Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought: New Theories of the Political (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

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POWER AND POLITICS IN POSTSTRUCTURALIST THOUGHT Saul Newman

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Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought New theories of the political

Saul Newman

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Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought

This book explores the impact of poststructuralism on contemporary political theory by focusing on a number of problems and issues central to politics today. Drawing on the theoretical concerns brought to light by the ‘poststructuralist’ thinkers Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze and Max Stirner, Newman provides a critical examination of new developments in contemporary political theory: post-Marxism, discourse analysis, new theories of ideology and power, hegemony, radical democracy and psychoanalytic theory. He re-examines the political in light of these developments in theory to suggest new ways of thinking about politics through a reflection on the challenges that confront it. This volume will be of great interest to students of postmodernism and poststructuralist theory in political science, philosophy, sociology, philosophy and cultural studies. Saul Newman is a Research Fellow at UWA and a Lecturer in Politics at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. His research focuses on contemporary and Continental political and social theory. He is the author of From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power (Lexington 2001).

Routledge innovations in political theory

1 A Radical Green Political Theory Alan Carter 2 Rational Woman A feminist critique of dualism Raia Prokhovnik 3 Rethinking State Theory Mark J. Smith 4 Gramsci and Contemporary Politics Beyond pessimism of the intellect Anne Showstack Sassoon 5 Post-Ecologist Politics Social theory and the abdication of the ecologist paradigm Ingolfur Blühdorn 6 Ecological Relations Susan Board 7 The Political Theory of Global Citizenship April Carter 8 Democracy and National Pluralism Edited by Ferran Requejo 9 Civil Society and Democratic Theory Alternative voices Gideon Baker

10 Ethics and Politics in Contemporary Theory Between critical theory and post-Marxism Mark Devenney 11 Citizenship and Identity Towards a new republic John Schwarzmantel 12 Multiculturalism, Identity and Rights Edited by Bruce Haddock and Peter Sutch 13 Political Theory of Global Justice A cosmopolitan case for the world state Luis Cabrera 14 Democracy, Nationalism and Multiculturalism Edited by Ramón Maiz and Ferrán Requejo 15 Political Reconciliation Andrew Schaap 16 National Cultural Autonomy and its Contemporary Critics Edited by Ephraim Nimni 17 Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought New theories of the political Saul Newman

Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought New theories of the political

Saul Newman

First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2005 Saul Newman Typeset in Sabon by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-415-36456-6

To Fabienne

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements

Introduction

x xii

1

1

Politics of the ego: Stirner’s critique of liberalism

13

2

Ressentiment and radical politics

31

3

New reflections on the theory of power: a Lacanian perspective

51

Spectres of Stirner: a contemporary critique of ideology

68

5

Derrida’s deconstruction of authority

84

6

On the politics of violence: terror, sovereignty and law

100

7

Spectres of the uncanny: the ‘return of the repressed’ in politics

116

Towards a poststructuralist politics of universality

134

Conclusion

153

Notes Bibliography Index

162 166 172

4

8

Preface

The essays collected in this book are the product of my investigations, over the past few years, into the political implications of poststructuralist theory. They were written between 2000 and 2003, and have been published in different forms in various places (see Acknowledgements). In putting this book together, these essays have all undergone significant modification; however their general logic and argument have remained unchanged. To the extent that they are organized around specific themes and topics in poststructuralist political theory, they can be taken as separate interventions in their own right. However, to the extent that these essays also relate to one another and to some extent overlap, they can be seen as reflecting the underlying themes and arguments that run throughout the book. My hope is that they will be taken in both senses, and that the reader will forgive their inevitable limitations and repetitions. My aim in drawing together these disparate threads of my research was threefold. First, I wanted to show the way in which poststructuralist approaches could shed new light on conceptual categories central to contemporary political theory, and how political theory generally could benefit from a more sustained engagement with poststructuralism. The reception of poststructuralist ideas by the mainstream discipline of political theory has been at best sceptical. This is no doubt because poststructuralism forces us to think about politics in radically different ways, and seriously challenges many of the paradigms and assumptions that much of Anglo-American political theory is based on. However, this does not mean that the differences between the two perspectives are totally incommensurable. In this sense the book can be seen as partly a work of conceptual translation. This hitherto missed encounter between poststructuralism and the discipline of political theory has not always been the fault of the latter, however. There are a number of limitations, tensions and conceptual problems in poststructuralist theory itself which to some extent have impeded its engagement in political theory debates. So the second aim of the book was to identify and try to address some of these limitations. There is the need, for instance, for a more consistent understanding of subjectivity and

Preface

xi

agency in poststructuralist theory. There is also the need for some sort of outside – a ‘constitutive outside’ – to relations of power and discourse, which can serve as critical point of departure. However, the challenge has been to develop these possibilities within poststructuralist theory itself – that is, without relying on essentialist conceptions of the autonomous subject, or on absolute moral and rational foundations. It is here that I have also utilized insights from theoretical perspectives such as psychoanalysis, discourse analysis and post-Marxism. Third, my intention was also to explore the implications of poststructuralist theory for radical politics today. Radical left politics, after the fall of Marxism, has been left drifting in uncertain waters. In the face of the global hegemony of neo-liberal economics, many on the left have given up on the idea of emancipation and social transformation, leaving the radical political ground to be taken over by the far right. Indeed, many have argued that poststructuralism, with its scepticism about universal discourses or ‘metanarratives’, has contributed to this general political lassitude on the left. However, one of the central aims here is to show that not only is there a political and ethical commitment implicit in poststructuralist theory, but that it can lead to new understandings of egalitarian politics, individual autonomy and radical democracy. These sanguine hopes notwithstanding, radical politics faces serious challenges today from an aggressive reassertion of state sovereignty and an ideological conservatism that has become increasingly dominant since September 11. Also the dangers of the new ‘security’ paradigm that we are all living in today, in which the politics of fear and paranoia pervade social life, and in which new and unheard of forms of control and surveillance form the very parameters of our existence, must be more seriously reckoned with. I am writing this Preface in the weeks following George W. Bush’s re-election. We can only imagine the difficult times that lie ahead. Saul Newman November 2004

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the various people who have encouraged me and provided invaluable advice on my research over the years, including friends and colleagues in the Political Science Department at the University of Western Australia. Special thanks must go to the Discipline Chair, Dr Bruce Stone, for supporting this project and for allowing me generous use of the Department’s facilities. I would also like to acknowledge the following journals which have kindly granted me permission to reproduce previously published material of mine. The chapters below first appeared, in modified form, as articles in the following journals (the original title of the article has been provided where different from the chapter title): 1

2

3

4

5

6

‘Politics of the ego: Stirner’s critique of liberalism’. First published in Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy – CRISPP, Vol. 5 (3) Autumn 2002, pp. 1–26. [Reprinted with permission from Taylor & Francis Ltd. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals] ‘Ressentiment and radical politics’. First published under the title ‘Anarchism and the politics of Ressentiment’ in Theory and Event, Vol. 4 (3) 2000, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. ‘New reflections on the theory of power: a Lacanian perspective’. First published in Contemporary Political Theory, Vol. 3 (2) 2004: pp. 148–167. [Reprinted with permission from Palgrave Macmillan] ‘Spectres of Stirner: a contemporary critique of ideology’. First published in Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 6 (3) 2001: pp. 309–330. [Reprinted with permission from Taylor & Francis Ltd. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals] ‘Derrida’s deconstruction of authority’. First published in Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. 27 (3) 2001: pp. 1–20. [Reprinted with permission from Sage Publications Ltd] ‘On the politics of violence: terror, sovereignty and law’. Originally delivered at the Australasian Political Science Association Annual Conference in Hobart in 2003. First published under the title ‘Terror, sovereignty and law: on the politics of violence’ in German Law

Acknowledgements xiii

7

8

Journal, Vol. 5 (5) 2004. [Reprinted with permission from the Editors of German Law Journal] ‘Spectres of the uncanny: The “return of the repressed” in politics’. Originally delivered at the Third Essex Conference in Political Theory at Essex University in 2002. First published in Telos, No. 124 Summer 2002: pp. 115–130. [Reprinted with permission from 2003 Telos Press Ltd, All Rights Reserved] ‘Towards a poststructuralist politics of universality’. Originally delivered at the International Political Science Association XVIII World Congress in Quebec in 2000. First published under the title ‘Universalism/ particularism: Towards a poststructuralist politics of universality’ in New Formations 41, The Future of Dialogue, Autumn 2000: pp 94–108. [Reprinted with permission from Lawrence & Wishart, London, Autumn 2000]

Introduction

The aim of this book is to explore the implications of poststructuralist theory for politics. It seeks to apply poststructuralist thinking to central conceptual categories in politics, showing how these might be rethought and taken in new directions. However, the book is not intended as a survey of all aspects of poststructuralist thought or of the thinkers grouped under this label. Rather, the essays collected here should be seen as a series of interventions around specific themes and conceptual problems in political theory – themes and problems that a poststructuralist approach can shed new light on. These relate to topics such as liberalism, rights, power, ideology, ethics, subjectivity, sovereignty, violence and collective identity. I will suggest that poststructuralist theoretical perspectives allow an interrogation of the discursive and conceptual limits of these ideas, revealing their heterogeneities, paradoxes and contradictions, and thus showing how they might be reinterpreted. A second aim of the book is to understand the implications of poststructuralism for radical politics specifically. Poststructuralism poses certain key questions about the future of radical politics in the wake of Marxism – questions that I shall endeavour to address here. Moreover, poststructuralist theory can itself be seen as working within the paradigm of radical and anti-authoritarian politics. This is not only because many poststructuralist thinkers emerged from Marxist and Althusserian theoretical traditions. It is also because a poststructuralist approach is aimed at undermining, or at least making problematic, the claims to legitimacy and ‘normality’ of dominant political and social institutions, discourses and practices – those which we commonly regard as normal, legitimate and, indeed, ‘natural’. It does this by exposing or unmasking the violence, coercion and domination behind these institutions, showing how their consistency is maintained through the more or less arbitrary exclusion of other possibilities. In other words, it shows that there is nothing inevitable or natural about the way we do and think about politics: what we perceive to be our political reality today is a contingent historical formation that has emerged through the suppression of alternative realities. Therefore, we might say that poststructuralism has an anti-authoritarian ethos – an

2 Introduction implicit commitment to question the truth claims of any form of political, social and even textual authority. Indeed, as I shall show, poststructuralism might be likened to a kind of anarchism – but an anarchism of a specific kind. Therefore the third, and more implicit, aim in this book is to suggest that, contrary to prevailing criticism, poststructuralism does not amount to an apolitical and amoral nihilism. Rather, a poststructuralist approach is ethically and politically engaged. However, this engagement or commitment is not always obvious – it needs to be teased out, emphasized, and this is precisely my aim here. Moreover, there are certain conceptual blind spots or ‘aporias’ – to use Derrida’s term – in poststructuralist theory, which present obstacles to its political efficacy, and which I seek to redress here. These include the need for a more consistent place for the subject, as well as the need for an ‘outside’ to structures of power, discourse and language. These, and other, problems emerge in different ways throughout the essays in this book. My contention here is that they can be resolved within the discursive limits of poststructuralism itself – that is, they can be resolved without falling back onto essential foundations, such as a universal conception of the subject or absolute moral and rational positions. Poststructuralism’s rejection of these metaphysical foundations has perhaps accounted for its rather frosty reception in the mainstream discipline of political theory, where it is usually regarded with suspicion, if not outright hostility. Instead, poststructuralist ideas tend to find a home in disciplines outside politics, such as cultural studies, literary criticism and film theory. Indeed, there seems to be a dissonance between usually AngloAmerican dominated or ‘analytical’ political theory, and ‘continental’ poststructuralist thought. The former seems more concerned with devising watertight moral and rational bases for political decisions – decisions which usually revolve around questions concerning the public sphere, such as rights or the distribution of ‘goods’. The latter, on the other hand, is more interested in how things work or how things come to be: how might we come to be asking these questions about politics, and not others; what are the investments of power and the relations of exclusion that are involved with asking these questions and limiting ourselves to certain political institutions and discourses? For instance, in mainstream political theory, liberalism functions as a kind of meta-ideology or ‘metanarrative’; it has become an embedded, universal discourse that determines the conceptual limits of the practice of politics and defines its very terms of enquiry. However, a poststructuralist approach might be more interested in interrogating or deconstructing the discourse of liberalism itself, questioning its assumed ‘neutrality’ and universality, and unveiling the moral and rational assumptions and particular modes of subjectivity that it is based on. Therefore, this book shows how poststructuralism might intervene in debates in political theory, not by conforming to terms of reference that are dominant in this discipline, but by redefining them.

Introduction 3 So what exactly is poststructuralism? There is no easy answer to this question. It is not a coherent body of thought: rather, like all theoretical ‘paradigms’, it refers to a heterogeneous field of thinkers who are as marked by their difference from one another as much as by their similarity. In this book, for reasons of convenience as much as anything else, I am adopting a broad understanding of poststructuralism, and am including here theoretical strategies such as deconstruction, discourse analysis, and post-Marxism. I will be discussing not only thinkers generally described as ‘poststructuralist’, such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, but also devoting a great deal of attention to Max Stirner – who predates the thinkers listed above by over a century – seeing him as a sort of ‘proto-poststructuralist’; as well as discussing more contemporary thinkers who follow in their wake, such as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, Étienne Balibar, Judith Butler, William ˇ izˇek. These ‘post-poststructuralist’ Connolly, Wendy Brown and Slavoj Z thinkers are important to my project here because they tend to focus more explicitly on political questions. However, it is important to remind the reader that this is not intended as a comprehensive account of poststructuralist theory, and, with the exception of Stirner whom I take as a theoretical point of departure for my project, there is not much emphasis on these individual thinkers themselves. Rather, the focus is on certain themes, concepts, categories and theoretical questions which I consider to be relevant to politics today, and which I believe these thinkers can, in different ways, illuminate. In other words, my approach to these thinkers is very specific and, rather than writing about them as such, I am using their ideas to solve specific problems. However, we have still not answered our question – what is poststructuralism? Poststructuralism can be seen as a theoretical strategy – or series of strategies – that responds to, and engages with, what has been termed the ‘postmodern condition’. So what, then, is the postmodern condition? Postmodernity or postmodernism are ambiguous terms which tend to be bandied about rather meaninglessly. This is not helped by the fact that postmodernism seems to influence a seemingly endless variety of fields: architecture, aesthetics, social theory, philosophy, politics, etc. It is, of course, the political aspects and implications of postmodernity that I am interested in here – what is termed the ‘postmodern political condition’. However, we should not imagine that postmodernity is an actual historical stage in which we now ‘do’ politics, art, philosophy, and so on. Rather, it has to be seen as a certain critical position or perspective on modernity itself: the postmodern ‘sensibility’ might be understood as the experience of living in the present – that is, living in the period that we call modernity – while at the same time, as Heller and Fehér put it, being after or posthistoire (1988: 1). Jean-François Lyotard famously summed up the postmodern condition as an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ (1984: xxiv). In other words, what defines the postmodern condition is a critical attitude

4 Introduction towards the grand ideals and discourses that emerged with the Enlightenment and which came to characterize modernity. For instance, postmodernity is sceptical about the rationalist epistemologies, positivist convictions and categorical imperatives of the Enlightenment. The idea that there is a universal rational and moral position that is absolute, and that the world’s problems can be solved through the application of rational thought and scientific ideas, is regarded as an outdated Eurocentric world view. Furthermore, life in post-industrial societies is seen as too pluralistic, ambiguous, complex and fragmented to sustain this idea of a universal rational and moral position. In political terms, the postmodern condition is associated with the abandonment of the notion of the universal rational subject who could act as an autonomous and self-willed agent in the political sphere. Instead, the subject is seen to be opaque even to himself – rather than transparent and unified, as the Cartesian model would suggest. Moreover, the subject is shown to be affected, and indeed constituted, by conditions that are often outside his control; there can be no strict separation between the subject and the objective world. Furthermore, rationality and morality can no longer serve as the absolute foundations for the subject’s political and ethical judgement and decision making (Torffing 1999: 61). This is also related to the breakdown of sites of collective decision making, and a general fragmentation of the political and social field into a multitude of incommensurable identities and ideological perspectives. This has had an impact on radical politics in particular, where the rise of the new social movements around issues such as gender, ethnicity and sexual identity, as well as environmental causes, took the place of Marxist class struggles over economic issues. The decline in Marxist projects, symbolized most vividly by the collapse of the Communist systems nearly two decades ago, was the culmination of transformations in capitalism from industrial to post-industrial modes of production, and the concomitant decline in importance, at least in Western societies, of the proletariat as the privileged revolutionary identity. Radical politics has also faced new challenges from the Right, not only with the hegemony of neo-liberal economics, but also with the re-emergence of ethnic and religious fundamentalisms, as well as what might be seen as new forms of ‘postmodern’ racism, in which the logic of difference and incommensurability is used to justify the separation of ethnic groups. How did poststructuralism develop as a response to this condition of postmodernity? Poststructuralism, as the name suggests, came out of the theoretical movement known as structuralism. Central to structuralism is the idea that experience or ‘reality’ is structured primarily through relations of language: that is, we understand ourselves and the world around us only through an external linguistic structure that determines meaning. Ferdinand de Saussure, for instance, saw language in terms of a system of linguistic signs composed of signifier (the material sign itself) and signified

Introduction 5 (the object to which it referred). However, the crucial thing here is that there is no necessary or essential relation between the two – it is only a matter of convention that we use a particular signifier, like ‘table’, to refer to a particular object (see Finlayson and Valentine 2002: 8–9). What really determines the signifier is not the object that is arbitrarily attached to it, but rather its relation to other signifiers in a fixed system of differences. Louis Althusser applied structuralism to an understanding of the political and social field, seeing it as a symbolic dimension in which identities were fixed – or overdetermined – within an ideological system that bestowed meaning upon them. The virtue of structuralism was that it avoided essentialist understandings, in which identity and experience were seen as being grounded in an objective intelligible ‘substance’ or ‘reality’ that was internal to it – the ‘thing in itself’. Structuralism showed that there was no such thing as the ‘thing in itself’, and that what really mattered was the way that identity and experience were determined by an external structure. However, the problem with this was that because the structure was so totalizing and determining, it could be seen as a kind of essence in itself. In other words, structuralism came increasingly to be seen as a new form of essentialism or foundationalism, in which identity was once again founded on an absolute ground (see Peters 1997). As Derrida says: ‘The entire history of the concept of the structure . . . must be thought of as a series of substitutions of centre for centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre’ (1978b: 279–280). In other words, structuralism had merely replaced the absolute ground of metaphysics with the absolute ground of the structure itself. This could be seen in Althusserian structuralist Marxism, where the capitalist economy determined in the last instance the entire field of social and political relations and symbolic identifications. Now it is important to understand that poststructuralism does not reject structuralism per se but, rather, radicalizes it. In other words, it does not reject the fundamental insight of structuralism that identities are constructed discursively through external relations of language: it does not return to a pre-structuralist essentialism. Rather, we could say that poststructuralism takes structuralism to its logical conclusion: in order to avoid the charge of essentialism and foundationalism that was levelled at structuralism, the unity, consistency and stability of the structure itself must be questioned. This ‘deconstruction’ of the structure has taken two basic forms in poststructuralist thought. The first position, exemplified by thinkers like Foucault and Deleuze, suggests that rather than there being a single, centralized structure, there are instead multiple and heterogeneous discourses, power relations or ‘assemblages of desire’ that are constitutive of identity, and are immanent throughout the social field. The second position, exemplified by thinkers like Derrida and Lacan, places more emphasis on the structure itself, but sees it as indeterminate, incomplete and unstable. One way to think about this is through Gödel’s

6 Introduction ‘incompleteness theorem’, which states that in any given branch of mathematics there will always be certain propositions that cannot be verified using the axioms of that particular branch, and which require going outside the system, thus creating ever larger systems. Simply put, there can be no closed, complete or self-contained system or structure, because there will always be elements within this system whose identity can only be established by something outside it. The structure can therefore only be sustained by a structural element that stands outside it and is incommensurable with it. However, this excluded element is not an essential identity or a metaphysical point of departure that emerges from beyond the structure: rather it has to be seen as the internal limit of the structure itself. It is something that is, paradoxically, inside and outside the structure simultaneously, and it is the point around which identity is both constituted and destabilized. Lacan’s notion of the ‘real’, as that which is excluded from the symbolic order, might be seen as an example of this logic, as might Derrida’s notion of ‘aporia’ as an internal contradiction within a textual structure that opens onto an outside. These different approaches will be explained in the book itself, but what they are directed towards is the idea of a ‘constitutive outside’, which will become a crucial theoretical figure in my argument: this is the idea that there is an outside to any structure, which is both incommensurable with the inside of the structure, but at the same time the condition for its emergence and identity. In other words, the outside neither eliminates nor reaffirms the structure, but rather makes it undecidable. To give an example of this logic of undecidability, Derrida talks about the aporetic structure of the law and the way that, logically speaking, the law has to be founded on something that precedes it – that is, an extra-legal violence (see Derrida 1992). What this undecidability points to is the contamination between the inside and the outside, a contamination that makes the border of any identity – including, and especially, political and social identities – blurred and indeterminate. There is a certain tension in poststructuralist theory between these two ‘positions’ – a tension that will be brought out in this book. One of the ways this tension emerges, as I shall show, is over Foucault’s theory of power, and whether it allows for an outside from which resistance can be conceived. However, despite this tension, both poststructuralist positions are united by an anti-foundationalism – that is, a rejection of essentialism and the idea of an absolute moral and rational ground. If we take poststructuralism seriously, then, the practice of politics cannot be seen as being based on notions of a universal autonomous subject and unquestioned moral and rational criteria. Rather, politics must be seen as being based on an antagonistic and unpredictable dimension that both constitutes, and destabilizes, its limits. This is the dimension that Chantal Mouffe refers to as ‘the political’ (2000: 101). Poststructuralism is also characterized not so much by the desire to eradicate or completely overthrow existing political institutions and identities, but rather to unmask

Introduction 7 them, revealing the cracks, uncertainties and heterogeneities in their structure, and to show how these might give rise to new political meanings. To completely overthrow an existing centre or structure of power always risks inventing another in its place. In other words, in poststructuralist theory there is an anxiety over the ‘place of power’, which is the structural tendency of power to reinvent itself in different forms. Therefore, a poststructuralist political approach involves a sort of permanent suspension or problematization of institutions and discourses. Nevertheless, because of its questioning of moral and rational foundations, poststructuralism has been criticized from many different quarters – from liberals to critical theorists and Marxists. While Anglo-American analytical theory mostly ignores poststructuralism, believing that it has no real relevance to politics – which it sees as a purely rational and predictable pursuit – other thinkers, such as Jürgen Habermas and Nancy Fraser, who want to remain faithful to the Enlightenment tradition of firm moral and rational conditions for political action, have suggested that because poststructuralism rejects, or at least questions, these guidelines, it is ethically vacuous and politically impotent. This is a well worn argument and it is not my intention to devote much time to it here. However, aspects of my argument in this book can be seen as a response to such a criticism. For instance, I suggest that poststructuralist theory can remain politically and ethically committed, while at the same time questioning absolute moral and rational categories, and that the challenge of politics today is to take political and ethical decisions in the absence of clear guidelines. Moreover, I show that poststructuralism does not reject the Enlightenment outright, as many seem to suggest. On the contrary, thinkers like Foucault and Derrida actually seek to renew the radical political legacy of the Enlightenment through a rethinking of its discursive limits. However, a second criticism of poststructuralism has emerged which is more interesting. It has been made recently by thinkers such as Terry Eagleton, who contends that poststructuralism is no longer radical or subversive, and that it has actually become incorporated into the dominant politico-ideological system. This is because poststructuralism’s rejection of firm foundations and essentialist identities reflects the very logic of capitalism itself. As Eagleton argues, capitalism also has a disdain for fixed identities and foundations (2003: 118). In other words, perhaps there is something disingenuous about the poststructuralist critique – the ‘system’ itself has become ‘postmodernized’ and now operates through the logic of difference and the transgression of essentialist identities. This is a point ˇ izˇek, who has called for a return to a that has also been made by Slavoj Z quasi-Marxist critique of capitalism, and a ‘return’ even to Leninist forms of revolutionary politics (1997). Both thinkers suggest that poststructuralism is dead, and that it no longer offers any radical alternatives to capitalism – indeed, it seems to be perfectly accommodated within its ideological structures.

8 Introduction There are several ways of responding to this very important critique. It is in many respects valid: capitalism has become postmodernized and, as Deleuze and Guattari said, it operates through the ‘deterritorialization’ of fixed identities and the transgression of boundaries in its ruthless pursuit of profit. At the same time, however, we should not get too carried away by this: as Deleuze and Guattari also said, for every deterritorialization there is a ‘reterritorialization’ (1984: 34). That is, where capitalism transgresses borders and destabilizes fixed identities and authoritarian structures – such as the family, the state and the nation – it also in turn, reinforces them or invents them in new forms, because it needs these social arrangements in order to function and to legitimize itself. We can see this quite clearly in the way that the modern state, particularly in its new, postSeptember 11 ‘security’ mode, polices national borders more heavily than ever before. Borders of new kinds are being created all the time, thus generating a tension with the capitalist drive towards the free flow of labour and capital across borders. Of course, it is the ‘illegal’ migrant whose movements are restricted, rather than those of the transnational CEO; nevertheless it points to a tension internal to capitalism itself between the desire to transgress borders of all kinds, and the desire to create new borders and exclusions – usually more vicious and cruel – in their place. Moreover, we are living at a time when the forces of conservatism and religious fundamentalism – both Christian and Islamic – are becoming dominant once again; where the gains over the last two centuries in civil liberties and human rights are being rolled back;1 where politicians – and not just in the United States – talk openly about the importance of God in their lives; where religious and ‘family’ values are once again back on the social and political agenda; and where many people are actually demanding, or at least willingly submitting to, more intense security, control and surveillance measures – measures which are inevitably leading to their own domination. In a sense, this is a new, perverted form of religious conservatism – one that is itself born of the postmodern condition, as a reaction to it; nevertheless, there are many people in many parts of the world for whom God is not dead, for whom even modernity, let alone postmodernity, is morally unbearable, and who really believe in a moral ground that is absolute and non-negotiable. So while poststructuralism might have become part of the dominant discourse in university cultural studies departments, this is certainly not the case in the Middle East, for instance, or in ‘bible belt’ USA. There is, however, an aspect of this critique that I will take on and will seek to address more thoroughly. This refers to the question of universality ˇ izˇek both argue that because in poststructuralist theory. Eagleton and Z poststructuralism is a theoretical logic that emphasizes difference over universality, it cannot develop a radical political response to capitalism, which also operates through the logic of difference and particularity. While I agree that the ‘politics of difference’ does not pose a real threat to capitalism, I try to show, particularly in the last chapter, that poststructuralism

Introduction 9 does not necessarily lead to this form of politics, and that there is the possibility of developing new and radical forms of political universality within the anti-foundationalist logic of poststructuralist theory. One of the questions raised by the book, then, is whether or not poststructuralism can be used as a theoretical basis for a political critique of capitalism. I suggest that it can, and argue that the global anti-capitalist movement – whose emergence is one of the most significant developments in radical politics in decades – can be seen as a form of a form of poststructuralist politics in action. So, far from being dead, poststructuralism continues to be relevant to political analysis and critique, as well as to radical political struggles, today.

Outline Chapter 1 explores Max Stirner’s critique of liberalism, which he sees as the political articulation of Enlightenment humanism. I use this critique to investigate one of the central paradoxes in liberalism: that the liberal discourse of rights, freedom and individual autonomy is based on a series of practices that can be considered ‘illiberal’, and which involve more subtle forms of domination and normalization. That is to say, liberalism is based on a certain understanding of the subject which, as Stirner shows, is a discursive formation produced through various disciplinary and normalizing practices that tie the individual to an essentialist identity – Man, the human or the ‘citizen’. For Stirner, then, the problem with liberalism is not, as communitarians argue, that it allows too much individual autonomy, but that it does not allow enough. However, I suggest here that Stirner’s critique of liberalism does not mean that we should abandon liberal notions of rights and autonomy, but rather that their discursive limits should be re-examined so that they can be extended and articulated in different ways. Here I try to develop a politics of ‘post-liberalism’ – in other words, a non-essentialist form of liberal politics that allows greater scope for plurality and individual autonomy. In Chapter 2, I turn to the question of radical politics and how poststructuralist theory might approach it. Here I choose anarchism rather than Marxism, because the commitment of the former to anti-authoritarian politics is close, in some ways, to the politico-ethical position of poststructuralism itself. Taking Nietzsche’s critique of anarchism and his theory of ressentiment as my point of departure, I suggest that in the classical anarchism of thinkers like Bakunin and Kropotkin, there is a Manichean conceptual division between a ‘natural’ and immanently rational and moral social order, and the order of political power, which is seen as ‘artificial’, immoral and irrational. There is a strange paradox, then, in the revolutionary imaginary of anarchism, which is that although the subject is oppressed by power – in other words by the political order of the state – he is, at the same time, uncontaminated by it because he emerges

10 Introduction from an altogether different ontological order. Using Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s theories of power, in which the subject is constructed within power’s limits, I deconstruct this conceptual division in anarchism, showing that there can be no pure, uncontaminated point of departure from which to imagine a revolution emerging. Instead, the politics of emancipation must take place within the world of power, and can no longer rely on essentialist and rationalist foundations. Power is a central concept, not only in radical politics, but also in the study of political institutions and social relations more generally. One of the central debates in politics has been over how power is to be understood: is it, for instance, a capacity of individual agents, or should it be understood as a function of social structures? Foucault’s radical intervention in this debate is well known: power is neither a capacity to act, nor can it be concentrated within a central institution or structure. Rather, power relations are plural and emerge from a multitude of points throughout the social field; and, moreover, power is productive rather than repressive, producing even the very subject who at the same time resists it. However, as I show in Chapter 3, Foucault’s theory presents some conceptual problems: 1) if power is ‘everywhere’, then it loses definitional clarity as a concept because it can no longer be differentiated from other social relations; and, 2) if there is no outside to power, then how does resistance to power emerge? Therefore, the effect of Foucault’s theory of power has been, at best, ambiguous for radical political theory. The theoretical dilemma that arises is this: while there needs to be some sort of conceptual outside to power, at the same time we have to avoid falling back onto essentialist ontological foundations and rational epistemological positions. Here I turn to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to understand not only the subjective dimension that both binds itself to power and resists it, but also to develop a new approach to power, in which the ‘real’ can be seen as an internal limit to the symbolic order of power – conceptually limiting it and opening a place for resistance to it. Similar problems have emerged with the concept of ideology, and the question I deal with in Chapter 4, is whether there can be a poststructuralist theory of ideology. The concept of ideology has been rejected by both Foucault and Deleuze, who saw it as involving essentialist and rationalist assumptions. However, can we afford to jettison the whole problematic of ideology, particularly today when we seem to be surrounded by new and disturbing ideological paradigms? Is it not clear that power relations and institutional practices can only be fully understood if we also take into account the ideological dimension that legitimizes them and gives them a symbolic consistency? Therefore I try to retain the notion of ideology, but rethink it in a poststructuralist way that avoids Marxist ideas of ‘false consciousness’. Here I turn to Stirner’s theory of ideological interpellation, in which the subject is constituted through humanist ideology – around the idea of essence – and yet there is, at the same, a kind of spectral excess in

Introduction 11 his notion of the ‘un-man’, which escapes ideology and forms a dimension of resistance to it. In order, then, for poststructuralism to be politically and ethically engaged, in order for a politics of resistance to emerge, there needs to be some sort of ‘outside’ to structures and mechanisms of power, ideology and discourse – an outside that, at the same time, avoids essentialist foundations. In Chapter 5, I explore Derrida’s idea of deconstruction as a politico-ethical strategy that seeks to locate this outside from within the textual structures of philosophy, as well as the political structures of the law and sovereignty. Deconstruction reveals the heterogeneities, contradictions and aporias in discursive identities, showing the way in which these identities are constituted through the exclusion of a particular structural element that they at the same time rely upon – a relationship that contaminates them and denies them closure. This logic also has political implications, and I show how it might be used to undermine institutions and political structures that we tend to see as legitimate and consistent. Moreover, I argue here that Derrida seeks to avoid the ‘place of power’ by deconstructing the binary of inversion/subversion, suggesting that radical political action must involve a combining or ‘weaving’ together of these two strategies. Deconstructive politics can be seen as a sort of responsible or ethical anarchy – that is, an anti-authoritarian politics and ethics that is committed to ideas of justice, democracy, rights and emancipation. Chapter 6 pursues a hidden link unearthed by Derrida in the previous chapter between violence, law and sovereignty, and applies this insight to an exploration of terrorism. Here I develop a poststructuralist critique of the contemporary discourse on terrorism – for which the ongoing ‘war on terror’ is the ultimate referent and consequence – a discourse that has become so pervasive and hegemonic that its political dangers are often ignored. I argue that there can be no clear, analytical distinction between the violence perpetrated by terrorists as non-state actors, and the violence perpetrated by the state itself. For example, the usual distinction between legality and illegality does not hold here because, as I show through thinkers like Benjamin and Agamben, sovereignty – and the violence it entails – ultimately stands outside the law, thus sharing a paradoxical proximity to terrorism itself. Moreover, I explore not only the relationship of violence to law, but also to power, developing Foucault’s thesis that power itself is a form of violence and warfare. Ultimately Georges Bataille’s idea of heterogeneity is used to characterize contemporary forms of terrorist violence as involving a nihilistic and quasi-religious politics of the spectacle. However, in order for poststructuralism itself to avoid the charge of nihilism, it must find a place for the subject. The question of agency is central to politics and ethics; there must be some understanding of the subject who comes to identify himself in a certain way, and who can engage in political and ethical activity. In Chapter 7, I try to develop a

12 Introduction more substantive place for subjectivity in poststructuralist theory, and again the challenge here is to do so without reverting to essentialist assumptions about the subject that are so common to analytical political theory approaches – those which see the practice of politics as based on rational and utility-maximizing models of behaviour from which the dimension of the ‘passions’ has been entirely excluded. Instead, I argue that it is precisely in this domain of the passions that we should locate the subject, and here I turn to Freudian and Lacanian theory, which develops an understanding of the subject as being anchored not in certainty, as the Cartesian rationalist model would have it, but rather in doubt. In other words, the subject is anchored in something that at the same time he cannot grasp and which remains fundamentally ambiguous and opaque – that is, the unconscious. Here I explore Freud’s notion of the uncanny as the ‘return of the repressed’ – the unconscious, traumatic void that the subject is founded upon – arguing that this has crucial implications for politics, particularly in understanding how political identification takes place against a background of negativity and lack. Both Stirner and Marx, in different ways, try to come to terms – ultimately unsuccessfully – with this figure of the uncanny, seeing it as an alienating gap between the subject and the objective world that surrounds him. However, what is important here is that the opposing attempts made by these two thinkers to fill this gap produce different articulations of the relationship between the individual and the community, a relationship that remains crucial to politics today. The final chapter, Chapter 8, explores the question of universality in poststructuralist theory. I suggest here that there must be some sort of reference to a universal dimension – left vacant by the decline of Marxist ideas of the universal proletariat – if collective projects of emancipation are to be theorized. Here I challenge the usual perception of poststructuralism as being not only politically and ethically ineffective, but also obsessed with a multicultural politics of difference that seems to fit hand-in-glove the ideological structures of global capitalism. Rather, I argue that, first, the non-essentialist logic of poststructuralism actually makes the limits of any identity, including identities of difference, problematic by showing how they are constituted against a background of universality that also contaminates them. Second, I show that poststructuralism does not abandon the Enlightenment, but rather explores its heterogeneities precisely in order to renew its radical emancipative promise. Third, I argue that an interrogation of the discursive limits of universality is the sine qua non, paradoxically, for there to be any real political notion of universality at all. I show how, on the basis of these theoretical conditions, and through Laclau’s logic of hegemony, a universal dimension can emerge – albeit one that is constitutively empty and can be defined through concrete political struggles; yet which, at the same time, can inform these struggles and provide a radical emancipative horizon for them.

1

Politics of the ego Stirner’s critique of liberalism

One of the central problems in contemporary political theory is the question of whether or not liberalism is, or should remain, neutral with regard to normative conceptions of the good life. For liberal philosophers like Rawls, the principle of ‘justice as fairness’ refers not to any overarching moral assumption or universal conception of the good, but merely to a neutral framework that allows for competing conceptions of the good life. Neutral liberalism seeks to achieve a consensus about the conditions for a ‘well-ordered society’ while at the same time allowing for the plurality of identities and religious, philosophical and moral perspectives found in contemporary societies (see Rawls 1996: 35–40). For Rawls, in other words, neutral rights are given priority over value-laden conceptions of the good. Communitarians, on the other hand, have objected that this supposedly neutral notion of individual rights presupposes a specific type of subjectivity and series of conditions that make it possible. In other words, rights cannot be seen as abstract and neutral – they cannot be seen outside the specific forms of subjectivity and political associations that give rise to them. For instance, the autonomous, rights-bearing individual that liberalism bases itself on is only possible within a certain type of society and cannot be considered apart from this (see Taylor 1985: 309). According to some communitarians, then, we should reject the liberal valorization of individual rights and return to the idea of a common good and universal normative values. However, what if one were to suggest that the very opposition between liberalism and communitarianism is itself problematic and needs to be deconstructed? For instance, it is clear that the liberal notion of abstract rights is unsustainable without considering the social conditions and forms of subjectivity that make it possible. Liberalism presupposes certain forms of subjectivity based on the notion of the autonomous, rational individual, without acknowledging the often oppressive conditions under which these subjectivities are constituted. However, this does not necessarily mean that we should side with the communitarians and abandon the notion of individual rights and liberal institutions altogether. The fact that rights are the product of discourses, disciplinary practices or ideological mechanisms

14 Politics of the ego does not mean that we should entirely discount their political importance. It simply means that their status is always problematic, contingent and undecidable. I shall argue here that it is through a reconsideration of nineteenth-century thinker Max Stirner’s critique of liberalism that we can approach the question of the limits of individual rights in a new way. Stirner developed a radical critique of liberalism based upon an interrogation of its essentialist premises and foundations. He explored the question of how and under what conditions the liberal subject is constituted, and what problems this presents for liberal theory. While liberalism was ostensibly a philosophy that liberated man from religious mystification and political absolutism, this was consistent, according to Stirner, with the subjection of the individual to new disciplinary and normalizing practices. Indeed, Stirner saw the abstract rational universalism and political neutrality of liberalism as merely a new form of religious conviction, a Christianity reinvented in terms of Enlightenment ideals. These ideals, moreover, masked a series of strategies designed to negate individual difference. For Stirner, then, the notion of individual rights was meaningless without considering the relations of power on which they were based.

Humanism’s ‘religious insurrection’ As one of the lesser known of the Young Hegelian philosophers, Stirner’s work has generally received little attention from contemporary political theory. He is best known for the theoretical controversy over his critique of idealism, and his subsequent repudiation by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology. Indeed, some have suggested that Marx’s so-called ‘epistemological break’ between his classical humanism and more mature economism was inspired by Stirner’s critique of the humanist philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach (see Arvon 1978). However, Stirner’s 1995 critique of Feuerbachian humanism in The Ego and Its Own (published 1844) had more radical and far-reaching implications than simply the effect that it might have had on Marx. It enabled a kind of ‘epistemological break’ within the Enlightenment tradition itself, opening a theoretical space for an interrogation of the discourses of modernity – its essential identities and rational and moral categories, as well as its political articulations. Stirner’s critique of humanism has been crucial to the development of post-Enlightenment political thought, and some have suggested that he may be seen as a precursor to contemporary ‘poststructuralism’ (see Koch 1997). Indeed, there is an extraordinary resonance between Stirner’s thinking and that of later ‘poststructuralists’ such as Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Lacan. But leaving this question aside for the moment, I shall explore the implications of Stirner’s rejection of Enlightenment humanism for liberal political theory. Central to the Enlightenment humanist project was the attempt to liberate man from the fetters of religious mystification and obscurantism, and to allow him to develop the rational and moral faculties proper to his

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humanity. Ludwig Feuerbach, for instance, claimed that Christianity had an alienating effect on man because it confronted him with an abstract image of God as the embodiment of supreme goodness, love and wisdom. However, these qualities that religion attributes to God are really the reified qualities of man as a ‘species being’, having been abstracted from him and projected onto an alien, external figure that remains forever out of his grasp. In other words, the sublime cruelty of Christianity, and religion generally, was to negate man’s humanity and bring him face to face with a sort of inverted mirror image of himself, saying to him that he was nothing while God was everything. In this way, man’s essential self is displaced and stolen, leaving him alienated and debased: ‘Man gives up his personality . . . he denies human dignity, the human ego’ (Feuerbach 1957: 27–28). In other words, God was really an illusory externalization of man’s own humanity, and man will never be free until this essential humanity is restored to him through the dialectical overcoming of the Christian illusion. However, it is precisely this secular emancipation of man – so emblematic of humanism – that Stirner questions. Stirner argues that Feuerbach’s critique of religion has not succeeded in overthrowing it, merely reinvented it in a new humanist form. In other words, by seeing God’s qualities as really man’s reified qualities, Feuerbach has not displaced God so much as turned man into God. Man becomes, in Feuerbach’s eyes, the ultimate expression of divine attributes – love, rationality, goodness and so on. The end result of Feuerbach’s humanist dialectic, according to Stirner, is that man and God have simply exchanged places – man has now become infinite and universal in the same way that God was once believed to have been. Rather than overthrowing the categories of religious authority and alienation, Feuerbach has only inverted them and placed man within them, thus keeping intact the structures of religious oppression. Stirner goes beyond the problematic of humanism by seeing human essence – the very essence that has become, for Feuerbach, alienated through religion – as an alienating abstraction itself. Like God, the essence of man becomes a superstitious ideal that now alienates the individual. In other words, through Feuerbach’s humanist insurrection, man has replaced God as the new ideal abstraction – an abstraction that negates individual difference by attempting to unify it within a general idea of ‘humanity’. Here Stirner breaks with the discourse of humanism by introducing a radical division between man and the individual. In humanism, man becomes like God, and just as man was once subordinated to God, so the individual is subordinated to this perfect being, man. For Stirner, man is just as oppressive, if not more so, than God: ‘ “Man” is the God of today, and fear of man has taken the place of the old fear of God’ (1995: 165). This is why Stirner sees Enlightenment humanism, with its rational and moral discourses that were supposed to free people from religious mystification and idealism, as a form of Christianity reinvented.

16 Politics of the ego Humanism may be seen as a new secular religion based on a universal idea of human essence. Just like the concept of God, the concept of essence is radically external to the individual. This notion of human essence becomes sacred, thus confronting the individual with series of moral and rational norms that he is supposed to venerate and live up to because they are seen as intrinsic to his humanity. The idea of man was supposed to live inside every individual and yet exceed him as a universal ideal: Man reaches beyond every individual man, and yet – though he be ‘his essence’ – is not in fact his essence (which would rather be as single as he the individual himself), but a general and ‘higher’, yes, for atheists, ‘the highest essence’. (Stirner 1995: 38)

The dialectics of liberalism Through this critique of Feuerbach, Stirner has turned humanism back upon itself, introducing a radical break within the Enlightenment tradition. Humanism is seen as a discourse which, while it claims to free man, actually introduces new forms of subjugation and alienation, devouring the individual in its abstract generalities and universal ideals. The political expression of this new domination, for Stirner, is liberalism. Liberalism is a secular politics for a secular age, a political counterpart to the epistemology of the Enlightenment – basing itself on reason and law rather than absolutism and tyranny. However, for Stirner, liberalism has a Janus face1 – its liberation of man from oppression and tyranny is concomitant with its domination of the individual. In a counter-dialectic Stirner shows the way in which liberalism develops through a series of political permutations, and culminates in both the final liberation of man and the complete subjection of the individual. The dialectic begins with the emergence of ‘political liberalism’ – which, according to Stirner, is synonymous with the development of the modern state. After the fall of the ancien régime a new locus of sovereignty has emerged – the democratic republican state. This is a distinctly modern form of rule, based on the notion of neutrality and institutional transparency. The rule of the liberal state superseded the political absolutism and obscurantism associated with the old feudal order. In the place of the antiquated system of hierarchy and privilege, political liberalism established itself on the principle of a formal equality of rights: equality before the law, for example, and equal and unmediated access to political institutions. Political liberalism may be seen, in this sense, as the logical political counterpart to the Enlightenment: it is founded on the presupposition of a rational, autonomous and rights-bearing bourgeois subject, one who has been liberated from the shackles of aristocratic privilege and may now express this freedom in the public sphere.

