Radical Philosophy 100, 2000

Layout by Petra Pryke
Tel: 0171 243 1464

Copyedited and typeset by
Robin Gable and Lucy Morton
Tel: 01981 241164
Production by Stella Sandford
and Peter Osborne
Printed by Russell Press,
Russell House, Bulwell Lane, Basford, Not-
tingham NG6 0BT
Bookshop distribution
UK: Central Books,
99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN
Tel: 0181 986 4854
USA: Bernard de Boer, 113 East Centre
Street, Nutley, New Jersey 07100
Tel: 201 667 9300;
Ubiquity Distributors Inc., 607 Degraw
Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217
Tel: 718 875 5491
Cover: Enjoy Others, 1999
Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd.
http://www.ukc.ac.uk/secl/philosophy/rp/
CONTENTS
R A D I C A L P H I L O S O P H Y
a j o u r n a l o f s o c i a l i s t a n d f e m i n i s t p h i l o s o p h y
MARCH/APRIL 2000
100
Radical Philosophy Ltd
Editorial collective
Chris Arthur, Andrew Chitty, Diana
Coole, Philip Derbyshire, Howard Feather,
Jean Grimshaw, Joseph McCarney, Kevin
Magill, Stewart Martin, Mark Neocleous,
Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford, Sean
Sayers, Alessandra Tanesini
Editorial group
Howard Feather, Kevin Magill, Stewart
Martin, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne
(Reviews), Stella Sandford, Alessandra
Tanesini
Contributors
Homi K. Bhabha is Chester D. Tripp
Professor in the Humanities at the Univer-
sity of Chicago. His new book on cultural
narratives and rights will be published by
Harvard University Press next year.
Mark Neocleous teaches politics at
Brunel University. His latest book, The
Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical
Theory of Police Power, is forthcoming
from Pluto Press.
Simon Critchley is Professor of Phil-
osophy at the University of Essex. His
essays, EthicsPoliticsSubjectivity, are
published by Verso.
Chetan Bhatt teaches sociology at Gold-
smiths College, University of London. He
is the author of Liberation and Purity
(UCL Press, 1997) and Hindu National-
ism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern
Myths (Berg, forthcoming 2000).
Alessandra Tanesini teaches philosophy
at Cardiff University. She is the author of
An Introduction to Feminist Epistemology
(Blackwell, 1999).
Mark Lance is the co-author (with John
OLeary-Hawthorne) of The Grammar
of Meaning: Normativity and Semantic
Discourse (CUP, 1997).
EDITORIAL
A Hundred Issues Have Blossomed! ....................................................... 2
COMMENTARY
On Minorities: Cultural Rights
Homi K. Bhabha ............................................................................................. 3
ARTICLES
Against Security
Mark Neocleous ............................................................................................. 7
Demanding Approval: On the Ethics of Alain Badiou
Simon Critchley ........................................................................................... 16
Primordial Being: Enlightenment, Schopenhauer
and the Indian Subject of Postcolonial Theory
Chetan Bhatt ................................................................................................ 28
Identity Judgements, Queer Politics
Mark Norris Lance & Alessandra Tanesini ................................................ 42
REVIEWS
Ben Rogers, A.J. Ayer: A Life
Kevin Magill ................................................................................................. 52
Daryl Koehn, Rethinking Feminist Ethics: Care, Trust and Empathy
Janna Thompson, Discourse and Knowledge: Defence of a Collectivist Ethics
Sabina Lovibond .......................................................................................... 54
Warren Breckman, Marx, The Young Hegelians and the Origins
of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self
Joseph McCarney ........................................................................................ 56
Marian Hobson, Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines
Willy Maley .................................................................................................. 59
Slavoj Z
iek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology

Stewart Martin ............................................................................................ 60
Anne Phillips, Which Equalities Matter?
Diana Coole .................................................................................................. 62
John Corvino, ed., Same Sex: Debating the Ethics, Science, and Culture of
Homosexuality
Alan Sineld ................................................................................................. 63
Sean Sayers, Marxism and Human Nature
Tony Burns .................................................................................................... 64
Kevin Magill, Freedom and Experience: Self-Determination without Illusions
Stefaan E. Cuypers ...................................................................................... 65
NEWS
Signs of the Times, Critical Politics Conference
Mark Neocleous ........................................................................................... 67
UK Kant Society Annual Conference
Jonathan Derbyshire ................................................................................... 68
2 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 0 0 ( Ma r c h / A p r i l 2 0 0 0 )
Radical Philosophy has become one hundred in the year 2000, mimicking the Christian millen-
nium with a numerological accident of its own. Arbitrary as such anniversaries are, it nonetheless
provides an occasion to reect upon some of the changes in the context of the journal over the last
three decades.
RP is the only one of the string of self-published collective journals founded in Britain in the
early 1970s to remain independent from corporate publishing while retaining a commitment to a
readership uninhibited by disciplinary boundaries. Yet despite this continuity, it has, inevitably,
undergone a series of changes as the space in which it operates between the academy and a
broader literary-political sphere has contracted, squeezed on either side by the developments of the
late 1980s and 90s. Intellectual publishing in Britain has altered almost beyond recognition during
the last ten years.
When the founding statement of the Radical Philosophy Group (1972) set as its main aim to
free ourselves from the restricting institutions and orthodoxies of the academic world, who could
have predicted just how much more restrictive those institutions and orthodoxies would subsequently
become, albeit in new ways? When it set out to question above all, the divisions which have iso-
lated the universities and other educational institutions from the wider society, there was no inkling
of the collapse of the political culture upon which effective questioning of this kind depends. And
when it sought to encourage and develop positive alternatives to the poverty of so much that then
passed for philosophy, there was as yet no indication of how accommodating philosophy in Britain
would turn out to be, to small portions of phenomenology, existentialism and Hegelianism, taken
on the side to pep up the curriculum, or analytically reconstructed to suit the national palate the
chicken tikka masala of current philosophical life. Marxism was (and remains) another matter; its
much-touted but seldom convincing analytical makeover notwithstanding. But Marxism has troubles
of its own.
If the principal vices of professional philosophy in Britain in the 1960s were the trivial character
of its problems, gratuitous formalization, and a social and political complacency and aloofness char-
acteristic of its heartland, the Oxford colleges, these vices have largely been abated; yet without any
transformation of the discipline comparable to those which overwhelmed other areas of the humani-
ties during the 1980s. For all the changes, institutionally, philosophy remains the most traditional and
least reformed discipline in the humanities; not least with regard to race and gender.
However, as a product of the student movement, with its intermingling of a libertarian political
tradition and a Marxist theoretical culture, Radical Philosophy was always about more than the
reformation of philosophy as a discipline. It is with the contribution of philosophical thought to left
intellectual culture, and the maintenance of that culture as a critical and irreverent space, that the
journal has become increasingly preoccupied wherever such thought originates. As a result, the
range of topics and contributors continues to expand, while the turn to photographic imagery has
made its visual quality one of its most distinctive and intriguing features. Thought is not borne by
words alone.
Intellectual journals are creatures of their time or should be; they must keep moving or wither.
The resounding call to Let a Hundred Flowers Blossom! with which the founding statement ended
strikes a different note today. A hundred issues have blossomed. We would like to thank the growing
ranks of our contributors and readers over the many years for keeping the project alive. At a time in
which collective spaces and practices of every kind are under assault by new managerialisms of state
and corporation alike, the task has become harder, the terrain less hospitable, but the journal is all
the more precious for that.
Peter Osborne
EDITORIAL
A hundred issues have blossomed!
COMMENTARY
On minorities:
cultural rights
Homi K. Bhabha
A
fter the ftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
we still need to ask: what is the human thing itself? Who is one of us in
the midst of the jurisdictional unsettlements of migration, minoriti-zation, the
clamour of multiculturalism? To whom do we turn in neighbourly embrace or alien
embarrassment?
In The Politics of Recognition, Charles Taylor proposes a global mode of cultural
judgement that has become a landmark of liberal multiculturalism. Merely on the
human level, he writes, one could argue that whole societies cultures that
have provided the horizon of meaning for large numbers of human beings of diverse
characters and temperaments over a long period of time are almost certain to have
something that deserves our admiration and respect. At this point Taylor introduces
an evaluative caveat, a qualied disavowal: I have excluded partial cultural milieux
within a society as well as short phases of a major culture. There is no reason to
believe that, for instance, the different art forms of a given culture should all be of
equal, or even of considerable, value; and every culture can go through phases of
decadence. What is the signicance of this exclusion of the partial milieux in making
a case for cultural value on the grounds of whole societies?
Could it be that in the inuential, humane language of communitarian liberalism,
whole societies, however universal their aspirations, are fundamentally imagined to
be nationalist cultures? Is there an inability to conceive of societal or cultural options
outside the national, even nationalist frame? As the Mexican social and legal historian
Rodolfo Stavenhagen has aptly reected in the recent UNESCO publication Cultural
Rights and Wrongs: the conveniently ambiguous term of national culture, leaves
open the question of whose nation and what kind of nation is to be developed the
development of modern states have been more a process of nation-destroying than
one of nation building, in view of the fact that in the name of the modern nation-state
peoples have in fact been destroyed or eliminated.
An excess of identity?
The restrictive and prescriptive nationalist impulse disguised in the global horizon
of the merely human and its cultural measure, the whole society, is further borne
by Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Article 27 is
one of the two main implementing conventions of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights: it protects the right of minorities, in community with the other members of
their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to
use their own language. As such Article 27 is the most signicant international instru-
ment for the protection and implementation of cultural rights. Over the years, various
member states have proposed amendments in order to prevent migrants and diasporic
peoples from being considered minorities. These states have held that The very
existence of unassimilated minorities would be a threat to national unity; and hence,
the provisions relating to the rights of minorities should not be so applied to encourage
the emergence of new minority groups, or to thwart the process of assimilation and
so threaten the unity of the State. Spain, Peru, India, Brazil and other representatives
have suggested that the rights of minorities should only be conceded to those who
over long periods of times have enhanced the historical stability and the integrity
of the whole society of the state, all of which adds up to the fact I quote from the
Commissions working papers that loyalty [is] an element in the [very] denition of
minority.
A study of these working papers submitted by member-states suggests that the under-
lying fear here, once again, is the creation of new minorities. What I have identied
as the extrusion of the partial cultural minority and the bias towards a large number
of persons over a long period of time should be read in the resonant context of
what it means in Article 27 for minorities to enjoy their culture. The insistence in
Article 27 that minorities should preserve their cultural identity rather than emerge as
new formations of minoritization, or partial cultural milieux, emphasizes the fact that
minorities, amongst others, are regulated and administered into a position of having an
excess of identity, which can then be assimilated and regulated into the states concep-
tion of the common good. As Seyla Benhabib has pointed out, historically the strong
pursuit of collective goals or goods, commonly referred to as nationalism, has usually
been at the cost of minorities sexual, cultural or ethnic. Minorities both national
and migrant or diasporic are too frequently imaged as the abject subjects of their
cultures of origin huddled in the gazebo of group rights, preserving the orthodoxy of
their distinctive cultures in the midst of the great storm of Western progress.
Such proscriptions on the creation of new minoritarian subjects ignore the fact that,
in our times, partial cultural milieux and non-state social actors are increasingly
relevant, nationally and internationally, in the ght for cultural rights and social justice.
The frontlines in the battle for racial justice for African Americans, Manning Marable
recently argued, are increasingly located in prisons, in community-based coalitions
struggling against political brutality and in efforts to organize the unemployed and
welfare recipients forced into workfare programmes. The partial decentralization of
the state in the global context opens up the theatre of international law to what Saskia
Sassen has described as a space where women can come out of the invisibility of
aggregate membership in a nation-state by partly working through non-state groups
and networks [where] the needs and agendas of women are not necessarily dened by
state-borders.
Just history
The creation of new minorities reveals a liminal, interstitial public sphere that emerges
in-between the state and the non-state, in-between individual rights and group needs;
not in the simpler dialectic between global and local. Subjects of cultural rights
occupy an analytic and ethical borderland of hybridization in a partial and double
identication across minority milieux. In fact, the prevailing school of legal opinion
specically describes minority cultural rights as assigned to hybrid subjects who stand
somewhere in-between individual needs and obligations, and collective claims and
choices, in partial cultural milieux. While the law moves uneasily and uncomfortably
on these new terrains, the proleptic grace of poetry has the power to align the anxiety
of speaking from within the partial cultural milieux of minority rights, with the
aspirational vision of the formation of new minorities.
Listen to Adrienne Rich:
Old backswitching road bent toward the oceans light
Talking of angles of vision movements a black or a red tulip
opening
Times of walking across a street thinking
not I have joined the movement but I am stepping in this deep current
Part of my life washing behind me terror I couldnt swim with
part of my life waiting for me a part I had no words for
I need to live each day through have them and know
them all
though I can see from here where Ill be standing at the end.
...
When does a life bend toward freedom? grasp its direction?
How do you know youre not circling in pale dreams, nostalgia, stagnation
but entering that deep current malachite, colorado
requiring all your strength wherever found
your patience and your labour
desire pitted against desires inversion
all your minds fortitude?
Maybe through a teacher: someone with facts with numbers with poetry
who wrote on the board: IN EVERY GENERATION ACTION FREES OUR DREAMS
Maybe a student: one mind unfurling like a redblack peony
...
And now she turns her face brightly on the new morning in the new classroom
new in her beauty her skin her lashes her lively body:
Race, class all that but isnt all that just history?
Arent people bored with it all?
She could be
myself at nineteen but free of reverence for past ideas
ignorant of hopes piled on her shes a mermaid
momentarily precipitated from a solution
which could stop her heart She could swim or sink
like a beautiful crystal.
(Inscriptions, Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems, 199195)
Race, class all that but isnt all that just history? This preoccupation with what
is just history both historical justice and historical justication gives the poem
a particular relevance for the pedagogy of our times. The subject of the poem is,
literally, the sphere of the proximity of differences race, class, gender, generation
as they emerge in a range of intersecting public spheres the street, the academy,
the political party, the private diary to claim a right to representation. As the nine-
teen-year-old mermaid turns her back on all that history the poem itself, redblack
peony, moves restlessly back and forth in a double-movement that relives and revises:
the sixties in the nineties, mothers-and-daughters; race-within-the-claims of gender and
class. Article 27 and its potentially hybrid subject of inter-cultural rights is caught in
the colorado of the partial cultural milieux of minority identications and their meto-
nymic representations: Part of my life washing behind me.../ part of my life waiting for
me The repetition of part of me part of me threads the ambivalent, anxious
subject of poetic-psychic afliation with the hybrid legal subject of cultural rights, often
agonistically poised between individual and group: not I have joined the movement
but I am stepping in this deep current/ malachite, colorado. Can poetry think the
problem that legal discourse can only describe?
In embodying the spirit of the hybrid subject of Article 27, Rich suggests that
individual and group, singularity and solidarity, need not be opposed or aligned against
each other. They are part of the movement of transition or translation that emerges
within and between minority milieux. For an international community of rights cannot
be based on an abstract inherent value of humanness; it requires a process of cultural
translation that, each time, historically and poetically inquires into the conictual
namings of humanity. What is being defended in the name of the individual right?
What freedom is denied in the designation of the collective culture of the group?
While rights are always attributed to individuals, in the last instance, they are achieved
and won collectively, tienne Balibar has argued. The human is identied not with a
given essence, be it natural or supranatural, but with a practice, a task. The property of
the human being is the collective or the transindividual construction of her or his indi-
vidual autonomy; and the value of human agency arises from the fact that no one can
be liberated by others, although no one can liberate herself or himself without others.
Richs insistence on the partial identication of the minoritarian subject no whole
persons or whole societies makes her aware that individual and group are not the two
faces of human rights, but its chiasmatic doubles. As in the disjunctive yet proximate
temporality of the poem itself, individual and group stand at the hybrid intersectionality
of rights; just as the minority stands doubly within and across the national boundary;
and the psyche has an agonizing rendezvous with history.
Kant,
Romanticism,
and the
Origins of Modernity
3-5 July 2000
Keynote speakers:
Paul Davies, Eckart Frster, Mary Shell
Other speakers include:
Lilian Alweiss, Christine Battersby, Geoffrey Bennington,
Andrew Bowie, Jonathan Dronseld, Joanna Hodge,
Stephen Houlgate, Kimberly Hutchings, John Llewelyn,
Diane Morgan, Michael Newman, Stella Sandford
For registration details contact: Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature,
Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL
Telephone: 024 765 22582
E-mail: H.A.Jones@csv.warwick.ac.uk
We live, apparently, in insecure times. Sociologys
current grand thinkers, for example, all highlight the
issue of insecurity in their accounts of what is vari-
ously described as risk society, reexive modernity
and postmodernity. For Anthony Giddens, existential
anxiety is generated by the collapse of ontological
security in the late modern age, while Zygmunt
Bauman suggests reversing Freuds argument in Civiliz-
ation and its Discontents. Where Freud believed that
civilization is a trade-off in which we achieve a certain
security by sacricing a certain degree of individual
desire, it is now security which is sacriced on the
altar of ever-expanding individual freedom and liberty,
producing endemic insecurity in its wake. Similarly,
Ulrich Becks inuential thesis about risk society
depends heavily on the intrinsic connection drawn
between risk and security. Not only the new global
market, but what is taken to be its opposite the
idea that society can be planned and bureaucratically
ordered from above bring about insecurity on a
wide scale. The hazards and problems produced by
society exceed the bases of societal conceptions of
security. Thus the disappearance of lifelong jobs,
the fact that we can no longer feel safe in what we
eat or drink, the phenomenon of global warming, are
all indicators of intensied levels of insecurity both
real and perceived.
1
In an interesting parallel development, insecurity
has also come to play a major role in other disciplines.
Introducing a recent collection of essays on the theme
from within social policy, John Vail comments that
insecurity has seeped into the fabric of our lives, and
has become the template of our daily lived experience
an idea which has also been used within political
economy as a means of identifying and gauging the
damaging effects of neo-liberal policy.
2
Within main-
stream party politics Blair and his apparatchiks have
in part justied their reformist zeal on the grounds
that the Labour Partys core constituency is insecure,
is feeling insecure, and must be made to feel secure
again.
3
It appears that the age of reason, the age of
science, the age of ideology and all the other ages
we are said to have been through have now been
replaced by the age of insecurity.
This widespread claim comes at a time when equally
widespread demands have been made for an expansion
of the concept security. Within international relations,
for example, long the disciplinary home of security
studies, arguments for a broad concept of security
extending beyond the traditional sectors of state and
military are now common. Buzan, Wver and Wildes
new framework for security analysis, for example,
attempts to widen the security agenda by claiming
security status for issues and referent objects in the
economic, environmental and societal sectors, as well
as the militarypolitical ones that dene traditional
security studies. Indeed, the question of how the
concept of security can be expanded, broadened or
deepened has been the central debate within inter-
national relations theory in the 1990s.
4

Inuential political gures and institutions have
also called for an expansion of the concept along
similar lines. The Clinton administration in the early
1990s and Yeltsin in the late 1990s both called for
a new understanding of the meaning and nature of
national security, while the 1994 United Nations
Human Development Report encouraged a new con-
cept of human security much broader than the older,
narrow, denition focused on military and territorial
issues. The Report invites us to move from nuclear
security to human security, with the latter incor-
porating universal concerns within several broad
categories: economic security, food security, health
security, environmental security, personal security,
community security and political security. Similarly,
the 1995 Commission on Global Governance proposed
to broaden security from its traditional focus on the
security of states to the security of people and the
planet, and in the same year the UN secretary-general,
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, called for a conceptual break-
through going beyond armed territorial security
towards incorporating the security of people in their
homes, jobs and communities. Such arguments have
dominated debates within the European Union during
Against security
Mark Neocleous
the same period.
5
In many ways such comments con-
solidate tendencies which rst emerged within the
reports from international commissions in the 1980s,
such as the Brandt Report (1980) on the wealth divide
and the Brundtland Report (1987) on the environ-
ment. There had begun to develop what the Brandt
Report describes as a new, more comprehensive under-
standing of security which would be less restricted
to the purely military aspects.
6
But they come at a
time when insecurity is a central trope around which
a whole host of social scientic researchers now base
their work.
One of the advantages said to follow from expanding
the security concept to the individual, for example
and incorporating within it more human concerns
is that it helps focus on factors causing the generalized
insecurity we now face. Claiming security status for
an issue is said to render it somehow more important
and the need to deal with it more urgent than simply
designating it a problem. The general outcome is a
demand for more security. One of Blairs leading
wonks describes the key question in the new economy
as how to provide greater security; even more critical
writers comment that at the heart of social democracy
is the one economic feature specically and unasham-
edly ruled out by the resurgent free market: security.
Social democracy offers nothing if it does not offer
security.
7
And one can trace a clear line between
the account of ontological security Giddens adapts
from Husserl, Schutz, Goffman and Garnkel and his
presentation of the renewal of social democracy (the
third way) as the basis of a new security.
8
It has even
been suggested that the way to mobilize resources to
deal with environmental degradation is to think of the
environment not just as a security issue, but as the
ultimate security issue.
9
My concern in this article is as follows. There
is no doubt that the demand to securitize issues
such as poverty and the environment comes from
a genuine desire to do something about them. Such
appeals to security might have an instinctive appeal
for the Left generally, concerned as it must be with
these same issues. Buying into the assumption that
the best way to have something done about these
issues is to code them as questions of (in)security
would appear to render objections to it arguments
against security completely out of place. In fact,
as I shall argue, this is the very problem. A more
critical interrogation of the concept of security
reveals a deeply problematic core. In this article I
therefore aim to show, rst, that security is one of
the essential categories in the self-understanding of
bourgeois society; second, that the extensive secu-
ritizing of such a wide range of issues now taking
place is in fact a mechanism by which they become
depoliticized; third, that this is a dangerous political
game to play; and fourth that, by implication at least,
the concept of security therefore has little place in
critical theory.
I like your word security
In the summer of 1945, a few days before Hiroshima
received its abject lesson in US military power, Joseph
E. Johnson, chief of International Security Affairs in
the US State Department, commented that the abstract
noun security has acquired a very concrete signi-
cance for us. There had been, he thought, a signicant
change in the attitude towards security, which could be
witnessed by the fact that it had become impossible to
read a newspaper, or leaf through a magazine, or go to
a dinner party without being aware of the widespread
discussions of the concept. A few months later in the
autumn of that year a range of civilian and military
heads of different parts of the US state testied before
a Senate committee on the unication of the military
services; whereas talks on the same issue eighteen
months previously had barely used the term security,
by the 1945 talks the term was on everyones lips, in
conjunction with the concept of the nation national
security. The most forceful advocate of the concept,
Navy Secretary Kames Forrestal, commented that
national security can only be secured with a broad
and comprehensive front, adding that I am using the
word security here consistently and continuously
rather than defense. The idea appeared so new that
one Senator commented, I like your words national
security.
10
The subsequent creations of the US National Secu-
rity Council and the Central Intelligence Agency were
a product of debates not about defence (seen as too
narrowly military) or even national interest (seen as
too weak a concept to form the basis of the exercise
of state power) but about national security, embodied
in the National Security Act of 1947. The implications
of this development on the security concept were
massive, not just because the global expansion of US
power spawned and funded a generation of academ-
ics guided towards area studies, security studies and
international relations more generally,
11
but because it
appeared to place the state at the heart of the security
question: it was the state which was to be secured
and the states security which was to be prioritized.
To spell out the implications of this we need to take
a historical detour.
The English word security comes from the Latin
securitas/securus. As an explicitly political concept
securitas became prominent with the motto securitas
publica the safety or defence of empire which built
on the idea of necessity contained in the earlier idea
of raison dtat and followed the assumptions embod-
ied in the Peace of Westphalia. This was eventually
transformed into the idea of security of state. Hence
the Act of Security (1704), passed by the Scottish
Parliament excluding Queen Annes successor from the
throne unless conditions of government were enacted
securing the independence of the kingdom. The US
development of the concept in 1945 may be seen as
reviving and building on this tradition.
But security has another, less obvious history.
The Latin securitas/securus is derived from sine
cura. Sine meaning without, and cura meaning
troubling, solicitude, care, anxiety, attention, pains,
grief and sorrow, guardianship, concern for persons
and things. Together they give us sine cura: to be
without care, free from cares and untroubled. Securitas
is consequently dened as freedom from concern and
danger, or, looked at from a slightly different angle,
safety and security.
12
Lest this appear to provide the
taken-for-granted positive dimension to security, it
is pertinent to note that the Oxford English Diction-
ary gives several examples of the way security was
originally thought of as a negative state: our vayne
glory, our viciousness, avarice, ydleness, security
(1564); they were drowned in sinneful securitie
(1575). Here security is mortals chiefest enemie,
as Shakespeare has Hecate declare in Macbeth (III.
v.32). In terms of its origins, then, security referred to
individuals and was thought of as a careless, dangerous
and in some cases sinful condence.
Although by the eighteenth century the term had
developed an intensely political meaning focused on
the state, the second half of that century was a period
of conceptual innovation for the concept of security,
as important as that after the Second World War, but
in an entirely different way. As with many concepts
in this period such as interest and independence
security underwent a semantic drift, shifting from
politics to the marketplace and being re-focused on
individuals, but this time as a positive term. That John
Stuart Mill could declare that security is the most
vital of all interests and that security of person and
property are the rst needs of society
13
was one
of the achievements of eighteenth-century liberalism,
which treated security and liberty as more or less
synonymous. Adam Smith, for example, refers to the
liberty and security of individuals in the same
breath, while Montesquieu claims that political liberty
consists in security or, at least, in the opinion one has
of ones security. Bentham in his work of the 1780s
suggests that a clear idea of liberty will lead us to
regard it as a branch of security.
14
Almost identical
claims are made by a range of other writers in the
liberal tradition: if population be connected with
national wealth, liberty and personal security is the
great foundation of both (Ferguson); the design and
end of government, viz. freedom and security (Paine);
the people, having no political liberty, would have
no security for the continuance of the same laws
(Priestley); the loss of security is the loss of liberty
(Paley); I would call security, if the expression does
not seem too abrupt to be clear, the assurance of legal
freedom (Humboldt).
15
It was also found to be part
of English constitutional law concerning individual
liberty during this period.
16
This identication of liberty with security should
be understood as part of the articulation of a certain
vision of security: liberty designated a range of
activities which occurred outside the political realm. In
stark contrast to the state-centred approach embodied
in the 1704 Act of Security and later revived by
the American state, as security became the decisive
criterion of liberty it came to imply the security of an
undisturbed development of the life process of society
as a whole. In other words, security for liberalism
came to refer to the liberty of secure possession;
the liberty, that is, of private property. Government
exists for the security of property, Smith tells us,
presenting us with a triad of concepts which are run so
closely together that they are almost conated: liberty,
security, property. The same triad can be found in
diverse places in the late eighteenth century, from
Blackstones Commentaries on the Laws of England
(1769) to the French declaration that the Rights of
Man are liberty, property, security.
17
Security, in
other words, became the cornerstone of the liberal
bourgeois mind. Liberalisms radical recoding of the
politics of order in the eighteenth century turned
politics into a range of security measures consistent
with liberal principles. The concept of security thus
became the ideological guarantee of the independent
and self-interested pursuit of property within bourgeois
society the guarantee of the egoism of civil society.
In doing so, security became the supreme concept of
bourgeois society.
18
Historically, then, it might appear that there are two
broad approaches to security, a state-centric approach
and an approach focused on the individual property
owner. However, far from being opposites, these two
strands in the history of security are two sides of the
same security coin. Thinking about what unites them
reveals some of the problems with recent demands for
more security and the attempt to securitize a range of
social issues.
Police, good order, and security
Daniel Yergin has argued that the concept of national
security postulates the interrelatedness of so many
different political, economic, and military factors that
developments halfway around the globe are seen to
have automatic and direct impact on Americas core
interests. As a consequence virtually every develop-
ment in the world is perceived to be potentially crucial.
The range of threats becomes limitless. The doctrine
[national security] is characterized by expansiveness, a
tendency to push the subjective boundaries of security
outward to more and more areas, to encompass more
and more geography and more and more problems.
19

But it is pertinent to note that as an explicit anti-com-
munist move, national security was (and remains)
concerned with domestic as much as foreign politics.
The expansiveness of the doctrine also holds for per-
ceived problems internal to states: anything which
appears to threaten or even question the state regime
is deemed a security threat. The doctrine of security
postulates the interrelatedness of so many different
internal political, economic and social factors that
virtually nothing is beyond its concern. Characterized
by expansiveness concerning domestic issues and a
tendency to push the subjective boundaries of security
into more and more areas, national security questions
come to encompass more and more spheres of social
life. This is apparent from the statutes themselves. The
National Security Act made the US military a central
participant in the American economy, requiring the
National Security Council to advise the President
with respect to the integration of domestic, foreign
and military policies relating to the national security;
the British Security Service Act of 1989 imposes on
the security service the function of safeguard[ing] the
economic well-being of the nation; the US National
Security Education Act of 1991 similarly makes direct
links between national security and the economic
well-being of the United States. Such formulations
obscure any distinction between the civil and military
spheres and merge internal and external security. As
much as national security may be state-centric, then,
it is in fact concerned with the penetration of civil
society by the state (which, we shall see, takes us back
to the concerns of liberalism). The best way to under-
stand this penetration is as a police project. I shall
develop this argument initially through a brief account
of the work of two writers from very different intel-
lectual backgrounds who developed a critique of the
liberal conception of security in the early nineteenth
century: G.W.F. Hegel and Patrick Colquhoun.
While Hegel is clearly heavily inuenced by Smiths
account of the political economy of the wealth of
nations, his own understanding of the system of private
property is that it needs to be administered politically:
its adjustment also needs to be consciously regulated
by an agency which stands above both sides. One of
the reasons for this is because the system of private
property necessarily requires the existence of a class
of poverty. This is a problem which agitates and
torments modern societies but to which there is no
solution. The problem, however, is not poverty per se,
but the fact that from the class of poverty a further,
more dangerous class can emerge, a rabble without
right, integrity and honour and thus in rebellion against
property. This is a condition of profound insecurity
which needs to be dealt with politically. Colquhouns
starting point is also the links between the insecurity
of private property and the necessary existence of a
class of poverty. Because poverty is that state and
condition in society where the individual has no sur-
plus labour in store, and, consequently, no property but
what is derived from the constant exercise of industry
in the various occupations of life that is, the state
of every one who must labour for subsistence it is
not poverty that is the problem but indigence, the
state of any one who is destitute of the means of
subsistence. The insecurity of property therefore lies
in the existence of a class of poverty, and in particular
in the threat of this class becoming indigent (Hegels
rabble). As with Hegels account, this situation needs
to be dealt with politically. For both writers the politi-
cal solution resides in the police.
Since for Hegel security is a form of universality
and a shape assumed by rationality, what the police
provides for is the actualization and preservation
of the universal within the particularity of civil
society. The police does this as an external order
and arrangement for the protection and security of
the masses of particular ends and interests which have
their subsistence in this universal. Security needs to be
guaranteed, and this is what the police provides. Simi-
larly, Colquhoun comments that Security [of property]
does not proceed from severe punishments [but is] to
be attributed to a more correct and energetic system
of Police. The purpose of policing here is extend-
ing security to Commercial Property as a whole:
Wherever a proper Police attaches, Colquhoun states
categorically, good order and security will prevail.
Police exists for the well ordering and comfort of
Civil Society, as Colquhoun puts it, or to to mediate
between the individual and the universal and care for
the particular interest as a common interest, as Hegel
remarks. As such it consists in the most general pro-
cesses and institutions of public regulation, including
street-lighting, bridge-building, the pricing of daily
necessities, public health and, most signicantly, the
poor law.
20

