Neo-Anarchism or Neo-Liberalism?

Yes, Please! A Response to Simon

Critchleys Innitely Demanding1
Robert Sinnerbrink

Abstract: Simon Critchleys Innitely Demanding makes a timely contribution to

contemporary debates in ethics and political philosophy. For all its originality,
however, one can raise critical questions concerning Critchleys account of the
forms of resistance possible within liberal democratic polities. In this article I
question the adequacy of Critchleys ethically based neo-anarchism as a response
to neo-liberalism, critically analysing the role of ideology in his account of the
motivational decit aicting capitalist liberal democracies.
Keywords: Critchley, neo-anarchism, neo-liberalism, subjectivity, ideology,
capitalism

Simon Critchleys remarkable new book, Innitely Demanding, represents a timely

intervention in our contemporary intellectual and political situation, in what is
all too quickly described as the post-9/11 world.2 This is a paradoxical world
of freedom and fundamentalism, of marketing and moralism, spectacle and cyni-
cism, terrorism and triviality. It is the world of global (and in some instances
increasingly authoritarian) neo-liberalism. How should we respond to this new
world order? How should we respond to the much discussed motivational de-
cit aicting liberal democracies? Have Western democracies entered a post-
political era, where the great ideological divides of the past between Left and
Right, between socialism and capitalism, between Western and non-Western
worlds have been superseded? These are weighty, even crushing questions, as
many thinkers on the Left assuming that we can uncritically retain such ter-
minology can attest. Critchleys response to such sceptical doubts and political
uncertainty is refreshingly clear, precise and constructive: we need a new phil-
osophy of commitment, he argues, a new way of thinking ethical subjectivity, so

1. With apologies to Slavoj iek and the Marx Brothers.

2. Simon Critchley, Innitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (New York/
London: Verso, 2007).

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164 ROBERT SINNERBRINK

that we can ethically re-motivate political practice in liberal democracies in such

a way as to avoid the oppressive trappings of the state, the subtle manipulations
of the market, or the nihilistic temptations of conformism or fundamentalism.
As Michel Foucault once quipped about Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus,
which he described as a book of ethics, Critchleys Innitely Demanding could
also be described as an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life.3
His arguments are as lucid as they are compelling. They are also, like many
works of political philosophy, rooted in the specic experience of a distinctive his-
torical and political situation: the latter part of the Bush Jr administration with its
ongoing War on Terror, and the apparent high-water mark of the cultural neo-
conservative turn across many Western liberal democracies. Whether the tumul-
tuous events of 2008 notably the global nancial crisis and election of Americas
rst black president, Barack Obama substantially alter Critchleys Zeitdiagnose
remains an open question. His most recent critical remarks on Obamas election,
for example, suggest that the essential lines of argument in Innitely Demanding
his scepticism concerning state-based forms of politics, his diagnosis of the
dysfunctional malaise aicting representative democracies, and commitment to
ethically based forms of political activism remain intact.4
According to Critchley, chiming with many other political philosophers, con-
temporary liberal democracies are suering from a motivational decit: an
expression of widespread political disappointment in democratic institutions
that no longer motivate their citizenry.5 Indeed, citizens today, Critchley argues,
experience the governmental norms that rule contemporary society as externally
binding but not internally compelling.6 From a sociopolitical perspective, vari-
ous kinds of nihilism now beckon. There is the passive nihilism that withdraws
from the dicult problems of the political world in order to cultivate the inner
garden of the soul (and of the body): New Age spiritualism, self-help culture,
Western Buddhism and so on. Then there is the more disturbing active nihil-
ism of Islamist or Jihadist extremism (which Critchley argues we should see as
a type of revolutionary vanguardism) and its Christian fundamentalist obverse.7
What unites these passive and active forms of nihilism, respectively, is a moral,
metaphysical and theological critique of secular liberal democracy. Indeed, this
motivational decit aicting democracy, Critchley observes, is regarded chiey

3. Michel Foucault, Preface, in G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, R. Hurley, M. Seem &
H. Lane (trans.) (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), xiii.
4. Simon Critchley, Whats Left After Obama?, Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters, 12 November
2008, www.adbusters.org/print/1652 (accessed May 2009).
5. Critchley, Innitely Demanding, 67.
6. Ibid., 7.
7. Ibid., 7.