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However, Stirner detects several problems in political liberalism. First, the notion of formal equality of political rights does not recognize, and indeed reduces, individual difference. This is not to say that Stirner sees anything wrong with equality as such; what he is criticizing is the way that, through the logic of political liberalism, the individual is reduced to a commonality sanctioned by the state. The ‘equality of rights’ means only that ‘the state has no regard for my person, that to it I, like every other, am only a man’ (Stirner 1995: 93). In other words, what Stirner objects to is the way that the state, through the doctrine of equality of rights, reduces all individual difference to a general, anonymous political identity – that of the citizen. Moreover, this notion of political rights is limited – it is granted to the individual by the state and is therefore formal and empty. Rather than giving the individual autonomy from the political authority of the state, as conventional accounts of liberalism claim, it merely gives the individual unmediated access to the state (or rather the state to the individual) thus allowing him to be more effectively dominated. In other words, political liberalism may be seen as a logic that regulates the individual’s relationship with the state, cutting out the complex intricacies of feudal relationships – tithes, guilds, communes and so on – and allowing a more direct and absolute connection with the state. While this ostensibly frees the individual from arbitrary rule, it also removes the obstacles and plural arrangements that hitherto stood between political power and the individual, thus shutting down the autonomous spaces upon which political life did not intrude. Political liberalism is not too pluralistic, but rather not pluralistic enough. The idiosyncrasy of this critique may be due to the fact that Stirner has in mind here the Hegelian conception of the universal state which would overcome the particularistic self-interestedness and egoism of civil society (Gesellschaft). It is precisely this self-interestedness that Stirner wants to protect as the basis for individual difference, and he sees the liberal state, despite its claim to be the embodiment of liberation, to be an institution that intrudes upon this individuality. Therefore, just as Marx contended that religious liberty meant only that religion was free to further alienate the individual in civil society, so Stirner claims that political liberty means only that the state is free to further dominate the individual: ‘Political liberty’, what are we to understand by that? Perhaps the individual’s independence from the state and its laws? No; on the contrary, the individual’s subjection in the state and to the state’s laws. But why liberty? Because one is no longer separated from the state by intermediaries, but stands in direct and immediate relation to it; because one is a – citizen. (Stirner 1995: 96)

18 Politics of the ego This question of citizenship brings us to the further problem. For Stirner, the discourse of political liberalism constitutes a certain form of subjectivity – the bourgeois citizen – that the individual is forced to conform to. Citizenship is a mode of subjectivity based on unquestioned obedience and devotion to the modern state. In order for the individual to attain the rights and privileges of citizenship he must conform to certain norms – bourgeois values of hard work and responsibility, for example. Behind the visage of political liberalism, then, there is a whole series of normalizing strategies and disciplinary techniques designed to subjectify the individual, to turn him into the ‘good citizen of the state’. The individual finds himself subordinated to a rational and moral order in which certain modes of subjectivity are constructed as essential and enlightened, and from which any dissent results in marginalization. In this way, the category of bourgeois citizenship creates a series of excluded identities. The ‘proletariat’, for Stirner, refers to those who do not or cannot live up to bourgeois norms – the vagabonds, prostitutes, vagrants, ruined gamblers, paupers – those with ‘nothing to lose’ (1995: 102). This subaltern identity constitutes the excluded other of the liberal bourgeois citizen: it refers to those who have no place in society, who are radically excluded from all notions of citizenship, and even from relations of labour and economic exchange. This would be the class that Marx rather dismissively termed the ‘lumpenproletariat’. The problem with political liberalism, according to Stirner, is the rational and moral absolutism that accompanies it, and the way that this denies individual difference and establishes universal norms that exclude certain identities. Stirner describes liberals as zealots, and liberalism as a new secular, rational religion – a religion in which the modern state has taken the place of God, and in which rational laws have become as fundamental, absolute and oppressive as Christian edicts. Indeed, it is precisely through the liberal discourse of universal rights and freedoms that the individual is increasingly dominated and subjected to alienating norms. This domination is intensified, Stirner argues, in the second articulation of liberalism, which he calls ‘social liberalism’. Whereas in the discourse of political liberalism, equality was restricted to the formal level of political and legal rights, ‘social liberals’ demand that the principle of equality be extended to the social and economic domain. People must be equal socially and economically, as well as politically. This can only be achieved through the abolition of private property, which is seen as an alienating and depersonalizing relation. Instead, property is to be owned by society as a whole and distributed equally. Where the individual once worked for himself, he must now work for the benefit of the whole of society. It is only through a sacrifice of the individual ego for society, according to social liberals, that humanity can liberate itself and develop fully. However, Stirner finds behind this talk of social liberation, a further denial of the individual and an intensification of oppression. While social

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liberals – or socialists, as they may be understood in this analysis – claim to be fighting for equality, what they really find intolerable, according to Stirner, is individual egoism: ‘We want to make egoists impossible! . . . all of us must have nothing, that “all may have” ’ (1995: 105). In other words, behind this discourse of social and economic equality for all, there is a pernicious and hidden resentment of individual difference. Stirner argues that, despite its restrictions, political liberalism still allowed certain limited spaces for individuality – in private property, for instance, which socialists now want to do away with. In doing so, they would be abolishing one of the few remaining places of individual autonomy. Social equality and commonality are thus a more effective means of limiting individual autonomy. Therefore, society itself becomes the new locus of sovereignty and domination, rather than the liberal state. Once again the individual is alienated by an abstract generality, according to Stirner. Like the liberal state, the idea of society is seen as sacred and universal, demanding of the individual the same self-sacrifice and unquestioned obedience. However, in Stirner’s analysis the inexorable dialectic of liberalism continues, and now even the idea of society is seen as not universal enough. Because social liberalism is based on labour, it is seen as still caught within the paradigm of materialism and, therefore, egoism. The labourer in socialist society is still working for himself, even though his labour is regulated by the social whole. Humanity must instead strive for a more ideal, abstract and universal goal. Here, according to Stirner, the third and final articulation of liberalism emerges: ‘humane liberalism’. Humane liberalism is the last stage in the dialectic of liberalism, the final reconciliation of humanity with itself. Where the previous two stages of liberalism still maintained a distance between humanity and its goal through a devotion to external ideas – the state and society – humane liberalism claims to finally reconcile us with our ultimate goal, which is our humanity itself. In other words, the internal ideal of man and the essence of humanity are what people should strive for. To this end, every kind of particularity and difference must be overcome for the greater glory of humanity. Individual difference is simply abolished through the call to identify the essence of man and humanity within everyone: ‘Cast from you everything peculiar, criticize it away. Be not a Jew, not a Christian, but be a human being, nothing but a human being’ (Stirner 1995: 114). For humane liberals, this ideal of universal humanity, in which individual differences have been transcended, is the final goal of man – the state of perfection and harmony in which man has been finally liberated from the external objective world. However, this final stage in man’s liberation is also the final and complete abolition of the individual ego. For Stirner, as we have seen, there is nothing essential about humanity or mankind: they are nothing but ideological apparitions that tie the individual to external, alien commonalities. There is no essence of humanity residing in each individual waiting to be discovered, as the discourse of humanism would have it. Rather, human

20 Politics of the ego essence is something radically alien and external to the individual. Therefore, Stirner sees the proclaimed liberation of humanity as the culmination of the progressive subordination and alienation of the individual. In other words, it is precisely through the humanist drive to overcome alienation that the alienation of the concrete individual is finally accomplished. Humane liberalism, for Stirner, is only the political expression of this final abdication of the individual ego. We have seen the way in which the various forms of liberalism progressively limited the spaces for individual autonomy. Once private property was abolished, egoism took refuge in individual thoughts and opinions. Now, however, even this has been denied under humane liberalism – individual opinions have now been taken over by general human opinion (Stirner 1995: 116). Moreover, humane liberalism attempts to abolish all forms of particularity and difference. Ethnic, national and religious differences – indeed anything that would allow some form of particularity or uniqueness – must all melt into a universal humanity. Thus, we see in humane liberalism the complete domination of the general over the particular. The exemplary figure of disgust for the humane liberal, according to Stirner, is the whore, who, because she ‘turns her body into a money-getting machine’ defiles her own humanity (1995: 113). In this way, humane liberalism, despite, or rather because of, its proclaimed universality and inclusiveness, produces a series of excluded, marginalized identities. Indeed, it is precisely through these excluded identities that the liberal subject constitutes its own universality. As Stirner shows, the figure of man central to humanism and liberalism is always haunted by an other – the ‘un-man’ or Unmensch. The un-man is that part of the individual that is leftover from the dialectical process, and which cannot be incorporated into the general identity of humanity: ‘Liberalism as a whole has a deadly enemy, an invincible opposite . . . by the side of man stands the un-man, the individual, the egoist’ (Stirner 1995: 125). Therefore, there is a point at which the universalizing dialectic of liberalism fails to fully incorporate difference – and difference remains, even if only in the spectral form of the un-man, as a radical excess which escapes its logic. This critique of the dialectic as being hostile to difference is a theme familiar to a number of contemporary poststructuralist thinkers. Gilles Deleuze, for instance, explores Nietzsche’s thinking in terms of a rejection of the Hegelian dialectic. According to Deleuze, Nietzsche shows that the oppositions central to the structure of the dialectic – thesis and antithesis – are only superficial, and mask its misunderstanding of difference and its attempt to reconcile it with the logic of the same. Deleuze, moreover, sees Stirner as one of the ‘avatars of the dialectic’ – as ‘the dialectician who reveals nihilism as the truth of the dialectic’ (1992: 161). Stirner’s critique of liberalism would seem to support this. Stirner uses the dialectical structure precisely to undermine the dialectic itself, and to expose as its culmination not the triumph of freedom or rationality, but rather the

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universalization of alienation and mystification. The truth of this supremely rational process is the spectre of man and human essence, the supreme illusion. The dialectic of liberalism, as we have seen, has revealed itself in the domination of the individual and the exclusion of difference. The oppositions between the different articulations of liberalism – political, social and humane – were simply stages in the revelation of a new meaning, a new logic of domination.

Disciplinary liberalism Stirner therefore goes beyond conventional accounts of liberalism in seeing it not as a particular political system or set of institutions, but rather as a certain ‘technology’ that runs through different political symbolizations and instantiates itself in different ways. It might be understood as a disciplinary technology because it involves a mediation between the individual and the norms and institutions that constitute him as a subject. Liberalism is therefore the political articulation of the idea of human essence, and may be seen as a strategy of constituting the individual in conformity with this essence – as a subject of external norms, ideological mechanisms and political institutions. This is a strategy that runs through different political arrangements and is progressively intensified. Thus, we see that in political liberalism – which is ostensibly a discourse of rights that guarantees the individual freedom from political oppression – the individual is constituted as a subject of the state. In the discourse of social liberalism, the individual is tied to external collective arrangements through a subjection to the idea of society. Humane liberalism completes this subjection through a normalization of the individual according to the ideal of mankind. Liberalism may be understood, then, as a progressive ‘taming’ of the individual – a restriction of his difference and singularity by constructing him as a subject of various institutions and norms. In other words, liberalism does not operate through simple overt repression – its mechanism is much more subtle. Rather, it operates by constructing the individual around a certain subjectivity which actively desires its own domination. It may be argued here that Stirner has uncovered, more than a century before Foucault and Deleuze, a post-‘juridical’, post-repressive paradigm of power that operates through self-subjection.2 In any case, it is clear that Stirner’s diagnosis of liberalism as a normalizing, disciplinary technology has fundamental implications not only for contemporary understandings of liberalism, but also for conceptualizations of power and ideology in political theory. Stirner has unmasked the disavowed underside of liberalism – behind the language of rights, freedoms and universal ideals, there is a covert network of disciplinary technologies and normalizing practices designed to regulate the individual. Rationality may be seen as one of these liberal disciplinary technologies. Stirner argues that liberalism is the attempt to impose a universal rational

22 Politics of the ego order on the world: ‘“Liberalism is nothing else than the knowledge of reason, applied to our existing relations.” Its aim is a “rational order”, a “moral behaviour” . . . But, if reason rules, then the person succumbs’ (Stirner 1995: 96). However, Stirner is not necessarily opposed to rationality itself, but rather its status as a universal and absolute discourse. Rational truth is always removed from the grasp of the individual and held over him tyrannically, thus creating an external alienating ideal that one is expected to conform to. Rational truth has no real meaning beyond individual perspectives. According to Stirner, we should no longer be awed by the transcendental claims of rationality and truth – they are merely discourses based often on the meanest of motives, in particular the desire for power and domination. This critique of rationality has clear implications for even contemporary liberal political theory: Rawls’ attempt to establish a rational consensus about the conditions for justice, would be seen, from Stirner’s perspective, as a way of excluding different and antagonistic discursive positions – ‘opinions’ – from a universal ‘rational order’, precisely by branding these dissenting voices as irrational or unreasonable. What this notion of the rational consensus conceals, in other words, is a coercive marginalization of individual difference.

The politics of resentment This critique of universal rationality has certain important parallels with Nietzsche. Nietzsche also talks about the way that rational and moral ideas dominate the modern consciousness and turn the individual against himself. Both Stirner and Nietzsche see liberalism as an inverted form of Christianity, based on a resentment of difference and individuality. While my purpose here is not to engage in a comparison between Stirner and Nietzsche, I will explore certain connections between the two thinkers – particularly on the question of modern liberal subjectivity – that allow us to shed light on liberalism. It may be suggested that both thinkers explore a counter-history or genealogy of modernity – an analysis through which modernity’s highest ideals are unmasked, revealing the will to power behind them. For Stirner, as we have seen, liberalism is based on a notion of human essence that the individual is expected to conform to. Stirner’s critique has been precisely to make problematic this idea of essence, to expose its ideological function and the relations of power that are instantiated through it. Thus, human essence can no longer be taken as an ontological certainty. Rather, its very status has become a political question. This has enormous implications for liberalism because, as Stirner has shown, liberalism is based upon an essentialist understanding of the individual – on the idea of a universal rational and moral subject. For Nietzsche, similarly, the idea of the essential human subject is problematic. Going against the Enlightenment humanist tradition, Nietzsche was suspicious of this all too confident

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modernist proclamation of the Death of God: ‘The tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men’ (Nietzsche 1974: 182). Even though we have killed God, we are not yet ready for this event – we are still trapped within the categories of metaphysics, in the religious mode of consciousness. God has simply been reinvented in man: the dialectical reconciliation of man and God that is found in Feuerbach and Hegel is only the high point of Christian nihilism and the triumph of reactive ‘life-denying’ forces. The human is merely a way of reproducing the divine. Like Stirner, then, Nietzsche sees humanism as only the last metamorphosis of Christianity. Morality is simply our inability to relinquish Christianity: ‘They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality’ (Nietzsche 1990: 80). Leaving aside some of their political differences – for instance Stirner did not share Nietzsche’s nostalgia for aristocracy and his valorization of hierarchy and inequality – both thinkers nevertheless engage in a similar critique of the levelling impulse and secular religiosity of modern political systems like liberalism. For both Stirner and Nietzsche, the problem with liberalism and its various political offshoots is that they deny individual difference and uniqueness by reducing everyone to the same formal level on the basis of an idealized and universal image of human essence. The Feuerbachian image of a god-like man – imbued with rationality and goodness – is for Nietzsche, as well as for Stirner, an inverted image of the sacrifice of the individual on the humanist altar of self-mortification. Perhaps, in other words, we should look beyond the formal liberal principle of equal rights to see the spirit of ressentiment that infects its root – the will to power of the weak against the strong, of the slave against the master, that lies beneath it. This attitude of ressentiment, Nietzsche shows, is hostile to difference – it cannot understand difference except by incorporating it within its moral structures and defining it in oppositional terms. Thus, what is different to itself is necessarily bad, precisely because without this external other it could not define itself as good. Perhaps we could understand liberalism in this sense – as a political logic infected by a resentment of difference and individuality. As Stirner shows, individuals who deviate from the accepted moral and rational norms of liberalism are excluded from the liberal polity. This may be seen in terms of an institutionalized attitude of resentment towards that which is different or other – that which does not conform to the ideal liberal subject. Moreover, in liberal societies, the individual himself is split between an identification with liberal subjectivity, and a recognition of those elements of himself which do not or cannot conform to this ideal, and which are seen as pathological, inhuman and are often violently repressed. The individual is thus alienated and ‘terrified at himself’ (Stirner 1995: 41). In this way, resentment is turned against oneself and becomes a sickness. Stirner’s un-man refers not only to differences outside the modern

24 Politics of the ego liberal subject, but to those within him as well. We can easily apply this argument to modern liberal societies, in which particular identities – such as the unemployed, drug addicts, the homeless, psychiatric patients, illegal immigrants and welfare-dependents – are marginalized because they do not live up to the liberal ideal of the autonomous, independent, responsible, self-reliant subject. A whole series of punishments, disciplinary procedures and social sanctions are applied to those who fall behind: welfare breaches, prison sentences, fines, court injunctions, medicalization, confinement in psychiatric wards or detention centres. William Connolly analyses this reactive intolerance of difference characteristic of today’s liberal societies. By constructing the liberal subject as responsible and autonomous, liberalism inculcates a sense of rancour and guilt against the self where it fails to meet this standard; this can only be alleviated by directing it outwards so that it becomes a generalized resentment against those who are perceived as different: ‘Certain weakness is here transformed into merit, so that what the slave must be becomes the standard against which every difference is defined as a deviation to be punished, reformed or converted’ (Connolly 1991: 79). Thinkers like Stirner, Nietzsche and Connolly show that any analysis of liberalism must take into account the exclusion of difference at the base of its edifice of freedom and equal rights. Both Stirner and Nietzsche, in different ways, engage in a genealogy of the autonomous liberal subject – unmasking the way that he is constituted through strategies of domination, discipline and taming. Liberalism is based on the assumption of an essential human subject as the locus of rationality and natural rights. However this subject is shown to be the result of an ideological or discursive operation. Because this universalized abstraction is privileged over the concrete individual, there is no guarantee in liberalism for even the private space of individual autonomy that it purports to hold sacred (see Warren 1988: 215). This private space is merely the ideological supplement of liberalism, masking an unprecedented state domination and restriction of individuality. Moreover, as Stirner shows, this domination is articulated in a new paradigm of power and is justified in terms of the ‘health’ of the subject.3 For instance, Stirner believes that the modern liberal-humanist treatment of crime as a disease to be cured is only the flip side of the old moralreligious prejudice: Curative means or healing is only the reverse side of punishment, the theory of cure runs parallel with the theory of punishment; if the latter sees in action a sin against right, the former takes it for a sin of the man against himself, as a decadence from his health. (Stirner 1995: 213) In other words, the moral hygiene of the subject becomes a new norm according to which transgressions are punished. This has obvious connec-

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tions with Foucault’s formula of punishment and incarceration, in which the new fetters of ‘reason’ and ‘humane punishment’ take the place of the old moral prejudices. Foucault also exposed the disciplinary technologies and subjectifying norms behind the veneer of liberalism. The prison system, for instance, and the strategies of power, knowledge and discipline that operate there, could be seen as the ‘other side’ of liberalism: behind the liberal institutions of formal rights, independent judiciaries and legal procedures there lies a whole network of normalizing techniques that constitute an entirely different form of power. Indeed, the function of liberalism is precisely to mask the nature of this disciplinary power with the outmoded language of sovereignty – the ‘juridico-discursive’ paradigm. What is really at issue for Foucault, as well as for Stirner, are the disciplinary and discursive conditions under which the subject of liberalism – the subject of formal rights and freedoms – has been constructed, and how this makes liberalism itself problematic. As Foucault says, the autonomous rational subject that Enlightenment liberalism invites us to free ‘is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself’ (1991: 30). Furthermore, for Foucault, as for Stirner, liberalism was not so much a philosophy that sought to protect the natural freedom of the individual against the state, but rather a mode of government – or a governmental rationality – that promoted a particular form of life as free. Or, to be more precise, these two understandings of liberalism ultimately coincide. That is to say that, for both Stirner and Foucault, the autonomy and freedom enjoyed by subjects in liberal societies depends on the way they have been normalized as liberal subjects. Liberalism, in other words, is the discursive threshold where individual freedom meets the regulative power of the state. Other contemporary thinkers, such as Wendy Brown, are critical of the liberal discourse of rights. Brown argues that when minority groups and identities situate their demands for recognition and autonomy within the liberal language of rights, this simply binds them further to the state, allowing the state to extend its power over life. For instance, the rights claims of certain feminist groups simply reaffirm their status as ‘victims’ requiring the protection of the state. Brown asks: ‘Might such protection codify within law the very powerlessness it seeks to redress?’ (1995: 21). In a similar manner to Stirner, then, Brown argues that while rights ostensibly give the individual autonomy from the state, at the same time, because they are sanctioned and prescribed by the state, they only tie the individual more firmly to it. In other words, the problem with liberal rights is that they are only realizable within a state framework that at the same time limits them.

‘Ownness’ Stirner has shown that it is through the construction of a particular form of subjectivity that the individual is tied to liberal institutions and

26 Politics of the ego discourses. The individual seeks to conform to a series of moral and rational norms, and thus remains confined to liberal modes of subjectivity that are, at the same time, dominating. For Stirner, then, the individual can only free himself from these limitations by inventing new forms of subjectivity and autonomy. Here Stirner advocates a radical form of individual autonomy which he calls self-ownership or ownness. This involves an assertion of the self as a contingent, rather than fixed, identity. The individual ego is thus seen as ‘creative nothingness’, a radical emptiness which it is up to the individual to define (Stirner 1995: 135). This implies a form of autonomy that goes beyond the transcendental liberal ideal of freedom. The problem with a freedom prescribed by formal rights and institutions is that it brings into play a series of universal norms and expectations that are themselves oppressive. The individual in contemporary liberal societies is expected to conform to a certain rational mode of freedom – to engage as a free and self-reliant agent in the marketplace, for instance. Of course, this freedom is always tempered by a notion of responsibility – so that a certain degree of freedom is allowed to some and not others, and is restricted only to particular spheres of life. Liberal freedom is based on a false universality and neutrality which masks its complicity with power. By contrast, ownness is a form of freedom that is created by the individual himself and is based on his power alone: ‘My freedom only becomes complete when it is my – might; but by this I cease to be merely a free man, and become an own man’ (Stirner 1995: 151). Ownness increases the individual’s power of self-determination by breaking away from essentialist identities and universal ideals. It may be seen, then, as a radical and highly individualistic form of freedom that goes beyond the formal confines set down for it by liberalism. Paradoxically, it may be suggested that Stirner’s political philosophy implies an extreme form of liberalism, a kind of ‘hyper-liberalism’.4 Stirner has exposed the dark, oppressive underside of liberalism that palpitates behind its formal edifice of rights and freedoms: the mechanisms of normalization and discipline that go into constituting the autonomous liberal subject; the will to power and the negation of difference at the base of its proclamations of freedom and tolerance. For Stirner, the problem with liberalism is not that it allows too much individual freedom and autonomy – as communitarians might claim – but, on the contrary, that it does not allow enough. That is why the individual must go beyond the formal freedoms of liberalism and invent his own forms of autonomy. There is a sense in which Stirner sees individuality as a radical excess that can never be contained within the narrow individuated identities allowed under liberal subjectivity – something that spills over its edges and jeopardizes its limits. In order to remain one step ahead of the subjectifying power of liberalism, the individual must continually ‘consume’ himself and invent himself anew (Stirner 1995: 150). In this way, Stirner uses the language of liberalism to interrogate its limits. For instance, he takes the concept of property and

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turns it against liberalism itself: why should property be restricted to what is allowed under the law? Rather, its only limit should be power – the individual’s ability to seize as much as possible. Thus, the liberal institution of private property is made unstable precisely by expanding it beyond all legal and rational limits. Moreover, when Stirner talks about ‘property’ he does not necessarily mean material possessions, but more a notion of self-ownership and selfdeterminacy that goes beyond this. Property refers to everything that belongs to the individual and is within his power to determine. This concept of property would include material possessions in certain instances: for example, as we have seen, in political liberalism, private possessions provided a ‘safe haven’ for the individual from the incursions of the state. However, at other times, Stirner sees material possessions as themselves enslaving the individual. When the individual lusts after material possessions he is once again placing himself under the power of an external abstract object and abdicating his freedom to it.5 In other words, Stirner is only interested in material property in so far as it allows for the development of a much more profound and broader notion of personal self-ownership. As soon as material possessions come into conflict with self-ownership and autonomy they must be rejected. Perhaps, in this sense, we could see Stirner’s concept of ‘property’ as pertaining to an open-ended project of individual autonomy, rather like Foucault’s idea of ‘care of the self’ – which involves ethical strategies of self-mastery and self-constitution (see Foucault 1994). Both point to some kind of ethics of individual autonomy and self-ownership, and an affirmation of difference and plurality. Perhaps it could be argued, then, that Stirner’s most radical gesture is to actually take the message of liberalism – the valorization of individual autonomy and freedom – seriously, pushing it to its furthest limits and thereby revealing the gap between this message and the reality of liberal politics.

Towards a politics of ‘post-liberalism’ Stirner’s critique, despite its eccentricity, clearly poses problems for liberal political theory. By unmasking the disciplinary underside of liberalism – the oppressive normalizing practices that go into constituting the neutral liberal subject – Stirner has exposed the paradoxical nature of liberal notions of freedom, individual rights and autonomy. It is not that liberalism cynically parades itself as a philosophy that guarantees individual freedom, while in actual practice denying it. Rather, it is that the liberal notions of rights and freedoms are based on a certain conceptualization of the subject, derived from Enlightenment humanism and rationalism, which Stirner has shown to be an oppressive and alienating ideological construction. Freedom and autonomy are conditional upon the individual conforming to this abstract generality, therefore denying his difference and

28 Politics of the ego individuality. Those who do not or cannot live up to this ideal are excluded, marginalized and subjected to a whole series of regulatory, judicial, medical and disciplinary procedures which have as their aim the normalization of the individual. Stirner may therefore be seen as a crucial link in the post-Enlightenment and poststructuralist critique of liberalism – particularly in his questioning of the conditions under which the liberal subject is constituted. However, I would argue that this interrogation of the limits of liberalism does not necessarily invalidate it. For Stirner, there is nothing necessarily wrong with liberal ideas of individual freedom and equality of rights themselves. The point is, however, that there is always another side to this discourse of rights. There is an oppressive dimension through which these rights are instantiated, yet which remains undisclosed and disavowed. The purpose of Stirner’s critique has been to uncover the relations of power, discipline and exclusion through which liberal identities are constituted. Through a realization of the power relations upon which they are based, liberal rights and freedoms would have to be seen as contingent. In other words, if it is the case that liberal rights and freedoms are founded not on some universal, essential subjectivity, but on a series of arbitrary exclusions, discursive constructions and strategies of power, their status becomes undecidable rather than absolute. This undecidability does not mean, however, that the notion of rights itself is jeopardized. Indeed, it could be argued that the last thing we need today – what with the unprecedented expansion of state power in the name of ‘national security’ and the ‘war on terror’ – is any kind of weakening of rights. On the contrary, it means that the discourse of rights itself would be expanded beyond its current liberal capitalist conceptualization. It would encompass a whole series of potentially different and contingent political articulations. For instance, why could one not extend the notion of rights and individual autonomy to include identities that are currently excluded by liberal regimes and, through this, make problematic the status of these regimes themselves? This was precisely what Foucault tried to do: in his advocacy of prisoners’ rights, for instance, he was attempting to challenge the absolute status of the division between innocence and guilt and, through this, the conditions under which people are incarcerated (see 1977: 227). A Stirnerian concept of rights might follow along similar lines. It might involve an expansion of liberal rights and freedoms to those who are marginalized in liberal societies – the ‘lumpenproletariat’, or more contemporary subaltern identities like the homeless, the unemployed and illegal migrants. Illegal migrants and asylum seekers face some of the worst abuses at the hands of governments today. A radicalized discourse of rights might be used to challenge some of the practices of institutionalized exclusion and detention, practices regarded as acceptable in our so-called liberal-democratic societies, where rights and legal protections are enshrined in citizenship and denied to those who fall outside this

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category.6 Again this points to the paradoxical and two-sided nature of this discourse of rights that Stirner has highlighted. So for Stirner, the problem is not the rights and freedoms themselves, but rather the discursive regime of essentialist humanism and Enlightenment rationalism that they are articulated in. Stirner’s critique allows us to identify this essentialist paradigm, and thus disentangle these rights and freedoms from it. This would free liberal rights from their current epistemological limits and open them to different articulations, thereby allowing them to be used to interrogate the structures of power and practices of domination inherent in liberal capitalist societies. In this sense, through Stirner’s critique of liberalism, we may be able to theorize a ‘postliberalism’ – a liberalism which is not confined to essentialist identities and rational frameworks, but which, rather, refers to a political ethos of contestation with practices of domination. Moreover, it would be an agonistic liberalism in the sense that it acknowledges and, indeed, affirms competing and different identities, perspectives and forms of life. Here a Stirnerian concept of ‘post-liberalism’7 may be likened to John Gray’s attempt to articulate a form of liberalism that was not based on the search for a rational consensus about the ‘best life’, but rather which recognized the incommensurability of different perspectives in modern society. Gray argues for an ‘agonistic’ liberalism based on the notion of ‘ethical contestability’ (Gray 1995: 86). Like Stirner, he believes that the central problem of liberalism lies in its attempt to establish a universal epistemological standpoint – to find the best form of life, from which others can be judged. This tendency derives from liberalism’s indebtedness to a defunct Enlightenment essentialism and rationalism, which is no longer sustainable in modern plural societies. In attempting to extricate liberalism from its anchoring in Enlightenment epistemologies and universal conceptions of the ‘good life’, Gray theorizes a form of ‘post-liberalism’ which would recognize the irreducibility of difference, and would concern itself only with establishing a modus vivendi between competing forms of life. ‘Post-liberalism’, then, would be a reconfiguration of liberalism on the basis of an acknowledgment of the plurality of existence and the singularity of personal freedom, rather than a universal human essence. As Gray says: ‘We do not pretend that our identities express the essence of the species; we recognize them to be products as much of chance as of choice’ (Gray 2000: 270). In other words, post-liberalism would be based on the recognition of the contingency of identity, and the impossibility of inscribing this within a universal subjectivity. This would be precisely the kind of ‘post-liberalism’ that the implications of Stirner’s critique would allow us to envisage – a politics of personal autonomy, central to which is an ongoing interrogation of the status of the individual and also, through this, an interrogation of the very discursive limits of liberalism itself. Of course, there are many aspects of Stirner’s political philosophy that

30 Politics of the ego are problematic. For instance, his extreme individualism and egoism, in which any kind of collective identity is seen as an oppressive burden, clearly makes it difficult to theorize a collective politics of resistance.8 It would appear that Stirner’s politics would be limited to an individual rebellion. However, what is important politically in Stirner’s critique of liberalism is the way that it makes problematic the ontological status of the subject. In this sense, his critique of essentialism could be used against a simplistic ‘politics of difference’, in which the rights of various minority groups are often asserted on the basis of a specific identity. This is the sort of pluralism that Stirner would see as endemic to liberal politics, and as a form of essentialism brought in through the back door. Instead, perhaps Stirner’s thinking may be seen in terms of a politics of singularity. Singularity may be conceptualized as a non-essential form of difference and individuality – one which is itself contingent and undecidable. The idea is not to valorize the individual as a stable, fixed identity of difference, as this would be another kind of essentialism that in the end is itself hostile to difference. Instead, Stirner’s philosophy shows us the multiple possibilities of individuality – its very singular, contingent and unpredictable nature. On the basis of this principle of singularity, a post-liberal politics would seek to invent, multiply and expand spaces for individual autonomy and singularity that are often denied in modern liberal societies. A politics of ‘postliberalism’ would seek to respect and encourage, rather than deny, in Nietzsche’s words ‘the rich ambiguity of existence’ (cited in Connolly 1991: 81).

2

Ressentiment and radical politics

A word in the ear of the psychologists, assuming they are inclined to study ressentiment close up for once: this plant thrives best amongst anarchists. (Nietzsche 1994: 52)

Of all the nineteenth-century political movements that Nietzsche decries – from socialism to liberalism – he reserves his most venomous words for the anarchists. He calls them the ‘anarchist dogs’ that are roaming the streets of European culture, the epitome of the ‘herd-animal morality’ that characterizes modern democratic politics (1994: 161). Nietzsche sees anarchism as poisoned at the root by the pestiferous weed of ressentiment – the spiteful politics of the weak and pitiful, the morality of the slave. Is Nietzsche here merely venting his conservative wrath against radical politics, or is he diagnosing a real sickness that has infected our radical political imaginary? Despite Nietzsche’s obvious prejudice towards radical politics, I will take seriously his charge against anarchism. I will explore this cunning logic of ressentiment in relation to radical politics, particularly anarchism, and I will attempt to unmask the hidden strains of ressentiment in the Manichean political thinking of classical anarchists like Bakunin and Kropotkin. This is not with the intention of dismissing anarchism as a political theory. On the contrary, I see anarchism as an important theoretical precursor to a poststructuralist politics because of its deconstruction of political authority and its critique of Marxist economic determinism. However, I suggest here that anarchism could become more relevant to contemporary political struggles if it were made to confront the ressentiment at the heart of its revolutionary philosophy, particularly in the essentialist identities and oppositional structures that inhabit it.

Slave morality and ressentiment Ressentiment is diagnosed by Nietzsche as the sickness endemic to our modern condition. In order to understand ressentiment, however, it is necessary to understand the relationship between master morality and

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slave morality in which ressentiment is generated. Nietzsche’s work On the Genealogy of Morality is a study of the origins of morality. For Nietzsche, the way we interpret and impose values on the world has a history; its origins are often brutal and far removed from the values they produce. The value of ‘good’, for instance, was invented by the noble and high-placed to apply to themselves, in contrast to the common, low-placed and plebeian; it was the value of the master – ‘good’ – as opposed to that of the slave – ‘bad’. According to Nietzsche, it was in this pathos of distance between the high-born and the low-born that values were created (1994: 61). However, this equation of the good with the aristocracy began to be undermined by a slave revolt in values: It was the Jews who, rejecting the aristocratic value equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = blessed) ventured with aweinspiring consistency, to bring about a reversal and held it in the teeth of their unfathomable hatred (the hatred of the powerless), saying, ‘Only those who suffer are good, only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people, the only ones, salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble, the powerful, you are eternally wicked, cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will also be eternally wretched, cursed and damned!’ (Nietzsche 1994: 19) In this way, the slave revolt in morality inverted the noble system of values and began to equate good with the lowly, the powerless – in other words, the slave. This inversion introduced the pernicious spirit of revenge and hatred into the creation of values. Morality, as we understand it, has its roots in this vengeful will to power of the powerless over the powerful – the revolt of the slave against the master. It was from this imperceptible, subterranean hatred that grew the values subsequently associated with the good – pity, altruism, meekness and so on. Slave morality is characterized by an attitude of ressentiment – the resentment and hatred that is felt by the powerless towards the powerful. Nietzsche sees ressentiment as an entirely negative sentiment – the attitude of denying what is life-affirming, saying ‘no’ to what is different, what is ‘other’. Ressentiment is characterized by an orientation to the outside, whereas the focus of noble morality is on the self. While the master says ‘I am good’ and adds as an afterthought, ‘therefore he is bad’, the slave says the opposite: ‘He (the master) is bad, therefore I am good’. Thus the invention of values comes from a comparison or opposition to that which is outside, other or different. Nietzsche says: ‘In order to come about, slave morality first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, psychologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act all – its action is basically a reaction’ (1994: 21–22). This reactive stance, this inability to define any-

Ressentiment and radical politics 33 thing except in opposition to something else, is the attitude of ressentiment. It is the reactive stance of the weak who define themselves in opposition to the strong. The weak need the existence of this external enemy to identify themselves as ‘good’. Thus the slave takes ‘imaginary revenge’ upon the master, as he cannot act without the existence of the master to oppose. The man of ressentiment hates the noble with an intense spite, a deep-seated, seething hatred and jealousy. It is this ressentiment, according to Nietzsche, that has poisoned the modern consciousness, finding its expression in ideas of equality and democracy and in radical political philosophies, like anarchism, that advocate them. For Nietzsche, values of equality and democracy, which form the cornerstone of both liberal and radical left politics, arose out of the slave revolt in morality. They are generated by the same spirit of revenge and hatred of the powerful. Nietzsche sees the democratic movement as an expression of the ‘herd-animal morality’ derived from the Judeo-Christian revaluation of values (1994: 161). Anarchism is, for Nietzsche, the most extreme heir to democratic values, the most rabid expression of the herd instinct. It seeks to level the differences between individuals, to abolish class distinctions, to raze hierarchies to the ground, and to equalize the powerful and the powerless, rich and poor, master and slave. To Nietzsche this is bringing everything down to the level of the lowest common denominator, thus erasing the pathos of distance between master and slave, the sense of difference and superiority through which great values are created. Nietzsche sees this as the worst of the excesses of European nihilism, resulting in the death of aesthetic values and creativity. Is anarchism the political expression of ressentiment? Is it poisoned by a deep hatred of the powerful, as Nietzsche suggests? While Nietzsche’s attack on anarchism is in many respects unjustified and excessively malicious, and shows little understanding of the complexities of anarchist theory, I would nevertheless argue that Nietzsche does uncover a certain element of ressentiment in anarchism’s oppositional, or Manichean, logic. It is necessary to explore this logic to see where it leads and to what extent it imposes conceptual limits on its radical politics.

Anarchism Anarchism, as a revolutionary political philosophy, has many different voices, origins and interpretations. From the individualist anarchism of Stirner, to the collectivist, communal anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, anarchism is diverse series of philosophies and political strategies. They are united, however, by a fundamental critique and rejection of political authority in all its forms. The critique of political authority – the conviction that power is oppressive, exploitative and dehumanizing – may be said to be the crucial politico-ethical standpoint of anarchism. For classical anarchists the sovereign state was the embodiment

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of all forms of the enslavement and degradation of man. In Bakunin’s words, ‘the State is like a vast slaughterhouse and an enormous cemetery, where under the shadow and the pretext of this abstraction (the common good) all the best aspirations, all the living forces of a country, are sanctimoniously immolated and interred’ (1984: 207). The state is the main target of the anarchist critique of authority. It is, for anarchists, the fundamental source of oppression in society, and it must be abolished as the first act of any social revolution. This last point brought anarchism into sharp conflict with Marxism. Marx believed that while the state was indeed oppressive and exploitative, it was largely a reflection of economic exploitation and an instrument of class power. For Marx, the economy, rather than the state, was the fundamental site of oppression. Because of this, the state could be used as a tool of revolution if it was in the hands of the right class – the proletariat. The state was only dominating, in other words, because it was currently in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Once class distinctions had disappeared the state would lose its political character (Marx 1978b: 545). However, anarchists like Bakunin and Kropotkin disagreed with Marx on precisely this point. For anarchists, the state is much more than an expression of class and economic power. Rather, the state has its own structural logic of domination, expansion and self-perpetuation and is largely autonomous from class interests. Instead of seeing the state as deriving from social and economic relations, as Marx did, the anarchists believed that it was actually political oppression that made economic oppression possible (see Bakunin 1950: 49). The ruling class, for Bakunin, was only the state’s real material representative: behind every ruling class of every epoch there looms the state. Therefore, because the state has its own autonomous logic it can never be trusted as an instrument of revolution. If the state is not destroyed immediately, if it is used as a revolutionary tool as Marx suggested, then it will be perpetuated in infinitely more tyrannical ways. It would generate, as Bakunin claimed, a new series of class contradictions – creating a new bureaucratic class that will oppress and exploit workers in the same manner that the bourgeois class once did (1984: 228). So the state, for anarchists, is a priori oppression no matter what form it takes. Indeed Bakunin argues that Marxism pays too much attention to the forms of state power while not taking enough account of the way in which state power operates: ‘They [Marxists] do not know that despotism resides not so much in the form of the State but in the very principle of the State and political power’ (1984: 221). Oppression and despotism exist in the very structure and symbolic order of the state – it is not merely a derivative of class power. The state has its own logic and momentum, which is often beyond the control of the ruling class and does not necessarily reflect economic relations. So anarchism locates the fundamental oppression and power in society in the very structure and operation of the state. As an

Ressentiment and radical politics 35 abstract machine of domination, the state haunts different class actualizations – not just the bourgeoisie state, but the workers’ state too. Because of its economic reductionism, Marxism was blind to this autonomous dimension of state power. This conception of the state ironically strikes a familiar note with Nietzsche. Like the anarchists, Nietzsche also sees modern man as ‘tamed’ and fettered by the state. He sees the state as an abstract machine of domination which precedes capitalism, looming above class and economic concerns. The state is a mode of domination that imposes a regulated ‘interiorization’ upon the populace. According to Nietzsche, the state emerged as a ‘terrible tyranny, as a repressive and ruthless machinery’, which subjugated the population (Nietzsche 1994: 62–63). Moreover the origins of this state are violent: it is imposed forcefully from without, and has nothing to with ‘contracts’ (1994: 63). Nietzsche here rejects the fantasy of the social contract – the idea, central to liberal theories of sovereignty, that people voluntarily relinquish their power to a centralized sovereign body in return for their safety and security.

The social contract Anarchists also repudiate social contract theories which, they argue, serve to conceal the violence of the state’s origins. The state has no legitimacy: it is a brutal and unnecessary intrusion that disturbs a naturally functioning social order, and it comes about through war and conquest, rather than rational agreement. The theory of the social contract is based on the myth of the ‘state of nature’ – a picture of society characterized, as it was in the Hobbesian paradigm, by a radical and ongoing antagonism, where there were no common bonds that united people, their natural drives, on the contrary, rending them apart. However Bakunin condemns this theory as an ‘unworthy hoax’, an ideological fiction created to legitimize the state (1984: 136). He exposes the paradox at the heart of the social contract: that if people live a savage existence in the state of nature, without rationality or morality, how can they have the foresight to come together for their common ends? That is to say, if there is no notion of social unity to begin with, no common goal that unites humanity, how does the social contract, this supremely rational gesture, emerge? Political authority cannot, therefore, be based on a rational and free agreement between individuals. Rather, it is based on a founding gesture of violence that is masked by the ideological fiction of the contract. Unlike social contract theorists, then, anarchists argued that society has no need for the state. Society regulates itself according to natural laws and principles, and it is based on an essential commonality between people. Rather than preventing perpetual warfare between people, as Hobbes contends, the state actually engenders it. For classical anarchists, society embodied a natural, organic fullness. Instead of being characterized by a

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nihilistic emptiness, by the loneliness and desperation of the ‘state of nature’, society is governed by a natural harmony which regulates relations between individuals. It is this natural mechanism that political power only interferes with. As the anarchist William Godwin said: ‘They lay their hand on the spring there is in society, and put a stop to its motion’ (1968: 92). The natural mechanism may be likened, then, to the spring of a clock, and the actions of the state to the clumsy hands that disturb its operation. Kropotkin saw this natural mechanism in the ethical principle of mutual aid and co-operation. The social contract relies on a singularly negative idea of human nature. Human beings were, in this paradigm, selfish, aggressive and competitive. Kropotkin believed, however, that this was a misrepresentation of the human condition. Rather, human beings were essentially co-operative and sociable. Contrary to what he saw as a pseudo-Darwinist approach, Kropotkin argued that co-operation and mutual aid amongst animals were more prevalent and instinctive than competition and aggression (1955: 5). Kropotkin applied these findings to human society. He argued that the basic principle of human society is mutual aid, and that man is naturally co-operative rather than competitive and egoistic. In this sense, the principle of mutual aid constitutes an essential commonality that is lacking in the ‘state of nature’. It is an organic principle that governs society, and it is out of this that notions of morality, justice and ethics grow. This natural sociability is the principle that binds society together, providing a common basis upon which daily life can be conducted. It is, moreover, this principle of mutual aid that will naturally replace the principle of political authority. A state of ‘anarchy’, a war of ‘all against all’ will not ensue once the sovereign power is displaced, as Hobbes believed. According to the anarchists, a state of ‘anarchy’ exists now. It is the intervention of political power that creates social dislocation, rather than preventing it. It is only with the destruction of state power that this dislocation will itself be overcome and society will be reconciled with itself.

Manicheism Central to classical anarchism is a radical conceptual division between two ontological orders – that of ‘natural authority’ and ‘artificial authority’. Natural authority, according to Bakunin, is the dimension that is governed by ‘natural laws’ – that is, rational principles which are part of a natural, organic life world. These principles are essential to the subject’s existence: they surround us, shape us and determine the physical world in which we live. However, obedience to natural laws is not a form of slavery because these laws are not external to man: ‘Those [natural] laws are not extrinsic in relation to us, they are inherent in us, they constitute our nature, our whole being physically, intellectually and morally’ (Bakunin 1984: 239). They are, in other words, the essential core of the subject’s humanity.

Ressentiment and radical politics 37 In Bakunin’s schema, this natural order is diametrically opposed to the ‘artificial’ order of power and political authority, which is embodied in political institutions such as the state and in man-made laws. This form of authority is ‘entirely mechanical and artificial’, according to Bakunin, and is constituted by ‘pneumatic machines called governments’ (1984: 239). Moreover, this form of authority is seen as inherently oppressive, irrational and corrupting. It is external and alien to human nature, and constitutes an unnatural imposition upon it. Political power restricts the subject’s rational and moral potential, thus keeping him perpetually enslaved. For Bakunin, then, political institutions are ‘hostile and fatal to the liberty of the masses, for they impose upon them a system of external and therefore despotic laws’ (1984: 240). Anarchism may be understood, then, as a struggle between these two forms of authority. This struggle is part of a dialectical process in which the subject develops to a state of full humanity. This development is determined by natural laws, whose predominance will be restored after the revolutionary overthrow of political authority. Anarchism can only be understood through the image of a natural order – an organic wholeness that forms the basis of society. Institutionalized political power, moreover, is seen as an external parasitic force that contaminates and distorts this social order. This schema, which establishes a clear opposition between two ontological points – one natural and good, the other artificial and evil – is precisely the logic of Manicheism, a theological dualism that finds its secular form in radical political philosophies like anarchism. The Manichean paradigm divides the world into two opposing orders, two hostile camps. As Jacques Donzelot argues, Manicheism is a logic endemic to revolutionary political philosophies like anarchism and Marxism: Political culture is also the systematic pursuit of an antagonism between two essences, the tracing of a line of demarcation between two principles, two levels of reality which are easily placed in opposition. There is no political culture that is not Manichean. (Donzelot 1979: 74) Moreover, anarchism, in subscribing to this logic and making political power the focus of its analysis instead of economic relations, as Marxism did, has perhaps has fallen into the same reductionist trap as Marxism. Has it not merely replaced the economy with the state as the essential evil in society, from which other evils are derived (Donzelot 1979: 74)? Manichean logic thus involves a reverse mirroring operation: the place of revolution is an inverted reflection of the place of power. In the case of anarchism, human subjectivity is essentially moral and rational while the state is essentially immoral and irrational. The state is, thus, essential to the existence of the revolutionary subject, just as the revolutionary subject is essential to the existence of the state. One defines itself in opposition to

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the other. The purity of revolutionary identity is only defined in contrast to the impurity of political power. While the relationship between the state and the revolutionary subject is one of clearly defined opposition, the two antagonists could not exist outside this relationship. They could not, in other words, exist without each other. Moreover, this absolute separation between the dimension of subjectivity and the dimension of political power means that, although the subject is oppressed by the operation of power, this power is external to him – emanating from an artificial, as opposed to a natural, world. This allows anarchist theory to view human subjectivity as a sort of uncontaminated point of departure – in other words, as occupying an epistemologically and morally privileged position outside the order of power, from which power can be condemned as immoral and irrational. Perhaps this paradoxical relationship between subjectivity and power might be seen as a form of ressentiment in the Nietzschean sense. I would argue that although there are differences, the Manichean relationship of opposition between the human subject and political power that is found in anarchism parallels the general logic of ressentiment described above. First, as we have seen, ressentiment is based on the moral prejudice of the powerless against the powerful – the revolt of the ‘slave’ against the ‘master’. We can see this moral opposition to power clearly in anarchist discourse, which pits the essentially ‘moral’ and ‘rational’ human subject against the essentially ‘immoral’ and ‘irrational’ quality of political power. Second, ressentiment is characterized by the fundamental need to identify oneself by looking outwards and in opposition towards an external enemy. Here, however, the comparison with anarchism is not so clear-cut. For instance, one could conceivably argue that anarchist subjectivity and ethics – the notion of mutual aid and assistance – is something that develops independently of political power, and that therefore it does not need an oppositional relationship with the state in order to define itself. However, I would suggest that although anarchist subjectivity does indeed develop in a ‘natural’ system which is radically external to the ‘artificial’ system of political power, it is precisely through this assertion of radical exteriority that ressentiment emerges. Anarchism subscribes to a dialectical logic, according to which the human species emerges from an ‘animal-like’ state and begins to develop independent moral and rational faculties. However, the subject finds this development impeded by the power of the state. Thus the subject cannot achieve his full human identity as long as he remains oppressed by the state; the realization of full human subjectivity is always deferred or put off by the state. This dialectic of man and state suggests that the identity of the subject is characterized as essentially ‘rational’ and ‘moral’ only in so far as the unfolding of these innate faculties and qualities is prevented by the state. Paradoxically, the state, which is seen by anarchists as an obstacle to the full identity of man, is at the same time essential to the forma-

Ressentiment and radical politics 39 tion of this incomplete identity. Without this stultifying oppression, the anarchist subject would be unable to see itself as ‘moral’ and ‘rational’. His identity is thus complete in its incompleteness. The existence of political power is therefore a means of constructing this absent fullness. So we could say that the Manicheism that structures anarchist thought – in which revolutionary identity is constituted through its essential opposition to power – follows the logic of ressentiment. Like Nietzsche’s reactive man, revolutionary identity purports to be uncorrupted by power: human essence is seen as moral where power is immoral, natural where power is artificial, pure where power is impure. There are, however, a number of contradictions or aporias in anarchism’s logic. First, there is a tension between the Manichean oppositional structure that presupposes an absolute division between two ontological orders, and the dialectical process described above, which presupposes a deeper underlying social logic that encompasses both subjectivity and the political forms that oppress it. Ernesto Laclau sees this contradiction as being endemic to Enlightenment-based discourses of emancipation. In revolutionary philosophies like anarchism and Marxism, which are based on the idea of a radical emancipation of an essential human subjectivity from oppressive political and social arrangements, there is a logical incompatibility in what Laclau calls the dichotomic dimension of emancipation (1996b: 1–3). Emancipation, on the one hand, is based on the idea of a radical break or discontinuity with the preceding social order. For the anarchists, the destruction of state authority as the first revolutionary act would symbolize a complete break with the past and the ushering in of new communal social arrangements. However, if, at the same time, the anarchist revolution was to be the result of a dialectical unfolding of a historically determined rational social essence, then this implies a continuity between the past and the future, and between subjectivity and the power that opposes it. Both are seen as part of the same rational process of unfolding – in which case, the idea of a radical chasm and discontinuity is jeopardized. Second, as Laclau shows, there is a contradiction between the idea of the emancipation of a human essence from oppressive external structures of power, and the extent to which this essential identity is actually constituted through its opposition to the order of power. That is to say, there is a paradoxical relationship of dependency between the subject to be emancipated, and the power that denies and, at the same time, constitutes the identity of this subject as oppressed (Laclau 1996b: 17–18). As I have suggested above, we see precisely this paradoxical logic in anarchism – where the subject seeks emancipation from power, and yet is defined as the subject of emancipation precisely through its opposition to power, thus implying a relationship of dependence on the very identity it opposes. These aporias suggest that the strict Manichean separation between subjectivity and power central to anarchist theory is at best problematic,

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and that perhaps there is a contamination between these two opposing orders. Bakunin himself throws this strict division into doubt when he talks about the ‘power principle’. This is the natural lust for power which Bakunin believes is innate in every individual: ‘Every man carries within himself the germs of the lust for power, and every germ, as we know, because of a basic law of life, necessarily must develop and grow’ (1984: 248). The power principle means that man cannot be trusted with power, that there will always be this desire for power at the heart of human subjectivity. While Bakunin intended to warn us of the corrupting danger inherent in power, he has perhaps unconsciously exposed the hidden contradiction that lies at the heart of anarchist discourse: namely, that while anarchism bases itself upon a notion of an essential human subjectivity uncontaminated by power, this subjectivity is ultimately impossible. Pure revolutionary identity is torn apart, subverted by a natural desire for power. This forces one to question anarchism’s notion of a revolution of humanity against power: if humans have an essential desire for power, then how can one be sure that a revolution aimed at destroying power will not turn into a revolution aimed at capturing it?