Police therefore consists in the ways in which
the state fabricates social order and administers civil
society in its search for security: security is the police
project. As Marx puts it, with typical acumen: security
is the concept of police.
21
It is under the banner of
police that security most often marches, and vice
versa. This deepens the concept of security and draws
together the two approaches outlined above. First,
because in specifying the centrality of the policing
of poverty to security, the question of class as the
key to making a market economy possible becomes
from the bourgeois point of view an essential part
of the politics of security.
22
This undermines and
transforms the liberal identication of security with
individual liberty, turning it instead into a question of
class dynamics. Second, it is clear that despite Hegels
and Colquhouns attempts to locate police as part of
the institutional framework of civil society, for both
writers police is ultimately administered, and security
ultimately achieved, by the organs of state power.
The condition of security is thus not so much liberty
and property, nor the state itself, but the penetration
of civil society by the state via a range of police
mechanisms. Far from being a spontaneous order of
the kind found in liberal mythology, civil society is the
security project par excellence. Police is a mechanism
for securing civil society; a mechanism, that is, for
securing class society.
That the security of civil society is fabricated by the
state tells us something important about the concept of
security. The Oxford English Dictionary organizes the
entry for Security under three sections, each highly
revealing. The rst two sections reveal that security
operates as both noun and verb. Security refers to
a condition (of being secure or protected), a state (of
freedom from care or doubt), or a quality (of being
securely xed). But it also refers to a means of being
secure and thus a process (of making safe, of securing
something). The third meaning is nancial in the
sense of security-bonds revealing that security,
like capital, is a key term for both bourgeois econom-
ics and law. The fact that security is both noun and
verb reveals that as much as one might talk about
the condition of security, one must also address the
substantive and active process of securing. As Dillon
puts it, security is not just a noun that names some-
thing, but a principle of formation that does things.
23

On this basis, police should be thought of not as
an institution or set of institutions but as a process,
a principle of formation. This process is necessary
because of the insecurity inherent in the system of
private property. The market rests on the insecurity
of economic actors, is founded on the insecurity of
a class of poverty forever on the edge of falling into
the state of indigence and becoming a rabble (or, as
some would later come to argue, consciously opting for
the money provided by the state rather than the wage
provided by capital) and, nally, is rendered insecure
by generating political enemies.
All security is dened in relation to insecurity. Not
only must any appeal to security involve a specication
of the fear which engenders it (as in Hobbes), but
this fear (insecurity) demands the counter-measures
(security) to neutralize, eliminate or constrain the
person, group, object or condition which engenders
fear. Securing is therefore what is done to a condition
that is insecure. It is only because it is shaped by inse-
curity that security can secure. This is what James Der
Derian describes as the paradox of security: in security
we nd insecurity. Any argument for security contains
a strong trace of insecurity within it: originating in
the contingency of life and the certainty of mortality,
the history of security reads as a denial, a resentment,
and nally a transcendence of this paradox. In brief,
the history is one of individuals seeking an impossible
security from the most radical other of life, the
terror of death.
24
One can apply this argument to civil
society and the state in general: the terror of death can
be thought of as a terror of social death the death of
civil society itself. The history of security is a history
of the state seeking an impossible security from the
terror of the death of civil society and thus the end of
private property. To make the point in more explicit
class terms: it is because civil society generates its own
enemies that private property is inherently insecure.
The economic inactivity of the working class is the
heart of the insecurity of the system; the resistance of
this class to the social domination of private property
is its next step; and the political mobilization of the
class its highest form. Thus the history of police as a
security project is a history of private propertys fear
of its most radical other (communism). The police
project involves nothing less than securing the social
system the fabrication of social security the aim
of which is less the security of the individual citizen,
assured of a safety net in place to help him or her in
times of need, and more the security of the existing
forms of social domination.
25
It is for this reason that
the idea of security is one of the principal ideological
mechanisms in operation within bourgeois society.
Securitization as depoliticization
One of the features of the recent attempts to achieve
security and to expand the concept accordingly is
that it speaks to the common-sense assumption that
security is something we all naturally seek. The texts
in question are replete with comments on the pro-
found and unquenchable desire for security, on how
insecurity is a timeless concern that is always with
us, or how concerns about human security are as
old as human history, or how the need for security
is embodied in the primal relation as a fundamental
human emotion.
26
On this assumption is based the
further argument that the things to be secured are
universal concerns the environment, biotechnology,
economic life, and so on about which there can be
no debate. Environmental security, for example, is
said to concern the maintenance of the local and the
planetary biosphere as the essential support system on
which all other human enterprises depend. Its ulti-
mate referent is therefore the risk of losing achieved
levels of civilization a return to forms of societal
barbarism.
27
Presenting us with the option security
or barbarism? invites us to accept the identication
of security with, crudely speaking, the good things
in life that is, virtually everything to which we
think a rational society ought to aspire.
28
As a politi-
cal technique, securitizing an issue simultaneously
homogenizes and mobilizes social and political forces
by highlighting an existential threat in the form of an
enemy, justifying actions outside the normal bounds
of political procedure. In the process the disruption of
normal liberal politics under the exercise of emergency
powers is legitimized. But this is a dangerous game
to play, for it encourages the blurring of the dividing
line between normal and exceptional or emergency
powers.
29
Key social and political aspirations become
wrapped in the security blanket and incorporated into
the security agenda.
The corollary of the focus on (in)security is the per-
petual mystication of the processes of social power.
Whatever one feels about treating the environment,
economic change, new forms of migration, develop-
ments in biotechnology and so on, as existential threats,
the logically and politically prior point to be made is
that these are socially manufactured problems. To say
this is not to say that they are unimportant. It is to
say that they need to be understood in the context of
the historical intensication of capital accumulation,
an increased desire on the part of national govern-
ments to facilitate the search for prot on the part of
corporate power, and the decline of effective politi-
cal opposition. To securitize them, or to view them
through the prism of security, represents a profound
and disturbing failure of political awareness.
30
Far
from being unimportant, the insecurities in fact raise
the central questions of social and political power; the
central questions, that is, of critical theory. And this
is the point: in the process of being securitized these
questions are being depoliticized.
Transforming social issues into questions of secu-
rity plays into the hands of corporate power by turning
us into consumers of the products of nance capital.
Security becomes a positional good dened by income
and access to private protective services, a prestige
symbol concerned less with dealing with the social
causes of insecurity and more with ones own private
safety and personal insulation from unsavoury social
elements. This revives the liberal assumptions about
individual autonomy and private property in the guise
of new forms of neo-liberal subjectivity. Much of the
contemporary sociological discourse on security, for
example, assumes that its achievement can be found
in a more productive relation to the self as a condi-
tion for liberty, requiring active participation in the
schemes and plans put forward by those institutions
of corporate nance which have come to replace the
more traditional mechanisms of social security (the
third way). Thus insecurity comes to be used as a
strategy for encouraging investment in private health-
care schemes and pensions, or for consuming the
commodities which are said to make us more secure.
This denies that security is a political relation and
makes it the responsibility of the private individual
pursuing their self-interest, consolidating its position
as one of the greatest commodities of our time.
Far from encouraging political action, the outcome
has been to help realize a fortress mentality, either
forcing us further into our privatized (but secure)
universes or transforming the public sphere through
the intensication of surveillance programmes.
31
There
is an integral link between security and knowledge, as
Nietzsche noted (is the jubilation of those who attain
knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a
sense of security?), but the point needs to be made
politically. Security functions as knowledge, relies on
knowledge, produces knowledge, and uses its claim
to knowledge as licence to render all aspects of life
transparent to the state. Security therefore requires
that civil society be calculable and knowable, a project
of knowledge and calculation in the services of state
power. Hannah Arendts comment that under totali-
tarian rule the police dreams that one look at the
gigantic map on the ofce wall should sufce at any
given moment to establish who is related to whom and
in what degree of intimacy is the police dream in a
liberal democracy too. It is no more than the dream
of state power and its search for security.
32
Moreover, labelling an issue a security problem
enables the state to curb criticism, shut off debate,
undermine civil liberties and, if necessary, destroy
those individuals and groups which offer political
opposition to the system that produces the insecurity
in the rst place groups, that is, which try to
politicize rather than securitize the issues. For if, say,
environmental questions are security questions, then
it is perfectly reasonable for the security services to
place environmental groups under surveillance. Thus,
as a major contribution to making us more secure, the
Prevention of Terrorism bill currently being considered
by the British parliament will treat environmental
groups as terrorist organizations. The liberal-Left res-
ponse to this argument is that the demand for more
security has to be couched in terms of the rule of
law and basic rights. But this reveals itself to be
a politically naive misunderstanding of ruling-class
inventiveness with the concept of security, not least
because the ruling class has been most sensitive to
the fact that property and the state are the two sides
of the security coin. For example, Master of the Rolls
Lord Donaldson has argued that,
although they give rise to tensions at the interface,
national security and civil liberties are on the
same side. In accepting, as we must, that to some
extent the needs of national security must displace
civil liberties, albeit to the least possible extent, it is
not irrelevant to remember that the maintenance of
national security underpins and is the foundation of
all our civil liberties.
33
The beauty of such a formulation is in the way that it
synthesizes the classical liberal principle of individual
rights with one of the most trenchant twentieth-century
formulations of authoritarian rule.
The demand for security, then, lends itself to the
greater exercise of state power and private property.
As part of the coinage of power security is a funda-
mental ideological tool of the system of internal
political repression and social domination, and secu-
ritization little more than a technique for grounding
and legitimating the political regime, equating the
political status quo with the desirable order and giving
the state virtually carte blanche powers to protect
it.
34
In a situation where the obvious existence of
widespread insecurity would appear to make the call
for more security unchallengeable, the Left needs to
remember that security is the supreme concept of
bourgeois society. Far from generating new ways of
thinking about social and political questions, the cry
of insecurity has induced an intellectual paralysis
and failure of political awareness. To demand more
security is to add our signatures to the operating
manual of class rule and blind us to the possibility
of building real alternatives to existing forms of the
state and private property. Securitizing questions of
social and political power has the debilitating effect
of allowing the state to subsume genuinely political
action concerning the issues in question, consolidating
the power of the existing forms of social domination,
and justifying the short-circuiting of even the most
minimal liberal democratic procedures. Rather than
securitizing issues, then, we should be looking for
ways to politicize them in non-security ways. It is
worth remembering that one meaning of secure is
unable to escape: we should avoid thinking about
state power and private property through categories
which may render us unable to escape them.
Notes
1. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity,
Polity Press, Cambridge, 1990, p. 131; Anthony Gid-
dens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in
the Late Modern Age, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991,
pp. 3569; Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and its
Discontents, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1997, pp. 23,
124; Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Con-
sequences, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 11618;
Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics, Polity Press,
Cambridge, 1999, pp. 1624; Ulrich Beck, Risk Society:
Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter, Sage,
London, 1992, pp. 76, 98, 153, 197, 220, 227; Ulrich
Beck, Ecological Enlightenment: Essays on the Politics
of the Risk Society, trans. Mark Ritter, Humanities Press,
New Jersey, 1995, p. 126; Ulrich Beck, World Risk So-
ciety, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 6, 38, 56, 74;
Jane Franklin, ed., The Politics of Risk Society, Polity
Press, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 2, 77, 85, 9095, 121, 126;
Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash, Reexive
Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the
Modern Social Order, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1994,
pp. 80, 11617, 141.
2. John Vail, Insecure Times: Conceptualising Insecurity
and Security, in John Vail, Jane Wheelock and Michael
Hill, eds, Insecure Times: Living with Insecurity in Con-
temporary Society, Routledge, London, 1999; Larry El-
liott and Dan Atkinson, The Age of Insecurity, Verso,
London, 1998.
3. Tony Blair, Battle for Britain, Guardian, 29 January
1996, p. 11; Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle, The
Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver?, Faber,
London, 1996, pp. 17.
4. Barry Buzan, Ole Wver and Jaap de Wilde, Security:
A New Framework for Analysis, Lynne Rienner, Boulder
CO, 1998, p. 1. More generally, see Jessica Tuchman
Mathews, Redening Security, Foreign Affairs, vol.
68, no. 2, 1989, pp. 16277; Michael Renner, National
Security: The Economic and Environmental Dimen-
sions, Worldwatch Paper 89, Washington DC, 1989;
Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: An Agenda for
International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War
Era, 2nd edn, Harvester, Hemel Hempstead, 1991; Ole
Wver, Barry Buzan, Morten Kelstrup and Pierre Le-
maitre, with David Carlton, Identity, Migration and the
New Security Agenda in Europe, Pinter, London, 1993;
J. Ann Tickner, Re-visioning Security, in Ken Booth
and Steve Smith, International Relations Theory Today,
Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995; Ronnie D. Lipschutz,
On Security, in Ronnie D. Lipschutz, ed., On Security,
Columbia University Press, New York, 1995.
5. Yeltsin, cited in Jonathan Steele, The Dream Goes
Cold, Guardian, 17 November 1999; Bill Clinton,
speech at the United Nations, 27 September 1993, and
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Lets Get Together to Halt the
Unravelling of Society, International Herald Tribune,
10 February 1995, both cited in Emma Rothchild, What
is Security?, Daedalus, vol. 124, no. 3, 1995; United
Nations Development Programme, Human Development
Report 1994, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994, pp.
13, 2240; The Commission on Global Governance,
Our Global Neighbourhood, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1995, p. 78. For a range of comments from
within the European Union concerning unemployment,
welfare, law and order, immigration and a whole range
of other issues, as security issues, see Buzan, Wver
and Wilde, Security, pp. 17989.
6. Report of the Independent Commission on International
Development Issues, NorthSouth: A Programme for
Survival, Pan Books, London, 1980, pp. 1245; World
Commission on Environment and Development, Our
Common Future, Oxford University Press, Oxford,
1987, pp. 67, 290304.
7. Charles Leadbetter, Living on Thin Air: The New Econo-
my, Penguin Viking, London, 1999, pp. 157, 226; Elliott
and Atkinson, Age of Insecurity, p. vii.
8. Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of So-
cial Democracy, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 62,
124. Also note Becks comment on the politicization of
security in Democracy Without Enemies, trans. Mark
Ritter, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998, p. 134.
9. Norman Myers, Ultimate Security: The Environmental
Basis of Political Stability, W.W. Norton, New York,
1993. On the same theme, see Michael Renner, Fighting
for Survival: Environmental Decline, Social Conict and
the New Age of Insecurity, Earthscan, London, 1997.
10. Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold
War, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1980, pp. 1946.
11. Recently given new impetus by the National Security
Education Act (1991) which created a $150 million fund
to improve university teaching of area studies and for-
eign languages.
12. Michael Dillon, Politics of Security: Towards a Political
Philosophy of Continental Thought, Routledge, London,
1996, pp. 16, 125.
13. Utilitarianism (1861) and Considerations on Repre-
sentative Government (1861), in Utilitarianism, On Lib-
erty and Considerations on Representative Government,
ed. H.B. Acton, Dent, London, 1972, pp. 50, 355.
14. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence (176264),
ed. R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael and P.G. Stein, Liberty
Fund, Indianapolis, 1982, pp. 405, 412, 540, 7223,
944; Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), trans.
Anne Cohler, Basia Miller and Harold Stone, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1989, Pt 2, Book 12, Ch.
2; also Pt 2, Book 11, Ch. 6; Jeremy Bentham, Principles
of the Civil Code, in The Works of Jeremy Bentham,
Volume I, ed. John Bowring, William Tait, Edinburgh,
1843, pp. 302, 307; also see An Introduction to the Prin-
ciples of Morals and Legislation (1789), in A Fragment
on Government and An Introduction to the Principles
of Morals and Legislation, Blackwell, Oxford, 1960, p.
147.
15. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil So-
ciety (1767), Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh,
1966; Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776), in Rights
of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings,
ed. Mark Philp, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995,
p. 7; Joseph Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles
of Government (1771), in Political Writings, ed. Peter
Miller, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993,
p. 32; William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Politi-
cal Philosophy, R. Faulder, London, 1785, pp. 4445;
and Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action
(1792), ed. J.W. Burrow, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis,
1993, p. 84.
16. Entick v. Carrington (1765), in which the court argued
that the constitution existed to protect liberty and secu-
rity (State Trials, 1765, 1030).
17. Adam Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. R.H. Campbell, A.S. Skin-
ner and W.B. Todd, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, 1979,
pp. 710, 944, see also 456, 910; William Blackstone,
Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. 1, Dawsons,
London, 1966, p. 125.
18. Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, in Karl Marx,
Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor
Benton, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1975, p. 230.
19. Yergin, Shattered Peace, pp. 56, 1213, 196.
20. G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed.
Allen Wood, trans. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1991, paras. 188, 2323, 236, 244,
2489; G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on Natural Right and
Political Science: The First Philosophy of Right: Heidel-
berg, 18171818, trans. J. Michael Stewart and Peter
C. Hodgson, University of California Press, Berkeley,
1995, para. 119; G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures of 18191820,
cited in Allen Wood, Editorial Notes to Philosophy of
Right, p. 453; G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philo-
sophical Sciences (1830), published as The Philosophy
of Mind, trans. William Wallace, Clarendon Press, Ox-
ford, 1971, para. 533; Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise
on the Police of the Metropolis, Etc., 2nd edn, H. Fry,
London, 1796, pp. 357, 42835; Patrick Colquhoun, A
Treatise on Indigence, etc., J. Hatchard, London, 1806,
pp. 78; Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Police of
the Metropolis, Etc., 7th edn, J. Mawman, London, 1806,
pp. Preface, 945, 567, 591601. For a fuller account
of the signicance of Colquhoun and Hegels work on
these issues, see Mark Neocleous, Policing the System
of Needs: Hegel, Political Economy, and the Police of
the Market, History of European Ideas, vol. 24, no. 1,
1998, pp. 4358, and Mark Neocleous, Social Police
and the Mechanisms of Prevention: Patrick Colquhoun
and the Police of the Poor, British Journal of Criminol-
ogy, forthcoming, 2000.
21. Marx, On the Jewish Question, p. 230.
22. Colin Gordon, Governmental Rationality: An Intro-
duction, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter
Miller, eds, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Govern-
mentality, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead,
1991, p. 31.
23. Dillon, Politics of Security, pp. 16, 122.
24. James Der Derian, Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed,
and War, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992, p. 75; R.N. Berki,
Security and Society: Reections on Law, Order and
Politics, Dent, London, 1986, pp. 39, 231; Dillon, Poli-
tics of Security, p. 121.
25. For a fuller account, see Mark Neocleous, The Fabric-
ation of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police
Power, Pluto Press, London, 2000.
26. Respectively: Bauman, In Search of Politics, p. 23;
Jane Wheelock, Who Dreams of Failure? Insecurity in
Modern Capitalism, in Vail et al., eds, Insecure Times,
p. 24; Renner, Fighting for Survival, p. 18; Bill Mc-
Sweeny, Security, Identity and Interests: A Sociology of
International Relations, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1999, pp. 15, 199.
27. Buzan, People, States and Fear, pp. 1920; Buzan,
Wver and Wilde, Security, p. 75.
28. See here Laurence Lustgarten and Ian Leigh, In From the
Cold: National Security and Parliamentary Democracy,
Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994, p. 27.
29. See here William Scheuerman, Globalization and Ex-
ceptional Powers: The Erosion of Liberal Democracy,
Radical Philosophy 93, Jan/Feb 1999, pp. 1424.
30. For similar claims in the context of the environment
and migration respectively, see Daniel Deudney, The
Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and
National Security, Millennium, vol. 19, no. 3, 1990,
pp. 46176; and Jef Huysmans, The Question of the
Limit: Desecuritisation and the Aesthetics of Horror in
Political Realism, Millennium, vol. 27, no. 3, 1998, pp.
56989.
31. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in
Los Angeles, Vintage, London, 1992, pp. 22363. The
use of security cameras in public spaces is a good
example of the ways in which security issues lend them-
selves to corporate and state power. In Britain the evi-
dence for how successful security cameras are in making
us more secure is mixed. The only Home Ofce review
to date found that CCTV had little impact on the crimes
that most concern the public, and that in the areas exam-
ined robbery and theft continued to rise. Nonetheless the
argument that such surveillance renders us more secure
continues to be made, most notably by the corporate
powers which have an economic interest in the sale of
such technology and by the state which has a politi-
cal interest in surveillance indeed, the Home Ofce
press release launching the report made no mention of
any negative ndings, instead choosing to repeat the
platitudes about CCTV reducing crime and therefore the
need for such surveillance. For a discussion of this and
related research, see Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong,
The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV,
Berg, Oxford, 1999, pp. 637.
32. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1887), trans. Wal-
ter Kaufmann, Vintage, New York, 1974, p. 301; Hannah
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1950), Harcourt
Brace, San Diego, 1973, p. 435; Dillon, Politics of Se-
curity, p. 17.
33. R. v. Secretary of State for the Home Secretary, ex parte
Cheblak [1991], All England Law Reports, 1991, vol.
2, p. 334, writing about the internment of Iraqis and
Palestinians during the Gulf War.
34. Huysmans, Question of the Limit, p. 580; David Camp-
bell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and
the Politics of Identity, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 1992.
What is ethical experience for Alain Badiou? What can
be said of the subject who has this experience? Let
me begin by trying to pick out the formal structure
of ethical experience, or what with Dieter Henrich
we can call the grammar of the concept of moral
insight,
1
and explaining how such experience implies
a conception of the subject.
Ethical experience begins with the experience of
a demand to which I give my approval. Approval and
demand: that is, there can be no sense of the good
however that is lled out at the level of content, and
I am understanding it merely formally and emptily
without an act of approval or afrmation. My moral
statement that x is good or bad is of a different order
to the veridical, epistemological claim that I am now
seated in a chair. This is because the moral state-
ment implies an approval of the fact that x is good,
whereas I can be quite indifferent to the chair I am
sitting on. If I say, for example, that it would be good
for parrots to receive the right to vote in elections,
then my saying this implies that I approve of this
development. Practical reason is in this way distinct
from theoretical reason. In Badious terms, the order
of the event (lvnement) is distinct from the order
of being (ltre).
However, if the good only comes into view through
approval, it is not good by virtue of approval. Ethical
noesis requires a noema. In my example, my approval
of parrots receiving the right to vote is related to
the fact that at least in my moral imagination
parrots make a certain demand, the demand for
political representation. Ethical experience is, rst
and foremost, the approval of a demand, a demand
that demands approval. Ethical experience has to be
circular, although hopefully only virtuously so.
Leaving parrots to one side, in the history of phil-
osophy (and also in the history of what Badiou calls
anti-philosophy, namely religion), this formal demand
is lled out with various contents: the Good beyond
Being in Plato, faith in the resurrected Christ in Paul
and Augustine, the fact of reason or the experience
of respect for the moral law in Kant, the certitude
of practical faith as the goal of subjective striving
(Streben) in Fichte, the abyssal intuition of freedom
in Schelling, the creatures feeling of absolute depend-
ency on a creator in Schleiermacher, pity for the
suffering of ones fellow human beings in Rousseau,
or for all creatures in Schopenhauer, eternal return in
Nietzsche, the idea in the Kantian sense for Husserl,
the call of conscience in Heidegger, the claim of the
non-identical in Adorno, and so on.
2
All questions of
normativity and value, whether universalistic (as in
Kant in the categorical imperative, and his latter-day
heirs like Rawls and Habermas) or relativistic (as in
Wittgenstein on rule following and his latter day heirs
like Rorty), follow from such an experience. Without
some experience of a demand that is, without some
experience of a relation to the otherness of a demand
of some sort to which I am prepared to bind myself,
to commit myself, the business of morality would not
get started. There would be no motivation to the good,
the good would not have the power to move the will to
act. Kant calls that which would produce the power to
act, the motivational power to be disposed to the good,
the philosophers stone. What is essential to ethical
experience is that the subject of the demand assents to
that demand, agrees to nding it good, binds itself to
that good and shapes its subjectivity in relation to that
good. A demand meets with an approval. The subject
who approves shapes itself in accordance with that
demand. All questions of value begin here.
Let me take this a little further. If we stay with the
example of Kant, then this dimension of ethical experi-
ence or moral insight the capacity of being motivated
to the good resolves itself, in a rather complex
fashion, in the seemingly contradictory notion of the
Demanding approval
On the ethics of Alain Badiou
Simon Critchley
fact of reason. That is, there is a Faktum which places
a demand on the subject and to which the subject
assents. There is a demand of the good to which the
subject assents, and this demand has an immediate
apodictic certainty that is analogous to the binding
power of an empirical fact (Tatsache). The difference
between the apodicticity of a fact of reason as distinct
from an empirical fact is that the demand of the former
is only evident in so far as the subject approves it. It
is, if you like (and Kant wouldnt), the ction of a fact
constituted through an act of approval. However things
may stand with the doctrine of the fact of reason,
Dieter Henrich argues, rightly I think, that the entire
rational universality of the categorical imperative and
Kantian moral theory follows from this experience of
moral insight. The philosophers stone would consist
precisely in the link between the motivational power
of the fact of reason and the rational universality of
the categorical imperative. Now, because Kants entire
moral theory is based on the principle of autonomy,
the fact of reason has to correspond to the will of the
subject. The fact of reason is a fact, it is the otherness
of a demand, but it has to correspond to the subjects
autonomy. Hence, for Kant, the ethical subject has to
be apriori equal to the demand that is placed on it.
It is arguably this structure that Heidegger repeats
in his analysis of conscience in Being and Time,
where conscience is constituted in the experience of
a demand or appeal that seems to come from outside
Dasein, but which is really only Dasein calling to
itself. Heidegger writes, In conscience Dasein calls
itself.
3
In this sense, the grammar of moral insight in
Heidegger, at least in the analysis of authenticity, would
be an existential deepening of Kantian autonomy.
Heidegger recognizes as a positive necessity the
Faktum that has to be presupposed in any analysis of
Dasein. The Kantian fact of reason here becomes the
ontic-existential testimony, attestation or witnessing
(Zeugnis) of conscience which is relativistically trans-
lated into the key notion of the situation.
4
We can see already, from this little sketch of Kant
and Heidegger, that the claim about ethical experience
being constituted in a demand which I approve is
also a claim about the nature of the self or subject.
The response to the question of ethical experience
entails a response to the question of the subject of that
experience. The self is something that shapes itself
through its relation to whatever is determined as its
good, whether that is the law of Moses, the resurrected
Christ, the suffering other, the intuition of freedom,
the call of conscience, the non-identical, or whatever.
If the demand of the good requires the approval of
that demand, then that approval is given by a self. An
ethical subject can be dened as a self relating itself
approvingly to the demand of the good. For me, the
ethical subject is the name for the way the self relates
itself bindingly to the good.
This claim about the entailment between ethical
experience and the subject can be buttressed by claim-
ing not simply and rather neutrally that the demand
of the good requires approval by a self in order to be
experienced as a demand, but by asserting that this
demand of the good founds the self, or is the funda-
mental organizing principle of the subjects articulation.
What we think of as a self is fundamentally an ethical
subject, a self that is constituted in a certain relation to
a good. This is perhaps best proved negatively through
the experience of failure, betrayal, or evil. Namely, as
Badiou notes, that if I act in such a way that I know
to be evil then I am acting in a manner destructive of
the self that I am, or that I have chosen to be. I have
failed myself or betrayed myself. Once again, such a
claim is quite formal and does not presuppose specic
content for the good. For example, my good could be
permanent revolution, perpetual peace or paedophilia.
This is why Plato is perfectly consequent when he
claims that vice is destructive of self. Anyone, who has
tried and failed to cure themselves of some sort
of addiction, whether cigarettes, alcohol, permanent
revolution or whatever, will understand what is meant
here. The subject that I have chosen to be enters into
conict with the self that I am, producing a divided
experience of self as self-failure and the concomitant
overwhelming affect of guilt. Guilt is the affect that
produces a certain splitting or division in the subject,
which is something that St Paul understood rather
well, For the good that I would I do not: but the evil
which I would not, that I do.
5
Three applications:
Levinas, Lacan, Badiou
Leaving Kant and Heidegger to one side, can this
formal structure of ethical experience can be used
to illuminate other moral theories? I think it can.
Before turning in detail to Badiou, let me make some
remarks on Levinas and Lacan, and attempt a small
rapprochement between them. For Levinas, the core of
ethical experience is, indeed, the demand of a Faktum,
but it is not a Faktum der Vernunft as much as a
Faktum des Anderen, a fact of the other. In Totality
and Innity at least, the name for this fact is the face
of the other. Now Levinass difference from Kant (or
Heidegger for that matter) is that ethical experience
turns around the alterity of a demand that does not
correspond to the subjects autonomy, but that places
that autonomy in question, at least at the ethical level
(although autonomy can be said to come back at the
level of justice, politics and everything that Levinas
gathers under the heading of the third party). What
Levinas tries to articulate in his work is the experi-
ence of a demand to which the subject assents (tu ne
tueras point), but which heteronomously determines
the ethical subject. The ethical subject in Levinas is
constituted through a relation, an act of approval, to
the demand of the good to which it is fundamentally
inadequate. The Levinasian ethical subject chooses to
relate itself to something which exceeds its relational
capacity. This is what Levinas calls le rapport sans
rapport, the relation without relation, the anti-dialecti-
cal core of Levinass work that fails to respect the
principle of non-contradiction that is, how can there
be a relation between beings that remain absolute
within that relation? Logically speaking there cannot,
and yet it is precisely such a relation between persons
that Levinas wants to describe as ethical.
This dimension of ethical experience can be
explored in relation to the theme of trauma in
Levinass Otherwise than Being or Beyond
Essence. What is a trauma? The source of
trauma is a heteronomous event that comes
from outside the self (for example, a terrorist
explosion or an earthquake), but that lives on
in the subject after the fact in, say, traumatic
neurosis. Levinas constructs what he calls an
ethical language, composed of several rather
strange and hyperbolical terms: persecution,
obsession, substitution, hostage and trauma.
Focusing on the notion of trauma allows one
to bring out the links between Levinas and the
psychoanalytic dimensions of ethical experi-
ence, studiously refused by Levinas himself.
But for Levinas, ethics is the dimension of a
traumatic demand, something that comes from
outside the subject, but that leaves its imprint,
trace or mark within the subject. My hetero-
dox but, I think, justied claim in relation to
Levinas is that the condition of possibility for
ethics that is, for the ethical relation to the
other is found in a certain picture of the
subject; that is, it is because of a disposition
of the subject that relatedness to the other is
possible. This is why I privilege Levinass later
work, Otherwise than Being, over his earlier
work, Totality and Innity, for it is here that
ethics is worked out as a theory of the subject,
conceived as the other within the same, and not simply
in terms of the relation to the other.
So, the grammar of moral insight in Levinas is that
ethical responsibility begins with a subject approving
of an impossible demand, or a demand that it could
never meet. This makes responsibility innite and
splits open the subject through an experience of heter-
onomy. I decide to be a subject that I know I cannot
be, I give myself up to a demand that makes an imprint
on me without my ever being fully able to understand
it (you can perhaps already see the psychoanalytic
implications of such a claim). In other words, for
Levinas, ethics is not ontology, which simply means
that the ethical relation to the other that lives on
as an imprint within the subject is not a relation of
comprehension, of totality. So, the notion of ethical
experience that I am trying to elicit in Levinas prod-
uces a certain picture of the subject as fundamentally
split, between itself and a demand which it cannot
meet, but which is nonetheless that by virtue of which
it becomes a subject.
Once this psychoanalytically reconceived account
of the Levinasian ethical subject is in place, it can
be shown that there is a rather interesting homol-
ogy between it and Lacan. There is a formal struc-
ture to ethical experience common to each of them,
although they obviously differ at the level of content,
not to mention their rather different evaluations of
the importance of Freud. What is the basic claim of
Lacans Lthique de la psychanalyse? Lacans thesis
is that the ethical as such is articulated in relation to
the order of the real, which is variously and obscurely
glossed as that which resists, the impossible, that
which always come back to the same place, the limit
of all symbolization, etc. Indeed, this thesis is nessed
in the following, crucial way: namely, that the ethical,
which afrms itself in opposition to pleasure, is articu-
lated in relation to the real in so far as the latter can
be the guarantor of what Lacan calls, following a
certain idiosyncratic and radical reading of Freud,
das Ding, la Chose. The main example of das Ding
in the ethics seminar is the Freudian gure of the
Nebenmensch, the fellow human being, and I think
what we might call a Nebenmensch complex is at
work in both Levinas and Lacan. That is, there is a
Thing at the heart of the subject that denes the subject
in terms of an interior exteriority, as it were, what
Lacan calls something strange or foreign to me that
is at the heart of me.
However, more generally, what is interesting is how
well the ethics of psychoanalysis ts into the structure
of ethical experience and the subject that I have tried
to describe. One might say that psychoanalytic experi-
ence begins with recognition of the demand of the
unconscious, the impingement of unconscious desire.
In the analytic situation, if the analysand has agreed
to the interpretation of the symptom, the Faktum of
this desire provokes an act of approval on the part
of the subject. That is, the ethical subject decides
henceforth to relate itself approvingly to the demand
of its unconscious desire. This demand produces what
I see as the categorical imperative of Lacans ethics
seminar, namely do not give way on its desire (ne
pas cder sur son dsir); do not cease to approve of
the demand that is unconscious desire. For Lacan, as
much as for Kant, it is this act of approval that founds
the subject, where he claims that tout le cheminement
du sujet, the entire itinerary of the subject, articulates
itself around the Thing that shadows the subject. This
is why Lacan can claim that Freudian psychoanalysis,
as much as Kants critical philosophy, subscribes to the
primacy of practical reason. The difference between
Lacan and Kant is that between the heteronomous and
autonomous determinations of the ethical subject. I
will come back to Lacan below, but my psychoanalytic
question to Badiou is whether his ethical theory loses
sight of this dimension of the Thing; that is, whether
his privileging of love over law risks reducing the
traumatic demand to the real to the symbolic order.
6

