R A D I C A
a journal of socialist
81
Editorial collective
Chris Arthur, Ted Benton, Nadine Cartner,
Andrew Collier, Diana Coole, Peter Dews,
Roy Edgley, Gregory Elliott, Howard
Feather, Jean Grimshaw, Kathleen Lennon,
Joseph McCarney, Kevin Magill, Peter
Osborne, Stella Sandford, Sean Sayers,
Kate Soper
Issue editor
Kevin Magill
Reviews editor
Sean Sayers
Contributors
Angela Mason is Executive Director
of Stonewall, the lesbian and gay rights
pressure group.
Peter Hallward is based at Yale
University, working on contemporary
literature and philosophy.
Andrew Collier teaches philosophy at
the University of Southampton and is the
author of Critical Realism (Verso).
Alexander Düttmann is the author of
At Odds with Aids (Stanford University
Press, 1996) and The Memory of Thought:
An Essay on Heidegger and Adorno
(forthcoming from Athlone Press).
Jonathan Rée teaches philosophy at
Middlesex University. His next book
is The Voice: A Philosophical History
(forthcoming from HarperCollins).
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Cover: Vit Hopley and Yve Lomax, from
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Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd.
http://www.ukc.ac.uk/cprs/phil/rp/
Jan/Feb 1997
© Radical Philosophy Ltd
L P H I L O S O P H Y
and feminist philosophy
CONTENTS
COMMENTARY
Coming In: Lesbian and Gay Politics in the Nineties
Angela Mason ................................................................................................ 2
ARTICLES
Gilles Deleuze and the Redemption from Interest
Peter Hallward ............................................................................................... 6
Unhewn Demonstrations
Andrew Collier ............................................................................................. 22
The Culture of Polemic:
Misrecognizing Recognition
Alexander García Düttmann ...................................................................... 27
Poor Bertie
Jonathan Rée ............................................................................................... 35
REVIEWS
István Mészáros, Beyond Capital
Chris Arthur .................................................................................................. 41
Keith Burgess-Jackson, Rape: A Philosophical Investigation
Sue Lees, Carnal Knowledge: Rape on Trial
David Archard............................................................................................... 44
Morwenna Griffiths, Feminisms and the Self: The Web of Identity
Meena Dhanda............................................................................................. 46
Alan D. Schrift, Nietzscheʼs French Legacy
David Macey................................................................................................. 47
Chris Hables Gray, ed., The Cyborg Handbook
Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, eds, Posthuman Bodies
John Armitage ............................................................................................. 48
Cairns Craig, Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and
British Culture
Stephen Cowley .......................................................................................... 49
Adriana Cavarero, In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of
Ancient Philosophy
Stella Sandford ............................................................................................ 50
Bill Martin, Humanism and its Aftermath
Gideon Calder .............................................................................................. 51
Ulrich Beck, Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk
Ulrich Beck, Ecological Enlightenment
Matthew David and Iain Wilkinson ........................................................... 52
William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization
Chris Erickson .............................................................................................. 53
NEWS
Friendly Fire: The Hoaxing of Social Text
Peter Osborne ..............................................................................................54
COMMENTARY

Coming in
Lesbian and gay politics in the nineties

Angela Mason

A
s the countdown to the general election begins, there is a rising tide of expecta-
tion among lesbians and gay men in Britain. This time we can surely expect a
new government to sweep away discrimination and finally give lesbians and gay
men the same rights and recognition enjoyed by other citizens in our society. But nothing,
of course, is that simple. Here I want to offer an assessment of where the lesbian and gay
movement stands now, the nature of our political project, the forces that will help us win
change, and the obstacles and barriers that are still to be overcome.
The turning point for the lesbian and gay movement today was undoubtedly the
passing of Section 28 of the Local Government Act, which made it unlawful for a local
authority or local education authority intentionally to promote homosexuality or teach in
schools the acceptability of homosexuality as a ʻpretend family relationshipʼ. The clause
was an attempt by the Conservative government to use the ʻgay cardʼ against ʻloony
leftʼ councils, and it played with considerable success. Within the Labour Party, ʻgaysʼ
were blamed for losing the pensionersʼ vote. Whether this was true or not, the passing
of Clause 28 marked a new beginning for lesbian and gay politics in Britain, involving a
new strategy for change and a new relationship with all the three main political parties.
The enormous anger that Clause 28 generated remobilized the lesbian and gay
community, bringing many into politics for the first time. Having resisted the first
terrible backlash against AIDS, we began to feel a growing confidence that something
could be done. Perhaps unconsciously borrowing from the concept of niche marketing,
at the same time we developed ways of organizing that recognized political differences
within our community. Stonewall and Outrage were set up almost contemporaneously:
Stonewall to create a cross-party political lobby for lesbian and gay rights, and Outrage
to keep these issues on the front pages through peaceful direct action. Although at times
both groups have wrongly sought hegemony, intense discussion about tactics has always
belied an underlying unity on the fight for equality. Indeed, legal discrimination in this
country is so universal and extreme that it is impossible for any lesbian or gay group not
to demand equality. Of course, there are differences about priorities, and it is quite clear
that over issues like marriage or gays in the military there are conflicting philosophies.
But whilst we are unequal, the egalitarian agenda is the most powerful force unifying a
community that contains so many differences in social class, race and gender.
Moreover, in the context of lesbian and gay politics the demand for equality, for human
rights, also sends a powerful message about sexual identity. The despised status of homosexu-
ality has meant literally living outside society, an existence in the demimonde, the ʻtwilight
zonesʼ. The partial decriminalization of homosexuality in 1967 did not fundamentally chal-
lenge that status. It was precisely the difference between homosexuals and other men that
was used to justify reform. Leo Abse, one of the architects of the Sexual Offences Act, said
that ʻIt was only by insisting that compassion was needed by a totally separate group, quite

2 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)

unlike the absolutely normal males of the Commons, that I could allay the anxiety and
resistance that otherwise would be provoked.ʼ The compromise settlement was, in a sense,
the ʻprivatizationʼ of homosexuality. The offence of gross indecency remained, but homo-
sexual acts were declared lawful between consenting adults ʻin privateʼ, when both parties
were over twenty-one. Privately homosexuality could be tolerated, but not its existence
within the public arena.

A growing recognition
The modern lesbian and gay movement dates from the Stonewall riot of 1969, and the Gay
Liberation Movement to which it gave rise has precisely been about a refusal to accept
ʻprivacyʼ as a tolerable settlement, and the demand for public status and recognition. In this
sense, ʻqueerʼ theory and politics are as much a part of that aspiration as campaigns for an
equal age of consent. The right to be recognized for who we are, not tolerated or pitied in
practice, unites the queer activists and the lobbyists campaigning for civil rights. They might
understand different things about their sexuality, yet they both demand the right to be out
and recognized. Breaking down the closet doors, demanding public status, necessarily also
involves an appeal to universalistic human values, equality under the law, the right to free
expression.
But translating these aspirations into the discourse of British party politics was not
easy. The absence of a written constitution also made it difficult to challenge discrimi-
nation through the courts. Prior to 1988 much of the original force of gay liberation
politics had been lost. Lesbians largely worked in the womenʼs movement; despite many
successes, the Campaign for Homosexual Equality was not able to operate successfully
at a national political level. Much was going on. Gay News – a national lesbian and gay
weekly – was established; national counselling and self-help groups like Icebreakers and
Friend were set up. There were the beginnings of gay organization within the political
parties, but national politics remained relatively uninfluenced.
A breakthrough seemed to come when the London Labour Party recaptured the
Greater London Council, and under the leadership of Ken Livingstone embarked on
radical programmes which gave sexual politics and lesbians and gay men a central
position. Equal opportunity units seemed to provide opportunities for funding and, more
importantly, to change political practice to acknowledge the needs of lesbians and gay
men. Lesbian and gay activists flocked to join local government and the Labour Party.
However, the change was shortlived. The unthinkable happened. The GLC was closed
down by the Thatcher government, and the political backlash which led to the passing of
Section 28 left municipal socialism and the Labour Party in defensive retreat. Lesbians
and gay men had certainly achieved a new visibility. However, the débâcle of Section
28 showed how dangerous it can be for a cause to be hitched exclusively to one political
party – and, indeed, one political tendency. Lesbians and gay men were not going to be
able to piggy-back change by capturing sections of the Labour Party. It became clear
both that we were going to have to rely on our own organization and strength and that,
by whatever means, we had to win a broader basis of support and understanding through-
out society.
So how has this strategy fared? I think few would deny its success. Public awareness
of lesbian and gay issues has never been greater. Support for what I have called the
public status of lesbians and gay men is growing. A Guardian/ICM poll in 1996 found
that over 70 per cent of respondents thought that ʻa declared homosexual living in a
stable relationship with a partnerʼ should be a allowed a job in teaching, the Church, the
police, and as an MP. The number of people who admit to personally knowing lesbians
and gay men has also increased dramatically. ʻComing outʼ does work. Numerous
surveys also show major generational changes. Speaking in the House of Lords in the
age-of-consent debate, Lord Russell, with a distinctive historical flourish, said that his
students found the idea of discriminating against lesbians and gay men as inconceivable
as a proposal to burn heretics.

Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 3

 Within the corporate sector
there is growing recognition
of lesbians and gay men as
employees and as consum-
ers. Numerous public bodies,
including the Bar Council and
the Law Society, have profes-
sional codes of practice which
deal with sexual orientation.
Many trade unions have lesbian
and gay groups, and during
the age-of-consent campaign
trade-union support was strong
and significant.
The ʻpink poundʼ is certainly
a media reality and the argu-
ment now is whether events like
ʻPrideʼ, which attracts a quarter of a million people, have too much corporate sponsor-
ship. Certainly in retail, fashion, computing and the drinks industry, the gay market
is seen as increasingly important. Alongside this there has been an explosion of gay
culture and media. There is a thriving gay press and a seemingly insatiable media appe-
tite for gay stories in the straight press. If there was to be an award for the programme
that has done most to break down discrimination, it would surely be EastEnders.
Pioneered by the Lesbian and Gay Switchboards, specialist service agencies dealing
with housing, legal advice, violence, mental health, young people and the elderly are
developing and statutory funding is slowly becoming available.

The turning point

Politically, too, we have made the most enormous advances since the dark days of
Section 28. The turning point was the age-of-consent debate in 1994. In 1990 the
Guardian had carried out a survey for the ʻOut this Weekʼ series on Channel 4, and
found that only 11 per cent of MPs would support an equal age of consent for gay men
of sixteen. However, in the event 280 MPs voted for sixteen, including 37 Conservative
MPs and all but one Liberal Democrat. Among Labour MPs, 36 voted against sixteen
or abstained. The amendment for equality, which was supported by Edwina Currie, Neil
Kinnock and Robert Maclennan, was lost by only 27 votes.
For the first time, MPs were inundated with letters from gay men and lesbians, who
clearly recognized that this was a debate about the status of homosexuality in Britain
today. This was partly made possible through Stonewallʼs database of 30,000 supporters
and the growing infrastructure of lesbian and gay, HIV and AIDS groups throughout
the country. Stonewall also produced an influential pamphlet, The Case for Change,
which was distributed freely by the gay press. The pamphlet contained detailed lob-
bying tips; for the first time the lesbian and gay community not only found a voice
in Parliament, but quickly became one of the most conscious and politically aware in
the country. Heaven, one of the largest nightclubs in London, produced leaflets asking,
ʻDoes your MP know you exist?ʼ Weekly meetings of all the major lesbian and gay
organizations, including Outrage, were held to co-ordinate and advance the campaign.
Lesbians and gay men, who probably thought St Stephenʼs Gate was a local gay bar,
thronged to the House of Commons to attend packed meetings and mass lobbies. It
became acceptable, and even fashionable, to support equality.
Why then did we lose? We didnʼt win enough of the traditionalists in the Labour
Party, despite the support of the leadership and the trade unions. Most Conservative
MPs took their lead from John Major, who supported eighteen as an acceptable com-
promise. At a deeper level, the concept of rights for lesbians and gay men had still

4 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)

not taken a deep enough hold in public thinking to allow us to make the jump from
what Edwina Currie called the ʻdark shadowsʼ to equality. We were still a moral issue,
not a human-rights issue. In this we suffered not just from the lingering vestiges of
prejudice that certainly exist, but also from a political culture which is stony ground
for human rights. There has been no major civil-rights movement on mainland Britain
since the war. The modern Womenʼs Liberation Movement obviously touched on these
issues, but was primarily informed by a struggle over gender and power. Both the Race
Relations and the Sex Discrimination Acts were informed by an attempt to overcome
disadvantage, rather than an appeal to basic rights. We lack any clear constitutional
protection of human rights, as the numerous appearances of the British government at
the European Court of Human Rights testify.

The edge of change

The question for us now is whether it will be any different under a Labour government.
There is no doubt of the sea change in attitudes within the Labour Party since the late
1980s. Support for gay rights is no longer the preserve of a section of the Left. This
yearʼs Party Conference even voted unanimously to lift the ban on lesbians and gay
men serving in the armed forces. Within the Shadow Cabinet there is strong personal
support for equality. Tony Blairʼs speech in the age-of-consent debate was a powerful
plea for inclusion of lesbians and gay men within the framework of society. Yet the best
we can hope for in the manifesto is probably a one-word reference to sexuality. The
weight of legislation to which the Labour Party is committed will make it very difficult
to get lesbian and gay issues onto the parliamentary agenda.
More fundamentally, many fear that the leadershipʼs espousal of ʻfamily valuesʼ and
law and order – the traditional clothes of the Right – will create a climate hostile to
lesbian and gay rights. It is certainly a dangerous game. But the evidence, I believe,
is that Blair is trying to create an inclusive, rather than exclusive, moral agenda. In
a recent speech on the subject he was at pains to say that a return to family values
did not mean a return to Victorian hypocrisy and homophobia. The Labour Party is
perfectly conscious of the strength of the gay movement and will be reluctant to stand
against us. But it is also aware that, whilst there is broad support for equality, issues
such as lesbian and gay partnerships and parenting are still at the margins. It is very
aware of the disastrous effect of Clintonʼs fumbled attempt to lift the ban on lesbians
and gays in the military, although it may take consolation from the failure of the moral
Right to win electoral support for Dole and the Republican Party.
There are also other options. Stonewall is supporting applications to the European
Court of Human Rights on the age of consent and the ban in the armed forces. The
International Governmental Conference is considering a new equality provision in
the Treaty which would cover race, sexual orientation and disability discrimination.
European law is likely to provide good political cover for gay rights legislation.
We are poised on the edge of change. Everything is possible, but nothing is certain.
If a Labour government quickly runs into trouble, if the Conservatives adopt a right-
wing moral (as well as political) agenda, the window of opportunity that now exists
will close. Alternatively, we could in the next five years see lesbian and gay rights
finally enshrined in law, and the lesbian and gay movement moving into its own third
age.

Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 5

Gilles Deleuze and the
redemption from interest
Peter Hallward
Deleuze writes a redemptive philosophy. In conjunction
with its mainly artistic allies, it is designed to save its
readers from a situation contaminated by ʻconscious-
nessʼ, ʻrepresentationʼ, ʻanalogyʼ, ʻrepressionʼ, ʻlackʼ, and
ʻthe Other [autrui]ʼ. Redemption from these things,
according to Deleuze, provides immediate access to
a very different kind of situation – a situation defined
by its radical self-sufficiency, its literal, absolute, all-
inclusive immanence to itself. In a whole variety of
ways, Deleuze writes the passage from our given,
contaminated situation, to the purer, more primordial
situation.
Just how this self-sufficiency allows itself to be so
contaminated is the first question which Deleuze, like
so many other redemptive writers, must confront. Like
Spinoza, most obviously – but also, like the Christian
St Paul or the Muslim Suhrawardî1 – Deleuzeʼs work
begins with the problem of an all-powerful, all-deter-
mining ontological principle somehow repressed or,
denied through its own power of creation. Consider-
ation of this problem throws into question some of
our most cherished assumptions about Deleuzeʼs work
– his alleged subversions of authority and the subject,
his refusal of ʻtotalizingʼ knowledges, and his affirm-
ation of a radical pluralism or ʻdifferenceʼ.
I will argue that Deleuze, like Spinoza, Suhrawardî
or Paul, writes a relentless attack on specific, worldly
knowledges and worldly differences, in favour of an
other-worldly redemptive force. This force is defined
by its absolute power to negate or transcend relation
as such. If Deleuzeʼs radical philosophy of imma-
nence of course entails the critique of transcendence
just as it implies the refusal of negation, this very
critique obtains only through a preliminary trans-
cendence of what might be called the ʻGivenʼ (relative,
worldly, specific, human, significant) as opposed to the
ʻRealʼ (absolute, other-worldly, singular, inhuman or
6 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)
impersonal, asignificant).2 This transcendence is the
enabling gesture of Deleuzeʼs entire project. It is also,
perhaps, the source of its ultimate incoherence.
For Deleuze as much as for Spinoza or Suhrawardî,
Being is defined by its singularity or univocity. ʻThere
has only ever been one ontological proposition: Being
is univocalʼ, and ʻthe One expresses in a single
meaning all of the multiple.ʼ3 The Real is that which
creates what it perceives (or conceives, in both senses).
Here, ʻdesire and its object are one and the same
thingʼ, and ʻthere is only one kind of production, the
production of the real.ʼ4 But we, ourselves ʻproducedʼ,
are somehow led to distinguish between ʻrealʼ and
ʻunrealʼ (either ʻimaginaryʼ or ʻsymbolicʼ). We are
led to figure the literally true. If Real is self-constitu-
ent, self-sufficient and self-expressive – originally and
immediately determinant – such knowledge that we
have of this immanent determining force is derivative,
second-order, the product of an eventual mastery. The
Real, in other words, is immediate but not given. What
is first given to us is a worldly condition governed
by mediation, a world ruled by plurivocal relations
between perceptions and perceived, between subjects
and objects, between transcendent and transcended
forces. For Deleuze as much as for Paul and Spinoza,
the great task is to overcome such relations, to over-
come a worldly or interested mediation, so as to return
to a wholly immanent immediacy.
Models of redemption
Consider briefly the more familiar models of redemp-
tion associated with Paul, Suhrawardî and Spinoza. If
Spinozaʼs example is the most important for Deleuze,5
the logic of salvation is comparable in each case. For
all, it follows from the definition of an all-powerful
God that, in Paulʼs words, ʻall that may be known of
God by men lies plain before their eyes; indeed God
himself has disclosed it to them. His invisible attri-
butes, that is to say his everlasting power and deity,
have been visible, ever since the world began, to the
eye of reason, in the things he has made.ʼ The ʻRealʼ
is immediately and primordially evident; it inheres in
all creation, by definition. Necessarily, ʻnothing in all
creation can separate us from the love of Godʼ.6 But
we live in the world as if separate from God. We live
as positioned, interested, specified (Greek, Roman,
Jew…). As worldly creatures, we try to relate to a
God imagined as transcendent, to figure God through
the law, and this effort brings only ʻconsciousness of
sinʼ.7 The solution is simple: we must escape the world
(the ʻas ifʼ), the legal organization of relations, so as
to become-immediate to God, literally God. ʻAdapt
yourselves no longer to the pattern of this present
world, but let your minds be remade and your whole
nature thus transformed. Then you will be able to
discern the will of God, and to know what is good,
acceptable and perfectʼ. Die to the world, so as to
be reborn in a spirit unlimited by the mediate speci-
ficities of the world. ʻYou are on the spiritual level,
if only Godʼs Spirit dwells within you.ʼ8 Then ʻthere
is no such thing as Jew or Greek … for you are all
one person in Christ Jesus.ʼ9 Unlimited and therefore
all-inclusive, Paulʼs Spirit announces the dawn of what
Deleuze will call ʻa world without othersʼ10 – a world
of one singularity–multiplicity, a world beyond worldly
mediation or relation altogether.
Like all visions of the Islamic deity, Iranian phil-
osopher Suhrawardîʼs ʻLight of Lightsʼ is radically
sovereign, autarcique, ʻthat which subsists through
itselfʼ.11 The purely original One is wholly unknowable
(deus absconditus), a blinding light. The One is not an
accessible whole but what, inaccessible, gives rise to
the multiple. Deleuze will use the term ʻthe Unthoughtʼ
(or ʻnon-senseʼ) to describe much the same thing. The
multiple is invariably expressive of the One, but to
variable degrees. Hence a strictly vertical arrangement,
determined by proximity to God. The aim of any given
being is to return, to the degree possible, toward the
One Light from which it springs. For Suhrawardî,
since ʻto turn entirely towards God is liberationʼ, so
ʻeverything that gets in the way of the Good is Evil.
Everything which erects an obstacle on the spiritual
path is human impiety.ʼ12 We begin as impious. Our
ʻvisible world is not itself the Temple, it is the Tem-
pleʼs cryptʼ, the place of an inherited ʻexileʼ from the
Temple.13 To gain access to the Temple of Light, from
ʻthis dark lump that is our earthʼ,14 the seeing subject
must pull away from the world and grasp a spiritual
and only spiritual existence. Sensual and spiritual
perception are, for Suhrawardî as for the Sufi tradi-
tion, mutually exclusive.15 When I move toward God,
ʻI separate myself from this world and join myself
with the world above.ʼ16 Above all, with Rûmî as with
Suhrawardî, ʻthe goal of all ascesis is a vision in which
there is no longer a difference between the knowing
and the known.ʼ17 Only God can proclaim the Being of
God (ʻthroughʼ the speaker). Illuminated, the knowing
subject ʻis not a subject opposed to an objectʼ; rather,
ʻthrough the soul which knows, the real knows itself,
becomes conscious of itself. Knowledge is illumination
of the real in reality itself, it is Light reflecting on
light.ʼ18 Not ʻI thinkʼ, but ʻI am thought.ʼ19
With Spinoza, finally, ʻGod acts and directs every-
thing by the necessity of his own nature and perfection
aloneʼ; ʻhis decrees and volitions are eternal truths,
and always involve necessity.ʼ20 Godʼs creatures are
simply modes or actualizations of Godʼs power to
various degrees. In the Given state of nature assumed
by Spinoza as much as Hobbes, these modes remain
ignorant of their ʻReal natureʼ, remain ʻslavesʼ of their
positioned interests, ʻpassionsʼ and ʻappetitesʼ.21 If God
is all-powerful, we – and it is a point Deleuze stresses
in his reading of Spinoza – do not begin as God (as
reasonable). We must become the reason that we are,
and eventually reasonable modes are those which see
themselves as actualizations of Godʼs univocal power,
as wholly and immediately identical to the one Real
interest, the interest of divine reason itself. In a fully
reasonable polity, then, it follows that the ʻliberty of
the Subject [is] consistent with the unlimited power of
the sovereignʼ.22 By becoming immediate to reason,
subjects as much as rulers become literally unlimited,
redeemed from the limits of interest. In this way the
ʻgreatest freedomʼ is identical to the ʻgreatest obedi-
enceʼ, on the Pauline (or Ismâʼili) model: the two are
unlimited in themselves. ʻWe are bound to perform all
the commands of the sovereign without exceptionʼ,23
and the ʻmore absolute a governmentʼ, ʻthe more suit-
able for the preservation of freedom.ʼ24 ʻThe greater
the right of the sovereign the more does the form of
the state agree with the dictate of reasonʼ – that is, the
more it ʻform[s] one body directed by one mindʼ.25
Despite obvious differences in doctrine and
approach, all of these thinkers assert an essentially
similar redemptive sequence. The elements of much the
same sequence obtain in Deleuzeʼs philosophy: onto-
logical univocity; a critique of its repression or mis-
representation; its restoration (redemption) declared
through an escape from worldly mediation; dissolution
of the subject (or equation of subject and object); a
consequent insistence upon the literal and immediate.
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 7
Always, Deleuze tries to break out of a Given situa- volatile [through] an irreducible pluralism of discur-
tion (positioned, related, specified, mediated, figured) sive figures and modes of behaviour.ʼ37
towards a situation in which ʻeverything divides, but Third, while the redemptive orientation of Deleuzeʼs
into itselfʼ.26 Deleuzeʼs philosophy of difference has work reduces the play of relations with others to the
nothing to do with the articulation of positions or immediacy of conversion in the Pauline sense, the pub-
interests as such, any more than with the ʻcomplica- lished Deleuze readers generally emphasize his utility
tionʼ of mediation. The mediate conflict of interests as ally in the articulation of a world of pure ʻothernessʼ.
has no more place in Deleuzeʼs ʻworld without othersʼ Massumi finds with Deleuze a ʻhyperdifferentiatedʼ
than it does in Spinozaʼs ʻreasonable commonwealthʼ, subject, which exists only ʻin the interactions between
in Suhrawardîʼs luminescent ʻimaginal worldʼ, or in peopleʼ, expressed through ʻincreasingly nuanced local
Paulʼs ʻone body of Christʼ. The prevailing reception reactionsʼ.38 Hardtʼs Deleuze provides ʻtools for the
of Deleuzeʼs work renders this reading difficult on constitution of a radical democracyʼ, ʻopen to the will
four counts. of its constituent membersʼ.39 Again, Boundasʼs explicit
In the first place, his mainly pluralist followers aim as editor of the Deleuze Reader is to promote his
refuse or restrict the ontological univocity basic to the thought for the reinvigoration of American discussions
redemptive enterprise. With this Deleuze we discover of ʻpostmodernismʼ and ʻdeconstructionʼ: ʻthe ritornello
the ʻforces of difference that compel thought to move of their [Deleuze and Guattariʼs] minor deconstruction
outside a logic of identityʼ.27 As Pierre Zaoui argues in coordinates the manifesto of their radical pluralism.ʼ40
one of the best recent studies, Deleuze provides ʻone There is no room here for the redemptive coordination
of the most fruitful philosophies of differenceʼ because of interests in favour of the one disinterest.
he so insistently dismantles ʻthe identity of the One, The fourth and final point: redemption turns on
the identity of the origin of Being in Platonismʼ.28 As judgement, on definitive, unequivocal (univocal) judge-
Boundas presents him through the Deleuze Reader, ment – a last judgement. But readers of Deleuze are
Deleuze writes the ʻinteraction of differential intensi- virtually unanimous in their assumption that to radical
ties, incommensurable with respect to each otherʼ, and social pluralism corresponds a competing chaos of
disruptive of any teleological coherence.29 Deleuzeʼs evaluations, the dissolution of all hierarchy. Deleuze is
asserted ʻtotal oppositionʼ to Hegel has long been read as the prophet of the equivocal, rather than the uni-
a standard point of departure for the reading of his vocal. He is said to elaborate ʻa theoretical programme
work.30 It is the basis for the distinction of a ʻpureʼ,
ʻnondialecticalʼ difference from a difference which,
ʻin the dialectical relation, is only thinkable in terms
of the implicitly presumed Wholeʼ.31 I will argue, on
the contrary, that Deleuzeʼs redemptive philosophy
always works from, within and toward the assumption
of ontological univocity, the redemptive identity of the
One and the multiple.
Second, our deleuziens generally refuse or limit
the conceptual space Deleuze allots to the agent
of redemption – that is, the thinker, artist or phil-
osopher.32 Hardtʼs Deleuze is especially vigorous
in ʻcombatting the privileges of thoughtʼ, in under-
mining ʻany account that in any way subordinates
being to thoughtʼ.33 With Lecercleʼs Deleuze, ʻthere
is no Totality, and there is no Subject to grasp itʼ,34
but rather a surging ontological delirium, the subver-
sion of all conceivable subjective order.35 According
to Gros, Deleuze refuses all aspects of an ʻoriginary
experienceʼ,36 in favour of what Janicaut describes as
a radical shattering of perspectives: ʻmore than ever,
[with Deleuze] being articulates itself in multiple
ways, on the condition that the unity of the ontologi-
cal signified is hitherto declared false, and becomes

