Radical Philosophy 117, 2003

CONTENTS
R A D I C A L P H I L O S O P H Y
a j o u r n a l o f s o c i a l i s t a n d f e m i n i s t p h i l o s o p h y
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003
117
Radical Philosophy Ltd
Editorial collective
Caroline Bassett, Andrew Chitty, Howard
Feather, Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie,
Kevin Magill, Stewart Martin, Mark
Neocleous, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford,
Alessandra Tanesini
Contributors
Peter Osborne teaches philosophy at
Middlesex University. His books include
Philosophy in Cultural Theory (Routledge,
2000) and Philosophies of Race and
Ethnicity, edited with Stella Sandford
(Continuum, 2002).
Robert Bernasconi is Professor of
Philosophy at University of Memphis.
He is the editor, with Tommy Lott, of
The Idea of Race (Hackett, 2000), Race
(Blackwell, 2001) and, with Simon
Critchley, The Cambridge Companion to
Levinas (CUP, 2002).
Magnus Ryner teaches politics and
political economy at the University of
Birmingham. He is the author of Capitalist
Restructuring, Globalisation and the Third
Way: Lessons from the Swedish Model
(Routledge, 2002) and editor, with Alan
Cafruny, of The Political Economy of the
European Union (Rowman & Littleeld,
forthcoming 2003).
Mike Wayne lectures in film and
television at Brunel University. His
forthcoming book, Marxism and the
Media, will be published by Pluto Press.
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COMMENTARY
Interpreting the World: September 11, Cultural Criticism
and the Intellectual Left
Peter Osborne ................................................................................................ 2
ARTICLES
Will the Real Kant Please Stand Up: The Challenge of
Enlightenment Racism to the Study of the History of Philosophy
Robert Bernasconi ....................................................................................... 13
What is Living and What is Dead in Swedish Social Democracy?
Magnus Ryner .............................................................................................23
Surveillance and Class in Big Brother
Mike Wayne .................................................................................................. 34
REVIEWS
Alexander Garca Dttmann, The Memory of Thought: An Essay on Heidegger
and Adorno
Simon Jarvis ................................................................................................43
Nathan Widder, Genealogies of Difference
Christian Kerslake ....................................................................................... 46
Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography
Benjamin Noys ............................................................................................47
Sherry Weber Nicholsen, The Love of Nature and the End of the World:
The Unspoken Dimensions of Environmental Concern
Kate Soper ...................................................................................................50
William Rehg and James Bohman, eds, Pluralism and the Pragmatic Turn:
The Transformation of Critical Theory. Essays in Honor of Thomas McCarthy
Tim Hall ........................................................................................................51
Jonathan Joseph, Hegemony: A Realist Approach
John Kraniauskas ........................................................................................ 53
OBITUARY
Dominique Janicaud, 19372002
Simon Critchley ........................................................................................... 55
2 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 11 7 ( J a n u a r y / F e b r u a r y 2 0 0 3 )
COMMENTARY
Interpreting the world
September 11, cultural criticism and
the intellectual Left
Peter Osborne
P
hilosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is
to change it. How many times during the heyday of socialist activism in
the 1970s was Marxs eleventh thesis on Feuerbach rolled out to put overly
reective comrades back in their place? In fact, of course, even then one would have
been hard-pressed to nd a thinker on the Left or elsewhere brash enough to
engage in anything so immodest as interpreting the world under the auspices of
philosophy. Interpreting the world is too tied up with politics and the arts and the
contingencies of life too tangled up in the world itself to be considered a respect-
able activity by most Anglophone philosophers. Since 11 September 2001, however, the
imperative to interpret the world as a condition of changing it has reasserted itself
with renewed clarity and vigour on the Left. Interpreting the world after September 11
(moving backwards through Thesis 11) promises a revival of an international political
discourse of the Left.
1
But what is the philosophical shape of such world-interpretation
to be? More broadly, is there a specically philosophical contribution to be made to the
interpretation of geopolitical events in terms of world history, perhaps?
At one level, the question appears otiose. After all, do we really need sophisticated
theory to detect in the response of the US state to September 11 the rapid seizure of
an opportunity for the deepening and further expansion of US hegemony over the
international system of states? Keeping an eye on the broadsheets and an ear out for
the broadcast media will generally be enough for that. Yet recourse to a common-sense
empiricism about the interests of states will not take us very far towards the deeper
historical and political meanings and implications of such hegemony; nor, indeed, will
even a more theoretically elaborated objective analysis of strategic goals and practices
for all its indispensability if it abstracts wholly from the political discourses and
cultural representations through which such events are lived, not only by strategic
planners, but by publics of all kinds.
2
Rather, something more like a new kind of
philosophical discourse of modernity would appear to be required, in Foucaults general
(and, ironically, at least quasi-Hegelian) sense of an ontology of the present; provided
that we understand this present in a properly historical manner that is, as the unity of
a complex set of temporalizations differentiating geopolitical space.
3
Yet this is very far from being the conceptual form of those interpretations of the
present which currently capture the imagination of the cultural Left. The publication by
Verso of three short books of cultural-philosophical commentary on September 11, to
mark the rst anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
provides an occasion to reect upon what currently passes on the intellectual Left for
philosophical diagnoses of the meaning of the present.
*

Baudrillard, Virilio and Z
iek are totems of the tribes of cultural commentators that

have formed in the wake of the institutionalization of cultural studies. They are also
brands which have been central to Versos repositioning of itself in the intellectual
marketplace since the late 1980s, after its retreat from the publishing project laid down
by its parent, New Left Review: to seed and foster an indigenous, yet internationally
savvy, intellectual culture of Marxism. Since the end of the 1980s, the leading edge
of Versos list has combined political journalism with post-Situationist French cultural
theory. For all Z
ieks carefully cultivated idiosyncrasies, this is a genre into which he

slots comfortably, with his theoretical background in Lacans surrealist Hegelianism,
his political background in the auto-critique of Praxis School Marxism, and his
tireless personal pursuit of publicity through provocation.
4
Such work has proffered
handy compensation for the philosophical decit of Anglophone cultural studies and
the cultural decit of NLR-style Marxism alike, as it has for the political decit of a
domestic continental philosophy. Yet the conception of culture with which it operates
is largely pre-critical, in the sense of falling behind that intense, conjointly political,
historical and conceptual interrogation of the term which formed the background to the
emergence of cultural studies.
It is an irony of New Left thought about culture in Britain that, in the wake of the
institutionalization of cultural studies, an imported pre-critical form of cultural critique
should have become the stand-in for the philosophical dimension that it ignored.
5
As
we shall see, this has consequences for the politics of these texts. However, these are
to a large extent concealed by the performative character of the texts radicalism,
which displaces the political burden from the content of their analyses onto their mode
of address: an enactment of conceptual opposition to each and every status quo. Let
us begin with Baudrillard, the acknowledged master of the genre, whose temper, for
better or worse, is incapable of assent to any notion with collective acceptation.
6

Philosophy of the non-event
Baudrillard is notorious politically for his pronouncement that the Gulf War did not
take place. Yet in its popular reception this statement is somewhat misunderstood. In
its leading formulation at least, it was emphatically not a straightforward application
of Baudrillards ontology of hyperreality, to the effect that the simulacral quality of
the media transmission of the war cast doubt on the reality of the events depicted
(although, as a title, it was no doubt designed to be thus misunderstood). Rather, more
simply, it was a contestation of the appropriateness of the application of the concept of
war. Baudrillards opening point in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place is that a war
that is won in advance by technological means, a war that is a one-sided annihila-
tion, a war that is as much about control of the images of destruction as it is about the
control of territory such a war can no longer be considered a war in the traditional
agonistic sense. It has more of the character of a medical procedure.
7
Is the surgeon
at war with the body? At this level of description, this is not a particularly radical
hypothesis, philosophically or otherwise. Indeed, it is in line with a number of accounts
of the changing character of US military operations and the development of a concept
of policing appropriate to the internationalization of Gramscis theory of hegemony. It
has subsequently received a form of empirical verication in the non-combatant status
* Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers, trans. Chris Turner, Verso,
London and New York, 2002, 52 pp., 8.00 pb., 1 85984 411 1; Paul Virilio, Ground Zero, trans. Chris
Turner, Verso, London and New York, 2002, 82 pp., 8.00 pb., 1 85984 416 2; Slavoj Z
iek, Welcome
to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, Verso, London and New
York, 2002, 154 pp., 8.00 pb., 1 85984 421 9. Henceforth SoT, GZ, and WDR, respectively. The series
announces itself as an attempt to comprehend the philosophical meaning of September 11 [that]
will leave untouched none of the prevailing views.
attributed by the US government to the prisoners in Guatnamo Bay. If the Gulf War
was not really a war, how much less so is the war on terrorism.
But this is only one level of Baudrillards analysis. Conjoined to it are two more
characteristic theses concerning the impact of information technologies upon politics
and the nature of historical events characteristic, that is, in their technological
reductionism. These are the theses of: (1) the degradation of the event by its involu-
tion and encrustation by information; (2) the corresponding collapse of the ontological
form of place supporting the old types of political power and historical event a
collapse of places into places of collapse.
8
This is the familiar Baudrillardian evacua-
tion of the terrain of social ontology and its transposition into a generalized and virtual
hyperreality (which does not involve denial of the empirical reality of events, but
contests the modalities of their possible experience the outrage of a common-sense
realism is, as usual, misplaced). It announces the domain of the non-event: defer-
ral of the passage of practice from virtuality to actuality by entrapment in images.
(Philosophically, the framework here is thoroughly, if wildly, Kantian.) At the ontologi-
cal level at which the thesis is pitched, empirical occurrences lose the possibility of
acquiring the more fundamental, one might say socio-existential, character of histori-
cal events. In this sense, strictly speaking, nothing (not the Gulf War or anything else)
takes place (a lieu). In this context, the idea that the Gulf war did not take place is
thus thoroughly unexceptional. Indeed, it is redundant; and hence its proclamation is in
a certain sense contradictory, since in ostentatiously declaring the failure of the (non-
)war to take place, it picks it out from the domain of non-events, giving it a privileged,
event-like status. (The problem for Baudrillard here is that event is primarily a
narrative category its ontological signicance derives from that and narrative is
rather less easy to abolish than Baudrillard appears to think.) The interpretation of the
Gulf War as a paradigmatic non-event is thus dependent on the conation of two quite
different levels of analysis: war/non-war and event/non-event.
The general account of the involution of the event and the evacuation of the place of
power combines, syllogistically, with the more prosaic account of non-war to produce
Baudrillards concluding dtournement of Clausewitz (which reappears, modied, in
his analysis of September 11): non-war is the absence of politics pursued by other
means. This is not an uninteresting proposition although its interest pales somewhat
on its strictly Baudrillardian interpretation. Moreover, crucially, it should be noted that
Baudrillards sense of a remainder, of those residual uncontrollable forces operating
outside of hyperreality, which are the objects of non-war, is exclusively cultural: the
real stake is the challenge of Islam and behind it that of all forms of culture refrac-
tory to the occidental world.
9
At the end of the day, then, all this virtuality is just
another (techno) version of Huntingtons clash of civilizations: the West is virtual, the
East is real and the South, presumably, is just hungry. The culturally coded West/East
divide is the dominant imaginary here, suppressing the economically coded division
between North and South, along with all other, more differentiated geopolitical forms.
All manner of levels and types of analysis are conated and homogenized in order
to map the philosophy of hyperreality onto a simple bipolar interpretation of world
events, the political content of which remains that of the most hackneyed civilizational
conservatism. This is a philosophical discourse of modernity in the worst sense,
failing utterly to mediate its concepts with anything like a plausible global history,
opportunistically seizing upon events merely in order to publicize itself. The only twist
in the tail is that the civilizational content of the West here has been reduced to the
prison-house of images: the Old World is preserved as lost, all the better to be romanti-
cally mourned. Nevertheless, with this analysis of the Gulf War as a paradigmatic
non-event, the stage is set for Baudrillards account of September 11 as the eruption of
an absolute event.
Romanticism of death
Much has been made of the dreamlike cinematic quality of the television images of
the attack on the World Trade Center. And it comes as no surprise to nd Baudrillard
rhetorically absolutizing this affect: everyone without exception has dreamt of [this
event] they did it, but we wished for it. (SoT, 5) Z
iek offers a similar, if more

psychoanalytically elaborate, account (WDR, 17ff.). What is more distinctive, as
Baudrillard ratchets up the rhetoric in a desperate attempt to produce an analysis that
might possibly be as unacceptable as the event itself (SoT, 41), is the extension of this
speculative thesis of repressed psychological complicity to the level of agency.
When the two towers collapsed, you had the impression that they were responding to the
suicide of the suicide-planes with their own suicides. [The West] has become suicidal, and
declared war on itself. (SoT, 78)
In a system of absolute immanence (hyperreality), any disruptive event can only
have been produced from within; and in the immanence of a system of non-events, the
event can return only absolutely, as pure interruption. Hence the thesis of a terroristic
situational transfer according to which Terrorism is the act that restores an irreducible
singularity to the heart of a system of generalized exchange (SoT, 9). Terrorism is
thus at once wholly outside of the system and yet (inscribed within the systems suicidal
desire for its own collapse) wholly within. The fundamental antagonism here is
triumphant globalization battling against itself (SoT, 11).
10

This is a neat and thoroughly Hegelian conceptual dialectic, in which the logical
structure that Marx took to be specic to the ontological peculiarities of the value-form
(and hence complexly mediated with historical societies) once again achieves, simul-
taneously, both independence and actualization. And, as with Hegels, Baudrillards
version of absolute idealism is equally falsely positivistic, since empirical gures must
be found to represent logical moments in the development of the idea (globalization).
The agent of negativity here is the spirit of terrorism; its act the gift of a death that
is symbolic and sacricial that is to say, the absolute and irrevocable event. The
terrorist hypothesis is that the system itself will commit suicide in the face of such an
excess of reality, because, having erased [death] from its own culture, it can no longer
deal with its idea (SoT, 1518). The romanticism of the event in the era of its passing is
the romanticism of death. We have been here before in Europe, in the period between
the two World Wars (with a rather more cogent analysis of the metaphysics of death);
but no one suggested it was a contribution to the intellectual culture of the Left.
Furthermore, for Baudrillard, the events in New York have radicalized the relation
of the image to reality resuscitat[ing] both images and events. Now the image con-
sumes the event, giving it unprecedented impact as image-event (SoT, 27). The deaths
of the attackers have breathed life back into the Old World and Baudrillards ontology
of hyperreality has been given an axial turn. It is hard to see this as much more than a
game internal to the logic of justication of Baudrillards theory of symbolic exchange:
another ad hoc modication, this time trading on the meaning of collapse. Were the
Twin Towers destroyed or did they collapse? (SoT, 47). If the latter, places of collapse
themselves appear as sites of a new involuted, suicidal form of systemic agency.
This is not to say that the image is not a relevant site for political analysis. It is the
privileging of the image of the attack on the towers that is the mistake. The xation
on this one set of images conceals both the more complex meanings of the event it
embodies and, importantly, the role of images in its aetiology. If we want to understand
the signicance of images to the attack, and related events, we should look not to the
images of the attacks, but rather, as Stuart Hall has argued, to the spectacle of wealth
on the one hand and destitution on the other [that] drives people crazy. This is the
new reality of the world as a whole:
11
the sheer visibility of widening extremes of
wealth and power on the one side, and poverty, exclusion and oppression on the other.
In writing on the Gulf War, Baudrillard was careful to present his analysis of
indenite virtuality as diametrically opposed [to the] opinions of Paul Virilio on
[the] apocalyptic escalation of conict. For Baudrillard, programmed escalation was
the means of non-occurrence.
12
Escalation was only rhetorical and Baudrillard was
more than happy to play his part in the build-up. With the attack on the Twin Towers,
however, the fantasy scenarios of the two great fogeys of French culturalism begin to
converge. Baudrillards is a Franco-Hollywood co-production (Suicide of the Towers);
Virilios is more of a French arthouse version of a Bond lm, the plot global takeover
of humanity by totalitarian multimedia powers (GZ, 26). The point of identity between
the two scripts: A global suicide state united beyond good and evil in which
advertising in all its forms aspires to provide the entire terrain of social reality (GZ,
37, 29; cf. SoT, 13). The difference is that while Baudrillard, by and large, maintains
the analytical stance of structuralist anti-humanism, Virilios technophobia is grounded
in a sentimental humanism with its roots in a religious naturalism of sexual difference.
Technophobia/sexophobia
Virilios imaginary is dominated by twin fears: depopulation and the transgression of
sexual difference. The agent of doom is, predictably, science in its technical appli-
cation in particular, genetics. Technology is considered here not merely in abstraction
from differences between contexts of social use, but, quite explicitly, as politically
indifferent to them. Thus, we nd an innocuous quotation from the current chair of the
European Group on Ethics in Sciences and New Technologies directly compared to one
glossed as a directive of the Final Solution, from the Handbook of the Hitler Youth
(GZ, 45). No political difference can escape the reductive power of this mother of all
metanarratives of decline:
After the murder of the Creator (the death of God foretold in the nineteenth century) and
that of the procreator in the following century, it was inevitable that this system of retro-
gression would end in the demand for a spermless genesis.
We are witnessing the technologically based abolition of human beings as such (GZ,
2, 80). Summon the priest!
Science is the virus. The delivery system is the media. Their principles are the same,
the prohibition to prohibit. Eluding any precautionary principle, the systems of infor-
mation have become bombs which keep on exploding in peoples minds. The result:
the immense misery of mass ego-sexuality women now equipped with penises
men would marry men underage girls no longer need to have their parents permis-
sion to have abortions compulsory sex education in schools (GZ, 25, 22, 2830,
71). Horrors indeed. Western capitalist democracies present themselves to Virilio like
a painting of Dantes inferno by Hieronymus Bosch. But ours is a hell of sexuality and
advertising. (According to Virilio, the world is united beyond good and evil by the
inauthenticity now shared by broadcasters in East and West, and by those watched by
Muslim TV viewers, GZ, 37.) There is no reference to systems of production, political
rights, the treatment of immigrant populations or even the commodity form.
And what, you might ask, of September 11? Is this not a book published to mark
its anniversary, which will leave untouched none of the prevailing views? It turns
out that Ground Zero is just a metaphor for Virilios view of the world in general, or
rather European culture, since he continues, charmingly, to confuse the two. The book
should be consulted by readers curious to know just how easily Virilio is shocked (on
the eve of the Christian festival of All Saints, Halloween is celebrated in our schools!
GZ, 63); or those seeking a case study in bad montage the instrumental technique of
substituting sequences of only loosely associated quotations for determinate connections
between ideas. It would be nice to believe that all this is a satire of cultural reaction.
For Virilio, it is a satirical presentation of the age. As for the concluding page on
September 11, the analysis is the same as that of President Bush: it was an act of total
war heralding the rise of a global covert state.
Reading Baudrillard and Virilio today, one is led to wonder just how long it is going
to take for their intellectual milieu to work through the trauma of the invention of tele-
vision, or come to terms with the impact and implications of the sexual emancipation of
women.
13
In the meantime, perhaps the Anglophone cultural Left should attend a little
more closely to the politics of these writings and place them where they belong, on the
groaning shelves of reactionary Romanticism, alongside Carlyle, Ruskin and their ilk.
The bait of the real
Or is reaction the new progress? It is easy to imagine Z
iek defending this thesis,

vigorously. Just as it is easy to imagine him denouncing it as sophistry, equally vigor-
ously; perhaps in the course of the same talk or piece of writing; perhaps deliberately,
perhaps not. There is a voluptuousness to the outpouring of Z
ieks prose that shames

the very idea of critical regulation or judgement, a will to power as prose that scorns
all but its own productivity. A joke must be repeated, a received idea confounded, a
recent movie cited whatever the weather.
14
But this is no mere showmanship (although
at times it teeters on the brink). There is a political purpose to Z
ieks writings that

distinguishes them, decisively, from those of Baudrillard and Virilio: the promotion
of an absolute Leftism which, bereft of power, scorns the compromises of the actual,
thereby legitimating something close to pure pragmatism, on the grounds of a meta-
physical conception of truth. Hence the afnity with Alain Badiou that has led Z
iek
to an identication with Lenin (contra Leninism) as the existential model for a form of
political engagement that associates ethics with the necessity of violence. Yet the con-
crete political meanings and implications of this identication are so densely mediated
by different kinds and levels of theory as to risk (or does he seek?) obfuscation.
There is a cynicism about Z
ieks pyrotechnics the cynicism of the magician but

there is also a jouissance and hence a lack of control. However, it is precisely this lack
of control which it is the (Lacanian) purpose of his discourse to promote. The slogan:
Be true to your desire! There is thus a sublime consistency at the very heart of the
instability, excesses and inconsistencies in Z
ieks discourse a psychoanalytic ruse

of reason by which the acceptance of inconsistency becomes a royal road to making
theoretical discourse consistent with the structure of the psyche itself. Dialectics is the
instrument of this operation; identity of opposites, and hence inversion, its principal
effect. Yet is the contradictory structure of the human psyche the appropriate measure
for the adequacy of theory? How can Lacan and Lenin cohabit so cosily? And what
can such a stance contribute to conjunctural and longer term, historical analyses of
geopolitical events? Welcome to the Desert of the Real provides a way in to these issues
via, rst, its dialectic of semblance and the real; second, its call to orthodoxy, against
the liberalism and postmodernism of the Anglophone academic Left; and, nally, its
more concretely political remarks about the implications of September 11.
Like Baudrillard, Z
iek trades on stock misunderstandings of his position, positively

provoking them in order to draw readers in, and then using them as fodder for dialecti-
cal inversions. And just as in Baudrillards writings on the Gulf War (which seem to be
something of a model for Z
iek here an exemplar in the generation of controversy), so

once again it is the wretched question of the real that serves as bait. Z
ieks opening
essay, Passions of the Real, Passions of Semblance, takes the reader on a phenomeno-
logical journey from (1) a naive view of reality (in opposition to appearance), via
(2) its inversion (real reality itself as a virtual entity), to (3) the resolution of the
contradiction in the standpoint that it is the symbolic coordinates of fantasy alone that
gives consistency to what we call reality, in opposition to mere appearance and the
underlying, unknowable Real alike. This is Hegels Phenomen-ology of Spirit rewrit-
ten by Lacan: reconciliation to misrecognition.
The real of Z
ieks title, to which he welcomes us on behalf of the events of

September 11, thus only appears to be that of a fundamental ontological realm, the
Lacanian equivalent to Baudrillards absolute event. It is, rather, to the barrenness
of the fantasy that we could have access to such a realm that we are welcomed: the
fantasy of a pure or excessive reality beyond the symbolic forms of a constitutive
fantasy. And because it is only a fantasy, this passion for the real culminates in
its apparent opposite, in a theatrical spectacle (WDR, 9). The spectacularization of the
events of September 11 thus registers both our desire for the real and the impossibility
of its fullment. The necessarily unReal character of the object of desire (consequent
upon the symbolic structure of desire itself) makes the real we desire into a desert,
however spectacularly it is (mis)represented. This is a Lacanian phenomenology of the
reception of the events of September 11, masquerading as an interpretative account of
the events themselves. It moves back and forth between several different sense of the
real in order to dissolve the events as a discrete object of interpretation and analysis
and replace them with the set of obscene unwritten rules that underlie the symbolic
construction of reality in general (WDR, 32).
What Z
iek offers is thus actually very similar to Baudrillards account of the status
of the real within the image-event.
[W]e thought we had seen (perhaps with a certain relief) a resurgence of the real [but]
reality is a principle that is lost. the real is superadded to the image like a bonus of
terror, like an additional frisson [s]omething like an additional ction, a ction surpass-
ing ction the ultimate and most redoubtable ction.
The terrorist violence is not real. In a sense it is worse: it is symbolic. Only
symbolic violence is generative of singularity. (SoT, 289)
For Baudrillard, the absolute event is not real, it is pure interruption. The event is
ontologically more fundamental than the real. Baudrillard is more consistent than
Z
iek here, whose attempt to incorporate Badious notion of the event into a Lacanian
framework equating the Real with the event leads only to bald, undialectical contra-
dictions. Thus, Z
ieks opening, Badiou-inspired claim The ultimate and dening

moment of the twentieth century was the direct experience of the Real as opposed to
everyday social reality the Real in its extreme violence (WDR, 5) contradicts
the whole theoretical edice of fantasy, reality and the Real that is subsequently elabo-
rated. The same thing happens in such descriptions as that of the Israeli-Palestinian
conict as the Real of the Middle Eastern crisis (WDR, 126). The fantasy of Badiou is
too strong for Z
iek in these instances; he is overcome.

One feels almost intrusive witnessing these increasingly blatant moments of self-
contradiction in Z
ieks writings. There is something private about the great showmans

public struggle with himself, in which the desire to outdo all competitors by delivering
the decisive formulation does battle with the requirement to continue making some
kind of theoretical sense. After all, if the only way of breaking out of th[e] vicious
cycle of the System is the impossible act of a revolutionary violence which no
longer relies on the superego obscenity as Z
iek argues (WDR, 27) why does he

not follow Baudrillard in recognizing such an act in the absolute event of September
11 itself? In fact, he comes close in his conclusion when he describes the ultimate
aim of the attacks as being to (re)introduce the dimension of absolute negativity into
our daily lives (WDR, 142). Seduced by the intransigence of Badiou (the oldest trick
in the book), Z
iek is left defenceless before Baudrillard. His only chance is to change

the subject and begin again with a completely different analytical framework. Which is
precisely what he proceeds to do.
The second essay in Welcome to the Desert of the Real abandons all talk about
reality, the image, the symbolic and the Real, and suggests that we consider what hap-
pened on September 11 in the context of the antagonisms of global capitalism. This
is a more promising approach. Unfortunately, however, there is no progress beyond the
suggestion itself, for two main reasons. The rst is that just as Baudrillards conception
of extra-systemic forces is exclusively cultural, so Z
ieks conception of anti-capitalist

forces is exclusively ideological. The second is that the purpose of the change of focus
is to prepare the ground for the actual topic of the essay: namely, Leftist follies. And
Z
iek is not thinking of Badiou.