Turning to Badiou, the structure of ethical experi-
ence described above can be applied to his wonderful
reading of St Paul.
7
What interests Badiou in Paul
is the connection between the subject and the event.
More precisely, Badious question is: what law can
structure a subject deprived of all identity in relation
to an event, of which the only proof is rightly that
a subject declares it. This event is the resurrection of
Christ, something that can only have the status of a
fable for Badiou. What interests Badiou is the notion
of an event which is not empirically demonstrable
in the order of being. The event demands an act of
belief that Paul rightly compares to folly. That is, the
event is a Faktum that is analogous but irreducible to
an empirical Tatsache. Now, the structure of ethical
experience in Badious reading of Paul can be formal-
ized into the following four moments:
1. There is the universality of the demand of the
good, or what Badiou calls the adresse, which is what
Paul calls grace, charis.
2. The charisma of the subject consists in the
declaration of this grace in an act of faith, or what
Badiou prefers to call conviction. Thus, faith is the
arising or coming forth of the subject (surgir du sujet),
a subjective certitude that approves of the demand that
is placed on it.
3. If faith is le surgir du sujet, then love (agape)
is the practical labour of the subject that has bound
itself to its good in faith. The practical maxim of love
is love your neighbour as yourself. That is, if the
human being is justied by faith, then s/he is redeemed
by love. Love is what gives consistency to an ethical
subject, which allows it to persevere with what Badiou
elsewhere calls a process of truth.
4. Love binds itself to justice on the basis of hope
(esprance, elpis). The hope is that justice will be
done and the subjective maxim that this require-
ment of justice produces is, as elsewhere in Badiou,
Continuez! That is, continue to love your neighbour
as yourself. That is, we might dene hope as political
love.
In terms of the account of ethical experience given
above, it is the rst two moments of this structure
that are essential. Ethical experience begins with the
experience of a demand or address, which is the event
of grace, and the subject denes itself by approving
of this event in a declaration of faith. Thus and
this is essential the Christian subject does not
pre-exist the event that it declares. Subject and event
come into being at the same time. As I have already
shown, in ethical experience, the subject denes itself
by binding itself approvingly to the demand that the
good makes on it. For Badiou, it is this feature of
Paulinian Christianity, its singular universality based
on the Faktum of an event irreducible to an empiri-
cal Tatsache, that provides an exemplary gure for
contemporary political militancy.
The place of ethics in Badious system
With this in mind, I would now like to turn to the
more detailed account of ethical experience presented
in Lthique: Essai sur la conscience du Mal.
8
The
eighty pages of Badious Ethics fall, very roughly,
into two parts: (1) a refreshingly direct presentation
and critique of the so-called return to ethics in
contemporary French philosophy; and (2) an exposition
of Badious ethical theory in relation to the problem
of evil. Consequent upon this division of the argu-
ment, the intention of Ethics is twofold: (1) to show
how the contemporary ination of ethics in French
philosophy is a symptom of a more general nihilism;
and (2) to provide a quite other meaning to ethics, by
relating it not to abstractions, like Man, God or the
Other, but to concrete situations. That is, for Badiou,
what is ethical is the production of durable maxims
for singular and determinate processes, what he calls
processes of truth.
The subtext of the opening chapter is a counter-
critique of the return to ethics in the critique of la
pensee 68 found in the work of Luc Ferry and Alain
Renaut, but also les nouveaux philosophes, Bernard-
Henri Lvy and Andr Glucksmann. Badiou rightly
understands the critique of la pense 68, based on
a defence of human rights, democracy and individual-
ism, as a reactionary response to the foundering of
revolutionary Marxism in France. Badiou defends
the anti-humanism of Foucault, Althusser and Lacan
because it was complicit with the critique of (and
rebellion against) the established order, whereas the
critique of la pensee 68, with its defence of ethics, of
the individual and human rights, is simply, for him, at
the service of ofcial Western ideology. For Badiou,
with some justication, the contemporary return to
ethics is essentially a return to Kant and to a Kantian
conception of the subject of the moral law as universal
and context-free and not situationally bound. Reading
Kantianism a little too straightforwardly as an ethical
formalism, Badiou basically runs a Hegelian-Marxist
critique against this position by claiming that a neo-
Kantian ethics is incapable of thinking the singularity
of situations and of being orientated to praxis. Beneath
the de-contextualized pallor of contemporary neo-
Kantianism, Badiou detects in its ethical universalism
an implicit apologia for Western ideology in so far as
all human beings are judged according to the same
standards: Western standards. Badiou also tags on the
more Nietzschean thesis that the traditional notion of
ethics turns human beings into victims. It is an ethics
of ressentiment, of blaming the other and self-blame
(in the auto-laceration of conscience), of reactive rather
than active forces, in Deleuzes sense.
Against the neo-Kantianism implicit in the con-
temporary return to ethics, Badiou poses three theses:
(1) that the human being identies itself, in the Freud-
ian sense (we are always-already intersubjectively
situated), through an afrmative thinking by action
rather than reaction by singular truths, that is, truths
that arise from and apply to singular situations. (2) It
is from this afrmative, processual character of the
human, and its ethics of truths, that one is to deter-
mine, and determine positively, the Good. Namely,
that evil is derived from this good by privation and
not vice versa, which is a view that Badiou attributes
to Kant. Badiou reads Kantian ethics, with Hegel, as
a form of ethical stoicism in an evil world devoid of
value. (3) Badiou writes, All humanity enroots itself
in the identication in thought of singular situations;
9

that is, there is no ethics in general, there is only an
ethics of processes whereby one deals with possible
courses of action that arise in a specic situation.
The question posed in the second chapter of Ethics
is whether the contemporary ethics of the Other, habit-
ually derived from Levinas, disrupts this critique.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, Badious response is negative,
and it must be said that the critique of Levinas is
rather violent and certainly contestable. However, he
does make a good point in claiming that in order
for the relation between the Same and the Other to
escape from the narcissistic and aggressive logic of
identication described by Lacan in the Mirror Stage,
there is a requirement that the alterity of the Other be
supported by an alterity or exteriority that transcends
nite human alterity. This alterity is that of the tout-
autre, namely God. This move enables Badiou to make
his coup de grce (although he is not the rst to make
it), namely that ethics as rst philosophy is dependent
upon an axiom derived from religion. Thus, Levinass
claim that ethics is rst philosophy subordinates phil-
osophy to theology. This is not wrong, although there
are other ways of reading Levinas: for example, my
way, where I try and read Levinas through the catego-
ries of psychoanalysis. But lets suppose that Badiou
is right, that ethics is a category of pious discourse,
then wouldnt Levinas simply be another in that long
line of anti-philosophes, like St Paul, Luther, Pascal,
Rousseau, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, some of whom
he elsewhere praises? On this point, let me attempt
a small criticism in terms of what are for Badiou
the four conditions of philosophy: art, mathematics,
politics and love.
For Badiou, quite simply, there is no God. This is
also to say that the One is not.
10
Hence, multiplicity
is the general law of being, what Badiou means by
tre. Every situation is a multiplicity composed of an
innity of elements. Given this facticity of the mul-
tiple, the order of the event as the realm of the subject
distinct from being is characterized by a return to the
Same. For Badiou, the Same is not what is simply
given tre but rather ce qui advient, that which
comes to itself in relation to the facticity and alterity of
multiplicity. What Badiou sees as the tre immortel of
each singularity is its capacity for the true, that is, to
become this Same that constructs itself, that ad-venes
to itself, through the processual character of Sameness.
A subject is not something that I am, it is something
that I become, that comes to itself in a process of
becoming. Thus, for Badiou, there is only an ethics
of truths, that is, an ethics of processes of truths, of
the labour that allows truths to ad-vene to the world.
Ethics in general does not have any validity. Thus,
although Badious ethical theory is highly formalistic,
it only takes on esh in relation to specic and by
denition variable situational conditions. That which
is ethical, then, corresponds to what Badiou adjudges
as the four sole conditions for philosophy: politics,
love, mathematics, poetry.
This brings me back to the question of religion. If it
is granted that religion, at least for St Paul but perhaps
also for Levinas, is anti-philosophical, then I do not
see why it cannot be a condition for ethical action.
Obviously for Paul, Pascal and others, like Luther and
Kierkegaard, religion plays precisely this role and it
is privileged because it is anti-philosophical. In this
sense, at the very least, one would have to admit that
in addition to the four conditions of philosophy that
are also conditions for ethical action, one needs to add
a fth, namely religion. Yet, one might want to go
further and claim that precisely because of the exem-
plary way in which the logic of the event plays itself
out in relation to Paul, namely that Pauls notion of
grace shows most clearly the subjectivity of the event,
religion is perhaps the paradigm of ethical action,
a paradigm upon which the
other four conditions should
be modelled.
11
In terms of my account of
ethical experience, Badious
ethics is an entirely formal
theory, a grammar of
ethical experience, and not
a specic determination of
the good. However, what is
motivating this formalism is
a theory of the subject that
has strong normative conno-
tations located in Badious
Beckettian formula il faut
continuer although the
specic content given to the
good is subject-relative. As
I have shown, every account of ethical experience
has at its base a demand on the self to which the
self assents. The ethical subject is the name for this
structure. Ethics, for Badiou, cannot be premissed
upon any pre-given account of the subject, because the
subject is not something that one is, it is something
that one becomes. One can only speak of the subject
as a subject in becoming or a becoming-subject. As
Nietzsche, the shadowy twin to St Paul, would say:
werde was du bist!
For Badiou, we are simply the sort of animals who
are claimed by circumstances to become a subject.
What are those circumstances? For Badiou, they are
the circumstances of a truth. What are they? These
circumstances cannot be what there is. What there is
for Badiou is the factical-being-multiple of the world, a
plurality irreducible to any theological principle, henol-
ogy or even post-ontotheological singulare tantum.
Thus, the circumstances of the
being-multiple of the world do not,
for Badiou, place a claim or demand
on the subject. A subject which
is that which becomes demands
something more; it demands that
something happens that supple-
ments its insertion into that which
is. Badiou calls this supplement an
event, hence the distinction between
ltre and lvnement. Thus, the
event is what calls a subject into
being, into the creation of a truth,
whereas being is that which simply
is, which is the order of episteme in
Plato, which is to be explained by
mathematics. As Badiou states in
the initial thesis of Ltre et lvnement: ontology is
accomplished historically as mathematics.
12
Let us just note en passant that this founding
dualism of being and the event might raise certain
philosophical worries. First, simply because it is a
dualism and hence, in Heideggers terms, splits the
phenomenon of being-in-the-world. Second, in so far
as it does split the phenomenon, Badious theory might
bear a certain family resemblance to other dualisms,
for example that of the Sartrean dualism of en soi and
pour soi by which, Badiou confesses at the beginning
of his little book on Beckett, he was attracted in his
youth: I was a perfect Sartrean.
13
Third, the dualism
of being and event risks reproducing the Kantian or
early Wittgensteinian distinction of pure and practical
reason, between the ontological order of knowledge,
explicable through logical form, and the ethical order
of truth, an ethical order which, like that of Kant
and perhaps more particularly Fichte, is based on an
innite Streben: Continuez!
The logic of the event
virtuously or viciously circular?
Badious theory of ethical experience and the subject
of that experience turns entirely on his account of the
event. I would now like to bring out the logic of this
event, a circular logic, although hopefully only virtu-
ously circular. On this basis, certain critical questions
can be raised.
From the standpoint of being, the event is, one
might say, invisible (I cant think of a better word,
but this is not satisfactory). That is, there is only an
event for the subject who assents to the event, who
declares it, and who denes its subjectivity in terms of
a delity to the event. The event is the event only for
the subject who pledges itself to the event. But and
this is important this is not to say that the event is
the act of the subject, or that the event is the subjects
invention. Rather, the event is an event for a subject
who carries out the act that binds its subjectivity
to that event, who denes its subjectivity through a
delity to the event.
The event is only visible to the subject who decides
to pledge its subjectivity to that event. For example,
the event of Christs resurrection is just not visible
as such to the non-believer, who sees only an empty
tomb. This is not to say that Christs resurrection
did not take place we have read enough Pascal to
keep a rather selshly open mind on such matters
but that it only becomes an event for the subject
who pledges itself to the event, for the subject who
has pistis, the conviction of faith. In a similar way,
the event of the French Revolution does not appear
as a revolution to the opponent of the revolution, say
the supporter of the ancien rgime. For the latter, the
revolution is only visible as chaos and disorder. The
event of the French Revolution is not the same event
for Edmund Burke as for Thomas Paine. Analogously,
multinational global capitalism looks like chaos to its
insurrectionary opponent, whereas it looks like order
to the capitalist. To put this into a formula: the event
is not the mere act of a subject, but it only becomes
an event through a subjective act.
On the question of the reality of the event,
thinking of St Pauls faith in the event of Christs
resurrection, Badiou emphasizes that the only proof
of the event is the subject who declares it. What
interests Badiou is a notion of an event which is not
empirically demonstrable in the order of being. As
Erasmus another anti-philosopher emphasizes in
his Encomium Moriae, if Christs crucixion and
resurrection was an act of folly, then such madness
is all the more true of the Christian who decides to
make the leap of faith. The only evidence for Pauls
leap of faith is the presence of grace, which is hardly
a strong empirical guarantee.
Of course, there are events and events, and Badious
choice of Paul as a paradigm for the event is all the
more compelling because his act of faith is so strange
to the modern atheist. For example, I can imagine
pledging myself more easily to the event French Revo-
lution than I can to the event Christs Resurrection.
But that, of course, is to miss the point. The choice of
Paul is intended to show the extreme subject-depend-
ency of the event. Thinking of Wallace Stevenss poem
The Idea of Order at Key West, an event is an idea
of order, it is something that we impose on the world,
the grid through which and in terms of which we see
it. But the event is also what makes the world a world
for us, that is to say, a meaningful world: She was the
single articer of the world/ In which she sang. And
when she sang, the sea, / Whatever self it had, became
the self/ That was her song, for she was the maker.
Then we,/ As we beheld her striding there alone, /
Knew that there never was a world for her/ Except
the one she sang and, singing, made.
How to distinguish a true from a false
event the question of hegemony
The eventhood of the event is the consequence of a
decision. For Badiou, a subject is the always local
occurrence of a process of truth, and the subject binds
itself to a process of truth, an event, on the basis of
a decision. Now, I have a couple of questions on this
notion of decision. But let me try and formalize my
argument in order to recapitulate what I have said so
far and to make one further step:
1. First, the logic of the event, as I have tried to
describe it, is very close to the description of ethical
experience given above. The logic of the event cor-
responds to the structure of ethical experience.
2. The consequence of this argument is that every
event is an ethical event. That is, every exception to
the order of being belongs to the domain of practical
rather than theoretical reason.
3. In this sense, the circularity of the logic of the
event is not a problem, it is just the way it is, the
very nature of practical reason. The event, like ethical
experience, is virtuously and not viciously circular.
4. But if that is the case, then my question is very
simple: how can one speak of the event as an event of
truth, or a process of truth? Let me try and explain.
If the event is the consequence of a decision, namely
the decision to dene ones subjectivity in terms of a
delity to the event, then this event is true only in
the sense that it is true for a subject that has taken
this decision (true = true for a subject). Now, if that
argument is valid, then how and in virtue of what is
one to distinguish a true event from a false event?
That is, I dont see how on the basis of Badious
criteria we could ever distinguish a true event from
a false event. The only realm of superior evidence to
which such questions can be referred is the order of
being, which is apriori excluded from discussions of
the event. As Badiou admits in his Dictionary at
the end of Ltre et lvnement, there is therefore
no contrary to the true.
14
But if there is no way of
distinguishing truth from falsity at the level of the
event, then might we not be better advised to stop
talking about truth in this domain?
One inference from this argumentation let us call
it the pragmatist inference would be the following.
We might imagine the pragmatist saying Sure, we
cannot distinguish between a true and a false event.
True just means true for a subject who decides in
favour of this event. False just means that the subject
decides not to dene itself in terms of such an event,
and perhaps to dene what is true for it in terms of
explicit opposition to such a perceived falsehood.
Now, if one accepts this pragmatist inference that
is, if true just means true for the subject then why not
go on to conclude that every event is the consequence
of what Gramsci or Ernesto Laclau would call a
hegemonic articulation? That is, why not conclude
that every event is the consequence of a decision to
relate oneself to the situation in a certain way, and
that every decision is a hegemonic act. Therefore,
otherwise stated, my question is how and in virtue of
what is one to distinguish between truth and hegem-
onic articulation in Badious theory of the event? Isnt
Badious talk of truth in ethical and political matters
simply, as Wittgenstein would say, a way of talking,
and doesnt it risk obscuring the real question in ethics
and politics, which is that of power?
Allow me a nal series of questions on the decision.
If the eventhood of the event is the consequence of a
decision, then how might that decision be character-
ized? Is a decision something taken by a subject?
Badiou, it seems to me, would happily say Yes. But
if that is the case, then doesnt the notion of decision
have to presuppose some conception of the subject
dened in terms of an active, virile will, as it does,
say, in Carl Schmitt? That is, doesnt Badious concept
of the decision have to presuppose some notion of an
autarkic will? Obviously, if this criticism is justied,
then it would have signicant political consequences,
particularly as the very concept of the political depends
on how we understand the voluntaristic power of deci-
sion.
The heroism of the decision Badiou and
psychoanalysis
Against this (and I am thinking of Derridas reading
of Schmitt in Politics of Friendship), can one, should
one, not try and rethink the concept of decision,
and hence the concept of the political in terms of a
passive or unconscious decision, what we might call
the decision of the other in me? That is, rather than
thinking of the decision taken by the subject, might
we not do better to think of the subject taken by the
decision? In this sense, the decision is an event with
regard to which I am passive, the decision taken by the
other in me, a decision based not on a sheer autarkic
act of will, or even a Faktum der Vernunft, as much
as what one might call a Faktum des Anderen, a fact
of the other.
15
Such a position on the decision would seem to be
entailed by the very logic of Badious position. There
is, I think, the risk of a certain heroism of the decision
in Badious work, a heroism enshrined in the central
maxim of his ethics: Continuez! Yet this heroism can
be avoided by another understanding of Badiou that
can be seen by considering his relation to Lacanian
psychoanalysis.
In Ethics, Badiou provides a formal denition of
an ethics of truths: the ethical is dened as the free
submission to a principle that decides to continue
with a process of truth. In relation to psychoanalysis,
we might say that the ethics of the psychoanalytic
situation consists in the decision to continue in the
process of the transferential interpretative situation
under the normative constraint of a desire which is not
to be given way on. More generally, the ethical is that
which gives consistency to the presence of someone
(the specic, punctual individual that pledges itself to
a process of subjectivization) in the composition of
the subject that effectuates the process of truth. This
ethical consistency on the part of someone is a delity
to a process of subjectivization that is in excess of
that someone. It passes through the specic, punctual
individual, but the latter cannot exhaust or fully know
it. The someone is ethically committed to a process
of subjectivization that exceeds its knowledge, and is,
to this extent, unconscious.
But if this is the case, then the subject has to
commit itself to a process of truth that is in part
unconscious. That is, the subject has to commit itself
to a decision that has already been taken within me,
mon insu, as it were. This takes us back to Lacans
ethics of psychoanalysis. Badiou reads Lacans ethical
imperative from Seminar VII, do not give way on
its desire, as do not give way on that of oneself
one does not know. For Badiou, the someone who
embarks upon a path of subjectivization is seized by
a process of truth that cannot be cognitively or reec-
tively exhausted. Thus, the someone has to be faithful
to a delity that it cannot understand, which is one
way of understanding the analytic pact of transference
in psychoanalysis, namely to give oneself over to a
process of interpretation of which one does not know
the outcome.
Badiou claims, with some justication, that this
is an ethics of the real in so far as the real is of the
order of the rencontre for Lacan. It is that which we
cannot know, what resists symbolization, where das
Ding addresses and claims the subject without the
subject being able to address and claim it. Of course,
as Lacan shows in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, the
prime gure for das Ding in Freud is the fellow human
being, der Nebenmensch; that is, in my language, the
ethical relation to the other person is a relation to
the Real.
In this sense, the heroism of the decision in Badiou
can be avoided by showing that ethical decisions always
confront elements of the Real that are irreducible to the
conscious will. The decision is taken with regard to
the other within me, the Faktum of unconscious desire.
However, there is a problem in Badious understanding
of Lacanian psychoanalysis, which I alluded to above
when I said that his ethical theory risks losing sight
of the dimension of the Thing. Badiou claims that his
theory is an ethics of the real in so far as the real is
of the order of the rencontre for Lacan; it is what we
cannot know, that which resists symbolization, where
das Ding addresses and claims the subject without the
subject being able to address and claim it. This is the
structure of the fellow human being complex installed
at the heart of the Lacanian and Levinasian ethical
subject as its Law.
Now, although Badiou describes his theory as an
ethics of the real, my question is: isnt this traumatic
dimension of the Thing as the Law that divides the
subject overcome in Badiou through his emphasis
on love? This is revealed particularly clearly in his
reading of St Paul, where Badiou writes in his seventh
theorem, The subjective process of a truth is the sole
and same thing as the love of that truth.
16
That is, the
way in which a subject relates itself to the event is
through an act of love that overcomes the dimension
of Law, which is always identied with death: the
rst of the names of death is the Law.
17
In this sense,
Badious moral theory would be structurally Christian,
whereas Lacan and Levinas would be structurally
Judaic in so far as their conception of ethics is based
around a dimension of Law that cannot be overcome
through the work of love.
Let me put the same criticism another way. On the
one hand, Badiou would seem to grant that there has
to be a dimension of what he calls the unnameable
(linnomable) in all ethical action: the Good is only
Good insofar as it does not claim to make the world
good.
18
In this sense, the subject always confronts ele-
ments of the real, aspects of the situation that remain
inaccessible to it. Yet, on the other hand, how is this
claim consistent with the emphasis on love, which
would seem to entail the overcoming of the law of
the Real in an act of almost mystical identication
with the vnement? That is, in Lacanian terms, isnt
there a risk of a reduction of the order of the Real to
the Symbolic through Badious emphasis on love? This
is revealed most clearly perhaps in Badious seeming
hostility to the death drive as the basic law of the
unconscious in Freud and Lacan.
19
Two things are
revealed here: (a) the structural Judaism of psycho-
analysis is conrmed through its preoccupation with
the unsurpassable character of the death drive, the Law
and the Real, a fact that would simply conrm my
attempted rapprochement between Levinas and Lacan;
(b) the structurally Christian character of Badious
work is revealed in what is perhaps its most attractive
feature, namely its persistent and restless afrmation
of life and its refusal of the tragic pathos of Lacanian
psychoanalysis in the name of courage and energy. In
this sense, Lacan would be closer to Levinas than to
Badiou. But maybe for precisely this reason Lacan,
Levinas and everybody else should try and be closer
to Badiou. Let me try to explain myself by turning to
the question of comedy.
Beckett as comic anti-hero
against tragedy
Returning to the question of heroism, I would like to
wager a nal series of questions on the gure whom
I would choose to see as the real hero of Badious
work, not St Paul but Samuel Beckett. Let me quote
from Badious Theses on the Theatre:
I do not believe that the principal questions of our
epoch are horror, suffering, destiny or despair. We
are saturated with them and the fragmentation of
these terms into theatrical ideas is incessant. Our
question is that afrmative courage, of local energy.
To seize hold of a point and to maintain it. Our
question is therefore less that of the conditions for
a modern tragedy than those for a modern comedy.
Beckett understood this, whose theatre, correctly
performed, is hilarious.
20
It is true, Beckett understood this very well; but have
we really understood Beckett? Let me take a small
sideways step to try and explain myself. Ethics, for
Badiou, is that which governs our lives as subjects,
what gives them consistency, and its only maxim
is Continuez! Submission to this ethical principle
involves a certain asceticism, a certain renunciation,
but this is only at the service of our desire, which
sometimes seems close to Spinozas notion of conatus
essendi. As is well known, and in delity to a largely
German tradition that stretches back from Heidegger
to Hegel and Hlderlin, Lacans prime example of
someone who acts in accordance with their desire and
who continues is Antigone. She exemplies the pos-
ition of being entre deux morts which, for Lacan, best
describes the situation of human nitude. Antigone is
the heroine of Lacanian psychoanalysis that is, she
is possessed by that transgressive ate or madness that
enables her to stand out against the conformism of the
state, where all ethical action is reduced to what Lacan
calls le service des biens (the service of goods), and
achieve an authentic relation to nitude.
Now, I have problems with Antigone, not so much
with her personage, but with its exemplarity. I have
elsewhere attempted to criticize Lacan for employ-
ing tragedy as his paradigm of sublimation, arguing
that the reading of Antigone in Seminar VII makes
psychoanalysis the inheritor of a tragic paradigm that
stretches back to Schellings Identity Philosophy.
21
I
criticize this paradigm for making nitude too heroic,
where the tragic heroine achieves a certain purication
of desire in the experience of being-towards-death.
Inspired by Lacoue-Labarthes anti-Heideggerian
reading of Hlderlins translation of the Antigone, I
call this the tragic-heroic paradigm.
22
I argue that a
quite different picture of nitude emerges if we focus
on the phenomena of the comic and humour. The
picture of nitude that I want to recommend is not
accessible in the form of tragic afrmation, but rather
comic acknowledgement, the acknowledgement of the
ubiquity of the nite, but also its ungraspability. My
approval of the demand of nitude is not equal to that
demand, but makes that demand even more demand-
ing. To put this in a formula, I think that humour
is a form of minimal sublimation that corresponds
to the structure of depression in the Freudian sense,
but which is not at all depressing. On the contrary,
Freud concludes his essay on humour by claiming that
humour dark, sardonic, wicked humour is liberat-
ing and elevating. Look!, he concludes, Here is the
world, which seems so dangerous! It is nothing but a
game for children just worth making a jest about.
23

Ethical subjectivity is comic rather than tragic.
To return to Badiou, what interests me in his work
is the link between afrmative ethical courage and
comedy as the form of aesthetic sublimation that
would best exemplify this ethical stance. This is what
Beckett understood so well and it is why his tragi-
comedy which is how he describes Godot uses
the strategy of humour, hilarity and drlerie to attain
an ethical stance of courage and love of humanity. As
Badiou rightly writes, Beckett has to be played in the
most intense drlerie and it is only then that the
true destination of the comic comes into view: not a
symbol, not a disguised metaphysics, still less a deri-
sion, but a powerful love for human obstinacy, for an
insatiable desire.
24
Thus, for Badiou, it is the strange
cast of characters who populate Becketts ction and
theatre that best exemplify the maxim Continuez!: I
must go on, I cant go on, I will go on.
I couldnt agree more. And yet, I have a question on
this interpretation of Beckett. For Badiou, Beckett prac-
tises a form of methodical asceticism that reduces all
ethical considerations to the bare maxim: Continuez!
25

The problem I have here is that this makes Beckett
sound like a stoic. Now, although there are obviously
strongly stoical elements of discipline, denial, rigour
and exactitude in his work, I dont think that Beckett is
only a stoic. That is, Beckett does not just say il faut
continuer, but also je ne peux pas continuer. What
is perhaps the most characteristic feature of Becketts
writing is not just the decision to continue, but also
the acknowledgement that I cannot continue. That is
to say, Becketts prose is characterized by an aporetic
rhythm of continuity and discontinuity, of being able
to go on and not being able to go on. This aporetic
rhythm is the very movement of Becketts writing,
what he calls a syntax of weakness, a self-undoing
language that cannot go on and cannot but go on, that
continues in its failure, and continues as that failure.
For example, Live and invent. I have tried, Invent.
It is not the word. Neither is live. No matter. I have
tried.
26
Or a longer example,
What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do,
in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure and
simple? Or by afrmations and negations invalid-
ated as uttered, or sooner or later. Generally speak-
ing. There must be other shifts. Otherwise it would
be quite hopeless. But it is quite hopeless. I should
mention without going any further that I say aporia
without knowing what it means. Can one be ephec-
tic otherwise than unawares? I dont know.
27
But this syntax of weakness is at its most explosive
when it becomes a comic syntax. For example, Clov
to Hamm in Endgame, Do you believe in the life to
come?; Hamm to Clov, Mine was always that. Got
him that time.
28
Or again, as I began with talk of
parrots, here is Molloy on Lousses parrot:
Fuck the son of a bitch, fuck the son of a bitch. He
must have belonged to an American sailor, before
he belonged to Lousse. Pets often change masters.
He didnt say much else. No, Im wrong, he also
said, Putain de merde! He must have belonged to a
French sailor before he belonged to the American
sailor. Putain de merde! Unless he had hit on it
alone, it wouldnt surprise me. Lousse tried to make
him say, Pretty Polly! I think it was too late. He
listened, his head on one side, pondered, then said,
Fuck the son of a bitch. It was clear he was doing
his best.
29

Becketts work is characterized by a syntax of
weakness, a comic syntax that continues and then
decides not to continue, simply to realize that it cannot
not continue and that it must continue. It is this
experience, like that of Vladimir and Estragon trying
and failing to hang themselves in Godot, that is so
comically tragic, or tragically comic. But if that is the
case, then there are two conicting norms in Becketts
work: on the one hand, there is Continuez!, and on
the other hand, Ratage! The logic of Becketts work
follows the aporetic rhythm of these two imperatives.
The courage to continue does not simply derive from
a stoical act of ascetic will, from some Spinozist
conatus essendi or Fichtean Streben, but rather from
the continual experience of failure: Try again, fail
again, fail better.
Let me try one last time. There seems to be a
residual heroism at work in Badiou, the heroism of
resistance and militant activism: St Paul, Jean Cavail-
ls, or Georges Canguilhem. But this doesnt seem
to be Becketts world, lled as it is with anti-heroic
personages, a gallery of moribunds who seem riveted
to the spot, unable to move: Murphy, Molloy, Malone,
Mahood, Watt and Worm. But is such blatant inactivity
another form of resistance? Might not Becketts heroes
best exemplify what it would mean to be, in Badious
allusion to Mallarm, militants of restrained action?
30

Now, I would quite like to be a militant of restrained
action, particularly as it doesnt sound too demanding,
but what is it exactly?
The question of heroism is urgent because the
stakes are not just ethical, they are political. As Badiou
admits at the beginning and end of his Abrg de
mtapolitique, true politics is rare, the last good exam-
ple being 1968.
31
Perhaps this is true, but nevertheless
what I suspect in Badiou is the seduction of a great
politics, the event that would, in Nietzsches words,
break history in two. But perhaps the epoch of great
politics, like the epoch of great art for Heidegger and
Hegel, is over. Perhaps. And perhaps that is a good
thing. Perhaps we have had enough of the virile,
Promethean politics of the will, the empty longing
for total revolution. To be seduced by great politics is
to risk nostalgically blinding oneself to the struggles
of the present. As such, the seduction risks being
politically disempowering. What we have to hope for,
in Pauls sense of the word, is the knowledge that it is,
in Becketts words, all quite hopeless. But such hope-
lessness is not resignation and could provide a bridge
to another model of politics, what I would see as a
micro-politics of continual interruption, interruptions
both internal to civil society and internationally at a
trans-state level. Such interruptions would be move-
ments of dissensual emancipatory praxis that work
against the consensual horizon of the state. Perhaps
we have to content ourselves with smaller actions and
smaller victories, an everyday and heroically anti-
heroic militancy. We have to learn to expect much
more from much less. To my mind, such a politics is
not approached through the gure of the tragic hero
lofty, solitary, derelict and unheimlich but rather
through what Badiou calls the humoristic pragmatism
of Beckett. As Malone quips in what I would like to
imagine as an ironic response to St Paul, For why
be discouraged, one of the thieves was saved, that is
a generous percentage.
32

Notes
1. Dieter Henrich, The Concept of Moral Insight and
Kants Doctrine of the Fact of Reason, in The Unity
of Reason, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA,
1994, pp. 5587. I would like to thank Alain Badiou,
Barbara Cassin, Charles Ramond, Sandra Laugier and
other participants at a conference on Badiou held in
Bordeaux in October 1999 for their critical responses
to a French version of this paper. I would like to thank
Jay Bernstein for rst alerting me to the rich potential
of Henrichs argument for contemporary moral theory
and Peter Osborne for an acute critical reading of the
rst draft of this article.
2. The philosopher who doesnt really t in this list is
Hegel, who rejects the Kantian version of moral insight
in the strongest terms as that cold duty, the last un-
digested log in our stomach, a revelation given to reason
(quoted in Henrich, The Concept of Moral Insight, p.
69). However, one might say that the notion of moral
insight in Hegel is the awareness of freedom as the self-
consciousness of Spirit in its historical development,
something to be learned by consciousness by recapitu-
lating the experiences described in the Phenomenology
of Spirit. In other words, moral insight would be identical
with the achievement of rational self-determination.
3. Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson,
Blackwell, Oxford, 1962, p. 20; German pagination p.
275.
4. Ibid., p. 358; German pagination p. 310.
5. Romans 7:19.
6. A very similar line of criticism of Badiou can be found
in Slavoj Z
ieks The Ticklish Subject, Verso, London

and New York, 1999; see ch. 3 The Politics of Truth,
or, Alain Badiou as a Reader of St Paul, pp. 12770.
7. Saint Paul: Le fondation de luniversalisme, Presses
Universitaires de France, Paris, 1997.
8. Lthique: Essai sur la conscience du Mal, Hatier, Paris,
1993.
9. Ibid., p. 18.
10. Ibid., p. 25.
11. For a useful critique of Badiou on this question of
religion, see Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Cantor, Lacan,
Mao, Beckett, mme combat: The philosophy of Alain
Badiou, Radical Philosophy, 93, 1999, pp. 613.
12. Ltre et lvnement, Seuil, Paris, 1988, pp. 910.
The same thought is expressed in the Court trait de
lontologie transitoire, Seuil, Paris, 1998, p. 189.
13. Beckett: Lincrevable dsir, Hachette, Paris, 1995.
14. Ltre et lvnement, p. 561.
15. I have argued for such a view in detail in the nal chapter
of my EthicsPoliticsSubjectivity, Verso, London and
New York, 1999. See also my Remarks on Derrida and
Habermas, forthcoming in Constellations.
16. Saint Paul, p. 97.
17. Ibid., p. 78.
18. Lthique, p. 75.
19. A more detailed version of this line of criticism can be
found in Z
iek, The Ticklish Subject, pp. 14567.