Will to power Has anarchism been invalidated by the aporias and contradictions at the heart of its revolutionary discourse? I have exposed a hidden strain of ressentiment in the essentialist categories and oppositional structures that are found in anarchism. However I would argue that anarchism, if it can free itself from these essentialist and Manichean concepts, can overcome the ressentiment that limits it politically. Nietzsche believes that to try exclude or disavow power – as anarchism does – is a sign of ressentiment. Rather than denying power, according to Nietzsche we should acknowledge and indeed affirm our desire for power, and revel in our ability to exercise it. Here the ‘power principle’ – this inherent desire for power that Bakunin saw as so dangerous – would be seen by Nietzsche as a positive, life-affirming force. Nietzsche sees power in terms of a capacity for will and action, as well as a force that precedes the subject and is felt only through its effects. The subject is constituted retroactively through the act of power or force, rather than being presupposed by it: ‘There is no being behind the deed, its effect and what becomes of it; “the doer” is invented as an afterthought’ (Nietzsche 1994: 28). Therefore power, in Nietzsche’s analysis, is a force or capacity that is manifested in the act of will, particularly in the will towards self-overcoming – transforming and going beyond the concept of ‘man’ and inventing new forms of subjectivity and new values: ‘The most cautious people ask today: “How may man still be preserved?” Zarathustra, however, asks as the sole and first one to do so: “How shall man be overcome?” ’ (Nietzsche 1969: 297). The Superman or Overman, for Nietzsche, is man ‘overcome’: ‘God

Ressentiment and radical politics 41 has died: now we desire – that the Superman shall live’ (Nietzsche 1969: 297). For Nietzsche the Superman replaces God and Man. He comes to redeem a humanity crippled by nihilism and ressentiment, joyously affirming instead power and eternal return. The strict Manichean separation between humanity and power on which classical anarchism bases itself would be seen, from a Nietzschean perspective, as an expression of the Apollonian illusion central to Enlightenment humanism. Behind the Apollonian illusion of a life-world without power, is the Dionysian reality of power that tears away the ‘veil of the maya’ (Megill 1985: 39). In other words, it is illusory to imagine that power can be eradicated, that there can be pure, harmonious social identities that are uncorrupted by power. Rather, there is a multitude of conflicting power struggles that form the ontological basis of social identities, and upon which we seek to impose some sort of semblance of order – whether it be through laws, morality, or rational Enlightenment ideals of humanity. However, this succeeds only in concealing the violence of this ‘essential condition’ – the unruly and discordant clamour of forces that lurks behind the Apollonian masks that ornament our culture. Indeed the universal humanist ideals which try to conceal this power struggle are themselves articulations of a particular position of power, one that seeks to impose itself upon others: ‘The insistence upon spreading “humaneness” (which guilelessly starts out with the assumption that it is in possession of the formula “What is human”) is all humbug, beneath the cover of which a certain type of man strives to attain power’ (Nietzche 1964: 255). Moreover, according to Nietzsche, to deny the reality of this power struggle would be to succumb to ‘passive’ or negative nihilism. Active nihilism would be, on the other hand, to affirm rather than negate, this tumultuous world of power, and out of this create a new system of values. We can see, then, how this analysis of power undermines not only the Enlightenment humanist epistemology that classical anarchism based itself upon – in which the distorting effects of power were criticized from the perspective of an essential human rationality and morality – but also the idea of a rational social order governed by ‘natural’ laws. If we are to take Nietzschean genealogy seriously, we would have to abandon the promise of a harmonious social order that would be reconciled with itself once power relations are overcome. Instead we would have to accept the irreducibility and inevitability of antagonistic power struggles that rend apart stable social identities. Without, however, wanting to advocate an untrammelled Nietzschean will to power, and without wanting to adopt the triumphalist stance of the Overman – whose new system of values may be of the most reactionary and elitist kind – we have at least to acknowledge that Nietzsche’s understanding of power poses problems for classical anarchism, and indeed for any radical politics of emancipation. Not only does Nietzsche unmask the will to power behind the very ideals of emancipation – democracy, equality

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and freedom – but he also denies radical politics an epistemologically and morally privileged position from which to condemn power. In particular, as I have shown, he displaces any sort of conceptual opposition between subjectivity and power, revealing instead their mutual involvement and complicity. This argument finds a distinct echo in more contemporary poststructuralist thought, particularly that of Foucault. To shed some light on the theoretical deadlock of radical politics, we must turn to Foucault’s genealogical understanding of power relations.

Genealogy, power and antagonism Nietzsche’s thematic of the will to power is reflected in Foucault’s genealogical project, which seeks to expose the constant and violent struggle for power that has raged throughout history, and which is hidden behind universal ideals, moral discourses and legal norms. This understanding of history as embroiled in permanent antagonism, discontinuity and moments of rupture puts paid to the dialectical view of history central to classical revolutionary politics. Rather than history unfolding in dialectical stages towards a final and rational reconciliation of social forces, there is an ongoing series of unstable power relationships: ‘Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at a universal reciprocity. Humanity settles each one of its violences within a system of rules, and thus goes from domination to domination’ (Foucault 1984a: 91). In other words, there is no possibility of a society reconciled with itself, freed from the distortions and dislocations of power and based on entirely equal social relations, as the anarchists imagined. Instead, according to Foucault, power and antagonism would be irreducible features of any society. Indeed, any attempt to eliminate these entirely would itself be a form of domination. This is because there is no essential commonality at the base of society, no system of natural laws or an inherent human sociability upon which a fully reconciled social order could be established. Rather than there being an essential dimension of subjectivity that remained uncontaminated by power and from which power could be resisted, according to Foucault there was only a ‘non-place, a pure distance, which indicates that the adversaries do not belong to a common space’ (1984a: 85). In other words, the struggle between antagonists that underlies identities and social relations is so absolute, their differences so incommensurable, that it undermines any common ground that might exist between them. Through this genealogical understanding of social relations, Foucault arrives at a new methodology for observing power, one that goes beyond: 1) the ‘juridico-sovereign’ model – defined by law, right, contract; and 2) the ‘Marxist economic’ model – that sees power in terms of economic or class domination. Instead Foucault suggests an alternate model – one based on war and conquest (2003: 16). Of course, there is a similarity here

Ressentiment and radical politics 43 with the anarchist theory of power which also rejected both the contract model and the Marxist economic determinist model of state domination, seeking instead to uncover a new dimension of power that was based on conquest, violence and coercion. In some ways, Foucault’s unmasking of the violence behind legal structures and sovereign authority parallels the anarchist critique of authority. However, Foucault’s analysis goes beyond the conceptual structures of anarchism in a number of fundamental ways. First, while the anarchists believed that violence, antagonism and social dislocation would cease once the state had been overthrown and replaced with an egalitarian social order, Foucault sees this antagonism as ontological, contending that power and violence would be present in any social order, even a post-revolutionary one. In other words, there is no dialectical reconciliation of opposing forces. Rather, the violence that Foucault speaks of merely congeals into the very norms, principles and relationships that would structure a post-revolutionary society. In fact, the very imposition of a post-revolutionary society would itself have to be seen as an act of violence. The fundamental question for the Nietzschean/Foucauldian genealogist is ‘who speaks?’: that is, from what particular position of power is a universal social revolution articulated from? Second, Foucault would reject the Manichean separation between political authority and social relations. Rather than seeing power as emanating from the state as a central symbolic position, Foucault shows the way that power relations have colonized the social network and are immanent throughout it, emerging from a multitude of infinitesimal points and positions. While power can be colonized by the state, it should not be seen as belonging to, or deriving from, the state as the anarchists believed. Indeed, Foucault argues that to see power as centralized in the mechanism of the state to some extent occludes a concrete analysis of the way that power actually operates and, moreover, perpetuates the classical revolutionary strategy of overthrowing power at a single unified location. Foucault believes that it is more productive to examine what he calls ‘rationalities of government’ – that is, the plurality of discourses and practices through which government institutions interact with society by discursively constructing social identities in ways that allow them to be regulated. Foucault’s point, of course, is not that the state does not exist, but rather that theories of the state often serve to disguise the much more troubling realization that power has already permeated social relations and identities. That is to say, by seeing power as deriving from the state, anarchism could sustain the strict conceptual division between society and power, between natural authority and artificial authority. Third, Foucault’s analysis shows that the subject, rather than being autonomous from power or somehow external to it, is deeply embroiled in power relations. Not only is the subject caught up in power relations at the level of his daily interactions – both exercising power and being the target for the exercise of power – but, more radically, the subject has to be seen

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as an effect of power relations. This is rather like Nietzsche’s idea that the subject is a retroactive effect of his own act of power. However, Foucault points to the darker flip side of this process: the way the subject is constructed retroactively, not only through his own exercise of power, but more particularly through power being exercised over him. In other words, the will to power, or power/knowledge, also has dominating effects. This is illustrated in Foucault’s numerous analyses of the disciplinary techniques and discourses – particularly those of sexuality, psychiatry and criminology – through which the subject is constructed as ‘deviant’, ‘abnormal’ or, indeed, ‘normal’, thus subjecting him to regulative norms of behaviour. However, Foucault does not grant us a normatively or epistemologically privileged position from which this domination can be condemned as violation of our humanity. Indeed, the very Enlightenment motifs of human rights, rationality and science that radical political theories like anarchism believed would liberate us from power, are precisely the discourses through which disciplinary/bio-power operates, giving it rational, scientific and moral legitimacy, and constructing the subject as a subject of humanist norms.1 In other words, it is through the very concept of the human that we are dominated. Moreover, as Foucault contends, the human subject is constructed in such a way that he imagines that he has an essence – whether it be a sexual identity or some other ‘secret’ of his being – that is repressed and needs to be emancipated. However, this essence is a sort of discursive illusion whose emancipation or bringing forth to the surface further inscribes the subject within the very network of power and knowledge that he purports to oppose. While Foucault’s understanding of the relation between subjectivity and power is somewhat problematic for conceptualizing resistance, nevertheless it has serious consequences for anarchism which bases itself on the emancipation, through a ‘scientific’ revolution, of a natural human essence from the external order of power. From Foucault’s perspective, such a revolutionary emancipation would only produce new forms of domination.2

Revolution, subjectivity and power Does this mean that every insurrection against power is doomed to perpetuate it in new ways, and that we should give up on the idea of emancipation altogether? Foucault’s and Nietzsche’s thinking would seem to suggest that not only is power endemic and irreducible, but that the very humanist ideals, universal rational norms and essentialist identities that anarchism believed would overcome power, were themselves merely ideological or discursive masks that hid the reality of violent domination. One could say here that Nietzsche and Foucault are anarchists who take the antiauthoritarian project of unmasking domination and violence beyond the very conceptual limits set down by anarchism itself, displacing its Enlightenment humanist foundations and exposing their complicity with power.

Ressentiment and radical politics 45 So where does this leave anarchism as a radical politics of emancipation? I would argue that anarchism can free itself from ressentiment provided that a number of theoretical conditions are met. First, anarchist theory must acknowledge that power is an ineradicable dimension in any social identity. This does not mean that anarchism should affirm a nihilistic will to power, but rather that it recognize that power relations will always be with us – that power can never be entirely overcome. Even in a post-revolutionary anarchist society there will always be structures, contours and limits: certain forms of dangerous or violent behaviour would have to be excluded; certain limitations or regulations would still apply, even if these were much less restrictive and coercive than in preceding social arrangements. These exclusions would, of course, involve the operation of power. Indeed, even at the ontological level, a social identity can only constitute itself through the exclusion of a particular element. This is why the anarchist idea of a harmonious society without power relations is an impossibility. As Laclau says: ‘A harmonious society is impossible because power is the condition for society to be possible. . . Even in the most radical and democratic projects, social transformation thus means building a new power, not radically eliminating it’ (1990: 33). Therefore, while revolutions can be against certain forms and articulations of power, they cannot be against power altogether. This is because every revolution is itself the act of power – the sometimes violent imposition of a new social order, even one that is based on egalitarian and libertarian principles. This does not mean, however, that post-revolutionary social arrangements would be necessarily dominating and oppressive. Here we must draw a distinction between power and domination. Foucault sees power relations in their everyday sense as relatively fluid, unstable and reciprocal. However, when these relations become congealed and fixed into asymmetrical systems and unequal hierarchies, this is when power becomes domination (Foucault 1994: 292–293). These relations of domination form the basis of institutions such as the state. Foucault believes, then, that radical political action, rather than trying to overcome power entirely, must instead intervene at the points where power relations become dominating, engaging in an ongoing and strategic contestation with power. Therefore, while we cannot hope to entirely eliminate power relations from society – there will always be differentiated forms of influence, persuasion and even, at times, coercion – we can at least try to ensure that these power relationships remain relatively egalitarian and fluid, and allow for as much reciprocity between actors as possible. In other words, there will always be relations of power and acts of exclusion – even if only discursive exclusion – but their limits and contours would always have to be negotiated democratically. Second, this ineradicable condition of power suggests that the Manichean division central to classical anarchism, between an uncorrupted natural order and the order of power and authority, is no longer

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sustainable. In other words, there can be no uncontaminated point of departure that is external to power – whether it be in the form of the essential human subject, or some notion of an immanent rational social order. As Foucault has shown, the subject cannot be seen as autonomous from power; on the contrary, subjectivity is deeply embroiled in power/knowledge relations that constitute not only the fabric of social relations, but also the discursive limits of identity. This means that we can no longer imagine that there is a human essence that emerges from a natural order and that is inherently moral or rational. Indeed, we must abandon this idea of a universal human essence altogether, and acknowledge the discursively constituted nature of identity. This does not mean, however, that we are always imprisoned in ‘discursive cages’, as certain critics of Foucault have charged. On the contrary, poststructuralist theory emphasizes the structural instability and undecidability of our identity – the way that it is constructed contingently through our social interactions. The point is that our identity is not fixed or determined by a deeper underlying essence. Moreover, this notion of identity as contingent and indeterminate might offer another way of understanding Nietzsche’s concept of the Overman as man ‘overcome’. Rather than the Overman implying a higher, post-human subject that revels in his own sense of superiority, perhaps it can be taken to mean a certain understanding of subjectivity that is no longer defined by essence. Similarly, there is no essence at the base of society. Anarchism understood society as being determined by a natural system of relations that was inherently rational and ethical, and that obviated the need for political authority. In other words, society contained the possibility of a harmonious order based on natural laws that could be observed scientifically. However, society can no longer be seen to be transparent to itself in this way, and there is no deeper rational structure at its base. As Laclau and Mouffe argue: ‘ “Society” is not a valid object of discourse. There is no single underlying principle fixing – and hence constituting – the whole field of differences’ (2001: 111). In other words, the signifier ‘society’ is something that we have imposed on a fragmented and pluralistic field of discursive differences, incommensurable perspectives, identities and ideological positions. For Nietzsche, there is no objective truth that transcends the multitudinous layers of dissimulation; the social order conceals nothing but the will to power and the antagonism of competing perspectives. Foucault, too, as we have seen, speaks of a ‘non-place’ – an antagonistic dimension at the heart of social identity. This can be seen as another way of conceptualizing society as fragmented and differentiated at the ontological level, rather than held together by a deeper objective truth. This does not mean that society will always be antagonistic and violent: Foucault and Nietzsche are referring more to a clash of representations and perspectives that make any stable symbolization of society impossible. Third, anarchist theory must abandon its dialectical understanding of

Ressentiment and radical politics 47 history. As the Nietzschean/Foucauldian genealogical model shows, history does not progress in stages, determined by the unfolding of a rational truth. Rather, history is a haphazard and unpredictable series of ruptures, discontinuities and events. Indeed, one could argue that to see history as rationally or dialectically determined – as classical anarchism does – amounts to a denial of politics. That is to say, if the revolution against state authority is determined by historical forces or the unfolding of natural laws, then there would be little room left for contingent political interventions. Indeed, anarchism’s Manichean division between the ‘natural’ social order and the ‘artificial’ order of political authority, would seem to consign the activity of politics – which inevitably involves acts of power and decisions that discursively exclude certain alternatives – to the corrupted latter order. However, if anarchism were to reject this division between the natural and the artificial, and if it were to no longer rely on the dialectic, then it would have to see the revolution as a fully artificial or synthetic – rather than natural – political act. That is, the revolution against centralized political authority would depend on contingent interventions and forms of resistance at the political and social level – a series of anti-authoritarian struggles and alliances that emerge in an unpredictable fashion, contesting different forms of domination. It would be the plurality and unpredictability of such struggles that would characterize the political as a fully indeterminate, contingent and autonomous dimension.

The autonomy of the political I would suggest, however, that this conception of the political as an autonomous and contingent dimension is already implicit in classical anarchism, yet it is in tension with the dialectical and Manichean conceptual structures which seek to occlude it. The potential contribution of classical anarchism to contemporary radical political theory lies in its theorization of the state as a specifically political instance of domination, rather than one that was reducible to economic or class domination, as was the case in Marxist theory. This allows us to analyse ‘the political’ as a specific field of power relations, political identities and antagonisms that was autonomous from questions of economics and class. Although anarchism confined this dimension of power relations to the mechanism of the state, nevertheless, by breaking the structural link that Marxism had established between the political and the economic, it performed a vital theoretical operation – one that foreshadowed later poststructuralist and post-Marxist understandings of the political. For instance, post-Marxists like Laclau and Mouffe assert the primacy of the political over the social (see Laclau 1990: 33). That is, rather than seeing politics as being determined by social and economic relations – as in the Marxist paradigm – it is political decisions that actually shape and, indeed constitute, social relations.3 According to Laclau and Mouffe, the

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economic and class determinism of Marxist theory has prevented it from being able to fully grasp the political in its specificity, autonomy and contingency, and this has led to Marxism’s theoretical and political downfall. Therefore, both anarchism and post-Marxism point, albeit in different ways, to Marxist theory’s neglect of the political sphere as an autonomous and specific dimension with its own structures and logic. Laclau and Mouffe argue that the contemporary political field is no longer held together by the struggles of the proletariat, and that for some time it has been fragmented by a whole series of different and competing identities and struggles: the struggles of the ‘new social movements’ such as blacks, feminists, gays, ethnic minorities, as well as those of students, environmentalists, consumers, anti-war activists and so on. Class is no longer the dominant category through which radical political subjectivity is defined: ‘The common denominator of all of them would be their differentiation from workers’ struggles, considered as “class” struggles’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 159). It could be suggested, moreover, that these new struggles and antagonisms point to an anarchist moment in contemporary politics. These ‘new social movements’ have been primarily struggles against domination rather than economic exploitation, as the Marxist paradigm would contend. That is not to say that they do not contest capitalist exploitation, but rather that economic exploitation would be seen here as an aspect of broader relations of domination. In particular, the permutations of the state over the past fifty or so years – from the welfare state and its increasing bureaucratization, to neo-liberal state privatization, to more contemporary forms of security-driven biopolitical sovereignty that have emerged with the ‘war on terror’ – have generated new relations of subordination, domination and surveillance, as well as concomitant forms of resistance: ‘In all the domains in which the state has intervened, a politicization of social relations is at the base of numerous new antagonisms’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 162). In other words, they are struggles against specific forms of state power and relations of domination instigated by it. In this sense, they are anti-authoritarian, anti-state – that is anarchist – struggles. Laclau and Mouffe also show the way in which the struggles of workers and artisans in the nineteenth century tended to be struggles against relations of subordination generally, and against the destruction of their organic, communal way of life through the introduction of the factory system and new forms of industrial technology such as Taylorism. They did not conform to Marx’s notion of the proletarians embracing the forces of capitalism in order to radicalize it (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 156). This refusal to reduce the struggles of workers to the specific Marxist vision of the proletarian struggle against capitalism would also be characteristic of the classical anarchist position, which emphasized the heterogeneity and anti-authoritarian character of subaltern struggles and identities – peasants, intellectuals déclassé, and the crucial revolutionary role of the

Ressentiment and radical politics 49 lumpenproletariat, which had been dismissed by Marx. Indeed, Bakunin preferred the word ‘mass’ to ‘class’ to characterise this heterogeneous revolutionary identity, ‘class’ implying hierarchy and exclusiveness (Bakunin 1950: 47).

A postanarchist politics I have shown, then, that there is a certain tension between two moments in classical anarchism theory: 1) that which is characterized by scientific positivism, a dialectical understanding of historical development, and a Manichean separation between humanity and power; 2) that which emphasizes the autonomy of the political field and the heterogeneity and contingency of anti-authoritarian struggles. It is not that there is an absolute or necessary contradiction between these two moments: anarchism combines both as we have seen. However, there is a potential inconsistency or undecidability here that can be developed, as I have tried to do through a comparison with post-Marxist theory. My contention is that if contemporary anarchism is to avoid Nietzsche’s charge of ressentiment, then it must distance itself from its classical foundations in the dialectic and positivist and essentialist ideas of Enlightenment humanism, and assert instead the second moment – that of political contingency and heterogeneity. Given the contemporary epistemological conditions of what is termed ‘postmodernity’, where the universal grand narratives of the Enlightenment are coming in for question, and where the social and political field is increasingly differentiated and fragmented, radical politics can no longer rely on fixed rational and normative foundations to guide it, or on a universal notion of human essence that seeks emancipation. Rather, radical politics today must remain open to a multiplicity of different identities and struggles, particularly those that take place at a more localized level at the interstices of power. Here we might refer to a politics of ‘post-anarchism’ – an anti-authoritarian politics that affirms the contingency of political identity, the indeterminacy of history and the new possibilities of emancipation offered by postmodernity. Post-anarchism might be seen as an anarchism that no longer relies on the epistemological foundations of Enlightenment humanism, or on essentialist conceptions of subjectivity. Rather, the contribution of anarchism today is in its theorization of power in its specificity, and in its deconstruction of political domination. Post-anarchism would be a series of politicoethical strategies that are aimed at the deconstruction of authority, exposing the domination and coercion behind institutions, norms and practices that we tend to accept as normal or legitimate. Moreover, postanarchism would retain its commitment to freedom and radical egalitarian democracy. However, the discursive limits and contours of these would not be determined in advance, but left open to be defined contingently during the course of political and social struggles. Of course, these political

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principles of equality and democracy would not sit comfortably with Nietzsche. However, the value of Nietzschean genealogy and the diagnosis of ressentiment is not in the reactionary values that they are often animated by, but rather in their unmasking of the power relations at the foundation of all systems of values. To acknowledge this ambiguity, and yet to remain committed to the egalitarian and libertarian values, would be the politico-ethical stance of a ressentiment-free radical politics of the future.

3

New reflections on the theory of power A Lacanian perspective

Power is a central category in contemporary political theory. Where it is particularly crucial is in the field of radical politics, in which questions of emancipation, freedom and resistance all bear reference to a dominant mode of power which is perceived as being a threat to them. However, Foucault’s reconfiguration of the concept of power had, as I showed in Chapter 2, fundamental implications for these questions: no longer could power be seen in simple opposition to the subjectivity it restricted, but rather as something that actually constituted this subjectivity. Nevertheless, it has been suggested that Foucault’s theory of power ran into its own conceptual difficulties – particularly in relation to the all-pervasiveness of power, explaining the actual mechanism of subjection and allowing a theoretical space of resistance. The aim of this chapter is to examine some of these limitations through the use of key Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts such as the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real, as well as transgression, law, fantasy and enjoyment ( jouissance). I will suggest that an application of these categories allows us to extend the analysis of power to its symbolic and ideological dimensions – aspects that were neglected in Foucault’s approach. Furthermore, it will allow us to develop new insights into the functioning of power, the process of subjectification and the question of resistance in contemporary societies.

Foucault’s ‘microphysics’ of power To sketch the background to some of these theoretical developments we must briefly revisit Foucault’s analysis of power. For Foucault, power could no longer be seen as a capacity to act that could be concentrated in a few hands or in centralized institutions. Power is, rather, a polyvalent force that runs through multiple sites in the social network. Power is dispersed, decentralized and diffused throughout society: it may run through the prison or the mental asylum, or through different discourses such as psychiatry or sexuality. As Foucault says: ‘Power is everywhere . . . because it comes from everywhere’ (1978: 93). Power is to be thought of as a series of ongoing strategies and relationships rather than a permanent state of

52 New reflections on the theory of power affairs. It is to be seen, in Foucault’s words, as a ‘mode of action upon the action of others’ (1982: 221). Foucault was interested in the microphysics of power: the operation of power at the level of minute, and previously unobserved discourses and practices. This was a radical departure from previous accounts, which still operated in what Foucault called the ‘juridico-discursive’ paradigm, where power is seen as a capacity that can be possessed and wielded by political actors. For Foucault this was an outdated notion: ‘What we need is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty . . . We need to cut off the King’s head’ (1980: 121). Instead, power was to be understood in terms of intersubjective relationships – relationships that actually constitute the subject: This form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. (Foucault 1982: 210) For Foucault, then, the subject is produced by power. This may be seen in the case of the prisoner, whose marginalized identity is constructed through the disciplinary and normalizing techniques of power in the prison, and the discourses and bodies of knowledge that support them. The subjectivity of the prisoner is thus constructed at the intersections of power/knowledge. It may also be seen in the way that sexual identity itself, rather than being natural and essential, is a discursive effect, a construction of the discourse of sexuality. This is what Foucault calls ‘productive power’, and it is perhaps his most important contribution to theory of power. Power can no longer be seen as purely repressive and prohibitive; rather, modern power produces and incites (Foucault, 1991: 94). More insidiously, subjectivity is produced in such a way that its assertion or identification, rather than being an act of liberation that transgresses power, is something that only supports and reaffirms power. For Foucault then, ‘The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself’ (1991: 30). This is the ‘ruse of power’ according to Foucault: we are tricked into thinking that there is an essential subject who is repressed, whereas in fact this subjectivity is itself an effect of power, and the assertion of this identity as an attempt to transgress power plays right into its hands. Power is therefore ‘subjectifying’ – that is, it produces the subject as a site of his own domination. This breaks radically with the conviction central to the politics of emancipation – that there is a human essence whose interests are restricted by power. Rather, human essence is not only constructed by

New reflections on the theory of power 53 power, but, even more perversely, operates as a site in which the individual body is disciplined and regulated: ‘The soul is the prison of the body’ (Foucault 1991: 30). This has crucial implications for radical politics because it means that there is no essential or autonomous ‘place’ of resistance outside power. As Foucault says: ‘It seems to me that . . . one is never outside, that there are no margins for those who break with the system to gambol in’ (1980: 141). Foucault’s theory of productive power also denies radical politics a privileged epistemological point outside power, from which power relations can be criticized in the name of the truth that they deny. Rather, power has colonized the discourse of truth itself. Power no longer operates by distorting, concealing or repressing truth – as the critical theory and classical accounts of emancipation would have it – but instead operates through truth itself. Truth is deeply implicated in power: power works through and produces ‘regimes of truth’, while these in turn allow power to operate. So, to speak the truth about power relations is also to be fundamentally embroiled in them. Power, in this sense, no longer has an ideological function: ‘The political question . . . is not error, illusion, alienated consciousness or ideology; it is truth itself’ (Foucault 1980: 133).

Resistance and subjection However, despite these insights, Foucault’s theory of power ran into its own conceptual limits. First, one could argue that if power is everywhere, as Foucault maintains, then it loses its identity as power. Quite simply, the problem with Foucault’s concept of power is that it is so broad and all-encompassing that it becomes indefinable. If we accept Saussure’s idea that language is constituted in a system of differences, then an identity can only be constituted through a radical exclusion of another identity. In other words, an identity only has meaning in so far as it differentiates itself from other identities, if there is a gap or ‘lack’ that separates one identity from others. With Foucault’s notion of power, however, we have no such definitional limit – power is something that pervades every social relation and interaction. There is no gap that separates power from other social relations, and it therefore loses its specific identity. Power, for Foucault, is all-pervading, and this is precisely the problem. Ernesto Laclau says about the theory of ideology that ‘it died as a result of its own imperialist success’ (1996a: 201–222). Exactly the same point could be made about Foucault’s notion of power. If the first problem was that if power is everywhere, then it is nowhere, the second problem with Foucault’s theory is that if power is everywhere, then from what point does one resist power? In other words, if power has already colonized subjectivity and truth-knowledge, then are we not robbed of any point, epistemological or ontological, from which relations of power may be criticized or resisted?1 There is no doubt that Foucault sees resistance to certain relations of power and modes of subjectification

54 New reflections on the theory of power as possible and, indeed, desirable. In his conversations with Gilles Deleuze, Foucault says that theory must be seen as a form of political practice, whose precise function is to unmask and contest relations of power: ‘This is a struggle against power, a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining power where it is most invisible and insidious’ (1977: 208). It is clear, then, that Foucault sees certain relationships of power – particularly when they become crystallized into institutions and hierarchies – as dominating and inequitable, and calls for their transformation in ways that allow a greater degree of reciprocity, fluidity and personal autonomy. The problem, however, is that, as Foucault has shown in his numerous analyses, the subject who struggles against power is always already caught up in power – indeed, his very subjectivity is an effect of this power. In other words, there is always the risk that the subject who resists is only playing into the hands of the very power that dominates him. As Foucault quite explicitly states, there is no going beyond power – the subject will always be embroiled in power relations. Resistance is therefore seen as an effect of power; power and resistance exist in a relationship of mutual incitement and provocation, where localized forms of power are met with localized forms of resistance, and where the fluidity of this relationship means that resistance is always in danger of being co-opted by power. Many of the critiques of Foucault on this question have been along lines that he does not allow sufficient normative or epistemological grounds for a critique of power to emerge. Nancy Fraser argues, for instance, that because the subject for Foucault, is merely an effect of power relations, ‘there is no foundation . . . for a critique oriented around the notions of autonomy, reciprocity, mutual recognition, dignity, and human rights’ (1989: 56). The problem, however, with this form of criticism is that it once again falls back into the position of implying that there is some sort of stable normative and epistemological standpoint – a universal rational foundation or essence – outside power, from which relations of power can be criticized. However, if we are to take seriously Foucault’s contention that human essence and the category of truth itself are merely effects of power – and I think we should – then this foundationalist critique simply misses the point: the notion that there is a rational or normative Archimedean point beyond power is merely part of the ‘illusion’ created by power. Yet, at the same time, it is clear that there needs to be some sort of ‘space’ beyond power if a coherent project of resistance is to be conceptualized. The paradox is, of course, that this theoretical ‘space’, upon which the politics of emancipation has always insisted, can no longer be sustained by the categories of human essence and undistorted rational truth.

Subjectification, desire and the psyche As an alternative to the modernist solution discussed above, there have been a number of recent attempts to revise and develop Foucault’s theory

New reflections on the theory of power 55 of power along non-essentialist, poststructuralist lines. Most prominent of these would be Judith Butler’s ‘post-Foucauldian’ theory of ‘passionate attachment’. According to Butler, Foucault’s analysis has taken the study of power beyond conventional and critical theory accounts, whereby power was seen as a force that oppresses the subject from the outside, and has uncovered power’s hidden productive and subjectifying dimension – that is, its capacity to constitute subjectivity itself. Therefore the process of subjection has two sides: the mechanism by which the subject is subordinated to power; and the way in which subjectivity is actually constituted through this very act of subordination (Butler 1997: 2). In other words, the paradox revealed by Foucault’s analysis is the extent to which one’s subjectivity – one’s sense of self that resists power – is actually formed by, and dependent upon, one’s very subordination to power. For Butler, the central question posed by this realization is: why do we become attached to certain forms of subjection? In other words, what is the precise mechanism of subjection by which we actually come to desire a mode of subjectivity that dominates us? Why is it, for example, that the homosexual comes to desire and affirm his identity of homosexuality, even though, according to Foucault, this is precisely what dominates him? According to Butler, what is lacking in Foucault’s account of subjectifying power is the dimension of desire itself – an understanding of why we become psychically attached to what dominates us, and how this attachment actually sustains this relation of domination. Foucault’s account of subjectification, in other words, is incomplete without a theory of the psyche. A theory of the psyche, moreover, would have crucial implications for the question of resistance as well. According to Butler, a notion of the psyche would allow Foucault to explain how subjects, at times, actually resist their particular modes of subjectification. It is in this question that a notion of the psyche as that which is different from the subject, is implicit: Thus the psyche, which includes the unconscious, is very different from the subject: the psyche is precisely what exceeds the imprisoning effects of the discursive demand to inhabit a coherent identity, to become a coherent subject. The psyche is what resists the regularization that Foucault ascribes to normalizing discourses. (Butler 1997: 86) In other words, in order to explain resistance to subjectifying power – to a power that demands that we have a coherent identity – there must be some psychic or unconscious dimension that is both conceptually different from the notion of subjectivity, and exceeds it, going beyond its discursively constructed limits. Yet it is precisely this psychic dimension that Foucault’s theory of power and subject formation has no room for. Therefore, in order to adequately theorize this dimension, it requires going beyond Foucault’s account, or at least substantially modifying it,

56 New reflections on the theory of power through the insights of psychoanalysis. A psychoanalytic account would allow us to shed further light on the processes of subject formation through the mechanism of desire, and ways in which the subject might resist or escape this subjectivity. Indeed, in Butler’s words: ‘One cannot account for subjectivation and, in particular, becoming the principle of one’s own subjection without recourse to a psychoanalytic account of the formative or generative effects of restriction and prohibition’ (1997: 87).

The subject of the ‘lack’: the Lacanian intervention The problem of resistance has therefore highlighted the need for some kind of psychic dimension that goes beyond relations of power and the subjected identities produced by them. This domain would be, in psychoanalytic terms, the unconscious – the field of desires and drives, the passions that both bind us to power and cause us to try to free ourselves from it. In other words, there is in the unconscious a dimension of radical excess through which the ‘subjectified’ subject is both formed and unformed – something that is both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ power. In an attempt to conceptualize this dimension, we will now turn to Lacanian psychoanalysis.2 However, rather than give a detailed account of the totality of Lacan’s thinking, my aim here is to critically examine certain key Lacanian ideas about subjectivity, desire, law, prohibition and fantasy, in order to apply them to the specific questions of power and resistance that have been raised thus far. Moreover, the point is not that Lacanian ideas will lead to a new theory of power that will supplant Foucault’s; rather, that an exploration of particular Lacanian ideas will allow us to uncover psychic, symbolic and ideological dimensions of power that were not possible within the parameters of Foucault’s theory. What I am suggesting here is that a psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity would complement the Foucauldian theory of power. The fundamental question that has been raised so far is the status of the subject in power: that is, if the subject is constituted by power and is to be understood within its limits, then how can one account for the aspect of the subject that resists power? It is here that Lacan’s account of the subject is relevant. Although Lacan does not have a specific notion of power, nevertheless, like Foucault, he sees the subject as ‘constructed’ – although in this case, not by power, but by structures of language. Subjectivity, for Lacan, is only achieved through its entry into the external world of language and signifiers – the Symbolic Order. The ‘I’ only has meaning and a sense of its ‘self’ in relation to the signifier that stands in to represent it (Lacan 1977: 3). The subject, in Lacan’s account, is far from the autonomous, transparent and self-reflective subject of the Cogito. For Lacan, the subjectivity is based on not knowing oneself. The ego’s selfidentity is an illusion; it is disrupted by a knowledge that is ‘not known’ – namely, the unconscious, which, as Lacan said, is ‘structured like a lan-

New reflections on the theory of power 57 guage’ (1998: 203). So the ego’s recognition of itself is based on a fundamental ‘misrecognition’ or méconnaissance: it is an ‘illusion of autonomy’ (Lacan 1977: 6). The subject’s ego is based on an identification with an illusory image of cohesion and stability, which is produced through the external order of images and signifiers – the Imaginary and the Symbolic. While this notion of subjectivity may appear to coincide at the outset with Foucault’s account – where the subject is also constituted by external structures and discursive effects – there is nevertheless an important difference. For Foucault, the subject is wholly constituted by power and discourse. That is, the identity of the subject coincides with the discursive parameters that are laid down for it, and there is no aspect of the subject that is not colonized by power/knowledge. For Lacan, on the other hand, the identity of the subject is always incomplete. The symbolization of the subject – its self-recognition in the symbolic order – ultimately fails and, therefore, there is always a structural gap between the subject and the signifier that is supposed to represent him. In other words, there is a ‘lack’ in the symbolic identity of the subject – a lack which paradoxically constitutes the subject. The subject is incapable of fulfilling this symbolic identity. That is why Lacan writes the subject as S(Ø) – s barred: this recognizes the failure of the signifier to represent the subject. For Lacan, the subject is represented by a ‘cut’ or radical discontinuity in the signifying chain: ‘This cut in the signifying chain alone verifies the structure of the subject as discontinuity in the real’ (1977: 299). So, whereas for Foucault the identity of the subject is based on a successful interpellation, for Lacan the subject’s identity is based on a failed interpellation. There is an excess or surplus of meaning produced by this failed encounter with the symbolic – a radical void between the identity and meaning, which the subject inhabits. The subject is the name given to this discontinuity in the symbolic structure – the failed place of signification. So the essential, autonomous subject is subverted in Lacan’s analysis, not because it is entirely determined by signifiers, but because its determination by signifiers is fundamentally flawed. The subject here is radically split between its symbolic representation and the void in the symbolic itself – the radical dimension that lies beyond it. For Lacan, then, unlike Foucault, there is always a distance between the subject and the structures which constitute it. There is a kind of internal fold or limit within the structures of subjectivity itself, pointing to a radical void that it cannot master, and which both jeopardizes and constitutes its identity. For Foucault, as we have seen, there is no outside to the discursive limits of subjectivity, and this would explain the difficulties he encountered in adequately theorizing resistance to subjectification. Despite his attempts to see resistance as a kind of counter-movement to power or as some fleeting ‘plebeian’ quality, Foucault could not conceive of a dimension beyond subjectification, from where this possibility could emerge. By contrast, Lacan is able to theorize the limits of subjectivity itself, precisely by pointing to an unsymbolizable dimension that exceeds them. This is

58 New reflections on the theory of power what he calls the ‘real’ – that which cannot be integrated into the symbolic order of meaning, thus disturbing the very borders of any identity. For Lacan, the real is ‘that which always returns to the same place’ (1998: 49) – the immovable limit against which the movement of symbolization is blocked. The real may be understood as what is missing from the structure of symbolization. According to Jacques-Alain Miller, the real in Lacan may be seen as extimité – an ‘excluded interior’ or ‘intimate exterior’ – in other words, what is excluded on the inside (1994: 74–87). With this notion of the real, Lacan goes beyond the limits of the ‘constructionist’ position adopted by Foucault. Yannis Stavrakakis suggests that the constructionist argument – in other words, that everything is constructed by discourse or power – has a theoretical blindspot that it cannot account for: ‘The blindspot of constructionism . . . is that on the one hand it reduces everything to the level of construction and, on the other hand, it occupies a meta-linguistic or essentialist position outside construction’ (1999: 66). For example, if one were to take seriously the implications of the constructionist argument, one would find a certain difficulty in speaking critically about power relations and discourse, as one presumably would already be caught up in their ‘truth effects’. While Foucault himself fully acknowledges the way that his thinking is inextricable from the very relations of power and discourse it diagnoses, there is still a kind of implicit assumption of a place of enunciation beyond the ‘truth effects’ of power. Indeed, being able to speak critically about these relations indicates an implicit attempt to step beyond them. Stavrakakis argues, then, that the constructionist position itself needs to be ‘deconstructed’, precisely by positing another level at which meaning is produced, beyond the level of constructionism itself. In other words, there must be some kind of constitutive ‘outside’ beyond the discursive limits of the constructionist position. However, to avert the dangers of falling back into the essentialist position, this would have to be an exteriority that is impossible to represent or symbolize (Stavrakakis 1999: 67). This non-essentialist exteriority is precisely what is entailed in Lacan’s notion of the real – a void of contingency and indeterminacy in which the limits of identity are dislocated. The real, in Lacan’s formulation, has nothing to do with reality as such; rather, it is precisely what displaces what is commonly understood by ‘reality’. In other words, our reality – the reality of our identities and our way of seeing the world – is fundamentally conditioned by symbolic and fantasy structures; and it is the real – that which cannot be integrated into these structures – which jeopardizes this reality, making our identities precarious. The real, in a Lacanian understanding, is non-essentialist precisely because it is produced by the processes of symbolization, and yet is also the ‘leftover’ of these processes and the dimension that exceeds them. The real is the point at which these symbolic structures break down and the contingency of their operation is revealed.

New reflections on the theory of power 59

The real and the impossibility of identity The real is the dimension that intervenes to block the full realization of any identity – it refers to the internal limits in the symbolic structure of identity itself. As such, it has a number of important consequences. First, the real is what undermines the full identity of the subject, thus allowing us to theorize a gap or ‘lack’ between the subject and the structures of meaning that constitute him. In this sense, the real provides a way of conceptualizing the psychic dimension beyond the structures of subjectivity that this discussion has been pointing towards. Second, this psychic exteriority in the subject does not refer to some sort of essential place in the subject that precedes symbolization. The subject in the Lacanian analysis is thoroughly social – spoken through and through by the external structures of language and the symbolic. Rather, the real is precisely the effect of these very symbolic processes – it refers to an internal void in the symbolic structure itself. In other words, what is lacking in the structure of the subject is precisely also what is lacking in the objective order itself.3 So, third, this notion of the real as that which is lacking in the objective order, can perhaps provide a theoretical ground through which resistance to social and political structures and subjectifying practices may be explained. With Foucault, part of the difficulty in accounting for resistance to subjectifying power was that there was no conceptual outside to power – no space that exceeded power and that would allow for ‘free’ action on the part of the subject. With Lacan, on the other hand, because the subject has not been fully constituted, because there is a gap between the subject and the symbolic order, which is produced through the failure of this order, there is room for a certain freedom or radical indeterminacy in the identity of the subject. For instance, Laclau shows, in his Lacanianinspired theory of politics, that one can have a notion of the subject that is both indeterminate and ‘free’, yet non-essentialist. For Laclau, the subject is not an essentialist and autonomous entity since he is constituted by social structures – power, discourse, language, etc. However, the very structure that determines the subject is itself fractured and indeterminate. In other words, the radical indeterminacy lies not in the subject but in the structures that determine him. This means that although the subject’s identity is not autonomous to the structure, it is nevertheless constituted by a radical dislocation and undecidability. This undecidability introduces to the political field a radical freedom and contingency of agency: ‘The freedom thus won in relation to the structure is therefore a traumatic fact initially: I am condemned to be free, not because I have no structural identity as the existentialists assert, but because I have a failed structural identity’ (Laclau 1990: 44). A further crucial implication of the intervention of the real would be that the very identity of power is itself incomplete. As I have suggested, the indeterminacy of the subject lies in the indeterminacy of the structure. If

60 New reflections on the theory of power we were to apply this to the theory of power, the consistency of power – as a series of determining effects – would itself be problematic. As mentioned earlier, one of the central problems with Foucault’s treatment of power was its all-encompassing nature, which so broadened the concept as to make it difficult to sustain. Power, for Foucault, had no definitional or structural limit – it pervaded all levels of social and discursive reality. However, if we were to accept the Lacanian understanding of a structure that is limited by the dimension of the real which is exterior to it, we could argue that power too must have some sort of exteriority, that there must be something beyond power which it cannot entirely grasp. Power cannot be everywhere and everything – there must be some sort of ‘outside’ to it, that both limits it conceptually and allows for the possibility of resistance. As Slavoj Zˇizˇek argues: ‘Every power structure is necessarily split, inconsistent; there is a crack in the very foundation of its edifice – and this crack can be used as a lever for the effective subversion of the power structure’ (1996: 3). In other words, the structure of power is to some extent deficient and lacking, allowing for the possibility of undermining it.

The symbolic dimension of power What this points to, then, is the need to partly revise Foucault’s notion of power. In the Foucauldian analysis, power is reduced to a dispersed series of ‘concrete’ practices and relations, and its symbolic dimension is ˇ izˇek argues, the problem with Foucault’s account neglected. However, as Z is that a disavowed spectre of power always haunts his concrete analyses. That is to say, Foucault’s theory of power only makes sense if one acknowledges that behind the plurality of practices, relations and discourses there looms a symbolic dimension of power which these practices and discourses implicitly refer to – and yet it is precisely this dimension which is denied by Foucault. There is always an unbridgeable gap in Foucault’s ‘bottom-up’ analysis between micro-practices and power itself ˇ izˇek 1999a: 66). So while Foucault’s analysis might appear to be more (Z ‘concrete’, in the sense that it claims to be discarding symbolic ‘sovereign’ notions of power, focusing instead on the direct, local ‘power effects’, there is in fact nothing concrete about this. Paradoxically, power only has ‘concrete’ meaning if it refers to an ‘abstract’ symbolic dimension. However, as Étienne Balibar shows, this return to the notion of a ‘structure’ or ‘apparatus’ of power does not mean that power is to be seen as absolute. Rather, as a structure, power is deficient and lacking: I would say against Foucault . . . that there is power, even a power apparatus, which has several centres, however complex and multiple these ‘centres’ may be . . . But, having said this, I shall parody Lacan and add: power cannot be all; in fact, in essence it is ‘not-all’ [pastout], that is, deficient – even if we include in it its opposite and adver-

New reflections on the theory of power 61 sary, counter-power, that is, revolution and rebellion, ‘anti-systemic movements’, and so on. (Balibar 2002: 136) So, if one were to approach the question of power from a Lacanian perspective, we could suggest that what is important is precisely this ‘abstract’ structural and symbolic dimension that is absent from Foucault’s account. In other words, the micro-practices of power that Foucault describes – the heterogeneous, localized practices and strategies – would actually presuppose a ‘deeper’ symbolic structure of power. This is because the symbol of power would be, in a Lacanian analysis, a ‘master signifier’ – that is a primary structural interdiction that brings the symbolic order into being. In other words, power would perhaps be a way of understanding what Lacan calls the Name-of-the-Father – a structural prohibition against incest, which brings about Oedipal repression. It is important to emphasize here that Lacan is not talking about an actual father’s ‘no’, but rather a structural function of the signifier. To give an example of this symbolic operation, Lacan argues that psychosis is based on ‘foreclosure’ (Verwerfung) – the radical failure in the subject to register the Father’s ‘No’, resulting in the inability of the subject to constitute a coherent system of meaning, an operation that depends upon some sort of structural repression (Lacan 1993: 208). What I am suggesting here is that the theory of power must contain some sort of symbolic dimension based on a fundamental prohibition, which would provide an interpretive framework through which the ‘concrete’ micro-practices and relations of power can be understood. This notion of power as involving a symbolic repression would seem to be a far cry from the Foucauldian notion of a ‘productive’ power, which purports to go beyond the ‘repressive hypothesis’. However, it is important to note here that for Lacan also, repression has productive effects. Indeed, the emergence of subjectivity itself is based on this Oedipal repression. It is the prohibition against incest that produces and incites the subject’s unconscious desire. Without this Oedipal prohibition, there could be no desire, since desire is always predicated upon a fundamental lack of the impossible ‘lost object’ – the imaginary incestuous relationship with the mother: What we find in the incest law is located as such at the level of the unconscious in relation to Das Ding, the Thing. The desire for the mother cannot be satisfied because it is the end, the terminal point, the abolition of the whole world of demand, which is the one that at its deepest level structures man’s unconscious. (Lacan 1992: 68) In other words, subjectivity – the dimension of desire – is founded upon a necessary structural impossibility. So, rather than this impossibility being merely prohibitive, it is precisely what produces the subject’s psyche.

62 New reflections on the theory of power In doing so, prohibition incites a certain dimension of desire in relation to the law itself. In other words, the law of prohibition produces also a desire to transgress this prohibition. This results in a kind of eroticization of the law – a jouissance or enjoyment that palpitates at the law’s limits. We can see this paradoxical relationship between law and enjoyment in Lacan’s reading of Kant and Sade. For Lacan, the transgressive excess of Sade is the logical counterpart to the universal laws, injunctions and categorical imperatives of Kant. It is not only that the coldness of the law – embodied by Kant – produces its own form of perverse and excessive enjoyment. It is also that excessive enjoyment itself becomes rigidified into its own cold, universal, rational imperative – an operation enacted in the sheer monotony one encounters in the Sadian boudoir. In other words, Sade unmasks the hidden enjoyment in Kantian law by holding up to it its dialectical mirror – the universal law of enjoyment: Let us enunciate the maxim: ‘I have the right of enjoyment over your body, anyone can say to me, and I will exercise this right, without any limit stopping me in the capriciousness of the exactions that I might have the taste to satiate’. (Lacan 1989: 58) It is here that, strangely enough, Lacan is perhaps closest to Foucault. Foucault also recognized the eroticization of power itself, and the way that power operated in a perpetual spiralling relationship with pleasure (1978: 45). Indeed, for both thinkers, there is an inextricable link between enjoyment and the forces that would seem to restrict it. As Lacan says: ‘The Law appears to be giving the order, “Jouis!” ’ (1977: 319). We can see this paradoxical relationship in capitalist culture today, where there is a continual injunction to enjoy – an enjoyment, moreover, supposedly achieved through consumption, which is sold to us as a ‘hidden’ form of transgression and self-affirmation. As Foucault suggests, modern ‘bio-power’ operates through an enforced sense of ‘well-being’: ‘The “right” to life, to one’s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppressions and “alienations”, the “right” to discover what one is and all that one can be’ (1978: 145). This paradoxical relationship in both Lacan and Foucault’s thinking between law or power and transgression, has a number of implications for this discussion. First, it raises once again the troublesome question of resistance. That is to say, if power now operates through its own transgression – if breaking the law, crossing the ‘line’, is actually a function of power – then does this not mean that every act of resistance only reaffirms the power it is supposedly working against? In other words, how can we think about resistance if, according to this argument, it is already included in the very structures it resists? It is clear, then, that resistance can no longer be seen in terms of simple transgression.4 Second, the relationship between

New reflections on the theory of power 63 law/power and transgression suggests the need for a including an ideological dimension in the understanding of power – something that is denied in Foucault’s account. However, rather than re-invoke the critical theory account of ideology, I will explore the possibility of a new approach – one that is informed by the Lacanian categories of fantasy and object petit a. Moreover, this new notion of ideology will involve some rethinking of question of resistance beyond the problematic of transgression.