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as a moral failing: there is something rotten in the state of democracy, a felt inade-
quacy in ocial democratic culture, a discontent demanding a moral response.
Critchleys wager is that we must acknowledge the extent and pernicious
eects of the motivational decit of democracy, the massive political disap-
pointment marking our time, while also rejecting both passive and active forms
of nihilism.8 Indeed, both consumer hedonism and fundamentalist violence are
nihilistic responses to the motivational decits aicting contemporary democra-
cies, a combination strikingly thematized, I note in passing, in recent novels by
Don DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis, and Michel Houellebecq.9 As Critchley insists,
however, we should not succumb to the temptations of passive indierence,
self-interested hedonism, or revolutionary nihilism. Rather, his wager is that
we should construct a motivating ethics capable of empowering individuals and
groups; one that motivates them to face and face down the drift of the present,
an ethics that is able to respond to and resist the political situation in which we
nd ourselves.10 Critchley clearly means here we denizens of auent, lib-
eral-capitalist democracies, whose situation obviously cannot be compared, for
example, to that of oppressed youth in the Gaza Strip, slum-dwellers in Rio or
occupied communities in Iraq. The situated character of Critchleys analysis needs
to be borne in mind, however, the better to understand the kinds of justications
for, and limitations of, his ethical anarchism.
What kind of ethically based political action would be sucient to respond to
our historical and political situation? Here Critchley weds, in audacious fashion,
a Levinasian ethics of innite responsibility with neo-anarchist forms of political
resistance. Political action is grounded in an ethical commitment to respond to
and resist the experiences of injustice within the interstices of global capitalism.
It is worth noting that global capitalism plays the role of assumed background in
Critchleys diagnosis; yet it is not clear to what extent it is to be taken as causally
responsible for generating the kinds of disaection, disappointment and dissen-
sus concerning norms and institutions that would motivate the kind of political
resistance Critchley advocates.11 Such resistance would come, rather, from the
ethical experience that fundamentally shapes the core structure of moral self-
hood; the experience of ethical demand and obligation that motivates a subject
to pledge itself to some conception of the good.12

8. Ibid., 8.
9. See Don DeLillo, Mao II (London: Vintage, 1992), Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama (London: Picador,
1998), Michel Houellebecq, Platform, Frank Wynne (trans.) (London: William Heinemann,
2002).
10. Critchley, Innitely Demanding, 8.
11. As I discuss below, Critchley acknowledges the dislocatory power of capitalism (ibid., 99 .) but
without suggesting that it can necessarily be overcome.
12. Ibid., 9.

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In any event, such resistance against the state, and indirectly against global
capitalism, nds expression, for Critchley, in non-state-based forms of political
action. In this sense, it is an ethical and political anarchism that draws on Levinas
as much as the early Marx, for whom the free association of individuals would
constitute a true democracy, or what Marx would later baptize as commu-
nism. Far from a utopian demand for the impossible, however, such anarchistic
political practice can be found, Critchley argues, in post-Colonial indigenous
movements (in Mexico and Australia, for example), but also in the loose coa-
litional associations constituting the anti-globalization movement. Unlike its
libertarian predecessor, this anarchist resistance would be one of responsibility
rather than of liberation. Critchley thus advocates responsible forms of activism,
a non-violent warfare: peaceful actions that can be undertaken at a distance
from the state, in what Critchley calls the interstitial spaces between the anarchic
self-organizing networks of activists and the restrictive apparatuses of the state.
For all Critchleys emphasis on ethics, responsibility and commitment, how-
ever, this is no austere political asceticism. It is more a kind of political aes-
theticism; a carnivalesque, satirical form of politics that mocks and questions
authority through humour, theatricality and spontaneous action. Here one could
cite the kinds of colourful and media-savvy forms of activism familiar from anti-
globalization protests. Groups such as Billionaires for Bush, sporting tuxedos
and ball gowns while carrying placards praising Bushs pro-wealth policies; the
Rebel Clown Army, whose comic antics at G8 summits and the like always add
a note of humour and absurdity to the heavy-handed security presence; and
Pink Bloc, a queer activist group that, as the name suggests, stages colourful
and humorous protest actions celebrating sexual diversity.13 This is not to say
that such anarchic politics always avoids dealing with the state, with law or with
rights; these can be strategically deployed depending on the forces making up
a situation and the resources that actors have at their disposal (as is clearly the
case with the indigenous rights movements). All the same, it remains an ethical
form of anarchism that strives to avoid the extremes of libertarian irresponsibility,
vanguardist violence or empty symbolic play. Under conditions of globalized neo-
liberalism, it is the subversive, satirical protests of the anti-globalization move-
ment, for Critchley, that best exemplify this kind of ethico-political anarchism.
To paraphrase Foucault again, Critchley (like Deleuze and Guattari before him)
reminds us that we do not have to be sad in order to be militant, and that we need
to rout the fascist within us as much as the forces of domination outside us.14

13. See the following websites for more information on these groups: http://billionairesforbush.com/
index.php (Billionaires for Bush); http://www.clownarmy.org/ (Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown
Army (CIRCA); http://anityproject.org/practices/blocking.html (Pink Bloc and the Blocking
movement more generally).
14. Foucault, Preface, Anti-Oedipus, xiv.