20. Petit Manuel dinesthtique, Seuil, Paris, 1998, p. 117
18.
21. The most succinct version of this argument can be found
in Comedy and Finitude: Displacing the TragicHeroic
Paradigm in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, Constel-
lations, vol. 6, no. 1, 1999, pp. 10822
22. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Metaphrasis, Presses Uni-
versitaires de France, Paris, 1997.
23. Sigmund Freud, Humour, trans. J. Rivire, Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sig-
mund Freud, vol. 21, p. 166.
24. Beckett: Lincrvable dsir, pp. 745.
25. Ibid., p. 19.
26. Samuel Beckett, The Trilogy (Malloy, Malone Dies, The
Unnameable), Picador, London, 1979, p. 179.
27. Ibid., p. 267.
28. Samuel Beckett, Engame, Faber, London, 1958, p. 35.
29. Beckett, Trilogy, p. 36.
30. Abrg de mtapolitique, Seuil, Paris, 1998, p. 118.
31. Ibid., pp. 17, 167.
32. Beckett, Trilogy, p. 233.

Primordial Being
Enlightenment, Schopenhauer and the Indian
subject of postcolonial theory
Chetan Bhatt
century Enlightenment philosophers others could
have been chosen considered the place of India
and some of its religions and philosophies in their
grand civilizational, cultural and philosophical chrono-
graphies. This is a difcult area whose complexities
can be elided by the easier claim that there was no
comparative philosophical project. Can the claims of
postcolonial theory be unied with statements such as
the following made by Arthur Schopenhauer, the main
focus of this article?
Kants philosophy is therefore the only one with
which a thorough acquaintance is positively as-
sumed in what is to be here discussed. But if in
addition to this the reader has dwelt for a while in
the school of the divine Plato, he will be the bet-
ter prepared to hear me, and the more susceptible
to what I say. But if he has shared in the benets
of the Vedas, access to which [was] opened to us
by the Upanishads if, I say, the reader has also
already received and assimilated the divine inspira-
tion of ancient Indian wisdom, then he is best of all
prepared to hear what I have to say to him.
2

The function of the subaltern artice is another
aspect of postcolonial theory that is implicitly criti-
cized below. In postcolonial theory, the genuinely
subaltern cannot be gured as the subject of human-
ism and cannot be brought into any kind of repre-
sentation-in-itself within the universal discourses of
humanism or reason. The word of the Indian subaltern
can seem like an ever-delayed moment of revelation
that functions to provide the theoretical integrity of
postcolonial theory. However, this unrepresentability
is also applied rather widely by Spivak to a range
of evidently non-subaltern phenomena, including the
livedness of everyday Hinduism as well as Vedantic
theological debates which, it is claimed, can at best
only be inauthentically simulated in Western humanist
Postcolonial theory, especially in the writings of
Gayatri Spivak, has undertaken intricate critiques of
specically Western Enlightenment humanism and
foundationalism and by extension the broad European
philosophical tradition. While postcolonial theory in
its deconstructive mode can face many ways at once
in its claims about the West, Europe and (post)colonial
India, it contains some consistent themes that can
sharply demarcate European Enlightenment, conceived
as science, truth, rationality and humanism, from its
truly abject other, the colonized or the genuinely sub-
altern that can only be impossibly, if ever, articulated
by or heard within humanist, rationalist paradigms.
Spivak, for example, draws a very clear distinction
between a universalizing German philosophical tradi-
tion and the world of the non-European, the former
representing untainted and irreducibly Eurocentric
philosophy that did not have a concern with com-
parative discipline:
Cultural and intellectual Germany, the place of
self-styled difference from the rest of what is still
understood as continental Europe and Britain,
was the main source of the meticulous scholarship
that established the vocabulary of proto-archetypal
(comparative in the disciplinary sense) identity, or
kinship, without direct involvement in the utiliza-
tion of that other difference, between the colonizer
and the colonized; in the nascent discourses of
comparative philology, comparative religion, even
comparative literature. The eld of philosophy as
such, whose model was the merging of science and
truth, remained untouched by the comparative im-
pulse. In this area, Germany produced authoritative
universal narratives where the subject remained
unmistakably European.
1

This main claim of postcolonial theory forms the
uneasy background for an essay that is primarily
focused on how some eighteenth- and nineteenth-
discourse. There is a third theme emergent in recent
postcolonial theory, relating to the distinction between
elite and subaltern in the (post)colonial world in which
the elite, another agile concept, is conceivable only in
so far as it is a subject of knowledge (or ethics) within
Western humanism and against which the genuinely
subaltern lives on in some kind of dense, unrepre-
sentable, unheard world with its own eco-logic that
can be only impossibly narrated within the discourses
of the Indian humanist elite. If these postcolonial
arguments are new, it is also worth examining the
possibility that they have entirely European historical
or philosophical precedents.
The cradle of reason and the hearth of
culture
After the mid-eighteenth century, Voltaire made
several pronouncements about the primordial antiquity
of Indian civilization and the superiority and rational-
ity of ancient Indian culture in comparison with that of
Europe: Almost every people, but particularly those of
Asia, reckon a succession of ages which terries us.
For Voltaire, like several Enlightenment thinkers, India
received the rst revelation and was the cultural hearth
for world civilization. Indians were those whom we
look upon as the rst nations, the men who were
the most anciently united into a body of people.
3

India, for Voltaire, was also the primordial homeland
of European peoples. Fundamentally, the example of
ancient Indian culture, apprehended through some
of the texts that were available in Europe in the
mid eighteenth century, demonstrated for Voltaire and
others a rational civilization that could be compared
favourably with the superstitious, irrational and bar-
baric forms of institutional clerical authority that
dominated Catholic Europe. It is well known that, in
an extremely inuential dispute, Voltaire mobilized the
fact of the antiquity of Indian culture sharply against
the chrono-logos of humankind that was presented in
the Old Testament. Indian antiquity was marshalled on
the side of reason against the Abrahamic,
4
Noachian
and Mosaic chronography within Judeo-Christendom.
Voltaires understanding of Indian texts was initially
based on a fabrication, claming to be Vedic, that
contained an invented dialogue between two Indian
sages.
5
The rationalist arguments of one sage were
contrasted with the idolatrous beliefs of the other,
and provided Voltaire with his own justications for
rational religion against medieval superstition and
arbitrary clerical power. Later, Voltaire had access
to renderings of Hindu texts, often translated from
Persian, but these did not alter his beliefs about Indian
primordiality, nor that India was the cradle of reason
and of world civilization.
To be sure, Voltaires enthusiasm for India was not
shared by many of the philosophes, who saw in India
only barbaric or enlightened despotism overseen by
the religion of the Brachmanes that privileged both
an internal turn towards metaphysical dissolution and
nothingness a state often described as opium-
induced and an obsession with caste purity which
was forbiddingly intolerant and oppressive, and cer-
tainly not conducive to ideas of liberty or freedom of
will. China was initially, though not exclusively, the
favoured ancient source of inspiration for rational-
ist Enlightenment thinkers. However, the example of
Voltaires fascination with the rationality of India high-
lights a number of densely complicated themes about
the imagination and judgement of India in Europe
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well
as the way this has been articulated in more recent
postcolonial theory.
What is now called the universal humanist subject
of Enlightenment can be said to have arisen as a
product of the comparative philosophical world
histories, histories of humankind and philosophical
anthropologies whose writing preoccupied so many
Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers. Where did the
history of humanity begin? If the rst abode of man
was a garden, Herder asked, Where then lay the
garden where the creator placed his gentle, defenceless
creature? For him the traditions of Genesis and the
mythologies and traditions of the Chinese, Tibetans,
Arabs, Persians and Indians pointed to one place:
there can be no doubt that this primal seat
should be a region between the Indian mountains.
The land [described in tradition as] abounding in
gold and precious stones, can hardly be any other
than India, which has been known from the days of
yore for these treasures. The river that ows round
is the twisting, sacred Ganges; all of India recog-
nizes it as the stream of paradise.
6
Herder, like many of his contemporaries, was fam-
iliar with some of the work of early British and
European Orientalists, including Dow, Holwell, Halhed,
Wilkins, Anquetil-Duperron as well as William Joness
pioneering Asiatic Researches.
7
However, it has been
argued that his main image of India was based on
the translation of Kalidasas classical Sanskrit play,
Sakuntala, from which Herder derived his view of the
Indian as child-like.
8
It is conventional, especially
after the dominant interpretation of Hegel (though it
was stated most clearly by Friedrich Schlegel), to read
the representation of the primordiality of India within
many such texts as one of the infancy (cradling)
of humanity which was superseded by the mature
civilizations of Greece and then Europe. However,
while such sentiments are clearly apparent in Herder,
especially in his view of different countries contribut-
ing in a decisive way to the process of world history,
there is a far more complex comparative judgement
at work, certainly one in which allows a space for
contemporary Europe to be contrasted unfavourably
with both ancient and contemporary India.
9
We might
call Herders work a founding statement of unity-in-
diversity multiculturalism with all the problems that
it entails:
[The] history of humankind also needs to be ob-
served and treated with humanity. In other words,
we must examine even erring nations without preju-
dice, anger, hatred, envy, or slander; we must view
them as brothers or as children [of a common God].
For are they not all brothers of human reason and
of every error of reason?
10

For Herder, a founding reason, justice and language
dened the essence of what it meant to be human
(Humanitt). It has been argued that the concept of
Humanitt was inuenced by and gained stature for
Herder because of the discovered relevance to it
of values from the Indian world that he found in his
readings:
11
if this is the case, then does the metaphor of
what were conceived as Indian values already reside
inside Herders conception of universal humanity?
Against Rousseau, Herder argued that it was not
inarticulate sounds that formed the basis of language.
Some kind of fully formed, especially poetic language
was natural to all humanity. Religion, for Herder, was
also both its oldest and highest expression and here
Herder alluded to the possibility of primal philosophy.
Furthermore, all mankind are only the one and the
same species.
12
If the founding unity of humanity
was in reason and justice, the diversity arose through
the precision of the relation between what he called
the genetic force of nature and the environment
(climate) in which it was manifest:
No people of Europe, let alone all of Greece, has
ever been more savage than the people of New Zea-
land or of Tierra del Fuego. This can be expected if
one takes the analogy of climate into consideration.
These inhumane peoples nevertheless possess hu-
manity, reason, and language. No cannibals devour
their own children or brothers; their inhumane prac-
tice is in their eyes a ruthless custom of war that
preserves their courage and terries their enemies. It
is, therefore, nothing more or less than the work of
a crude form of political reasoning, which repressed
the humanity of these peoples in the face of these
few sacrices to their country.
13

The original cultural differences of humanity were
described by Herder through the conceptions of Vlker
and Volk. From this cultural carapace though in
one important sense the term cultural is being used
here to describe the moment of its modern creation
Herder strongly criticized Kants preoccupation with
race. Kant was later to castigate Herder, and indeed
Kants authority was important for the unequivocal
acceptance of the concept of race and a warning
against the admixture of races.
14

However, Herders conception of the genetic force of
nature, with which climate acted merely as an auxil-
iary or antagonist, provided for a wider epistemic eld
that could encapsulate powerful conceptions of cultural
identity and cultural becoming based on an invocation
of eco-logical, lial, naturalist, organicist and in some
indeterminate way hereditarian ideas that did not
need to rely on the resources of biology proper. The
dense ecological relation between a specic branch of
humanity and the particular environment in which it
thrived resulted in its unique epistemological differ-
ence. Herder may have identied all such variations
as inhabited by a primal reason, but we should note
the contemporary resonance of the kinship established
here between primal ecological harmony and epistemo-
logical rupture. If there is one race, the human race,
[and] the differences are of culture, then the culture
of todays cultural studies and postcolonial theory
owes its foundation to this manoeuvre of Herders.
In particular we also note the oscillation between the
universal Humanitt of reason and justice to which one
must appeal, and the particular and primeval ecological
determination of Volk which one must be compelled to
respect. Herders conception of national culture was a
strong one. For example, the cultural integrity of the
Indian people under Brahmin hegemony, the latter seen
by Herder as both oppressive and, through its educa-
tion, enlightening, was one which rampant European
colonialism, like the Mongol yoke before it, was
unable to annihilate. In the face of Brahmin dominion
over the soul of the Indian, which will endure, as
far as I can see, as long as an Indian shall exist, all
European institutions touch only the surface.
15
Herders philosophy of the history of humankind is
therefore based on a comparative and differential judge-
ment of national cultures in which the ancient Indians
were the Urvolk and the mountainous regions of India
were not simply the primal Urheimat, but the cradle
of human reason, emotion, poesis and aesthetic.
Prehistoric Being-in-itself
Kant had famously stated of India that:
This is the highest country. No doubt it was in-
habited before any other and could even have been
the site of all creation and all science. The culture
of the Indians, as is known, almost certainly came
from Tibet, just as all our arts, like agriculture,
numbers, the game of chess etc., seem to have come
from India.
16

Kant had said this in the context of a disagreement
about the primordial homeland of humanity and against
the view, derived from the speculative astronomy of
Bailly (which Hegel was also to disparage), of an
Arctic
17
Urheimat. Kant was engaging with the specu-
lations about primordiality that were to intensify con-
siderably over the coming century around the Urvolk,
the Ursprache, the Urheimat and the Ur-Mythus.
Kant also believed that an original and pure religion
had been manifest in India and survived in some
contemporary religious forms.
18
However, he had little
sympathy with the celebration of all things Indian. For
Kant, India was fundamentally an erosion, even if it
had possessed an original state of primordial purity.
Here Kant was echoing an established orientation
towards India that was to nd its theoretical-material-
ist fullment in the nineteenth century, via Hegel,
in Marxs statement about the Asiatic mode of prod-
uction and his theory of ideology and religion. It
was, however, in the aftermath and as a consequence
of Kantian transcendental idealism that Indian meta-
physics acquired a different resonance.
Hegel, in attacking the Romantic conception of
history, had said in one of his lectures on world
history :
[I]t has been argued that a primitive nation
[India] once existed, and that all our knowledge and
art has simply been handed down to us from it. This
original nation, it is contended, existed before man-
kind proper had come into being, and is immortal-
ized in ancient legends under the image of the gods;
distorted fragments of its highly developed culture
are allegedly also to be found in the myths of the
earliest nations. And the condition of the earliest
nations, as described in history, is represented as a
gradual decline from the high level of culture that
preceded it. All this is put forward with the claim
that philosophy required it to be so, and that it is
also supported by historical evidence. We cer-
tainly owe very much that is valuable to the interest
which has red such historical research, but this
research can also be indicted on its own testimony.
For it sets out to prove by historical methods that
whose historical existence it has already presup-
posed.
19
This notion of perfect primeval condi-
tion does, however, contain a philosophical element
namely the realisation that man cannot have
originally existed in a state of animal sensibility.
20

Hegel was here sternly dismissing both Schellings
and Friedrich Schlegels philosophies of history and
the foundational place of India within them. Schlegel
claimed the primordiality of the Indians, and that
Indians were the rst to see the face of God.
21
This was
the rst Revelation, which Schlegel saw as the original
and purest form of the Christian religion. For Schlegel,
however, Indians had committed the primordial wrong,
the fall from grace. This was the start of degeneration
and deterioration, the slow and gradual declension of
India that signalled the fall of all humankind. In an
instructive move, Schlegel inverted the temporality of
natural Romanticism: a degeneration from low state
of cultural development into high modern culture
became instead a degeneration from a high state
of ancient cultural development into a low modern
culture.
22

Hegels critique of Schelling and Schlegel could
not, of course, recuperate the meaning Rousseau attrib-
uted to his own temporality. Hegels and Schlegels
chronographies can be seen as travelling in opposite
directions along a line that plots a desirable state
of civilization against a judgement of civilizational
worth in time; Rousseaus crosses this line obliquely.
However, Hegel had to provide the location on a
chronographic tabula for the existence of an early
Indian philosophical tradition with which Hegel was
very well acquainted.
23
This had to be a coordinate
in relation to philosophical history. The empirical
science of events required metabolizing into that
radical mode of being that prescribes their destiny
to all empirical beings.
24
There is another, important
factor which pressed Hegel: the great historical dis-
covery elaborated in Hegels time of the connections
between the Sanskrit language and Europe, including
its insight into the historical links between the Ger-
manic nations and those of India.
25
The chronographic
and taxonomic organization of the system of kinship
between languages was the opening created by the
archaic cries
26
that had been discovered in Sanskrit.
Hegel argued that,
Externally, India sustains manifold relations to the
History of the World. In recent times the discovery
has been made, that Sanscrit lies at the foundation
of all those further developments which form the
languages of Europe; e.g. the Greek, Latin, Ger-
man. India, moreover was the centre of emigration
for all the western world; but this external histori-
cal relation is to be regarded rather as a merely
physical diffusion of peoples from this point. The
spread of Indian culture is prehistorical, for History
is limited to that which makes an essential epoch in
the development of Spirit.
27

This much is known about Hegels views of Indias
place in mere general history, or as pre-history,
and therefore its exteriority to philosophical history.
28

However, Viyagappa and Halbfass have presented more
nuanced readings of Hegel that are advantageous for
the arguments advanced below. For Hegel, India pos-
sessed a true philosophy based on a conception of an
absolute, the indivisible substance of the universe from
which Indians created a philosophy of pure, abstract
Being-in-itself. Indian philosophy was for Hegel a
highly developed but singular focus on substantiality.
It was practically manifested in the other-worldly,
dreamy, opiate state
29
of the Brahmin apprehending
the absolute. We can read this as an attribution of a
kind of pure objectivity to Indian philosophy. However,
for Hegel, it was content-less, regressively ineffable,
an almost wilful and decided apprehension of pure
substance that did not have subjectivity, form, particu-
larity or determination. (Though, for Hegel, reason is
also this innite substance of the universe.
30
) Indian
philosophy was founded on an abstract negation of
the subjective element, of the nite, the practical or
the determinate. Hence, the elemental lack in Indian
philosophy was both of the concreteness of the world,
and of every subjective or multiple conception that lay
beyond abstract unity. For Hegel, this lack was lled
with imagination, fantasy, sensual abandon, and a
representational excess of the illusion (maya) that was
the phenomenal world.
The negation of subjectivity, particularity, deter-
mination, the concrete-in-the world also meant that
Indian philosophy could not have a conception of
dialectical mediation: no dialectic and thus no history.
However, Halbfass has argued that in the movement
of Spirit in history, the pure Being-in-itself of Indian
philosophy is already contained in and available to
the unfolding of Spirit in the European present. The
ancient philosophies of India can stand guard against
the egoistic excess that arises from pure subjectivity.
Hegel paradoxically identied egoism with the German
Romantics, who were obsessed with India for their
own motives and had consequently misunderstood its
philosophical warning.
31
For Hegel, the fundamen-
tal deciency in the Indian world-view is that of its
foundational incapacity to individuate Indians and
bring them into a subjecthood of the kind enjoyed in
European Enlightenment reason and humanism; its
fundamental gift was to destabilize the excesses of
European subjectivity. Hegel can be said to have insti-
tuted a paradigm in which the possibility of rational,
humanist subjecthood and consequently freedom
for the Indian subaltern is perpetually theoretically
inconceivable. There is also a hauntology
32
here in
which India travels across the sciences-disciplines of
rationalists and romantics alike. Conversely, that Spirit
might have come and gone from ancient India leaves it
now only as decaying corpus,
33
an omnibus of archaic
texts, a barely living body that nds fullment in the
grotesque excess of somatic functions and pleasures,
and a glimpse, through an opium haze, of substance,
but otherwise in a state of putrefying slumber. The
spectre that haunted both Hegel and Schlegel was that
of the stagnation and decay of modern civilization,
for which the archaic corpus of India was variously
poison, drug, remedy and recipe.
34

The irrational mosaic
It was perhaps Arthur Schopenhauer who brought this
into sharpest relief and ultimately forbidding resolution.
For Schopenhauer the Indian corpus was a canon. If
Hegel denigrated the unmediation of abstract Being by
the concrete within Indian metaphysics, Schopenhauer
was to privilege the Indian conception of Being while
his ontology displaced entirely the dialectic. Schopen-
hauer had already rejected the foundational basis of
Hegels claim through his dismissal of both Fichtean
subjectivism (which Hegel identied as an example
of egoistic philosophy for which Indian metaphysics
might act as a rebuke) and materialist objectivism,
and indeed of the limitations of sufcient reason that
derived from any reective philosophy of subject and
object. If Hegel placed India outside of philosophical
history because of its undialectical preoccupation
with pure content-less Being-in-itself, Schopenhauer
valorized precisely this aspect of Indian philosophy
through his belief that it spoke to his completion of
the project of post-Kantian Western philosophy. If, for
Hegel, Indian philosophy was solely one of abstract
unity, for Schopenhauer unity and the plurality were
phenomenal objectications that were sidestepped
by the real determination of the noumenal will
which India had uniquely apprehended in other ways.
Hegels belief that Spirit was progress and history had
direction was precisely the illusion (maya) that both
Schopenhauer and ancient Indian philosophers had
discovered. Similarly, if history was rationality, for
Schopenhauer this claim was a subterfuge that masked
blind directionless movement. Frivolously, Schopen-
hauer used the Upanishads to turn Hegel both sideways
and on his head.
While Schopenhauer was initially close to intel-
lectuals and writers inuenced by the interest in India,
and lived in a period where German Indomania was
coming to fruition, there was an important practi-
cal link between Herder and Schopenhauer
in the gure of the enthusiastic German
Indologist, Frederich Maier, a student and
close friend of Herder, who was to intro-
duce Schopenhauer in 1813 to Hindu
texts.
35
Another key inuence was Karl
Christian Frederich Krause, a philosopher
and Sanskritist,
36
who both translated texts
for Schopenhauer and apparently taught
him how to meditate.
37
Schopenhauer had
already written his dissertation on the
basis for sufcient reason prior to his rev-
elatory encounter with Anquetil-Duperrons
anachronistic Oupnekhat, his rendering into
Latin of a Persian translation of some of
the Sanskrit Upanishads, the Hindu texts
that creatively followed, commented on and
elaborated Vedic ideas and introduced new
ones. There is little question of the pro-
found importance for Schopenhauer of the
Upanishads, other Hindu texts, and early translations
of (mainly Burmese) Buddhist texts that had become
available in Europe. He was to say of the Oupnekhat
that it has been the consolation of my life and will
be that of my death.
38

Schopenhauer claimed a relation between Indian
and European thought not because of philological or
mythological similarities, but because of their philo-
sophical afnities.
39
The question about the relation-
ship between his philosophy of will and denial of the
will-to-live and Upanishadic and Buddhist thinking is
particularly interesting. Schopenhauer later said of his
philosophy of will that it arose when the Upanishads,
Plato and Kant were able simultaneously to cast their
rays into one mans mind. He was to say of Kant that
The maya of the Vedas [and] the phenomenon of
Kant are one and the same,
40
the phenomenal world
being the necessary illusion or delusion that we live.
However, he also said of the relation between his
philosophy of will and Buddhism inasmuch as in
my own philosophizing I have certainly not been
under its inuence,
41
though the strong inuence of
Buddhism came later in his work. Schopenhauer had
probably read the Oupnekhat in late 1813 or early
1814
42
and had met Krause around 1815.
43
In the rst
(1818) and second (1844) editions of The World as Will
and Representation and in both volumes of Parerga
and Paralipomena (1851), he repeatedly refers to the
Upanishads and the Oupnekhat, the Vedas, the Puranas
and the Bhagavad Gita, as well as the translations and
writings of Colebrooke, Joness Asiatic Researches,
Julius Heinrich Klaproths Asiatische Magazin, the
Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, the writings
of the eighth-century Indian philosopher Shankara and
numerous other Hindu and Buddhist sources. Magee
has argued that the core elements of Schopenhauers
philosophy were fully formed at the time that he then
almost immediately discovered their similarities to
Hindu or Buddhist doctrines.
44
Certainly, his critique
of the Kantian division of phenomena and noumena,
and of the principle of sufcient reason were prior to
his encounter with Hindu thinking. There is less clarity
about the authority, rather than interpellative function,
of Hindu and, later, Buddhist concepts that he often
used in his development of the philosophy of will.
However, in The World as Will and Representation
and in his later work there is a denitive engagement
with Hindu and Buddhist ideas. While he often made
associations between his and Hindu or Buddhist con-
cepts, these were not uncomplicated identications (for
example, phenomenon is maya, will is Brahman,
the aporetic state of the denial of the will-to-live is
nirvana) but a more complex and fruitful expansion
and negotiation with Hinduism and Buddhism through
his own philosophy.
45
Accepting with Kant that the mind imposes space,
time and causality to create the phenomenal world
available to its intuition or reection, Schopenhauer
famously began the rst book of The World as Will
and Representation:
The world is my representation: this is a truth valid
with reference to every living and knowing being,
although man alone can bring it into reective,
abstract consciousness.
46
For Kant, the distinction between appearances and
things is conclusive, but, for Schopenhauer, not con-
cluded. The thing-in-itself, for Kant, is unavailable to
us in-itself. It was the resolution of these distinctions
between phenomenon and noumenon, and adjacently
subject and object, appearance and essence, empirical
reality and transcendental ideality that was Schopen-
hauers objective. Schopenhauer rejected philosophical
systems that started from either the subject or the
object: these could at best only provide explanations
based on the limit of sufcient reason, and which were
valid only for the phenomenal world. If representation
was the primary form of the division into subject and
object,
47
what remained after we eliminated the form
of representation and all forms subordinate to it that
were explained by the principle of sufcient reason?
Schopenhauer started his discussion on the relation
between subject and object by focusing on the body,
and in this sense displaced the Cartesian privilege
of mind over body that was arguably foundational to
what later became sufcient reason. As my body acts,
it objecties my will in an immediate way that is
indivisible from that will. Hence, my body may be
my representation, but it is also, and otherwise, my
will. This is the excessive, unavailable to sufcient
reason, to the relation of subject and object or causality
that I also have with my body.
48
The body (and indeed
sexual plenitude) was thus the privileged site of the
objectication of the thing-in-itself.
Schopenhauer extended this conception of will
outward: the will is the thing-in-itself of all things.
Schopenhauer used several different conceptions of
will, but in this grand conception of will Schopen-
hauer was referring to the in-itself of the universe
beyond the phenomenal world, though this cannot be
a simple identication with the real. Will is foreign
to the phenomenal forms in which will appears or
passes; nor can will be identied as object or concept.
The conditions of space and time and the plurality
and differentiality of objects are examples of what
Schopenhauer called the principium individuationis
(principle of individuation) that is coextensive with
and the condition for subjecthood and knowledge. It
is the essential differentiability of phenomena that
separates them from groundless and unconceptual-
ized will. Will also has no direction or purpose,
no telos or history. For Schopenhauer, will is blind
impulse, an obscure, dull urge, a striving devoid of all
knowledge.
49
Schopenhauer also identied will as the
will-to-live since everything in nature presses and
pushes towards existence, if possible towards organic
existence, i.e., life, and then to the highest possible
degree thereof.
50

One of Schopenhauers conceptions of will is the
idea of ones own will in self consciousness that is the
basis for judging the illusion of plurality (Maya), the
form of objective apprehension in which the world of
objects always meet with this one being.
51
The will
might be recognized as a unity that lies beyond the
phenomenal world, and we may have isolated glances
of this unity in the relation of things in nature.
52

We can also apprehend the consciousness of the
knower not as an individual, but as pure, will-less
subject.
53
This will-less subject is necessary for
Schopenhauer because for him the world is a miser-
able, purposeless place, the battle-ground for tor-
mented and agonized beings who continue to exist
only by each devouring the other.
54
Conversely, the
will-less subject of knowing is one of pure contem-
plation, lost in the object, forgetting all individuality,
abolishing the kind of knowledge which follows the
principle of sufcient reason, exemplifying a denial of
the will-to-live, delivered from the miserable self, and
which has become entirely one with objects.
55

