Filozofski vestnik ISSN 0353-4510 Programska zasnova Filozofski vestnik (ISSN 0353-4510) je glasilo Filozofskega inštituta Znanstveno- raziskovalnega centra Slovenske akademije znanosti in umetnosti. Filozofski vestnik je znanstveni časopis za filozofijo z interdisciplinarno in mednarodno usmeritvijo in je forum za diskusijo o širokem spektru vprašanj s področja sod- obne filozofije, etike, estetike, poli tične, pravne filozofije, filozofije jezika, filozo- fije zgodovine in zgodovine politične misli, epistemologije in filozofije znanosti, zgodovine filozofije in teoretske psihoanalize. Odprt je za različne filozofske usme- ritve, stile in šole ter spodbuja teoretski dialog med njimi. Letno izidejo tri številke. Druga številka je posvečena temi, ki jo določi uredniški odbor. Prispevki so objavljeni v angleškem, francoskem in nemškem jeziku s pov- zetki v angleškem in slovenskem jeziku. Filozofski vestnik je vključen v: Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Current Con- tents / Arts & Humanities, EBSCO, IBZ (Internationale Bibliographie der Zeitsc- hriften), The Philosopher's Index, Répertoire bibliographique de philosophie, Scopus in Sociological Abstracts. Izid revije je finančno podprla Javna agencija za znanstvenoraziskovalno in ino- vacijsko dejavnost Republike Slovenije. Filozofski vestnik je ustanovila Sloven- ska akademija znanosti in umetnosti. Aims and Scope Filozofski vestnik (ISSN 0353-4510) is edited and published by the Institute of Phi- losophy of the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Filozofski vestnik is a philosophy journal with an interdisciplinary character. It provides a forum for discussion on a wide range of issues in contemporary polit- ical philosophy, history of philosophy, history of political thought, philosophy of law, social philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of science, cultural critique, ethics, and aesthetics. The journal is open to different philosophical orientations, styles and schools, and welcomes theoretical dialogue among them. Three issues of the journal are published annually. The second issue is a special issue that brings together articles by experts on a topic chosen by the Editorial Board. Articles are published in English, French, or German, with abstracts in Slove- nian and English. Filozofski vestnik is indexed/abstracted in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index; Current Contents / Arts & Humanities; EBSCO; IBZ (Internationale Bibliographie der Zeitschriften); The Philosopher's Index; Répertoire bibliographique de philoso- phie; Scopus; and Sociological Abstracts. Filozofski vestnik is published with the support of the Slovenian Research and In- novation Agency. Filozofski vestnik was founded by the Slovenian Academy of Sci- ences and Arts. Filozofski vestnik ISSN 0353-4510 1 2024 IS SN 0 35 3 45 10 Le tn ik /V ol um e 45 Št ev ilk a/ N um be r 1 Lj u bl ja n a 20 24 Filozofski vestnik RETHINKING INSTITUTIONS: HETERODOX AND CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES BEING AFFECTED Rethinking Institutions: Heterodox and Critical Perspectives Werner Bonefeld, Notes on Wealth as a Real Abstraction and the Critique of Suffering Lorenzo Chiesa, Badiou/Lacan-Badiou: Beyond Anti-Philosophy Mike Grimshaw, Radical Theology and the “Weakening” of Bourgeois Institutions Uroš Kranjc, Institutions, History, Subjects Tomaž Mastnak, Is Economic Power an Institution? The Limits of August Ludwig von Rochau’s Redefinition of Liberal Politics Being Affected Antonia Birnbaum, Un courage sans héroïsme. Antigone, Créon, Ismène, Hémon, Tirésias Christian Fierens, Une petite pensée : « l’appensée » La dernière séance du séminaire XXIII (11/05/1973) Dries Josten and Levi Haeck, Towards an Affective Understanding of Pure Judgments of Taste Alexi Kukuljevic, Absense, or the Extimate Place of Art Marcus Quent, Interval and Event: Present as In-between Time in Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou Alexandra Van Laeken, Whatʼs Love Got to Do With It? Badiouʼs Scene of Two Through the Lens of Lacanʼs Formulas of Sexuation Cindy Zeiher, Rough Cuts: Refusal, Negation and Ineffability Fi lo zo fs ki v es tn ik Uredniški odbor | Editorial Board Matej Ažman, Rok Benčin, Aleš Bunta, Marina Gržinić, Boštjan Nedoh, Peter Klepec, Vesna Liponik, Jelica Šumič Riha, Lovrenc Rogelj, Tadej Troha, Matjaž Vesel, Alenka Zupančič, Marisa Žele Mednarodni uredniški svet | International Advisory Board Alain Badiou (Pariz/Paris), Paul Crowther (Galway), Manfred Frank (Tübingen), Axel Honneth (Frankfurt), Martin Jay (Berkeley), John Keane (Sydney), Steven Lukes (New York), Chantal Mouffe (London), Herta Nagl-Docekal (Dunaj/Vienna), Aletta J. Norval (Essex), Oliver Marchart (Dunaj/Vienna), J. G. A. Pocock (Baltimore), Wolfgang Welsch (Jena) Odgovorni urednik | Editor-in-Chief Boštjan Nedoh Tajnik | Secretary Matej Ažman Jezikovni pregled angleških tekstov | English Translation Editor Dean DeVos, Holden M. Rasmussen Jezikovni pregled slovenskih tekstov | Editor for Slovenian language Marko Miočić Strokovni pregled | Copy Editor Lovrenc Rogelj Naslov uredništva Filozofski vestnik p. p. 306, 1001 Ljubljana Tel.: (01) 470 64 70 filozofski.vestnik@zrc-sazu.si | https://ojs.zrc-sazu.si/filozofski-vestnik/ Korespondenco, rokopise in recenzentske izvode pošiljajte na naslov uredništva. Editorial correspondence, enquiries and books for review should be sent to the Editorial Office. Revija izhaja trikrat letno. | The journal is published three times annually. Letna naročnina: 21 €. Letna naročnina za študente in dijake: 12,50 €. Cena posamezne številke: 10 €. | Annual subscription: €21 for individuals, €40 for institutions. Single issues: €10 for individuals, €20 for institutions. Back issues are available. Naročila sprejema Založba ZRC p. p. 306, 1001 Ljubljana Tel.: (01) 470 64 65 E-pošta: narocanje@zrc-sazu.si CC BY-SA 4.0. Oblikovanje | Design: Pekinpah Tisk | Printed by: Birografika Bori Naklada | Print run: 350 Orders should be sent to Založba ZRC P.O. Box 306, SI-1001 Ljubljana, Slovenia Phone: +386 (1) 470 64 65 Email: narocanje@zrc-sazu.si Editorial Office Address Filozofski vestnik P.O. Box 306, SI-1001 Ljubljana, Slovenia Phone: +386 (1) 470 64 70 Filozofski vestnik ISSN 0353-4510 Programska zasnova Filozofski vestnik (ISSN 0353-4510) je glasilo Filozofskega inštituta Znanstveno- raziskovalnega centra Slovenske akademije znanosti in umetnosti. Filozofski vestnik je znanstveni časopis za filozofijo z interdisciplinarno in mednarodno usmeritvijo in je forum za diskusijo o širokem spektru vprašanj s področja sod- obne filozofije, etike, estetike, poli tične, pravne filozofije, filozofije jezika, filozo- fije zgodovine in zgodovine politične misli, epistemologije in filozofije znanosti, zgodovine filozofije in teoretske psihoanalize. Odprt je za različne filozofske usme- ritve, stile in šole ter spodbuja teoretski dialog med njimi. Letno izidejo tri številke. Druga številka je posvečena temi, ki jo določi uredniški odbor. Prispevki so objavljeni v angleškem, francoskem in nemškem jeziku s pov- zetki v angleškem in slovenskem jeziku. Filozofski vestnik je vključen v: Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Current Con- tents / Arts & Humanities, EBSCO, IBZ (Internationale Bibliographie der Zeitsc- hriften), The Philosopher's Index, Répertoire bibliographique de philosophie, Scopus in Sociological Abstracts. Izid revije je finančno podprla Javna agencija za znanstvenoraziskovalno in ino- vacijsko dejavnost Republike Slovenije. Filozofski vestnik je ustanovila Sloven- ska akademija znanosti in umetnosti. Aims and Scope Filozofski vestnik (ISSN 0353-4510) is edited and published by the Institute of Phi- losophy of the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Filozofski vestnik is a philosophy journal with an interdisciplinary character. It provides a forum for discussion on a wide range of issues in contemporary polit- ical philosophy, history of philosophy, history of political thought, philosophy of law, social philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of science, cultural critique, ethics, and aesthetics. The journal is open to different philosophical orientations, styles and schools, and welcomes theoretical dialogue among them. Three issues of the journal are published annually. The second issue is a special issue that brings together articles by experts on a topic chosen by the Editorial Board. Articles are published in English, French, or German, with abstracts in Slove- nian and English. Filozofski vestnik is indexed/abstracted in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index; Current Contents / Arts & Humanities; EBSCO; IBZ (Internationale Bibliographie der Zeitschriften); The Philosopher's Index; Répertoire bibliographique de philoso- phie; Scopus; and Sociological Abstracts. Filozofski vestnik is published with the support of the Slovenian Research and In- novation Agency. Filozofski vestnik was founded by the Slovenian Academy of Sci- ences and Arts. Filozofski vestnik ISSN 0353-4510 1 2024 IS SN 0 35 3 45 10 Le tn ik /V ol um e 45 Št ev ilk a/ N um be r 1 Lj u bl ja n a 20 24 Filozofski vestnik RETHINKING INSTITUTIONS: HETERODOX AND CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES BEING AFFECTED Rethinking Institutions: Heterodox and Critical Perspectives Werner Bonefeld, Notes on Wealth as a Real Abstraction and the Critique of Suffering Lorenzo Chiesa, Badiou/Lacan-Badiou: Beyond Anti-Philosophy Mike Grimshaw, Radical Theology and the “Weakening” of Bourgeois Institutions Uroš Kranjc, Institutions, History, Subjects Tomaž Mastnak, Is Economic Power an Institution? The Limits of August Ludwig von Rochau’s Redefinition of Liberal Politics Being Affected Antonia Birnbaum, Un courage sans héroïsme. Antigone, Créon, Ismène, Hémon, Tirésias Christian Fierens, Une petite pensée : « l’appensée » La dernière séance du séminaire XXIII (11/05/1973) Dries Josten and Levi Haeck, Towards an Affective Understanding of Pure Judgments of Taste Alexi Kukuljevic, Absense, or the Extimate Place of Art Marcus Quent, Interval and Event: Present as In-between Time in Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou Alexandra Van Laeken, Whatʼs Love Got to Do With It? Badiouʼs Scene of Two Through the Lens of Lacanʼs Formulas of Sexuation Cindy Zeiher, Rough Cuts: Refusal, Negation and Ineffability Fi lo zo fs ki v es tn ik Uredniški odbor | Editorial Board Matej Ažman, Rok Benčin, Aleš Bunta, Marina Gržinić, Boštjan Nedoh, Peter Klepec, Vesna Liponik, Jelica Šumič Riha, Lovrenc Rogelj, Tadej Troha, Matjaž Vesel, Alenka Zupančič, Marisa Žele Mednarodni uredniški svet | International Advisory Board Alain Badiou (Pariz/Paris), Paul Crowther (Galway), Manfred Frank (Tübingen), Axel Honneth (Frankfurt), Martin Jay (Berkeley), John Keane (Sydney), Steven Lukes (New York), Chantal Mouffe (London), Herta Nagl-Docekal (Dunaj/Vienna), Aletta J. Norval (Essex), Oliver Marchart (Dunaj/Vienna), J. G. A. Pocock (Baltimore), Wolfgang Welsch (Jena) Odgovorni urednik | Editor-in-Chief Boštjan Nedoh Tajnik | Secretary Matej Ažman Jezikovni pregled angleških tekstov | English Translation Editor Dean DeVos, Holden M. Rasmussen Jezikovni pregled slovenskih tekstov | Editor for Slovenian language Marko Miočić Strokovni pregled | Copy Editor Lovrenc Rogelj Naslov uredništva Filozofski vestnik p. p. 306, 1001 Ljubljana Tel.: (01) 470 64 70 filozofski.vestnik@zrc-sazu.si | https://ojs.zrc-sazu.si/filozofski-vestnik/ Korespondenco, rokopise in recenzentske izvode pošiljajte na naslov uredništva. Editorial correspondence, enquiries and books for review should be sent to the Editorial Office. Revija izhaja trikrat letno. | The journal is published three times annually. Letna naročnina: 21 €. Letna naročnina za študente in dijake: 12,50 €. Cena posamezne številke: 10 €. | Annual subscription: €21 for individuals, €40 for institutions. Single issues: €10 for individuals, €20 for institutions. Back issues are available. Naročila sprejema Založba ZRC p. p. 306, 1001 Ljubljana Tel.: (01) 470 64 65 E-pošta: narocanje@zrc-sazu.si CC BY-SA 4.0. Oblikovanje | Design: Pekinpah Tisk | Printed by: Birografika Bori Naklada | Print run: 350 Orders should be sent to Založba ZRC P.O. Box 306, SI-1001 Ljubljana, Slovenia Phone: +386 (1) 470 64 65 Email: narocanje@zrc-sazu.si Editorial Office Address Filozofski vestnik P.O. Box 306, SI-1001 Ljubljana, Slovenia Phone: +386 (1) 470 64 70 Filozofski vestnik Edited by Jelica Šumič Riha 45 | 1/2024 Izdaja | Issued by ZRC SAZU, Filozofski inštitut Institute of Philosophy Založnik | Published by Založba ZRC Ljubljana 2024 Contents Filozofski vestnik | Volume 45 | Number 1 | 2024 Rethinking Institutions: Heterodox and Critical Perspectives 7 Werner Bonefeld Notes on Wealth as a Real Abstraction and the Critique of Suffering 25 Lorenzo Chiesa Badiou/Lacan-Badiou: Beyond Anti-Philosophy 77 Mike Grimshaw Radical Theology and the “Weakening” of Bourgeois Institutions 95 Uroš Kranjc Institutions, History, Subjects 119 Tomaž Mastnak Is Economic Power an Institution? The Limits of August Ludwig von Rochau’s Redefinition of Liberal Politics Being Affected 163 Antonia Birnbaum Un courage sans héroïsme. Antigone, Créon, Ismène, Hémon, Tirésias 179 Christian Fierens Une petite pensée : « l’appensée » La dernière séance du séminaire XXIII (11/05/1973) 197 Dries Josten and Levi Haeck Towards an Affective Understanding of Pure Judgments of Taste 219 Alexi Kukuljevic Absense, or the Extimate Place of Art 243 Marcus Quent Interval and Event: Present as In-between Time in Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou 269 Alexandra Van Laeken Whatʼs Love Got to Do With It? Badiouʼs Scene of Two Through the Lens of Lacanʼs Formulas of Sexuation 289 Cindy Zeiher Rough Cuts: Refusal, Negation and Ineffability Kazalo Filozofski vestnik | Letnik 45 | Številka 1 | 2024 Premisliti institucije na novo: heterodoksne in kritične perspektive 7 Werner Bonefeld Beležke o bogastvu kot realni abstrakciji in kritiki trpljenja 25 Lorenzo Chiesa Badiou/Lacan-Badiou: onkraj antifilozofije 77 Mike Grimshaw Radikalna teologija in »oslabitev« buržoaznih institucij 95 Uroš Kranjc Institucije, zgodovina, subjekti 119 Tomaž Mastnak Ali je ekonomska moč institucija? Meje redefinicije liberalne politike Augusta Ludwiga von Rochaua Biti aficiran 163 Antonia Birnbaum Pogum brez junaštva: Antigona, Kreon, Ismena, Hemon, Tirezij 179 Christian Fierens Mala misel: »l’appensée«; zadnja seansa seminarja XXIII (11. 5. 1973) 197 Dries Josten in Levi Haeck K afektivnemu razumevanju čistih sodb okusa 219 Alexi Kukuljevic Absense ali ekstimno mesto umetnosti 243 Marcus Quent Interval in dogodek: sedanjost kot vmesni čas pri Gillesu Deleuzu in Alainu Badiouju 269 Alexandra Van Laeken Kaj ima ljubezen s tem? Badioujeva scena Dvojega z vidika Lacanovih formul seksuacije 289 Cindy Zeiher Grobi rezi: zavračanje, negacija in neizrekljivost Rethinking Institutions: Heterodox and Critical Perspectives 7 Keywords critical theory, real abstraction, critique, suffering, wealth, economic compulsion Abstract The object of a critical theory of society is Man [Menschen] in her historically specific forms of life. The article argues against ontological conceptions of social labour and of economy. Instead it insists that historical materialism far from being a materialism of nature and history, is fundamentally a critique of the objectivity of the capitalist eco- nomic categories. For a critical theory of society, the economic concept, capital as a process of the valorisation of value, is not a natural thing but a social relationship be- tween persons that is mediated through things. The fetishism of commodities is real. In the mediated world the social individuals appear as personifications of the economic object; and yet there would be nothing without their social practices—of self-preserva- tion. Human suffering is objectively mediated. The article concludes that suffering is the non-conceptual content of the concept of society as a process of valorisation. The sheer unrest of life is the social constituent of the economic object. Beležke o bogastvu kot realni abstrakciji in kritiki trpljenja Ključne besede kritična teorija, realna abstrakcija, kritika, trpljenje, bogastvo, ekonomska prisila Povzetek Predmet kritične teorije družbe je človek-bitje [Menschen] kot proizvajalec zgodovinsko specifičnih oblik življenja. Prispevek se zoperstavlja ontološki koncepciji družbenega dela in ekonomije in zagovarja tezo, da historični materializem nikakor ni materializem narave in zgodovine, marveč je v svojem temelju kritika objektivnosti kapitalističnih * University of York, United Kingdom werner.bonefeld@york.ac.uk | https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6709-5313 Werner Bonefeld* Notes on Wealth as a Real Abstraction and the Critique of Suffering Filozofski vestnik issn 0353-4510 | Volume 45 | Number 1 | 2024 | 7–24 cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.45.1.01 8 werner bonefeld ekonomskih kategorij. Za kritično teorijo družbe ekonomski koncept – kapital kot pro- ces valorizacije vrednosti – ni preprosto neka »naravna« reč temveč družbeno razmerje med osebami, ki je posredovano kot razmerje med rečmi. Blagovni fetišizem je realen. V posredovanem svetu se posamezniki v družbi prikazujejo kot poosebitve ekonomske- ga objekta; in vendar ne bi bilo nič brez njihovih družbenih praks – samo-ohranitve. Človeško trpljenje je objektivno posredovano. Prispevek podaja sklep, da je trpljenje ne-konceptualna vsebina koncepta družbe kot procesa valorizacije. Gola nemirnost ži- vljenja je tako družbeni gradnik ekonomskega objekta. ∞ Given the current state of technical development, the fact that there are still countless millions who suffer hunger and want must be attributed to the forms of so- cial production, the relations of production, not to the intrinsic difficulty of meeting people’s material needs. —Theodor Adorno, On Interpretation: The Concept of Progress1 Immanuel Kant’s conception of Enlightenment as humanity’s exodus from self-imposed immaturity still possesses subversive cunning. Not only does he speak about self-imposed immaturity, that is Man-made immaturity, but he also sees humanity as a subject that can free herself from the immaturity of her so- cial condition.2 The notion of Man emerging from self-imposed immaturity presupposes opposi- tion to the existing social relations. Kant’s determination of the role of the schol- ar acknowledged this. He argued that only that science is true which helps the common Man to her dignity.3 Kant therefore demanded from scholarly work that 1 Theodor W. Adorno, “On Interpretation: The Concept of Progress (II),” in History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–1965, ed. Rolf Tiedermann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 144. 2 Man, with a capital “M,” is used here and throughout in the combined sense of Mensch, Menschheit and Menschlein—he/she/it or humanity as a concrete universal. 3 See Immanuel Kant, “Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse,” in Immanuel Kant’s sämmtliche Werke, ed. G. Hartenstein (Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1868), 8:625. 9 notes on wealth as a real abstraction and the critique of suffering it reveals the true character of the political constitution and that failure to do so amounts to a deceitful publicity.4 Marx echoed Kant’s idea of Enlightenment when he argued that human history would begin once social relations existed in which humanity would no longer be held in bondage as a living means for the accumulation of capitalist wealth, but in which humanity would be an end in itself. Against the bourgeois ideal of abstract equality, which recognizes rich and poor as equal partners in wealth regardless of their inequality in property, Marx argued for an equality of human needs. He went further than Kant by arguing that the unveiling of the true char- acter of the constituted relations of human “immaturity” is not sufficient. In fact, Marx did not conceive of the existing social relations as “immature” in re- lation to the promise of their further development. Marx’s critical theory sets out to show that the capitalist labour economy comprises definite forms of human social practice and that it is therefore the social relations themselves, not their labour economy, that require revolutionising for the sake of a society, he calls it communism, in which humanity is a purpose, not a means. Towards a Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion: Wealth, Suffering, Negation Critical theory thinks against the flow of the world, at least that is its intention. The opposite of a critical theory of society is not uncritical theory, however. It is traditional theory, at least according to Max Horkheimer who invoked the no- tion of a critical theory of society in his seminal essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” of 1937.5 If one were to summarise the difference between them, tradi- tional theory, at its best, analyses the world of real (economic) abstractions to comprehend their political, economic, cultural, psychological, social, and his- torical truth from various standpoints, including the standpoint of labour. By ar- guing from the standpoint of labour, it establishes what society lacks in terms of 4 See Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Abaris, 1979). The inspiration behind this opening of my argument is Johannes Agnoli’s “Destruction as the Determination of the Scholar in Miserable Times,” in Revolutionary Writing: Common Sense Essays in Post-Political Politics, ed. Werner Bonefeld (New York: Autonomedia, 2003), 25–37. 5 Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (London: Continuum, 2002), 188–243. 10 werner bonefeld the justice and rationality of its labour organisation, and what therefore needs to be done to overcome what it finds to be deplorable in the capitalist labour economy. In contrast, critical theory scrutinises the untruth of the economic abstractions. It asks about the social constitution of the relations of economic compulsion. Instead, then, of “stating what society lacks” with respect to the rational organisation of its labour economy and instead of asking “what praxis must realize” to achieve a more perfect “version of industrial society,”6 Adorno’s and Marx’s critical theory of capitalist political economy highlights “what is de- plorable about society and has to be abolished.”7 What really is the social logic that holds sway in capitalist society? In their judgement, capitalist society does not promise a freedom from want. Rather, it promises that the dispossessed, free traders in labour-power, will have to work for the profit of the buyer of their labour-power to make a living as exploitable human material. Indeed, they un- derstand that both the capitalist and the labourer are subject to the relations of economic compulsion, which under the threat of bankruptcy compels the em- ployer of labour-power to make a profit from the living labour of its seller. What holds sway in capitalist society is the law of value, that is the law of the valori- sation of living labour. The law of value posits the necessity of money to beget more money, on the pain of ruin. Marx thus conceived of the social character of capitalist society as an “abstraction in action.”8 It is, as Slavoj Žižek put it in the context of the anti-austerity struggles in Greece during the Eurozone crisis, the “real of capital,” one which turns counter-hegemonic struggles for progressive ends into alternative strategies of capitalist development.9 Herbert Marcuse articulated the critical meaning of society as an “abstraction in action” well when he argued that in capitalist society the world manifests itself 6 Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System (London: Verso, 2016), 2. 7 Matthias Benzer, “Social Critique in the Totally Socialized Society,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 37, no. 5 (June 2011): 588, https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453710393317. Benzer ar- gues with reference to Adorno’s social theory. 8 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume Two, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1978), 185. 9 Slavoj Žižek, “Should the Left’s Answer to Rightist Populism Really Be a ‘Me Too’? Part I,” The Philosophical Salon, October 15, 2018, http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/should-the- lefts-answer-to-rightist-populism-really-be-a-me-too-part-i/#_edn1, para. 15. 11 notes on wealth as a real abstraction and the critique of suffering “behind the backs of the individuals; yet it is their work.”10 On the one hand, the individuals owe their life to what society as a process of silent compulsion does to them. On the other, their endeavour to make a living furnishes society as a compelling abstraction with an independent consciousness and a will. The economic quantities move as if by their own volition beyond human control; and yet, their movement manifests the practices of the social individuals in the form of the economic object. With reference to the social classes, society as an abstraction in action entails, crudely put, that the social reproduction of the free labourers depends on how effective their living labour is exploited for prof- it by the buyers of their labour-power. Profitable employers hire workers; un- profitable employers go under. They shed labour. For those without independ- ent means, free labourers, their access to the means of subsistence depends on achieving sustained wage income, the premise of which is the enrichment of the capitalist through the consumption of their labour-power, which they relin- quished to him by agreeing on a contract of labour. The money-form of capitalist wealth, money that yields more money, is the real power of society as a process of economic compulsion. Following Simon Clarke, The drive to force down wages, intensify labour [. . .] is not a matter merely of the subjective motivation of the capitalist, but bears down on the capitalist with the objective force of competition [. . .]. Competition forces every capitalist to seek out means of reducing costs or accelerating the turnover of capital, the better to with- stand immediate or anticipated competitive pressure. Thus, the individual capi- talist is no less subject to the power of money than is the worker.11 That is to say, exploiting labour for profit is the means of avoiding competitive erosion, liquidation, and bankruptcy. These outcomes are particularly painful for the workers who, left without employment, find themselves cut off from the means of subsistence. Profit is primary. The satisfaction of needs is a sideshow. For the sake of maintaining waged-based access to the means of life, the valori- 10 Herbert Marcuse, Negations, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (London: Free Association Press, 1988), 151. 11 Simon Clarke, Keynesianism, Monetarism and the Crisis of the State (Aldershot: Edward and Elgar, 1988), 100. 12 werner bonefeld sation of capital is primary, making money out of money from the living labour of a class of people who make a living as free traders in labour-power. What is “cannot be true.”12 It is true that to reproduce herself, the worker “must produce surplus value. The only worker who is productive is one who produc- es surplus value for the capitalist, or in other words contributes towards the self-valorisation of capital.”13 There is therefore a misfortune far worse than be- ing a productive worker, and that is the misfortune of being a superfluous work- er who, deprived of wage income, depends on the charity of others for her sub- sistence. It is because of their freedom as sellers of labour-power that the free labourers are prevented from “running away.”14 Following Herbert Marcuse, the “lash of hunger” compels them to “sell their services” for the profit of another class of Man.15 The class struggle is not about abstract ideas like socialism. It is a struggle for access to “crude and material things” and it is struggle over the la- bour process, effectively the conditions of exploitation.16 Forms of Critique: Forces of Production and Social Critique The many variations in the Marxist tradition revolve around two contrasting readings of the critique of political economy. Commentators pose the critique of political economy as either a critique of capitalism from the standpoint of labour or a critique of the capitalist labour economy. According to the former, capitalism amounts to a historically specific mode of labour economy. This read- ing argues for a socialist mode of labour economy as the progressive alternative to capitalism. Its conception of socialism is programmatic in that it advocates for a perfected system of labour organisation by means of central planning. According to the latter, the critique of political economy does not argue from the standpoint of labour. On the contrary, it amounts to a negative critique of the capitalist labour economy. Its critique lacks in programmatic features. Instead, 12 Ernst Bloch, Grundfragen der Philosophie: Ausgewählte Schriften, Band I, ed. Johann Kreu- zer (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1965), 336. 13 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (Hamonds- worth: Penguin, 1976), 644. 14 Marx, 719. 15 Marcuse, Negations, 225. 16 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999), 254. 13 notes on wealth as a real abstraction and the critique of suffering it holds that the conceptual content of the society of the free and equal might emerge from the negation of the capitalist relations, that is, the struggle against the social conditions of suffering. According to the standpoint of labour critique of capitalism, labour economy is an ontological principle. It holds that humanity has to exchange with nature to satisfy her needs. It rejects capitalism as a crisis-prone system of labour ex- ploitation for private gain and demands the emancipation of labour from capi- talist domination in socialism. Its argument for socialism is founded on a theory of modes of production as historically specific organisational forms of labour economy. According to this point of view, since “in any form of society human beings productively expend their corporeal powers,” the critique of capitalist labour economy has to differentiate between the “generic materiality” of hu- man life as the transhistorical presupposition of the modes of production and the specific capitalist “historical form of wealth.”17 The analytical focus of this critique of capitalism falls on “the contradictory unity between the materiality of human life and its historically-determined social forms.”18 That is, it views as historically active the relationship between the transhistorically conceived forc- es of production and the historically specific social relations of production, as the decisive dynamic for the understanding of capitalism as a mode of produc- tion in “ ‘transition to communism.’ ”19 Its conception of communism is found- ed on an ontological conception of the capitalist labour economy, that is, it ar- gues that labour is the foundation of human existence. Therewith it supposes a transhistorical materiality of labour, and it thus ontologises labour activity in capitalism as an expression of human essence, abstractly conceived.20 It ar- 17 Guido Starosta, “The Commodity-Form and the Dialectical Method: On the Structure of Marx’s Exposition in Chapter 1 of Capital,” Science and Society 72, no. 3 (July 2008): 31, 25, https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2008.72.3.295. 18 Alex Kicillof and Guido Starosta, “On Materiality and Social Form: A Political Critique of Rubin’s Value-Form Theory,” Historical Materialism 15, no. 3 (2007): 24, https://doi. org/10.1163/156920607X225852. 19 Paresh Chattopadhyay, “The Economic Content of Socialism: Marx vs. Lenin,” Review of Radical Political Economics 24, no. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 1992): 94, https://doi.org/10.1177/ 048661349202400306; quoted in Kicillof and Starosta, 37. 20 What comes to mind is Adam Smith’s conception of a human propensity to truck and bar- ter that for him is the natural dynamic behind the growth in social wealth through the in- crease in labour productivity and the (technical and social) division of labour that it brings about. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. 14 werner bonefeld gues for communism as a morally rational organization of the natural necessity of labour. In short, the argument for a socialist labour economy recognises the capitalist mode of production as an historically overdetermined mode of labour economy, which through its development of the economic forces compels his- tory forward as the unleashed forces of production come into conflict with the capitalist relations, which become too small and narrow for them, thereby creat- ing the objective conditions for transition to socialism.21 As a critique of capital- ist political economy, the argument about a transhistorical materiality of labour economy is as fruitless as the conception of the productive forces as a historical subject. The conception of labour economy as the “transhistorical essence of social life,”22 which will be perfected in socialism in the interests of the workers through the application of state-socialist reason, is illusionary in its grasp of capitalist political economy. However, as a dystopia, it is no less real. It replaces the semblance of freedom in market mediated forms of social coercion by the freedom of state socialism as an unmediated form of social coercion. Following Adorno, the critique of political economy from the standpoint of la- bour perverts the critical intention of Marx’s historical materialism.23 In his view, it ontologises the capitalist labour economy and naturalises the capitalist eco- nomic categories. The circumstance that Man needs to eat and has therefore to exchange with nature does not explain capitalism nor does capitalism derive from it. Man does not eat in the abstract.24 Nor does Man struggle for life in the abstract. The struggle for life, invoked by Marx (and Engels) as a history of class struggle, takes place in definite forms of society. Instead, then, of transposing “every given struggle into the phrase ‘struggle for life,’ ” Marx’s critical theory Edwin Cannan (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 1:25. For an argument that Marxist eco- nomics derives from classical political economy, see Simon Clarke, Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology: From Adam Smith to Max Weber (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992). 21 See, for example, Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 43–4. 22 Moishe Postone, Time, Labour and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 167. 23 See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 335. 24 As Georg Lukács put it, “existence can have no reality except [. . .] the reality of lived experi- ence.” Georg Lukács, Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973), 179. 15 notes on wealth as a real abstraction and the critique of suffering requires analyses of the “struggle for life as it manifests itself historically in var- ious specific forms of society.”25 Critically understood historical materialism is critique of capitalist society un- derstood dogmatically as a historically overdetermined form of natural econom- ic necessities and requirements. What appears in the appearance of society as a relationship between economic things is not some abstractly conceived eco- nomic nature. Rather, what appears in capitalist society as economic nature is Man in her historically specific social relations. The capitalist economic laws compel the social individuals as if they, the economic laws, were a person apart, and yet, their nature is a social nature. What compels them is their own social world. In the words of Marx, “it is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly kernel of the misty creations of religion than to do the opposite, i.e., to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which these have been apotheosized. The latter method” he continuous, “is the only materialist one, and therefore the only scientific one.” For him, the former method belongs to the “abstract materialism of the natural sciences, which excludes the historical process.”26 There is only one reality and that is the reality of historically definite forms of life. Marx’s point about the actual relations of life is key to social form analysis. It asks about the social constitution of the economic categories and expounds their “nature” as a social nature. For social form analysis, therefore, the forces of production and the normative categories are the forces and norms of the ac- tual capitalist social relations. In the words of Moishe Postone, “Marx’s critique transforms the categories of political economy from transhistorical categories of the constitution of wealth into critical categories of the specificity of the forms of wealth and social relations in capitalism.”27 Form analysis is critique of the eco- nomic categories as apotheosised forms of definite social relations. It conceives of historical materialism as critique of the existing social relations, including their normative values and forms of thought. 25 Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, June 27, 1870, in Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975–2004), 43:527. 26 Marx, Capital, Volume One, 494n4. 27 Postone, Time, Labour and Social Domination, 56. 16 werner bonefeld The social form approach to the critique of political economy emerged from the new left of 1968. It contains three overlapping methodological approaches. They are immanent critique, systematic dialectics, and ad hominem critique of the economic categories, which is decipherment of the economic abstractions as the apotheosised forms of definite social relations. Immanent critique judges reality by the standard of its own claims. For example, it judges the reality of social equality by the standard of its normative claim to equality. By judging reality by its own criteria, it seeks to make the “petrified rela- tions [. . .] dance by singing their own tune to them.”28 Instead of criticising real- ity as failing to live up to its normative standards, it both demystifies the norma- tive ideas of, say, freedom and equality as the pleasant norms of a dreadful con- tents, and retains a glimpse of what could be. Matthias Benzer makes this point about the double meaning of immanent critique well when he says with regards to Adorno’s critical theory, the “liberal category of freedom purports to yield the utopian image of a genuinely free individual” but “on closer inspection, it si- multaneously depicts an individual released from feudal social structures who is granted the autonomy that the capitalist economy requires of ‘him’; a ‘mockery of true freedom [. . .] which compels the individual towards ruggedness.’ ” At the same time, it critiques “society for failing to fulfil conceptual standards” which it “cannot avoid advocating” and which therefore lead to demands for “their social realization.”29 Immanent critique interrogates the social coldness of the norma- tive standard. There is a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in. Systematic dialectics is associated with the work of Chris Arthur in the UK and the so-called New Reading of Marx of Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt in the former Federal Republic of Germany.30 Systematic dialectics fo- cuses on the categorical character of the capitalist political economy to under- 28 Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction,” trans. Martin Milligan and Barbara Ruhemann, in Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 182. 29 Benzer, “Social Critique,” 583–84. 30 See Chris Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Chris Arthur, The Spectre of Capital: Idea and Reality (Leiden: Brill, 2022); Hans-Georg Backhaus, Dialektik der Wertform: Untersuchungen zur marxschen Ökonomiekritik (Freiburg: Ça Ira, 1997); Helmut Reichelt, Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriffs bei Karl Marx (Freiburg: Ça Ira, 2001); Helmut Reichelt, Neue Marx-Lektüre: Zur Kritik sozialwissenschaftlicher Logik (Freiburg: Ça Ira, 2013). 17 notes on wealth as a real abstraction and the critique of suffering stand the logic that holds sway in it. It recognises the social forms as real (eco- nomic) abstractions and argues that they establish the social framework within which, as Reichelt put it, the individuals encounter each other, “make contracts in the sphere of circulation, where they deal in mysterious economic forms with so-called ‘goods,’ and who have always already perceived each other as equal and free subjects of law, and, who, prior to this thinly veiled perception of them- selves as independent subjects, experienced class society as one of inequality, exploitation and rule by an autonomised system.”31 Systematic dialectics elab- orates the logic that holds sway in society as a process of real abstraction and expounds the categorical character of the relations of economic compulsion be- yond the objective illusions of normative order thinking and the dogmatic mate- rialism of a political left that deems itself capable of transforming the capitalist labour economy for the benefit of its surplus value producers. Charlotte Baumann’s characterisation of systematic dialectics, the new Reading of Marx in particular, as a logicians’ account of the capitalist social relations is apposite.32 Although systematic dialectics delivers on the logic of the capitalist social nature, its concept of the social is tenuous. Systematic dialectics tends to take the identification of the logic of real abstraction as a goal, which entails the risk of falling back onto the (traditional) differentiation of society into system and lifeworld. Rather than conceptualising the capital relations with reference to the historical elements implicit in them, systematic dialectic posits capital as a conceptual totality akin to a Hegelian idea imposed on reality. For systemat- ic dialectics the category of the free labourer is unsettling, to say the least. For Arthur “labour-power is not produced by capital; it is an external condition of capitalist production.”33 In contrast Elena Louisa Lange argues that “labor power is [. . .] a capitalistically produced commodity.” She argues that capital produces the commodity “labour power [sic]” as “the direct source” of its “raison d’etre: 31 Helmut Reichelt, “Social Reality as Appearance: Some Notes on Marx’s Conception of Reality,” trans. Werner Bonefeld, in Human Dignity: Social Autonomy and the Critique of Capitalism, ed. Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis (London: Routledge, 2017), 65. 32 Charlotte Baumann, “Adorno, the New Reading of Marx, and Methodologies of Critique,” in Adorno and Marx: Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Political Economy, ed. Werner Bonefeld and Chris O’Kane (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 55–76. 33 Chris Arthur, “The Inner Totality of Capitalism,” Historical Materialism 14, no. 3 (January 2006): 92, https://doi.org/10.1163/156920606778531752. 18 werner bonefeld profit.”34 Her identification of the capital relation as a system that produces its own social premise conceives of the social relations in terms of their incorporat- ed functionality. Postone’s account expresses the dualist conception of society as system and as lifeworld. He argues that capital “subjects people to impersonal, increasingly rationalized structural imperatives and constraints,” which “cannot be grasped adequately in terms of class domination.”35 In his account, “capital” as system sets the objective framework within which the social conflicts unfold. The identification of capital as an extra-social subject presumes what needs to be explained. On one hand, following Adorno, “the reality in which men live is not unvarying and independent of them.” On the other, following Clarke, the cap- italist relations of production presuppose the historical emergence of a class of free labourers.36 It is the case that a logic holds sway in capitalist political econ- omy. It incorporates the individuals as its personifications. However, its shape remains human. That is to say, the individuals “live in social being, not in [eco- nomic] nature,” and their social being has not been given to them by the capital- ist economic nature.37 It is rather the historical result of their own—objectively compelled—social practices. Discovering the untruth of the capitalist relations does not only entail discovery of the logic that holds sway in reified society. It also entails discovery of the sim- ple fact that the capitalist “social order cannot exist without distorting men.”38 The social individuals are not just cogs in a system of economic compulsion. As such cogs, mere human “instruments of production,” they are “possessed with consciousness.”39 As Baumann puts it, they suffer “from the pressures” of their 34 Elena Louisa Lange, Value without Fetish: Uno Kōzō’s Theory of “Pure Capitalism” in Light of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 47. 35 Moishe Postone, “The Subject and Social Theory: Marx and Lukács on Hegel,” in History and Heteronomy: Critical Essays, ed. Koichi Maeda (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy, 2009), 78. 36 Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, trans. Willis Domingo (Cam- bridge: Polity, 2013), 28; Clarke, Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology, 118. See also Si- mon Clarke, “Class Struggle and the Working Class: The Problem of Commodity Fetishism,” in The Labour Debate: An Investigation into the Theory and Reality of Capitalist Work, ed. Ana C. Dinerstein and Michael Neary, eds. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 50–69. 37 Adorno, Against Epistemology, 28. 38 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 194. 39 Marx, Capital, Volume One, 719. 19 notes on wealth as a real abstraction and the critique of suffering own reified existence as personifications of the economic categories.40 Society as a process of real abstraction does not suffer from the capitalist economic na- ture. It does not go on strike and does not struggle to make ends meet. The social individuals do, and they do so as personifications of their own social world that in the form of the economic object compels them into action. On the one hand, the understanding of the mysterious character of the economic things, which “abound with metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties,” rests on the comprehension of the human social practice that furnishes them with a will and a dynamic. The social individuals “do this without being aware of it” in the pursuit of their self-preservation.41 On the other, although society’s laws of motion abstract “from its individual subjects, degrading them to mere ex- ecutors, mere partners in social wealth and social struggle, there would be noth- ing without individuals and their spontaneities.”42 Reification, society as system, “finds its limitation in reified Man.”43 That is, the critique of reification amounts to the conceptualised praxis of the capitalist social relations. The preponderance of society as reified object entails the sheer unrest of life as its hidden, non-con- ceptual foundation and secret history. The need to make suffering speak, to “lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth.”44 In this context, suffering is not an existential term of pure subjective feeling, the mush of the soul. Rather, it is an objectively mediated term. It “is the weight of objectivity upon the subject, and because that which the subject experiences as its most subjective moment—the expression of suffering—is objectively mediated.”45 While a definite logic holds sway in the social forms, the critique of political economy is decipherment of the social relations that constitute them. It is decipherment of the relations of eco- nomic compulsion as relations of the sheer unrest of life. Concluding Remarks Social form analysis interrogates the economic categories as the objectified forms of definite social relations. Furthermore, it argues that the sheer unrest of 40 Baumann, “Adorno,” 66. 41 Marx, Capital, Volume One, 163, 166–67. 42 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 304. 43 Theodor W. Adorno, Gesellschaftstheorie und Kulturkritik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), 25. 44 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 17–18. 45 Adorno, 18; translation modified. 20 werner bonefeld life, the class struggle to avoid and alleviate suffering, is the hidden secret of the relations of economic objectivity. The social mentality and the forms of thought of the acting individuals are in- corporated in the spirit of money. However, money does not talk. It is rather the social individuals who speak in and through money as the independent power of their social relations. Money does not care about inflation or deflation, wheth- er it belongs to the few or is desired by the many, or whether it yields living off- spring or crashes. The validity of money is a social validity, and its power to compel the individuals to the point of madness is socially constituted. As the universal of the capitalist relations of economic compulsion, it “compress[es] the particular until it splinters, like a torture instrument.”46 Yet, money does not care for the sacrifice of living labour on the altar of profit. The capitalist cares for profit – as he must – to avoid competitive erosion. The free labourers care for money, too. They struggle for money to make a living. In its entirety, the world of economic compulsion is a world of definite forms of human social practice, which endow society in the form of the “money subject” with a cold, calculating consciousness.47 The defining character of bourgeois society is social coldness. The critique of social coldness has to be more than just a normative argument about re-distributive justice, equality and freedom. Theoretical concepts and normative values “cannot be perceived without reference to the historical ele- ments implicit in it.”48 The history-making violence which divorced the direct producers from the means of subsistence imbues the bourgeois concepts of free- dom and equality with a definite social content that appears in its civilised form as an exchange relationship between supposedly equal legal subjects—one trading her labour-power for a wage to “dodge the freedom to starve,” the other consuming the acquired labour-power for profit to avoid competitive erosion.49 46 Adorno, 346. 47 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Policital Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973), 144. 48 Theodor Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, ed. Christoph Gödde, trans. Edmund F. N. Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 145. 49 Adorno, History and Freedom, 201. On law making violence and law preserving vio- lence, see Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund F. N. Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 1986), 277–300; Amy Swiffen, “Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Law,” in The SAGE 21 notes on wealth as a real abstraction and the critique of suffering The concepts of justice, humanity, freedom, and equality do not comprise a nor- mative standard that remains somehow separated from an altogether disagree- able social content. Rather, they are afflicted with the injustice and inhumanity “under whose spell they were conceived.”50 The truth of normative critique is the untruth of freedom as economic compulsion. It really is the case that the dy- namic of the whole process of capital as self-valorising value is fed by the social practices of the class divided individuals who “owe their life to what is being done to them.”51 Clearly, the civilised regulation of social coldness is much pref- erable to its authoritarian conduct. Yet, by standing up for the free labourers the normative critique of capitalism endorses the system that compels them in their acquired freedom. “Thinking means venturing beyond.”52 We know the bad; we should know how to avoid it, but we do not know the good. What a human freedom it would be to live life without anxiety and worry about the satisfaction of needs, and with time to spare for enjoyment. In the meantime, despite an immense accumulation of wealth, the poor and miserable continue to “chew words to fill their bellies.”53 References Adorno, Theodor W. Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Translated by Willis Domingo. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. . Gesellschaftstheorie und Kulturkritik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975. Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, ed. Beverley Best, Werner Bonefeld and Chris O’Kaney (London: Sage, 2018), 870–85. 50 Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Samuel Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 66. 51 Theodor Adorno, “Society,” trans. F. R. Jameson, in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (London: Routledge, 1989), 275. 52 Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), 2. For an appreciation of Bloch’s Marxism, see Cat Moir, “Ernst Bloch: The Principle of Hope,” in Best, Bonefeld, and O’Kane, SAGE Handbook, 199–215. 53 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. Edmund F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 102. On the lack of access to basic material things in our time, see Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017). 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Vol. 3 of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Col- lected Works. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975. . Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin, 1973. . Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, June 27, 1870. In Marx and Engels, 1868–1870, translated by John Peet, Michael Slattery, and Sergei Syrovatkin, edited by Eric Hobsbawm et al., 527. Vol. 43 of Karl Marx, Fredrich Engels: Collected Works. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988. Moir, Cat. “Ernst Bloch: The Principle of Hope.” In The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, edited by Beverley Best, Werner Bonefeld, and Chris O’Kane, 199–215. London: Sage, 2018. Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. 24 werner bonefeld Postone, Moishe. “The Subject and Social Theory: Marx and Lukács on Hegel.” In History and Heteronomy: Critical Essays, edited by Koichi Maeda, 63–84. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy, 2009. . Time, Labour and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Reichelt, Helmut. Neue Marx-Lektüre: Zur Kritik sozialwissenschaftlicher Logik. Freiburg: Ça Ira, 2013. . “Social Reality as Appearance: Some Notes on Marx’s Conception of Reality.” Translated by Werner Bonefeld. In Human Dignity: Social Autonomy and the Critique of Capitalism, edited by Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis, 31–68. London: Routledge, 2017. . Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriffs bei Karl Marx. Freiburg: Ça Ira, 2001. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by Edwin Cannan. 2 vols. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981. Starosta, Guido. “The Commodity-Form and the Dialectical Method: On the Structure of Marx’s Exposition in Chapter 1 of Capital.” Science and Society 72, no. 3 (July 2008): 295–318. https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2008.72.3.295. Streeck, Wolfgang. How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System. London: Verso, 2016. Swiffen, Amy. “Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Law.” In The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, edited by Beverley Best, Werner Bonefeld, and Chris O’Kane, 870–85. London: Sage, 2018. Žižek, Slavoj. “Should the Left’s Answer to Rightist Populism Really Be a ‘Me Too’? Part I.” The Philosophical Salon, October 15, 2018. http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/ should-the-lefts-answer-to-rightist-populism-really-be-a-me-too-part-i/#_edn1. 25 Keywords Badiou, Lacan, anti-philosophy, philosophy, foliesophie Abstract For Badiou, Lacan is not a philosopher. He is instead a sui generis anti-philosopher. Anti-philosophy is, in a complex manner but eventually by definition, against philoso- phy. I intend to dispute this reading of Lacan while also profoundly sympathising with Badiou’s understanding of philosophy and acknowledging his extensive engagement with Lacan.1 Badiou/Lacan-Badiou: onkraj antifilozofije Ključne besede Badiou, Lacan, antifilozofija, filozofija, foliesophie Povzetek Za Badiouja Lacan ni filozof, temveč antifilozof sui generis. Antifilozofija je na kompl- eksen način, vendar po definiciji, proti filozofiji. To branje Lacana nameravam ovreči, hkrati pa upoštevam Badioujevo razumevanje filozofije in priznavam njegovo obsežno ukvarjanje z Lacanom. 1 This article is part of a much wider book project tentatively titled Lacan-Badiou: The Letter and the Event. I wish to thank Moritz Herrmann for his acute comments on an early draft. I have only very recently (mid-August 2023) received insightful comments from Paul Livingston (especially on Badiou’s and Lacan’s Wittgenstein) and Paris Lavidis (especially on Badiou’s meta-ontological reading of Lacan), which I plan to incorporate and discuss in the book, and for which I warmly thank them. * Newcastle University, United Kingdom lorenzo.chiesa@newcastle.ac.uk Lorenzo Chiesa* Badiou/Lacan-Badiou: Beyond Anti-Philosophy1 Filozofski vestnik issn 0353-4510 | Volume 45 | Number 1 | 2024 | 25–75 cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.45.1.02 26 lorenzo chiesa ∞ Philosophical Anti-Philosophy or the Destruction of Philosophy? For Badiou, Lacan is not a philosopher. He is instead a sui generis anti-philos- opher. Anti-philosophy is, in a complex manner but eventually by definition, against philosophy. I intend to dispute this reading of Lacan while also pro- foundly sympathising with Badiou’s understanding of philosophy and acknowl- edging his extensive engagement with Lacan. Badiou’s general stance on the matter, especially as conveyed in the 1994–95 Seminar Lacan: Anti-philosophy 3, could be summarised as follows: Lacan is an anti-philosopher, because he sees philosophy as a “pretension of thought to dispense with the real.”2 Save for the fact that he is not just like any other anti-philosopher, because he “restored and, in a certain sense re-established, the category of truth.”3 Save for the fact that he eventually falls back into an an- ti-philosophical position, because he misses “the being of truths” or, in a com- plementary fashion, “the truth of the real.”4 Save for the fact that philosophy should be relaunched on the basis of these passages and an overcoming of their final deadlock, because that is precisely what Badiou’s philosophy does . . . Let us patiently disentangle Badiou’s line of reasoning. First, like other an- ti-philosophers, Lacan denounces philosophy’s claim to be a self-sufficient dis- course or, which is the same, that there is a meta-language—of Being as One.5 To this avoidance of the real, and in resonance with anti-philosophers such as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, he would oppose: 1. A strong “subjective trait” whereby what I say, against philosophy’s pseu- do-truth as avoidance of the real, is conclusively true. And it is so pre- 2 Alain Badiou, Lacan: Anti-philosophy 3, trans. Kenneth Reinhard and Susan Spitzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), xxxix. 3 Badiou, 23. 4 Badiou, xl, 148. 5 See Badiou, 138. 27 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy cisely by eclipsing my own self for the sake of the non-self-sufficient dis- course I serve.6 “I, the truth, speak,” or better, “I, the truth, speaks.” 2. The dimension of the act as necessitated by this saying the truth in van- ishing, which, as an act, is itself vanishing and can only be apprehended retrospectively from the standpoint of its effects.7 The act happens when “there emerges a saying that does not always go so far as to be able to ‘ex- sist’ [meta-linguistically] with respect to what is being said,”8 that is to say, a saying that fleetingly carries over with it a truthful un-said attached to what is being said. According to Badiou, Lacan supplements these tenets—already debatable when applied to his work—with two additional—and textually far less defensible—leit- motifs shared by anti-philosophers: 3. The prevalence of the act over the truth it conveys, which unwittingly and contradictorily reiterates the—philosophical for the anti-philosopher— destitution of truth.9 Truth can at best only be half-said. Or also, in the act, (half-)saying the truth is favoured to the detriment of (half-)saying the truth.10 4. The final change of focus from truth to knowledge, which is in turn made possible by the emphasis on the act and reinforces the destitution of truth. The psychoanalytic act ultimately resolves itself into a “passing,” as transmission, of knowledge.11 Yet, secondly, unlike other anti-philosophers, for Badiou, Lacan positively com- plicates this otherwise abortive scenario to such a degree that he also ends up 6 Badiou, 3–4. 7 See Badiou, 5–6. 8 Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: Encore, 1972–73, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 22; quoted in Badiou, Lacan, 60; trans- lation modified. 9 See Badiou, Lacan, 22–23, 144, 7–8. 10 See Badiou, 19–20. 11 See Badiou, 6–7, 23–26. 28 lorenzo chiesa assuming an “anti-philosophical relation to anti-philosophy itself.”12 This is the case insofar as: 1. Despite truth eventually giving way to knowledge, truth remains a “hole in knowledge”13 that knowledge can never fill in. More precisely, the ker- nel of truth is “stripped of all meaning”14—the meaning of knowledge. Truth can therefore subtractively be thought as the truth of the mean- inglessness of knowledge. Knowledge becomes transmissible only on these presuppositions. Such a move challenges both Wittgenstein’s and Nietzsche’s anti-philosophical subsumption of truth under meaning: for the former, meaning as the silent-unsayable sense of the world outclass- es truth as reduced to an exact linguistic description of existing states of affairs; for the latter, meaning as a differential evaluation of vital forces exceeds truth as an evaluation of forces carried out by the reactive force.15 2. Despite its prevalence over truth, the act that tears a truthful hole in knowledge is an immanent act.16 This means that it has its own place—in the practice of psychoanalysis, on and behind the couch . . . —since it has already taken place—starting with Freud. The psychoanalytic act ceases to be merely programmatic. In not presuming to reveal a meaning, it no longer preludes an “ineffable” elsewhere to-come,17 whether in the guise of a “mystical element, the silent principle of salvation” (Wittgenstein) or of a fateful super-human transvaluation of all values (Nietzsche).18 3. Despite its undeniably subjective dimension, immanently half-saying the truth, in the act, does not demonise science. On the contrary, the psycho- analytic act is “archi-scientific.”19 As Jean-Claude Milner spells it out in dialogue with Badiou, this means that what first and foremost matters in the psychoanalytic act with regard to modern science is the latter’s math- 12 Badiou, 2–3; emphasis added. 13 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 511. 14 Badiou, Lacan, 95; emphasis added. 15 See Badiou, 74–75. 16 See Badiou, 88. 17 See Badiou, 81, 83, 151. 18 Badiou, 6. 19 Badiou, 2. 29 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy ematisation rather than its experimentations.20 In Lacanese, the only ac- cess to the real is provided by the matheme and, as Badiou puts it, there is a “reciprocity” between the matheme and the non-transcendent act.21 However, crucially, the matheme is located at a “point of the real” precise- ly to the extent that this point coincides with an “impasse of the mathe- matizable”22—which can as such be demonstrated by means of inscrip- tion/formalisation and thereby initiate the possibility of the transmission of knowledge. It is in this specific mathematical sense that the kernel of truth is stripped of the meaning of knowledge. At bottom, mathematics amounts to a “meaning-less saying” that renews what is being said (or known).23 While mathematical (matheme-atical) meaning-less saying should not strictly speaking be associated with an “event,” it nonetheless indicates an “appearing.”24 Such an appreciative assessment of mathe- matics diametrically opposes Nietzsche’s and Wittgenstein’s identifica- tion of it with logic and its subsequent denigration as an alleged guaran- tee for the consistency of philosophy.25 4. Despite his vehement attacks on philosophy, Lacan’s discrediting of it is not “frontal” but “oblique.”26 He very much appreciates that philosophy is and has always been inherently split.27 In tension with what Badiou says in Being and Event (Lacan would relegate philosophy as a whole to specu- lative totalisation and hence to the imaginary),28 and pace Heidegger, for Lacan, “there is no single history of philosophy’s diversion of thought.”29 There is bad and good philosophy, even in the specific sense of meta- physics. Bad philosophy leads us to the One as Being, since it always pre- supposes that being as such thinks.30 Good philosophy instead treats the One as an operation without being—il y a de l’Un, there is something like/ 20 See Badiou, 212–14. 21 Badiou, 94, 34. 22 Badiou, 33–34, 95; emphasis added. 23 Badiou, 97. 24 Badiou, 96. 25 See Badiou, 93–94, 30. 26 Badiou, 68; translation modified. 27 See Badiou, 64 (translation modified), 59. 28 See Badiou, Being and Event, 2. 29 Badiou, Lacan, 59. 30 See Badiou, 55, 63, 140. 30 lorenzo chiesa of the One, but the One is not.31 Good philosophy thus thinks being as a multiple without One and “it must be acknowledged that this distinction is a Lacanian one”: “Badiou could be said to have developed his ontolo- gy” on this basis, Badiou admits in passing.32 Lacan’s questioning of phi- losophy is “totally new” since, while anti-philosophy can obviously not do without philosophy as an object of scorn, he alone sees that ever since Plato, and in Plato himself, philosophy has itself been an “avant-garde of anti-philosophy” against the temptation of the One.33 Here Lacan could not be further away from Nietzsche’s ambition to cure humanity of the Plato-disease or Wittgenstein’s aspiration to unveil once and for all the harmfulness of the senseless propositions of philosophy.34 By relating anti-philosophically to anti-philosophy in various ways, Lacan would thus dialectically “close”—a period of—anti-philosophy and “open up” something unprecedented for philosophy.35 Or better, I would add, his anti-phil- osophical relation to anti-philosophy would result into an anti-anti-philosophy, a philosophical anti-philosophy that would resume, reinvigorate, and finally put at centre-stage an anti-philosophical philosophy (namely a philosophy an- ti-Being-One) that has for the most part been latent or marginalised in the his- tory of philosophy. Still, for Badiou, Lacan somehow clings to anti-philosophy tout-court. What is at stake in this third major swerve in Badiou’s overall argument is, again, as a purported threshold dividing his project from Lacan’s, a residual yet resilient un- derestimation and misplacement of truth with respect to the act and knowledge. In terms of the act’s alleged overshadowing of truth, Badiou could not be more ad- amant: “The analytic act is anything but a search for truth.”36 Strangely enough, the immanence of the act that tears a truthful hole in knowledge and thus access- es the real, where the latter is for Lacan always translatable into the absence of the sexual relationship (in brief, the fact that there is no meaningful measure or 31 See Badiou, 65. 32 Badiou, 56. 33 Badiou, 57. 34 See Badiou, 21. 35 Badiou, 2–3. 36 Badiou, 144. 31 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy mathematizable ratio between the two sexes; that truth is the not-One of sexual incompleteness), would end up installing the act itself as “the real of the real”37— and hence, we are left to infer, as ultimately transcendent to the real. Following from this, in terms of knowledge’s supposed replacement of truth, what the act as thus understood would instead search for is a “correlation” be- tween truth and sense/meaning on which to then establish a “connection” be- tween sense/meaning and knowledge.38 Any “essential” link between knowl- edge and truth would therefore be ruled out.39 To begin with, sense would be extracted out of the absence of the sexual relationship. As dubiously evidenced by some phrases from Lacan’s article L’Étourdit, the truth of the non-rapport, of the absence of sense (“ab-sense”) of the absence of the sexual relationship would be reduced to a “sense as ab-sense,” or “ab-sex sense.”40 Subsequently, the mathemes that inscribe such an ab-sex sense could be arranged in a fully transmissible knowledge, albeit impersonal as purely formalised. Returning to the point we made earlier, where Badiou praised Lacan against the other an- ti-philosophers, the kernel of truth now turns out to be stripped of the meaning of knowledge only at the cost, exorbitant for Badiou, of re-founding knowledge on a—however paradoxical—meaning, not on truth. To sum up, notwithstanding the convolutedness of his argumentative trajectory, Badiou’s conclusion on why Lacan would anti-philosophically abide by a desti- tution of truth is very clear: insofar as “the analytic act consists in a production of transmissible knowledge with regard to ab-sex sense,” “truth is [. . .] in a po- sition of eclipse between supposed knowledge”—as truthfully holed by the act— “and transmissible knowledge.”41 All in all, the key outcome of the act amounts to a registration of sense (as ab-sense),42 for the benefit of both the end of the treatment and the knowledge of the psychoanalyst. On the one hand, the math- 37 Badiou, 31–32. 38 Badiou, 79; translation modified. 39 Badiou, 78. 40 Badiou, 76–78, 84. As Badiou puts it even more unequivocally in “Formules de ‘L’Étourdit,’ ” “absence of sense positively means ab-sex sense”; the latter would be a “non-negative for- mula.” Alain Badiou, “Formules de ‘L’Étourdit,’ ” in Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin, ll n’y a pas de rapport sexuel: Deux leçons sur “L’Étourdit” de Lacan (Paris: Fayard, 2010), 111–12; emphasis added. All translations of references in French are my own. 41 Badiou, Lacan, 81 (translation modified), 76. 42 Badiou, 77; translation modified. 32 lorenzo chiesa eme is integrally transmissible; on the other, truth can only be half -said.43 To cut a long story short, truth recoils into a predictable function of unveiling-veiling and Lacan reverts to Heidegger.44 Adopting the terminology of Being and Event we could thus suggest that, for Badiou, while Lacan is one of the few thinkers in the history of philosophy who initially thinks truth as a hole in knowledge, he subsequently does not raise this thinking to the level of a “generic thought” that sees “the place of truth” (how- ever unnameable and indiscernible it is in Badiou’s meta-ontology) in “parts” of being.45 As seen, unlike in other anti-philosophies, in Lacan, an act that tears a truthful hole in knowledge has its—at first sight immanent—place, but the fact that the act has indeed taken place “must be confirmed in knowledge,”46 through the latter’s transmissibility, not in truth. Juxtaposing Being and Event with the Seminar on Lacan, at the risk of some oversimplification, I would suggest that, in Lacan, for Badiou, truth does not really have a place—to be—through the act’s taking place as attested by knowledge. This would be his quintessential limit. To put it even more simply, thinking truth as a hole in knowledge would, again, not pave the way for thinking an “essential”47—the words Badiou uses are nev- er random—link between knowledge and truth, through which a renovation of knowledge could not but depend on a truth procedure. Generic thought would be occluded by, again, the correlation between truth and sense and the ensuing connection between sense and knowledge. This highly abstract pattern has wider implications for the status of Lacan’s an- ti-philosophy in general, which can no longer be considered as just having an anti-philosophical relation to anti-philosophy itself. It is still a full-blown an- ti-philosophy, according to Badiou, not an anti-anti-philosophy or philosophi- cal anti-philosophy. Lacan would definitively be consigned to anti-philosophy, despite all the oscillations I described and Badiou hardly manages to keep un- der control. Another way to phrase the point above about the placeless-ness and lack of being of truth from a slightly different perspective is to say that—as Ba- 43 See Badiou, 78. 44 See Badiou, 78–79. 45 Badiou, Being and Event, 510–11. A discussion of indiscernibility and unnameability re- garding truth is beyond my remit here. 46 Badiou, Lacan, 88. 47 Badiou, 78. 33 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy diou says in his Seminar—in Lacan, there would only be the “triad” truth, real, knowledge “which cannot be divided into parts” and as such coalesces exclu- sively into knowledge.48 In other words, there allegedly would be no knowledge of the real, no knowledge of truth, and no truth of the real.49 These pairs instead determine the field of philosophy (“good” philosophy, of course): under the ae- gis of a search for truth, philosophy “assumes that there is a truth of the real” and thereby conveys it as a “knowledge of this truth.”50 After all, Lacan’s appar- ently philosophical anti-philosophy is not philosophy because while the latter “claims to arrange a truth of the real as knowledge,”51 for him, there is only a “function of the real within knowledge that enables a situation of truth.”52 For a reader unfamiliar with Badiou’s jargon in Being and Event, this could seem a minor, almost sophistic, distinction, but it is not. Again, Badiou always choos- es his words very carefully. To put it simply, a situation of truth is not what truth is about, for Badiou. Or also, constraining truth to a situation of truth denotes precisely the fact that truth does not really have a place to be—again, there is no “being of truths” in Lacan. In more technical terms, a situation of truth con- fines truth to a presentation of being as “consistent multiplicity,” namely, to the “regime of the count-as-one,” namely, to structure (in passing, on the contrary, for Badiou, truth will have been—as a, now indiscernible, infinite part of the sit- uation—the truth of the entire situation, of the being of the situation, following a truth procedure).53 All in all, in Lacan, truth has no place to be because it is too structurally placed. We are thus back to square one, or quite literally, ground zero as square One. Badiou’s last take on Lacan in the—at first sight largely sympathetic—Seminar is the same as and as critical as in his major works: in Lacan truth is simply a structural truth, a truth of knowledge (which Lacan constantly and most em- phatically rejects).54 Unsurprisingly at this stage, according to the Seminar, his 48 Badiou, 148. 49 See Badiou, 148. See also Badiou, “Formules de ‘L’Étourdit,’ ” 121–22. 50 Badiou, Lacan, 149. 51 Badiou, 144; translation modified. 52 Badiou, 148; translation modified, emphasis added. 53 See Badiou, Being and Event, 522, 525. 54 See, for instance, Jacques Lacan, . . . or Worse, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 171. 34 lorenzo chiesa very discernment of a “good” philosophy that subtractively tears a truthful hole in the presumed Oneness of Being and concomitantly understands the One as an operation without Being—il y a de l’Un—ultimately only serves the identifica- tion of “the One as an empty place”55—il y a de l’Un—to which being as such is wrongly restricted. That is to say, all things considered, for the Seminar, Lacan’s il y a de l’Un means nothing other than that there is the void yet truthful sub- ject, attacked in Being and Event since the subject cannot be reduced to the void according to Badiou (and to Lacan), as contained within the “circular closure” of structure, castigated in Theory of the Subject, and as such unable to respond to the event.56 Lacan’s subtractive ontology is merely an ontology of “dis-be- ing”57 that contradictorily leads us to the Being of the One as an empty place, the Being-One of the empty place, and therefore back to “bad” philosophy, at best. Or, at worst and however unintentionally, as Badiou seems to insinuate at one point, precisely due to this relapse the “ultimate aim” of Lacan’s seemingly non-frontal attack on philosophy is, beyond any kind of dialogue, “to destroy [good] philosophy.”58 According to Badiou, and leaving aside his unfailingly re- spectful tributes to Lacan, he finally stands out as the most effective and in- tractable anti-philosopher. I think this final round of twists in Badiou’s reading of Lacan, as eventually fall- ing back into utter anti-philosophy, is incorrect and can textually be disproved. They all fundamentally derive from and revolve around a presumed detection of “sense as ab-sense” and then sense as ab-sense—both of which Lacan never speaks about—in “ab-sense”—on which he insists.59 In L’Étourdit, Lacan even warns the reader not to “force” the “ab-sense”60—in the direction of sense, I would add. Lacan does mention, once, “ab-sex sense” (sens-absexe) yet clearly 55 Badiou, Lacan, 56; emphasis added. Strangely, Badiou does not openly criticise Lacan on this point in the Seminar but he vehemently does so in Being and Event: Lacan would thus “concede a point of being to the one.” Badiou, Being and Event, 24. 56 See, for instance, Badiou, Being and Event, 432–33; Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009), 54. A detailed unravelling of why Badiou is mistaken on this series of points, and why Lacan’s stance on them is far more similar to Badiou’s than Badiou acknowledges, is one of the leitmotifs of my current project. 57 Badiou, Lacan, 55. 58 Badiou, 149. 59 Jacques Lacan, “L’Étourdit,” in Autres écrits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 452, 458–59, 463, 469, 477. 60 Lacan, 463. 35 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy refers it to a “swelling,” an abscess of the “ab-sense [that] designates sex,”61 or, in other words, and moving quickly, to the (phylo- and ontogenetic) emergence of the phallic function as a transcendental species-specific invariant which in- deed produces sense/meaning by “warding off the absence of the sexual rela- tionship.”62 But there is here absolutely no “correlation” whatsoever between truth and sense, no sense of the absence of the sexual relationship. The absence of the sexual relationship remains an unredeemable ab-sense. A fortiori, the phallic function’s production of (imaginary and always precariously patched- up) sense has nothing or very little to do with the question concerning the trans- missibility of knowledge following an act that tears a truthful hole in knowl- edge, which instead aims at, at least transiently, draining the abscess of every- day sense in a formalised fashion. More in general, and from a slightly different angle, Badiou’s basic mistake with “ab-sex sense” is to assume (like other, even refined, commentators do) that, in Lacan, “there is no sexual relationship”—which for Lacan is—can be reversed into and domesticated as “the sexual non-relationship is”—which for Lacan is not really, for all the pertinent meta-ontological reasons adduced by Badiou himself.63 Including in the Seminar, which otherwise excels in exegetical acu- men, when taking some distance from Lacan becomes mandatory, Badiou thus fabricates a threshold that can be upheld only through very selected, decontex- tualised, and often extremely circumstantial statements made by Lacan, which are altogether coerced from him. Furthermore, the fabricated threshold also receives and inconsistent treatment across Badiou’s works. This already begins to transpire by comparing the Sem- inar with Being and the Event. While the former ends up embracing the latter’s condemnation, whereby in the end it is entirely up to Badiou to rejuvenate phi- losophy through Lacan yet against Lacan (Badiou’s final change of course), it does so only after adopting a much more appreciating stance towards Lacan and thus—temporarily—moving the threshold. To recapitulate, in Badiou’s Seminar, 61 Lacan, 452. 62 Lacan, 458. 63 Although Lacan is at times very ambiguous on this in his late and latest Seminars, after a renewed and closer scrutiny of them, I here retract my previous claim that, after Seminar XX, he would privilege “there is a nonrelationship.” Lorenzo Chiesa, The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), xx. 36 lorenzo chiesa for Lacan, philosophy is inherently split, namely, not wholly devoted to the Be- ing of the One; Lacan’s anti-philosophy can relate anti-philosophically to an- ti-philosophy itself; and, thanks to Lacan, this at least potentially philosophical character of anti-philosophy, mirrored by a positively anti-philosophical char- acter of philosophy, opens something new for philosophy—thanks to Badiou. Lacan the Philosopher: The Torsion of Anti-Philosophy In opposition to Badiou, we can initiate a dismantling of his threshold as set up in the Seminar precisely by means of the notions he uses to erect it in the same work. According to Lacan, most definitely, there is a knowledge of the real; there is a knowledge of truth; and, albeit in a more complex manner, there is also a truth of the real. The sources speak for themselves. I will here only outline these three issues. 1. Modern science is a knowledge of the real: “There is a knowledge in the real. [. . .] [It is] the scientist who has to accommodate it.”64 Science seizes or at least “bites” the real.65 In suspending the alleged corre- spondence between thinking and what is being thought, and hence the fantasy of a Oneness of being, the real remains a meaningless impasse of formalisation that, however, as such promotes further formalisations (knowledge). Although scientific knowledge inherently tends to reduce these formalisations to the level of meaning, its tangible—technological—effectiveness necessarily rests on re- peated encounters with the meaningless real. Since his early Seminars Lacan in- sists on how the real should not only be located “at the limits of our experience” for it is precisely as an impasse of formalisation that it “involves in itself any possibility of effect.”66 Through scientific knowledge the real as what “does not work”67 in everyday reality also becomes what is eminently effective and actual 64 Jacques Lacan, “Lettre de Jacques Lacan à trois psychanalystes italiens,” Spirales 9 (1981): 60. I acknowledge that this is not exactly the same as a “knowledge of the real,” but I think the two phrases can quite easily be reconciled via Lacan’s treatment of science. I will ad- dress this in the near future. 65 Jacques Lacan, D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, 1971 (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 43. 66 Jacques Lacan, La relation d’objet, 1956–1957 (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 31. 67 Jacques Lacan, “The Triumph of Religion,” in The Triumph of Religion, Preceded by Discourse to Catholics, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 61. 37 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy in it. Through scientific knowledge the real is in Wirklichkeit, namely—playing along Lacan on the polysemy of the German phrase—it “really” is as an “in fact” only insofar as it is “in effect.”68 2. Psychoanalysis is a knowledge of truth: “If analysis rests on a presump- tion, it is that knowledge of truth can be constituted on the basis of its experience.”69 Lacan indeed inscribes this savoir sur la vérité in his matrix of the discourse of the psychoanalyst as a knowledge in the position of truth.70 Revolving around the absence of the sexual relationship, the psychoanalytic knowledge of truth should diametrically be opposed to any “truth of knowledge” (vérité sur le savoir) as a final truth, including and most insidiously the truth about (the knowledge of) truth we might be tempted to derive in extremis from the very absence of the sexual relationship—whereupon the absence of the sexual relationship turns into the sexual non-relationship as One. The knowledge of truth is thus strictly connected with the Il y a de l’Un, or better Yad’lun, Lacan says, as a mere opera- tion “. . . and nothing more” that refutes the Oneness of being (“The knowledge of truth is articulated from the tip of what I advance [. . .] about Yad’lun. [. . .] It’s an altogether particular One [. . .] and it’s an abyss”).71 For the same reason, the knowledge of truth is equally a development on and a rectification of science as a knowledge of the real that ultimately does not want to know what it already knows about the real. What both science and psychoanalysis know of the real “cannot but be attained by demonstrating that the real is that which does not have any kind of meaning.”72 But, on the one hand, the productivity of scientific 68 “When one speaks of the real, one may intend several things. It is a question first of the set of what effectively happens. That is the concept implied by the German term Wirklichkeit, which has the advantage of distinguishing in reality a function which the French language does not easily allow us to isolate. It is what implies in and of itself every possibility of ef- fect, of Wirkung.” Lacan, La relation d’objet, 31. 69 Lacan, Encore, 91; translation modified. 70 It is very strange that Badiou ignores this basic and well-known, even often abused, Lacanian mantra, which is moreover contemporary to L’Étourdit and pervasive in Lacan’s work of the early 1970s. “The Knowledge of Truth” also features as one of the titles appro- priately given by Miller to one of the sessions of Seminar XIX. 71 Jacques Lacan, . . . or Worse, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 171; translation modified. 72 Jacques Lacan, “De James Joyce comme symptôme,” Le croquant 28 (November 2000). 38 lorenzo chiesa knowledge, its promotion of new formalisations starting from the formalisation of a previous impasse of formalisation antinomically advances hand in hand with a presumed accumulation of meaning (ideally aimed at absolute knowl- edge). Science embraces sense as ab-sense, which is now blatantly epitomised by chaosmotic yet all the more totalising paradigms of the universe. On the oth- er hand, psychoanalysis’s knowledge of truth—as a specification of the knowl- edge of the real indebted to modern science—deliberately dwells on the very lev- el of the formalisation of the impasse of formalisation. What the knowledge of truth aims at actively transmitting is the irreducibility of ab-sense as such. This basically amounts to Lacan’s so-called formulas of sexuation, namely, a math- eme-atical formalisation of how the phallic function functions only against the background of the enduring truth of the absence of the sexual relationship73— there is no other knowledge of the psychoanalyst outside of the formulas that is not a supposition of knowledge. The formulas are then in turn singularised by each analysand at the end of the treatment (terminable analysis as, so to speak, pre- or proto-procedural) who thereby sustains a truth-procedure in Badiou’s specific sense of the term (interminable analysis as the field of a discourse of psychoanalysis, initiated by Freud, that surpasses that of the psychoanalyst and the psychoanalytic clinic). 3. The psychoanalytic subject, the subject of science betrayed by science as far from contained by and even less so identifiable with a structural void, embodies the truth of the real. This is a subtle and difficult point. For Lacan, “there is no truth of the real, since the real is delineated as ruling out meaning. This is already saying too much be- cause to say this one nonetheless supposes a meaning”74—which is another way of saying that truth can only be half-said. Yet, without contradiction and very explicitly, “there are truths that are of the order of the real.”75 On the one hand, there is no ultimate Truth of the real. If, in a certain sense, the truth of the real is quite plainly that the real of the ab-sense of the sexual relationship is what 73 For an in-depth reading of this, see Chiesa, Not-Two, especially chap. 4. 74 Jacques Lacan, “L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile a mourre: Séminaire 24, 1976–1977” (unpublished typescript, March 15, 1977), PDF document. 75 Jacques Lacan, “Conférences et Entretiens dans des universités nord-américaines,” Scilicet 6/7 (1975): 35. 