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There is much more one could say about Critchleys original and welcome con-
tribution to contemporary philosophical debate concerning the nexus between
ethics, politics and resistance. The fact that this is not primarily a theoretical
debate is well worth noting. Critchley is clearly committed to the idea that theory
should be able to motivate or orient practice, even comprehend it; but it must
do so in such as way as to avoid either the pretensions of the universal intel-
lectual, pretending to speak on behalf of, or theoretically comprehend, those
protesting or resisting the state, or to simply use existing movements as empirical
fodder for constructing philosophical arguments. In this respect, he could well be
described as engaging in a kind of critical theory, taken in a broad and generous
sense that encompasses a diversity of philosophical traditions but also remains
committed to engaging with practically engaged subjects and movements. And
at a time when academic political philosophy threatens to become an entirely
professional aair, a battle of technical arguments and analytical refutations
rather than of transformative paradigms or practical interventions, this is very
much to his credit.
In what follows, I would like to highlight three related political themes in
my response to Critchleys ne book, a work replete with many philosophical
riches. These are (i) the adequacy of ethico-political neo-anarchism as a response
to global capitalism; (ii) the question of ideology in Critchleys account of ethical
subjectivity; and (iii) the role of global capitalism in Critchleys account of the
political disappointment and motivational decit aicting liberal democracies.

Neo-anarchism or neo-liberalism?

Let me elaborate the rst question in more detail. Critchley argues for an ethically
responsible form of political neo-anarchism: a non-violent politics of resistance
grounded in an experience of ethical responsibility. Critchleys neo-anarchism cul-
tivates a distance from the state; it is a politics of interstitial resistances to power
grounded in an ethical responsibility for the injustice suered by the Other.
Such a politics is not so much concerned with transforming state institutions as
with resisting state-based power. It accepts that the liberal democratic state and
global capitalism are here to stay, hence it engages in ethico-political forms of
resistance that remain at a remove from state power, questioning, challenging,
subverting it from an independent distance. This is an ethics and politics that
strives to face and face down the drift of the present15 by inventing new politi-
cal subjectivities capable of disturbing the political status quo. Critchleys ethi-
cally motivated subjects engage in and invent new practices of civil disobedience

15. Critchley, Innitely Demanding, 8.

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(like contemporary anti-globalization protesters), questioning from below any

attempt to impose power from above, articulating the demand for normative
dissensus rather than aiming for communicative consensus, constituting an
anarchic multiplicity that calls into question the authority and legitimacy of the
state.16 In cultivating this kind of neo-anarchist form of subjectivity and ethical
resistance, Critchley argues, we may contribute to restoring some much needed
dignity to the dreadfully devalued discourse of democracy.17
Now the question of whether this response an ethico-political anarchism
of resistance is adequate to global neo-liberalism has been forcefully raised by
Slavoj iek.18 iek argues that Critchleys position amounts to a resistance to
state power that assumes that the liberal-democratic state is here to stay, that
attempts to abolish the state have failed miserably, that the motivational decit
aicting democratic institutions remains irreducible, and hence that the new
politics has to be located at a distance from the state.19 Such a politics resists
state power by denouncing the limitations of state mechanisms, which by deni-
tion cannot respond to the innite ethical demand for justice since the state is
ultimately concerned with the pragmatic and strategic goals of ensuring its own
reproduction (its economic growth, public safety, and so on).20 The result is a
form of resistance that remains in a curiously symbiotic relationship with power;
ethico-political resistance to the neo-liberal democratic state, iek claims, func-
tions as a kind of ideal supplement to Third Way social democracy: a revolt
which poses no eective threat, since it endorses in advance the logic of hysteri-
cal provocation, bombarding the Power with impossible demands, demands

16. Ibid., 13.

17. Ibid., 13.
18. Slavoj iek, Resistance is Surrender, London Review of Books (15 November 2007), http://www.
lrb.co.uk/v29/n22/print/zize01_.html (accessed May 2009). For more developed versions of ieks
critique of Critchley see The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 3324, and In
Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 33950. There has been an extended debate between
Critchley and iek on this matter. See Critchleys review of ieks short book Violence, A Dream
of Divine Violence, Independent (11 January 2008), www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/
books/reviews/violence-by-slavoj-iek-769535.html?r=RSS (accessed May 2009). See also ieks
response to Critchley, T. J. Clark, and David Graeber, in the London Review of Books 30(2) (24
January 2008) http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n02/letters.html#letter6 (accessed May 2009), There is
also an exchange of letters in Harpers Magazine: ieks critique of Critchley (February 2008),
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/02/0081896 (by subscription); and Critchleys response,
Resistance is Utile (May 2008), http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=1147 (accessed May
2009). For his most recent comments in the debate, see Critchleys Violent Thoughts about Slavoj
iek, Naked Punch 11 (Autumn 2008) http://issuu.com/naked_punch_review/docs/supplement?
mode=embed&documentId=090212185419-5bc1ed88f6c94b06b755ea4cd951f0b0&layout=grey
%3E (accessed June 2009).
19. iek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 346.
20. Ibid., 3.