8 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)

which aims to be beyond system – and consequently
opposed to all doctrinaire conceptsʼ.41 Lecercleʼs
assessment is typical: ʻ[Deleuze and Guattariʼs] main
objective was a critique of all the forms of theoretical
imperialism that had dominated French philosophy in
the 1960s and 1970sʼ,42 and the affirmation of a place
ʻwhere interpretation waversʼ before the profusion of
possibilities, an ongoing moment of ʻhesitationʼ.43 I
will argue, on the contrary, that Deleuzeʼs redemptive
authority is absolute by definition, an authority liter-
ally and explicitly beyond discussion, beyond appeal.
Rather than limit or eliminate judgement, Deleuze
makes it literally unlimited; his judgement is no longer
relative to a judge, a faculty, a place, a constitution or
a set of criteria of judgement, but coincides with itself
alone – as redemptive of all.
The constitution of the Given
Like Spinoza or Nietzsche, Deleuze takes as his criti-
cal starting point that the Real nature of things has
been concealed from us by inherited human tenden-
cies, by ressentiment, by vicious relations with and
between others. Deleuze begins with a version of what
Suhrawardî called our ʻoccidental exileʼ – an exile
from the Light, from the pole of genuine Orientation.
The Real ʻ“Whole” is never “given”ʼ.44 For us, the
Real exists only as repressed or, at best, as partially
expressed, and the fundamental question must be,
ʻhow is the Real led to desire its own repression?ʼ45
Philosophy as Deleuze conceives it serves to struggle
with this repression; philosophers and artists have,
first and foremost, a ʻclinicalʼ or ʻsymptomalogicalʼ
function.46
In Spinozaʼs all-important terms, the idea of God
is the only adequate basis for the ordering of reality,
but ʻthat one cannot begin from the idea of God, that
one cannot from the outset install oneself in God, is
a constant of Spinozismʼ.47 Divine thought alone is
authentically Real, original in both senses – but we
must become thinkers. ʻThinking is not innate, but
must be engendered in thoughtʼ, for ʻwe are born
cut off from our power of action or understanding.ʼ48
Spinozaʼs exemplary becoming-thinker takes place in
three stages. First, we begin in a (Given) ʻchild-
likeʼ state of ʻimpotence and slaveryʼ, governed by
ʻignoranceʼ and ʻchance encountersʼ.49 Second, we
create expressive common notions through such
encounters which ʻlead us to the idea of Godʼ.50 And
third, ʻas quickly as possibleʼ, we attain knowledge
of God as from Godʼs perspective, ʻthe knowledge
of Godʼs essence, of particular essences as they are
in God, and as conceived by Godʼ. Here ʻwe think
as God thinks, we experience the very feelings of
Godʼ.51
The third kind of knowledge achieves a complete
fusion of self and God, or of Given and Real. And
so the formation of ʻa reasonable being may in this
sense be said to reproduce and express the effort of
Nature as a wholeʼ52 – creation is expressive of its
creator. It is not a process that separates outcome from
origin, but one which actualizes the initial, virtual
identity of origin and outcome. The result is original
in both senses (ʻprimordialʼ and ʻunprecedentedʼ). The
process itself, the three steps, abolish themselves in
their realization. The equation leaves no remainder.
ʻWe do of course appear to reach the third kind of
knowledge… [but] the “transition” is only an appear-
ance; in reality we are simply finding ourselves as we
are immediately and eternally in Godʼ53 – very much
on the Pauline model.
In other words, the Real requires an archaeolo-
gist. Its original immediacy must be uncovered and
reconstructed through its Given fragments. Hence
the exemplary importance of Foucault, archéologue
par excellence. ʻEverything in [Foucaultʼs] statements
is real and all reality is manifestly presentʼ, but it
is nevertheless ʻnot given in … a manifest wayʼ.54
The statement ʻis not immediately perceptible but is
always covered over by phrases and propositions.…
We are forced to begin with [Given] words, phrases
and propositionsʼ,55 in order then to extract the virtual
problem or statement which (ʻfirstʼ) determines them.
For example, what is said about sexuality in the Vic-
torian age is Given as repressed, and it ʻsaysʼ the
repression of sexuality; what is Really stated, however,
is the proliferation of determining discourses which
define and manipulate the sexual, without respite.56
Statements ʻare never hiddenʼ but, somehow, a ʻstate-
ment does remain hidden if we do not rise to its
extractive conditions; on the contrary, it is there and
says everything as soon as we reach these conditions.ʼ57
Once extracted, the virtual statement is all-determin-
ing; this is for Deleuze ʻFoucaultʼs greatest historical
principleʼ.58 To become-Real is to be extracted from
the Given. This ʻextractionʼ of virtual from actual is
the process which eliminates a situated specificity or
context, which makes the Real independent of context
or scale, on the fractal model.59 It is achieved through
annihilation, explosion, or paralysis of the Given.
If the Real is (transcendental) immanence to itself,
the Given forces which literally ʻcover upʼ or mediate
the Real are necessarily transcendent.60 If the Real
is one and consequently immanent to itself, trans-
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 9
cendence establishes a world of plurality (as opposed
to multiplicity); it relates beings to other beings and
concepts to things.61 Deleuzeʼs critical task is thus
ʻto hunt transcendence down in all its formsʼ,62 to
eliminate what he calls ʻthe four shackles of mediation:
… [immediate d]ifference is “mediated” to the extent
that it is subjected to the fourfold root … of identity,
opposition, analogy and resemblance.ʼ63 Immanence
will exist, then, as beyond identity and beyond oppo-
sition, as literal and non-resembling.
For Deleuze as for Spinoza or Paul, the great ques-
tion is, how does the Real which is alone creative allow
itself to be transcended by its own creations? In some
mysterious way, the Real creates a world in which it
weakens itself, becomes wordly, much as God creates
a creature which denies Him. Real ʻvirtual difference
tends to actualize itself in forms which cancel itʼ,64
and for Deleuze–Bergson, ʻlife as movement alienates
itself in the material form that it creates; by actual-
izing itself, by differentiation itself, it loses “contact
with the rest of itself”. Every species is thus an arrest
of movementʼ.65 Consequently, the restoration of Real
movement will require the extinction of species. If
ʻemergence, change, and mutation affect composing
forces, not composed formsʼ,66 the task of philosophy
is simply to explode the coherence of composed forms.
In the terms of Anti-Oedipus, for example, the explo-
sion of the mediate, ʻmolarʼ or specific category of the
person liberates the immediate desiring-production of
singular molecular machines.67 In the terms of Cinema
2, dissolution of the sensory-motor schema (roughly,
the subject) reveals ʻtime in the pure stateʼ.68 Deleuzeʼs
philosophy always aims to move from the composed
to the composing, to restore the original dimensions
of the immanent Whole – to redeem the Real from
its given, worldly condition. Philosophy is both a
becoming-Real of the Given and a critical account of
how the Given comes to constitute itself at the heart
of the Real.
For Deleuze, then, the preamble to any possible
philosophy is an account of the Given. This account
figures, variously, as: the constitution of the moral man
or slave in Nietzsche and Philosophy; the constitution
of representation and of merely specific difference in
Difference and Repetition; the constitution of worldli-
ness (mondanité, amour) in Proust and Signs; the limi-
tation of schizophrenia to a ʻclinical conditionʼ and the
castration of desire in Anti-Oedipus, and so on. Three
accounts of the Given stand out as particularly impor-
tant: (i) with Bergson, the constitution of the human
in its most general form (critique of the organism); (ii)
with capitalism and psychoanalysis, the constitution
10 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)
of the subject of work and lack (critique of Oedipus);
and (iii) with Foucault, the constitution of the subject
in modern thought (critique of ʻManʼ, of the ʻMajorʼ).
Together, they allow us to situate Deleuzeʼs work as
a refusal of the Given on two levels, one ʻcosmicʼ
(with Bergson), the other historical (with Oedipus and
Foucault). On the first level, Deleuze mixes what might
be called ʻprophetic fragmentsʼ of the ʻdeath of Manʼ
from any available source (ʻnomadicʼ pre-history or
futuristic post-history; the Stoics as much as Artaud;
Spinoza as much as Nietzsche). On the second level,
Deleuze aligns himself with a particular moment in
the development of philosophy, working towards this
death, today, alongside Foucault, Klossowski, Lyotard,
Virilio, Godard, Beckett, Artaud, Michaux, Simondon,
Guattari, Badiou, and others, as allies in this effort to
overcome the Given.
Bergson and the alienation of life
Bergsonʼs great virtue, for Deleuze, is his effort to
account for a mediate, perceiving organism within
the wholly immediate, inorganic Reality of Life, ʻthe
powerful, non-organic Life which grips the worldʼ.69
According to Deleuze, Bergson was the first of our
contemporaries to realize that it is strictly ʻimpossibleʼ
to relate ʻobjectiveʼ things or movements to ʻsubjectiveʼ
images of movements – this would be to posit two
(equivocal) orders of being, in violation of Real uni-
vocity. ʻIt [is] necessary, at any cost, to overcome this
duality of image and movement, of consciousness and
thing.ʼ70 In place of images in the mind and movements
in space, Bergson insists that ʻIMAGE = MOVEMENTʼ.71
Rather like that of Suhrawardî, Bergsonʼs ʻplane of
immanence is entirely made up of Lightʼ.72 Within
this Real coherence, the seeing eye is not directed at
objects, but rather
the eye is in things, in luminous images in them-
selves. ʻPhotography, if there is photography, is
already snapped, already shot, in the very interior
of things and for all the points of spaceʼ [Bergson].
Things are luminous by themselves without anything
illuminating them: all consciousness is something, it
is indistinguishable from the thing … immanent to
matter.73
Given consciousness, then, what Deleuze here calls
ʻour consciousness of factʼ, is ʻmerely the opacity
without which light “is always propagated without its
source ever having been revealed” [Bergson]ʼ.74 It is,
in other words, a gap [écart] in the continuous Real
fabric of matter-light, a separation of movement and
image, maintained in the interests of a coordinated
motor-schema of perception and action. For Deleuze,
this is mediation, the organism (or ʻOther structureʼ75)
at the most basic level. Organisms isolate, reflect
or ʻperceiveʼ only that aspect of Real light which
interests them (the herbivore, for example, perceives
food in grass, and only food). Whereas Real percep-
tion is disinterested and concrete, Given perception
is limited by interest and consequently abstract; ʻwe
perceive only what we are interested in perceiving,
or rather what it is in our interest to perceive.ʼ76
Such a subjectivity is ʻsubtractiveʼ, ʻincomplete and
prejudicedʼ, while an ʻobjectivelyʼ Real perception is
ʻcomplete, immediateʼ.77 To become adequate to the
complete, impartial Real, then, is to overcome the
organic interval, to restore the continuous luminous
flow in all its immediacy. It is to overcome interest
and thereby return to the ʻprimary regime of variation,
in its heat and its light, while it is still untroubled
by any centre of indetermination [i.e. an organism].
How can we rid ourselves of ourselves, and demolish
ourselves?ʼ78
In short, Bergson suggests how we might ʻattain
once more the world before man, before our own
dawn, the position where movement was … under
the regime of universal variation …, the luminous
plane of immanenceʼ.79 Deleuzeʼs persistent dream is
to be thus
present at the dawn of the world. Such is the link
between imperceptibility, indiscernibility, and im-
personality – the three virtues. To reduce oneself to
an abstract line, a trait, in order to find oneʼs zone
of indiscernibility with other traits, and in this way
enter the haecceity and impersonality of the creator.
One is then like grass…80
Deleuze equates origin and outcome, the realization
of the Real in an apocalyptic dawn. The properly
eternal or ʻuntimelyʼ aspect of Deleuzeʼs work is a
function of his affirmation, wherever he finds them,
of means (nomadic, schizophrenic, stoic, surreal,
aphasic, genetic, fractal, aesthetic…) to this wholly
extra-historical end.
Oedipus and the repression of desire
ʻOedipusʼ is the broadest term given to what Deleuze
with Guattari analyses as the specifically subjective
form of transcendence, the most ʻconcentratedʼ form
of the organism or ʻbody with organsʼ. Oedipus is that
which unites transcendence and organism in a single
repressive form. If ʻsubjectivity appears as soon as
there is a gap between a received and an executed
movementʼ,81 it is because, according to Deleuze, the
subject is our privileged locus of transcendence or
mediation. Subjective identity as it exists in relation
to other identities is the privileged Given bulwark
established against Real becomings-imperceptible.
Deleuzeʼs first book, Empiricism and Subjectivity
(1953), is an attempt to determine with Hume what
permits the constitution of the transcendent subject
within a Real field of immanence.82 His first collabora-
tive book, Anti-Oedipus, provides his fullest and most
celebrated answer to this question, now posed as: how
is desire led to desire its own repression?83
According to Deleuze and Guattari, the Oedipal
subject achieves this repression by linking the two
major forms of transcendence: a ʻprivateʼ (subjective)
transcendence of immanence as invoked by the phil-
osophy of representation, and a public (subjected)
transcendence as performed by the state. In the
first case, the subject is led to figure the world, to
represent the world, and, through imagination and
analogy, negate the literal or immediate presence
of the world. This negation is maintained by the
ʻtheatricalʼ mediation of psychoanalysis. Specifically
subjective desire – a subjectʼs desire for an object
– detaches Real composing desire from its immediate
creation of objects, in order to relate to ʻcomposedʼ
objects which it (now) lacks. The paradigm for this
missing object is the elusive object of Oedipal desire
(Artaudʼs ʻmommy daddyʼ). To the ʻprivateʼ trans-
cendence of the subject corresponds, in the second
case, the ʻpublicʼ transcendence of the state as over-
coding, external instance ʻbeyondʼ production. The
state figures in Anti-Oedipus as a kind of primor-
dial super-ego, detached, standing watch above the
now coordinated field of social action. The subject is
thus harnessed to work, under the supervision of the
state, in its endless pursuit of the missing object (the
fulfilment of desire-as-lack). According to Deleuze
and Guattari, the capitalist organization of labour, the
distribution of familial roles across the whole social-
symbolic field, and the pyschoanalytic interpretation
of desire, are all aspects of a single apparatus for the
repression of the Real (or consolidation of the Given,
of ʻlackʼ). Oedipus is the mechanism which cements
these two subjective–subjected poles of transcendence
together. Oedipus is what establishes and relates a
psychological interiority to external social author-
ity;84 the ʻpersonʼ is doubly subjected through the
mediate ʻcastrationʼ of desire and the transcendent
over-coding of the state.85 A Deleuzian recovery of
the Real, then, will begin with the dissolution of
these two forms of subjection, and the evocation of a
space without person or state.
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 11
Foucault and the death of Man
Foucaultʼs famous thesis concerning the imminent
ʻdeath of Manʼ helps specify the historicity of Deleuzeʼs
project – its contemporary urgency. As Deleuze
presents it, the ʻMan-formʼ analysed by Foucault is
our particular version of the Given mediate form
analysed in general by Bergson, and only slightly
more specifically through Oedipus. Deleuze takes from
Les Mots et les choses three stages in the constitu-
tion and dissolution of this form: pre-Man (classical),
Man (modern), and after-Man (apocalyptic). Deleuzeʼs
thought can be considered quite precisely as an attempt
to equate the first and second stages in the third.
In the first stage, the Real is (correctly, in Deleuzeʼs
view) identified with the Infinite, with God as infinite
power of understanding, infinite power of creation, and
so on.86 ʻSo long as God exists … then man does not
yet exist.ʼ87 But, rather than immediate to the Real,
the human is here identified with a limitation placed
upon such an infinity (for example, the human power of
understanding as a limited form of a divinely infinite
understanding88). The objects of science include only
those things which can in principle be extended to
infinity, constructed in indefinite series out from one
central ʻcreativeʼ point (money or wealth in ʻecon-
omicsʼ, specific differences in ʻbiologyʼ, and so on).
The great effort of knowledge in the classical age is
thus the effort to represent or locate itself within the
infinite,89 and to explain is here to extend to infinity,
to ʻunfoldʼ the Real without losing this location.90
In the second stage, human finitude becomes more
ʻpositivelyʼ constituent (with Kant) than negative or
limiting. Rather than construct general series referring
back to one infinitely creative point, each element
in a series takes on a self-constituent energy, and
diverges in an ongoing ʻevolutionʼ of living beings
(Lamarck, Cuvier, Cournot, Darwin); the force of
work becomes constituent of wealth, and ʻwork itself
falls back on capital (Ricardo) before the reverse takes
place, in which capital falls back on the work extorted
(Marx)ʼ;91 languages no longer refer back to a universal
general grammar but to ʻcollective willsʼ (Bopp, Sch-
legel). Specific, comparative histories replace a general
deductive order, histories in which the coordinating
agent is of course ʻManʼ himself, specified as living,
working, speaking, being. In short, ʻManʼ dominates
the most powerful order of the Given yet produced,
and the only ʻcritique of knowledgeʼ is an ʻontology of
the annihilation of beingsʼ, that is, the annihilation of
beings specified as living, working or speaking.92
Hence the third stage, Deleuzeʼs own stage, the stage
of the superman, involves affirming this annihilation,
12 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)
the attempt to carry the forces of finitude across
the limit of ʻManʼsʼ coherence. The goal is to make
finitude itself the basis of an active or creative infinity.
To ʻknowʼ is here to affirm the infinitely disjunctive
forces of life, labour and language in themselves,
as they radiate out along their separate evolutionary
paths, and in this way restore the infinite of the first
stage, through the finite, so to speak. That is, within
a finite living organism (ʻManʼ), to affirm an infinite
power of Life; within a finite speaking organism,
to affirm an infinite power of Language; and so on.
ʻNietzsche said that man imprisoned life, but the
superman is what frees life within man himself, to
the benefit of another form.ʼ93
So although the infinite now passes through ʻManʼ,
it is no longer located; it explodes all possibility
of location. In this, it surpasses the infinite of the
first stage. It has become identical to the immediacy
of time or being itself. Such contemporary thought
runs like a ʻligne de fuiteʼ through the fractured ʻIʼ
of Kantʼs constituent cogito.94 Such has been, for
example, the task of a specifically modern litera-
ture as Deleuze everywhere endorses it: through and
alongside the ʻdissemination of languagesʼ recognized
by philological linguistics, modern literature ʻtook on
a completely different function that consisted, on the
contrary, in “regrouping” language and emphasizing
a “being of language” beyond whatever it designates
and signifies.ʼ95 In other words, through a finite liter-
ary mechanism, language ʻturns back on itself in
an endless reflexivityʼ.96 This is very precisely how
Deleuze envisages his own effort: through the finite
power of the philosopher, the infinite expression of
the Real.
Why canʼt Deleuze simply return to the first, pre-
Man stage? Because classical philosophy remains
limited and located, governed in the end by a conver-
gence with God. The third stage, by contrast, puts
Man ʻin charge of the animalsʼ, ʻof the very rocksʼ,
ʻin charge of the being of language (that formless,
“mute, unsignifying region where language can find
its freedom” even from whatever it has to say)ʼ.97 In
other words, only the third stage effects a kind of
becoming-God of man, a becoming infinite of the
finite, and it is this becoming which, as we shall see,
enables Deleuzeʼs redemptive paradigm. The failure
of classical thought (excepting Spinoza) lies not in
its affirmation of the infinite and serial, of ʻGodʼ, but
in its timid humility, its refusal to identify itself with
God. In the end, it is the specifically human ability
to become inhuman, to become infinite, which will
redeem the whole of the finite universe. Only the
inhuman is Real, but only the human, of course, can
become inhuman.
Art and the dissolution of the Given
Like Spinoza, Deleuze studies the Given for one and
only one reason: to announce the manner of its dissolu-
tion. Tautologically, in order to regain the immediate
Real we must ʻforgetʼ or ʻescapeʼ the mediate, on
the model of the ʻschizophrenic escapeʼ.98 An ʻobjec-
tiveʼ redemption begins with a subjective paralysis.
Our ʻmistake [is to] postulate the contemporaneity of
subject and object, whereas one is constituted only
through the annihilation of the otherʼ.99 By Deleuzeʼs
logic this is a properly (and merely) binary logic
– either one or the other. ʻThe identity of the self
is lost … to the advantage of an intense multiplicity
and a power of metamorphosis.ʼ100 To overcome oneʼs
limited, interested coherence is, immediately, to par-
ticipate without reserve in an absolute coherence. ʻThe
indefinite aspects of a life lose all indetermination
to the degree that they fill a plane of immanence.ʼ101
To become-Real is to become perfectly automatic,
automated – in Spinozaʼs phrase so often cited by
Deleuze, the ʻspiritual automatonʼ, the model thinker,
ʻthe identity of brain and world, the automaton.ʼ102 If
ʻthe automaton is cut off from the outside world, there
is a more profound outside which will animate itʼ.103
The figure of the automaton equates a ʻpersonalʼ or
ʻprivateʼ disempowerment with absolute determination
by pure, pre-existent power.
On the one hand, the great spiritual automaton
indicates the highest exercise of thought, the way in
which thought thinks and itself thinks itself.… On
the other hand, the automaton … no longer depends
on the outside because he is automonous but be-
cause he is dispossessed of his own thought.104
Through our dispossession – through the dissolution of
the Given – the Real reclaims its own productive auto-
coincidence. The rise and fall of the Given appears as
one gigantically redundant exercise.
Such is the basis of Deleuzeʼs insistent discus-
sions of the eternal return, the eschatological identity
of origin and outcome, considered as a redemptive
principle, as principle of ʻontological selectionʼ.105
Eternal return is Deleuzeʼs version of a Last Judge-
ment, the determination of what qualifies for eternal
life. Deleuzeʼs redemptive paradigm is not essentially
different from the Christian or Enlightened versions
– through sin or superstition, through worldly inter-
est, a return to original harmony or Reason, pure
disinterest. An Enlightened eventual order, become
actual in history (Mercierʼs Lʼan 2440), will duplicate
a natural, primordial order. A Real outcome, in each
case, is attained through a loss of interested partial-
ity. History is the remainder that disappears with the
perfect realignment of calculation. For Deleuze as for
dʼAlembert, historian of human knowledges, history
and worldly consciousness have only one purpose: to
achieve their own redundancy.
This task defines the purpose of the philosopher and
artist as Deleuze defines them, allies in an ongoing
redemption from the Given. Like the mystic or the
Enlightened philosophe, Deleuzeʼs philosopher is
defined as the being most capable of renouncing all
conceivable interest or specificity. By definition, only
the most singular subject can renounce a worldly
interest – that is, exchange a personal or specific
coherence for an impersonal, cosmic coherence. The
ʻembodiment of cosmic memory in creative emotions
undoubtedly only takes place in privileged soulsʼ, the
vehicles of genius.106 This embodiment takes place in
ʻisolationʼ, and only occasionally, elliptically, ʻleaps
from one soul to another, “every now and then”, cross-
ing closed deserts.ʼ107 The artist or philosopher exists
alone, outside history, following the path of Beckettʼs
characters toward pure self-exhaustion (épuisement),
the solitude of Blanchotʼs espace littéraire.108
However, the solitude of the artist in no way implies
the ʻprivateʼ idiosyncracy of an artistic vision, a pat-
ented ʻoriginalityʼ to be treasured by collectors; ʻa
statement never refers back to a subjectʼ.109 A Real or
ʻminorʼ literature is defined not only by a minimum of
mediation or a ʻhigh coefficient of deterritorializationʼ,
but by its political, collective articulation. Everything
in a minor literature ʻis politicalʼ; its ʻcramped space
forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately
to politicsʼ.110 ʻKafkaʼs solitudeʼ, for example, ʻopens
him up to everything going on in history todayʼ,111
for there is literally nothing and no-one to limit his
articulation of the Real. The solitary minor artist
produces ʻintensive quantities directly on the social
body, in the social field itself. A single, unified process.
The highest desire desires to be both alone and to be
connected to all the machines of desire.ʼ112
The writer is thus defined by his or her lack of
definition, positioned by the lack of position. In this
sense, Deleuze is firmly positioned at the extreme
limit of what Bourdieu has famously analysed as ʻle
champ littéraireʼ.113 The artist is focus for the abolition
of worldly values, in the name of the ʻother-worldlyʼ;
like the masochist, the genuine Artist ʻsuspendsʼ all
relations-with and between114 and ʻstops the worldʼ115
so as to leave it absolutely, so as to grasp ʻlife in its
pure stateʼ.116 As Spinoza is the ʻfulfillment of phil-
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 13
osophyʼ, so ʻArtaud is the fulfillment of literature,
precisely because he is a schizophrenic.ʼ117 Deleuze
and Guattariʼs schizophrenic exists ʻas close as pos-
sible to matter, to a burning, living center of matterʼ,
ʻclosest to the beating heart of reality, to an intense
point identical with the production of the realʼ.118
The ʻschizoʼ is a pure in-between without terms, an
ʻindivisible distanceʼ.119 The artist–schizophrenic has
absolutely nothing to learn from the world. There is
nowhere the artist has not already been. The schizo is
from the outset ʻsituated wherever there is a singularity
… because he is himself this distance that transforms
him into a womanʼ, a child, an ʻEskimoʼ, and so on.120
It is an exemplary definition of the champ littéraire:
the writer is this distance which transforms the related,
actual world into an immanent composition whose
value is precisely that it has no worldly value.
So, in a sense, every ʻgreat artistʼ always does
the same thing, performs the same radical ascesis of
self. The thinker is always Dionysius, or a synonym
of Dionysius, a reincarnation of the Real-in-person,
the Real depersonalized. Artaudʼs ʻHeliogabalus is
Spinoza, and Spinoza is Heliogabalus revivedʼ,121
and everything converges toward ʻla grande identité
Spinoza–Nietzscheʼ.122 ʻNo art is imitative, no art can
be imitative or figurativeʼ,123 because art is Real, and
vice versa. Art, in other words, follows the very move-
ment of the Real, with a minimum of mediation, on the
model of metallurgy.124 The Real ʻmatter-flow can only
be followedʼ, and ʻone writes [then] on the same level
as the real of an unformed matter, at the same time
as that matter traverses and extends all of nonformal
languageʼ;125 ʻwriting now functions on the same level
as the real, and the real materially writes.ʼ126 It is
ʻa writing that is strangely polyvocal, flush with the
realʼ,127 and ʻthe only aim [in] writing is life.ʼ128 Real
or ʻlivingʼ writing is not somehow outside language
(that is, equivocal, in another realm of Being) but the
ʻoutside of languageʼ: language become immediate to
things; language and things collapsed together in a
single plane.129
Among Deleuzeʼs many artistic models, there is
space to consider only three, chosen from fields as
disparate as possible – Proust, Bacon, and cinema as
a whole. (Certainly, Beckett, Kafka, Artaud, Michaux,
Bene, Masoch, and Cézanne are no less important.)
The fundamental sequence (Given to Real) is much
the same in each case, driven by the immediate as
both means and end – redemptive immediacy as telos
and technique of art.
The choice narrated by Proust is typical of the
general redemptive pattern. As Deleuze reads it, the
14 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)
narrator stops loving Albertine so as to begin com-
posing the Recherche. He swaps a worldly position
(mondaine, amoureuse, sensible) for that artistic coher-
ence that excludes our own, ʻthe original complication,
the struggle and exchange of the primordial elements
which constitute essence itselfʼ.130 Deleuzeʼs Proust
writes the shift from specific to singular, relative to
absolute, Given to Real. Deleuze distinguishes four
regimes of signs in his work, organized in relative
proximity to the Real. Worldly signs are the lowest or
ʻlast degree of essenceʼ,131 the most related, the most
specific to a place and a group. Next, the signs of
love offer insight into the true solitude or singularity
of the lover, but do so only negatively, through what
Spinoza would call ʻbad encountersʼ, the specificity
of a positioned personality, and the perception of
others as specific to a world which excludes the lover
(love as jealousy). Closer still to absolute singularity,
the signs of involuntary memory offer a perfect but
temporary coincidence between two distinct times.
They reveal a shared ʻidentical qualityʼ beyond all
specificity, but remain limited as a relation between
rather than external to its terms. Artistic signs, finally,
are wholly and sufficiently immediate to the Real,
pure essence, beyond all forms of the specific and
the relative. Art composes the ʻpure and empty form
of timeʼ, immediacy or le temps retrouvé as ʻfinality
of the worldʼ – ʻthat birth which has become the
metamorphosis of objectsʼ,132 dawn of a world before
(or after) the human. Proust thus composes the Real
by decomposing it in the world; he extracts the Real
from the specific.133
Francis Bacon so interests Deleuze because his
painting retains enough of the figural for Deleuze to
argue that ʻno art is figurativeʼ, that ʻby virtue of its
most profound theme, the visual image points to an
innocent physical nature, to an immediate life which
has no need of languageʼ.134 According to Deleuze,
Bacon like every other Real artist produces a wholly
literal art. His painting ʻreveals presence, directly
[donne à voir la présence, directement]ʼ; with Bacon
as with Cezanne, ʻpainting aims to extract directly