Ideological fantasy and resistance One of the problems with the classical and critical theory approaches to ideology was that they were based on the presupposition of a human essence whose ‘real interests’ ideology distorted. Marx’s formula for ideology was that subjects in capitalist society do not know it, but they are doing it. That is, under the ideological conditions of capitalism, subjects do not know what their ‘real’ interests are, and are therefore deceived into supporting relations and institutions that exploit and dominate them. In other words, according to this account, ideology operates through a fundamental distortion of perception. However, the assumptions about ‘false consciousness’ implied in this account led to the ‘poststructuralist’ rejection of the whole problematic of ideology. Foucault’s theory of power attempted to bypass the notion of ideology altogether by seeing power as functioning directly at the level of the body, as well as through the very discourses of truth that a critique of ideology would be founded upon. However, what if we could develop a notion of ideology that did not rely on essentialist assumptions – one that was not premised on the distortion of the subject’s ‘real’ interests? I would suggest that such a rethinking of the problematic of ideology is possible along Lacanian lines. In contrast to the critical theory account, a Lacanian approach to ideology might proceed as follows: ideology does not operate through distortion or deception but through truth itself, and yet this does not make it any less ideological. This is based on the Lacanian thesis that it is quite possible to lie in the guise of the truth. Just as Freud believed that the truth of unconscious desire emerged in a distorted way through dissimulation – for example in dreams – so too Lacan showed that a lie can take the guise of truth itself. For example, in the clinical setting the analysand is quite likely to present to the analyst an endless series of objectively ‘true’ facts about his or her life, in a desperate attempt to conceal a deeper underlying truth – the truth of the unconscious (see Lacan 1988: 306). That is why, as Jacques-Alain Miller says, truth is not the opposite of falsehood (1990: xx). What ‘objective’ truth and falsehood both ultimately refer to is another order of truth, which is psychic truth of the unconscious. In other words, what is important to the question of psychoanalytic truth are not matters of objective truth and falsehood, but rather the place of enunciation itself – the position from where the unconscious psyche of the subject is spoken.

64 New reflections on the theory of power Let us apply this Lacanian understanding of truth to the question of ideology. Here the ideological distortion would be not at the level of its objective content, but rather in the position of power from which it is ˇ izˇek argues: ‘Ideology has nothing to do with “illusion”, articulated. As Z with a mistaken, distorted representation of its social content. To put it succinctly: a political standpoint can be quite accurate (“true”) as to its objective content, yet thoroughly ideological’ (1999a: 60). To give an example, when the media focuses on a certain ethnic community, claiming that it has higher rates of crime, or poses a greater risk of sponsoring terrorism than other communities, even if this is objectively ‘true’ and borne out by statistics, government reports and so on, it is still ideological because it conceals the racist gaze through which this particular community is being observed. In other words, the ideological ‘distortion’ is not in the content of the discourse or utterance, but in the ‘place’ of enunciation – the concealment of the power relations operating here. We can see here how this notion of ideology goes beyond the critical theory understanding, which saw ideology as merely the distortion of an objective truth. In a Lacanian account, ideology actually operates through objective truth – what it conceals is not the essential interests of the subject, but rather a particular position of power from which it is articulated. However, unlike the Foucauldian argument, which sees the involvement of power with truth as grounds for dismissing ideology, I would see this as the very reason for retaining the concept. There is still a distortion or concealment here, but one which operates within the structure of truth. If ideology does not conceal objective truth, what exactly is its function? It is here that we would apply the Lacanian category of fantasy. Simply put, the role of fantasy for Lacan is to conceal or cover over the lack in the Other. The dimension of fantasy is constituted around what Lacan calls object petit a, which is the illusory semblance of fullness or wholeness – the lost state of oneness with the Mother. As we have seen, for Lacan, the Other is always lacking – there is an irreducible void around which the symbolic order is structured. For the subject, the realization of this lack is unbearable because it means that his identity, as constituted through the symbolic, is also lacking. Fantasy is a way of coming to grips with this trauma – it has the role of masking this lack in symbolic reality itself (see Stavrakakis 1999: 46–47). It is important to point out here that in this formulation, fantasy is not the opposite of reality but, rather, the dimension that sustains it. It is this that designates the ideological character of reality itself – the fact that ideology does not repress ‘true’ representations of reality, but rather conditions this very reality: ‘Ideology is not simply a “false consciousness”, an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived of as “ideoˇ izˇek 1989: 21). Our ‘reality’ is really symbolic reality – constilogical” ’ (Z tuted by signifiers and structures of representation – and this is sustained by the fantasy of an escape to a ‘lost’ Edenic state beyond the symbolic.

New reflections on the theory of power 65 However, at the limits of reality is, as has been shown, not a utopian state of oneness but the unbearable and traumatic void of the real itself – that which threatens to disrupt these symbolic structures. If we were to apply this argument to political analysis, we could say that the subject’s social reality – the social world as constructed by signifiers and images that structure our beliefs – is also lacking. That is, there is a kind of structural gap in social representation itself – a radical discontinuity in the way social identity is represented. The role of ideology here is precisely to cover over, to ‘patch up’ this void – to sustain the fantasy of fullness and wholeness. ˇ izˇek gives a concrete example of this ideological operation in the figure Z of the Jew in Nazi anti-Semitic discourse. ‘The Jew’ is: just the embodiment of a certain blockage – of the impossibility which prevents society from achieving its full identity as a closed, homogeneous totality . . . Society is not prevented from achieving its full identity because of the Jews: it is prevented by its own antagonistic nature, by its own immanent blockage, and it ‘projects’ this internal negativity into the figure of the ‘Jew’. ˇ izˇek 1989: 127) (Z In other words, for Nazism, the Jew embodied a fantasmic figure upon which all social ills could be blamed, thus masking the radical lack which existed at the level of the social itself. The ideological figure of the Jew thus allowed lack to be bypassed in this discourse, and the fantasy of social fullness to be sustained. In this way, the Jew – as a construction of ‘the enemy’ – was crucial to Nazism attaining a consistent political and ideological identity. Moreover, it allowed the fantasy of a lost Nazi utopia to be sustained: ‘We could restore the purity and organic harmony of the German race if only it were not for the Jew’. Ideology therefore has the function of sustaining the political fantasy of a lost state of fullness – a state which is actually impossible: ‘Symbolization makes us believe that what was impossible was prohibited and thus can also be recaptured’ (Stavrakakis 1999: 52). We can see, then, that ideology is still a form of concealment – only what it conceals is not our perception of social reality, but the lack at the heart of social reality itself. It thus sustains, through the operation of fantasy, the subject’s participation in social reality. Even more radically, perhaps, this ideological distortion operates not at the level of the subject’s beliefs, but at the level of his actions. Ideological distortion here is radically external, rather than internal. It is something that functions at the heart of social reality. According to this ‘materialist’ thesis, ideology retains a cynical distance between itself and the subject. We are not expected to believe in the ˇ izˇek ideological content, as long as we act as though we believe in it. As Z says: ‘We all know very well that bureaucracy is not all-powerful, but our “effective” conduct in the presence of bureaucratic machinery is regulated

66 New reflections on the theory of power by a belief in its all-powerfulness’ (1989: 30). It is precisely this action – action without belief – that sustains structures and relations of domination. It does not matter if we believe in what the state tells us, as long as we ‘obey’ at the level of our actions. The same ideological principle operates in advertising. When we see an advertisement for a brand of toothpaste, and we are being told that this toothpaste is far superior to all other brands because of some revolutionary secret formula, we know that this is nonsense. Moreover, the makers of the product know that we know it is nonsense. However, the point is that we still buy the toothpaste, and this is precisely how advertising works. While we might congratulate ourselves on being able to see through the deception of the advertisement and on making an ‘informed’ choice at the supermarket, we still buy the product. Ideology works in exactly the same way. We know that, in most cases, what we are being told is nonsense – it is ideological in the usual sense of the word – and those in power know that we know this, but it does not matter as long as we conform to the ideological message at the level of our actions, as long as we ‘buy the (ideological) product’. In other words, we are not expected to believe in, or identify with, the ideological message. In a sense, our actions believe for us and, while we can retain some cynical distance from the ideological message at the level of belief, we are still caught up in it. Therefore the knowledge that we are being deceived does not render ideology ineffective. On the contrary, it is precisely through this cynical distance that ideology operates. This distance between ideology and the subject is built into the logic of contemporary ideological mechanˇ izˇek 1989: 28). isms. We are not supposed to take it seriously (Z So where does this leave us with regards to resistance? The question of resistance to power, I would suggest, is also the question of resistance to the ideological dimension through which structures and relations of power are sustained, articulated and extended. As we have seen, the usual strategies of transgression are ultimately unsuccessful. Indeed, they only reaffirm the structures of the law. Moreover, the fantasy of transgression is sustained by the illusory promise of a lost state of fullness – an enjoyment that has been supposedly prohibited by the law, and which is accessible to us on the other side of the law. However, this notion of prohibition, in a Lacanian analysis, only serves to mask a much more fundamental structural impossibility. So if it is the case that ideology actually functions by sustaining the fantasy of an undistorted, utopian ‘place’ beyond the law, ˇ izˇek has shown, it is not then how exactly do we resist this lure? As Z necessarily an act of resistance to cynically satirize the ideological message. Indeed, the ‘hold’ that ideology has over us is never more complete than when we claim to be able to see through its deception. So what would a ˇ izˇek suggests that, given the way genuine act of resistance to ideology be? Z that ideology functions through maintaining a certain distance between its message and the subject, the only way to resist ideological subjectification is by taking its surface content at face value and by identifying with it

New reflections on the theory of power 67 absolutely. In other words, because ideology only prohibits on the surface, while it secretly incites its own transgression, the only effective form of resistance is ‘to simply do what is allowed’ (Zˇizˇek 2000: 147). According ˇ izˇek, this strategy attacks the inverse logic of the ideology by operatto Z ing at its surface level. By doing this we would be refusing to play the game of ideology, thus avoiding the trap of false transgression. In other words, because ideology expects to be taken cynically, the ultimate act of transgression is perhaps to follow it to the letter, to thoroughly identify with it. This naïve identification with the content of ideology causes a ‘short circuit’ in its logic by exposing the cynical processes it relies upon. While it would be difficult to imagine how such a strategy might actuˇ izˇek himself never really ally work in political terms – something that Z spells out – it does nevertheless point to what is crucial in the way that contemporary systems of ideology, and indeed power, operate. Rather than simply prohibiting, they also cynically incite their own transgression, thus making the act of resistance much more ambiguous. Perhaps, in this sense, the only way to effectively resist is precisely to ‘go through’ the symbolic edifice of ideology or the law, thus finding its limits by working from ‘within’. This strategy of forging an ‘outside’ from the ‘inside’ – of creating the conditions for free political action on the part of the subject – is made possible through the logic of the real, which renders any structure of power or ideology open to the contingency and indeterminacy of what it cannot integrate. I have argued that the Lacanian real is what allows us to theorize a psychic dimension at the limits of power, something that was needed in Foucault’s analysis. I have also shown the ways in which Lacan’s understanding of the psyche – through structures of language, and through concepts of enjoyment and fantasy – can extend the theory of power, unmasking its symbolic and ideological dimensions, and allowing us to perceive more clearly both its subjectifying function and the processes by which the subject comes to resist this subjectification. In the following chapter I will explore more thoroughly the effect that ideological systems have on the subject, and the ways in which the subject can resist this domination.

4

Spectres of Stirner A contemporary critique of ideology

The last chapter developed new approaches to the concepts of power and ideology. I suggested that power and ideology cannot be seen as all encompassing, and that there must be a subjective dimension that is both constituted by them and, at the same time, exceeds them and forms their outside. Here I continue this line of enquiry, exploring the contemporary status of the theory of ideology, as well as questions of resistance to the way that ideology positions us as subjects. I will argue that Stirner’s critique of the ‘spectres’ of humanism is crucial to this debate, allowing us to go beyond both essentialist and structuralist understandings of how ideology functions. Stirner’s importance as a theorist of ideology has been largely overlooked by contemporary political and social theory. He engages in an iconoclastic project of unmasking the ideology of Enlightenment humanism, exposing the relations of domination behind its serenely rational, humanist visage. For Stirner, ‘fixed ideas’ – such as human essence, morality and rational truth – are ideas that have been made ‘sacred’ or ‘essential’, and now come to dominate the individual in the same way that Christianity once did. Stirner was one of the first to systematically analyse ideological systems in their own right. In doing so he went beyond materialist accounts of ideology that reduced it to an epiphenomenon of capitalism and bourgeois social relations.

Marx’s critique of idealism This latter point emerged as the crucial difference between Stirner and Marx. Marx’s central charge against Stirner was that he ignored the real, material basis of ideology. Marx and Engels, in The German Ideology, develop two different and, in some respects, contradictory theories of ideology. First, The German Ideology may be seen as a critique of German idealism, which they saw as prevalent in several of the young Hegelian philosophers including Feuerbach, Bauer and Stirner. These philosophers, Marx and Engels argue, are ideologists because they abstract ideas and consciousness from their basis in the real, material world, turning them

Spectres of Stirner 69 into otherworldly, metaphysical spectres. The ‘German Ideologists’ have inverted the real state of things, seeing the material world as being determined by the Idea, when, in actual fact, the Idea is determined by the material world and concrete social practices: In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here it is a matter of ascending from earth to heaven. That is to say, not of setting out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh; but setting out from real active men, and on the basis of their real life-process demonstrating the development of their ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. (Marx and Engels 1975: 36) In other words, ideas and consciousness are a reflection of material life, of the concrete activities and processes that people engage in. It is these material processes that determine consciousness, rather than being determined by it. To invert this relationship, to hide the material basis of ideas and to see ideas as abstract, autonomous entities that determine the material world, as Marx and Engels accuse the idealist philosophers of doing, is an ideological gesture. Ideology, in other words, is the distortion of the real relationship between life and ideas, the disguising of the real, material basis of consciousness. The second understanding of ideology found in The German Ideology is political, where the first one may be said to be epistemological. For Marx and Engels, ideology may be explained as the reflection of class domination: ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas . . . The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of dominant material relations’ (1975: 59). Ideology, then, is always the expression of the dominance of an economic class. Members of the ruling class are also producers of ideas, ideas which legitimize and perpetuate their rule. Ruling ideas, moreover, produce the illusion of universality – so that the interests of the ruling class are always presented as the common interest. Each new ruling class ‘has to give its ideas the form of universality, and present them as the only rational, universally valid ones’ (Marx and Engels 1975: 60). Ideology thus involves a certain illusion or deception – it presents the particular interests of a class as the common, universal interests of all. It is a sort of camera obscura which performs an inversion of the particular and the universal, masking particular interests by giving them the appearance of universality and rationality, thus legitimizing them. Each new ruling class that takes the place of the old, effects this ideological inversion. For instance, the real interests of the bourgeoisie – to exploit economically the proletariat – are disguised as the universal interests of humanity. In this way, the proletariat is deceived through this ideological misrepresentation into identifying its interests with those of the bourgeoisie. Ideology prevents

70 Spectres of Stirner the proletariat from identifying its true interests – which would be to overthrow bourgeois social relations – and thus perpetuates these exploitative and oppressive relations. Ideology thus involves a distortion: it has the function of obscuring bourgeois relations of domination and exploitation, and blinding the proletariat to its own essential interests. According to Engels, therefore, the proletariat suffered from ‘false consciousness’. The two understandings of ideology presented here are quite different. The first notion of ideology sees it as the abstraction of ideas from their basis in real, material life – an epistemological distortion. The second sees ideology in a more directly political sense as a series of ideas produced by the ruling class, which mask its particularity in the guise of universality, thus inducing a state of ‘false consciousness’. There is a central contradiction here: is ideology that which disguises the fact that ideas do not have a determining effect on material and social life? Or is ideology a series of ideas that plays an active role in supporting and maintaining a certain system of social relations? Is ideology that which abstracts ideas from the real world, or is it an active weapon in real political and social struggles? In other words, the first theory sees ideology as the abstraction of ideas from material and social life, whereas the second locates ideology in the actual ideas themselves and the role they play in very real, material struggles. The latter version perhaps allows ideology a more internal role in material life than the former, which sees it purely as the abstraction from material life. However, I would argue that despite these differences the two versions of ideology developed by Marx and Engels are united in one crucial sense: they both see ideology as pertaining to a fundamental illusion – a distortion or mystification of reality. The first notion of ideology sees it as a disguising of material and social basis of ideas. The second sees ideology as creating an illusion of universality, masking the particularity of bourgeois interests, and thus deceiving the proletariat as to its own, essential interests. Ideology, in both senses then, implies a ruse or deception, a fundamental distortion of reality. This notion of ideology obeys a rationalist logic, in which rational truth is counterpoised to obfuscating ideological mechanisms that distort this truth. Ideology in the first sense, as we have seen, distorts the real relationship between material life and ideas and, in the second sense, disguises the reality of class rule and the interests of the proletariat. The proletariat cannot perceive the truth of its real interests because it is deceived in this regard by ideological mechanisms. Ideology as deception, in other words, implies a rational truth or a notion of real interests that is being distorted. Ideology is therefore inherently irrational.

Paradigms of ideology: rationalism and structuralism This approach to ideology has its roots in the rationalism of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment claimed to bring the bright light of reason to the dark, murky waters of superstition and religious mystification. Scientific

Spectres of Stirner 71 and rational thought was seen as a tool that would liberate man from obscurantism and tyranny. If rule by divine right could be exposed as irrational then it would be overthrown. It is interesting, as Terry Eagleton remarks, that these Enlightenment thinkers who sought to develop rational systems of ideas and bring reason to bear on obscurantism, were themselves first known as ideologists or ‘ideologues’ (1991: 67). With Marx and Engels, however, as we have seen, the term ‘ideology’ itself became associated with the mystification and distortion of rational truth. In any case, it is clear that, despite the inversion of terms, this theory of ideology subscribes to the rationalist logic of the Enlightenment, in which rational and scientific knowledge is seen as an antidote to obfuscating and illusory ideas. Here materialism, or historical materialism, is precisely this scientific antidote to ideological mystification. More importantly, with Marx and Engels there is a notion of the real, essential interests of the proletariat, which have been misperceived due to the operation of bourgeois ideology, and can only be correctly and rationally perceived through the scientific study of actual historical conditions. In other words, there is an essential and rational truth about society, and a core of essential interests within the subjectivity of the proletariat as a class, that is hidden under layers of ideological mystification and false consciousness and is waiting to be discovered. This essentialism is central to the logic of Enlightenment rationalism: there is an essentially rational and moral subject who has only to grasp this inherent rationality and morality to liberate himself from the metaphysical obscurantism and political authoritarianism that keep him in chains. This was the language of Enlightenment humanist political philosophies, from liberalism to socialism: man was enslaved by his own ignorance, and if only he could develop his innate rational and moral faculties, he could free himself from political oppression. In other words, there is an essential identity whose rational realization is distorted or denied by ideology. One has only to remove these ideological obstacles, to exorcise these mystifying spectres with scientific and rational discourses, for human essence to be realized. Here we may say, then, that there is a point of departure, in the form of an essential human subjectivity and rational scientific discourse, that is uncontaminated by ideology. In the language of Enlightenment rationality there is always a non-ideological standpoint – a rational position that remains outside ideological mechanisms, from which one can critically reflect on them. Rational science is thus seen as the antidote to ideological distortion. For Marx, this extra-ideological rational discourse was historical materialism. In other words, although the subject’s perception of his true interests is distorted by ideology, these interests themselves remain outside ideology and can be grasped rationally and scientifically. If ideology involves distortion, there must be a rational truth or essence that is distorted, and this provides a critical point of departure beyond ideology. It is precisely from this standpoint outside ideological

72 Spectres of Stirner mechanisms – this uncontaminated point of departure – that ideology can be criticized as an irrational distortion. The rationalist Enlightenment understanding of ideology therefore contends that we can step outside ideology, that we can see through its distortions from a certain epistemological viewpoint. For Marx and Engels, an understanding of the logic of history would allow the proletariat to shed the scales of ‘false consciousness’ and finally grasp its true interests, thus becoming ‘class conscious’. However, can we simply step outside ideology in this way? Can we engage in a rational critique of ideology from a safe distance, from an uncontaminated point of departure outside it? A ‘structuralist’ account of ideology would contend that this uncontaminated, extra-ideological position does not exist, and that we cannot simply extricate ourselves from ideological mechanisms. Indeed, to posit a vantage point outside ideology, from which we can supposedly rationally reflect upon it, is itself an ideological gesture. In other words, according to this account, there is no gap between ideology and the subject – there is no division between ideological distortion and rational thought. This gap is itself an ideological distortion. Ideology has colonized this place, and to think that we can step outside ideology merely affirms our position squarely within it. Let me explain this structuralist account with reference to Althusser. For Althusser, there is no human essence beyond the grasp of ideology, as rationalist Enlightenment thinkers supposed. Indeed Althusser’s theory of ideology is a radical break with humanist forms of Marxism. Rather, the human subject is constructed, or ‘interpellated’ by ideological mechanisms. Althusser here inverts the paradigm in which the subject constitutes ideology: ‘the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of “constituting” concrete individuals as subjects.’ (1977: 171) Ideological structures, or what Althusser calls ideological state apparatuses (ISAs), produce the subject through the misrecognition and distortion that is at the heart of social reproduction. There is no ‘false consciousness’ in this account. The subject is not deceived as to his true, essential interests, because these interests do not exist, or rather they are constructed by ideological apparatuses. There can be no essential, rational point of departure beyond ideology; ideology is all around us, forming the very basis of social existence. In other words, ideology is eternal for Althusser – there is no going beyond ideological interpellation. We have, then, two radically opposed accounts of ideology: the rational Enlightenment account, in which ideology is seen as an irrational distortion of the subject’s essential, rational interests; and the structuralist account, in which the notion of essential interests is dismissed, and the subject itself is constituted by ideological structures. I have argued that the first understanding of ideology provides an uncontaminated point of departure outside ideology, from which one can rationally reflect upon it,

Spectres of Stirner 73 while the second position allows no such privileged vantage point. There is no gap here between ideology and the subject. The question of ideology is skewed on these two opposing poles.

The end of ideology? Moreover, it may be argued that these radically different positions have led to the theoretical stagnation of ideology as a concept. The rational Enlightenment account, in order to see ideology as an irrational distortion of reality, had to presuppose an essential dimension of subjectivity outside ideology. It relied, as I have argued, on an uncontaminated point of departure from which ideology could be resisted. However, as structuralists have argued, this concept of a privileged viewpoint outside ideology can no longer be sustained. It relies on dubious essentialist and metaphysical notions of subjectivity. Rather, ideology has colonized the subject, and to posit a gap between ideology and the subject is the ultimate ideological gesture. The structuralist critique of the Enlightenment humanist position, however, presents us with a number of problems and throws the concept of ideology into crisis. First, without some kind of point of departure outside ideology, how can ideology be analysed and resisted? If the subject is already determined by ideology, how can there be any conception of a political critique of dominant ideological structures? Second, if there is no point outside ideology, if ideology has colonized this non-ideological gap whereby ideology was seen as a distortion or illusion, then how can we continue to define a concept of ideology? How do we distinguish it from ˇ izˇek’s words, other practices? The concept of ideology has, in Slavoj Z grown ‘too strong’, and it has become consequently meaningless: ‘It begins to embrace everything, inclusive of the very neutral, extra-ideological ground supposed to provide the standard by means of which one can measure ideological distortion’ (1999a: 69). The gap that separated ideology from a rational understanding of it functioned as a constitutive gap which allowed ideology to be defined in opposition to something. Once this gap or point of departure was removed, then ideology became impossible to define. The question of ideology is therefore caught in a quandary: if it retains the notion of ideology as a distortion of rational truth, then it can retain an uncontaminated point of departure outside ideology, yet it has to rely on spurious essentialist claims. Alternatively, if it abandons these essentialist categories, then it loses this extra-ideological standpoint and thus falls into the trap of expanding the concept of ideology to the point where it loses any theoretical value. This over-inflation of the ˇ izˇek argues, ‘one of the main reasons for proconcept of ideology is, as Z gressive abandonment of the notion of ideology’ (1999a: 69). What forms has this abandonment of ideology taken? The two main responses to the crisis of ideology are logical extensions of the two radically opposed accounts of ideology outlined above. The rational Enlightenment

74 Spectres of Stirner account of ideology finds its logical conclusion, it would seem, in Habermas’ rationalist abandonment of the ideology thesis. Jürgen Habermas presents a theory of rational, non-coercive communication in which ideology has no place. For Habermas there is always the possibility of undistorted communication between subjects, and this presupposes a universal intersubjective understanding (1990: 136). Subjects can reach a rational understanding about the world through speech acts referring to this context, without the distorting effects of ideology. Habermas’ notion of communicative action subscribes to an Enlightenment rationalist understanding of the world. Ideology is still seen as a distortion of understanding and communication. However, in this world of perfect communication, the concept of ideology simply has no place – its distorting effects can simply be bypassed by rational consensus achieved through an ‘ideal speech situation’. In the Habermasian universe, then, ideology has become obsolete – it ceases to have any theoretical or political relevance. However, is not Habermas, in attempting to bypass ideological distortion through the ‘ideal speech situation’, open to the same charge that in trying to go beyond ideology one merely reaffirms one’s place within it? As I have suggested before, this non-ideological place, whether it takes the form of human essence or an intersubjectively achieved rational consensus, is itself ideological. To try to step outside ideology is the ultimate ideological gesture. It is perhaps the circularity of this argument – the ‘ideology is everywhere’ thesis – that has prompted the second version of the abandonment of ideology – ‘poststructuralism’, or at least a particular strand of it. The poststructuralist dismissal of the idea of ideology may be seen to be the logical conclusion of the structuralist position. Structuralism, as shown above, rejected the idea of an essential human subjectivity; rather, the subject was produced by ideological apparatuses and, consequently, there was no uncontaminated place of departure outside ideology. This led, however, to the chief problem that if the concept of ideology is expanded to encompass everything, then it loses meaning. Why not just do away with ideology altogether? Does it continue to have any value conceptually or politically? Is it not more relevant and effective to see the world in terms of discourses, practices and strategies of power? This is precisely what Foucault does. For Foucault, it is no longer valuable to think in terms of ideological distortion because this implies that there is some rational truth whose representation is being distorted, and it is precisely this idea of absolute truth that Foucault questions. So, for Foucault as we have seen, what is in doubt is not the representation of truth, but the ontological and epistemological status of truth itself. In other words, if the status of truth itself is in doubt, then questions of the ideological distortion of truth are no longer relevant. What is more important here are the power relationships and practices that are implicit in the discourse of truth. Moreover, for Foucault, there is no essential human subjectivity that is

Spectres of Stirner 75 denied or deceived by ideology – the subject is a product, a fabrication. However, rather than the subject being constituted by ideology, as Althusser contended, it is actually produced by power and discourse. This is distinctly non-ideological because there is no distortion here – not even a constitutive distortion as there was with Althusser. Foucault looks at the material practices and techniques that are applied directly to the body and its movements, constructing the subject as disciplined and normalized. With Foucault, power has usurped ideology as the analytical focus – power is dispersed throughout the social network at all levels, and is involved in our everyday actions and relationships, our most minute practices. However, there is a problem with this discursive abandonment of ideology. It represents a further attempt to step outside ideology, this time, not from the perspective of an autonomous, essential subject, but, paradoxically, from the very rejection of this essential identity. In other words, it is an attempt to go beyond the problematic of ideology by dismissing it in place of discourses and practices that constitute the subject. While this positing of all-pervasive networks of power and discourse is supposed to deny the possibility of any critical standpoint outside these networks and, in an ironical way, deny the thinker himself any such objective vantage ˇ izˇek argues, this is the point, this is, in itself, an ideological gesture. As Z ‘last trap’ of ideology. We have seen the way that the rationalist attempt to separate ideology from reality, and to posit an uncontaminated point of departure outside ideology, was itself ideological. However, to respond to this by completely dismissing the notion of an extra-ideological reality and to see the world solely in terms of discursive fabrications – in other words to give up completely on the possibility of a critical standpoint from which ˇ izˇek, ‘such a quick, slick to reflect on ideology – is itself ideological. For Z “postmodern” solution, however, is ideology par excellence’ (1999a: 70). That is to say, the Foucauldian position here is somewhat disingenuous: in humbly denying itself a neutral standpoint, by seeing its own voice as merely one discourse amongst many, it is paradoxically assuming an ‘objective’ gaze above this endless plurality of discourses and power relations. In holding that we must abandon the whole problematic of ideology because it presupposes a non-ideological essence that does not exist, Foucault is actually performing two contradictory operations simultaneously. He is attempting to step outside ideology while, at the same time, denying us a place outside. What this amounts to is a reaffirmation of ideology despite or, more precisely through, one’s attempts to elude it. In the words ˇ izˇek: ‘The stepping out of ideology is the very form of our enslaveof Z ment to it’ (1999a: 60). Ideology continues to pop up obstinately in the very places where we think we have eschewed it. Maybe this also reaffirms our conceptual ‘enslavement’, or should we say indebtedness, to ideology. So it seems that we are back to where we started. I have shown that the radically opposed rational Enlightenment and structuralist accounts of

76 Spectres of Stirner ideology have led to the stagnation and progressive abandonment of ideology as a project. I have also shown that this abandonment of ideology has taken two radically opposed forms: the Habermasian approach, which is concomitant with the rational Enlightenment position; and the Foucauldian poststructuralist approach, which is an extension of the structuralist account of ideology. Moreover, I have shown the way in which these two rejections of ideology as a concept have ultimately failed and, in their very attempts to dispense with ideology, have both led to its reaffirmation. So it would seem, then, that there is no getting away from ideology. However, the discussion thus far has yielded some interesting conclusions. It is clear, first, that ideology can no longer be theorized as a distortion of human essence. The structuralist intervention has shown that the subject is a product of ideology, and that to posit an uncontaminated point of departure outside ideology is itself ideological. Second, and paradoxically, it is also immanently clear that we cannot present a critique of ideology, or indeed have any meaningful notion of ideology at all, without this point of departure, without this critical standpoint outside ideological structures. We must have some extra-ideological ‘space’ with which to reflect on the mechanisms of ideology, otherwise the critique of ideology cannot proceed any further and the ‘end of ideology’, as many have already heralded, will be well and truly with us. It would seem, then, that there are two contradictory requirements: that the theory of ideology must reject the notion of an essentialist identity, thus denying the extra-ideological standpoint of rationalist Enlightenment thought, and, at the same time, retain this extra-ideological point of departure for there to be any critical theory of ideology at all.

Stirner’s spectral critique of ideology Stirner’s theorization of ideology, I shall argue, provides a possible way out of this quandary. His critique of ideology goes beyond both rational Enlightenment and structuralist accounts of ideology, and satisfies the two seemingly contradictory theoretical conditions that I have outlined – that a theory of ideology retain a point of departure outside ideology, yet reject the notion of an autonomous, essential subject. He does this, as I shall show, through a radical reformulation of the ideological subject. The rest of the discussion will be devoted to exploring Stirner’s theory of ideology and developing his logic of spectrality, which will provide vital clues to a contemporary retheorization of ideology. It would seem, from the problematic outlined above, that ideology is an impossible spectre. It is an apparition that repeatedly comes to haunt us, despite our most ardent attempts to exorcise it, and vanishes once again when we try to approach it. However, it is perhaps by acknowledging this spectral nature of ideology that we can begin to understand it. Stirner had no doubts that ideology was a spectre – one that bedevilled and haunted

Spectres of Stirner 77 modern man: ‘Look out near or far, a ghostly world surrounds you everywhere; you are always having “apparitions [Erscheinungen]” or visions’ (1995: 36). These apparitions are what he calls ‘fixed ideas’ – ideological abstractions like essence, rational truth and morality, which have been raised to the level of an absolute generality. Ideological systems contain oppressive ideas that haunt the individual by confronting him with a series of illusory ideals, goals and promises that he futilely pursues. As Stirner declares: ‘Man, your head is haunted . . . You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you’ (1995: 43). Ideology is therefore seen as an illusion or distortion that alienates the individual. If this was all there was to Stirner’s theory of ideology, then it would merely be an extension of the rationalist Enlightenment understanding in which, as explained above, ideology is seen as a distorting system of ideas that alienates the individual from his essential interests. However, if we look more closely we see that Stirner represents a paradigmatic break with the Enlightenment and constructs a radically different and non-essentialist theory of ideology. Stirner’s critique of Feuerbach and his ‘epistemological break’ with Enlightenment humanism has already been touched upon in Chapter 1. By showing that Feuerbach’s secular emancipation of man from religious alienation simply reinvents this alienation in a humanist form – man and human essence becoming the substitutes for the Christian illusion of God and divinity – Stirner introduces a radical conceptual division between man and the individual, between human essence and the ego. Human essence, rather than being at the core of the individual’s subjectivity, is an external ideological abstraction that now oppresses him: The supreme being is indeed the essence of man, but, just because it is his essence and not he himself, it remains quite immaterial whether we see it outside him and view it as ‘God’, or find it in him and call it ‘essence of man’ or ‘man’. I am neither God nor man, neither the supreme essence nor my essence, and therefore it is all one in the main whether I think of the essence as in me or outside me. (Stirner 1995: 34) According to Stirner, man and the discourse of humanism have become the substitutes for the Christian illusion: ‘The human religion is only the last metamorphosis of the Christian religion’ (1995: 158). The humanist figure of man is a new ideological spectre that oppresses the individual and alienates the individual, desecrating his uniqueness and difference by comparing him to an ideal which is not of his own creation. In this way the individual becomes interpellated by this spectre – his subjectivity is constructed

78 Spectres of Stirner around an essence that is illusory. The strange ideological doublet of God/man is central to the discourse of humanism. It becomes the basis for a spectral ideological world which takes its absolute authority from human essence and traps us within its rigid paradigms. For Stirner, the world has been freed from the obfuscation of Christianity only to be plunged into a new darkness. We can see here how radical Stirner’s inversion of the Enlightenment humanist understanding of ideology actually is. While Stirner retains the idea of ideology as distortion, he abandons the idea – central to humanism and classical radical politics – that it is human essence which is distorted: rather, human essence is itself the ideological distortion. In Stirner’s formulation, then, there is no autonomous, essential human subject that is deceived by ideology. On the contrary, this essential subjectivity has itself been constructed by ideological mechanisms. The very idea of essence – the idea that there is some sort of unchanging identity at the base of our existence – is, for Stirner, an ideological illusion. We can see the way that Stirner’s logic of spectrality goes beyond classical theories of ideology. First, spectrality is applied to ideology in the classical sense – we are haunted by illusions, ‘fixed ideas’ or ‘spooks’ that deceive us. Second, however, man himself becomes the spectre, the ideological illusion created by the humanist ‘inversion’ of religion. Man is, in a sense, haunted and alienated by himself, by the spectre of ‘essence’ inside him. In Stirner’s theorization, then, there is no essentialist point of departure outside ideological systems – essence is itself ideological.

Ideology and power For Stirner, humanism is an ideological worldview in which we have become trapped. It is a discourse that claims to free individuals from all sorts of institutional oppressions, while at the same time entailing an intensification of the oppression over ourselves and denying us the power to resist this self-subjection. Here the individual has only pseudo-sovereignty. Within the humanist language of rights and freedoms there is a trap: rights and freedoms are granted to the individual in return for the relinquishment of power over oneself. Humanist ideology constitutes, in Stirner’s words, ‘a new feudalism under the suzerainty of “man” ’ (1995: 278). An important site of this humanist ideological domination is morality. Stirner believes that morality is not only a fiction derived from Christian idealism, but also a discourse that oppresses the individual. Morality is merely the leftover of Christianity, only in a new humanist garb. As Stirner claims, ‘Moral faith is as fanatical as religious faith!’ (1995: 45). What Stirner objects to is not morality itself, but the way that it has become a sacred law. Morality has become the new religion – a secular religion – through which individuals are subjectified. Moral ideas rule over the conscience, inculcating a sense of shame and guilt. Stirner exposes the will to

Spectres of Stirner 79 power, the cruelty and domination behind moral ideas: ‘Moral influence takes its start where humiliation begins; yes, it is nothing else than this humiliation itself, the breaking and bending of the temper [Mutes] down to humility [Demut]’ (1995: 75). Morality therefore mutilates the individual: the individual must conform to prevailing moral codes otherwise he becomes alienated from his ‘essence’. Moreover, morality is linked directly to state domination: ‘This popular rage for the moral protects the police institution more than the government could in any way protect it’ (Stirner 1995: 215). Stirner exposes here a new ideological operation that eluded nineteenthcentury theory – the link between human essence as an ideological spectre and political domination. Rather than the state directly oppressing the subject, Stirner shows that state power functions by tying the subject to an ideological figure of man, thus constructing him as a site of his own oppression. In other words, ideology constructs the individual as a subject of the state. The state demands that the individual be human and conform to certain moral and rational norms and modes of behaviour, so that he can be made part of state society and dominated in this way. Moreover, Stirner suggests that this subjectification functions at the level of desire. Rather than the state simply repressing desire, it channels it to itself: ‘The state exerts itself to tame the desirous man; in other words, it seeks to direct his desire to it alone, and to content that desire with what it offers’ (Stirner 1995: 276). It is this desire for authority, this love of the state, which perpetuates its power. People are dominated, Stirner suggests, because at some level they desire it. Stirner was one of the first thinkers to explore the links between desire and self-domination, thus foreshadowing Deleuze and Guattari’s notion that desire can ‘desire its own repression’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 133). For Stirner, ideological domination cannot be explained entirely by economic relations and socio-political structures, as Marx would argue; it is also rooted in psychological needs, in the passions which bind us to power.

The ‘un-man’ However, if the individual is subjectified in this way – as a site of his own domination – how can we theorize resistance to the systems of politicoideological domination that Stirner unmasks? If there is no autonomous human essence, if the subject himself is constructed by the very ideological systems that also dominate him, then upon what basis can we critically engage with these mechanisms? Because Stirner has rejected the idea of the autonomous, essential subject – seeing him instead as an ideological artefact – has he also denied himself any critical point of departure? I would argue here that Stirner does theorize an extra-ideological point of departure, one that does not rely on essentialist categories. In doing so, he goes beyond both the Enlightenment humanist and structuralist accounts of

80 Spectres of Stirner ideology and satisfies the two opposed requirements for a critique of ideology outlined above. This extra-ideological ‘place’ of resistance is made possible through his radical formulation of the ideological subject. The chief advantage of Stirner’s notion of subjectivity is that the subject, while constituted by ideology, is never fully determined by it, as it is in structuralist accounts. For Stirner, there is always the possibility of the subject resisting his subjectification. The identity of the ideological subject is never complete. There is always a ‘lack’ in symbolization that undermines the fullness of this identity. In other words, ideological interpellation never fully accounts for the individual: ‘No concept expresses me, nothing that is designated my essence exhausts me’ (Stirner 1995: 324). There is always a left-over, a spectral remainder that escapes ideological symbolization and provides a point of resistance against it. There is a kind of flaw in ideological mirroring, a point at which the ideological subject does not entirely reflect ideological symbols and images but, rather, exceeds them. It may be seen, in other words, as a distortion of ideology itself, a distortion of distortion. This excess lies in what Stirner terms ‘the un-man’, the other of man: ‘But the un-man (Unmensch) who is somewhere in every individual, how is he blocked? . . . by the side of man stands always the un-man . . . State, society, humanity do not master this devil’ (1995: 125). The un-man is a force that cannot be contained, both a creation of man and a threat to it. It is an excess produced by ideological interpellation, which refuses to conform to human essence, to the ideal of man. The ‘un-man’ is ‘a man who does not correspond to the concept man, as the inhuman is something human which is not conformed to the concept of the human’ (Stirner 1995: 159). Perhaps it may be considered in the Lacanian psychoanalytic sense as the ‘real’: an excess of meaning produced by its inability to be inscribed within meaning, by its inability to be signified. For Lacan, the subject is faced with a series of signifiers that are supposed to represent him. However, there is always an excess of meaning that escapes this signification (Lacan 1977: 306). As an excess which escapes symbolization, the un-man may be seen as a point beyond ideology and a figure of resistance against it. It is something that dislocates the identity of the essential human subject by transgressing its narrow boundaries and unmasking the arbitrary and contingent nature of this ideological spectre. It is important, moreover, to understand that the ‘un-man’ is not an essence of some sort. It does not pre-exist in the individual prior to ideological interpellation. Rather the ‘un-man’ is a spectral excess produced through the process of interpellation: it only comes into being once an ‘essential’ identity is constructed for the individual. In this sense, then, the un-man, rather than being an essence, is the very failure of this essence; it represents the limits of ideological symbolization. It is the point at which ideology breaks down and the contingent nature of its operation is exposed. In this way, the un-man, as the limit of ideological symbolization, may provide the non-essentialist, extra-ideological

Spectres of Stirner 81 point of departure from which a critique of ideology may be constructed. It satisfies the two conditions mentioned above for a contemporary critique of ideology: that it dispenses with the essentialist human subject; and that it allows, nevertheless, a critical point of departure. In this way, Stirner’s notion of the un-man can be understood as a non-essentialist position of resistance to ideology, going beyond both rationalist and structuralist understandings of ideology and providing the foundations for a contemporary critique.

Strategies of resistance But how might this act of resistance be conceptualized? It is clear that one can no longer call upon the notion of a repressed human essence as the foundation for political resistance. Stirner’s critique has shown us that this notion of essence is precisely the problem – that ideological subjectification operates through this very idea of essence. We are tied to ideological and political institutions through our attachment to an essential identity. This is why, for Stirner, a politics of resistance can no longer be based on the idea of the emancipation of an essential identity because it is precisely this identity that confines us. Rather, the individual must seek to free himself from the discursive limits of his ‘essential’ identity. One such strategy of resistance for Stirner is the ‘insurrection’, which differs from a revolution in the sense that the latter is based on the notion of a liberation of essential identities from external oppression, whereas the former is a process through which the individual frees himself from the internal constraints of essence. For Stirner, revolutions in the past have failed: they have remained trapped by the paradigm of authority, changing the form of authority but not the category of authority itself, and often ending up perpetuating new forms of power and domination. The idea of a political revolution parallels the Feuerbachian humanist revolution which, as we have seen, only reaffirms religious oppression by putting man in the place of God. One could argue that the idea of revolution itself should be abandoned, or at least questioned: revolution is the imposition, in the name of a universal idea of emancipation, of one identity, one particularity on others. By contrast, an insurrection does not aim at directly overthrowing political institutions, but at the individual overthrowing the essential identity that ties him to these institutions. In other words, it is an intervention that takes into account the way that ideological and political domination is not only external to the subject, but also internal to him, constituting the limits of his very identity. Thus the insurrection is aimed not only at the external impediments to the subject’s freedom – political institutions such as the state – but more precisely at our ‘passionate attachment’ to the modes of subjectivity that tie us to these institutions:

82 Spectres of Stirner 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. (Stirner 1995: 280) Therefore the insurrection is not a rebellion of the subject against political institutions, but rather a rebellion of the subject against himself, against his ideologically constructed identity. It starts, as Stirner says, ‘from men’s discontent with themselves’ (1995: 280). It is a rejection of essence, an escape from essential subjectivities, which leads, nevertheless, to a dislocation of politico-ideological structures. It abandons the idea of an essential subjectivity that can only be expressed once ideology is abolished, and rather exhorts the subject to reconstruct his identity as he chooses, beyond the limitations of essence. Insurrection, in other words, is not about becoming what one ‘is’, but about becoming what one ‘is not’. This idea of rejecting one’s essential identity and exploring new subjectivities is of course a feature of various poststructuralist strategies.1 Moreover, it is through this insurrection – through this process of ‘working forth of me out of the established’ – that the egoistic subject starts to emerge. This escape from ideological subjectification is, of course, only temporary and finite; there is no final place beyond ideology that the subject can pass into. There is no ultimate state of freedom from ideology. Indeed, freedom, according to Stirner, is only a negative concept that is still tied to essentialist humanist discourses – it always posits ‘freedom from’ something, and to strive for this is to show how much we are still enslaved to the concept we seek to free ourselves from. Freedom itself is therefore an ideological spectre: ‘I cannot create it: I can only wish it and – aspire toward it, for it remains an ideal, a spook’ (Stirner 1995: 143). Instead, to effectively contest ideological domination, we must acknowledge that, to some extent, ideology will always be with us. We must, as Stirner suggests, work on ourselves to resist our own ideological subjectification and renegotiate our position within ideology, seeking ‘lines of flight’ from it. Here the individual reinvents his subjectivity, creating new forms of freedom. This strategy of ‘ownness’ allows the subject to work at the limits of ideology, looking for the cracks and points of dislocation in its edifice, and contesting the way we have been interpellated by it. Stirner provides, then, a possible way out of the quandary of both rationalism and structuralism through a spectral reconfiguration of the ideological subject. While the subject is constructed by ideology, there is also a constitutive openness in its structure. The subject is actually constituted by the spectral excess which, while produced by ideological symbolisation, exceeds it and, in doing so, exposes the very limits of ideology. This allows us to theorise, as I have suggested, a non-essentialist extra-ideological

Spectres of Stirner 83 point of departure necessary for a contemporary critique of ideology. Stirner has explored the subtle connections between ideology, subjectivity, desire and power, seeing human essence not as an undistorted identity outside ideology, but rather as something located at the heart of ideological distortion itself. I have suggested, moreover, that poststructuralism must not abandon the problematic of ideology but, rather, rethink it in ways that no longer presuppose a universal rationality or an essential identity whose interests are distorted. As Stirner has shown us, ideology can operate precisely through these rational discourses and essential identities, its function being not only to dissimulate, but also to universalize a particular epistemological perspective and to conceal the domination that lies behind its claims to truth. The following chapter examines the metaphysical gesture invoked in such claims to absolute truth, and explores ‘deconstruction’ as a political strategy aimed at unmasking the oppositions, contradictions and arbitrary exclusions inherent in the discourses and institutions that structure our political and social reality.

5

Derrida’s deconstruction of authority

The political aspect of Jacques Derrida’s thinking, in particular his critique of authority, is often neglected. However, his interrogation of rational and essentialist structures in philosophy makes his work crucial to any critical analysis of political institutions and discourses. Derrida instigates a series of strategies or ‘moves’ to unmask the suppressed antagonisms, differences and ‘aporias’ within the Western philosophical discourse, a discourse whose claims to universality, wholeness and lucid self-reflection have been sounded since the time of Plato. His critique has important implications for political theory: his questioning of the claims of philosophy may be applied also to the claims, and indeed the practices, of political institutions and sovereign forms of authority that are founded upon them. Moreover, Derrida allows us to explore radically new understandings of democracy, ethics and justice, as well as an anti-authoritarian politics of emancipation.

