R A D I C A L P H I L O S O P H Y

a journal of socialist and feminist philosophy

85 CONTENTS SEPT/OCT 1997

Editorial collective COMMENTARY

Chris Arthur, Ted Benton, Nadine Cartner,
Andrew Collier, Diana Coole, Peter Dews, CULTURE CLASH
Roy Edgley, Gregory Elliott, Howard Simon Bromley .............................................................................................. 2
Feather, Jean Grimshaw, Kathleen Lennon,
Joseph McCarney, Kevin Magill, Peter
Osborne, Stella Sandford, Sean Sayers, ARTICLES
Kate Soper THE COASTLINE OF EXPERIENCE: MATERIALISM AND
Issue editor
METAPHYSICS IN ADORNO
Stella Sandford Simon Jarvis .................................................................................................. 7
Reviews editor BAKHTIN, CASSIRER AND SYMBOLIC FORMS
Sean Sayers
Craig Brandist .............................................................................................. 20
Contributors COSMOPOLITANISM AND BOREDOM
Simon Bromley teaches International Bruce Robbins .............................................................................................. 28
Political Economy at the University of
Leeds. He is the author of Rethinking
Middle East Politics (Polity Press, 1994). REVIEWS
Simon Jarvis teaches English at Robinson Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde
College, Cambridge. His book Adorno: A Gordon Finlayson ........................................................................................ 33
Critical Introduction is forthcoming from
Polity Press, Spring 1998. Michael Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness and
Craig Brandist is HRB Research Fellow
the Theory of Ideology
in the Bakhtin Centre and Department of Alex Callinicos ............................................................................................. 36
Russian and Slavonic Literature at the
University of Sheffield. His publications Jacques Bouveresse, Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious
include Carnival Culture and the Soviet Donald Levy, Freud Among the Philosophers: The Psychoanalytic
Modernist Novel (Macmillan, 1996). Unconscious and its Philosophical Critics
Bruce Robbins is Professor of English David Snelling .............................................................................................. 38
and Comparative Literature at Rutgers Linda Martín Alcoff, Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory
University. His books include Secular
Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Gill Howie..................................................................................................... 40
Culture (Verso, 1993). He is an editor of
the journal Social Text.
Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach
David Archard............................................................................................... 41
Typing (WP input) by Jo Foster Christopher J. Arthur, ed., Engels Today: A Centenary Appreciation
Tel: 0181 341 9238 Ian Hunt ........................................................................................................ 43
Layout by Petra Pryke Jean-Paul Sartre and Benny Lévy, Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews
Tel: 0171 243 1464
David Macey................................................................................................. 44
Copyedited and typeset by
Robin Gable and Lucy Morton Stanley Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzscheʼs Zarathustra
Tel: 0181 318 1676 Francesca Cauchi ......................................................................................... 45
Design by Peter Osborne & Stella Sandford Robyn Ferrell, Passion in Theory: Conceptions of Freud and Lacan
Printed by Russell Press, Radford Mill, Margaret Whitford ....................................................................................... 46
Norton Street, Nottingham NG7 3HN John D. Cash, Identity, Ideology and Conflict: The Structuration of Politics
in Northern Ireland
Bookshop distribution
Paul Gilbert .................................................................................................. 47
UK: Central Books,
99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN Alan How, The Habermas–Gadamer Debate and the Nature of the Social:
Tel: 0181 986 4854 Back to Bedrock
USA: Bernard de Boer, 113 East Centre Ian Craib ....................................................................................................... 48
Street, Nutley, New Jersey 07100,
Tel: 201 667 9300; Véronique M. Foti, ed., Merleau-Ponty: Difference, Materiality, Painting
Ubiquity Distributors Inc., 607 Degraw Diana Coole .................................................................................................. 49
Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217,
Tel: 718 875 5491;
Fine Print Distributors, 500 Pampa Drive, NEWS
Austin, Texas 78752-3028. DICTATING RESEARCH: Feminist Philosophy and the RAE
Tel: 512-452-8709
Christine Battersby ...................................................................................... 50

Cover: Andy Fisher, Glove, 1997 The Case of Economics

Frederick S. Lee and Sandra Harley........................................................... 51
Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd.
http://www.ukc.ac.uk/cprs/phil/rp/ OBITUARY
Wal Suchting, 1931–1997
John Rosenthal............................................................................................ 55
© Radical Philosophy Ltd
COMMENTARY

Culture clash
Simon Bromley

A
lmost as soon as the Cold War framework of Western and United States
foreign policy began to dissolve in the early 1990s, the op-ed pages of the
Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and such conservative periodicals as
The National Interest and The Atlantic Monthly began to feature articles about ʻThe
West and the Restʼ, ʻThe Roots of Muslim Rageʼ, and ʻThe Coming Anarchyʼ. Not to
be outdone, and ever-ready to distil the conservative preoccupations of the US foreign
policy elite into the sedulous prose of academic political science, in the summer of
1993 Samuel Huntington published his now famous article, ʻThe Clash of Civilizationsʼ,
in Foreign Affairs. He has now expanded, modified and embellished the original argu-
ment into a sustained meditation on the new conjuncture of global politics in The Clash
of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996).
The Clash of Civilizations has been widely acclaimed by figures such as Kissinger,
Brzezinski and Fukuyama, and it has been respectfully, if not uncritically, reviewed
in such liberal journals as the New York Review of Books and the London Review of
Books. The attention that Huntington has received once again attests to his unparalleled
ability to articulate and popularize a certain conservative common sense, but to do so
by engaging in an apparently meaningful dialogue with the political adversaries of that
common sense. It is above all this timely capacity to play to the gallery, to resonate
widely with friend and foe, that has marked Huntingtonʼs career ever since his rise
to fame in the year of the Tet Offensive, with the publication of Political Order in
Changing Societies (1968). For while Huntington has played only a relatively minor
role in the formulation of US foreign policy as compared with his near contemporaries
at Harvard, Kissinger and Brzezinski, he has risen to the presidency of the American
Political Science Association and has had a distinguished academic career.
In his new book Huntington puts these personal and political attachments to work in
attempting to develop a new doctrine for Western, and specifically US, foreign policy
after the Cold War. The striking claim at the centre of Huntingtonʼs argument is that
the bipolar world of superpower ideological rivalry is being replaced by the clash of
civilizations: ʻBosnia is everyoneʼs Spain.ʼ Global politics is still primarily a world of
power politics among states, but states, especially the core ones of each major civiliza-
tion, are increasingly bandwagoning with their cultural kin and balancing against the
cultural other. In turn, this claim is elaborated in two contrasting registers which are
not always coherently orchestrated, and it is in the ensuing discordance that the real
meaning of Huntingtonʼs message may be heard. On the one hand, he advances a series
of linked propositions about the importance of civilizations in human history and the
current rise of what he sees as civilizational consciousness. On the other, he is con-

2 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

cerned to diagnose the predicament of one particular civilization: the West. And in the
end, it is a deeply conservative rendition of the Western predicament that dictates the
overall composition of Huntingtonʼs argument and the new doctrine flowing from it.

Modernization and the West

To begin with, Huntington draws a sharp distinction between the processes of ʻmod-
ernizationʼ (economic and technological development, growing social differentiation
and popular mobilization, state-building and nation-formation), and the cultural
attributes of ʻWesternizationʼ (individualism, secularism, notions of universal human
rights, the rule of law, and pluralist forms of representation). In the shadow of the rise
to global dominance of the West, countries have three choices: they may resist both
Westernization and modernization (parts of Africa?), though this is not a long-term
option; they may attempt to modernize by Westernizing (Turkey and Japan, Russia and
Mexico); and they may modernize without significant Westernization (China and the
contemporary Islamic world). According to Huntington, the latter path is increasingly
the dominant one: ʻIn fundamental ways, the world is becoming more modern and less
Western.ʼ Huntington suggests that this is clearly the case for those societies currently
modernizing as the Westʼs power declines: ʻThe revolt against the West was originally
legitimated by asserting the universality of Western values; it is now legitimated by
asserting the superiority of non-Western values.ʼ He also suggests that it is increas-
ingly true even for those societies which originally modernized in the era of Western
dominance: ʻInitially, Westernization and modernization are closely linked, with the
non-Western society absorbing substantial elements of Western culture and making
slow progress towards modernization. As the pace of modernization increases, however,
the rate of Westernization declines and the indigenous culture goes through a revival.
Further modernization then alters the civilizational balance of power between the West
and the non-Western society and strengthens commitment to the indigenous culture.ʼ
Next, Huntington argues that the illusion that modernization was synonymous
with Westernization merely reflected the temporary ascendancy of Western power in
European imperialism and US hegemony; that a ʻuniversal civilization can only be
the product of universal powerʼ; and that as the dynamism of Asian (predominantly
Chinese) economic and Islamic demographic growth rates overwhelm those of the West,
so Western universalism will increasingly be seen – and rightly so, in Huntingtonʼs
neat accommodation with the self-conceptions of his foes – as Western arrogance: ʻThe
dangerous clashes of the future are likely to arise from the interaction of Western arro-
gance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic assertiveness.ʼ Moreover, Huntington maintains
that there is an internal, domestic corollary to this false and immoral identification of
Western values as universal: by denying its uniqueness in the face of internal challenges
from strangers in its midst, the West is in danger of being undermined by ʻproblems of
moral decline, cultural suicide, and political disunityʼ.

Universal chauvinsm or liberal universalism?

Who are these strangers? In Europe they are the Muslims; in the United States
they are the Black and the Hispanic populations. Huntingtonʼs ultimate concern is
with the USA, and what he presents as the multicultural challenge to its identity as
a part of Western civilization: ʻIf the United States is de-Westernized [by non-
White multiculturalism], the West is reduced to Europe … a minuscule and declin-
ing part of the worldʼs population on a small and inconsequential peninsula at the
extremity of the Eurasian land mass.ʼ
Huntingtonʼs diagnosis has given as much comfort to conservatives at home as
it has to those proclaiming their cultural peculiarity abroad. For all its resonance,
however, the argument is not only false, but also ugly and pernicious. As his

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 3

liberal critics have noted, Huntingtonʼs argument is false because cultures are not
unified, closed totalities centred upon univocal religious doctrines, but are rather
multiform, open and contested – subject to interpretation and contestation in rela-
tion to different interests and contexts. Indeed, Huntingtonʼs own attempt to portray
the conflicts and issues of contemporary international politics is in fact remarkably
conventional: it is all about the control of territory, peoples, sea lanes, markets,
military capability, etc., with cultural alignments being mobilized as means to these
ends. Nowhere does Huntington actually identify a significant conflict over culture.
More importantly, however, Huntingtonʼs schema of a bipolar world characterized
by ideological division being replaced by a multi-polar civilizational order is radically
insufficient to make sense of the contours of contemporary global politics. What he
spectacularly fails to explain is what ʻthe rise of the Westʼ and the response to it have
all been about. Though the ʻrevolt against the Westʼ began before the First World War,
it was essentially a post-Second World War phenomenon and, as such, intersected in
complex ways with the Cold War. Important as this latter conflict was, however, it was
not the only development of major international significance. At least as important were
two other developments, each very closely related to the other: namely, the reconstruc-
tion of the unity of the capitalist world market and its increasing expansion on a global
scale; and the generalization of state sovereignty as the political form of the modern
international system. These developments, though Western in (geographical) origin, are
now universal in scope, if uneven in penetration. (Indeed, it was the very strength of the
consolidation of these forms of economic and political power in their capitalist forms on
a global scale that rendered the communist challenge redundant in the long run.)
Throughout this epoch attempts to foster economic growth and consolidate legitimate
political authority across the national territory have been the fixed points around which
the politics of the South have turned, both domestically and internationally. Within this
matrix of developmental possibilities, the forms of ideological or cultural imaginings are
now, of necessity, predominantly nationalist. In this context, the ʻreligiousʼ revival that
Huntington and others read as a sign of the weakening of national identification, and as
a rise of ʻkin-countryʼ international politics, is nothing of the sort. On the contrary, both
domestically and internationally, these movements represent a fundamental continuity
with the postwar co-ordinates of development noted above: they re-present new forms
of a basically nationalist project. This can be seen in a number of ways once we move
beyond the incipiently racist imagin-ings of Huntington and others (ʻraceʼ has now
become ʻcultureʼ).
In relation to the
Islamic world, for example,
Huntingtonʼs optic is an
instance of the temptation,
in Sami Zubaidaʼs helpful
phrase, to ʻread history
backwardsʼ, ʻseeing the
current “revival” as the
culmination of a line of
development of Islamic
politics, rather than as
the product of recent
combinations of forces and
eventsʼ. Domestically, the
fact is that the dominant
literate discourses of the
Middle East have been

4 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

local adaptations of the social and political thought of the West, and ʻIslamʼ (which
is neither a culture nor a civilization, but a religion, and like all religions is socially
indeterminate) has only ever prospered as a political force when it has adapted to their
terrain; political Islam was born when it adapted to the matrix framed by the sovereign
state, to nationalism (see, especially, Aziz Al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities [1993]
and Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism [1993]). Equally, internationally, there is precious
little that is pan- about the advent of political Islam. Of course, there are demonstration
effects; there is mutual interference in the ʻinternalʼ affairs of other states; there is
money (mostly Saudi) flowing around; and so on. Cross-border co-operation between
co-religionists is not only strikingly rare; even where it does occur, it is based not on
general feelings of mutual religiosity, but on specific political calculations of interest
and advantage. As to Huntingtonʼs thesis of a Sino-Islamic alliance against the West,
perhaps the least said, the better – since the most powerful military state in the world
seeks to limit the acquisition of military technology by China and Iran, why do we
need to invoke civilizational considerations to explain their co-operation in military
matters?

A gathering racism?
Huntington makes much of what Ronald Dore has called the ʻsecond generation indi-
genization phenomenonʼ – the turning away from Western secular ideologies towards
indigenous religions and cultures by the masses and second-generation, post-independ-
ence elites. In Huntingtonʼs reading, multiculturalism in the West represents exactly the
same phenomenon. This is undoubtedly a powerful and important development, but the
image of a return to an indigenous culture is misleading, since what is mobilized is
invariably a reworked version of the old, more or less appropriate to the circumstances
of the new. And, as Dore has himself pointed out, to the extent that this second-genera-
tion culture cannot cope with the demands of modernization, which in popular terms
now includes many of the freedoms that Huntington takes to be specifically Western,
it is in turn rejected or reworked by the subsequent generations. To that extent, the
culture of the West has become global and universal: conflicts and negotiations around
individual rights (including freedom of thought), the rule of law, and pluralist forms of
politics are now present within all civilizations. Huntington simply refuses to listen to
these voices in other places, preferring to indulge the siren calls of cultural chauvinism.
In an exactly parallel fashion, Huntington presents multiculturalism within the West
(particularly in the United States) as an attempt to reject the Westʼs cultural heritage
and to overthrow its liberal political arrangements. A more convincing interpretation,
one more ready to engage with these new voices in the spirit of liberal tolerance and
negotiation, would see them as attempts to expand and develop the freedoms of Western
societies to incorporate all, and not just their White, people. Again, Huntington refuses
to attend to these voices; refuses to recognize the legitimate claims of peoples who are
not cultural others, but who are for the most part simply involved in the continuing
attempt to elaborate and expand notions of rights and freedoms on a more inclusive,
universalist basis. Against this, Huntington would have conservatives in the West make
themselves the implicit allies of illiberal authoritarians in the rest of the world – and in
the name of what? Well, in defence of the inherited position of the Whites in the United
States. In sum, Huntington advocates an inversion of the liberal combination of univer-
salism abroad and multiculturalism at home to give us universal White domination at
home and an inter-civilizational modus vivendi among diverse chauvinisms abroad.
When, early in his career, Huntington advocated the mass bombing of the rural
peasantry in Vietnam to drive them into the urban areas of government control, one of
his colleagues remarked that the trouble with Sam was that he didnʼt know the differ-
ence between pacification and genocide. It is a sobering comment on the reaction of

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 5

conservative America to its loss of ideological bearings after the certainties of the Cold
War that The Clash of Civilizations concludes with Huntington now being unable to tell
the difference between the realpolitik remaking of world order and a racist attack on
some of the better aspects of Western liberalism.

6 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

The coastline of experience
Materialism and metaphysics
in Adorno

Simon Jarvis

Such a critique confines all our speculative claims not cease to play tricks with reason and continually
rigidly to the sphere of possible experience; and it entrap it into momentary aberrations ever and again
does this not by shallow scoffing at ever-repeated calling for correction.ʼ2
failures or pious sighs over the limits of our reason,
These passages from Kantʼs work offer a useful
but by an effective determining of these limits in
introduction to the difficulty of thinking without illu-
accordance with established principles, inscribing
its nihil ulterius on those Pillars of Hercules which sions. Materialists have usually regarded themselves
nature herself has erected in order that the voyage as the bearers of just such illusionless thinking. But
of our reason may be extended no further than the it often appears more difficult to say what materialism
continuous coastline of experience itself reaches is. Why should this be? Surely materialism is the
– a coast we cannot leave without venturing upon
most straightforward of philosophical creeds, not one
a shoreless ocean which, after alluring us with
requiring any complex negotiation with idealism, with
ever-deceptive prospects, compels us in the end to
abandon as hopeless all this vexatious and tedious phenomenology, with ʻfundamental ontologyʼ? So at
endeavour. least the confidence with which this word is sometimes
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason1 put about in the human sciences would suggest. But
Adornoʼs materialism starts from a painful awareness
This passage from the transcendental dialectic of the
that it is much more difficult really to think as a
Critique of Pure Reason argues for the need to set
materialist than it is to lay claim to that label; through
properly determined limits to metaphysical speculation.
an awareness, indeed, that it is often just where this
The metaphor reveals a redundance in the procedure
label is most vehemently and immediately claimed that
of the transcendental dialectic. Critique inscribes its
a particularly unreflective kind of metaphysics is all
ʻnihil ulteriusʼ, but on pillars which nature herself has
the more powerfully at work. For all the unfashionable-
already erected. The limit which the critic is to set is
ness of its diction, what Adornoʼs attempt to rethink
one that already exists. Its ʻnihil ulteriusʼ, moreover, is
misleading: there is not nothing beyond these limits, materialism without dogmatism is centrally addressing
but an (albeit shoreless) ʻoceanʼ. These difficulties are is nothing other than the problem of ʻgivenness, or, to
not contingent upon this metaphor but are incident to use the Hegelian term, immediacyʼ,3 which has proved
the whole project of reasonʼs self-limiting critique. It of such continuing importance, in radically divergent
is not clear why criticism should need to ʻsetʼ a limit ways, not only for phenomenology, fundamental ontol-
which is regarded as naturally inherent in reason: or ogy and deconstruction, but also for much recent work
rather, this need raises the acute difficulty that reason in analytical philosophy.4
is supposed to be both naturally transgressive and The problem may be put like this. All attempts
critically self-limiting. So that while criticism may beat to avoid idealist claims of the type that thought
its bounds, it cannot put a stop to lawless speculation. constitutes, shapes, or is identical with, its objects
Such speculation is ʻinseparable from human reason, appear to run the opposite risk of claiming access to
and even after its deceptiveness has been exposed, will immediacy, to a transcendence which is just ʻgivenʼ. In

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 7

such invocations, as Hegel himself forcefully pointed mediated through experience. In making this insist-
out, we are effectively invited to have faith in some ence, Kant wants to distinguish between what we can
datum or framework for data which is sheerly given. claim knowledge of, and what we can only think of.
Our knowledge of such ʻgivensʼ is mistakenly thought The pure concepts of the understanding by themselves
of as being purely passive.5 Enquiry must simply halt afford no knowledge of objects. But we must be able
before them. Dogmatic materialism of this kind is not to think of an object as it is in itself, irrespective of
at all free from metaphysics in the way it supposes. all experience of it. If we could not think of things in
When thinking comes to a halt with an abstract appeal this way, Kant argues, we would be left in the absurd
to history, or society, or socio-historical material position of positing appearance without anything that
specificity, or any other form of givenness, it might does the appearing.7 Yet although we must be able to
as well stop with God. The lesson which Adorno think the idea of a thing ʻconsidered as it is in itselfʼ,
draws is that whether thinking is really materialist it is nevertheless beyond our experience. We can only
is not decided by how often the word ʻmaterialismʼ know things considered as they ʻappearʼ to conscious-
is repeated, but by what happens in that thinking. ness, only as ʻphenomenaʼ.
Materialist thinking would need to ask how thinking Adorno, however, points out that a pure form with-
about that which appears to escape conceptuality is out any content is not merely unknowable, but also
even imaginable. unthinkable. A thought which is not a thought of
In this article I want to attempt to understand anything will be not merely ʻemptyʼ, as Kant concedes,
the connection between the materialist and the meta- but also blind, not a thought at all.8 If the categorial
physical motifs in Adornoʼs thinking. This attempt forms specified by Kant are the conditions of the
will focus on Adornoʼs relationship to Kantʼs critical possibility of experience, the reverse is equally true:
thought, in order to explicate what Adorno means by the categorial forms themselves are only made possible
referring to his own thinking as critical thinking freed by the experience whose conditions of possibility they
from the armour of transcendental method. The article are supposed to provide.9 Accordingly those forms
falls into three main parts. In the first and longest part, could not be invariant, but would necessarily change
I give an account of Adornoʼs reflections on trans- as experience changes.
cendental epistemology and his reasons for thinking it It is sometimes thought that this argument rests
unworkable. In part two I ask whether these objections on a misunderstanding of Kantʼs categorial forms as
to transcendental epistemology need oblige Adorno to though they designated not pure forms but beings.10
adopt a fundamental ontology or a fully-fledged meta- This is a mistake. It is true that Adorno does not
physic of his own. In part three I consider the status of believe that we can intelligibly refer to a pure form
Adornoʼs appeals to negativity in his answers to these without any substance, any more than a substance
questions. Finally, a brief conclusion attempts to sketch without any form is thinkable.11 His target, however,
the relation of these epistemological and metaphysical is not the ontological status of the conditions of the
problems to problems of praxis which for reasons of possibility of experience, but the supposed invariance
space cannot be fully covered in this article. of these conditions.
Adornoʼs account of Kantʼs transcendental subject
The metacritique of transcendental is motivated by a wish to arrive at a different kind
epistemology of concept of experience from Kantʼs.12 Kant insisted
It is unfortunate that Adornoʼs book on phenomen- that all experience requires a concept, or form of
ology – ʻOn the Metacritique of Epistemologyʼ – has understanding, to be joined with a (sensible) intuition.
been translated into English under the title Against Without intuitions, my experience would simply be
Epistemology, because the idea of ʻmetacritiqueʼ is an empty, nothing, because concepts have no content
important one to him.6 Adornoʼs approach to epistem- of themselves. Nor is it any easier to imagine the
ology is a metacritique in the sense that it performs possibility of experience without conceptual forms, in
a further critique on critical enquiry itself. It asks Kantʼs view, since not only would there be no sense in
not only ʻwhat are the conditions of the possibility which I could be said to ʻhaveʼ my experiences, but it is
of experience?ʼ, but ʻwhat are such a transcendental not possible to imagine what a substance devoid of all
enquiryʼs own conditions of possibility?ʼ The pivot form could actually be like. But this did not mean that
of this metacritique is an account of Kantʼs transcen- concepts and intuitions could not be separated out by
dental subject. Adorno proceeds by radicalizing Kantʼs philosophers. On the contrary, it was ʻa strong reason
own insistence that all knowledge of objects must be for carefully separating and distinguishing the one

8 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

from the otherʼ for epistemological purposes. Adorno – might no longer apply. However, like all attempts
is less convinced that this kind of methodological to criticize transcendental inquiry by ʻradicalizingʼ it,
separation is possible. The result of any such separa- Adornoʼs attempt to think with and against Kant has
tion, for Adorno, is that experience comes to look as remained liable to the suspicion that, far from really
though it were something which was somehow added radicalizing transcendental inquiry, it instead falls
up by joining concept with intuition,13 or, to put the back from it, into one or other of the bad alternatives
matter more precisely, as though it were manufactured which Kant was attempting to get beyond. Its appeal to
by the pure activity of concepts upon the raw material experience can be seen as a relapse into a historicizing
of intuition.14 or sociologizing dogmatism, which thinks about Kant
These considerations throw a rather different light from a perspective already set up by some dogma-
on Kantʼs ʻblockʼ – his insistence that pure concepts tically posited opinions about social history. Its attack
of the understanding cannot by themselves provide on the prohibition on the experience of transcendence,
knowledge of objects. This prohibition on dogmatic conversely, can be seen as a relapse into pre-critical
metaphysics, Adorno suggests, is itself dogmatically metaphysics. The charge of a relapse into pre-critical
formulated, because of the claim that the conditions metaphysics is discussed later. Here we need to focus
of the possibility of experience are timeless. This in more detail on Adornoʼs arguments about experi-
invariance has the result of converting certain features ence and its conditions of possibility.
of variable experience itself into invariants. In particu- As Hans-Georg Gadamer has remarked, the concept
lar it implies that it is impossible for us to experience of experience is one of the least clarified concepts used
(rather than just ʻthinkʼ or ʻpostulateʼ) freedom, or our by philosophers and yet one of those to which appeal
own subjectivity in general. It also suggests that it is is most often made.18 Adornoʼs use of the concept
impossibile to know things as they are in themselves appears to struggle beneath this difficulty more than
rather than as they appear to consciousness.15 most others. The concept of experience is a constant
Adorno does not think that Kant simply made point of reference in his criticisms of the philosophical
a mistake about experience. He argues that Kantʼs tradition since Kant, yet he refuses to provide an
enquiry into the conditions of the possibility of expe- unambiguous definition for it. What is more, it is not
rience truthfully bears witness to certain structural hard to think of plausible defences against Adornoʼs
features of modern natural-historical experience. The criticisms of the transcendental concept of experi-
Kantian object [Gegenstand] produced by ʻpureʼ con- ence. A Kantian might point out that for Kant, the
ceptual activity upon the material of intuition closely conditions of the possibility of experience yielded by
resembles the commodity as a supposed product of transcendental inquiry are not simply the conditions
ʻpureʼ or abstract labour.16 The insistence that for of the possibility of ʻourʼ experience at present or
experience to be possible, a concept must work upon an to date, but, rather, the conditions of the possibility
intuition, is conditional upon what experience itself is of any thinkable experience whatever. The point is
increasingly becoming: a production of exchange-value not that historical and/or current experience is made
for its own sake. For Adorno, this is both the truth and possible by these conditions, but that we cannot in
the untruth of Kantʼs ʻexperienceʼ. It is a true index principle even imagine any experience which would
of the real historical emptying-out of our experience.17 be intelligible without these conditions. They make
Any attempt simply to wish away that prohibition in possible all possible, not merely actual or historical,
advance of a real change in our experience would experience.
amount to a merely hopeful or dishonest declaration If Adornoʼs reformulation of the concept of experi-
that an unfree society is in fact free. To this extent ence rested only on the argument that because experi-
Kantʼs prohibition remains in force. ence itself changes the conditions of its possibility
Yet at the same time, because Kantʼs is a trans- must change, it would clearly have failed to take this
cendental account, it implies that this emptied expe- objection into account. But this is the conclusion, not
rience, bereft of real content, is the model of what the presupposition of Adornoʼs argument. The argu-
experience itself has been and must be like. Adornoʼs ment rests instead on a thoroughgoing re-examination
interest here is in suggesting that this transcendental of what Kant splits up for epistemological analysis as
account of experience need not be taken as legislative the two indispensable components of human experi-
for all future experience. If our experience were differ- ence, understanding and sensibility. To understand this
ent, both these transcendental blocks – on experiencing re-examination, it is useful to draw on a course of
freedom and on knowing the thing as it is in itself lectures Adorno gave in 1957–58, the second half of