For Schopenhauer this was the start of what could
be found in the soaring metaphysics of his beloved
Indian wisdom. Hindu and Buddhist philosophy had
recognized the world as a place of suffering and
(because) of the blind, purposeless will-to-live. We
cannot escape this will-to-live since it is the true
nature of all things. We might, however, apprehend
it in a way that temporarily halts it. This apprehen-
sion cannot be willed, nor can one desire it: instead,
it comes to one, from the outside. Crudely put, this
is through the practices of the philosophies of what
Schopenhauer called the denial of the will-to-live.
Such practices may include renunciation, mystical
apprehension or aesthetic contemplation (especially
of music) that in some way cease the world: the wheel
of Ixion stands still. In the state of the shaking off
of the world, seeing through the principium individu-
ationis, there is an apprehension of a kind of pure,
will-less, subject-less Being-in-itself of the kind that
Hegel criticized Indian philosophy for. This state of
Being is complex and a site of a theoretical aporia
in Schopenhauer. It cannot be a knowledge of the
real; instead, at the moment where one is at one
with objects, purely in the world of representation,
the phenomenon comes into contradiction with itself
and the in-itself of its true nature ultimately abolishes
itself. In some important way, Indian consciousness
had the capacity to rst escape subjecthood, ego-hood
and individuality, and then slip away altogether from
the possibility of representation.
Schopenhauer contrasted this Hindu or Buddhist
refusal with the odious and false optimism of the
will-to-live he saw in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic
traditions. Those traditions contained founding errors:
the belief in the creation of humankind out of nothing
by a Creator or Deity in whom one must forever have
monotheistic faith; a false conviction that humankind
is free to will what it does in life; a belief in death
as an ending; and a rejection of metempsychosis and
the transmigration of souls. This led to an optimistic,
cheery, ego-dominated and individuated orientation to
life, a celebration of the will-to-live and hence to a
disastrous misrecognition of what the world actually
is. For the Western religious tradition, death is the
great reprimand for the will-to-live in a way that it
cannot be for the Hindu or Buddhist.
In Schopenhauers discussion of the Hindu and
(some) Buddhist ideas of metempsychosis and palin-
genesis, we get a sense of how his post-Kantian ontol-
ogy and an atheism both dominate and negotiate with
Hindu and Buddhist philosophies. For Schopenhauer,
the subject and the object were essential to each other
as a consequence of the form of representation; both
resided in the realm of phenomena excessive to
which is the will as noumenon. The extent to which
one lived in ego was the extent to which one had not
apprehended the connection and unity of all things;
hence, death was regarded as annihilation.
The egoistic fear of death was contrasted with
Hindu and Buddhist philosophies. The latter empha-
sized existence as an original necessity, rather than
an accidental creation, in which the fact of ones
individual existence necessarily implied accepting the
innite time and innity of changes that preceded
it. Every possible state has already exhausted itself
without eliminating the possibility of ones individu-
als existence. Similarly, this immanent proof of the
imperishableness of our real inner nature (the will)
must show that if we were to live in a happy state this
would have already occurred in the innity of time
that has elapsed. Conversely, we should have ceased
to exist if we could have.
56
I perish, but the world
endures, and The world perishes, but I endure,
are not really different at bottom.
57
Schopenhauer
compared this idea with the Buddhist conception of
nirvana as nothingness; he also frequently used the
famous Upanishadic declaration tat tvam asi (Thou
art that!) to show the imperishable identication with
the universe that existed (will) and which, in the
same way, was also void.
Schopenhauers discussion of metempsychosis
after the critique of Kant contained at its core an
endogenous dimension to Schopenhauers strong attach-
ment to Hinduism and Buddhism that is often glossed
(together with his misogyny) in the English Schopen-
hauer literature. It is stated clearly in his laudatory
discussion of Anquetils Oupnekhat. Schopenhauer
was very much aware that suspicions had been raised
about the veracity of Anquetils translation, especially
since direct translations from Sanskrit sources of the
Upanishads and parts of the Vedas were available in
Europe. Schopenhauer rejected these in preference for
Anquetils translation:
how thoroughly redolent of the holy spirit of
the Vedas is the Oupnekhat! From every page
we come across profound, original and sublime
thoughts, whilst a lofty and sacred earnestness per-
vades the whole. Here everything breathes the air of
India and radiates an existence that is original and
akin to nature.
58

Schopenhauer, however, immediately followed it
thus:
And oh, how the mind is here cleansed and puried
of all Jewish superstition that was early implanted
in it, and of all philosophy that slavishly serves
this!
For Schopenhauer, Judaism was culpable for the phil-
osophy of the blind afrmation of the will-to-live
that he detested and that he found in Christianity and
in the philosophies that existed in his day (such as
Hegels). Schopenhauer contrasted the Sublime Oup-
nekhat with other translations of Indian texts he had
read. With some exceptions, such as August Wilhelm
von Schlegels translation of the Bhagavad Gita, and
Colebrookes translations of sections of the Vedas,
most had the opposite effect on me. Schopenhauer
complained about the padding to the original texts,
wherein I notice something foreign. The texts were
Europeanized, Anglicized, Frenchied. Only too
often is there in them also a trace of the foetor
Judaicus.
59

The phrase foetor Judaicus (and the Jews pitch)
occurs many times in Schopenhauers work. It is a
potent, heavily overdetermined symbol of medieval
anti-Semitism in which the foul stench of Jews was
punishment for their crimes against Jesus and
against Christianity. It evokes both the host desecration
libel and the blood libel in which, respectively, Jews
were alleged to have desecrated Christian churches
to recrucify Christ, and Jews were alleged to kill and
drink the blood of Christians in the belief that it would
eliminate the fetid odour. The foetor Judaicus was
contrasted with the odour of sanctity emanating from
the Christian body. Foetor Judaicus is also at the core
of the anti-Semitic symbolization of the Jew as disease,
parasite, lth and the source of death. Foetor Judaicus
represented for Schopenhauer a contingent, historical
and foreign contamination by Jewish metaphysics of
an authentic, pristine and primal wisdom that arose
in India. Schopenhauer indeed bemoaned the great
misfortune that the people whose former culture was
to serve mainly as the basis of our own were not, say,
the Indians or the Greeks, or even the Romans, but just
these Jews,
60
one of his many such expressions.
If Voltaire can be said to have legitimized (though
not initiated) an Enlightenment polarization between
the civilizational arche-histories of the Hindu-Bud-
dhist and the Judeo-Christian, within which modern
European civilization must be compelled to nd for
itself a place in history, Schopenhauer rened this
polarization with a second hauntology of the death
and putrefaction of Western civilization that leaves
Judaism isolated in the history of the world. This
was because Christianity, according to Schopenhauer,
also had Hindu blood in its veins and was Indian
in spirit. In the gure of Adam, Christianity symbol-
ized nature. In the original sin, it symbolized the
afrmation of the will-to-live. However, Christian
teaching also symbolized freedom as the kingdom
of grace and of grace or salvation coming, unwilled,
from outside to ones apprehension or intuition. This
for Schopenhauer was that very denial of the will-
to-live of which Christ was the personication, and
which was abundant in the philosophia perennis of
Hinduism and Buddhism. Those who rejected this
view of Christianity were clinging to a Jewish doc-
trine of faith that was an accidental accretion to its
original teachings and of which they must be puried.
Schopenhauer made frequent and unambiguous con-
trasts between Hinduism and Buddhism (and those
aspects of Christianity that he thought accorded with
them) and Judaism (and Islam); the Brahmins and
Buddhists against the Jews. Schopenhauer did indeed
believe that Jesus must have been Indian.
The noumenal Hindu in postcolonial
theory
The path elaborated above from Voltaire and Herder
through Hegel and into Schopenhauer is an attempt at
a strategically provocative rewriting of the accepted
place of what was conceived as Indian or Hindu
civilization in Europe during Enlightenment. The
narrative can also be read as a scurry through the
philosophy of primordial cultural hearth, of ancestral
blood communities, of the authority of race, of the
philosophy of lost unity, the inevitability of history,
and the metaphysics of will and of dissolution that
results in an identication of ones primordial being
with a community of others or with cosmic nature.
Some of these philosophical tendencies were a prelude
to (were they necessary for?) National Socialism.
The article concludes with a strategic interpretation
of a few claims of postcolonial theory in Gayatri Spi-
vaks writings.
61
The focus of the discussion below is
about some of the claims that postcolonial theory has
advanced about humanism, subjecthood, and the inef-
fability within humanist discourse of non-European or
non-Western or genuinely subaltern livedness. Post-
colonial theory can make the explicit or metonymic
assertion that it is the most sophisticated and indeed
theoretically the only immanent and sustainable cri-
tique of Western imperialism and colonialism that can
also maintain a persistent critical vigilance against
collusion with either Western, claimed nativist or
diasporic identitarian epistemologies, the latter two
bearing a catachrestic relation to the nineteenth-century
nationalist, colonial or humanist episteme of their
European adversary. The methodological manoeuvre
in deconstruction which can rigorously interrogate
the excessive to meaning in rationalist, humanist, or
logocentric discourse is characteristically utilized by
Spivak to create a theoretical space to argue for the
excessive nature of the genuinely subaltern, the Third
World, Hindu polytheism, or the gendered not-yet-
subject for any Eurocentric or Western humanism,
within which they are always in-themselves unspoken
or unheard.
Spivaks condensation of the Enlightenment into
a project of science and truth
62
and her theoretical
investment in claiming that there was no (German or
European) comparative philosophical project is a strat-
agem which needs to be sustained in order to make
certain foundational arguments about Orientalism,
colonial discourse, postcolonialism and decolonized
space. However, the association of primordial India
or Indian philosophy with reason cannot be conceived
as liminal, let alone a foundational difference, nor is
there a completed and concluded, irreducibly European
(undifferentiated) subject of reason and humanism that
can be contrasted with its obstinate antipode, (the not-
yet-subject of) India or Hinduism. Something like a
project of comparative philosophy was also important
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Not only
did a form of comparative philosophy exist in its own
right, as well as through its sometime adjacent ventures
(such as philosophical anthropology), but it can be
difcult indeed to comprehend the better-known eight-
eenth- and nineteenth-century comparative sciences
of philology and mythology without recourse to the
resources of the former. For Voltaire, and in different
ways for Herder and Schopenhauer, the subject of
humanism or reason was not essentially European.
For Schopenhauer, indeed, the subject of reason was
not the Jew (Reason does not belong to Judaism),
but the Indian, who had both comprehended and sur-
passed reason. Even Hegel, in conceding an abstract
philosophy of Being to the primordial Indian, seems
to imply within the terms of his own philosophy its
coming into reason.
The reduction of Enlightenment to a project of
science and truth is also problematic. Voltaires oeuvre
cannot be placed in solely rationalist, scientic or
romantic camps. It would be as difcult to situate
Schopenhauers completion of the Kantian and
Humean project, and his philosophy of the natural
sciences, through a different idea of lost unity deriv-
able from the Upanishads or the elite Buddhist canon.
To afx the label Romantic or anti-rationalist to
Schopenhauers philosophy would be seriously mis-
leading and there are tendencies that would make
this association only because of Schopenhauers inter-
est in the East, such that the philosophies of the East
can only be pregured as Romantic.
If the perceived antagonism in the relation between
Enlightenment and Romanticism is muddied, a range
of other analytical directions become possible and
allow for a consideration of the differentiated places
of non-Europeans in the European idea of founding
civilization and cultural hearth. The question, then,
becomes one about the inadvertent complicity with
European and non-European discourses of civiliza-
tion, culture and elite. There are parallels between
eighteenth-century Enlightenment and Romantic dis-
course and the contemporary critiques of the latter that
share an investment in what is essentially the possibil-
ity of a modied recovery of Indian civilization. Its
cost is the effacing of the people without cultures
and the cultures without civilization. If one wants
to put it in those terms, the gure of the complex
and differentiated Indian other is kept intact for the
academic gaze precisely because its study elides the
cannibals of Tierra del Fuego and New Zealand, the
Aborigine of Australia or the Andaman Islands, or
the German colonial subjects in Tanganikya, Namibia
or Togo. A subjected marginality is required for an
authoritative discourse of the other civilizations that
can be framed within a critique of Europe but can also
sanction the idea of civilizational timetables. With very
few exceptions, the exteriority of the sub-Saharan
African or the Aborigine sustained the tabula of the
scale and reach of civilizations and the philosophies
of civilizational time they entailed, and which were
virtually universally written about in the world his-
tories, philosophical anthropologies and philosophies
of history that were fashionable in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. The condition of demarcation
as an elite civilization was the basis of appropriation
into the timetables of historical development, genius
or stagnation
It can also be a small step from stating that the
Hindu texts encountered in the West were so grossly
distorted as to be meaningless to claiming that they
were tabula rasa. This is an innocence that continues
to be maintained by the memory of the suffering
of colonial victimhood and now neo-imperialism.
The substantive content of the Hindu text becomes
irrelevant in the face of its Western appropriation or
distortion. The Hindu text is unwritten at the moment
of its colonial appropriation. Alternatively, there is a
founding incommensurability from a European hermen-
eutic gaze, and hence Hindu writing is always invisible.
Perhaps the text has been so radically misapprehended
that it is nothing more than a new creation that is in
its entirety European.
However, the actual texts that informed eight-
eenth- and nineteenth-century Europe were primarily
renderings of the foundational, mainly northern Indian,
Sanskrit, Vedic and Vedantic elite Brahminism (but
could also include the texts of northern Indian Vaishna-
vaite sectarian traditions). The representation in the
seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth century of the
actual Brahmin of India, rather than the philosophies
of his primordial ancestors, is more complicated,
ranging from complete revulsion to a sometimes highly
qualied respect to almost adoration. The aspects of
Hinduism that were usually monstrous to the European
imagination were, in the main, aspects of bhakti,
tantra, shudra, dalit, adivasi and various southern
Indian texts, beliefs and practices (but could also
include elite and non-elite sectarian, primarily Shakta
and Shaivite, traditions). With some Dionysian excep-
tions, the European preference was for Sanskritic,
Brahminic world-views of which the others were seen
as, and were genuinely though differentially, subordi-
nate. Caste, hierarchy, ideas of nobility and purity, and
varieties of Rig Vedic and Manusmriti xenology and
ethnology were read by Europeans both into and out
of the Hindu corpus. Many of these ideas were archaic
but foundational legitimations for existing caste and
gender domination. It can be accepted that Brahminic,
but by no means only Brahminic, texts contained very
important philosophies. It can also be accepted that
there existed processes of European distortion that
might have been unauthorized in every sense by the
texts. However, while an antagonistic corrective to the
fabrication and denigration of elite Indian texts within
European discourse may be a necessity, as would
a critique of the persistent charisma of Christianity
in Western philosophy, these critiques can only be
sustained on the basis of a complicity with elite cul-
tural and civilizational claims within Hinduism. Do
archaic, nineteenth-century or contemporary Hindu
conceptions of dasyus, dasas, mleccha, varnashra-
madharma, jati, dharma and adharma, stri-dharma,
sati, ethical systems founded on ideas of nobility,
purity or the will to action, or the social and politi-
cal systems authorized by the Manudharmashastra
or the Arthashastra become innocent at the moment
that it is established that they were subject to Western
humanist recuperation, distortion or invention? Does
arya become harmless at the point at which it is
demonstrated that its racial inexions were fabricated
in nineteenth-century Britain or Germany?
Postcolonial theory can paradoxically magnify this
elite comparative civilizational quest even while it can
claim to undertake a critique of Indian elites. Spivak
has certainly come very close indeed to conrming
the unique and special nature of elite Hinduism which
cannot be brought into a (maximally tracing, presum-
ably universal-humanist) discourse that is claimed to
be based on Semitic conceptions of the religious.
63
In
criticizing the Christian or monotheistic frame from
which Jean-Luc Nancy elaborates the relationship (or
lack of) between philosophy and the body after the
death of God, Spivak counterposes what she calls
the everyday polytheism of Hinduism, as well as the
irrecuperability in Western humanist or Eurocentric
discourse of the livedness of everyday Hinduism,
and of what she claims is otherwise mistakenly called
in Western discourse the distinction between dvaitin
as dualist and advaitin as non-dualist. There is no
theoretical or polemical system or vocabulary, she
claims, within which the dense livedness of everyday
Hindu polytheism or of dvaita-advaita (dualism/non-
dualism) can be made available. Everyday polytheism
is only capable of being brought meaningfully into
Western discourse as the anecdote of a native inform-
ant constituted in Western humanism, though this
manoeuvre only conrms its ineffability. Academics
in India are (rather startlingly) also criticized for being
unwilling or unable to take on such tasks.
Spivak also contrasts the expansiveness of Nancys
conception of corpus with a Derridean concentration,
a dense focus at the limit of contradiction, which she
applies to what she says were articulated reductively
in Western humanist discourse as the abject victims of
the devastating cyclone that hit Bangladesh in 1991. In
the ecological, spatial world-view of the inhabitants of
the coastal areas of Bangladesh, subject to the patterns
and cycles of the forces of nature, living what seems to
be articulated by Spivak as a happy existence congru-
ent with nature, the conceptual humanist schemes of
disaster relief or the necessity of migration, refuge,
property and aid are ineffable. Their lives can be
articulated in humanist discourse only at the risk of not
hitting the contradiction with that discourse which is
their everyday, lived eco-logic. It is striking here that
Spivak institutes a naturalized ecology of the subaltern
as the basis for its epistemological incommensurability
with Western humanism.
There may not be much to disagree with in a cri-
tique of the Christian frame of and metaphors within
Nancys discussion. However, there are complex ethical
commitments when it is done in the name of some
(whatever) kind of Hinduism. Christianity and Chris-
tian or, for that matter, Islamic monotheism are not
foreign to India (and were not so prior to the colonial
period); to institute that division in the 1990s between
a grounded Hinduism and an imperializing (Chris-
tian or Islamic) monotheism is troubling, even though
Spivak makes the declaration of her opposition to what
she calls Hindu communalist identity politics.
Spivak also utilizes that old bifurcation between
Hinduism and the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions
to sustain a critique of the subject of Enlightenment
rationality and humanism which, for some philosophers
of Enlightenment, was formed precisely through the
same division, but with India marshalled on the side
of reason. It may be accepted that this was an entirely
Western project. However, what is to be made of the
similarities between the Hegelian and the postcolonial
theoretical vision of the Indian as only impossibly
articulated within a European humanist or rational
subjecthood?
Spivaks claim about the necessary academic
unfullling of aspects of Hinduism, such as the lived-
ness of dvaitin and advaitin, also requires sweeping
away the historic indigenous and wide-ranging elite
caste discussions in India which have come down to
us as dvaitaadvaita commensurabilities and distinct-
ions, and which have preoccupied various strands of
Indian Vedantic philosophy since at least the early
medieval period. Similarly, the use of the term every-
day cannot elide the circumstance that discussions
of the ethical systems of the Upanishads and the
Gita were everyday discussions primarily for elite
Brahmins.
Postcolonial theory has become an important peda-
gogic source, often and disastrously the main source for
Western academics and students for their knowledges
about historical and contemporary India. While post-
colonial theory often performs critical gestures about
elites in the Third World or the diaspora, their status
is not clear, because the disciplinary focus and indeed
most of its material tends to focus on either highly elite
mainly Brahminic, Sanskritized, Vedic, Vedantic and
already comprehensively Hinduized Indian traditions.
The erasure of the Indian Muslim in this work might
even be viewed as a gesture.
Today, the phrase Hindu dharma is a deadly one,
inseparable from the civilizational claims in which it is
manifestly embedded. The claim that one can attempt
to use Hindu dharma as the basis for a different, non-
Western ethical project, untainted by the Semiticized
Hinduism of the nineteenth century, unmarked by
communalist claims, still has unique conditions of
possibility unmistakably indebted to northern Indian
Vedic or Vedantic Brahmin traditions in their attempts
to create a singular dharma. That claim has also been
an explicit component of the elitist projects of northern
Indian Brahminism (since at least the mid nineteenth
century), as well as of varieties of caste-Hindu and
sampraday devotion that have already pregured the
place within or outside Hindu dharma of women,
sudras and dalits. One can certainly argue against
these conceptions of dharma for a progressive ethical
dharma, but at the cost of the erasure of irreducibly
secular possibilities, the latter in an important sense
inconceivable in posthumanist postcolonial theory.
This is aside from that other hard rock: Hindutva
neo-fascists have been making this same proposal
about Hindu dharma in relation to Western ethical
systems since at least the 1920s in a totalitarian project
that also conceives Hindu ontologies to be exceptional,
hermeneutically irrecuperable and for which there can
be no full understanding in a Western discourse from
which they will persistently slip away.
64

The idea that there is a primal ineffability of (what
is now known as) Hinduism or the world-view of
the Hindu in the face of Western philosophical or
Judeo-Christian traditions is also a comprehensively
European, Enlightenment claim. It is positively articu-
lated in Hegels conception of the Indian philosophy of
pure Being-in-itself that cannot be fully conceived in
the terms of subjecthood or practical determinateness
available to Western philosophy. It is stated differently
in the will-lessness and extinction that were impera-
tive for Schopenhauers philosophy. It is a Schopen-
hauerian claim that Hindu and Buddhist philosophical
systems are precisely unsignied or incommensurable
in those Western philosophies based on the Judeo-
Christian or reective philosophical tradition for which
the subject is unmistakably European. The Hindu
desires to slip away from the world of subject, object
and representation. Spivaks valorization of the incom-
mensurable and hard contradiction of the ecological,
nature-driven world-views of the ordinary populations
living in ood areas against the Bangladeshi doctors
and relief workers who can only articulate them in
terms of humanist subjecthood also has systemati-
cally Western conditions of philosophical and cultural
possibility. For these coastal populations, there is no
death of the kind conceived in humanism, despite
the horrors nature inicts on them. They live with(in)
nature, indifferent or unreceptive to a humanism that
is forcibly attempting to compel them to subjecthood.
This is the other side of Herders unresolved eco-logic
of nature, that exhalation of nature in culture that
demarcates a people as epistemologically distinctive,
even as the Humanitt imposes its understanding on
their lives and actions. It is also there in Schopen-
hauers denial of the will-to-live that identies an
aporetic cosmology and a different relation to death
and nature. Here the distinction between posthuman-
ism and anti-humanity dissolves, for Schopenhauers
Hindu or Buddhist, as much as for the victims of
cyclones.
Notes
I would like to thank John Solomos, Kirsten Campbell, Parita
Mukta and Jane Hindley for their comments.
1. G. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Rout-
ledge, London, 1999, p. 8, emphasis added.
2. A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Volume I (1818), 1969, trans. E.F.J. Payne, p. xv.
3. Voltaire, The Philosophy of History (1766), Philosophical
Library, New York, 1965, pp. 9, 69, 73.
4. Voltaire used an existing argument that Abraham derived
from the Indian idea of Bram. Ibid., p. 69.
5. The text was the Ezourvedam procured by the library
at Paris, which Voltaire believed was translated by a
Brahmin and was not the Vedam itself but a sequel.
Ibid., p. 77.
6. J.G. Herder, Reections on the Philosophy of the History
of Mankind (178491), Book VI, in J.G. Herder, On
World History, ed. H. Adler and E.A. Menze, trans. E.A.
Menze and B. Palma, M.E. Sharpe, New York, 1997, pp.
22021.
7. R. Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europes Re-
discovery of India and the East, 16801880, Columbia
University Press, New York, 1984, p. 59.
8. See, for example, J.W. Sedlar, India in the Mind of Ger-
many, University Press of America, Washington DC,
1982, p. 30.
9. It is also incontestable that the Brahmins formed their
people to such a degree of gentleness, courtesy, temper-
ance and chastity, or at least have so conrmed in them
these virtues, that Europeans, compared to them, fre-
quently appear as impure, inebriated and deranged.
Herder, Reections, Book VI, p. 241.
10. J.G. Herder, Fragment of an Essay on Mythology (c.
178292), in J.G. Herder, Against Pure Reason: Writings
on Religion, Language and History, trans. M. Bunge,
Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1993, p. 80.
11. R. Taylor, The East and German Romanticism, in R.
Iyer, ed., The Glass Curtain Between Asia and Europe,
Oxford University Press, London, 1965, p. 190.
12. J.G. Herder, Reections on the History of the Philosophy
of Mankind (178491), Book VII, ed. F.E. Manuel, Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1968, p.
5.
13. Herder, Ideas, p. 90.
14. Thus we can judge with probability that the intermixture
of races which gradually extinguishes their character-
istics, does not seem benecial to the human race all
pretended philanthropy notwithstanding. I. Kant, An-
thropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (179698),
trans. V.L. Dowdell, Southern Illinois University Press,
Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1978, p. 236.
15. Herder, Reections, Book VI, p. 241.
16. Quoted in L. Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of
Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe, Heinemann,
London, 1971, p. 186.
17. Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance, p. 349.
18. W. Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Under-
standing, State University of New York Press, Albany,
1988, pp. 6061. This has been a very useful source of
ideas for some of the directions taken below.
19. Compare Schellings mobilization of Hindu creation
metaphors in attacking the presuppositions of Hegels
philosophy in F.W.J. Schelling, On the History of Mod-
ern Philosophy (c. 183387), trans. A. Bowie, Cam-
bridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 1478.
20. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World His-
tory Introduction: Reason in History (18221831),
trans. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press, Cam-
bridge, 1975, pp. 13233, emphasis added.
21. F. Schlegel, On the Language and the Wisdom of the
Indians, in Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works (1808),
trans. E.J. Millington, Henry G. Bohn, London, 1849.
22. F. Schlegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J.B. Robert-
son, Henry G. Bohn, London, 1847 (fth, revised edi-
tion), p. 93.
23. The Indian texts that Hegel knew and used were ex-
tensive and included the work of Jones, Colebrooke,
Wilkins and Halhed as well as Wilhelm von Humboldts
essay on the Bhagavad Gita on which Hegel made an
extensive commentary that is seen as denitive of his
view of Indian philosophy and its possibility for eth-
ics. See I. Viyagappa, G.W.F. Hegels Concept of In-
dian Philosophy, Universita Gregoriana, Rome, 1980,
pp. 26674, for a full list of Hegels sources; Halbfass,
India and Europe, pp. 856. See also M. Hulin, Hegel
et lOrient : Suivi de la Traduction Annote dun Essai
de Hegel sur la Bhagavad-Gita, Vrin, Paris, 1979.
24. M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of
the Human Sciences, Tavistock, London, 1970, p. 219.
25. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History,
p. 135.
26. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 233.
27. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Si-
bree, Prometheus Books, New York, 1991, pp. 14142,
emphasis added.
28. For an assessment of Western critiques of Indian con-
ceptions of time and historicity, see R. Thapar, Time as
a Metaphor of History: Early India, Oxford University
Press, Delhi, 1996.
29. Both Hegel and Marx used the opium metaphor to des-
cribe, respectively, Brahminism and religion in general.
The drugged religious bliss in The German Ideology is
perhaps the superstructure to the base of the Asiatic
mode of production in the Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy.
30. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p. 9.
31. See Halbfass, India and Europe. We can also read this
as two antagonistic sides of the active principle in
which Hegel could criticize Romantics like Schlegel
for a celebration of Oriental stasis, while the Romantics
saw their mission as one of dynamic vitality. See also
C. Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. G. Oakes, MIT
Press, Cambridge MA, 1986.
32. J. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work
of Mourning and the New International, trans. P. Kamuf,
Routledge, London, 1994, p. 51.
33. J.L. Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. B. Holmes
et al., Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 1993,
p. 189.
34. J. Derrida, Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson, Athlone
Press, London, pp. 7071. At least India was a remedy
for Schlegel, for a period. He, like many of his Roman-
tic peers, converted to Catholicism. We nd the Indian
metaphor as poison, drug and remedy in turn-of-century
thinking about Western decline, of which Oswald Spen-
gler and Ren Guenon are important markers.
35. On Maier, see A.L. Willson, A Mythical Image: The
Ideal of India in German Romanticism, Duke University
Press, Durham NC, 1964, pp. 93104.
36. It can also be easy to forget that Saussures work was as
a Sanskritist and scholar of Indo-European languages in
both Paris and Geneva. While now known principally for
his Cours as the founding text of structuralism, the only
book he wrote was the Memoir on the Original System
of Vowels in the Indo-European Languages, 1879.
37. R. Safranski, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Phil-
osophy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA,
1991, pp. 2012.
38. A. Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume
II, trans. E.F. Payne, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1974, p.
397.
39. Sedlar, India in the Mind of Germany, p. 47.
40. A. Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena Volume
I, trans. E.F. Payne, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1974, p.
422.
41. A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Volume II, trans. E.F. Payne, Dover, New York, 1969, p.
169.
42. B. Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, Clarendon
Press, Oxford, 1997, p. 15.
43. Safranski, Schopenhauer, p. 201.
44. Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, p. 15. See also
Sedlar, India in the Mind of Germany, p. 232.
45. See Halbfasss discussion, India and Europe, pp. 113
20.
46. The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, p. 3.
47. Ibid., p. 25.
48. Ibid., p. 100.
49. Ibid., p. 149.
50. The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, p.
350.
51. Ibid., p. 321.
52. Ibid., p. 323.
53. The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, p.
195.
54. The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, p.
581.
199.
56. The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, pp.
4889.
57. Ibid., p. 5078.
58. Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume II, p. 397.
59. Ibid.
232.
61. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, ch. 1; G.
Spivak, Response to Jean-Luc Nancy, in J.F. Mac-
Cannell and L. Zakarin, eds, Thinking Bodies, Stanford
University Press, Stanford, 1994.
62. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 8.
63. Spivak Response, pp. 37, 3943.
64. There are many possible references here, but see D.
Upadhyaya, Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya Ideology
and Perception Part II: Integral Humanism, compiled
by V.V. Nene, trans. M.K. Paranjape and D.R. Kulkarni,
Suruchi Prakashan, New Delhi, 1991; S.R. Goel, De-
fence of Hindu Society, Voice of India Press, New Delhi,
1993.