Deconstruction ‘Deconstruction’ is the term most commonly associated with Derrida and, while it is a widely misunderstood and misused term, it will nevertheless be used here to describe the general direction of his work. Christopher Norris defines deconstruction as a series of moves which include the dismantling of conceptual oppositions and hierarchical systems of thought, and an unmasking of ‘aporias’ and moments of self-contradiction in philosophy (1987: 19). It might be said that deconstruction is a certain way of reading texts – philosophical texts in particular – with the intention of making these texts question themselves, forcing them to take account of their own contradictions, and exposing the antagonisms they have ignored or repressed. What deconstruction is not, however, is a philosophical system. Derrida does not question one kind of philosophy from the standpoint of another more complete or less contradictory system. This would merely be to substitute one kind of authority for another. This is a trap Derrida assiduously tries to avoid. He therefore does not come from a point of departure outside philosophy. Rather, Derrida works within the discourse of Western philosophy itself, looking for hidden antagonisms that destabi-

Derrida’s deconstruction of authority 85 lize it. Moreover, his aim is not to undermine philosophy, as has often been claimed. On the contrary, Derrida’s critique of philosophy is itself fundamentally philosophical. By opening philosophy to this mode of questioning, Derrida is being faithful to the spirit of philosophy: unquestioning and slavish adulation ultimately makes a mockery of philosophy. Deconstruction may be seen as a critique of the authoritarian structures inherent in philosophy, in particular ‘logocentrism’, which refers to philosophy’s subordination, throughout its history, of writing to speech. The privileging of speech over writing in philosophical texts is an example of what Derrida calls the ‘metaphysics of presence’. It is an indication of how much Western philosophy is still grounded in the metaphysical concepts it claims to have transcended. Derrida points to Plato’s Phaedrus in which writing is rejected as a medium for conveying and recording truth. Here it is seen as an artifice, an invention which cannot be a substitute for the authenticity and immediate presence of meaning attributed to speech. Where speech is seen as a means of approaching the truth because of its immediacy, writing is seen as a dangerous corruption of speech – a lesser form of speech, which is destructive of memory and susceptible to deceit. Moreover speech is associated with the authority of the teacher, while writing is seen by Plato as a threat to this authority because it allows the pupil to learn without the teacher’s guidance. Derrida points out certain contradictions within this logocentric way of thinking. He shows that Plato cannot represent speech except through the metaphor of writing: ‘It is not any less remarkable here that the so-called living discourse should suddenly be described by a metaphor borrowed from the order of the very thing one is trying to exclude from it’ (Derrida 1981a: 148). Speech is, therefore, dependent on the writing that it excludes. Writing is an example of the ‘logic of supplementarity’: a supplement is excluded by presence, but is, at the same time, necessary for the formation of its identity. Writing is thus a supplement to speech: it is excluded by speech, but is nevertheless necessary for the presence of speech. The unmasking of this logic of supplementarity is one of the chief deconstructive moves employed by Derrida. Speech claims to be a self-presence that is immediate and authentic to itself, whereas writing is seen as what diminishes this presence. However, Derrida shows that this authenticity and purity of identity are always questionable. Any identity is contaminated by what it tries to exclude. According to this logic, no identity is ever complete or pure: it is constituted by that which threatens it. Derrida does not want to deny selfidentity or presence: he merely wants to show that this presence is never as pure as it claims to be. It is always open to the other and contaminated by it. Furthermore, for Derrida, the idea of a pure, complete self-identity is authoritarian. It establishes a series of hierarchical binary relationships in philosophy, in which one term is subordinated to another. Derrida sees these as ‘violent hierarchies.’ Logocentrism establishes the binary hierarchy of speech/writing, in which writing is subordinated to speech, representation to

86 Derrida’s deconstruction of authority presence. Presence constitutes a form of textual authority that attempts to dominate and exclude its supplement. However, this authority is continually jeopardized by the excluded supplement because, as I have shown, it is essential to the formation of the identity of the dominant term. These binary structures nevertheless form what might be termed a place of power in philosophical discourse, forming also the foundations for political authority. Binary structures in philosophy perpetuate discourses and practices of domination.

Inversion/subversion It must be made clear, however, that Derrida does not simply want to invert the terms of these binaries so that the subordinated term becomes the privileged term. He does not want to put writing in the place of speech for instance. This sort of inversion merely leaves intact the hierarchical, authoritarian structure of the binary division. In political terms, such revolutionary strategies only reaffirm the place of power. One could argue, for example, that Marxism fell victim to this logic by replacing the bourgeois state with the equally authoritarian workers’ state. In most cases, revolutionary political theories have often only succeeded in reinventing power and authority in their own image. However, Derrida also recognizes the dangers of the more radical or ‘anarchistic’ strategy of subversion – that is, the radical strategy of overthrowing all hierarchies and structures of authority. For instance, the classical anarchist critique of Marxism went along the lines that Marxism neglected political authority – in particular the institutionalized power of the state – and that this would lead to a restoration of political authority in a Marxist revolution. Therefore the anarchists believed that the state and all forms of institutionalized political power must be abolished as the first revolutionary act. However Derrida argues that subversion and inversion culminate in the same thing – the reinvention of authority, in different guises. We have seen the way, for instance, that anarchist theory, in its desire to overturn political hierarchies and institutions, nevertheless relies on metaphysical concepts such as universal humanity and rationality, as well as a Manichean imaginary, which, as Stirner would argue, are a reaffirmation of religious idealism. Both radical politico-theoretical strategies – the strategy of inversion exemplified by Marxism, and the strategy of subversion exemplified by anarchism – are two sides of the same logic of ‘place’. So for Derrida: What must occur then is not merely a suppression of all hierarchy, for an-archy only consolidates just as surely the established order of a metaphysical hierarchy; nor is it a simple change or reversal in the terms of any given hierarchy. Rather the Umdrehung must be a transformation of the hierarchical structure itself. (Derrida 1978a: 81)

Derrida’s deconstruction of authority 87 Derrida therefore points to the risks associated with overthrowing a hierarchy – this can often result in the reinvention of another hierarchy in its place. To avoid the lure of authority, then, one must go beyond both the anarchic desire to destroy hierarchy, and the mere reversal of terms. If we want to avoid this trap the hierarchical structure must be transformed, not simply overthrown. Political action must involve a rethinking of revolution and authority in a way that traces a path between these two terms, so that it does not merely reinvent the place of power. Deconstruction adopts a strategy of displacement here: rather than reversing the terms of the binary opposition, it questions, and tries to make problematic, its very structure.

The end(s) of man The prevalence of such binary structures indicates, according to Derrida, how much philosophy is still tied to metaphysics: it is still dominated, in other words, by the place of metaphysics. In the same way, one might argue that political theory is still dominated by the metaphysics of presence, by the need for some sort of essential subjectivity or universal epistemological position that it has never had and yet continually tries to invoke. The demand for a self-identical essence in politics and philosophy would be, according to Derrida, the residue of the category of the divine. God has not been completely usurped from philosophy, as has been proclaimed since the Enlightenment. God has only been reinvented in the form of essence – in the humanist figure of man in which Stirner detected the lingering presence of Christian idealism. Derrida is influenced here by Nietzsche, who argues that as long as we continue to believe absolutely in grammar, in essence, in the metaphysical presuppositions of language, we continue to believe in God. As much as we may claim the contrary, we have not yet ousted God from philosophy. The authority of the divine remains intact, inscribed in the demand for presence. For Derrida, God has been inscribed in the secular figure of man central to humanism: What was named in this way . . . was nothing other than the metaphysical unity of Man and God, the relation of man to God, the project of becoming God as the project of constituting human-reality. Atheism changes nothing in this fundamental structure. (Derrida 1982: 116) The spectre of God-Man has yet to be exorcised from our midst. For instance, Derrida shows that Heidegger’s notion of Being does not displace the category of God-Man-Essence as it claims to have done. On the contrary, Being merely reaffirms this place. The notion of Being is only a reinscription of humanist essence, just as man was only a re-inscription of God. The place of religion and metaphysics remains intact (Derrida 1982: 128). Derrida’s analysis is important because it exposes the authoritarianism

88 Derrida’s deconstruction of authority that still inhabits certain structures of thought. Moreover it shows that any kind of radical political theory must first become aware of its own latent metaphysical structures. Here Derrida allows us to re-evaluate the problem of humanism. He describes two possible ways of dealing with the problem of metaphysical authority in philosophy – the two temptations of deconstruction. The first strategy is: To attempt an exit and a deconstruction without changing terrain, by repeating what is implicit in the founding concepts and the original problematic, by using against the edifice the instruments or stones available in the house, that is, equally, in language. Here, one risks ceaselessly confirming, consolidating, relifting [relever], at an always more certain depth, that which one allegedly deconstructs. The continuous process of making explicit, moving toward an opening, risks sinking into the autism of the closure. (Derrida 1982: 135) So this strategy of working within the metaphysical structure of humanist discourse, and using its terms and language, risks reaffirming and consolidating it. Derrida is referring here to Heidegger’s critique of humanism which, he argues, involved a replacement of man with the equally essentialist and metaphysical Being. The second strategy, according to Derrida is: To decide to change terrain, in a discontinuous and irruptive fashion, by brutally placing oneself outside, and by affirming an absolute break or difference. Without mentioning all the other forms of trompe-l’oeil perspective in which such a displacement can be caught, thereby inhabiting more naively and strictly than ever the inside one declares one has deserted, the simple practice of language ceaselessly reinstates the new terrain on the oldest ground. (Derrida 1982: 135) This is the alternative move of making an absolute break with the discourse of humanism, of seeking an outside to which one can escape. According to Derrida, this would have the same effect as the first strategy: by attempting a complete change of terrain, one only reaffirms one’s place within the old terrain. The more one tries to escape the dominant paradigm, the more one finds oneself frustratingly within it. Derrida argues that deconstruction is always caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of these two impossible strategies, and must therefore navigate a course between them. These two strategies of deconstruction, moreover, are the two alternate paths awaiting radical politics. However, Derrida can perhaps show us a way out of this theoretical

Derrida’s deconstruction of authority 89 abyss. There may be a way of combining these two seemingly irreconcilable paths in a way that allows radical politics to advance beyond the problematic of metaphysics and humanism without reaffirming these structures. Rather than choosing one strategy over another, Derrida believes that we must follow the two paths simultaneously (Schrift 1988: 138). We must find a way of combining or ‘weaving’ these two possible strategies, thereby transcending them. For instance, Derrida does not dispense with the category of the subject. Rather he seeks to displace and re-evaluate it. Rather than think in terms of the end of man, as Foucault does, Derrida refers to the ‘closure’ of man in metaphysics. The difference is that, for Derrida, man will not be completely transcended but, rather, ‘re-evaluated’, perhaps in terms of Nietzsche’s Higher Man. For Derrida, the authority of man will be decentred within language, but the subject will not be discarded altogether. Derrida’s refusal to dispense with the subject points to a number of interesting possibilities for political thought: perhaps the category of the subject can be retained as a de-centred, non-essentialist category, existing as its own limit, thus providing a point a departure for politics.

Différance Deconstruction tries to account for the suppressed, hidden differences and heterogeneities in philosophical discourse, the muffled, half-stifled murmurs of disunity and antagonism. Derrida refers to this as ‘différance’ – difference spelt with an a, in order to signify that it is not an absolute or essential form of difference. It is rather a difference, or series of differences, whose identity as difference is always unstable and never absolute. Because différance does not constitute itself as an essential identity, because it remains open to the other, it can become a motif for an antiauthoritarian form of politics: ‘It governs nothing, reigns over nothing, and nowhere exercises any authority . . . Not only is there no kingdom of différance, but différance instigates the subversion of every kingdom’ (Derrida 1982: 22). This series of differences has a structure or, as Rodolphe Gasché argues, an ‘infrastructure’. However, this is a system whose very nature is that of a non-system: it is comprised of non-dialectical, non-binary differences. It threads together differences and antagonisms in a way that neither orders nor effaces them. Infrastructures are not essentialist – their very essence is that of a non-essence (Gasché 1986: 150). It does not have a stable or autonomous identity, nor is it governed by an ordering principle or central authority. Instead, it is characterized by its very inability to constitute an identity, to inhabit a stable place. As Derrida says: There is no essence of the différance; not only can it not allow itself to be taken up into the as such of its name or its appearing, but it

90 Derrida’s deconstruction of authority threatens the authority of the as such in general, the thing’s presence in its essence. (Derrida 1973: 158) The infrastructure may be seen as a model for anti-authoritarian thought: by its own structural absence of authority, it undermines from within various structures of textual authority. Moreover, it neither affirms identity or non-identity, but remains in a state of indeterminacy between the two, thereby allowing us to transcend binary ways of thinking. Therefore the aim of deconstruction is not to affirm difference over identity, absence over presence. This would be, as I have suggested, to reverse the established order only to found a new order in its place. Difference would become a new identity, and absence a new presence. The point of Derrida’s thinking is not to seek the establishment of a new order, but rather the displacement of all orders. Derrida argues that the strategy of deconstruction cannot work entirely within the structures of logocentric philosophy, yet nor can it work entirely outside it. Rather, it traces a path of undecidability between the two positions, disrupting the identities of both terms. It works from within the discourse of philosophy, operating at its limits in order to find an outside (Gasché 1994: 28). Deconstruction cannot attempt an immediate neutralization of philosophy’s authoritarian structures. Rather, it must proceed through a strategy of displacement – what Derrida calls a ‘double writing’, which is a form of critique neither strictly inside, nor strictly outside philosophy. It is a strategy of continually interrogating the selfproclaimed ‘closure’ of this discourse. It does this by forcing it to account for the aporias which jeopardize this closure. The aporia might be seen as a contradiction internal to the structure itself, which denies it a selfenclosed identity by referring to what is outside it and which it cannot account for. This aporia which deconstruction tries to identify confronts philosophy with a limit to its limitlessness, a limit to its closure. The proclaimed totality and limitlessness of philosophy is itself a limit. However, its complete closure to what threatens it is impossible because, as deconstruction has shown, the thing that it attempts to exclude is, at the same time, essential to its identity. There is a strange logic at work here, a logic which continually impedes philosophy’s aspiration to be a closed, complete system. Deconstruction unmasks this limit of the limit. The limits that Derrida identifies are produced within the tradition of philosophy; they do not come from a nihilistic, irrational exterior. As Derrida says: ‘The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures’ (1976: 24). This positioning of limits is important here because it points to the possibility of an outside – one that is paradoxically on the inside. As I have already suggested, there is a need for poststructuralist political theory to develop a notion of a non-

Derrida’s deconstruction of authority 91 essentialist outside of this kind. This would be a radical exteriority that emerges, paradoxically, from within the structures of discourse, power and ideology themselves, and functions as their internal limit, the point at which their consistency is destabilized. This constitutive outside is necessary, moreover, if any sort of resistance to these structures is to be possible. As Derrida has shown, to position oneself entirely on the outside of any structure, as a form of resistance to it, is only to reaffirm, in a reversed way, what one resists. However, this idea of an outside constituted through the limits of the inside, may allow us to conceive of a politics of resistance which does not restore the place of power.

The ‘outside’ of ethical responsibility So the internal limit of philosophy, the impossibility of its closure, at the same time refers to an outside – one that is constituted through the limitations and contradictions of the inside. These contradictions make closure impossible; they open philosophical discourse to an Other. This is a radical outside. It is not part of the binary structure of inside/outside, and it does not have a stable identity. It is not clearly divided from the ‘inside’ by an inexorable line: this ‘line’ is continually disrupted and redrawn. Indeed, the interpretation of these limits is always contingent and depends on political interventions. It is therefore an outside that is finite and temporary. Moreover, it obeys a strange logic: it exists only in relation to the inside which it threatens, while the inside exists only in relation to it. Each is necessary for the constitution of the identity of the other, while at the same time threatening the identity of the other. It is therefore an outside that avoids the two temptations of deconstruction. Derrida makes it clear that it cannot be seen as an absolute outside, as this would only reconsolidate the inside that it opposes. The more one tries to escape to an absolute outside, the more one finds oneself obstinately on the ‘inside’: ‘The logic of every relation to the outside is very complex and surprising. It is precisely the force and the efficiency of the system that regularly changes transgressions into “false exits” ’ (Derrida 1976: 135). Any kind of transgression, as Derrida argues, can only be finite, and it cannot establish a permanent outside: by means of the work done on one side and the other of the limit the field inside is modified, and a transgression is produced that consequently is nowhere present as a fait accompli. One is never installed within transgression, one never lives elsewhere. (Derrida 1981b: 12) So deconstruction may be seen as a form of transgression which, in transgressing the limits of metaphysics, also transgresses itself. It affirms nothing, does not come from an oppositional outside, and dissipates upon crossing this limit. It exposes the limits of a text by tracing the repressed

92 Derrida’s deconstruction of authority absences and discontinuities within the text – the excess that the text fails to contain (Clifford 1987: 230). Deconstruction therefore neither affirms, nor destroys, the limit it ‘crosses’; rather it re-evaluates it, re-inscribing it as a problem, a question – one that is open to political and ethical reinterpretation. This radical outside is, for Derrida, ethical: the act of forcing philosophy to confront its own structures of exclusion can be seen as a thoroughly ethical gesture. Derrida is influenced here by Emmanuel Levinas, who attempts to think the limits of the Hegelian tradition by showing the point at which it encounters an ethical outside, an alterity that is ethical in its exclusion and singularity. Levinas tries to transcend Western philosophy, to rupture it by confronting it with the Other, the point of irreducibility which cannot be accommodated within its structures. Deconstruction may be seen, in a similar sense perhaps, as an ethical strategy which opens philosophy to the Other. It tries to step, if only for an instant, beyond the confines of reason and historical necessity, and this momentary ‘stepping beyond’ constitutes an ethical dimension – an ethics of alterity. This deconstructive interrogation of philosophy does not lead to an amoral nihilism, as has often been claimed. John Caputo argues that Derrida’s thinking might be seen as a responsible anarchy, not an irresponsible anarchy (1988: 18). Deconstruction is by no means a rejection of ethics, even when it involves questioning and challenging moral philosophy. Rather, it involves a re-evaluation of ethics (Kearney 1993: 30). It shows us that moral principles cannot be absolute or pure: they are always contaminated by what they try to exclude. Good is always contaminated by evil, reason by unreason. What Derrida questions is the ethics of morality: if morality becomes an absolute discourse, then can it still be considered moral or ethical? Deconstruction allows us to open the realm of ethics to re-interpretation and difference, and this opening is itself ethical. It is therefore an ethics of impurity; if morality is always contaminated by its other – if it is never pure – then every moral judgement or decision is necessarily undecidable. Moral judgement must always be self-questioning and cautious because its foundations are not absolute. Unlike much moral philosophy that is grounded on the firm foundations of the categorical imperative, deconstructive ethics has no such privileged place and, therefore, enjoys no such self-assurance.

Law, violence and sovereignty The undecidability of judgement that is produced by a deconstructive critique has implications for political discourses and institutions, particularly legal institutions. Derrida argues that authority of the law is fundamentally ambiguous and open to question. This is because the basis of the law – the authority that it is grounded on – is only legitimized once law is instituted. In other words, the law is ultimately grounded on some-

Derrida’s deconstruction of authority 93 thing that is, strictly speaking, non-legal because it had to exist prior to law. The original act of instantiating the law is outside the limits of the law: it is prior to the law and therefore has no legal authority. It would be an illegitimate act of discursive violence. As Derrida says: ‘Since the origin of authority, the foundation or ground, the position of the law can’t by definition rest on anything but themselves, they are themselves a violence without ground’ (1992: 14). Like Foucault, Derrida shows that the origins of laws and institutions are violent, and that this violence is disavowed, yet at the same time inscribed within the structures of the law itself. However, for Derrida, this foundation in violence does not mean that the origins of law are illegal: because they are prior to law, they are, strictly speaking, neither legal, nor illegal. Rather, this violence occupies a position of undecidability with regards to the law; it is something that is both inside and outside the law, thus making the legitimacy of the law itself ambiguous. In other words, the structure of the law is aporetic – it cannot form a closed, complete identity because its foundations derive from something that is outside itself, and cannot be fully incorporated into it. A deconstructive interrogation of law therefore reveals the absence, the empty place in the edifice of law, and the violence at the base of institutional authority. In unmasking this ambiguity in the foundations of the law, deconstruction has important political consequences. Walter Benjamin, for instance, shows the way that the law is closely intertwined with violence, and how it sanctions a number of coercive practices and functions such as military and police violence. When the police and security apparatus, in the name of enforcing the law or preserving ‘national security’, routinely detain people without charge, or when asylum seekers and illegal migrants are forcibly detained and coerced in Western ‘liberal democracies’, the violence of the law is revealed in all its nakedness and brutality. Rather than violence being antithetical to the law and external to its structures – as has been the contention of classical theories of sovereignty – violence is internal to the law. Indeed, the law itself can be seen as an articulation of a form of violence. Derrida’s point is that every legal decision, every expression of the law, invokes at least a kind of discursive violence or ‘force’, in which its legitimacy is simultaneously affirmed and put into question. The authority of law can therefore be questioned from the perspective of its own ambiguity: it can never reign absolute because it is contaminated by its own foundational violence. Derrida asks how it is possible to distinguish legitimate, legal violence – the violence involved in enforcing the law – and illegal or illegitimate violence, when the law itself is founded on a violence that is ‘neither legal nor illegal – or, as others would quickly say, neither just nor unjust?’ (1992: 6). The justness or legitimacy of any legal decision is put into question through such a critique, allowing one also to interrogate any institutional and political discourse or series of practices that claim to derive their authority from the law.

94 Derrida’s deconstruction of authority Indeed, this ambiguous relation between law and violence allows the very idea of sovereignty itself to be deconstructed. A number of contemporary thinkers, including Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, have argued that sovereignty occupies a dimension that is both inside and outside the law simultaneously, pointing to Carl Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign as the one who can proclaim a state of exception (see Agamben 1998: 15–16). This means that because the authority of the law rests on the power of the sovereign to enforce it, the condition of sovereignty is, at the same time, the ability to stand outside the law and to suspend it. The state of exception, as Agamben shows, is a state of lawlessness and violence in which normal juridical protections no longer apply and sovereign power is unrestricted. Sovereignty therefore has a homologous relation to the extra-legal violence that grounds the law. Indeed, it might be said that sovereignty is an embodiment of this violence. Sovereignty might be understood as the point where violence and law intersect, one becoming indistinguishable from the other.1 From this perspective, the claims of the sovereign state to moral and legal legitimacy would be precarious – what lies at the heart of sovereignty is not the public good, but rather a dimension of violence that is beyond the limits of the law. Moreover, the law cannot protect us from the violence of the state, because it is itself grounded ultimately in this violence. A deconstructive analysis thus exposes this link between violence, sovereignty and law. Furthermore, as Derrida points out, sovereignty has its roots in theology and it continues to be inextricably linked with it. The position of exception or exteriority to the law that is occupied by the sovereign is strictly parallel to the theological notion that God is beyond the law, since it was God who created the law, giving it a moral foundation (Caputo 2003: 10). Derrida detects vestiges of this ‘onto-theology’ even in modern understandings of the sovereign state, notwithstanding its claims to democratic secularism. Like Stirner, he believes that the spectre of God has not been exorcized from modern structures of power and authority, and that they continue to be haunted by it. For instance, political discourse in the world’s most powerful democracy, the United States – despite its formal separation of church and state – is strongly marked by religious references. It is perhaps no surprise that the USA is currently locked into a sort of theological duel – complete with references to the ‘axis of evil’ and ‘infinite justice’ (see Derrida in Borradori 2004: 117) – with another form of fundamentalism, that emanating from the Islamic world. However, even though this onto-theological reference continues in modern democracies, Derrida believes that there is a potential tension between the principle of sovereignty, with its violence and authoritarianism, and democracy with its secularizing and emancipative impulse. Indeed, democracy has a revolutionary potential that remains unfulfilled, and which sits at odds with sovereignty. The question is, then, can we have a form of democracy which is not tied to the principle of sovereignty,

Derrida’s deconstruction of authority 95 which is not circumscribed within the limits of the sovereign state (Caputo 2003: 11)? Derrida refers to a ‘democracy to come’ – a democracy that has no specific form and which is not grounded in any concrete political practice, but rather refers to a radically open political horizon. For Derrida, democracy has the character of a sort of messianic promise. However, unlike the religious notion of the messianic, the democratic messianic promise is one that is never fulfilled or completed, and is therefore infinitely perfectible. Therefore a politics of deconstruction would be a radical democratic politics that is not based on any particular programme or specific vision of democracy; rather, it would based on the contingency and openness of the political field itself. Deconstruction therefore involves a radical moment in which sovereignty can be brought into question, and which allows new, nonauthoritarian forms of politics to be conceived. In this sense, it opens a space in which what is currently unthinkable or ‘unreadable’ from the perspective of existing political paradigms can become thinkable. Derrida likens this revolutionary moment in deconstruction to Benjamin’s notion of the general strike: For there is something of the general strike, and thus of the revolutionary situation in every reading that founds something new and that remains unreadable in regard to established canons and norms of reading, that is to say the present state of reading or what figures the State, with a capital S, in the state of possible reading. (Derrida 1992: 37) In this sense, deconstruction is an eminently political practice – a way of reading the ‘text’ of politics in radically new ways, in ways that are no longer determined by the idea of sovereignty, by the institution of the state. Indeed, deconstruction’s questioning of the authority of meaning – the ‘state’ – in the text of philosophy corresponds with the questioning of sovereign authority and political institutions. Indeed, there is no point separating the deconstruction of philosophical texts from the deconstruction of political institutions and power relations: the two realms of struggle are inextricable because political authority is dependent upon not only its sanctioning by various texts – including legal texts, as well as those of classical political philosophers and theorists of sovereignty such as Hobbes and Bodin – but also by the logocentric discourses which lend themselves to existing forms of political rationality.

The possibility of justice Moreover, this deconstructive opening of the text of politics to what it excludes, is synonymous with justice. Justice forms a kind of internal limit to structures of sovereignty and law. Indeed, for Derrida, justice must be

96 Derrida’s deconstruction of authority carefully distinguished from law. Law is merely the general application of a rule, while justice is an opening of the law to the other, to the singularity which the law cannot account for. Justice exists in a relation of ‘alterity’ to law: it opens the discourse of law to an outside, thus performing a deconstructive displacement of law. For a decision to be just, for it to account for the singularity denied by law, it must be different each time. It cannot be the mere application of the rule; rather, it must continually reinvent the rule. Therefore justice conserves the law because it operates in the name of the law; but at the same time it suspends the law because it is being continually reinterpreted (Derrida 1992: 23). Justice, moreover, exists in an ethical realm because it implies freedom and responsibility of action (Derrida 1992: 22–23). Justice is the experience of the impossible because it always exists in a state of suspension and undecidability. It is always incalculable. Like democracy, it is the promise of something yet to come, something that can never be completely grasped or understood, because if it is, it would cease to be justice and become law. As Derrida says: ‘There is an avenir for justice and there is no justice except to the degree that some event is possible which, as an event, exceeds calculation, rules, programs, anticipations’ (1992: 27). Justice is an event that opens itself to the other, to the impossible. Its effects are always unpredictable because it cannot be determined, as law can, by an a priori discourse. It is an excess which overflows the boundaries of the law and cannot be grasped by it. Justice functions as an open, empty signifier: its meaning or content is not pre-determined. Indeed, not only does justice involve a deconstruction of the law, but, as Derrida asserts, deconstruction is justice. That is, deconstruction traces within the structure of the law moments of aporia and undecidability which open it up to a singularity beyond it, and this is precisely the dimension of justice. Justice occupies a politico-ethical dimension that cannot be reduced to law or political institutions, and it is for this reason that justice opens up the possibility for a transformation of law and politics (Derrida 1992: 27). This transformation, though, is not an absolute rejection of the existing order because this only leads to the founding of a new order. It is much more radical than that: it is a re-founding of political and legal discourses in a way that, as I have suggested, unmasks the violence, lawlessness and illegitimacy of their origins, thus leaving them open to continual and unpredictable reinterpretations. This strategy can be applied to our contemporary political reality. This is not necessarily to reject out of hand existing political discourses, but rather to reinterpret and re-evaluate them. For instance, the discourse of emancipation, which has been with us since the French Revolution, should not be rejected but, rather, reformulated. While the Enlightenment-humanist ideal of emancipation has the potential to become a discourse of domination through its universalizing of rational and moral categories – as thinkers like Foucault and Stirner have shown – it can also become a discourse of liberation if it can be unmoored from its

Derrida’s deconstruction of authority 97 foundations and radically re-founded as a non-essentialist, constitutively open political signifier. As Derrida says: Nothing seems to me less outdated than the classical emancipatory ideal. We cannot attempt to disqualify it today, whether crudely or with sophistication, at least not without treating it too lightly and forming the worst complicities. But beyond these identified territories of juridico-politicization on the grand political scale, beyond all selfserving interpretations . . . other areas must constantly open up that at first seem like secondary or marginal areas. (Derrida 1992: 28) Derrida suggests that we can free the discourse of emancipation from its essentialist foundations and categorical imperatives, thereby expanding it to include other political struggles hitherto regarded as of little importance. In other words, the discourse of emancipation can be left structurally open, so that its content would no longer be limited or determined by its foundations. The Declaration of the Rights of Man has in the past been expanded to encompass the rights of women, and sexual and ethnic minorities. It could even in the future include animals, as Derrida suggests (1992: 28). The logic of emancipation is still at work today, although in different forms and represented by different struggles. The question of rights highlights the differences between deconstructive politics and classical revolutionary politics. Both strategies have a notion of political rights and a conception of emancipative struggles on the basis of these rights. The difference is, though, that classical revolutionary politics sees these rights as essential and founded in natural law, while the politics of deconstruction would see these rights as radically founded. In other words, these rights would be without stable foundations and therefore their content would not be fixed in advance. For instance, Derrida insists on the ongoing and universal importance today of human rights, particularly as a standpoint from which the sovereign state can be challenged: ‘We must [il faut] more than ever stand on the side of human rights. We need [il faut] human rights’ (Derrida in Borradori 2004: 132). Yet Derrida also insists on the historicity of these rights, and on the need to question their ontological foundations: the concept of the ‘humanity of man’, for instance, involves a series of discursive assumptions and exclusions that can be deconstructed. In other words, we must have the courage to assert, unconditionally, human and political rights, while also being able to question, challenge and rethink their foundations and discursive limits. This leaves them open to a plurality of different political articulations. Deconstruction, for instance, would question the idea of natural, inalienable rights. In his critique of liberal social contract theory, Derrida argues that these ‘natural’ rights are actually constituted discursively through the social contract and that therefore they cannot claim to be

98 Derrida’s deconstruction of authority natural (Ryan 1983: 160). These rights, then, are displaced from the social to the natural realm, and the social is subordinated to the natural, just as writing was subordinated to speech. As Derrida suggests in his critique of Rousseau, the social is the supplement which threatens and, at the same time is necessary for, the identity of the natural. The idea of natural rights can only be formulated discursively through the contract. Therefore, there is no pure natural foundation for rights, and this leaves them open to change and reinterpretation. They can no longer remain inscribed within human essence and, therefore, can no longer be taken for granted. If they are without firm foundations, one cannot always assume that they will continue to exist. They must be fought for, and in the process they will be reformulated by these struggles.

Derrida’s an-archy It is through this form of deconstructive logic that political action becomes an-archic. An-archic action is distinguished here from the political philosophy of the classical anarchists like Proudhon, Kropotkin and Bakunin. The discourse of classical anarchism is governed, as we have seen, by original founding principles such as human essence and rationality. On the other hand, while an-anarchic action is also conditioned by certain principles, it is not necessarily determined or limited by them. An-archic action is the possible outcome of a deconstructive strategy aimed at undermining the metaphysical authority of various political and philosophical discourses. Reiner Schurmann defines an-archic action as action without a ‘why?’ (1987: 10) However, a deconstructive notion of an-archy might be somewhat different: it can be seen as action with a ‘why?’ – that is, action forced to question itself, not in the name of a founding principle, but in the name of the deconstructive enterprise which it has embarked upon. In other words, an-archic action is forced to account for itself, just as it forces authority to account for itself. It is this self-questioning which allows political action to resist authority, to avoid becoming what it opposes. Derrida occupies a number of crucial terrains in the radical political thinking. Through the unmasking and deconstruction of the textual authority of logocentrism, Derrida allows us to develop a critique, using the same logic, of the contemporary political institutions and discourses based on this authority. He also shows us that no identity is pure and closed – it is always contaminated by what it excludes. This undermines oppositional politics, because identity is in part constituted by what it opposes. Moreover, through the various deconstructive strategies and moves that Derrida employs, he allows us to examine the subtle and pernicious logic of the place of power – the propensity for radical politics to reaffirm the authority it seeks to overthrow. He explores the limits of the two possible strategies of radical politics – inversion and subversion – showing that they both culminate in the re-affirmation of authoritarian

Derrida’s deconstruction of authority 99 structures and hierarchies. These strategies are the two poles that skewer radical political theory. Derrida, however, shows a way of transcending this impasse by weaving together subversion and inversion, affirmation and absolute rejection, in a way that re-evaluates these terms and thus displaces place. In doing so, he is able to formulate a notion of an ‘outside’ – one that is constructed through the limits of the inside. I have suggested that this notion of a constitutive outside is central to any understanding of the political. It opens up a politico-ethical dimension of justice and emancipation at the limits of legal and political authority, unmasking its hidden relation to violence, and thus destabilizing institutions that are based on it. Derrida’s political thinking may be seen, then, as an an-archism, an interrogation of authority, and a politico-ethical strategy which forces us to reevaluate the limits of our contemporary political reality.

6

On the politics of violence Terror, sovereignty and law

Deconstruction has exposed the fundamentally ambiguous and paradoxical nature not only of central philosophical concepts, but also, as we have seen, of political and legal institutions, unmasking the latter’s intimate relation to violence. This chapter continues with the theme of violence, this time exploring what, at least on the surface, is a form of anti-institutional, anti-state violence – that is, terrorism. In the context of the major terrorist attacks on September 11, as well as of the so-called ‘war on terror’ – whose dark implications we have seen unfolding – I will seek to explore the phenomenon of terrorist violence, and examine its hidden links with law, power and sovereignty. While there has been an enormous and renewed interest in terrorism recently, most analyses coming out of the disciplines of politics and philosophy have tended to focus on normative questions relating to just war theory, such as whether terrorism can or cannot be morally justified. However, there have been a number of contemporary continental thinkers ˇ izˇek, Alain Badiou, Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida – – like Slavoj Z who have taken a different approach, employing, for instance, the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy to understand the symbolic importance of the ˇ izˇek 2002b), as well as September 11 strikes as a media event (see Z looking at the current discourse on terrorism and its political effects. They explore some of the ambiguities in the term ‘terrorism’, which is used so problematically, yet unquestioningly, today, and which forms part of a dominant discourse and ideology that is increasingly coming to define our political reality. ‘Terror’, ‘terrorist’, ‘terrorism’, the ‘war on terror’ are the terms on everyone’s lips today, emanating from every media outlet and every politician across the spectrum, from left to right, from social democrat to conservative. However, as Badiou suggests, the word ‘terrorism’ or ‘terrorist’ cannot be used in any objective or neutral sense. Rather, it immediately brings into play a whole discursive apparatus and a series of moral assumptions which have concrete political effects. The word ‘terrorism’ has the following functions, according to Badiou: first, it determines a subject or, rather, a ‘victim’ – ‘the West’, ‘democracy’, or even simply the

On the politics of violence 101 United States; second, it forms a predicate – terrorism is now always ‘Islamic’ fundamentalist terrorism, never Christian fundamentalist terrorism (the Oklahoma City bombing) or Jewish fundamentalist terrorism (the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin); and, third, it determines a sequence – it justifies an ongoing ‘war on terrorism’ (Badiou 2002: 1–2). In other words, the appellation ‘terrorism’ forms part of a discursive series that appears to be self-evident, and yet which functions as an ideological tool of the modern Western state, serving to legitimise a series of measures which, prior to September 11, would have been unthinkable, but which are now accepted as necessary and normal. The ‘war on terrorism’, for instance, has given the state unheard-of powers of surveillance, permanent detention and control over its internal population, not to mention the justification – almost a blank cheque – for external military action. The USA Patriot Act and the extra-juridical detention camps in Guantánamo Bay have become emblematic of a new war – a war that we are now told will last a generation, despite the dubious and problematic nature of a war against an unseen enemy, without national sovereignty or even territorial locality. As Foucault has shown, discourse is inextricably intertwined with power – being both constituted by and, in turn, perpetuating, institutional power relations, as well determining dominant categories of ‘truth’ and normality through an exclusion of other voices and perspectives. The contemporary discourse on terrorism functions in a similar way, lending itself to practices of domination and military aggression and prohibiting any dissenting voices from emerging – or even any attempt to understand the reasons for terrorism.1 ‘Terrorism’ implies in advance its own moral condemnation, assuming the character of a ‘radical evil’. One of the tasks of a poststructuralist or deconstructionist approach to this discourse on terrorism would be to make it problematic, to point out its ambiguities and contradictions. For instance, if terrorism is to be defined by a form of violence designed to inspire fear, then one can of course speak equally about state terrorism as one can about non-state terrorism. Indeed, one might recall that the very word ‘terrorism’ derives from La Terreur of the post-revolutionary French Republic in the early 1790s. The Jacobins on the Committee for Public Safety – those who instigated the Terror, the purges and mass executions that followed the French Revolution – called themselves ‘terrorists’. Indeed, Saint-Just’s words stand out as one of the most infamous justifications of state terrorism: ‘What do you want, you who do not want virtue in order to be happy? What do you want, you who do not want the Terror to be used against the wicked?’ (see Lefort 1988: 72–73). That the highest ideals of the Republic were accompanied, and indeed inscribed, through a systematic yet often indiscriminate register of violence, that Republican virtue came to be associated with the willingness to be merciless, is more than just a vicissitude of history. It speaks perhaps to the very nature of any political discourse, unmasking the violence implicit in every political symbolization, at the base of every law, no matter how democratic.

102 On the politics of violence For Claude Lefort, the Terror of the French Republic was a way of masking or covering over the symbolically empty place of power that was left in the wake of the Ancien Régime. In other words, the discourse of Terror was a form of dissimulation – a desperate attempt to give substance to the Revolution, to retroactively invent its foundations, to fill the gap in the place of power that would from now on remain empty. The Terror was therefore characterized by a hysterical need to find more and more enemies of the Republic, more and more insidious plots against the Revolution, in order to continually justify itself, to put off the traumatic realization of the ambiguity of its own foundations. Terror embodies the fantasy of a social whole, of a society reconciled with itself, and yet is constantly haunted by the absence of foundation, the abyss of indeterminacy that opens up below one’s feet and threatens to swallow the Revolution. As Lefort says: The image of a society which is at one with itself and which has been eliminated from its divisions can only be grasped during the administration of the purge, or, better still, during the work of extermination . . . In that sense, the Terror threatened from the outset to be interminable. It is as though the terrorists constantly had to create the ground in which they want the Republic to take root. Their fascination with being is at the same time their fascination with the abyss. (Lefort 1988: 84) Is there not something like this fascination with the abyss in contemporary terrorist violence, in both its state and non-state forms? It may be suggested that this abyss – the indeterminacy haunting any political or social symbolization – is present in the modern dialectic of terrorism and counter-terrorism. Terrorist violence always threatens to expose the emptiness and indeterminacy at the base of the symbolic authority of the law and the state. It unmasks the violent and mysterious foundations of this authority.2 Was there not a strange, almost sublime suspension of the law – a sense of the very impotence and vulnerability of its authority – as we watched the collapse of the Twin Towers? Moreover, can we not see in the state’s response to terrorism both the sovereign violence at the base of state authority, as well as the attempt to disguise this violence through a terrorism of its own? The desire to continually find new enemies, both external and internal, is more than a mere feature of the new ideological ‘war on terrorism’. Like the Terror of the Republic, it refers to something at the heart of political violence itself and its shrouded link with law and authority. If, for the terrorists of French Republic, Terror was the ‘law in action’ or the ‘sword of the law’ (see Lefort 1988: 73), and if today’s terrorists are characterized by the very ‘illegality’ of their actions, this raises fundamental questions about the validity of the distinction between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ violence.

On the politics of violence 103

Benjamin’s critique of violence This is precisely the question that Walter Benjamin takes up in his ‘Critique of Violence’ (‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’). Benjamin’s essay is important here not only because it allows us to reflect on the ambiguities of terrorist violence, but also because it shows the complicity between the two seemingly opposed orders of violence and law. Benjamin presents here a genealogy of violence, exposing its ambiguous relationship with the law. Benjamin begins by showing the different conditions under which an action may be considered violent. Violence may, in the first sense, be seen as a pure means to an end. That is to say that an action may be judged violent if its ends or objectives are considered unjust. This view would be based, according to Benjamin, on the notion that violence is a natural force or capacity that can be put to either just or unjust ends. Indeed, Benjamin uses as an example of this ‘natural’ understanding the terrorism of the French Revolution, in which violence was justified as long as it served just ends (1996: 236–237). According to Benjamin, however, this notion of natural law does not provide adequate criteria for a critique of violence, as it may be difficult to conceive of violence being moral even if it was for a just cause. Counterpoised to this notion of natural law, then, is positive law, in which the means of a certain action, regardless of the justness of its ends, come under legal scrutiny. However, just as natural law leaves unresolved the question of means, so positive law leaves unresolved the question of ends. Nevertheless, despite the shortcomings of positive law, it is this question of means that Benjamin’s study focuses upon, positive law providing at least general grounds for critical reflection on a central question: under what conditions is it possible to make a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence? The ground for this distinction is found in the sanction provided by the state and the legal system. The state tries to establish a monopoly on violence by restricting others from exercising it, even if it is in order to attain ‘natural’ ends. As Benjamin argues, ‘From this maxim it follows that the law sees violence in the hands of individuals as a danger undermining the legal system’ (1996: 238). In other words, what is most threatening to the state is not the legality or illegality of people’s intentions, but whether these intentions are pursued with violence. That is to say, it is the mere existence of violence outside the law that constitutes a threat. What implications does this insight have for terrorist violence? Is terrorism considered threatening simply because it is a form of violence outside the order of state authority, engaged in by non-state actors, regardless of whether the ends pursued by terrorists are ‘natural’ and legitimate? The state, according to this analysis, sees in the terrorist a rival to its own monopolistic exercise of violence. Benjamin here talks about the ‘great criminal’ and the admiration that he arouses because of the ‘unsanctioned’ violence that his deed invokes. Do we not see this ‘great criminal’ in the

104 On the politics of violence modern figure of Osama bin Laden, who, while not exactly arousing our admiration, at least arouses our fascination? Bin Laden is a figure heavily invested with fantasies of transgression, of being somehow ‘outside’ the law and embodying an excessive violence that threatens it. What Benjamin is endeavouring to do here is study violence on its own terms, as pure means, beyond the normative considerations that would be applied to its ends. Violence, in other words, constitutes a phenomenon that goes beyond the question of its particular objectives. It has its own logic and analytics. To this end, Benjamin introduces a further distinction – between law-making and law-preserving violence. Law-making violence is violence against existing laws and conditions with the effect of constituting new laws. It refers to the founding act of violence that, as Derrida shows, brings the law into being. Therefore violence pursued for natural ends always has the potential not only to conflict with existing laws, but to construct new ones in their place. This is why, according to Benjamin, military conquest always culminates in a peace treaty – in the sanctioning of a new legal system. Even action that has as its consequence the overthrowing of existing legal conditions inevitably establishes a new system of laws in its place. This form of violence is distinguished from law-preserving violence which refers to the enforcement of existing laws. Here the pursuit of legal, as opposed to natural, ends has the function of maintaining and perpetuating the authority of the existing legal system. Even if violence is directed towards changing or reforming a particular law, it still operates within the paradigm of the legal system and therefore sustains its authority (Benjamin 1996: 243). For instance, military action – or militarism – embodies, according to Benjamin, both these dimensions of violence. As I have mentioned, it is law-making in the sense that it can lead to the overthrowing of an existing legal system in the pursuit of natural ends, and consequently to the establishment of new laws in its place; it is also law-preserving, as it is a form of violence that can be used for legal ends – it can be used, in other words, as simply an arm of state authority. Similarly, the modern institution of the police, Benjamin argues, combines these two functions: while most people would see police violence as law-preserving in the sense that it enforces existing laws, it can also be seen as law-making because its violence often functions beyond the realm of the law. The police often intervene for ‘for security reasons’ in an arbitrary fashion, outside the parameters of the law (Benjamin 1996: 243). Police violence can be seen as a kind of suspension of legal authority, in which the law is both preserved and transgressed through the very violence and arbitrariness with which it is enforced. Perhaps we could say here that the law is supplemented by a shadowy zone of illicit violence, violence which both grounds the law in the sense pointed to by Derrida, and yet also exceeds its limits. As I have shown, with reference to Agamben, this undecidability between violence and law – this ‘zone of indistinction’

On the politics of violence 105 where one passes imperceptibly into the other – is the very condition of sovereignty. According to Agamben sovereignty is defined by a ‘state of exception’, where the sovereign – whose position is defined paradoxically by standing inside and outside the law simultaneously – can suspend the normal juridical framework (1998: 15). Indeed, we might say that the state of exception is upon us already: the extra-ordinary powers of indefinite detention that have been given to police and security apparatuses as part of new anti-terrorist legislation, points to the fact that sovereign power, as Agamben argues, rules increasingly by decree, the law no longer affording us any real protection from the state. Agamben is fond of invoking Benjamin’s aphorism from his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ that the state of exception is no longer the exception, but the rule (see Benjamin 1982: 259). So, in this sense, rather than the extra-legal violence of police being anomalous or exceptional, it is essential to the law. It might be seen as its hidden, yet true, face. There are a couple of points that can be made here. First, the two examples of violence that Benjamin provides – militarism and the police – are examples of state, rather than non-state, violence. Does this perhaps indicate that the problematic of violence lies primarily within the paradigm of state authority? One could suggest that, following Benjamin’s formulation, the sovereignty of the state exists precisely in the ambiguous and twodimensional nature of the violence it exercises – the ‘double-edged weapon’ of Terror that Saint-Just spoke of (see Lefort 1988: 73). In other words, state violence is always characterized by a combination of its lawpreserving and law-making functions. More precisely, it is this very distinction which is suspended here. As I have suggested, these actions are not illegal as such, but rather ‘extra-legal’ – which is to say that they are made possible through a ‘space of exception’ where the normal juridical order no longer applies. This form of intervention, which often goes beyond the parameters of the law in the very name of enforcing it, suspends the distinction between law-making and law-preserving violence. Therefore, if we are to define terrorism by the illegality of its violence, we can say that terrorism and state violence share an analytical structure and logic. They may be seen, in other words, as part of the same dialectic of violence. The violence that they both display is in its very nature excessive, arbitrary and often falls outside the law. Terrorism, because it represents a violence that is beyond the state and outside its control – in other words, an alternate law-making violence – presents a supreme challenge to the authority of the state, thus provoking in the state a kind of terrorism of its own. Indeed, as Agamben argues, the danger of the new ‘security’ paradigm that we are living in today is precisely that the state ‘can always be provoked by terror to become terroristic’ (2002). The second point is that despite the differences between law-making and law-preserving violence, they both lead to a perpetuation of the law or, more precisely, power. Law-preserving violence, because it acts either

106 On the politics of violence to enforce existing laws, or to change only particular laws, maintains the authority of the legal system and the state. Law-making violence, which is directed towards the overthrowing of existing laws, only establishes new ones in their place. In both cases, the symbolic position of the law is sustained and perpetuated. Law-making violence is particularly problematic for Benjamin because it succumbs to the illusion that one is breaking absolutely with existing forms of authority, only to establish a new authority in its place, thus remaining, inextricably, within the very paradigm it seeks to overthrow. Therefore law-making violence only reaffirms the place of power. In fact law-making violence is irreducibly related to the problem of power, reaffirming the link between violence, law and power. As Benjamin argues, the violence in law-making is paradoxical: it has as its aim, in so far as it seeks that which is to be established as a new system of laws, the dismissal or overcoming of violence; yet, at the same time, violence is instantiated and reaffirmed at the very moment of this establishment of the law. So the paradox of the law is that it contains a hidden complicity with violence: violence cannot abolish the law without erecting a new legal order in its place; and law cannot abolish violence without itself acting violently. In other words, there is an irreducible violence at the heart of the law, despite the attempt of law-making to disavow the violence at its own foundations. Rather than the dismissal of violence, ‘it specifically establishes as law not an end unalloyed by violence but one necessarily and intimately bound to it, under the title of power’ (Benjamin 1996: 248). Power, in other words, refers here to this irreducible connection between violence and the law: violence against the law always involving a reaffirmation of the law; the law which seeks to dismiss violence always involving a violence of its own. Power is the signifier that presides over this connection. That is why, as Benjamin argues, ‘Lawmaking is powermaking, assumption of power, and to that extent an immediate manifestation of violence’ (1996: 248). Benjamin therefore forces us to rethink the question of violence within the problematic of power, and to reexamine the relationship between violence and power. Benjamin has presented a genealogy not only of violence, but of law as well. Law and violence have been shown to exist in an ambiguous relationship, in which violence reaffirms the law and the law reaffirms violence. The spectre of an immanent law looms up behind every act of violence against it; the law is based, in turn, on a disavowed violence which haunts its foundations, making its formulations problematic. One could argue, then, that there is always a violence at the heart of every form of political and legal authority – a disavowed original crime or act of violence that brings the body of the law into existence and which is now hidden in its symbolic structures. Terrorism, as a certain articulation of violence, has the effect of exposing this hidden sovereign violence precisely by inciting it, eliciting it in response. Moreover, through this genealogical analysis Benjamin has introduced the problematic of power, unmasking it in the very

On the politics of violence 107 nexus of law and violence. That is to say that all instances of violence, as well as of law, must ultimately refer to the question of power.