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 9

which comments in more consecutive fashion than was These two sets of arguments lead on to a more general
Adornoʼs habit on some central issues in the Critique case about the project of transcendental enquiry itself.
of Pure Reason.19 If we look in more detail at his criti- Adorno argues that such enquiry dogmatically answers
cism of Kantʼs concept of experience, we will see that its own questions in advance by asking how synthetic
it marshalls three primary sets of arguments, the first a priori judgements are possible rather than whether
addressing Kantʼs account of the intellectual conditions they are possible.21 What links the arguments as a
of knowledge, the second addressing his account of whole may be understood by saying that for Adorno,
the sensible conditions of knowledge, and the third Kant indeed provided a critique of pure reason, but
addressing Kantʼs account of the connections between one which rested on a failure to criticize the notions
these. All three groups of argument are contentious, of pure understanding and pure sensibility. Adornoʼs
and open to many objections. The first set is intended critical thinking understands itself as a radicalization
to show why concepts devoid of all reference whatever rather than a relapse from critical thinking in that
to a ʻsomethingʼ are not only ʻemptyʼ, as Kant would it criticizes not only pure reason but the very idea
have it, restricted to a logical rather than a synthetic of ʻpure conceptsʼ and ʻpure intuitionsʼ. ʻThinking
use, but ʻblindʼ, unthinkable, and consequently devoid without purityʼ is the model for Adornoʼs attempt to
of a logical as well as of a synthetic use. Here Adorno free critical thinking from the armour of its trans-
is clearly in disagreement not only with Kant but also cendental method.22
with his twentieth-century semanticist critics.20 The Let us examine the first limb of Adornoʼs account
second set of arguments is intended to show that an of the concept of experience. He attempts to argue that
experience supposedly free from all conceptual media- pure concepts of the understanding are not only empty
tion would not only be ʻblindʼ, as Kant suggests, but but blind: that they are by themselves unthinkable, not
also empty, not experience at all. This second set of just lacking in content. It might initially be thought
arguments addresses both Kantʼs theory that time and that this argument is making the mistake of trying to
space needed to be considered ʻpure forms of intuitionʼ use empirical means, to argue from the way human
which were necessary to all synthetic a priori knowl- beings happen to be able or unable to think, to settle
edge, and his characterization of phenomenal reality a non-empirical point about the validity of logical
as a ʻsensuous manifoldʼ devoid of qualities prior to concepts. It might be thought, that is, that this is a
conceptual determination. Here Adornoʼs arguments, psychologistic argument. Kant himself had already
perhaps surprisingly, have something in common with argued that this kind of argument could be of no
those of Kantʼs semanticist and empiricist critics. help in transcendental thought. Pure concepts of the

10 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

understanding could not be simply inductive abstrac- their having any content, lies for Adorno precisely in
tions from experience, because otherwise we could their not being pure, but rather already contaminated
not account for the ʻfactʼ of that scientific knowledge with some reference, however minimal. (I shall discuss
which we can possess a priori: ʻnamely, pure math- later the charge that this view necessarily obliges
ematics and general science of nature.ʼ23 Adornoʼs Adorno himself to develop a positive ontology.)
argument, however, rests on an account of the con- If we move now to look at the second limb of
ditions of intelligibility of a proposition. This is what Adornoʼs account of Kantʼs concept of experience,
makes it a metacritical rather than a psychologistic we can see that it rests on some complementary argu-
argument. For Kant non-contradictoriness is a suf- ments. Kantʼs account of the sensible conditions of
ficient condition of intelligibility. In his discussion of human knowledge in the transcendental aesthetic is
the possibility of thinking freedom, intelligibility is notoriously complex. Adorno at some point or other
taken as synonymous with non-contradictoriness: ʻI discussed most of its arguments, and it would be
can none the less think freedom (that is to say, the impossible to give a complete catalogue here. Instead
representation of it is at least not self-contradictory)ʼ;24 an especially critical instance, Kantʼs account of time
ʻI can think whatever I please, provided only that I do and space as pure forms of intuition, will be discussed.
not contradict myself, that is, provided my concept is What does it mean to describe space and time as
a possible thought.ʼ25 The subjective intelligibility of ʻpure forms of intuitionʼ? Adorno is sympathetic to
the pure concepts of the understanding is taken as the impulse which lies behind such a description. Any
read; the question of their referential content – what attempt simply to define space and time will inevitably
Kant calls their objective validity and reality – is appeal to spatial and temporal concepts. But our right
addressed later in the transcendental deduction and to use such concepts is precisely what an account of
is not regarded as essential to their intelligibility. For space and time is supposed to ground. This, of course,
Adorno, the referential content of concepts is a neces- is itself an argument in favour of the need for a trans-
sary condition of their intelligibility. Without reference cendental account of spatial and temporal concepts.
to a ʻsomethingʼ, no formal logic could be thinkable.26 They are concepts which we cannot not use.30 Space
A thought which is not a thought of anything is not and time, such an argument runs, cannot be inductive
only empty but unintelligible: ʻthe meaning of logic abstractions from experience because they are already
itself demands facticity.ʼ27 presupposed in any attempt to describe experience. Yet
Here not only Kantians but their positivist or seman- they cannot be pure concepts of the understanding,
ticist opponents may have a strong objection. It can according to Kantʼs view of such concepts, otherwise
be protested that Adorno is confusing the question of they would be empty, whereas Kantʼs account of them
how logical propositions are arrived at – their ʻgenesisʼ is supposed to show how synthetic a priori knowledge
– with whether they are true – their validity. Another is possible. Accordingly Kant regards space and time
way of putting this would be to say that he confuses as ʻpure forms of intuitionʼ, or, as he elsewhere puts
the quid juris of a transcendental deduction – what it, ʻpure intuitionsʼ31 – that is, as a kind of a priori
right do we have to these concepts? – with the quid form of sensibility.
facti of an empirical deduction – how do we come Adorno argues that the vacillation between these
by these concepts?28 As I argue elsewhere, Adorno two formulations is not accidental but symptomatic.32
does not think that the genesis and validity of logical Kant must place the emphasis he does on the argument
propositions can be quite so easily separated. More that space and time are not categories because other-
importantly here, for Adorno intelligibility is not a wise the immediate givenness of sensibility would
merely psychological criterion. It is inseparable from be endangered. Kant would have to concede that the
the very notion of validity. Validity can never be ʻmaterialʼ which the activity of the categorial forms is
meaningfully ascribed to a proposition which is in supposed to shape is already preformed, a subjectified
principle unthinkable, even an analytic one: ʻEvery object. Hence the description of space and time as ʻpure
judgement, even, as Hegel showed, an analytical one, intuitionsʼ. Yet at the same time space and time must
carries within itself, whether it will or no, the claim not be empirical intuitions, otherwise the possibility of
to predicate something which is not merely identical synthetic a priori knowledge itself would fall. Hence
with the bare subject-concept.ʼ29 Adornoʼs critique is the description of space and time as ʻpure forms of
thus directed from the start against the notion that pure intuition.ʼ Adorno, by contrast, argues that ʻspace and
concepts of the understanding really are ʻpureʼ. The time as developed by the transcendental aesthetic are,
condition of their even being thinkable, not only of despite all assurances to the contrary, concepts: in

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 11

Kantian parlance, representations [Vorstellungen] of a to determine in order to make experience possible
representationʼ.33 For Adorno, this fact is not simply are not merely empty but unintelligible. Nevertheless,
a mistake on Kantʼs part, but rather testifies to the the transcendental deduction is of special interest to
impossibility of freeing space and time from all con- Adorno because it offers to show in just what way
ceptual mediation whatever. ʻPure intuition would be the two sets of conditions of human knowledge which
wooden iron, experience without experience.ʼ34 Yet this Kant has been investigating in isolation are connected
ʻexperience without experienceʼ is arrived at precisely to each other. It provides further confirmation in
by a realist impulse to preserve a moment of sensibility Adornoʼs view of the internal difficulties produced
from all mediation by concepts. by an epistemological separation of understanding
Kant insisted, of course, that the separation in his and sensibility. It shows how hard it is subsequently
work of concept and intuition, of understanding and to put back together what has first been analysed in
sensibility, had an epistemological rather than an onto- radical separation.
logical status. These were not opposed kinds of being The transcendental deduction is littered with the
for Kant, but an opposition between form and content. bones of the many attempts to provide an exhaustive
It is important to recognize that the above argu- interpretative account of it – not least because of
ments do not misattribute an ontological separation the many important differences between the form it
between concept and intuition to Kant. They are not takes in the first and second editions of the Critique
complaining that the pure concepts and pure intuitions – and such an account certainly cannot be attempted
discussed by Kant are non-entities, that there are ʻno here. Instead discussion will have to be limited to one
crucial aspect to which Adorno points – the factic-
such thingsʼ, but rather that their very epistemological
ity of the categories. In one passage of the second
ʻpurityʼ renders them unintelligible. Adorno expresses
edition of the transcendental deduction, Kant answers
this by a joke. In Kantʼs epistemology, Adorno sug-
the question of why it is that ʻour understanding …
gests, adding nothing to nothing produces something.35
can produce a priori unity of apperception solely by
What Adorno is pointing to is that the very rigour
means of the categories, and only by such and so
of Kantʼs exclusion of any ontological moment from
manyʼ by ruling it out of court: it is ʻas little capable
his epistemological separation makes it unworkable,
of further explanation as why we have just these and
because unintelligible, as epistemology. Pure under-
no other functions of judgement, or why space and
standing and pure sensibility have not been subjected time are the only forms of possible intuition.ʼ36 The
to the same critique as pure reason. Or rather: how categories and the logical functions of judgement are
they may legitimately be used has been intensively at this point regarded as raw givens no less than the
discussed. But what these expressions signify, what forms of sensibility. For Adorno this, if true, means
pure concepts and pure intuitions ʻareʼ, cannot be made that the deduction has in fact not taken place. In the
intelligible without already destroying the methodo- transcendental deduction itself we come to a halt
logical separation in which they are supposedly held before ʻsomething given, something simply to be taken
apart for epistemological analysis. up [etwas Hinzunehmendes], something which can no
It is here that we come to the third limb of Adornoʼs longer properly be deduced at allʼ.37 In this sense the
account, his examination of the connection between question quid juris – with what right do I use these
Kantʼs accounts of pure understanding and pure sen- concepts? – has become, with this appeal to brute
sibility. The aim of the transcendental deduction (most givenness, a question quid facti – how did I get hold
clearly in the version provided in the second edition of of them? Adorno is dissatisfied with the way in which
the Critique of Pure Reason) is to establish a connec- the question of right is itself thus modelled on facticity
tion between the conditions of the possibility of human in the heart of the deduction – with what he thinks is
knowledge provided by the understanding and those the dogmatic aspect of transcendental method itself.
provided by sensibility: to show, crudely summarized, How, then, has the concept of experience been
that the categories have a synthetic rather than a reformulated? First, Adorno has argued that experi-
merely analytic use. In one sense, of course, the trans- ence is both somatic and conceptual. It is so, not only
cendental deduction does not have the decisive status in the sense that two elements must come to-gether
for Adorno that it so often takes on in assessments for experience to be possible, but also in the sense
of the success or failure of transcendental idealism, that these cannot be separated out as ʻelementsʼ for
since he has already argued that the notions of ʻpureʼ analysis in isolation from each other. There can be no
concepts and of the sensible manifolds that they are account of exper-ience without an account of experi-

12 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

ences. Second, it has been
suggested that the future
of experience cannot be
legislated for in the image
of its past. This dual refor-
mulation has consequences
for every aspect of the
project of transcendental
inquiry. It remobilizes the
whole series of methodical
separations – of form from
content, of spontaneity
from receptivity, of think-
ing from knowing – upon
which Kantʼs account of
transcendental subjectivity
depends.
We have already seen regard the liquidation of metaphysics as of itself desir-
why Adorno thinks his argument can be sustained able, despite – indeed, as will be seen, precisely on
against Kantian objections to it. But two different account of – his materialism. Instead, he regards
kinds of objection may already have become clear. a moment of metaphysical speculation as currently
First, his reformulation of the concept of experience ineliminable from thinking which is to be thinking
is deeply indebted (although, as we shall see, by no at all, including materialist thinking.
means identical) to Hegelʼs earlier and more systematic What, then, ʻisʼ the metaphysical moment which
criticism of all Kantʼs radical separations. This debt is Adorno thinks of as currently ineliminable from think-
a clear difficulty for Adornoʼs own account of Kant. ing? In order to answer this question, we need to go
How far does Adornoʼs critique of Kant commit him back once more to his encounter with Kant, and this
to just that idealist identification of thought and being time less to motifs originating in Kantʼs analytic than
which a negative dialectic is supposed to help us out to those originating in his dialectic. Adorno recognizes
of? This is a question that I have begun to approach that the Critique of Pure Reason itself already aimed
in an earlier paper.38 Second, do Adornoʼs criticisms at a critical rescue of certain aspects of metaphysical
of Kantʼs transcendental account of experience obligate thinking, rather than a simple liquidation of metaphys-
Adorno himself to provide a fundamental ontology, ics.40 Although it is Kantʼs view, in Adornoʼs words,
an examination of what is meant by ʻbeingʼ, or even that the result of the antinomies is that certain ques-
a fully fledged metaphysics? It is this latter question tions ʻmay not really be askedʼ, the very premiss of
that I want to attempt to answer here. Kantʼs attempt, in the transcendental dialectic, to set
clear limits to the use of the pure concepts of the
The problem of metaphysics understanding is an admission that reason is naturally
The problem around which these difficulties circle is transgressive of these limits. Kant points to ʻa natural
that which has dominated the history of philosophy and unavoidable dialectic of pure reason … inseparable
in the twentieth century: whether thinking may free from human reason … which, even after its deceptive-
itself from metaphysics; how this might happen; and ness has been exposed, will not cease to play tricks
whether such an escape, if feasible, is even desir- with reason and continually entrap it into momentary
able. One very powerful tradition in twentieth-century aberrations ever and again calling for correctionʼ.41
thought, that of logical positivism, has, of course, This element in Kantʼs work can prompt Adorno to
regarded this as not really a problem at all. For Rudolf speak of a ʻmetaphysical experienceʼ which ʻinspiresʼ
Carnap, for example, so-called metaphysical prob- Kantʼs thought:
lems were ʻpseudo-problemsʼ which were the result of In order to be spirit, spirit must know that it is not
incautiously allowing words with no meaningful refer- exhausted in that to which it extends; that it is not
ent into philosophical talk.39 But most other European exhausted in the finitude which it is like. Thus spirit
philosophical traditions have regarded metaphysics thinks what would be beyond it. Such metaphysical
as not so easily liquidable. Adorno, indeed, does not experience inspires Kantʼs philosophy, once it has

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 13

 been broken free of its armour-plated method. Any to have the last word. Instead of “we cannot know”:
consideration of whether metaphysics is still at “we do not yet know”.ʼ45 But Wellmer goes on to raise
all possible must reflect the negation of the finite an important objection to Adornoʼs line of argument:
demanded by finitude. Its riddle-image [Raetselbild]
ʻWe can already know that what we cannot even
animates the word ʻintelligibleʼ.42
consistently think as actual, we cannot anticipate as
Such a passage seems to raise more problems than actual either.ʼ46
it solves. How, in particular, can spiritʼs ʻthoughtʼ of This objection by no means exhausts the issue,
what would be beyond it be compared to ʻmetaphysical however. For Wellmer, Adorno becomes a pre-critical
experienceʼ? Surely Kantʼs idea of the intelligible as dogmatic metaphysician when he helps himself to a
such depends on just this distinction between our speculative Hegelian argument – the argument that the
capacity to think the intelligible and the restriction prohibition on the misemployment of pure concepts
of our experience to what appears?43 However, it is of the understanding is dogmatically formulated.47
in turn just this gulf between thinking and knowing, But this argument, if accepted, means that the very
between thinking and experiencing, that Adorno has distinction between pre-critical and critical thinking
in his sights when he refers to freeing criticism from which Wellmer, like almost all second-generation criti-
transcendental method. Freeing Kantʼs thought from cal theory, takes as a bench-mark, cannot be taken
the armour of its method is what Adorno takes the as absolute. Indeed the whole point of this argument
metacritique of transcendental enquiry to have accom- is that transcendental inquiry has not managed, and
plished. could not in principle manage, radically to separate
Kantʼs antinomies arise in the course of illegitimate itself from pre-critical ʻmetaphysicsʼ. It is in fact quite
attempts to use the pure concepts of the understanding central to Adornoʼs reflection on the demise of meta-
as though they could by themselves yield knowledge physics, and part of the point of his ʻmetacritiqueʼ,
of objects. Adorno, however, regards the concept of that transcendental enquiry was never as distinct from
intelligibility itself as aporetic. To Kantʼs antinomies, rationalism as it has sometimes subsequently been
as we have seen, he adds a further antinomy which, painted.
as Albrecht Wellmer puts it, ʻplaces not only the The motive for this argument is not to suggest that
knowability, but also the thinkability of the intel- therefore it is legitimate to go back to pre-critical
ligible world in question. The antinomy consists in rationalism as though Kant had never happened, but
the fact that objective reality cannot be attributed to rather to suggest that metaphysics may be ineliminable
the transcendental ideas, and yet if they are to be the from thinking in a different way than was supposed
expression of a meaningful thought, reality must be by Kant. It need not be the case that, as Wellmer
attributed to them.ʼ44 objects, this argument asks us to anticipate as actual
Adornoʼs critique of Kantʼs ʻblockʼ, then, is moti- what we cannot even consistently think as actual. Such
vated by the attempt to criticize the separation between a demand clearly would constitute a decisive objection
our real experience and a really possible future experi- to Adornoʼs account of his relation to metaphysics. The
ence through a philosophical interpretation of the argument, instead, is a negative one. It points out that
former. In this criticism it is not cognition of external we cannot liquidate as chimerical what we cannot even
metaphysical entities which is at stake. The loss of consistently think as chimerical: the transcendence in
metaphysical dogmas is irreversible, and all hope for thinking.
such knowledge already testifies in the terms express- Adorno described Kantʼs statement that ʻthe criti-
ing it to its own impossibility. What is at stake is how cal path [in philosophy] alone remains openʼ beyond
the moment of freedom in thinking testifies to the dogmatism and scepticism as ʻone whose truth-content
real possibility of a future experience not bound to is incomparably greater than what it means in its par-
self-preservation, a future experience in which spirit ticular contextʼ.48 Indeed critical thinking, for Adorno,
could relinquish its infinite postponement of material may almost be defined as that thinking which manages
satisfaction. in fact rather than merely in intention to take this path.
As Wellmer has remarked in his lucid discussion It is in this context that Adornoʼs difficult remarks
of this aspect of Adornoʼs thought, for Adorno it is in the closing lines of Negative Dialectics on the
as though with this idea ʻa thin crack had opened up ʻsolidarityʼ between his own thinking and metaphysics
through which a weak glimmer of light might fall are finally to be understood.49 Materialism and meta-
from redemption upon the darkened world, enough to physics alike violate both the Kantian prohibition on
contest the right of Kantʼs metaphysical agnosticism the misemployment of transcendent concepts and what

14 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

Adorno sees as Hegelʼs total ʻcontext of immanenceʼ. topic as ʻsolely negativeʼ.53 The magical, mystical and
Materialism and metaphysics are both untrue wherever theological terms which Adorno uses to designate the
they claim access to immediate givenness. But they possibility of an escape from pure immanence or from
are both true where they show how the prohibition on self-preservation – as where he talks of ʻbreaking the
dogmatism is itself dogmatically formulated. This is spellʼ of the context of immanence or of a ʻsalvationʼ
the basis upon which Adorno can argue that ʻmaterial- or ʻredemptionʼ of natural-historical life – need to be
ism is not the dogma which its shrewdest opponents understood in the context of this negative thinking.
accused it of being, but rather the dissolution of some- Such expressions are, instead, a twofold ʻanamnesisʼ,
thing which has for its part been seen through as thoughtʼs attempt to recollect, instead of suppress,
dogmatic. Hence materialismʼs rights [Recht] within what it depends on. They recollect both instrumental
reasonʼs own history of pre-instrumental rationality,
critical philosophy.ʼ50 Kantʼs prohibition on the misuse
its inability to rid itself of the magical and mythical
of transcendent concepts is true to aspects of our
thinking which it has suppressed, and the concealed
present and past experience, but untrue in so far as it
transcendence of prohibitions on transcendence. They
seeks to legislate for all future experience:
are determinate negations of these prohibitions which
Socially, it may be suspected with good reason that make visible the experience implicitly sedimented in
this block, the limitation on the absolute, is one them.
with the need to work, which really does hold hu- How far does Adorno, then, appeal to negativity
mans in the same spell which Kant transfigured into
itself as a panacea? When Adorno and Horkheimer
philosophy. The captivity in immanence to which
he, with brutal honesty, confines spirit, is a captivity discussed the possibility of a materialist dialectic in
in self-preservation … if this beetle-like natural- 1939, Horkheimer was on one occasion driven to an
historical care were broken through, the positioning exasperated outburst: ʻSo all we can do is just say
of consciousness with respect to truth would be “no” to everything!ʼ54 Adornoʼs reply does not attempt
changed.51 to conceal the extent to which he identifies thought
The prohibition is ʻhonestʼ about natural-historical itself with determinate negativity: ʻThere is no other
measure of truth than the specificity of the dissolution
experience. It is only ʻbrutalʼ in so far as it confines
of illusion.ʼ55 We need, finally, to consider in more
such experience within supposedly immutable con-
detail just what Adorno means by negativity, as well
ditions of its possibility, and to this extent prohibits
as some of the more cogent among the many counter-
experience from changing. Brutal honesty becomes
arguments that have been offered to his conception.
brutally dishonest, Adorno suggests, by this appeal
Michael Theunissen has given a critical account of
to invariance. The critical ʻblockʼ which prohibits
ʻNegativity in Adornoʼ that is all the more powerful for
experience of transcendence relies on a presentation
its engagement with the philosophical tradition from
of experience as invariably the pure work of concep-
which Adorno emerges. Theunissen argues that, unlike
tual forms upon the content of intuition. The block most philosophers, Adorno does not use negativity
cannot be thought away. But thought can show how to refer to non-being, but rather to something which
the experience on which the block rests is both real is existent, which negates, and which ought not to
and changeable. A changed experience would change be: the existing negativity of identificatory thinking
whatever are taken as the conditions of its possibility. and the domination that it accompanies and makes
A society in which our experience itself was no longer possible.56 The point of negative thinking, in this
identitarian might be one in which the prohibition sense, is not a limitless scepticism which will negate
on the experience of transcendence would no longer any positive content whatever, but a negation of this
apply.52 existing negativity. Its point, that is, is the reverse of
scepticism. It is conceived of as a negation of sceptical
Negativity without nihilism negativity which will overcome the prohibition on the
Adornoʼs account of the entanglement between materi- experience of transcendence. Theunissen goes on to
alism and metaphysics, then, depends centrally on this distinguish two primary conceptions of negative dia-
double move. To liquidate the possibility of experienc- lectic. On the one hand, he suggests, negative dialectic
ing transcendence would make thinking impossible; is conceived of as (1) a ʻconsistent “consciousness of
yet this does not of itself mean that immediate access non-identity”ʼ;57 on the other as (2) an ʻontology of the
to such experience has thereby been secured. This is wrong state of thingsʼ.58 Negativity means something
why Adorno takes care to refer to his thinking on this different in each case. The non-identical is not itself

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 15

negative, except from the standpoint of identificatory are not absent in the negative whole.ʼ62 The negative
thinking. In sense (1), then, the negativity is, as it is not the whole in the sense that there really is
were, within quotation marks. In this sense, nega- nothing positive – this would be the nihilism of ʻall
tive dialectic is not really negative. In sense (2), by is nothingʼ against which Adorno sets himself – but in
contrast, the negativity referred to is the negativity of the sense that everything is shaped by negativity. The
that which should not be, the ʻwrong state of thingsʼ. result, Theunissen argues, is that Adornoʼs negative
In this sense, negative dialectic is not really dialectical. thinking founders in contradictions which cannot be
The result, for Theunissen, is that negative dialectic excused as the manifestation of historical antagonism,
is ʻa dialectic which transcends itself, as it makes a but which are, instead, of its own making: between
transition into metaphysicsʼ.59 A dialectic which was insisting, for example, on the one hand that exchange
imagined as entirely self-sufficient would be making is a distorted prolepsis of true reconciliation, and
an entirely undialectical claim to exclusivity. Accord- on the other that the work of art is a prolepsis of
ingly, dialectic depends on an ʻundialecticalʼ moment. the thing which would no longer be mutilated by
It is in invoking the ineliminability of this undialec- exchange;63 or between insisting, on the one hand,
tical moment, in the raising of the non-identical to an that the world as it exists is ʻfalse to its innermost
absolute, Theunissen suggests, that Adornoʼs dialectic coreʼ64 and insisting, on the other, that ʻeven in its
goes over into metaphysics. most questionable state society is the epitome of the
The force of Theunissenʼs criticism, unusually, is self-producing and reproducing human lifeʼ65 – ʻthat
that what he calls Adornoʼs ʻnegativismʼ is not, in isʼ, as Theunissen comments, ʻfor all its negativity,
a certain sense, negative enough.60 It depends on never simply negativeʼ.66 Only if negative thinking
a series of pre-negativistic or even anti-negativistic were to be able to free itself entirely from metaphys-
arguments. In particular, it depends on the argu- ics could it avoid such ʻbad contradictionʼ.
ment that total despair is unintelligible, because as This is clearly a series of objections which goes to
a minimal condition of the possibility of despairing the heart of Adornoʼs work. Since negative dialectic so
determinately of the world as it is, consciousness must openly confesses its own aporetic quality, objections
have a sense of some element that is not negative: that merely point to contradiction are not addressing
ʻWhen philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape the decisive issue, which is, instead, to what extent
of life has grown oldʼ;61 but ʻ[c]onsciousness could and in which cases negative dialecticʼs claims that
not even despair over the grey, did it not harbour the its moments of contradiction aporetically manifest
notion of a different colour, whose dispersed traces real antagonism are justified. The question is partly