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which are not meant to be met.21 It remains parasitic on the state-based power
that it resists, nding its ethical self-understanding through the questioning,
demanding and resisting character of its ethico-political withdrawal from the
state, its invention of new forms of non-violent warfare that would challenge
hegemonic forms of state power. For these reasons, iek remarks, Critchleys
Innitely Demanding is an almost perfect embodiment of the position to which
my work is absolutely opposed.22
For all Critchleys insistence on the ethical basis for engaged subjectivity and
anarchist political resistance, there is an important question raised here about the
relationship between ethics, politics and violence. As Critchley remarks, it is true
that history is usually written by those wielding guns and sticks, and that one can-
not hope to defeat them with mocking satire and feather dusters.23 Nonetheless,
the history of ultra-Leftist political vanguardism and here Critchley, contro-
versially, yokes together Leninism, Maoism, Situationism, and radical Islamism
as political forms of active nihilism24 shows one is lost the moment one picks
up guns and sticks.25 Indeed, according to Critchley, one should approach al-
Qaeda with the words and actions of bin Laden resonating against those of Lenin,
Blanqui, Mao, Baader-Meinhof, and Durruti.26 Is it legitimate, however, to yoke
together all of these ideologically clashing, politically disparate, situationally spe-
cic gures and movements? iek, for example, criticizes Critchleys claim that all
such forms of revolutionary vanguardism assuming these can be equated are to
be equally rejected as forms of active nihilism. Indeed, by blurring the dierence
between the distinct political logics of radical egalitarian violence (what Alain
Badiou calls the eternal Idea of revolutionary justice) and anti-modernist fun-
damentalist violence (dening radical Islamism), Critchley lapses, iek argues,
into the purest ideological formalism, echoing the identication, both by liber-
als and conservatives, of so-called Left and Right forms of totalitarianism.27
While it is true, as Critchley points out, that Sayyid Qutb, intellectual pro-
genitor of radical Jihadist Islamism, appropriated Western revolutionary political
theory, in particular Marxist-Leninism, this does not mean that his particular
brand of political ideology is necessarily Western, or that it can therefore be
assimilated to more classical forms of extreme revolutionary vanguardism.28

21. iek, The Parallax View, 334.

22. iek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 339.
23. Critchley, Innitely Demanding, 124.
24. Ibid., 5.
25. Ibid., 124.
26. Ibid., 56.
27. iek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 348.
28. Critchley, Innitely Demanding, 6. Critchley follows here the interpretation of Jihadist revolution-
ary Islam given by the Retort group in Aicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War
(London: Verso, 2005).

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170 ROBERT SINNERBRINK

For the same reason, the fact that al-Qaeda deploys Western media and commu-
nications technology (or beneted from American training during the Russian
invasion of Afghanistan) does not mean that it is therefore to be understood an
essentially Western phenomenon. To make this claim the frequently voiced
Leftist critique that Islamist terrorism is a case of the violence of the West itself
coming home to roost is to ignore the specicity of radical Islamism and its
own ideological-political strategic agenda.29 It would be to say that, because they
are forms of political vanguardism that can be equated as expressions of active
nihilism, there is no essential dierence between, say, the Situationist protests
in 1968, Aldo Moros murder and the Bali bombings. To do so, however, would
be to overlook the important dierences between the ideological motivations,
social experiences and political circumstances behind each of these historically
specic instances of political violence.
In any event, ethical anarchism, Critchley argues, must therefore choose the
pacist path of non-violent resistance (the Quakers, Ghandi or Martin Luther
King), and reject the revolutionary path that inadvertently mirrors the violent
sovereign power it opposes (Bakunin, the Black Panthers, or the Red Brigades).
ieks criticism here is to argue that the question of violent versus non-violent
resistance guns and sticks versus mocking satire and feather dusters surely
depends on the situation and the forces one is confronting. From a historical and
strategic point of view, it is important to note that terrorism involving suicide
bombing, for example, is fundamentally a political response typically enacted by
a weaker force facing intractable occupation or overwhelming imperial power. It
arises, historically and sociologically, under conditions in which all other political
options are experienced as futile or counter-productive. It has specically secular
aims and objectives (forcing a democratic power to withdraw military forces from
occupied homelands), though it is also legitimated by powerful religious and
ideological discourses; and it is typically deployed to eect a maximal strategic
impact from co-ordinated individual or small group actions.30 More generally,
there are surely historical and political situations (iek mentions Hitler) where
violence can and should be used to confront the state, whereas there are clearly
others where all one can and should do is use mocking satire and feather dust-
ers.31 Critchley criticizes iek on just this point, however, arguing that his
political thought is vitiated by a regressive and nostalgic yearning for outmoded
forms of state-based political power, and the exercise of ruthless revolutionary