Z
iek maintains that global

capitalism is a totality the dia-
lectical unity of itself and its other
but he takes this other to be the
forces that resist it on fundamen-
talist ideological grounds. And
this despite his own insistence that
Muslim fundamentalists stand
for the way the Arab world strives
to accommodate itself to global
capitalism (WDR, 512). Ideologi-
cal counter-position is judged more
important than practical tendency.
Two years ago he offered us the
radical legacy of Christianity as an oppositional source.
15
Currently, it is the memory of
Lenin. In the meantime, Z
ieks notion of global capitalism has remained as abstract

and ahistorical as ever, equated, at the level of form, with capital itself. But surely,
strictly speaking, it is capital, not capitalism, that is the dialectical totality: the other
through which it unies itself is the labour that it subsumes as variable capital. All
manner of other social forms are caught up in this process, in all manner of ways, as
conditions of its reproduction on a global scale. And global capitalism has certainly
been posited, politically, as a nationalimperial project along the way. But history is
too open a process to be appropriated by a dialectical totality in Hegels logical sense
and fundamentalist ideological resistance is too crude a tool by which to measure
political progressiveness within its mle; not least because it contains no historical
index of its relationship to capitalism itself.
When Z
iek writes of Leftist follies, he is thinking of the anti-war movement and

the obscene mathematics of guilt of the scandalous relativizing anti-Americanism of
Western European Leftists. The anti-war movement is said to have shown less power
of reection than George W. Bush, since Bush at least recognizes that this is not a
war like others a facile and dubious debating point in this context, if ever there was
one. Meanwhile the ethical stance of a redeeming violence is turned on its head: the
only appropriate stance is unconditional solidarity with all victims (WDR, 514). This
ethical circle is subsequently squared by the principle: The true ethical test is not only
the readiness to save victims, but also even more, perhaps the ruthless dedication
to annihilating those who made them victims (WDR, 68). Bush would doubtless agree
with this too. For this ethical discourse of victims and violence is wholly politically
indeterminate, at this level of abstraction. More precisely, it is ideological, in its mis-
representation of the antagonisms of global capitalism as amenable to a purely ethical
determination.
There is a tinge of self-hatred mixed in with the provocation of Z
ieks contempt for

Leftists other than Lenin and Alain Badiou: the repellent gure of the comfortable,
well-paid English or French [or Slovenian?] radical Leftist (WDR, 75). However
much one may agree (or disagree) with particular arguments against particular posi-
tions, the level of bombast certainly conveys the impression of the strengthening of an
identication that Z
iek is quick to attribute to others on the Left: identication with

the dirty obscene underside of Power (WDR, 30). This increasingly prominent aspect
of Z
ieks thought achieves its most direct expression in his advocacy of orthodoxy.
Orthodoxy
Z
iek does not argue that reaction is the new progress, but he comes pretty close. Or-
thodoxy is the new criticism would be a fair summary of his position, although criti-
cism is not part of his vocabulary, for reasons that will shortly become clear. Welcome
to the Desert of the Real takes G.K. Chestertons Othodoxy as its text: the struggle for
freedom needs a reference to some unquestionable dogma (WDR, 3). The main target
here is the naivety of postmodern liberal democrats. Postmodern liberal democrats
are ontologically naive because they believe in the irreducible plurality of particular
constellations, each of them multiple and displaced in itself (WDR, 65). And they are
politically naive because they fail to recognize that democracy is part of capitalism.
Both points would be unobjectionable were it not for the slippage between postmodern
liberal democrats and foolhardy non-Badiouian Leftists, on the one hand, and the
imputation of a strict identity between capitalism and democracy, on the other. As a
result of the latter, anti-capitalism is taken to require the abandonment of democracy.
Democrats cannot be true Leftists. The dogma of the anti-democratic act is all well and
good, for Z
iek, but dogmatic democrats must nd the courage to question their own
position (WDR, 75). So much for the unquestionable dogma.
The problem, of course, is that a philosophical advocacy of orthodoxy per se,
irrespective of its socio-political content, isnt worth any more than its opposite. Z
ieks
dialectic tends to terminate on the rst negation. When Chesterton wrote about ortho-
doxy, no one was in doubt about what orthodoxy he meant. The formally suppressed
presupposition of Z
ieks defence of orthodoxy is the model of Lenin the existence of

Lenin, contra Leninism. But this attempt to separate out the politics of an individual
from both historical situation and organizational form (orthodoxy!) is hardly a convinc-
ing basis for a new orthodoxy even one as indeterminate as an orthodoxy of the
act. This is especially so when the history of the orthodoxy on offer is one that the
anti-capitalist Left is still stutteringly working through, most notably, in the West, via a
reactive libertarianism with a primarily oppositional bent.
16
The Hegelian point about the unquestionable is surely that while each act may need
a dogmatic presupposition, such presuppositions become open to question in the
aftermath of the act, by virtue of precisely that excess of the act over its conception
that Z
iek fetishizes as the basis for his philosophy of the act. (The term opposed to
dogmatism in Enlightenment thought is not liberalism, but criticism.) Such is the
dialectical constitution of a critical political community. Z
ieks imperative to invent

a new collectivity as a Leftist alternative to democracy (WDR, 85, 79), on the other
hand, is devoid of both content and process. For a philosophy of the act risks short-
circuiting politics altogether, without the mediations of a historical theory of political
subjectivization. Yet this conceptual space is already occupied by Z
ieks unmediated
and overgeneralized application of Lacanian theory to the interpretation of social
events.
Z
iek is most interesting in Welcome to the Desert of the Real in his passing,
more concretely political remarks about the legal-political paradoxes of the war on
terrorism, the international situation and the Israeli-Palestinian conict, in particular.
Yet these are largely unrelated to his theoretical positions about fantasy, orthodoxy and
the radical act. And where they do stray onto the same ground they are often in contra-
diction or at least, unresolved tension with a previously stated position. Thus, for
example, criticism of the anti-Americanism of Western European Leftists is matched
by the proposal that The Left should unashamedly appropriate the slogan of a unied
Europe as a counterweight to Americanized globalism. [T]he real politico-ideological
catastrophe of September 11, Z
iek concludes, was that Europe succumbed to a kind

of ideologico-political blackmail by the USA (WDR, 1445).
So where does all this leave the philosophical meaning of September 11 and of the
present? Or rather, where does this leave the attempt to construct such meanings?
To be done
Clearly, the attempt to totalize solely from the standpoint of the cultural/ideological
reception of events both constricts and reies the domain of meaning. The difference
between Baudrillard and Z
iek here is a difference internal to theories of the symbolic:

Maussian versus Lacanian, sociological versus psychoanalytical, respectively. Neither
is adequate to the task of interpreting geopolitical events because neither recognizes,
or opens onto, the more complex nexus of mediations that give historical meaning to
events. Culture and ideology are treated, not as names for the dimension of meaning
in social practice, or for the semantic principle of wholeness in social life, but as
designations for a self-contained realm of meaning within which political signications
are produced independently of mediations with other forms of social activity. This is
what I mean by a pre-critical conception of culture. It attributes meaning to events
independently of a broader historical understanding of the societal contexts and politi-
cal conicts that constitute them as events for a variety of social subjects.
17
It inter-
prets the world in a way that is detached from the possibility of changing it.
The rst thing to be said about the events of September 11, in this regard, is that
they are still happening. An ontology of the historical present that constructs events
from the standpoint of the political struggles at stake in them, in their broadest geopo-
litical scope, must recognize their durational (rather than merely punctual) temporality,
as a variable of the rhythm of these struggles themselves. In this respect, September
11 has become the nodal point of an extended historical present in which, and through
which, a variety of political agents and constituencies are forming and reforming their
projects: principally, the US state apparatus, al-Qaeda, Israel, the UN Security Council,
the EU and the states of the Islamic world. Several of these agents, although ercely
antagonistic, share an interest in extending this moment of redenition that has sus-
pended or suppressed various other antagonisms. In particular, the US state apparatus
has an interest in extending it indenitely as the occasion for the legitimation of the
geographical extension of its military-juridical power to vast new areas of the globe.
Sustaining the innite possibility of a September 11 sustains and legitimates the US
imperial project of an Americanization of the world. This is the main symbolic func-
tion of the images of the attacks on the towers: a certain freezing of historical time in
the moment of the legitimation of a military-political project that almost immediately
far exceeded any determinate relation to the events themselves.
Yet, none of this yet makes September 11 an epochal event in the sense in which
some commentators have claimed. It makes it a crucial moment in the practical
articulation of a process that was already well under way. In this respect, the recent
event to which it is perhaps most suitably compared is the Sixteenth Congress of the
Communist Party of China (815 November 2002). In the long term, though, the latter
may well turn out to be of far greater world-historical signicance. US hegemony in the
aftermath of September 11 derives a large part of its historical meaning from that.
Notes
1. Susan Buck-Morss, A Global Public Sphere?, Radical Philosophy 111, January/February 2002,
pp. 210.
2. This is the characteristic aw in Perry Andersons otherwise powerful application of Gramscis
conception of hegemony to the current international situation in Force and Consent, New Left
Review 17, September/October 2002, pp. 530: it reduces the practical function of political
discourse to the spray of rhetoric. But what is a theory of hegemony without a place for the
subjective moment?
3. That is to say, a philosophical discourse of modernity needs to be mediated with a social history
of states which is reducible to neither a Hegelian conception of worldspirit nor a positive theory
of nationalism, nor some merely syncretic combination of these two such as Andersons version
of Gramscianism, in which historical particularities appear as manifestations of exceptionalism.
See Force and Consent, p. 21.
4. For a critique of Z
ieks claim on Hegel, see Peter Dews, The Tremor of Reection: Slavoj
Z
ieks Lacanian Dialectics, Radical Philosophy 72, July/August 1995, pp. 1729. For a critique
of Z
ieks Marxism, see Sean Homer, Its the Political Economy, Stupid! On Z
ieks Marxism,
Radical Philosophy 108, July/August 2001, pp. 716.
5. As Stuart Hall has put it: What was there as philosophy [at the time] wasnt of any help to us in
a pragmatic sense. Culture and Power: An Interview with Stuart Hall, Radical Philosophy 86,
NovemberDecember 1997, p. 27.
6. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, Verso, London and New York, 1998, p. 52.
7. Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
(1991), trans. Paul Patton, Power Publications, Sydney, 1995, pp. 6187; 612. It is important
to distinguish the analysis in this essay (rst published version, 29 March 1991) from that of the
preceding two (from January and February 1991, respectively) published together with it in book
form: The Gulf War Will Not Take Place and The Gulf War is Not Taking Place. The character
of the claim is different in each instance, as Baudrillard scurries to render his account consistent
with events, while maintaining a rhetorical continuity of address. The famous speculative the-
sis, the Gulf War did not take place, is thus actually the result of a sophistical form of ad hoc
modication.
8. Ibid., pp. 48, 70. The thesis of the evacuation of the place of power has something in common
with Hardt and Negris account of a new form of sovereignty supposedly characteristic of em-
pire. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and
London, 2000.
9. Ibid., pp. 30, 83, 86. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1996. The dtournement of Clausewitz rst appears in the
second most ontological of the three essays.
10. Once again, one is reminded of Hardt and Negri: the homology of empire and multitude. Given
the structure of the analysis of Empire, it is hard to see how they can avoid the conclusion that the
acts of September 11 were a manifestation of the multitude. Yet this would appear not to tell us
anything more about them, or the multitude.
11. Stuart Hall, Out of a Clear Blue Sky, Soundings 19, Winter 2001/2, pp. 915; 1314.
12. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, p. 49.
13. Baudrillards initial way of ridiculing the de-intensied state of a UN-sanctioned war in the Gulf
was to describe it as the bellicose equivalent of safe sex: make war like love with a condom! On
the Richter scale the Gulf War would not even reach two or three. Later, extending the metaphor
of the surgical strike, he switched to the image of in vitro fertilization. This, apparently, produces
a living being but is not sufcient to produce a child a child issues from sexual copulation.
Ibid., pp. 26, 612.
14. This voluptuousness has long defeated his publishers. Welcome to the Desert of the Real contains
passages in one instance about ve thousand words in length that also appear, word for word,
without acknowledgement, in the Afterword to Z
ieks selection of Lenins writings, Revolution at

the Gates, published by Verso on the same day.
15. Slavoj Z
iek, The Fragile Absolute Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?, Verso,
London and New York, 2000.
16. See Martin Ryle, Oppositional Mentalities: Intellectuals, Protest and the Left, Radical Phil-
osophy 114, July/August 2002, pp. 26.
17. Cf. Stuart Halls delimitation of the eld of cultural studies as combining the study of symbolic
forms and meanings with the study of power asking questions about the insertion of symbolic
processes into societal contexts and their imbrication with power. Culture and Power, pp. 245.
Will the real Kant please
stand up
The challenge of Enlightenment racism to the
study of the history of philosophy
Robert Bernasconi
This article poses the question of racism in philosophy.
I will be referring to the racism that we often nd in
the texts of some of the most eminent gures of the
history of Western philosophy, particularly Locke and
Kant. They seem to express racist views that appear
to us, but not apparently to them, to run counter to
the ethical principles that they themselves proclaimed.
However, the focus of this article is not so much on
their racism, but on our ways of addressing it, or, more
often, our ways of not addressing it. My question is
whether there is not an institutional racism within
contemporary philosophy that emerges in our tendency
to ignore or otherwise play down their racism while we
celebrate their principles. It is to my mind shocking to
see how little thought contemporary philosophers give
to this issue, although there are denite signs that there
is now at least a recognition of the problem, just as
the sexism of so much philosophy is also now being
more carefully scrutinized.
1
Because the details of
both Lockes and Kants racism are now more readily
available to anybody who wants to know about them
than they were even three or four years ago, it is
important to think about what difference they might
make to the way these thinkers are discussed and
taught. In other words, we must explore the possibility,
which some people may want to dismiss too quickly
as a symptom of political correctness in the academy,
that these investigations raise serious and difcult
philosophical questions that we need to attend to as a
matter of urgency.
The unwillingness of philosophers generally to con-
front, for example, the failure of Locke and Kant to
oppose the African slave trade does not arise out of a
healthy refusal to engage in tabloid philosophy, but rep-
resents both a moral and a philosophical shortcoming.
I should make it clear at the outset that I do not under-
stand this article as offering reasons not to read them.
In spite of my best efforts to avoid giving precisely this
impression, some people have assimilated my efforts to
the way that certain scholars attempted to use the facts
of Heideggers involvement with National Socialism
as a way to expel him from the canon: according to
Gilbert Ryle, because Heidegger was not a good man,
he cannot have been a good philosopher.
2
But I have
never used that argument, nor sought to apply any
variation of it to the works of Locke or Kant. My point
is not that we should now bypass these thinkers, but
that, given their unquestioned importance, such that we
cannot afford not to read them, we should make their
racism a further reason to interrogate them. In other
words, because they were unquestionably major phil-
osophers whose impact lives on outside the academy
as well as in it, their racism has a particular claim
to our attention. This is what makes Kants racism
more philosophically interesting than that of Christoph
Meiners, for example. So how should we address the
racism of Locke and Kant? I will detail three initial
tasks, but this is not intended as an exhaustive list.
The rst task is to research, acknowledge and
address philosophically the racism of canonical phil-
osophers in such a way that it is seen in relation to
the larger body of their work.

This includes raising the
question of how the racism of these thinkers relates to
their philosophy. For example, Frege was strongly anti-
Semitic, but it is hard to draw a connection between his
anti-Semitism and his philosophy. Heideggers involve-
ment with National Socialism raises serious questions
that cannot be evaded by any philosophical assessment
of his work, but his anti-Semitism, although undeni-
able, is not so easily associated with his philosophy,
although an argument along these lines can be for-
mulated. The case against Heidegger quite properly
relies on the fact that he was at work in a crucial time
period when the question of the fate of the Jews could
not be evaded, but at other times other moral questions
impose themselves. Slavery was one of these. Western
philosophy has been and is still largely in denial about
its racism, not least because most specialists tend to
be defensive about the thinkers on whom they have
devoted years of study.
Take Locke, rst. It is true that Locke scholars for
a number of years have recognized the need to address
the question of his leading role in the administration
of British colonial activities and his investment in the
slave trade through the Royal African Company, as
well as the Company of Merchant Adventurers, who
operated in the Bahamas, but the consideration of these
topics is still largely the preserve of historians and
political theorists, as if they raised no philosophical
questions.
3
Although the precise role that Locke played
in writing The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina
is unknown and may never be settled, it seems that,
when that document grants to slaveholders absolute
power and authority over their Negro slaves, the
reference to power was added to the manuscript
in his own handwriting to read: Every Freeman of
Carolina shall have absolute power and Authority
over his Negro slaves, of what opinion or Religion
soever.
4
The point of the specic article of the Fun-
damental Constitutions was to resolve the question
of whether conversion to Christianity on the part of
the slave would jeopardize the slaveholders interest
in his property. But Lockes intervention in 1669 was
continuous with his insistence in the Second Treatise
of Government that subjection to absolute, arbitrary,
power denes slavery.
5
With reference to power, the
terms absolute and arbitrary are used by Locke
virtually interchangeably.
6
And yet, as a generation of
scholars have now repeatedly observed, the chapter Of
Slavery in the Second Treatise clearly excludes chattel
slavery of the kind practised in Carolina, because it is
restricted to captives in a just war.
7
Locke must have
recognized that what he said about legitimate forms
of slavery in the Second Treatise contradicted the
conditions he helped to establish for Negro slaves in
Carolina. And the fact that Slaves bought with Money
by planters in the West Indies make an appearance in
the First Treatise shows that he was perfectly capable
of relating his political theory to conditions outside
England, when it helped his argument.
8
Nevertheless,
most commentators on Locke take it for granted that
what needs to be explained is merely a contingent,
anomalous, aberrant Locke behind which lies the
benign farsighted liberal Locke, the Locke of whom
Lockeans are proud to be the heirs.
Turning to Kant, it is hard to know whether the
fact that Kant scholars waited for non-specialists like
Emmanuel Eze and me to raise the issue of Kants
racism was because these scholars did not know the
full range of Kants works very well which would
be somewhat damning if true or because they per-
suaded themselves that there was nothing here worth
discussing.
9
In any event, Kants essays on race were
acknowledged by philosophers until the Second World
War, and it was only after that time that recognition
of their existence seemed to be conned to non-phil-
osophers, such as Leon Poliakov and George Mosse,
who included reference to Kant in their books on the
background to the Holocaust.
10
It is true that some
philosophers, and not just historians of science, when
writing on the Critique of Teleological Judgment,
saw that some of the central problems addressed in
that work were rst formulated by Kant in his essays
on race.
11
However, the racism that is apparent in
those essays, as in his lectures on anthropology and
on physical geography, was almost never brought into
relation with his teleology, his moral philosophy, or
his essay on universal history, in spite of the obvious
question that they raised: how could his racism coexist
with his moral universalism?
12
Discussions of the racism of Enlightenment phil-
osophers are often met by the response that the phil-
osopher in question it does not really matter who
it is simply shared the assumptions of the time.
This suggests a second task: one must recognize the
importance of context for an understanding of these
philosophers. To assess their remarks one needs to
know the range of views being expressed at the time
in which they wrote. This exercises a form of external
control on our judgements. The child of his time
defence cannot be used until we research what their
contemporaries thought and particularly how their
contemporaries responded to them. Although there
does not appear to have been a thoroughgoing public
debate about the legitimacy of chattel slavery until
some time after Lockes death, we do know that he
was familiar with a debate, involving one of his former
students, over the question of whether Christians can
be enslaved, a question that concerned planters fearful
about the impact on their investment of mission-
ary efforts among slaves.
13
Blumenbach objected to
some of Kants racial remarks against the Tahitians as
unfair.
14
Concern about Kants racism is not therefore a
new concern, the product simply of sensibilities that
have only recently surfaced. This part of the inquiry
is important because it makes it possible to decide
whether or not an interpretation is anachronistic.
15

A third and somewhat related task is to inquire
into their sources, paying particular attention to the
selection of sources. What did they know, when did
they know it, and what could they have easily known
had they wanted to? To my surprise, in raising these
questions I have made the kind of historical discoveries
that one would have thought specialists in the area
would have known long ago. My earlier discussion of
Lockes insertion of the term power in the Funda-
mental Constitutions of Carolina is a case in point.
Even though the fact that Locke had a role in the
drafting of this document has been widely known, so
far as I am aware no scholars focused on the evidence
that Locke added the term power until I did.
16
Simil-
arly, I nd it surprising that Kant scholars would not
have noticed that Kant had alternative accounts of
the character of Africans at his disposal from that
On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy,
and that when he characterized the freed Negroes
of America and England as like the Gypsies in
Germany unwilling without exception to work, he
deliberately gave credence to the account provided by
James Tobin of the pro-slavery faction rather than that
proposed by James Ramsay, a prominent opponent of
slavery, although both were equally available to him
in the same periodical.
17
Kant was well aware of the
problem of alternative sources and explained why in
his review of Herders Ideas: one could prove whatever
one chose to prove.
18
But that is why Kants own
choices must be carefully examined. Kants failure to
express disapproval of the chattel slavery of Africans,
either in his published works or, so far as I can tell,
in his lectures, has to be understood in the context of
the fact that this was one of the most prominent moral
issues of his day.
Excising contradictions
These three tasks identifying the problematic state-
ments of these thinkers that are prima facie racist,
locating them in the context of their works and the
broader historical context, and establishing their
sources are basic tasks that intellectual historians
would perform as a matter of course, although they
involve scholarly and historical skills that philosophy
graduate programmes, for the most part, do not spend
much effort in developing among their students. By
contrast, many philosophers, even historians of phil-
osophy, seem not to care about these tasks, because
they are intent on taking the problem into a different
sphere. Historians of philosophy tend for the most
part to isolate Locke, Kant and Hegel from the his-
torical realities which nurtured them and to which
they responded. Furthermore, whole volumes of their
works are disregarded. In short, the basic rules of
good history are disregarded. For largely historical
reasons, the study of the history of philosophy in the
English-speaking world has much more to do with
maintaining its philosophical legitimacy in the face of
the very narrow conception of philosophy that came to
prominence in the period immediately after the Second
World War than with meeting the standards that would
establish its credentials as history.
For fty years or so historians of philosophy have
believed that they can write a work in the history of
philosophy and brazenly rewrite the arguments of
the canonical philosophers, if they think they can
improve on what those philosophers had managed
for themselves. For example, Bernard Williams in
the preface to his book on Descartes explains that
because Descartes work was inevitably and essentially
ambiguous, incomplete, imperfectly determined by
the authors and his contemporaries understanding, he
would take it upon himself to write a rational recon-
struction of Descartes thought.
19
The history of ideas,
he explained, is an historical enquiry and the genre
of the resulting work is unequivocally history, but
the history of philosophy faces a cut-off point, where
authenticity is replaced as the objective by the aim of
articulating philosophical ideas.
20
Clearly the casualty
of such efforts is an understanding of the historical
dimension of a philosophers work and I believe that
this leaves anyone who takes this route ill-equipped
to address the question of the coexistence in the same
thinker of both racism and moral universalism, which
is why they tend to ignore one or the other, usually the
racism. This approach allows philosophers to persist
in presenting racism as no more than a surface feature
of a philosophy, in contrast with moral universalism,
which is a philosophical thesis that, as such, will
always trump racist particularism.
What is a philosopher who believes that arguments
are the base currency of philosophy to do in the face
of a bad argument or a contradiction in some text
by a major historical philosopher? Whereas some
academics seem to gain some satisfaction from expos-
ing the errors of a Plato or a Kant, and for many of
them this seems to be all the satisfaction they need,
Williams seems to advocate that one simply pick and
choose, add and subtract, until one arrives at what the
philosopher should have said. If the problem is that a
thinker appears to contradict himself or herself, then
one can always drop one of the competing claims.
The rule is that one saves the proposition that is most
worth saving, and it is only a slight extension of this
practice to drop all claims that are in the least bit
embarrassing, whether there is a contradiction or not.
What remains is the authentic doctrine of the phil-
osopher in question. We are served a new, slimmer,
more elegant Kant, after he has undergone liposuction
and had the surplus removed. This is quite normal
philosophical practice, which is why no eyebrows are
raised when it is applied to Lockes role in writing
The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, Kants
insistence on the racial superiority of whites, and, for
that matter, Hegels exclusion of Africa, China and
India from history proper. What remains is a benign,
sanitized philosophy.
Although most commentators choose to excise the
racism from the philosopher in question in the way I
have just described, a few have begun to address the
contradiction between racism and moral universalism.
They have found that sometimes imputing a racist
position to the thinker renders them more coherent
and serves to defend their philosophical credentials.
So when trying to explain why Locke accepted the
idea that blacks could be slaves, but seems at the
same time not to have wanted Native Americans to
be slaves, Barbara Arnell simply concludes that the
former were for him less than human, although she
seems to have no direct evidence for choosing that
particular formulation.
21
Consider also the example
of James Farrs essay on the problem of slavery in
Lockes political thought.
22
Following his recognition
that Lockes theory positively condemns seventeenth-
century slave practices even though Locke invested in
the African slave trade and was involved in legislation
concerning it, Farr asks: are there other grounds in
Lockes political thought that would justify seventeenth
century slavery? His answer is as follows: I fear that
there just are no other grounds. In particular, Locke
was not a racist in the strong sense required to justify
slavery.
23
Farr seems to be saying that it would be
better that Locke had been a consistent racist than
that he be caught contradicting himself. Or, more
precisely, it seems that Farr would prefer evidence
that Locke was a racist in a strong sense than that he
was inconsistent, where being a strong racist means
having both an empirical theory that explains black
racial inferiority and a moral theory that justies
enslavement because of racial inferiority.
24
I do not
accept Farrs account, which identies strong racism
neither with strength of feelings, nor with the character
of actions, but with explicit theories. Nor do I believe
that he has exhausted the historical evidence. But my
interest here is that Farr, who was not a philosopher,
nevertheless wants, above all, a Locke who is free of
contradiction. Of course, had Farr been a philosopher
of the kind that is all too familiar, he could have
simply disregarded the evidence of Lockes investment
in the slave trade and in its institutionalization by
declaring that this was not the real Locke. Indeed, he
could also have disregarded any empirical theory on
the grounds that it was not the real Locke either, as
happens when philosophers read Kant.
This can most easily be illustrated by reference
to Thomas Hill and Bernard Boxills recent essay,
Kant and Racism. I applaud their essay as one of the
few serious treatments of the topic, but I regard it as
symptomatic of the failings I identify as endemic to
predominantly analytic approaches to this topic. Hill
and Boxills strategy is to distinguish at the outset
Kants philosophical theses from his empirical claims,
to which they assimilate his racist and sexist beliefs
and attitudes. This allows them to segregate what
they call his basic ideas (e.g. the central and more
foundational claims in the three Critiques and the
Groundwork) from the separable parts of that phil-
osophy, which are independent of the basic ideas and
perhaps falsely believed to be derivative from them,
and from particular illustrations.
25
In other words, they
operate by making distinctions. So long as there is no
necessary connection between the racist and sexist
beliefs and attitudes and what they identify as his
main philosophical claims, then this provides them
with the basis for saying that, if Kant writes racist
remarks, it is not the real Kant who does so.
So who is the real Kant? The real Kant appar-
ently is not the historical Kant but, rather, the author
only of his central philosophical principles. The real
Kant is dened not by texts so much as by select
ideas that contemporary Kantianism nds valuable. So
Kants teleology is discarded because contemporary
philosophers are sceptical about it and because it
appears to be separable.
26
The emphasis is on con-
structing a Kant that can meet the demands we place
on a contemporary moral theory, including providing
resources against racism. But it is striking that even
within these very restricted accounts of Kant, the
name Kant is still made to do all the work, and the
theory remains parasitic on a brand name whose status
largely derives from texts that are now for the most
part ignored. I am thinking of the fact that for the
generations immediately after Kant it was the Critique
of Teleological Judgment that was regarded as his true
accomplishment. It is almost impossible for anyone
taught Kant by a contemporary Kantian to make sense
of most of what Schelling, Hegel, or Hlderlin had to
say in praise of him, let alone the majority of their
criticisms. For example, at the beginning of 1795
Hlderlin wrote to Hegel that he regarded the way in
which Kant united mechanism with the purposiveness
of nature to contain the entire spirit of the system.
27