16 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

a hermeneutic one which demands an examination None of these arguments brings forward consider-
of how to read a contradiction such as that between ations of which a series of objections like Theunissenʼs
the claims of the type that (1) the existing world is is unaware. Rather, the weight resting on an argument
false to its innermost core and claims of the type that such as the claim that complete despair is not fully
(2) even in its most questionable state society is the thinkable is just what Theunissen means by arguing
epitome of the self-producing and -reproducing life of that Adornoʼs negative dialectic transcends itself in so
mankind. Claims of the first type, Adorno wants to far as it goes over to metaphysics. What the perspective
suggest, cannot be made intelligible without already outlined above would want to question, however, is
hearing claims of the second type sounding within Theunissenʼs suggestion that there can be a negative
them. Arguments to the effect that ʻthe existing world thinking which is fully freed from metaphysics without
is false to its innermost coreʼ can never be read as becoming a nihilism. Theunissenʼs own work has
completely literal in Adornoʼs work, not at all because drawn attention to what he calls ʻthe critical functionʼ
Adorno has in some way decreed that they should not of parts of Hegelʼs logic – ʻthe logic of being exposes
be read literally, but because if taken with total literal- positivism as metaphysics; the logic of essence exposes
ness they are not thinkable. In the very act of thinking metaphysics as positivism.ʼ67 On Adornoʼs account
such a claim we provide ourselves with evidence of the condition of such a critical logic, which, despite
the extent to which it is untrue. That if we are to Theunissenʼs criticisms of Adorno, remains very close
despair determinately we cannot make despair into to the intentions of a negative dialectic, would be an
an absolute – which Theunissen rightly emphasizes acknowledgement of the impossibility of liquidating
as being what distinguishes Adornoʼs negative think- metaphysical speculation. It could not be expounded as
ing from nihilism – also affects, rather than being a a negativism absolutely free from metaphysics without
matter of indifference for, the hermeneutic status of delusively making just the kinds of claim to exclusivity
Adornoʼs claims. which Theunissen himself regards as the reason for
Here many may think that their worst fears have negative dialecticʼs own ʻtransition to metaphysicsʼ.
been confirmed. The problem of contradiction is to
be evaded in favour of a frankly aestheticized reason,
which skips argument by an easy appeal to context and Kant protested that any thought that, like Adornoʼs,
removes contradiction by suggesting that one limb of wanted to resist both dogmatism and the procedure
a contradictory pair was not meant literally. The argu- of a critique of pure reason could only have the
ments raised here, however, are not simply aesthetic sceptical aim of ʻchanging work into play, philosophy
but concern the extent to which Adornoʼs thought into philodoxyʼ.68 For Adorno, the work of thought is
remains not only dialectical but speculative. The model negativity. Positivity is where thought comes to rest,
for what the ʻspeculative momentʼ in thinking means comes to a halt. The negativity of Adornoʼs thought
for Adorno is provided by the idea that we are already represents its unceasing labour, its refusal to come
unable not to hear claims of the second type sounding to rest in a posited standpoint or fact or method. But
in claims of the first type. A moment of unliteralness the manual labour which ʻsmooths the pathʼ for this
is non-liquidable from such claims to despair, because ʻlabour of the conceptʼ continues, and thought con-
if they were meant with absolute literalness they could tinues to live off it. For this reason, to come to rest
not even be thought. For Hegel, speculative thinking in invariant positivity whilst work goes on all around
was famously able to see ʻthe rose in the cross of is indeed to change ʻwork into play, philosophy into
the presentʼ. Adornoʼs thinking is speculative to the philodoxyʼ. Adorno does want to change work into
extent that this motif can be reread in the light of play, but really to change it, not in thought alone, nor
his own thesis about the unthinkability of complete for thinkers alone. Only on this condition can negative
despair. Every line which, if read with sheer literal- thinking be distinguished from nihilism.
mindedness, speaks despair, bespeaks hope. What The hope of Adornoʼs negative thinking, then, is
philosophical argument bespeaks, as well as what it not to protect its own negativity but, in truth, to bring
speaks, cannot in Adornoʼs view simply be reassigned negativity to an end. Hegel referred to the course of
to the aesthetic, and used as the basis for a charge of thought as a self-correcting or ʻself-perficientʼ scepti-
an aestheticization of reason, as though it were the cism. Adornoʼs negativity too would be self-perficient,
place of strictly philosophical argument only ever to yet could not regard such self-perficience as guar-
read what is written with absolute literalness, because anteed, nor as satisfactorily to be accomplished in
absolute literalness is itself a chimera. thought alone:

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 17

 If thought … gropes beyond itself in such a way Notes
that it names the other as something simply in- 1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman
commensurable with it, which it yet thinks, it will Kemp Smith, Macmillan, London, 1933, p. 361 (Kritik
find no shelter but in the dogmatic tradition. In such der Reinen Vernunft [KrV], A395–96). I wish to thank
a thought thinking is alien to its content, unrecon- Nick Walker, Drew Milne, Nigel Mapp, Jay Bernstein,
ciled with it, and finds itself once again condemned Chris Thornhill. For a paper on a partially related topic
to two separate kinds of truth, which would be cf. Carrie L. Hull, ʻThe Need in Thinking: Materiality
irreconcilable with the idea of truth itself. Meta- in Theodor W. Adorno and Judith Butlerʼ, Radical Phil-
physics rests on whether it is possible to escape osophy 84, July/August 1997, pp. 22–35.
from this aporia without any sleight of hand. To this 2. Ibid., p. 300; KrV, A 298/B354–55.
end dialectic, at once the impression [Abdruck] of 3. Wilfrid Sellars, ʻEmpiricism and the Philosophy of
the universal context of delusion and its critique, Mindʼ in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Sci-
must in one final movement turn itself even against ence. Volume 1: The Foundations of Science and the
Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, edited by
itself.69
Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven, University of Min-
nesota Press, Minneapolis, 1956, pp. 253–329, p. 253.
Adornoʼs ʻnon-identicalʼ, as he has emphasized
4. Cf. John McDowell, Mind and World, Harvard Univer-
throughout, is not ʻsimply incommensurableʼ with sity Press, Cambridge, MA, 1994.
thought. Any statement of such ʻsimple incommen- 5. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V.
surabilityʼ is already a thought, after all. Dialectic Miller, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977,
ʻturns against itselfʼ, not by exhaustedly lurching into pp. 351–2.
6. The German title of the work translated as Against Epis-
a dogmatism it has managed to stave off until the last, temology by Willis Domingo (Blackwell, Oxford, 1982)
but by making visible its own conditionedness. Adorno is Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie [ME] (Towards
suggests, indeed, that charges of dogmatism will fall a Metacritique of Epistemology). Adorno, however, had
on any attempt to think the conditionedness of thought: initially wanted the work to be called The Phenomeno-
logical Antinomies; he was planning in 1935 to subtitle
ʻWhatever convicts the subject of its own arbitrariness,
the work ʻProlegomena to a Dialectical Logicʼ. The final
whatever convicts the subjectʼs prius of aposteriority, title was a compromise with the publisher. For a discus-
will always sound to the subject like a transcendent sion of the title of this book see Vorlesung zur Einleitung
dogma.ʼ70 The two apparently opposed complaints in die Erkenntnistheorie 1957–58 [VEET] Junius, Frank-
furt am Main, n.d., p. 18. Readers should be aware that
most often addressed to Adornoʼs thought – that he
Domingoʼs version is not always accurate.
makes an inadmissible leap into sociology, and that 7. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 27; KrV, Bxxvi.
he takes flight into metaphysics or mysticism – are in 8. Negative Dialektik [ND], Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main,
truth deeply related. Both take Adorno as dogmatic in 1975, p. 383; Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton,
just the sense to which he here refers.71 Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1973, p. 391.
VEET, p. 50. ʻDer Essay als Formʼ, Noten zur Literatur,
But the statement also indicates just why it is so
Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1974, pp. 9–13, p. 17;
important to Adorno to contest the prohibition on the Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2
experience of transcendence. The impulse to thematize vols, Columbia University Press, New York, 1991–92,
an ineliminably metaphysical moment in thinking is vol. 1, p. 10. Readers should be aware that Ashtonʼs
translation of Negative Dialektik is often defective.
not the impulse once and for all to liberate spirit
9. ND, p. 379; Negative Dialectics, p. 386. Philosophische
from its body: quite the reverse. The possibility of Terminologie [PhT], 2 vols, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am
the experience of transcendence is at once that of the Main, 1973–74, vol. 2, p. 98 (4.xii.1962).
experience of freedom and that of thoughtʼs ability 10. Cf. Carl Braun, Kritische Theorie versus Kritizismus
([Kantstudien: Ergänzungshefte, 115] de Gruyter, Berlin,
to think its own conditionedness. Without such a pos-
1983, passim.
sibility thought will be unable to think what it lives 11. VEET, p. 90. Cf. Helga Gripp, Theodor W. Adorno:
off. Thought which fails to think what it lives off is Erkenntnisdimensionen negativer Dialektik, Schöningh,
not thinking. The reproach of dogmatism or of contra- Paderborn, 1986, pp. 73–4.
dictoriness addressed to the idea of the non-identical 12. Cf. Anke Thyen, Negative Dialektik und Erfahrung. Zur
Rationalität des Nichtidentischen bei Adorno, Suhrkamp,
– as though from blessed islands where these hydras Frankfurt am Main, 1989.
have long been slain – does not succeed in eliminating 13. ND, p. 189; Negative Dialectics, p. 188.
either dogmatism or contradiction. The life of nega- 14. ND, pp. 379–80; Negative Dialectics, p. 387.
tive dialectic lies in contradiction; it does not aim to 15. PhT, ii, p. 48 (20.xi.1962).
16. Ibid.
eradicate contradictions in thought, but to understand 17. ND, p. 382; Negative Dialectics, p. 389.
the possibility of reconciling antagonism. ʻNur wenn, 18. Cf. Ludwig Pongratz, ʻZur Aporetik des Erfahrungs-
was ist, sich ändern läßt, ist das, was ist, nicht allesʼ: begriffs bei Theodor W. Adornoʼ, Philosophisches Jahr-
ʻonly if “that which is” can be changed is “that which buch 93, 1986, pp. 135–42, p. 142.
19. VEET, pp. 185–320. An edition of this text overseen
is” not all there isʼ.72

18 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

 by the Theodor W. Adorno Archiv is to appear shortly Sturzes”ʼ, in Metaphysik nach Kant? Stuttgarter Hegel-
as section 4, volume 1 of the Nachgelassene Schriften Kongreß 1987, edited by Dieter Henrich and Rolf-Peter
[Posthumous Works], published by Suhrkamp. Adornoʼs Horstmann, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1988, pp. 767–83, p.
1959 lectures on the Critique of Pure Reason will ap- 767.
pear as section 4, volume 4 of the same series. 45. Ibid., p. 773.
20. For whom, see J. Alberto Coffa, The Semantic Tra- 46. Ibid., pp. 773–4.
dition from Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna Station, 47. Ibid., p. 773.
edited by Linda Wessels, Cambridge University Press, 48. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 668; KrV, A856/B884.
Cambridge, 1991. Adorno, ʻÜber Traditionʼ, in Gesammelte Schriften
21. VEET, p. 187. Cf. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 128; KrV, 10.1, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1977, pp. 310–20,
B127–28. p. 315.
22. ND, p. 384; Negative Dialectics, p. 392. 49. ND, p. 400; Negative Dialectics, p. 408.
23. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 128; KrV, B128. 50. ND, p. 197; Negative Dialectics, p. 197.
24. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 28; KrV, Bxxviii. 51. ND, pp. 381–82; Negative Dialectics, p. 389.
25. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 27n; KrV, Bxxvi n. 52. Ibid.
26. ND, p. 139; Negative Dialectics, p. 135. 53. ND, p. 384; Negative Dialectics, p. 392.
27. ME, p. 84; Against Epistemology, p. 78. 54. ʻDiskussionsprotokolleʼ, in Max Horkheimer, Gesam-
28. Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 120–22; KrV, A84–87/ melte Schriften, volume 12: Nachgelassene Schriften
B116–19. 1931–49, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Fischer,
29. ND, p. 78; Negative Dialectics, p. 71. Cf. G.W.F. Hegel, Frankfurt am Main, 1985, pp. 349–605, p. 490.
Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller, George Allen & 55. Ibid.
Unwin, London, 1969, pp. 412–16. 56. Michael Theunissen, ʻNegativität bei Adornoʼ, in
30. VEET, p. 288. Adorno-Konferenz 1983, edited by Ludwig von Friede-
31. ʻPure forms of intuitionʼ: Critique of Pure Reason, p. burg and Jürgen Habermas, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am
67; KrV, B36/A22. ʻPure intuitionsʼ: Critique of Pure Main, 1983, pp. 41–65.
Reason, p. 69; KrV, B39/A24. 57. ND, p. 17; Negative Dialectics, p. 5.
32. ME, p. 151; Against Epistemology, p. 146. 58. ND, p. 22; Negative Dialectics, p. 11.
33. Ibid. 59. Theunissen, ʻNegativitätʼ, p. 46.
34. Ibid. 60. Ibid., p. 61.
35. VEET, p. 215. Cf. VEET, p. 182. 61. G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right,
36. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 161; KrV, B145–46. edited by Allen Wood, trans. Barry Nisbet, Cambridge
37. VEET, p. 225. University Press, Cambridge, 1991, p. 23.
38. S. Jarvis, ʻThe “Unhappy Consciousness” and Con- 62. ND, p. 370; Negative Dialectics, pp. 377–8.
scious Unhappiness. On Adornoʼs Critique of Hegel
63. Ästhetische Theorie [AT], Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am
and the Idea of an Hegelian Critique of Adornoʼ, in
Main, 1970, p. 337; Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert
G.K. Browning, ed., Hegelʼs Phenomenology of Spirit:
Hullot-Kentor, Athlone, London, 1997, p. 227.
A Reappraisal, Kluwer Press, Amsterdam, 1997, pp.
64. ND, p. 41; Negative Dialectics, p. 31.
57–72.
65. AT, p. 335; Aesthetic Theory, p. 226. (Translation
39. Rudolf Carnap, ʻPseudoproblems in Philosophy: The
mine.)
Heteropsychological and the Realism Controversyʼ,
66. Theunissen, ʻNegativitätʼ, p. 53.
in The Logical Structure of the World, trans. Rolf A.
67. Theunissen, Sein und Schein. Die kritische Funktion
George, Routledge, London, 1967, pp. 301–43.
der Hegelschen Logik, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main,
40. ND, p. 374; Negative Dialectics, p. 381.
1980, p. 33.
41. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 300; KrV, A298/B355.
68. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 33; KrV, Bxxxvii.
42. ND, p. 384; Negative Dialectics, p. 392.
69. ND, p. 397; Negative Dialectics, pp. 405–6.
43. See, for example, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 28; KrV,
70. ND, p. 183; Negative Dialectics, p. 181.
Bxxviiii: ʻThough I cannot know, I can yet think free-
71. For an account aware of the link between these two
dom; that is to say, the representation of it is at least not
charges, see Michael Theunissen, Hegels Lehre vom
self-contradictory, provided due account be taken our
absoluten Geist als theologisch-politischer Traktat, de
critical distinction between the two modes of represen-
Gruyter, Berlin, 1970, pp. 27–40.
tation, the sensible and the intellectual, and of the re-
72. ND, p. 391; Negative Dialectics, p. 398. On the per-
sulting limitation of the pure concepts of understanding
sistence of dogmatism, cf. especially lecture 23 from
and of the principles which flow from them.ʼ
PhT ii, pp. 44–55 (20.xi.1962).
44. Albrecht Wellmer, ʻ“Metaphysik im Augenblick ihres

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 19

Bakhtin, Cassirer and
symbolic forms
Craig Brandist

Many have seen in Bakhtinʼs theory of the novel represent Marburg Neo-Kantian epistemology.2 Thus,
something relevant for a wide variety of disciplines, while many have noted the importance of Neo-Kan-
from literary studies, narrowly defined, to political tianism in Bakhtinʼs work, though with little or no
theory and anthropology. Accordingly, it has been archival evidence, Cassirer has remained simply one
noted that the theory incorporates an ideal history of among many thinkers. Recently published interviews
literary forms, a philosophy of culture, a typology of with Bakhtin shortly before his death make it very
discursive relations, and a theory of conflicting social clear, however, that Cassirerʼs 1923–29 three-volume
forces. The sources of such a wide-ranging theory The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms was one of the
seem to be diverse: from Marburg Neo-Kantianism most important influences on Bakhtinʼs mature work,3
to Russian Formalism, Marxist political theory and while Brian Pooleʼs forthcoming archival research has
classical aeshetics. However, there seems a wealth uncovered notebooks in which Bakhtin made copious
of evidence to suggest that behind the eclecticism notes from Cassirerʼs work. At a deeper level, research-
of Bakhtinʼs theory lies a unifying feature: Hegelian ers have tended to take Bakhtinʼs negatively tinged
philosophy as modified by the work of Ernst Cassirer. overt references to Hegelʼs philosophy at face value,
I believe there are many areas in which the influence assuming that they implied a rejection of Hegelianism
of Cassirer on Bakhtinʼs group can be traced, including in its totality. This is based on Bakhtinʼs objection to
the concept of the sign and the way such periods as interpretations of Dostoevskyʼs novels which confuse
the Renaissance and the Enlightenment are conceived, the way Hegel treats different perspectives on reality
but here I shall limit my attention to the influence of as stages in a single, linear development with Dosto-
Cassirerʼs work on Bakhtinʼs theory of the novel. As evskyʼs presentation of ʻa plurality of independent and
we shall see, while Bakhtinʼs own terminology differs unmerged voices and consciousnessesʼ which unfold
significantly from that of Hegel and Cassirer, the struc- in the course of the novel without each ʻbecom[ing] a
tural features common to their works are too pervasive simple object of the authorʼs consciousnessʼ.4 There is
to be passed off as one influence among many. no doubt that Bakhtin is with Dostoyevsky and against
Hegel here. However, Bakhtinʼs comment is almost
Revised Hegelianism identical to a remark by Cassirer, whose central work
If the structural parallels between these thinkersʼ is profoundly Hegelian,5 that the main problem with
works are as pervasive as I suggest, it would be Hegel is that philosophy deprives ʻvarious cultural
reasonable to ask why, when such a huge amount of forms … of their autonomous and independent value
critical material about Bakhtin has been produced and subordinates them to its own systematic purpose.
in recent years, no systematic analysis of Cassirerʼs Here is the point of contrast with Kant.ʼ6 Despite this
influence on Bakhtin has appeared.1 One reason is the reservation, there seems little doubt that Bakhtinʼs
lack of a definitive, chronologically organized edition account of the emergence and development of the novel
of Bakhtinʼs work, which is itself a product of the is profoundly Hegelian, and that the novel itself takes
vicissitudes of intellectual life in the Soviet Union. over many of the functions of Hegelʼs philosophy, but
Another reason derives from the way Cassirerʼs work now cleansed of its monologic inclinations.
has been understood until quite recently. As John Krois For Hegel, phenomenology studies the way Geist 7
notes, Anglo-American writers have tended to present ʻappearsʼ – that is, objectifies itself in things in order
Cassirer as ʻa scholarly investigator and historian of to appear ʻfor itselfʼ as something opposite to itself.
ideas, a representative of historicism without a position Bakhtin follows Hegel closely here, arguing that the
of his ownʼ, while in Germany he has been seen to novel studies and recalls the way life is objectified in

20 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

language. This recollection is not only historical but other and as a result of the internal criticism of lan-
also, like Hegelʼs phenomenology, the study of the guage.14 At this stage ʻcontext is … communicated by
essential. The philosophy of Geist is characterized a formal analogy between the phonetic sequence and
by Hegel as the representation of the route natural the sequence of contents designatedʼ,15 the sign has a
consciousness takes to true knowledge as a matter of referential relationship to reality and communicates the
necessity. ʻEssenceʼ must ultimately ʻappearʼ at the speakerʼs relationship with reality. Ultimately language
end of a course of development. Bakhtinʼs 1934–35 makes a ʻvirtue … of the ambiguity inevitable in the
essay ʻDiscourse in the Novelʼ is an account of how linguistic signʼ and relinquishes ʻthe last semblance
the ʻessenceʼ of the novel as a genre ʻappearsʼ, that is, of any mediate or immediate identity between reality
comes to fully present ʻall the social and ideological and symbolʼ.16 Understanding is thereby liberated from
voices of its era [heteroglossia], that is, all the eraʼs close adherence to the concrete world of sense impres-
languages that have any claim to being significantʼ.8
sions, through orientation towards the activity of the
The parallel is explicitly outlined at one stage of this
subject and towards the full realization and application
work:
of the symbolic character of interpretation. In a key
Heteroglossia ʻin-itselfʼ becomes, in the novel and passage from the volume on language, Cassirer argues
thanks to the novel, heteroglossia ʻfor-itselfʼ: lan- that the value and specific character of both linguistic
guages are dialogically implicated in each other and
and artistic formation lie in the ʻprogressive removalʼ
begin to exist for each other. It is precisely thanks
to the novel that languages are able to illuminate from ʻthe immediately givenʼ, for ʻthe distance from
each other mutually; literary language becomes a immediate reality and immediate experience is the
dialogue of languages that both know about and condition of their being perceived, of our spiritual
understand each other.9 awareness of themʼ.17
The general lines of the parallels with Bakhtinʼs
This extraordinary recasting of the Hegelian dia-
account of the emergence of novelistic discourse
lectic was based upon a crucial amendment made to
should be apparent even after this short sketch. For
Hegelʼs system by Cassirer in 1923: the insistence that
Bakhtin, it is precisely the breakdown of the period of
ʻphilosophical awareness arises only in and through
sealed-off national languages (monoglossia) at the end
languageʼ.10 Indeed, it may well have been the appear-
of the Hellenic period that allowed the decentring of
ance of the first volume of Cassirerʼs The Philosophy
cultural consciousness represented in and by the novel
of Symbolic Forms in that year that led Bakhtin and
to develop. No longer was there an absolute faith in the
his group into a prolonged and extremely productive
correspondence of language and reality; only a formal
study of the relations between language in everyday
analogy was now sustainable. Yet even this was subject
life and in literature.
to pressure from the relativizing influence of reflexive
Like Bakhtin, Cassirer followed Hegel in shifting
and self-aware (purely symbolic) forms of discourse
the concept of ʻcultureʼ11 from the aesthetic sense it
promoted by speech diversity. Critical consciousness
still maintained in Kantʼs writing to an anthropological
thus begins to emerge from the fetters of myth as
sense where it helped to effect a shift in political theory
from problems of ideology to questions of hegemony.12 the dissociation between ʻlanguage and intentions,
However, Cassirer added a semiotic dimension by language and thought, language and expressionʼ is
replacing Hegelʼs ʻlogicʼ with the ʻlawʼ of symbolism made clear. By ʻdissociationʼ Bakhtin makes it clear
that underlies the development of symbolic forms: art, that he is talking about ʻa destruction of any absolute
language, myth, science, history, and so on. There bonding of ideological meaning to language, which
are three stages in the development of these forms, is the defining factor of mythological and magical
which Cassirer calls ʻmimeticʼ, ʻanalogicalʼ and ʻpurely thoughtʼ. The absolute domination of language by
symbolicʼ. In the case of language, the first stage is mythological thought is, argues Bakhtin, ʻlocated in
reached when the sound uttered tries to ʻapproach the the prehistorical … past of language consciousnessʼ18
sensory impression and reproduce its diversity as faith- from which language and literature emerged and began
fully as possibleʼ. Here, there is no attempt to make to limit the influence of myth over thought by exposing
ʻgeneral designationsʼ; rather, a phonetic nuance tries the distance between language and reality.
to reproduce every nuance of the sensory impression.13
In an argument that strongly echoes Bakhtinʼs narra- Myth as a symbolic form
tive, Cassirer argues that this breaks down as different For Cassirer, all symbolic forms must ʻbe emancipated
cultures and languages come into contact with each from the common matrix of myth.… Theoretical,

