In Praise of Irresponsibility: The Politics of Universal Castration

[note: This 41 page paper was originally submitted for a lecture I gave at the International Journal of Zizek Studies Conference in 2012, of which I cannot help thinking as a more innocent time. It served as my lecture notes, even though I did not have anywhere near enough time to go through even a small portion of it.  Actually, this version was edited down considerably from a much, much longer, even more wandering, unfinished version - one that I cannot seem to locate.  There were extensive revisions, with paragraphs re-ordered and large sections deleted entirely.  Also, to the dismay of the editors of the journal, it had relatively few direct references to Slavoj Zizek.  Ultimately I abandoned this project and wrote an entirely different essay, which was published here: The International Journal of Zizek Studies

Looking back at this essay, I am dismayed at its many failings.  The editors may have found it insufficiently Zizekian, but I find it way too Zizekian, now.  Clearly I was attempting to imitate his style.  It is extremely long and unfocused, jumping from one topic to another - now the history of Indonesia, now Levinasian deontology, now Hegel, now Marilyn Manson, now the Sopranos, without any clear organizing structure.  There are many ideas in embryonic form here, undeveloped.  I suppose I was attempting, in my own way, to carve out a political position that was neither Marxist nor anarchist, but something in between.  Along the way, I wrote many things with which I now disagree, and other things that generally seem to ring true but which I would probably phrase differently now.  Even so, this is where (I think) I first began to write about topics that I have subsequently explored on this blog and elsewhere - notably, the Liquefactionist Party.  I'm therefore including this essay, as is, just for, oh, let's say, old times' sake.]

In Praise of Irresponsibility:
The Politics of Universal Castration

    By the outbreak of World War I, the political climate of the radical left, which had hitherto been supportive of large-scale, government reforms such as child labor laws and environmental conservation, changed considerably: as governments of the great powers went to war, socialists were divided over whether they should support their governments, with the more consistently radical in general rejecting the war and their national governments, drawing a firm line between themselves and mainstream parliamentary reformism.  In Germany, Rosa Luxemburg was characteristic of this trend, which was so pronounced that Karl Kautsky, who had hitherto been regarded as the leading intellectual of the Second International and of orthodox Marxism, was suddenly shunned by many Marxists and others as a traitor to the Social Democratic Party for not opposing the German government’s war effort strongly enough, though he did oppose it quite strongly and indeed left the party over the issue.  In Italy, the split among socialists and progressives over the question of whether Italy should enter the war led to the development of fascism, when the young Mussolini supported the war effort and split from his former comrades in the socialist movement to do what he felt was patriotic duty.  From then on, the radical left deliberately and consistently separated itself from mainstream politics and, in turn, became more and more marginalized. 
    But that was only the beginning.  By the century’s end, everything had gradually become topsy-turvy: whereas the progressive movement had once been the home of bold, futurist manifestoes, with principles inherited from the enlightenment, exuding confident, quasi-scientific certainty and universalism, now the left, at least in the capitalist West, gradually became more and more interested in the marginal, the exception, the outsiders.  To put it bluntly, the left deliberately took a losing strategy when it declared that the only authentic forms of revolution would be those that came from the isolated, the disadvantaged, the failing and disappearing.  Whereas individualism and partialism had once been shunned as bourgeois romanticism in favor of solidarity with the collective, suddenly “independent” now became a trendy word, as American leftists for instance admired the “independent” voices of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and as Kautsky himself formed the Independent Social Democratic Party.  As the years rolled on, people - not only right-wingers, but lefties perhaps even more so - tended to fetishize their own alienation. 
    At a theoretical level, leftists more and more turned “against totality,” shifting their commitment (if commitment is indeed the word) to the partial, the incomplete, the fragmentary, and the excessive, and most importantly, what might be called a renewed attention to the trivial.  This term, trivial, comes from the “trivium,” the first three subjects taught to medieval scholastics, namely grammar, logic, and rhetoric.  Generally the Anglo-American philosophical tradition took up the study of logic, and the Continentals tended to see grammar everywhere and to defend rhetoric against the interrogations of philosophy proper.  Both traditions eschewed everything having to do with the higher levels of traditional higher learning, the “quadrivium”: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, the four of which had once represented the pinnacle of philosophy.  They became deeply suspicious of all of these, as each implies what, borrowing Chomsky’s vocabulary, we might call a “deep structure” to experience.  It was, I think, a healthy development, particularly in the wake of the spectacular failure of Bolshevism, Maoism and so on, and also in the wake of fascism, for leftist theorists to take a step back, to eschew grand sweeping judgments, and to anchor theory in a focus on the local and the precise, the concrete, keeping their heads down.  More and more leftists became reticent to speak for “the people” and instead have worked for more specific groups, paying close attention to issues of race, gender, sexual preference, the interests of indigenous peoples, identity politics, the rights of immigrants, refugees, prisoners, patients in mental hospitals, and in general have focused on what came to be known as micro-politics.  As we fast-forward to the contemporary left, in its celebration of “indie” this and “D-I-Y” that, and we see an utter rejection of any kind of large-scale planning, a movement that is not only incoherent but which occasionally celebrates its incoherence. 
    When I call attention to this history, I am in no sense implying that we should take a reactionary stand here and turn the clock back to some golden age of large-scale statist progressivism - this type of reactionary stance is, itself, symptomatic of contemporary theoretical incoherence, since reaction always implies an unwillingness to think through the event and its consequences.  To repeat: this move was a healthy move.  But there is a hunger now to move beyond this attention to the trivial, the relentless microscopic attention to rhetoric and grammar, this tendency to see how this or that is structured like a language.  Rather than dogmatically insisting on language alone, we want to try other comparisons: how is our experience, and our social praxis, for instance, structured like music? 
    This brings us to the contemporary scene of academic theory, in which many writers are trying to pick up the pieces of the inchoate, fragmentary, almost reflexive kicks against the capitalist “system” and attempting to make some kind of sense of these moments of resistance, without disturbing their delicate uniqueness.  But how is it even possible to mend what has been rent, the fundamental interpersonal, intersubjective trust that once stood as a tough, thick, leathery fabric of solidarity, at the very basis of being and of human experience?  If, of course, it ever existed at all.  Perhaps I’m getting a little Romantic.  The point, however, is that the left deliberately chose the losing strategy, when the left insisted that authentic revolutionary struggle could only be authored by the isolated, the disadvantaged, the disconnected, the failing, the disappearing.  There is a kind of operatic tragic grandeur in all of this, but as the show repeats itself it looks more and more like melodrama.  The Greek word logos, the word, so central to the Western tradition, is related, as Heideggerians know, to the old verb legein, for which Liddell and Scott’s Greek lexicon gives, among other definitions, “to gather,” “to pick up,” “to choose for oneself,” “to pick out.”  After a long period in which leftist theory shook its fist in revolt against “the word,” the logos, many theorists are rethinking the word and are now trying to bring a word, a name, to the largely inarticulate struggle that already exists, to gather these disparate movements together somehow. 
    A good example is Simon Critchley.   
    The ethics to which Critchley refers is (with some modifications) that of the Lithuanian-French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), and the many writers he influenced, such as Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler.  Critchley writes: “...[I]t is the sovereign, self-positing subject that has dominated philosophy since Descartes, where the arche or principle governing selfhood is autarchy, understood as self-origination or self-legislation.  Against this, Levinas argues that ethical subjectivity is affected by the other in a way that places in question the subject’s purported sovereignty and autonomous majesty.  In this sense, the ethical relation is anarchical, which, for Levinas, is not devoid of political significance.”  (p. 93)  For Critchley, this an-archic ethical relation is a series of infinite, necessarily unrealizable demands made on the subject by the other.  Having already demonstrated in his Ethics of Deconstruction that Derridean deconstruction is not, as popularly believed, nihilistic, Critchley now turns to the global political situation and its seeming vast theoretical void, the absence of any “totalizing” framework for contextualizing political struggle, and here he again shows that what looks like nihilism actually has an ethics.  This political situation reflects that of the personal: multiple resistance movements engage in a “politics of subversion” (p.124) (rather than outright revolution), each making infinite demands on the state (from a distance) that are impossible for the state to satisfy, but that’s okay.  Everything is okay - politics is not “eclipsed” as per unnamed post-Althusserians, we are not caught in a deadlock, as per the Lacanians.  Real, substantive resistance to the status quo is not just possible, says Critchley, it is actual, and where it is not actual it is actualizable.
    I think there is much to admire in Infinitely Demanding.  In fact, Critchley’s work parallels, anticipates, and surpasses much of my own work on the idea of heterarchy.  His notion of “originary inauthenticity” is very fertile and (ironically) true to life, as is his related way of looking at humor.  But I would like to focus on several contradictions that remain unresolved in this work (not that I hope to resolve them here; they can only be resolved in practice).  My first thought is not to judge the central thesis of Infinitely Demanding as right or wrong, but to ask: what infinite demands can we make of it?  That is, how can we ask questions of it that don’t collapse into a quick yes or no, but which expand its frontiers beyond all limitation? 
    Indeed, if I have a problem with Critchley’s “infinite demands,” it is that they do not demand enough.  His argument resolves itself too easily into a pat on the back of activists such as the (ironic) “Billionaires for Bush,” the “WOMBLES,” and others. In arguing for a Levinasian “neo-anarchism,” he is not arguing that contemporary anarchists and other activists should change their political goals, or their interpretive methods, or even their pragmatic tactics.  They don’t need to change anything at all - they are already Levinasian, whether they realize it or not.  Contrasting contemporary struggles with those of the 60s, when critical theorists like Herbert Marcuse called for non-repressive sublimation and anarchists whipped themselves into a frenzy of free love, Critchley writes, “Strange as it may sound, perhaps contemporary anarchism is more Levinasian than Marcusean.” (p. 126)  This is an oddly complacent and congratulatory tone for someone who speaks of infinite demands, and especially for a Levinasian - after all, could anyone ever be Levinasian enough?  Isn’t that an oxymoron?  Critchley himself refers, with good humor, to his own work as “cheerleading,” but isn’t it possible to demand more of these situated modes of resistance?  Of course we should support and encourage these movements, but when engaging in criticism, isn’t there more to be said than “Carry on”?  Is what the young Marx called “the relentless criticism of all that exists” completely dead? 
    The problem with Critchley’s attempt at gathering together the disparate forms of demands made against the system is not that it is incomplete, unsuccessful, or that it leaves something out, but rather that it works too well, gives an answer that is too pat, too complete - it settles things once and for all, at a time when things should be more unsettled.  Apropos of what I wrote above about the logos, Critchley writes that “Politics is always about nomination.  It is always about naming a political subjectivity and organizing around that name.”  (p. 103)  But could it be that the political subject sometimes becomes, so to speak, over-nominated, the subject of uncritical nomination?
    Levinas’s work is important, for he was writing about the “anarchy of the spectacle” (TI 90, 1961) a few years before Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” (1967).  But isn’t Levinas’s conception that “ethics is an optics” the very formula of the spectacle, or as the Gang of Four would put it, the idea that “guerilla war struggle is a new entertainment”?  Critchley recommends Guy Debord’s critical work, which he consistently misidentifies as “Situationism” and misreads as being primarily concerned with something like public relations1 (“Politics is more than ever concerned with spectacle and the control of the image, which is what makes the Situationism of Guy Debord more relevant than ever as a diagnostic tool in political analysis.” -p.135).  But despite the many laudible aspects of groups and tactics like Billionaires for Bush and the Rebel Clown Army, one is tempted to say, following Debord, that here the dissent against the spectacle has given way to a mere spectacle of dissent.2  I suspect that Critchley is aware of this, for even he refers to contemporary anarchist practice as “spectacular” (p. 123).  Could this perpetual (and I would hazard to say, intentional) marginalization be the price we must pay for the insistence that such resistance must remain “at a distance from the state,” never directly confronting the state?  That is probably an over-simplification.  Nonetheless, these are unmistakable limitations on the demands Critchley’s ethics will allow us to make, rendering them not only not “infinite” but barely worth noticing, particularly for those in power (and not only for them) - as Critchley himself says, “One needs to search for the struggle.” (p.105)

