought, 121, 132, 139–40, 162, 170 always already fictionalizing, 119–21, 123, 126–32 asceticism, 111–14, 125, 127 becoming, 114, 127, 133, 139–42 beyond good and evil, 115–17, 125, 131 “clever animals” and the fable of knowledge, 126–8 dissociative logics, critique of, 113, 132, 139 dreaming, 128–32 eternal recurrence, 138–42 fetishism, defined, 112–13, 114, 127 the fragment, 108–10, 143 the friend, 138–9 interpretative problems of, 108–17 metaphysics, critique of, 112–13, 118, 121, 125 naturalization and normativity, critique of, 121–3, 124 nihilism, 118–34 perspectivism, 112–13, 124–5 philosophical mythologies, 109, 113, 128 post-representational thought, 116, 123–4, 136, 141 referential fixity, critique of, 112–14, 116

index / 225 ressentiment, 126, 128, 133, 137 Stirner, Max, 124, 131 textuality in, 105, 108–17 transformative, 123 wisdom contra knowledge, 111–13 see also God: God’s grammar, living in shadows of dead God; ontology: errors; slave moralities; subjectivity: fictive/utopian, reactive not-yet, 2, 12, 56, 74, 153–61, 163, 170 ontology determining exterior, 22–3, 123 errors, 125–30 and morality, 123 oppositional thought fiction/reality binaries, 8, 9, 44, 55, 78–82, 95–7, 123, 150–3 fiction/theory hierarchies, 3–4, 8, 9, 58, 116, 131, 138 see also fictive mode of theorizing; materialism, intelligity of: and utopia, opposed performative Hobbes’s reading as, 19, 21, 24–5, 32, 35 philosophical atheism, 13, 21, 85, 122 political theory canon of, 14, 37–8, 133 claims to power of, 1–7, 12, 21–2, 23, 50, 97, 105, 147, 167, 171n1 disciplinary conception of politics, 1–7 future-oriented imagination, 2, 147 haunted, 77, 168 programmatic, legislative, authoritative, 1–7, 22, 23, 26, 55, 79, 90, 103–5, 134, 161, 165 textuality of, 7–10, 40, 105, 108, 110–11 see also creative epistemologies of possibility; epistemologies of “the given”; fictions, dual work of; fictive theories; foundations; legislator, the possibility, 2, 5, 10, 12, 13, 14–15, 32, 37–8, 52, 74, 105, 123, 131–2, 135–6, 139–40, 142, 147–65, 167–70 postmodern, the, 4, 120, 169

post-representational thought, 2, 11, 20, 32, 35, 52, 55, 77–80, 90–1, 97, 98–100, 104, 123, 168–70 emancipatory knowledges, 78–9, 107, 153, 167–70 politics of, 77–80, 98–100 as transformative praxis, 123, 167–70 see also anticipatory thought; fictive theories power future as alterity, 135–6 promising, 20, 30, 32–4, 53–4, 98, 158; see also representation; social contract reading transformational, 9, 11–12, 19, 21, 37–8, 108–17 real, the, 77–101; see also Derrida, Jacques; Marx, Karl; Rorty, Richard; Stirner, Max reflexivity in political theory, 8, 12, 19–20, 111–15, 130–2, 165 reification, 1, 6, 14, 47, 48, 54, 56, 87–9, 93–5, 105, 127, 130, 132, 134, 142, 148, 151, 155, 162, 164, 165, 169; see also epistemologies of “the given”; political theory: programmatic, legislative, authoritative representation referential fixity, 13, 32–3, 34–5, 37, 48–9, 54, 56, 87–9, 91, 95, 98–100, 107, 110–16, 168 representational stability, 20, 34, 89 responsibility, 9, 100, 112, 123, 162; see also Cornell, Drucilla; deconstruction Rorty, Richard apolitical, 80–1, 100, 168 post-representational epistemology, 80–1, 97 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 37–56 affective fictionalizing in, 45 bad fictives, 39, 44, 47–8 bourgeois dependency, 39, 40, 46–7 catachresis in, 55 “catastrophic” theory of history, 39, 48, 178n7 “clever animals,” 38–9, 45

226 / index Rousseau, Jean-Jacques—continued different modes of fictionalizing in, 39, 44, 48, 55–6 epistemological aporias, 39, 41 epistemological disclaimer, 41, 49–50 fictional status of natural condition, 22, 42–4 fictive mode, 38, 39, 44, 48–9, 50–2, 55–6 “forcing freedom” (Affeldt), 50, 54 fraudulent social contract, 47–8 General Will as not reducible to law, 53–4 history-writing as fabulation, 43–4 humanity as distortion, unnatural, 39, 42–3, 48–9, 52 inequality as unnatural, 46–7 inventing the fable of humanity, 39, 56 metaleptic narrative, 45–6, 51 natural freedom and compassion, 44–6 nature vis-à-vis human possibility, 37–8, 42, 43, 47, 48–9 perfectibility, ambivalence of, 40, 46, 48 radical innocence of natural humanity, 44–6 social contract, 49–54 see also legislator, the: epistemic privilege, social power Seery, John E., 6, 82, 97 Simons, Jon, 174n49 slave moralities, 111, 135, 137–8, 139 ascetic fictions, 58, 68, 69, 111–12, 127–8 social contract, see Hobbes, Thomas; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques specters the spectral, 77, 80, 84–6, 88, 100 spooks, 26, 61, 78, 84–91 see also Stirner, Max Starobinski, Jean, 40, 44 Stirner, Max, 77–91 insurrectionary politics, 90 logic of domination in, 84–9, 90 property, possession distinguished, 88–90 referential fixity, critique of, 83–4, 89

rejection of disciplinary fictions, 83–4, 88–9 strategies of resistance, 78, 90, 170 subjectivity, fictive, 87–8 subjectivity, reactive, 86 transformative praxis, problems of, 90 subjectivity disciplined, 29–31, 58, 61–4, 69, 84, 86, 89, 113, 127–32 fictive/utopian, 29, 155–61, 170 reactive, 86, 137–8, 163 Swenson, James, 48, 49 telling stories, 7, 23, 69, 104–5, 130, 160, 169 temporality, 3, 10–11, 15, 29, 33, 37, 55, 74, 87–8, 112, 123–5, 140–1, 147, 149, 150–64, 168–70 textuality, 10–12, 105, 107, 108–17; see also Barthes, Roland undecidability, 8–10, 74 condition of possibility of politics, 9 see also responsibility utopia as alterity and critique, 49, 150, 152–3, 158 anti-utopian, 20, 28–9, 31, 37, 152, 155, 174n2 disruptive, 2–3, 51, 148, 150–1, 167 emancipatory knowledges, 78–9, 107, 153, 167–70 good/no place, 43, 150, 152 as impossibility (productive), 152–3 and messianism, compared, 162 as prefigurative and transformative, 150, 161, 165, 170 as promise, 158 see also Bloch, Ernst; utopian theory utopian method, 153–4 in Rousseau, 37–8, 43, 49, 51, 52, 55 utopian theory as metaphysical, 152, 160 programmatic, legislative mode, 50, 150 utopian ethos, 90, 133, 138, 169–70 see also fictive theories

index / 227 Vanegeim, Raoul, 89, 132–3, 156, 169 Wolin, Sheldon creative epistemologies, 5–6, 167, 169 epic political theory, 5–6 world-creation, 19, 23, 28

Yeatman, Anna, 22–3 Young Hegelians, 80–3 Zapatistas dignity, 163–4 see also Marcos, Subcommandante; not-yet