Political identities have received bad press for quite
some time. Sexual identities constitute no exception to
this trend. Nearly ten years ago Judith Butler expressed
her ambivalent relation to identity categories by calling
them necessary errors, whilst at the same time hold-
ing that there remains a political imperative to use
[them].
1
In more recent times, Alan Sineld has sug-
gested that we might be entering a period which he
labels post-gay. This period is characterized by the
realization that metropolitan post-Stonewall gay and,
perhaps, lesbian identities are historical phenomena
and may now be hindering us more than they help us.
2

Sineld gives voice, then, to the hope that in this new
period it will not seem so necessary to dene, and
hence to limit, our sexualities. For reasons not dis-
similar to those advanced by Butler, however, Sineld
cannot bring himself to reject identities altogether.
Instead, he enjoins us to entertain more diverse and
permeable identities.
3
This uneasiness or discomfort with identities is
widespread among queer theorists.
4
This common
ambivalence has several sources. The reasons that
motivate suspicion about sexual identities are well
known. Among them, there is, of course, the tired, and
by now tiresome, argument that identities presuppose
essences. Perhaps more crucial is the assumption that
sexual identities limit or constrain sexuality in ways
that must be resisted. Sometimes this assumption is
motivated by the desire to undermine the dichotomy
between hetero- and homosexuality. At other times,
it depends implicitly on a radical libertarian position
that any constraint imposed on our sexual practices
is oppressive, since it limits our freedom. Finally,
a negative attitude toward identities is motivated by
a discontentment with the shortcomings of identity
politics as traditionally understood.
Nevertheless, theorists never advocate the end of
all sexual identities as a proposal for the immediate
future. There is little doubt that many individuals take
their sexual orientation to be a feature which plays an
important role in their perception of who they are.
They feel that in some sense they would not be the
same person if their sexual orientation were to change.
For this reason it seems deeply unrealistic to deny that
sexuality is, in the current situation, one component
of personal identity; hence the tendency to preserve,
despite numerous reservations, talk of sexuality as
an identity.
Awareness of the views shared by the vast majority
of gay men and lesbians, activists included, must also
be part of what motivates theorists to preserve the idea
of sexual identities. Most gay people take their sexual-
ity to be fairly xed, something which is unlikely to
change. They often also perceive it as something about
which they had very little choice. More strikingly, in
recent times many gay men and lesbians believe that
they were born gay.
5
A widespread belief that sexual
identities can be explained biologically stands in direct
opposition to the social constructionist view which is
now the orthodoxy among scholars working in queer
theory, history and politics.
6
This formulation of the division between academics
and the majority of gay people leads to an impasse. This
stalemate, however, cannot be ignored if we care about
politics, since it has given rise to incomprehension as
well as several degrees of separation between theory
and political practice. Given this background we intend
in this article to reconsider the notions of personal and
collective identities.
We do not want to begin, however, by asking a
direct question about what sexual identities might be.
Instead, we hold that questions about the importance
of identity claims offer a better starting point. Thus,
our question is: what is one committed to when one
claims that one has a particular sexual identity?
7
We
do not assume that there is a reality either biological
Identity judgements, queer
politics
Mark Norris Lance & Alessandra Tanesini
or socially constructed which identity claims purport
to describe. Instead, we argue that identity claims are
not descriptive. Their correctness is not a matter of
descriptive truth; it is not a matter of the presence
of biological or social truth-makers. Identity judge-
ments, we hold, are normative.
8
They are political
endorsements of particular sorts of psychological and
sociological placings, whose appropriateness can be
evaluated only within specic political contexts. We
hope that the theoretical advantages of choosing this
starting point will become clearer as our argument
develops. Nevertheless, it might be useful to begin
with a consideration which speaks in favour of this
approach.
There is a common tendency, widespread among
academics, to avoid the difculties involved in genu-
inely political questions. Nowhere is this tendency
more manifest than in recent discussions about identity
politics among feminists and queer theorists. In these
discussions political issues of commitment and strat-
egy have been transformed into metaphysical questions
about essences or the lack thereof and social
constructs. Hence Cindy Pattons suspicion that decon-
structionists may believe in the imputed essentialist
identities much more than those in the political sphere
who are purported to have them.
9
In this manner, theorists dream of an end to all
disagreements. They hope to home in on the right
theory about identity which will answer their problems
once and for all. This theory will either explain what
identities are or dissolve them. In either case, theoreti-
cal discoveries will be a substantial guide for political
decisions. This approach, we argue, is misguided.
Discussions about identities cannot ever be settled
solely by looking at the biological, social or even
cultural facts. They are genuine political discussions,
and as such not based on any metaphysics, even a
negative one. Disagreements which cannot be settled
by means of non-normative considerations will, thus,
always arise.
In this article we rst explain and defend our
account of identity judgements as normative claims,
showing why it is a mistake to conceive of identi-
ties in biological terms. Some social constructionist
accounts are, however, equally defective. Perhaps sur-
prisingly, one consequence of our account is that the
claim to be straight as a matter of identity is unlikely
ever to be appropriate. Further, we argue that most
current accounts of political identities are descriptive.
Even performative accounts of identity categories, we
contend, fall within this camp since they amount to
descriptive interpretations of normative judgements.
Am I that name? The psychological
signicance of identity attributions
We all take ourselves to have several identities. One
might, for example, be a mother or a father, a woman,
a socialist, or a philosopher. These identities carry
with them desires and inclinations. Philosophers, for
instance, like abstract thinking, and fathers are inclined
to play with their children. These desires and inclin-
ations, however, do not in themselves constitute iden-
tities. One might like ice-cream without taking being
an ice-cream lover to be a matter of identity. Identities
play a far more prominent role in our psychology than
mere likes and dislikes. Further, identities are often
associated with social roles and mere inclinations do
not have this sort of social signicance.
We claimed that identity judgements are endorse-
ments of psychological and social placings and also
that identity judgements are normative. In order to
make good our position, however, we need to turn
rst to questions concerning the psychological and
social signicances of taking oneself, and being taken
by others, to be of a given identity. Our immediate
concern is thus not with what identities themselves
might be, but with the signicance of identity attribu-
tions. Borrowing from Anthony Appiahs account of
the psychological signicance of identity claims,
10
we
label the three aspects of this account felt demand,
call to coherence, and normative projection.
Appiah claims that identities provide scripts by
which to live. These scripts are not fully determined,
but they offer reasons for and against some ways of
acting. It is hard to see, for example, how one could
take oneself to be a socialist as a matter of identity
without being thereby committed to working towards
ending specic forms of injustice. If one never engages
in this kind of work, sees no reason to do so, and does
not even perceive this as a problem, then one is simply
not a socialist. In this way identities pose demands on
us to which we are sensitive, provided that we take
that identity to be part of who we are.
Related to the fact that identities pose demands on
us is the fact that we feel the need to try to reconcile
the scripts that accompany each of our different identi-
ties. Thus, identities issue a call to coherence. It might
never be possible to achieve full coherence between our
identities since they might always make demands on
us that take us in different and, perhaps, incompatible
directions. In these cases one will perceive some sort
of rational tension which one might try to alleviate in
a variety of ways. For example, there might be tensions
between those commitments to our parents which
follow from our identities as their sons and daughters,
and our commitments to our partners which stem from
a different aspect of our identity. In this case, we will
attempt to nd strategies to make these two sets of
commitments more compatible.
Sometimes, however, one might nd two aspects
of ones identity to be so irreconcilable that one will
feel a demand to abandon one of them. One might,
for example, come to the conclusion that being gay is
incompatible with being a religious believer. In this
case one holds that the commitments and demands
that follow from being a religious believer conict with
those which follow from taking being gay as a matter
of identity. If one believes that there is no justifying
story which can bestow some discursive coherence
on these two aspects of ones identity, one might stop
taking oneself to be a religious believer.
These examples show that self-attributions of iden-
tities come with commitments. They also show that
we expect in the sense of call for some discursive
coherence between different aspects of our and others
identities. Hence, it is perfectly appropriate to be
critical of somebody who does not even perceive a
conict between his gayness and his membership of,
say, the Catholic Church.
11
As these examples show,
then, identity attributions are subject to normative
constraints.
Since identities carry commitments, they project
normatively rather than merely causally into the future.
Suppose being a mother is one of your identities. Of
course you can predict that you will care for your
children in the future. More importantly, however,
your identity places future demands on you; it carries
a commitment to care for your children in the future.
Caring for your children in the future is not simply
something you know you will do. It is also something
you feel you ought to do.
Of course, things can change: people get divorced,
change sexual orientation, give up philosophy. However,
if they do so on a whim, and feel no need to provide
themselves and others with reasons for the change, we
will doubt the extent to which being married, having
that sexual orientation, or being a philosopher were
ever signicant parts of their identity.
Identities also have a signicance for ones place in
society besides being, as we have already explained,
of psychological signicance. Thus, whether one is
taken to be a woman, or a man, single or not, makes
a difference to how others treat you as well as to
how it is generally assumed you ought to be treated.
Identities are a matter of social signicance. There is
a world of difference in the signicance of knowingly
serving pork to someone who dislikes it and to a
practising Muslim. Generally people could not carry
out the commitments that are, for them, associated
with their identities were they not facilitated by others.
People need their identities to be recognized as matter
of psychological and social signicance. When social
facilitation is not forthcoming, as in the cases of
working mothers or gay parents, we are dealing with
prima facie cases of oppression.
Two mistakes: biological and social
descriptivism
What we have said so far should already be sufcient
to show that biology is not even a candidate for
an explanation of sexual identities. Accordingly, the
debate over gay genes is a red herring. We believe
that there is very little evidence for the belief that
there are biological causes of homosexual sexual inclin-
ation. But, even if sexual inclination was biologically
determined, this fact would not make sexual identities
a matter of biology.
An analogy should help to make this explicit. Con-
sider the case of a person who is revolted by strawberry
ice-cream. Suppose that this revulsion is genetically
determined. This fact does not make hating straw-
berry ice-cream a matter of identity for the person in
question. More specically, mere likes and dislikes,
whether or not they are genetically determined, do not
project normatively into the future. The person who
hates strawberry ice-cream might be in a position to
predict that her dislike will not change. However, it
makes no sense to say that she is committed to dis-
liking this kind of ice-cream in the future. Further,
were her dislike to change we might be surprised,
but would not think that she needs a justifying story
for her change. Similarly, mere likes and dislikes do
not issue calls to coherence. We would be surprised
if the person who dislikes strawberry ice-cream so
strongly loved fresh strawberries as well as ice-cream
in other avours. But, neither we nor the person in
question would feel a need to alleviate any conceptual
conict.
This analogy shows that there can be behaviours
which have a deep biological root and are, therefore,
fairly xed, but which are not a matter of identity.
Further, there are identities, such as being a socialist,
for which it seems absolutely ludicrous to suppose
a biological aetiology. It is possible, however, that
biological and social facts about the individual are a
necessary condition for the correct attribution of some
sorts of identities to that individual. Examples of such
identities could be: being black, being American, or
being a woman, as well as being queer. Even so, these
facts do not constitute that identity. To suppose that
they do is a category mistake.
In the case of biological facts this is quite clear.
Suppose that the claim to be gay is the assertion that
certain biological facts are true of oneself. We have
seen that attributions of identities to oneself give
reasons for and against some forms of behaviour,
issue calls to coherence with other aspects of ones
identity, and project normatively into the future. But,
attributions to oneself of a certain biological nature
have no such consequences. On the basis of biology we
can expect in the causal sense of predict a certain
future behaviour to occur. On the basis of identity
judgements we can expect in the discursive sense of
call for a certain future behaviour to occur. To think
of identities in biological terms involves confusing
normative for causal constraints.
The irrelevance of biology to identity judgements
might, incidentally, explain why many activists who
believe that they were born gay or lesbians do not
necessarily engage in the kind of identity politics
one might expect to be associated with so-called
essentialist accounts of identity. These activists make
a distinction between what they think has caused them
to have homosexual inclinations, and what being gay
or queer as matter of identity means to them. The
distinction might not always be clearly articulated, but
it is sufciently entrenched. No one looks to biology
to nd out how they ought to behave, whilst almost
everybody holds that social and political commitments
follow from attributing a given identity to oneself.
Even sophisticated accounts of identities as social
constructions are not immune from the same category
mistake of taking a descriptive claim for a normative
one. More precisely, these accounts often employ a
descriptive interpretation of normative judgements in
their accounts of identity. They identify the normative
nature of identity claims, which we have discussed in
its psychological and social dimensions, with what
is done in ones society. In other words, they reduce
normativity to normality. It is, therefore, not surprising
that identities have got such bad press. If we are right
that current social constructionist accounts of identity
ultimately take identities to be dened by what is
normal in society, it becomes clearer why theorists
have taken identities to be, as a matter of theoretical
necessity, limiting in oppressive ways. But what, more
precisely, is meant by a descriptive account of the
normativity of identity, and what is the alternative
proposal?
We have claimed that commitments and expect-
ations follow from identity judgements. For example,
being judged to be a woman makes a difference as to
how one is treated. Thus, it is not uncommon to hear
from some quarters that women ought to get married,
look after children, stay at home, and so on. This is
a particularly conservative view of the commitments
associated with being a woman. Similarly, it is not
unusual to hear that gay men and lesbians should
not have children. This too is a conservative view
of the sort of scripts associated with gay and lesbian
identities. Social institutions and practices also dene,
sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, the com-
mitments and responsibilities which are taken to ow
from given identities.
Some crude social constructionist accounts identify
being of an identity with the occupation of such a
social role. These accounts take identity claims to
be purely descriptive of ones position in society.
According to these accounts, whatever norms might
be associated with identities, they are not constitutive
of the identities in question. Rather, the identities,
seen as social positions, logically precede the norms
associated with them.
More recent social constructionist accounts are less
crude. They acknowledge that identities are normative
in the sense that being of a certain identity is con-
stituted by, not just constitutive of, norms. However,
they understand norm in a weak sense that makes it
a function of what is taken to be proper in society.
In other words, they take the norms constitutive of
identities to have merely a de facto normative force.
Normative, here, refers to the kind of behaviour that
is licensed or sanctioned within the society. According
to this view, to be of a certain identity is to be the
kind of person for whom certain forms of behaviour,
but not others, are taken to be proper.
This new form of social constructionism is not
committed to the belief that identities pre-exist the
norms of identity. On the contrary, the view entails that
identities are constituted by the current social-norma-
tive signicance attributed to identities. Nevertheless,
this view continues to be committed to a form of
descriptivism. It assumes that claiming that one is
of an identity is tantamount to asserting that one is
the sort of person who is subject to the demands and
commitments which society (or the majority, or some
future idealized version of the majority) associates
with that identity. It is rather obvious that identities so
understood will always function as stumbling blocks.
The grammar of identity claims, according to this
view, entails that when making such a claim one
implicitly accepts what the majority says is proper for
an individual of ones own kind.
Given the current popularity of performative
accounts of identities, our charge is bound to
sound paradoxical, to say the least. It seems
rather obvious that performatives are not
descriptive (that is, constative). Yet, despite
appearances to the contrary, we believe that
these constructionist accounts ultimately rely on
descriptive interpretations of normative judge-
ments. In this regard, it is useful to consider
Butlers accounts of gender identity, since she
was the rst to provide a sustained account of
the performativity of identity.
In Gender Trouble Butler claims that the
critical task of feminism is to identify and
participate in those practices of repetition
that constitute identity and, therefore, present
the immanent possibility of contesting them.
12

What are being repeated in the practices of
repetition are norms.
13
But these norms are
nothing other than what is taken to be proper,
what has de facto normative force. Norms are
tantamount to prescriptions of what is normal.
They are merely the result of compulsory regu-
latory regimes. For this reason, Butler takes
the repetitions that constitute identities to be
imitations of the currently accepted norms of
heterosexuality. However, since we are always
bound to fall short, since we never fully embody
what is proper in accordance with these norms,
we are compelled to repeat our attempt to
comply with them.
Butler argues that identity claims do not describe a
pre-existing hidden nature. Thus, she abandons crude
forms of descriptivism. She does, however, adopt a
descriptivist account of identity judgements. This fact
is obscured by her decision to call her view a per-
formative account of identities.
There are at least three related problems with this
view. First, it misreads what people do when they
claim a currently despised identity for themselves.
According to these sophisticated social constructionist
accounts, self-attributions of identity amount to assert-
ing that one occupies the psychological and social
placings that are currently associated with that identity.
For example, in the case of queer identity, to claim
that one is queer would amount to asserting that one
occupies a position about which it is appropriate to feel
ashamed, and guilty. But, we contend, when people
claim Were here, were queer, get used to it!, they
are not implicitly accepting what society takes to be
proper for queers.
Second, the view makes it hard to explain why
people take on despised identities. Usually, one will
need to resort to accounts that show that individuals
were forced into the mould of the despised identity.
In this case, however, it becomes a mystery why
people valorize their despised identities, since these
identities would be purely the result of oppressive
forces. Further, given the psychological centrality of
identity attributions, these constructionist accounts will
interpret individuals who take themselves to belong to
an oppressed identity to be always clinging to, and
valorising, what is a direct result of their oppression.
14