The Stand-Off

    Oscar Wilde famously observed that “the chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody.... The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism[.]”
    This is a witty version of the standard reproach that Marxists have for anarchists: the anarchist, with his ethical commitment never to coerce, oppress, or hierarchize another person, is a reflection and indeed a product of bourgeois-liberal values, the values of the dominant class under capitalism.  The anarchist individualizes - subjectifies - what should properly be a social problem, with a social and a political solution.  The genuine socialist, as Wilde completes this argument, quite correctly collectivizes responsibility and thus has no need for personal commitment or responsibility (or guilt).  The ethical subject, which is the foundation of anarchist ideology, is itself merely a kind of illusion created by bourgeois values, and ultimately by the economic infrastructure that underlies them - and this individual subject, with its guilt, will wither away once the economic system has changed, after the revolution.  In other words, the Marxists accuse the anarchists of “sentimental idealism,” as in the famous exchange between Marx and Bakunin, recorded by Bakunin in Max Nettlau’s biography: “He called me a sentimental idealist, and he was right.  I called him a vain man, perfidious and crafty, and I, also, was right.”3  Bakunin accuses Marx of being immoral, and Marx accuses Bakunin of being, so to speak, too moral.
     Therefore the current philosophico-political boxing match is intensely ironic.  In the one corner, we have the followers of Critchley, inheritors of the anarchist tradition; in the other corner are the followers of Zizek, inheritors of the Marxist tradition.  What is ironic is that the tables have now turned - it is precisely the followers of Zizek - the Marxists - who insist on rehabilitating the notion of the subject, while the followers of Critchley - the Anarchists -  use Levinasian deontology to eat away at the foundation of subjectivity.  At a deeper level, what is being played out is a conflict between Hegel and Levinas, with Zizek as Hegel’s champion and Critchley as Levinas’s.  This is not merely a battle of clashing egos, nor is it the case, as it is popularly misunderstood, that the argument hinges on the question of violence: both men have indicated, Critchley in his gentle, nuanced way and Zizek in his brash way, that violence is sometimes necessary for social justice.  At the bottom of this debate is a properly philosophical question, hinging on the contest between two fundamental principles: responsibility vs. recognition.  My purpose in this paper is to compare the overbearing Levinasian responsibility (responsabilité), on the one side, with the more subtle and nuanced Hegelian recognition (Anerkennung), on the other.  At first this may seem like a subtle distinction, but hopefully I will demonstrate that they are poles apart.  The two sides are at a stalemate, since each cannot advance on his opponent without paradoxically supporting his opponent’s position.  My intention is not to elevate one of these principles above the other, but to elucidate their meaning, the ways in which they overlap, and how they are distinct.4
    Responsibilité and Anerkennung.  Both are modes of engagement with the other, and in the discourse concerning these concepts, “the Other” and “otherness” have become the go-to buzzwords for academic theory.  But how are they different?  How are they other than each other?  I’m going to argue, completely against the prevailing wisdom, that between Hegel and Levinas, Hegel is the softer, gentler philosopher, and that the notion of Anerkennung is the quieter, more careful notion.  At issue here is the distinction between autonomy, literally self-law, self-legislation, the creation of one’s own customs, and its complimentary term, heteronomy, law that comes from without, from outer laws and customs, from the demand of the other. 
    The distinction between autonomy and heteronomy, of course, was developed by Kant, and these two traditions, Hegelian and Levinasian, can be read as two distinct ways of grappling with Kantian ethics - Levinas offering a profound reproach for Hegel’s account.  For Levinas, the Hegelian tradition concerning the ethical substance is predicated on reciprocity, but this reciprocity is only knowable from a third-person perspective; Levinas insists on the phenomenal, first-person, subjective ethical encounter with the Other.  But the great irony here is that such a traumatic experience of the Other is so excessive, so over-abundant, that it obviates the very lack that is constitutive of subjectivity.  Therefore, what this supposedly subjective ethics misses is - subjectivity itself.  The ethical person, in Levinasian altruism, is not, properly speaking, a subject - she is abject.
    On first glance, the difference between recognition in the Hegelian sense and Levinasian responsibility would be that recognition is conditional, that is, in some sense, contingent, while responsibility is the unconditioned - that is to say, absolute.  Levinas can then be placed in the tradition of writers like Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling etc., who sought to find an unconditioned basis for the entire map of Kantian metaphysics.  Each in their own way, these philosophers attempted to surpass Kant’s finding that when reason attempts to think the unconditioned, it inevitably falls into unresolvable antinomies.  Levinas's quasi-altruism can be seen as a radicalization, or at least an extreme version, of a trend already present in germ form in post-Husserlian attempts, by Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, and others, a gradual turn away from the supposedly "scientistic" excesses of post-Hegelian philosophy.  The writers in this trend diagnose scientism with a bad case of Cartesian dualism, trace the etiology of this disease back to an over-confident ego, and prescribe an ever-increasing dose of engagement with the external (whether this be the destruction of metaphysics and the return to a description of the authentically zuhanden, or whatever the case may be).  Levinas pushes this movement to the ultimate extreme.  No ontology, no matter how constituted, is good enough for him: ontology as such is already culpable, because of the ego-centrism it ultimately necessarily entails.   But the absolute invoked by Levinas is ahistorical, indeed antihistorical, which is to say inescapable, permanent, inviolably sovereign, eternal.  We are discussing hell, here, and hell is other people.  In this ideology, no revolt, no subversion is possible against this total despotism, the despotism of the other over you; resistance is futile.  But Hegel does not make such overblown claims.
    Levinasian responsibility, the endless assault of reason by the heteronymous demands of the tout-autre, the wholly other, begins (and perhaps ends) in the face: “The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face.”  (Totality and Infinity, page 50).  It is understandable that, in the age of coercive totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, Vichy France, and Stalinist Russia, which operated through a mass-dehumanization, taking away their prisoners’ names and giving them numbers, and so on, that the face of the other would be the stumbling block of what Levinas calls the “imperialism of the same.” (87)  One thinks of the Malleus Maleficarum, the “Hammer of Witches,” that Renaissance instruction book for the persecution of witches, in which inquisitors were instructed to walk backwards into a room where a witch was to be interrogated, to prevent themselves from looking into the witch’s eyes and thus taking pity upon her, from which was derived the notion of the “evil eye.”  Or, for that matter, one can look at children’s cartoons of the 1980s, in which evil henchmen from Star Wars imperial stormtroopers to G.I. Joe’s enemies, the Cobra, who are about to get blasted by the good guys, always have their faces covered by helmets to keep us from empathizing with them.  Those who are to be exterminated must have no face.  And who can love without loving a face, the way the other presents and is presented, exceeding the narrow image of the beloved as passed down from Persian poets like Hafiz and Rumi, through 14th century Catalan troubadours like Raimon Vidal de Besalú, to modern advertising executives.  The face does indeed seem worth protecting, and not just as a historical heirloom.
    But now it seems we have entered into another era of the development of the spectacle, one predicated on a propaganda of the face.  Every billboard broadcasts the face, and every corporation has its corporate spokesperson or its cute little cartoon mascot, which protects it from all criticism - because no one would want to kill the Pillsbury Doughboy.  In a move similar to Saddam Hussein’s cynical use of human shields in a grotesque attempt to make bombing potential targets politically untenable, every corporation from the United Colors of Benetton to Ben and Jerry’s takes care to personalize their commodity, with images of a face, often laughing and happy, sometimes developed into complete, complex personalities, and it is often unnecessary for the person pictured even to say anything in defense or in favor of their represented brand - the fact of the very being of this face, frozen in eternity, is enough to justify the continued existence of the institution.  Think of the lionized image of Steve Jobs that has haunted us recently in the wake of his death.  And so it is in politics.  Nowadays, every news story, every outrage, every political movement, must have a face.  From Mumia Abu-Jamal to Trayvon Martin, to Kali Ann Poulton to Casey Anthony to Terry Schiavo, we are buffeted with images of the face, a face that calls us, that demands that we act, with a gut-level intensity that overrides all rational deliberation.  Meanwhile, structural, systemic violence compounds itself at the aggregate level, especially among an invisible proletariat in the global South, in the sweatshops of Haiti, of Bangladesh, and so on.  In an earlier age, back when sociologists warned us about the “lonely crowd,”  it seemed that the individual was becoming lost, fading into an abstract statistic; but now just the opposite is happening: it is precise, statistical reasoning that has been hidden, submerged, repressed - behind the face.  Sex is not repressed in our society, it is represented everywhere.  The real repressed topic is economics.
    The knee-jerk reaction to Levinasian altruism is to say that it looks like a kind of ethical attention deficit disorder.  Little Red Riding Hood’s autonomous ethical commitment to her grandmother is entirely disrupted by her heteronymous encounter with the Other - in the form of the Wolf.  And what big eyes he has.  Stepping out of my house for a few minutes, while my wife sits at home, I encounter the other woman and my responsibility toward her - and so on.  In Against the Logic of Submission, Wolfi Landstreicher has a section entitled, “The Projectual Life,” in which he writes that “the logic of submission, the logic that the social order seeks to impose on the exploited is a logic of passivity.... Starting from a refusal of this imposed existence, a decision to rise up against it, we are faced with the necessity of creating our lives as our own, of projecting them....”  But the Levinasian encounter necessarily disrupts and subverts any projectual life, putting our little projects aside in favor of our profound responsibility to any particular other that crosses our path.
     Levinasian altruism is reminiscent of a meme that has been making the circuit on the internet lately.  It is a quote frequently attributed to John Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism, and it is even referred to as “Wesley’s Rule,” but there is no unambiguous proof that Wesley ever said or wrote it.  Nonetheless it is passed around from wall to inbox to spamfilter: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can.”  Isn’t one tempted, upon hearing this, to reply, “Great!  You can start by not being so moralistically demanding!”  And the same goes for the statement from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which Simone de Beauvoir, doubtlessly under the influence of Levinas, made the epigram of her novel, “The Blood of Others”: “Each of us is responsible for everything, and to every human being.”  Sartre does not hesitate to call this kind of crippling Levinasian hyper-responsibility “total responsibility,” and this in itself is interesting, since it clues us into the possibility that even though Levinas contrasted the “totality” with “infinity,” and even though the post-modern program of Levinas’s followers has been “against totality,” that this very struggle has itself been totalized, and that Levinas’s responsibility has developed its own kind of totalitarianism.