39 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy remains meaningless,76 then one can turn this into the Truth only by downgrad- ing truth to a final meaning of meaninglessness—or, again, by misunderstand- ing the not-One of “there is no sexual relationship” with the One (not-One) of “the sexual non-relationship is,” like Badiou does with his sense as ab-sense. On the other hand, according to Lacan, it is not just that, famously, “the truth holds onto the real,”77 precisely because of the impossibility of saying it all, of only being able to half-say it by always meaningfully saying too much of it, but that, less famously, this logical impossibility, which cannot be separated from the impossibility given as the ab-sense of the sexual relationship, stands as the starting point of a subjectivized truth of the real. It is not enough to simply claim that the real is the impossible and hence truth can only be half-said. In order to really “introduce” the real as the impossible in the world, the subject of psychoanalysis needs to supplement this mere “enun- ciation” with “the most extreme tightening of saying,” namely, formalisation.78 In other words, following the same temporality we have seen at work in science as a knowledge of the real that nonetheless avoids its truth, the real as cause— and as such always relatable to the ab-sense of the sexual relationship—retro- actively becomes such when it passes through the subject’s formalising the real as the impossible. Conversely, it is only on this level, where the subject formalis- es the real as the impossible, that the subject really becomes a subject. At least initially, this formalisation first and foremost cannot but have to do with the subject’s formalisation at the end of analysis of how the ab-sense of the sexual relationship will have at that moment caused him/her (his/her sexuation) in a singular way. Lacan indeed speaks of truths of the real in the plural. Anticipating Badiou’s own distinction between the human animal and the sub- ject in the strict sense of the term, as a subject-to-truth, Lacan thus insists on the fact that, however much the “being that speaks” is an “effect of language”—or a void subtractively effected by the structural recurrence of anguage—“this pa- thos does not make, by itself, a subject.”79 Not coincidentally, in the same con- 76 See Jacques Lacan, The Sinthome, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 97. 77 Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 3. 78 Jacques Lacan, D’un Autre à l’autre, 1968–1969 (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 66. 79 Lacan, D’un Autre, 67, 160, 66. 40 lorenzo chiesa text, in Seminar XVI, Lacan speaks of “the event of discourse,”80 which here I am tempted to provisionally conceive of in terms of the subject’s retrospective entrance into analysis. Lacan also contends that while truth, the truth of the real I would add, can still generally be considered with regard to the subject that actively embodies it as just a designation within saying of what cannot be said, as something lacking that merely “insinuates itself” (as what cannot be said in “truth can only be half-said”), thanks to formalisation, it can equally “be inscribed in a perfect- ly calculated manner.”81 Against Badiou, in Lacan there is not only a symbol- ic truth that always speaks the truth of structure—on close inspection always eventually in the guise of a totalising imaginary fiction as a by-product of the very fact that truth can only be half-said. Quite bluntly, “if I distinguish real, symbolic, and imaginary, it is clearly the case that there are real, symbolic, and imaginary truths.”82 If these three overlapping points hold, and I think they do—based on textual ev- idence it is far easier to uphold them and unfold them than to refute them—then Lacan has a philosophy according to Badiou’s own standards. In short, as we saw, for Badiou philosophy needs to assume a knowledge of the real, a knowledge of truth, and a truth of the real and thereby “arrange a truth of the real as knowledge,” that is, as a “knowledge of this truth.” In summarising what I have just covered, at the very minimum we can advance that Lacan as- sumes scientific knowledge as knowledge of the real, psychoanalytic knowledge as knowledge of truth, and the ab-sense of the sexual relationship as truth of the real and thereby arranges the latter as a formalised knowledge of this truth as embodied into a subject-to-truth. Or also, assuming that my reading is correct, Lacan does not constrict the real to a “function of the real within knowledge that enables a situation of truth,” namely, he does not situate the ab-sense of the sex- ual relationship precisely because, on the contrary, its inscription turns knowl- edge into a function of knowledge within the real. 80 Lacan, 83. 81 Lacan, 67. 82 Lacan, “Conférences et Entretiens,” 35. 41 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy With respect to Badiou’s Being and Event, very roughly speaking, we are here already at the level of what he calls a post-evental “enquiry” as opposed to an “encyclopaedia of a situation.”83 Like for Badiou, the huge and open question for Lacan is then, of course: What is the status of—newly nascent—knowledge within a truth-procedure? And, in my view, this is a question Badiou himself never fully answers. Another contiguous way to exegetically challenge Badiou’s anti-Lacanian threshold as expressed in his Seminar is to question his claim that, in Lacan, the act overshadows truth, ultimately for the sake of the connection knowl- edge-meaning. Albeit perhaps less conclusively, on this front the sources seem again to contradict Badiou (recall that, for Badiou, “the analytical act is any- thing but a search for truth” because “an apparatus of transmissible knowl- edge must exist for the act to be confirmed”).84 For instance, in Seminar XV, devoted to the act as primarily the psychoanalyst’s act—of subtracting himself from the position of subject-supposed-to-know—Lacan states that “in order to introduce what constitutes the psychoanalytic act as such,” in psychoanalysis, on the side of the analysand, “there is only that which resists the operation of knowledge-making-a-subject, namely, this residue we call truth.”85 Truth has chrono-logical precedence over the act. I acknowledge that, with some twist- ing, this could still be accommodated by Badiou’s interpretative framework. But Lacan then goes on to specify that, far more importantly, “the evocation of truth” as residual at play at the end of (the analysand’s) analysis does not stop there: it continues as an “effect of loss”—synonymous with a “point of being” unconfinable to a mere unicum of dis-being—“beyond the operation [of] the an- alytic act.”86 To cut a long story short, it continues through the analysand now turned into an analyst; it continues each time this analyst acts at the end of the analysis of another will-be analyst; and hence it continues both with regard to this analyst and the will-be analyst. Here truth clearly overshadows the act, in spite of its strict entwinement with it. In other words, quite explicitly, there are truthful “stumbling block[s]” (achoppement) “beyond an act supposed to put an 83 See Badiou, Being and Event, especially 234–36, 328–38, 394–96, 406–9, 499, 506, 510, 513. 84 Badiou, Lacan, 164–65. 85 Jacques Lacan, “L’acte psychanalytique: Séminaire 15, 1967–1968” (unpublished type- script, November 29, 1967), PDF document. 86 Lacan, “L’acte psychanalytique,” December 6, 1967. 42 lorenzo chiesa end” (faire fin).87 Most crucially, I would add, these constructive achoppements need to be thought procedurally, not in isolation, as following the pre- or pro- to-procedural—yet post-evental—course of the treatment. Here I will leave this complex and thus far unexplored set of issues aside. Let us instead dwell on the fact that Lacan’s thought would appear to comply with Ba- diou’s definition of philosophy and draw some broad conclusions out of it. After all, what does this tell us about his use of Lacan as an anti-philosopher and the alleged distinction between philosophy and anti-philosophy at large? 1. Lacan’s philosophical anti-philosophy and the tradition of anti-philo- sophical philosophy in general are one and the same. That is, Lacan’s anti-anti-philosophy, his assumption of an anti-philosophical stance on anti-philosophy itself—because the latter makes the same mistakes it criticises in what it considers as philosophy, namely, it ends up proposing itself as a self-sufficient discourse—corresponds to anti-philosophical philosophy’s internal critique of any philosophy that presupposes and leads us to the One as Being. 2. Anti-philosophical philosophy, including Lacan’s, amounts to just (good) philosophy tout-court, anti-Being-One philosophy, as understood by Badiou. 3. Badiou’s own philosophy is as philosophical and as anti-philosophical as Lacan’s. Obviously, Badiou’s philosophy vividly portrays itself as an insurrection against the philosophy of the One as Being. His very Manifesto for Philosophy cannot be separated from a call against philosophy. More interestingly, note that even if we were to agree with Badiou that Lacan remains at bottom an anti-philosopher and even a “destroyer” of philosophy by Badiou’s standards of philosophy, this would paradoxically turn Badiou’s de- nunciation of Lacan as an anti-philosopher into a supremely anti -philosophical 87 Lacan, December 6, 1967. 43 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy operation by the standards of anti-philosophy (as understood by Badiou). Lacan’s eventual relapse into the One as Being—the Being-One of the empty place obtained via the subject as void—would need to be opposed by a critique of the spurious self-sufficiency of Lacan’s discourse. Not only is Badiou’s philos- ophy in a sense anti-philosophical insofar as it counters the philosophy of the One as Being, but also and especially, given that the future of philosophy must pass through Lacan,88 it is such exclusively by means of an anti-philosophical denunciation of Lacan as, in the end, a bad philosopher. Badiou’s philosophical denunciation of Lacan as an anti-philosopher cannot do without positing Lacan as a (bad) philosopher and Badiou as a (good) anti-philosopher. 4. Perhaps Badiou’s very notion of anti-philosophy is tautological and con- tradictory—even when applied to anti-philosophies preceding Lacan’s. It is tautological because it seems to merely duplicate the distinction be- tween “good” and “bad” philosophy. It is contradictory because both “good” and “bad” philosophy can be anti-philosophical. Perhaps there is instead just “good” (anti-Being-One) philosophy and “bad” (pro-Being-One) philosophy— with Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, the allegedly opposite epitomes of twentieth century philosophy, ultimately sucked into “bad” philosophy, as Badiou would fully concur. Or, perhaps, in a less dichotomic way, there structurally is “good” and “bad” philosophy in every philosophy worthy of this name. And, perhaps, as we will soon see, this is Lacan’s final word about philosophy as such. 5. At the very least, Badiou’s supposed philosophical “torsion” of the an- ti-philosophical schema,89 built upon Lacan’s own (anti-)philosophical torsion of previous anti-philosophy, becomes redundant, for Lacan al- ready accomplishes it. Rather, Badiou operates within the outcomes of Lacan’s torsion and systemati- cally elaborates on them beyond Lacan. In addition, regarding this last matter, it also remains unclear to me how, on close inspection, Badiou himself precisely conceives of what the required phil- 88 See, for instance, Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2008), 129. 89 Badiou, “Anti-Philosophy: Plato and Lacan,” in Conditions, 246. 44 lorenzo chiesa osophical torsion applies to and who or what carries it out. Is it Badiou’s phi- losophy with respect to Lacan’s psychoanalysis as an anti-philosophy, a philos- ophy that would be needed notwithstanding Lacan’s necessary but insufficient previous torsion of previous anti-philosophy, as suggested in the Seminar? Or, more sympathetically towards Lacan, is it Lacan’s psychoanalysis with respect to philosophy tout-court, and not anti-philosophy, yet only by means of philos- ophy itself, as instead evinced in “Anti-Philosophy: Plato and Lacan” (a hypoth- esis I would favour)? Or is it again Badiou’s philosophy but now with respect to what a torsioned philosophy can do with itself only with respect to what Lacan does with philosophy, as also arguably insinuated in “Anti-Philosophy: Plato and Lacan” (a hypothesis I am far from disdaining as I fully appreciate the bril- liance of Badiou’s appropriation of psychoanalysis, until it relegates Lacan to anti-philosophy)? In Theory of the Subject, where the notion of torsion features prominently, it loosely indicates “the way in which a subject works upon the structure that de- termines it in the first place.”90 In Being and Event, in which “torsion” occurs very rarely, we are nonetheless accordingly told that a truth, a subject-to-truth, is a “torsion of being [. . .] within the perpetually total web of knowledges.”91 Ev- idently, all this lies at the core of Badiou’s relaunching of philosophy. To brutal- ly simplify, and skipping several logical passages, a torsion is nothing less than what philosophy in the strict sense of the term thinks, as a meta-ontology of the subject-to-truth (in the same paragraph, Badiou indeed specifies that mathe- matical ontology only “sets off” the thinking of the torsion).92 But what happens to this complex yet linear scenario when the distinction philosophy/anti-philos- ophy is in turn understood as a torsion, a torsion whereupon philosophy proper begins to think the torsion, the subject-to-truth? I think Badiou provides us with conflictual answers to this question when deal- ing with Lacan. I also think this is primarily due to his a priori intention to pre- serve a threshold that would contain Lacan, separate him from Badiou’s project 90 Bruno Bosteels, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Badiou, Theory of the Subject, xxxvi. 91 Badiou, Being and Event, 18. 92 Badiou, 18. 45 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy (“I agree almost entirely . . . Except that”),93 and instead proves increasingly fragile. In a first sense, as discussed in the Seminar, the torsion concerns Lacan’s “an- ti-philosophical relationship to anti-philosophy itself,”94 namely, what makes him differ from other anti-philosophers, namely, the fact that he does not sub- scribe to their subsumption of truth under meaning and, concomitantly, their positioning of the act as transcendent to truth and thus open to an ineffable meaning. But, as we saw, Lacan would then mutatis mutandis fall into the same anti-philosophical trap. Hence, the torsion ultimately concerns Badiou’s rectifi- cation of Lacan’s mistakes. However, in a second sense, as treated in the very dense conclusion of “Anti-Phi- losophy: Plato and Lacan,” the needed torsion has unexpectedly to do with Lacan’s anti-philosophical relation to philosophy itself. Moreover, this is the case not simply in terms of some (good) philosophy constituting “an avant-gar- de of [good] anti-philosophy,”95 as per Lacan’s maxim “Plato was [already] Laca- nian”96—which in Badiou’s Seminar could itself be taken as a sort of torsion— but also, and on the contrary, in terms of philosophy “continuing [Lacanian psy- cho-]analysis or fulfilling it.”97 If we wish to be exegetically pedantic, it is actu- ally only here that Badiou explicitly uses the phrase “torsion of the anti-philo- sophical schema.”98 Let us look into such a juncture more closely. In “Anti-Philosophy: Plato and Lacan,” and especially in its conclusion, like in the Seminar, Badiou spells out the “duplicity” of Lacan’s stance on philosophy, that is, his acknowledgement of philosophy’s internally split status, now con- densed by Plato himself. On the one hand, for Lacan, Plato’s theory of ideas would be a botched attempt at mastering “real being [. . .] at the level [. . .] of knowledge” (bad, pro-Being-One philosophy).99 On the other hand, “Lacan is well aware that [. . .] Plato’s One fragments itself,” “is [. . .] incompatible with 93 Badiou, Lacan, xl. 94 Badiou, 2. 95 Badiou, 57. 96 See Badiou, “Plato and Lacan,” 236, and Lacan, . . . or Worse, 113. 97 Badiou, “Plato and Lacan,” 246; translation modified, emphasis added. 98 Badiou, 246. 99 Badiou, 241; translation modified. 46 lorenzo chiesa being,” and there is an “affinity with regard to [Plato’s and Lacan’s] doctrine of the One” (good, anti-Being-One philosophy).100 Yet, unlike in the Seminar, for Badiou, the next step in such an alignment of (Plato’s) philosophy and (Lacan’s) anti-philosophy, which would accomplish the philosophical torsion of the an- ti-philosophical schema, is to follow Lacan in his exhortation to “push the [psy- cho-]analytic intervention” into Plato’s dialogues—and by extension philoso- phy at large. In other words, the task of the contemporary philosopher would not only be to work through Lacan’s anti-philosophy, singling out its fallbacks, and restarting from there, but also—or even instead—to reread and develop in- tra-philosophically the great history of philosophy with a, so to speak, Lacan- ian eye, regardless of Lacan’s anti-philosophy. Lacan’s (anti-)philosophical tor- sion of philosophy is a precondition for the philosophical future of philosophy, whereby Lacanian philosophy continues and fulfils psychoanalysis (although Badiou does not explain what this fulfilment would amount to). In passing, Ba- diou goes even as far as stating that, in this context, “Lacan identifies himself with [. . .] the very site of the philosopher.”101 The further specification—which is not as such in tension with the previous point while it reinforces the tension with the Seminar—is that, in the last two paragraphs of “Anti-Philosophy: Plato and Lacan,” Lacan’s torsion of philos- ophy to be continued and fulfilled by Lacanian philosophy becomes Badiou’s own Lacanian torsion of philosophy. Badiou appoints himself in charge of push- ing Lacan into philosophy. The language he adopts, which amalgamates his jar- gon from Being and Event with Lacan’s from The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans- parently reflects it: the mission at stake relies on “a sole imperative [. . .]. En- deavour to abide by the point where at least one truth proceeds. You will emerge there as this subject of which this truth is the stuff of being.”102 Beyond the pro- grammatic imperative to which “Anti-Philosophy: Plato and Lacan” limits itself, for me, Being and Event conclusively proves that the psychoanalytic/(anti-)phil- osophical Trojan horse Lacan drove into the philosophical city is by now, with Badiou, already in the process of capturing it. Being and Event stands out as a chef d’oeuvre of Lacanian philosophy. 100 Badiou. 235–36; translation modified. 101 Badiou, 239; translation modified. 102 Badiou, 247; translation modified. 47 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy Still, in a final twist—in tension with what Badiou has in my view been delineat- ing so far in this conclusion and more in tune with the Seminar’s line of reason- ing—the “crossing in torsion” between anti-philosophy and philosophy would not give rise to a “unity of plane” between the two.103 However much we could try to account for this twist topologically, its analogical message is adamant: for Badiou, the torsion still maintains a negative threshold between Lacan and Ba- diou. For me, the torsion thus gratuitously remains a dividing line and does not do justice to Lacan. Good and Bad Philosophy, Lacanian-Style Returning to our main conclusion that Lacan has a philosophy (even by Badi- ou’s own standards) and further, I’d be tempted to seriously add, that if “Plato was already Lacanian,” then Lacan was already Badiousian just as much as Ba- diou is still Lacanian, we should tackle an apparently naïve but instead by all means crucial rejoinder: Does Lacan not proudly and insistently present himself as an anti-philosopher? In spite of his frequent pedagogical and critical—ped- agogical as critical—recourse to the great names in the history of philosophy (Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, first of all), does he not neatly demarcate his psychoanalytic discourse from that of philosophy? The quick answer is: Not re- ally—and Badiou correctly senses it, but only in part . . . As a preamble, consider for instance the following, apparently innocuous, statement from Seminar X, arguably one of Lacan’s less theoretical and more clinical Seminars: One segment of psychoanalysis, the one that’s being pursued here, has a more philosophical character than any of the others [. . .]. It’s not my fault, as one says, that psychoanalysis puts into question, on the theoretical plane, the desire to know [. . .]. This would justify in and of itself the questioning that lends a certain philosophical nuance to our discourse.104 Undoubtedly, Lacan s’insurge against philosophy, violently if not offensively, and this remains a constant throughout his oeuvre. His psychoanalysis is in 103 Badiou, 246. 104 Jacques Lacan, Anxiety, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 55; translation modi- fied. 48 lorenzo chiesa “rupture” instead than “in continuity” with philosophical interrogations.105 He cannot see why he “would classify [himself] philosophically” since psychoan- alytic discourse “is not philosophical discourse.”106 Quite conclusively: “I am not at all a philosopher”; “I do not do any philosophy, on the contrary, I avoid it like the plague”; “I abhor philosophy.”107 Philosophers are “people who are very much behind,”108 even retarded, and there is more to be learnt from Pres- ident Judge Schreber’s memoirs of his psychosis than in philosophical texts.109 In short, the reason for such an abhorrence of philosophy and its identification with uninstructive mental illness lies in the fact that “there is only one kind of philosophy and it is always theological,” namely devoted to the Being-One.110 Yet, at the same time—and not without numerous lexical contradictions—es- pecially in his later and latest works Lacan also goes as far as understanding his psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis tout-court, as containing a full-fledged philosophy, and not just as assuming a “philosophical nuance” or “character”: “What I am doing here is philosophy. [. . .] It’s a philosophy that I have han- dled the best way I could following the current that results from Freud’s phi- losophy.”111 Not only that, but, apologising for his “complacency,” Lacan states that his Freudo-Lacanian philosophy “is nothing less than the first philosophy that seems to me to be standing on its feet.”112 In the same context, squaring the dialectical circle with mental illness, or better, menacingly re-opening the circle itself, Lacan presents his philosophie—that finally stands on its feet—as a “foli- esophie,” namely, a “fool-osophy.”113 105 Jacques Lacan, “R.S.I.: Séminaire 22, 1974–1975” (unpublished typescript, February 18, 1975), PDF document. See also Lacan, Encore, 11. 106 Lacan, . . . or Worse, 98. 107 Jacques Lacan, “Conférence de presse du docteur Jacques Lacan,” Lettres de l’École freudienne 16 (1975): 26; Jacques Lacan, “Freud per sempre. Intervista con Jacques Lacan,” interview by Emilia Granzotto, Panorama, November 21, 1974. 108 Jacques Lacan, Talking to Brick Walls: A Series of Presentations in the Chapel at Sainte- Anne Hospital, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 39; translation modified. 109 See Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses, 1955–1956, trans. Russell Grigg (Abingdon: Routledge, 1993), 55. The Staferla version of this passage is far more explicit on this point. 110 Jacques Lacan, “Réponses de Jacques Lacan à  des questions sur les noeuds et l’inconscient,” Lettres de l’École freudienne 21 (1977): 473. 111 Jacques Lacan, “Le moment de conclure: Séminaire 25, 1977–1978” (unpublished type- script, December 20, 1977), PDF document. 112 Lacan, Sinthome, 125; translation modified. 113 Lacan, 108; translation modified. Adrian Johnston has incisively commented on some of these passages in “This Philosophy Which Is Not One: Jean-Claude Milner, Alain Badiou, 49 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy Let us address these vertiginous oscillations step by step. Lacan’s hostility to- wards philosophy indeed revolves around what, paraphrasing Badiou, we could refer to as its compulsive tendency towards imaginary totalisation. In this re- gard, Lacan continues and reinforces Freud’s antipathy for philosophy. For Freud, philosophy “cling[s] to the illusion of being able to present a picture of the universe which is without gaps and is coherent”; specifically, in this way, even “the philosophy of today has retained some essential features of the animistic mode of thought—the overvaluation of the magic of words and the belief that the real events in the world take the course which our thinking seeks to impose on them.”114 Unlike psychoanalysis, philosophy thus at bottom cannot be separated from a religious Weltanschauung, in the sense that the latter “leaves no question unanswered and [. . .] everything that interests us finds its fixed place.”115 Here Lacan develops Freud’s critique of philosophical animism ontologically, epistemologically, historically, and even biologically. In brief—summarising a series of complex issues I have detailed elsewhere116—ontologically, philosophy believes that the real events in the world follow our thinking in the sense that it assumes a correspondence between thought and what is being thought—the “world” in Freud’s parlance. That is to say, ever since Parmenides, in differ- ent guises, “being is presumed to think”; “what is thought of is in the image of thought, in other words, [. . .] being thinks.”117 What is more, philosophy thereby “speaks of ontology as if being [as such] held together all alone”—as Being-One, as onto-toto-logy.118 Epistemologically, according to Lacan, philosophy does indeed overvalue words—what Freud also called “omnipotence of thought”—in the sense that it does not realise that “language proves to be a field much vaster [. . .] than and Lacanian Antiphilosophy,” in “Jean-Claude Milner,” ed. Justin Clemens and Sigi Jöttkandt, special issue, S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 3 (Spring 2010): 137–58. 114 Sigmund Freud, “The Question of a Weltanschauung,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 22:160, 165–66. 115 Freud, 158. 116 Especially in Chiesa, Not-Two, chap. 2. 117 Lacan, Encore, 114, 105. 118 Lacan, “De James Joyce.” 50 lorenzo chiesa [. . .] the field in which philosophical discourse has inscribed itself.”119 That is to say, purporting itself as a discourse about discourse as such, philosophical discourse rests instead on its obliviousness of the fact that discourse, any dis- course for that matter, amounts only to a semblance, a precarious stabilisation of language as an incomplete and overall entropic structure. This institutes, on top of the fantasy of a being that is presumed to think, that of a subject who is supposed to know. The “false position” of philosophy, its basic epistemological mistake, is “to define the conditions of possibility of a subject in the face of [a] knowledge that can be accumulated.”120 Instead of conceiving of the subject as an effect of structure that thereby dialectically gives rise to discourse and an im- personal discursive knowledge, philosophy thus treats the subject as a “super- imposed ornament, a joker convenient to the theoretical game.”121 Ultimately, the game at stake cannot but converge on the “God of philosophers,” an Other in whom absolute being and absolute knowledge equate and who externally guar- antees the truth of knowledge.122 Historically—resuming yet also problematising the linear chronology with which Freud sequenced the discourses of religion, philosophy, science, and psychoanalysis (in this order) as an increasing albeit hesitant distancing from the animism of any Weltanschauung—for Lacan, philosophical discourse “in- scribes itself [. . .] in the discourse of the master.”123 This does not only mean that, in arousing the master’s desire to know, philosophy enabled the theft of the slave’s knowledge and its transformation into the master’s knowledge.124 It also and more disturbingly entails that the philosophical subject supposed to know, coalescing into a “tyranny of knowledge” starting from early modernity, is directly responsible for the contemporary emergence of “the most absolute masters.”125 The onto-epistemologically based “I-cracy” of the subject supposed to know now determines the very conditions of possibility for the politics of the 119 Lacan, Encore, 30; translation modified and expanded following the Staferla version. 120 Jacques Lacan, “Les problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse: Séminaire 12, 1964–1965” (unpublished typescript, June 16, 1965), PDF document. 121 Juan-David Nasio in Jacques Lacan, “La topologie et le temps: Séminaire 26, 1978–1979” (unpublished typescript, May 15, 1979), PDF document. 122 See Lacan, D’un Autre à l’autre, 102. 123 Lacan, “L’Étourdit,” 453. 124 Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 20–24. 125 Lacan, Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 32; Lacan, D’un Autre à l’autre, 396. 51 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy capitalist as a modern master engaged in a “curious copulation” with science.126 The only master psychoanalysis actually ever confronts is the capitalist master as derived from philosophical-university discourse. Biologically, Lacan anchors the kernel of philosophy’s delusion, its belief in the m’être—in being the master (maître) of myself, in being-me-to-myself (m’être à moi-même), and, by extension, in mastering the uni-verse as One127—to what Freud referred to as “helplessness,” which he deemed to lie at the phylogenetic and ontogenetic origins of our propensity to create Weltanschauungen.128 Lacan embryologically and physiologically complicates Freud’s account, by consider- ing Homo sapiens’ helplessness as due to a species-specific prematurity of birth that leads to a prematurity of sexual maturation and is then retained as sexual neoteny in adulthood, but abides by his main assumption. The natural help- lessness of the human baby who cannot satisfy its most elementary needs is partly remedied by the maternal figure’s care-giving role; following a protracted period of extreme dependence on the maternal figure, weaning thereby triggers a retrospective “nostalgia of the Whole” (which was never there) that leaves its trace, in a more abstract manner, in “the metaphysical mirage of universal har- mony” and of a “perfect assimilation of totality to being.”129 I think that this pivotal biological grounding, as evolutionarily contingent yet as such contingently necessary, by itself already moderates Lacan’s invectives against philosophy and promotes less unilateral considerations on it that more and more part ways with Freud’s unconditional scientistic trust in the—sui gen- eris anti-philosophical—progress of reason. Homo sapiens cannot not philos- ophise. Foliesophie is a structural condition of the biologically premature and thus mentally retarded animal that happens to speak. Lacan is vocal on this point: if philosophical discourse has enunciated “certain reference points [. . .] that are difficult to completely eliminate from any use of language,” if, that is, 126 Lacan, Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 63, 80, 110. 127 See Lacan, Encore, 31, 39; Lacan, Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 152. 128 “The last contribution to the criticism of the religious Weltanschauung was effected by psy- cho-analysis, by showing how religion originated from the helplessness of children and by tracing its contents to the survival into maturity of the wishes and needs of childhood.” Freud, “Question of a Weltanschauung,” 167. 129 Jacques Lacan, “Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu: Essai d’analyse d’une fonction en psychologie,” in Autres écrits, 36. 52 lorenzo chiesa “we always do more philosophy than we believe we do,” this is the case be- cause “the systems of philosophers [. . .] rest on the system everyone has.”130 We should therefore not be “ironic” with philosophy, like Freud’s “wild” psychoa- nalysis instead was when he claimed that “philosophy falls under paranoia.”131 But, conversely, foliesophie could potentially “stand on its feet” if it starts out from the assumption that promoting, in various ways, more or less direct, a belief in the m’être depends on an unsurpassable transcendental invariant of the speaking animal—what Lacan also calls “the God hypothesis”132—through which it thinks, in a compensatory manner, the otherwise phenomenologically self-evident non-correspondence between thinking and being. On the one hand, psychoanalysis takes its cue from an empirical “experience,” namely the real of the absence of the sexual relationship, of there is no two sexes as One, which cannot be taken for a “philosophical enlightenment” for it gives itself as an impossibility, or “cluttering up.”133 Philosophy has always found it difficult to approach this real, and its “extravagant opposition of realism and idealism” witnesses to that.134 This real can instead be grasped numerically, not in the sense that it is “measurable” or “countable,” but in the sense that what founds the count, the “final resource” through which language is knotted to the real by means of impossibility, is the fact that, mathematically, “the number two truly is a problem”; “it is from there that the real enters the scenes”—that it really enters the scene, we should add, following the empirical evidence of the absence of the sexual relationships.135 130 Lacan, Encore, 30–31; Lacan, “L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue,” January 11, 1977; Lacan, Talking to Brick Walls, 44 (translation modified and expanded following the Staferla ver- sion). 131 Jacques Lacan, “Réponses à des étudiants en philosophie,” in Autres écrits, 210. 132 Lacan, Encore, 45. See also Chiesa, Not-Two, and Lorenzo Chiesa, “Psychoanalysis and Agnostic Atheism,” in Lorenzo Chiesa and Adrian Johnston, God Is Undead: Psychoanalysis and the Case for Non-Belief (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming). 133 Jacques Lacan, “Alla ‘Scuola Freudiana,’ ” in Lacan in Italia, 1953–1978, ed. Giacomo B. Contri (Milan: La Salamandra, 1978), 102. 134 Lacan, 113. 135 Lacan, 113. A thorough examination of this issue, countering Badiou’s claim that Lacan remains “pre-Cantorian” (Badiou, Conditions, 219), is central to my present project. 53 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy Yet, on the other hand, philosophy has and has always had something to say in this respect. No doubt, there is an allegedly enlightened philosophy centred on the idea that humankind is made for “wisdom,” which completely misses the dimension of “structure”136—structure as the symbolic oscillation not-One/One (the God hypothesis), intrinsically giving rise to the imaginary semblance of the One (m’être), but actually resting on the not-One as real (the no-two-as-One of the absence of the sexual relationship). But, at the same time, there is also a phi- losophy friendly to psychoanalysis—and structure—that “can take charge,” and it can do so specifically in terms of truth, the real, and the non-correspondence between thinking—the One—and being.137 Lacan here defends the philosophical tradition. In parallel, he scorns any presumed overcoming of its metaphysics as a disavowal of the latter’s structural presuppositions. Although it does not yet stand on its feet, philosophy’s philia as an incipiently cognizant foliesophie must be preserved: neither Plato, nor Descartes, nor Hegel, nor Marx, nor Freud—all labelled as “classical philosophers”—“can be ‘gone beyond,’ insofar as they car- ried out their research with the passion to unveil that has an object: truth.”138 In- sofar as, in the Parmenides and The Sophist, Plato already clearly perceives our predisposition “to turn the One into the supreme Being”139 and tries to think the One differently through another kind of ontology (or even metaphysics), contem- porary philosophy’s equally fashionable and moronic preaching about “the end of metaphysics”140 can at best achieve an implicit and paradoxical metaphysics of the m’être in the guise of the One (not-One). All in all, however much philos- ophy tout-court goes round in—historical and logical—circles when it comes to thinking the being of the being that happens to speak, this failure nonetheless paradigmatically indicates that, for the speaking being, the real access to being is precisely nothing other than the fact that “he doesn’t come to [being], that he 136 Jacques Lacan, “Conférences dans les universités nord-américaines,” Scilicet 6/7 (1975): 53. 137 Lacan, Sinthome, 125 translation modified. 138 Jacques Lacan, “Presentation on Psychical Causality,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 157. “One may find that I here deal a bit too much with what one calls—God-damned denomination—the great philosophers. The fact is that, not only them, but them especially articulate what we may well call a research [. . .] an unsur- passable research in the same sense I mean when I tell you that each of those we may call ‘great philosophers’ could never be surpassed on a certain point.” Jacques Lacan, “L’identification: Séminaire 9, 1961–1962” (unpublished typescript, February 28, 1962), PDF document. 139 Jacques Lacan, La logique du fantasme, 1966–1967 (Paris: Seuil, 2023), 303. 140 Lacan, . . . or Worse, 18. 54 lorenzo chiesa fails” to enter it.141 And this very predicament coincides with a “suddenly open dimension of being,”142 an ontological springboard so to speak. Lacan does not stop here in his remarks in favour of philosophy, even and espe- cially when at first sight he would appear to adopt a very antithetical stance to it. Specifically with regard to philosophy’s classical inscription in the discourse of the master and modern hijacking of it, philosophers at the same time “play the role of the fool,” the court jester who is the “place-holder of truth” without knowing it, and what they say as such is “more than usable.”143 Hence, it is “not at all” the case that the question of philosophy can be solved as soon as we ge- nealogically assume that philosophy has always amounted to discursive “ide- ology,” “the reflection of the superstructure of the dominant classes.”144 Quite on the contrary, the history of philosophy has always also been a history of “de- vising the correct use of discourse,” or better, of understanding how “discourse [as an] operation” rests on “the difference there is between subject and sub- stance”145—the non-correspondence between thinking and being that philoso- phy contradictorily also masks. If we carefully follow Lacan on this subtle dialectical point, we then grasp his own torsion (not Badiou’s) of psychoanalysis (as an initially anti-philosophical discourse, with Freud) not only into an anti-anti-philosophy but also into the future of philosophy. His converging comments in “Intervention sur l’exposé de J. Favez-Boutonier” (1955), “Psychoanalysis and Its Teaching” (1957), and a 1966 lecture given in Bordeaux in which he recalls a conversation he had just had with Derrida (“a very talented boy”)146 are here very instructive. On a first level, Freudian anti-philosophical psychoanalysis already stands—de facto albeit ret- rospectively—as anti-anti-philosophy: Freud the anti-philosopher is in a sense equally “without doubt a philosopher” for the simple fact that his discovery that “the subject who speaks”—the barred subject of discourse—“is not the conscious 141 Lacan, Talking to Brick Walls, 44; translation modified. 142 Lacan, 44. 143 Lacan, “L’Étourdit,” 453. 144 Lacan, D’un Autre à l’autre, 242. 145 Jacques Lacan, My Teaching, trans. David Macey (London: Verso, 2008), 72, 88; translation modified, emphasis added. 146 Lacan, 87. 55 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy subject” belongs to “the order of truths.”147 Yet, on a second and more important level, this first level should become the cornerstone of any (Lacanian) philoso- phy to come (not just Lacan’s). Philosophy is not dead. Philosophy is not sur- passed. Lacan’s question to his philosophical audience at the Société française de Philosophie is: “What, in their view, does analysis teach us that is proper to analysis, or the most proper, truly proper, truly the most, the most truly?”148 Adopting the philosopher’s perspective, his blunt answer is: “A certain relation between [hu]mankind and the signifier,”149 namely, the fact that a subject is noth- ing but that which a signifier represents for another signifier in and for discourse and that this operation leaves an unassimilable real rest that renders discourse structurally incomplete while at the same time giving the subject access to the real only by means of an impossibility. Because of that, the most appropriate and concise reply Lacan can provide, in another instance, to Derrida’s partial perplexity—“All that’s very well, everything you say, I follow it [. . .] what you articulate as the unconscious structured like a language [a discourse], but why continuing to call that the subject?”—cannot but be “I preserve the subject . . . to get you talking” about it, to make you, a philosopher of the future, resume and complicate from the standpoint of the psychoanalytic unconscious what philoso- phy has always been putting forward by “separating in the most rigorous way the subject from substance”; it would be “sheer madness not to resume this term [the subject] [. . .] now that the time has finally come to turn/invert its use.”150 I am of the opinion that such a turning should also potentially be understood in the specific framework of the “quarter turns” Lacan recurs to in his matrix- es of the four discourses.151 Although in this context he never presents—any fu- ture—philosophy as an independent discourse, and it would be precipitous of me to attempt a matrixial algebraization of it, we are also clearly told that psy- choanalysis “extends” philosophy, and it does so “very much beyond the point 147 Jacques Lacan, “Intervention sur l’exposé de J. Favez-Boutonier,” Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie 49, no. 1 (1955): 38–39. 148 Jacques Lacan, “Psychoanalysis and Its Teaching,” in Écrits, 367; emphasis added. 149 Jacques Lacan, “La psychanalyse et son enseignement,” Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie 49, no. 2 (1957): 96. The discussion that followed Lacan’s lecture is not in- cluded in the Écrits version of “La psychanalyse et son enseignement.” 150 Lacan, My Teaching, 87–89; emphasis added, translation modified and expanded follow- ing the version of the École lacanienne de psychanalyse. 151 See Lacan, Other Side of Psychoanalysis. 56 lorenzo chiesa at which” philosophy, as the discourse of the m’être, has been seriously disrupt- ed—if not, too optimistically, “effaced”—by the very emergence of psychoanaly- sis (and set-theoretical mathematical logic).152 I do not think that what is at stake here is the post-mortem survival of philosophy, in a zombified state, although the text could also be tweaked in that sense. On the contrary, what is at stake is the fact that psychoanalysis “is philosophically so problematic,” whereby its “currency” remains all the same philosophical, despite there being two distinct discourses, psychoanalysis and philosophy—hence, strictly speaking, psycho- analysis “does not transform” philosophy.153 The message seems clear: there is as much philosophical psychoanalysis as there is, or should be, psychoanalyt- ic philosophy. I admit this partly clashes with Lacan’s more peremptory claim that “what I am doing here is philosophy,” full stop, but, on close inspection, very little changes here in respect to refuting an alleged relapse of Lacan into anti-philosophy. Lacan’s insistence on a future discourse of psychoanalytic philosophy—again, not necessarily Lacan’s own philosophical discourse but necessarily a Lacanian discourse of philosophy for which Lacan does not fall back into anti-philosophy— is protracted and amplified in his latest works. In Seminar XXIV, for instance, his back-and-forths on what should be done with philosophy may seem disorienting at first, yet in the end combine in an unequivocal, and quite astonishing, conclu- sion. Lacan does not believe he is doing philosophy. But the Derridean philoso- phers who by then (1977) speak of a “philosophie en effet”—a real philosophy of Wirklichkeit, for what we said previously—all in all proceed from “something I have inaugurated with my discourse.”154 But we should not “push too quickly the door of philosophy.”155 But the right way not to do that is by dwelling on the lev- el of the theory of discourses. But this makes Lacan “hit a brick wall” (since his matrixes do not really sort out the status of philosophical discourse?).156 But what we should certainly avoid is Freud’s position, who did not face the same problem only because his anti-philosophical stance paradoxically coincided with a “phil- osophical order [for which] there was no [philosophy]”157—namely, the negative 152 Lacan, Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 146. 153 Lacan, 146. 154 Lacan, “L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue,” January 11, 1977. 155 Lacan, January 11, 1977. 156 Lacan, February 8, 1977. 157 Lacan, February 8, 1977. 57 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy Weltanschauung according to which there is no Weltanschauung, and the not- One unintentionally turns into a weakly atheistic One (not-One).158 Hence, even- tually, the only way out of this impasse cannot but be not only a reconsideration of philosophy—as foliesophie—in spite of its going in circles but also more strong- ly a “preserv[ation]” of the notion of a “system of the world,” where the system is exclusively based on the fact that concerning this world “we can say nothing of man except that he fell from it”—yet accesses it by means of this very fall.159 We are left to assume that this minimal presupposition—the empirically derived yet axiomatic decision about the co-implication between language and the ab- sence of the sexual relationship—paves the way to any “philosophy standing on its feet.” As already anticipated in Seminar XV, we are equally left to assume that such an axiomatic decision necessarily involves a “philosophical act,” which should not be isolated as Lacan’s act for it pertains to “posterity,” which should not forc- edly always be “the same” in the history of philosophy, but which “each time a renewal” of it takes place—from Plato to Lacan and his “successors,” passing through Descartes, Kant, and Hegel—always requires a “suspension of the sub- ject supposed to know.”160 We are moreover left to assume that one can speak of Lacan’s philosophy as “the first philosophy standing on its feet” only to the extent that, for the first time, it openly sequences a series of anti-epistemic and thus philosophical acts as a theory of the subject-to-truth. What Lacan Said About Anti-Philosophy At this stage, we need to summon again our naïve interlocutor who could still very legitimately ask: What about Lacan’s own pronouncements in direct sup- port of anti-philosophy? Leaving aside his claims against (bad) philosophy and how they are dialectically enmeshed with his claims in favour of (good) philoso- phy, are those pronouncements not indisputably partisan? The answer is again 158 I develop this in Chiesa, “Psychoanalysis and Agnostic Atheism.” 159 Lacan, “L’insu que sait de l’une bévue,” December 14, 1976. 160 Lacan, “L’acte psychanalytique,” January 17, 1968. 58 lorenzo chiesa negative. A close examination of the sources once more disproves both pro- and anti-Lacanian doxastic preconceptions on the matter. There are only three short passages in which Lacan explicitly refers to anti-phi- losophy. The first is very well-known and unmistakably pro anti-philosophy, yet it does not add much to what Lacan already says in his critiques of philosophy. The second is less well-known, although quoted also by Badiou, and rather am- biguous if put into context. The third has so far, to the best of my knowledge, been ignored in discussions about Lacan and anti-philosophy and turns out to be patently opposed to anti-philosophy, to the point of ridiculing it. Let us scru- tinise them. In “Peut-être à Vincennes . . .” (1975)—note the conditional and the ellipsis— Lacan includes anti-philosophy among the disciplines that should be taught at the newly established Department of Psychoanalysis at Vincennes (the others being linguistics, logic, and topology). The entire text is two pages; the para- graph devoted to anti-philosophy is seven lines. We are just told that: a. Anti-philosophy refers to an investigation of what the university dis- course owes to its “ ‘educational’ supposition.” b. This investigation could not be accomplished by a history of ideas, how- ever critical the latter might be. c. This investigation will basically consist of a “patient collection of the im- becility” that characterises the university discourse. d. This investigation will hopefully highlight the “indestructible root,” which is also the “eternal dream,” of this imbecility. e. There are only “particular” awakenings from this dream.161 What seems clearly under scrutiny here is not philosophy as such. The target of anti-philosophy is instead the university discourse and, specifically, its assump- tion that it can educate, namely, that it can transmit knowledge as wisdom. Even more specifically, the target of Lacanian anti-philosophy therefore amounts to nothing other than the philosophy of the m’être as taught at university (not only as part of the curriculum for will-be-philosophers but also and especially as the set of so-called “learning skills” imparted to all students). Against this back- 161 Jacques Lacan, “Peut-être à Vincennes . . .,” in Autres écrits, 314–15. 59 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy ground, the best Lacanian anti-philosophy can achieve as a discipline, beyond any genealogy of education, is an inventory of the imbecility of the university discourse—as a discourse far exceeding the boundaries of universities yet coa- lescing in an idiotic “ ‘educational’ supposition”—that also evidences the struc- tural character of this imbecility. In spite of psychoanalysis, there is no universal remedy to the I-cracy of the fantasy of being-me-to-myself, of being a graduated subject-supposed-to-know.162 Lacan stops here. He does not attempt to “destroy philosophy.” In the introduc- tion to “Peut-être à Vincennes . . .” he even suggests that the disciplines he pro- poses to teach at Vincennes should make the disciplines they originate from “find in the [psychoanalytic] experience the opportunity to be renewed”163—so however modest the actual aims of anti-philosophy at Vincennes turn out to be, they nonetheless contribute to building a new philosophy. And this is Lacan’s most extensive reference to anti-philosophy. One could only overlap it with Ba- diou’s definition of anti-philosophy—at bottom, a discourse against the pretence that discourse can be self-sufficient, that it can master itself by mastering the dis- course of the m’être—in a roundabout way, by means of other isolated passages in Lacan’s oeuvre (in which, by the way, anti-philosophy is never literally men- tioned, quite simply because what he is contrasting is, again, bad philosophy . . .). For instance, in Seminar XII, Lacan states that “I call ‘philosophy’ everything that tends to mask the radical character and originating function of [a] loss [. . .] that is produced every time that language tries in a discourse to account for it- self.”164 Interestingly though, he at the same time specifies that “every dialectic” that makes this mistake is a philosophy, which also implies that there are other dialectics which—potentially at least—do not make this mistake.165 The second passage in which Lacan mentions anti-philosophy is in his last Sem- inar, Dissolution (1980) and is almost exclusively anecdotal but very telling. Ba- diou correctly reports that, recalling a Dadaist text by Tristan Tzara, “Monsieur Aa l’antiphilosophe,” Lacan adds “it is also my case,” that is, I am an anti-phi- 162 Hence, in this regard, “the subject is not wrong in identifying himself with consciousness [. . .] but, from there, in not being able not to miss the topology that tricks him in this iden- tification.” Lacan, “Réponses à des étudiants,” 205; emphasis added. 163 Lacan, “Peut-être à Vincennes . . .,” 313. 164 Lacan, “Les problèmes cruciaux,” December 2, 1964. 165 Lacan, December 2, 1964. 60 lorenzo chiesa losopher too.166 Lacan then states: “If I may say so, I rebel against philosophy. What is certain is that it’s something that’s finished, even if I expect some off- shoots to sprout back from it.”167 Badiou makes a lot out of this. However, what he strangely underplays is that, immediately after, Lacan relates this sprouting back precisely to his own psychoanalytic School, which he is about to dissolve, and adds “I am not at all intending to dissolve the École Normale Supérieure, where in the past I’ve been most welcome”168—namely, the most authoritative establishment of academic philosophy in France . . . If this were not enough to evidence the obvious ambivalence of Lacan’s “rebel- lion,” two further provisos can additionally challenge Badiou’s unilateral take on this passage. Badiou equally omits to specify that Lacan returns to Tzara’s “Monsieur Aa l’antiphilosophe” in response to a “Monsieur A., philosopher” who contested him a few days earlier. Put simply, here Lacan’s anti-philosoph- ical stance limits itself to countering a philosopher’s, in his view, anti-psycho- analytic stance. This anti-psychoanalytic philosopher is, very surprisingly, none other than Louis Althusser, arguably one of the most pro-psychoanalysis and pro-Lacan philosophers up to that point, who, suffering from severe depression (another complication . . .), disrupted the meeting in which Lacan dissolved his School and, “in the name of analysands” (another complication . . .), accused Lacan of being a “pitiful Harlequin.”169 Furthermore, and most significantly, we should not lose sight of the fact that, only two years earlier, it was precisely Althusser (“someone of good sense”) who, according to Lacan, told Lacan that what Lacan does is philosophy, which on the same occasion Lacan very gladly consents to (“What I am doing here is philosophy. [. . .] It’s a philosophy that I have handled the best way I could fol- lowing the current that results from Freud’s philosophy”).170 Again, we are here for the most part on the level of anecdotes but the negative bias that vitiates 166 Jacques Lacan, “Dissolution,” in Aux confins du Séminaire, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Navarin, 2021), 60. 167 Lacan, 60. 168 Lacan, 61. 169 See Louis Althusser, Writings on Psyhoanalysis: Freud and Lacan, ed. Olivier Corpet and François Matheron, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 125–43. 170 Lacan, “Le moment de conclure,” December 20, 1977. 61 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy Badiou’s reading—who I suppose is acquainted with them—seems to me incon- trovertible. As for the third direct reference to anti-philosophy in Lacan’s oeuvre, it has to do with Wittgenstein and the tradition of analytic philosophy he commenced. In Seminar XVII, Lacan provides an interpretation of Wittgenstein that in many ways anticipates Badiou’s singling the latter out as a quintessential anti-philos- opher—hence it could be made to correspond to what Badiou designates as the anti-anti-philosophical moment in Lacan—but he refrains from using this term with respect to Wittgenstein. In Seminar XIV, he instead uses it, very disparag- ingly, with respect to the Wittgensteinians. We need to tackle these passages in quite some detail. First of all, let us recall that, for Badiou, (at least the early) Wittgenstein is an an- ti-philosopher since, in spite and especially because of his crusade against the pseudo-truth of philosophy as a self-contained discourse that would thus have an overarching meta-linguistic meaning, whereas for him philosophical propo- sitions are actually senseless, he ends up submitting truth to meaning nonethe- less, which is what characterises anti-philosophy at large. According to Badiou, for Wittgenstein, truth can only correspond to an exact linguistic description of existing states of affairs; meaning as the mystically unsayable sense of the world instead anchors truth.171 Lacan’s assessment of Wittgenstein in Seminar XVII—which focuses on the Tractatus and whose complexity I will have to simplify—is overall similar to Ba- diou’s: Wittgenstein’s operation is, positively, “the detection of philosophical knavery” yet as such it remains, negatively, “an extraordinary parade.”172 First, for Wittgenstein, there is no meta-language (“there is no other meta-language than all the forms of knavery”).173 Second, truth can thus only be inscribed in a proposition and as such be articulated as transmissible knowledge.174 Third, more specifically, truth means propositional conformity to a grammatical struc- 171 I acknowledge that assuming there is a mystically unsayable sense of the world in the Tractatus amounts to an old-fashioned and by now largely discredited interpretation of it. I will expand on this in the near future. 172 Lacan, Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 61; translation modified. 173 Lacan, 61. 174 See Lacan, 62. 62 lorenzo chiesa ture.175 Fourth, the world amounts to the grammatical structure and “all that is true is [. . .] a composite proposition comprising the totality of the facts that con- stitute the world”176—for Wittgenstein, in his words, “the world is the totality of facts, not of things,”177 namely, facts are not objects but structural relations be- tween objects that language, as denotative, can “picture” as true. But fifth and crucially, according to Wittgenstein, the set of true propositions is “tautologi- cal” or “stupid,” Lacan says: to the extent that “whatever you enunciate is either true or false” (“it is day” is either true or false), “enunciating that [whatever you enunciate] is either true or false is necessarily true” (it is necessarily true that “ ‘it is day’ is either true or false”).178 That is to say, sixth, there is a performative an- nulment of sense via tautology—and of the sense of the Tractatus itself. Given that Wittgenstein refuses to solve this impasse by means of Aristotle’s solution of the problem of future contingents, the latter’s infamous “it is nec- essary that a sea-fight either will or will not take place tomorrow,” that is, giv- en that, for Wittgenstein, truth should be internal to the proposition and not lie outside the set of true propositions (the truth that the sea-fight will or will not take place tomorrow is external to the proposition; future contingents are not propositions for Wittgenstein), his conclusion—which Lacan much appre- ciates—is brutally honest: due to the tautology “everything that can be said is only senseless,” including and especially what Wittgenstein has just said so far concerning the propositional status of truth; “nothing else is sayable” about the world; and silence thereby imposes itself.179 Yet, according to Lacan, this is not Wittgenstein’s whole story. Indeed, this very predicament posits the world of things as “inaccessible”180 beyond what we have just senselessly said about the world of facts. Or better, Wittgenstein’s push- ing the absence of a meta-language to its extreme consequences—for truth can only be inscribed in a proposition—paradoxically leads him on the contrary to a propositional treatment of truth for which, against all our empirical evidence in 175 See Lacan, 59. 176 Lacan, 59. 177 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 1995), 5. 178 Lacan, Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 59; translation modified. 179 Lacan, 59. 180 Lacan, 60. 63 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy everyday life, “we reject that the true [. . .] can have a false consequent”—a rejec- tion that founds propositional logic—whereby “we end up with this curious fact that the true has a genealogy, that it always goes back to an initial truth, from which it is no longer able to fall.”181 As we just saw, this initial truth cannot but be the truth that stating that a proposition is either true or false is necessarily true. Thus, the fact that everything that can be said is senseless equates with the fact that everything that can be said is true as senseless with respect to the ulte- rior transcendence of an ineffable “absolute sense.”182 Like for Badiou, for Lacan, Wittgenstein therefore sutures truth to sense. But pace Badiou (Lacan would consign truth to the “sense as ab-sense” of the sexu- al relationship on which the transmissibility of knowledge would itself depend; after all, Lacan would be a sui generis Wittgensteinian) what Lacan instead pro- poses about truth against Wittgenstein in the same passages of Seminar XVII is very different. For Wittgenstein, according to Lacan who now deconstructs Witt- genstein by also making him in part ventriloquise Lacan’s own stance, truth is al- ready somehow not simply “internal” to the proposition—where only “the factici- ty of language” is announced.183 Truth depends on my enunciation; it depends on whether my enunciation is appropriate; this appropriate enunciation does make it true that the facticity of language is a fact; but the fact that this is true “is not a fact, unless I explicitly add that, moreover, it’s true.”184 As Wittgenstein would retort against this forced ventriloquising, such a step seems superfluous. But it is not. It is not superfluous, not even for Wittgenstein who affirms that “no sign of affirmation needs to be added to what is assertion pure and simple.”185 Generally speaking, it is not superfluous because this addition invariably hap- pens in everyday life (more or less explicitly); bluntly put, subjects always have a “reason” for saying what they are saying (even just “it is day”);186 or better, 181 Lacan, 61. 182 Lacan, 62. 183 Lacan, 60; translation modified. 184 Lacan, 60. 185 Lacan, 60. 186 Explicitly: “Look, it’s day. It’s true. I told you it was late, let’s go home”; implicitly: “Come on, it’s day (I’ll never go out with her again, it’s so late).” 64 lorenzo chiesa subjects of language are also subjects of desire and truth always has to do with what “desire hides of its lack.”187 Reading between the lines of Lacan’s interpretation, with regard to Wittgenstein and his desire for a purely propositional truth, adding that “it’s true” to the fact that it is true is not superfluous because it is only by explicitly adding that it is true that we are “genealogically” taken back to the “initial truth,” the truth that, independently of whether a proposition I enunciate is true or false, it is always contained by the senseless truth that stating that a proposition is either true or false is necessarily true. The senseless truth that stating that a proposition is ei- ther true or false is necessarily true necessitates stating that a particular propo- sition is true and not false. Otherwise, without this—second-degree—perform- ative dimension, we could not truly distinguish between true and false propo- sitions (for they are both contained by the initial truth) and there would quite simply not be any propositional logic . . . Are the truth tables of propositional logic, which Wittgenstein invented, not a way of adding that “it’s true” to the fact that it is true? And, as such, are they not fragments of a genealogy of truth? Lacan claims that, unlike other philosophers, “Wittgenstein wasn’t interested in saving the truth” meta-linguistically:188 he was not insofar as, for him, truth is ultimately senseless; but what he initiated in terms of the propagation of prop- ositional logic into analytic philosophy certainly stands as a gigantic attempt at meta-linguistically saving the truth within language . . . Finally, taking the perspective of Wittgenstein’s desire more comprehensively, the—first- and second-degree—performative dimension of truth—which Witt- genstein would like to expunge—is not superfluous because it is only through the Tractatus itself, as paradigmatically both an enunciation that it is true that whatever one enunciates is either true or false and a vade mecum for adding that “it’s true” that a given proposition is true, that the senseless truth negative- ly opens onto an ineffable absolute sense. Put simply, silence in the face of the latter requires an active detour by means of language. Indeed, for Wittgenstein’s desire, the impasse of the Tractatus has not been in vain. 187 Lacan, Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 61; translation modified. 188 Lacan, 63. 65 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy If we now specifically turn to Lacan’s own stance, for him, truth is unequivocally not internal to the proposition. Like for Wittgenstein, “truth [. . .] is certainly in- separable from the effects of language taken as such,” which in turn cannot be separated from a subject of enunciation—presupposed albeit overshadowed by Wittgenstein.189 Yet, for Lacan, unlike for Wittgenstein, there is no genealogy of truth that takes us back to an initial truth, however senseless it may be. In other words, on the one hand, as the logicians of the Middle Ages already realised, ex falso sequitur quodlibet—that is, from falsehood anything follows, that is, “the false sometimes also entails the true” and therefore “the true can be about an- ything.”190 But, on the other hand, “that there is no false without the true”—as ultimately entailed by an initial senselessness of truth that opens onto an ab- solute sense—“that is false.”191 This is Wittgenstein’s error, the error of the non- dupped who err the most (les non-dupes errent). This is also very similar to the error made by those psychoanalysts (including Lacanian ones like Laplanche, according to Lacan) who advance that “the unconscious is the condition of lan- guage,” and not vice versa.192 The unconscious itself amounts to the effects of language taken as such, Lacan insists. And if psychoanalysis were to posit the opposite, it would inevitably also posit “an absolute sense [that] answers to the unconscious.”193 Given these premises, we should then think the non-interiority of truth to the proposition not as its priority to the set of propositions (wheth- er true or false but ultimately always true—as per a wrong understanding of “I, the truth, speaks”) but instead as its being “beside” it (“But is it certain that we should find [truth] intus, within? Why not beside?”).194 All in all, for Lacan, “we are not without a relationship with truth,”195 but with the crucial specification that this is a lateral relationship, that truth is a para-truth with respect to (the effects of) language, which, I add, demands a para-ontology. Lacan already hints at this ontological dimension in the same pages of Seminar XVII we are scrutinising. In order not to capitulate to any, however paradoxi- cal, “absolute sense” (sens absolu) and consequently also turn truth into an “at- 189 Lacan, 62. 190 Lacan, 61. 191 Lacan, 62. 192 Lacan, 62. 193 Lacan, 62; translation modified. 194 Lacan, 58; translation modified. 195 Lacan, 58. 66 lorenzo chiesa tribute” of knowledge;196 in order, that is, not to repeat Wittgenstein error—and Badiou’s in his reading of Lacan as a quasi-Wittgensteinian—we need to put at centre stage the not without (pas sans) relationship with truth as a truth-beside. As Lacan already spelled out in Seminar V, sense (sens) does not go without a non-sense (pas-de-sens) that is also a step-of-sense (pas-de-sens).197 Here Witt- genstein is, in a limited sense, not too distant. But Wittgenstein’s non sequitur is to still end up with a—ineffable—sense that is allegedly “being full sense” rath- er than search for “what of being there is in sense” starting from sense as “what escapes being” and, concomitantly, leaves truth aside.198 What is now delineating itself on the horizon is not only the truth of the real in terms of subjectivized truths of the real but also, and without solution of conti- nuity, a more daring para-ontological investigation into whether it is possible to approach a truth of the real tout-court that does not reabsorb the senselessness of truth into an absolute sense. This is a question—one of the key questions of the para-ontology I am pursuing, as, in my view, a prolongation of Badiou’s meta-on- tology—with which Lacan flirts, repeatedly, but never thoroughly addresses. For the time being, let us just stress that Lacan does not label Wittgenstein’s po- sition as anti-philosophical but as that of “psychotic ferocity.”199 In psychotic discourse, as “the most assured discourse,” there is indeed no false without the true.200 The psychotic position, Lacan says in the same pages of Seminar XVII, can briefly be defined as “not wanting to know anything about the spot where truth is in question.”201 Senseless truth as initial truth does not really pose a problem to Wittgenstein: it instead marks the border of a, however much inac- cessible, divine sense. At bottom, that border is where the truth of his desire lies. Like for President Judge Schreber, the Order of God turns against any alleged rational order of the world He has himself established, yet it remains an Order. (Badiou is thus right in highlighting a “silent principle of salvation” in Wittgen- 196 Lacan, 62; emphasis added. 197 See Jacques Lacan, The Formations of the Unconscious, trans. Russell Grigg (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 87–93. 198 Lacan, Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 57–58. 199 Lacan, 62. 200 Lacan, 63. 201 Lacan, 63. 67 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy stein’s Weltanschauung, but he is wrong in referring to it as “mystical”;202 while for the mystic the apparent disorder of the world can immanently give access to a transcendent order, for the psychotic the latter is given only as inaccessible.)203 Having said this, in a passage from Seminar XIV, which should be made to di- alogue with Seminar XVII, Lacan instead refers to Wittgensteinians as anti-phi- losophers and resolutely opposes them to Wittgenstein himself: “Do not believe that since an entire school that is called logico-positivistic keeps harping onto us with a series of most insipid and mediocre anti-philosophical considerations that Wittgenstein’s step is nothing.”204 In other words, there is something to be learnt from Wittgenstein’s—psychotic and failed yet not anti-philosophical—at- tempt at reducing truth to the proposition and, more generally, promoting a log- ic that could do without the existence of the subject, since it goes together with an unprecedented upholding of senselessness. But there is nothing to be learnt from the Wittgensteinians who, as anti-philosophers, cannot even be consid- ered as just ordinary bad philosophers. Lacan does not name names nor explains further what the anti-philosophical position of the Wittgensteinians precisely amounts to, but we can try to un- pack this briefly by profiting also from other occasions on which he attacks log- ico-positivism. In short, logico-positivists radicalise Wittgenstein’s treatment of truth as internal to the proposition in an effort to dispose of senselessness. Like for Wittgenstein, truth should be approached by means of an alternative be- tween true and false propositions. But unlike for Wittgenstein, the enunciative truth that a proposition is either true or false should itself become internal to the proposition and thus no longer make truth senseless—for instance, and simpli- fying a lot, the senseless truth that it is necessarily true that “ ‘it is day’ is either true or false” turns into the sense of the proposition “it is necessarily true that ‘it is day’ is either true or false.” From a certain perspective, there is here no meta-linguistic truth, yet concomi- tantly propositional logic becomes the true language of language that rules out senselessness. Hence, from another perspective, truth as the true language of 202 Badiou, Lacan, 6; emphasis added. 203 See Chiesa, “Psychoanalysis and Agnostic Atheism.” 204 Lacan, La logique du fantasme, 140. 68 lorenzo chiesa language also becomes the meta-linguistic referent of language. This leads to a “fabulous paradox,” Lacan says: if referring to truth presupposes a division between propositions that are in themselves true and propositions that are in themselves false with regard to state of affairs—since, unlike for Wittgenstein, for the Wittgensteinian anti-philosophers there is moreover no distinction be- tween the world of facts and the world of things—then referring to truth unwit- tingly albeit necessarily also involves “positing an absolute false, namely a false to which one could refer oneself as such.”205 And, we could continue, perhaps this is the reason why Wittgensteinian logico-positivists are, strictly speaking, for Lacan, anti-philosophers: there where philosophers, as Badiou puts it, “as- sume that there is a truth of the real,” Wittgensteinian logico-positivists assume this only by not realising that, in parallel, they are also assuming a falsehood of the real . . . Lacan’s overall view does not leave room for doubt: “If we start from the principle that something that has no meaning cannot be essential in the de- velopment of discourse, we quite simply lose our bearings.”206 This is precisely what Wittgensteinian anti-philosophers start from. Senseless truth is dammed up, sense no longer hinges on an ineffable sense, but only at the cost of pretending to lose the subject (of enunciation)—including the sub- ject-supposed-to-know of bad philosophers—which is instead preserved in Witt- genstein at least as awestruck silence. I would be tempted to add that the related cost to be paid here is also the relinquishment of the florid phase of psychosis; the question “What was Wittgenstein thinking of when he was keeping silent?” is very much worth asking . . .207 For Lacan, Wittgensteinian logico-positivism is an “insipid” and “mediocre” anti-philosophy also because, so to speak, it is a psychosis without psychosis. The Future of Foliesophie So, to conclude, where does this leave us regarding a—anti-psychotic and, es- pecially, anti-psychosis-without-psychosis—foliesophie that as such refuses the very distinction Badiou draws between philosophy and anti-philosophy? Let us 205 Lacan, D’un discours, 84; emphasis added. 206 Lacan, 59. 207 Derek Jarman’s 1993 film Wittgenstein becomes a great film if it is taken as an attempt to answer this question. 69 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy recall that foliesophie has three inseparable aspects: the structural, that is tran- scendental, condition of the Homo sapiens species for which it cannot but foli- esophise, namely, put forward the Being-One; Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory as “the first philosophy that seems to be standing on its feet” precisely insofar as, by assuming this structural condition critically, it, like Badiou’s philosophy, on the contrary revolves around the axiomatic decision that the One is not, it only exists as an operation, and, moreover, in doing so does not contradict itself; a future Lacanian philosophy (and Badiousian to the extent that Badiou is a Laca- nian if and only if he no longer confines Lacan to anti-philosophy) that, by re- cuperating the anti-Being-One component of the (good) philosophical tradition, continues Lacan’s philosophical psychoanalysis in the philosophical domain, up to the point of not falling short of proposing, as we saw, an alternative “sys- tem of the world” that is not a self-contained Weltanschauung. Against doxastic interpretations, I wish to stress once again that this final aspect of foliesophie does not at all force Lacan’s broad conclusions on the matter. Let me quickly further vindicate my assertion with some supplementary textual evi- dence and thus also highlight a series of key notions I will have to return to and delve into elsewhere—engaging and agreeing with Badiou yet also attempting to dismantle his anti-Lacanian threshold. First, to clear the ground one more time, “psychoanalysis renews philosophy”; philosophy would demonstrate a “fundamental dishonesty” only if it ignored this.208 Second, on a related and still basic yet also massive level, in the future, “we have to begin to think up something that accounts for the fact that there are un- conscious thoughts. The latter does not go without saying. Actually, no one has ever truly tackled this so far” as an “eminently philosophical question.”209 Third, that there are unconscious thoughts cannot but lead to a philosophi- cal appreciation of “substance as on the side of a shortage”; specifically, this 208 Jacques Lacan, “L’objet de la psychanalyse: Séminaire 13, 1965–1966” (unpublished type- script, March 30, 1966), PDF document. 209 Lacan, My Teaching, 8; translation modified, emphasis added. 70 lorenzo chiesa is what “the psychoanalytic act could indicate.”210 However, such an indication should not be unfolded in terms of psychoanalysis being aware of “the phil- osophical error”—not treating substance as on the side of a shortage—“as if, from there, philosophy should then be aware of it.”211 This naïve take on psycho- analytic discourse would turn it into a discourse of the m’être about the philo- sophical discourse of the m’être. Psychoanalytic discourse amounts to neither a conscious drainage of the unconscious that would allegedly make up for sub- stance as a shortage (as per the infamous Freudian metaphor of the draining of the Zuider Zee) nor to a discourse of the Being-One veiled under an apparent discourse of the definitive not-oneness of Being, whereby substance as a short- age is meta-linguistically installed as a One (not-One). As Lacan glosses, imag- ining a superior awareness of psychoanalysis over philosophy “would be the philosophical error as such.”212 In other words, Lacan continues, psychoanalysis should absolutely not stand as a “hermeneutic”—a sense-provider—of philoso- phy, otherwise “it would take philosophy back to its ties to obscurantism”—and this is also the major risk for psychoanalysis’ own future.213 To cut a long story short, the philosophical act that suspends not only the alleged self-sufficiency of substance but, together with it, also the subject-supposed-to-know needs to remain independent of the psychoanalytic act albeit indebted to it as the kernel of a practice of the unconscious. Fourth, that the dimension of the act emerges as pivotal for a renewal of phi- losophy cannot but raise for philosophy itself the question of a transmission of knowledge that does not rely on the supposition of masterly teaching; “[Trans- mission] interests the philosopher in the sense that [. . .] a specific practice [psy- choanalysis] raises radical problems” in this regard, but “the solutions that [psychoanalysts] provide to these problems” may well receive “singular applica- tions at the level of other disciplines.”214 Here philosophy should avoid founding the question of transmission on the wrong assumption that the fact that “there is no unity of the subject,” and hence no subject-supposed-to-know, could be 210 Lacan, “Réponses à des étudiants,” 205. 211 Lacan, 205. 212 Lacan, 205. 213 Lacan, 210. 214 Jacques Lacan, “Interview donnée par Jacques Lacan à François Wahl à propos de la paru- tion des Écrits,” Le Bulletin de l’Association Freudienne 3 (May 1983): 7. 71 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy obviated by postulating that “there are two [unities],”215 namely, that there is a unconscious subject-supposed-to-know. This move, “installing [in] the psyche a whole small population of unities,” Lacan says, “only redoubles the deadlock that the unconscious proposes to us.”216 Fifth, and perhaps most importantly, what should nonetheless be involved in both psychoanalytic and philosophical solutions to the problem of transmis- sibility (with the former revolving around the formation of the psychoanalyst and the technique of the so-called passe) has to do with formalisation. As Ba- diou well sees, there is a strict connection for Lacan between the act that tears a hole in knowledge and the question of the transmission of knowledge, on the one hand, and the matheme, on the other (let us recall that, for Badiou, Lacan was the first in the twentieth century to put mathematics again at centre stage of speculative reasoning—against its anti-philosophical use in logico-positiv- ism).217 As Badiou equally well sees, for Lacan, transmissibility as formalisation is given only via the matheme as itself “the impasse of the mathematizable”/ formalizable—which can as such be formalised and thereby initiate transmis- sion. Against this background, according to Lacan himself (who again does not refrain from openly speaking as a philosopher—“If you allow me to be a philos- opher in my spare time”), the future of philosophy is adjudicated on whether it understands that “what [. . .] constitutes a concept is very precisely the function of a limit,” namely, of a matheme.218 There will be philosophy as a philosophy that is “strictly speaking relating to the real” on condition that it constructs its concepts on an “indefinitely approachable limit.”219 On the one hand, this might rightly give the impression that Lacan is here far too modestly limiting the future of philosophy to this side of the limit/matheme. On the other hand—and we have to admit that this remains a tension in Lacan’s arguments—he at the same time suggests that future philosophy can itself be a philosophy of the limit/matheme insofar as it can be—and in a sense has always been—a philosophy of mathematical infinity and the latter’s inherent impasses. 215 Lacan, 7. 216 Lacan, 7. 217 See Badiou, Being and Event, 7. 218 Jacques Lacan, “En guise de conclusion,” Lettres de l’École freudienne 8 (1971): 217; em- phasis added. 219 Lacan, 217. 72 lorenzo chiesa Obviously, the tradition of philosophy rests on “the requirement of the One,” the Being-One.220 Yet inasmuch as philosophy severs the link between the One and be- ing in its ontological discourse, “where there is being, infinity is required.”221 We, Lacanian philosophers of the future, are therefore left with two—up to a point compatible—options: with Badiou, philosophy can turn into a meta-on- tology of set-theoretical mathematics as ontology, where set-theory leads via— uncountable—infinity (as opposed to the bad infinity of an indefinitely ap- proachable limit) precisely to the matheme as a productive formalisation—and then transmission—of the impasse of formalisation/mathematisation.222 Better said, transmissibility as formalisation in philosophy is precisely what Badiou does meta-ontologically with regard to his use of ontological/set-theoretical for- malisation as ultimately the latter’s formalizable impasse. With Badiou but also beyond Badiou, this very platform can subsequently promote a philosophical para-ontology for which the assumption that the One is not and only exists as an operation can be upheld practically—that is, ethically and politically—without contradiction only after contemplating the theoretically undecidable possibility of the One as not-One as One as not-One etcetera (what I have elsewhere called the self-deceiving God).223 In my view, this last passage is in the end mandatory, and the two options should merge into one, in order to prevent Lacanian philosophers of the future from themselves embracing a negative Weltanschauung. As Lacan lucidly warns us, When one will make a course of philosophy . . . one will summarise my teaching and say: “What Lacan states is this—isn’t it?—he says that on the animal ladder [. . .] crack, eh! No more sexual relationship!” Which means the same thing as the origins of language—because philosophers are clearly not idiots. A speaking being has no sexual relationship! [. . .] It’s very funny as we will regain there the totality of the world.224 220 Lacan, Encore, 10. 221 Lacan, 10. 222 Of course, for Badiou—and for Lacan—the productivity of the impasse of mathematisation first and foremost concerns Cantor’s theorem, specifically when considering infinite sets. 223 See Chiesa, Not-Two and “Psychoanalysis and Agnostic Atheism.” 224 Lacan, Lacan in Italia, 75. 73 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy Clearly, for Lacan, it is far from granted that “good” Lacanian philosophers are exempted from surreptitiously endorsing bad philosophy. References Althusser, Louis. Writings on Psyhoanalysis: Freud and Lacan. Edited by Olivier Corpet and François Matheron. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: Columbia Univer- sity Press, 1996. Badiou, Alain. “Anti-Philosophy: Plato and Lacan.” In Conditions, trans. Steven Corco- ran, 228–47. London: Continuum, 2008. . Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. 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Cambridge: Polity, 2014. . “Conférence de presse du docteur Jacques Lacan.” Lettres de l’École freudienne 16 (1975): 6–26. . “Conférences dans les universités nord-américaines.” Scilicet 6/7 (1975): 53–63. 74 lorenzo chiesa . “Conférences et Entretiens dans des universités nord-américaines.” Scilicet 6/7 (1975): 32–45. . “De James Joyce comme symptôme.” Le croquant 28 (November 2000). https:// ecole-lacanienne.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/1976-01-24.pdf. . “Dissolution.” In Aux confins du Séminaire, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, 43–77. Paris: Navarin, 2021. . D’un Autre à l’autre, 1968–1969. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques- Alain Miller, book 16. Paris: Seuil, 2006. . D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, 1971. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, book 18. Paris: Seuil, 2006. . “En guise de conclusion.” Lettres de l’École freudienne 8 (1971): 205–17. . The Formations of the Unconscious. Translated by Russell Grigg. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, book 5. Cambridge: Polity, 2017. . “Freud per sempre. Intervista con Jacques Lacan.” Interview by Emilia Granzotto. Panorama, November 21, 1974. https://www.slp-cf.it/orientamento-lacaniano/interv- iste/freud-per-sempre/. . “Intervention sur l’exposé de J. Favez-Boutonier.” Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie 49, no. 1 (1955): 37–41. . “Interview donnée par Jacques Lacan à François Wahl à propos de la parution des Écrits.” Le Bulletin de l’Association Freudienne 3 (May 1983): 6–7. . “L’acte psychanalytique: Séminaire 15, 1967–1968.” Unpublished typescript, ses- sions of November 29, 1967, and January 17, 1968. PDF document. . “L’Étourdit.” In Autres écrits, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, 449–95. Paris: Seuil, 2001. . “L’identification: Séminaire 9, 1961–1962.” Unpublished typescript, session of February 28, 1962. PDF document. . “L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile a mourre: Séminaire 24, 1976–1977.” Unpublished typescript, sessions of December 14, 1976, and March 15, 1977. PDF doc- ument. . “L’objet de la psychanalyse: Séminaire 13, 1965–1966.” Unpublished typescript, session of March 30, 1966. PDF document. . La logique du fantasme, 1966–1967. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, book 14. Paris: Seuil, 2023. . “La psychanalyse et son enseignement.” Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie 49, no. 2 (1957): 65–101. . La relation d’objet, 1956–1957. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques- Alain Miller, book 4. Paris: Seuil, 1994. . “La topologie et le temps: Séminaire 26, 1978–1979.” Unpublished typescript, May 15, 1979. PDF document. 75 badiou/lacan-badiou: beyond anti-philosophy . “Le moment de conclure: Séminaire 25, 1977–1978.” Unpublished typescript, ses- sion of December 20, 1977. PDF document. . “Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu: Essai d’analyse d’une fonction en psychologie.” In Autres écrits, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, 23–84. Paris: Seuil, 2001. . “Les problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse: Séminaire 12, 1964–1965.” Unpublished typescript, sessions of December 2, 1964, and June 16, 1965. PDF docu- ment. . “Lettre de Jacques Lacan à trois psychanalystes italiens.” Spirales 9 (1981): 60. . My Teaching. Translated by David Macey. London: Verso, 2008. . On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: Encore, 1972–73. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, book 20. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. . . . . or Worse. Translated by A. R. Price. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, book 19. Cambridge: Polity, 2018. . The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Russell Grigg. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, book 17. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. . “Presentation on Psychical Causality.” In Écrits, translated by Bruce Fink, 123–58. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. . “Psychoanalysis and Its Teaching.” In Écrits, translated by Bruce Fink, 364–83. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. . The Psychoses, 1955–1956. Translated by Russell Grigg. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, book 3. Abingdon: Routledge, 1993. . “Réponses à des étudiants en philosophie.” In Autres écrits, edited by Jacques- Alain Miller, 203–11. Paris: Seuil, 2001. . “Réponses de Jacques Lacan à des questions sur les noeuds et l’inconscient.” Lettres de l’École freudienne 21 (1977): 471–75. . “R.S.I.: Séminaire 22, 1974–1975.” Unpublished typescript, session of February 18, 1975. PDF document. . The Sinthome. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, book 23. Cambridge: Polity, 2016. . Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Translated by Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson. Edited by Joan Copjec. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. . “The Triumph of Religion.” In The Triumph of Religion, Preceded by Discourse to Catholics, translated by Bruce Fink, 55–85. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge, 1995. 