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 21

practical and aesthetic consciousness, the world of timeʼ of the gods. In rituals surrounding birth and
language and morality, the basic forms of commu- death, puberty and marriage, a sort of abstract ʻbio-
nity and the state – they are all originally tied up logical timeʼ is felt rather than thought in an abstract
with mythico-religious conceptionsʼ.19 Myth, like art, sense.26 Mythic experience and expression are ʻa mere
science and language, is a configuration towards being, passivity, a being-acted-upon rather than actingʼ, and
but the specificity of myth lies not in its content but this receptivity stands in evident contrast to that kind
in ʻthe intensity with which it is experienced, with of spontaneity in which all self-consciousness as such
which it is believed – as only something endowed with is groundedʼ.27 In the repetition of rites critical discern-
objective reality can be believedʼ.20 Mythic thought ment and consciousness of personality are lulled asleep
allows no detachment; it stands in awe of what con- and the mythical conception of the world can extend
fronts it, having ʻno will to understand the object by its influence.28 This became particularly pertinent for
encompassing it logically and articulating it with a Cassirer at the end of his life when he reflected on
complex of cause and effects; it is simply overpowered the rise of Nazism in Germany. Myth there became
by the objectʼ.21 The mythical world is one of con- a ʻtechnique of rulershipʼ based on the shifting of
flicting powers, every natural phenomenon is imbued language from descriptive to emotional speech; the
with those powers and it is therefore perceived as ritualization of social life; the replacement of ideal
itself permeated by emotional qualities. Everything values with concrete images of good and bad; and the
in the mythical world is friendly or inimical, alluring development of a sort of prophesy based on scientific
or repellent, fascinating or threatening because the and philosophical claims.29 The spontaneity of thought
primitive mentality views nature as sympathetic – that and action is limited and authoritative substitutes are
is, as a fundamental ʻsolidarity of lifeʼ in which the provided.
viewer has no unique and privileged place. Scientific While it is highly unlikely that Bakhtin read Cas-
thought has systematically to liberate the observer sirerʼs last work, the ritualization of everyday life
from observed phenomena and obliterate all trace of and the unprecedented ideological centralization of
mythical perception, but such activity only restricts
it to certain spheres; it does not, and indeed cannot,
destroy myth itself. Myth remains in the ʻexpressive
functionʼ of symbolism, where there is no differ-
ence admitted between ʻimage and thing, the sign
and what it designatesʼ,22 where ʻevery phenomenon
discloses a definite character … which belongs to it
immediatelyʼ.23 Art, like myth, is dependent on the
perception of expression, but, as we shall see, there
are significant differences between the two. Myth is
overwhelmed by this perception, whereas art couples
depth of feeling with ʻthe distance accompanying the
universality of objectificationʼ. Human life is ʻbound
and fetteredʼ in mythical experience, whereas in art Soviet society in the 1930s were undoubtedly enough
it becomes ʻaesthetically liberatedʼ.24 to compel Bakhtin to treat myth as a contemporary
As well as being an ideal history of the unfolding as well as a historical and formal question. Thus
of autonomous symbolic forms from the common while Bakhtin was to treat the absolute domination
matrix of myth, Cassirerʼs work also presents a theory of language and literature by myth as an issue that
of conflicting social forces. As for Bakhtin, the main receded into the distant past, the relative power of
conflict here is that between mythical and non- (or myth in these spheres is treated as an eternal ques-
anti-) mythical conceptions of the world: a dialectic tion. Having accepted the irreducibility and incompat-
of mythical and critical symbolic forms. Although a ibility of ʻsymbolic formsʼ, Bakhtin follows Cassirer
distinct and irreducible symbolic form, myth can and in posing the struggle between different orientations
does enter into combinations with other forms and has as irreconcilable in principle. Within the sphere of
a particularly close kinship with both language and art. language, Bakhtin sees all forces towards linguistic
It is especially apparent in openly emotional language centralization as evidence of a mythical influence
and in lyric poetry.25 It is also there in mythic rites, on language, while within the realm of literature he
where time is arrested and man can enter the ʻoriginal follows Cassirer in positing ʻpoetryʼ, the ʻdiscourse of

22 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

pathosʼ and the epic as manifestations of the influence Passive reverence is the only possible relationship with
of the mythic. The unitary language imposes ʻspecific this time; it is a mythical time that excludes any active
limitsʼ on heteroglossia, brings about the ʻenslavementʼ engagement; it is a ʻvalorised, hierarchical categoryʼ,
of other languages by ʻthe process of illuminating them all points of which are equidistant from the present,
with the True Wordʼ.30 Unitary language limits the active, open moment. 36 The ʻabsolute pastʼ is a mythic
spontaneity of thought and action by limiting its verbal realm it is no longer possible to enter, but it has
embodiment, and it ʻpositsʼ itself as universally valid, authority in the present, being a time of ʻbeginningsʼ
directly expressive of reality itself. Coinciding with and ʻpeak timesʼ, of ʻfirstsʼ and ʻbestsʼ.37 The epic poet
this, the disciplines which study this language have gives prophesies in a language that originates in the
tended to assume the passive reception of this ideologi- valorized past, which cannot be doubted; a language
cally ʻneutralʼ discourse as synonymous with verbal from an authoritative time before which the listener
understanding as such, essentially obscuring and thus and singer stand in awe.
strengthening the influence of myth on language.
Similarly in poetry and poetics the mythical con- Myth and hegemony
ception of the world has been dominant. As Bakhtin This complex of myth and language is thus oriented
puts it: ʻany sense of the boundedness, the historic- against the decentralizing, critical forces of culture,
ity, the social determination and specificity of oneʼs seeking to limit those forces and present a single
own language … and therefore a critically qualified viewpoint as directly expressive of natural existence.
relationship to oneʼs own language … is foreign to The term Bakhtin gives to language that is oriented
poetic styleʼ. The poet is thereby dangerously close to in a mythical fashion is ʻauthoritative discourseʼ. In a
a mythical conception of language, having no critical famous passage he notes that
distance from his own language, in which he is ʻutterly
The authoritative word demands that we acknowl-
immersedʼ.31 The language of the poet presents itself as edge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite
at one with his immediate experience, it only exists for independent of any power it might have to persuade
him from the inside. For lyric poetry, notes Cassirer, us internally; we encounter it with its authority
ʻthere is nothing external; it is always withinʼ; it main- already fused to it. The authoritative word is located
tains an apparently infinite ʻinnernessʼ to the extent in the distanced zone, organically connected with a
past that is felt to be hierarchically higher.38
that ʻit is never completely expressible or exhaustible;
but this is an infinity of content not extensionʼ.32 The Bakhtin then goes on to pronounce the kinship of this
object of poetic discourse, whether externally per- ʻwordʼ with taboo, a central plank of Cassirerʼs volume
ceived or internally felt, has an ʻinexhaustible wealth on myth. The ʻauthoritative wordʼ is a ʻname that
and contradictory multiplicityʼ to which the poetic must not be taken in vainʼ;39 it can be unconditionally
word is never equal, but it need never assume other accepted or rejected, and its authority along with it.
acts of ʻverbal recognitionʼ.33 Like that of the lyric As in myth, ʻobligation has a purely social character
poet, the ʻdiscourse of pathosʼ also ʻhas the appearance and is experienced as an external force. Deliberation
of directly intentional discourseʼ. Although it appears is unnecessary in the rigidly prescribed social sphere
in the novel, it does so ʻto restore some other genre, of mythic thoughtʼ.40
genres that, in their own unmediated and pure form, As I have argued elsewhere,41 what Bakhtin is
have lost their base in realityʼ, and it is thus usually describing in his discussion of monologism, poetry
conditional.34 A discourse of pathos appears in the and ʻauthoritative discourseʼ is less a type of dis-
novel to resist the critical forces at work within it: course than an orientation towards other discourses.
ʻThe discourse of pathos and the kind of representation He speaks of relationships between languages as a type
it represents were born and shaped in the distanced of language itself rather than as a mode of interaction
image; they are organically linked with the hierarchi- or ʻhegemonic principleʼ. ʻAuthoritative discourseʼ is
cally evaluated concept of the past.ʼ35 This discourse really an authoritative relationship between privileged
thus shares with poetry the expressive function as a and subordinate perspectives. The confusion seems to
dominant aspect, but it is also linked with a type of emanate from Bakhtinʼs adoption of irreducible and
view of the past which dominates the world of epic and ideal symbolic forms: myth, science, history, language
is an aspect of mythical time. For epic is concerned etc., which remains consistent only as long as language
with the ʻabsolute pastʼ and ʻsacrosanct traditionʼ, is treated, as Cassirer treats it, in a general, abstract
which, like the mythical ʻoriginal timeʼ of the gods, fashion. Once each specific language is considered as
is ʻimpossible to change, to rethink, to re-evaluateʼ. an autonomous symbolic form in itself, then it is no

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 23

longer possible to talk about myth, art and so forth as Similar accounts of the role of laughter in litera-
symbolic forms in the same sense. There is a crucial ture, though without the populist gloss or centrality
difference between stylistic and generic categories, bestowed upon it by Bakhtin, appear in Cassirerʼs
which Bakhtin does not admit. Myth, in this sense, work. In one of his last books, Cassirer noted that
refers to the absolute hegemony of one language, the ʻcomic art possesses in the highest degree that faculty
ideal limit of the authoritative hegemonic principle. shared by all art, sympathetic visionʼ. Human life
This redefinition becomes necessary as soon as any appears to us with all its defects and foibles. Whereas
attempt is made to stratify language internally in any the lyric poet can revitalize mythic feelings, the comic
systematic sense. This was perhaps the single most artist is particularly realistic:
important advance made by Bakhtin over Cassirer: the
attempt to stratify language according to sociological We become observant of the minutest details; we
see this world in all its narrowness, its pettiness,
principles and orientations. However, Bakhtin was not
and silliness. We live in this restricted world, but
prepared to take the next logical step: to correlate we are no longer imprisoned by it. Such is the na-
linguistic evaluation and orientation with the insti- ture of the comic catharsis. Things and events begin
tutional co-ordinates of social life in anything but the to lose their material weight; scorn is dissolved into
most general terms. In the absence of this, Cassirerʼs laughter and laughter is liberation.45
dialectic of mythical and critical forms of culture are
In the 1932 book The Platonic Renaissance in
grafted onto a populist dialectic of the official and
England, Cassirer singled out the works of Cervantes,
the popular. Cassirerʼs conceptual structure, forged
Boccaccio, Rabelais, Hans Sachs and Shakespeare as
from within the traditions of German liberalism, is
representatives of the use of comedy as a ʻliberating,
now attached to a structure adopted from Russian
life-giving, and life-forming power of the soulʼ. In
populism.42
these works excessive seriousness and pedantry are
Popular laughter and radical scepticism revealed:
The main features of this grafting are apparent in the To the pedant, as to the zealot, freedom of thought
importance Bakhtin accords to the role of folk laughter is an abomination; for the former takes shelter be-
and parody in the development of critical forms of hind the dignity of knowledge, the latter behind the
culture. Laughter, argues Bakhtin, ʻdemolishes fear sanctified authority of religion. When both retrench
and piety before an objectʼ, making ʻinvestigative themselves behind a false gravity, nothing remains
but to subject them to the test of ridicule and ex-
experiment – both scientific and artisticʼ possible by
pose them.46
bringing the object up close to examine it with bold
familiarity. The destruction of ʻepic distanceʼ, strip- These Renaissance authors effectively inaugurate a
ping the object of its ʻhierarchical ornamentationʼ, comic and parodic testing of the charactersʼ discourse
is ʻan extremely important and indispensable step and their claims to universality. Again, this is a very
in making possible free, scientifically knowable and short step from Bakhtinʼs analysis as it appears in
artistically realistic creativity in European civilisationʼ. 1934–35, where all the examples given by Cassirer that
Through laughter, ʻanalysis, dismemberment, turning appear in novelistic texts appear in ʻDiscourse in the
things into dead objectsʼ reigns supreme.43 Turning Novelʼ. Following through the logic of his fusing the
things into ʻdead objectsʼ is the antithesis of mythical dialectics of symbolic forms with populism, Bakhtin
perception as found in Cassirerʼs work, but here it is finds in the novel the literary equivalent of popular
correlated with popular culture. In the carnival squares parody: it is quite the antithesis of ʻofficialʼ genres,
of early modern Europe Bakhtin saw the antithesis parodying their roles as genres, and has no canon of
of the monolithically serious official world-view of its own.47
the ruling culture.44 Playing with sacred images and As a ʻpopularʼ genre and a critical symbolic form,
official language served to destroy its fear-inspiring the novel evolved in and through its struggle with
ornamentation and claims to ultimate, mythical valid- myth in the form of ʻpoetryʼ, those ennobled forms
ity. However, argues Bakhtin, it was only with the of literature which assumed an immediate or mediate
entry of the spirit of the carnival square into literature correspondence between sign and referent. In such
that the critical impulse implicit in popular travesty ʻpre-novelisticʼ genres as the minor parodic genres
could achieve ideological structuredness. The epitome ( fabliaux, schwänk, street songs etc.), Bakhtin saw the
of this transposition of popular humour into literature emergence of an inherent ʻphilosophy of discourseʼ,
Bakhtin famously found in the work of Rabelais. in essence a ʻprofound distrust of discourse as suchʼ.

24 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

What concerns such genres is not the direct meaning scepticism in the philosophy of language (sophism).
or emotional content of the word, but In seeking to expose the nullity of knowledge and
language, scepticism ultimately demonstrates some-
the actual and always self-interested use to which
thing rather different: ʻthe nullity of the standard by
the meaning is put and the way it is expressed
by the speaker, a use determined by the speakerʼs which it measures themʼ:
position (profession, social class etc.) and by the
In scepticism the ʻcopy theoryʼ is methodically and
concrete situation. Who speaks and under what
consistently demolished by the self-destruction of its
conditions he speaks: this is what determines the
basic premises. The farther the negation is carried
wordʼs actual meaning. All direct meanings and di-
in this point, the more clearly a positive insight fol-
rect expressions are false, and this is especially true
lows from it. The last semblance of any mediate or
of emotional meanings and expressions.48
immediate identity between reality and symbol must
be effaced, the tension between the two must be
In response to the falsity of pathos-ridden truth
enhanced to the extreme, for it is precisely in this
claims by knights, priests, scholars and so on, one tension that the specific achievement of symbolic
sees the ʻgay deceptionʼ, the intelligent lies of rogues expression and the content of the particular symbol-
or the foolʼs lack of comprehension. Deception meets ic forms is made evident. For this content cannot be
(dubious) truth claims, and incomprehension meets revealed as long as we hold fast to the belief that
(pseudo) intelligence in a polemical fashion. Some- we possess ʻrealityʼ as a given, self-sufficient being,
prior to all spiritual formation.52
times the rogue dons the mask of the fool and becomes
the clown ʻto motivate distortions and shufflings of The novelistic image for Bakhtin is just such a ʻtensionʼ,
languages and labels, thus unmasking them by not an unresolved argument in a form ʻlike a symbolʼ, what
understanding themʼ.49 Thus evolves a ʻradical scepti- Cassirer called a ʻcoincidentia oppositoriumʼ.53 What
is now revealed in the novel is that ʻthe meaning
of each form cannot be sought in what it expresses,
but only in the manner and modality, the inner law
of expression itself.ʼ54 Dialogism, the relationality of
languages, is that ʻinner-lawʼ for Bakhtin, for it is
here that the myriad voices of heteroglossia are united
into a single problem and solution. Their diversity and
richness are forms of human ʻspiritualʼ life, but, as
Cassirer puts it, ʻof spiritual life which bears the stamp
of inner necessity and hence objectivityʼ.55

The novel
As an artistic form, the novel presents us with a
cism … bordering on rejection of the very possibility particular and indispensable type of knowledge. One
of having a straightforward discourse at all that would is immediately struck by the wealth of visual meta-
not be falseʼ.50 The further this freeing of discourse phors Bakhtin utilizes in his description of the novel,
from heavy pathos proceeds, the more open it is to from the ʻrefractionʼ of the intentions of the speaker,
a further development: a dialectical synthesis of the through the ʻprismʼ of heteroglossia, to the novelistʼs
heroʼs discourse about himself and his world with presentation of the ʻimageʼ of a language. For Bakhtin,
the authorʼs own thought about him in the image of as for Cassirer, ʻimage worldsʼ are the sole means of
the heroʼs language. Now one can take a variety of seeing and possessing ʻrealityʼ.56 Art, argues Cassirer,
attitudes towards ʻthe argument sounding within the teaches us how to ʻvisualise thingsʼ, giving us a ʻricher,
image, … take various positions in this argument and, more vivid, and more profound insight into its formal
consequently … vary the interpretation of the image structureʼ.57 By objectifying his ʻsympathetic visionʼ,
itself. The image becomes polysemic, like a symbolʼ.51 giving expressive meaning an objective form, the artist
In the novelistic image the negation is itself negated reveals the ʻinner-formʼ of the object. In the novel,
and a new, qualitatively different type of knowledge argues Bakhtin, the ʻinner-formʼ, the ideological struc-
is born. ture, of a language is revealed in the ʻimage of the
In a key section of The Philosophy of Symbolic languageʼ. Moreover, the novel presents ʻa system of
Forms, to which we alluded above, Cassirer develops images of languagesʼ,58 a variety of viewpoints on the
exactly the same argument with regard to the role of world mutually illuminated through their interaction:

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 25

 Languages of heteroglossia, like mirrors that face in new contexts of usage. In its most fully developed
each other, each reflecting in its own way a tiny form, the novel is a model of the transcendence of the
corner of the world, force us to guess at and grasp opposition between the individual and society, of com-
for a world behind their mutually reflecting aspects
pulsion and internal impulse through the democratic
that is broader, more multi-levelled, containing more
and varied horizons than would be available to a hegemonic principle.
single language or a single mirror.59 The novel takes on the role of a philosophy of
culture in that it aims to reveal the basic formative
Bakhtin here follows closely an argument presented principle behind verbal images of the world. Common
by Cassirer in his 1927 study of Renaissance phil- and typical principles of formation are revealed behind
osophy. All the perspectives of an era must be col- diverse and dissimilar discourses: in a ʻnovelʼ sense
lected into ʻthe unity of a vision, a visio intellectualisʼ the unity of ʻspiritʼ behind the multiplicity of its
which illustrates the absurdity of the proposition that manifestations. The diversity of the ʻproducts of the
the absolute can be perceived through an individual human spirit sustains and confirms the unity of the
point of view, and also the lack of priority to be given productive processʼ.66 Following Shaftesbury, both
to any single perspective ʻbecause only the concrete theorists argue that the aesthetic turns man away
totality of them can mediate a true picture of the from created things and towards the creative process:
Whole for usʼ. The ʻaccidentality and necessityʼ of ʻthe operative forces which have shaped this universe
every single viewpoint is ʻincluded and recognizedʼ, and constitute its inner coherenceʼ. It is here that the
each view including ʻthe thing seen as well as the synthesis of subject and object, man and God is made
manner and direction of the seeingʼ.60 possible, for man is no longer simply a creation but
Bakhtinʼs novelist creates an artistic world as also a creator.67 A religious man, but nevertheless one
the ʻliving vehicleʼ of perception; as in the work who maintained a rigorous kenoticism of the intellect,
of Leonardo, ʻfantasy guides perception and gives Bakhtin followed through the Hegelian logic of his
it significance, its sharpness and its definitivenessʼ.61 argument to its natural, but unspoken, conclusion – the
Selected perspectives become ʻpregnant factorsʼ which absolute is the manifestation of God:
guide the ʻsynthetic spatial imagination in certain
directionsʼ.62 Thus, the novelist ʻforces all … socio- The ideal towards which our knowledge must strive,
then, does not lie in denying and rejecting particu-
logically alien and distant worlds to speak about them-
larity, but in allowing it to unfold in all its rich-
selves in their own language and their own style – but ness. For only the totality of faces gives us the One
the author builds a superstructure over these languages view of the Divine. The world becomes the symbol
made up of his own intentions and accents, which of God … in that we pass through it in all of its
becomes dialogically linked with themʼ.63 The very forms, freely submitting ourselves to its multiplicity,
shape of the artistic work develops in accordance with to its antitheses.68
the essential truth of things, as the sort of imaginative
In so far as Bakhtinʼs theory of the novel provides
model Cassirer found first theorized in the aesthetics of
a dynamic model of ʻindividuals woven into an inti-
Shaftesbury.64 The authorʼs own perspective becomes
mate unity with no detriment to their specificityʼ,69 it
decentred among the various perspectives on offer, his
continues the hegemonic project of Enlightenment aes-
own biases and preferences subdued to a ʻcommunity
thetics. Dialogism, like Hegelʼs Geist, runs throughout
of sensibility with othersʼ. The novel becomes the
all epochs and social orders, and as such it describes
image of democratically organized social relations, of
the social whole; but as an epoch or order might
a different hegemonic principle. In this new world it is
fail to recognize the norms of social and political
not the authoritative, mythic use of language as a law
behaviour that it puts forward as a type of imperative,
to be obeyed that is operative, but a critically active
dialogism stands, like Geist, ʻin critical judgement over
selection, rejection and assimilation from a plurality of
against the historical givenʼ.70 Dialogism becomes, in
social perspectives. Like Hegelʼs philosophy, the novel
Bakhtinʼs last work, the ʻsuperaddressee … whose
becomes a model for social relations. What Bakhtin
absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed,
calls internally persuasive discourse refashions the
either in some metaphysical distance or in distant
human subject ʻfrom the inside, informing its subtlest
historical timeʼ.71
affections and bodily responses with this law that is
not a lawʼ.65 It is a sort of implicit ethical ideology
Notes
which is ʻhalf-ours and half someone-elseʼsʼ; it ʻorgan-
1. I acknowledge Brian Pooleʼs illuminating paper on the
ises the mass of our words from withinʼ and struggles sources of Bakhtinʼs cultural messianism delivered to
with other ideologies, only to be selected or rejected the Bakhtin centenary conference at Sheffield Univer-

26 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

 sity in 1995 as an important exception here, and one 8.
which prompted me to examine the relationship between 27. Cassirer, PSF, Vol. 3, p. 75.
Bakhtin and Cassirer at greater length. I believe, how- 28. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State, Yale University
ever, that the focus of my article is quite different to that Press, New Haven CT and London, 1946, pp. 284–5.
of Poole. 29. Krois, Cassirer, pp. 192–5.
2. John M. Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History, 30. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 270–71.
Yale University Press, New Haven CT and London, 31. Ibid., p. 285.
1987, p. 4. 32. Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Humanities, Yale Uni-
3. N.I. Kolyshkina, ed., Besedy V.D. Duvakina s M.M. Ba- versity Press, New Haven CT and London, 1961, p.
khtinym, Progress, Moscow, 1996, pp. 42, 240. 210.
4. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Problems of Dostoevskyʼs Poet- 33. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 278.
ics, trans. Caryl Emerson, Manchester University Press, 34. Ibid., p. 394.
Manchester, 1984. 35. Ibid., p. 395.
5. On this, see Donald Verene, ʻKant, Hegel and Cassirer: 36. Ibid, pp. 17, 18.
The Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Formsʼ, in 37. Ibid., p. 13.
Journal of the History of Ideas 30, 1969, pp. 33–48; 38. Ibid., p. 342.
David Lipton, Ernst Cassirer: The Dilemma of a Liberal 39. Ibid, p. 352.
Intellectual in Germany 1914–33, University of Toronto 40. Cassirer, PSF, Vol. 2, p. 175.
Press, Toronto, 1978, pp. 70–82. 41. Craig Brandist, ʻThe Official and the Popular in Gramsci
6. Quoted in Charles Hendel, ʻIntroductionʼ, in Ernst Cas- and Bakhtinʼ, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 13, no.
sirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms [PSF], Vol. 1: 2, 1996, pp. 59–74, pp. 70–72.
Language, trans. R. Manheim, Yale University Press, 42. On Cassirer and liberalism, see Lipton, Ernst Cassirer.
New Haven CT and London, 1955, pp. 1–65, p. 34. 43. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 23–4.
7. Note Cassirerʼs use of this term, which in the translated 44. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans.
texts quoted below appears as ʻspiritʼ: ʻWe should use H. Iswolsky, Indiana University Press, Bloomington,
it in a functional sense as a comprehensive name for all 1984.
those functions which constitute and build up the world 45. Cassirer, An Essay on Man, p. 150.
of human cultureʼ (Krois, Cassirer, pp. 77–8). 46. Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England,
8. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. trans. J. Pettegrove, Nelson, London, 1953, p. 184.
M. Holquist and C. Emerson, University of Texas Press,
47. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 269.
Austin, 1981, p. 411.
48. Ibid., p. 401.
9. Ibid., p. 400.
49. Ibid., p. 405.
10. Cassirer, PSF, Vol. 1, p. 117.
50. Ibid., p. 401.
11. Cassirer defines ʻcultureʼ as ʻthe totality of activities that
51. Ibid., pp. 409–10.
produce … human historyʼ (Krois, Cassirer, p. 73).
52. Cassirer, PSF, Vol. 1, p. 188.
12. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Basil
53. Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Re-
Blackwell, Oxford, 1990, p. 145.
13. Cassirer, PSF, Vol. 1, p. 190. naissance Philosophy, trans. M. Domandi, Harper &
14. Krois, Cassirer, p. 101. Row, New York, 1963, p. 38.
15. Cassirer, PSF, Vol. 1, p. 193. 54. Cassirer, PSF, Vol. 1, p. 188.
16. Ibid., pp. 197, 188. 55. Ibid., p. 111.
17. Ibid., p. 188. 56. Ibid.
18. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 369. 57. Cassirer, An Essay on Man, p. 170.
19. Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. S. Langer, 58. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 416.
Harper & Bros, New York, 1953, p. 44. 59. Ibid., pp. 414–15.
20. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 60. Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos, p. 32.
2: Myth, trans. R. Manheim, Yale University Press, New 61. Ibid., p. 158.
Haven CT and London, 1955, pp. 5–6. 62. Cassirer, PSF, Vol. 1, p. 108.
21. Ibid., p. 74. 63. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 409.
22. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 64. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment,
3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge, trans. R. Manhe- trans. F. Koelln and J. Pettegrove, Beacon Press, Boston
im, Yale University Press, New Haven CT and London, MA, 1955, pp. 318–27.
1957. 65. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, pp. 39, 42.
23. Ibid., p. 72. 66. Cassirer, PSF, Vol. 1, p. 114.
24. Krois, Cassirer, p. 139. 67. Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, p. 316.
25. See Ernst Cassirer, Symbol, Myth and Culture: Essays 68. Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos, p. 37.
and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer 1935–45, Yale University 69. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 25.
Press, New Haven CT and London, 1979, pp. 188, 253– 70. Ibid., p. 149.
5; and An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Phil- 71. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Es-
osophy of Culture, Yale University Press, New Haven says, trans. V. McGee, University of Texas Press, Austin,
CT and London, 1945, pp. 154–6. 1986, p. 126.
26. Cassirer, PSF, Vol. 2, p. 109; Krois, Cassirer, pp. 87–

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 27

Cosmopolitanism and
boredom
Bruce Robbins

ʻIn the course of my lifeʼ, Joseph De Maistre famously rest against the West by means of an unrepentant
observed, ʻI have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians; reassertion of Western philosophical universalism.
I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be I warmed somewhat to Nussbaumʼs argument,
a Persian; but man I have never met.ʼ De Maistreʼs however, for two reasons. The first was a sense of
genteel snubbing of ʻmanʼ is still remembered often, sneaky incoherence in positions that, like De Maistreʼs,
and usually with satisfaction. But the propriety of this base their counter-appeal on the unquestionable self-
snub has never seemed so open to doubt. Even if one evidence of the particular. After all, it is not just an
could assume, with De Maistre, that the abstract uni- abstract, universal ʻmanʼ, but very particular groups
versal ʻmanʼ is vague and ungraspable, recent history of non-citizens who can be treated as if they were
has made it difficult to pretend that this abstraction can not there, and are still treated as if they were not
be neatly opposed to particular nationalities, assumed there, because of a code of intellectual courtesy that
to be palpable and real. Those Frenchmen De Maistre prides itself on recognizing only particulars. A second
has seen with his own eyes: are we sure they werenʼt reason for putting my doubts on hold was seeing what
Alsatians or Occitanians of uncertain allegiance and massive hostility that argument provoked, how much
identity? Could it be that his Russians were not really more unwilling I was to join her attackers – and, last
Russians at all, but Ukrainians or Georgians, Chechens but not least, how disquietingly the arguments of her
or Abkhazians whose day of national recognition had attackers echoed the epistemological modesty of the
not yet arrived – and would arrive only to be contested American cultural Left itself. Most of the essays in
in turn? Nationality, it would appear, is also an artifice, For Love of Country are less interesting as critiques of
a fragile historical generalization rather than a given Nussbaumʼs cosmopolitanism than as instances of an
fact of nature. And precisely because France and emergent form of American nationalism that becomes
Russia must be acknowledged to be abstractions, it is visible against it.
harder and harder to avoid at least a nodding acquaint- To the rest of the world, American nationalism may
ance with ʻman,ʼ who is nothing but a more unruly, still seem first and foremost a hypocritical version of
less institutionally grounded abstraction. idealist universalism. Its primary associations are with
This devious line of argument expresses some of my the borderless-world globalism, at once capitalist and
ambivalence about Martha Nussbaumʼs essay ʻPatriot- electronic, that hypes McDonaldʼs and MTV along
ism and Cosmopolitanismʼ and the essays gathered with free markets and carefully selected human rights.
around it in For Love of Country.* In part because But recently there has been a retrenchment, a circling
of my own discomfort with the universal ʻmanʼ, I did of the wagons, a scaling-down of American national-
not set out with overwhelming sympathy for Nuss- ism in the direction of Realpolitik. These days there
baumʼs cosmopolitan project, the project of educating are many American policy-makers and media pundits
people into a primary allegiance to what she calls ʻthe who no longer bother to pretend that whatʼs good for
worldwide community of human beingsʼ. According to us is good for the world. With a menacing modesty,
this Stoic and Kantian ideal, there could be only one they are now content to champion one national interest
cosmopolitanism, one ʻworld citizenshipʼ, for there is against all others. The mood is neo-medieval. And
only one ʻworldwide community of human beingsʼ. the flower of the national clerisy, at least as far as it
Paradoxically, then, Nussbaum could only defend the is represented in this book, seems intent on declaring

*
Martha C. Nussbaum with Respondents, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, edited by Josh Cohen,
Beacon Press, Boston MA, 1996, 151 pp, $15.00, pb., 0 8070 4313 3.