That is to say, the version of Kant taught in history
of philosophy courses today has been developed to
protect Kant against the criticisms leveled by his
immediate successors, thereby making the writings
of the latter appear arbitrary and idiosyncratic. The
real Kant is the version of Kant that approximates
most closely to what the philosophers who propose
this construction recognize as the truth. The real Kant
is the true Kant because common sense, freedom
from contradiction, and, where possible, freedom from
racism, are introduced as hermeneutic principles even
where they contradict the historical evidence. What
one often nds is anything but the much-vaunted
analytic necessity; what one nds is pick and mix.
Kant himself is damned: his racist attitudes are judged
to be incompatible with his basic principle of respect
for humanity in each person. But the deep theory is
salvaged to live and ght racism another day.
28
The point of contention here is not the racism of
the historical Kant, which Hill and Boxill concede, but
how philosophers can come to a better understanding
of how racism operates, the better to understand and
so combat it. Hill and Boxill believe that in spite
of his racism, Kants moral theory can serve as a
reasonable framework for addressing contemporary
racial problems, provided it is suitably supplemented
with realistic awareness of the facts about racism and
purged from associations with certain false empiri-
cal beliefs and inessential derivative theses. But the
problem of the coexistence of what they deem to be
Kants racist attitudes and his philosophical ideas
incompatible with those attitudes is not pursued. This
is all the more surprising because their defence of
Kant as a philosophical resource to address racism and
particularly their defence of reasonable deliberation
and dialogue to address racial problems leads them
to argue for an examination of racism in terms that
I fully endorse. This is what they say: such use of
reason must be informed by an adequate understanding
of the empirical facts about racism, its genesis, its
stubbornness, its hiding-places, its interplay with other
factors, and the most affective means to combat it.
29

My response is that if one indeed wants to address
racism, then investigating Kants racism in its coexist-
ence with cosmopolitanism would have been a good
place to start. One nds there an inuential, articulate
racism whose genesis, stubbornness, self-deception,
and interplay with its opposite that is there to be
studied. But how is this to be done?
Ones answer to this question will depend on how
we already think of racism, which is why I applaud the
publication of Boxills recent anthology on this issue,
N
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,

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,

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in which the essay Kant and Race is to be found.
Reliance on a narrow denition of racism has led to
a society which is obsessed almost exclusively with
the task of avoiding saying certain things, especially
policing certain types of essentialist remarks about
racial inequality, while doing nothing to address, for
example, inequalities in access to education, health
care and economic wellbeing, as well as life expect-
ancy, as they correlate with racial identity. If one
wanted to address those questions, in terms of both
diagnosis and remedy, Kants philosophy has, par-
ticularly in the curtailed versions now popular among
Kantians, much less to recommend it than some other
philosophies, and that too belongs under the topic
of Kant and racism. And I might add that, although
arguments drawn from Kant could be used to combat
racism, historically they seem to have had little impact
as a study of, for example, debates about the abolition
of slavery conrms.
The analytic approach relies heavily on the assump-
tion that the appropriate hermeneutical task in this
context the primary imperative is to resolve the
contradiction between racism and universalism in these
philosophies, either by amputating one limb of the
contradiction or by supplying a missing premiss. As
Michel Foucault noted in The Archeology of Knowl-
edge, both philosophers and historians have tended
to operate on the assumption that the discourses they
analyse possess coherence and that we all speak
to overcome the contradictions of our desires, our
inuences, and the conditions under which we live.
30

However, if, as Foucault suggested, we challenge that
assumption, then the contradictions I have identied
in Locke and Kant, far from being mere surface
phenomena that can easily be surgically corrected,
are perhaps better understood dialectically, although
Foucault would not have liked the idea.
31

Take the parallel and more familiar case of the
contradiction between the American Declaration of
Independences proclamation of human equality and
the practice of sexual discrimination and chattel slavery
which the Founding Fathers continued to underwrite.
The claim is still often made that the Declaration of
Independence in some way entailed the emancipation
of slaves and it was only a matter of time before the
inference would be drawn and the United States would
become the place it was destined to be. But another
way to reconcile the Declarations statement of the
equality of human beings with the racist practices of
the country was to declare The Negro a Beast, as one
author insisted at the end of the nineteenth century.
32

These alternative ways of resolving the contradiction
are indeed opposed, but, from what I am here calling
provisionally a dialectical perspective, it can in addi-
tion be seen that that opposition is sustained by their
mutual adherence to the words of the Declaration.
The Declaration of Independence, understood as an
expression of a society sustained by a racially based
slavery, called for both a universalism and a more
explicit racism than had hitherto existed. To that extent
it is possible to see these rival positions as nevertheless
mutually supporting each other, insofar as they both
work to sustain the space that makes possible their
opposition.
33
This allows some insight into the coexist-
ence of moral universalism and racism in Kant, as I
hope now to show by taking up a problem identied
by Robert Louden in his recent book Kants Impure
Ethics.
Cosmopolitan prejudice
Louden quotes a passage from Kants Conict of the
Faculties where Kant writes that all peoples on earth
will gradually come to participate in progress.
Loudens gloss is that Kant is logically commit-
ted to the belief that the entire human species must
eventually share in the destiny of the moral species:
moral perfection. This leads Louden to identify Kant
as a gradualist. Louden quotes a statement from the
Reections: we must search for the continual progress
of the human race in the Occident and from there
spreading around the world.
34
It sounds no better in
context. The previous sentence, the rst of the note,
which unfortunately Louden does not cite, reads: The
oriental nations would never improve themselves on
their own.
35
The problem is that attributing gradualism
to Kant seems to raise more questions than it resolves:
given his view of the permanency of racial character-
istics, including talents and dispositions, and given his
opposition to colonialism and race mixing, one still has
no answer to the question of how the entire species
would progress. Hence Louden explains, according
to a formula that is more familiar than illuminating,
although Kant is logically committed to the idea that
the entire species progresses in perfection, he is not
personally committed. My hypothesis is that Kants
cosmopolitanism his search for a purpose in human
history made his racism even more pronounced
because the racial inferiority he already recognized
now struck him as an offence against all humanity,
an offence against this very cosmopolitanism. When
we read in Kants Idea for a Universal History with
Cosmopolitan Intent that Europe will probably give
law to the rest of humanity, we should hear not only
pride but frustration directed against the other races
from a man who elsewhere will complain that the
white race alone of all the races contains all impulses
and talents.
36

When philosophers today nd in Kants cosmo-
politanism a resource for their own thinking, they
need to be more aware than they are of the different
ways in which it is severely compromised, at least in
its original formulation. The cosmopolitanism that is
today taken to be an appropriate response to national-
ism, or what some people like to call tribalism, is very
different from Kants cosmopolitanism because the
latter was formulated not as an antidote to national-
ism, let alone racism, but as an answer to the question
of the meaning of human history. Kant could see
purposefulness at work in nature, but he could not
see anything comparable in human affairs, which, by
contrast, seemed arbitrary.
37
A universal history with
cosmopolitan intent addressed that problem, but at a
clear price. Henceforth, to be lazy was not merely to
be less deserving a judgement that, from Lockes
perspective, would be damning enough, as it would
threaten Gods plan by running counter to his com-
mand to increase and multiply. It was also to infect
or compromise the very idea of humanity as Kant
conceived it.
Kant expressed this concern in a number of places,
most notably in his review of Herders Ideen and in
the Critique of Judgment. From Herders perspective,
all people contributed to the idea of humanity, but
in Kants time laziness was not only a fault of select
individuals; it was also widely regarded as a racial
characteristic of, among others, Africans, Gypsies
and South Sea Islanders. On Kants account, their
dispositions, like their other racial features, were the
product of the effect of the climate on the germs
(Keime) of their ancestors, a climate so benign that it
gave them no reason to do anything but enjoy Natures
largesse. Hence the question of why they existed. This
same question of purposefulness that is at the heart
of Kants conception of cosmopolitanism is also at
the heart of his concept of race. What makes Kants
concept of race so distinctive is its reliance on the
teleological principle for judging nature in general as
a system of ends. As I mentioned, Kant wrote in his
review of Herders Ideen that one can use the empirical
evidence to give either a favourable or an unfavourable
account of people like the Tahitians. But if history is
to be read as if it has the meaning that he believed
should be attributed to it, then there is no choice.
Kant saw the Tahitians as by nature less talented and
so, although they may be better suited to survive their
particular climate, their role in human progress was
problematic.
From a dialectical perspective, Kants stature as
a philosopher derives from the way he helped to
articulate and thereby helped to produce a radical trans-
formation of the philosophical landscape, a shift in our
way of conceiving ourselves and the world, something
like what certain philosophers of science sometimes
call a paradigm shift. But this is invisible to an analytic
approach. Cosmopolitanism as a philosophy of history
embodies a new basis for prejudice: hatred, distrust or
incomprehension in the face of those who, by refusing
to assimilate to European ways, do not contribute
to the march of humanity towards cosmopolitanism.
This renders them in some sense less human. Hence
believers in a certain form of reason renounce with all
the zeal of religious believers those whom they see as
refusing what reason demands of them. Then univer-
salists in the name of all attack those who seek to
maintain their difference. A new more virulent strain
of prejudice has germinated as a side effect of the new
version of universalism. Theoretical racism does not
only take the form of believing in polygenesis or a
simple biological destiny. Racism is more often to be
found in moral gradualism, geographical determinism,
or in the gesture which demands become like us and
which adds sotte voce you can never become like
us because you are not one of us.
38
Cosmopolitan-
ism in at least some of its versions is a constituent
form of such racisms, not its contrary, which is why
we need to be on our guard to recognize racism in
the concrete that is to say, in context. If analytic
reasoning establishes that there is no necessary con-
nection between Kants caricature of Africans and his
cosmopolitanism,
39
it can do so because it can choose
to reformulate his cosmopolitanism so as to establish
this result. That saves cosmopolitanism, but it does
nothing to throw light on how racism operates within
major philosophical texts, let alone exploring ways to
combat it.
40
With his introduction of a more rigorously dened
concept of race, Kant opened up a new space for think-
ing: he took it into new territory. And then his thinking
stopped. One could attribute this to cowardice or lazi-
ness, but it is more likely that, because this was new
territory, he did not know what to think. Those who
came after him worked within the space he opened
up. He never resolved the problem of how to reconcile
his belief in cosmopolitanism with his racism, but this
left a dangerous legacy, one which he occasionally
glimpsed. To the question of how the entire species
might progress, he responded: It appears that all of
the Americans will be wiped out, not through the act
of murder that would be cruel but they will die
out. A private conict will emerge among them,
and they will destroy each other.
41
Kant, it must be
remembered, was a defender of Native Americans
against their exploitation through colonialism. But it
is clear from this statement that when he referred to
the entirety of humanity he did not mean everybody.
Indeed, in note 1520 of the Reexionen zur Anthro-
pologie Kant wrote in a somewhat sinister way: All
races will be extinguished only not that of the
Whites.
42
But how would that take place? Kant explic-
itly opposed genocide as a solution, and commentators
agree that that was not an option for him. In one place
in The Racial Contract Charles Mills writes, Im not
saying that Kant would have endorsed genocide.
43
It
is a throwaway line, much like Paul Gilroys similar
remark in Against Race: he [Kant] does not himself
conceive of genocide or endorse its practice against
Negroes, Jews, or any other variety of peoples.
44

Nevertheless, Kant needed to reject it explicitly only
because it suggested itself as a solution to the problem
of reconciling a specic conception of progressive
cosmopolitanism with a belief in the inequality of the
races that threatened to frustrate it.
Forgetting history
I readily concede that most analytical philosophers will
nd little, if anything, here to threaten moral universal-
ism or cosmopolitanism as they understand it. It is for
them enough simply to observe that they can formulate
versions of these positions that do not entail racism. I
also recognize that my call for a re-examination of the
way that the study of the history of philosophy oper-
ates threatens a practice so thoroughly established that
to many of its adherents it is obvious. When charges
of sexism and racism are levelled against a canonical
philosopher they can easily be dismissed as the result
of a failure to understand the task and procedures of
the history of philosophy. But perhaps it is time to
put that task and those procedures in question so as
to challenge a history of philosophy that takes itself
so seriously as philosophy that it forgets that it is also
supposed to be history. Whenever a thinker is defended
by use of the central arguments defence the risk is
that, in trying to marginalize the criticism, philosophy
itself is rendered less and less central because it comes
to be more and more restricted. In other words, the
price to be paid for defending some of the major phil-
osophers of the Western tradition against charges of
racism is that we diminish philosophy as an activity
more generally. Ultimately ill-conceived defences of
these philosophers do more to damage the place of
philosophy in our culture than any of the evidence
brought against them. Philosophers are not and never
have been as divorced from historical reality as their
defenders are forced to make them: Locke was proud
of the fact that he was a practical man and not just a
thinker; however embarrassed we might now be about
some of his activities, we do not serve ourselves by
dismissing their relevance to an understanding of his
thought. By teaching slimmed-down versions of these
thinkers the so-called real Kant rather than the
historical Kant we contribute to the illusion that all
that matters is the annunciation of ne principles.
My point is not to deny or dismiss the need we
feel to address the contradictions in a philosopher, par-
ticularly when the contradiction arises in the context
of moral issues. When this problem arises for us in
the context of studying the life and works of phil-
osophers to whom we feel especially indebted in
our own thinking, the urge to nd a resolution is
particularly strong. Nor would I deny that there is
much to be learned from these exercises. But if the
analytic philosopher has a way of separating off the
question of the racism of great philosophers from what
is considered to be their authentic doctrines, thereby
suppressing the problem in a way consistent with his
or her overall philosophical stance, the continental
philosopher has a different strategy: he or she is prone
to offer ever more fanciful interpretations, turning the
transgression into its opposite.
45
However, to the extent
that I believe that so-called continental philosophy or,
more precisely, dialectical philosophy is ultimately
better equipped to address these issues than analytic
philosophy because it is less prone to sacricing the
complexity of the issues to the distorting lens of false
clarity and abstraction from historical reality, then it is
so much the worse for continental philosophy, because
it has largely failed to do so.
But let me end on a conciliatory note with what
might be agreed by good-minded representatives of
both approaches. Hill and Boxill close their essay by
recognizing that condent, complacent, well-posi-
tioned white people will nd it difcult to do what
they know to be right and indeed still more difcult to
know what is right.
46
The cure to self-deception, in so
far as there is one, lies, they argue, in listening to what
others with different viewpoints, attitudes and emotions
say and indeed designing institutions to help us do so,
institutions which would allow reason to do its work. I
believe that this is a most signicant recommendation
which would, if it was widely adopted, change what
is taught under the name philosophy, as well as the
way it is taught, and in a way that ultimately will
impact on the question of whether philosophy in the
future addresses a broad audience or an increasingly
narrow one.
47
Notes
1. I talk exclusively about racism in this article because
I believe it should be treated in its uniqueness, just as
sexism or homophobia should be, although I grant that
at various points they intersect. Indeed, I will focus
primarily upon anti-black racism, although prejudice
against other races and groups is also rampant in the
works under consideration.
2. The Times Higher Educational Supplement 850, 17 Feb-
ruary 1989, p. 12.
3. John Dunn considered Lockes silence on the Europeans
use of Africans as chattel slaves an immoral evasion.
John Dunn, The Political Thought of Locke, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1969, p. 175 n.4. See also
Geraint Parry, John Locke, George Allen & Unwin, Lon-
don, 1978, p. 70.
4. The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, North
Carolina Charters and Constitutions 15781698, ed.
Mattie Erma Edwards Parker, Carolina Charter Ter-
centenary Commission, Raleigh, 1963, p. 164. On the
question of Lockes authorship, see J.R. Milton, John
Locke and the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina,
The Locke Newsletter 21, 1990, pp. 11133. Milton does
not draw specic attention to the phrase on which I am
here focusing, but the conclusion that he considers it
to be in Lockes hand is unmistakable if one compares
what he says with Parkers edition of the manuscript
changes.
5. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter
Laslett, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988,
p. 284 (henceforth TT).
6. See Nicholas Jolley, Locke: His Philosophical Thought,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, pp. 21112.
7. TT, pp. 2835, 3223, 3823.
8. Ibid., pp. 2368.
9. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, The Color of Reason: The
Idea of Race in Kants Anthropology, in Katherine
M. Faull, ed., Anthropology and the German Enlighten-
ment, Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg, 1995, pp.
20041; and Robert Bernasconi, Who Invented the
Concept of Race? lecture rst delivered in 1995, now
published in Robert Bernasconi, ed., Race, Blackwell,
Oxford, 2001, pp. 1136. Also R. Bernasconi, Kant as
an Unfamiliar Source of Racism, in Julie Ward and
Tommy Lott, eds, Philosophers on Race, Blackwell,
Oxford, 2002, pp. 14566. See now Robert B. Louden,
Kants Impure Ethics, Oxford University Press, Oxford,
2000, pp. 93100; Thomas E. Hill and Bernard Boxill,
Kant and Race, in Bernard Boxill, ed., Race and Rac-
ism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, pp. 448
71. Allen W. Wood defers to Louden in Kants Ethical
Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999,
pp. 3389. It is striking that Hill and Boxill themselves
characterize the debate as one provoked by non-Kan-
tians (Kant on Race, p. 448).
10. Lon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, trans. Edmund Howard,
Barnes & Noble, New York, 1996, pp. 1713. George
Mosse, Toward the Final Solution, University of Wis-
consin Press, Madison, 1985, pp. 3031 and 73. One of
the few philosophers to show an interest in these essays
after the Second World War was Gabrielle Rubel. See the
selections translated in Kant, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1963, pp. 98100, 15052, and 1849. How-
ever, this could be judged to be merely a continuation
of an interest began almost forty years earlier in Goethe
und Kant (Selbstverlag, Vienna, 1927) and Kant as a
Teacher of Biology (The Monist 41, 1931, pp. 436
70).
11. For example, J.D. McFarland, Kants Concept of Tele-
ology, University of Edinburgh Press, Edinburgh, 1970,
pp. 5668; Peter McLaughlin, Kants Critique of Tele-
ology in Biological Explanation, Edwin Mellen Press,
Lewiston, 1990, pp. 2932; Manfred Riedel, Historiz-
ismus und Kritizismus: Kants Streit mit G. Forster und
J.G. Herder, Kant-Studies, vol. 72, no. 1, 1981, pp.
4157.
12. The question was raised briey by Nathan Rotenstreich
in 1979, but seems not to have been pursued further for
almost twenty years. Races and Peoples in Practice
and Realization, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1979,
p. 100.
13. Locke had in his personal library a copy of Rev. Morgan
Godwyns The Negros and Indians Advocate, Suing for
Their Admission into the Church: or a Persuasive to the
Instructing and Baptizing of the Negros and Indians in
our Plantations, London, 1680. See John Harrison and
Peter Laslett, The Library of John Locke, Oxford Uni-
versity Press, Oxford, 1971, p. 144. The Fundamental
Constitutions of Carolina had already pronounced on
this issue. I am currently working with Anika Simpson
on a more detailed treatment of Lockes relation to the
enslavement of Africans, in which among other things
the question, neglected here for lack of space, of the
legitimacy of using a term like racism with reference
to Locke is raised.
14. F.W.P. Dougherty, Commercium epistolicum J.F. Blumen-
bachii. Aus einem Briefwechsel des klassischen Zeitalt-
ers der Naturgeschichte, Gttingen, 1984, p. 189.
15. Hill and Boxill, Kant on Race, p. 448. In an earlier,
longer version of this essay I also addressed Hegels
racism. The issues raised are ultimately no different
in his case; it sufces to refer briey to the parallels.
On the question of whether the change of racism was
an anachronism, G.E. Paulus publicly attacked Hegels
Philosophy of Right at the time of its publication for its
Eurocentrism. G.E. Paulus, Vorlesungen ber Rechts-
philosophie, ed. Karl-Heinz Ilting, Frommann, Stutt-
gart-Bad Cannstatt, 1973, vol. 1, p. 372. See further R.
Bernasconi, With What Must the Philosophy of History
Begin? Nineteenth Century Contexts 22, 2000, pp. 171
201. On Hegels outrageous distortion of his sources in
an attempt to justify violence against Africans, see R.
Bernasconi, Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti, in Stuart
Barnett, ed., Hegel after Derrida, Routledge, London,
1998, pp. 456. Finally, for a discussion of Hegel that
takes a similar form to that I have found among some
Kant scholars, see Darrel Moellendorf, Racism and
Rationality in Hegels Philosophy of Subjective Spirit,
History of Political Thought, vol. 13, no. 2, Summer
1992, pp. 24355. Moellendorf judges that Hegels ac-
count of spirit makes his racism possible not necessary
(p. 249). Furthermore, Hegels racism is not contra-
dictory to his more general theoretical views, nor does
it follow from them, rather it is compatible with them
(p. 249). But this begs the question as to what the
fundamental claims (p. 244) are, just as Moellendorf
asserts that Hegels racism can be traced to the general
ideology of the nineteenth century (p. 244) without
investigating either Hegels use of his sources or his
contribution to the formation of that ideology.
16. See R. Bernasconi, Lockes Almost Random Talk of
Men, Perspectiven der Philosophie, 18, 1992, p. 316
n4.
17. I. Kant, Uber den Gebrauch teleologischer Principien
in der Philosophie, Kants Werke, Akademie Ausgabe,
Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 1923, vol. VIII, p. 174n; trans.
Jon Mark Mikkelsen, On the Use of Teleological Prin-
ciples in Philosophy, in Bernasconi, ed., Race, p. 54
n4. See Bernasconi, Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of
Racism, pp. 1489. Subsequently, I found that Monika
Firla-Forkl had already made the same observation: Phi-
losophie und Ethnographie: Kants Verhltnis zu Kultur
und Geschichte Afrikas, in XXV Deutscher Oriental-
istentag, ed. Cornelia Wunsch (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner,
1996), p. 439 (henceforth all references to the Akademie
Ausgabe of Kant are abbreviated as AA followed by the
volume number).
18. AA VIII, p. 62.
19. Bernard Williams, Descartes. The Project of Pure En-
quiry, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1978, p. 10.
20. Ibid., p. 9.
21. Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America, Oxford Uni-
versity Press, Oxford, 1996, p. 127.
22. James Farr, So Vile and Miserable an Estate: The
Problem of Slavery in Lockes Political Thought, Politi-
cal Theory, vol. 14, no. 2, 1986, pp. 26389.
23. Ibid., p. 264; my italics.
24. Ibid., p. 278.
25. Hill and Boxill, Kant on Race, p. 448.
26. Ibid., pp. 452, 456, 4623. I am not challenging the
thesis that objections to Kants teleological claims are
not of themselves ground for dismissing his empha-
sis on reason in his basic moral and political theories
(ibid., 463). My inquiry operates at an entirely different
level.
27. See Briefe von und an Hegel, ed. J. Hoffmeister, Felix
Meiner, Hamburg, 1969, vol. 1, p. 20.
28. Hill and Boxill, Kant on Race, pp. 467, 449.
29. Ibid., pp. 449, 467.
30. Michel Foucault, LArchologie du savior, Gallimard,
Paris, 1969, p. 195; trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, The
Archeology of Knowledge, Tavistock, London, 1972,
p. 149.
31. I employ the word dialectical provisionally here be-
cause, although this term is now fraught with ambiguity,
the basic insight into the reciprocal relation that ties
contradictory terms, an insight widespread in so-called
continental philosophy, rst became pronounced in He-
gels dialectical philosophy.
32. Charles Carroll, The Negro A Beast, American Book and
Bible House, St Louis, 1900). Lest I be misunderstood, I
should make it clear that I am not, of course, suggesting
that the idea that the Negro was a Beast was a proposi-
tion that Kant could ever have allowed. Kant wrote his
essays on race in large part in an effort to exclude this
possibility and, indeed, further to secure the unity of the
human species.
33. Recognition of this fact at some level may have been
what led some abolitionists to challenge the Declaration
of Independence, but in so far as the Declaration dened
the space of discourse this option could not be sustained
politically. See Robert Bernasconi, The Constitution
of the People: Frederick Douglass and the Dred Scott
Decision, Cardozo Law Review, vol. 13, no. 4, 1991,
pp. 128196.
34. AA VII, p. 89; AA XV1, p. 789, both quoted in Louden,
Kants Impure Ethics, p. 105.
35. AA XV, p. 788. See also AA XXV, p. 840.
36. AA VIII, p. 29; AA XXV/2, p. 1187.
37. AA VIII, p. 17.
38. Hence my surprise at nding Joseph McCarney defend
Hegel from the charge of racism on the grounds that he
was, rather, a geographical determinist: Hegel on His-
tory, Routledge, London, 2001, p. 143. Indeed, it is even
suggested that a rmer theoretical basis for the funda-
mental equality of human beings then Hegelian spirit
provides can scarcely be conceived (ibid., p. 145).
39. I should be clear that I am not using the term analytical
philosophy as a synonym for Anglo-American phil-
osophy. I mean, rather, those philosophers committed
to a form of thinking that leaves no room for synthe-
sis, holism or dialectic, while recognizing that analysis
nevertheless plays an indispensable role in these other
ways of thinking. But it should not go unnoticed that
the approach to the history of philosophy that I am here
describing as analytic has its roots in a certain reading
of Kant.
40. For an invaluable contribution to a historical under-
standing of cosmopolitanism, see Pauline Kleinfeld,
Six Varieties of Cosmopolitanism in Late Eighteenth
Century Germany, Journal of the History of Ideas 60,
1999, pp. 50524.
41. AA VIII, p. 35; AA XXV, p. 840.
42. AA XV/2, p. 878.
43. Charles Mills, The Racial Contract, Cornell University
Press, Ithaca, 1997, p. 72.
44. Paul Gilroy, Against Race, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge MA, 2000, p. 60.
45. For example, Jacques Derrida, De lesprit, Galile, Paris,
1987; trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby,
Of Spirit, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1989.
Derrida argues for a reading of spirit in Heidegger that
neglects the connotations of the word at that time. See
R. Bernasconi, Heideggers Alleged Challenge to the
Nazi Concepts of Race, in James E. Faulconer and Mark
A. Wrathall, eds, Appropriating Heidegger, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 5067.
46. Hill and Boxill, Kant and Race, p. 470.
47. In a more thorough treatment I would need to address
the philosophical canon and philosophers resistance to
multiculturalism as well as the racial constitution of the
average philosophy department, including its student
body. On the latter, see Leonard Harris, Believe it or
Not or the Ku Klux Klan and American Philosophy
Exposed, Proceedings and Addresses of the American
Philosophical Association, vol. 68, no. 5, May 1995,
pp. 1337. On the former, see Robert Bernasconi, Phil-
osophys Paradoxical Parochialism: The Reinvention of
Philosophy as Greek, in Keith Ansell-Pearson, Benita
Parry and Judith Squires, eds, Cultural Readings of
Imperialism, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1997, pp.
21226. I should stress that I do not mean to deny the
existence of a signicant number of philosophers who
have at some cost long raised these issues and advocated
a reexamination of the canon. Nor would I deny that for
much of my career I have been unambiguously part of
the problem, until some of my students woke me from
my dogmatic slumber.
What is living and what
is dead in Swedish social
democracy?
Magnus Ryner
Seeming to conrm that politics proceeds through
contradiction, the essentials of a neoliberal project
the subordination of the social to market discipline
has been consolidated in Europe by social-democratic
governments. As yet another political project which
is referred to as the Third Way, this articulation of
social democracy with economic liberalism sets high
demands on ideology, understood in the Gramscian
sense as a multi-levelled phenomenon that contains and
fuses a wide range of more or less coherent discursive
forms from common sense to philosophy.
Ideology in this sense is a material practice, with
the function to cement (or, better, interpellate) multi-
farious, stratied and antagonistic segments of society
into a broad political direction. Politicians and mass
parties play a strategic role in this context as organic
intellectuals, as it is they who take on the task of
ensuring this coherence. In this practice they deploy a
number of discursive techniques at different levels of
civil and political society. These range from spin-doc-
toring to internal party work and policy formulation,
and assume different forms depending on what specic
context of civil/political society they are directed at. In
terms of content, provided that it is possible to achieve
operational coherence at the policy level, heterogeneity
in the message and even factionalism are not neces-
sarily a weakness, but rather a strength, since this
increases the range of interests and identities that can
be integrated into the political project. In other words,
the successful mass party elaborates and mediates dif-
ferent and heterogeneous interpretations of common
sense, with a coherent and operational political strat-
egy within the state in a way that is also consistent
with socio-economic developments. In this process,
social scientists and philosophers may under certain
conditions play a crucial role, providing ideological
discourse with a special logical coherence, direction
and authority. The cosmopolitan intellectual
1
of the
Third Way par excellence, Anthony Giddens, seeks
to contribute to resolving the difculties of the Third
Way articulation by fusing neoliberal economics with
more communitarian sentiments that draw on recent
developments in reexive sociology.
In this article I criticize the trajectory of Giddenss
The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy
2