The Liquefactionist Party

    From Levinas, Beauvoir, and Sartre begins the cult of responsibility, but it doesn’t end there.  Derrida is famous for asserting the undecidability of responsibility, and he does seem to poke fun at those whom he calls (in The Gift of Death) the “knights of responsibility,” those who demand responsibility as a simple fulfillment of duty, including the duty of the philosopher to spell out, programmatically, the duties of everybody else.  But Derrida is far from repudiating this Levinasian responsibility here - he is merely dutifully applying Levinasian responsibility to its logical end.  Indeed, he calls for “a more radical responsibility.”  Derrida gives us no respite from the overbearing, indeed infinite demands of Levinasian responsibility - rather, he forces us to feel this pain all the more acutely, for all he shows is that even if we were to do everything that responsible people do, our responsibility would still be undecidable.  Even Abraham, the paragon of Levinasian responsibility, the one who articulated the famous “haremi” (“Here I am”) to God, is at the same time “the most irresponsible.”  No commandments and no Kantian program of reasoning can save us.  So to our already heavy life, Derrida adds on the extra burden that this responsibility must spring from nothing: for him, and contra Kant, ethics is not ethics unless it is private, singular, and unjustifiable.  And this is fully Levinasian, for in Levinas’s writings, my responsibility to the infinite other calls me to guard her against the systematic determination of any moral law.
    This is where Critchley comes in.  In Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, Critchley sketches in a slim volume a remarkably comprehensive summary of an ethical stance that he has been working on for some time, really beginning with 1999’s The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas.  Infinitely Demanding is, one might say, Critchley’s manifesto, in which he advances a “neo-anarchism” (147, 148).  What makes it “neo-” is that it “cannot hope to achieve the classical anarchist dream of society without the state,” although it can “articulate a politics at a distance from the state.”  (148)  What makes it anarchism, according to Critchley, is “its emphasis on ethics as a binding factor in political practice, as opposed to the silence or hostility to ethics that one finds in Marx and in many Marxist and post-Marxist thinkers.” (p. 93) He writes, “This is an anarchism of infinite responsibility rather than unlimited freedom.” (p. 93)
    Critchley is quite correct: deconstruction is, through and through, ethical.  But let’s be careful when we use this term, deconstruction, a term which is often misinterpreted by people who have never read Derrida.  I remember sitting in a cafeteria and overhearing a conversation between a young couple, in which the woman was obviously offended by a sexist remark the man had said, and the man at one point exclaimed, exasperated, “Why do you have to deconstruct every single thing I say?”  What he meant by “deconstruct” was clear: to give a thorough, part-by-part analysis to a text, paying particular attention to the ways in which the author of that text may have implied a bias regarding gender, race, sexual preference, and so on.  The many people who loosely use the term deconstruction in something like this way are misinterpreting Derrida (and even Derrida sometimes seems to have misinterpreted himself), but a careful reading shows that deconstruction and analysis are not at all the same.  One might even say that deconstruction is the opposite of analysis.  When analysis occurs, the analyst achieves mastery over that which is being analyzed, freezing it, isolating it, and dissecting it, reducing it to its constituent parts and absorbing them utterly until a complete knowledge, a digestion of the material is completed.  Deconstruction might be a name for the impossibility of analysis, the incapacity of the subject to comprehend the other, and occurs precisely at the points of aporeia, of diaporesis, in which there is no passage, no way forward.  Whereas analysis is active on the part of the analyst, deconstruction merely happens, beyond anyone’s control.  It is the point at which the text itself breaks down, and is utterly heteronymous in regards to the reader.  The echoing refrains for deconstruction are decentering, loss, (mis)translation, and forgetfulness - forgetfulness as a form of loss of Husserlian internal time consciousness at the level of beings, and also as the forgetting of being itself, as per Heidegger.  This goes far beyond Barthes’s celebration of the death of the author and the birth of the reader, for in its fall, the text takes the reader down with it.  The triumphant slogan of analysis was: Where it was, I shall be.  If deconstruction could have a slogan, which is impossible, it would have to imply the reverse: the collapse of the I into a static it, under the sign of the tomb.
    Alarmist readers of Derrida, De Mann, and others back in the 80s used to warn that deconstruction was dangerously radical, even nihilistic.  They couldn’t have been more wrong.  Deconstruction is deeply conservative.  What occurred, again and again, was a close reading of the canonical works of Western civilization, and to the extent that this involved a loss of the tradition, deconstruction taught its students to feel this loss, to such an extent that deconstruction could be seen as nothing but an elaborate act of mourning; even at its most ludic it is what we, echoing Genet, might call “funeral rites.”  Far from radical, this was the undermining of the post-Hegelian radical tradition, the questioning of whether or not there can be an authentic radicalism, a method by which one gets to the root (or radix) of problems, an interrogation of the very concept of an unconditioned basis for phenomena, an all-embracing fundamental antagonism that motivates all smaller conflicts, as a base to a superstructure, and as such this deconstruction is a continuation of the ethical tradition of Emmanuel Levinas, and reflects at most a longing for an inaccessible orthodoxy, and sometimes an actual return, as if the very impossibility of orthodoxy were the condition of this orthodoxy’s possibility. 
    Levinas’s entire project was to police the dangerous freedom of ontology, to reign it in, to bring it to justice: “A philosophy of power, ontology is, as first philosophy which does not call into question the same, a philosophy of injustice.... Being before the existent, ontology before metaphysics, is freedom (be it the freedom of theory) before justice.... The terms must be reversed.”  (Levinas, 46-47)  Enough of this freedom of theory, exclaims Levinas, we must now have justice before freedom.  Thus freedom is called in for questioning.  (cf. TI pp. 85-90)  And in turn, Derrida identifies justice as undeconstructible.  Who could stand up in the face of undeconstructable justice?  Here we can see the origin of Critchley’s “neo-anarchism” under which one is infinitely responsible, rather than infinitely free - a formulation that may sound like good anarchism to him, but undeconstructable justice sounds like a Kafkaesque nightmare to everyone else (remembering that Kafka was, above all things, a biting, satirical humorist). 
    Critchley points out, I think rightly, that reigning from Kant to Fichte to Hegel to Marx to Heidegger and beyond (we could add some other names in here, such as Max Stirner and Ayn Rand, who was a bit of a throw-back) was what Critchley calls “the autonomy orthodoxy.” For these writers “and their many heirs,” writes Critchley, “the philosophical goal remains some conception of autonomy, whether the individual ego, individualized Dasein, the intersubjectively constituted realm of Spirit, the collective praxis of the proletariat as the index of humanity, or whatever.” (p. 36)  In contrast to this trend, Critchley recapitulates Levinas’s argument that “ethics is obliged to acknowledge a moment of rebellious heteronomy that troubles the sovereignty of autonomy.” (p.37)  The autonomy orthodoxy would demand a kind of autarchy - understood as self-legislation or self-origination (p. 36) - or, as the greatest of all D.C. hardcore bands, VOID, would put it, “My Rules.”  Rebellious heteronomy would be an ethical demand that crucially comes from outside the self, startling the self out of its self-imposed slumbers, disrupting and decentering the subject, and paradoxically creating a moment in which the subject can come fully into being, as a subjective fealty to an event (here Critchley borrows heavily from Badiou). 
    But along with this “autonomy orthodoxy” (prevalent especially in 19th century German philosophy) there has come to exist a parallel tradition, particularly in the 20th century.  Emmanuel Levinas is definitive of this trend, but it also includes Derrida, Roland Barthes, a certain aspect of Lacan’s work, and many, many other writers, up to and including Judith Butler, especially in her recent work Precarious Life (2004).  These writers stand ready at a moment’s notice, to turn aside and brood (to use a Joycean phrase).  They are always bearing mute witness to things, and are especially obsessed with grief, tombs, ghosts, death, dying, and mourning - they all just love the insipid stories of Edgar Allen Poe.  One thinks of Barthes’s Camera Obscura, which is outwardly his work on photography, but essentially an extended remembrance of his mother; Derrida’s Circumfession, in which he confronts the death of his mother; or his Adieu, a funeral oration for Levinas, or practically any other writing of Derrida.  I also can’t help but think of the scene in the movie Derrida (I use the word “scene” advisedly) in which he partakes in a little suffering tourism, to visit the South African jail cell that once housed Nelson Mandela.  What was he doing?  All of these writers (w)rite continuously of death - the death of the author, the death of the subject, and on and on.  Their goal is clear, and Critchley identifies it well - to disrupt autonomy, or at least, in a more passive register, to catalog the ways in which autonomy is disrupted.  As Butler puts it (in a passage cited by Critchley) “Let’s face it: we’re undone by each other.  And if we’re not, we’re missing something.”  (Critchley 120) 
    I refer to this tradition as the “liquefaction party.”  The phrase comes from William S. Burroughs, in his list of the Parties of Interzone.  In Naked Lunch, this is a political party, composed of people that literally reduce each other to liquid, a “liquid that is absorbed into someone else’s protoplasmic being.”  The signal characteristic of the tradition that I call the Liquefaction Party is a kind of politics that asserts that people, as individuals, are too solid, and that if people were merely self-effacing enough, breaking down their pernicious dualism and the border between the inner and the outer, the self and the other, if people were self-destructive enough, effectively liquefying themselves, a kind of political liberation would just magically materialize around them.  According to this way of thinking, everything will be better if we just turn into jelly.  One even sees a bit of this trend in Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, when he describes “the spectacle’s basic practice of incorporating into itself all the fluid aspects of human activity so as to possess them in a congealed form.”  The liquefactionist party is always complaining about “objectification” as though there were something offensive about being an object, as though all objects should lose their objecthood, should never object to anything ever again, and should just flow - by the path of least resistance.     
    The sway of the liquefaction party is so large that it may seem ubiquitous - truly it has naturalized itself in the contemporary intellectual scene, so much so that it is refreshing to remember that things were not always this way.  Liquefaction for instance has absolutely nothing to do with Karl Marx, who urged his revolutionaries not to crumble or liquefy but to be stronger, more unwavering, more precise - to arise.  It was Marx who, far from preaching Liquefactionist self-abnegation, exclaimed, “I am nothing.  I should be everything.”  And Marx claimed that under capitalism, far from things congealing, all that was solid melts into air.  It is especially odious that the Liquefactionist party does its business in the name of Friedrich Nietzsche, who would have had nothing to do with it, but that is the subject of another paper.
    Simon Critchley, in Infinitely Demanding, sets himself up as the current foremost mouthpiece of Levinas’s Liquefaction Party, arguing for a continual humiliation and belittling of the subject.  What the liquefactionists represent is pure heteronomy, and what they oppose is autonomy - any kind of autonomy, including their own.  Critchley argues, as he puts it, for an ethical demand “that I cannot fully comprehend and to which I am not adequate.” (p.78)  For Critchley, an ethical demand, to be ethical, must necessarily be unfulfillable.  He claims of this ethical demand that “its radically one-sided unfulfillability sunders my ethical subjectivity in a manner that entails the endless inadequacy of my action.”  Through humor, and particularly in the encounter with the other, Critchley believes that the subject should be continually reduced and boiled down.  Burroughs writes, “It will be immediately clear that the Liquefaction Party is, except for one man, entirely composed of dupes, it not being clear until the final absorption who is whose dupe.”  Is that a fair statement?  Is the Liquefactionist stance ultimately nihilistic?  Before we can answer that, let’s take a closer look at Critchley’s argument, which actually begins with a discussion of nihilism.


The Third Nihilism

    Critchley begins his argument in Infinitely Demanding by distinguishing between two types of nihilism, “active” nihilism and “passive” nihilism, a distinction that I believe he derives from Raoul Vaneigem’s similar, yet crucially different distinction, described in his seminal work, “Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations,” or “Treatise on Living for the Younger Generations,” usually translated as The Revolution of Everyday Life.  For Critchley, passive nihilism is a kind of quietistic withdrawal from politics and from our ethical commitments to suffering others throughout the world - the passive nihilist, in the face of a perceived universal meaningless, “tries to achieve mystical stillness, calm contemplation....”; he “closes his eyes and makes himself into an island.”  Active nihilism “also finds everything meaningless, but instead of sitting back and contemplating, he tries to destroy this world and bring another into being.” (Critchley, p. 5)  In the long list of active nihilists throughout history, Critchley includes Charles Fourier, Mao Zedong, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and Al Qaeda.  He doesn’t list out each and every active nihilist, nor does he clearly spell out the criteria or essential characteristics of an active nihilist, so you have no way of knowing whether you have been included in this axis of evil.  But I believe the most crucial name included is that of Lenin.  Critchley is suggesting that we avoid “either passive or active nihilism, although each of these positions represents a potent temptation[.]” (p. 8)
    It is clear what Critchley is doing here.  He has a central thesis, which is that the proper ethical stance consists in opening oneself to infinite ethical demands, which are necessarily unfulfillable.  He anticipates a criticism with which this will be met, namely that this is a nihilistic attitude, a refusal of substantive ethical or moral content.  Then he turns his anticipated critics back upon themselves, portraying himself as steering a quasi-Aristotelian middle course between two extremes, both of which represent genuine nihilism: he is not a nihilist, but a guardian of genuine ethics, which is beset on all sides by throngs of monsters.  Critchley even quotes Nietzsche in his argument, concerning both nihilism as the “most uncanny guest,” and the growing “European Buddhism” of passive nihilism.  (But here Nietzsche and Critchley part, for, rather than steering a middle course and avoiding extremes, Nietzsche heartily advocates fearlessly taking this path away from nihilism to its ultimate logical conclusion, even if this means destruction - destruction is necessary for creation, and the over-going is the down-going.) 
    But besides so-called passive and active nihilism, I assert that there is a third form of nihilism that Critchley is forgetting here.  Moreover, while active nihilists are relatively few in number, and passive nihilists, though more numerous, have, by their very definition, a quite limited influence over - and engagement in - the world, this third type of nihilism is nothing less than the most powerful cultural force shaping public discourse and global politics. 

Nihilism in Indonesia

    When nihilism comes up, I like to think about the history of Indonesia.  How can we characterize the Golkar, the “Party of Functional Groups,” which effectively maintained single-party rule for 32 years, abandoning politics proper in favor of simple pragmatic administration, after a violent coup in which hundreds of thousands of communist party members and citizens that were ethnically Chinese were rounded up and murdered?  The Golkar were totalitarians, without a doubt, and their massacre of Chinese nationals is one of the few historical genocides that may reasonably be compared with the holocaust (like the Jews in Nazi Germany, the Chinese were confusingly stereotyped as simultaneously being both communists and money-grubbing, greedy capitalists).  But totalitarianism, as it is usually understood, at least in American classrooms, means a political regime that goes too far, that hubristically attempts to do the impossible, to change human nature.  We are told that totalitarians, in the grip of a religious-like zeal, can be spotted by their messianic drive to impose their ideology, their vision of the New Man onto humanity, without any rational limits, any safe zone of personal space, individuality, personal property, or civil society (one thinks of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, a perfect example of what Critchley calls “active nihilism”).  But in Indonesia one had something different - totalitarianism without ideology.  There was no program, no vision of a “New Man” they sought to impose.  To borrow one of Marx’s one-liners (used in a somewhat different context), for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, the Golkar substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.  They were against everything - against the communists, obviously, but also against the nationalists - people of Indonesia were of course expected to support the government, but not too much, because of the way the Golkar came to power, wresting control from a previous coup that had claimed to be nationalist. Not only were the Golkar against the communists and nationalists, but also against the westernizers, and also against those who asserted their particular ethnic or tribal identity, and so on, and so on, effectively banning all politics, so that their program resembled that of Louis Aragon in the Dada Manifesto of 1920:

“...No more royalists, no more radicals, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more communists, no more proletariat, no more democrats, no more republicans.... an end at last to all this stupidity, nothing left, nothing at all, nothing, nothing.”
   