28 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

itself unwilling or incompetent to pass judgement communitarian political philosophies. At any rate,
on this melee from anywhere outside or above it. the refusal to recognize foreign obligations and com-
With a silent bow in the direction of poststructuralist mitments certainly gathers up her critics into a sudden
commonplace, they seem to say that if there is indeed and coherent collectivity.
no metalanguage, no metadiscourse, then so much the It is quite a show. With few exceptions, liberals and
better for us; this limitation on thought turns out to conservatives join in a shockingly smooth bipartisan
have unexpected benefits for the worldʼs most powerful consensus against this or, it seems, any challenge to
nation, which can present itself as just another tiny the American nation. Michael Walzer, forgetting what
particular locked in battle with a tyrannical, totalizing Stalin did to those he called cosmopolitans, tries to tar
universalism. Faced with criticism of their country cosmopolitanism with the brush of Stalinism. Foreign-
from the outside, liberal and rightist intellectuals can ers canʼt be granted the moral rights of fellow citizens,
claim the protection that the cultural Left has accorded says Nathan Glazer. Otherwise, we would be forced to
to smaller and more vulnerable collectivities. allow an unlimited number of Third World refugees
Unlike, say, Alain Finkielkraut in The Defeat of into the USA. (This is a neat bit of illogic, on a par
the Mind or David Hollinger in Postethnic America, with believing that socialism means having to share
Martha Nussbaum does not set her cosmopolitan ideal your toothbrush.) Our boat is full. But cosmopolitan-
against the perceived excesses of atavistic nationalists ism itself is empty. According to Robert Pinsky, who
abroad or academic multiculturalists at home. For not coincidentally has just been named our new Poet
Love of Country began as an essay in the Boston Laureate, cosmopolitanism is as empty of affect and
Review in late 1994 that protested against recent state- constituency as Esperanto. Cosmopolitanism is ʻa view
ments by Sheldon Hackney, chairman of the National of the world that would be true only if people were
Endowment for the Humanities, and the philosopher not driven by emotionsʼ.
Richard Rorty. Hackney, speaking for the Clinton Emotions are among the many local particulars
administration, had recently called for shared values that the respondents, following De Maistreʼs lead,
and national unity to counter the threats of excessive throw in the face of Nussbaumʼs fidelity to ʻmanʼ.
pluralism. In a much-debated editorial in the New Benjamin Barber argues that to ʻbypassʼ the local is
York Times entitled ʻThe Unpatriotic Academyʼ, Rorty to end up ʻnowhereʼ, in mere ʻabstraction and disem-
had sternly cautioned the cultural Left to show more bodimentʼ. For Gertrude Himmelfarb, cosmopolitan-
deference to ʻthe emotion of national prideʼ. ism ʻobscures and even denies … the givens of life:
Nussbaum, a distinguished classical scholar, could parents, ancestors, family, race, religion, heritage,
hardly be mistaken for one of those mythical multi- history, culture, tradition, community – and national-
culturalists who supposedly refuse to teach the Greeks. ityʼ. Many of the arguments in the book follow the
Indeed, her counterattack has nothing either multi- curve of this last sentence. The local, intimate ʻgivensʼ
or cultural about it. No multiculturalist could have lined up before the dash – ʻparents, ancestors, family,
written, as she does, that ʻ[t]he accident of where one race, religionʼ, and so on – are identified with the term
was born is just that, an accident.ʼ For the cultural Left, after the dash – ʻnationalityʼ – so as to lend to the
the culture one is born and raised in could hardly be nation their warmth, inevitability, inviolability. Only
deemed accidental. Whatever controversy may exist the dash itself hints at an unbridgeable difference in
over when cultural diversity should matter, or how scale and kind. Religion and nation-state, it is implied,
and how much, there is widespread agreement that in are both local. Since religion deserves protection from
one way or other it does matter. But for Nussbaum, state interference, it becomes an apparent argument for
culture has nothing to do with ʻmoral worthʼ, hence it sheltering the US state itself, suddenly radiant with
is ʻmorally irrelevantʼ. Her demand is not that greater borrowed divinity, from any critique of its behaviour
reverence be paid to the diversity of cultures. What she toward non-citizens.
wants is respect for a universal ethical standard. It is customary to see the American academy as a
Nussbaum thus resembles the cultural Left only in sanctuary of secular intellectuals sheltered from the
that she too insists on obligations and commitments often eccentric religiosity of the American majority.
that do not stop short at the borders of the nation. To judge from these responses, however, it would
But those obligations and commitments may provide seem that academic opinion on US nationalism – or
an ultimately more significant marker of current the absence of acknowledgement that such nationalism
political alignments than the usual clashes of philo- exists – reflects with uncanny exactness the petulant
sophical position, including that between Kantian and sensitivity of the sectarian believer. There is more than

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 29

one irony in this. Multiculturalism is often charged absurd to think that most of us can or should spend
with an uncritical celebration of cultural givenness. our time trying to fight free of our nations or local
But one finds a much cruder celebration of cultural entanglements. Nussbaum herself notes that the local
givenness here, among writers who are mainly vehe- deserves priority in at least one ethical sense: itʼs in
ment opponents of multiculturalism, than in multi- your power to affect it more directly, for example as a
culturalism itself, where a shared interest in diversity parent. Mrs Jellyby, the character in Bleak House who
tends to force at least some relativizing of everyoneʼs neglects her children in favour of what Dickens calls
given culture. ʻtelescopic philanthropyʼ, remains an object lesson.
Nussbaumʼs own favoured image for how local Her eyes ʻhad a curious habit of seeming to look a
givens relate to concern for humanity is concentric long way offʼ, as Michael Sandel reminds us in his
circles. Borrowed from the Stoics, this image mini- case against cosmopolitanism. ʻAs if … they could see
mizes conflict between humanity and the local, urging nothing nearer than Africa.ʼ But let us pause to note
us merely to make the outermost circle (humanity as a that in his frequently less familial moods, Dickens
whole) more and more like the inmost circle (self and himself could be considered a practitioner of telescopic
family). Yet it does suggest, however gently, the need philanthropy. And his Mr Vholes in the same novel,
for an educative progress from narrower to broader the Chancery lawyer who endlessly reminds everyone
loyalties. This is already too much of an either/or for that he both has and is a father, offers an opposite but
most of the respondents. They insist, rightly enough, equally instructive lesson in how tender solicitude for
that larger loyalties need not preclude or replace oneʼs family can stand in the way of reform. Dickens
smaller loyalties: ʻWe will not love those distant from sums up Vholesʼ position like this: ʻMake man-eating
us more by loving those close to us less.ʼ (Of course, unlawful, and you starve the Vholeses!ʼ
as Charles Taylor observes, Americans have not thus Like Mr Vholes, Nussbaumʼs respondents treat
far displayed abundant love toward those closest to local attachments as peremptory and absolute. Neither
them: ʻthe widespread opposition to extremely modest cannibalism nor the Court of Chancery shall be out-
national health care proposals in the United States lawed, they imply, if such measures mean that their
doesnʼt seem to indicate that contemporary Americans loved ones will eat one morsel less. Walzer writes:
suffer from too great a mutual commitment.ʼ) It is ʻMy allegiances, like my relationships, start at the
center.ʼ Starting at the centre, Walzer gives us
no reason to believe that his allegiances will
go any distance away from that centre. Michael
McConnell quotes Edmund Burke: ʻto love the
little platoon we belong to in society is … the
first link in the series by which we proceed
toward a love to our country and to mankind.ʼ
McConnell does not address the question of
whether we do in fact proceed in that direction,
or proceed far enough. The actual platoons,
companies, and battalions that America has
sent out into the world give some cause to
wonder.
Amy Gutmann argues in a similar vein that
ʻasking us to choose between being, above
all, citizens of our own society or, above all,
citizens of the worldʼ is ʻmorally misguided
and politically dangerousʼ. But if choosing is
not always called for, could one not at least
acknowledge that sometimes it may be? Along
with the necessity of choice, Gutmann and most
of the others throw out even its hypothetical
possibility. Thus they refuse to confront the
real core of Nussbaumʼs case, which is simply
that loyalty to oneʼs nation can and sometimes

30 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

does contradict the manifest demands of justice as status quo that is Nussbaumʼs point of departure. In
seen from any extra-national perspective, even a sub- order to get the haves mobilized behind a significant
universalistic one. They acknowledge no moral or transfer of resources to the have-nots, you would need
political leverage against the profound rootedness of more than even a cosmopolitan extension of decorous
caring first and always for our own. constitutionalism. You would need something like
Many of the respondents balk at being asked to treat religious fervour.
strangers as lovingly as they would treat their own The true opposite of such fervour is not consti-
family or friends. One can see their point. As Elaine tutionalism, however, but boredom. On the defensive
Scarry argues, it is quite possible that the confusion from the outset, Nussbaum rejects again and again
of strangers with friends is both unnecessary and a the charge that cosmopolitanism is as ʻboringly flatʼ
mistake. You donʼt have to pull off the neat trick as it may seem. But this is a point that could be
of relating to the worldʼs distant peoples with full made more aggressively. Nussbaum could have said
imaginative and emotional intensity in order to lobby that boredom and indifference name the truth not
for better policies with respect to their wellbeing. And about cosmopolitanism, but about nationalism. For in
feeling obliged to try may lead you to neglect the legal countries like the USA, at least, nationalism may do
machinery of the state, with which cosmopolitans must the most damage today not by its racist and xenophobic
be glad to cooperate when they can, as well as NGOs enthusiasms, real as these are, but rather because it
operating in the politically ambiguous but increasingly encourages inertia, compassion fatigue, a normalizing
material domain of international civil society. A third of our all-too-human satedness with the demands
alternative would involve thinking of distant strangers of the distant, even when distant events are nothing
neither as objects of loving concern nor as objects of but the sensational result of routine domestic policy.
policy, but as interlocutors with whom one must enter Strangely enough, many of Nussbaumʼs respondents
into dialogue, common participants in a transnational seem to agree with her implication that the single
public sphere whose goal would be coordinated action. largest cause of the worldʼs curable unhappiness today
This path might seem a very mild and unthreatening is global capitalism. (More concerned with ethics
extension of existing belief in participatory democracy. than with politics, Nussbaum herself is a bit vague
But the theorists of American democracy represented on this point.) Indeed, they engage her in a spirited
here decline to venture down it. ʻAmerican patriotismʼ, game of more-anti-capitalist-than-thou. They accuse
Benjamin Barber asserts defiantly, is ʻitself the counter her of naively ignoring the complicities between her
to the very evils Nussbaum associates with American cosmopolitan ethics and ʻthe market-driven globalism
patriotism.ʼ currently being promoted by transnational corporations
Barberʼs patriotism, like the constitutional patriot- and banksʼ. Or, more damningly still, they treat her
ism of Habermas, resembles that antidote to ethnic cosmopolitanism as if it were simply global capitalʼs
nationalism that Michael Ignatieff and others have official line.
called civic nationalism: ʻthe only guarantee that This rather pervasive style of romantic anti-capi-
ethnic groups will live side by side in peace is shared talism is worth pausing over. It looks very much
loyalty to a state.ʼ This remains the crucial concept like the dominant, academically respectable form that
allowing Americans (and a few deluded others, such American nationalism is coming to assume. One dis-
as Elie Kedourie) to deny that there is nationalism tinctive feature is that capitalism is attacked only or
in the USA at all. But respect for the constitution primarily when it can be identified with the global.
unfortunately guarantees very little. Quiet and consti- Capitalism is treated as if it came from somewhere
tutional rather than ethnic or tribal, American national- else, as if Americans derived no benefit from it – as if,
ism arguably has been and remains one of the worldʼs rather than being penetrated and to a large extent even
most dangerous. defined by many decades of capitalist development,
Whatever might be said on behalf of constitutional American society and American nationalism were
patriotism, it is of little use to non-citizens and non- among its pitiable victims. Again and again, the case
residents, especially those who are touched by US against cosmopolitanism is framed as a call to renew
power without living on US soil. Even the most judi- ʻour various intact moral communitiesʼ, to defend
cious interpretation of the constitution will not make it vestigial enclaves against an outside seen as chill and
protect those who stand outside it. Internally, constitu- inhospitable. By refusing to acknowledge that these
tional patriotism may calm things down, shielding the warm insides are heated and provisioned by that cold
status quo against bloody outbreaks of ethnic violence. outside, they allow the consequences of capitalism to
But it cannot speak to the desperate need to change the disappear from the national sense of responsibility.

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 31

McDonaldʼs and the IMF could not ask for better states ʻhave expanded their comprehensive welfare
protection from ethical scrutiny. apparatuses to guestworkers and their families. How-
A second distinctive feature of this supposed anti- ever, there is nothing inherent about the logic of the
capitalism is that economic suffering registers only or welfare state that would dictate the incorporation of
primarily when it can be blamed on the globalists. One foreigners into its system of privilegesʼ (p. 138). They
example among many is the demagogic description are compelled to seek closure, exclusion…
of cosmopolitanism as ʻthe village of the liberal Perhaps Nussbaumʼs high moral line can be seen,
managerial classʼ. Class is indeed an issue well worth rhetorically, as an oblique but practical means of
raising here. But if they are so interested, why do addressing unnamed social collectivities. Still, one
her respondents want nothing to do with Nussbaumʼs would like to know more about the collectivities
numbers, the relative and absolute indicators of one – domestic or transnational, given or elective – that
populationʼs wealth and anotherʼs desperate, almost might be capable of translating her moral universal-
unfathomable misery? If life expectancy is 78.2 years ism into a historical force. Nussbaum is uninterested
in Sweden and 39 in Sierra Leone – with recent events in this question, even when such collectivities are
in Sierra Leone, Iʼm sure the figures are now even transnational rather than domestic and thus potential
worse – then ʻwe are all going to have to do some vehicles for or embodiments of cosmopolitan ideas
tough thinkingʼ, as Nussbaum says, ʻabout the luck like her own. And she is uninterested in negotiating
of birth and the morality of transfers of wealth from the messy, soiling compromises between the normative
richer to poorer nationsʼ. Who among her respondents and the descriptive that would inevitably follow from
talks about transfers of wealth? Who offers to explain engagement with them. The only agent that can sustain
why such ideas are aborted in the richer nations before the unblemished purity of the normative is, of course,
they can even be proposed, victims of an ethical ennui ʻmanʼ. Nussbaumʼs love for this large and clumsy
or paralysis that is perhaps the truest face of national- figure of Enlightenment is understandable. But there
ism in the so-called developed world? is an argument to be made that this is a moment for
Almost no one concedes any connection between transnational politics to turn from Kant to Hegel – that
is, from the purity of the normative to the impurity of
the unbearably unequal distribution of the worldʼs
the already existing, to plural cosmopolitanisms that
resources and the future shape of American society.
are non-European and non-elitist, if also sometimes
Only a few (Richard Falk, Amartya Sen, Immanuel
ineligible. These lesser abstractions – ethnic minori-
Wallerstein) enter critically and constructively into
ties, diasporas, religions, worker solidarity movements,
Nussbaumʼs project by extending it beyond the domain
feminist and ecological organizations, and even (why
of the ethical. No one at all, including Nussbaum
not?) sovereign states – may attract equally passion-
herself, invokes or even questions the hypothesis that
ate feelings toward cosmopolitan aims without the
the riches of the West were and are produced by the
same pretension to absolute universality. No less trans-
active underdeveloping of those areas of the world
national than humanity, one can only hope that these
that are now the poorest, and that the demand for
actually existing cosmopolitanisms will be more politi-
redistribution is thus not a plea for benevolent humani-
cally effectual. For the times, as Nussbaum reminds
tarianism but merely for restitution.
us, are desperate.
At this point one has to note the limits of staking
One does not require Nussbaumʼs prolonged
hopes for change, as Nussbaum does, on moral reason-
acquaintance with classical Greece in order to feel
ing directed to the free individual conscience. For a that a great and tragic conflict of loyalties is brewing
rich country like the USA, despite its glaring and around ʻthe limits of patriotismʼ, perhaps even a trans-
increasing inequalities, more equitable redistribution national equivalent of the conflict between family
on a global scale would certainly entail some sacrifice and polis that generated the Antigone. When and if
in living standards, some willingness to postpone or national and cosmopolitan values reach this intensity
dilute self-interest, even for ordinary or (as we say) of confrontation, extreme passions will be thrown up
ʻmiddle classʼ people. In the USA, then, Nussbaumʼs (perhaps cathartic ones) out of the very distance and
high-minded universalism may prove a paradoxically dispersal of the global system. The result may be an
necessary way of getting down to the grassroots, where answer to George Steinerʼs old challenge: proof that
ʻfairnessʼ and the moral autonomy of the individual the modern era can indeed produce high tragedy. In
are influential notions. Soysal argues that European any event, the spectacle will not be boring.

32 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

REVIEWS

Time for the future

Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, Verso, London, 1995. xv + 272 pp., £39.95
hb., £14.95 pb., 0 86091 482 8 hb., 0 86091 652 9 pb.

In the Preface to The Politics of Time Peter Osborne as a contribution to the same modern project of clari-
claims that it comprises two books: ʻa book about the fying and mobilizing the normative resources of the
philosophy of time which grew out of a book about present. The significance of this move becomes clear
the culture of modernityʼ (p. x). The reason for this is when one considers that the first-generation Frankfurt
that metaphysical questions about time and temporal- School critical theorists understood themselves to be
ity inevitably confront anyone who inquires deeply part of a very different project. In its anxiety to break
enough into the concept of modernity. In the light of with the present, of which it had every reason to be
such questions, Osborne attempts to make explicit the deeply suspicious, Critical Theory aimed to draw on
metaphysical assumptions that underlie the cultural the normative resources of the future. The norms that
and political debate concerning modernity, modernism would obtain in a future rational society underwrite
and postmodernism that dominated cultural studies its criticism of present injustice. This is explicit in
and continental philosophy in the 1980s. Horkheimerʼs early work, and is implicit in most of
In so doing, Osborne is exploring an avenue of Adorno and Benjaminʼs writing.
thinking opened up by the suggestive, if somewhat The Politics of Time addresses many of these same
gestural, opening lecture of Jürgen Habermasʼs Philo- questions about the time-consciousness of modernity,
sophical Discourse of Modernity on ʻModernityʼs in a more detailed and sustained argument which
Consciousness of Timeʼ. Like Osborne, Habermas draws very different conclusions. These locate
touches on Koselleckʼs account of the historical emer- Osborne, despite his enthusiasm for Heidegger, Hegel,
gence of the concept of modernity, Heideggerʼs Being and phenomenological ontology, firmly in the tradition
and Time, Gadamerʼs conservative reinterpretation of of first-generation Frankfurt School Critical Theory,
ʻeffective historyʼ; and he discusses the philosophical for he attempts to establish a materialist and future-
significance of the time-consciousness of modernity in orientated conception of political practice. Given the
Hegel and in Walter Benjaminʼs critique of historicism. sphere of interests that guides Osborne, one might
Habermas argues that modernity ceases to draw on have expected an extended polemical engagement with
the normative resources of the past and turns instead Habermasʼs essay; after all, his book contains polemics
to the resources of the present. This concern with the against just about every other recent or contemporary
present is constitutive of the project of modernity; and theorist of modernity, with the notable exceptions of
Hegel, preoccupied as he was with the formulation of Ricoeur, Heidegger and Benjamin, who are accorded
a self-grounding conception of reason, is seen as the lengthy exposition and attentive, nuanced critique.
modern philosopher par excellence. As is well known, Although Osborne enrols Habermasʼs support when
Habermas thinks that Hegel failed in his attempt, venting his spleen against the conservative function
because in his mature work he conceives his phil- of ʻtraditionʼ in Gadamerʼs hermeneutics, he does not
osophy in the metaphysical categories of subject and seriously engage with the Philosophical Discourse
object, although his early work contains the lineaments of Modernity. Indeed, he dismisses Habermas as an
of a philosophy of intersubjectivity that holds out the ʻorthodox Kantianʼ (p. 32).
prospect of a more robust way of contributing to, if One reason for this absence of an engagement with
not completing, the project of modernity. Habermas may be that, apart from the opening chapter,
Despite his critique of Hegelʼs conception of subjec- where Osborne has some very percipient and illumin-
tivity, Habermas allies himself with Hegel in two ways: ating things to say on the debate about modernity
he understands his own philosophy of intersubjectivity and postmodernity, the theme of modernity is pushed
as a development of Hegelʼs early work; and he sees it below the surface by the very weighty metaphysical

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 33

problem of time and time-consciousness. This is the each chapter. He shows considerable insight and dex-
other main difference between them. For Habermas terity in bringing a formidable and diverse array of
talks about the time-consciousness of modernity, material under one theme. Each chapter consists in a
but not about time and time-consciousness as such, self-contained medley of critical expositions of works
whereas Osborne wants to make use of the ʻphilo- of contemporary theory which expound or implicitly
sophical resourcesʼ (p. xiii) of the discourse about time trade on a conception of time-consciousness. For the
and time-consciousness for the purposes of explaining most part, I found his expositions lucid and informa-
the culture of modernity. tive in themselves. For example, in the final chapter
His overall argument goes something like this. he delivers a crisp cameo critique of the theoretical
Time has to be thought both subjectively, as tensed motivations for Heideggerʼs political accommodation.
experience, and objectively, as infinite succession. On certain important matters, however, his analysis is
Without the former, experience would fragment into altogether too brief and superficial, particularly in the
an aggregate of unrelated now points; all acts, physi- case of Kantʼs conception of time and history. I also
cal and mental, would be inconceivable. Without the felt that more explanation of the theories of Aristotle,
latter, the relations of before and after could not be Augustine and Husserl was needed, if only to get the
intersubjectively identified and real relations between philosophical problems into focus; and that filtering
events would not perdure through time. But subjec- their views through the optic of (Osborneʼs reading
tive and objective time cannot be different times; of) Ricoeurʼs account of them in Time and Narrative
they mutually support each other and must form part only added to the confusion.
of one and the same time. So what is this totality
of which subjective and objective time form part?
Osborneʼs deceptively simple answer is ʻsocial ontol-
ogyʼ. Just as for Heidegger Dasein is a being whose
Being is a question for it, modernity is a being whose
Being is a question for it. Just as Daseinʼs temporal-
ity is its being-towards-death, so the temporality of
modernity is its being-towards-extinction. What this
consciousness of finitude is supposed to do is awaken
modernity to the radical openness of the future. This
move allies Heideggerʼs analytic of Dasein with Ben-
jaminʼs concept of historical time. Benjamin used
the concept of messianic redemption to dispose of
what he called ʻhistoricismʼ, a Hegelian legacy that
emphasized the continuity between past and present,
thereby confining the radical openness of the future
within the narrow horizon of present expectation. The
twin threats of environmental catastrophe and human
extinction have, on the one hand, brought out the social
significance of Heideggerʼs analysis of Dasein and, on
the other, put secular flesh on the theological bones of This problem of having to condense the exposition
Benjaminʼs apocalyptic theory of time. A politics of of very difficult theories stems from Osborneʼs chosen
time is supposed to emerge once modernity realizes method of ʻtheory construction through appropriative
the dialectical connection between its abstract myth critiqueʼ (p. xiii). Perhaps this is not the best way to
of infinite progress and the concrete lack of political approach such an intractable metaphysical problem; or
and historical change. Thus modernity is driven back perhaps his critical appropriations were not selective
to a concern with everyday life as the locus of what enough. Either way, he does not do justice to the
Osborne calls ʻthe social production of possibilityʼ complexity of the issues of time and time-conscious-
(p. 198). ness. The constant introduction of new material and
My reservations about The Politics of Time are the lack of concrete examples makes it difficult to
of two kinds. The first concerns methodology and follow his argument. I am still not sure in what sense
style. In one sense, it is a strength of the book that Osborne takes himself to be advancing a ʻmaterialistʼ
Osborne manages to compress so much material into theory of time, despite his mention of the Marxist