77 Keywords radical theology, weak thought, Nietzsche, Vattimo, secularization, death of God, neoconservatism, neo-liberalism, the university, Ignazio Silone Abstract Radical theology offers a different way to interrogate and critique bourgeois capitalist society and its institutions. Almost always institutional in location and focus, radical theology recognizes that the traditional religious underpinnings of liberal bourgeois so- ciety and its institutions no longer continue to operate nor offer a workable foundational basis. We could say, contra Habermas, that there is more than “the awareness” of what is missing; rather, what is missing is what is necessarily missing because “the what” of God is dead. The crisis of contemporary institutions is that, founded implicitly or explicitly on bourgeois religion and its God, they now find themselves with an ontological crisis most do not even recognize. Or rather, they recognize there is a crisis of meaning and pur- pose but are unsure or unwilling or even unable to engage with its foundational causes. Drawing on the weak thought of Gianni Vattimo, radical theology is empoyed as a way of rethinking institutions from within, against both their foundations and their current expressions, articulating a set of “weak possibilities” for ways forward. Radikalna teologija in »oslabitev« buržoaznih institucij Ključne besede radikalna teologija, šibka misel, Nietzsche, Vattimo, sekularizacija, smrt Boga, neokon- servativizem, neoliberalizem, univerza, Ignazio Silone * University of Canterbury, New Zealand michael.grimshaw@canterbury.ac.nz | https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8829-061X Mike Grimshaw* Radical Theology and the “Weakening” of Bourgeois Institutions Filozofski vestnik issn 0353-4510 | Volume 45 | Number 1 | 2024 | 77–94 cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.45.1.03 78 mike grimshaw Povzetek Radikalna teologija ponuja drugačen način preizpraševanja in kritike buržoazne kapi- talistične družbe in njenih institucij. Radikalna teologija, ki je glede na svojo umešče- nost in fokus skoraj vedno institucionalna, izhaja iz spoznanja, da tradicionalni religi- ozni temelji liberalne buržoazne družbe in njenih institucij ne delujejo več in ne nudijo delujoče temeljne podlage. V nasprotju s Habermasom bi lahko rekli, da ne gre zgolj za »zavest« o tem, kar manjka. Prej gre za to, da je tisto, kar manjka, tisto, kar nujno manj- ka, ker je tisto »kaj« Boga mrtvo. Kriza sodobnih institucij je v tem, da so se institucije, ki so implicitno ali eksplicitno utemeljene na buržoazni religiji in njenem Bogu, znašle v ontološki krizi, ki je večina niti ne prepozna. Ali bolje rečeno, priznavajo krizo smisla in smotra, vendar so negotove, nepripravljene ali celo nezmožne obravnavati njene te- meljne vzroke. Opirajoč se na šibko misel Giannija Vattima, pričujoči članek obravnava radikalno teologijo kot način ponovnega premisleka institucij od znotraj, zoperstavlja- joč se pri tem tako njihovim temeljem kot njihovim trenutnim pojavnim oblikam, na podlagi česar lahko zariše niz »šibkih možnosti« za pot naprej. ∞ The death of God was famously proclaimed—albeit as a question—on the cover of Time magazine on April 6, 1966.1 Given Nietzsche had already proclaimed it in 1882 in The Gay Science and his proclamation was not that it had just happened, but that it had happened and no one had really noticed, it may be said that Time was behind the times in raising it as even a question. Perhaps we could say that Time’s question was itself but a cave for the shadow of God? For Nietzsche also observed: After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tre- mendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may 1 For the cover and a discussion of what was in the article, see Lily Rothman, “Is God Dead?,” Time, 2016, https://time.com/isGoddead/; Leigh Eric Schmidt, “Is God Dead? A Time Cover Turns 50,” Religion and Politics, April 5, 2016, https://religionandpolitics.org/2016/04/05/ is-God-dead-a-time-cover-turns-50/. For my discussion and analysis of the wider “death of God” debate see Mike Grimshaw, “Did God Die in The Christian Century?,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 6, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 7–23. 79 radical theology and the “weakening” of bourgeois institutions still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.—And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.2 As Graham Ward reminds us in Cities of God the question that theology “does not handle,” the question of “what God is in relation to the world” does become addressed in the question of “that relation and that world [. . . which . . .] is a question about history and salvation [. . .] the question becomes very specific; it becomes the question concerning ‘what time it is?’ ”3 Or in this case, what or who was the God of Time? Sitting at the heart of the question, and indeed, the critique of radical theology, is a further question: What does it mean if God is dead in relation to the world? That is, if we exist in the time of the death of God, then is the answer that this is now the time of radical theology—after God? Moreover, is the task of radical the- ology—perhaps paradoxically for many—to vanquish the shadow of God . . .?! What do I mean by the shadow of God? In 1946 in a broadcast to post-war Germany, T. S. Eliot emphasized that while the unity of European culture as expressed in arts and ideas arose out of a his- tory of a common Christian culture, this did not necessitate or mean there was a contemporary, unified Christian culture in the modern world. Rather, as he observed, the acknowledgment of a shared heritage did not necessarily involve a shared belief: It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe the Christian faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of the Christian faith for its meaning.4 What do we actually understand of that heritage? The death of Christ is, as Gi- anni Vattimo notes, “the mysterious event that lies at the basis of our civilization 2 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 109. 3 Graham Ward, Cities of God (London: Routledge, 2000), 2. 4 T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (London: Faber & Faber, 1948), 122. 80 mike grimshaw and of modern calculation of time.”5 The death of Christ is the culmination of the incarnational event that inaugurated the death of God. Therefore, contra El- iot, what actually sits as the unacknowledged basis of both western civilization and of modern time is the death of God. This is why radical theology is a critical engagement with the society of the death of God. Radical theology is the gospel of the death of God; that is, the proc- lamation of the good news of the death of God. While institutions and their rep- resentatives such as Time may wish to question, qualify, or moderate the death of God, reducing it to a question to be dismissed, radical theology proceeds from the death of God and so finds itself in an interesting position vis-à-vis those in- stitutions that seek to maintain, return or resuscitate God. Radical theology also has an ongoing alliance to critical theory as a different way to interrogate and critique bourgeois capitalist society and its institutions. What makes it of particular interest is that radical theology is almost always in- stitutional in location and focus, arising from and engaging with the recognition that the traditional religious underpinnings of liberal bourgeois society and its institutions no longer offer a workable foundational basis. William Hamilton forcefully and thoughtfully articulates this protest in his outline of “The Shape of a Radical Theology.”6 In this confessional piece from 1965, being a radical is not enough for Hamilton. One can either be a soft radical or a hard radical. For soft radicals, the medium of expression is the problem, but not the central mes- sage. For Hamilton and other hard radicals the message is problematic and God is experienced as real loss; God is not just absent or hidden, but dead. What fol- lows is therefore the expression of a “hard radical” theology. Radical theology enables us to understand that the crisis of contemporary insti- tutions is that, founded implicitly or explicitly on bourgeois religion and its God, they now find themselves with an ontological crisis most do not even recognize. Or rather, they recognize there is a crisis of meaning and purpose but are unsure or unwilling or even unable to engage with its foundational causes. This results 5 Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 106. 6 William Hamilton, “The Shape of a Radical Theology,” The Christian Century, October 6, 1965, 1219–22. 81 radical theology and the “weakening” of bourgeois institutions in a society of non-Nietzschean nihilism and institutions that at most realizes there is a crisis but is not able to properly articulate or interrogate why. The Role of Weak Thought The framing of my discussion occurs in conversation with the weak thought (pensiero debole) initiated by Vattimo that combines, in particular, the influ- ences of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer in a hermeneutic expression of a postmodern ethic. Weak thought aligns itself with radical theology in being a herald of the return of religion into philosophy, but a return that is anti-meta- physical, a return that is theological in basis. Yet, it is a theology that itself is situated against all strong expressions of theology, faith and Christianity and its associated institutions, both those explicitly Christian and those implicitly expressing a Christian-derived culture and tradition. For weak thought arises from Vattimo’s engagement with the ongoing “profoundly Christian meaning of secularization”7 wherein Christianity itself needs to weaken in order to facilitate its vocation and its authenticity. My radical theology weakening of institutions proceeds from a critical reading of Vattimo’s After Christianity, his text that lies closest to radical theology. What follows can be termed an annotative herme- neutics8 that in turn weakens Vattimo’s thought and text in the process of an engaged weakening of institutions. To begin, weakening is linked to belief and what Vattimo notes is “believing that one believes”9 wherein faith, conviction and/or certainty also includes “to think with a certain degree of uncertainty.”10 As Vattimo clarifies, the first “believing” involves the uncertainty regarding the believing involving faith, conviction and/ or certainty. Therefore, radical theology has within it a central uncertainty that in turn exposes the central uncertainty of contemporary institutions after God. Such uncertainty is in fact the central event of Christianity, an uncertainty that the institution of Christianity—and then the institutions of Christian culture and 7 Vattimo, After Christianity, 98. 8 See Mike Grimshaw, “Flanuering with Vattimo: The Annotative Hermeneutics of Weak Thought,” Critical Research on Religion 2, no. 3 (December 2014): 265–79, https://doi. org/10.1177/2050303214552574. 9 Vattimo, After Christianity, 1. 10 Vattimo, 1. 82 mike grimshaw society sought—if not to undo, then at the very least—to ignore. This uncertain- ty occurs because of what I term the weak event of the incarnation. It is a weak event for in it lives the claim of weak thought, the weak event that acts against all strong thought; the anti-foundationalist event that acts against all claims for foundationalism. Therefore, to build Christian institutions and also insti- tutions of Christian culture stands against the central claim and anti-founda- tional and anti-institutional act-event of the incarnation. For the incarnation is to be understood as the weak-event wherein the kenotic act, the self-emptying of God, what we will call the death of God, acts against all strong claims—and what is an institution but, from the start, a strong claim? Via Nietzsche, this means that the proclamation “God is dead” is the end of metaphysics as there is no longer an ultimate foundation and this also means that to claim “God does not exist” is to continue to participate in a metaphysical principle.11 In other words, the death of God also ends both metaphysics and atheism. This is Christianity,but certainly neither in its common, foundational continuation nor in its institutions. It is also important that the death of God is an announcement and not a claim. For the claim is the expression of metaphysics, while, in contrast, the announce- ment is that of “an event that transforms the existence of the person who receives the announcement—or which is entirely constituted by this transformation.”12 This is why we can speak of radical theology as the gospel— the good news—of the death of god—for to receive such an announcement (god is dead) one entire- ly transforms oneself. So, if weak thought is announced, but not claimed, weak thought also transforms. Therefore, in regard to institutions, to announce the death of God to institutions is also to seek their transformation. How is this so? Firstly, the announcement of the death of God arises from that event which transforms God via the kenotic self-emptying. In other words, God stops being God and so transformed in turn transforms those who receive the announcement. Secondly, the death of God is the announcement that is heard, an announcement that is non-foundational but rather relational. Thirdly, the announcement of the death of God is political in that it proclaims against both what was metaphysics and what is the order of modern technological society. 11 Vattimo, 3. 12 Vattimo, 13. 83 radical theology and the “weakening” of bourgeois institutions Most centrally, the announcement of the death of God, if received, transforms all institutions built of or on the claim of God. The announcement of death of God is therefore doubly situated as the announcement contra metaphysics and contra what has, for many, been derived from metaphysics as “the de facto or- der of the rationalized world of modern technological society.”13 This transformation is a liberation that recovers the weakness of the kenotic event of love, of charity, of agape. Via Heidegger our Geworfenheit amounts to us being thrown into a world of the kenotic event because God was self-thrown as the event of death. This self-thrownness of God positions all claims to foun- dationalism as a lie seeking to limit or stop human relation in the name of love, which is liberation in the secular world, the saeculum, the world of shared hu- man experience.14 A saeculum that the death of God enables. In this saeculum the issue becomes one of a “critical principle”15 to ensure that myths and ideolo- gies and their institutions do not become uncritical expressions which can in turn become a normative metadiscourse. Vattimo links weakening with secularization, describing it “as the paradoxical realization of Being’s religious vocation.”16 The weakening of Being is not only “akin to the secularization of the sacred in the western tradition;”17 it is also the announcement of the secularization of institutions. Secularization is, as Vattimo notes, “an occurrence within the history of Western religiosity” and also “char- acterizes it very deeply.”18 As such it is positioned (we could say, announced) not just against the return of overt “religion” which is actually the attempted return of metaphysics but also versus the continued metaphysical foundations and as- sumptions of institutions—whether explicit or implicit. The message of the Ju- deo-Christian heritage is still alive in institutions that have yet to hear the an- nouncement of the death of God and be transformed in the process. 13 Vattimo, 14. 14 For discussion as to what this involves see Mike Grimshaw, “Gabriel Vahanian: From the Death of God to Wording and Worlding,” in Gabriel Vahanian, Theopoetics of the Word: A New Beginning of Word and World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1–24; Mike Grimshaw, “ ‘In Spite of the Death of God’: Gabriel Vahanian’s secular theology,” Palgrave Communications 1, art. no. 15025 (2015), https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2015.25. 15 Vattimo, After Christianity, 20. 16 Vattimo, 24. 17 Vattimo, 25. 18 Vattimo, 25. 84 mike grimshaw What does this possibly mean? Reading via Vattimo, radical theology is an interpretive event in what we term the poetic and leads to salvation which is linked by Vattimo with emancipation. Therefore, radical theology—especial- ly I would argue in relation to institutions—is a poetic interpretative event in the name of emancipation; a secular emancipation in that it occurs within and for the world of shared human experience. If the salvation of the Judeo-Chris- tian heritage, after metaphysics, is understood as appearing “as the lightening and weakening of the ‘heavy’ structures in which Being has manifested itself throughout human civilization,”19 then radical theology is expressed and expe- rienced as the lightening of those “heavy structures” in the name of emancipa- tion. These heavy structures are nothing less than our religious, political, eco- nomic and social institutions. Radical theology thus proceeds first from within Christianity yet against the in- stitutions of Christianity and its culture that wish Christianity to continue as a metaphysical religion and not embrace its radical announcement of the event of the death of God. Radical theology identifies that in Christian institutions and the institutions of a Christian culture and society we sought to resurrect meta- physical Being and metaphysical God. Even as western society underwent sec- ularization we did not seek to properly emancipate our institutions from their basis in metaphysical Being and metaphysical God, for to do so would mean a refocusing and rethinking of society as now composed of “a community of interpreters.”20 Therefore, what continues is the seeking an authority over Be- ing in the name of institutional power and tradition. I now want to raise three different entry points for discussing radical theology, institutions and the death of God. I draw upon these because they occur outside of the normal discussions and make us consider just how problematic the death of God and its attendant collapse of foundational meaning for bourgeois capi- talist society and its institutions has been—and continues to be. 19 Vattimo, 53. 20 Vattimo, 67. 85 radical theology and the “weakening” of bourgeois institutions Entry Point: Kristol’s Neoconservatism I admit it is not often that a neo-conservative thinker such as Irving Kristol21 is employed in a discussion of radical theology, which is perhaps a glaring over- sight, when you consider the role and influence that Reinhold Niebuhr’s neo- orthodox theology of Krisis played in his thought,22 especially in the articulation of what became known as Christian realism. Of course, Niebuhr was no death of God theologian, but he was a theologian who critiqued the failings of liberal bourgeois culture. This enabled Kristol to critically evaluate what was happen- ing in liberal bourgeois society in his historical moment. For the purposes of our discussion, I want to draw upon a statement made by Kristol in Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978).23 Kristol positions his argument ver- sus those “who indict bourgeois capitalism for not only failing to create a uto- pia for humanity to dwell in, but for even failing to try.”24 As an aside, we can see how neoliberalism attempted to answer this—you create your utopia by your agency: whether in a communal fashion/societally via what would become pro- gressive neoliberalism or, economically—at the level of individuals and families or at state and globalized level—by neoliberal economics. Kristol and neoconservatism are antiutopian, arguing for a capitalist order that “begins with the assumption that the word is full of other people, moved by their own interests and their own passions, and that the best we can reasonably 21 It was Kristol who coined the famous definition: “A neoconservative is a liberal mugged by reality.” This has an often not quoted extension: “The reference ‘mugged by reality’ is from Irving Kristol’s quote, ‘[a neoconservative] is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who got mugged by reality but has not pressed charges.’ ” Douglas Murray, Neoconservatism: Why We Need It (San Francisco: Encounter, 2006), 89; quoted in Lee Trepanier, “ ‘Mugged by Reality’: The Neoconservative Turn,” Vogelinview, July 15, 2021, https://voegelinview.com/mugged-by-reality-the-neoconservative-turn/. 22 Kristol lists Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Jacques Maritain, and later Martin Buber, Franz Rozenweig, and Gershom Scholem as his theological influences. See Irving Kristol, Neo- conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: Free Press, 1995), 5. 23 Irving Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978). For my discussion on Kristol, Foucault and neoliberalism see: Mike Grimshaw, “Is The Center Neoliberal?,” The Philosophical Salon, August 22, 2022, https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/is-the-cen- ter-neoliberal/. 24 Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism, ix. 86 mike grimshaw hope for is a society of civil concord, not a community of mutual love.”25 This means, in Kristol’s reading, that “Capitalism is the least romantic conception of a public order that the human mind has ever conceived”26 and this needs to be remembered in his later critique of Milton Friedman as being “heir to modern romanticism.”27 Kristol argues this from his conception of the central role of bourgeois virtue in bourgeois capitalism that began with “a kind of benign toleration of religion but a firm commitment to Judeo-Christian morality.”28 In particular, bourgeois capi- talism arose out of a protestant ethos and society that celebrated and endorsed “the domestic virtues” of “prudence, diligence, trustworthiness—and the ambi- tion to better one’s condition.”29 Kristol later expands this list to include hon- esty, sobriety and thrift,30 all of which, in the Puritan-Protestant origins of bour- geois capitalism are connected to worldly success. So, what has this to do with radical theology and its critique of institutions? It is here that Kristol provides a statement in line with radical theology. The trouble is that late twentieth century bourgeois capitalism was, for over 150 years, “liv- ing off the accumulated moral capital of traditional religion and traditional mor- al philosophy, and that once this capital was depleted, bourgeois society would find its legitimacy ever more questionable.”31 If we remember Nietzsche, the death of God was not only that of God but of all that which had been built on the claim of that God. If God dies, then bourgeois capitalism is exposed as now existing on the shadow of God—as are the institu- tions of bourgeois capitalism. This is why we can again draw upon Kristol who observes: “The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as ni- hilism. Only liberal capitalism doesn’t see nihilism as the enemy, but rather as just another splendid business opportunity.”32 25 Kristol, x. 26 Kristol, x. 27 Kristol, 65. 28 Kristol, Neo-conservatism, 33. 29 Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism, x. 30 Kristol, 64–65. 31 Kristol, 65–66. 32 Kristol, 66. 87 radical theology and the “weakening” of bourgeois institutions For this is not a Nietzschean nihilism, rather a nihilism from within the institu- tions of liberal bourgeois capitalism. To put it another way, after the death of God we need to be not just beyond good and evil but beyond the institutions of liberal bourgeois capitalism—and the neoliberal caves of their shadows. This means the radical theologian can find an unexpected ally in Kristol the neo-con; (similar perhaps to how Žižek can draw upon the conservative Chester- ton . . .?) for Kristol asks a question aligned to that of radical theology: Who on earth wants to live in a society in which all—or even a majority—of one’s fellow citizens are fully engaged in the hot pursuit of money, the single-minded pursuit of material self-interest? To put it another way: Who wants to live in a society in which selfishness and self-seeking are celebrated as primary virtues? Such a society is unfit for human habitation: thus sayeth the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Koran, the Greek philosophers, the medieval theologians, all modern moral philosophy.33 Kristol also provides an unexpected entry point to critique neoliberalism by noting: The inner spiritual chaos of the times, so powerfully created by the dynamics of capitalism itself, is such as to make nihilism an empty temptation. A “free soci- ety” in Hayek’s sense gives birth to in massive numbers to “free spirits,” emptied of moral substance but still driven by primordial moral actions. Such people are capable of the most irrational actions.34 In line with Kristol’s critique, what we fail to properly recognize is that neolib- eralism is the ethos of not only a post-Christian society but actually an anti- Christian society. As he observes (in what is of course a highly contestable state- ment), “it is the ethos of capitalism that is in gross disrepair, not the economics of capitalism.”35 This is because central to neoliberalism is the rebellion against tradition: culturally, societally, religiously, morally and economically. While on the one hand this is a rebellion against the institutions of Christian society, on 33 Kristol, 85. 34 Kristol, 268. 35 Kristol, Neo-conservatism, 112. 88 mike grimshaw the other it is rebellion in the name of romantic market nihilism that still leaves us with the dominance of the caves of the shadows of God. Now we have new neoliberal institutions of the shadow of God: God as neo-liberal capitalism and market forces, God as agency of the individual within neo-liberal capitalism, God as the new institutions of identity politics or rather, the institutions that now enforce the individual romanticized politics of the shadow of God. Entry Point 2: Nash on the University The second entry point comes from within one of the central institutions of modern bourgeois society, the university. In 1949, amidst a wider rethinking of post-war western culture, values, and civi- lization that often looked to draw upon Christianity, appeared Sir Walter Mober- ly’s The Crisis in the University.36 Moberly’s book was both an explicit and im- plicit Christian response to a wider “conviction that much ails universities to- day, that what is wrong with them is closely connected to what is wrong with the whole world; and that the chief seat of the malady is to be found in the underlying assumptions, largely unconscious, by which their life and work are determined.”37 Moberly observed that the only recent work “which deals with the university to- day from a Christian standpoint” is “Arnold Nash’s deliberately provocative and challenging The University and the Modern World,”38 which is subtitled An Essay in the Social Philosophy of University Education. And it is to this secondary text, not Moberly’s better-known text, that I want to turn. Nash provides a social theology of higher education that, having critiqued the is- sues and failures of, variously, the liberal democratic university, the Nazi univer- sity, and the Soviet university, then argues for a reconstruction of the university under a revived and rethought Christian framework. Nash’s overall concern is the confusion and questions of meaning that arose as the basis of the university 36 Walter Moberly, The Crisis In The University (London: SCM Press, 1949). 37 Moberly, 7. 38 Moberly, 7. Arnold S. Nash, The University and the Modern World: An Essay in the Social Philosophy of University Education (New York: Macmillan, 1943). I will refer to the later edi- tion (London: SCM Press, 1945). 89 radical theology and the “weakening” of bourgeois institutions changed from that founded in a Christian culture of identity to one that sought a basis in scientific method and spirit. Nash argues that the totalitarian university of either the Nazi or Soviet system occurs as an inadequate answer and remedy to these issues as do the failings encountered in the liberal democratic university. The underlying concern is the absence of a meaning of life or history. As Nash sets out in his preface: “What is at stake is the adequacy of the common premises of any tradition now current in the liberal democratic world on the na- ture and function of the university in society.”39 The focus of his discussion is what can be drawn upon to order experience “in the new world being born.”40 That is, the issue of the passing away of a world whereby its “Geist of rational in- dividualism expressed itself in politics as representative democracy, in religion as liberal Protestantism, in thought as the scientific movement and in economic life as capitalism.”41 That is, the crisis in the university is a symptom of a wider crisis in liberal capitalist democracy,42 whereby in the face of “the confusion and chaos of the liberal world view” the “liberal democratic university, by rejecting any real attempt to discover and then teach a unified conception of life refuses to be a university.”43 That is, like liberal bourgeois capitalism, the liberal democratic university was living off an ever-depleting moral capital, yet unsure what to replace that moral capital with that would enable a unified conception of life that was neither ni- hilistic nor reduced to market forces. In short, the institution of the university became—and I would argue remains—yet another cave of the shadow of God. In the case of the university, of the shadow of God that scientific thinking can be the basis of meaning and history, whether in the natural and physical sciences or in the growth of the social sciences—or even in the turn of the humanities to justify themselves via forms of “the scientific method.” This, Nash names the idol of science in the modern world. He traces this to the challenge to scholasti- cism undertaken by the Protestant reformation and how this in turn was chal- lenged by the Enlightenment. 39 Nash, University and the Modern World, 11. 40 Nash, 11. 41 Nash, 16. 42 Nash, 22. 43 Nash, 35. 90 mike grimshaw It is not that Nash wishes to undo the advances in human knowledge made pos- sible by these changes, rather that the social turn to science created a philo- sophical gap in the meaning of life and of history that science has been unable to fill. In his discussion of the inter-relatedness of the rise of capitalism and that of the scientific movement, the point is made that neither science nor capitalism can provide that which is missing, and the result is chaos and nihilism—or the turn to totalitarianism. So, what then is to be done? For Nash it is nothing less than that in the liberal democratic university, the task is “to accept the responsibility for the creation and teaching of a unified and coherent philosophy.”44 This involves both its on- tological reference (“the ultimate purpose for which knowledge is sought”) and its form, that is “the categories in which it is finally expressed.”45 In other words, Nash is arguing that what is needed is “a new frame of reference in terms of which scientific knowledge can be ordered and understood.”46 Nash saw this as occur- ring within moves towards a collectivized economy because of “the disorder in the socio-economic life of liberal capitalist society.”47 Therefore, the questions becomes not shall an economy and its university be planned but rather, on what shall it be planned and to what purpose?48 For this to occur, Nash argues that “knowledge can only be adequately understood in terms of its social origins.”49 The university can therefore only be a uni-versity when it is able to work towards and proceed from such a rethought, intellectual synthesis that interprets human life and destiny in light of and in response to the crisis of modernity. Crucially, it is here that radical theology asks that problematic question: but is not the university still the institutional cave of the shadow of God? Or rather, what would a university that embraces—rather than ignore or dismiss, or even not hear—the radical announcement of the death of God look like? Is the uni- versity actually even able to display an awareness of something missing? Is this why it has been so open to capture — in fact seemingly sought to be captured — by the romanticist nihilism of neoliberalism? 44 Nash, 163. 45 Nash, 163. 46 Nash, 164. 47 Nash, 166. 48 Nash, 166. 49 Nash, 167. 91 radical theology and the “weakening” of bourgeois institutions Entry Point 3: Silone on Liberalism on and Religion Writing in the cold war journal Encounter50 the Italian author and ex-Marxist Ig- nazio Silone in “The Choice of Comrades” discussed the question of a beneficial alliance between liberals and religion.51 The issue Silone identifies in 1954 is that which we can say proceeds in many ways from the still not yet fully acknowledged death of God: The last forty years have witnessed the collapse of most of the great politico-so- cial myths bequeathed to us from the 19th century. As a result, certain kinds of people who had relied on these myths as a compass find themselves in a state of spiritual vagueness and ambiguity that is still far from being clarified. This situ- ation is one aspect of the general crisis of capitalism and anti-capitalism. we are confronted with the need for reassessment, not only of the question of how to be- have but also the greater question of the meaning of our existence.52 Silone identified Nietzsche as the first one to identify this as “the nihilism of modern times,”53 a world of spiritual crisis and nihilism in which modern prog- ress, capitalism and communism are all found wanting, resulting in a world whereby “we are neither believers nor atheists, nor are we sceptics.”54 Silone’s essay, in its signalling of a possible, provisional way out of post-war nihilism, was influential amongst North American Protestant liberals who became radical theologians; in particular it was a major influence on the American death of God theologian William Hamilton55 and can be seen as one of the early expressions of secular theology. Hamilton describes Silone as expressing “the dilemma of the non-Catholic, non-Communist, non-humanist European intellectual.”56 50 For any overview history of religion and Encounter in the Cold War, see Mike Grimshaw, “Encountering Religion: Encounter, Religion, and the Cultural Cold War, 1953–1967,” History of Religions 51, no. 1 (August 2011): 31–58, https://doi.org/10.1086/659608. 51 Ignazio Silone, “The Choice of Comrades,” Encounter 3, no. 6 (December 1954): 21–28. 52 Silone, 21. 53 Silone, 21. 54 Silone, 28. 55 William Hamilton, “On Doing Without Knowledge of God,” The Journal of Religion 37, no. 1 (January 1957): 37–43. 56 Hamilton, 37. 92 mike grimshaw I would argue that the situation of the radical theologian is very close to this statement by Silone from 1962: Now I consider myself to be a Socialist without a party and a Christian without a church. I still feel bound to the ethics and idealism of each but I can no longer have any part of what the State has made of Socialism and the Church has made of Christianity.57 In such a context requiring “A Choice of Comrades” we are left with perhaps only “a few Christian certainties so deeply immured in human existence as to be identified with it.”58 That is “founded on the inner certainty that we are free and responsible, and it turns on the absolute need of finding a way towards the inmost reality of other people. This possibility of spiritual communion is surely the irrefutable proof of human brotherhood.”59 This is not faith, but trust and is therefore aligned to what Vattimo will describe as the announcement. What really resonates with radical theology is Silone’s positioning of what oc- curs: [T]he spiritual situation I have just described admits neither of defence nor of ar- rogance. Frankly, it is merely an expedient. It resembles a refugee encampment in no-man’s-land, an exposed makeshift encampment. What do you think refugees do from morning to night? They spend most of their time telling one another the story of their lives. The stories are anything but amusing, but they tell them to one another, really, in an effort to make themselves understood. As long as there re- mains a determination to understand and to share one’s understanding with oth- ers, perhaps we need not altogether despair.60 Conclusion It is perhaps a necessary cliché to consider that, as Marx observes, with capi- talist modernity “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and 57 Kenneth Allsop, “Ignazio Silone,” Encounter 18, no. 3 (March 1962): 49. 58 Silone, “Choice of Comrades,” 28. 59 Silone, 28. 60 Silone, 28. 93 radical theology and the “weakening” of bourgeois institutions man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”61 Institutions were—and are—one central way modernity attempts to institute, justify and maintain into contemporary exis- tence, what we can call “solidity.” Therefore, modern bureaucracy often seeks to inform and instil in us the belief that it is the role and duty of institutions to order our world. And yet they fail. It was another former hard-left liberal turned neo-conservative, Norman Podhoretz, who offered a reason why: most thinkers and critics being “unable to establish the connection between the spiritual con- dition of the individual and the institutions by which the condition was shaped and formed.”62 In conclusion, it is not institutions that enable us to live after the death of God, for our current institutions are either institutions of God and of the culture and society of God—or at most, caves of the shadow of God. What radical theology reminds us—via Silone—is that in taking a critical position against such institu- tions, and in finding ourselves after God, the choice of comrades takes on para- mount importance. References Allsop, Kenneth. “Ignazio Silone.” Encounter 18, no. 3 (March 1962): 49–51. Eliot, T. S. Notes Towards a Definition of Culture. London: Faber & Faber, 1948. Grimshaw, Mike. “Did God Die in The Christian Century?” Journal for Cultural and Reli- gious Theory 6, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 7–23. https://jcrt.org/archives/06.3/grimshaw.pdf. . “Encountering Religion: Encounter, Religion, and the Cultural Cold War, 1953–1967.” History of Religions 51, no. 1 (August 2011): 31–58. https://doi.org/10.1086/659608. . “Flanuering with Vattimo: The Annotative Hermeneutics of Weak Thou- ght.” Critical Research on Religion 2, no. 3 (December 2014): 265–79. https://doi. org/10.1177/2050303214552574. . “Gabriel Vahanian: From the Death of God to Wording and Worlding.” In Theopoe- tics of the Word: A New Beginning of Word and World, by Gabriel Vahanian, 1–24. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 61 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” trans. Samuel Moore, chap. 1, Marxists Internet Archive, accessed June 29, 2024, https://www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm. 62 Norman Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1979), 50. 94 mike grimshaw . “ ‘In Spite of the Death of God’: Gabriel Vahanian’s Secular Theology.” Palgrave Communications 1, art. no. 15025 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2015.25. . “Is The Center Neoliberal?” The Philosophical Salon, August 22, 2022. https:// thephilosophicalsalon.com/is-the-center-neoliberal/. Hamilton, William. “On Doing Without Knowledge of God.” The Journal of Religion 37, no. 1 (January 1957): 37–43. . “The Shape of a Radical Theology.” The Christian Century, October 6, 1965, 1219–22. Kristol, Irving. Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. New York: Free Press, 1995. . Two Cheers for Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 1978. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” Translated by Sa- muel Moore. Marxists Internet Archive. Accessed June 29, 2024. https://www.marxi- sts.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm. Moberly, Walter. The Crisis In The University. London: SCM Press, 1949. Murray, Douglas. Neoconservatism: Why We Need It. San Francisco: Encounter, 2006. Nash, Arnold S. The University and the Modern World: An Essay in the Social Philosophy of University Education. New York: Macmillan, 1943, and London: SCM Press, 1945. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Edited by Bernard Williams. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Podhoretz, Norman. Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir. New York: Weidenfeld and Ni- cholson, 1979. Rothman, Lily. “Is God Dead?” Time, 2016. https://time.com/isGoddead/. Schmidt, Leigh Eric. “Is God Dead? A Time Cover Turns 50.” Religion and Politics, April 5, 2016. https://religionandpolitics.org/2016/04/05/is-God-dead-a-time-cover- -turns-50/. Silone, Ignazio. “The Choice of Comrades.” Encounter 3, no. 6 (December 1954): 21–28. Trepanier, Lee. “ ‘Mugged by Reality’: The Neoconservative Turn.” Vogelinview, July 15, 2021. https://voegelinview.com/mugged-by-reality-the-neoconservative-turn/. Vattimo, Gianni. After Christianity. Translated by Luca D’Isanto. New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 2002. Ward, Graham. Cities of God. London: Routledge, 2000. 95 * Institute of Philosophy ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana, Slovenia uros.kranjc@zrc-sazu.si | https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8778-2169 Keywords institutions, Law, subjectivity, history, event, Giordano Bruno Abstract Recent years have seen an immense upsurge in developing the notion of institution with the aim of updating and reconfiguring its conceptualisation to make it correspond to present times. The stakes are high as the current Western institutional framework struggles to ensure its historical continuation—conceived broadly as political, econom- ic, social, scientific, artistic, and other institutions—as the predominant global dispos- itive. In the article, we first review the current most significant orientations and dis- ciplines that focus on institutions and proceed with a critical assessment of relevant events. In the second part, we question the subjective process and subjectivation of an institutional framework. If we reject the linguistic, empirical, or hermeneutic ap- proaches, how can we capture the dynamics of change in a framework? What indicates that a subjective process is taking place? We draw on the cases of St. Paul and Giordano Bruno to illuminate the Law’s historical repetition through cumulative cultural growth in re-inscribing the subjectivization of faithful and enduring—i.e. universalist—oper- ations of rupture and dispute leading to a Decision against reigning particularisms of institutional setups.1 Institucije, zgodovina, subjekti Ključne besede institucije, Zakon, subjektivnost, zgodovina, dogodek, Giordano Bruno 1 This research article is funded by the European Union—NextGeneration EU. Uroš Kranjc* Institutions, History, Subjects1 Filozofski vestnik issn 0353-4510 | Volume 45 | Number 1 | 2024 | 95–117 cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.45.1.04 96 uroš kranjc Povzetek Zadnja leta smo priča izjemnemu vzponu in reartikulaciji pojma institucije. Namen teh refleksij je konceptualna posodobitev in prilagoditev pojma skladno s potrebami so- dobnega časa. Gre predvsem za čas, ko se Zahodni institucionalni okvir utrjuje v svoji historični poziciji – zajemajoč politične, ekonomske, družbene, znanstvene, umetno- stne in druge institucije – kot prevladujoči globalni dispozitiv. V prispevku se najprej osredotočimo na trenutno najpomembnejše orientacije in discipline, ki pokrivajo do- ločitev pojma institucije, ter nadaljujemo s kritično obravnavo konkretnih dogodkov. V drugem delu nas zanima predvsem subjektivni proces ter subjektivacija v institucio- nalnem okviru. Če namreč zavrnemo lingvistični, empirični ali hermenevtični pristop, na kakšen način naj ujamemo dinamiko spremembe v okviru? Kaj označuje subjektivni proces v odvijanju? Na primerih sv. Pavla in Giordana Bruna prikažemo historično re- kurenco Zakona, ki skozi »kumulativno kulturno rast« pre-vpisuje subjektivacijo zve- stega in vztrajajočega – univerzalnega – v operacijah preloma in nesoglasja, ki vodita k Odločitvi proti prevladujočim partikularnostim institucionalnih redov. ∞ What would be an intuitive and immediate answer to the question: “What are institutions?” We could say something along the following lines: Institutions are ubiquitously present in today’s lives. We explicitly talk about them as so- cial, political, or economic institutions of concrete places such as parliaments, central banks, world trade centres, the United Nations, courts of justice, medi- cal hospitals, etc. or refer to them in a more implicit manner, such as marriage, money, law, religion, the police, army, cultural traits or sportsmanship inclina- tions. This might just be our first sense of what they are and how we “see” them. The last fifteen years have unleashed an intensive restructuring of human in- stitutions, paralleled by intensive research into new technologies, economic structures, political power, and social relations. The underlying circumstances for the project2 Institutions and Society: Towards a Critical Theory of (Economic) Institutions were precisely the global financial crisis and the economic turmoil that started in 2007, with the collapse of the famous Lehman Brothers bank in the US and Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, which lasted for over 5 years. In either 2 This project was part of my Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship awarded in 2020. 97 institutions, history, subjects case, the political repercussions have been immense and sustained. The popu- list backlashes to the monetary union and attempts at preserving the monetary union, including proposals to integrate a monetary and fiscal union, which if adopted would significantly change the current institutional set-up, were sure- ly to raise fundamental questions about the character and purpose of econom- ic institutions in the following decades. In any case, we can conclude that the first decade of the century was not resilient enough to face the coming times. Unfortunately, these chronic economic issues were only the tip of the iceberg on an open road to a period of looming stagflation, eclipsed by an even bigger col- lective shock announced on the 11 March 2020—the Covid-19 pandemic. While collective panic during the Great Recession was confined to financial markets and businesses alone, sparingly affecting households and the general global population, impulsive and uncoordinated action unfolding throughout the pan- demic became widespread. The severe virulence and pathogenicity with a rel- ative high morbidity and mortality in the oldest age and immunocompromised cohorts sent both formal and informal institutions to the highest levels of alert. For pure theory, this situation crucially and vividly revealed the versatile char- acter of institutions as a concept—exposing why they truly are a transdiscipli- nary concept—that fundamentally organises numerous disciplines. On the oth- er hand, we must examine these consecutive definitions to uncover the essence and functioning of institutions. Just consider the intersection of definitions of institution as rules-equilibrium following, cumulative cultural growth, institut- ed behaviour of the collective body and its praxis, or even the abstract mathe- matical study of formal logical systems. All of these impose a number of difficul- ties when in search for a “generally” valid definition of the concept institution. This project, however, has also had a particular angle of approach. It calls for a “back to the tables” approach that starts with reignited interest in the philo- sophical and sociological interpretation of economic concepts.3 Such an under- taking, however, presupposes a philosophical debunking of the prevailing con- ceptual and institutional dispositive, in economics in particular, but also more broadly, touching upon the historical and sociological conditions of institution- al frameworks: cumulative cultural growth, vested interests, social/symbolic 3 We are faithful here to Herbert Marcuseʼs remark that “philosophy appears in the con- cepts of economics”; Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (London: MayFly Books, 2009), 99. 98 uroš kranjc significations, the dialectics of Law and desire, etc. The driving question of the present enquiry is the following: Does it not seem like that the current state-of- affairs is presenting us with an ever more opaque, chaotic, and yet completely oriented institution of reality? Or could it be just the opposite? We hear contem- porary philosophers, like Alain Badiou, talk about living and thinking in abso- lute disorientation,4 while Jacques Rancière and Étienne Balibar5 turn the tables to emphasise the complete determinacy of (capitalist) orientation unfolding in our day and age. What is invoked here, although from opposing sides, is a pure problem of politics. Choosing either path, our initial question now becomes: Is our (instituted) reality (we choose to call it institutional framework) determined to such a degree as to make it impossible to critically reflect upon it? There are multiple layers to this answer: (1) the project of an adequate disambiguation, apprehension, reinterpretation and satisfactory fixation of economic catego- ries is still very much in progress, a process taking absolutely far too long—for three centuries now; (2) the theoretical ramifications of the notion of institution and its many disciplinary aspects infused by consensual operations should be countered with emancipatory subjective processes, and (3) the (onto)logical and philosophical tenets of an institutional framework ranging from mathematics to linguistics and beyond provide us with new modes of thinking and representing such frameworks. The scope, content and structure of this essay is set to deal only with the second (2) point outlined above and is thus composed of two distinct and interrelated sections addressing that point. The first part gives a general scope of the con- cept of institution with its most recent elaborations in various disciplines. The second part poses the question: How does a subject of modification/change in an institutional transformation come to be? Institutions in Theoretical and Historical Perspectives Why do we encounter these difficulties when speaking about the notion of in- stitution? It seems that the current state of literature on institutions in social 4 The title of Alain Badiou’s seminar Comment vivre et penser dans un monde livré à une absolue désorientation? held at La Commune—CDN Aubervilliers in the 2021/22 academic year. 5 A presentation given by Jacques Rancière entitled Quel est notre présent? and in discus- sion with Étienne Balibar at Citéphilo 2021 on November 13, 2021. 99 institutions, history, subjects sciences and philosophy is caught in a deadlock of endless conceptual back- and-forth. Today, we use the word as if it were second nature, confident of speaking about an agreed-upon determinate set of entities. Yet, we should bear in mind the striking fact that the word “institution” has not played a significant role for most of human history. These institutions are supposed to have been known to humankind ever since evolution first endowed the human animal with reason. However, historic analysis tells a vastly different story. The term “institution” itself is a relatively recent notion that describes human and social organisation, and as such, it only retroactively renders palpable the historical social structures that fall under the same notion today. There is surprisingly lit- tle use of the term in the contemporary sense anywhere prior to the seventeenth century if we discount its use in religious orders. Only later did it slowly begin to penetrate the legal and political discourses of the time, finally establishing its general meaning in the eighteenth century. This is attributed to the Enlightened Spirit in France, their merit in the final semantic transition from the term “estab- lishment”6 to the almost universally comprehensible concept of the institution.7 The works of the German Historical School, the Institutionalist strands in eco- nomics, and the French School of Sociology have managed to turn a rather un- determined concept into an entirely new object of knowledge. In doing so, they unleashed a vast array of new theoretical insights on thinkers, ranging from Hobbes, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, but also Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, and Con- stant, all the way to latter-day thinkers, like F. A. Hayek, Richard Rorty, and oth- er prominent liberals. A broader delineation of these thinkers can be summoned up into four general orientations that deploy the term “institution” in distinct manners: (i) the early principal usage, designating legislation and political dis- course as a structure of power of a sovereign or religion, hearkening back to the ancient political philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and others; (ii) a dynam- ic/static social/logical entity, structure or organisation operating within func- tionally ascribed (tacit or explicit) rules, as in Max Weberʼs Economy and Society as the prime example, but also contemporary (political) institutional theory or recent computer science model theory; (iii) the scientific concept, marking a genuine object of analysis for a discipline of sociology, as is done in the works 6 The term establishment once conveyed much of the functionalities known to be later pro- moted by the modern institutionalisms. 7 Alain Guéry, “Institution: Histoire d’une notion et de ses utilisations dans l’histoire avant les institutionnalismes,” Cahiers d’économie Politique 44, no. 1 (2003): 7–18, http://doi. org/10.3917/cep.044.0007. 100 uroš kranjc of the French School of Sociology; and, (iv) an anthropological usage that pro- vides insight into social habits of thought, social regularities and tendencies, instincts, drives and customs. A scrupulously intertwined impact can be most clearly seen in contemporary commentators of classical political dialogues and texts. Such commentaries may, for example, build on the Western heritage of Plato or Aristotle and retroactively re-interpret the contents of Laws, Republic or Politics for the institutional disposition of today’s societies. This presumes that these contents and today’s institutions are transhistorical, universal, and always already present. Below are some examples of how the notion itself is defined relating to the above distinctions: Sociology “In fact, without doing violence to the meaning of the word, one may term an institution all the beliefs and modes of behaviour instituted by the collectivity; sociology can then be defined as the science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning.”8 (Émile Durkheim) “[Institution is] an already instituted set of actions and ideas that individuals find before them and that impose themselves on them to a greater or lesser ex- tent. [. . .] Institution, therefore, in the social order, plays the same role as func- tion in the biological order; and in the same way that life science is the science of vital functions, so the science of society is the science of institutions thus de- scribed.”9 (Marcel Mauss, Paul Fauconnet) “The institution is a socially sanctioned, symbolic network in which a function- al component and an imaginary component are combined in variable propor- tions and relations. Alienation occurs when the imaginary moment in the insti- tution becomes autonomous and predominates, which leads to the institution’s becoming autonomous and predominating with respect to society. This becom- ing autonomous, or autonomization, of the institution is expressed and embod- 8 Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, ed. Steven Lukes, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Free Press, 1982), 45. 9 Marcel Mauss and Paul Fauconnet, “Sociologie: Objet et méthode,” in Marcel Mauss, Œuvres, ed. Victor Karady (Paris: Minuit, 1969), 3:139–77. 101 institutions, history, subjects ied in the material nature of social life, but it always presupposes at the same time that society lives its relations with its institutions in the mode of the imag- inary, in other words, that it does not recognize in the imaginary of institutions something that is its own product.”10 (Cornelius Castoriadis) Mathematics “Whereas traditional model theory assumes a fixed vocabulary, institutions al- low us to consider many different vocabularies at once. Informally, an institu- tion consists of · a collection of signatures (which are vocabularies for use in construct- ing sentences in a logical system) and signature morphisms, together with for each signature ∑, · a collection of ∑-sentences, · a collection of ∑-models, and · a ∑-satisfaction relation, of ∑-sentences by ∑-models.”11 (Joseph A. Goguen and Rod M. Burstall) “The theory of institutions is a categorical abstract model theory which formal- izes the intuitive notion of a logical system, including syntax, semantics, and the satisfaction relation between them. Institutions constitute a model-oriented meta-theory on logics similarly to how the theory of rings and modules consti- tute a meta-theory for classical linear algebra.”12 (Răzvan Diaconescu) Heterodox Economics and Social Ontology “Institutions are the kinds of structures that matter most in the social realm: they make up the stuff of social life. [. . .] Without doing much violence to the relevant lit- erature, we may define institutions as systems of established and prevalent social rules that structure social interactions.”13 (Geoffrey M. Hodgson) 10 Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), 132. 11 Joseph Goguen and Rod Burstall, “Institutions: Abstract Model Theory for Specification and Programming,” Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery 39, no. 1 (January 1992): 95–146, https://doi.org/10.1145/147508.147524. 12 Răzvan Diaconescu, Institution-Independent Model Theory (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008), 1. 13 Geoffrey M. Hodgson, “What Are Institutions?,” Journal of Economic Issues 40, no. 1 (2006): 1–25. 102 uroš kranjc “Institutions are particular forms of emergent social phenomena, mostly social systems, or structured processes of interaction, that are either intended to be (whether or not they are), or are discovered a posteriori to be and are recognised as, relatively enduring.”14 (Tony Lawson) “Institutions are the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, the hu- manly devised constraints that shape human interaction. [. . .] They are a guide to human interaction, so that when we wish to greet friends on the street, drive an automobile, buy oranges, borrow money, form a business, bury our dead, or whatever, we know (or can learn easily) how to perform these tasks.”15 (Doug- lass C. North) “The rules are symbolic markers that represent equilibria (or parts of equilibria) and help the players use a particular coordination device. Unlike in rules-based theories, the concept of pattern (equilibrium) is central in this theory. But unlike “pure” equilibrium-based theories, this account brings at center stage the rep- resentation of the equilibrium by means of symbolic markers (rules). This way, we obtain a satisfactory, consistent, and empirically adequate conception of in- stitutions.”16 (Francesco Guala) Observing the various definitions above one last time, we can derive the follow- ing propositions to formulate and group the ideas of different directions: (a) the institutions themselves as the object of the science of sociology, (b) mathematical structures conveying different logics through multi-signatures, (c) the accepted system of rules or means in philosophical discourse, (d) settled habits of thought in the social realm. * * * 14 Tony Lawson, “What Is an Institution,” in Social Ontology and Modern Economics, ed. Stephen Pratten (London: Routledge, 2015), 553–77. 15 Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3–4. 16 Francesco Guala, Understanding Institutions: The Philosophy and Science of Living Together (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 55. 103 institutions, history, subjects The latest contribution to the concatenation of definitions is delivered by Rober- to Espositoʼs short book reflecting on the institutional response to the pandemic bearing the simple title of Institution. Writing in the summer of 2020, he propos- es these reflections on institutions: “Institutions [. . .] are the bridge by means of which law and politics shape societies, differentiating and uniting them.”17 There are two intertwined distinctions to be drawn, (a) between law (nomos) and politics (Πολιτικά) and (b) between bare life (zoē) and instituted life (bios/vi- tam instituere), whose interplay is a continuous effort of instituent praxis. What Esposito posits is a contradiction between bare (biological) life and life that in- stitutes and is instituted within institutions; a contradiction that manifests the unravelling of freedom and power relations. In rethinking the French sociolog- ical roots, German philosophical anthropology, and Italian legal institutional- ism, Esposito relates the instituent praxis with the continuous and contingent contradiction of freedom and necessity, of subject and object, of the inside and outside. His functionalist description of institutions goes: “Whatever lies out- side institutions, before being institutionalized itself, alters the previous insti- tutional structure, challenging, expanding, and deforming it,”18 and ends his short treatise with confidence in mobilized mass movements (once again) be- coming the subject of creative change in the institutional fabric. This point was also already highlighted by Giorgio Agamben with his posited division of politi- cal and economic theology.19 What both share is nomoi, either in relation to poli- tiká or oikos, oikonomia, distinguishing political philosophy and modern theory of sovereignty from the modern management of bodies and lives through econ- omy and governance, biopolitics. To illustrate these points, numerous literary works could be evoked, covering different aspects of pandemics, dystopian futurist writings of (technological) apocalypse, inquiries into (micro)eschatologies, etc. Let us briefly mention just some of the most famous and insightful, as they relate to the pandemic in ques- tion. Surely one of the most general guidelines for interpretation is offered in Jean de la Fontaine’s fable Animals Sick of the Plague (Les Animaux malades de la peste, 1678), where animals around the world are dying from a deadly disease. 17 Roberto Esposito, Institution, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge: Polity, 2022), 2. 18 Esposito, 9. 19 See Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa and Matteo Mandarini (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 1. 104 uroš kranjc The Lion declares it a punishment from the gods and seeks confessions from fel- low animals, himself confessing eating sheep and the shepherd—a minor spe- cies. All other animals follow suit, while also saying how unworthy the sheep are of existence, downplaying the Lion’s original sin. Only the donkey confesses truthfully, eating the grass from an abbot’s field. The confession and punish- ment proves to be fatal. The fable in itself represents a classic example of the seclusion between (life) truth and (institution) power relations. However, how these relations in concerto unfold is famously captured in Camus’s Plague where the main protagonists Bernard Rieux and Jean Tarrou disapprove of the Law’s reactions (embodied by the Prefect and Dr. Richard—chief medical officer in the town of Oran) shown in a slow, muddled, and authoritarian response from the authorities and medical association. This kind of response was also very vividly seen in practice during the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The sec- ond phase (starting in 2021) with the rollout of quarantine measures and vacci- nation programmes is brilliantly epitomized by José Saramagoʼs Blindness, boil- ing down to the question of how all these measures were in fact implemented by the institutions and how the distinction of bare life versus instituted life, inside and outside, was implemented as biopolitics. What we saw with the global governmental responses to the pandemic was not just the execution of pre-planned pandemic playbook actions but also an or- chestration of disproportionality and opposing set of actions, frequently contra- dictory measures, a science-ideology-driven narrative on different ends, further extended with authoritarian mass control, unnecessary fear-mongering and panicking at the same time, segregation of unvaccinated, war-like profiteering, blocking of non-mainstream viral remedies, and so on. In Blindness Sarama- go concomitantly captures a crucial angle and significant shift in the writing of maladies embodied in the character of the doctor’s wife, more precisely, her unique ability to retain vision in an epidemic of blindness. In attaching this sup- plementary role for the character Saramago provides an ethical context to the storyline, i.e. her imperative usage of this advantage for her cause and that of the community, all while fighting injustices imposed both by the mob and the authorities. What one can observe here is a transitional shift in the dispositive, i.e. a parallax, from the classical Antigone-like Law imposition on society, the struggle and defiance, power relations, etc., to an ever more nuanced position of an ethical judgement included in an “outside” point (the doctor’s wife with an uncompromising desire to declare the faithful search of a resolution in their 105 institutions, history, subjects particular state of emergency). While the doctor’s wife keeps her eyesight a se- cret and fulfils her individual role, what is at stake here is the ethical attribute of a subject “who can see/drill a hole in the full wall,” both of the good and the bad, the benevolence of the (state) institutions, and also the nihilism of the au- thorities and businesses. To put this in a more theoretical context, we can turn to what Cornelius Castori- adis called the difference between autonomy and heteronomy. If the term nomos usually describes the law—with Castoriadis it also acquires the meaning of social custom, convention, and institution—it is the difference between the Autos as self and Heteros as other that defines the situation. In today’s societies, we do not enact an autonomous, i.e. emancipatory stance, against the institutional order. Rather, we all increasingly choose to passively witness the “rule of other(s)”—in a manner of a “lazy consciousness,” which is in another sense a form of (self) alienation or suppression. This instance of the other(s) becomes an established vocabulary, knowledge, or signature, in other words, a recount of terms. This fact disables our capacity to see other possibilities, putting an amalgamation of con- crete material practices, organisation and functioning securely in between insti- tutional frameworks and our individual imaginaries. As Marx once put it: “For instance, one man is king only because other men stand in the relation of sub- jects to him. They, on the other hand, imagine that they are subjects because he is king.”20 Every historical society is heteronomous, with its institutional frame- work, i.e. its laws, customs, traditions and habits of thought. This heteronomy is reinforced by relying on a determinate ideology, symbolic structure, or social im- aginary significations. Recall also Foucaultʼs concept of heterotopias, a term de- scribing the utopian synthesis of such concrete places and virtual spaces. There- fore, every society within a heterotopia first and foremost bears an autonomous potentiality, a capability of a scission, a discontinuity, a disclosed and enunciat- ed wrong in a world of standardisation and homogenisation according to the Law. How does such an autonomous act take place in actuality? Looking back at the last two years, we hear persistent talk about so-called “new reality,” a social transformation kicking in. Let us call such a transformation a change in the institutional framework. How is this transformation unfolding? 20 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmonds worth: Penguin, 1993), 149n22. 106 uroš kranjc On close examination, one could hardly call this an unravelling revolution or a revolutionary break. The imposition of the Law in most time sequences does not work in this way. What we had and still experience can better be described as a culmination of smaller and greater evolutionary increments and the conse- quent adaptation and mutation of institutions. In this sense, we can here also recall and paraphrase Catherine Malabouʼs recent inquiries into a plastic mod- ification of psychic/social frameworks.21 Today, we can simultaneously also ob- serve a significant deterioration of world-wide trust in formal and informal in- stitutions (particularly law enforcement and the press, media and digital social platforms, and, of course, the now perpetually crony, political establishment), reducing their credibility and giving rise to alternative institutions to substitute their tasks and actions. The latter can be seen as an autonomous response of a collective subject that seeks to establish a disputative space toward the nomos. It is the reflection of the part that has no part in the distribution of the sensible (Foucault, Rancière), leading to a demand for equaliberty (Balibar) with a re- course to the remnant (Agamben), in positing the undecidable and searching for an (antagonistic) decision (Laclau) that makes the subject resurface in the social body as something universal. Who is the Subject of Modification/Change in an Institutional Framework? From St. Paul Recent decades have brought an extensive philosophical interest in the Jew- ish/Christian figure of St. Paul and his quest for universalism. The almost slo- gan-like, accepted statement that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”22 has become a universalist operation of shedding difference in search of its concrete realization at an ap- propriate time, place, or event together with subsequent consequences. Con- temporary philosophers,23 ranging from Agamben and Badiou to Lyotard and Žižek, have endorsed a universality of truth stemming from the Christ-event and the enduring fidelity to it, thereby countering the now influential postmodern 21 See Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 22 Gal 3:28. 23 All motivated by the preceding scholarly interest in Paul by figures such as Hegel, Nietzsche, Comte, Freud, Heidegger, etc. 107 institutions, history, subjects pluralism of particular identities and differences framed in a capitalist mode of standardisation and homogenisation. Unfortunately, these latter instances are not akin to any search for truth, rather being characterised with an absolutely overt quest for power and struggling entities for hegemony. Such universaliza- tion of identitarian singularities will (have) all end/ed up in either unfavoura- ble, untenable and reactionary outcomes, or in some cases in disasters. In the current nihilist age, both Badiou24 and Agamben25 therefore come to the conclu- sion that proper (political) subjects are indeed rare. The Pauline example for our purposes convokes these two main hypotheses: (1) the Universality of infinite truths supported by an agent/subject and hold- ing for everyone, and (2) the disturbance of the Law through the dialectic of faith (pistis) and law (nomos). Granted, once in accordance with these two op- erations, the subject’s threshold becomes immeasurable and the consequences potentially limitless. However, we must point out the preceding path taken by Paul, formerly Saul, from his early days of being a Greek-speaking Jew, born a Roman citizen (?) in Tarsus (Asia Minor, present-day Turkey) and raised in Jeru- salem. During his early years, he lived as a Pharisee and believed there is only One, true living God, while wishing to know nothing about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity. Yet, he also tried to resolve the con- tradiction between the law of the Torah and the teachings of Christ. Thus he tried to adhere to both a conception of righteousness under the law (Torah) and charity for all (Christ). This fact was his motivation for being a faithful observer 24 In Theory of the Subject Badiou posits: “Every subject is political. Which is why there are few subjects and rarely any politics.” Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009), 28. Later in Conditions he recasts this thesis but withholds the scarcity of subjects: “Every subject is induced through a generic proce- dure, and therefore depends upon an event. As a result, the subject is rare.” Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2008), 305n12. Even later in his Logics of Worlds, Badiou had to give avenues on how to perceive and adopt structural transformations devoid of any subjective support, hence adding a distinction between modification and change occurring at a “site,” becoming either a modification or a fac- tual/singular change resulting from the site—event. 25 The messianic concept of the remnant in The Time That Remains, for Agamben represent a figure of “the only real political subject” (Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005], 57) as never coinciding with its own identity, prohibiting the clo- sure of All (i.e. remaining non-All) maintains the potentiality of a subject to always evade inscription. 108 uroš kranjc of the Law (covenant nomism) and strict critic of the nascent sect surrounding Jesus of Nazareth. Having observed his “earlier life in Judaism,” Paul experienc- es the Damascus transformation and conversion to becoming an “apostle to the Gentiles” not by renouncing his Judaism, but rather by adding to it his role as a messenger to Gentiles spreading the word about God having raised Jesus. What needs to be acknowledged here is how the forming-of Paul as Paul, not just his encounter with Jesus and the following revelation and universalist agency, but even more importantly, the prior course of his personal development had all in all attributed to his entire edifice and the consequences that followed. While his apostolic missionary status and achievement is generally underscored, the earlier circumstances leading to his initiation remain more opaque. It needs to be emphasised that for him to be able to freely fulfil the inclusion of Gentiles as the new peoples of God, starting anew the Christian “race,” he first had to go through his own journey of lawful torment applied to these peoples beforehand in order to finally transgress Law through the encounter with Jesus sending him to Damascus: “And I fell unto the ground, and heard a voice saying unto me, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And I answered, Who art thou, Lord? And he said unto me, I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom thou persecutest.”26 With such a background in mind, we turn to a second example that even more pertinently depicts our current worldwide situation in transitory modification/change: the dispute between the Law and an individual. To the Case of Giordano Bruno Some fifteen centuries later, Europe had witnessed the unprecedented spread of the Christian religion, the Church now boasting tens of millions of adherents spanning from Europe to the Far East and South, adding the newly discovered territories over the Atlantic. Owing to numerous (ecumenical) reforms, mission- ary expansions and crusades, schisms, inquisitions, the development of ecclesi- astical (canon) law, etc., this entire expansion was eventually initiated by a uni- versalist grassroots approach laid down by Paul the Apostle. By the sixteenth century, the Church institution had already accumulated an enormous amount of cultural growth, habits and vested interests, traditions and rites leading also to many moral scandals, corruption at the highest ranks of the papacy, finan- cial contrivances of the-now-already wealthy clergy, finally resulting in the Hus- site (Bohemian) and Lutheran calls for Reformation of the Church against such 26 Acts 22:7–8. 109 institutions, history, subjects aberrations. The Law was once again put to the test, responding in the form of a Counter-reformation with its famous heresy trials, surveillance of suspect- ed heretics, excommunication, and persecution of Protestant Christians. When talking about the period from the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE (312) and all the way to the Early Middle Ages, but also the Renaissance, we have to acknowledge that the institutions of the Church and State were immensely interwoven27—it was the French Revolution that finally brought about a secu- larised disentanglement of these relations—related particularly to their devel- opment and mutual influence of the Law. At the start of the fourth century CE, the crucial question was the unity of the Catholic Church and who counted as a Christian. With the first ecumenical council in Nicea (325 CE), the State began to support the Councils to maintain Christian Law, where these “tribunals of faith” had now become the State religion and the fight against heresy incorpo- rated into laws of the Roman Empire with the Inquisition and the Congregation of the Roman Holy Office/Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as their oper- ational posts.28 What this implied was that the philosophical (with findings also originating in the natural sciences) and theological truths could not co-exist anymore, but rather had to be synthesised. This is the background that frames the current governmental and legislative structure of modern European nation states, with its ministries and bureaucracies, but also its obscurer side, the pro- tection of secular and holy “truths.” The first and most famous historical figures to find themselves at odds with these new circumstances were Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei. These were the times and circumstances during which the 27 Two further remarks can be made pertaining to Agamben’s distinction of political and economic theology above: (1) Observing a strictly theoretical conceptualisation arching from the arch-political theologian Carl Schmitt with his famous thesis “all significant con- cepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” to the already mentioned Marcuse remark about “philosophy occurring in economic concepts” culmi- nates well in Marx’s politico-economic analysis of commodity perceived as “abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” (2) On the practical level, it was John Kenneth Galbraith who meaningfully coined the term “Bureaucratic Symbiosis” to depict the tendency of the executive bodies of public and private organisations to pursue a com- mon objective. As was the case by the time he wrote Economics and the Public Purpose (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), the symbiosis was well in effect between Pentagon and weapons firms, such as Lockheed, Boeing or General Dynamics, while today we have simi- lar cases between the FDA and Pfizer, or the FBI, DHS, Global Engagement Center and Twitter, Facebook or Google. 28 See Germano Maifreda, The Trial of Giordano Bruno, trans. Paul M. Rosenberg and Loretta Valtz Mannucci (New York: Routledge, 2022), 56–57. 110 uroš kranjc most famous Italian philosopher of the Renaissance from Nola began his jour- ney through European courts and universities. The lectures he delivered were extraordinary. In his childhood, he discovered his immense memory, leading him to master the art of memory and the application of the mnemotechnic in the lines of Hermetic tradition,29 i.e. drawing from the resurgence of Renaissance magic and alchemy to master his own memory, soul, and being. Another cor- related theme is his rejecting of Aristotle for a Neo-Platonist version of Ideas as shadows of divinity that pushes human understanding to light and knowledge (On the Shadows of Ideas/De umbris idearum, 1582) and towards unity of the hu- man soul with the infinite One. His opposition to Aristotle’s physics, which was a generally accepted philosophical doctrine of the Catholic Church at the time, combined with his endorsement of Copernicanism and the open and infinite Universe with a plurality of worlds with intelligent beings, was the second of his heresies. To keep these claims intelligible and coherent, Bruno relies heavily on relations between nature (atoms), human understanding (cognitive methods), metaphysics (matter and form) and mathematics (monadology; points, geome- try). This pantheist (Spinozist-like) basis was a third marker of profound disa- greement with the Church. What this all adds up to is a stipulation that his goal was to introduce theoretical foundations (a general reform) to a world where the philosophical, natural and theological spheres would fall under one canopy, free from unintelligible dogmas and rites, while remaining a pure Christian one. Bruno’s name unquestioningly joins those of Copernicus, Galileo, Gilbert, Ke- pler, and Brache in the preparatory period of the early modern times scientific revolution, however, there is another aspect to his endeavours. It was his person- ality, torn between an intellectual and imaginative scholarship and personal im- patience, quarrelsome and hysteric nature that eventually makes him a subject of faith. Which of Bruno’s particular qualities therefore made him a subject of modification/change? It could not have been his scholarly discoveries—although he did make unprecedented observations and practices—but rather his synthetic abilities to migrate different theories in a unified corpus and disseminate them imperviously. He did so with fierce fidelity both to his ideas and to his cause, de- fending his theoretical positions wherever he was invited to orate and prompt- ing the legitimate interest of the Inquisitorial bodies. This second aspect, which 29 The seminal book on this topic is by Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge, 1964). 111 institutions, history, subjects associates him with Paul, is the spatial trajectory that gave him enough lever- age to both develop his own theories and simultaneously promote his teachings to all progressive European lands. The method he employed can be likened to drilling small holes into the Law, by way of opposing or seeking a contradictory argument, thereby probing different cornerstones of a monolith finitude of the Church—all with the clear aim and justification that it was the good and the true he was pursuing when promulgating ideas. To this kind of subjective process Balibar gives the name equaliberty30—taking on the demand, i.e. maintaining an untenable stance of persistence in an endless (impossible) “drilling” of the Law— the present and future to be retroactively and ceaselessly re-shaped by the past. As one biographer observed, these traits ran in Bruno’s family: Dès lors, Bruno prend les armes tout comme l’a fait son père: il est excubitor, sol- dat plutôt qu’académicien, prêt à combattre, à réformer ou à détruire les idées comme les institutions qu’il juge vieillies, obsolètes, impropres à satisfaire aux besoins de son temps et de ceux à venir. Penseur éminent et de haute volée, il est aussi homme d’action, engagé dans la bataille; maître de la pensée, il en est aussi le témoin sur tous les champs de dispute ; il en sera finalement le martyr. Il n’est donc jamais à court de mots cinglants et durs pour se moquer de ses confrères trop doctes, les provoquer en duel, les combattre et les vaincre. Ils sont, écrit- il dans De la cause, du principe et de l’un, « aussi bon marché que les sardines: comme elles se multiplient, se trouvent et se pêchent sans peine, elles s’achètent également à bas prix ». Lui revendique de ne pas être un mercenaire, mais un phi- losophe libre, « académicien de nulle académie », proclame-t-il fièrement dans Chandelier, missionnaire de sa propre pensée, la nolana filosofia [. . .].31 A militant for free thought, Bruno anticipated Kant’s message delivered to the question What is Enlightenment?32 and paid for his struggles with power by sac- 30 See Étienne Balibar, Equaliberty: Political Essays, trans. James Ingram (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 31 Jacques Arnould, Giordano Bruno: Un génie, martyr de l’Iinquisition (Paris: Albin Michel, 2021), 52–53. 32 We rely here on a distinctive reading of Kantʼs usage of private and public reason in an attempt of positing an “universalization of emancipatory politics, understood as a singu- larity of—that ʻthing in particular,ʼ ” proposed by Rado Riha in his interpretation of real politics, i.e. universalization of the real. For more, see Rado Riha, “Kako je mogoče misliti singularno univerzalno?,” Filozofski vestnik 20, no. 1 (1999): 193–203. 112 uroš kranjc rificing his very life at the stake. Both Paul and Bruno stand for the faithful mili- tants of presented events, unconditionally maintaining the truth that arises out of them, opposing the established and vested institutional dispositive, main- taining the dispute to be enforced at any cost. As Bruno declared in his last dec- laration to the pope: “The debate will not be closed by my stake, but rather on the contrary, opened after it and perhaps because of it to all humanity.” This Messianic gesture designates a rupture in the established scientific purview that was only left to the likes of Galileo, Kepler, Gilbert and Newton, with philoso- phers Bacon and Descartes to finally conclude the scientific revolution and abol- ish the existing scientific law of the Middle Ages. On the one hand, this signified a historically repetitive, but also confused and unconvincing, reaction coming from the Law towards the promoters of misdeeds, indicating on the other hand a thorough transformation of the institutional landscape taking place. * * * Why are the two figures of Paul and Giordano Bruno important for us? It is be- cause they stand precisely at the crossroads of historical pathways on which our institutional frameworks are decided upon, displaying the recurring (potential- ly failed) mechanisms employed by the Law. Put obversely and concretely, their names represent the agents of instituent praxis stemming at least from the early Middle Ages, giving support to a new distribution of the sensible, new state of situation, new social imaginary significations, new content to floating signifiers, etc. Presently, we can posit along these lines a situation marked with a (rare) visible short-circuit between heteronomy and autonomy emerging from the two heterogeneous events—the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict. These give the latest empirical display of the dialectic of Law (states of emergen- cy and martial law) and Faith (fidelity to a righteous stance, following through end-to-end, a Decision), that was however, already put in place throughout a long history of accumulated institutional growth, glimpses of which we tried to illuminate above. Just consider how elites in power have used the states of emergency (the facts regarding the course of events are used in an entirely non-pejorative way) to impose mandatory vaccinations as a condition to work, vaccine passports and quarantine hotels for restriction of movements and doings, media campaigns, as well as promulgating bizarre obligations of outdoor mask-wearing, banning 113 institutions, history, subjects smoking outside, curfews, and the banning of public protests and manifesta- tions. What recasts the case and trial of Giordano Bruno is the Law’s response to any critical attitude against these measures and the entire development, pro- motion and instrumentalisation of the science-ideology driven narrative around the effectiveness and invincibleness of newly developed mRNA vaccines. How individuals were being discredited and ousted for having questioned the “of- ficial executive narrative” and the agenda behind it has only recently been re- vealed with the publication of the so-called “Twitter Files” and other informal social media correspondence between high-ranking officials of the United King- dom, the United States of America, and the European Commission. The IT and social media giants in cooperation with governments were and still are instruct- ed to pool information about criticisms and to promote “official fact-checking” to fight “disinformation” and conspiracy theories against opposing views on ei- ther the pandemic measures or critical attitudes towards Western support for Ukraine in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Precisely in the same vein as Inquis- itorial judges in pre-trial proceedings, these modern symbiotic administrators collect facts, use various mechanisms to admonish, disqualify and ban individ- uals from public spheres by resorting to talk about the “greater cause” or the “meaningless, but nonetheless valid Law.” Anticipating such a sequence, this is also what is covered by Agamben’s dis- tinction33 between law of the state-of-exception and the Messianic (Kingdom state-of-exception) law, where the first instance indeed suspends the law(s) in force, but is nonetheless an “imperfect nihilism,” a law without any significa- tion, any content, and yet residing in validity, although undecidable. The law of the Messianic Kingdom (“perfect nihilism”), however, represents the suspen- sion of validity itself by the Messiah, destroying any significance, opening “an- other use of the law [. . .]. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value.”34 It must, however, be maintained that such an excess over law, as was the grace for St. Paul coming prior to the law, is a parameter of sustained en- 33 In reference to Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem and Franz Kafka. See Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller- Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 169–72. 