the presences beneath and beyond representation …; it
puts the eye in everythingʼ, and thereby allows a wholly
de-positioned, wholly objective vision, immediate to
the exclusive ʻintensityʼ of the Real, a ʻpure vibrationʼ
unlimited by extension of any kind, unqualified by
any adjective.135 ʻFreedʼ from positioned or intentional
representation, painting ʻacts directly upon the nervous
systemʼ, and puts ʻthe emancipated senses into direct
relation with time and thoughtʼ, in a single material
plane without intermediaries.136 In short, rather than
some kind of relation between ʻsubject and object …
it is both things at onceʼ; ʻI become in sensation, and
at the same time something happens because of it. In
the last analysis, the same body gives it and receives
it, and this body is both object and subjectʼ.137
Perhaps the most vivid and exhaustively detailed of
Deleuzeʼs artistic examples is the becoming-immediate
of modern film described in the two Cinema books.
Deleuze aims to show that cinema duplicates the path
taken by modern philosophy beginning with Kant,138
from Given to Real – from an indirect, mediate presen-
tation of time through relative, positioned movements,
to a direct, immediate presentation of time based
on an absolute movement constitutive of all possible
positions. In the first phase, the ʻmovementʼ or ʻaction-
imageʼ of cinema is based on the coordination of
perceptions and actions through an intentional subject,
what Deleuze calls the ʻsensory motor schemaʼ which
mediates time in the interests of action.139 It is a
cinema of the specific and related,140 which orders the
parts of a ʻchanging open wholeʼ through figurative
association with a referential ʻworldʼ of some kind,
an ʻout-of-fieldʼ.141 In the second phase, the Given
dissolves to reveal the Real in its pure immediacy, in
its singular and exclusive element – ʻtime in the pure
stateʼ.142 The ʻsensory-motor schema is shattered from
the inside. That is, perceptions and actions cease to
be linked together, and spaces are neither co-ordinated
nor filledʼ; the actors become ʻpure seers, who no
longer exist except in the interval or movementʼ, ren-
dered ʻhelplessʼ, paralysed within a ʻpure optical and
sound situationʼ.143 Place becomes ʻuninhabitableʼ, ʻany-
space-whateverʼ, ʻwaste groundʼ;144 situations become
dispersive rather than integrative;145 the association of
images becomes ʻellipticalʼ, ʻirrationalʼ and ʻdirectʼ,
without ʻintermediariesʼ;146 events no longer ʻconcern
the person who provokes or is subject to themʼ, but
consist of ʻwanderings, immobilizings, petrifications
and repetitionsʼ;147 finally, ʻthere is no more [refer-
ential] out-of-fieldʼ but only an ʻautonomous imageʼ
that ʻdestroysʼ, ʻreplacesʼ or ʻcreatesʼ its object and
its world.148 Literal images replace figures. ʻThere is
no longer association through metaphor or metonymy,
but relinkage on the literal image.ʼ149 There is no more
an ʻin-betweenʼ art and life; ʻit is the whole of the
real, life in its entirety, which has become spectacleʼ,
ʻlife as spectacle, and yet in its spontaneity.ʼ150 In
other words, the new cinema eliminates the specific
through ʻthe extraction of an any-question-whateverʼ.151
Cinema restores ʻour faithʼ in the world, by moving
beyond (above or beneath) it. It redeems the world,
by exploding it.
According to Deleuze, we regain in the process the
Reality of ʻnon-organic lifeʼ, the identity of Brain and
Universe, of art and ʻpure thoughtʼ as the very ʻtruth
of cinemaʼ.152 This truth puts an end to intermediaries.
At the limit, through ʻcontact independent of distanceʼ,
cinema becomes pure resolution of binaries, ʻco-pres-
ence or application of … negative and positive, of place
and obverse, of full and empty, of past and future, of
brain and cosmos, of the inside and the outsideʼ.153 For
Deleuze, this is always and everywhere the artistic
achievement par excellence, a kind of supreme self-
sacrifice, the transcendence of all interests in the
absolutely singular interest of something else. Such is,
precisely, the redemptive interest of Thought.
Thought and the redemptive choice
For Deleuze, thought creates what it thinks, as percep-
tion creates what it perceives (and therefore does not
relate to it). ʻThe philosophical concept does not refer
to the lived … but consists, through its own creation, in
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 15
setting up an event that surveys [survole] the whole of
the lived no less than every state of affairsʼ.154 Deleuze
does not establish a relationship between philosophy
and other disciplines, other ways of making sense, but
eliminates this relationship to the advantage of a kind
of ʻgreater philosophyʼ. Thought or philosophy thinks
the sufficient reason of the actual. In this way,
thinking and being are … one and the same …;
movement is not the image of thought without being
also the substance of being… It is a single speed on
both sides: ʻthe atom will traverse space with the
speed of thoughtʼ (Epicurus). The plane of imma-
nence has two facets as Thought and as Nature, as
Nous and as Physis.155
The power of Thought is for Deleuze very much
that of an unlimited creator God, natura naturans,
the union of spontaneity and necessity. Following
Spinoza, ʻpurest of philosophersʼ,156 ʻwe have a power
of knowing, understanding or thinking only to the
extent that we participate in the absolute power of
thinkingʼ.157 We think because we are (ʻobjectivelyʼ)
Thought: ʻthe power of thinking is asserted, by
nature or by participation, of all that is “objective”.…
But objective being would amount to nothing did
it not itself have a formal being in the attribute of
Thought.ʼ158 That is why the true thinker is ʻspiritual
automatonʼ, ʻthought as determined by its own laws.ʼ159
The automaton reaches that ʻsecret point where the
anecdote of life and the aphorism of thought amount to
one and the same thingʼ.160 Thought in itself dissolves
the thinker as subject.161 As with Suhrawardî or Paul,
the redeemed subject is thought, immediately – on
condition that he or she stops thinking as a subject.
ʻThe activity of thought applies to a receptive being, to
a passive subject which represents that activity to itself
rather than enacts it …. Thought thinks only on the
basis of an unconscious … the universal ungrounding
which characterizes thought as a faculty in its trans-
cendental exercise.ʼ162
Thought redeems. To think requires a ʻclean breakʼ,
a leap altogether out of the world, an escape from all
worldly opacity and particularity.163 To think is to
become transparent or insubstantial – to present no
resistance to the impersonal movement of thought. To
think is to escape the Given. With Deleuze, thought
is not a transitive activity. Thought coincides with its
own constitution as thought.
In other words, to think is also to choose to think
– to choose Real over Given, to refuse the world.
Deleuze, like Paul or Pascal, erects a logic of choice
at the very centre of thought. According to Deleuze,
16 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)
the modern fact is that we no longer believe in
this world. We do not even believe in the events
which happen to us, love, death as if they only
half concerned us… The link between man and
the world is broken. Henceforth this link must
become an object of belief: it is the impossible
which can only be restored within a faith.… [The
sensory motor] reaction of which man has been
dispossessed can be replaced only by belief.164
It is precisely because thought paralyses us as pos-
itioned thinking beings, that it is, in a second moment,
redemptive of all positions. Thought allows us to
recognize and affirm our unjustifiable state (as Paulʼs
ʻgraceʼ is beyond relation, beyond merit). In the terms
of Deleuzeʼs Cinema 2, thought destroys the ʻsensory
motor schemaʼ – that is, the ʻsubjectʼ who perceives
and reacts to situations – and this ʻbreak makes man a
seer who finds himself struck by something intolerable
in the world, and confronted by something unthinkable
in thought …; we should make use of this power-
lessness to believe in life, and to discover the identity
of thought and life.ʼ165 It is only ʻthis belief that makes
the unthought the specific power of thought, through
the absurdʼ.166 Ultimately, ʻthe power of thought gives
way, then, to an unthought in thought, to an irrational
proper to thought, a point beyond the outside world,
but capable of restoring our belief in the worldʼ.167 To
choose means to accept what is, to become what we
are, and nothing more.
Again, what determines this densely argued
sequence is immediate coincidence pure and simple.
Deleuzeʼs obscure account of ʻthe choiceʼ equates
chooser and chosen; it joins the supremely ʻsubjec-
tiveʼ moment of decision (the moment of Pascal and
Kierkegaard) and the moment of supreme, absolute
automation (the moment of Spinoza and Leibniz).
The Real choice is a choice ʻincreasingly identified
with living thoughtʼ.168 To choose the Real is to reach
a ʻspiritual space where what we choose is no longer
indistinguishable from the choice itselfʼ,169 a place
where ʻspace is no longer determined, it has become
the any-space-whatever which is identical to the power
of the spirit, [its] “auto-affection”ʼ.170 To ʻbelieveʼ is
to return to the all-productive origin of immediacy;
ʻit is only, it is simply believing in the body. It is
giving discourse to the body, and, for this purpose,
reaching the body before discourse, before words,
before things are namedʼ.171 Like Humeʼs theory of
association developed in Empiricism and Subjectivity,
the choice is wholly external to its terms.172 Choice
chooses the dissolution of terms. ʻIn short, choice
as spiritual determination has no other object other
than itself: I choose to choose …[choice] in this way
confirming itself by itself, by putting the whole stake
back into play each timeʼ.173 The choice, like the dice-
throw of Difference and Repetition and Nietzsche and
Philosophy, equates player and play, rules and game,
stakes and ʻstakerʼ.
According to Deleuze, ʻthe true choice, that which
consists in choosing choice, is supposed to restore
everything to us. It will enable us to rediscover every-
thing, in the spirit of sacrifice, at the moment of the
sacrificeʼ. To be thus redeemed is to renounce the
world in favour of a ʻpure, immanent or spiritual light,
beyond white, black and grey. As soon as this light
is reached it restores everything to usʼ.174 In the eco-
nomical terms of Deleuzeʼs Foucault, ʻonly forgetting
(the unfolding) recovers what is folded in memory (and
in the fold itself)ʼ.175
Why does Deleuzeʼs choice restore the world?
Simply because it claims to be wholly, perfectly
identical to it, in its creativity, as natura naturans.
It restores not a world Given for us (naturata), but
the world as it is in itself, in its ʻgenitalityʼ. In the
chosen immediacy, the chooser gains access to ʻthe
power of a constitution of bodiesʼ, and carries ʻout a
primordial genesis of bodiesʼ: ʻconstituting bodies, and
in this way restoring our belief in the world, restoring
our reason…ʼ.176 What Deleuze says of the German
expressionists, artists of the ʻdynamic sublimeʼ, applies
nicely to his own redemptive paradigm:
it is intensity which is raised to such a power
that it dazzles or annihilates our organic be-
ing, strikes terror into it, but arouses a thinking
faculty by which we feel superior to that which
annihilates us, to discover in us a supra-organic
spirit which dominates the whole inorganic life
of things; then we lose our fear, knowing that
our spritiual ʻdestinationʼ is truly invincible.177
What is really ʻinvincibleʼ here is the immediate equa-
tion of all the terms involved (chooser, choice, chosen).
The identity of the terms ensures their perfect revers-
ibility. Deleuzeʼs Real chooser is, as with Nietzsche
or Paul, himself chosen (élu): ʻonly he who is chosen
chooses well or effectivelyʼ.178 To be chosen is to fuse
with ʻgraceʼ, to become, in the mystical formula of
Cinema 2, one with ʻthe Spirit, he who blows where
he willʼ.179
That is why, again, Deleuze always equates the
ʻfreedomʼ of Real choice with the purest form of
automation. In Spinozaʼs exemplary ʻethical vision
of the world it is always a matter of capacity and
power, and never of anything else. In a sense every
being, each moment, does all it can.ʼ180 With Deleuzeʼs
Leibniz, likewise, a free act is not determined by a
choice of one motive over another, but entails the
absence of a specific motive as such, the absence of
a subjective specificity.181 With Leibniz, ʻeverything
is sealed off from the beginning and remains in a
condition of closureʼ.182 To be ʻfreeʼ, in other words,
can only mean, to be free of worldly interest as such.
Freedom is here an expressive state, rather than situ-
ated action. Since ʻeach monad is nothing other than
a passage of Godʼ, ʻthe voluntary act is free because
the free act is what expresses the entire soul at a given
moment of its duration.ʼ183 What a free monad does is
include or express what inheres in it – ʻinherence is
the condition of liberty and not of impedimentʼ.184 For
Deleuze, freedom has only a literal value: free equals
unlimited, free of specific limits. Free is all-inclusive,
or dis-interested. The properly ʻethicalʼ or political
issue for Deleuze is never what is conventionally dis-
cussed as human liberty but rather liberation from the
human – ʻla liberté devenue capacité pour lʼhomme de
vaincre lʼhomme.ʼ185 Since ʻmanʼ is itself the ʻprisonʼ,
ʻlife becomes resistance to power [only] when power
takes life as its objectʼ, to the exclusion of the merely
living as such (ʻmanʼ, the organism).186
In other words, Deleuzeʼs ʻfaith in the worldʼ is
restored, ultimately, because his chosen ʻbreak with
the worldʼ is offset by a still more radical fusion with
its ʻcreatorʼ or sufficient reason.187 He breaks with the
Given so as to return to the Real. He restores faith in
a ʻworldʼ to which he has perfectly immediate access
– access beyond the mediation of a ʻpriestʼ, beyond
ʻinterpretationʼ188 – much as the Enlightened think-
ers restore their faith to a Reason they immediately
incarnate (Montesquieuʼs principes, Diderotʼs arbre
encyclopédique). We cannot, of course, question the
validity of Deleuzeʼs choice without transforming it
into the very choice which, like Melvilleʼs Bartelby,
he ʻprefers notʼ to choose. But we can demonstrate
its consistency with other logics (Pauline, Enlight-
ened…) which equate redemption with the sacrifice of
a positioned interest, and consider for whom Deleuzeʼs
choice is valid. Who can afford this sacrifice? Who
has an interest in disinterest? Like Spinoza, like Paul,
Deleuze writes for the establishment of one univocal
order, ʻone body directed by one mindʼ. His univocal
excludes the equivocal; his One-multiple excludes the
many; his literal excludes the figural. Deleuzeʼs phil-
osophy proclaims a redemptive dislocation of interests
every bit as radical as that asserted, in their very
different ways, by his contemporaries Lévinas and
Badiou.
Whatever the virtues of Deleuzeʼs philosophy, then,
we should not mistake it for what it most emphati-
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 17
cally is not – a philosophy that complicates the realm
of immediate expression, that subverts a univocal
order, that disrupts a strict ontological homogeneity,
that promotes a world of complex relations between
distinct, specific individuals or others. If most of
Deleuzeʼs commentators look to his work for tools in
the building of a ʻradical democracyʼ, to advance the
deconstruction of ʻMajorʼ narratives and hierarchies,
to support the assertion of ʻMinor identitiesʼ and dif-
ferences, they seldom consider the terms upon which
this apparent pluralism rests. Invariably, ʻmultiplicityʼ
with Deleuze is the predicate of a radical, self-differ-
ing singularity. His multiple is not the plural, but the
internal consequence of univocity.
Despite his own very practical engagement in politi-
cal struggle, Deleuzeʼs political philosophy thus leaves
little no room for a confrontation with the equivocal
as such. With Hume, Deleuze knows that ʻparticular
interests cannot be made identical to one another, or be
naturally totalized. Nonetheless, nature demands that
they be made identicalʼ.189 So with Spinoza, Deleuze
looks for a way to accomplish this identity that is
ʻnaturalʼ yet not given as such. Only something like
Spinozaʼs ʻsovereign City has power enough to institute
indirect conventional relations through which citizens
are forced to agree and be compatibleʼ:190 Deleuzeʼs
own political philosophy assumes comparable power.
The sovereign interest is built on the renunciation of
interests, and the ʻreasonableʼ citizen is precisely that
ʻpersonʼ beyond the reach of ʻany personal affections
whateverʼ.191 The multiple, always, is impersonal and
ahistorical, and has nothing to do with the aggrega-
tion let alone the negotiation or mediation of personal
affections or interests.192 The multiple is a function
of what the One can become – as One. Deleuzeʼs
ʻbecoming-otherʼ, in short, is precisely the tendency
of a ʻworld without others.ʼ193 ʻBecoming-otherʼ is the
very movement of redemption, the movement away
from relations with others. Deleuzian ʻbecomingsʼ are
not of this world.
Hence the lasting ambiguity of Deleuzeʼs work.
Unlike Paul or Suhrawardî, of course, Deleuze is
a self-declared empiricist, a radical materialist. The
Deleuzian version of univocity certainly means that
ʻone must find a fully physical usage for principles
whose nature is only physical…ʼ, geared to a single
ʻMechanosphereʼ194 There is no ontological dualism
here, of spirit and flesh, life and death, light and opacity.
With Deleuze, we know that everything is Real, that all
inheres on the same plane. Yet the redemptive move-
ment remains. The enabling conclusion follows neces-
sarily: everything is Real – but some things are more
18 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)
Real than others. Univocity guarantees the integrity of
a single quantitative scale of reality, a single matrix of
salvation (the more or less redeemed). In a way, this
matrix is more ʻdamningʼ, more ʻinclusiveʼ, than Paulʼs
dualism. Deleuzeʼs redemptive philosophy, coupled
with his ontological univocity, ensures a hierarchy of
beings every bit as dizzying as the vertical layering
of Lights in Suhrawardîʼs cosmology. With Deleuze,
everything is physical, but our world is proclaimed
minimally physical. Everything is Real, but positioned;
specific actors are confined – once again – to a world
of illusion. This is a world that lacks even the paltry
autonomy accorded the negative term in a binary
opposition: it is merely the weak, diluted aspect of
the philosophy that exceeds it.
Notes
1. As Christian Jambet puts it, ʻSuhrawardî is like a Spino-
za of Lightʼ, La Logique des Orientaux, Seuil, Paris,
1983, p. 142; cf. pp. 108–12, 163.
2. Throughout this article, I capitalize this meaning of
ʻGivenʼ to form an antithetical pair with ʻRealʼ.
3. Difference and Repetition (hereafter DR), trans. Paul
Patton, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994,
p. 35. ʻLʼun se dit en un seul et même sens de tout le
multipleʼ, A Thousand Plateaus (hereafter TP), trans.
Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, Min-
neapolis, 1986, p. 254; ʻa single and same voice for
the whole thousand-voiced multipleʼ, DR, p. 304. Cf.
Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Hab-
berjam, Zone, New York, 1988, p. 29.
4. [with Félix Guattari] Anti-Oedipus (hereafter AO),
trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane,
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1977, pp.
26, 32: ʻthe objective being of desire is the Real in
and of itselfʼ and ʻdesire does not lack anythingʼ (pp.
26–7).
5. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (hereafter EP),
trans. Martin Joughin, Zone, New York, 1990, p. 11.
6. The Letters of Paul to the Romans 1.19–20; 8.39. I
refer to the text of The New English Bible, Oxford
and Cambridge University Presses, 1961, volume 2. I
draw here, in part, on Alain Badiou, ʻSaint Paul et la
fondation de lʼuniverselʼ, lectures given at the Collège
International de la philosophie, 1995–96.
7. Romans 3.20; cf. Romans 7.7–10.
8. Romans 12.2; 8.9.
9. The Letter of Paul to the Galations 3.28; cf. The First
Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, 12.13.
10. The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles
Stivale, Columbia University Press, New York, 1990,
p. 306.
11. Shihâboddîn Yahya Suhrawardî (Shaykh al-Ishrâq), Le
Livre de la Sagesse orientale, translated and edited by
Henri Corbin, introduction by Christian Jambet, Ver-
dier, Lagrasse, 1986, §129–30, pp. 112–13.
12. Suhrawardî, LʼArchange empourpré, Quinze traités et
récits mystiques, translated and edited by Henri Corbin,
Fayard, Paris, 1976, p. 431.
13. Henri Corbin, Temple et contemplation, Flammarion,
Paris, 1981, p. 293; En Islam iranien, Gallimard, Paris,
1971, pp. i, 46; Histoire de la philosophie islamique,
 Gallimard, ʻFolioʼ, Paris, 1986, pp. 129, 138.
14. Suhrawardî, Archange, p. 57.
15. Suhrawardî, Le Livre des tablettes, ch. vii, in Archange, 39.
p. 104. 40.
16. Suhrawardî, Archange, pp. 101–2; cf. Corbin, En Islam
iranien, pp. ii, 22. 41.
17. Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch, ʻLa Poétique de lʼIslamʼ,
in Julia Kristeva, ed., La Traversée des signes, Seuil,
Paris, 1975, p. 216. 42.
18. Jambet, Logique, p. 38; Henri Corbin, Philosophie
iranienne et philosophie comparée (1977), Buchet- 43.
Chastel, Paris, 1985, p. 118.
19. Jambet, Logique, pp. 118, 224–5; cf. p. 231.
20. Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, in The
Political Works, edited by A. Wernham, Oxford Uni-
versity Press, Oxford, 1958, p. 83. 44.
21. ʻHuman nature is such that everyone pursues his pri- 45.
vate advantage with the greatest eagernessʼ (Spinoza, 46.
Tractatus Politicus, in The Political Works, p. 337).
22. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by C.B. Mac-
pherson, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1968, pp. 263–4.
The deduction of sovereignty, for Spinoza as much as
for Bossuet, ʻrequires no belief in historical narratives
of any kindʼ (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, p. 73) but
is, rather, ʻself-validating and self-evidentʼ (p. 75). It 47.
follows immediately from itself. 48.
23. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, p. 133. 49.
24. Tractatus Politicus, p. 367. 50.
25. Tractatus Politicus, pp. 373, 383. 51.
26. AO, p. 76; cf. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 52.
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993, p. 53.
7; TP, pp. 153, 335. 54.
27. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari, Routledge, New
York, 1989, p. 156.
28. P. Zaoui, ʻLa grande identité Nietzsche–Spinoza, quelle
identité?ʼ, Philosophie 47, September 1995, pp. 64–5.
29. C. Boundas, ʻIntroductionʼ, The Deleuze Reader, Co-
lumbia University Press, New York, 1992, p. 11.
30. Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in
Philosophy, University of Minnesota Press, Minne- 55.
apolis, 1992, pp. 52–3; xii, 8–13, 27–8, 115; François 56.
Zourabichvili, Deleuze: Une philosophie de lʼévéne- 57.
ment, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1995, 58.
pp. 56–8; Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari, pp. 2, 15–17, 59.
156; Armand Guilmette, Gilles Deleuze et la modernité,
Trois-Rivières, Les Editions du Zéphyr, Ottawa, 1984,
p. 14. It is consequently typical to assume that, rather
than Spinoza, it is Nietzsche – the same radically anti-
Hegelian Nietzsche of Klossowski and Foucault – who
is the decisive model and ally.
31. Zourabichvili, Deleuze, p. 53.
32. Hardt, Gilles Deleuze, p. 38. Cf. Philippe Mengue,
Deleuze: Le système du multiple, Kimé, Paris, 1995, 60.
pp. 10, 53, 291–3; Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy
through the Looking-Glass, Open Court, Lasalle, 1985, 61.
pp. 40–41; Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari, pp. 141–2.
33. Hardt, Gilles Deleuze, pp. 79–85, xiii. 62.
34. Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking-Glass, 63.
p. 163. 64.
35. Ibid., pp. 38, 41. 65.
36. F. Gros, ʻLe Foucault de Deleuze: une fiction méta- 66.
physiqueʼ, Philosophie 47, September 1995, p. 56. 67.
37. D. Janicaut, ʻFranceʼ, in R. Klibanski and D. Pears, eds, 68.
La Philosophie en Europe, Gallimard, ʻIdéesʼ, Paris, 69.
1993, p. 161. 70.
38. B. Massumi, A Userʼs Guide to Capitalism and Schizo- 71.
phrenia, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1992, pp. 26,
69.
Hardt, Gilles Deleuze, pp. 119–20.
Boundas, ʻIntroductionʼ, Deleuze Reader, pp. 21, 13–
14.
Guilmette, Deleuze et la modernité, p. 20. Cf. Boun-
das, Deleuze Reader, p. 2; X. Papaïs, ʻPuissances de
lʼartificeʼ, Philosophie 47, September 1995, p. 86.
Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking-Glass, p.
185.
Ibid., pp. 107, 110; Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari, p.
161. It follows that Deleuzeʼs concepts are supposed to
be ʻindefinitely variableʼ (Jean-Clet Martin, Variations.
La Philosophie de Gilles Deleuze, Editions Payot et
Rivages, Paris, 1993, p. 11).
Bergsonism, p. 104.
Cf. AO, pp. 29, 119.
Cinema 1: The Mouvement-Image (hereafter C1), trans.
Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, University
of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986, p. 125; Maso-
chism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty (here-
after MC), G. Braziller, New York, 1971, pp. 15–16;
Negotiations: Interviews 1972–1990, Columbia Uni-
versity Press, New York, 1995, p. 195.
EP, p. 137.
DR, p. 147; EP, p. 307.
EP, pp. 263, 289–90.
EP, pp. 296, 297.
EP, pp. 303, 308.
EP, p. 265.
EP, p. 308.
Foucault (hereafter FC), trans. Seán Hand, University
of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1988, pp. 3, 16, my
emphasis. Again, ʻcinemaʼs concepts are not given in
the cinema. And yet they are cinemaʼs concepts, not
theories about cinemaʼ (Cinema 2: The Time-Image
(hereafter C2), trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam, University of Minnesota Press, Minne-
apolis, 1989, p. 280, my emphasis).
FC, pp. 16–17.
FC, p. 53.
FC, pp. 53, 54; cf. p. 59.
FC, p. 54.
ʻThe task of philosophy when it creates concepts, en-
tities, is always to extract an event from things and
beingsʼ ([with Félix Guattari] What is Philosophy?
(hereafter WP), trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham
Burchell, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994,
p. 33), just as ʻthe essence of the cinematographic
movement-image lies in extracting from vehicles or
moving bodies the movement which is their common
substanceʼ.
Cf. Mireille Buydens, Sahara: Lʼesthétique de Gilles
Deleuze, Vrin, Paris, 1990, p. 22.
WP, p. 47; Gilles Deleuze, ʻLʼimmanence: une vieʼ,
Philosophie 47, September 1995, p. 5.
WP, pp. 48–9.
DR, p. 29.
DR, p. 228.
Bergsonism, p. 104.
FC, p. 87.
AO, p. 285.
C2, pp. xi, 169.
C2, p. 81.
C1, p. 56.
C1, p. 58; ʻbodies in themselves are already a lan-
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 19
 guageʼ, and ʻlanguage is always the language of bodiesʼ 107. Ibid., p. 111.
(Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard, G. Braziller, 108. Deleuze, LʼEpuisé, Minuit, Paris, 1992. Cf. Blanchot,
New York, 1972, p. 91). LʼEntretien Infini, Gallimard, Paris, 1969, pp. 304–5;
72. C1, p. 61. ʻThe Essential Solitudeʼ, in The Space of Literature,
73. C1, p. 61. trans. Ann Smock, University of Nebraska Press, Lin-
74. C1, p. 61. coln, pp. 19–34; Faux Pas, Gallimard, Paris, 1943, pp.
75. The Logic of Sense, p. 306. 10–11.
76. C2, p. 20, my emphasis. ʻIt is grass in general that 109. [with Félix Guattari] Kafka: Toward a Minor Litera-
interests the herbivoreʼ and ʻit is in this sense that the ture, trans. Dana Polan, University of Minnesota Press,
sensory-motor schema is an agent of abstractionʼ as Minneapolis, 1986, pp. 83–4; cf. TP, p. 84, FC pas-
opposed to Deleuzeʼs Real ʻconcreteʼ (C2, p. 45). sim.
77. C1, pp. 64, 63. 110. Kafka, p. 17, my emphasis.
78. C1, p. 66. 111. Ibid., pp. 17–18.
79. C1, p. 68, my emphasis. 112. Ibid., p. 71.
80. TP, p. 280 – ʻlike grassʼ, rather than ʻinterested in 113. P. Bourdieu, Les Règles de lʼart, Seuil, Paris, 1992.
grassʼ. Cf. AO, p. 281. 114. MC, pp. 28, 31; Kafka, p. 84.
81. C2, p. 47. 115. C1, p. 85; C2, p. 68.
82. ʻThe mind is not subject; it is subjectedʼ (Empiricism 116. MC, p. 63.
and Subjectivity, trans. Constantin Boundas, Columbia 117. WP, p. 48; AO, p. 135.
University Press, New York, 1991, p. 31). 118. AO, pp. 19, 87.
83. Cf. AO, pp. 29, 119. 119. AO, p. 76.
84. AO, p. 79; cf. TP, p. 124. 120. AO, pp. 76–7.
85. AO, pp. 54, 73, 269. 121. TP, p. 158.
86. FC, p. 88. 122. Negotiations, pp. 185, 199.
87. FC, p. 130. 123. TP, p. 304; Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation,
88. FC, pp. 124–5. Vol. 1, Editions de la Différence, Paris, 1981, p. 14.
89. Deleuze relies here on M. Serres, Le Système de Leib- 124. See TP, p. 411.
niz, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1982, pp. 125. TP, p. 512.
648–57. 126. TP, p. 141, my emphasis.
90. FC, p. 126. 127. AO, p. 87.
91. FC, p. 128. 128. Dialogues, with Claire Parnet, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
92. FC, p. 130. and Barbara Habberjam, Columbia University Press,
93. FC, p. 130. New York, 1987, pp. 6, 50.
94. Kantʼs Critical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and 129. Critique et clinique, Minuit, Paris, 1993, p. 16.
Barbara Habberjam, University of Minnesota Press, 130. Proust and Signs, p. 47.
Minneapolis, 1984, p. vii; DR, pp. 85–6, 194, 199. 131. Ibid., p. 79.
95. Deleuzeʼs examples include ʻMallarméʼs Livre, Péguyʼs 132. Ibid., pp. 49, 48.
repetitions, Artaudʼs breaths, the agrammaticality of 133. ʻFrom every finite thing, Proust makes a being of sens-
Cummings, Burroughs and his cut-ups and fold-ins, as ation that is constantly preserved, but by vanishing on
well as Rousselʼs proliferations, Brissetʼs derivations, a plane of compositionʼ (WP, p. 189).
Dada collage, and so on. And is this unlimited finity 134. Francis Bacon, pp. 39, 13–14.
or superfold not what Nietzsche had already designated 135. Francis Bacon, pp. 37, 33.
with the name of eternal return?ʼ (FC, p. 131). 136. Ibid., p. 37; C2, p. 17; Francis Bacon, p. 14.
96. FC, p. 131. 137. Ibid., p. 27.
97. FC, p. 132. 138. C2, p. xi.
98. AO, p. 341. 139. C1, p. 152.
99. The Logic of Sense, p. 310. 140. C1, p. 134.
100. Ibid., p. 297. 141. C2, p. 179.
101. Deleuze, ʻLʼImmanence: une vieʼ, p. 6; cf. C2, p. 142. C2, p. xi.
245. 143. C2, p. 41.
102. C2, p. 206. ʻThe spiritual automaton, ʻmechanical manʼ 144. C1, p. 121; C2, p. xi.
is … a little time in the pure stateʼ (C2, p. 169). 145. C1, p. 207.
103. C2, p. 179, my emphasis. 146. C1, pp. 207, 168.
104. C2, p. 263. 147. C1, p. 207; C2, p. 103.
105. TP, p. 508. ʻEternal return alone effects the true selec- 148. C2, p. 181; C2, p. 251.
tion, because it eliminates the average forms and un- 149. C2, pp. 214, 42.
covers “the superior form of everything that is” … the 150. C2, pp. 83–4, 89. ʻThe whole cinema becomes a free,
superior form is not the infinite, but rather the eternal indirect discourse, operating in realityʼ (C2, p. 155).
formlessness of the eternal return itselfʼ (DR, p. 55, my 151. C1, p. 189.
emphasis). 152. C2, p. 214; C1, p. 215; C2, p. 151.
106. Bergsonism, p. 111. For Deleuze as much as for Berg- 153. C2, p. 215.
son, ʻthe great souls … are those of artists and mystics 154. WP, pp. 33–4.
… The mystical soul actively plays the whole of the 155. WP, p. 38.
universe, and reproduces the opening of a Whole in 156. Negotiations, p. 140.
which there is nothing to see or to contemplateʼ (ibid. 157. EP, p. 142.
p. 112). 158. EP, p. 122.