34 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

account of the advent of standardized clock-time. On Benjamin, who, despite manifest differences, agree
this point, a discussion of the well-known arguments on this: that praxis consists in a radically contin-
for the ideality of time advanced by Kant or McTaggart gent break with all present concerns. Whatever their
would have helped to clarify his position. political allegiances, there is a remarkable similarity
This brings me to my second set of worries: the between Benjaminʼs messianic motif of ʻpulling the
conception of political praxis advanced in The Politics emergency cordʼ of history and Schmittʼs invocation of
of Time. For I think that Osborneʼs account of time the ʻstate of emergencyʼ; and it ought to be politically
risks bringing metaphysical confusion to the social disquieting.
and political questions he addresses. In conceptual Osborneʼs position is ambivalent. At times he
terms Benjaminʼs notion of redemption is problematic appears to want to condemn any constraint on the
enough. Can we make any real sense of the thought radical openness of the future as reactionary or con-
that a temporal relation can be constituted by a relation servative. This view is mistaken. Normative criti-
to something outside time? Certainly the threat of cal theory, like moral philosophy, must be oriented
human extinction and environmental destruction make towards the future. But it must also be action-guiding
sense, but these are in no sense outside time. And, if to some extent. It must be able, from the standpoint of
that is so, the politics of time seems to be saddled with the present, to rule out certain practices and actions
a notion of political and social change of mysterious in the future. At others, Osborne acknowledges that
theological origin. there is a problem with the practical indeterminacy
A more pressing problem can be raised apropos an of Benjaminʼs revolutionary conception of politics,
exquisitely apposite typing error in the discussion of and argues that it can be solved by repositioning a
Heidegger and Benjamin on ʻ“averageness” (Durch- politics of time within the ʻeverydayʼ. The solution lies
schmittlichkeit)ʼ (sic) – a word which, if it existed, in the dialectical thought that the break with present
would mean ʻthoroughly Schmitt-likeʼ. Osborne empha- concerns is immanent to those concerns; the rupture
sizes the ʻuncanny convergence between Benjamin and with everyday experience is inscribed within it. Actu-
Heideggerʼs views on historical timeʼ (p. 175), and ally, Osborne is arguing that this ʻsurrealʼ texture of
acknowledges the problem with their (and Schmittʼs) the everyday is the solution to the problem of ʻrepeti-
ʻdecisionisticʼ conception of practice. The charge of tionʼ. It remains unclear to me that ʻthe mystery of the
ʻdecisionismʼ can be understood as the objection that everydayʼ even addresses the problem of the ethical
the notion of an authentic mode of existence, reso- indifference of a decisionistic praxis.
luteness in the face of oneʼs finitude, cannot supply Finally, there is Osborneʼs conclusion that a mate-
any determinate theoretical constraints on action that rialist theory of culture needs an awareness of ʻthe
could serve in place of moral principles. Since almost social production of possibilityʼ. This claim can be
any action could, in the right circumstances, count understood as a challenge to a thought that runs like
as authentic, Heideggerʼs destruction of metaphysics a red thread through the political thought of Arendt,
invites ethical catastrophe. Osborne argues convinc- Adorno and Habermas: that we think political pos-
ingly that Heideggerʼs decisionism alone does not sibilities as socially produced is not the solution to the
underwrite his political capitulation to authority. The absence of political praxis; it is part of the problem.
fault lies with his epochal view of ʻrepetitionʼ, which For political possibilities are largely possibilities of
understands the future as the ʻreturn to a new begin- doing and acting differently, of different social prac-
ningʼ, in the shape of the destiny of a people. Thus, tices, and these cannot be ʻmadeʼ or ʻproducedʼ like
argues Osborne, Heidegger fails to understand the things. The extent to which we think they can only
future as ʻradical opennessʼ and thinks of it, instead, as reflects the extent to which intersubjective relations
the inauguration of a forgotten past. The real political have been reified under modern conditions. Osborneʼs
danger of Heideggerʼs Being and Time, Osborne claims readiness to break with lines of thought now familiar
provocatively, is that it is not decisionistic enough (p. on the reconstructed ʻLeftʼ is admirable in itself, and
174). More decisionism, not less! Osborne answers quite in keeping with his own theory. He is nothing if
the problem by denying that there is one. Surely not controversial. To my mind, however, the reasons
the problem is and always was, not that decisionism that cast a shadow over the utopian content of the
leads Heidegger to a naive identification with political model of production are not defeated by the ecstatic
authority, but that decisionism permits such a course of vision of the everyday with which The Politics of
action, because it is ethically indifferent. This ʻethical Time concludes.
indifferenceʼ is common to Schmitt, Heidegger and
Gordon Finlayson

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 35

A good man fallen among individualists
Michael Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology, Polity Press,
Cambridge, 1996. xi + 289 pp., £45.00 hb., £14.95 pb., 0 7456 0595 8 hb., 0 7456 1596 1 pb.

ʻWhat has to be explained is not the fact that the man Nevertheless, perhaps because of the enormous
who is hungry steals or the fact that the man who scope of the project, Rosen is unable to avoid a degree
is exploited strikes, but why the majority of those of unevenness in his accounts of individual thinkers.
who are hungry donʼt steal and why the majority of For example, Adam Smith is not the only member
those who are exploited donʼt strike.ʼ These words of of the Scottish historical school to offer a theory of
Wilhelm Reich define, according to Michael Rosen, the ʻthe connection between economic life, political insti-
question that the theory of ideology seeks to address. tutions, customs and ideasʼ, as John Millarʼs Origin
In its most developed form, within Marxism, this of the Distinction of Ranks bears witness. Again, it
theory answers Reichʼs question through the concept of wonʼt do to criticize Habermas and Foucault for a
what Adorno calls ʻnecessary false consciousnessʼ. The parallel error they commit in their writings of the
best-known version of this concept is probably Marxʼs 1960s, while ignoring the way in which each later
declaration in The German Ideology that ʻthe ideas of modified his theory in part to take account of the fault
the ruling class are, in every epoch, the ruling ideasʼ: identified by Rosen.
by means of this ideological domination the exploited Omissions of this kind do not affect Rosenʼs overall
are persuaded to accept their exploitation as just. argument. But his surprisingly inaccurate discussion
Rosen pursues a double strategy in this long-awaited of Darwin does relate to his central preoccupations.
book. On the one hand, he traces the historical develop- He follows G.A. Cohen in drawing parallels between
ment of the concept of false consciousness, from its explanations in evolutionary biology and functional
origins in the Enlightenment (De la servitude volon- explanations in social theory. There is nothing wrong
taire, by Montaigneʼs friend La Boëtie, thus, despite with this in principle. Rosen, however, tends towards
providing Rosen with his title, forms part of ideologyʼs a Lamarckian interpretation of Darwin, attributing to
prehistory), to its latest development by the Frankfurt him, inter alia, the beliefs that a species has welfare-
School. On the other hand, he undertakes a work of furthering characteristics ʻprecisely because they
conceptual clarification and, above all, of philosophical further its welfareʼ, and that ʻthere exists a mechanism
critique. Of Voluntary Servitude, its opening sentence – natural selection – which ensures that over time,
declares, is ʻwritten againstʼ the theory of ideology. species come to acquire characteristics which further
It seems intended to allow Rosen more generally to their welfare.ʼ
settle accounts with Marxism, and thereby to help Now, of course, precisely what the theory of natural
establish how ʻegalitarian valuesʼ and ʻprojects of selection does not explain is the acquisition and inher-
human emancipation, perhaps … even socialist onesʼ, itance of characteristics by organisms: relative to the
can survive it. theory, variations are random, not in the sense that they
Anyone familiar with Rosenʼs brilliant The Hegelian are uncaused, but that, as Elliott Sober puts it, they
Dialectic and its Criticism (1982) will know that ʻdo not occur because they would be beneficialʼ. What
he brings to this challenging undertaking both tre- Darwin predicts is that where a variation occurs which
mendous historical erudition and great philosophical enhances an organismʼs fitness – that is, its chances
rigour. These are displayed most successfully in the of survival and reproduction – and is passed on to
chapters where he outlines the historical emergence its descendants, the latter tend to increase in number
of the ʻtwo background beliefsʼ which, he argues, ʻpro- relative to other populations. While Darwin thus dis-
vide the core of Marxʼs answer to Reichʼs question: the tinguishes between the causes of fitness-enhancing
belief that societies are self-maintaining entities, and variations and their role in natural selection, it was
the belief that, in the case of prima facie illegitimate Lamarck who argued that evolution consisted in organ-
societies, the way in which they do this is by means isms acquiring and passing on adaptations because of
of false consciousness on the part of those who live their beneficial effects, a goal-oriented process – in
in them.ʼ Rosenʼs discussions of Hume, Rousseau, Lamarck, writes François Jacob, ʻadaptive intention
Smith and Hegel are outstanding, as is his sensitive always precedes realizationʼ – reflecting the ʻplanʼ at
and illuminating treatment of Benjamin towards the work in nature to achieve ever greater perfection of
end of the book. biological structure.

36 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

 however, in turn depends on an analogy
between persons and societies. But while
we intuitively treat individual human
beings as coherent and autonomous
entities, ʻwe do not have a commonly
agreed “ folk sociology” to match the “
folk psychology” by which we explain
peopleʼs everyday beliefs and actions.ʼ
Many of Rosenʼs criticisms of Marxʼs
models are well taken. But it is not clear
that they inflict fatal damage on the
theory of ideology. The interests model
has more life to it than he suggests, pro-
vided we stop regarding the exploited as
simply the passive recipients of ruling-
class ideas and treat social consciousness
This slide into a teleological conception of evolu- as the outcome of an active struggle between the
tion is related to Rosenʼs ascription to Marx of the classes. Gramsciʼs notion of ʻcontradictory conscious-
ʻbackground beliefʼ that, as Cohen puts it, treats ʻsocie- nessʼ, a composite – indeed compromise – formation
ties or economic units as self-maintaining and self- containing beliefs corresponding to the interests of
advancingʼ. This belief, which invites us to conceive divergent classes, is particularly suggestive in this
society as an end-in-itself and therefore to explain context. Taking this line would mean dropping what
its features teleologically, in terms of their contribu- is sometimes called the ʻdominant ideology thesisʼ,
tion to the process of social reproduction, is, Rosen expressed in Marxʼs assertion that ʻthe ideas of the
believes, central to Marxʼs theory of ideology. Indeed, ruling class are … the ruling ideas.ʼ Yet, although
he claims that Marx lacks anything amounting to a Rosen is careful to dissociate the concept of ʻneces-
properly articulated theory of ideology. Instead, we are sary false consciousnessʼ from that of a ʻdominant
confronted with a series of ʻmodelsʼ usually governed ideologyʼ, and indeed to deny that it requires that
by a metaphor that substitutes for the specification of false consciousness be ʻthe sole meansʼ whereby unjust
a mechanism. societies are reproduced, he gives no consideration to
Thus The German Ideology offers, in addition to this possible strategy.
the ʻinterests modelʼ (the idea that capitalist society is The reason for this failure lies, I think, in the
kept going by means of bourgeois ideological domin- emphasis he lays on Marxʼs ʻbackground beliefʼ in
ation), the ʻreflection modelʼ, according to which society as a self-maintaining system. Rosen argues that
ideology, like a camera obscura, gives an accurate, both the existence of this assumption, and the extent
but inverted, depiction of social reality. Marxʼs later, to which even the later Marx remains dependent on
more ʻscientificʼ writings also contain the ʻcorres- Hegel, are shown by the way in which ʻthe Grund-
pondence modelʼ, best represented by Cohenʼs attempt risse presents an account of capitalist production as a
to show that the ideologico-political superstructure is self-unfolding process with capital as its subjectʼ, an
functionally explained by its tendency to reproduce account also implicit in Capital. Now the presence of
the economic base; and the ʻessence and appearance strongly Hegelian motifs in the Grundrisse is familiar
modelʼ implied by the theory of commodity fetishism, enough. Both Edward Thompson and some of the
according to which the operations of the market lead Althusserians he smote in The Poverty of Theory drew
participants to perceive the capitalist mode of produc- attention to them. Much of the work of the German
tion in a systematically misleading way. ʻcapital-logicʼ school was vitiated by the tendency to
Rosen briskly disposes of each of these models in take up the hints offered by the Grundrisse, and treat
turn. The interests model treats the working class as a capital as a secularized version of the Absolute Idea,
passive object of manipulation. The metaphors inform- necessarily actualizing itself through its contingent
ing the reflection and essence and appearance models empirical manifestions.
dis-integrate on closer inspection. The correspondence Rosen, however, ignores the series of system-
model presupposes the idea, already encountered, of atic conceptual recastings which Marx undertook
ʻsociety as a self-maintaining systemʼ. This concept, in the decade 1857–67, during which he wrote first

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 37

the Grundrisse, then the 1861–63 Manuscript, and vated agentsʼ (East European dissidents in the 1970s
finally Capital itself. Perhaps the best discussion of and 1980s, for example), but, in thus highlighting the
the general direction these changes took is provided limited role of instrumental rationality in explaining
by Jacques Bidet in Que faire du ʻCapitalʼ? (1985). collective action, he unintentionally draws attention to
He notes that in Capital Marx lays far greater stress what a clumsy tool rational-choice theory is.
than in his earlier economic writings on ʻstructuresʼ Maybe the root of the problem lies in Rosenʼs earlier
– empirically identifiable mechanisms arising from book on Hegel. There he argues that the dialectical
class relations and from inter-capitalist competition method necessarily leads, pace Engels, to mystifying
– to explain the global ʻtendenciesʼ of the system, and idealist consequences. It seems to be the drive to
where previously he had been prone either to deduce exorcize social theory of any taint of Hegelian idealism
these tendencies directly from the abstract concept of that has thrust Rosen into Elsterʼs arms. Lenin called
ʻcapitalʼ, or to derive them ʻdialecticallyʼ through some Bernard Shaw ʻa good man fallen among Fabiansʼ.
piece of word-play. Consequently, Capital does not rely Well, Of Voluntary Servitude is the work of a good
on the idea of capital as a self-maintaining system to man fallen among methodological individualists. Their
anything like the extent that Rosen claims it does. influence ensures that, for all its undoubted strengths
He does not notice these changes perhaps because and incidental pleasures, the bookʼs overall argument
he seems to share the belief of analytical Marxists (or must be accounted a failure.
ex-Marxists) like Jon Elster that the only alternative Alex Callinicos
to treating social structures as the unintended conse-
quences of individual actions is to hypostasize society
as a Hegelian macro-subject. But this is plainly false.
While rejecting the functionalist conception of society Freud against
as a self-maintaining system, several contemporary
theorists have sought to conceptualize social structures Wittgenstein
as, in Anthony Giddensʼs formulation, ʻthe unacknowl-
edged conditions and the unanticipated consequencesʼ Jacques Bouveresse, Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The
of human action. Such a position, though incompatible Myth of the Unconscious, trans. Carol Cosman, Prin-
with methodological individualism, is consistent with ceton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1995. xx + 143
different substantive social theories, ranging from Gid- pp., £22.50 hb., £9.95 pb., 0 691 03425 7 hb., 0 691
02904 0 pb.
densʼs neo-Weberian sociology, through Roy Bhaskarʼs
marxisant ʻCritical Realismʼ, to Erik Olin Wrightʼs and Donald Levy, Freud Among the Philosophers: The
my own variously orthodox Marxisms. Psychoanalytic Unconscious and its Philosophical
Critics, Yale University Press, New Haven CT and
Rosenʼs failure to consider this line of thought may
London, 1996. 189 pp., £18.50 hb., 0 300 06632 5.
reflect the malign influence of Elsterian rational-choice
theory. This influence is certainly evident in his alter- As Jacques Bouveresse informs us, Wittgensteinʼs brief
native to the theory of ideology. ʻCompliance without and scattered remarks on psychoanalysis do not add
false consciousnessʼ occurs in unjust societies thanks up to a ʻthorough and systematic critiqueʼ (p. 3). Witt-
to the free-rider problem. In other words, the exploited gensteinʼs attitude to psychoanalysis seems ambiguous;
do not rise up against their oppressors, not because he calls himself a ʻdisciple of Freudʼ (ibid.), and yet
they believe their exploitation is just, but because it is psychoanalysis is a ʻdangerous and foul practiceʼ (p.
instrumentally rational for each to let others incur the xix). His ambivalence reflects a profound pessimism
risks involved in revolt, since any individualʼs partici- about the role of science in our culture. Tellingly,
pation will make no difference to the outcome. Bouveresse reports that Wittgenstein ʻhesitated over
This ʻanswerʼ to Reichʼs question, outlined in a whether the real problem was with psychoanalysis
couple of pages, is, to say the least, feeble. It does not itself or rather how it was used … in an age like
begin to explain recent mass revolts – for example, oursʼ (ibid.). Wittgenstein is a harsh critic of the
the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79, the Polish strikes pretensions of psychoanalysis to scientific status; and
of August 1980, and the South African township insur- this may lead us to think that he should be aligned
rections of 1984–86 – all of which developed spontane- with those philosophers of science, like Karl Popper
ously, in times when the costs of rebellion were still and Adolf Grünbaum, who have been equally scathing
very high. Like Elster, Rosen stresses the vanguard about Freudʼs scientific shortcomings. But as both
role played by minorities of ʻnon-instrumentally moti- Bouveresse and Donald Levy stress, this would be a

38 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

mistake. Wittgenstein wishes to resist the scientistic (Grünbaum). In either case, psychoanalysis fails to
approach to understanding human beings which he furnish a scientific justification of its claims. Levy
thinks psychoanalysis exemplifies. shows that these complaints, in common with those of
He has two main objections to psychoanalysis. Wittgenstein, do not present an adequate picture of the
First, that Freud elevated the characteristic sin of Freudian unconscious; they misunderstand that Freudʼs
philosophical theorizing – the tendency to think that unconscious cannot be separated from the phenomena
understanding something means deriving some essence of transference and resistance – phenomena which can
from a typical or central case upon which a general only be properly characterized within Freudʼs general
theory can be erected – into a scientific principle. theory of the mind and its development, and which
Second, that the kinds of theories Freud provides can only be observed in the free associations of the
only appear to be scientific. What they actually do is patient in the analytic setting.
redescribe the phenomena of mental life in a way that Bouveresse sets out to give a unified exposition of
makes sense to us and which we find attractive and Wittgensteinʼs comments on psychoanalysis, and in
convincing, notwithstanding Freudʼs contention that so doing he too extends the discussion to encompass
we resist the repellent nature of psychoanalytic truths. the views of others. Both books could serve as intro-
Indeed, for Wittgenstein, the fact that such ideas repel ductions to issues in the philosophy of psychoanalysis;
explains their peculiar ʻcharmʼ: we feel such things neither presumes detailed specialist knowledge on the
must have great significance. part of the reader. So it appears that we have here two
Psychoanalysis thus provides a mythology, which similar treatments of the same subject matter. But the
can impose a pattern on our lives and give significance methods and results, the whole style of thinking, of
to what is otherwise meaningless. It tells a story to each writer differ greatly.
which we respond: Yes – it must be like that. This Levy makes a number of important new contrib-
is quite different from explanation in a real science, utions to the debate around these topics, which signifi-
which provides objective evidence for testable causal cantly advance the argument. In contrast, Bouveresse
hypotheses, the bases for genuine predictions. None of remains within the orbit of Wittgensteinʼs thought. He
this is present in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a is content to endorse Wittgensteinʼs positions in toto
persuasive enterprise, both in the wider world and on and to recruit arguments from a motley array of recent
the couch. Freudʼs readers are seduced by the sense- hostile critics of psychoanalysis to bolster them. But
making charm of his constructions; while the patient psychoanalysis is currently receiving a lot of favourable
on the couch assents to the truth of interpretations attention from analytical philosophers (the tradition to
– assent being the main criterion of their truth for which Bouveresse and Levy both belong, Bouveresse
the psychoanalyst, Wittgenstein thinks – because of having made a reputation over the years as that rarest
the analystʼs powers of suggestion. of philosophical animals, an ʻanalytical Frenchmanʼ).
Levy tackles Wittgensteinʼs criticisms as part of a This work, associated in particular with Marcia Cavell,
wider project: clarifying the notion of the unconscious Donald Davidson, Sebastian Gardner, Jim Hopkins,
in Freud through removal of misunderstandings per- Jonathan Lear, Thomas Nagel and Richard Wollheim,
petuated by previous commentators. Thus he analyses sees psychoanalysis as an extension of the kind of
the positions of a number of critics besides Witt- explanation of motive and action employed in everyday
genstein, chief among them being William James, ʻcommon-senseʼ psychology. Explanation by ascription
Alasdair MacIntyre and Grünbaum. The closest of of beliefs and desires in common-sense psychology
these in spirit to Wittgenstein is William James, who is supplemented and extended in psychoanalysis by
attacked the idea of the unconscious before Freud. invoking mental states with different, more primitive
James seeks to resist the reduction of consciousness features, which it was Freudʼs achievement to have
to non-conscious mental ʻatomsʼ (ʻmind-dustʼ, in his discovered.
phrase). Levy is able to show that the psychoanalytic Levyʼs book is potentially continuous with this
concept of the unconscious is not reductive in this development. Indeed, he provides in passing what is
way. MacIntyre and Grünbaum, on the other hand, in effect a summary of it (p. 92). Bouveresse, though
offer full-blown positivist critiques of psychoanalysis. obviously aware of such ideas, gives them no part
Either the unconscious is an unobservable and non- to play. This is regrettable for two reasons, one of
explanatory metaphysical construct (MacIntyre); them deeply ironic. First, the common-sense extension
or psychoanalysis is unable to test its hypotheses view stakes out a middle ground between (everyday)
according to strict inductivist standards ʻon the couchʼ explanation by reasons and (scientific) explanation by

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 39

causes, which Wittgenstein thinks are confused in When we try to understand what someone says,
Freud. Bouveresse grants, following Davidson, that we presume that what they say makes sense; and
reasons can be causes, but denies that this helps psycho- this idea of ʻmaking senseʼ is the key to Alcoffʼs
analysis, which pretends that it has a scientific route argument. First, we assume that the speaker can and
to causal explanation. But this does not admit the will attempt to provide a coherent account of his or
possibility, now generally acknowledged, that there can her own experience. Second, we presume that the
be motivating mental causes which are not reasons, experience itself provides material which can sustain
and that citing such motives in explaining behaviour a coherent account. Third, we will consider new infor-
is a properly psychological form of causal explanation, mation justified to the extent that it coheres with, or
as Freud always said it was. increases the coherence of, the general picture. If we
The irony lies in the fact that one of the main eschew naive realism, or consider experience to be
precursors of the common-sense extension view is already an effect of an interpretative scheme; and if
Wittgenstein. The basis of ascription of mental states we believe that we, in the attempt to understand, are
in common-sense psychology is interpretation: the also interpreters – then it appears that we are caught in
conditions which make interpretation possible – the an uneasy position. But it is at this point that Alcoffʼs
grounding of interpreter and interpretee in a shared attempt to bridge analytic and continental traditions
world which is logically prior to the subjectʼs identifi- is at its strongest. She argues that Foucaultʼs idea of
cation of her inner states – being first described by a discursive practice can be employed to understand
Wittgenstein. Bouveresseʼs book thus has important that both speaker or text, and reader or interpreter, are
limitations. part of the same tradition, that there is an internal or
Adequate discussion of Levyʼs arguments exceeds conceptual dependence between terms such as truth,
the scope of this review. In particular, however, I justification and belief, but that truth is still irreduc-
would single out his treatment of Grünbaum. Levy ible to justification. Within the Foucauldian account,
articulates a generally held and just appreciation of a statement is held to be true, or a unit of knowledge,
Grünbaum in saying that he has written ʻby far the when it fits, or coheres with, other units or state-
most important philosophical rejection of the scientific ments which are all formed in a regular manner by a
credibility of Freudʼs work ever to appearʼ (p. 129). discursive practice.
All the more significant for psychoanalysis, then, if Thus Alcoff can explore a concept of realism
Grünbaumʼs critique can be overthrown. Levy offers a which is, in a sense, contextual. We can accept both
definitive refutation. This and the whole book deserve that claims to know something are actually about
the widest and most careful attention. something (experience), and also that the experience
David Snelling is produced or organized through the discursive prac-
tice – as are our ways of presenting, representing
or analysing that experience. Coherence works as a

Internally real
theory of justification because the discourses con-
stitute the objects of which we speak in a regular
manner, and criteria for truth and falsity are ways of
Linda Martín Alcoff, Real Knowing, New Versions reasoning internal to each conceptual scheme. Given
of the Coherence Theory, Cornell University Press, that we can talk about a discursive field, we can also
Ithaca NY and London, 1996. x + 240 pp., £25.50
talk about subjugated and dominant knowledges and
hb., 0 8014 3047 X.
their differential relations to power. Because there
Alcoffʼs Real Knowing is an attempt to span the so- is no overarching scheme or framework, we can
called continental and Anglo-American philosophical argue that truth is irreducibly plural. Taking on the
divide. Her explicit aim is to present an epistemological problem of ʻaboutnessʼ – the irreducibility of truth to
theory which can both provide the grounds for a nor- justification – Alcoff draws from Putnam a version
mative, evaluative theory of knowledge and explain of internal realism which can support a non-reduc-
the interconnections between knowledge, power and tive account of a mind-independent world. First, ʻthe
desire. As part of this project, Alcoff attempts to dem- worldʼ underdetermines theoretical descriptions, so
onstrate how a coherentist epistemology can answer that there can be a plurality of theoretical schemes.
problems of justification, without reducing truth to Second, although experience determines the truth-
justification. This can be done, she argues, by retaining value of statements, experience is itself part of an
but revising realist commitments. interpretative scheme. Lastly, truth-value is dependent