    This is a nihilism that wipes out, in advance, every concrete competing ideology, but substitutes nothing in place of these ideologies, no coherent plan, no meaningful alternative. 
    No one would accuse the Golkar of being “passive” nihilists, withdrawn homebody dreamers.  But neither were they attempting to re-create humanity according to an image cooked up in a fever dream.  I would describe the actions of the Golkar as sheer, naked will-to-power, if this didn’t completely cheapen and insult Nietzsche’s concept, which more resembles an artist’s noble and creative self-mastery than it does flawlessly executed perfunctory bureaucratic management.  Ultimately, the Golkar were a Kafkaesque exaggeration of typical myopic company men, devoid of any heartfelt vision, perfect examples of what Arendt called the banality of evil.  Their only mission was to try to maintain an ill-defined status quo against all threats to this empty sovereignty - in much the same way that the United States and other western powers jealously defend the entirely arbitrary set of borders in the post-colonial era (see, for instance, the First Gulf War, and the brutally ham-fisted defense of the utterly meaningless borders of Kuwait).  Notice also that the Golkar’s nihilistic regime prospered at precisely the point at which Indonesia was brought into the orbit of American hegemony and a gradual opening to Western markets - a sign, perhaps, that the nihilism characteristic of the Golkar is a symptom of what Alain Badiou has identified when he points out that the experience of capitalism is fundamentally “worldless.”  Capitalist globalization is our name for worldlessness infecting the world.
    Critchley is quick to attack what he calls “the tragic-heroic paradigm” (73) but what he misses is this banality, the third nihilism, which is by far the most common form of nihilism, outweighing by far both what he calls passive and active nihilism.  The Golkar were not heroic, indeed they represent the total absence of heroism, and by deconstructing the heroic subject, we all face the danger of becoming Golkar.  This is the end product of the Liquefactionist tendency toward the dissolution of the subject: the abject, “responsible” man, whose very sense of obligation to his friends, to his colleagues, to his superiors, and ultimately to the existing order precludes all real resistance.  This is what I would call institutional nihilism - a nihilism that involves a commitment, even perhaps a passionate commitment, but a commitment to an institution without rational justification or even a pre-rational phenomenal moral intuition - a kind of pure institutionality, something perhaps on the order of what Foucault describes when he elaborates the ways in which we are subjectified by the micropower of a specific regime.  It is the type of activity that one does because that is what one does. 
    What is necessary is not a happy medium between active nihilism and passive nihilism, because the problem has been misidentified.  Active nihilism (of the Leninists, the terrorists, and yes even the situationists) is not too active - rather active nihilism is not active enough.  It fails to perform the activity of a critical reappraisal of received ideological dogma.  The solution to the problem of activism is more activism: the spontaneous creation of life as a work of art, with the world as both inspiration and canvas.
    I wouldn’t bring up the case of Indonesia unless I thought it were somehow instructive.  And indeed, I think that this regime can be seen as the very prototype of governance in this supposedly “post-ideological” age.  Most of the rest of the world has slowly come around to follow Indonesia’s example in this, the End of History.  The post-modernists who proudly trumpet that humanity has become victorious over every meta-narrative, fragmenting every universal, and ridding itself of the Enlightenment project, may see in Indonesia’s Golkar regime the first fulfillment of their dearest hopes - and it’s not the rosy picture of diverse, multi-cultural children holding hands and singing in a circle.  The repression of the universal is universal repression. 

*         *         *

    Notice the way in which the term “responsible” is used in public discourse today: “responsible” commentators are those who have eschewed dangerous and self-deluded radicalism in favor of a more mainstream approach, one that takes into account and aims preserve the fundamental institutions of our society: commerce, the family, and so on.  But this is not to say that here in the United States in the 21st century we live in the same kind of regime that Indonesia innovated.  Our cultural system is far more advanced, sophisticated, subtle, exquisite, and effective.  As William S. Burroughs observes in Naked Lunch, “A functioning police state needs no police.”  These words are put in the mouth of the delightfully fiendish Dr. Benway: “I deplore brutality,” he says, “It’s not efficient.... torture locates the opponent and mobilizes resistance....”  Our regime of discourse is one that functions in making it impossible to locate the opponent and to mobilize resistance.  In our system, rather than actively, violently coercing potential rebels of every political stripe, we allow everyone to speak their minds - on the condition that their words will be released into a culture where they have already been used up and rendered meaningless.  You have freedom of speech - so long as you don’t mean what you say. 
    But we should pay careful attention to the manner in which we don’t mean what we say - and that is, paradoxically, that we mean much more than we say.  Our speech is, to put it bluntly, too free, and undermines itself with a repressive polysemy.  Our culture functions through a process of symbolic inflation, the inflation of the image, where every image, every concept, every movement, every gesture has already been used, replicated, iterated, too many times.  Like money, when language is excessively printed and circulated, it loses all value. 
    In this context, to return to Critchley’s argument for Levinasian heteronomy, my question for Critchley is simple: does it actually happen?  Does this rebellious heteronomy ever come to trouble the sovereignty of autonomy?  Think of the protesters that Critchley supports, who are in some sense enacting the other, putting the radically other, and specifically the other’s capacity for suffering, on display for the eye of power.  Do these stunts truly destabilize autonomous sovereignty?  I think of a lyric by Eugene Chadbourne: “Governments love anti-war songs / they say sing 'em loud, and we'll sing along / because it reminds them, in a musical kind of way / that there's a war.”
    Enough with moralizing against egoism, and beware of those who moralize against egotism.  Critchley has written admirably in other places about the modern sophists of our time, which require a Socrates to defeat them: namely the self-help gurus that populate the landscape, each one confident that he has the one true answer.  A central lesson of the 60s was that the struggle to eradicate the ego was a failure, and that the ego came back with a vengeance.  In our attempts to belittle the ego, we only made it stronger, for nothing is more dangerous than a wounded ego.  And those gurus who instruct us to rid ourselves of our egos continue to turn out to be the most ego-driven personalities of all.
    Slavoj Zizek has written of “a key feature of the Judeo-Christian universe: the externality of truth,” and has claimed that for both this religious tradition and for psychoanalysis, “The focus is on the traumatic encounter with the abyss of the desiring Other....”  For the Judeo-Christian tradition, this the encounter with God; for Lacanian psychoanalysis, this is the destabilizing trauma of the Real.  But in the symbolic exchange that characterizes contemporary culture, what room is there for this trauma, which Zizek also calls “the shock of the external encounter”?  To quote Jane’s Addiction, nowadays, “Nothing’s Shocking.”  We are all in a similar predicament that Marilyn Manson was in, according to the cover story of the Jan 31st, 2001, issue of the Onion:


Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-To-Door Trying To Shock People
January 31, 2001 | ISSUE 37•03
[...]

Last Friday at 4 p.m., Mark Wesley, 46, a resident of Overland Park's exclusive Maple Bluff subdivision, heard the sound of "animal-like shrieking" coming from the vicinity of his front lawn. Upon opening his front door, he was greeted by the sight of a pale and shirtless Manson carving a pentagram into his chest with a razor blade.
"Look at me, suburban dung," Manson told Wesley. "Does this shock you?"
When Wesley replied no, he said Manson became "petulant." Recalled Wesley: "He started stamping his feet and shaking his fists, saying, 'What do you mean no? Aren't your uptight, puritanical sensibilities offended? Don't you want to censor me so you don't have to confront the ugly truth I represent?' So I say, 'Well, not particularly.' Then, after a long pause, he says, 'Well, screw you, jerk!' and walks off sulking."
That evening, Linda Schmidt was preparing to drive her daughter Alyssa to a Girl Scouts meeting when she found Manson standing on her porch draped in sheep entrails.
"I knew who he was, but I was kind of busy and didn't really have time to chat," Schmidt said. "He just kept standing there staring at me, expecting me to react in some way."
Added Schmidt: "I tried to be nice and humor him a little. I said, 'Yesiree, that sure is some shocking satanic imagery, no doubt about it. And that one eye with no color in the pupil, very disturbing. I'd sure like to suppress that.' I mean, what do you say to Marilyn Manson?"
A deflated Manson remained on Schmidt's porch as she and Alyssa drove off.
[...]

    I respect genuine shock value; I consider it a fully legitimate value.  But what we have here is the mild, superficial nihilism of Marilyn Manson confronting the much more profound and intractable nihilism of the typical American consumer.  I can appreciate Zizek’s point, the upshot of all his books, which is that the authentic Christian experience is a destabilization of the subject, a traumatic intrusion of the Real - the “monstrosity of Christ.”  But I question whether monstrosity, and its attendant shock, is a mode of possibility of being-towards-the-world these days.  I wonder whether fear, or dread, or horror, or Angst, is something we can even do anymore, without some ironic distance.  Don’t we find ourselves going through the motions of being shocked, as in that witty chapter title from Naked Lunch, in the midst of the most horrifying and obscene material possible: “Pretend an Interest”?  A similar thing is happening these days with the supposed controversy over a two year old saying the “f word” on a recent episode of the popular television series, “Modern Family.”  Doesn’t one get the impression that McKay Hatch of the college protest group, the “No Cussing Club” is acting out the part of a protester, without any real feeling, simply for the sake of his groups’ 15 minutes of fame?  One almost suspects that the ABC Network invented the No Cussing Club in a desperate attempt at raising their own ratings.  Meanwhile, the protesters claim that they are horrified, not on their own behalf (they are worldly, after all) but on behalf of the children.  The irony, of course, is that savvy children have all seen much more brutal, obscene images on the internet than their parents even know how to access.  But our society needs someone, somewhere to be shocked by this, and reassures itself that somewhere, someone is: a wonderful variation on the Lacanian concept of the analyst as the “subject supposed to know”:  the subject-supposed-to-be-shocked.  This is the supposed subject that genuinely resists (and thus genuinely accepts) the traumatic, heteronomous intrusion of the Real.
    To see the development of this culture, observe the trajectory of horror movies: from their early presencing of the thing itself, epitomized, appropriately, by the Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World (1951, usually simply called “The Thing”), to more subtle, indirect presentation (the innovations in the 60s and 70s, such as in “The Shining,” or “In the Mouth of Madness,” wherein you can never tell, until the very end, whether you are witnessing genuine paranormal experience or madness), to campy low-budget indie films such as those put out by Troma, characterized by extreme, almost Brechtian exaggerations of brutality without any attempt at realism, and a silly sense of humor even in the midst of horror, such as in “C.H.U.D.” and “Pumpkinhead,” to ironic meta-horror, as in the “Scream” movies, to an appreciation of the inadvertantly hilariously bad and unscary, such as the cult following of “Troll II,” and finally to the desperate attempt to fake badness in an attempt at humor, as in “The House that Drips Blood on Alex” (2010).  We have reached a point at which even irony itself is no longer accessible, and can only be acknowledged at an ironic distance.
    It is not simply the case that, with each new supposedly shocking event, we have seen it all before.  This would be an easily solved problem, one that something suitably traumatic would dispense with.  The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is social relation between people mediated by images, and the problem lies in this social relation.  The problem now is that the very contours of social space have changed, so that even when something comes along that one hasn’t seen before, one experiences it as something that one has already experienced before.  This is what I call assimilation-before-the-fact.  For every new experience, the very experience is canceled ahead of time.  In a certain sense, one might say that phenomenology no longer applies to contemporary Western humanity, because we no longer experience anything, and so appearances can no longer be said to appear.  It is far beyond the situation that Debord warned us about, in which every rebellion becomes a new “conformism” - now, somehow, every potential rebellion is already “recouperated” and assimilated before it even begins.
    The mark of such a cultural context is flirtationism: public intellectuals are free to flirt openly with that which was previously taboo: not just Marx, Bakunin, Stirner, Sade, or someone like Derrida, who are completely passé, but Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Carl Schmidt, and Heidegger in his Nazi period.  It is a sign of our permissive society that we allow these ideas to float freely, because we know that they exist only as a kind of intellectual game, to sell books.  No truly sophisticated bourgeois would raise an eyebrow at the idea that all of the bourgeoisie should be lined up before a firing squad and shot in the back of the head.  Forget Cavell’s “Must We Mean What We Say?”  In our culture, we must not mean what we say.  Indeed, we are now allowed to say anything - so long as we don’t really mean it.  Really meaning it has been permanently blocked off from us; there is a necessary gap between ourselves and our own discourse, which allows our words to glide freely as floating signifiers, in and out of language games, utterly disconnected from the material world and its power.  We are no more capable of receiving the meanings of the words that we produce, than we are of receiving the full value of the products we produce under capitalist modes of production.