exactly at the level where Giddens seeks to pitch it:
as a social-scientic/philosophical justication of a
neoliberalization of social democracy. In this endeav-
our, I am joining a growing chorus of Left critics.
3

The distinct contribution of my critique is its refer-
ence to research on Swedish social democracy and its
crisis in the wake of neoliberal globalization. Such a
focus on the Swedish model can be justied for two
reasons. First, the Swedish model was for a long time
a paradigmatic case for the European reformist Left,
because of its perceived capacity to integrate economic
and distributive rationality. Whilst there was a lot of
simple-minded hubris associated with this, I argue
that this has now resulted in an equally simple-minded
disillusionment. My exposition seeks to demonstrate
that there are many positive lessons for the Left to
learn from the legacy of the Swedish model, which
can help meet the urgent need of formulating concrete
alternatives. The second reason for focusing on Sweden
is because a closer reading of The Third Way makes
it clear that crucial passages in Giddenss dismissal of
what he calls traditional social democracy rest on a
faulty interpretation of the crisis of the Swedish model
in the 1990s.
The thesis I seek to defend is that Giddenss attempt
to reconcile radical democratic principles (no author-
ity without democracy) with neoliberal socio-eco-
nomic discipline (no rights without responsibilities)
is awed and cannot escape the essential limitations
on democratic citizenship exerted by commodication.
This is masked in the Third Way through a sleight-
of-hand through which very different types of risk
ecological, social and nancial risk are treated as
if they were one and the same. This conation of types
of risk ignores not only that the incidence of risk is
systematically unevenly distributed in capitalism, but
also that the radical democratic citizenship which the
challenge of ecological risk requires is undermined
by the exposure to social and nancial risk that the
institutions of the Third Way imply. In short, radical
democracy presupposes exactly the decommodication
strategies and social citizenship which Giddens would
have the Left abandon.
It is for that reason that it is interesting to reconsider
the structural reforms of the welfare state that the
Swedish Left mobilized around, and partly imple-
mented, in the 1970s and the 1980s. I argue that these
reforms provide important clues for how one might,
within the context of post-Fordist forces of production
and late-modern patterns of societalization, plausibly
construct a politics of no authority without democracy.
Contrary to what Giddens implies, this Swedish model
did not falter due to economic dysfunctions. Rather,
the crisis was politically determined: the requisite
power mobilization on the Left did not materialize
because of the limitations and contradictions implied
in the integration of the organizations of the reform-
ist Left into the management of the capitalist state.
This conrms the continued relevance of Poulantzass
analysis in State, Power, Socialism.
The conation of risk
I will not argue against Giddenss principle of no
authority without democracy. The problem is rather
that it is irreconcilable with no rights without respon-
sibilities. Giddens does, to be sure, imply the contrary
and links neoliberal economics with radical partici-
patory politics. The link is made, via Beck, with
reference to a generic conception of risk.
Providing citizens with security has long been a
concern of social democrats. The welfare state has
been seen as the vehicle of social security. One
of the main lessons to be drawn from ecological
questions is that just as much attention needs to be
given to risk. The new prominence of risk con-
nects individual autonomy on the one hand with the
sweeping inuence over scientic and technologi-
cal change on the other. Risk draws attention to the
dangers we face the most important of which we
have created for ourselves but also to the oppor-
tunities that go along with them. Risk is not just a
negative phenomenon something to be avoided
or minimized. It is at the same time the energizing
principle of a society that has broken away from
tradition and nature.
4
This reading allows him to treat the imperative for
democratic civic involvement in ecological risk-
management as equivalent and synonymous with the
risk that the individual faces in the management of
his or her pension, unemployment and health. In this
context ecological, social and nancial risk are treated
as if they had the same ontological quality: taking
responsibility for the environment and ones mutual
fund become one and the same.
From the point of view of political and ideological
practice this conation is cunning, because it recon-
ciles within the neoliberal social-democratic project
conicting economic demands with demands for legiti-
macy, social representation and civic participation. As
a result it justies on a philosophical-theoretical level
a broad alliance of interests that otherwise would not
be reconcilable. This parallels the practical politics of
New Labour in Britain, and its aim to be all-inclusive
and construct a politics without enemies, but ignores
real and concrete political cleavages and antagonisms
in an unequal society.
[New Labour] speaks as if there are no longer any
conicting interests which cannot be reconciled. It
therefore envisages a politics without adversaries.
This suggests that by some miracle of transcendence
the interests represented by, say, the ban on tobacco
advertising and Formula One, ethical foreign
policy and the sale of arms to Indonesia, media
diversity and the concentrated drive-to-global-power
of Rupert Murdochs media empire have been ef-
fortlessly harmonised on a Higher Plane, above
politics.
5
Of course, one cannot deny that positive-sum games
and social compromises are possible. Indeed, it is
difcult to envisage any social-democratic politics,
past, present or future, without it, and indeed the
Fordist compromise was essentially about this.
6
But
such positive-sum games are based on particular con-
ditions. Giddenss conation of risk obscures rather
than claries an analysis of these conditions, and
pretends that there is scope for positive-sum solutions
where there is none. It is far-fetched indeed to suggest
that Becks conception of ecological risk is of the
same ontological quality as the kind of risk that is
associated with the management of nancial assets,
which so severely constrain welfare states through
globalized nancial markets. The same goes for the
kind of risk that wage-labour faces on the labour
market. Furthermore, the human energies required
in the pursuit of a job and in the choice of a mutual
fund, on the one hand, and in civic involvement and
in the reasonable consideration of our actions in light
of ecological risk, on the other hand, are hardly one
and the same. In fact one can reasonably follow the
classical works by Marx and Polanyi on the nature of
alienation in the capitalist wage relation to argue that
these human energies stand in a relation of mutual
conict and contradiction to one another. This is
especially the case for the socially unprotected worker
without human capital, who enters the labour market
under subordinate conditions. Moreover, if it is at all
possible to reconcile them, it requires a continued
commitment to the traditional social-democratic
project of humanization of capitalism that is, the
decommodication that Giddens rejects in his moral-
hazard argument.
The fundamental point was already made by Aris-
totle.
7
According to him leisure is required for civic
involvement and ethical deliberation in the polity. This
means that free and equal citizens must be certain
that the satisfaction of their basic human needs are
guaranteed and hence are not dependent upon success
in the marketplace. But, furthermore, capacities for
practical reason, afliation with fellow human beings,
and relatedness to nature must also be fully encour-
aged and nurtured, and the autonomy of humans as
individual must be respected. Only when these needs
are satised can humans leave the realm of necessity
and enter the realm of freedom as citizens capable
of civic involvement in a democratic polity. What
is more, in a democratic society these needs must
be secured for all citizens to organize themselves
democratically and ethically in society. In the Eco-
nomic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 it was
Marxs point exactly that the leisure required, and
these architectonic functions, could not be adequately
produced for the possessive individualist of capitalist
society. Adequate amounts of leisure and security
are certainly not granted to the wage labourer. Further-
more, though, those who are afuent in capitalist
society are also constantly compelled to face the risks
and competition of the market. As a result, all their
energies have to be concentrated on the reproduction
of the conditions necessary for their existence, and
the development of the architectonic functions are
thus neglected. And, indeed, social welfare reform
constituted exactly a response to this Marxist challenge
to bourgeois society.
The problem with Giddenss conated extension of
Becks management of ecological risk to the manage-
ment of risk in the labour and nancial markets is that
the latter type of risk corresponds exactly to the kind
of commodication of human life that undermines
the architectonic functions. The result of this is that
Giddens sets utterly unreasonable demands on the
citizen. One wonders where one might nd Giddenss
heroic competitive, exible and mobile individual who
at the same time is a nurturing parent, rooted in a
community, in which s/he has time and energy to
invest civic involvement, and who in this context
would refrain from engaging in power-charged strate-
gic language games driven on by economic interests
imposed by necessities as dened by the terms of
market participation. It is as if the entire weight of
the social contradictions of modern capitalism is to
be borne by the individual, who has no social rights
at all to claim without responsibilities. The highly
unequally distributed incidence of this weight, which
stems from the unequal terms on which individuals
participate in the labour and capital markets, is too
obvious to require further elaboration.
Symptomatically, it is on issues such as these that
Giddens draws back from Habermas and Offe. In con-
trast to Giddens, however, Habermas and Offe continue
in this context to be concerned with the dangers of the
commodity logic of the capitalist economic system
and its colonization of these communal networks.
In recent work, Offe is particularly concerned with
the threat of social marginalization that is inherent
in private insurance. Such insurance gives powerful
incentives to those with purchasing and market power
to exclude others, in order to reduce risks and costs
on premiums. More generally, neoliberal deregulation
promotes residual measures, where only those in
need will be protected. This, however, tends to con-
stitute different welfare constituencies as fragmented
and marginal groups, who can easily be targeted as
minority special interests when further cutbacks are
called for, or as neoliberal political constituencies call
for tax cuts. This perpetuates rather than mitigates
the fragmentary tendencies of post-traditional socie-
ties.
8
Whilst Giddens claims that the Third Way is
committed to prevent such social exclusion, he does
not provide any reasonable evidence that it is up to
this task.
The Swedish model
It is in this context that I make the case for reconsidering
the legacy of the Swedish model. My argument should
not be seen as an apologia for postwar Swedish social
democracy. Sweden has been riddled with the tenden-
tial accumulation, rationality and legitimation crises of
Fordist welfare capitalism, and its original foundation
in a homogenous industrial working-class project is, as
Giddens suggests, anachronistic. Nevertheless, as neo-
institutionalism argues, different welfare state regimes
do generate different trajectories of socio-political
development and the universal welfare state regime
of the Swedish model provides a more propitious
framework for realizing a politics of no authority
without democracy than Giddenss Third Way.
9
More-
over, contrary to what Giddenss and Lindbecks moral
hazard thesis suggests, such a reconstitution of the
universal welfare state can be made compatible with
post-Fordist economic rationality. We do not need to
succumb to no rights without responsibilities. When
considered dialectically, the Swedish model can con-
tinue to serve as a guide for the Left, because within
it is an immanent logic of decommodication that also
reexively considers ex ante the terms of its economic
reproduction.
Giddenss characterization of social democracy as
having no conception of the supply side and productiv-
ity is a caricature, probably based on the comparatively
unsuccessful experience of British Labourism. Social-
democratic doctrines have indeed emphasized the idea
of a progressive humanization of industrial capitalism.
But these doctrines were also simultaneously con-
cerned with the development of the productive
forces, and hence with the supply side, as
well as demand side planning measures that
would achieve productivity growth and socially
reexive rationalization. This is, for example,
the case with the expansive wage policy of
the metalworkers union in Germany.
10
The
same principle appears in a more developed
form in the Swedish RehnMeidner model, a
theoretical elaboration of thoughts on solidar-
istic wage policy that the Swedish trade union
began to develop in the 1930s.
11
The RehnMeidner model sought to make a
humanization of capitalism compatible with
economic rationalization, through mutually
reinforcing policies that modied the capital-
ist wage relation. The key ingredient is an
unconditional commitment by the government
to ensure full employment and universal social
programmes based on social citizenship prin-
ciples. In this context, trade unions pool their
bargaining power in centralized negotiations
with employers and seek to maximize the
wage share for workers in the economy as a
whole. Wage negotiations generate only one
central wage bargain for the entire economy,
based on the principle equal pay for equal
work. This means that low-productivity rms
cannot afford the going rates and are forced
out of business. But rms with high-productiv-
ity growth are rewarded with lower wage increases
than they would have to pay in a free labour market
at full employment, where the labour supply would
be scarce. The effect of this solidaristic wage policy
is a stimulation of the structural transformation of
the economy and a diffusion of core technologies and
employment. Resources are more rapidly transformed
from the low-productivity rms to the high-productiv-
ity rms through the transformation pressure that
negotiated wages exert.
12
The transformation is further
enhanced by public investments in selective labour
market policy, which ensures that the labour force is
trained according to the new labour demand. Grants
are also provided for the relocation to new jobs. This is
the supply side of the model that minimizes structural
and frictional unemployment. On the demand side,
macroeconomic policies are pursued to prevent cycli-
cal unemployment. When labour demand in industry
is saturated because of increased capital intensity,
the state expands welfare state services (especially
in childcare, health care, education and the care of
the elderly) and employment. Solidaristic wage policy
between the public and private sectors and increased
taxes then partially take over the function of exerting
transformation pressure. Alternatively (or in combina-
tion with the latter) work-time is reduced: solidaristic
work policy.
13
Apart from this rationale for productivity, the
RehnMeidner model also implies a rationale of
redistribution and decommodication. This is because
work becomes a citizenship right and solidaristic wage
policy eliminates low-wage and precarious employ-
ment. The conception of equal pay is not determined
by the market here, but by the subjective conception
of a just wage of the wage-earner collective, as
dened and organized from within encompassing trade
unions.
14
This moral economy denes the terms of
legitimacy for trade unions in wage bargaining. It
provides an incentive for unions to set the macro-wage
high, so that the room for manoeuvre of market-
determined wages (wage drift) is minimized. As
long as an appropriate macroeconomic stance is kept,
this is productive because it facilitates transformation
pressure. It should be noted that the model ought to
be an instance of moral hazard. Wages are not con-
tingent on the performance of individuals. The state is
unconditionally committed to pursue full employment.
Should an individual nevertheless not obtain a job, or
should wage-labour be insufcient to meet the publicly
dened income norms (caused by health problems or
child-rearing expenses, for example), then universal
social insurance payments are available. This model
provided the chief policy paradigm for Swedish post-
war politico-economic development, and was
remarkably successful in ensuring a combina-
tion of economic growth, equality and social
security.
15
From the economic point of view, the Achil-
les heel of the RehnMeidner model can be
located at the nexus of nance and investment.
The imperatives of the moral economy implied
a general prots squeeze as wage drift had to
be avoided. In this context, there is no guar-
antee that capitalists would be motivated to
reinvest on a level sufcient to maintain full
employment. To redress this problem, the gov-
ernment pursued a deliberate low-interest-rate
policy, which in the context of a full-employ-
ment economy in the postwar period required
heavy controls and regulation on the nancial
and foreign exchange market. As a result of
increased concentration of capital, internation-
alization of production, and increased demand
for nance in the twilight of the Fordist period,
incentives and capacities to evade capital con-
trols and nd alternative investment opportunities
correspondingly increased. As a result, Swedish trade
unions demanded a progressive socialization of the
nance and investment function.
First, this took the form of publicly managed
pension funds, nanced by surcharges on capital. These
pension funds would provide alternative source of
nance, alternative to those of banks and shareholders.
Later, it was argued that a more consistent solution of
the problem required wage earner funds. The basic
idea here was that excess prots that resulted from
unions not seeking wage increases corresponding to
productivity growth in high-productivity rms would
be earmarked for the emission, or, in more moderate
versions, purchase, of shares that would become the
property of wage earners via trade unions. Hence,
holding companies (owned by workers) would become
the major investors in the economy and, in the most
consistent applications, the result would be the transi-
tion to market socialism in Sweden.
16
The wage-earner-
fund proposals were, however, defeated in political
struggle, and the Swedish social-democratic party lost
its nerve and retreated from the proposal.
17
Underpinning the RehnMeidner model and its
proposed extensions was a particular ideologicalintel-
lectual perspective that synthesized insights from
Marxian and institutionalist political economy in order
to redress capitalist misrationalization.
18
The latter
notion was coined by Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer, who
was invoked in debates on strategy in the Swedish
labour movement in the 1930s. According to Bauer,
misrationalization occurs when there is a discrepancy
between the reduction of private-economic costs gener-
ated by rationalization in individual enterprises and
societal costs. The reduction of costs of production
for the individual capitalist is not necessarily the
same as the reduction of costs for society, and in
advanced, functionally differentiated and organically
complex capitalism the tendency is towards increased
gap between these costs. This tendency is due to wage-
labour being a commodity in capitalist society, which
the capitalist purchases only for the limited duration
under which s/he needs it, whilst the reproduction of
wage-labour takes place outside this relation. Hence
capitalists do not incur the costs of this reproduction,
which rather is borne by society as a whole (and in
the case of laissez faire the cost is distributed to each
individual wage-labouring household). The discrep-
ancy between private and social rationalization can
only be bridged when economic production and social
reproduction are unied within the same organizational
meta-principle, with increasingly socialist traits.
In this ideological conception, rationalization as a
principle is afrmed. However, the naive equation of
rationalization with the unleashing of market forces is
profoundly problematized. What Swedish social demo-
crats took from Bauer as a guiding principle in their
pragmatic search for appropriate welfare state mechan-
isms was the idea that economic and social rationaliz-
ation had to be viewed from an integral perspective
and that a common organizational meta-principle was
needed (planning). This required an integral welfare
state that had at its regulatory core institutions that
could promote economic rationalization at the same
time as this rationalization was checked for social
concerns. Viewed from this perspective, Giddens does
not so much infuse Left discourse with a conception of
rationalization on the supply side, which previously
was absent; rather, he loses the important distinction
between privateindividual and social rationalization
and embraces the simple-minded and narrow market
conception of rationalization. In contrast to an integral
welfare state perspective, this results in a residual
welfare state perspective. Here, the market mecha-
nism is not modied ex ante but is construed as the
basic mechanism of social organization. Welfare state
measures are merely used as correctives ex post when
people cannot for valid reasons manage to make ends
meet through market participation. This is the welfare
state type that has characterized especially Anglo-
Saxon societies.
19
If anything, Giddens has merely
advocated a purer type of residualism, which is riddled
with contradictions. Though formally justied in terms
of individual freedom, this type of welfare state is
by necessity selective and intrusive, as it is forced
to economize on scarce welfare state resources and
to subject its clients to surveillance that restricts and
violates their freedom.
The radical implications of Otto Bauers reformism
should not be underestimated, because it implies a
highly conditional tolerance of capitalist social relations
and a fundamental challenge to the absolute discretion
of private ownership of the means of production. In
the Swedish context, capital has continuously fought
off the most radical and logically consistent political
implications of this thinking, as in the case of the
wage-earner funds as well as Gunnar Myrdals notions
of democratic planning in the immediate postwar
period. Nevertheless, Swedish social democrats in the
postwar period were sufciently strong to maintain
the integral welfare state principle in the form of the
RehnMeidner model. In other countries, this control
of the supply side has been weaker particularly
in Britain, where Labour in the end only came to
subscribe to a vulgar variant of demand-side Keyne-
sianism, without any elements of integral planning.
But this retreat to the demand side was not due to
a lack of an integral perspective in other countries.
It rather expressed a compromise from the position
of political weakness.

What Giddens characterizes as
the essence of traditional social democracy is, then,
no such thing. It is the dilution of social democracy
in its postwar compromise with economic liberalism.
His remedy for the crisis of this hybrid form is further
hybridity.