29. See, for example, Noam Chomsky, September 11 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2001).
30. See, for example, Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York:
Random House, 2005). See also Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror
(Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2002), 5484; and Abdel Bari Atwan, The Secret History of Al-
Qaida (London: Abacus, 2007), 83114.
31. iek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 348.

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 NEOANARCHISM OR NEOLIBERALISM? YES, PLEASE! 171

action. Like a Slovenian Hamlet, Critchley quips, iek dreams of an unname-

able violence, an impotent and unrealizable fantasy of political terror.32
ieks provocation nonetheless raises an interesting question. Critchleys anar-
chic politics of resistance assumes that the global capitalist democracy is here to
stay. Given the immutability of global capitalism, all we can really do is ethi-
cally resist state-power and thereby help create a neo-liberal democracy with a
human face. But here one might ask, following iek: does not this neo-anarchist
resistance also function as the inherent transgression of the neo-liberal order,
the safety valve that grants it legitimacy and thus facilitates its orderly function-
ing? iek cites the Not in Our Name anti-Iraq War protests in London and
Washington as telling examples of this kind of Leftist moralizing politics of resist-
ance. The paradox here, iek notes, was that everyone got the moral-political
satisfaction they wanted: the protestors expressed their moral rejection of Blairs
commitment to Bushs invasion of Iraq, while Bush and Blair could both point
to the protestors and say, You see, this is what were ghting for, the right to
peaceful democratic protest just the sort of thing were liberating the Iraqis to
enjoy too!. The 2008 Chinese Olympic torch protests are another case in point:
such protests are permissible, even laudable, provided they are peaceful and do
not actually disturb anything (Canberra); by contrast, protests that do actually
disrupt a situation, involving clashes with law-enforcement or between oppos-
ing parties, are impermissible or even immoral (Paris). In short, the relationship
between ethico-political resistance and the absorptive power of neo-liberalist
democracy, I want to suggest, is more dialectical, ambiguous and conictual
than Critchley seems to allow.

Ethical subjectivity, motivational decit and ideology

The second, related question concerns Critchleys theory of the ethico-political

subject and the question of the source of the motivational decit aicting liberal
democracies. This part of Critchleys argument is based on his theory of ethi-
cal experience, grounded in the concepts of approval and demand; every moral,
ethical or normative claim can be analysed as deriving from an experience of a
demand to which one gives (or withholds) approval.33 This account of ethical
experience points to a model of ethical subjectivity, according to which being
a self or as Critchley puts it, becoming a subject involves a relationship
between the self and the good: moral selfhood or ethical subjectivity is shaped by
a relationship towards whatever it determines as its good.34 The self or ethical

32. See Critchley, A Dream of Divine Violence.

33. Critchley, Innitely Demanding, 14.
34. Ibid., 20.

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172 ROBERT SINNERBRINK

subjectivity is that which approves (or disapproves) of this or that conception of

the good, approves (or disapproves) of this or that demand. The ethical subject,
in short, is a self that relates itself approvingly, bindingly, to the demand of its
own good.35 More strongly, Critchley goes on to claim that it is just such a rela-
tionship of approval in response to a demand, of relating oneself to the good, that
founds the self; the demand of the good constitutes the fundamental principle
of the subjects constitution.36
We experience this in the case of failure, betrayal, and evil; in acting in a way I
know to be evil, I am destroying the self that I am, or that I have chosen to be.37
The sense of self-division that follows the clash between the ethical self I have
chosen to be and my failure to enact that commitment is experienced in the form
of guilt. Guilt is the experience of a splitting or self-division in the subject;38 the
experience that reveals, for Critchley, the fundamentally moral articulation of
the self .39 Ethical commitment is what binds me to that which denes me as a
self. And such ethical experience is only possible because I am capable of becom-
ing an ethical subject disposed towards the approved demand of its good.40
To this account of the relationship between ethical demand and approval
we must add Critchleys critique of the Kantian autonomy orthodoxy. Against
the prevailing Kantian-liberal tide, Critchley argues that the subject is ethically
heteronomous rather than morally autonomous. He or she is motivated by the
unfulllable, innite demand posed by an Other, rather than by fullling a uni-
versalizable maxim that would be in harmony with the moral law. The funda-
mental question Critchley addresses here is that of distinguishing between the
justication of morality and my motivation to act morally: how to bring together
universally justiable moral norms with the practical motivation that is rooted in
my sense of moral selfhood?41 Bringing together the two halves of this dialectic
constitutes the problem of morality; the way to reconcile justifying reasons for
universalizable norms with exciting reasons motivating us to act ethically.42
To address this question, Critchley proposes an alternative conception of the
subject that comprises three essential aspects. From Badiou, Critchley takes the
notion of a delity to the universality of a demand that opens in a singular situa-
tion but exceeds that situation.43 From Danish theologian Knud Eiljer Lgstrup
he takes the notion of a radical, unfulllable ethical demand that expresses an