A violent analytics of power Is there a specific connection, then, between violence and power? To what extent can violence be seen as an act of power, and to what extent can a relation of power be seen as a certain articulation of violence? This was a question that was central to Foucault’s thinking – particularly in his genealogical analysis of discourses, institutions and practices of power. Indeed, genealogy itself is precisely an unmasking of the disruption, discontinuity and violence at the heart of human history. Like Benjamin’s ‘Critique’, Foucault’s genealogical analysis allows us to examine the originating violence at the heart of social symbolizations, laws and institutions. Like Benjamin, moreover, Foucault is interested in the question of power and violence as pure means. Power is not conceived here as an instrument or a capacity to achieve ‘natural’ or even legal ends. Rather, power, like violence, must be understood on its own terms and as having its own logic and analytics. As we shall see, power is a particular encoding of violence which operates at the heart of political and social discourse. Instead of seeing power from the ‘juridico-discursive’ perspective of law and sovereignty, Foucault observes it through the lens of violence. Not only is violence inextricably linked with power but, for Foucault, violence – or more precisely war – could serve as the theoretical basis for deciphering power relations. Violence, in other words, was not a phenomenon of power – rather power was a phenomenon of violence. In a series of lectures organized around the title ‘Society must be defended’ (‘Il faut defendre la société’), Foucault examined the discourse of war and conquest through a body of different texts, from those of Edmund Coke and John Lilburne to French aristocratic thinker Boulainvilliers. In a sort of counterhistory, he explored the way that war – as a strategic principle and a practice of violence and conquest – had become, over the course of history, woven into the very tapestry of the social. Rather than war and violence being seen as something external to civil society, it is the very constitutive principle of any social identity. Indeed, our way of seeing society and its political formations is based on a metaphor of struggle and violence, which has its origins in actual warfare. The violence of this war – now seen in metaphorical terms as a clash of representations – has stolen its way into institutions, language, law and power itself. Indeed, Foucault raised the possibility of using violence and war as an analytical tool for understanding power relations: ‘Can we find in bellicose relations, in the model of war, in the schema of struggle or struggles a principle that can help us understand and analyse political power, to interpret political power in terms of war, struggles, and confrontations?’ (2003: 23). Here Foucault reverses Clausewitz’s axiom that war is politics

108 On the politics of violence continued by other means: rather, politics is war continued by other means (2003: 15). This violence is ongoing, yet it is now codified in institutions, laws, economic inequalities and even in language. Like Benjamin, Foucault does not believe that violence can be dismissed once the law is established. Rather, the register of the law itself must be seen as a form of violence. Violence speaks through these very laws, and the task of the genealogist, according to Foucault, is to unmask it, to ‘awaken beneath the form of institutions and legislations the forgotten past of real struggles, of masked victories or defeats, the blood that has dried on the codes of law’ (1976: 17–18). Law, sovereignty and political power are merely articulations of an ‘unspoken’ warfare that has raged throughout history. Violence operates as an ontological schema for interpreting the world – war, in other words, is a ‘grid of intelligibility’, a metaphorical ‘essential condition’ by which different social, historical and political formations can be deciphered: ‘Can the phenomenon of war be regarded as primary with respect to other relations (relations of inequality, dis-symmetries, divisions of labour, relations of exploitation, et cetera)?’ (Foucault 2003: 47). Power, in this paradigm, is a certain unstable relation or constellation of hostile forces. Foucault’s strategic model of analysis allows us to see violence as being at the basis of social and political identity, creeping into the very structures, laws, hierarchies and institutions that have been established to suppress it. Rather than society being founded on the idea of contract – as in liberal political theory – it is based on a constitutive violence, both metaphorical and real, which continues to haunt it. Political sovereignty itself is merely a form of conquest that has fallen silent and now tries to disavow the violence of its own origins through the discourse of law, contract and rational agreement. War and violence, in this sense, are ‘the very sum of peace’, the primary condition and single reality from which social and political structures must be understood. Indeed, Foucault’s strategic model implies a new kind of political philosophy – one that ontologically and epistemologically privileges war over peace, and violence over contract and law. The violence that the discourse of political philosophy has for centuries tried so hard to keep at bay can be seen at the very heart of civil society. As Pasquale Pasquino has argued – following Foucault’s analysis of Hobbes – the starting point of political theory must be the problem of disorder and threat of violence. The possibility of stable political identities, he suggests, is based on the overcoming of the condition of ‘terror’ (Pasquino 1993: 84). Perhaps, in this sense, we may see terrorism as a form of violence which, in the Foucauldian sense, is both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ civil society. That is to say, if we are to understand terrorism as a certain technology of violence, it is difficult to separate it analytically from the violence that has been codified in laws, institutions and the sovereign power of the state. Indeed, as I have suggested, terrorism has the effect of unmasking this con-

On the politics of violence 109 stitutive violence. In this sense, the condition of terrorism is internal to civil society. On the other hand, terrorism would be characterized by its absolute exteriority, its ‘alterity’ to civil society. It gives us a glimpse of the ‘liminal’ condition of terror – the absolute violence that haunts society at its limits, simultaneously threatening and constituting the borders of social and political identities. There is forever a spectre of violence and terror that is marked as a ‘trace’ at the borders of the social – neither entirely outside nor inside civil society, but suspended above it as a permanent threat.

Security and biopower This inscription of violence and war in the framework of the social finds its modern permutation in what Foucault terms ‘biopolitics’. The ‘race wars’ of earlier periods have now become codified in modern political rationalities that have as their central concern the preservation of the biological life of the species. The target of politics in contemporary societies, according to Foucault, is the administration of life itself. This designates a new technology of power – biopower – whose focus is on the ‘health’ of the population, and whose emergence during the late eighteenth century coincided with governmental discourses that sought to monitor, for the first time, birth and death rates, demographics, longevity and the fertility of the population (Foucault 2003: 243). These discourses thus allowed the state to intervene more directly in social relations, designating a new modality of power which had the purpose of securing and sustaining the conditions of life. The operation of power was now aimed at the regulation, calculation and administration of populations. Violence is still inscribed at the heart of these modern societies. However, the crucial difference with modern regimes of biopower is that, unlike sovereign regimes where blood was shed symbolically on behalf of the sovereign, now wars are waged on a massive scale by states on behalf of the populations they administer, or to intervene in humanitarian crises in order to sustain the life of the local population.3 Sovereign societies, by contrast, were symbolized by the sword and by the right of the sovereign either to take life or to spare it. The symbolic register of these societies was a supreme power over life and death: ‘The sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill . . . Its symbol was, after all, the sword’ (Foucault 1978: 136). Sovereign societies were characterized by the power of the spectacle – witness the ‘spectacle of the scaffold’ whose grotesque horrors and excessive violence Foucault famously described in the execution of the regicide Damiens in Discipline and Punish. Power was exercised here in a highly symbolic fashion, through a violence that was excessive, spectacular and ritualized. Punishment involved, for instance, the literal sacrifice of the body of the condemned. Foucault argues that this notion of violence as spectacle and

110 On the politics of violence symbolic sacrifice is no longer characteristic of modern societies, where power now operates in a quiet, methodical, regulative fashion. Modern societies are defined by an entirely different register and technology of power – one in which the symbolic power of the sovereign to take life has been supplanted by a power that operates at the level of population and whose fundamental principle is to secure life. Therefore, for Foucault, the power of the sovereign was defined by the right to take life or to let live, whereas biopower is characterized by precisely the opposite right to make live or to let die (2003: 241). This modern technology of power is no less bloody according to Foucault, having produced unprecedented genocides and holocausts. However, these are now carried out, perversely, in the name of protecting the biological health and purity of the population from contaminants. Thus, the symbolic order of biopower is non-violent. That is to say, it is based on the principle of the preservation, rather than the sacrifice, of life. That power is now organized around securing and preserving the conditions of life is an undeniable fact of modern politics. As Agamben argues, the concern with security and the preservation of life, while always one of the several prerogatives of modern state power, has now become the fundamental principle of state activity (2002). We can see this new preoccupation with security in the obsession with ‘terrorist plots’ within one’s own borders, with a new invisible enemy that can strike anywhere at any time. The security and protection of internal populations from this invisible enemy – that is seen as both an external threat and an internal contaminant – has become the primary concern of political power. Questions of national security and protection from terrorism are now the central feature of any political platform. Needless to say, this new raison d’être of the modern state has as its flip side the systematic destruction of life – the meaningless military operations, for instance, that are engaged in precisely in the name of the preservation of life. The value, therefore, of Foucault’s analysis is in showing the way that the discourse of war can be readily mobilized by the modern state precisely for the purposes of internal control. The fact that campaigns against terrorism are articulated in the language of war – the ‘war on terrorism’ – is indicative of the extent to which the principle of war has intersected and become infused with the logic of biopolitics. Moreover, perhaps Foucault’s argument about the essentially nonviolent and regulative nature of power in modern biopolitical societies finds its ultimate justification in the astonishment that the terrorist attacks on September 11 provoked. The only explanation for our transfixed fascination with this spectacle of excessive violence can be that we live in a society where the symbolic sacrifice of life is unthinkable. That the terrorists were prepared to sacrifice their own lives and the lives of others in a highly symbolic and violent fashion is deeply shocking to a modernity governed by the principle of the preservation of life and the careful, methodi-

On the politics of violence 111 cal and administrative functioning of power. However, did we not see in the World Trade Center attacks a strange anachronism – almost the vague glimpse of an older order of sovereignty, of the symbolism of blood and the sword, of the absolutism of death over life? Did we not see, in this strange, almost inconceivable spectacle of destruction, amidst the flames and the tumbling debris, the uncanny figure of a sovereign violence long thought to be dead? It would seem that in an age where the spectacle of sovereign power has vanished from the register of politics, that it has returned as the power of the spectacle itself – the spectacle of excessive violence that, Medusa-like, paralyses our gaze. The terrorist attacks bore witness to a new form of violence as spectacle – the symbolic dimension of the sovereign sacrifice of life, which is precisely unthinkable in our contemporary times. There are a couple of points to be made about this constellation of violence and power. Foucault’s analysis, by freeing the study of power from juridical questions and notions of the contract, has developed the connection, first hinted at by Benjamin, between power and violence. Violence is not only linked to power but becomes, in Foucault’s analysis, its very ontological condition. Foucault has placed violence at the heart of social and political identity. Moreover, he has shown the way that modern biopolitical societies are based on a violence that has been rigidified into codes, norms and technologies of regulation – into a political register that, instead of the symbolic right of the sovereign to take life, has as its defining principle the preservation and protection of life. Modern political power, or biopower, Foucault argues, operates through a register from which the violent, symbolic sacrifice of life has been excluded. However, what are we to make of the recent terrorist attacks, in which we saw a ‘return’ of the very symbols of sovereign force – the power of the spectacle; the excessive, almost nihilistic quality of the violence; the intense spirituality of suicide and martyrdom; and the symbolic sacrifice of life? That is to say, in this excessive violence and sacralizing of death, can we not see the intervention of a different order – one that is no longer intelligible within the paradigm of biopower? One could perhaps go further here. Are we perhaps witnessing a new economy of violence, one that can no longer be contained within the analytic of power itself?

Violence and heterogeneity There are several elements of violence – in particular, terrorist violence – that allow us to detect in it an irreducible particularity. This form of violence is characterized by what might be termed heterogeneity. To speak of the ‘heterogeneity’ here – which is a term borrowed from Georges Bataille – means simply that there is an aspect of this violence that is unmediated. For Bataille, the heterogeneous is the ‘waste-product’ of homogeneous society – it includes everything that is unproductive and extraneous, and

112 On the politics of violence which is therefore excluded from homogeneous society. Violence, excess, delirium and madness characterize the heterogeneous (Bataille 1985: 142). According to Bataille, however, the heterogeneous does not exist as a simple essence outside the order of the homogeneous and strictly separated from it. Rather, there is a dynamic interplay and antagonism between these two forces, in the same way that there is an interplay between the state order and terrorism. Political change in society, for instance, depends upon this interaction – different political articulations draw upon heterogeneous elements in order to constitute an identity. Bataille shows that fascism, for instance, contains elements of both the homogeneous and the heterogeneous – both the construction of order and its dissolution. Heterogeneous elements are present in fascism in the aesthetics of the spectacle – marches, street parades, mob activity, etc. There is a certain register of the political here that operates through, or that contains elements of, an enacted excess of violence – a spectacle of violence. New forms of terrorist violence are characterized by a similar heterogeneity. For instance, the attacks on September 11 represented a violent intrusion of excluded heterogeneous forces into the homogeneous order of globalized capitalist society. The stable and commensurable political structures and identities of this order were disrupted by a certain irreducible particularity – in this case a violent articulation of Islamic radicalism – that is excluded from this order.4 Furthermore the aestheticized element of heterogeneity was evident in the deliberate use of the spectacle by the terrorists. The WTC attacks were a symbolic strike, manufactured for a television audience and designed for maximum visual impact. Is this not reminiscent, as I have already suggested, of the power of spectacle – ‘the spectacle of scaffold’ – which was the symbolic register of sovereignty? Here it seems the sovereign power of the spectacle has returned in this new aestheticized form of terrorist violence. However, the spectacle of violence that once characterized sovereign power has now become the violence of the pure spectacle itself. Indeed, as Bataille argues, while heterogeneity is usually found in nonstate or revolutionary elements, sovereignty itself is also in principle heterogeneous. The very condition of sovereignty lies in an excessive or superfluous power that goes beyond the logic of homogeneous society. This heterogeneous authority often manifests itself, Bataille argues, in violence against the forces that oppose it: ‘Situated above homogeneous society . . . it requires the bloody repression of what is contrary to it and becomes synonymous in its split-off form with the heterogeneous foundations of the law’ (1985: 148). Here, once again, we are back to the question of sovereign authority raised by Benjamin, who also brings to light the heterogeneous and violent foundations of the law. It would seem that, despite Foucault’s insistence that sovereign power is a thing of the past, it is once again displayed in the state’s equally violent and symbolic reaction to the non-state terrorist activity that has drawn its sword. This is particu-

On the politics of violence 113 larly evident in the state’s use of military power to symbolize its authority. Indeed, as Bataille shows, military power itself is also heterogeneous in principle – its violence and its phantasmic reversal of slaughter into ‘glory’ go beyond the order of homogeneity (1985: 150). The point here is that terrorist violence and the violence of the state share the symbolic register of sovereignty. They are both examples of heterogeneous excess and spectacle that exceed the logic of a carefully ordered and administered homogeneous society. A further example that Bataille gives of heterogeneity is religious power. Religion, which functions through the affective power of the sacred, through the veiled and mysterious authority of the divine, contains, according to Bataille, a dimension of ‘undifferentiated’ heterogeneity (1985: 151). This power of the sacred is largely unthinkable today. However, the terrorist strikes on September 11 displayed an intense spirituality – embodied in ideas of martyrdom and self-sacrifice – that was utterly incommensurable with our modern, secular and technocratic social reality. Perhaps what was truly shocking about the September 11 attacks, as well as other suicide bombings that are taking place around the world, is that we are witnessing a religious fervour – a spiritual jouissance – that is entirely alien to us. After all, here are people who are prepared to die for their cause, to use their bodies as guided missiles, to sacrifice themselves in the absolute conviction that it is God’s will. Suicide and martyrdom are essential to the symbolic force of these attacks. We see in this form of violence the operation of the power of the sacred, beyond all ideologies and direct political concerns. As Baudrillard says about this new form of terrorist violence, ‘Its goal is no longer to transform the world, but (as heresies did in their day) to radicalize the world through sacrifice’ (2002: 10). Revolutionary struggles have become, in the case of this new paradigm of terrorism, heterogeneous spiritual struggles characterized by a martyrdom for its own sake. The deliberate meaningless of the act of martyrdom highlights a further dimension of this new mode of violence – its nihilism. What perhaps most distinguished the September 11 terrorist strikes was the absence of any sense of concrete political or strategic objectives: there were no demands made, no one claimed responsibility for the attacks, those responsible remained nameless and faceless. The effect of this was pure terror, as we were confronted with a violence characterized by its very meaninglessness and absence of content – a violence without purpose or goal. This was perhaps the ultimate answer to Benjamin’s attempt to see violence beyond the question of ends, as pure means. So, far from Benjamin’s contention that the violence of pure means would be a kind of ‘non-violence’ (exemplified by the general proletarian strike, or the notion of ‘divine violence’), here was an instance of pure means returning as a form of ultra-violence. In other words, in the case of this new form of terrorism, violence itself – the spectacle of violence – is both the means and end, or, more precisely,

114 On the politics of violence the very suspension of these categories. In Alain Badiou’s words, it is a ‘fascist’ nihilism (2002: 10). It can no longer be measured by the operation of power it contests. It is a nihilism at whose heart there is nothing but emptiness, the terror of pure form, and the death-drive that approaches the edges of the abyss. The excessive dimension of violence that I have spoken about refers precisely to this nihilistic void. The excessive dimension of violence is perhaps the ‘fundamental fantasy’ – to speak in Lacanian psychoanalytic terms – of political power. At the base of all forms of political power and authority is the unspeakable abyss of indeterminacy. Perhaps one could argue that, on the one hand, violence has the function of covering up this traumatic void, of filling it and giving it meaning – in Benjamin’s terms, the function of law-making or law-preserving. Yet, as I have tried to show, violence also has the effect of exposing this very abyss, of tracing the hidden discontinuity at the origins of the law and political power. This was the paradoxical nature of the Terror that Lefort spoke of. Violence encircles the edges of this abyss, re-enacting the trauma of its own origins, both disavowing and affirming its symbolic link with sovereignty. In exploring this link – first through the question of law, then through the problematic of power – I have tried to understand this fundamental function of violence. This function, I would suggest, is increasingly apparent in the new modalities of terrorist violence that we are witness to today: violence that is characterized by a dimension that is excessive, heterogeneous and spectacular; that involves the sacrifice of life and the symbolism of death, and the terrifying nihilism of ‘pure means’. In this chapter I have tried to deconstruct the current discourse on terrorism by disrupting the accepted division, central to political philosophy, between state violence which is seen as legitimate, and non-state violence, or terrorism, which is seen as illegitimate. I have suggested, instead, that there is a contamination between these two orders of violence – sovereign and legal structures themselves resting on a form of violence which exceeds the boundaries of the law. Terrorism, and the violent response it elicits from the state, has the effect of exposing this disavowed violence – the abyss of illegitimacy – at the foundations of existing political and legal institutions. Therefore, rather than these being based on the elimination of violence, they are actually grounded in it, the condition of ‘terror’ referring to a point of liminality that is both inside and outside civil society. However, this parallel – or even equivalence – that I am drawing between state and non-state violence should not be taken as any sort of rationalization or justification for terrorism. On the contrary, as I have tried to show, contemporary terrorist violence is nihilistic and draws on the worst aspects of religious symbolism and the paraphernalia of sovereignty. It refers ultimately to the death drive, and is a form of action and thinking that, in Derrida’s words, opens ‘onto no future’ (Derrida in Borradori 2004: 113). Such questions of nihilism and violence, however, are important to any

On the politics of violence 115 consideration of poststructuralist political theory. Many have charged that because poststructuralism and deconstruction challenge existing moral, rational and legal categories, they amount to a kind of a-political nihilism which may bring with it its own forms of violence. While I have suggested that poststructuralism is ethically and politically engaged, this is at least a charge that must be taken seriously. In the following section, which is devoted to exploring new forms of radical politics and subjectivity, I shall try to show, particularly with the last chapter, that poststructuralism does not exclude ethical and political forms of universality, and indeed, is not thinkable without them.

7

Spectres of the uncanny The ‘return of the repressed’ in politics

Previous chapters have highlighted the need to formulate, within the parameters of poststructuralist theory, a more substantive notion of subjectivity. In Chapter 3, I suggested that the Foucauldian understanding of the subject as constructed by power/discourse, neglected the dimension of the psyche – that part of the subject that not only binds itself to power but also, at times, resists it. This dimension could be revealed, I argued, through psychoanalysis. In this chapter, I return to the problem of subjectivity, particularly as it relates to the formation of political identities and the way we view ourselves as political actors. In other words, how do we explain acts of political identification today; upon what ontological basis do they take place? Once again, we are faced with the same challenge: to be able to develop a theory of political identification without falling back into the essentialist category of the subject with natural or rational ‘interests’. This is a central question for radical politics today, which can no longer be based on the universal Marxist category of subjectivity – the proletariat. On the other hand, if collective political projects of resistance and emancipation are to be imagined today, political identity cannot be based on an egoistic individualism either. Rather, radical politics must involve a deconstruction of these two opposing modes of subjectivity. To do this, I turn once more to psychoanalytic theory, specifically to Freud’s concept of the uncanny as the ‘return of the repressed’ in the subject. This logic of the uncanny, I argue, is fundamental to both Marx and Stirner’s critique of the ideological void or ‘lack’ that separates the subject from the objective world. I show that despite Stirner’s and Marx’s attempts to overcome the spectre of the uncanny, they nevertheless rely on this dimension in order to conceptualize their different understandings of the political subjectivity. I attempt to develop from this a political logic of ‘disidentification’ which allows contingent and non-essentialist radical identities to be constructed.

Spectres of the uncanny 117

‘Es spukt’ John Fletcher argues in his critique of Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, that Derrida misinterprets the concept of the uncanny. Even though Derrida claims that the alternate title to the book might have been ‘Marx – the Uncanny’ (Marx – das Unheimlich), he does not deal with the concept of the uncanny, as derived from Freud, in any great depth, thus robbing it of its theoretical force (see Fletcher 1996). Derrida discovers a ‘hauntological’ dimension in Marx’s thinking – a spectral ‘counter-ontology’ that Marx tries to eschew, but which reasserts itself in his very attempt to exorcise it. As I shall show, for example, Marx cannot refute Stirner – whom he accuses in The German Ideology of idealism – without referring to the very spectres and ghosts that he has tried to exorcise from his own thought. Marx can only dispel this apparition by invoking it at every turn. Derrida uses the example of Hamlet’s father’s ghost returning to haunt the troubled young prince, to characterize this spectral dimension in the Marxian universe. That the ‘time is out of joint’, that the world is somehow characterized by a fundamental dislocation, a lack or inconsistency in the structure of representation, is seen as being the chief concern of Marx. Moreover, Derrida takes issue with Freud’s insistence that the ghost in Hamlet is not uncanny. Freud had argued that the apparitions that appear in Shakespeare’s plays, including Hamlet, while they might be terrifying, are not examples of the uncanny. This is because they appear in the context of fiction, in the imaginary world of fairy tales, and therefore do not provoke feelings of intellectual uncertainty because we accept from the outset their fictive context (Freud 1949: 405). The uncanny, on the other hand, is characterized precisely by this feeling of intellectual uncertainty. In other words, the uncanny is something that happens in ‘real life’, or at least when the author writes in a realistic way. It does not occur in fiction, and it is precisely this that renders it inexplicable and terrifying. For Freud, in other words, the uncanny is something that dislocates our sense of reality because it emerges through this very reality. Derrida appropriates the idea of the uncanny from Freud, interpreting it through the generalized structure of hauntology. He equates Freud’s uncanny with ghosts, apparitions and haunting – es spukt, or ‘it spooks’ (Derrida 1994: 1743). He suggests that Freud’s discussion of the uncanny begins with, and indeed presupposes, this very notion of es spukt. While the logic of haunting is important in this discussion, I would argue that Derrida’s formulation might be turned around. Rather than the logic of the uncanny presupposing a hauntology – a certain spectral dimension – it is actually presupposed by it. That is to say, the uncanny produces spectral effects – effects that are terrifying and haunting – rather than being produced by them. In other words, the uncanny cannot be reduced to a logic of haunting, but rather emerges, as we shall see, from something entirely different – from the ‘return of the repressed’. It is possible, then, to

118 Spectres of the uncanny theorize the uncanny in a more radically Freudian way as a ‘return of the repressed’ which produces spectral effects. If we are to reconstruct the uncanny in this way, we must return to Freud.

Psychoanalysis, politics and the subject It might seem strange at the outset that Freud, and indeed psychoanalytic theory generally, should enter into a discussion about politics – particularly when politics would seem to refer to a collective and social dimension beyond that of the individual psyche. However, as Freud contends, psychoanalysis is a mode of inquiry that seeks to explain the interactions of the individual with those around him – with, first, his family, and later with broader society. In that sense, psychoanalysis goes beyond the realm of individual psychology and refers to the intersubjective field of social relations: indeed, as Freud says, psychoanalysis is intrinsically concerned with ‘social phenomena’ (Freud 1995: 627).1 Furthermore, Freud demonstrates the political importance of psychoanalysis in his famous study of mob behaviour and group psychology, foreshadowing the rise of fascist group politics in the 1930s. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud shows the way that the identity of the group is constituted through a series of libidinous ties with the leader – where each member of the group forms a relation of love and identification with the leader, projecting onto this figure his own ego. Thus the figure of the leader holds the group together, becoming a sort of cipher of love through which the individual members of the group can identify with each other. Without the leader the group loses its collective identity and falls apart. The collective identity of the group – be it a political group, a street mob, or even an institutional association like the Church or an army unit – is therefore constituted through a point of singularity that stands outside it, and upon which the libidinal energies of the individual group members are focused. The importance of Freud’s contribution here is in showing that political behaviour cannot be explained entirely on a rational basis. Politics is not always reducible to rational choice models of behaviour and ‘utility maximizing’ action. Rather, any understanding of politics must take into account the ‘irrational’ dimension of the psyche. That is to say, psychoanalysis shows us that political action may be motivated as much by unconscious impulses and drives – our passionate attachments to others, and even to authoritarian figures who dominate us – as by rational calculations about our ‘best interests’. Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, as that dimension of the subject which remains enigmatic and opaque even to himself, thus provides a new way of looking at politics and the way that political identities are formed – one that goes beyond conventional liberal and even Marxist accounts. Indeed, most understandings of politics are still based on a Cartesian idea of subjectivity, in which the subject is transparent to himself, being ration-

Spectres of the uncanny 119 ally aware of his own thoughts, interests and motivations. Freud showed, of course, that this one dimensional notion of the subject was only half the story, and that the ego as the centre of the subject’s sense of identity and self-certainty was displaced by the awareness of an unconscious that thinks ‘where he is not’, that reveals itself in slips, accidents and those dreams which occasionally disturb our waking life. The subject was henceforth irretrievably split and decentred. However, it would be a mistake to imagine that this decentring of subject amounts to an abandonment of the subject altogether, or to the problematic of agency. On the contrary, it could be seen as leading to a fuller understanding of the subject. That is to say, the post-Cartesian subject, unlike his predecessor, is no longer a subject of certainty but of doubt, and is anchored no longer in rational understanding and selfconsciousness, but in a dimension of himself that he cannot grasp. Lacan’s rereading of Freud through structuralist linguistics has further radicalized this notion of the split subject, seeing the unconscious in terms of external social structures of language. However, Lacan makes it clear that the Freudian psychoanalytic enterprise can still be situated within the problematic of the Cartesian subject – only now this subject is constituted, paradoxically, not by what it knows, but by the knowledge of what it does not know, by the ‘certainty that eludes it’ (Lacan 1998: 126). Therefore, the radical innovation of the Freudian/Lacanian intervention is that it retains the category of the subject, while at the same time avoiding both essentialism and structuralism. For Lacan, the subject is constituted not on the basis of a rational essence – not on ‘the living substratum needed by this phenomenon of the subject, nor any sort of substance, nor any possessing knowledge in his pathos, his suffering, whether primordial or secondary, nor even some incarnating logos’ (1998: 126) – but rather through external structures of language. However, there is always a dimension of the subject that cannot be symbolized – what Lacan terms ‘the real’ – and which forms the internal void or limit around which acts of identification take place. Similarly for Freud – notwithstanding the biological and positivistic conceptual language to which he at times resorted to explain the unconscious – there is still a point of opacity, the ‘navel of the dream’ that remains indecipherable and that forms the core of the subject. In other words, the Freudian/Lacanian subject is grounded in a kind of void or abyss – the radical trauma of emptiness – and it is in relation to this lack, and in order to come to terms with it, that the subject constitutes his identity.

The uncanny For Freud, the trauma of the void which has been repressed in the subject, returns in various forms throughout his life, provoking an experience of the uncanny. Freud sees the ‘uncanny’ as pertaining to what is frightening,

120 Spectres of the uncanny arousing horror and dread. He argues that this fear is provoked by the familiar or ‘homely’ (heimlich) becoming somehow ‘unfamiliar’ or strange (unheimlich). What is interesting is the way that, as Freud shows, the different variations on the meaning of the German word heimlich or ‘homely’ eventually slide into their opposite meaning of ‘unfamiliar’. Through the different meanings that he explores in the everyday usage of the term ‘homely’, there is a gradual progression towards that which is secretive and strange. Thus, heimlich becomes its opposite – unheimlich or ‘uncanny’. In this way, the ‘uncanny’ is related to what is familiar; it is something that appears in the form of the familiar, yet is somehow different or strange. Freud relates the notion of the uncanny to the story of ‘The Sand-Man’ in Hoffmann’s Nachtstucken. The Sand-Man is a dreaded character in a children’s tale – a figure who comes in the dead of night and steals the eyes of children. The young Nathaniel in the story sees the figure of the SandMan return throughout his life in the form of the odious lawyer Coppelius, whom Nathaniel associates with the death of his father. Coppelius returns time and time again in different guises to haunt Nathaniel, eventually throwing him into a state of madness leading to his suicide. Freud detects several instances of the uncanny in this story. First, there is the link between the anxiety of having one’s eyes put out, and the castration complex in childhood. Second, there is the question of the uncanniness of the double: in the story, Nathaniel falls in love with an uncannily life-like doll, Olympia. There is a strongly uncanny feeling that is provoked by the uncertainty as to whether the doll is living or inanimate. Freud argues that the creation of the double was originally a form of early childhood ego defence, which has now become something horrifying: ‘The “double” has become a vision of terror, just as after the fall of their religion the gods took on daemonic shapes’ (1949: 389). The uncanny therefore involves a notion of repetition – the return of the same thing, but this time in a way that is strange and different. It may be likened, according to Freud, to the uncanny or eerie feeling one gets when one is lost and one keeps returning to the same place despite one’s attempts to escape it. Other coincidences, involving an unexplained repetition or return of some entirely arbitrary object, place or number, are all instances of the uncanny. Even ghosts and spirits may be seen as the uncanny ‘return’ of the dead person, and Freud points out the closeness in translation of the German expression an ‘unheimliches house’ to a ‘haunted house’ (1949: 395). From these different examples, Freud offers a general definition of the uncanny: the uncanny is something familiar, something ‘old-established in the mind’, which has become alienated from it through a process of repression (1949: 394). That is to say, the uncanny only emerges as a ‘return’ of that which has been repressed. It is something familiar, something that may have even been with us since childhood, but which assumes the vague terror of strangeness and unfamiliarity through its repression and subsequent return. Freud explains this repression: ‘An uncanny experience

Spectres of the uncanny 121 occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed’ (1949: 403). It must be emphasized that the uncanny does not refer to something different, but is always the return of the same. That is to say, it is frightening precisely through its familiarity, precisely because it is the same, yet acquires the nature of something different and alien through repression. This idea of the uncanny as a ‘return of the repressed’, the return of the familiar in an alienated form, is a crucial one for politics. Politics is always simultaneously the attempt to construct something new, coupled with the re-invoking of something old. Radical politics, for instance, is always haunted by the ghosts of the past – the revolutionary traditions which are dead, yet remain unburied; which have been repressed, yet which insist upon returning in uncannily familiar forms. As J. M. Fritzman remarks in his work on nostalgia, the struggles and narratives of workers’ movements and revolutionary traditions are the repressed which nevertheless ‘return’ in the form of new struggles against oppression: ‘The struggle against injustice always is revolutionary in that it contains the potential for the return of the repressed’ (1993: 186). The uncanny may also be characteristic of a certain conservatism in politics – the fact that revolutions are somehow a return to the old order, to the old forms of power, which are reaffirmed at the very instance where one thinks one has overthrown them. This was, as we shall see, the chief political and epistemological problem for Stirner. The uncanny is therefore characterized by a fundamental ambiguity. Like the intellectual uncertainty which always accompanies Freud’s uncanny, the political uncanny is always undecidable. Its effects are unpredictable. In order to understand the ambiguous operation of the ‘return of the repressed’ in politics, we must turn our attention to Stirner and his critique of the uncanny spectres of Enlightenment humanism.

Uncanny ‘spooks’: Stirner’s fear of ghosts Stirner, the most radical of the Young Hegelians, was intensely troubled by the spectres. Modern consciousness, he argued, was haunted and alienated by apparitions or ‘spooks’. These spooks are fixed ideas, metaphysical abstractions like human essence, rationality and morality, which have been raised to the absolute level of ‘the sacred’. ‘Fixed ideas’ are constructs that govern thought – discursively closed, absolute paradigms that deny difference and plurality. They are conceptual generalities which try to represent or ‘speak for’ the individual, thereby alienating him and denying his individuality. Modern man, Stirner argued, was surrounded and alienated by this ghostly world of fixed ideas: ‘Everything that appears to you is only the phantasm of an indwelling spirit, is a ghostly “apparition”; the world is to you only a “world of appearances [Erscheinungswelt]”, behind which the spirit walks’ (1995: 36).

122 Spectres of the uncanny What is this ‘spirit’ that dwells behind the material world, turning everything into an appearance or representation of something more fundamental? For Stirner, this spirit is essence – the conviction that humanity must have a unifying core, an underlying morality and rationality that reflect man’s ‘species being’. However, for Stirner, this is precisely what alienates the individual: human essence is held up as a sacred ideal that the individual must live up to, thus dividing the individual between his concrete and idealized selves. Sacred ideals like morality and rationality function as ideological spectres that subsume the individual. The individual aspires to these ideals but can never approach them. This spectral world of essence and the sacred is, therefore, profoundly oppressive and alienating. Moreover, this strange world of apparitions, for Stirner, has the character of the uncanny: ‘Yes the whole world is haunted! Only is haunted? Indeed, it itself “walks”, it is uncanny through and through’ (1995: 36). It is not just that the whole world is haunted – the whole world has become uncanny. It is literally alive with spectres, and it starts to ‘walk’ of its own accord, rather like Freud’s image of dismembered limbs and body parts that uncannily move or ‘dance’ by themselves, as if animated by an invisible internal force (1949: 397). The sacredness of the world is uncanny: ‘In everything sacred there lies something “uncanny”, that is strange, such as we are not quite familiar and at home in’ (Stirner 1995: 38). What is this singular sense of the unease that Stirner feels, this unfamiliarity that lies in the familiar? There is something unhiemlich or ‘strange’ about the world – it resembles something else, something that we believed to be dead and long forgotten. It is as if the world has become haunted by a strange double of itself. Something has returned from the past – something unfamiliar and disconcerting, yet strangely familiar. These apparitions that haunt the world are, for Stirner, the remnants of Christianity that have returned in a new guise – that of human essence. The same spectres of religious mystification and obscurantism have returned in the form of Enlightenment rationality and humanism, the very discourses that were supposed to dispel them. In other words, the spectres of humanism are uncanny because they are the return of a repressed Christian idealism. That is why the spectre of human essence is so uncanny for Stirner, so unfamiliar yet familiar – it is this same figure of God only now in a human form. In the humanist paradigm, religious alienation has been suppressed and replaced by rational humanism. God has been replaced by man. Yet the repressed has ‘returned’ in the form of its replacement. Rationality and morality have become the new forms of religious fanaticism. Religious essence – the essence of God – has returned in the form of human essence and the figure of Man. This religious essence is no longer external to the individual, but internal to him. It is not merely that man is haunted, according to Stirner. Rather, man himself has become a ghost: ‘Henceforth man no longer, in typical cases, shudders at ghosts outside him, but at himself; he is terrified at himself’ (Stirner 1995: 41). Man has thus become a kind of uncanny double of himself – an embodiment of

Spectres of the uncanny 123 both God and the individual. We see that, for Stirner, the Freudian nightmare of the gods taking on daemonic shapes after the fall of religion, has been realized in the logic of Enlightenment humanism. Therefore, for Stirner, humanism is uncanny because it represents the return of the repressed – the return of old forms of alienation and religious oppression in our ‘secular’ and ‘enlightened’ attempt to overcome them. The return of these spectres has intensified the experience of alienation, deepening the gap or ‘lack’ between the individual and the objective world. The ‘objective’ world that is supposed to have been freed from obfuscation, has become even more incomprehensible and mystifying.2 For Stirner, then, there is always an ideological gap between the individual and the objective world, a fundamental dislocation or deadlock that needs to be resolved. The individual is alienated from this world of abstract ideals – he does not feel ‘at home’ there. Humanism failed to overcome this lack – it has only further entrenched alienation in its own structures. Marx also recognized this gap in representation, this dislocation in the structure of experience wrought by idealism, and sought its resolution. Marx, like Stirner, was similarly disconcerted by the uncanny. In light of Stirner’s critique, Marx is forced to recognize the uncanny return of idealism in his own thinking and, as if to exorcise it from his midst, located it in Stirner’s notion of the individual ego. The relationship between Stirner and Marx is complicated and paradoxical. It is generally acknowledged that Stirner’s diagnosis of idealism had a dramatic effect on the direction of Marx’s thinking. It forced Marx to take account of the idealist presuppositions in his own early notions of human essence and species being that he derived, to a large extent, from Feuerbach. Moreover, it inspired criticism of Marx from some of his contemporaries. Arnold Ruge and Gustav Julius, for instance, who were both influenced by Stirner, accused Marx of being indebted to the same Feuerbachian humanism and idealism that Stirner had linked to religious alienation (see Arvon 1954: 45–46). Indeed, Marx was troubled by Stirner’s suggestion that the species being, and the collective forms of society that derive from it, are tainted with the same idealism as Christianity. Marx’s new found disillusionment with humanism is manifested in a vitriolic attack on Stirner to which the largest part of The German Ideology is devoted. This work can be seen as a cathartic attempt by Marx to tarnish Stirner with the same brush that Marx himself had been tarnished with – that of idealism – while, at the same time, to banish this spectre from his own thought. What is important here, however, is the question of the uncanny and how it functions in both Stirner and Marx’s thinking.

‘Saint Max’ The German Ideology is Marx and Engels’ critique of German idealist philosophy, which, they claim, is still caught within the categories of

124 Spectres of the uncanny Hegelianism. They argue that German philosophical criticism, from Strauss to Stirner, is confined to a critique of religious conceptions, and neglects the concrete materiality of the world. While the ‘German ideologists’ are attempting to overcome religious idealism by condemning the dominance of abstract ideals, they are, in doing so, only reaffirming the idealist conception of the world, thus falling into the idealist trap themselves. In other words, by confining their critique to the effect that ideas have on the world, they are reaffirming the idealist inversion of reality. Marx and Engels claim that Stirner is an ideologist par excellence: by seeing the world as haunted by ghostly abstractions or ‘fixed ideas’, and by seeing these ideas as dominating consciousness, Stirner is considered to be merely perpetuating the idealist illusion that ideas determine the world. In a relentless parody of Stirner, where he is caricatured as the religious thinker ‘Saint Max’, or as ‘Sancho’, the deluded servant of Don Quixote, Marx and Engels attempt to show that Stirner is caught in the world of his own illusions. They argue that he has merely conjured up the very apparitions that he sees as so besetting the world: Saint Max has so far done no more than give instruction in the rudiments of spirit-seeing, by regarding the ancient and modern world only as a ‘pseudo-body of a spirit’, as a spectral phenomenon, and seeing in it only struggles of spirits. (Marx and Engels 1975: 160) In other words, Stirner, in seeing the world in terms of spirits, has neglected the material, corporeal world. This is nowhere more apparent, Marx and Engels argue, than in Stirner’s analysis of the state. Stirner argues that the state itself is an ideological abstraction, much like God, and it only exists because we allow it to exist, because we surrender to it our own authority. Stirner argues that we are as much dominated by idea of the state – by the idea of sovereignty or the ‘ruling principle’ (1995: 200) – as we are by concrete political institutions. In other words, for Stirner, the state’s dominance is really based on an alienation of the individual’s power over himself and his willing submission to state authority (1995: 174–175). As Stirner realized, the state cannot function only through top-down repression, as this would expose its power in all its nakedness and brutality. Rather, the state relies on us allowing it to dominate us.3 However, according to Marx and Engels, this argument ignores the economic and class relations that form the material basis of the state. Stirner’s ‘idealism’, they contend, absurdly allows the state to be dismissed by an act of ‘wishful thinking’ (1975: 379). While it may be contended that, in fact, it was Marx who neglected the importance of political power by reducing it to economic and class relations, this issue of the state in Stirner and Marx’s thinking raises important questions about subjectivity and resistance. Stirner is not suggesting that

Spectres of the uncanny 125 the state is an illusion – rather that its institutions and mechanisms are sustained by an ideological underside that gives them a symbolic consistency and, at the same time, binds us to them. Therefore, the only way to effectively resist its domination is to rid oneself of our enthralment to its power. Moreover, according to Stirner, while the individual is alienated by the idea of human essence, there is an element of individuality that escapes this. This element Stirner calls the ‘ego’ (der Einzige) or the ‘unique one’. The ego is the irreducible element of subjectivity that cannot be contained by the idea of essence, and provides an escape from the experience of alienation. Stirner is concerned with finding a way of reconciling the world with the self, of overcoming the lack in representation created by the return of a repressed religious idealism. The individual should therefore assert his egoistic qualities and not be limited by existing moral and rational norms. He should become a ‘self-conscious’ egoist – an egoist ‘reconciled with himself’, or ‘in agreement with himself’. The individual, who has always been egoistic – although this egoism has in the past been repressed by the injunction to conform to a fictional human essence – should throw off the alienating and oppressive fetters of morality and self-sacrifice and become a self-conscious egoist: Thousands of years of civilization have obscured to you what you are, have made you believe that you are not egoists but are called to be idealists (‘good men’) Shake that off! Do not seek for freedom, which does precisely deprive you of yourselves, in ‘self-denial’; but seek for yourselves, become egoists, become each of you an almighty ego. (Stirner 1995: 149)

The ego and society However, does the ego escape alienation in this way? According to Marx and Engels, the ego is merely the highest point of idealism. They argue that Stirner, in order to escape the world of illusions and apparitions that he has conjured up, creates the ultimate apparition in the ego. They see the ego as no more corporeal, no less abstract and conceptual than human essence or ‘fixed ideas’: ‘This “Ego”, the end of historical construction, is no “corporeal” Ego, born of the flesh of man and woman . . . it is an “Ego” born of the spirit from two categories, “idealism” and “realism”, a merely conceptual existence’ (Marx and Engels 1975: 259). According to Marx and Engels, then, the ego – which for Stirner is the corporeal subjectivity that escapes idealism – is itself an abstract spectre or ideal that has no impact on the material world. Moreover, for Marx and Engels, Stirner’s distinction between ‘ordinary egoist’ and the ‘self-conscious egoist’ is an illusory one. This is because there is no contradiction between ‘personal’ and ‘general interests’. Stirner’s main criticism of socialism was that it sacrificed personal interests to the general interest of society.

126 Spectres of the uncanny However, Marx and Engels argued in response, that in socialism or communism this is a false opposition. Rather, the ‘general interest’ is produced through the very ‘private interest’ that Stirner sees as being diagrammatically opposed to it (Marx and Engels 1975: 267). That is to say that, for Marx and Engels the general and private interest, rather than being in opposition to one another are, on the contrary, inextricably tied to one another. One flows from the other. It is interesting to see, in this context, Engels’ initially enthusiastic response to Stirner’s work The Ego and Its Own in a letter to Marx, in which he said any ‘general cause’ striven for by communists must first be made an egoistic cause: ‘It is equally from egoism that we are communists’ (see Paterson 1971: 103). It would seem that Marx and Engels, in light of Stirner’s attack on idealism, had incorporated his egoistic stance into their notions of socialism. Moreover, could we not say that Stirner’s ‘false’ division between the ‘ordinary egoist’ and the ‘egoist in agreement with himself’ is mirrored in Marx’s distinction between the proletariat ‘in itself’ and the proletariat ‘for itself’? For Marx, the economic conditions of capitalism have created the proletariat as a class in itself. But it is only when it becomes conscious of itself as a class, when it unites and politicizes its struggle, that it becomes a class ‘for itself’ (Marx 1978c: 218). So too, with Stirner, the egoist remains an ‘ordinary, everyday’ egoist until he becomes conscious of his egoism, thus becoming a political subject – an ‘egoist in agreement with himself.’ The point here is that this dispute revolves around the notion of subjectivity and its relation to community or collective identity. For Stirner, communities are abstract idealistic spectres which imprison the individual. This is not to say that he rejects all notions of community: indeed he believes that egoists can at times more effectively attain their ends in voluntary associations (1995: 161). However, any notion of a community must flow from the individual egoist, rather than the other way round. It must be a deliberate construction of the individual and not be based on any essentialist categories. It is only when the individual breaks away from fixed collective structures and communities that he becomes a fully self-conscious egoist. In other words, the egoist’s struggle only becomes politicized through a radical break with collective identities. For Marx, on the other hand, the individual only becomes a political subject when his collective or class context is realized and asserted – in other words, once proletarians consciously unite as a class. Indeed, the individual only has meaning within a social or collective context. The individual presupposes society, rather than being presupposed by it. For Marx, to propose an idea of individuality beyond social identities, as Stirner does, is to posit an abstract ideal with no basis in corporeal reality. It represents, Marx would argue, the return of idealism in one’s attempt to escape it. With Stirner, as we have seen, it is precisely the opposite: the individual is the core reality and society is the idealist spectre. The individual only has real meaning outside collective entities.

Spectres of the uncanny 127 These different articulations of the relationship between the individual and community are ultimately different ways of attempting to overcome the gap in social representation. For Marx, the alienating lack in subjectivity is caused by the separation of the individual from a collective social context. For Stirner, on the other hand, generalities like society actually deny individuality. The individual can only realize his possibilities and overcome alienation if he frees himself from the binds of society. Thus, any attempt to see the individual as being inextricably bound up in social life further alienates the individual from himself. Moreover, we have seen that, for Marx at least, Stirner’s individual egoist as an entirely autonomous subjectivity is an idealist presupposition grounded in nothing. On the other hand, we have seen that, for Stirner, Marx’s notion of a social collectivity to which the individual is inextricably bound, is also an abstract ideal that reintroduces alienation. Neither position, then, would seem to be able to escape the uncanny return of idealism. There are a number of themes that can be drawn from this discussion. First, the uncanny is seen in terms of an alienating gap or lack separating the subjective and objective world. For Stirner, there is the uncanny return of religious idealism in the form of humanist notions of essence. Essentialism, because it assumes the category of the sacred, represents a new form of alienation: it mystifies or ‘spectralizes’ the objective world, making it unattainable to the individual. For Marx, this gap or dislocation operates in a similar way – only this time, idealism returns in the form of the egoistic separation of the individual from society. Second, both thinkers’ approaches to overcoming this problem of alienation and lack are ultimately flawed. Stirner tries to overcome alienation through a radically autonomous form of individuality. Yet, as Marx has shown, this falls into the trap of idealism. Marx sees the individual as being inextricably part of the social. However, as Stirner has shown, the social itself is an idealist spectre with no basis in the corporeal. From this we can conclude the following: while it is clear that we cannot see the individual as entirely autonomous from society, it is also clear that the idea of society itself must be rethought. It cannot be founded on essentialist categories, or seen as being governed by a dialectical process or by inexorable historical laws. That is to say, if we accept Stirner’s critique of essentialism, we must reject the idea that there is an internal logic or identity whose unfolding determines social relations and identities. This idea has been central to Enlightenment-based political theory, including Marxism and liberalism. In classical liberalism, ‘civil society’ is a natural commonality that provides the basis for legitimate forms of sovereign power while, at the same time, keeping this power in check. Stirner has shown, however, in his critique of liberalism, that this idea of ‘civil society’ as being autonomous from, and acting as check upon, political power, is false – ‘civil society’ is merely state-dominated society. In Marxism, the generality of society is embodied in the particularity of the

128 Spectres of the uncanny proletariat. The class position of the proletariat in capitalism represented, for Marx, the ‘notorious crime of the whole of society’ (1978d: 63). However, for Stirner, it is precisely this notion of the ‘whole of society’ that we should question. Society has no essence, no unified identity. On the basis of Stirner’s rejection of social essence, perhaps we can reformulate the social in the following way: society is not a complete identity, but rather one that is fractured and constitutively open. It is governed by a radical dislocation or ‘lack’, rather than an essential unity or underlying rationality. According to Laclau and Mouffe, there is always something missing from the social totality, something that escapes social symbolizations. This is the gap upon which society is radically founded, making the identity of ‘society’ ultimately incomplete (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 111). Society may be seen as a kind of ‘empty signifier’ that is not fixed by any essence and, thus, remains open to different political articulations which try, ultimately unsuccessfully, to ‘fill’ this symbolic empty place in society. Stirner’s rejection of essence – in particular social essence – was, in effect, his attempt to overcome the uncanny. As we have seen, he believed that essence was a form of repressed religious idealism that has returned in a different form. However, what if we were to turn this argument around? What if we were to argue that the logic of the uncanny is not only fundamental to the process of political identification, but crucial to the theorization of a non-essentialist form of politics? That is to say, rather than the uncanny imposing a hindrance or a limit to the openness of identity, as Stirner claims, what if it is precisely the opposite – that political identification relies on an uncanny element that disturbs or disrupts the sociopolitical field? The uncanny, for Stirner, is a spectral dimension that alienates the individual from himself. In other words, there is a gap between the individual and the humanist ideal that he is supposed to conform to. Stirner’s way of overcoming this is for the individual to become egoistic – to explore egoistic modes of experience and subjectivity. I would argue, however, that this injunction to become egoistic invokes the very uncanny logic of dislocation that it is supposed to overcome. The individual becoming egoistic involves an act of identification with a certain mode of subjectivity that is not ‘natural’ to him – a kind of constitutive leap from the subjectivity of the ‘ordinary egoist’ to the ‘egoist in agreement with himself’. This constitutive ‘leap’ or act of identification is only made possible through the alienating split in subjectivity that derives from the uncanny and that Stirner seeks to abolish. The only way Stirner can overcome alienation is to affirm the pure void of subjectivity that is created by alienation. He says: ‘I am the creative nothing [schöpferische Nichts], the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything’ (1995: 7). This nothingness at the heart of subjectivity – the void out of which a new form of egoism will emerge – is only conceivable through the experience of alienation. That is to say, it is only made possible through the split in

Spectres of the uncanny 129 subjectivity created by the operation of the uncanny. Put simply, it is only through the drive to overcome alienation – the rift in subjectivity – that new forms of non-essentialist subjectivity, like egoism, can emerge. Therefore it may be argued that, rather than the uncanny imposing essentialist identities on the individual, it is precisely what disrupts essences and allows the creation of new identities. The uncanny may be seen, then, as a kind of supplement in Stirner’s thinking: Stirner tries to exorcise the uncanny through the radical experience of individuality or egoism, yet he cannot do so without relying on the dimension of the uncanny in order to constitute precisely this form of subjectivity. A similar argument can be made with respect to Marx. The same kind of ‘leap across the void’ is present in Marx’s notion of proletarian subjectification. The proletariat must go from being a class ‘in itself’ to a class ‘for itself’ – in other words a self-conscious proletariat. That is the only way that it can overcome the experience of alienation wrought by the capitalist productive process and the ideological form of commodity fetishism. However, this subjective void out of which proletarian consciousness emerges is only possible through the dislocation of existing identities. In other words, for both Stirner and Marx, the uncanny is what dislocates the subject, creating a rift between him and the objective world, which henceforth appears strange and ‘unhomely’ to him. Both thinkers try to ground this uncanny dimension in a positive subjectivity: the egoist for Stirner, the proletarian for Marx. However, this act of political identification, because it involves a symbolic and constitutive ‘leap’ across a void from one mode of subjectivity to another, is only possible through this very dimension of the uncanny.