I would maintain that the integral welfare state
perspective, which centres on a decommodication of
the wage-labour relation, is as relevant as it ever was.
If we accept Giddenss contention of a more pluralist,
heterogeneous and denaturalized society in which
social policy becomes more complex and difcult
to implement, because norms must be discursively
established, then it is more universal programmes and
entitlements that are needed, combined with regulatory
policies that prevent capitalist misrationalization ex
ante.
20
It is a fallacy to think that cultural hetero-
geneity is antithetical to universalism. Only if social
entitlements are formulated on a universal level can
they be sufciently abstract to include a multifari-
ous range of identities and interests.
21
Only through
abstract social policy norms can the welfare state
do its job without refraining from the impositional
encoding of correct living on social groups. Such
general norms are also necessary in order to allow the
state to devolve the implementation of welfare policy
to different groups, so that they can gear the general
entitlements towards their particular needs and situa-
tion. Moreover, such a universalabstract conception of
social citizenship is needed to prevent social divisions
and distributive conicts between different groups.
22
It
is only through decommodication and this broader
conception of social citizenship that one can envis-
age adequate architectonic capacities emerging, which
would allow citizens to cope, for example, with the
environmental risks that Giddens raises by invoking
Beck.
23
But to be meaningful at all in this context,
universal entitlements need to be set at high levels,
and services need to be of a high quality. This means
that they are costly and that they require higher tax
rates and rates of public consumption than Giddens is
willing to contemplate.
24
Universalism, as opposed to
redistribution through means-testing, also means that
the prevention of poverty is best resolved ex ante at
the level of the wage relation. Qua the RehnMeidner
model, this requires a tight discipline on capital and
in its most consistent application implies a socializa-
tion of nance and market socialism. In other words,
social wage relations need to be modied before the
capitalist labour market generates its external effects
on the lifeworld.
This is why the Swedish New Left did not oppose
the universal welfare state so much as seek to extend
it in the 1970s and 1980s and to ll it with democratic
content, through reforms in the areas of workplace
democracy and social service delivery. This project
rested on a broad-based wage-earner alliance which
encompassed blue- and white-collar workers, and an
increasingly heterogeneous welfare state constituency
that nevertheless remained committed to universalism.
25

The workplace reforms centred on the Work Envi-
ronment and Co-determination Acts, which extended
considerable powers to local trade unions and shop
stewards to shape workplace organization. Work-safety
representatives were, for example, given authority to
shut down unsafe work, and it was employers that
carried the burden of proof in tripartite tribunals to
show that work was safe and could be recommenced.
The relatively strong language of this legislation and
of the Work Safety Laws, along with the strong local
and central position of Swedish trade unions (with
a unionization rate well above 80 per cent) and full
employment, ensured that these local provisions indeed
translated into real power to shape working life, at
least to a degree, in terms of the adaptation of new
technology and the organization of work time.
26
If
wage-earner funds had been implemented, this power
would have become yet stronger. In terms of social
provisions, ambitious proposals were put forward in the
early 1980s to decentralize the administration of social
services and to grant local clients inuence over their
administration. If they had been successfully combined
with the co-determination reforms, this could have
resulted in the freeing up of leisure time (through, for
example, fully compensated reductions of the working
week, and work sabbaticals), which would have resulted
in real democratization of welfare state provision.
In short, these reforms would have gone a long way
towards realizing the principle of no authority without
democracy.
27
Viability and moral hazard
If we accept that the Swedish model provided an
adequate mode of economic regulation in the Fordist
period, does it provide the basis for a viable mode in
a post-Fordist era where the terms of global capitalist
competition have intensied, where there is less scope
to tolerate moral hazard? The answer is yes.
28
First,
Giddenss and Lindbecks claims notwithstanding,
there is no problem of moral hazard. If there were,
then we would expect Sweden to have had a higher
number of vacancies (unlled jobs) at a given rate
of economic activity and unemployment than other
advanced capitalist countries in the 1970s and 1980s.
According to OECD statistics, the exact opposite is
the case.
29
Second, a modied RehnMeidner model
demonstrably provides an appropriate framework for a
progressive post-Fordism. As regulation theorists have
argued, post-Fordism does not inherently require a
numerically exible and commodied labour market.
Negotiated involvement constitutes an alternative
post-Fordist trajectory. Here co-determination for
labour on the shop oor, operating in tandem with
a solidaristic wage policy and active labour market
policy la RehnMeidner model, provides an alterna-
tive form for functional exibility.
30
This was veried
in Swedish industrial experiments of the 1980s.
31
This
in turn can underwrite high wage employment in a
public social-service sector, which provides use values
for social reproduction.
32
Hence, this model does not
presuppose the male-breadwinner model that Giddens
attributes to traditional social democracy.
What, then, was the problem? Clearly there was
one, because events between 1989 and 1994 shattered
the Swedish model as a paradigm. They started with
accelerating ination 198990, fuelled by strikes and
wage rivalry between different unions that fragmented
wage bargaining coordination. This, in turn, led to a
run on the Swedish currency, which compelled the
government, for the rst time since the budget of 1932,
to give up its full-employment commitment in favour
of price stability. The austerity measures that ensued
dovetailed with the world recession and a crisis of
the nancial system as borrowers defaulted on debt
en masse. This exacerbated currency collapse further
and forced overnight interest rates up to the unbeliev-
able level of 500 per cent in late 1992. Subsequently,
Sweden experienced negative growth rates through
1994. Whilst the economy recovered in the late 1990s,
the policy routines of the Swedish model were aban-
doned: unemployment remained high, social insur-
ance replacement ratios were reduced, and collective
bargaining was decentralized along sectoral lines.
Swedens post-Fordist development shifted towards a
neoliberal trajectory. Nothing symbolized this more
than the shutdown of the Kalmar and Uddevalla plants
in 1994, as Volvo eliminated spare capacity during the
deep recession.
But, as argued above, contrary to the neoliberal
thesis, the causes of the crisis cannot be reduced to
microeconomic dysfunctions and moral hazard on
the labour market. Rather, the propitious tendencies
towards a progressive post-Fordism were not realized
because of the failure to institutionalize a support-
ing mode of regulation based on the reforms of the
1970s discussed in the previous section. This failure
was, in turn, an outcome of social struggle, where
the wage-earner alliance associated with the latter
reforms was divided and defeated by forces led by
transnationally mobile Swedish capital. This resulted
in a hybridic, unstable and contradictory regulation,
with a crisis logic that progressively tended towards
ever more neoliberal solutions. Critical in this context
was the interpellation of strategically important state
apparatuses and social-democratic personnel into the
neoliberal hegemonic project especially those located
in the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank. This
pre-empted the progressive project primarily organized
around the trade unions, the social policy complex
and the Ministry of Labour. It would be overly vol-
untarist merely to conclude that the leaders betrayed
us. Rather, it underlines the importance of structural
features of social relations of capitalist accumulation,
including those of the state.
Increasing internationalization of production, the
collapse of Bretton Woods, and the globalization of
nance conspired to undermine the precarious relations
between nance and investment that the RehnMeidner
model presupposed.
33
This undermined the prospects
to determine just wages in accordance to the trade-
union moral economy. As a result the scope for
responsible coordinated bargaining was severely
limited. At the same time, employers had in the 1980s
adopted a neoliberal ideological orientation. Hence
they had deliberately begun to insist on a decentral-
ization of bargaining, and they resisted any attempt to
maintain a solidaristic wage policy. Increasingly they
took the view that wages should be a tool of individual
managers. As a result, they used the increased struc-
tural power that transnational production implied and
increased divisions within the wage-earner collective
generated by procyclical economic policy and the
ensuing wage drift to decentralize bargaining. This
was the determining factor behind the unravelling
of the public and private and white- and blue-collar
factions of the wage-earner alliance.
35
But these structural developments of globalization
and the deliberate actions of business must be actively
constituted and enabled through the state. Here we
nd the most interesting part of the story of Swedish
neoliberalism in the 1990s: the remarkable ease with
which the Swedish social-democratic personnel in the
Finance Ministry and Central Bank not only acted to
pre-empt the implementation of wage-earner funds,
but also deregulated nancial markets and, especially,
deliberately destabilized the terms of solidaristic wage
policy through a monetary and borrowing policy that
deliberately increased the sensitivity of Swedish interest
rates to global nancial markets.
35
The broader purpose
of this so-called norms-based monetary policy was
to contain ination by exerting market discipline on
collective actors, such as unions and social-service
agencies in wage and budget bargaining.
36
This is
clearly a variant of disciplinary neoliberalism,
37
and
it represents a redenition by the Ministry of Finance
and the Central Bank of the patterns of social repre-
sentation in the state. In effect, the Ministry of Finance
abandoned its support of solidaristic wage policy. The
tendencies towards deeper commodication of the
wage relation were thus enforced.
The structural power mobilized by this form of rule
was effectively used to create a crisis consciousness
at strategic junctures. Previously inconceivable deci-
sions to calm the market were taken in the context
of rapid capital ight, including the decision formally
to abandon the full-employment commitment in 1990.
The basic fallacy was that disciplinary neo-liberalism
would enhance incomes policy. Short-termism and
the speculative nature of international nancial ows,
however, totally undermined any predictability for
bargaining in the late 1980s. Apart from the effect
of economic overheating resulting from procyclical
policy, the defensive distributive struggles of increas-
ingly fragmented trade unions generated wage-push
ination, which exacerbated the problem. Of course,
this provided the basis for blaming the trade unions
for the crisis, and it is in this context that one should
consider Lindbecks moral hazard argument. However,
the largest source also of this conjunctural instability
can be traced to nancial capital. Bank lending was
overextended as a result of deregulation. This resulted
in bad loans and defaults in the deep recession of the
early 1990s. Capital deregulation and the strategy to
increase Swedens interest rate sensitivity thus seri-
ously backred.
The policy of the Ministry of Finance is so anti-
thetical to our understanding of Swedish social-demo-
cratic economic rationality that it is tempting to invoke
the term false consciousness. The policy clearly con-
tradicted the terms of solidaristic wage policy, which
also has been critical to the continued electoral hegem-
ony of Swedish social democracy, based as it is on a
wage-earner alliance.
38
The reasonable interpretation
is that the Ministry of Finance acted according to its
ideational convictions; this, then, would be a case of
the permeation of transnational neoliberal hegemony in
the practice of Swedish social-democratic elites.
But why did social democrats at the commanding
heights of economic regulation become neoliberals? I
have argued at greater length elsewhere that this recep-
tiveness to neoliberalism was generated as a result
of ideational developments within social-democratic
circles during the golden age of Fordism itself.
39
Under
the surface of policy continuity, the way of arguing
and justifying the mode of regulation changed. It
changed from the Marxianinstitutionalist conception
to a piecemeal social engineering conception. As a
result of this, the crisis of the 1970s was not, as in the
trade unions, interpreted as a crisis of capitalism, but
as a falsication of Keynesian ideas, which veried
the null hypothesis of monetarism. This shift in
the epistemic form of economic policy discourse, as
opposed to content, corresponds to the period in which
the Swedish social democrats established themselves
as the managerial cadre of the capitalist state.
Thus there was an impasse in the traditional social-
democratic project in Sweden. But the impasse does
not pertain to the policy of decommodication, as
Giddens suggests. Their decommodication strategies
remain the lasting contributions of Swedish social
democrats to socialist thought. It rather pertains, as
Poulantzas suggests, to the institutional materiality
of the capitalist state sui generis and its attendant
discourses, which tends to capture the reformist labour
movement.
40
As the implausibility of Giddenss discussion of risk
shows, the politics without enemies beyond left and
right is a mirage. At best, and disregarding the threat
of the extreme Right, we are faced with a struggle
between capitalism and commodication on the one
hand, and democracy and decommodication on the
other, where the former has the upper hand. But this
is not because of objective and intransitive realities.
Pluralist and democratic market socialism is possible,
and the Left does not have to reinvent the wheel in
this endeavour.
The Swedish experience does, however, underline
the difculty of engaging in a war of position in the
capitalist state. In my critique of Giddens I argued
that when the real causes of the crisis of the Swedish
model were understood, his argument amounted to a
tautology: neoliberalism is necessary because of neo-
liberalism. This points to a powerful dialectic within
the capitalist state: when the labour movement and the
Left have managed to achieve a degree of decommodi-
cation and generated hybridic forms of regulation,
scientic analysis in the state nds ways arbitrarily
to blame and purge the element of decommodication
in moments of crisis. We can see this in the fact
that the Left has been blamed for the crisis of the
weak demand-side variants of Keynesianism, when
these were in fact creations of the Right. But we
can also see it in the way that the economic elites of
the comparatively strong Swedish labour movement
were progressively interpellated by the institutional
materiality of the capitalist state and rejected their
own creation.
Notes
I thank Mark Neocleous for comments on previous drafts.
1. Pace Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks,
trans. and ed. Q, Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith, Inter-
national Publishers, New York, 1971, pp. 56n and 374.
2. Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of So-
cial Democracy, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998 (hence-
forth TW).
3. E.g. Stuart Hall, The Great Moving Nowhere Show,
Marxism Today, Special Issue, November/December
1998; Chantal Mouffe, The Radical Centre: Politics
without Adversary, Soundings 9, 1998; Nikolas Rose,
Inventiveness in Politics, Economy and Society, vol.
28, no. 3, 1999; Riccardo Petrella, Man nannte es den
dritten Weg, Le Monde Diplomatique (German-language
version), 6 October 1999; Alex Callinicos, Against the
Third Way, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2001.
4. TW, pp. 623.
5. Hall, The Great Moving Nowhere Show, p. 10. See
also Mouffe, The Radical Centre.
6. E.g. Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation,
New Left Books, London, 1979.
7. Martha Nussbaum, Aristotelean Social Democracy, in
B.R. Douglas et al., Liberalism and the Good, Routledge,
London, 1990,
8. Claus Offe, Modernity and the State, Polity Press, Cam-
bridge, 1996, pp. 10520; 147200.
9. See especially Ulf Himmelstrand et al. Beyond the Wel-
fare State, Heineman, London, 1981.
10. See Peter Swenson, Fair Shares: Unions, Pay and Poli-
tics in Sweden and West Germany, Cornell University
Press, Ithaca, 1989.
11. Anders L. Johansson, Tillvxt och klass-samarbete,
Tiden, Stockholm, 1989; Gsta Rehn, Ekonomisk poli-
tik vid full sysselsttning, Tiden 3, 1948; Rudolf Mei-
dner, Lnepolitikens dilemma vid full sysselsttning,
Tiden 9, 1948; LO, Fackfreningsrrelsen och den fulla
sysselsttningen, LO, Stockholm, 1951.
12. Lennart Erixon, Rehn-Meidnermodellen: En tredje vg i
den ekonomiska politiken, Arbetslivscentrum. Research
Report 4, 1994.
13. Anna Hedborg and Rudolf Meidner, Folkhemsmodellen,
Rabn & Sjgren, Stockholm, 1984; Wallace Clement
and Rianne Mahon, eds, Swedish Social Democracy,
Canadian Scholars Press, Toronto, 1994.
14. Swenson, Fair Shares.
15. Sven E. Olsson, Sweden, in Peter Flora, ed., Growth
to Limits, De Greuyter, Berlin, 1987.
16. Rudolf Meidner, Our Concept of the Third Way: Some
Remarks on the Socio-Political Tenets of the Swedish
Labour Movement, Economic and Industrial Demo-
cracy, vol. 1, no, 1, 1980; Jonas Pontusson, The Limits
of Social Democracy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca,
1992.
17. Jonas Pontusson, Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish
Social Democracy, New Left Review 165, 1987.
18. For an elaboration, see Magnus Ryner, Capitalist Re-
structuring, Globalisation and the Third Way, Routledge,
London, 2002, chs 3 and 7.
19. Gosta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare
Capitalism, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990.
20. Offe, Modernity and the State.
21. Bo Rothstein, Just Institutions Matter, Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, Cambridge, 1997.
22. On the integrative qualities of welfare universalism and
the gender nexus, see Diane Sainsbury, Gender, Equal-
ity and the Welfare State, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1996. I have advanced similar arguments
pertaining to the welfare state and immigration, based
on the research by Keith Banting. See inter alia Ryner,
European Welfare State Transformation and Migration;
and Keith Banting, Looking in Three Directions: Mi-
gration and the European Welfare State, in Michael
Bommes and Andrew Geddes, eds, Immigration and
Welfare: Challenging the Borders of the Welfare State,
Routledge, London, 2000.
23. Offe, Modernity and the State.
24. Rothstein, Just Institutions Matter.
25. Himmelstrand et al., Beyond the Welfare State.
26. Guy Standing, Unemployment and Labour Market Flex-
ibility: Sweden, ILO, Geneva, 1988.
27. There are, of course many potential pitfalls here and
devil in the detail that go beyond what is possible to
discuss here. Especially recommended on this is the
work of Bo Rothstein, whose overall conclusion is that
as long as universalism and decommodication can
be maintained, these problems can be redressed. See,
inter alia, Just Institutions Matter, and Social Capital
in the Social Democratic Welfare State: The Swedish
Model and Civil Society, Paper Presented at the 11th
International Conference of Europeanists, Baltimore, 26
February1 March 1998.
28. See Ryner Capitalist Restructuring, ch. 2, for further
elaboration.
29. OECD Employment Outlook, OECD, Paris, 1992,
pp. 626, cited in Bertil Holmlund, Arbetslsheten
konjunkturfenomen eller systemfel?, Swedish Min-
istry of Finance, Nya villkor fr ekonomi och politik,
SOU 1993:16 bilaga 1, pp. 41921.
30. Danille Leborgne and Alain Lipietz, New Tech-
nologies, New Modes of Regulation: Some Spatial Im-
plications, Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 6, 1988.
31. Especially noteworthy are the Kalmar and Uddevalla
plants of Volvo, to which Leborgne and Lipietz also
refer. These plants combined a remarkable departure
from conveyor belt technology, returned considerable
elements of crafts production and decision making to in-
dividual workers in a framework of strong union negoti-
ating power on the labour process and work environ-
ment, with exceptional productivity growth and high
quality output. As similar experiences in other sectors
show, these kind of experiments are not only viable in
the automobile sector.
32. See Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare
Capitalism. Esping-Andersen has recently abandoned
this position, but he does so on the basis of the faulty
argument of moral hazard which has been criticized
here. See, for example, Welfare States in Transition,
SAGE, London, 1996.
33. Internationalization of production undermined the
relationship between wage moderation in high pro-
ductivity sectors and future domestic investments. The
breakdown of Bretton Woods undermined the precari-
ous balance between international demand and domestic
macroeconomic balance. In particular, globalization of
nance imposed higher, and above all more unstable,
unpredictable interest and exchange rates.
34. See especially my Economic Policy in the 1980s, in
Clement and Mahon, Swedish Social Democracy.
35. Together with a vow not to devalue again, the govern-
ment declared it would no longer borrow abroad di-
rectly to nance the debt or cover balance-of-payments
decits, but would instead only borrow on the domestic
market (i.e. only issue bonds in Swedish crowns). This
meant that in order to maintain a balance of payments,
the Swedish interest rate would have to increase to a
level where private agents would hold bonds or other
debt in Swedish crowns, despite the devaluation risk.
36. Swedish Ministry of Finance, Valutautdena 1985 och
den ekonomiska politiken, Ds.Fi. 1985: 16.
37. Stephen Gill, Reections on Global Order and Socio-
historical Time, Alternatives 16, 1991.
38. Andrew Martin, Wage Bargaining and Swedish Politics:
The Political Implications of the End of Central Negotia-
tions, FIEF, Stockholm, 1993.
39. Capitalist Restructuring, ch. 7.
40. Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, New Left
Books, London, 1978.
Centre for Research in
Modern European Philosophy
Attendance by arrangement. Contact: Dr Ray Brassier (r.brassier@mdx.ac.uk) Research Associate, Centre for Research
in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, White Hart Lane, London N17 8HR, Tel. 020-8411-6220
Research Seminars
EVENTS
Jan-March 2003
6 February, 68 pm
How the West was One:
Heidegger and the Greek
Origins of Continental Phil-
osophy
Stella Sandford
20 February, 68 pm
MMMarx
7th Annual Conference
Questioning, Critique,
Construction:
Aspects of Philosophy
Modern European Philosophy
encompasses a diverse as-
sortment of traditions,
approaches and concerns.
This conference will consider
what is at stake in the differ-
ences between three of its
main tendencies today.
Saturday 15 March,
10 am6 pm
Speakers include:
Jay Bernstein
(New School for Social Research)
Rudi Visker
(University of Leuven)
25 waged, 12 unwaged
Capitalism and Philosophy Lab
Saturday 25 January, 26pm
Structure and Dialectic
Jason Barker, Ray Brassier,
Christian Kerslake
The start of a regular workshop on
approaches to capitalism in French
philosophy since the 1960s, placing
Althusserianism back into its proper
philosophical context.
Future topics will include:
Technoscience and capital,
Capitalism and nihilism,
Capitalism and psychotherapy, Rep-
etition and history
Saturday 29 March, 26 pm
Militant Subjectivity
Speakers: to be conrmed
Hegels Logic and Marxs
Capital: The Logic of Capi-
tal
Christopher J. Arthur
Surveillance and class
in Big Brother
Mike Wayne
The television series Big Brother, for which Channel
Four has contracted the rights until 2006, is in fact
rather more than a television programme. It is better
understood as an evolving multimedia, multiplatform
technological experiment, trailblazing free terrestrial
television into the brave new world of what Dan
Schiller calls digital capitalism.
1
The political economy
of Big Brother is inseparable from larger institutional
and economic trends which have seen huge capital
investments in new communication and information
technology. Along with the economics of Big Brother,
as a text, the series is also a cultural mediation of
leading developments within capitalism, particularly
the increasing importance of surveillance and the
capacities it gives elites for further social control and
manipulation. Precisely how we conceptualize the
relations between different levels of the social the
cultural and the economic in particular has been
the central problematic of the basesuperstructure
model in Marxism. I want to offer an unpacking of
that model in the course of a materialist analysis of
the techno-spectacle. In doing so, I will clarify, via
a critique of Althussers notion of overdetermination,
the meaning and importance of the concept of medi-
ation. I will also draw on some concepts developed for
textual exegesis by Fredric Jameson in The Political
Unconscious, integrating them into some of the politi-
cal economic mediations Jameson is often criticized
for neglecting.
Political economy
Big Brother is a format devised by Dutch company
Endemol Entertainment, one of the largest independ-
ent European producers, which by the late 1990s had
interests in more than two dozen production houses in
some fteen countries. The show features contestants
who are locked inside a house, cut off from all contact
with the outside world and monitored 24/7. In the
UK version of the show contestants are nominated
for eviction by their house-mates every week. The
two contestants with the most nominations are then
subjected to a public vote, where their fate is decided.
A cash prize goes to the last person left in the house.
The Dutch Big Brother rst ran in 1999. The format
was subsequently sold or subcontracted out to local
producers in Germany, Spain and the USA. The UK
version of the show is produced by Bazal, part-owned
by GMG Endemol, the British offshoot of the Dutch
parent company. The GMG refers to the Guardian
Media Group, who also part-own the UK offshoot. Big
Brother did not come out of a cultural and televisual
vacuum but was preceded by Survivor (whose makers
sued Endemol after claiming that Big Brother was a
virtual copy of their idea) and other reality TV shows
which followed the daily activities of law enforcement
ofcers and public service agencies.
2

The success of such shows in both Europe and,
crucially, the United States generated large demand
from broadcasters for producer ideas around what is
known as scriptless shows involving ordinary people.
It is important to note how well reality TV ts into
the political economy of television. In terms of the
number of editions of such shows that a given outlay
can produce, and therefore the airtime they can ll,
Reality TV is considerably cheaper than those other
staple fares of the schedules, situation comedies (which
cost on average $2 million per episode) and drama (ER
costs $13 million per episode).
3
With no actors fees
and no writers fees it is hardly surprising that Channel
Four could afford to strip the rst series of Big Brother
across the schedules six nights a week. Moreover,
reality TV lends itself to continuous originals (with
all the attendant publicity that generates) rather than
having to show repeats.
Within the UK television industry, the general logic
of capitalist production does not unroll uniformly but
is instead recongured differentially by the various
broadcasting organizations: BBC, ITV, Channel Four,
Channel Five, BSkyB. The material conditions of exist-
ence for any particular text depend on the broadcasters
identity, public service remit (if any), main audience
constituency or target, and the particular problem or
gap in the schedule which the programme aims to
ll. Thus within UK terrestrial television, there was
probably only one broadcaster who could have com-
missioned Big Brother and that was Channel Four. It
had the right demographics (a younger audience base
than ITV, which tends to be skewed towards an older
audience prole) and it was looking for a response
to ITVs phenomenally successful Who Wants To Be
a Millionaire?, which was being stripped across the
schedules.
4
The success of the programme in Europe
probably already made it too expensive a franchise
for Channel Five. Meanwhile the programmes com-
petitive elements made it vulnerable to charges of it
being exploitative, and the controversies that it had
already generated in other European countries made
it emphatically not a BBC programme (which instead
developed the more public-service-oriented, coopera-
tive and idealistic Castaway).
One feature of Big Brother is that it has become
a showcase for developing an evolving multimedia,
cross-platform and interactive experience. Continu-
ous live feeds to a Big Brother website gave a crucial
reinforcement to the theme of surveillance beyond
the restrictions of the edited highlights broadcast on
Channel Four. (The channels digital channel, E4,
also ran hours of live footage.) Thus Big Brother saw
the rst real convergence between television and the
Internet, between a new distribution technology and
an old technologys content. The integration of the
Internet and the website into the television programme
was profoundly attractive to the corporations involved,
since it facilitated worldwide marketing opportunities.
The Big Brother website markets not only the usual
books, magazines, caps and T-shirts, but also has links
to bookmakers and Big Brother-branded gambling
games. The Dutch site for the rst series generated
53 million online impressions.
5
The UK Big Brother
website registered 7.4 million page impressions on
the night the pantomime villain Nasty Nick was con-
fronted by his housemates.
6
The UKs Big Brother 3
(2002) meanwhile generated an average of 4 million
hits per day.
7
Big Brother 3 was also important in shift-
ing from free 24-hour web streaming to a subscription
service costing 10 a month. Important here was the
need to break with the cultural expectations of the
Internet distributing free services. We always knew
there would be a bit of a backlash from the internet
community, noted Chris Short, head of interactive
services at Endemol. The problem is that they have
been used to the internet being free. By next year
people will have got used to paying and it wont be
such a big deal.
8
Meanwhile the continuous nature of the programme
generates daily newspaper copy. According to one
estimate, the tabloid press ran at least 1,300 stories
on Big Brother 2.
9
Live feeds to cinema-size screens
in public places further spread the Big Brother text
into every pore of the public sphere. The phone votes
are the other important interactive dimension of
the programme. This generated yet more cash for
Channel Four, Endemol and BT (around another
4 million for the second series). The programmes
spin-off series, Big Brothers Little Brother uses the
discussion format to encourage endless mini-votes and
phone-ins. With the third series (sponsored by the
mobile phone company O
2
), viewers were able to vote
using their mobile phones text message facilities. On
top of this viewers can receive news updates as text
alerts on their mobile phones, costing another 5 for
36 alerts. What the boosters of interactive television
forgot to mention was that it involves multinational
corporations aggressively interacting with viewers
pockets. As Chris Short admits, Were trying to be
increasingly clever about how we move our audience
around from one platform to another.
10
The accumulation logic of all this interactivity is
closely woven into the feedback mechanisms, which
increases the levels of surveillance and manipulation
of the Big Brother audience. For example, phone votes
on Big Brothers Little Brother not only bring in the
cash but also provide data on audience attitudes to
both the contestants and the Big Brother apparatus
itself. The programme producers can then respond
exibly to audience attitudes and concerns as each
series unfolds. The multimedia and interactive com-
ponents of the programme t exactly into contem-
porary corporate strategies that have seen Internet
companies and content providers, such as AOL and
TimeWarner, merging. Thus it is no surprise to nd
that Endemol was subsequently bought up by the
Spanish telecommunications giant Telefonica for 3.5
billion, up from a pre-Big Brother valuation of 700
million.
11
This corporate base in turn underpins the
technological construction of a multiplatform national
experience and national community. The society of the
spectacle is not a collection of images, wrote Guy
Debord, but a social relation among people, mediated
by images.
12

An analysis of the political economy of the media
can show us the way in which the reality TV genre
is congruent with commercial pressure and strategies,
and it can even explain the development of certain
features such as the multimedia and interactive com-
ponents of the show. It begins to shade in some of the
crucial mediations at work on the cultural product.
In his textual/ideological analysis of reality TV, Bill
Nichols notes that it has a vested interest in subsuming
everything beyond itself into its own support system of
circulating exchange values.
13
We have seen that there
is a real economic infrastructure, a web of interlocking
nancial interests underpinning the hermetic quality of
the genre. At the same time, political economy of the
media is but one scale of determination we must attend
to. Political economy of the media is a blunt instrument
when it comes to understanding why this particular
format has developed now and not some other format
equally congruent with the industrys economic priori-
ties. In other words, it cannot account for the cultural
origins of reality TV; nor can it explore the particular
programme as a production of that cultural milieu.
14

For that we have to develop the mediations between
the various levels of the social order.
Mediations
When we study or observe a particular thing a text
or institution it is its immediacy that impresses
itself on us most powerfully. In its immediacy we
observe and study the text or institution as a discrete
thing, cut off and separate from other texts and insti-
tutions. This ssure between appearance-forms and
the real conditions of existence is a product of the
social relations of capitalism. Its competitive property
relations, fragmented processes of production and
displacement of social control into material things
generates its characteristic fetishistic surface forms.