20 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)

159. EP, pp. 158, 115, 131, 160.
160. The Logic of Sense, p. 128. CALL FOR PAPERS
161. DR, p. 85; Kantʼs Critical Philosophy, p. viii.
162. DR, pp. 85–6, 199, 194; Kantʼs Critical Philosophy, UK Association for
pp. viii–ix.
163. ʻA clean break is something you cannot come back Legal and Social Philosophy
from; that is irretrievable because it makes the past
cease to existʼ (Dialogues, p. 38). 24th Annual Conference
164. C2, pp. 171–2.
165.
166.
C2, p. 170, my emphasis.
C2, p. 170. Communitarianism
167.
168.
C2, p. 181.
C2, p. 177.
and Citizenship
169. C1, p. 117.
170. C1, p. 117.
171. C2, pp. 172–3, my emphasis.
3–5 April 1997
172. Empiricism and Subjectivity, pp. 108–9. Faculty of Law,
173. C1, pp. 114–15.
174. C1, p. 116, my emphasis.
University of Edinburgh
175. FC, p. 107.
176. C2, pp. 201; 200–201. Papers should last 30 minutes. Ab-
177. C1, p. 53.
stracts (one side of A4) should be
178. C2, p. 178.
179. C2, p. 178. sent to Emilios Christodoulidis as
180. EP, p. 269. Modern cinema is likewise ʻautomatism soon as possible and no later than
become spiritual artʼ; through cinema, ʻthe moving ma-
February 28. A booklet of abstracts
chine becomes one with the psychological automaton
pure and simpleʼ (C2, p. 263). will be circulated to participants in
181. The Fold, p. 69. the conference packs. It is likely that
182. Ibid., p. 68. a selection of conference papers will
183. Ibid., pp. 73, 70.
be published after the conference.
184. Ibid., p. 70.
185. Gilles Deleuze, Périclès et Verdi: La philosophie de The Austin Lecture is planned for the
François Châtelet, Minuit, Paris, 1988, p. 11; cf. FC, evening of April 3. It will be given by
p. 90.
186. FC, p. 92. Cf. Périclès et Verdi, p. 13.
Professor Philip Selznick, University
187. C2, p. 188. of California at Berkeley, and will ad-
188. AO, p. 111, 171. Cf. Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. dress themes developed in his recent
Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, University
of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1983, p. 131. The Moral Commonwealth.
189. Empiricism and Subjectivity, p. 43.
190. EP, p. 266.
Prices:
191. EP, p. 267.
192. Ultimately, Deleuzeʼs philosophy of the choice chooses
£170 fully residential
ʻthe erasure of the unity of man and the world, in favour £100 non-residential
of a break which now leaves us with only a belief in this Non-members please add £20 to cover
worldʼ (C2, p. 188). His nomads ʻdo not exist in historyʼ one year’s membership of the asso-
(TP, pp. 23, 393–4), his ʻmultiplicities are made up of ciation, including subscriptions to Res
becomings without historyʼ (Dialogues, p. viii), and
Publica.
with Guattari he insists, of course, that ʻno, we have
never seen a schizophrenicʼ (AO, p. 380) – this is his
ʻfavourite sentence in Anti-Oedipusʼ (Negotiations, p. For further information and to obtain
12). registration forms, contact
193. The Logic of Sense, pp. 306ff.
Emilios Christodoulidis,
194. Empiricism and Subjectivity, p. 119; TP, p. 514.
Centre for Law and Society, Faculty of
Law, University of Edinburgh,
Old College, South Bridge,
Edinburgh EH8 9YL
fax: 131 6624902
e-mail: Emilios.Christodoulidis@ed.ac.uk

Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 21

Unhewn demonstrations
Andrew Collier
Compell the Reasoner to Demonstrate with unhewn
Demonstrations.
Let the Indefinite be explored, and let every Man be
Judged
By his own Works. Let all Indefinites be thrown
into Demonstrations,
To be pounded to dust & melted in the Furnaces of
Affliction.
He who would do good to another must do it in
Minute Particulars:
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite
& flatterer.
For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely
organized Particulars
And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Ra-
tional Power.
William Blake, ʻJerusalemʼ1
This article is intended as a contribution to criti-
cal realist philosophy, not a criticism of it, but my
starting point is a paradox about the critical realist
corpus, and my conclusion a rather surprising practi-
cal consequence of it. Indeed the conclusion involves
incorporating into a scientific realist position some
views which are normally associated with romantic
or Green critiques of science, though there is nothing
essentially anti-scientific about them.2
The motivation of critical realist work has mainly
been the rectification of method in the human sciences.
Roy Bhaskar in particular is explicit about his desire
that critical realism shall do this underlabouring not
only for the work of science but for the work of human
emancipation. This could hardly be claimed if critical
realism limited itself to theorizing the natural sciences,
and indeed it has been in the human sciences that
critical realism has had most impact. Yet the central
and most fundamental argument of critical realism has
been an argument from the possibility and necessity of
experiment in science – and there are no experiments
in the human sciences.
The central argument to which I refer goes as
follows. In experiments, we make nature do what it
would otherwise not have done. We do so in order to
find out how nature produces the effects that it does
22 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)
spontaneously, when we are not making experiments.
How can such experiments yield such knowledge,
rather than just the knowledge of what happens in the
experiments themselves? And why is it necessary to
force nature in this way, rather than just observe what
nature would do without our interference?
Bhaskarʼs answer, which forms the basis of
critical realism, is that an experiment isolates one
mechanism of nature from the others. Under normal
(non-experimental) conditions, the course of events is
co-determined by a number of mechanisms working
together. By preventing some of these mechanisms
from working, or keeping their operation constant, or
measuring and discounting their operation, an experi-
ment isolates one mechanism, and shows what it is.
We may assume that when no experiment is going
on, the same mechanism works, but in conjunction
with others.
An experiment, in other words, abstracts from
certain mechanisms to identify others. It does not
just do so in thought, but makes the abstraction real.
It gives rise therefore to abstract laws – laws which
would predict how something behaves other things
being equal, but do not predict how anything will
behave in the real world where other things never are
equal. Other things are only equal when we artificially
make them equal – and that is just what an experi-
ment is. Experiments give rise to what may be called
the abstract sciences, since they are each about one
set of laws which we have discovered by abstraction.
They are not about particular entities of one sort or
another. Physics is not specially about the physical
world; chemistry is equally about the physical world.
Chemistry is not about ʻchemicalsʼ in the sense that the
chemical industry produces chemicals. It is about the
chemical aspect of the whole physical world, including
living organisms, for instance.
Bhaskarʼs argument confirms and explains the
importance of experiments for the abstract sciences,
but it also shows that the laws defining those sciences
are not actualized; nothing is more fundamental to the
physical sciences than the law of inertia, which states
that bodies tend to remain at rest or in uniform motion
in a given direction. But nothing in the universe has
ever remained at rest or in uniform motion in a given
direction. This is no skin off the physicistsʼ noses
though, for although a cricket ball does not exemplify
inertia, we need the law of inertia alongside the law of
gravity and the laws governing air resistance in order
to explain its flight.
Now some natural sciences – for instance geog-
raphy, meteorology, medicine – are about particular
entities. They may be called the concrete sciences.
When making the distinction between abstract and
concrete sciences, Husserl says that abstract sciences
ʻare nomological in so far as their unifying principle,
as well as their essential aim of research, is a lawʼ,
whereas in concrete sciences ʻone connects all the
truths whose content relates to one and the same
object, or to one and the same empirical genusʼ. He
tells us that ʻthe abstract or nomological sciences are
the genuine, basic sciences, from whose theoretical
stock the concrete sciences must derive all that theo-
retical element by which they are made sciences.ʼ3
It is only by getting the relation between the
abstract and the concrete sciences right that we will
be able to understand the position of the human sci-
ences. The abstract sciences – for example, physics
and chemistry – are self-standing in the sense that
they can justify themselves experimentally, and so
donʼt need to rely on the concrete sciences in which
they are applied in order to vindicate their claims.
But there are no such self-standing abstract sciences
in the human world. Instead, there are abstract parts
of sciences whose whole connection with reality is at
the concrete level.
Husserlʼs reference to the ʻgenuineʼ sciences as
abstract reflects (surprisingly for him) what might
be called common sense in a positivistic culture; but
another apparently contradictory idea goes along with
this as part of positivistic common sense: that only the
concrete is real. It is quite widely taken for granted that
only the abstract sciences are real sciences, but that
only the concrete world really exists. We are then at a
loss to explain how the abstract sciences map onto the
concrete world. Critical realism denies both poles of
this contradiction. The mechanisms corresponding to
the laws of the abstract sciences are also real, hence:
Domain of Domain of Domain of
real actual empirical
Mechanisms / him- or herself doing something that he or she could
Events / /
Experiences / / /
Note that this diagram4 is not saying that mechanisms
are somehow more real than events or experiences, as
is sometimes alleged, but just that they are also real.
But the concrete sciences are real sciences too,
or at any rate they are an essential part of the body
of knowledge outside of which the abstract sciences
would make no sense. For while the concrete sciences
can certainly draw on the knowledge yielded by the
abstract sciences, they can also do quite a few things
that the abstract sciences canʼt, and without which
things being done all science would lose its point.
In the first place, they have in their practical deal-
ings with their objects a source of knowledge indepen-
dent of the abstract sciences. Second, they can carry
out a depth analysis of concrete beings, which abstract
sciences cannot. And third, they can draw practical
conclusions from their knowledge. I shall return to
these points with reference to the human sciences.
Let me illustrate this with reference to a practical
discipline, which, while it would not normally be
described as a science, can be more or less scientifi-
cally done, and which brings out many of the strengths
and weaknesses of the concrete sciences. I refer to the
teaching of singing, particularly operatic singing.5
I have said that concrete sciences have two sources
of knowledge: what they borrow from the abstract
sciences and what they pick up from practical experi-
ence. They also have two tasks which abstract sciences
cannot undertake, namely depth analysis and practical
conclusions. They are tied to the practice in which
they are applied in a way that the abstract sciences are
not, since the latter have their own internal practice in
experiment. I have elsewhere called practical concrete
sciences ʻepistemoidsʼ. Some are quite science-like in
their rigour and explanatory power; others, like the
one chosen here, are much more problematic. But this
is a matter of degree, not of kind.
First of all, a singing teacher is or has been a singer
herself. She knows what it feels like. Here is some
knowledge ʻin a practical stateʼ, as Althusser would
say, which however she must put into words if she
is to teach it. I am not denying that some non-verbal
communication may take place (for instance, feeling
each otherʼs bodies to see what happens when some
specific vocal or respiratory instruction is carried out),
but the teaching would not get far without the medium
of language. But ʻputting it into wordsʼ is a genuine
problem in communicating practical knowledge of this
sort. It is often done by asking the pupil to imagine
not literally do. For instance: ʻpretend your voice is
coming out of the back of your headʼ; ʻsing from the
top of your head and make the sound come down
your noseʼ; or ʻdraw the sound inʼ. Taken literally, of
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 23
course, these instructions would be nonsense. But they
succeed in telling the singer how to make it feel, and
hence what to do.
However, some instructions sound plausible enough
to be quite easily taken as literally true, as descriptions
of what can take place in the singerʼs body, though a
physiologist could show that they are not. For instance:
ʻuse your sinusesʼ (i.e. make your sinuses contribute
to the sound by their vibrations). Now apparently the
vibration of the sinuses cannot appreciably contribute
to the sound. However, if the singer sings in such a
way that she can feel her sinuses vibrating, she will
be singing in the right way. Sometimes the descrip-
tion of how it feels is the opposite of what is physi-
ologically the case. Thus a singer may be advised to
ʻmake more spaceʼ when singing high notes. But the
action which feels like making more space actually
makes less space in the singerʼs throat. This does not
vitiate the instruction as a direction in teaching, since
it is understood and the required effect produced.
Nevertheless the physiologist should not be entirely
ignored by the singing teacher. His or her findings
do make certain judgements possible about good and
bad practice, since it can be discovered physiologically
that certain singing techniques do harm to the vocal
cords, and so on. Sometimes such information could
have been discovered or guessed at by a good singing
teacher on the basis of experience, but not necessarily.
Physiology can correct singing practices in ways that
phenomenology canʼt – yet it would be absurd to think
that it could replace the phenomenological knowledge
that the singing teacher has. One could never become a
singer or a singing teacher by studying the physiology
of the vocal organs.
Similar considerations apply in psychoanalysis,
whose raw data are entirely phenomenological, but
some of whose abstract parts sound like speculations
about neurology and sexology. Those biological sci-
ences do not vitiate the practice of psychoanalysis
when they appear to conflict with it, yet it would be
obscurantist for psychoanalysis to ignore their findings.
Freudʼs metapsychology has a status much like the
metaphorical physiology used by singing teachers. At
certain points – for instance, the concept of instinct or
drive which Freud explicitly says is a border-concept
between the biological and the psychological sciences
– a tie up with physiology is useful and helps to confirm
or refute the metapsychological theory. At others it
would be inappropriate to take the psychoanalytical
idea physiologically and look for confirmation or
refutation from physiology, since the concept may
be justified phenomenologically, by its clarification
of the patientʼs self-experience. For instance, Freudʼs
distinction between clitoral and vaginal orgasms is
24 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)
neither contradicted by claims that all female orgasms
are clitorally triggered, nor confirmed by claims about
the G-spot. They are based on the self-experience of
some women whom Freud analysed, and make no
physiological claims.
These points may I think be generalized to the
concrete sciences: their concepts are arrived at partly
by retroduction from practical experience – ʻhow can
we explain the way things seem in practiceʼ – and
partly borrowed from the abstract sciences. By these
two methods, the concrete sciences build up a stock
of abstract concepts of their own. But here we may
note a difference between concrete natural sciences
like meteorology and concrete human sciences like
psychoanalysis. The borrowings are in both cases
from natural sciences since only in these are there
experiments. This means that the human sciences
can learn far less by borrowing than can the natural
concrete sciences. This is what justifies my claim that
the human sciences relate to their objects only through
their concrete parts, even though there is some input
from experimental sciences into human sciences and
disciplines (e.g. from physiology into psychoanalysis
or singing teaching). That input is alien in a way that
the input from physics to meteorology is not.
Now let us look at what one of the only three people
with a credible claim to have founded a human science
says about the relation of abstractness to concreteness.
I refer to Marx (the other two are Freud and Chomsky).
Marx sometimes stresses the importance of abstraction
in science, while at other times he seems to be quite
rude about it. Most of his followers follow either one
or the other of these examples, but it may be that the
two can be reconciled. First, it should be mentioned
that for Marx as for Kant, the term ʻabstractionʼ often
refers to a process rather than a result: abstracting from
something, bracketing it off. Now to one rude remark
about abstraction:
First of all, an abstraction is made from a fact;
then it is declared that the fact is based on the
abstraction. That is how to proceed if you want
to appear German, profound and speculative.
For example: Fact: The cat eats the mouse.
Reflection: Cat = nature, Mouse = nature;
consumption of mouse by cat = self-consumption
of nature.
Philosophical presentation of the fact: the de-
vouring of the mouse by the cat is based upon the
self-consumption of nature.6
Here the point about abstraction is that it gives you
poorer, less specific information than more concrete
language. Wherever abstraction means no more than
leaving something out in order to arrive at a more
general and less specific description, Marx is rude
about it.
 But in the section on the method of political
economy in the 1857 introduction, he says that to
start with ʻthe real and concreteʼ, e.g. the population,
commits the same error, since ʻThe population is an
abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes
of which it is composedʼ.7 We should therefore start
by moving analytically towards ʻever thinner abstrac-
tionsʼ, and then put them together again in their due
order to arrive at ʻthe population again, but this time
not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich
totality of many determinations and relationsʼ.8 We
arrive at this full conception of a concrete entity by
showing the relations between its features which taken
separately would be abstractions, but of which the real
concrete entity is composed: ʻThe concrete is concrete
because it is the union of many determinations, hence
unity of the diverse.ʼ9
Good abstraction consists in specifying the many
interrelated aspects of something, and this is how
a concrete science should proceed; bad abstraction
consists in ignoring the specificity of something, to
subsume it under some more general concept. Thus
a social scientist who wanted to provide knowledge
of Britain in the 1990s should analyse out the many
aspects of that society and show how they are related;
and not abstract from many of its specific features in
order to place it in a statistical population of somewhat
similar societies, and produce statistical data about
them. If social science were an experimental science,
it would be possible to actualize these abstractions
and test them separately – for example, to test what
the effect of exposure of British capital to Continental
competition would be in the absence of trade unions.
But it is not. Hence ʻin the analysis of economic
forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are
of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace
both.ʼ10 We make abstraction in thought – ʻexperi-
ments in thoughtʼ – and cannot do more than this.
But we stay with the concrete reality which we are
analysing and try to tease out as many details as we
can, rather than ignoring details in order to subsume
it under generalizations. The abstract parts of good
social science are speculative explanations of concrete
particulars, which are tested only by their capacity
to explain those concrete particulars. To take them
out of their use in such explanation and use them to
compare different concrete particulars in the attempt
to arrive at ʻstatistical causalityʼ is always a mistake,
since the other determinants of events and differences
are being ignored without their having been rendered
ineffective as in a real experiment. Statistics has an
important place among the descriptive preliminaries
of social science; information about the simultaneous
increase in unemployment and crime may be the start-
ing point of a fruitful social-scientific analysis. But the
analysis itself must focus on concrete particulars, and
retroduce explanations from them. It cannot read off
the explanations from the statistical correlations. But
if statistics has no explanatory role in social science,
neither has any other form of mathematics, since we
cannot measure abstract forces without actualizing
them as is done in an experiment.
To return, then, to the original paradox: the analysis
of experiment has not been useless for the human
sciences, since it shows something very general about
the real world, namely that it is structured and strati-
fied, that the concrete really is a union of many
determinations, and hence that abstraction and analysis
are appropriate methods of developing knowledge of
concrete beings. But it also shows that where experi-
ment is not possible, this analysis and abstraction is
not measurable, and is testable only by its capacity
to explain the minute particulars of concrete enti-
ties. It shows, in short, the ontological similarity of
natural and human sciences – they are both analysing
concrete structured wholes and explaining them in
terms of the abstractions arrived at – and also the
methodological dissimilarity of natural and human
sciences: the latter cannot use mathematics and should
look rather to paradigms like Freudʼs analysis of the
Rat Man (or any full psychoanalytic case-history), or
Trotskyʼs History of the Russian Revolution. In short,
social science can exist only ʻas minutely organized
particulars, and not in generalizing demonstrations of
the rational powerʼ.
Now to the question of practical applications. Many
of the concrete sciences are inseparably tied to a prac-
tice (for example, medicine to healing, psychoanalysis
to therapy, Marxian theory to working-class politics),
but whether this is so or not, all sciences, abstract
or concrete, deliver their discoveries into a world of
ongoing practices which they often transform in some
way. I want to argue in conclusion that as a matter of
scientific ethics and good public policy, abstract sci-
ences ought never to be allowed to influence practice
directly, but only through the assistance they give to
concrete sciences. This applies not only to natural sci-
ences, where it has important ecological implications,
but also with respect to the abstract and concrete parts
of human sciences.
Abstract sciences can yield practical advice of a
sort; for instance, ʻhere is a way w to make product
x with half the labour that it took before.ʼ This may
justify the conclusion: ʻother things being equal, we
should make x by process w.ʼ But other things are not
equal and in this sort of case that is crucial. Process
w may also deplete a scarce resource or cause pollu-
tion or produce sickness in the workers. To establish
whether this is so, we need a concrete study of the
process in context – environmental, human, economic
and so on. That study may yield real practical advice,
without the ʻother things being equalʼ clause. However,
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 25
it is a feature of our economic system that the ʻother
things being equalʼ clauses of the practical advice of
abstract sciences are not taken seriously – the advice
is carried out as if it were conclusive, which only the
advice of a concrete scientific study can even approxi-
mate to being. This is a feature of modern economic
life because if the ʻother thingsʼ do not relate to
profitability, they are equal to the commercial appliers
of science – all equally indifferent. But it is important
to notice that all advice from abstract science is subject
to an other-things-being-equal clause, just because it
is abstract, having abstracted from some of the other
things that affect the outcome. An economic system
that systematically applies science in an abstract state
is a systematically irresponsible system.
There is a tradition of hostile criticism of science
which makes very similar points to those that I have
been making. Blake in some moods is part of that
tradition. Today it often comes from those within
the Green movement who blame science rather than
its commercial use. There is also a tendency within
ʻpostmodernismʼ to counterpose the practical concrete
knowledge of (for instance) shepherds to the preten-
sions of the Ministry of Agriculture experts, trained
in abstract science. In so far as these tendencies have
directed attention to the necessity of concrete knowl-
edge and its sole right to guide practice, they are
absolutely right. Yet the fault lies not with abstract
science but with the tendency of its commercial and
military users to apply science in its abstract state,
rather than treating abstract sciences as contributory
disciplines whose results must flow together into the
sea of concrete science before they are in a fit state
to be applied practically.
Since I am claiming that the rationality of the
practical application of science depends on following
the full sequence abstract sciences – concrete science
– practice rather than the abridged sequence abstract
science – practice, I should perhaps say something
about what sort of discipline counts as a concrete
science, as distinct from an abstract science on the
one hand and a practice on the other. I have given
examples of concrete sciences such as meteorology and
medicine, but it is not always easy to identify them.
Whereas abstract sciences are individuated (as physics,
chemistry, biology and the like) by the kinds of laws
that they discover, and practices are individuated (as
agriculture, health care, war and so on) by the aims
that they pursue and the means that they use, concrete
sciences are individuated by their concrete objects,
which may be of greater or lesser scope, so that the
concrete science required for a given bit of application
of science to practice may not have a ready-made
name. To take the instance of pesticides, the abstract
science of chemistry is applied in the practice of
agriculture. The concrete scientific disciplines which
26 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)
ought to stand between these two would include in
their objects the state of the soil, water and air, and
various ecosystems dependent on that state. It is a
matter of ʻpractical wisdomʼ to determine in any given
case what the scope of the requisite concrete science
should be.
The application of abstract science is irrational
and the application of concrete science is rational.
But concrete science can never give you what abstract
science appears to give: a method of calculating which
course of action is rational. For the discovery that w
is the most economical way of producing x can be
quantified: it costs half what process v had cost. But as
soon as a multiplicity of incommensurable reasons for
using or not using w is delivered by the concrete study
of w-in-context, we have to make a decision between
incommensurable alternatives. Calculation becomes
useless. But that is not an objection to basing action
on concrete science, for calculation between the actual
alternatives was always impossible anyway. It was only
because many of the incommensurable values were left
out of account or assigned arbitrary commensurable
values that the issue looked calculable in the first
place. Deciding on the basis of an abstract science
just is leaving some things out of account – that is
what abstract means. If we have to decide between a
motorway and an ancient wood of special scientific
interest, there is nothing we can rationally do but sit
down and think ʻwould life be better with a wood and
no motorway or with a motorway and no wood?ʼ At
which point I can perhaps conclude as I started with
a quote from Blake:
Improvement makes strait roads; but the crooked
roads without Improvement are the roads of Gen-
ius.11
Notes
1. William Blake, Complete Writings, Oxford University
Press, London, 1966, p. 687.
2. An earlier version of this paper was read to the Seminar
on Critical Realism organized in the Faculty of Econom-
ics and Politics at the University of Cambridge.
3. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. 1,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1970, pp. 230–31.
4. Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, Harvester
Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 1978, p. 13.
5. I am grateful to Heather Collier for information in this
part of the article.
6. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology,
edited by Pascal, International Publishers, New York, pp.
114–15.
7. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973,
p. 100.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p. 101.
10. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Penguin, Harmondsworth,
1976, p. 90.
11. Complete Writings, p. 152.
The culture of polemic
Misrecognizing recognition
Alexander García Düttmann
One would like to be recognized as this or that indi-
vidual, according to this or that description, since
recognition promises to overcome the splitting of what
is to be recognized, to facilitate the incorporation
of what is split into some unified identity or unified
life-context. According to María Zambrano in her
book The Agony of Europe, first published in 1945,
ʻEuropean manʼ strives ceaselessly towards a projected
self that is yet to be, while fleeing constantly from
another self that still continues to lead a shadowy
existence within him. That is why we can supposedly
describe European history as the story of a heresy
which procures the birth of the European individual.
The human being who splits apart into a doubled self
(a given self and a projected self) is a ʻEuropeanʼ
because he or she decides to exist, to exist inde-
pendently of every already prevailing order. This self
is grounded in a deficiency, in an absence, in a lack:
it represents a violence of existing.1
From the perspective of reflections such as these one
might also understand the demand for recognition, and
not merely the confession of which Zambrano speaks,
as a historical attempt to overcome that splitting and
diremption of the human being which results from this
resolute decision to exist. The limits of recognition
would then constitute the limits of decision and of
resolution, because a resolute and decisive existence
always presupposes a self which decides to exist, a
self which constitutes itself precisely in and through
this founding act. There is a double limit here: first,
the limit of the birth and death of the historical or
ʻEuropeanʼ subject as the limit of two comprehensive
orders (pre- and post-historical); second, the limit
inherent in any recognition which would enable the self
successfully to overcome its splitting into a given self
and a projected self. Projects directed towards success-
fully ʻaccomplishedʼ recognition only perpetuate the
history of the deciding, projecting, recognizing and
overcoming subject: they neither conceive the limits of
this subject nor seek its transformation.
For this subject and this theory of recognition the
question arises as to how, where and when such recog-
nition can be recognized. When can one say, and when
can one know, that an individual or a group has indeed
been recognized? That the group or the individual is
no longer recognized? Or is yet to be recognized? Is
recognition intrinsically bound to a shared experi-
ence, to a regulated practice, to certain gestural or
specifically linguistic conventions and rules, to legal
entitlements and socio-political institutions? Or does
the process of recognition perhaps evince resistance to
its own recognizability, to the subject and the theory
of recognition which would seek conceptually to grasp
that process? Might the struggle for recognition be
permanently bound to a testimony which cannot be
measured through recourse to unambiguous criteria?
‘We’re queer, we’re here, so get fuckin’ used
to it’
Take the slogan currently circulating in North America,
ʻWeʼre queer, weʼre here, so get fuckinʼ used to itʼ, at
once elliptical and utterly unambiguous. As long as
it works as a slogan, a caesura which cannot simply
be bridged over by transferring and integrating the
offensively and polemically intended phrase into a
legitimate, legitimated and legitimating discourse, this
exclamation effectively testifies to a struggle for recog-
nition. But if this slogan, this phrase, this exclamation
works merely as a provocation, one which ultimately
lives, like every provocation, off a secret complicity
and solidarity with what it seeks to provoke; if those
who proclaim this slogan bear an already presup-
posed identity, confess themselves as such bearers
and thereby direct themselves toward bearers of a
different identity, precisely in order to secure equality
of treatment and status for themselves through legal,
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 27
social, institutional and political recognition – then demanding recognition here in your very midst. On
the struggle for recognition disappears in a reformism the other hand, only when you, to whom our demand
which only accepts, and only can accept, differences is addressed, get used to something you must get used
on the ground of some more fundamental unity. It to, something which in a certain sense you already
disappears in the purist and puritanical equality of a have got used to, only then are we what and who we
ʻpolitical correctnessʼ that is merely the complement are, in your very midst. The necessary contradiction
of misinterpretation, exclusion and oppression. Yet a harboured within the demand for recognition allows us
reformism that excludes the process of recognition to translate the phrase in the following way: We, who
finds itself confronted with the difficulty of procuring raise our voice in our own name, because this name
recognition for that fundamental unity, which does not and this voice are not yet our name and our voice,
have to be substantial, but which can simply exist on because we must first appropriate them for ourselves,
the assumption of a formal equality in principle. Thus we are here without being here, we are what we are
every reformism risks slipping into that very strug- without being what we are, and this is why we demand
gle for recognition, the uncertain outcome of which that you recognize us and get used to our being here
it attempts to transform into stability and security as what we are. Only when you have got used to our
precisely through regulation, limitation and direction. being here, and that we are what we are; only when
Although reformism seeks to incorporate the struggle you have thereby recognized us, whom you do not
for recognition within itself, it simultaneously exposes even need to recognize since we are already here, in
itself to this struggle. your midst – only then shall we be able to say that we
Who is it that generally raises this demand for are here, that we are what we are, and that we have
acceptance and what is intended by it? If there is a name and a voice.
indeed no unambiguous, but merely a more or less
plausible or probable, answer to either of these ques-
tions, and if the plausibility and probability of any
possible answer depends upon some contextual inser-
tion (for which there can be no ultimate criterion),
then the resulting dissemination of this demand can be
regarded as an effect of iterability. The interpretation
of the demand itself demands and needs recognition.
To interpret is to recognize. Yet it is just this need
for a recognitive interpretation and an interpretive
recognition – the dissemination of the demand, the
iterability – that allows the demand to be raised as a
demand at all. We could never even raise the demand
ʻWeʼre queer, weʼre here, so get fuckinʼ used to itʼ, we
could never even interpret the phrase as a demand,
as the intrication of an assertion and a demand, if it
were possible to determine unambiguously what the
demand in question signified; if it could be shown
indubitably that it represented nothing but a demand.
For a demand without the moment of uncertainty
remains inconceivable.
ʻWeʼre queer, weʼre here, so get fuckinʼ used to
itʼ: if this phrase implies a demand for recognition,
then it seems, like all demands for recognition, for
confirmation and institution, to be torn through by a
contradiction, to be suspended by a certain irony – it
is demanded that one recognize what one no longer The demand for recognition is a demand for con-
needs to recognize. We who demand recognition are firmation and institution. The phrase in question
already what we are, not merely someplace else, some- at once binds and separates assertion and demand
where to which you have no access, or which you through the paradoxical blind spot of the ʻsoʼ. The ʻsoʼ
could simply avoid, and that is precisely why we are marks the simultaneity of a continuity and a caesura,