40 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

on the fit between experience (as interpretation) and tion-begging and this might lead them to describe the
theoretical description. drive to maximize coherence – for Alcoff, the drive
The concluding chapter is an argument for the idea to resolve conflict – as yet another example of the
of plural truths and a rejection of the claim that this authoritarian drive to truth. Luckily, however, few of
results in an absolute relativism. The argument runs us are so ʻpureʼ. By gleaning the best from feminist
like this: truth-claims concern the fit between experi- empiricism and feminist standpoint theories, Alcoff
ence and theoretical description; different schemes will manages to present a coherent account of justification
have different truth variables; disagreement between and truth, without reducing one to the other, and offers
schemes does not prove incommensurability; therefore an insight into the grounds of real knowing directed
conflicts can be resolved (at a local level). The most towards future practice.
productive, true, theoretical description will be one
Gill Howie
which aims for adequacy: a coherent and compre-
hensive account of the constellation of elements that
make up experience.
The argument in Real Knowing is basically of the
transcendental deductive kind: given x, p must be true
(as the condition of x), where x is understanding rather
than knowledge or belief, and p the principles of coher-
Unworldly models
ence and discursive formations. Aside from general
problems with arguments which take this form, there is Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A
Conceptual Approach, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996.
a further problem concerning internal realism. To take
x + 592 pp., £45.00 hb., 0 19 827532 3.
an example suggested by Alcoff, both Marxism and
neo-classical economic theories are comprehensive, This is a large, ambitious and very rewarding book. It
but incommensurable, schemes for analysing economic supplies a comprehensive survey of the central political
behaviour. The difficulty, as I see it, is that within ideologies of the past two centuries: liberalism, con-
either scheme beliefs will be considered true or false servatism and socialism. Feminism and green ideology
depending on whether or not they maximize coherence are briefly discussed at the end of the study. At the
and thereby explain experience. Alcoffʼs suggestion same time Freeden defends a particular approach to
appears to be that the falsity of one scheme will be the study of ideology which is exemplified in the
figured in terms of its inadequacy. This figuring will survey. He takes his stance in opposition to two other
take place at a local level, and will be based on a approaches. One is that which represents ideologies as
lived dissonance between experience and theoretical organized doctrines of little or no intellectual merit,
description. Although internal realism is supposed to to be understood solely in causal or functional terms.
accommodate the idea that ʻthe realʼ constrains our The other is the approach of political philosophy which
theoretical descriptions or analyses, we need a harder, evaluates any theory in pure and abstracted terms of
or more detailed, empirical theory to make sense of truth or rightness. On both approaches an ideologyʼs
the concept ʻinadequacyʼ. Following on from this, a conceptual character is simply neglected, as irrelevant
more thorough assessment of the differences between or absent.
subjugated and dominant knowledges would have been Freeden sees ideologies as ʻparticular patterned
useful, as this distinction is used to bypass difficulties clusters and configurations of political conceptsʼ. Each
associated with theories of false belief, false conscious- ideology has a shape which is given by the relationships
ness and ideology. between what Freeden terms ʻcoreʼ, ʻadjacentʼ and
On the whole, Real Knowing is an impressive, ʻperipheralʼ concepts. Within the core of liberalism,
astute and clear guide through difficult and compli- for instance, is the concept of liberty; the concept is
cated arguments from both traditions. Alcoff manages ʻdecontestedʼ – that is, given a clear single meaning.
to demonstrate the commensurability of concerns, Adjacent and peripheral concepts are further from
interests and questions which run through philoso- the core, but it is central to Freedenʼs approach that
phers as diverse as Gadamer, Davidson, Blackburn, the relationship between an ideologyʼs concepts is not
Quine, Putnam and Foucault. It is unlikely that the simply ʻlogicalʼ, but also cultural and historical. Thus,
arguments for internal realism will convince many concepts at the edge of an ideology are not simply
purist Anglo-American philosophers. Similarly, some those at the furthest intellectual remove from its core
postmodernists may find the form of argument ques- but also those that define an ideologyʼs engagement

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 41

with the world of politics – particular policy proposals, instalment. Freedenʼs target here is the American East
for instance. Each ideology has its own ʻspecific morph- Coast Rawlsianism which has launched a thousand
ologyʼ in which the main political concepts – liberty, doctorates. Freedenʼs approach allows him to make
equality, democracy, and so on – assume their place. telling points. For instance, philosophical liberalism
Freeden offers the metaphors of a map or road grid is famously subject to a communitarian critique for
within which a given number of towns are situated, and its neglect of community. Yet strong conceptions of
of a room within which a common pool of furniture community and the common good did, as Freeden
is placed. On his approach the political theorist can claims, have a solid pedigree in the American liberal
engage with and understand the distinctively ideological tradition. That trail has gone cold as the philosophical
structure of political ideas, without adopting the stance variant of American liberalism has cut itself off from
of the political philosopher who constructs unworldly its own ideological history. In consequence, philo-
pre-scriptive models out of sophical liberalism has also denied itself the political
such ideas. potential and usage a richer American liberal ideology
The approach is immen- might possess.
sely illuminating. One not The relationship between an ideology and political
only sees the ideational philosophy also broaches one very crucial issue. In
architecture of each ide- concentrating on the structure or syntax of an ideol-
ology; one can also rec- ogy, Freeden is careful to bracket the question of its
ognize what one might call truth. At one point (p. 310) he is explicit that since the
the higher-order features of book deals with ideologies, not political philosophies,
each architectural style, the his interest lies not in the ʻrightnessʼ of one approach
intellectual temperament of but in how that approach relates to existing ideological
an ideology. Thus, liberal- systems. Political philosophies which forget that they
ism displays a self-critical are ideologies thereby jettison their politics – that is,
spirit which encourages flexi- a grounding in ʻadjustable social practicesʼ. However,
bility in the arrangements there is a converse problem. As Freeden says, ideolo-
of its conceptual furniture. gies are not only power structures that manipulate
Conservatism, on the other human actions, but also ʻideational systems that enable
hand, organizes its concepts us to choose to become what we want to becomeʼ (p.
in response to its perceived ideological opponents. It 553). Ideologies which forget that they are political
is a ʻmirror-imageʼ ideology of reactive self-aware- philosophies may thereby sacrifice their claim on us
ness. Socialism, finally, is an ideology structured as to change the world in a certain prescribed way. It
a critique of the present which projects an imagined, seems too simple to suggest, as Freeden does on his
but yet to be actualized, future. last page, that the evaluative investigation of ideologies
There are minor cavils. It might have been inter- can readily be ʻsuperimposedʼ on the bookʼs findings.
esting to see nationalism treated as an ideology in Any system of political thought must combine an
its own right. It might have been more worthwhile adequate reflexivity about its historical, cultural and
to extend the treatment of feminism in its ideologi- political conditions of possibility with a warranted
cal function of deconstructing the existing political normativity – that is, a compelling claim upon us to
language, than to pair it with the very young and realize its ideas. Doing that is an immensely complex
incomplete ʻgreenʼ ideology. However, it is in relation task. The outstanding merit of Freedenʼs work is that
to political philosophy that Freedenʼs work is most he has shown what political philosophy presently lacks,
revealing. Freeden identifies a dominant Anglo-Ameri- and has done so by demonstrating that ideologies
can political philosophy which is mainly liberal in should not be dismissed as merely the ʻpoor cousinsʼ of
its allegiances. Not only is such philosophy charged philosophies. Both political theory and political phil-
with being insensitive to its own ideological character; osophy have a great deal to learn from this book.
it is blind to the history and morphology of the par-
David Archard
ticular ideology – liberalism – of which it is the latest

42 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

Engels in his own right
Christopher J. Arthur, ed., Engels Today: A Centenary Appreciation, Macmillan and St Martinʼs Press, London
and New York, 1996. xiv + 214 pp., £40.00 hb., £14.99 pb., 0 333 63324 5 hb., 0 333 66531 7 pb.

This centenary collection usefully steers between two support of a large majority, and that revolution cannot
extreme responses to Engelsʼs role in the development be made against the militaryʼ (p. 40). Collier finds that
of Marxism, neither attributing all errors and crudi- these predictions are supported by historical evidence,
ties in the official doctrine to his baneful influence, but criticizes Engels (and Marx) for failing to appreci-
nor merely portraying him as playing second fiddle ate that revolutions are ʻalways exceptionalʼ (p. 42).
to Marx. However, its main focus is not an attempt His summary (pp. 43–4) stresses Engelsʼs ʻexemplary
definitively to settle Engelsʼs relationship to Marx, but realismʼ, thus leading into the issue of philosophical
rather a review of what in Engelsʼs works still occa- naturalism.
sions debate. This includes his views on class struggle Various aspects of this topic are covered by John
and ʻscientific socialismʼ, philosophical naturalism, OʼNeil, Ted Benton and Sean Sayers. Ted Benton
feminist issues, and political economy. While there is considers what can be learned from Engels about the
some unevenness in the collection, it succeeds in its prospects of a realignment of red and green politics.
aim of showing that Engels had views which warrant He claims that Engelsʼs The Condition of the Working
critical discussion. Class in England demonstrates a link between the
Terrell Carver and Andrew Collier discuss Engelsʼs class position of the English working class and the
views on the politics of class struggle, arguing that he poor health and environment it suffered, and thus
should be seen as a democrat. Terrell Carver notes can be seen as a foundational text for an ecologi-
that Engels could only enter into an uneasy alliance
cal socialism. Sean Sayers, meanwhile, argues that
with other supporters of secular democratization in
Engelsʼs non-reductive materialism is the viable alter-
Europe. He suggests a parallel between the struggles
native to idealism and physicalism (equating this with
of 1848, in which Marx and Engels participated, and
the mechanistic materialism that Engels rejects). For
popular revolts against Communist rule in Eastern
Sayers, as for Davidson, this position asserts that all
Europe, claiming that both were crucially inspired by
ʻmaterial things are physical in natureʼ, yet denies
a demand for constitutional government, which, for all
that ʻall material phenomena are fully describable
its limitations, ʻimplies power sharing with citizens
or explicable in terms of physicsʼ (p. 159). However,
[and] respect for them and their viewsʼ (p. 23). I doubt
Sayers rejects Davidsonʼs ʻanomalous monismʼ because
this. Hayekʼs constitutionalism, for example, seems
it gives a ʻnon-realist account of the mental standpointʼ
rather to imply suspicion of citizens and their views.
(p. 161). This charge might stick for the mental, since
Constitutionalism as such can be seen as a device
on Davidsonʼs account what counts as a correct mental
to restrict appropriation of wealth through political
description or explanation is partly determined by
power. It has democratic overtones when directed
against feudal lords, but not as a safeguard against a presumption that others mostly believe and think
redistribution of wealth by popular majorities. rationally as we do (the ʻPrinciple of Charityʼ). But the
Andrew Collier absolves Engels of responsibil- charge may not hold for other areas, such as biology; or
ity for subsequent retreats among social-democratic even for the view that the mental is ʻanomalousʼ, if that
parties from social revolution to reform and, finally, to is simply a consequence of denying determinism.
mere management of capitalism. Collier asks whether The collection is balanced by some serious criti-
socialist revolution is indeed necessary or possible cisms of Engelsʼs views. While applauding Engelsʼs
given its prerequisites, and then proceeds to show vision of how men and women might live, Lisa Vogel
what Engels contributes to this question. According argues that he fails to integrate his various sources into
to Collier, Engels makes ʻtwo main tendential predic- a coherent theory of the oppression of women. She
tions: that the proletariat will grow as a proportion of suggests a need to go beyond socialist feminism to a
the population; and that military technology will shift critique of Marxism. If, however, historical material-
the balance of forces in the stateʼs favourʼ. He also ism can be interpreted sufficiently broadly to contain
makes ʻthree main constraint predictions: that social- approaches such as Christine Delphyʼs, it may be that
ism cannot be brought about without a revolution, feminism needs only to reject timid, conventional
that revolution cannot be made without the organized Marxisms. Chris Arthur argues that gratitude for

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 43

Engelsʼs contribution to Capital should be tempered Sartre can be seen actually working with someone
by recognition of the muddles involved in his concept else and being contested is more dubious; Lévyʼs
of ʻsimple commodity productionʼ and his attribution questions are often aggressive and he tries too hard to
of a ʻlogico-historicalʼ method to Marx. Arthurʼs claim keep his own hands clean. The criticisms of Sartreʼs
that theory need not recapitulate history is well taken. fellow-travelling would, for instance, be much more
He also shows that value can be a fully developed palatable if they were accompanied by a self-critical
social relation of production only under capitalism. reflection on Lévyʼs starring role in the tragi-comedy
His further assertion that categories such as ʻvalueʼ of French Maoism. Some of the retractions prompted
cannot apply to pre-capitalist commodity exchange by Lévyʼs questions are startling. Sartre is now critical
relies, less plausibly, on claiming that labour time has of his notorious endorsement of the use of a cleansing
a ʻnecessaryʼ influence only on capitalist exchange. violence in his Preface to Fanonʼs Wretched of the
Engels Today provides useful food for thought now Earth. Whilst it is true that the piece has not aged
that the work of Marx and Engels is no longer, as a well, it is hard not to see Sartreʼs admission that he
matter of course, engulfed in ideological fall-out from found it ʻunpleasantʼ to be against his own country as
the collapse of Communism. a surrender to the collective amnesia surrounding the
horrors of the Algerian War. It is heartbreakingly sad
Ian Hunt
to see Sartre retreating from his honourable position
of old.
The central issue addressed in these interviews

Whose last words? is that of constructing new foundations for the Left
after the eclipse of Marxism. Sartre and Lévy explore
the possibility of a new ethics of fraternity and look
Jean-Paul Sartre and Benny Lévy, Hope Now: The
forward to a future in which each person will be a
1980 Interviews, trans. Adrian Van Den Hoven, with
an introduction by Ronald Aronson, University of human being, and in which collectivities will be equally
Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1996. 135 pp., human. Parties will give way to mass movements with
£15.95 hb., 0 226 47630 8. definite and specific goals. At times the discussion
is alarmingly abstract and divorced from political
ʻItʼs other people who are my old age. An old man realities. The rise of Mitterrandʼs Socialist Party and
never feels like an old manʼ, protests the seventy-five- the electoral victory of 1981 may well have resulted
year-old Sartre. The recall of the famous ʻHell is other in new disappointments, but it is perverse to see them
peopleʼ is one of the few flashes of the old brilliance as signalling the demise of political parties.
to be found in these interviews, first published in the The references to an ethics of fraternity would
weekly Nouvel Observateur only weeks before Sartreʼs simply be a banal coda to Sartreʼs political evolution,
death in April 1980. His interloctor is his young were it not for the discussion of messianism, and
secretary Benny Lévy, the rabbinical reincarnation of particularly Jewish messianism, in the final interview.
the Maoist chief formerly known as Pierre Victor. In Anti-Semite and Jew, which, it now transpires, was
The interviews immediately provoked controversy written without any recourse to documentation or
and were given a hostile reception by the Sartre research, Sartre claimed that the Jew would finally
ʻfamilyʼ. Simone de Beauvoir, in particular, was vitri- discover that he is ʻa manʼ and not merely a creation
olic, accusing Lévy of ʻabductingʼ and manipulating of the anti-Semite. Sartre argues that the Jewish vision
an old man who no longer had the intellectual strength of the end of the world as resulting in the appearance
to defend himself. In his very informative, but perhaps of a new world, and in the emergence of an ethical
over-generous, introduction Aronson argues that, in existence in which men live for one another, is an
Beauvoirʼs view, respecting the new direction that essential ingredient in any revolutionary politics.
Sartre appears to be taking here would imply disre- The reappearance of religious themes, and of posi-
spect for the Sartre she had known in his prime. He tive references to monotheism, are commonplaces of
then asks why Sartre should not be able to change French political thought from the so-called New Phil-
in yet another direction. The question is legitimate, osophers onwards. Yet it is still surprising to find
as is the reminder that the image of Sartre which Sartre subscribing to such ideas. If the comments made
emerges from Beauvoirʼs autobiographical writings by Lévy in his Afterword are a faithful reflection of
is a highly contrived and controlled one. To claim Sartreʼs thinking, the old atheist was looking forward
that Hope Now is one of the few occasions on which to the coming of the Messiah – the reign of man and

44 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

of the universal. Was Sartre being overinfluenced by a of creative overcoming and amor fati, free will and
dialogue with someone who went so rapidly from what determinism – that constitutes the principal strength
he now calls ʻmilitant stupidityʼ to religious Judaism? of his inquiry. Rosen shows how the nihilism required
Is this the authentic voice of the dying Sartre? Beau- for the destructive preliminary stage of Zarathustraʼs
voir claimed that Lévy brought pressure to bear on revolutionary ideology necessarily precludes the all-
the blind Sartre, who finally gave in from exhaustion important creative stage. He further shows how the
and agreed to his secretaryʼs arguments. If that is true, correlatively dual role of will to power, as ever-shift-
Lévy appears not to have changed; Foucault is likewise ing ground of fragmented subjectivity on the one
reliably reported, in the very different context of a hand, and defining act of integrated subjectivity on the
discussion of ʻpeopleʼs justiceʼ, as having surrendered other, is inherently ʻselfʼ-defeating. As Rosen astutely
to the unrelenting arguments of the then Pierre Victor concludes, Nietzscheʼs attempt to derive individual sig-
… out of exhaustion, to make him happy, to shut him nificance from chaos is like trying ʻto pull a rabbit out
up. Despite Aronsonʼs attempts to argue that these of an empty hatʼ. The failure of Zarathustraʼs teaching
interviews reperesent a new departure for Sartre, some is thus seen to lie in a double rhetoric which flourishes
doubt must remain as to their authenticity. Just whose and founders on its internal contradictions. While
last words these are is far from certain. the destructive determinist instinct in Zarathustraʼs
doctrine of the eternal return flourishes in hearts hard
David Macey
enough for nihilism, the creative flourish of the vulgar-
ized doctrine luxuriates in swampy hearts yearning for
salvation. In the former, wisdom confines life; in the
Rhetorical latter, art refines wisdom and thereby reanimates life.
In both, the ʻlived wisdomʼ which Rosen locates at the
rotundities core of Zarathustraʼs prophetic mission falters on the
common disjunction between theory and practice.
What Rosen fails to mention, however, is that
Stanley Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzscheʼs
Zarathustra, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, the split between theory and praxis is in no greater
1995. xviii + 264 pp., £35.00 hb., 0 521 49889 9. evidence than in the person of Zarathustra himself;
nowhere is the pathos of personal failure more
The title of Rosenʼs trenchant critique of Nietzscheʼs affecting, especially if one sees in Zarathustra partial
Zarathustra refers to ʻthe role of rhetoric in the revo- projections of his author. One must of course be
lutionary movement known as the Enlightenmentʼ. mindful of the boundary between work and author,
Rhetoric, we are told, is the means by which dangerous blurred though it is by the fluctuations of chaotic
philosophical truths are hidden behind noble lies, and ʻsubjectivityʼ. But while Nietzscheʼs hermeneutic tool
Nietzsche, as the subtlest of rhetoricians, is cast as of ʻbackward inferenceʼ from the work to the author
the most dangerous revolutionary of them all. Having would reject any simple identity between Nietzsche
stripped away the smiling rhetoric of rational progress, and Zarathustra, it would consider equally untenable
Nietzsche dared to expose not merely the latent grimace Rosenʼs representation of Zarathustra as ʻthe expres-
of scepticism and materialism, but the far deeper terror sion of Nietzscheʼs loneliness purged of its purely
of the certainty of chaos and ʻthe eternal return of the subjective or personal elementsʼ. To portray a tragic
sameʼ. Finding himself face to face with the horror of and psychologically complex figure, a man torn apart
nihilism, he too felt constrained to fashion a revivify- by violent inner conflict, as ʻthe highest and purest
ing rhetorical mask. Anthropomorphizing force into aspect of Nietzscheʼs spiritʼ, is to rob Nietzscheʼs
will and flux into freedom, he sought to conceal chaos most cherished (and to my mind, most personal) work
behind creativity, notwithstanding the rigid determin- of its clumsily masked confessional content. Rosenʼs
ism of an eternal return which spurns the rhetorical sanitized spiritualization of Zarathustra diminishes not
rotundities it illegitimately spawns. only the latterʼs all-too-human weaknesses, which bar
The focal point of Rosenʼs book is Zarathustraʼs his way to self-overcoming, but the specific allegori-
ʻdouble rhetoricʼ: a dual invocation of subjective free- cal significance, persistently overlooked by Nietzsche
dom and absolute necessity which juxtaposes exoteric scholars, of the kindred spirits (the ʻhigher menʼ of
exaltation and esoteric despair. Indeed, it is the tenac- Part IV), who strew the path of his inner journey. It
ity of Rosenʼs hold on the equivocal character of is surprising indeed that a critic who places so much
Zarathustraʼs discourse – its ʻincoherent synthesisʼ emphasis on the spiritual perceives neither the clear

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 45

connection between the spirit of Romantic pessimism – the reference to neuro-physiology, chemistry and so
(personified by Schopenhauer) and the soothsayer, nor on – is disqualified; it is rather that the foundational
that between the spirit of Romantic art (personified objectivity apparently guaranteed by the reference to
by Wagner) and the sorcerer. Consequently, Rosenʼs the external world is put into question.
reading of Part IV of Zarathustra is by far the weakest The question which Freud goes on to raise in
section of the book. respect of any theory – and that includes not only
Even more surprising, however, is Rosenʼs failure empiricism but also his own metapsychology – is
to connect the subtlety of Zarathustraʼs double rheto- whether it can avoid projecting unconscious desires,
ric with the forked tongue of his cunning serpent. in the shape of its concepts, back onto the material
For if, as Rosen claims, ʻserpents are a metaphorical it is using the concepts to organize. On this view,
expression of … the wisdom of deceit and poisonous theory would always be an elaborated kind of second-
attackʼ, and Zarathustraʼs serpent is a metaphor for ary revision (to use the term applied to the narrative
cunning intelligence, then the latterʼs intrinsic relation that the dreamer imposes on the elements of his/her
to Zarathustraʼs rhetorical duplicity is self-evident. dream), informed by interior psychic structures. This
Furthermore, Rosenʼs claim that, ʻas personifications does not mean that we cannot make legitimate dis-
of natural force (including the human spirit), [Zar- tinctions between hypotheses. (In Freudʼs example
athustraʼs] animals do not represent [his] personal of geology, it is plausible to assume that the core of
subjectivityʼ is seriously undermined by Zarathustraʼs the earth is molten rock; it is not plausible to assume
prior claim that the spirit is a tool and toy of the that it is strawberry jam.) It does, however, entail that
body. Once again, Rosenʼs hermeneutic bent towards theory is never completely free of unconscious desire.
the abstract and the spiritual deprives Zarathustra of Science and reason cannot be neutral, in the sense
his quintessentially human characteristics. of disconnected from their source in unconscious,
These reservations aside, Rosenʼs The Mask of desiring psychical reality – which means, ultimately,
Enlightenment is the most penetrating interpretation their source in the body.
of Zarathustra to have appeared in recent years. It is not until the very last pages of the book that we
discover where the argument is heading. When science
Francesca Cauchi
claims, implicitly or explicitly, that it has access to the
most ʻrealʼ kind of reality, what we are witnessing,
in Ferrellʼs view, is the religion of our times. Science
itself ʻis a species of theology … the description of fact

Sacred facts is the sacred writing of the contemporary world, and

that world worships where things are taken literallyʼ
(p. 98). On this interpretation, ʻfacts are expressive of
Robyn Ferrell, Passion in Theory: Conceptions of
contemporary desireʼ (ibid.). So real is the ontology
Freud and Lacan, Routledge, London and New York,
1996. viii + 118 pp., £35.00 hb., £10.99 pb., 0 415 produced by science, Ferrell writes, that we do not
09019 9 hb., 0 415 09020 2 pb. see that this reality is a theological one. The desire
that empiricism embodies is for the objective real to
In Robyn Ferrellʼs account of psychoanalysis, Freud be unrelated to our desire, whereas for psychoanalysis,
was a committed empiricist who evolved a theory that without desire there would be no connection with
challenges the premisses of the empirical sciences. the world at all. Love is ʻan epistemological rela-
Briefly, her argument runs as follows: as early as The tionʼ (p. 99) (which is why transference is not just
Interpretation of Dreams (1900), when his theorizing a phenomenon of clinical work, but a key concept
starts to becomes recognizably psychoanalytic, Freud in psychoanalytic theory). For empirical science, the
offers two hypotheses: the first, that the primary mental subjectivity of the observer has to be neutralized,
item is not the sense-perception but the hallucination; ʻfixedʼ, in order to establish the validity of the scientific
the second, that the wish, originating in the body, is observation. That is all well and good, says Ferrell,
more basic than the thought. The consequence is to provided we remember that the neutralization of the
disturb the assumption ʻthat the objective view is a subject-pole itself corresponds to a desire. The same
valid – or even a possible – intersubjective referenceʼ problem arises, of course, in psychoanalysis when it
(p. 29). The real can no longer be equated with the aspires to be scientific. The recurring clash between
external objective world that is taken as a yardstick by the essential mobility and destabilizing power of the
the sciences. It is not so much that scientific empiricism id and the need for both epistemological stability and

46 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

therapy is often thought to be exemplified in Lacanʼs is that they are either too sociological, and therefore
eventful career and contradictory heritage. unable to treat it as operating autonomously through
It makes sense to see Ferrellʼs short study as belong- the activity of individuals; or too psychological, and
ing in many respects to the genre of the philosophical hence disabled from appreciating its role in structur-
essay: offering a series of reflections which are often ing intersubjective relations. Cash seeks to overcome
pithy and epigrammatic in expression. Its rhetorical this duality through an appeal to Giddensʼs theory of
qualities are simultaneously seductive (the pleasure structuration, whereby the structure of social systems
of seeing complex ideas condensed so satisfactorily); is both the medium of individual action and the effect
demanding (in the effort required to consider whether of it. The structuration of ideology is, Cash claims,
the condensation is accurate, or whether one needs to governed by unconscious rules which should, so he
question further); and an obstacle (the condensation questionably infers, be specified in psychoanalytic
is a barrier at those points where one is not in a terms. Thus the Kleinian paranoid-schizoid position
position to do the unpacking). Its account of Freud is gives rise, as a defence mechanism, to dehumanizing
remarkable in its conciseness and pertinence, although or persecutory ideological formations; the depressive
I imagine the book will leave the sceptics unconvinced position to an ambivalent one which, unlike the former
and believers confirmed in their views. But part of sorts, is able to treat its objects as whole people
Ferrellʼs point is that we cannot be literally dispas- with good and bad aspects, so that ʻthe capacity for
sionate about any of our theories: neutrality is not reality testing, vis à vis the prior positions, is greatly
an option. enhancedʼ (p. 88).
Cash combines this psychodynamic account with
Margaret Whitford
aspects of Kohlbergʼs cognitive-developmental theory
to devise rules governing the structuration of identi-
ties and relations in Northern Ireland. He discerns
Ulster defence four modes of ideological reasoning: two corporate
ones which constitute persons by their ethno-religious
mechanism category, the instrumental through shared objectives
and the affiliative through allegiance; and two liberal
ones, the conventional and the post-conventional,
John David Cash, Identity, Ideology and Conflict:
The Structuration of Politics in Northern Ireland, which constitute them as citizens and as human beings
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996. x + respectively. The suitability of the corporate modes to
230 pp., £30.00 hb., 0521 55052 1. the dehumanising or persecutory positions, and of the
liberal to the ambivalent one, is evident. Terms like
Under capitalism, says the Communist Manifesto, ʻall ʻProtestantʼ and ʻRoman Catholicʼ thus have a different
fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient significance, depending on whether the corporate or
and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away.ʼ liberal modes are employed, and incorporate either
Not, apparently, in Northern Ireland; nor in those exclusivist or inclusivist constructions of the social
numerous other countries where the so-called ʻethnic world. This is the basis of Cashʼs ʻdepth hermeneutic
revivalʼ increasingly dominates political life. How are of Unionist ideologyʼ (p. 111).
we ʻto comprehend the persistence and regeneration Cash rejects both pluralist explanations in terms of
of ideologies of ethnicityʼ (p. 6)? This is the question the continuity of ethnic identities, and modernization
Cash sets out to answer. The difficulties we have in accounts which sharply contrast the rational pursuit
answering it are, he believes, due to defective theories of group interest with irrational ethnic regressions.
of ideology. This he sets out to remedy in the first part Instead, he emphasizes the fluctuations in Union-
of the book. In the second he puts his own theory to ist ideology, attempts at inclusivist policies towards
work in explaining the ideological formations of one Nationalists alternating with exclusivist reactions
particular ethnic group: Ulster Unionists. to political crises. Through analysis of speeches by
Cash defines ideology as ʻa dynamic and relatively Unionist politicians he identifies the changes from
autonomous system of signification, communication liberal ambivalence to corporate dehumanization or
and subjection which operates by constructing a persecutory anxiety and back again.
social and political order and subjecting individual If the strength of Cashʼs theory of ideology is to be
human beings to cathected positions within this orderʼ judged by its power to explain Unionist politics, then
(p. 70). His objection to existing theories of ideology it cannot be judged a complete success. His somewhat