34 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception. trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 64. 114 uroš kranjc durance, of insistence on the symptom, of fidelity to the decision that can sus- pend the time and alter the situation—or as Badiou has it: “An evental rupture always constitutes its subject in the divided form of a ʻnot . . . but,ʼ and that it is precisely this form that bears the universal.”35 What is impossible or indifferent as far as the law of a determinate institutional framework is concerned becomes nonetheless possible or transcendental, a potentiality and a fidelity, either for a Christian convert, the Renaissance man, or for a contemporary seeker of ma- terial enjoyment. By Way of Conclusion, the Coming of New Struggles It was held not so long ago that the twenty-first century has not yet begun. With the overture of the financial crises of 2007–13 and the main events of the Cov- id-19 pandemic and the armed conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, we can claim that it has finally begun. In the midst of all these events lie different institutions, international and domestic, tacit and formal, archaic and contemporary that supply us with modes of being and doing by shaping various relationships. A critical analysis of any institutional framework is al- ways comprised of two stages: (1) the continuous tracking and assessment of plastic modifications within the institutional dispositive and a (2) new concep- tualisation of a rupture and de/reconstruction of an existing framework. Our aim for the near future should be to formulate a new analytical framework, par- ticularly in terms of (a) modern (critique of) political economy, that could tackle and build upon the extinguished projects of state-socialisms in the twentieth century, and simultaneously also confront the now abruptly declining model of liberal-democratic economies of the West. The upcoming circumstances dictate that the task of grasping and interpreting a new global setup—considering an interrelated web of burgeoning technological advancements of artificial intelli- gence, bio technologies, virtual spaces, big data economics—in a world of ris- ing individual control and severe environmental changes is needed in the near future. Novelists such as Jonathan Franzen (in his novel Corrections) already portray the slow demise of our imaginary to grasp financial innovations, while Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go) along with the entire cyberpunk genre (Neal Stephenson is a paradigmatic example of the latter) point to our limited (in)ca- 35 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 63–64. 115 institutions, history, subjects pacity for comprehending the technological ramifications waiting around the corner. To confront these challenges, our conceptual apparatuses need to re- assess the historical conditions (economic, political, sociological, psychologi- cal, etc.) of the rise in new technological advancements, but also environmental damage, while sustaining the leitmotif of universal ideas such as equality, en- lightenment, communism, and justice. Why institutions then? Our concluding thesis here is the following: If the nine- teenth century was dominated by class struggles and the twentieth century came absorbed in the struggle of grand narratives, the twenty-first century will have encountered the struggle of institutions. Observing one last time the definitions of the concept of institution, we can pos- it that for us it does not present an extension of a linguistic model based upon rules and equilibrium (social ontology); it is not just a science of institutional origins with their functionalities, modalities and interpretation (sociology) and it can be only formally conceived as a (logical) model of different signatures, i.e. syntaxes and semantics (mathematics and computer science). Neither do insti- tutions fall simply under an empiricist delineation of mainstream (neoclassical) economics. What institutions, and their particular mounting in a framework, need to have is architecture robust enough to institute different logics, ontos (ὄντος) and modalities of creation/modification/change. Furthermore, there is the question of the status of a subject. Is there a subject to/of institution? This was the topic of the second part of this paper: What are the (historical) condi- tions to instigating a subjective process of institutional alteration of a frame- work? What kind of events, occurrences, as well as contingent and necessary sequences evoke a peculiar situation where a dispute, objection, etc. is raised, uncovering the real state-of-affairs in the current institutional setup? We traced these doings to the acts of grace and fidelity, to the “keep going” moment, and the faithfulness of subjects that support and maintain such acts. What can be deducted from the examples of Paul and Bruno is that there has to be autono- mous thought and the freedom to follow it through; there has to be a thought- out exception, i.e. a singular universal, a Decision, going into opposition to the Law and existent registers of knowledge; and there has to be support for the consequences, coming either from a revolutionary act that shatters all relations among objects and places new ones, or else a slow and laborious moulding of existing objects in a framework. This is because the recasting of the framework 116 uroš kranjc had already begun by the time the names of St. Paul or Bruno were used to sig- nify the irreversible re-composition of the institutional framework. References Agamben, Giorgio. The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Econo- my and Government. Translated by Lorenzo Chiesa and Matteo Mandarini. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. . Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. 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Mauss, Marcel, and Paul Fauconnet. “Sociologie: Objet et méthode.” In Cohésion sociale et division de la sociologie, ed. Victor Karady, 139–77. Vol. 3 of Œuvres. Paris: Minuit, 1969. North, Douglass C. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Riha, Rado. “Kako je mogoče misliti singularno univerzalno?” Filozofski vestnik 20, no. 1 (1999): 193–203. Yates, Frances A. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. London: Routledge, 1964. 119 * Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana, Slovenia tomaz.mastnak@guest.arnes.si Keywords August Ludwig von Rochau, Realpolitik, economic power, counterrevolution, Bonapartism, Liberalism Abstract The article deals with August Ludwig von Rochauʼs reformulation of Liberal politics after the defeat of the 1848 revolution. In response to the widely perceived crisis of Liberalism, von Rochau developed a realistic view of politics (he is credited with the in- vention of the concept of Realpolitik) as the basis for a renewed Liberalism. His realism with regard to politics, however, did not extend to a critical view of economic power. Economic power was exempted from political reflection and control. Ali je ekonomska moč institucija? Meje redefinicije liberal- ne politike Augusta Ludwiga von Rochaua Ključne besede August Ludwig von Rochau, Realpolitik, ekonomska moč, kontrarevolucija, bonaparti- zem, liberalizem Povzetek Članek obravnava reformulacijo liberalistične politike po porazu revolucije leta 1848, ki jo je ponudil August Ludwig von Rochau. Von Rochau je kot odgovor na očitno krizo liberalizma razvil kritično razumevanje politike, na katerem je utemeljeval prenovlje- ni liberalizem. Njegov realizem v odnosu do politike (von Rochau velja za iznajdite- lja pojma Realpolitik) pa ni imel dopolnila v kritičnem razumevanju ekonomske moči. Ekonomska moč se je izmaknila tako politični refleksiji kot kontroli. Filozofski vestnik issn 0353-4510 | Volume 45 | Number 1 | 2024 | 119–59 cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.45.1.05 Tomaž Mastnak* Is Economic Power an Institution? The Limits of August Ludwig von Rochau’s Redefinition of Liberal Politics 120 tomaž mastnak ∞ Economic power is an established mode of social action whose structural ele- ments correspond to the definition of an institution in the social sciences, yet it is as a rule not defined as an institution. In the social sciences, institutions are of prime concern. With reference to Paul Fauconnet and Marcel Mauss, Émile Dur- kheim famously defined sociology as “the science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning.”1 I will here presuppose an elemental definition of insti- tution as a social structure, organization, or system of rules, norms, and beliefs that regulate (shape, direct, constrain, manage, control, etc.) social behavior, and is in turn itself based on and regulated by its own rules, norms, and beliefs, as well as by public law, and will ask the question why economic power is gener- ally not dealt with as an institution. This, in my view, is an important theoretical question, but also one that has huge practical implications. Introduction In order to outline the problem, I will begin by touching upon a relatively recent debate that addressed the question of economic power, and note that such de- bates are actually rare. In one of his last publications, Lapo Berti called for lim- iting economic power. He characterized “excessive wealth and economic power in private hands, which produces and presupposes excessive wealth,” as a prob- lem that afflicts contemporary democratic regimes, yet is not taken issue with, or confronted, and, moreover, is not even named. He also reminded the reader that constitutions, which from the beginning of modernity regulate the life of our type of societies and enshrine the social pact, do not deal with economic power. “Among the powers, which [our constitutions] are trying to temper and control, economic power does not figure.”2 Berti belonged to the Italian operaista collective that launched the journal Pri- mo Maggio in 1973, and more specifically to the “working group on money” as- 1 Émile Durkheim, “Préface de la seconde edition,” in Les règles de la méthode socioloqique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), xxii; all translations of non-English works are my own. 2 Lapo Berti, “Mettere un limite al potere economico,” CivicoLab, December 11, 2017, https:// www.civicolab.it/mettere-un-limite-al-potere-economico/. 121 is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . . sociated with the journal.3 In retrospect, that was one of the last productive at- tempts to retool and revitalize Marxist theory so that it would be able to engage with contemporary capitalism. What in the early 1970s determined contempo- rary capitalism was the world economic crisis that was building up, and capi- tal’s response to it. Characteristic of the crisis was an enormous expansion of the boundaries of monetary policy. Along with it grew the space “to maneuver and manipulate money for political ends.” As Berti later observed: “Money had become an institution with a high political value. After effectively being trans- formed into an instrument of government, it was thus inevitable for monetary policy to directly intervene in the power struggle between social classes.” At the center of the working group on money’s analysis was the insight that “money is an institution which is part of the governance of society.”4 The analyses of the working group on money were initiated and given direction by Sergio Bologna’s rereading of Marx’s articles on Crédit Mobilier, published during the world economic crisis of the mid-1850s. Bologna argued that those forgotten or neglected articles represented an important shift in Marx’s theoret- ical development. In them, Marx turned his attention to the “money form.” The “institutional organization of the money form, the bank, becomes the point of departure for Marx’s analysis of the whole of the bourgeoisie, of capital in its entirety.”5 Crédit Mobilier was “the first appearance of investment banking in the nascent European capitalism.”6 The celebrated Italian economist Piero Sraffa in his lec- tures at Cambridge in 1929–30, for example, presented it as “an antecedent of industrial banking, and industrial banking as a type (or ideal-type) of a conti- 3 See Stefano Lucarelli, “The 1973–1978 Workgroup on Money of the Journal Primo Maggio: An Example of a Pluralist Critique of Political Economy,” International Journal of Pluralism and Economics Education 4, no. 1 (2013): 30–50, http://doi.org/10.1504/ijpee.2013.053585. 4 Lapo Berti, “Interview: Marx, Money and Capital,” interview by Paolo Davoli and Letizia Rustichelli, trans. Ettore Lancellotti and Letizia Rustichelli (n.p.: Rhizosfera, 2016) 16–17, 19, 23, https://monoskop.org/images/1/1a/Marx%2C_Money_and_Capital._An_Interview_ with_Lapo_Berti.pdf. 5 Sergio Bologna, “Moneta e crisi: Marx corrispondente della ‘New York Daily Tribune,’ ” Primo Maggio: Saggi e documenti per una storia di classe 1, no. 1 (June–September 1973): 3. 6 Joseph Ricciardi, “Marx on Financial Intermediation: Lessons of the French Crédit Mobilier in the New York Daily Tribune,” Science and Society 79, no. 4 (October 2015): 498, http:// doi.org/10.1521/siso.2015.79.4.497. 122 tomaž mastnak nental banking system differing from the English system.” Crédit Mobilier was an institutional innovation that answered the problem of financing industry.7 From a different perspective, Crédit Mobilier was a key institution of the new Bonapartist regime, which Louis Bonaparte established in France after his coup d’état in December 1851. Marx’s articles on Crédit Mobilier represent an impor- tant advance in his understanding and critique of Bonapartism as first laid out in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, as well as in his understanding of capitalism.8 It is easy to observe a cross-fertilization between the Italian operaists’ analysis of the 1970s economic crisis and their reading of Marx’s articles on Crédit Mobili- er. With the new understanding of how the advanced capitalist system worked, it was possible to detect in Bonapartism or, to be precise, in the economic revo- lution under the wing of the Bonapartist counter-revolutionary political dicta- torship, elements, or beginnings, of the institutionalization of monetary power and of financial policies as an instrument of government. As Sergio Bologna wrote, Marx in his articles on Crédit Mobilier (preceding his work on the man- uscript we know as the Grundrisse) confronted the Bonapartist regime as “the first accomplished form of the modern state, as the rule of social capital [. . .] as the first accomplished form of the modern monetary system.”9 Bologna here projected too much on Marx’s articles. Marx only came to under- stand Bonapartism as the modern form of the state, or as the modern state, fif- teen years later in his writings on the Paris Commune. Drafting his well-known Civil War in France, Marx characterized Louis Bonaparte’s rule as the “ultimate political form” of “bourgeois society,” as “the statepower of modern classrule.”10 Such appreciation of Bonapartism was not unique. For Friedrich Engels, too, Bonapartism was “a modern form of the state,”11 as it was earlier, for example, 7 Michel Bellet and Adrien Lutz, “Piero Sraffa and the Project to Publish Saint-Simon’s Works,” Social Science Research Network (SSRN) (2019): 10, 14, https://doi.org/10.2139/ ssrn.3312188. 8 I discuss this in Tomaž Mastnak, Bonapartizem: Prolegomena za študij fašizma (Ljubljana: Založba /*cf., 2021), chap. 10. 9 Bologna, “Moneta e crisi,” 5. 10 Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France (Second Draft),” in Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), pt. 1 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, Akademie Verlag, and De Gruyter, 1972–), 22:117. 11 Friedrich Engels, “Ergänzung der Vorbemerkung von 1870 zu ‘Der deutsche Bauernkrieg,’ ” in Marx-Engels-Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1957–68), 18:513. 123 is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . . for Theodor Mundt12 and Bruno Bauer (who considered Louis Bonaparte’s em- pire a “modern empire”).13 What is important for my argument is that we find here an initial analysis of eco- nomic power as an institution in Marx, which is intertwined with his analysis of the modern state. We are in the 1850s, at the junction in history that witnessed crucially important developments of both political and economic power. One might say that we are at a decisive or formative moment in the historical forma- tion of modern political and economic power. Just as the formation of modern political and economic power took place si- multaneously, and the two were interlinked, so did the beginnings of their ana- lytical and conceptual understanding. The times when political thinkers could write their treatises as if the economy had not existed14 were definitively over. However, and this is the paradox I want to highlight, whereas political power was widely discussed, the elements for a conceptualization of economic power do not seem to have been taken up and systematically developed—at least not with the same intensity and to the same extent as discussions of political pow- er. And, as Berti pointed out, whatever understanding of economic power there existed, it was not—in contrast to political power—translated into institutional policies and constitutional arrangements. Economic power would become a practical issue, for example, in the United States with the antitrust Sherman Act of 1890, or with the suspension of the Act during the World War II industrial mobilization, and it was theoretically ad- dressed in the work of Thorstein Veblen, the British New Liberals (J. A. Hobson in the first place), and the German Ordoliberals (especially Franz Böhm and Walter Eucken, but also Hans Grossmann-Doerth).15 But the volume of these writings 12 Theodor Mundt, Paris und Louis Napoleon: Neue Skizzen aus dem französischen Kaiserreich (Berlin: Verlag von Otto Janke, 1858), 2:175. 13 Bruno Bauer, Russland und das Germanenthum (Charlottenburg: Verlag von Egbert Bauer, 1853), 75. 14 See István Hont, introduction to Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historcal Perspective (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005), 1–156. 15 More on this in Tomaž Mastnak, Črna internacionala: Vojna, veliki biznis in vpeljava neolib- eralizma (Ljubljana: Založba /*cf., 2019), chap. 1, 2, 5. 124 tomaž mastnak seems negligible in comparison with all that has been and continues to be writ- ten and talked about political power, and today hardly anyone discusses them. A history of the sporadic and fragmented thinking about economic power is a desideratum. Here, however, I aim to elucidate the absence of such thinking at a point in political and intellectual history, where one would, by the “logic of things,” expect it to occur. I will de-center my discussion from the already men- tioned “English model,” which has decisively shaped and dominated our views on modern political-economic history as well as on the societies we live in, and blinded us to the issue of economic power, while at the same time glorifying it. I will turn instead to the developments in continental Europe. I will focus on Au- gust Ludwig von Rochau’s book The Principles of Realpolitik. Published in 1853, von Rochau’s book redefined liberal politics and policies af- ter the defeat of the progressive forces in the 1848–49 revolution, and was wide- ly read and influential in Germany in the third quarter of the nineteenth centu- ry.16 The book was polemical, a Streitschrift, yet it also brought about a shift in theoretical perspectives on politics. As such, von Rochau has earned his charac- terization as one of the most interesting German political writers of the second half of the nineteenth century.17 While the book was an intervention into German political life, it was not provin- cial. At the core of von Rochau’s theoretical innovations were reflections upon Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état in France and upon the Bonapartist system that the violent seizure of power had inaugurated. The Italian historian Trocini has re- cently credited von Rochau with discovering the “law of power.”18 Since this term refers to political power, I take von Rochau and his Principles of Realpolitik to be a perfect case for asking the question of why this discovery of the “law of pow- er,” that is, these new reflections on power, did not encompass economic power. 16 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, introduction to Grundsätze der Realpolitik: Angewendet auf die sta- atlichen Zustände Deutschlands, by Ludwig August von Rochau, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1972), 7–21. 17 Federico Trocini, L’invenzione della “Realpolitik” e la scoperta della “legge del potere”: August Ludwig von Rochau tra radicalismo e nazional-liberalismo (Bologna: Società edi- trice il Mulino, 2009), 15. 18 Trocini. 125 is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . . I will first say a few things about von Rochau. I will then present his ideas about a realistic approach to politics and the introduction of the concept of Realpoli- tik.19 This will be followed by addressing the question of how to understand von Rochau’s redefinition of liberalism, which will include a discussion of Bonapar- tism, of the defeat of the 1848 revolution, and of contemporary critiques of liber- alism. I will conclude by exploring the limits of Realpolitik, that is, von Rochau’s failure to take issue with economic power. August Ludwig von Rochau August Ludwig von Rochau was born in 1810 in Prussia. During his student years, in the early 1830s, he was heavily involved with Burschenschaften, stu- dent associations or fraternities. In order to escape imprisonment for his radical activities—a court in Frankfurt had sentenced him to life—he fled to France in 1836. From Paris, where he became acquainted with other German exiles and developed an interest in Fourierism, he worked as a translator and wrote as a correspondent for a number of German liberal newspapers. In 1840, he pub- lished a book on Charles Fourier’s “social theory” and seven years later another one on his travels in southern France and Spain. In 1846, von Rochau returned to Germany and worked as an editor in Heidel- berg. After the general amnesty of March 1848, he took part in the Vorparla- ment in Frankfurt and was active as a journalist. On the liberal left himself, he soon began to criticize the impotence of German liberals—their lack of “moral and material strength”—as well as the “eccentricities of the extreme left” and 19 Whether the concept of Realpolitik was indeed invented by von Rochau is of secondary im- portance. The point is that he introduced the concept into wide public usage. See Wehler, introduction to Grundsätze, 7. Duncan Kelley calls von Rochau “the most important de- veloper of the concept.” Ducan Kelley, “August Ludwig von Rochau and Realpolitik as Historical Political Theory,” Global Intellectual History 3, no. 3 (2018): 302, https://doi.org /10.1080/23801883.2017.1387331. See also John Bew, Realpolitik: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), chap. 1. According to Trocini (L’invenzione della “Realpolitik”, 8), von Rochau also introduced to the German political language the term “socialism” (Socialismus). His reference seems to be to von Rochau’s early publication on Fourier’s “social theory.” However, the term does not appear in that text, in which von Rochau in fact used the term “socialist.” See the use of the term Socialisten in Rochau’s book, written under the pseudonym A. L. Churoa, Kritische Darstellung der Socialtheorie Fourier’s, ed. Gustav Bacherer (Braunschweig: G. C. F. Meyer sen., 1840), 67. 126 tomaž mastnak the “arrogance of the conservatives.”20 Soon after the defeat of the revolution, he emigrated again, this time to Switzerland, travelled through Italy, and pub- lished a book about the travels. In 1852 he took residence in Heidelberg and dedicated himself to writing. He published books on Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état and on the Moriscos in Spain, the Principles of Realpolitik, and later in the 1850s a history of France in two volumes, and a new edition of the Principles of Realpolitik. That second edition of the Principles of Realpolitik impacted the younger gen- eration of German liberals like a “bolt of lightning,” as von Rochau’s younger contemporary, the historian and liberal politician Heinrich von Treitschke was to say in his obituary for von Rochau.21 In the late 1850s, von Rochau entered politics and as one of the leaders of the liberal Nationalverein and worked for the unification of Germany. This finally brought him to supporting Prussia and its Minister-President Otto von Bismarck for their leading role in the state uni- fication process. Von Bismarck, as we know, was and remains something of a symbol of anti-liberalism, and von Rochau had a clash with him in 1850, which cost him his journalistic license. Up to 1866, von Rochau regarded von Bismarck as the “Messiah of feudal aristocracy.”22 But the war in 1866, in which Prussia defeated Austria and established itself as the leading German state and the un- disputed bearer of national unification, changed the political calculus—not only for the liberals, but also for the socialist labor movement as well.23 Soon after von Rochau the politician had made his nod to von Bismarck’s politi- cal success, to what he regarded as Erfolgspolitik, he offered a theoretical justifi- cation as well. In 1869, he published the second part of the Principles of Realpo- litik. The first volume in 1853 had appeared anonymously and prompted guesses about the authorship. Some, for example, attributed the work to Arnold Ruge. I find this an interesting choice because, on the eve of the 1848 revolution, Ruge 20 For these citations, see Trocini, L’invenzione della “Realpolitik”, 32. 21 Quoted in Trocini, L’invenzione della “Realpolitik”, 35. For a more cautious view, cf. Natascha Doll, Recht, Politik und “Realpolitik” bei August Ludwig von Rochau (1810–1873) (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005). 22 Quoted in Trocini, L’invenzione della “Realpolitik”, 36. 23 See Cora Stephan, “Genossen, wir dürfen uns nicht von der Geduld hinreißen lassen!” Zur Theoriebildung in der deutschen Sozialdemokratie 1862–1878 (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlag sanstalt, 1981), chap. 2, 3. 127 is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . . (an erstwhile close associate of Marx) published a “self-critique of liberalism,” in which he called on his fellow radical democrats to make the transition from liberalism to “democratism.”24 The second volume of the Principles of Realpoli- tik, too, was printed without von Rochau’s name on the title page, yet this time the authorship was not kept a secret. In the eyes of some scholars, the book es- tablished von Rochau as a literary precursor of Bismarckian politics, and von Bismarck himself now on some occasions passed flattering judgement on him.25 Von Rochau died in 1873 as a member of the German Reichstag. Realpolitik, Constitutional Politics, Force In his Principles of Realpolitik, von Rochau goes in medias res. His starting point is the state, and his objective is to define “the dynamic basic law of the state [Staatswesen].” The state is “the political organism of human society,” whose existence is “based on natural necessity.”26 This “natural” necessity is under- stood historically: in a historically given state, it is fulfilled through the inter- action of manifold forces, whose composition, measure, and results endlessly change with time and place. “The starting point of all political understanding is the study of the forces that shape, maintain, and transform the state, and its first step leads to the following insight: that the law of strength [Stärke] domi- nates the life of the state in a similar way that the law of gravitation dominates the material world.”27 Whereas the old Staatswissenschaft fully understood that “truth,” it drew from it a “false and baleful” conclusion: “the right of the stronger.” In modern times, this “unethical erroneous conclusion” (that the stronger has the right) was cor- rected, yet at the same time something important was lost from sight: “the real power [Macht] of the stronger,” whose importance in and for the state necessari- 24 Arnold Ruge, “Selbstkritik des Liberalismus,” in Arnold Ruge’s sämmtliche Werke, 2nd ed. (Mannheim: J. P. Grohe, 1847–48), 4:116. On attribution, see Trocini, L’invenzione della “Realpolitik”, 13n10. 25 See Trocini, 39, 47, 228. 26 On the “organism” metaphor, see Lynn K. Nyhart, “The Political Organism: Karl Vogt on Animals and States in the 1840s and ’50s,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 47, no. 5 (November 2017): 602–28, https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2017.47.5.602. 27 August Ludwig von Rochau, Grundsätze der Realpolitik, angewendet auf die staatlichen Zustände Deutschlands (Stuttgart: Verlag von Karl Göpel, 1853), 1. I will refer to this work as Grundsätze (1853). 128 tomaž mastnak ly needed to be recognized. “This error is the cause of the grossest blunders and heaviest defeats of the constitutional politics [Verfassungspolitik], committed and suffered in European states for some generations.”28 There is a lot to unpack here, but let us just note first that the formulations of von Rochau that I cited belie the criticism that his was a “social Darwinism avant la lettre,”29 and turn to the core of his argument, to his critique of constitutional politics. Whereas his view of politics was definitively state-centered, his view of the state was just as clearly not constitution-centered. The examination of the question of who ought to govern, whether the right, wis- dom, [or] virtue, whether one, or few, or many—this question belongs to the realm of philosophical speculation; the practical politics first has to deal with the sim- ple fact only power alone is that which can govern. To govern means exercising power, and solely he who has power can exercise power. This direct connection between power and governing is the basic truth of all politics and the key to the entire history.30 As we see, von Rochau blamed political blunders and defeats of the recent past—which included the 1848 revolution—on the preoccupation with constitu- tional politics, that is, with the form of government. This is how he interpreted the recent and lived history. Early in the twentieth century, the great liberal his- torian Guido de Ruggiero offered a very similar interpretation, describing two of the three main proposals put forward by German liberals in 1848 as “to obtain, especially in Prussia, genuinely modern constitutions in place of the old feudal diets; and to make these constitutions a bond of political union for the whole German people.”31 There was a theoretical dimension to von Rochau’s interpretation. His decenter- ing of the state from the question of the constitution was very much an expres- sion of the Zeitgeist. In the aftermath of the 1789 French Revolution, the more perceptive political thinkers of the time tended to turn their attention away from 28 Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 1–2. 29 Wehler, introduction to Grundsätze, 11. 30 Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 2. 31 Guido de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism, trans. R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927), 248. 129 is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . . the constitution and progressively ceased to rely on the classical political lan- guage of the forms of government. Such was the case with Benjamin Constant, who was among the leading thinkers seeking to reformulate or reconstruct the post-revolutionary political theory and rehabilitate political language, and who observed that “the study of the constitutional organisation of government [. . .] had generally fallen into disgrace.”32 Refusing to differentiate between the forms of government, he in his Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation, instead introduced the distinction between “regular government and that which is not [regular],” and the concept of usurpation, which applied to the latter.33 As another example of turning away from the question of constitution as the central political question, I will cite Lorenz Stein (later in life: von Stein). Stein was von Rochau’s contemporary and even lived in Paris when von Rochau, too, was there. And like the latter, he studied the contemporary French socialism and communism, and French political developments in general. I have seen no mention of their ever meeting, but Stein cited von Rochau’s pseudonymous book on Fourier in his own account of “socialism and communism in today’s France.”34 In a later work, analyzing contemporary French political struggles, Stein detected the shift from Verfassung to Verwaltung, that is, from constitu- tion, or the form of government, to administration (or management). For Stein, administration was the application, or the use, of state power.35 The question was who uses state power and for what purposes. Stein linked that shift to the emergence of “social democracy” as a fusion of the radical democratic republican “political movement” with the socialist “social 32 Biancamaria Fontana, Benjamin Constant and the Post-Revolutionary Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 18; see also 13, 15, 27. 33 Benjamin Constant, “De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation dans les rapports avec la civilisation européenne,” in Écrits politiques, ed. Marcel Gauchet (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 181, 184. 34 Lorenz Stein, Der Socialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs: Ein Beitrag zur Zeitgeschichte (Leipzig: Verlag von Otto Wigand, 1842), 263, 278. 35 Lorenz Stein, Das Königthum, die Republik und die Souveränität der französischen Gesell- schaft seit der Februarrevolution 1848, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Verlag von Otto Wigand, 1855), 216. In his voluminous later work on the science of administration, or management, he defined administration as the “concrete realization of the will or essence of the state.” Lorenz Stein, Die Verwaltungslehre: Erster Theil (Stuttgart: Verlag der J. G. Cottaschen Buchhandlung, 1865), 9. 130 tomaž mastnak movement.” In his interpretation, the key importance of the administration of the state was recognized precisely by the labor movement. As long as the prop- ertied class, which had state power in its hands, did not use it in the interest of the propertyless class, the latter had to fight to take over the administration of the state. Then it could use “all the means of state power to promote the laboring class with regard to its most essential interest.” The administration of the state by the working class meant the “administration of social reform.”36 Von Rochau himself wrote about the “struggle for the possession of public authority [öffentli- che Gewalt]” between the governed and the governing, which had run through the “whole of European history” and had been the moving force “in the present century more than in any preceding.”37 The final discredit of the forms of government approach to politics and the state was brought about by Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’etat. On the one hand, Louis Bonaparte’s seizure of power dispensed with constitutional niceties and was an apotheosis of the politics of force that sent waves of admiration (among the ruling classes) and horror (among those with democratic leanings) across Eu- rope. On the other hand, the fact of the successful coup and the system of pow- er it inaugurated, the so-called Bonapartism (or Caesarism), posed a problem to apologists and critics alike: its nature could not be explained in the existing (traditional) language of politics and in particular could not be captured with the categories of the forms of government.38 When von Rochau relegated reflections on politics in terms of forms of govern- ment to “philosophical speculation,” he put at the center of thinking about practical politics—for practical, or real, politics was what he was interested in— the “fact” (Tatsache) of strength, force, and power. In this regard, too, he was very much expressing the spirit of the age. A good example of how “force” began to be considered of central importance is von Rochau’s French contemporary Auguste Romieu. Even before Louis Bonaparte seized power, Romieu wrote of “Caesarism” as a new political phenomenon. Writing about new political phe- nomena as a rule goes together with new ways of looking at politics, as well as with realizing that the old concepts have lost their explanatory power. In this 36 Stein, Das Königthum, 217–18. 37 Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 41. 38 I quote the textual evidence in Mastnak, Bonapartizem, chap. 1–2. 131 is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . . sense Romieu wrote, for example, that the emerging Caesarism “signifies nei- ther royalty, nor empire, nor despotism, nor tyranny.”39 Romieu connected the advent of Caesarism with the decline of monarchies. Na- poleon may have wanted to restore “monarchical foundations” for his rule, but could not succeed in that intention. Monarchy rested on faith and the hereditary principle, but the era of faith had been succeeded by the age of reason. Conse- quently, Caesarism could not be “founded,” like monarchy had been, but had to be “established.” To be precise: it had to “establish” itself. It could only rely on itself, and that ultimately meant relying on force.40 With the sacred gone under the new reign of reason, only force had remained. Force was a “FACT,” it was at the bottom of all human institutions, even those believed to have been born “in the name of liberty.”41 Bonapartism and Realpolitik Bonapartism made a big impact on von Rochau’s understanding of politics. It was a revealing moment. Von Rochau was quick to describe the coup d’état in great detail. He published a booklet in which he explained how Louis Bonaparte had “seized absolute power [Alleinherrschaft] with violence” and had his autoc- racy legitimized both democratically, through a plebiscitary vote of the people, and priestly, by the Church, which “with a Te Deum declared God the originator of the coup d’état.”42 In his History of France, he again narrated the preparations for and the execution of the coup, and the political changes it introduced. That narration made it clear how easily Louis Bonaparte repeatedly dispensed with the existing constitution and the law, and how he, relying on force and pow- er, shaped the new constitution according to his will.43 In his booklet on Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état, von Rochau cited Auguste Thiers, who had allegedly retorted to the police officer who came to arrest him “in the name of law,” that 39 Auguste Romieu, L’ère des césars, 2nd ed. (Paris: Ledoyen, 1850), 30. 40 Romieu, 194–95, 197. 41 Romieu, 200–3. 42 August Ludwig von Rochau, Vier Wochen französischer Geschichte: 1. December 1851–1. Januar 1852 (Leipzig: Avenarius & Mendelssohn, 1852), 139, 161. 43 August Ludwig von Rochau, Geschichte Frankreichs vom Sturze Napoleon bis zur Wieder- herstellung des Kaiserthumes, 1814–1852 (Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1858), 2:314–30. 132 tomaž mastnak the arrest was made “in the name of violence.”44 In the History of France, the di- mension of violence and force is even more pronounced. In the Principles of Realpolitik, however, von Rochau delivered a categorical judgment of Louis Bonaparte’s coup. He characterized it as an epochal moment in modern political history (eine große Epoche in der politischen Geschichte der Neuzeit). He confronted his reader with the following shocking fact (Tatsache): The people that have for two generations stood at the helm of the European move- ment, that have in the name of civic freedom gone through a string of most diffi- cult trials and withstood them, that after the fall of Napoleonic domination seem to have made themselves completely at home in the parliamentarian system, these people have overnight lapsed back into an absolutism, which on this side of the Russian border does not have an equal any longer.45 How was one to understand the fact that “the highest official of the French peo- ple overthrew the constitution and the law [Gesetz], private and public law [Re- cht] of the country, and seized for himself a plenitude of power, thanks to which he can with unlimited arbitrariness command not only over the state institu- tions but also over the life, freedom, and property of citizens”?46 Von Rochau had an answer: These events hold one of the biggest political lessons that history has ever taught. What emerges from them in the first place, and with an unprecedented clarity, is the incurable nothingness of constitutions, which seek to separate public law from public power, that confront the armed power with unarmed right. The pol- itics of facts overthrows governments and creates governments; the constitutive constitutional politics on the contrary has essentially nothing else to do but to rec- ognize the existing powers and consecrate them with the written law.47 Some historians of political thought hold the view that Bonapartism entered von Rochau’s thinking in the first place as regarding international relations.48 I 44 Rochau, Vier Wochen französischer Geschichte, 18. 45 Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 207. 46 Rochau, 207–8. 47 Rochau, 208. 48 See Kelley, “August Ludwig von Rochau,” 312 et passim. 133 is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . . do not think so. France under Emperor Bonaparte—whom von Rochau, just like, for example, his contemporaries Stein and Mundt, saw as being bent on war49— was of course a big issue for German foreign policy. But an effective foreign pol- icy clearly demanded building up German unity, that is, it was reflected on the internal political changes. Bonapartism (and French contemporary politics in general) had a formative im- pact on von Rochau’s thinking about the nature of politics. I do not think that that impact can properly be explained as his—or Stein’s—“nationalizing in Ger- man form the social diagnoses of French political theory.”50 Rather, both von Ro- chau and Stein were following and reflecting upon the “raw” politics and social movements in the neighboring country and, based on their observations and analyses, formulated their own theories. Stein, studying French political devel- opments, hammered out a “theory of society,” or social theory.51 Von Rochau, himself stimulated by French political developments but primarily concerned with the state of the fragmented German nation, worked out a theory of politics in a realistic key. “Realism” was a philosophical concept. In Ludwig Feuerbach’s influential state- ment, which reverberated especially on the Hegelian left, Realismus represent- ed the spirit of the time or of the future.52 It was opposed to “theology,” and “the negation of theology” was “the essence of the modern time [Wesen der neuern Zeit].” If in Feuerbach’s critique, realism was the opposite of “refined illusions and unbecoming [vettelhaft] prejudices,”53 in von Rochau’s polemics it was pit- ted against abstraction, speculation, chimeras, dogmatism, doctrinairism, cas- tles in the air, the autonomous power of ideas and principles, and “creatures 49 For Rochau, see the 1859 edition of Grundsätze der Realpolitik, angewendet auf die sta- atlichen Zustände Deutschlands: Neue, mit einer Einleitung vermehrte Ausgabe (Stuttgart: Verlag von Karl Göpel, 1859), iii. 50 See Kelley, “August Ludwig von Rochau,” 311. 51 See Lorenz Stein, Der Begriff der Gesellschaft und die sociale Geschichte der französischen Revolution bis zum Jahre 1830, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Verlag von Otto Wigand, 1855), especially the long introduction. 52 Quoted in Wehler, introduction to Grundsätze, 7, and Trocini, L’invenzione della “Realpolitik”, 13. 53 Ludwig Feuerbach, Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (Zürich: Verlag des literarisch- en Comptoirs, 1843), iii, 23. 134 tomaž mastnak of ideas.”54 The same applies to repeated references to “facts.” These referenc- es were an expression of the rise and growing prestige of the natural scienc- es, which Feuerbach counted among “the so-called real sciences [reale Wissen- schaften]” as prime examples of “empiricism or realism.”55 Just like Stein, who was well acquainted with Hegelian philosophy, turned to class struggles, von Rochau turned to social struggles or, to use a more cautious formu- lation, social dynamics. He postulated the importance of studying social forces (gesellschaftliche Kräfte) “that shape, maintain, and transform the state.” (If this formulation sounds rather Machivellian, it is because it probably was: Machia- velli was at the time an important presence in German thinking about French politics.)56 In von Rochau’s view, the constitution of a state was “determined by reciprocal relations among the forces that are either active or resting within that state. Each social force [gesellschaftliche Kraft] claims a standing within the state that corresponds to its magnitude, and the state power [Staatskraft] itself is solely the sum of the social forces that the state has integrated into itself.”57 In his analysis of the active and passive social forces in Germany, and ponder- ing their intellectual and monetary power—he spoke of Geistes- und Geldkräfte der Gesellschaft58—von Rochau privileged the historical position and role of the rising middle classes, of the “middle estate.” That Mittelstand possessed in the greatest measure “wealth, opinion, and intelligence,” the “main social forces,” the “three factors” that had to be reflected in the representative system.59 This social analysis was clearly pregnant with a political program. It postulated the need to adjust the political system to the social transformation, which meant the necessity of the state integrating the advancing social forces, as well as mirror- ing the waning strength of the old social forces. 54 Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 2, 3, 23, 32, 91, 106, 131, 153, 165, 212. 55 Feuerbach, Grundsätze der Philosophie, 23. Nyhart writes that “the natural world and its sciences” provided “a source of legitimation for politics, especially liberal politics.” Nyhart, “Political Organism,” 32. 56 Theodor Mundt, for example, published three editions of his book on Machiavelli between 1851 and 1861 (I cite the first and the third enlarged edition in notes 72 and 82). See also Jacob Venedey, Machiavel, Montesquieu, Rousseau (Berlin: Franz Duncker, 1850). Von Rochau was close with Venedey during his French exile. 57 Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 4. 58 Rochau, 9. 59 Rochau, 24. 135 is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . . Following such “historical-sociological” approach, however, would lead us away from the main concern of this paper, which is not so much the social trans- formation as the political transformation. I differentiate between them for the sake of argument, and want to further specify that the political transformation I am primarily interested in here is that which concerns political ideology and theory. And of special interest to me in this regard are the fortunes of liberalism. Was the Revolution Defeated? The few scholars who have studied von Rochau agree that his Principles of Re- alpolitik was a book that crucially contributed to the reformulation of German liberalism.60 These appreciations of von Rochau’s work turn on the question of the failure of the 1848 revolution. The reformulation of liberal theory, ideology, and politics appears to have been prompted by the experience of defeat. But let us first ask: Was the revolution really defeated? This question contains two sub-questions: Which revolution? Whose revolution? The question of the defeat of the 1848 revolution was a moot question already for contemporaries. Karl Marx famously wrote that, “with the exception of only a few chapters, every major section of the annals of the revolution of 1848 to 1849 carries the heading: Defeat of the revolution!”61 The German historian Jo- hann Gustav Droysen had a more nuanced view. He wrote that Louis Bonapar- te’s regime rested “on the European movement of 1848” and was “its ripe fruit.” He explained: “Everywhere else the big European reaction has won, only in France did the wild movement coalesce into a new positive foundation.”62 Considering Bonapartism the fruit of the 1848 revolution may be confusing. To untangle the confusion, Droysen referred to the conservative legal scholar Frie- drich Julius Stahl and his “confreres,” who had commented that “the street tu- mult, barricades, the revolts, etc.,” as such were not to be understood as revo- 60 I cannot enter into a discussion of this literature here. For an exhaustive list of sources, see Trocini, L’invenzione della “Realpolitik”, and Kelley, “August Ludwig von Rochau”; see also Wehler, introduction to Grundsätze. 61 Karl Marx, “Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich 1848 bis 1849,” in Marx-Engels-Gesamt- ausgabe, pt. 1, 10:119. 62 Johann Gustav Droysen, “Zur Charakteristik der europäishen Krisis,” in Politische Schrif- ten, ed. Felix Gilbert, (Munich: Verlag von R. Oldenbourg, 1933), 310. 136 tomaž mastnak lution.63 Droysen added that it was “also certain that [revolution] was not end- ed in the moment when it stabilized itself in a monarchistic form.”64 (That was also Stahl’s view: that Bonapartism, characterized by “mechanical violence,” was not “the closing of the revolution but its consolidation.”)65 For beyond the “street tumult,” momentous changes were taking place in nineteenth century Europe, of which the year 1848 was only one moment: “All the basics and con- ditions of European life, all social and state forces, all mental and material fac- tors have changed.”66 Droysen’s description of those changes was not unlike the picture Marx and Engels drew in the Communist Manifesto.67 Only that Droysen seems not to have found much to celebrate in “the destruction of the old,” which progressed with an “insuperable force.”68 Unlike von Rochau, who portrayed the growing importance and strength of the middle classes, Droysen saw them already helplessly falling victim to the Verpö- belung generated by the economic changes that the Communist Manifesto por- trayed as the revolutionary work of the liberal bourgeoisie: just like the “lower strata,” the “middle strata” were being “reduced to mob.”69 But like von Ro- 63 Droysen, 310. Droysen referred to Friedrich Julius Stahl, Was ist die Revolution? Ein Vortrag, auf Veranstaltung des Evangelischen Vereins für kirchliche Zwecke am 8. März 1852 gehalten, 3rd ed., with an addendum Die Reformation und die Revolution (Berlin: Verlag von Wilhelm Schultze, 1852), 8–9. 64 Droysen, “Zur Charakteristik,” 310. 65 Stahl, Was ist die Revolution?, 13. Constantin Frantz saw “mechanic coercive power [mech- anische Zwangsgewalt]” as characteristic of liberalism. Constantin Frantz, Vorschule zur Physiologie der Staaten (Berlin: Ferdinand Schneider, 1857), 290. 66 Droysen, “Zur Charakteristik,” 322. Here, too, Stahl held a similar view: “Revolution is not a one-off act; it is a continued condition, a new order of things,” brought about by turn- ing the world upside down, by an Umwälzung. Stahl, Was ist die Revolution?, 4, 8. Von Rochau, for his part, held a negative view of the historical school of law, to which Stahl belonged. See Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 93–95. 67 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei,” in Marx-Engels- Werke, 4:459–93, especially pt. I. 68 Droysen, “Zur Charakteristik,” 324. 69 Droysen, 324. A few decades later, Wilhelm Roscher made a similar point, writing about the middle estate melting away at both the top and at bottom and the people splitting “into the opposition of the over-rich capitalists and the wholly propertyless workers.” He called the emerging system plutocracy, giving rise to “Caesarism.” See Wilhelm Roscher, “Umrisse zur Naturlehre des Cäsarismus,” in Abhandlungen der philologisch-historisch- en Classe der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1888), 10:641–42. An earlier “Naturlehre” of Caesarism can be found in Constantin Frantz, 137 is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . . chau, Droysen detected the change in the nature of political power, at the core of which was the expansion of “power” and of its importance. The key change was not that power simply expanded, grew, but that it now began to generate itself. The state became an “institution” that was “engendering [erzeugen: producing, generating] power and exercising it.”70 Droysen compared this new type of institutionalized power to that “insuperable force” with which the economic changes asserted themselves. He described the state as similar to the “big mechanized [or: machine-based] industry.” This state machine, absorbing the power of the “artisanal” type and eating up the “auton- omy of all the lower circles,” became omnipotent. It “needed and demanded omnipotence” in order to have everyone and everything at its disposal at any given time, to use for its own purposes, to determine, and to mobilize.71 Where- as von Rochau used the medieval legal term plenitude (or fullness) of power (plenitudo potestatis) to describe the post-revolutionary French state, Droysen described it as omnipotent. In contrast to the static state of the preceding pe- riod, which had summed up in itself the existing stable relations of power, the omnipotent new state was producing power: its own power. It became a produc- tive force on the industrial model. If we understand revolution in the modern sense as a radical change (and not in the traditional meaning of a circular motion), the transformation of political power Droysen described was revolutionary. However, the omnipotent state ma- chine he depicted was the Caesarist, or Bonapartist, state of France, and it was an exception. (Only in retrospect does it appear as a political vanguard, the har- binger of “the new normal.”) Elsewhere in Europe, as Droysen wrote, reaction had won. And even if we consider the Bonapartist type of power to have been the fruit of revolution, that does not mean that it was a revolutionary type of power. In fact, that was a reactionary, or counter-revolutionary, regime. Theodore Mundt captured the paradox when he characterized Bonapartism (he called it Napoleonism) as “the true system of revolutionary reaction in modern Naturlehre des Staates als Grundlage aller Staatswissenschaft (Leipzig: C. F. Winter’sche Verlagshandlung, 1870), especially 173–74 et passim, and even earlier in Constantin Frantz, Vorschule zur Physiologie, passim. 70 Droysen, “Zur Charakteristik,” 323. 71 Droysen, 323. 138 tomaž mastnak Europe.”72 Already in 1849, Alfred Meißner, a German writer of democratic lean- ings (whom Marx and Engels ridiculed as a “true socialist”), wrote of the “work of the counterrevolution,” that is, of the counterrevolution at work within the French Revolution.73 In that context he described the plans of Louis Bonaparte and his “Napoleonic party” as part of the “plans of the counterrevolution” and as a “parody of the eighteenth Brumaire.”74 Meißner’s descriptions and insights are interesting, yet to the best of my knowledge Karl Korsch—reflecting on the victorious fascist counterrevolution in Europe on the eve of World War II—was the first to clearly point out that no one, neither Marx and Marxists nor liberals, had had a theory of counterrevolution. That amounted to saying that they were unable to think of counterrevolution as a productive force of history and as a phase of social development. Instead, they regarded it as an “abnormal inter- ruption” or a “temporary disturbance of a normally progressive development.”75 Yet counterrevolution could generate new realities and revolutionary changes, and in that sense it was a revolutionary force. Bonapartism was a case in point. Political and Economic Revolution, Critiques of Liberalism All this means that there is not one single, and straightforward, answer to the question of whether the 1848 revolution was defeated. The basic distinction that emerged in the aftermath of the revolution, reflecting what had taken place, was between political and economic revolution. Contemporaries came to the realiza- 72 Theodor Mundt, Niccolò Machiavelli und das System der modernen Politik, 3rd edition (Berlin: Verlag von Otto Janke, 1861), 307–8. 73 Alfred Meißner, Revolutionäre Studien aus Paris (1849) (Frankfurt: Literarische Anstalt, 1849), 1:107. According to a biographical sketch in the series on German “moderne Klassiker,” Meißner moved to Paris in the winter of 1849, because he could not stand seeing the streets of his native Prague flooded with “foreign agitators from all the Slavic regions,” who had gathered there for the revolutionary “Slavic Vorparlament.” During his sojourn in Paris he then wrote the work I cite. See Alfred Meißner (Cassel: Ernst Balde, 1854), 15. Neither did von Rochau show much understanding, not to speak of sympathies, for the Slavic peoples in his reflections on German politics. On the “true socialism,” see Friedrich Engels, “Die wahren Sozialisten,” in Marx-Engels-Werke, 4:248–90, especially 270–78. 74 Alfred Meißner, Revolutionäre Studien aus Paris, 1:209, 218; see also 164, where Meißner said that the “fool” Louis Napoleon conceived of “an imitation of the 18th Brumaire.” 75 Karl Korsch, “The Fascist Counter-revolution,” Living Marxism 5, no. 2 (Fall 1940): 29–37, https://www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1940/fascist-counterrrevolution.htm; see also Karl Korsch, “State and Counter-Revolution,” The Modern Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1939): https:// www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1939/state-counterrevolution.htm. 139 is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . . tion that the two did not coincide, and tended to agree that whereas the political revolution was defeated, the economic revolution gained momentum. Mundt’s youthful friend Ferdinand Kühne, for example, in his review of Alfred Meißner’s Parisian Revolutionary Studies cited above, wrote that “the political revolution in France has failed.”76 Marx and Engels, on the other hand, observed that the defeated proletarian revolution was succeeded by “economic revolution.”77 But if political revolution was, or may have been, defeated, who exactly was defeated? Whose revolution? Who experienced a political defeat? For Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, it was the proletarian revolution. This view became more concise as the years went by.78 The German philosopher, political writ- er, and politician Constantin Frantz, whose political position is more difficult to define than Marx and Engels’s, also wrote of the “victory over the proletar- ians.”79 Alfred Meißner delineated the defeat of democratic forces. Two years ahead of Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état, he depicted the “de-democratization [Entdemokratisirung] of France.”80 Since republic was the “form” in which de- mocracy was “organized and strengthened,” moreover, since republic was “the only” political form “in which democracy can appear,” the defeat of democratic forces coincided with the defeat of republicanism.81 For Theodor Mundt, what happened all across Europe was a defeat of the people, of popular politics. He detected the same “fatal turning of popular politics [Volkspolitik] into cabinet 76 Ferdinand Gustav Kühne, “Alfred Meißner’s revolutionäre Studien aus Paris,” in Mein Tagebuch in bewegter Zeit (Leipzig: L. Denicke, 1863), 682. 77 See, for example, Friedrich Engels, “Einleitung zu Karl Marx’s ‘Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich 1848 bis 1850,’ ” in Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, pt. 1, 32:337–38. 78 See Engels, 337–38. 79 Constantin Frantz, Louis Napoleon, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Schneider & Comp., 1852), 6. For Frantz, see the entry Erich Wittenberg, “Frantz, Gustav Adolph Constantin,” Deutsche Biographie, accessed June 25, 2024, https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/gnd118534939. html; for a balanced recent assessment see Iain McDaniel, “Constantin Frantz and the Intellectual History of Bonapartism and Caesarism: A Reassessment,” Intellectual History Review 28, no. 2 (2018): 317–38, https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2017.1361218. Von Rochau called Frantz “a man of conservatism,” while “conservative” in his view was a self-de- scription of the “old liberalism that has become unfit to do anything.” Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 125, 128. 80 Meißner, Revolutionäre Studien aus Paris, 1:105. 81 Meißner, 1:109. 140 tomaž mastnak politics [Cabinetspolitik]” that Machiavelli had identified in the Florentine poli- tics of his own time.82 All these descriptions point to the popular masses, to the underlying classes (to use Veblen’s term) as the loser. But what about liberals? Were they among the defeated? And if that was the case, how did they relate to the other defeated so- cial or political foces, and how did these other defeated forces relate to them? Let us start with the French writer and politician Victor Hugo, whom we may see, as some contemporaries did, as an icon of liberalism. After the coup d’état, in exile, Hugo wrote an invective against Louis Bonaparte, whom he had earlier supported. Meißner portrayed him as “shallow and puffed up as always,” giving a bland speech of no purpose in the National Assembly in early 1849, finding fault with the legislative body for “not being Napoleonic.” The speech was interrupted by the laughter of the Left.83 Bruno Bauer mocked his bemoaning the Bonapartist suppression of “the tribune, the press, the in- telligence, the word, the thought, all that used to be freedom.” Hugo compared “the French tribune” with the “open mouth of human spirit.”84 Bauer brushed off this comparison as pathetic. He asked rhetorically: “Toward what barba- rism would mankind be heading should it really learn only from the bickering of parliamentary factions, from the trivial quarrels between the right-center and left-center, for example, what intelligence, word, thought are capable of achiev- ing?”85 Karl Marx later remarked that Hugo actually made “Napoleon the Little” big because he ascribed to him a “personal power of initiative, which was with- out parallel in world history,” that is, because he did not understand that the coup was a result of historical social and political struggles, in a word: because he did not understand history.86 These remarks ad personam may give a glimpse of the low esteem in which rad- icals on the political left held the liberals. A heavier blow against liberalism 82 Theodor Mundt, Machiavelli und der Gang der europäischen Politik (Leipzig: Dyk’sche Buchhandlung, 1851), iii. 83 Meißner, Revolutionäre Studien aus Paris, 1:216. 84 Victor Hugo, Napoléon le Petit (London: Jeffs, 1852), 19, 145. 85 Bauer, Russland und das Germanenthum, 81. 86 Karl Marx, “Vorwort zur zweiten Ausgabe von ‘Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte,’ ” in Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, pt. 1, 21:130–31. 141 is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . . came from the political right. It was dealt by Auguste Romieu, whose thoughts on the role of force in the contemporary politics I cited above. Describing the political situation in France, Romieu located the main threat of violence in the popular “masses” or “proletarians,” whom he depicted as being “in organized uprising.”87 He admitted that he was “horrified” by “the poor, set up to envy, hate, thirst for pillage, ready to ravage by a million hands the castles, luxurious apartments.”88 Yet his accusing finger pointed at the liberals. He characterized liberalism as both deadly and dead, as destructive and self-destructive. “I’m telling you, O bourgeois! that your role is finished,” Romieu theatrically turned to the liberal. On the one hand, the bourgeois revolution was a charade. What had taken place in France was a foolishly and hastily played comedy in which the bourgeois had changed too many costumes and had been too quick in picking up the ermine coats thrown out the windows of the aristocracy. The bourgeois remade for their own use all that which they had destroyed with the punches of their words, all that which the theater, the printing press, the chan- son, and the tribune had helped them demolish.89 On the other hand, the liberals could not realize their own ideas or, rather, the realization of their ideas was destructive of liberalism itself. That was fateful. The society they had made was incapable of living. “It is that the society, such as that made by the bourgeoisie, is not capable of anything more. That socie- ty has to die.” The illegitimate, “bastard” order, l’ordre bâtard, established by the “sophists” (that is, the Enlightenment philosophers and their descendants), could not be maintained and preserved. The bourgeois was no longer fit to rule: “No, bourgeois, you are not going to rule any longer!”90 What the bourgeois had sown, they were now going to reap. “You had, O bourgeois, soiled the beginning of your work with blood.” Robespierre and Danton, their advocates, had taught people to murder, their successors had continued that teaching, and the people had learned it in their own way. The spilling of blood was returning with the “tom-tom of the revolt of the poor.”91 87 Romieu, L’ère des césars, 77, 92, 169, 203. 88 Auguste Romieu, Le spectre rouge de 1852 (Paris: Ledoyen, 1851), 47. 89 Romieu, 62–63. 90 Romieu, 66. 91 Romieu, 67. 142 tomaž mastnak The liberal idea had arrived at the point of its accomplishment. It had ended up in the hands of the poor in revolt and turned against the bourgeoisie. That was the point at which “the liberal idea accomplishes its last ravage,” Romieu wrote. “In my reflections on that which is wrong with the liberal ideas, nothing has struck me more than this extreme result of their application.” And that re- sult was inevitable.92 Romieu, as we see, regarded the revolt of the popular masses as the logical out- come, or a consequence, of liberalism, which was destructive of liberalism it- self. He was scared of the spectre rouge, of the “red specter” of socialism and communism. The realization of the liberal idea by socialist hands, in socialism, meant the end of liberal society and liberalism. Liberals themselves became scared of socialism and afraid of the historical dialectics they had set in motion and that was now turning against them. Once socialism appeared to them as if it were a logical consequence, or development, of liberalism, the liberals had to block that development so it would not empower social and political forces op- posed to liberalism, but by doing so they themselves paralyzed liberalism. This dialectics of the self-paralysis of liberalism was well captured by Karl Marx in his first critique of Bonapartism. He depicted how the liberals began to be afraid of their own ideas, ideals, and principles as “socialistic,” and distanced themselves from them.93 He observed that the bourgeoisie had the correct insight that all the weapons it had forged against feu- dalism turned their points against itself, that all the means of education it had produced rebelled against its own civilization, that all the gods it had created fell away from it. It grasped that all the so-called civil liberties and progressive organs attacked and threatened its class domination concurrently at its social founda- tion and its political top, and had therefore become “socialistic.”94 According to Marx’s critical analysis, what the bourgeoisie had “earlier celebrat- ed as ‘liberal,’ it now denounced as ‘socialistic.’ ”95 But that meant denouncing 92 Romieu, 91, 99. 93 Karl Marx, “Der 18. Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte,” in Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, pt. 1, 11:106, 134–35. 94 Marx, 135. 95 Marx, 136. 143 is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . . liberalism. When the liberal bourgeoisie, in order to defend itself, attacked so- cialism, it had to curtail civil liberties and thus thwart liberal ideas and princi- ples. In order to protect itself from being negated by socialism, liberalism negat- ed itself. And in negating itself, and its principles and ideas, the liberal bour- geoisie itself both reached for repression and made the way for a repressive, dictatorial Bonapartist regime to step in. The function of that repressive political regime was to keep the underlying class- es in place and thus to ensure that the bourgeoisie could exercise its economic power freely, unimpeded. Marx did not use the concept of economic power. He argued that the bourgeoisie renounced its political power, or accepted that “its political power be broken,” in order to “maintain its social power unscathed.” In order to be able to exploit other classes, the “private bourgeois” acquiesced to their class being reduced to the same “political nothingness” as all other class- es.96 But was that really the case? It seems to me that rather than being reduced to political nothingness, the lib- eral bourgeoisie gave up the burden and responsibility of holding political pow- er, and opted (as Stein observed) to hold the state power “through the person of Louis Napoleon.”97 In this way, it could more effectively and safely exercise and increase its economic power. Under Louis Bonaparte, its ability to subject and exploit the underlying classes, to enrich itself, and enjoy its privileges only increased. In Engels’s vivid description, Louis Bonaparte’s rule gave impetus to industrial development and trade, to speculation and stock market swindles, to corruption and massive stealing. The whole bourgeoisie had enriched itself to a hitherto unheard of extent, while Bonaparte’s court extracted a hefty percent- age from this enrichment.98 The factional struggles within the ruling classes, between Louis Bonaparte and the liberal bourgeoisie, led to a re-articulation of the relationship between economic and political power, which overcame the vulnerability and instability of liberal class rule. The shift of power in the illib- eral direction, rather than endangering the class rule of the liberal bourgeoisie, 96 Marx, 135–36. 97 Stein, Das Königthum, 421. 98 See Friedrich Engels, “Einleitung zur dritten deutschen Auflage von Karl Marx’ ‘Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich,’ ” in Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, pt. 1, 32:8; Friedrich Engels, “Entwurf des Kapitels IV der Broschüre ‘Die Rolle der Gewalt in der Geschichte,’ ” in Marx- Engels-Gesamtausgabe, pt. 1, 31:72. 144 tomaž mastnak strengthened it and made it possible for the consolidated ruling class to more efficiently, and without being accounatble, govern and control the underlying population. Von Rochau’s Reformulation of Liberalism I am aware that, in the preceding pages, I was describing the French political situation at greater length than the German. I claim, however, that this back- ground is relevant, even indispensable, for judging von Rochau’s reformulation of liberalism. First, let me repeat, Bonapartism had a big, formative impact on von Rochau’s political thinking. And second, Bonapartism loomed large not only beyond the German border and unavoidably entered foreign policy calcula- tions. With Bismarck’s presidency, Bonapartism also came to Germany. At least that was the perception of many a contemporary.99 As Marx wrote in the name of the First International, the Bonapartist regime “got its counterfeit” on the other side of the Rhine, in Bismarck’s regime.100 It is not only that Bonapartism rep- resented “the first accomplished form of the modern state,”101 or that, as Engels observed, the “Bonapartist half-dictatorship” was “the normal form” of “man- aging the state and society in the interest of the bourgeoisie,”102 but also that Prussia accomplished its bourgeois revolution “in the delightful form of Bona- partism.”103 So how does all this relate to von Rochau’s Realpolitik? If I may simplify, von Rochau’s reformulation of the liberal view of politics and of liberal politics tends to be explained in two main ways. The first is not really flattering and can basically be reduced to the charge of opportunism.104 The dis- illusionment caused by the defeat of the political revolution led to the accept- ance of the political realities, to the abandonment of the ideals and principles of the revolutionary years, and to conformity with “power politics” (Machtpolitik), 99 See Iain McDaniel, “Constantin Frantz.” 100 Karl Marx, “The General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association ON THE WAR. To the Members of the International Workingmen’s Association in Europe and the United States,” in Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, pt. 1, 21:247. 101 Bologna, “Moneta e crisi,” 5. 102 Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, April 13, 1866, in Marx-Engels-Werke, 31:208. 103 Engels, “Ergänzung der Vorbemerkung,’ ” 513. 104 See Trocini, L’invenzione della “Realpolitik”, 15, 44, 210, 222. 145 is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . . that is, to the politics that now had revealed its real nature as being determined by those who possessed social power and means of violence. The other explanation seems to have the unspoken intention of preserving the idea of the continued progress of liberalism. In a sophisticated and well-in- formed version of this view, “initially radical ideas and ideals” had not been “destroyed through failure in 1848,” but were rather “repackaged and re-de- scribed by Rochau, both as part of the social fabric of contemporary politics, and as being natural or inevitable in the present.” Accordingly, what von Ro- chau produced was “a post-revolutionary political theory that re-described lib- eral ‘idealism’ around 1848 as political ‘realism’ in the 1850s and 1860s, in order to show that the untimeliness of those early demands had nevertheless become timely now, making their adaptation an obligatory part of a newly realistic ac- count of contemporary politics.”105 To me, this sounds dangerously like projecting the dominant twenty-first-centu- ry Western politics—politics as the ever more consummate art of presentation— back onto the 1850s. The problem is that this—“our”—kind of politics is increas- ingly being freed from facts and reality, whereas back then political thinkers like von Rochau claimed they were trying to do precisely the opposite: to tie the understanding of politics to “facts,” Tatsachen, and reality. One might say that von Rochau was inventing new politics according to reality, whereas today poli- ticians are inventing reality. But let us not wade into discussing today’s politics. One problem I find with this second explanation is the idea of “untimeliness” applied to political demands (which then in unexplained ways turn “timely”). One can find this logic at work in Marx and Engels’s attempts at putting a brave face on the defeat of the proletarian revolution. The time for the proletarian rev- olution had not been ripe, yet the progress of history was going to eventually create the material conditions for the proletarian victory. In the explanation of von Rochau’s reinvention of liberalism I referred to above, “the apparent failures of 1848” were due to the fact that “the constitutions then outlined had failed,” because the political situation was not ripe (yet).106 Based on what I said earli- 105 This is how Kelley (“August Ludwig von Rochau,” 306, 309) refers to Natascha Doll’s thesis in Doll, Recht, Politik und “Realpolitik”. 106 See Kelley, “August Ludwig von Rochau,” 311. 146 tomaž mastnak er in this article on the waning importance of the constitution-centered view of politics in the first half of the nineteenth century, I want to argue that von Ro- chau’s realistic turn did not lie in recognizing the untimeliness of the “outlined constitutions” but in recognizing the futility of concentrating politics on outlin- ing constitutions. The problem was not that those constitutions were not timely. The (liberal) political focus on outlining constitutions was a wrong approach. The other problem with the discussed explanation lies in weaving the tale of liberalism’s progress into the long-term development tendencies that led to the Prussian hegemony and toward the unification of Germany. Duncan Kelley cit- ed Hermann Baumgarten’s “self-critique” of liberalism as a typical—and influ- ential—case of how “the history of Germany into the 1860s became a myriad tale of political and cultural development since the Reformation culminating in Prussian-led claims for unification.”107 From this perspective, if liberalism was to have, or be seen as having, a continuous life, it had to be part of that story, and Realpolitik meant adjusting to, or rather adopting, Prussian hegemony. Yet Baumgarten himself wrote that, before the Prussian military victory over Aus- tria in 1866, which consolidated Prussia’s leading role in German politics, even “those friends of Prussia who had most believed in it,” found it “hardly believa- ble” that the political struggles would turn out the way they did.108 I do not think von Rochau’s Principles of Realpolitik can really be judged a “self-critique” of liberalism, like Ruge’s in the late 1840s or Buamgarten’s a good twenty years later. Von Rochau’s book was, rather, a critique of the politics of the era of revolution, especially of the politics on the revolutionary side of social and political struggles, and it was a critique of political forces and their policies in the aftermath of the revolution. Even if written by an ex-left liberal, it was a critique of politics in general, rather than a specific critique—or self-critique—of liberalism. Or to put it differently: the critique of liberalism was part of a wid- er critique of contemporary politics. It was general reflections on politics that had implications for, and an impact on, conceiving liberal politics, on figuring out what liberal politics for the post-revolutionary, or counter-revolutionary, era 107 Kelley, 310. 108 Hermann Baumgarten, Der deutsche Liberalismus: Eine Selbstkritik. Abdruck aus dem achtzehnten Bande der Preußischen Jahrbücher (Berlin: Druck und Verlag von Georg Reimer, 1866), 108. 147 is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . . might be like. It would be misplaced to look for the continuity of liberal ideas, because the view of politics had changed. To be more precise, whatever continu- ity of liberal political ideas there might have been, it was criss-crossed by new ways of looking at politics. The new politics was not about “repackaging” old radical ideas but about think- ing about politics in a radically different way. That is why none of the two main explanations of what von Rochau’s work had done does justice to his work, yet taken together they come close to opening a productive perspective on it: the continuity of liberalism lay precisely in abandoning its ideas, ideals, and prin- ciples (under today’s “dictatorship of values,” one would, of course, say “val- ues”) in order to keep economic power untouched and untouchable. Liberalism sloughed off its political skin in order to grow its economic power, and thus de- politicized economic power. With Bonapartism, periodic political discontinui- ties became the condition for the continuity of economic liberalism. The con- tinuity of liberalism is the continuity of economic liberalism. The distinction between political and economic revolution that emerged with the defeat of the 1848 revolutions is complemented by the distinction between political and eco- nomic liberalism, and both are crucial for understanding the post-revolutionary reformulation of liberalism and its subsequent history.109 The Economic Limits to Realpolitik: Economic Power without Political Limits Without entering into a discussion of von Rochau’s concrete political views and analyses, there is not much more to be said about the leading principles of his realistic view of politics than has already been said. But before proceeding fur- ther, I want to add that those concrete political views and analyses are not some- thing accidental. One may disregard them only at the cost of fully understand- ing von Rochau’s Realpolitik. They are integral to his political thought: a mode of thinking. The distinction of von Rochau’s realistic political thinking is his thinking about politics concretely. Concrete political thinking meant looking at “the real social 109 See Ishay Landa, The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 148 tomaž mastnak conditions and their development” instead of being fixated on “state forms”: analyzing the manifold social forces, whose interaction shapes, maintains, and transforms a historically given state, and which—just like their interactions and the results of their interactions—change endlessly according to time and space, “nach Raum und Zeit.”110 And the social forces shaping, maintaining, and trans- forming the state were not only “wealth, opinion, and intelligence,”111 not only “the new factors of social life” such as the “civic consciousness, the idea of free- dom, national spirit, the idea of human equality, the political factionalism of the parties, the press,” and “public opinion,”112 but also “stupidity,” “lies or any other immorality,” and “even crime.”113 Early in the twentieth century, Vladimir Ilich Lenin on the left and Carl Schmitt on the right stand out as model repre- sentatives of this way of thinking politically. Limiting my discussion to a more abstract level, and seeing von Rochau’s real- politisch views as resting on his formulation of the “law of power,” I will con- clude this paper by looking at the limitations of that “law of power.”114 The law of power, according to von Rochau, “dominates the life of the state.” Among the forces that “shape, maintain, and transform the state,” the stronger prevail: “Power responds [gehorcht: obeys] only to the bigger power, and the strong can- not allow themselves to be swayed [sich beherrschen lassen: dominated] by the weak.”115 A realistic view of politics needs to recognize the “real power of the stronger” and realize the standing and importance “the stronger” by “necessi- ty” have to have in the state. For power alone “can govern.” As von Rochau put 110 Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 1, 8. 111 Rochau, 24; see also 24n60. 112 Rochau, 11. 113 Rochau, 9. 114 Von Rochau used the term “das Gesetz der Stärke.” Stärke has multiple meanings, includ- ing “strength,” “force,” and “power.” English and Italian translations of von Rochau often render it as “power,” or “potere”—hence the “law of power,” or “legge del potere,” respec- tively. Von Rochau used distinct terms for “force” (Kraft, e.g., “gesellschaftliche Kräfte” for “social forces”) and “power” (Macht, especially in connection with politics, e.g., “poli- tische Macht” for “political power”). Some of his contemporaries, e.g. Treitschke, used the term Machtpolitik (politics of power) as roughly equivalent to von Rochau’s Realpolitik. See Trocini, L’invenzione della “Realpolitik”, 44, 149–50n34, 232. I think a more precise translation would be “the law of strength” (especially because von Rochau writes, for ex- ample, of the “power of the strong,” “Macht des Stärken”). But with these explanations, I may as well use “the law of power.” 115 Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 3. 149 is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . . it: “To govern means exercising power, and solely he who has power can exer- cise power.”116 This language of power, however, fell silent when it came to the economy. Not only did von Rochau himself abstain from using the language of power when discussing the economic life of society. He polemicized against those who did use it. He accused, for example, the Berlin press that was sympathetic to so- cialism of using “the language of toxic demagogy” against “the ‘bourgeoisie,’ against the ‘monopoly of capital,’ against the ‘exploitation of the worker’ by the entrepreneur, yes, even against the machinery.” Arguing, as the pro-social- ist press did, that “the existing national-economic [volkswirtschaftliche] system” originates “only in the selfishness and greed of money-men” and, as such, had to be “transformed from the bottom up for the benefit of the laboring classes,” was for von Rochau nothing short of “incitement.”117 It is interesting and telling that most of what von Rochau had to say about the economy was said in the context of polemics against socialism and “the mass- es.” “The masses” was a new term for a new social phenomenon. They became a political factor that could not be ignored—as Louis Bonaparte was quick to comprehend and skillfully use to his advantage.118 Von Rochau had a haughty and dismissive attitude toward the masses. They were unworthy of polemics. So- cialism was a different matter, even though the masses were sometimes drawn to socialism. Socialism’s distinction was that it had a theoretical and political answer to the social evils produced by the new “industrial system.” 116 Rochau, 1–2. 117 August Ludwig von Rochau, Grundsätze der Realpolitik, angewendet auf die staatliche Zustände Deutschlands: Zweiter Theil (Heidelberg: Akademische Verlagshandlung von J. C. B. Mohr, 1869), 138. 118 Louis Bonaparte represented himself as the “instrument, the creation of the mass- es.” See Robert Michels, Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie: Untersuchungen über die oligarchischen Tendenzen des Gruppenlebens (Leipzig: Verlag von Dr. Werner Klinkhardt, 1911), 204. In his time, Louis Bonaparte explained, “one can only govern with the masses; therefore, they have to be organized in order that they could for- mulate their will, and disciplined in order that they could be steered toward and enlight- ened about their proper interests.” Napoleon-Louis Bonaparte, Extinction du pauperisme, 5th ed. (Paris: Pagnerre, 1844), 17. 150 tomaž mastnak Von Rochau admitted that “the transformation of crafts into the factory system has its serious wrongs [Uebelstände].” However, he was sure that “there is no power in this world that is able to prevent that transformation or even undo it.” Any attempt to make things better must start from this understanding.119 Once the transformation is regarded as given and necessary, and property—which von Rochau, unlike for example Stein, did not see as a social relation of domination and subjection (and resistance), that is, as a power relation—as untouchable, those wrongs or evils appear as a necessary evil. And yet von Rochau agreed that “the economic condition of the poorest popular classes” had to be bettered—but only within certain limits.120 Such prudent limited improvement might be called “social reform,” whereas the socialists called for “social revolution.” The latter, a “violent act of politics,” was a “chimera [Hirngespinst].”121 Von Rochau called those who spoke for revolutionary socialism “fanatics of the- ory.”122 As their opposite, Realpolitik in this context surprisingly turned into a re- jection of the politics of force. Von Rochau dismissed social revolution as a “vi- olent and radical change of property,” for which one needed only a “sufficient number of fists.”123 Here, a big enough force to be politically effective did not count as an argument. Realpolitik also became concerned with limiting power. For social reform, acting within certain limits when attempting to better the mis- erable conditions of the laboring poor was about putting limits on state action. Defining the limits of state action was Wilhelm von Humboldt’s aim in an essay he wrote at the time of the French Revolution, but which was only published in 1851—and was adopted by liberals as their own classic text.124 In von Rochau’s book, however, whose declared realism lay in recognizing and accepting the role of power in politics and in defining the state by the law of power, speaking about limits on the tasks of the state appears somewhat incongruous. Just as it was “self-evident” that one should find a “remedy” for the “economic suffering” of those times, moreover, that that was an “urgent need,” it appears 119 Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 98. 120 Rochau, 163. 121 Rochau, 163, 165. 122 Rochau, 165. 123 Rochau, 165. 124 Alexander von Humboldt, Ideen zu einem Veruch, die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen (Breslau: Verlag von Eduard Trewend, 1851). 