28 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)

of a closing and an opening. The contradiction, the
irony, the diachrony within this simultaneity robs
speakers and agents of any possibility of straightfor-
wardly counterposing their own ʻweʼ to the ʻweʼ of
others, of any possibility of marking an unambiguous
distinction between those who make the demand and
those upon whom it is made, between those who are to
bestow recognition and those who are to receive it. The
skandalon of the phrase, its irreconcilable polemic,
the illegitimacy it possesses prior to any possible
legitimacy and legitimation, lies in the equivocation
it generates in conflating the ʻweʼ of those to whom
the demand is addressed and the ʻweʼ of those who
make it. At the same time, the latter seem to segregate
and delimit themselves all too unambiguously, for they
constitute the ʻweʼ who hurl the phrase like a shaft
which, once the others recognize the danger of its
whistling flight, has already struck home.
ʻWeʼre queer, weʼre here, so get fuckinʼ used to itʼ:
a recognisable phrase and a barely intelligible exclam-
ation; an impertinent suspicion and an act of violence
beyond all argument; a declaration of war and a decla-
ration of love; an exclamation whose pointed contours
permit no divided, wrangling or sentimental foes to
take its measure; an exclamation whose measure can
only be taken by that foe whom Jean Genet sought out
in his imaginary newspaper advertisement – one who
is ʻblind, deaf and dumbʼ, because he is permitted no
possible room for manoeuvre, ʻwithout legs, without
arms, without a stomach, without a heart, without a
sex, without a headʼ.2 On the one hand, there is hardly
any doubt who the demanding subject is and what the
demand consists in. On the other hand, the boundaries
between these subjects, who are not yet subjects, prove
to be shifting and impermanent. The demand cannot
immediately be re-cognized (Wiedererkennen).*
This unsettling opening up of borders and limits is
furthered once we grasp ʻfuckinʼʼ as the object of that
habituation which is demanded: get used to a different
kind of fucking! Again, the ones who proclaim the
phrase suddenly become those who recognize, while
those who encounter it and to whom it is addressed
suddenly become those who require recognition and
have to struggle for it. From this perspective, those
who are targeted and struck by the phrase must them-
selves struggle to earn the recognition from those who
recognize only with reluctance and for that very reason
are themselves recognized as bestowers of recognition.
Bestowers of recognition who are not ʻreluctant giversʼ,
* The distinction between Anerkennen (recognition) and Wie-
dererkennen (re-cognition) is awkward to render in English.
Anerkennen has the sense of acknowledging.
as Michael Walzer puts it;3 bestowers of recognition
whose generosity does not consist in their miserliness,
their hesitation, their reticence, their reluctance, in a
sense of responsibility – such bestowers of recognition
stand more in need of recognition than those who are
still to be recognized. This open economy of recog-
nition harbours a certain undemocratic moment, a
one-sided dependency, which renders it unsuitable for
procuring a closed economy of reciprocal re-cogni-
tion in which that moment of dependency could be
overcome or ʻsublatedʼ in a Hegelian fashion.
This does not imply that the process of recogni-
tion exercises a disintegrative effect. On the contrary,
to the degree that the process of recognition never
comes to a final conclusion; to the degree that it is
constantly unsettled and placed in tension by a one-
sided dependency, by an asymmetry, by a relationship
of heterogeneous forces, it seems rather to solicit that
decisionistic resistance which exercises an integrating
effect that is crystallized in a servile collective soli-
darity with what is arbitrarily recognized. A thinking
and a politics of recognition that underestimates or
is even incapable of perceiving the danger of such
decisionism remains impotent against it, precisely
because this thinking and this politics confuse the
process of recognition with a process of simply re-
cognizing (Wiedererkennen).
The insuperable difficulties which the exclamation
and expression ʻWeʼre queer, weʼre here, so get fuckinʼ
used to itʼ presents for both a theory and a subject of
recognition are clearly revealed where this exclamation
and expression functions as a privileged example for
other possible demands for recognition, and where
it strives to ensure and maintain an accomplished
relation of recognition as a familiar and habitually
accepted fact. A demand for recognition cannot just
represent a demand for the establishment of a relation
of recognition which brings the struggle for recogni-
tion to an end. For it must also represent a demand
for the maintenance of this established relation, since
without such maintenance the fulfilment of the demand
would merely prove to be a further postponement. In
other words, when we ʻget usedʼ to what is recognized,
then this process of habituation and familiarization
– which permits the establishment of the relation of
recognition and is simultaneously suspended by its
unfamiliarity, an unfamiliarity which first makes the
act of recognition what it is – must eventually come
to an end. It must produce something utterly habitual
if the demand for recognition is to be properly and
effectively fulfilled. No subject of recognition would
ever be secure if the process of habituation – where
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 29

those who recognize get used to those who are to be
recognized, and those to be recognized get used to
those who recognize them – itself failed to become
habitual. The fatal character of this necessity, however,
lies in the fact that such habitual familiarity threat-
ens the very re-cognition of recognition upon which
the permanence of the already established relation of
recognition rests.
Does not the very process of habituation destroy
the act of recognition which requires that process?
Is it not inevitable that the discriminating indiffer-
ence and the concealed domination should assume the
form of habitual recognition? And is it not the case
that such habitual recognition renders the recognized
invisible and obliterates them in their very difference?
Is there any more effective remedy for recognition or
means against it than that process of habituation with-
out which there can be no recognition? Acceptance
through habit: the monument and ruin of recognition.
Even a theory of recognition; a historical, conceptual,
historico-philosophical investigation – an investigation
which must always also exempt itself as such from the
struggle for recognition and attempt to justify its own
exemption on the grounds that this is the only way of
doing justice to recognition itself – can be denounced
as an oppression, a repression, an eradication, a per-
30 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)
version inflicted upon those who are to be recognized;
as an unacceptable, ideological, politically strategic
and controlling subsumption of recognition under a
process of exclusive and excluding re-cognition.
The expression ʻWeʼre queer, weʼre here, so get
fuckinʼ used to itʼ is a speech act which is incapable
of being controlled. It is an exclamation that one can
appropriate for oneself, but only at the cost of relin-
quishing it to a different process of appropriation,
in the very moment of appropriation, domestication,
coordination. ʻWeʼre queer, weʼre here, so get fuckinʼ
used to itʼ is a contrary expression, a very queer phrase
indeed, a homeless orphan that always behaves other-
wise than its family expects, an irregular combatant, a
deracinated and deracinating partisan, a fighter whose
extreme mobility defies enclosure and containment,
whose tactical agility even displaces and unsettles the
ʻtellurianʼ character and the defensive posture of the
ʻclassical partisanʼ (Carl Schmitt). But it is because
the act of recognition is one of confirmation, and
simultaneously one of institution, that every demand
for recognition resembles this exclamation and this
expression; that every attempt at thinking recogni-
tion proves to be a queer and contrary thinking, a
contrary thinking of the queer. One who demands
recognition has already arrived, has already reached
the destination still to be attained, and does not require
the recognition that is demanded. The polemical pre-
sumption here lies in the way in which the one who is
to be recognized transforms those who are to bestow
recognition into those who require recognition. The
roles, the functions, the positions in question thereby
find themselves caught up in a constant and uncon-
trollable process of exchange – in the final analysis
it is impossible to decide who should be recognized
here and now and who is recognizing whom here
and now.
‘Spain is different’
The pressure exerted on this here-and-now is all the
more exacerbated by the fact that there is no longer any
horizon from the perspective of which that exchange
could either be recognized as deviant or perverse, or
be transformed into a more regular and acceptable
one. Thus the process of recognition, duplicating every
integrating effect with a disintegrating one, but without
permitting this integration and disintegration to be
captured by any positive dialectic, does not properly
lend itself to any all-englobing act of identification
which would ensure stability. Yet recognition is indis-
pensable if one is to identify oneself with a group,
with a people, with a country, with a state, with a
tradition; if one is to be capable of identifying these
in the first place, capable of re-cognizing them, of
re-cognizing oneself in them, of being re-cognized
by them. For all identifications must transgress a
limit. They therefore require an act of recognition if
that re-cognition to which they aspire is to be made
possible. Recognition thus intersects and transfixes, for
example, every attempt to justify a form of national-
ism, even that supposedly enlightened ʻnationalism
of the presentʼ or ʻcontemporary nationalismʼ which
Oriol Pi de Cabanyes, the director of the Institució de
les Lletres Catalanes, would like to derive from the
ʻinterrupted identityʼ of a people.
Instead of simply opposing ʻthe Catalan traditionʼ
to other traditions; instead of attempting to anchor
the sense of national ʻbelongingʼ in the ʻdense texture
of the pastʼ or to acquire it from ʻplanning the futureʼ
– Pi de Cabanyes addresses himself to the present. The
here-and-now of a Catalan ʻversionʼ of the universally
human is supposed to furnish the basis for an appro-
priate contemporary nationalism.4 Such a ʻcontem-
porary nationalismʼ springs from fears of nationalistic
extremism, ʻdiseased forms of nostalgiaʼ and ʻfuturistic
fanaticismʼ. But if this idea of an ahistorical, purely
ʻpunctualʼ or instantaneous here-and-now – which
appeals to a suprahistorical and utterly abstract con-
ception of human essence without effectively clarify-
ing the relationship between the universality of this
essence and the particularity of its specific versions and
manifestations – proves to be unconvincing, then such
vaunted ʻcontemporary nationalismʼ proves equally to
be a familiar nationalism after all, and thus already to
represent the extremism it was supposed to contain.
The symptoms of contamination here vividly reveal
themselves when Pi de Cabanyes speaks of those
ʻundesirableʼ cases of interference and interruption
which his ʻcontemporary nationalismʼ would have to
exclude from the ʻinterrupted identityʼ of the Catalans.
The identity of the Catalans is an interrupted one.
Like all forms of identity, it cannot insulate itself against
the irruption of an alien externality or foreign element.
If this identity could insulate itself against such forms
of irruption, it would only ossify immediately. Pi de
Cabanyes distinguishes between heritage, experience
and interruption in order to emphasize the violent and
unavoidable moment of ʻinterferenceʼ, of interrupting
and disrupting intervention. But if the identity of a
people is essentially an interrupted one, a non-identical
one, then it can appeal neither to an organic totality
grounded in a past nor to the frictionless or seamless
appropriation of a future. The justification of its inter-
rupted identity leads necessarily to the projection of
such a ʻcontemporary nationalismʼ. But as a nationalist
project this justification tends to promote a certain
extremism, an exclusive appropriation of a totality,
a positing of boundaries which would mark some
permanent belonging, through which interruptions are
subjected to control and by which the sentiment of
diverse identity only comes to serve an undisturbed
self-assertion. The interrupted identity, the identity
which is exposed to the dynamic of recognition and
finds itself suspended there, finally transforms itself
into a unified identity, into the identity of a re-cogni-
zable and (self-) re-cognizing subject. The plan, the
projection, the programme of the new nationalism
is the ideological projection of a unification without
interruption, of a will to undisturbed self-presence
which would place past and future alike in its own
service:
The full responsibility for what we shall be at every
moment will fall all the more clearly to ourselves.
In the precise and appropriate conscious awareness
that we have been Catalans for a thousand years,
that we are precisely what we are, that we shall be
what we wish to be, our own grasp of temporal-
ity will be more evenly developed. This sense of
equilibrium will in all probability prove to be our
strongest protection against all presumptuous forms
of interference, against all forms of undesirable
interruption and intervention.5
Legal indifference
But even if the one demanding recognition is the
one bestowing recognition, and the bestower of rec-
ognition is the one requiring recognition; even if the
here-and-now of recognition is also a there-and-then
– why can we not interpret this internal splitting as
an equilibrium or balance of reconciling completion?
Why must we insist upon the vertiginous movement
of an uncontrollable exchange of positions, upon a
universal resistance and displacement? Because the
difference between the confirmation and institution
of what has been demanded is a difference between
heterogeneous acts, and this heterogeneity can only be
bridged by the dogmatic or postulated presupposition
of a re-cognizable unity and a unified re-cognition,
by the elimination of the process of recognizing. The
phrase ʻWeʼre queer, weʼre here, so get fuckinʼ used
to itʼ represents a caesura charged with tension, an
interruption which cannot be bridged over, an invasive
and invading presumption, a queer and contrary self-
disowning exclamation, elusive over and against all
attempts to own or appropriate it.
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 31
 Consequently it would be a euphemistic interpre-
tation, an essential domestication, if one were to
reduce this expression to a demand for pacifying and
habitual recognition, for the willing readiness to put
up with something, for the reasonable acceptance and
toleration of those nameless individuals intended by
the first-person-plural pronoun. As little as one can
or should exclude an interpretation which regards the
expression as a demand for the ʻtransformation and
reconfiguration of socially binding rules and regula-
tionsʼ, for the creation of that in-difference of nameless
recognition which alone is capable of doing justice to
difference within society,6 one must equally recognize
that there always remains something unacceptable
and unreasonable about the phrase, something which
is directly connected to the exclamatory character of
the expression itself. For the latter resists both the
ideological preformation of the legal system, which
disadvantages those who raise the demand, and the
anonymity of a social cohesion regulated by legal
norms, the ʻin-differently bindingʼ character of all
rules and regulations, whether it is purely ʻformalʼ or
substantively ʻeffectiveʼ in nature. For this ʻin-differ-
ently bindingʼ validity is either selective in character,
and has its condition of possibility in the by no means
ʻin-differentʼ decision concerning who can actually be
intended by the regulation in question, or, alternatively,
it possesses an undifferentiated ʻin-differently binding
validityʼ which intends in principle everyone, so that
no real recognition transpires at all. In truth this
means: by virtue of the indispensable and constitutive
selection mechanism involved in it, this ʻin-differently
binding validityʼ of nameless individuals represents the
binding validity of a virtual normality, a normality
which saves and keeps itself intact, which builds up
an arsenal of power, which has already withdrawn
from its exclusionary, minimalizing and marginalizing
manifestations once we attempt to call it by its proper
name. As in Andrew Sullivanʼs apologetic pamphlet
Virtually Normal ,7 the difference of the recognized,
in which the virtuality in question has accumulated
and concentrated itself, is merely that distance which
allows normality to assert itself all the more fiercely
and inexorably.
Of course one does not have to pay the price of a
naive intentionalism or contextualism, if one wishes
to distinguish ʻpolitical recognitionʼ from another
kind of recognition and to utilize this distinction
in order to mark a difference between the sphere
of namelessness and the sphere of names. But one
does fall back into a naive intentionalism or contex-
tualism if one claims that the name of ʻthe politicalʼ
32 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)
should be reserved for the anonymous social order
which is always presupposed by the ʻnon-politicalʼ or
ʻsub-politicalʼ spheres of recognition. For the opening
which repeatedly suspends recognition, the opening to
which the challenge of that unpredictable and uncon-
trollable expression ʻWeʼre queer, weʼre here, so get
fuckinʼ used to itʼ bears testimony, itself belongs to
the political dimension and to the politics of recogni-
tion. It is precisely this opening which makes politics
necessary. Must the effective political securing of
that open domain we supposedly require in order to
experience the significance of what has already taken
shape in the ʻnon-socialʼ, ʻsubsocialʼ, ʻnon-politicalʼ
and ʻsubpoliticalʼ forms of recognition,8 must this too
not remain exposed to the possibility of suspension
and disturbance if such ʻin-differently binding validityʼ
over against difference is not ultimately to lead to a
levelling process of assimilation, to the namelessness
of eradicated names?
If the framework within which differences exist
is quite obvious; if it is obvious that there is an
overall framework which comprehends and includes
these differences; if it is already decided, for example,
that it is exclusively ʻrelationships of adult love and
friendshipʼ9 which effectively characterize a determin-
ate ʻnon-socialʼ, ʻsubsocialʼ, ʻnon-politicalʼ, ʻsubpoliti-
calʼ open domain of recognition; then difference has
already been robbed of what makes it different in the
first place. Difference has been domesticated and the
phrase ʻWeʼre queer, weʼre here, so get fuckinʼ used
to itʼ has been deprived of its political virulence. It
is not merely in the juridical sphere that the phrase
represents a caesura that cannot simply be bridged,
but rather in all spheres in which recognition proves
to be decisive. Certainly, the irreducible tension in
the process of recognition is a tension between asym-
metry and symmetry (otherwise the recognition would
be nothing more than a re-cognition), so that the
demand for effectively secured political spaces of
openness and free play, for a certain leeway, is just
as inscribed within the struggle for recognition as
is the destabilizing disjunction of play and space.
Politics is nothing other than the name for sustaining
and enduring the conflict within this tension, between
name and anonymity.
Asymmetry and symmetry, confirmation and insti-
tution, do not have the invariant form of a concept.
Rather, they are stabilized elements of a recognition
which is and must be distinguished from mere re-cog-
nition, a recognition whose tensile character consists
in the fact that dissolving it into an accomplished
form of recognition only eliminates the difference
between recognizing and re-cognizing. But the possible
modes and opportunities for recognition, which result
from the constellations and configurations of the ele-
ments involved, cannot in principle be located within
a hierarchical relationship, within any relationship of
precedence or derivation, presupposition or depend-
ency. Recognition precisely promotes the subversion
of such relationships wherever they have assumed a
fixed and independent existence. It makes a difference
whether we are speaking of the recognition accorded
to a people struggling for its own autonomy or the rec-
ognition involved in love or friendship; but the various
forms of recognition and their respective configurations
are nonetheless simultaneously subject to a process of
deformation. They are themselves part of a movement
whose dynamic cannot be grasped either by concepts
of form or by concepts of formlessness. Recognition is
misconceived if we attempt to divide it up into forms
and modes which are laboriously segregated from
one another in order thereby to control the process of
recognition. Recognition is misconceived if we make
the reformist attempt to relate it to the underlying unity
of a universal ʻin-differently binding validityʼ or of an
accomplished and effective recognition. Recognition
is misconceived if we believe we can simply know or
re-cognize it, or even measure the misconceiving of
recognition against this possibility.
Against majorities and minorities
The misconceiving of recognition which is involved in
the reformist conception of the latter, a misconceiving
which cannot even be thought without the continual
destabilization of recognition, has one important con-
sequence: drawing distinctions between the various
majorities and minorities that struggle for recognition
may well serve as a reformist strategy within the
overall horizon of a unity based upon formal equal-
ity, but it also afflicts the majorities and minorities
struggling for recognition with a perilous social blind-
ness. For anyone who distinguishes majorities from
minorities and ascribes him- or herself to this majority
or that minority, can only address the essentially
incommensurable and measureless moment which is
harboured within the very movement of recognition by
attempting to reduce this resistance to all measurability
precisely to some measure, to a range of quantifying
and identifying factors. In an essay discussing the
question of measure, of minorities and majorities in
the debate concerning multicultural societies, Werner
Hamacher writes:
For any claim that is incommensurable with a
purely quantitative representation according to
equivalents, there is a voice which still ineluctably
makes itself heard precisely in this representation
– an other voice, and perhaps something other than
a voice. The commensurable must render itself in-
commensurable, and the countable uncountable.10
Minorities that struggle for recognition, and the
majorities that recognize them, must intrinsically blind
themselves before the anarcho-revolutionary power of
the measureless. Expressed in another way: a group
that identifies itself as a minority can, fundamentally
speaking, no longer struggle for recognition and has
already become powerless in this struggle. When some-
one on the street of a North American city shouts
ʻHey, faggot!ʼ to a supposedly recognized individual,
the latter feels outraged. Alternatively, someone who
makes no appeal to the recognition of a fixed identity
invents other, more novel, war machines.
The suspicion that no one is more powerless
than someone who has struggled for recognition as
a member of some minority or majority, adducing
more or less convincing reasons and obtaining more
or less successful results – the suspicion that, all
appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the one
who has achieved recognition is the most powerless
of all – this suspicion is transformed into an insight
once we perceive that recognition, precisely because it
only remains recognition to the degree that it does not
solidify and objectify itself as recognition, suspends
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 33
the possibility of the ʻasʼ: the possibility of ʻrecog- Notes
nition asʼ. The moment of equilibrium, of equality in This essay is excerpted from Alexander García Düttmannʼs
the struggle for recognition, may repeatedly promise book Zwischen den Kulturen. Spannungen im Kampf um
Anerkennung (Between Cultures: Tensions in the Struggle
or even open up this possibility, but it also suspends
for Recognition), Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1997.
it precisely because it can never be wholly isolated
1. María Zambrano, La agonía de Europa, Mondadori,
or dialectically defined as a determinate result. The Madrid, 1988, p. 42.
pre-predicative or linguistically articulated ʻasʼ which 2. Jean Genet, Lʼennemi déclaré, Gallimard, Paris, 1991,
determines what is present in its specific quiddity gets p. 9.
3. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice, Basic Books, New
separated from itself in the struggle for recognition,
York, 1983, p. 254.
even before it can constitute itself as a unity, as the 4. Oriol Pi de Cabanyes, Repensar Catalunya, Edicions 62,
ʻasʼ itself, as the ʻasʼ of an originary or subsequently Barcelona, 1989, pp. 88–9.
modified understanding. 5. Ibid., p. 91.
6. Christoph Menke, ʻWarum und wie?ʼ, in Babylon, no.
Following a suggestion of Michael Walzer it would 13–14, Neue Kritik, Frankfurt am Main, 1994, p. 92.
appear useful to distinguish an explicit and complex 7. Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal: An Argument about
ʻrecognition as this or thatʼ from a ʻsimple recog- Homosexuality, Picador, London, 1995.
nitionʼ,11 from the universal expectation with which 8. Menke, ʻWarum und wie?ʼ, p. 94.
9. Ibid., p. 92.
one member of society may reasonably approach and 10. Werner Hamacher, ʻOne 2 Many Multiculturalismsʼ,
engage with another. But every recognition which is manuscript 1994, pp. 30–31.
supposed to serve the successful establishment of an 11. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, p. 258.
equilibrium, an order or a framework, which is sup-
posed to satisfy universal expectations, is implicitly
or explicitly a form of ʻrecognition asʼ, a recognition
through which the recognized party can be re-cog-
nized as a member of that group whose parameters
are circumscribed by the framework and which is
sustained in equilibrium by the order. Thus the strug-
gle for recognition reveals itself as a struggle for
the ʻasʼ, for the structure of the ʻas-suchʼ; it reveals
itself as a struggle for revealing-oneself-as-something.
Consequently we should not confuse the reification of
recognition – something which eliminates the process
of recognition and merely grasps recognition itself
as the repetition and confirmation of a presupposed
identity, precisely as ʻrecognition asʼ – with recog-
nition and the struggle for recognition itself.
In the last analysis ʻrecognition asʼ proves inevitably
to have concealed or excluded the alterity of the
process of recognition. As a consequence of this con-
cealment and this exclusion one no longer recognizes
nor is recognized, because fundamentally one only
ever recognizes oneself: the struggle for recognition
becomes the struggle of the subject which strives either
to include otherness within itself or to exclude other-
ness from itself. The politics of recognition becomes
a fundamentalist and immanentist politics, irrespective
of the intentions or the means with which it oper-
ates. Another limit to recognition: the annihilation
of otherness through an absolute re-cognition, which
is precisely what my struggle, mein Kampf, has in
its sights.
Translated by Nicholas Walker

34 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)

Poor Bertie
Jonathan Rée
In the dark midwinter of 1916, Londoners had an
unusual opportunity to see radical philosophical prin-
ciples applied to the urgent issues of the day. The peace
campaigner and feminist C.K. Ogden had hired the
Caxton Hall for a series of eight weekly lectures on
politics, to be given by Bertrand Russell. It was a risky
venture, both financially and intellectually. Russell
was a small-voiced weedy-looking man; although he
was still in his early forties, he was grey-faced and
grey-haired, and wore old-fashioned dark clothes. The
fact that he was also a philosopher and mathematical
logician and Fellow of the Royal Society was not
guaranteed to compensate for his inexperience as a
public lecturer on politics.
The monumental Principia Mathematica (written
with A.N. Whitehead) had been published in three
huge volumes between 1910 and 1913, but, as Russell
knew, very few people could understand it, and most
of them lived in France, Poland or Germany anyway.
On the other hand, its sheer impenetrability could
give Russell (like Einstein a little later) a bankable
reputation as a symbol of absolute braininess. Russell
himself, though, was haunted by doubts (he had been
shaken by Wittgensteinʼs criticisms); and in any case
he thought he had lost his capacity for doing original
work in logic. So with Ogdenʼs help, he was going to
launch himself on a new career, earning his living
as a freelance political commentator rather than a
mathematician and fellow of a Cambridge college.
He had dabbled in politics before of course; indeed
he had been brought up political, in the home of the
great Victorian reforming prime minister, Lord John
Russell, who was his grandfather. And in 1896, when
he was 24, he had published a book about revolu-
tionary socialism called German Social Democracy.
His experiences as a political tourist in Germany and
his interviews with Liebknecht and Bebel had led
him to fear that the nascent Marxist movement might
eventually prove as violent, repressive and illiberal
as the Bismarckian state itself, and the young Rus-
sellʼs conclusion was that the only hope for ʻcommon
justice and common humanityʼ was some kind of
synthesis between liberalism and socialism.
Just a century later, the young Russellʼs view of the
prospects of Marxist politics may appear far-sighted;
but it was not deeply considered and he attached
little importance to it. He was determined to devote
his attention to mathematical logic instead, and to
founding a British tradition of ʻlogical analysisʼ which
would at last bring ʻscientific methodʼ to bear on
the problems of philosophy. He interrupted himself
briefly in 1907, to stand for the National Union of
Womenʼs Suffrage Societies in a parliamentary by-
election in Wimbledon. (He won a remarkable 3,000
votes, compared with 10,000 for the Tory.) He also
took an interest in Fabian and Liberal affairs, though
his involvement took the form of supper parties with
Beatrice and Sidney Webb or the philosophical prime
minister Arthur Balfour, rather than rubbing shoulders
with a broad political public.
But by the end of 1914, apart from feeling burnt-out
as a logician, Russell was galvanized into action by the
Great War – or rather, not so much by the war itself as
by the bloodthirsty relish with which it was welcomed
by the people of Britain. He soon became an activist
in the Union for Democratic Control and the No-Con-
scription Fellowship, and in 1915 took a period of leave
from Cambridge to pursue his political activities, and
prepare for the Caxton Hall lectures in January 1916.
ʻI have something important to say on the phil-
osophy of life and politics,ʼ Russell thought; ʻsome-
thing appropriate to the times.ʼ He needed to present
an account of the origins of war in general, an attack
on the war then being waged against Germany, and
a sketch of the prospects of socialism, liberalism and
feminism; and it all had to be permeated by the author-
ity of a great logician. Russell was naturally nervous;
but in the event he was pleased with the response:
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 35
 My lectures are a great success – they are a rally- tion, and Russell came to regard them as the ʻleast
ing-ground for the intellectuals, who are coming unsatisfactoryʼ of all his political works. But it is quite
daily more to my way of thinking.… All sorts of hard to see, reading them today, what all the excite-
literary and artistic people who formerly despised
ment was about. Political problems of all kinds, as
politics are being driven to action, as they were
in France by the Dreyfus case.… In philosophy, Russell saw it, sprang from a single conflict: the battle
when I was young, my views were as unpopular between ʻthe impulses that make for lifeʼ and those
& strange as they could be; yet I have had a very that ʻmake for deathʼ. His main argument was that
great measure of success. Now I have started on a ʻtraditional Liberalismʼ was breaking down because
new career, & if I live & keep my faculties, I shall it lacked a proper appreciation of psychology, and
probably be equally successful.
could not comprehend the fact that social processes
The audience included nearly all the members of are governed not so much by rational calculation as
the Bloomsbury group. Even Lytton Strachey – who by ʻthe instinctive part of our natureʼ. In particular, it
had long ago come to the conclusion that Russell was a could not see that war was an outgrowth of ʻordinary
ridiculous threadbare remnant of Victorian worthiness, human natureʼ, or that the only way to prevent it in
and a ʻpoor manʼ who ʻlooks about 96ʼ – described future was to engineer a ʻfundamental reconstruction
the lectures as ʻa wonderful solace and refreshmentʼ. of economic and social lifeʼ.
Although feeling ʻnearer the grave than usualʼ, Strachey The social revolution proposed by Russell was to
would drag himself to the ʻghastly Caxton Hallʼ every be grounded in the principles of syndicalism and
Tuesday afternoon, to hear what Russell had to say. co-operation, combining all the benefits of socialist
ʻOne hangs upon his wordsʼ, he wrote; ʻit is splendid equality, industrial prosperity, and liberal freedom.
the way he sticks at nothing – Governments, religions, But Russell did not enter into any analysis of politi-
laws, property, even Good Form itself – down they go cal or economic trends, because so far as he was
like ninepins – it is a charming sight!ʼ
The ʻutterly immoralʼ Ottoline Morrell was
impressed as well, though her sense of the ridicu-
lous did not desert her.
All the cranks who attend lectures on any
subject were there, and amongst them was a
Captain White, who was slightly crazy, and
would make a long speech about sex and free
love, pointing out that if children were born
from parents who were in love with each other
they would never want to fight.… Then Vernon
Lee got up and made a long speech about a
cigarette case, waving her hands about …; and
of course, a representative of Arts and Crafts
made an impassioned harangue. Bertie sat look-
ing miserable on the platform. At last he had to
ask them to sit down.