Mediation reconstitutes the less visible relations that
lie behind the appearance of the object. Its appear-
ance, which strikes our senses so forcibly in the rst
instance, comes to be seen, once it is mediated, as a
moment in the movement of consciousness and the
totality.
15
Like a brass rubbing, mediation makes
visible the (social) patterns and connections that make
up the complete picture. As Kellner and Best argue,
The real issue if one is to avoid an idealism
which divorces social levels from one another and
from economic processes concerns the use of
adequate mediations, of constructing a sufciently
sophisticated framework which can map the full
complexity of cultural texts and social practices in a
non-reductive way.
16
If we unpack the basesuperstructure model we can
begin to identify the main social levels that require
mediation.
Media texts Texts must be conceived as a pro-
duction of existent cultural materials a point we will
come back to later.
Production process A text is the product of a
specic productive activity by particular people over
a given duration.
Production context This refers to the companies
or organizations in which the production process takes
place; its history, strategies and philosophy which
predates the production process.
Industrial context This refers to the industry (lm,
television, advertising, etc.) in which the company or
organization is operating. As we have seen, there is
increasing cross-industrial linkage through ownership
and alliances in the age of monopoly, subsidiary and
subcontractor capitalism.
The state The state has a major impact on the
media through its policies and the regulatory regimes
it establishes. Although there is no space here to
consider the state as a policy organ, much of the
commercialization of British television derives from
the 1990 Broadcasting Act. I will, however, draw some
allegorical connections between Big Brother and the
bourgeois state, later on.
Modes of development This is a category I borrow
from Castells to work as a link between the mode of
production and superstructure. A mode of development
refers to specic social and cultural trends developing
within the mode of production. Castells uses the term
informationalism, for example, to capture the rising
importance of communication and information tech-
nology to capitalism and its resultant social, cultural
and political effects.
17
We have already seen that there
is a close link between information channels and
surveillance.
Modes of production This is the master category,
mapping out the fundamental social and technological
antagonisms and priorities of an epoch. Under capital-
ism the mode of production is dened by the social
relations of exploitation of human labour power. Like
modes of development, which this category encom-
passes, we can also talk in terms of plural modes of
production in coexistence with each other, albeit with
decreasing frequency globally.
These levels are dened according to a series of
increasingly wider contextualizations. The rst ve
levels would usually be located in the superstructure,
while the nal two levels belong to the mode of produc-
tion and its internal transformations (modes of develop-
ment). The media are both a business, an increasingly
important site for capital investment, accumulation and
employment and a producer of ideas and values. It is
precisely this split between their economic and cultural
operations, the relations between them, which is the
source of tension and debate between political-eco-
nomic and Cultural Studies approaches to the media. It
may be useful, then, to distinguish between two levels
in the foundational category, the mode of production.
We can think of the mode of production as a general
category with no particular concrete content, no par-
ticular kinds of production, industry, or services. At
this very abstract level, to talk of the
capitalist mode of production refers
to the social form which production
takes within a given society. At this
level of abstraction the distinction
between a mode of production and
superstructures holds rm. But then
we can also talk of a mode of pro-
duction in a more concrete sense,
referring to actual industries, actual
production, actual companies, and so
forth. Clearly, a considerable variety
of concrete productive arrangements
or practices can be housed within the
general social form. How the mode
of production as a general social
form sets limits and exerts pressures
on media producers and products
18

cannot be read off from the abstract
mode of production category, but
requires analysis of the mediations
between the general social form and
specic media, their institutional
and economic relations or base and
their cultural forms.
It is well known that Louis
Althusser, in his attempt to purge
Marxism of Hegelian traces, rejected
the notion of mediation and instead
developed the concept of overdetermi-
nation. The problem with the concept
of overdetermination, however, is that it separates the
various superstructural determinants from the mode of
production in order to give them due autonomy. But
the effectivity of superstructural forces is not the same
as their autonomy. The latter conception is ultimately
indistinguishable from liberal pluralism. Althusser
argued that in the Hegelian model of how the differ-
ent parts or determinants relate in the social whole,
we have not multiple determinants but the cumulative
internalization of a general contradiction.
19
This is
the crucial concept: internalization. It is clear that if
all parts of the social whole are simply internalizing
a general contradiction (the economic base in vulgar
Marxism), then all we need do is devote our critical
and practical energies to that general contradiction.
And yet without some conception of internalization, the
superstructure disengages from the mode of production
entirely and we are left with Althussers concept of
overdetermination in which the superstructural factors
converge from disparate sources, apparently unrelated
to the economic relations which remain rigorously
external (until the last instance which never comes)
to these other determinations. We appear to be in an
impossible bind, caught between crude reductionism
and liberal pluralism.
Althusser is in fact only half-right on the question of
mediation. If internalization is one side of the media-
tion process, linking the particular to the general, the
other side involves a process of reconguration. The
mode of production does not pass into the other levels
of the social formation unhindered and in a uniform
and homogenous manner. Mediation involves a double
process of internalization and reconguration, so that
the logic of the mode of production which itself
must be internally differentiated by categories such
as social class, productive forces, commodication,
use-value and so forth pervades the social formation
but gets reworked according to the practices, agency,
institutions and technologies of a differentiated social
whole. To take one small example: live web streaming
for television increases in cost the more people log
on to use it, in stark contrast to the way costs fall per
negative copy for every consumer of a lm. Here the
particular technology of the Internet and web broad-
casting recongures the general logic of the mode of
production which it internalizes, thus calling forth,
in turn, particular responses and strategies from the
social agents involved. All that the mode of produc-
tion dictates is that social phenomena take up some
relationship to the socio-economic antagonisms of
production; but it does not dictate that all phenomena
take up the same relations to it.
The cultural contradictions of surveillance
Thus far the analysis of Big Brother has operated at
the level of the industrial and production contexts.
To link the political economy of the media to more
general social and cultural contradictions, we need
to move both down towards the modes of develop-
ment and production, and up towards the production
process and the signifying practices of the text itself.
The development of technologies of representation,
communication and information such as video, the
Internet, mobile phones, computer software programs,
global positioning systems and so forth, has massively
expanded the capacity to generate, store, access and
analyse data. There is an inextricable link between
surveillance and the cutting-edge mode of develop-
ment Castells calls informationalism. The technologi-
cal forces of communicative production thus become
the site and stake of the class struggle. New tech-
nology allows the individual unprecedented access to
a plethora of information, data and communication
channels, but it also allows corporate and state agents
unprecedented access to consumers and citizens. Thus
the meaning of surveillance think, for example, of
the debates around closed-circuit video monitoring of
public space whether it is essentially benevolent and
protective, or whether it is malevolent and directed
by interests inimical to those who are observed and
classied, acquires the multi-accentuality of a sign
being pulled in different directions by the conicts and
contradictions of class division and struggle.
Surveillance can thus be textualized as an example
of what Fredric Jameson calls an ideologeme. An
ideologeme is any signifying unit around which the
antagonistic dialogue between classes is conducted.
Surveillance as an ideologeme is the means by which
we can articulate the modes of development and pro-
duction to a cultural text such as Big Brother. An
ideologeme within a particular text thus counts as a
move or stratagem in the ideological confrontation
between the classes.
20
Jameson sees the cultural text
as a symbolic act,
21
which is to stress that the text
is a production of preexisting cultural and ideological
materials. Seeing the text as a production is vital if
we are to move away from the more passive notion
of a text simply reecting the wider society. If it
is a production, then the task is to investigate it as a
reconguration of existing materials, a combination of
those materials which has some element of uniqueness
about it no matter how generic or formulaic its materi-
als and operations. And one of the things that the text
produces is its own imaginary resolution to real social
contradictions. The resolution is imaginary because
the social problems that the text diagnoses can only
in fact be resolved through social practice. When that
practical resolution is blocked (by the dominant social
relations), culture performs a mythical reconciliation.
Cultural texts use formal strategies such as narrative
oppositions, imagery, and particular points of entry
or focalization on the action, in order to manage
and contain problematic social content. This implies
that strategies of containment are a complex process
in which problematic social content simultaneously
surfaces, only then to be repressed by the formal
strategies deployed.

Jamesons interpretive model is,
then, like a Geiger counter passed over the text; the
distinctive clicking of the Geiger counter here picks
up not just what is emitted but what is omitted by
the text, what has been repressed.
22
Jameson aims to
decode the political unconscious (the repressed mode
of production) that haunts the text, leaving its mark on
its forms and content.
How, then, is the ideologeme of surveillance both
articulated and repressed in Big Brother? In relation
to the housemates, surveillance is deliberately used
to generate some of the negative signiers associated
with a remote institution (the set design of the house,
the motif of the mechanical camera eye, the capricious
tests and surprises which Big Brother sets for the con-
testants) in order to generate a certain dramatic frisson.
In relation to the audience, the programme works very
hard to develop strategies to contain and manage any
anxieties which might cause them to distrust the Big
Brother apparatus. There are, for example, the strate-
gies of inclusion (the publics vox pop commentaries
on the contestants, the fans gathered around the house
on eviction nights) and presentation (the performance
of Davina McCall, or even the Northern accent of the
narrator, Marcus Bentley market research for call
centres has found that the Northern accent connotes
a trustworthiness and honesty which helps contain
anxieties around the remoteness and anonymity of such
consumer services).
The tension within the ideologeme of surveillance
between representation for public good or observation
for some private (or state) interest runs back to the
aesthetic origins of reality TV itself. Where once the
extension of representation to the ordinary in docu-
mentaries or social realist lms was a subversion and
critique of professional codes of representation, now
the ordinary is co-opted as a badge of professional
authenticity, a sign of the proximity of the profes-
sionals, including their stars and celebrities, to the ver-
nacular and the plebeian. This is one master strategy of
containment in which class is simultaneously acknowl-
edged and conjured away at a stroke: the ordinary is
valued precisely because of its difference from the
elites, but then we discover that since the media elites
and their codes of representation can adopt the style of
the ordinary at will, there is no class difference of any
note. Reality TVs production of this cultural tension
has its roots in the camcorder revolution which made
it economically possible and aesthetically legitimate
for the ordinary to break into the fortied bastion of
broadcasting.

Video technology is obviously central to
the feasibility of Big Brothers 24-hour surveillance,
but it is also central to the rationale of the form, the
aesthetic of reality TV. For reality TV at its purest (and
Big Brother is reality TV at its purest) is premissed
on the myth of real time, where both the gap between
action and representation is closed by the eternal pres-
ence of the cameras and the gap between the recording
and audience consumption (and feedback) is narrowed
by technologies of rapid assemblage (digital editing)
and dissemination (Internet, satellite, broadcasting).
Big Brother produces a surprising twist on earlier
1970s debates concerning the illusionism and pseudo-
transparency of dominant audiovisual discourse. In Big
Brother the authenticity and spontaneity of the events
are paradoxically conrmed by the very visibility of
the representational apparatus. For Nichols, reality TV
offers a richly constructed sense of contingency a vital
element in the pervasive now of tele-reality.
23
Thus
in Big Brother all those banks of monitors recording
the events unfolding in the house, which we see when
the programme cuts to the inside of the control room,
or when Davina quietly watches the inmates behind the
two-way mirror, are signiers of catching reality on
the run. This was the explicit and conscious intention
of the executive producer, Ruth Wrigley, who tells
us: I wanted viewers to see the control room, to
get an idea of all the behind the scenes work. We
were lming it for real, and it was a virtue of the
programme that viewers understood that.
24
But the
contradictions of the surveillance ideologeme and the
class divisions that underlie it nevertheless resurface
via this selfsame strategy of containment. The show is
caught between aunting its elaborate apparatus and
trying to persuade us that they are not really in control.
In the Big Brother book accompanying the rst series,
the writer is at pains to convey the producers sense
of not being able to control the events going on in
the house. But, rather like the base in relation to the
superstructure, the producers have already determined
the parameters within which their lack of control
will run. The contradiction between displaying the
apparatus as a sign of authentic connection with the
ordinary and its display as a sign of the apparatuss
ability to control and manipulate is the mediation, the
internalizationreconguration, of the more general
contradiction already discussed around the ideologeme
of surveillance. It is a contradiction that surfaces
when ex-contestants complain about how they were
represented by Big Brothers editing decisions. As one
ex-contestant Josh Rafter from Big Brother 2 noted:
The producers tend only to show on TV what they
want the audience to see. I was constantly shown
reading books. But I only read one book in seven
weeks. I dont mind that they made me look intelli-
gent like that, but it wasnt what was really happen-
ing.
25
The contradiction between authenticity and manipu-
lation also surfaces in this passage from the Big
Brother book on the computer software used to log
and retrieve actions by the contestants:
For example, if a producer was trying to put togeth-
er a lm package on two contestants, he or she put
their names into the computer and it would deliver
every instance when they were lmed together. By
adding the keyword touching this would be rened
to any sequence of them making bodily contact with
each other.
26

These contradictions at the level of form between
the authenticity of the ordinary and manipulation
are also played out in relation to the content of the
show. Despite the postmodern qualities of Big Brother,
it mobilizes powerful utopian desires which would
be left untapped in a more thoroughly postmodern
artefact (given that utopianism implies some desire
for those very concepts that postmodernism tends to
eschew, such as progress and transcendence). Within
the utopian promise of the ordinary there lies a desire
for transparency in our relations with individuals and
institutions that the capitalist mode of production is
structurally quite unable to deliver. So the hope that
24-hour observation will reveal through emotional
revelation, confession and action, such transparency,
and thus provide the viewer with the basis on which
to judge and vote for the contestants, is cancelled
by the very structure and premiss of the show. The
competitive relations between the contestants, coupled
with the monitoring of their every move, means that
they must instrumentally calculate their performance
both to each other and to us the watching audience.
Under such circumstances, every action and gesture
and confession becomes tainted with some hint of
perception management. The spectator is thus cleaved
in two, torn between credulously wishing to believe
in the emotional honesty of the interpersonal relations
or the revelation of their falseness (and on that basis
cast their votes) while also suspecting, like the most
burnt-out cynic, every word, gesture and edit. The
electoral element of the show thus now stands revealed
as something of an allegory of the crisis of legitimacy
bourgeois democracy now confronts. Like the Big
Brother inmates, the political class is trapped in a
system it cannot control and so perception management
becomes a central activity of politics when manage-
ment of pretty much everything else is subcontracted
out to the private sector. And the sceptical citizens,
like the Big Brother spectators, still cast their votes
(although in declining numbers) hoping against hope
that this time their elected representatives mean what
they say and say what they mean.
Programming
The crisis of bourgeois democracy, operating within
increasingly narrow margins, increasingly dened by
failure (rather than the self-realization of the world
of consumption), by remoteness, by elites, is both
offset and highlighted by media representation where a
more authentic participation and representation without
representation (that is, elite mediation) appears to be
on offer. People tune in for Big Brother because the
media speak the language of the ordinary so much
more convincingly than the political class, while at the
same time appropriating a simulation of participation
and collective representation which the political realm
is supposed to represent, but which it has evidently
lost, particularly for the age group (1835) Big Brother
is appealing to.
The world of Big Brother is very similar in many
ways to the world of work: along with the instru-
mental calculation of performing for colleagues and
superiors, there is the tension between cooperation
and competition, the rules and conditions already
imposed, the futile tasks and the boredom. Once
again, reality surfaces only for its potentially troubling
antagonisms to be recontained, not least by the fantasy
compensation of mastery and control offered to the
spectator by their alignment with the all-seeing Big
Brother eye. Furthermore, while there is class, ethnic,
gender and sexual diversity in the selection of the
contestants, this only becomes converted into elements
of their media performance (working-class contestant
wins because he does not seem bright enough to be
dissembling; gay man wins because he embodies emo-
tional honesty). For the audience, this social diversity
works in a contradictory fashion. On the one hand, it
offers multiple points of identication; on the other,
the text encourages the social or political basis for
that identication to be converted into an individuals
media performance. Indeed, were the Big Brother
contestants actually drawn from a more homogenous
group say, white men or the upper middle class the
show would be much more political, more evidently
about a social constituency. The social diversity of the
contestants is depoliticized in the editing out of any
reference to the social reality from which the contest-
ants are drawn, partly through fear of libel action
(even the web feeds have a ten-second delay to provide
enough time for controllers to stop broadcasting should
libellous material be produced), but largely because of
the nature of the programme (premissed on isolating
the group from any contact or stimuli from the outside
world) and the narcissistic contestants selected.
This strange abstract social unit masquerading as a
social microcosm is projected by the techno-spectacle
as the raw material of relatively risk-free national
conversation in the interstices of work (so called
water-cooler television). An ethnographic study of
the reception of the programme would very likely
nd the ghostly traces of the social and political
basis for judgement and evaluation beneath the surface
reduction of opinion to the merely personal, but it
can hardly be said that the programme itself encour-
ages this. Similarly, an ethnographic study would in
all likelihood nd an intermittent awareness within
such conversations of how the production apparatus
of Big Brother manipulates and controls the events
and warrants ethical judgement on their role. But,
again, it can hardly be said that the programme itself
encourages this.
Instead Big Brother is a symptom of certain regres-
sive trends within the public sphere whereby the found-
ations for making rational and informed decisions about
socially constituted persons and events are eroded by
a welter of mediatized interests (both corporate and
individual). The rst series of Big Brother ran at the
same time that mobs were being whipped up by the
News of the World around fears concerning listed pae-
dophiles. At least one newspaper commentator made
the link between Big Brother and a season of media
witchhunts and the opportunistic exploitation of ordi-
nary people, of fake intimacy and knee-jerk emotional
outpourings.
27
When everything becomes reduced to
perception management, the postmodern subject dis-
solves, as Jameson argued,
28
into a fragmented series
of intense experiences with little rational continuity
and prone to powerful feelings of either exhilaration
or fear, love or hate. Thus the public narrative of Big
Brother is characterized by a series of displacements in
which many of the contestants eventually particularly
once on the cusp of eviction become the focal point
of dislike and public condemnation orchestrated by
the media. This reached hysterical proportions in the
tabloid press during Big Brother 3 with the vilication
of Jade Goody. The triple determination of her being
poorly educated (i.e. working class), female and of
mixed-race parentage underlay the press coverage in
which she was described as a pig, the Elephant Women
and a foul mouthed ex-shoplifter (Daily Mail).
29

Such tabloid hostility to Jade and the other contestants
rarely broadens out into a critique of the programmes
producers and certainly never widens further into an
understanding of the industrial conditions shaping
reality TV. Those conditions of commercialism, cor-
porate alliances and the synergies of cross-promotion
are very similar to those determining the press itself.
Thus the real determinants of the mode of production
remain repressed, only symptomatically evident in the
cultural contradictions around surveillance, authentic-
ity, and the symbolic overloading involved in the
judgement of the performance of individuals.
In Big Brother we see one possible future direction
of television: the thorough penetration of commodied
information and communications technology into our
rapidly shrinking public spaces and public services.
Such public spaces are perhaps best understood as the
residual traces of an older, still present, but embat-
tled mode of development that was characterized by
nation-states regulating national markets and capital.
New information and communications technology has
been one important element in the globalization of
capital that has undermined that old order. The new
political economy of the media evidently has paral-
lels with globalized economy more generally. This is
the reality of reality TV. In Big Brother we see the
cultural contradictions of this political economy mani-
fest themselves around the closely connected question
of surveillance. The tensions between accessing the
ordinary and being spun by the media perform-
ance, between the authenticity of representation and its
manipulation by the technological controllers, between
participation in an event and being a mere object to be
controlled and exploited, are all swimming around the
programme as a reconguration of the class struggle.
In offering a materialist analysis of all this, I have
sought to unpack the often monolithic and immobile
basesuperstructure model and show that its problem-
atic is of continuing importance for media analysis.
Notes
1. Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global
Market System, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1999.
2. Jon Dovey, Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual
Television, Pluto Press, London, 2000, pp. 8081.
3. Ed Martin, Toss Out the Script, Advertising Age, vol.
71, no. 21, 15 May 2000, p. 26.
4. Mike Wayne, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? Con-
textual Analysis and the Endgame of Public Service
Television, in Dan Fleming, ed., Formations: A 21st
Century Media Studies Textbook, Manchester University
Press, Manchester, 2000.
5. Peter Thal Larsen, Spanish Were Watching as Big
Brother Stole the Show, Financial Times, 18 March
2000, p. 10.
6. Paul McGann, Web Reaps the Benets of TV, Media
Week, 25 August 2000, p. 8.
7. Kate Watson-Smyth, Would You Pay to Watch TV on
Your Computer? Guardian, New Media supplement,
15 July 2002, p. 40.
8. Ibid.
9. Ashley O Connor, Companies Jump on Reality Band-
wagon, Financial Times, 27 July 2001, p. 6.
10. Watson-Smyth, Would You Pay to Watch TV on Your
Computer?
11. Paul McGann, Web Reaps the Benets of TV.
12. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Black and Red,
Detroit, 1983, p. ?.
13. Bill Nichols, Reality TV and Social Perversion, in
Paul Marris and Sue Thornham, eds, Media Studies: A
Reader, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1996,
p. 396.
14. Dovey, Freakshow, p. 85.
15. Stanley Aronowitz, The Crisis in Historical Material-
ism: Class, Politics and Culture in Marxist Theory,
Praeger, New York, 1981, p. 13.
16. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory,
Critical Interrogations, Macmillan, London, 1991, p.
187.
17. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society Black-
well, Oxford, 1996, p. 17.
18. Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Cul-
ture, Verso, London, 1980, p. 32.
19. Louis Althusser, For Marx, Verso, London, 1996, p.
101.
20. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, Routledge,
London, 1989, p. 85.
21. Ibid., p. 76.
22. Ibid., pp. 21315.
23. Bill Nichols, Reality TV and Social Perversion, p.
396.
24. Jean Ritchie, Big Brother: The Ofcial Unseen Story,
Channel Four Books, London, 2000, pp. 1011.
25. Ben Summerskill, Big Brother Sucks You Up and Spits
You Out, The Observer, 27 January 2002, p. 9.
26. Ritchie, Big Brother, p. 12.
27. Kathryn Flett, Only a Gameshow? TVs Theatre of
Cruelty, The Observer, 20 August 2000, p. 15.
28. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, London, 1991, p. 6.
29. Esther Addley, Baying For Blood, Guardian, 19 June
2002, p. 10.