*          *         *

    Theodore Adorno, in Prisms (1955) famous wrote that “...[t]o write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today.”  Of course, on the face of it, this statement is plainly false.  There have been plenty of fine poetic phrases since Auschwitz, all over the world; what has actually been lacking since Auschwitz is a coherent political program.  Unreconstructed Leninists continue on their merry way, as if nothing had happened, as if the events of the Holocaust did not question their unthought assumptions to the very depths of their being (an attitude that truly is barbaric).  And so does nearly everyone else: anarchists, liberal democrats, conservatives, and what have you - for all are implicated by the Shoah.  Meanwhile, the deconstructionist Left and their ilk try to cover over their embarrassing lack of a coherent political program with a sulky gesture of refusal, a kind of perverse sour grapes: “Well, I never wanted a program, anyway!  Program, programmatic, pro-gramme, gramophone, grammatology, pajama-gram, gram cracker, grumble mumble mumble.”
    Post-modernists pat us on the back and assure us that “resistance is everywhere” (since “power comes from everywhere,” according to this logic, resistance must somehow be there, somewhere, too) but what is the meaning of resistance when a meaningful alternative is impossible to imagine?  To be perverse, and to state things concretely (and we have reached a point where to state things concretely is perverse): what if, somehow (impossibility of impossibilities), the movement that reached a certain decisive point at Occupy Wall Street suddenly somehow became a revolutionary force and managed to vanquish the United States government?  What then?  Wouldn’t the 99%, flush with their victory, be confronted with the very same intractable issues that the 1% in power now face?  Wouldn’t we still face global climate change, and the energy crisis, and the water crisis, and so on?  And wouldn’t we still not have any concrete, certain answers about what to do about the economy?  After the revolution, would answers magically fall from heaven?  We know what we don’t want: we don’t want the current hegemony, and we also don’t want the statist, Stalinist alternative as practiced in Russia, Maoist China, Albania and so on.  But what do we want?  Does anyone have any kind of clear picture?
    In a word, no.  What we are facing is the foreclosure of the imagination, a sudden, asphyxiating loss of phantasmatic space.  Nor is this accidental.  It is the very essence of the stability of our society - which is to say, what makes it what it is, and prevents it from becoming something else - which is, in turn, to say that it is the essence of our society to render it literally impossible to imagine any other preferable possibilities.  (Which in turn makes it incumbent upon us to do the impossible, and to do the work of such imagination.) 
    The left, in its theoretical infancy, may respond with that slogan, “Another world is possible.”  One wants to add: “unimaginable, yet possible.”  Rather than an answer to the debate, isn’t this just a short-circuit of the conversation?  What other world is possible?  And yet, this sullen refusal of theoretical rigor is nothing new, but begins with Marx himself, in the famous passage from “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”: “The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content – here the content goes beyond the phrase.”  Although the nineteenth century has come and gone, and the 20th with it, apparently somehow the future will resolve the problem that we literally cannot formulate.  But what did Marx mean?  One can puzzle about the content of this phrase forever.

*         *         *
    When I say that the inflation of the image takes away the value of images, what does this mean?  What value, precisely, is taken away?  Specifically, it is the power of the image to make a demand upon us.  When all images float free of any determinate material content, when their rule is “arbitrary,” as the structuralists would put it, they cannot fill us with ethical commitment, moral outrage, righteous indignation.  The only genuine, emotional response we have for these images is exasperation.  We have become like the suburban mom who is caught in the awkward encounter with Marilyn Manson in the Onion article.  Signs have demanded so much from us before - or at least they always already phenomenally come to us as seeming to have demanded so much “before” - that exasperation is all we have.  Isn’t that what we feel when we are encountered by Occupy Wall Street, by activists trying to raise money for an environmental cause, by hapless leftist groups attempting to sell newspapers, or by images of starving children in Africa?  The truly obscene response to all of this is the wistful feeling, “Ah yes, I was young once, too...,” which is especially stupid in its nostalgia for some lost time in the past when confronting us all in the near future are the impending calamities of water shortages, environmental devastation, peak oil production, antibiotic-resistant microbes, and so on.  Yet, even in the face of all this, the image is inflated, both in the sense of expansion and emptiness.
    The ultimate symbolic inflation, its power of demand completely expanded and utterly empty, is the idea of the infinite demand.  Couldn’t we say that to render a demand “infinite” is to make it safe, distant, unreachable, unapproachable, and as unable to attack us, as existentially uncertain as something from the realm of pure forms?  And yet, ultimately, the demand itself is unchanged in being rendered infinite - it is we who are changed, in our orientation to this demand, our “mood” (Stimmung) in our being-towards-the-demand, to play the Heideggerian game.  The infinitizing of the demand is really the infinitesimalization of the subject of the demand, our ability to render ourselves too weak to stand up to the demand - and there is a kind of relief in this, the peace of abandon.
    If we abandon ourselves, our rational subjects, to an unlimited number of heteronymous demands that we know in advance to be irreconcilable, then there is no necessity to attempt to reconcile them into a whole, a new vision of an alternate social organization.  This is especially true on the economic level, and indeed, the abandonment of the project of a consistent alternative to contemporary social organization is really merely symptomatic of a deeper problem on the left, which is the failure to come up with consistent viable economic alternatives to the current class structure. 
    One might add here that the analogue of Levinasian deontology in the realm of the development of political science is, surprisingly enough, Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated essay, “Two Concepts of Liberty.”  Here one can just begin to trace out the development of Berlin’s “value pluralism” that does, in the Anglo-American political science tradition, what post-structuralism - rooted in Levinasian deontology - does to Continental metaphysics.  For Berlin, there are two types of liberty, positive liberty and negative liberty, which often come into conflict.  Negative liberty (which Berlin identifies with the British tradition) is understood as “freedom from” outward coercion, the ability to do what one pleases; positive liberty, on the other hand, is something at once more profound and more dangerous.  Often encapsulated with the phrase, “freedom to,” positive freedom is something Berlin traces back to Rousseau and identifies with revolutionary currents throughout history: not merely the satisfaction of man’s desires as they exist, but the self-transformation of humanity, including humanity’s desires.  The Anglo-American tradition has been to elevate negative liberty and to forget positive liberty, rendering us into happier but also shallower beings, like Nietzsche’s “Last Man” who claims that “we have invented happiness” and blinks.  So this raises the question: what, exactly, is missing in negative freedom?  Precisely, negativity itself. 
    Levinasian altruism, with its concern for the Other, may seem to be the opposite of Berlinian negative freedom, with its alienating distance, and they are strange bedfellows to be sure.  But upon closer inspection they have more in common than may first appear - namely, what they ignore, what they both pass over in silence.  Putting these two aspects of contemporary philosophical (and not merely philosophical) deadlock - Levinasian altruism and Berlin’s negative freedom - side by side, one can begin to see what Hegel meant in his famous equation between subjectivity and negativity.  To put it succinctly, these are two different words for that which is missing today.  That may come as a surprise for those who see the post-modern condition as characterized by endless iterations of subjectivity and negativity, of every culture, every group, and every individual defining themselves against some perceived conformity, some heteronomous threat to their cherished autonomy, producing an unlimited array of identities that resist all attempts at categorization and universalization, but I think this is a misinterpretation, which stems from a misunderstanding of both of these terms, and especially negativity (negativität) as it was originally used in the tradition of German Idealism, as I’ll explain below.
    What is it that is missing in the Levinasian encounter?  Perhaps nothing - perhaps, rather than saying that it misses something, we should say that the Levinasian encounter is “too much.”  It is an ethical bombardment that disrupts rationality and is ultimately paralyzing and, strange to say, totalizing.  To put it differently, what is missing is negativity, incompleteness, lack.  The encounter with the Other is for Levinas over-abundant, excessive, infinite; it is the excess of totality.  This is not to say that it is oceanic or bombastic - the infinite is, so to speak, the little tiny bit left over after totality has been exhausted - the accursed remainder.  Can the Levinasian altruist be said to engage critically with the other, to criticize the other?
    The post-World War I obsession with the fragmentary, the non-total, among leftists, is, I believe, a reversion to a pre-Hegelian romanticism.  Hegel wrote during a period of intense German philhellenism, but one that gradually changed, and whose fate was tied to the hopes of the French Revolution.  At first, a Romantic optimism fervently wished that the French Revolution would somehow restore something like classical Greek polity in nineteenth century Europe, a view that was perhaps derivative of a combination of French Republican values with Cristoph Martin Wieland’s ideal of die Schöne Seele, the beautiful soul, a person who, with enough cultural Bildung (cultivation) had arrived at a state in which Pflicht und Neigung, duty and inclination, no longer conflict, as, it was imagined, was naturally true for the Classical Greek.  But as the violence of the revolutionaries turned inward upon the revolutionaries themselves and the French Republic devolved into Bonapartist imperialism, this was increasingly seen as a definitive break, and that the Greeks had something that was forever closed off for modern man.  The question only remained: why?  What separated us so completely from the ancient Greeks?  What was it that they could do that we can’t?
    The definitive document of this shift is Schiller’s Aesthetic Education, which was, upon being published, immediately praised by Hegel as a “masterpiece” and which influenced his writings for the rest of his life.5  In this work, Schiller wrote: “Why was the individual Greek qualified to be the representative of his time, and why can no single Modern venture as much? ...Because it was all-uniting Nature that bestowed upon the former, and all-dividing intellect that bestowed upon the latter, their respective forms.”6  Although they are distinct, one can trace out the beginnings of Hegel’s more complex and nuanced concept of the Understanding in this image of an “all-dividing intellect,” and in fact it is the same word in German that is translated as “intellect” or as “understanding,” namely Verstand.  The basic theme in Schiller’s Aesthetic Education, and in his Letters, which was shared by Hölderlin and Hegel after him, was that, as Steven B. Smith puts it, “the highest aspiration is the drive for unity,”7 a unity that was forever sundered by this all-dividing intellect.  However, this was a very precisely worked-out notion of unity, one that “presupposes and even welcomes diversity and conflict.”8  Indeed, it is this very conflict that somehow creates the unity that is the goal of the human spirit. The feature that made Hegel’s philosophy distinctive, and which he worked out in a much more explicit way than Hölderlin or anyone else, was that though the ways of modern humanity are, to use a Schillerian word, “fragmented,” that the only way of restoring unity is by fragmenting them more still.  One thinks of the exchange between the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and the critic Henri Lefebvre, after Lefebvre had written “Dada smashes the world, but the pieces are fine.”  Tzara, seeing Lefebvre, asked him, “So?  You’re picking up the pieces?  Do you plan to put them back together?”  And Lefebvre responded, “No - I’m going to finish smashing them.”9  An interesting remark, implying that nihilism is an incomplete fragmentation, a fragmentary fragmentation, and that the Marxist or post-Marxist position of Lefebvre is a complete fragmentation, whatever that would mean.  In any case, for Hegel, the modern (in Hegel’s words, the “German”) mind, which divides itself against itself, particularly by negating itself in the form of other people, ultimately will indeed achieve a higher unity than the foggy, natural unity of the classical Greeks.  This process of the negative, fragmentary mode of being of the mind negating itself by encountering its negation in the form of another person, this unity created by diversity and conflict, is what is called recognition (or Anerkennung) by Hegel.
    Levinasian responsibility is something quite different from this unity which contains diversity and conflict: it refers to an encounter with an other that is not the negation of the self, but simply, altogether other, or tout-autre, and which will never be reconciled into any kind of unity, even a unity in diversity.  It is worth emphasizing that, though the Hegelian tradition is accused of the orthodoxy of autonomy, it is Hegel who allows the self to be fully negated by the other, while it is Levinas who will not allow this transaction to be made, who forbids the history of this event, thereby subtly preserving the self, as well as the other.  The otherness of the other is for Levinas irreconcilable, and for Derrida and his followers undecidable.  Paradoxically, given the general drift of the Levinasian-Derridean (Liquefactionist) tradition, this forever puts the other out of play, unreachable.  It has the effect, intended or not, of preserving the subjectivity of the other, by freezing it, in a kind of suspended animation.  What Levinas and his followers fail to see is the way in which the transcendentalizing of the other, the infinitizing of the other, does a disservice to the other, by barring the other from play, from the game of history, the game of power.
    Our duty is, quite precisely, to think the unthinkable, or, if you prefer, to deconstruct the undeconstructable.  To do so we must think outside the bounds of responsible criticism.  This is not because nothing’s sacred, but because it is precisely this sacred, which heteronymously calls us, in the space of the most sacred, to be most relentlessly critical.  What is called for is sacred criticism, for criticism itself is sacred.  It is something like what Northrup Frye, discussing Blake, described as visionary satire - a vision, which is the satire of a vision, yet nonetheless a vision.  With this in mind, we can ask ourselves: is it possible to deconstruct nihilism?