Altogether, Lady Ottoline found the lectures

ʻrather a comic occasionʼ. But about a hundred
people turned up to each one, paying three shil-
lings a lecture, or one guinea for the whole course.
Russell and Ogden both scooped a satisfactory
profit, and by the end of it Russell had settled
his destiny as the most celebrated public British
intellectual of the twentieth century. (Only four
years later, he would be welcomed in China as
ʻthe greatest social philosopher of the worldʼ;
even Mao Tse-Tung, in his mid-twenties, turned
up to admire him.)
The lectures themselves were published a few
months later as Principles of Social Reconstruc-

36 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)

concerned the key obstacles to progress were not faulty
social structures, or the vested interests of those who
benefited from them, but the outmoded superstitions
and irrational beliefs that still gave sustenance to the
instincts of death and destruction.
Religion, for instance, despite its incidental beau-
ties, always ʻsteels the hearts of men against mercy
and their minds against truthʼ, so what was needed was
not so much economists as atheistic iconoclasts, who
could destroy the last vestiges of belief. Nationalism,
too, was ʻnoble, primitive, brutal and madʼ, and what
was needed was not sociologists but forthright rational
humanitarians, who could face down the primitive
instincts of the herd. What was needed, in short,
was logicians, but logicians who also understood the
ʻinsinctiveʼ side of life. What was needed, for example,
was Bertrand Russell.
Philip Ironsideʼs The Social and Political Thought of
Bertrand Russell* is a work of contextualizing intel-
lectual history which explains many of the peculiari-
ties of Russellʼs conception of politics. Ironside charts,
for instance, his fluctuating estimate of the relative
importance of ʻreasonʼ and ʻinstinctʼ, connecting it
with his wish to ingratiate himself with an artistic elite
– Berenson, the Cambridge Apostles and Bloomsbury.
He also highlights some more surprising elements in
Russellʼs political complexion – his ferocious support
of British imperialism in the Boer War, his indiffer-
ence to New Liberalism, and his standing obsession
with racial degeneration – which now make him seem
far more reactionary than he appeared to his audience
at the Caxton Hall.
But Russellʼs converts in 1916 were utterly enchanted
by his insouciant philosophical way with politics.
Some of the younger ones, according to Ironside,
ʻseriously discussed the possibility of making him
Prime Ministerʼ – which suggests that they shared
Russellʼs rather sketchy approach to the machinery
of political power. Ironside also explains a range of
other influences, from the British Idealistsʼ conception
of the state as a moral force, which he found utterly
repellent, to the theory of instinct as elaborated in
the early stages of English Freudianism, which he
found attractive, and the wild irrationalism of D.H.
Lawrence, about which he came to have reservations.
In the 1920s, though, he ran out of steam and began
*Philip Ironside, The Social and Political Thought of Bertrand Russell: The Development of an Aristocratic
Liberalism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995. 280 pp., £30.00 hb., 0 521 47383 7.
**Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, Jonathan Cape, London, 1996. xx + 695 pp., £25.00
hb., 0 224 03026 4.
to follow the agenda set by Wallas, Cole, Laski and
Wells, concerning eugenics, land tax and guild social-
ism, though he also had a very congenial proposal of
his own, for what he called a ʻvagabondʼs wageʼ – a
basic income to be paid to all who chose to sacrifice
the comforts of social respectability and lead a bohe-
mian life of philosophy, art and innovation, thereby
sustaining ʻa much-needed element of light heartedness
which our sober, serious civilisation tends to killʼ. In
1931, though, Russell gave up on vagabonds: on the
death of his brother, he became an earl – and a very
sober and serious Labour peer. As Beatrice Webb said
after she heard the news: ʻpoor Bertie; he has made a
miserable mess of his life and he knows it.ʼ
Ironside seeks for some consistent doctrine at the
heart of Russellʼs political thought, and comes up
with the surprising but – when you think about it
– quite plausible suggestion that, with his constant
harping on ʻlifeʼ and ʻcreativityʼ, Russell belongs ʻin
that line of English cultural criticism which extends
forward through the influence of Leavis and Scrutiny
and backward to Arnoldʼ. But so far as Russellʼs con-
crete political views are concerned, Ironside concludes
that they were in a permanent muddle. He oscillated
between dull Fabian gradualism and crazy bohemian
impossibilism: as Ironside perceptively puts it, Beat-
rice Webb and D.H. Lawrence marked ʻthe boundaries
of Russellʼs eclecticism in much the same way as
Bentham and Coleridge had provided Millʼsʼ.
There are plenty of gaps in this account, however,
and Ray Monkʼs excellent biography** does a lot to
fill them. Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude is
an attempt to repeat the success of Monkʼs marvellous
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990),
which managed to integrate lucid explanations of the
philosophical issues that troubled Wittgenstein into
a fascinating account of his daily life. Russell poses
a far bigger problem for his biographer, however.
Wittgenstein – as Monk showed – concentrated all his
energy on making himself into a supremely fastidious
genius: writing was a slow torture for him, and he
was assiduous in destroying all traces of imperfec-
tion. Russellʼs life, by contrast, was determinedly
multi-track, and he never threw things away. And
his literary productivity is one of the wonders of the
world: he published seventy books or more, including
a three-volume Autobiography. Monk calculates that
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 37
he wrote an average of two or three thousand words
a day, throughout his ninety-seven years. He worked,
it seems, all the time: sometimes on pure philosophy;
sometimes on political theory and agitation; and some-
times – rather a lot of the time, in fact – on himself
and his affairs with women.
Faced with these mounds of Russelliana, a biog-
rapher might be tempted to recount Russellʼs activities
in a multiple narrative, like Doris Lessingʼs Golden
Notebook perhaps: a red book for politics, a white
book for philosophy, and a blue one for sex. But it
would be hard to cap them all with a golden book that
would bring his lives together: they were essentially
separate, it seems, and Russell never threw himself
wholeheartedly into one field of activity unless he
was in full flight from the other two. So Monk has
taken the sensible course of presenting Russellʼs activi-
ties side-by-side in an episodic day-to-day story. And
although he has kept his focus quite narrow – most
of his sources are Russellʼs own writings, or those of
Russellʼs friends – this volume, though it looks like a
doorstep, only gets up to 1920: the forests must still
be saplings that will bring us Russellʼs remaining half
century in the second volume.
Monk has been extremely selective all the same. He
gives far less attention to philosophy than he did in
his book on Wittgenstein, and within Russellʼs strictly
philosophical output he ignores most of the work on
knowledge, sense-data and reality – issues that bulked
large in works like D.F. Pearsʼs Bertrand Russell and
the British Tradition in Philosophy or A.J. Ayerʼs
Russell. (It would be interesting to know whether
Monk would accept that Russellʼs epistemology is so
hopelessly misconceived as to hold no interest at all.)
But Monk gives beautiful explanations of Russellʼs
logical achievements in Principia Mathematica and
the 1905 essay ʻOn Denotingʼ, which he regards as ʻhis
undoubted philosophical masterpieceʼ. (This leaves
Russell sixty-five years in which to go downhill, and
Monk understandably avoids the question as to whether
there is anything worth preserving in Russellʼs logic
that had not been done already, and rather better, by
Frege.)
But the ordinary sensual reader cannot put up with
very much mathematical logic. Like Russell himself,
in fact, we are glad to take a break after a few pages,
and Monk, a gifted storyteller, unfailingly gives us
what we want. After learning a bit about Russellʼs
stupendous cruelty to his first wife, however, or the
clumsy manipulativeness of his intrigues with Ottoline
Morrell (who could look after herself) and of numer-
ous insignificant others (who unluckily could not) we
38 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)
are glad to turn away again – as Russell did too – with
a rekindled passion for logic.
Monk is unable to find much connection between
the logic and the love in Russellʼs daily life, except
that each had the attraction of not being the other.
But when it comes to Russellʼs political evolution,
the integrated biographical approach becomes more
illuminating. Ironside has expounded Russellʼs belief
that political questions are basically a matter of psychol-
ogy, especially the psychology of ʻlife instinctsʼ and
ʻdeath instinctsʼ, and he follows the Autobiography
in describing how, in the period just before he wrote
Principles of Social Reconstruction, Russell discussed
these matters with D.H. Lawrence, and even contem-
plated some literary collaboration with him.
But as Monk shows, in the most gripping section
of his book, there was rather more to it than that.
Lawrence had met Ottoline Morrell early in January
1915, responding to a fan letter which had delighted
him as coming from an ʻaristocratʼ. At that time he
was elaborating a ʻgospelʼ – a Germanic ʻphilosophyʼ,
he hoped – which was going to escape from the past
and institute a ʻnew lifeʼ on earth. Lawrence told
Lady Ottoline that ʻevery strong soul must put off
its connection with this society, its vanity and chiefly
its fear, and go naked with its fellows, weaponless,
armourless, without shield or spear.ʼ She was mildly
entertained by such talk, until Lawrence announced
that she herself was to become the ʻnucleusʼ of a
prefigurative community of love, and indeed that it
should be established at once in her estate at Garsing-
ton, just outside Oxford. Perhaps it was sheer mischief
on her part, but she then told Lawrence that she knew
a man who would be interested in helping him with
his schemes: Bertrand Russell.
Lawrence was excited by the thought of collaborat-
ing with Russell (ʻthe Philosophic – and Mathematics
man,ʼ he mused, ʻa Fellow of Cambridge University
– F.R.S. – Earl Russellʼs brotherʼ), and when they met
he immediately won the heart of the great logician.
ʻHe is infallibleʼ, Russell said after their first meeting;
ʻhe sees everything and is always right.ʼ Lawrence
sent him a long letter proposing a socialist revolution,
starting with ʻthe nationalising of all industries and
means of communciation, & of the land, in one fell
blow.ʼ (That should ʻsolve the whole economic ques-
tionʼ, he said.) He was under the impression that he
and Russell had sworn Blutbrüderschaft in the name
of the new order, and by May they were planning to
give a joint lecture series, Russell dealing with ʻEthicsʼ,
Lawrence with ʻImmortalityʼ. Russell said that the
unifying theme of the series would be the idea that
existing institutions are ʻa prison for the infinite in usʼ,
and Lawrence envisaged the lectures being presided
over by Ottoline Morrell, whose task would be to
keep him and Russell striving ʻtowards the Eternal
thingʼ. After all, as Lawrence observed with entreating
urgency, ʻWe mustnʼt lapse into temporality.ʼ
No indeed. By July, Lawrence was spelling out
the details of socialism to his philosophical blood-
brother. The state must be all-powerful; in fact it
ought to become an object of worship; and of course
ʻthere must be a ruler: a Kaiser: no Presidents &
democracies.ʼ There should also be a clear politi-
cal division between the sexes, with a ʻDictatorʼ to
control the ʻindustrial side of the national lifeʼ, and
a ʻDictatrixʼ to command ʻthings relating to private
lifeʼ. When, after a few months, Russell at last began
to quibble with some of these opinions, Lawrence
savaged him in a monstrously wounding letter, and
abandoned him and Ottoline Morrell as ʻtraitorsʼ. It
was then that the unhappy Russell started work on
the Caxton Hall lectures, whose emphasis on a time-
less psychology of instincts, we can now see, was a
response to Lawrenceʼs precocious National Socialism,
as well as to the horrors of the Great War and Russellʼs
need for a role.
But the main thing in this biography is the sex, or
rather the business surrounding it. Monkʼs life of Witt-
genstein has been praised for the restraint and delicacy
with which it described Wittgensteinʼs intimate life;
but then, Wittgenstein left his biographer with practi-
cally no material to be indelicate with. The Russell
archives, carefully tended at McMaster University in
Ontario, are a very different matter, and the result
is that Monk has had to spend a lot of time sorting
out the ups and downs of Russellʼs well-documented
penile career. But even those who dote on revelations
about illicit love affairs will be slightly disappointed
by this saga. We may experience a little elation the
first few times Russell is exposed as a self-righteous
old goat, a liar and two-timer; but the pleasure does
not increase with repetition. Compared with other
earls or other logicians, Russellʼs sexual experience
may have been quite wide; but compared with most
ordinary human beings, it was numbingly boring. It
is not just that he was more interested in the hunt, so
to speak, than the kill, but that his top priority always
seems to have been to give it verbal expression, so as
to avoid at all costs the prudish secretiveness associ-
ated with ʻVictorianismʼ. His obsession with putting
sex into words – plain ones or flowery, and many
of them – is a striking confirmation of Foucaultʼs
famous paradox: that the advocates of free love and
libidinal liberation were prisoners of the ʻrepressedʼ
conceptions of sexuality from which they imagined
they had escaped. Sex, in Russellʼs opinion, was an
ʻinstinctive impulseʼ, a base bodily function which,
unluckily, may sometimes pester us importunately, like
a raging tooth or a bursting bladder. It never seems
to have occurred to him that sexual experience might
focus on the bodies of other people instead of the
efficient gratification of oneʼs own needs. As
the inexhaustible Ottoline Morrell noted, he
habitually complained that his lovers were
selfish, because they would not sacrifice
themselves entirely to him: ʻHe is intensely
self-centred, poor man.ʼ
What Russell sought in his sexual encoun-
ters, it seems, was simply a helping hand.
In 1920, for instance, when he was invei-
gling Dora Black into becoming his second
wife, he forestalled any misunderstanding
by explaining that ʻI must find a place for
sex with the smallest possible damage to
work.ʼ And she had already written to him
on the same lines: sex, for a modern girl
like her, was ʻa need, to be satisified now
& then as it presents itself, like hunger and
thirstʼ. ʻI am all for triviality in sexʼ, she
announced; and in Bertrand Russell she had
found her man.
There is something quite disconcerting
about the way Russell related to his ʻneedʼ
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 39
for love. It was as if he simply glanced inside himself
to observe a set of libidinal traffic signals alternating,
sometimes rather rapidly, between three blunt mes-
sages: Halt, Caution and Go. Although he was often
baffled by what his ʻemotionsʼ were telling him, he
never seems to have realized that it might be in their
very nature to be ambiguous, and always capable of
absorbing new interpretations. And, come to think of
it, the same is true of his attitude to language and
philosophy as well. Disciples like A.J. Ayer used to
refer to the ʻpower and elegance of his literary styleʼ,
but what is really striking in Russellʼs writings is that
they show absolutely no talent or care for overall com-
position. They contain points, sharply made, but never
lines, firmly drawn: the result is always disjointed and
unsustained, with punctual clarity in the details but
obscurity and fudge on the whole.
It may be true that Russell never wrote a really
duff sentence; but surely he never wrote a fine and
memorable one either. True, there are his celebrated
quips, like the one in ʻOn Denotingʼ about the bald-
ness of the present King of France. There is no King
of France, of course, so, as Russell pointed out, ʻif
we enumerated the things that are bald, and then the
things that are not bald, we should not find the present
King of France in either list.ʼ But in that case, how
could it be meaningful to say that the King of France
is bald? Before giving his solution to the conundrum,
Russell makes a characteristic joke: ʻHegelians, who
love a synthesis, will probably conclude that he wears
a wig.ʼ
The one about the King of Franceʼs wig is the
paradigm joke of British analytic philosophy, still
much imitated by the kind of philosophers who fancy
themselves as wits. But it is a rotten joke. It is neither
accurate nor funny; and it is both showy and beside the
point. What is more, it is exultantly complacent: not
only conceited, but pleased with its conceit as well.
The same unhappy clever-dick style is to be found
in another typical sentence of Russellʼs, from the
Lectures on Logical Atomism: ʻI think an almost
unbelievable amount of false philosophy has arisen
through not realising what “existence” means,ʼ Russell
says. You can hear the prose pausing to allow readers
to applaud the great logicianʼs audacity in suggest-
ing that philosophers have overlooked something so
elementary as the meaning of ʻexistenceʼ. But the
invitation is quite fraudulent. It may well be true that
past philosophers have all been wrong about existence,
but that ought surely to inspire a little humility in us,
40 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)
some attention to the reasons for their difficulties, and
a lot of severe circumspection if we imagine we have
finally come up with The Answer. Instead, Russell
comes on all cocky, assured, and tendentious: as blind,
it seems, to the layered ambiguities of philosophy as
to those of either politics or love.
And there is another side to Russellʼs vaunted
ʻstyleʼ. He combined a rhetoric of self-admiring clever-
ness with a surprising weakness for purple platitudes
about how – to quote the peroration of his History of
Western Philosophy – philosophy can ʻsuggest and
inspire a way of lifeʼ. It is to these sentiments, indeed,
that Monk has traced the force that drove Russellʼs
astonishing productivity. Russell, like the rest of us,
suffered from a recurrent sense of cosmic loneliness.
But he sought his solace amongst impersonal things,
ʻabstract and remoteʼ, such as mathematics and espe-
cially philosophy. Traditional philosophy could not
delight him, though: he dismissed it as unscientific,
and we may also suspect that it was too probing and
personal for his comfort – not remote and abstract
enough. So he sought a new theoretical dispensation,
as immaculate as the Lawrentian state: a perfect philo-
sophical science, isolated from the past and untouched
by superstition, grief or love. He was intent, in other
words, on annihilating everything in philosophy that
might remind him of contingency; but in the end,
inevitably, he could never find any that did not.
Monk evidently came to his biographical task with
the intention of praising Russell. He hoped to find
– as he had with Wittgenstein – a deep unity between
the life and the work, a single passion that would
vindicate and redeem them both. By the end of the
book, though – and this is only volume one – Russell is
almost buried. Against the odds, Monk has succeeded
in unifying the life, by elaborating on the theme of
Russellʼs solitude, and his quest for security in phil-
osophy as in politics and sex. Russell wanted to exist
in an unequivocal world where his intellect would
reign supreme. But the biography shows – as biog-
raphies will – that he kept falling back into another
world, the only world there is; and it is enigmatic
through and through. When Monk demonstrated the
unity of Wittgensteinʼs life, he portrayed an astonish-
ing and touching philosophical hero; but when the
same service is performed for Russell, he appears as
superficial, mediocre and unwise: exceptional only
in his productivity, and his titanic imperceptiveness
about others and about himself. Poor old Bertie. Poor
old us.
REVIEWS
Capital futures
István Mészáros, Beyond Capital, The Merlin Press, London, 1995. xxvi + 994 pp., £45.00 hb., £14.95 pb.,
0 85036 454 X hb., 0 85036 432 9 pb.
It is now a quarter of a century since István Mészáros
had his first big success in Britain with Marxʼs Theory
of Alienation. In the Preface to the third edition (1971)
he promised to complement that masterly work of
conceptual excavation with a study of actually exist-
ing capitalism and socialism. Other work intervened
(notably a study of Sartre), but finally the promise
is redeemed. Beyond Capital is the first substantial
restatement of the case against capital, and for social-
ism, since ʻthe fallʼ (indeed, for a good while longer),
and very welcome on that account. In the face of those
who preach ʻthe end of historyʼ, and the dogma that
ʻthere is no alternativeʼ, Mészáros remains intransi-
gent. He subjects capital in all its manifestations to
merciless critique, exposing the crying contradictions
of its apologists and the vacuity of the nostrums of its
would-be ʻsavioursʼ. However, it is not just a matter of
forcefully restating known truths (such as the fact that
capitalism is still founded on an alienated, and alienat-
ing, power, consequent on the structural subordination
of labour to capital), but pushing the argument further,
to overcome the limitations of Marxʼs own work and
assess the significance of contemporary trends. Here
Mészáros has much to offer. Although deeply rooted in
the Marxist tradition, his thinking incorporates the new
determinants of development in the postwar period.
The title of the present volume must be under-
stood in three senses. First it means ʻgoing beyond
capital as such and not merely beyond capitalismʼ
(this important idea I will take up later); second, it
means going beyond what Marx himself managed to
achieve; finally, it means going beyond the original
Marxian project, formulated when the full range of
capitalʼs powers of adaptation lay beyond the horizon
of its century.
This huge sprawling work has three main parts.
Part One analyses the nature of capital and debunks
the claims of its apologists (e.g. Hayek). Part Two
meditates on the legacy of the Russian Revolution,
notably theorizations formulated in its shadow: here
History and Class Consciousness is exemplary and we
are offered what is virtually a book-length critique of
Lukács. Mészáros brilliantly underscores the continu-
ity in the latterʼs outlook right up to the late essay
on democratization; he also shows that to the end
Lukács stuck to the Stalinist shibboleths of ʻsocialism
in one countryʼ and ʻtheʼ party as the sole agent of
transformation. Mészáros explores Marxʼs theoretical
difficulties, highlighting epigraphically an important
unnoticed reservation expressed by Marx himself:
ʻwill revolution in Europe not be necessarily crushed
in this little corner of the world, since on a much larger
terrain the development of bourgeois society is still
in the ascendant?ʼ Today the world market predicted
by Marx is finally being established; for the first time
we now live in one world (as Mészáros says, talk of
a ʻThird Worldʼ is nonsense), with all the attendant
economic, ecological and ideological consequences.
Any coherent socialist project must encompass this
reality. Accordingly, the crucial question is this: under
what conditions can the process of capital-expansion
come to a close on a truly global scale, bringing with
it necessarily the end of crushed and perverted revo-
lutions, opening thereby the new historic phase of an
irrepressible socialist offensive?ʼ
Part Three explores the present structural crisis of
the capitalist system in detail. Here Mészáros demon-
strates the devastating effect of the ʻdecreasing rate of
utilisationʼ, including its bizarre manifestation in the
military-industrial complex. As he rightly points out,
much of the debate over ʻgrowthʼ ignores the relevance
of the fantastic wastefulness inherent in the capital
system. While the necessity of the socialist alterna-
tive is reasserted, the reasons for the collapse of the
USSR are not evaded. As Mészáros correctly says, ʻthe
tragedy of Soviet type post-capitalist societies was that
they followed the line of least resistance by positing
socialism without radically overcoming the material
presuppositions of the capital system.ʼ In contrast, ʻthe
radical negation of the capitalist state and the like-
wise negative “expropriation of the expropriators” was
always considered by Marx only the necessary first step
in the direction of the required social transformation.ʼ
He insisted that the hegemonic alternative to capitalʼs
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 41
social order can only be an inherently positive enter-
prise. This is why the socialist revolution could not
be conceived as a single act, no matter how radical in
intent, but only as an ongoing, consistently self-critical
social revolution, as a ʻpermanent revolutionʼ (Marx).
The object is to build an economy in the hands of
the ʻassociated producersʼ (self-management), who put
qualitative considerations above quantitative measures.
As for socialist strategy, Mészáros argues that, since
capital is itself an extra-parliamentary force, it would
be foolish to restrict radical politics to parliament. A
politics from below (ʻsocialist pluralismʼ) must generate
a global opposition to a global system.
As the title indicates, central to Beyond Capital
is the thesis that it is necessary to go not merely
beyond ʻcapitalismʼ but beyond ʻcapitalʼ itself. A lot
therefore hangs on the coherence of this distinction.
For example, it is used to characterize Soviet-type
regimes of production as ʻpost-capitalistʼ, yet still
under the sway of ʻcapitalʼ. This is outlined in a
fascinating chapter on ʻchanging forms of the rule
of capitalʼ. Mészárosʼs analysis of no-longer-existing
socialism is of more general importance; for it is clear
that the lessons are not specific to the extremities of
the Russian situation, but are germane to the theory
and practice of transition in general. It is crucial here
to recognize that ʻMarx was not concerned with demon-
strating the deficiencies of “capitalist production” but
with the great historical task of extricating humankind
from the conditions under which the satisfaction of
human needs must be subordinated to the “production
of capital”.ʼ Capitalʼs metabolism, based on its dom-
ination of alienated labour, on the predominance of
exchange over use-value, and on a hierarchical division
of labour, is driven by the imperative of expansion. As
a system with its own logic and coherence it cannot be
changed without tackling this central metabolic order
42 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)
and replacing it; tinkering with surface phenomena
(e.g. juridical arrangements) will not change such
fundamentals. Thus Mészáros argues that ʻthe real
target of emancipatory transformation is the complete
eradication of capital as a totalising mode of control
from the social reproductive metabolism itself, and
not simply the displacement of the capitalist as the
historically specific “personification of capital”.ʼ As he
put it in our interview with him in Radical Philosophy
(no. 62, p. 31):
You can overthrow the capitalist but the factory sys-
tem remains, the division of labour remains, nothing
has changed in the metabolic functions of society.
Indeed … you find the need for reassigning those
forms of control to personalities, and thatʼs how the
bureaucracy comes into existence. The bureaucracy
is a function of this command structure under the
changed circumstances where in the absence of the
private capitalist you have to find an equivalent to
that control … very often the notion of bureaucracy
is pushed forward as a kind of mythical explana-
tory framework… [But] the bureaucracy itself needs
explanation… [It is said that] if you get rid of bu-
reaucracy then everything will be all right. But you
donʼt get rid of bureaucracy unless you attack [its]
economic foundation…
It is indeed possible to smash the bourgeois state and
conquer political power. However, it is quite impossible
to ʻsmashʼ labourʼs inherent structural dependence on
capital. For that dependency is materially secured by
the established hierarchical division of labour. Without
the positive transcendence of capitalʼs metabolic
functioning, ʻlabour itself self-defeatingly continues
to reproduce the power of capital over against itselfʼ,
Mészáros concludes.
In one version the distinction between capital
and capitalism is already familiar to us; for it is a
commonplace that merchants and usurers employed
money as capital long before
capital seized hold of pro-
duction and established the
modern system of industrial
capitalism. But it is novel
to argue that capital may
survive capitalism. (It should
be noted that on Mészárosʼs
account the USSR was not
ʻstate-capitalistʼ, as Tony
Cliff among others argues.)
So let us look first at his
definition of capitalism.
Mészáros argues that the
capitalist formation extends
over only that particular phase of capital production
in which (1) production for exchange is all pervasive;
(2) labour power itself is a commodity; (3) the drive
for profit is the fundamental regulator; (4) the vital
mechanism for the extraction of surplus-value – the
radical separation of the means of production from
the producers – assumes an inherently economic
form; (5) surplus value is privately appropriated by
the members of the capitalist class; and (6) following
its economic imperative of growth and expansion,
capital production tends towards a global integra-
tion. It follows from this definition, according to
Mészáros, that one cannot ʻspeak of capitalism in
post-revolutionary societies when out of these essen-
tial defining characteristics only one – number four
– remains, and even that in a radically altered form,
in that the extraction of surplus labour is regulated
politically and not economicallyʼ. Yet at the same
time Mészáros argues that capital maintains its rule
in such post-revolutionary societies. What, then, is
the definition of ʻcapitalʼ that would be congruent
with this survival?
According to Mészáros, the necessary conditions of
all conceivable forms of the capital relation – including
the post-capitalist forms – are: (1) the separation and
alienation of the objective conditions of the labour
process from labour itself; (2) the superimposition of
such alienated conditions over the workers as a sepa-
rate power exercising command over labour; (3) the
personification of capital as ʻegotistic valueʼ pursuing
its own self-expansion – the bureaucrat is the post-
capitalist equivalent of the private capitalist; (4) the
equivalent personification of labour whether as wage-
labourer under capitalism or as the norm-fulfilling
ʻsocialist workerʼ under the post-capitalist system.
ʻCapital can change the form of its rule as long as
these four basic conditions – which are constitutive of
its “organic system” – are not radically supersededʼ,
Mészáros concludes. Additionally, he maintains that
since the inherited social division of labour and the
objective structure of production remained in the post-
capitalist economies we have witnessed, capital in this
sense persisted.
Clearly there is considerable room for discussion
about such a definition of capital. But in one respect
– namely, that capital is inherently accumulation driven
– everyone would agree. Mészáros goes out of his way
to argue that this was still true of the USSR:
The imperative of accumulation driven expansion
can be satisfied under changed economic circum-
stances not only without the subjective ʻprofit
motiveʼ but even without the objective requirement
of profit, which happens to be an absolute necessity
only in the capitalist variety of the capital system.
… During several decades of Soviet economic
development high levels of capital accumulation
[were] secured by means of the politically con-
trolled extraction of surplus labour, without remote-
ly resembling the capitalist system in its necessary
orientation towards profit.
This seems odd to me; for I would have thought
that the accumulation-fetish was not rooted in ʻthe
metabolic orderʼ but in the hopes of the controllers,
who imposed external ʻtargetsʼ, terroristically driven.
Moreover, if Mészáros insists that the USSR as a
capital system was expansion orientated, how is that
compatible with the failure to innovate which led to
permanent stagnation? No matter how much political
authority, for external reasons of state, tried to coerce
or stimulate the producers, the economy responded
only sluggishly in quantitative terms, and innovation
became completely bogged down. This was politically
crucial; for the failure to ʻcatch upʼ with the West,
and the failure to achieve real growth in the Brezhnev
years, stripped the system of legitimacy, even in the
eyes of its beneficiaries, and brought about its implo-
sion. Mészáros is clearly right to argue that socialist
revolution is not merely a matter of political power,
or of redistribution, but of changing the fundamental
social metabolism established by capital; it means
transforming the very structure of material production
and abolishing the hierarchical division of labour. He
is clearly right that post-capitalist social formations
failed to achieve this positive transcendence; and the
emergence of ʻthe bureaucracyʼ is explicable primarily
on that basis. His conceptualization of the problem in
terms of the survival of ʻcapitalʼ beyond ʻcapitalismʼ
is the most interesting analysis since that of Trotsky,
and deserves to be widely discussed.
For me Mészáros pays insufficient attention to the
value-form of capital and the positing of expansion
inherent in it. I therefore find incoherent the notion of
capital without profit. Certainly, if the factory system
in which capital materialized itself endures, then one
cannot speak of socialism; but, conversely, if the law
of value enforced through capitalist competition is no
longer operative, we have a clock without a spring. I
would argue that in the USSR capitalʼs metabolism
was disrupted without an alternative being established;
lacking organic coherence, the system could not sur-
vive once the exceptional conditions of revolutionary
mobilization, and of war, had passed.
Chris Arthur
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 43
Without consent
Keith Burgess-Jackson, Rape: A Philosophical Investigation, Dartmouth, Aldershot and Brookfield VT, 1996.
xi + 224 pp., £42.50 hb., 1 85521 485 7.
Sue Lees, Carnal Knowledge: Rape on Trial, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1996. xxvii + 292 pp., £20.00 hb.,
0 241 13629 6.
These two books form an admirably complementary
pair. Burgess-Jacksonʼs is a jurisprudential study of
what the crime of rape is, why it is a crime, the forms
it can take, and the defences that may be offered.
Leesʼs is a study of how, in practice, rape cases are
handled by the police and the judiciary, from their
initial reporting through to the conduct of any even-
tual trial. Both authors are feminists and both studies
provide good reasons to be dissatisfied with the way
in which the law does deal with rape. Both write
against the background of sustained public debate
about what should and should not be regarded as rape
at law. This debate has, in Britain, been prompted by
a number of celebrated recent cases – most notably,
the acquittal of the student Austen Donnellan and
the conviction of the solicitor Angus Diggle. It has
also been fuelled by claims, mainly made in the con-
servative press, that men are now being stigmatized
as rapists merely for misreading sexual cues in a
world where communication between the genders if
fraught with difficulties and ambiguities. However,
the debate has also heard contributions from feminists
worried about the overextension of the term ʻrapeʼ, the
representation of women as perpetual victims, and the