‘Disidentification’ It may be argued, then, that for both thinkers the uncanny is a disavowed, yet at the same time, unavoidable dimension in political subjectivization. Both Marx and Stirner are threatened by the uncanny. It is a spectral dimension that creates a rift between the subjective and objective world; an alienating logic that distorts reality, that makes things appear different and strange. Both thinkers try to ground this uncanny dimension in a positive figure of subjectivity that is supposed to overcome alienation. However, as I have argued, this act of political identification or subjectivization relies precisely on the lack created by the uncanny. We may suggest, then, that the uncanny is an irreducible dimension in the political field. It is crucial to the act of radical political identification, which requires the subject to move beyond his ‘ordinary’, ‘everyday’ identity to articulate a conscious political position – egoist or proletarian, or, for that matter, feminist or environmentalist. Indeed, the contemporary political field is characterized by these acts of symbolization, which rely on a constitutive dislocation of an existing identity whose position of subordination

130 Spectres of the uncanny was hitherto accepted as normal or natural, but which is now questioned and challenged. As Lacan shows, subjectivity is always incomplete and ‘lacking’, and it only retroactively constitutes itself through acts of identification. According to Lacan, the individual enters the symbolic network, the order of signifiers where he is represented for another signifier. This representation ultimately fails – there is a lack or gap between the subject and its symbolization. The subject is, in this sense, a void, an empty place in the structure of symbolization. There is a lack between the signifier and what it signifies; an excess of meaning that eludes signification, and yet, paradoxically, enables it to take place. Identity is actually constituted by this gap, by this failure of signification. The subject is, in this way, constitutively split: his alienation within the symbolic order of language cannot be overcome. So the identity of the subject is constituted through a méconnaissance or misrecognition – through the fundamental inability to recognize himself in the symbolic order. This is precisely the experience of the uncanny that Stirner talks about – that the subject no longer recognizes himself in the abstract imagery of humanism and now ‘shudders’ at himself. For Lacan, however, this experience is fundamental to the structure of the subject and the process of identification. Because the subject is split in this way, he is always seeking recognition in the symbolic order through a series of (ultimately incomplete) identifications. It is therefore the way that the subject tries to overcome this lack that is of central importance to politics. It allows us to see political identities as ultimately failed symbolizations of the ‘real’. The real, for Lacan, is a void in the symbolic order itself, the element which cannot be incorporated into its structures of signification. This creates a disturbance in the objective order, in our sense of reality: ‘reality’ is itself lacking or incomplete, appearing alien or uncanny to the subject who tries to find his place in it. Here it is necessary to distinguish between ‘reality’ as such and the real: reality is our everyday understanding of the world as structured through symbolic relations; whereas the real is the irreducible and traumatic void that does not fit into these structures, and which thus has a destabilizing effect on our sense of reality. When we are confronted with this void we experience the uncanny in all its alienating effects. Indeed, the real can be seen here as an ‘anamorphic stain’ that disrupts the objective order of ‘reality’, revealing its constructed nature. This notion of anamorphosis is related to Lacan’s theory of the gaze, and the uncanny effect that is achieved when one realizes that the object that one is looking at is actually looking back at us. The example Lacan uses here is Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors: our serene contemplation of the two richly dressed figures is suddenly disturbed when our gaze falls upon an object in the middle of the room that we cannot immediately make out – it appears almost as a three-dimensional blot or distortion – and yet it eventually reveals itself to be a skull that looks back at us, that returns our gaze

Spectres of the uncanny 131 (1998: 88–89). The experience here is uncanny because our sense of the outside world – which we seek to master with the gaze – is disrupted by a kind of distortion in the objective order itself. The skull in the painting represents the trauma of death, which is precisely what cannot be mastered or symbolized – the absolute limit of our existence – and which shows to us the indeterminacy of our place in the objective order. This distortion in our subjective experience of the world again refers to the dimension of the ‘real’ – a trauma that has been repressed, yet which returns to disturb the symbolic order. As Lacan says, the real is ‘that which always comes back to the same place – to the place where the subject in so far as he thinks, where the res cogitans, does not meet it’ (1998: 49). This spectral absence, this trace of a repressed trauma that always returns to haunt the objective order, is precisely the experience of the uncanny. So we might say, then, that the uncanny is a certain point or ‘place’ of dislocation in which our normal, everyday experience of reality is disrupted, and where its constructed nature is revealed. In this way our usual position in the social order is disturbed, as we are confronted with the ideologically constituted nature of our identities. In other words, what previously appeared natural and normal to us, becomes now strange, alien, unheimlich. However, this dimension of the uncanny is crucial for politics: the place of dislocation and alienation is, at the same time, the place in which new political identities are constituted. It is a place made unfamiliar by the continual return of repressed symbolizations which disrupt our contemporary political and ideological frameworks, allowing us to imagine new political articulations and construct new identities. Indeed, as Jacques Rancière argues, ‘any subjectification is a disidentification, removal from the naturalness of place’ [my italics] (1999: 36). For Rancière, politics is a dislocation of the natural order of domination – an egalitarian disruption of established social hierarchies. It emerges from a ‘disidentification’ of the subject, where the subject no longer identifies with his ‘natural’ place of subordination within this order, thus constituting a new political subjectivity. The uncanny may be seen in terms of this process of disidentification – a removal or estrangement of the subject from the ‘naturalness’ of place. This unfamiliar place of ‘disidentification’ may be likened to Freud’s notion of the haunted house or the unheimlich house. It is only when the individual finds himself in an unfamiliar place or subject position, when he no longer feels ‘at home’ in the existing social order – when things appear ‘not quite right’ – that he undergoes the traumatic process of politicization. The uncanny is something that disturbs the subject position of the individual in this way, producing new and radical forms of politicization. The ghosts of the past, the repressed voices and lost dreams of radical movements return to haunt the ideological symbolizations of the present, unmasking the contingency of their operation, the ‘lack’ upon which they are based. For Marx himself, the political struggles of contemporary

132 Spectres of the uncanny society were haunted by the ghostly conflicts of the past. The struggles between the ‘freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf’ appear to return from the past and find their expression in the struggles between bourgeois and proletarian (Marx 1978a: 473–474). Perhaps the proletariat could itself be seen as an example of the uncanny in this way – an embodiment of previous struggles between oppressor and oppressed. I am suggesting here that the uncanny is the necessary constitutive gap between the subject and the objective world of ‘ideology’. Both Stirner and Marx, as we have seen, tried to close this gap, to reconcile the subjective and objective worlds. However, as I have argued, this gap is crucial for political identification. The reconciliation of the subjective and objective world is not the beginning of politics, but its end.

The ‘end of politics’ and the uncanny community It would appear that the ‘end of politics’ might already be upon us. We live in an age that proclaims itself to be ‘post-ideological’. Instead of the turbulent, violent political and ideological conflicts of the past, we have ‘rational’ policies and ‘good governance’. This is the age technocratic ‘post-politics’, where the ideological struggles over equality and community simply have no place. One could argue, though, that this ‘end of ideologies’ thesis is the worst kind of ideological obfuscation – an example of ideology at its most cunning and insidious. The world of ‘post-politics’ is more mystifying than ever. While the political problem of community appears to have been solved through a formal liberal pluralism, this is only achieved through its depoliticization. Differences between minority groups are officially tolerated and ‘respected’, yet this results in a kind of global compartmentalization of these differences and an essentialization of their limits. As Rancière says: ‘A world where everyone needs everyone else, where everything is permitted so long as it is on offer as individual pleasure and where everything is jumbled together is proposed to us as a world of self-pacified multiplicity’ (1995: 23). The harsh clamour of politics – the antagonism between the dominant hierarchy and the community of those who have ‘no place’ in this hierarchy – has now become the quiet, machinic hum of the technocratic administration of a thousand particularities. It would seem that in this sanitised world we can simply choose our particular communities: we can join internet chat groups, religious and sexual minorities, ‘new age ‘cults and so on. It would seem that there is no tension between the individual and the community, and that the individual can freely participate in any number of different community identities. However, what if we were to argue that, rather than being the ultimate expression of community, this is its very antithesis? This is because, in this pluralistic world, the question of community is depoliticized. It is no longer seen as a challenge to the dominant politico-economic order – its threat is vitiated through the granting of differential rights. The idea of

Spectres of the uncanny 133 community is thus particularized into different identity groups which are all tolerated by the dominant ideological system. However, the troubling spectre of the community continues to represent an unresolved deadlock in political theory. Its unconditional, universal demand for both equality and liberty is the repressed trauma in politics. It threatens to disrupt the neat world of administered particularities and individual pleasures that condition our contemporary culture. The notion of community is politically uncanny because it does not fit into, but rather, always exceeds the structures that have been established to contain it. We have seen the ways in which both Stirner and Marx tried to domesticate this traumatic spectre: Stirner sought to dismiss it in place of a radical individual egoism; Marx tried to incorporate it into a notion of collective class identity. However the problem of community is not accounted for by these formulations. Indeed, it continues to return as an impossible demand, a spectral injunction emerging from the muted voices of history. That it appears in forms that are strange or alien is because it has been marginalized – yet it remains at the universal horizon of our political imaginary. The question of community is the question of politics itself.

8

Towards a poststructuralist politics of universality

Chapter 7 explored the idea of community as a radical field of political identifications which had the potential to disrupt existing social hierarchies and structures. I showed that this idea of the community could neither be contained within a Marxist class identity, nor could it be dismissed through a radical individualism. Instead, it had to be seen as an uncanny and open-ended demand that returns unexpectedly. This demand for community refers to a universal dimension in radical politics, one that goes beyond particular identities, struggles and concerns, and speaks to all those who are dominated, oppressed, marginalized and exploited. Universality is crucial to any understanding of radical politics. There must be a dimension of universality – whether it is understood through some notion of rights, equality or even radical democracy – if we are to engage in collective projects of resistance and emancipation. The central problem that I am seeking to address here is how exactly to theorize this universal dimension? If we are to take seriously the implications of poststructuralist theory, then this universal dimension can no longer rest on some essentialist foundation such as human rationality or morality, nor can it emerge dialectically. In poststructuralist theory, as we have seen, genealogy undermines the dialectic, and the autonomous subject of the Enlightenment is displaced by the external and unconscious structures of language, discourse and power. Therefore it becomes impossible to see the subject in essentialist terms, as having either natural moral and rational capacities, or even a stable identity. What this amounts to is an understanding of the subject as unfixed and open to different discursive and political articulations. This is why, according to this perspective, various attempts in liberal, communitarian and critical theory to establish a universal foundation for action – whether through a communicative rationality, deliberative democracy or a common acceptance of rational and moral norms – are ultimately bound to fail: they assume a kind of impossible subjective position without considering the power relationships and discursive exclusions that go into constructing it. So given these epistemological conditions, how is it possible to retain a universal referent for radical political thought and action? This question is becoming particu-

A poststructuralist politics of universality 135 larly relevant today, as the politico-ideological field, post-September 11, is undergoing a series of authoritarian and conservative transformations in which even liberal notions of universal human rights are coming to be questioned. One might be tempted to say that in the face of these new dangers, poststructuralism is irrelevant and politically impotent, and that we need to return to a more substantive and universal idea of Enlightenment rationality or the Kantian ‘categorical imperative’.1 However, my contention here is that not only is poststructuralism politically and ethically engaged, but that the poststructuralist interrogation of Enlightenment universality is, paradoxically, necessary for there to be any real notion of the universal at all. I shall also argue that, contrary to prevailing critiques of poststructuralism, there is the possibility of a radical and emancipative universality emerging from within its own logic. This would be a political dimension of universality that, on the one hand, transcends today’s narrow identity politics and yet, on the other hand, does not deny difference and swallow up the particular in the name of a universal subject. Moreover, while the proliferation of particularized political identities and struggles – of gays, blacks, women, ethnic minorities, for instance – has often been associated with poststructuralist theory, I shall argue that poststructuralism, on the contrary, makes their particularity problematic by unmasking their reliance on a dimension of universality. I will explore this ambiguous logic of the particular and the universal, and argue that, far from being a philosophy of difference and particularism, poststructuralism is a philosophy whose logic implies an immanent universality.

The politics of the particular The ‘postmodern condition’ that is said to be upon us is characterized not only by a decline in ‘metanarratives’ and universal epistemological and normative categories, but also by a general fragmentation of once central political, social and cultural identities. It appears that today we are living in the world of the particular – particular lifestyles, particular identities, particular politics, which are incommensurable and seem to bear no reference to anything beyond their own limits. This compartmentalization of our lives and identities is concomitant with, as Étienne Balibar argues, the expansion of capital (1995: 69–70). Capital confronts us with an ‘ambiguous universality’. It has created a world in which universality is more of a possibility now than ever before. Yet it is also a world without a universal centre and periphery, but rather with many centres, inviting new antagonisms. Global capital has freed the individual from traditional community ties, yet has subjected him to new oppressions and exclusions. Identities are at the same time less isolated, and more incompatible and antagonistic. So it seems that the more we are brought together – through the global economy, the worldwide web and so on – the more atomized and antagonistic we

136 A poststructuralist politics of universality become. One thinks here of the new forms of anti-immigrant racism that have been emerging throughout Europe and the world, largely in reaction to the consequences of economic globalization. These new antagonisms and differences, while born of the ‘universalizing’ logic of capitalism, are increasingly making any real political dimension of the universal unthinkable. We also seem to be surrounded today by a multitude of identities, lifestyles and ethnic and sexual minorities. As Balibar says, this process ‘generalizes minority-status, first of all in the sense that there are now “minorities” everywhere’ (1995: 53). Everywhere there is the assertion of a particular identity with its own demands for exclusive social, political and cultural rights. The political terrain is defined by the absence of a universal centre which cuts across particular struggles – in the way that the Marxist struggle against capitalism was able to interpellate other struggles so that, for instance, feminism became the struggle of women against the oppressive patriarchal structures of capitalism or against the structures of oppression in general. If we apply Balibar’s argument, we can say that this universal political centre has been replaced by the proliferation of separate, and often antagonistic and exclusionary sites of oppression, struggle and identity. The antagonism concomitant with this universalizing capital is inherent in the politics of identity. Political identities are constructed not only around a perceived incommensurability or uniqueness, but also around an experience of oppression. However, this often results in an oppression of other groups and identities. For instance, when some feminist groups demonize men as oppressors, or when lesbian groups exclude transgender women because they are somehow ‘not woman enough’ and could have no idea of what it feels like to be a ‘real’ woman suffering ‘real’ oppression, they seem to be reaffirming the very oppression and exclusion they claim to be struggling against. Identity politics is defined by this clinging to a certain identity to the exclusion of others, reproducing, in an inverted way, structures of domination. There is an oppositional logic at work here that is profoundly authoritarian – the valorization of a particular identity through the denigration of other identities. Certain political identities define themselves through the sense of being oppressed by, or having suffered an injustice at the hands of, another, thus claiming a moral high ground. Wendy Brown sees this culture of ressentiment at work in certain forms of modern feminism (Brown 1995: 45). She argues that certain feminist identities or positions are constructed around a sense of ‘woundedness’, a perception of having been injured by an Other – that is, men. According to Brown, this position of weakness conceals a ‘will to power’ – a resentment and vengefulness that is directed outwards towards other identities that are perceived as oppressive.2 The notion that, for instance, men and women could be really struggling for the same thing – the removal of structures of domination and hierarchy that affect us all – is

A poststructuralist politics of universality 137 met with the charge that in suggesting this, one seeks to devalue the specificity of the struggle of women. There is no doubt that women, or cultural and sexual minorities, face certain specific forms of oppression. However, there is a closing off of the political terrain here around this specificity, as though there is a logical connection between the realization of this specificity and the absolute dismissal of any possibility of a universal struggle. So the antagonism that is implicit in these particular struggles is, therefore, not antagonism towards any kind of general structures of domination and exploitation, but rather antagonism not only towards other more marginalized groups and identities, but also towards the inscription of these struggles in any notion of the universal. I would argue, however, that this disavowal of the universal supports structures of domination and exploitation more than its affirmation ever could. The claim of many theorists of identity politics is that the category of the universal contains a totalizing logic that is inherently authoritarian, and that denies the particularity and specificity of minorities. On the one hand this is certainly true; one of the most important achievements of poststructuralist theory is precisely the unmasking of the domination inherent in the universalizing logic of Enlightenment humanism. On the other hand, the domain of the universal is fundamental to any struggle against domination, and it is necessary if we are to have any notion of the political at all. So to respond to the totalitarian potential of the universal with the complete dismissal of this category altogether is an approach that should be rejected. To do this is, paradoxically, to reaffirm the very totalizing logic one was against by robbing oneself of the ability to resist it. One gets the sense that particularized identity politics and struggles do not really resist domination; they do not challenge structures of domination and oppression in any significant way. On the contrary, their demands seem to be easily accommodated by these very structures and institutions. Slavoj Zˇizˇek has commented on the way that demands of minority identities are easily addressed and met by the capitalist system. Indeed, he argues that ‘liberal multiculturalism’, which is based on a differentiation of identities in which each minority group or identity is assigned its place within the system, is the very ideology of global capitalism. Liberal multiculturalism embodies a pluralistic attitude of ‘respect’ and ‘tolerance’ for different identities. Politics has become a kind of consumerism where people shop around for different lifestyles and identities, each of which is comfortably accommodated within the ‘system’.3 In this paradigm, any kind of antagonism is contained by treating each identity or minority in its specificity and meeting its demands in an orderly, institutionalized way: ‘What is usually praised as “postmodern politics” (the pursuit of particular issues whose resolution must be negotiated within the “rational” global order allocating its particular component its proper place) is thus effectively the end of ˇ izˇek 1999b: 209). Hence the demands of many minority politics proper’ (Z

138 A poststructuralist politics of universality or feminist groups, for instance, are met through the institutional imposition of rules regulating language and conduct – the use of ‘non-sexist’ language, for instance, or policies on ‘sexual harassment’. No wonder there is, ˇ izˇek argues, a certain hysteria in voicing these demands, as those who as Z do so try to retain a sense of radicalism, a sense of being against ‘the system’, while their demands, no matter how ‘radical’ or ‘excessive’, are calmly implemented by this very system. Moreover these demands are usually implemented in extremely oppressive ways, and often result in a proliferation of institutional strategies of surveillance and regulation. ‘Political correctness’, for example, is a discourse which involves a whole series of discursive and non-discursive forms of coercion – a myriad of rules regulating the way we behave and think. Balibar talks about another dimension of universality – what he calls fictitious universality, by which he means the constitution and universalization of social hegemonies such as state institutions (1995: 71). He argues that the liberation of the subject from traditional community ties is accompanied by the increased normalization and institutional domination of the individual. Would not political correctness be a case par excellence of this increasing normalization and policing of everyday life? The struggle of women, for instance, to be free from traditional patriarchal ties is met with more institutions, more bureaucracies and more regulations. These policing strategies, moreover, oppress other more marginalized minorities. So the minor subversions and transgressions of identity politics – the excessive particularity of their demands dressed up as radicalism – actually supports and perpetuates the power it claims to be subverting. So it seems that identity politics, the politics of the particular that so bombards us today, is a politics which, in its desire to preserve this very particularity, excludes other identities and often finds its expression in institutional and oppressive forms. In its desire to resist the totalizing possibilities of the universal, the politics of the particular affirms the totalizing logic of the state and capitalism instead. One could argue that it is precisely because the politics of the particular eschews the dimension of the universal, that it ends up reaffirming domination. That is to say that because the politics of the particular rejects any notion of the universal it is a ‘non-politics’ – a politics which denies any meaning to the political dimension. The potentially radical and subversive nature of identity politics is vitiated in its rejection of the universal. Because it eschews the universal, identity politics cannot present a challenge to general structures of power and domination. It is clear that without some notion of universality – without a truly political dimension – one is condemned to remain in this dead-end politics of particularity. Balibar argues that there are three dimensions to the question of universality. The first is real universality, which refers to the spread of global capital and the proliferation of centres, and which is, as we have seen, accompanied by the increase of minority identities and the possibility

A poststructuralist politics of universality 139 of antagonism between them. The second is fictitious universality, which is the liberation of the individual from traditional community ties and the concomitant normalization of the individual by social institutions and hegemonies. We have seen these two dimensions of the universal in operation in the politics of the particular, where the antagonism of differences resolves itself in institutionalized and oppressive ways. There is, however, a third dimension of universality, a subversive dimension – what Balibar calls ideal universality. Ideal universality invokes an infinite horizon of the universal, one of liberty and equality and their radical interconnectedness (Balibar 1995: 72). I would argue that this is the horizon of the political – a dimension of universality that is truly subversive. It may be theorized in different ways, but it is something that is irrepressible, returning time and time again. It is the absent centre of politics, the real of the political that has the potential to dislocate the dominant politico-economic order. Perhaps it can be seen as that dimension of the universal which subverts the first and second dimensions in Balibar’s schema. It is a radical universality that rends apart the universalization of the particular and the particularization of the universal.

Poststructuralism and the possibility of the universal How is this subversive dimension of universality to be theorized? As I have suggested, an emancipative political universality can no longer be anchored in the essentialist subject of humanism, or in the rational and moral epistemologies of the Enlightenment. Given the breakdown of these discourses, the decline of the universal revolutionary subject, and the fragmentation of the social and political field into a multitude of competing identities and particularisms, universality must be now theorized on the basis of its own ontological limits. In other words, we must try to examine the ways in which a universal political dimension can actually emerge through the discursive conditions that would seem to exclude it – those of postmodernity. Poststructuralism – as a series of critical strategies that take the postmodern condition as their point of departure – has been seen by many as a philosophical approach that valorizes difference over sameness and emphasizes particularity at the expense of universality. Thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari are commonly referred to as ‘philosophers of difference’, who unmask the domination and denial of difference inherent in any universal identity. Does not Foucault, for instance, show the way that certain rational discourses have become universalized into a series of norms which exclude and marginalize different discourses and forms of experience such as madness, criminality or homosexuality? Does not Derrida’s deconstruction of universal philosophical identities and categories unmask the arbitrary exclusions and suppressions of difference? Do Deleuze and Guattari not emphasize difference and

140 A poststructuralist politics of universality plurality over unity and sameness, through their concept of the ‘rhizome’? This apparent assertion of difference, through the unmasking of the exclusion and discursive violence behind any unity, has led to the association of poststructuralism with the identity politics that so dominates our contemporary political landscape. However, here I would propose a very different reading of poststructuralism. Rather than asserting identities of difference against the universal, a poststructuralist approach can be seen as a rejection of the essentialism of difference that identity politics is founded upon. Poststructuralism unmasks the rift and antagonism, not just in the identity of the universal, but in the identity of the particular as well. It shows that all identities, whether they are universal or particular, are ultimately impossible. They cannot form closed, complete identities and they are therefore problematic, unstable and constitutively open. For Derrida, as we have seen, identities are never fixed and complete: an identity is always made indeterminate by its relation to an excluded supplement which destabilizes it, yet which nevertheless is necessary for the constitution of this very identity. According to Derrida, the supplement constitutes an ‘originary difference’ in the structure of identity, but it is an originary difference – or différance – that is ‘neither absence, nor presence, neither negative nor positive’ (1976: 167). Similarly for Lacan, identities are incomplete and deficient because there is always a radical lack or gap in the structure of identity itself which resists symbolization. The ‘real’, as we have seen, is the structural void which, paradoxically, both dislocates identity and yet, at the same time, is the point around which identity is constructed. So Lacan’s notion of the real and Derrida’s concept of différance may be seen as structural principles that actually prevent identity from being fully constituted. These concepts cannot be seen as identities of difference in themselves. Rather, they refer to the very limits of identity, the point at which any identity breaks down and becomes radically impossible. Therefore the implications of a poststructural approach are that any identity is problematic: it cannot form a closed whole because there is always a structural element which resists it. This radical indeterminacy would be characteristic of any identity – not just the identity of the universal, but the identity of the particular as well. Even at this basic level, then, it would be extremely problematic to assert a particular political identity on the basis of a poststructuralist analysis. For instance, the identity of ‘the homosexual’ is itself an impossible, incomplete identity. For this identity to be asserted as part of a gay identity politics, in opposition to the domination of ‘universal’ heterosexual norms would be, according to a poststructural approach, to subscribe to an essentialism which it rejects. Even ‘hybrid’ identities – the ‘Chicana lesbians’ for example – which are often associated with poststructuralism, are themselves problematic and cannot be asserted as pure particularities. Poststructuralist theory rejects such an essentialization of difference, showing that the discursive limits of even –

A poststructuralist politics of universality 141 and especially – marginalized identities are inherently unstable. Far from being a philosophy of difference, poststructuralism is the point at which difference becomes as problematic as sameness, particularity as problematic as universality. Poststructuralist thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari also reject the essentialization of difference. This would be to contain difference within a binary oppositional relationship with the Same, the fundamental gesture of the ‘aborescent’ form of thought they want to transcend. Instead of this oppositional structure, Deleuze and Guattari propose a ‘rhizomatic’ model of thinking that breaks down binary oppositions into a multiplicity of haphazard connections, ruptures and becomings (1988: 7). The rhizome is characterized by a radical openness to the Outside, where identities are fractured by the heterogeneities they try to repress. This way of thinking makes it impossible to affirm any essential identity, even an identity of difference. They are destabilized and contaminated by the unpredictable connections they form with other differences. Difference here is open to other possibilities, even to the possibility of the Same. Here the particular is constitutively open to the possibilities of the universal. For Deleuze and Guattari, moreover, to construct a politics around a pure identity of difference is not only impossible, but also dangerous. It sets up a false Manichean division between the identity of resistance and the identity that it resists. This politics of pure opposition which characterizes much of today’s identity politics, neglects the possibility that lines of resistance are capable of forming multiple connections, even connections with the very power it resists: ‘These lines tie back to one another. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad’ (1988: 9). So, to assert a pure particularity and inscribe this in an oppositional struggle with a universal identity is hazardous because it ignores the dark, volatile, authoritarian energies that are released in any political struggle, the lines that cross and re-cross the political terrain, forming unpredictable connections with the very power it intended to resist. Deleuze and Guattari talk here about the potential ‘microfascisms’ of groups (1988: 10–11). In this sense, a pure particularity cannot be asserted against the universal, not only because this pure particularity is impossible, but also because it often ends up perpetuating existing structures of domination and inventing new ones. Foucault, too, rejects the oppositional logic of identity politics. To posit a particular identity of opposition – to think solely in terms of the oppression of women by men, gays by straights, blacks by whites, and so on – is to severely limit our political possibilities. Instead we should be thinking outside these oppositional structures: The problem is not so much that of defining a political ‘position’ (which is to choose from a pre-existing set of possibilities) but to imagine and to bring into being new schemas of politicization. If

142 A poststructuralist politics of universality ‘politicization’ means falling back on ready-made choices and institutions, then the effort of analysis involved in uncovering the relations of force and mechanisms of power is not worthwhile. (Foucault 1980: 190) Here Foucault exhorts us to avoid the trap that the politics of the particular has fallen into – the politics of asserting an identity in opposition to another identity, and inscribing this struggle within ‘ready-made choices and institutions’.

Which universality? Moreover, the focus of a poststructuralism is not on the particular identity that resists the universal, but always on the universal itself, and on the heterogeneities and aporias in its structure. The emphasis here is not on the particular identities excluded from the universal, but on the process of exclusion itself, the way that a particular identity or discourse – rationality for instance – has achieved a universal status by excluding and repressing other identities and discourses. When Derrida talks about writing as the excluded supplement of speech, the focus of his analysis is not really on writing itself, but on the exclusion that takes place when speech constitutes itself as having a universal immediacy. When Foucault talks about the subjects of exclusion – homosexuals, madmen, prisoners, etc. – his emphasis is not really on these identities, but on the way that they unmask the processes of exclusion and domination that go into constructing the universal, essential status of rationality and morality. These excluded identities are not important in themselves: their function is only to expose the arbitrariness of the universal. There is nothing essential or morally privileged about these identities just because they are excluded. On the contrary, they are just as arbitrary and unstable as the universal norms and forms of subjectivity they have been excluded from. So while Foucault was interested in these marginalized identities, the real focus of his thinking is on the universal itself. In other words his focus is on ‘us’ – on how we have been constituted as universal subjects, how we have come to think of ourselves as ‘normal’, ‘rational’, ‘moral’.4 So, far from sacrificing the universal to the particular, the focus of the poststructuralist approach is on the universal and its emergence. One could argue, further, that it is only through the poststructuralist interrogation of the universal – highlighting of the discursive exclusions inherent in its structure – that we can have any real political notion of the universal at all. What a poststructuralist critique puts in question is the universality of certain conceptual categories that were bound up with the Enlightenment – an essentialist notion of the subject, as well as a universal moral and rational position. It shows that there is always a particularity behind this universal – a particularity that has assumed the mantle of universality only by

A poststructuralist politics of universality 143 excluding other elements, discourses, subjectivities. Rationality, for instance, has only become a universal discourse through a violent suppression and marginalization of other discourses that are henceforth seen as ‘irrational’. Foucault has shown that it is only through the incarceration of the mad, through the marginalization of the experience of insanity, that rationality has become universal. The crucial operation performed by thinkers like Stirner and Nietzsche through to Foucault and Derrida, is asking the question ‘who speaks?’: which voice, which discourse, which particularity speaks through the dimension of the universal and in its name? In other words, we cannot assume that universality is somehow politically or ideologically neutral, or that it is universally understood in some abstract sense. It often conceals a particular position of power. This is precisely the point made by Judith Butler in her debate with Martha Nussbaum over the idea of cosmopolitanism. Nussbaum argues for a universal cosmopolitan sensibility based on universal Kantian moral and legal principles, as an antidote to narrow patriotism. However, Butler responds to this by pointing out that the concept of universality is never universally understood in the same way, as Nussbaum implies it can be. That is to say, the problem with basing the notion of cosmopolitanism on an abstract morality is that it assumes that this morality is universally accepted, whereas in reality it emerges from a particular European cultural and epistemological perspective that is not necessarily applicable or even meaningful in other cultures. Put simply, what is seen as universally applicable from one culture’s perspective, may not be so from another culture’s perspective. Indeed, it may mark, in Butler’s words, the very limit to universalizability (Butler in Nussbaum 1996: 46). In other words, rather than universality being universal, it has to be understood as culturally situated and, therefore, variable. But, crucially, as Butler suggests, this does not mean that we should abandon the category of universality altogether. It simply means that the discursive contours and limits of universality are never predetermined in an abstract sense, but rather are contingent and contestable. In other words, universality is a constitutively open concept: its meaning and limits – which identities and practices it includes and excludes – are redefined through different political and cultural struggles. It is important to note that this is not a relativist argument: Butler is not saying that there is no universality, and that there are only different and incommensurable perspectives. Rather, she is saying that there is a universal dimension, but that its limits are understood differently and have to be negotiated. Universality is seen here as an open-ended project, rather than as a pre-existing legal ideal. One could argue, moreover, that to simply accept the idea of universality without questioning its parameters and conditions is to accept a universality whose coordinates have already been decided for us by global capitalism. Indeed, Nussbaum’s vision of a cosmopolitan global order

144 A poststructuralist politics of universality could easily correspond to a global capitalist order of borderless transactions, that has long been the fantasy of many a multinational corporation. The struggles that we have seen, in recent years, around the question of globalization demonstrate that the idea of a universal global order is a fundamentally contested vision. The ‘anti-globalization’ movement – the mass mobilizations around the WTO and G8 meetings – is an example of the way that the dominant neo-liberal conception of the global order might be challenged by another, competing vision of universality – one of global democracy and egalitarianism. So the question that we must pose when considering universality is which universality are we being asked to accept? By showing that universality is never simply neutral – that is, universal – and that it always conceals particular perspectives, poststructuralist theory allows us to ask precisely this question. As I have suggested, however, this does not mean that the category of universality itself should be abandoned in light of this poststructuralist critique. On the contrary, by revealing the epistemological limits of universality, poststructuralism allows it to be politicized and therefore to be opened to different and, indeed, more universal articulations. Perhaps we could say that a poststructuralist approach to universality, in a very paradoxical sense, implies an ethical demand that universality be truly universal, that it live up to its own promise.

The political ethics of poststructuralism The interrogation of the discursive limits of universality highlights an important politico-ethical dimension in poststructuralist thought. The commonplace criticism of poststructuralism is that because it seeks to question the moral and rational categories of the Enlightenment, it amounts to an ethical nihilism that robs it of any genuine critical political perspective. However, I would suggest that not only is poststructuralist theory ethically committed and politically engaged, but that its stance on the Enlightenment is much more complex than its critics allow. Far from rejecting the Enlightenment out of hand, poststructuralist thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault are actually committed to a rethinking of the Enlightenment’s discursive limits and, through this, a renewal of its critical and emancipative project. The Enlightenment contained a universal political legacy – one that has been invoked for two centuries to liberate people from obscurantism, oppression and exploitation. However, this emancipative project was at the same time articulated through positivist assumptions, notions of absolute rationality, the categorical imperative, as well as an essentialist conception of the human subject – discourses and concepts that are no longer sustainable today and which have come to impose limits upon radical politics. So the challenge of poststructuralist political theory has been to reinvigorate the radical energies and subversive potential of the Enlightenment by freeing it from its foundation in these ideas. Indeed, it is

A poststructuralist politics of universality 145 only by interrogating its discursive limits in this way that the Enlightenment can once again become politically effective. The need for this sort of discursive interrogation of the Enlightenment is more pressing now than ever. As we have seen, Derrida calls for an unconditional defence of the notion of universal human rights, particularly in the face of the aggressive reassertion of state sovereignty. However, at the same time, this notion of human rights needs to be rethought and deconstructed. These two positions are by no means contradictory. On the contrary, as I have suggested, it is only through a questioning of the ontological conditions – the assumed ‘naturalness’ – of the discourse of human rights that they can be renewed. Indeed, as Derrida says, the acknowledgment that human rights are social and historical rather than natural, means that they are immanently ‘perfectible’ – that is, they are never complete or sufficient as they are, but must always be reinterpreted and updated. He says: To take this historicity and this perfectibility into account in an affirmative way we must never prohibit the most radical questioning possible of all concepts at work here: the humanity of man (the ‘proper of man’ or of the human, which raises the whole question of nonhuman living beings, as well as the question of the history of recent juridical concepts or performatives such as a ‘crime against humanity’), and then the very concept of rights or of law [droit], and even the concept of history. (Derrida in Borradori 2004: 132–133) In other words, in order to reinvigorate human rights we must be able to question not only their discursive foundations – the idea of ‘man’ for instance – but also the juridical apparatuses and relations of power they are tied to. This sort of deconstruction that Derrida advocates has already been made possible by thinkers like Stirner, who revealed the two-sided and paradoxical character of discourses like humanism and liberalism, showing that the Enlightenment figure of man was an ideological construction that had a whole series of dominating effects. However, Derrida’s point is that it is only through engaging in this sort of critique that we can tease out what is potentially subversive and liberating in these ideas. A similar deconstructive operation is performed by Foucault in his approach to the Enlightenment. In his essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Foucault considers Kant’s insistence on the free and public use of autonomous reason as an escape, a ‘way out’ for man from a state of immaturity and subordination (1984b). While Foucault believes that this autonomous reason is useful because it allows a critical ethos towards modernity, he refuses the ‘blackmail’ of the Enlightenment – the insistence that this critical ethos at the heart of the Enlightenment be inscribed in an absolute rationality and morality. The problem with Kant is that he opens

146 A poststructuralist politics of universality up a space for individual autonomy and critical reflection on the limits of oneself, only to close this space down by re-inscribing it in transcendental notions of rationality and morality which require absolute obedience. For Foucault, the legacy of the Enlightenment is deeply ambiguous. Indeed, it might be said that for Foucault there are two Enlightenments: the Enlightenment of rational certainty, absolute identity and destiny; and the Enlightenment of continual questioning and uncertainty (see Gordon 1986). According to Foucault, this tension is reflected in Kant’s own treatment of the Enlightenment. Foucault shows how one might read Kant, and indeed the Enlightenment itself, in a heterogeneous way, focusing on its more liberatory aspects: here we are encouraged to interrogate the limits of modernity, to reflect critically on the way we have been constituted as subjects. As Foucault shows, Kant sees the Enlightenment (Aufklärung) as a critical condition, characterized by an ‘audacity to know’ and the free and autonomous public use of reason. This critical condition is concomitant with a ‘will to revolution’, with the attempt to understand revolution – in Kant’s case, the French Revolution – as an Event that allows an interrogation of the conditions of modernity as well as the way we as subjects stand in relation to it (see Foucault 1986). Foucault suggests that we may adopt this critical strategy to reflect upon the limits of the discourse of the Enlightenment itself and its rational and moral injunctions. We may in this sense use the critical capacities of the Enlightenment against itself, thus opening up public spaces for autonomy, freedom and critical reflection within its edifice. This idea of a revolutionary Event that creates a space or opening through which the conditions of the present may be questioned, is also reflected in Foucault’s writings on the Iranian Revolution. Foucault saw in the Iranian Revolution – notwithstanding its culmination in authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism – a kind of radical political event which embodied new forms of identity and collectivity, and which shattered existing structures of power. Moreover, for Foucault, the Iranian Revolution was a revolution precisely because it referred to a dimension of universality – an intense communal spirituality arose from this struggle and cut across different groups, parties and identities. It was, he argues, a life and death struggle between people and power which, because of the stakes involved, because people were prepared ‘to die to resist’, exposed the very limits of the power that oppressed them. In this context, Foucault talks about adopting an anti-strategic stance on the question of resistance: ‘to be respectful when something singular arises, to be intransigent when power offends against the universal’ (1981: 9). This anti-strategic approach, I would argue, is a vigorous defence of the dimension of the universal in politics. Here Foucault attests a deep reverence for a space of universality, seeing it as the wellspring of revolt, the empty horizon which any political action or struggle, no matter how particular, pays homage to. It is this domain that is vital to politics and must be defended against the incursions

A poststructuralist politics of universality 147 of power. When power ‘offends against the universal’, when the state or the forces of domination try to shut this domain down, to fill its empty place, then we should risk our lives defending it. Foucault also talks about a respect for singularity. However, by singularity Foucault does not mean particularity in the sense of a particular political identity. Rather, he means a kind of singular event whose emergence is unpredictable and, to some extent, inexplicable, which shatters our political reality and fundamentally dislocates the structures of power. This profound veneration of universality in politics, coupled with a desire at the same time to question its discursive limits and foundations, might be seen as the central politico-ethical position of poststructuralist political theory. Poststructuralism therefore develops an approach to universality that is immanently political. Rather than universality existing as an abstract series of ideals or preordained moral and rational norms that politics must live up to, it is seen, from a poststructuralist perspective, as emerging in a contingent way through concrete political action itself. In other words, universality is the ontological space or void that is opened when a singular political event goes beyond its own discursive limits and makes implicit reference to broader issues and conditions. In other words, what defines a radical political event – like a revolution – is that a series of particular demands or grievances, almost by accident, come to signify the universality of a situation, thus allowing people to question existing social conditions and the politico-ideological frameworks that had hitherto legitimized it. There are a number of contemporary thinkers who employ similar ideas. Alain Badiou, for instance, believes that the French Revolution, despite its subsequent concretization into a Republican order, contained an emancipative potential, what he calls an infinite multiplicity – expressed in the demand for universal egalitarian democracy – that, although it lies dormant today, can nevertheless be reactivated (Barker 2002: 83–84). It is if an event of this kind that makes a tear in the fabric of history, creating a new space in the political imaginary which can animate subsequent struggles. Also, Jacques Rancière talks about the way that the irrepressible demand of the oppressed and excluded – those who have ‘no place’ in the system – for political recognition and inclusion, has the potential to create a general dislocation in the system itself (1999: 42). Rancière sees politics itself as being conditioned by this disruptive element, this ‘disagreement’ (mésentente) between the excluded demos or ‘the people’ and the ‘police order’ it opposes – a disagreement that has its origins in Athenian democracy. The ‘police’ order refers to the status quo, the ensemble of dominant social and political structures, practices and institutions. It is based, according to Rancière, on a process of ‘calculation’ that seeks to separate the individual from the mass and assign each his place within the dominant order. Its tendency is therefore towards a de-politicization of the mass, and a reduction of the political terrain through a process of individualization. We can see the contemporary order of state capitalism operating in

148 A poststructuralist politics of universality the same way, compartmentalizing and incorporating different cultural identities, thus de-politicizing them. What really poses a threat to this order is therefore not cultural difference, but rather a certain position of exclusion that, at the same time, invokes a universal position, and which therefore is incompatible with the dominant order. For both Ranciere and Badiou, in other words, there is a particular series of concrete demands that, because they cannot be accommodated in an institutional way, open onto a universality which threatens to destabilize the entirety of the social and political order that opposes them. So we see here how universality emerges from a point of particularity that does not quite fit.

Contamination and hegemony However, we need to explain how this process actually works in political terms – exactly how does a universal dimension emerge through a certain point of particularity? For poststructuralists, there is no simple opposition between particularity and universality: to see the political terrain in this way is to fall back into an essentialist position. The relation between the universal and the particular is therefore not one of opposition, but rather one of contamination. The poststructuralist approach deconstructs the opposition between the universal and the particular, showing one to be dependent upon the other, thus contaminating the identities of both terms. This relationship of contamination is perhaps best theorized by Ernesto Laclau. Laclau is sceptical of the ‘politics of difference’, showing that political identities cannot exist without a dimension of universality that contaminates them. The idea of a purely particular or differential ‘subject position’ is problematic because it implies a fixed position or location within a totality (Laclau 1996b: 21). In other words, what is implied, yet disavowed, in the ‘politics of difference’ is precisely a place of enunciation which forms a background upon which these differential ‘subject positions’ and identities are constituted. He argues, for instance, that it is impossible for a group to assert a purely separate and differential identity, because part of the definition of this particular identity is constituted in the context of relations with other groups. As Laclau says: ‘A pure particularistic stand is self-defeating because it has to provide a ground for the constitution of the differences as differences, and such a ground can only be a new version of essentialist universalism’ (1996b: 58). In other words, the purely particularistic position presupposes some sort of absolute difference, which is of course another form of essentialism. Particular demands and struggles, if they are to have any real political effect, must be articulated in some sort of relation to a common ground or universal horizon. For instance, the demand for cultural autonomy or minority rights, so prevalent in multicultural societies, always bears reference to a universal dimension. For Laclau, identities are constituted in a system of differences: for these differences to be different from one another, they

A poststructuralist politics of universality 149 must refer to the system that constitutes their horizon. This means that the identity of these differences is constitutively split between their own particularity and the universality of the system that constitutes them. If we apply this formula to politics, we see that no identity or demand, no matter how particular, can be asserted without referring to a universal dimension that governs its horizon. The demand of an ethnic minority for differential rights is always made with some sort of reference to a dimension of universality that goes beyond the specificity of this demand – equal rights with other groups, for example. In this way, particularity is always contaminated by the dimension of universality it resists. Universality is therefore the positive condition for politics. However, because there is no longer any universal subject or rational or moral position that serves as the ultimate foundation for politics, this universal dimension is, at the same time, an empty place, an open horizon. It is, Laclau says, at once both impossible and necessary: impossible because it cannot represent or symbolize itself in any absolute sense; and necessary because it is, as we have seen, the dimension through which all political identities are ultimately constituted. Because of this paradoxical position of being there yet not there, the universal might be seen as an ‘empty signifier’. It cannot be completely symbolized or embodied because it is constitutively empty, and yet it can only be represented if a particular element comes to ‘stand in’ for it or partially embody it. To give an example, the idea of ‘society’ is an impossible discursive object whose universality can only be represented if a particular ideology or political identity – like Communism, for example – can articulate a certain vision of it. While no particularity can fully symbolize this universal, its partial symbolization is crucial if we are to have any notion of politics at all. Therefore, the universal requires that a particular element ‘stand in’ for it, without which the universal itself loses all meaning. It is this political operation of attempting to fill the ‘unfillable’ place of universality that Laclau refers to as the logic of ‘hegemony’ (Laclau in Butler et al. 2000: 58). Here we see, then, that although the universal and the particular are the opposite poles of the political field, each is dependent on the other as its positive condition. So in this hegemonic relationship of mutual contamination, the universal is split between its universality and its need to be represented through a concrete particularity; while the particular is split between its particularity and its reference to a universality which constitutes its horizon (Laclau in Butler et al. 2000: 56). So to articulate a certain demand, a political identity must form what Laclau calls ‘chains of equivalence’ with other identities and groups. To give an example, the demand of students for better conditions and more funding cannot remain within this specificity for long; these demands, if they are not acceded to by the government, will eventually overlap with the demands of other political identities in forming relations of united opposition to the power that denies them. Thus, the government that denies students their rights also denies workers their

150 A poststructuralist politics of universality rights, and so on. In this way, the groups in this chain are increasingly unable to maintain their own particularity as they become united in opposition to a common enemy. It is important to note here that this hegemonic political relationship, in which one particular identity ‘stands in’ for the others, is not determined in an essentialist way. In other words, there is no a priori link – as there was in Marxist theory with the proletariat – between the universal and the particular identity that comes to incarnate it. According to Laclau, the relation of incarnation is entirely contingent and indeterminate. The ‘stand in’ is decided in an open field of discursive articulation and political contestation. Theoretically any identity, if it manages to articulate adequate chains of equivalence, can come to represent a common political struggle. Furthermore, the particularity that ‘stands in’ for the universal does so only temporarily, and its identity is destabilized by the universality it ‘represents’ (Laclau 1996b: 53). In other words, its status as a representative is increasingly made more difficult to sustain as the struggle progresses, as it is caught between the imperatives of its own particular identity and of the universality it comes to embody. Therefore, because this link is indeterminate and contingent, this opens the political field to other identities to attempt to fulfil this incarnating function.