151 is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . . that it was also evident that such a remedy meant, or involved, state interven- tion. The question was: How big a room for action should the state be given? Von Rochau gave his answer as soon as he asked that question: “However big a room for action is given to state measures for this purpose, they meet their limit in property rights.” Whereas remedying “economic suffering” was the “econom- ic task of the state,” that task had to be fulfilled “within those limits.”125 It was not the state power that defined the scope of the state’s action, or its limits. The power that imposed limits on the state was economic. Von Rochau’s preferred “big means of social reform” were two: reducing the costs of running the state (Ersparnis im Staatshaushalt), that is, cutting the budget, and the “freedom of exercising economic force” (Freiheit der wirtschaft- lichen Kraftübung). The perception of wrongs and evils shifted from the “eco- nomic suffering” of the “poorest popular classes” to state spending and imped- iments to economic freedom: “The oversized budgets and the laws that under different pretexts impede the freedom of economic movements—these are the two and sole biggest evils in the economic realm.” What one might expect from politics was the removal of those two evils. The rest of the wrongs would be tak- en care of by “slow organic development” by the “development of the economic strength of the people [wirtschaftliche Volkskräfte], in which politics [. . .] has solely the task of warding off external interference.”126 While von Rochau defined state action negatively, by limiting it he ascribed a positive role to the economy: “The positive part of the task falls to the national economy [Volkswirttschaft] itself, and it will, and can be, accomplished only in measure to which production increases.”127 The “increase of production” was first an argument against the lingering remnants of the guild system, or artisanal production. The “economic interest of society” or, more emphatically, the first, the most urgent, and the most irrefutable demand of the economic interest is the following: that each economic force be realized [verwerthet: utilized or ex- ploited to produce value] as much as possible. The economic interest of society does not ask for a certificate of apprenticeship or for a masterpiece, but for the 125 Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 163. 126 Rochau, 164–65. 127 Rochau, 165. 152 tomaž mastnak ability to produce as much as possible [Leistungsfähigkeit], regardless of how and where it is acquired.128 The answer for Germany was “economic freedom” (Gewerbefreiheit), such as it existed in the countries which stood “at the forefront of world industry.”129 The same argument was then used against socialism, because, as von Rochau asserted, the social revolution, with entails the violent transformation of prop- erty, could not “increase social production” and “augment public wealth.”130 By the time von Rochau wrote his Principles of Realpolitik, economic science had made enough progress to relegate into oblivion the sober—one may say realis- tic—view that increased production, while it might multiply individual riches, did not necessarily increase public wealth (rather the opposite was often the case).131 Since, as von Rochau contended, a “new economic system,” such as im- agined by the socialists, was simply a “folly”132—that is, since liberalism already in its first reformulation adopted the position that “there is no alternative”—the most logical solution for getting out of the crisis and going forward was indeed an increase in productivity. The sum total of what the labor of the whole society yielded was insufficient to cover the existing needs, and a different distribution of the fruits of labor would achieve “little or nothing,” unless production was in- creased. “But the increase in production is not a matter of politics, and politics can basically do nothing to support it except for removing the impediments.”133 This applied also to the proletariat. An honest and smart thing to do would be to “bluntly tell the proletariat that by and large one cannot help them in any other way but by creating the legal possibility that they can help themselves.” Von Ro- chau not only reminded his reader of the German folk wisdom “Help yourself, and God will help you,” but also brought up the “motto of the North American entrepreneurial spirit and of the North American labor force,” which was: “Help 128 Rochau, 97. 129 Rochau, 99. 130 Rochau, 165. 131 See especially James Maitland, The Earl of Lauderdale, An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth, and into the Means and Causes of Its Increase (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1804). 132 Rochau, Grundsätze (1853), 165. 133 Rochau, 165. 153 is economic power an institution? the limits of august ludwig von rochau’s . . . yourself.” That was the “magic formula” which in two generations made Ameri- ca a “first class economic power” and created a general welfare such as had not been seen in the whole of history.134 In this context, von Rochau found it worth repeating that “the big means of so- cial reform, which stands at offer to German national politics, is the freedom of economic movement.” Only under the conditions of economic freedom could “each economic force be exercised” and yield the most it could, and “the high- est increase in economic production” be achieved. That would also benefit “the so-called workingmen’s estate.” Consequently, that is what the workers could demand from the state: “The free use of their economic force is the most right- ful, the most irrefutable, demand that the proletariat can make of the state.”135 All of this could be described as a staple laissez-faire. The irony of it would be that von Rochau, in his turning away from philosophy and his realistic commit- ment to “facts,” ended up with him embracing a philosophy—for, as Keynes was to say, that is what laissez-faire actually was.136 If laissez-faire had been econom- ic science, one could say that von Rochau was actually consistent with his politi- cal realism project. But one would have to understand economic science like von Rochau’s contemporary Frantz did: as a science insisting on observing “what is going on and how is it going on,” instead of developing a doctrine “scholasti- cally”—which was characteristic of the theoretical doctrine of the state, Staats- lehre—i.e., proceeding from a general idea.137 Understood in this way, economic science offered “something real,” and because it was in this sense superior to state doctrine, the latter “struck sail” in front of it and “made economy the orga- non of all political thinking.” Consequently, the state would become simply “an economic institution.”138 This is not what von Rochau’s embracing laissez-faire was. If anything, he made the state a handmaiden of economy, of the existing “economic system.” But with regard to his political-theoretical project, the embrace of laissez-faire philoso- phy was a failure. Instead of sticking to the “facts,” a set of facts was kept be- 134 Rochau, 168. 135 Rochau, 169, 170–71. 136 John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire (London: Hogarth Press, 1926). 137 Frantz, Naturlehre des Staates, 71. 138 Frantz, 74. 154 tomaž mastnak yond questioning. Even more seriously, those were the facts that involved pow- er, more precisely: the exercise of power. The exercise of power within the eco- nomic realm was closed to political thinking, while the state was locked into protecting and maintaining, one may say serving, that exercise of power. In- stead of analyzing the exercise of economic power, von Rochau spoke of the de- velopment of economic forces—he consistently uses the term Kraft in this con- text, never Macht—i.e., an increase in economic productivity, efficiency, and freedom.139 While those who wielded economic power were free from state in- terference, but were shielded by the state from “external” “impediments,” the proletarians were given the freedom to be proletarians. That was the help they could hope for by the state. The state power was limited by economic power, while economic power was kept politically unlimited. The law of power did not extend into the realm of the economy. It was limited to reflections on the state and politics, while economic power, never named, was a law unto itself, legibus solutus. As such, it was in no conceivable sense an institution. Discussing the crisis of liberalism early in the twentieth century, John Hobson wrote of “the shipwreck which Continental Liberalism has suffered when it was driven on the submerged reefs of the economic problem in politics.”140 One may say that von Rochau’s Realpolitik was shipwrecked on economic power, which he himself turned into a submerged reef. But the failure of his realpolitisch pro- ject did not impact his reformulation of liberalism. In that very failure lay a suc- cessful reformulation of liberalism: the exemption of economic power from po- litical reflection and control. References Anonymous. Alfred Meißner. Cassel: Ernst Balde, 1854. Bauer, Bruno. Russland und das Germanenthum. Charlottenburg: Verlag von Egbert Bau- er, 1853. 139 Regarding “freedom,” too, Frantz was much more realistic than von Rochau. “The lib- eration of man, which liberalism proclaimed, has in the economic realm totally failed.” Frantz, Vorschule zur Physiologie, 291. 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Being Affected 163 * Universität für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna, Austria antonia.birnbaum@wanadoo.fr | https://orcid.org/0009-0003-4272-9721 Antonia Birnbaum* Un courage sans héroïsme: Antigone, Créon, Ismène, Hémon, Tirésias Keywords desire, tragic, courage, heroism Abstract The comprehension of the tragic in Hegel and Lacan states Antigone’s unconditional desire as heroic. Against this tendency, another hypothesis is explored: The heroic, be it ironic or a sublime brilliance of the sublime, bars the access to the unconditional by attaching it to a transcendence, rather than inquiring into its address. To play down her- oism means to reinterpret the capacity of solitude which characterizes heroic courage. What courage then reveals is an ignorance regarding the law of totality, regarding the world that is to be lived in, through a risk taken by a single one. The direct reference to a “conflict of worlds” throws new light on the approaches of Hegel and Lacan. Pogum brez junaštva: Antigona, Kreon, Ismena, Hemon, Tirezij Ključne besede želja, tragično, pogum, junaštvo Povzetek Razumevanje tragičnega pri Heglu in Lacanu afirmira Antigonino brezpogojno željo kot junaško. V nasprotju s to težnjo bomo mi raziskali drugo hipotezo: Herojsko, pa naj gre za ironično ali za sublimni sijaj sublimnega, onemogoča dostop do brezpogojnega, koli- kor ga namreč pripenja na transcendenco, namesto da bi se spraševalo po njegovem na- govoru. Oslabiti junaštvo pomeni reinterpretirati zmožnost za samoto, ki je značilna za junaški pogum. Pogum torej razkriva nevednost glede zakona totalnosti, glede sveta, v Filozofski vestnik issn 0353-4510 | Volume 45 | Number 1 | 2024 | 163–78 cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.45.1.06 164 antonia birnbaum katerem je treba živeti s tveganjem, ki ga prevzame vsak sam. Neposredno sklicevanje na »konflikt svetov« meče novo luč tako na Heglov kot na Lacanov pristop. ∞ Décrit très simplement, l’acte d’Antigone consiste à rester fidèle à la fatalité, au fléau (Ate) de sa lignée, en enterrant son frère criminel contre l’ordre donné par Créon de laisser Polynice pourrir sans sépulture. A partir de là, toute sim- plicité cesse. Il y a la tragédie de Sophocle, il y a des interprétations qui se sont transformées en des morceaux de théorie autonome, voire en un mythe d’An- tigone. Il en va ainsi des considérations de Friedrich Hölderlin, G.W.F. Hegel, Jacques Lacan, qui éclairent des contextes différents, à savoir respectivement : un transcendantal du temps, une figure historique de la Sittlichkeit antique, le désir de l’analyste.1 L’approche adoptée ici détraque l’héroïsme emphatique d’Antigone tel qu’il est véhiculé de manière différente chez Hegel et Lacan. Chez Hegel, l’excellence de son héroïsme est déterminée par le fait qu’elle agit dans le savoir de son crime, contrairement à OEdipe. Pour autant, la sépulture dont elle fait don à Polynice ne transforme en aucun cas la différence entre crime et loi dans la sphère de la polis. L’acte d’Antigone ne fait que provoquer le retour inévitable de la famille, de la fin privée, au sein même de la fin universelle qui régit la cité. Ainsi, le fé- minin se dispose selon une « ironie éternelle de la communauté », il se fixe en une négativité qui reste continuellement limitée à la rétribution des défunts, seuls êtres pleinement singularisés. Pour Lacan, Antigone est l’héroïne en tant que seule héroïne ; il raccourcit vo- lontairement le drame de Sophocle en faveur de sa personne, mettant en évi- dence sa « beauté sublime », dont nous sommes éblouis. Son éclat incarne l’image négative d’un désir inconditionnel, le désir de rendre justice à son sort filial. La simple mort n’atteint pas ce désir. Selon Lacan, cette tragédie de So- 1 Nous ne traduisons pas Sittlichkeit, pour éviter l’amalgame avec la moralité, qui fait contre- sens. Sittlichkeit désigne ici chez Hegel l’esprit historique du monde antique, en tant qu’il est rapporté aux lois des dieux et à celles de la cité. 165 un courage sans héroïsme: antigone, créon, ismène, hémon, tirésias phocle crée le champ d’un entre-deux-morts. Elle ouvre un interstice, une ten- sion entre un horizon de mort au-delà de la fatalité et la mort naturelle. Ce fai- sant, il concentre le tout du drame en la transgression des limites par l’héroïne, au détriment des trajets que le drame parcourt. L’intransigeance d’Antigone, ce qui en elle s’adresse à l’au-delà, devient pour ainsi dire le noyau essentiel de la tragédie. Quel est l’enjeu de minorer ces penchants héroïques ? Tout d’abord, il convient de rappeler que pour les Grecs, la forme de la tragédie signifie une décomposi- tion de l’héroïsme, alors que la modernité établit une continuité entre l’héroïque et le tragique. À l’encontre de cette tendance, une autre hypothèse est ici expéri- mentée : l’héroïque, qu’il soit ironique ou qu’il nous expose à l’éclat d’une beau- té sublime, barre l’accès à l’inconditionnel, car en lui cet inconditionnel reste toujours attaché à une exception supposée transcendante, au détriment de son adresse. Déjouer l’héroïsme signifie donc réinterpréter la capacité de solitude qui caractérise le courage héroïque. Ce que le courage de la protagoniste risque, ce n’est pas en premier lieu sa propre mort, mais une dissolution des coordon- nées qui lui sont assignées ; son audace est celle d’une parole et d’un acte « dé- liés ». Ce que le courage révèle, c’est une ignorance en partage quant à la loi du tout, quant au monde qu’il s’agit d’habiter, à même un risque pris par une seule. La référence directe à un « conflit des mondes » porte un éclairage nouveau, qui diverge des approches de Lacan et de Hegel. Le désir inconditionnel d’Antigone dont s’enquiert Lacan n’est pas à chercher seulement dans l’éclat sublime, mais tout autant dans les ombres qu’il projette. Car ce désir pur ne fonctionne justement pas comme l’ultime limite à laquelle se heurtent toutes nos aspirations et tous nos faire, mais constitue le réel même de ces aspirations et de ce faire, sa vie immanente, ce à quoi nous ne sommes pas prêts à renoncer. L’inconditionnel n’est pas à découvrir au-delà, mais dans les impasses et les enchevêtrements irréductibles du contingent lui-même, dans les symptômes qui le perturbent, dans les dysfonctionnements qui en fracturent la disposition. Cela vaut aussi pour Antigone : elle est constituée par son désir, mais en tant qu’elle est aussi affectée par celui-ci, poussée par son « partage de l’amour » (symphilein) à enterrer son frère. On peut faire l’hypothèse que ce qui de son désir fait symptôme, c’est la manière dont il s’affecte d’une urgence sans répit. C’est cette urgence par laquelle elle ne cesse de se devancer elle-même qui 166 antonia birnbaum la précipite vers son sort. C’est de cette hâte, du désordre politique qu’elle intro- duit dans la raideur tyrannique, que la cité porte trace.2 « L’ironie éternelle » appelle elle aussi une pensée autre. Le savoir d’Antigone n’est pas, comme le prétend Hegel, un savoir « préalable » du moment in- conscient des lois de coutume, le savoir négatif de commettre un crime contre une autre loi. Dans la perspective hégélienne, l’accomplissement de ce savoir est le retour hostile d’un intérieur, au sens d’un retournement contradictoire du féminin contre l’exclusion que l’universel de la polis lui inflige. Mais le savoir insu d’Antigone n’est précisément pas un tel savoir de l’identité du féminin avec la famille, avec la loi souterraine. Ce qui est « inconscient » dans ce savoir, c’est plutôt la rupture de cette coïncidence, un acte supplémentaire qui fait ressortir le caractère contre-nature de la répartition des sexes. Le malentendu des sexes provoqué par l’intervention d’Antigone ruine irrémédiablement la dialectique de leur complémentarité. Ces apories invitent à localiser différemment la relation du conditionné à l’in- conditionnel, tant du point de vue topologique que temporel. Les démons qui indiquent ces détours s’appellent Walter Benjamin et Hölderlin. L’appui pris sur leurs considérations portent l’éthique jusqu’à une géographie politique. L’inter- prétation déployée s’empare philosophiquement du drame sophocléen, avec les défauts que cela suppose. Lacan Le fait que le commentaire de Lacan sur Antigone dans le séminaire de 1959- 1960 soit aporétique, tant en ce qui concerne le drame qu’en ce qui concerne l’éthique de la psychanalyse, a été noté à plusieurs reprises. Il donne lieu à deux confrontations, l’une sur la tragédie elle-même, l’autre sur l’éthique de la psy- chanalyse, qui se recoupent en plusieurs points. Je rappelle très brièvement la seconde, dans la mesure où elle est importante pour la première. Dans son livre La Marionnette et le nain, Slavoj Žižek remarque que, loin d’être LE séminaire, le séminaire VII sur L’Éthique de la psychanalyse rapproche dan- 2 Hölderlin souligne que la hâte caractérise les deux protagonistes, Créon et Antigone, avec la différence que l’un commence et que l’autre répond. 167 un courage sans héroïsme: antigone, créon, ismène, hémon, tirésias gereusement celle-ci d’une « passion du réel » classique.3 L’énoncé que Lacan extrait de la tragédie, selon lequel il importe de « ne pas céder sur son propre désir » tend à transformer le désir en un simple impératif. De plus, la mise en avant d’une pureté du désir le rend étanche à son rapport immanent avec la dé- faillance. Or le désir ne peut être pensé que depuis un retour, depuis une révoca- tion de sa défection ; il est donc uniquement concevable dans le registre d’une expérience à laquelle participent culpabilité et lâcheté. Cette critique a été for- mulée par des psychanalystes, entre autres Pierre Bruno, Geneviève Morel.4 La- can lui-même n’est pas le dernier à l’exercer. Lesdéveloppements ultérieurs de son enseignement montrent qu’une topologie du désir pur ne suffit pas à saisir l’enjeu de l’expérience analytique ; sans la référence à la contingence sympto- matique, ce désir n’est pas même saisissable. Ces déplacements le conduiront sept ans plus tard à formuler une éthique de l’analyse placée sous le signe de la destitution subjective, dans la « Proposition de la passe, 7 octobre 1967 ». En ce qui concerne la tragédie elle-même, Jean Bollack, Nicole Loraux, Fran- çoise Duroux ont remarqué, sous des aspects différents, que l’Antigone de Lacan est une Antigone sans théâtre.5 Certes, la mort est l’horizon ; l’ordre donné par Créon de laisser Polynice sans sépulture place d’emblée la fidélité d’Antigone à son égard dans un autre monde. Mais, pour parler avec Hölderlin, il faut de- mander en quoi cet autre monde fait irruption dans la polis, et non comment l’intransigeance d’Antigone quitte celle-ci.6 Dans une tragédie, il ne s’agit pas seulement de ce qui arrive aux protagonistes, mais de ce qui arrive au drame lui- 3 Slavoj Žižek, La Marionnette et le nain: Le christianisme entre perversion et subversion (Paris: Seuil, 2006). 4 Pierre Bruno, « Éthique du littoral », L’éthique de la psychanalyse: Retour du sémi- naire d’été 2020, Groupe niçois de psychanalyse lacanienne, https://www.gnipl.fr/pdf_ journees_l_ethique_de_la_psychanalyse/%C3%89THIQUE%20DU%20LITTORAL.pdf. Geneviève Morel, « D’un éclat féminin qui suscite la dispute: Lectures croisées d’Antigone de Sophocle par Jacques Lacan et Jean Bollack », dans Christoph König et Denis Thouard, dir., La Philologie au present (Lille: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2020), 185–99. 5 Jean Bollack, La Mort d’Antigone: La tragédie de Créon (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999); Françoise Duroux, Antigone encore: Les femmes et la loi (Paris: Côté-femmes- éditions, 1993); Nicole Loraux, « Antigone sans théâtre », dans La Grèce hors d’elle et autres textes: Écrits 1973–2003, dir. Michèle Cohen-Halimi (Paris: Klinsieck, 2021), 629–36. 6 « Parce que c’est son caractère [à Zeus], contrairement à l’éternelle tendance, de re- tourner l’aspiration à quitter ce monde pour un autre en une aspiration à quitter l’autre monde pour celui-ci. » Friedrich Hölderlin, « Remarques sur Antigone », dans Antigone de Sophocle, trad. Philippe Lacoue Labarthe (Paris: Christian Bourgois éditeur, 1978), 167. 168 antonia birnbaum même. Dans cette perspective, la tragédie de Sophocle explore l’écart entre deux lois, celle de la filiation et celle de la polis ; leur désajustement, leur interférence crée un hiatus où le nouage entre vie et mort se désagrège. Il a souvent été noté que la spécificité de cette tragédie — Antigone — est qu’elle ne connaît pas de développement, que la fin intervient au début. Si l’on suit le drame dans son dé- roulement, la décision d’Antigone entraîne irrésistiblement d’autres morts dans la sienne. Mais si l’on appréhende la tension dramatique à rebours, prêtant at- tention aux haltes qu’elle marque, les parties plus indépendantes, les regroupe- ments dialogiques, les traits disparates apparaissent, qui freinent cet emporte- ment. Devient perceptible ce qui va à l’encontre de l’intrigue, ce qui y inscrit des trajets divergents. L’intransigeance d’Antigone ne constitue pas simplement une scène excentrique. Son bouleversement de l’ordre malmène la polis, son « insurrection » (Hölder- lin) prend effet en des déplacements de frontières, des malentendus. Lorsqu’il est pris sous l’aspect de sa hâte, son refus d’abandonner le frère criminel peut être interrogé en tant que symptôme : quels déplacements, prévisibles aussi bien qu’imprévisibles, produit son geste, quelle hétérogénéité traverse la fatali- té guerrière, virile de la polis ? Lacan expose cette problématique de la manière suivante : « La descendance de l’union incestueuse s’est dédoublée en deux frères, l’un qui représente la puis- sance, l’autre qui représente le crime. Il n’y a personne pour assumer le crime, et la validité du crime, si ce n’est Antigone. Entre les deux, Antigone choisit d’être purement et simplement la gardienne de l’être du criminel comme tel. Sans doute les choses auraient-elles pu avoir un terme si le corps social avait bien voulu pardonner, oublier et couvrir tout cela des mêmes honneurs funé- raires. C’est dans la mesure où la communauté s’y refuse, qu’Antigone doit faire le sacrifice de son être au maintien de cet être essentiel qu’est l’Ate familiale — motif, l’axe véritable, autour de quoi tourne toute cette tragédie.7 »La décision d’Antigone est sans doute à penser d’abord depuis l’objet de son désir — procuer une sépulture à son frère — mais elle n’en évoque pas moins un danger qui ne concerne pas seulement les Labdacides, mais la polis elle-même. Le courage, écrit Benjamin, « est don de soi au danger qui menace le monde. […] le coura- geux a conscience du danger, mais il n’en tient pas compte. Car il serait lâche s’il 7 Jacques Lacan, L’éthique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 329. 169 un courage sans héroïsme: antigone, créon, ismène, hémon, tirésias en tenait compte ; et s’il n’avait pas conscience du danger — il ne serait pas cou- rageux. La solution de cet étrange rapport est que le danger ne menace pas le courageux lui-même, mais bien le monde. Le courage est le sentiment de la vie qui se livre au danger, qui, en mourant, étend donc le danger au monde et, en même temps, le surmonte.8 » Que se passe-til si l’on prend cette pensée comme boussole ? Le processus dramatique de la pièce sophocléenne inclut deux niveaux dans son articulation. La transgression d’Antigone répond à une confiscation des lois souterraines par Créon. Soucieux de distinguer ennemi et ami, soucieux de l’ordre de la polis, il s’est arrogé le droit de tuer une seconde fois l’ennemi, de lui barrer le passage vers le royaume des défunts. Antigone enterre Polynice et, sommée de rendre compte de son acte, invoque des « lois non écrites ». « Créon : Et tu as osé passer outre à mon ordonnance ? Antigone : Oui, car ce n’est pas Zeus qui l’a promulguée, et la Justice qui siège auprès des dieux n’en a point tra- cé de telles parmi les hommes. »9 Et encore : « Antigone : Hadès n’a pas deux poids et deux mesures. Créon : Le méchant n’a pas droit à la part du juste. Anti- gone : Qui sait si nos maximes restent pures aux yeux des morts ? Créon : Un en- nemi mort est toujours un ennemi. Antigone : Je suis faite pour partager l’amour non la haine (symphilein). »10 Objet de désir et de dispute : les funérailles refusées à Polynice mettent en jeu le nouage de Dike, (la loi relative à la justice des dieux souterrains) et des Nomoï (les lois relatives aux prescriptions humaines de la polis).11 La fidélité au défunt doit-elle participer aux commandements de la polis, ou ceux-ci doivent-ils être déterminés uniquement par la différence entre ennemi et ami ? La chose paraît comme indémêlable : l’attachement au frère criminel devient la cause d’Anti- gone exactement dans la mesure où la polis elle-même devient pour tous les autres protagonistes l’objet d’un malentendu. La méthode exige de ne pas dua- 8 Walter Benjamin, « Deux poèmes de Friedrich Hölderlin », dans Œuvres, trad. Maurice de Gandillac, Rainer Rochlitz et Pierre Rusch (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 1:120. 9 Sophocle, Antigone, dans Théâtre complet, trad. Robert Pignarre (Paris: Éditions Flamma- rion, 2013), 79. 10 Sophocle, 81. 11 Signalons que Françoise Duroux (Antigone encore) marque la complexité de ce point en interprétant les recoupements de Dike, Nomoï et Themis (coutume). 170 antonia birnbaum liser, de partir d’emblée de ce démêlé du singulier et du pluriel afin d’en saisir la logique. Le recouvrement du corps de Polynice, aux confins de la cité, connecte un de- hors à la scène devant le palais, y répand une étrangeté. D’un même geste, l’acte d’Antigone ruine l’identité entre pouvoir et politique, tout comme il révoque l’as- signation du féminin à la famille. Rien ne reste inchangé, ni le caractère préten- dument naturel, archaïque, des dieux d’en bas et de leurs lois souterraines, ni le caractère conflictuel et guerrier de la polis. Hegel Dans l’interprétation hégélienne, cette double délimitation s’avère comme le contenu aporétique de la tragédie. On le sait, la conception de Hegel correspond à l’interprétation conservatrice par excellence de la tragédie antique. Il prend deux sphères, celle de la famille, celle de la polis, et les répartit entre l’homme et la femme. Pour le philosophe, il ne s’agit nulle part de démesure, mais d’un droit contre un autre droit, même s’il est évident que les deux protagonistes (Antigone et Créon) ne respectent aucune mesure et que la tragédie dans son ensemble entraîne une dislocation de la mesure. Voilà ce qui a tellement irrité Goethe, et plus tard Erwin Rhode : où donc trouver cette égalisation des dis- cours dont Hegel fait état ? Pourtant, il ne faut pas se hâter de congédier son interprétation. La différence sexuelle telle que Hegel la répartit dans la tragédie décrit précisément la situation que perturbe l’action d’Antigone. Elle peut donc valoir comme formulation d’un point de départ. Chez Hegel, la Sittlichkeit de l’Antiquité est une figure historique de l’esprit. En celle-ci, la naturalité des deux sexes prend une signification rationnelle. Dans ma féminité ou ma masculinité, je réalise d’emblée ma part d’universel, ma dé- termination de sa dimension commune. En appartenant à l’une de ces parties, par exemple à la partie féminine, j’incarne directement la totalité elle-même. Mais cette symétrie recèle une asymétrie drastique. À y regarder de plus près, la détermination rationnelle de ces entités naturelles consiste à son tour en une division de cette rationalité, laquelle répartit à nouveau rationalité et physis. L’homme devient individu parce qu’il devient un citoyen, et se libère ainsi de sa naturalité. Ce détachement implique un certain rapport à l’éros. Ainsi Hegel : 171 un courage sans héroïsme: antigone, créon, ismène, hémon, tirésias « […] cependant que chez l’homme, ces deux côtés (le singulier et l’universel du désir) se disjoignent, et dès lors qu’il possède, en tant que citoyen, la force consciente de soi de l’universalité, il achète par là même le droit du désir, tout en se conservant en même temps la liberté de s’en affranchir. »12 Le naturel du sexe est devenu pour lui désir, dont l’universel entre de manière singulière dans sa subjectivité, exactement comme pour tous ses autres actes. L’éthique se su- bordonne le naturel, il y a donc désir humain au lieu de l’indifférence naturelle du sexe. Chez la femme, cela ne se produit pas. La rationalité de la singularité de la mère et de l’épouse est « pour une part quelque chose de naturel qui appartient au plaisir, d’autre part quelque chose de négatif qui n’y aperçoit que son dispa- raître, et c’est pourquoi précisément cette singularité est pour une part quelque chose de contingent, qui peut être remplacé par une autre. Dans la maison du souci éthique, du souci des bonnes moeurs et de la coutume, ce n’est pas sur tel homme, ce n’est pas sur tel enfant, mais sur un homme, sur des enfants en gé- néral — ce n’est pas sur le sentiment mais sur l’universel que ces rapports et la condition de la femme se fondent. »13 En bref, la femme colle à la généralité de sa fonction sexuelle et reproductrice, qui ne mène en soi à aucune subjectivité, mais représente la contrepartie souterraine, divine, du règne des lois humaines. Elle est vouée à l’emprise de la physis, là où l’homme s’en détache. Pour Hegel, la médiation de ces moments vaut comme une mise à l’épreuve complémentaire. « L’un des extrêmes, l’esprit universel à soi-même conscient, est concaténé avec son autre extrême, à sa force et son élément, avec l’esprit sans conscience, par l’individualité de l’homme. En revanche, la loi divine a son individualisation, ou encore, l’esprit sans conscience de l’individu singulier a son existence chez la femme, par l’intermédiaire de laquelle, comme terme mé- dian, il monte de son ineffectivité à son effectivité, passe de l’ignorant et du non- su au royaume conscient. »14 12 G. W. F. Hegel, La Phénoménologie de l’esprit, trad. Jean-Pierre Lefebvre (Paris: Éditions Aubier, 1991), 310. 13 Hegel, 310; traduction modifiée. 14 Hegel, 314. 172 antonia birnbaum Cette complémentarité est résolument hiérarchique. Le tout de l’éthique forme une rationalité commune qui exclut d’emblée sa part féminine des procédures de son universalité. Elle condamne le féminin à ne pouvoir transformer d’au- cune façon la rationalité qui la fixe sur une position naturalisée et muette en son sein. Cela vaut pour toute rationalité qui se réclame d’une complicité des ordres. Aussitôt surgit irrésistiblement la question : et quelle part de cette arti- culation complémentaire du rationnel détermine comment les ordres doivent se compléter ? La complémentarité de l’éthique tragique hégélienne repose logiquement sur une naturalisation de la différence sexuelle. La femme ne participe à la vie ra- tionnelle de la citoyenneté que dans l’exacte mesure où elle est exclue de son lo- gos, où elle fonde ce qu’il y a de non-conscient, de souterrain en lui. La femme a sa place dans les conflits de la polis en ce qu’elle n’y a aucune place. Le polemos a lieu entre hommes, sa disposition est homosexuelle. Sans s’attarder davan- tage sur les incohérences internes de cette interprétation, on peut reprendre le cadre esquissé par Hegel comme tendance aporétique. L’esprit éthique détaillé par Hegel ne correspond pas à une complémentarité dialectique, mais à une hié- rarchie des sexes qui opère comme condition monotone et opaque de leur diffé- rence. Celle-ci impute au féminin une incapacité à la dispute. Le drame Il existe bien une protagoniste du drame qui fait sienne cette élimination d’elle- même, qui acquiesce à son mutisme, à savoir Ismène. Ainsi, la scène d’intro- duction du drame contient une indication directe sur la mise à l’écart d’Anti- gone. Sa fidélité à la fatalité des Labdacides, son acte, sa proclamation de cet acte divise la loi de la parenté dans l’exacte mesure où elle déclare honteuse la soumission féminine d’Ismène. Antigone n’incarne donc en aucun cas le natu- rel inconscient du deuil féminin, pas plus que sa voix ne représente le féminin face à la polis.15 Il ne s’agit pas pour elle d’une chose qui serait déjà commune à toutes les femmes, mais d’une chose qui la sépare directement d’Ismène, et par- tant, qui clive le féminin. La fidélité d’Antigone divise à nouveau un lien de sang qui est lui-même contre-nature. Elle ne se situe pas simplement dans une loi 15 Proclamer Antigone « féministe » revient le plus souvent à ne pas s’intéresser à ce qu’elle aurait à nous dire sur les rapports entre sexualité et politique égalitaire. 173 un courage sans héroïsme: antigone, créon, ismène, hémon, tirésias de parenté assumée, elle l’aliène. Pas de sororité donc ; Antigone répond d’une solidarité inexistante, que l’on peut anticiper comme une réinterprétation de la politique elle-même. La loi prescrit qu’au-delà de la politique, les femmes sont assignées au deuil, tandis que Créon interdit à tous d’offrir une sépulture à l’ennemi politique. Par conséquent, Antigone ne peut venir au secours de son frère criminel qu’en trans- gressant les limites qui lui sont imposées. D’abord, comme on n’a cessé de le souligner, les liens autres que ceux avec ce frère perdent toute signification pour elle. Ensuite, son acte, sa revendication déconcertante font effraction dans la sphère où il n’y aucune place pour elle. La sépulture offerte au criminel Polynice inverse les rapports des sphères : il fait du deuil féminin une chose contre-na- ture de la polis. La fidélité au frère s’interpose, déporte les frontières du dedans et du dehors, de la justice et des lois, bouleverse le contexte ordonné qui situe l’ami, l’ennemi et la femme.16 La « monstruosité » d’Antigone est clairement attestée dans l’aversion spécifique que son acte suscite chez Créon, ainsi que dans la dispute d’Hémon avec Créon. Ce n’est pas seulement l’insolence à l’égard de son règne qui lui est odieuse, mais bien le fait que cette transgression soit accomplie par une femme. « Créon : Un ennemi mort est toujours un ennemi. Antigone : Je suis faite pour partager l’amour non la haine (symphilein). Créon : Descends donc là-bas, et, s’il te faut aimer à tout prix, aime les morts. Moi vivant, ce n’est pas une femme qui fera la loi. »17 Et encore : « Créon : Son forfait accompli, elle pêche une seconde fois par outrecuidance lorsqu’elle s’en fait gloire et sourit à son oeuvre. En vérité, de nous deux, c’est elle qui serait l’homme si je la laissais triompher impunément ».18 Créon ne cesse d’y revenir : une femme ne doit pas avoir de voix là où Antigone s’immisce. La domination de Créon est tout uniment patriarcale et tyrannique et c’est justement cette unité qui est rompue par la contestation d’Antigone. Sa transgression des limites ne fait pas que déplacer les frontières ; elle engendre 16 Il ne s’agit donc nullement de reprendre dans les mêmes termes l’assignation d’un deuil au delà de la politique, quitte à en faire une « politique du deuil », ainsi que le propose Judith Butler. Il s’agit de décomposer les frontières selon lesquelles se départagent mort, deuil, conflit et guerre. 17 Sophocle, Antigone, 81. 18 Sophocle, 80. 174 antonia birnbaum une nécessité, sans aucune solution possible, la nécessité de relier autrement le partage d’amour (symphilein) et le polemos. Il ne s’agit pas d’un changement po- litique, mais d’une détotalisation de la politique, de son rattachement à ce qui lui échappe, à l’impolitisable dont elle procède. Ou, pour reprendre le vocabu- laire de Benjamin : sa transgression a pour effet un inachèvement de la justice. Dans cette perspective, le recours aux lois souterraines prend également un sens différent. L’enterrement du frère est revendiqué auprès de Créon en faisant appel à Zeus. Mais l’acte d’enterrer, ce qui en lui n’accède pas à la parole, ne re- conduit pas simplement une loi plus ancienne. Elle s’apparente à une tentative d’élargir le champ symbolique, d’y matérialiser un topos nouveau. Son balbu- tiement d’oiseau en témoigne. Ainsi le gardien : « Au bout d’un long moment, quand la bourrasque s’est éloignée, nous apercevons la fillette qui pousse des lamentations aiguës, comme fait un oiseau affolé, quand il arrive au nid et n’y trouve plus ses petits. »19 Ces circonstances, ces bruitages indiquent que la sai- sine explicite de Zeus fonctionne comme un soutien et non comme une justifi- cation. Hölderlin exprime cet aspect étrange et insaisissable dans la tournure blasphématoire qu’il prête au dire d’Antigone. Sommée de s’expliquer sur qui l’autorise à passer outre le décret, elle déclare s’autoriser « Par ceci, que mon Zeus ne m’en a pas instruite. »20 De même que l’insurrection d’Antigone est le point focal des conflits déclen- chés par le contexte tragique, de même sa solitude ne peut être saisie comme un centre vide, à égale distance de tous les autres protagonistes. Le fait que tout perde de l’importance pour Antigone à l’exception de l’enterrement de Polynice ne dit rien sur l’éloignement ou la proximité des autres à celle-ci. La dispute entre Hémon et Créon met cette différence à l’épreuve ; c’est en elle qu’a lieu, de manière irrésolue, ratée, l’inachèvement de la justice évoqué plus haut. Dans l’échange avec son père, Hémon tente de prévenir une terrible faute, là même où la condamnation à mort d’Antigone a déjà été prononcée, mais n’a pas encore été mise à exécution. La chance manquée de la justice se manifeste à contretemps. Le fils ne fait pas appel à un possible que le réel aurait déjà effacé. Bien plutôt, la dispute tourne directement autour de l’effacement de ce qui n’a 19 Sophocle, 79. 20 Friedrich Hölderlin, Antigone de Sophocle, 57. 175 un courage sans héroïsme: antigone, créon, ismène, hémon, tirésias pas encore eu lieu, et partant autour de la temporalité qui s’y loge. Hémon s’en remet à la possibilité d’un revirement temporel : que l’injustice s’interrompe. Ainsi, son appel à la rétractation, l’échec de cet appel ne peut être pensé que dans l’élément du temps : si la justice est bafouée, c’est que l’ajournement de l’injustice fait défaut. On a souvent remarqué que l’amour pour Antigone n’est jamais évoqué par Hé- mon. Il est peut-être plus important de noter qu’Hémon est saisi, ébranlé par ce que dit et fait Antigone, qu’il prend en charge et élargit le choc qu’elle introduit et transmet au sein de la polis.21 Il s’avère que la fidélité d’Antigone n’est pas res- tée une intuition isolée. C’est précisément en cet endroit que se révèle une rup- ture dans le contexte tragique, laquelle renvoie au seuil du drame, vers son de- hors. L’enchaînement de l’intrigue et ce que montre le drame sont deux choses différentes. L’acte d’Antigone prend effet doublement, à même son éclat solitaire et à même l’ombre sans éclat qu’elle projette : dans le fait que sa contestation a été entendue et relayée par Hémon, qui l’a traduite. Ou, pour le dire avec Lacan ; Antigone est seule, mais elle n’est pas la seule. Elle ne peut certes rien en savoir, ni y prendre appui, sinon sa décision ne serait plus tragique. Mais le drame par- court les deux, l’ombre et l’éclat. Il y a un passage remarquable dans la dispute entre Hémon et Créon. Hémon tente à plusieurs reprises de dissuader son père de tuer la jeune fille. Créon veut l’obliger à prendre parti contre Antigone. « Créon : c’est pourquoi notre devoir est de défendre l’ordre et de ne jamais souffrir qu’une femme ait le dessus. Mieux vaut tomber, s’il le faut, sous les coups d’un homme, que d’être appelé le vaincu d’une femme. »22 Le fils tente de le raisonner en intervertissant les positions in- terlocutoires. « Créon : Ce garçon à ce qu’il me semble, fait cause commune avec la femme. Hémon : Si tu es femme, oui, car c’est à toi seul que je m’intéresse. »23 Le fils devient le défenseur de la polis en devenant à la fois défenseur de l’épouse et du père contre le père. Il ne peut exprimer le fait qu’il s’inquiète à la fois du père et du juste qu’en incluant Créon lui-même dans la mise à l’écart du féminin, 21 Le déplacement de ce problème est redevable à l’impressionnante réflexion de Kurt von Fritz, « Haimons Liebe zu Antigone », dans Antike und Moderne Tragödie. Neun Abhand- lungen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1962), 227–42. 22 Sophocle, Antigone, 85. 23 Sophocle, 86; traduction modifiée. 176 antonia birnbaum en l’y inscrivant. Cet étrange report met en jeu un fossé d’expérience, une faille qui traverse les rapports des sexes. Le père est luimême exposé à cette faille, et avec elle à la chance de revenir sur l’injustice de sa prescription ; cette sépara- tion éprouvée pourrait empêcher sa faute envers celle-ci, et partant, envers la cité elle-même. Ce n’est que le rejet obtus et tyrannique de Créon qui amène fi- nalement Hémon à s’exclamer : « Si tu n’étais pas mon père, je dirais que tu n’as pas toute ta tête ! »24 À cette première torsion du cadre vient s’en ajouter un autre. Créon accuse le fils de sa prise de parti : « Créon : Tous les mots que tu dis ne sont que pour elle. Hémon : Et pour toi aussi, et pour moi, et pour les dieux d’en bas. »25 Hé- mon enchaîne paratactiquement sur le dire de son père, affirmant que le parti des prescriptions de la cité ne peut être pris sans l’élargir. Parler pour Antigone ne signifie pas l’excepter, cela signifie aussi parler pour les autres. Le mouve- ment d’inclusion prend effet dans une traversée dialogique, dans l’écart franchi d’une parole à sa réponse. Cette parataxe répercute, dans le contenu dialo- gique, la succession dans l’intrigue des plaidoyers pour l’acte d’Antigone, celui d’Ismène, celui de Hémon lui-même, enfin celui de Tirésias. Chacun donne voix différemment à ce qui fait malentendu, et cette consécution elle-même gagne en violence au fur et à mesure de son déploiement. Ismène la soumise rappelle à Créon l’amour qui est porté par Hémon à sa soeur, Hémon en appelle à la raison de son père et l’exhorte à se rétracter, à quitter l’espace solitaire de la tyrannie. Tirésias enfin décrit le malheur qui s’abat sur la cité et prédit à Créon le sort fu- neste qui attend son règne imprudent et arrogant. Dans sa progression, cette suite mène à la chute, où la mort du fils puis de la mère matérialiseront la défaite de Créon. Le dialogue de Hémon et de Créon y prend place tout en dérogeant à sa cohérence. Mettant en jeu cette parataxe bi- garrée, démultipliée, du « un par un » (Elle, Moi, Toi, les dieux d’en bas) contre l’acharnement de son père, Hémon anticipe la chute des anciens ordres, non selon l’issue funeste dictée par la tyrannie, mais selon leur transposition en un autre sériage, en l’occurrence précisément le sériage auquel Antigone refuse de renoncer. Ce sériage d’une autre vie n’est donc pas seulement la « propre » vie d’Antigone, sa vie de femme, d’emblée perdue, dont elle se désole dans sa cé- 24 Sophocle, 87; traduction modifiée. 25 Sophocle, 87; traduction modifiée. 177 un courage sans héroïsme: antigone, créon, ismène, hémon, tirésias lèbre lamentation du quatrième épisode. Cette autre vie s’esquisse déjà au mi- lieu de la dispute entre Hémon et Créon, et à ce titre son altérité change aussi de sens. Le conflit tragique s’élargit, comme nous l’avons déjà mentionné plus haut, d’un désir porté par la seule qui soit fidèle à sa lignée vers un conflit des mondes irréductible à l’ordre de la polis. Ainsi, nous qui assistons au drame, nous voyons une articulation temporelle- ment tordue : d’abord une réinterprétation de la polis, provoquée par l’incroyable audace d’Antigone, puis l’échec anticipé du possible que son audace a esquis- sé, la solitude de son désir implacable, et enfin le cruel destin de Créon, qui le transfigure lui aussi en personnage tragique. L’audace d’Antigone se transpose dans tous les incidents, les efforts, les disputes que suscite son intransigeance. De Lukács à Lacan, on ne cesse de souligner que tout perd de son importance pour elle au regard d’un seul objet inconditionnel. Mais quel est donc cet « un seul objet » ? L’intransigeance d’Antigone dans la tragédie ne se répercute-t-elle pas plutôt dans tous ses retournements ? Son désir s’étend à un enchaînement : ne pas trahir sa propre naissance, accorder une sépulture à ce criminel qu’est Polynice dans sa singularité, contrer l’injustice de la polis par une justice divine, chercher un langage inouï pour cela, chanter la perte de sa propre vie. La simple mort n’atteint pas le désir inconditionnel d’Antigone. Non pas parce que cet inconditionnel serait d’emblée qualifié de pur, mais parce que l’énigme qu’il représente persiste dans tous les enchevêtrements et toutes les significa- tions de son destin. Ce n’est pas le sublime d’Antigone qui nous éblouit : les morceaux et les chutes nous sautent aux yeux et nous regardent, comme s’ils étaient le tout. Références Benjamin, Walter. « Deux poèmes de Friedrich Hölderlin ». Dans Œuvres, tome 1, traduit par Maurice de Gandillac, Rainer Rochlitz et Pierre Rusch, 91–124. Paris: Gallimard, 2000. Bollack, Jean. La Mort d’Antigone: La tragédie de Créon. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999. Bruno, Pierre. « Éthique du littoral ». L’éthique de la psychanalyse: Retour du séminaire d’été 2020, Groupe niços de psychanalyse lacanienne. https://www.gnipl.fr/pdf_ 178 antonia birnbaum journees_l_ethique_de_la_psychanalyse/%C3%89THIQUE%20DU%20LITTORAL. pdf. Duroux, Françoise. Antigone encore: Les femmes et la loi. Paris: Côté-femmes-éditions, 1993. Fritz, Kurt von. « Haimons Liebe zu Antigone ». Dans Antike und Moderne Tragödie. Neun Abhandlungen, 227–42. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1962. Hegel, G. W. F. La Phénoménologie de l’esprit. Traduit par Jean-Pierre Lefebvre. Paris: Édi- tions Aubier, 1991. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Antigone de Sophocle. Traduit par Philippe Lacoue Labarthe. Paris: Christian Bourgois éditeur, 1978. Lacan, Jacques. L’éthique de la psychanalyse. Paris: Seuil, 1986. Loraux, Nicole. « Antigone sans théâtre ». Dans La Grèce hors d’elle et autres textes: Écrits 1973–2003, dirigé par Michèle Cohen-Halimi, 629–36. Paris: Klinsieck, 2021. Morel, Geneviève. « D’un éclat féminin qui suscite la dispute: Lectures croisées d’Antigone de Sophocle par Jacques Lacan et Jean Bollack ». Dans La Philologie au present, dirigé par Christoph König et Denis Thouard, 185–99. Lille: Presses universitaires du Sep- tentrion, 2020. Sophocle. Antigone. Dans Théâtre complet, traduit par Robert Pignarre, 69–101. Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 2013. Žižek, Slavoj. La Marionnette et le nain: Le christianisme entre perversion et subversion. Paris: Seuil, 2006. 179 * Psychanalyste,Association lacanienne internationale, Paris, France christian.fierrens@telenet.be | https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1996-1517 Christian Fierens* Une petite pensée : « l’appensée » ; La dernière séance du séminaire XXIII (11/05/1973) Keywords appensée, Borromean knot, ego, fantasy, Joyce, lalangue, narcissism, sinthome, symptom, thinking, trefoil knot Abstract Psychoanalytic practice requires articulating three dimensions (imaginary, symbolic, real) in the Borromean Knot. The Freudian symptom articulates these three dimensions with a fourth one, psychic reality. Articulation of the three dimensions in the person- ality presupposes their fusion or confusion in the trefoil knot. The concatenation of the symbolic dimension with the real one would lead to the loss of the imaginary dimension if the knot of the ego did not retain it within the structure. All these movements support the thinking of psychoanalytical practice: the “appensée.” Mala misel: “l’appensée“; zadnja seansa seminarja XXIII (11. 5. 1973) Ključne besede appensée, boromejski vozel, jaz, fantazma, Joyce, jejezik, narcizem, sintom, simptom, mišljenje, trilistni vozel Povzetek Psihoanalitična praksa zahteva artikulacijo treh razsežnosti (imaginarnega, simbolne- ga, realnega) v boromejskem vozlu. Freudov simptom te tri razsežnosti poveže s četrto razsežnostjo, psihično realnostjo. Artikulacija treh dimenzij v osebnosti predpostavlja njihovo zlitje oziroma pomešanje v trolistnem vozlu. Združitev simbolne razsežnosti z realno bi vodila v izgubo imaginarne razsežnosti, če je vozel jaza ne bi zadržal znotraj strukture. Vse te poteze podpirajo mišljenje psihoanalitične prakse kot »appensée«. Filozofski vestnik issn 0353-4510 | Volume 45 | Number 1 | 2024 | 179–95 cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.45.1.07 180 christian fierens ∞ How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life ! —Ludwig Wittgenstein ; mise en musique par Steve Reich dans Proverb Est-ce une application pour la psychanalyse ? Est-ce « App psychanalyse » à télé- charger sur l’Iphone du psychanalyste ? Voilà la question de l’app penser. Com- ment penser en psychanalyse ? La philosophie comme appui à la pratique psychanalytique « On s’appuie contre un signifiant pour penser ».1 C’est le sens de « l’appensée », donné par Lacan tout à la fin du séminaire. Au début du séminaire, il a pour- tant dit autre chose  : c’est la chaîne borroméenne qui est appui à la pensée. Alors, sur quoi allons-nous nous appuyer pour penser : sur le signifiant ou sur la chaîne borroméenne ? Et que veut dire penser ? Et pourquoi nous intéresser au penser, alors que l’ana- lyse du rêve montre clairement que l’inconscient « ne pense pas, ne calcule pas, ne juge absolument pas » ? Quoi que nous fassions, nous sommes menés par l’inconscient et, dans ce sens, nous ne pensons pas encore. Mais. Mais maîtriser. Mais si nous voulons ouvrir une pratique avec l’inconscient, si nous voulons en quelque sorte maîtriser la pratique analytique, nous nous trouvons automatiquement dans un discours magistral. Ce dernier se supporte d’une philosophie qui y occupe la place de vérité. Tout maître (y compris le sujet supposé savoir) s’appuie sur une pensée, sur une philosophie. Ici, nous ne cher- cherions plus un appui pour la pensée, mais une pensée comme appui pour une pratique (psychanalytique) plus ou moins bien maîtrisée. 1 Jacques Lacan, Le sinthome, 1975–1976 (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 155. 181 une petite pensée : « l’appensée » ; la dernière séance du séminaire xxiii (11/05/1973) Quelle est la pensée, la philosophie capable de soutenir la pratique psychana- lytique de l’inconscient (lequel ne pense pas) ? Eh bien, ce sera la philosophie comme telle. Elle se définit par ce qui lui échappe ; « amour de la sagesse », elle se définit par ce qui lui manque, la sagesse et c’est ce manque qui recèle l’in- conscient. Elle ne fait que tendre vers la sagesse, c’est un éternel projet (projet de sagesse) toujours jeté vers ce qui pourrait advenir, tendu vers le futur qui n’est jamais pleinement accompli. La philosophie est cette tension, ce temps fu- tur projeté. L’être que vise le discours du signifiant maître/m’être n’est rien sans le temps.2 Je reviendrai plus loin sur ce temps pensé projeté, qui est au cœur de notre pratique : l’analysant vise un futur qui lui échappe radicalement (de même qu’à l’analyste). Comment s’appuyer sur quelque chose qui n’est qu’une faille ? Le nœud borroméen Nous rencontrons sans cesse le trou, le manque, la difficulté majeure, la panne, le ratage dans notre pratique : ça ne va pas. L’os de notre pratique, c’est ce « ça ne va pas » dans notre pratique elle-même, le manque d’une sagesse ou de sa- voir pertinemment comment appliquer un savoir, un savoir-faire qui n’est jamais donné par avance, quelles que soient les finesses de la théorie. Nous n’avons pas l’app de la psychanalyse qui sait tout. Mais comment faire avec ce trou ? Nous pouvons penser pouvoir le cerner et nous écrirons un cercle, un rond simple. Mais c’est trop facile, car ce qui fait trou n’est pas cerné, il est partout. Nous sommes cernés par le trou, par du « ça ne va pas » que nous ne cernons pas. Prenons un signifiant, au sens d’un signe qui pourrait faire signe vers une signification, une association quelconque d’un analysant, un lapsus ou même un symptôme. Bien sûr, nous imaginons déjà qu’avec une bonne app, nous allons pouvoir l’interpréter, c’est-à-dire lui coller un signifié : voilà un fil imaginaire possible, qui vient d’un passé insondable et qui surtout qui court vers un futur improbable et tout ce qui entoure ce projet imaginaire de l’analyste et de l’analysant, c’est la vastitude d’un espace vide autour de cette ligne imaginaire infinie. Nous avons beau imaginer le signifiant inséré dans une « chaîne », la chaîne signifiante. Cette « chaîne » n’est qu’une 2 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Être et Temps, trad. François Vezin (Paris: Gallimard, 1986). 182 christian fierens droite infinie plongée dans le vide de signification, dans un océan de perplexité, de non-savoir. Prenons maintenant un signifiant, au sens plus poétique d’un fil qui court sans fin, qui court comme le furet de la chanson sans jamais s’arrêter. Fil symbolique que l’analyse comme processus ne lâche pas. Nous avons beau nous accrocher à ce fil des associations libres. Ce fil n’est qu’une droite infinie plongée, entourée par le vide de sens radical et mélancolique de la vie de tout homme. Prenons maintenant le « ça ne va pas » comme un fil réel que nous rencontrons dans le cours de la vie et de l’analyse de tout analysant. Ce n’est encore qu’une droite infinie plongée dans un autre Réel dont nous n’avons même pas idée. Voilà bien trois droites infinies — imaginaire, symbolique et réelle — qui donnent une idée de notre pratique psychanalytique, non pas en tant qu’elle rencontre un trou ou des trous, mais en tant qu’elle est de toute part entourée par un « ça ne va pas » radical, que nous percevons gentiment comme un « ça ne va pas… de soi ». « Ça ne va pas de soi » la droite infinie du symbolique et nous l’appuyons sur la droite infinie de l’imaginaire (pour suivre le processus symbolique, nous nous appuyons sur des significations supposées fixées). « Ça ne va pas de soi » la droite infinie de l’imaginaire et nous l’appuyons sur la droite infinie du réel (pour suivre les fantasmes imaginaires de l’analysant, nous imaginons qu’ils se réfèrent à un réel plus ou moins traumatique). « Ça ne va pas de soi » la droite infinie du réel et nous aurons vite fait de l’appuyer sur la droite infinie du sym- bolique et ainsi de suite indéfiniment. Le tour est joué, car l’appui tourne en rond nous avons construit un triskel composé des trois droites infinies du sym- bolique, de l’imaginaire et du réel. Voilà l’application, l’app, l’appui, l’appensée qui soutient toute la pratique psychanalytique, la « si petite pensée qu’elle peut remplir toute une vie », car elle est faite de droites infinies dans un espace infini. Nous pouvons chaque fois imaginer que la droite infinie se bouclera, que la fin de la droite rejoindra le début pour former un cercle. Nous pouvons l’imaginer pour zéro, pour une, pour deux ou pour trois de ces droites. Nous avons ainsi quatre figures de la chaîne borroméenne : 183 une petite pensée : « l’appensée » ; la dernière séance du séminaire xxiii (11/05/1973) De ces quatre figures, je retiens surtout la seconde. Certes, la figure du triskel avec les trois droites infinies semble davantage correspondre à la réalité cli- nique : que nous nous situions dans l’imaginaire, dans le symbolique ou dans le réel, ça file vers l’infini. Mais en même temps, nous risquons toujours de perdre le contact avec l’une ou l’autre dimension. La pratique psychanalytique exige une « attention également flottante » entre la perspective imaginaire (quelle est la signification de ce qui se dit ?), la perspective symbolique (ça court comment ? vers où ?) et la perspective réelle (qu’est-ce qui nous échappe continuellement ?). Pour tenir toutes ces perspectives ensemble, il faut que nous imaginions qu’au moins l’une d’entre elles se boucle sur elle-même, se présente comme un rond. Il faut que nous l’imaginions, ce sera l’imaginaire qui fera le mieux l’affaire. Nous verrons que cette deuxième figure de la chaîne borroméenne est centrale dans le faire. Car « faut l’faire » le nouage borroméen ; si nous ne le faisons pas (dans notre pratique), il n’existe pas. Il nous faut fabriquer cette application qui permet de soutenir l’attention également flottante. L’attention également flottante ou le nœud borroméen à quatre Nous ne pensons pas spontanément avec l’app de la psychanalyse, même si nous avons les figures du nœud borroméen en poche. Ici, je reviens à quelque chose qui a précédé cette dernière leçon du Sinthome, plus précisément à la pre- mière leçon traitant du nœud borroméen à quatre consistances, plus pédagogi- quement à la présentation freudienne d’un nœud borroméen à quatre dans la leçon XXIII de Nouvelles conférences, la conférence consacrée précisément au « symptôme ». Plaçons-nous dans l’état d’esprit de Freud : le symptôme est causé par le réel du trauma (premier étage de la construction freudienne : R), le réel du trauma sert de base pour l’imaginaire d’une série de fantasmatisation à partir de ce trauma 184 christian fierens (deuxième étage : I), enfin sur la base de cet imaginaire fantasmatique vient le commentaire symbolique (troisième étage : S). Ceci n’est PAS un nœud borroméen. C’est un empilement de ronds, qui se dis- persent facilement. Par exemple, c’est le réel du trauma qui attire toute l’atten- tion et on oublie la fantasmatisation imaginaire et le commentaire symbolique comme si c’était rien. L’attention également flottante requiert de prêter égale- ment attention aux trois étages sans en perdre aucun. Très bien, mais comment la psychanalyse, qui est essentiellement une pratique de parole, une pratique symbolique pourrait-elle changer quoi que ce soit au réel du trauma et à l’imagi- naire des fantasmes qui sont déjà installés dans le symptôme ? Dans ce schéma, c’est fondamentalement impossible : la psychanalyse est un bavardage qui ne change rien. Mais le symptôme n’est pas simplement le résidu d’un trauma réel. Il est un faire (« faut l’faire »), il est un processus, il est une formation. La formation du symptôme n’est ni le réel du trauma, ni l’imaginaire de la fan- tasmatisation du trauma, ni le symbolique du commentaire du trauma et de sa fantasmatisation. C’est une « réalité psychique », dit Freud, qui n’a rien à voir avec la réalité ordinaire. Le symptôme est un compromis, un con-promis : il pro- met une communauté structurelle, il promet de mettre ensemble les restes du trauma R, les restes de la fantasmatisation I et les restes du commentaire S. Au- trement dit, il promet de nouer les trois dimensions : il est le matériel parfai- tement adéquat à l’attention également flottante. Or, cette égalité d’attention entre ces trois dimensions ne vient pas seulement avec l’attention également flottante ; elle est déjà là dès avant le trauma et dès avant leurs fantasmatisa- 185 une petite pensée : « l’appensée » ; la dernière séance du séminaire xxiii (11/05/1973) tion : c’est la « réalité psychique » construite sur une base symbolique. C’est la fonction du père et des fantasmes originaires qui l’explicitent (scène primitive, castration et séduction). La formation du symptôme doit s’entendre avec l’app, l’appensée de la réalité psychique. Et l’attention également flottante utilisera cette « réalité psychique » inventée pour se soutenir. C’est elle qui va expliquer la formation du symptôme, c’est elle qui va soutenir ou supporter le réel du trauma qui dépend d’elle plus que d’une réalité matérielle extérieure. C’est elle qui va soutenir la fantasmatisation. C’est elle qui doit être mobilisée dans le transfert à partir de la parole, sur le fond du symbolique, c’est-à-dire du signifiant. On peut la dessiner en tenant compte qu’elle doit soutenir le réel et l’imaginaire du schéma précédent tant en étant soutenue par le symbolique. Il faut inventer — « faut l’faire » — une courbe fermée qui passe en dessous du réel et de l’imagi- naire et au-dessus du symbolique : L’écriture : faire la lettre « Une écriture est un faire qui donne support à la pensée ».3 Cette chaîne borroméenne à quatre ronds se présente bien comme une écriture. Mais quelle est cette écriture ? Apparemment, j’ai exposé quelque chose de la pensée du symptôme par Freud et je l’ai ensuite transposée dans l’écriture de cette chaîne. Et voilà, muni de cet outil qu’est cette chaîne, nous pouvons aller vers le symptôme et l’appliquer dans une pratique dite borroméenne à quatre ronds. 3 Lacan, Le sinthome, 144. 186 christian fierens Ce n’est pas le sens de ce que Lacan propose. Il ne dit pas que le nœud borro- méen est une écriture qui transcrit une pensée pour ensuite pouvoir faire de la clinique en s’appuyant sur une transcription schématisée des pensées théo- riques. Il dit : « Une écriture est un faire qui donne support à la pensée ».4 L’écriture qui nous concerne en psychanalyse n’est pas l’écriture qui transcrit la parole, la pensée, le dit, le signifiant sur le papier ou un autre support. C’est, disons l’écriture comme lettre. Mais le problème se repose : qu’est-ce que la lettre ? À nouveau, non, la lettre qui nous concerne en psychanalyse n’est pas la transcription d’un son, d’une idée ou d’un phonème. Comme l’écriture, la lettre n’est elle-même pas sans un faire. Nous n’allons pas la trouver dans un tiroir caché de ce qu’on pourrait imaginer comme la cave de l’inconscient. « Faut l’faire », il faut faire la lettre en tant qu’elle est l’écriture pro- duite par un discours. Les lettres de l’alphabet phénicien sont produites par le discours du marché, les lettres ou caractères chinois sont produits par l’ancien discours chinois, les lettres de l’alphabet psychanalytique (petit a, S de grand A barré, phi) sont produites par le discours psychanalytique. « N’importe quel fait de discours a ceci de bon qu’il fait de la lettre ».5 Avec ces exemples de discours, nous pourrions maintenant penser que le travail est fait : dans notre ordinateur, nous avons les différentes polices : chinoise, garamond, calibri, arial, cambria, times ; nous avons même la police Lacan. Ces lettres sont toutes faites, autre- ment dit la formation, le processus, la production, le faire, la fabrication de la lettre, tout ça est court-circuité pour ne laisser qu’un produit tout fait. Comment revenir au faire inhérent à la lettre ? D’abord, première étape du faire la lettre : faut s’insérer dans le faire d’un discours. Sans discours proprement dit, il n’y aura pas de lettre produite par un discours. Ensuite, deuxième étape du « faut l’faire » : il faut faire le discours jusqu’au point où il bute sur son « ça ne va pas », sur son impossible. Ce point d’impossible s’écrit à la place du pro- duit du discours en question. Mais nous ne toucherons à ce point d’impossible que si le produit n’est en aucune façon compris comme quelque chose qui peut 4 Lacan, 144. 5 « N’importe quel effet de discours a ceci de bon qu’il est fait de la lettre ». Jacques Lacan, Encore, 1972–1973 (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 37. 187 une petite pensée : « l’appensée » ; la dernière séance du séminaire xxiii (11/05/1973) être assimilé par le discours en question. Ainsi, le discours magistral produit de l’objet par l’intermédiaire du travail de l’esclave ; mais si cet objet est pris comme un objet consommable, le discours magistral devient le discours capi- taliste, le discours de la consommation où rien n’est impossible (il ne fabrique pas de la lettre). Ainsi, le discours psychanalytique produit du signifiant S1 par l’intermédiaire du travail de l’analysant ; mais si ce signifiant est pris comme un signifiant interprétable, le discours psychanalytique devient le discours de l’analyste supposé savoir, où en principe rien n’est impossible (il ne fabrique pas de la lettre, il produit des signifiants qui pourront être interprétés dans le savoir du psychanalyste). Que faut-il laisser mettre en jeu dans cette production, cette fabrication de la lettre ? Dans le « faut l’faire », nous avons déjà distingué deux moments : primo, faut le faire d’un discours, secundo, faut pousser le discours jusqu’à son impos- sible, jusqu’à son « ça ne va pas ». Mais ce n’est pas pour ensuite se lamenter que ça ne va pas et pleurer sur son impuissance. Tout au contraire. Un troisième mo- ment du « faut l’faire » s’impose maintenant pour la lettre : la lettre comme im- possible, comme « ça ne va pas » radical ouvre le champ de la création, de l’in- vention. Mais attention ! cette invention n’est pas celle du sujet ou de l’individu qui bricolerait quelque babiole ou bafouille avec les lettres ainsi produites ; c’est l’invention produite par ce que nous appelons — faute de mieux — l’inconscient. L’impossible du nœud borroméen Nous ne réussissons jamais à saisir la « réalité psychique ». Nous ne réussissons jamais à cerner le symptôme. Nous n’arrivons jamais à soutenir une attention également flottante. Autrement dit, nous n’avons jamais une formation borro- méenne toute faite à enfiler à notre doigt. Ça échoue, ça ne va pas. L’impossible de la chaîne borroméenne se présente de trois façons différentes. Primo, nous pouvons penser les trois dimensions une par une, sans faire chaîne : ainsi, Freud pense le symptôme comme construit d’abord sur un réel, la réalité matérielle d’un trauma pour y ajouter ensuite la dimension imaginaire du fan- tasme et enfin la dimension symbolique de la parole. On peut aussi commencer par le symbolique : « au commencement est le verbe » et puis le réel créé et enfin l’imagination. 188 christian fierens J’ai déjà indiqué la réponse qui s’impose pour ce type d’impossible du nœud borroméen : le troisième moment d’un « faut l’faire », le faire de l’inconscient qui invente, chez Freud, la réalité psychique comme quatrième dimension. Pour ce même type d’impossible, mais en partant du symbolique (et non du réel), on inventera le sinthome comme quatrième dimension, nouant les trois premières en une chaîne borroméenne à quatre. Secundo, nous pouvons penser les trois dimensions ensemble, bien en continui- té : ainsi, quand nous présentons un cas, nous tentons nécessairement de mon- trer ce qui se joue dans la continuité du symbolique, du réel et de l’imaginaire pour tel individu unique ; nous le présentons comme une personnalité (c’est-à- dire un psychisme unifié, qui fait un), un fil unique avec cependant des couleurs tantôt symbolique, tantôt réelle, tantôt imaginaire. Ce fil unique serait représenté par un rond simple, ce n’est pas une chaîne, c’est un nœud. Mais si nous voulons tenir compte du nœud borroméen dont ce fil provient, il faudra prendre en considération les croisements entre les différentes couleurs (symbolique, réelle et imaginaire) de ce nœud. Autrement dit, nous ac- ceptons de penser dans le cadre de cette personnalité, dans le cadre d’un cas, nous représenterons cette personnalité par un nœud, le nœud de trèfle. Je rappelle très brièvement qu’une erreur dans les croisements du nœud de trèfle (au croisement 3) transforme le trèfle en un rond simple. 189 une petite pensée : « l’appensée » ; la dernière séance du séminaire xxiii (11/05/1973) Cette erreur se produit nécessairement : nous n’arrivons pas à penser vraiment les trois croisements du nœud de trèfle : l’impossible de la chaîne borroméenne se dit dans l’impossible du nœud de trèfle. Comment y répondre ? Troisième mo- ment d’un « faut l’faire ». Qu’est-ce que l’inconscient peut maintenant inventer pour soutenir le nœud de la personnalité ? Deux solutions essentiellement différentes se présentent, qui toutes deux se présentent comme cette invention d’un cercle crochetant le croisement des deux droites, qui correspond exactement à la création locale d’une chaîne bor- roméenne avec deux droites infinies et un cercle : – Soit on laisse faire ; le nœud se réparera de toute façon par — notamment à un autre endroit que celui où s’est produit l’erreur ; et c’est la structure du fantasme qui apparaît. L’invention du nouage borroméen se fait n’importe où et n’importe quand. – Soit « faut l’faire » vraiment ; l’inconscient doit directement être mis en de- meure d’inventer le nouage borroméen au lieu même de l’erreur et sans tar- der et tout de suite ; et c’est une tout autre structure qui apparaît : celle que Lacan nomme aussi « sinthome ». C’est cette position active que la pratique psychanalytique doit soutenir. 190 christian fierens Les deux sens du « sinthome » ont en commun qu’il s’agit de répondre active- ment à deux formes d’impossible de la chaîne borroméenne elle-même et de son substitut le nœud de trèfle. Il s’agit du troisième moment de « faut l’faire » impératif éthique de l’inconscient qui doit inventer activement — en acte — une nouvelle forme pour pouvoir répondre au symptôme qui lui s’est laissé aller. Tertio. Il reste encore un troisième mode d’impossible de la chaîne borroméenne, c’est la chaîne qui enchaîne deux ronds, deux dimensions. L’enchaînement de Joyce Dans Portrait de l’artiste en jeune homme, chapitre 2, ladite « scène de la raclée » est enchâssée dans une scène plus large. Stephen — alias Joyce — est sur le point d’entrer en scène dans une pièce de théâtre où il tient le rôle principal (non sans raison, puisqu’il s’est très tôt engagé dans la lecture, dans la poésie, dans le symbolique). Surviennent alors deux condisciples ignares dont Héron le jaloux : dans le réel. Héron (le réel) prend Stephen-Joyce (le symbolique) à parti, il l’enchaîne dans une mise en scène précédent la pièce de théâtre à pro- pos d’une faute que Stephen-Joyce aurait commise, à savoir la faute d’avoir une petite amoureuse (avec toute l’imagination qui est ici convoquée, y compris le regard désapprobateur du père). Nous avons apparemment les trois dimensions de la chaîne borroméenne : le symbolique du poète Joyce, le réel de l’agression de Héron et l’enjeu imaginaire de la petite amoureuse présentée comme un pé- ché. Mais ce n’est pas une chaîne borroméenne, car le symbolique et le réel sont ici clairement enchaînés : Joyce est enchaîné dans le piège de Héron et l’imagi- naire de la petite amoureuse semble pouvoir ou même devoir s’échapper : 191 une petite pensée : « l’appensée » ; la dernière séance du séminaire xxiii (11/05/1973) Voilà le discours de Joyce avec Héron (première étape d’un « faut l’faire ») ar- rivant à une impasse, dans laquelle Joyce est enlacé à Héron (deuxième étape d’un « faut l’faire »). Mais ce n’est pas tout ! Car il y a la faute, la culpabilité — réelle, symbolique et imaginaire — jouée dans la parodie d’un confiteor récité par Joyce devant Héron et son comparse, pendant lequel il se rappelle la scène de la raclée proprement dite. La scène dans la scène touche toujours au réel : la remémoration de la scène de la raclée est enchâssée dans la scène du confiteor. Et c’est là que Joyce arrive à la troisième étape, au réel du « faut l’faire ». L’invention de l’égo de Joyce Comment se fait-il que l’imaginaire engagé avec la petite amoureuse ne soit pas perdu ? Qu’est-ce qui soutient la persistance de l’amour malgré l’enchaînement symbolique — réel ? Une autre scène, la scène de la raclée, apparaît comme re- mémorée. La structure d’enchaînement entre le symbolique de Joyce et le réel de Héron y était déjà présente  sous la forme de l’engagement symbolique de Joyce dans la littérature et la poésie (marqué de suspicion d’hérésie et de faute) et la raclée administrée réellement par Héron et ses comparses à cet intellectuel méprisant et arrogant ; Joyce est littéralement enchaîné, « acculé contre un gril- lage de fil de fer barbelé »6. Comment se fait-il qu’il ne reste pas englué dans cet enchaînement et la rage bien légitime qu’il entraînait ? Comment se fait-il que Joyce ne reste pas pris dans la colère provoquée par la lâcheté de Héron et de ses comparses ? Joyce va découvrir en lui une puissance — la puissance de l’égo — devant laquelle toutes les descriptions d’amour et de haine, lui paraissent bien pâles : « Toutes les descriptions d’amour et de haine farouches, qu’il avait ren- contrées dans les livres, lui paraissaient, de ce fait, dépourvues de réalité »7. Déjà dans cette première scène qu’est la scène de la raclée, « il avait senti qu’une certaine puissance » — quelle est-elle ? — « le dépouillait de cette colère subite- ment tissée » — tissée de symbolique et de réel — « aussi aisément qu’un fruit se dépouille de sa peau tendre et mûre »8. 6 James Joyce, «  Portrait de l’artiste en june homme  », trad. Ludmila Savitzky et Jacques Aubert, dans Œuvres, dir. Jacques Aubert (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1982– 1995), 1:610. 7 Joyce, 611. 8 Joyce, 611. 192 christian fierens Joyce décrit bien la situation produite par l’enchaînement de son symbolique avec le réel de la haine de Héron ; mais il prête une oreille distraite à la fois à la haine réelle de Héron et aux manifestations symboliques de la pièce de théâtre dans laquelle il doit bientôt intervenir. Entre les deux  : l’imaginaire de son amoureuse. « Il se demandait s’il avait vécu dans ses pensées (à elle), comme elle avait vécu dans les siennes. Puis, dans l’obscurité, sans être vu des deux autres, il posa le bout de ses doigts sur la paume de son autre main, d’un effleu- rement à peine sensible. Mais la pression de ses doigts à elle avait été plus légère et plus insistante. Et soudain, le souvenir de ce contact traversa son cerveau et son corps comme une onde invisible »9. Comment l’imaginaire de ce contact traversant son cerveau et son corps a-t-il pu rester présent ? L’idéal du moi du moi est là : du côté de Héron (et de leur agression réelle), « la voix de ses camarades le pressait d’être un chic type »10, du côté de son père (symbolique), la voix le pressait « d’être un bon catholique avant tout » et puis encore les voix « d’être fidèle à sa patrie, de contribuer à relever son langage et ses traditions déchues »11. « Et c’était le vacarme de toutes ces voix, sonnant creux, qui le faisait hésiter dans la poursuite de ses fantômes. Il n’y prêtait l’oreille qu’un instant, mais il n’était heureux que loin d’elles, hors de leur at- teinte, seul ou bien en compagnie de ses camarades fantasmatiques »12. Au-delà de toutes ces voix particulières, voilà son égo qui se constitue supportant le réel de ses camarades et surmontant le symbolique de son père et de ses maîtres. 9 Joyce, 611. 10 Joyce, 612. 11 Joyce, 612. 12 Joyce, 612. 193 une petite pensée : « l’appensée » ; la dernière séance du séminaire xxiii (11/05/1973) À nouveau, voilà le deuxième schéma de la chaîne borroméenne (avec deux droites infinies et un cercle) qui vient réparer la faute de la chaîne borroméenne première. « Peu après, il était en scène ». Ce n’est pas lui qui acquiert une vie personnelle, c’est la pièce de théâtre. « Il fut étonné de voir cette pièce, qui avait été pour lui, pendant les répétitions, une chose disparate et inerte, acquérir une vie person- nelle »13. Le développement du moi chez Freud ou le narcissisme Tout le monde n’a pas vécu une scène de la raclée comme Joyce et tout le monde n’a pas développé une habileté poétique et littéraire comme Joyce. La scène de la raclée n’en fait aucunement un monstre, un être à part, un psychotique ou un extraterrestre ; car, mutatis mutandis, nous retrouvons la même structure, exactement la même structure, chez chacun des humains sans exception et c’est cette toute petite structure, cette toute petite pensée qui remplit toute une vie. C’est le travail de l’analyse de la laisser s’épanouir, pourvu que l’analyste puisse se le permettre. Avec lalangue, chacun a été plongé depuis toujours dans l’émergence de la pa- role créatrice véritablement poétique (chaque être humain est un petit Joyce : symbolique). Pour chacun, les aléas de la vie sont venus le frapper, donner une raclée à cette joie de lalangue (chaque être humain est en même temps un petit Héron : réel). Le réel de la vie est toujours déjà venu détourner et enchaîner l’ef- florescence du symbolique de lalangue. Avec cet enchaînement des aléas réels de la vie et de lalangue, l’imaginaire d’un narcissisme primaire (qui n’a jamais existé) semble radicalement perdu : his ma- jesty the baby est une belle image, mais ça ne tient pas. Oui, il y avait bien les talents, les possibilités infinies de l’infans qui ne demandaient qu’à se dévelop- per comme un Moi idéal sans faille. Mais le Mozart, amoureux de la musique, a été assassiné dans l’œuf. Avec l’enchaînement du symbolique et du réel, l’ima- ginaire s’est envolé. 13 Joyce, 612. 194 christian fierens Dans son écrit « Pour introduire le narcissisme », Freud différencie d’emblée l’autoérotisme et le narcissisme  : l’autoérotisme ne suppose aucun dévelop- pement, tandis que du côté du narcissisme, « le Moi doit subir un développe- ment »14. Mais quel est ce développement qui fait que le Moi est le Moi ? Tout le texte de Freud est polarisé vers la réponse à cette question, la question de ce qu’est le Moi en ce sens qu’il n’est rien d’autre que son propre développement : le Moi n’est rien d’autre que ce qui moi-ïse. « Le développement du moi consiste à s’éloigner du narcissisme primaire (à l’avoir toujours déjà perdu dans l’enchaî- nement de lalangue par le réel), et engendre une aspiration intense à recouvrer ce narcissisme »15. Je vous renvoie ici à mon livre L’âme du narcissisme.16 Mais comment satisfaire à cette aspiration à recouvrer le narcissisme primaire, imaginaire toujours déjà perdu ? Il s’agit de construire non pas une réplique imaginaire du Moi idéal (du narcissisme primaire toujours déjà perdu), mais un Idéal du moi construit sur le fonctionnement symbolique lui-même, sur la- langue elle-même. Naturellement, cet Idéal du moi risque toujours d’être enta- ché des pièges où lalangue s’est déjà trouvée enchaînée avec la voix du père, la voix des camarades, la voix de la religion, du quand dira-t-on, de la police, de la conscience, etc. S’il n’était que ces voix coercitives, l’idéal du moi ne serait qu’une nouvelle raclée administrée cette fois par le surmoi féroce et méchant. 14 Sigmund Freud, «  Pour introduire le narcissisme  », trad. Jean Laplanche, dans Œuvres Complètes (Paris: Puf, 1991–2019), 12:221. 15 Freud, 243. 16 Christian Fierens, L’âme du narcissisme (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Midi, 2016). 195 une petite pensée : « l’appensée » ; la dernière séance du séminaire xxiii (11/05/1973) Mais il est possible de vider toutes ces voix de leur signifié ; la voix du Surmoi vaut alors comme un signifiant sans signifié, où le grand Autre ne répond pas, c’est le signifiant du grand Autre barré. Joyce l’écrit : « C’était le vacarme de toutes ces voix, sonnant creux, qui le faisait hésiter… » Et « Il n’y prêtait l’oreille qu’un ins- tant, mais il n’était heureux que loin d’elles, hors de leur atteinte »17. La voix vide proclame alors « Jouis », c’est le véritable tour de force du Surmoi et de l’Idéal du moi. Celui qui ouvre l’invention de l’inconscient. Petite pensée qui peut soulever tous les aléas du réel et remplir toute une vie. Pour cela : « faut l’faire ». Références Fierens, Christian. L’âme du narcissisme. Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Midi, 2016. Traduit en anglais par Michael Gerard Plastow sous le titre The Soul of Narcissism (London: Routledge, 2019). Freud, Sigmund. « Pour introduire le narcissisme ». Traduit par Jean Laplanche. Dans Psychanalyse, 1913–1914, édition par André Bourguignon et Pierre Cotet, 213–46. Vol. 12 de Œuvres Complètes. Paris: Puf, 2005. Heidegger, Martin. Être et Temps. Traduit par François Vezin. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. Joyce, James. «  Portrait de l’artiste en june homme  ». Traduit par Ludmila Savitzky et Jacques Aubert. Dans 1901–1915, édition de Jacques Aubert, 535–761. Vol. 1 de Œuvres. Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1982. Lacan, Jacques. Encore, 1972–1973. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, édition de Jacques- Alain Miller, livre 20. Paris: Seuil, 1975. . Le sinthome, 1975–1976. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, édition de Jacques-Alain Miller, livre 23. Paris: Seuil, 2005. 17 Joyce, « Portrait de l’artiste en june homme », 1:611. 197 Dries Josten and Levi Haeck* Towards an Affective Understanding of Pure Judgments of Taste Keywords affect, Kant, Arendt, natural humanity, moral humanity, political/aesthetic humanity, pure judgement of taste, pleasure, desire Abstract In this article, we argue that “affect” should be an important notion in political philos- ophy. We do this, firstly, by tracing the notion of affect through the philosophical sys- tem of Immanuel Kant. We find that affect plays a threefold role for Kant, which can be mapped onto Hannah Arendt’s distinction between natural humanity, moral humanity, and political/aesthetic humanity (our rephrasing). Affect clearly plays a role on the lev- el of natural humanity, and it is arguably to be pinpointed from within moral human- ity. With regard to political/aesthetic humanity, we argue that in order to understand how pure judgments of taste can vouch for the ‘bridging’ of the gap between natural and moral humanity, an understanding of the role of aesthetic affection is essential. Secondly, we broaden the Kantian scope of affect by discussing how Žižek, in Lacan’s wake, has tried (but failed) to systematically examine the political relevance of pure judgments of taste. To understand how humans are able to come together politically, we need a better understanding of affect as that which allows pure form to effectuate a sub- jectively but universally shareable proclivity for (dis)pleasure and desire. K afektivnemu razumevanju čistih sodb okusa Ključne besede afekt, Kant, Arendt, naravna človečnost, moralna človečnost, politična/estetska človečnost, čista sodba okusa, ugodje, želja Filozofski vestnik issn 0353-4510 | Volume 45 | Number 1 | 2024 | 197–216 cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.45.1.08 * University of Ghent, Belgium dries.josten@ugent.be | https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5551-9235 levi.haeck@ugent.be | https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7856-8355 198 dries josten and levi haeck Povzetek V tem članku zagovarjamo tezo, da bi moral biti afekt pomemben pojem v politični filo- zofiji. Da bi to pokazali, sledimo pojmu afekta v filozofskem sistemu Immanuela Kanta in ugotavljamo, da ima afekt pri Kantu tri vloge, pri čemer si za njihovo razlikovanje pomagamo z razlikovanjem Hannah Arendt med naravno človečnostjo, moralno člo- večnostjo in politično/estetsko človečnostjo (naša reformulacija). Afekt ima očitno vlo- go na ravni naravne človečnosti, verjetno pa ga je mogoče opredeliti znotraj moralne človečnosti. Glede politične/estetske človečnosti pa trdimo, da je za razumevanje, kako lahko čiste sodbe okusa jamčijo za »premostitev« vrzeli med naravno in moralno člo- večnostjo, bistveno razumevanje vloge estetske afekcije. Drugič, kantovski domet afek- ta razširimo z razpravo o tem, kako je Žižek, sledeč Lacanu, poskušal (a mu ni uspelo) sistematično preučiti političen pomen čistih sodb okusa. Da bi razumeli, kako se lahko človeška bitja politično združujejo, potrebujemo boljše razumevanje afekta kot tisto, kar omogoča, da čista forma udejanja subjektivno, a univerzalno deljeno nagnjenje k (ne)užitku in želji. ∞ Introduction How is it possible for people to come together politically? This might come across as a naïve question. People do, after all, already do so. Philosophically speaking, however, this topic is not only poorly understood, it is also quite of- ten neglected. In an attempt to revive this question, we will draw upon Kant. In doing so, we will deal with the blind spots left behind by Hannah Arendt and Slavoj Žižek when interpreting Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (here- inafter referred to as the “third Critique”).1 The paper argues that the general conditions of possibility of coming together politically can be articulated by means of the notion of affect and its role in pure judgments of taste. In line with scholars such as Lyotard, Žižek has famously argued that the political value of 1 When referring to Kant, we refer to the Akademieausgabe (Gesammelte Schriften) by indi- cating title abbreviation, volume and page numbers (e.g., KU, 5:178), but we quote from English translations. For the title abbreviations and translations used, see the list at the end of the article. 199 towards an affective understanding of pure judgments of taste the third Critique lies in its discussion of the (dynamically) sublime.2 Inspired by Lacan, he relaunches ideology critique by trying out not so much an episte- mological account3 as an account focusing on jouissance. However, Žižek does not give a systematic analysis of what constitutes ideology as such. More pre- cisely, Žižek fails to see that a critique of ideology is also (and perhaps more in- terestingly so) to be found in the third Critique’s “Analytic of the Beautiful.”4 Al- though he acknowledges that the sublime must always be read as following the beautiful, namely in the sense that the sublime is the point of collapse of what the beautiful stands for,5 Žižek still fails to grasp what the beautiful would, then, “stand for.”6 This leads one to wonder why Žižek devotes so little attention to the beautiful. In our view, the main reason for this is the minor role of affect in his philosophy. We will thus attempt to contribute to ideology critique by properly exploring the notion of affect and its role in the constitution of the hu- man being as a political being. In view of this, however, we will indeed return to the philosophy of someone who is often portrayed as being totally apathetic, asexual, and affectless: the sage of Königsberg, Immanuel Kant. Although Kant himself is often evidently dismissive of affect, we argue that this notion is cru- cial to his philosophy. In what follows, we will first delve into Kant’s account of affect, which will serve as a prelude necessary to be able to reconsider, in line with Arendt, the political relevance of pure judgments of taste. Our discussion of the relevance of pure judgments of taste builds on but also attempts to move beyond Hannah Arendt’s famous take on it in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. By means of our 2 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), 228; Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 46–7. 3 That is to say, Žižek moves away from the diagnosis that one falls prey to ideology due to a lack of knowledge. He convincingly argues that such an approach makes no sense in re- lation to the ‘cynical ideology’ of our time. (Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 26–30) This form of ideology invokes a certain distance from a universal knowing and, so the argument goes in The Sublime Object of Ideology, preserves the illusion constitutive of ideology. 4 KU, 5:203–44, §1–22. 5 Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 228. 6 Žižek mentions the beautiful, but merely refers to it as symbol of the good, and refrains from exploring how the beautiful and the good are distinguished by Kant: “Beauty is the symbol of the Good, i.e., of the moral Law as the pacifying agency which reins in our egotism and renders possible harmonious social coexistence.” Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 47. 200 dries josten and levi haeck focus on affect, we also hope to shed new light on a crucial issue in contempo- rary critique of ideology: the place of pleasure in the human condition. In our forward-looking conclusion, we highlight the potential avenues of research that could emanate from our approach. * * * In this section, we will explain why considering affect7 from a Kantian point of view is an interesting starting position to examine the conditions of possibility of “coming together politically.”8 In our view, the Kantian conception of the hu- man being as both an animal belonging to the realm of nature and as a moral subject belonging to the realm of freedom, seems to draw in a notion of affect. Not only do we encounter affects in human beings considered as animals, but they also seem to be at the heart of the position that bridges the gap between nature and freedom: the aesthetic subject. In the Kantian universe, affects seem to be the point where the “pure” aspects of our humanity anchor themselves in its “pathological” aspects. Moreover, if we may take seriously the examples Kant gives, this anchoring seems to take place in a manner that is not only morally and aesthetically, but also politically, relevant. We will, in the spirit of Hannah Arendt, discuss affect in reference to her tripartite distinction of humans as (i) natural beings (natural humanity), (ii) moral beings (moral humanity), and (iii) actual inhabitants of the earth (political/aesthetic humanity).9 More in particu- lar, we will argue that affect, as a specific type of feeling, (i) occupies a (straight- forward and unsurprising) place in a conception of man as a natural being, (ii) is a feature of our animality that is excluded from but still must be pinpointed from within the realm of morality, and (iii) seems to play a central but often un- noticed role in man’s capacity to bridge the gap between (i) and (ii). 7 Examples of affects are: longing (KU, 5:178), hope, fear, joy, anger, scorn, laughter (KU, 5:332), timidity, fortitude (Anth, 7:256–8), as well as enthusiasm (SF, 7:85–86). Although sometimes Kant takes longing to be a passion rather than as an affect (V–Anth/Fried, 25:589). 8 In our view, this is so even if 1) Kant is often dismissive of affects, and 2) a consistent ac- count thereof is absent from the Kantian corpus. 9 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 26–27. 