When Hermann Mrchen was accumulating materials
for his massive study Adorno and Heidegger: An
Investigation of a Philosophical Refusal to Communi-
cate (1981), he asked Heidegger whether he had ever
met his persistent antagonist. Heidegger recalled that
he had been introduced to Adorno after Heidegger had
delivered a paper on Philosophical Anthropology and
Metaphysics of Dasein in Frankfurt in January 1929.
As Heidegger remembered the meeting, no more
extended conversation followed. Heidegger never read
anything Adorno wrote. Hermann Mrchen once tried
to convince me that I really ought to read Adorno. But
I never did. The refusal to communicate referred to in
Mrchens title appears to have been a decidedly one-
sided refusal. Whilst Adornos work is saturated with
direct references and oblique allusions to Heidegger,
from the early philosophical manifestos and his 1933
study of Kierkegaard through to The Jargon of Authen-
ticity and the rst part of Negative Dialectics (1966),
Heidegger adopted a policy of silence in the face of
these explicit criticisms of his work. At rst sight there
might seem to be little to wonder at in this, even before
considering the gulf between Adornos Marxism and
Heideggers National Socialism. Yet Adornos intense
antipathy to Heideggers work is motivated not by
the absence of any point of contact with it but by
convergences which run much deeper than the starkly
contrasting philosophical styles of each thinker might
lead us to expect. In 1949 Adorno tried to persuade
Horkheimer to write a review of Heideggers Holzwege
for the journal Der Monat, adding that Heidegger was
in favour of false trails [Holzwege], in a way thats
not very different from our own. This history inevi-
tably puts Mrchens efforts in a rather comical light.
His book appears as a well-intentioned but doomed
attempt to pacify an antagonism, and in a case where
the simultaneity of afnity and hostility is just what
needs thinking about. That study too willingly accepts
its own secondariness, and is thus fated to break down
these two breathing authorships into large quantities of
atom-like philosophemes, which are then reassembled
into the large but unstable edice of an imaginary
rapprochement. Despite the local serviceability of
Mrchens labours, then and despite the existence
of perceptive comments and essays by others here and
there a decisive account of this important collision
remains lacking.
Alexander Garca Dttmanns attempt, rst pub-
lished in German in 1991, is now issued in an out-
standing translation by my friend Nicholas Walker.
(Not the least of its many merits is that Walker sup-
plies his own versions of the texts quoted, versions
which are almost invariably superior to those already
available, especially in the case of quotations from
Negative Dialectics and Dialectic of Enlightenment.)
From the start it is clear that Dttmann is operating at
a level which is in every sense far more sophisticated
than Mrchens. Dttmanns justied insistence that
he is not offering a contribution to the secondary
literature on these authors, but pursuing through an
interpretation of them a series of independently signi-
cant questions, is, as it turns out, part of what pushes
his readings to a level of interpretation at once subtler
and sharper than most existing commentary on the
subject.
The book deserves, rst of all, then, to be read in
terms of its own matter, and only subsequently to be
considered as commentary. This, however, is just what
most readers will be unlikely to do, since it is fair to
warn the book presents barely superable difculties
to reading. One ready response to such difculty will
be mentally to convert it into a set of descriptions of
these two authorships and then to judge favourably or
unfavourably the accuracy of this set. I shall myself
yield in part to this temptation later. I wish rst,
though, to confront Dttmanns argument, in so far as
I understand it. In order to do so I shall have to begin
immanently. This will involve me in repeating ideas
which are not yet wholly clear to me. I must say, too,
that there are many rich problems and analyses in this
book including the consideration of fate and sacrice
in the Dialectic of Enlightenment; the discussion of
REVIEWS
Thinking-cum-knowing
Alexander Garca Dttmann, The Memory of Thought: An Essay on Heidegger and Adorno, trans. Nicholas
Walker, Continuum, London and New York, 2002. 338 pp., 60.00 hb., 19.99 pb., 0 8264 5900 5 hb., 0 8264
5901 3 pb.
revolt and revolution in Benjamin; the account of
constellation and de-constitution which I shall be
unable to consider in this short review.
The hypothesis which Dttmann sets out concerns
the name: in this century Heidegger and Adorno have
experienced the force and power of the event in ques-
tion, and consequently that of the name in question, as
few other thinkers have done. And this most tellingly
where the opposition between them seems to leap out
at us most obviously: there where Heidegger with
explicit reference to Hlderlin speaks of Germania
and Adorno speaks after Auschwitz. In their own way
and in their own language both thinkers have acknowl-
edged the power of the name, and have inevitably
fallen victim to that power themselves. Their thought
can therefore teach us the impossibility of escaping
the power of the name.
Thus begins a patient, even a laborious, movement
in which immanent critique or repetition of the two
authorships would disclose the name as at once a
limit and a condition of both: [t]he name marks the
limit of negative dialectics and of the destruction or
overcoming of metaphysics, even if these approaches
themselves rst serve to reveal the limited and limiting
character of the name. Just how all this is so, however,
stubbornly refuses to crystallize.
It is clear enough that the intention is not at all
to construct any kind of synthesis between Adorno
and Heidegger, nor to adjudicate between them, but
to reveal in reading them a limit that they share, and
which might be constitutive of their thinking. But if
the name marks the limit of negative dialectic, on
the one hand, and of destruction of metaphysics, on
the other, the brisk reader will want to know why we
do not start with saying what is meant by the name.
If it is the trump here, it should surely be explained?
Or named? But this demand shows in its own form,
for Dttmann, why the name has to be approached
with such indirection, and this reason can be given in
both idiolects:
Caught as we are in the tension between concept
and name, we cannot simply hurl ourselves to the
side of the name. Or to express this differently, and
in Heideggers terms: caught in the movement of
a beginning which is marked by its own counter-
turning, we are unable to bename originary naming
itself.
Dttmann, in these nal pages, is interpreting a
story by Kafka. A philosopher, believing that proper
knowledge of any tiny thing would sufce to produce
knowledge of the universal, gets ready, whenever he
sees children spinning a top, to seize it. If he could
know this one thing properly, he would know every-
thing. Yet as soon as he gets hold of it, he nds that
all he has in his hands is a silly wooden thing a
discovery which sends him reeling like the top he has
just brought to rest. Thus far Dttmann has read this
story as a diagnosis of thinkings fate. Seizing the
top would be just what we cannot do: to express the
name immediately and hold the name within ones
hands. Yet on the very last pages of the book, another
possibility is raised, one which is almost the only
intimation of escape from a heavy logic of fatedness
which otherwise sets the tone throughout.
It is decisive for the understanding of the story that
we recognize what it is the philosopher would properly
like to grasp here: namely, not the resting object the
silly piece of wood but the spinning itself, or speak-
ing as such. If he were ever to succeed in uttering the
word of the word or in entering fully into the event
of language, he would be free of the reeling revel into
which we are whirled by language. He would be bereft
of the name, bereft of the concept, though not like one
who had isolated the concept or the name and incurred
guilt in doing so; but rather like one who no longer
needs to inaugurate anything. Such thinking would be
a thinking without the memory of thought.
A happiness which looks to us like bereavement; a
knowledge which looks to us like madness: thus, the
book implies, must happiness and knowledge appear
to the fated.
The gloomy subtlety of this is wholly characteristic.
So is the thinness of the air breathable at this altitude
of ideation. It is clear that for this writing what is
meant by the name has little to do with what is
usually understood as philosophy of language, still
less with philology; just as it is convinced that nothing
but petitio principii would result from an attempt
to understand the event in question in relation to
any kind of information whatever, whether historical,
sociological, biographical, and so on. This, however,
may indicate that the promise made that The argu-
ment is not itself conducted from the perspective of
either of these thinkers nevertheless does not imply
perfect evenhandedness. Adorno could describe his
own thought as a rebellion of experience against
empiricism. Negative dialectic inaugurates nothing
at all; it is time not for rst philosophy but for last
philosophy. When he was trying to explain what he
meant by constellations he turned to Max Weber.
Heidegger, on the other hand, reasoned thus:
Science does not think. This is a shocking state-
ment. Let the statement be shocking, even though we
immediately add the supplementary statement that
nonetheless science always and in its own fashion
has to do with thinking. That fashion, however, is
genuine and consequently fruitful only after the gulf
has become visible that lies between thinking and the
sciences, lies there unbridgeably. There is no bridge
here only the leap. Hence there is nothing but
mischief in all the makeshift ties and asses bridges
by which men today would set up a comfortable com-
merce between thinking and the sciences.
Even here there is something not wholly unlike
the at once cooperative and antagonistic rela-
tion between different kinds of enquiry imagined in
the project of critical theory. It is just that the price
paid for the conscious exclusion of Adornos explicit
criticisms of Heidegger from the discussion comes
into view.
The reason given for this exclusion is that the task
here is not to examine the justication or plausibility
of this critique. It is, however, assumed that such an
examination, whatever the eventual result, would make
no essential or decisive difference to the hypothesis
explored here. I am not certain that that assump-
tion is justied. That critique is not an adventitious
or merely polemical part of Adornos writing. It is
essential to negative dialectic in the sense that without
it negative dialectic a rescue, in Adornos particular
sense of that word, in opposition to a destruction of
metaphysics cannot be specied. With its exclusion,
a whole organ of Adornos thinking vanishes: the
theory of illusory concretion, a necessary partner for
the critique of empty proceduralism. And with it the
experiential middles of Adornos world, those differ-
ent colours without which we could not even despair
over the grey (kindness, wit, delight, dsinvolture),
drop out too. Dttmanns discomfort with this side
of Adornos work is stood in for, in this book, by a
placeholder, a series of attacks on Habermas. In effect
that whole side of Adornos thinking which differs
from Benjamins is treated as inessential.
The theory of illusory concretion asks: what hap-
pens when a decided leap hits the turf? At just this
juncture thinking-without-knowing decides, precisely,
that it is going to know after all in any case. So it pro-
nounces, about various matters of which it is ignorant.
So Heidegger could both declare philology unimpor-
tant to his project and keep on deciding to make it up;
so we tumble into the bathetic inadequacy of what he
was able to say about National Socialism; so indeed,
we arrive at the whole medium of Scheinkonkretion,
illusory concretion, in his writing: the existentiales,
luminous with the names of passion, suspended above
all merely ontic feeling. Thinking-without-knowing
which decides to know after all: what is this but that
amphibious uid, the quasi-transcendental, in which
so much vanguard thinking-cum-knowing remains
suspended? I repeat, it is possible that I may not have
understood this book. It is a long time since I found
it so hard to nish a book which appeared to have so
many claims to my admiration. Yet again and again
particular claims that it makes are not intelligible
either as transcendental or as empirical; they seem to
make no sense unless they are understood as quasi-
transcendental. This book is one of that elements
most advanced tongues, groundbreaking indeed in
what it erodes. It is one of its most defended fortresses,
binding to itself a joy it will not name. All pathos and
lustre of experience nd themselves here compressed
as in a dark chamber, where passions have the privilege
to work, yet only hear the sound of their own names.
Simon Jarvis
The new scholasticism
Nathan Widder, Genealogies of Difference, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2002. 190 pp.,
25.99 hb., 0 252 02707 8.
Who could have predicted that philosophy, whose end
had been announced so often that it was difcult to
imagine it returning as anything other than a zombie,
would be reinvigorated by a return to the medieval
notion of the univocity of being? If Deleuze had not
rediscovered the power of this theme, languishing in
the unloved pages of scholastic philosophy, would the
Hegelian vision of the absolute still be the only con-
ceivable horizon under which a philosophy could even
think about expressing Being itself in a transparent
logos? The thesis of univocity claims that there can be
no equivocal uses of the concept of being: each being
is said in the same way; consequently there is no kind
of being that is ontologically hidden from us. It gives
thought access to being in the same radical manner as
Hegels philosophy does, thus putting into question the
popular idea that speculative thought is doomed never
to get beyond Hegel.
The impetus for Nathan Widders book is clearly
the key section on the univocal ontology of difference
in Deleuzes Difference and Repetition. He has set off
in search of the background to Deleuzes references to
Duns Scotus and Aquinas, tracing crucial moves in the
philosophy of difference back to Aristotle. However,
at some point in his quest Widder appears to have
gone native, and returned with what appears to be a
work of postmodern scholasticism quite of his own
making. Widders book shows that the univocal turn
might itself be a perilous passage, and it bids us look
to other motives at work in the appropriation of the
Deleuzean return to Scholastic theology (a theology
which Deleuze argued was the matrix of Spinozism).
Widder begins by suggesting that the idea that
antifoundationalism and pluralism entail a commit-
ment to ontological minimalism is a mistake. Might
speculation and ontology not provide new ways of
undermining concepts of identity, unity and totality?
Rather than embarking on a new ontology, however,
Widder seeks to perform a genealogy that claries
the ontological elements at work in the contemporary
philosophy of difference. At certain crucial junctures
in Western philosophical history, he says, it is pos-
sible for the genealogical eye to discern alternative
speculative routes not fully taken, leading off towards
radical notions of difference, nally fullled in our
times by Nietzsche and Deleuze. Widders book is
composed mostly of highly abstract sketches of these
philosophical junctures: the elaboration of teleological
thought in Greece, the disputes between the early
Christian Fathers and the Gnostics, as well as Scho-
lastic debates about univocity.
The whole project of a genealogy of difference
raises certain questions straight away. Can a logical/
ontological concept like difference be treated as the
object of a genealogical analysis in the way, say,
morality or the prison are? The last two were taken
as objects for genealogy, by Nietzsche and Foucault
respectively, in order to undermine long-established
ideas about their development, and to bring to light
hidden contingencies in their formation. But Widder
seeks a genealogy of difference precisely to conrm
poststructuralist accounts of difference. It often looks
as if, no matter which period of thought we look at, the
face of Deleuze keeps appearing in its midst, grinning
and pointing out the correct direction for philosophy.
More problematically, doesnt the concept of difference
have certain philosophical and logical constraints that
morality and the prison dont? Dont these constraints
which would be the subject of the philosophy of dif-
ference need thorough examination before one oats
difference on the seas of genealogy? In Deleuze,
genealogy is put at the service of a philosophy of
difference, rather than vice versa. Hence there is an
empty space at the centre of the book, since the theory
of difference that is the object of genealogical analysis
is not fully expounded. What happens instead is that
difference is often primarily characterized in terms of
the vocabulary of excess and otherness (to concept,
identity, representation, measure, etc.) in a way that
ultimately suggests (because nothing is introduced to
replace the concepts just mentioned) that a coherent
and determinate formulation of it would somehow
betray it. While Deleuze attempts to construct a deter-
minate account of internal difference to rival Hegels,
Widder is driven by a pathos of indeterminacy foreign
to Deleuze. Rather than doing any differentiating work,
difference is continually fetishized as wild, feral, the
dog outside the house of Being.
As it happens, though, Widders real methodological
approach is as much deconstructive as it is genealogical
or Deleuzean. For instance, he rehearses certain inter-
nal tensions in Aristotles thought in order to suggest
(rather too quickly in this case) that these tensions
are irreducible, and that Aristotelian thought neces-
sarily inhabits an unstable and ambiguous ground, as
a symptom of its suppression of difference. At other
times, he will suggest that a certain trend of thought
(for example, Epicureanism or Gnosticism) manages to
harness a current of difference or plurality in a way
that never quite fulls its potential, domesticating its
creative powers at the last moment. But either way,
the genealogies continually lead to something that is
never fully spelled out.
Hence there is something of a paradox at the
core of this book. In Deleuzes case, pluralism and
groundlessness are effects to be found within a system
that is nevertheless itself intended to have universal
validity (as, similarly, Freuds metapsychology is not
itself overdetermined, even though dreams and other
psychopathological phenomena are). But if, as here, a
notion of difference as perpetual excess seems to hold
in a virulently antifoundationalist way at the meta-
theoretical level as well (or at least if there is nothing
to show that this is not the case), then what need is
there for the kinds of ontology outlined in this book?
Why does radical antifoundationalism or pluralism
need to know about what is?
Perhaps a subterranean anxiety exists within the
theory of excessive, indeterminate difference advo-
cated by Widder (in common with Hardt and Negri
on the Left), and perhaps this is at the source of the
attempt to reinscribe itself at the level of ontology, with
the help of Scholastic theology.
Because pluralism relativizes all convictions, it
tends to attenuate the connections between ontology
and subjectivity (to the extent of risking its own exist-
ence). A certain kind of pluralism can gain from a
pact with Scholastic theology because the latter offers
it a theory of the powers of being, or power to act, in
which pluralist subjectivity, weakened by lack of unity,
can nevertheless afrm that something, something
substantial, ows through it: power. For it is the God
of omnipotence, of Power, who is solicited by the
contemporary return to scholasticism, not the God of
benevolence, providence, redemption.
If this is true, however, it seems inconsistent with a
major shift in recent history. The age in which anxiety
was felt that God, or totality, might not exist (and
the universe therefore be a wasteland abandoned of
meaning) is passing. Rather, the most horrible thing,
worse than the vacuum itself, is that God might exist
after all. That God, the bastard, exists. The thought
that the world might be unied, totalizable, after all,
must be denied at all costs. Why? In such a world, our
glorious innite creativity, our precious fundamental
indeterminacy, might be eroded. But the only way
to staunch the doubt that God might exist is to give
pluralism the status of a counter-theology. Subtract
the teleological aspects of the God of the Scholastics
(benevolence, providence, redemption) and expose the
Being of innite power beneath. Now we can see Him
clearly: we realize that what is being sought is a proof
for the existence of Satan. Only a Devil can save us.
The only way a pluralist can look at himself in the
mirror is through the mask of Mephistopheles.
A new theology of power is sought to aid the
afrmation of our activity in a world of indeterminacy
and uncertainty. This often abstract, second-order afr-
mation of creativity and difference is proclaimed
loudest at a moment in history when the obese gure of
universal capitalism is blocking the view to any genu-
inely creative future. By its abstraction the afrmation
shows itself to be ideology. Perhaps the hyperbolic,
abstract appeal to the Scholastic theory of power is
drowning out a deeper anxiety about powerlessness,
which needs to talk abstractly and ceaselessly about
creativity, in order to conceal its inability actually to
create anything. The problem is that the ideology of
maverick, diabolical creativity suits capital nicely as
it enters its perverse age.
Christian Kerslake
Death struggle
Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual
Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael
Richardson, Verso, London and New York, 2002. 588
pp., 25.00 hb., 1 85984 822 2.
Why do the life and work of Georges Bataille still
exert a fascination over us? A steady stream of new
translations and reissues of Batailles writing continue
to appear, along with new critical studies of his work.
There is very little doubt of the relevance of this most
untimely of thinkers. Perhaps this is because the world
of late capitalism nds its uncanny mirror in Batailles
world of excess. What he regarded as extreme states
such as war, cults, games, spectacles and perverse
sexuality now constitute the normal states of every-
day experience. As Slavoj Z
iek has remarked, the new