35. Ibid., 20.

36. Ibid., 20.
37. Ibid., 21.
38. Ibid., 21.
39. Ibid., 23.
40. Ibid., 23.
41. Ibid., 25.
42. Ibid., 24. This is a distinction that, as Critchley notes, goes back to Francis Hutcheson.
43. Ibid., 40.

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 NEOANARCHISM OR NEOLIBERALISM? YES, PLEASE! 173

asymmetrical ethical relation.44 This asymmetry is then understood, following

Levinas, as arising in the experience of the innite demand of the others face, the
split between myself as a subject and an exorbitant demand that I can never
meet but which denes me as an ethical subject.45 This delity to a universal
demand arising out of a specic situation, a demand arising in response to the
Face of the Other and expressing a radical asymmetry, denes Critchleys model
of the hetero-aectivity of the ethical subject. Such a conception of the ethical
subject is then used to show how ethical experience gives rise to a constituting
relationship towards the demand of the Other that has both universal validity
and motivating force.
Given this complex account of ethical subjectivity, and the strong case made
for the internal relation between the structure of moral selfhood and ethical
motivation, how do we explain the motivational decit that burdens liberal
democracies? And given the psychoanalytical dimensions of his theory of the
subject the self-division of the subject, the importance of sublimation (through
cultural paradigms of tragedy and humour), and the various ways that the motiv-
ation of ethical subjectivity can be perverted Critchleys theory of ethical sub-
jectivity would also seem to require an account of ideology; of the systematic
ways in which the structure of moral selfhood can be distorted or damaged by
prevailing forms of cultural practice, legitimating discourse, or socioeconomic
relations.
That this is the case seems indicated by Critchleys own analysis, later in his
book, of the ideological dimensions of what we might call authoritarian democ-
racy, which functions through the careful manipulation of the politics of fear: the
promotion of an unpredictable external enemy without, constant reminders of a
ubiquitous threat to security within, coupled with the distorted sublimation that
drives narcissistic consumerism. This ideological manipulation of aect, the poli-
tics of fear, is strikingly evident in Critchleys compelling account of the crypto-
Schmittianism of Bushs America.46 Here Critchley deftly analyses the double
fantasy construction of Bushs ideological landscape, menaced by a threat that is
at once real and phantasmatic:47 the fantasy of an external enemy threat without
(al-Qaeda), and the fantasy of a homeland needing sovereign protection within
(even at the expense of democratic civil rights). As Critchley notes, politics has
arguably always been conducted at the level of fantasy, the image and spectacle;48
but this has become especially egregious with the unholy alliance between Bushs
militarism and al-Qaedas Jihadism, both of which have shown themselves to

44. Ibid., 40.

45. Ibid., 40.
46. Ibid., 13348.
47. Ibid., 134.
48. Ibid., 134.

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be obsessed with the image, whether the image of the collapsing Twin Towers
or the shock and awe Baghdad bombing campaign.49 Critchley even remarks
that politics is more than ever concerned with the spectacle and control of the
image, which is what makes the Situationism of Guy Debord more relevant than
ever as a diagnostic tool in political analysis.50 Why, then, is this recommended
critical analysis of the ideological character of the politics of fear the hegemonic
control of political spectacle and ideological fantasy to generate a manipulable
collective fear lacking in Critchleys developed account of the demotivation of
ethical subjectivity and need for an ethically grounded resistance?
The early generation of Frankfurt School critical theorists were also confronted
by the problem of a motivational decit during the 1920s and 1930s (faced with
historical and social conditions that might have precipitated revolution, why did
the masses choose fascism?). Their response was to turn to psychoanalysis and
sociology in order to theorize the ideological forces in particular, the ubiquity
of the culture industry that contributed to the destruction of autonomy and
the embrace of authoritarianism. As Critchley puts it, in our own time too we
are desperately in need of a political psychology or political psychoanalysis;
a theory of ideology and subjectivity that could explain the motivational decit
aicting Western democracies.51
We should note, however, that such a motivational decit is hardly evident
on the populist Right, which has brilliantly harnessed the anger, disaection and
alienation with liberal democracy particularly among the marginalized work-
ing classes for its own political ends (usually through anti-progressivist moral
protests, and divisive scapegoating of stigmatized cultural or racial groups). Why,
then, is this more robust conception of the ideological dimensions of contempor-
ary subjectivity an account, in other words, of precisely the motivational decit
with which Critchleys account of ethico-political resistance begins lacking in
his broader theorization of subjectivity, ethics and politics?