201 towards an affective understanding of pure judgments of taste First, we will give a brief overview of what Kant has to say about affects, and how he distinguishes them from passions in light of his faculty psychology, i.e., on the level of man as a natural being. Then we will highlight, to some extent contrary to his general assessment of them, the possible role of affect in morali- ty. Subsequently, we discuss how this seemingly inconsistent picture can never- theless be quilted via the aesthetic-political role of affect. Pathological Affect in Natural Humanity Affects, according to Kant, are “movements” of the mind (Gemüt)10 grounded in “a feeling of pleasure or displeasure” that do “not allow a subject [in his present state] to rise to reflection.” That is, affects impede a subject from considering “the representation of reason whether one should give himself up to [. . .] or re- fuse” something.11 This is because an affect involves “surprise by means of sen- sation, in which the mind’s self-control (animus sui compos) is suspended.”12 In this capacity, affects are to be distinguished from passions: Affect is a feeling through which we lose our composure [aus der Faßung kom- men], but passion is a desire which takes away our composure [aus der Faßung bringt]. The desire is not a perception of what is actual, but merely of what is pos- sible and future. Feeling however aims at the present. Actual affects therefore ap- pertain to feeling and passions to the desires.13 Both passions and affects hinder the subject’s reason,14 but the former are con- cerned with inclinations, while the latter concern feelings.15 Passions are said to 10 EEKU, 20:238. 11 Anth, 7:251, § 73. 12 Anth, 7:252, § 74. 13 V–Anth/Fried, 25:589. 14 Anth, 7:251. 15 More specifically, whereas an affect is an incapacity “to estimate and compare the object with the sum total of all our sensation [and/or feeling],” a passion occurs when one is “un- able to estimate the object with the sum total of all inclination” (V–Anth/Fried, 25:590). Kant did not always sharply distinguish between passions and affects. In fact, in early lectures they seem to be treated synonymously (this is in line with Hutcheson’s account, Kant’s reference point in these matters). For instance, in Anth–V/Collins he is reported as having stated: “A desire that is so big that it makes it impossible to compare the object of our desire with the sum of all inclinations, is called affect” (25:210; quoted from Frierson, 202 dries josten and levi haeck involve the faculty of desire, and are therefore grafted upon a representation of the future, while affects, due to the involvement of feeling, are grafted on to the present.16 Affects hamper one’s ability to keep one’s composure, and to “keep one’s composure means when the state of the mind is subject to our power of choice.”17 For Kant, affects are thoughtless paroxysms,18 but they are nonethe- less still able to cause desires (just like cognition causes feelings).19 Now, in this context, affect is to be seen as an aspect of human nature insofar as it high- lights the latter’s animality: “In the state of animality, where after all the first human beings were, the affects served to double all of their powers and thus provided for their preservation.” Preserving these affects in a civilized context would defeat this purpose: If the human being has emerged from animality, he does not need the affects any- more and must suppress them. Nature thus implanted the affects in us only provi- sionally and it gave them to us as a spur to activity, as it were, in order to develop our humanity. In opposition to affect is equanimity, the state of inner repose of the soul, not apathy but affectlessness. [. . .] Furthermore, in opposition to affect is the capacity to control oneself with composure during a surging affect.20 “Affects and Passions”). Here, desires and affects are not yet uncoupled. For a compar- ison between Hutcheson and Kant, and for a historical account of the genesis of Kant’s more clear-cut distinction between passions and effects, see Patrick Frierson, “Affects and Passions,” in Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology: A Critical Guide, ed. Alix Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 94–113. 16 However, this is not to say that the prospect of an affect could not in any way be future–ori- ented (V–Anth/Mron, 25:1343). In an affect, the future can be implicated, but it is implicat- ed from within the present. That is why affects and passions are essentially different from each other as concerns their quality, even if they “are equally vehement in degree” (7:251; cf. VA–Anth/Mensch 25:1115). 17 V–Anth/Fried, 25:589; and, as Frierson (“Affects and Passions,” 111) points out: while af- fects bypass this ability to keep one’s composure (thus annulling rationality), passions act on it (thus influencing rationality). 18 Anth, 7:253. 19 V–Anth/Mensch, 25:1125; according to Kant’s “psychology,” there are three basic “facul- ties” of the mind: cognition, feeling, and desire. Feeling is indeed right in the middle. 20 V–Anth/Mron, 25:1342–43; cf. V–Anth/Mensch, 25:1125. 203 towards an affective understanding of pure judgments of taste Affects According to Moral Humanity? At first glance, the preceding picture is generally quite in line with Kant’s moral philosophy. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant tells us that “moderation in affects and passions” (just like self-control and calm reflection) is not only “good for all sorts of purposes but even seem[s] to constitute a part of the inner worth of a person [. . .].”21 As is well known, the main focus of this work is on how “the idea of freedom makes me a member of an intelligible world,” whereby, “if I were only this, all my actions would always be in conformity with the autonomy of the will.” However, “since at the same time I intuit myself as a member of the world of sense, they [my actions] ought to be in conformity with it [the autonomy of the will].” This “categorical ought represents a synthetic prop- osition a priori, since to my will affected by sensible desires there is added the idea of the same will but belonging to the world of the understanding.”22 Now, this addition of the idea of a purely practical will to the will affected by sensible desires presupposes, conversely, that the categorical imperative itself can also affect our will. This is what Kant calls “moral feeling,” namely the “subjective effect that the law exercises on the will, to which reason alone delivers the ob- jective grounds.”23 Moreover, Kant grants that for a sensibly affected rational being to will that for which reason alone prescribes the “ought,” it is admittedly required that his reason have the capacity to induce a feeling of pleasure or of delight in the fulfillment of duty, and thus there is required a causality of reason to determine sensibility in conformity with its principles.24 21 GMS, 4:394. 22 GMS, 4:454; some italics added. 23 GMS, 4:460. 24 GMS, 4:460; respect, for instance, as the consciousness of the “immediate determination of the will by means of the law,” is “the effect of the law on the subject,” namely a “feeling that is not “received by means of influence” but rather “a feeling self–wrought by means of a rational concept” (GMS, 4:401n). This is still sharply distinguishable from “the agree- able, as that which influences the will only by means of feeling from merely subjective causes, which hold only for the senses of this or that one, not as a principle of reason, which holds for everyone.” This passage from GMS distinguishes between the agreeable and a principle of reason on the basis of subjective causes, and general validity (holding for everyone). The third Critique adds pure judgment of taste, which confuses things, since it is a judgment on subjective grounds, but independent of the existence of an object. We will come back to this in the next section. Crucial here is that for the categorical impera- tive to be an imperative, it needs to anchor itself in a will that is “exposed also to subjective 204 dries josten and levi haeck This means that feeling is both internal to Kant’s moral philosophy as well as significantly external it: it is external to the idea of an autonomous will, but central to the idea of the moral law as a categorical imperative. In fact, Kant even says that the universal formula of the categorical imperative (e.g., “act in accordance with a maxim that can at the same time make itself a universal law”), can only be specified as a threefold formulation (that is, the three formulae of universality, humanity, and autonomy) by relating it to the subjective, patho- logical, or sensible aspects of our human condition. Thus, these “three ways of representing the principle of morality” are at bottom only so many formulae of the very same law, and any one of them of itself unites the other two in it. There is nevertheless a difference among them, which is indeed subjectively rather than objectively practical, intended namely to bring an idea of reason closer to intuition (by a certain analogy) and thereby to feeling.25 The idea intimated here is this: if it were not for our human nature, which is struc- turally torn between affectation by sensibility, on the one hand, and affectation by reason, on the other, we would not even have the three formulations of the categorical imperative, arguably the centerpieces of Kant’s moral philosophy.26 In spite of this striking role of affect for morality, Kant’s practical philosophy can still be seen (and in a sense, rightly so) as completely affectless, inhuman even. His own contempt for and criticism of affect (see section Pathological Af- fect in Natural Humanity) cannot be neglected and does of course add to this picture. However, we hold that there is a split within Kant’s practical philosophy to which Kant was quite sensitive himself. We have on the one hand a “pure” moral sphere, and on the other hand a “pathological” moral sphere where the conditions (certain incentives) that are not always in conformity with reason (as is actually the case with human beings)” (GMS, 4:412–13). 25 GMS, 4:436. 26 Admittedly, in this aspect of his philosophy Kant does not come to the point of developing a more fine-grained theory of the role of feeling, let alone of affect. This is, after all, not his concern here. Moreover, if affect is indeed what hampers our ability to maintain our com- posure, to control ourselves, because it overwhelms us (quantitatively) with a sensation, then perhaps affect, as a type of feeling, cannot be counted among the moral feelings de- scribed in the Groundwork. 205 towards an affective understanding of pure judgments of taste former is to exercise its jurisdiction. How exactly this exercise of power is pos- sible is a question recognized by Kant himself already in the Groundwork.27 In our view, Kant most significantly addressed this question in the third Critique, where (and elsewhere – cf. infra) affect is portrayed as being morally significant, at times namely as not unworthy of praise in political contexts. * * * As argued in the previous sections, the notion of affect runs through Kant’s phi- losophy in a peculiar way. Even though affect is ascribed to the human being’s natural state, this ascription is perhaps also to be made from the standpoint of man as a moral agent. How could the objective moral law effectuate a subjec- tively felt categorical imperative? This “effectuation” can be made sense of by means of the notion of affect.28 It seems that a human being cannot only be af- fected by sensations, as described above,29 but also by laws. What else could in- stantiate so-called “moral feeling” (the subjective effect of the law)30 other than the pathological capacity for affect as such? To develop this hypothesis, we pro- pose to take a look at Kant’s notions of enthusiasm and humor, which form a part of his politico-aesthetic discussions in the third Critique. Before we can do this, however, we must, in line with Arendt, take a look at the political signif- icance of pure judgments of taste. After all, Kant himself had put his hope on pure judgments of taste precisely in order to quilt the divided realms of natural humanity and moral humanity, of nature and freedom.31 27 We consider the following citation to be a good example of how Kant anticipates the pro- blem of his unearthly practical philosophy: “Es ist aber gänzlich unmöglich, einzusehen, d. i. a priori begreiflich zu machen, wie ein bloßer Gedanke, der selbst nichts Sinnliches in sich enthält, eine Empfindung der Lust oder Unlust hervorbringe; denn das ist eine beson- dere Art von Causalität, von der wie von aller Causalität wir gar nichts a priori bestimmen können, sondern darum allein die Erfahrung befragen müssen.” GMS, 4:460. 28 This is in line with Zupančič’s argument that “form itself must be appropriated as a materi- al surplus, in order for it to be capable of determining the will. Kant’s point, I repeat, is not that all traces of materiality have to be purged from the determining ground of the moral will but, rather, that the form of the moral law has itself to become ‘material,’ in order for it to function as a motive force of action.” This concerns what she calls “ethical transub- stantiation,” namely “the question of the possibility of converting a mere form into a ma- terially efficacious drive.” Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real (London: Verso, 2011), 15. 29 Anth, 7:252, §74. 30 GMS, 4:460. 31 KU, 5:176. 206 dries josten and levi haeck Affected by Neither Concept nor Object First of all, we need to establish that pure judgment of taste can be considered as involving affect.32 In the first section of the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” Kant makes it clear that pure judgment of taste concerns the feeling of pleasure and displeasure.33 Interestingly, pleasure and displeasure are, thus, common to both affect and pure judgments of taste (see section Pathological Affect in Natural Humanity). Yet, affect does not allow a subject to rise to reflection at the mo- ment of affection, while Kant specifies that a judgment of taste deals with “the reflection of the subject on his own state (of pleasure or displeasure).”34 This re- flection does not allow for an objectively and universally valid judgment. As a consequence, the predicate “beautiful” in the judgment “this rose is beautiful” does not allow for subsumption and comparison, i.e., it does not give us a rule with which to determine objectively whether or not a particular thing is beauti- ful, so that we could compare it with other particulars within the class of beau- tiful objects.35 In pure judgment of taste, reflection is key, but then the question arises: reflection on what? In the “Analytic of the Beautiful,”36 Kant defines the ground of aesthetic judgment as follows: “The relation to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, by means of which nothing at all in the object is designated, but in which the subject feels itself as it is affected by the representation.”37 The feeling of pleasure in pure judgment of taste is not attributed to the existing ob- ject. Instead, the pleasure is effectuated by the free play of our faculties, i.e., as the subject “is affected by the representation.” Pure judgment of taste thus en- tails reflection on the felt effect of our faculties vis-à-vis the sensible form of an object, i.e., it entails reflection on the affect caused by the faculties.38 Peculiar to 32 For another insightful account on the role of affect in beauty, see Maria Borges, “Emotion and the Beautiful in Art,” Con–Textos Kantianos: International Journal of Philosophy 15 (2022): 263–71. 33 KU, 5:204. 34 KU, 5:285–86. 35 KU, 5:215–16. 36 KU, 5:203–44, § 1–22. 37 KU, 5:204. 38 For more on this “effect logic,” see: Gertrudis Van de Vijver, “Embarrassments of Knowledge: A Philosophical Comment On Lacan’s Formulae of Sexuation,” Psychoanalytische Perspe- ctieven 41, no. 2 (2023): 171–86; Levi Haeck and Gertrudis Van de Vijver, “Can guilhem’s Divided Subject: A Kantian Perspective on the Intertwinement of Logic and Life,” in Canguilhem and Continental Philosophy of Biology, ed. Giuseppe Bianco, Charles Wolfe, 207 towards an affective understanding of pure judgments of taste judgment of taste is that we can and must presuppose this capacity for affect(a- tion) in all humans, which makes up its universality and disinterestedness.39 That is to say, the grounds of the subjective universality of pure judgment of taste lie in the disinterestedness of the judgment. Kant characterizes “interest” as pleasure combined with the representation of the existence of the object.40 Such pleasure always relates to the faculty of desire “either as its determining ground or else as necessarily interconnected with [it as] its determining ground.”41 The ground of a judgment of beauty, however, has nothing to do with pleasure in the existence of the object of representation. In pure judgment of taste, we lay “a claim to validity for everyone without the universality that pertains to objects, i.e., it must be combined with a claim to subjective universality.”42 Crucially, in claiming (aesthetic) universality, one appeals neither to the object of practical reason, nor to the object of bodily sensations, but to a subjective disposition supposed to be shared by all. In this way, Kant is at once able to distinguish the beautiful from both the good and the agreeable (Angenehme). 1) The agreeable, on the one hand, is that “which pleases the senses in sensa- tion.”43 In this judgment the grounds are subjective, but rely on the felt effect of an object on the senses, i.e., on the feeling of pleasure and displeasure. Therefore, one takes an interest in the object’s existence, precisely because what one judges to be agreeable is the effect of the object on our subjec- and Gertrudis Van de Vijver (Cham: Springer, 2023) 123–46; Levi Haeck, “Immanuel Kants transcendentale logica: Singulier, algemeen, heterogeen.” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 83, no. 2 (2021): 217–48. 39 For universality, see KU 5:212; for disinterestedness KU, 5:204–6. For a discussion of both, see Bart Vandenabeele, “The Subjective Universality of Aesthetic Judgements Revisited,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 48, no. 4 (October 2008): 410–25, https://doi.org/10.1093/ aesthj/ayn042. 40 KU, 5:204. 41 KU, 5:204. 42 KU, 5:212. 43 KU, 5:206. 208 dries josten and levi haeck tive disposition. This is what distinguishes it from the pleasurableness of the beautiful, which, as we know, does not rely on the existence of an object and involves no felt effect of an object as such. 2) The good, on the other hand, is “that what pleases through the mere con- cept.”44 Thus, here too we encounter a distinguishing feature of the beauti- ful, which does not, as we know, rely on a concept. Moreover, if “one judges objects merely in accordance with concepts, then all representation of beau- ty gets lost.”45 Thus, with pure judgment of taste, we get a judgment that (i) does not rely on a concept, (ii) nor on the existence of the object. Interestingly, the judgment of beauty has something in common with both, without possibly being reduced to either one of them. It shares with the agreeable that the ground of the judgment is subjective, i.e., the feeling of pleasure, while it shares with the good the uni- versality of our discursive capacities. This very configuration, we claim, is what allows pure judgment of taste to quilt the practical and the theoretical realms, freedom and nature. However, as will be shown below, in order to establish the binding of these two realms, we need to understand how it is possible that our faculties are the cause of the reality of our representations.46 A Quilting Point Consider Kant’s definition of the faculty of desire, which goes as follows: “The faculty of desire is a being’s faculty to be by means of its representations the cause of the reality of the objects of these representations.”47 Kant was heavily criticized for this definition. He tries to give an answer to the main objections in a fascinating footnote appended to the third Critique’s introduction.48 The main objection is quite obvious: one can wish whatever one wants, but the wish will 44 KU, 5:207. 45 KU, 5:215. 46 For a discussion of this “project of unification,” see: Sebastian Gardner, “Kant’s Third Critique: The Project of Unification,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 78 (July 2016): 161–85, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246116000254. 47 “Das Begehrungsvermögen ist das Vermögen desselben, durch seine Vorstellungen Ursache von der Wirklichkeit der Gegenstände dieser Vorstellungen zu sein.” KpV, 5:9n; we added the German here because this is quite a controversial definition, and was al- ready in Kant’s time. 48 KU, 5:177–78n. 209 towards an affective understanding of pure judgments of taste not become reality simply by virtue of wishing it. This, however, is not exactly what Kant is after. Generally speaking, in this definition Kant is concerned with the way in which a representation alone can be the cause of something, say, of another representation—and of the object that belongs to it. This means that even idle wishes are an effect of “our faculties for the production of an object.” It is worth quoting Kant a bit more at length here: Although in the case of such fantastic desires we are aware of the inadequacy of our representations [. . .] to be causes of their objects, nevertheless their [i.e., the representations’] relation as causes, hence the representation of their causality, is contained in every wish, and it is especially visible if this is an affect, namely long- ing. For the latter prove by the fact that they expand the heart and make it flaccid and thus exhaust our powers that the powers are repeatedly strained by means of representations, but the mind, in view of the impossibility, is inexorably allowed to sink back into exhaustion. Even the prayers for the avoidance of great and so far as one can see unavoidable evil and many superstitious means for the attain- ment of naturally impossible ends prove the causal relation of representations to their objects, which cannot be held back from striving to achieve their effect even by the consciousness of their inadequacy for it.49 Even though we know very well that what we wish for is impossible to obtain, the representation of the causality of the representation remains unaltered. Now, pure judgment of taste has to be understood in line with this representa- tion of causality, for it is caused by nothing but the felt effect of one’s own facul- ties.50 Conversely, however, it seems that pure judgments of taste, because they are both without an object and without a concept, lay bare the very condition of possibility for (moral) representations to have an effect on a human subject. To further illustrate the latter point, we will briefly elaborate on two notions closely related to our interpretation of pure judgment of taste: enthusiasm and humor. 49 KU, AA05: 178n. For more on the relevance of this footnote for Kant’s theory of objectivity, see: Gertrudis Van de Vijver and Eli Noé, “The Constraint is the Possibility: A Dynamical Perspective on Kant's Theory of Objectivity,” Idealistic Studies 41, no. 1–2 (2011): 95–112. 50 We consider this the right moment to stress that our article is in line with Rado Riha’s fo- cus on the self-affectation in Kant’s philosophical system. Rado Riha, Kant in Lacan’scher Absicht: Die Kopernikanische Wende und das Reale (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2018). 210 dries josten and levi haeck 1) Kant explains enthusiasm [Enthusiasm] as the “idea of the good with af- fect,” whereby this “state of mind seems to be sublime, so much so that it is commonly maintained that without it nothing great can be accomplished.” Nonetheless, every affect is, as such, blind. Affect is still, and always will be, “that movement of the mind that makes it incapable of engaging in free con- sideration of principles, in order to determine itself in accordance with them. Thus, it cannot in any way merit a satisfaction of reason.” And yet enthusi- asm, as the idea of the good with affect, “is aesthetically sublime, because it is a stretching of the powers through ideas, which give the mind a momen- tum that acts far more powerfully and persistently than the impetus given by sensory representations.”51 2) The humorous affects, e.g., the humorous conversations during a lively par- ty of about three to eight guests,52 are “an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing.”53 In the case of jokes, which must be “counted as agreeable rather than as beautiful art,”54 the play begins with thoughts which, as a whole, insofar as they are to be ex- pressed sensibly, also occupy the body; and since the understanding, in this presentation in which it does not find what was expected, suddenly relaxes, one feels the effect of this relaxation in the body through the oscillation of the or- gans, which promotes the restoration of their balance and has a beneficial in- fluence on health.55 Both enthusiasm and humor testify to the effect that a mere thought, of whatev- er kind it may be, can have. Both enthusiasm and humor show a similar struc- ture as pure judgment of taste with regard to the latter’s articulation of how it is possible for a mere thought to anchor itself in the body, to have subjec- tive effect. This configuration cannot suffice to demand universal assent, as is the case for pure judgments of taste, but it does offer a crucial perspective on what the human’s “split constitution” amounts to, or how it can function. As 51 KU, 5:272. 52 Of all the settings in which Kant dared to venture himself, this is arguably the most politi- cal one. 53 KU, 5:332; italics added. 54 KU, 5:332. 55 KU, 5:332; italics added. 211 towards an affective understanding of pure judgments of taste the nodal point between thought and the body per se, we can appreciate affect as the baseline condition of possibility for becoming something other than a plaything of nature. Why, then, do we focus on pure judgment of taste, rather than solely on affect as such? We argue that pure judgment of taste must still be put center stage, be- cause it shows the connection of affect to discursivity in a universal way. This does not hold for enthusiasm (which involves sublimity and thus is not cou- pled to sensus communis as strongly as beauty is)56 and humor (which is merely agreeable, and thus not subject to the claim of universal assent), where the con- nection is general at best. In addition, pure judgment of taste allows us, because of its “emptiness” (with regard to both the object as well as to the concept), to make explicit what underlies moral feeling (i.e., the subjective effect of the mor- al law). That is why beauty is able to bridge nature and freedom. This quilting aspect of beauty is exactly what Žižek, by focusing on the sublime, does not grasp. By rushing to the sublime, one forgets how a momentary feeling of harmony, i.e., of sense, gets constituted to begin with. In order to appreciate the political value of the beautiful, one must be attentive to the role of affect(a- tion) in it. This is something that, e.g., Paul Guyer and Allen Wood did not fail to see, as they rightly remark “that our disinterested affection for beauty prepares us for the non-self-regarding respect and love for mankind that is required of us by morality.”57 Conclusion We hope that we have marked the crucial role of affect for pure judgment of taste as such, as well having paved the way for further investigations into its political relevance. The manner in which pure judgment of taste functions as a quilting point between nature and freedom has been made more palpable. The beautiful involves an affect, namely a felt effect of x. The x in this case is nothing but form, that is, the forms exhibited by our capacity to judge vis-à-vis a certain sensible 56 See, for example, Kant’s discussion of fearfulness regarding the dynamical sublime in KU, 5:260–64. 57 Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), xxvii. 212 dries josten and levi haeck Vorstellung. Since pure judgment of taste involves no interest in the existence of the object, the delight in this reflective judgment stems from the free play of the faculties, on account of which aesthetic judgment is subjectively, yet universally valid. The judgment of beauty is about the ability to be affected by nothing but our faculties and the free play between them. Importantly, contrary to affection for sublimity, which can only be cultivated by some,58 the affection proper to the judgment of beauty implies a capacity or ability that is, in principle, shared by all judging beings. In other words, while the sublime proliferates a politics of exclusion, there is no principled exclusion as to who is able to formulate pure judgments of taste. We think that, on the basis of this programmatic analysis, further avenues of research are possible. Our interpretation of the role of affect in aesthetic judgments and its political signification can help to elucidate the importance of something like moral feel- ing, and clarify why the moral law appears to us human beings as an imperative. Notwithstanding the significant distinction between morality and aesthetics, we would like to propose that the felt effect of the law as an imperative (moral feeling), presupposes, quite like the judgments of taste, a universally shareable capacity for being affected by form as such (in this case, the law).59 We know that pure judgment of taste bridges the gap between practical and theoretical reason, and that affect plays a role in this bridging. However, what was left untouched in our interpretation is the principle for this bridging: pur- posiveness without a purpose.60 This would however merit further investigation, as it too can highlight the importance of form as such. The purposiveness of aesthetic judgment is not (ful)filled by a specific purpose, or: the form remains without content. We can connect this to the fact that beauty as a predicate does not signify anything in the object deemed to be beautiful.61 That is, a judgment of taste does not predicate something of the object, but entails reflection on the felt effect (i.e., affect) of the free play of the faculties. Thus, we propose to un- derstand beauty along the lines of a Freudian and Lacanian framework, where- 58 Cf. KU, 5:260–64. 59 See Zupančič, Ethics of the Real, 15, 17. 60 EEKU, 20:242–43; KU, 5:180. 61 KU, 5:207, 215–16, 285–86. 213 towards an affective understanding of pure judgments of taste by beauty functions as a mere Vorstellungsrepräsentanz or empty signifier.62 If the beautiful is understood as we have been arguing, it should be understood as a functioning of mere form (resulting in a specific type of affect); its element of purposeless purposiveness might be understood as resting on a structure of “signification,” which comes close to the definition of a signifier in Lacanian theory: that which signifies something for another signifier. Understood in this way, the beautiful expresses a formal structure which is itself without meaning, but which allows for the production of meaning.63 In this structure, forms of pleasure and desire can be anchored. Let us now address the question with which this essay was launched, namely: how is it possible to come together politically? By discerning the importance of affectation in our understanding of pure judgment of taste, we are in a better position to compare it, qua structural features, with affects such as enthusiasm and humor.64 Technically speaking, we could say that knowing what affects are is relevant to knowing what pure judgments of taste are, because the latter involve a kind of affectation as well. However, there is an important difference between affects such as humor and enthusiasm and the affectation proper to pure taste—a difference which will turn out to be key in addressing the issue of coming togeth- er politically. This difference is in our view wrongly suppressed by Arendt, even if she rightly connects affect (namely, enthusiasm) to pure taste. By bringing af- fects such as enthusiasm closer to pure judgment of taste, Arendt forgets how af- fects actually add an element to pure taste that it would otherwise lack. Pure taste involves a structure that allows a subject to be affected by the activity of its faculties, which, as Arendt explains quite well, involves intersubjectivity. 62 For a thorough article on the role of affectation and signification, see Gertrudis Van de Vijver, Ariane Bazan, and Sandrine Detandt, “The Mark, the Thing, and the Object: On What Commands Repetition in Freud and Lacan,” Frontiers in Psychology 8, art. no. 2244 (2017): https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02244. For an interpretation of pure judgment of taste and signification, see Moran Godess–Riccitelli, “The Cipher of Nature in Kant’s Third Critique: How to Represent Natural Beauty as Meaningful?,” Con–textos Kantianos: International Journal of Philosophy 12 (2020): 338–57. 63 This is another part of the third Critique that is overlooked by Žižek, namely that the form or the Idea that fills one with delight corresponds to purposiveness, but then it is a “pur- posiveness—full stop.” 64 And, perhaps, love, if this is indeed an affect. 214 dries josten and levi haeck She rightly suggests that the three maxims of the sensus communis65 imply the presence of others.66 This, however, is not a complete account. As such, sensus communis implies nothing but the idea (and the potentiality) of there being oth- er judging beings whenever one singularly judges.67 Otherness runs through the beautiful, humor, and enthusiasm, but it does so in a different way. Affects such as humor and enthusiasm involve our being affected by an actual other human being. Judging the beautiful, however, does not require another human being to be judging along with us whenever we are judging. It “merely” implies that if there is another judger, this other being too shall (i.e., must) know (dis)pleas- ure with regard to this or that object we deem beautiful or not. Pure judgment of taste does not depend on the assent of the other. It is the other way around: one appeals to the other’s assent on the basis of one’s judgment. What is shown by affects such as enthusiasm and humor is the exact inverse of this: affects (can) attest to the fact that, as judging beings, we can also be interpellated by other judging beings calling on us to respond. That is to say, what works in a joke as well as in the enthusiasm for a revolution relies on what the other is trying to tell me.68 If one speaks, then one demands from the other to hear the universal in what is being said. This indeed goes for the revolutionaries, who would not do what they do (storm the Bastille) if it were not for the presence of a spectator, as Arendt rightly remarks.69 The same goes for the funny guy, who would not tell a joke if nobody were around to hear it. This is the role of affect as pathology: in order to hear the universal, one must be able not only to speak, but to listen too. This is why Kant (and Arendt cites this passage), in a sense retroactively, says that “only in society does it become interesting to have taste.”70 And also: the 65 “1. To think for oneself; 2. To think in the position of everyone else; 3. Always to think in accordance with oneself.” KU, 5:294. 66 Arendt, Kant’s Political Philosophy, 67. 67 For example, with regard to the three maxims of sensus communis, we can see that from the moment one is capable of saying “I think,” i.e., to think in accordance with oneself, the figure of the other is implied. 68 It is in The Contest of the Faculties that Kant is most adamant about the value of affect vis- à-vis one of the supreme political events of the century, the French revolution. SF, 7:85. 69 Arendt, Kant’s Political Philosophy, 61–62, 65–67. Gertrudis Van de Vijver pointed out to us that this is at bottom the idea intimated in “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” (WA, AA08), be it with regard to freedom of speech. The point made in this text is that to be able to come together politically, we need to be engaged in free public discourse (i.e., we must speak to each other). 70 KU, 5:205; italics added. 215 towards an affective understanding of pure judgments of taste “beautiful interests empirically only in society.” The “drive to society is,” after all, “admitted to be natural to human beings.”71 However, this is a testimony to the addition of the pathological (affect) to the pure (beauty). We find this most exquisite collapsing of the pathological in the pure, of which Kant is in fact the masterly analyst, here as well: For himself alone a human being abandoned on a desert island would not adorn either his hut or himself, nor seek out or still less plant flowers in order to deco- rate himself; rather, only in society does it occur to him to be not merely a human being but also, in his own way, a refined human being.72 Through the human pathology, thus, one can escape the singular position in which one would demand that the other assent to one’s own judgment, if the other were around.73 In this sense, studying affects (such as both humor and enthusiasm) can expand our understanding of pure judgment of taste if we ac- knowledge that the former realize the latter’s fulfillment. Where Arendt locates the actual presence of the other in pure judgment of taste, we hold the latter to be a pure moment in need of supplementation by a pathological moment (even though our conception of pure judgment of taste surely anticipates this supple- mentation). Whereas for pure judgment of taste the actual presence of the other is not a necessary condition, the exact opposite goes for both humor and enthu- siasm. We can now answer our general question as follows. How can we come together politically? By coming together—full stop. Abbreviations of Kant’s Works: Anth: Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (AA 7), 1798 EEKU: Erste Einleitung in die Kritik der Urteilskraft (AA 20), 1794 GMS: Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (AA 4), 1785 IaG: Idee zu einer allgemeine Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht (AA 8), 1784 KpV: Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (AA 5), 1788 KU: Kritik der Urteilskraft (AA 5), 1790 71 KU, 5:296. Albeit a divided drive to society, called unsociable sociability (ungesellige Geselligkeit). Kant calls this antagonism, inherent in man’s sociability, the means by which nature operates to bring about development in human history. IaG, 8:20. 72 KU, 5:297. 73 Cf. KU, 5:278 on egoism and pluralism. 216 dries josten and levi haeck SF: Der Streit der Fakultäten (AA 7), 1798 V-Anth/Fried: Vorlesungen Wintersemester 1775/1776 Friedländer (AA 25) V-Anth/Mensch: Vorlesungen Wintersemester 1781/1782 Menschenkunde, Petersburg (AA 25) V-Anth/Mron: Vorlesungen Wintersemester 1784/1785 Mrongovius (AA 25) V-Anth/Pillau: Vorlesungen Wintersemester 1777/1778 Pillau (AA 25) References Arendt, Hannah. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Edited by Ronald Beiner. Chica- go: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Borges, Maria. “Emotion and the Beautiful in Art.” Con–Textos Kantianos: International Journal of Philosophy 15 (2022): 263–71. Frierson, Patrick. “Affects and Passions.” In Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology: A Critical Guide, edited by Alix Cohen, 94–113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Gardner, Sebastian. “Kant’s Third Critique: The Project of Unification.” Royal Insti- tute of Philosophy Supplements 78 (July 2016): 161–85. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S1358246116000254. Godess–Riccitelli, Moran. “The Cipher of Nature in Kant’s Third Critique: How to Repre- sent Natural Beauty as Meaningful?” Con–textos Kantianos: International Journal of Philosophy 12 (2020): 338–57. Guyer, Paul, and Allen Wood. “Editor’s Introduction.” In Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, xiii-lii. Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Haeck, Levi. “Immanuel Kants transcendentale logica: Singulier, algemeen, hetero- geen.” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 83, no. 2 (2021): 217–48. , and Gertrudis Van de Vijver. “Canguilhem’s Divided Subject: A Kantian Perspective on the Intertwinement of Logic and Life.” In Canguilhem and Continental Philosophy of Biology, edited by Giuseppe Bianco, Charles Wolfe and Gertrudis Van de Vijver, 123–46. Cham: Springer, 2023. Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Edited and translated by Robert Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. . Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. . Lectures on Anthropology. Edited by Allen Wood and Robert Louden. Translated by Robert Clewis, Robert Louden, Felicitas G. Munzel, and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Riha, Rado. Kant in Lacan’scher Absicht: Die Kopernikanische Wende und das Reale. Vi- enna: Turia + Kant, 2018. 217 towards an affective understanding of pure judgments of taste Vandenabeele, Bart. “The Subjective Universality of Aesthetic Judgements Revisit- ed.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 48, no. 4 (October 2008): 410–25. https://doi. org/10.1093/aesthj/ayn042. Van de Vijver, Gertrudis, “Embarrassments of Knowledge. A Philosophical Comment On Lacan’s Formulae of Sexuation,” Psychoanalytische Perspectieven 41, no. 2 (2023): 171–86. , Ariane Bazan, and Sandrine Detandt. “The Mark, the Thing, and the Object: On What Commands Repetition in Freud and Lacan.” Frontiers in Psychology 8, art. no. 2244 (2017). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02244. , and Eli Noé. “The Constraint is the Possibility: A Dynamical Perspective on Kant’s Theory of Objectivity.” Idealistic Studies 41, no. 1–2 (2011): 95–112. Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan. London: Verso, 2011. Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. . The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 2008. 219 * Universität für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna, Austria alexi.kukuljevic@uni-ak.ac.at Alexi Kukuljevic* Absense, or the Extimate Place of Art Keywords art, aesthetics, sense, nonsense, stupidity, extimacy, Heidegger, Lacan, Balzac Abstract In order to think Art in its difference from the arts, I argue, requires that we take seri- ously its lack of sense. This lack is symptomatic of a historical rupture with the sense of art as technē (know-how), a sense that remains at play when one speaks of the arts. However, if art is not an art, then what is it? In this essay, I argue that art is a thing that makes sense absent. To specify art’s absent sense, its absense, requires both a histori- cal analysis of art’s rupture with technē and the mastery it implies, and an ontological determination of the manner in which it makes of this loss a thing that serves to dumb- found. Art is thus inseparable from stupidity. Through an engagement with the work of Aristotle and Heidegger, Bataille and Balzac, Baudelaire, and Lacan, I suggest that art marks the extimate place of absense. Absense ali ekstimno mesto umetnosti Ključne besede umetnost, estetika, smisel, nesmisel, neumnost, ekstimnost, Heidegger, Lacan, Balzac Povzetek Menim, da je za to, da bi mislili Umetnost v njeni razliki od umetnosti (množina), treba resno jemati njen manko smisla. Ta manko je simptomatičen za zgodovinski prelom s smislom umetnosti kot technē (know-how), ki ostaja dejaven, ko govorimo o umetnostih. Če pa umetnost ni (neka) umetnost, kaj potem sploh je? V tem eseju trdim, da je ume- tnost tisto, kar povzroči odsotnost smisla. Da bi opredelili odsotnost smisla (absent sen- se) umetnosti, njeno odsotnost (absense), sta potrebni tako zgodovinska analiza preki- Filozofski vestnik issn 0353-4510 | Volume 45 | Number 1 | 2024 | 219–41 cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.45.1.09 220 alexi kukuljevic nitve umetnosti s technē in obvladovanjem, ki ga ta implicira, kot tudi ontološka do- ločitev načina, kako iz te izgube naredi stvar, ki služi poneumljenju. Umetnost je torej neločljivo povezana z neumnostjo. S spoprijemanjem z deli Aristotela in Heideggerja, Batailla in Balzaca, Baudelaira in Lacana zagovarjam tezo, da umetnost zaznamuje ek- stimno mesto odsotnosti smisla (absense). ∞ “Absense” is a funny word, funny looking at least. Strictly speaking, it is not a word at all. If spoken, it loses this funny quality, which becomes legible only when written down. When read, it pits the eye that stumbles over its presence against the ear that leaps with expectation towards a sense. One does not hear the “s” in “absense”; one hears a “c,” as in “absence.” Moreover, one has to be reminded that the “c” here is absent. One would not be remiss to think it a typo, for the understanding has a powerful undertow, but I assure you it is not. It may have been, but once it catches the eye with its hook, a certain sense accrues to this absence. So, one ought to see the “s” in “absense” not merely as an “s” but as a “c” with a hook. It is an “s” that is not sure of its place, of its identity. Is it merely posing as a “c”? It is not exactly an “s” but more like the excrescence of the “c.” This excrescence marks something that is missing. It is in between sense, which is to say in between two senses of “sense”: between what can be sensed (the aes- theton) and the sense of sense. When something makes sense, when it adds up (to think in terms dollars and cents), we do not question its meaning. We take it for granted. The sense of what is missing when the “s” is in the place of the “c” is in fact a missing sense. Absenssse—to exaggerate the failure, to make of it a caricature—here serves to name, and thus amplify, an absent sense. To insist on the “s” is to stress that the sense of “absence” is itself absent. It presents to us an absence that cannot be made sense of. This is what art does: it makes sense absent. To cultivate a relation to this absence is what I have called the art of liv- ing absently.1 1 See Alexi Kukuljevic, Liquidation World: On the Art of Living Absently (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017). 221 absense, or the extimate place of art If this is indeed the case—if art makes absense—then art is itself aptly named. For it is altogether difficult to locate the sense of art. Although the institution(s) of art (the system of galleries, museums, schools, etc.) are there to remind us that the thing itself exists and to ensure if not to engender a belief in its referent, the sense of the word is by no means self-evident.2 Art is a noun that does not at all build the kind of confidence in its referent that we normally expect from a noun. Put bluntly, the sense of art itself seems to be absent. This absence doubt- less has something to do with a missing “s.” If art named the set of all the arts, or even a definitive subset of the arts—as for a time one still in the habit of speaking of the fine arts could believe—then art would not be lacking sense. One could delimit its extension, demarcate its limits, in short, supply an intuition for its concept. This remains possible when we speak of the arts in the plural. How- ever, art does not designate a general class. Rather, it designates a subset of the arts that excepts itself from their determination. This exception has itself become a commonplace. We speak of the history of art, debating perhaps its beginning and what ought or not to be included. Ought we to include the shell doodles of Homo erectus some 500,000 years ago? Yet, the domain or field that is covered by art is not identical with the history of arts, which is synonymous with a history of technics. Art is both more and less abstract than a conventionally functioning noun. On the one hand, it is akin to a proper name, for it serves to differentiate art from all the other arts, serving to designate something that is “singular and without any qualifiers.”3 Yet, on the other hand, unlike proper names it does not serve to specifically identify what it names. The name itself seems to conceal rather than to reveal an identity as if rendering itself, that which it names, indiscern- ible. It sets apart a singularity whose very singularity lies in being unnamable. Akin perhaps to Odysseus’s cunning escape from Polyphemus, where the very utterance of the name “Nobody” serves as Odysseus’s disguise, the evasiveness of the proper name “art” points to something improper, an unseemly substance. 2 Let us recall the famous opening of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: “It is self-evident that noth- ing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.” Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 1. 3 I borrow this formulation from Jacques Rancière: “A ‘history of art’ assumes that art exists in the singular and without any qualifiers.” Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of the Arts, trans. Zakir Paul (London: Verso, 2013), 12. 222 alexi kukuljevic It serves to identify that which lacks an identity. Art’s autonomy consigns it to a radical heteronomy that is altogether other than the heteronomy of the arts. Art is extimate to the arts. As such, art locates something that is extimate to sense as such: the presence of an absence, the protuberance of the void. As a result of its extimate character, its exceptionality entails that it can be in principle confused with the commonplace. The historian of art may try to dispel the ontological and epistemological co- nundrum presented by the name by claiming that art itself does not exist. Ernst Gombrich can claim, “There is no art; there are only artists,” and Werner Hof- mann may assert that, “There is no art, only arts!”4 However, these efforts to maintain the foundation of a discipline’s identity from the indiscernibility of its object fail to grasp that artistic practices do not only produce but are produced as the ongoing attempt to come to terms with art’s singular abstraction. It is worth recalling that art as a term to designate a “specialized meaning” in “arts” and “artist” only emerges in the eighteenth century.5 Before this emergence, it would not have been possible to speak of a history of art or to undertake a phi- losophy of art. Neither Plato nor Aristotle had any notion of art. Rather, they conceived of mimetikē (the art of imitating or representing) as a kind of technē (skill, know-how). The retroactive reconfiguration of this field that allows one to speak of cave paintings, Greek tragedies, and altar pieces as art is the result of an effort in principle infinite to specify the singular abstraction of art, to give 4 As cited by Helmut Draxler, Gefährliche Substanzen: Zum Verhältnis von Kritik und Kunst (Berlin: b_books, 2007), 35. 5 See Raymond Williams’s entry “Art,” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Oxford University Press, 2015), 9. Art itself presumes the institutionalization of what Paul Oskar Kristeller refers to as the modern system of the arts or what is more gener- ally referred to as the fine arts, which chiefly comprises the five arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry (and more loosely, the arts of gardening, the decorative arts, drama and dance, opera, and prose literature). As he argues in a magisterial two-part work of intellectual history, the emergence of “this system of five major arts, which under- lies all modern aesthetics and which is so familiar to us all”—art conceived as a separate sphere of culture autonomous from religion, science, craft, and other practical pursuits such as entrepreneurship, which thus taken for granted by both post-Kantian aesthetics and critics of aesthetics—“is of comparatively recent origin and did not assume and did not assume definite shape before the eighteenth century, although it has many ingredi- ents that go back to classical, medieval, and Renaissance thought.” Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics Part I,” Journal of the History of Ideas 12, no. 4 (October 1951): 498, https://doi.org/10.2307/2707484. 223 absense, or the extimate place of art it sense. Both the history of art and its theory (the emergence of a philosophy of art and the discourse of aesthetics) emerge as efforts to make sense of this abstraction. Most notably, for Hegel, the very revelation of this abstraction, of art’s autonomy, exposes the essence of art as “a self-annihilating nothing” (ein Nichtiges, ein sich Vernichtendes).6 Art embodies the paradoxical freedom of the suicide where absolute freedom is expressed through its irreparable abolition. Art purports to be something—a thing that artists make, a thing inscribed in works of art—but as soon as one attempts to identify or isolate the ground of this distinction between art and the arts, one is at a loss. Modernism is certainly the most consequential attempt to ground art in and through its relation to the arts. The problem of art’s autonomy from the arts becomes a problem of the autono- my of each of the arts. The problem of art as such is thus replaced with the prob- lem of each specific art’s relation to itself. And this relation itself becomes the criterion or measure that allows one at once to determine the difference between the many arts and reinstall a hierarchy within each specific art. The autonomy of art from the arts is here thought as the autonomy of each art with respect to itself, that is, the laws governing its own practice. Yet, the theory requires that a nontechnical determination of technē is reintroduced, for the difference be- tween the artist (qua fine artist) and the artist (qua craftsperson) is maintained and asserted as a difference in kind, but the difference in their “know-how” can only be construed as a difference in degree (the craftsperson remains absorbed in the object while the artist is concerned with mediatic conditions that make it possible). Through this sleight-of-hand modernism succeeds in bestowing meaning or sense on art, but at the cost of enforcing exclusions that become increasingly ridiculous, leading to the implosion of this mode of conceptualis- ation and periodisation. The anachronistic return of technē is both understand- able and futile since it is perhaps the only means not of saving (since that is im- possible) but of attempting to save art from absense.7 6 Knox translates this phrase as “null in its self-destruction.” See G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 1:67. I am following the translation of this phrase suggested by Georgia Albert in her translation of Giorgio Agamben’s The Man Without Content (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 7 As should become clear shortly in the paper, technē as it is thought by either Plato or Aristotle has nothing to do with “media” or its “formal” conditions. Poetics, for Aristotle, is not concerned with the medium of poetry or theater, let alone the medium of the word, of language. The ground of poetikē is the story (mythos). The poem is most fundamentally 224 alexi kukuljevic Rather than seeking to restore meaning to art, it is preferable to acknowledge that its relation to the arts is groundless. One encounters this groundlessness, according to Martin Heidegger, in the circularity of its definition: an artist is one who makes a work of art, but a work of art is something made by an artist. To speak of artists presupposes artworks and to speak of artworks presuppos- es artists. Both the identity of the artist and that of the work of art presume a relation to art.8 “Art—this is nothing more than a word to which nothing actual any longer corresponds.”9 If art is not merely a work of an art (the work of an artisan), then the work of art in itself—pure art, as Gustave Flaubert formulates it—is positioned in relation to its absent sense. Art no longer corresponds to an- ything, because it names a vacancy. This vacancy can of course always be filled by a relation to the arts, for art is not not an art, but this relation is not determi- native. Art is indifferent to its being an art precisely because it is not determined by technē. If art is not the product of a kind of making, there is no criterion, measure, or ground to differentiate it from what it is not. It remains, of course, for the most part, something made, but most decisively, it need not be. It can, in short, be readymade. For the fact of its having been made no longer functions as a cri- terion for it being a work of art. As Flaubert famously puts it in a letter to Lou- ise Colet, “Masterworks are stupid [bêtes].—They have the placid faces of the the representation (mimesis) of a story. The art of poetry is differentiated from other arts by means of its end (telos). Saddle-making and poetry do not differ in essence, since they are both arts, but in their respective ends. One makes saddles, the other makes stories. To make technē a mediatic concern entails a radical transformation of how representation itself is conceived. In other words, to speak of medium with respect to Aristotle’s Poetics would entail that the story is itself the medium of poetry. The very thing that would have to be the medium for Aristotle cannot be mediatic. 8 It is also worth noting that the term “artist,” from artista, first coined in the Middle Ages, initially referred to craftsmen (artisans) and students of the liberal arts. See Kristeller, “Modern System of the Arts,” 508. 9 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Harper Perennial, 1993), 143. Heidegger here recasts the problem that Hegel identifies at the outset of his lectures on Aesthetics: “In all these respects art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintain- ing its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place.” Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:11. 225 absense, or the extimate place of art very products of nature, like big animals and mountains.”10 A work of art is only when it is not what it is; namely, when it is something made in conformity with a specific end and for a specific reason; crucially, it is this “not” which makes it appear dumb like nature.11 Stupidity (bêtise) connotes here something that is irresponsive, placid, in the sense of not being easily disturbed, unaffected. Masterpieces (les chefs-d’oeuvres) like large animals are not quick to react, un- perturbed like a mountain, deadpan. Pure art and the works that most closely incarnate it do not put on a display of intelligence, but, on the contrary, assume its failing. They are closed upon themselves and idiotic. Immanuel Kant says something strangely similar in The Critique of Judgment when he shifts his consideration from aesthetic judgment to the definition of beautiful art (schöne Kunst). Although Kant distinguishes “art as such” (Kunst überhaupt) from nature as a kind of making or doing (facere) grounded in free- dom, he writes, “By right, only production through freedom, i.e., through a ca- pacity for choice that grounds its actions in reason, should be called art.”12 When it comes to defining beautiful art, beauty itself becomes a sign of an exception to this rule: “Beautiful art is an art to the extent that it seems at the same time to be nature.”13 Beautiful art embodies a fundamental contradiction. Beautiful art is an art that insofar as it is beautiful does not appear to be an effect of an art. Al- though we cannot confuse art and nature (we must remain “aware of it as art”), art must nevertheless assume a relation to that which it is not—it must “look to us like nature.” Thus, even though an artwork is “certainly intentional,” as Kant puts it, in order for beautiful art to be differentiated from mechanical art, it “must nevertheless not seem intentional, i.e., beautiful art must be regarded 10 Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet, June 27, 1852, in Correspondance (Paris: Gallimard, 1973– 2007), 2:119; quoted in Giorgio Agamben, Man Without Content, 9. 11 Commenting on Flaubert’s claim, Jacques Rancière writes: “When Flaubert says that mas- terpieces are stupid, he defines a different kind of stupidity, which is the fact of being put forward, just like that, without meaning anything. This can end in a radical decision: since the meaning is stupid, you destroy all that produces a meaning. Consequently, you will put stupidity in art, namely, the decision not to produce meaning, interpretation, any ef- fect of interpretation, against stupidity in the sense of a consensus.” Jacques Rancière, The Method of Equality, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 98. 12 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 182, § 43. 13 Kant, 185, § 45. 226 alexi kukuljevic as nature, although of course one is aware of it as art.”14 The artwork cannot be conceived as conforming to an intention, for if it did exhibit such conformity, it would be a determinate object that “would please only through concepts.” And although an artwork, according to Kant, has to accord with rules, this accord cannot be merely “academic”; the accord must be “exacting” (Pünktlichkeit) without being “painstaking” (Peinlichkeit).15 In order to appear as art, an art- work cannot appear to be the work of an art but appear like a product of nature. Although Kant attempts to resolve the problem of this necessary gap in inten- tion by introducing the figure of the genius whose transgressive drives must be tamed by the judgment of a true aesthete, as Flaubert perceives, as soon as one admits such a gap there is no criterion to distinguish the genius from the fool. Idiocy rules the day because art is only art if it fails to conform to expectation. Art cannot accord with what we expect from it. It must lack determination. It must dumbfound. Flaubert never tires of railing against such expectations. I challenge any dramatist to have the audacity to put on stage of popular the- atre a worker who is a thief. No thank you, the worker has to be an honest fel- low, and the gentleman is always a scoundrel. Just as at the Théâtre Français the girls on stage are always pure, because the mummies take their daughters there. I therefore believe in the truth of this axiom: people love falsehood; falsehood all through the day and dreams all through the night, such is human nature.16 If human nature inculcates in the subject an ineluctable love of falsehood, pure art, according to Flaubert, serves to confound human nature. Although Kant would in no way suggest that the work of genius is tantamount to work of the most profound stupidity, he would have to admit that stupidity is the danger that genius incurs precisely in abandoning technē as a criterion for art. The sense of art, insofar as it is indexed to the arts, remains tethered to the Greek sense of art: technē. It is a know-how, a skill that enables one to make or produce something. All works of art, in this sense, from tables and chairs to sculptures, 14 Kant, 186, § 45. 15 Kant, 186, § 45; translation modified. 16 Gustave Flaubert, “Eleven Letters,” trans. Geoffrey Wall, The Cambridge Quarterly 5, no. 3 (1996): 235. 227 absense, or the extimate place of art health, or stories are not the creations of a particular artisan as much as the re- sult of a conformity to the ends of a given art. A particular doctor only produc- es health by conforming to the art of medicine. Thus, if I am cured by a doctor of an ailment, I do not attribute the cure to the particularities of the doctor but to her capacity with respect to her know-how. Likewise, the art of poetry (poē- tikē) produces a poem (poiēma) through making an imitation or representation (mimēsis) of a story (mythos). The beauty of a story, according to Aristotle, thus depends on the organization of its plot (logos) and the propriety of its magni- tude. It is thus the story and the kinds of people that the story is about (whether of high or low moral stature) that in turn determines the kind of story it is (its genre) and the kinds of affects and feelings appropriate to it (e.g., pity and fear in the case of tragedy). Insofar as the work of art is thought in relation to tech- nē, it is not the cause of itself; it is not autonomous (to use an anachronistic term). Only nature (physis) is autonomous, which is to say, its source (aitia) or origin (archē) is internal to it.17 All products of technē, on the other hand, have their source (archē) external to them: “The source is in the one who makes it and not in the thing that is made.”18 As Aristotle clarifies, this entails that the sculpture, for example, lies in the skilled know-how of the sculptor (that is, in the art of sculpting) and not what is only incidental to that art: namely, the in- dividual sculptor, Polyceitus: “It is incidental to the sculptor to be Polyceitus.”19 Just as ethics, for Aristotle, is the art of building character, poetics is the art of storytelling. Each of these arts have a distinctive virtue that the artist strives to master and whose excellence can be judged. Each art has its own “exertion of mastery.”20 One can thus compete in the art of storytelling, just as one can com- pete in sports, because what is at issue is the state of the art, the level of mastery being exerted over those it affects or those it aims to move. 17 See Aristotle, Physics: A Guided Study, trans. Joe Sachs (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), bk. II, chap. 1. Aristotle states clearly that nothing produced by means of art (technē) has “the source of its making” in itself. 18 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Joe Sachs (Indianapolis: Focus, 2002), 1140a12. 19 Aristotle, Physics, 195a30. 20 The phrase is from Plato, “Gorgias,” in Plato and Aristotle, Gorgias and Rhetoric, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport: Focus, 2009), 450c–451a. Gorgias defines rhetoric as “the action and exertion of mastery by means of speech.” It is important to note that Socrates denies that rhetoric itself is an art, which is to say, a true art. He thinks that the definition itself is too broad, since arithmetic, for example, also exerts mastery by means of speech. Importantly for what I am here claiming, the assumption that technē is an exertion of mastery is not itself questioned. 228 alexi kukuljevic Art (technē) is itself an exertion of mastery. Mastery implies hierarchy, but it does not entail domination. The true master does not have to appeal to brute force but skill, know-how. Art is then precisely something that can be taught and learned. Though art is distinct from nature, it is not opposed to nature. On the contrary, an art has to accord with nature as such and as a whole, and what it produces is not nature but this accord. Aristotle will thus claim that “imitating is in accord with our nature” and that the sign of this accord lies in the pleasure that we take in representation: “We delight in contemplating the most accurate- ly made images of the very things that are painful for us to see, such as the forms of the most contemptible insects and of dead bodies.”21 Thus poetry as the art of imitation exhibits mastery only in being in accord with nature. Yet, this accord is produced if the imitation represents the sorts of things that a certain kind of person says and does “as the result of what is likely or necessary.”22 A likely or necessary sequence of events is a sign that the story is in accordance with nat- ural causality. The believable is thus privileged over the possible: “With a view to the poetry, an impossible thing that is believable is preferable to an unbeliev- able thing that is possible.”23 Aristotle goes on to claim that poetry, insofar as it is the art of imitatation, is originally divided according to the “character” of the poet: “And the making of poetry split apart in accordance with their own char- acters, for the more dignified poets imitated beautiful actions and people of the sort who perform them, while the less worthy sort imitated actions of low peo- ple, first making abusive poems just as the others made hymns and praises.”24 Thus, the imitation has to accord with the nature of those being represented. Mastery is ultimately the art of knowing one’s place, of knowing how to shape and control the effects of one’s speech and how to calibrate one’s mode of ad- dress. Above all, it is a matter of knowing the limits of propriety. However, the identification of art and nature touched upon above displaces this notion, for art is like nature only insofar as it knows no propriety. Stupidity could thus be defined as the meeting point of intelligence and idiocy. The fool is the one who fails to recognize one’s place, and thus by extension the propriety of place. Propriety of place is akin to what Georges Bataille in Manet 21 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport: Focus, 2006), 1448b9–12. 22 Aristotle, 1451b9–10. 23 Aristotle, 1461b11–13. 24 Aristotle, 1448b25–28. 229 absense, or the extimate place of art calls rhetoric. Rhetoric consists of a “vast didactic structure” in which rep- resentation serves to institute the place of the viewing subject, enabling them to locate themselves within a hierarchical order, such that the subject will accord with expectation. Bataille illustrates this with reference to Antonin Proust’s characterization of Manet’s frustration with the ridiculous heroic poses that his models would naturally adopt, preferring his models to stand naturally as they would standing in line at the grocer’s.25 The break with representation is a break with the rhetoric of prescribed attitudes, poses that institute a set of expecta- tions concerning how a subject ought to be presented and establish an accord- ance between viewer and the work. Bataille notes this shift in Manet’s The Old Musician (1862), where a certain “ungainliness” is opposed to theatrical stag- ing. Rather than “a carefully arranged pose,” Manet paints “a natural disorder arrived at by chance.”26 As Bataille suggests, Manet’s realism is not opposed to the autonomy of art itself but is the very means through which representation is itself shattered.27 The conquest of autonomy passes by way of realism.28 The identification of art with nature serves to displace the implied mastery of artistic handling by displacing the sense of the subject or what Bataille refers to as the implied text that renders the painting legible as a painting. Manet’s destruction of the subject, as Bataille puts it, proceeds by obliterating the text that serves to place the figure within a legible scene. Nature here marks an indifference of sub- 25 If I insist here on the repetition of the adverb “naturally,” it is to emphasize how “accord- ing to nature” can assume diametrically opposed senses, and it is this tension between these two senses that I have been trying to highlight by contrasting the place of “nature” in Aristotle’s Poetics and the place of nature in Kant, Flaubert, and now Manet. 26 Georges Bataille, Manet: Biographical and Critical Study, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and James Emmons (Ohio: Skira, 1955), 38. 27 Bataille identifies the autonomy of art with the emergence of art in general: “The various kinds of painting that have arisen since Manet’s time represent the varied possibilities of painting in this new realm we have entered, where silence reigns profoundly and art is the supreme value—art in general, which means man as an individual, self-sustaining, de- tached from any collective enterprise or prescribed system (and also from individualism). Here the work of art takes the place of everything that in the past—even in the remotest past—was sacred and majestic.” Bataille, 64. Jacques Rancière has emphasized, particu- larly in his treatment of Flaubert, that realism far from being opposed to autonomy is the condition of its emergence. 28 Thus, although Bataille aligns Manet with the emergence of painting’s autonomy, he gives the modernist interpretation of this notion a violent twist. See Yve-Alain Bois’s essay “The Use Value of Formless,” in Formless: A User’s Guide, ed. Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss (New York: Zone Books, 1997) 13–40. This is a point that T. J. Clark also acknowledg- es as Bois points out in Formless, 256n5. 230 alexi kukuljevic ject matter, a leveling of its order that marks a disjunction between the appear- ance and its form. According to Bataille, even death, such as in The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian (1867), which would seem to preclude “an indifferent treatment” and to be “charged with meaning” is approached by Manet “with an almost callous indifference that the spectator, surprisingly enough, shares to the full.” He continues, Maximilian reminds us of a tooth deadened by Novocain; we get the impression of an all-engulfing numbness, as if a skillful practitioner had radically cured paint- ing of a centuries-old ailment: chronic eloquence. Manet posed some of his mod- els in the attitude of dying, some in the attitude of killing, but all more or less cas- ually, as if they were about to “buy a bunch of radishes.”29 Bataille stresses that the painting fails to meet with expectation. Given the sub- ject of the painting, one expects an “emotional reaction,” but this is disappoint- ed. Rather, this disappointed expectation leaves behind “the curious impres- sion of an absence.”30 This failure is not a deficit but a gain that positions the painting within a “imponderable plenitude,” a vast lack of significance. With Olympia this is pushed to an extreme. Manet dislodges the subject, that is, the figure, from a ground that would assign it meaning. Manet does not lo- cate “his subject anywhere, neither in the drab world of naturalistic prose nor in that, typified by Couture, of absurd academic fictions.”31 She of course remains a figure on a ground, but this relationship is itself stripped of the accord that enable’s a viewer to make sense of her place. She is presented as a mere thing, something simply there, a mute obstacle: a presence that presents an absence, the place of signification’s lack. Bataille writes, In her provocative literalness she is nothing. Her real nudity (not merely that of her body) is the silence that emanates from her, like that from a sunken ship. All we have is the “sacred horror” of her presence—presence whose sheer simplicity is tantamount to absence.32 29 Bataille, Manet, 52. 30 Bataille, 52. 31 Bataille, 67. 32 Bataille, 67. 231 absense, or the extimate place of art It is her silence, this quality of indifference, of withdrawal that Bataille likens to a downed ship, which serves to stupefy. Bataille is of course aware that the very scandal of her presence has now in part served to ensure it pride of place in the Louvre. However, this misses the point. For there is no art that is beyond all such recuperation. Bataille’s simile is here apt. Like the hole in a hull of a ship, Olympia’s entry into the museum does not diminish but instead seals her fate of never being just a painting, but a painting that serves to exemplify a paradig- matic instance of Art. What secures this place is not its masterly execution (what Bataille refers to as “eloquence”) but an enunciation that lisps, an articulation that stutters, things that impress upon sense, an essential incongruity between what is shown and how it is shown, making a place for the implacable.33 Art as the null-occupant of this place emerges as an effect of a transformation in the structure of mastery in which the products of art are subordinated to the calculated effects one expects them to produce. Art’s loss of an “s” appears like a symptom. It is an absence that marks an excess (something that exceeds the determinations of mastery and thus whose effects are difficult if not at times im- possible to predict or contain). The appearance of art serves to split the history of the arts in two. This split does not pass between the liberal arts and the fine arts but rather between the arts and art. Art names the ongoing appropriation of this rupture or split itself. Since art both is and is not an art as well as the sepa- ration of an art from a position of mastery, not only everything that is made but also that which is unmade can be a work of art (the non-site for Robert Smith- son; the refusal to make in Lee Lozano’s Dropout Piece; or the empty exhibition in Laurie Parsons’s 578 Broadway, 11th Floor 1990 at Lorence Monk Gallery, New York). Art as such, and the history of art, is the ongoing effort (perhaps one can say drive) to exhibit the effects of its absent sense. The history of avant-garde 33 Bataille’s critique of Valéry’s interpretation of Olympia is decisive in this regard. Valéry interprets the painting as an elevation of the ignoble, where a prostitute “whose status re- quires guileless ignorance of all decency” become a “bestial vestal dedicated to absolute nakedness.” Bataille, 66. Yet, for Bataille, Manet does not maintain the form of the majes- tic, of grandeur, but precisely challenges this very form, this very rhetoric: “[Olympia] is the negation of mythological Olympus and everything it stood for.” Bataille, 71. Olympia does not simply invert a meaning but challenges sense bestowal as such. Bois puts it as follows, “If the Olympia caused a scandal, Bataille argues, it was because by means of it Manet refused the various ideological and formal codes regulating the depiction of the nude, whether erotic, mythological, or even realistic (Courbet didn’t like it).” Bois, “Use Value of Formless,” 15. 232 alexi kukuljevic practice is a history that attends to its most flamboyant effects. The effects of this history are perhaps less visible if one attends only to the “shock of the new.” More significant in my view is the effect of stupefaction that the appearance of art can produce. So the conjunction of art and absense should make us think of the missing “s” in “art” and the missing “c” in “absense.” To hear “art,” one should sense what this lack of an “s” here signifies—namely, that art is not one of the arts. And this negation, this “not,” should make us hesitate over the sense of its singu- larity. A work of art that is not the mere result of the work of an art is neither simply a thing of use (a piece of equipment) nor is it merely a commodity (an exchange value), but it is also not something natural (“it does not have the char- acter of having taken shape by itself like the granite boulder”).34 Heidegger re- sists identifying this thing, this interstice between the natural and the social as a mere thing. To arrive at a mere thing through the process of subtraction de- termines the thing, its “thing-being,” as a “left-over.” Heidegger adds that “this remnant is not actually defined in its ontological character. It remains doubtful whether the thingly character comes to view at all in the process of stripping off everything equipmental.”35 To think the ontological character of the work of art is to think the being of this leftover. I propose that we dwell on this moment that Heidegger would not like us to dwell on. In the leftover we are faced with a mere thing, a dumb thing, which is to say, something that dumbfounds. In English one can speak of being “dumbfounded.” When one is dumbfounded, one finds oneself in an encounter with a demand for which there is no response. As one of its first appearances in the English language attests to in Thomas Ur- quhart’s translation of Rabelais, to dumbfound is an embarrassment of the head: “I beseech you never dum-found or Embarrass your Head with these idle Conceits.” Or as another Thomas puts it, Thomas Otway, in The Souldiers For- tune, “He has but one eye, and we are on his blind side; I’ll dumb-found him. (Strikes him on the shoulder.)” To be dumbfounded is to encounter something unexpected, unforeseen, and thus something that cannot be avoided, resolved, or circumnavigated. “I cannot wriggle out of it; I am dumbfounded,” as Charles 34 Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 154. 35 Heidegger, 156. 233 absense, or the extimate place of art Darwin puts it.36 In short, one finds oneself dumb, which is to say, unable to speak.37 What is dumbfounding founds the subject in dumbness, in silence. One is at a loss for words, trapped somewhere between being stunned and aston- ished, between stupidity and wonder. Jacques Lacan introduces the relation to the thing, “the-beyond-of-the-signified,” as a matter of dumbness. “The things in question are things insofar as they are dumb [. . .]. And dumb things are not exactly the same as things which have no relationship to words.”38 Lacan intro- duces here, as a case in point, the face of Harpo Marx: Is there anything that poses a question which is more present, more pressing, more absorbing, more disruptive, more nauseating, more calculated to thrust everything that takes place before us into the abyss or void than that face of Har- po Marx, that face with its smile which leaves us unclear as to whether it signi- fies the most extreme perversity or complete simplicity? This dumb man alone is sufficient to sustain the atmosphere of doubt and of radical annihilation which is the stuff of the Marx brothers’ extraordinary farce and the uninterrupted play of “jokes” that makes their activity so valuable.39 Dumbness connotes a reduction to the irreducible. A reduction, in other words, not to nothingness but to a nothing that cannot be made to mean anything, not even nothingness. It marks the muteness of language, that which cannot be sig- nified within language, which is to say, extimate to language. A thing is dumb because it marks the place of a nothing that cannot be made to signify some- thing. A thing because it evades the opposition between something and nothing (nothingness) cannot be reached by means of a negation. A nothing marks the advent of absense. 36 For these references, see “Dumbfound” in the Oxford English Dictionary. 37 One might here also refer to Plato’s treatment of aporia in the Meno where Socrates is jokingly likened to a torpedo-fish or sting-ray (narkē) for his capacity to numb (narkan) both soul and mouth. See Plato, Meno, trans. George Berns and Laurence Anastaplo (Newburyport: Focus, 2004), 79e–80b. I would like to thank Surti Singh for reminding me of this passage. 38 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 55. 39 Lacan, 55. 234 alexi kukuljevic In the essay, “Salon of 1846,” Charles Baudelaire reminds us of what is at stake in the attribution of this singularly abstract term, “art,” by returning to the scene in 1822 when Delacroix’s The Barque of Dante was first exhibited. To get a good idea of the deep turmoil that the picture Dante et Virgile must has caused in the minds of the people at the time, the astonishment, the stupefaction, the anger, the chorus of insults, the enthusiasm, the guffaws of insolent laughter that greeted this fine picture, signal if ever there was one of a revolution, it must be remembered that in the studio of M. Guérin, a man of great talent, but a des- pot and narrow like his master David, there was only a handful of outcasts who bothered about the forgotten old masters and who dared, albeit timidly, to con- spire under the aegis of Raphael and Michelangelo. There was as yet no question of Rubens.40 For Baudelaire, Delacroix’s originality consists in his radically different relation to mastery. It is not a matter of a rupture with tradition but how Delacroix relates to the form of its transmission. Raphael and Michelangelo become models not of the pedantry of a despotic master (M. Guérin) but of artists pursuing art as the pursuit of truth. It is this relation to art that serves, according to Baudelaire, to either astonish or stupefy. It stupefies the pedants, because Raphael is not sum- moned for the purposes of being a model of classicism. It is worth recalling, as Rancière reminds us: In the prize list of painters compiled by Roger de Piles in 1708, he was the un- disputed master in the fields of drawing and expression, equaled only by Guer- chin and Rubens in composition. Colour alone, of which Titian and the Venetians were the recognized masters, constituted his weak point. But even this weakness contributed to his supremacy for all those who considered drawing the directing principle of the art of painting, and colour its simple servant.41 Now compare this understanding of Raphael to that of Frenhofer’s ecstatic praise for the painter in Honoré de Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece: 40 Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1846,” in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charvet (London: Penguin, 1972), 61. 41 Rancière, Aisthesis, 22. 235 absense, or the extimate place of art His supremacy’s due to that intimate sense which apparently seeks to break Form. In Raphael’s figures, Form is what it is in all of us: an intermediary for the communication of ideas and sensations, a vast poetry! Each figure is a world, a portrait whose model has appeared in a sublime vision, colored by light, drawn by an inner voice, examined by a celestial hand which has revealed the sources of expression in an entire existence. You people make lovely gowns of flesh for your women, elegant draperies of hair, but where’s the blood which creates peace or passion, which causes particular effects? Your saint’s a brunette, yet this, my poor Porbus, this belongs to a blonde! And so your figures are tinted phantoms you pa- rade before our eyes, and you call that painting, you call that art!42 If Delacroix’s canvas, according to Baudelaire, can induce insult and anger, even “guffaws of insulant laughter,” it is because it calls into question hierar- chies of painting that an educated public believed they had every right to ex- pect, for by recognizing these hierarchies they would themselves in turn be rec- ognized, confirmed in and by their judgment. From this perspective, Delacroix’s painting is not a painting but a mere caricature of a painting, or what Balzac in The Unknown Masterpiece describes as a “prétendu tableau.” Richard Howard translates this an “imagined picture,” but it has the sense of the supposed, al- leged, or, perhaps, feigned. Balzac publishes The Unknown Masterpiece (Chef d’oeuvre inconnu) in the peri- odical L’Artiste in 1831, and he doubtless has Delacroix (and perhaps also Ingres) in mind. Set in the seventeenth century, the central figure, the painter Frenhofer, provides “a consummate image of the artist’s nature,” as an incarnation of Ro- mantic genius: “everything about this old man transcended the limits of human nature.”43 Frenhofer is depicted quite precisely as an artist and not a mere paint- er. A mere painter, according to Frenhofer, remains “satisfied” with the appear- ances of things. An artist, such as Raphael, on the contrary, “is never deceived by all those subterfuges, he perseveres until nature’s forced to show herself stark naked, in her true spirit.”44 The artist is one who not only paints (“Many painters succeed instinctively, without ever knowing this theme of art.”)45 but 42 Honoré de Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece, trans. Richard Howard (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), 15. 43 Balzac, 25. 44 Balzac, 14–15. 45 Balzac, 14. 236 alexi kukuljevic philosophizes, animated by a passion for the truth—a truth that is touched upon only through the inscription of a difference that is “a nothing” (un rien). Com- menting on Porbus’s unfinished canvas: “What’s lacking? A trifle that’s nothing at all, yet a nothing that’s everything.” For Frenhofer, it is this nothing that car- ries the burden of differentiating the “the appearance of life” from the expres- sion of “its overflowing abundance, that je ne sais quoi which might even be the soul, floating like a cloud over the envelope of flesh.”46 Yet, it does not end well for Frenhofer. For he is a contradiction incarnate, an absolute master (a master painter) who has placed his talent, his genius, in the service of rendering that which cannot be mastered. His attempt to render the living presence of his troublesome beauty (la Belle Noiseuse), Catherine Les- cault, results only in her utter dismemberment. All that remains of her is a mere “stroke of the brush” (coup de pinceau),47 the “tip of a bare foot.” When Porbus and Poussin confront the painting, they are not “speechless with admiration” but stupefied and fear they are in fact the objects of a cruel joke.48 “The old fraud’s pulling our leg,” Poussin murmured, returning to face the so- called painting [prétendu tableau]. “All I see are colors daubed one on top of the other and contained by a mass of strange lines forming a wall of paint.”49 Howard renders “prétendu” on this occasion as “so-called,” which suggests that it is a painting in name only. It is a painting whose status qua painting has been suspended through an onslaught of brushstrokes. The painting is all but de- stroyed. Yet, prompted by the sense that something “must be missing,” Porbus then discovers in the “corner of the canvas” a mere fragment, “the tip of a bare foot emerging from this chaos of colors, shapes, and vague shadings, a kind of incoherent mist; but a delightful foot, a living foot!”50 The existence of this mo- ment, which Didi-Huberman will make the basis of his account of the detail in painting, arrests the gaze.51 “They stood stock-still with admiration before this 46 Balzac, 16. 47 Balzac, 19. 48 Balzac, 19. 49 Balzac, 40. 50 Balzac, 40–41. 51 See Georges Didi-Huberman, La Peinture Incarnée: Suivi de “Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu,” d’Honoré de Balzac (Paris: Minuit, 1985), 91–111. 