Egaliberté So in this hegemonic operation outlined by Laclau, we can see how a universal dimension can be realized within the epistemological conditions of poststructuralist theory. In other words, universality does not need to be founded on predetermined moral and rational positions or on an essentialist conception of the subject. Rather it is something that emerges through concrete political struggles themselves, through a contamination of different identities, groups and political demands. To give an example of this poststructuralist politics of universality in action, perhaps we could point once again to the broadly termed ‘antiglobalization’ movement. As a series of mass interventions and protests against the capitalist globalization, it is one of the most important developments in radical politics in recent years, despite its temporary lull due to the ‘war on terror’ and the repressive post-September 11 political climate. What is radical about this movement is not only the breadth of its scope, but the new forms of political action it entails. It challenges the neo-liberal vision of globalization that so dominates us today, and it does this from a universal position. However, this universal position remains empty, open to be defined and redefined in ways that are not yet specified. Also, unlike Marxist struggles which were centralized around the primary subjectivity of the proletariat, the anti-globalization movement has no centre, but, rather, incorporates a multitude of different struggles and identities, targeting specific sites of domination, exploitation and exclusion: corporate

A poststructuralist politics of universality 151 power and greed, environmental degradation, workplace surveillance, displacement of indigenous peoples, labour and human rights abuses, draconian border protection practices, and so on. The difference between this movement and the Marxist concept of revolutionary politics is that while Marxism created an imaginary universality on the basis of one particularity – the proletariat – ‘the anti-globalization’ movement creates a real universality on the basis of multiple particularities, particularities whose identities are themselves contingently constructed through the struggle itself. This movement, which is still in its infancy, is a genuinely contemporary form of radical politics that transcends the old paradigms of Marxism and identity politics, embodying entirely new forms of activism and collective identity. The ‘anti-globalization’ movement also invokes a new, more democratic and egalitarian vision of globalization.5 It allows us to imagine an alternative to the current neo-liberal global order racked by poverty, exclusion and violence. In this sense, it could be seen as an instance of what Balibar has termed ideal universality or universality as a symbol. If we recall, the first dimension in Balibar’s schema – real universality – referred to the conditions of global capitalism itself and the fragmentation and antagonisms it was generating; the second dimension – fictitious universality – referred to the emergence of normalizing institutions and practices that sought to discipline the individual. However, these are accompanied by a sort of spectre – an insurrectionary dimension of universality that refers to the ideals of emancipation and justice, beyond any institutional embodiment (Balibar 1995: 64). The conditions for ideal universality were also generated by capitalism, yet it has the potential to dislocate its structures. Ideal universality is characterized by a demand for what Balibar calls ‘equaliberty’ or egaliberté – that is, a kind of unconditional and necessarily excessive demand for both full liberty and full equality, a demand that was explicit, for instance, in documents like The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Liberal theory has generally seen liberty and equality as mutually limiting, so that the more liberty one had the less equality one had and vice versa. However, what would distinguish radical politics would be the refusal to separate liberty and equality, a refusal to see one as imposing limits on the other, and a conviction that it is simply unjust to do so: ‘If no equality can be achieved without liberty, then the reverse is also true: no liberty can be achieved without equality’ (Balibar 1995: 66). Maybe the interconnectedness of the demand for equality and the demand for liberty is the real of politics which refuses to be symbolized or contained in the political order – a radical excess which disrupts any political identification. The irresolvable, unfulfilled demand for liberty/equality haunts our political horizon like an unseen dream, always returning to its place at the centre of our political universe, keeping alive the vital tension between the particular and the universal. Foucault believed that we are living in the time of revolution. However,

152 A poststructuralist politics of universality we are not talking here about revolution in the sense of a dialectical overturning in which one class, or one particularity, imposes its will on others. This would be, as I have argued, to close off the possibilities of the universal – to deny the universal in the name of the universal. No, revolution must be something that keeps the space of the universal open to the possibilities of the particular, and keeps the space of the particular open to the possibilities of the universal. It is this kind of inscription and re-inscription of the possibilities of the universal that emerges from a poststructuralist critique of identity.

Conclusion

In her book The Democratic Paradox, Chantal Mouffe makes the following distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’: By ‘the political’ I refer to the dimension of antagonism that is inherent in human relations, antagonism that can take many forms and emerge in different types of social relations. ‘Politics’, on the other side, indicates the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions which seeks to establish a certain order and organize human coexistence in conditions that are always potentially conflictual because they are affected by the dimension of ‘the political’. (Mouffe 2000: 101) In other words, what we usually refer to as politics – the simulacra of institutional activities, policy debates, political parties, elections and so on – is a way of domesticating a much more unstable and antagonistic social dimension that at times threatens to disrupt this established order. To speak in psychoanalytic terms, the political might be seen as the unconscious dimension of politics itself; it is a traumatic place that is disavowed, repressed, and yet which has potentially destabilizing effects on dominant institutions and discourses through the production of new meanings and symbolizations. The political is always there as a kind of spectral underside of politics. An administrative decision or an institutional practice – no matter how seemingly uncontroversial or routine – can be at any moment challenged or resisted, and thus politicized. The moment of the political is therefore a moment in which the oppression, violence and exclusion concealed behind the dominant order is exposed; in which practices, institutions and discourses that we hitherto accepted as normal and legitimate are made problematic; and in which new discursive meanings can emerge. The essays collected in this book have all been attempts to engage with and explore this idea of ‘the political’ through poststructuralist theory. Poststructuralism, as I have suggested, is immanently political. This is because thinkers like Stirner, Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, and others, have, in different ways, challenged the discourses and theoretical coordinates through

154 Conclusion which we normally approach politics, thus allowing new political meanings and practices to be conceived. They have shown us how we might rethink the central political categories of subjectivity, rights, power, ethics, democracy, community and universality. They have revealed the aporias and heterogeneities internal to these ideas, thus opening discursive spaces through which they can be reinterpreted. Moreover, poststructuralist theory has politicized or made problematic ‘normal’ social and political practices and discourses by exposing the unequal power relationships on which they are based. It has created the conditions through which these discourses might be challenged by unmasking their ultimately arbitrary character – by showing that, rather than being natural, rational or inevitable, they are constituted through the often violent exclusion of other possibilities. We can say, then, that a poststructuralist approach to politics points always to a certain void that makes social and political identities indeterminate: genealogical rupture and antagonism for Foucault; ‘creative nothingness’ for Stirner; the unsymbolizable trauma of the real for Lacan; différance and alterity for Derrida, etc. This void is precisely the dimension of the political – an ontological absence that forms the unsteady ground of politics. In other words, in a poststructuralist analysis the practice of politics is founded not on the stable ground of universal rationality or absolute morality, nor on an essential idea of humanity, but rather on a constitutive absence or emptiness which makes it unstable. Politics can no longer be based on metaphysical foundations, or on the moral and rational coordinates of Enlightenment humanism. This does not mean, as I have argued, that we should abandon emancipative or democratic political projects. It simply means that the practice of politics today – in the conditions of ‘postmodernity’ – is given no ultimate guarantees, nor is it guided by any absolute telos. The impact of a poststructuralist approach to politics therefore lies in ‘de-naturalizing’ it, in showing that there is nothing natural or eternal about existing political identities, discourses and practices. They are not set in stone, but, on the contrary, are historical formations whose meaning can be contested and whose structures can be transformed. In other words, poststructuralism makes visible the hidden discontinuities behind these structures and discourses, thus confronting them with their own contingency. Poststructuralism therefore politicizes politics.1 To see social and political identities as historical and discursively constituted, rather than natural, has been the central contribution of poststructuralism to political theory. What brings together the different thinkers and theoretical perspectives that I have been discussing – what perhaps is the defining feature of poststructural theory is a critique of essentialism. In other words, what is rejected in poststructuralism is the idea that there is an underlying essence or unchanging substratum that forms the basis of social identities and interactions – whether this be a notion of what is

Conclusion 155 properly ‘human’, or some sort of rational social logic. From the perspective of poststructural theory, this idea is simply unsustainable. The search for an essence – for an eternal secret at the base of existence – only reveals, as Stirner says, an emptiness, an absence: ‘By bringing essence into prominence one degrades the hitherto misapprehended appearance to a mere semblance, a deception. The essence of the world, is for him who looks to the bottom of it – emptiness’ (1995: 40). Rather, social identities have to be seen as discursively constructed – that is, they are constituted through external structures of language and power. The idea of the universal human subject with essential moral and rational properties – the idea that is central to modern political discourses, from liberalism to Marxism – is displaced in poststructuralist theory: for Stirner, this subject is an idealist abstraction created by humanist discourses, with no basis in reality; for Foucault, the discursive limits of the subject are constructed through relations of power, knowledge and discourse; for Lacan, the subject is decentred by the unconscious, which is structured through external linguistic and symbolic relations; for Derrida, there can be no self-presence of identity, as the limits of identity are formed through what they exclude and are thus contaminated by this excluded element, etc. In all of these cases there is no essential core of subject that stands outside these structures. The subject has to be situated within discourse. The problem with essentialism is that it is a form of metaphysics in the rationalist guise of the Enlightenment. It is, in other words, a reaffirmation of the idea of a God who stands outside, and determines the course of, human affairs. Indeed, poststructuralism reminds us that God is not really dead after all – he has been reborn in the idea of man and in the categorical imperative. This was, of course, the central problem for Stirner, whose ‘epistemological break’ with Enlightenment humanism was the theoretical point of departure for my project, foreshadowing, as I suggested, later poststructuralist perspectives. Indeed, in showing that the idea of God had yet to be exorcized from our midst, and lives on in the secular discourses of modernity, Stirner can be seen as one of the first postmodernists. The radical innovation of Stirner’s critique lay in showing that the discourse of Enlightenment humanism was simply Christianity reinvented in a secular form: the idea of Man, central to the experience of modernity, was just as abstract and illusory – and, indeed, just as oppressive – as the idea of God. The idea of essence – the essence of man, or human essence – was a ‘fixed idea’, a new kind of religious conviction that dominated our thinking. Moreover, Stirner’s unmasking of the religious character of Enlightenment humanism had important consequences for politics: to what extent are our modern, secular political categories still conditioned by religious concepts? For instance, the idea of state sovereignty, as both Stirner and Derrida have shown, has its roots in ‘onto-theological’ categories that derive directly from the idea of divine authority. Moreover, a political

156 Conclusion discourse such as liberalism, which is based on the idea of the liberation of the subject from both political absolutism and religious obscurantism, is concomitant with, as Stirner argues, new forms of oppression – now, the absolutism of rationality and the tyranny of the norm. Stirner’s critique of liberalism – discussed in Chapter 1 – exposed behind its formal edifice of rights and freedoms a whole series of ‘illiberal’ disciplinary and normalizing practices. Indeed, Stirner has shown that modern political discourses – not just liberalism, but also socialism – are based on a certain construction of the subject around a series of idealized moral and rational norms that at the same time dominate him. In other words, because these political discourses are based on a certain essential image of the subject that is derived from Enlightenment humanism and which the subject is expected to conform to, they result in more subtle and internalized forms of domination, tying the subject to a fixed identity. The value of Stirner’s intervention for political theory has been to show how these essentialist concepts and categories severely limit our political horizons. In other words, if we accept Stirner’s contention that not only is the essential human subject a discursive and ideological construction, but that it is also a form of subjectivity that dominates us, then we can begin to explore new possibilities for political thought and action. The poststructuralist critique of essentialism therefore not only has important implications for the way we view politics generally, but also, more specifically, for the question of radical politics today. Indeed, I have suggested in this book that there is an immanent convergence between poststructuralist thought and radical political theory. Poststructuralist perspectives can be understood within the ‘paradigm’ of radical politics, in that they seek to unmask the domination and coercion behind established political institutions, practices and discourses, and show how they might be undermined and resisted. Moreover, poststructuralism poses broader theoretical questions and challenges for radical politics: what is the future for radical politics in the wake of the collapse of Marxist projects? What happens to the idea of emancipation if there is no essential subject to be emancipated? How do we rethink the ideas of equality, democracy, freedom and human rights if, at the same time, we abandon the idea of an absolute moral and rational ground? I have tried to address some of these questions in the book. In particular, in Chapter 2, I have dealt specifically with the issue of radical politics, exploring some of the limitations and also the potentialities of classical anarchism through Nietzsche’s idea of ressentiment. Why have I chosen anarchism here, instead of Marxism? Because I see anarchism – provided that it can free itself from its Manichean logic, as well as its moorings in the dialectic, human nature and natural law – as becoming a referent for contemporary political and social struggles, particularly those around the issue of globalization today. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that anarchism – or postanarchism – can be seen as the closest political approximation of poststructuralism. Poststructuralism, in

Conclusion 157 its interrogation and subversion of dominant discourses and institutions, entails an implicit anti-authoritarian ethos. However, the point I have made in the book is that poststructuralism turns the anti-authoritarian project back on anarchism itself, undermining the rational, moral and conceptual categories that informed classical radical politics. This last point highlights one of the central controversies over poststructuralist theory and the question of whether it has any relevance for politics. Many have argued that precisely because poststructuralism questions the idea of human essence and the moral and rational categories of the Enlightenment, that it denies us any firm ethical or rational foundation for political critique or action. This is a serious charge, especially at a time when we are increasingly seeing around us new forms of nihilistic violence, from fundamentalist terrorism to anti-immigrant racism.2 However, I have tried to show throughout this book, and particularly in the final chapters, that poststructuralism is ethically and politically engaged. Abandoning the idea of absolute rational and moral foundations for politics does not mean that we should give up on the idea of political and ethical critique, but simply that its trajectory is no longer predetermined and is therefore open to different articulations. For instance, in the last chapter, I showed that neither Foucault nor Derrida seeks to abandon the legacy of the Enlightenment. On the contrary, they try to renew its emancipative potential by interrogating its discursive structures. Moreover, I also suggested that through a critique of the existing discursive limits of universality, poststructuralism can develop new and radical forms of universality that remain constitutively open to different political identities and struggles. We might say, then, that poststructuralism implies an ethics and politics of contingency – a position that can give rise to new understandings of egalitarianism and democracy. However, while it presents fundamental challenges to the way we think about politics – revealing the aporias, tensions and internal contradictions within central political categories and discourses – poststructuralism is not without its own internal tensions. We should not assume that poststructuralism is a coherent body of thought; the thinkers I have discussed here are all very different and hold often divergent positions. However these points of disagreement and tension in poststructuralist theory are important because of the way they highlight certain conceptual problems in politics. I have attempted to explore and tease out some of these tensions here. Indeed, these aporias must at least be addressed if we are to understand the relevance of poststructuralism for political theory. Power In Chapter 3, I investigated some of the conceptual and political limitations surrounding Foucault’s theory of power: if power was ‘everywhere’, as Foucault contended, then, first, it lost definitional clarity as a concept

158 Conclusion because it could not be differentiated from other social relations; and second, it was difficult to formulate a critical point of departure from which resistance could emerge. The central dilemma here was that while political theory, and indeed, radical politics needed some sort of point outside the play of power, we could not at the same time revert to essentialist foundations – such as human nature or a universal rationality – to formulate it. Here I turned to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in order to account for a subjective unconscious dimension that resists power, and to revise the concept of power itself, giving it a structural and symbolic identity, albeit one that was flawed and inconsistent. Here Lacan’s concept of the real – as the internal limit of symbolic identity – was central: it provided a traumatic point around which the structures of power were destabilized, and from where some form of resistance could emerge. However, the real was not some sort of essential foundation outside the order of language/discourse/power – rather it is something that emerges from within these very structures themselves, as their internal point of discontinuity. Ideology A similar conceptual dilemma emerged around the concept of ideology. The problematic of ideology has been dismissed in several poststructuralist accounts – including Foucault’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s – because it is seen to be a concept that presupposes essentialist assumptions about the subject not being able to clearly perceive his ‘interests’. However, at a time when we feel the effects of ideological obfuscation all around us – the ‘war on terror’ being a prime example – we need to retain the concept of ideology, yet rethink it along non-essentialist lines. Here I developed two complementary approaches: first, to see ideology – along the lines of ˇ izˇek’s account – as a distortion that can operate through the objective Z order of truth itself, rather than dissembling it (Chapter 3); and second, to see Stirner’s figure of the ‘un-man’ as a subjective dimension that was produced through ideological interpellation and, at the same time, exceeded it (Chapter 4). Subjectivity One of the central challenges of the book was to try to find a place for the subject in poststructuralist theory, especially as most conceptions of politics rely on some notion of autonomous agency. However, this idea of agency is somewhat problematic in poststructuralism, which sees the subject as being constructed through external structures of language, power and discourse. This has been a problem particularly for Foucault, and his later works on ethics can be seen as a way of reintroducing the category of the subject. Here I tried to develop a more substantive account of

Conclusion 159 subjectivity through the contribution of both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. In Chapter 3, I explored the subjective dimension of the unconscious as the place of ‘passionate attachments’ that forms a possible outside to power. In Chapter 7, I returned to the question of subjectivity, and tried to develop a theory of political identification through the Freudian concept of the uncanny. As I showed, acts of political identification take place when the subject is somehow displaced from his normal subjective position, from his usual ‘place in the world’, and is confronted with the contingency and unfamiliarity (unheimliches) of his own existence. Here I was trying to understand political agency without relying on rationalist models of behaviour common to political theory. The outside The question of whether there can be a notion of an outside in poststructuralist theory has been one of the underlying themes of several essays here. Many of the above-mentioned problems that I have sought to address refer to the possibility of an outside. The problem is this: while there needs to be some notion of an outside to the relations of language/discourse/power that structure and limit our experience, how can we theorize this outside without falling back onto metaphysical foundations like human essence or an absolute epistemological position? Here I have tried to show that an outside can emerge, paradoxically, from the inside – that is, from within these very structures of language, discourse and power. There were several ways that this was formulated: through Lacan’s concept of the real, as the internal limit of the symbolic order; through Stirner’s concept of the ‘un-man’ as the point of excess or transgression that goes beyond the discursive and ideological structures of humanism; and also through Derrida’s notions of alterity and aporia, which refer to an ethical outside that is opened up from within the limits of philosophy and language. Ethics, nihilism, violence As I have suggested above, I see poststructuralism as being ethically committed rather than nihilistic. But where do we locate the ethical dimension of poststructuralism, without the firm moral and rational coordinates of the Enlightenment? It is clear that poststructuralism does not lay down clear ethical guidelines for political action. Indeed, the relationship between the ethical and the political is one of the most keenly contested questions in continental political theory today (see Critchley 1998). I would suggest that a poststructuralist approach to this question, rather than seeking to force politics to conform absolute ethical guidelines, would instead seek to politicize ethics itself: that is, to see the discursive limits of ethics as being contingent rather than fixed and absolute, and thus able to

160 Conclusion be reinterpreted through concrete political and social struggles. In Chapter 5, I have shown how Derrida develops a notion of deconstructive ethics through concepts of justice, human rights and democracy to come. However, these are not regulative ideals or absolute normative standards, but rather function as ways of opening existing political and legal structures to the Other, to what is excluded by them. The question of nihilism also emerges in Chapter 6, where I show that there is a structural link between the violence at the base of sovereign institutions and legal structures, and the violence exhibited by anti-state terrorism. A poststructuralist approach has shown here – contrary to the claims of the classical theorists of sovereignty – that there can be no strict conceptual separation between these two orders of violence, that both lack legitimacy and cannot be grounded in anything other than violence itself. Individuality and community The question of community and collective identity is a central one for politics; the practice of politics cannot be an entirely individual experience. However, we saw in Chapter 1 that Stirner’s politics of the ego amounted to a radical individualism – a kind of ‘hyper-liberalism’ – that shunned broader social and political identities. This was the key point of contention, moreover, between Stirner and Marx, which I explored in Chapter 7. While for Stirner, social collectives were abstractions that denied individuality, for Marx, the individual was intrinsically part of these broader identities. However, I have suggested that what needs to be deconstructed are the very conceptual terms of this opposition: while the individual cannot be considered outside larger social identities, at the same time the idea of ‘society’ or the ‘social whole’ as a unified, objective entity has to be questioned. In other words, the idea of ‘society’ is a discursive construction that seeks to hide the disunity and antagonism at the heart of social relations. Out of this discussion emerged the idea of community as an openended promise that could not, at the same time, be embodied in any objective content, nor could it be accommodated within dominant political discourses and structures. Rather, it was what threatened to destabilize these structures. Poststructuralism and universality Perhaps the most important question that this book has addressed is that of universality in poststructuralist theory. I have argued that it is crucial that there be some sort of universal dimension in politics, especially in order to formulate collective projects of resistance and emancipation. However, the problem here was that if one accepts the validity of the poststructuralist approach, then this universal dimension cannot be based on a universal human subject, or on universal rational and moral ideals. In

Conclusion 161 other words, universality would have to be theorized without absolute foundations. Moreover, because poststructuralist theory rejects the idea of a universal subject, it tends to be associated with a politics of difference – an association I have challenged in Chapter 8 by showing that the logic of poststructuralism is precisely what makes identities of difference unstable and problematic. Difference and particularity are, therefore, constitutively open to a universal dimension that lies beyond their borders. Thus I showed that a radical universal dimension can emerge from within the discursive limits of poststructuralism itself, through the constitutive tension and contamination between the orders of the universal and the particular. Without this universal dimension, radical politics cannot hope to advance beyond the deadlock of identity politics, which, despite its important achievements over the past couple of decades, is now becoming increasingly irrelevant. At a time when we are beginning to see the aggressive reassertion of state sovereignty and the emergence of new forms of conservatism and fundamentalism, whose dark potentialities we can only speculate on, radical political theory must be able to develop a universal dimension around which new forms of emancipative and democratic politics can be constellated. The aim of this book was not only to explore the implications of poststructuralism for political theory, but to show that poststructuralist strategies are politically and ethically relevant to the social and political struggles of today.

Notes

Introduction 1 This was never clearer than when, post-September 11, the use of torture was ˇ izˇek being openly discussed and debated in the United States. As Slavoj Z remarks, the ethical tragedy of this is that torture has become an accepted part of public discourse, and it is now legitimate to talk about the use of torture on terrorist suspects, whereas before it would have been seen as the government’s ‘dirty little secret’ that must be concealed and publicly disavowed (2002b). 1 Politics of the ego 1 John Gray also unmasks the other side or ‘face’ of liberalism. In The Two Faces of Liberalism he shows that there is a central and unresolved antagonism between two dimensions of liberalism – the first being that which sees liberal toleration as a pursuit of a universal rational consensus and an ideal form of life; the second being that which acknowledges the impossibility of achieving this consensus, seeking instead to reconcile the conflict between competing and plural ways of life without privileging one above the others (see Gray 2000: 1). 2 For instance, Gilles Deleuze argues that desire desires its own repression (see Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 133). 3 Today more than ever, the ‘health’ of the subject has become a regulatory, disciplinary norm – we are increasingly required to conform to various standards of physical and mental health: we are told to exercise more, to not be depressed; there is almost a Superego injunction to enjoy, be happy, consume, strive for the ‘good life’, find fulfilment, experience full sexual jouissance, etc. This emphasis on health and happiness, which is everywhere accompanied by anxieties around issues like obesity, smoking and so on, might be seen as an aspect of the ‘bioculture’ we live in today, where transgressions of the norm are seen as having biological causes and are treated medically – drugs for depression, anxiety, over-activity, underperformance. This normalization, detected by Stirner, is just as dominating, prescriptive and vicious as the religious and moral codes of previous centuries. 4 I borrow this term from Beiner’s ‘Foucault’s Hyper-liberalism’ (1995). 5 Stirner: ‘Yet he, for whom he seeks the lucre, is a slave of lucre, not raised above lucre; he is the one who belongs to lucre, the moneybag, not to himself; he is not his own’ (1995: 266). It is worth noting that Stirner’s term ‘property’ must be seen in its Hegelian sense – as that which becomes incorporated into the self so that it is no longer an alienating external object – rather than being derived from the language of laissez-faire liberalism. 6 Giorgio Agamben shows that in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789 there is a strange ambiguity between ‘Man’ – which would

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imply a universality of rights, regardless of where one was born – and ‘Citizen’ – which implies a more narrow definition of rights, as being limited to citizens of a nation state. In other words, does one have rights purely by virtue of his being human, being ‘man’, or are rights based on the notion of citizenship, on belonging to a nation state? The ambiguity is profoundly exposed by the figure of the refugee, whose claim to human rights beyond national state borders calls into question this very fiction of citizenship (see 1998: 131). 7 I borrow this term ‘post-liberalism’ from Gray (see 1993). 8 Stirner does, however, talk about the possibilities of voluntary collective arrangements amongst egoists. See his discussion of the ‘union’ (1995: 161). 2 Ressentiment and radical politics 1 ‘The “Enlightenment”, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines’ (Foucault 1991: 222). 2 Indeed, Bakunin’s idea of applying scientific techniques of ‘social hygiene’ on an individual and collective basis, in order to combat the hereditary transmission of ‘physical and moral maladies’ – while it was intended to supersede the regressive moral and religious prejudices of the times – takes on almost ominous dimension in light of Foucault’s analysis of the normalizing and regulatory regimes that now surround us (see Bakunin 1984: 243). 3 Anarchism also recognizes that the political domain can have a determining effect on economic and social relations. Indeed, anarchist theorist Alan Carter argues that because many Marxists have neglected the possibility of political forces determining economic forces, they have fallen into the trap of the state: ‘Marxists, therefore, have failed to realize that the State always acts to protect its own interests. This is why they have failed to see that a vanguard which seized control of the State could not be trusted to ensure that the State would “wither away”. What the State might do, instead, is back different relations of production to those which might serve the present dominant economic class if it believed that such new economic relations could be used to extract from the workers an even greater surplus – a surplus which would then be available to the State’ (1989: 184). 3 New reflections on the theory of power 1 Many have suggested that there is a central tension in Foucault between his rather pessimistic descriptions of the intractability of power, and his sometimes quite explicit and impassioned advocacy of resistance to practices of domination – something that implies a clear normative argument (see Hindess 1996: 156). 2 While Jacques Lacan is not a thinker often applied to the field of contemporary political theory, let alone to theories of power, there have been a number of recent attempts to utilize certain Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts to address central problems in politics and social and cultural theory. Here I am referring ˇ izˇek, as well as to Yannis to the interventions of Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Z Stavrakakis’ Lacan and the Political (1999). 3 As Stavrakakis argues, it is Lacan’s contention that there is a radical lack or void at the objective level – in the very external structures of social meaning – that is perhaps the truly innovative aspect of Lacan’s thinking, and which has the greatest consequences for political theory (1999: 40). 4 Foucault shows that transgression and limit depend upon one another – transgression is produced by the limit, and its only function can be to highlight the limit, burning itself up once it has crossed it: ‘like a flash of lightning in the night, which . . . gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies’ (1977: 35).

164 Notes 4 Spectres of Stirner 1 As Foucault suggests, ‘Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover who we are, but to refuse who we are . . . The political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to liberate the individual from the State and its institutions, but to liberate ourselves from the State and the type of individualization linked to it’ (1982: 216). 5 Derrida’s deconstruction of authority 1 Agamben suggests that we are currently moving into a generalized state of exception, in which the extra-legal powers assumed by democratic states in the wake of September 11 point to the emergence of a new political paradigm in which power rules increasingly by emergency decree: the multitude of laws being promulgated in new ‘anti-terrorist’ bills gradually lose their significance as law and become indistinguishable from sovereign power (2003). 6 On the politics of violence 1 The dangers of this new discourse on terrorism are clear: not only can it be used by the state to attack external enemies – ‘rogue states’ – but it can also be used as a convenient label for internal political dissidents and protest movements, even in our ‘Western democracies’. 2 In this sense, for Derrida, terrorist violence would be an attack on the very foundations of the law and, thus, the legitimacy of the state (see Borradori 2004: 169). 3 As Agamben contends, humanitarian operations are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from wars and standard military operations – one thinks here of Kosovo, for instance (1998: 187). 4 Jean Baudrillard, for instance, talks about the way that the terrorist strikes were an attack on the order of global capital itself, defined by a generalized system of exchange which the terrorists were able to disrupt (2002: 9). 7 Spectres of the uncanny 1 Lacan develops this idea, seeing the unconscious itself – because it is structured ‘as a language’ – as a thoroughly social and intersubjective, rather than, individual domain (1998: 20). 2 This experience of ‘the new opacity’ is never more present than in our ˇ izˇek argues, with reference to Habermas’ claim about contemporary world. As Z the neue Undurchsichtlichkeit, ‘more than ever, our daily experience is mystifying: modernization generates new obscurantisms, the reduction of freedom is presented to us as the arrival of new freedoms’ (1997: 1). 3 Here Stirner might be seen in the same light as a thinker like Étienne La Boétie, who was also interested in why we, as subjects, willingly submit to state authority, arguing that state power depends on our voluntary servitude (see La Boétie 1963). 8 Towards a poststructuralist politics of universality 1 Martha Nussbaum, for instance, in her essay ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’ calls for a return to a Kantian universal morality as the basis for a new cosmopolitan sensibility (see Nussbaum 1996: 3–16). 2 This ideology of victimization is also characteristic of certain ethnic and reliˇ izˇek shows the way in which the Bosnian Serbs gious identities. For instance, Z saw themselves as the victims of Muslim or Croat oppression and discrimination, thus providing a moral legitimacy for their aggression against these other identities (1993: 204).

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3 As Terry Eagleton remarks, capitalism is remarkably tolerant of cultural difference – indeed difference and diversity are what it thrives upon: ‘Most of the time, at least, it [capitalism] is eager to mix together as many diverse cultures as possible, so that it can peddle its commodities to consumers’ (2003: 19). 4 Foucault makes this quite clear when he says in an interview that his focus has always been on how the ‘human subject fits into certain games of truth’, whether it be through scientific discourses, institutional coercion, or through ethical strategies that we apply to ourselves. Foucault is not just talking about ‘marginals’ here but about all of us, and how we come to constitute ourselves as subjects (1994: 281–282). 5 Derrida prefers to call it the ‘alter-globalization’ movement, because, rather than being against globalisation as such, it is against the particular capitalist form that globalization has taken. In other words, it offers an alter-native vision of a global order. Conclusion 1 Here I agree with Alan Finlayson and Jeremy Valentine that the value of poststructuralist approaches is in interrogating the often narrow conceptual and discursive categories that modern political theory is articulated in – categories which determine in advance what are ‘legitimate’ forms of political inquiry, and which also naturalize and give legitimacy to existing liberal modes of governance (see Finlayson and Valentine 2002: 7). 2 Étienne Balibar talks about forms of ultra-violence violence that are emerging around us, which converge onto an irrational and excessive cruelty – such as ethnic cleansing, for instance. Such practices contain a dimension of cruelty that is unmediated or unsymbolizable. They are conditioned by a jouissance or enjoyment – to speak in psychoanalytic terms – that is not intelligible within the economy of power relations, and that goes beyond utilitarian or even ideological considerations, corresponding more to the ravages of the pre-Oedipal Id (2002: 143).

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Index

Agamben, G. 11, 94, 104–5, 110 agnostic liberalism 29 alienation 127, 128–9 Althussarian structuralist Marxism 5 Althusser, Louis 5, 72 ‘analytical’ political theory 2 anamorphosis 130–1 an-archic action: Derrida, J. 98–9 anarchism: Derrida 86–7; emancipation 44–7; Manicheism 36–40; Marxism 34; Nietzsche 31, 41; political authority 33–5; and poststructuralism 2; and power 9–10; social contract theories 35–6; and the state 34, 43; understanding of history 46–7; see also classical anarchism Anglo-American analytical theory 7 antagonism: Foucault 42–4 anti-authoritarian ethos 1–2 anti-capitalist movement: global 9 anti-foundationalism 6–7 anti-globalization movement 144, 150–1 Apollonian illusion 41 ‘aporia’ 6, 90 aristocracy 23, 32 ‘artificial authority’ 36–7, 47 Arvon, H. 14, 123 asylum seekers 28–9 authoritarianism 87–8 authority 36–7 autonomy 26, 27–8 Badiou, A. 100–1, 114, 147 Bakunin, M. 9, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36–7, 40, 49 Balibar, Étienne 60–1, 135, 136, 138, 139, 151

Barker, J. 147 Bataille, Georges 11, 111–12, 113 Baudrillard, J. 113 Bauer, Bruno 68 Being: Heidegger’s notion of 87 Benjamin, W. 11, 93, 103–7, 112, 113 binary structures 85–6 Bin Laden, Osama 104 ‘biopolitics’ 109–11 biopower 109 borders 8 Borradori, G. 94, 97, 114, 145 bourgeoisie state 34–5 bourgeois relations 69–70 Brown, Wendy 25, 136 Butler, Judith 55–6, 143 capital 135–6 capitalism 7–9, 48, 63, 151; global 143–4 capitalist exploitation 48 Caputo, John 92, 94, 95 Christianity 15, 22, 23, 78, 122, 155 citizenship 17, 18, 28 civil liberties 8 civil society (Gesellschaft) 17, 127–8 class 48, 49 classical anarchism 36, 41, 45–6, 47, 48–9, 98, 156–7 classical anarchists 33–4, 35–6 classical liberalism 127 Clausewitz, Carl von 107 Clifford, M. R. 92 ‘closure’ 89, 90–1 coercion 43, 45, 49, 137, 156 collective identity 30, 126–7, 160 communism 126, 149; collapse of 4 communitarianism 13–14

Index 173 communities 126–7 community 132–3, 134, 160 conformity 23–4, 26, 27–8 Connolly, William 24, 30 conservatism 8, 161 ‘constitutive outside’ 6, 91, 99 contamination 6, 40, 114, 148–50 ‘continental’ poststructuralism 2 cosmopolitanism 143 crime: treatment of 24 Critchley, S. 159 critique of idealism: Marx, Karl 68–9 Declaration of the Rights of Man 97, 151 deconstruction: an-archic action 98–9; definition 84–6; ‘différance’ 89–91; foundations of law 92–3; general 11; justice 95–8; sovereignty 94–5; strategies of 88–9; transgression 91–2 Deleuze, G. 5, 8, 10, 20, 54, 79, 139, 141 democracy 33, 95 Democratic Paradox, The 153 democratic republican state 16 Derrida, J.: an-archic action 98–9; authority of the law 92–3; deconstruction 11, 84–6; deconstruction strategies 88–9; ‘différance’ 89–91; difference 139; Enlightenment 7, 157; ethical outside 91–2, 159; exclusion 142; hauntology 117–18; human rights 145; identities 140; inversion/subversion 11, 86–7; justice 95–8; law-making violence 104; metaphysics 87–8; sovereignty 94–5; structuralism 5; the subject 155; terrorism 114; undecidability 6 de Saussure, Ferdinand 4 desire 55–6, 61–3, 79 despotism 34 ‘différance’ 89–91, 140, 154 difference 8, 20, 23, 27–8, 30, 139–41 Dionysian reality of power 41 disciplinary liberalism 21–2 disciplinary techniques 13, 18, 21, 24–5, 28, 44, 52, 156 Discipline and Punish 109 disidentification 131 displacement 87, 90 domination 45, 48 Donzelot, Jacques 37 ‘double writing’ 90

Eagleton, Terry 7, 8, 71 economic exploitation 48 economic oppression 34–5 ego, the 125–6 Ego and Its Own, The 14, 126 egoism 19, 20, 30, 125–6, 128–9 emancipation 39, 41–2, 44–7, 96–7, 156 Engels, F. 14, 68–9, 71–2, 123–4, 126 Enlightenment, the 4, 7, 70–1, 144–6 Enlightenment humanism 14–16, 41, 155 Enlightenment rationalism 29 ‘equaliberty’ (egaliberté) 151 equality 16–17, 33, 133, 151 essence 10–11, 15–16; see also human essence essentialism 5, 30, 127, 154–5; rejection of 7 essentialist humanism 29 es spukt (it spooks): Derrida 117–18 ethics 159–60 ethnic fundamentalism 4 ethnic minorities 48 excluded others 18, 27–8, 142 exclusion 27–9; process of 142 false universality 26 fantasy 64–6 fascism 112 ‘fascist’ nihilism 114 Fehér, F. 3 feminist groups 25, 48, 136–8 Feuerbach, Ludwig 14, 15, 23, 68, 77, 123 fictitious universality 138, 139 Finlayson, A. 5 ‘fixed ideas’ 121, 124, 155 Fletcher, John 117 Foucault, M.: biopolitics 109–11; difference 139; the Enlightenment 7, 145–6, 157; exclusion 142; genealogical project 42–4; identity politics 141–2; ideology 10; individual autonomy 27; Iranian Revolution 146–7; liberalism 25; poststructuralism 3, 5; power 107–9; power relations 45; rationality 143; revolution 151–2; rights 28; sovereign power 112; the subject 155; subjectivity 57; theory of power 51–4; truth 74–5; violence 107–9, 111

174 Index foundationalism 5 Fraser, Nancy 7, 54 freedom 82; liberal 26, 27–8 French Revolution 101–2, 147 Freud, Sigmund: truth 63; the uncanny 117–21 Freudian theory 12 Fritzman, J. M. 121 fundamentalism 4, 8, 94, 146, 161 Gasché, Rodolphe 89, 90 gaze: theory of 130–1 genealogy: Foucault 42–4, 47 German Ideologists 68–9, 123–4 German ideology, The 14, 68, 123 Gesellschaft (civil society) 17 global capitalism 143–4 globalization 150, 156 God: death of 23, 40–1; image of 15; and law 94; replaced by man 77, 81, 87, 122, 155; spectre of 94 Gödel’s ‘incompleteness theorem’ 5–6 Godwin, William 36 Gordon, C. 146 government: mode of 25; rationalities 43 Gray, John 29 group psychology 118 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego 118 Guattari, F. 8, 79, 139, 141 Habermas, J. 7, 74 hauntology 117 Hegel, G. W. F. 23 Hegelian philosophers 68–9 hegemony: logic of 12, 149–50 Heidegger, M.: notion of Being 87 Heller, A. 3 heterogeneity 11, 111–13 hierarchy 23 Hobbes, Thomas 35, 36, 95, 108 homogeneous society 111–13 ‘humane liberalism’ 19–20 human essence 15–16, 19–20, 22–3, 44, 46, 52–3, 54, 77, 121–2 humanism 23, 77, 78, 122; Stirner’s critique 14–16 humanity 18–19, 41 human rights 8, 27–8, 97–8, 145 human subjectivity 37–40, 71, 74, 155 ‘hyper-liberalism’ 26, 160 idealism: Stirner 14, 123–4, 127

ideal universality 139, 151 identification 23, 130 identities 48, 136, 140; excluded 20, 24 identity 5, 6, 20, 46, 59 identity politics 136–8, 141–2, 161 ideological fantasy 63–6 ideological interpellation 10–11 ideology: abandonment of 73–6; concept of 10–11, 158; new approach 63–6; poststructuralist approach 74–6; and rationalism 70–2; Stirner’s critique 76–83; structuralist approach 72–4; theories of 53, 68–9 ‘illegal’ immigrants 28–9 immigration 8 ‘incompleteness theorem’ 5–6 individual autonomy 24 individualism 30, 116, 134, 160 individuality 19, 22, 23, 24, 26, 30, 125, 126–7, 160 individual rights 27–8 inequality 23, 108 infrastructures 89–90 institutional transparency 16 insurrection 81–2 inversion/subversion 86–7, 98–9 Iranian Revolution 146 Julius, Gustav 123 juridico-discursive paradigm 25, 52 juridico-sovereign model 42 justice 95–8 Kant, Emmanuel 145–6 Kearney, R. 92 Koch, A. 14 Kropotkin, P. 9, 31, 33, 34, 36 Lacan, J.: identities 140; power 61; the ‘real’ 6, 80, 130–1, 159; the structure 5; the subject 119, 155; subjectivity 130 Lacanian approach: to ideology 63; truth 64–6; power 51–67 Lacanian psychoanalytical theory 10, 12, 56–8 Laclau, E. 12, 39, 45, 46, 47–8, 53, 59, 128, 148–50 La Terreur 101–2 law: authority of 92–3; and transgression 61–3; and violence 106–7 law-making violence 104–6, 105–6 law-preserving violence 104, 105–6

Index 175 Lefort, Claude 101, 102, 105, 114 legitimacy 93 lesbian groups 136 Levinas, Emmanuel 92 liberal freedom 26 liberalism 2, 9, 13–14, 16–22, 23–4, 25, 127, 156 liberal multiculturalism 137 liberal political theory: problems for 27–30 liberal rights 25, 29 liberty 133, 151 logocentrism 85–6 ‘lumpenproletariat’ 18, 28–9, 49 Lyotard, J.-.F. 3 Manichean separation 41, 45–6, 47 marginalised identities 142 martyrdom 113–14 Marx, Karl: ideology 63, 68–9, 70, 71–2; ‘lumpenproletariat’ 18, 48–9; religious liberty 17; the state 34; and Stirner 14, 123–9; the uncanny 12, 117–18, 129, 131–2 Marxism 34–5, 37, 39, 47, 48, 86 master morality 31–2 materialism 19 material possessions 27 Megill, A. 41 metaphysical authority 88–9 metaphysics 87–8, 155 Middle East 8 migrants 8; see also immigrants militarism 104–5, 113 Miller, Jacques-Alain 58, 63 minority groups 25, 30, 132, 136–7, 137–8 modern societies: power of 110 moral hygiene 24–5 morality 23, 32, 78–9, 121–2; ethics of 92 Mouffe, Chantal 7, 46, 47–8, 128, 153 mutual aid 36 national security 28 ‘natural authority’ 36–7, 47 natural laws 36–7, 41, 46 Nazism 65 negative nihilism 41 neutral liberalism 13 ‘new social movements’ 48 Nietzsche, F.: anarchism 9, 31; difference 20; genealogical model 47; God 87; liberalism 22–3, 24, 30;

morality 32–3; Overman 46; power 10; the state 35; will to power 40–2 nihilism 113–15, 160; negative 41; ‘passive’ 41 normalization 27–8, 156 normalizing practices 21, 25, 27 Norris, Christopher 84 Nussbaum, Martha 143 object petit a 64 On the Genealogy of Morality 32 oppression 34–5, 37, 136–7, 156 Other, the 92 outside, the 159 Overman 40–1, 46 ‘ownness’ 25–7, 82 Parnet, C. 79 ‘particular’, the: politics of 135–8 Pasquino, Pasquale 108 ‘passionate attachment’ 55–6 ‘passive’ nihilism 41 Paterson, R. K. W. 126 Peters, M. 5 Phaedrus 85 ‘place of power’ 7 Plato 85 pluralism 30 police violence 104–5 political, the 153; autonomy of 47–8 ‘political correctness’ 138 political identities 118–19, 136; subjectivity 116 ‘political liberalism’ 16–22, 27 political oppression 34–5 political power 37, 38, 39 political rights 16–17 political theory: and poststructuralism 2 politics: and the political 153; practice of 7 positive law 103 post-anarchism 49–50, 156 ‘post-ideological’ age 132–3 ‘post-liberalism’ 9, 27–30 post-Marxists 47, 48 ‘postmodern condition’ 135 postmodernism 3–4 ‘postmodern political condition’ 3 ‘postmodern politics’ 137 poststructuralism: criticism of 7–9; definition 3; development 4–6; and the Enlightenment 144–6; and identities 139–41; political ethics of 144–8, 157; and political theory 2

176 Index poststructuralist theory: tension in 6–7; universality of 8–9 power: Butler’s ‘post-Foucauldian’ theory 55–6; exteriority of 59–60; Foucault’s analysis 42–4, 51–4, 60–1, 157–8; normalizing techniques 24–5; place of 7; political 37; symbolic dimension 60–3; theory of 6; understanding of 10; and violence 105–9; will to 40–2 ‘power principle’ 40 power relations 43, 45 presence: metaphysics of 85–6 prisoners’ rights 28 prison system 25 private property 18, 19, 20, 26–7 ‘productive power’ 52 proletariat 18, 69–70, 126, 128, 132, 151 property 18, 19, 20, 26–7 psyche: theory of the 55–6 psychoanalysis 56–8, 118 psychoanalytical theory 10, 12 punishment 24–5, 109 racism: ‘postmodern’ 4 radical politics: anarchism 45; identity politics 161; post-anarchism 49; and poststructuralism 1, 4, 9–10, 156; and power 41–2; and ressentiment 31, 33; the uncanny 121 Rancière, Jacques 131, 132, 147 rationalism 70–3; Enlightenment 29 rationality 21–2, 121–2, 143 rational principles 36–7 rational truth 22 Rawls, J. 13, 22 the ‘real’ 6, 58–60, 119, 130–1 reality 58, 64–5, 130–1 real universality 138–9, 151 religion 15, 87–8, 94 religious alienation 123 religious fundamentalism 4, 8 religious liberty 17 religious power 113 religious values 8 repression 21, 120–1, 122–3 resistance 53–4, 55, 56, 57, 62, 66–7, 81–3 responsibility 26 ressentiment 9, 23, 31–3, 38–9, 40–2, 45 ‘reterritorialization’ 8 ‘return’: of the repressed 120–1, 122–3

revolution 39, 87, 151–2 Revolution, French 101–2, 147 Revolution, Iranian 146 revolutionary identity 38–9, 87 revolutions 40, 45, 47, 81–2 rights 13–14, 16–17, 25, 27–8, 97–8 Ruge, Arnold 123 ruling classes 69–70 Ryan, M. 98 Saint-Just, Louis de 101 Sand-Man story 120 Schmitt, Carl 94 Schrift, A. 89 Schurmann, Reiner 98 security 8, 110; national 28 self-domination 79 self-ownership 26–7 self-sacrifice 113 self-subjection 21 September 11 attacks 100, 110, 111, 112, 113–14 signifiers 4–5, 56–7, 80, 130 singularity 30, 147 slave morality 31–3 social contract theory 35–6, 97–8 social identities 155 socialism 125–6, 156 ‘social liberalism’ 18–19 society 19, 21, 35–6, 46, 125–8, 149, 160 sovereign authority 112–13 sovereign societies 109 sovereignty 11, 16, 19, 25, 94–5, 105 sovereign violence 109, 111 species being 122–3 spectacle: of violence 109–10, 110–11, 112 spectrality 76–8 Spectres of Marx 117 speech 85–6 ‘spooks’ 121–3 state, the 34–5, 37, 38, 43, 48, 79, 103 state authority 104, 105, 124 ‘state of nature’ 35–6 state sovereignty 155, 161 state violence 105 Stavrakakis, Yannis 58, 64, 65 Stirner, Max: anarchism 33; concept of property 26–7; critique of liberalism 14–22; essence 155; liberalism 9, 23–4; Marx and Engels on 123–8; political discourses 156; problems with political philosophy 29–30;

Index 177 ‘proto-poststructuralist’ 3; society 127–8; ‘spooks’ 121–3; subjectivity 25–6; theory of ideology 68, 76–83; the uncanny 12, 128–9; the ‘un-man’ 23–4, 159 structuralism 4–5, 72–4 struggles 48, 113, 131–2, 136–7, 148 students 48 subaltern identities 28–9 subjectification 55–6 subjection: and resistance 53–4 subjectivity: Cartesian idea of 118–19; citizenship 18; egoism 124–6; Lacan 56–7, 61, 130; political identities 116; and poststructuralism 158–9; and power 38, 42, 52; psychoanalytical understanding 56–8; Stirner 25–6; Stirner’s notion of 79; the uncanny 128–9 subversion 86–7 suicide bombings 113 Superman 40–1, 46 Taylor, T. 13 Terror, the 114 terrorism: Benjamin’s critique 103–7; and civil society 108–9, 114; French Revolution 101–2; protection from 110; as a term 100–1 terrorist violence 101–4, 111–13; martyrdom 113–14 theory of ideology 53 Torffing, J. 4 transgression: deconstruction 91–2; and law 61–3 truth 53, 54, 63–4; rational 22 uncanny, the 119–21, 127, 128, 130–1; concept of 117–18

undecidability 6 universal humanity 19 universality: of the Enlightenment 144–6; fictitious 138, 139; Foucault on the Iranian Revolution 146–7; and global capitalism 143–4; ideal 139, 151; and minority struggles 136–7; and the particular 147–8; political approach 147–8; in poststructuralist theory 8, 12, 142–4, 160–1; process of exclusion 142; real 138–9, 151; theorization of 134–5; understanding of 143–4 universal state 17 ‘un-man’ 11, 20, 23–4, 80–1, 158 USA: religion 94 Valentine, J. 5 violence: Benjamin’s critique 103–7; Foucault 107–9; and heterogeneity 111–14; and law 93, 106–7; lawmaking 104–6; and nihilism 114–15; and sovereignty 94–5; as a spectacle 109–10, 110–11, 112; terrorism 101–2, 111–14 war 42–3, 107–8 ‘war on terror’ 28, 48, 101, 110, 158 Warren, W. 24 workers’ struggles 48 World Trade Centre attacks see September 11 attacks writing 85–6 Zarathustra 40 ˇ izˇek, Slavoj 7, 8, 60, 64, 65, 66–7, 73, Z 100, 137, 158

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