Global capitalism and its discontents

The role of global capitalism in Critchleys account of ethically based neo-

anarchism becomes pertinent here. Is it simply presupposed as the inalterable
background to state-based forms of power? Or is it the systemic generator of the
kinds of social alienation, anger and disaection or political disappointment
that for Critchley motivate ethico-political resistance? In his chapter, Anarchic
Metapolitics, Critchley oers a fascinating analysis of this political disappoint-

49. Ibid., 134.

50. Ibid., 135.
51. Ibid., 136.

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ment, arguing that it is the response to a situated injustice or wrong that pro-
vokes the need for an ethics.52 What Critchley calls the passage from an ethics
of innitely demanding commitment to a politics of resistance, however, must
explain the role of global capitalism in generating this disappointment or sense
of injustice that would motivate ethico-political action.
To mark this passage from ethics to politics, Critchley turns to none other
than Marx. The truth of Marxs work, for Critchley, lies in its description of the
nature of capitalism, that is to say, the hegemony of the bourgeoisie and the
reduction of socio-economic life to the circulation of commodities through the
universal equivalent of money.53 What Critchley rejects, however, is the politi-
cal corollary of Marxs socioeconomic analysis, namely the reduction of class
struggle to one basic antagonism (bourgeois/proletariat), and the emergence
of the proletariat as the revolutionary class that would serve as the historical
agent for the emancipation of humanity.54 While Marx was right about the
deracinating eects of capitalism, Critchley claims, this accelerating dislocatory
power leads not to class struggle but rather to the multiplication of social actors
dened by dierences of locality, language, ethnicity, sexuality and so on.55 In
other words, the dening character of class antagonism gives way to a multiplicity
of social agents engaged in local and specic political struggles over moral values
and cultural and social norms, rather than particular material, class or economic
interests. Instead of culture being the shadow play of the economy, the economy
becomes the shadowy backdrop for cultural-political forms of struggle.
Critchley borrows for this analysis Gramscis concept of hegemony, which he
denes as the formation of collective will and political associations out of the
multiplicity of divergent groupings constituting civil society, groupings that are
based in local and situated forms of commonality.56 The challenge, Critchley
argues, becomes one of articulating new political subjectivities born of diverse
social struggles and competing antagonisms; the problem of political subjectivity,
moreover, becomes one of naming a political subject as a focal point for politi-
cal organization.57 Following Laclau, Critchley argues that the logic of political
nomination involves the process of identifying a determinate particularity in
society be it a stigmatized social grouping or form of cultural or social identity
and then hegemonically constructing that particularity into a generality that
exerts a universal claim.58 It involves, in short, the task of identifying that part

52. Ibid., 88.

53. Ibid., 90.
54. Ibid., 91.
55. Ibid., 91.
56. Ibid., 91.
57. Ibid., 91.
58. Ibid., 91.

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of no part (as Rancire puts it) an excluded element capable of expressing a

universal claim that would question the normative structures of the prevailing
social and cultural order or challenge, in the name of justice, existing social and
political institutions.
Here we might ask what role global capitalism plays in the problem of creating
new forms of political subjectivity. There is no doubt it has proved remarkably
ingenious in nding ways of absorbing and neutralizing resistance, in providing
consumer surrogates for dysfunctional autonomy and damaged intersubjectiv-
ity, and in extending the market principle to all dimensions of the social totality,
thus eroding and undermining the normative fabric of democratic politics. As
Critchley quips, [i]f someone found a way of overcoming capitalism, then some
corporation would doubtless buy the copyright and the distribution rights.59 To
be sure, Critchley does take capitalisms capacity to absorb resistance into account
in his more concrete analyses of Bush Jrs neo-conservative America; but the focus
remains rmly on the cultural eects of this neutralizing power (rather than its
economic dynamics), and on possible ethical resistance towards it.
His stated aim, however, is to reactivate the political dimension of Marxism:
not to embrace a kind of discursive politics (or disco-Marxism) that politi-
cizes Marxism while leaving capitalism unquestioned, but to retrieve the kind of
Marxism that would argue for the establishment of capital as a social product
and remove the class-character of private property.60 As Critchley notes, citing
Gramsci, this is certainly a political task, one that requires a critique of econo-
mistic reductionism that does not ignore the economic dimension, incorporating
the latter into a wider ethical-political and ideological strategy.61
These are admirable aims and part of a powerful critique of contemporary cap-
italism and its deracinating power and plastic capacity to absorb resistance. The
question is how this wider ethical-political and ideological strategy would be
articulated and implemented, without reverting to those forms of political prac-
tice and action that Critchley has critically rejected (state-based forms of power,
radical political vanguardism, or liberal-democratic reformism). Critchleys
answer, as we have seen, is to point to local, situational, non-state-based forms
of ethically motivated activism, such as can be found in anti-globalization and
indigenous rights movements. Indeed, the radical political dislocation that
capitalism generates its ruthless destruction of the bonds of tradition, local
belonging, family, and kinship structures that one might have considered natu-
ral reveal the contingency of social life, while at the same time opening up the