*        *        *

    Hegel is often portrayed, quite wrongly, in one of two ways: first, as a kind of revolutionary prophet, foretelling a utopian future, a perfect society which would be the end of history, in which all contradictions would be resolved, a kingdom of ends, of absolute justice and freedom.  The second way of misunderstanding him is as a conservative who claimed that this utopian perfect society had already arrived, and that it only remained for him to accomplish at an ideological level what had already occurred at the level of politics (and then of course everyone else’s role would be simply to agree with him and understand him). 
    What both of these interpretations get wrong is the meaning of this crucial term, recognition.  For in both cases, it is imagined that the end of the historical progress that Hegel describes is a situation in which all problems have been solved.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Fichte had begun his philosophy with the self-positing I; Schelling inverted this and reduced it to Nature.  Hölderlin and Hegel took a middle position between these extremes of the breadth of Nature and the height of Subjectivity, as Goethe pointed out, when he wrote, “Where object and subject meet, there is life; when Hegel places himself between object and subject by means of his philosophy of identity and lays claim to this position, we must do him honor.” (Letter of January 5, 1832) 
    It was Hölderlin who first attempted to find this position, and he and Hegel together came to reframe the question of subjectivity.  Instead of asking, how does the subject manage to reach outside of itself to discover nature, Hölderlin and Hegel asked how it was that the subject came to divide itself from a pre-existing absolute, to draw a firm boundary between itself and nature.  But Hölderlin’s mistake was to seek a substantive aesthetic whole in this middle position.  Hegel’s innovation was to see the negativity of this act by which the subject divides itself from the world, that in essence the subject is the negative.  It is precisely this freedom that the subject comes to recognize, but since it is the subject, it cannot recognize it except by recognizing it in the person of the other.  So what is recognized is this very negativity - that is to say, at the end of this historical process, we do not come to solve all of our problems, but, just the opposite, we come to recognize each other as problems.
    In a way, this is very similar to Nietzsche’s famous quotation, many years later: “When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”  In other words, recognition occurs in the confrontation with nihilism.  One may question one’s own presuppositions, even one’s moral precepts, until one questions one’s moral commitment to other people.  One may even ask whether the other exists, and contemplate the possibility of solipsism.  But at the end of this progression, one sees the other’s abyssal freedom - his capacity to go through the same nihilistic questioning in regards to you.  We are all, each, abysses for each other, and this is the end of historical development - not the solution or covering-over of all problematic otherness, but the problems for the first time laid bare.
   

    As is well-known, the number zero was, so to speak, “invented” by the Indians, developed by Persian mathematicians like Al-Kwarizami and spread throughout the world of the Arabs and Turks before coming, belatedly, to the West.  Like the number zero, nihilism, though it may be, so to speak, nothing, had to be recognized, invented, passed from one culture to another, and different cultures have so to speak constructed this nothing differently - which, in turn, subtly alters the ways in which they interpret all of their somethings. The term “nihilism” is often traced back to the Russian nihilists, and people often cite the first usage in Turganev’s Fathers and Sons.  But in fact the word “nihilism” is at least half a century older, and can be found in the much-neglected writings of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi.  Significantly it was Jacobi who began the discourse on the other that has since played itself out in different ways among the Hegelians and the Levinasians.  For Jacobi, in his criticism of the philosophy of Fichte, asserted that there is no “I” without a “Thou” - 124 years before Martin Buber.  Hegel was particularly attentive to Jacobi, and though his Phenomenology of Spirit can, in a sense, be read as one long rejection of Jacobi’s ideas, even several years after writing it, Hegel took the time to write a review of the third volume of Jacobi’s collected works in the Heidelberger Jahrbücher, and in it he is extremely complimentary and acknowledges Jacobi’s importance as a thinker.
    Nowadays there is some interest returning to Jacobi, especially in this time after deconstruction.  A modern Jacobi, it is supposed, could identify the nihilism implicit in
aimless post-structuralism, and whip these theorists into shape.  But this popular hope has it exactly backwards, for it is post-structuralism that reinvigorates Jacobian negation, with undeconstructable justice taking the place of Jacobian faith. 
    Hegel’s great insight is a recognition and a sublation of Jacobi - Jacobi accuses his contemporary philosophers of a nihilism that is borne of limitless negation, but in Hegel’s view, Jacobi misunderstands negation: for Hegel, negation has a content.  In the Science of Logic, Hegel writes, "All that is necessary to achieve scientific progress . . . is the recognition of the logical principle that the negative is just as much positive, or that what is self-contradictory does not resolve itself into a nullity, into abstract nothingness, but essentially only into the negation of its particular content . . . . Because the result, the negation, is a specific negation, it has a content." (Logic, Introduction, 54) In other words, Hegel’s great discovery is determinate negation.  Jacobi’s negation, what Hegel calls abstract negation, negates this and that without ever coming to any kind of resolution.  In this sense, the post-structuralist Liquefactionist Party’s platform is a return to abstract negation.  They are not truly post-Hegelian, but in essence and in actuality pre-Hegelian. 
    Just as Hegel is accused of being a utopian, he is also accused of absolutism.  In a certain sense, this is true.  But as any kindergartener will point out, to say that “There are no absolutes” is itself an absolute.  Therefore the notion of a cosmos without absolutes is self-defeating, and forces us to consider the alternative.  The whole purpose in German Idealism of bringing the absolute into play is that once the absolute is asserted as absolute, it renders all other players relative to it.  The absolute, qua absolute is sui generis, and nothing else can stand in its place.  Since nothing can stand in its place, it is removed from the exchange of relative goods, from every chain of signifiers, and thus once the absolute is settled and established, every other signifier is kept in motion.  Once the absolute is invoked, no other contender can fix itself permanently, and thus all is kept flexible, in flux.  One might say that the absolute is the great escape valve of philosophy, the ctrl-alt-del that prevents all stagnation and freezing.  To put it differently, the absolute is not opposed to relativism - the absolute protects relativism and keeps it relative.  What is absolute is that nothing measures up to the absolute; everything eventually gives way.  What is absolute is contingency itself.
    To put it yet another way, there is no escape from the absolute, from absoluteness.  In the absence of the absolute, some other contender will inevitably become absolute, until this plays itself out and the absolute is shifted up and over, sublated to another realm.  At a political level, for instance, the absolute absence of an absolute regime ensures that any neighborhood bully with a shotgun will become the absolute.  But this cannot last forever; it is inherently unstable, leads to the demise of the tin-pot dictator, and on to another form of polity, which will be absolute until its inherent instability leads to another arrangement of forces, and so on.  And isn’t this, mutatis mutandis, the process that Hegel traces? What if we read The Phenomenology of Spirit as beginning with a Levinasian encounter with the other as absolute, and then attending to the inconsistencies in this conception, this “shape” as Hegel would say, its tendency of its own inner motivating force to move beyond itself into other, more complex “shapes?”  Hegel's genius is neither to embrace the absolute nor to reject the absolute but to historicize the absolute, to pay close and scholarly attention to the way in which the absolute changes.  The absolute is the motive force of all change, the spirit behind it, if you will; indeed, the absolute is change.