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 47

one-dimensional account does not take us far beyond of the origins of the dispute in the Adorno–Popper
recording the readily observable affective reactions of controversies, and of the main themes of Gadamerʼs
Unionists to political events. Although he dwells on the Truth and Method. He offers the best account of the
paradox of a Loyalism which defies British authority concept of ʻapplicationʼ available, and a useful account
and asserts a right of self-government, his scheme of the differences between Gadamer and Peter Winch.
fails to elucidate what Britishness means to Unionists. When faced with teasing out the Habermas–Gadamer
Nor does his downplaying of their Protestantism as debate myself, I react as I might if I were asked to
just a potentially exclusionary label help capture their separate two gridlocked Sumo wrestlers. How himself
complex identity. But it is his reluctance to look outside deals with it as a contest over four rounds, carefully
his confiningly pathological framework that is finally describing the punches and scoring the points, arguing
unsatisfying: Nationalists are described as exclusivist that Gadamerʼs hermeneutics is capable of producing
when, for them, ʻthe enemy was trying to continue critiques of ideology, that the emphasis on tradition
with its regime of oppression and discriminationʼ (p. does not entail obedience to authority, and so on. Yet
154). But it was, wasnʼt it? I find I am not convinced by these arguments.
This last criticism survives, even if we grant that it In his introduction, How calls on a distinction made
would be unfair to judge Cash by his failure to shed by Ricoeur between a hermeneutics of suspicion and a
light on a situation whose explanation is nearly as hermeneutics of faith, which seems to me to be a very
clear way of distinguishing between the contestants;
intractable as its resolution. There is a good deal of
and towards the end he recognizes the possibility
independent interest here, including useful discussions
– perhaps the necessity – of being able to move
of Althusser and Habermas on ideology. Its application
from one to the other. But he also wishes to defend
is at least a serious attempt to get beyond the usual
Gadamerʼs conception of language – the basis of faith
journalistic banalities.
– in a way that leaves me uneasy. Language becomes
Paul Gilbert the source of sociality, which is fair enough, but also
the way the world discloses itself to us, and this is
too close to a theological conception to be accepted
uncritically: ʻIn the beginning was the word … and
the word was God.ʼ I am not sure that Howʼs defence
Suspicion and faith of it is actually compatible with his more even-handed
assessments. Everything – and perhaps especially
Alan How, The Habermas–Gadamer Debate and the the subjective and the individual – is absorbed into
Nature of the Social: Back to Bedrock, Avebury, such a conception which, in a strange paradox given
Aldershot, 1995. xi + 251 pp., £37.50 hb., 1 85628 Gadamerʼs intentions, produces in theory a form of
179 5. totalitarianism where there is no room for critique.
Language can be many things – a link with Being,
It is a pleasure to find a book where one disagrees, an instrument, a reflection, a self-revelation and a
sometimes profoundly, with the author, but which one persuasion. But it can also be an enemy, something
still feels able to praise. This is an excellent text. It which strips us of our intuition, and with which we
is written clearly and – an all too rare phenomenon must struggle.
– with the reader and his or her sensibilities in mind, There is one sentence in which How opposes the
rather than as a display designed for the satisfaction of two thinkers in a typically succinct way: ʻGadamerʼs
the author. It does what it sets out to do, no more and most basic attitude orients him towards seeing the
no less, and bears the stamp of a good teacher and a connectedness between things, finding complicity
careful thinker. I can see myself referring students to even between oppositions. Habermasʼ attitude actively
it for some time to come and I am sure that I will be heightens dualisms, for example setting off reason in
referring myself to it as well. It is the best account of direct opposition to traditionʼ (p. 166). Yet these are
the Habermas–Gadamer debate that I have found. precisely the moments of dialectical thought – the
The author announces his prejudice for Gadamer separation and contradiction and the bringing together.
at the beginning and tries to show that in the debate If we seek only connectedness, we move towards
between the two, Habermas is guilty of the greater mysticism, and there is no development, nothing new
misinterpretation. In the process of demonstrating emerges; if we seek only contradiction, we move
this, he does us the service of succinct summaries towards fragmentation. We need to hold on to faith

48 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

and suspicion at the same time and move between the comparison between Merleau-Ponty and some other
two, giving each one priority in turn. Perhaps the most thinker (such as Nietzsche or Derrida). Fromanʼs final
important thing about this book is that it stimulates remarks on similarities between flesh and différance,
thinking about these issues in an accessible way. for example, are interesting but the issue is touched
Ian Craib on much too sketchily.
The final category, on painting, seems a rather
less obvious priority, but reflects Fótiʼs own interests.
Intriguingly, she notes that the conference was held
Unengaged in conjunction with an exhibition of post-Abstract
Expressionist art and in her own piece she relates
Véronique M. Fóti, ed., Merleau-Ponty: Difference, the works on display to Merleau-Pontyʼs own writing
Materiality, Painting, Humanities Press, Atlantic on painting, noting that it offers probably the most
Highlands NJ, 1996. 201 pp., $55.00 hb., 0 391 03904 sensitive yet audacious discussion of this topic to
0. come out of contemporary continental philosophy. In
many ways I found this to be the best piece in the
The editor introduces these twelve essays by sug-
collection, since it combines a real engagement with
gesting that the need for exposition of Merleau-Pontyʼs
Merleau-Pontyʼs work in this area with some innova-
work has now passed, and that what is required is
tive ways of applying, extending and criticizing it.
a dialogue with him in the context of recent post-
phenomenological and post-structuralist philosophies.
For members of the Merleau-Ponty circle, from one of
whose conferences these papers are loosely derived,
this is probably true; and they have indeed taken the
injunction against exegesis to heart. It is possible to
imagine some intriguing debate surfacing during their
meeting, but as a collected volume the book does not
work well because there is no real engagement with
Merleau-Pontyʼs texts, or any sense of the overall
project on which these writings bear, or of how they
relate to subsequent developments in continental phil-
osophy. The task of the editor should surely have been
to provide some such overview and contextualization,
but instead Véronique Fótiʼs introduction merely offers
a brief summary of each article. She does, however, Situating his interest – primarily in Cézanne – within
divide the contributions according to what she sees broader French concerns with vision and his own onto-
as the three main issues to be confronted: difference, logical inquiries into the appearing of the visible as a
materiality and painting. phenomenology of perception, Fóti finds a tension in
Fóti registers surprise that among these Merleau- Merleau-Pontyʼs work between ʻperceptual originʼ and
Ponty scholars, the question of materiality seemed to ʻpureʼ or ʻdifferentialʼ nascency, or as she also puts it,
incite the most interest, and the essays in this section between ʻfoundational unityʼ and ʻungrounded crea-
do offer some suggestive explorations of matter vis-à- tive differentiationʼ. It is in the latter – predominant
vis Merleau-Pontyʼs ontological category of the flesh. in The Visible and the Invisible, which returns us to
Here materiality loses its inertia and opacity to appear the generativity of the flesh with its ʻplay of energies
as inexhaustible rather than impenetrable; as a field of in irresoluble tensionʼ – that she finds the possibility
forces and a style of existing, rather than Cartesian for an oblique extension to, and theoretical resource
extension or Kantian spatiality. Olkowskiʼs reading for, the abstract painting of which Merleau-Ponty was
of Merleau-Ponty through Bergson is especially provo- himself quite dismissive. Given the rather difficult yet
cative in this regard. Somewhat confusingly, the editor superficial treatments most of these pieces offer, it
also concludes that difference is the ʻfocal problematicʼ would nevertheless be preferable for readers to return
of these scholars. However, this part of the collection to the original texts, whose elegant prose is too often
is the least satisfying. It is never made clear by any of merely parodied here in strings of metaphors without
the writers in what sense they are using difference, and any real guiding purpose.
it often seems to amount to no more than a skimpy Diana Coole

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 49

NEWS

Dictating research
Feminist philosophy and the RAE

In an essentially contested subject such as philosophy, it makes little sense for a

small Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) Panel to make judgements across the
whole breadth of the discipline, however well-intentioned that panel might be. As I
work between the ʻcontinentalʼ and ʻanalyticalʼ traditions – in the field of feminist
philosophy, which was (and always has been) completely unrepresented on the
RAE Panel – I feel this very acutely.
In practice, little work in feminist philosophy was submitted in the course of
the RAE to the Philosophy Panel. But that is precisely the problem. I know from
discussions in the Society of Women in Philosophy (UK) that many junior (and
sometimes also senior) colleagues working in this field were either dissuaded by
their heads of department from submitting ʻfeministʼ pieces, or were persuaded
to submit ʻoutsideʼ Philosophy, under the entirely inappropriate heading of Sociol-
ogy, for example. Such a strategy prevents the development of the discipline of
philosophy – and also fails to register the 180 plus women who are part of this
network, including those who have responded to recent SWIP questionnaires in
ways that show that many see their academic future in fairly grim terms.
If we have to continue with the absurd process of RAE assessment (as I fear we
must), it is absolutely essential that the discipline recognizes the need for separate
sub-panels for different philosophical traditions. There was nobody on the panel
this time, for example, who had skills in recent French philosophy, and ʻContinen-
tal Philosophyʼ is certainly not a homogeneous tradition, even though it is often
equated with all that is not ʻanalyticʼ. In Europe, after all, a similar RAE exercise
would have a variety of ʻContinentalsʼ, and probably only one person who was
supposed to have skills in the whole ʻAnalyticʼ area.
My suggestion is that next time round there be at least four sub-panels. It has
been suggested by some that there might be sub-panels in ʻanalyticʼ, ʻcontinentalʼ
and ʻappliedʼ philosophy. However, I would like to add to this suggestion by request-
ing that consideration be given to a further sub-panel that should be set up to deal
with interdisciplinary work in philosophy. Furthermore, I would propose that some
person or persons on this interdisciplinary sub-panel should have the skills neces-
sary to judge work on sexual difference and race: work that emerges from a variety
of philosophical traditions, but that is usually not ʻapplied philosophyʼ. It should be
clear that ʻapplied philosophyʼ is an inappropriate category for assessing work in
such lively research areas as feminist epistemology, feminist meta-ethics or feminist
political philosophy. Nor can ʻapplied philosophyʼ embrace my own two primary
areas of research specialism: feminist metaphysics and feminist aesthetics.
Interestingly, when I recently assembled the self-descriptions of the women
serving on the editorial board of the Womenʼs Philosophy Review (UK), what
was striking was the impossibility of telling from the lists of research expertise
whether a particular board member was trained in the analytic or continental tradi-
tions. Here, what matters more is the necessity forced on those working within

50 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

feminist philosophy to familiarize themselves with a broad range of philosophical
argument and interdisciplinary debates.
The RAE process is already acting like the Medusaʼs gaze, freezing the disci-
pline of philosophy into anachronistic modes of self-definition that block innova-
tion. If the only philosophy that is financially rewarded as ʻgoodʼ philosophy is
ʻpureʼ philosophy – and if ʻpureʼ philosophy is judged in a way that marginal-
izes interdisciplinarity – then we might expect further ʻcutsʼ and ʻblocksʼ to the
development of radical and ʻnon-standardʼ philosophy (including feminist phil-
osophy). And what should be a vigorous discipline, open to a plurality of voices
and conceptions of philosophy, will be unable to defend itself effectively against
those university managers and administrators who are looking for easy targets in
this time of financial stringency. As we are already seeing, the RAE judgements
have already meant that posts are ʻaxedʼ or ʻfrozenʼ, and at least one English phil-
osophy department is threatened with dispersal and closure. It is urgent that we
discuss questions of future strategy now before too much more damage is done.
Christine Battersby
Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick

The preceding article is reprinted from the ʻViews and Commentsʼ section of the Womenʼs Philosophy
Review, no. 17, Summer 1997. It represents the personal views of the editor of that journal, which is
affiliated to the Society of Women in Philosophy (UK). It is based on a letter that was posted to the
e-mail discussion group for philosophers, philos-l@liverpool.ac.uk.

The case of economics

The Research Assessment Exercise carried out by the Higher Education Funding
Councils (HEFC) for England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland and their
predecessors was established as an institutional mechanism to provide the govern-
ment with a rationale for distributing research funds among university departments
of a given subject area. Central to the Exercise is the subject assessment panel
made up of pre-eminent peers who rate the research excellence of a department
and thereby determine the amount of research monies it will get. Perhaps not
initially intended to affect the areas of research carried out by British academ-
ics, the assessment panels in fact have that capability through their control of the
allocation of research monies.
The first exercise seemed to have little impact on economists and their research.
However, by the time of the 1989 RAE, the so-called ʻDiamond Listʼ of core
mainstream economic journals had been drawn up and there was a strong belief
amongst economists that this list was used by the assessors to inform their judge-
ment of the quality of research in economics departments in British universities.
Attempts were made to extend this list for use in the 1992 RAE. At the 1994
Royal Economic Society Annual Conference the chairman of the economics panel
for the 1992 RAE claimed that the assessors did not discriminate against non-
mainstream research and that the research assessment exercise should not be used
by economic departments to do so. He added that he did not believe that British
economists would actively discriminate against non-mainstream economists and
their research. However, at the same conference a flyer appeared which announced

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 51

that one old university was in the market for nine economists who would raise its
economics department research profile in mainstream economics. Advertisements
for posts in other institutions similarly specified that applicants must be working
within mainstream economics and linked this explicitly to either maintaining or
improving their ranking in the assessment exercise. It is clear that, as a result of
the RAE, economics departments were discriminating positively in their hiring
practices towards mainstream economists and their research as a way to maintain
and/or enhance their rating in the next research assessment exercise.*
Central to the assessment exercise is the peer review system, which can be
defined as a system by which the intellectual excellence of a piece of research is
judged by a committee or panel of researchers working in, or close to, the field
in question. According to researchers on peer review, for the system to work it is
necessary that each member of the panel be pre-eminent in the specialism(s) they
have to evaluate; that the pre-eminent panel members be selected from across the
relevant academic community; that the actual method of selection is open, demo-
cratic, and involves as much of the academic community as possible; and that the
panel be open to unorthodox and interdisciplinary research. Since the RAE utilizes
the peer review system, the HEFC based the selection of panel members on pre-
eminence in research and on the range of specialized expertise needed to cover
the spread of research in the subject area to be assessed; however, they were not
concerned whether or not the methods of selection of the panel peers were open
and democratic and whether the peers may have an interest in the outcome of their
deliberations.
The process by which economists were selected for the economic panels for
the 1989, 1992 and 1996 RAEs was not open or democratic in that the majority
of economists had little say in the selection process. In particular, the panellists
were selected by the HEFC and its predecessors, the Royal Economic Society in
conjunction with the heads of economic departments, and the chair of the eco-
nomics panel. All in all, less than 10 per cent of British economists had any real
say in the selection of the panels; moreover, the selection of nearly a third of the
panel members was done without any consultation whatsoever. Although the main
criterion for panel selection was pre-eminence in research, nearly a third of the
nineteen panel members in the three RAEs had published on average fewer than
three articles over a twenty-five year period and hence did not fulfil the criterion
of pre-eminence in research. As for the subject coverage criteria for panel selec-
tion, after closely examining the journal publication records of the panel members,
it can be concluded that none of the assessment panels covered all of mainstream
economics as represented by the core mainstream journals. Furthermore, our
examination revealed the near absence of publications in non-mainstream economic
journals by members of all three panels (except for the lone Post-Keynesian econo-
mist on the 1996 assessment panel), which suggests that the panel members did not
have the expertise or knowledge to judge the quality of non-mainstream economics
submissions. The consequences of this is made clear in our survey of the 1992
RAE publication submissions of seven 5-rated, eight 4-rated, eleven 3-rated, and
three 2-rated university economics departments. The survey revealed twenty-five
publications in non-mainstream core journals. Four of those publications were in
three 5-rated departments, none were in 4-rated departments, fourteen were in
eight 3-rated departments, and seven were in two 2-rated departments. Thus it
appears that if a department publication submission included a significant propor-

* Economics can be divided into a mainstream, called neoclassical economics, and a non-mainstream,
which broadly consists of Marxian, Post-Keynesian, Institutional and Sraffian economics.

52 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

tion of publications in core non-mainstream journals, it would most likely receive
a 2 or 3 rating.
The combination of peer review and the RAE has produced an institutional
arrangement in the form of an economics panel which, because of its control over
funding, has the power to affect the type of economic research carried out by
British economists. Since the selection process ensured that the members of the
economics panels were nearly all mainstream economists, the message that the
panels sent out was that research in mainstream economics and publication in core
mainstream journals were what was necessary for university economics depart-
ments to maintain or increase their research funding. This message was reinforced
by the evaluation of research submitted to them and the ranking of departments.
Consequently, since the 1992 RAE economic departments have taken steps in the
areas of recruitment policy and the direction of both departmental and individual
work to emphasize mainstream research and de-emphasize and discriminate
against non-mainstream research.

A shift towards the mainstream

We undertook a questionnaire survey of British economists regarding the RAE.
The findings of the survey showed that there has been a noticeable shift towards a
mainstream recruitment policy, with a concurrent positive disinclination to recruit
non-mainstream economists. Advertisements for posts ranging from lectureships to
chairs predominantly favoured mainstream economists, while departmentsʼ criteria
for making appointments narrowed to publications in core mainstream journals.
This resulted in interviews where candidates were directly asked in which core
mainstream journals they intended to publish. It also meant that non-mainstream
economists on probation or temporary contracts were coerced into doing main-
stream research. Thus the impact of the RAE on hiring has been to reduce the
employment possibilities of non-mainstream economists in British university
economics departments and to ʻpressureʼ those departments most open to non-
mainstream economists to hire mainstream economists as well. Furthermore, the
survey revealed that large numbers of British economists felt themselves directly
affected by the economics panelʼs apparent view that national and international
research excellence was restricted to mainstream economics and publishing in core
mainstream journals.
The real threat of financial sanction by the economics panel has, in light of the
declining financial support for universities and research, driven British economics
departments to discriminate against non-mainstream research and the hiring of
non-mainstream economists, as well as to restrict if not eliminate the teaching
of non-mainstream economics to students. This cleansing process clearly gained
steam after the 1992 RAE and has been accentuated by the results of the 1996
RAE. The ongoing discrimination against non-mainstream economists and their
research has resulted in few young non-mainstream economists obtaining univer-
sity teaching and research positions. As a consequence, within ten years or so, the
number of non-mainstream economists in British university economics departments
will decline significantly. Such a decline will result in the virtual disappearance
of non-mainstream economists from the vast majority of economics departments,
with the remainder ageing and increasingly invisible.
From the beginning, it has been apparent that the research assessment exercises
represent a thrust towards managerialism in UK higher education, with increased
competition among institutional providers in quasi-markets and the introduction of
ʻperformance indicatorsʼ to judge quality and determine funding. The fact that this
has been achieved under cover of peer review is of no consolation, as it ignores

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 53

intellectual authority relations. The RAEs give those dominant within a discipline
the power not only to define quality but also to ensure that only that type of
research is done which fits in with their often narrow definition of excellence.
Whilst this is most obvious in a paradigm-bound social science such as economics,
preliminary analysis of Harleyʼs new research findings in other disciplines would
indicate that similar processes may be at work.
Frederick S. Lee and Sandra Harley
De Montfort University

This article is based on research on the impact of the RAE on economics, the full results of which
are contained in S. Harley and F. Lee, ʻThe Academic Labour Process and the Research Assessment
Exercise: Academic Diversity and the Future of Non-Mainstream Economics in UK Universitiesʼ
(Human Relations, forthcoming), and F. Lee and S. Harley, ʻEconomics Divided: The Limitations
of Peer Review in a Paradigm Bound Social Scienceʼ (unpublished). Radical Philosophy readers
who would like copies of these articles are welcome to write to Dr Frederick S. Lee, Department of
Economics, De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester LE1 9BH.

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54 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

OBITUARY

Wal Suchting, 1931–1997

In March of this year, I received the sad news of the passing of Wal Suchting the previ-
ous January. I never met Wal in person. But, from a correspondence of some hundreds
of pages stretching over five or six years, I felt I had come to know him and I thought
of him as a friend. A fair part of our correspondence consisted of commiserations over
the debased politics of academic life and the difficulties of pursuing a Marxian-oriented
research agenda in an intellectual conjuncture dominated by neo-liberal dogma and
ʻpostmodernʼ dilettantism. Though writing from different continents (North America and
Australia) and occupying opposite ends of the academic cycle of experience (at the incep-
tion of our correspondence, I was still in the process of finishing my Ph.D., whereas Wal
had just accepted early retirement from his post at the University of Sydney, declaring
himself on the occasion ʻvogfreiʼ), Wal would assure me that upon reading my descrip-
tion of some academic horror story or another he could ʻimaginatively place himself in
the situation immediatelyʼ. What followed was always sound advice, often returning in
the most intractable circumstances to the recommendation given by Virgil to Dante when
encountering the ʻlukewarmʼ in Danteʼs Inferno: ʻlet us not speak of them, but look and
pass onʼ.
Wal was one of the authors of a new translation of Hegelʼs Encyclopedia Logic,
although he took issue with some of his co-workersʼ translating conventions in a sepa-
rate preface to the volume (Indianapolis: Hackett 1991). As a philosopher, he defended
a hypothesis which he himself conceded might appear to many ʻquite strange and even
far-fetchedʼ: namely, that Hegelʼs logic – which prima facie would seem to belong to the
broad movement of romantic reaction against modern science – in fact represents a sus-
tained, if only ʻsemi-consciousʼ (Wal used here a Freudian interpretive model, distinguish-
ing the ʻlatent contentʼ of Hegelʼs text from its ʻmanifest contentʼ), engagement with the
protocols of the ʻnewʼ – that is, ʻGalileanʼ – science. I myself never became convinced of
this point as concerns Hegel. But it mattered little – since the substantive guiding thread
of Walʼs research in the last years of his life was, in any case, the character of the ʻnewʼ
science itself, and its distinctiveness from an older ʻAristotelianʼ conception of science
which continued to hold sway in much philosophical discourse about science even long
after it had ceased to play any role in scientific practice proper. Wal was, in effect – even
if Hegel should turn out not to have been – a passionate defender of the scientific revolu-
tion. Wal was a socialist, and indeed in a far stronger and more traditional sense than
that which is usually attached to this word nowadays. Hence, he was especially distressed
to find epistemological relativism gaining ground in ostensibly ʻMarxistʼ circles or even
being marketed to a completely unknowing student public as a characteristically ʻMarxistʼ
ʻepistemological positionʼ. As far as Wal was concerned, the superiority of Marxʼs theo-
retical output, more specifically of his political economy, consisted not in its serviceability
to political interests whose angelic character could be safely assumed a priori, but rather
in its superior cognitive value in enabling us to grasp the nature of capitalist economic
reality.
The last package I received from Wal, around the New Year, contained a long type-
script on ʻThe Concept of Materialism in Althusserʼs Later Thinkingʼ. Althusser was a
constant source of inspiration for Wal – though in a rather unique way, sharing nothing in
common with the ʻAlthusserianismʼ which still makes the rounds, in various permutations,
in the Anglophone academy today. As readers of his autobiographical writings will

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 55

know, Althusser often despaired of the limits of his learning and self-consciously
belittled the significance of narrowly philosophical education – and indeed, it
must be said, he often did so with good reason. Walʼs erudition, by contrast, was
massively imposing: being both encyclopedic, spanning the physical sciences,
mathematics and the humanistic disciplines, and cosmopolitan, inasmuch as Wal
regularly read and drew upon resources in all the major modern European lan-
guages of scholarship plus ancient Greek and Latin. Whereas Althusserʼs style,
moreover, tended towards the lapidary, Wal preferred what he himself called,
following Hume, the ʻtedious lingering methodʼ, a single concept or proposition
being increasingly refined over the course of many pages of analysis, in the light
of various ʻtestsʼ or anticipated objections and in continual (often sharply critical)
dialogue with the results obtained by other scholars in the relevant field or fields.
In this sense, it can be said – though Wal was too modest to have said so himself
– that he often improved upon those suggestions of Althusser which he found
most fruitful or gave them a grounding that they lacked in Althusserʼs original.
In Althusser, he once wrote, ʻthe argument would appear to be not that claims
to knowledge are justified because they are in working-class interests, but rather,
conversely, justified claims to knowledge are in working-class interestsʼ.
This was surely Walʼs conviction: more simply put, that knowledge is progres-
sive – or at least is more likely to be so in the long run than its opposite. This is
not to say that Wal had any illusions about the efficacy in general of theoretical
work. He once remarked wryly that he might as well have placed his writings in
bottles and thrown the latter off a bridge for all the impact publishing them had
had. In fact, apart from his many articles and two books, Wal left behind a large
volume of unpublished typescripts. It could only serve the cause of enlightenment
– which, if Wal was right, is still a just cause – if these gradually found their way
into print.
John Rosenthal

56 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)