technologies of biogenetic manipulation and virtual
reality promise not only freedom from bodily suf-
fering but also enhanced possibilities of torture. The
image that fascinated Bataille of the Chinese torture
victim (reproduced in Surya), whose suffering has been
extended by the administration of opium, was only an
indication of future possibilities for the iniction of
pain. It appears that a deterritorializing late capital-
ism has caught up with Bataille and the anti-capitalist
impulses he sought to analyse.
Michel Suryas magisterial intellectual biography
of Bataille is both a symptom of our fascination with
Bataille and an attempt to analyse it. Surya pursues
the secret of the fascination his work exerts by sifting
through the biographical evidence, and his thesis is
that the secret lies in Batailles fascination with death,
in particular the practice of joy before death. For
Bataille death is not an occasion for mourning or
for the assigning of meaning to a life (it was Hegel,
Bataille argued, who turned death into mourning/
meaning). Instead death has overowed these limits;
it is a spreading contagion that cannot be contained or
assimilated and it is this contagion that Bataille tried
to transmit in his writings.
Surya seeks the source of this contagion in
Batailles own experiences, and especially in the death
of Batailles father in 1915 when he was eighteen.
Batailles father will be familiar to anyone who has
read the Coincidences section of Batailles 1927
novel Story of the Eye. He appears there as a mad,
blind, syphilitic gure who destroyed the constraints
of Batailles strict upbringing by shouting to the doctor
who had come to attend to him, and was alone with
his spouse, Doctor, let me know when youre done
fucking my wife! Whether this portrait is accurate or
not was the matter of some dispute between Bataille
and his brother Martial, when Bataille admitted to
being the author of Story of the Eye in 1961. Suryas
discussion lends support to Batailles claims but he
also has to concede the absence of any denitive or
decisive evidence. Bataille did not only experience the
trauma of his fathers madness but also guilt because
his father died abandoned by Bataille and his mother
when they ed Rheims at the beginning of World War
1. For Surya this is the key event of Batailles child-
hood, and from this point on Bataille will be haunted
by the spectral, monstrous, mad, paternal presence
of his dead father.
Surya returns again and again to the death of the
father to explain the events of Batailles early adult-
hood. So, his conversion to an extreme Catholic piety,
which lasted longer than Bataille claimed, is seen as an
attempt to relieve the guilt he felt at his act of abandon-
ment. Then Batailles conversion to Nietzsche, under
the inuence of the Russian philosopher Leon Chestov,
is interpreted as an afrmation of the senselessness
of his fathers death. From a Christian No! to a
Nietzschean Yes! philosophy is reduced to a matter
of father and son, a very traditional schema. The image
of his blind fathers rolling eyes will also penetrate
into Batailles earliest writings on the pineal eye,
claims Surya. This eye, which erupts through the top
of the head and gazes directly at the sun, is another
thinly veiled autobiographical reference. What this
reading fails to recognize is Batailles parodic treat-
ment of the traditional philosophical metaphor of the
sun as source of knowledge. Also, Bataille subjects the
Oedipal thematic Surya detects to wild exaggeration
in his philosophy and ction, to the point where it is
radically destabilized. Although the biographical offers
resources for Batailles thinking, there is little sense
on Suryas part of how these elements are transformed
in the space of writing. What is lost, in particular,
is any real sense of the strange humour of Batailles
writing. While he may not make us laugh, as Sartre
argued, his laughter does disturb any serious approach
to his work.
Surya is on stronger ground when discussing the
most interesting period of Batailles life, the 1930s.
Biographical details of Batailles relationships with
such gures as Boris Souvarine and Simone Weil make
vivid the stakes of his political engagement. Surya also
devotes considerable discussion to settling, once and
for all, the charge that Batailles politics during this
period were somehow tainted with fascism, despite
their explicit anti-fascism. This makes it all the more
ironic that one recent reviewer of this biography (Peter
Conrad in the Observer) could not resist describing
Bataille as possibly a fellow-travelling fascist. In this
case, a fascination with Bataille, albeit negative, blocks
any recognition of the reality of what he actually
did, said or wrote. Suryas patient attempts to rescue
Bataille from these charges and from claims that his
thinking is nihilistic are essential, but can make little
headway against those who would peddle the clichs
of the mad philosopher.
After the excitement of the 1930s, which includes
a great deal of tactfully described debauchery along
with political engagement, comes what Surya con-
cedes is the ebb of the 1940s and 1950s. Although
he wrote against the background of the experience
of total war and then the Cold War, Batailles life
and writings display a growing sense of detachment.
Surya is keen to stress that Batailles political engage-
ment did not end in 1939 but continued until 1953.
However, this was not based in any practical political
experiments and lacked the personal intensity of the
1930s. The 1950s were, instead, the time when Bataille
consolidated his work, trying to establish it in a more
denitive form. He founded the journal Critique to
encourage eclectic research across disciplines, and
published The Accursed Share, an attempt to system-
atize his earlier insights into expenditure. Here Surya
could have taken the opportunity to contextualize
Batailles thinking more widely, rather than continuing
his focus on Batailles disputes with Andr Breton.
The biographical certainly has dominance over the
intellectual.
Ending with Batailles death in 1962, Surya reiterates
his argument that All his life Bataille wrote with his
eye on death, thinking of anguish and of ecstasy;
inamed, fascinated by death. While he recognizes
that Bataille did not regard death as a moment of
closure, but instead of radical incompletion, he does
give weight to an interview Bataille gave to Madeleine
Chapsal for LExpress in 1961. There Bataille said
that death is what seems to me the most ridiculous
thing in the world and he talked of devouring death.
What Surya does not consider is how the radical
incompletion of death threatens his model of Batailles
life as bounded by birth and death. If death is not a
moment of completion then Bataille lives on after
his own death. Bataille was a radically unconventional
thinker who probed the unstable boundary between
life and work, but Surya has produced a remarkably
conventional biography. Although his achievement is
signicant, and unlikely to be surpassed, his condence
in the biographical form appears misplaced.
Perhaps Bataille lives on and fascinates us because
he is an acute representative of the twentieth century,
with its mass production of corpses. Certainly Giorgio
Agamben has argued that Batailles thinking is useless
to us because, for him, it remains trapped within the
limits of a Western thinking of death. What Bataille
celebrates with his joy before death is, simply, the
horror of a meaningless death and our powerlessness
before those who would decide who is worthy or
unworthy of life. Has Bataille then been outrun by a
capitalism that is more inventive and exible than he
could grasp? Transgression and death, valorized by
Bataille, no longer seem to be threats to the existing
order but lifestyle options for a bourgeoisie seeking
new limit-experiences. It is the radical incomple-
tion of Batailles work that makes it available for
appropriation, recuperation or reterritorialization in
these ways. At the same time this incompletion also
makes it slip from the grasp of such appropriations,
and it is this paradox that Surya neglects. To para-
phrase Batailles comment on Nietzsche, it may be that
Batailles doctrine cannot be enslaved. This, though,
is far from evident and to establish it is a matter of
struggle with those appropriations of Bataille that
attempt to assimilate him to contemporary reality.
The importance of Suryas biography is, then, partly
negative: it has exhausted a particular biographical
approach to Batailles works and suggests the limits
of all biographical approaches to his work. If it cannot
yield the secret of Batailles fascination, it may be
because this secret is not biographical. The struggle
with death will continue then, this time with and
against Bataille, but further along the path he has
opened for us without reserve.
Benjamin Noys
Aestheticism of nature
Sherry Weber Nicholsen, The Love of Nature and the End of the World: The Unspoken Dimensions of Environ-
mental Concern, MIT Press, London and Cambridge MA, 2002. 216 pp., 19.50 hb., 0 262 14076 4.
This work seeks to reveal the underlying reasons
for what it claims is a persisting equivocation in our
attitudes to nature: that we both love it and remain
largely indifferent to its destruction. Readers should
be forewarned, however, that even if they agree that
there is such a conict of responses (or at least are
prepared to consider it) they will not nd any very
sustained or cohesive engagement with the grounds for
its existence. The author is a translator and writer on
Adornos aesthetics (though little is said on him here)
and a practising analyst, and her main inuences are
either literary and artistic (Thoreau, Gerard Manley
Hopkins, Gary Snyder, Czanne are regularly cited)
or psychoanalytic theorists. The work of Winnicott,
Wilfred Bion and Donald Meltzer gures especially
prominently, and, in so far as the book offers a con-
ceptual framework for addressing the questions it
raises, it is they who provide it. As one might expect,
much is made of the legacy of childhood experience
and the ways the motherchild relation its intimacies,
identications, reciprocities, resented dependencies
and ruptures conditions and maps our subsequent
responses to the natural environment. But Weber
Nicholsens purposes here are, on the whole, more
therapeutic than explanatory. Her main aim, she tells
us, is to provide a collage of meditations that will
evoke feelings and prompt reection on aspects of our
emotional experience with the natural world that are
so deep and painful they often remain unspoken.
Those, then, who are allergic to anything very
primal, New Age or motherchild evocative in dis-
course about the environment might do well to skip
this read. So, too, those who prefer the systematic to
the suggestive, the denitive to the elliptical, and the
ironic to the profound. Even those, however, who are
more charitable to a project of this kind are likely to
feel a little cheated of discussion of some of its major
premisses. Weber Nicholsen acknowledges that it may
be empirically problematic to insist that everyone
feel an appreciative connection to nature even as
they tend to ignore or abstract from its destruction.
However, she believes it to be the case, and we are
invited to take her word for it. Even if this is the
case, can we also be expected so readily to go along
with the apocalyptic presumption that we are all in
denial of an environmental devastation that will bring
us to the end of the world? Many will agree that
environmental degradation is serious, progressive and
potentially calamitous in its consequences. But this
is hardly the universal view, and even those who do
hold it will want to acknowledge there are now some
countering forces, and more to the historical dialectic
than Weber Nicholsen seems willing to admit. By
implicitly dismissing all sceptical voices as if they
were expressive of a Freudian negation, rather than
an articulate opposition in need of persuasion, she
detracts from the more serious consideration her case
might otherwise receive.
We might ask, too, whether what is really most
problematically at issue here is the death of nature
and the repression of its pain rather than tolerance and
adaptation to social and environmental exploitation.
Even if we grant that there is much suppressed grief
occasioned by the extinction of species and destruction
of wilderness, we surely need to be concerned with
the readiness of so many to accept and live with the
political and economic consequences of the Western
consumerist model. Viewed through this more politi-
cized optic, the rhetoric that speaks of a generalized
and collective end of the world or death of nature
looks itself to be repressive or evasive of another and
more likely denouement: that the afuent will continue
to inherit the earth together with many of their more
favoured species and places and in doing so come
to tolerate increasingly aggressive measures to protect
overdevelopment and hold off the inux of economic
migrants and eco-refugees from less fortunate areas
of the globe.
But readers who can get past, or agree to shelve,
these larger issues may nd something to engage
them in the more particular questions raised in this
book. There is, for example, an extended reection on
natures ineffability and our silence in the face of it.
We are referred here to Adornos arresting although
surely contestable point in his Aesthetic Theory
that the disinclination to talk about natural beauty
is strongest where love of it survives. The How
Beautiful at the sight of landscape insults its silence
and reduces its beauty. And there are relevant and
provocative citations in this context from a number of
other authors. In the end, though, Weber Nicholsens
discussion is disappointing, mainly because it quickly
removes itself from any concern with the aesthetic
motivations for silence, and comes to focus exclusively
on its role as psychological self-protection. (What
interests her primarily is our reluctance to talk of our
environmental concerns, a silence that is treated as
exemplary or a more general resistance to speaking
about our profoundest loves and anxieties, and for
which she provides a confusing array of explanations:
that it is designed to protect the loved object, or to
guard against betrayal of love, or to avoid madness)
She also leaves it unclear whether it would be a better
thing if we did manage to become more voluble. But
there are resonances here that an interested party can
reect upon.
Something similar can be said of the themes of
Chapter 5. They relate to a recurring motif of the
book concerning the differential impact of individual
death and species extinction (the end of birth), but
are directed specically to the psychological effects
of confronting the possibility of wholesale planetary
devastation. The argument here owes a good deal to
Robert Jay Liftons account of the role of symbolic
immortality (the afterlife guaranteed by descend-
ants, religious beliefs, cultural achievements and the
natural world) in allowing us to come to terms with
our individual mortality, and the prospect of its loss in
the face of nuclear holocaust and ecological collapse.
As suggested, one can question how helpful it is to
think about our environmental situation in quite such
apocalyptic terms, but the considerations raised here
are important and worth attention. However, this only
makes the concluding discussions of the book seem all
the more woolly and feeble. For when Weber Nicholsen
turns there to the question of possible remedies for
our plight, she has little to offer but platitudes. Our
capacity to meet the adaptive challenges we face will
depend, she tells us, on our ability to collaborate
effectively as thinking individuals; while the wish for
a clear and denitive answer to the question of what
we should do reects the urgency and anxiety we are
prey to. Could one disagree?
Kate Soper
Expunction
William Rehg and James Bohman, eds, Pluralism and the Pragmatic Turn: The Transformation of Critical
Theory. Essays in Honor of Thomas McCarthy, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001. 464 pp., 16.50 pb., 0 262
6813 2 pb.
This collection of essays is largely concerned with
exploring the ramications of Thomas McCarthys
pragmatic critique of Habermass theory of com-
municative action. These could be formulated in terms
of the following questions. How is critique possible
once the strict formal presuppositions of Habermass
theory of communicative rationality are relaxed to
allow for different perspectives within the communi-
cative sphere? And what is the consequence of this
admission for democratic theory?
The formal presuppositions or idealizations of
communicative action are fourfold for Habermas.
Every communicative act involves the supposition of
a common objective world to which the interlocutors
refer. Subjects are accountable for their acts and omis-
sions. Validity claims are unconditional in the sense
that something is lost in the sense of propositions
and ethical judgements if truth and rightness are
construed as properties that they can lose. Discourse
or argumentation theory represents the intersubjective
forum for the justication of norms and ideals through
the decentring of participants perspectives. Taken
together these comprise the formal-pragmatic pre-
suppositions of communicative rationality. They are
implicit in every action without for that reason being
realized.
The collection begins with a helpful restatement of
this theory through a contrastive exposition with Kants
theory of ideas. (Habermas calls it a genealogical
exposition of the idealizing presuppositions of com-
municative action, but it is unclear why.) Like Kantian
ideas, the idealizations of communicative rationality
have a twofold function: a norm-setting function
that enables critique, and a concealing function that
calls for vigilance and self-critique. Without these
idealizations we lose the capacity to critique, although
with them we constantly run the risk of lapsing into
illusion through hypostatization.
The central question that this theory gives rise to
and it is a question that is taken up in the essays
that immediately succeed it is why Habermas views
the transition from idealism to formal pragmatics as a
de-transcendentalization of reason? What a transcend-
ental theory consists in is a contested notion that
cannot be adequately developed here, but at least
one important sense is the concern to distil the pure
elements of reason and rationality which can then
serve as the basis of a general (i.e. transhistorical
and transcultural) theory of rationality. In this respect
Habermass theory of communicative rationality in
its concern to distil the pure elements of rationality
that can serve as the formal presupposition of any
communicative act regardless of context appears to
remain very much within the transcendental fold. This
is notwithstanding what he says about the dissolution
of Kantian oppositions (appearance/reality, transcen-
dental/empirical) implied in the pragmatic turn.
Hereafter the contributions take up what William
Rehg refers to as indexically sensitive idealizations
that participants nd useful in their discursive activi-
ties. The problem could be put thus: if we give up on
Habermass attempt to distil the purely formal presup-
positions of communicative rationality along with the
project of a general theory of rationality and instead
admit of no context-independent ideals underpinning
communicative action, how are we to account for the
possibility of critique?
While McCarthy himself demurs at bidding an
irrevocable farewell to general theory, his former
students, emboldened by Rortys critique of com-
municative rationality, do not hesitate. Both Bohman
and Rehg attempt to show how critique is possible
having dispensed with context-independent idealiz-
ations. Bohman offers an interperspectival rather
than transperspectival account of critique. Hitherto,
according to Bohman, critical theory has sought
to account for the possibility of critique in trans-
perspectival terms. In other words, the superiority of
critical theory over traditional theory was to be under-
stood in epistemic terms in its capacity to penetrate
through to the core of social reality, while traditional
theory splashed about in the realm of appearance. To
cut a long story very short indeed, Bohman believes
that something of the transperspectival conception
survives in Habermass theory, particularly in the
residual metaphysical realism in his consensus theory
of truth as criticized by Rorty.
Bohman explicates the interperspectival concep-
tion of critique as a second-person standpoint that
mediates between rst- and third-person perspectives.
First-person perspectives yield cultural self-interpre-
tations that serve to render explicit what is already
in some sense known in a practical and proximate
way. Third-person perspectives, on the other hand,
produce objective descriptions and explanatory
theories. Neither perspective, however, represents an
adequate basis for critique: rst-person perspectives,
because they simply render explicit what was implicit
and are powerless to generate new norms and ideals;
third-person perspectives because they remain trapped
in the epistemological delusion that we can arrive
at warranted access to the world. Instead of taking
interpretation and explanation as mutually exclusive
social scientic methodologies, Bohman recommends
that we consider them as dual perspectives within a
critical social theory. When we adopt a second-person
dialogical perspective, theories and interpretations
are dramatized and enacted. Norms and ideals that
were previously perceived statically from rst- and
third-person perspectives are now viewed as emerging
from a dialogical process between social scientist or
critic and her prospective audience. In other words,
Bohman seeks to salvage the notion of critique, which
threatens to evaporate altogether as a result of the
rejection of context-independent idealizations, through
a Gadamerian critical hermeneutics.
Critical hermeneutics is probably the right direc-
tion in which to head to account for the possibility of
critique, although not in the highly idealized sense that
Bohman is advocating. The problem with Bohmans
account like so many post-Habermasian accounts
is that it tends to presuppose an operative, politi-
cally functioning public sphere as the precondition of
its communicative reconstruction, delivering critical
consensuses on a range of issues of immediate public
concern. Phenomena like the de-activization or priva-
tization of the modern individual and the collapse of
the actual (albeit restricted) public sphere that was the
bourgeois public sphere of classical liberalism, which
used to exercise critical theorists, have mysteriously
vanished and been replaced by a vital public sphere
eager to fathom its own normative underpinnings.
Bohman is able to ignore a good deal of the concerns
of traditional critical theory by dismissing its objec-
tivist pretensions. But this is hugely problematic. Does
he really want to suggest that all critical theory from
Marx to Habermas is metaphysically realist in orienta-
tion seeing its essential difference and superiority
to traditional social theory in the cognitive access it
secures to social reality in itself, rather than how it
appears to the situated observer? To say this would
be a gross mischaracterization of traditional critical
theory that completely ignores its relationship to ideal-
ism and overstates the importance of Rortys natural-
izingpragmatic critique of traditional epistemology.
The charge of idealizing the public sphere and
refusing to think its historical collapse could be level-
led a fortiori at the position set out by William Rehg.
Like Bohman, Rehg is concerned to account for the
possibility of critique having admitted an ineliminable
perspectivism into the communicative sphere. Unlike
Bohman, however, who links the possibility of critique
to the possibility of new and better interpretations
resulting from dialogue, Rehg seeks to understand
critique in terms of an ever-widening public that
the social scientist addresses. Thus he distinguishes
between mere laboratory talk, in which the back-
ground suppositions ensuring successful communi-
cation are many; locality-transcendent claims, in
which scientists subject their arguments to peer review;
and nally context-transcendent claims, in which
scientists address scientists from other elds or even
the lay public itself. Scientic claims, he holds, are
subject to their severest test and process of justi-
cation when they are addressed to the general public
and their background suppositions are reduced to a
minimum. Thus the conception of critique emerges as
a kind of democratic validation of scientic claims in
which the onus is on the scientist/expert to couch her
argument in terms that a lay audience can understand
and thereby engage with. Rehg points to the public
criticism to which research into the AIDS virus was
subject as a case in point.
The shortcomings of this account of the possibility
of critique hardly need stating. What, one wonders,
would be Rehgs response to the all too imaginable
prospect of the context-transcending claim of the sci-
entist being met with indifference? While doubtless
there are pockets of political activism in contemporary
public life over issues pertaining to gender, sexuality
and environment, these tend to be the exception rather
than the rule. What happens when the scientist or
critic doesnt have an audience to whom to address
the claim? I think the real mistake here is to suppose
that context can do all the work in restoring the public
realm. What is missing is any account of how the intel-
lectual division of labour that structures knowledge
is implicated in the process of social fragmentation
and the loss of meaning, anomie and nihilism that
this entails.
The political ramications of a further or fully
pragmatized reason lie in a more intransigent pluralism
than Habermass consensus theory could have admit-
ted. This would seem to favour a Rawlsian conception
of justice over a Habermasian one because of its
indifference to individual and essentially private con-
ceptions of the good. The essays collected in section
three of the volume for the most part explore this
possibility. Andrew Buchwalter recommends Hegels
political pluralism over Rawlss. Seyla Benhabib offers
a critique of the Kantian conception of a cosmopolitan
right as an inadequate basis for defending the claims of
refugees and asylum seekers to political participation.
The one exception is Axel Honneths essay on Dewey
and the logic of fanaticism. Drawing on Deweys
account of the rise of nationalism and, later, fascism
in Germany, Honneth stages the relation between prag-
matism and idealism in more fruitful ways than was
possible in section one, with its over-reliance on the
naturalistic pragmatism of Rorty.
The principal dissonant note, however, is struck by
Joel Whitebook in the essays collected in section two
on conceptions of autonomy and the self. Whitebook
gives a trenchant critique of the intersubjectivist turn
of Habermasian and post-Habermasian critical theory,
singling out Habermas and Honneth and their reli-
ance on George Herbert Meads social psychology in
their respective concepts of recognition. Whitebook,
in my view rightly, argues that the consequence of the
attempt to socialize the subject all the way down is
the loss of a good deal of radical and revolutionary
potential in critical theory. Might not the inability to
see anything other than different shades of liberalism
on the political horizon have something to do with the
predominance of the intersubjectivist paradigm over
the last thirty years and the success with which it has
met in effectively expunging the concept of negativity
from social theory?
Timothy Hall
Defensive work
Jonathan Joseph, Hegemony: A Realist Analysis,
Routledge, London and New York, 2002. 240 + xii
pp., 60.00 hb., 0 415 26836 2.
Hegemony: A Realist Analysis has, as its title indicates,
two closely related aims. First, it hopes to present
an account of the principal theories of hegemony, as
well as a range of hegemonic practices, in such a way
as to distil from them a new concept of hegemony
that is not only useful politically but also scientic.
In this sense, Hegemony works through processes of
historical recovery, critical engagement and concep-
tual discipline. Second, it enters into a dialogue with
Roy Bhaskars account of critical realism within the
social sciences, and in particular his overall theoretical
approximation to society contained in the idea of the
transformational model of social activity (TMSA),
so as to endow the scientic concept of hegemony
with a critical realist stamp and, thereby, reect on the
relations between Marxist and realist materialisms.
These critical aims presuppose each other and some-
times work well in tandem, as when, for example,
Joseph rescues Gramsci from his Italian voluntarist
milieu (and the inuence of Machiavelli, Croce, Labri-
ola, Sorel et al.) that is, from an idealist philosophy
of history and reinvents him as a realist political
thinker. For the most part, however, Josephs rst
aim endlessly stumbles over his second, dening the
style and tenor of the book, as well as the exhausting
experience of its reading. It is at times dogmatic, and
relentlessly accumulative, rather than probing, in its
subjection of all to the same realist criticism. As the
work engages with hegemony in-theory-and-practice
(in the work of Williams, Thompson, Anderson and
Nairn, Althusser, Poulantzas, Derrida, Laclau and
Mouffe, and Habermas, among others) its arguments
repeatedly run into the wall of merely asserted critical
realist postulates. This is particularly so in the series
of binarisms generated by the opposition between the
intransitive and transitive realms that is constitutive of
critical realism as a conception of science, and that
here comes to organize and dene the new, scientic
concept of hegemony as a combination of a hegemony
1 (of deep structural reproduction) and a hegemony
2 (of surface political and cultural projects). From
this perspective, hegemony is an emergence into
surface agency of structural possibility a nice idea,
poorly argued.
In Josephs view, critical realism endows the concept
of hegemony with the ontological depth which it had
lacked: the social as a stratied combinatory of struc-
tures and causal mechanisms. And it is the addition of
the idea of hegemony 1 to the more common historical
notion of hegemony 2 that fulls this scientic func-
tion. However, there is no real explanation of how
causal mechanisms and deep structures work, in what
sense they exist independently of social practices, and
how they are more or less unconsciously reproduced.
And although there are references to the historical
effects of unintended consequences and to the abstract
character of deep structures (at one point the idea of
mode of production itself is given as an example of
a causal mechanism), no real explanations are given
we are just repeatedly told, on almost every page,
in the midst of every philosophical argument (against
idealism, humanism, structuralism, deconstruction,
discourse theory, praxis ontology), of their determinate
effects and existence and how they must or should
be taken into account. It is as if and he is clearly
aware of this the reproductive slant of Josephs
account of hegemony has to be asserted as a critical
imperative because in fact such a necessary structural
attribute of endurance over time threatens to make the
very concept of hegemony itself unnecessary.
Hegemony does nevertheless touch on a series of
questions of enduring interest: the historical origins of
the concept of hegemony in the perceived experiences
and political effects of uneven development, not only
in the Russia of Lenin and Trotsky but also in the Italy
of Gramsci (the Southern question); the hypostatization
of political revolution around the French model in the
work of Perry Anderson on the underdevelopment of
the English bourgeoisie and proletariat, and the effects
this has on thinking social revolution; the signicance
of Poulantzass late attempt to de-fetishize the concept
of the state within the Marxist tradition for a renewed
concept of hegemony that might rethink state form.
Because it is the scientic status of the concept of
hegemony that is the prime concern, however, none
of these issues is really developed.
In this sense Hegemony is a defensive work. On
the one hand, it defends the continued usefulness and
relevance of hegemony at a moment in which its privi-
leged terrain of operations the modern nation-state
would seem to be on the wane due to the tendential
transnationalization of capital accumulation and its
juridico-political conditions. On the other, it actively
retreats from the consequences of Bhaskars transfor-
mational model of social activity. Joseph realizes that
in subjecting the intransitive domain of the social to
the transformative effects of human practice, Bhaskar
must reground his critical realism anew. He did so
as a philosophy of history whose negative logic is a
dialectical unfolding of freedom. Bhaskars work thus
became, from the point of view of this political criti-
cal realist, merely idealist. But without an alternative
model of structural social transformation, geared to
emancipation, what is a critical concept of hegemony
for?
John Kraniauskas
OBITUARY
Dominique Janicaud, 19372002
T
he philosopher Dominique Janicaud died on 18

August 2002 at Eze on the Cte
dAzur from a cardiac arrest after swimming in the Mediterranean. He was
sixty-four years old. Eze is just along the coast from his beloved Nice, where
Dominique had been teaching philosophy since 1966, refusing many invitations to
leave for Paris and elsewhere. He lived and worked in a wonderful house high on the
slopes of the arrire-pays, close to the valley of the Var.
Born in Paris on 14 November 1937, Dominique studied philosophy with Andr
Jacob at the Lyce Lakanal, and was rst drawn to Bergson and the tradition of French
spiritualism, particularly the important but little-known (in the English-speaking world)
work of Flix Ravaisson. Dominiques doctoral thesis on this topic was published in
1969 as Une gnalogie du spiritualisme franais, reissued in 1997 as Ravaisson et
la mtaphysique. His crucial philosophical encounter was with Jean Beaufret, the
most prominent of Heideggers French interlocutors, to whom Heidegger addressed his
Letter on Humanism. Beaufret was a cousin of the Janicaud family and Dominique
was deeply impressed with Beaufrets inuential transla-
tion and presentation of Parmenides Poem. Dominique
began to read Heidegger and was taught by Beaufret when
he entered the cole Normale Suprieure in 1958. It was
with Beaufrets encouragement that Dominique studied
in Germany and met with Heidegger on several occasions
in the 1960s. Dominiques other teachers were Louis
Althusser and Jean Hyppolite, and although the former
left little impression on him, it was from the latter that
he developed his interest in Hegel, who was the topic of
Dominiques Thse dtat, published in 1975 as Hegel et le
destin de la Grce.
Dominique belonged to a small group of Heidegger
readers very much contre-courant to the overwhelming
Freudo-Marxist hegemony of the early 1960s in Paris. An
informal discussion group met in 1965 at the Fondation
Thiers in Paris, and included Dominiques lifelong friend
Michel Haar, as well as Hubert Dreyfus, Henri Birault
and Jacques Derrida. Yet Dominique was no orthodox
Heideggerian. Although captivated by the later Heideggers
analysis of the completion or closure of metaphysics
and his thinking of the age of technology in terms of
the Gestell, his work adopted a signicant and growing
critical distance from Heidegger. Evidence of this appears in four stunning studies of
Heidegger in the 1983 book La Mtaphysique la limite, of which I would strongly
recommend the essay Heideggeriana, which is a meditation on Heideggers too little
known text berwindung der Metaphysik.
This critical distance from Heidegger is more obliquely but powerfully at work in
Dominiques major philosophical work, La Puissance du rationnel of 1985, published
in Peg Birminghams excellent translation as The Powers of the Rational (1994).
Refusing to follow Heideggers division between rational thinking and the thinking of
Being, the book attempts an ambitious genealogy of rationality which gives a detailed
phenomenology of the effects of techno-scientic power. The Hegelian pedigree of
this concern with rationality leads into proximity with both Foucault and Habermas,
but also Anglo-American philosophy of science. Far from abandoning rationality,
Dominique was led towards an alternative notion of reason that he called partage. This
term has many shades of meaning in French, of which Dominique liked to emphasize
the idea of rationality as our human lot or portion. What he was after was a non-domi-
nating, non-instrumental and dialogic experience of rationality as that which is shared
by mortals in their everyday being with one another. In many ways, Dominiques
critique of Heideggers sharp division between meditative thinking and technologized
reason echoes Habermass critique of Adornos univocal notion of instrumental rational-
ity opposed to aesthetic experience. The concern with partage led into an original
account of temporality in the 1997 book Chronos.
In an autobiographical text, Dominique wrote of his sharp disagreement with
Heidegger:
I could no longer accept either the schema of history or that of Being, or the secret, destinal
correspondence of the originary and the Ereignis. And I do not think that meditative thought
can preserve a resource against technicist nihilism if it refuses all specic understanding of
new realities, which always resound with ambiguity.
One of the most impressive features of La Puissance du rationnel was its detailed
engagement with those new realities, and Dominique had an impressive knowledge
of both the history and the philosophy of science and much contemporary scientic
research. The critique of Heidegger was extended to the latters unconditional destinal
historicism in a 1990 engagement with the effects of Heideggers politics in French
philosophy, LOmbre de cette pense, which also includes a powerful critique of
Lacoue-Labarthes work.
La Puissance du rationnel did not get the reception it deserved. As is often the case
with philosophers, Dominique was better known for more occasional works, in particu-
lar two books that appeared in 1991: nouveau la philosophie, a collection of essays,
widely and favourably reviewed; and Le Tournant thologique de la phenomenologie
franaise, which initiated a whole series of debates and polemics among French
philosophers. Essentially, the book was a polemic against the theologizing tendency
towards a phenomenology of the inapparent or the invisible that can be found in the
work of Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chrtien and Michel Henry, but whose ancestry
can be traced to the inuence of Levinass Totality and Innity. Phenomenologically
speaking, Dominiques sympathies were always more Merleau-Pontian and committed
to the idea that philosophy should attend to the concrete world and nothing besides.
These debates were continued in a 1998 collection, La Phnomnologie clate.
Dominique spent the last years of his life working on a hugely ambitious history of the
reception of Heidegger in France, published in two volumes as Heidegger en France in
autumn 2001. It is an extremely valuable piece of work that deserves to be translated.
I knew Dominique well. He was the supervisor of my M.Phil. thesis on the question
of the overcoming of metaphysics in Heidegger and Carnap, a topic that he assigned
to me. During my year and a half in Nice in the mid-1980s, we met regularly and he
would sit patiently as I explained some text in demotic French. He was a good, kind
and generous man, a person of great integrity, hospitality and warmth. He was intel-
lectually and geographically remote from the paranoid and nally provincial world of
Parisian philosophy and his life in the provinces paradoxically gave him the liberty of a
more international outlook than other French philosophers of his generation.
Simon Critchley

Radical Philosophy 117, 2003

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CONTENTS

iek are totems of the tribes of cultural commentators that

ieks carefully cultivated idiosyncrasies, this is a genre into which he

iek offers a similar, if more

iek defending this thesis,

ieks prose that shames

ieks writings that

ieks pyrotechnics the cynicism of the magician but

ieks discourse a psychoanalytic ruse

iek trades on stock misunderstandings of his position, positively

iek here an exemplar in the generation of controversy), so

ieks title, to which he welcomes us on behalf of the events of

ieks opening, Badiou-inspired claim The ultimate and dening

iek in these instances; he is overcome.

ieks writings. There is something private about the great showmans

iek argues (WDR, 27) why does he

iek is left defenceless before Baudrillard. His only chance is to change

ieks conception of anti-capitalist

iek is not thinking of Badiou.

iek maintains that global

ieks notion of global capitalism has remained as abstract

iek writes of Leftist follies, he is thinking of the anti-war movement and

ieks contempt for

iek is quick to attribute to others on the Left: identication with

ieks defence of orthodoxy is the model of Lenin the existence of

ieks imperative to invent

iek concludes, was that Europe succumbed to a kind

iek here is a difference internal to theories of the symbolic:

ieks selection of Lenins writings, Revolution at

iek has remarked, the new

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