Thus, these individuals will, of necessity, contribute
to the continuation of their oppression. That we can
achieve a political conclusion of such generality from
a claim about the grammar of identity claims should
make us extremely suspicious of these constructionist
views.
Third, these accounts practically rule out the pos-
sibility of using identity attributions for progressive
ends. If claiming that one is of an identity is a descrip-
tion of what society takes to be proper for individuals
of that identity, then identity claims always function
as implicit reassertions of the status quo.
In order to overcome these problems, we suggest
that one take seriously the normative nature of identity
judgements. Thus, we subscribe to a radical norma-
tivity thesis about identity claims. In our view to
claim an identity for oneself is to endorse a cluster of
attitudes, behaviours and judgements on the part of
oneself and of society, and to undertake a commit-
ment to defend their appropriateness. In our opinion,
therefore, identity judgements are moral and political
evaluations. They do not describe the evaluations cur-
rently associated with the identity, as in the social
constructionist interpretation; rather, they consist
in an endorsement of a range of psychological and
sociological placings, and of their consequences. The
placings, attitudes and behaviours one endorses by
claiming oneself to be of a given identity, however,
could be somewhat at variance with those currently
associated with that identity. (However, they cannot be
totally at variance with current evaluations, because in
such a case it would be nonsensical to hold that one
is claiming that same identity, rather than a different
one, for oneself.)
To summarize, in our view, to say that one is of
a given identity is to say that one ought to take that
identity to be part of ones script for ones life, that one
ought to allow an associated script to demand coher-
ence with ones other scripts, that one ought to take
this identity to project normatively into the future, and
that others ought to assign social priority to facilitating
ones living according to the resulting narrative unity
of the various scripts. To say who one is, then, is not
to describe ones hidden nature because it is not to
describe at all. At the same time, it is therefore neither
empty nor a mere description of how one is currently
treated, for it is an endorsement.
Straight is not an identity
So far we have discussed the grammar of identity
judgements, and suggested that they are political
endorsements. But, we have not made fully clear what
identities themselves might be. In our view, identities
are a matter of the correctness of identity judgements.
Thus, if one claims to be of an identity, and ones claim
is correct, then one is of that identity. Since identity
claims are normative they are political endorse-
ments their correctness conditions are not a matter
of corresponding to something in the world, some
biological or even socio-cultural facts. Rather, identity
judgements are correct whenever genuine political and
moral goods are endorsed by making those claims.
15
A consequence of our view is that it is impossible
to have a totally bad political identity. One can, of
course, make claims to such an identity. For example,
one can make racist beliefs normative for oneself. One
can hold that society should facilitate ones attempt to
prevent miscegenation and so forth. However, these
identity claims are never correct since what they
endorse are not political and moral goods. By claiming
such a racist identity for oneself one is claiming that
society ought to give one a special status, accord one
privileges and make it easier for one to act on ones
racist beliefs. However, since the racist is not entitled
to such status, and privileges, their claim to these
entitlements is incorrect. In other words, the racist
claim to identity is wrong, because by making it the
racist claims entitlements, which would be constitutive
of an identity, that he does not have. (This case shows
why another sort of performative analysis one which
would equate having an identity with asserting that
one has it wont do. Since normative obligations on
the part of others follow from an identity ascription,
neither thinking nor saying that one has an identity
makes it so.)
With reference to the specic case of sexual iden-
tities, we think that it is highly likely that, whilst it is
sometimes appropriate to claim being gay or queer as
a matter of identity, it is never appropriate to claim a
heterosexual identity. Although it is foolish to make
general claims at this level of abstraction, we are
condent that, at least in the context of contempo-
rary British and American cultures, being straight is
not a genuine identity. Thus, we reach the surprising
conclusion that there is an asymmetry in the case of
sexual identities, since gay and queer identities exist,
but heterosexual identities do not.
We shall deal with some of the obvious objections
to this conclusion in what follows after having pro-
vided some reasons in its favour. It must be stressed
that these are exclusively political and moral reasons.
We have entered at this juncture the fray of political
discussions and disagreements. It is perfectly possible
for somebody to agree with what we have said about
the grammar of identity judgements, and about iden-
tities as a matter of normative status, and violently
disagree with the purely political evaluations that
follow. They are offered here because we recommend
them, but also because these discussions allow us to
clarify a few features of identity judgements as we
understand them.
We have claimed that to accord to sexuality the
status of an identity is to endorse the taking up of a
particular script as normative for ones thought and
behaviour, and to demand societys facilitation of ones
living a life which coherently conjoins this script with
ones other identities. But exactly which script is in
question here? Three senses could be given to this
normative issue, senses we label conservative, ideal
and tactical.
A conservative identity endorsement is an
endorsement of a range of psychological attitudes
and social roles of the sort currently associated with
that identity by currently dominant social practices.
It is not thereby a mere description of these attitudes
and roles, but rather a political act which attempts to
preserve the status quo. All identity judgements are
script-endorsements, and if the script in question is
precisely the dominant one, then the act of so judging
is a way of throwing ones social weight and epistemic
authority behind current practice.
In the case of sexual identity, this would mean an
endorsement of stereotypical psychological identities
by either gay or straight people, and an endorsement
of the oppressive social order of heterosexist practice.
We have little to say about this potential endorsement
as it is quite clearly inappropriate. No one who opposes
homophobia could endorse taking up either social
position denitive of that oppressive relationship.
When thinking of race, one would similarly not
be likely to endorse the current scripts and social
positionings of racist society. One might, however,
be prepared to make what we call an ideal identity
judgement. To do this is to envision a future non-
racist society, and to endorse an amended version of
racial categories presumably some sort of ethnic
identity which would be appropriate and defensible
in that context. In the case of sexuality, however, we
do not see any progressive role for ideal endorse-
ments either. In other words, we do not believe that
in a society free of heterosexist bias, it would make
much sense to elevate ones sexual inclinations to the
status of an identity. We see no reason why in such
a society it would be morally and politically good
to turn ones current inclination to nd partners of
a particular gender into a commitment not to change
that inclination. In such a society people might still
have fairly settled sexual inclinations towards people
of one gender rather than another, and they might be
able to predict that this will continue to be the case.
But there seems to be no good reason to make this a
matter of normative concern.
Contrast the elevation of ones inclinations to stay
with a particular partner. Here there is a clear reason
why, even in the absence of oppression, one would
take this to be a matter of identity. The elevation of
the inclinational to the normative that is constitutive
of identity here serves a positive force in shaping the
nature of the relationship. Families can only be what
they are because they are taken on with normative
signicance. But we see no corresponding reason to
take ones inclination, should ones current partner die,
to be attracted to future partners of a given gender as
a matter of normative concern in a non-homophobic
world. And if no positive good is served, then there can
be no grounds for demanding that society facilitates
the identity.
The third and most interesting sort of identity judge-
ment, and the one in which an asymmetry emerges,
is what we refer to as a tactical identity endorse-
ment. In this case, we claim that there are politically
progressive gay identity claims and no progressive
straight identity claims in the contexts of British and
American societies. We have said that to claim oneself
to be gay is to make ones sexual inclination a matter
of normative concern. To do so involves adopting a
certain conception of oneself which gives reasons for
and against attitudes and behaviours. One will feel the
need to make the rest of ones life rationally cohere as
much as possible with this aspect of ones psychology,
and one will take this conception to project norma-
tively in the future. In other words, one will endorse
a commitment to preserve ones current set of desires
and inclinations and, importantly, demand social facili-
tation of this stance toward ones life.
In the case of tactical identity endorsements, what
is being endorsed is not the script which is currently
associated with gay identity. Rather, this embracing of
gay identity will involve substantial revisions of this
script. There is no need to assume that everybody
who makes a tactical endorsement of a gay identity
will thereby endorse precisely the same revisions of
the attitudes and self-conceptions which society takes
to be proper for gay people. Just as in the case of an
assertion of marital identity or of oneself as a socialist,
there is scope for variance on this issue; and there is
scope for ethical and political discussion.
Similar considerations apply on the social front.
One can endorse societys taking oneself to be gay,
and endorse that there are statuses, obligations, expect-
ations and privileges carried by that attribution, without
embracing the current set of such normative expect-
ations as just, or good. Further, there is a politically
progressive point to such endorsements. They are acts
of solidarity whereby one afrms a commitment to
being treated as others are being treated.
Such political acts belong to an old tradition of
endorsing a social positioning for oneself with an eye
to subverting the signicance of that social position.
For example, to be queer in the old usage was rst
to be excluded from what is proper, and then to be
reviled for it. To call oneself queer in the new usage
is to endorse that exclusion and to turn the evaluation
on its head, to embrace difference as a challenge to
what is regarded as proper.
16
Not one of my words
There are no symmetrical political considerations that
would indicate that genuine ethical and political goods
are endorsed by means of straight tactical identity
judgements. Let us begin with the psychological. It is
hard to see anything of value in a tactical embracing
of straight identity. One of us is not gay, and he is
married to a member of the opposite gender. Suppose,
for purposes of argument, that he were able to predict
that he would only be attracted to women should he
lose his current partner. What would be gained by
taking this projection into the normative realm? Why
would one want to make this into a normative concern
at all? In the case of gay identity, the point was to
commit oneself to a project and to embrace ones
place in the division of political labour. There is no
corresponding point in the straight case.
The primary social markers of a positioning as
straight are the trappings of privilege. One is con-
sidered by dominant society to be more trustworthy
with children, more valuable as an employee, even
more likely to be rational and unbiased when dis-
cussing gay politics. Obviously none of this privilege is
deserved. Thus it would be wrong to endorse the social
granting of it. This is not to say that one can avoid
being granted it. Ones inclinations, if known, will be
enough for heterosexist society to grant one privilege,
but to take ones heterosexuality on as a matter of
identity is to endorse this granting of privilege and to
make it central in ones life. Denying straightness, is
a disavowal of such privilege. Such a refusal, though
it wont prevent others from recognizing privilege, at
least calls into question the universal assumption that
such would be welcome.
One should not confuse this political act of refusal
with a failure to acknowledge the unwarranted privilege
that generally accrues to individuals who are taken to
be heterosexuals. It is not uncommon to hear individu-
als complain that gay activists are too vocal about their
sexuality. These individuals might even assert that they
do not think of themselves as heterosexuals, but merely
as fathers or professional men. These claims amount
to denying that matters of sexuality currently have a
social-normative signicance. As such these assertions
are false. They are also politically pernicious because
they make invisible the privileges granted to those
who are taken to be straight. The explicit refusal to
endorse heterosexuality as a matter of identity has the
opposite political effect. It is an acknowledgement of
these privileges as undeserved.
Yet, one might remain unconvinced, and argue that
there are politically progressive tactical endorsements
of heterosexual sexual identity. For example, one might
cite the use of the slogan straight but not narrow as
an example of such an endorsement. We think this
is a mistake. There is, of course, a political point in
making the claim that one opposes heterosexist bias.
One hopes that many non-gay people would perform
such political acts of solidarity against homophobia.
But it is hard to see why such acts should take the
form of identity claims. One might suggest that what
is at stake is the elaboration of new scripts which one
might endorse as a heterosexual without endorsing
homophobia. But, why, we ask, if one is attempting
to refuse undeserved privilege, and the narrowness of
current heterosexual scripts, try to do so by hanging
on to the view that ones sexual inclinations should be
elevated to a matter of normative status with accom-
panying entitlements and facilitations? We do not see
any plausible answer to this question that does not
rely, at least covertly, on the structures of authority
and the privileges which are undeservedly bestowed
upon people whom society takes to be straight, and
who do nothing to disassociate themselves from that
attribution. (Compare an eighteenth-century person
claiming that it is a matter of identity that they are
noble, but insisting that this doesnt really imply any
sort of privilege. We nd it hard to make sense of
this act. Of course one could say, for example, these
are my parents; this is my culture. But one should
simply go on to deny that one is noble, to deny the
legitimacy of the very category as having to do with
nothing but privilege.)
One must distinguish this point about tactical iden-
tity endorsements from questions of pure, brutal, short-
term political effectiveness. It might be the case that
straight but not narrow people could achieve results
by claiming this identity for themselves. Virtually
any act might, in some circumstance, be politically
useful, but our contention is that their success will
be partly predicated on the fact that straight people
are often taken more seriously than queers by straight
society even on matters of queer politics. In these
cases strategic success is obtained by implicit reliance
on homophobic expectations. Hence, we are sceptical
about claims that such endorsements are politically
progressive.
One might object, on another front, that these con-
siderations ignore gender disparities in matters of
sexuality. The psychological scripts and social roles
currently associated with womanhood by dominant
male society still prescribe sexual passivity as the
appropriate behaviour for women. In the light of this,
tactical revisionary endorsements of heterosexual iden-
tity might have a role to play in feminist politics. This
conclusion is, however, premature, for it is politically
important to call into question the current social norms
governing womens sexual behaviour; it is hard to see
what is gained by taking this project to be part of a
revision of heterosexual identity. We see the point
of embracing an active and independent sexuality
for women as an important part of feminist politics,
but such political acts of endorsement do not require
that one makes the gender of ones sexual partners
a matter of normative concern. Feminism does not
require that we elevate the heterosexual dimension
of some womens sexual inclination to the status of
an identity.
17
What about the more abstract objections to our
position? First, it must appear odd to argue, as we have
done, that heterosexual sexual identities do not exist.
Such a conclusion seems intrinsically implausible.
Second, our argument also seems to employ a notion
of identity that does not correspond to the ordinary
usage.
It is easier to address the rst of these two objections
by means of an analogy. Consider the case of claims to
property, and more specically to ownership of land.
In several countries colonialists have appropriated for
themselves, by means of genocide and pillage, the land
which natives inhabited. It is not unusual nowadays
for natives to reclaim entitlement to their land. These
claims are, at least partly, based on the judgement that
those individuals who now take themselves to own the
land in question do not, and never did, own it. They do
not own it because, due to the morally impermissible
ways in which they have claimed it, they never really
gained the sort of entitlement which is constitutive of
genuine ownership.
Our claim about heterosexuality is the same. We
do not deny that people have heterosexual inclinations
and take themselves to have a heterosexual identity.
Similarly, we do not deny that society attributes such
an identity to many individuals. Politically bad iden-
tities can be attributed, undertaken and facilitated,
but one cannot be entitled to them. So, given the
meaning of identity judgements, one cant really be
of that identity.
None of this implies that homophobia is not real.
Since people take themselves to be straight, and
society also takes them to have this sexual identity,
privileges are granted to people with heterosexual
inclinations. The claim that heterosexual identity does
not exist does not prevent one from recognizing the
very damaging ways in which incorrect identity claims
operate.
18
Our account of identity judgements as normative
claims could also be accused of failing to t ordinary
usage. Thus, one might want to assert that there are
descriptive uses of identity vocabulary. For example,
one might point out that we have often used in this
paper the expression straight people, although we
have denied that being straight is ever a matter of iden-
tity. There is, however, no contradiction in our ways
of writing. The expression straight people stands as
shorthand for people who take themselves and are
taken by others to be straight, or for people with
heterosexual inclinations. We have never denied that
there are such identity attributions. Also, one might
point out that there are uses of the word heterosexual
in scientic contexts. We contend that in these cases,
either the word is used merely to refer to a sexual
inclination, or that we have a normative use of the
word which is mistakenly taken as descriptive. What
we would have in this case is a politically conservative
naturalization of identities.
Finally, we would like to consider briey the
charge that identity politics of the sort we have been
defending always belongs to a kind of minoritarian
politics. Related to this charge is the claim that iden-
tity politics in matters of sexuality reinforces, rather
than undermines, the dichotomy between hetero- and
homosexuality. We nd these charges to be premature,
and based on descriptivist readings of what identities
might be. Whilst we agree that in an ideal society there
would be no place for being gay as a matter of identity,
there is no reason to conclude that in the current
situation it is always counterproductive to claim being
gay or being queer as a matter of identity. Similarly,
there is no reason to assume that the political import
of identity judgements is limited to making a demand
for rights to be bestowed on a minority group. Rather,
it is plausible that, by claiming to be gay as a matter of
identity, and thereby endorsing for oneself a cluster of
attitudes, behaviours, responsibilities and facilitations,
one might be able to inuence societys expectations
about matters of sexuality in ways that are progressive
for all members of the community.
In conclusion, one might ask what a non-queer
person is to say to the question whether they are
straight or gay, if they accept our position. We suggest
that one follow the example of Oscar Wilde. When he
was asked to state whether a certain passage in one
of his books was blasphemous, Wilde, apparently,
answered that blasphemy was not one of his words.
By extension, we recommend that those of us who are
not gay, when asked whether we are straight, should
insist that straight is not one of our words.
Notes
1. Judith Butler, Imitation and Gender Insubordination,
in Linda Nicholson, ed., The Second Wave: A Reader
in Feminist Theory, Routledge, New York and London,
1997, p. 303.
2. Alan Sineld, Gay and After, Serpents Tail, London,
1998, p. 5.
3. Ibid., pp. 14, 199.
4. See, for example, Ed Cohen, Who are We? Gay Iden-
tity as Political (E)motion (A Theoretical Rumination),
in Diana Fuss, ed., Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay
Theories, Routledge, New York and London, 1991, pp.
7192; and Lisa Duggan, Queering the State, Social
Text 39, Summer 1994, pp. 114.
5. See Vera Whisman, Queer by Choice, Routledge, New
York and London, 1996. Alan Sineld remarks on this
fact in his Virtually Undetectable: The Andrew Sullivan
Phenomenon, Radical Philosophy 97, Sept/Oct 1999, p.
4.
6. Some of the most inuential papers in the currently
extinguished debate between biologism and social con-
structionism are collected in Edward Stein, ed., Forms of
Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Construction-
ist Controversy, Routledge, New York and London,
1992. Outside the context of queer theory, biological
accounts of sexual orientation have been supported by
Simon LeVay in his Queer Science: The Use and Abuse
of Research into Homosexuality, MIT Press, Cambridge
MA, 1996.
7. Here we follow Robert Brandom in refusing to take the
question of meaning to be a matter of identifying which
bits of reality a linguistic expression refers to, together
with an account of their relation. For a systematic ac-
count of this semantic view of language, see his Mak-
ing It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive
Commitment, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA,
1994.
8. For a sustained account of the nature of meaning claims
as well as of normative commitments of the sort dis-
cussed in this article, see, Mark Norris Lance and John
OLeary-Hawthorne, The Grammar of Meaning: Norm-
ativity and Semantic Discourse, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1997.
9. Cindy Patton, Tremble, Hetero Swine!, in Michael
Warner, ed., Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics
and Social Theory, University of Minnesota Press, Min-
neapolis and London, 1993, p. 166.
10. See K. Anthony Appiah, Identity, Authenticity, Sur-
vival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction,
in Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Poli-
tics of Recognition, Princeton University Press, Princ-
eton NJ, 1994, pp. 14963.
11. This is not to say that self-attributions of these two
identities must be absolutely irreconcilable. But there
is a rational tension between them, which individuals
would need to do something about.
12. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Sub-
version of Identity, Routledge, New York and London,
1990, p. 147.
13. Ibid., p. 148.
14. In recent times Butler, and others, have explicitly en-
dorsed this consequence of their position. See, for exam-
ple, Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories
in Subjection, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA,
1997. We nd it astonishing that these writers do not
think it a problem that they make a priori universal
claims about matters which would seem to require case-
by-case consideration.
15. Thus, the three criteria offered above felt demand,
call to coherence, and normative projection explain
what it is to take oneself to be of an identity. One might
full them and yet not be of the given identity. This is
no surprise since it is always possible to take oneself to
be of an identity and be mistaken. On this matter, as on
any other, we are not infallible.
16. Some readers might be troubled by our almost inter-
changeable usage of gay and queer. We do believe
that these terms are employed in tactical identity endorse-
ments which tend to differ from each other. It would,
however, be a mistake to read queer as simply advocat-
ing an end for all identities.
17. There are deep and important connections between
heterosexism and sexism. Further, there are also im-
portant differences in the socio-normative signicances
of identity claims made by men or women. These issues
must be explored in detail in each particular political
context. These considerations do not entail that women,
unlike men, should make their heterosexual inclinations
a matter of identity.
18. Similarly Appiahs claim that there are no races does
not prevent him from acknowledging the reality of rac-
ism. See K. Anthony Appiah, Race, Culture, Identity:
Misunderstood Connections, in K. Anthony Appiah and
Amy Gutman, Color Conscious: The Political Morality
of Race, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1996,
pp. 30105.
At a New York party in 1987, A.J. Ayer, then in his late
seventies, walked into a bedroom where Mike Tyson
was forcing himself on a young woman. In reply to
Ayers warning that he should desist, Tyson replied:
Do you know who the fuck I am? Im the heavyweight
champion of the world. Ayers response was priceless:
And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic.
We are both pre-eminent men in our eld; I suggest
that we talk about this like rational men. The two
men talked, while Tysons captive Naomi Campbell
made her escape.
The tale is emblematic of many of the themes of
Rogerss biography. To begin with, there is Ayers
presence at a celebrity gathering. Perhaps de Beauvoir
and Sartre, or Foucault, had they still been around,
might have been invited as well, but it is hard to think
of anyone else from the ranks of former Wykeham
professors or international emeriti who could rival
Ayers glamorous socializing, or for that matter his
(not unprincipled) hedonism. More notably, the episode
exemplies Ayers courage; his egotism and guileless
condence in the currency of a proudly held title;
and as often, against the odds his Enlightenment
condence in the power, in life as in philosophy, of
rationality. I dont suppose Tyson would have known
what hit him.
Ayer is widely regarded as a guilty party in the
analytic movements much-bemoaned remodelling of
the discipline in English-speaking universities a
process in which great questions about the meaning
and purpose of existence were abandoned in favour of
specialized, professional, second-order inquiry. Ayer
gave a memorable summing up, to Isaiah Berlin, of
his attitude to the relationship between philosophy and
life: There is philosophy, which is about conceptual
analysis about the meaning of what we say and
there is all of this all of life. Taken together with
his enduring commitment to the fact/value distinction,
this attitude, and its considerable inuence, earned
Ayer the enmity of a diverse collection of interests
and groups, including the philosophical establishment
of 1930s Oxford, the Churches of England and Rome,
the post-Bloomsbury culturati and its descendants, and,
from the late 1960s onward, the British intellectual
Left (a number of whose members have since, of
course, moved to his right). Ayers intention, according
to Rogers, was not just to separate philosophy from
life but to liberate life from philosophy, by under-
mining the pretensions of philosophers and philosophy
to a special authority about the fundamental nature of
the universe, life and morality. As Ayer saw it, that
supposed authority had typically been used to foster
oppressive and imprisoning superstitions about eternal
rewards and punishments, as well as anti-experimen-
tal, and therefore anti-scientic, limiting metaphysical
systems. Freed from their effects, people, in both life
and science, would, Ayer thought, be less prejudiced,
more experimental and open to other points of view,
as well as to what life has to offer. In many ways
whatever else might be said about Ayers inuence
and that of the analytic movement he was right.
Nevertheless, if Rogers is correct, Ayers aim was
not to separate philosophy from life, but to challenge
philosophical pretensions to authority about life: a
challenge based on a denitely philosophical attitude
towards life. Certainly in Ayers case the claimed
division between philosophy and life was far from
straightforward. In the rst place, his many political
campaigns and his wartime service manifested his
utilitarian hedonism and opposition to harmful preju-
dice. According to Rogers, moreover, Ayer was well
aware that for the many who lacked the opportunity,
his humanist conviction that people should make the
most of the one life they have would be ashes in the
mouth. Humanism, he argued, carried an obligation
to do something about that.
Rogers also suggests some interesting, if not entirely
convincing, links between Ayers philosophical com-
mitments and his various personal idiosyncrasies.
Ayers anti-essentialist belief in the bundle theory
of personal identity, for example, may have stemmed
from his lack of interest in individual psychology
REVIEWS
Ayer: con ou non?
Ben Rogers, A. J. Ayer: A Life, Chatto & Windus, London, 1999. xii + 402 pp., 20.00 hb., 0 7011 6316 X.
(whether his own or anyone elses) and what, for
most of his life, struck many of his acquaintances
as a lack of emotional depth. Likewise, his belief
that philosophical problems are primarily linguistic
in character could have owed something to the fact
that Ayer always thought in words (asked what he saw
when he thought of Paris: A sign saying Paris) and
regarded thinking in images as primitive.
Ayers conception of philosophy did not lead
him, as it did other analytic philosophers, to eschew
political philosophy, or to conne himself simply to
working out the consequences of his personal politi-
cal commitments. Rogers notes that, in contrast to
Marcuses claim that empiricism operates with an
image of humans as passive receivers of experience,
Ayers liberalism went with an attraction to political
theorists notably Marx, Proudhon and Sorel (who
he admiringly referred to as a moment of glory, a
spanner in the works) who stressed the working
and active nature of humanity.
Moreover, notwithstanding his dismissal of
Heidegger and Derrida as charlatans, Ayer displayed
much greater willingness and seriousness in engaging
with non-analytic philosophers than most of his con-
temporaries. Rogers lists six articles on existentialism
published in the ten years after the Second World
War, including a long and detailed critique of Being
and Nothingness. At the time, existentialism was very
popular among non-philosophers, and despite its con-
genially anti-authoritarian doctrine that the meaning
of life is something the individual must create for
herself, Ayers main interest was in undermining what-
ever unwarranted authority that popularity carried
with it. He regarded Sartres analysis of mauvaise
foi as often very penetrating, while repudiating his
startling indifference to logic. While he agreed with
Camus that life was ultimately meaningless, in the
sense that it has no transcendent purpose beyond what
we give to it, Ayer argued that Camuss inference from
this that life is absurd, as well as his ethic of heroic
deance, was based on the mistaken assumption that
the absence of transcendent purpose was some kind
of catastrophe, rather than, as Ayer thought, a logical
necessity. Incidentally, it is Sartre who, in ruling out
a public meeting with Ayer (Ayer est un con), is
revealed, by contrast, as unwilling to engage.
Ayers considerable published output is given a
serious and sympathetic evaluation by Rogers. What
emerges from this, in addition to a diverse range of
interests, is a relentless and hard-headed quest, through
the gradual elimination of error, for a Popperian kind
of truth, in which former commitments were succes-
sively abandoned or revised, including, by the time of
Central Questions of Philosophy (1973), a concession
that some metaphysical doctrines may be illuminating
(if wrong) and a rejection of the phenomenalism of
Language, Truth and Logic in favour of, in his own
words, a sophisticated form of realism. In addition to
the appraisal of Ayers publications, Rogers also draws
on reviews, letters and interviews with philosophical
contemporaries and former students to provide some
account of his standing as a philosopher. As a teacher,
by all accounts, Ayer was devoted, generous and inspir-
ing; genuinely welcoming disagreement, as many phil-
osophers say they do but dont. As a philosopher Ayer
considered himself much better than Austin, although
not quite as good as Quine. (Michael Lockwood, to
whom the remark was made, commented that Most
people think like this but few will admit to it. It
was the guileless nature of his vanity that made it
more charming than objectionable.)
Ayers importance for twentieth-century philosophy
is certainly harder to pin down than that of Austin or
Quine. It is clouded by his public status. He will be
chiey remembered as the author of Language, Truth
and Logic and for a position a philosophical doctrine
whose brief moment came and then passed (which is
not to say that it came to nothing). But Ayer was not,
as many have remarked, the originator of any major
tenet of logical positivism. He was, instead, both for
English-speaking philosophy and the wider public, its
popularizer. And yet the idea of a popularizer is that
of a simplier, which Ayer, at the cost of his ambitions
to follow the popularity of Bertrand Russells The
Problems of Philosophy and The History of Western
Philosophy, most certainly was not.
The logical positivists were not as one on all
matters of philosophical importance, and Language,
Truth and Logic, with its emotivist theory of moral
statements and phenomenalism, was, in that respect
at least, typical. Nor did he ignore or minimize the
philosophical problems associated with logical positiv-
ism; principally the difculties in providing a plausible
and coherent account of the vericationist theory of
meaning. Ayer typically took objections to his position
seriously enough to set them out carefully, to concede
qualications where he thought they were called for,
and even to admit to having no suitable response to
offer. It established him as a stylish (although, as bets
a logical positivist, the style was always free of unnec-
essary ornament) and eloquent advocate, paradoxically,
of a movement that valued clinical symbolism over
natural language. As such, he delivered a certain kind
of clarity for logical positivism, which, in view of the
importance it placed on clarity, positions him as one
of its foremost representatives. Ayers was not the
canonical clarity of quantiers, operators and so on,
but if the point of vericationism was to set a standard
for meaning in what can be understood, he did more
than anyone else to make it understood.
Despite the publication of some his best work
during the period, postwar analytic philosophy was
a considerable disappointment to Ayer. The ordinary-
language philosophy of Wittgenstein, Ryle and Austin
and, later, the essentialism of Kripke and Putnam
abandoned, from his perspective, the philosophical
progress achieved by Hume and, in the twentieth
century, by Moore, Russell, the Tractatus and the
Vienna Circle. His own association with those gures
must have sharpened his sense of disillusionment
(without diminishing his condence in the achievement
and enduring progressive promise of Enlightenment
reason), but more so, perhaps, his treatment as an
unfashionable stalking-horse, as the author of Lan-
guage, Truth and Logic. For all his pride in it, it is
a book whose principal defect he described to Brian
Magee as being that nearly all of it was false. It is
worth remembering, nevertheless, that it was one of
the highest selling and most inuential philosophy
books in the postwar period. It still sells two thousand
copies a year in Britain.
There is philosophy and there is all of this: all
of this, in Rogerss telling, reveals a man who lived up
to his humanist credo. He was heard at least once to
observe that he had made something of a mess of his
personal life: a judgement with which many who knew
him would have agreed. For all that, Ayer crammed
a vast amount into life, was much loved and made a
difference, mostly for the better. We could do with
more Wykeham professors like that.
Kevin Magill
Ethics for porcupines
Daryl Koehn, Rethinking Feminist Ethics: Care, Trust and Empathy, Routledge, London, 1998. viii + 215 pp.
45.00 hb., 14.99 pb., 0 415 18032 5 hb., 0 415 18033 3 pb.
Janna Thompson, Discourse and Knowledge: Defence of a Collectivist Ethics, Routledge, London, 1998. v +
155 pp., 40.00 hb., 12.99 pb., 0 415 18543 2 hb., 0 415 18544 0 pb.
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,
Freud recalls an image from Schopenhauer. Human
beings, from a social point of view, are like freezing
porcupines: they roll together for warmth, but nd
close contact painful, so roll apart again; but the
cold eventually forces them back together; and so on
indenitely until an optimum distance is arrived at.
Perhaps there is an analogous process to be observed
in ethical theory as we feel, alternately, the claims of
individual autonomy and of collective authority. If so,
then Janna Thompsons book represents the freezing
phase of the oscillation the reaction against what she
sees as an excessive individualism in moral epistem-
ology; while Daryl Koehns represents the prickly
phase in which the epistemic capacities of the subject
are reasserted. Koehn, however, is the more overtly
feminist of the two in her terms of reference, and she
is also the one who makes an explicit appeal to the
value of care though she argues that the proper
object of care for moral beings as such is not particular
persons, but the logos, or co-operative effort to avoid
wrongdoing through thoughtful dialogue.
Koehns book is predominantly critical, with the
care, trust and empathy of the subtitle each cor-
responding to a position in recent feminist ethics; her
main interlocutors are Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings,
Annette Baier, Trudy Govier and Diana Meyers. The
shortcomings she nds in these writers provide the
subject matter of her rst three chapters, while the
fourth, which unexpectedly turns out to centre on
Platos Crito, develops a dialogical account of moral
reasoning designed to correct the irrationalist tendency
of the positions criticized. (One may feel that Koehn
should have thought twice before converting female
ethicist a phrase in use throughout the book into
a philosophical term of art, inapplicable to women
who adopt a more traditional approach to ethics; her
evident awareness of the facticity and political con-
testability of such labels makes this choice of usage
a strange and slightly vexing one.)
Koehn is to be applauded for giving voice to
the disquiet many women must have felt over the
discovery by academic philosophy of de facto
feminine habits of moral thinking habits deriving
from a domestic rather than from a public (juridical)
context. She nds the resulting body of theory wor-
ryingly slow to challenge the expectations that arise
in relationships of intimacy and dependency, or to
provide safeguards against the kind of injustice (to
ourselves or to third parties) which we risk condoning
through emotional partiality towards our intimates.
Against the view that the self is generated by, or even
is, the social relations in which it is implicated, she
argues that not all distance from others is bad, that
the demand to apprentice ourselves empathetically
to others is not always appropriate, and that people
can be overly responsive to one another. What degree
of distance, or of responsiveness, may be right in
particular cases is a matter to be decided by rational
discursive means, seeking at every stage the consent
of ones interlocutor to the direction of movement of
the logos, and (most strikingly) providing a right of
exit from the discussion in the manner of Crito
51d if a bona de (non-cynical) interlocutor neither
succeeds in convincing the opposition, nor comes
round to the opposing view. (The right of exit is
pictured by Koehn not as merely notional, but as a
serious political desideratum, to be constructed by
means of international extradition treaties, arrange-
ments for the transfer of pension funds, and so forth.
As a contribution to the theory of criminal justice
and/or international relations, this struck me as the
weakest passage in a generally sane and realistic text.
If we think that [a] persons history in a particular
context [may be] partially responsible for the person
performing [a] condemned deed, so that this same
person may cease to be a threat if treated differently
by another community, why not start by getting our
own house clean for instance, by ceasing to tolerate
gross social inequality?)
Janna Thompsons discussion takes place, in the
main, at a more abstract level and contains less in the
way of textually detailed debate with other writers.
(The most signicant individual presence in her bibli-
ography, which is much shorter than Koehns, is that
of Habermas.) Her doctrine of ethical collectivism
and this is very much a book with a positive theory
to promote is based, rst, on the thought that each of
the multiple viewpoints from which individual moral
thinking proceeds is partial and limited, so that a
policy of relying on our own judgement cannot but
lead to some degree of error; and, second, on a com-
mitment to press forward nonetheless to views about
disputed moral questions (specically, questions about
the right as distinct from the good) which are not
just the best that can be arrived at for purposes of
political compromise, but actually correct as answers
to those questions.
We might wonder what would be wrong with
acquiescing in merely political solutions to what are
undoubtedly, from one point of view, problems of
social coexistence. For example, it is unclear why sup-
porters of the pro-choice position on abortion should
care particularly about eradicating the views of their
opponents, provided that abortion remained legal and
that the existence of such views posed no practical
threat to its legality. According to received liberal
wisdom, one of the positive achievements of modernity
is precisely to have devised political systems which
diminish the importance of substantive moral agree-
ment as a condition for the survival of communities,
and while there is room for ambivalence about this
achievement, Thompson could be accused of failing
to appreciate it. I would not deny that the authority
of ethical judgements and our ability to think of them
as knowledge require ethical agents to strive for a
rational consensus, but I am underwhelmed by the
observation that behind every moral agreement lurks
potential for dissonance, awaiting its opportunity to
emerge, and unsure why this should be thought to
threaten the rationality or objectivity of ethics. One
might ask: What did you expect? And, in fact, isnt
there something to be said for a culture within which
people have the necessary composure to maintain
uneasy truces and silences? To treat this as a conces-
sion to ethical scepticism is to write off something of
value in the liberal tradition.
The core of Thompsons theory lies in the dis-
tinction she draws between a critical and a construc-
tive stage of ethical argument. The critical stage takes
us as far as we can go in moral enquiry on the basis
of monological methods, meaning those that can be
employed by individual thinkers pictured as operating
autonomously. Such methods, however, are not guaran-
teed to eliminate disagreement, and for this reason we
must proceed to a constructive stage, in which posi-
tions that have emerged from critical discourse with
a claim to be regarded as cogent (a term to which
I return below) feed into a process directed towards
dialogic equilibrium (the echo of Rawls is deliber-
ate). This equilibrium is reached when all parties can
agree in regarding a certain proposal (a candidate for
the status of best or most plausible judgement on the
relevant question) as indeed the winning candidate for
that status an agreement that will reect the ability
of the proposal to accommodate better than any avail-
able alternative the various concerns embodied in the
assembled cogent positions. Since participants know
that these views are partial, explains Thompson, they
have no reason to suppose that the right conclusion is
identical with any one of them. So they will attempt to
reach agreement by making proposals which take into
account aspects of each of the positions represented
in discourse. These proposals can be thought of as
hypotheses for explaining the [doxastic] data, the
hypothesis which provides the best explanation being
the rightful winner.
Since participants in constructive ethical discourse
are supposed to give equal weight to all positions
certied as cogent at the prior, critical stage, it
is a matter of some moment how that title is to be
earned. Thompson tells us that in order to admit a
view as cogent, participants in discourse have to be
able to judge that the reasons given for the view are
good reasons that they adequately support the view
and that objections and criticisms can plausibly be
answered by those who hold it, a requirement which
Thompson thinks we often judge to be satised even
when we disagree with the view at issue. However,
this usage of good reasons, adequately support,
plausibly answered, and the like is open to question:
does our understanding of these terms license the idea
that we can, logically, regard a view that we hold to
be false as being supported by genuinely adequate
or good reasons, or as capable of producing (more
than supercially) plausible answers to objections?
(Compare the question whether it is logically possible
to regard the criteria for the truth of a proposition as
being really, genuinely satised, while continuing
to entertain the thought that the proposition might be
false.) Since I am inclined to answer this in the nega-
tive, I remain unconvinced by Thompsons proposed
method of generating an array of views to which equal
epistemic weight must be accorded at the subsequent,
constructive, stage.
Thompsons political motivation can hardly fail to
win respect. In contrast to the monological tradition,
she promotes from empirical to a priori status the
proposition that freedom and equality, underwritten
by suitable social institutions, are necessary to suc-
cessful moral enquiry (since an ethical collectivist
must value social conditions which enable others to
contribute to discourse). But progressive thinkers too
will nd grounds for anxiety in this book. Abandoning
monology means assenting to the thesis of individual
fallibility, not just as a reminder of the continual need
to expose ones beliefs to criticism (a role in which
any rational person will make room for it), but as a
principle requiring that one allow those beliefs to be
cognitively diluted by engagement with others which
one persists in an individual capacity in thinking
false. I nd it anything but obvious that the cause of
moral and political reason per se, as opposed to the
(however desirable) short-term elimination of conict,
will be advanced by doing this. I therefore suspect that
Thompsons position calls for an excessive degree of
epistemic sociability, and nd myself drawn to Daryl
Koehns implicitly dissenting claim that individuals
should not have to endorse anothers view if that view
seems mistaken. Or, in Kants version, The motto of
enlightenment is Sapere aude! Have courage to use
your own understanding!
Both books are clearly written and presented.
Thompsons is a sophisticated work of philosophy
and a model of orderly, professional exposition, but
Koehn is the more readable and, arguably, the more
rewarding.
Sabina Lovibond
The personal
is political
Warren Breckman, Marx, The Young Hegelians and
the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the
Self, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999. xii
+ 335 pp., 35.00 hb., 0 521 62440 1.
The Hegel revival in the Anglophone philosophical
world has produced over the past thirty years many
monuments of critical insight and scholarship. That
they represent advances in our understanding of their
subject is not to be doubted. Yet there has been a price
to pay in terms of certain constitutional weaknesses of
the movement. They stem in large part from its reviv-
alist character, its sense of itself as pressing its claims
on an indifferent or hostile world. This has created a
pressure to accommodate Hegel to the ways of that
world, to make him palatable to its ruling intellectual
powers. Thus, the dominance of analytical habits of
thought has encouraged a systematic downplaying of
his metaphysical ambitions so as to represent him
as essentially an epistemologist. In practice the only
feasible way to do this is to assimilate him as closely
as possible to Kant as a fellow explorer of the trans-
cendental conditions of knowledge. The tendency is
illustrated by the inuential work of Robert Pippin
and, in more extreme form, of Klaus Hartmann, a
German scholar under the inuence of Anglo-Ameri-
can philosophy.
A succession of works has, moreover, sought to
suggest or imply that Hegel would himself have been
quite at home in the contemporary United States, for
all his apparent aversion to republicanism, liberal-
ism and democracy, and the continuing existence of
mass poverty, the problem which, according to Hegel,
especially agitates and torments modern societies.
Hegels recent American admirers do not seem in the
least agitated and tormented by it. Thus, for Michael
Hardimon, the modern social world constitutes a satis-
factory home for human beings provided only that the
philosophically reective bourgeoisie is reconciled
to it, while the presence of poverty has simply to be
accepted, admittedly as a moment of melancholy.
That representative, bien pensant members of the
liberal academy are less troubled by large-scale suf-
fering, injustice and alienation than Hegel was should
indeed induce melancholy reections on the moral and
intellectual darkness of our time. To avoid embroiling
Hegel in the darkness it is natural to turn for help from
the philosophical commentators to the intellectual
historians. They may surely be expected to show what
may reasonably or intelligibly be attributed to him in
the light of his intellectual formation, cultural context,
the assumptions and expectations of contemporaries
and their reception of his work. To that undertak-
ing Warren Breckmans book makes a striking and
original contribution.
The book begins, it must be admitted, somewhat
ominously, with the apparent intention of treating its
concerns in the context of the current debate about
civil society initiated by the dissidents of Communist
Eastern Europe. This invites us, Breckman declares,
to revisit and rethink the original debate on the
subject that developed under the impact of Hegels
thought. Such an approach seems in general to be at
odds with the historical scruples he displays elsewhere:
the resolve not to impose current preoccupations on
the past. This is illustrated by, for instance, the polite
distancing of his view of Hegel from that of Pippin.
Moreover, the approach being canvassed seems inept
on more specic grounds. For Hegel, civil society is
essentially the capitalist market economy together with
the institutions needed to mitigate its ferocity. This
conception must sit awkwardly, and idly, with any sup-
posed revolution of civil society under Communism.
In fact any misgivings the reader of Breckmans
opening pages may be forming turn out to be ground-
less. The standpoint of the present programmatically
announced there turns out to have no effective role in
the subsequent discussion. It is true that the current
debate about civil society reappears in the last few
paragraphs of the book and, indeed, the Vaclav Havel
of 1988 is invoked on the need to struggle against the
momentum of impersonal power. This invocation may
shed some oblique light on Havels evident resolve to
use power himself, once he had laid hands on it, in as
wilfully personal a way as he could manage. It sheds
none at all on what Breckman had immediately before
referred to as the Young Hegelians emancipatory
struggle against the sovereign discourse of personal
authority. Nor is his claim that the two topics are
linked ironically at all persuasive. Here, as elsewhere
in his book, the ironic serves its familiar function of
inviting the reader to stay cool over a hiatus in the argu-
ment while shufing off responsibility for repairing it.
However, it is not merely
Breckmans introductory
and con-cluding remarks
that serve the substance
of his work badly. This
is true in general of, so
to speak, the way its
substance is packaged.
Most obviously, the
books title is compre-
hensively misleading.
Marx does not deserve
his prominence there,
for he looms no larger
in the text, and is stra-
tegically less important
to the developments it
traces, than Feuerbach,
or even Arnold Ruge. Neither is the work a study of the
Young Hegelians as such, since it is highly selective
in its choice of subjects. The most prominent thinkers
who receive no sustained attention in it are Bruno
Bauer and Max Stirner. It cannot even be placed safely
in the genre of the Young Hegelians and Karl Marx.
The Young Hegelians who do gure are not primarily
treated in relation to Marx but in relation rather to the
controlling themes of the argument, themes to which
the treatment of Marx is itself strictly bound. Finally,
the books central concerns cannot reasonably be said
to fall within the scope of the, admittedly elastic, term
social theory, radical or otherwise. Yet, while the
title seems a concoction of the publishers marketing
department, the subtitle Dethroning the Self is an
accurate pointer to what is really at stake.
The book is chiey preoccupied with early-nine-
teenth-century conceptions of the self as they mani-
fest themselves in philosophical theology on the one
hand and political theory on the other. The links
between these two realms of thought and discourse are
characterized by Breckman in terms of homologies,
analogies and structural parallels. This may seem
unsatisfactorily vague to some readers, who may wish
to have the nature of the links specied more pre-
cisely. That would be hard to do, however, in view of
the complexity and slipperiness of the relationships
involved, as Breckman conceives them, and forcing
the issue might well lead to distortion. In any case,
it seems entirely proper for him to claim that he is
aiming to disclose not rm causal relations but rather
meaningful relations within a constellation of themes.
The simplest case is the homology of the traditional
Christian conception of a personal, transcendent God
and the advocacy of personal monarchical sovereignty
in Restoration political theory. God is both the exem-
plar of the personal monarch and the source of the
authority of all earthly instances. These sovereign
persons, taken together, serve as the guarantors of per-
sonal property and of the established order in general.
On the other side of the theological-political divide
there is the looser, but still intelligible, connection
between the impersonal, immanent deity of pantheism
and progressive political theory, with socialism at
its outer limit. Breckman studies this connection in
detail in the work of such thinkers as Heinrich Heine,
Moses Hess and August Cieszkowski. He traces also
the process, culminating in Marx and Engels, through
which the radical critique of personalism was secular-
ized, shifting its main target from personal monarchy
to the egoistic individual proprietor of civil society.
These questions are dealt with by Breckman with
a consistent sharpness, subtlety and force. His demon-
stration of the overwhelmingly theological content
of the various debates is itself a feat of historical
imagination, given that we are all now inheritors of
their nal secularization. Moreover, his attempt to shift
backwards in time the moment at which they took on
a political dimension is persuasive and enlightening,
breaking as it does with the conventional picture of an
apolitical 1830s and a highly politicized 1840s. The
point is made with particular clarity in the important
case of Feuerbach. There are many lesser benets to be
gained from Breckmans discussion. It sheds light, for
instance, on an issue which has puzzled many readers
of Marxs Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right.
This is the extent of his interest in what may well
seem a minor matter, Hegels attachment to constitu-
tional monarchy. Marxs interest in it takes on a fresh
signicance and validity against the background of
Breckmans account of the personalist controversy.
What is perhaps most impressive is Breckmans
relaxed, indeed magisterial, way with the evidence,
derived in large part, no doubt, from his condence in
the soundness of his overall picture. Thus, he is quite
willing to acknowledge the need for qualications and
exceptions in large points of detail for instance, with
regard to the conjunction of devotion to a personal God
and to liberal politics in such varied gures as Jacobi,
Novalis, Weisse and Immanuel Hermann Fichte. There
is perhaps one area in which Breckman may be sus-
pected of forcing the pace a little: that is, in the claims
he makes for the inuence of Saint-Simonianism in
Germany. In the cases of Feuerbach and Ruge in
particular, he seems to go somewhat beyond what the
evidence strictly warrants. Even here, however, he may
at least be said to be bending the stick in the direction
it now needs to go, against the prevailing current.
Moreover, his general emphasis on the intimate links
between French and German intellectual life in the
period in question is both convincing and salutary. His
book is fully worthy to be set alongside John Toewss
Hegelianism as a study of the immediate reception of
Hegels thought. We are fortunate to have two such
recent works in English on a portion of intellectual
history rich in reverberations that have continued to
sound loudly right down to the present.
Joseph McCarney
Hobsons choice
Marion Hobson, Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines, Routledge, London and New York, 1998. xv + 288 pp.,
14.99 pb., 0 415 13786 1.
Some critics set great store by whats new. They
initiate debates, open elds, break fresh ground. The
question of contemporaneity where deconstruction is
concerned is complicated by the fact that although its
a coinage, its one that bears the stamp of older cur-
rencies, including that of Heideggers Destruktion. For
all the accusations of faddishness and fashionability
that attach themselves to Jacques Derrida, he has
always insisted upon his place within a long tradition,
underlining the classical nature of his work rather than
its cutting edge. Of course, to write in the margins of
philosophy, as Derrida claims to do, is not to write
against it. Derrida has gone so far as to say that, as
with philosophy, so with science: he has the greatest
respect for its fundamental premisses and modes of
inquiry. This traditional side to Derrida is seldom
emphasized by friends or foes alike. Both are happy to
see Derrida as an iconoclast. His radicalism, whether
commended or condemned, is readily acknowledged
by all. Less remarked upon is the extent to which he
is a reactive, perhaps even a reactionary, thinker, in the
sense of being responsive rather than innovative.
While claiming to be writing from within the
philosophical canon, Derrida also insists that he is
essentially a respondent and a correspondent, one
who answers calls for contributions to conferences
and collections. This occasional aspect to Derridas
work seems at odds with the popular perception of the
deconstructive project as patterned and programmatic.
Moreover, it sits rather awkwardly alongside Derridas
ongoing critique of those he terms professor-jour-
nalists. The picture of Derrida as a commissioned
critic, someone who writes to order, and whose inter-
ventions into philosophical and literary debate arise
directly from solicitations, does however chime with
his reputation as a philosopher of the everyday; an
intellectual of the present moment who has something
to say on every subject; a commentator, if not a
professor-journalist.
These two Derridas the man with shoes of wind
who ies round the world intervening by invitation
only, and the philosopher rmly grounded in the great
tradition, albeit treading or trespassing on its borders
and verges are sometimes hard to reconcile. Because
both literary and philosophical critics of Derrida have
tended to be selective about his work, there remains
a suggestion of fragmentation. One could see in this
a positive sign. After all, deconstruction depends pre-
cisely upon fragments. Derrida, though, has arguably
suffered more than any other thinker from the splitting
and parcelling out of his writings. Caught between a
rock and a hard place, he has engaged in a struggle for
acceptance and recognition across a number of elds.
The interdisciplinary nature of his writings and reputa-
tion has led to a separation of the strictly philosophical
from the more general cultural and political material.
The major writings have been divided broadly into
dry and wet work. Of Grammatology would be an
example of the former, Glas of the latter.
The problem with this kind of division is that Der-
ridas intellectual project is not being considered as a
whole. In France, Derrida is arguably regarded rst
and foremost as a philosopher. In an Anglo-American
context he is transformed into a Jacques of all trades.
The systematic quality of Derridas work has been
recognized by Rodolphe Gasch, but Gaschs defence
of Derrida is geared towards trying to win him back
for the philosophers, and he deliberately underplays
the wet, wild and witty side. More recently, in Acts of
Literature, Derek Attridge set out to reclaim Derrida
for literary studies.
Derridas best critics have long been his transla-
tors Alan Bass, Peggy Kamuf, Gayatri Spivak. But
something has been lost in the translation, not least
of all because the task of the translator is to convince
the reader that a reasonably accurate translation is
actually possible. The truth lies somewhere in between
those critics who maintain that Derridas chief inter-
ests lie in philosophy and those who insist that his
real concern is with ction. Behind this fragmentary
gure who its between philosophy and ction is a
French Derrida. What has been lacking is the com-
bination of an understanding of Derridas debt to
French language and literature with an equally intense
appreciation of his familiarity with Anglophone tradi-
tions. Marion Hobsons painstaking examination of the
interconnections across Derridas corpus thus marks a
crucial moment in critical accounts of deconstruction.
This book displays the same clarity and compression
as Hobsons work on Rousseau. It is argued through-
out with an impressive mix of exibility and rigour.
Hobson knows both the French contexts and currents
that Derrida is plugged into, and the larger European
and global networks that he traverses. Opening Lines
is on one level an exercise in reconciliation and
reconstruction, bringing together a range of writings
by Derrida and making a case for their connectedness.
Hobson demonstrates that Derridas work consists of
reworkings of conceptions of subjectivity, meaning
and identity.
Ironically, Hobsons reminder of Derridas invest-
ment in French comes along at precisely the moment
at which Derridas relationship with the French lang-
uage has itself become an object of his concern. Born
and raised in Algeria, he sees himself as an outsider
with regard to metropolitan French culture. In Mono-
lingualism of the Other, he has gone to great pains to
mark out his distance from domestic French, his dis-
enfranchisement, positioning himself as an Other even
in his mother tongue. He styles himself the exemplary
Franco-Maghrebian, haunted by nostalgeria.
Hobson is admirably alert to Derridas idiomatic
French, and to the overall consistency as well as the
characteristic idiosyncrasies of his arguments. This
is not a book for the beginner, but it is a formidable
and challenging study, which will help change the way
in which Derrida and deconstruction are received.
Hobson begins by pointing to the ways in which
Derrida has been read out of context. There is some
irony in a French philosopher becoming a central and
con-troversial gure in English Studies. Hobson takes
her cue from Richard Rorty, who famously argued
in an essay published over twenty years ago that the
key to understanding Derrida was the conception of
philosophy as a kind of writing. As Hobson puts it,
language is freighted in ways we cannot oversee and
control. In Derridas case this is further complicated
by the fact that he is writing in a language foreign
to the discipline in which he has been most readily
received. To reinforce her point, Hobson cites Derrida
throughout in both English translation and French
original. A crucial component of Hobsons argument
is that Derridas writing is not easily reduced to neat
summaries, to kernels or nutshells. It obstinately resists
this sort of appropriation or familiarization exactly
because it is designed at some points to allow for
what is new, or difcult, to emerge.
There is no doubt that Hobson is more concerned
with accountability than accessibility. (Her chapter
headings are far from reader-friendly: Strange attrac-
tors: singularities, Negatives and steps: pas sans
pas. Derridas titles are by contrast direct and lucid,
even when they are punning and provocative.) Her
aim is to clarify rather than simplify. If this makes
her treatment of Derridas arguments at times a little
arid, this is a small price to pay for such sterling
scholarship. Opening Lines is the rst truly compre-
hensive study of Derridas work. The old literary
and philosophical split is elaborately deconstructed to
reveal a network of underground tunnels connecting
a very varied body of work to different traditions.
Hobson combines close readings of individual texts
concentrating on particular passages, and sometimes
specic phrases with an enviable understanding of
larger cultural and historical formations. It is precisely
with the relationship between microscopic fragments
of text and the mapping of a macropolitical sphere
that Derrida is concerned.
Derridas most recent work points to ethics as
a sustaining concern. Hobsons closing quotation,
typically convoluted, comes from Wittgenstein citing
Kierkegaard while speaking of Heidegger: Man has
the impulse to run up against the limits of language.
This running-up-against Kierkegaard also recognized
and even designated it in a quite similar way (as
running-up against Paradox). This running up against
the limits of language is Ethics. If ethics is about limit
or test cases, and is thus necessarily taxing and trou-
bling, then Hobsons is a profoundly ethical book.
Willy Maley
Revolutionary
Lacanianism
Slavoj Z
iek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre

of Political Ontology, Verso, London and New York,
1999. vi + 409 pp., 20.00 hb., 1 85984 894 X.
The latest and largest instalment in Z
ieks already
expansive uvre presents itself as little less than a
politico-philosophical manifesto for the reformula-
tion of the left intelligentsia. In a manner oscillating
between revolutionary zeal and wry self-parody The
Ticklish Subject opens with a sort of intellectual call
to arms: A spectre is haunting Western academia, the
spectre of the Cartesian subject. Z
iek goes on to list

his thesis and his project: (1) Cartesian subjectivity
continues to be acknowledged by all academic powers
as a powerful and still active intellectual tradition; (2)
it is high time that the partisans of Cartesian subject-
ivity should, in the face of the whole world, publish
their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this
nursery tale of the Spectre of Cartesian subjectivity
with the philosophical manifesto of Cartesian subject-
ivity itself.
Z
iek does not hereby proclaim an orthodox