237 absense, or the extimate place of art fragment which had escaped from an incredible, slow, and advancing destruc- tion.”52 They are more literally frozen stiff, petrified, by what they see, this bit of nothing, un rien, what Baudelaire might call an embellishment of the void. If the painting is no longer a painting but prétendu, this fragment distills its man- ufactured identity with art. It is no longer a painting (because destroyed) but art. Frenhofer’s masterpiece is unknown because it has literalized the je ne sais quoi. It is no longer a painting (having become a mere canvas) and thus nothing at all, but it is only in virtue of being nothing at all that it can be art. It is either a work of art or nothing at all in virtue of the suspension of its status as a painting. The young Poussin, confronted with such a decision, consigns it to oblivion. “But sooner or later he’ll notice that there’s nothing on his canvas!”53 It is this judgment that serves to undo Frenhofer’s delusional belief in his genius, shak- ing him from his naivete. Overcome with crippling “anxiety” he contemplates his “painting” and staggers “as if from a blow,” declaring: “Nothing, nothing! And after working ten years!” He sat down and wept. “I’m an imbecile then, a madman with neither talent nor ability. Just a rich man who makes no more than what he buys . . . I’ve created nothing!”54 Giorgio Agamben, in The Man without Content, interprets Balzac’s story as an allegory of an antinomy that, he argues, “traverses the entire history of aesthet- ics” and constitutes “it’s speculative center and living contradiction.”55 When the work of art becomes a quest for a living work of art, as it does for Frenhofer, far from opening up a shared world, the work marks the site of a radical division that severs the position of the artist from that of the spectator. What appears to Frenhofer as the very incarnation of the truth is for Poussin and Porbus a mess of paint. The process of refinement, in principle infinite, that brings expression ever closer to the expressed, the signifier to the signified, commits itself to an end whose success can only be utter and complete failure: “The quest for ab- solute meaning has devoured all meaning, allowing only signs, meaningless forms, to survive. [. . .] In order to leave the evanescent world of forms, he has no 52 Balzac, Unknown Masterpiece, 41. 53 Balzac, 42. 54 Balzac, 43. 55 Agamben, Man Without Content, 12. 238 alexi kukuljevic other means than form itself, and the more he wants to erase it, the more he has to concentrate on it to render it permeable to the inexpressible content he wants to express.”56 Art as such is positioned as the disjunctive synthesis between pure art and its abolition (nonart). Yet, Agamben overlooks how the “painting” itself inscribes this disjunction through the suspension of its sense qua painting. The story lays bare what is at stake in the difference between an art and art, a painting and what appears when a painting is no longer a painting. What appears is not simply nothing— nothingness—but a nothing (un rien): the void’s embellishment, as it were. The void punctuates nothingness, inserting within it an interval that separates it from its form as negation. What appears is not a what, nor a being, but the pres- ence of an absence, the tip of a bare foot. Less than a fragment, but not nothing- ness, this fragment of a fragment inscribes the place of an absentee subject. It is painted but its failure to signify a painting allows it to embody a singular lack of significance. It is this punctuality that escapes both Poussin and Frenhofer that the story solicits us, forces us, perhaps, to think. It presents to us an object of absence, a thing in the substituted place of painting. The thing that we all too easily call art. What is named here is precisely not a sense, but that which appears only in relation to its destruction. We should take Frenhofer’s claim to have “created nothing” quite seriously by shifting stress from what he does to what appears in the contingency of its place. If we focus on what he does, then we are con- demned to viewing what appears (i.e., its result) as a bit of bad fortune, symp- tomatic of an irreparable gap between his intention or desire to make art and the demand that it assume legible form—we are condemned to think that a liv- ing work of art in its very accomplishment presents to us death itself. And this failure is a fault that Frenhofer himself cannot live with and wants to destroy forever. He burns his work and then dies. From the perspective of mastery, the remainder (this bit of nothing) is itself unbearable and must disappear, because it can only signify failure. However, one need not follow the judgment of Poussin. Poussin’s judgment of a failure (there is nothing on the canvas) is in fact a failed judgment. He fails 56 Agamben, 10. 239 absense, or the extimate place of art to see what is in fact given, which is only given through the form of its failure. We are confronted with a signifier that not only signifies its failure but internal- izes a relation to this absence—that is, a signifier that presents its nonsensical presence. Art appears only in and through the failure of the whole to secure the promise of sense. Art is not whole, which is to say, it makes a hole (without a “w”) in sense. Yet, this hole is not without sense if we refuse the demand to make sense of it. That which is not without sense is what I presented at the beginning as absense. If we are to take this conjunction seriously (art and absence), then we have to abandon the expectation that art make sense, that its being has a meaning, that its substance is anything other than liquidated. We must take this vacuity se- riously. To conclude, let me propose a definition: art is the abscess of absent sense. The “s” adds something to the “c” in absense. It is the abscess of the let- ter, a contusion of the letter, as if the added stress on the “c” had produced some swelling, as a punch to the gut might produce dropsy, a senseless cedilla (ç), the letter’s bone spur, a part of the letter that is not of the letter and thus cannot be made sense of by reference to the body of language. It is not of language but only appears on its surface as its abscess. Something forced to the surface through a displacement. I would like you to hear the Greek resonance of oedēma (from oiden, to swell) defined as “a condition characterized by an excess of watery flu- id collecting in the cavities or tissues of the body.” Samuel Beckett himself, in a letter to Mary Manning Howe, proposed an idea of “ruptured writing, so that the void may protrude, like a hernia.”57 Art is perhaps nothing less than the protu- berance of the void. Art hollows out sense, filling it with an absence. Art hollows and fills; it makes a vacuole. What appears as art – in and through this nomi- nation – is an absent sense. Art is thus not something that merely resists defi- nition, that is difficult to define. Its lack of definition is definitive. It is positively lacking. It marks the space of an evacuation such that art truly is everything and nothing. Art appears as an herniatic strain in and of culture; art is a rupture that marks the extimate place of absense. 57 The letter is from July 11, 1937. See Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929–40, ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 521n8. 240 alexi kukuljevic References Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Agamben, Giorgio. The Man Without Content. Translated by Georgia Albert. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Joe Sachs. Indianapolis: Focus, 2002. . Physics: A Guided Study. Translated by Joe Sachs. New Brunswick: Rutgers Univer- sity Press, 1995. . Poetics. Translated by Joe Sachs. Newburyport: Focus, 2006. Bataille, Georges. Manet: Biographical and Critical Study. Translated by Austryn Wain- house and James Emmons. Ohio: Skira, 1955. Baudelaire, Charles. “The Salon of 1846.” In Selected Writings on Art and Literature, translated by P. E. Charvet, 47–107. London: Penguin, 1972. Balzac, Honoré de. The Unknown Masterpiece. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: New York Review Books, 2001. Beckett, Samuel. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929–1940. Edited by Martha Dow Fehs- enfeld and Lois More Overbeck. Vol. 1 of The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009–16. Bois, Yve-Alain. “The Use Value of Formless.” In Formless: A User’s Guide, edited by Yve- Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, 13–40. New York: Zone Books, 1997. Didi-Huberman, Georges. La Peinture Incarnée: Suivi de “Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu,” d’Honoré de Balzac. Paris: Minuit, 1985. Draxler, Helmut. Gefährliche Substanzen: Zum Verhältnis von Kritik und Kunst. Berlin: b_books, 2007. Flaubert, Gustave. “Eleven Letters.” Translated by Geoffrey Wall. The Cambridge Quarter- ly 5, no. 3 (1996): 213–242. . Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet, June 27, 1852. In Juillet 1851–Décembre 1858, ed. Jean Bruneau, 119. Vol. 2 of Correspondance. Paris: Gallimard, 1973–2007. Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. 2 vols. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Basic Writings, edited by David Far- rell Krell, 139–212. London: Harper Perennial, 1993. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kristeller, Paul Oskar. “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthet- ics Part I.” Journal of the History of Ideas 12, no. 4 (October 1951): 496–527. https://doi. org/10.2307/2707484. Kukuljevic, Alexi. Liquidation World: On the Art of Living Absently. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017. 241 absense, or the extimate place of art Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. Plato. “Gorgias.” In Plato and Aristotle, Gorgias and Rhetoric, translated by Joe Sachs, 29–120. Newburyport: Focus, 2009. . Meno. Translated by George Berns and Laurence Anastaplo. Newburyport: Focus, 2004. Rancière, Jacques. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of the Arts. Translated by Zakir Paul. London: Verso, 2013. . The Method of Equality. Translated by Julie Rose. Cambridge: Polity, 2016. Williams, Raymond. “Art.” In Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 9–11. Lon- don: Oxford University Press, 2015. 243 Keywords time, event, present, contemporary, politics, Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze Abstract Are we living in an “in-between time”? If so, what does it mean to be the “contempo- rary” of such a time? Starting from its consistent recurrence over different times, this article investigates the temporal-philosophical operation related to the designation of “in-between times.” It examines the function this operation assumes in thinking about time, i.e. the specific construction of time it establishes. By focusing on the functioning of intervalle in Alain Badiou and entre-temps in Gilles Deleuze, two contradictory rela- tions to the present conveyed in the concept of “in-between time” are discussed. The article demonstrates that for both philosophers, in-betweenness occupies a key posi- tion in their philosophical construction of time—yet, in reverse form in each case. The discussion of this contrasting mode then leads to the final question of whether there is such a thing as a fundamental in-between character that manifests itself through all times, belonging to time as such. Interval in dogodek: sedanjost kot vmesni čas pri Gillesu Deleuzu in Alainu Badiouju Ključne besede čas, dogodek, sedanjost, sodobnik, politika, Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze Povzetek Ali živimo v »vmesnem času«? Če je tako, kaj pomeni biti »sodobnik« takega časa? Članek raziskuje časovno-filozofsko operacijo, povezano s poimenovanjem »vmesnega časa«, izhajajoč iz njenega doslednega pojavljanja v različnih obdobjih. Preučuje funk- * Berlin University of the Arts, Germany m.quent@udk-berlin.de | https://orcid.org/0009-0005-4592-9395 Marcus Quent* Interval and Event: The Present as In-between Time in Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou Filozofski vestnik issn 0353-4510 | Volume 45 | Number 1 | 2024 | 243–67 cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.45.1.10 244 marcus quent cijo, ki jo ta operacija prevzema pri mišljenju časa, oz. specifično konstrukcijo časa, ki jo vzpostavlja. S poudarkom na delovanju intervalle pri Alainu Badiouju in entre-temps pri Gillesu Deleuzu obravnavamo dva nasprotujoča si odnosa do sedanjosti, ki ju izraža pojem »vmesnega časa«. Članek pokaže, da pri obeh filozofih vmesnost zavzema ključ- no mesto v njuni filozofski konstrukciji časa – vendar v obratni obliki. Razprava o tem kontrastnem načinu nato pripelje do končnega vprašanja, ali obstaja nekaj takega kot temeljna vmesnost, ki se kaže skozi vse čase in pripada času kot takemu. ∞ Is it true that we are living in an “in-between time,” as is sometimes claimed to- day in light of numerous overlapping crises that our weakened politics seems merely to administer reactively? How plausible is this diagnosis of the present? What phenomena, what developments allow or suggest such a diagnosis, and what conclusions could be drawn from it? And what about the history of this diagnosis itself, its strangely consistent recurrence over different times? Based on these questions, I would like to turn to the specific temporality of in-between times. What concerns me here is not so much a sociological examination or his- torical characterization of “our” present, but the temporal-philosophical opera- tion related to this designation. The focus will therefore be on the function this operation assumes in thinking about time, that is, on the specific construction of time it establishes. Within this context, I am particularly interested in two con- tradictory relations to the present conveyed in the concept of in-between time. There is a specific twofold appearance of the present that will be examined by focusing on the functioning of intervalle and entre-temps in Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze. For both philosophers, in-betweenness occupies a key position in their philosophical construction of time—yet, as we will see, in reverse form in each case. The discussion of this contrasting mode of operation will finally bring me back to the question of whether there is such a thing as a fundamental in-be- tween character that manifests itself through all times, belonging to time as such. Interim, Interval, and In-between Times If we first consider the historical meanings of the phrase “in-between time,” we understand it as a time of transition. In-between time as an interim is a time of the temporary and provisional, a period between two heterogeneous orders. An 245 interval and event: the present as in-between time in g. deleuze and a. badiou interim period always occurs when an old order is suspended without a new one having taken its place. Such times have a minimal, fading, and bracketed being that follows an end without indicating a new beginning, a being-in-suspension that emerges from dissolution or disintegration. Since the formation of the new is still pending, the interim period is relativized. Only in retrospect, that is, in the perspective of its overcoming—once the period in between is over—will it become possible to identify its beginning and end. From the internal perspective, howev- er, the experience of the in-between—which is itself structured in an intervening or intermitting manner—lacks a fixed frame or determination; its end is never in sight, but always impending or looming. Antonio Gramsci famously called this time the “interregnum,” a time in which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.”1 Those who live in an interregnum find themselves in a space between the law of the old and a fragile, ambiguous new that is obstructed. The crux is that for the one who inhabits this space the distinction between the old and the new, the traditional and the novel, becomes obscure. The in-be- tween status challenges the ability of its contemporaries to distinguish and ori- ent themselves in time. The sign of such times is that dynamics and statics, ten- sion and relaxation, mobility and immobility tend to become indistinguishable. It is symptomatic for intervening periods that social phenomena circulate con- spicuously with opposing, mutually exclusive valuations. Even before all symp- toms of decay, this crisis of discernment is probably the most conspicuous of the “great variety of morbid symptoms” that, according to Gramsci, appears in such times. Where appearances are obscured, judgment and reasoning become precarious, and, above all, the experience of temporality itself becomes diffuse. Living through in-between times therefore means waiting for the sign of a new order at every moment. The interim is the topos of desire, of longing. But of- ten the state of endless waiting cannot be distinguished from nonstop action; time stretches and shrinks ambiguously. Where nothing is given, confusion can reach such an extent that it is impossible to say whether the time is standing still and nothing is happening, or whether it is accelerating and constantly bringing something new. The complicated relationship between past, present, and future is shaken in the in-between time; the very fabric of time is subject to fundamen- tal disorientation. In other words, in such periods, not only has a particular his- 1 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1992), 276. 246 marcus quent torical present disintegrated, but the order of time itself is at stake; the construc- tion and intelligibility of time become problematic. On the other hand, thinking that emphatically determines its own time as a tran- sition, and tries to establish its own contemporaneity precisely on this in-be- tween state, finds itself in a Nietzschean trajectory: when thinking is concerned with an “unfashionable effect,” and assigns to itself the task of “work[ing] against time and thereby hav[ing] an effect upon it, hopefully for the benefit of a future time,”2 it declares the present to be a phenomenon of transition. Both downfall and birth, this transition becomes a radical tension that thinking im- poses on itself. The interim period is then no longer simply an external process that one suffers; instead, the one who determines the transition takes on an ac- tive role and helps to bring forth its in-betweenness in the first place. We con- ceive our present as a time bracketed between a past that is both outdated and oppressive and a glorious future whose arrival we help to prepare. In his “Comforting words for those despairing of progress” (“Trostrede eines desparaten Fortschritts”), from Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche diagnoses: “Our age gives the impression of an interim state; the old worldviews, the old cultures, still exist in part, the new ones are not yet secure and habitual and hence lack decisiveness and consistency. It appears as if everything were be- coming chaotic, the old being lost, the new worth nothing and becoming ever feebler.” People who think “unfashionably” or “untimely” are identified with soldierly bravery directed against fear resulting from uncertainty. They react to the crisis of world views and habits with a kind of mechanical courage, which enables them to overcome the ambiguity of time: “But so it is for the soldier who is learning to march; for a time he is more uncertain and awkward than ever be- cause the muscles are being moved now according to the old system, now ac- 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,” in Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 87. The “unfashionable effect” is connected with praise of humankind as a bridging figure, a fig- ure of transition, preparing a new being: “Mankind is a rope fastened between animal and overman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still. What is great about human beings is that they are a bridge and not a purpose: what is lovable about human beings is that they are a crossing over and a going under.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A Book for All and None, ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 7. 247 interval and event: the present as in-between time in g. deleuze and a. badiou cording to the new one, and neither has yet decisively claimed victory. We stag- ger, but it is necessary not to let this frighten us and possibly make us surrender what we have newly achieved.3” The interim period appears here as something to be endured only “for a while” until the new, which must be supported by us, has established itself. But if we include another fragment by Nietzsche, this determination of a par- ticular historical present with an in-between structure is extended to a charac- teristic of all times; it becomes the characteristic of historical time in general: An age of transition: this is what everyone calls our time, and everyone is right. However, not in the sense that this word belongs to our age more than to any oth- er. Wherever we find a foothold in history, we find fermentation, the old concepts battling with new ones; and those with a keen scent—who were formerly called prophets, but who only felt and saw what was happening to them—knew it and were usually very much afraid. If it goes on like this, everything falls to pieces; well, the world must perish. But it did not perish. The old trunks of the forest broke, but a new forest always grew again, and at any time there was a decaying and a becoming world.4 Here, too, fear is countered by a promise that relies on the becoming of the new within the constant process of disintegration; contemporaries try to read a re- markable persistence into this. Interestingly, the state of “fermentation,” deter- mined as the essential characteristic of history, requires the perception and dis- covery of a specific vision, a particular “scent.” However, this historical sensibil- ity to the present’s inconsistency, to its contradictory forces, potentially renders every time an in-between time; every time becomes an “interregnum” in which the old concepts battle with new ones and a decaying world and a becoming world coexist. The in-between status is then no longer our temporary malady of disorientation but something that belongs to every time and needs to be discov- ered by the prophetic thinker.—At one time the intervening present is a transi- 3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. Gary Handwerk (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 169, § 248. 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, 1880–1882, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988), 154; my translation. 248 marcus quent tion that must be endured and overcome; at another it is the hidden refuge of the forces of becoming that a “keen scent” must uncover. Living Finitely and the Endless Present The critique of temporality grounded in the present—that is, of all conceptions of time that proceed from the intertwinement of present/presence—is a central motif of twentieth-century philosophy opened up by Nietzsche. If we take into account the various complications of the concept of the present in this century, it becomes clear that “our” present stands in the shadow of a scientific, tech- nological, and philosophical century which, to put it in a nutshell, has to be termed a century of the critique of the present. Critique in this sense, however, does not refer to a specific present; it is not restricted to a specific historical for- mation with its respective social, political, and cultural conditions. If we think of significant philosophical works by Heidegger, Adorno, and Derrida, for ex- ample, then “critique of the present” targets above all the metaphysical, phan- tasmatic, or ideological sediments and residuals that the present or any pres- ent-based conception of time contains; it is always firstly about the paradoxes and contradictions of the temporality of the present itself. At the same time, however, the twentieth century is equally characterized by a tendency towards the liberation or intensification of the present, which it ac- complishes within and against its horrific history. Experiencing the contraction and escalation, the depletion and exhaustion of ideas, and remembering their destructive power and biopolitical ramifications, sheds light on the inherent right of the living present, which comes increasingly to the fore as affirmed fini- tude. To live finitely!—perhaps this can be identified as the ambivalent slogan that simultaneously closes and opens this century. It means, first of all, liberat- ing oneself from the burdens of the past—which have always obliged the pres- ent to continue a tradition, to take over a heritage, or to pay off a debt—but also liberating oneself from the overwhelming demands of projective constructions, which always seem to postpone the fulfillment of a promise to a future still to come, and thus to sacrifice the living present. This emergence of the present is reflected in the paradigm shift from the mod- ern to the contemporary with its different historical genealogies, each related to significant ruptures of the century (1945, the 1960s, 1989). While for the mod- 249 interval and event: the present as in-between time in g. deleuze and a. badiou ern, it is said, time was essentially oriented towards the future, and the present was primarily understood as something to be overcome because it obstruct- ed and delayed the realization of future projects, the present came to the fore precisely at the moment when modernist projects, goals, and hopes were be- ing questioned, contested, and reformulated. Therefore, the temporality of the contemporary does not appear only as liberation; it is essentially manifested, as Boris Groys has argued, as doubt, hesitation, insecurity, and indecision.5 It is as if the living present that tries to liberate itself from past and future—time that intensifies itself as a finite present—were caught up in the horror of its own endlessness: the liberation of the present is turned into the jail of the now. And at the same time we sense that the cruel permutations of twentieth-century bi- opolitics have not ceased to be effective in the economic and technological re- gime of the present. In the case of Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou, we are confronted with two major philosophies of the event that deal with this contrasting character of the present, and for which the “critique of the present” is primarily connected with a different kind of intensification of the present. Remarkably, in each of them the concept of the present appears twice; their thinking is marked by a double emergence of the concept of the present as the fundamental problem of the phi- losophy of time. This problem can especially be elucidated with reference to “in-between time.” In doing so, Badiou uses the concept of intervalle to charac- terize our present as a time of disorientation, a “non-world” suspended between a past world and a new one yet to come. Deleuze, in turn, uses the concept of en- tre-temps to think of the event’s structure as an infinite becoming that opens up an in-between in the midst of the world and time itself. In what follows I would like to elaborate on this opposition, which not only appears between both event philosophies but also traverses each of them on its own terms. Starting from the contrast in the concept of in-between time, I am interested in what it means for both philosophers to determine time as an “interval” or “meanwhile” and, con- sequently, what they see as the particular task of thinking in interim periods. 5 Boris Groys, “Comrades of Time,” in E-flux Journal: What is Contemporary Art?, ed. Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010), 25. 250 marcus quent Intervals without Event: The Amnesia of the Present In his book The Century (2005), Badiou attempts to comprehend the twentieth century by employing the thinking that it produced (or that produced it).6 He fo- cuses on what he terms the “passion for the real”7 as the century’s key feature, mostly apparent in its entanglements of art and politics. At the same time, the book diagnoses a characteristic loss of a creative force in the contemporary sit- uation, at the beginning of the twentieth-first century. Badiou thus confronts the intensification of the present (which we have defined as its liberation) with another intensification of the present (which could be defined, as we will see, as its presentation). In a certain sense, he actualizes the present of the twentieth century against the “presentism” of our contemporary situation. Or, to put it dif- ferently, he emphasizes the creation of the present, the present as creation, as a key feature within modernism’s futural imperative, and positions it against the temporality of the contemporary: the creation of the present as infinite is mobi- lized against the liberation of the finite present. The problem of the contemporary situation is that it ultimately indicates a non- time. Badiou writes that the contemporaries of the twenty-first century have en- tered “a period of atemporality and instantaneity” characterized by the absence of any thinking of time. Their time, he argues, must therefore be understood as time without time: the day after tomorrow has become “abstract,” and the day before yesterday “incomprehensible.” Characteristic of this sort of time, which does not produce its own construction of time and therefore knows only pure passing, is a peculiar “marriage of frenzy and total rest,” the indistinguishabil- ity of permanent renewal and immobility. This kind of time, Badiou claims, is “an inaccessible amalgam of agitation and sterility, the paradox of a stagnant feverishness.” Ultimately—and this is the crucial point of his line of thought—it is a time “upon which the will, whether collective or individual, has no grip.”8 Because of the lack of a proper construction of time, from the standpoint of thought it is actually the case that the twenty-first century has not even begun 6 The century as a “philosophical object” does not simply coincide with the empirical fact of the century or a historical unit of measurement. To be able to think the century, “to con- stitute it as an object for thought,” one has to “construct” it in the first place. See Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 1. 7 Badiou, 32. 8 Badiou, 105–6. 251 interval and event: the present as in-between time in g. deleuze and a. badiou yet. But what characterizes a contemporary situation if one locates it after some end and before its own beginning? Badiou qualifies this atemporal, instantaneous time as a transitional time or “in-between.” For him, in-between periods have eliminated the possibility of events, and thus their ability to incorporate a subject. Lingering in an atem- poral, instantaneous time does not mark the advent of the new, but is an ex- pression of a deficient and disoriented subjectivity of transition that has not yet found a new formation. Badiou’s diagnosis of the present is that contemporar- ies are in a phase of transition between two worlds, which at the same time is a transition between two temporalities. This period is characterized by uncertain- ty and disorientation because the laws of the old world have been suspended, but new ones have not yet taken their place. In the lecture series Images of the Present Time (L’Image du temps present), which he delivered from 2001 to 2004, after delivering the series the book The Century is based on, Badiou describes the in-between period as a kind of transition “between a worn-out, deteriorat- ing, exhausted world and a world that is not yet either calculable or foreseea- ble.”9 In the original French version, the reader often finds the term intervalle, which, unfortunately, is not preserved in the English translation. The moment of the interval in which one lingers extends further and further, and peculiarly perpetuates itself. It is as if the transition that has become permanent is form- ing a formless non-world in which the contemporaries of the twenty-first centu- ry dwell. Their past and future become increasingly distant as incomprehensi- ble and incommensurable images or phantasies. In the non-world, interval, or in-between time, the only thing that remains is a phantasmagorical reflection of the past and future, which is appropriated and applied as definite proof of the backwardness of both the past and the past’s future. It is this intervening character of time—a time without time, a void caught be- tween two times—that, for Badiou, favors a supremacy of the present. In atem- poral, instantaneous time, there results, as it were, in an almost natural way, a “unilateral promotion of the present”10—although not of the present as real, bear- ing witness to the interruption of an event, but of the present as given, corrupted, 9 Alain Badiou, Images of the Present Time, 2001–2004, trans. Susan Spitzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023), 59. 10 Badiou, 67. 252 marcus quent and bereft of events. By focusing solely on this continuous present, on the end- less now, temporality is reduced to an empty measure that registers only the ev- er-identical passing of time. Atemporal, instantaneous time knows no other form than continuous passing, in which it appears only as an allegory of decreasing possibilities, an indicator of diminishing strength, and an insignia of a hope that has already faded. In the in-between time of the present epoch, time appears solely “as flight, as passage [. . .], as consumption or as consummation.”11 Time is ultimately nothing but the neutral measure of continuous annihilation. This re- duction of time to the finite dimension of decay, of consumption, is problematic since it is not capable of any novelty, of any creation, precisely because nothing can persist in it. Everything that could happen in it is nipped in the bud, exposed to destruction in advance, and consigned to death and oblivion. Jelica Šumič Riha has coined the apt term “anticipated amnesia” for this act of preliminary annulment of every moment of potential rupture, of sealing against potential discontinuity and potential novelty. She describes it as “a readiness to forget in advance”: “Hence, for us, something is doomed to be forgotten even before it has actually taken place. This anticipated, programmed amnesia is the ability not only to wipe out what has happened but to annihilate the very idea of the possibility for something to happen, in short, the ability to erase the pos- sibility of the possible.”12 “Anticipated amnesia” is thus a severe form of amne- sia, because it consigns something that has happened to oblivion along with the possibility of any future. We must conclude that the future is forgotten—and not in the sense of an abstract and indeterminate image of the future, but precisely the future possibilities produced by a real present: The amnesia of the beginning, or, rather, of its possibility, is namely a subjectiva- tion of time that denies the event as a clear-cut interruption by inscribing it back into history as one of those things that simply happen. By denying the disconti- nuity in which the eventness of the event consists, the amnesia of the amnesia not only annihilates the past, but also the future. Not, of course, some abstract future, but the future of the very present, the future of its proper present. It is therefore not enough to say that for an amnestic subject nothing has happened, 11 Badiou, 69. 12 Jelica Šumič Riha, “Contemporary Thought and the Crisis of Negation,” Crisis and Critique 1, no. 3 (July 2014): 79. 253 interval and event: the present as in-between time in g. deleuze and a. badiou that the past event is but an illusion. It would be more appropriate to say that for him nothing can happen. And it is only in this sense that it could be said that for an amnestic subject there is no such thing as a beginning or an event.13 The amnestic subject, who abides in the present of the interval, thus annuls the present insofar as it signifies the possibility of intervening in the course of things actively, of taking part in a real change. This subject sacrifices the real present—the present of discontinuity that only enables the incorporation of a new world—and suffers a kind of premature forgetting. Premature forgetting is the crucial political instrument of contemporary domination because, as Badiou points out as well, power today is less concerned with the consolida- tion of what exists alone but primarily with the regulation of possibilities: “It’s an operation that restricts, limits, cuts, whittles away at, redefines, and formats possibilities.”14 Following Badiou’s critique of the “democratic emblem” and its aggressive regulation of the realm of the possible, Jan Völker has similarly ar- gued that democratic subjectivity is characterized by a fundamental “corruption of time,” which is the result of a suppression and subsequent reification of the split between subjectivity and the reality of things that ultimately runs through the subject itself. While the suppressed non-temporal appears and reappears again and again in the world, it is itself never just an objective fact, however, but dependent on a subjective stance that perceives and acknowledges it as a non-temporal: “That which both interrupts and generates time, happens con- tinuously, if it has not already been subordinated again to the temporal pulse that always inserts it into the course of the world.”15 In Badiou’s diagnosis of the present, the concept of the present assumes a double function. It is in play in two distinct ways. The series of lectures mentioned above, Images of the Present Time, illustrates this double emergence of the concept of the present very well because, later in the series, a transition is made from a de- nunciation of transitional or “in-between” time to a more complex construction that Badiou calls “declaration.” Notably, both figures revolve around the concept of the present. On the one hand there is an in-between time—held together by the 13 Šumič Riha, 80. 14 Badiou, Images, 113. 15 Jan Völker, “Das demokratische Subjekt und die Korruption der Zeit,” in Absolute Gegen- wart, ed. Marcus Quent (Berlin: Merve, 2016), 48. 254 marcus quent “democratic emblem” and the “youthful imaginary”16—that masks the absence of a world. It is a time “concentrated or focused entirely on itself,”17 a concep- tion that thinks of time as immediacy and thus “unilaterally” promotes the pres- ent. Because it valorizes the present one-sidedly, it cannot maintain or hold any- thing in place. It is a “time without retention” in which a futureless everydayness combines with the succession of interchangeable moments to generate a furious “movement in place.”18 For Badiou, the present of our contemporary democracy is therefore essentially a “temporal flight,” a “substitutable, empty, and deferred present”; the prevailing temporality is founded on a “vanishing present.”19 But on the other hand, Badiou speaks of a “present of the present” that func- tions without an emblem and imaginary, a present that is radically imageless and turns against power as an actively dis-imaging force.20 If the present is accentu- ated in the sense of this dis-imaging force of the real, then it is nothing given, no flow of time that can always be presupposed; then, on the contrary, it is uncer- tain whether there is such a thing as a present in a “contemporary” situation. The question of the present then initially requires an examination, which may lead to the disappointing conclusion that “there may be no present”21 at all. It is not cer- tain that there is such a thing as a present at any time, in any situation. While the “vanishing present” is based on a conception of time “without re- tention,”22 in which the present is “unilaterally” promoted as the immediacy of consumption, the present as this dis-imaging force of the real hinges on a con- ception of time that constructs a bringing forth of the present as a “conflictual interaction of repetition and projection.”23 The “present of the present” emerges through a torsion, in which a repetitive element of the past is combined with a projective element of the future in a “declaration.” The present—in the sense of the “present of the present” or of the imageless force of the real—which turns against the emblem of power, is constituted in a creative declaration of the mass 16 Badiou, Images, 68. 17 Badiou, 59. 18 Badiou, 69, 70. 19 Badiou, 75. 20 Badiou, 13. 21 Badiou, 134. 22 Badiou, 72. 23 Badiou, 141. 255 interval and event: the present as in-between time in g. deleuze and a. badiou or the crowd: “The present contained in the declaration, in what the Crowd de- clares, is something that raises repetition to the level of projection. It’s not sim- ply replacing the one with the other. [. . .] The declaration [. . .] is the ‘swept up’ coexistence of repetition and projection.”24 The “real” present then, the present “of” the real, has to do with a specific configuration of past and future; it is the construction of a torsion of a past element through a projective force: To sum up regarding the complexity of the present, we could say that the com- plexity of the present is the declaration—that is, the overlapping of repetition and projection—the declaration insofar as it exerts a torsion on repetition in order to hook it up or connect it to projection. This is an electrification that is different from tradition: a different current will be made to flow. It’s something other than destroying it for the sake of an absolute beginning, of a new world.25 The act of declaration and the operation of torsion are essential features of the incorporation of a faithful subject, which Badiou then further discusses and for- malizes in Logics of Worlds (2006). In Book I of the second of three volumes of his opus magnum Being and Event, he famously introduces a formal theory of the subject, laying the conceptual ground for the appearance of a truth in a world. In this context, the “subject” is understood neither as a register of expe- rience, a category of morality, or an ideological fiction, but essentially as a “sys- tem of forms and operations”26 that denotes nothing other than the conjunction between the body and the trace of an eventful rupture. The notion of the present famously plays a crucial role in distinguishing the formal types of subjects intro- duced. For Badiou, there are three fundamental relations to a present, which is itself nothing other than a “set of consequences of the evental trace”:27 While the faithful subject produces the present, the reactive subject is characterized by the denial of the produced present, and the obscure subject, in turn, by the full oc- cultation of the relation to the present.28 What is decisive for Badiou, of course, is the faithful subject, which involves a “realization in the present of a hitherto 24 Badiou, 143, 144. 25 Badiou, 146. 26 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009), 47. 27 Badiou, 52. 28 Badiou, 62. 256 marcus quent unknown possibility.”29 The faithful subject produces the consequences of an eventful rupture, the trace of an event within a situation—and thereby produces the present itself in the first place. Thus the present is neither the point-totality of all that merely exists, nor the punctual experience of an ecstatic presence, but the present of an event-conditioned truth that is in itself universal and eternal. Therefore, the complement of this subjective production of the present (or of the production of the present as subject) is that of incorporation: “The only real re- lation to the present,” Badiou sums up in the last pages of Logic of Worlds, “is that of incorporation,”30 which is conceived as a continuous process. Contem- porary ideology, labeled as “democratic materialism” by Badiou, famously de- nies precisely the possibility of this real relation to the present: “For democratic materialism, the present is never created. Democratic materialism affirms, in an entirely explicit manner, that it is important to maintain the present within the confines of an atonic reality.”31 To summarize, an examination of how Badiou thinks of “in-between” time must be undertaken in the particular context of a diagnosis of the present, in which the concept of the present is involved in a twofold way. Badiou’s diagno- sis of the present not only expresses an evaluation of the contemporary histori- cal present but also states, above all, the loss of the creative power of the new in contrast to the temporal constellation that precedes it. At the same time, as part of this contemporary diagnosis, another present emerges within the present, or, one could say, is presented, resulting from a conflictual construction of past and future dimensions. In the intervening present or the interval’s time, anoth- er in-between emerges that is embedded in the sequence of events it highlights. This diagnosis is linked to a task, a kind of ethos of thinking: “A world that’s between two things requires a particular discipline of thought because you’re not supported by any structure. Since you’re in an in-between space, a gap, you are your only reference point.”32 29 Badiou, 52. 30 Badiou, 508. 31 Badiou, 509. 32 Badiou, Images, 38. 257 interval and event: the present as in-between time in g. deleuze and a. badiou Virtual In-between Time: Event without Present Deleuze’s challenging contributions to the philosophy of time are directed against the present. Not just against any given present—that is, for example, a particular historical shape or a determinate political constitution of the pres- ent—but against the primacy of the present in thinking about time itself, against it limiting and reducing our understanding of time. Reading the various texts in which he develops his fundamental reflections on a philosophy of time—the difficult sections on the three syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition, the remarks on the two regimes of time scattered throughout the various series in The Logic of Sense, or, regarding his later work, the thoughts on the “time-im- age” developed with Bergson in the second volume of Cinema and the short but dense passages on the concept of entre-temps in What is Philosophy?—it is striking that Deleuze is always concerned with confronting a conception of time dominated by the present with a fundamentally different way of thinking about time. He challenges the understanding of time that conceives of the past, the present, and the future as three single dimensions of a unified present, thus establishing temporality based on the living present. Instead, this new way of thinking about time assumes an irrevocable split in the consciousness of time, whereby the living present dissolves. Proceeding from Kant’s discovery of tran- scendental consciousness and Bergson’s concept of memory and duration, the conception of both a past in itself and a future in itself become decisive features of Deleuze’s thought. The dimensions of past and future acquire, as it were, au- tonomy and independence from the living present. First, Deleuze’s fundamental intervention in the thinking of time consists, roughly speaking, in supplementing chronological time by an a-chronicle time that is alien to it. The time of present realization and actualization is contrast- ed with a non-present time stratum of the virtual that should be regarded as the real site of the event. Time, Deleuze argues, following the Stoics, “must be grasped twice, in two complementary though mutually exclusive fashions.” These are two incompatible ways of looking at time that nevertheless overlap in thought: “First, it must be grasped entirely as the living present in bodies which act and are acted upon. Second, it must be grasped entirely as an entity infinitely divisible into past and future, and into the incorporeal effects which 258 marcus quent result from bodies, their actions and their passions.”33 On the one hand, there is a realm of bodies and things; its time is the present in which all bodies are causes of one another. On the other hand, there is a realm of events that are in- corporeal effects; its time is said to be the past-future. “Only the present exists in time and gathers together or absorbs the past and future. But only the past and future inhere in time and divide each present infinitely.”34 The dominant conception of time as a continuous flow within which three suc- cessive constitutive dimensions—past, present, and future—permanently merge into one another is radically reconfigured into two simultaneous but incompat- ible “readings of time,” one being the chronological, dominated by the present, and the other the aionic, being infinitely dividable into past and future. Past, present, and future no longer denote historically locatable points in the flow of time. Instead they are conceived as non-linear, non-successive, coexisting strata of time overlapping one another.35 Instead of a single chronological time, which encompasses three constitutive dimensions merging into one, Deleuze’s funda- mental intervention into the thinking of temporality consists in presenting two fundamentally different and mutually exclusive “readings of time,” in each of which the relationship of the temporal dimensions to one another is conceived in a completely different way: the time of the Chronos and the time of the Aion. For Deleuze, the common chronological understanding of time is entirely dominated by the present—although the present is effective in different ways in each case. The chronological account of time sets the present as absolute in all forms and instances. The aionic understanding of time, which he contrasts with it, accepts the present only in the form of a moment without extension, dividing the past and 33 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 5. 34 Deleuze, 5. 35 In his book on Deleuze’s philosophy of time, James Williams accentuates this destruc- tion of the one-dimensionality of linear time: “We must therefore speak of many presents with their own ways of taking the past and the future as dimensions. We must also avoid any general spatial representation of time as something pre-existent that things can be placed on or in. There is no general line of time and no space–time continuum. Instead, singular processes make their own times within the limits set by some wider formal princi- ples, such as asymmetry.” James Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 4. 259 interval and event: the present as in-between time in g. deleuze and a. badiou the future infinitely, being only an infinitesimal abstract “limit value.” In aionic time, past and future are set autonomously as eternally coexisting strata.36 In What is Philosophy? the idea of a virtual in-between time is developed, which in this late work written together with Félix Guattari, varies and expands the no- tion of the aionic past-future from Deleuze’s early work and inscribes it into the framework of a Bergsonian terminology.37 Unlike Badiou, the concept of “in-be- tween” appears here precisely where the eventful dimension of time is specified. On the one hand, Deleuze and Guattari argue, there is a time of facts, bodies and objects, and experience. This is the present time of actualization, which passes between moments. In contrast, there is the time of the event, which they call virtual “in-between time” for which the English translators have chosen the equivalent temporal adverb “meanwhile.” Unfortunately the English language cannot reproduce the subtle double meaning of the French entre-temps, which Deleuze and Guattari spell with a hyphen that perfectly indicates the split of time the term is intended to describe.38 The entre-temps is without beginning or passing; in a sense it is extra-temporal or atemporal. Its in-betweenness opens up the time of the event but no longer serves as a real agent of mediation. It no longer mediates states and bodies but forms a space of its own—a midpoint that has renounced its borders. “It is no longer time that exists between two instants; it is the event that is a meanwhile [entre-temps]: the meanwhile is not part of 36 “Chronos is the present which alone exists. It makes of the past and future its two ori- ented dimensions, so that one goes always from the past to the future—but only to the degree that presents follow one another inside partial worlds or partial systems. Aion is the past-future, which in an infinite subdivision of the abstract moment endlessly decom- poses itself in both directions at once and forever sidesteps the present.” Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 77. 37 Deleuze contrasts the pair of the possible and the real with the pair of the virtual and the actual to carry out an intervention in ontological thinking on the basis of this four- fold constellation. For the philosophical background in the context of the discussion with Bergson, see Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1–25. 38 The translators themselves address this problem of terminology in a footnote: “We have followed the usual translation of entre-temps as signifying ‘meanwhile’ or ‘meantime,’ although the English loses something of the literal meaning of the French as that which happens in the interval between moments of time or actions.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 158n. 260 marcus quent the eternal, but neither is it part of time—it belongs to becoming.”39 Becoming is no longer conceived on the basis of a living present that at the same time is always a transient and never graspable movement that couples two intercon- necting states of the body or of experience. It is understood instead as a perma- nent and infinite movement that reveals an incorporeal being independent of the body and its states. Ultimately and enigmatically, philosophy itself is identified with this in-be- tween time of the entre-temps.40 Philosophical thinking has to be understood as the unique practice of this in-between, following the extensionless present as the “limit value.” The different reference to the event, to the virtual, and to becoming is thus unfolded as a distinguishing criterion of science and philoso- phy: while scientific thinking derives functions from the virtual, philosophical thought extracts concepts from it. Science descends from virtual to actual states of affairs, while philosophy ascends from actual states of affairs to the virtual.41 It is their opposite progression that makes it possible to distinguish science and philosophy: the one descends from the virtual; the other ascends to it. On the descending path from the virtual to actualization—the path of science— we always grasp the time passing between two or more moments, according to Deleuze and Guattari, and thus obtain the image of successive time. On the as- cending path—the path of philosophy—where we abstract from realized and ac- tualized forms to give consistency to the “infinite movement” of the virtual, we find ourselves in an “empty” and “dead” “meanwhile” that is measureless and withdrawn from the sphere of power of the present. Through philosophy, we therefore obtain the image of overlapping in-between times that coexist. Now, importantly, what we call an “event” in everyday life is not the same in both re- gimes of time: from the viewpoint of passing time, the event ultimately always occurs as an accident or ambush. It is an unforeseen exception to the regular temporal course, which nevertheless still confirms it. It is a short incision, and disappears in its subsequent effects. In the entre-temps, however, the event lasts as bodiless and extra-temporal. 39 Deleuze and Guattari, 158. 40 Deleuze and Guattari, 159. 41 Deleuze and Guattari, 160. 261 interval and event: the present as in-between time in g. deleuze and a. badiou The meanwhile (entre-temps), the event, is always a dead time; it is there where nothing takes place, an infinite awaiting that is already infinitely past, awaiting and reserve. This dead time does not come after what happens; it coexists with the instant or time of the accident, but as the immensity of the empty time in which we see it as still to come and as having already happened, in the strange indifference of an intellectual intuition.42 Thus, the in-between of time in Deleuze is something like an empty and infinite middle that has emancipated itself from the bodies and objects enclosing it and remains perpetually withdrawn from the present as an absolute in-between. For Deleuze, entre-temps indicates the time of the event that can be infinitely divid- ed and decomposed into past and future. It can never be grasped in any other way than in the strange sensation of something that has only just happened and will happen straight away. The pure event “is always and at the same time something which has just happened and something about to happen; never something which is happening.”43 From the perspective of time, of the temporal course, an event becomes comprehensible only in its realized and actualized parts. The decisive thing in the event, however, is just what escapes the actual- ization, evades it, and exceeds it. Each component of the event is actualized or effectuated in an instant, and the event in the time that passes between these instants; but nothing happens within the virtuality that has only meanwhiles as components and an event as compos- ite becoming. Nothing happens there, but everything becomes, so that the event has the privilege of beginning again when time is past. Nothing happens, and yet everything changes, because becoming continues to pass through its components again and to restore the event that is actualized elsewhere, at a different moment. When time passes and takes the instant away, there is always a meanwhile to re- store the event.44 The force mobilized in event-thinking here is based on asserting a “shadowy and hidden part,” a “pure reserve,” which pervades or manages reality with- 42 Deleuze and Guattari, 158. Instant and chance are the images of the event in chronological time, while waiting, reserve, and dead or indefinitely past time are images of the event in aionian time. 43 Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 63. 44 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 158. 262 marcus quent out being able to be appropriated or made accessible. The “pure reserve” of the event, its “intangible” part, is more “real” than reality, without depending on a beyond, without establishing a transcendent realm. The event thus always marks the inconsistency point of reality without being merely unreal. I would argue that the work of art for Deleuze is ultimately situated at the inter- section of these two regimes of time, the passing time of actualization and the lasting time of counter-effectuation. By capturing invisible forces and opening itself up to deformation, it is able to incarnate the pure time of the event, that is, to inscribe the virtual in-between time into the living present. Art—which would then have to be called contemporary art in a strong sense—confronts us with the present as a split of time and an intersection of time. Within the work of art, which in What is Philosophy? is conceived as a monument (of becoming, not of memory), the rift or crack of time appears.45 The present permanently evades it- self, incorporating into its monument the endlessly divisible past-future, which is experienced, as Deleuze shows in relation to Francis Bacon’s work, as a pres- ent slip or fall: the non-present sensation inscribes itself into the flesh, transfers the particular present of an intensity—and manifests itself as a fall. In Between Two Forms of Timelessness Considering the steps we have accomplished so far, in-between time entails, as it were, two mutually exclusive perspectives. For Alain Badiou, “in-between time” or “interval” denotes an empty period during which a corrupted, weak- ened present expands endlessly so that time appears only in the image of con- 45 It cannot be discussed in detail here whether and to what extent this model remains sub- ject to the dispositif of the expression of being. I am thinking here of Rok Benčin, who, in relation to aesthetics and the work of art, has argued instead for concentrating on the “surplus representation,” enabled by what is excluded from representation, which he de- velops in strict opposition to the idea of the expression of being as some kind of hidden truth behind the veil of representation. So, against Heideggerian unconcealement and Deleuzian becoming, we should follow Badiou and Rancière in rethinking the complexity of representation: their subtraction of being, or the reconfiguration of the division of the sensible. Whether Deleuze’s approach is ultimately doomed to this proximity to a con- cept of truth that relies on a presupposed concealment should be discussed elsewhere. See Rok Benčin, “Rethinking Representation in Ontology and Aesthetics via Badiou and Rancière,” Theory, Culture and Society 36, no. 5 (September 2019): 95–112, https://doi. org/10.1177/0263276418806573. 263 interval and event: the present as in-between time in g. deleuze and a. badiou sumption, exhaustion, and self-destruction. This intervening time is one that lies between two events, a time of the absence of an event in which past, pres- ent, and future tend to become incomprehensible. The task of thought, then, is to recover a discipline of time capable of tracing sequences of truth-events. For Gilles Deleuze, on the other hand, “in-between time” or the “meanwhile” indicates something like an empty and infinite middle that has emancipated itself from every kind of body and object enclosing it and, as an absolute in-be- tween, is perpetually withdrawn from the present. This in-between is the event itself, which presupposes supplementing the regime of chronological time with a second “reading of time.” The task of thinking then lies in a counter-effectua- tion, which distances itself from actuality—the sphere of existing reality—to ap- proach virtuals that subsist in reality. Thus, while the time of the meanwhile (entre-temps) denotes the opening up of time to its hidden and shadowy event dimension, the time of the intervening period (intervalle) is the name for a time that, on the contrary, has split off its event dimension, its capacity to incorporate a subject. On the one hand, with Badiou, we have the formalization after a disruption resulting from the pres- entation of the real that overcomes a dull intervening period. On the other hand, with Deleuze, we are confronted with a timeless subsisting sphere that opens up any given moment in time, and can be detected in each present as something that evades it. The interval calls for the incorporation or subjectivization of the real that will ultimately end it, whereas the meanwhile is the de-subjectivizing effect of the endless real. Here we face the ambiguous figure or conundrum of the present, its uncanny circle: the present becomes both the name for a problematic, uneventful inter- val and the term for the moment of its eventful disruption, which is brought into position against it. It indicates the continuum of an incurious actuality, as well as the lucid counter-effectuation that is supposed to break through this continu- um—or create it in the first place as the present. The “present” circulates as both empty and fulfilled time, as both elapsing and enduring time. It is conceived as a time of unreserved consumption from which the urgency of a “discipline” is deduced, and as a vicious moving moment representing the event that perma- nently divides time into past and future, thus demanding a different mode of ac- tualization. But how can the present simultaneously be a sealed continuum and a discontinuous incision in the same continuum? 264 marcus quent There is a well-known dispute between Badiou and Deleuze, or the “Badiousian” and “Deleuzian” approaches, which not only arises due to complex questions in terms of ontology and the constitution of the event and its relation to truth, but noticeably also based on the question of how to delineate, determine, and con- struct what we call “politics.” Is politics, for example, as Badiou contends, in the end completely absent in Deleuze? Or, on the contrary, is Badiou’s concept of politics, seemingly purged of all biophysical dimensions, insensitive to the necessary “impure” affective dimensions of politics itself? At this point, within our framework, we can neither decide this matter nor do justice to the complex discussion of its argumentation on both sides.46 But as I have indicated above, the uncanny circle of the present is not only ef- fective if we relate and compare Badiou’s and Deleuze’s different concepts of time and the real, but, more importantly, it also traverses both of them precise- ly in their different denunciations of the regime of the present. The in-between time as a double signifier—once attacked in the critique of the interval, and once highlighted in the affirmation of the meanwhile—is ultimately effective in each philosopher in the respective other dimension: it appears elsewhere. What is contrasted here in the discussion of their use of the term “in-between time” al- ready appears in their own conceptions of the temporality of the event, even if in each case from a different starting point. For example, in Badiou, the event itself is developed as a figure of the Two, circulating between an eventful inter- ruption and an intervention pertaining to this interruption: the interval of the (non-)world is thus juxtaposed by another kind of in-between-time. In Deleuze, in turn, the meanwhile of the event is contrasted with the pure passing of time between two moments, which is capitalized by the historical logic he opposes. With Badiou and Deleuze, we are confronted twice—in two separate and mu- tually incompatible ways—with a timelessness, a time without time. Ultimately, the ambiguous figure or vicious circle of the present pushes us towards the con- flict between two timelessnesses: the interval of in-between time, the corrupted 46 For this comparative discussion, for example, although with a clear swing in the direc- tion of Deleuze, see Katja Diefenbach, “Über das Un/Sinnliche. Ereignis- und Zeitbegriffe in Deleuzes und Badious Ontologien unendlicher Mannigfaltigkeit,” in “Sensibilität der Gegenwart. Wahrnehmung, Ethik und politische Sensibilisierung im Kontext westlich- er Gewaltgeschichte,” ed. Burkhard Liebsch, special issue, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 17 (2018): 151–76. 265 interval and event: the present as in-between time in g. deleuze and a. badiou present, is the timelessness of mere temporal passing; the becoming of in-be- tween time, the virtual dimension, is likewise a timelessness, but that of the event itself. In any resistant thinking of time the present always meets us two- fold, double in form, critical, and affirmative.47 This observation neither implies mediation or relativization nor indicates negligent thinking. It is rather that re- sistance to the timelessness of passing time, whose inexorable consumption produces an empty duration that regresses to a point, is not feasible if historical time is thought of as the intact totality of time. The force of another timelessness is required, a timelessness that originates from an unconnected discontinuity: the inner times, the processes of becoming, the events in art and politics. To somewhat speed up our train of thought here, we must keep in mind that every strong construction of time is ultimately an intersection and conversion of two timelessnesses. Historical positivism always tries to fight within passing time, within reality, against its peculiar timelessness. The historian can cure the baleful amnesia of the present only by sketching its prehistory, attempting to develop a memory that deepens, fathoms, and underpins the present. Historical thinking, however, is necessarily blind to that second timelessness that comes from elsewhere. This peculiar timelessness, which opens itself up to a living, becoming, subjective duration, is itself an origin of history that sets in motion its own construction of time—not as the origin of a supratemporal being but as an unthinkable division or split that marks the event of time itself. Time is not the measurement of a homogeneous course; it does not coincide with continu- ous-discontinuous history, but is a necessary initial construction that operates in the space between two timelessnesses and evades any history given in ad- vance. Time and history exist only as subsisting counter-stories, due to becom- ing, in the form of retroactive sequences or nodes that unfold their own logic. What, then, is the peculiar opportunity of so-called “in-between times,” and how should they be understood? The answer, in the context of the temporal-phil- osophical operation in question, must at this point be a short one, nevertheless having complex implications: in-between times allow us to develop a sense, first- ly, for a possible split of a (historical) present, and, secondly, for the principle split of the present as such. The task of thinking about time lies in a construction that 47 I have developed this argument in detail in Marcus Quent, Gegenwartskunst: Konstruktionen der Zeit (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2021). 266 marcus quent starts from a double splitting of the present, which itself can never be presup- posed as given. We can thus learn from Deleuze and Badiou, without repressing their incompatibilities, that thinking about time always consists in juxtaposing two timelessnesses. Time only becomes possible at their intersection. Resistance to a present regime in any case requires the meeting of both. References Badiou, Alain. The Century. Translated by Alberto Toscano. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. . Images of the Present Time, 2001–2004. Translated by Susan Spitzer. New York: Co- lumbia University Press, 2023. . Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2. Translated by Alberto Toscano. London: Con- tinuum, 2009. Benčin, Rok. “Rethinking Representation in Ontology and Aesthetics via Badiou and Rancière.” Theory, Culture and Society 36, no. 5 (September 2019): 95–112. https://doi. org/10.1177/0263276418806573. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. , and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Gra- ham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Diefenbach, Katja. “Über das Un/Sinnliche. Ereignis- und Zeitbegriffe in Deleuzes und Badious Ontologien unendlicher Mannigfaltigkeit.” In “Sensibilität der Gegenwart. Wahrnehmung, Ethik und politische Sensibilisierung im Kontext westlicher Gewalt- geschichte,” ed. B. Liebsch, 151–76. Special issue, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allge- meine Kunstwissenschaft 17 (2018). Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1992. Groys, Boris. “Comrades of Time.” In E-flux Journal: What is Contemporary Art?, edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle, 22–39. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010. Hardt, Michael. Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human, I: A Book for Free Spirits. Translated by Gary Handwerk. Vol. 3 of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. . Nachgelassene Fragmente, 1880–1882. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Mon- tinari. Vol. 9 of Kritische Studienausgabe. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988. 267 interval and event: the present as in-between time in g. deleuze and a. badiou . “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life.” In Unfashionable Observations, translated by Richard T. Gray, 83–167. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. . Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A Book for All and None. Edited by Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin. Translated by Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Völker, Jan. “Das demokratische Subjekt und die Korruption der Zeit.” In Absolute Gegen- wart, edited by Marcus Quent, 28–48. Berlin: Merve, 2016. Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Šumič Riha, Jelica. “Contemporary Thought and the Crisis of Negation.” Crisis and Cri- tique 1, no. 3 (July 2014): 59–83. 269 Alexandra Van Laeken* What’s Love Got to Do With It? Badiou’s Scene of Two Through the Lens of Lacan's Formulas of Sexuation1 Keywords love, politics, sexuation, Lacan, Badiou, emancipation Abstract Badiou’s philosophy deals with the question of radical change, most prominently in relation to love and emancipatory politics. Yet, he notes that love and politics are not interwoven and must be dealt with separately. In recent literature, Lacan’s theory of sexuation and love has been extensively drawn upon and put into relation with politics (notably by Žižek and Zupančič). It is striking that Badiou, being both a highly political thinker and strongly influenced by Lacan, only discusses sexuation in relation to love, but disconnects the concept from politics. In this paper, I probe Badiou’s concept of love in light of Lacan’s formulas of sexuation. I first examine Badiou’s concepts of love and politics in relation to sexuation, then set this against Lacan’s formulas, to eventually illustrate the political relevance of love.1 Kaj ima ljubezen s tem? Badioujeva scena Dvojega z vidi- ka Lacanovih formul seksuacije Ključne besede ljubezen, politika, seksuacija, Lacan, Badiou, emancipacija Povzetek Badioujeva filozofija se ukvarja z vprašanjem radikalne spremembe, predvsem v povezavi z ljubeznijo in emancipatorno politiko. Vseeno pa Badiou opozarja, 1 This research was made possible by Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO), particularly by the PhD fellowship for fundamental research under grant N°11P9C24N (2023–2027). * University of Ghent, Belgium alexandra.vanlaeken@hotmail.com | https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1690-0567 Filozofski vestnik issn 0353-4510 | Volume 45 | Number 1 | 2024 | 269–87 cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.45.1.11 270 alexandra van laeken da se ljubezen in politika ne prepletata in ju je treba obravnavati ločeno. V na- sprotju s tem so se novejši komentarji v veliki meri opirali na Lacanovo teorijo seksuacije in ljubezni in jo postavljali v razmerje s politiko (zlasti Žižek in Zupan- čič). Presenetljivo je, da Badiou, ki je izrazito politični mislec in je obenem pod močnim vplivom Lacana, razpravlja o spolnosti le v povezavi z ljubeznijo, sam koncept spolnosti pa ločuje od politike. V pričujočem prispevku proučujem Badi- oujev koncept ljubezni v luči Lacanovih formul seksuacije. Najprej preučim Badi- oujeva koncepta ljubezni in politike v razmerju do seksuacije, nato ju primerjam z Lacanovimi formulami, da bi na koncu ponazorila politični pomen ljubezni. ∞ Introduction When I say I love you, and I do, I don’t know what I am saying. And when you say you love me, and I believe you do, you don’t know either. What I do know is that we are affirming each other, that we firmly agree upon this very incom- prehensible statement that we love each other. And in doing so, I become even more convinced of it. I act upon it, and even more so, I was already acting upon it before I dared to say it to you. But the moment I said it, I could act upon it with more confidence. Yet due to the fact that I don’t really know what I am saying, my confidence also makes me feel somewhat insecure. What exactly am I acting upon so confidently? Well . . . I try to gasp your difference and make it my own. I imagine how to look through your gaze and see the world from your perspec- tive. I look through a window of how I think you would see the world. And in that window, I see you, standing there, looking through another window, and I wonder what you are looking at. In his celebrated essay, In praise of love Alain Badiou stated that love is a “truth of difference.” It creates a new world in which one no longer departs from the perspective of the “One,” but from the perspective of the “Two.”2 Less famous are his elaborations on love in Conditions, where he introduces a notion of sex- 2 Alain Badiou, Éloge de l’amour (Paris: Flammarion, 2009), 39. 271 what’s love got to do with it? badiou’s scene of two through the lens of lacan’s . . . ual difference.3 For Badiou, sexual difference only exists in the field of love. The two sexes do not pre-exist. Rather, love establishes sexuation from the moment two lovers encounter each other. Two disjunctive positions arise: the masculine and the feminine position, “as gay as it may be.”4 For Badiou states that the two positions are to be understood as “strictly nominalist: no empirical, biological or social distribution is acceptable here.”5 This conception of sexual difference resonates Jacques Lacan’s famous formu- las of sexuation. Lacan developed a formalisation of two logical positions, the “phallic” or “masculine” and the “Other” or “feminine” logic, to grasp speaking beings’ relation to the world. The masculine and the feminine logic illustrate the way in which we relate ourselves to the world, respectively, through language, and through the shortcomings of language. In Seminar XX, Lacan uses these logics to formalise love. Yet, contrary to Badiou, Lacan does not restrict sexua- tion to love. Lacan’s concept of sexuation is much broader in use and applica- tion than that of Badiou. In recent literature, many Lacanian philosophers draw from the formulas of sex- uation to (re-)think politics, notably Alenka Zupančič and Slavoj Žižek.6 Alenka Zupančič departs in her book What is Sex from the claim that “the sexual is po- litical [. . .] in the sense that a true emancipatory politics can be thought only on the ground of an ‘object-disoriented ontology’ [. . .]—that is, an ontology that pursues not simply being qua being, but the crack (the Real, the antagonism) that haunts being from within, informs it.”7 Politics, for Zupančič, is not about what is, but about what is not, “the crack,” which is “the sexual.” It is exactly this “crack” that is, following Zupančič, grasped by Lacan in his formulas. It is striking that Badiou, being a highly political philosopher, does not make this connection. 3 Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2008). 4 Badiou, 196. 5 Badiou, 183. 6 Alenka Zupančič, What is Sex? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017); Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). 7 Zupančič, What is Sex?, 24. 272 alexandra van laeken Following Badiou, sexuation is linked to love, and love should be strictly sep- arated from politics. But if love creates a new world, how could this not be po- litical? When I say I love you, and I do, I get to see the world differently. My gaze gets differentiated. It gets sexuated. It is on this level of sexuation, I claim, that pol- itics comes into play. In this paper, I question the relation between love and politics through the notion of sexuation. I do so by first examining what Badiou means by love and how this relates to his own concept of sexuation. Secondly, I bring in Lacan’s formulas of sexuation, consider their relation to love and think through their political implications. Thirdly, I confront the Lacanian formulas of sexuation to Badiou’s frame, to illustrate how Badiou’s concept of love is also politically meaningful. The One That I Want The philosophy of Alain Badiou is all about the “radical change” caused by the confrontation with “truth.” He formalises this confrontation as an “event,” i.e. an occurrence of love, politics, science, or art which drills a hole in the current state of affairs and makes possible something radically new. “An event is some- thing that takes place in the world, but which cannot be calculated from the el- ements of that very world itself. It happens.”8 The concept of the event should be understood from within Badiou’s ontology. According to Badiou, we can discern two notions of being. On the one hand, there is the ontological notion of being, which considers being in terms of a set of beings counted as one. Here, the following Leibnizian principle applies: “What is not a being, is not a being.”9 Everything that is, is counted as one. Yet, each one is thereby always a set referring to multiple members, which are in turn multiples themselves. “Every multiple is a multiple of a multiple.”10 By counting the multiple of everything we experience as one, we create a consisten- 8 Alain Badiou, Alain Badiou par Alain Badiou (Paris: PUF, 2021), n.p.; all translations of ref- erences in French are my own. 9 Alain Badiou, L’être et l’événement (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 31. 10 Badiou, 37. 273 what’s love got to do with it? badiou’s scene of two through the lens of lacan’s . . . cy in which we can think and move. So, there are sets such as “the Frenchman,” “the artwork,” “the migrant,” and “the witch,” and so forth. However, despite the appearances of “ones,” Badiou’s central premise is that one is not—“l’un n’est pas.”11 The apparent consistency of the one is always an effect of a procedure of counting something inconsistent, namely “inconsistent multiplicity.” This is where the second notion of being comes in, i.e. being qua being, which lies at the origin of counted being, and is in itself exactly this true inconsistent multiplicity. The true inconsistent being cannot be grasped by the one, yet we constantly attempt to by counting multiples and setting up a con- sistent ontology. Every consistent multiple is always a flawed attempt to grasp the inconsistent multiplicity. Consequently, one does not exist in itself. It only exists as an operation, the count-as-one. It should be noted that this metaphysical structure of being is clearly inspired by Lacanian theory, more precisely, the Lacanian notion of castration. That is the idea that all human beings as speaking beings are castrated, i.e. they fall short in language. Badiou’s pure inconsistent multiplicity is in terms of Lacan “non-castrated”: nothing more can be said about it. Yet, once it gets “counted as one”—and therefore recognised within ontology—it becomes castrated. And, just as castration, according to Lacan, is doomed by its shortcomings, so is on- tology always lacking according to Badiou. For Badiou, the counted being is always haunted by “a multiple-without-one” that cannot be addressed. “Its non-arrival makes it comparable to the flight of scenes from a dream.”12 It is the surplus of our structuring procedure of the count-as-one. Since it is not one, it is not—or rather, it is “no-thing.” Badiou refers to this nothing as the “void,” which functions as the proper name of the negativity of all multiples, i.e. the proper name of the unpresentable.13 It is ex- actly this void which forms the condition of possibility for the event. The occurrence of the event passes through different phases. First, there is a “sit- uation,” a multiple of everything there is. This is, for example, the situation of 11 Badiou, 31. 12 Badiou, 44. 13 Badiou, 105. 274 alexandra van laeken the Belgian state, which consists of everything that is counted as being part of the Belgian state. The situation is always stuck in place. “It is like it is,” they say. Here comes the need for radical change. How can the migrant free him- or herself from “being a migrant”? How is it possible that the witch is suddenly no longer a witch, but a falsely accused woman? A situation is always temporary since it is but an imperfect representation of what there is. Radical change within a situa- tion is possible when an event occurs. The event in turn is never independent of the situation. It is initiated by the creation of something exceptional—a love en- counter, an artwork, a scientific outcome, a political trigger—within a situation. Although the event is thus always intrinsic to a situation, it is always fundamen- tally extrinsic to it as well. The event arises from an exceptional creation with- in the situation, bringing forth an ineffable truth that is grounded outside the situation, i.e. in the void. But this ineffable truth, even once discovered within the situation, does not necessarily lead to radical change. An event can only be realised if there is a subject willing to hold on to the truth. It is a matter of “fi- delity” to embody the truth of an event and bring forth its effects in the situa- tion. The subject here should not be thought of as a given, nor as a constituting human being. A subject only arises in relation to a truth. The subject therefore necessarily takes up a revolutionary position within the situation. It could be, for example, a series of artworks moving away from the prevailing art norms, or a political party that breaks with the status quo. The “procedure of fidelity” that is followed by the subject, is, just as the count-as-one, a structuring proce- dure. It regroups the multiplicities that are counted-as-one. “One can think of a fidelity as a counter-state: it organises in fact in the situation another legitimacy of the inclusions.”14 Because of this procedure of recounting, some things are brought to life and others disappear, for example the unjustly burned woman and the witch. It Takes Two Love, for Badiou, is one of the four realms, next to art, science, and politics, in which an event can take place. Thus, love is posited as “a construction of truth,” that is, not only an encounter, but a new life or even a new world that is made, departing no longer from the perspective of the “One,” but from the perspective 14 Badiou, 263. 275 what’s love got to do with it? badiou’s scene of two through the lens of lacan’s . . . of the “Two.” The truth at stake here is a “truth of difference,” refuting the laws of identity. This new world is what Badiou calls “the scene of Two.”15 How is the scene of Two realised? It follows the structure of the event as set out above. First there occurs, hazardously and unexpectedly, an amorous encoun- ter between two differences. It founds the sexual difference. For this encounter to turn into an event, the subject, in this case the two lovers, should faithfully hold on to this truth by reinventing the world from the point of the Two. This “long-lasting laborious desire,” “le dur désir de durer,”16 is sealed by the dec- laration of love: “I love you.”17 Badiou describes this moment, referring to Mal- larmé, as the fixation of the hazard (See Mallarmé: “Le hasard doit être fixé”).18 This moment of fixation is an eternal task, one impossible to ever fullfil. “The hazard of the encounter is conquered day after day in the invention of a dura- tion, in the birth of a world.”19 As I mentioned before, Badiou holds it is only in respect to love that the sexual difference shows itself, as a radical disjunction between the two lovers. In the scene of Two, the two lovers have nothing in common and there is no “third po- sition” as a neutral perspective that could count the Two. Therefore, the amo- rous Two is at the same time uncountable, from the perspective of the one, and immanent, because it is only counted from itself. Love articulates itself around this paradox of the uncountable immanent Two. “Love does not relieve the par- adox; it treats it. More precisely, it makes the truth of the paradox itself.”20 The masculine and the feminine, as two positions of difference in the scene of Two, each develop a different relation towards the truth. The feminine position “sustains the articulation of the Two and the infinite,” and at the same time “in- scribes when and as needed the becoming-truth [of this articulation].”21 In other words, the feminine position is about the long-lasting challenge to make love true, and to prove the ontological existence and symbolic value of the Two. The 15 Badiou, Éloge de l’amour, 39. 16 Badiou, 42. 17 Badiou, 50. 18 Badiou, 49. 19 Badiou, 52. 20 Badiou, Conditions, 186. 21 Badiou, 192–93. 276 alexandra van laeken masculine position, on the other hand, “guards [. . .] the premier naming, which ensures that the naming of the event is not engulfed by the event itself” and “[takes] absence itself as a modality of continuation.”22 With this, Badiou means that the masculine position recognises much more the split of the Two, and the void in which it situates itself. Rather than affirming its ontological existence, the masculine poistion sees love as a metaphor for truth. The paradoxical (non-?) relationship between the masculine and feminine posi- tions becomes even more interesting in light of what Badiou calls “humanity.” While love is founded on a totally disjunctive, uncountable Two, i.e. the sexual difference, its immanent truth appeals, following Badiou, to one humanity. By humanity, Badiou refers to “that which provides support to the generic or truth procedures.”23 When becoming a subject relating to truth, man elevates himself above the bestial and identitarian and lays claim to one universal humanity. While this “humanity function” applies to all four realms of truth (science, pol- itics, art, and love), Badiou points out that the feminine position in love takes on a unique role: The existence of love makes it retroactively appear that, in the disjunction, the position woman is singularly conveying of the relation between love and human- ity. [. . .] Woman is that term x that, as the noumenal virtuality of the human and irrespective of its empirical sex, only activates the humanity function on the con- dition of [the experience of love]. Thus, woman is she (or he) for whom the par- ticular subtraction of love devalorises H(x) in its other types, namely, science, politics and art.24 In other words, woman states that love is the truth of all truths. “It knots the four [truths] together.”25 Interestingly, Youngjin Park notes that “this implies that an- yone who participates in a truth procedure, regardless of the type, is a lover in the Badiouian sense. Love and truth are coextensive,”26 at least from the femi- nine point of view. 22 Badiou, 192–93. 23 Badiou, 184. 24 Badiou, 195–96. 25 Badiou, 196. 26 Youngjin Park, On Love: Between Lacan and Badiou (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2018), 45. 