59. Ibid., 98.

60. Ibid., 99.
61. Ibid., 99.

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 NEOANARCHISM OR NEOLIBERALISM? YES, PLEASE! 177

possibility of new forms of political rearticulation: what Laclau, after Gramsci,

calls hegemony.62
This analysis, however, assumes that global capitalism is here to stay. There
does not seem to be a viable alternative, according to Critchley, to the current
economic and social system, or to the political institutions and state-based forms
of power that accompany it. On this point, Critchley, like many other political
philosophers, recognizes the diculty of the ideological-political situation that
confronts us. For example, in respect of the question of an oppositional left-
ist political strategy in the US context in particular, the rise of the religious
right or radical right Critchley asks whether we are currently facing a transient
political phenomenon, or a new regime of truth; a novel theologico-political
form of life that will become increasingly hegemonic.63 Interestingly, Critchleys
analysis of the prospects of Leftist politics in the US context focuses mainly on
the cultural-ideological dimensions of this antagonism (the moralizing cultural-
political clashes between liberals and conservatives on issues such as abortion,
gay marriage and so on). There is little mention of the way these ideological
skirmishes are themselves embedded in the broader framework of global capi-
talism or increasingly authoritarian-conservative forms of neo-liberalism. Here
one might have expected a link to be made between the earlier analyses of the
accelerating dislocatory power of capitalism and the more ideological analysis
of contemporary American cultural politics. A critical analysis of global capital-
ism and its distorting eects on subjectivity, however, is lacking in Critchleys
substantive account of the ethics of commitment and politics of resistance.
So how adequate is Critchleys ethical neo-anarchism to the challenges fac-
ing global capitalism? It is hard to see how these challenges we face can be met
without reference to state-based form of power, or by way of humorous forms of
protest or ethically based forms of resistance. The political alternatives Critchley
outlines seem to oer a stark choice: military neo-liberalism (Bushs America and
Blairs New Labour); neo-Leninism (political vanguardisms of all persuasions);
or neo-Anarchism (non-violent, non-state-based activism).64 But do these three
options authoritarian liberal democracy, political vanguardism and ethical neo-
anarchism exhaust what forms of political response might be possible today?
It could be argued here that neo-anarchism might represent an expression
of, rather than simply resistance towards, liberal democracy, whether taken in
authoritarian or socially progressive senses. Put dierently, does neo-anarchism
risk becoming what Italian political dramatist Dario Fo called the libera-
tory burp that dispels social indigestion within our liberal democracies? We
might even describe it as a carnivalesque inversion that ultimately conrms

62. Ibid., 101.

63. Ibid., 1445.
64. Ibid., 1467.

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178 ROBERT SINNERBRINK

the prevailing sociopolitical order. As The Maniac in Fos Accidental Death of

Anarchist remarks, we should always remember that political scandal is the fer-
tilizer of social democracy:

They [the government] have never tried to hush up these scandals. And
theyre right not to. That way people can let o steam, get angry, shudder
at the thought of it Who do these politicians think they are? Scumbag
generals! Murderers! And they get more and more angry, and then, burp!
A little liberatory burp to relieve their social indigestion.65

Fos Maniac prompts us to ask whether ethico-political resistance to the excesses

of state power and brutality of global capitalism is really enough. Or is it just
to plead, whether seriously or satirically, for liberal-capitalist democracy with a
more human indeed ethical face?

Robert Sinnerbrink is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the

author of Understanding Hegelianism (2007), co-editor of Critique Today (2006), has recently
published articles in The International Journal of iek Studies, Cosmos and History and Film-
Philosophy. He is currently writing a book on the philosophy of lm.

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