Cartesianism, but rather the elaboration of the obscene
truth that sustains the idea of a self-transparent cogito
but is overlooked in the critique of Cartesian subjec-
tivity. This is an oversight that Z
iek claims occurs

throughout the dominant debates of Western academia,
between Habermasians and deconstructionists, cog-
nitive scientists and Heideggerians, feminists and
New Age obscurantists. For Z
iek, the philosophical

manifesto of Cartesian subjectivity is provided by the
Lacanian reading of German idealism and Marxism
that he has developed over the last ten years. The
Ticklish Subject provides perhaps the most ambitious
application of this position to date, not least because
of the hyperbolic political claim made for this project:
namely, that in unearthing the common presupposi-
tion of Western academia we are enabled to address
the burning question of how we are to reformulate
a leftist, anti-capitalist political project in our era
of global capitalism and its ideological supplement,
liberal-democratic multi-culturalism.
Z
iek performs his multilateral assault on Western

academia through a serial criticism of three authors
whom he takes to have provided exemplary critiques
of Cartesian subjectivity: Heidegger, Badiou and
Butler. Each analysis is coupled with an accompany-
ing elaboration of the principle underlying its critique:
subjectivity in German idealism, political subjectiviz-
ation in post-Althusserian political philosophy, and
the Oedipus complex as the psychoanalytic account
of the emergence of the subject. Despite the scale and
multiplicity of the material covered, the argumentative
strategy of the book is relatively clear and, correla-
tive to its three main parts, can be summarized as
follows:
1. Contra Heideggers displacement of the problem
of subjectivity into the history
of Being, it seeks to recover the
notion of an irreducibly nega-
tive, obscene (i.e. con-cealed)
or excessive dimension to sub-
jectivity as the fun-damental
lesson of German idealism.
2. Contra Badious consti-
tution of subjectivity through
the positive afrmation of
a truth-event, it draws an
analogy between German
idealisms logic of subjectivity
and the experience of politi-
cal order, such that however
unsurpass-able a political
order may appear prior to the
event of its transformation,
this apparent unsurpassability
is nonetheless sustained by a
necessarily concealed condition of possibility which
threatens to explode it.
3. Contra Butlers pluralization of subject formation,
it emphasizes how capitalism remains a fundamental
condition of subjection, which despite being obscured
by this pluralization continues to underlie it.
Thus, through the novel optic of a Lacanian
reconstruction of German idealism, Z
iek pursues a
surprisingly classical Marxian project: a radicalization
of politics through the politicization of an apparently
apolitical economic base. Indeed, the leitmotiv of The
Ticklish Subject appears to be the translation of the
Lacanian Real as capitalism. The promise of this
translation is that it will provide a psychoanalytically
infused articulation of the subjective experience of
capitalist societies. This is clearly the matrix that
Z
iek obsessively illustrates elsewhere. However, the

status and structure of this matrix is rendered deeply
problematic by Z
ieks apparent endeavour to general-

ize Lacanian psychoanalysis into a form of speculative
philosophy, while eliding the question of how psycho-
analysis can convincingly overcome the specicity of
its original interpretative situation. Hence, for the most
part, the infusion of a Lacanian critique of subjectivity
into a Marxian critique of political economy remains
forced and one-sided. As a result, in so far as Z
iek
gures the emancipatory project of a re-politicization
of the economy as the realization of demands for
subjective multiplicity, the precise character of this
project remains obscure.
Ironically, this elision of the specicity of psycho-
analysis results from the inversion of Z
ieks debt to
Althusser. Althussers construction of a theory of ideol-
ogy through recourse to Lacan, with Hegel as its prin-
cipal philosophical target, is transformed into Z
ieks
Lacanian redemption of Hegel, once Althussers com-
mitment to the structuring condition of scienticity is
dissolved. This enables the dissolution of Althussers
neo-Kantian organization of the eld of knowledge
around the specic objects of the various sciences.
However, Z
iek does not perform a direct critique of

neo-Kantianism, in the manner of Lukcss Hegelian-
ism, for example. Rather, he effaces the specicity of
Lacanian psychoanalysis by generalizing it through the
model of Hegels speculative philosophy. Thus, Z
iek
tends to full the Althusserian fantasy of a Hegelian
expressive totality, in which the particular phenomena
of contemporary society become immediately expres-
sive of the subject of capital.
This reduction is exacerbated by Z
ieks form of
exposition, which, despite his Hegelianism, remains
illustrative rather than dialectical. Z
ieks extra-
ordinarily uent application of Lacan to contemporary
culture does not of itself establish its truth, in so
far as it is facilitated by the independence of theory
from its material. It is noteworthy in this respect
that Z
ieks interpretation of cultural phenomena is

largely indifferent to their form. The consideration
of form is for Z
iek almost entirely a question of the

(psychoanalytic) interpretation of the explicit narrative
of those phenomena. The consideration of the form
of, for instance, cinema, as a specic organization or
mediation of social experience, as distinct from opera
or sport (a consideration which radically affects its
meaning independently of any psychoanalytic interpre-
tation of its explicit narrative), appears to be beyond
Z
ieks concept of interpretation. To help overcome

this limitation we can still usefully consult the cul-
tural criticism developed by the rst generation of the
Frankfurt School.
Stewart Martin
Refresher
Anne Phillips, Which Equalities Matter?, Polity Press,
Cambridge, 1999. 159 pp., 45.00 hb., 13.99 pb., 0
7456 2108 2 hb., 0 7456 2109 0 pb.
Political theorists are well used to the notion of essen-
tially contested concepts. The ideas central to their dis-
cipline have not only been honed by analytical labour;
they have emergeed through an ongoing process of
political struggle. Debate over the signicance of terms
tends therefore to incite ideological differences which
are intrinsic to concepts like freedom, equality or
justice. There is a further process at work here, too,
inasmuch as concepts move in and out of fashion
according to wider political interests. Freedom offers
a good illustration. Attempts at denition threw up a
fertile dichotomy between negative and positive liberty
which thereafter enframed debates while also splitting
the term along politicized lines: liberalism versus its
critics. Yet freedom does not gure much in more
recent analyses, having been replaced by political
theorists interest in justice, democracy and rights.
The concept of equality seems to have suffered
a similar, even a more pronounced, fate. Because of
its entanglement with the idea of justice it has been
especially vulnerable to occlusion under the weight of
Rawlsian or Habermasian fascination with formal pro-
cedures of justice. At the same time, equality became
a politically difcult word during the 1980s, aban-
doned by just those exponents of radicalism who were
previously its natural allies. For the Left it acquired an
aura of anachronism unless diluted into a tepid equal-
ity of opportunity; among feminists it has been widely
derided as insufciently sensitive to difference.
It is in this context that Anne Phillips has written
Which Equalities Matter?, a book that self-consciously
aims to put the concept of equality back on the agenda
and one that explicitly situates itself within the politics
of Blairite Britain. It is a fairly short book, written
with the sort of clarity and commitment that is a
trademark of Phillipss work. If it does not exactly
say much that is new, it does say a good deal that
has become unfamiliar. In this sense its very appear-
ance is important; it offers an incisive account of the
various meanings, weaknesses and debates that have
surrounded equality, thus providing a framework for
the terms rehabilitation.
In fact, equality is not a new concern for Phil-
lips. More than a decade ago she published Divided
Loyalties: Dilemmas of Sex and Class, in which she
considered feminist claims to sexual equality and
focused on the problematic way gender and class are
imbricated. Since then her ideas have been through the
crucible of debates about a far more extensive litany
of differences. The inuence of some of the more
modest postmodernists is apparent here, but consistent
throughout Phillipss work is her strong commitment
to egalitarianism. In this latest volume she comes full
circle, insisting and lamenting that it is the economic
equality associated with class that has fallen out of
recent discussions about difference.
Inevitably it is the polemics surrounding equal-
ity-versus-diversity that feature most prominently in
the analysis. But Phillips is inclined to transpose the
debate into one concerning the relation between eco-
nomics and politics, stating that it is their separation
which lies at the heart of her book. Despite applauding
the revived interest in politics that is apparent in the
1990s where democratization provokes questions
about equal citizenship which involve rethinking
representation as well as the role of respect and rec-
ognition in multicultural societies she worries that
this emphasis on political equality has eclipsed earlier
anxieties about economic inequality. In particular,
and as Phillips insists time and again, economic
inequalities subvert not only our substantive ability
to participate equally as citizens but also any genuine
respect for those whose difference involves signicant
material inequality. It is in their lack of attention to the
structural arrangements which reproduce an unequal
distribution of life-chances, income and wealth that
Phillips nds deliberative democracy and a politics
of recognition, as well as more classically liberal
arguments, inadequate.
One of the best things about Which Equalities
Matter? is the way Phillips combines analytical meticu-
lousness with political conviction. She takes us through
the major conceptual analyses of equality (although
there is little discussion of Marxism), showing why
many of the senses in which it is politically appealing
are actually quite confused. It is apparent here how
the fastidiousness of Anglophone political theory has
a rather paralysing political effect, which it shares
with some deconstructive approaches. Terms with a
strong ideological resonance begin to look too danger-
ous to handle without scare quotes and certainly too
problematic to stake ones political ambitions on. But
this is balanced in the text by Phillipss unequivocal
commitments, which she states with a refreshing lack
of ambiguity.
Some of her theoretical convictions will send post-
structuralist alarm bells ringing, as when Phillips
states boldly that it is that assertion about a funda-
mental human equality (in the capacity for reason, or
perhaps just capacity for suffering) that underpins my
use of the term. But many will surely sympathize with
the uncompromising political conclusions she draws.
Phillipss positions are always sensible and pragmatic.
She accepts the inevitability of capitalism and merely
advocates policies such as afrmative action that will
have some effect on outcomes. She recognizes broad
structural dimensions of inequality, such as the power
of private corporations, but leaves them aside in favour
of more operational concerns such as reducing income
differentials and reforming the division of labour. Even
so, readers for whom economic equality has remained
high on their political agenda might wonder whether
a more rigorous sociological exploration might not
reveal structural limitations to even Phillipss more
modest demands for material equality. If the book
has a weakness, it lies in its failure to match its
analytical rigour with any account of the sociology of
contemporary Britain. What is missing is any attention
to actual material disparities and their trajectory; their
distribution across gender and racial or ethnic lines;
the identity of those who are socially excluded and
who constitute the underclass, and so on. Perhaps,
in fairness to Phillips, her book has done enough
simply by putting economic equality back at the heart
of political theory. It deserves to be widely read and
discussed. But if a new and vital conceptualization
of inequality is to emerge, it surely must arise out
of an informed consideration of the sociology of late
modern societies and not merely from the logic of
conceptual analysis.
Diana Coole
Tommy and Jim
John Corvino, ed., Same Sex: Debating the Ethics,
Science, and Culture of Homosexuality, Rowman &
Littleeld, Lanham MD and Oxford, 1999. xxvii +
394 pp., 20.95 hb., 13.95 pb., 0 8476 8482 2 hb., 0
8476 8483 0 pb.
The project of Same Sex is declared in the subtitle:
Debating the Ethics, Science, and Culture of Homo-
sexuality. John Corvino places his authors with careful
thought, so that they answer each other, sometimes
explicitly. It seems that this has been found useful,
because Same Sex started life as a hardback in 1997,
and now comes with approving comments from review-
ers on its papered back.
Corvinos goal is to render discussion more rational,
more civil, and more productive, and most of these
essays are indeed quietly purposeful. What doesnt
get addressed is the agenda. If the idea is to balance
the debate, where does the centre lie and what are
the extremes? From this point of view, Same Sex is
distinctly depressing. Let me show why.
In the opening chapter Corvino argues that his
friends Tommy and Jim, who have been together for
fourteen years and have lovingly restored their Vic-
torian house, may properly have sexual relations. In
the next two chapters David Bradshaw and John Finnis
hold that homosexuality is bad in principle, because
it fails to respect the given form of the human body
as male or female and treats sexual organs as mere
instruments of pleasure. Then Andrew Koppelman
replies that gay couples are as legitimate as sterile
heterosexual relations. No one argues on behalf of
lesbian and gay sex outside stable partnerships.
This pattern continues. The Ramsey Colloquium
(Jewish and Christian biblical scholars) declares that
gays embrace the false and dangerous claims of the
sexual revolution. Thomas Williams denies that they
must do so. No one suggests that a sexual revolu-
tion, supposing we have had one, or were to have
one, might be a good thing. One scholar claims to
show that St Paul regarded homosexual relations as
ethically neutral; another that they are condemned
consistently throughout the Bible. No one says the
Bible is irrelevant.
It is debated whether a refusal to acknowledge that
there are gays in the military exhibits either prejudice
or a reasonable concern for good discipline. There is
no analysis of the masculinist ethos that is assumed
to be necessary if you are going to get people to kill
each other. The pros and cons of marriage are fairly
put, but the book doesnt entertain the more risky
prospect of lesbian and gay parenting.
My point is not that Corvino has treacherously
compiled a homophobic collection of essays. Prob-
ably he has done his best to set up the issues so that
instructors in philosophy classes will feel able to take
them forward with their students. What is depressing
is that these seem to be the terms on which that is
possible, at least in the USA.
Lets hope Tommy and Jim arent waiting on the
outcome.
Alan Sinfield
Historical humanism
Sean Sayers, Marxism and Human Nature, Routledge, London and New York, 1998. 203 pp., 45.00 hb., 0
415 19147 5.
This book falls into two parts: one deals with the
world of work, especially in the writings of Andr
Gorz, the other concentrates on Marxisms attitude
towards morality, particularly the ideas of Norman
Geras. Only the introductory rst and the last chapters
(Marxism and Human Nature Sayerss most recent
contribution to his ongoing debate with Geras) are
new. Not surprisingly, Sayerss views with respect to
some issues appear to have evolved in the fteen-year
period which has elapsed since the publication of the
earliest paper in 1984.
One of the central themes of the book is Sayerss
attempt to present an alternative to two allegedly
erroneous doctrines which, in his opinion, have domin-
ated recent discussion of Marxisms attitude towards
human nature and/or ethical values. The rst of these
is the essentialist humanism of the Enlightenment.
This afrms that there is such a thing as human
nature; is completely ahistorical; adopts an absolut-
ist or objectivist approach to ethics; and postulates
the existence of a universally valid, transhistorical
ethical yardstick which might be used to critically
evaluate existing society in the manner of traditional
natural law theory. Sayers associates such a humanist
interpretation of Marxism with the work of Norman
Geras. The second doctrine, which Sayers refers to
as conventionalism, denies altogether the existence
of human nature and is committed to the principles
of both social constructionism and ethical relativism.
Sayers associates this second doctrine not only with
postmodernism but also with a particular interpreta-
tion of Marxism which he himself rejects. In Sayerss
view, each of these opposed doctrines is one-sided.
The approach adopted by Marxism is, he insists,
neither completely universalist nor exclusively relativ-
ist but, rather, historicist. As such, it represents a form
of historical humanism.
This Marxist historicist approach recognizes the
existence of that which is universal, so far as both
human nature and ethical values are concerned, but
nevertheless insists that this universal is always his-
torically mediated. For example, man is a productive
being who possesses a natural need to work. However,
as in the case of all natural needs, the specic form
which this need to work takes in contemporary society
is a product of the historically developed conditions
of modern industry. In the nal analysis, then, human
nature (and its needs), together with any natural ethical
values associated with it, remain historically con-
stituted. Hence, pace Norman Geras, they are unable
to provide a transhistorical or transcendent standard
for the critical evaluation of existing society.
This is not to say, however, that there are no reasons
for objecting to capitalist society on moral grounds.
Sayers maintains that Marxs historicism can provide
us with a standard of moral evaluation but that, at its
decisive point, this is necessarily a historical standard.
It is a standard which is not transcendent, as Geras
suggests, but immanent within the historical process
itself. According to Sayers, given its recognition of the
historical mediation of all universal values, it is only
possible for Marxism to avoid the political quiescence
associated with ethical relativism by committing itself
to the idea of moral progress. The ethical values of
a later and higher stage of historical development are
superior to those of an earlier and lower stage and
might therefore, in certain circumstances, be used to
critically evaluate society at that earlier stage. Sayers
insists, however, that this form of historicism is not one
which is teleological in the manner Hegel understands
this term. There is no end to moral progress.
Considered simply as an account of Marxisms
attitude towards human nature and morality there
is a lot to be said for this thesis. However, he has a
tendency to employ the terms historical and historicist
interchangeably, thereby giving the impression that
he himself subscribes to the conventionalist or his-
toricalist reading of Marx which he later rejects. For
example, he maintains that his own approach involves
seeing human nature in a purely historical fashion
and that human nature is social and historical through
and through (my emphasis). In connection with the
need to work he claims that this is not an inherent
and universal feature of human nature. For although
it is a real and fundamental need in present society,
this has not always been so. This statement seems
to imply that the need to work is something which
is exclusively historical and conventional and in no
sense natural or universal. Consequently, it appears to
contradict the central thesis of the book as a whole.
This is historicalism rather than historicism properly
so called.
Sayers rightly associates Marxist historicism with a
rejection of that type of essentialism which is usually
associated with the humanism of the Enlightenment.
However, he occasionally gives the impression that he
thinks that this is the only form of essentialism. Hence
at times he appears to be suggesting that Marxism
rejects essentialism per se. But this is inconsistent with
his acknowledgement that there are certain universal
characteristics and needs which are possessed by all
human beings For this acknowledgement logically
entails that there is a human essence after all. In
short, Sayerss implicit claim that Marxism rejects
essentialism outright is historicalist rather than his-
toricist and appears to contradict his assertion that
Marxism is a form of historical humanism.
So far as morality is concerned, Sayers maintains
that the essential insight of Marxism is that morality,
also, is a social and historical phenomenon. Marxism
sees different moralities as the products of different
social and historical circumstances and tries to under-
stand them in these terms. Hence it cannot and does
not appeal to universal moral principles or values.
However, here Sayers once again appears to overstate
his case. For these statements seem to imply that,
in his view, Marxism denies altogether that there is
any natural or universal component to morality, and
afrms that moral values and principles are exclusively
social or historical in character. But this would be to
present a purely conventionalist account of Marxisms
approach to morality. This is inconsistent with the
central claim of the book as a whole and something
which Sayers himself explicitly rejects later on. Once
again this is historicalism and not historicism properly
so called.
Tony Burns
Really, really want
Kevin Magill, Freedom and Experience: Self-Determin-
ation without Illusions, Macmillan and St Martins
Press, London and New York, 1997. x + 207 pp.,
40.00 hb., 0 333 63453 5.
The debate on free will, agency and moral responsibil-
ity still rages in analytical philosophy. Compatibilists
(like A.J. Ayer and D.C. Dennett) champion the view
that determinism the doctrine that at any instant
there is exactly one physically possible future is
compatible with free choice, free action, and moral
responsibility. In contrast, libertarian incompatibilists
(like P. Van Inwagen and R. Kane), deny that these free-
doms and moral responsibility are compatible with the
truth of determinism, and insist that, if we are unable
to choose or do otherwise, consistent with the past and
the natural laws remaining as they were prior to choice
or action, then we are not relevantly free our beliefs
about free will, agency and moral responsibility are
partly or wholly illusory. According to some recent
accounts (e.g. of Honderich and Double), the debate
is inconclusive and so the problems of free will are
irresolvable.
Magills book belongs to the compatibilist tradi-
tion and tries to dispel the apparent irreconcilability
by addressing and explaining away or deating the
intuitions and experiences which make the libertar-
ian picture of the incompatibilist tradition attractive
or even inescapable. He admits that compatibilists
have not done enough to justify our phenomenol-
ogy of freedom our undeniable experiences and
unreective attitudes and feelings about free will,
agency and moral responsibility which in general
favour incompatibilism. Magill admirably recties
this deciency of existing compatibilism by making
these experiences and attitudes metaphysically innocu-
ous and offering an account of how we can have
non-illusory freedom worth wanting. Our practice of
holding people morally responsible for their actions,
for example, fundamentally depends upon moral
reactive attitudes and feelings, but these attitudes them-
selves do not need a further general theoretical justi-
cation in terms of metaphysical presuppositions about
origination, agent-causation or ultimacy which are
incompatible with determinism. Our capacity for self-
determination does not rest upon a metaphysically
robust notion of alternative possibilities in acting
and choosing invoked by incompatibilist libertarians.
Instead, a persons non-illusory self-determination and
freedom consists in their hierarchical and evaluative
identication with what they really want and their
doing what they really want because it is what he
really wants. Whether Magills strategy works depends
upon his own compatibilist presuppositions and the
detail of his arguments, which cannot be discussed
here. On the whole, I think he does a ne job to
capture incompatibilist intuitions and to meet libertar-
ian worries to a considerable extent.
Magills book is not introductory. It is packed with
illuminating, interesting and often original elabora-
tions of central themes in the contemporary discus-
sion on free will, agency and moral responsibility.
It offers a subtle defence of compatibilism to which
incompatibilists should respond. Anyone concerned
with the analytical debate on human freedom should
engage with it.
Stefaan E. Cuypers
In his History of the World in 10 Chapters Julian Barnes remarks that to say that
history repeats itself, the rst time as tragedy, the second time as farce, makes it sound
too grand and considered a process. History just burps, he says, and we taste the raw-
onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.
The opening speaker on behalf of Signs of the Times declared that in the summer of
1997 the organization began a lengthy discussion of Marxs work in the context of a new
global capitalism and, more domestically, a landslide victory by a Labour Party seemingly
intent on advancing the neo-liberal project inherited from the Conservatives. For Signs of
the Times to discuss the relevance of Marx in todays world certainly has a touch of farce
about it. The organization was founded from the fallout of Marxism Today. That magazine
spent its last few years elaborating the idea that we are living in New Times. The central
themes of these new times globalization, a new modernity, the collapse of socialism and
the Left facilitated Marxism Todays shift from Marxism through post-Marxism to anti-
Marxism, resulting in a liberal progressivism which became the dening characteristic
of the work produced by Signs of the Times, dominated Left-liberal intellectual culture
in the 1990s, and fed into what became the new Labour project. Part of the underlying
ideolog-ical rationale of the Marxism TodayNew TimesSigns of the TimesNew Labour
nexus was an attempt to bring an end to Marxist class analysis on the Left. To witness
the organization consider in public the possible relevance of Marx, the debilitating effects
of intensied capital accumulation, and the problems posed by a hegemonic liberalism,
therefore left the air heavy with the smell of decade-old raw onion.
Yet this also presented the conference with what was its central tension and only
interesting question. The tension was focused on the debilitating effects of an ever more
hegemonic neo-liberalism, which now appears so dominant that it has appropriated key
socialist ideas which were once used as principles of collective resistance. The question
emerged in the closing plenary, the highlight and most revealing moment of the day. This
was whether anti-capitalism has to remain the central organizing principle for radical
politics. The fact that most talk of the future had been couched in such terms as an
alternative modernity and living differently suggests that for many speakers the question
was null and void if one can live differently within capitalism then why would one be
against it? But Robert Brenner chose to answer the question with a detailed account of the
shifting political economy of capital over the last thirty years. He pointed out that real
wages are the same level now as in 1969, that in 1998 the wages of the bottom 80 per
cent of the workforce were lower than the wages of the bottom 80 per cent of the work-
force in 1989, that US poverty levels are higher now than in 1979, and so on. Brenners
paper was at once breathtaking and a breath of fresh air. It answered the question of the
plenary with a range of other, more pertinent questions, such as why on earth would you
want to give up on an anti-capitalist politics? How on earth could you even think of doing
so?
Lukcs once castigated the German intelligentsia for having taken up residence in the
Grand Hotel Abyss, a beautiful hotel with all the comforts, allowing for daily contem-
plation of the abyss between excellent meals and entertainments. Signs of the Times seem
to have had a long stay in the hotel, fallen in love with it, bought it, and turned it into a
cheap B&B. With aking paintwork, empty rooms and raw-onion sandwich the only meal
on the menu, it is one to avoid.
Mark Neocleous
CONFERENCE REPORTS
Raw-onion sandwich
Signs of the Times, Critical Politics Conference,
30 October 1999, London School of Economics
P.F. Strawson occupies a special place in the history of postwar analytic philosophy. In
Individuals (1959), Strawson sought to make metaphysics respectable again, after the
opprobrium heaped upon it by the logical positivists and the indifference affected by the
practitioners of Oxford conceptual analysis. Strawsons other great contribution was to
stimulate a new interest in Kant among philosophers in the analytic tradition. In Individu-
als he had used transcendental arguments of explicitly Kantian descent to establish that
the basic or fundamental particulars of our conceptual scheme are material bodies and
persons. In The Bounds of Sense (1966) Strawson undertook to isolate the philosophical
core of Kants rst Critique, detaching a descriptive metaphysics of experience from the
imaginary subject of transcendental psychology and the metaphysics of transcendental
idealism. Both these aspects of Strawsons work were evident in the papers delivered at
the recent UK Kant Society conference on Strawson and Kant.
Strawson himself discussed an important recent contribution to Kant scholarship, Rae
Langtons Kantian Humility. Langton rejects Henry Allisons deationary, double aspect
account of the distinction between appearances and things in themselves, maintaining that
his interpretation fails to do justice to the genuine sense of loss Kant expresses at the
unknowability of things as they really are. Langton proposes instead that the distinction
be interpreted in the light of a substantive metaphysical thesis about the intrinsic proper-
ties of things. Given the Janus-faced picture of Kant that emerges from The Bounds of
Sense, in which a suitably analytic argument about the self-ascription of experiences is
menaced by an idealistic dark side, Strawsons enthusiasm for Langtons view is easy to
understand.
The relationship between descriptive metaphysics and Wittgensteins later philosophy
was the topic of a paper by Peter Hacker. Whilst recognizing the manifest difference
between Wittgensteins therapeutic philosophical temperament and Strawsons claim
to generality, Hacker wondered whether there is not a Wittgensteinian way out of the
difculty in which Strawson nds himself when trying to account for the status of the
fundamental propositions of our conceptual scheme. Strawson famously rejects Kants
description of such propositions as synthetic a priori.
Hacker also addressed Strawsons treatment of philosophical scepticism. This was the
main concern of papers delivered by Barry Stroud, Robert Stern and Lilian Alweiss.
Hacker expressed some unease about Strawsons naturalistic turn to Hume in Skepti-
cism and Naturalism (1985). In that work, Strawson comes to accept that transcendental
arguments do not provide a rational refutation of scepticism, and adopts instead a Humean
position which seeks not to refute sceptical doubts, but to dissolve them by an appeal
to the naturalness of our beliefs in, for example, the existence of the external world
and other minds. Hacker interpreted Strawsons naturalistic turn in Quinean terms, and
objected that the quasi-scientic argument in favour of the existence of the body illegiti-
mately treats the belief in the body as a hypothesis. Stern questioned whether Strawson
really does move in the direction of naturalized epistemology, while still managing to nd
grounds for suspecting the coherence of the turn from Kant to Hume.
Graham Bird, one of Strawsons most persistent opponents, asked whether Kants
descriptive metaphysics really belongs in the justicatory framework of traditional scepti-
cism at all. No response to this challenge was forthcoming from Strawson, however, and
he was similarly, and regrettably, reluctant to say more about his citation, in Skepticism
and Naturalism, of Heideggers assertion that the real scandal of philosophy is not that a
proof for the existence of the external world has yet to be given, but that such proofs are
attempted again and again.
Jonathan Derbyshire
After-dinner mints
UK Kant Society Annual Conference,
University of Reading, 1719 September 1999

Radical Philosophy 100, 2000

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Radical Philosophy 100, 2000

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Layout by Petra Pryke

Tel: 0171 243 1464

iek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology

ieks The Ticklish Subject, Verso, London

iek, The Ticklish Subject, pp. 14567.

iek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre

iek goes on to list

iek does not hereby proclaim an orthodox

iek claims occurs

iek, the philosophical

iek performs his multilateral assault on Western

iek obsessively illustrates elsewhere. However, the

ieks apparent endeavour to general-

iek does not perform a direct critique of

ieks interpretation of cultural phenomena is

iek almost entirely a question of the

ieks concept of interpretation. To help overcome

You might also like