277 what’s love got to do with it? badiou’s scene of two through the lens of lacan’s . . . In light of this, it is remarkable that Badiou also claims that “love, as a singular adventure of a truth of difference, must be rigorously separated from politics.”27 What love and emancipatory politics have in common is that both “always frac- ture a point of impossibility,”28 with regard to, on the one hand, “the power of the state and the gesture of normalisation,” and on the other hand, “the fam- ily as the basic unit of property and egoism.”29 Yet, for Badiou, love and poli- tics only share a structural similarity. But that is it. Their subject should not be confused. But what about the feminine position claiming that love is the truth of all truths, knotting all truths together? Has Badiou now created a feminine position only to reject it completely? And how can Badiou hold that the effect of love, namely seeing the world from the perspective of difference instead of identity, does not have any political significance? To better understand why Ba- diou makes a theory of sexuation, and to what exactly the “feminine position” is a response, we must turn to the original formulas of sexuation formalised by Jacques Lacan. One Way or Another —Tu as remarqué que dans le mot masculin il y a masque? Et il y a cul? —Et dans féminin? —II n’y a rien.30 For Jacques Lacan, speaking beings’ relation to the world is determined by a “masculine” or “phallic” and a “feminine” or “Other” logic. Although these names refer to the sexes, Lacan is not putting forward any essentialist or ste- reotypical theory of sex, i.e. male versus female in a biological or institutional sense. As Marie-Hélène Brousse emphasises: “It is not a question of distributing the men on one side and the women on the other as is done in religions, locker rooms or toilets, and more generally in any institutionalised social order.”31 We are not doomed to one or another logic, nor could we ever exclusively choose the one above the other. Both logics are applicable to all human beings. They 27 Badiou, Éloge de l’amour, 75. 28 Badiou, 72. 29 Badiou, 62. 30 Masculin Féminin, directed by Jean-Luc Godard (Anouchka Films-Argos Films, Sandrews- Svenskfilmindustri, 1966). 31 Marie-Hélène Brousse, Mode de jouir au féminin (Paris: Navarin, 2020), 67. 278 alexandra van laeken aim to illustrate the way in which we relate ourselves to the world, on the one hand through language, and on the other hand through the shortcomings of language. The first question that arises now is where the need to formalise this as sexual difference comes from. Badiou, just like Lacan, emphasises that his masculine and feminine positions should not be equalised with a human’s biological, or institutional gender. But why then do we talk about the sexes anyway? What is logically interesting about the sexual difference is that the two positions are not, following Lacan, like two equal sides of a coin. They are not “1+1.” The two positions can only be understood in relation to one another. Zupančič ex- presses this in the following formula: “What splits into two is the very nonex- istence of the one (that is, of the one which, if it existed, would be the Other).”32 The difference between the Two already departs from referring to both as “the One” and “the Other.” “If there are two sexes, and they attract each other, which is [O]ne and which is the [O]ther?”33 One (or the Other) could say it is equal who is the One and who is the Other. However, this ignores the fact that the second one will always be the “Other” of the first, “One” being the man, and “the Oth- er” being the woman. This unequal relationship can be traced back in various examples in culture and history. To illustrate this, Guy Le Gaufey brings in the biblical origin story. First, there is Genesis 1:27, where God creates human be- ings, men and women, in his own image. Next, there is in Genesis 2:18–24, the better-known story of God creating man, and subsequently man creating wom- en from one of his ribs. Here the image is created of “men” being created as one genus, and subsequently this genus being split into men and women.34 One can recognise the same hierarchy in language. There is man—in French Homme—as the general term for our species, and then there is man—homme—and woman— femme—as the two genders of the species. Here, man determines the principle of distinction. At first, he is all (tout). Next, he gives away something of himself, creates a part of all, but still thinks of him- 32 Zupančič, What is Sex?, 46. 33 Guy Le Gaufey, Le Pastout de Lacan: Consistance logique, conséquences cliniques (Paris: Epel, 2006), 11. 34 Le Gaufey, 17. 279 what’s love got to do with it? badiou’s scene of two through the lens of lacan’s . . . self as all, or as the One in relation to the Other. Women however, being the “Other,” have no other to relate to, since there is no other of the Other. There- fore, women follow another logic, of being not–all (pastout). Lacan takes this structural relation between man and woman, the One and the Other, as being exemplary of speaking beings’ relation to language. Being con- stantly in relation to one another, man represents our linguistic inclination to grasp all and define what is there. In this way, the masculine logic illustrates how we positively relate to the world through language. Yet, each attempt is dis- appointing. There is always something which escapes our grasp, for which our words do not satisfy. This is where the feminine logic comes into play. It repre- sents our negative relation to the world through language: language falls short. This is nicely illustrated in the citation with which I started this paragraph. At some point in Masculin Féminin, a movie by Jean-luc Godard, Robert notices that in the word masculine (masculin), there is the word “mask” (masc.) and “ass” (cul.). “And in femininity (féminin)?” Paul asks. “Nothing,” says Robert. Femininity as such, is nothing, and to be masculine is to put a mask over this nothingness, in order to be something. She’s Not There Departing from the difference between the One and the Other, Lacan develops the following schema: Masculine Feminine x Φx x Φx x Φx x Φx S/ Φ S(A/) a Woman Image 1: Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge: Encore, 1972–1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 78. 280 alexandra van laeken On the left side there is the masculine logic that is thought of as “One.” The for- mula x Φx states that all x fall under the function Φx, the phallic function. This means that all men are counted or nominated as “One.” In other words, there is the conviction that all can be brought together under one predicate. “All x are subject to the function of castration.”35 However, as I have already pointed out above, just like Pandora’s box, castration comes at a price, i.e. one has to deal with the ever-present shortcomings of language. Yet, the creation of all is only possible if there is something that does not fall under this predicate and thereby, as an exception, confirms the rule. For this, Lacan writes x Φx, meaning there is an x ( x) that does not fall under the function Φx. It is only because there is one that is not castrated that the universal of castration (the phallic function), as the predicate for all, is founded. On the right side, there are the feminine formulas, the “Other,” which can only be understood in relation to the masculine. Here, not the predicates but the quan- tifiers themselves are negated: “there is not one . . .” and “there is not all . . .” It is not about what there is but that there is. The first formula states x Φx, there is not one x that does not fall under the phallic function. There is no exception to the rule, and as a consequence there is no rule to be confirmed. In other words, there is no all since all is not grouped together by the same exception. Following this logic, there is no such thing as the woman. Therefore, the second formula states: x Φx, “not all x fall under the phallic function.”36 “Not-all,” pastout, does not function here as a simple negation of the masculine side (for all x . . .), because this would lead us again to a function of grouping to- gether. “For no x . . .” is in fact “for nothing,” which equally operates as a predi- cate that applies to all. Instead, Lacan puts forward “pastout” as a maximal par- ticular, something that only applies to some. Not all, not nothing, as “existence without essence.”37 It is “characterised by undecidability.”38 For this reason, I would opt not to use the term “feminine” in reference to pastout, but only use the other term Lacan proposes, namely the “Other” logic. This is because the notion 35 Zupančič, What is Sex?, 51. 36 Zupančič, 53. 37 Le Gaufey, Le Pastout de Lacan, 83. 38 Gertrudis Van de Vijver, “De durf van onbeslistheid,” in Dates with Gender and Diversity: Huldeboek voor Marysa Demoor, ed. Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle (Gent: Skribis, 2021), 282. 281 what’s love got to do with it? badiou’s scene of two through the lens of lacan’s . . . of femininity in contrast to masculinity gives all too much the impression that it is about a binary opposition: masculinity and femininity, each having their own essence. The Other logic, however, does not have any categorical trait that correctly classifies it in a set of all things falling under the predicate “feminin- ity.” As Le Gaufey formulates mysteriously: “If there were an Other, it must not be that one.”39 The phallic and Other logics each relate to the way we experience “jouissance.” Enjoyment or “jouissance” refers, within Lacanian theory, to an ever-present attraction that is neither desire nor enjoyment. It cannot ever be satisfied and comes forth out of our human capacity to talk and our incapacity to talk suffi- ciently. It is an effect of castration. Phallic jouissance relates to language and the prospect that there is a possibility to talk sufficiently. In other words, it fosters the dream that one moment we will no longer be castrated. In trying to capture something as “all,” under one predicate, we derive a short-term pleasure. Yet, “phallic” refers to the fallible/fallibility (faillible/faillibilité). It fails us, it always disappoints, because no predicate ever suffices. It is never able to grasp the Oth- er. Rather, the Other is reduced to and loved as an object of desire, what Lacan calls “object a.”40 Other jouissance is then, just like the Other logic, supplementary to phallic jou- issance. It functions as “a shadow of the phallic jouissance.”41 Its existence is undefined and its longing much more radical. It no longer relates itself to lan- guage and does not hold on to any prospect. It is a constant strife, never tempo- rarily satisfied, and therefore also infallible. Following the formula of “pastout” (not-all), Fink states that “not all of her [sic] jouissance is phallic jouissance,” and “there is not any that is not phallic jouissance.”42 Here, the emphasis is laid on the first “is.” While there exists only phallic jouissance, Other jouissance “ex- sists.” It is not there as One, but this does not mean that one cannot experience it. Rather, it is not countable. It escapes our grasp. Contrary to the phallic jouis- sance, Other jouissance “belongs to that part of the Other that is not covered by 39 Le Gaufey, Le Pastout de Lacan, 43; italics added. 40 Bruce Fink, “Knowledge and Jouissance,” in Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, ed. Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 37. 41 Le Gaufey, Le Pastout de Lacan, 45. 42 Fink, “Knowledge and Jouissance,” 39. 282 alexandra van laeken the fantasy of the ‘One’—that is, the fantasy sustained by the positioning of the phallic exception.”43 So, we experience Other jouissance as negativity, but it cannot be nominated, as otherwise it would fall prey to phallic fallibility. Other jouissance is ineffable, but “One’s experience of it simply ex-sists.”44 It exists without being counted as one. Nothing can be said about the Other, non-phallic enjoyment “because it is a placeholder for the knowledge which does not exist.”45 Other jouissance is that which has always fascinated us. It is like the Zombies sang: “Nobody told us about her, she is not there.”46 This does not mean that Other jouissance is not at all there. It is rather excessively there, or, in Lacan’s words, “She is not not at all there. She is there in full (à plein).”47 All That She Wants Now we can understand how Badiou’s theory of sexuation is a response to and a revision of Lacan’s formulas of sexuation. Badiou takes over the idea of sexu- ation as two totally disjunctive positions, the masculine and the feminine, that cannot be counted as 1+1. Yet different from Lacan, he absolutises this uncount- able Two as the universal truth of love. In doing so, he narrows down the con- cept of sexuation from two positions expressing humans’ relation to language and its shortcomings, to two positions expressing humans’ relation to love. In- stead of the function of castration—that all humans fall prey to the shortcom- ings of language—he posits the “humanity function,” i.e. that all human beings are capable of elevating themselves to one universal humanity, which is embod- ied in the truth of the Two. In this regard, Park notes that “the transition from the phallic function to the humanity function results in the transition of the feminine position from not-all 43 Suzanne Barnard, “Tongues of Angels: Feminine Structure and Other Jouissance,” in Barnard and Fink, Reading Seminar XX, 172. 44 Fink, “Knowledge and Jouissance,” 40. 45 Zupančič, What is Sex?, 54. 46 The Zombies, “She’s Not There,” by Rod Argent, released July 24, 1964, as the first single from the album The Zombies, Parrot PA 61001. 47 Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 74. 283 what’s love got to do with it? badiou’s scene of two through the lens of lacan’s . . . to universality.”48 This transition is due to Badiou’s critiques of Lacan’s formu- las. Next to his overall critique of Lacan’s use of logic—which, according to Ba- diou, is inconsistent and overly intuitionistic49—he rejects Lacan’s conception of the feminine position and feminine jouissance because of its lack of univer- salisation. Lacan’s introduction of the logic of “pastout” makes any overarching idea of universalisation impossible. Badiou critises Lacan for upholding such a “segregative thesis of sexual difference”50 in which the infinity of the pastout can only be grasped from the masculine point of view, and the two positions cannot be united as one universal humanity. As Burchill points out: Indeed for Badiou, as we know, Lacan’s very claims for such a jouissance reveal his formulae of sexuation to be flawed from the start: they underline that the phallic function—which does effectively hold universally, or “wholly” in respect of the masculine position alone, according to Lacan—is always already situated within the disjunction of the sexes and is, as such, unsuitable as a support for the universal.51 Badiou instead proposes that the feminine position be the universalising posi- tion par excellence. For Badiou, she is the one hammering on the ontological ex- istence of the Two. By upholding love as the guarantee of a universality, woman “treats”52 the paradox of the two, and shows what both sexes relate to. For Badi- ou, there is a sexual relationship after all, realised in the event of love. It is remarkable then that in response to Lacan, Badiou shifts the focus from sex- uality to love. He does not elaborate on the concept of jouissance. As Zupančič points out: “It is indeed striking how Badiou, who is otherwise a most incisive reader of Freud and Lacan, mostly uses the notion of enjoyment in an entirely non- or pre-analytic sense—as an individual hedonistic idiosyncrasy, devoid of any possible bearing at the level of truth. That is to say: he takes it to be some- 48 Park, On Love, 45. 49 For a logical discussion of this critique, I refer to Russell Grigg, “Lacan and Badiou: Logic of the Pas-Tout,” Filozofski Vestnik 26, no. 2 (2005): 53–65. 50 Alain Badiou, “The Scene of Two,” trans. Barbara Fulks, Lacanian Ink 21 (Spring 2003): 47. 51 Louise Burchill, “Of a Universal No Longer Indifferent to Difference: Badiou (and Irigaray) on Woman, Truths, and Philosophy,” Philosophy Today 62, no. 4 (Fall 2018): 1179, https:// doi.org/10.5840/philtoday201937250. 52 Badiou, Conditions, 186. 284 alexandra van laeken thing titillating, but at the same time completely irrelevant.”53 But while dis- missing the concept of jouissance as irrelevant, could one not understand Ba- diou’s reaction to Lacan as being a clearcut example of only phallic jouissance? By wanting to “treat” all paradoxes, group them together under one truth, and delimit them to the realm of love, he fosters the dream that “all” can be grasped under one predicate, namely “one universal humanity.” The feminine position becomes for Badiou the one that recognises the ontological existence of “all.” Woman becomes just another name of the phallus. The Power of Love I argue that Badiou is wrong in dismissing “pastout” and “jouissance.” Rath- er, these Lacanian concepts of sexuation and its contemporary reception are of great value for Badiou’s concept of love. Not only do they deliver a fruitful inter- pretation of his theory, they also pave the way for a more political take on love, revealing its emancipatory potential. First, Van de Vijver reformulates the logic of pastout as being about “the im- possibility of universalising. It is about dropping nobody, that is, nobody is left behind, regardless of what someone’s predicates are. It is the universal iden- tification with the unconditional.”54 Isn’t this exactly what Badiou’s truth of love is about when he defines it as “a truth of difference,” “refuting the laws of identity”?55 Badiou opposes the pastout because it does not universalise and thereby seems to contradict his so-called “humanity function,” which appeals to one universal humanity. What Badiou is missing here, however, is that a pastout-interpretation would make the humanity function much more radical. It is no longer about inclusion: Who falls under the humanity function, i.e. who is able to belong to that one universal humanity? Rather, it is about “dropping nobody”:56 nobody does not fall under the humanity function. Second, recalling what I have explained above, phallic jouissance follows the phallic logic, relating to language and the prospect that there is a possibility to 53 Zupančič, What is Sex?, 133. 54 Gertrudis Van de Vijver,“Het gaat er niet om gelijk te hebben, het gaat erom niemand te laten vallen,” VSTN, no. 2 (Summer 2023): 42. 55 Badiou, Éloge de l’amour, 39. 56 Van de Vijver, “Het gaat er niet om gelijk te hebben,” 42. 285 what’s love got to do with it? badiou’s scene of two through the lens of lacan’s . . . grasp “all.” In the words “I love you,” we think that we have captured it “all,” and we derive a short-term pleasure. However, it soon becomes clear that this is not it. It does not cut the mustard. So, Badiou points to the importance of “fideli- ty” as a “long-lasting laborious desire” (dur désir de durer).57 Is this laborious de- sire not exactly what Other jouissance is about? As not all seems to be grasped in the words “I love you,” it follows the logic of pastout (not-all). We negatively ex- perience this Other jouissance as an ever-present challenge, a “long-lasting labo- rious desire” that is impossible to ever fully complete. Thinking of fidelity as Oth- er jouissance grasps our struggle to love “beyond the veil of phallic presence.”58 With this interpretation of love, through the lens of pastout and jouissance, it seems strange to rigidly separate love and politics. For Badiou, “emancipatory politics presupposes an unconditioned prescription. [It] does not set out from an examination of the world that aims to demonstrate its possibility. [. . .] A politics of emancipation draws itself from the void that an event brings forth (fait advenir) as the latent inconsistency of the given world.”59 It is this very in- consistency that contemporary Lacanian philosophers, notably Zupančič and Žižek, recognise in sexuality. For Zupančič, “what relates sexuality to politics is that they are not simple ontological categories but essentially imply, depend on, and deploy something which is not of the order of being, and which Lacan refers to as the Real.”60 Žižek, in the same vein, states that “politics is structured around a ‘missing link,’ it presupposes a kind of ontological openness, gap, an- tagonism, and this same gap or ontological openness is at work also in sexual- ity: in both cases, a relationship is never guaranteed by an encompassing uni- versal Signifier.”61 Both politics and sexuality deal with the same difficulty, namely a “crack” or an “ontological openness.” One can try to ignore this gap by excluding it, accord- ing to a phallic logic. Love, however, forces us to be confronted with the gap. One loves the other unconditionally, without knowing or being able to name exactly what it is that one loves. In other words, love refutes the laws of iden- tity and makes counting impossible. Instead, there is a logic of difference, that 57 Badiou, Éloge de l’amour, 42. 58 Barnard, “Tongues of Angels,” 178. 59 Badiou, Conditions, 152. 60 Zupančič, What is Sex?, 22. 61 Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute, 129. 286 alexandra van laeken is, a logic of pastout, at play. The lovers are haunted by a long-lasting desire, or Other jouissance, to try to grasp the other, without ever succeeding. In boldly confronting this negativity, love forces us to do politics. It makes us rearticulate the borders of what is possible and compels us to reinvent the world. That is the power of love. References Badiou, Alain. Alain Badiou par Alain Badiou. Paris: PUF, 2021. . Conditions. Translated by Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2008. . Éloge de l’amour. Paris: Flammarion, 2009. . L’être et l’événement. Paris: Seuil, 1988. . “The Scene of Two.” Translated by Barbara Fulks. Lacanian Ink 21 (Spring 2003): 42–55. Barnard, Suzanne. “Tongues of Angels: Feminine Structure and Other Jouissance.” In Re- ading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, edited by Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink, 171–86. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Brousse, Marie-Hélène. Mode de jouir au féminin. Paris: Navarin, 2020. Burchill, Louise. “Of a Universal No Longer Indifferent to Difference: Badiou (and Iri- garay) on Woman, Truths, and Philosophy.” Philosophy Today 62, no. 4 (Fall 2018): 1165–87. https://doi.org/10.5840/philtoday201937250. Fink, Bruce. “Knowledge and Jouissance.” In Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, edited by Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink, 21–46. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Godard, Jean-Luc, director. Masculin Féminin. Anouchka Films-Argos Films, Sandrews- -Svenskfilmindustri, 1966. Grigg, Russell. “Lacan and Badiou: Logic of the Pas-Tout.” Filozofski Vestnik 26, no. 2 (2005): 53–65. Lacan, Jacques. On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge: Encore, 1972– 1973. Translated by Bruce Fink. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-Ala- in Miller, book 20. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. Le Gaufey, Guy. Le Pastout de Lacan: Consistance logique, conséquences cliniques. Paris: Epel, 2006. Park, Youngjin. On Love: Between Lacan and Badiou. PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2018. Van de Vijver, Gertrudis. “De durf van onbeslistheid.” In Dates with Gender and Diversi- ty: Huldeboek voor Marysa Demoor, edited by Marianne Van Remoortel, Leah Budke, and Eloise Forestier, 281–3. Gent: Skribis, 2021. 287 what’s love got to do with it? badiou’s scene of two through the lens of lacan’s . . . . “Het gaat er niet om gelijk te hebben, het gaat erom niemand te laten vallen.” VSTN, no. 2 (Summer 2023): 40–42. Zombies, The. “She’s Not There.” By Rod Argent. Released July 24, 1964, as the first single from the album The Zombies. Parrot PA 61001. Žižek, Slavoj. Sex and the Failed Absolute. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Zupančič, Alenka. What is Sex? Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017. 289 Keywords apology, forgiveness, Freud, Jankélévitch, ineffability, negation, refusal Abstract Vladimir Jankélévitch allows us to rethink the relation between negation and refusal as a rift where one is confronted by the repetition of givenness and where refusal upends negation by turning the object being refused into an ineffable question. Here we turn to Freud as a reader of Jankélévitch’s refusal of German culture in order to consider his procedure of radical exclusion as a matter of idealistic temperament marking a transi- tion from knowledge as “knowing how things are” to a different proposition which cul- tivates knowing “how things should be.” Grobi rezi: zavračanje, negacija in neizrekljivost Ključne besede opravičilo, odpuščanje, Freud, Jankélévitch, neizrekljivost, negacija, zavrnitev Povzetek Vladimir Jankélévitch nam omogoči, da ponovno premislimo razmerje med negacijo in zavrnitvijo kot razpoko, v kateri se soočimo s ponavljanjem danosti in v kateri zavr- nitev prevrne negacijo, saj zavračani predmet spremeni v neizrekljivo vprašanje. Tu se obračamo k Freudu kot bralcu Jankélévitchove zavrnitve nemške kulture, da bi njegov postopek radikalne izključitve obravnavali kot stvar idealističnega temperamenta, ki označuje prehod od vednosti kot »vednosti, kako stvari so«, k drugačni propoziciji, ki goji vednost, »kako bi stvari morale biti«. Filozofski vestnik issn 0353-4510 | Volume 45 | Number 1 | 2024 | 289–311 cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.45.1.12 * University of Canterbury, New Zealand cindy.zeiher@canterbury.ac.nz | https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0575-4760 Cindy Zeiher* Rough Cuts: Refusal, Negation and Ineffability 290 cindy zeiher ∞ To pardon! But who ever asked us for a pardon? It is only the distress and the dereliction of the guilty that would make a pardon sensible and right. —Vladimir Jankélévitch, Should We Pardon Them? Vladimir Jankélévitch’s idealism calls for a rational, ethical yet passionate tem- perament in the pursuit of the ineffable as a form of knowledge rather than lofty indulgence. The more one reads Jankélévitch, the more one realises that there are some fantasies worth fighting for, even those irreconcilable contradictions which haunt us. What Jankélévitch offers is a method in which one can be dis- cerning regarding which fantasies are worthwhile. This is what distinguishes his independent intellectual trajectory, something he achieves through vari- ations in his thought which gradually shift him away from his mentor, Henri Bergson. Jankélévitch is usually read along humanist and deconstructionist lines; how- ever, one cannot avoid his ongoing intellectual trauma in facing what it means to be a Jewish thinker. Therefore, in pondering Jankélévitch’s position on re- fusal we should not, however questionably, separate the thinker from their thought, not least because such separation merely serves to fantasise the task of thinking as beyond both divided subjectivity and moreover, the thinker as master of this fantasy of wholeness. Furthermore, the thinker needs to be ac- countable for their thoughts. In addition to being a philosopher, Jankélévitch was also a dedicated composer and musicologist who positioned himself in the gap of the non-relation between the two fields which, although not cut from the same cloth, have something to offer one another. Here, the Jankélévitchian spirit deftly holds the reins to one’s competing passions—a lesson for thinkers and creatives alike. While it has been posited that Jankélévitch’s refusal of all things German is what marks his later work, I suggest that rather what here marks his eventual refusal of the given as a logical precept is his “intuitive knowing,” which para- doxically embraces both stoicism and vulnerability. We might even say that he 291 rough cuts: refusal, negation and ineffability treats the given as to some extent a fantasy which attempts to obfuscate the in- effable as intrinsic to knowledge, or at least to an “intuitive know-how.” The trajectory of Jankélévitch’s idealism moves from knowing how things are to knowing how things should be and is therefore in part necessarily negation. His hyper-ethical position is that of the intellectual—one practices what one preaches as much as one can, all the while knowing that one may be acting in the name of its opposite. Here, such fidelity to act complicates Jankélévitch’s maxim when it comes to his “radical exclusion” of German culture1 because this would seem to refuse what has always been a given in German intellectual culture, namely thinking itself. Before getting into why and how Jankélévitch embraced refusal it is helpful first to conceptualise negation and refusal and how these are distinctive for him. He did not make such clear distinctions himself; the conceptualisation of these terms is therefore up to us, for which we have no option but to employ those very dialectical thinkers his positions actively refuse without losing sight of his will towards refusal. Thus the task of marking the trajectory of Jankélévitch’s thought is an atemporal process which is always intentionally out of time and slightly out of tune with the present. Nevertheless, this recursive manoeuvre re- mains true to his stoic refusal of German culture post Holocaust.2 Furthermore, it leaves a space for the intellectual courage required in order to contemplate the ineffable. In understanding Jankélévitch’s paradoxical refusal it is important to appreci- ate his background. He was born of Russian Jewish immigrants and went on to be a member of the French Resistance during World War II. Following the dis- covery of the Nazi extermination camps, Jankélévitch systematically removed from his work any reference to German art, thinking, and music, maintaining that the Nazis, together with all Germans, are never to be forgiven for the Holo- caust. He maintained this protest against Germany and its culture consistently 1 Vladimir Jankélévitch, “Should We Pardon Them?,” trans. Ann Hobart, Critical Inquiry 22, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 552–72, https://doi.org/10.1086/448807. 2 I thank Rebecca Rose for here reminding me of Penelope, the Greek mythological figure whose courageous, repeated refusal of potential lovers in her husband’s absence and like- ly death during the Trojan War can be considered an ethical push-back against both social expectation and libidinal desire. 292 cindy zeiher for the remainder of his life and has been much criticised for this radical and partisan position. Yet in 1948 he started publishing influential texts on the pos- sibility of forgiveness as he felt duty-bound to scrutinise his refusal. In this he was meticulous. Although forgiveness held either no or perhaps too much meaning for him at the time, it was not ruled out as a possibility for the future: forgiveness might arise, but he surely was not counting on it because he could not imagine a scenario in which this could be possible. Then, twenty-three years after his initial texts on forgiveness, he stated that forgiveness was actu- ally impossible and moreover should be actively refused. He even called such an act of forgiveness immoral because firstly it is impossible (along with immor- al) and secondly, it does not take into consideration the will of the guilty. At this point we can refocus on the distinction between Jankélévitch’s positions on ne- gation and refusal as specific speech acts. We generally think of negation as emanating from the contradiction or deni- al of something in order to make more apparent its absence. Freud puts it well when he says of negation that, “the content of a repressed image or idea can make its way into consciousness on condition that it is negated.”3 For Lacan trauma is characterised as traumatic via three distinctive features: the event itself, its affective baggage and its lack of complete “speakability.” This entails that trauma is understood as both a psychic reality and inscription in which or- dinary identifications are not wholly stabilised. Negation reveals repression in partially lifting it. But the act of negation does not follow that any consciousness of what has been repressed entails an accept- ance of it. Here, negation offers a strange certainty that there is nothing being asked in the revealing of repression, merely something, that which is left over, being repeated.4 Thus negation can never be a “no” proper. Refusal, on the oth- 3 To differentiate, in German verneinen means “to negate” and verleugnen means “to deny.” It is worth reading on this point in Freud’s “The Infantile Genital Organization: An Interpolation into the Theory of Sexuality (1923),” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953– 74), 19:143. 4 While Freud provided the logic of the traumatic encounter in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (trans. James Strachey [New York: W. W. Norton, 1990]), Lacan furthered the effect of trau- ma as a specific compulsion one is driven to repeat. See Jacques Lacan, On a Discourse that Might not be a Semblance, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002). 293 rough cuts: refusal, negation and ineffability er hand, preserves the matter at issue in order to present doubt through excess of meaning and jouissance. It preserves the neurotic fantasy whilst at the same time enjoying the transgression when confronted with the law of the Other. Here we might say that Jankélévitch’s refusal of German history and culture serves to make the necessity of them more apparent in, and relevant to his later work. He does not disagree that the function of refusal is to provoke and wrestle with the ambiguities of dealing with the trauma of the Real. For him war and killing invade the field of the Symbolic Order by providing ways in which ob- jects are captured and integrated, mediated and justified into the formation of meaning. However, for Jankélévitch this is highly problematic because the jus- tification for killing is often propped up by opaque and undifferentiated mean- ings that appeal signifiers such as divine violence or holy war. To this extent Jankélévitch is refusing a particular chain of signification; he is maintaining that one should not even linguistically create an opportunity to derive meaning from what is beyond meaning. We could even say that for Jankélévitch attribut- ing meaning to war is delusional. Afterall, although killing as an act of co-op- tion forms part of Jankélévitch’s critique, it also speaks to the dimension of the significant other as one which is also beyond comprehension. If the social bond means that one is capable of meeting the demands of everyday life, then co-op- tive killing is an act way beyond this. When Jankélévitch says in his meditation on bad conscience that “moral con- sciousness does not exist,” he is rather pointing towards the crisis of moral con- sciousness which occurs in the wake of contemplating its non-existence, even that there is joy in lamenting its loss. This is a typical Jankélévitchian manoeu- vre whose end result is what Lacanians term jouissance. Jankélévitch asserts that for the Holocaust there can be no such thing as a sincere apology; any apol- ogy, when uttered, is meaningless, because once it is uttered it has already oc- curred or perhaps did not occur. For Jankélévitch one should already feel sorry before an apology can be signalled or articulated into the Symbolic of the social bond. Therefore, the apology, being now redundant should be either refused or treated with indifference. There is an amusing anecdote where a student at the Sorbonne arrives late for one of Jankélévitch’s classes. Upon arrival the student apologises profusely to which Jankélévitch somewhat light-heartedly dismiss- es the apology, saying that the student chose to be late. For Jankélévitch since the lecture was already in progress regardless of the student’s lateness, the stu- 294 cindy zeiher dent’s apology is irrelevant and not therefore subject to judgement (although Jankélévitch did facetiously say he forgave him!). For Jankélévitch, apology is not contingent on forgiveness. From a Freudian perspective, to negate is to ex- ercise an intellectual judgement through having inserted what is negated into the judgement—this is precisely Jankélévitch’s melancholic ethic. For Freud the function of judgement is concerned with two sorts of decisions; it affirms or disaffirms the possession of an attribute and it either asserts or disputes that the presentation of this attribute implies its existence.5 The attribute to be de- cided about may originally have been good or bad, useful or harmful. Yet, for Jankélévitch, there is always an intuition associated with judgement, an irra- tional quality underpinning rational judgement. Trying every which way, in the end one can only accept the destitution from the object rather than refuse it completely. Hence the Nazis cannot be negated whereas the Germans can be refused. Here, we can identify the subjectivity which inserts a gap in the rules and authority of the Symbolic. It is important to note that Jankélévitch points out what is for him the onto- logical impossibility of negation since it breaks with coincidentia oppositorum, the unity of opposites which situate tension and release in a boundless field of force. As a literal example, Hippolytus states that “the road up and the road down are the same thing,”6 meaning that regardless of the direction one travels the road itself remains that same. Similarly, if we say that fire is hot and water is cold, we are nevertheless acknowledging that in so far as both belong to the field of the four elements both must also contain sameness as well as difference as a basis for change and transformation: for example, ice can melt in the sun. Or as Heraclitus says, “cold things become warm, and what is warm cools; what is wet dries, and the parched is moistened.”7 Here we have the contradiction of opposites used to reveal the oneness or unity of things previously believed to be different. This oneness and its circularity provide the unity principal to the very existence of any opposite: “And it is the same thing in us that is quick and dead, awake and asleep, young and old; the former are shifted and become the 5 See discussion in Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes (1915),” in Standard Edition, 14:136. Freud took up the question of judgement in the first chapter of “Civilization and its Discontents,” in Standard Edition, 21: 57–146. 6 Heraclitus, frag. 60 Diels-Kranz; quoted in Hippolytus of Rome, Refutation of All Heresies, 9.10.4. 7 Heraclitus, frag. 126 Diels-Kranz. 295 rough cuts: refusal, negation and ineffability latter, and the latter in turn are shifted and become the former.”8 One’s identi- ty (whether singular or communal) is a contra-posing principal necessitating the Other which is however, simultaneously negated: in other words we are subjects only in so far as we subsume the phantasmatic status of the Other as intrinsic to our subjectivity. The criteria for what is opposite is therefore an a priori encounter with its oppositional force. What sets Jankélévitch apart in his position on fields of force is that for him there is a distinction between the expression/elucidation of an idea and its abil- ity to be possible both as a liveable idea and one which speaks to his conception of ineffability: that thinking must include affect because it directly implicates the ineffable. Any idea—for example, forgiveness—must necessarily remain a possible idea of fantasy which is not always fully realised. For Jankélévitch, it isn’t so much that something is now believed to be different from what it once was, but rather that it must be different now because of the intervening to-ing and fro-ing of repetition. With every cycle of repetition, some gesture of differ- ence becomes more apparent in hinting at its own (im)possibility. Thus, if one takes up a personal idealistic position then one must at the same time contend with the opposite which is not living up to this. Here, one cannot simply be act- ing out a libidinal fantasy, because to be in the world one must also be contend- ing with its contradictions and impossibilities. In this way we can think of Jankélévitch’s ontology of refusal as distinct from that of negation. Refusal is an act of idealism where judgement is put on the line, where something unutterable must be at stake in the name of postulating that it is ineffable. Refusal is not indifference, nor a position of repetition (in) difference, as Deleuze might have us think.9 Rather, refusal is a moment in time when one participates in the knowledge one has beyond the mere repetition of it. If we return to the thinker/thought dichotomy, Jankélévitch is similar to 8 Heraclitus, frag. 88 Diels-Kranz. 9 I refer here to Deleuze’s thinking on representation, specifically in Difference and Repe- tition, in which he conceptualises difference as in itself and repetition as for itself, wherein both cannot be not tied to any given identity. He elaborates that the ontological status of repetition is best understood as “difference without a concept” and thus repetition is re- liant upon difference. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 13. 296 cindy zeiher Paul Ricoeur10 and Jacques Derrida11 who also maintain that the subject cannot be separated from their thinking. By contrast, negation is the absorption of the uttered “no” in a wish fulfilment of complete knowledge. Here, Jankélévitch is often read alongside Emmanuel Levinas who suggests that for the other to be the Other means it cannot be subject to some form of relation because it is abso- lutely Other, a radical alterity. However, Jankélévitch stops short of this position, because in his ontology one is subsumed via negation into the radical alterity of the Other as an ineffable circumstance within the traumatic event which cannot be spoken about. We might say that the too-much-ness of the event deliberately flouts the rules of taking up refusal, which is precisely what Jankélévitch avows as his hyper-ethical position. It is important to include in Jankélévitch’s impossible Other not only the Nazis but also the collective bodies of dead Jews, in order to present a unified object of overwhelming anxiety. This ineffable image is an encounter, on the borderline of the Symbolic and the Real, with resignation to one’s ultimate fate. We will die but death itself falls within a strangely ambiguous context of both tolerable and intolerable negation. Although he never said as much Jankélévitch had no time for fantasised collective mourning which he likely thought of as mere ro- mantic resignation. But we can say that for him the uncanniness of death keeps alive the relation of the subject with the fantasy of the body. Perhaps part of Jankélévitch’s ethical re-authorship is to privilege the voiceless dead alongside the body which he shares with them. Jankélévitch’s ethical subject is a profound reduction who, in living out an im- possible relation to the Other in the face of the Other, is nevertheless guaran- 10 Specifically, Ricoeur’s passionate plea for what is can possible in/as thought as an act of mutual recognition. In his Memory, History, Forgetting, he commences his text citing Jankélévitch as one who understands how memory of present is also something absent and lingering in the past: “He who has been, from then on cannot not have been: hence- forth this mysterious and profoundly obscure fact of having been is his viaticum for all eternity.” Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), epigraph. 11 Inverting Deleuze, Derrida privileges identity over différance as a metaphysics of presence in that differences are always located as in between identities. Différance refers to a spati- ality, a space which is deferred and thus differentiated and from which “immediacy is de- rived.” Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 157. 297 rough cuts: refusal, negation and ineffability teed maintenance of subjective refusal. However, that the Other is absolutely Other means that the impossibility of the relation to it is also absolute, which is at the same time both reassuring and problematic. Since the impossible can- not be thought outside present possibilities, it cannot be an ontological ques- tion beyond the linguistic turn. That nothing can supplement the existence of the impossible is because it cannot be conceived of. The most difficult chal- lenge for thinking is the absence of a signifier on which to hinge a fantasy. Thus, Jankélévitch employs a signifier in order to refuse: the Nazis are never to be for- given. We should refuse to forgive them regardless of whether or not forgive- ness is requested. This is the kernel of Jankélévitch’s refusal; it must transcend time and risk oblivion to emerge as an eventual given. On the other hand, for Jankélévitch negation takes place as a response to or promise of the inevitability of a given. The key thing here is this notion that there exists that which cannot be thought. For Jankélévitch this is the horror of the Holocaust which, being just too traumatic, exists in the realm of the ineffable where it should remain. Here we can say that through Jankélévitch’s intuitive knowing, he is making a specif- ic judgement. In contrast to this position, for Alain Badiou, there is no ineffable preventing us from arriving at knowing what we do not. Rather, it is those concrete conditions which plug up the space of the ineffable. According to Badiou, the real predi- cate of an ethics of the Other is not the ineffable but interventionist truth which occurs in the domain of thought. Yet might not Badiou’s ethic of truths repre- sent a principal of operation not so far removed from ineffability? Like truth, the ineffable can present merely as fragmented abstract thought. For the ethical subject who cannot subsume the ineffable, the logical conclusion is indiffer- ence, refusal or negation of the so-called given, positions for which everyone has the capacity. We do it all the time, often without thinking, a social proce- dure which Jacques Rancière calls “the part of no part.”12 There is always a lit- tle enigmatic bit left in the regime of ethics which representation cannot touch; this illegible leftover comprises the ineffable and is what hystericizes. It is what 12 For Rancière the dividing line between what is visible and invisible is where politics can be disrupted and recuperated by those who are excluded by the commons. Moreover, it is a space in which subjects can “exceed” symbolic authority in order to reinvent poli- tics anew. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2010). 298 cindy zeiher Badiou calls the void of a situation13 or what we might call the bit in every in- clusion that does not belong. Every situation contains a void-part which cannot be represented, yet is what everyone shares equally, a generic capacity to not be known. We might even say this is what gives rise to the determination to partic- ipate in refusal and negation. While Badiou’s refusal of the ineffable—that is, nothing itself is thinkable and nothing is unthinkable14—is a particular prov- ocation for thinking the subject (and arguably one which is not entirely in line with psychoanalysis’s position on the traumatic subject), he does resist the fully interpellated Althusserian subject by insisting that one can refuse to be such a subject. On this Badiou and Jankélévitch agree but for different intellectual and arguably, political reasons: both agree that the subject’s ethical potential lies in the transformation of courage into justice.15 Although for both thinkers some- thing remains which one needs to acknowledge, perhaps their difference lies in whether or not one decides to take up the reminder—the part of no part—as a specific charge of fidelity to truth. For Badiou, this is consistency to remain in a void constructed around his four conditions (art, love, politics, philosophy), while for Jankélévitch it is to stay loyal to truth conditions that can be spoken despite their apparent inconsistency. 13 I refer to Badiou’s text Ethics included without necessarily belonging. That is, the ontology of a situation is understood as through the presentation of multiplicity, one is counted “at the heart of every situation, at the foundation of its being, there is a ‘situated’ void, around which is organised the plenitude [. . .] of the situation in question.” Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 1993), 68. 14 Badiou insists that which cannot be thought must be represented as thought, even tor- mented thought should not be rejected. Adam Bartlett puts Badiou’s positions succinctly: “Everything in contemporary ethics, Badiou argues, is built on this rejection of thought: simply that situations are thinkable, that real change is thinkable, that some truth of the collective exists and on this embrace of representation or even the pathos of representa- tion: especially insofar as by the power of representation—myths, fiction, symbolism— the Other becomes the suffering other, the victim other of those with the limit power and the means of representation or knowledge.” A. J. Bartlett, “Ethics, Riots and the Real: Badiou’s Politics,” Forcings: Philosophical Writings, April 6, 2024, https://ajbartlett.sub- stack.com/p/ethics-riots-and-the-real. 15 Badiou is clear about this when he says, “decide consequently from the point of the un- decidable” as a theory of affect contrasting the difference between fidelity and confi- dence. Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels, (London: Continuum, 2009), 287. 299 rough cuts: refusal, negation and ineffability Jankélévitch’s particular uptake of refusal is both as a condition of the ineffable (that which cannot be said) and as a condition in which the ineffable is neces- sarily included (that is, one refuses in part for reasons that cannot be spoken about). The ineffable is not the void which says nothing but simply something belonging to the category of void. For Jankélévitch negation enables the sub- ject’s indifference whereas refusal is indifferent to the process of negation. Even if taken for granted, negation does not disallow refusal to be claimed as a pos- sible truth. The effects of the distinction between negation and refusal become clear in Jankélévitch’s ineffability: negation allows us to know how things are and refusal allows a way into knowing how things should be. This distinction provides the basis for his hyper-ethical subjectivity. Let us consider how this applies to Jankélévitch’s position that forgiveness of the Nazis is not possible and should never occur. For Jankélévitch, the problem of forgiveness arose in response to the Second World War, as he dealt with the on- tology of evil and ethics in books like Le Mal and Traité des Vertus.16 His text For- giveness was published in 1967, although he is far better known for dismissing forgiveness in essays like Should we Pardon Them? and the book, L’Imprescrip- tible.17 The event of the Holocaust says Jankélévitch must be stuck to us all the time and moreover we need to be stuck to the traumatic ineffability of it. With this in mind Jankélévitch distinguishes between forgiveness and pardon: what can be pardoned cannot in the case of the Holocaust be the object of forgiveness because this would require rejection of the ineffable. Jankélévitch’s pondering the (im)possibility of forgiveness under the condition of ineffability marks his contradictory relationship to the linguistic turn. On the one hand, because one cannot say everything which captures evil, one should not struggle to say it in the name of forgiveness which can be granted only after an impossibly sincere scrutiny, in other words, never. On the other hand, even if forgiveness could be expressed with adequate eloquence and sincerity, it should be refused on the grounds that this would be entering into the territory of the given. 16 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le Mal (Paris: Arthaud, 1947); Vladimir Jankélévitch, Traité des Vertus (Paris: Bordas, 1949). 17 Jankélévitch, “Should We Pardon Them?”; Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’Imprescriptible: Pardon - ner? Dans l’honneur et la dignité (Paris: Seuil, 1996). 300 cindy zeiher Part of the difficulty here is that Jankélévitch is not so much wary of offering an absolute theory on the conditions of forgiveness, he absolutely refuses any. This is not an oversight on his part but rather his understanding that any totalising ontologising of forgiveness misses the mark, being mere identification that may appear to be forgiveness, but in the end amounting to no more than superficial pseudo-forgiveness. Instead Jankélévitch discusses what forgiveness is not: “In- deed, the more forgiveness is impure and opaque, the more it lends itself to de- scription. As a matter of fact, only an apophatic or negative philosophy is truly possible.”18 For Jankélévitch such impure forms include forgetting the transgres- sion; generational integration, of trauma (transforming memory into a painless element of a person’s past); and intellection (where the efforts to understand the transgression result in the perpetrator’s pardon). Although these all bear a superficial resemblance to forgiveness, none include the intentional aspect necessary for forgiveness. None grapple with the importance of intending to for- give as a form of moral action on the part of the victim of transgression. For Jankélévitch, forgiveness must always be seen as an active moral choice which one stands by. Regarding the Holocaust, this is impossible. Claiming that forgiveness is not instrumental redirects our attention to the im- portance of the ethical relation between individuals. Formulations that privilege reconciliation as a fundamental goal or rehabilitation subvert the importance of forgiveness by measuring its value on some external metric. Jankélévitch em- phasizes that such a move does not result in forgiveness of the perpetrator since it seeks only to reach a new state of affairs and is thus merely a pragmatic re- sponse to the legacy of violations. For Jankélévitch when we direct forgiveness toward some end, such as overcoming bitterness, we are subordinating forgive- ness to something and to this extent moving away from engagement with the violator. Here Jankélévitch redirects the difficult (non)ethical relationship be- tween victim and transgressor back towards the centre of his theory of forgive- ness. This situates forgiveness as an impossible extimate space in which the subject disappears because here forgiveness as an ethical object of satisfaction is privileged over the radicality of the subject’s struggle. However, this disap- pearance of the subject cannot supress its reappearance as one truly trauma- tised. This is where Jankélévitch’s refusal allows the process of trauma to un- 18 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, trans. Andrew Kelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5. 301 rough cuts: refusal, negation and ineffability fold as a negation staging refusal of the perpetrator. We can conclude that for Jankélévitch forgiveness without ineffability is nothing more than another ob- ject to be grasped by the will. In addition to ineffability, Jankélévitch places moral sincerity behind the instru- mentality of forgiveness, which invites the question, how then can we ensure that forgiveness is ever pure and sincere and not merely some cheap semblance? We can’t, says Jankélévitch. All we can do is turn the focus from transgression in general onto those horrific transgressions whose enormity falls outside the scope of what can be considered pardonable or forgivable. Unlike turning up late for one of his lectures, such transgressions cannot be ignored or excused, because, via negation, we are held captive by their barbarity, helpless to re- spond by harnessing the miraculous power of forgiveness. In this way forgive- ness comes up against a symbolic limit beyond the reach of negation, ethical imperatives, and all reason. Afterall, one is not obliged to forgive, still less to give reasons for what is beyond reason to forgive. In order to understand from Jankélévitch’s perspective the conditions for forgiveness in such cases we have to accept that in any scenario of forgiveness there no radical antithesis in the relation between subject and subject or subject and object. The relation should always be faithful and remain intact in the presence of the other, not become modified or distorted by omission. However, given that we are divided subjects caught within the repetition of the Symbolic order, Jankélévitch sets up an im- possibly idealistic scenario for forgiveness to truly take place. Jankélévitch’s scenario is provocative when placed alongside other philosoph- ical views which have gained currency. Although Hannah Arendt shares with Jankélévitch the belief that genuine forgiveness allows for the possibility of cre- ating a new future relationship, thus escaping cycles of revenge, she also argues that forgiveness can be understood only within the realm of comprehensible, if banal human affairs. Thus forgiveness for what she calls radical evil is for her impossible, incoherent and beyond the realm of punishment. In the final sec- tion of Eichmann in Jerusalem she calls for Eichmann’s death not as a form of punishment (no punishment could ever be appropriate for his crimes) but rath- er to cast him symbolically from the community of humanity.19 Simply the task 19 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 277–79. Arendt says: “Under conditions of  terror  most people will comply 302 cindy zeiher of “doing one’s job” is insufficient to justify not acting in according to ethical reciprocity.20 This logic of no agency is an active avoidance of responding to the other’s desire. The difficulty with Jankelevitch’s philosophy of forgiveness stems from his refus- al to allow any notion of fluid instrumentality, instead conceptualising forgive- ness as a gift or form of grace and the one who forgives in the name of accept- ance, a given.21 Such a refusal of instrumentality avoids symbolic capital being made out of the pretence of public forgiveness. In such cases instrumentality certainly poses a problem not least because it risks undermining the normative force of forgiveness, relegating it to the status of pseudo-forgiveness. If we ad- here to Jankélévitch’s refusal, then the problem of pseudo-forgiveness might be sidestepped by allowing for the possibility of forgiveness outside the bounds of the Symbolic law, through requiring that forgiveness avoid public expression. It should therefore take place in secret, silently or anonymously notwithstanding the receiver of the gift of forgiveness might never be aware of it. However, this too is problematic because severing the relational nature of forgiveness (which Jankélévitch argues is fundamental to his philosophy) becomes one-sided, since only the forgiver is privy to this secret new relationship. Moreover, in this sce- nario, with just a single party present, forgiveness becomes viable only as an act of negation. It is perhaps possible that through the psychoanalytic procedure one might come to a place of forgiveness without the need to articulate publicly. Within the psychoanalytic space, forgiveness might take place notwithstanding the risk of becoming indifferent to forgiveness and its consequences; however, it is not usually the neurotic’s charge to be such a bystander to their symptom. A second way to avoid the problem of pseudo-forgiveness would be to insist on the absolute erasure of memory. However, such a tabula rasa response is also problematic. Jankélévitch insists that memory must be maintained following the impossible task of forgiveness: “Nothing could be more evident: in order to but some people will not . . .” Arendt, 55. 20 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998); Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. See also, Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002); Norman Geras, The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy after the Holocaust (London: Verso, 1999). 21 Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 9. 303 rough cuts: refusal, negation and ineffability forgive, it is necessary to remember.”22 For Jankélévitch forgetting is the worst form of negation because what is given up is the very moral agency which sit- uates conditions necessary for thinking and enacting forgiveness, negation or refusal. However, forgiveness is not automatic and cannot occur as either ne- gation or refusal. Yet as Freud reminds us, conscious forgetting does occur; re- membering is motivated by goals and unconscious processes wherein forgetting is a moment of repression presenting in the form of a symptom. It is important to understand the psychoanalytic function of repression: repression emerges in the shape of a symptom and what is refused will inevitably return. For the neu- rotic the return of the repressed requires managing love and hate. In this regard what Jankélévitch is offering the neurotic is that although foreclosure implies the possibility of outright refusal (which he advocates), he nevertheless allows such refusal an agency by leaving open a symbolic space in which its active and repeated affirmation must push towards a point of radical exclusion. Memories are par excellence the memories of affects, “the persistent effect of an emotion experienced in the past” in the “memory chain.”23 In Freud’s work there is much that belongs to the associative theory of memory—and as he famously attests, “unexpressed emotions will never die.” Memory, like mnemic symbols, screens memories and fantasies to form a memory chain concept as part of the logic of the lost object. In Mourning and Melancholia,24 Freud demonstrates how, in melancholia, the pathological memory fixes and fetishizes the idealized ob- ject, hated as much as loved, and how in the work of mourning, all memories about the object are illuminated in their smallest detail, so that remembering may facilitate release followed by cathexis. Importantly, Freud maintains that no memory is exempt from the influence of fantasy, and no fantasy can do with- out ideational elements borrowed from a perceived reality. Thus, it would seem that forgiveness can occur only as part of a fantasy scene, internally subsumed and externally enacted. It is in this context that Jankélévitch makes a plea for re- membrance to be in service of his hyper-ethics. 22 Jankélévitch, 56. 23 Sigmund Freud, “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” in Standard Edition, 3:187–221. 24 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia (1917 [1915]),” in Standard Edition, 14:243–58. 304 cindy zeiher In response to Jankélévitch, Derrida’s essay On Cosmopolitism and Forgiveness addresses similar problems.25 He too locates forgiveness outside politics but un- like Jankélévitch claims that the function of forgiveness is to forgive “the unfor- givable.”26 For Derrida, this is unconditional forgiveness, and it must forgive the guilty as guilty without a reference to any request for forgiveness or mitigation of guilt. He refuses Jankélévitch’s position that “forgiveness died in the camps.” It seems that Derrida conflates legal guilt with moral responsibility when claiming that forgiveness is neither a system of exchange nor an enabler of reconciliation. In attempting to name the impossible Derrida brings back the notion of “radical evil” as a singular articulation reduced to dimensions where forgiveness is pos- sible in reconciling the universal with the particular, the public with the private. We might think of this as salvation translated into politics: only the ghastliest is worthy of forgiveness. But if forgiveness lies outside political action, what else is it good for? If, in Derrida’s world, our humanity is distinguished by notions of transcendence and salvation, then even more than Arendt he is politicising the Christian roots of forgiveness. Yet, Derrida even proceeds to down-play Arendt’s strict political separation between private sentiments and public action. This is because, for him, the demarcation between the private and the public spheres should ideally be abolished. Thus, for Derrida private and public forgiveness are one and the same. Similarly, for Jankélévitch, except that for him forgiveness is not possible and should be refused. This in turn leads to the recognition of the individual as abstracted from their crimes and the ensuing processes. This is why judicial law is so problematic for Derrida, Arendt, and Jankélévitch. How can judicial procedures deal with big questions like humanity and crimes against it, a concern echoed in many of Arendt’s deliberations. This concern also leaves open the precise nature of the transition from forgiveness, an affective quality, to restitution, which is a prag- matic undertaking. The judicial procedure may start with some recognition of transgression which reflects public outrage or regret and finish with restitution, arguably a political gesture of forgiveness. In so far as the act of forgiveness is here secondary, it leaves intact the paradox of individual autonomy and pub- lic moral conscience. This marks the transition from the metaphysical level to 25 Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001). 26 Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 32. 305 rough cuts: refusal, negation and ineffability the mundane where refusal is based on symbolic value and not ethical princi- ple. Further, this is how forgiveness translates into renumeration, or the back and forth of currency negotiation as a procedure of negation. Looking at crimes against humanity, one can see how there is both the event, which may be be- yond understanding, and the subsequent representation of the event by those not directly involved. Hence, Derrida talks about such crimes against humanity as ultimately crimes “we” committed against ourselves, meaning we are all to some degree, responsible. In Le Pardon27 Jankélévitch argues that forgiveness arises out of a need for love: he even claims that “forgiveness transfigures hatred into love.”28 For him this shift signals his hyper-ethics as an “ethic beyond ethics,” that is, beyond the norms and laws which he found thoroughly unsatisfying. He says of forgiveness that it is not of the natural order of things but rather politically ratified to give it a sense of moral mastership and authority. Nor can we simply forget and thus be left in a void. Forgetting and forgiveness are for Jankélévitch totally incom- patible and at the ontological level, mutually exclusive. To grant unconditional forgiveness locates the subject who is either untouched by guilt or hystericized by it, in territory so unfamiliar that it is perhaps more of a way to avoid strug- gling with injustice. An example of Jankélévitch’s hyper-ethical refusal of Germany and German cul- ture, in 1980 he received an invitation from German teacher Wiard Raveling to visit him in Berlin, which solidified his stance on refusal. In his letter, Raveling said that he suffered from “bad conscience” regarding certain events of the Hol- ocaust, which kept him awake at night. Appalled by the actions of the Nazis and holding the entire German people responsible, Jankélévitch had relocat- ed to Paris vowing never again to visit Germany. Raveling nevertheless wrote Jankélévitch a heartfelt invitation to stay with him and his family—they would listen to and converse about their favourite music, share food and wine and per- haps, Raveling hoped, Jankélévitch might discover that, together with his own remorse, a similar desire for separation from the Holocaust was to be found in 27 Jankélévitch, “Should We Pardon Them?” 28 In Lacanian terms, the opposite to love is not hate, but despair, destitution and eventually indifference. Perhaps this is where Jankélévitch’s claim on forgiveness falters slightly. In Lacanian terms his plea is not to be indifferent to but in the difference between love and hate. 306 cindy zeiher the everyday people of Germany, many of whom still lived with bad conscience. Raveling says in his letter, I, myself have not killed any Jews. Having been born German is not my fault. No one asked my permission. I am completely innocent of Nazi crimes, but this does not console me at all. My conscience is not clear, and I feel a mixture of shame, pity, resignation, sadness, revolt . . . I do not always sleep well . . . Raveling goes on, If ever, dear Monsier Jankélévitch, you pass through here, knock on our door and come in. You will be welcome. And be assured my parents won’t be there. No one will speak to you of Hegel, or of Nietzsche, or of Jaspers, or of Heidegger or of any of the great teutonic thinkers. I will ask you about Descartes and Sartre. I like the music of Schubert and Schumann. But I will play a record of Chopin, or if you prefer, Debussy . . . 29 In his reply Jankélévitch writes, I am moved by your letter. I have waited for this letter for 35 years . . . This the first time I have received a letter from a German, a letter that was not a letter of more or less disguised self-justification. You alone, you the first and no doubt the last, have found the necessary words outside the pious clichés. There is no mistaking it. Thank you.30 However, Jankélévitch refused the hospitality of Raveling’s invitation, instead inviting Raveling to visit him in Paris, proposing the same hospitality but on his terms: No, I will not come to visit you in Germany. I will not go that far. I am too old to inaugurate a new era. Because for me it is a new era all the same . . . It is my turn 29 Wiard Raveling, “Lettre de Wiard Raveling,” June, 1980, Magazine Littéraire 333 (June 1995): 53. 30 Raveling, 57. 307 rough cuts: refusal, negation and ineffability to say to you: when you come to Paris, do as everyone does, knock on my door, we will sit down at the piano.31 Raveling obliged; he went to Paris. They listened to music, their shared passion and spoke of many things except the Holocaust, the very event which haunted them both. He then returned to Germany and resumed his teaching. Although they remained in contact, it was propelled by civility rather than a confronta- tion with the rage and anguish which permeated their mutual desire to separate themselves from the Holocaust. Jankélévitch was trying to achieve separation in any way he could, but his anguish was too great to give up. His insistence on the “nonunderstanding” of both the crime and its forgiveness is the reason why forgiveness is for him, truly impossible. Yet, perhaps this was not such an im- passe because Jankélévitch also claims that the very impossibility of forgiveness offers a way to preserve the freedom of the transgressor to eventually ask for for- giveness. However, Jankélévitch states this should be refused anyway, since the Holocaust cannot be eclipsed by the mere speech-act, “we forgive you.” Here a strange mirroring takes place, what Jankélévitch calls a mad, spontaneous movement wherein one is not lost or assimilated by the fiction of forgiveness, because how could anyone want to identify with transgression of such incom- prehensible magnitude? What does it mean to truly refuse as an act of politics? It is possible to read Jankélévitch’s refusal as a fault in him: a stubbornness which absolutely refuses the possibility of reconciliation even at a transferential level of friendship and love. Raveling attempts to understand Jankélévitch’s position and offers that it is shared by other Germans. Nonetheless, the Holocaust is simply unforgivable from Jankélévitch’s position. He does not deny the grief and perplexity Raveling experiences, indeed he urges him to stay with it, but however traumatising this experience may be for Raveling, it is nowhere near that trauma experienced in and because of the Holocaust. In stating to Raveling that he is too old to inau- gurate a new era Jankélévitch is testifying to a negation beyond his control and moreover, that only via negation can mourning of the Holocaust occur. This is where Jankélévitch as the subject in mourning resides, in resignation and sub- mission to negation as an unhealable wound. 31 Raveling, 53. 308 cindy zeiher One reading of Jankélévitch’s refusal is that forgiveness can be thought of as pure tragedy. Like Derrida, Jankélévitch conceives forgiveness as an invention. However, whereas for Derrida the potential for forgiveness opens up something new, for Jankélévitch, in circumstances such as the Holocaust, it is impossible even to imagine any potential, which is why forgiveness should be refused. It would be too convenient to think of Jankélévitch’s position on refusal as ide- ological: that is, as fully identifying with the position of refusal as a political gesture for its own sake. On the contrary, for Jankélévitch the will to forgive is thoroughly ideological because of the theatricality involved in the act of forgiv- ing. Forgiveness here becomes an empty gesture, an imaginary exercise of false modesty, a liberal performative ritual and little more. Forgiving the Nazi’s atroc- ities would require either unconscionability amnesia or the opposite, platform- ing them via perverse fascination. Jankélévitch rejects both positions. At the same time Jankélévitch unwittingly leaves open a space akin to the ana- lyst’s discourse. His claim, “forgiveness died in the death camps” is an enunci- ation of mi-dire in an uncompleted sentence which neither elaborates anything implicit in it, nor invites any specific response. We can always refuse his refusal of forgiveness, argue against it or become hystericized; negation is strictly with- in the content of what has been said. For Jankélévitch the space of forgiveness is totally closed off, yet together with Raveling’s declaration of his trauma, it is these very limits which prompt the invitation to meet. Jankélévitch’s reply implies that this might be a good start in thinking about the unforgivable as a question of politics, and this thus provides a synthetic knotting, which is pre- cisely the analyst’s intervention allowing the analysand to differentiate between “to be” and “to do.” By focusing on what has actually happened, the process of knotting and unknotting destabilises the wider field in which solutions are usu- ally sought or facilitated. The radicality of negation in mediating horror mirrors the madness of killing. To this extent Jankélévitch’s negation tells the truth: his refusal of Germany mirrors Germany’s refusal of the Jews. His ultimate speech- act “forgiveness died in the death camps,” in precluding forgiveness and recon- ciliation, thereby signals the end of rhetorical engagement with the politics of war. Jankélévitch’s insistence on this intellectual castration of German thinking and culture began with his removal of all reference to it in his previous work, his one truly political act of refusal. This is the neurotic refusal of a fantasy-cure in which the social bond keeps politics alive through a commitment to hyper-eth- 309 rough cuts: refusal, negation and ineffability ics. Attending to the singularity of trauma ensures that the subject must take re- sponsibility for their subjectivity. Freud’s idea that within all memories there is always an element of fantasy, is something which Jankélévitch’s refusal ambiguously preserves. Thus, remem- bering the bodies of the dead Jews brings with it the memory of people with the potential for a good life. It is this paradoxical nature of memory that for Jankélévitch holds a fantasy of the ineffable; the ineffable always contains something unreachable and more pertinently in the case of the Holocaust, the trauma of the event and its historical residues. Jankélévitch’s plea to remember protects the dignity of the traumatised victims notwithstanding that the effects of trauma remain in the domain of the partially conscious and the uncertain. In conclusion, those who take up the ineffable as an “intuitive knowing” en- abling a new way of locating oneself cannot assume that private thought and public language are so intimate and interrelated as to be unproblematic. But they can acknowledge that what is truly human is sometimes hard to express in language lacking a cohesive grammar of suffering which connects how things are with how things should be. There is nothing that is given in language—it must necessarily make us anxious thus we must construct what can be taken for granted before coming to a position of negation or refusal. What we can speak of is the struggle to overcome what is difficult to express in language alone, as being beyond linguistic representation. It is what happens after the trauma of speaking which matters. But for the Lacanian subject who takes up the inef- fable, there is always something else. It is not necessarily something deeper or profound. Yet, there is something so radical hiding in plain sight that once glimpsed reveals a hyper-ethics of coincidentia oppositorum, irreconcilable con- tradictions. This is the place in which the subject resides, the Lacanian void and perhaps also the very location of Jankélévitch’s refusal. In this place we are bound to admit our complicity in the traumatic event and thereby be forced to reckon with how how things should be. Any such judgement as an ethical prop- osition evolves from a temperament exposed to the effects of bad conscience, a subject position one must live with. Afterall, in psychoanalysis we say that if one feels guilty, then one is guilty—of something. Therefore, one should (at least on the couch) act guilty so that it accords with the sensation of guilt and its accom- panying anxiety. The very struggle with their articulations is an act of courage one simply should not refuse: the passage to a transformative act confronts the 310 cindy zeiher impossible by also confronting the possibilities of any situation. We could say that bad conscience is an anxious philosophical state of mind and affect which puts to work how one might think about that which cannot be fully expressed in language; moreover, rather than rendering language more complete, accept that being rough cut, the affective inevitably ruptures the linguistic turn. References Arendt, Hannah. 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Raveling, Waird. “Lettre de Wiard Raveling.” June, 1980. Magazine Littéraire 333 (June 1995): 53–56. Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. New York: Continuum, 2010. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pel- lauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 313 We accept manuscripts in Slovenian, English, French, and German. Submissions must be original works that have not been previously published and are not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Authors should provide the manuscript in Microsoft Word format (.doc or .docx), preferably in Times New Roman font, with 1.5 line spacing. Each manuscript should include an abstract summarising the main points in no more than 150 words, in both the language of the manuscript and in English, accompanied by up to seven keywords in both languages. 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It provides a forum for discussion on a wide range of issues in contemporary polit- ical philosophy, history of philosophy, history of political thought, philosophy of law, social philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of science, cultural critique, ethics, and aesthetics. The journal is open to different philosophical orientations, styles and schools, and welcomes theoretical dialogue among them. Three issues of the journal are published annually. The second issue is a special issue that brings together articles by experts on a topic chosen by the Editorial Board. Articles are published in English, French, or German, with abstracts in Slove- nian and English. Filozofski vestnik is indexed/abstracted in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index; Current Contents / Arts & Humanities; EBSCO; IBZ (Internationale Bibliographie der Zeitschriften); The Philosopher's Index; Répertoire bibliographique de philoso- phie; Scopus; and Sociological Abstracts. Filozofski vestnik is published with the support of the Slovenian Research and In- novation Agency. Filozofski vestnik was founded by the Slovenian Academy of Sci- ences and Arts. Filozofski vestnik ISSN 0353-4510 1 2024 IS SN 0 35 3 45 10 Le tn ik /V ol um e 45 Št ev ilk a/ N um be r 1 Lj u bl ja n a 20 24 Filozofski vestnik RETHINKING INSTITUTIONS: HETERODOX AND CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES BEING AFFECTED Rethinking Institutions: Heterodox and Critical Perspectives Werner Bonefeld, Notes on Wealth as a Real Abstraction and the Critique of Suffering Lorenzo Chiesa, Badiou/Lacan-Badiou: Beyond Anti-Philosophy Mike Grimshaw, Radical Theology and the “Weakening” of Bourgeois Institutions Uroš Kranjc, Institutions, History, Subjects Tomaž Mastnak, Is Economic Power an Institution? The Limits of August Ludwig von Rochau’s Redefinition of Liberal Politics Being Affected Antonia Birnbaum, Un courage sans héroïsme. Antigone, Créon, Ismène, Hémon, Tirésias Christian Fierens, Une petite pensée : « l’appensée » La dernière séance du séminaire XXIII (11/05/1973) Dries Josten and Levi Haeck, Towards an Affective Understanding of Pure Judgments of Taste Alexi Kukuljevic, Absense, or the Extimate Place of Art Marcus Quent, Interval and Event: Present as In-between Time in Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou Alexandra Van Laeken, Whatʼs Love Got to Do With It? Badiouʼs Scene of Two Through the Lens of Lacanʼs Formulas of Sexuation Cindy Zeiher, Rough Cuts: Refusal, Negation and Ineffability Fi lo zo fs ki v es tn ik Uredniški odbor | Editorial Board Matej Ažman, Rok Benčin, Aleš Bunta, Marina Gržinić, Boštjan Nedoh, Peter Klepec, Vesna Liponik, Jelica Šumič Riha, Lovrenc Rogelj, Tadej Troha, Matjaž Vesel, Alenka Zupančič, Marisa Žele Mednarodni uredniški svet | International Advisory Board Alain Badiou (Pariz/Paris), Paul Crowther (Galway), Manfred Frank (Tübingen), Axel Honneth (Frankfurt), Martin Jay (Berkeley), John Keane (Sydney), Steven Lukes (New York), Chantal Mouffe (London), Herta Nagl-Docekal (Dunaj/Vienna), Aletta J. Norval (Essex), Oliver Marchart (Dunaj/Vienna), J. G. A. Pocock (Baltimore), Wolfgang Welsch (Jena) Odgovorni urednik | Editor-in-Chief Boštjan Nedoh Tajnik | Secretary Matej Ažman Jezikovni pregled angleških tekstov | English Translation Editor Dean DeVos, Holden M. Rasmussen Jezikovni pregled slovenskih tekstov | Editor for Slovenian language Marko Miočić Strokovni pregled | Copy Editor Lovrenc Rogelj Naslov uredništva Filozofski vestnik p. p. 306, 1001 Ljubljana Tel.: (01) 470 64 70 filozofski.vestnik@zrc-sazu.si | https://ojs.zrc-sazu.si/filozofski-vestnik/ Korespondenco, rokopise in recenzentske izvode pošiljajte na naslov uredništva. Editorial correspondence, enquiries and books for review should be sent to the Editorial Office. Revija izhaja trikrat letno. | The journal is published three times annually. Letna naročnina: 21 €. Letna naročnina za študente in dijake: 12,50 €. Cena posamezne številke: 10 €. | Annual subscription: €21 for individuals, €40 for institutions. Single issues: €10 for individuals, €20 for institutions. Back issues are available. Naročila sprejema Založba ZRC p. p. 306, 1001 Ljubljana Tel.: (01) 470 64 65 E-pošta: narocanje@zrc-sazu.si CC BY-SA 4.0. Oblikovanje | Design: Pekinpah Tisk | Printed by: Birografika Bori Naklada | Print run: 350 Orders should be sent to Založba ZRC P.O. Box 306, SI-1001 Ljubljana, Slovenia Phone: +386 (1) 470 64 65 Email: narocanje@zrc-sazu.si Editorial Office Address Filozofski vestnik P.O. Box 306, SI-1001 Ljubljana, Slovenia Phone: +386 (1) 470 64 70 Filozofski vestnik ISSN 0353-4510 Programska zasnova Filozofski vestnik (ISSN 0353-4510) je glasilo Filozofskega inštituta Znanstveno- raziskovalnega centra Slovenske akademije znanosti in umetnosti. Filozofski vestnik je znanstveni časopis za filozofijo z interdisciplinarno in mednarodno usmeritvijo in je forum za diskusijo o širokem spektru vprašanj s področja sod- obne filozofije, etike, estetike, poli tične, pravne filozofije, filozofije jezika, filozo- fije zgodovine in zgodovine politične misli, epistemologije in filozofije znanosti, zgodovine filozofije in teoretske psihoanalize. Odprt je za različne filozofske usme- ritve, stile in šole ter spodbuja teoretski dialog med njimi. Letno izidejo tri številke. Druga številka je posvečena temi, ki jo določi uredniški odbor. Prispevki so objavljeni v angleškem, francoskem in nemškem jeziku s pov- zetki v angleškem in slovenskem jeziku. Filozofski vestnik je vključen v: Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Current Con- tents / Arts & Humanities, EBSCO, IBZ (Internationale Bibliographie der Zeitsc- hriften), The Philosopher's Index, Répertoire bibliographique de philosophie, Scopus in Sociological Abstracts. Izid revije je finančno podprla Javna agencija za znanstvenoraziskovalno in ino- vacijsko dejavnost Republike Slovenije. Filozofski vestnik je ustanovila Sloven- ska akademija znanosti in umetnosti. Aims and Scope Filozofski vestnik (ISSN 0353-4510) is edited and published by the Institute of Phi- losophy of the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Filozofski vestnik is a philosophy journal with an interdisciplinary character. It provides a forum for discussion on a wide range of issues in contemporary polit- ical philosophy, history of philosophy, history of political thought, philosophy of law, social philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of science, cultural critique, ethics, and aesthetics. The journal is open to different philosophical orientations, styles and schools, and welcomes theoretical dialogue among them. Three issues of the journal are published annually. The second issue is a special issue that brings together articles by experts on a topic chosen by the Editorial Board. Articles are published in English, French, or German, with abstracts in Slove- nian and English. Filozofski vestnik is indexed/abstracted in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index; Current Contents / Arts & Humanities; EBSCO; IBZ (Internationale Bibliographie der Zeitschriften); The Philosopher's Index; Répertoire bibliographique de philoso- phie; Scopus; and Sociological Abstracts. Filozofski vestnik is published with the support of the Slovenian Research and In- novation Agency. Filozofski vestnik was founded by the Slovenian Academy of Sci- ences and Arts. Filozofski vestnik ISSN 0353-4510 1 2024 IS SN 0 35 3 45 10 Le tn ik /V ol um e 45 Št ev ilk a/ N um be r 1 Lj u bl ja n a 20 24 Filozofski vestnik RETHINKING INSTITUTIONS: HETERODOX AND CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES BEING AFFECTED Rethinking Institutions: Heterodox and Critical Perspectives Werner Bonefeld, Notes on Wealth as a Real Abstraction and the Critique of Suffering Lorenzo Chiesa, Badiou/Lacan-Badiou: Beyond Anti-Philosophy Mike Grimshaw, Radical Theology and the “Weakening” of Bourgeois Institutions Uroš Kranjc, Institutions, History, Subjects Tomaž Mastnak, Is Economic Power an Institution? The Limits of August Ludwig von Rochau’s Redefinition of Liberal Politics Being Affected Antonia Birnbaum, Un courage sans héroïsme. Antigone, Créon, Ismène, Hémon, Tirésias Christian Fierens, Une petite pensée : « l’appensée » La dernière séance du séminaire XXIII (11/05/1973) Dries Josten and Levi Haeck, Towards an Affective Understanding of Pure Judgments of Taste Alexi Kukuljevic, Absense, or the Extimate Place of Art Marcus Quent, Interval and Event: Present as In-between Time in Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou Alexandra Van Laeken, Whatʼs Love Got to Do With It? Badiouʼs Scene of Two Through the Lens of Lacanʼs Formulas of Sexuation Cindy Zeiher, Rough Cuts: Refusal, Negation and Ineffability Fi lo zo fs ki v es tn ik Uredniški odbor | Editorial Board Matej Ažman, Rok Benčin, Aleš Bunta, Marina Gržinić, Boštjan Nedoh, Peter Klepec, Vesna Liponik, Jelica Šumič Riha, Lovrenc Rogelj, Tadej Troha, Matjaž Vesel, Alenka Zupančič, Marisa Žele Mednarodni uredniški svet | International Advisory Board Alain Badiou (Pariz/Paris), Paul Crowther (Galway), Manfred Frank (Tübingen), Axel Honneth (Frankfurt), Martin Jay (Berkeley), John Keane (Sydney), Steven Lukes (New York), Chantal Mouffe (London), Herta Nagl-Docekal (Dunaj/Vienna), Aletta J. Norval (Essex), Oliver Marchart (Dunaj/Vienna), J. G. A. Pocock (Baltimore), Wolfgang Welsch (Jena) Odgovorni urednik | Editor-in-Chief Boštjan Nedoh Tajnik | Secretary Matej Ažman Jezikovni pregled angleških tekstov | English Translation Editor Dean DeVos, Holden M. Rasmussen Jezikovni pregled slovenskih tekstov | Editor for Slovenian language Marko Miočić Strokovni pregled | Copy Editor Lovrenc Rogelj Naslov uredništva Filozofski vestnik p. p. 306, 1001 Ljubljana Tel.: (01) 470 64 70 filozofski.vestnik@zrc-sazu.si | https://ojs.zrc-sazu.si/filozofski-vestnik/ Korespondenco, rokopise in recenzentske izvode pošiljajte na naslov uredništva. Editorial correspondence, enquiries and books for review should be sent to the Editorial Office. Revija izhaja trikrat letno. | The journal is published three times annually. Letna naročnina: 21 €. Letna naročnina za študente in dijake: 12,50 €. Cena posamezne številke: 10 €. | Annual subscription: €21 for individuals, €40 for institutions. Single issues: €10 for individuals, €20 for institutions. Back issues are available. Naročila sprejema Založba ZRC p. p. 306, 1001 Ljubljana Tel.: (01) 470 64 65 E-pošta: narocanje@zrc-sazu.si CC BY-SA 4.0. Oblikovanje | Design: Pekinpah Tisk | Printed by: Birografika Bori Naklada | Print run: 350 Orders should be sent to Založba ZRC P.O. Box 306, SI-1001 Ljubljana, Slovenia Phone: +386 (1) 470 64 65 Email: narocanje@zrc-sazu.si Editorial Office Address Filozofski vestnik P.O. Box 306, SI-1001 Ljubljana, Slovenia Phone: +386 (1) 470 64 70