    In my opposition to Wesley’s (so-called) rule, which tells us to always do all the good we can, am I saying that sometimes it is preferable to do bad than to do good?  Let me be clear about this: yes. The fundamental difference between Hegelian and Levinasian political philosophy is that Hegelian philosophy is a philosophy of right.  And what is a right other than a right to be bad, and to do bad – to do that which might otherwise be prohibited?  That is the essence of Hegelian philosophy, as one can see in Hegel’s Science of Logic, § 1795: “The immediate, from [the] negative side, has been extinguished in the other, but the other is essentially not the empty negative, the nothing, that is taken to be the usual result of dialectic; rather is it the other of the first, the negative of the immediate; it is therefore determined as the mediated — contains in general the determination of the first within itself. Consequently the first is essentially preserved and retained even in the other. To hold fast to the positive in its negative, in the content of the presupposition, in the result, this is the most important feature in rational cognition.”
    This is one of Hegel’s most famous passages, and one of a few in which he deals directly with the other.  But the Hegelian other is quite different than the Levinasian other, because of the question of rights.  For Levinas, the subject has no rights, no right to be bad.  The Levinasian subject, if subject it may be called, is a reversion to a scriptural ethics, an ethics without rights, in which each of us stands utterly naked before God.  In (non-hermeneutic, literalist) Biblical law, there are no rights, only prohibitions and commandments.  Rights only appear when we hold fast to the positive in its negative, when we attend to the right of the subject to be bad, and thus begin to see the good in bad, the positive in its negative, which is another way of saying freedom.  The entire trajectory of the vast Hegelian scaffolding of thought tends toward this freedom, which is necessarily dangerous, which violates prohibitions, and is this violation, this violence.  Recognition is, in essence, violence, and brings with itself the right to violate.  Hegelian philosophy is, so to speak, a philosophy of criminality.
    Levinasian responsibility can be understood as a theory of justice without rights, a pure justice.  For Levinas, the subject has no rights, no right to be bad.  The Levinasian subject, if subject it may be called, is a reversion to an Old Testament ethics, an ethics without rights, in which each of us stands utterly naked before God.  In Biblical law, there are no rights, only prohibitions and commandments.  Rights only appear when we hold fast to the positive in its negative, when we attend to the right of the subject to be bad, and thus begin to see the good in bad, which is another way of saying freedom.  The entire trajectory of the vast Hegelian scaffolding of thought tends toward this freedom, which is necessary dangerous, which violates prohibitions, and is this violation, this violence.  Recognition is, in essence, violence, and brings with itself the right to violate.  Without this recognition, the law becomes inviolable - iron-clad, but also tautological and meaningless.
    “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” as Jefferson put it, that all people are “endowed” with “inalienable rights.”  What are these rights?  Can one hold a right in one’s hands?  Can one see it under a microscope?  How do we know these rights exist?  Fundamentalist Christians in the United States would have us believe that rights come from God, and that we know about them through reference to scripture, but there is absolutely nothing about rights in the Bible.  Jefferson’s answer might surprise them - our awareness of our rights comes from an entirely different source.  “...Our civil rights,” he wrote, “have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry....” For Jefferson, though rights come from nature, and ultimately from what he called “Nature’s God,” the only way we become aware of them is through “reason,” and from “free argument and debate.”  We might say, from the dialectic.
    Jefferson’s association of civil rights with the principles of geometry demonstrates his commitment to enlightenment rationalism and brings us to the figure of Kant.  For Kant, more explicitly than for Jefferson, civil rights are true, synthetic a priori propositions no less than the theorems of geometry, and his fundamental question, asking how synthetic a priori propositions are possible, applies to the assertion of civil rights no less than the theorems of geometry.  Kant in essence derives our rights from the twin criteria of autonomy and equality.  We are each capable of self-legislating our own moral law, but must therefore recognize everyone else’s right to do the same; and from here it is a mere hop, skip, and a jump to the categorical imperative. 
    Now, of course, by the end of the 19th century, we find Nietzsche scoffing at all of this, in the 11th section of Beyond Good and Evil, comparing Kant to the Doctor in Moliere’s play, “The Doctor in Love”: “It seems to me that there is everywhere an attempt at present to divert attention from the actual influence which Kant exercised on German philosophy, and especially to ignore prudently the value which he set upon himself. Kant was first and foremost proud of his Table of Categories; with it in his hand he said... "How are synthetic judgments a priori POSSIBLE?" Kant asks himself—and what is really his answer? “BY MEANS OF A MEANS (faculty)”... —he had said, or at least meant to say. But, is that—an answer? An explanation? Or is it not rather merely a repetition of the question? How does opium induce sleep? "By means of a means (faculty)," namely the virtus dormitiva, replies the doctor in Moliere.”
    This, I think, is a fairly devastating criticism for Kant and the post-Kantians, ultimately including Hegel.  But it is important to point out that it was Hegel himself who first began the line of thought completed by Nietzsche, for it was Hegel who initiated the analysis of Kant’s assertion that this property exists within us, which gives us the capability of making synthetic a priori judgments, including the self-legislation of our rights.  Hegel wants to know: what property is this, how did it get to be there, and how do we know that it exists?  This is not to say that Hegel thought that rights don’t exist, or that they are not “self-evident.”  The title of Steven B. Smith’s book is perfect: “Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism: Rights in Context.”  This is not a repudiation of liberalism, or of the rights that are the central focus of liberalism, but a critique in the Kantian sense of the word.  Just as Kant, in writing the Critique of Pure Reason, was not trying to repudiate or destroy Pure Reason, but to put it on “trial,” to use his famous image, so that it will, by the end, be on a firmer, more certain foundation.  So it is with Hegel and rights - he does not deny that they are self-evident, but he wants to know how it is that rights came to be self-evident.  Hegel’s role here as philosopher is to uncover the story of how rights came to be recognized - the history of right is necessarily implicated in the philosophy of right.  Nor was this ancient history for Hegel.  Slavery still existed all over the world when he wrote the Phenomenology of Spirit, and we have the monstrosity of Jefferson who, while claiming that it was “self-evident” that “all men are created equal,” nonetheless himself owned slaves.  Apparently this self-evidence did not make itself known to all people immediately, but only gradually were these rights recognized for all: strange as it may sound, self-evidence has a history. 
    Hegel is often set up as a strawman, the ad hoc representative of civilization, which those who oppose civilization, be they surrealists, structuralists, or what have you, feel the urge to take down.  But identifying Hegel with civilization is an uneasy equivalence at best.  For Hegel understood keenly why civilization might have its discontents.  Indeed, I see Hegel primarily in the opposite way, as a representative of barbarism, the philosopher who, perhaps more than any other, understands and respects – recognizes – the perspective of the barbarian.  It is precisely in the figure of the barbarian that rights, properly so-called, originate.  The right of conquest eventually gives way to the right of possession, which gives way to hereditary rights, ancestral rights, the right of primogeniture and so on.  Genghis Khan had his rights.  When Agamemnon and Achilles stormed Troy, each had their rights to various women to be taken captive, and it was a dispute over these rights that began the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon, at least according to the Iliad.  As Aldous Huxley observed, “Liberties are not given, they are taken.”  Hegel traces this “taking” from the Orient to the Classical world and on to the Germanic world. 
    Granted, as Zizek points out, the ethical is distinct from the moral - morality comes from outside, in the form of societal laws and rules that must be obeyed, while ethics is a duty to oneself.  Zizek gives, as an example, Don Giovanni, who at the end of the opera refuses to repent for his life of sin, renounces heaven and allows himself to be taken to hell - in a sense, though he is completely immoral, he is perfectly ethical here.  Nevertheless, ethics tend to become moral.  The section of the Phenomenology of Spirit commonly called the master-slave dialectic (which Hegel himself called Herrschaft und Knechtschaft, or Lordship and Bondage) can be considered Hegel’s own Genealogy of Morals, the way that morals develop out of ethics. Hegel is here describing a kind of nobility of character that has much in common with Nietzsche notion of the master morality, but for Hegel this is only the first step.  The noble, the lord, has his self-concept which is the center of a kind of ethics without morals (much like Don Giovanni as Zizek describes him).  But in order to maintain this self-concept, and even to have this self-concept as a concept from the very beginning, the lord must be sure that everyone else has this same concept of him.  This sets the ball rolling, as it were, for the lord needs his bondsman to recognize his own self-concept, and thereby becomes dependent upon him. 
    Although Hegel’s philosophy is uniquely panoramic, touching metaphysics, aesthetics, politics, the philosophy of language, and nearly every other philosophical field, at its core is an ethical question, which is the question of the application of ethics: To whom does ethics apply, and how does ethics apply to them?  Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, had asked how synthetic a priori judgments were possible, and this included not only judgments about mathematics and geometry but also, among other things, ethical judgments.  He further claimed that such judgments could be made transcendentally but not of the things-in-themselves.  But in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, the second formulation of the categorical imperative is to “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”  This begs the question: how can we treat people as ends-in-themselves if we can never know them as things-in-themselves?
    Levinas is on the right track when he refers to the way in which the other exceeds the idea of the other in me.  But Hegel goes further.  There is an entire, complex progression by which the subject comes to recognize the other.  In a nutshell, the distinction between responsibility and recognition is that recognition has a history.  Levinas’s responsibility is ahistorical and even anti-historical.  We see this in a sentence in Totality and Infinity, which is perhaps the decisive sentence of the Liquefactionist movement and its distrust of “things”: “In history, the will is congealed into a personage interpreted on the basis of his work, in which the essential of the will productive of things, dependent on things, but struggling against this dependence which delivers it to the other, is obscured.” (p. 228)  Levinas is quite right, and recognition is absolutely inextricable from this work.  Recognition is an act; responsibility is a condition.  More than this, recognition is necessarily a free choice, and a freely chosen necessity; but as Sartre shows in Being and Nothingness, the only thing for which we are not responsible is our responsibility itself, which alone is given and unalterable - on this point, Sartre and Levinas are in agreement.
    Not only is recognition an act - it is a specific act.  It is recognition, not responsibility, that reveals the other in its aspects that fail to fit into any systematic program.  The great lesson of the Lordship and Bondage episode in the Phenomenology of Spirit is that recognition is work.  It is not simply automatically, heteronymously “there.”  We create it.  The fundamental force of Levinas’s responsibility is desire, but Hegel is critical of this desire, and writes that “work... is desire held in check, fleetingness staved off; in other words, work forms and shapes the thing... it is precisely for the worker that the object has independence.”  And Hegel’s analysis of this process is brilliant: the one who does the work of recognition, namely the slave, does not do so through resistance to power, a resistance that is everywhere and is a necessary component of power, as in Foucault.  In Derrida’s Adieu to Levinas, he focuses on the intrusion of “the third” in Levinas, “the third that marks the demand for justice as law.”  He writes, “It is right endlessly to insist on this: even if the experience of the third, the origin of justice and of the question as a putting into question, is defined as the interruption of the face-to-face, it is not an intrusion that comes second.  The experience of the third is ineluctable from the very first moment....”  But what many readers pass over is the fact that the experience of the third is already present in the writings of Hegel himself, in the Lordship and Bondage episode, where the third takes the form of the chain.  The slave does not do the work of recognition by breaking his chain, but by working on the chain, building it, creating it.  And more important than the way in which the chain is the mediation of the relationship between the lord and the bondsman, is the way in which the bondsman is the mediation in the relationship between the lord and his chain.  “...The lord relates himself mediately to the thing through the bondsman.... The lord, who has interposed the bondsman between it and himself takes to himself only the dependent aspect of the thing....”
    Hegel’s point here is, in part, to make fun of the romantic tendency to accept only the “immediate” as the only authentic mode of being.  The lord demands immediacy, “the sheer negation of the thing, or the enjoyment of it.”  Deeply understanding this lordly mode of being towards the world, yet opposed to it, Hegel champions the humbler path of the mediate, of mediation, development, work.  The lord asserts his independence, the bondsman frankly acknowledges his dependence.  But in his servile work, the bondsman grapples directly with the thing itself, his very chain.  The lord, demanding immediacy, demanding the face-to-face relation with the truth, in fact becomes dependent on the slave’s work, and grows out of touch with the reality of the factory floor - thus the supposed immediate demonstrates that it is mediated, whereas the frankly mediated touches the immediate immediately and is identical with it.  Hegel was probably thinking of Schelling when he wrote this, but Hegel’s critique of the romantic concept of immediacy, I think, applies equally well to Levinas and his heirs, who insist on the ahistorical, immediate, face-to-face encounter.
    Rather than responding to an overwhelming, infinite, blank demand which simply tells us what to do, the subject recognizes the other in the other’s otherness, a difficult, demanding task.  A perfect example of this is the Arab Spring: an initial temptation here for the radical left was to see in the Arab Spring hope for the revolution we had been longing for all along - a secular, universalist uprising led by communists and/or anarchists.  Another tendency, perhaps even stronger, among the western left was a kind of automatic cynicism - assimilation-before-the-fact, again - which shrugged off the Arab Spring off as either another set of bourgeois revolutions, powered by Google and a potentially upwardly-mobile young would-be middle class that was frustrated by lack of opportunities in the existing economic structure, or something less - a mere show, in which, for instance, the generals of Mubarak’s regime were still essentially in control.  In either case, we would have at least the responsibility for humanitarian missions to help those whose lives are disrupted by the instability, and at most the yoke of responsibility to make sure that everything comes out the way our preconceived theories say it must.  Both of these interpretations, the hopeful interpretation and the cynical interpretation, are versions of the same mistake - the attempt to short-cut the work of research and theory.  Truly revolutionary activism consists, however, in seeing beyond the spectacle of the peaceful transfer of power and recognizing the genuinely new movements that are occurring outside of our little theories.  The same is true for the London riots of 2011- they seemed, on first glance, not only leaderless but also without a specific message or even a shared grievance.  These moments, which baffle the theorists, resemble the July Revolution of 1830, which so confused and dismayed German intellectuals like Immermann, von Stein, Niebuhr, and even, to a certain extent, Hegel himself.  All of the contradictions had already been resolved, so what were these revolutionaries doing?  It seemed to the intelligentsia like a kind of surplus, an excess, a pure politics.  Hegel insultingly referred to these revolts as “courage from below.”