overdramatization of the offence if unaccompanied
by violence.
Both writers regard rape as a sexual crime. This
does not imply that it is in some sense a less serious
crime. Nor does it imply that rape occupies a place
on a continuum of behaviours which extends to con-
sensual sexual interaction. Nor does it imply that
sexual pleasure is the sole end of the rapist. Nor does
it imply that a number of all too familiar stereotypical
assumptions about the sexual character of men and
women, and about the nature of heterosexual inter-
action between men and women, are true. It does mean
that rape is other than simple assault. It also requires
that the crime of rape be clearly distinguished from all
other kinds of sexual encounters, however unwanted,
regretted, unsatisfactory, or loveless some of these
may be. Evidently, the matter of consent is central
to the crime of rape. Rape is unconsented sex. What
distinguishes rape from sexual intercourse is lack of
consent. However, both books, in their different ways,
44 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)
draw attention to serious problems that attend this
simple definition.
Burgess-Jackson in fact disputes the view that there
is a single understanding of rape. He argues that there
can be – and is – deep disagreement about what is
and is not rape, and suggestions that there are several
conceptions of rape. The conservative theory construes
rape as a trespass upon the property of the man, the
wrong done being to he who owns the woman violated.
The liberal theory regards rape as an unconsented
sexual battery, the wrong done being to the individual
woman whose own choices with regard to her body
are denied. The radical theory regards rape as but
one instance of the subordination of women by men,
the wrong done being to the gender as a whole whose
entitlement to equal respect and consideration is dis-
honoured. Burgess-Jackson claims not to endorse any
one of these three conceptions (though his sympathies
are clearly with the last). He does seek to show how
their application yields different conclusions as to
whether some act is one of rape, what makes rape
wrongful, and what may serve as a defence to the
charge of rape. Some of his analyses are exemplary.
The chapter on ʻMarital Rapeʼ, for instance, exposes
and rebuts, with admirable clarity and conciseness,
all of the various arguments that might be offered
to the conclusion that a husband cannot be guilty of
raping his wife.
A problem with Burgess-Jacksonʼs approach is that,
although he is surely right to display the differences
between the views of the conservative, liberal and
radical, it is not always clear on his account whether
these really do differ about what rape is, or only about
what makes it wrong. If rape is unconsented sex, then
it is possible to disagree about what is wrong with
unconsented sex for being unconsented. And this need
not be a trivial dispute. But it is not a dispute about
what rape is. We can have a single concept of rape
– unconsented sex – and various conceptions of rape.
These conceptions can be distinguished in two regards
– how they understand consent and its absence; and
what it is about the lack of consent which makes rape
morally problematic. The liberal may be wrong to
think that rape is only wrong for being the violation
of an individualʼs wishes; the radical may be right in
seeing each and every such violation as signifying
a more general oppression of women. Neither need
deny that some sexual act is one of rape only if it is
unconsented.
What counts as consent is a separate and further
matter of dispute between the liberal and radical. The
radicalʼs view (and Catharine MacKinnon is the most
notable protagonist) is that the liberal is prepared to
countenance as consensual what she views as com-
pelled or passive acquiescence. Again there is no
reason to see this dispute as one over the concept of
rape. It is one about the concept of consent. The radical
is prepared to view ʻnormalʼ heterosexual intercourse
as perhaps no less non-consensual than a paradigmatic
instance of rape – because a woman, socialized into
the role of passive acceptance of the eroticized dom-
inance that is heterosexuality in our society, cannot be
said ʻreallyʼ to consent to any sexual encounter with
a man. Burgess-Jackson, it must be said, invokes this
understanding without mentioning any of the serious
worries that have been expressed about it by many
feminist philosophers and jurisprudential theorists.
The problem Sue Lees reveals is that the current
system simply does not do justice to women and fails
to convict the rapists it should. Whilst the number of
reported rapes in England and Wales has trebled in the
last ten years, the conviction rate has fallen. It is ludi-
crous to suppose – whatever the press may say in the
wake of some publicized cases – that more than 4,500
women each year are mendacious, spiteful accusers.
Leesʼs monitoring of the British police and judicial
process at work provides some explanation of what is
going wrong. A dangerous combination of bad legal
practice and general, misogynistic attitudes is exposed.
When consent is the central issue at stake, and the
complainant is no more than a witness within an adver-
sarial hearing which requires proof beyond reasonable
doubt and tolerates the admission of certain kinds of
evidence, the stage is set for a shameful display of
prejudicial attitudes and procedures which favour the
defendants at the cost of humiliating their accusers.
Despite all the supposed improvements in law and
rules of procedure, Leesʼs evidence is damning. Time
and again testimony regarding the behaviour, lifestyle,
clothing, character and past sexual conduct of women
is not only admitted, but seen as bearing directly on
the question of whether a rape occurred.
Many of Leesʼs recommendations for change are
to be welcomed: better training of the judiciary, more
stringent controls on the admission of sexual character
and sexual history evidence, an acceptance of some
forms of corroborative evidence, and – especially
in the light of cases of serial rapists who are being
acquitted time after time – a greater disposition to
admit evidence from several women of similar rapes.
However, other of her comments are less welcome.
That rules permit misogyny does not mean that the
rules are themselves misogynistic. Nor should rules be
devised to punish misogyny as such. If it is thought
proper to allow a womanʼs past behaviour some weight
in assessing the validity of her charge, it should at
least be permitted to count a manʼs past behaviour as
bearing on the present accusation. However, it is not
proper, as Lees suggests, to see his views on women
and sex as relevant. Least of all should any revealed
ʻsexismʼ ʻbe seen as evidence for his guiltʼ (p. 253).
Both books raise all the right empirical and norma-
tive questions about how we define, try, excuse and
punish the crime of rape. They do not settle matters.
At the end of the day this may be because, although
rape just is sex without consent, the law and its tri-
bunals have proved deeply inadequate to the task of
understanding what non-consensual sex is. Whether
that is the fault of present practice, or is due to the
straightforward impossibility of legally regulating
sexual conduct, is unclear. But both authors afford an
admirable brief for either argument.
David Archard
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 45
Patchwork selves and others
Morwenna Griffiths, Feminisms and Self: The Web of Identity, Routledge, London and New York, 1995. x +
220 pp., £37.50 hb., £12.99 pb, 0 415 09820 3 hb., 0 415 09821 1 pb.
If a book can be heaped with praise for the scale of
its ambition, then this one deserves mountains of it.
It aspires to convince the reader of the incapacities of
the Anglo-Saxon tradition of philosophy in the fields
of ʻepistemology, ethics, mind and politicsʼ, while
simultaneously engaging us in a process of renewal
and reconstruction. The move we are enjoined to
make is from the ʻfalse universalisation inherent in
mainstream philosophy towards a situated abstractionʼ
(p. 70), particularly in discussions of personal identity
and the self.
Mainstream philosophy is ʻrepresentedʼ by Williams,
Parfit, Nagel and Dennett. Griffiths warns feminists not
to expect the work of these philosophers to illuminate
their concerns with the question of ʻwho or what I
amʼ. In the absence of a credible analysis of their
views, her warning amounts to advocating the view
of ʻknowledge by testimonyʼ in traditional terms. But
it can also be redescribed as ʻtrusting othersʼ judge-
mentsʼ in a certain sort of feminist terminology. This
supports implicitly a dismissive attitude towards ʻmaleʼ
philosophers, disappointing in a book which is duly
self-conscious of its diverse audience.
In other contexts, trust, co-operation, love and
acceptance are indeed attractive notions from most
feminist perspectives and, in this book, form the
guiding pattern for a conceptual revision of the notion
of self-identity as self-creation. Several good argu-
ments are offered for accepting these notions as politi-
cal values. The most crucial one is that fear debilitates,
and therefore any commitment to increasing autonomy
for self-creation must recognize the need for ʻgenerous
patterns of cultural and political life, and the reduction
of fearʼ (p. 143). To this end, we are provided with an
absorbing description of how emotions and feelings are
socially and interpersonally constructed in a politically
structured environment, which opens the way for self-
creation via a ʻpolitics of the selfʼ.
This, for me, is where a problem emerges. If
politics is about creating public spaces where fearless
exchanges can occur between more or less autono-
mous selves, and these public spaces are constituted
by various languages of expression and communica-
tion, what exactly is the role of philosophy in this
political process? ʻMainstream/academic philosophyʼ
is frequently derided in this book, while the author
continues to identify herself as one of ʻus argumen-
46 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)
tative philosophersʼ. In her terms, philosophy is simply
another language, and she inhabits the community of
philosophers just as she inhabits other communities.
In re-creating herself as a feminist philosopher, she is
involved in a politics informed by an understanding
of how judgements are validated by a new community
and get into circulation. Indeed, it is her view that one
is theorizing, in a sense, ʻsimply by publishingʼ.
Is one also doing philosophy simply by publishing?
Manifestly not. The mistake lies in identifying phil-
osophy as another language, rather than as an activity
of unravelling the grammars of languages. It is the
politically structured character of their involvement
with these languages that marks the exclusionary/
inclusionary features of the philosophical activity of
male/female, white/black, Western/Eastern philoso-
phers. It follows that the activity of philosophy cannot
be seriously undertaken if one fails to listen to those
who have been set up as the Other. Here the Other
is the ʻmaleʼ philosopher. Richard Rorty is criticized
for valorizing fear and cruelty in self-creation, when
the whole point of his work is to show how a liberal
ironist can fulfil his only clearly articulated desire
of preventing the actual and possible humiliation of
others. It may have been more appropriate to differ
with him about how the job of opening oneself to
the pain of others is accomplished, in particular by
questioning his commendation of the private–public
division. Ironically, his preference for literature rather
than philosophy in forging human solidarity is echoed
in Griffithsʼ own use of critical autobiography. More-
over, her commitment to vigilance about oppression is
not very different from Rortyʼs plea that ʻwe should
stay on the lookout for marginalized people.ʼ
Charles Taylorʼs communitarianism is likewise
found wanting for its insufficient attention to the politi-
cal. While it is true that Taylor does not specifically
focus on feminist concerns, to extend this charge to
the accusation that his view is ʻnot about political
individualsʼ is intriguing. Once again insufficient argu-
ment leaves one dissatisfied. Paul Gilroy is quoted
with approval; however, the claim to ʻgo beyondʼ him
is made without warrant.
The merit of Griffithsʼ constructive arguments
is seriously threatened by her brief and ineffective
attempts to critique the position of others. Comparable
preceding accounts, such as Jonathan Gloverʼs on self-
creation and Elizabeth Potterʼs on moral identity, are
surprisingly omitted. A more sustained discussion of
the work of other feminists might have added to the
appeal of the book. Repetitive and insubstantial refer-
ences to othersʼ work can often perplex the uninitiated.
A case in point is Pratibha Parmarʼs writing on Asian
women. We are told that the creation of authentic
works of art by black and migrant women asserts both
their unity and their difference, without any indication
of how this creative process works for these women.
Shortcomings apart, Griffithsʼ novel use of auto-
biographies to illustrate the problems and resolutions
to some of the paradoxes of self-identity is a refreshing
turn. Her overriding preference for ʻvariety, confu-
sion, colour, hotchpotch … of patchwork selvesʼ has
undoubtedly left its mark on the production of this
book. It deviates from many norms; how successfully
is a debatable matter.
Meena Dhanda
Nietzsche’s French
futures
Alan D. Schrift, Nietzscheʼs French Legacy: A Geneal-
ogy of Poststructuralism, Routledge, New York and
London, 1995. xvii + 198 pp., £40.00 hb., £12.95 pb.,
0 415 91146 X hb., 0 415 91147 8 pb.
In his Ecce Homo, Nietzsche referred to the French
as ʻcharming companyʼ, and he often regretted having
to write in German, rather than in a more playful and
fluid language like French. He was also conscious
of having been ʻborn posthumouslyʼ, predicting that
he would eventually find his true readers amongst
the philosophers of the future. As Schrift notes in
passing, Nietzscheʼs French incarnation was for a long
time a cultural-literary one, and it was sustained by a
variety of literary writers from Malraux and Camus to
Klossowski, Blanchot and Bataille; oddly, no mention
is made here of the Gide of Fruits of the Earth
(1897) and The Immoralist (1902). During the years
when French philosophy was dominated by alternative
imports such as the ʻthree Hʼsʼ (Hegel, Husserl and
Heidegger), Nietzsche remained a shadowy and even
suspect figure. It was, it is generally agreed, Deleuzeʼs
Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) that turned him into
a French philosopher. Henceforth Nietzscheʼs future
appeared to be both French and solidly assured.
Schriftʼs concern is not with the rectitude of the
many interpretations of Nietzscheʼs work that have
been proposed in France. He is concerned, rather,
with what might be termed Nietzscheʼs use-value
within recent French philosophy, and with the way in
which Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Cixous have
made use of him in developing their own projects.
Neither Deleuzeʼs pioneering study, Derridaʼs Spurs,
nor Foucaultʼs essays on Nietzsche are dealt with
here. Schrift further restricts his field of enquiry by
ruling himself incompetent to deal with the philo-
sophical projects of Bataille, Blanchot or Irigaray.
His modesty sounds genuine rather than feigned, and
the admission is refreshingly honest. More refreshing
still is Schriftʼs lucidity and clarity of expression. He
is no vulgarizer, but his readings of the more abstruse
pronouncements of Deleuze and Derrida in particular
are happily free of the clogged prose that obscures so
many accounts.
The primary use-value of Nietzsche for the
so-called ʻpoststructuralistʼ generation (Schriftʼs
delicate inverted commas are a timely reminder
that ʻFrench poststructuralismʼ is largely an Anglo-
American construct) is that he offers an alternative
both to the phenomenological privileging of subjec-
tivity and to the anti-subjectivism of structuralism.
Nietzsche makes it possible, that is, to raise new
questions about individual agency without relapsing
into either voluntarism or scientism. The attraction
for those wishing to escape the codified confines of
academic philosophy was irresistible. As Foucault
once remarked, some things are more fun to think
about than others. And for a long time, Nietzsche
was certainly fun.
For Derrida, Nietzscheʼs rejection of the binary
logic of ʻgood or evilʼ opens up a new line of approach
that avoids a history of philosophy replicating binary
divisions and choices. At this level, Nietzsche is a talis-
man, a guarantee of otherness rather than an author
to be expounded in any detail. Similarly, for Deleuze,
Nietzsche often stands for symbolic deterritorializ-
ation; his aphorisms are always elsewhere, always
resistant to codification. In the case of Cixous, the
link seems more tenuous, and her proposal that gift-
giving can provide the foundations for a feminine
libidinal economy, as opposed to a masculine economy
predicated on a desire to possess, appears to owe
more to Derridaʼs passing comments on Nietzsche
than to Nietzsche himself. Schriftʼs reading of Cixous
does, however, demonstrate just how widely Nietzsche
was disseminated in the 1970s, albeit in a sometimes
indirect manner.
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 47
 Schrift does not always avoid the obvious danger
inherent in an essay like this, and at times tends to
ascribe a little too much influence to his subject. That
Deleuzeʼs notions of desire as a productive force and
of the perpetual nature of becoming are indebted to
the Nietzschean will to power is not in dispute. But
one would like to learn more about how Deleuzeʼs
Nietzscheanism relates to the Bergsonian rhizomes that
sprout throughout his work. With Foucault, matters
may be more complex still. Thus, the Nietzschean
genealogy of his theory of power as a network of
relations of force, rather than an object to be taken,
held or lost, may have been filtered through Canguil-
hemʼs work on vitalism, and Canguilhem himself often
claimed to be a Nietzschean. To disentangle that line
of descent would no doubt require a new book, and it
is to be hoped that Schrift will write it.
In his final chapter, Schrift argues that Nietzscheʼs
French future is over for the moment, and that he is
now little more than another figure in the history of
philosophy. For Descombes in his influential Modern
French Philosophy, for Ferry and Renault in their
French Philosophy of the Sixties, as for Lyotard, the
Beyond the flesh
Chris Hables Gray, ed., The Cyborg Handbook, Routledge, New York and London, 1995. xx + 540 pp., £40.00
hb., £16.99 pb., 0 415 90848 5 hb., 0 415 90849 3 pb.
Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, eds, Posthuman Bodies, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and
Indianapolis, 1995. x + 275 pp., £27.50 hb., £13.50 pb., 0 253 32894 2 hb., 0 253 20970 6 pb.
There is growing interest in the human body as a
subject of investigation within philosophy. Although
primarily driven by the traditions of phenomenology
and poststructuralism, significant contributions have
been made by radical feminists and in the developing
queer literature.
The Cyborg Handbook, however, is really concerned
with the relationship between the body and new cyber-
netic and prosthetic technologies like virtual reality.
For the evolution of technology renders the possibility
of substituting physical operations and attributes, to
restore and enhance the functioning of the body. This
is achieved by assembling synthetic appliances and
modifying individual competencies through facilities
contrived to heighten human effectiveness. The tech-
nologized body is thus furnished with a redesigned
exterior made up of precisely modelled electronic
instruments, robotics and machinic devices. Not
surprisingly, there has been a considerable amount
of fascination with the philosophical significance of
48 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)
rallying cry ʻWe are not Nietzscheansʼ has become one
of the main slogans of a turn away from – and against
– poststructuralism. Kant appears once more to be the
only (or last) good German philosopher, as he was fifty
years ago. This is in part no doubt a banal generational
quarrel and a critique of a marginality that has become
an orthodoxy. More worryingly, it signals a rejection
of relativist perspectivism in the name of a return to
ʻRepublican valuesʼ and a ʻuniversalismʼ that is in
fact disturbingly Gallic in flavour. The new binary
choice appears to be: either Kant and the Republic,
or Nietzsche and barbarism.
Schrift is, however, optimistic about Nietzscheʼs
next French future, and suggests that the critique of
nationalisms and identity politics made in Human, Too
Human has considerable contemporary relevance. It
is hard to disagree. ʻSupposing truth to be a woman
– what?ʼ, asks Nietzsche. Sections of the French media
currently suppose a young Arab woman with a veil to
be a threat to the Republic. And supposing that she
has something to say about the truth of Republicanism
– what?
David Macey
cybernetic organisms, or cyborgs, which began with
Donna Harawayʼs powerful essay ʻA Manifesto for
Cyborgsʼ (1985). Since then, cyborgism has become a
central concept for many postmodern, ʻcyberfeministʼ
philosophers and cultural critics like Anne Balsamo,
Allucquere Rosanne Stone and Sadie Plant.
The Cyborg Handbook is a collection of articles
which attempt to define and explore these ques-
tions. It brings together the most important historical
and theoretical documents on cyborgs, particularly
with respect to their development in space, warfare,
medicine, politics, anthropology and the technological
imaginary. It suggests that there is not just one type
of cyborg but many different types, ranging from the
merely ʻrestorativeʼ (i.e. replacing lost functions/limbs)
through to the ʻenhancedʼ jet pilots of the Gulf War.
The editor argues that the distinction between humans
and machines is now almost imperceptible. Indeed, for
him, humanity is on the threshold of a new stage of
human-machine evolution; a stage which brings with it
not only cybernetic technologies but also vastly altered
linguistic capabilities and sense perceptions.
Posthuman Bodies, by contrast, is specifically con-
cerned with how the body, in conjunction with various
reproductive and cinematic technologies, impacts upon
feminist and queer cultural politics and identities. The
book is an assortment of articles that relate to disparate
postmodern cultural confrontations with the rationality
of the technologized body. The argument of the editors
is that ʻthe posthuman condition is upon us, and that
nostalgia for a humanist philosophy of self and other,
human and alien, normal and queer is merely the
echo of a battle that has already taken placeʼ (p. vii).
Posthuman Bodies is an exhortation to employ a wide
range of corporeal forms that supplant both the human
and the humanities. Halberstam and Livingston suggest
that such an undertaking arises out of the knowledge
that the licence that these singular identities pretend
to advance is extortionate, since it makes valueless
much of what matters to them. The pieces included
draw on a variety of disciplines, including film and
literary studies, cultural studies of science and science
fiction, feminist and queer studies. Whilst there is no
posthuman manifesto on offer, the contributors do ally
themselves with a variety of hyphenated (post-, sub-,
inter-, trans-, etc.) methodological principles.
The body is now firmly on the agenda. But a
number of theoretical problems remain. First, there is
an underemphasis in both these volumes on defining
the modern body and its history. Second, there is no
attempt to define what a postmodern body might be: is
it a ʻbody without organsʼ (Deleuze and Guattari)? A
body without a self? A self without a body? Certainly,
the posthuman body seems to have the capacity to
become monstrously Other when, as White puts it in
Posthuman Bodies, ʻthe menagerie withinʼ is let loose
on celluloid, as in Inoshiro Honda and Eiji Tsuburayaʼs
Attack of the Mushroom People. Third, neither of these
books contributes significantly to the development of
a critical theory of technology, although The Cyborg
Handbook does at least highlight the fact that imman-
ent cyborgization also presages alarming mutations
that may possibly transform human beings into mere
automatons. Posthuman dilemmas are multiplying
daily. Unfortunately, it is clear that our understanding
of the moral implications of technologized bodies is
not going to be enhanced by a postmodern philosophy
which is devoid of ethical foundations, let alone ethical
prescriptions.
John Armitage
The measure of
some things
Cairns Craig, Out of History: Narrative Paradigms
in Scottish and British Culture, Polygon, Edinburgh,
1996. 240 pp., £11.95 pb., 0 7486 6082 8.
This is a thoughtful analysis of conflicting modern
cultural identities written from a Scottish perspective.
Craig lectures on English literature at Edinburgh Uni-
versity, and this collection, largely a reprint of essays
in Cencrastus and Radical Scotland from 1981 to the
early 1990s, is notable for its informed discussions
of a shelf-full of classic Scottish (and other) novels
and books.
It is a mark of the rapid movement of debate and
recovery of cultural self-confidence in Scotland that
the early essays already have a slightly dated feel to
them. Do we still need to be lectured on ʻparochial-
ismʼ, for example, or told that ʻScottish culture has
cowered in the consciousness of its own inadequacyʼ
(p. 11)? The core of the book, however, is a fascinating
essay entitled ʻGeorge Orwell and the English Ideol-
ogyʼ which ranges widely over the themes of English
poetry, self-image, and their resonances in popular
politics in Britain. The cultural Right in England, from
T.S. Eliot to C.S. Sissons, is seen as employing a model
of tradition based on assumed continuities of language
and landscape. Its echoes in Edwin Muirʼs Scott and
Scotland (1936) give it a relevance to Scottish self-per-
ceptions. The English Left from Orwell on, so Craig
argues, implicitly accepted this idea of continuity,
theorizing for example about the distinctive ʻpatienceʼ
and ʻfundamental decencyʼ of the common people. The
older ʻNew Leftʼ writers (Raymond Williams or E.P.
Thompson) thus popularized culture-specific English
ʻtraditionsʼ to counter both the rival traditionalism of
Eliot, and the crude and suspect ʻinternationalismʼ
flowing from the Soviet Union. In this way, following
Marxʼs foregrounding of the development of English
capitalism in the nineteenth century, they prioritized
English history in a kind of unwitting cultural impe-
rialism. Even their critics in the New Left Review
prioritize England, Nairn in The Break-up of Britain
(1981) seeing Scottish popular culture as peculiarly
ʻdeformedʼ in comparison with Englandʼs.
More questionable is Craigʼs final essay, ʻPosting
Towards the Futureʼ. It is hardly a model of clarity.
Craig imperceptibly blends in exposition of othersʼ
views with his own argument, and deals in vague, ill-
defined contrasts. He begins by contrasting Marxism
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 49
(in its Soviet ʻHistmatʼ version) with a Nietzsche-
inspired ʻpostmodernismʼ, and ends by suggesting that
both overvalue a Western idea of history at the expense
of other perspectives. This last point, in so far as it tells
against Marxism, was made with considerably greater
clarity by John MacMurray in the 1930s.
In the section on ʻpostmodernismʼ, the abandon-
ment of England as the yardstick of all historical
development becomes an excuse for an unwarranted
rejection of the rationality of historical analysis per se.
Thus we are told: ʻthough we may wish to fight for
the truthfulness of our discourse, in the last analysis
we have to accept that if one discourse succeeds in
replacing another it is only as a function of the “will
to power”, or as a shift in some deep-structure of our
social organization that we cannot control, not as a
function of its superior valueʼ (p. 212). Yet when a
newspaper owner replaces the ʻdiscourseʼ with a left-
wing journalist like Paul Foot on the Daily Mirror
with ʻalternative discoursesʼ, this is surely not merely
an expression of the ʻwill to powerʼ outside of our
ʻcontrolʼ. It is better – more accurate – to speak of
something essential (e.g. the control of public space
by capital) occurring behind superficial appearances.
According to Craig, by contrast, ʻThe “postworld”
is a world in which it is impossible to distinguish
appearance from reality, because appearance is the
only realityʼ – an argument illustrated as follows: ʻbolt
art nouveau decorations on to modernist tower blocks
50 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)
and they will cease to be unacceptable prisons to their
tenants. The style is the meaningʼ (pp. 212–13). Never
mind fuel poverty, dampness or poor design then:
Protagoras lives.
As for the Scottish literary criticism, we might wish
at times that Craig took his own advice and validated
perspectives other than those of the political-cultural
activist. Moreover, admiration for the ʻliberation of
the voiceʼ in modern Scottish fiction and poetry is less
than convincing when accompanied by neglect of what
the ʻliberatedʼ voice actually says. All in all though,
Out of History represents a sustained and closely
argued effort, from a liberal standpoint, to nurture a
vital literary culture in Scotland.
Stephen Cowley
The last laugh
Adriana Cavarero, In Spite of Plato: A Feminist
Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, translated by Serena
Anderlini-DʼOnofrio and Aine OʼHealy, Polity Press,
Cambridge, 1995. xxii + 136 pp., £39.50 hb., £11.95
pb., 0 7456 1259 8 hb., 0 7456 1572 4 pb.
With few translations available, Italian feminist phil-
osophy has received little attention in the Anglophone
world. This welcome addition helps redress that situ-
ation and also demonstrates the inadequacy of the still
popular classification of feminist philosophy into either
French or Anglo-American branches. For, whilst it is
true that the influence of Luce Irigaray pervades her
book, Cavarero is by no means an acolyte or imitator;
to think so would be to ignore the mutual exchange of
ideas that Irigaray has enjoyed with Italian feminists
over the years. Furthermore, the influence of Irigaray
nestles here amongst many others (Le Dœuff, Arendt,
Kristeva, Clément, Cixous, Daly, Lispector, and no
doubt several Italians whom I did not recognize),
making this work the very embodiment of feminist
intertextuality.
Cavarero starts from the assumption that the mythic
figures of any given culture represent the ʻsymbolic
orderʼ which has shaped it, and that through these
figures a culture may recognize and understand itself.
What the mythic figures of ʻwestern cultureʼ reveal,
then, is a symbolic order in which ʻa male subject
claiming to be neutral/universal declares his central
position, disseminating a sense of the world cut to
his own clothʼ. This culture, so Cavarero argues, lacks
any female mythic figures not constructed according
to patriarchal codes, figures in whom a woman could
recognize herself as ʻa female subjectivity capable feminism more generally, that it is less successful in
of taking shape within her own symbolic orderʼ. To its reconstructive, ʻpositiveʼ aspects than as a critical
accede to the demand of such a female or feminine discourse. But this would probably be to make an
(the Italian does not differentiate) subjectivity, new overly rigid distinction. As the mocking laughter of
figures are needed; but, rather than creating them from the Thracian maid gets louder and louder, pointing to
scratch, Cavareroʼs strategy is to steal. Each of the four the sheer phenomenological implausibility of Platonic
sections of the book is named after a female figure idealism, the philosophical analysis simultaneously
ʻstolenʼ from Platoʼs dialogues and relocated within a picks apart the dualistic system on which it is based,
ʻfeminine symbolic orderʼ, which gives them new life until the laughter and the philosophical voice of the
and us the possibility of new mythic identifications. text merge. Much satisfaction is to be had from the
To that end, the book is probably written for the sisterly complicity, but Cavareroʼs fine readings of
woman reader, the active ʻfemale feministʼ reader Plato are accessible without it.
identified in Rosi Braidottiʼs useful foreword to the
Stella Sandford
English edition.
Lest this encourage the tendency to marginalize
feminist philosophy, it must at once be pointed out
that there is much in Cavareroʼs book which ought to
make the non-feminist mainstream of philosophy sit up Turning ethical
and take notice too. This is particularly evident in the
Bill Martin, Humanism and its Aftermath: The Shared
section which centres on the figure (in Platoʼs Thea-
Fate of Deconstruction and Politics, Humanities Press
etetus) of the Maidservant from Thrace who laughed
International, Atlantic Highlands NJ, 1995. xvi + 199
at Thales when, too busy gazing at the heavens, he
pp., £29.95 hb., £9.95 pb., 0 391 03893 1 hb., 0 391
neglected to look at his feet and fell into a well. For
03894 X pb.
Plato the Maidservant illustrates the inability of simple
folk to appreciate the concerns of the genuine philoso-
Much has been made of deconstructionʼs supposed
pher. Cavarero, by contrast, uses the womanʼs laughter
ʻethical turnʼ. But not enough, according to Bill Martin
as the starting point for a rigorous and compelling
– at least not in a practical sense. This book is a spir-
reading of the philosophical relationship between
ited, lucid, often highly polemical attempt to ʻthinkʼ
Parmenides and Plato, a critique of their dualistic
a deconstructive politics which can be engaged at
distinction between being and appearance, and an
a practical level. Martinʼs main opponents in this
invigorating account of the way in which Platonic
enterprise are those on the Left who would dismiss
philosophy was able to conceal the fact of sexual dif-
Derridaʼs work as a politically irrelevant species of
ference with the idealization and false universalization
idealist posturing and wordplay, and those in the
of ʻManʼ. So, whilst it is true that sexual difference is
deconstructive camp who play straight into the hands
Cavareroʼs theme, such an intelligent and interesting
of this caricature by presuming that there is nothing
analysis of Plato ought to be of concern to more than
more to do than tinker with texts.
just ʻfeministʼ philosophers.
The book has three main parts. In the first, Martin
In the other sections, Cavarero has Penelope illus-
examines the relevance to deconstruction of trad-
trate the interweaving of the intelligence and the
itionally Marxist preoccupations (class, history, the
senses, and Diotimaʼs speech from the Symposium is
concrete nature of social change). He criticizes existing
exposed as the mimetic device by which Plato ambigu-
deconstructionist treatments of the political (namely,
ously attempts to justify the exclusion of women from
conceptions of the ʻunavowableʼ or ʻinoperativeʼ com-
philosophy. Demeterʼs refusal to generate life becomes
munity in Blanchot and Nancy), for their rejection of
the inspiration for an understanding of motherhood
the very idea of a political ʻprojectʼ, and their con-
as choice and act rather than natural function, an
sequent ʻgloomy nihilismʼ. Deconstructive talk of ʻthe
understanding in which the phenomenon of chosen
otherʼ and ʻthe marginsʼ is rendered vacuous unless
abortion is invoked to illustrate the power of ʻmaternal
supplemented by some sort of analysis of the workings
subjectivityʼ to act outside of patriarchal control.
of capitalist imperialism. At the same time, Marxism
Of course there is much to take issue with in
cannot begin to confront deconstructive themes, or
Cavareroʼs thought. Recurrent references to the
ʻthe possibility of justiceʼ, without shedding its more
ʻGreat Motherʼ and the unexplained assumption of
crudely positivistic aspects. A concern for the other
the ʻfeminine symbolic orderʼ, for example, will
is hard to ground in classical historical material-
understandably worry some readers. It would be easy
ism. It needs something more: Martin seeks ʻa praxis
to say of Cavareroʼs work, as is sometimes said of
that strives toward the good within the open-ended

Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 51

structure of the infiniteʼ (p. 42) – and suggests that it
lies in an interweaving of Marxist and deconstructive
concerns.
Part 2 explores the trajectory of the humanist ideal
from Descartes, via Kant, down to Habermas and
Rorty. For Martin the promise of humanism has been
almost entirely hidden by its practice. There is a
tension between Cartesian, ʻcalculatingʼ, positivistic
humanists (for example, Hobbes, Mill and present-
day utilitarians) and those, like Kant and Derrida,
for whom the key aspiration is the concern for the
other. (Marx, incidentally, moves between these two
strands.) Unsurprisingly, Martin has strong objections
to Habermasʼs depiction of Derrida as a ʻYoung Con-
servativeʼ, and suggests that Habermasʼs own empha-
sis on communication as the vehicle of emancipation
is both internally problematic and reductively Euro-
centric: not the universalism he might think. Rorty,
too, comes in for extended criticism. Martin finds
that, for all his freewheeling anti-foundationalism and
prioritization of imagination and poetry over social
theory, Rorty deals in a domineering and chauvinis-
tic instrumental rationality which seeks to assimilate
other cultures into that of the contemporary bourgeois
West, without any self-questioning of the violence
that this involves.
Finally, Martin looks at Derridaʼs treatment of the
language of humanism in The Other Heading. For
Derrida, as for Kant, thinking is condemned to strug-
gle with metaphysics, and they are equally committed
to pursuing ʻthe infinite task set by the thinking of
justiceʼ, which ʻwill provide the kind of totalizing
ideal that is both necessary to and resistant to closureʼ
(p. 129). Martin rejects Alex Callinicosʼs ʻorthodox
Marxistʼ challenge to Derrida for presuming that he
takes no concrete political positions and is unaware of
the claims of materiality. In fact, Derrida poses ques-
tions about the nature of the humanist project which
point not in the direction of political detachment but,
on the contrary, towards a politically indispensable
rethinking of what he calls the ʻidea of Europeʼ and
thus the idea of humanism itself.
Martin pursues his arguments with great passion
and inventiveness. His marshalling of Derridaʼs texts
is impressive, if selective, and his quest to forge a link
between the ethical insights of deconstruction and a
sort of Kantian-Marxist political commitment is both
shrewdly conducted and highly readable. Whether it
works is another question. At one stage Habermas is
accused of giving up on the goal of a participatory
socialist society. Has Derrida ever had such a goal?
The humanistic continuum between Kant and Derrida
is vigorously asserted, but Martin never quite connects
it to a Marxist-deconstructionist political project. A
52 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)
stated aim (in the back-cover blurb) is ʻto make sense
of the politics of deconstruction for those outside the
academyʼ. Iʼm not sure that Martin succeeds in this,
but his book is a worthy attempt.
Gideon Calder
Anxious times
Ulrich Beck, Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk,
translated by Amos Weisz, Polity Press, Cambridge,
1995. 216 pp., £39.50 hb., £12.95 pb., 0 7456 07632
hb., 0 7456 13772 pb.
Ulrich Beck, Ecological Enlightenment: Essays on
the Politics of the Risk Society, translated by Mark
A. Ritter, Humanities Press International, Atlantic
Highlands NJ, 1995. v + 159 pp., £29.95 hb., £12.95
pb., 0 391 03831 1 hb., 0 391 03832 X pb.
Although translated from different original German
titles, both English volumes contain much identical
material. The former is longer and contains a greater
amount of qualification and elaboration. Each appears
to have been written in an attempt to address at least
some of the diverse critical reactions prompted by
Beckʼs Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (1992;
reviewed by Caroline New, RP 66, Spring 1994). It
is frustrating that they read very much as collections
of essays rather than as sustained arguments. The
reader has to work hard to reconstruct the underlying
thread of Beckʼs argument, and is often forced to
ask how each isolated skirmish fits into some overall
framework of analysis. Criticism has come at him from
many directions, and he appears overly concerned to
address all his detractors at once. Nevertheless, it is
possible to recognize three major sources of underlying
controversy which may help to structure a reading of
his latest work.
Is our heightened sense of insecurity in ʻrisk
societyʼ the result of a greater consciousness of self-
generated ecological risk? Or, contrariwise, is our
sense of heightened ecological risk the result of greater
social insecurity (as Mary Douglas suggests in her
commentary on Beck in Risk and Blame, 1994)? Beck
wants to go beyond the either/or; to accept that increas-
ing risk consciousness is bound up with a deficit of
trust in authoritative institutions and the break-up
of ʻtraditionalʼ forms of social solidarity, while still
maintaining that society is increasingly confronted
with the very real threat of self-annihilation.
A second question might be posed as follows:
does nature still grow on trees, or is ʻnatureʼ the
social construction of our technological interventions
and/or our ideological representations? Many of Beckʼs
German reviewers felt he was too uncritical towards
claims about nature made by the environmental move-
ment. The naturalistic fallacy of a pure nature, ʻout
thereʼ, underlies both romantic, deep-ecological theor-
ies of ʻequilibriumʼ and instrumentalist-technocratic
approaches to the ʻecological crisisʼ. Nevertheless,
Beckʼs rejection of a pure nature is tempered by a
distrust of knee-jerk social constructivism: ʻEcology is
guilty of forgetting about society, just as social science
and social theory are predicated on the forgetting of
ecologyʼ (Ecological Politics, p. 40). Beck argues
that it is through the growing contradictions within
technocratic modernity that the weaknesses of our
sense of ʻcoherenceʼ, both of natural and social order,
increasingly impinge upon our senses.
Finally, how can ecological politics hope to
reappropriate the same rational resources of moder-
nity (science, technology and bureaucracy) which are
so central to the ecological crisis in the first place
(a criticism of Beck made by Zygmunt Bauman in
his book Postmodern Ethics)? Can ʻreflexivityʼ save
modernity from itself? Beck seeks to demonstrate the
force of modern technocracyʼs own contradictions in
undermining its rationality claims. The nuclear indus-
tryʼs own worst enemy is itself, and not the marginal
protesters at the gate. Reflexivity emerges from within.
Beckʼs revolution without a subject, ʻwhich the prevail-
ing conditions have instigated against themselves with
the objectified power of the industrial momentumʼ,
seems to suggest that a deterministic technological
dynamic may undermine itself and set us free.
These three issues help mark out the territory ʻat
stakeʼ in the current debate over ʻriskʼ and ʻmodernityʼ.
No doubt they will remain hotly contested; not simply
because of disagreements with what Beck writes, but
over interpretations of what he means.
Matthew David and Iain Wilkinson
Radical democracy
William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization,
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1995.
243 pp., $49.95 hb., $19.95 pb., 0 8166 2668 5 hb., 0
8166 2669 3 pb.
The Cold War is over and democracy, we are told, has
won; the end of history has arrived and all that remains
is to drag the few remaining holdouts into the light of
reason. Yet the ʻvictoryʼ of pluralist democracy has left
us with a paradox. Acting in the name of unity – what
Michael Walzer might call ʻshared understandingʼ
– pluralism exacerbates disunity.
In his collection of essays, William Connolly
addresses the paradox in terms of the relationship
between fundamentalization and pluralization. Every
doctrine rests on some set of foundational assump-
tions. Fundamentalism is a political strategy to protect
those assumptions from interrogation. It defines its
critics as possessing all those defects which ʻGod,
nature, reason, nation or normalityʼ dictate must
be eradicated. There is a creative tension between
fundamentalization, which seeks to fortify and defend
boundaries, and pluralization, which challenges and
enlarges them. Every challenge risks adopting the
strategy of its counterpart and may become ʻfun-
damentalizedʼ itself. Connolly attempts to break
this cycle, using the techniques of genealogy and
deconstruction to expose the hidden contingency and
contestability of any set of ontological presuppositions
that claim absolute authority.
Though indebted to the ʻpostmodernistsʼ, Connolly
departs from them in his opinion that a viable alter-
native is available. The contestability of all founda-
tional claims – he calls them ʻontopoliticalʼ rather
than ʻontologicalʼ, to avoid the implied singular logic
of the latter – opens a space of ambivalence in which
political action may occur. Here an ʻethic of critical
responsivenessʼ and an air of ʻagonistic respectʼ may
be cultivated. Such an ethos may be said to obtain
when an individual or group is aware of both the con-
tingent nature of his/her/its identity and of the exclu-
sions thereby imposed. This enables the individual
or group to respond to difference not with hostility,
but with respect for that which allows his/her/its own
identity to be consolidated. Such responsiveness is
anticipatory, critical and self-revisionary. It responds
to pluralization before the constituency in question is
consolidated into a positive identity. It asks whether
this emergent constituency will attempt to impose
its identity as predominant and punish those who
transgress it. According to Connolly, the task of ethics
is to disallow any single moral code to dominate the
field. It is self-revisionary in that those responding to
pluralizing movements must revise their own identities
to allow room for new ones.
At a time when the foundations of the ʻmodernityʼ of
Hegel and Marx are collapsing under their own weight,
Connollyʼs ʻpost-Nietzscheanʼ stance, prioritizing the
richness of life over identity, is most compelling. At
a time when we are told that democracy has won,
Connolly urges us to consider what exactly democracy
is and what it might mean to live democratically.
Chris Erickson
Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 53
NEWS

Friendly fire
The hoaxing of Social Text

W
hen the editorial committee of the US journal Social Text chose ʻScience Warsʼ
as the title for last yearʼs special double issue (nos 46–47, Spring/Summer
1996), they could hardly have guessed how apt it would prove to be – not as
a description of its contents, but of the furore it would provoke. For with this issue of
Social Text, a new front was opened up in the ʻculture warsʼ which rage in the USA over
the disputed terrain where academic discourse meets mainstream politics in the distorting
mirror of the media: a complex and treacherous battlegound of ʻscienceʼ, where political
allies can be swiftly transformed into ideological foes in a hail of friendly fire.
The spark was the revelation that Social Text had been subjected to a carefully
managed hoax. Several months previously, Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New
York University, had submitted an article, ʻTransgressing the Boundaries: Toward a
Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravityʼ, claiming to offer support from
recent physics for various ʻpostmodernʼ epistemological positions. After some hesitation,
Social Text decided to carry it in their special issue on science. However, the day after
it appeared, another article by Sokal was published in the bimonthly Lingua Franca, in
which he exposed his own Social Text piece as a ʻparodyʼ of cultural studies of science,
intended to unmask its ʻshoddy scholarshipʼ.
His method, Sokal revealed, was to structure the article around ʻthe silliest quotes
about mathematics and physicsʼ from ʻthe most prominent academicsʼ, ʻinventing an argu-
ment praising them and linking them together.ʼ All of which, he claimed, was ʻvery easyʼ,
since he ʻwasnʼt obliged to respect any standards of evidence and logicʼ – although it will
have taken considerable industry, since the text is liberally referenced, being accompanied
by over twenty-one pages of notes and bibliography. Furthermore, Sokal argued, he had
perpetrated his hoax on behalf of the Left: specifically, that section of the Left increas-
ingly fed up with the ʻtrendyʼ obscurantism and wrong-headedness of a postmodern
cultural studies which, it believes, is undermining the prospect for ʻprogressive social
critiqueʼ by insisting upon the ʻsocial constructionʼ of reality. Nowhere are its idiocies
more apparent, so the argument runs, than in the ʻculturalʼ treatment of physical theory.
We were thus presented with a set-piece confrontation between a new, culturally-based
academic Left and its scientifically-oriented predecessor, in which the latter, apparently,
worsts the former by publicly revealing the illusory character of its clothing (intellectual
standards), and gains a rare opportunity to show off its own sense of humour into the
bargain.
The media had a field-day. The story made the cover of The New York Times (18/5/96);
it was picked up in Britain by The Observer (19/5/96); it became a subject of debate on
National Public Radio; and follow-up articles and exchanges appeared in everything from
Newsweek (3/6/96), the THES (7 & 21/6/96) and The Village Voice (21/6/96) to a host
of smaller US Left periodicals such as Tikkun and In These Times. Letters columns were
clogged with competing voices, with Sokal comically complaining about the number of
Stanley Fishʼs column-inches in the NYT (38) and refusing to continue playing there when
his own 12-incher was cut down to ʻ7.3ʼ by the lettersʼ editor (7.3!). Sokal chose instead
to post his reply on the Internet (with commentary on his threatened inches), although
how many inches it can be said to have occupied there is anyoneʼs guess. Sokal was not
alone in making use of the Internet, though, and its communities of interest have played a

54 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)

significant role in framing and sustaining the affair. But what, exactly, is the affair about?
And what does it actually show?

Misplaced solidarity
For Sokal and his supporters, there is little doubt (they have few doubts): it demonstrates
the bogus intellectual credentials of ʻpostmodernʼ cultural studies and reaffirms the
need for the Left to turn away from ʻwishful thinking, superstition and demagogueryʼ,
to reclaim its Enlightenment roots in the ʻscientific worldviewʼ (Sokal, talk at the NYU
Forum, 30/10/96). For the editors of Social Text, matters are predictably more complex.
Clearly, they regret the publication of Sokalʼs essay and acknowledge it to have been an
error of editorial judgement. But, they argue, it was a mistake generated by a misplaced
sense of cultural-political solidarity, rather than any particular intellectual affinity with the
offending piece –as its comparison with any of the sixteen other articles in the ʻScience
Warsʼ issue (by the likes of Steve Fuller, Sandra Harding, Ruth Hubbard, Joel Kovel,
Emily Martin, Les Levidow and Hilary Rose) shows.
Both stylistically and in tone, Sokalʼs essay stands out as an anomaly, but in Andrew
Rossʼs words: ʻthe editors considered that it might be of interest to readers as a “docu-
ment” of that time-honoured tradition in which modern physicists have discovered har-
monic resonances with their own reasoning in the field of philosophy and metaphysics.ʼ
And in its own perverse way, it undoubtedly is. According to Robbins (the other main
editor of the journal, besides Ross): ʻSocial Text was hoaxed not because it liked Sokalʼs
jargon-filled references to postmodern authorities – in fact we asked him to cut them out
– but because we thought he was a progressive scientist, a physicist who was willing to be
publicly critical of scientific orthodoxies.ʼ
The mistake was thus to allow the lure of an ally within the scientific establishment
to dictate judgment about the piece; to allow political convenience to suspend intellectual
judgment. In this respect, for some, it was a representative error, whatever oneʼs concep-
tion of physics, and however much one may disagree with Sokalʼs views about science:
representative of an overly strategic approach to intellectual matters, characteristic of that
section of the cultural Left to which Social Text, broadly speaking, belongs. (Although it
should be noted that it also represents a certain cultural Marxism, which is one reason it
fell for the hoax in the first place. It takes science seriously; seriously enough to be scepti-
cal of its conventional self-understanding.) But what of the politics of the hoax itself?

Media Wars
One of the most salient aspects of the affair has been Sokalʼs recourse to the mainstream
media to conduct an ideological campaign against another section of the Left. Sokal has
used the media skilfully, both to register his hoax and to
generalise its point into a full-scale attack on ʻcultural studies
of scienceʼ and ʻpostmodern cultural studiesʼ (which he tends to
treat as equivalents). And for many on the Left, his hoax was
a welcome public counter to the attention-grabbing ʻrelativismʼ
of much recent cultural theory. Yet Sokal has also provided
the press with an ideal occasion to prosecute two of its favour-
ite pastimes – disparaging intellectualism, of any kind, and
travestying the Left – while bolstering the sagging image of
the ʻscientistʼ as a figure of authority and a man of reason and
good sense. (Relishing the ʻimpenetrable hodge-podge of jargon
[and] buzzwordsʼ in Sokalʼs hoax essay, the New York Times
(18/5/96) selected ʻhegemonyʼ and ʻepistemologicalʼ for especial
derision ... postmodern nonsense indeed!)
This was Sokalʼs major media card: his status as an ʻexpertʼ
in modern physics legitimated his views about the philosophy
of science, and thereby about the cultural study of science,

Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997) 55

from whence it was but one small step to cultural studies as a whole. That these views
are simplistic, at best, and never short of commensensical was an added bonus. Stanley
Fish (Professor of English and Law at Duke University and executive editor of its Press,
which publishes Social Text) was wheeled in by the NYT to provide an alternative account
of ʻsocial constructionʼ, but nobody in the press thought to ask the likes of Hilary Putnam
what he thought about Sokalʼs bracingly down-to-earth conception of ʻrealityʼ, or the
confidence with which he distinguishes ʻtruthʼ from ʻclaims of truthʼ, and ʻknowledgeʼ from
ʻpretensions to knowledgeʼ. Nor was anybody interested in the decidedly non-commonsensi-
cal character of Sokalʼs own scientific work, as spelled out in such papers as ʻNew Lower
Bounds on the Self-Avoiding-Walk Connective Constantʼ.
Philosophy has been notable by its absence, which is just as well for Sokal, since as
Linda Martín Alcoff has pointed out, his robust views would be rejected by nearly all con-
temporary philosophers of science - irrespective of their politics. Yet, weirdly, philosophy
is precisely what Sokal now claims his hoax was all about. ʻSocial Text is not my enemy,
nor is it my main intellectual targetʼ, he insisted at the recent Forum at NYU. In fact, ʻthis
affair is in my view not primarily about science ... What I believe this debate is principally
about ... is the nature of truth, reason and objectivityʼ. But this is not what it has been
about for the media. Nor is it what it was originally about for Sokal, when he started it all
off by feeding the press yet another version of one of its most relentlessly promulgated nar-
ratives: the story of a decline in a ʻstandardsʼ. It was about knocking the cultural Left, and
if that meant reinforcing conservative dogmas about ʻdeclining standardsʼ, the ʻemptinessʼ
of fashion and the ʻobscurantismʼ of cultural minorities, so be it.
There has always been a section of the radical Left which is more comfortable in the
company of Burkeans than sexual libertarians. And it is here, perhaps, rather than in the
philosophical disputes about science (which have been going on since the 1960s), that the
heart of the matter lies: in a heightening of intellectual antagonisms between generations of
the Left. It is an aspect of the affair that has been most prominent in the parade of opin-
ions on the Internet.
Fantasies of ‘pomos’
One of the functions of the Internet has been to expose to immediate public scrutiny
exchanges that would previously have taken place in private, over a longer period of time.
One of the dangers of this exposure is that intemperate and hastily conceived thoughts
can readily take on the character of ʻpositionsʼ in highly charged debates. One of the
advantages, however, is that the motivations underlying different views are more legible
than usual. So it is that the ad hominem attacks on Stanley Aronowitz and Andrew Ross
– against which Sokal himself has recently protested – have much to tell us about the
anxieties, fantasies and displacements sustaining what is an increasingly harmful divide
between an older ʻscientificallyʼ-oriented and a younger ʻculturallyʼ-oriented Left.
It is tempting (and no doubt, to some, reassuring) to conceive of the divide as structured
by differing attitudes to Marxism. But this is too simple. Not just because the intellectual
culture of Marxism is pervasive, if uneven, on both sides, but because antipathy to the cul-
tural Left tends to be focused on a particular composite image: ʻpomosʼ (postmodernists),
who have alledgedly taken over the academy, dismissing material interests and laying waste
to intellectual standards in their dogged pursuit of identity politics, fashionable clothing
and academic careers. In the exchanges provoked by Sokalʼs hoax, ʻpomosʼ are the ideal
imaginary others of the ʻtrue Marxistsʼ (and vice versa), and they are modeled on the
mediaʼs fantasy projection of Andrew Ross. (Clothing places a key metaphorical role in
these invectives.)
One might, I think, be forgiven for finding this spectacle both intellectually irritat-
ing and politically depressing: irritating, because of the lowering of the level of debate that
it involves; depressing, because it is so clearly the product of a political defeat, from which
it distracts attention. At a time when the Left needs all the solidarity it can muster just to
survive, there has to be a better way for it to conduct its debates than this.
Peter Osborne

56 Radical Philosophy 81 (Jan/Feb 1997)