    Far be it from me to accuse the Levinasian-Derridean tradition of irrationalism.  I believe both philosophers, and many of their followers, have clear, well-thought-out theoretical stances, arrived at through the most rigorous reason.  But ask yourself this question: what does Levinasian reason do?  If we already feel the heteronymous demand of the other, then Levinasian reason is not necessary.  If we do not, then Levinasian reason will not help us - for if there were a way for reason to persuade us to feel this demand, then we would have come to this ethical stance by way of an autonomous decision, arrived at through reason, and so the demand would not be genuinely heteronymous.  So Levinasian reason is powerless and useless. 
    There is, of course, a quite consistent response that the followers of Levinas can assert, which is that Levinasian reason is indeed powerless and useless, that, unlike ontology, it is not a “philosophy of power,” and it cannot be made of use to any particular systematic determination of political or even moral law - that it is entirely gratuitous.  But if that is so, then does it not resemble a Husserlian phenomenological description, something like a phenomenological description of the event of the ethical?  If it cannot compel us to feel the moral demand of the other, then it leaves us free to make our, so to speak, existential choice, and yet Levinas renounces freedom.  If it can be reduced to a phenomenological description then this requires us to radically reinterpret Levinas’s philosophy as a kind of epistemology - indeed, since being is exteriority, mightn’t one risk calling Levinas an ontologist par excellence - flipping Levinas inside-out, as it were?  Of course this would be to overturn all of Levinas’s laws, but only for the sake of fulfilling them: here we stand, we can do no other.
    And isn’t this, rather perversely, precisely what Zizek does?  Except, of course, that Zizek does this from the other side: he projects Levinasian concern for the other back into Hegel.  Returning to the stand-off between Zizek and Critchley, the only way out of this is to recognize not what it is that the two sides are fighting over, but what they have in common: this is what I call the passion for the external.  Remember that the subtitle to Levinas’s Totality and Infinity is “An Essay in Exteriority” and that one of the final sub-chapters of his “Conclusions” is “Being is Exteriority.”  When Zizek writes of “a key feature of the Judeo-Christian universe: the externality of truth... the focus is on the traumatic encounter with the abyss of the desiring Other...,” Zizek’s Hegel is, through and through, a Levinasian.  The kind of all-or-nothing face-to-face encounter is everywhere in Zizek’s Hegelian interpretations, for instance when he writes of soldiers from opposing armies encountering each other during times of war.
    Zizek does not go far enough here, in resurrecting Hegel.  Let’s return to Schiller’s statement, that all-uniting nature gave form to the Greek mind, while all-dividing intellect gives form to the modern mind.  Whether we intend to fully justify or to repudiate this statement, doing so requires us to deal with this concept of nature, so central to Schiller’s essay and also to Hegel’s philosophy which follows from it.  Most people, even including Hegel’s fiercest defenders, now dismiss and ignore Hegel’s book the Philosophy of Nature (there are important exceptions, like Allison Hall of Trinity Hall, Cambridge).  And it’s understandable that they do, since the book has received such a bad press, for instance among astronomers, who laughingly assert that Hegel, in this book, created an a priori argument that there could only be seven planets.  (In fact, Hegel made no such argument.) 
    Moreover, for leftist academia in the 20th century, and particularly for the Liquefaction Party, the concept of nature has become the great bete noir.  Nature is the great Denkverbot of post-modern times.  And not without reason - the reactionary claims that woman has a “natural” place in the house, or that homosexuality is “unnatural,” or that, as Aristotle would have it, some people are “naturally” slaves are all reprehensible.  But rather than forbidding one’s followers to think about nature, wouldn’t it be more productive to point out that these reactionary claims simply aren’t true - that homosexuality exists throughout the animal kingdom, for instance?  To give up the concept of nature to the reactionaries already cedes too much to the enemy.  Rather than giving them the field, why aren’t we willing to take a stab at arriving at a notion of nature of our own, a revolutionary nature?
    Slavoj Zizek surrenders to his post-modern rivals when he claims that we need an ecology without nature.  If this means abandoning a god-like life-giving, protective matrix that keeps everything in balance, then that is fine as far as it goes, but isn’t that simply a very bad concept of nature?  Don’t we need a better one?  Hegel already gives as a head-start in this direction, because he advances the idea of a dialectical nature.  This is not “nature” in the stupid sense, a human nature which, it is imagined, is completely unchangable and unchanging, and which will bring all progressive programs to ruin.  This is actual nature, nature that is change, ceaseless growth, decay, and evolution, an ecology of change in which every element is continually adapting to its environment, which is composed of elements that are continually adapting to each other, and so on and so on - nature as permanent revolution.
    What is necessary for the left is what was once called “natural philosophy” -that is, science, and particularly the science of economics.  By ceding nature - that is, reality - to the enemy, the left has essentially said, very well, you can have the real world, with its dirty economics - we will take care of literary theory and film studies.  To become vibrant, the left must wrestle once again with the issues that are discussed in science.  We must do again what Hegel attempted, but without Hegel’s illusions - to bring the spirit of the romantics down to the scientific world.  What is most symptomatic in this passion for the external is that, in practice, by rejecting nature, it cancels the external. 
    One of the most telling passages in Totality and Infinity is the first sentence of the fourth subsection of section I.B, in which, just after dismissing political law as that which “concludes and sanctions the struggle for recognition,” and claiming that “glorious” responsibility is (one of) “the condition(s) for equality itself,”  Levinas admits that “Not every discourse is a relation with exteriority.”  This always strikes me a bit like, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”  So enough with this anticipatory resoluteness towards the heteronymous demand, which never comes; enough waiting for Godot.  No external agency, no divine violence, will ever come to save us.  We must do it for ourselves.  For this we need not a decentered self but an inner confidence that is strong, powerful, robust, defiant, and indeed, revolutionary.
    One of the derivative ironies here is that, on the one hand, Zizek enjoins us to repeat Lenin, while Critchley sees himself as “criticizing the Leninist idea of the withering away of the State,” but on the other hand, if there is any intellectual alive today who is repeating Lenin, it is Simon Critchley.  Why do I say this?  Because it was Lenin who, in his critique of those he accused of “economism,” started the shift in Leftist thought away from a scientific, economic analysis of the prevailing trends of historical forces, and towards a quasi-ethical demand on the subject to be a good revolutionary.  Lenin’s insults are telling here: he does not claim that his rival theorists have their facts wrong, or that they have interpreted these facts unscientifically.  Rather, they are class-enemies, scoundrels, renegades, opportunists, traitors.  Though Zizek may call for an end to moralizing leftism, his hero Lenin is the ultimate moralizer.  If we compare him with anarchists like Hakim Bey or Bob Black, it is they who seem more like the opportunists, and proud of it.  Meanwhile, if we compare Critchley and Zizek, it is clearly Critchley who takes up the mantle of personal moralism, while Zizek heaps laughing scorn on vegetarians, fair trade consumers and other moralizing political do-gooders.

Conclusion

    In episode 55 of the Sopranos, we see gangsters fighting each other over territory, specifically the territory in which different landscaping companies do business.  What makes the episode funny is the idea that gangland territory applies to all capitalist ventures - not just drug sales or protection rackets, but also lawn care.  But why not?  Here’s why not: the concept of territory shows us that we are in the black market, the secret underbelly of capitalism, in which capitalism has reverted to a pre-capitalist quasi-feudal system, in which aristocratic families battle over land.  Pure capitalism, on the other hand, engages in a system of deterritorialization.  One thinks of Karl Polanyi’s magnum opus, the Great Transformation, in which he describes the transition to capitalism: in pre-capitalist societies, economic interactions are embedded in a social framework; under capitalism, social interactions are embedded in an economic framework.  It is a bit like a photo-negative: the figure has become the ground, and the ground has become the figure.
    Novalis’s famous and trenchant remark that the philosopher wants to be at home everywhere should be placed next to Marx’s (and Deleuze’s) thoughts about deterritorialization.  The philosopher, or more precisely the theorist, the spectator, the ideal of the pure subjective consciousness, passive as an audience member at the theater, originated more or less at the same time and place as the birth of modern money, and has become, over time, the epitome of the superstructural aspect of this centuries-long process of deterritorialization.  But this very process of intellectual globalization itself necessitates a negative moment, an intermediate stage when the very inverse happens - before the philosopher can be “at home everywhere” she must first learn to be foreign everywhere and to learn to see those very things that were, in the innocence of her youth, so familiar and commonplace as not even to be noticeable, as suddenly unfamiliar and strange.  This moment of foreign-ness - of what Heidegger would call the unheimlich, usually translated as the uncanny, but more literally as the un-home-ly - this moment, in a word, is philosophy.  The philosopher is not the one who takes a given problem and readily gives an answer to it - that would be the domain of the sophist, the merchant of wisdom.  The philosopher is the one who radically recontextualizes a problem, who gives a problem a fresh strangeness, in such a way that we can never simply see the problem in our old familiar way, ever again.  That is not to say that we cannot see it in the old ways - we can - but we cannot simply see it that way.  We must also see it in a fresh strange context, as a foreigner might see it, and these two contexts will for forever overlap, superimposed, creating strange dissonances and even stranger harmonies.
    This experience of fresh strangeness, of coming face-to-face with an utterly foreign way of looking at the familiar and commonplace, so that one is forced, so to speak, to start all over again, but more precisely to become a beginner at a process that never had a beginning, is what Hegel called Enlightenment.  The obvious example of this in literature is the Baron de Montesquieu’s “Persian Letters” (Lettres Persanes, 1721), in which the Parisian Montesquieu imagines a pair of Persians experiencing Parisian culture for the first time.  Philosophy, in the sense of making foreign what was once familiar, is the only way to avoid assimilation-before-the-fact.  Philosophy in this sense could be seen as a kind of attention to subtle distinctions.  The traumatized subject of the contemporary world looks at the event and says, “I’ve seen it all before.”  The philosopher, on the other hand, though she may have this initial experience (or pseudo-experience), takes the “double-take” and says, “Ah yes, but this time, it is, ever-so-slightly, different.” 
    The word “dialectic” has undergone horrible abuse over the past couple of centuries: in college classrooms across the world, innocent children are indoctrinated with some kind of monstrous absurdity that there is, or was, something called the “Hegelian dialectic,” which, they are told, involves some kind of historical process of “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.”  I need not tell the better-educated that Hegel never said or wrote anything even remotely resembling this indecipherable nonsense - that actually this comes from a bastardized hodgepodge of the philosophies of Gottlieb Fichte, Joseph Dietzgen, and especially Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus.  That this cobwebbed clutter could be associated with the fine name of Hegel is bad enough, but it is far worse that it should be called “dialectic.”  I propose a return to Plato’s concept of the dialectic, defined as the art of collecting together and dividing apart.  Similarities, unities, and subtle distinctions: these are our tools.  Artfully, creatively determining where we can be generous enough for a reconciliation, and where we must draw a line - that is the business of the philosopher.
    J G Ballard once said: [This was his response to a question in Re/Search 8/9 on October 30, 1982:] “I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again… the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.”  Philosophy, at first glance, appears to be this very “suburb of the soul.”  Think of Kant, who lived a life of legendary regularity, walking the same path through Königsberg at the same time every day, never marrying or having any long-term romantic relationships, and so on.  From the third person perspective, this cannot seem anything but boring.  As Heidegger said of Aristotle: "Regarding the personality of a philosopher, our only interest is that he was born at a certain time, that he worked, and that he died."  Yet I would argue that philosophy alone can stand up to Ballard’s fear of the future in one word.  Only philosophy can detect, through the gathering together and dividing apart of the dialectic, the newness and fascination within this endless repetition.
    It is with this in mind that I assert that philosophy is the irresponsible.  When we hold up a work of humanity against God and Nature and boast that it is philosophical, what we mean is that there is no way to respond to it adequately.  But we can play the Derridean game here and point out, quite truthfully, that this impossibility of a response is the very condition of the possibility of responses.  This is clearly true when we speak of “philosophical literature”: a piece of literature, if it is truly philosophical, may be interpreted this way and that way, and will never be used up.  There will always be more to say about it.  Shakespeare is the obvious example.  We may interpret and reinterpret what it means “to be or not to be” again and again and our descendants will always see something new in the text, staring them right in the face, clear as day, that we in our supposed knowledge have missed.  No one will ever have taken Hamlet fully into account, fully assimilated the text.  The same is true for Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” and for Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, and this is why we refer to such works as philosophical literature. 
    This gives us an insight into what philosophy is, in general.  It is a commonplace to say that an ideology gives a person a list of answers, like a catechism, whereas philosophy’s job is, instead, to raise new questions.  But this does not go far enough.  It does not make one a philosopher simply to look at the world of one’s experience and to say, “Huh?”  The clarion criterion of a work that allows us to call it philosophy is that it irreversibly recontextualizes our own experience, even if only by telling us what we already know.  It does not provide any new answers for our problems, it simply restates the problem in different words.  Take, for instance, the decisive philosopher of the Enlightenment, Thomas Hobbes.  (As Hegel says, an event that happens twice in history establishes this as a decisive break with the past; if it had only happened once, it might merely be a contingent happenstance - happening twice establishes it as history.  So it is with Machiavelli and Hobbes - had there only been Machiavelli, he would have been a contingency.  It requires an uncanny doubling for a contingency to become fact.)  Thomas Hobbes did not provide any new answers for humanity; before him the answer was absolute monarchy, and after him the answer remained absolute monarchy.  What Hobbes accomplished was not a new answer but a restatement of the problem of political economy, in different terms.  Before Hobbes, it was Romans, chapter 13 of the New Testament and the resulting belief in the divine right of kings that ensured absolute monarchy.  But Hobbes justified absolute monarchy in a different way (life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short; we require the social contract to protect us from this nature; this contract is binding; and so on).  Not that pre-Hobbesian political economy is any more scriptural than Hobbes’s work, or that Hobbes’s work is any more secular.  Hobbes’s Leviathan is still Biblical - it is named after a Biblical monster, after all, and Biblical references appear throughout the book.  But it remains a radical recontextualization of our experience, including our experience of the Bible itself - one might say that Leviathan is an “experience text” in the sense in which Foucault used this phrase.  Once we have read it, we cannot unread it.  Even if we refute its claims, it remains, its act of contexting superimposed on every other context, including that of other philosophers, as inexhaustible as any work of Shakespeare.  There is no response to it that will cancel its hold upon us, and in this way it triumphs in a world predicated on the canceling of all experience and imagination.  Philosophy is that to which one cannot respond, and therefore philosophy remains that which is not canceled.
    It is in this sense that Emanuel Levinas survives.  Although we can have our knee-jerk response to his altruistic moralizing, after we kick, he does not disappear, but continues to haunt us.  Emanuel Levinas, the representative in every philosophy textbook of “responsibility” is, himself, the ultimate irresponsibility, and that is why he deserves our utmost praise.  All Derridean puzzles about the difference between writing and speech, listening and reading, aside, only by becoming the audience does one understand the writer.  Only by becoming the writer does one become the audience.  Only by becoming the audience can one write.  I’m listening.